Christopher Caldwell: Is It Too Late to Save the English-Speaking World?

The great replacement isn’t a theory, much less a conspiracy. It’s measurable, physical reality that has changed the West more profoundly than any war. Christopher Caldwell has been writing about it for 25 years. (00:00) Are White, Christian, English-Speaking Countries Under Attack? (07:20) Can the Immigration Crisis Be Fixed? (13:37) How WWII Broke the Minds of Europe and Led to Today’s Immigration Crisis (28:02) The Radicalization of Politics (1:11:14 ) Is the Democrat Party Becoming More Radical? (1:17:02) The Link Between Economics and Immigration Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the new Pod 5 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker Byrna: Go to https://Byrna.com or your local Sportsman's Warehouse today. Beam: Get 30% off for a limited time using the code TUCKER at https://ShopBeam.com/Tucker Pique: Go to https://piquelife.com/tucker to get up to 20% off for life when you start your first month Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Into the wild. The Calthea Panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

• 0:15Tucker Carlson?

  So you travel more than anybody I know. You spend more days out of the country and have for more years than literally anyone I know. So answer this question. The countries that seem to be moving backward the most quickly, this is my perception, are the white, Christian, English-speaking countries: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, UK, United States. Am I imagining that? What is that?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Well, I know I don't. I can't really speak about the countries of what they used to call the old Commonwealth, the, you know, Australia, New Zealand. I've never been to those places. But I certainly think that England, the UK more generally, but England in particular, is really in a difficult position now. And I think that the diagnosis that English people generally are coming to is that they've had too much immigration.

• 1:35Tucker Carlson?

  It seems like they've been overwhelmed by immigration, but you may have a better handle on the numbers. How much immigration has the UK had-ish?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Well, I think that they're up around, you know, the country is...

• 1:51Speaker 02

  The country, well, most recent, the country's had a lot of immigration since, you know, since the Second World War. It had some moments of acceleration. It, they had a huge wave of migrants from both the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent in the years right after the war, and by a huge wave, you know, one, you know, it's a couple hundred thousand. But more recently, we've had even larger numbers. And in fact, one of the, one of the things that made, has made Brexit so contentious in England is that the big

• 2:32Speaker 02

  promise of Brexit, the primary promise of Brexit, was to limit immigration. That's what most English people thought it was for. Now Brexit was delayed between the referendum and 2020. And when, when Britain finally got Brexit, it had Covid. And so it had a period of zero immigration for a while. But then something really interesting happened, which is the, the people who had managed to get Brexit, that is, the, the government of Boris Johnson, sort of looked at the numbers and they were very frightened that, that

• 3:11Speaker 02

  the economy was going to continue slow after, after Covid. And due to the way the British government scores economic predictions, immigration comes out as by definition, a benefit to the economy. So then, seriously, so they Like in California? Yes. So they decided, they decided to just loosen immigration for a little bit. And the result was really extraordinary. They got, I think, 4.5 million immigrants between 2021 and 2024. 4.5 million?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yes. And so we're talking about, in, in three years, we're talking about an immigration that is 7% of the, of the country's population. And that immigration, because the European

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Because Britain had left the European Union was not European immigration. It was eighty percent of it came from outside of Europe. So it was a profoundly foreign immigration and the largest Britain had ever had. And it was brought about by the very people whose entire reason for being in government was to stop immigration. And it's had an extremely destabilizing effect on the on the politics of the country.

• 4:43Tucker Carlson?

  So they, according to the way British economists score the economy, more people almost always from poor countries make you richer or something?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, it's sort of like it adds, it adds a certain amount of units of labor in the country is that many units of labor richer. And there's not really a sufficient, without going into the economic details, there's not sufficient reckoning done of the fact that these people will age, they'll form families, and they will collect the generous and perhaps overly generous state benefits that they've been brought in to, to, you know, to help defray.

• 5:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I mean, is there in the history of the world, a country that's had like that level of immigration from poor countries that got richer because of it?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  The United States. And but it's a very special case because we were, you know, we were, we had laid claim to a, you know, a continent wide landmass, although we didn't always do that explicitly. And we had only a very few millions of people with which to claim it. And so we really needed people and they generally came from societies that were.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Or let's say they came from, they might have come from societies that were richer than ours, but they came from the less fortunate parts of those societies. So I think it did enhance the United States while we had, you know, a more or less virgin territory. I understand that the Indians were there, but a lot of the territory was virgin and ripe for, for development. As long as we were in that position, it was a benefit to us. The mistake that other countries in the world have made, and Europe more than anyone, has been to assume that if they get mass immigration, it's going to work the way it

• 6:50Speaker 02

  did under the very special circumstances of 19th century North America. But instead, what's happening is it's, it's working more like the circumstances of 17th century North America. That is, the, the people who are arriving from abroad are becoming the, the core group.

• 7:13Tucker Carlson?

  They're replacing the indigenous population.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  That seems to be what's happening. Not everywhere, but in, in a lot of places.

• 7:22Tucker Carlson?

  But in Great Britain.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  If you go to London, it's, it's incontestable.

• 7:26Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it's overwhelmingly, it's like 70% non-British, right?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 7:32Tucker Carlson?

  So what, I mean, can that be changed, fixed, reversed?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  That's what the discussion in England is about now. And that's why the politics on the English right is so, you know, it's, it's so fractured. It's, it's fractured, but it's actually very interesting. A lot of, you know, there's a lot of sort of like new ideas.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Sort of popping up out of desperation, you know? Like what? They're mostly of, uh, they're mostly ones that you would recognize from, you know, the Trump campaign. They have, a lot of them have to do with deportation, you know? There are, there's a lot of discussion of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights and from the UN, um, you know, Refugee Treaty, um, from the 1950s. I, the, the, the UN, um, has a Refugee Convention from the, the 1950s that governs a lot of, um, rights of asylum. And the, uh, Tony Blair government in the late 90s and the

• 8:46Speaker 02

  early part of this century, um, passed something called the Human Rights Act, which made, um, which, uh, uh, made European human rights law and the authority of the, uh, European Convention of Human Rights binding on the UK. So there is talk about, about, um, exiting those agreements and, and not just talk. I mean, this is the sort of thing that, that, that whenever it's brought up in a Western country, it's described as extreme right wing and fascist and, and, and, and that kind of thing. It's not just being talked about in England. It's being talked about by, I would say, the three main forces on

• 9:28Speaker 02

  the English right, which are Nigel Farage, who's in the Reform Party, uh, Kemi Badenoch, who is the leader of the, um, of the Conservative Party, and Robert Jenrick, who's the main sort of like radical, let's, let's just say, the conservative alternative within the Conservative, um, Party. All of them are talking about getting Britain out of the European Convention of Human Rights to, to the extent where you, you think if there is ever a Conservative government again, it will happen. I mean, it's no, it's no less believable than Brexit was before Brexit happened.

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• 11:27Speaker 03

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• 13:20Tucker Carlson?

  But that's still, I mean, that's pretty tepid, really, like pulling, I mean, the country's been pretty much the same for 1,000 years. I mean, you can go to Stonehenge, pull up bone fragments and trace the DNA to people living in Britain. So, I mean, for all history that we know of, it's been pretty much the same people. With something, the French came 1,000 years ago or whatever, but there've been some changes. But in general, they're the indigenous population, and now in 80 years, they've been, like, overthrown, replaced.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  It's extraordinary. This is an extraordinary anthropological moment. It's like-

• 13:53Tucker Carlson?

  I've never heard of anything like that happening.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Well, there were these, there have been a couple of examples of, you know, what the German paleohistorians call, you know, "Völkerwanderung," you know, movements of peoples, you know, where, you know, people move off the steppes in Asia and into Western Europe and then they, you know, that's how we got our independent, sorry, our Indo-European languages.

• 14:23Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  And, you know, there's movements down through Greece and on to, you know, the Minoan area. I don't, I don't know exactly when it was, about 1,000 or 2,000-

• 14:33Tucker Carlson?

  This is why the Russians and the Finns have kind of- Asiatic eyes, you know?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, I don't know what happened when, but occasionally there are these huge movements of population. This one's a little bit different because it's enabled by technology. So it's not contiguous peoples sort of like pushing against one another. I mean, it's sort of people who are brought by boat and by, and by airplane. But in terms of its, its importance, yeah, it's a, it's a major.

• 15:06Tucker Carlson?

  I guess what I'm saying is the reason it's unprecedented, I mean, Genghis Khan, you know, rolled over and impregnated thousands of people.

• 15:15Tucker Carlson?

  But I don't think those people's leaders asked him to come and impregnate their wives. This is like the only invasion I've ever seen that was been bitten by the leaders of the countries that have been invaded, like come and invade us.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  It's not like they were begging for it, but they, they, they sort of created a climate of permissiveness, you know, that, um, which people took advantage of. And, and it's the, I think, I think what you're getting at is what was the psychological state of Europeans between 1945, when they started doing this?

• 15:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  And, and today that made this possible.

• 15:57Tucker Carlson?

  The question, and I don't understand it.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  And it's a funny thing because you and I have lived through the deepest part of that transformation and it's still kind of a mystery to us. So if anyone's watching this a hundred years from now, they, you know, they, you know, I hope they, they can see how confused we in fact were. But I mean, I think that in the wake of World War II, uh, something happened in the middle of the 20th century and it's really tough to say what it was. It might be a coming to, you know, to consciousness of, you know, after the horrors of the two world wars, it's like.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  You don't want to, you know, this is maybe too moralistic in explanation, but you know, people began to understand that there were bad things could happen if you were too judgmental about other peoples or inimical, but there are other factors such as just the technological factors, the visibility of alternative places to live through television. And that I think is, I think it's, I think the technological, oh, and the fact of easy travel through airplanes and the fact that the telephone, the television, and finally

• 17:20Speaker 02

  the internet enable you to go someplace without being cut off from your ancestral homeland. So it makes the decision to travel abroad much lower stakes, you know? I mean, the people who came to the United States in the 19th century from Sicily, they were gone. They got, you know, for the most part.

• 17:40Tucker Carlson?

  They never saw their people again.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, in fact, in the Italian migration, a lot of them did go back. But it was, in general, it was a big decision. In the case of the Irish, I think they were usually here for good. Anyhow, I think it's a combination of, you know, at the statesman, at the level of statesman, I think it's a discomfort with any kind of expression of hostility or lack of hospitality towards other peoples. But at the, just the operational level of the individual migrants, I think technology had a lot to do with it.

• 18:21Tucker Carlson?

  It's impossible, but I mean, yeah, technology for sure, but you know, Victorian England had... You know, the ability to move people around the world, to control, you know, the world's biggest navy and all that, and it would have been unimaginable. They didn't want millions of non-English living in England because they were proud of England and they thought it was distinctly English. And I guess what I'm getting at is, it's so strange to me that the self-confidence of Western Europe collapsed after winning the war. I think that's so, Germany's a different case, but I mean, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal,

• 19:02Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, these are all countries that like had nothing to be ashamed of from my perspective, certainly England and France. Why did they lose confidence in themselves after winning?

• 19:14Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a sort of complex question. I'm not sure I agree that these countries had, I mean, they were all in, they were all in very different positions. I mean, Germany, Austria, and Italy were the defeated powers and the malefactors in the war.

• 19:35Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  France had collaborated, part of France had collaborated, and there was a tremendous amount of soul-searching, and there was a tremendous amount of guilt. Spain and Portugal had kind of resolved their own civil war in the 1930s, and they were kind of out of the picture. It would seem that Britain had a record that it could really be proud of, but it was dismantling an empire. And so the two main victorious, you know, the main victorious powers were the United States, Britain, and Russia. Russia was communist

• 20:13Speaker 02

  and had its own project to propagandize. But the United States and Britain, they also had reasons for self-examination. There was, you know,

• 20:27Speaker 02

  I think there was plenty of triumphalism after the Second World War. It's a very, it's a very tough thing to read. I think that the America I grew up in was really quite proud of its, its role in the Second World War.

• 20:41Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I remember.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Even as it was reexamining its own history, you know, of racism and slavery and, and, and even the, you know, the settlement and the, and the wipeout of, of the Indians, you know? So it was a mix of, it was a mix of impulses. So I'm not sure that they were, I'm not sure these countries were, were as self doubting as we, as we think.

• 21:07Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the effect was to just collapse, especially in the case of the UK. So is there any getting back to what it was even 35, 40 years ago?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny, I heard a member of the Reform Party saying that what people, what people really long for in England is a return to the status quo anti Tony Blair. That is, you know, Britain had a lot of, of migration. There was one wave in the 40s and 50s. There is another one that kind of coincided with our, the beginnings of our latest wave, which has never, which has gone on unabated, but they had a wave in the 70s and 80s that British did. But the, but the, the biggest one was just, was intentionally started by Tony Blair.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  And the, so the Reform, this one member of the Reform Party says, if we could just go back to the status quo anti Blair, that would be fine. That was only 30 years ago. But in fact, the amount of change has been so tremendous. And it's not just the, that the numerator of, of migration is changed. It's also that the denominator of the, of the, of the total population of Britain has changed. That is, Britain is a very, very slow growing demographic. So they're not really producing a lot of new children.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And so the, a disproportionately large amount of the, of the British people in years to come are going to be the product of, of immigration. So, no, I don't see any. Any, in general, there's no way short of like cataclysmic developments to, to, to reverse any of that.

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• 24:56Speaker 05

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  Make them remember you.

• 25:07Speaker 06

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 25:12Tucker Carlson?

  So it just kind of goes extinct. I mean, because there's no way that those two cultures can live and share power. I mean, one, that doesn't, that's never happened in history. A one culture dominates in the end. You have a culture.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  It depends on how separate they remain. I mean, let's look at the, at the, um, at the history of the settlement of North America. I mean, the, the British, particularly if you talk to Spanish historians and, and Spanish observers of this, were notoriously insistent on remaining separate in the, in the lands they, they conquered and, and they did, and they did dominate. And some, in some places, they were able to settle these, these areas. In other places like India, they were sent home, you know, after a long period of exploiting the place. But there were other, um, there were other nationalities that tended to colonize

• 26:10Speaker 02

  by, by mixing more. And so there is a, there is a sort of a, a mix of cultures becomes possible. The cultures that mixed into what we now think of as, um, you know, different Latin American cultures were earlier on quite separate. There still is a degree of separation in South America between these different strains of like the European culture and the, the, the native culture of, um, but I mean, in, in, in most of Latin America, you can say that there's such a thing as Brazilian culture. There's such a thing as, as Mexican culture. And there will be, uh, you know, I trust such a thing as English

• 26:54Speaker 02

  culture in, you know, in 50 or 100 years, but it will be a very different thing than...

• 27:03Speaker 02

  The English culture that we recognized over the last 500 years. It would, so it is a rupture. You're right.

• 27:10Tucker Carlson?

  What happens to the, I mean, at some point, do the politics get radical?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, that I think is

• 27:17Tucker Carlson?

  Because it makes me feel radical hearing about this.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Well, that I think is what's happening in England now. And it's one of the reasons I went to England and it's why I, I think it's really, it bears watching in, uh, in the next few years. They had a, they had a huge, um, they had a lot of riots last summer. I mean, there was an episode in which, uh, um, you know, the, the British born child of, um, Rwandan immigrants, who sounds like he was kind of a crazy man, um, went to a, to a Taylor Swift dance party that was being held for a bunch of, um, you know, little girls. And he stabbed a dozen of them and, um, and killed three of them.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  And the, and, and the town in which he did it just blew up. And the, um,

• 28:11Speaker 02

  and, and, and, and the protests spread across the country. And you had like a wave of really quite spontaneous, um, public uprising. And that was last, that was but just about a year ago in August. The government, which had just entered office, the, the Starmer, the government of Keir Starmer, the Labour government, chose not to view it as a spontaneous uprising. They described it as the, you know, a reaction to misinformation and that sort of thing. That did not convince the, um, the public very much though. And I think it contributed to the, in general, low popularity the government has enjoyed since then.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  It's a strange, just as an aside, it's a very strange situation in Britain where they, they have a lands, the, this Labour government has a landslide majority, although they've won only a third of the votes. So that in itself is very stabilizing. But I think the events that we've just been, let's see, the, the developments we've just been discussing have made, have contributed to make. To make Britain susceptible to radicalization.

• 29:22Tucker Carlson?

  What about Germany? I mean, Germany's also been completely transformed by immigration, but that's a society with less free even than Britain, and people can't even say it out loud. They've been taught to hate themselves and to keep that stuff inside. But you wonder at some point, did Germans say, you know, just had enough?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's worth, it's worth remembering that, you know, that we had a lot to do with that, you know, German culture of denazification and, and sort of, let's say, German, the critical German approach that they take to their past. And so Germany was not, Germany has never been a real free speech society. It's not a, it's not a, a value that is held to quite the high degree that we hold it in our First Amendment.

• 30:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Very, in fact, no other culture on earth really has that absolutist idea of free speech that we treasure, I think rightly.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  But so, working with that German culture, which is not a pure free speech culture, I think that we reasoned, you know, the United States, partly because of the circumstances of the Cold War, wanted to reintroduce Germany into the family of citizen, of civilized nations, very fast. I mean, we were talking about rearming them in the 1950s, you know? We were talking about creating, building a European army around Germany in like 1955. It was as an alternative to that, that the European Union was created,

• 31:15Speaker 02

  because that prospect really freaked the French out, okay? But at any rate, the United States really wanted Germany to. Be reintroduced to the West and to do that, a certain number of ground rules had to be laid down. You know what I mean? Like you couldn't buy a, you couldn't buy a copy of Mein Kampf. You couldn't, eventually you couldn't join a Communist Party. You know what I mean? There was, so yeah, Germany had, Germany's,

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Germany's free speech was a little constrained, you know? It might have been constrained anyway, but it also had this highly critical idea of, of, of, of German history. And again, it's understandable, but there's a lot of great stuff in German history, too. I mean, the Reformation comes out of Germany. Germany was the most cultured country in the world with the, you know, with the arguable exception of, of Britain at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. And it's, it's, I mean, I don't have to go through the, through the list. It was only a matter of time before Germans said, well, like, can't we talk about the good things in our, in our culture, too?

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I thought that that moment actually was coming around the time of the Iraq War. And I think that that was a, to a, to a, you know, Gerhard Schröder, I mean, at the time, it was fashionable to blame France for the European opposition of, to the American adventure in Iraq, in which, in which, you know, Europe has been spectacularly vindicated, I think. But in fact, I think it was Germany as much as France that was, that was driving that, you know, rebellion. And it was Gerhard Schröder who said, who is then the Chancellor of Germany, he said, the, you know, the foreign policy of Germany

• 33:22Speaker 02

  is going to be made in Berlin and only in Berlin.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  I thought that that was happening then. At any rate, For a long time, people really lacked the institutions through which to express that German, you know, I wouldn't even call it pride. It's just the desire that it's partly pride, but it's just the desire that Germany be treated like a normal country again, you know? And I think now 80 years after the war, that 80 years after the war and confronted by certain problems that actually require a certain amount of national pride to address.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I mean, the Germans are beginning to talk that way again. They're beginning to say, you know, we need to be Germans again.

• 34:17Tucker Carlson?

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• 35:01Tucker Carlson?

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• 35:42Speaker 00

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• 36:26Speaker 05

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games!

• 36:28Speaker 06

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 36:33Speaker 06

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  Make them remember you.

• 36:37Speaker 06

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Leaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 36:41Tucker Carlson?

  It's interesting that AFD, the alternative for Germany, is treated like an outlaw party by the courts in Germany. And yet, it's growing in popularity. I was just reading in the largest German state, members of the party were banned from owning guns because they were unreliable.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  North Ryan, Westphalia, yeah.

• 37:06Tucker Carlson?

  Can that continue?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Well, this is a big, this is a big drama. Yes, it can continue. It's, you know, it's, it's an interesting situation. I mean, the German, the German, I'm not sure where in the Grundgesetz it is, in the basic, German basic law, but, but the German, the German...

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Constitution permits something called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to monitor parties, to make sure that they're not dangerous right-wing extremist parties. And the goal of having that in the Constitution was to prevent any recrudescence of Nazism. Now, there are parties all across Europe that had certain antecedents, whether in the institution itself or in certain, just personnel, you know, the way for the, the

• 38:12Speaker 02

  way, for example, Mussolini's fascist party was ended at the end of, of World War II, but a lot of its members went and they joined the MSI, the Italian Social Movement. And that sort of continued after the Second World War, and then there was, there were offshoots of it. Many of the people in it became left-wing. Giorgia Maloney started a new party, but it had some people who were in the MSI. So if you want to trace a genealogy from, to, you know, from mid-20th century fascism to certain European leaders, you can. And, and, and people do that as a way of sort of gaining talking points against Maloney.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Constantly, they do it. Yeah. However, the interesting thing about, about the AFD though, is that the AFD is not one of those parties. The AFD was founded in 2013 by a bunch of academic macroeconomists who were worried that the European Union, by guaranteeing the, the debts of Greece and other failing countries, was in an invisible way taxing Germany. So it was, it was, it was built around a very recondite complaint, you know? Yeah. And not a hate-filled complaint. And I, I remember interviewing the head of the party at the time, who was an economist named Bernd

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Looka, and he was just a very nerdy guy. He's left, I think he's left the party since. But the party underwent two transformations. The first came in 2015 when Angela Merkel invited immigrants, you know, from fleeing the Syrian civil war to come to Germany. And it began streaming over land into Europe. And were then joined opportunistically, as you may remember, by a lot of Pakistanis and Iraqis and Iranians and Afghans and just a whole huge human wave. And a woman in the party, a very charismatic,

• 40:28Speaker 02

  sort of like mother of many children, named Frauke Petry, said, you know what, we are the alternative for Germany. No, no party is arguing for an alternative immigration policy. And that has to be us. And so it became the anti-immigration party. But at the same time, it had, it had, for similar but less noticeable reasons, it had attracted people who wanted a change in Germany for all sorts of things, including, you know, what we would call culture warriors, people who wanted to change the school curriculum to,

• 41:12Speaker 02

  so that it denigrated Germany less. And then it became a whole big grab bag of parties, of tendencies, which it is today, although they are a much more united party than I think a lot of people think. And they're now, you know, they're, they're, they get 20% in the last election. And between elections, they tend to poll much higher. So they're a serious party. They have at, at times in the last.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  In the last few months, since the elections in January, I believe, they have been the largest party in Germany in terms of opinion polling.

• 41:51Tucker Carlson?

  So if you have a country that calls itself, advertises itself a democracy, a country run by the people who live there, and over time, the establishment excludes parties that represent the majority of the people, then don't you get a revolution at a certain point?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Maybe, I think I got a little off track. There's one piece I forgot to explain. So there exists in the German constitution, this idea of banning parties.

• 42:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  And I think that when people understood it, it was something that was supposed to be done in like 1948, whenever a gang of people got together in one city. And that's why there have been parties banned since the Second World War, not in a very long time. And they tended to be tiny little groups of what we would call jackbooted thugs. The idea that this mechanism could be used to ban the largest party in the country, and furthermore, one that was founded, one that was founded two generations after the Second World War in 2013,

• 43:10Speaker 02

  is not what the constitution envisioned. Nonetheless, you can see the appeal of it for two formerly big national parties that are now shriveling up and want to get those votes back or want to keep from being swept away.

• 43:27Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course I can. It's just such a violation of the core principle of a democracy that I just don't think, either you have to change the name of the system, it's just, it's an autocracy run by people with power and everyone else shuts up, or you have to stop doing that.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, you have...

• 43:49Speaker 02

  You know, you have, you've interviewed Callan Georgescu on this, on this show. If you look at what happened in Romania and the elections last, you know, last November, where he was simply disqualified because someone in the government asserted without presenting proof that, that there had been a Russian campaign to, to elect him and, and, and managed to head off the next, you know, his replacement in the second round of that election, which was delayed for many months and got a member of the establishment into, into the Romanian government. It didn't really work like, like, like a democracy.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  And yet, when it happened, people said, well, we've defended democracy. We've defended democracy against the voters. So it's the sort of kind of, it's the kind of thing that, that Bertol Brecht would, would make a joke about.

• 44:46Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  And, and yes, it's not small D democratic, but people have chosen to call this, this form of government, which is, you might call it like state of emergency liberalism, which is basically the, I think, the most accurate description of what it is.

• 45:05Tucker Carlson?

  It's a great description.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  For, for, they, they, they claim, they claim the term democracy, but I don't think they're doing so very successfully. And the, the parties that, that, that, that, that represent this state of emergency liberalism do not do terribly well.

• 45:23Tucker Carlson?

  It just seems like the spread between what people want and what they're getting grows wider every year. People seem to hate mass migration everywhere in the world. I don't think there's a single person who likes mass migration, really. And you can tell by their behavior. Certainly true in this country. I think people have an expectation of sovereignty, which almost no country has. Like, a country gets to make its own decisions, but that's not, in practice, happening anywhere, with only, again, a few exceptions. And so there's so much frustration about that, that I just, I'm wondering, what's the point where it bubbles up into something unmanageable?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Well, a couple of things. I don't, I'm not sure that the, I, I think that the gap between what people

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Want and what they're getting is wide, is wide, but I'm not sure that it's widening. I mean, the election of Trump was certainly a Yes. Was certainly a call for more action against mass migration. Yes. And since he's been elected, the border has been pretty much closed. There have been deportations, there have been, you know, certainly the rhetorical stance of the administration is against migration. I mean, Trump may disappoint his voters on other things, but on that one thing, which I think we agree is like a really central issue.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Actually, the will of the people and the actions of the government have kind of converged. I agree with that. If the, if there were to be, as I've just described, a conservative government in England and it abolished the Human Rights Act, which would allow Britain to act in a fully sovereign way, then the way would be wide open to deporting people who did not have the right to be there and certainly to stopping the ongoing traffic of small, small boat migration in England.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  So I think that that's, I think it is, I think it's possible things are getting better from a democratic point of view. You also said, okay, so at what point does this explode? I'm not sure it does because one of the things that makes things explode is the, is the, is discontent in numerous and dynamic classes. And that's why, you know, the Arab world was so unruly throughout the 1980s and the 1990s because you had, this was a part of the world in which people were having like

• 48:09Speaker 02

  six or eight or 10 kids and there was no place to put these young men. And there was a lot of, there was a lot of martial dynamism in the, in these societies. And In fact, wherever you have a lot of young people, if you look at the United States in the in the 60s and 70s, you have a lot of disorder and rebellion. But we're not societies like that anymore. We are top-heavy societies full of old, wobbly people. And not, these are not the kind of societies that that say, darn it, I've had enough.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  These are people who need, I mean, the demographic heart of our societies is in the, in people who are of an age where they need care, not where they're going to run out into the street shaking their fists.

• 49:03Tucker Carlson?

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• 50:52Speaker 05

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Day.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Film for IMAX.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Make them remember you.

• 51:03Speaker 06

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Leaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 51:07Tucker Carlson?

  When the children of the latest wave of migrants to the United States are 18, so that'll be in 15 years,

• 51:19Tucker Carlson?

  then you're gonna have a really dynamic society. You're gonna have a lot of people born in this country, to immigrant parents who feel like they want a piece of it, and you're gonna have massive change, wouldn't you think?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and that, I think, is, that's why I've tended to look at this, you know, what's happening now with arguments over the border and with, you know, with Trump as part of a process that will come to resemble about a century later, the process that led to the New Deal. I mean, because I think the New Deal was the consolidation of a new governing system in a way that took account of the waves of migration that had changed the country between 1880 and 1920, you know, and, you know, we are,

• 52:16Speaker 02

  we look at our present demographic change and we say, oh my goodness, things are really, you know, what country has ever faced anything like this? And it's really, there really is, there are really a lot of points of contact between what has happened with us and what happened to the country between 1880 and 1920. You have, you know, people from, you know, the initial argument is, look, you know, it's all well and good to receive people, but this country is about a certain set of values, it's about, you know, it's historically determined, these people who are coming know nothing of our, of our country, how are they going to ever, you know, assimilate into it? It's exactly...

• 53:00Speaker 02

  The same arguments that you got in the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties. Then you get demands for, you know, like, closing the border. And it just doesn't happen and doesn't happen and doesn't happen until nineteen twenty four, when it suddenly happens. And then suddenly, the only people who can come here are the people who are already here. You know, I mean, let's see, the only Americans are the ones who've already arrived. Those are the only foreigners. And that's why, you know, if you look at it, it's why there are so many Italians in Argentina. They came after nineteen twenty four, when the Italians could no longer go to, to, to New York.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  And so from there, these people had no choice but to mix together into a new kind of American. And, and, and the people who said, these people will never be able to adapt to the old American ways. They were wrong, but they weren't totally wrong. I mean, this sort of like, the, the country did change to reflect the identity of the new, of the new immigrants. And then in nineteen thirty two, when Roosevelt came to power, on the heels of an event that discredited the old elites, which is the crash. Then he claimed the authority to, basically,

• 54:23Speaker 02

  reorganize the, the, the country in the name of this new mix of the, you know, of the settled Americans, the new immigrant Americans. And it, it knit the country into one people so effectively that by the nineteen fifty, in the nineteen fifties and sixties, young Americans were sort of like complaining about how boring and homogenized the United States was. You know what I mean?

• 54:49Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  And so, so it can be done.

• 54:54Tucker Carlson?

  Will there, after Trump leaves in three years, will there be like a series of Trumps? Or will the party revert to what it was?

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Oh, will the Republican Party revert to what it was before Trump? Oh, first of all, I think Trump is such a, an unusual person that I don't think he can really be replicated, even if, no matter how hard anyone tries. He was a, he was a, I mean, he came to prominence because he had an incredible amount of, you know, what used to be called brass at a time when brass was, was what, what was required.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  There are other people who have sort of, sort of, who seem to have more of the, you know, more of the qualifications that, that a politician would require. That is like patience and, and like an understanding of policy and things like that. You had people like Ron DeSantis seem to be offering that to the Republican Party for a while. But it's not what the country felt it needed. The country felt it needed brass. The country felt it needed someone to come in and insult, topple and, and break the old establishment.

• 56:27Tucker Carlson?

  Was that establishment broken, like after Trump?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Well, it's still in progress. I mean, it's, I mean, I think, I mean, this is something you know a lot more about than I do. But I, I mean, if I look at Trump I, I would say that, that it was an almost utter failure on Trump's own terms. That is,

• 56:52Speaker 02

  I mean, he he used that list that Leonard Leo and and others had given him to to to to fortify the Supreme Court as a, you know, a more or less conservative

• 57:10Speaker 02

  force and and he nominate a lot of judges. He but I don't think that he ever understood the where the actual levers of power in the government were. And so the the same deep state that he had complained about went on was as strong on the day he left office as it was on the day that he arrived. And so one had the impression that he'd learned absolutely nothing. And so what has happened in under Trump two is one of the most astonishing surprises in the history of American politics.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Now, in Brexit, you had a guy who was kind of a genius in the workings of British government named Dominic Cummings, who was be able to was able to say, well, no, you don't need to win a a majority in Parliament on this one. You just need to control the the Cabinet Office, etc. Trump never had such a person. But apparently, and the details are still not clear how, apparently, he acquired one or several in the course of in the course of his four years out of power. I think Steve Bannon is correct to say that the four years out of power were in in Trumpian terms were were a great blessing for him. So there's

• 58:34Speaker 02

  someone, I mean, maybe Steve Miller is an is a candidate for this, who has the most tremendous Machiavellian understanding of what can be done inside government. I mean, the speed with which, you know, USAID was was dismantled, which in in what seems to me, it was not really a cost saving operation. It was like a purge of a of a certain tendency in in in government was really.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  You know, whatever you think of it as an ideological operation, it was a tremendously expert operation in terms of, you know, government rejiggering. The executive orders that he has, you know, canceled and the new ones that he has passed in order to give a new reading to affirmative action. And I would say that affirmative action was in many ways the key institution of American government of the last half century. To render it inoperative, even if he hasn't fully killed it, is a constitutional revolution.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  So, yeah, this is, I mean, things are still in progress. It's very difficult to see whether for, whether an operation like, say, deportations, whether that is going to accelerate or whether Trump is really running out of gas and this is going to. But it's hard to see how it will proceed from here. But it's been a huge change. He's turned out to be a very significant president.

• 1:00:23Tucker Carlson?

  Can you go back a second? How was affirmative action the key institution in American government?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, I've always thought, and we've talked about this, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the, you know, it created a new constitution that was really at odds, a de facto new constitution that was at odds with what we thought of as our real constitution. And as, you know, what it basically tried to do was sort of like create a more, you know, create a society in the South where, you know, blacks could live as equal citizens to whites,

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  you know, in public and in large companies and that sort of thing. But it wound up to be a, wound up being an incredibly Versatile tool, you could use it for anything. Once you had declared a sort of national emergency. So like getting women onto, you know, like corporate boards or getting, you know, bilingual education into schools, getting, you know, protecting, you know, transgender story hour. I mean, it just, it just ramified into every corner of American life.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  And anybody could be made, anybody was under suspicion. And, you know, let's, let's just say incorporation, it worked publicly and privately. In corporations, anyone who ran a, a company that was, you know, larger than a few dozen people was understood to be under, you know, the government's watchful eye. You could, you could, you could avoid being sued really only by establishing a, an affirmative action program. And so it became, it became the, the means through which the government

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  could approach any institution, public or private, and saying, you know, we'd like to have a look at your hiring practices. We'd like to have a look at like how you, you know, how you've been behaving for the last, you know, for the last year and your board meetings. We'd like to know if there's anyone you're hiring who has kind of an, an animus against black people or women or gays or, or immigrants. And so it had a very chilling effect at every level of government and at every level of, of society.

• 1:03:09Tucker Carlson?

  Is that over?

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  It is for now, except we now have a culture in which for 50 years, people, even in the most private, you know, conversations, sort of have been trained to ask themselves, you know, can I say this or, or is this okay? Or, or, you know, like, you know, I'm not homophobic, but, you know. And, and, and so you have a, you have a, you have a society that has really been trained to be scared. So a lot of this. You know, yes, I think so. So I think that institutionally it's over.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  But but culturally, we are really not a a people that has sort of like learned to use freedom and that will take a long ti- it'll take a long time to get an easy freedom of conversation back.

• 1:04:11Tucker Carlson?

  About about things, obvious things that you notice differences between people and differences between groups.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Yes, about anything.

• 1:04:17Tucker Carlson?

  About anything.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Almost anything. Yeah.

• 1:04:19Tucker Carlson?

  Do you see that changing?

• 1:04:23Tucker Carlson?

  I see it changing.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Do you see it changing?

• 1:04:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I do.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Yeah.

• 1:04:27Tucker Carlson?

  It feels like the term racist has lost its sting like almost completely.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I well, I would expect that to happen. I'm I don't I haven't really gathered any evidence about it, you know? I mean, for one thing, it's harder to, you know, sue a person when you're, you know, the government has announced that it's not enforcing affirmative action, that kind of thing. So, I mean, if you can, it used to be that if someone could just if you could just successfully attach the word racist to a person, you know, whether through a lawsuit or a or a or a or a public relations campaign, no one could hire him. Do you know what I mean? It was a real.

• 1:05:17Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I do know.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it and it and it was sort of like it was not as different from the the Chinese social credit system, which we liked to deplore as we like to think.

• 1:05:33Tucker Carlson?

  And that is no longer true?

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Yes, I think I think that is no longer true. I think it's no longer true that in institutionally, you can destroy a person with that kind of imputation. However.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  It may become true again, depending on what happens in the in the next election. So people are wary. And I also think that people, we're not the sort of people that is comfortable going out on a limb anymore. We've become a very conversationally cautious people, or at least anyone who's like lived the last several decades in this country. You acquire habits. I mean, I think that that you can't expect a person who's had these very self-protective habits beaten into him over over decades to give them up.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  In the same way that, you know, like, you know, people who lived through the depression maintained their habits of frugality for 60 years after that.

• 1:06:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. I remember when banks introduced ATM cards, they couldn't get people who grew up during the depression to use them.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's a very good analogy.

• 1:06:53Tucker Carlson?

  Because it was just too spooky, you know? Do you remember a country where people spoke freely in conversation? Do you have memories of that?

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  I remember one where people spoke more freely. I remember, and in fact, I went to college in the 1980s. I think it was pretty free. And I, and actually, when people described the, the first really mentioned in the wider public of so-called political correctness was, I think, in the winter of 1990 to 1991.

• 1:07:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  And shortly thereafter, you know, you had the Clarence Thomas hearings for the Supreme Court, which introduced the idea of of sexual harassment. And I got the feeling that things were changing very quickly right then. There were a couple of incidents then, and in one that I I remember very clearly was there is, there was a. A Dodgers, an executive for the Los Angeles Dodgers of, named Al Campanis. Yeah. Who got invited on, um, on, uh, Ted Koppel's show Nightline to talk about Jackie Robinson forty

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  years after, um, you know, he'd entered the, you know, big leagues and, and Al Campanis had been, um, you know, he was, he was, not only was he not a racist, he was, he had been Jackie Robinson's roommate and he was one of his defenders, he was great, but he said a few things kind of the wrong way, you know, like he gave a wrong answer to the question of why aren't more blacks managers and he was ruined, he was ruined. This is a guy who had like fought to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. Right. But I mean, you know, you had, um, he, he lost his job and I remember Maxine Waters, who was the, uh, was already in, I don't think she was yet in Congress actually, but

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  she was a very active in, in California politics already, was, said she wanted to be sure that he wasn't, you know, secretly being given any benefits by, by the Dodgers of any kind. And, I mean, he was just like, he was just destroyed. This, this, this kindly old man who had been a friend of Jackie Robinson's and it was, clearly something was, something was, was happening there. Um, and I think that what was happening is that these enforcement possibilities, which are in the Civil Rights Act, that, that lawyers were getting, were, were getting more adept at using them for a growing number of things, like saying, well,

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  of course you have freedom of speech, but if you say that in the company you own, you will create a hostile environment for your, your employees and therefore they'll be able to sue you for this much money. So basically without.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  Without banning speech, you were able to make speech very uncomfortable for people.

• 1:10:05Tucker Carlson?

  Did that just play out? Was, I mean, is it just impossible for people to live this way forever and people just decide?

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  No, it didn't play out. It had to be rebelled against. And the, and the, um, the, the removal, the lifting of the executive orders that, that, that, that order affirmative action by Trump was an absolutely necessary step. The decision not to enforce affirmative action was a necessary step. By the way, it was preceded, it was preceded by a Supreme Court case that appeared in its mealy mouthed way to say negative things about affirmative

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  action programs in universities. But it's clear that universities were proceeding, um, were proceeding as, as best they, they could to, to maintain it. So, no, it does not play out. It's a, it's a, uh, uh, this affirmative action, political correctness woke this whole constellation of authoritarian and even totalitarian seeming rules. They are rules. They are not part of the culture. They are not the result of, you know, a lot of people deciding we really ought to be nicer to trans people. They're, they are

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  enforced by the fact that, that if you fall afoul of these, uh, of, of, you know, of, of civil rights, rights laws, it can cost you your business, your reputation and everything else.

• 1:11:50Tucker Carlson?

  What, what's the real purpose of them? I sense that social justice is not actually the, the, the goal.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Well, I, no, I, you know, you know, I, and I should add that, that, that, you know, this is just a, well, let's, let's, let's deal with this.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  I think that solving the age-old race problem in the United States was the original goal of civil rights.

• 1:12:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  But the tools that were given to solve that problem included ways to overturn democratically made decisions in the South. That tool, that ability to circumvent a democratic mandate from the American people, from any people, is such a valuable thing for politicians to have. And so they started using it for everything. As I say, you know, under-representation of women, under-representation of immigrants,

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  under-representation of Hispanics, all these things become crises. And social justice actually was the name that was given to this. But it was always, and you can call it anything you want, but it always was a way of using the government to sort of order society. And that's, and the danger of it was that you could do that at a really, really micro level, you know? I mean, you can do it at the level of like what signs people hang in the doors of their shops.

• 1:13:37Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  You know? And so it became kind of like the world that, you know, Watzlaw Havel describes in his, and that's why everyone started reading Watzlaw Havel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn again, because our society felt like those Eastern European societies at the time of communism.

• 1:13:55Tucker Carlson?

  No, it was Soviet, it was totalitarian, I mean, in the strict sense.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:14:00Tucker Carlson?

  It was total control over people's lives.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. I like to draw the distinction that Hannah Arendt does at one point. A lot of people use totalitarianism to mean like a really, you know, I mean, Mussolini originally used it to mean, you know, like the state can, you know, like can be all competent. And a lot of people in our time use it to mean like a really, really, really bad dictatorship. But the way Hannah Arendt uses it... Means like the state gets into the totalitarian, the totality of your

• 1:14:35Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  Of your life.

• 1:14:36Tucker Carlson?

  Doesn't have to be violent.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Right, there's no nook of your life that the state, where the state does not belong. The state wants to be at your dinner table, you know what I mean? And, and, and listening in on you, you know, the state wants to be, you know, on your route to work and make sure, you know, if the state wants to be everywhere with you in everything you do.

• 1:14:59Tucker Carlson?

  Can we go back to that? So you said that this was not organic. The population never cried out for total control of its personal conversations or anything else. It was imposed on the population by the state. Now it's been rolled back by the state.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:17Tucker Carlson?

  Run by Donald Trump. But can it be reimposed? Would people put like, could President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be like, you know, my goal as president is gonna be to eliminate racism? Wouldn't people just laugh at her?

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Yes, but there, there, there might be a confrontation. I mean, as long as Trump hasn't, you know, removed these laws from the books, which he hasn't, he's merely sort of like suspended the enforcement of them and he's unwritten some executive orders which can be re, you know, reissued. I mean, it's, it's a reprieve. So the interesting thing would be what would happen if, you know, how would the, the public respond with, you know, four years of living more freely if those freedoms were suddenly withdrawn? And this includes, you mentioned young people.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  This includes people, you know, who've had, who've never had any experience of, of having political, politically correct censorship at work or, or that sort of thing. And I don't know.

• 1:16:23Tucker Carlson?

  You were saying last night at dinner that people often say the Democratic Party, when it takes power again, as it will at some point, will be a lot more radical. But you were saying maybe that's not correct.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  I don't know what they will have the capacity to do. You know, I don't, you know, you say, well, you know, how will people respond if President Ocasio-Cortez says, you know, we're going to have, you know, affirmative action and Drag Queen Story Hour again. Um, I just don't know. But I do, yes, I do think the Democratic Party is probably, um, is probably going to, you know, it's going to find something to, you know, some way to radicalize.

• 1:17:11Tucker Carlson?

  At what point do economic debates like reemerge? I notice we've, you know, as we've been talking about Drag Queen Story Hour and race and sexuality and all this stuff, there's been in a way that would have been weird 40 years ago, but almost no conversation of like macroeconomics in public, like all the oxygen's taken up by that, this, the political correctness stuff.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I think it's, it's a very welcome thing that economics is coming back. You hear a bit of it when we talk about the tariffs, you know, a very, I mean, but Trump is, um, Trump has really confounded a lot of the, of the categories. I think that, that everyone has the habit of like saying, you know, talking about tax cuts for the rich and, and all that kind of thing. To tie this to what we've been saying with immigration, immigration is a very important part of this economic question. Trump, an interesting thing about Trump's first term is that as best we can measure

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  it, it was a highly egalitarian period. And, um, you know, we really only have accurate, undistorted numbers for the first three years of it because the final year of it was, was COVID. But it really appeared that the that the bottom quintile of of earners advanced against other quintiles for the first time since the 20th century. And I, you know,

• 1:18:55Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And this is in the the Fed's numbers that came out towards the end of the the Trump administration. If you look at total economic performance, like the way we tend to measure it, okay, we tend to measure it by the mean, that is, the GDP per capita. Economic performance was much better, or it was better under the Obama administration than it was under Trump. The economy grew more. However, if you look at the distribution of it, it was, there were far lower gains for the the very rich under Trump. And and but there were relative gains for the, there were absolute gains, let us say, for the

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  people in the lower quintiles. I think the four bottom quintiles did quite well under Trump. And that

• 1:19:48Tucker Carlson?

  So his voters benefited is what you're saying.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. Okay, so there's, I mean, it's hard to say why that happened. I think immigration did go down, but mostly immigration was talked down. Okay, when you have high immigration, high immigration is like a direct transfer payment from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants, you know. But

• 1:20:15Tucker Carlson?

  That's, that's interesting. So immigration really is a transfer of wealth to the rich.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So when we talk about Trump and immigration, that's, that's, I think, an important thing to keep in mind. And and and that is why a lot of people were really surprised by the shift in votes among, particularly among black and Hispanic males to Trump in in 2024. And people have sought to explain it through these cultural You know, factors that we've been discussing earlier today. Oh, it was a Trump's, you know, endorsement by this rap hip hop star or whatever. But I think it might just be

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  that people, you know, people at that part of the economy, you know, who tend to be, you know, that benefited from Trump, one, tend to be disproportionately black and Hispanic. And it might just be a direct, a case of people just voting their direct economic interests.

• 1:21:21Tucker Carlson?

  It's a little weird. If you go through the Congressional Black Caucus, certainly among the people whose names you've heard, like the famous black political leaders in this country, they're all for open borders.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Huh. Well, I think that that is largely intersectionality. And, you know, people talk about, people in, in, in universities talk about intersectionality, like it's a theory about, you know, the how, you know, different types of lack of privilege intersect, like, you know, am I, am I more discriminated against because I'm a black woman or because I'm a lesbian and, and that kind of thing? Or because I'm foreign or whatever. But actually, what intersectionality is, you've, you've used the term on your, on your show, but I,

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  what I think it really is, is just coalition building. The civil rights regime created a, a system in which you, you could do almost anything you wanted. A minority could do almost anything that he wanted with government. You could do almost anything you wanted with government in the name of minorities, but minorities remained minorities. You couldn't get the, the majority to do that. So what happens is minorities wind up, make the beneficiaries of minority government wind up making an alliance, you know? You can't vote against immigration because you're a woman. And, you know, women's rights are immigrant rights,

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  and immigrant rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights, and they're all- Wrapped up together. So and that's where the, you know, like the, the much mocked non sequiturs of intersectionality come from like, like gays for Gaza and, and, and that, and that kind of thing.

• 1:23:17Tucker Carlson?

  My favorite.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 1:23:19Tucker Carlson?

  But really, you're just describing the Democratic Party. That, that this is just like a theoretical overlay to justify retroactively a coalition.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  The Democratic Party is the party of the beneficiary beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• 1:23:35Tucker Carlson?

  Democratic Party is the party of beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the Republican Party is the party of the victims of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Or those who have objections to it on, you know, I mean, if you count among the victims, those who feel their liberties constrained by it. Yeah.

• 1:23:57Tucker Carlson?

  I would say curtailing someone's liberty is to hurt somebody.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting. Does that change?

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Well, as I say, I think it's, it's inabeyance now, but, but, you know, to, if, if, if I could say another thing about, about immigration and the economy, there is a kind of a longer term. There's a kind of a longer term process sort of working itself out as we create this. As we create through border enforcement, a tightening of the labor market on the bottom of the income distribution. It should do some very good things for the, for the country. If you believe, as I think you probably should believe that,

• 1:24:52Speaker 02

  that inequality is one of the biggest problems confronting the country, it's going to alleviate that somewhat. But it's going to do it in a kind of a, it's going to do it in a way that is going to hurt in places. I think people are right. I mean, I think those economists who say that, that, that immigration, that curtailing immigration is inflationary are right. And it's inflationary in a lot of ways that affect the, not just the upper middle class, but also the middle class lifestyle, like the great proliferation of.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  Of really nice restaurants. The idea that, you know, when this experiment in mass immigration in a nearly open border, you know, with Mexico began in the 1970s, there weren't a dozen sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh, you know? I mean, people didn't.

• 1:25:51Tucker Carlson?

  There were no sushi restaurants in Pittsburgh.

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  This stuff, we tend to think that this is, that these amenities have developed because of our, you know, improving taste, that we're just so much more discerning than our parents were. But the difference, I think, is this source of just plentiful, bountiful, really cheap labor for people who can, you know, work in back kitchens and things like that.

• 1:26:20Tucker Carlson?

  There's no doubt. When I worked in a restaurant as a dishwasher 40 years ago this summer, it was a diner in New England. Everyone was white in the kitchen. Everybody, everyone had a criminal record, everyone was white.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  That's interesting. But so when you tighten up that labor market and suddenly you have to pay your dishwasher a dollar more, $2 more, $3 more, the meals in your restaurant are going to get more expensive. So there aren't going to be, you know, like sandwiches, gourmet sandwiches for $1.99 anymore. They're going to be like $28.99, you know? And people are going to say, I'm going to bring my sandwich to work, you know? I'm going to, and then the restaurant is going to close. And the country is going to become much more like it was, like what you saw the tail end of in your diner in New England.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  It's going to have crummier food. It's going to have, you know, things are going to, there's going to be a lot more sameness. That's what the world of a, of a, of a, of a low immigration, less free market, where there's less of a free market in labor. That's what a society like that looks like. The.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  The working class gets richer, they they move towards the middle. Everyone gravitates towards the middle class, right? And institutions, economic institutions begin to serve the middle class. That is, you have a a shrinking of of gourmet restaurants and and a concentration of restaurants in the middle of, you know, the middle of the road category.

• 1:28:04Tucker Carlson?

  So the middle class was the dominant, um, you know, was the dominant portion of the country, was the majority of the middle class country up until, I think, 2015. And did that change? And then the middle class is no longer the majority. Is that because of immigration?

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  Has a lot to do with immigration. Yes, globalization and immigration. And, um, I mean, I think people, people tend not to mention, um, immigration. I mean, people tend to say it's a mix of globalization, that is, free trade and technology, you know? But I think that the most important part of globalization is immigration.

• 1:28:47Tucker Carlson?

  Why is it the most important? You mean, it has affected most changes?

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has said that, you know, immigration, people always talk about, you know, is immigration good for the economy or bad for the economy? And basically, whenever you measure it, it's tough to get an effect on the economy that's more than like 1%. It's so trivial. I I I mean, but what the huge effect is, which is like dozens of times larger than the effect on the economy as a whole, is the transfer effect. The sort of loss of jobs by people who need $15 an hour to wash dishes to those who will do it for $8 an hour, okay?

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  And the benefit to people who used to be paying their gardener, you know, $30 an hour, but now find it can be done for $6 an hour. Or more likely, they pay a guy who's got a team on his truck and they pay him, you know, $30 an hour and let him sort out how this is done. And he does it much quicker and they save money. You see what I mean?

• 1:29:55Tucker Carlson?

  I do.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  So it becomes a, it becomes a transfer from the, from the working class.

• 1:29:59Tucker Carlson?

  So it doesn't necessarily, I think what you're saying is it doesn't necessarily expand your economy. But it just makes the rich richer.

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:30:09Tucker Carlson?

  So that would explain why rich people, and these are broad strokes, but in general, hate any conversation about immigration, immediately go to motive, "You're a racist", and just aren't at all interested in talking about it at all, and why working-class people really resent it. There may be other reasons too, but that seems like a big reason.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  Yes, those are broad strokes, but I think they're roughly accurate. There's a, you know, I, I, there's a French sociologist named Christophe Gilwi, who's written books about how this has worked in France, and his thinking has really clarified mine on this. But, you know, you basically, in France, you have 20 cities that are like nodes of the global economy. And they like, you know, like in, in Toulouse, you have Airbus, and where the, you know, where there are engineers and executives at Airbus, they have, you know, you know, African gardeners, and, and there are nannies, and there are all sorts

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  of people there. It's a global economy niche. When you get out into the countryside, none of that stuff touches anything. It's basically people, the economy consists of like returning, you know, cans to the, you know, to the grocery store. This explains why, you know, if you live in a place like Washington DC, or, or Berkeley, California, and, and, or Boston, people are like sincerely puzzled. They say like, "How did Trump win? I don't know anyone who voted for him." You know, and they say, they'll say something like, "No, really. I've talked to people of all classes. I didn't vote for him. You know, my mother didn't

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  vote for him. My nanny, you know, and, you know, in, you know, from Jamaica didn't, you know, who's not naturalized and vote, she didn't vote for him." And the answer is, the dividing line is, is not between rich and poor, it's between the beneficiaries of, and the excluded from the global economy, right? That's the dividing line in the politics.

• 1:32:19Tucker Carlson?

  So when you give up open borders, you're really giving up like a whole way of life?

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  You give up the solidarity between classes in your country.

• 1:32:32Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, what does that mean?

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. As soon as I said it, I realized that you could look at it in a separate, in a different way. I mean, you give up a dynamic that brings the classes close together, you know, which is that the ability of working class people to withhold their labor for more money.

• 1:32:56Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? You undercut that. They become, it's why trade unions, when they were actual industrial unions and not arms of the Democratic Party, you know, were, you know, they equated immigrant labor with scab labor. That was what-

• 1:33:15Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they were behind the immigration restrictions-

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:17Tucker Carlson?

  Of the 1920s.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  So you give up that dynamic, you know. But it's very tempting, you know, there are other ways to look at it. But yeah, I think that's basically, that's basically the best way to look at it.

• 1:33:32Tucker Carlson?

  Will China ever decide, as its, you know, economy matures and it cools inevitably, that it needs mass immigration to China?

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know much about China. I know a little more about Japanese. You know, China has had a tremendous amount of internal labor migration, which it is just, which is just about to come to the end of. And so its labor costs are going to rise. I don't know how it's going to react. It's very interesting that Japan has chosen, you know, a tightening economy over a diversifying society. That is, they've kept out immigrant labor for the most part. And where they've admitted it, they've tended

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  to do it on a temporary basis. You know, you get a few Filipino nannies and they send them home at the end of their, of their, of their term.

• 1:34:38Tucker Carlson?

  The only mass migration they've had in the last 100 years has been from Korea.

• 1:34:46Tucker Carlson?

  Which they controlled until 1945 and then the Koreans who stayed kind of pretend they're Japanese.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Yes, so you know, I think that, you know, and.

• 1:34:55Tucker Carlson?

  How's that trade worked for them?

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  I think it's worked well for them. I mean, I think it's worked for them. I mean, the United States is constantly that the United States has brought tremendous pressure on Japan to to admit immigrants. And this is one of the things that I find, exactly, this is one of the things I find quite mysterious. But if you look at the pressure that the United, this is one of the things that I think that USAID did. It's, I mean, it's sort of an ideological arm of the country. But if you look at not just programs, but but people in the United States diplomatic or in the State Department were always sort of like brow beating Viktor Orban in Europe, for instance, for not

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  for not being more welcoming of immigrants. But I, so I think we're at the point now where we're in a moment of of transition. But I, you know, Japan is is deeply in debt. They, I believe they have the largest per capita debt in the world, although it is all to themselves, you know. So it's the, it's debt to the, so it should be, it should be workable. But there's still a Japan and, you know, as we've discussed, Japan decided that it valued its cultural continuity more than European countries did.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  And so Japan, if you go there, you'll discover it's still, I think, the Japan that people who went there 20 or 30 years ago remember it as.

• 1:36:32Tucker Carlson?

  So that, I mean, they seem like the only smart country like in the world. Because that does seem, no one's starving in Japan. Actually, Japan is infinitely nicer than New York, for example. Sorry, and Tokyo is, and even though it's bigger and more crowded.

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Tucker Carlson?

  And I just wonder, like, is that? Like that just, that just seems like the greatest win to me.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  I, well, I, well, they, they think so because they continue to, they continue to keep this policy and, and there's not a lot of, um, there's not a lot of agitation for, for changing it, you know, but I don't, I don't, I don't know. It's been a few years since I've been there.

• 1:37:18Tucker Carlson?

  Last question, are you hopeful about the United States?

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for, you know, but I, I'm not sure that's saying much. I, I tend to, to want to be hopeful and, and, um, the United States has some, um, tremendous strengths, you know? It's got, um, the United States is, something has happened since the, I'm, I'm using Europe, which I think is the best, you know, frame of comparison here. The, you know, the, the United States has got a lot richer than Europe in the last 15 years. I don't know why that's happened. The two societies seem to be converging up until, you know, roughly the time of the,

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  the, you know, the, the, the, the financial crisis of 2008 and then the Euro crisis that followed it. And since then, the United States has peeled away by like, I don't know, 20, 20 or 25% from, from European standards of living. So it's, it's richer. It seems to have a, it seems to be in a period of democratic abolition. I mean, that is the, the, the, the populace is engaged. This doesn't mean that, you know, they've made a right choice with Donald Trump or that he's always going to do the right thing, but, uh, but the, the,

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  the, the public is kind of vigilant and, and it's, it is reforming the country. And, um, we've reformed before, so I'm, I'm relatively, I'm relatively optimistic.

• 1:39:01Tucker Carlson?

  I am too. And you make me feel optimistic. Christopher Caldwell, thank you very much.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tucker.

• 1:39:11Tucker Carlson?

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