525. JD Vance vs. the Pope and the Far-Right Funding Machine (Question Time)

“This is a deliberate thing of constantly wrapping up what they're doing in religious rhetoric. And if you are somebody like Poglio, who clearly can't stand what these people are doing to America and to the world, then you can see why he would get very, very offended.”

“The reality is that Vance and the administration are wrong. I mean, they're theologically illiterate. They are consistently portraying a worldview, which is, well, in a lot of their actions, almost seems to be completely unbound by any kind of ethical principles.”

“One of the reasons that Victor Orban is such a big global figure is because he was the first, I think, fully to understand that if you were going to change minds on big cultural issues, then you had to internationalize campaigns. He understood the importance of propaganda; he understood the need for networks and the need for money to fund it all.”

“What definitely we underestimated was the extent to which the devolution debate would politically benefit the SNP to make it more about that this is a sort of step towards nationalism. But also when Tom says, was devolution always going to lead to nationalism, it hasn't led to the breakup of the UK.”

“I think less than 50 percent, but I think we're in very, very, very volatile times. And don't forget, we've got these elections on May 7th, and if the polls are right, we're going to end up with, essentially, we will have three parts of the United Kingdom led in part by governments which want to break up the United Kingdom.”

“I think it's the most exciting potential really in British politics. Clearly, so much isn't working and a lot of it is to do with a very overly centralized state with still one of the most centralized countries on Earth.”

“Traditionally, we've always imagined that civil wars are often the products of human culture—the idea of a nation, the idea of a flag, the idea of us and them. But the odd thing is the chimpanzees, who don't seem to have those kinds of mental models, appear to be engaging in murderous internecine warfare.”