The Charlie Kirk Show - Why Is Europe Choosing To Replace Itself?

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

One of Charlie’s favorite modern thinkers was Dr. James Orr, who has the lonely job of defending Western classics at Cambridge University. Shortly before Charlie’s martyrdom, he and Dr. Orr met in-person to talk about European decline, why the West decided to give up on itself en masse, and what hope exists for a turning of the tide. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!  Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers. I could say the only conservative professor at Cambridge University, Dr. Orr, who is a contributing editor for Heritage and Culture at GB News, Dr. James Orr, everybody. Good to be with you, Charlie.

Dr. Orr, great to see you. First, I want to just, you know, you sat through the presentation. You've been around all of this. As a Brit, as a professor, what is your take on this whole thing we have going on here? Well, I got to say first off, I was saying to Andrew earlier, it's pretty overwhelming for a Brit like me to see the scale of your success and of your ambition, what you've achieved. There's that, you know, lots of students at Cambridge claim they want to change the world, that they can go into jobs that are going to change the world. And I thought to myself this morning, you really could say that you are changing the world.

As America goes, so goes the world. And that's what you're doing. You're doing extraordinary things in transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people of caliber and character and courage, particularly among the young. This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain. We're working very hard on it. And I just felt both envious, but also excited because I thought we can bottle some Kirkjuice and take it over to Britain. We need to work out what the DNA is and we need to try to replicate it as best we can. hard to do that, particularly if you're a movement that's focusing on national pride and national distinctiveness and sovereignty and so on. You can't just copy and paste everything that you're doing, of course, we have a very different constitutional setup, very different electoral dynamics,

very different challenges in many ways. But I think philosophically, we're very much there. We're very much on the same page. That is to say, we want to work out what the not so much what the politics of left and right is. I think that's the sort of the politics, the philosophy of what I call the long 20th century, 1940s, to 2016. I think the long 20th century ended in 2016 and the politics of left and right ended in 2016. And we're now talking about the politics of national preference, the politics of national interest. This is still a kind of shocking to the liberal ear, but this is the direction of travel for the new right on both sides of the Atlantic. So what do you mean by that, the long 20th century?

Well, so historians like to talk about this, that, you know, periodizing in history is always very, very, very difficult. And it turns out that human development doesn't always obey neat, neat time periods. But of course, we know what we mean by the 20th century. But I think there are these sort of history doesn't quite obey those neat kind of neat, neat, even divisions. And so historians will sometimes talk about the long 19th century that sort of began roughly in 1815 and probably ended in 1914, right? 1815, Congress of Vienna. And then really you've got this extraordinary period of peace in Europe. And then 1914 is really the point at which that piece explodes. And so I think also we can talk about the long 20th century persisting in some ways beyond 2000 to 2016 as a fundamental

watershed moment in how we think about national flourishing, how we think about politics, how we think about the organizing axes and horizons of national flourishing, of mutual flourishing. Was that Brexit plus Trump? Is that why you think 2016 was the year that began the 21st century? I think that's right. I think it's always easy to conflate the two phenomena. They are distinct phenomena in lots of ways, but there's lots of overlaps too. And I think that it really marks a moment of change in the West. And it's very convenient a point. It's not just Brexit and Trump. It's also the rise of pro-nation national conservative movements all across Europe. You're seeing it with Vox in Spain. You're seeing it with Cheager in Portugal. You're seeing it with AFD in Germany. You're seeing it with a Rassamblement Nacional in France, the Fraterally in Italy in Spain. in Austria, you're seeing it in Italy, I'm sorry, and in Austria as well, all over Europe, Fidesz, in Hungary, and going at different speeds, and one of the challenges conservatives are always trying to conserve what is our own. And so it's actually very difficult to form what are the communists used to have a com intern. It's very difficult to have a con intern, because, you know, Marx could say workers of the world unite.

The progressives can say, wokesters of the world unite, right? It's a fundamentally transnational ideology that's very, very powerful. This is something that moves in lockstep. If we're conserving our own nations, it's much harder to have that sense of international solidarity. But I think various movements are trying to catalyze that, the National Conservatism Movement, which I'm proudly the chair of in the UK, is helping to do that. And so, yeah, that's a big challenge. So what do you think led towards that national conservatism moment?

And let's go a step back and also take a moment, introduce yourself. You teach the Western canon at Cambridge. correct I wouldn't say I'm not allowed to teach the Western canonism it would be sort of too big a good example I teach a program moral philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche that includes Aristotle it includes Augustine it includes Aquinas Kant Hume so as much of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can fit in and then and then I also teach an Enfield program but but broadly speaking yes I teach Western philosophers

without the, but not through the prism and not through the lens of kind of critical theory. I try not to politicize my teaching in any way. Of course, that itself is a political act these days, just trying to be neutral, trying to listen to these ancient

thinkers on their own terms and not trying to force ideological kind of masks onto them. But yes, I see myself very much as trying to pass on what is best in the Western tradition. I think really universities have only three primary purposes, that is to pursue the truth, to preserve the truth, and to pass on the truth. And those are the kind of,

it's a little bit crude, but those are the kind of the three pieces. Those are the sort of three, that's the way I sort of think about what I'm doing. So partly it is preserving the best of what has been said and thought in the West, but it's also not wanting to kind of, you know, be kind of inert in that, always having that sort of sense of looking forward. testing, always probing, searching for new things, being open to novelty, open to change, but kind of anchored in the great Western tradition. So with that backdrop, post-World War II, there was somewhat of a new world order that was established, the neoliberal world order. And it was one that was based on free trade, that was based on both American dominance, but also

kind of NATO expansionism, international cooperation. Some could call it globalism. And liberalism seemed to be an inevitability. The famous book, End of History, by Francis Fukuyama was what, late 80s, I'm not mistaken? 92. Okay, 1992. Where he basically said, this is it. We've reached it. Like, all the ideas that have been tried have led us to this moment. Classical liberalism, whatever you want to call it, liberalism is the best it's going to get. And congratulations, humanity. History is over. What happened from Fukuyama in 1992 to now, what you say, 2016 to now, where you go from this kind of hubristic, prideful, you know, kind of exaltation of liberalism to a completely different

moment we're in now. Yeah. Well, that book, The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, it's a fascinating kind of moment of sort of hubris, you might say, a kind of misplaced optimism. But if you read the very end of that book, the actual full title of the book is The End of History and the Last Man. And he has his fascinating kind of final chapter or two of that book where he says, look, actually this sort of sense of this end of history dispensation where everything is we've hit the sunlit uplands of the kind of liberal utopia

and peace and prosperity for all, that in the end is not going to satisfy man's instinct. And this is, particularly this is what he calls the Fumos. This is, if we think of Plato's like three level, three level soul,

you've got the, the noose at the top, the mind, then you've got the Fumos, which is courage, that's a sort of sense of that kind of the spirit that animates us.

And then you've got the epithumia, which is kind of the base appetites. And Plato says, you've got all three of these in check. And what Fukuyama says is that there's a real danger that with this kind of, in the sunlit uplands,

of the kind of globalized utopia, we're going to suppress the thumos. But that thumos is not going anyway. It's not going away. It will come back. And so he's very, he's not, he's not quite as naive as that. And I think what's happened, you know, that quest, you might think of the quest for thumos

as the search for identity. In fact, Fukuyama wrote a very interesting book on identity where he sort of starts to concede that the kind of sort of Berkeley liberalism was never really going to deliver the goods. And so I think, you know, the suppression of that sense of sense of, sense of rootedness, sense of home, sense of distinctiveness and what we are and what we love,

that was never going to be sort of erased by the liberal doctrines of a blank slate doctrines of human nature. We're rooted human beings, we're related to what's around us, we're conservative about what we love most, about what's closest to us, and that's never going to go away. And we've got to face up to reality as it is given to us and not as we would like it to be. But what went wrong with the liberal project? the fundamental problem with the liberal project is that it's grounded on fundamentally mistaken assumptions about what it is to be human.

The basic idea is that human beings are born into the world with completely independent, completely blank slate. This is a lot of view of the tabula rouser or the white page, and we're completely free of all unchosen obligations. And there can be no obligations that we don't ourselves choose. And this is just a complete fantastic.

I don't think it's an accident that the great liberal philosophers like John Locke and Emmanuel Kant never had any children Anyone who's had anyone who's had a child will understand that the radical nature of dependency That most basic bond we're born into the world with that most literally with a physical bond we're attached to a physical bond to our To our mothers and so that was always going to be a problem That we're not we're not blank slates we are connected we flourish most when we're connected to what is closest to us and it's not natural to love what is closest to us. I was in France, I think last month, up in the mountains, this beautiful chateau addressing some,

must have been 50 or 60, I suppose, conservative right-wing students from all across, I think probably 25 different nations. And I opened, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say to them, that the organizers hadn't been very clear. So I found myself beginning the session by saying, who here has got the best mum in the world? and every hand went up.

And they looked around and they started laughing at each other. And I said, notice what you're not doing right now. You're not arguing with each other. You're not discussing, what are the proper optimality criteria of being a mother? You're not. There would be a crazy, inhuman thing to do. It's a totally natural thing to think that your mum is the best mom in the world. And then I said, who here lives in the best country in the world?

And everybody's hands went up. And my point was, I don't owe you an argument for why my country is the best country in the world, any more than I owe you an argument for why my mom is the best mom in the world. Somebody who asks for an argument has had what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls one thought too many. The person who has one thought too many is like the guy, the utilitarian, and he walks up to the river and he sees two women drowning, his wife, and a strange woman, and stops to ask, what if that strange woman might win the Nobel Prize in public economics? That person has had one thought too many. It is a totally natural disposition of every human to love what is closest to their own. Aquinas sees this. Aristotle sees this at the beginning of one of the greatest works of politics ever written.

Book one, page one, of Aristotle's politics. He says, how do we think about how we get on? How do we think about the life of the polis, that politica? He says, well, you know, we're born into the world and we're dependent upon each other. Male, female, men and women will bond. Then they will have, then they will procreate. There'll be a family, a household, an oikos. But that won't be enough.

That will be enough for daily needs. But it won't be enough for sort of, you know, non-day, more than daily needs. So you'll have a village, and the village will come together, but that won't be enough either. you will need to grow into a polis for self-defense and so on, a city state, as it were, a country, a nation. And that Aristotle thinks, okay, that's pretty small in 5th, 4th century, BC, Greece, but that was the functioning, that was the way in which Aristotle, that was his kind of optimal size for human beings to flourish, to, as it were, fulfill their proper ends as human beings.

And I think that's still the basic way of thinking about things. it's really what you see in Aquinas. I think it's what you see in the Bible as well. Wow, there's so much there to think about. We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries, and today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture and Christianity, the Alan Jackson podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump and the White house issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems. In every episode, he gives

practical things we can do to make a difference. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends. And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words. Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today. The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging. You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture. You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at Alanjaxon.com forward slash Charlie.

So let's go, let's let's pull one of those threads, which is that all the French young people at that chateau will raise their hand, who lives in the greatest nation, why does Europe not vote or believe that vocally in any of their politics. Let's now center our conversation around continental Europe and then we'll make our way to your home. If I may say so, continental Europe is a husk of its former self. It's an open-air museum. It's sad. It's depressing. There are pockets, obviously, of joy and of history, but I think you would agree, Dr. Orr, it's not what it used to be. How did that happen? World War II, the West won, right? And now we look in 2025, Europe is an unrecognizable continent in more ways than one.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And it would take a very, very kind of long, long conversation to really get to the bottom a bit. I mean, one book I'd really recommend on this is actually by an American Christopher Caldwell, reflections on the revolution in Europe. This actually goes way back. It's 2009, which is a long time considering what's happened in the intervening period. But I think Caldwell really sort of, it's an incredibly prescient book. and he starts to see the kind of the sort of conditions of the unraveling

kind of kicking in. And you're right, you know, after the Second World War, the French had what they call the Trents glorious years. In Germany you have, at least in West Germany, you have the Vichchapwanda, this economic miracle, this extraordinary explosion of economic flourishing and national self-confidence in West Germany. And I suppose, you know, 1989 has got to feature somehow in the story

of Europe's decline or Europe's sort of once that, you know, the great bug bear of the Soviet Union and that great enemy of freedom everywhere had been dissolved then I think there was a sense of well before that there was a sense of what do we for? We know what we're for

we're for freedom and this is something that is pretty uncomplicated and it's going to stitch us together as a kind of as the West it was easy to think about the West and it was easy to think about the rest I think after you know 1989 into the 1990s, the fall of the wall.

The fall of the wall, in a way, sort of starts to mark the beginning of the kind of questioning, what are we about? What is our story? What are we for? There's a fascinating moment in 2004 when the European Union is trying to work out

a constitution. In the end, it fails because it can't agree on anything, really. And there's a huge debate about what goes in the preamble of the Constitution. How do we set out right at the beginning of the Constitution? We, the European Union,

who are we? what makes us we what makes us a we they said well are hellenic inheritance greece and rome the classical inheritance yes the enlightenment inheritance as well no mention of the hebraic or the christian inheritance this was seen to be something that was you know low status not something that wanted to be admitted john paul the second is right towards the end of his life 2004 and uh got got involved and some italian politicians got involved there's a huge fight about and in the end the decision was No, we're not going to have any recognition of the fact that the European Union is in any way at all, the successor to what it really was a successor to, namely Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire,

and that which stitched Europe together as a sort of self-conscious collective entity. That was gone. And I don't want to overstate that too much, but I think that it was an indicator, an index, into the way in which Europeans were beginning to run out of a sense of who are we? What are we for? Where do we come from? And then, of course, with the emergence of a kind of technocratic, democratically unaccountable, Potemptic in Brussels and Strasbourg, the parliament is in both places. Wait for this. For a hundred million, a hundred million euros a year,

the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg. I think it's every fortnight. Back and forth. How long is a fortnight? Sorry, you do have fortnights over here. It's 14 days. Two weeks. We do. just trying to. Yeah,

Port-like, two, so, and just, just sort of think of that. They can't, kind of, couldn't resolve

something as basic as that. But they moved back and forth? They move back and forth. Yeah, just so the Belgian's at, you know,

the kind of, Franco-German pact is happy, and then the sort of, you know, the idea of there being a European Union beyond the Franco-German Alliance, so that's, that's when you go to Brussels.

So all these crazy things, crazy sort of features of, of the kind of European settlement. And there's a kind of democratic, deficit, I'm now at Cambridge. I was at Oxford in 2016 just ahead of the Brexit vote. One of the parlour games I would play with my,

I was the only out of the closet Brexiteer. As far as I know, in the whole of this college among, I don't know, I think about 70, 80 colleagues. And I used to ask them, who's our MEP? Who's our member of the European Parliament? Like, which, who represents us? Who represents Oxford and the surrounding areas in Brussels, Stras. book and no one could answer. No one knew. Not even the professors of politics. And there's

no reason for them to know because it's a fake, it was a fake, it was a fake, it was and is a fake parliament with very little powers, very little, very little, few veto powers, very few powers of it to initiate legislation. Nobody voted for them. Nobody, nobody had any reason to know who they were. And so that has been a huge problem, that kind of the sort of the European Union project has been, you know, from 1992 onwards, where it really became a self-consciously political union and not just an economic and trade one, that's really been, it's been a disaster. And I hoped that in 2016, Brexit would be the first brick in the wall, that it would catalyze a kind of domino effect. That was probably wishful thinking, because particularly in the Euro denom,

so you're in the Euro nations, you know, it's one thing for Britain with its own pound, its own currency to break away. It would be a much, much, more dramatic, there'd be much more dramatic consequences if a Euro country split away. But the Euro has been a disaster for the countries who have been members of it. I mean, Italy, for example, has scarcely had any GDP growth. I think it started to pick up recently. Really, for the first 20 years of its being part of the Euro, effectively nothing at all. Greece and Spain, youth unemployment was through the roof.

Effectively, you've got the Spanish currency, the Greek currency, effectively being shackled to the German business. Deutsche Mark and said the Germans weren't complaining because the currency was artificially depreciated. So there are exports more attractive. And so it was all this kind of elaborate Ponzi scheme which at some point is going to unravel. And then somehow, you know, ideologically, within the elite forming classes in Oxford and Cambridge and London, certainly in Britain, you know, the idea is that to be European was to be part of the European Union. Those two are absolutely part and parcel. And I never understood this. You know, you can hate FIFA and love football.

as I've often said, or soccer, I should say. You can hate FIFA, like the worldwide organization for soccer, and you can love soccer. In fact, I hate, I hate FIFA because I love football. I don't like what FIFA is doing international football. I don't like the corruption. I want the game to be a richer game. And I think it's the same of the European Union.

And it's had this sort of deadly effect on our sense of what it is to be European. What explains the hyper-secularization of Europe post-World War II? Why did we see such a dramatic drop off of church rates? Is it as simple as they saw tragedy and suffering and nihilism took the void? Because Europe has had depressingly low church rates, and they just keep on finding new lows every decade, where what percentage of people in Europe do you think regularly attend church? It varies quite a bit from country to country,

but it is shockingly low relative to, certainly relative to the United States. So in Italy, it's now very, very low. I think it's certainly well below 5%. I mean, you know, religious adherence is just a very difficult thing to measure. Is actually going to church? Does it count as sort of being a Christian or being a church go? You know, in Britain, you know, what caused it? I mean, it may be the opposite, I think.

I think I'm more tempted to the analysis that actually it's prosperity and flourishing, particularly material flourishing prosperity, that tends to catalyze a sort of collapse in the sense of any need for meaning or any any orientation to the transcendent. I suppose also in the 60s you're seeing the emergence of competing systems of meaning, competing accounts of what it is to have significance, competing sets of answers to life's deepest questions. We see that a lot of that imported from California and elsewhere. and I suppose the sort of something, you know, there's something fashionable about religious skepticism that was certainly true in the 60s. If you think back, you know, to the high noon of the new atheists in 2005, you know, there was something very, very sort of elite.

There was something very, a lot of cachet in being an atheist. And I'm tempted to think that new atheism was just a politically correct way to be skeptical of Islam. I think that the timing works quite well there. I think if you look in the last few years, and I just saw some data out from Britain this morning, you know, I think between 18 to 35-year-olds, belief in God has tripled over the last five years. Bible purchases has gone up by 87% over four years.

Now, it's from a pretty low base, but something is happening out there. You know, it's still quite small, but the numbers among Gen Z, or Gen Z, as you call them, You call them Gen Z. Well, because Zed is how you pronounce the letter in English. And I know you Americans have a different way of putting it. No, it's interesting.

So let's now take our attention to your country, which I had the opportunity to visit, and you hosted us wonderfully in Cambridge, which was quite the ambush. So not by you, but by Cambridge. But we survived it. More than survived it. Yeah, I think we, we, we, we, we, we, we, triumphed, some could say. And you were so sweet and so kind throughout that entire process. So the United Kingdom or Britain or England, whatever word we want to give, give it, voted for Brexit in 2016.

Where are British politics today? What is the status of British politics? Yeah. Well, it's a great question. You know, in 2016, we have this extraordinary expression of the democratic will. in 17.46 million people voting for the principle that laws affecting the United Kingdom should be made in the United Kingdom and should be accountable to the people and voters of the United Kingdom. It's a very, just seemingly an entirely uncontroversial principle,

but it was the biggest vote of, we've had in the history, in British voting history. And another key driver there was the sense of we're losing our sense, we're losing what it is to use the first person plural, as Roger Scruton, one of my favorite philosophers likes to put it, that sense of we, we the people. What is it that makes a we?

And what was going on in Brexit was a kind of inchoate kind of cry that we are losing that sense of who we are. That every time, for the last 40, 50 years, every time the British people have had an opportunity to express a view on mass demographic change transition, it has said no or go much slower. And every time its leaders have effectively ignored that clearly expressed will. And I think 2016 was a moment where suddenly it looked as

if we might have the opportunity to finally regain control of our laws and regain control of our borders at the same time. What actually happened in the last five years, one in what have we had is one in 27 people in Britain have arrived in the last five years. One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months. In the first 25 years of this century, gross immigration are talking 12 to 15 million people. That's roughly four to five times as many people who arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history. It's difficult to overstate, and I know you've had, you know,

you've had enormous influxes too under the Biden administration, but you've got a much bigger, you've got a much bigger territory, and you've got different kinds, different kind of categories of migrants coming in, and you've at last got an administration that's willing to do something about it. Praise God for that. Indeed. And that has had, but that's had a profoundly,

kind of traumatic shock on us Brits and it's had a kind of tectonic effect on the landscape of British politics. So what's happening in British politics? Well, quick update. Last year, July 2024, we saw the loveless landslide. So we see the Starma government getting an astonishing 175 odd seats of majority in Parliament, which is an enormous, enormous majority, one of the biggest in living memory, on only 20% of the vote, 20% of the people eligible to vote, something like 34% of the vote share. It was, you know, the sofa won. I mean, the couch won that election. It was a very low, very low turnout. Nobody, it was an apathetic election. Nobody seemed to care. Fast forward now, you know, we're just over a year in. Back in the first of May of

this year, we had the local elections, which are a pretty good proxy. It's a bit like the midterms, and not a bad proxy for what the country's mood in is it is. And I think Labor gets goes from 34% to 20%. The Conservative Party goes down to 15% extinction level, almost an unprecedented low. And for the first time in 100 years, a new party emerges, a third party, to rival the duopoly that's had Britain in its grip

since 1920, 1923, and that is Nigel Farage's Reform UK, which surged through to win 677 local seats, which if you extrapolate that out, is 30% of the electorate. They were at 14% a year ago, and that's going up and up and up. And what you're seeing for the first time in the history of British politics, since there have been political parties, let's say the Tories are emerging in like the 1670s, 1680s, and really kind of bedding down in their modern form in the 1830s, for the first time in the history of British politics, there is another right-wing party emerging,

another conservative party that is, it looks as if, in my view, we'll have to see what happens next May. There's some more proxy elections, and then there'll be a general election in 2019, the last point that Kirstama can call it. But my sense is that Nigel Farage is on track to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

that deserves some applause. So let's examine that deeper and more thoroughly. Some people in the audience will hear, wait, wait, hold on, the conservative party, don't we like them? Explain what it means to be part of the conservative party. That's not exactly, you know, let's say the equivalent that we would have here in the United States of what we consider to be a conservative. Yes, that's right. I mean, but even here, I suppose, in the States, there are lots and lots of fascinating debates within the GOP, within the Republican Party as to, you know, what is it to be a conservative? You know, is it to be a Reaganite? Is it to be a fusionist? Is it to be a kind of compassionate, Bushite conservative, whatever it might be? So, I mean, and, you know, to some extent, we mirror some of those debates, those debates about freedom, economic freedom, how to rank that in the order of what it is we want to conserve. But roughly speaking, we mirror. the Conservative Party was in power from 2010 to 2024.

And, you know, all of the good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident. You know, it granted the referendum on Brexit in 2015, not expect in its manifesto. It didn't expect to win in 2015. It thought there would be another coalition that the referendum would be scrapped by their coalition partners, but they won almost, you know, unexpected, not expecting to.

They granted reluctantly the referendum. They campaigned against Brexit. that that was the official government position. Then they lost, the government fell. A new government came in, headed up incredibly by Theresa May, a prime minister who'd voted against Brexit. A prime minister who'd voted against Brexit was tasked by the internal party political dynamics of the conservative party to deliver Brexit. And sure enough, it was a complete catastrophe. That's when I cut up my membership card.

to be conservative in 2016, 2017 was quite a straightforward. It's just you've got one job. 17.4 million Brits have asked us to do this one thing. And right now that's all that we want you to do. And it couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. Finally, the May government falls in the summer of 2019 after a spectacular defeat at the European elections.

Those European elections are good for something, it turns out. Because in the space of six weeks, Nigel Farage sets up the Brexit, party and goes from zero to winning a national election in the United Kingdom. That is never was inconceivable, just just unthinkable. And that spelt the end of the May party and Boris Johnson takes over and finally managed to get Brexit over the line. Then the plague strikes and COVID and lockdown and so on and so forth. Spending goes through the roof and you know we've got very very serious economic economic problems, headaches to it to worry about. So being concerned, has been very, very hard to kind of keep a track on what it means to be conservative.

I suppose for Brits, the British Conservative Party is just to be conservative, is just to be a pragmatist, just to be pragmatic. But as, you know, I remember Larry Arne, he passed through, a mutual friend of mine and Charlie's came through, he said that the trouble with pragmatism, James, is, it doesn't work. And it's true, you know, you got it, you can't, G.K. Chesson says, you know, the pragmatist's chief end. is to be something more than a pragmatist.

If all your prizing is efficiency, then what is efficiency? Towards what? It's got to be towards what? You have to aim your destination. You've got to have a telos. You've got to have a horizon. And I think for years and years and years,

the Conservatives horizon was just to win. We just need to win. And they were very good at winning. They're the most successful election. Does that sound like a Republican Party that we know of? It's very similar. And the Conservative Party, and the British Conservative Party

is the most successful election winning machine in the history of politics anywhere in the world. But, you know, I think that may now be coming to an end. This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of Y Refi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us. His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with TurningPoint for years to come. Now, hear Charlie in his own words tell you about Y ReFi. I'm going to tell you guys about YREFI.com.

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Go to yrefi.com. That is y-R-E-F-Y-F-Y.com. Private student loan debt relief, yrefi.com. So then, so that defines the Conservative Party. Reform, which is Nigel Farage's party, is growing. How, and you've mentioned this, how does mass immigration, specifically mass Islamic immigration, playing into how people are thinking about this election and the United Kingdom. Yeah. Well, it's a great question. I mean, you know, it's very hard to know with so many people coming in. It's very hard to know who they are. What do they believe? What do they think? Let alone working out strategies of integration or assimilation. So what's happening now. I mean, so we've got illegal immigration.

So roughly, you know, tens of thousands of people. coming onto the Calais beaches and paying people traffickers three, four thousand euros a pop to take the pretty dangerous journey in dinghies across the across the channel. And so there's an immediate now that those numbers are tiny relative to the levels of legal migration, which are huge. But somehow it concentrates the, concentrates the mind, this fact that, you know, these people are coming over. We know nothing about them. Most of them are young men are fighting age, very few women, very few children, very hard to believe that they are actually refugees fleeing persecution and warfare. I mean, France is not a great country right now. You know,

you might not like it very much, but, you know, is it in the grip of civil war and widespread urban conflict? I mean, yeah, only in August, really. And, you know, actually Calais is a pretty nice, pretty nice place to be. But that's what's going on. And so the government doesn't know what to do with these people. The Tories didn't know what to do with them. The Labor Party didn't know what to do with them. We are wedded and kind of enmeshed in all of these complex webs of international obligations, treaty obligations. There's a foreign court in Strasbourg that has jurisdiction over who we can and can't admit into the country. But wasn't Brexit supposed to fix that? Well, is there something that is worth clarifying here. So there are two courts. There's two European courts. It's European Court of Justice

in Luxembourg. And then there's the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And we did not leave the European Court of Human Rights. That is a separate jurisdiction, which emerges after the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s where there was a sense that in order to kind of ensure that this could never happen again, that the Nazi war criminals were never able to say, what laws did we break? And actually, it was very hard. You know, the allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue. Jackson, the U.S. prosecutor, and David Maxwell 5, found it very difficult to say, well, you know, it's not clear what laws you have broken. I mean, technically, it's not clear that the Holocaust, for example, was against the law. The Nazis were scrupulous legislators.

So there was this sense we have to have this convention. We have, in order to ensure that this never happens again. And that's different from the European Union. The European Union doesn't come along till later. And we still remain under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court. And for as long as we are under that, its jurisdiction, we effectively, you know, our courts are required, you know, to effectively grant the rescission of deportation orders by the British government. On the grounds that deportation on origin country

would breach the deportees human rights. I mean, so you're getting, you know, I had a story that this is happening last week of people facing deportees. going to their embassies, protesting outside the embassies, claiming that they would have caught the eye of officials within the embassy, and then claiming that it would be too dangerous for them to go back. They'd be likely to be political prisoners,

or they'd like to be victims of political persecution. It's quite extraordinary. You have people joining terrorist organizations, because that will mean that they're going to be persecuted politically politically when they go back to their origin countries. Or Article 8, right to a family life, which is incredibly open basket human right. You can say, no, I just feel I'm going to be, you know,

I'm gay. And Syria's not going to like that. Okay, fine. You're not going back. And you're not going to win that. You're not going to win that case. The government is not, no government's going to win that case against the human rights, legal, industrial complex.

Because Britain very much, you know, it's no longer the rule of law. It's the rule of lawyers. Is Nigel thinking about ending that jurisdiction and what is he running on in regards to immigration? So one of the key questions is do we get out of this court? How do we get out of the court? In my view, if you want to really get Brexit done, you have to finish the job,

we have to remove ourselves from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court. That means rescinding Tony Blair's 1998 Human Rights Act. But the political appetite to repeal a human rights act and effectively this sort of new constitution of kind of rights-based regime, very kind of continental in spirit,

very different from the common law approach that England has always had. Contrast that. Can you build into that for a second? I don't want to just zip by that. Let's just think about this. So there's very two, there's a very different, you might say there's the kind of the jurisprudence of the English-speaking peoples,

kind of a common law, the idea that we discern the principles of justice, of natural justice, from the bottom up, on a case-by-case basis. And we work it out through concrete quarrels between particular neighbors, between contractual disputes, or in the case of the criminal law.

The European model, this is a little bit crude, but broadly, I think, broadly kind of plausible. The European model is just to kind of imagine what, you know, to come up with codes, abstract codes that are going to just apply universally no matter what, that are basically agnostic and kind of not attentive to the concrete particularities of human interrelations. And so, you know, that one of the great sort of gifts

of the English-speaking peoples is this idea of a kind of bottom-up common law approach. We see this in Blackston, we see it in Cook, we see it in all the great jurists that we the English-speaking people's have inherited, whereas the European idea is to think in these sort of rights-based ways, which is a metaphor drawn from kind of the world of property. So, I mean, one way of thinking about this is, you know, we have an offences against the Person Act, 1861.

And we have these words, these lovely earthy, Saxon words like murder and manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm. And I sometimes joke with my students, you know, which do you think is the more kind of morally accurate way, what's the kind of right moral grammar in these two scenarios? Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached Lucy's right to life? and I think you know the common law bottom up way of thinking is just more accurate that he murdered her or maybe it was manslaughter, diminished responsibility

or whatever it might be whereas a rights based view is a much more kind of artificial liberal kind of construct of this sort of floating ethereal blank slate with all these kind of strings and these different rights

coming off it and it's very difficult it turns out to reconcile all these different rights it's intentionally confusing exactly right it's a feature not a It has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. And part of what they're attempting in the rights-based regime is to say, well, if we all

signed up to one common shared view of what is right, capital R, singular, right, then secularism can't work. Because the point of secularism is to try and create this slightly fake, neutral public square where everybody's allowed to kind of disagree about the fund. the fundamental questions so that we don't have any more wars of religion. Like this is the basic idea of kind of Treaty of West Bali and 1648. And so we've got to be agnostic about the underlying capital R right. Because if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing each other.

It'll be a kind of, you know, Hobbesian war of war against all. So what we say is we everybody, every individual has a right to determine what is right. And then it becomes impossible for any judicial process of discerning what is absolute, Because what is a judicial, what is a judge supposed to do to discern the right, to discern objective natural justice? And it's impossible to do that when you've got these competing conflicting, conflicting claims, conflicting demands. So that's so helpful. The question that a lot of people have is why is Europe continually importing people that not only wish them harm, but will replace core European identity and culture? get even metaphysical if you have to hear it is confusing to me and to the audience

what is it I mean Paris Brussels London these are unrecognizable cities and it's being done voluntarily why who's voting for this what is their argument so increasingly they're not voting for it so we are seeing this is the key driver for populist movements all across continental Europe and and now in Britain I think is a sort of is an

kind of emerging resistance to all of this. But it is taking a long time, and it's a good question. Why is it taken so long? Yes. You know, I think the first, you know, shooting from the hip, the first answer might be guilt, a sense of kind of post-colonial, a post-colonial need for atonement. And you see this in France. It's present in Britain.

There's a sense that we wrong the world. You know, we invaded the world. Now we need to invite the world. That's the kind of, that's the idea. And you see this, you know, there's even this sort of guilt dynamic. with Germany, even though Germany were useless imperialists. I mean, they were absolutely terrible. I think they had Namibia, but they were, you know, maybe the problem of the 20th centuries,

they feel they missed out. Namibia is actually a great country. Windhock is an underrated city. Now it is, but, you know, they didn't actually have much of, they didn't have a break of it. They felt they lost out on the 19th century, scrambled for Africa. So 20th century now it's our turn in our own backyard. I don't know.

It's speculative. But I remember in 2015, after Merkel announced, you'd have opened up the gates. We shaffend us. we can do this. And she was making policy. That's one of the most consequential policies in the history in the history of Europe in living memory.

It's almost done in real time on a TV program where a, I think it's a young Palestinian or Syrian child sort of emotes or begs her to help and she's almost changing her mind in real time. In 2015 she opens up the gates of you. Europe. Actually, she says to the German borders are open, which of course means Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and suddenly you have this domino effect. And you know, tens of thousands coming across in Digny's, thousands dying, thousands drowning from these very risky voyages. And so, you know, the trains would be rolling in to Munich and there would be big signs in German saying simply atonement.

atonement. 80 years on, 70 years on, this is how we atone for our sins. And I think so there's a kind of, there's a specifically German version of that, there's a British version of that, there's a French version of that that that explains those first ways.

So that would be the first answer. And can I just interject before it? My view is that when you don't have Christianity, you don't know how to deal with guilt. And so you come up with these strange, counterfeit ways, because in Christianity, we go to the cross, we go to Jesus.

In secularism, you invite a bunch of Muslims. I think that's a very subtle point. I mean, it's, I don't know if you, it's not as simple as inviting a bunch of that. That's not what they're consciously thinking. No, but it's what it's, but yeah, it's a kind of atonement for, we're kind of attoning by finding new victims and finding victims that instead of we're of kind of inflicting suffering on them, now we can sort of somehow, we can over time, we can sort of brick we can we can we can seek kind of kind of secular redemption but you had a second one that

i interrupted you so no no thank you so very very very very astute point thank you charlie that second point is it's just the raw economics so the idea is you know the dogma in the treasury the finance department in in in in britain is you know we've got to just keep the Ponzi scheme going we've got to just keep the GDP you know the line the line has to keep going up the pie has to keep getting bigger even if it means the slices of the pie keep getting smaller and this is a dogma in finance ministries all across Europe. So it's just this it's just this Ponzi scheme we're not having kids, we're aborting hundreds of thousands of them and there's a demographic collapse all kinds of demographic collapse winter all across Europe already. It's

already here, it's here in Britain, it's it's certainly happening in Britain and so the dependency ratio of taxpayers to dependents whether it's the out of work which is which is which is which is very high. I think it's nine million. in Britain. So we basically have 27 million taxpayers, 9 million out of work, 6 million public sector workers, 13 million pensioners. So that ratio, and that ratio is going to get a lot worse.

Pensioners or retirees. Sorry, that's right. Pensions are retirees. And so those sort of dependency ratios of taxpayers to non-taxpayers is going to get worse and worse and worse. So the idea is if we can just, you know, we can kind of import people who can contribute somewhat to our national economy. In fact, it turns out their net drains.

on our national economy, but that's been one of the myths. I think the other myth is, to go back to liberalism, to the third answer, would be this kind of the liberal myth of the blank slate. And the way I was thinking about this the other day,

was in the context of the transgenderism debate. And the view seems to be, you know, it's the similar kind of metaphysical myth that has kind of bewitched the liberal mind as with transgenderism. So with transgenderism, you know, the problem is, look, if anyone can become a woman,

what is a woman? What is it to be a woman? It's subjective self-decloration of any human being we've lost our definitional distinctions. And I think there's the same problem with what you might call transnationalism. If anyone can become an Englishman,

what is an Englishman? If anyone can become an American, what is an American? We've got this such sort of definitional vagueness that it becomes impossible to go back to that phrase ever to use the first person plural ever to be able to say we the people we're not an idea we're not a proposition we're not a project we're a people with a home with a history with a heritage and that doesn't mean that we can't welcome people in i mean that the model i have for

this is the book of ruth and that very short short book in the in the old testament and that's i think a perfect model you know what does ruth do she's a moabite right she's not an israelite what does she do her husband dies she says to say she like where you go I will go where you lodge I will lodge

Boaz right your people will be my people and your God will be my God and she's she shows humility she integrates herself she works the fields she's loyal

and and the interesting thing I noticed this even to the end of the book she doesn't become Ruth the Israelite. She's still root. So her identity is still there. So she's incorporated into the people of Israel, but she's still

a Moabite, a Moabite test. And we just have, we can't even have that conversation. We're not even, you know, we have no idea what it you're not allowed to say, what is it to be an Israelite. You're not allowed to say what is it to be an Englishman. You know, there was somebody the other day

who just said, you know, the concept of Englishness and English identity is evil. one of Tony Blair's speechwriters, John Rintels, he deleted the tweet. Now that's interesting. There's been a vibe shift. A year ago he wouldn't have deleted it. So things are changing fast.

But there is this strange myth that sort of bewitches us, that there's nothing that there is to be British, to be English, to be Welsh, to be Scottish. You can just pass through the gates of the Heathrow, get your piece of paper, and this magic dust will descend upon you and infuse all of Shakespeare and Shawson. and that kind of will ensure that your pulse quickens

when you see a spitfire in the sky, you know, and it turns out that magic dust doesn't work. National identity is more than paperwork. It's more than just having documentation. And I look at Mom Donnie, okay, yeah, he's got his paperwork. That guy's not an American. He's just not. Nothing about him as American.

I'm sure he's got his paper. I'm not doubting it. I'm sure he's got all of his documents. but nothing he says or believes is anything close to what it means to be in America, period. It's at odds, actually. He's an Islamist, Marxist. This takes us quite nicely onto Islam,

because one of the challenges that Islam has always had is to incorporate into itself, into its political theology, the concept of the nation state, the concept, certainly the concept of the secular public square. Oh, of course. It's incomprehendant. Or the distinction between the secular and the same. This is not something that is that comes naturally at all to Islamic theology.

And actually you can understand in many ways I think Islamic political theology is more consistent, more predictable, more kind of comprehensible than Christian political theology. You know, when Augustine comes along and says, well, yes, God is in charge of everything, but there are some parts where he's just going to let us be neutral and he's going to let these earthly authorities take control. and the church has the worries about the eternal and the earthly authorities worry about the the kind of the temporal and that's the kind of the beginning of the secular starts to emerge with Augustine it's not meant to be a kind of godless zone but that's really effectively what it what it becomes after after the 18th century and you know for Islam if you're if you're a monotheist that's a very strange idea why should there be any corner of creation that is somehow even kind of provisionally neutral

and godless. Islam can't cope with this thought, and it's monotheism, it's particularly it's very, very aggressive, a strong commitment to Tawid, to the doctrine of oneness, and to the power of God makes it very hard

for this kind of Augustinian idea to emerge. And so the nation state is fundamentally a kind of secular construct. Now it's one that Christianity has been able to baptize. I've just come back from Hungary. I mean, they are very self-conscious a Christian nation founded by St. Stephen and there's going to crosses everywhere. It's in their

constitution. That's not a problem. England. England is, you know, our monarch is also the supreme governor of the church of England. We are technically, you know, constitution. If any of you watch the coronation or the funeral of her late majesty, you know, that is, you know, the ceremonial kind of pedigree is, is a Christian one. But within Islam, it's much harder for Islam to form it. It's much harder to convince a loyal Muslim to have a political loyalty to a nation rather than the Umah, that is a rather than the covering, rather than the covering rather than the Dar al Islam. And so Islam is a much more, a much more cosmopolitan and rootless universal identity. And it finds it very difficult to work with the particular and with kind of secular national boundaries.

So I mean, one of the stat just to close the loop on that, Charlie. So right. For example, you know, there are roughly 6% of Muslims in Britain. 0.5% of them are in the armed forces. So much, there were more British Muslims who went to fight for ISIS than there are in the British armed forces. I'm surprised only 6% because I go to London it feels like a lot more than 6%. Well, that's because they're very concentrated and they're very dense. So had we had a successful strategy of assimilation integration, if such a thing is possible.

Then there might have been a much more diffuse diaspora. But that's not how it works. And you get these certain tipping points where effectively chain migration that creates these demographic silos. And that effectively means integration becomes impossible. What is it to integrate into the city of Birmingham today? What is it to integrate into the city of Bradford? You have nothing to integrate towards. To become a Muslim.

That's right. The majority population in Luton or Malala is coming close to or is even there. Muhammad is the number one birth name in the biggest cities all across. Yeah, and I think that's indicative. It's a little bit complicated that stat because Muhammad is way more common just as a first name among, say, you know, from 100 Muslims, you're going to have way more Mohammeds, whereas your first name is a much more evenly distributed. in the West, I think. But it's still, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an index of sorts, yeah. We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries. And today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture and Christianity, the Alan Jackson podcast. What makes it unique

is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, doge, Trump and the White House, issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems in every, episode he gives practical things we can do to make a difference. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends. And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words. Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today. The culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging. You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you don't

miss any episodes. Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our you can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at Alan jackson.com forward slash charlie so let's let's build on this Islam topic a little bit what you're saying is that islamists have no concept of separation between mosque and state i think that's actually islam 101 and i think that's important and that's why when i say Islam islam is not compatible with Western civilization. I'm not inherently even attacking Islam. I do in other comments, I say, but not in that one.

That's a separate topic for another time. But that one, they get mad. They say, oh, no, we can coexist outside of the state, but Islam is a all-encompassing. That Allah is overall, right? That you submit in all that you do. And talk about how, when the Islamists go into Western country, We know that they don't assimilate, but they actively then try to run for political office

and then try to get involved in government. The rates of Islamic participation in government far exceeds rates of Christian participation in government in the West. We are on the precipice of having a Muslim mayor in Minneapolis, New York, Calgary, and London by the end of this calendar year. Well, so I think the reason for that is because Muslims certainly in Britain tend to vote in in blocks and tend to vote as households rather than as individuals. And this is, it's just the way it is. They tend to be, you know, rooted more in kinship and tribe and, and ethnicity than is common, has been common in England. I mean, in England, we know this is a

wonderful book by Alan McFarlane, a colleague of mine in Cambridge called the origins of English individualism that shows that the English people from the 13th, 12th, 13th century onwards were constantly moving around, always moving around. We were not very familial. We weren't very sort of clan-based at all, whereas our sort of new arrivals, the new English, as it were, do not take that approach at all. And so you've got very, very high rates of kind of electoral blocks,

and that means, you know, what, it's like 80, 85% of Muslims will vote, labor, roughly. And so, effectively, that's why you see. see a lot of, you know, mayoral teas, a lot of local MPs, the mayor of London, Zadik Khan, seems to be like he's going to be running our metropolis for the foreseeable future. But isn't that interesting that 80, 85% of American Muslims, so Democrat, 8 to 85% of U.K. Muslims vote labor, which is interchangeable parts. That goes to show that it's not an outreach problem on behalf of the Republican Party

or conservative. That's their disposition, like, you're importing future voters of a certain political party. Yeah, I think that's true. What interestingly we saw last summer was five MPs were elected at the House of Commons on explicitly pro-Gaza tickets. That is to say they were elected, they were in labor strongholds, but their promise to voters, they were going to stand as independent MPs, and their promise was, we're going to take Gaza more seriously, even than the Labour Party is taking it. And so for the first time in the history of British politics, we saw five members of Parliament returned to the House of Congress. Commons, who were explicitly loyal to a foreign entity that doesn't even exist, but not to Britain. And that is something that's new.

And so you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition between, you know, rainbow and crescent and star. So I want you to build that out because we're running tight on time. So what is, say that again, rainbow, crescent and star. So think of rainbow as a kind of metonymy for. progressivism and the crescent for Islam and the star for socialism, good old-fashioned, old left socialism. And this is really this messy coalition that holds the left all across the Western political landscape. And up until now, they've operated in lockstep. I said this in my NatCon speech last July. You know, the jokes on us conservatives when we laugh at gays for Gaza.

The jokes on us. Why? Because in fact, it's a completely, within their worldview, it's a completely consistent and coherent position. It's not funny. It's frightening. What it means is what they're saying, what that movement, and movements like it are saying, is that we hate the West more than we hate each other. And we're going to destroy the West before we turn on each other. A gaze for Gaza. Rainbow and Crescent will beat it. together until we've got rid of the cross. And so in Britain, you're starting to see those cracks appearing. I think maybe there are parts of America where you're starting to see, but then Trump miraculously gets to airborne and he gets very,

he wins the Muslims, which does very well among the Muslims. So it's more complicated with you over here. But I mean, that coalition is very fragile. And for now it's held together by this kind of common sort of collective hatred for for the oppressor, whether it's Israel or whether it's the British establishment. I have two final things I want to talk about, the first of which is broad, and then I want to talk about J.D. Vance at the end. The first of which is, when you come to America,

what is it that you appreciate about this country, that you want Americans to know as an outsider, that you see that is different and unique? Well, in a strange way coming to America, he's like coming to a new world, a strange, an unfamiliar world, where you know you can't speak English properly and you have all these funny habits but another you know for the most part

there's a sense now particularly given the scale and speed of demographic change and churn in my corner of England and southeast of England there's a sense of coming home you know I can you know I can land in

particularly somewhere like Phoenix a couple of nights ago and I sort of I'm surrounded by not quite my people, but I'm surrounded by the English speaking. I'm among the English speaking peoples. I'm in the Anglosphere. I'm in the world of the Anglosphere. And that's something which now has almost as a kind of nostalgia. There's a sense of weird homecoming.

Because I can see glimpses of the old world in the new. Glimpses of the old world that are no longer, that are beginning to fade in the old world world. I don't know if I'm putting this very clearly, but do you understand what I mean? I do. And look, we're a very confusing country because we're very, we have contradiction. But one of them is free speech. Free speech was a British birthright. How many people are arrested on a daily basis in Britain for speech crimes? 30. A day. Arrested. 30 offenses. So we, you know, what we now have.

in England is this sort of kind of complex shopping list of different offenses and indeed non-offences 15 years ago something was introduced called a non-crime hate incident how about that for Orwellian I was going to say so the idea behind a non-crime hate incidents is if you've been you haven't committed a crime but somebody has got upset at something you've said or you're sailing a bit too close to the wind on discrimination we'll take your name and we'll record it and we'll keep it. Now, the last government did manage to reverse. It introduced it, but it managed to reverse some of the worst of that,

but it's still there. And so we have these extraordinarily kind of pernicious statutes on the books, which effectively weaponize allow the police to spend their whole time policing tweets not streets. And what you're seeing in the police force is a sort of massive mass demoralization, I saw three days ago. There's a 17% drop over the last year and sign-ups to the police force. It's because it's a pretty thankfulist job now. It used to be the case that a policeman, to become a policeman was one of the great kind of professions you could get into if you were, you know,

civic-minded, pretty bright, but, you know, not an egghead like me. You could go into the police force. Theresa May brings in a requirement for a degree requirement. You've now got to go to some Mickey Mouse University to get a Mickey Mouse degree to be eligible to become a a British Bobby. And guess what? They just want to sit around policing tweets and checking TikTok and checking your thoughts. As one friend of mine who was arrested a few years ago was told by policemen on his door. They're arrested for wrong speak. Wrong speak and wrong think. In the case of these poor women or Adam Smith O'Connor that your vice president, the case that your vice president so eloquently drew attention to in his brilliant Munich speech back in February,

Adam Smith O'Connor whose child was aborted and he would pray outside the abortion clinic where his son was aborted and pray silently in his head. And because he breached the buffer zones that had been imposed in the course of the last government under the ostensibly conservative government, he was arrested for breaching those zones and for being intimidating.

There's no protest, no speech, not holding a sign, praying silently. And do you believe that there is a reckoning that will come on the culture of free speech in Britain? So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything. I mean, part of the free speech, you know, it's when you start talking about free speech, a society is talking about free speech,

worrying about free speech, that there's probably no more free speech. We never worried about free speech when there was a we, when there was a first person plural. We didn't have to worry about it. Why? Because basically 98% of the population, broadly speaking, shared a common universe of norms and conventions and manners

that had built up, sedimented over centuries. And so we knew what the acceptable parameters and limits of speech were. But once you go through this extraordinary experiment, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration, let's just put it euphemistically, then all the norms have gone, all the norms are dissolved, and you've got to learn to cope with and get along with, exist alongside people for whom free speech makes no sense at all. Well, especially Muslims are not going to be the ones arguing for free speech, the opposite. Correct, correct. Absolutely right. They're not going to be your big fighters.

No, I mean, because the central idea within Islam is Islam. So submit. It's submission. And also, they don't want you to be able to criticize Muhammad or all that. You know, the idea of free speech comes through in Athens, this idea of parisia, isonomia, isegoria, in the Athenian Assembly, in the 5th century BC. But you also see it come through in the Christian tradition in the second century AD, when these early Christian apologists are being arrested and they go to the emperor and they say,

look, surely, oh, Emperor, you don't want me to bow the knee or burn my pinch of incense or worship you, if you wouldn't want me to do that if you knew that my belief was being coerced. Surely it's a good thing for me to kind of freely decide what I should worship. So you see this in Titalian, the first Latin church father. He's the first person to come up with the phrase, freedom of religion, libitas religionis. There's actually freedom of speech is downstream of freedom of religion as a Western value. I mean, yes, it's there in Athens, but really emerges in the kind of that tussle between the early Christians and the Roman authorities. And it's freedom of religion.

We should have freedom to worship, freedom to meet on Sundays. And that took 300 years for them to win that right. But then the freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of association is a kind of secular kind of counterpart to that and downstream of it. Last question. A piece just came out that showed you that, has said that you were. JD's mentor, J.D. Vance's mentor, our wonderful vice president of United States, and maybe the next president of the United States. Tell us about that. First of all, that's ridiculous. If anything, he has mentored me far more than I've mentored him. I've learned so much from him.

I've been learning from him since 2016 when a Texan friend of mine pressed Hillbilly elegy into my hands two weeks before the election saying, Trump is going to win. and this is why. And I remember reading that book and my mutual friend of ours, Rod Dreher, was raving about it and did an interview with JD and the book, you know,

rocketed up through the charts. So he caught my eye then and just, it's just a great, great sort of privilege and source of pride to be able to call him a friend. And we've got to know each other over the years. And, you know, that mentor line, it's just media mischief, really.

So what do you? you see in him as a statesman? So I see somebody who is sort of wise and mature beyond his years. I think he's got a kind of a sense of calm, a sense of, I think he's just highly intelligent. You don't get that many just really high IQ politicians anymore, certainly not in Britain. I don't know about America. But now we got a, we got problems. He's just got kind of, you know, raw cognitive processing power. And but he doesn't show it to, you know, it doesn't show it too much, but it's there. And that helps a great deal. Like, he can, he can size up, he can size up a problem, he can size up in this. You know, the most interesting thing about that leaked signal chat,

do you remember from a few months ago? I thought the most interesting bit was J.D. saying something like, wait a minute. The US only gets X percent, I think it was four percent of trade through the Suez Canal. The Europeans are getting, you know, several factors more. Why are we bearing the brunt of this. And I just thought, I mean, first of all, what did that little revelation say? One, he really drilled out. He wasn't getting policy advice. He just worked that out. Two, he's working it out with the interests of the American people first and foremost in his mind. It was very striking little detail that. And we just don't have politicians like that. We don't have politicians whose reflex is to refract every public policy question whether it's foreign policy, domestic

policy, economic policy, cultural policy, through the prism of the national interest of national preference. This is just a strange idea to the liberal mind. But it's the politics of the future. It's the politics of home. It's the politics of belonging.

It's the politics of nationhood, of the first person plural. And it's what defines the new right. And it's why the old right gets confused when some slightly left-leaning economic policies sometimes pop up. Nigel's sort of talking about maybe you know, re-nationalizing the water companies and, yeah, it seems crazy. I thought you was a

Thatcherite, but actually, if you're thinking, it may be the case that if you're really putting the national interest first, maybe you want to go easy on trade. Maybe you want to put some tariffs on. And it's very hard for the pre-2016, you know, the long 20th century kind of political ideology to understand this. But once you've got the national preference in mind, you can understand JD's decisions. You can understand the vice president's way of thinking about the world. You can understand the president's way of thinking about the world. He's not, you know, you might think he's a limousine liberal. You might have predicted him to be a limousine liberal from the 1990s onwards.

And he's whacking all these tariffs on and he's doing things which are, you know, it's been in its foreign policy, neither isolationist nor idealist. He's just being, he's being a realist. He's assessing the world as it is and not as the liberal mind would like it to be. Well, Dr. Orr, I think I'll use the first person plural. We really enjoyed our chat here today. God bless you, Dr. Ork. Thank you so much.

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