Politics and immigration

`4:23:08`

And the reason I say that is that the Overton window does not open itself. It opens one nudge at a time by people risking a little. A little reputation, a little pushback, a little criticism, or maybe sometimes a lot of reputation or a lot of criticism or a lot of pushback. And I think the question of mass immigration in Europe was for many years this total taboo, and it still is in several European countries. Now, for reasons of maybe just chance and happenstance, they weren't in Denmark. The Danes started having the discussion around mass immigration and the consequences thereof in the mid-'90s. Really early. And some of it can be traced back to one man, Mogens Glistrup, who was a very quirky character. I remember him, seeing him on the TV in the '80s talking about the dangers of mass immigration. And this was at a time where-- I grew up in the '80s, and in the neighborhood I grew up in, in Brønshøj, in, what was it? '84, 99% ethnic Danes, people who could trace their lineage back to Danes who'd lived in that country for 1,000 years. The Danes have one of the oldest monarchies in the world, all the way back to Harald Bluetooth, who's literally who has named the standard Bluetooth. So well over 1,000 years. Like, there's a long lineage there of people who lived in the same place. And 99% of the people lived in that neighborhood. And then early '90s, I think it goes to 5% or something like that, and then at this point, it's down to around 60-something or 70%-... in Brønshøj.

That's a big change. And the Danes started noticing that or talking about that, that this was not an undivided blessing, that there were downsides to mass immigration in about the '90s. And the debate really roared through the 2000s in a way that didn't happen in the neighboring countries. So Sweden in particular just didn't have that debate at all. Total taboo. Same thing with Norway, same thing with other countries in Europe. And suddenly now, after some years after '15, where we had the big migration of a million Syrians walking up through the highways in Europe, and Germany choosing to take a lot of them and 30,000 arriving in Denmark and so forth, It's gotten more of a focus, right? Because this change has happened. And one of the ways I find that you can spot where sort of there's something that isn't right in the culture is, like, what are you allowed to talk about? What are you allowed to notice, actually, is how I should put it. And what I noticed in an essay, when was that? Only a year and a half ago as I remember London, was that I started coming to London in the late '90s or something like that. At the time, whatever, it's 59%, 60% ethnic, uh, Brits. And then 20 years later, we're down to 34% or something like that. Like, that's noticeable. Like, literally just walking on the street, you realize, well, this is a different city from what it was when I visited 20 years ago.

And if you went 20 years before that, you get back to similar rates as as what the Danes have. This was like a country of ethnic Brits in the 85s, 90s percentiles-... if you get further back. So that's a different country in a generation. It's okay to notice that. It's also okay to think, "Do you know what? I don't agree with that." "I wish it wasn't that way." I mean, if The last time I was in China was '19, 2019. I was in Shanghai. Um, it was all Chinese. If I, when I go back here this October, suddenly find that there's only 30% Chinese and then there's 70% other people, I'd be a little weird. I'd probably be like, "Uh, what happened?" And I would not take offense if the Chinese in that instant would go like, "Ah, we don't like that." So this idea that countries of Europe don't have a right to, A, notice what's happening and, B, oppose what's happening, I find just to be, uh, wrong, right? Like there's just-- I think there's a moral argument for self-determination, and we invoke that argument all the time in other regions around the world that like, oh, the people who live in that region, they have a right to self-determination, um for their country. And I think it's completely fair for, say, the Danes or the Swedes or the Norwegians to go like, "Well, we've been kingdoms here for a thousand years with a certain ethnic mix-up." It's a-- I mean, I'm a big fan of immigration. I'm an immigrant to the US.