Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / How the FAR-RIGHT is destroying the West from within, with dr. Nafeez Ahmed

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How the FAR-RIGHT is destroying the West from within, with dr. Nafeez Ahmed · The Smart Cookies podcast

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Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a transdisciplinary academic investigative journalist and system theorist
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who's also the author of the already best-selling book, a title that's fresh off the press,
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The Alt-Reich, the network war to destroy the West from within. Dr. Ahmed, welcome to
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the show.
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Thanks for having me.
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German distinction regarding the title of the book. No, I didn't pronounce Alt-Reich
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in a funny pretentious way. It is supposed to be Reich, right? Like the German Reich
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since the movement that you write about in the book has many far-right and straight-up
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Nazi underpinnings, which we'll discuss later on. But before we do, and since it's still
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pretty fresh, do you think that was a Nazi salute that we saw from Elon Musk at Trump's
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inauguration rally or can we chuck it up to some of his defenders claim? And I can't believe
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I'm even saying this, autism.
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So it's interesting because having written this book, which makes the case that there
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has been a undercurrent of Nazi eugenics influence on the right wing increasingly and the far-right.
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But I think the case I make is that this is increasingly mainstream and normalized. And
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that's something I think is pretty well documented. So it's kind of unbelievable to see what
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we saw. It's the inauguration in the United States and you have a senior official who
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some people are calling the co-president of the United States because of his massive influence.
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The first buddy, right?
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Yeah. And he does what by any standard appears to be not just one Nazi salute, but two Nazi
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salutes. I think people have actually analyzed the physical characteristics of what he did.
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I believe that what is clear is that what he actually did were Nazi salutes. We can
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always debate the intentionality and why he did those movements. But when you actually
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play back videos of Nazis who do Nazi salutes, he did exactly what they do. So the physical
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movements were perfectly mimicked, authentic traditional Nazi salute. And no wonder that
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actual neo-Nazis and far-right political activists were celebrating universally the wow, we can
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actually see that we've got this Nazi energy on the global stage in the sea of the American
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presidency. Fantastic. So I think that gives us an indication of that's what it looked
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like. And for us to point that out is not delusional. And I'm firmly of the belief
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that if someone shows you who they are, you believe them. So that's my take on it. But
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I think the other way to think about it is, well, I don't want to get into all this stuff
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about autism or all of that stuff. We're getting into strange territory there. Let's just look
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at what he's actually done. Now that he's bought X, what has he actually done on that
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platform? And again, the record speaks for itself. He has amplified and enabled and re-enacted
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neo-Nazi accounts and websites. He brought back into activity anti-Semitic accounts,
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Holocaust denial accounts, neo-Nazi accounts, white supremacist accounts. Even when it came
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to the far right riots in Britain that happened last year, people who were egging those riots
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on, people like Paul Golding, who is a former leader in the BNP, the British National Party,
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which is a notorious neo-Nazi group, Holocaust denying, anti-Semitic. This group is well
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known and yet Paul Golding was amplified by Elon Musk. Elon Musk has actually come out
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and commented on and amplified anti-Semitic comments. There was one famous, I mean, it
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became famous because people were reporting on it, but there was a quite widely read comment
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posted by an anti-Semitic account saying that the Jews are involved in a conspiracy to import
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immigrants at scale into the West and this is a threat to the white race. He replied
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to that and he said that this is actually, I can't remember the exact words he used,
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but he endorsed the tweet. You just have to judge that. Look at Nick Fuentes, another
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notorious far right activist, Holocaust denier, misogynist. Just find all the pejoratives
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you can, add them all up and I think he is them. He was allowed back onto Twitter. He's
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been amplified and he was actually celebrating the Nazi salutes that Elon Musk appeared to
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do. I don't actually care whether he knowingly did a Nazi salute or didn't. What is absolutely
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clear though is that Elon Musk has been following and amplifying neo-Nazi accounts. He's been
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reading this material. I wouldn't be surprised if he's been radicalizing himself by his
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own platform and found it within himself that doing that movement just made perfect sense.
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Whether he personally decided that this was a Nazi salute or didn't decide it was a Nazi
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was actually besides the point. I'm more concerned about the fact that no one is talking
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about how he has been and this platform has been weaponizing neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic
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sentiment ever since Elon Musk purchased it. This is the real issue. Judging a person by
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their actions, Elon Musk is a Nazi sympathizer. There's no other way to put it. The Nazi
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salute that he did or apparently did fits into that pattern. I just wonder where are
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we where this is a debate that we have to have. This is just a really strange place
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for us to be.
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It doesn't help that people are trying to explain it away by saying also that it was
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a Roman salute. Of course, the Nazi salute was inspired by the Roman salute. I don't
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know what we did there. Also, it didn't help that after his saluting, he virtually appeared
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at the AfD conference and gave a speech there. Within this context, it's exactly like you
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said, if people show you who they are, you better believe them.
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Yeah, absolutely. The Roman salute thing is, if you look it up, the Roman salute itself
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is kind of an invention. There was no actual Roman salute. It's got no historical basis.
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It's a modern thing that was associated with modern fascism. Again, it's just like the
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question we need to ask is that Elon Musk is not a stupid person. We all agree that.
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We all know that. Why did he choose to do that? Why did he choose to make an action
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at this critical time, which sent a signal to neo-Nazis everywhere?
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Then, when he didn't even deny it, he actually just mocked the Holocaust. He made Holocaust
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jokes using the names of Nazi war criminals like Goebbels and Himmler and made some jokes
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about it. It's all a big joke. To the point that the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League,
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which tried to call for calm and said, look, maybe these are not Nazi salutes. Even they
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came out and said, whoa, why are you making jokes about the Holocaust? This is not something
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to joke about. It's obvious that this guy holds these issues in contempt. Just look
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at what has happened now with Trump's executive orders and his war on DEI and diversity, equity,
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and inclusion. One of the things they've done is they've banned people in the military
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and I think possibly other parts of the government from participating and celebrating Holocaust
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Memorial Day as part of a whole raft of other things. This is what we're up against. The
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experiences of a minority, like the Jewish minority, there's other things that they've
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got. They've also attacked Martin Luther King's Day and things like that. The experiences
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of minorities like black communities, Jewish minorities, these historical experiences are
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not important anymore. That's the message that we're hearing. Why would you not consider
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those important? Why does America being great again have to involve not thinking about the
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Holocaust and not remembering what happened to millions of black people who were enslaved?
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It's just bizarre and indefensible and makes no sense.
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All right, back to your book, which is, I'm not going to lie, quite a dark and heavy,
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if necessary, read. Speaking of what you term as the alt-reich, I was surprised that ideologically
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the whole thing didn't start with the Nazis, but even earlier, and you mentioned it already,
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with eugenics in the US, which predated even the Nazis. Could you give us a breakdown of
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these infamous beginnings?
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The book starts in the 1920s, 1930s. We saw that these ideas about eugenics, which was
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this pseudoscience, at the time it was considered high science, but we now know that it scientifically
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doesn't really stand up. At that time, this was a very common way of seeing the world.
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Obviously, it was linked up with historical colonization and the very, very hierarchical
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structures of power that existed at the time. Eugenics was really seen as a way of making
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sense of that. It justified those hierarchical power structures. It justified the way in
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which colonization worked. Essentially, it was the belief that there was an inherent
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kind of biological structure to humanity and that really there wasn't one human race in
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a way. There wasn't one human species. Actually, there were multiple different races. These
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races existed according to eugenics in this kind of biological hierarchy. Of course, the
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science of genetics was emerging at this time and began to feed into this idea that they
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were there. There was this hierarchy and of course, white people were seen as the pinnacle
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of this hierarchy. Black people largely at the bottom. I think there were some debates
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about rich ethnicities might have been in the middle and it could be moved around sometimes.
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But generally, that hierarchy was pretty much the way people saw the world. This predated
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the rise of the Nazis, but also obviously influenced them heavily. I think what the
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book shows is that there was this really alarming cross communication between American eugenicists
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in the 30s who were really pushing forward this new, what they felt was a very exciting
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frontier in science about scientific racism. They were communicating with Nazi eugenicists
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and they were sharing ideas. Even before the Nazis came into government, these ideas were
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swirling around. In fact, the Nazi eugenicists took a lot of inspiration from the Americans.
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The things that were even on a legislative level, there were laws that were being passed
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on immigration, on dealing with black people, sterilization laws, really horrific racial
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laws. Segregation obviously was already there. The Nazis were looking at this and saying,
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this is actually great stuff. We should be doing this here in Germany. A lot of those
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ideas were imported into Nazi Germany and actually took shape when the Nazi government
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was formed. They were implemented in different ways by the Nazi government. In turn, the
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American eugenicists were looking at what was going on in Nazi Germany and saying, wow,
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these guys are implementing these policies on an industrial scale with huge, huge kind
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of efficacy. We should do the same here. They then imported the things back to America and
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said, look, let's pass laws in Congress. Let's have sterilization laws here. Let's
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overcharge the anti-immigrant legislation and all this kind of stuff. It became a bit
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of a vicious cycle in a way, and they fueled each other very much so. Many people aren't
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aware of that. From the very beginning, there was this dialogue going on between the American
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right wing and this was the mainstream right wing at that time and Nazi Germany.
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That was before the Second World War. Then after the Second World War, it wasn't all
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that popular going around proclaiming your race to be superior to others. However, as
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you detail in the book, that didn't mean that these kind of folks didn't try exerting their
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influence in other ways, sometimes in the guise of so-called scientific inquiry. One
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of the most revered works that falls under the banner of pretty much scientific racism
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appeared in 1994. There was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray in which he linked race
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and intelligence with predictable results, white people being the most intelligent than
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everyone else. Now, even though the book has been refuted a million times by a number of
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serious scholars, its appeal among the radical right endures to this day. Why is that?
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This was a really interesting exercise and gives us a sense of why and how we've arrived
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at where we are today. As you said, right after the Second World War, obviously to go
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around in the West saying you're a Nazi was hardly, you wouldn't make many friends at
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parties put it that way. You had to change your approach. In fact, what we saw happening
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was a whole bunch of Nazi sympathizers going around actually saying we're not Nazis and
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we hate Nazis. This became the defining dynamic of the far right actually as it evolved, in
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that increasingly far right activists were masquerading as anti-Nazi and tried to put
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themselves forward as we are the most anti-Nazi people ever in the world despite harbouring
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these very traditional anti-Semitic, racist, eugenics ideas.
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Now, Charles Murray really exemplifies this. He came along in the 1990s, his book The Bell
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Curve was based on the key theories that he put forward about scientific racism were all
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based on research that was funded by the Pioneer Fund. Now, the Pioneer Fund was a Nazi foundation
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that was established in the 1930s before the Second World War in New York. It was one of
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the key conduits between the American right, American eugenicists and Nazi eugenicists and
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it maintained very close connections with Hitler's officials. In fact, there was a
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lot of research sharing going on and so on and so forth.
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The Pioneer Fund continued to exist after the Second World War and one of the things
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that they started doing was funding research to support their theories of scientific racism
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and giving grants to mainstream American universities. Now, all of this was kind of happening underground,
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like it wasn't very well known, but it didn't have a huge amount of visibility. But even
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as they were doing that, they began to shift their direction towards really two things,
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countering communism because that was the next big enemy on the horizon that you could
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focus on and using that to counter the civil rights movement. So that's why we see that
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there was this intersection. Even at the time, we saw that many of the Republicans were campaigning
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against civil rights on the basis that the entire civil rights campaign was essentially
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a left-wing communist conspiracy to undermine America, infiltrate American society, destroy
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national security from within using race and using racial equality and things like that.
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So these foundations, these ideas, which nowadays we hear about wokeism and culture wars, the
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seeds of this were already there, it was already happening in the 1960s. So fast forward to
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Charles Murray, he writes, he publishes this book in 1994 called The Bell Curve. When you
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read his book, it really gives away the approach. He praises Henry Laughlin, who was one of
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the early directors of the Pioneer Fund and an actual Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite.
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But in this book, he praises him, but he never refers to him as a Nazi, he never acknowledges
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his anti-Semitism, never acknowledges the anti-Semitic roots of all of this research,
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instead just repackages it, talks about it as if he's putting forward this very objective
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science. The Bell Curve laid the foundations for this idea. What happened then was quite
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extraordinary. Charles Murray ended up finding himself in all sorts of mainstream right-wing
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spaces pushing forward these ideas. And on the back of this eugenics model, he basically
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said that welfare, welfare economics of any kind, where it's believed that the state
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should have some responsibility for disadvantaged citizens, this should be dispensed with. And
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the reason it should be dispensed with is because the stratification of society is not
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due to the system, it's due to biology. Biology and genetics, primarily, along with
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some environmental factors, but has created this, what he called this cognitive stratification
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of society. So in other words, because there are these racial hierarchies in intelligence,
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that is why we have inequalities, that is why we have predominantly poor people are
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black and ethnic and maybe Muslim and all the rest of it. And that is why society has
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these structures. So rather than throwing money at these people, we should be actually
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trying to contain them, manage them, and really just depopulate them, really, reduce their
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numbers in some way. And that was essentially the political program that he was offering.
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And this made a lot of sense to the traditional right-wing. It was like, well, actually, that
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makes sense. We want to have deregulated states, deregulated economies. We want freedom for
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capital. We don't want to be investing too much money in all of this stuff. And we want
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to, we think these existing structures as they exist should really be maintained. And
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we should be putting more money into the productive classes rather than into these unproductive
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kind of areas. So that made a lot of sense. And so Charles Murray ended up influencing
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Reaganomics. His ideas even influenced Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton implemented welfare
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regulation on the basis of Charles Murray's ideas. Charles Murray was flown over to the
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UK by Rupert Murdoch. He wrote some articles in the Sunday Times about the underclass in
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Britain and the problem of the underclass. These ideas were shared with the Institute
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for Economic Affairs, which was one of the biggest right-wing think tanks in the UK.
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Charles Murray also became very, very prominent in calling for Britain to leave the European
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Union most recently. Charles Murray also met number 10. He had a bunch of meetings with
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Margaret Thatcher, number 10 policy officials, the finance departments, the treasury. He
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was a darling of the British establishment, of the American right-wing establishment.
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And since then, his ideas have kind of seeped into mainstream discourse and have kind of
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by stealth have smuggled in this eugenics ideology. So a lot of people don't realize
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that the very strong neoliberal, neoclassical economic theories that we have are kind of
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married to this kind of eugenics undertones and they work together and they reinforce
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each other.
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Makes sense. These days, it's kind of exhausting to keep up with these lads. Well, it's mostly
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lads but not exclusively because they seem to be inventing kind of like a new grievance,
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a new conspiracy theory every week, even though these theories, as they call them, theories
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are usually totally contradicting each other. Now, one of the most popular ones is the so-called
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great replacement theory, which until I read your book, I honestly never even heard of.
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Could you tell us what that's supposed to be?
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Sure, of course. So the great replacement theory is an increasingly popular theory that's
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been put out by a number of far-right writers. You can trace it back to many, many different
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kind of writers in America, in Europe, but it kind of took on that formal, it got its
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name from someone called Renaud Camus, I believe his name is. He's a French author and he actually
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used that specific term, the great replacement. And there's this idea that essentially there's
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some sort of grand conspiracy from outside. It might be driven by Islamists. It might
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be driven by European Union. It might be driven by European kind of a cabal of evil kind of
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lefties and liberals. But somehow there's this conspiracy to basically import millions
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of migrants largely from the Muslim world, but overwhelmingly dark-skinned into Europe
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to replace white people. And it's, I mean, obviously on his face, when you say like that,
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you're kind of thinking, what are you talking about? And so that's the general idea that
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that's the fundamental channels that we have. Now this idea was fringe maybe say 15 years
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ago, but has increasingly become normalized. And it's actually inspired terrorist attacks.
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So remember the 2011 mass murder of Norwegians by Anders Breivik, the convicted neo-Nazi
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terrorist, white supremacist. Now he was someone who was really inspired by this idea of a
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great replacement. And he referred to the theory in his manifesto. And when journalists
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were analyzing that manifesto, they realized that the kind of the ingredients of this idea
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were not just contained to these fringe elements, but they were being promoted by people in
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the United States, people like Robert Spencer, who is a very anti-Muslim theologian. He's
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been talking about ideas like this. Daniel Pipes, who is a kind of a national security
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type scholar, but considers himself a scholar of the Middle East, an expert in the Middle
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East. He runs this thing called the Middle East Forum. There's a bunch of these different
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people in America, but also being picked up in the UK and parts of Europe by different
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elements. Now the funny thing about the great replacement theory is that it's obviously
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there's no evidence whatsoever that there's any conspiracy of such kind taking place.
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There's no evidence whatsoever that there's an influx on this scale even happening. We
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do know that there have been large influxes of immigrants that happened at specific times.
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For instance, in the wake of the Syria war, there was obviously this collapse of Syria.
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We had multiple simultaneous theaters, Iraq, Syria, just on the back of the Arab Spring
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chaos as well. There was many parts of the region were in chaos. At that time, most of
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the people who were coming to Europe's shores were actually coming from the Syria conflict.
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There was something like a million people, I think, at some point in one year who were
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coming. We know that there is an issue going on here, but we can clearly trace that back
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to major geopolitical shifts rather than some sort of attempt to replace white people. I
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think what they've done is they've said this immigration thing is also working as
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a part of a plan to increase the population of these migrants inside the Europe so that
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we can take over. I think when you actually look at the statistics on that, people are
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saying even recently there's been stuff coming out from GB News here in the UK, for
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instance, which is a right-wing broadcaster, putting out these ideas. They're saying
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stuff like Muslims are going to take over the British population. They're going to
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potentially become 50% of the population or even dominate the population within the next
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20 to 30 years. All of this inflammatory stuff. All the demographic experts who are looking
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at this are saying, look, yes, there is going to be population growth of specifically the
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Muslim population if we're going to look specifically there. It's something like maybe it will
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rise by about 10% over the next 30, 40 years or something like that. Yes, there is a population
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rise, but it's nothing like what is being claimed. There's obviously other populations
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which are also growing. Is this something that as societies we should be looking at?
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Should we be having policies about this? Should we be thinking about it, making good decisions?
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Absolutely. Should we be discussing immigration laws and how to manage immigration? Absolutely.
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No one is saying don't talk about these things, don't think about how to manage these issues
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as our society. Is there a catastrophic great replacement going on? No, this is total bullshit.
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But yes, this has become increasingly normal mainstream. The Trump administration or so
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many of people in the Trump administration believe this and have been saying this. It's
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how they got into power. They used this narrative to get into power. They were saying that in
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the swing states in America, they were saying the Democrats are importing immigrants and
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they're going to get voting rights and all of this stuff. It was all completely false.
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If you look at the data on immigration to all those swing states, immigration has been
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either the same or actually declining for the data that we have over a four-year period,
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the last kind of data that we've got. What we have is a very deliberate effort to weaponize
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these ideas, to fear monger in order to control us and actually to compel populations to move
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in a certain direction. Who's supposed to be leading this incredible operation? Is it
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like a revolving door of villains like George Soros or is it specific populations? It's
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all sorts of things. It's everybody. That's what's interesting. You've got this interesting
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conspiracy between people like George Soros, people who's painted as, obviously he's
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ethically Jewish, so the antisemitic undertones are there. He's painted as part of this globalist
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conspiracy to do this. You've got the European Union and the liberal establishment, European
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Union governments are doing this. At the same time, it's Islamists, so Islamists, Sharia
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law-toting totalitarians are also doing this. Somehow, you've got the Jews, lefty Jews and
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liberals and of course, the liberals who want us to be LGBTQ+, they want us to be gender
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fluid and they want us to be trans. All of those guys are working in cahoots with the
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totalitarian gay-hating Islamists who want to destroy democracy. They're all working
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with the European Union. All of this is happening and they're all part of the same conspiracy
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and they're all trying to come and send these Islamists in to replace white people because
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what else is there to do? Just replace white people. That's it. That just makes perfect
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sense. There's no actual logic to this idea. It's just crazy.
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Yeah, that's a really tight story. No holes there. All of this stuff listening to you,
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the great replacement theory and then you also have cultural Marxism, the Muslim Brotherhood
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running things, Jewish control. It's such an obvious dumpster fire of nonsensical racist
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paranoia. However, what I do want to know is what's the ideological base under all of this,
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the underpinning that's holding all of these wacky strands together?
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It's important to be clear that there isn't any unifying heterogeneous single ideology
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that's driving this. What we have is an evolving movement and an evolving network. I should
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say there isn't a homogeneous ideology. The movement in the network is very heterogeneous,
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which essentially means it's quite diverse. People disagree with each other a lot. They
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emphasize different things. It's important to look at this from a network point of view
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of rather than seeing it as some sort of conspiracy driven by one like Kabal. What I think has
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happened is on the one hand, you have a core nexus of Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists
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who right from day one really bought the Nazi ideology and wanted to export it. They themselves
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have also evolved. They've gone through their own process adapting their ideas. Fundamentally,
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the core of it is still very similar. We can see that core when we look at the bell curve.
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It gives us that sense of there's cognitive stratification, eugenics, there's a hierarchy,
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there's a racial biological hierarchy. That ideology, these guys have been making a deliberate
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effort to attempt to bring that ideology into mainstream spaces. They have been trying to
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indoctrinate people. They have been trying to radicalize people and they have had some
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success. What's happened is that they've been moving into these political spaces, whether
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it's political parties, whether it's institutions and think tanks and laundering their ideas.
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As they've been doing that, they've had mixed success. Some people have gravitated to these
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ideas and taken them on. They don't necessarily know the Nazi origins of the ideas, but they've
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said it makes sense to me that there is a biological stratification of society. Now
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I believe that. They'll believe that they won't realize that this is scientifically ridiculous
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and not grounded in anything, but originating from Nazi ideology. They won't even necessarily
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know that many of the people who've been pushing these ideas have these Nazi connections. They
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won't realize that some of these people actually work with the Nazi Pioneer Fund, which still
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exists today and in fact has now been rehabilitated. It has a new name. It's called the Human
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Diversity Foundation. They think humans are diverse and there's multiple human races,
35:12
essentially. It's interesting that they use that language. They've had that rehabilitation
35:19
process and there are people who are intersecting with that network still. They have connections
35:23
with that network and they're listening to their ideas. People who have taken on those
35:28
ideas, some of them might know that there is this white supremacist Nazi element to
35:34
it and some of them might not. In a way, that's useful because many of those who don't know
35:39
will continue to write about it. They'll continue to push these ideas and push the
35:44
consequences of those ideas in different forums. The more it gets pushed out, the less obvious
35:52
it is. There is this kind of link. There's this kind of fundamental, logical, and intellectual
35:59
framing that originates in eugenics ideology. They'll just take the remnants of it. The
36:04
remnants of it are, if we believe that, then surely we shouldn't have immigration of
36:10
inferior people to this country. Because the framing becomes, let's frame it in terms
36:16
of culture. That's where you get the tactical shift. You get the Nigel Farages of the world
36:21
and Nigel Farage, who is head of the Reform Party, head of one of the main right-wing
36:27
parties in the UK. Many would say they're very far right. There's Nick Griffin from
36:32
the BNP party. Of course, you have others as well like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands,
36:41
Marina Le Pen in France, the Austrian FPO. All these different parties that got slightly
36:49
different approaches. But they've converted this idea that there's a cultural problem
36:56
of Muslims. Sometimes they'll talk about the ethnic problem. Wilders will come out
37:01
and say, there's too many Moroccans. They don't have a problem with ethnic Moroccans.
37:06
When he's pushed, you'll say, well, it's the Muslim ideology that they bring in. It's
37:11
the Quran, which you ban the Quran. He'll focus on religion. But what they've done
37:15
by framing it as it's a cultural and religious issue, they try to escape the strictures of
37:22
anti-racist legislation and try to escape being labeled as racist. But what they're
37:28
actually saying is that these groups of inferior people out there who are biologically race
37:34
kind of inferior in some way, and that's consistent anyway, even if those guys don't believe
37:39
that it's consistent and it's been pushed forward by more eugenics ideology. So you've
37:45
got this idea that all those guys are inferior. Well, how does that inferiority manifest?
37:49
Well, it manifests civilizationally in these regressive cultures, regressive values, regressive
37:54
ideas. That's why they're all terrible. So we can't have them here. So we don't have
37:59
any soul searching about, well, what were the impacts of the way in which the global
38:06
system evolved? Why are there these deep seated structural kind of, you know, kind of ruptures
38:14
between the global north and the global south or the west and the east? What explains those
38:20
things? It's much easier for these guys to say, oh, that's just because they're just
38:26
them and they're just terrible. They're just bad. They're just inferior in the way that
38:30
they are. It's their culture. It's their ideas. It's their biology, whatever it is, it's just
38:35
them. Rather than saying maybe colonization does have a role to play. And I think a nuanced
38:46
analysis would say of course that there are issues in these countries which people in
38:53
those countries have to take responsibility as well for things that are going on in those
38:56
countries. It's not right to say everything is the fault of the west or everything is
39:00
the fault of Europe, but a nuanced conversation will acknowledge that history has consequences
39:08
and that there were these big structural realities that created these dynamics that made it much
39:13
more likely that with lack of resources, lack of access, very deeply unequal systems of
39:19
exchange that that did leave countries, many countries in Africa, the impact of slavery
39:24
and so forth. Of course, it left them in a very, very disadvantaged position, which meant
39:29
that most nefarious people and corrupt people have had a chance to kind of exploit the system.
39:37
Of course, many Western governments and institutions have been complicit as well in that. I mean,
39:42
this is not controversial. So I think that the reality is that what these people are
39:50
doing is trying to avoid engaging in that complexity and just simplify it and say the
39:56
problem is just them out there and that's what we have to deal with.
40:00
The surprising twist for a movement or a network that keeps alleging shadowy control literally
40:05
behind every fart is the fact that most of these think tanks and organizations are funded
40:11
and spearheaded by a bunch of notable billionaires, usually quite openly. So not exactly a popular
40:18
peasant revolt, all this, is it?
40:21
Yes, exactly. It's a really absolutely great point. Just follow the money is the way I
40:27
would put it. Have a look at the think tanks, have a look at the institutions that are putting
40:33
this out. I would urge people to take a step back and say, wait a minute, I'm reading
40:39
this in the Telegraph. Who owns the Telegraph? I'm reading this in the Daily Mail. Who owns
40:45
the Daily Mail? I'm reading this, I'm watching this on GB News. Who owns GB News? GB News,
40:52
by the way, is owned by and was set up and founded by a guy called Christopher Chandler,
40:57
who's a billionaire who made his fortune from basically helping to save Gazprom, Russia's
41:05
state-owned energy company from collapse back in the decades ago and worked very closely
41:11
with senior Russian officials, including one of Putin's closest advisors today. So who
41:21
is this guy? What's going on? If we look at the institutions that are pummeling this
41:26
stuff out that I've mentioned, look at the Heritage Foundation, look at the Conservative
41:32
Washington think tank, look at the Institute for Economic Affairs, look at the Atlas Network,
41:37
this network of 500 odd free market think tanks all over the world putting forward these
41:44
sorts of ideas. Who funds them? The Koch industries, that's just one. Fossil fuel, you've got
41:56
all of these, the Mellon industries, they were a big banking industrial family. You've
42:03
got all of the major philanthropic organizations that are financing these groups come from
42:11
largely billionaire families in the United States that have made most of their money
42:16
out of the fact that they own and control some of the most important industries in America.
42:23
These are often fossil fuel industries, automotive industries, even some of the manufacturing
42:30
industries and so on and so forth. Now increasingly, what's come into that space and made it even
42:36
more disruptive is the technology oligarchy. The people who have made the most recent money,
42:43
the tech platforms are Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, of course, Peter Thiel.
42:48
Now a lot of these folks, Mark Androsine, a lot of these folks who are in technology,
42:54
they own the big platforms and things like that, these guys are now massive players on
43:01
a similar level to the other big oligarchy that we had in fossil fuels and things like
43:06
that. These guys are now pouring money also, not just into those think tanks, but into
43:13
many other initiatives. Speaking of billionaires, the darling champion
43:20
of the far right right now is of course Donald Trump yet again. In the book you detail how
43:25
in the middle of the resurgence of these ideas, again in 2010s, one of the most successful
43:30
propagandists of the alt-right, Steve Bannon, who was actively looking for a suitable presidential
43:36
candidate at the time. They were looking for an outsider that would propel the movement
43:42
into the mainstream and then he obviously found him. But I'm curious as to why do you
43:46
think they went with this extremely unpleasant former reality TV show star who as Scottish
43:54
comedian Frankie Boyle once put it, looks like someone playing a president in a porno.
44:00
I mean, what did they see in Trump? Yeah, this is a good question. And I think
44:06
this speaks to, in a way, the effectiveness of the analytical techniques using information
44:15
tools that the right wing and the far right are now using. The first thing that informed
44:26
their decision to go for Trump was polling, which was very simple really. But there was
44:34
some polling that was done which showed that both Americans, both Democrat and Republican
44:44
were extremely disillusioned and wanted an outsider candidate to come in and shake things
44:52
up. So at that point, Steve Bannon and the Mercer's, who actually, as I reveal in my
45:00
book, the David Horowitz Freedom Center annual restoration weekend, which is a far right
45:06
gathering that's been taking place for many years. And David Horowitz, if listeners are
45:12
not aware, is a very well known far right anti-black activist. He's actually extremely
45:21
racist, constantly talking about black people in generalized terms, being terrible and taking
45:28
over things and all of this stuff. So in any case, they did this polling and Steve Bannon
45:38
was already aware of Donald Trump at the time. And presumably, they looked at who he was,
45:51
I think, and the fact that he had this already interesting popularity at that time. He was
46:00
quite well known, he was on TV, he was entertaining. And people didn't really know what his political
46:08
views were that much at the time. He felt like this could be an empty vessel situation.
46:13
We can push him in the direction we want. And I think they realized that there was an
46:17
opportunity to resonate specifically with the disenfranchised elements of the Republican
46:23
base and also to pull people who were traditionally voting Democrats into that by weaponizing
46:33
sentiment. And that's where the role of things like Cambridge Analytica came in. Cambridge
46:39
Analytica, which was the very well known tech profiling analytics platform set up by Bannon
46:48
with funding from the Mursers. They set up in America, they also set up in London. And
46:55
they essentially created profiles of voters, both in the UK in relation to Brexit and also
47:03
in the US, you know, like something like 10s of millions of American voters on Facebook
47:10
and developed a way of targeting them according to their emotional state of being. So this
47:16
is quite a sophisticated operation. We don't know, we can't empirically prove how successful
47:23
or not successful that approach was because the data is just opaque. I think it's inherently
47:29
impossible to prove really what actually happened. We just don't know. But what we do know is
47:35
that those techniques were used and clearly they were used with considerable success.
47:43
They used this to inform a new form of what I might say, you might call it information
47:48
warfare where you're targeting specific individuals across populations to compel them to make
47:57
political decisions in a certain direction. And a lot of the techniques they were using,
48:01
we're now seeing these, you know, after Cambridge Analytica collapsed, those techniques have
48:05
become widely used everywhere. And now we're seeing them used on X by Elon Musk quite openly
48:15
on a grand scale. And we've seen there's been studies which have looked at the way
48:21
and which things have worked on X. And they've found that there's been a major algorithmic
48:28
shift, you know, that all the evidence points to a major algorithmic shift. So X has now
48:33
become kind of a political tool of information warfare and is now being used to kind of just
48:39
weaponize outrage. And I think that's been the strategy so far is to weaponize outrage
48:44
specifically to target, you know, these different sectors of the population that they think
48:51
are going to resonate with a right wing and a far right agenda.
48:57
Do you think that the billionaires who are running this charade who are funding all of
49:00
these think tanks are just cynically playing the game, so to speak, so promoting these
49:05
narratives to further destroy the power of the state and push for deregulation just to
49:09
line their pockets further? Or do they actually believe some of this stuff?
49:14
So I guess what I'm asking is, at the end of the day, is it all about money?
49:18
So it's difficult to tell. I mean, what we can see is that there's been a consistent
49:23
pattern of these ideas becoming more mainstream and very powerful people intersecting with
49:31
them and kind of amplifying them. So, you know, Elon Musk, for instance, we've already
49:37
talked about how he's been weaponizing neo-Nazi accounts. And as part of that, he's also
49:45
been amplifying directly, you know, accounts which are promoting scientific racism. He's
49:51
been commenting on them. He's been signal boosting them. That might suggest on his face
49:58
that he believes them. He actually thinks these ideas are true.
50:01
Peter Thiel has also been intersecting with these ideas. So, for instance, we know that
50:08
he has flown out kind of pro-Eugenicist far-right activists who are linked to Mankind Quarterly,
50:19
which is a journal that was published by the Nazi-Aligned Pioneer Fund. There's been
50:26
incredible reports. Max Chafkin, the Bloomberg reporter, in his biography of Peter Thiel,
50:33
wrote that Peter Thiel has funded, gave seed funding to a publication called Quillette.
50:42
And Quillette is widely recognized as an attempt to repackage discredited race science in a
50:51
new way and to kind of get it more amplified. So we see these intersections there. The question,
50:59
of course, is do they really believe those specific ideas or are they just using these
51:03
ideas to divide and rule? And I think for us, ultimately, we don't know the answer
51:08
to that, but I think we have to just take things at face value to some extent. I think
51:13
my concern is that the more that you keep kind of finding yourselves entertaining these
51:19
ideas, the more you're going to end up essentially beginning to believe them and the more they
51:27
become mainstream in your mind. So that's the danger is that you might start playing
51:34
with these ideas and weaponizing them and using them to divide and rule populations,
51:39
but then more and more people start believing them. And it gets to a point where you start
51:43
believing the same things that you're actually promoting.
51:46
What do you think is the ultimate aim of the Alt-Right?
51:50
So there's lots of different aims amongst different groups of people in the Alt-Right.
51:58
They have different agendas. Some of them are very focused on wanting to deregulate
52:02
capital, which is much more aligned with some of what the technology guys want. Technology
52:07
guys are very concerned about all these efforts to regulate the tech platforms. They don't
52:13
want to be told that you need to worry about harms and have fact checking and stuff like
52:20
that. So that's one kind of obvious thing. If you're looking at other side, other side,
52:27
other kind of elements of it might be focused on, for instance, fossil fuels. We want to
52:36
keep fossil fuels going. We don't want to have this clean energy stuff. But that's just
52:40
to give an example. We have different elements looking at different things. Other people
52:42
are focused on the transgender debate. The thing that really motivates them is transgender.
52:47
That's the thing that we have to worry about. For other people, it's abortion. We have to
52:52
focus on that. But what's increasingly uniting these people is the shared ideologies that
52:58
are emerging. So more and more people who are having these different agendas, they're
53:04
latching onto the great replacement view. They're finding that that's the kind of
53:09
a shared way of seeing the challenge. All of these different views begin to kind of
53:15
cohere around the idea, also the cultural Marxism view, the idea that there are these
53:21
liberal left-wing conspiracies often run by Jewish people or Jewish-linked institutions.
53:27
But often they will take out, because they don't want to be labeled anti-Semite, they'll
53:32
take out the Jewish part and say, oh, it's just liberal. They're fighting cultural wars
53:36
to destroy Western civilization as it stands. That kind of thing. So I think that's the
53:44
problem is that they're all kind of cohereing. But I think that where that shared ideology
53:51
begins to land in terms of one singular goal that I think they've begun to converge on
53:55
is the simple idea that democracy in its current form, liberal democracy in its current form,
54:01
is over and is the problem and needs to be taken down and totally re-engineered in some
54:07
way. And they're moving toward this idea that we need a much more authoritarian political
54:13
structure in power and that that is the solution.
54:16
Fantastic. With Trump's decisive victory, the far right is riding high at the moment.
54:21
However, some cracks within MAGA did appear almost immediately after his inauguration,
54:25
notably the split between Elon Musk and the hardcore MAGA supporters when it comes to
54:29
visas for foreign tech workers. Do you think this is an early taste of the things to come?
54:36
Well, as I said, because the ultra-right is very heterogeneous, because there are different
54:43
views and different approaches, we're going to increasingly see as they attempt to implement
54:48
their agenda, they're going to create all of these conflicts. They're going to create
54:52
all of these fractures. Those fissures and fractures are going to increasingly worsen.
54:59
And so here we have an opportunity to leverage that, to fight back and also to expose what
55:07
these people really believe. So I think that's going to be a thing that we're going to see
55:11
in the future. With this strange conflict that emerged between Musk and Bannon, they're
55:18
arguing over the visa thing. So again, it was so weird. Elon Musk, you could see the
55:24
eugenics thinking in his ideas where he was like, we're going to use these visas to bring
55:29
in more productive workers from foreign workers, because American workers are retarded. Someone
55:40
wrote this and he basically agreed with it. American workers are retarded and you can't
55:46
train retarded people to be not retarded. And that's a very eugenics idea that cognizant
55:54
people, cognitively, if you're inferior and you don't have what it takes, that's it. That's
55:58
just who you are. That's where you're at. But he used that to justify his idea of, well,
56:04
let's bring some other more clever, cognitively clever people from abroad to recompense that.
56:08
And Steve Bannon, who's also a racist, and also said a lot of racist things, said, no,
56:14
Elon Musk, you're racist and we need to just ban all immigration completely. So you have
56:20
two racists effectively fighting with each other about the modality of racism that they
56:25
want to implement. Now, I think Elon Musk backed down because Steve Bannon literally said that
56:32
I'm going to rip your face off. So that's how visceral this was going to get. So he
56:37
backed down because he realized that he didn't want to fracture the movement right now. But
56:43
this is going to be something that is going to exist and continue to be there in months
56:48
and years to come. And there's a question over how coherent this is. I mean, this ideology
56:53
is not coherent. That's the whole thing. It's not a coherent ideology. It's a mess. And
56:57
that's one of the reasons why I don't think it can actually work.
57:01
Last question. Despite these kind of scuffles in general, the far right seems to be incredibly
57:06
unified somehow. However, the mainstream left is as fragmented, clueless and lost as ever.
57:12
I saw a great post on Instagram today where somebody wrote the following, the Democrats
57:16
turned the party of the working class into the party of consultants, defense contractors
57:20
and Davos divas. They refused to declare a climate emergency, refused to condemn the
57:25
billionaire class, refused to utter the word genocide, let alone stop it. The Democrats
57:30
ran as MAGA light. So people chose the real thing. What does the mainstream left need
57:36
to do to turn this catastrophic run around?
57:41
So that's a massive question. But I think we need to basically on the one hand, understand
57:48
what we're up against. I think the left is deeply confused. They do not really understand
57:55
what we're up against. They're focused on narrow myopic things and they don't realize
58:00
what is at stake. That leads us to the next thing. So the first part, I think is really
58:06
getting an understanding of what this network is, how it operates, what their agenda is,
58:13
what they're about and really understanding what is at stake. Because what is at stake
58:16
is exactly that. It's the fundamentals of democracy. This is a network war. That's why
58:21
that's the subtitle in my book. It's an offensive on the foundations of democracy as it stands
58:29
today. And one of the reasons they're doing it is because there's a systemic crisis in
58:37
energy and environment and the economy. And these guys want to clamp down and maintain
58:43
even more authoritarian structures to maintain power and wealth. Having understood that,
58:49
we need to realize that we need to get better at communicating this to publics in ways which
58:54
are really simple and easy to understand. But even more importantly, we have to start
58:59
creating an alternative vision that people can buy into and one that is based on systemic
59:06
transformation. And I think that critique of the Democrats that you read out is spot
59:10
on that we were in a weird situation where voters were able to look at Trump who had
59:16
just been voted out. Then they voted Biden in and now they've gone swung back to Trump.
59:25
So I think we're in this era of swing politics where we're swinging from this tepid liberal
59:32
orthodoxy which is trying to keep this broken system going along. And the other alternative,
59:40
which is what the far right is saying, which is just tear it all down. Tear down the so
59:44
called deep state, the administrative state. And of course, they're not really tearing
59:47
down deep state. They're just replacing certain structures and systems and putting their own
59:54
people in there, making it even more homogeneous just so they can pursue a very specific agenda.
1:00:01
That's not democratic. It's the complete opposite. So what we need to do, what the
1:00:08
left needs to do and people on the right who do not buy into the far right, we need to
1:00:12
create a new way of seeing things which embraces the urgency and necessity of systemic transformation,
1:00:20
fundamental systemic transformation. Not tinkering around with the system, but really changing
1:00:25
things at scale and doing it by leveraging the amazing things that are happening today,
1:00:32
whether it is in clean energy, whether it is in amazing new things happening in food,
1:00:40
whether taking on board some of the best advice that we've got coming from cutting edge economics
1:00:45
on how we rethink massive wealth inequalities in the way in which GDP has been used in a
1:00:53
narrow way and start thinking about different metrics, apply different ways and start investing
1:01:01
in productive infrastructure in a way that makes sense rather than getting caught into
1:01:07
the trap of saying, oh, we're going to invest in the old industries which are dying and
1:01:12
stuff like that, which is essentially what we're seeing now, which I think is such a
1:01:15
sad thing. It trumps like I'm going to drill, drill, drill, I'm going to do all this stuff.
1:01:20
And it's like one of the themes of the book is this idea of energy return on investment,
1:01:25
which says that the amount of energy that you've put into a resource to get out energy
1:01:32
is actually increasing. So we're putting more energy in to get less energy out. And
1:01:38
this is an objective empirical measure that has been used to assess fossil fuels. And
1:01:43
all the studies show that the EROI value of fossil fuels of the last decades has massively
1:01:49
declined and this plays a big role in why there is a cost of living crisis and why there's
1:01:55
a crisis of inflation. It's not just about Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That's been
1:02:01
an amplifier and it's been a trigger which has put the system into a tailspin. But the
1:02:06
underlying issues are these deeper, bigger energy economic issues, which obviously intertwined
1:02:13
climate change, intertwined other things. Those are the big issues that we're not dealing
1:02:17
with. The problem with people like Trump, Farage and others is that their agenda is
1:02:21
not going to work. It's going to fail. But that's also what we need to remember was
1:02:27
that as those things fail and they are going to fail, all the crazy things Trump is going
1:02:31
to do, he wants to deport 20 million migrants and all the studies show that that's not
1:02:38
the problem with the economy. You're going to take out 7.5% of GDP. That's on a conservative
1:02:47
basis. No one is saying maybe we should tighten things up. Maybe we should do better. Maybe
1:02:53
we should make sure that there are more ways of getting migrants documented, making sure
1:03:01
they're paying tax, making sure they're building jobs. All that kind of stuff. No one's saying
1:03:07
don't do that. But just throwing out 20 million undocumented migrants, you're going to destroy
1:03:12
your economy. That's just a fact. Is migration actually, is that the real problem in the
1:03:17
economy? Is that the thing? All the evidence shows that this idea that it's immigration
1:03:23
that is the problem in the economy is actually not grounded in fact. Again, it's an ideology.
1:03:30
So there is an opportunity for us here on the left when these things fail, that people
1:03:36
are going to be like, what is the alternative? What is the answer? What do we do? They need
1:03:39
to have those ideas ready to pick up and say, that's what we need to do. That's the answer.
1:03:44
I understand why these people failed. They failed because they're the ultra-right. This
1:03:48
is what the systemic solution is. Let's go for it. We've got our work cut out, but it's
1:03:55
the only way forward. Or maybe George Soros, the man who's conducting so many dark conspiracies
1:04:01
is going to die and then the world is going to become a utopia overnight. Who knows? Who
1:04:08
knows? Dr. Ahmed, thank you so much. Where can people find your book? The book is a book
1:04:14
now out and available. It's been published only in the UK in paperback, but the great
1:04:25
news is you can actually, wherever you are in the world, you can actually order the book
1:04:29
directly from the publishers from the website, which is alt-right.com. It is also available
1:04:39
in all the good bookshops across the UK. You should be able to order it in as well. It's
1:04:46
available on most online platforms and bookstores all over the world. The ebook edition is available.
1:04:55
I think in many places, whether in the US or Europe, you can actually order it from
1:05:01
online bookstores as well and it will be shipped across. We're working on getting it out there.
1:05:07
Awesome. Thanks again. I hope we get to do this again and in slightly better times. Thank
1:05:13
you so much, Zadar. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube,
1:05:16
follow on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I've been told I have to say that otherwise nothing
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Thank you so much.