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Notes -
Questioning the Core
Recently Tucker Carlson, who everyone knows, did an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former British MP for the Tories. JRM is a known quantity in British politics as an upper class Englishman with a neoliberal stripe who manages to say enough things 'wrong' for the far left and right to dislike him. But on the flipside he does say those things with a very pleasing accent. He earned this particular interview with Carlson due to his firm anti-Russia stance and recent agitation that Britain needed to prepare for war.
The interview itself was mostly boring. Tucker seemed to not really know what his own point was for the first half of the interview, aside from JAQing off about NATO aggression. And JRM didn't feel like giving Tucker any rope to pull on. To that end both parties came across as snide. JRM never directly engages with what exactly the point of NATO is or what Britain or the EU is even doing at this point, and Tucker never directly asserts that the liberal moral order has been the catalyst for more harm than good. Instead they both circle around their underlying points but never directly engage with them.
The surface level Tucker Carlson argument here is that Britain is weak, its allies are weak, and Russia is strong. So Britain should sue for peace.
JRM's argument is that Britain is good, and Russia is evil. So there will be no peace.
They are both correct. Insofar as Britain is weak, Russia is also weak. And as far as Russia is evil, Britain is also evil. Failing demographics with corrupt and inept leaders suppressing their subjects alongside shocking news of unconscionable crimes on a huge scale, signaling deep social decline. No offers of a positive vision for the future are anywhere to be found. Only fatalism and the faint promise of a coming metamorphosis. Worry not for your pain. You, the English, will soon cease to exist. And so will the Russians (as far as any westerner has an analog to what a Russian is). A complete separation of state and folk. The death of nations.
It's fair to say that neither party wants to engage with this reality. As admitting to anything real here would be tantamount to ponder whether Hitler was actually right. Since neither can, neither will. Though they do get close:
The Liberal World Order gambit that JRM employs is simple enough: If Hitler was evil, everything is vindicated. So we just repeat that for Putin, right?
Well, Tucker doesn't raise this point directly enough, but leaving aside the question of whether looking at world events through the eyes of a 10 year old to decide who is good and who is evil is beneficial or not, has the consequence of being on the side of 'good' been of benefit to the people? The obvious answer is no. And that's not the fault of Hitler, but the people who came after him. So why should anyone take their word for anything? They are fast becoming literally worse than Hitler.
Whilst not directly questioned, it should be. Are Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Ursula von der Leyen really the best a man can get? Can you really take the light of critical inquiry seriously if it can only be shone at those who have already been determined to be evil? So we pretend the Ukrainian state isn't a cesspool of corruption and shame, but rather the bastion of good against evil. That the EU isn't a bureaucratic hellscape that hates its citizens. Or that the US isn't going to industrially and culturally decline along with its demographics.
The big question is: Are any of the big movements that now define modern society worth dying for? Is continuing the status quo of 'good' in anyone's best interest except those who are evil? The cynic in me believes you can always draft enough young men to die in any war no matter what. And that indignance towards dying for the ruling class has and always will exist. And maybe I'm in that bubble of indignance. But I want to believe that things are different now. The current state of affairs is just so ridiculous.
Russia is everything that the west is but worse. Russia has more abortions, more divorces, more stringent islamophobia laws (!!!), more nihilism and even less principles than the much maligned countries in Europe. It's not the antithesis of woke that (mostly) Americans imagine it to be.
I think it’s because their government is saying anti-woke things and not importing millions of non-white immigrants.
They are doing the second. Russia has no more qualms about retaining slavic identity than Berlin has with German and in 2023 they were importing half a million central Asians. If it were a more desirable place to live I am sure they would import even more.
If you look at the new laws, there's been a big shift since 2024 in how it's done. They've tightened the system significantly, making path to citizenship for migrants from Central Asia significantly harder, raising requirements in classic, immigrant dominated niches like food delivery and taxis, and now favoring North Korean, Indian and (rarely) African economic migrants that have absolutely zero paths to citizenship over Central Asians, who often have (or had) simplified paths to citizenship due to Soviet legacy. The system is the complete opposite of what the orangutans in EU have been doing
Western European governments have been doing exactly the same things (i.e. too little, too late from a right-populist perspective) over roughly the same timescale. I'm most familiar with the UK, because I live there, and there isn't anyone with a megaphone and an incentive to shout about how small boat immigration is about 50% off the peak or that a brown muslim Labour home secretary has closed the loopholes and abuses that enabled the Boriswave, but I suspect we have made more progress on reducing unwanted immigration than Russia has.
If you accept the far-right paradigm that %white is a key figure of merit for European and Europe-derived societies (or %white British for the UK specifically), then this doesn't matter because that number is still going down and slightly reducing the negative first derivative doesn't change the big picture. And in any case neither the far right nor the centre-right would want to make a Labour government look good. And the pro-establishment centre-left is constitutionally incapable of pointing out good news on unwanted immigration because they are too afraid of being called racist.
FWIW as a right-populist I'm sincerely impressed by what Labour and Mahmood have done, whilst also thinking much more needs to be done. Sadly I don't think Labour would do it, but if they did even half of it then I would vote for them.
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