The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden's Foreign Policy Failures, Rise of Woke Police, and the Value of Religion, with Niall Ferguson | Ep. 534

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Niall Ferguson, best-selling author and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, to talk about Biden announcing he's running for re-election next week, the Trump vs. DeSantis GOP divide, Ukraine-Russia foreign policy conversation among the GOP candidates, the foreign policy successes of the Trump administration and failures of the Biden administration, the China-Taiwan showdown coming, why Megyn is paying for Twitter Blue and supporting Elon's Twitter ownership, the Biden administration's virtue signaling policy-making, chilling of free speech by "woke police" on college campuses," the University of Austin's mission, building the Navy SEALS of the brain, importance of religion and spirituality even for non-believers, dating and marrying Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has a fatwa against her, the toll it takes, whether our institutions in America can withstand this woke revolution, and more.More on Ferguson: https://www.niallferguson.com/ Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday. Today we bring you world-renowned historian Neil Ferguson. I have been so looking forward to talking to Neil. We have had many friends of Neil's on this show. Douglas Murray, Andrew Sullivan is not only his friend, but God father show. One thing about Neil is his name is spelled in a way that really makes you want to call him Niall. He's Scottish. Anyway, it's Neil. He's the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of many bestselling books, including 2021's Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe. He has fascinating thoughts on wokeism, religion, Trump, American foreign policy, and much, much more. Neil, great to have you here.

Megan, it's a great pleasure. Yes. So I'm going to, it'll be easier for me to call you Neil since I'm looking at you, but whenever I read your stuff, I'm like, Niall. Why? Is that the Scottish way of spelling Neil? Well, it's Gaelic. You'd encounter it in Ireland too, and there are versions of the name even in Iceland. But the funny thing is that the Irish mispronounced the name, Niall. And that's wrong in the same way that it would be wrong to call me Ian if my name was Ian. But can you imagine how annoying this is? Imagine if everybody kept calling you Meghain. I mean, I've never called you that, but imagine if somebody were to do that, you'd be kind of annoyed. So all my life I've had to correct people. I'm sure it was character building.

Right. You never considered just converting to a more Americanized spelling when she moved here? No, I think it's important to stick to your guns, Megan. I named one of my children, in fact, Andrew Sullivan's godson, Lachlan, so that he would have to go through life correcting people. And I think it's already showing signs of having made him as obstinate as his father. With my name, it's usually they think it's it's Megan or they don't know if it's Megan or Megan. I don't really know the answer either. I always try to fudge the pronunciation of my own name because I don't know how to say it. It's confusing. I've never heard it pronounced any other way, but Megan, but that's because you're famous. Yeah. Well, not exactly, but my mom gave me a little weird spelling of my own, which has confused people.

It's true that there are multiple ways. These are both Celtic names. There are multiple ways of spelling them. And I try to remind people of this. In the past, nobody knew how to spell. So if your name was Neil, your parents were taking a guess when they filled in the birth certificate. So, yeah, I mean, we should be thankful that it's not more complex. My father at one point wanted to call me Icarus.

Can you imagine how my life would have been different with that name? He had a healthy sense of humor. And then you married the beautiful Ayaan, which is really, I mean, not to define you by your wife, but you know my admiration for your wonderful spouse. And that's also difficult to pronounce. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, people are probably like,

what's going on? This is a really difficult family. Well, I certainly heard people mangle Ayaan's name, though it's never struck me as particularly difficult to pronounce. I don't mind being defined as a husband of the more famous Ayaan. That's just fine by me.

It was Dennis Thatcher's view that Margaret Thatcher was more significant than he was, and he never complained. I feel the same way. We'll get to her in just a bit because we definitely have to spend some time on her and your union and what it's like being married to Ayaan. But we have to start with this because there is news this morning. Joe Biden is running. ABC and others now reporting that not only is he definitely running, but he will announce next week. They believe the announcement will come on Tuesday. And to this, you say what? I know you're not a fan. You've been openly critical. What do you make of the fact that the 80-year-old Joe Biden will run for president for a second term? Well, I think I understand the game plan that the Democrats have, which is essentially the game plan that they had in 2020. He's the candidate they can come up with who can beat Donald Trump. And so they have decided to replay that particular script.

And I think it's very, very risky for them. And I'll tell you why. First of all, a significant proportion of voters are already aware that President Biden is, shall we say, on the old side for the world's most stressful job. Secondly, and more importantly, between now and that day in November of 2024, when the votes get cast, or at least most of them get cast, there's very likely to be a recession. The probability of a recession starting sometime this year is certainly north of 50%. Larry Summers told me the other day, 80%. So between now and the election, there's going to be a recession. And it must be said that presidents who go for re-election with a recession in the pipeline

don't have a great track record. So my sense is that they think they know what they're doing, but they're underestimating the downside risk. Because my own view is that at this point, Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican nomination, and whoever is the Republican candidate is quite likely to win next year if there's a recession. Yeah, if there's a recession. The thing about Trump is as much baggage as he has, that economy under Trump pre-COVID is unforgettable. I mean, and he'll be there to remind people of it in case it is. You know, Megan, I think people have not fully

grasped the consequences of such significant interest rate hikes by the Fed in response to the huge inflation mistake that the Biden administration made in 2021 have yet to feed fully through, particularly the labor market, which is still pretty hot. But there's a kind of chain reaction that happens when the central bank tightens interest rates. And it takes a little while to hit the ordinary household, but I think hit it, it will. And when that happens, people are going to start looking back on the Trump economy. They're no longer going to have such a sense that he mishandled the pandemic because after all, more people died in 2021 of COVID than in 2020. And I think if President Trump places cards right and emphasizes that they had full employment

under Donald Trump, but pretty much no inflation problem, a lot of people who turned away from him in 2020 are going to be tempted to turn back because the combination of much higher inflation, which we've had, followed by a recession is a combination that loses you elections historically. So I think this is the way I'm seeing it right now. A lot can happen, of course. We're a long way off from the election. But the assumption that they've got a winning formula that will beat Donald Trump under any circumstances, I don't think that's the correct lesson of 2020. 2020 was a very exceptional year to hold an election. Donald Trump had mishandled the way he dealt with the pandemic. He was in a weak

position that he wouldn't have been in. Without the pandemic, I think he'd have been reelected. And now we're all pretty much over the pandemic, apart from a few people still clinging to their masks here in Northern California. And that means that the circumstances in 2024 will be radically different. You seem to be pro-Trump in a lot of your writings. Ayaan seems to be more pro-DeSantis. She wrote a column not long ago saying, we got to move past Trump. Is that still where you are? You know, I was never unconditionally pro-Trump, Megan.

I was ambivalent from the outset. When I look back on the things that I wrote in 2020, I was, and indeed in 2016, I was ambivalent from the get-go. And I think there are many things about Governor DeSantis that are appealing for those of us who found the Trump year as exhausting because of his chaotic approach to government. It would be lovely to have those elements of Trumpism, the policy elements that worked well, particularly for the economy, but also I would say for foreign policy, but without the chaos, without the sense that every day your hair was on fire from the minute the alarm clock went off. I think that's the dream that DeSantis

is supposed to represent. But at this point, I don't think he's succeeding in conveying that he's Trump with competence. And that is why at this point, the polling is showing Trump establishing a dominating lead. So I'm still ambivalent. I slightly kind of shudder at the thought of a second Trump term. But I think at the moment, I shudder more at the thought of another Biden term, because I do think that if one strips away all the fairly positive media coverage that this administration gets, it's done shockingly on both the economy, where we've had this inflation mistake, I think mistakes understating it, and foreign policy, where I think things have really been pretty disastrous. If you asked me, would I prefer DeSantis over Trump, then I think probably I would in common with a lot of conservative elites. But that is not where, primary voters are leaning ever further in the direction of renominating Donald Trump.

And in the end, it's not it's not up to people like me, is it? The thing about DeSantis, and I realize he hasn't actually declared yet, but he's you know, he basically came out this week that the Florida delegation, the congressional delegation is mostly backing Trump, not DeSantis. And DeSantis didn't have the foresight to make sure that was lined up. You know, he should at least have those guys. And it dovetails with something I heard my friends on National Review talking about it this week, and I've heard others talk about it, about whether DeSantis can connect with people in a way that one must in order to advance in presidential politics. And I think some, some friends of mine were at one of these dinners with him. You know, he's not dumb. He's been having these muckety muck dinners

with very wealthy donors and they were at one of them and their comment and DeSantis who they really liked. I mean, they, they like him on, was that the entire dinner, he did not ask one question of anyone there. It was all about himself. He was happy to talk about himself, but he showed zero interest in the people around the table, which is a cardinal sin in how to run a dinner party, how to be at a dinner party, nevermind how to run for president. Trump is probably the opposite, right? Even as a reporter, Trump would call me all the time. He'd send me notes all the time, newspaper articles about him. And he wanted to make sure I saw. This, I actually think it could matter. I know it sounds like small ball, but I actually think that difference in dynamic

is probably important. Well, Megan, I'm a historian, not a political pundit, but I have observed the same thing, which is that I've seen Governor DeSantis give a terrific stump speech. He's really good at that. And he knows how to hit those talking points, but then sit down at the dinner table in a ballroom and not connect with the people at that table. And American primaries, especially in the small states that matter early on, New Hampshire, Iowa, those are places where you need to press the flesh and connect with ordinary folks.

Another Ron, I'm thinking of Ronald Reagan here, of course, won in 1980 in the wake of a pretty dismal Carter presidency. I've often compared the Biden administration to the Carter administration. And I kind of thought for a while that it would end the same way with a governor named Ron handily winning. But Ronald Reagan had those interpersonal skills. He could fake interest in the people around him. I mean, typically you have to fake it because if you're president, you meet a lot of people. But Ronald Reagan was an actor, so he could convey interest

in the people around him. And this is the thing that Governor DeSantis does not seem at all good at. And I have to say that that for me gives him a glass jaw in boxing terms. And that's why I've come to be somewhat skeptical that he can do this, unless there can be a reconfiguration of his whole personal style. And as well, I think, as the campaign strategy, this thing is going to be like Elon Musk's rocket. Yesterday's rocket, right, which did not go so well, though. It was weird how the internet instantly divided on that. People were like, that's it. It blew up and we're calling it

a success. And then other people were like, he tried. He's innovative. The whole point was to learn. I'm like, I don't know what to think or say other than it didn't go up very high. The thing I've learned from studying exploding rockets, this goes back to the Space Shuttle Challenger, is that it makes a huge difference if it's manned versus unmanned. And I think we'd be dealing with a completely different story here if that had been a manned rocket. When you think back to the Challenger disaster,

that dominated the news cycle in the United States and indeed the world because there were people on board. So I think he can get away with an experiment failing like this for that reason and that reason alone. It does give you some perspective, though, on why he doesn't get too heated about his employee complaints over at Twitter. It's like, OK, I'm launching rockets. I have an electric car company. Just take a seat. You're the least of my worries. I couldn't really care less about your woke objections at Twitter. And that's exactly who we need running Twitter. I call him Napoleon. He's the Napoleonic figure of our times. He bestrides the spirit of the age metaphorically, as Napoleon did in his day. And but at the same time be managing uh these extraordinary feats of of engineering ambition and and that's that is what makes him such a unique personality

is as an historian i wonder how this story will end is it going to end with the triumph of elon city on mars in future generations uh or is is it going to end with all the shorts on Tesla finally being vindicated as the Chinese eat Tesla's lunch? I don't know, but I can't help but admire his courage. He is fearless when it comes to business risk. He is a visionary. And, you know, those of us who felt that Twitter had become, under previous management, the exemplar of the surveillance censorship network platform, we cheered when Elon took over. Though I must say, I warned him against doing it. I said, you really shouldn't do this. This is a worse idea than if you were buying an Italian soccer team or one tear about biological sex being real and keeping men out of women's spaces. And half the stuff I tweet, you couldn't have tweeted two years ago, pre-Elon. So I'm very grateful. I agree, Meghna. I must say, as a Twitter user, I haven't noticed some great deterioration. I don't

join in these endless hissy fits about, they took my blue tick mark away. All that stuff strikes me as nonsense. And at this point, the really important thing is that systematic censorship that was going on is no longer happening. I think it'll take a long time to figure out how to make this thing work in the way that I think Elon imagines, where you have real free speech without the thing becoming a kind of hellscape of bots and fake identities. But I think it's moving in a better direction than it was before. Because if you think back to 2020, the really shocking thing was the extent to which the network platforms worked against Donald Trump, worked against conservatives, worked against people who were dissidents on the issue of the pandemic,

like my colleague here, Jay Bhattacharya. I mean, it really was quite shocking to see a bunch of private companies working in some measure with political operatives create their own version of the Chinese surveillance state. So anything that breaks that trend up has to be good. Yes. I thought the same thing. I was like, so for a hundred bucks a year, I'm going to support Elon's new Twitter. That's fine. That's a no brainer. I give that to half the people I subscribe to on Substack just because I want to support their effort. It's not what it actually costs. I just pay more because I want to support the platform or the journalist. Thankfully, I'm in a position to do that.

So for me, it was like a no brainer. People are absolutely melting down over the stupid $8 a month. Like, okay, get over it. Yeah, that is, again, that's one of these many non-issues that one really should try not to waste time on when we consider all the subscriptions that our lives currently require us to pay, I hate to think how many I'm mindlessly paying without even making much use of them. The Twitter issue is a non-issue. I want to spend some time, just a minute, on foreign policy and DeSantis and Trump, if you don't mind, because I know you've written a lot about foreign policy in China and the Cold War 2.0 that we may be in. And DeSantis, this is one

Achilles heel for him, potentially. You know, he's a governor. Yes, he did spend some time in the House. So he's got some exposure to thinking about foreign policy. But it's not really your thing. It's really a presidential thing. And it's not something a governor does. And his first step out of the block on that wasn't great. He called Ukraine a territorial dispute in response to a request from Tucker for a statement on where he stood. And of course, that's kind of Tucker's position. So he kind of gave Tucker, I think, what he thought would go over well with Tucker, because most of these GOPers are afraid of Tucker because he has a lot of power on his platform. And then he got hit by the more establishment GOPers who do not see it that way, who see it more as an existential potential crisis. And that if we let Russia win this, we, the United States, will be weakened and that it has direct effects and implications on U.S. foreign policy. So then he tried to back off of it. He flailed a bit. Trump's more hardcore territorial.

You know, he's he's a non-interventionalist. He's the opposite of a neocon. So how do you assess those two gentlemen when it comes to foreign policy? I don't know where DeSantis will land. You know, if you were to actually win and be in the governing position, I don't I'm not sure. He hasn't given us enough info. But how do you see it right now? Well, as a general principle, anybody who's a governor hoping to run for president has to stake out some national security territory and has to have credibility on the great global issues

of the day. And that was what Ronald Reagan did so successfully in the course of the 1970s. A great part of Reagan's rise to national fame was based on his readiness to critique detente. And in many ways, he was the harshest critic of Henry Kissinger at that time. Rhonda Sanders hasn't really done that. He had opportunities. But until Tucker Carlson asked him the question, and many others the question about Ukraine, he'd said relatively little. Now, to be fair to Governor DeSantis, the reply, which I read carefully, was not a bad one. Like somebody had inserted that word territorial on the basis perhaps of focus groups. And if you take it out, the reply is actually not bad. But that was an error of judgment because it made it sound as if Governor DeSantis was really, well, trivializing the nature of the conflict and particularly misrepresenting Vladimir Putin's objectives, which are clearly stated, namely to eradicate Ukraine as a nation and the Ukrainian people as a people. So that's not territorial. So I think that was a mistake. The problem that Ron DeSantis has is that Donald

Trump has a much more straightforward story to tell voters about his foreign policy, which is based on a track record. Donald Trump can credibly say that there were no wars started on his watch. He can credibly say that he made both Russia and China much more nervous than Joe Biden did. I remember, and you may also remember it, Megan, Trump on a phone call to some golfer claiming last year that if he'd still been president, Putin wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. And for that matter, Xi Jinping wouldn't be threatening Taiwan. And he made the following argument that when he'd been president, he'd said to Putin, don't invade Ukraine or I'll bomb Moscow and all those lovely golden domes will be gone. Now, when I first heard that, I thought, that can't be right. He's making it up. But I asked

people who'd been in Donald Trump's administration, is it plausible he did say that? And they said, Neil, he said that stuff all the time. So one of the things that's really interesting about Trump is that he seems to illustrate Richard Nixon's Madman theory, which was that if the other guys really, I may be a little old, but oh gosh, I'm really sane. And the most you have to fear for me is sanctions. That was what the Biden administration said to Putin in 2021. And Putin said, I'm not afraid of your sanctions, I'm going to invade. I think Trump can credibly argue that Putin would have been much less ready to take that risk if Trump had still been in the White House. So this is the key. I think Donald Trump has a pretty good foreign policy record to run on. And if he runs on that, I don't see how Ron DeSantis can land a punch. And if he's up against Biden on that, now it's a real ballgame

because you've got, you know, this has not been Biden's forte at all. And I realized that he just released this report claiming Afghanistan was all Trump's fault. Trump made the commitment to get us out of there. And Trump, he actually said in this report, Trump left no game plan for us to leave. So you just decided to march blindly into doing it, into withdrawing all the troops without getting a game plan? We're supposed to blame that on Trump? That's really actually what happened. So those two battling it out on foreign policy, Trump and Biden, could be very interesting to

watch. Right. And I think it's clear that although Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan, he would not have done it in the way that the Biden administration did, which was extraordinarily inept. I mean, withdrawing the special forces people first, not really telling your allies what you're doing. It was tremendously badly executed. And, you know, if you can talk in private to people in the administration, they'll admit they screwed it up. And that by doing so, they then created a credibility problem for themselves with just about everything else. But, you know, Megan, that's not the biggest mistake of Joe Biden's presidency so far. I don't

think it's well enough understood how badly they handled Russia's threats to Ukraine the year before the war, because I think there were ways of deterring Putin if you'd stepped up the arms deliveries to Ukraine. In fact, they did the opposite. They reduced them. They took the sanctions off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And they explicitly said that the only thing that Putin would really have to fear would be more sanctions.

Now, sanctions in all the history of sanctions have never deterred anybody from doing anything. They punish people for doing things, but as a deterrent, they don't work. So I think if one asks again the question, how would this have gone if Trump had been reelected? It would not have gone the same way. I think there were ways of deterring Putin. We can see clearly that the Russian army was not ready for an operation where they faced serious resistance from Ukrainians. And so they could have been deterred if it had only been made explicit

that in the event of Russian aggression, there would be full-scale military assistance to Ukraine. We never said that. The United States under Joe Biden said, we'll do sanctions. At one point, the president even talked about an incursion into Ukraine as if you could do a little bit more invading and it wouldn't matter. Yeah, if it's just a minor incursion, that's one thing he said. This was just such terrible communication. And say what you like about Donald Trump. One of the things that did impress me when he was president was his ability to intimidate foreign leaders, whether it was with a talk of fire and fury that was, of course, directed at the North Koreans, or in the way that he played Xi Jinping. I spent quite a bit of time

in China in the period before the pandemic, was a visiting professor in Tsinghua in Beijing. It never ceased to amaze me how Donald Trump could wrong foot the Chinese leadership. They did not know what to make of him. They went from thinking it was a good thing that he'd won to thinking that it was a terrible thing that he'd won to going back to thinking that it was a good thing. I mean, they really didn't know what to make of him. And if you think about US-China policy, Megan, one of the funny things to reflect on is that if he'd won in 2020, Donald Trump would probably have done a trade deal with China the following year.

Donald Trump doesn't care about Taiwan. He made that explicit to John Bolton. You can read it in John Bolton's memoir. We wouldn't be having showdowns over Taiwan if Trump were president, because that was never his focus. So I think that the question that more and more Americans will be asking themselves in the coming months is, was Trump really as bad as they kept telling us? Turns out the collusion with Russia was not, in fact, true. Turns out that there's a kind of sustained campaign against him now through the law courts. I mean, people are going to start asking themselves, was he really as bad as he was painted by liberal media at the time? In terms of outcomes, and this was something I

said again and again during Trump's presidency, if you just judged him by the outcomes of policy, not by the tweets, not by the constant news cycle, but just by the outcomes of policy, the Trump administration was really quite a successful administration. And that is the thing that I think more and more voters are going to be remembering. Right. And the perception of Trump as erratic, which of course was at least in part real, could have been a boon to us, especially as you point out, when it comes to the perceptions of foreign leaders who didn't know what they were going to get if they made a false move that involved US interests. On the subject of Taiwan, I'm interested in following up on that

because I know you believe, as many do, that's coming. That problem is coming at us within the next couple of years. And we need to care somewhat because they make all the semiconductors, which we need, and we're trying to catch up, but there's zero chance we're going to catch up anytime soon in making them domestically. So how would that play out? If you had a President Trump who didn't want to get involved in Taiwan, or if you had a President

Biden that did, how's that going to look for the United States over the next couple of years when it comes to our dependence on Taiwan for those semiconductors and on China for trade and a lot of other things? Well, this is a hugely important issue, Megan. In Cold War I, we nearly blew the world up over an island, Cuba, in 1962. And I don't want us to rerun that particular experiment with another island, Taiwan, in Cold War II, particularly as in many ways the case is more difficult for the United States. Cuba's really close to the United States. Taiwan's really close to China. And so getting into a fight over Taiwan doesn't strike me as something particularly advantageous for the United States. In fact, one of the things I keep telling congressional leaders is, why are you talking so

tough on this issue? Any war over Taiwan would be extraordinarily difficult for the United States because of improvements in China's military capability. They now have missiles that can sink our aircraft carriers, which they sure didn't in the 1990s. And it just would be hard for us to sustain any protracted conventional war. Look at how quickly our stocks of missiles have been depleted by the war in Ukraine. So I don't know why we talk so tough on this issue when there's such risk implicit in it. Now, Taiwan matters economically way more than Cuba did. I mean, Cuba's economy was a nothing, a rounding error. Taiwan is the most important

center for the production of sophisticated semiconductors in the world because of TSMC, the great semiconductor manufacturer founded by Morris Chang in Taiwan. It's really important for the world economy that it not become Ukraine 2.0, another battlefield where TSMC would presumably be reduced quite swiftly to rubble, possibly by us to make sure the Chinese didn't get a hold of it. So the stakes are extraordinarily high. Now, there is in fact a quite simple way to avoid a conflict over Taiwan, and that is just to stick to the strategic ambiguity that we have had on this issue since the 1970s. Since the 1970s, going right back to Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, we basically accepted the Chinese claim that Taiwan is part of China. We don't treat Taiwan

as an independent country. We just kind of go along with this claim that there's one China. In practice, Taiwan's an independent country. In practice, it's a democracy. But we kind of just accept the fiction that it's not. And we don't have an unambiguous commitment to defend it in the event of a Chinese invasion. We just say that if the Chinese try to change the status quo by force, then we reserve the right to take some

unspecified action. That's the strategic ambiguity we've had really since the late 1970s. What has been very strange to me is that over the last three years, Democrats and various foreign policy think tank types like Richard Haass have started to question strategic ambiguity. And they've started to say, we should be unambiguous in our commitment to Taiwan, and we should carry on like it is an independent country. I think that was the spirit of Nancy Pelosi's visit, that the president himself, Joe Biden, has said on more than one occasion that there's an unambiguous commitment. Now, the simple solution to avoiding the Cuban Missile Crisis happening over Taiwan is just to go back to strategic ambiguity. And I think many Taiwanese people would welcome that. They're pretty nervous

that we're making these hawkish noises because they're the ones who would have to deal with the sharp end of a war. So I don't think it's too hard to turn this down. You just have to revert to the status quo and stop talking like a war over Taiwan is somehow inevitable, which seems to be the way that some of the more reckless people in Washington are talking today. Is there a lesson that the Biden administration may have learned from the soft talk on Russia and Ukraine here? Do you think they thought that lesson could then be applied to a totally different country and different set of circumstances and upped the rhetoric over Taiwan because of the failure you just outlined earlier on Ukraine?

Well, I do think that some people in the administration regard these things as very much interconnected, that they are, in a sense, backing Ukraine in this war against Russia and backing it with considerable firepower and finance, partly in order to make a point to China, not just to erode Russia's fighting capability, but to signal to Xi Jinping, hey, don't mess with friends of the West. The problem with that theory, which sounds superficially quite cynical, maybe clever, Machiavellian, is that I think China at this point is the net winner of the war in Ukraine. I mean, it's reduced Russia to subservience on China economically, gives China an option to pose as even a peacemaker, while at

the same time giving the Russians economic support. Meanwhile, the Chinese can sit back and watch America run down its stockpiles of missiles and other weapons on a war over Ukraine, which China doesn't really care about that much. And so I don't think that the administration is nearly as clever as it thinks it is about this. But the thing about deterrence is, Megan, in the end, it's not just about words. Talking tough is not going to deter anybody if you don't have the means to back up your tough talk. It's that whole thing about speaking softly and carrying a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's famous line. We currently are in danger over Taiwan of speaking loudly and not having much of a stick at all. And I think that's very, very dangerous. Historically, the most dangerous thing to do is to talk tough, say that you'll fight over a territory if you don't have the military wherewithal to back up the talk.

And I don't think we currently deter China in military terms from at least imposing a blockade on Taiwan. I'm not sure the Chinese would risk an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. That would be very difficult for the People's Liberation Army to pull off because that's the hardest thing in war. But I can easily imagine them putting a blockade around Taiwan and saying to the United States, what are you going to do about it? And that would pose a really major challenge to any US administration. Because if you run that blockade, if you send aircraft carriers and submarines to try and run that blockade, you are doing what the Soviets did in 1962. In other words, we'd be rerunning the Cuban Missile Crisis, only we'd be the Soviets. Because remember, it was John F. Kennedy who quarantined,

he called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade around Cuba, and defied the Russians to run that blockade. I do not think it's a smart thing to get yourself into the position of Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, because as you know, in the end, Megan, he backed down. And I think a scenario like the one I'm describing over Taiwan might very well lead the US to back down because the alternative would be a really huge war with China that nobody would know how to stop and how to prevent escalating. And the American people are not ready to see our aircraft carriers go down under Chinese fire in the sea over there. So there's just no appetite for that after 20 years of the forever wars here. You mentioned Henry Kissinger in passing. Later, we'll get to the story. I think it was our pal Douglas Murray writing up about your wedding to

Ayan and how he thought he was in the receiving line to go see you and your beautiful bride and wound up realizing that the very long line he was in with people queuing up to see Kissinger, which is very fun. So many great connections. And for a good reason, because both you and Ayan are fascinating people. We're going to have more with Neil coming up next. Don't you want to hear his thoughts on everything? He can explain everything in such an easy to understand way. And he knows of what he speaks more with Neil after this. Neil, I've got to ask you about this in the news today. Speaking of President Biden, he has got this new rule he is proposing now that is going to penalize homeowners who have good

credit rates. He wants them to pay more on their mortgages than those who have bad credit. And even former President Obama's senior housing official in the Obama administration has come out to say this is not the way. His name is David Stevens, saying this this is going to penalize financially stable homebuyers to subsidize those of higher risk. And here's from the Daily Wire. This is how they describe it. Americans purchasing a new home or refinancing their existing mortgage can expect to pay higher mortgage rates and monthly fees starting in May if they have a higher, meaning better, credit score. Those with lower credit scores and smaller down payments will be provided better rates. Homebuyers with

credit scores above 680, for instance, would pay an additional $40 each month on a home loan of $400,000. Homebuyers who make down payments between 15 and 20 percent will receive the largest fees. They will be assessing you more if you pay 20 percent, which is a good number to put down. And this guy, Stevens, who worked for Obama, said this is unprecedented. We can do better programs to help more minorities get into homeownership. This is not the way to do it. This what mentality is this reflecting that we're now going to punish people who paid their bills on time so their credit rates are higher. Megan, I haven't seen this proposal, and so I'll watch what I say. But by the way, Neil, that's because no one's covering it.

Literally, that's because the mainstream media will not touch this. It's certainly, as you describe it, an extraordinary and terrible idea. I can't believe an idea like that will get past first base. I can almost see Secretary Yellen at the Treasury falling from her desk chair. So I'm assuming this is not intended to become real policy, but I think it's designed so often with the administration as a little bit of virtue signaling. You did use the word minority there, and I infer that part of the goal here is to address perceived iniquities in the housing market. So I'm assuming it's virtue signaling with that in mind, but I find it depressing that an idea like that would even be aired, even as a trial balloon.

But it's part of a long list of terrible policy ideas that periodically surface. You'll remember when inflation was first really surprising to the upside, we were told that, in fact, inflation was caused by profiteering businesses, an idea that I thought had surely been killed off long ago by Milton Friedman and his generation of economists. So bad ideas are back in fashion, particularly on these economic questions. And you can only console yourself that they're unlikely to be put into practice and reflect that what they're really about is essentially political signaling of a sort that is in itself depressing, but probably not quite so harmful as the policies would be.

It's just, it happens at every turn with this administration. The way this is going down is the current director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency made a shift, lowering the fees being charged to borrowers with low down payments and low credit scores, and compensating that loss by raising fees on better credit worthy borrowers who are putting down larger down payments. And there's been a pushback. They delayed it till August under pressure from Fannie Mae and all those other housing lender companies. But now it's in place and they're under pressure to reverse it because it's unfair. But it continues a policy of the people who take out

college loans, who fall behind on payments. Let's reward them by getting rid of the payments. Make the truckers who didn't go to college and had the foresight to recognize, I don't need that degree and I don't want to be saddled with that burden. Make him pay for that. Let's look at the rent abatement procedures that were kept in place long after they were necessary following the COVID pandemic, which he was told the Supreme Court was not going to allow. And he did it anyway. He extended it at every turn. Neil, you could even take it down to, you know, changing the messaging on obesity to be, oh, it's not your fault. And it's absolutely healthy and beautiful to be 200, 300 pounds overweight.

All of it is looking for an excuse for people's life choices that, no, are not serving them well. But that used to be somebody's private business. Now it's up to people who have made better life choices to bail you out of those problems. We're moving away from the age of cost benefit analysis when you assessed the policy with the question, will this be net beneficial to society? That of course included to the economy. We left that behind and we now can see policies that are designed on the basis of, are we going to hit key voters in our coalition, particularly in the key states that are going to be in play? And this is the basis on which policy now gets designed. And it's extremely harmful in two ways. First of all, we end up with economically suboptimal policies. It's obviously

a totally terrible idea to start penalizing people who have good credit scores and rewarding those who have bad or penalizing those who haven't got student debt in order to pay off the loans of the beneficiaries with taxpayers' money. These are suboptimal policies. Economically, they will have costs to our economic efficiency. They will create distortions that will ultimately reduce our rate of growth. But the second thing, which I think in some ways is worse, is that these are so politically divisive. These are policies that are designed to ensure that the playing field isn't level, and in particular, to make sure that the particular groups are on the wrong side of the trade nine times out of 10. And you're kind of signaling to middle America, to middle class America, you're kind of signaling

that discrimination is okay as long as it's against you. And that, I think, is deeply toxic politically, quite apart from the economic costs. There's actually now a disincentive to keep your credit score high if you're about to apply for a mortgage. Dale's bill or your car payment or whatever it is that previously we understood we needed to pay all of our bills on time, especially for applying for a mortgage. So we could get a nice credit card score, a credit rating, rating, I should say, and get a very, you know, a correspondingly low mortgage rate. Exactly the opposite. Now he's absolutely incentivizing the wrong things. And for the wrong reasons, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that really drives me nuts. It's like the left will give him a pass because they'll say, oh, he was trying to help minorities. Why? By encouraging bad, irresponsible behavior by

the masses who were previously behaving well? But Megan, this reminds me of some of what goes on in education where we're told that actually standardized tests are a bad thing, and we should get rid of those, because so it's alleged they're disadvantageous to minorities. Now, in reality, the creation of standardized tests was a way of boosting social mobility by ensuring that we made decisions like university admissions on the basis of some kind of objective measure of academic performance and potential. And it's highly unlikely, in my view, that getting rid of those tests will benefit anybody in the bottom quintile of the income distribution.

I should think that that's almost certainly not going to be the consequence. Just to add to that, Neil, we just had on Heather MacDonald, who I know you know, she's brilliant. She just wrote a new book. And she had taken a hard look at all of this, the getting rid of the SAT scores and the ACT scores at various colleges. And so far, the colleges are complaining it's done nothing to increase their diversity. Nothing. Well, in fact, it will probably have the perverse opposite consequence, because if you get rid of that measure, what are you going to end up relying on? And I've witnessed experiments of this sort at different universities. There was a time when

Oxford got rid of its entrance examination, thinking that it would somehow benefit lower class students, but it didn't at all all because when you get rid of the exam or you get rid of the standardized test, you end up relying more on things like essays that can be absolutely fine-tuned by the kids of wealthy families who can afford tuition and all the kind of things that go into college applications. So I'm a meritocrat, Megan. I passionately believe in meritocracy, in admission and promotion on the basis of academic achievement, hard work plus skill plus talent. That's how we should organize our society.

It doesn't produce a level playing field outcome, but it should start with a level playing field to begin with. So we have equality of opportunity. of the century so that people with talent and hard work who happen to be born into the bottom half or the bottom fifth of the income distribution had a shot. And it's one of these things that's quite irritating if you are a conservative. You kind of always get presented as if somehow you are on the side of the rich and privileged against the poor and underprivileged. And the opposite is true. Let's just spend some time on your background, Neil, because I didn't know a lot of this about you as my team was getting me prepared

on the Neil Ferguson life story. I mentioned you're originally from the UK. So tell us about your upbringing. You had two very smart parents from the sound of it. Well, I grew up in Glasgow in Scotland. I was very fortunate in my appearance. My father and mother were the first in their families to go to university. Hence my earlier remarks before the break about the importance of social mobility through education. My father managed to become a doctor. He was a dedicated internist all through my childhood, tremendously devoted to his work, regarded work as a vocation.

And my mother was a physicist, a physics teacher. My father died a few years ago, but my mom is still alive and living in England. And I owe them everything. Without them, and of course, without my grandparents who produced them, I would be nothing and would have achieved nothing. They gave me their genes, but they also gave me something else, which is the kind of upbringing that I try to give my own children, in which they instilled me with a sense of responsibility, of good fortune, and a sense that one should never waste that good fortune. And I try not to waste the good luck I've been given.

Now, one thing they did not give you was a belief in any particular religion. And what was your mom's line about how the universe was created or what we're doing here? It was some great line. Well, my mother and father both left the Church of Scotland really on, I think, the principle that Glasgow and much of Scotland was afflicted by sectarian division. This was the great curse of the part of the world where I grew up, Catholics and Protestants, not only hating and despising one another, but in Northern Ireland, of course, engaging in violence. And I think that was a big part of the reason that my parents stopped going to church. But my mother was also a kind of committed atheist. She loved to tell me and my sister that life was a cosmic accident

and that in that sense, one shouldn't expect the world or indeed the cosmos to revolve around us. It was all a kind of combination of Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution. And that was how I was raised. We didn't go to church. Although there was a chapel, there was a religious element to my education, I always felt somewhat detached from it.

And as I said, Glasgow, in a sectarian society like Glasgow's, there was a Catholic football team, Celtic, and a Protestant football team, Rangers. But I found the atheist football team Partick Thistle. And the joke always was that if you do believe in God, when you start supporting Partick Thistle, you'll soon stop. So that was my background. You know, it's funny. It's all coming together for me. In New York, there's this

thing called the Kelly Gang, and it's a bunch of media personalities and some other well-known Kellys. And, uh, we raise money for charity and we get together on St. Patrick's day every year. And I remember saying, um, to Ray Kelly, who was the police commissioner for a while and, uh, Greg Kelly's dad, I said, what's, what's the story? Like what, how does one get into the Kelly gang? What am I doing here? And he said, well, there are three rules. He said, you got to have some juice. You got to, oh God, what was the second thing? Got to have some juice.

Got to have something that said there was second. It'll come to me. And he said, and the third thing is you can't have that second E to your point about, because those of us without the second E are Catholics. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing mattered a lot where I grew up and I still always marvel at the great self-confidence of the Irish Americans and vaguely grind my teeth at the thought of the way that back in the day, they tended to sympathize with the provisional IRA who were conducting terrorist operations in Northern Ireland and the UK.

So that background kind of creates a certain wariness about religion because it got so associated with politics and indeed at times with violence and certainly was associated with prejudice. So I completely get why my parents took that approach. I found that when I left Scotland and studied history, I became less and less convinced of atheism as a way of life or indeed as a way to organize a society. And so these days you'll find me a regular attender at church. I love this. Because you believe in observance, if not true belief.

So tell us why. What are you doing with your children and how did you get to that place? Well, I think, and I have five children, I felt this for all of them, that one should at least educate children about religion. And as we are a society that came out of Christianity, it's extremely important that they understand what that is. So there's that part. But there's also a sense in which a life without spirituality is at some level a life with a missing piece. I think that G.K. Chesterton said something very true. He didn't

quite say this, but that's usually how it's quoted. The trouble with atheism is not that men believe in nothing, it's that they'll believe in anything. And so if you kind of opt out of religion, it's quite possible that something else, it might be crazy conspiracy theories, will fill it, or it might be a secular religion like Marxism. So I've kind of come to the view that even if I don't have a strong spiritual impulse and struggle a bit to have belief in God, I do think it's important to have a part of your life that is devoted to spiritual reflection. I think going to church is good for you. It is good to think about Christ's teaching.

It's good to be part of that tradition. Apart from anything else, Christ has some very radical things to teach us about how to be good, how to treat our fellow human beings. And I think that's something I want my children to know. We're definitely not naturally good. I mean, I don't think that we have evolved to be ethical. I think that's something that society has to drum into people somehow. And over time, I've come to feel that this is a really important part of our lives.

Now, this, of course, raises the thorny question of how does Ayaan feel? Because, of course, my wife is a former Muslim. She was raised in the muslim brotherhood she she went through a period in her life when she was not only a devout muslim but had been radicalized by the muslim brotherhood she too uh became an atheist but by a very different route from me um and we find ourselves uh a most unusual uh family both these atheists have arrived at a consensus that we should go to church on Sunday. And we took a while to find the right church. Northern California has strangely politicized kind of a religion. I got very turned off by church services, which included a mandatory anti-Trump sermon. But there's a wonderfully traditional Anglican church that we now attend, which uses the traditional order of

service and avoids altogether politics in the sermons. And this is a source of considerable satisfaction to me, and I think it's good for us as a family, good for the kids. And they can make up their own minds as they grow up what they want to do. But my eldest son was recently married in London last December. Yeah, Ion sent me a couple of those pictures. You had your traditional Scottish dress on. I had my kilt on, as did nearly all the Ferguson boys. The bridegroom himself opted not to because he was marrying an English girl and I think felt it might be just a little bit too much of a good thing if we all were decked out like Sean Connery in our kilts.

This was a religious service in an Anglican chapel and a beautiful thing. The great thing about Anglicanism is the aesthetics are so good. I mean, you may not have very uplifting spiritual impulses, but you can enjoy the music, if nothing else. And that's itself meaningful. I think that's so great because you're a historian. And just from reading up on what you've said about this in the past, you recognize that atheist societies don't tend to end very well. It's not a very good blueprint for a society in which you'd want to live. And so there was, as much as anything, an intellectual decision to try to raise children who were not atheists, who had a commitment to a faith unlike yourself.

Correct. And it's not just that they end badly, they start badly. I mean, the great experiments with non-Christian systems, the French Revolution did it, so did the Russian Revolution, so in its way did the Chinese Revolution. I mean, these very quickly became terribly bloodthirsty regimes. I remember reading Richard Pipes' great history of the Bolshevik revolution when I was an undergraduate and being appalled at the descriptions of the violence the Bolsheviks directed against the clergy, against all religious institutions, the destruction that occurred at that time of churches in Russia. So it came to me that atheism wasn't just this kind of individual choice not to believe, but it could in fact be the operating system for totalitarian regimes. And what they do, and this is the really interesting point, is they try to create their own religion, an ideological, political ideology, which then replaces Christianity. And I'll add one final point, Megan. It's worth remembering that the people who resisted Nazism most tenaciously in Germany were nearly all religious. And that has to tell us something very important about the power of religion as a kind of vaccine and inoculation against evil. And I think it is that. The union between you and Ayaan, which led to two of those five children you have, was a second marriage. And as I understand it, you met at the time 100.

You were both being inducted as two of the world's most influential people. There was a write-up about it at the time in the Daily Mail. And I love this quote. A friend of Ms. Hirsi Ali said, I think that's where they met for the first time. In all the years I've known Ayaan, she's never had a boyfriend. She's gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it's tricky to find guys. Ayaan, we laugh, but Ayaan remains with a fatwa on her, a fatwa on her, from the Muslim Brotherhood, from which she ultimately fled. She was now famously or infamously working on this film that got its director, Theo Van Gogh,

killed, shot because it was critical of Islam. And on his chest was pinned a fatwa on Ayaan, a threat on Ayaan's life, a commitment to kill Ayaan. And she has had to live with that every day thereafter. She's the bravest, most courageous woman I know. And you, you know, I can see the woman's point who gave this quote to, to Daily Mail. You walk into this, just like this powerhouse of a woman. I mean, I can imagine you're bowled over by meeting the Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But then it's a little complicated. Well, honey, I've got something to tell you.

Well, remember, don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail. Actually, we were on a date when we went to the Time 100 dinner, we'd met already at a much more obscure, but I think cooler event, which was the emergency conference of the Mont Pelerin Society at the time of the financial crisis. The Mont Pelerin Society, famously a gathering of mostly Chicago free market economists, and we've both been invited to attend. And indeed, I gave a speech about why the financial crisis shouldn't be blamed on free markets. And that was when I was introduced to Ayaan. I knew-

Very sexy. Well, it's certainly nerdy, isn't it? And she wasn't wearing that blue dress either. But I knew, of course, who she was when a lovely Australian man named Greg Lindsay introduced us. He was the unlikely Cupid. By the way, if you've ever read War and Peace, the moment when Pierre sees Natasha, everything stops. That's what the French called a coup de foudre. It happened to me then. So I knew very much that she was under threat and indeed these threats don't have expiry dates. There's no statute of limitations and we have to accept that there are people out there

who would regard killing my wife as she's an apostate and somebody who's been highly critical of Islam and particularly political Islam, they would regard it as a holy act. I mean, we have to live with that. The fact that Salman Rushdie was attacked last year, when he clearly felt it kind of was over, came as a huge blow, I think, to Ayaan, who was deeply upset by the attack on Salman, whom we know. I suppose I think about it this way. First of all, terrorism is designed to inspire fear and is its purpose. And I grew up in a culture which is highly resistant to accepting fear. My grandfathers fought in the world wars. The Scots pride themselves in their fearlessness. And I have never been afraid of these people because I despise them. I have utter contempt for them and I don't fear them. And indeed, I'd already made the choice to move to

the United States just after 9-11 because actually 9-11 prevented me from giving a lecture at New York University. It was supposed to happen the next day. I never flew. And it was shortly after that, that I decided to leave Oxford and take a job at New York University. So before I met Ayaan, I think I'd already made it clear that I was going to march towards rather than away from the gunfire. My grandfathers had to fight at great cost to themselves. They didn't pay the ultimate price, but my grandfather was very badly injured in World War I, and my mother's father suffered significant health damage in World War II fighting the Japanese. I haven't been asked to do anything as difficult as that. My war is a small war. It takes place here, and I just have to keep my wife safe and happy and make

sure that she lives a long life because that will be the ultimate victory over all those cowards who threatened her over the years. That's my war, and it's a much easier one than my granddad had to fight. Oh my goodness. But like those wars, well worth the fight. That's probably on some level what attracted her to you, that Scottish background, that fighter background, and the feeling that this person will help protect me. I'm sure as strong and brave as Ayaan is, there's got to be a fear factor even for her, knowing that these very effective killers are out there thinking about her, knowing that these very effective killers are out there thinking about her, wanting to target her. Look, I think my wife's extremely brave and good at putting up

a brave face, but I would not be doing justice to this interview if I made it sound as if it was all okay, because the mental stress of being threatened has taken a heavy toll, a very heavy toll. And my wife's well-being, happiness, it's been a struggle, much harder than I had foreseen. I thought the challenge would be just making sure that the bad guys couldn't get close. But the real challenge when you're facing terrorist threats like this is actually making sure that your spouse's mental health is okay. Because that's really what the terrorists are trying to do. It's not just about

threats and objective security. The thing that really turns out to matter in life is the subjective security. And that terrorism is designed to erode. And it's been a much bigger challenge than I foresaw. One that we are overcoming, but not one that we should understate. When she came out with her book, she came to Fox News and I interviewed her. I think I was her first interview on that. And it was shocking to me the amount of security back then. This would have been 2013, 2014. I can't remember the year that she had to travel with. I mean, it and even, you know, I've visited her privately since then. And it's still like she still has to live like this because of these lunatics who are

so delusioned by religion and what they think it requires of them because she's been critical of Islam. I mean, a religion in whose name she had to undergo mutilation of her genitals. I mean, it can cause some bitterness. It can cause you to abandon the religion, not to mention all the other things that she's written about and talked about so many times that have happened to her. It's just deeply wrong. And most of us would be in a puddle crying for most of our lives or retreating into very private lives where people couldn't find us. The mere fact that she's chosen to live a public life, that you live a public life, the two of you, you've had kids, that's another factor you got to layer into the worries, does speak to both of your courage, Scottish, whatever the background.

Well, it still beats being in Eastern Ukraine. I mean, it still beats what so many people around the world have to contend with. And from that point of view, I have no complaints. And as long as my wife is healthy and safe and happy, and the same applies to our kids, then I'm winning the war. But I think the important thing that's worth sharing is just the kind of damage that is done, which is generally speaking, not seen. I think people who aren't directly affected by this kind of threat underestimate the psychological consequences of it because they kind of assume that, oh, you get used to security and you get used to coming in through the back way rather than the front way when you give a speech, you get used to all of that. And I think you do get used to all of that in fact to a certain degree it becomes slightly

second nature but but you don't get used to the psychological uh effects of the threat and that's the thing that I've come to learn and it's it's made me much more appreciative Megan of of mental health about which I thought very little again not, the not-so-sunny side of a Scottish upbringing is the mentality that you never admit to weakness, you never admit to depression, you never admit to any mental health problem. And if there's a problem, you kind of work your way out of it. And I think that attitude isn't really the right one. I've become much more aware of mental ill health as a problem throughout our nation and indeed throughout the world and i'm i'm much more understanding than than i used to be when as a young man i dismissed

all that kind of thing as you know just a sign of weakness i'm i'm a i'm a wiser person thanks to ayan the um i'll tell you one funny story so you talk about this sort of those Scottish roots and my husband's both Dutch and Scottish, Scottish on his mother's side. And they went back to Scotland in the not too distant past, maybe five, six years ago with the family. And they found their clan and they found their motto, the family motto. And it translated, it was be fearless, but cautious. Yeah, I think we didn't get the but cautious part in the Ferguson clan. But yeah, that sort of spirit does still animate me. It's been 40 years since I've lived in Scotland. I left when I was 17 to go to college, but it's still kind of there as an operating system. And when I read Scottish literature, I spent the pandemic reading all the novels of Walter Scott. I realised that that's really still home and that culture is still what I grew out of.

And the Scottish Enlightenment, which after all produced some of the greatest ideas human beings have ever had, think of Adam Smith's contribution, The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That's the kind of intellectual legacy that I think of myself as being responsible for. And if those ideas are not carried on to the next generation, then we lose something incredibly precious that came from my little cold, rainy country in the north of Europe. So we have you with this background of fight, say what you mean, stand up for your

principles. We have Ayaan who found a way to say exactly what she felt, notwithstanding the enormous threat to her personal safety in doing so, on the most controversial issues you could ever speak of. And she was doing it at a time when, you know, this is post 9-11, when, you know, that was a very fraught conversation to be having. And you two wind up, who would have predicted an academia, which you probably didn't realize at the time would be the least tolerant place for any of those values. And it's only gotten worse over the past 10, 12 years. And you're both now at the Hoover Institution, which is this little oasis within the university system, including at Stanford, which is, you know, we do a story every other day. I'm sure

you saw what happened with the judge who went out there, Judge Duncan. But the Hoover Institution's different. However, you're still on, you're in academia and you're on a college campus. And so how, how's that going? Well, I think if you told me back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate at Oxford that by the 2020s there would be less free speech in American universities than in American saloon bars, I would have been pretty incredulous. Because in the early 80s, when I was at Oxford, there was almost no restriction on what we could say. And there was incredible intellectual diversity in the university. You could go from talking to a Marxist professor in the morning to listening to an ultra conservative in the afternoon. Andrew Sullivan and I were undergraduates together. We were quite outrageous and highly offensive and said a whole range of things that would get you cancelled today in a heartbeat i i never foresaw that there

would be an atmosphere in universities where students would denounce one another or denounce their professors for something that was said in class i i never imagined a university world in which associate deans for diversity, equity, and inclusion would decide what could be said on university premises. I find all this completely surreal. In fact, I think it's probably the biggest surprise of my life because back in the 80s, I guess working with historians like the late, great Norman Stone, I learned that denouncing, informing, cancellation, all that kind of stuff went on in totalitarian regimes like Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. And that kind of behavior happened because it was a dictator in charge. And that's how people tend to behave in such a regime. The thing that's amazing is to see people behaving

that way with no dictator in sight. In fact, they're behaving that way in a completely free society. And that's shocking to me because I can't imagine anything, frankly, more contemptible than writing a letter denouncing somebody, sending it to a higher authority, asking for them to be disciplined. But that stuff goes on all the time in American universities. Stanford is not by any means unusual. The same kind of things are stuff goes on all the time in American universities. Stanford is not by any means unusual. The same kind of things are going on at all the major universities and the minor ones too. So this is a big surprise to me. I think it's pretty appalling. In fact, I think it's highly dangerous that there is this assault on academic freedom and on free speech because our

universities, like it or not, produce not only the elites, but a really large proportion of the people who run America. And if they leave after four years at college with at least a habit of self-censorship and at worst, a kind of indoctrination in what we call work ideology. That's terrible for America and terrible for the world. So the situation is very bad. I think there are things we are doing that are gradually improving it, creating new institutions like the University of Austin, making sure that the few existing institutions that are healthy, like the Hoover Institution, stay healthy, making sure that we organize so that cancel cultures sort of doesn't succeed. I was involved in creating the Academic Freedom Alliance to fight back when individuals are

targeted. There's a lot we're doing. And so in this part of my life, as in other parts, I'm trying to fight the good fight because I think it's hugely important. Mm-hmm. I think it was, is it Harvard that just came out with a new group saying that they're going to fight for academic freedom, including professors' ability to say what is factual and not get piled on or canceled because of it. We'll see whether that's a real commitment or not. It used to be that Princeton was the place you'd go if you really wanted that, but they've surrendered to the woke. University of Chicago was another place. They've surrendered to the woke. One by one, they dropped like dominoes. Harvard, it's long overdue because actually Harvard's track record on disciplining faculty and other university members for speech, quote unquote, offenses is pretty bad. So this is good.

I mean, these are good signs, Megan, that we're getting organized and we're trying to contest and fight back against these really deplorable trends. But I really want to stress there's a long way to go. And the kind of events that you're covering and others are covering and organizations like FIRE are monitoring, these events are happening a lot. Sometimes I'm told, oh, there's a pendulum that will swing back to the center. And I don't see that pendulum. I actually think that the pendulum, if there is one, has been swinging to the left with every decade since I was an undergraduate. And there

is no sign of it moving the other direction, quite the opposite. The tendency is for people to hire ever more ideologically, to discriminate ever more explicitly on political grounds. So we've a lot of work to do to create the kind of university that I would want our young sons to go to. Thomas is 11, Campbell is 5, and we've got just about time to make sure that there's a higher education worth their doing by the time they get to be 18. So explain University of Austin to me. I'm confused by it. I love everybody associated with it, but I don't understand what it is or how it works. It's not an online university. So what is it? Well, we are building a university that will be located in Austin, Texas, that will be founded on the principles of academic freedom,

intellectual freedom, as well as meritocracy. And we will institutionalize those principles so that they are constitutionally guaranteed by a university constitution. Creating a university is not easy. It's not like doing an AI startup, which seems to take about three weeks these days. You have to go through an accreditation process, which is quite laborious and time-consuming. But we will admit our first class, all going well, in the fall of 2024. That's next year. We've moved it by academic standards at lightning speed. We've raised $150 million, which is chump change by Harvard standards, but we're a startup. We don't need to have Harvard's budget. We just need to build and then scale this institution. And it's extremely exciting,

and I think very American, to be creating a new institution. Once upon a time, the University of Chicago was us. Once upon a time, Stanford was us. You have to remember that by Oxford standards, both Chicago and Stanford are quite young institutions, not even close to 200 years old. And so we believe that America needs a new university and it's ultimately going to be good for the existing universities if there's one that really models academic freedom and really models a truly meritocratic culture in which we only discriminate in favor of talent. That's what we're going to do. And I think if we get it right, we're going to attract the most exciting students in the country. Because

I can assure you, students at the established universities are frustrated, downright depressed in many cases, because academic life, student life is just no fun. It's no fun when the woke police are poised to jump on you if you use the wrong word in the wrong context. Building a university which will be truly intellectually free will be fun. And I think we will very quickly be a magnet for talent. And the minute we do that, the other universities are going to realize we have to address our own illiberal, no fun culture. And ultimately, I hope 20 years from now, I probably only have 20 years left, judging by typical life expectancy for Scotsmen. I hope 20 years from now, we've really made a difference. And I believe we will.

Well, the other thing is, I think there are a lot of employers who are thirsty for this kind of a product to recruit graduates from a school like that who haven't been indoctrinated. Anyone who would choose the University of Austin will have a certain set of ideals and principles and ways of approaching thinking and problem solving that I, for one, as an employer, would find very attractive. And I know there are many just like me. So that's the other thing. Once people see that the graduates of this university get great jobs. It may not be with Bud Light, but they get great jobs with great corporations that will employ and be loyal to them. That'll change the equation there too. You are so right, Megan. And we absolutely

intend to make sure that the message gets out. And also that we make sure that as we devise our undergraduate and master's programs, we devise them so that our people will be like the Navy SEALs of the mind. And that's an image I really like. We see still elitism in our military. The desire to be the very, very best is something that motivates the SEALs and the other special forces folks. But where is that in academia? Well, we want to build it. And if you can produce the Navy SEALs or the Green Berets of the brain, then you bet the top employers are going to want to hire our people. And this is something that our wonderful president, Pano Kanelos, keeps emphasizing. We've got to make

sure that we are designing programs that are fundamentally different in their aspiration. We want to produce leaders. We want to produce people who dare to think and learn to lead. That's my kind of preferred motto for the University of Austin. And so it's actually very invigorating to be involved in doing this because we can learn from history. We can learn from what's gone wrong at the established universities and try and come up with something that's fundamentally different. There won't be departments. There won't be a system of tenured faculty who become dominant. There won't be an enormous bureaucracy of officers policing

what gets said and done. All of that will be got rid of. It won't exist in those forms at the University of Austin. I love it. Two plus two will remain four. You won't have DEI policing your math, volleyball, and whatever else they can dream of. It's exciting. So the first incoming full class begins in 2024, fall of 2024? That's right. And we will, I hope, scale rapidly. You mentioned the online piece. I think that's important.

It's not enough in the 21st who get admitted, but more widely. and preserves the values of the great universities of the past, because I think the greatest teaching experiences do still happen in classrooms, in relatively small groups. We've got to preserve all that because it's really powerful, but we've also got to make available content to people around the world who don't have the good fortune to be able to spend four years in a US university. I really feel passionately about my egalitarian mission. My egalitarian mission is to get history, which is my subject, out to the greatest number of people possible. And that includes people living in poverty, whether it's in sub-Saharan Africa and Somalia, where my wife was born, or in the deprived parts of Scotland. I want that kind of historical knowledge to be accessible to everybody because history can help you live your life better. It will help you learn

from the mistakes of that vast population who died, who've moved on. The majority of human beings are dead. The majority have passed on. And we have to learn from their experience if we're to make a better job of the 21st century than we're currently making. So we mentioned Douglas Murray. I don't think my husband Doug would mind. He's going to be interviewing him on his podcast, which is called Dedicated with Doug Brunn. He's an author and he interviews other authors about their writing process, their books, and so on.

And Doug has been reading, my Doug has been reading Douglas Murray's War on the West. And he's, of course, got so many similar thoughts to your own on how the absurdity of writing off every bit of history as terrible and not worthy of consideration because of colonialism, because white men, because of all the things. And I want to ask you about a similar subject right after this break, colonialism and King Charles's commitment to atoning for it. That's kind of sounds like where he's going. I'll tell you what he said and get your thoughts on it right after this. More with Neil Ferguson in two minutes. So Neil, King Charles is about to go through his coronation across the pond. And in his first big speech in front of a foreign leader, which was in November, he signaled that his monarchy will tackle the legacy of colonialism.

He's made quite a few comments about this, his sadness about the UK's role in the slave trade. He cannot describe the depths of his personal sorrow at the suffering of so many as he continues to deepen his own understanding of slavery's enduring impact. But he seems to be focused on some sort of atonement for the legacy of colonialism. Good idea to make this any sort of a centerpiece of his reign? Well, Charles, King Charles, as I must learn to call him, has had a bad press on many occasions in the past, and I often think has been misunderstood and misrepresented. And it's easy, I think, to infer from this kind of thing, oh no, here comes the woke monarch. And I don't think that's fair. First of all, I think Britain has been dealing with the complexities of its imperial past for a long time. It's not as if his mother disregarded this. In fact, one of the most striking

achievements of Queen Elizabeth II's reign was the way that the legacy of empire metamorphosed into the Commonwealth, an entirely different kind of organization in which the different members, including former colonies, were equals. So this is not something that he's starting from scratch. The key in this debate, Megan, is for us not to go down the road of, on one side, there being people who say every single thing about empire, and particularly the British empire, was evil. And on the other side, people saying every single thing about it was great. 20 years ago, I wrote a book called Empire, How Britain Made the Modern World. And in that book, I pointed out that Britain was responsible both for some dreadful evils, the transatlantic

slave trade to which Britain made a major contribution, but also the United States of America. I mean, let's face it, the United States of America starts out as a bunch of rebellious colonies. And most of the institutions that get put together to produce the United States have a pretty visible British imprint, not to mention the language we're speaking. So you can't say it's all bad and you can't say it's all good. You've got to recognize that as with all historical phenomena, the British

empire was a tremendously complex thing. It was responsible for great misdeeds, but then so were all empires. I mean, give me an empire that didn't have some version of slavery. I'd be very interested to hear about it. And one can't ignore the fact that unlike many empires, and I mentioned one earlier, Hitler's empire, the British empire did a lot of good. I mean, I can't think of any good that Germany's empire did in the 1940s, but over the 200 plus years of its existence, there were some undoubted benefits to British Empire. You can't say that in certain circles these days, because you have to maintain the fiction that it was all bad. But I'm a historian, and I'm here to tell you

that history isn't all bad and it isn't all good. Sorry, it's complicated. It's complicated. I, for one, was a little concerned when they fired that lady susan hussey so quickly when she had that exchange with a black activist who was there visiting and she the lady kept asking her where are you actually from but the woman was in african garb and she had an african name and she was lady susan hussey was confused that she might not actually be from Great Britain. Anyway, they fired her pretty quickly. And I just wonder whether, you know, you don't think we're in for a woke monarch?

Well, I think that kind of performative protest, which always reminds me of footballers who dive in the penalty area clutching their face, is going to be a pretty recurrent feature of British and American life for years to come. There are people who are on the lookout for reasons to be offended. And it's hard to deal with those people, especially if you're a traditional institution with centuries of history. I think the challenge for the monarchy is the same challenge it had when I was born gulp nearly 60 years ago. And that is, how do you justify an institution based on the hereditary principle in the age of democracy and in the age of technology. And the extraordinary thing about the British monarchy is how well that's gone so far. I mean, there was a time when you think back to, I don't know, late 18th century,

when the revolutions were happening, not only here, but also in France, where it didn't seem like monarchy had a great future ahead of it. But what I think King Charles will have learned from his mother is that there are, in fact, great virtues to having a non-elected head of state who personifies tradition. And this is the same thing that I was saying to you earlier about religion. You know, at some level, the United States feels a lot more divided politically and in other ways than Britain today. Wokeism has made far greater inroads here than in the UK. And it's partly because there's so many parts of British life that are kind of off limits. They're not really supposed to be political. And so the church, the crown, these things, as my old friend Roger Scruton used to say,

are the things that we as conservatives should really want to conserve because they're the things that preserve part of our lives from the scourge of democratic politics. So as a historian and a conservative looking around at America, seeing wokeism take over, seeing the loss of biology and reality, math realities, seeing just this incredibly divisive anti-free speech rhetoric pop up in every one of our massive institutions. Are we looking at the end of days here for this great republic? Where do we go from here, based on what you've seen historically? Well, my last book, Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe, takes this question on. I love that feature of American life, that we're always predicting

American decline, and we're always predicting either the next civil war or the overthrow of the Constitution. I think it keeps us on our toes to worry about that stuff. And I'd be kind of concerned if Americans didn't occasionally ask themselves, are we about to blow it? Now, I tend to regard most of the kind of exaggerated prophecies of doom as being not worth the paper they're printed on. I mean, I got slightly exhausted by the analogies that were constantly made between Donald Trump and Mussolini or even Hitler, and that just seems to me ludicrous. I think there are two things that are important. First of all, there's a populist tradition in American politics. And there's also a kind of nasty tradition in American politics. Dickens was appalled when

he came to the United States by how brutally nasty American politics was. And we mustn't forget that that's kind of part of the way this republic has tended to roll. And there's a very 19th century character to a lot of what we see today, including political machines, which have got to be almost Tammany Hall in their efficiency. The second point I'd make is that we should worry about the durability of republican institutions. There's a reason Rome turned into an empire. It's the thing that political history and political theory tells us we should worry about. But I don't think we are near the end of the Republic or much less the end of days.

Americans have to remember that it was a lot worse in this country, for example, in the late 60s and early 70s. Much more division and a good deal more violence than we see today. So let's keep calm, as the British poster says, and carry on. American institutions are extraordinarily well-designed and extraordinarily strong. And the challenges we face, like the People's Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party, those challenges are not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge we face is within. It's are we capable of sustaining those principles that have served us so well over two centuries? And as long as we don't throw those out the window in a paroxysm of wokeism, I think the United States will be just fine. As the Scottish might do, we must fight to preserve them. Neil, so great to talk to you. Please send my love to your beautiful wife. And thank you so much. Really enjoyed this. My pleasure, Megan. Great to see you.

Before we go, I wanted to bring you the latest edition of the MK Mailbag. If you would like to email me, you can do so now. Megan, M E G Y N. That's really how you say it. Megan, M E G Y N at megankelly.com. Okay. Go there now and you can sign up for our American news minute. If you so desire while you're there, that's my email to you that I send out on Fridays. Okay. Some great ones this week, uh, regarding the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, insisting that they admit this trans person who was like the six foot one man who's 250 pounds i can't whatever it's a nightmare uh claudia in ohio writes i was a proud kkg alumna until last fall uh i attended university of utah in the 80s was pledged chairman and president i

was also an advisor blah blah the national organization is fully responsible for this and i hope that they pay dearly i'm considering returning my key and resigning as an alumna um another former kkk kkg writes in saying this guy doesn't even have a high enough gpa to be a member why was he even able to rush with that pathetic score he has a 1.9 uh candace writes in thanks so much for bringing up this case if those young women choose to move forward with their suit and let their names be known. They are absolute heroes. I agree on Dylan and Bud White, but like Bud White, but light somebody writes in Sasha, thanks for sticking up for real women with the XX chromosomes. My issue is not even Dylan, but the marketing woman in charge who said she wants to appeal to women. You pick a man dressed as a woman to do so real

women should represent and be used to be used to appeal to women. Christie writes in, um, Christie wrote this great email. I think is the one who forwarded us for a long email to Anheuser-Busch. Yeah, it was. And Christie, I read the whole thing. You didn't think I was going to read it. I read every word. It was amazing.

She said, I never, I've never written to a company or a person for any reason. Uh, I just never really thought it would do much good after everything that's happened. I couldn't sit quietly by any longer. I sent an email to Anheuser-Busch today. I wanted to thank you for helping me to find my voice and speak up and speak out. It was a great letter. Good for you. And then lastly, I love this one. Okay. Meg's going to tell me. I screen grabbed it. And the name is Michelle who wrote this in or was it Michael? Michael. Finally, about your swearing. Please do not stop. My life's journey has exposed me to a lot of profanity and a lot of people who use profanity like everything in life. The ability to use profanity effectively has not been distributed fairly over the years. You come to be able to

distinguish between people who are simply nasty and those who possess a certain profane elegance. Ms. Kelly, you have a gift. Don't change a thing. God bless you and your staff. Thank you so much for that, Michael. Yes, Michael Andrews. I appreciate that. And I will keep on swearing, sir. Have a great fucking weekend. See you Monday, guys. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.