TRIGGERnometry - “Tucker Has Become an Enabler of Fascists” - Sir Niall Ferguson

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Sir Niall Ferguson is a Scottish-American historian who serves as the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. He is the author of more than 16 books, including, ‘Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World’ (2003), ‘The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World’ (2008) and ‘Civilization: The West and the Rest’ (2011) - all available here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Niall-Ferguson/author/B000APQ8G0/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. Yeah. I don't understand why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative broadcaster has decided to become at least an enabler of fascists. We have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where everyone gets called a Nazi. Even my instinct is to go, Neil's going a bit far here. Can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that?

If you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your approach to World War II. Sir Neil Ferguson, you've become that since we last spoke. Such a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome back. It's a pleasure to be with you, Constantine. Lord Constantine. As you will one day be. I'm afraid not. I doubt that very much. Lord Foster, that would be quite. Yeah, that would be good, especially with this voice. Yes. We'd inject some realism. You'll fit right in in in my house of Lord. It's the least exclusive club in London. Oh, is it?

Being a knight is very Monty Python, and I'm of the generation for whom the word sir immediately evokes the knights who say knee. So it's been a source of a great deal of mirth in the Ferguson family. Well, I do. I say half-mockingly, I have to say, but congratulations. Americans are actually slightly more respectful. But for British people, it's just a chance to make fun.

Americans are very earnest, we bruce. I think they just wish they had titles, and it's title, And culture. Yeah. Whereas all they've got is Mr. President. We've slagged off American. We've lost all my American audience. Look, I am an American, so I'm conflicted about feudal, you know, feudal remnants.

You're Ouija. Now, I'm, of course, first and foremost, Oweeji. Yeah. Do you notice how he turned up a Scottish accent? Yeah, he did. He died up a little bit, didn't he? If you say it without a Scottish accent, people are referring, you'll think you're referring to people who clean car windscreens. But I'm, of course, born in Glasgow, British.

unionist, very anti-nationalist, but I'm an American citizen. So the whole Sir Neil thing actually goes over better there. Here it's an excuse for mockery. Yeah, which is how I I actually take it as an honor to all the people who helped me, my parents and my school and all my teachers. That's the way to think about it. You're really just kind of getting something for all they did for you. It's great to have you back. Neil. I'm looking forward to me Trigger. This is the most weird opening to Trigonomics

we have for a long time. Particularly one that I actually intend to be quite serious on some subjects. I've come here under false pretenses. Yes, you have. You're always expecting a comedy podcast. That's what I thought you were. Many people have said that. Not necessarily as a compliment. Inadverson, I think. Yes.

So, I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. Yeah. I mean, we're continuing with the comedy theme, but, you know, we started Trigonometry in 2018. One of the reasons we love having you on the show is that we love having historians on the show more broadly. And one of the reasons we love doing that is that we feel that history is important. And the reason it's important is that among other things, it's a way of knowing who we are. It's a way of knowing how we arrived at the values that we've arrived at.

and it's a way of knowing who almost, I would say, who we're supposed to be in a way. It's kind of like how you know what's up and what's down. And so in this history of our channel, one of the things we've done is we've talked to lots of people in order to counter some of the false narratives that have been pushed about the history of this country, the empire, colonialism, slavery, Churchill, and many other things. And as you know, the direction of that, those attacks on history has always been from the work left. Almost always. There have been people like David Irving and others.

But generally speaking, that has been the direction of attack, the direction of travel. So I think this is why so many people felt very strongly about the thing I referenced just a second ago, which is Tucker Carlson hosting an amateur historian. Maybe that would be the right way to describing a podcast or whatever the right term is, who basically said Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. He was a psychopath and he wanted World War II. Hitler didn't. Hitler made lots of peace offers. The reason that millions of people died on the Eastern Front civilians and prisoners of wars,

you know, the Germans hadn't planned properly, which ironically is one of the supposed strengths planning, and lots of other things that we wanted to touch on you on and also talk about why you think this has happened, why Tucker is hosting this person, promoting him as the most important, most honest and best historian in America, which was an extraordinary claim. But first and foremost, was Churchill the chief villain of World War II who wanted the war? No. Not surprisingly, I don't agree with that view. I was quite surprised by Tucker Carlson's decision to devote so much space, time and praise to Daryl Cooper, of whom I had never previously heard.

You see, I had thought that the most popular historian of our generation was Yuval Noah Harari, who has sold millions of books, such as Sapiens. So it came as a shock to learn that I'd been eclipsed by someone else, too. So I hastily tried to find books by Daryl Cooper that I could read and couldn't find any, apart from one on Amazon, which seemed to be about Twitter. And then I realized, looking more closely at the transcript of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper, that he's not a historian. He's part of your world. He's a podcaster.

Now we're really getting insulted now. Anyway. I mean, there's nothing wrong with podcasts. And some of my best friends do history podcasts. But it's different from history as I'm. had been brought up to think about it. Because for me, a historian is somebody who goes into archives and libraries and pours over dusty documents and tries to work out what happened and then writes articles and books and the books have booknotes which tell you where they got the

evidence from. And I don't really think you're a historian if you're not doing that. So that was the first surprise. And the second surprise was of course that Daryl Cooper's views on Churchill and on many things appear to be those of the national socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. Now, there are lots of people who've beaten up on Churchill in recent years. On the left, it's more or less standard to say that he was a racist and that he was a colonialist and that he was responsible for famine in Bengal. There's a whole charge sheet. And that's familiar.

year, there's also a conservative critique because revisionism is not just a left-wing activity. Historical revisionism goes on on the right too. And I remember John Chalmley writing books saying what a terrible Prime Minister Churchill had been because he had led Britain to the position of weakness that it found itself in in 1945 and effectively handed the British Empire to the United States. So I'm quite accustomed to critiques of Churchill from the left. the right. Now, my position has been that of AJP Taylor, who says of Churchill in his extraordinary English history that Churchill was the savior of his nation. And Taylor was no conservative,

and it was one of his characteristic flourishes to make such a statement in a footnote. And I agree with that. But I go further than Taylor, because Churchill was in fact the savior of Western civilization, by fighting on, by leading the British people to keep fighting, even after the fall of France, even after Dunkirk, at a time when plenty of people were open to the idea of some kind of settlement with Hitler, Churchill performed one of the great historic services of all time. So to have him described as the villain of the peace of World War II came as a surprise, especially when it became clear in the course of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper, that in truth, Hitler is the hero of World War II.

Now, this is an unusual position to take, to say the least. I mean, you criticize in Church trials, that's common, we hear that a lot. But when you hear somebody criticizing Churchfiel in the exact same terms the Nazis used at the time during World War II, that's less common. Neil, can I just pick up on this because you and I both know, I think all of us know watching this and listening to this, we have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where everyone gets called a Nazi for eating meat and finding women attract, like whatever.

There's lots of things that everyone's a Nazi. So when you say this guy is expressing the opinions of the National Socialists of the 1930s, even my instinct is to go, you know, is going a bit far here. Why is he being woke and calling people names? But you're talking from a historical perspective. So can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that? Well, in the conversation, a number of claims are made about Churchill and about World War II. And let me take one in particular.

The claim that Churchill wanted the war, wanted it for personal reasons. because he'd performed somewhat poorly in World War I, wanted it because he was a psychopath and a drunk. Those are things that Darryl Cooper says. And wanted it also because he was under the influence of Zionists. Financier's, really told. Not named, but there is a recurrent allusion to the idea that Churchill was a phylocemite and was incentivized to pursue a policy of war because he was under the influence of unnamed Jewish financiers. So that's the clue that there's something a little unusual about this brand of revisionism.

Then there's another clue that Hitler sincerely wanted peace and made peace offers to Britain that Churchill, because he was a drunk and a psychopath and in league with the Zionists, spurned. What's interesting about this is that anybody who's actually studied the peace offers that Hitler made in 1940 knows why Churchill rejected them because they would have implied the subordination of the British Empire to the national socialist regime. They were not sincere peace offers because Hitler, in conversations with people in Germany refer to Britain as Germany's hate-inspired antagonist, and we know that Hitler's objective was not to adhere to any kind of compromise peace with Britain, but indeed to pursue his goals, not just of domination of the Eurasian landmass,

but of global domination, ultimately challenging the United States by building a massive Atlantic fleet. This is all fairly familiar if you, I don't know, read any books about World War II, or for that matter written books about World War II, My book on that subject was called The War of the World, History's Age of Hatred. And it discusses in considerable detail why it was that Hitler's peace overtures were spurned and how right Churchill was to overrule those, such as Lord Halifax, who thought that Britain's position was so weak. There ought to be some kind of negotiation.

Then there's a third argument that's suspect. Cooper says, not only did Churchill spurn these peace overtures from Hitler, he then launched a terror bombing campaign against German civilians and sent the Royal Air Force to civilian targets with the view of killing as many German civilians as possible. Of course, all the men, by this time when the armed forces and not in Germany, because they'd occupied various other countries, So it was only women and children and the elderly who were killed by the Royal Air Force, and this was terrorism. This is another interesting argument because it's exactly what Joseph Goebbels said at the time. It draws something of a veil, indeed a rather thick velvet curtain, over the fact that at this very point, the Germans were bombing British targets in what we used to call the Battle of Britain. And the principal objective of the Royal Air Force at that point was to stop the Germans. the Luftwaffe from inflicting fatal damage to Britain's war economy. There were bombing raids on German targets, but they were industrial, economic and military targets.

And the fact that civilians got killed reflects the lack of precision of bombing at that point. There was extremely little accuracy in World War II bombing. So if you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your approach to World War II. But it doesn't stop there, because one of the more remarkable flourishes that Cooper produces is the claim that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity were the victims of a slight mix-up, a little logistical snafu that was quite understandable under the circumstances. They, the Soviet Union, you achieve enormous military victories, suddenly you have all these

prisoners and I knew we forgot something. We didn't order food for the POWs. Oh, my God. And so we are told a story of how the very high numbers of Soviet prisoners who died in German hands were just the victims of a little bit of a logistical mess up. Now, this is the kind of thing that would be said after the war by people who wanted to cover up the war crimes of the Wehrmacht of the German regular army. And it was quite a concerted effort to say that, well, it wasn't really the regular army that was involved. It was all done by the SS, or people died because of logistical problems. So there's another Nazi argument. But in reality, and we know this, it's well documented, number one, there were explicit orders to kill Soviet prisoners

as part of Operation Barbarossa and not only the so-called political commissars, the members of the Soviet Communist Party, but it soon became clear that Jews could be killed, Jewish civilians could be killed if they fell into German hands. And there was a series of clear instructions to commanders to carry out killing murders of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

And this is something that starts a terrible cycle of violence on the Eastern Front, in which prisoners are not taken by either side. Again, I spent quite a large part of my life writing about this, teaching courses about it at Harvard and elsewhere. And it's a little depressing to me, not to say, infuriating, to have somebody get tremendous publicity for rehashing the arguments that the Nazis made in the 1940s and after the war, that we know to be false because book after book has documented the reality.

And that's, I think, the most fascinating part about this interview, because the interview itself was not interesting. What's interesting is why it has suddenly risen to prominence. And I guess the question to you is this, and push back if you disagree, I see Churchill as a symbol of the Western project of what is good about the West, of standing up to a crazed death cult. Do you think the fact that we are now attacking him so publicly

from both left and right, is that just a symptom of a lack of faith and also a crisis at the heart of the Western project? One of the things about Western civilization that I like and Churchill liked was that you got to criticize everybody, that even the heroes were subject to crime. criticism. Churchill talks about this as one of the features of our system, and it was one reason

that he took criticism, of which he had a great deal during his life, so easily. I also think if you go back a few generations, that it's kind of standard practice in Britain to have a go at the heroes of the previous generation. Think of Lytton Strait's eminent Victorians, which was one of the kind of Urethex of Bloomsbury. So I don't think it's not. necessarily a bad thing for us to ask critical questions about the heroes of previous generations. In fact, I think it's a good thing. And I certainly became a historian with a view to challenging the things that I had been taught. There's a sense in which history is a constant argument about what happened, why it happened, and whether it was a good or a bad thing. And I'm fine with that.

But there are certain rules. You can't make historical claims that are not based on good evidence. If you do, you'll be found out and your work will be discredited. In the realm of podcasts, with all due respect, no such rules apply. There are no footnotes on a podcast. There's no fact checking. There's no effort, in fact, to challenge somebody unless you or the broadcaster does it. And what's notable about Tucker Carlson's conversation with Darrell Cooper is that at no point does Carlson challenge any of the wild claims that Cooper makes?

He just agrees with them and sometimes amplifies them. Now, why pick on Churchill? I think it's partly in the American context that the older generation of American conservatives have long idolized Churchill. And you'll never really go wrong, writing a book about Churchill in the United States and going on a speaking tour about Churchill, you'll always get an audience. So part of this is the old, I'll call it punk rock position, that if something's sacred, you should have a go at it and it's bound to get clicks. And it certainly works in that way, sort of outrageous and provocative and daring and edgy to criticise somebody who's been idolized by previous generations.

There's another part, though, which is a little bit stranger and recalls Carson's interview with Vladimir. of Putin, the Russian president. Now, in that interview, you may remember, Putin engaged in an epic filibuster in where she told a pack of lies about Russian history and Ukrainian history, and Tucker Carlson tried to get occasional words in, but mostly did a kind of allergy nod. And so the problem here is that if people make outrageous historical claims, if you want to have a discussion of history, it seems to me that the interviewer has some responsibility to do some homework, so that they can at least attempt to challenge the more outrageous falsehoods that their guest utters. But this isn't the Carlson way. Tucko Carlson was a

tremendously effective broadcaster for whom I had a good deal of respect when he was in Fox News. And to give him his due, some of his monologues in the crisis year of 2020 were extraordinarily powerful and impressive. And I had high hopes that Tucker Carlson would be an influential and effective voice on the American conservative side. My illusions have been completely shattered by the Putin interview and now by this interview, because it seems as if Tucker is happy, is in fact eager to give platforms to people whose positions are a tissue of lies and politically aligned with real fascism. And I use the term deliberately. The word fascist is overused. People are always calling people fascists or Nazis, as you said. But it still has a meaning. And if your

positions are, as Putin's have become, or as Daryl Cooper's appear to be, clearly analogous with the positions of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, then you are a fascist. You are, in fact, a Nazi. And that's the thing about these two interviews that I find troubling. I don't understand why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative broadcaster has decided to become at least an enabler for fascists. Do you think part of it, because it's a dangerous thing to intuit motive, but if we look at it in a broader perspective, do you think part of it is we're sick of experts?

We feel let down by institutions. We've been lied to again and again. We look at universities, and we go, you know, they're pumping out all of this stuff. Gender is a social construct. And we go, well, we can't trust you on this. So why can we trust you on World War II? If you're going to talk nonsense about something as basic as gender, which we all know,

well, we all know what the truth is, then why wouldn't you make up this stuff about Hitler, for one of a better word? I think that's part of the attraction of forbidden fruits on the right. The left has played so fast and loose with scholarly rules that it's almost as if the rule book has been thrown out the window. And you might as well join in. in this strange game of distortion. But I'm not going to impute a motive.

I don't know. It might just be that this is the way you get clicks. You lose your gig on Fox News. You've got to start over. You're basically in a similar position to you guys. You just got a million subscribers. I don't know where Tucker is. But the pursuit of subscribers can lead people to make perhaps errors of judgment.

That might be it. Or it may be that what we're seeing here is something slightly more idea. I think on the right in Europe and in the United States, there's a pretty clear dilemma. And the dilemma is, do you remain true to conservatism as, say, Bill Buckley defined it? And that is to say, as Churchill defined it. Something that's rooted in the rule of law, the idea of a free society, not just of free elections, but of a free civil society and a free press, Do you remain committed to that? Or do you go to a dark side in which other ideas get involved,

ideas of racial hierarchy, for example, ideas in which might is more important than right? And I think there are quite a number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who've decided that the dark side is attractive, maybe just because it's transgressive and edgy, or maybe because they think it works better. And in a way, Ukraine is a pretty good test of this. And it's clear that if you go to Moscow and you give Vladimir Putin an easy interview

after he's invaded a sovereign state, after he's allowed troops to commit heinous war crimes, you have crossed over to the dark side. There's just no defending that. And I couldn't really believe my eyes when I watched that interview happen. because it seemed to me quite clear that Tucker Carlson had volunteered to be part of the propaganda of Russia's fascist state. Now, I've just got that from Kiev. I've stood in the city centre looking at the long, long line of photographs of people killed by the Russians since this war began.

Tens of thousands, soldiers and civilians. I have met victims of Russian torture, have a conversation with a woman, a military medic, was captured at Mario Paul, and raped and horribly tortured by Russian troops. This doesn't make me sympathetic to apologists for what has become a fascist regime in Moscow. And in the same way, I'm not at all sympathetic to people who want to use the supposed revisionist history of World War II, as part of this recasting of the right, I think if conservatism is to have any meaning, it must be rooted in the ideals of Western civilization that I just outlined, which Churchill, by the way, once very brilliantly summarized in one of his shortest speeches,

which I quote in the book Civilization, the minute you start making excuses for a dictator like Putin or for that matter Hitler, you're on the wrong side. You've crossed over from conservatism in its sense that Churchill understood it to something else, which is more or less equivalent to fascism. Neil, I'm glad you've had a chance to address some of the historical claims. And I feel that my own view, by the way, is, look, people like this Cooper guy are allowed to have their opinions. They should be allowed to exist. The issue for me is whether that person should be put on the biggest platform in America.

And it's not about de-platformating a censorship. it's a kind of taste thing. You don't invite someone to your house and then feed them rotten fruit. And that's kind of what a broadcaster's job is. You pick things that you think are valuable and you offer it to your audience, right? But since we moved on to the current context,

I think it's really interesting and important to have this conversation because I think the thing you're saying is exactly right. This represents a loss of direction, perhaps, or a loss of clarity of direction on the right about the right way to deal with some very real problems. Well, it's a loss of principle, but it also is a strategic defeat.

Let me illustrate the point in another way. Let me just say this, though, Neil, before you do, because I think it's important. I don't think it's just a loss of principle. I think the right is genuinely lost. And Tucker and his guest allude to this in the conversation at the end when, and I wanted to ask you about the historical veracity of this final claim. the guest says, well, the truth is that after Nuremberg, and it's an interesting jumping off point for the claim he's about to make, after that, it became illegal to be a right wing in the West. What's you talking about?

Well, there is even the claim that if you write the truth about World War II in Europe, you go to jail. I still haven't been sentenced, obviously, since I wrote what was a pretty critical account. of the Allied role in World War II even has a chapter tainted victory. And I got away with it. Somehow they didn't nick me. So I can only assume that this is an allusion to the failed libel case that David Irving brought, which is, again, a kind of complete misrepresentation. It is illegal in Germany to be a Nazi. That is an understandable. German position given the impact the Nazis had on that country. So, of course, if you think Nazism should be legal in Germany, that's a legitimate position.

But that's really what he's saying. It's certainly not illegal to write revisionist history in the United Kingdom or the United States or indeed in most countries. But I said it was a kind of loss of principle because it seems to me that this is a very fundamental problem for the right that goes back a very long way, recurrently throughout the history of conservatism. This goes right back to the 19th century, to all the early critics of the French Revolution, there is this problem, and that is, who are you getting into bed with? It was a problem that Bill Buckley was really instrumental in solving for the American right, in that he broke

with the John Birchers, with the explicit racist and segregationists, and said, American conservatism cannot be an anti-civil rights movement that is essentially aligned with the white supremacists, with the segregationists. In Britain, the fork in the road was probably Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech, in which Powell said, if we have not only large-scale immigration from the former colonies, but also intermarriage, there will be terrible violence. And this was really the thing that led to the end of PALS up until that point, brilliant career. And a generation of conservatives defined themselves, including Margaret Thatcher, as not being power lights. And Powell's ideas ended up being taken up by organizations like the National Front.

In the 1980s, when I was a student, that division was very clear cut. Conservatives believed in free trade, in a free society, essentially classical liberalism in the days of Thatcher. and the far right were skinheads in the National Front. So this is a recurrent problem that conservatives have recurrently had to grapple with. And I think it's bad when as influential a figure as Tucker Carson decides, I'm going all in with the racists and fascists. Now, there is a racist dimension to the conversation he had with Daryl Cooper, though it's not at all explicit.

There's a theory of American history that's occasionally alluded to in their conversation, which essentially is, well, everything after civil rights is a sort of dissent into chaos. They don't go into in great detail, but it's obviously one of Cooper's other themes in podcasts and other content that he's produced. And then we get to the English case. And in the later part of their conversation, the conversation turns specifically to the country where we're having this conversation. It's actually Carlson who says, surely the proof that Churchill was a terrible thing is that everything that's happened since 1945 has been the dissent of England into a kind of chaos in which a society has been destroyed by a large-scale

immigration. And they kind of agree about that. And then they conclude it by saying, you know, if only they had someone like Victor Oban to sort this out in the way that he's sorted out Hungary. So you see where we've gone. We've sort of started with the German arguments of the 1930s, 1940s, and we've ended up making an argument about the decline and fall of Britain because of immigration. Neil, but let me do something Tucker didn't do, which has challenged his guest as robustly as he can. The reason I said I don't think it's just a loss of principle, although I think your point is valid, of course, is that there is a very real problem, which is one of the things they talked about at the end of that interview, which is if you look at a place like the UK or Ireland,

which is the example they're used to, and you say, well, look, let's look at the government's own statistics. By 266, British people are going to be white British people are going to be the minority in their own country. By 2070, Irish people are projected to be the minority in their own country. What is the sane conservative answer to the fact that we've had two decades of mass immigration and unprecedented scale? You see the protests we've seen about the war in Israel on the streets, many of them tainted

by vile anti-Semitism, and there is a kind of sense that there's levels of mass immigration combined with immigration from hostile cultures, frankly. Just saying it out loud, right? What's the answer to all of those criticisms? Because a lot of people would say, well, you know, I'm not a Nazi this, and I'm not interested in those unprincipled things. But this is a real problem. And I keep voting for governments, including conservative governments,

that do nothing about this. In fact, make the problem worse. So what are sensible conservatives to think about this? Well, this is the central question. And this is why I say the principle really matters. And if you choose the dark side, the consequences will. be dire. First, let me put my cards on the table. I'm married to an African. We have two children.

You know, we're contributing to turning the population of the United Kingdom slightly browner over time. So it would be very odd for me to say it's dreadful that there are more brown people in London than there used to be when I was a kid. That would be insane hypocrisy. And it would be be very odd for me to be opposed to asylum seekers when Ayyahn, my wife, was once an asylum seeker, and it was by applying for asylum, she was to get out of an enraged marriage and what was the oppressive Islamic culture she'd grown up in. I'm an immigrant too. I emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States, and I'm a naturalized American. I'm a dual citizen. So how could we possibly have a power-light view of immigration? That's the personal.

But let me take you back to War of the World. War of the World War of the World War II, it's only to begin 1939 and end in 1945. It's actually a general theory about hatred that takes the story right back to the late 19th century and the great migrations of that era. History has been characterized by large-scale waves of migration. You are no more able to stop those by and large

than King Canute was able to stop the tide coming in. But we have to understand what happens when there is a large increase in immigration to a society, when, for example, the foreign-born share of the population rises above 10% gets to 14% which it was in the United States in the late 19th century. And it was, of course, a characteristic feature of central and eastern Europe in the late 19th century

that there had been very large scale migration, including of Jews, but not only of Jews of Slavs, from the relatively poor hinterland of the Russian Empire westwards to prosper central Europe. In the 19th century, there was a disastrous backlash against large-scale immigration. It was disastrous because it went from observing the social problems that nearly always arise when there's large-scale migration,

housing shortages, the cultural differences between the incomers and the natives, to a theory of racial difference. And this theory of racial difference, which really was first pioneered in the United States, a sort of biological theory of why black Americans should be second-class citizens, this theory crossed the Atlantic and was adopted by the far right all over Europe, including by Hitler. So what happened in the early 20th century was that the reaction to mass migration produced a theory of racial hierarchy that culminated in the notion in Hitler's mind that the Jews were, quote, the racial tuberculosis of Europe and the Aryan folk would only be safe if they were annihilated.

So that's the background to my warning that if you start to believe this stuff, if you start to say, you know what, there might be something to this, there might be something to this idea of racial hierarchy. If you start saying, you know what, it's not just that these people have a different culture and they're poorer than us and they do things differently from us, but they're fundamentally incompatible with our society, then you have to understand that the path to genocide is that. the path you're choosing. That's the lesson of history. That's what the book says. The book says the most shocking thing about the 20th century is that the Holocaust arose from the society, Germany, where the level of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was highest in the world, the highest in the world. And we haven't fully understood why the great migrations of the late 19th century and early 20th century culminated in a genocidal regime in a violent. all places Germany, which also was the place with the highest level of education and the

best universities in the world. Despite my career of writing about this issue, I don't think we've got very far down the road of understanding the German catastrophe and seeing its relevance for us. On the contrary, we are in the midst, I think, of making the early steps that were taken in the late 19th century by the early racial theorists down that primrose path to hell again. And the only role a serious story can play, I think, is to say, please understand, this is how it begins. Do you think part of the problem is as well, Neil, in that I saw it in Venezuela where when things are going awry, when culture doesn't function as it should, when society doesn't work, there becomes a, and I think it's something deep rooted within us, if I'm being honest, a craving for authoritarianism. for an authoritarian for the strong man.

That's why Tucker eulogizes Putin. It's the strong man who is going to come in and save us, who is going to come in and save the West. Is that part of it? Just as these people, they can't all have been terrible bad people, wanted Hitler to come in and save Germany. First of all, I've never really understood this

because I have a kind of morbid fear of authority figures. It's probably why I became an academic to make sure... This is a boyfriend. I didn't have. I never went to awarding school, but I always had a horror of authority, and I never really understood why anybody would want to cede the personal rights to a dictator. But you're right. There seems to be, at least in some cultures, Russia's certainly, something of a habit of preferring autocracy to democracy. Now, let me make two important points here.

The first is that if you are a true conservative, in the sense of Churchill, or a classical liberal in the sense of Mill. You believe, as I believe, that the ideas and institutions of a free society, including the rule of law and representative government, are open-source technology that anybody can access, no matter what color their skin, no matter what religion they have been brought up in. It's open access as an operating system, and it works for everybody. This is important because it's why the racial theories were wrong.

Remember, we can now see that the racial theories of 100 years ago were just wrong. There was no peculiarity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that made them more successful economically than anybody else. History has shown that that's not the case, that what made Britain and North America successful were the ideas and institutions. And those ideas and institutions can be enjoyed and adopted and embraced by anybody. That's a very important first point. Second point. There are two threats to that free society. One that we've spent this conversation discussing, which is the threat from the right.

But there's another threat, and that's the threat from the left. Because left says, you see, this free society is a scam. It only really benefits the plutocrats, the elite. elite, the capitalist class, the Kulag, the bourgeoisie. They're the problem. Not the Jews, that's the other guys. It's the elite, it's the upper class, it's the capitalist class. And the left's argument, which also, of course, gathered its momentum in the late 19th century and came to par in the early 20th century wars, if we can only get rid of those exploitative parasitic classes that Marx and Engels identified, then we can have utopia. So two utopian visions,

one of racial purity and the other of class purity. That's essentially the dominant story of the 20th century and the free society is in the middle, fighting against both. Now, an interesting thing about Chuck was that he was as much an anti-Bolshevik, an anti-Stalinist as he was an anti-Nazi and an anti-Hitlerist. And in his view, fighting with Stalin on your side against Hitler, which of course Britain did after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, was a pact with the devil. You were literally supping with Satan. And as soon as the war was over and Germany was defeated,

Churchill said, now we have to prepare for Cold War with the Soviet Union. Because that's a totalitarian regime too. It was the lesser evil strategically in 1941, 2, 3, 4 or 5. But as soon as Hitler's dead, you have to recognize that it's an evil too. And you must prepare to defend Western civilization against that enemy. This is what's so good about Churchill. He's consistent.

And he makes the choice between evils, because it's more or less forced upon him by Hitler. This is the way I think about the problem. We are, as a species, multicolored. And there's all kinds of variants within Homo sapiens, but no speciation. We've stayed the same species all the way, and that is why it is perfectly possible for a Scotsman and a Somali to have two beautiful boys. And God bless them. and God bless all the children who are produced by mixed unions in Britain, in the United States, all over the world.

They're the future, and it's a beautiful future, actually look better on the whole than people of pure race, with no disrespect to my white children by my first marriage. You're also very beautiful. But this is the future. We can't avoid this future unless we want to go extinct as a species. Why? Because population collapse is a reality for our... whole bunch of ethnic subgroups, East Asians, collapsing population, total fertility rate

well below replacement, actually below unity, and the population of people who are of white descent, people like me from almost entirely Scottish lineage, that population is falling. Now, falling population is not something that we should take likely. If you look beyond 2100, the human population is likely to collapse back down towards 2 billion, with much greater speed than people realize. This is something that Elon Musk talks about and people think he's crazy. It's absolutely right. And we should look much more closely than we tend to at what is causing the collapse of fertility

all across the world. The only place it hasn't happened, though it may happen, is sub-Saharan Africa. And that's where human population between now and the end of the century is going to grow. So what's the plan? I'm interested to hear. Are we going to stop Africans coming to Euro? And for that matter to North America, we're just going to build some enormous wall and keep them in sub-Saharan Africa. Is that the plan?

If that's your plan, if you want to just keep the societies of what you could call the North as they are, stop any further shift from white to brown in the average complexion, the average pigmentation, you have got to explain to me how that's going to work economically. There are great many elderly voters in this country who want two incompatible things. They want to have no immigration and no inflation. Guess what? If you don't have any immigration, if you hadn't had no immigration in the last 10 or 20 years, there would be much higher inflation today than there is

because the population, the labour force, would simply be much smaller. So this is, from an economic point of view, relatively straightforward, from a historic point of view, relatively straightforward, there will be mass migration, there will be miscegenation, there will be more brown people. The question is, what are we going to do about it? keeping the Africans out of the rest of the world is a doomed enterprise. The only question that interests me is,

how do you make the assimilation process as successful for every African as it has been for my wife? That must be possible. It doesn't seem impossible that we could sell the benefits of Western civilization to all immigrants. It doesn't seem impossible that we could say to Muslims, look, in this country, church and state are separate. And you can't use Islam as a political movement. I think we can say those things, but we haven't really said them. So the issue for me is not, can we stop immigration and be like Hungary?

You've been to Hungary? Do you think Hungary has a future? It doesn't have a future. It's aging out as a society. The question is, what do we do to make assimilation work so that the multiracial societies that we've already created, that we can't uncreate, are harmonious and productive, and good. committed to the ideals of freedom. And I think your point is incredibly valid, but what we need for that to happen is, or politicians, to actually be honest, to actually speak to us honestly. And also

to speak to those communities honestly. But they don't do that. We don't do that. Instead, what we do is we talk about things like Islamophobia and hate speech laws in Scotland and suppressing when people voice quite reasonable criticisms and concerns that they have over the way society is going. That is unsustainable because to go back to Germany, Germany in the 1930s, as I know it, and please correct me if I'm wrong, had pretty stringent hate speech laws and that didn't stop what Germany became. Well, of course, the problem in Germany was a lot more profound than limits on the freedom of speech. But I take your points. I mean, I I think there has been dishonesty on both the left and the right.

Conservatives have made it seem as if they could stop immigration when they really couldn't, and indeed they presided over a dramatic increase in net migration. And that is, I think, a very large part of the reason why the Conservative Party fared so badly on July the 4th in general election. But the left has had its own version of this, which is that a multicultural society is possible in which everybody can hold completely inconsistent beliefs. And it's all right for Islamists to propagate a theory of society that is incompatible with the norms of a free society. So both sets of politicians have been, I think, mandatious.

There is, I think, a new generation of politicians who are themselves the product of the Great Migration. Think of someone like Kemi Bédinach, who can't really deal with this hypocrisy anymore because it makes no sense of their lives. So I think the hope is that there are a new generation of politicians who are themselves of African descent or of South Asian descent who can make the kind of arguments that I'm making and they make them better than I can. My wife makes these arguments better than I can because I'm just a dead white male. What do I know? Well, so Neil, just to flesh that out then, I want to get very clear and I don't want to put any words in your mouth. So I just want to get exactly right what you're saying.

Your argument is that the sensible right, the sensible conservative position should be that mass immigration is inevitable. Judging the dynamics of what's happening to Western populations and what's happening to non-Western populations, it's likely to increase. It's going to need to increase if we're going to maintain the standards of living that we have. Can I qualify that? I don't think it necessarily increases. But it needs to be in a relatively steady state. One of the problems has been the sudden surge that we've seen in the UK.

History shows that a big, an unanticipated surge in immigration is not generally very popular. It needs to be legal. That's very important that people do not believe, as many Americans do, and increasing number of British people, that people are becoming residents of their people. country illegally and getting away with it. So I think it's not so much that immigration increases. I don't think that's necessarily true. It may even be possible for it to come down some for the heights of the last few years

in the US and the UK. It needs to be managed so that it's legitimate. And that means instead of an open southern border in the United States, you have a return to a system of large-scale legal immigration of the sort that I and Ayan went through. And if you don't have that, if you do a little bit of a system of large-scale legal immigration, of the sort that I and Ayanne went through. And if you don't have that, if you do a lot of a lot of a lot of the Democrats have done, we simply open the border and tolerate large-scale illegal migration, it will not be legitimate. And that is, of course, why the election of the United States

is going to be close. Because if there's one issue that truly alienates a really large number of American voters, it is the issue of illegal immigration. And I don't at all blame them for feeling angry about that. I think it's a legitimate thing for a citizen to see the border of their country not defend it and for citizenship effectively to be handed out, or at least the right to vote to be handed out to people who have arrived illegally, of course that's outrageous and wrong. So here I think there's a need for truth on both sides of the political divide. Well, that's what I'm trying to flesh out because, and the reason I'm doing this with you is not that I'm trying to pin you to the wall, but rather there has to be an articulated,

credible right of centre position that the centre right will see as legitimate. And I'm, and I agree with you about illegal immigration. As you know, I myself am an immigrant to this country. There's nothing that pisses me off more than seeing people come into this country illegally. I think it's wrong. It shouldn't happen. So immigration may stay at similar levels or come down over time. But ultimately, what you're saying is we are not integrating people in the way that we should be.

Right. And that's the problem. And I suppose the only question that a reasonable person might then ask is, well, as a historian, is it possible to, integrate this number of people coming in in such a short period of time and when the institutions and systems and structures and culture that are supposed to integrate them refuse to even acknowledge their own existence. We don't even say there's such a thing as British society into which you must integrate. We say this is a multicultural place to which you bring your own ideas and just go and live

the way you want. Part A, is it possible? Do we have any historical experience of this? Yes, of course. I mean, in the 19th century, there were great many Americans who said, we can't possibly let all these Irish come to America. It'll be a disaster. And we can't possibly let all these poles. And we can't have these East European Jews coming to America.

And that whole debate, of course, was nonsensical because precisely those groups quickly assimilated into American society. And pretty quickly, the second and third generations were fully established. And indeed, we're sending people to the American Congress. So I remember a debate I had Samuel Huntington, the great Harvard political scientist, about his book, Who Are We? In which he argued that Mexicans are never going to be integrated into the United States. This is different. And I remember saying, what possible basis can you have for making that argument? It's just the argument that was made about the Irish and the Poles and the East European Jews.

And it's going to be just as wrong with the Mexicans. And it is just as wrong. Fast forward, however many years it is since that book was published 20 years. and you'll never find more coherent opponents of illegal immigration than legally naturalized Mexican Americans. Because it's their livelihood that's being undercut more than anybody else's. So I think there's plenty of evidence that a society can manage that kind of immigration. But let me just finish the point. But you have to have, this is part B of your question, you have to have a commitment to assimilation.

There needs to be a set of things that the newcomers sign up for. The United States has been very good at that because it's been doing it all along. Yes. We're newer to this game, but I don't see any reason. But it can't be good at it. Here's the reason, and again, I'm just testing out your argument. You know, isn't America unique? It's a continent.

Largely at those points that you're talking about, barely populated, frankly. still is barely populated, frankly. And it's a place the Native Americans is a separate issue, but to which people came all together at different points, but together. And the African Americans are a different case of course, to form a new society. The issue in Europe surely is different, where you have people coming and what some people argue,

replacing the existing population. In some ways, the British might be, to be the Native Americans in this kind of comparable scenario. Isn't that entirely different? And isn't that why the tensions are different? Well, this is, of course, a kind of absurd argument. It's not like there are bands of asylum seekers hunting down the tribes of North London native. I know what you mean.

And it's a terrible analogy. And you shouldn't go there because it doesn't make any sense. Okay. And as for replacement, what is actually happening? is that migration is providing employees for large parts of the economy that would not otherwise be able to find them. I don't know how you would run the National Health Service right now with that immigration. I mean, just run the counterfactual in your mind. Let's imagine a counterfactual in which the Blair government, instead of being quite liberal in this issue,

had decided, in fact, to close the border. And let's run the counterfactual of British history since 1997 with zero net net. migration. Now, unless you imagine that there would have been a magical jump upwards in the fertility rate of the indigenous population, Britain would be a very different place, and economically it would be significantly poorer. So I think from an economics point of view, it's absurd to talk about replacement. There is a genuine shortage of young people in any population which has a fertility rate below two. And those shortages would have been far more of a problem had there not been immigration. That's clear. I mean, even if you look at the recent

history of the United States, it's obvious that a very large surge of immigration, most of it illegal, was one of the reasons inflation didn't go higher in the period after the pandemic. So the economics here is quite straightforward. And replacement is one of these buzzwords of the transgressive right that has absolutely no validity. That's not what's going on here. And remember, historically, as I said, mass migration is the name of the game. And what's interesting is, is that mostly this is a relatively peaceful process. Sam Huntington's other great idea late in his life was the clash of civilizations, but the argument I tried to make in the book civilizations is that civilizations don't clash. They're much more likely to fuse. It's the

fusion that actually makes often for the creativity. I don't know how English history would have gone if the Anglo-Saxons had just kind of been on their own the whole time, like the Normans just don't show up. They never make contact with the Scots because the mountains along the Scottish-English border are just too high. It's just the Anglo-Saxons. So let's run the experiment of only Anglo-Saxons. It's a parallel world. Maybe there's some infinitely different universe where it exists, but it's a different world. English history without the non-English, Norman Davis made this point brilliantly long ago, is a different story because the various immigrants have made enormous contributions at every turn, not forgetting the royals who were consistently non-anglo-Saxon

from 1066 onwards. Neil, so I think one of the things that people are worried about when it comes to mass immigration, it's what people talk to me about. It's not Islam, it's radical Islam. And they look at these terrorist attacks, and they look at, you know, the fact that far more of them are thwarted because the police and the government pooled so many resources. into stopping these extremists. And there's people who go accurately, go, well, look, if we actually had an immigration system that was limited,

we would be able to screen people far more effectively and we'd be able to reduce attacks because we can't continue to live in a society where we're continually under threat from extremists. I agree with that view. I think it's a major problem that goes back all the way 23 years, to 9-11, that in our dealings with Islamic extremists or radical Islam or Islamists, we have tended to focus only on those engaged in violence, engaged in terrorism,

and we have tended not to scrutinize those who use radical personalization that is the necessary precursor of violence. Dawa, that radicalization that precedes jihad. I'm merely quoting my wife here because she is the expert on this as a former Muslim. Ayyahn's argument has long been that there is a clear problem if we don't focus on radical preaching, but only on acts of terrorism. Being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood should be as disqualifying for immigration to the United Kingdom as being a member of the Communist Party was disqualifying for immigrants to the United

States during the Cold War. That's as simply as I can put it. And this is why you have to manage immigration and you cannot do it with an open door, because you have to make sure that you are not importing people who are committed ideologically to the destruction of your way of life. And for the same reason that Americans kept communists out of the United States, we need to keep Islamists out of the United Kingdom. And we need to make it clear that the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood are not going to be tolerated. And it's not enough to say as long as you don't commit violent acts, that's not good enough.

Because radical proselytization and extremist preaching is the prelude to acts of violence. To me, this is quite clear cut. Future generations will wonder if we have a return to the kind of terrorism that we've seen in the recent past, why we weren't tougher on these people. And they will conclude, perhaps rightly, that organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood were extremely effective at duping the elites of Britain into thinking that they were somehow willing to coexist peacefully with a free society, which they're not. Duping or do you think what it denotes is a lack of backbone amongst our leaders and a concern

and a worry of being called racist? Have you read Michel Welbeck's submission? Yes. It turns out to be about Britain. Not France. That was the one thing he got wrong. So I think, you know, Welbeck's vision in that very funny book is that the French elite, the Parisian sophisticates, submit to an effect of Muslim Brotherhood government out of fear of the far right. And they do it gladly.

And I worry that we might just make that mistake here because if you allow the demonization of the right to be. your preoccupation so that you care more about combating Islamophobia than combating Islamism than you are halfway to Submission, you're halfway to Welbex dystopia. Well, it would seem the reframe here is quite obvious. I mean, Islamic extremists, Islamists are quite clearly by every single definition that we have the far right, that all the views align. Yeah, they're very gendercritical. This gets us to the great paradox.

the most bizarre unholy alliance of our time has been between the Islamists and the woke. And it's puzzled me for 10 years that on campuses in particular, but this is no more generally true, that these two groups make common cult so readily, since they seem to believe in diametrically opposite things, certainly as far as a social order should be concerned. But yeah, I mean, I think we need to recognize who are the enemies of a free society. And the thing about a free society

is that you have enemies to the left of you and enemies to the right of you. That's the problem. Churchill understood that. I think a lot of people today forget it because they prefer to have just one enemy. It simplifies life. It's all the left. No, no, it's all the right. But you know what?

Perhaps because I'm from Glasgow, perhaps because I'm Owegey. I think having fights with people on both sides is kind of the real, that's a real pub fight. That's when you're really enjoying yourself. It's what happens to us because we are trying to find out what the sensible position is on things, and that inevitably means you either get attacked from the left or the right, depending on what weak it is.

It's a good sign. If you're not getting attacked from both sides, you're not getting it right. We feel that way. And look, I'm glad I was able to put some of the arguments that we hear on these issues a lot because, you know, this is what a lot of people are thinking in the privacy of their own home, and it's good to air that with someone who is as informed as you are. Perhaps we ought to wrap the main section of the interview by talking about integration. You know, I always say that that's what an immigrant's duty is to come and integrate into the society into which they come.

I think that's true and I think it's important. And then I suppose the question is how. I guess you learn the language, you learn the history and try to understand what this country is about and make yourself more like that. But what is the successful model for integrating populations from different cultures and backgrounds? How do we do the thing you're saying, which is we have multi-ethnic societies, we do have high levels of immigration. We may, for economic and other reasons, continue to do that demographic reasons. How do we have these great cohesive societies as we move into the rest of the century? Well, you partly answered the question yourself.

What's interesting to me as a naturalized American is how that worked, and particularly the citizenship ceremony when you have a pledge of allegiance. And it is actually quite a moving ceremony. I was in Oakland, California, surrounded by people from all over the world. But the largest group were Chinese. But from everywhere, I was next to a guy from Eritrea. And we were put through a secular right, a ritual confirming that we were American citizens. And I think there has to be on the side of the country that is importing people that

kind of a thing. You have to communicate to the newcomers that they are becoming part of a different social order. They're citizens of something that has a history that they must respect. If we don't do that, if we say, you know what, you need to learn English. Don't worry about that. You don't need to, in fact, adapt at all that which was the message of multiculturalism for decades. That is the recipe for disaster. That actually is the disaster. That actually is the disease of which it pretends to be the cure, because that's the kind of argument that creates ghettos, that creates alienated second and third generation, people who haven't been successfully integrated into the labor market and the society.

I mean, look at parts of Sweden today, and you see where multiculturalism has led, and it's let down everybody, it's let down the native-born population, it's let down the immigrants. The United States shows how to do this pretty well. And I think one of the odder things about the great debate in the United States about immigration is how often we lose sight of the facts that the problems illegal immigration and uncontrolled immigration, that success of the United States was based on managing immigration successfully and conveying to newcomers what it was to be an American.

We could continue this conversation for hours, but unfortunately our time is up. I have to go and fight with other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're a Ouija. It's 12 o'clock, so it's time to get on the whiskey. But our final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Neil answers that final question, when the interview is over,

make sure you head on over to locals by clicking a link in the description to see this. The fact that people like Tucker, who clearly influential in American politics, are indulging this, how does this affect the electoral dimension of this? because I don't think the mainstream American public is on board with these ideas. Let's put it that way. Can you see us lurching in Europe far more to that kind of hard, right position for want of a better term? What odds would you give to a Taiwan conflict erupting in the next decade? Well, we talked about it already.

The crisis of collapsing population that's already unfolding in, say, South Korea, That seems like the future for many Western societies on our present trajectory. And the thing that we're not talking about is the thing that may lie behind that, which is the strange alienation of young men and young women from one another. One of the most striking things about the US election, and I think it's true in the UK too, is we see extraordinary divergence in the political preferences of young men and young women. Nowhere has this gone further than in South Korea.

And I don't think it's coincidental that South Korea has about the lowest fertility ray on the planet. So we're not talking enough about the breakdown in relations between young men and young women around the world and what that may lead to for our species. So, you know, my message is love one another. Head on over to locals to see the rest of the questions, including answers to your questions. If you want to lose this election, go right down the Tucker Carlson Park. and you more or less ensure that Camillaris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, wins Michigan. That's why it's so baffling because... Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.

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