Hello, I'm Charles Mallett with Auk column interview.
Today I have with me James Lindsay, who describes himself
as an American born author, mathematician and professional
troublemaker, the last part of which will no doubt make him
somebody that UK Column audience will certainly want to listen
to. James is also the founder of New
Discourses and the creator of a new and much acclaimed film,
Beneath Sheep's Clothing. James A warm welcome back to UK
Column. Thank you.
It's great to be here again. Great.
Now there's going to be a lot to get through.
And it was March 2023 last year that you last spoke to us.
I wonder, therefore, how the world looks now from your
vantage point of roughly 18 months ago.
Well, I think a lot has changed for good and for bad.
The trajectory, the the origin I suppose, of the trajectories
that the world has taken, I think it's the same.
The analysis I'm I gave previously is, of course, that
what I believe is being pushed upon Western countries,
including the UK, the United States, Canada and so on, is in
fact a communist revolution. I think the model of communism
is an updated model. It's not what, you know, they
used in the 20th century. It's something new that was
incubated in China under Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao
eventually. And so that I think it's still
continuing. But to say it's continuing apace
would be a little incorrect. But it gets complicated because
we have to split the screen in a sense.
On the one hand, Donald Trump has just won the United States
election. And of course, the world has
taken notice of this. The business world has taken
notice of this. Many things have, you know, the
stock market has exploded. Bitcoin has hit 100,000,
whatever that indicates. I mean, there's a very bullish
market I think is what all that indicates in response to this
kind of new optimism that Donald Trump presidency might turn the
corner on this kind of very dark last four years.
But then on the other hand, in the UK, you've put up Keir
Starmer. And Keir Starmer has enacted
what are undoubtedly to be recognized as totalitarian
policies that seem to be increasing rather than
decreasing in their scope and in their tyranny.
And so we have this bizarre split between America and the
rest of the English speaking and free world, which complicates
further if we go to Asia. So we'll leave Asia out of the
equation for the moment. So these are the biggest
changes. Obviously, nobody can deny them.
I see across the accounts that I follow from the UK tremendous
fear, sometimes horror, sometimes tremendous anger about
the two tier justice system that you're facing.
So I would say there the program has the, the communist program
has advanced considerably. Of course, Mr. Mr. Stormer is a
Fabian and that's no surprise. Whether or not people understand
what that means, it means that he's not necessarily a Marxist,
but is in fact a communist and is following the Fabian playbook
to take Britain in that direction.
Up to and including all of the things that are have happened
with the migration and the imported proletariat, if you
will, that they've brought in in Britain over the past decades.
It's now become a fever pitch problem.
I was even there in the Uki was in London last fall.
So it's been about a year when all the big protests following
October 7th kicked off every Saturday.
And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the
street. It was almost an unrecognizable
phenomenon in in city. Although I think every time I've
been to London as an adult, there's been a protest of some
kind or another near Trafalgar. So London and the UK more
broadly are very concerning. Canada is very concerning,
although it looks like Justin Trudeau is trying to ingratiate
himself with President Trump. America, however, has become
this kind of beacon of hope. I think that the US has, the US
population has given a clear and loud voice to not just our
leaders but also to the world that no more of this is, is, is
going to be tolerated. We expect that Donald Trump is
going to use the powers he has in office to great effect, the
greatest effect that he can, given the constraints and
divisions of power, to push back on the progressive agenda, if
you want to call it that. I would call it the communist
revolution that has taken hold, pushing out DEI, challenging
ESG, cleaning up the infiltration of these ideologies
into our schools and into our businesses and into our federal
apparatuses, into our state apparatuses.
And so we have this moment in time then to summarize that
where something in the plan, if we consider the communist
revolution, that I think is the underlying assumption we have to
take for what's happening in the world.
Something has gone awry in their plan.
Something has gone off. And that thing that has gone off
is, as it frequently turns out to be, that America woke up a
little bit too late, but woke up indeed, as frequently happens
when there are major moves happening on the world stage.
And I won't get into, you know, further developments on the
world stage, the development of bricks, the challenge with
Russia, with Ukraine as proxy in between the battles waging in
the Middle East with Israel there.
There's much going on in the world, in China, of course,
always being a menace. There's much going on in the
world stage that actually contextualizes all this.
But for the start, I think that we're at this moment where the
1st person, the, the, the first country, I should say, not
person, I'm doing metaphorical people here has stood up. the
United States has stood up as a population and said no more.
And we'll see what President Trump is able to accomplish to,
to push back and to, to answer the mandate that the American
people gave him. And hopefully that will be a
beacon to the rest of the world, the UK in particular, Canada and
Australia in particular. But also like I've said, I won't
get into the Asian theatre, but South Korea, which is also now
an interesting peace on the world board in Japan, which are
are free countries that are up against the same challenges in
their own unique ways. Fantastic synopsis, I think,
which we can dig into a bit. I, I think what I'd like to do
for the benefit of those who are sort of familiar to, to an
extent perhaps with you, your philosophy and your work, but
but maybe not so intimately and not currently.
Can we just bookend that by first of all, a definition of
well, the, the sort of working theory on what woke is and where
it came from? And then I think for the latter
part, which relates to what you've just explained, what it's
end state is perceived to be and and how that can as you describe
how that can drift. I'm going to start off being
provocative and very simple, which is to say that what woke
is, is, is communism updated for the Western world in the 21st
century. I mean, you could say tag on the
end of the 20th century as well with the political correctness
madness of the 19, 90s. But really, wokeness is a 21st
century phenomenon. And it is the conflict theory of
Karl Marx updated to to sensitivities that the Western
world will respond to where we didn't respond so much to class
warfare. We do respond to racial and
immigration status. We do respond to sex and sexual
status and these other dimensions of identity politics
that we've become familiar with. So that's why I'm so adamant in
saying that what I believe is happening is it is a new form of
a communist revolution using a 21st century, a new 21st century
model of communism, which is people will notice immediately
and it'll be the question mark hanging over many heads using
the communist word given what they see in their their everyday
lives. This seems to be coming very
significantly through corporations and through large
banks and large finance institutions.
So it doesn't feel like the old working class communism of the
20th century. So that's why I designate 21st
century. It's willing to use corporate
power. It's willing to take new
dimensions other than just class warfare and in fact has mostly
left class warfare behind. Whether it will return to that
at some point or not is actually a matter of internal debate
within the various socialist and communist movements.
Some say yes, some say no, and it's not clear which factions
will win out. But that is a starting place.
It's not a very good starting place.
Woke, I think is, is more accurately defined as not just a
disposition, but a worldview, kind of a totalizing lens
through which you see the world. And I, I, I stick to the
language, right? The word woke tells you
something about what woke means. The reason that we've decided to
call this movement woke, which followed their use of the word
woke for themselves, is because they believe that they have woke
up to something. They have awakened to a true
understanding or a more true understanding of reality.
This is why I say it's a world view they've adopted.
If we don't need to get this philosophical, but they've
adopted different metaphysical commitments than the rest of us
that they have woken up to. They've adopted different
analytical commitments to how they see and view and and
interpret the world around them. And they've awoken to different
duties of conscience, as it's called an American
constitutional law. In other words, different
beliefs about what they are to do with the knowledge that they
think that they have woken up to.
And specifically, I get, I again reiterate, these factors are all
derived from the Marxist theory. It's as I spoke at the European
Parliament roughly at the beginning, I guess it was in the
last of March, in 23, I spoke at the European Parliament and it's
gone quite, quite viral. Many people have seen it.
I think it's the best talk I've ever given, even, you know,
since. And so I peaked that day in a
good, a good venue. But I spoke there and said that
communism needs to be thought of as a, as like an Organism that
evolves. And what we call Marxism is a
genus. It's not a particular species of
totalitarian thought. It's a genus of of of many
species, and where you have classical Marxism as an economic
species, you have critical race theory as a racial species, you
have post colonial theory as an immigration status species, you
have queer theory as a sexuality based species, and so on and so
forth. But that the architecture
underneath the the the model by which these all operate is the
same. As a former mathematician, I
would say that each of these is isomorphic to the other.
You can very easily derive each one from any of them by just
swapping out who the oppressed class and the oppressor class
is. Renaming the dynamic of
oppression and and the objective is still the same that the
oppressed class is to band together and seize the means of
production of whatever it is that is considered to be
cultural or economic or human capital or property and use it
to their own ends. So woke is having woke up to a
belief that reality is structured by systems of power
dynamics of power that create an oppressor class that is
oppressing an oppressed class. And that this is a fundamental
aspect of what it, of what history represents in the, the,
the movement of history and that everybody is a participant.
And so there's a very kind of Manichean good versus evil.
The people who are on the side of the oppressor become
intrinsically and irredeemably evil, and the people who are on
the side of the oppressed become by default as good as one can
be, as a person who can be still contaminated by evil values.
And so there's a absolute dichotomy of good versus evil
that's defined by the oppressor versus oppressed dynamic.
And I mean, quite literally in the Manichean sense.
And so that's what having woke up means.
And that also in such you are in, in, in this arrangement, I
should say, you have a duty of conscience, a, a requirement, a
moral and ethical duty to step up and do activism on behalf of
the, the, the theoretical interpretation of the, the lot
of the oppressed. And this is straight Marxism.
Like I said, if we think of Marxism as a genus and we think
of all of these different, these different models, whether
communism, critical race there or whatever, a species within
that genius at all very quickly makes sense.
So that's what I think woke means in practice.
It's identity politics. It's a constant sense of
grievance and victimhood. It's a entitlement that you're,
you're absolutely right by virtue of being on the so-called
right side of history in this epic battle between good and
evil, oppressor versus oppressed.
You're, if you are on the side of the oppressed, you are
entitled to do whatever you need to do in order to liberate
everybody from a, from not from the specific oppression, but
oppression in the abstract overall.
And in this belief system, they, they actually believe that
they're building out a perfect world.
The problem is nobody can describe what that world looks
like because they can describe what it doesn't look like.
It's a, as if we, if it was a theology, we would call it a
negative theology or an apophatic theology.
You don't describe what God is. You only describe what God is
not in such a theology. Well, here we have this kind of
utopian vision of the world. It's a negative utopianism where
you don't describe what the utopia looks like.
You only describe what it doesn't look like.
It doesn't look like there's any racism.
It doesn't look like there's any classism or inequality of any
kind, and so on and so forth. So what this amounts to, just as
it amounted to in communism in the People's Republic of China
and all the other Asian countries, in the South American
countries and also the Soviet Union and in the Eastern Bloc
satellites, Soviet satellites. What this amounts to is that
communism, Marxism, is not a philosophy that does what the
sales pitch says. It's not about helping the
oppressed. It's not about ending
oppression. What it's actually about is
creating circumstances in which the Communist Party itself can
concentrate as much wealth and as much power into the smallest
number of hands that you can possibly have, and can erect a
system of totalitarianism that maintains their power for as
long as possible. One reading of the history of
Mao Zedong's rule in China, for example, in the People's
Republic of China, which technically ran from 1949 till
he died in 1976, makes it very clear that Mao Zedong was a true
believer in communism. He wasn't cynical about that.
He absolutely believed in communism and that the socialist
model was the best model. On the other hand, he also did
all of his political maneuvering in every way and every time to
maintain and multiply his own power over the the People's
Republic of China, the the Communist Party, the CCP was not
to be questioned and Mao Zedong and his leadership was not to be
questioned. And Mao Zedong thought was, as
they called it, was to rule everything.
So it's to concentrate all resources, all money, all
opportunity, all power in very few hands who are the most
ideologically pure and at the end of the day, because of the
nature of real politic, the most ruthless and being able to
maintain and handle that power once they get it.
So why we won't want to stand up against that is, I think,
intrinsically clear, especially in the British context, because
you've got such an such a glorious warning about what
you're dealing with. Obviously I said earlier that
that Keir Starmer is a Fabian and many of your leaders have
been Fabians. It's not just Keir Starmer, but
he's a particularly obnoxious and and glaring example.
The Fabian Society was criticized probably in the one
of the very small number of the most famous books ever written,
and that book was called 1984. A man named Eric Blair, better
known as George Orwell as his pen name, wanted to write a
story explaining what would happen if the Fabian Society,
founded in 18401884, had a century to consolidate its power
and generated power roughly equivalent to Stalin's.
And he wrote this allegorical story called 1984 to imagine
that situation. The totalitarian entity in that
book is called Ingsoc. INGSOC.
And I don't know if they teach you because they don't teach us
this. Here in America, we study 1984.
And no one tells us that INGSOC is an abbreviation for English
socialism. But that's exactly what it is.
And it was a, it was a warning to the world and to Britain in
particular about the the Fabian Society working underneath the
cover. And so Britain I think has had a
clear warning what the end game actually looks like.
And hopefully my friends across the pond are not going to find
at the end of the day that they do, in fact, love Big Brother.
No, indeed not. I mean, certainly that would be
the view of of people listening and watching they, they very
much hope not to to find out what that's all about and that
that's you know, I mean, you know, fantastic place to take it
with the Orwellian element. Now you, you mentioned earlier
this being pushed and of course that is the case.
But I think we see or have seen over the last few years as it's
evolved and developed an increasing degree of what you
might call pull people who appear to desire to want to go
in this direction. But of course, unless you would
disagree. But I think it'd be fair to say
that this hasn't enveloped the whole world or all societies
within the world. So, So what is it about the
places that have been affected that that sort of defines or
provides that susceptibility of the populace?
So this is an interesting question, and I think that the
answer is slightly uncomfortable one.
I want to use a metaphor to start.
Obviously he didn't start the term, but I think he is now the
person who's made it the most famous.
Certainly other people. I mean, I think I used the term
years and years ago and certainly Gadsat and some other
commentators have used the term extensively, but Elon Musk has
been very, very notable recently in calling it the woke mind
virus. So it's the metaphor of a
psychological and social virus that I, I, I want to kind of
focus on for a moment to make this explanation.
And having read again recently, I read the entire history of, of
Mao's time in China. I read a number of books on on
the Cultural Revolution and in the, the, the circumstances of
the 1950s, which was not yet the Cultural Revolution and the, the
idea that this is a mind virus, that communism in general
operates as a mind virus is, is particularly clear reading that
as well. So I think this is a decent way
to describe it. And so the question that you're
asking in that metaphorical framing is why are certain
countries, the Western countries, in particular, the
Anglosphere primarily so susceptible to this mind virus?
And I come back to that evolutionary.
Model that I gave in the previous answer, the
evolutionary model, if we think of this, you know, this is a,
this is not a literal, literal virus.
So it's not literally evolving in that sense, but it is a, in a
sense as, as Richard Dawkins called a mimetic virus, it's a,
it's a, it's a, it's a set of ideas and beliefs and propaganda
and motifs that look in fact and act a certain way and that they
have changed over time. And I, I think that the answer
to your question is that there has been a very long standing
project, roughly 100 years old, reaching back to the beginning
of Soviet Union. And, you know, it's 1917 to 1921
or two where this was rapidly exported.
The target of the Western world became a high priority.
This the KGB was very interested in infiltrating the United
States and infiltrating Britain and infiltrating Europe, but
particularly the Anglosphere. And I think that this particular
we, we in the Anglosphere are so susceptible to this mind virus
because this mind virus was, and I'll say engineered because it
was, it was, it was philosophers cooking stuff up, activists
taking stuff to the streets to see what worked.
It didn't just kind of happen. This, this mind virus was
engineered to affront our sensibilities.
And those don't always match across other cultures.
The thing that I've noticed that repels the woke mind virus most
effectively, and this has actually an interesting and long
history. The word that I'm about to use
is now considered not to be an acceptable cosmopolitan way of
being in Western countries, particularly wealthy English
speaking Western countries. You know, we can make all the
jokes we need to about the French here in a minute, which
in that word is chauvinism. So the Soviets, you know, to, to
overcome the, they had all these satellite States and all these
internal states within the, the, the Soviet Federation that were
minority ethnic states. And they had to go up against
the fact that the majority population was Russian.
And it turned out that it was about 60% Russian and about 40%
spread out across 20 or so ethnic minorities.
China had a similar situation with the Han Chinese being, you
know, some incredible proportion.
I don't know the actual proportion, but probably north
of 80, maybe even 90% of the population of China and the 55
minority ethnicities making up the rest.
United States has similar proportions to the Soviet Union,
50 some odd percent white and 45 or so percent the other ethnic
minorities as as a kind of conglomerate block.
I think it's this kind of standard across a lot of these
countries. And what has happened is that
the Russians or the the Soviets, I should say, cowed the Russian
population by introducing an affirmative action program for
the for the ethnic minorities. It was called Korinitzatzia in
Russian, and it was a direct policy of Lenin and Stalin.
Stalin actually came up with it, even though he wasn't leader
yet. And Lenin and Stalin implemented
it together starting in 1921 in Soviet Union.
And they created this affirmative action program.
And then they said that any opposition to this by anybody
who was Russian was called great Russian chauvinism.
And the reason is because this willingness to say we are who we
are and you can't change us, which is in a sense chauvinism,
actually repels this woke attempt to to needle people into
guilt and shame for their history.
And we have as a kind of broad English speaking culture, not to
say that we all have the same culture, but we'll take the
Anglosphere as having certain cultural elements in in common,
as a broad cultural object. We have become particularly wary
of being chauvinistic about ourselves, probably as an echo
of both colonialism and slavery, which we all recognize now to
have been really inappropriate in, in a lot of the ways that
they, they acted to slavery in particular being just a moral
abomination. Colonialism is much more
complicated. We're not even allowed to say
that yet. It brought good, it brought bad,
but many of the techniques, many of the activities were
absolutely brutal and unforgivable in a lot of ways.
But we've become unable to say that on balance, we did good and
our culture that we thought we were bringing to the world,
maybe not by always the best methods was a good culture to
bring to the world. It did elevate what we brought
this chauvinism, as it would be called is is is absent and it I
think was worn away. And I think that the the the
main drivers, if you read again in the People's Republic of
China, the primary objectives for Mao's campaigns through the
1950s while he was consolidating power were to induce guilt and
shame. They used meetings that they
called speaking bitterness. And it was to induce guilt and
shame in the population for their old feudal values, for
their old nationalist support. And the same techniques have
been modified and unleashed on the Western free countries,
particularly the Anglosphere. And we've accepted this.
We've accepted that being proud of our history, as they say,
warts and all that. Yes, there were horrors and yes,
there were things that were of their time that we would look
back on with with, you know, I was going to say shame, but I
don't think shame's the right word that we would look upon now
and not approve of for ourselves because we don't want to be
anachronistic here. That but on balance, say what we
we have actually done in the world and through history was
good. The culture that we brought was
good and brought the world up, not down.
We've lost that ability, which makes us extremely susceptible
to the Korinetzatzia program. And I'd say in Britain, it's a
very interesting situation when again, Korinetzatzia was the
affirmative action DEI program of the Soviet Union that that
that Stalin created specifically for that purpose.
What I would say is that in Britain, because of the fact
that until relatively recently, your island was overwhelmingly 1
racial makeup. And now that's obviously changed
that I said earlier, an imported proletariat.
But the interesting thing is Karina Zatia Karini in Russian
means roots. And So what you're doing is
you're digging into the roots of the ethnic minority populations
and saying, you know, you guys are here and we're going to let
everything's going to be in your native language.
You're going to get to run your own affairs and it's going to
create this friction. But what we're going to do is
get the Russian, the great Russian, to criticize himself
for his his bigotry against you. Somehow they've managed to flip
the script in the UK. And so the native population
where the roots actually are the Carini of Russia, or I'm sorry,
of the UK, the Carini are the everything's upside down.
You're not digging into the roots and say you're the
indigenous population, therefore you have these privileges.
It's upside down. They brought in a new population
that's to be treated as though they're the more legitimate
Brits. And what I urge people, 'cause
this is extraordinarily frustrating and extraordinarily
infuriating and extraordinarily unfair and a true robbery of, of
your, your country and your heritage.
And that's a dangerous, poisonous, explosive
circumstance to have your population put under.
So I wouldn't urge, you know, indulging the catharsis of, of
wanting to let those negative emotions flow and fight back
kind of in, in the blatant, obvious and physical kinetic
ways that the, the, the, the government's going to bait you
into doing again and again. But rather, I would urge your
population to understand that the entire question around
immigration, particularly Islamic country immigration into
the UK has been a communist Soviet Union plot, that if you
want to know its actual origins, you can go read them in Lenin
and Stalin. And the point was to break your
country. And that when you hear Keir
Starmer come out and talk about it like he did recently and say
things like, yes, we were trying to do this policy intentionally
and it kind of got out of control that this has a
precedent in the Soviet Union as well.
When Stalin finally had to admit in the early 1930s that the
Korine Tzatzia program had flared ethnic tensions so much
they couldn't advance as a unified Soviet Union and what
they called their new economic policy.
And So what he had to do was flip it over completely.
And what he absolutely destroyed the the ethnic minorities,
particularly Ukrainians in the famously in the Holodom where he
starved anywhere between 3 and 9 million of them to crush ethnic
minority. So this policy flipped on a
dime. So I worry because when you look
at that situation, Keir Starmer seems to be admitting that this
is what they have been doing. This is a Soviet program that
Britain has been importing for over 50 years into the into
their country. And when you look at the flipped
script, it is not the imported people who are the ones who are
going to get crushed. It is in fact the native British
population and it's a very concerning moment.
I think that the Brits generally need to understand that you guys
are being subjected by your government to a Soviet technique
to break your country. And the response is not to get
mad on the street against other people, but rather to focus the
energy against the the government that's that's trying
to take advantage of you. Absolutely.
I mean, that's, that's a message that will resonate, you know,
loud and clear. And I think that's a really good
analysis of where the United Kingdom is and, and
unfortunately, where it's going. You referred to the, the changes
afoot on your side of the Atlantic and how you see that
there might be the, you know, reason to believe that the Trump
administration could be a beacon of hope.
And, and again, you used the word that I think people will
have clung to, which was to repel all of this.
Are you suggesting therefore that that in a way, although the
land masses in the populations can't really necessarily be
compared terribly directly, but the United States has gone
through this process to a certain extent and therefore has
passed back to the powers that perhaps shouldn't be, that they
have had enough? I think that we're at a moment
of testing that hypothesis. I, I would love to say yes, I
think we've been through this and that we have, in typical
American exceptionalist fashion, we have rejected communism
without having dipped our feet into other forms of tyranny like
fascism as a means of repelling it.
But and I don't think that in any regard that Donald Trump is
a fascist and he certainly didn't act like a fascist in his
first administration. So that is a very popular myth
about him that he is 1. I don't think that I think that
America has rejected both. But I think it's a precarious
moment. Many things are going to happen.
Certainly Donald Trump is going to to meet incredible resistance
that maybe we may see some very, very ridiculous, you know,
attempts at law fair lawsuits, other things getting in his way,
political machinery like Senate Republicans working against him.
Who knows? I think he's going to face a
much steeper hill than than the American people hope.
And that's going to cause a lot of anger and resentment in the
American people when they see that the thing that they voted
for, which wasn't necessarily Donald Trump, it wasn't
necessarily mega, it was this, we've had enough of this.
And they can tell because the coalition is made-up of so many
people who up until this last election only have ever voted
Democrat. And so this was a rejection of
the left in our election more than it was a validation of
Trump or MAGA. And I say that as somebody who
likes Trump and feels, you know, aligned in many ways, but not
always with MAGA. And so I think that what we're
going to see is a much more frustrating situation as this
actual fight, the election was the easy part.
Now the actual fight is going to to begin.
But what I do think is, and I have been saying this well
before the election, is that the American people, I believe, have
moved on. American people are not at all
interested in this woke agenda, this transferred fundamental
transformation, as Barack Obama called it, of our country.
And we want to not only stop the fundamental transformation, but
go back to a time when the fundamental transformation had
not yet begun and get back on track.
And I think the American people are going to fight tooth and
nail for this. And I think it's going to be a
huge inspiration to other countries such as Britain and
Canada that are in much, I think, more dangerous
situations. I really am deeply concerned
about both Britain and Canada at the moment.
And I think that the American people and to a degree what
Trump is able to do with his powers and his administration,
we will see in America actually taking up the fight.
I mean, it's a, it's a worn out metaphor.
Nobody really enjoys World War 2 metaphors anymore.
But the fact is Trump's election was very much like coming to
Normandy and taking Omaha Beach. But we're nowhere near Berlin
yet. And there's a lot to do to get
there. And it's not going to be pretty.
And then just like to stretch the metaphor a little further,
even should we win to Berlin and and you know, liberate Europe,
so to speak, there's the Pacific theatre to concern ourselves
with still, which is in this, in our case, the CCP in the
creation of bricks, which is a much more concerning and very
dangerous development on the world stage, probably unlike it
much we've seen in about a century.
I was about to ask you something else about the woke right, But
having dropped the the the bricks sort of descriptor, go on
you, you must go on. Tell us what you mean by that.
China is, of course, the world's second largest economy.
It's a very powerful country, but it hasn't in fact been
powerful enough to achieve its goals.
Russia under the leadership of of Vladimir Putin, who I think
is no friend to the West. But I, I'd, I'd, I don't share
the sentiments of many of my, my conservative friends here in the
US who think that he must be doing something right.
I, I very much distrust Vladimir Putin and do not think even if
he has, you know, bad intentions for say, our, our foes in the
Democratic Party, I think he has equally bad intentions for the
United States and the Western world overall.
So, you know, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend or
something like that. But OK, so now Russia is this
kind of rising power, wishing to be a rising power.
It's obviously asserted itself in a incredible way on the world
stage with its invasion of Ukraine.
It is a gigantic country with mountains, literally mountains
of resources is one of the more important things.
It's economy is not exactly huge or thriving or robust, but there
are resources, unbelievable resources.
And now you have, because of the situation as it's played out in
Ukraine, not just the development of bricks, which is
downstream from this, but you have this alliance between
Russia and China that then extended to India that then led
to the building of the BRICS alliance.
And this is a, this becomes an somewhat artificial, rather like
LGBTQ is an artificial acronym. The letters do not represent the
same things. This is a rather artificial
superpower. It's not a country, but it's an
alliance that is now operating in something like European Union
fashion to create its own transnational currency.
And the goal of this transnational currency and of
this alliance is in fact to destroy the the United States
dollar as the world reserve currency.
We all know that that would be an extremely upsetting
circumstance, but the word that they use for that circumstance
is called multipolarity. The idea right now is that the
world is unipolar from the United States and its allies,
particularly the so-called Five Eyes.
And they want to shift the balance of power so that it is
no longer located in the US and the Western alliance and put on
the stage a second alliance of equal or greater power in
bricks. And a lot of people are cheering
this on. They were for whatever weird
reason. I mean, conservative people who
should know better are are cheering this on.
Tucker Carlson cheers this on. And I don't understand why we
would want to move to a multi polar world, because what a
multi polar world is going to end up with is we on the one
hand, have the United States, which is not always been the
best actor, again, on balance, though, has been a very
responsible steward of its power as a global superpower in ways
that few countries that have had that status have ever matched.
And then we have the CCP LED China with Vladimir Putin's LED
Russia here. And then Lula's communist Brazil
are now forming a union. So now we have not just not just
irresponsible actors rising to the level of world superpower
through this alliance, and but also malevolent actors who we
know have tremendous ambitions for global conquest.
Whatever Russia's ambitions are are murky.
Virtually everything that comes out of Moscow is a lie.
It's very difficult to tell what the truth is, but certainly
putting Russia back on the map as a global superpower would be
1 of Putin's ambitions. Getting China to be the world's
global hegemon is certainly Beijing's ambition.
I mean, even even down I laugh about this because I speak
barely enough Chinese to understand that, you know,
China, what what we call China in China is Jungwo right?
And what that means is, is is center Kingdom, right?
So they see themselves as the center of the world and they
want to be the center of the world.
And their entire philosophical existence is, I know Britain's
on the map at the center of the world right now, by the way, but
their entire, their entire ambition is to become the new
center of the world politically, economically, and in every other
sense, which, you know, if they were a free and democratic
country, that's a open question as to whether or not that's OK.
But we're not talking about it being a free and democratic
country. It is a dictatorship.
It is a communist dictatorship, as a matter of fact, being led
by somebody who's not even as pragmatic and open-ended as Deng
Xiaoping that I mentioned earlier, as was in the 1980s.
He was, he was presiding during the Tiananmen Square incident,
by the way, though. So it's not like he's a good guy
either. He was far more open than Xi
Jinping. Xi Jinping has actually moved
China back toward what was called Mao Zedong Thought.
And to to think that we want a a economic superpower, I guess a
artificial superpower to rise that can threaten the the the
Western alliance's current global power basis.
Is to me madness when we have these hostile entities like
China and to the degree that it can organize itself with a
communist leader, Brazil. And then, like I said, whatever
Russia's ambitions are, Russia getting into that mix with its
enormous coal and oil and other reserves and besides minerals
and what not, is in a tremendous concern for the viability of
bricks becoming a weapon that economically undermines the
United States and the Western alliance.
At which point the world is going to be in the most unstable
and most dangerous point it's been since World War 2.
Well, we'll have to wait and see on that one.
But but I mean, that's a, that's a, you know, very interesting
insight. And actually it brings to back
to what I was about to ask, which, although on a different
scale, you're talking about shifting power and friction in a
sense. And I was going to ask you about
something you've spoken about increasingly in, in recent
times, which is the concept of the woke, right, as a sort of
counter to how we would typically view the woke as being
of the left. You just go into that in a in a
bit of detail, but also particularly the the sort of
hoax exercise that you played out in order to verify your
hypothesis. I'll begin again with what I
said woke means, because if we're going to talk about woke,
right, we can understand that there's a left, a set of left
wing values that this woke operating system or worldview or
or belief structure could operate for and within.
But there could also be other values, more traditionalist
values or religious values or something else.
And so woke means that you have awoken to a belief that there is
a kind of grand conspiratorial power structure that oppresses
people like you to the benefit of other people who are keeping
their hands on power. And undoubtedly there's degrees
of truth to these claims, but the characterization, I would
say, is not true nor false, but misleading.
So the woke right has adopted this point of view, including
the grievance politics, the identity politics and so on,
saying that the world is now organized not actually as a
communist revolution, but rather in a grand conspiracy to oppress
white people, to oppress Christians, to oppress straight
people, to oppress men. And enough is enough.
If they say we're not allowed to hold those identities and be
proud of them, we will hold those identities and be proud of
them. Which is why I said it was
awkward to talk about the chauvinism, because there's a
very fine line between pride and chauvinism and yet another fine
line between chauvinism and supremacy.
And what I see the woke right doing in in this sense, and it's
very faction ated, there are lots of people that do this that
don't agree with one another. There are people whose
conspiracy is that the Jews are the problem and they run
everything and it's Jewish power and Zionism that needs to be
taken on. But then on the other hand,
there are people who say that there's a broad post war liberal
consensus into which Israel is merely one small piece, but a
consequential piece. But this post war liberal
consensus was actually designed to create a false conservatism,
what we call rhinos, what is exemplified by kind of the
Fabian Tories in the Britain. And you have this belief that
they created a false conservatism that actually
agrees with the left and that its primary purpose is to box
out what they call the true right.
But when you start listening to what they say, the true right
is, it's not just people who are skeptical of immigration.
It's not just people who are then I mean mass immigration,
obviously not, you know, bringing in and allowing skilled
people from other countries who want to come benefit your
country and who are net positives and just mean mass
immigration and illegal immigration, especially in our
country. So we're not just talking about
people skeptical of that. Or you start to see people
openly advocating that people that fascist dictators like
Pinochet and Francisco Franco and Spain and even openly Hitler
had the right ideas. It's it's a very hot topic.
I'm a great deal of X right now that Adolf Hitler knew how to
stop communists, which is a little bit funny since
communists ended up taking over East Germany and holding it for
the rest of the century, more or less after he died.
But they are, they're openly glorifying fascism.
And when I my reading of the fascists themselves indicates
that they're making the same mistake that the fascists made.
And that mistake that the fascists made was, well, the
methodologies of Marxism are very powerful and they work and
they are correct, but the conclusions about radical
egalitarianism are wrong. So where communism comes along
or Marxism comes along and says there's all this oppression, the
system is inherently oppressive. Oppressive power is how society
is structured. That's the woke belief.
Oppressive power is how society is structured, and that's bad.
So we should be able to take over and run everything because
we we're anti oppressors. That's Marxism, which of course
is a lie. They're going to oppress
everybody too. What the fascist response is to
say. Yeah, actually, oppressive power
is how society is structured, but it's also what kept things
together all this time. So we should go back to that and
in fact, do more of it than ever.
And so it's it's, you know, two sides of the same awful coin.
And the the results in both cases are equally or almost
equally bad. I don't know which one's
actually worse. I think communism's actually
worse, to be honest. But we shouldn't have to choose
between those when there are other choices on the table, like
free republics, where people have individual identities and
individual liberties that are secured and protected by their
government, which otherwise is operating at a light touch and
allows them to engage in unrestricted trade within the
boundaries of, you know, normal safety regulations and, you
know, some basic environmental regulations like we learned in
the early 20th century. So this is a very concerning
movement. I don't know how big it is.
It's bigger than I thought. I do know it's well funded and
some of that funding is coming from having convinced wealthy
people within the movement itself.
And some of that funding is undoubtedly coming from foreign
sources. The Chinese understand
dialectical warfare, so the CCP would understand that it it
benefits to create the conflict between a very radical left that
you fund in a very radical right that you also fund.
Russia has been famously funding kind of what they sometimes call
Buffalo run movements on the right wing politics scene
throughout Europe and America for years and years, which a
Buffalo run is when you get a movement to start believing
absolutely crazy things so that you can use that to discredit
them at the big reveal after several months after you get
many prominent members to sign on and say whatever the crazy
thing is, the earth is flat or whatever it is.
And then you come out and prove that it was all a hoax and they,
you know, all look like fools and they're now discredited in
the mainstream politic. Russia has been known to fund
Buffalo run type operations on on western right wing movements
for for years and years. And so there's a great deal of
hostile foreign money as certainly within the, the Jew
hating side of this, there is an awful lot of money from hostile
Islamic republics pouring in. Iran certainly.
Qatar very likely, I think certainly at this point, pouring
in to foment this woke right reaction to the woke left menace
that they happen to also be funding.
Because what they need is chaos and discord and civil breakdown
of our free societies in order that we would start to, you
know, demand tyrannical power to fix these problems as they are
increasingly generated. Or that politicians that have
tyrannical ambitions can take advantage of the chaos to
implement tyrannical policies. So I'm very concerned about the
rise of the woke right, which is timed almost exactly with the
the rise of a reaction that is actually proving effective.
Whether that's the election of Donald Trump or even preceding
it. We have come a long way.
Much further, I think then is healthy for the Communist
project in understanding that what we're facing is communism,
understanding how it works, understanding its manipulations,
understanding the importance of getting involved to do something
about it rather than hoping it blows over.
And I think we've become involved enough to thwart most
of their plans and most of our countries.
And the best way to divert that attention is to create this
toxic, radical movement on the right, tapping into people's
frustrations, tapping into their anger, tapping into the desire
to have catharsis and revenge for all of this injustice that
we've been suffering for for many years.
And the fear that we face for losing our country's, losing our
heritage, losing our lives, losing our our children's lives
or safety, they want to tap into that negative emotion and
channel it into an unproductive direction.
And I, I fear very much about this.
So you mentioned the hoax. I've been trying.
Actually going back to early 2021 is when I realized that
this movement was organizing and getting money behind it and
becoming an eventual threat. I was at a conference and many
people at some of the lunch tables I was sitting at, not
from the stage, were saying many of the same things that I've
just been talking about. And this was in January of 2021.
So, you know, four years ago, more or less.
And I came back so shocked by some of the things they were
saying, like, well, at least Hitler knew how to get rid of
communists. And it was was a quote from the
table at one lunch. I came back so alarmed, I called
my colleagues that I worked with and said, I'm think we are
getting close to the point where the right becomes a bigger
problem than the left. But it for the last several
months at least, I have become increasingly concerned watching
their activity rapidly rise. I think either in anticipation
of a Trump win that they would wish to infiltrate or in
anticipation of a Trump loss that they would wish to
capitalize and whip people to anger and and rash action.
I saw a lot of rising energy. So I decided to start speaking
up openly about it. And this is not gone well for
me. And they say that I'm a I'm
grifting and trying to get engagement and all this.
Actually, my engagement is down by almost 50%.
I have no outstanding speaking invitations any I I'm being
cancelled by these people very effectively for standing up to
them and pointing out that they exist.
And so I thought it would be a little bit helpful to clarify
what's going on and to test my hypothesis that they actually
are woke. So a few weeks ago I was on a
long flight. I was flying to Alaska and it
occurred I was preparing for a podcast I wanted to record about
the Communist Manifesto. And so I was reading the
Communist Manifesto and it occurred to me that the language
I was reading with marks railing on the in extolling the
proletariat sounds exactly like these woke right guys about how
they talk about this new Christian right in the new
right. They call themselves the
dissident right and how it's rising up and how angry they are
at classical liberalism and what they call the post war, post
World War 2 liberal consensus that the world has been forced
into to prevent the rise of fascism, which is what they
actually want is the rise of fascism.
And I said, wow, this is almost, you know, exactly the same
argument but for bourgeoisie and proletariat.
So I just did a little copy paste out of the Communist
Manifesto, swapped around the words, massaged the language,
sent it off to one of their leading publications, which is
called the American Reformer, which is a kind of middle of the
road. They're not particularly anti
Jews or anti Israel. They're kind of a middle of the
road, so-called Christian nationalist publication.
They're Protestant in their orientation, not Catholic.
That's a there's a whole thing with that that we don't have to
get into and they published it. I was rather surprised to to see
they published, you know, this very transparent rewrite of the
Communist Manifesto that maintains the logic but reverses
the, IT doesn't reverse. It reorients the, the targets of
of Marx's conflict theory, which are the bourgeoisie and
proletariat become classical liberalism versus the nuclear
Christian right. And not not only, and I say it's
very transparent. How transparent was it?
Well, they published it on their site.
And unbeknownst to me, they didn't tell me that they
published it on their site. I didn't know for 10 more days.
They published it on their site. And on the day it was published,
a commenter of their magazine left a comment saying this was
pulled directly from the Communist Manifesto with
extensive proof of the parallel language in the comments.
So it was so transparent. A commenter recognized it
immediately. And so they've published the
dialectical conflict Theory of Karl Marx for their own
conclusions. And their response to this,
other than, you know, viciously attacking me online, as one
would expect, is that they've changed the author.
I, I submitted it under a pseudonym, Marcus Carlson, which
is very close to Karl Marx. And it's now listed on their
website under my name instead with an editor's note.
And the editor's note includes the sentence that it is a
reasonable representation of some of new right thought, new
right ideas. I should say that's the exact
quote, a reasonable representation of some of new
right ideas. And so they've not only did they
publish this when they found out what it was, they've stood by it
and said, yes, this represents us.
And so now the most bizarre part of this for me, I mean, I knew
there would be at least some fools who stepped up and said,
well, Karl Marx was right about a lot of things.
This has become their main vector of defense is to say Karl
Marx was actually right about liberalism, Karl Marx was
actually right about capitalism. And it's very revealing because
a lot of people don't understand that they also want to abolish
capitalism. They want to replace it with GK
Chesterton's idea called distributism, where again,
there's some party that decides who gets what in society.
So it's just another kind of, you know, family friendly, I
guess, socialist model. And they not only have stood by
this, they're they're arguing that that Karl Marx was actually
a luminary that we should be looking to for his critiques of
liberalism and capitalism, although we should not adopt his
specific solutions, which I go back to the fascist mistake that
I mentioned earlier, Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, which I've
also read and rewrote for a leftist magazine some years ago.
And they accepted it. Actually a leftist social work
academic journal, peer reviewed journal, accepted a rewrite of
of Mein Kampf that I did some seven years ago.
Well, Mein Kampf, Hitler's explaining his, his, his, I
mean, it's, if you've never read it, it's a sprawling diary.
So he's explaining how he came to be where he was, had to think
what he thought. And what he wrote was that he
argued with Marxists and argued with Marxists and frustratedly
argued with Marxists until one day he decided to properly study
Marxism and he developed. He figured out that the formula
was to adopt the Marxist methodologies for what he called
his own firm convictions, which is exactly what they're doing
now. They're saying Karl Marx was a
great for his critique and his analysis, his rhetoric.
And I think my favorite comment was when Mike Cernovich said
Karl Marx was a great writer, which I think means he's never
read Karl Marx because he certainly was not a great
writer. He was a great writer.
He had great rhetoric. He had great demagoguery, I
guess. And he had in an excellent
critique of liberalism and capitalism, which is a
misreading of Marx. He did not have an excellent
critique of those and therefore we should use that, but we
should go toward our own fixed conclusions instead of the
communist conclusions. We shouldn't take the communist
solutions. We should take our new Christian
right solutions. So I was, I'm flabbergasted to
see that they just owned it and implicitly admit that they're
making the exact same mistake, exact same mistake that Hitler
made in in, in, in devising how he would organize National
Socialism as as a movement down to its demagoguery, its
propaganda and so on. It's a completely bizarre tale
and well worth reading your account of it on the Your New
Discourses website. It it also teases out that quite
like you say, many people have not read Marx, or at least have
really a very basic grasp only of Marxism.
And I'm sorry that we haven't got to it sooner, but I but
obviously want to talk about your film Beneath Sheep's
Clothing, which I think would sort of deal with exactly this
in, in much more specific terms. So just please provide a a sort
of snapshot of what it was that prompted you to to make a film
in the 1st place and what it is that the film encapsulates and
and and does for you and your audience.
Well, I mean, yeah, you said it. It's that people haven't read
Marx and they don't understand. Like one of the guys arguing
about this hoax said, oh, you could take a piece out of any,
you know, sufficiently long book and it, you could find something
anyone would agree with. That was his deflection.
But the Communist Manifesto, the Body chapters 1 and 2 are, are
13 pages long. It's not a long book.
I used six of the 13 pages. It's I used, you know, not quite
half, almost half of the Communist Manifesto.
As a matter of fact, it's a very short read, but people don't
know that. That was the point is the people
don't know that because they actually haven't read Marx.
Oh, the Communist Manifesto must be a very long book.
It's not a very long book. Capitals, a very long book, 1000
pages or some odd almost 700 pages, something like that,
depending on the book, but not the Communist Manifesto.
So what? We recognized me and Julie
Bailing, who wrote the book Albany Sheep's Clothing, upon
which the film is made, and our executive producer and
filmmaker. What we recognized is, you know,
the interviews like this are fantastic and they do a lot,
they reach a lot of people. They help a lot of people
understand and get people interested to find out more
Books are are fantastic. They they really lay out the
story. But reading takes a lot of time
and it's it's AII read for a living and have to struggle to
commit to reading another book. There's so many articles and
other things to read. There's so much else to do.
Sitting down to read a book is going to cost you, best case
scenario, one to three days of your working time to get
through. And it's it's a genuine, you
know, impediment. Articles are great, podcasts are
great. Everything's great.
But nothing tells the story and gets people's full engagement
and attention like a film, a documentary or other film.
And this film is going to run, you know, roughly an hour and a
half, give or take a few minutes because you want to keep
people's attention, don't want to drag it out.
And it's going to tell them the story in a visually compelling
way, ideally with a great soundtrack.
So they're really emotionally connected to it, engaged, paying
attention. And it becomes away with a with
a story told in a way that can't be told any other way in a
digestible form. People will sit down for an hour
and a half and watch a movie. They are much less less likely
to pick up a book or sit through a long interview or, or
something like that or a long podcast.
And so it it gives you a way to reach a mass audience with a
very compelling part of the story and actually a lot of very
good information very quickly. And so we knew that this would
be an important thing to build. Julie had our had the Julie
Bailing, who is the author and director of the film,
fortunately had run into this filmmaker and he had run into
her book and had wanted to build this film.
Then I got involved later after they contacted me and told me
that this was going on. And I, of course, wanted to be a
part of the project because of what I just explained.
So we made this movie to create a mass market appeal to what's
happening in the world. And the kind of the tagline of
Beneath Sheep's Clothing is it's not coming, it's here.
Meaning, you know, communism is here and.
It's very, I will admit, for a British audience, it's very
American. We start off and end with Ronald
Reagan, you know, and all this. But I think that the message
that that we chose is is very, very, very strong and compelling
from what Reagan has to say. It'll resonate.
But the idea was that in Soviet Julie in her research from both
when she did a, a, her, her, her a mission, a religious mission
to, to Russia just after the fall of the Soviet Union in the
90s. And then in her studies where
she did a double master's degree in Russian history and
literature and something else. It's her degree.
I don't know. And she realized that a lot of
the tactics that the Soviets had used in education and in
religion were being replicated in the United States and, and to
to bring communism to the US through a kind of a long March
through the institution's infiltration from the bottom up.
And so she wanted to document the parallels that she saw.
And so that's the book Beneath Sheep's Clothing that she wrote.
And then we move forward to make a film that would show those
parallels and explain the phenomenon in a way that's
really resonant with people. And everything I hear about the
film is that it's overwhelming, that it's blowing them away,
that it's amazing. Everybody needs to see it.
I sat and watched it in Louisiana at an event that we
did to show the film a few weeks ago and I was like, wow, this is
even better because I haven't watched it in several months.
I thought, wow, this is even better than I remember.
This really tells the story. So that was the point.
That's what the film is about. How has how have communist
tactics that were tried and true in Soviet Union made their and
also in People's Republic of China to a lesser degree for the
film? How have those made their way
into American religion and education?
And I think that because the programs are largely global, a
lot of them are UN coordinated. As a matter of fact, you'll find
extraordinary parallels in the British context.
And and it's just an eye opener. That's that's all I can really
conclude about it. That's a great synopsis and I
would really urge people to to go and watch it.
And I tell us they where can we find it?
Where can we watch it? Yeah, the if you remember the
name of the film, you can remember where to find it.
The film is called Beneath Sheep's Clothing and it is at
Beneath Sheep's Clothing dot movie.
And so it's pretty easy to find Beneath Sheep's Clothing dot
Movie, which I will warn use a lot of letters to type in a URL.
OK, well we'll make sure that goes into the notes below the
interview and also for people who are keen to follow up on
what they've learned today, where should they go with regard
to your website, social media, any any of that sort of thing?
My website isnewdiscourses.com That's, you know, like we're
having a discourse right now, but new ones, new discourses.com
and you'll find the article that we discussed about my hoax.
You'll find, I think they told me I'm at almost 600 hours of
podcast explaining various things that I've been learning
about, whether it's mostly a little bit about this woke
right, but overwhelmingly about the woke left and communism and
communist history. And you'll find articles and,
and videos and some other things.
There are lots of resources at newdiscourses.com.
I'm on social media at Conceptual James and I think I'm
on all of them, all the big ones, at least except for
Facebook. So don't look for me there.
They kicked me off forever for a joke.
And so that's how that works. But I'm primarily active on X at
Conceptual James and it's it's a wild ride if you join me there.
Perfect. Now I imagine a lot of people
will be joining you there. Also, I would encourage people
to listen back to the interview that James Last gave to UK
Column, which as I say, was in March 2023, and to the audience,
if you are in a position to support UK Column financially in
order that we can continue to bring interviews of this quality
to you, then please consider a membership or indeed a donation
at ukcolumn.org. And it just remains for me to
say, James, how much I've enjoyed talking to you and to
thank you very much indeed for joining me today.
Well, thank you so much. It was a real pleasure.
It's always nice to talk with you, so thanks for the
invitation.