Latest / Thinking Class / #142 - Nathan Pinkoski - France Sacrificed Free Speech To Keep The Peace, Britain Did The Same And Now Neither Has Either

Transcript

#142 - Nathan Pinkoski - France Sacrificed Free Speech To Keep The Peace, Britain Did The Same And Now Neither Has Either · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmate, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Nathan Pinkosky.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a writer for First Things and Compact, and the translator of Eric Zamore's The Suicide of France, his own book, Silent Revolution, The End of the Liberal West, is forthcoming.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Nathan and I think out loud about why Zamor's Suicide of France is not just a French story but a diagnosis of the entire Western world, how the 1968 Revolution conquered society rather than the state, the 10% threshold, the point at which free speech was sacrificed to manage diversity in both France and Britain, how Britain could dismantle the Supreme Court, the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, and the relationship with the European Court of Human Rights in a single statute, and why France, Canada, and America cannot do something similar in their own countries.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre Trudeau's constitutional coup and how Canada became the end game of perverted Westminster, and why only Tony Benn and Enoch Powell saw it coming.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: The three deaths of the father, Charles de Gaulle, paternal authority and the gold standard, and why the West no longer produces leaders, how Vichy was weaponised to impose collective guilt on the French people and delegitimise national sovereignty, why the smartphone killed assimilation and the Ellis Island myth is dead, and why Nathan believes the only way to save the West is Christian revival.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: V.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Nathan Binkosky.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Eric Zamor wrote a book in 2015 that broke the spell of French progressivism, and it went on to sell over half a million copies.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: He went on to have a presidential run himself, and its translator, my guest today, Nathan Pincosky, argues that it's not just the suicide of France, but the suicide of the entire West.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan, welcome back to Thinking Plus.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for having me.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure to return.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: You translated and introduced one of the most consequential books, I think, in French public life, perhaps in this century.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he he being Eric Zamor makes the argument that France has been systematically dismantled by her own children since the death of de Gaulle.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this was through the 1968 revolution and everything that followed.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: What was it about this book written in 2014 that made you want to bring it to an English-speaking audience now?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's exactly as you say.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's uh it's it's a very it's a very consequential book in France, and uh what you say is exactly right, uh, if if you think about it in terms of consequential political works, political analyses in the 21st century.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have in the early 90s, uh, so that was definitely a big literary event of the of the 1970s, right?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Soljenitsyn's Gulag Acropolago.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it definitely made an impression in France, kind of, I think, uh broke the spell of uh of intellectual communism uh that had, of course, been dying for some time, but uh that really helped bringing it in.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the Communist Party never did uh better than um it basically was in steady decline after that point.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'll jump ahead to early 1990s, uh, would be the next big literary event.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So a book um called Mitterrand et les 40 voleurs, uh Mitterrand and the and the 40 thieves, uh you could translate it as, uh, was a kind of uh expose of Mitterrand's presidency.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So Mitterrand François Mitterrand gets elected in 1981, and this is actually one of the episodes that Zimo talks about um in his book.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: He basically uh repudiates the the socialist uh um the socialist policies that had defined the post-war left uh and reorients the the socialists toward a kind of uh anti-racist identity rather than a kind of policy of uh of economic uh solidarity.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and this, of course, prepares the way for the socialist party's uh alliance with um with Islam and becoming much more uh pro-migration.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there was a lot of cynicism about Mitterrand's presidency.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's re-elected in 1988, but doesn't really have much of a platform.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it's kind of uh coasting, and secrets are starting to come out here and there, various scandals.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So this was a book that also sold half a million copies within a few months when it was released in the in the early 1990s.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you could say it broke the spell of um of the of the French Socialist Party, uh of the of the institutional uh French left, which had been so powerful uh for a long time on the political landscape, and of course it's been in decline ever since.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, jump ahead now to uh Suicide of France, the Suicide Francais.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is all this is the next big literary event of a book that sold on the similar scale to Goulag Archipelago and uh and and Mitterrand and the and the 40 thieves.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you you you think this is just an important um longer perspective here to uh to bear in mind, to look at the fuller landscape, because the the this is a book that just had uh the kind of impact it had uh was uh was sensational when it hit the landscape.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And as I wrote, I think it's the book that broke the spell of French uh progressivism, kind of tackled a lot of the intellectual assumptions, the way of reading the history of France, the way of being told what was happening uh since uh since the death of de Gaulle and really since the May 1968 uh revolution.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And um, well, this is definitely a book written by a Frenchman for Frenchman.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's a lot that an English-speaking reader can uh pick up from it, not only to get a better sense of what happened in France, which I think is is uh is especially important, but also looking at uh analogies to uh to the English-speaking world uh and looking for similar kinds of events uh uh that have played the same kind of role because many of the themes are very, very similar, just to take the one I mentioned about the rise of a kind of anti-racist left.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you get a better sense, I think, when you read a book like this of not only the French predicament, but you can say the the Western predicament uh writ large to understand some of the big changes that have happened uh in the course of our lifetime.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're definitely right that the the the read across to even my own country of Britain becomes quite apparent as you read about various laws that were instituted that changed uh the preference of the nation from the preference for the national good toward the global good.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a a a brilliant quote uh which just about captures everything with regard to the egalitarian legal agenda that that took off really in the 70s and beyond.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Zamor writes about the the Plaven law, and I would have pronounced that incorrectly.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: He said this would become the programme to melt the French nation into one planetary magma.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he goes on to talk about these laws ultimately being the end of freedom of speech because you then weren't able to criticize anyone on the basis of origin, culture, whatever.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and ultimately the prohibition of national preference.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that that's a a neat segue actually into the impasse of the 1968 revolution because it's often seen as a failed revolution against the state, but as as one of the most striking arguments made in the book is that, okay, yeah, it didn't see this the overthrow of the state, but what it did see was the conquest of society, and nobody seems to have noticed the difference.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the right way to understand what happened there in France and perhaps even in Britain, perhaps even in the US up until Trump 2.0?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the right way to understand it?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I think that's exactly right.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this is partly what the book does is it selects episodes, uh, moments of social significance, maybe uh uh uh the release of a famous film um uh or a moment that was that was uh that that got a lot of media attention um at the time and selects these episodes um and looks at them closely to to argue that these were moments that things were changing, but not necessarily in the way that people were uh were were thinking, or uh things were changing for the worse.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so you get uh uh this is uh this is a book that is a kind of cultural and social history uh as well as a political history.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about legal changes like the the law you referred to, the the Pleven law, that um that uh basically set up uh hate speech laws in France, which should not have been done before, um, and set them up on quite a wide uh basis.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you had the capacity for a third-party um NGO, uh really, an activist organization to bring charges uh against someone, and that has kind of cascaded ever since.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and they were also financially rewarded for that when they when they uh when they get a fine uh brought in.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that was really a sea change um in the French Republican landscape and was adopted at the time kind of unthinkingly or at least not with a lot of careful uh scrutiny.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: That said, though, and just as a quick addendum to that, since you since you brought it up, one of the things that people did notice when, or at least have the debate over when this law came forward, um uh why would you need it now?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and the sense was well, as uh France is becoming more multi-ethnic, there's likely to be more uh hate crimes.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and the only way to keep the peace is to ban uh hate speech.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a threshold that was thrown around at the time, and I think it was 10%, if I recall, that if you have 10% more of the population foreign-born, then this is going to become a real problem.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so the numbers were coming up to that.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this this was uh was seen as a preventive or uh law to to uh to keep the peace.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: But the price, of course, is is free speech.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's by the way, the same argument that came up in the mid-1960s when Britain starts having uh these laws introduced, is that they were seen as uh as preventive measures um given that Britain had become uh a more multi-ethnic uh society, uh, or indeed uh really uh a multi-ethnic society, which hadn't happened before from the changes that had come about uh as a consequence of the 1948 um uh act.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you see the parallels right there, and you see uh right away uh as part of our social history, part of the consequences of this of this revolution, um, our changing attitude towards uh a multi-ethnic society and a recognition that, well, we're gonna embrace it, but there's gonna be a cost, and those costs are uh are going to be uh redefining a lot of our quote unquote liberal freedoms that had uh that we'd uh we'd uh grown accustomed to before then.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think about where we're at now with regards to this abolition of and prohibition of national preference, and there's been a news story here in Britain in the last week.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: I say a news story, it was in a particular corner of the internet, but Gavin Barwell took umbrage at Reform UK's policy to um say that those who were not born in Britain, foreign citizens, will be immediately barred from having access to the welfare state.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Seems totally unobjectionable to anyone who has any idea of social contract fairness of paying in, all the rest of it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: But he took Umbridge because he didn't like them being referred to as foreigners.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: How dare we call them foreigners?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them have worked and paid their taxes, and why should they have it taken off them?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: That we have someone so high ranking in the Conservative Party that is unwilling to make a distinction between British citizens and foreigners, doesn't even want the words to be used, shows just how deeply ingrained both that cultural and then that legal revolution has been, that people are so afraid to even talk about the distinctions between people.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously it's been criminalized in in many ways, but that people will even self-police when there isn't even something like that at play.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you've just been on a speaking tour ultimately with with Eric Sabor.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: He went on some American podcasts.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's obviously very well plugged into the the current environment in France.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Since those laws were passed, it's not even just about 10% of the population being foreign-born.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think 10% of the population were born in Algeria, um something like that, or they are Algerian.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what's his sense about the the potential for this changing, laws changing, uh culture changing, uh an overturning of this status quo.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does he think it's possible or and that we're on the cusp, or does he think that there's much more to go before we get there?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the the big thing that he would point out in the French situation, I think this is the same in in Britain too, is you have uh overwhelming majorities that support some of these uh measures that are being proposed, whether it's something like uh restricting welfare recipients uh to uh British citizens, um, whether uh in the French case, of course, uh restricting welfare recipients to French citizens, uh having a more restrictive immigration policy, um, even something as inane as expelling those who commit crimes, uh, deporting them, right?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, although obviously that's uh controversial in some circles.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And in in uh in EU law, um, and so it applies in France, that can't itself be the grounds for the fact that someone's in the country illegally uh can itself be the grounds for deportation.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: You need to have an additional uh burden over that.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I have broken the law, I'm here, you can't deport me just for that fact.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh, but these are all things that socially, and uh if you put it to a referendum question, you'd be able to win sizable uh majorities on.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: The challenge in the French context is you run up against the legal systems that have developed since uh the since really the 1970s.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um I speak here of the kind of power that judges have acquired in France, which is uh far more than than in Britain.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think in Britain, if you had a parliamentary majority and a prime minister uh who um who had the fortitude to take on this, you could um you could uh deal with a lot of these changes immediately.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: It could be handled um handled very, very quickly uh because of the of the mechanisms that are still in place in the British system.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: In the French system, they're not there.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So any effort to campaign for tighter welfare restrictions, um, for uh for tighter immigration policy uh and for deportations runs up against the challenge of what uh the French call gouvernement des juges, a government by the judges.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that in the French context, most politicians are unwilling to talk about that, uh, the extent of that problem.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of become part of the system that everyone just accepts, um, that the judges play this elevated role.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh Zimo is one of the only few who tackles this directly.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: So uh that's definitely been an important contribution for him.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: But this is one of the things that that he's trying to point out and why why I think this book made such a splash when it was released a decade ago um was because it was a book that captured the, captured a generation that had become uneasy with the trajectory that they'd been on, um, had a sense that something had gone wrong, something had gone very wrong in the in the country.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so there wasn't the enthusiasm for just embracing this uh project anymore.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: But people needed someone to diagnose.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the the diagnostics weren't coming from the from the political class, with maybe a couple uh exceptions here and there.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's how come the the book did so well.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of tapped into this, into this broader anxiety about the direction uh one is on.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, in the French context, if you're not willing to to go uh to go into a direct conflict with the judges, you're not gonna make any progress on this.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the British context, I think you have some more flexibility.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: In the American context, because the judiciary has been a political question for some time, um, there's a better environment to to handle that.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, if you if you wait long enough and the court and the courts handle your cases, it goes up, uh, you're more likely to win on some of these issues.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: But that said, there's a lot of administrative things that are definitely not being touched, uh, even under Trump too.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a lot of hesitation to push things a little further uh because of the pushback that it might receive from within the Republican Party um uh elite.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So the problem is uh is is uh is one that goes across many countries.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, before we think about it in the North American context, given that I know you are in in America right now, that's where you you work, you you were born in Canada, but clearly you know a lot about France, so it'll be interesting to understand a little bit about how quickly things could turn around within the constraints of the systems of those countries.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but I think it is a very pertinent point to make that the judicial supremacy um is the means by which that post-1968 revolution managed to entrench itself and across the English-speaking world too, it wasn't d just in France.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh as you've pointed out, democratic democratic reversal is actually possible here in Britain because whilst we have this proud history of having fought against absolutism, removed the Stuarts and obviously put them back on the throne, is the reality is we just moved the absolutism to Parliament and they can do whatever they want.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just depends whether they want to do it.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, as you say, broadly patriotic government that was against all of this could, with the right legal mechanisms, just unpick it immediately.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what's the situation in Canada and America?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Canada are obviously a more direct outgrowth from the British parliamentary system.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, America remodeled itself ten years after independence to take some more of the uh principles, but is obviously different in also other ways.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: How quickly could things be turned around if either of those two countries wanted to unpick uh this judicial supremacy?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I see Canada as kind of the the the end game of the perversion of Westminster Parliament.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what I mean by this is uh for decades and quite carefully the the people in charge knew what they were doing.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: They handed over more and more parliamentary prerogatives and parliamentary power to the Canadian Supreme Court.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the real litmus test for this was the establishment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the early 1980s, uh, in part of the context of constitutional um of the debate over uh over patriating the the constitution.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because at the time, uh, if you wanted to change the constitution of Canada, you need to get approval of Parliament, of the British Parliament.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, and um as a result, uh the the argument was, well, we need to just bring all those powers back into Canada to have this.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what Pierre Trudeau did at the time, he was very clever, is he in he attached this debate, which you can say, all right, fair enough.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Canada's a it moved on as a as an independent country, it should be able to change its own constitution without consulting um the British Parliament.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: The British Parliament has little interest in maintaining this relationship anymore, so let's proceed.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: But Pierre Trudeau attached that effort to patriate the Canadian Constitution to an effort to uh pass the Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedom and therefore exponentially increase the power of the Canadian Supreme Court because that would give them a bill that would be subject subject legislation to judicial review.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And incidentally, this was going through uh British Parliament, uh, this proposal, and it was being kind of waived through uh generally the Thatcher government at the time didn't really want to look too closely at this and just was pushing it through.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: The two people who raised objections to this uh in the British context were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, uh, who both saw from different uh political perspectives, but both saw what a threat Pierre Trudeau's proposal was to parliamentary sovereignty.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so they uh raised the alarm.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: That alarm got caught up by the Canadian provinces, uh, which had some power to stop this process, and basically.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: What happened was you had a kind of compromise that developed where some asked the parliament could retain the power to invoke something called the notwithstanding clause, which would uh which would circumvent uh judicial review on certain pieces of legislation.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that's been kind of the way that that it was set up to operate.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: But uh to go to your point, um, the upshot of this is that the judges still have an immense power in Canada to stop a lot of the things that could be done uh through uh whether provincial at the provincial parliamentary level or at the at the federal one.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh and because that's been put as part of the Canadian Constitution, you can't just have a parliament walk in and change it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in the British context, if you want to end uh the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, uh that could be handled in a statute uh and changed just like that.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you want to uh bring an end to the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, um, the British relationship to the European Court of Human Rights, all that could be done in a statute.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: In Canada, you don't have that flexibility.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of power has been taken out.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: You have to reopen the kind of constitutional debates and so forth.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Canada is, I think, the scenario that um people in Britain should be afraid of.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you can see judges moving more and more in that direction to try to restrict uh more and more things that parliament that were associated with traditional parliamentary prerogatives.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: To me, the the case product set else here is Miller No.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which was the British case uh in which the court asserted that it had the right to challenge proroguing of parliament, that was that was judiciable, and that the invocation of of uh prerogative or uh the invitation the invocation of the power to prorogue parliament, um, this was under the Johnson government um early on, just when they took over, uh, was uh was something that uh was null and void.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: So now you subject a procedure of parliament, of the crown acting in Parliament, which of course is a technical definition of what of what parliament of what the British Parliament is.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's the it's the combination of both the action of the crown and the action of Parliament.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um you subject that to a new sovereign, which is the judges who sit outside all of this.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that was an extraordinary decision, and and it uh and that is I think a uh a very dangerous precedent that really needs some serious acts of constitutional plumbing to stop that uh vandalism from going further.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but it shows you the trajectory that um that judges are on uh in in Britain and the need to uh to urgently restrain that and urgently remove any capacity to do something like that again.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and with the US, uh clearly Trump has uh shown that unable to get through some of the um the checks and balances in place, he'll sign an executive order.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is that effectively suggesting that to undo much of the progressive less legislation, which clearly the the the counter-elite movement against uh the previous status quo uh uh takes umbrage with?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it going to be much more difficult to unpick things in in the US based on their current system, or is it simpler than it's currently looking?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the problem in the US system is you have uh you have uh federal judges, uh like a single single federal judge can issue a national injunction which will stop uh which will stop the either an executive order or a particular executive action, uh, and that could be on anything from a particular aspect of immigration policy to uh some other aspect of um of policy enforcement.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that process is just being abused through and through.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what happens is these injunctions tend to get struck down um relatively quickly by the higher courts, but you have to wait.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that means you're waiting uh on the courts uh before you can actually enact your agenda.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: So this slows down a lot of things.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh and that's the frustration in the in the US context.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that you're losing the the cases to um at the top level to judicial activists, it's more that um at the lower level, you have these activist judges who are uh just pulling levers all over the place to try to do as much damage to the administration as possible.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know you that they'll eventually get held into check, but that could be months lost of trying to implement some aspect of of your of your policy.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the other aspect too, uh this is a more complicated question that is a tougher one to grapple.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: The other, the the difficult one is is how um deportations are subject to administrative process.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh enforcing immigration law um because and and trying to deport people who manifestly are in the country illegally and so forth, there's always the the risk there that that process gets held up in a court somewhere and then gets individualized.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to do each single case, and this slows the whole thing down.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's the the problem is a little different.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think the advantage the US has is that you have had a conservative movement for years that has warned about a politicized judiciary and has made appointments to try to fix that.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but of course, you still have uh quite a few people at the lower level that are doing a lot of damage.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think the bigger problem is in the congressional level, where there's little appetite to uh challenge these rogue judges in the lower courts and uh call what their decisions into question and basically make the argument that what they're doing is manifestly unconstitutional, it's a breach of their oath, they're doing it for uh ideological political reasons, and you could start an impeachment process against some of these judges who are weaponizing the system and uh exploiting the exploiting the the law and arguably uh violating it.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um you could start impeaching those judges, which is Congress's power to do, and there's no appetite to do to do that with the present Congress.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: So uh a different problem, I think.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but there's certainly a relation between all of them.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there you go.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have very different systems, but very much the same problem.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: So legal wonks, please figure out the answer in all of our respective countries.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Nathan, let's get back to Suicide Afront.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: So Zamor makes a very compelling case in the structure of his book around the death of the father.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: The father uh holds a very um uh exalted place, I suppose, when it comes to the psychological and psychiatric literature.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he makes the case that there were three deaths of the father.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: There was the the death of the father of the nation, Charles de Gaulle, there's the death of the father of the family in 1970, where a law uh was instituted that abolished paternal authority.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then he even argues more metaphorically, and I like this, that there was the death of the father of the economy when the gold standard was ended.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose my question to you is is this specifically a French story, or is this almost the master key to understanding the Western crisis?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I think this is this is exactly it.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's telling, I think, that on this kind of analysis, the more draws from an English reader, uh, or I should say uh an English-speaking reader, Christopher Lash, the American uh uh social commentator and critic, um, who is very astute on on uh on how uh on the same question, the death of the of the of the father figure.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh and you can I think trace this trend in a number of different countries, a kind of hostility towards male leadership, the legal efforts to kind of constrain that and prevent that from happening, uh, which is a big part of the way that civil rights law developed uh in the US um from the 1970s onwards.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um the ease of lawsuits uh against male typical behaviors, um, uh, for instance, uh, uh whereas you don't have the same uh symmetry with respect to female uh typical behavior.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm thinking here of something like uh uh uh uh making jokes in the workplace versus uh versus gossip or those are things like that, um, and and so on.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: But this is exactly uh this is exactly, I think, uh one of the themes that he brings out very well.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's also incidentally the source of his original notoriety, which he wrote a book in the early 2000s called The Second Sex, uh, a playoff uh Simon de Beauvoir's uh famous book, uh, that men had effectively been relegated into this into this position.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so there's this is a really rich unit of uh of analysis, and I think um is something that uh that much more uh could be said on.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the big thing that uh I think we can focus on, well, there are two big things that we can focus on.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh one is the the kind of cultural animosity against the the male leader, and you can think of lots of pop culture examples of this.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not very hard to think of someone.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Simpsons, for example, and Homer Simpson, uh I think is a kind of classic example of a debilitated um uh figure of a male leader and so on.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh uh and uh that would be the kind of cultural analysis.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: But the other one we should draw attention to is the legal uh changes that have taken place that make it very, very difficult to um to even have someone in that kind of role uh without subjecting yourself to a potential uh lawsuit or uh some kind of uh of process crime.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: So this is part of the legal changes that have taken place um that are loosely wrapped under equality uh legislation or anti-discrimination legislation or civil rights legislation, but are in fact uh a seismic shift that have changed uh that have changed the way that uh that really I think we we view ourselves and we view our own our own society.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Not every country, I should add, has something as marked as uh the death of a father of a nation like de Gaulle has, uh, or I think France has with respect to de Gaulle.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um not every country um had a similar kind of figure who who existed for a certain time as kind of the embodiment of of that of that national uh figure.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe the closest in the US context would be something like John Wayne, um, you could argue, uh, kind of represented that in in popular culture.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think hard to find someone in the in the British context who who played a similar role, Churchill's of another generation and um and his post-war uh legacy is a little different different and a little messier, um, not least because he loses the 1945 election.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but still it's it it speaks to the kind of I think sense that you that having a figure like that uh in charge is authoritarian.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's something bad about that person.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you if you want to pin a label on it, I think it would be the rise of the authoritarian personality concern, which was the way that fascism kind of gets redefined um in the in the decades following the Second World War.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Fascism isn't now about a regime uh uh type that existed in Italy or uh or Germany.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's now a personality type, which means it exists in every family.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and of course is found in the uh most typically in the in the head of the household, the the father figure.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: So a father figure becomes a suspect figure for for fascism.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and that's shaped a lot of our our thinking in terms of what kinds of uh the the precedence we place on personalities, the the sort of psychologizing of a lot of political figures.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And Trump, of course, is is a great example of this, so the way that people attack him.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's often on these grounds, you know, psychologizing uh him and so forth, rather than in terms of the of the agenda.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he's sort of seen as someone coveting absolute power, a kind of uh an author really another the a a kind of authoritarian uh uh figure, and he's always attacked on those personality grounds.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well that's that ties in pretty nicely with the the theme that often surfaces uh throughout our cultural conversations, regardless of where you're on the West, which is the weaponization of guilt.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And w we have it here in Britain, so if ever you want to beat Britain over the head with a cudgel, you'll bring up the Empire, you'll bring up slavery, you'll bring up the Windrush generation.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Eric Zamore devotes a whole chapter to Vichy, but specifically through the work of an American historian called Robert Paxton.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Vichy, I think people are aware of it and the time and place that it took that it that that it occurred, but I don't think people probably understand exactly what it is.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps we start off with a primer of what was the Vichy government, what were its its crimes, how is it seen in the uh modern eye, and how is it used to delegitimize French sovereignty and French assimilation of foreigners?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's definitely uh a lot we could dive into there.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh basically what happened when the French were defeated uh in May-June 1940, um, the the rapidity of the of the defeat uh meant that um the leaders of the Third Republic um at the time uh decided that armistice was probably the best path to follow.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Pétain, by an overwhelming parliamentary majority in July, start of July, is given a basically a mandate to rewrite uh to write a new constitution for the for the for France, um, with which he's granted the power to rule um uh to rule without uh there's a couple limitations, but effectively he's he's uh he's given the power to to govern as a head of state with with very little limitations to fulfill this uh project.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um a couple points I want to stress from the start here is I think you have to understand the context of this to understand that most French people supported this at the time.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the British government started having uh uh diplomatic relations uh with the Vichy government, the Americans did, um, the the Holy See did.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: This was the expectation this was going to be, this was a legitimate government from the beginning.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and um and it's important to bear that in mind so you understand, I think, two things.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: One is that the Vichy that ended up four years later was not the same and definitely did not have the same um uh uh was not part of the same context of that's initial uh the initial setup in 1940.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: But second is you don't really appreciate de Gaulle's courage and, if you will, audacity for going to London and saying we need to fight on and therefore defying this whole regime.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't appreciate his his uh his intuition from the very beginning that this project was never gonna work, that the Vichy project was never gonna work.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because the Vichy project was essentially to write a new constitution from a position not only of defeat in the armistice, but also one of military occupation, where half the country was occupied by the Germans.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: And de Gaulle saw that that was not a situation that would lead uh in a healthy direction, and that you could not you could not manage this uh this situation and get a good constitution, get a new uh regime.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's effectively what happens.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the the tragedy of Vichy is that you have all these different factions, and as I said, the third republic picks leadership of the third republic picks uh Peitan to lead it.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not that you have Third Republic and then a rupture and then Vichy.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: You actually have a continuity between the leadership of the Third Republic and the Vichy regime uh uh in terms of who staffs it, who's running it, who supports it.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that also means that a lot of the figures who are involved in Vichy are actually from the political left.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Pierre Laval, who's the first prime minister of Vichy, uh, he was someone who was uh who started his career on the on the left uh and uh was very interested long before Hitler came around of uh of France developing closer ties with Germany.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um that was a big thing that he thought was something that should be done.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the second figure who becomes the prime minister of Vichy is Admiral Darlon.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and Darlon uh is sort of in charge of the Navy, that's sort of his personal fiefdom.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: But he was a figure who was promoted by the Popular Front, so the left-wing government in 1936, because he was hostile to Mussolini and Italian ambitions um in the Mediterranean.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I say all this so you really understand the complexities of the Vichy experience, and you don't just see it as kind of or imagine it to be a kind of, I don't know, cardboard cutout of a Catholic integralist regime or something like that.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: It never was that.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Paxton's work actually was very good for showing this.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Paxton um in the 70s, his book was to try to show that Vichy was a technocratic uh enterprise.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was run by all these people who'd come out of technocratic circles, and it was kind of a uh a criticism of the of the of the technocratic operation, and that was his argument about what kind of regime uh Vichy was, deeply embedded in a in a kind of technocratic enterprise.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: He also brought something, and this now goes into the the controversy that um that Zemmour um invokes.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Paxton also showed how close um Pétain's government, if not Pétain himself, because you have to remember, Pétain is a very old man, forgetful, uh, didn't remember things very well.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: So there's always been a kind of confusion around what he was actually authorizing himself, personally authorizing.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: But needless to say, that his entourage and uh and then and himself um Afonciori, because he was part of these same circles, uh, were complicit in uh in intensifying collaboration with the Germans, in handing over a lot of uh of French citizens um to uh to to uh to force deportations to work in in German factories.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was a big thing.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then of course uh on uh uh collaboration in uh in the Holocaust.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and um and so that was something that Paxton uh kind of helped uh his research helped expose.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I think the a bit of the context for that that that is that um is useful is Paxton did have a kind of polemic in mind uh when he was doing this.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to criticize the he wanted to criticize America after Vietnam.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he was explicit about this, that he saw this as a kind of Vichy as a kind of uh the direction that a centralized state goes in, a nationalist uh state goes in if it if it if it goes off in the wrong direction.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: So Zamu's objective in calling attention to these episodes was basically uh in part to s to do what a lot of historians have done uh since then, which is show that what basically a little bit what I did, the complexities of of the Vichy regime and how it changes over time.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but what he also wanted to show was that Paxton uh and the people who appropriated him wanted to take the Vichy experience and argue that this was archetypical uh of the way that the French were.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of extracting collective guilt, saying everyone was responsible uh uh for everything that went wrong in Vichy, everything all of Vichy's crimes, or the way the regime ran for during its four years, all French are complicit in this.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem with that is that then undermines uh de Gaulle's whole point and the resistance's whole point, which is to say that Vichy was never a legitimate government from the start.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the legitimate government had moved to London with uh with with de Gaulle.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this tension that later that kind of developed over time, which was the more you'd blame the uh Vichy and the more you'd blame the French, uh the French for Vichy, the more you were saying that France itself was responsible for Vichy, and that therefore the resistance had no legality.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: The resistance had no legitimacy because the legitimacy was actually uh Vichy, um, uh in the sense that uh that the French are responsible for uh what this government.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Government did and the resistance is no longer important.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: So Zymour was trying to show that shift that had taken place in France.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he was also trying to show that Vichy had really become an obsession of the left.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: The only people who get riled up about what Pétain may have done or may not have been done, or about the actions of the Vichy, it was it was the left that got really excited.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: They were using this to attack to attack France writ large.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't about trying to finesse the historical responsibility and show Pétain was responsible for this decision or he wasn't responsible for that decision.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't uh to to uh an exercise of history, it was an exercise to attack the French themselves and to make them responsible for uh ultimately uh for Nazism and for the and for the Holocaust.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that was that was his that's what he was trying to do with that.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: But uh because it's such a um a complicated period, uh, and because there were a lot of moving parts and different aspects going on, it's very hard uh to communicate this in the in the public domain, even though historians do very good work on on this period to kind of show uh what it's all about.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the public domain, what had happened was basically um the the argument uh became all of France was complicit in collaboration, all of France was complicit in the Holocaust, and Vichy was the government that represented this aspiration, Vichy was the government that represented all of France.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can attack that on the historical point, and then it I think it's very easy to do that.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: The harder one is to attack that notion in in popular culture, uh, how it developed over time, and how uh French leaders began embracing um embracing that narrative without really necessarily understanding the the period um very well and what the uh what the complexities were.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just incidentally, um you had people who were pro-Pétain, who liked him because of of uh what he had done during Verdun and trusted him, who hated the strategy of collaboration and thought that was a disaster, uh, and you shouldn't be working with the Germans and so forth.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: But even if they so you have a kind of pro-Pétainist uh resistance, uh that's not an absurd uh proposition.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Julian Jackson writes about it in uh in his book Um France the Dark Years, which is a great piece I would recommend, a great history I'd recommend of this period if anyone wants to delve into it uh further.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well I've seen Zamor in conversation with political rivals, and they often accuse him of a kind of alignment with Vichy ideals, uh, and it's always in response to him uh railing against this psychological destruction of borders, which have obviously had a very real uh implication for our nations and anything when he's railing against the dissolution of the family or that or or consumer culture uh as opposed to being a well-formed citizen or a subject in the case of Britain.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this um this convergence of economic liberals and cultural libertarians has proved proved very durable up until now.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now I will lean on the fact you're sitting in America on the First Amendment and pivot a little bit as to how durable that might be able to remain with the changing demographics, because Zamor himself has been, as you'd expect, more blunt than almost anyone that anyone in the Anglosphere has permitted to be about what he sees as the impossibility of assimilating Islam into a Western nation state.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: And he's put lots of reasons forward for that, and I know we don't have a lot of time, Nathan, but do you think that Zamor is ultimately right, or is the problem that the Western nation state has effectively become so weakened that even if it wanted to, it couldn't assimilate anything?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think both are both are an issue.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I think that uh that we should see Islam not as a religion akin to Christianity, where it's an attitude of of faith, where we think about our internal disposition, but rather as a political project that aims to change the society, change uh moris, uh, change the law uh and uh and put people in positions of power who are doing that.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that's the that's the confrontation which we which we face right now.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh and we should be frank about that and and speak about that uh directly.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um we also though have the the general problem of assimilation, I think, built into our new technological environment, which is that decades ago, uh when people moved to the United States um last century, uh, when this would happen, you would leave the ties to the old country behind.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was difficult to communicate regularly with your older relatives or your friends.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: But now, because of the of the smartphone, uh you're able to communicate instantly and you can watch uh uh videos from people from the home country and so forth.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so you never lose that tie.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can send them money instantly when they when they ask for it.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this is part of the process that makes it very difficult to assimilate uh cultural Muslims, uh, even the ones who aren't necessarily uh uh practicing, is that they're still tied to the old country and and uh the way they consume information for if they're uh attending religious services, and the German data on this is quite telling, um, is online.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: So they're uh they're they're watching online services that are attached to their old country, uh, which means that this keeps the connection to the old culture uh and then potentially keeps the path of radicalization uh uh open.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not in an environment anymore which is conducive, uh naturally conducive to um to uh assimilation.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: And this makes the Islamic uh question uh much more uh much more of uh uh powerful and uh and requires us to get better control of the of the immigration question, I think, to handle this new environment.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't see a lot of people uh willing to uh to do that, I think.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and in the US case, I think it's because a lot of people are still attached to the myth of of Ellis Island.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, people will come here and over time they'll integrate and assimilate and they'll become like everyone else.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, to do that, you need to surrender your ties to the old country and surrender your your technical ties.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: But because we have the the technological means to keep those communications up on a daily basis, and this is what happens, that's not going to work.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we can't recreate the Ellis environment Ellis Island environment uh in the 21st century in a digital world.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Much to be said on that, but I know we've got six minutes to go, so I'll I'll finish with two relatively rapid-fire questions.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so the first one is Zamor is um a reality in France, insofar as he is an intellectual powerhouse, he has created ultimately a political movement, a way of thought, just through him and his work.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have had someone similar, though certainly less forthright, in Roger Scruton.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yet we've had no one, uh, even with the same intellectual depth, being able to move the dial in the way that Zamor has in France.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you think that France has been able to produce this figure and Britain hasn't been able to?
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that one of the things that the French did well um in the end of the 20th century was they had a relatively uh they had a relatively homogenous uh media environment.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as a result, uh uh uh uh that was one thing.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second thing was they would kind of elevate these figures of the public intellectual um in that uh in that space.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this was someone who was seen as part of the part of the of the of the landscape, part of the person you would look to to comment.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, most of these figures definitely were trending towards the the left and kind of people who reinforced the consensus of May 68.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: But Zemmour emerged in that and then became the kind of contrarian figure, but he had a large audience kind of built into this system because of how many, how much French people watch television, watch the same channels, and have a venue where they expect this kind of higher-level highbrow um discussion uh uh and debate.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in English-speaking countries, we just don't have the same trend.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's it's very hard to find that.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, in a large country like US, the media environment has been fragmenting uh for some time.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: Little different story in uh in Britain, I think.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: But but that's I think one of the big uh differences.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: So figures who've who uh who occupy the kind of position of the public intellectual, like say Roger Scruton, never really got a chance to uh to have much of a reception in their own country until I think in his case, uh until the very end of his life.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh most of the positive reception that he got was in Eastern Europe, where he would go run these underground classrooms.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't in his own uh in his own uh environment.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that's a big, a big part of of of why the the landscape um is uh is different uh and why it's been uh it's been difficult to see a kind of public intellectual play such a such a decisive role as it has in in the French context.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, final question.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a creed occur from you.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've asked you before what you changed your mind on, but perhaps in the context of this conversation, what would you say is to be done if you were speaking to a a national or a business leader?
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's to be done?
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, look, uh the the overall uh theme that we've been discussing is suicide of France and suicide of the West.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it I think it raises this question as to what a country like France is, but what Western identity is.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the the big thing that here we need to acknowledge is the roots of our identity are ultimately uh religious and ultimately Christian.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: All conversations about saving one's nation, saving one's uh saving one's civilization have to grapple uh with that.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: What I would encourage people to do who are maybe curious uh about uh about about uh about Christianity um is investigate, explore.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for those who are already practicing, I would say uh be assertive uh about what you believe.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh don't think that you need to hide it or conceal it.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh be ready to defend what you uh to believe and to state it forthrightly and uh and directly.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think ultimately that's the only way you're going to save the West is with some kind of uh Christian uh uh revival.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: And doing something like that is is a good way to start.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Nathan.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: As ever, it's been a delight.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And before I let you go, where can people find you online and what can we expect from you next?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a forthcoming uh book called Silent Revolution, The End of the Liberal West.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that should be out in the next few months.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so to follow my work, you can look at my Substack, Lament for the Nations.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm also on uh Twitter under my name, uh N Pinkoski.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but either Substack or there, good place to start.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I also write uh often for Compact magazine in America, as well as the magazine First Things.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan, that was very expertly landed considering we're right up against time.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been my pleasure.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking to you about your new book when it lands in a few months.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in the meantime, keep fighting the good fight.