Niall (Neil) Ferguson

speaker

315 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Niall (Neil) Ferguson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Call Me Back - with Dan Senor · AI is Activating Antisemites Left and Right - with Niall Ferguson · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

The pro-Soviet left, which took Stalin's lead,

in the later part of Stalin's life when he became overtly anti-Semitic, and that blended with Soviet anti-Zionism, hostility to Israel.

These things were there.

But to give you a concrete example, Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley, who was in many ways one of the leaders of American conservatism and a towering figure when I was a young scholar, Buckley's life's work was really to take the anti-Semites on the American right

and marginalize them and drive them out of the respectable conservative or respectable Republican tent so that American conservatism wouldn't have that baggage.

And he did the same with the John Birchers.

He did the same with the people who were unelectable in his mind.

And one can think of Buckley's contribution as being a kind of purging of American conservatism of those toxic elements, segregationism being the other.

All those sentiments, antisemitism, segregationism, and so forth, his own father had certainly adhered to.

That's clear from the recent Tannenhaus biography.

And the triumph really comes with the Reagan administration and a version of American conservatism that has really been purged of all these toxic elements.

And I think if you'd sort of asked me then, I was starting out my career in the mid-1980s as a graduate student, you know, are you worried that anti-Semitism could make a comeback in the United States?

I probably would have said, no, I think that's really unlikely.

I could imagine it elsewhere, but probably not the United States.

or the United Kingdom for that matter, where a parallel process had produced Margaret Thatcher's cabinet.

Margaret Thatcher's government was full of very talented Jewish ministers, the most talented, Nigel Lawson.

So it all kind of seemed like a problem that would be elsewhere, that it might be a problem in post-Soviet Russia.

That was obvious to me more or less as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed.

I remember being in the streets of Moscow and seeing people selling audio cassettes of SS songs.

And I remember saying to my Russian friend, what the hell is going on here?

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