Carl Benjamin critiques liberalism's moral monopoly, arguing it destroys family cohesion and stigmatizes men, contrasting this with conservative sentimental bonds. He analyzes the rise of progressive totalitarianism in cities like San Francisco, the rigging of Biden's primary, and the UK Labour Party's shift under Keir Starmer. Discussing elite weakness versus Trump's necessity for America's spiritual crisis, Benjamin suggests DeSantis should have waited to avoid overshadowing Trump, while Rubin agrees with this strategic assessment despite Trump's conduct. Ultimately, the conversation highlights the urgent need to resist digital death penalties and restore common law principles against an eroding establishment. [Automatically generated summary]
The thing that the left has done very very effectively is claimed to have a monopoly on morality because it defines morality in quite a narrow way itself.
It has to be essentially rationally calculable but actually if you think about it a lot a lot of What we actually do that is moral is actually very sentimental and habitual.
We didn't think about it, we just do it because it's the right thing to do.
And so if you are actually taking principles like freedom and equality, well actually you can destroy the family with those principles.
You know, you don't owe anything to your parents and you can't say that your father is superior to you because that's not equality.
And so you're not bound by being, you didn't choose your parents, and so by the principles of freedom and equality you can be unbound from your own family.
Like, children can have no responsibility to not only their parents, but their own country.
And to anything like that, it's like, God, this is actually quite horrific.
And I said to you right before we started, of all weeks for you to be in America, because you live across the pond, you came the very week that we're opening up this studio to in-person guests.
And for people who do not know, who haven't been with me since the beginning of the beginning, when I was waking up to the left, what's going on with the left?
Why are we calling everybody racist?
No one's actually acting liberally.
The Sargon of Akkad story.
Everybody online, all the commenters said, Dave, you gotta watch this guy Sargon of Akkad.
I don't know that your face was even in the videos at that time.
It wasn't at the time.
unidentified
But everybody said, you gotta watch Sargon of Akkad.
I started watching your videos and I'm going, wow, this guy's a liberal and he makes sense.
And then eventually we started talking, you had me on your show, and in some ways the rest is history, so I think I've done it once or twice over the years, but I give you serious cred for getting me here today because you were one of the first in that way.
Tell, give the people, like, the two-minute bio about you first, and then we'll get into the politics and the fighting and the craziness and the state of the world and the rest of it.
I'm from England, so if I'm not surrounded by greenery, I get a bit weird and edgy, and California is just this brown, blasted hellscape of dirt, whereas Florida, it's luscious, genuinely luscious.
For me, it happened in about 2012, 2013, where I was just... I wasn't even, like, a hard liberal.
I was just like, well, no, I'm a liberal person, and I believe in, you know, basic liberal ideals, which most of us really do.
Even the quite conservative people will say, well, actually, yeah, I mean, obviously I want rule of law, freedom of speech, and property rights, and all these sorts of things, right?
Fairly basic stuff, so it's not stuff we had to think about too often.
And then we had this very aggressive, and what I now, after the fact, have learned is just essentially an open communist insurrection within liberalism.
And at the time there weren't Publicly like that, you know, it's it's actually been quite far on that.
You've got a sound pica being like yes I'm a communist.
Here's my red flag, you know beneath behind it Which is you know, okay fair enough at least at least it masks off, right?
Cuz before they would say I'm a liberal but everything around you is racist and we need to redistribute all the wealth That's not very liberal.
But wait, before we get to them and everything else, so it's 2011-2012, you're saying, you know, I'm just kind of a liberal guy, but now you're doing some stuff on YouTube.
What was waking you up that kind of made you get into this?
I was trying to develop a video game and, obviously, being in that sort of space, you start becoming aware of, like, well, feminism, frankly.
Coming in and attacking the industry as a whole.
And I was just like, OK, what is this?
I looked into it and I was like, OK, this isn't really in line with the principles that basically everyone is espousing.
Why are we stigmatising men?
And, of course, then that leads on to the stigmatisation of white people and straight people and Anything that they view as what they call a dominant class, it gets stigmatized in order to try and tear it down.
And so I started making videos just in 2013.
I think it was July 2013 was my first video where I was just like, look, I don't really agree with this.
I don't really understand why you're saying it.
And I think...
Looking back, I watched my very first video a few years ago.
Exactly, everyone's immune to that kind of attack now.
And so I just started talking about these things from my perspective, which really is still the perspective of a classical liberal.
I've developed an appreciation of conservatism, like real sort of hearthy conservatism, the sort of genuine bonds of sentiment that tie together people and place and community, building outwards to nation and to humanity.
I spent a lot of time reading their philosophy, because they're actually really bad at articulating it.
You probably can't actually name very many conservative philosophers, but you can name dozens of left-wing ones, right?
And so, it's kind of annoying that the conservatives are actually quite bad at telegraphing their message.
It's actually a really wholesome message.
Really, what's the most important thing in your life?
Well, your family, actually.
The people who depend on you.
And so, I've kind of been leaning into that a bit more, but I've still got the same sort of classical liberal core, where it's like, well, obviously people should be treated as individuals in decent ways, but there's more to the good
life than just being an atomized individual on your own, you know, with just a bunch of
things given to you by the state.
There's actually a lot more to the good life than that.
And so, yeah, I just continued developing.
I've matured a lot, which is never fun to say, right?
But it's never fun to say, but I've definitely matured a lot.
I started a business called Lotuses.com, where we develop, I hate to say it's right-wing philosophy, but I don't really have a better term for it, because everything else seems to be left-wing philosophy.
But what we're really trying to do is just Properly understand the sort of metaphysics of what it is we actually assume all day every day.
Because we never talk about the importance of not just family, because it's easy to say that and it's trite to say that.
It's like, what about the family actually is it that's important?
And it's really the bonds of reliability on the person, right?
Because one thing having four kids has taught me, it's The predictability of each day is what's really good for your children.
It's really what they need.
They need to wake up and know, Dad's gonna do this, Mum's gonna do this, I'm gonna go to school, and everything will be the same as it was yesterday, and it'll be the same tomorrow.
And so they can genuinely be happy in the world around them.
And then when you start thinking like this, you realise, God, the people in charge are totally irresponsible.
With everything in our state, you know, everything in the country, everything in the West, you know, they're just so cavalier with the decisions that they make.
And it's like, God, how can they...
Think like this.
And I think a lot of it is because we're kind of lent too much towards liberalism and not enough towards what should be a happy marriage between liberalism and conservatism.
Like, a man without the lawful judgement of his peers under the law of the land shall not be transgressed upon or pressed upon by the state.
That's literally what it says, and this is what we're watching happening in real time.
So it's not enough to just be a liberal.
But liberalism is great in that regard, in that sort of narrow band.
It's really good to say, look, these are the rules and the boundaries that have been kind of learned from English political tradition, and then that way they can be spread around the world.
Brilliant idea.
But on the other side, it lacks a kind of normative doctrine.
As in, you know, you get up and say, what should you do today?
And actually, liberalism doesn't have any answers to this.
And so this gives the whole world of where conservatives and Christians in particular have lots of good answers for what you should do today.
No, you should get up.
You should make your kids breakfast.
You should get them to school.
You should go to work.
You should uphold the right ordering of the world in your actions, in the character of what you do.
And liberalism really can't say that.
And so that's why liberalism is kind of vulnerable.
Because if actually you take away the Christianity, you take away the conservative values,
then you can take the liberal principles of freedom, equality, and say, right, I can explode these
out into everything.
You know, the freedom to never be bothered by another human being.
So you're just an isolated individual who's there.
I'm free to take as many drugs as I want.
I'm free to just become dependent on the government.
Oh, and we want equality now.
Right.
OK.
Well, how do you get equality?
Well, you've got to make sure the highest never have more than the lowest.
Once you take away all of the other considerations about the richness of human life, then actually you can take liberal principles and explode them into things they're not meant to be.
And this is the problem, I think, that the left has right now, and why so many people are just like, OK, I used to be part of the left, but I'm not that.
So I guess it doesn't shock you then when you look back and you go, okay, you were doing these videos saying, hey, liberals wake up and then a guy like Dave Rubin from the very far left, Young Turks, is kind of waking up and then he's talking to you.
And then we've seen a series, you know, Bill Maher kind of half wakes up.
We get a series of people that kind of wake up.
A lot of them end up going back the other way because the mob freaks them out and they can't, they're not brave enough, okay.
But I guess you think that it's sort of just like an inevitability of a liberal who's really thinking, right?
I would say it's about intellectual honesty and moral courage.
Because there are lots of people who are in a very cloying society, in places like California, where it's very oppressive.
For all of the freedom that they claim to have, actually you don't have the freedom to say, I disagree.
And this, I think, is really the fundamental precept of what freedom could be.
If you're not free to disagree with what everyone else is doing, in what way are you really free?
It was probably only a matter of time until people like yourself, people like me, turned around and said, hang on a minute, I just don't agree with the way that you view the world, I don't agree with what you're doing, and I'm willing to shed the label of being left-wing if it means living an authentic life true to my values and true to what I believe is correct and right and good.
And I think there are a lot of people who frankly lack that moral courage.
Do you think part of that, it's not just that they're afraid of the mob, but there's something so baked into culture, the default of culture that is left.
And I know these terms are sort of becoming increasingly meaningless, which is nice to an extent, but that that's what they're really afraid of.
Like it's automatically like, oh, if you're not for equity, if you're, if you don't think boys or girls, you're automatically framed as a bad guy now.
And that people just don't want to walk from that.
The thing that the left has done very, very effectively is claimed to have a monopoly on morality, because it defines morality in quite a narrow way itself.
It has to be essentially rationally calculable, but actually if you think about it, a lot of What we actually do that is moral is actually very sentimental and habitual.
We didn't think about it, we just do it because it's the right thing to do.
And so if you are actually taking principles like freedom and equality, well actually you can destroy the family with those principles.
You know, you don't owe anything to your parents and you can't say that your father is superior to you because that's not equality.
And so you're not bound by being, you didn't choose your parents, and so by the principles of freedom and equality you can be unbound from your own family.
Like, children can have no responsibility to not only their parents, but their own country.
And to anything like that, it's like, God, this is actually quite horrific, right?
And this is a sort of radical form of morality.
This is really unusual.
Like, nowhere else on Earth, you know, even from very, very...
...sort of loose civilizations where the society isn't very tightly knit to, you know, deeply tribal societies where literally everyone in the tribe is sort of like second or third cousins or something.
You know, everything outside of left-wing morality is kind of on a continuum and has been normal for almost all human societies to some degree for all of time.
And it's only since about the French Revolution, incidentally, where this kind of radical morality asserts itself.
This is the left and this is the absolute liberation of the individual.
All right, so you just gave me the perfect segue to bring up something that I have never talked about on this show, and in some ways I don't really want to talk about, but having you here, I kind of feel like I have to talk about it, which is an old colleague of mine at the Young Turks, Anna Kasparian, who has said some really, really unbelievably horrible, dishonest things about me.
It's not important, actually.
I'm not going to repeat any of them.
The Internet sort of knows what they are, is what it is.
But we were extremely good friends, invited to my wedding, et cetera, et cetera.
But apparently, and I only know this from some of the videos that you've done,
she's having some sort of wake up. She's waking up out of this leftism and this sort of mental prison that you're
I don't want to try because she's been very embedded, very publicly, in what I would
call radical left-wing morality for a very long time.
and...
Solzhenitsyn has this particular quote that probably everyone knows.
A lot of the time these people, even when reality is hitting them in the face with the consequence of their own ideology, they won't admit it.
Anna is being hit in the face with the consequences of this morality and is going, okay, I was wrong.
Because she, I think she got assaulted by a homeless person outside of her house.
I think that she's very aware that the trans lobby have got to the point where they're going to degrade her status as woman to merely birthing person or something like that and I'm sure she pays way too much in taxes to Gavin Newsom, which I hear she's not a fan of his policies.
And so she's got to the point where now it's affecting her.
Hang on a second.
Actually, we need to arrest criminals.
Actually, giving half my wages to the state is not moral.
This isn't making the world a better place.
Actually, a lot of the things the left are saying, such as there is no difference between men and women, these are not truths.
And you can't really build morality on untruths, actually.
And so I think that she's come to the point where it's untenable for her.
I think that Cenk is still essentially wedded to the left and left-wing morality.
And so I think he's afraid of looking at the reflection in the mirror and saying, look,
this is actually kind of hideous.
It's kind of maybe this sort of Dorian Gray painting might be a better thing.
Going and looking at the painting and looking at the rot on the face of the painting
and being like, oh my god, is that secretly me in my heart?
And so I'm actually tremendously sympathetic.
And I realize that that's not probably what you would like to hear, because she was.
A part of me feels that she's kind of the victim of the ideology, and I'm not trying to say that she's got no agency or anything like that, but... Well, she used to say, but way back when, that, you know, when she got there at the Young Turks, she knew nothing about politics, and Cenk taught her everything.
And if you're a host on a massive channel, you've got thousands and thousands of people every day either reinforcing what your biases are that you've been taught or castigating you for having an independent thought of your own, you can see how someone would be like, well, I'll just move away from that and into the safe place where I'm allowed to say left-wing things.
There's a part of me that, I mean, was it Jordan Peterson who called it the mind virus?
He's I think he's right to call it a mind virus and I think that one when you have a kind of disease It's not necessarily your fault if you are in ill temper basically and so there's a part of me that is That doesn't see her necessarily as being the author of the actions.
She was kind of operating in a pre-planned way.
If someone is an apostate from leftism, that's worse than being a heretic.
You know, it's always worse to be the apostate.
And so it's predictable that she would act that way.
And one would hope now that with her having a kind of Damascene moment of her own, being like, hang on a second, These people are evil and wrong, and they're cruel.
They're being cruel to me.
Maybe she'll think, well, in a way that I was cruel to people I loved, actually.
Was the most shocking part to you as you were talking about this stuff and sort of seeing the hate from, you know, your side so to speak, what I was more amazed by, yes, I was shocked by the hate and I ended up developing an autoimmune disease because of it and lost like 40% of my hair.
I mean, I could not believe how much hate I was getting from the supposed good guys.
So I'm not saying that was nothing.
But the thing that actually shocked me more so, and even to this day still shocks me in a weird way, is how conservatives, who I still might disagree with on some of the social issues, I'm begrudgingly pro-choice.
I'm married to a man, as I said, like there might be some stuff there that my life is not traditionally conservative, obviously.
I get nothing but love from them.
Nothing but love, and I am invited to religious things of various denominations all the time, and I find them acting far more liberally.
Did that part shock you?
I mean, well, is that a fair estimation for you, too, that the conservatives, who you were probably disagreeing with, may be on taxes at one point?
Because one of the things about conservative Morality in itself.
It's very concerned about... If you picture two people who know each other, you could draw... You know Donnie Darko, he's got the tunnel coming from his chest?
You could draw one of those connecting the two people.
You can call that their relationship.
And that can wax and wane and grow in intensity.
Like with my wife, we have a very shining connection because we know each other very well.
We love each other and we've got lots of responsibility.
Everything's very bound up.
And so the Conservatives are very concerned about that, and that is maintained by goodwill.
It's just goodwill.
It's about being polite to the other person, doing acts of unexpected kindness for the other person.
You know, you pick up some flowers for your wife, or you take the rubbish out or something, right?
And actually curiosity too, which liberals are the ones that are supposed to be curious, but I found conservatives, they couldn't figure out what to make of me at the beginning.
This guy's a lefty, he's gay, like what's going on here?
San Francisco, in fact, is probably a case study of... It's probably going to be... In 50 years time, there'll be tragedies written about San Francisco.
Because, I mean, I was talking to your producers before the show.
They're too young to remember, but I remember...
When I was a teenager, San Francisco and Los Angeles were legendary cities.
Yeah!
Legendary.
Like, the idea that anyone would leave, voluntarily leave these places is just mind-boggling, right?
But you can see how it's been, they've both been driven into the ground.
I mean, I was in San Francisco, I think it was 2018 last, and even then it was like the zombie apocalypse in here.
Like, you were walking around, there's literally zombified drug users on the street, and I was just like, oh my God.
But it's essentially the reduction of everything good.
That's what the communists want.
They won't say that that's what they want, and they'll have some ideal, but if you have to equalize everything, then the only thing you can have is the lowest common denominator.
So would you say from an American context, our Democrat Party, and from a British perspective, your Labor Party, are they just like the party members and the party elites?
Are they just using these people as the pawns in this game?
Or do you think they believe it too?
Like Gavin Newsom destroyed San Francisco as mayor, then becomes governor of California, and in essence is destroying California.
A million people have left in three years.
Like, what do you think about the people that are actually in charge?
But actually, Keir Starmer has kicked him out of the party and kicked loads of his supporters out of the party and essentially stolen it back from the radical left.
So actually, the Labour Party in Britain is more right-wing than the Conservative Party is at the moment.
Is that just bad governance by the Conservatives, or it was like a plan to really let it... I mean, I know, I guess that's the endless debate in all of Europe.
If I have an answer to that question, as far as I'm concerned, the Conservative Party is just traitors, right?
Weak-willed, spineless traitors.
Because they're not really Conservatives.
If they were actually Conservatives, they would just say no to a lot of things.
And really, that's the problem, is we just need an executive who will say, no, we're not doing that.
No, we're not doing that.
No, we're not doing that.
And that's really all it would take to turn our civilizations around, is have the moral fortitude to just refuse when a ridiculous request is made. It's actually not that
radical. But the morality that overlays what we're talking about, it is a radical change. It would
mean jettisoning the extreme left. It would just, sorry, we're just not going to do that,
we're not going to listen to you anymore. But going back to the Democrats, we're
totally captured and irredeemably so it looks like.
With the Labour Party, what it is, is there's a kind of old English socialism, old British socialism, that is rooted in these kind of conservative mores, where it's like, no, we love the country around us.
We just want to have the National Health Service.
We just want some social support because We need it.
There are poor people in the country who need help.
And actually, because we're a small, old country, there's a lot more social texture there.
And so it's easier to pull on that.
It's a lot more conservative.
And so the traditional Labour voters themselves are insanely socially conservative.
Like, they don't believe in any of this radical left-wing stuff.
And so Corbyn had a bunch of, essentially, students who supported him and joined the party.
And Keir Starmer just got the vote of the majority of the party, which was about two-thirds of the party.
And he's not conservative, but he's not a radical leftist.
Honestly, he's really not very bright.
So he's not really anything.
But he's just doing what he can do to get power, right?
And so that's kind of what happened.
In America, honestly, I really don't like calling people evil.
I don't like saying, oh, those people are just malevolent.
I don't like saying that.
But it's really hard to be able to formulate any other kind of reason why someone like Gavin Newsom or Joe Biden or whoever would just lie about what it is that's happening.
They will tell untruths about what you can see in front of your very eyes.
And I'll say, no, this is what progress looks like.
It's like, OK, but progress looks like literally the zombie apocalypse.
You know, I don't want that.
Whatever you want to call that, I'm against it.
And I'm for the complete opposite.
You know, I'm for growth and regeneration, wholesomeness and decency.
Jake Tapper said he's too extreme to interview him, but he'll put on DeSantis now.
Obviously I don't think DeSantis is extreme.
But the point is, he's saying that the most conservative guy, I'll put him on, but I won't have this Democrat on.
And did you know this?
That the DNC has so rigged the primary for Biden that if RFK shows up in Iowa or any of the early primary states, the votes automatically go to Biden, because they know Biden doesn't have to campaign.
So they're saying if anyone else running shows up there, the votes go.
Would you say that's partly because maybe we're just kind of in our adolescence with all this, where you guys are an older country and it's just a different attitude?
Why would you want to be trapped in a country with a bunch of people who literally hate you?
This goes back to the very nature of what it is to have a state in the first place.
Two and a half thousand years ago, he thought there couldn't be a state if it's not based on goodwill and friendship.
He thought that friendship was the basis of any political organization.
And so now, you look at it and you're like, okay, but those people are trying to destroy us.
Like, actively trying to destroy us.
They're trying to get us shut down, they're trying to make us homeless, they're trying to make us destitute on the streets like Belisarius or something.
You know, like we're just going to be on the street in Rome, blind and begging for pennies.
You know, that's where they would have you Give them the choice.
Why do my fellow countrymen think that way about me?
That's what I think the average American should be asking themselves.
Why should we have to live like this?
With people like that who don't respect that we are human beings, we're not just citizens, we are your countrymen.
There is meant to be a bond, a glowing bond between us, and you've severed that and called me a Nazi.
But the damn shame of it, and before we're beating a dead horse with this, the damn shame is that everyone that talks about it from that perspective gets annihilated.
Oh, yeah.
And therein lies the rub.
So it's like, OK, you wake up and now, congratulations, they're doing it to you.
And you either give up or you end up like us, which is not too bad.
But let's shift for a second, because actually, speaking of doing fine, you not only helped me when sort of I was waking up to this stuff and everyone was saying, you've got to talk to this Sargon of Akkad guy, and I don't even know that I knew that your name... Were you even public at that point?
Did I know that your name was Carl?
Was that even a thing?
Probably not.
You were just doing this thing, okay.
But then a couple years later, you were also instrumental in something else that happened, sort of accidentally, because you and I were two of the first political guys on Patreon.
And everyone remembers Patreon was sort of the first crowdfund monthly donation site.
And, well, I'll let you tell the story, but basically you got kicked off Patreon and it literally, what happened subsequently after that, changed the trajectory of my life.
Yeah, but but in retrospect probably unwise to have said it I totally accept and I guess one of these people had sent that to patreon And patreon like oh, well, you're not allowed to have your patron anymore I was like, okay, but I didn't actually violate your terms of service because I didn't post any of that on the Platform or nor was on my channel.
And yeah, for me, I mean, I started, Jordan and I, we were working on the ThinkSpot thing, and then Jordan obviously got ill, but that's what led to Locals, which led obviously to a lot of other success, and Rumble, so that you're allowed to say whatever you want on this show, which is pretty sweet.
But now you see it, you referenced it earlier, now your government, as we speak, is coming after Russell Brand and for Rumble, sending out a letter to pressure them to say that a guy who just has allegations against him should not be able to make a living.
It's psychotic.
But we've been through this again, that's my point.
I mean, at least in my case, the government didn't come for me.
You know, at least in my case, it was just Jack Conte over in California who decided, oh, I'll just take this executive action.
To have a sitting MP write, using the authority of a government committee, to, it wasn't just Rumbly, there was TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook, and who knows why YouTube just, you know, I don't know that there's something left to YouTube.
It's about the legitimacy of you as a person, right?
That's what it is.
So look, do I get to have an internet access, an account on the internet?
Do I get to engage in society with everyone else?
Or should there be a particular privileged class and everyone else literally reduced to Being a basket case, you know who can't get you know, a bank account or a YouTube account or whatever a Twitter account, you know Is that a just society and the conservative will say no everyone actually is a kind of unique human being who's a part of this Tapestry that we call society and even okay if they do something wrong Then we have a law that prescribes what the punishment for that wrongdoing is and that's as far as it goes You know, we don't ruin them because of course the conservatives think well people can learn their mistakes learn from their mistakes and change
And actually, it's not right to destroy someone.
Because essentially, it's kind of like a digital death penalty that they're trying to give Russell Brand.
It's like, OK, he hasn't even been convicted.
And even if he is guilty, there are punishments for it.
But what do you think the end game for them would be?
Not for a guy like... OK, so you scare the hell... You maybe destroy Russell Brand and you go for the people that are backing him and the tech that backs it and all that, which is clearly what this is about.
You know, the day before the Russell thing went out, there was a massive hit piece about Rumble and the Guardian.
Yeah, then the piece comes out from the House of Commons.
It's just so obvious.
We've been through this before.
But what do you think the endgame is?
You can take out a Russell Brand, you can take out a Tucker Carlson, you can take out whoever you can take.
You can take out Carl, you can take out Dave.
But if you take out millions of people who can't participate in society, what do they think is going to happen to those people?
Well, maybe it's what they want to happen to those people.
It's definitely about asserting a kind of Internet-wide dominance, so they are the ones who have the authority to say yes or no, which is totally alien to the sort of English-speaking experience, right?
Because we're used to there being a strong division between the state and society, and saying, no, look, society is pluralistic.
We all get to have our own little domains and gardens, and we get to grow our little things.
And if they grow, then that's great.
And if they don't, then that's our fault.
And it's up to us, right?
And so Russell Brand, again, for me, the classical liberal slash conservative, I'm not even a fan of Russell Brand.
I remember Russell Brand being on TV, and he was really annoying.
To turn around and give the UK government just that kind of response takes genuine courage, because everyone can see there is a kind of network of power that is above the national level at this point.
I don't know what people want to call it, like the World Economic Forum or anything like that, but there is clearly some kind of international network of power that is Left-wing, and it wants to have complete managerial control of the society, down to everything that you do, from every level.
It wants that, and it's trying to get it.
And that's why, when there were competitors to Patreon that popped up, they instantly got pulled.
It's like, no, we're not having that.
And that's what they're going to try and do with Rumble.
But Nigel Farage, who at one point was like basically the most influential politician in your country, Who I've had the pleasure of having many drinks with over time, and the man likes to take a gin and tonic at any time of the day.
It happened a few months ago, where the bank is called Coots, I think it was called, and it's the bank that the Queen uses, right?
So you've got to have a certain level of money in there, or they claim you have to have a certain level of money in there, but that's not really true, right?
Obviously, you know, your fortune's gotten down.
But one day they turned around and said, well, actually we don't like Nigel Farage and we're going to close his bank.
And so Nigel Farage put out a piece on Twitter and said, well, they're closing my bank.
I don't know why.
And they said, oh, it's just because for the, you know, the, oh, you don't have enough money in there.
Oh, we've got excuses.
Don't worry about it.
But Nigel Farage sent in a freedom of information request to Coots.
And legally they have to give him the documents he's after.
And he gets one document as minutes of a meeting, where they literally say, Nigel Farage is like some sort of right-wing extremist, and we don't agree with his values, and so we don't want him banking with us.
And so there was enough public pressure that the Conservatives, even the Conservatives, had to be like, well, OK, it's not on for you to just take people's bank accounts away from them, because, of course, in the modern era, you need that to exist.
And so Najaf Raj actually got his bank account back.
He won this battle, right?
And that's great.
It's always nice to have the win.
But again, why are we trapped in civilizations where there are people trying to ruin us?
So do you see it in a weird way that in America that our federalism in a bizarre way is a weakness, too, because a million people fled Cali.
That's a million people who probably would have fought for a lot of those things, myself included, right?
Big-time campaigner to get rid of Newsom, but I'm here fortifying this place now.
So the divide because of our federalism will increase where, as you were saying, you guys kind of resurrected your own Labor Party because... We've got nowhere to go.
You've got nowhere to go.
That's an odd position for us to be in, I suppose.
But there are also kind of immutable laws of politics that, unfortunately, I think DeSantis has kind of failed to not predict, but fail to observe.
And the first one is from Robert Greene's books, The 48 Laws of Power, which is never outshine the master.
Trump is a more veteran statesman than him by virtue of being, A, the president and being older.
Now, I'm completely in agreement with all of those people who say, look, do we have to have such old people
as the presidential candidates?
I totally, totally agree.
But you are kind of in that position.
And I think that people understand the world through stories.
And part of the reason I want it to be Trump, and I think a lot of Trump supporters feel this way, because I mean, you know, whether you like it or not, he's like 50 points up in the polls, right?
So he is crushing it.
And I've got many criticisms of the way Trump conducts himself, conducts his campaign, and I think the reason none of these criticisms land Is because actually we're not in the realm of political policy making and things like that when we're talking about this.
I think what's happening to America is a genuine spiritual crisis.
I think actually Trump is the only guy who can kind of resolve that spiritual crisis because I think they screwed him in 2020.
And I think Trump needs to have his sort of return of the king moment where he comes back and it has to be Trump because they hate him more than anything and they did this to him.
And that's why it has to be Trump.
And I think his base feels that way.
I think the average middle American who's just like, you know, Trump will die, I don't care.
You know, it's so interesting because I'm with you on so much of this and I think it's a spiritual crisis and they're in the process of screwing him in all these federal cases and all of that stuff.
My criticism has been, and I wonder, I want to know your thoughts on this because you obviously care about truth and you care about decency and everything else.
I think had he not gone so scorched earth with DeSantis, That I'd have an easier time with this right now.
Like, I just see the guy that I think is the best, that is the guy we've been waiting for, that in any other year, we'd be like, wait a minute, we have a guy who did everything we could have asked.
It's like, if I were DeSantis, I would have been like, I'm going to go for it, just not yet, right?
Because Trump can only go for it this last time, really, because otherwise he'll be too old, or he'll have two presidential runs, so he can't go for a third.
Is the inherent problem also that if Trump truly believes that the election was stolen, and clearly you believe at least to some extent that that is the case, and by the way, tens of millions of people do believe that, at least at some level, that why wouldn't they just steal it again?
Has he done anything to have them?
Why hasn't he brought that case forward?
I need him to say that.
Well, here's what I'm going to do so it doesn't happen all over again.
And it's like, okay, but one thing that you can take away from reading that, because I read that with great interest, ...was how much effort this was for them, right?
There was a lot of effort.
And it was because they'd just had four years of Trump, four years of, you know, Orange Hitler, destroying the entire country by making everyone wealthy and happy and prosperous and...
ending a lot of problems around the world and making sure that people respected America as a superpower again.
That was unconscionable.
You can't have any of that, right?
And so they felt deeply oppressed.
And so they were very, very motivated to do the things they did, right?
They were very motivated to do it.
I'm not sure that same energy is there this time, because they've had four years of Biden ruining everything for them.
And actually, Things were tangibly better under Trump.
Usually, with any kind of elite class, a cruel exercise of power is a sign of weakness rather than strength, because you've got the power, but you really shouldn't be using it.
You should be able to persuade those people underneath you to do the things that you think should be done, because that shows you've got moral legitimacy.
If you've got to literally start crushing people, like they are now, then it shows that actually they're afraid, and they think they're wiping out threats.
But whenever you do that, Anything that was connected to what you just whacked is like, oh, well, that wasn't good.
And, you know, you keep doing that.
You create a larger, large body of people who are just...
OK, you guys seem mad, and we're afraid of you now, right?
And so it's just bad blood.
It's bad vibes.
It's negativity.
And so I'm not convinced the Democratic elite class actually feels good about the position that they're in.
I mean, they must know.
I mean, almost all Democrats know that Biden's a terrible, terrible candidate.
He's a terrible president.
And what, are we really going to go through all this effort again to get that guy back?
Maybe, but either way, it's the same agenda as well, right?
And so I just, I wonder how much of the sort of, the pressure that, because I mean, we haven't heard about Trump for four years.
People forget it was non-stop, wall-to-wall media coverage of how Nazi, you know, Cheeto Hitler is doing this terrible thing, he's tweeted this terrible thing today, right?
But it was just very obvious from the Time Magazine article that this took a lot of work, and you had to have the people willing to do the work, you know, to spend all the energy.
I mean, they got paid, but it's still like you've got... it's a lot of...
Morale that you have to have to do this, right?
I'm not sure that's there this time and Maybe it is maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe it'll be maybe I'll eat these words sort of thing But I'm not sure they've got the energy for another fortification and honestly, I just really think it has to be Trump I just I really want it to be Trump that finally crushes them And then DeSantis would be the perfect man to step in and go.
Yep.
Okay, we've routed them We've got the winning formula right because everyone I mean, there are so many complaints about Trump's first term, right?
And even Trump, when he was on Tucker Carlson, he was like, well, I was kind of naive about this.
You know, I didn't realise all of the establishment would be against it.
All the institutions would essentially lock arms and keep me out, you know?
And maybe Trump in the next administration will legislate a lot harder against his political opponents.
And in fact, after the mugshot, maybe he definitely will.
But DeSantis would be a brilliant guy to come in after that and go, look, we know what works.
We know how we're going to win.
I've got a blueprint of it.
Trump's just done whatever he's just done.
We know that we're righteous, and we're decent, and we're creating a better world in what we do.
And there would be no conflict whatsoever.
Because Trump could then just go, as the outgoing president, DeSantis is our boy.
But instead, What you just said, which I actually agree with almost all of it, is a more compelling case than I think Trump has made for himself.
You're far more eloquent in the decent explanation of why it works, where he's doing still the name-calling and the games, and it's like, I don't want to be part of that anymore.
You just made a case that is completely decent and also proves that I have not lost all of my classical liberal beliefs because even though I'm still a DeSantis guy, I let you say it right here on my show.
Could there be anything more truly liberal than that?