Modern Wisdom - #499 - Konstantin Kisin - The West Is Under Attack

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Konstantin Kisin is a podcaster and an author. The West has had a bad run over the last few years with accusations every ism and obia under the sun. Having grown up in the Soviet Union however, Konstantin has a unique perspective on just how bad a nation can be and has some home truths to remind everyone of. Expect to learn whether we should be bothered that Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin are banned from Twitter, why the term Political Correctness has some very communist roots, how a Russian disinformation agent predicted everything we're seeing in 2022, whether we've passed peak woke, if both-sidesism is a grift and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks Free Access to the State App at https://bit.ly/statewisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy An Immigrant's Love Letter To The West - https://amzn.to/3yJZEFf  Follow Konstantin on Twitter - https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Constantine Kissin, it's a podcaster and an author. The West has had a bad run over the last few years, with accusations of every ism and obia under the sun. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, however, Constantine has a unique perspective on just how bad a nation can be and has some home truths to remind everyone of. Expect to learn whether we should be bothered that Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin are banned from Twitter, why the term political correctness has some very communist roots, how a Russian disinformation agent predicted everything was seen in 2022, whether we've passed peak

woke, if both sides of them is a gift, and much more, this Saturday is episode 500, which is insane. So I'm going to do a bunch of lessons that I've learned from some of my favourite guests and episodes over the last four and a half years. It's mad to say that it's 500 episodes, but thank you, everyone, for tuning in for the last 499 and I will see you on Saturday. But now, ladies and gentlemen, really. It's just the more of the same, I think. No, I was talking to my co-host for Trigonometry for answers about this in the studio today, and I was saying, can you imagine that they've got to be a bit more of a big deal? I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think. No, I was talking to my co-host for Trigonometry

Francis about this in the studio today. And I was saying, can you imagine that we've got to a point where to state a historical fact about someone's biography is now a crime, essentially, at least in Twitter's eyes. You're going to get banned from a social media platform for stating historical fact about an individual, which is what both Jordan and Dave have done here. And I think it speaks to the situation that we're in, which is the ideology behind all of this has just become so perverse and has been allowed to run a mock so far that we

live in this clown world. And unless Elon Musk is able to take over and change some of this, I don't really see how we're going to get out of it. Do you think Twitter is that important? Is it still the town square for public discourse? I do think that. And of course, you could say, well, only whatever percent of the public, even in Western countries or in Twitter, and it's true. But then that is where the discourse happens, because most people are on Twitter because

they don't want to be part of the discourse. They actually have, you know, jobs and kids and things they actually want to achieve in their life, instead of getting angry with each other. So I do think it's the public square and I do think it's really important. And I also think it's essential that correct principles are modeled in the space, because the sort of high culture discourse then leaks out into the rest of society and you see it, you know, in my former career of comedy, people now happily getting up in the middle of a gig and shouting stuff at comedians, not in an old way where it used to be a sort of heckling and battling, and that used to be fun, I really used to enjoy that. But it's like, no, they'll go to complain to

the people who run the club afterwards and demand that this comedian is never allowed to perform. So I think that sort of behavior that's modeled in this type of public square is actually really important. And of course, the rules they impose then get filtered down to other areas as well. And other people feel, well, you know, if Twitter's going to shut these people down, well, we're allowed to shut them down in real life with it, you know, not invite them to speak or ban them from speaking and so on. So I do think it's really, really important, actually, yeah. So the culture of censorship on Twitter

has more downstream impacts, perhaps. One of the interesting things now is that tweets become news. Right, previously people were tweeting about things that happened in the news, but now the news can be derived from what people tweeted. So there's this very sort of cyclical game. So just for the people that haven't seen it, the actual tweet that Dave got suspended for, there's

a difference between a suspension and a ban. The ban is, if you would, I think, been completely removed from Twitter, a suspension, you have to do this kind of struggle session where you admit that the tweet was wrong and delete the tweet and acknowledge the fact that the tweet broke terms of service. But Dave's tweet was, um, the insanity continues at Twitter. Jordan Peterson has been suspended for this tweet about Ellen Page. He just told me he will never delete the tweet paging at Elon Musk and the warning from Twitter says you may not promote violence against threat and the people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age disability or serious disease.

And that was enough to get Dave a strike. Yeah, and there's a couple of points I pick up there. The first one is you talk about the struggle session, and it's a really good reference because you're talking about, of course, Soviet Union and China. And this is exactly one of the things I talk about in the book. I know we'll get on to later is how Soviet, some of the things that we are now doing are because this is exactly what used to happen in the Soviet Union. If you wanted to, if you made some kind of faux pas and you were not politically correct

enough, again, as you know, I talk about the origins of political correctness in the book, then what you would have to do is you'd have to publicly come out and say, I come, you know, and you'd have to give this whole speech about how you messed up and this is what they make you do. They make you sort of admit that you'd done something wrong instead of just, you know, even just punishing you for breaking their rules, even as in this case, I don't think there's any credible evidence that Dave Rubin was inciting violence or hatred towards somebody. By using a name, that person used to use until about three seconds ago. So dead naming is, it seems like the thing that Dave's been popped for there. Yeah, well, clearly, and it's funny to me as well,

because I don't know if you saw this, obviously you and the US now, but in the UK, we have these sort of supposed conservative parliamentarians. They banned protesting too loud in public, and one of the ministers tweeted about it, saying finally we've put an end to the violent speech of blah, blah, blah, and this was somebody who was just using a megaphone and public, right?

So even the conservatives are buying into all this bullshit. Because once you accept the words of violence, this is an inevitable consequence. If you buy into this completely nonsensical dogma, the words are actual violence, then of course, we do have laws and rules that are aimed to prevent and regulate violence. And so you're going to end up regulating people's speech. What was the origin of political correctness? The origin of political correctness, we've basically already covered, which is it was created in the Soviet Union and then later used in Maoist China.

And the purpose of it never had anything to do with politeness, with being respectful, with being kind, with not offending people. It had one purpose and one purpose only Chris, which was to ensure that the political party line of the Communist Party was enforced in terms of how people spoke and behaved. Political correctness is saying to people, yes, what you're saying may be factually correct, but it is inconvenient to the party line. It is politically incorrect. And that is one of the reasons that I've been so troubled by many of the developments we've seen in the Western world in recent times, because they're not coming from nowhere. We've tried

these things before, and they come from a very specific place and have a very specific meaning and they have very specific consequences. A lot of similar themes between your new book and Douglas Murray's most recent one. What do you think you two are both converging on there? I don't know. I think Douglas is a very impressive man. I'm a huge admirer of his and always have been an honored like huge. I've had him onshah many times. I think that he's one of the few people in the Western intellectual world who is born here and grew up here, who nonetheless has access to the rest of the world. And so he's able to look at what's happening in the Western context, whereas many people in the West just think that the that the world has always

been the way it is currently in 21st century, America and Britain and other anglosphere countries. A Douglas, for reasons I'm sure, due to his extent, the fact that he's well-read and traveled and so on, he's able to appreciate how unique what we have is and how unusual it is. And so when he sees it being destroyed, denigrated, and attacked as I do, I think that's when he starts to realize this is a problem about which you need to speak. And I feel probably it's easier for me, you know, I haven't had to read

nearly as many books I think about it nearly as carefully as he has because of where I come from, you know, growing up in the in the late Soviet Union, hearing stories of my family and what they went through, my grandmother being born in a gulag, or down my mother's side, my grandmother living through the holodomor in Ukraine, watching her brother's staff to death, because they were politically the wrong type of people being exiled to Siberia. Like all of the stuff, I just see it a context. And we have a saying in Russian everything is understood in context. I think people in the West, and this is why I really wanted to write the book, don't appreciate just how brilliant the world is.

And I talk in the book, by the way, about things that I think are wrong in 21st century Anglosphere countries. The book is called Inimmigrants Love Letter to the West, but more accurately, it should be Inimmigrants Love Letter to the Anglosphere, not quite as catchy. But that's what I think is going on. This ideology that we're seeing is particularly infected Anglosphere countries, English-speaking countries. And I think it's because of these ideas come

from the English-speaking world, and they've really landed very hard, particularly I think with younger people. And I'm afraid I think it's just a lack of context which Douglas has, and I hope I have as well, that I'm able to share with people. Do you think that there's maybe a part of the reason why it's landed a little bit more hard in the US

than in the UK? Because in my experience, having spent a good bit of time in the US, there's maybe a part of the reason why it's landed a little bit more hard in the US than in the UK? Because in my experience having spent a good bit of time in the US, there's a lot of people here that have never been outside of the country. In the UK, that would be pretty rare. Now, maybe you've only ever been to Mallorca or Cyprus or Benadorm or something, but at least you've seen people that drive on the other side of the road or use different currency than you are different metrics of measurement than you are anything. It's a lot less myopic when it comes to a world view. And anybody that spent a modicum of time traveling around the world simply has to see that there are

wild variations in the quality of life that you could live. It's an interesting point. I'm wary of the point you're making even though I do agree with it because we do a lot of America bashing here in Britain. And I point. I'm wary of the point you're making, even though I do agree with it, because we do a lot of America bashing here in Britain. And I actually, I'm not a fan of it, because as someone who's been to America who really admires many things about America, I sort of understand why many people don't travel outside, because it's like, why would you? You've got everything you need.

Like do you like surfing? Great. You've got California. Do you like skiing? Snowboarding? You've got everything you need. Do you like surfing? Great. You've got California. Do you like skiing? Snowboarding? You've got that somewhere else. You've got incredible range of food.

You've got incredible diversity of political views, culture in terms of the different states and attitudes to freedom and attitudes to safety and whatever. You can really pick what you want. So, I don't blame people for not traveling as much outside America as they might do outside of the tiny UK where the opportunities are less. The way that's significantly worse and so on and so forth. Well, it's basically 50 countries

all attached together where you have freedom of trade. It's the same currency, the same language. You can use your driver's license. I totally get it. I don't have a, it's not a criticism. I also think about COVID. No, no, I know. I'm gonna get to answering your question's license. I totally get it. I don't have a, it's not a criticism. I also think about COVID. No, no, I know. I'm going to get to answering your question for sure. I just wanted to put that caveat in because I think we've passed America so much. I actually admire many things about America. And I understand why people would just enjoy what it is instead of

traveling somewhere else. Although I do think, obviously, traveling around the world gives you a perspective that you otherwise aren't going to get. But even during COVID, you know, Francis and I, we were so concerned about some of the restrictions that were being applied here in the UK. But it's not like America where if you're Joe Rogan and you're in California and you don't like what the government is doing, you just move to Texas, like, what are we going to do? Move to Belgium.

Do you know what I mean? Like, is this all going to happen? So I like that that freedom is there and you can move around. And I think that's one of the reasons people travel less. But I do very strongly agree with you. I think it's very easy to take for granted what you have if you've never experienced an alternative. And I see that around the Western world quite a lot, which is why I think it's one of the reasons that younger people are more more prone to be affected by it, because they've had less experience of being in other places and speaking to different people.

And all of these things that we talk about, whether it's racism or sexism or whatever, when you put it into the context of the global experience of women or people who are from minority backgrounds. He gives you a different perspective on it. Take a trip to Saudi Arabia, or somewhere in the Middle East, and have a little bit of a look there. Okay, so talk to me, speaking of travel, what were the first decades of your life like? How did you arrive in the UK?

Well, my father was a mixture of things in, so in the Soviet Soviet Russia he was a biochemical engineer not particularly wealthy when I was born my dad was barely 20 and my mum had barely it should been 18 for four days so born into two students very poor and then the Soviet Union collapsed and that was a moment where there were a lot of opportunities for people. How old were you? Not happened. So I would have been nine. Okay, so you must have memory of a little memory

before and after as well. Oh sure, sure. I remember going to school in the Soviet Union, I remember, it's actually the opening chapter of my book. I talked about the talk that my parents gave me before I went to school about how we mustn't share in school the stuff that we talked about at home because it was still even in late so union it was still dangerous. So that was the environment that I grew up in and then it all collapses overnight you know and people's careers broken lives up ended it was suicide rate spike because it was so unstable and difficult you know inflation many of the years it during the 90s in Russia was like 84% to hundreds of percent at one point or some months. You know, a war, a lot of terrorism going on.

So it was deeply unstable time, but it also was a time of a lot of opportunity. And my dad was a person who managed to capitalize on some of his opportunities. And his, you know, his, him and his friends, they started a small business. And then it grew, became a bigger business, and then became a bigger business. And suddenly they, they owned Russia's biggest bank. That's how, that's how things worked in the early 90s in Russia.

So he made a lot of money very quickly. And then he became a minister in Borussia, Elton's government. And when that happened, he was there for a couple of years before there was various political shenanigans going on in Russia at the time. And he was forced to flee Russia under a false identity and essentially went from being very successful and having lots of money to moving to another country under false identity, basically not ever really properly working

for 20 years after that because you couldn't, you know, rely on his past career. And so during that small period of time in my family's history, when they actually had some money, they wanted to send me to a better place. And the West and Britain was that place. So they sent me to boarding school in Bristol. I think I would have been about 13 at the time. And then I grew up. So parents are still in... So parents are still in Russia and then they move to Armenia because of these false allegations against my dad while I am in the UK, you know, living the great life of a boarding school.

Boy, talk to me about arriving in the UK with a Comrade Kissing's accent and his stress sense and his cultural affectations. Yeah, it was pretty brutal. I talk about him one of the chapters of the book as well It's like it was a difficult adjustment But it was a really important one because I think it's only when you've gone through that sort of adjustment that You are able to be flexible and understand different cultures. And I'm really grateful to be not only bilingual, but also by cultural. I can dip in and out of the different cultures. And I've just spent a couple of weeks in Armenia, I was there for my sister's wedding. And as I was leaving, I was saying to my family, like, you have no idea how different a world

I'm going back to. It's like, I said, if I was going to the moon, it would probably be less of a contrast. Because that's how different the cultures are. And so coming as a boy, especially, it was, yeah, it was difficult. It was really, really difficult, not speaking the language, particularly. But you know, it's funny.

One of the things I was remembered is like, the kids used to make fun of my accent, and I would make fun of the other stuff, and the day they were doing, or they looked like, and whatever. And it was, you know, it was banter. But when the kids used to make fun of my accent, because I used to speak like this, you know, I would always say, well, stop doing that.

And they would say, it's a free country. And I actually really took that to heart. I kind of thought, well, actually, I mean, look, it's not necessarily pleasant that people have the right to say things that I don't like. But it is a free country. And over time time I've really grown to like and appreciate that. And again, one of the reasons I feel very strongly about some of the stuff that we talk about. Given the fact that you're an immigrant yourself, what do you have views on immigration? Again, a chapter in the book, I talk about it extensively, and my view on immigration

is essentially that I think a modest amount of immigration that is democratically chosen by the people of the country. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a very healthy thing. I think we need people to come to have a bit of vibrancy and drive immigrants often the very cream of the society from which they've come if they're chosen correctly, if they're filtered correctly. What is that? Well, essentially, Australia has a system that I think more or less has got a right, which is if you have the right skills, if you have the certain talent, if you prove yourself

to be a law-abiding citizen, if you come in legally, if you don't break any rules, if you pursue an education or a career, if the come in legally, if you don't break any rules, if you pursue an education or a career, if the people of the country feel that you're going to make a positive contribution to the country and you're going to be a net benefit to the country, then you're welcome. And on the other hand, if you attempt to enter illegally, you simply have no chance. And in my opinion, that is how it should be. There are small, now that's not to say that I think, you know, people who are fleeing

war and conflict should just be forced to go back to where they've come from. And it's one of the frustrations I have with the more right side of politics. You know, as you know, I'm not party political and I'm not left or right. I have concerns about the way both parties and both sides of the discussions approach things. For example, I am very reluctantly, but in favor of allowing abortion until viability. That is my view. Very reluctant. I do think you're killing a being, but just the way that society is, I don't think you're going to get a better solution than that. Now people will of course disagree with that. So I'm okay

with that. What I'm not okay with is like abortion is like gray and we need to celebrate it. Do you know what I mean? And likewise with the immigration issue, with the right side of saying things, my concern is like, I do think people shouldn't be encouraged or allowed to come in illegally. But also I don't think we should celebrate sending people who are fleeing war and conflict back to the terrible countries that they've come from. We, I think that sometimes we get into this habit of like really enjoying the suffering of people

we dislike or disagree with or who we think are doing something wrong. And I'm not on board with that at all. But I do think people shouldn't be able to come illegally. I'm actually in favor, certainly, with things like refugee crisis of Western, richer countries helping to fund refugee centers that are better in areas around the countries from which people are fleeing and doing so more effectively.

Because I've seen with the situation in Ukraine, I have family who have been in that position. And I know that none of them is desperate to like go to America. What they actually quite like to do is go to a nearby country, get a bit of help, and then once the war's over, come back and rebuild their country and their home. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I'm really in favor of pragmatic solutions

to these things, instead of all the sloganering and the send them back or whatever people come up with. How having said that, I also feel that democracy is really important. And if the people of Britain, for example, were to vote to have no immigration ever again until somebody else votes to reverse that, well, the people of this country are entitled to do that. Likewise, if the people of this country vote to have no borders, I mean, I think that's a moronic idea. But again, they're entitled to do that. And I think one of the problems we've had both in the United States and in the UK is we're

not seeing the democratic decisions of the public filtering through into public policy. I don't think the democratic wishes of the US public are to have a porous open border on the southern side of the United States. I don't think the British public are to have a porous open border on the south on the southern side of the United States. I don't think the British people voted to have thousands of people to come into Britain on boat illegally, completely unchecked and unfiltered and we have no idea who they are and where they're coming from. So my concern is, Jewel, I think yes, you have to have a modest level of immigration. You can't go too far too quickly. And at the same time, I also think the lack of respect for the wishes of the public has

been really the thing that's troubled me the most in recent years. The problem that you have at the moment is that online, it's the people with the most outlandish views that are the ones that get the most airtime. And you don't need to be a commentator on YouTube, like me or you doing stuff. You can just be some bloke with a Twitter account. And yesterday you were nobody and tomorrow you're tweets gone high per viral because somebody somebody picked it up and retweeted it and now it's on the post millennial and now everybody wants to know your opinion on something or you just sent it over news headline. And one of the problems is

that that creates because of the perverse incentives the way that news works, it creates a disproportionate view of how news is actually presented. You very rarely get news stories that rise to the front with someone saying, well, I'm not actually that keen about this particular policy, but I think it's sort of the best of a bad bunch. It's really sort of all that we can hope for. Who's going for that? No, you want the person that's the flag waving lunatic for whichever side of the other. And what this means is

that most of the culture war consists of people sneering at the other side's extremists. That's it. And this is something I learned from one of the Weinstein's ages ago, like three, four years ago, right? And they said, it should be the job of the moderates of the same side of the people that are being the idiots to rein them in. Because you should not want your own side to be represented by somebody that has such an extreme viewpoint. It doesn't damage the other side, to the other side, it's ammunition, to your side, it's an embarrassment. That's why you're supposed to step in and rein people back. I agree with you completely, and that's why it's someone who, you know, I don't think I was ever like massively like all the way out on the woke left, but I certainly you know in my 20s and early 30s would have considered myself on the left and only the

experience of doing trigonometry has really cemented my position as a moderate who's in the center, but I'm definitely not someone who's coming from the right. I'm coming from the left. And the reason that I am so critical of wokeness in particular, or progressivism, I think, is a better term for it, is because I think it does it disservice to the good things about the left number one. And I also, I'm worried that, as you say, extremists exist on both sides, and I think the extremes of progressivism are creating a backlash of a kind that we don't want to see. The backlash I would like to see against the extremes of progressivism is moving the

left closer to the center. But I'm afraid what will probably happen is portions of the right will move further to the right and attempt to row back a lot of what I actually think are quite legitimate and useful achievements of the left. So one of my concerns is whether the pendulum is swinging back or whether it's slowing. I feel it's more slowing than swinging back. Is the wing it swings back, it usually swings back too far and too fast. And it's quite possible that three or four years from now, maybe even shorter, I'll be one of the most fervent critics of whatever the

equivalent of workness is going to be on the right as it forms. Do you know what I mean? Are you more concerned about the far right than the far left then long term? I think that I have a greater fear of the far right in terms of if they were equivalent in terms of their numbers. The far right, I think, is you're likely to see that within that there are people who are much more comfortable with violence, who are much more skilled with weapons, who are much more into that sort of way of behaving, whereas the far left generally are useless idiots. So, like there, I'm not so bothered about them, do you know what I mean?

But of course, in the situation that we find ourselves in, the far right is rightly been put in the evil, don't open box. The far left, on the other hand, is encouraged and supported by every major institution and corporation in the world. So, that's the disparity. So, as things stand,

I'm more concerned about the far left. But if they were equivalent in terms of numbers, prominence, support from the general public, then of course, I'm more concerned about the far right. Yeah. What are your thoughts on both sides? Because both sides is and is accused of being a grift on the internet. People believe that you're so- Man, it's the worst fucking grift in the world, because you get hated by both sides. It's like, I keep saying this to people like, for me, the best thing to do would just to become out and say I'm a conservative, right?

Because someone who's spent a lot of time criticizing the excesses of progressivism, I have a lot of people who would really love for me to be a conservative, right? And that people who would really love for me to be a conservative. And that would be the grift for me to be like, oh yeah, I'm a conservative, you know, dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar, give me all that conservative money. To me, that would be the grift, saying what I actually think is often quite painful and uncomfortable and I get attacked by both sides. What makes you most not a conservative? What are the things that you get pushed back from the right about the most? Well, I think, I mean, I imagine that any religious conservatives

who've been listening so far would not be enamored with my stance on abortion, for example. But that's a very American issue. I guess, we we did, we did an interview with David Pacman, the progressive commentator, and he's tried to sort of screw us over. I texted you about that afterwards. Yeah. I felt oddly, so I never want to see my mates get sort of rumbled over. However, there was something about it that felt oddly like Cassandra complex because I texted you once you done it, and I'd had to watch maybe half of it. And I met a message you and I was like, look dude, like congratulations, I think you got a better conversation out of David than I did because mine just felt a bit kind of

janky and discordant and I wasn't sure what was going on. And you were like, oh right, yeah, whatever. And then a couple of days later, he decided to release two or three different videos about you guys. I was on the right wing channel trigonometry and it's him sort of kind of sneering a little bit. It's him basically taking what was an attempt at a good faith conversation from us and like conceding points just to move on with the conversation and stuff like that and presenting that as him

destroying us with facts and logic or whatever it was. Look, you know me, I go on TV and debate stuff all the time. Like, if I wanted to destroy them, that's what I would have done. But when I'm the interviewer, I'd like very much like yourself. I'm more interested in hearing what the guest has to say. And letting them say it, even if I don't agree with it, right? And then the audience can decide for themselves. But my point is, we put out a video in which we kind of said, like, there's a lot of people in YouTube who think, who think and talk about how the other side is stupid and evil. And a trigonometry, we're not like that.

We think both sides are stupid and evil, right? And both have valid points, too. And that is my approach. I think there's a lot of stuff that conservatives get wrong. I think there's a lot of stuff that they get right. Now, you know, we have Brett,, a Brett once done and I had a conversation about this a few weeks ago and here, one of the points I made to him is I don't understand people who have a fixed political ideology because it's like me saying to you, Chris, well, here I am, I'm driving

a car, do I speed up or do I slow down? Well it's very dependent on the context, isn't it, right? There's times when you need to speed up, there's times when you need to slow down? Well, it's very dependent on the context, isn't it? There's times when you need to speed up, there's times when you need to slow down. Conservatism is about slowing down or stopping change. Progressivism is about having or accelerating change. So I think it really depends on where you are geographically, where you are in terms of time, where the country is in terms of what is happening. So the whole human history, we go through these ebbs and flows of piers of

rapid change followed by stability. And when we're stable, maybe a little bit more change is good. When we're changing too quickly, like I feel that we are now, then you know, you've got to pump the brakes a little bit. So, at the moment, I am aligned with the Conservatives mainly on the sort of runaway craziness of the sort of ideology. But it doesn't mean that I am in favor of, you know, a revival of the religious right, for example, the way it was in the 80s and 90s, when my great heroes, people like Bill

Hicks and George Carlin, were taken the piss out of it, right? That's the sort of people that I used to admire as a kid. And that's how I think of myself now, maybe not as great as them in terms of comedy or whatever, but in terms of what I am opposing, I am opposing the religious dogma of the 21st century. It's interesting to think about that man. It's interesting to think about how the dynamics

are the same, but the flavor of the conversation is kind of the same. Do you think that we've passed peak woke at the moment? Andrew Sullivan wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago, and me and David Follow from Rebel Wisdom were in Denver at the Headerdox Academy conference, and he sent it to me, and I read it, and I was like, that is really, really interesting. Basically, what he says is that peak woke was around about June of 2020 in his opinion. That was the moment at which the highest further, the greatest velocity of woke stuff was going on. And if you to look now, most of the thought leaders at the absolute top, probably, I mean,

who genuinely believes that is a thought leader that's in a position of power that transiting the kids is a good idea who genuinely believes so on and so forth and you can roll that across a bunch of different things and his argument is that those are the people that are kind of like the canary in the coal mine downstream from that are going to be public opinion and then downstream from that institutions, this big behemoth Leviathan that's being sort of dragged behind it, but he basically sees it as us having reached the apogee of woke and then come back down. What's your opinion on that? I like Andrew. We had him on the show recently. I think he's a

very intelligent man. I admire his courage in making predictions in the world that we live in today. I don't know that I agree with that characterization of the thought leaders and the people with power, because it may be true that Joe Biden doesn't think that Trans-Inkids is a good idea. It may be that people in power in the UK don't think that it's a good idea but to me that isn't really the question the question is are they allowing it to happen are you seeing the sexualization of children in the classrooms i think you are are you seeing the bringing in of transgender ideology into the classroom i think you

are and these are processes that play out of a decade rather than hours or minutes or days. So it may be, my opinion is the pendulum is slowly starting to slow down. But I still think it's still swinging in the wrong direction personally. But yeah, I don't think it's extremely unwise to make predictions, particularly given the last couple of years. I mean, think about this. When COVID first happened in March 2020, there was a real moment, I'm sure you'll remember this, Chris,

where it was like, maybe we're all gonna come together. Dude, I was adamant about this. Do you remember it was a... American president that said something along the lines, I've, can you imagine if there was an alien foe that was trying to attack us, how quickly our differences would be forgotten and we would bind together as a species. And I thought fuck this could be it. This could be the thing. And it was it was for three months. Yes. For three months. Nearly. It was, you know,

people were helping out the neighbors and dropping off food and... Clap for the NHS. Clap for the NHS and political lines were broken and Brexit seemed to have been forgotten in the UK and all of that, right? And then all it took is one incident and people who had been locked in the houses for three months and it just exploded in a way that I don't think anybody could have imagined. So, you know, you're seeing that obviously the Supreme Court in the US is, you know, the conservative element of the judiciary is doing what it was put in place to do, which is reversing a lot of what they would argue is liberal overreach. And, you know, liberals are not that great in my experience of taking the else. So, I don't know that that necessarily is going to be as smooth a process as people

hope. I'm concerned about what's happening in the US. I hope that the pendulum can be brought back to a sensible, moderate position. And I do believe eventually it will be whether we've reached peak work. It's like peak oil. I've been, you know, why I remember being as a kid when I was a kid at school, like oil was supposed to run out by now, you know. So these predictions are usually made by people who who are either pessimistic or optimistic be beyond the level that I'm willing to engage. Going back to your experience when you first moved to the UK from your homeland, you mentioned that there was a little bit of teasing

and stuff like that, but you're a darker skin person that had an accent probably for almost all of your youth. What do you think that Britain's racist? Have you seen examples of racism since you've been in Britain? Yeah, I had someone at school tell me to go back to Russia, you pack it. And I used to do a whole routine about that when I was doing stand up because it's funny. It's funny.

This is the point is like you've got to make fun of races because it's stupid people that are racists. Do you see what I'm saying? Like when someone tells you to go back to Russia because you're a Pakistani, that shows you the level of intelligence that this person has. And I was fortunate to have parents. You know, my parents were by no means perfect, but the one thing they really did teach me

is not to pay attention to stupid people. You know, and that's one of the reasons I think I'm able to do what I do now, giving getting quite a lot of flag from both sides as we talked about, not really paying too much attention to it because I never thought that the opinions of random people or the insults of random people who I don't respect should affect how I feel about myself or affect how I feel about the country in which I live. There are racist people in Britain, absolutely. There are tiny minority of people universally despised, whose views are not shared by the vast majority of the public. The vast majority of the public in Britain are extraordinarily

welcoming and tolerant. That has always been my experience. It's the experience of almost anyone you speak to who is actually sensible in these issues. And of course, historically and geographically speaking, Britain and other Western Anglosphere countries are the best places to live as a minority, not just in the world today, but the entire history of our species shows that those are the best places to live. So it really, but of course, we've got to a point where definitions of words are up for grabs. And so if you say he's Britain the racist country, some people think that if they've got one example of someone experiencing racism,

that means that Britain is the racist country. Well, by that definition, every country and every human being and every, you know, beetle in the world, it's, you've got some prejudice opinions. But I don't think that that is the way to, to approach this. I think you have to consider it from a historical perspective and a geographical perspective and go, are we doing as well as human beings can be expected to be doing? Well, with some of the best people in the world that having a multi-ethnic society where people come and live together and work together and you know, and it's amazing to me in terms of doing what we do because with Trigonometry, we have our core team, which is me, Francis and our producer Anton, who you know.

Yeah, big shout out to Anton. And we have between probably seven to ten part time and full time staff that work with us as well. And the only thing we've ever cared about was hiring the best people for the job. And we hire only people who want to work on the show and who've come forward and have put themselves forward. But we've naturally got like, I don't think we have any like just pure British straight white men working on the show, you know, we've got a couple of scots, we've got a Scottish guy and a Welsh guy so we're doing a bit of charity. Yeah, yeah. But we know like we've got people from every skin color,

every background, we've got trans people who work on the show. We like all of that. And it's never been our agenda to make that happen. But if you live in a society that is mixed up, like the ones that we live in, and you hire people on merit, you're naturally going to end up with all of that quote, unquote diversity, which is a word that I hate now.

And so I think we live in one of the most welcoming, tolerant, open societies in the history of the world. And one of the things I really wanted to explain to people in the book is maybe we should just pause for a moment and appreciate that before we beat ourselves up. It's difficult to have that context, right? I've had this guy on Gwinderbogal. I've had him on twice. You guys would absolutely adore him. So he's kind of like another Rob Henderson, similar to Rob.

And I'll loop you guys in. I think you'd have a fantastic conversation with him. And he taught me about a couple of different mental models. One of them's called the Tokville Paradox. And what this talks about is that as the living standards within a society rise, people's expectations rise with them, but reality can only deliver your ideals for so long. And then after a while, your ideals begin to overtake what reality is able to deliver to you. And that's when you start to feel a delta between what you were promised and what you're actually getting. And you combine that with the fact that the demand for racism currently outstrips the supply, because a lot of people have attached either their monetary income or their status or their sense of belonging or whatever,

to continuing to point out instances of racism. And what that means is that you need to continue to expand the definition of racism over time in order to keep the water level at the same height. So when you combine those two things together, the concept creep and the talkville paradox, you end up with, it's very easy to construct a low resolution narrative that saves the people, society's getting worse, this is an absolutely departal lips, you should be really really concerned. And what you're saying is, what's the term in Russian, the context thing? Can you say it in Russian? Shopas Nayotsov-Sravninyi. Everything is understood in comparison.

I agree with you. One of the quotes I love is from Eric Hoffer, the psychologist, which is every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually to generate into a racket. And diversity, inclusion, whatever you want to call it now. It's a racket now. The people who are benefiting the most from that are not minorities. They are individual people who are diversity offices at universities and television channels and institutions who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to you to put in trainings that don't work and make people more antagonistic and more intolerant of minorities, etc. And that's why you're

seeing this continue to progress because of course once you're on a crusade and you don't have a set goal, it's like even if you've captured Jerusalem, well there's other lands you could liberate from the evil infidel's, right? And I think that we've got to a point where progressivism has become a crusade. And it's kind of, you know, progressivism has a role to play. We do want to progress social beings and there's innovations that can come of that. But the problem with progressivism is inevitably based on utopianism. And utopianism is a whichever type of utopianism it is,

whether it's left, right, up, down, whatever, it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human beings. This is why I'm such a big admirer of Thomas Sol's writings. He talks about this in the conflict of visions. He talks about the constrained vision of the world and the unconstrained version of the world. And the constrained vision of the world says, well, human beings of the Lord, they're never going to be perfect.

So we have to learn to live with our imperfections and accept that we're never going to get to that perfect dream world that we would ideally like to live in. The unconstrained vision says, no, no, no, no, we're going to keep going until we've got utopia. And that's why, I say, I think 10, 15 years ago, the sort of left-woods movements that were making sure that gay people could be treated equally in terms of the law and all of that sort of stuff. I think they were good. I never had any problem with them. I want people to be treated equally. But we've got to a point now where people

are not treated equally, that some groups are given preference to other groups, whether that's in education in the United States, where you have to have a higher SAT if you're an Asian person because of the racial quotas or whatever it is in the UK. A straight white man in his mid-40s is not going to get on the BBC as a presenter unless he already has a 20-year career. And when you get into this level of actual discrimination, particularly when it's against the majority group, you're building up a lot of resentment that I don't think is healthy for a society going forward. So I talk about a couple of examples of this in the book where people were outright explicitly

saying to me, you know, I was once involved in a conversation on television around this issue. And when I walked off the set, one of the presenters who I think, I don't think they were particularly bright, maybe. And so they just said what they people in that world actually think. They said to me, you know what, I'm really glad we didn't have any white people on this panel having this conversation. And I was like, what? Like, how have you just said that? Do you know what I mean? And I think once you get

to that level where I couldn't work out where she said it, because I was like, you realize I don't hold these opinions, and I have quite a large public platform, and if I wanted to at the time, I could have put this out, and you'd be in a lot of trouble, and so would your station or the rest of it. But what I realized later when I got home was, the reason that person was comfortable saying it is that's the world in which they live.

That's how people think in that world. And that troubles me tremendously because as I say, look, racism is bad when it's against the minority, but a minority is limited in terms of the backlash it's going to have. Once you start saying this to a country like Britain, where it's 80 plus percent white and a country like the United States, which is the dominant group is white people, and you want to make them second-class citizens explicitly. You think that's gonna,

you think they're just gonna take that lying down and it's not gonna cause any resentment or tension or backlash. It's a recipe for very dangerous things, Chris. I think we all know that. And I'm deeply troubled that in the pursuit of this utopian dream of making sure that minorities aren't discriminated against, that we don't go too far in other direction. I fear that we already have.

I've noticed since I've been in America more of a tribal mentality, even amongst people that are super, super smart and probably a bunch of them when you come out to Austin, we may even go for dinner with. People identify themselves. I've never heard the word based used in an ironic way in the UK, but over here, it's actually something that people need to plant a flag in the ground about because it is a show of fealty to look, I'm not a part of this. And I think that kind of like, the only reason that Bruce Wayne turns into Batman is because there's the Joker, I feel like one of the reasons that people feel the need to kind of put on that mask a little bit more is because they

see it as a big, bigger threat. So rolling the clock forward, you know, this conversation up to now can kind of sound a little bit culture-worry, right? It's just discussing the current milieu of the day, well, you know, lick enough finger and put it in the air and what's the temperature and stuff like that. The interesting insight, I think, that you have coming from the Soviet Union and understanding what's happening

in that area of the world is just how dangerous those dictators and those sort of regimes can be. And it's, think it's Douglas Murray who said when the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are. And this insight that some of the smartest minds of our generation have been spent, their times been spent working out how to get people to click on ads or debating over whether a man is a man and a woman is a woman or not. No matter what your view on politics, that simply can't be the best use of our great minds, right? I agree with you and I would go further.

I think Douglas is right about the barbarians at the gate, but I would also say that it's not just a simple matter of the barbarians have showed up. But I would also say that it's not just a simple matter of the barbarians have showed up and we're debating about pronouns. It's that we're inviting barbarians by demonstrating weakness and distraction and corruption and perversion and all of these things of our brains before anything else. And that's why I've been warning, you see, I've been making this point for some time and there's a record of it that I've been saying well before the invasion of Ukraine and all of that.

Like, people in China and Russia are watching what we do. The most people in the West have no idea what's happening inside of China or Russia. Most people in Russia know very well what's happening in the West, because the West is the reference point for the entire world, because it's the dominant center of power and wealth and trade and everything else. So people in Russia are watching very, very carefully what the West is doing. And there is no question in my mind that if we had not been engaged in this obsession with things that don't matter, that what is happening

now in Ukraine would not be happening. You really think that? You think that if we weren't so captured with the work stuff that that would have altered the mindset of a leader like Putin from invading Ukraine? Well, ask yourself this, why was Donald Trump not re-elected? My opinion is that this never would have happened if Trump was still in power. Why was he not not reelected? My opinion is that this never would have happened if Trump was still in power. Why was he not reelected? He was heavily lambasted by the press.

And for what? What was he well-abasted for? He was racist, he was sexist, he was a bigger, right? Those were the issues that he was attacked on. That's workness, right? The idea that someone who wants to restrict illegal immigration into a country is automatically a xenophobic racist. That is where that comes from. So to my mind, Joe Biden is president because people didn't want someone as

brash and obnoxious as Donald Trump, and that's largely down to workness. And so, yeah, of course I think that. I think that presenting, and we've had, you know, Andrew Ray Laryonov Putin's former economic advisor on the show, and he said that if Trump was in power, this never would have happened. So, and we recently had the political scientist, Dr. John Lee, he's an Australian of, and he's an expert in China. And he was making the same point. It's like the Chinese are watching and they're seeing how distracted the West is. And they capitalize on that distraction. The line of Taiwan, the lining up Hong Kong.

Well, he was actually making the point that maybe the because of the way that Russia is faltered in Ukraine and the strength of the international response, which surprised me in how how strong it's been. That may have brought us a few years on time, but the broader point remains, which is if you appear weak, distracted, divided, and busy destroying your own culture and society, people will seek to take advantage of that. And I'm certain that that is a huge contributing factor to what we're seeing now. For the people that aren't familiar with Yuri Besman of, can you explain who he is, why

he's important and what you've learned from studying him? Well, I think people should go and watch a couple of his lectures, which are available on YouTube, but very brief summary. He was a Soviet defector, I think, in the 70s and maybe 80s. He was a KGB agent who was sent to India and when he was there he was disgusted with the way that the supposedly fraternal and friendly Soviet Union was treating the Indians and he said it was far worse and more racist than anything the colonial powers that have had done in India. He disguised himself as an American hippie and eventually manages to make his way to Germany

than Canada and eventually the United States. And the reason that it's relevant to our conversation is my book is called In Immigrants Love Let It To The West. He wrote a book, I don't know if you know this, called Love Let It To America, which is one of the reasons I called my book What I Called It because I'm referencing him. And what he talked about is the Soviet Union's Deliberate attempts to destabilize the culture of of the United States in particular by

Supporting and encouraging people within the United States who hated that society he wanted to see it undermined Which is one of the reasons the a society that was deeply racist towards black people like the Soviet Union supported The other reasons that a society that was deeply racist towards black people like the Soviet Union supported black liberation movements in America, not because they agreed with black people having equal rights, but because they saw it as a destabilizing force at the time. And so Russia has been playing from the same playbook. They've invested a lot of money into cyber warfare, manipulating what people in the West Sea. I mean, one of the biggest problems Elon Musk has identified with Twitter is the number

of bots. Now, a lot of those bots are coming from Russia and China, and they're seeking to shape the way people feel about different events and what's happening. And you see, of course, China using cultural power, whether that's the NBA or whatever, to influence how people in the West perceive their own country. So China or a country which puts its minorities in concentration camps and amputates the organs in order to sell them elsewhere without anesthetic often and kills them for this, is telling

America that it's a racist country and encouraging Americans to see it. There is a war going on and no great society can survive the destruction of its own culture from within. And if you raise generation after generation of people who hate your society and hate your culture and refuse to defend it, eventually the barbarians will realize that your society is weak and they will be at the gates. And what their gender is is not even going to be that important at that point. What would the strategies that Bezmanov detailed Russia would use in order to destabilize? Well, one of them, there's quite a lot, which is why I recommend people go and watch this for lectures.

But it was essentially funding people who were destructive to the fabric of the society, destroying the family unit. We've seen some of that, destroying people's cultural loyalty to their society. His point was also about religion, you know, I'm not a believer, but he believed very strongly, and starting to agree with it, to be honest, the absent a religion society begins to disintegrate and sort of eat itself from the inside. Or as in our case, develop a new religion, one that is far more destructive than the one that we have in the past. And it's essentially

about dividing people. It's about creating conflict between people and finding areas where there already is conflict and exacerbating it so that people with different opinions and people with different political views are no longer able to converse, they're only able to debate. And conversation is much more important than debate. Debate is usually about point scoring and looking better than the other side. And no, I can do that. You can do that. We can all do that. And that's fine and great. And it gives you a clip you can put on your YouTube channel. But conversation is what actually brings people together. And any conflict that I've ever been involved with that's actually got resolved in one

or another. There's always been through people coming together and having a conversation, a hashing out the differences while having the idea of a common good in mind. And the concern that I have, particularly with identity politics, is it encourages people not to think of the greater good of their country, because instead of encouraging people to think of themselves as Americans first and their ethnicity later, it encourages them to think of their ethnicity and to help with America, to help with Britain. That's a problem. That is not a society that is going to be willing to defend itself strongly enough,

or at least when we perceive this being willing to defend itself strongly enough against foreign threats. And I think that's where China and Russia have been in Bolton. Even more than that, the atomization, I think, of society, and the fact that people don't have that same degree of whatever local, collective sense of belonging, that to me seems like one of the most dangerous ways to remove the attachment to your country, because there is nothing, there is no footing for you to hold onto. And this firehousing, the complete overwhelm of information, I don't know anybody that actually wants that. I don't know anybody that wants more information.

In the last 15 years, the best performing people, the smartest people, the people that have been the most quick to make progress and to better their own lives, has gone from being someone that could seek more information to somebody that is able to filter more information. So we've gone from not having enough in maybe 2008 or something to now having way too much in 2022. And for almost all of our history,

ancestors, really more information gave you a better chance of survival. It meant that you knew where the berries were. It meant that you knew how to make a new type of blanket for you and your family or whatever. And now within the last 15 years, it's switched. It's completely pivoted and it's the people that are able to distinguish noise from signal. And you have to ask yourself, look, do I genuinely believe that this

overwhelm of conflicting narratives, this sort of firehousing of information that I'm being hit in the face with, do I think that that is a byproduct of social media? Or do I think that this is perhaps a cultivated, crafted weaponized strategy being used by people that want to actually confuse us? Because that, to me, seems to be the single most effective strategy from the stuff that Bezmanov was talking about, which is that when you've flood so much information over a population, the goal isn't to get people to agree on one thing or agree on another thing and then create disagreement within the two. The goal is to make everybody feel so overwhelmed that they simply don't know what's true anymore and they become passive and they become much easier to conquer then. Yeah, I do think that the last part of what you said is Zachary, I don't think that,

I think this is technology driven first and foremost. And I think Russia and China just using the technology that's emerged, rather than this was always the plan all along or whatever. I just think they're piggybacking on existing infrastructure too. Which they always have done. They would have used other stuff that was there before. You know, the Russia, the Soviet Union, rather, was very careful about recruiting people who would end up being, you know, journal and paper editors and TV people and whatever. That's always

been the way. Because what I would say on on all of that is, uh, I think one of the things we we should say in this conversation is I don't believe that we ought to be concerned about China or Russia. We we have nothing to fear from them if we're willing to ensure that our societies are strong and healthy. Barbarians are always going to be at the gate. There will always be barbarians at the gate. If you're the dominant and had Germanic superpower in the world, which we are part of, you and the US now, are there and we and Western Europe are under that umbrella.

The barbarians will always be at the gate, but if you've got a well-trained Roman legion, a strong governmental structure, a true democracy that respects the wishes and rights of the people, you're not, you have nothing to fear from the barbarians. You are better, you're stronger, you're much more technologically advanced. So my, I don't worry too much about China or Russia. What I'm worried about is making sure that we in the West are strong, we're capable, we love the culture that we've created and we improve it. Of course, we should always be improving our societies.

And if that is the case, we have nothing to fear from anybody. Did anybody? I appreciate that point of view. I think that given the background and where you grew up the fact that you're able to see that makes me feel It makes me feel more confident because there is a part of me that almost feels I make a joke about it whenever someone brings up China and I say I do welcome our new Oriental overlords like just in case they're listening over my iPhone But there is a little bit of a part of me that thinks, fuck, is there even anything that we can do here? Is this too far gone?

And the fatalistic nihilism that comes through isn't part of my nature. And yet, I've just, I don't know where that's come from. I feel like, well, I think it's because you're a smart guy and you're able to project into the future. And I think what your brain is telling you is if we continue down this path,

we're gonna end up in a bad place. And I do agree with you, but I also have hope that we can change the direction of travel and get back to a situation where the moderate voice is trying for the extremes. And I think if we can do that, we're going to end up in a very good position because difficulty makes you stronger. And we are in a position now where the West was in the sort of cloud, Kukulant for a while. And then we saw what happened in Ukraine. And I think it's given a lot of people an opportunity to rethink some of their strategies

and some of the approaches they've been taking, whether that's Germany getting rid of its nuclear power plants or whether this endless obsession with things that don't matter in terms of the political discussions that we have. It's given a lot of people a wake-up call, which I think they needed. So I believe we can do it. It's going to take a lot more effort from everybody, people like us and all sorts of other people. Reversing some of the terrible changes we've seen in our institutions, some of the terrible changes we've seen in education, particularly. It's going to take some time. But I do believe that we can do it. And if we can, we have absolutely

nothing to fear. Constantin Kissing, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out the stuff that you do and keep up to date, where should they go? I am at Constantin Kissing on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. And the book is called an Immigrants Love Letter to the West. You can order it on Amazon, UK, Instagram, whatever, and the book is called, an immigrant's love letter to the West, you can order it on Amazon, UK, and Amazon, US. You can also pre-order a signed copy if you just go to my Twitter, it's a pin post there. And by the way, Chris, it turns out my signature actually devalues the book.

So if you get the pre-order signed, it's cheaper than getting it at the full price on Amazon so go for it. Okay, mate. Well, I know that you're coming out to Austin at some point soon, so I'm looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks. Is Francis coming with you as well? Absolutely, I'm so excited, so you can talk to him to tips and help. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic.

Well, I look forward to seeing you then, make good luck with the rest of the book, too. Thanks very much, man. Offends, get offends