Read the full transcript of Russian satirist and author Konstantin Kisin’s talk at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 conference on Feb 19.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Ladies and gentlemen, it is great to be back at ARC. If we haven’t met, my name is Konstantin. I was born in Soviet Russia and I moved here when I was a teenager. I love this country and I say so publicly, which is how you know I still haven’t integrated into British culture.
Now this 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.
Recent Developments
So what has happened since we were last here? Well on the positives, let’s call it what it is. The tide is 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 for us here in the global corporate world as well. Once again, we can dream that our children will be judged on the content of the character and not the colour of the square they post on Instagram.
Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. Those may not be perfect, but according to one report, USAID gave $3 million to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs.
Now whatever your politics, we can all agree that’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Kanye West would have done it for free.
Now thanks to the end of censorship on Twitter, we finally have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are now fearful of being too aggressive in their censorship too.
Now it’s true, we haven’t yet won the argument on freedom of speech here in Europe. I thought the most hilarious example of this was last week, when JD Vance gave a speech in Munich in which he criticised European leaders for trying to shut down speech that they don’t like. The reaction? A German politician stood up and went, “This is unacceptable!”
The accent was a bit much, alright.
Challenges and Humor
So that’s the positives, but there’s been a lot of bad too. I mean if you want to understand how bad the crime problems become in Britain, British people used to deal with crime by moving the criminals to Australia.
Now British people deal with crime by moving to Australia. The number of testicular injuries in women’s sport is through the roof. I don’t think this is a laughing matter. 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 get me accused of being a conservative.
And I hate it when people call me a conservative, because I have made many mistakes over 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 Conservative Party. They have achieved the unachievable.
There is now a consensus in this country on that issue. I was talking to a politician the other day who said illegal immigration is one of the most important issues our country faces, and he was a Lib Dem.
And look, I know it’s hard to say anything about that issue without being put in the bigger box.
So let me just say, I empathise with and totally understand the motivations of the people who come here across the English Channel on smokeboats. I wouldn’t want to stay in France either. See, I lied. I have integrated into British culture.
Western Values and Society
But look, I also hate it when people call me a conservative, because it shows that they’re missing my point. I don’t believe that Western values and the societies they created are great because of an ideology or because of party affiliation. I believe our values and our societies are great because I’ve got eyes.
When I look at the fact that millions of people risk their lives to come here every year, and no one is going the other way, that tells a story, doesn’t it? 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 200 years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them.
I’m not saying we have a monopoly on genius. There are exceptions, like COVID. That was invented in China. Oh, it’s controversial.
Look, I know it’s a controversial joke. In my defense, it’s not a joke. COVID was clearly a Chinese virus, hardworking, made on the cheap, and very good at multiplying. One of the simplest things that most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we’re richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.
The Risk of Forgetting Our Past
But all of this is at risk because we’re in danger of forgetting how we got here. Do you know what this is? That’s just a photo of me on the screen. All right.
Can you see it? It’s behind me. All right. That’s why I’m here. It’s a plane made out of wood.
Why would you make a plane out of wood? Well, during World War II, both Japan and the US used small islands in the Pacific to supply their armies. In exchange for occupying these islands, they provided the tribes who lived there with food, clothing, and medical supplies.
But when the war ended, the Japanese and the Americans packed up and left, and they took their supplies with them.
So what did the natives do to try and restore them? They built plane imitations like that. They lit signal fires. They marched up and down with wooden rifles to summon back the provisions they’d got used to.
And this is what we’ve been doing. We’ve been imitating the things that got us here instead of actually doing them.
But the good news is this metaphor is complete bullshit. The success we enjoy was not created by a more advanced foreign civilization. It was achieved by our grandparents and their grandparents before them. A better metaphor would be the one Philippa used when she opened this conference, thereby ruining my speech. It’s King Theoden from Lord of the Rings who sits on a throne, paralyzed.
Bound to his seat by lethargy and passivity, he’s kept there by a weasel-y servant called Grima Wormtongue, who whispers dispiriting, cowardly lies in his ear. Too many people on our screens, our newspapers, in our schools and colleges have been modern day Grima Wormtongues who pour their cowardly lies in our ears and those of our children. If Grima was alive today, he’d have his own column in the Guardian.
We need to admit something very unpleasant. We have 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 rather live than the West? And 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, a self-confidence, these are not conservative values or liberal values, those are the values 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 do not want their children to be poorer than them.
Inspiration and Leadership
And 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 here, 4,000 of us, is that an obscure Canadian clinical psychologist became such a unique cultural phenomenon that he can help to pull us together like this.
And how did Jordan Peterson get so big? How did he 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, that responsibility is better than blame, and that strength is better than weakness, your life will get better.
And now he sells out sports arenas around the world. We are a civilization that is waiting to be inspired.
Call to Action
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 civilization is special.
We have built the most free and prosperous societies in the history of humanity and we are going to keep them that way.
But to do so, we’re going to have to win the arguments. Many of them we’ve been talking about in the last three days. 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 of 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.
Key Arguments to Win
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 so-called community cohesion. Public societies can work.
Multicultural societies cannot. We must be British, American, Australian and whatever else we are first and male, female, white, black and all that other stuff a distant second. And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good. 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 the ideas live on unaffected in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is the fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet, that if only we could 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 it represents a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. And at a cultural level, any successful civilization would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good.
What do you imagine happens to civilizations that don’t?
The Promise of a Better Tomorrow
So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the Industrial Revolution, nearly 40% of children died before they hit puberty. That means two of the five people next to you would be dead right now.
Now there are a lot of people outside this room who’d be happy about that. My point is, the promise of that better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have, it’s the debt we owe 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.
Conclusion: A Call for Truth and Action
Now look, they asked me to say something uplifting and motivational. I’m Russian, Ukrainian, British, and a little bit Jewish. Those are not four groups of people that are known for their optimism and joie de vivre.
But let me share with you the most inspiring thing that anyone’s ever told me. You’re going to die. Yeah, yeah, we’re all going to die, no. You are going to die. And when you do, there will be a gathering of people that love you. They’re going to say some words, meaningful, important words. They’re going to put your body on the ground, and then they’re going to go and eat some food.
And 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.
