Kemi Badenoch

speaker

549 appearances 8 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 9 Jun

Kemi Badenoch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch · 17 Feb 2025 podcast

And I think that they are just very weak people who don't like arguments and they say things like, well, you can't say that. Or how can you how can you say that you're black? You should know that, you know, all these people are racist and we're just trying to be helpful and so on. And they were so condescending. So I know I don't like that.

I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations. I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am. And I didn't realize that long enough. So all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism.

Then I do the law degree where I'm reading about John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke and, you know, how the rule of law is so critical to conservatism. you know, the West, but how this country functions and you learn the power of institutions, you see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation.

You then compare with what happened during the colonial era where institutions are brought and, you know, dropped in a place. And so, yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture has really changed and eventually the culture erodes it. So a lot of it is personal experience and observation and lots of arguing. So I loved arguing, loved debating.

And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me. And he kept saying, you are so right wing, you are so right wing. And I didn't know enough then. And I said, no, I'm not right wing because right wing, as I had been taught, was a bad thing.

You know, the media and the cultural establishment always used right wing as a pejorative term. So I would say, no, I'm not right-wing, but I was. And I remember when I really sat down and read the canon and the text, and you read Hayek, and of course, Thomas Sowell, who I love very much, I realized, oh my goodness, I'm very right-wing. And I'm proud of that.

This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about. And my being very much on the right is that mix of the cultural conservatism, because I want us to preserve the things that are amazing here. And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that. And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism.

And I gave a speech in December where I said liberalism has been hacked, that people have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing. And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf. And instead what they've been doing is giving away their turf. And that is how we ended up with a lot of the extreme gender ideology, uh,

coming into play because it wore the clothes of the gay rights movement. It's nothing like that. And that's how we saw a lot of the craziness of critical race theory, the BLM movement set race relations in a terrible negative territory, but it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement. And you need people who are in touch with reality who can say, no, this is not real. This is not true.

And I think that is something which I am lucky to have that I just don't get detached from everyday life. I know what is real and what isn't. And I am amazed that we have politicians, including the British prime minister, who will say things like 99% of women don't have a penis, as if 1% of women do. This is just not real.

And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?

So what are the preconditions? And there's a lot to unpack in what you've just said. So you are right. I force myself to always try and look at our country from an outside lens. And that's how I know that it is, in my view, you will differ. You will disagree because you're in Canada. This is the best place to be. Despite a lot of efforts to change it, it still is wonderful.

So you're asking, what are the preconditions? In my view, having a high trust society is so critical. People need to be able to trust each other. And the problem with having lots of different groups and lots of different group identities other than one shared group identity, is that no matter how hard you try, people will compete with each other, even when they look exactly the same.

Whether you're looking at Nigeria or Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics had endless troubles and turmoil, Everybody looks the same. We need to get past the skin color categorization because it's just a correlation. It's not the underlying thing. You need to create a society where people can trust each other.

The more they trust each other, the more they will interact, the more you will have better businesses because you don't have to worry about people stealing. We're all safe. We're not worried about people harming each other. Anything that creates lots of different groups.

where the group identity becomes more powerful than anything else, means that you start to dislike or distrust other groups, and that creates a problem. There's then competition for resources. People aren't collaborating, they're not cooperating. And I think what has been remarkably successful about Western society

is that it has had a dominant culture for a very long time, but has been able to tolerate other strains within it. This is something that's very unique. Most countries, if you're bringing in something else, it gets killed or you are forced to assimilate. It's not just allowed to be its own thing and just sit there.

And I think that that's something that's really special about a lot of Western culture. And it has allowed it to thrive and take the very best from what's all around the world. But the dominant culture has to be reinforced. And when we move away from culture as the starting point and think it's law or it's religion, we start to get confused about where we're going to end up.

You end up with the relativism. It doesn't matter what people's cultures are and so on. As long as they follow these rules, everything will be fine. And yes, the rules are important. But if your culture is strong enough... Quite often, you don't even need the rules. People just know. They know that you don't behave this way. They know that you don't speak like this to other people.

It's just in the system. And that's where I want us to get to. That's where I want us to get to as a country. And you can see, I haven't done theses and written books about this. A lot of it is just pure, as you say, anthropological observation.

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