The Eric Metaxas Show - Peter Hitchens

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Peter Hitchens joins Eric in the bunker from Oxford, England, and warns of the coming "regime change," here and in Europe, due to the fact that the Left controls the levers of power.

I hate to spread rumors, but someone told me that Eric's stood in front of a microwave too many times, and now he's got feathers sprouting from his neck. Some kind of mutation, I guess. Eric's very embarrassed about it. The doc told him there's nothing medical science can offer him. Except maybe telling him to wear turtlenex. Anyway, thought you should know. And now here's your chicken man of the airwaves.

Eric puts taxes. Hey, folks, welcome back. No, wait a minute. I'm welcoming myself back because you've been here, but I've been on vacation, sort of. Albin and Chris. Hello. James. How you doing? How he's doing? This is Monday, the 22nd of June. Yesterday was Father's Day. Chris, to be the father of one child as I am is an extraordinary thing. To be the child of six, what did your kids do? well they uh they tried to cancel me uh it was uh unnerving apparently all the teens in america

you were a slave trader back when but i had no idea young people get the dates mixed up but you were some kind of a slave trader and that's not appropriate yeah your statue or try to tear you down well my statue is a very small one it was action figure size about six inches tall so it came down without much effort really yeah i we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna have to talk about everything that's been going on in because obviously I have not been live on this program for more than a week. My family and I were out Long Island at the beach.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see how my skin is darker than it was once before. I'm tan from the sun. That's traditionally what happens to me because I've Greek ethnicity and we tan very easily. Okay, today, in case you're already bored, let me warn you in a couple of minutes. We're going to blow your mind. We have, as our guest, for this first hour, none other than the curmudgeon of curmudgeons, Mr. Peter Hitchens.

We have had him on before. He lives in England, so it's always tough to get him, and we haven't had him on in a little while. But he's such a curmudgeon that when you agree with him, he still disagrees with you. He finds a way. And so he's always fun to talk to, but be prepared. He's the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian of some kind. We're going to find out if he agrees with Philippians, rejoiced the Lord always,

or if being a curmudgeon supersedes that and why he thinks that it could supersede scripture. So that's, and in hour two, I think today we're going to be rerunning my conversation with Dinesh D'Souza, probably. and we may be able to talk more about current events in hour two in the beginning of hour two. I know we have 10 minutes in hour two today. Later this week, tomorrow we're going to rerun my conversation with Matt Lockett and Will Ford. Ladies and gentlemen, even if you've already heard it, I'm telling you, there are things that happen in life that they change everything. It's like a meteor hitting the planet and killing the dinosaurs. There are things that happen.

What happened with Will and Matt, Will is black, Matt is white. And I have to say that what happened with them really is genuinely miraculous. When you hear their story, there is a series of out-and-out miracles that it seems clear to me that God has done to bring about racial reconciliation his way, capital H, God's way. And it is so staggering that even if you don't believe in God, I challenge you to either go to our YouTube channel, the Eric Mataxis show and watch it. You can watch my whole conversation with them, or you can listen to it tomorrow on this program, you know, on the radio program. But it is so staggering. that we are rerunning it.

TBN ran it in a slightly abbreviated form, but it is one of those things that is game-changing. When you're trying to process, what does it mean to say Black Lives Matter? What does it mean that we're tearing down statues? What is happening, whatever? You need, I think, as a baseline, if you don't mind my suggesting it,

to check out their story. It is simply amazing. amazing as any story I've ever heard, which is why we're rerunning it so soon after having run it in the first place. I don't know, Chris and Albin, you wouldn't know this unless you're following me closely on Twitter, but I've got a lot of blowback for posting some things that strike me as very basic, like I have said over and over and over again, that we all believe that Black Lives Matter, but the movement, the organization Black Lives Matter has to be denounced because they have hijacked this anodyne term Black Lives Matter,

and they really want to bring about some kind of anti-American revolution within America. They declare themselves, have publicly now declared themselves as Marxists, as wanting to get rid of Trump, as getting. In other words, it has almost nothing to do with wanting to bless. blacks in the United States of America. It has everything to do with using that. It's very convenient since George Floyd was so horribly killed and on and on and on. It's a very convenient thing to infiltrate peaceful protests about that and to instigate looting and rioting and vandalism, as everybody by now probably knows, a statue in Portland, Oregon of George Washington was torn down.

This is George Washington, the father of our country. You can read about him in my book, Seven Men. He was one of the greatest heroes in history. His statue was torn down. An American flag was put on top of the fallen statue and lit on fire. Now, I don't know about you, but that goes beyond radical. That's a new level. So I want to tell you that what we're dealing with now in the Black Lives Matter movement, BLM,

all this stuff is wicked. It is nothing to do with what it claims to do. So first of all, they're frauds. Secondly, they're playing on white guilt. Shelby Steele, who's black, wrote a book called White Guilt. And it's a way that they have to manipulate people, to get guilty people to pay money to all kinds of organizations that do nothing to help black people in America.

And let's be really blunt. the Democratic mayors, the Democratic governors, the Democratic policies in America have harmed black people. That is why I vote GOP, not because the GOP is perfect, but because the Democrats over 50 years have harmed black people. If you actually care about black people, you are obliged to deal with this history, that they've had power for 50 years and they've harmed black people. There's no way around this, folks. We'll talk about it more in the program we've already talked about it with a number of people, Ryan Bomberger, Bob Woodson, a few times, Horace Cooper, and many others, Candace Owen. There's so many people, by the way,

we will soon have on Larry Elder. He is our friends on the Salem Radio Network. He is black and a conservative, and he is a hero. I know Larry personally, he has made a film called Uncle Tom. It broke all kinds of box office records this past weekend. I didn't know because I'm out of touch. I just found out. I've watched the film. Everyone needs to see this film.

If you want to know what's going on and what has been going on in America with regard to black people, my black friend Larry Elder has made a film for you. It is called Uncle Tom. I'm going to be promoting it like crazy because the information in this book needs to get out. People in America need to know what is really happening. So Larry's going to be on

this week. I also know we're going to be talking to Jenna Ellis again this week. You know, when I say I go on vacation, guys, you realize, like I'm sure I'm like you. I'm working on vacation. It's just a different kind of, I'm just not doing radio work. But I read all these books, you know, to do research for my upcoming book is atheism dead. And so I was really, I was really busy. But I managed to do a lot of the reading while I was in the sun. So I managed to get a tan out of it. Hey, what are you going to do?

Okay. You got something for free then. You got a free tan. I got it for free. So, well, oh my gosh. Oh, one quick thing to announce some of the packages of the seven more men book, we had a huge problem with the post office. So they went out late.

If this screwed up your father's day, contact us via email. I'm not kidding. I'd like to hear from you. All right. We'll be back with Peter Hitchens. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show. Yes.

Yes, indeed. I have, as my guest, for the rest of this hour, Mr. Peter Hitchens. Peter, it's so good to have you back and it's so good to have you help us make sense of what is happening around the world these days. You've written a number of articles on the protests in Oxford and elsewhere, and what is happening behind the scenes. So where shall we start? I would like to leave that to you, really.

There are so many things to discuss. But I think the main thing, which has been the theme of everything that I've done for the past three months, being that the governments of formerly free countries have made a terrible mistake, a huge disproportionate overreaction, now threatens, I think, the liberal and stability of many governments, certainly my own. I think we're in a very dangerous situation. When you say overreaction, do you mean to the COVID situation? Yes, I do. I think that obviously it's a serious disease, but I think that it's been greatly overstated by the authorities and the reaction to it has been far, far too great and is enormously damaging to life, Louiscy, the pursuit of

happiness, health, and many other things, and will be permanently damaging to those as well. And what do you see a connection between that overreaction and what is happening now with the Black Lives Matter movement and all kind of thing? Is there a connection? Are we speaking just about the overreaction to the COVID? No, I do believe there's a connection. Well, okay, then tell us, first of all, I think there was an overreaction. If you do this to a society, then you actually unstring the. you make all kinds of things very different.

You change the atmosphere. You change the way people behave the way they think. If you impose mass house arrests, we find in this country, if you compel people to stay away from work, if you put in, as we have had in Britain, huge numbers of people being paid basically a government pension for not doing anything. And at the same time, there's a constant air of panic and fear. Then it would be surprising if it didn't have social effects. I don't know what things feel like in your country.

In this country, parts of the country, are less inclined to obey the leadership cravenly and have more of an instinct about what freedom is. So speaking for what's happening there, and I know you're in Oxford, how have people reacted? Has there been any pushback to this overreaching, as you put it? Almost none. In fact, I would suspect that despite the efforts of myself and a number of other people to try and put a different case,

probably 85% of the population is still in support of the action being taken by a government, despite the devastating fact that it's having on them and on their futures. I think that there's a very widespread ignorance of the danger. And I also think there's a great deal of fear, real fear of disease in parts of the population, which is preventing people from thinking rationally. I think it's the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen. It makes the frenzy over the death of Princess Diana seem quite minor as a national spasm and indeed an international one. And also, it's as if the death of Princess Diana and September the 11th atrocities in Manhattan

have been rolled into one thing. It's completely changed the way people think of the hate. So then Boris Johnson is your prime minister. What do you see his role in all of this? Well, I think he panicked. I think fundamentally he is running a government of teenagers. I mean, they may be physically slightly older than that, but they have the mentality of teenagers. they were confronted with something faintly frightening, and rather than think about it and

carefully choose a course of action, they flew into a panic, not perhaps realizing how serious the damage would be or how difficult it would be to reverse the panic. It is so much like the old film of The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Disney's Fantasia, where the apprentice summons up this enormous force to carry water for him and then cannot stop it. and ends up being drowned by the thing that he's created. And they don't know how to stop the fear that they've started. And they don't know how to stop the panic that they've started. And so they are completely at the mercy of their own policy.

And they haven't the nerve to admit they made a mistake. It takes a real courage to admit that you've made a mistake, to apologize for it, an even greater courage to reverse it. And they haven't got the quality to do that. So we'll start with it. So you don't think Boris Johnson is leading well, obviously. No, well, I've never had much of an opinion of him as he's an engaging company and sometimes fun to read an interesting performer. But as an intellect and as a person of political grasp, I've never thought that he was particularly qualified.

And none of these events have changed my mind about that. Who do you think in the last election would have been the most qualified? I cannot think of anybody, I'm afraid. The British political class has been infantilized for a long time, and I've long abstained from having anything to do with them. Well, let's talk about something. Many of my listeners and viewers here on YouTube will not be familiar with it. But I saw a wonderful photo, at least it encouraged me,

of a multitude of people. I think it was in the Oxford High Street, Neely. among them was a single solitary figure, not kneeling. You, sir, were that single solitary figure. Can you explain to my audience what was happening there? Well, I get a lot of undeserved views, so I suppose I should be pleased to get some undeserved praise. They weren't actually kneeling.

They hadn't taken the knee, as the saying goes. They were sitting down. They'd taken the buttock, and I wasn't doing that. They were sitting down, I think, in commemoration of George Floyd, and I decided that for two reasons I wasn't going to do it. One, I was there as a journalist and my training has always been, don't get involved when you're a journalist at any occasion, whatever you think, don't heckle, but also don't join in. So I naturally wouldn't do so. And in any case, I wouldn't have done so had there been any pressure to do so. So I got a lot of undeserved praise for that, which I'm happy to accept because it makes up for all.

the undeserved abuse. Well, only you would say that it's undeserved praise. I don't see how it's undeserved. I think most journalists would have not thought logically the way you did, and they would have taken a buttock, or actually probably two buttocks, as the case may be. I don't know that one can take a buttock. So maybe one can take a fundament. Would that be better? I've seen it done. I tell you, they can do it. So, but that photo, as you know, was blasted out on the internet of you standing among those cringing or crouching or sitting or whatever it was. Don't let's go any further than we need to. Well, that's as far as I'd like to go.

And it's my program. And listen, you, sir, in standing, see, I think, you know, the reason you're just unbelievably diffident even for a Brit. but the idea to me of doing what you and I might rightly say deserves no praise, particularly, in this day and age, is nonetheless remarkable, because so few are doing it. So it's really simply the idea that you did what anyone might have done, but that no one else actually did. So you see that distinction. Well, it's kind of you to say so, as I say. I was there. I didn't rate it that highly. I wasn't certainly under any pressure to do so from anybody.

Nobody was threatening me or even heckling me or shouting at me. I just didn't really occur to me to do it. So I didn't. But I don't want myself, if asked about it, to overrate the event. I just think it's in many ways just funny because I think of you as an absolutely dedicated contrarian. The very idea. I've told you before you mustn't call me that. And why must it?

It sounds if I do it for its own sake. And I don't. I never, there's lots of things I don't oppose and don't disagree with. I oppose only those things which I feel as a good person. And yet, ironically, you're disagreeing with me just now. Are you not? No, I'm telling you that I regard the expression contrarian as something very close to an insult. It suggests that I've taken the position for some sort of game.

I haven't taken it for a game. I don't do it for fun. I take my position. of careful thought. I think, yeah, no, that's not my implication, and I don't think that's what it means to me. It's, it's, it's, it dismisses my behavior as some sort of, childish, oh, I'm not joining in with the others thing, which it isn't. I think, but I think you're instinctively and wisely instinctively contrarian. I'm not suggesting that you did it to be contrary. And I think simply are generally, involuntarily contrarian, but it comes from deep wisdom and that most people ought to have that

instinct. Very, very few do. In fact, it seems just the opposite that people are willing to go along with the crowd or the mob these days more than even previously. We're going to be right back, folks. I'm talking to Mr. Peter Hitchens. You won't go away. I know that, so I won't tell you not to. We'll be right back. The Trump campaign has a special offer just for you. President Trump wants to meet you. This will be the first opportunity he's had to. to meet with American patriots like you since our country started reopening. His team will cover the flight and hotel and give you VIP access for yourself and a guest. He'll even take a picture with you.

All you have to do is text VIP to 88022 today for your chance to meet President Trump. Again, that's VIP to 88022 for your chance to win and join President Trump in the fight to keep America great for four more years. Hi, folks, trying times. Just know they won't last. Trim times can be hard on our digestive track. So why not try LifeChange Tea at GetTheT.com? Life Change Tea is an herbal blend of tea that helps the digestive track and the colon cleanse from intruders. For years, people have experienced the benefits from Life Change Tea, and so can you.

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The yuck in your gut will pass also with get-thot-tot-com. That's get-the-ttea.com. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Peter Hitchens. Peter, it's wonderful, always to have you on the program. It's been a while. You, of course, are in Oxford and I'm in New York. Let me ask you, do you see a wider movement beneath everything that has happened with the COVID overreaction by governments and with the mass demonstrations or whatever? they are, supposedly for George Floyd, but often for almost anything else. What do you see at the heart of all of this? I think that the governments which shut down their countries because of COVID-19, destabilized their own countries. I don't think most of them understood what they were doing at the time. But by taking, there were several things that they did, and they're very profound. They took people away from their regular routine of working, in many cases of

commuting to work. They took people away from their normal source of income. They interfered more greatly in the lives of their citizens than in most Western countries any government's ever done before. And they introduced into politics a great fear. We're fundamentally saying here is terrible plague which will kill us all if we don't do the most drastic things. And in the course of that, of course, they assaulted personal liberty by compelling people to stay at home. And I think they underestimated, I did too, I thought it was bad, but I didn't think it would be this better. They underestimated the effect that this treatment would have on people's minds. But I think it alienated people's minds from their previous habits of thought.

It made them think, if they didn't think, it made them realize that the societies in which they lived were not as stable or as safe as they had imagined. And it made many of them, I think increasingly wonder that the lives that they've been compelled to cease having of daily work and daily commuting and all the rest. made them wonder whether those things would ever come back. And I think it's spread as much. I think there's probably a great submerged insecurity among people who, although they don't think about it much directly, it must be aware that their future employment and prosperity is in many cases at risk.

And of course, in the United States, in many cases, people have actually lost jobs, which in Britain they haven't because they're being paid by the government, 80% of their wages in many cases. So that has had a profound effect. And I think it's created, what we were, when I was a Marxist-Slanist, used to call the revolutionary situation in which the foundations of society, its general rules and institutions, are greatly weakened, and in which ideas which had previously been either minor or marginal or unacceptable spread in a feverish way through society. So while the government may or may not, I don't believe that it has, but while the governments may or may not have controlled COVID-19, they've unleashed a,

a fever of mind in society in which people are much more readily moved to, how should I put it, unconventional and even extreme action. And I think there is a connection between the two and I think it continues to be. And I think the failure in the case, I can't really talk so much about yours, though things don't look good. The failure of our government to get a grip on this crisis has hugely weakened its authority. And I think, I think it's probably it's not going to last very much longer. I might give it a year. You might give what a year?

I might give our current government a year. Technically it's got five years to run from last December. But actually, in fact, I don't think it can last that long. I think it's discredit it itself. You're talking about Boris Johnson's government. I am talking about that government. Yes, I think it's, I don't see how it can last its full term. Um.

Our governments don't. I mean, it's not unusual for British government's to fail to reach their full term, but I think this one will have a pretty short life. So you're not hopeful then about Boris Johnson, and I guess we've spoken about this, what has often been termed Brexit and his leadership in that. You don't, you weren't encouraged by that then, because others that I know in England were encouraged by his stalwart pressing of that, issue and pushing it. Well, it's curious. I've never really been sure that he believed in the first place, nor, of course, is he, he famously wrote two articles, one in favor of leaving and one in favor of staying and made up his mind on the night. And most people I knew if asked would have thought he was

a supporter of staying in it. Then there's the other very important point. We haven't actually yet left the European Union. And technically, the moment has passed, but in fact, we're still in all important aspects, particularly trade, we're still inside it. And the real moment of crisis when we discover what happens when we leave doesn't come till New Year's Eve at the end of this year. And if it does go wrong, and there are many people who suggest that it may well go wrong, particularly from the point of view of actual trade between Britain and other EU countries, If it does go wrong, then that will be on top of what most people, I think, will be a fairly major economic crisis taking the form of unemployment, possibly much higher taxation,

generally falling standards of living and at the moment of falling gross domestic product. So to have those things altogether in the middle of winter doesn't look an attractive prospect to me and I'm not sure that he can handle it. I don't know. I would say to the answer to question, no, I'm not sure that this is not over. It's still a thing waiting to happen. What was the term you used earlier, you said, when in your days as a Marxist, you would have called this moment? A revolutionary situation.

When power is, power, you know that wonderful passage in Alice through the looking glass where she reaches forward to go through the mirror. and the glass dissolves into a kind of mist and she climbs into looking glass world. It's like that. The hard, the hard carapace of society has softened. Things which previously seemed secure and solid, far weaker than they were before.

We're going to have a break. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Peter Hitchens. Don't go away. Go back, folks, I'm talking to Peter Hitchens. He. is in Oxford, England. I am in New York City, nonetheless, magically, we're able to speak with each other, see each other, and some of you can see us via our YouTube channel, the Eric Matakson this show. I hope you can hear us. Peter, you were talking about this revolutionary situation.

You refer to it as a Marxist idea. In other words, as though there are people poised for such moments, hoping to encourage such moments, and when those moments occur, which you and I think is happening now, they are ready, as it were, to flip a switch. I think that's the term you use in your article in the mail on Sunday. So what do you think is happening and going to happen in the short term? It's not the flipping of a switch. The whole technique of revolution has changed utterly since, say, 1917. You don't anymore need to seize the post office. the barracks and the railway station. You don't know, columns of black smoke don't need to rise above the city

and bodies don't need to lie on street corners like broken dolls. All that's over. What's been happening in Britain than most of the Western world, particularly since the end of the Soviet Union, but in general since the 1960s, has been an enormous moral social and cultural revolution in which the products of the 1960s campuses have become important and central.

in almost every major field of action from the law to the military, to politics, to journalism, and to the academy. They're all, they're there. But they've been restrained up till now by the old-fashioned rules of the liberal two-party state systems, which have existed in most of the anglosphere. Now it seems to me that that restraint is probably going to counter-in-end. and that the what you might call the long cultural revolution, the long march through the institutions, which began in the 60s, is going to come to fruition because there won't really be after this much in the way of conservative institutions or parties to get in its way. And we had a forte in 1997 with the Blair government, but they were terrified because they thought that the forces of conservatism were still very powerful. I think they were probably mistaken, but they thought they were. Now they know that they're not. You just need to call for something to be to be to be to be to be pulled down or changed down.

Immediately it happens. There's no there's no resistance in the British establishment to radical demands anymore. Is this, I mean, I can't help but see this as a struggle between Western civilization and cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call it. But don't call it that. Don't call it cultural Marxism. What should we call it? When it's a slightly tainted expression, I think. But I call it Gramshian Cultural Revolution because that's what it is.

Granchion. But when you say Granchion. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian. Wasn't it he who coined the term cultural Marxism? I don't believe so, no. He used different expressions like hegemony and things like that. But what he understood was that for Marxism to triumph in Western society, it had to completely separate itself of any association, particularly with the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik regime, which they now have. A lot of it took the form of a movement which was called in the 1980s, particularly Eurocommunism, which was a respectableized, a peaceful, intellectual form of communism, which again, a body of Bolshevik violence.

to secret policing. But it was very effective in spreading, more or less, Marxist, American ideas through the academy and through journalism and through life in general. Also, through law, the use of human rights laws, in general, the use of bodies like the Supreme Court to legislate has been a very powerful weapon of this cultural revolution. But you won't find old-fashioned Leninist violence in it.

It's much of it. That's not. That's why users. That's why using the term cultural Marxism for me does it. But let's go to Trump. Do you see Trump as any kind of bulwark against these forces? No, I think that he's always been ludicrous. And I think John Bolton's revelations that, for instance, he didn't even know that

Britain had a nuclear weapon, are typical of the sort of person that he is. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't understand anything. He can bluster quite effectively before a crowd that also doesn't know anything very much. But in terms of being political politician, leave alone somebody who understands his opponent and can fight them, is what half the problem with the Cultural Revolution is almost nobody in conservative parties in Anglo-Sphere countries has had a clue what it was they were fighting. They've never understood it. And so they couldn't fight it. And Trump is certainly one of the least capable of understanding it I've ever seen.

Well, I think you're wrong on that because I think he... I know you do, but I can't help that. I think he understands it instinctively. I think his strong stand against anything that's politically correct is an example of that. His stand against China, let's talk about that for a moment. Will you be able to give him any credit for seeing what China is and has been when most American politicians have either ignored it or abetted it? Well, I don't know. It's the CNN.

But in the end, China is now. an enormous economic political and increasingly military power, which can't be ignored. He can't just by being militant towards it. He can't overcome that. In fact, China is a much more dangerous adversary in the United States than the Soviet Union over was. Because apart for anything else, it has far more economic capacity. And also, it's much more cleverly governed. So I don't know.

What has you done that is going to alter that? nothing. And we see a particular thing about China, which is very sensitive in Britain, is more or less the suppression now of what remained of the freedoms of Hong Kong, which were negotiated by Britain before we left. They're going now. I don't think President Trump or anybody else can do anything to put them back, because China is now powerful enough in its own sphere to say, right, this is what we're doing. We are imposing our own legislation on Hong Kong. We are going to be appointing judges from now on. So that's the end of that.

And unless you can stop that, then I don't see really what he could have achieved. Well, he's done a lot with regard to trade that, of course, you know, you don't need to act militarily in all situations. What he's done in regard to trade, I think, has caught them up short. They didn't expect it. Well, but they've hit back. They've played as rough as he has. and for them it's a long game. Everything in China is a long game.

It's many thousands of years of recorded history and much of what they do now. I don't think communism is as old as you're suggesting. We're going to be right now. You're Hitchens. Don't go away. Make like a Mr. Milk Toast, you'll get shot out. Make like a Mr. Meek, And you'll get caught out.

Folks, I'm talking to Peter and I'm not. Peter, when we talk about the current struggle as being against Western civilization, we really are saying it's against Christian civilization. Something that Churchill often remarked upon, we don't talk in those categories anymore. Do you think in those categories when we talk about these things? things? Well, I think in those categories, but it's very noticeable that Christianity has been more or less removed from any sort of intellectual discourse at the top of my society, and it's

largely ignored. And that is part of the victory of the cultural revolution. The gradual wiping out of Christian references, the gradual wiping out of Christian influence over the law, in particular, of Christian principles about how a country should be going, what the obligations of the state are, their replacement by a new supposedly benevolent ideology of what is called equality and diversity here. People often in the United States often mistakenly believe that Britain is a country priest written by an established church. The established church has almost no power. Judges now say openly in court that the Christian religion doesn't govern English law, although it's certainly used to. And it is the official ideology of the country.

country is indeed this equality and diversity, which is a fancy name for what we would call political correctness. So that battle's already been lost, and in the losing of it, I think probably the main possibility of defending the civilization that was has gone as well. I don't see how you can, once you've given away that ground, don't see what you can do to fight by. I think the issue is that we haven't given up that ground entirely in the United States. And I think that there are many people here who are fighting and others who are finally being roused to recognize the necessity to fight because things have gone so so crazy here very recently. So I guess what you say is true in Europe, but I do have hope for the United States, although we're in a huge battle. I think it's an

existential crisis just as the Civil War was for us here in the United States. maybe as World War II was for England against the Nazis. Well, I don't know, maybe so. You were earlier on defending President Trump, who I think can hardly be described as a Christian exemplar as a head of state. Well, that has nothing to do with it. I'm talking about him as a theologically astute Christian, but I'm saying in the same way that Churchill stood for Western civilization,

it's something deeper than that. Maybe so, but I think the problem is we're seeing these things by the grim light of our own destruction, the old Kipling poem. You remember the islanders, the grim red light on the horizon as the raided coast towns burn. And light you shall have on that lesson. But it comes to late. We haven't really, people like me who've tried to say over the past 20 years, look, there is a major cultural. moral, social and political threat to our societies from the left and appointed to it have generally been laughed at. And when that threat takes the sort of form that it does now, people seriously

proposing things like defunding the police. And we all know the sort of inquisitions which are going to follow it from what's been happening lately. When all those things are happening and there's no coherent body which is capable of or willing to stand up against them. But it seems to me you've already had it. See the absurdity of this and we'll stand against it in the upcoming election and more than that. I'm so sorry we're out of time. Peter, it's wonderful to reconnect with you. We will do so again as soon as possible if you're amenable to it. Thank you so much. I look forward to that. Thank you.