#105 - Neema Parvini - Why Politics Is Like Pro-Wrestling And Democracy Is An Illusion

Neema Parvini is the author of nine books including Applied Elite Theory, The Prophets of Doom, The Populist Delusion, The Defenders of Liberty, Shakespeare's Moral Compass. He has also written dozens of chapters and articles in scholarly publications and the media. Neema is the Director of Academic Agency, which he set up to focus on core academic skills and knowledge areas which can help students and learners of all ages to achieve both academic excellence and improve communication and research skills in the workplace. He runs the YouTube channel Academic Agent and the Substack The Forbidden Texts.

In this episode, Neema and I think out loud about how the Iron Law of Oligarchy explains how populist movements are co-opted and this can be seen in America, what ‘the regime’ is and why Tony Blair represents the human embodiment of it, what the 'Boomer Truth Regime' is and how it has dominated since the Second World War, why politics is like pro-wrestling, how multiculturalism often masks the interests of multinational corporations and mercantile government policy as well as advancing ethnic preferences and interests, why Neema thinks Reform UK is a containment strategy for the regime rather than a solution and why a Great Man of History and a cleansing fire is needed to see off the current crop of elites, why Neema does not subscribe to Professor David Betz’ predictions of civil war in Britain, why Neema grew disillusioned with the online right, how the modern information landscape disincentivises searching for truth, and much more.

You can find Neema's work here:

• Neema’s YouTube channel
• Neema’s books
• X/Twitter

About Thinking Class:
Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world.

Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, academics, and independent thinkers.

Thinking Class is concerned with discovering long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes. Expect historically-grounded analysis on matters of national character, institutions, demography, belief, and political legitimacy.

New episodes every week.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Nima Parvini. Nima is the author of nine books, including Applied Elite Theory, The Prophets of Doom, The Populist Delusion, The Defenders of Liberty, and Shakespeare's Moral Compass. Nima has also written dozens of chapters and articles in scholarly publications and the media. He is the director of Academic Agency, which he set up to focus on core academic skills and knowledge areas, which can help students and learners of all ages to achieve both academic excellence and improve communication and research skills in the workplace. He runs the YouTube channel Academic Agent and the substack of the same name. In this episode, Nima and I think out loud about how the iron law of oligarchy explains why populist movements are so frequently co-opted, and how this can be seen in America. What the regime is and why Tony Blair represents the human embodiment of it, what the Boomer Truth regime is and how it has dominated since the Second World War. Why politics is really like pro-wrestling, how multiculturalism often masks the interests of multinational corporations and mercantile government policy, as well as advancing ethnic preferences and interests, why NEMA thinks Reform UK is a containment strategy for the regime rather than a solution, and why a great man of history and a cleansing fire is needed to see off the current crop of elites, why NEMA does not subscribe to Professor David Betts' predictions of civil war in Britain, why NEMA grew disillusioned with the online right, how the modern information landscape disincentivizes searching for truth, and much, much more. As ever, NEMA showed why he is a unique thinker, and this conversation proved as fruitful as our first. Check out the link to that in the show notes below. As ever, like, subscribe, follow and share Thinking Class on the podcast platform of Choice, YouTube, and Substack. Enjoy the show, classmates. Well, we can we can start all over again and do man of letters, Mr. Nima Parvini.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

No, it's alright. I don't know, yeah. I I I love the idea of a 19th century man of letters. In uh Thomas Carlyle's on heroes and hero worship, he has a whole section on men of letters. I'm like, hold on, kings, poets, men of letters, you know. Well, I want to be a man of letters, though. Yeah, Thomas Carlisle. I agree with John.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Very well, very well. Thomas Carlyle, uh well, I'm sure I'm sure he and some of his ideas will end up popping up throughout a discussion, but his his work really is very compelling. I I actually got very obsessed with it, having read your book, The Prophets of Doom, and um for various reasons. I think it um is pretty instructive um to those of us who are so much further along from um the rise of the industrial mindset, so to speak. There's all of that. But as you've written in your works, he he really does help you understand the reality of the great men of history, that it really does um, it really is a thing that people can impose their will upon events. Um and and as we spoke about earlier on the year in February, that civilizations, whether that it's their vitality or the the opposite, right? They're their malaise, it's driven by the the cultural elite, so to speak, or the or the elite class. Uh, and and so I think we should we should that's a perfect segue. You've you've inadvertently pushed me into a segue about your new book, which is Applied Elite Theory, which we've mentioned Prophets of Doom. Before that was populist delusion, in which you made the argument that uh this idea that there is a democracy that is driven by the people, is um it's a mirage that there is only ever one class that rules over another class, and whether you like it or not, we're all ruled over by an organized minority. So you came up with all of this work on the back of reading some of the great figures of the past who were all from very different periods and looking at different historical trends themselves. So, this is through analysis and observation. It's what you call a value-free analysis. So let's bring it back to the present then. We've got the rise of populist movements here in the United Kingdom, Reform UK. We see it on the continent with Jordan Bardella in place of Maureen Le Pen. We've got the alternative for Germany in Germany, of course. And then we've got uh we've well, we've seen MAGA rise in Trump 2.0. Let's start talking about this in the applied aspect then. Where are the populist delusions within each of those movements, Nima?

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Yeah, well, I I should say that uh we are talking about my new book, of course, Applied Elite Theory on the P.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Oh yeah, there's a well-thumbed version just to show that I've really read it.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

So um, yeah, I mean, really, this book, this new book, Applied Elite Theory, uh, is a lot about how these populist movements that you just mentioned have already, in some ways, been captured by uh various organized minorities, if not by the regime, what we call the regime itself. I mean, in this country, it's been obvious for some time to me that the system is fine with a figure like Nigel Farage coming in and that Reform UK are not going to be a revolutionary force, uh, even if it's gonna destroy the Tory party, which remains to be seen. I noticed the Financial Times was talking about a merger recently. Uh, over in America, Trump 2.0 uh has been frankly shocking, the extent to which uh it is obvious that he has been captured and that America First is not really America First, but is actually about certain special interests, which we can talk about or not. Um, and it it strikes me that the same thing is true of many of the populist figures in Europe. Um, Gert Wilders is a good example. He's he I would say is not really for the Dutch people first, he's for other people first. Um you know, you mentioned this this guy in France. I mean, last I checked, Le Pen is not allowed to run, is that right? Um But you know, whenever the original person is then now now it's some other person, I already think that uh Le Pen had moderated herself to the point where whatever was edgy, whatever was threatening to the system, as embodied in a figure like her father, uh, has already been kind of rounded, you know, skimmed off. She's already moderated. This is called the iron law of oligarchy. Um so yeah, and really uh what this book does is it explains the process of the iron law of oligarchy in practice and how or why so often uh these figures that get everybody excited end up being disappointing or end up doing not doing the things that they promise to do when they're in power. I mean, as we're recording this, everybody's talking about um America, you know, going to war with Venezuela. I mean, this is very different from the Trump who was boasting about stopping the war with Russia in day one. Now he's basically kind of doing uh neo-imperialism neocom with a MAGA hat. Um, you know, as it appears on issue after issue, he sides with special interests against the interests of his base, uh, which has unfortunately been the story of Trump 2.0. I I I really struggle at this point. We're in uh December now, so pretty much after a year, the data's in. We've you know, the story's already told, and uh even the greatest cope merchants online, like Captive Dreamer, is one I like to pick on. Um you know, even he has taken off the MAGA hat. Even he is finding it an embarrassment to be associated with this cavalcade of betrayal. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Well, I think we should definitely get into those ideas that figures like Nigel Farage and the party Reform UK is really containment. Um but perhaps before we get there, let's let's pick up on some of these threads that we're we we've started to talk about, like the regime in inverted commas, the system. Um I would say that for many people, those that are accused of conspiratorial thinking, that there are quite a few people who think that strings are pulled behind the scenes. There are others who perhaps believe that politics in the public sphere is engaged in uh forthrightly, and that the issues that are presented within the media and within the public sphere are to be fought over and to be won in the spirit of public debate. Whereas you argue within your books that much of what we see out in the public sphere is akin to pro-wrestling. You referred to it as the Kfabe, a predetermined outcome, theatrical moves. So perhaps you could unpack what you mean by the regime.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

Well, the first thing I do, the first thing I do is I'd strongly wish to criticise those people who want to start, you know, claiming that these ideas are conspiratorial. Because at this point there is no excuse. Dominic Cummings, who was as close as you can get to power, has come out and basically he's used these terms, Kay Phoebe. He's said, he's explained in detail how things work in Downing Street. Ross Johnson did uh an interview in the Spectator, uh a video interview, where he basically explained that a lot of the things he wanted to do when he was the Prime Minister, he was, you know, more or less told us he was taken to a dark room and told he had to do various things. Liz Truss, who was the shortest reigning uh Prime Minister ever, has come out and given interviews and said, Look, uh basically we were done in by the system. But Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, has done an interview where he said he was told in no uncertain terms, taken to a dark room, will you do a deal with us? And he was not prepared to do that, and he was, you know, then destroyed uh as a political force and continues to be destroyed. Uh as as we as we're recording this, is that your party thing has become a farce. Um so I would say that um if people are gonna go, if people are gonna kind of maintain the fiction, it it's almost like you know speaking to a child who is being shown evidence that wrestling isn't real, right? And the child saying, No, it is real, it's still real to me, it's still real to me, and you're and you're literally bringing out wrestlers telling you, you know, look, it is it is scripted, guys, it is performance. Um so so to me, at this point in 2025, I I'd say it's uh childish bordering on negligent to maintain the view that there aren't unseen you know forces that we don't see on camera, on TV, working uh you know, in the in the halls of power there. It's it's obvious, and they've told us. So that would be my one-shot answer to that.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Well, you've also written extensively about um Tony Blair and his enduring influence after his years as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom. And you say he's the human embodiment of the regime. Maybe we can touch on that so people can understand this influence that he has.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Well, I mean, Tony Blair, after leaving, uh you know, he he ceased to be the Prime Minister in 2007. Uh, I don't know if you you can remember there was a big ceremony where there was a changing of the guard and Gordon Brown came in as the Prime Minister. That was quite a surreal day because they made so they did it in such a symbolic and kind of pompous way. There was like the an actual changing of the guards um to show Labour unity or whatever. Uh, but after that point, he immediately, Tony Blair, did not go and retire and play golf like so many other politicians. Uh he did not join the House of Lords like many former prime ministers, but set about uh building a power network outside of you know Westminster uh with various NGOs. Uh those NGOs were then consolidated in a super NGO called the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which is now the biggest NGO of all of them. And um he remains a looming figure over our politics, left or right, over the Tory Party and the Labour Party. Um and we've seen it since Labour have become uh the government. Uh one of Blair's obsessions has been digital ID or ID cards back in the day. Uh he is constantly pushing for the government to adopt AI, to invest in AI, to adopt digital technology and various other things. Uh, he has certain financial backers too. Bill Gates famously, Larry Allison is another one. And um Labour, before they came uh to power, did not put digital ID in their manifesto. What the day after they came in, they uh defied Blair and said, We're not gonna do this. Uh then all of a sudden they did do it. All of a sudden, Blair's plan was being enacted by the government. Four million people signed a petition to uh say, hold on a second, you didn't consult us, there wasn't been a debate, you know, you're just gonna bring this in without it wasn't even in and um I think they they are after you reach a million threshold of signatures, the government has to respond. And they responded on that position by saying, uh, yeah, we're not gonna debate um it's gonna come in. So our trees. Uh so it seems to me that uh this is the most naked example of Blair basically just setting the agenda and representing the permanent the permanent managerial class. What he says tends to be the thing that happens, regardless of who's in power. Um he doesn't always get his own own way. For example, during COVID, during COVID, Blair wanted um there to be a kind of uh demarcation between the anointed and the benighted, between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. He couldn't understand uh why unvaccinated people were still being permitted into polite society. Uh he called branded them as idiots and openly called for there to be segregated spaces. That didn't actually happen, so he doesn't always get his own way, but uh he was pushing for it.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Yeah, I mean there seem to be myriad examples within the current Labour government of the influence of those that are back Tony Blair. I think you you've mentioned Gates and Ellison, and I think Starmer made a big thing within the press about uh these these meetings held at some of the grace and favour properties that are available to um British government parliamentarians, and uh uh Ellison and Gates um were both um well pushing their sustainable uh agriculture, sustainable finance, um renewable renewable energy agenda. And um within days uh we we saw Millerband's uh ramping up of changing legislation for um solar farms, as well as on, of course, uh farmers uh try and make it um economically unviable for uh our our farmers to be able to stay where they are and force them into having to sell lands to pay these taxes to the state. Uh so it's I'm trying to think of who it was that said it, whether it was you might know better than I, and maybe it's just a total diversion, but there are those who've written extensively about the kind of deluge of information and the demoralization of people that stop them from being able to connect the dots between uh news items. And so they read news items as though they're within isolation, that they're just these anomalous events. It's people reacting to these things. But actually, you can see if you're able to connect some of these new news items, the social imaginary that has captivated uh our ruling class or the agenda of the ruling class. And maybe actually we we we we at least start to uncover the worldview that has dominated and um it has been referred to, and I heard it from you first, the Boomer Truth regime. Um, and I and a recent guest of mine, Martin Zellner, also brought this up in in conversation. And um, you wrote in Applied Elite Theory that between 1945 and 2024, the rulers of Britain, the USA and the West more broadly, were arrested by a set of moral visions and a kind of collective dream which came to dominate all their thoughts and actions. Discuss what was this collective dream?

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Well, I mean it's really the term set by World War II, the outcome of World War II, uh, but also even more so, I would argue, the cultural evol the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. And the way I've uh described it is uh the two figures of John Lennon and Winston Churchill side by side doing that, okay, doing that together, okay. And um essentially what John Lennon wants, he outlines in in the Boomer anthem, imagine, imagine there's no countries, it's easy if you try, all the people of the world joining hands together, there's no religion, there's nothing to kill or die for, all of this sort of stuff. Um he's uh he has another song called God, which is even more nihilistic, uh, where you know he's saying, I don't believe in Beastos, I don't believe in Buddha, I don't believe in Jesus, I just believe in me, Yoko and me. So kind of truly kind of apex individualism, almost a nihilistic individualism, which has no limits, has no constraints. Uh just this morning, John, I've been compiling, I did this thing called 80s bangers better than Madonna, and now people are demanding a 90s one. So I've actually been spent the morning looking at 90s music, which is I have to do less research on because I was a teenager in the 90s, I remember him. And uh, I mean, almost every song hits on the theme of almost unlimited freedom and uh and kind of hedonistic excess. You know, I mean, in in a case of something like um Too Unlimited, you know, There's No Limits, uh, or you know, freed from desire, that gala song. I mean, but it doesn't really matter where you go in the culture, that it's it's excessively um individualistic, and then even uh nihilistic, you know, if you get into 90s music, the the the good the grunge side of it is kind of self-pitying and nihilistic and whiny. Uh but it doesn't really matter where you go, which genre you go to, whether it's the dance or the pop or the rock or the or the or the rap, it's all kind of an unconstrained individualism, is what I'd call it, okay, which is where the vision of John Lennon goes. And the role of Winston Churchill or the Winston Churchill side of the equation is to protect that. It is to protect John Lennon. So so Churchill is the kind of shield. Anybody who wants to attack the Lenin vision, the unlimited individualism, is always already Hitler, is always already a Nazi. And your job as Winston Churchill is to fight Nazis wherever they are, to punch Richard Spencer, whatever, whatever it is. Okay. Um, and and that in a nutshell is the Boomer truth regime. And then, of course, in foreign policy, that manifests as well, we want to export the John Lennon dream everywhere around the world. Okay, we we need to, it's really not all right that those Chinese and those Muslims over there are not engaging in the unlimited drug-fueled sex party, right? They're not doing the raves, and that's a problem. So we need to bomb them. We need to, you know, and if they're gonna be horrible dictators all around the world resisting the John Lennon Vision, then as the always Churchill, we have to bomb the always Hitler. Uh that, you know, and the always Hitler is who? I mean, at the moment is Vladimir Putin and Maduro in Venezuela, but in the past it's been, you know, the Ayatollah or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic or Stalin at one point. It doesn't really matter who it is, they are the forces of non-freedom, uh the forces of totalitarian dictatorship. They're they are against our John Lennon vision, therefore we must bomb them. That is the Winston Churchill side. And um really Tony Blair, who, if you remember when he became Prime Minister, was the first Prime Minister who grew up listening to the Beatles, literally with a guitar. Do you remember Blair had a guitar? Uh perfectly embodies this, if you think about it, because you know, he he stands for all of those socially liberal things that we talked about, but he's also like probably the most insane neocon ever. You know, he hasn't he's never even don't forget Blair wanted to bomb Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and it was George Bush saying, Hold on, Tony, now, you know, there's a there's a bit much tone. Um, you know, and it if you listen to Blair, we should have never pulled out of Afghanistan, we should have finished the job there. He hasn't seen a place he doesn't want to bomb. Um, you know, and and this is it, basically. This is that in a nutshell is the Boomer Truth regime. Uh, and I should stress uh for a lot of people, it really has nothing to do with actual or to actual Hitler, actual Churchill. It's more the kind of cartoon version of those things that exist in people's minds that then justify all of all of this other way, all of these other things that we've been talking about. Um it's why uh, you know, the the left saw it as such such an affront that people were against the trans issue, right? I mean, to a lot of people that was the most extreme end, the most absurd end. You know, up turning thousands of years of people saying, well, there are men and women. Actually, no, if you're a man, you can become a woman. I can be born as a woman, just born in the wrong body. Who are you, John, to tell me that I'm not a woman? And if you tell me that I'm not a woman, that's you being Hitler, and I have to fight you as an Nazi. You see, you see how the lot so even on something absurd like that, that's the kind of sharp end of it. But it's like that on every single issue, and then these things they try to enshrine them almost as a kind of religious codex. Uh, therefore, in America, things like uh, you know, you get quasi-religious figures like Martin Luther King, uh, or you know, the Civil Rights Act being enshrined now as this thing that we must always protect, any step backwards against those things is automatically Nazism. That's it in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Well, thinking about that particular example uh, even though it's been stretched, I suppose, um beyond recognition now, is um thinking about the ideas that have taken hold with regards to multiculturalism. I know you have um made the point uh previously elsewhere that actually things like ethnic preference is real and it drives people. And um, I'm not sure these were your words to paraphrase, but others have, which is often um universalism is used as a cloak in which to advance ethnic interests or your own religious interests, which are invariably tied to an ethnic group. So thinking about the story behind the hard multiculturalism or the asymmetric multiculturalism that someone like Professor Eric Kaufman would talk about, and which I think we can see in action in the United Kingdom where host population suppressed, don't want any of that out there. That's why there's been such a um a pushback against that the flags going up, talking about, as you said, this is making people uncomfortable, it's Nazism, it's whatever, but this is all uh downstream of having celebrated every other culture and people and their religious ceremonies and all the rest of it. The question I've got for you then is what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is it that you have the organized minority of ruling elites that are um concerned with creating a global village, one in which we'll trade freely and we move around freely, and it's a cosmopolitan utopia that have pushed this on everyone? Is it actually because there has been a transfer of large ethnic diasporas into countries that are um organizing themselves and then are uh getting close to seats of power or just being intransigent and saying this is what we want for our own people and it informs the policy? Or is this not an either-or thing? Is this a a both and they're both working together?

SPEAKER_02 28:12

Well, I mean, I I think the the the second group that you talk about there, there's a certain degree of opportunism and there's a certain degree of just what Karl Marx said, you know, we find that we can't really choose the conditions that we find ourselves in, but you do have control over what you do in them, right? So to a certain extent, this the second group of people you said, uh you mentioned there are just trying to do the best they've got with what they've been dealt, right? So you can't. I don't I I have a kind of a less negative view of those people because they're just doing what they're gonna do, okay. Really, I would like to put all the focus on our rulers, our ruling class, and the you know, the set of assumptions or the set of ideas that have got us here. Um I also think, I mean, I think that's important to stress, and I know not everybody agrees with me on this, but I I think that in their heart of hearts, they would prefer the different ethnic groups to lose their specific character. They would actually prefer everybody to join the melting pot, and for, okay, you can retain some residue of your indigenous character, okay, your Indian nuts or your, I don't know, if you're in America, your blackness or whatever, okay, you they'll let you retain some some version of that, but it has to be reduced to the level of the theme park. You know, it's like, well, if you're Mexican, that's very nice. You can have your your nachos and your taco bell or whatever, but really the bottom line is you have to join everyone else in the big gay disco. And so sometimes you see tension between, I guess what you'd call um uh kind of ethnic, ethnically driven figure min more minority figures in the leftist coalition, whether it's uh Muslims in this country or black left nationalists in America, who just want what's best for their own people, uh, which often does not, which often comes with a kind of social conservatism, i.e., they don't want all the LGBT stuff, they want to maintain their traditions, they want to just do what do what is best for them as they see it. Um, there's often a tension between those people and the kind of universalists who want to um, you know, bring people into John Lennon world. And funny enough, that actually happened at the your party uh conference a couple of days ago where they were playing John Lennon's Imagine. I'm not even making this up now. Sounds like I made it up. They were playing John Lennon's Imagine as an anthem, and the Muslims in the crowd said, hold on a second, he's saying, Imagine there's no religion. Well, we're hardcore Muslim, what are you doing? And it caused a problem within within your party because there you saw the the core Boomer Truth value rubbing up against one of the client groups of the power structure that's built around Boomer Truth, which in this country is the so-called Muslim community. Um, and they were they were at loggerheads, and I you expect to see these fallings out more and more as it becomes clear that this vision is not going to stop. This whatever it is that animates this will not stop until it's destroyed. Every culture, every religion, every country can't stand anything outside itself. That's why it has to bomb. I mean, ideally, like just think imagine a scenario now, right, where Vladimir Putin drops dead and um Russia truly comes under the remit of the of the American Empire. What do you think they'll do to Russia? What do you think that do you think they're going to install a leader who's for conservative values or Russian traditions and so on? Or are they going to want to try to do the same thing there that they have done here? And I I think the answer to that is obvious. So to me, I I I mean and lots of people disagree with this because some people say, well, actually, the target is just white people all the time. I think the target is all of humanity. And it's just that it so just so happens to have hit white people first. I think in the end they'll come for everybody. They don't, they do not want those things that threaten it um to exist, really. I mean, there was a great book written years ago called uh jihad versus muckworld, which was about this. And you know, I mean the title sums it all up. All of those things that are not part of it are seen as jihad or seen as Nazi. And lo and behold, it's conflated, Islamo-fascism, they call it. Because it's just something, it's not one of me. It's not it's not the McDonald's gay disco. So we might you you understand what I'm saying, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:19

So this is this is what the regime wants. I think people can can recognize this, whether they find it in some of NATO's recent mission statements and even Ukraine during the war, um, starting to uh field um people in the kind of military general um uh role that were effectively fully LGPT um on message. Uh so people can find these examples wherever they look.

SPEAKER_02 33:50

But as you've pointed out, the DLN flag in Afghanistan, that was the most ridiculous one. Afghanistan for George Floyd, do you remember that?

SPEAKER_00 34:00

So the um so if reality is always going to bite back in in the end, insofar as we found amongst the Muslim constituents at the your your party conference, that people's interests uh sometimes are um insoluble, that they are always going to find a way of coming out. And you, and this is to paraphrase you, have talked about how whilst Western nations have been busy importing uh large groups of people in who live uh a very different life according to different civilizational rules, and that there are many who think, well, that's just that uh the game is up, we're headed into whatever this future is, we're headed into. Is you've made the point that actually that's not going to happen because the reality is, is people will begin to recognize their own interests across those more insoluble lines, and in the end, they will be um, or the the civilizational preference of those people will be re-imposed. Where am I going with this? Well, I guess it's inescapable that at the moment we're having a pretty loud conversation, not just in the United Kingdom, but across the West, particularly the Anglosphere, about civic nationalism versus ethno-nationalism. The idea that we can create uh a civic uh nationalist unity amongst a wide group of people and all be under one flag, and we have to subscribe to a set of the values that are broadly aligned with Boomer Truth. Or there are those who say, well, actually, no, there's an ethno-cultural aspect to peoples, and it's better to recognise that and to run our countries on those bases. And they're typically the people who would call for re-migration. So maybe you can unpack it a little bit more for the listeners and the viewers. What do you think the future holds on the basis of we are a very uh mixed up set of civilizations and peoples with different interests? And do you think that the future is irresolvable, that things will continue as they are, or when do those preferences come back to the floor?

SPEAKER_02 36:14

I mean, the the the I think the first thing to say is that I wouldn't be too I mean, I don't know optimistic's probably not the right word, but I wouldn't underestimate the corrosive force uh of the dissolving acid that is liberalism. Okay. The Muslim community may look strong now compared to some other communities, but liberalism has a way of dissolving and destroying. Um and you can have a look. I mean, like probably like the banana the initial first case would be the Native Americans in America, who were strong, proud people. I think Tucker Carson talked about this recently, but then they got hooked on drugs and alcohol and gambling, and you know, they were they were destroyed. They were destroyed, like their their kind of spirit was broken. Um you could argue, even though it's happened over a slower and longer period, that similar things have happened to the uh the white population uh of America and the black population of America certainly have had problems with all of those things. Um and uh and and to the uh uh people of Britain as well, have also had this corrosive acid. Uh in so that some of these other people have just had uh a shorter time of exposure to all of these things. To imagine that they will somehow overcome them where all of those other people did not, uh strikes me as a little bit, you know, from their point of view, optimistic. I I I don't overlook the the strength. I mean, you could look at a case like Germany, right? Look at Germany after they lost the World War II. You know, they were pumped pretty heavily full of this, full of liberalism. And uh in fact they had a double dose of it, because it wasn't just the fall of um uh the fall of the mid-century Germans, but also the fall of the Berlin Wall. You know, David Hasselhoff on the wall, freedom and all that sort of stuff. The spirit of the 90s I was talking about. Um so that Germany had a double dose of it. And so, you know, I'm just and it's only just now starting to have different sorts of thoughts. So all I'm saying is that I don't count out, uh, even though these forces are there, these ethnic interests and so on, um, don't count out the possibility uh of I mean, even extremely ethnocentric groups. I saw a uh I saw I happened to see a clip uh of a Jewish guy talking. I happened to see a clip of this uh Jewish guy uh talking, and he said, Well, look, 40% of the Jewish population of New York voted for Mamdani, a Muslim, and somebody you see somebody who a certain section of the Jewish population see as a threat to them. Um, you know, because uh New York has historically been and I'm thinking, right, okay, so these are people who are pretty on every any measure ethnocentric, have a strong sense of themselves uh because of what happened in the 20th century, you know, slight siege mentality because of what's happening in the Middle East at the moment, you know, it's particularly heightened at the moment, and yet still under those conditions, you're getting a lot of them voting from from from Darny. So all I'm saying is that don't count liberalism out.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

Interesting. So all of the talk of liberalism being dead over being shown to be unworkable may well prove not to be the case.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

It's just got a it's got a way of kind of rotting the soul, of kind of kill kind of demoralizing and killing the kind of uh spirit of people. And uh, you know, i it remains a d it remains it remains to be seen as to whether I mean I I'll give you an example. When my dad is from Iran, uh they have an Islamic theocracy over there, an Islamic theocracy, they're literally run by radical Muslim clerics, and still even there they have a problem with you know degeneracy and drugs and you know uh the extent to which quote unquote Western propaganda reaches the the youth there, and you can see that it's seductive, it's seductive and people go for it. I mean it's uh it's the c it's the classic it's the classic uh vices that the the Aquinas talks about the classic vices are the tools that liberalism uses to seduce. And it is seductive, that's why people go for it. Well sex and drugs and rock and roll.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I suppose Paul Paul Kingsnorth, who is obviously very large on Substack and has grown a big follower, now he refers to it, and he's borrowed this term from other people and written extensively about the machine, this idea that in the end we just can't quite put down the temptations of what we've talked about, a lot of the individualism, the material uh accoutrement that makes our modern lives so uh so cushy, and uh and along the way we drop lots of other things that previously been very important to humans, like tradition and custom and ritual and and all the rest of it. Uh and I suppose that machine is to be.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Okay, going back thousands of years, and they they also have a Brahmin caste, okay? Uh or or or did have a Brahmin caste before before Gandhi, who were there for hundreds of years. And yet, when they come over, it's the Manchester United top, it's the mobile phone, it's you know they're not exact they're not exactly doing their gods broad. Okay. And now there could be some. There could be some. But what I'm saying is is that the you have to acknowledge reality as it is, and that a lot of the people who come over very quickly get seduced by all of the things that make the West attractive. So yeah, there is there's a there's two ways to look at it, I would say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Fascinating. Britain, let's go to Britain specifically, and we've dropped a couple of breadcrumbs on this. You've referred in your writings to Reform UK and Farage as being containment, a continuation of the regime. That would surprise a lot of people who are seeing them as being a kind of uh a saviour, so to speak, for Britain, which is in a in deep disarray. So, why is Reform UK containment?

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Well, they've I mean they've they've shown on issue after issue that um they want to stay compliant with the mantras. I mean, you know, whether it's apologizing for various remarks made, uh, the way they react to being called racist, uh, the way that uh they vet they have vetted various people. The most high profile one was Rupert Lowe, uh, who was kicked out of the party for reasons we still don't really understand. Um, various uh other people that we know who wanted to stand as a reform candidate. It's vetted out, uh, you know, not compliant enough. And um, yeah, I mean we've seen, I mean, it's not just Farage, Richard Tice and uh the other one, uh uh Lee Anderson. We've seen enough of these people to know exactly, you know, unless they're playing this kind of long game of hiding power levels. You know, it just looks like it's gonna be the Tories all over again. Tell me I'm wrong. I mean, does anyone disagree? I don't really you you say people would be uh surprised. Um I don't really come across I'll be honest, I see thousands and thousands of people online, uh both on Twitter and in my YouTube comments and just around the place. I don't really see that much excitement for Farage. I think people are wise to a lot of this stuff, and um he's getting default support in much the same way that Labour got default support because we hated the Tories so much with the zero seats. Do you remember? I mean we just wanted to wreck the Tories. Well now Labour are so hated and the Tories are still so hated, whereas, well, Nigel's kind of winning by default. Uh but I I don't see in him he's cautious, he's just so cautious. I don't see the kind of speaking of Carlisle, the man of heroic will, that's going to be prepared to do what it takes to save the country. Even on a legislative front, even on a I mean I I did a an uh an interview recently with Harrison Pitt where I said, well, there are no checks and balances in this country if you have a supermajority in parliament. So if Farage wanted, he can do whatever he wants. He could basically come as Cromwell. He could uh he could just repeal Blair in day one, he could just pass a bill saying every law passed since 1997, off, done. Supreme Court, done, off comm, done, communications act, gone, Equality Act, gone. He could do that. I just don't get any sense that he's willing to be anywhere near that sort of radical figure who's gonna cleanse with fire, and it's in the name.

SPEAKER_01 46:07

Reform.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

And and I guess one of the big questions is is the can the system as it stands now be reformed, or does it require, you know, bypass surgery? Like a like a proper, like a i.e., we need something bigger, like a heart transplant, or uh the change we need can't be done around the edges. We need proper radical change in this country if it's gonna be saved from the trajectory that it's been in uh over the past 20, 30 years.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

Well, let's linger on that for a moment. So with regards to the country being in such a parlour state, I think we can probably trot off a few examples of how the regime has been quite nefarious, really. So, what have we seen over the last 30 years? We've seen uh the establishment lie its way to war in Iraq, as you point out, put down the million-man march and then still go on to win um uh a majority in the election. We've seen phantom protests in response to the Southport massacre by Axel Rudikobana to try to shift attention to the far right and away from conversations about immigration. We've seen the astroturfing of the don't look back in anger uh response to the Manchester bombings in the in the arena following or during the Ariana Grande concert in 2017. And then you've mentioned digital ID cards, which are being billed as for ease, convenience to counter immigration to improve the welfare state. Suspect there's probably something else to it. And most recently, the abandonment of trial by jury has been proposed by the Justice Secretary David Lamy. That goes back to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon legal norms and was enshrined within the Magna Carta hundreds of years later. And so throughout all of these years, we've seen the state apparatus, private sector apparatus arraigned against the people in some way or against these norms that had become so a part of the nation.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

Don't forget the biggest betrayal of all, John, under Alexander Johnson. He locked us down in our houses for COVID. Do you remember? We were under house arrest, and while we were all under house arrest, imported the biggest influx of foreigners the nation has ever seen, now known universally as Boris Wave. That has to go down as one of the biggest betrayals in the history of the nation by any leader. And I think even in Cleve Churchill in that as well.

SPEAKER_00 48:44

Yeah, the the the Boris Wave is definitely one that I think has roused people, whether they end up going for containment figures like reform or or whatever is, there has been an immediate response to that, and people know that that is pure betrayal. Uh and then to add to that, and certainly you cannot miss it, is there has been the obfuscation about the the grooming gangs, which now that you have seen the transcripts that have been released by Open Justice, Adam Wren's um little NGO, so to speak, these transcripts read somewhat like war crimes that are taking place on uh on the the soil of of Britain. And um that was all kept from people, or at least it was suppressed within the media. So you you said, and you've you've mentioned cleansing fire already. You actually wrote, I think, toward the end of Applied Elite Theory that there comes a time when an elite is so thoroughly corrupted that there needs to come a cleansing fire to start again. It's been 367 years since Oliver Cromwell did that last time. We are long overdue. Do you see any signs of the kindling of this cleansing fire, the signs of an organized minority that aren't containment, as you would see it?

SPEAKER_02 50:02

The only glimmer on the horizon is in the twinkle of Rupert Lowe's eye. He's the only person who comes anywhere close to having the sort of kind of he's got a kind of I guess you call it like a devil may care attitude. He just doesn't seem to care about what people say or what people think. Um maybe he's just too old to care, right? Or maybe he's independently wealthy or whatever. He strikes me as someone who has the potential. He may be a little bit old, but in a figure like Rupert Lowe, I see the potential to be that you know, to the the person who will do what is necessary. Um I don't see it in Farage, I'm afraid. I he just seems to be an overly cautious figure, and we're not in a time that requires you know, there could have been a moment where Farage was the right man, maybe he was the right man for Brexit, but for what needs to be done now, we need people of a slightly different stripe, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_00 51:11

Do you think that reform should they come to power? If they do, you know, big if, you never know. But people do seem to be very sick of Labour and the Tories. If they do come to power, should it be tinkering around the edges and not going for the right, let's strike through the Blair out Blairite revolution that took place in 97, where effectively the British constitution was rewritten, the judiciary was um reconstituted to be very un British and not in line with common law, really. Um Do you think if he doesn't do that, if he doesn't do the full cleansing fire, that that's just people checking out at that point? Or do you think that we're so we become so bovine with the news cycle and just change and we forget about these betrayals and these things quite quickly that we'd just rumble along and just grumble? Or is that too much of a cynical view to take?

SPEAKER_02 52:11

Um I do think that there's not I I don't think that any system can indefinitely seem hostile to the population. And one of the problems that Labour has had is that Keystarmer has too often seem hot seemed hostile to the nation. Um and in fact it's it's reared its head recently with a budget, with Rachel Reeves blaming everybody else and lashing out, and hold on a second, you are the Chancellor, it's not everybody else, it's like it's you're the government, you're there, you've got accountability, and you're there to sort it out. And Labour at the moment just seemed to be against everybody, like, you know, the rich, the poor, the working class. I mean, I don't know who I don't know who they're playing here Sama's play one of the worst political games I had ever seen any person do ever. Um and I don't know if a system can rumble on indefinitely being actively hostile to the people that they rule over. It doesn't matter what if you call it democracy, if you call it dictatorship, it doesn't matter. All every system in the end needs some sort of unity between the leaders and the people they rule over. Um otherwise there will be conflict in the future. Now I have been critical of David Betts and people who prophecy civil war and things like that. Um I don't see the conditions for that. But in a scenario where they don't do what I describe as competent containment, i.e., if reform come in and really, really just carry on in the let's pretend Farage comes in and does a bor does a Boris or there's a Nigel wave or something like that. Uh, I think the British establishment will be dicing with, we would truly be dicing with danger then. I think people would start to uh get organized and collectivised at that point because the ang the anger is already very high in the country. Um but it takes an awful lot for that to actually become something tangible. At the moment, I would say the establishment is probably doing enough, right, to for people to be watching, sort it out, but that is not an indefinite piece of so come the mid-19 uh 2030s or something, if there's not big change in the next 10 years, then anything is possible, I would I would suggest.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

Rewinding a bit to your your David Betts refutation, so he recently came onto the podcast, and as people will be very aware, is he's the professor or scholar of war at King's College London that talks about how um the conditions seem to be ripe or ripening uh for civil war in various European nations. And he says this is because of various reasons. You've got a downgrading of the native population, a kind of replacement migration, people getting frustrated that there seems to be a self-funding of a colonization taking place on their own shores, and then seeing the tools of the state and the private sector arraigned against them with regards to job opportunities, judicial system. And he thinks that there's a kind of a rising thumos, I guess. Or I might be putting words in his mouth because I spoke to him about this. Um both of the native population, but also it's already present within the groups that have arrived who are potentially continuing their own ways. Um, but as you've said, you don't see the conditions for that. So let's do the counterpoint. What why do you think that civil war, as best describes it, isn't likely?

SPEAKER_02 55:52

Well, there's a chapter in here. It's called, in fact, it's the very final chapter. It's called Is Civil War Coming to Britain? In uh page 272. And uh, you know, as fair applied elite theory, what I do is I ask all the practical questions. Where's the funding coming from? Who's doing the organizing? If people are going to get organized, how do they overcome the permanent infiltrations of the security state, which is very good at infiltrating and breaking up any attempts at organization that they perceive as a rival to themselves, as all states are? British state is particularly good at that. Um, if anything, it's too vigilant. The British state is too vigilant, uh, to the point where people like George Galloway are being stopped at airports, you know, various other people that we know have been stopped at airports, okay. Um, under counter-terrorism. I mean, if you're stopping people like that, can you imagine if you are actually involved in some sort of conspiracy or some sort if you So what I'm saying is if they're stopping people like that, you you can bet yourself that they, you know, if if anything's becoming any threat becoming real, they're already there, they're already there. And they're pretty pretty good at that. So that that's a significant hurdle to overcome. Um another thing is just other simple things like uh, I mean, he he loves to draw the comparison with uh the troubles in Northern Ireland, but the sides there had massive backing. On the Northern Irish side, they're the literally the British state. Uh from the from the Irish side, huge backing from the states, from America, from the Irish diaspora, uh, and also, you know, from other powers within uh within America, uh, even people in you know who had political power at that time. So it's uh you know, and there was weapons and there was various other things. So I I still think it's a little bit fantastical um to you know m make these sorts of claims. Now, he's the expert, he's the professor of war or whatever. He thinks that uh he thinks the things that I've said in that essay are silly. Uh I think that if you're gonna claim there's gonna be a civil war or civil conflict coming, the burden of proof is on you. And at the moment it looks fantastical to me. People are still full of bread and circuses, like Piers Morgan, people are eating their curries, watching Netflix, playing on their iPhones. It's gonna take a lot to jolt people into the sort of actions that we did the sort of action that we saw during the troubles, in my view.

SPEAKER_00 58:37

So well, I'm sure that would give comfort to some people who uh are worried about Betts' predictions, and uh I suppose we'll see what comes to pass. Uh final question, Nima, and it is a question that I've asked you before, but we'll see if anything's changed. So I'd like to ask my guests if there's anything they've changed their mind on. The last time we spoke, you s you said, well, loads, because you've given up all your liberal priors that you had, you've been a Blair voter, a Romaine voter, but then various things changed you, which was reading Jonathan Heit's Righteous Mind, Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, and also seeing the establishment reaction to things like Brexit made you start looking behind the curtain. Well, given that you also said that changing your mind is a constant process, what else have you changed your mind on?

SPEAKER_02 59:25

Well, I mean, as I say in the in the introduction of this book, um, I've be been very disillusioned with uh what is known as the online right. I mean, there's an essay in there in here that says the online right is entirely fake. Um I have been, I mean, maybe I shouldn't be disillusioned, right? Maybe I shouldn't be disillusioned, maybe I should have expected it, but the extent to which people want to hold on to copes and not tell the truth, the extent to which people are willing to turn a blind eye, the extent to which people are cowardly, um, uh, the the extent to which in America the the obvious glaring flaws and failings of Trump 2.0, you know, where when I came into this thing, the the thing that made it vibrant, the thing that made it alive, was fiercely telling the truth, following evidence, you know, and um not being worried about taboo or not being worried about other people think fearlessly telling the truth. And uh unfortunately, over the past 12 uh months to a year to two years, two things have happened. One is that uh online spaces have become more and more infiltrated by money, by special interests, by uh, you know, possibly even regime compliant figures, but people who are not as independent as they appear. That's one. Uh, and much of that has been exposed over the past year. It wasn't clear two years ago or three years ago. It's become a lot more clear due to various different things. That's one thing that's happened. A second thing that has happened is that uh I think many people, you know, it's like, how can you read Populist Delusion or James Burnham or be aware of the things that we talk about and then devolve and degenerate into being a mindless cheerleader for the Trump admin? It just doesn't make any sense to me, especially when it's obvious that they have become beholden to special interests. Right? Now, when that happens, because I uh because I cannot I maybe it's some like curse I've been given, uh, John, that I have to tell the truth. I can't turn a blind eye to that. I will call it out, and uh it irritates me. But it is sufficiently large on both sides of the both sides of the pond here in Britain is even worse, by the way. The Americans are the Americans actually are not as bad as us in this country. British right is even worse when it comes to these sorts of things. Um I can't, I mean, so that's the main thing, is that I'm not willing to stand, I'm not willing to say, well, I'm part of this thing, uh, online right or whatever. So I've taken to saying sensible centre-left for all sorts of reasons.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:25

Well, well, you you'd said you'd said you're probably more closer to uh John Gray's worldview than than others. And I actually think probably quite a few people who found themselves aligned to the dissident right, online right, uh probably really those old school Carlillian social democrats um uh in some respects um than than they than they would be on the right. And it was just because, as you mentioned, there were some early figures on the right who started to tell the truth and that made people go, oh yeah, I'm definitely not part of whatever this is that's uh currently got the strings of power. Are there is there anyone that you think is doing a good job online, right or left, that you think um people would be worth following, other than your good self, of course?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:10

Tucker Carlson. And he's one of the biggest, he's probably the biggest one for a reason. Because he's doing he's doing a good job at the moment. Uh so yeah, Tucker. I'm big on him at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23

And and what would you say to what would you say to the to the viewers? So you you've agreed on a journey, we've mentioned Carneman and Height. If people were to want to engage in value-free analysis, get behind the curtain, and understand how powers work, what advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:39

Well, you could do uh worse than read this book, uh Applied to theory. Um but uh yeah, I mean I also think those books that you just mentioned, understanding the gap between your emotional kind of intuitive gut reaction to things and that and actual root reason and evidence. Uh you know, Carmel calls it system one and two thinking. How do you actually engage that system two brain? And at the moment, and this is where I get so frustrated, John, we are bombarded with what I call slop on a daily basis, so many things to get excited about and outraged about, and so much stuff is being flung at you, some of it's fake, some of it's real. How do you kind of not react to how do you kind of rise above some of it, maintain your sanity, keep that objective gaze? It takes quite a lot of discipline. Um, one of the people writers I like to think about, now he's considered right-wing John, right? But is Julius Eveler. Uh, his book Ride the Tiger uh is pretty good on this, right? He's because that that's a whole book about how are you surrounded with the kind of uh what he calls the kind of yuga, you know, the world everything's going to shit, the you know, you're surrounded by degeneracy, daily outrages, and so on. How don't you how do you keep yourself from from driving you insane? How do you keep all of that at bay? How do you hold yourself upright, become a man like a man of steel against it all, so that the modernity just breaks on you? And that book, Ride the Tiger, is very good on that particular thing, even if you don't like the rest of Evelyn's works, that one book I do recommend to people.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:34

Hmm. Well, on the topic of books, let's finish off with a plug. So applied elite theory is out now in all good bookshops. But what else are you working on and where can people find your works?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:49

Well, I I'm on YouTube, uh academic agent. Uh I have a substack under my own name. It's called Forbidden Text. It's it's under my own name now. I do have another book coming out soon. Shakespeare. Um I don't know when exactly it will come out, but that is gonna be like um they call it a prestige edition. It's like a it's it's a big hardback books, almost like a folio book. Um, but I'm excited about it. They've done a really good job on that. And I'm ex it's kind of like my Shakespeare greatest hits, if you want. It's gonna good one shot, non woke in intro to Shakespeare. So that's coming out soon. Um maybe I'll have to do another bunch of interview interviews to promote that.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:32

Well, Nima, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. Thanks so much for coming on the show.