Global Elites pushing radical environmental and economic agendas has grown in recent years happily so too has the pushback we’ve seen it in growing protests over the past weeks from Farmers across Europe the overthrow of the Sri Lankan government which remember wanted to turn the whole island into an
Organic paradise and this even as far back as a surprise vote at least for the Elites in favor of brexit and for Donald Trump in 2016. now this guest I’m so excited that he’s come to join us tonight Ralph schulhaver is an assistant professor in economics and political science at Webster University
In Vienna and he has written a fantastic piece on the working class revolt and he joins us now Professor scholar Hammer thank you so much for joining us today well thank you so much for having me and they do say that flattery is the highest power of intimidation so consider me thoroughly intimidated
Fantastic now you’ve written this great piece in Newsweek and one of the things that you talk about here is that there is a malaise in the west currently and you say that ideological goals of the elites are being pursued at the expense of the lower middle class and working
Classes and you see truckers in Canada rebelling against this farmers in the Netherlands um you see people rebelling against the United States in different ways um you see what’s happening in Germany where they’ve shut off the nuclear plants for whatever reason and now are going to go into a very cold winter in
Just a few months um they’re gratifying the elite you right while in miserating the working class tell us what is happening here tell us why the elites are doing this but also what is the pushback that’s happening I mean I think this is a larger Trend you already mentioned uh you know brexit
And the election of Donald Trump and those were already symptoms of that pushback but the situation we find ourselves in I would say it consists of four different groups right one group is the activist I mean those are the people who really believe that the end of the
World is around the corner and they’re overrepresented in media in Academia and in the cultural sphere then you have uh the the governments and politicians that what they do is they like to Virtue signal to those people because they believe right most of them on Twitter they’re very active on
Twitter they believe that they represent a huge chunk of the population and then you have companies who want to make a profit off of it right for example I don’t believe that Unilever cares particularly about the environment but it’s something they have to say because they wanted to Pander to a specific
Clientele so you have a kind of a Bermuda Triangle of ideology that consists of those three groups and the quote unquote but I mean you know the the working class or the middle class you could also call them the people who just pay their taxes and want to live
Their lives like people who don’t spend a lot of time on social media they’re trapped in this because it’s more and more encroaching on their daily lives I mean you just mentioned it right in Germany um to to leave nuclear energy behind was it purely political ideological position
And the people were told oh don’t worry don’t worry we’re gonna replace it with wind we’re gonna replace it with solar no it turns out that’s not going to work and they will get poorer and I think this is part of this they realize that that they accepted the you know
Eccentric ideas of their Elites uh to the to the extent that they did not believe that it will have a negative effect on their life but now they see this negative effect and this is what I tried to put together in my piece right it’s school policy in Virginia it is you
Know agricultural policy in uh in the Netherlands it is you know gas prices in France it’s nuclear energy in Germany so these things are driven by the same thing that the people say wait a moment we are supposed to be democracies when we constantly vote for governments that
In the end pursue goals that are interesting do you know those five percent of people who are very active like you’re very much in the public eye but the other 95 are completely ignored and I think this is the moment now and I’m very curious how this is going to
Play out I mean the future would be something that you just mentioned like a social conservative working-class party like a little bit you guys mentioned this in the previous segment you see this with Hispanics and working-class blacks in the United States they shift GOP because they say wait a moment
They’re like the progressives they are in some areas like they’re insane this is no longer common sense they just want to switch to a common sense party and I think this is exactly what we see at the moment Rita but you mentioned the people who pay their taxes and just want to
Leave their lives and be left alone they are always going to lose to those who want to win people who want to be left alone are always going to look how can we how can that population become more activated and become more politically aware we’ve seen the farmers because they were directly impacted
We’ve seen people who uh whose livelihoods are threatened and they rise up but the ordinary mum and dad out in the suburbs who pays their taxes and looks upon what’s happening and goes oh this is crazy but doesn’t really get engaged beyond that do you think that
Will shift or is that going to remain as it has it depends right it depends also a little bit if you allow me to say this on on individuals and people like you I mean what I found most surprising is and you mentioned this also before there is
A deafening media silence on on these protests right maybe I wouldn’t call them yet uprisings but they’re significant protests we’re talking about you know 30 000 people in the Netherlands now you know there people say no it’s not 30 000 it’s 25 000. well that’s still pretty significant so so
And this was also the pushback I got it was a well Ralph you inflated the numbers you know it’s 29 000 they’re not 30 000. but you see something else happening and that’s part of the story I mean if You observe it in the United States in Europe but all of a sudden
There’s all this worry again particularly in the in the political and media class about this information right to say oh we need to control this information we have to be careful about the information gets out there and this I think is part of this that that the
Best way to to prevent the pushback from from large numbers of people is if they don’t know that anything is going on so if you have people say wait we won’t organize we want to push back against it and you have this think about the situation about the trackers in Canada
Right when they pulled their their bank accounts when they they made sure that you know when GoFundMe put their their funding efforts so this is undermining precisely what you’re saying right the possibility of those people to organize so this is it’s not a conspiracy right I mean it’s it’s what interest groups what
What you know these players do they see there is something coming they could be a threat to their power so they try to do something to undermine it what bothers me is yes God please but but the media is never going to be on the side
Of anybody other than that left us Elite and we know that we’ve seen that with the truckers in Canada with the farmers now and the Netherlands they’re being either ignored or misrepresented as extremists as dangerous uh Fringe dwellers so if the media isn’t going to be a vehicle for informing people about
What’s what’s happening how how can you have that uh you know silent majority uh have their voices heard I mean I’m not so sure if that is entire I think you’re right but I think there are some good signs that look at the there is the the former citizens party
In the Netherlands right they currently have one seat in Parliament if there would be elections tomorrow they would get to 20 seats uh the leading Dutch government party would lose 14 out of 34 seats so there is something going on so I think there is and you guys mentioned
It before right we have brexit we had Donald Trump elected um so again what everyone thinks about Donald Trump but it seems I think that people have a much better grasp on what’s going on I think they sometimes have a hard time to formulate this which is why it’s very
Often unfortunately happens that you know kind of the most extremist parts of these movements are the ones to get most of the media attention which is also wanted because then you can discredit the rest of these movements exactly but I still think this is happening and what
I would always argue is I think we also have to kind of tell the people this is a a much larger phenomenon and this is I think particularly true in Europe right Europe is still riddled by significant historic guilt and I have a feeling so one part of this story is it’s the
Attempt to kind of atone for a past through sacrificing the future right and you see this a little bit you know it’s it’s this idea that if we can just go back to a more pristine world I mean it’s very true for Germany right there’s a certain hostility towards technology a
Hostility towards Innovation so there is a also a historical Dimension I think we should not underestimate I mean I think you a couple of weeks ago had Douglas Murray on on your show and when he talks about the war on the west I think this
Is but this is part of that story right I don’t think that these things are necessarily uh different from each other daisy look um it’s interesting you know the global Elite particularly the left the double speak they continually claim they’re for the working class but you know of course they’re not it’s very
Obvious they’re not but I think particularly when you consider the reaction to the truckers protest for instance that we discussed instantly um the one in the Netherlands it has morphed into if it wasn’t already an outright disdain and hatred for or the middle and working classes don’t you
Think which is which is quite frightening yes I think you’re right and this has always by the way been a problem for the Left Right the left always felt particularly which happened in the 60s and the 70s right once the left kind of was taken over let’s say by the academic
Life that is precisely what you said right and they claimed that they speak for the working class they got frustrated because it turns out that the Working Class People most of them are not interested in the great Revolution right they will they want affordable energy they want affordable food they
Want good Public Schools they want limited immigration right they want to maintain their cultural and national identity so they wanted to maintain all those things that the left always told them that they shouldn’t right you’re right we speak for you because allowed me to say it a little provocatively
Because apparently you’re too dumb to speak for yourselves and I think that this thing that you described they start to realize it I mean you had this before I think that Hispanics in the United States had a perfect example for this right they realized they say wait a
Moment they said they speak for us but actually they don’t and I think so I think we’re at the beginning hopefully right of a shift there I mean maybe just as a concluding americanist this is important because we are hampering ourselves also geopolitically I mean it
Is absurd China builds you know the belt and Road initiative and the G7 want to do something similar and the first thing they say they’re gonna do is take care of climate and and gender equality [Laughter] how how you die I mean the the visit of Biden in
Saudi Arabia showed it I mean they treated him they really killed him basically right I mean they they sent him packing without anything concrete and this is yeah come on sorry I was gonna say but you know it’s really interesting you talk about the geopolitics because you look at where
This same Elite mindset has led to geopolitically you know what have we got well we’ve gotten the Arab Spring you know which was supposed to be about democracy and you wind up with the Wagner group running half of the Middle East and Libya turning into a slave market
Um you look at the way the rest of the world which doesn’t share Western liberal values looks at the values that are trying to be exported to them by the west and they say no and now you look at the conflict in Ukraine where the opposition leader here in Australia was
Just on this network before saying this is going to be a long War which of course will drive up Energy prices even more how does the elite still get to even be referred to as an elite when they keep making so many wrong calls well I think the reason is because they
Still are on the levels of power right I mean just I think a few days ago there was a I know this is a small thing but I think it’s part of the story um a dance school in New York that you know they banned now ballet because
Ballet is white and privileged so we are in in the Russians like failure too yeah no but that’s there we’re constant war against ourselves and I think this has created something you know I’m in behind us why I can allow my inner Sigmund Freud to to speak so to say it’s it’s
It’s a Neurosis where you have a situation because you mentioned Ukraine people that would never ever put an Australian or Austrian or American flag in any of the social media profile right they now have Ukrainian Flags in there and this is again one of these things
Right so it’s it’s like it’s almost as if you can be nationalistic for Ukraine but you can never have a dare to be nationalistic for your own country and I think this is something that people start to feel more and more right they say why is it right why can’t I be a
Patriot right why can’t that be a nationalist can we can we can quibble about these terms but the point is why do I constantly feel that I have to sacrifice things that are very important to me in my daily life daily life for some higher cost that probably never
Comes to friction anyways I mean let’s be completely honest here we talk about countries that have a hard time controlling migration that have a hard time controlling inflation like all what we would say that we talked about crime look at Great Britain there’s serious crime problems so all of these things
They cannot address but changing the world’s climate right controlling it controlling the weather professor all right we’re going to have to leave it there we’re out of time but thank you so much for joining us here on the show today it’s been an absolute pleasure and an education we will definitely have you
Back so look forward to having you back on Outsiders again
