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"London has fallen" - Laurence Fox
1.9k Plays11 months ago
For the second time in his life, Laurence Fox is engulfed in a cancellation storm. It has taken a heavy toll, but he refuses to be silenced.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Will, he discusses cancel culture, GB News, the failure of multiculturalism, the future of conservatism and the sad decline of London.
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Transcript
Challenges in Interviewing Lawrence Fox
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. When I sit down to prepare for an interview, I start by thinking, what's the angle? What's the thread that will tie this conversation together? I've never had a guest that made that task more difficult than Lawrence Fox. Perhaps by accident, but I suspect by design, Lawrence continuously finds himself at the center of the totemic cultural and political battlegrounds of our age.
Lawrence Fox's Recent Controversies
00:00:43
Speaker
In only the last month, he's been canceled for the second time in his life for comments that were labeled by some as misogynistic. That cancellation storm led to him being fired by a challenger media organization, GB news.
00:00:56
Speaker
that calls itself the home of free speech. He has taken his broadcasting efforts to Twitter, or X, the platform on which he just went viral for climbing a statue near the Houses of Parliament to clean up the rubbish left on it by a mob of Palestinian protesters. His rallying cry of, get your shit off my statue, brought into sharp focus some of the more uncomfortable consequences of multiculturalism in the West today.
00:01:20
Speaker
He just so happens to be leading a political party that is attacking the very orthodoxies that permeate the parliament behind that statue. And, not to forget, he was, in a pre-cancelled life, one of Britain's most celebrated actors before the changing mores in the arts made that pursuit impossible.
Western Civilization and Traditional Values
00:01:40
Speaker
It's quite the culture wars bingo card and it's a reflection of the perilous state of western civilization today. There's a thread. Lawrence, welcome to Australiana. Hi Will, thanks for that introduction. That was very thorough and thought out.
00:01:58
Speaker
I must admit, I frantically pulled it together in the last half an hour, so I'm happy it came out okay. Let's start with just the small topic of Western civilization, because I think a lot of those strands can be bucketed together under that umbrella. Is Western civilization in terminal decline?
00:02:15
Speaker
Yes, it is. I've thought for the four years that I've been trying to wave a flag at people and say, guys, there's some trouble here, that there would be some rallying that people would come and come to the defense of all of these great values that have taken millennia to put together and certainly hundreds of years to refine.
00:02:40
Speaker
I don't think that people can. I have a newfound admiration for those that wish to destroy Western civilization. I think they're absolutely brilliantly organized. I think they have a very clear vision of
00:02:56
Speaker
how they're going to destroy it. I don't think they have any idea about what they're going to replace it with, but I think that they know that they want to destroy it. And I don't think that there are enough courageous people on our side, if there are sides in this thing, which I don't think there should be, because it should just be two different viewpoints arguing for the best outcomes.
Critique of Woke Hypocrisy
00:03:17
Speaker
I don't think there are enough people who are courageous
00:03:20
Speaker
enough. And people freely admit it to me. So they say, you know, I get stopped a lot on the street by people who say, you know, I'm with you, I'm right behind you. And you're speaking for the silent majority. And those two words behind and silent are what makes me think
00:03:37
Speaker
We could be in trouble as far as the efforts and the brilliance of the West are. We're defenseless against the attacks that are coming because all of them are seemingly legitimate as far as I can tell. That's a really interesting way that you phrase that in that you have a perverse admiration for the way that the woke left has organized itself. Is that by nature of the fact that woke left is collectivist? They're good at organizing. They're good at, I guess, putting down the importance of the individual.
00:04:06
Speaker
and those on the right traditionally are more entrepreneurial, but that may be a problem in attacking a collectivist group like this.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think they realize one of the things that they realize is we spend our lives attacking the hypocrisy of their movement. That's what we do. We go, it's ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. Come on, guys. But they know that. They know that it makes no sense. They don't care that they're campaigning for net zero while flying around on private jets because they feel anointed and righteous. It doesn't matter if they break their own rules, whereas it does matter if we do.
00:04:39
Speaker
So, you know, you talked about my second cancellation and all of those things. They apply a totally different set of strictures and rules to us than they apply to themselves, whereas we apply the same rules to ourselves as we apply to them, which are the sort of Marquis of Queensby rules.
00:04:54
Speaker
And what they do is because they know that their arguments are weak, and they know that their arguments will not stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever. They collect vice, as you say. So the stronger ones, the more powerful intellects in the group, will take the weaker ones with them, and they will never, ever let any man fall ever. You see in the BBC when Gary Lineker, who's been remarkably quiet since the terrorist sympathizers took over the streets of London, compared
00:05:20
Speaker
whatever he was comparing to the Nazis, immigration to how the Jews were treated in the 30s, in Germany and 40s, immediately they had this sense of what the left called solidarity.
Collectivism vs. Individualism
00:05:34
Speaker
So everybody walked out.
00:05:35
Speaker
of the BBC if they were going to fire Gary Lineker. Now, if you transmogrify that into my situation at GB News, which was essentially a mob was rabbled and roused very, very quickly, they couldn't be quicker to throw me under the bus. So that goes to show that the entrepreneurial spirit is the weakness of our argument. And the individual has been subsumed by the collective because
00:06:04
Speaker
Our life and Western civilization and all the things that we were touching on at the very beginning has been totally ruined. You're not going to be able to buy a house. You're not going to be able to put your kids through a better education than you had. You're not looking to have a pay rise to climb the ladder in the way that you would have done traditionally in the past. You're basically looking at an increasingly
00:06:24
Speaker
decreasing quality of life in the West. And young people who are already sympathetic to the causes of collectivist, communist, socialist thinking are now highly incentivized to think even more so of that philosophy. So they've created the perfect storm and then they've sent out their lifeboat, but only to their own side. And they're going to let us down. And we're going to fight over the last piece of Russians there are.
00:06:50
Speaker
The same time though, what's going through my mind is the 20th century was in some respects a triumph of ideologies that promoted individual liberty and free enterprise over collectivist ideologies. The triumph of the West of the Soviet Union was the key example there.
00:07:09
Speaker
So it can be done. If you put this in a historical context, what's different about what we're seeing today against the battles between individualism and collectivism that we've seen in the past? It's not that it won't be over, that it won't be beaten.
Predicting the Fall of Woke Ideology
00:07:23
Speaker
It will.
00:07:24
Speaker
because for all the reasons I said, their ideas don't make any sense and they have a really flawed understanding of human nature, which they think is sort of malleable and turnable towards something wonderful and great with the complete abrogation of the idea of human greed. So it will be overcome.
00:07:41
Speaker
But the mechanisms to overcome it are, as far as I can tell, Twitter. And that's not good. You know, when you've got every single foundational institution, certainly in our country, and seemingly across the West, have been completely captured by the other side, that long march through the institutions is going to have to be undone. If we called an end to Woak Korean,
00:08:02
Speaker
And the suicide of the west tomorrow if we pulled the knife away from the west trying to kill itself, slit its own wrists, it would still take 15 years before we'd get even a slight sense of normality back, I think. Unless there's some really fast switch change to people going around, I don't want to live in this perpetual misery.
00:08:22
Speaker
Do you have any thoughts on what a potential fast change could look like? Well, we've seen it, we see echo, we see little glimmers of them. So certainly with these marches in London, this absolute exposure of antisemitism, which is a fundamental aspect of woke thinking, and then the problems of the intersections of that, where you've got queers for Palestine and stuff like that. Surely the most
00:08:51
Speaker
that shit crazy of all the work movements to date but they don't care they know it's batch it crazy but also because they're not educated and they're driven purely by ideology it doesn't matter to them so that that's a sign of the overreach the overreach another sign of
00:09:07
Speaker
huge overreach is in the transing of children, and all of that sort of stuff. That's very unpopular with the public. So there is an opportunity that I can see where several of these things come together at once, and I imagine it'll involve violence of some kind, where you see a brutal attack on perhaps a Jewish person in London,
00:09:29
Speaker
or really agree just call for violence that's captured in a way which you know as you say goes viral and wait to people up and you know the combination of that and stuff that i try and prodd you know and i try and push myself which is certainly over the stuff that's going on with children and the family.
00:09:46
Speaker
But again, one of the things that really counts against us is we are so civilized. So when you're confronted with barbaric behavior, be that fundamental religious extremism or be that with the mutilation of children, people are too shocked to even believe it.
00:10:03
Speaker
So we're still in the waking up phase.
Public Backlash Against Woke Agenda
00:10:07
Speaker
And I certainly think the last three weeks of people calling for jihad on the streets of London, well, cops come around my house to arrest me for not liking a surveillance date. I think that does start to jar with people and they start to go, hang on a minute. I'm not even a far right Nazi extremist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, like Lawrence Fox. I'm just a normal lefty and I don't like it.
00:10:30
Speaker
And a lot of the people that I'm getting stopped by at the moment are saying, I don't agree with, I really agree with you on what you say about free speech, but I don't agree with your politics. But I am terrified of what they're doing to you. So we're up to speak what happens. The one thing I want to pick out of that answer is you mentioned that some of these people are uneducated when they are putting for particular views on the work left. Many are incredibly educated. You know, we can say that the intelligentsia and
00:10:59
Speaker
Huge swaths of the universities across the US and the UK are now captured by antisemitism, along with the worst parts of the transgender ideology. How has it managed to capture otherwise smart people? Well, because there is a universal truth, isn't there? And you know what the universal truth is because it's passed up from the working people. It's not passed down from the intelligence. So one of those universal truths is you only live once.
00:11:28
Speaker
preserve the innocence of children. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. These are universal truths that have passed up. You only have one life. All this stuff, I've said that, but it gets passed up from the working people. And that's the sort of thing I've always responded to because they're hard truths. You're going through a very difficult situation with somebody and you go, you only live once. It's unhelpful, but it's true, right? So the intelligentsia are arguing in an echo chamber of,
00:11:56
Speaker
You know, especially in looking through the world as we all do now, well, I don't, but a lot of people do through the prism of melanin race theory, which is that you can just tell how oppressed someone is just based solely around the color of their skin. These are not people that spend much time on the tube. They're not people that spend much time talking to normal people. They're not people that get the wisdom from the people.
00:12:18
Speaker
which are the people where I get my wisdom from because I don't want to be doing this really. It's not what I planned for my life. I didn't plan on fighting this battle, but I felt it was needed before. So I thought once I decided to fight it, I would listen to the people that if you're going to be engaging in politics, who you should represent, which are the people that no one ever listens to. Do you know what I mean?
00:12:37
Speaker
That is the people who voted for Brexit and all that sort of stuff. So yes, well, clever people can sit there. It's their sensitivity and their privilege, which is also why the work left is so clever, because privilege is real. It's their sensitivity and their privilege that encourages them to follow the ideology, not their reason and their logic.
00:12:55
Speaker
It's the fact that they go. I was saying it yesterday, I was like, if a black person talks about white privilege, that's just an excuse to give themselves a reason to fail. And if a white person talks about white privilege, that's an excuse to try and hold onto their job, you know, and not give it up for people. So I don't think there are a lot of intelligent people who, without trying to do sort of reductive thinking that can sustain any of these
00:13:20
Speaker
these arguments. None of them make sense to the people that say sticks and stones may break my bones, words will never hurt me. And those are the demos, those are the people, and those are the people I care about. I don't give a monkeys about. I'll probably be cancelled for that for saying monkey. I don't give a monkeys.
00:13:35
Speaker
what the people in North London think about culture because they're boring. Is it right to interpret what you said earlier as this isn't something you necessarily enjoy taking on this political role, this activist role, as much as you feel it is a duty?
Personal Impact of Activism and Cancellation
00:13:49
Speaker
Absolutely a duty. 100% I've got two boys, you know, and the state are heavily involved in the family. We saw how close the state got to trying out their vaccines on our children. We saw how close we were.
00:14:02
Speaker
For the state to go we know best and i have always been a believer in the fact that the family knows best is the only operational social unit that you can have.
00:14:11
Speaker
in the world that actually works and it exists for a reason. So I'm very, I was very, I was sat on the roof of a really nice hotel being paid a really large amount of money to do absolutely nothing except one day a week, go in and pretend to be a kind of drug dealing yogi and it was great. And I was sat there with my cocktail in my hand and I was thinking, this doesn't feel good.
00:14:37
Speaker
And it doesn't feel good because what's happening outside of this lovely little life of mine is that all the people I love and respect and know and care about are having their lives dismantled and they're being threatened and they're being forced to self-censor. So I just thought, you know, I can't be an artist without
00:14:56
Speaker
believing in the things that make art good, which are free expression and risking stuff and saying things and what comedians do essentially. They say they push it as far as they can push it. So what's the point in being an artist? If you're caged in a box and you then become a dancing
00:15:15
Speaker
whatever for people. You say that's what comedians do. I would say it's what comedians used to do. Comedy used to be the most subversive of the art forms, arguably, and now it is pushing the woke agenda more so than any other area within the arts. You are friends with a lot of comedians. You've spoken to a lot of comedians on podcasts that I've listened to. How has that change occurred specifically in comedy and why has it occurred?
00:15:39
Speaker
Well, because it's lethal comedy to Wokiri, it's absolutely lethal to it. It cannot survive. It's sunlight to the vampire. It can't cope with it. So what it does is in the same way as its arguments don't survive, so therefore it destroys free speech and it destroys ridicule and it replaces it with virtue and virtue signaling, false virtue and virtue signaling.
00:16:02
Speaker
The comedians that have tried to be truthful have all suffered hugely, except I suppose Dave Chappelle has probably got away with it. Ricky Gervais has got away with it. It's easier to get away with it when you've got a few hundred million quid in the bank. It's easy to turn around and go, I don't care if you cancel me. When you've hit scale, when you've hit that critical mass of support is the turning point. I thought that was a nice revealing insight about the way that you felt about this environment personally. And I'm interested to just
00:16:31
Speaker
a bit deeper there. We've had a couple of guests on the show that have been embroiled in cancellation storms. We've Graham Linnehan a couple of weeks ago, we've had Winston Marshall. And I think we can talk about this stuff if you haven't actually been through it. I think it's just you look at this in the abstract. When you are caught up in that storm, that cancellation cure, or what's it feel like? If you can describe the experience for me.
00:16:53
Speaker
Well, I've done it twice now, so I'm a seasoned vet, I would say. The first feeling you get, so the first cancellation is different from the second. The first cancellation is a sense of hope. You go, this can go away, but you have to say to yourself, because you have to prepare yourself to be cancelled, because you know it's going to happen, and the deal, the only deal you have to do with yourself as someone who's going to be cancelled is to promise yourself
00:17:22
Speaker
across your heart and hopes, die that you're not going to apologize. It's the most important thing. And then you're filled with a sense of hope that people will go, oh, he said, there's some courage there. That's truthful, you know, and that resonates with me. And then that evaporates quite quickly as you realize that the forces amassed against you are so much more powerful than you thought or appreciated. So then you watch your career be destroyed, which is really painful.
00:17:50
Speaker
and then you go the big f you part of it is i'm not gonna be cancelled i refuse to be cancelled by you guys so you fight back which is what i did in my situation the first time around and i got myself back up to not where i was but i got myself up to a place where i could survive again and then the second one is really really
00:18:13
Speaker
The rest making i am really really struggling to this day with this one because i'm not sure at the moment that i could get a job in a supermarket stacking shelves. I really don't think i think i turn up and i go no no we're not taking you your.
00:18:32
Speaker
mad. So I'm now sat in a country which I'm scared to live in anyway, because I got the wrong views. And I'm also going out. I'm going to find it very, very hard to make an income here. And I have a family here. I've been canceled. And therefore, to be canceled, you expect to be canceled by your enemies, to be canceled by your friends and people that you've helped.
00:18:54
Speaker
and people you've just mentioned actually, who you've helped to play a part in that, or to distance themselves enough from that situation. I think that's probably where my hopelessness at the beginning of the conversation came in. It's like it is the end because we cannot stand up for each other.
00:19:14
Speaker
You know, GB News is a classic example. Everybody knew what I was going to say, because they phoned you up and they asked you. And I say, I'm going to say this. I mean, they're all laughing, right? Everyone's going, ha, ha, ha. It's brilliant. That's exactly what Lars would say. He'd say something crazy like that. And they were all giggling about it. And then when I said it, they were all giggling about it. And then they've got a minute and a half delay. If no one thought it was funny or inappropriate or deeply offensive as their
00:19:44
Speaker
head of GB News, your fellow countryman, Angelos Frangopoulos, does. They've got a minute and a half to turn it off, you know? But they thought it was fine. They thought it was funny, edgy. It was no different from any TV show you ever see in the world back when I was growing up, anyway. And then the mob comes for them, and they capitulate immediately. So that's your friends cancelling you. That's something that will take a long time for me to come to terms with.
00:20:12
Speaker
And also, you know, it makes you think how many courageous people are there out of all of the freedom fighters. When I say freedom fighters, I use the parentheses. There's probably out of every 20 freedom fighters. No. So say out of 100 people, five are brave. How do those five? One is courageous. You know, and that's a pretty tricky metric and ratio to deal with, I find. How would you describe the difference between being brave and being courageous? Brave is what you say and courageous is what you do.
00:20:42
Speaker
is what I would say. What would yours be? I can't top that. I think that's pretty good. Perhaps as context, because many people in Australia are aware of why, of GB news. Some aren't.
Free Speech Challenges at GB News
00:20:54
Speaker
Why was GB news set up? What was the underlying reason for its existence? And then perhaps that provides more color as to why what you've said is so disappointing. Do you want my opinion as to why it was set up or do you want their propaganda as to why it was set up?
00:21:12
Speaker
I want your opinion. My opinion was that in the attempted defense of the last vestiges of the West and our values of free speech that a very wealthy man and a consortium of other very wealthy people pulled together all of the dissidents under one roof
00:21:34
Speaker
to speak and to say to speak out against it. And then their efforts were then moved into controlling them because we have an off-com. You have ACAS. What's it called? Set something along those lines, whatever our TV regulator is yet. I think the dissidents were corralled.
00:21:54
Speaker
They were put under one roof and then they were found out and then the bad ones were got rid of. The problem with GB News is by canceling their own, they've opened themselves up to canceling everybody.
00:22:09
Speaker
Like I said, with Gary Lineker and the BBC, all they have to do is stand in solidarity with each other. GB News is just going to be a turkey shoot for the next person to say the wrong thing. And so therefore, a channel which I'm not sure because I don't watch it, but whether it still calls itself the home of free speech or not is definitely not. It's the absolute opposite of what it says on the tin. So I think it's a real tragedy. But like all of these things, it leaves opportunities to do other other stuff.
00:22:36
Speaker
but within the regulated environment in the UK. Look, the major irony of GB News is when it started up, most people were saying how terrible Boris Johnson in our government was and how terrible he was partying and how dare he lock people down and all that stuff, and he's their first hire. In a courage versus bravery kind of thing, I go, I'm going to judge you on what you do, not what you say.
00:23:02
Speaker
And what they've done is they've gone, we'll get this guy in and we'll try and, you know, sanitize what they're going to do to conservatism in the West moving forward anyway, which is to turn it into social democracy or liberal democracy. There'll be no social conservatism left. It's going to be illegal to be conservative pretty soon. I'd imagine, you know, to what family and to believe that there's a higher authority than your prime minister or the doctor or whoever it is.
00:23:31
Speaker
Interesting you say that I wrote an article for Sky News in Australia recently talking about cosplay conservatives, that the conservatives in the West today still like to invoke the costumes of Thatcher, of Reagan, how to mendsies in Australia.
00:23:46
Speaker
They power it the same scripts as those guys, but then the actions, the policies that you see are a long way away from what we saw of that people of that Rishi Sunak smoking ban is one relatively small but interesting example of kindly authoritarian claptrap that someone like Margaret Thatcher would have been disgusted by.
00:24:07
Speaker
This raises the question and you flagged the thought, but I want to tease out what does the future of conservatism look like? What's the best in the worst case scenarios for where conservatism goes moving forward?
00:24:18
Speaker
I think there's the realistic outcome of conservatism, which is going to be getting rid of all forms of social conservatism whilst maintaining some simple aspects of it. But, you know, like the fundamentals, so that the family will be an important part of the future of conservatism on both sides. But essentially, I think it's
00:24:43
Speaker
The most likely outcome is that conservatives have ceded 80% of the ground to the woke left and they will just cling on to the most important things like their family, like hopefully the meaning of words, but I'm not confident that they will do that. And the fact that free speech is
00:25:04
Speaker
worth defending and personal responsibility, all the things they're trying to talk about at ARC. And they'll dispense with all of the other parts of conservatism, which is like culture, preservation of institutions, everything that keeps a society upright. I think they will see those to their left and our children will be taught all the stuff they're being taught at the moment and no one will fight back against it.
00:25:28
Speaker
what will that do you need to join me and send us will protect things like complete speech free speech and stuff like that but i think we'll give everything else away because i think we were not confident with that there's no confidence in our in our we're not confident in our own arguments even though i think they're the only arguments worth having.
Defending Unpopular Opinions
00:25:45
Speaker
I want to hone in on free speech there. Cause I'm perhaps not as confident as you is that that is a pillar that will remain standing, at least not fully standing. You mentioned Jordan piece and he had a lovely line in this respect. He basically said, we've had a pretty cushy time of it, relatively speaking, since the end of the second world war. If you look at it in a broader historical context, we haven't needed to argue for free speech on first principles, as we have done at many points in human history.
00:26:12
Speaker
As a result of that, we've got complacent and we've got bad at it to the extent that there are no John Stuart Mills walking around who can argue persuasively for free speech on first principles. My question would be, how can we make the argument for free speech better? Particularly, how can we make the argument for free speech for things that are unpleasant, hate speech, bigotry? How do you say to people,
00:26:36
Speaker
There are things which are nasty, which should be morally abhorrent, but it is still better on balance to make those things legal. Cause I'm not hearing anyone really put the case forward, maybe apart from Jordan Peterson, particularly persuasively.
00:26:48
Speaker
Well, I think that you use the right term when you say legal. So there are restrictions on free speech that exist for reasons that John Stuart Mill would understand, and so would anyone else who was sensible. You know, the incitement to violence, that sort of thing. These should be restrictions on free speech. But ultimately, everything else should be fair game.
00:27:08
Speaker
But you cannot make a standard and principle defensive free speech in a society which doesn't have the intellectual capacity to understand why it's so fundamental. Because if people say that their own personal feelings and their own identity matters more than the right of somebody else, you know, it's the classic transgender argument. It's like, it's fine for you to believe you're a woman. No one cares. You just can't make me believe you're a woman.
00:27:34
Speaker
that's a classic free speech argument i would say that we will. Most people that there is some truth in this world that is so universal that you don't even need to articulate and free speech is one of them so i think people know fundamentally that it's really important to them they'll play along with ideologues you tell them that you gotta call me she or
00:27:58
Speaker
they them, but after a while that will fold away. So I think free speech will be defended because without it, we don't get out of this problem and we don't even begin the fight back. It's whether that battle is won by the other side first before people wake up and go, you know what? I don't want to walk around the world self-centering myself. I don't want to walk around the world lying.
00:28:21
Speaker
because you know lying is jordan peterson's right about that as well like lying all the time is painful actually it becomes agony and i've had a few court cases in my life as a result of a lot of what's going on and i'm going into a court case next week sorry the week after an eight day high court case and the only reason i'm confident in this case is because i don't have to lie so i can say whatever i want.
Legal Battles and Policing Critique
00:28:44
Speaker
my speech will be unrestricted because I'm saying it in court but I won't have to lie and I think that's the most important thing is to not lie and if you don't and if you're not going to lie you are going to exercise free speech and that's human nature that's not that's much deeper than an intellectual defense of free speech that's just it's a universal truth you're going to get sick if you lie all the time I'll segue a tad tangentially to
00:29:12
Speaker
The role that the police are playing in policing speech, but also just the role they're playing in the woke movement in the UK. Recently you had police invade your home for what was effectively an alleged thought crime. At the same time in London, there are a plethora of very serious, very real criminal problems that are ripping the city. What role have the police and the
00:29:38
Speaker
the legal enforcers in society played in propagating the woke movement that we've been talking about. Well, institutions and collectives, as you quite rightly point out, are always drawn to the woke side of the argument, the solidarity side of the argument. So the police, I've interviewed senior policemen and senior management hospitals and various things to ask them about the anti-racism agenda, and they're very, very keen on the anti-racism agenda.
00:30:05
Speaker
So the anti-racism, gender and critical race theory do just boil down to melanin. That's it. There's nothing else that counts. It's like, how brown are you? That's all that matters. So when you see the pro-Hamas marches in London, the police are policing those based solely around how brown are the people that are angry.
00:30:22
Speaker
and how white are the people they're angry with. The police have completely given up on the idea of, and I think you have it in Australia as well, the idea of policing with consent because they're not heavily armed. So the police are not policing with consent, they're policing in a two tiered way, applying the law differently to each
00:30:41
Speaker
to separate groups of people, which means that the law is now no longer a protective measure. It's a political weapon, and it's being used to attack and prosecute people like me and many, many others who don't have a platform. So I'm at least lucky, whether I have a police raid in my house or not, at least I have a platform to share it on and to show people how bad it is. But many, many, many people are going through this. But we've succeeded with the police before, because I posted the transphostica flag, and instead of coming after me, they went after another guy.
00:31:11
Speaker
who contacted me and said the police are coming after me. So I made sure I was there with the camera crew and we captured it and we captured the police overreach and all that sort of stuff. It was another thing that went viral. And the senior police people in that were fired. They were removed from their jobs. So you just got to fight them back, really. You just got to go, guys, you're here to police us without fear or favor. And you know, you police us by consent, but they're not.
00:31:37
Speaker
You've seen in the last two or three days, and over the last 16, 17 days actually since the 7th of October, you've seen the most egregious examples of two-tier policing that make them cuddling just stop oil protesters look like a walk in the park. I mean, this is actual institutionalized anti-Semitism in our own police force, and it's led by the police and crime communists.
00:32:00
Speaker
police and crime commissioner of London is effectively the mayor of London, which is Sadiq Khan. That man cannot condemn the brutal program murder of 1400 Jews without saying the word Islamophobia in the same sentence. To me, it's a false equivalence. Our institutions, the police are completely destroyed. I think they should be put on special measures. I think
00:32:25
Speaker
the public should have no faith in the police in this country at all whatsoever.
00:32:35
Speaker
What does it say about London in 2023 that someone like Sadiq Khan can be elected and then re-elected democratically?
Multiculturalism vs. Multiracialism
00:32:44
Speaker
London has, in the last, I think, I don't know the exact stats, so, you know, forgive me media matters for getting it wrong, but London has gone from being a predominantly white city to now not a white city or an ethnically British city. So you've got one in 25 people in
00:33:05
Speaker
Sorry, 150 people in the UK have been here less than a year. A lot of them are in the towns. There's block voting, so there's vote harvesting as well. But it's, yeah, I mean, it's not a British city on any metric, decennial metric that you could gauge. It's just, it's utterly, utterly fallen as a city. And that's tragic. There's no point asking you the question, has multiculturalism failed? I know you think multiculturalism has failed. My question would be,
00:33:34
Speaker
Could it ever have succeeded? Could there have been parameters in place to make multiculturalism work in a country like the UK? No. Multiracialism is fine. Multiracialism is great. Works a treat. A lot of people don't understand this. Can you explain the difference?
00:33:50
Speaker
Well, multiracialism is like you can fly in from wherever, Burundi, and turn up in the UK and go, right, I'm British now, I hold a British passport, I, you know, God save the king and all that sort of stuff. You know, you unite under multiracialism is uniting beneath the culture.
00:34:07
Speaker
So you go, there is a culture already in this country, which is like we have a remembrance Sunday or we watch the football or whatever. You integrate, you assimilate into the culture to within which you wish to make your home. Multiculturalism is to culturally self-isolate and to say that I don't want to assimilate within a culture, I want to bring my culture here. And if, you know, I hate to be Islamophobic, especially in anti-Islamophobia month, which began yesterday, but
00:34:35
Speaker
If you're going to turn up in the country and you're going to say that it is more important to you that you cannot see a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad than it is the laws of Great Britain, which are there are no blasphemy laws and you can mock Jesus Christ and you can mock Muhammad and all those stuff. It's more important to you and you're going to hound a guy out of his job and send him into hiding with fears of death threats. That's multiculturalism as an abject failure.
00:34:59
Speaker
And if you've got people that are flying the flags of a foreign war, walking through the streets of London, calling for jihad, and then to the people like me who sit there and go, there are some issues with Islam, radical Islam, in the same way as there are some issues with radical Christianity, as we see on their much-fated white supremacist that Jay Biden talks about.
00:35:19
Speaker
There are issues with this, which is that we cannot tolerate them. Secular liberal democracy requires and demands that you tolerate all religions and none. And multiculturalism, especially from Islam, means that you do not do that.
00:35:34
Speaker
I've got some very good, moderate Muslim friends who would find the behavior of the people that are out there doing what they're doing in the streets, and they'll be doing them this weekend as well, abhorrent. But for those that do it and that carry on, and I would say also for the isolationist Jewish community and all the isolationist any community,
00:35:54
Speaker
It doesn't work. We have a culture. It's existed for a thousand years. It's malleable and it moves, but do not turn up and dismantle it in the name of a foreign war that's got nothing to do. I bet you a million pounds, 85%, 90% of the protesters out there on the street wouldn't be able to put a point on the map and tell you where Palestine was.
00:36:14
Speaker
your friend Konstantin Kissen said in a speech only a few days ago, he said, for a long period of time, we've been saying the barbarians are at the gate and now well and truly inside the gates are here. Now, I think you can choose to interpret that narrowly as a comment around immigration and multiculturalism. I think there's probably also a broader interpretation around our culture and the cultural erosion we're seeing taking place.
00:36:37
Speaker
Taking it narrowly, assuming that from what I can see in the UK, decades and decades of really poor immigration policy on both sides of the political divide have led to a multicultural framework which is not working. Take that as read now, it's happened. What can actually be done? Shut the borders, totally.
00:37:01
Speaker
to anyone, but I would say that if you're freeing a war zone and you're a refugee, then there's two aspects to this because there's the economic aspect as well because we're not breeding.
00:37:14
Speaker
there's that problem. But as an instant fix, I would say you flee the country to your nearest safe country. You go to a British embassy there and you apply for asylum. If you turn up in this country illegally, you're promised by the government that you will never ever hold a British passport, and neither will any of your family. And you put an absolute complete stop on immigration for, I'd say, 10 years.
00:37:41
Speaker
And we're gonna work on the project to what britain is re and we discuss our culture and find something that we agree on the problem with that is because we don't breed because no one wants to because we're all depressed and twitter is that we have to import our GDP.
00:38:00
Speaker
That's what we're doing, and that's what Europe has done, and it's what it will continue to do. Yeah, the GDP stays okay, but the societal cohesion is destroyed. It's just what you want out of a country, and these people get voted in for four or five years at a time, moved and shuffled around departments of government and all this sort of stuff. They only care about what's happening next for them. They're not public servants. The last public servant we had was Margaret Thatcher.
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah, the exact same phenomenon is playing out in Australia where there hasn't been real efforts on things like productivity or improving the economy in intelligent ways. So you just cheat and just increase immigration numbers. We've been more successful than the UK has on illegal immigration, but that's largely a function of our isolation and the fact that it's easier for us to control it.
00:38:46
Speaker
The knee jerk response from everyone on the left will be to what you just said. Oh, well, that's, that's racist. And I think that's the main reason why a lot of politicians have just been too afraid to deal with the problems associated with immigration in the UK. How do you combat that response? How do you mitigate that you're a racist response? I think it's racist to steal good people from other countries and make them work in our health service. I think that's racist.
00:39:14
Speaker
I think if you really wanted people to succeed, stay at home and succeed there. Everyone is really mean about the British Empire and all that sort of stuff, but it was actually great and I'm really proud of it. So find countries, build them stable governments, help them to build themselves stable governments. India is a great example of this in a lot of ways. It's still holding onto a lot of what Britain took to it. And you go, we don't want to steal your doctors and nurses.
00:39:39
Speaker
so that you don't have any doctors and nurses. We don't want to steal your professors, your astrophysicists. We want you to have them and we want your countries to rise. Like in all fair sport, you watch England play Australia at cricket and it takes five days and it's the most wonderful thing in the world to watch.
00:39:58
Speaker
You don't want to go, we'll just steal all the Australian cricketers because it makes our team better. That's what I would call racist and unfair. People use this word racist like it means anything anymore. What's so sad is it should because there are still a proportion of the population in any country who are racist. Those people should be called out on an individual level, but they killed it by saying that we're systemically racist to the culture, which is just ridiculous.
00:40:25
Speaker
There's a little nugget there that you said you're proud of the British Empire. You're proud of what it delivered to the world. We are having a chat with Nigel Bigger next week, who's tried to present a more nuanced picture of colonialism, and he's one of, thankfully, a few historians that aren't just putting forward this unnuanced perspective that colonialism is evil.
00:40:45
Speaker
It makes me think about how we look at our history in the West, this self-flagellating instinct in countries like the UK to only look at the bad parts
Balanced View of British Empire
00:40:54
Speaker
of our history. We've certainly seen something similar in Australia at the moment in the wake of this referendum we've had and looking at the evils in our history without looking at everything great that has happened. How can we think about history in a more positive way in Western countries?
00:41:09
Speaker
education is really important. There's a spiritual aspect to it though, which is that this idea, which is a really fundamental idea to most religions, which is that you are fallen, you are in some way sinful, and there is something not right with you, and that your life must be a journey to improve
00:41:28
Speaker
the fallen sinful nature that you inherited from, you know, whichever religion story that you happen to subscribe to. But we've given up on that. So we've given up on that in the search for personal identity and validation. I mean, just today there's been an advert on Marks and Spencer's, their British, their advert, Christmas advert that waited.
00:41:49
Speaker
And it's like, have whatever Christmas you want. And it's like, if I'm really honest, I don't want it. There's a few people in my family who I don't want to sit down with on Christmas day. I find them irritating and I don't want to spend time, but it's important that you do. So I think I've just wondered off topic, what was your question? How do we push back against the lie that colonialism and the empire was a bad thing? Well, one of the simple ways of pushing back against that lie is to say, what is happening to us? Are we being colonized?
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah, we are. And that's what's happening. And we're going, we don't like this. So it's fair enough for the people who were colonized to have not liked it either. But what did we take with us other than the Bengal massacre and all the stuff that gets thrown at you by the woke bunch? We took equality under the law across the planet. You know, that's an amazing thing to do.
00:42:43
Speaker
We also took a language across the planet as well, which is an amazing thing to do. Did we mess up? Yes. I think that we should look at ourselves and those that came before us as we look at our parents and we say, yeah, they messed up here and there and that's cool and I'll just try and remedy that bit with my own kids and I'll fail and I'm fallen and I'm
00:43:05
Speaker
It's this idea that we're in some way good people that I find really bonkers, actually. I think it's insane that people think that they're good.
00:43:15
Speaker
spiritual aspect to what you've just said, I think is interesting. And it leads me to what will be my final question. And it's a question that I've asked of a lot of people on this podcast. Konstantin is interested in this. John Anderson, Peter Bogosian, there are people that are having the conversation around the decline of religiosity in most Western countries.
Religious Decline and Ideological Shift
00:43:36
Speaker
that has created a vacuum. That vacuum has potentially been filled with really troubling alternative ideologies. And you could make the argument that woke ideology is a response to the decline of religion in the West. Assume that for some people, they can't get themselves to believe in a higher power, but we don't want them basically as a result of that.
00:44:00
Speaker
believing nutty alternative worldviews that lead them in the wrong direction. What is your advice to someone who, you know, let's say a young man who can't quite get themselves to believe in a God. It feels like they don't have a framework to hold onto that feels like that they are disconnected in a way that potentially in the past religion would have sold for. What is your advice to that person?
00:44:19
Speaker
Well, my advice would be to read a Bible as a person who doesn't believe in God. So read the Proverbs and put God out of it for a minute. Or read the Psalms and say, I don't believe in God. Or read the Book of Mark or the Book of Luke or John and go, there is no God. What's it saying? And what it says is a source of constant overwhelming comfort to the deepest and most pained parts of anybody's soul, which is the search for meaning.
00:44:46
Speaker
which we all need because the idea that we're all just sat here having a zoom meeting and we're all going to die and it'll be looked up in 300 years by someone who finds it on a click drive once the terminators have taken over you know it's like it's too depressing for words so your life physically and actually has meaning because you breed and you have children
00:45:09
Speaker
And therefore, those children, I will have echoes of my grandfather, and I do have echoes of my grandfather in me, and both genetic and nurtured ones. So if you want your life to mean something,
00:45:21
Speaker
have faith in something. And if you're going to put faith in something, don't put it in yourself because every single experience you've ever encountered in your whole life will be a disappointment. And every time you've turned around and gone, God, I'm a great person, you usually aren't or haven't been. So put your faith in something. And the only thing I can put my faith in is love.
00:45:42
Speaker
And when I say love, I don't mean the left wing version of love is love. I mean, love being a hard and tough thing to do to somebody sometimes and put my faith in truth. And those things are the things that are excoriated, not excoriated, are celebrated by all monotheistic religions and therefore, you know, focus on what you can do to give your life some meaning and don't focus on you being the meaning.
00:46:10
Speaker
Lovely sentiment,
Appreciation and Support for Values
00:46:11
Speaker
Lars. And it's a nice one to leave thisness to ponder. I can tell that I think the last month has weighed incredibly heavily. I really appreciate you taking the time. You should know that there are a lot of people that support you and what you are doing is incredibly important. Keep fighting for the values that you believe in, because as you said, there are far too people, not just with the bravery, but with the courage to do that. And you certainly do have that courage. Thank you for coming on, Australiana.
00:46:38
Speaker
My pleasure. Thanks, Will. And also I'm blessed with the courage. It's not because I have it. I'm just blessed with it. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.