Hollywood, Soft Power & Ireland’s Anti-American Left?

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1:18To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. how you doing there it is time for the podcast the podcast today comes from the west coast of the united states from la specifically from los angeles california specifically west hollywood john in la i have just spent the morning walking up and down sunset boulevard looking to find my inner James Dean, which I couldn't find, unfortunately. Before you go there, what do you think of West Hollywood? Because I remember when I was there many years ago, I found it incredibly disappointing. It's like a sort of a swanky version of the Long Mile Road.

2:08Exactly, exactly. Right, so that's exactly, if you imagine the Long Mile Road without the machine hire places, and if they had nail bars and sort of tanning bars instead. Now, it's interesting you asked me about that, because this morning I woke up very early, which you do when you're jet-lighted. And I was looking around for sunglasses and I thought, shite, I left them in Ireland. And of course it's bright here. So I said, okay, what I'll do is I will walk out and I will get myself a pair of sunglasses. Do a Rodeo Drive. So I walked out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and I'm staying in a place, John, you'd love it, called the Sunset Marquis.

2:49It's like a rock and roll tapestry. It's a homage to lead guitarists, to electric guitars, to Jimi Hendrix, to Jeff Beck. Wow. To all of them. Yeah, because that's a real rock and roll history place, isn't it? The problem, as I was saying to you before, the problem with these rock and roll hotels is that they've strapped their TVs to the wall so you can't chuck them out the window anymore. I know, John. And I was trying last night on my own. there I was going to rip the thing up and I was going to book it out the window but you will actually quite as interesting so I checked in here and of course it was very very jet lagged came off the flight from Dublin yesterday and I'll explain to you what I'm doing here and all that sort of stuff and I go in and it's you know it's a hotel and the lady at the reception chat, passport credit card all that sort of stuff and she gives me it and it's amazing she said no parties in your room no drugs house rules and i said that is very revelation no parties no drugs so that's the house rules so i get up this morning and i'm squinting in the in the sunshine right in my little my little pink irish frame so i say i'm going to go and get myself a pair of sunglasses yeah so i put into i go for a walk then of course nobody walks i'm the only egypt walking right yeah and i put it in Sunset Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, all these places.

4:17I sent sunglasses near me onto Google Maps. So they gave me three options. So I said, they're fine. They all look broadly the same. But of course, the distances are very long. But that's great. Each place I went to, so they were sunglasses shops, right? Opticians. Each place I walked to was gone. They had been there and they were gone. Each one of them. Closed down. Closed down. And that gives you a sense, this is what I was just saying, it gives you a sense of the transient nature of the American economy, of the American high street, of what happens in this country. So this was a reasonably, I presume Google Maps was probably, let's say, out of date by maybe a year.

5:02Yeah. Right? Yeah. And these businesses had existed. They were there. They had telephone numbers. But each one of them had disappeared. Now, by the time I got to the third, I was thinking, am I a gobshite here? Am I the one? But again, when you look at the way this economy works in America, what we call this constant, constant reinvention, it is Shumptarian John in tooth and claw. And everywhere around here, if it's not working, it's closed. Nothing stays open. And if it works, then it's fine, it expands. But if it's not working, it's closed. And that gave me a sense of just the transient, the sort of, what I always call it, it's like the kind of the Uberization of the American economy.

5:47Yeah. Where everything is short term, everything's a gig, everyone's on the hustle. And there's an interesting thing about this city, LA. When you look at it, what makes it really fascinating is not just the sheer size of it and the amount of people here and the madness of the place. What makes it really fascinating is this is a city that lives entirely on its imagination. Nothing's made here. Right. So there was no, there's never a major industry in LA except for the entertainment business. So the entire thing is anchored on the entertainment business, Hollywood in particular. Yeah. And the movie business.

6:28So before movies, there was very little here. And then you get the movie business and people flock here. And as a result of that, you've got movies, advertising, music, all those great things, all the studios that you know and love, John, all those iconic albums. That AI is going to kill. That AI is probably killing already, but all those things. But then you realize, so what does the place have? It has an imagination. And when you think about it, the story that America tells itself was a story written by scriptwriters here in Hollywood. so this story of let's say for example the 1950s the 1960s a Walt Disney story enormously enormously influential in the United States sure yeah for example cowboys and Indians that story they told each other it's entirely made up here on sets of film sets here in this part of the world here in Hollywood and you realize that these people are kind of living off their wits living off their brains, making stuff up, commercializing things.

7:34If it works, it's great. If it doesn't work, it's binned. And it has that sort of relentless competitiveness that kind of keeps America going. And you really feel it here because there is no reason for this city to exist except storytelling. I remember we spoke about storytelling last week. It's got no water or resources or anything. It only has water because of a fellow called Mulholland, John. Mulholland Drive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we did a podcast. If you're interested in this, we did the podcast. The last time I was in LA was about 18 months ago, and we did a podcast on the origin of Mulholland Drive.

8:08Many people believe it is a David Lynch movie, and that's all it is. But in fact, it is the story of a fella called Mulholland who came from Santry, and he became the key engineer that facilitated the building of the largest tunnel, Aqueduct, in fact, Roman technology, from miles away upstate in California all the way down to LA because as John says, LA has no water. Yeah. And yet here it is, this city of 10 million people. What they also have, because of that aqueduct and Mulholland, they've got beautifully manicured lawns down in Orange County, which I lived in for a few months. Everything was just pristine and horrible, I thought.

8:54I want to do a podcast from Orange County. And if I can get there this time, because I want to do it. Get Brinzer to do it. No, what I want to talk about is, if Brinzer's up on this, is how the conservative movement that propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House didn't come from rural America, didn't come from the Midwest, didn't come from the Bible Belt. It came from Orange County. And why that happened, Barry Goldwater, who was the sort of libertarian right candidate in the 1960s, how his politics fed into Ronald Reagan, how Ronald Reagan basically reframed the map of conservatism in the United States, how Reagan himself went from a trade union man to a right-wing trade union hater, all that stuff.

9:45I want to do that if I can get down there and get some Atmos, John. Because as you know, Atmos is the thing. Absolutely. And if you think I'm going to let Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter. You must think I'm crazy. I wouldn't do it for all the farms in Cuba. Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan. Ah, really? Bob Dylan. So there we go. Speaking of Bob Dylan, I had that feel. You know when The Doors in L.A. Woman wrote about a Hollywood bungalow? Yes. I was listening to both the combination of Lana Del Rey's West Coast, which is a bit of a classic, and then on my headphones I decided you had to listen to LA Woman and I was walking around Hollywood realising they actually all do live in bungalows.

10:30Yes. It's a really low-lying city. Really, really low-rise. It's like being in fucking spittle with foreigners. It's got that, you know what I mean, West Galway has that sort of thing and by the way, we're going to talk about Galway today. So sorry, listener, the podcast today is going to be about two things. Yeah, that'd be a good idea to tell them. Yeah, two things. One is the extraordinary, enduring, and incredibly positive relationship between Ireland and this place, the United States. Economically, culturally, familially, as well as tech-wise, geo-strategically, etc. And I want to talk about this relationship that we have with the United States because it's so precious.

11:13It is so important to us. It is so defining of what it means to be Irish, part of the Irish tribe, Irish America, to be Irish in a global world. It is overwhelmingly positive for us. And yet, the Irish left, who are now again in the Ores, hate them. I'm going to do this weird kind of podcast about we have the Americans who love us. We have no reason to be anti-American. unless, of course, you understand that the Irish left has been captured by an ideology which could be termed third worldism, right? And I want to explain that to you. Yeah, do, please. It is a world where everything indigenous is good and everything global is bad.

12:00So it could be called indigenousism, right? Indigenousism. So everything that was here first is better than everything that came afterwards. That's for people, for language, for culture, all that sort of stuff, right? And so what I want to explain is the real world relationship between Ireland and the United States, which involves compromises, it involves complexities, it involves making choices, it's never pure, and it involves making difficult choices. But that's what life is all about. And I'm going to contrast that with the Irish left's view of third worldism or indigenousism and where it involves no choices.

12:50Everything's black and white. Everything's moral. There's always one winner. and ultimately when you have a rigid ideology in the auras vis-a-vis an economy which is messy and evolutionary and constantly changing we have this chasm of understanding between the economy and the world that we live in and the aspirations and our morality espoused by third worldism and the reason I'll tell you thorough worldism is wrong, John, is because deep inside thorough worldism is a sense that you can either be wrong or right. There's no latitude for ambiguity. And ambiguity is what defines human relations, it's what defines economic relations, and it's what defines the economy.

13:44So that's what we're going to talk about today. But I'm not talking about my time in Sunset Boulevard, John. Throwing tellies out the window. Throwing tellies out the window, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And not having parties in my hotel room, right? Yeah. Okay, which I thought was really, really good. Okay, so, Mark, that's a big number you're talking there. So where do you want to start? I think we start this, John, in Dublin Airport yesterday morning. Right. Because nowhere is the relationship between Ireland and the United States more obvious than that little piece of America in Ireland that lies beyond US immigration at Dublin Airport.

14:21Yes. The actual fact that US immigration is in Dublin Airport underscores exactly what I'm going to talk about. The profundity of this relationship between us and the United States, right? It's an odd feeling walking through the US immigration there, isn't it? It's kind of, you know, you have these big burly yanks, you know, question you about your intentions. Are they good or they're bad? Are they this or what have you got? You're sitting there going, hang on a second. Yeah, this is Dublin. But it's a lot better feeling when you come off the far side, when you go straight through and you see the Hudson News straight away and you say, I'm in America.

15:01And you don't have to, you know, it's like if you're coming from Philadelphia. So I think it's, but again, isn't it amazing that we are the only country in the world that has American preclearance in Ireland? That, again, underscores the level of trust and the level of connection between these two countries. And what it does is it prevents us arriving in JFK or arriving in Logan or arriving, as I did last night, in L.A. and queuing for hours and hours and hours. So straight away you're treated slightly better than everybody else. And these are just little small straws in the wind that I was watching this yesterday.

15:41The place was absolutely buzzing, Dublin Airport yesterday, the American piece of it, right? You know, Irish-American families, business people, students, tourists, all sorts of people coming and going. Why? Because there are 40 direct flights to the United States every day from Dublin. 40! Yeah, that's incredible. Think about that, right? I'll just contrast this with this level of connectivity with another country, which is broadly the same population of ours, European, Norway, wealthy country. Yeah. Norway has two direct flights a day to the United States. Ireland has 40, right? And it's not just Aer Lingus, it's Delta, it's American Airlines, it's Aer Lingus.

16:24Yeah. It's the whole lot, right? You know, flights mean business, John, right? Flights mean family. Flights mean connectivity. Flights mean human relations. So as I was sitting there waiting for my flight, I was just thinking to myself, isn't this an amazingly strong connection between two countries, right? And then I was thinking, you know, the Irish-American connection, it's not some sort of special relationship that is going to be forged by diplomats based on geopolitics. It's a relationship that has forged kitchen tables, bar stools, sing songs and cousins' weddings. it's basically a personal relationship this is what we have with america you know it's really personal right these are our friends and it's interesting when you look at irish americans right it's not just irish americans who are fond of irish people in survey after survey in the united states the irish come out as the most favored foreign nation people like us right we occupy a special place in the american head in the american imagination in the american history Well, can I just say, just, you know, last week we were all at Kilkenomics, which is full of Americans.

17:39But I actually, just to, you know, tap into this, I actually bumped into a bunch of people. They were actually the golden ticket winners. But they were from... No way! Yeah. Tim Nash and his partner, Brianna, and they're with an Irish guy called Michael. And Tim won the golden tickets. he flew from San Francisco specifically for Kilkenomics and he went to something like 19 shows or something like his head must have been fried cheers Tim, cheers Tim it was brilliant, there was great travel with him well again that's very interesting, there were loads of Americans who listened to the podcast who weren't Irish Americans there were people from Nebraska I met a woman, not American Canadian, she was from Yukon, like the Yukon Valley miles away, she flew two hours to Vancouver to start her trip to Kilkenny.

18:33Wow. So there is this warm, fuzzy, nondescript, what I call fondness that the Americans have for us. And it is intergenerational. And it has lasted a long, long time. You know, the way people talk about the Israeli influence in America, right? The Israeli influence in America is bought. It's bought by AIPAC. It's a direct political transactional idea. There's no fondness for Israel in America. There's a fondness for Ireland. We exist in a nice place in their imagination. Now, my point is, this is the essence of soft power. Because soft power allows you to reside inside the heads of foreigners.

19:15And not only to reside the head, but reside in a nice, warm place in people's heads that people like you. And of course, this is embellished every year by Irish people going to America and Americans coming to Ireland. So I'll give you another example. Half a million Irish people travel to America every year. That's 10 % of the population. Yeah, that's incredible actually. That's fucking huge, right? And again, one and a half million Americans come to Ireland specifically for holidays. Yeah. So there are huge, huge synergies, Irish music, Irish art, Irish actors, the Oscars, all these sort of stuff, again, allow us to speak to the Americans in an Irish accent, which they love.

20:03And when I say an Irish accent, I don't just mean the way we speak, but our sensibility, our use of the language, our ideas. There is an enormous reservoir of good vibes towards us here. And that is, of course, then substantially bolstered, that relationship, by the commercial relationship, John. It needs to be reinstated. And the reason I am doing this podcast is the last week and during the presidential election, I heard so much anti-American rhetoric, you know, quite violent anti-American rhetoric coming from the left in Ireland. But is that not more kind of anti-Trump and anti-MAGA as opposed to, I mean, there is this new MAGA America that has been silent for many years.

20:49And now it's very vocal and it's very in your face. No, I think this predates this for years. I remember when poor old Ronnie Reagan came to Ballyporin and did the worst thing ever, had a pint of Smithics. And everyone was like, oh my God, he had a pint of Smithics, right? But there were bust loads of people, bust down, talking about warmongering, fascist America, la la la. This was like in the 1980s. It's always been there. And I want to talk about this deep strain first, before I talk about the deep strain of anti-Americanism in the Irish left. And I really want to understand where it comes from.

21:23And I also really understand why. Because the Americans have done nothing but been nice to the Irish for hundreds of years. When we were destitute, they took us in. They opened their arms to us. They created a place in the Irish mind that you could escape to, which wasn't a colony, right? Which didn't feel that we were dropping our forelock to a better race or let's say the superior race that actually gave us a chance. It's the first thing. But now, if yesterday they were taking us in as refugees, today they're paying our public health bills from their corporation tax, right? Yes, yeah. It's amazing, right?

22:06So think about the commerce here. Let's just list. So listeners have a really good sense of how positive America has been to Ireland. Now, we've also on the podcast made the point that it's up to us to spend the money wisely. And as I've always said, the Irish economy is Connecticut shitty weather. Because our economies are so intertwined, right? I'll give you a figure. American investment in Ireland, total investment. All the factories, all the research labs, all the capital has amounted to$1.3 trillion. Wow. Our GDP... Over 20 years, over 30 years. Over 20 years, yeah. Over 20 years. Our GDP is$400 billion.

22:51So it's two and a half times GDP is American strategic investment in Ireland, which is phenomenal. Yeah. The US accounts for nearly a billion of all foreign investment every year. And the 25 biggest American companies account for 65 % of all inward investment in the country. Without American know-how, capital and expertise, without this stuff, John, Ireland would be, it'll be Bulgaria in the rain. Forget Connecticut, shitty weather, right? We're still beer and biscuits. Or, dare I say it, Northern Ireland. backward, a little bit parochial, and obviously without the massive capital transfer that has happened.

23:39But we'd still be an agricultural economy, primarily. Agriculture and tourism, a little bit of services. And as you said, beer and biscuits, a great expression. Before independence, we had two industries with Jacobs and Guinness, which were two families based on beer and biscuits, both of whom which were derivatives of agriculture. So it was just slightly, slightly evolved agricultural production. Another few figures. American firms employ 300 ,000 people in Ireland. That's about 11 % of the workforce. And they're mainly in tech, in ICT, in pharma, high-value-added manufacturing jobs, right? American multinationals pay$40 billion per year in wages.

24:17In wages. Wow. And they account for 72 % of all Ireland's exports. The multiplier effect on that is enormous. It's huge. It's huge. You know, this all allows us to run a 50 billion trade surplus with the United States, which is probably the biggest trade surplus per head of population anywhere in the world. And of course, Donald J does not like that. And pisses him off completely, right? And Nutlick as well. Nutlick, our good friend. I haven't heard Nutlick for a while, actually. No, either have I. Now that I just mentioned him. Where has he gone? Howie, baby, if you're out there and you're listening.

24:56He's getting his teeth fixed. Getting your teeth fixed, exactly. But just one last quote, John. American corporation tax, 28 billion last year, which is 26 % of our total tax revenue. That's the corporation tax. Yeah. 75 % of that comes from American companies. And three American companies pay about 40 % of all corporation tax. Now, that is a high concentration, and that's dangerous because it shows us that we're really vulnerable. But this is what reality is. American multinational money is paying for Irish cancer treatment, is paying for Irish MRIs, is paying for Irish old age pensions, is paying for Irish schools, is paying for Irish dole, right?

25:45This is the truth. And of course, if you even think politically, could you even imagine that there would have been 25 years ago a peace process in Ireland without the Americans strong-arming everyone and coming in. Yeah, yeah, that's very true, yeah. It wouldn't have happened, right? So these are extraordinary positives that the Yanks have given us, right? Without a doubt, I think the Americans are our best friend, and I think they're probably going to be our ultimate protector if we need a protection from anybody else. And then you think, where does all this anti-American shite from the Irish left come from?

26:21Like, I can understand Irish people having an anti-British feeling, right? You can say they did horrible things to us, they wronged us, yadda yadda yadda. We need to get over that stuff anyway. But Americans have never wronged us. Americans have always been really nice to us. Yeah. All I understand is where does it come from? Well, let's get into that after a bit of this. Fair enough.

26:48Hey, Pablo Torre here. As a sports journalist, I've covered global sports for many years now. And there is one thing that I can promise you. Nothing compares to the World Cup. And this time, it is even better thanks to McDonald's. You have the chance to take home one of nine legendary cups when you order the FIFA World Cup meal. The cups feature some of the biggest legends in football, like David Beckham, Thierry Henry, and Ronaldinho, Christian Pulisic, Lamine Yamal, and Alphonso Davies. Right now, get one of nine legendary cups when you order the FIFA World Cup meal only at McDonald's. At participating McDonald's, only for a limited time, while supplies last, all rights reserved, copyright 2026, McDonald's at the FIFA World Cup 2026.

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29:33so mac you're talking about america as ireland's best friend which it always has been i agree with that totally. And it employs, what, 11%, you were saying, of the population, of the working population. But yet, there is this kind of anti-American feeling amongst the left in Ireland. So where is this coming from? Well, again, as I can say, right, the United States has never been anything towards Ireland, but unbelievably supportive, understanding, gentle, and open-armed in various ways. In the United States, the brand of Ireland is incredibly strong. There's a huge fondness for us. This is a massive source of soft power.

30:24And that soft power is made hard through the flows of finance and commerce, which have underpinned the economy and transformed the economy over the last 40 years. So as a target, I would find it bizarre that the Irish left would take America and single them out and the United States out for so much opprobrium. And that brings us to our new president. So Catherine Connolly, Irish president, She is all of our president. I don't like this idea. She's not my president. She's all of our president. Yeah, she is. And I think that we all hope that she does a good job. But I think she's the latest installment of what I would describe as the presidential left.

31:12There is a presidential left that exists in Ireland going all the way back to Mary Robinson. And this is sort of a low-level, low-stake leftism that wins Irish presidential elections. and today it is as close to political royalty as you can get in a republic. Yeah. But although they always say on the outside you're not, this is a deep, deep insider idea. And they are almost regal. They are incumbent in the sense that they have held the presidency for the last two decades, maybe three decades, I would say. I would say that Mary McAleese came from the same tradition although she was more conservative and more Catholic.

31:56She came from the leftist wing of the Fianna Fáil party and she was an amazing president to have during the peace process because we needed somebody from Belfast. We needed somebody who understood the North. We needed somebody who could have back channels with the Northerners as she had. But starting with Mary Robinson then you get into this sort of what I would call Catholic leftism of Mary McAleese. Then of course you have the leftism of Michael D and now you have the leftism of President Connolly. So what you have is this almost uninterrupted capture of the auras from what I would describe as the presidential left.

32:35And the presidential left is really quite, quite interesting, right? Because it sees itself as being on the right side of justice. it sees itself as being morally superior to everybody else. And that's, as a result, it spends its time lecturing everybody else about what we should and should not do. Now, of course, that means that not just we're getting lectures, but they're lecturing foreigners on what they should do. And part of the creed of the presidential left, this moral superior creed, is an anti-Americanism. It is an anti-NATO. They've described the Americans as warmongering. They don't stand up, for example, for Zelensky when he, the victim, turns up at the Dáil and they claim that he is the aggressor, even though the aggressor is Putin.

33:32Now, by all means, on issues like Gaza, criticize the Americans. Absolutely. But this idea that we have a blanket anti-American bias at the highest level of representation in the state seems to me to be bizarre, and we need to understand where it comes from. And again, I don't mind us saying, look, we're the small nation, and we've been wronged, and we stick up, and we're plucky and all that, right? But the notion that America is the enemy, which underpins so much of left-wing thinking, is a complete anathema to me. it makes no sense. But are you saying, though, that Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson and Mickey D, they were all anti-American?

34:22I think, with the exception of Mary McAleese, I think there's an anti-American strain which has become worse over time. As the Americans have become more generous to us, the anti-American strain, I think, has become worse. And again, what I'm trying to do is, I'm not... Look, people can be anti-whatever they like. I don't mind, right? But I'm trying to understand where this strain comes from. And I think I understand it. It comes from a strain of Maoism, right? Called Third Worldism. Now, believe it or not, John, there are still some weirdos out there who still think the chairman Mao is worthy of respect.

35:01This is a man who brought the cultural revolution. Yeah, absolutely. This is a man who starved his own people, right? Oh, yeah, I know. In the 1960s, a new type of politics emerged on the left. So the left starts with, for example, the class struggle between the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and the workers. And the bourgeoisie and the capitalists were exploiting the workers. And until such a time as the proletariat wins, i.e. the Soviets win, there can be no justice, right? Then what happens is after the Second World War, but particularly during the decolonial phase, when France and Britain start to pull out of the colonies, obviously pulling out of Ireland was the first one, there begins in the left to become this idea of third worldism.

35:53And third worldism sees the entire world through the prism of the colonized and the colonizer, of the settler and the occupied. And defeating the settler becomes part of a great, great journey of human embetterment, right? That basically, if we can only decolonize the world, we can make the world a better place. And this is very attractive to many members of the left who were losing their way in the 60s and in the 1970s. Why? Because a lot of the policies that they wanted were being enacted anyway all over Europe. Yeah. So what you have, therefore, is this kind of weird, I would call it kind of indigenous bias, like indigenism, that everything indigenous is better than everything that came after it.

36:54So in the case of Ireland, this involves neutrality. That's something deep. and they see neutrality as part of our worldview, which, by the way, I support. But the problem is... I'm not sure if I do. Neutrality, when they say things like words like neutrality, it's code for something else, right? Neutrality is code for pointing the finger at NATO. Neutrality is code for being in a higher moral position. Neutrality is code for we don't have to defend ourselves because the Yanks will eventually defend us. And neutrality is also code for saying, you know look at those Polish people how can they possibly expand NATO out to Poland you know this is warmongering you hear this all the time so neutrality is not just about our neutrality it's a heavily loaded word the presidential left about the rest of the world we are on a higher moral plane because we don't get involved in grubby things like wars even though we do yeah okay Yeah.

37:54That's the first thing. Climate change, another code word. Climate change has been adopted, again, not everybody, but some people. There's this idea of being a watermelon, John, which is that you're green on the outside, but you're red on the inside. So after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when ironically the communist countries were the worst polluters of all, the left have to regroup, they have to come up with some big idea. It's like, oh, brilliant. Yeah. The environment. Why? Because climate change at its heart, their perception of climate change is that we have to stop the capitalist system from expanding and consuming.

38:34And it's bad consumers and bad capitalists that drive everything in the environmental, in the wrong direction. I think you need to clarify, though, that climate change and climate action is a good thing. It's a very good thing. You know, there is climate change and we need to do something about it. But I understand how the green movement, I saw it myself when I was in college studying environmental science. You know, the green movement was hijacked in many ways by very left thinking people. That is true. You know, it was the kind of anti-capitalist, anti-big business and kind of working against them rather than working with them to find solutions.

39:17Yes, you're absolutely right. So when I hear the left saying climate change, I've got all these alarm bells ringing in my head because it's hiding a multitude of other ideological biases. At the end of the day, many, many things they say are right, but ultimately I think it is like a Trojan horse for the left in many areas. So neutrality, just watch what that means. Climate change, watch what it means. And when they talk about world peace, I mean, who doesn't want fucking peace, right? It's not like unique to you to want peace. But what they're basically saying is we are not involved in nasty wars.

39:58And we look down our nose at people involved in nasty wars. And those plucky Ukrainians who stood up to the Russians, we're not on their side at all. And the Poles who want to expand NATO and want to build up, beef up their resources, they are warmongering. Catherine Connolly described the Germans. the militarization the German rearmament now she said is like the Germans in the 1930s that sort of stuff is kind of mental now the problem is who got on your nerves? somebody has been on your mind I've been thinking about this for a while because what I just don't like is the fact that everything has been reduced to a moral yes or no that we are better than you we know more than you now that I'm in Hollywood John You can see polarization in its rawest form in America.

40:51Exactly. But what I'm saying is these guys, it's like a Hollywood blockbuster. That's why I'm here in Hollywood, right? The script of the presidential left always kind of races satisfyingly towards a moral conclusion, right? Imagine a fusion of Das Kapital and Disney World together, John. This is what we're talking about, right? Anti-colonial resistance is the core of everything, right? And we were colonized. And the colonizers are all capitalists. And the colonizers are all wrong. And therefore, anti-colonialism and resistance can turn everything into some sort of well-signposted morality epic.

41:30And leaders like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and James Connolly and Trotsky, right? These are all turned not into people, but into heroic figures. This is the Hollywood script. They're heroic figures. They're turning to heroic figures. And the people who oppose them are the oppressors. And that goes for every sort of character. So all those poor hundreds of thousands of poor Dublin lads and Irish lads who died in the Somme. Yeah. They are airbrushed out because they're fighting on the side of the oppressors. So basically everything is black and white and nothing is grey. You see everything in binary lenses.

42:16And then suddenly you begin to hear this language deployed internally, this sort of third worldism. So suddenly climate change, world peace, Irish unity, neutrality, all these sort of things, basic dilemmas, become part of a culture war, John, not part of an effort to find a pragmatic solution. So you'll hear them for a second talking about this presidential left, We'll be talking now about, for example, landlords as if they're settlers or developers as if they're kind of occupiers, right? So you've got the landlord is a settler, right? And on the other hand, the tenant is a member of the oppressed class and a permanent victim of the landlord, when in fact the tenant is a permanent victim of shit Irish housing policy over the last generation.

43:11That's what they're a victim of. But it's so much easier to have the, that person over there is bad and this person over here is good. And this is the sort of stuff that we're likely to hear coming out of the auris in the next while. But can I just say, there's a couple of things I just want to say. One of them is, a little while ago, you were talking about the amount of foreign direct investment and the multinationals in Ireland. And that's all well and good and it's boosted our economy. but it has kind of distorted our society as well because it's not working for everybody. But it's not the fault of the people who generate the money.

43:48It's the fault of the Irish public sector who are the vanguard of the presidential left actually, one would suspect, who are squandering the thing. Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean. And the other thing I was going to say is that Ireland in general is kind of a left-leading country in spirit. But when it comes to elections, there always seems to be this battle between kind of the head and the heart. And the head wins out in general elections because we go more centrist, the Fianna Fáils, the Fianna Gales. But we go more with our heart in the presidential election. It's more of a compromise. Yeah, I think you're right.

44:28I think you're right. I think the deep in the Irish DNA is what I would call Catholic compassion. It's not leftism. Yeah. It's Catholic compassion. And we learn this at our mother's knee. That's very true. We learn this from our mothers. And they learned this from their mothers. And I think this is very, very deep in our social DNA. And I think it's an actual wonderful, it's a wonderful, wonderful kind attribute that we tend to have. I also think, and I don't mean this sounds wanky, but I think that Irish people feel the pain of oppressed others more than many Europeans, right? Because I feel we've been there and I feel we have that collective experience.

45:14But what I don't think we have is an endemic anti-Americanism. I think this is new and he's been hijacked by a left ideological core, which is largely anti-American because they're pro-Soviet. And they're largely anti-American because they see the Americans as the ultimate colonizers because of the ultimate capitalists. They forget to remind us that America was actually the first country that got rid of its colonial ruler. America is based on anti-colonialism, right? It actually kicked the Brits out. It was a revolution, and that was actually an inspiration for the French Revolution and for all other revolutions, but that is conveniently forgotten.

45:59I also feel that what happens in third worldism is that the political North Star is always moral certainty. That if you are representing the oppressed, therefore you must be morally more superior than anyone else on every issue. And that is why, for example, in Ireland, you hear debates about the planning process. You hear debates about the health system. You hear debates about EU integration. And they're all framed in this third world-ism, this third world worldview, this indigenous worldview, that the European Union is in some way some great, ridiculous, giant squid that's trying to destroy all indigenous cultures.

46:45Nothing could be further from the truth. the European Union gives more money to minority languages than any other institution, gives more money to minority pursuits than any other institution. And this is where the presidential left and the anti-globalist right are meeting, which is again an interesting idea. But the problem is that rather than look at messy, ambiguous trade-offs, all those things that we do every day as part of choices of living. They see everything from black and white and they're morally certain. Economically, they sort of cleave also towards self-sufficiency, right? Now, you know, because the Americans are bad and investment is bad and why can't we create our own this and our own that?

47:33It's a kind of a Bulmer-Hobson, Mayfainism, right? Late 19th century thinking but what they forget is that we tried self-sufficiency from 1922 to about 1972 we were occupied in our heads by de Valera's thinking and you know what happened do you know what happened two out of every three babies born in the first four decades of our state's existence emigrated imagine that so we've done self-sufficiency we know what it looks like right and I think what we've come back to, John, is economics and political thinking that isn't well thought out, that is informed by a permanent global revolution, where the capitalists are seen as colonizers, and the downtrodden are seen as the occupied.

48:28This is incredibly easy to sell to people, because it reduces the world to binary figures, that there's good and bad and that there are legitimate and illegitimate people and that at the end of the day, if we can just have a global intifada against capitalism, then all will be well. The problem is, and that's where the Americans come in, the Americans are seen as the kind of banshee of the whole thing at the top, right? and that's why you hear people on the streets in Ireland and everywhere, right? You know, roaring down a megaphone like, fuck the United States and, you know, all that sort of stuff, burning the stars and stripes, all that sort of stuff, finding themselves in alliance with jihadis and all sorts of other characters, right?

49:19Because at the moment, there is no price or penalty for that performance. Because the Americans have tended to look the other way. They've tended in the past, maybe not with Donny J, John. Exactly. They've tended in the past to say, look, this is the price of democracy. It just is what it is, right? Now, there's lots of commentary going on about saying how dangerous it is for Ireland to have the Occupied Territories Bill, all that sort of stuff, right? I don't think that's the case. I don't think that the Americans are so short-sighted that they will reverse their investment in Ireland because of our stance on Gaza or because of our stance on the occupied territories.

50:02But I think relentless anti-Americanism could destroy or pollute the waters. And at some stage, the Americans might say, hold on a second, are these people for real? So I don't believe that anything is imminently going to come to an end. I don't believe that people should be silenced because they worry whether or not Intel will increase FAB or not. Because I think the relationship between Ireland and America is so strong, it's bigger than any political movement, it's bigger than any politician. But let me conclude here, that if the presidential left use the oris to re-emphasize the relentless anti-Americanism, I think ordinary Irish people will get sick of it very, very quickly.

50:57because ordinary Irish people understand the bonds. We have family there. We work for American companies. We visit the United States. We consume their media. We consume their movies. We consume their rock and roll. We consume their hip hop. We consume their technology. And I think what you will find is this a big, big gap will open up between the rhetoric from the presidential left and the reality of the average Irish person, even though the presidential left see themselves on the side of the angels. From the City of Angels, John, did you like the way I did that? I did, I did. I will talk to you on Thursday.

51:40You have a casting call now. I do.

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