Konstantin Kisin’s speech at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship: The tide is turning — and America is leading the way

Konstantin Kisin speaks at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

Konstantin Kisin is a Russian-British satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. He delivered this speech at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

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Last time we were here, I opened my speech with a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

I bring this up because his words are still true but also because, afterwards, one of my many critics claimed that in quoting him I was comparing myself to Solzhenitsyn. That is, of course, ridiculous: Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent years in a hard labour camp, where he endured a starvation diet, brutal punishments and a complete deprivation of his liberty. I went to a British boarding school. That’s where the similarities end.

So what’s happened since ARC’s last gathering in London?

On the positives, let’s call it what it is: the tide turning. Our American friends are leading the way.

DEI, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled. Not just in the American Government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.

Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave USD $3 million to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Kanye West would have done it for free!

Thanks to the end of censorship on Twitter, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.

Now, it’s true we haven’t yet won the argument on freedom of speech here in Europe. The most hilarious example of that was last week when JD Vance gave a speech in which he criticised European leaders for trying to shut down opinions they don’t like and a German politician stood up and went “This is unacceptable!”

So that’s the positives but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia. Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.

Nobel prize-winning writer and critic of Soviet regimes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The number of testicular injuries in women’s sports is through the roof. I don’t think this is a laughing matter, surely we can all agree women’s safety is incredibly important which is why we must do a much better job of protecting their balls.

See, it’s jokes like that that make people accuse me of being a conservative. I hate it when people call me a conservative because I have made many mistakes in the last 14 years, but even I haven’t let in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. I’m not being rude, I am grateful to the British Conservative Party – they’ve achieved the unachievable. There is now a consensus on illegal immigration in this country. I was talking to a politician the other day who said “Illegal immigration is one of the biggest problems this country faces” and he was a Liberal Democrat! And look, I empathise with and totally understand the motivations of the people who come here across the English Channel on small boats – I wouldn’t want to stay in France either.

But I also hate when people call me a conservative because it shows they’re missing my point. I don’t believe Western values and the societies they created are great because of an ideology or party affiliation. I believe our values and our societies are great because I’ve got eyes. You don’t need complicated theories about why the West is better to understand what I’m saying: just look at the fact that millions of people risk their lives to get to our shores and hardly anyone is going the other way.

Konstantin Kisin at ARC. Picture: Andrew Parsons / Parsons Media

I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of this country and much of the Western world. But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things that human beings have invented over the last two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. There are exceptions, like Covid. That was invented in China. I know that’s a controversial joke but, in my defence, it’s not a joke. Covid was clearly a Chinese virus: hardworking, made on the cheap, very good at multiplying.

One of simplest things that most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.

But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here.

The success whose fruit we enjoy was not created by a more advanced, alien civilisation, it was achieved by our grandparents and their grandparents before them.

A better metaphor would be King Theoden from Lord of the Rings who sits on his throne, paralysed.

Bound to his seat by lethargy and passivity, he is kept there by a weasley servant called Grima Wormtongue, who whispers dispiriting, cowardly lies in his ear.

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Too many people on our screens, our newspapers, our schools and colleges are modern-day Grima Wormtongues who pour their cowardly lies in our ears. If Grima was alive today he’d have his own column in The Guardian.

We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: if you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer. Because we all know the answer. We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.

A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history.

Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history. Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them. Recent election results around the world bear that out.

Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches, stunning good looks and ill-advised hand gestures. They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.

A big part of the reason we are gathered here is that an obscure Canadian clinical psychologist became such a unique cultural phenomenon that he can pull us all together like this. And how did Jordan Peterson get so big? He reminded us of something that human beings have known for millennia: that if you adopt the attitude that honesty is better than lies, responsibility is better than blame and strength is better than weakness your life will get better. And now he sells out sports arenas around the world.

We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired.

So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. Let’s open our eyes and see the world as it is. Our culture is special. Our civilisation is special. We have built the most free and prosperous societies in the history of humanity and we’re going to keep them that way.

But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.

On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner. The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We believe in free speech because we know that without it we can’t get to the future. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward. Free speech is not a right wing value or a left wing value, it’s a Western value.

The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”. Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first and white, black, male, female and all of that other stuff a distant second. And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.

Paul Ehrlich

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.

None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the Net Zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.

We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t?

So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty. The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.

Jordan Peterson speaks at the Alliance of Responsible Citizenship in London.

Now look, they asked me to say something uplifting and motivational. Now, I’m Russian, Ukrainian, British and a little bit Jewish. Those are not groups of people that are known for their optimism and joie de vivre.

But, let me share with you the most inspiring thing anyone has ever told me: You’re going to die. Yes, yes, we’re all going to die. And when you do, there will be a gathering of the people that loved you. They’re going to say some important, meaningful words, they’re going to put your body in the ground and then they’re going to eat some food. After that they’re going to go home and squabble over your inheritance. That’s it. We’re going to die. We have nothing to lose. So we might as well speak the truth, we might as well reach for the stars, we might as well fight like our lives depend on it. Because they do.