Read the full transcript of Member of European Parliament Christine Anderson’s interview on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast episode titled “How to Stop Europe’s Collapse: Learning from Germany’s Mistakes.” This episode was filmed on June 25th, 2025.
Introduction
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Hello everybody. I have a controversial guest today. I suppose that’s not particularly rare, although she might be more controversial than most. Interviewing her, having the opportunity to interview her brought to mind the conundrum I faced when my wife and I talked with Tommy Robinson who brought the grooming gangs to the rape gangs to widespread public attention in the UK.
Tommy, who is a man not without his flaws, like all of us by the way, has been pilloried in the UK press as far right. And that’s the same fate that’s befallen my guest Christine Anderson, who’s a member of parliament for the European Parliament representing Germany, Deutschland and the political party Alternative for Deutschland, the AfD, which has also been described by the progressive mob, by the asleep liberals and by conservatives who are attempting to virtue signal I think in the same way as far right.
Well, I’m quite curious about the AfD and its rise in Germany, the rise of populist right wing classic conservative parties throughout Eastern Europe and in Western Europe, in Italy, in Sweden, in the Netherlands and with reform for example in the UK. Very curious about this phenomena and this phenomenon and I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to about this than Christine Anderson who’s also on a tour in Canada.
And so it was an opportune time to discuss immigration, unrestricted immigration into Europe, particularly into Germany, the euro, the European Union, globalization, Net zero and the COVID tyranny. And so join us for that. On a related note, by the way, because I’m very interested in what is happening in Europe. I’m going on tour with my wife at the end of January till the end of March. 35, 40 European cities. I’ve been there a couple of times and it was great. I’m going there to share what I have to say and to listen. And so if you’re interested in that and hearing me speak and participating in the events, go to jordanbpeterson.com and check out the tour for January through March of 2026. Thanks very much and on with the show.
The Challenge of Conservative Politics in Europe
So I’ve been particularly nervous, I would say, in the last few years, about two podcasts that I’ve done. I had a period of illness and when I came back to start my podcast up again in earnest, I interviewed Abigail Schreier and she wrote Irreversible Damage. She was one of the earliest critics of the so called gender affirming care movement, which is composed of a pack of ideologically addled sadistic butchers, in my estimation. And I felt that way then, although the situation was even worse than I had initially imagined.
And so that made me quite nervous because at that time, three or four years ago, it was reputationally risky to take on the woke mob with their latest delusion. And more recently, I interviewed Tommy Robinson twice, both times with my wife, partly because both of us had been following him for a long time. And, you know, we come from a working class background, Tammy and I, and I am accustomed to people like Tommy. But more importantly, I’d been following him. The two of us had been following him for about 15 years.
And as far as we were concerned, he was pretty much the only person in the UK there’s some exceptions, but he was very early on who was drawing public attention to the absolutely scandalous depraved rape gang situation in the UK. And, you know, the Casey report just came out, right? And that was commissioned by the labor government, who are complicit in all of this to a degree that’s almost unimaginable. And the Casey report’s conclusion, as far as I understand it, is that the situation is far worse than anyone had imagined.
So those are two of the podcasts that made me quite nervous. But they were both, all three of them, because we interviewed Tommy twice. They turned out to be very much worth doing. This one makes me nervous, too, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, I know a lot of the Conservatives in Canada who aren’t particularly happy with you. You know, I have some interaction with Pierre Poilievre and some with Jason Kenney, and, you know, I was hopeful for the Conservatives in the last election cycle, although that didn’t work out so well.
And so. But having said that, I’m curious about why the Conservatives in Canada and maybe elsewhere in the world are so committed to distancing themselves from the Conservatives in Europe. Right. It’s as if Canadian Conservatives in particular find themselves obligated to swallow the progressive insistence that there is a emergent far right in Europe and that it poses a true danger. You know, when it’s so interesting when those rumors or when that propaganda gets distributed because it’s very difficult not to fall prey to it.
Now the counter evidence is Poland, which seems to be doing quite well. The Economist just said that Poland will be richer than the UK within 10 years. So that’s quite the turnaround. I’ve been to Hungary a number of times and I’ve been to worse places than Hungary. Sweden tilted pretty hard in the conservative direction. And Italy’s prime minister doesn’t seem to be the catastrophe that all the progressives predicted. And then there’s Germany.
And so I’m very skeptical of these far right claims, but we should like grapple with that right away too. So I would like you to tell us how you see the political situation in Germany and then also elaborate on why it seems necessary for arguably centrist conservatives to insist that they’re not the same people as the more conservative politicians in Europe.
The Rise of Alternative for Deutschland
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, it’s pretty much a necessity to defame us, to stigmatize us.
Nowadays it seems more like the people are being dictated to what their wants and what their needs are going to have to be. And these elected officials, they no longer take into consideration what is actually the best interest of the people that they were elected by and that they are paid by, by the way.
So now this new party comes along. That was in 2013 and pretty much when my party was founded. The only thing we really did was representing or claiming to change policies in areas that the former conservative party in Germany, the Christian Democrats, stood for. As long as I can remember, I used to vote for the Christian Democrats. Ever since I became eligible to vote, I voted for the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party, the Free Democratic Liberals. We have two votes in Germany, so you can split them like that.
And it wasn’t me that changed my political opinion. It was these two parties that I voted for my entire life that changed their basis, changed their policy. So my waking up moment was in 2007 and it was actually the subprime crisis in the United States where people getting kicked out of their houses left and right. And it was like, what is going on there? Why are so many people suddenly losing their homes and whatnot? And that was my waking up moment.
And in 2005. I still voted for the Christian Democrats. So yes, I did vote for Angela Merkel the first time she ran for Chancellor, but I no longer could vote for them in 2009 when the next elections came around. So I voted invalid. And I really have to say, this political homelessness that I felt, I would have never thought that it would get to me to an extent that it actually did. But not knowing who I felt represented by anymore, not knowing who was sitting in parliament and doing what I would want them to do, there was a horrible feeling, a really horrible feeling.
So I voted in ballot in 2009 and then 2013, I was watching TV and there was some talk on TV about some new party being founded and they were critics of the EU, they were critics of the euro. And I’m like, whoa, what is this? And I’m like all ears and listened to it for a while, turned off my TV and went on the Internet, researched that party and I was so glad to have finally found a party again that I felt represented by that. I decided, well, this time I’m not going to leave it up to anyone else to do the right thing here.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: And I decided to become a member that very same night, filled out an application and I’ve been a member of that party from the very beginning, 2013. And yeah, that’s when it all started. Right. So first we were called EU haters, European haters. We wanted to destroy Europe because we were critics of the currency that we had, the euro. So it pretty much started right in the beginning.
And as it. And they kind of were hoping that we were just short term kind of phenomenon, we would just go away like that. But we didn’t go away. And then the next thing happened, the mass invasion of these immigrants, so called immigrants, asylum seekers, as they claim. And now we were Islamophobes, we were xenophobes. So the labeling continued. Yeah, and now we are pretty much. I mean, we’ve been called every name in the book. You name it, there is nothing left to pretty much label us with. But it’s no longer working really, because I mean, if you apply a derogative label to just about anything and everything you disagree with, it no longer matters. And people are just sick and tired of being called all kinds of names.
The Decline of Political Labels
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, my sense is that the far right epithet has lost a tremendous amount of its useful currency in the last two or three years.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: It absolutely has. It absolutely has. And like I said, I mean, the number of people that have to call these names are getting larger and larger. With every controversial issue there is, you once again have another group of people of the population you need to stigmatize in such a way. Well, you know, sooner or later you’re going to have a majority of the people of the population being slapped with that label. Well, seriously, that’s what you’re going to do now. So it’s really no longer working.
And I mean, they did whatever they could. I mean, they tried. They really gave it their best shot to just, you know, make us disappear, but it’s not working. Why is it not working? Because everything we have been saying ever since 2013, we weren’t making that stuff up. We weren’t fear mongering, we were simply seeing where we were headed. And the people are now beginning to realize, whoa, they were right. They said that. That’s what they said like 10 years ago, and here we are.
So they’re seeing all of this, the policies that have been implemented, they’re seeing it unfolding. And the consequences of these policies that were set a long time ago, they’re seeing it now in their everyday life. And there is no denying it anymore. You know, I mean, you can kind of play with numbers in some kind of a budget or in a balance sheet. You can hide certain things. What you cannot hide is your lived reality and the lived reality in Germany. It really saddens me to say, but Germany is turning into a hellhole country.
The Security Crisis in Germany
We’re no longer safe on our streets. I mean, just go back to 2015, New Year’s Eve, there was a mob of like, what, a thousand men killed, ganging up on women. Just being out there celebrating New Year’s Eve, notably in Cologne, it was just dreadful what these women experienced. Right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I saw an echo of that in Paris two weeks ago at the music festival.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: I mean, these are occurrences. It’s no longer isolated incidents what we’re talking about here. So that’s been going on for quite some time. What we’re seeing in Germany now is you have like, were two brutal gang rapes every single day in Germany. And when I’m saying brutal gang rapes, I mean, these women are not just raped. Not just raped, they’re brutally beaten within an inch of their life, if they survive it at all. Right. Two of them every single day happening in Germany. And that’s not even talking about the rapes where there’s only one perpetrator. Right, so. Or these random knife attacks every day. Not only every day, on an hourly basis, we have those like 2, 12, 13, 14, 15 random knife attacks.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, they were thinking about bringing in knife control in the UK for the same reasons they have.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, that’s really something. That’s really quite something.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Watch them caring about that. They don’t. So what they do do, though, is once we had the Christmas markets and everything. Yeah, they were, you know, heavily patrolled. Yeah, they took like the little knife that a grandma had carried in her purse so she can cut up an apple or something. Yeah, they were, you know, taken away from people like that. But the real perpetrators, they wouldn’t go near them.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And have they erected, like, barriers in Germany? Because that’s a terrible thing, you know. I know that’s a terrible thing to see when. When the state starts to erect barriers to protect people, you know, that things are in dismal decline.
The Erosion of External Borders
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: That’s the funny thing about that. I mean, what is the function of external borders so the people that are inside can just go about their daily business and live in peace? Once you start tearing down the external borders, what are you going to end up doing? You’re going to erect little small borders all over that supposedly secure area. And that’s what we’re seeing.
So it’s like, you know, if a family father just decided to bring in, you know, just any old Joe Schmoe into his house, you know, because he felt, you know, he needed to help these people for whatever reason, and then he finds out his family is no longer safe in the house, what would this father do? We’ll kick all of them out, but what we’re doing is we’re locking up our family in the individual rooms so they are safe there. Seriously, this is so beyond reason and beyond any rational thinking. It’s actually ridiculous when you really think about it. But that’s what we’re doing.
The German Political Landscape
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So let’s, let’s review a few things. Will you describe to people the federal political structure in Germany so they have some sense. Outline the main parties and then maybe talk to us a bit about why these, what the fundamental issues are you raised. Problems with the EU, problems with the euro and immigration. Those are the three things that we didn’t touch on deindustrialization or the catastrophic consequences of net zero, which we should also touch on but lay out the political landscape so that people understand the German political scene more particularly.
I’d like to for you also to tell people what you did before you got involved in politics in 2013. And then let’s address the main issues that we discussed as well. So we’ll start with the German political landscape.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Okay. So there’s, I think there’s like seven parties represented in the national parliament in the Bundestag right now. So yeah, let’s start with the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats are the former Conservative Party. Angela Merkel, she pretty much turned the Christian Democrats into this just woke kind of nonsense party, just adhering to just about everything. She wanted to be everybody’s darling. But if you’re everybody’s darling, you’re everybody’s.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, the Conservatives, they take their base for granted and then they try to occupy the center.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So they’re always pulled to the progressive side.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly right. So we have the Christian Democrats, then we have the Social Democrats. They used to be the representation of the working class Labor Party, but they completely abandoned that base too for all kinds of transgender issues and what have you not?
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, economic alienation, let’s say characterized. That characterized the working class has been replaced by Postmodern alienation.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So it’s an absolute multiplication of oppressed status.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: People who seem to suffer.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, yeah.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: People who seem to suffer the most from that, in terms of lacking representation, are most perversely the working class people that some labor parties actually did work to represent not too long ago.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so the Social Democrats have gone seriously postmodern and woke.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. Okay, then we have the Free Democratic Liberals is what they were called. They were libertarian. They used to be, but they’re just the same thing now pretty much as the Christian Democrats. The FDP is what their short name is. They’ve been coalition with the Christian Democrats, with the Social Democrats, whatever. So in like the 70s, 80s, there really only were these three parties. So they were here and then they were there. So they were kind of shifting.
Then the 80s came about and this new party was found, the Greens. So the Greens came along and you know what they did in the beginning? We need to protect our environment. It really made sense. I mean, I never voted for the Greens because I just kind of, even back then, as young as I was, I could see where they’re going. This ultimately and inevitably will lead into communism because there is no other way you can cut down on industry without having to redistribute whatever kind of wealth is left. Right.
So, so they were the Greens, but granted, you know, what they stood for in the beginning as they came about, there was some merit to it and there was good reasons for it. Right. So. And then the next thing, then the Wall came down, and maybe we want to touch on that a little later. The Wall came down and then the next party, the fifth party came along. There was pretty much the. The ones that was the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, they just renamed themselves.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that was the leftover Communists.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. That’s exactly what they were. Just took a different name. So we’re now at 5. And they were predominantly elected, ironically enough, in the former GDR state.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, In Eastern German. East German.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You’d think people would have learned their lesson, but.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. Yeah, you would have thought so, but unfortunately not. So now we had these five parties, and for the most part, that was just about it. Right. But the former Communist Party, they split. So now we had seven parties. And then my part. So it’s eight parties now.
So then my party came along in 2013, but like I said, it was really a necessity, out of necessity, because all of the other parties that back in the days, each had a different basis, they represented. They all kind of Margin represent the same kind of thing. They only vary in nuances from what their policies are, what they advocate for. So they pretty much have become a unity party, I think that’s the term what you call it. And now it’s pretty much the Uni party and it’s usually. So once again we’re back to a two party system. You could call it that, yes.
The Rise of Alternative for Germany
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So tell me about the rise in fortune and Misfortune of the AfD. What does AfD stand for? Tell everyone that.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Alternative for Germany. And ironically Angela Merkel, believe it or not, she was pretty much the one that inspired our name. Because when the Euro crisis happened, the debt crisis, particularly with Greece, and we send all these funds down to Greece to help them, and maybe it’s worth noting none of these billions and billions of dollars that were sent down to Greece because we’re supposed to help the Greek people, right? So once again you have to act in solidarity.
Not a single cent ever reached a single Greek citizen on the street. These billions and billions of dollars we sent down there actually were used to pay off the debt with banks. Whether it’s the KfW Bank was pretty. So it was pretty much German banks that were German French banks, right? The Greek government went into debt and now they couldn’t pay it anymore. But the banks insisted, hey look, we want our money back, right? You better make it happen. So then the peoples of all the other European countries, they all chipped in. Germany, of course, the heaviest part of this, but it directly went back to the banks to pay off the debt.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Do you think there was any utility in doing that? Did it stabilize the banking system? Did it?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: No, it did not. No, it did not. The lesson or what the banks got from that is, look, we can just fool around here, you know, we can lose trillions, it doesn’t matter. The taxpayers of all of these countries, they’re going to step in and save us. So I mean, if you run your business into the ground, you should be the one bearing the consequences for that. But since they were considered vital to the economy.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Privatize the things and socialize the risk.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: That’s exactly what it was. Exactly. So anyway, we were talking about Greece and Angela Merkel said back then that saving the euro, it was without any alternative, there was no alternative for that. And that’s what inspired our name and that’s why we were called ourselves Alternative for Germany. Because you should never get yourself in a situation as a government to claim something there is no alternative, right? You back yourself into a corner and there’s no bargaining. Exactly.
The European Union: Promise and Reality
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So let’s talk about the EU a little bit. I mean, I remember when there were great hopes for the European Union. And so let me lay out some of those. The hope was, it’s kind of analogous in a way to the hope that if we brought China into the capitalist economic system, that that would produce a liberalization in political ideology in China of freeing. And you can understand that that was a plausible hope. And it’s certainly the case that the Chinese economy has grown dramatically and the cost of certain consumer goods have plummeted. The working class has paid a price for that, and absolute privation in many ways has been drastically limited in China. So it wasn’t a complete failure. But the idea that it would liberalize China has turned out to be like that just didn’t happen even a little bit.
So when the EU was formed, it was a thrill, I suppose, to some degree, that it became radically easy to move between countries without the inconvenience of passports and border guards and so forth. And the hope as well would be that the toxic elements of nationalism, such as they were, which had seemed to tear Europe apart multiple times, would be radically ameliorated and that Europe could unite. That would raise the poorer countries out of their penury and produce economy. I suppose that would be equivalent in some ways to the United States. That was the hope.
And the consequence was, and this is why the UK left, the consequence was really the elimination of intermediary political structures and the creation of a superorganism in Brussels. I’ve been to Brussels, to the home of the EU. The building that that enterprise is housed in is a monstrosity of cataclysmic foolishness. It’s like the world’s biggest and ugliest badly designed airport, tiny offices.
I’ve got a comical story for you. I was there three years ago, maybe speaking to another far right politician from Eastern Europe, Romania, I think, and he had this tiny little office. And while I was there, the environmental police came into his office and adjusted his thermostat, right, so that he couldn’t keep it cool, fundamentally because of the green requirements. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. And, you know, I’ve talked to Bjorn Lomborg about thermostat adjustments and the fact that they’re deadly, essentially, especially to elderly people, especially in winter.
But I thought it was so telling that we had gone to this staggeringly hideous monstrosity of a building. It was just a rat’s maze inside. There was no, I don’t know how you would ever orient yourself inside that building. It’s just, it’s gargantuan. And then to speak with this elected official who was powerless, he wasn’t happy about this, by the way, but who was powerless to adjust his own thermostat, I thought, yeah, that’s pretty much exactly it.
So you got a radically centralized Europe where the distance between the citizens and the government grew to like slave tyrant proportions. And so a hyper elite with disenfranchised people. That’s what it looks like to me. And so, I don’t know, maybe we should start by making a case for the European Union. I mean, if you had to play devil’s advocate and you looked at what’s happened in Europe over the last 20 years, do you think there has been advantages to the European project? I mean, the UK certainly decided no and decided to go their own way, which I think, all things considered, was a good idea. And then they went and elected a Labour government. So, you know, that’s a catastrophe.
But tell me what you think. You know, you intimated your displeasure with the European Union and the euro, so why don’t you lay out why and give the devil his due too?
The European Union’s Evolution from Trade Union to Supranational Government
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, when it started out, it was a really good idea actually. And how did it start out? Well, it started out that the European countries decided to form a trade union kind of, you know, so there was called European Economic Union and that was pretty much it. They were just, you know, seeing how can we support each other and you know, we’ll get rid of tariffs and everything, kind of like liberalize, you know, how we trade among each other. But that was it. That was the whole purpose of getting together. At least so we were told.
I’m pretty convinced at this point it was the idea all along to gradually upgrade this whole monstrum, you said it correctly, into this supranational kind of government, pretty much.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: But that was legitimate back then and it worked. You know, it was a good idea. But like I said, then they started evolving from there, you know, and they sovereign rights were relinquished. In the beginning it was just, you know, things that kind of made sense. Let’s invest in a common kind of external border protection, that type of thing. Right, but now we are at a point where the peoples of Europe are no longer sovereign. They are no longer deciding their own political fate.
And if they try to do so, as we have seen in Romania just recently. Oh yeah, they just go ahead and annul an election and to this day they have not brought up any substantial, substantial evidence for their claim that Călin Georgescu was apparently allegedly financed somehow by Russia or whatever.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Just like Trump.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: I mean. Exactly. So they just claimed that that was enough to just annul the election. And not only that, but bar him from running again, and he would have absolutely won the elections. So they barred him.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They tried similar shenanigans, let’s say, with Marine Le Pen.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Oh, of course, Absolutely.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Now they’re far right.
The Power Grab and Plausible Deniability
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: They’re not even hiding anymore. Right, they’re not even hiding it anymore. So. But, you know, the question really is, I mean, I’m speaking about, you know, how democratic principles are being abolished pretty much across the board throughout every single Western democracy. And, yeah, it’s a power grab.
The question begs the question, and especially people that are more left leaning always ask me this, but why would a sovereign government of a country, let’s say Germany, voluntarily relinquish their power to this supranational organization called EU? Well, it’s very simple. The agenda they are trying to implement, all of the policies they’re trying to implement, they wouldn’t get away with that in a democracy, they wouldn’t get away with that.
In terms of if the people saw, Wait a minute, that government just is trying to do this, then we will no longer elect them. But what if they had a way of blaming someone else for that? And that’s exactly how this play is working out here.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Are you speaking of specific, for example.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: The climate change policy, the NET zero policies. Exactly. The whole transgender ideology. I mean, these are all things that they want to implement, but they would no longer get. They wouldn’t get reelected if they advocated for these things. But now having the EU institutions, it’s pretty much providing them with plausible deniability. Now the elected government in Berlin can tell the Germans, well, we wouldn’t have done that to you. We would not have passed this. But there’s nothing we can do. It’s coming from Berlin, from Brussels.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. And when national parties, I’ve seen this in the Netherlands, when national parties try to move in a direction that the Brussels elite do not approve of, then often environmental groups, the Greens in particular, take them to court and frequently win. Right. And so the activist types have got an appeal to a centralized authority that can supersede national sovereignty. And that frequently does.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
The Ambition for Supranational Power
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, exactly. You know, when I saw the. I think it was Keir Starmer, if I remember correctly, who made some denigrating comments about Westminster not so long ago, it’s probably a few years pointing out that the real seat of power and the real decision making authority rests with these supranational organizations like the WEF and the EU.
And so it also seems to me to be the case that politicians whose ambition knows no bounds have their eye on the ultimate prize. And if that means sacrificing local or national interests, so be it. I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll see how this plays out, that that’s what’s going to happen to Canada, because Carney has turned hard in the direction of Europe.
Now, you know, he’s done that under some provocation from Donald Trump, who I think miscalculated greatly when he agitated for Canada to become the 51st state in the middle of our last election. Right. And I think he’ll regret that because we’ll see. Carney seems to have changed his stripes, which is something I don’t understand at all. But I think if he’s still the same man that he was. Trump managed to get a pretty canny enemy instantiated on the northern border.
And I think Carney is positioning himself as the leader of the opposition. He’s trying to do that, the leader of the opposition to Trump across the world. So there is this desire, especially by the status types, to serve the highest possible master. And that has meant the WEF and the EU.
And so, yeah, you know, in Canada, the Liberals have decided, I think it’s 2035 that we’ll no longer be able to have internal combustion vehicles in Canada. You know how insane that is?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: I know, I know, it’s totally insane.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. And what’s the legislation in Germany? Is it.
The COVID Pandemic and Democratic Erosion
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Oh, they’re like the EU is pushing forward with that. That’s just, I mean, we’re going to be seeing that, but this is like the overall issue and we are seeing that, like I said, in every single Western democracy. And it became abundantly clear during this so called COVID pandemic. Right. We’ve seen erosion of democracy, freedom, democracy and rule of law across the board in all the western democracies.
And the question really is why did they have to push that in the western democracies to that extent that they did? Well, they didn’t need to do that in China. China already was a totalitarian regime. They didn’t need to do that in North Korea, but they had to do it in the western democracies. Because we do have this democracy, we do have freedom, we have constitutions. And that had to be. Yeah, kind of, how shall I word this? Watered down in a sense. You know, fundamental rights have now become privileges that the government can grant or withhold, depending on how you behave. Right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, if you lose your natural rights philosophy to made in the image of God, let’s say, and we are seeing.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: That, like I said, in every single Western democracies in Europe. However, they did face a rather difficult situation in terms of, and you mentioned that already, removing the democratic processes further and further away from the people to get it. So the people no longer know who’s even responsible for what decision. And most of all, who can they hold accountable for what decision?
So this is happening in Europe. However, just looking at this rather small continent, and I mean the entire world envies us for our small continent with all these different cultures, languages, traditions, history. Right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Productivity, peace.
The Lie of European Unity
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, but you would have never been able to convince any single European people to relinquish their sovereignty, their traditions, to invest it in some kind of, let’s call it a one world government, or whatever you want to call it, would have never happened, would have never been possible.
But hey, let’s tell the people, look, we’ve been having wars for centuries and we need to go get away with that. So we living peacefully. Let’s try to move together closer. So how about we have this EU commission installed in Brussels and we have a parliament. So it’s democracy and all of that. And so people were told this lie that because we are obviously incapable of living peacefully together unless we have some kind of a king exact sort of right. And that’s how the people were sold this lie.
And now what we’re seeing is they’re moving closer and closer together. All the more rights competencies that are getting transferred to Brussels. And speaking of the EU commission, what is the EU commission? It’s not elected, it’s appointed, pretty much. So whenever a new country joins EU, they get to appoint a commissioner for that post. Right. So it’s not based on competencies. What areas do we have that need we need to fill with someone to be responsible for it? No, that they make it up as they go along. That’s pretty much what they’re doing.
The EU commission is not elected. The president is elected in parliament. But it’s more like she is selling whatever she has. You know, that’s how she got the votes. Ursula von der Leyen notably got the votes from the Greens because she did commit to the Green deal, which is now deindustrializing, in particular in Germany, where this is going on. So the EU commission is not democratically elected.
The Climate Change Scam and Deindustrialization
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The deindustrialization of Germany seems like a marked. What moved towards insanity. Remarkable situation where China and India are industrializing at a rate that leaves Europe and it’s not negligible effect on the environment in the dust and increasingly so and at an ever accelerating rate. All of the industry that’s leaving Europe and the west in general is localizing in China and in India. China’s building coal fired plants at a rate that’s just staggering. And we all breathe the same atmosphere. The whole bloody climate change narrative is a scam and a lie. And you know, and it’s a remarkable and destructive thing to see.
So there’s two things happening. Maybe if you think about partly sociologically and partly psychologically, it’s the pernicious combination of two trends. I know that in principle the EU was established on the basis of stated respect for the principle of subsidiarity, which is a principle I only discovered probably about five years ago. That has been the time tested alternative to tyrant and slaves. And the idea is a graduated hierarchy of responsibility from the individual upward with as much power pushed down to the lowest possible level as can be managed so that the centralized authority has a very delimited scope of responsibility and authority.
Okay, so now you fragment that. And so there’s way too much power at the top and not nearly enough authority or responsibility at the bottom, which is also very convenient for people who don’t want to take responsibility. And then as you said, that abstracts the political process so completely that it’s hard to, to keep the elected officials, let’s say, responsible for their actions. And so that allows the globalist ideological types to utilize their power mongering at the highest level of enterprise.
And so then that brings us to the second issue. You know, you have to ask yourself how a policy as reprehensible and vacuous as the climate change narrative, you know, which the pathology of which I think was most amply demonstrated by the fact that it was once global warming and then it become climate change overnight, which is really quite something. It’s not warming up, it’s increased variability. It’s like that’s actually very different. And the fact that you’re telling the same story with a completely different premise is extremely telling.
And so then you might ask why? And I think it’s, it’s the age old story of the Pharisees is that these metanarratives, environmentalism in particular, but also concern for income distribution, their ways of allowing people to claim a admirable reputation and morality while doing absolutely nothing except power mongering on the basis of that claim, while doing absolutely nothing to deserve it. So you get that combination of centralized control and moral hypocrisy. That’s an absolutely deadly combination.
Taxation and the Nuclear Power Plant Shutdown
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: But they kind of have to do this. The moralization. I mean, how else would they be able to tax people into oblivion? And the question really is, how is it taxing people into poverty going to save our planet? Well, especially when the evidence to even think that we could save the planet. Right, Especially. We’re doing that in Germany, I’ll have you know. We shut down all of our nuclear power plants.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you even blew some of them up, eh?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Oh, yeah, of course.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Which is really something.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, I mean, you know, just to think about how ridiculous that is. So in Germany, we had the most. The highest standards as far as nuclear power plants were concerned. Right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They were the safest and the best engineering.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Of course, we had all that. So we shut them down because of a catastrophe that happened at the other end of the world. So. And this hurricane only. No, it wasn’t a hurricane. It was a. What’s the worst?
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Earthquake and a flood.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, Tsunami. That’s the word we’re looking for. So it destroyed one power plant in Japan, but this very same tsunami that never reached Germany destroyed all of the power plants in Germany. And what did we do? So we shut them all down. Angela Merkel, once again, wanting to appease just about everyone, she declared the moratorium back then. So they were all shut down immediately, and then they were taken out of commission, you know, despite the green’s emphasis.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: On carbon dioxide being the world’s most toxic poison. Yeah.
The Green Energy Scam
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: So we shut them all down and instead we, you know, putting these solar panels on prime farmland, by the way, erecting these windmills. I mean, Germany, you know, we have beautiful old forests. They’re hundreds and hundreds of years old. We’re just tearing them down to erect these ridiculous windmills.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But solar Germany isn’t one of the world’s sunniest countries, and it’s also notorious for. What do you call those? Wind droughts.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yeah, There is no wind at all. And see, that’s the funny thing. All of Europe pretty much is in the same kind of condition as far as winds and that type of stuff is concerned. So it’s not like if the wind in Germany isn’t blowing well, then it might be blowing in Spain, so they can. No, then the wind is not blowing anywhere all over Europe. So it’s totally ridiculous.
So we’re tearing down our nuclear power plants. Highest standard ever. But we are buying now the nuclear power from France or Poland or the Eastern European countries because they’re building nuclear power plants. So I mean, anyone with two brain cells left intact really has to see how this is the biggest scam ever.
The Failure of Green Policies
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that let’s, you know, you gave the Greens a certain amount of credit earlier in our discussion, very limited credit. Right, right. But you said that when the movement started that there was some reason to be to make environmental concerns part of the conversation and that that was reasonable.
But let’s say that the green aim was to produce a decrease, at minimum a decrease in pollution, even if there was some additional economic cost associated with that. The idea being better to pay in the short term than the long term climate catastrophe. And so it’s actually an investment. You know the rationale. And that would be fine if the policies that the Green Inca be distributors, because those seem to go together if the policies they insisted upon actually produced the outcome they themselves desired.
But my understanding in Germany is that now electricity there, like it is in the UK, is prohibitively expensive, which is a complete catastrophe with regards to competitiveness and has resulted in. It’s part of the cause of the deindustrialization that you described. But worse than that, and in particular because Germany shut down its nuclear plants which were carbon dioxide free, Germany has had to rely on coal burning plants to fill the gap left by the unreliable solar and wind energy.
And many of the coal burning plants burn lignite, which is the most polluting form of coal. It’s the cheapest, but also the most polluting. And so Germany now has electricity that’s about five times higher than it should be in terms of cost, which is really, really hard on poor people. And they pollute more per unit of electricity than they did before. So it’s a failure even by the standards of the people who pushed the legislation to begin with.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yes.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And all to what? All to bolster the proclamations of the green income redistributors that they’re moral agents working in the service of the planet. And the poor, which they’re clearly. And they’re clearly not, in fact, quite the opposite.
There’s been some psychological studies recently on the psychological predictors of support for income redistribution. So George Orwell said decades ago that when he was speaking of middle class socialists, so the virtue signaling types, because he could never understand their motivations, or elite socialists, that they didn’t like the poor, they just hated the rich.
Well, so there’s been some psychological studies recently, I know of three papers that measured people’s attitude towards fairness as a motivation. Because that’s usually the motivation. Right. For income redistribution, it’s only fair compassion and malicious envy. Yeah, right. Fairness didn’t predict support for income redistribution at all. Zero. Compassion predicted a little bit, but the biggest predictor was malicious envy. Right. So it really is a destructive. It is a destructive ideology masquerading as compassion and worship of nature.
The Reality of Socialist Policies
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Right, Exactly. I mean, you know, whenever, especially young people, you know, they, God bless their hearts, they always think, you know, no, the communists or the socialists, they’re caring. They’re so caring for the poor people, they want to lift them out of poverty.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: And, you know, but it’s really not true. What the communists or socialists actually do is they don’t increase anyone’s wealth. They do not. They do not contribute so that the overall income will actually increase. What they’re doing is pretty much just. How shall I put this? Just to manage the poorness more fairly. That’s all they’re doing. Right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They manage it more fairly temporarily.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. Or they’re trying to do that, but they’re not productive. It never increases people productivity, it never increases anything. Why? Because if you are trying to establish a totally equal society, where is the ambition that is the actual driver of mankind to better themselves, to have a better life for their children?
They will be willing to do a lot and work a lot if in the end it means I myself will have a better life and I will have a better life or will provide a better life for my children. But if that is taken away because you’re now being looked upon in like, oh, you’ve got too much. You own two books. You’re only allowed one book. So I have to take that one book away from you.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Success is theft.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. That’s the pathway to rapid poverty.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: What does that lead to? It takes away the drive to contribute to better yourselves. Right. So people just, why should I work?
The Importance of Property Rights
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That drive to better yourself is also not merely competitive and comparative advantage. It’s predicated on the idea, and Western societies were unbelievably good at this, that if you produce it, then you get to keep it.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Because. And more than that, if you produce it, you get to keep it and other people don’t get to kill you to take it.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, there’s a mystery, there’s an anthropological mystery. Human beings have been around in the genetic form that we have now for about 350,000 years, and nothing really seemed to get going until after the last ice age. So you got to ask yourself what those people were doing. Now, there weren’t as many of them and that makes a difference.
But there are theories that propose that human beings spent much of that 350,000 year period engaged in viciously murderous inter tribal warfare and theft from anyone who had anything that everyone didn’t have at the same time. Right. The thing about, like if you own something, you produce something, you own it, that means you get to keep it and that other people can’t take it.
So the whole idea of ownership, which is your ability to store what you’ve produced, is predicated on acceptance of inequality. If you own something, I don’t get to have it. So the whole idea of ownership is acceptance of inequality. And it’s a weird thing too, and I’ve really only figured this out in recent years, is that a certain amount of inequality is the precondition to raise all boats.
Here’s why. When something new comes along, it’s scarce and it’s hyper expensive at first. And so what you need is, you need pools of, you need large pools of wealth so that some people can afford the new thing. Now they get it first. And you might say that’s unfair. But the thing is, is if they get it, that the cost comes down and then the next strata of wealthy people can afford it and then the cost comes down.
And then if you do that for five years, then everyone has a flat screen TV, right? And so the rich guy up the street got one in 2015, but you got to get one and you got to have one in 2020. It’s like, who cares? If you tolerate that much inequality, well then you’ll end up with nothing.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, if the communists have their way, no one gets to have the flat screen TV.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s always how it turned out, right?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. Exactly.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: The only way of producing equality was to equalize everything at zero.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Right.
The AfD’s Electoral Success
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let’s talk about the AfD and its electoral popularity and its success and the situation politically in Germany presently. So you said seven or eight, eight political parties now. Eight political parties that I counted correctly, yeah. Okay, so it’s right. Okay. And so. And three of those are major parties, but not including the AfD.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: No. Well, there is two of those are major parties, okay.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that’s the Christian Democrats.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: And they’re not major anymore though, by the way, because there are so many parties now, so fragmented. Well, if you think back in like the 70s, 80s, it was either the Christian Democrats were 50% and then social Democrats weren’t, and then it flipped. So they were like, you know, close to 50% Christian Democrats. They actually got the majority a couple of times, but they are far from that.
I mean, the Christian Democrats in the last election, which took place in February of this year, they came in at 27%.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: And they’re considering that a huge success.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right. And what’s the standing of the AfD?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: We came in at 20% something, but it was a psychological threshold that we went above the 20. Then we were polling immediately after the election because this is just the thing. The Christian Democrats now, Friedrich Merz, he’s our Chancellor. The number one issue he ran on during this campaign was, and he said, so I’m going to close the border on day one as Chancellor. I will close the border on day one if I get elected chancellor.
Well, guess what? The precincts closed. And not 24 hours later, he was like, no one ever said anything about closing any borders. Right. So immediately he just was, nope, never even talked about that. So once again, the people were betrayed. So they were promised things that Merz was never even considering to implement then. And that’s when we started polling at 27% actually. And the Christian Democrats had dropped down to like 24, 25%.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And what’s the AFD at now?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: And we are now back at like 24%. And the Christian Democrats are now up 26, 27, kind of.
Support Base and Eastern Germany
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Where is your support localized? Who are your supporters? Most fundamentally, I think the AFD is more popular in the former East Germany.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Yes, it is. Yes, they are. And notably so you also see this trend in the Eastern European countries, former Eastern European countries that were once under Soviet totalitarian.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: They’re a lot more leery of the progressive claims.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Right. Their common sense politics is more appealing to these people than in Western Germany. But the point that we do have, my party has a lot of support in the former GDR states in eastern Germany is for a very simple reason. These people, they remember and they see totalitarianism when they recognize it, when they see it, and they are recognizing it as we speak, they have learned how to read a newspaper.
It’s not important what the newspaper says. It’s more important what doesn’t the newspaper say and what does it say in between the lines? And they have very fine mechanisms. They can sense if something is not democratic, like free speech. Free speech is being stripped away pretty much everywhere. So they see totalitarianism. They see it once again being ushered in. And that’s why they’re voting in vast numbers for us. So we are like 38, 39%, even 40% in the Eastern German states.
And it’s really just looking back, I experienced when the wall came down. So I probably have to start here saying my family, my parents and my siblings, we were the only ones from my family that actually lived in West Germany. The rest of my family, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, they all lived in eastern Germany.
And the reason being is not. My dad was arrested in 1950. So my parents were born and raised in Erfurt. This is Thuringia, it’s eastern Germany. Born and raised there. And my dad was arrested in 1950 for having allegedly entertained or been involved in anti Soviet espionage. So he was arrested, he was tried. Was all done in Russian, by the way. And he was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor to one of the most horrific political prisons you can imagine, Bautzen.
So unfortunately, he only had to serve five years of his term. So only. Exactly. So he was released. He was arrested when he was 22. And once he found out I was in Bautzen, they wouldn’t even tell him how. How long he got, how long the sentence was. A comrade of his in Bautzen, he could read Russian, and He told him 25 years. My father was devastated. I mean, 22 years old plus 27. I’m going to be an old man by the time I get out of here. So anyway, he was released in 55. And he still would shut up. He still would not shut up.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Amazing.
The Escape from East Germany
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: I know. So then he was about to get arrested a second time in 59. But that time he was warned and he fled. GDR, Easter Saturday before Easter, in 59, my mom, with my two older sisters who had already been born, she followed him in 61, May of 61. So I had the luck. I was.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How did they get out?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Once my dad left, it wasn’t that big a deal. There was no border, no nothing. So it was 59, like I said. He just, you know, pretty much got. You couldn’t tell anyone that you were trying to leave, right? You just did it. So when my mom did it in 61, it was a little more difficult. The wall hadn’t been built, but it was already closed off. So that’s a whole other story for some other time.
So anyhow, I was born and raised in western Germany. But whenever my family went anywhere, ever, it was always GDR, always. And I still remember the first time we were even allowed to go. There was Easter of 74, and the Chancellor of Germany had struck a deal with GDR because they needed money. They were in desperate need of money. And he negotiated with them. Well, look, we help you financially, but in return, you will have to ease the restrictions on travel between the countries.
For the very first time. Refugee or the ones that had fled the country, they were considered state of GDR, enemy of the state of GDR. For the very first time, they were allowed back in the country to visit. So I was six years at the. But I’ll never, never forget that. So we were tearing up. I’m sorry.
As we were driving up to the border. I mean, there were cars and cars and cars and cars. And we’re like standing in four, four cars in a row, just trying to get in. But it was like you never knew what happened. You never knew what are they going to do to you this time? Take your car apart, you know, because they’re looking for some magazine or whatever. It was like. It was always like Russian roulette pretty much. You know, will you be able to get back out? You never really knew. So. But the first time we went there, that was. Yeah. So anyhow, we went there.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
And then now going fast forward to 89. In May of 89, in Hungary, there was a pan European festival of some kind. And Hungarian government, for whatever reason, had decided to open up a gate. There was the border to Austria, right? To the Western world, pretty much. And they decided to open that up so that people could walk back and forth for that day. The plan was only for that day.
But there was a lot of people from GDR that were visiting Hungary. That was like the only country they could really go to within the eastern block they were allowed to travel to. And that gate’s open. That gate’s open. There were like 400 people. Once they realized that, they fled right to Austria. But since Hungary had done that, they couldn’t really go back on that. So then they decided to just tear down, start tearing down this fence.
And that sparked something with the population in GDR. They were fed up with this communist system and everything. So then they started to take to the streets. Every Monday night. They would protest. In the beginning, it was only a few people. So the Stasi came in. You know, that’s the secret state police. Stasi came in and, you know, just.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Who were particularly vicious in Eastern.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. Arrested them. You know, to never to be seen again. Whatever. The families didn’t even know where, you know, their relatives were. But once this process all started, it was like the genie was out of the bottle kind of thing. And there was no way of getting it back in right so it evolved.
And I’ve been watching the news ever since that happened in Hungary and was like, something is evolving here and they’re not going to be able to contain it. I was sure of that. This is just going to go now. So I was watching the news, every news show on every channel. I was videotaping it to preserve it, whatever. So I was really following this whole process very, very closely.
And then the people of GDR, they occupied the. Not occupied, but fled to the embassy in Prague. And pretty much the embassy in Prague, it was just overflowing. I mean, there were like 3,000 citizens of GDR in the embassy requesting asylum. But the German Embassy, they couldn’t take him out because they would have to use a landline, which inevitably would have meant crossing Communist territory, Soviet controlled territory. So they were just trapped there.
So once again, they were negotiating. And then it was September 30th in 89, the very first train with all of these refugees was transported out of Prague into Western Germany. The GDR, however, the government, they made a drastic mistake. They insisted that this train would not take a direct route, which would have been Austria and then Western Germany. They insisted this train has to cross through GDR territory because they wanted to keep their face and wanted to say, look, they didn’t flee, we expelled them. That was their rationale behind that.
Well, that was a big mistake because what it led to, once it was known that this train was traveling through GDR territory, the people were just lining up by the thousands along where the train was going to come through in the hopes of being able to jump on the train. Right? So they were completely overwhelmed with keeping all of these people off of the tracks and off of the train stations that it passed through. So they never made that mistake again.
So a few people actually did manage to jump on that driving train, especially in the stations where it has to slow down. Right. So they actually managed to jump on these trains as they were going to freedom. So. Yeah, but the whole system just failed.
The October 7th Protests
And yes, I still remember October 7, 1989. There was the 40th anniversary of GDR. And, you know, they always celebrated that with, you know, the international elites from the Soviets, the countries and all of that. And these protests, you know, grew. We’re now talking like tens of thousands of people. And they wanted to put a stop to this. The government wanted. They didn’t want any interruptions during their celebration of their grandiose state. Right.
So they had called in the military to, yeah, pretty much just cut it down, whatever protests there might be. Right? And my cousin was in the military back then. He had to, because he wanted to go to university. And you couldn’t go to university unless you had committed yourself for the military for three years, I think it was. So he was in the military back then, and he was called to Leipzig.
And in Leipzig, there was like this big demonstration protest plant, and they were ready to go. They were deployed, they were ready to go. All what was missing was the order to actually move in. And once they realized there was 70,000 people on the street protesting for freedom, they just crumbled. The order never came, but they were ready to go.
And the pictures of this, I mean, and 70,000, again, it’s a small amount of people when you really think about it. There were 16 million. The population was 16 million. 70,000 5%, roughly, somewhere around there, that was enough. That was enough to bring the system down. They didn’t dare to deploy or have the military move in.
So in these pictures, there were two or three guys they had hit in a church tower to shoot, get some footage from that protest. And they were risking their lives. They literally were risking their lives just to hide up in that tower, to film people protesting on the street. And we already had the footage in western Germany by the time the eight o’ clock news came on. So once I saw that, I was like, it’s done. This is done. And it was finally done.
The Moment the Wall Came Down
Then November 9th, the German government representative, Gunther Schabowski, he gave a press conference and they had decided to probably to calm it all down a bit, and people wouldn’t protest that much anymore. They decided to release the restrictions on traveling. So up until that point, the only ones that could have traveled from eastern Germany to visit West Germany were pensioners, were people that no longer worked. If you were of working age, you were not allowed to leave the country unless you had a very, very good reason. And the government decided if that was a good enough reason for you to be allowed, they decided to remove these restrictions.
But Gunther Schabowski, he was somewhat confused, and he was just saying, well, we will issue visas for people wanting to visit western Germany. And then a journalist, he asked, and he was like, in what timeframe are we talking here? When will that go into effect? And he was confused about that. So he shuffled the paper around and he said, well, as far as I know. As far as I know, yeah, as far as I know. Immediately. And that was it.
People heard. I heard that there was the 5 o’ clock news that was aired. And I’m like, what? Immediately we heard. So many things. So we didn’t really believe it. But the people in GDR, he said immediately, we’re going to take his word for it. And they proceeded to the walls. And that’s when the whole thing came down.
And once again, there were no orders. So these patrols at the border, they didn’t know what the heck to do. They having thousands of people standing there demanding to just open it up, open it up. And they were trying to reach someone high up in the command who could have made that decision. They didn’t. They never made a decision. So they were pretty much left all of the people at the border stranded with no direction, no orders, no nothing. Leaving them out to fend for themselves is pretty much what they had to do. So eventually they just gave in and opened it up. And that’s when this glorious night of November 9th then actually happened.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, and all the Eastern Europeans remember that and know that one of the things that part of the. I started this. I helped start this organization in the UK called ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And we haven’t been pilloried too badly with the far right epithet, partly because we’ve tried to operate more in the philosophical domain than the political, which seems to be working quite nicely.
But we’re not big fans of net zero idiocy or centralized, essentially fascist collusion between governments, media, large corporations, et cetera. And we also believe that the ethos that makes Europe and the West a high trust and therefore a productive society is Judeo Christian to its core. You know, 100% of Protestant and Catholic majority countries outside of Africa are productive Western democracies. 100%, yes. Right. And three of the multitude of countries that are Islamic are quasi democracies at best. Yeah, Right. That’s a stark difference.
So let’s return to the AfD more specifically to bring this in for a landing. You described the machinations of the other political parties as a uniparty, essentially.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Pretty much.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You said that regardless of their original place of origin or orientation, they’ve melded together, I suppose, partly under the pressure of having to form coalitions, but they. They seem primarily united by their opposition to the AfD. Let’s say. Exactly what is it that you’re offering the German population, you think that’s appealing and fundamentally different? Let’s see if we can tie that in with your concerns about the Euro, about the EU, about the net zero catastrophe, and about immigration. Are those the major themes? Are there others?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: These are pretty much the major themes.
The AfD’s Political Platform
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. And so what’s the AfD’s pitch to people and why is it gathering steam as it moves? And I’d also like to talk about the fact that from what I understand, and I suppose this is a lesser severe, what analog to the situation that occurred in Romania that you described earlier. The AfD is alienated from the possibility of participating in any coalitions. Right. You guys are on the outs, right. Other parties will meld together. You’re seeing this happen in other places in Europe as well where the rule is don’t cooperate under any conditions with the so called fascists. Okay, so tell me what the AfD is offering to people and why you think that’s become increasingly popular.
The AfD’s Core Message: Common Sense Politics
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, pretty much all we are really saying is let’s approach politics once again with common sense. What is good for the country, what is good for the people? Like I said, if you just catering to niche kind of interest groups, you are not representing the German people. So this is pretty much what we’re saying and going from there.
The consequences of that is following. Should we flood our country with millions and millions of so called asylum seekers, 99.9% of which are young men of fighting age? Should we really do this right? Should we deindustrialize our nation?
I mean Germany, we don’t have any natural resources. Our resources, it’s always been our brains and your conscientious ingenuity, our, you know, engineers, that type, that was our resource, our only resource. We don’t have natural resources. Not a lot that is worth mentioning anyway. So in our industry that was our driving factor. Right.
So by tearing that down, it’s going to end in tragedy, it’s going to end in poverty. That’s pretty much what we’re doing. We’re already seeing that because a lot of industry, they are moving out of Germany because they no longer can afford to pay these energy prices. Right. They’re skyrocketing.
So, and we were told, by the way, 1989, that’s the first time that the Green Party became part of the coalition in the national Parliament, in the national government. And we were promised that this whole climate change, not climate change, energy kind of change isn’t going to cost us more.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, it’s going to provide opportunity.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: There’ll be more economic ice cream. It’s not going to be any more than that. Right. That was what was a promise People are now seeing it was a blatant lie.
Freedom, Democracy, and Individual Rights
So that’s what we’re people offering. And the most important issue, I think what we’re offering is freedom, democracy and the rule of Law and our constitution, our Kruntgesetz. This is what we’re offering to the people. We are offering freedom of speech, true freedom of speech.
And not like this so called freedom of speech, as IDI Amin once said. This dictator from an African country, Uganda. Yeah, exactly. He once said there is freedom of speech. I just cannot guarantee freedom after speech. So that is pretty much what the uni parties, they’re offering us. Oh, you get to say whatever you want, you just have to suffer the consequences. Right. That’s not free speech.
So freedom, individual freedom, that’s the number one thing that our societies are based on, it’s individuality. And there we will go into, or probably get into this whole transgender issue and what’s it called, intersectionality and all of that.
I think you once said that if you divide the population into so many different individuals and even find more ways to separate them, what will you end up with in the end? With the individual. But we already had that. We already had that, but we’re pretty much abolishing that.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right. Individual rights are the ultimate expression of personality.
COVID and the Erosion of Individual Autonomy
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Right. But we were willing, the majority was willing to sacrifice the right of an individual to make autonomous decisions over his own body because of this, what virus that was going around and apparently killing people left and right. But that was not the lived reality.
I mean, they made it sound like as though if you woke up in the morning, you opened your front door, the first thing you would have had to do is work your way through all the dead bodies. That’s what they made it sound like. What this, what Covid was going to do.
But lift reality was not anywhere near to that. But once again, they were preying on fear. We’re putting people into fear. They would put on their masks, stay at home, don’t ask any questions, and for God’s sake, don’t let any scientist speak who has unrefutable evidence for alternative methods of dealing with.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think that is another reflection of that emergent totalitarianism.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Absolutely.
International Impact and Conservative Politics
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So I want to ask you about your international work. I mean, I think, and that’s particularly relevant given that you’re in Canada and doing somewhat of a tour. And for everybody watching and listening, we’re going to, when we move over to the Daily wire side, I’m going to focus the conversation on immigration.
And I’d like to address a question which is that is it even possible in Germany in particular, to take a stance against unrestricted immigration without running into the problematic labeling of far right or fascist? And I think That’s a more acute problem in Germany than it is anywhere else. So I’d like to discuss that with you on the daily wire side.
For now, I think to close this off, I’d like you to speculate about, I don’t know if there is a conservative politician in the EU in Europe that has a, that’s more widely known internationally than you. And I’m curious about first of all, why you think that is, why you pursue that, because you do.
And also what you’d like to say to the conservatives, the more middle of the road conservatives, or the arguably those who self proclaim themselves as more middle of the road. I’d like to know what you have to say to them and what warning you might have for them as well. So let’s start with your impact on the international front and why you think that’s happened and why you also pursue it. Let’s begin with that.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, to be honest, I don’t really know why it happened. I guess I’m just, I have a big mouth.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, you’re a fiery speaker.
Speaking Truth in the Face of Totalitarianism
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: My parents always, you know, teachers too. But that may be one reason. But I don’t really know. But why do I pursue it? I think that’s the more interesting question and one I actually have an answer for.
It’s very simple. During the COVID it was so obvious what the playbook was and it was to abolish freedom, democracy and the rule of law in every single Western democracy. As I said earlier, they didn’t need to do any of that in China anymore. That was already a totalitarian regime. Right. So these people are being told to do something, they do it and they have means to make the people do it.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But they lack 100 million closed circuit TV cameras. They’re multiplying like mad in the West.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly. But they didn’t have a way of making people invert Western democracies to do what they were told to do. They had no means. So they needed to prepare for that. And our freedom, democracy and the rule of law. We are under attack, especially in the Western democracies.
And that’s why I’m speaking. I mean, most of my colleagues speak German in the EU Parliament or they’re speaking their native language. I choose to hold many of my speeches in English and I do so for the reason, because I want a lot of people to directly understand what I said. Well, that’s another problem we have in the EU Parliament. It’s like this Babylonic language confusion is what we’re suffering from actually.
So I Want to directly. I want to be able to speak to as many people as possible. And the English language is so. And then.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that’s a key reason as well, that your message is spread. Well, you also say things that other people won’t say. I’m sorry, you also say things that other people won’t say and you’re not particularly polite about it. Like, you’re very blunt and direct.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: They’re not polite either.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, no, look, that’s not a criticism.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: No, no, no, I totally get it. But I mean, the time where I exchanged verbal flowers and chocolates. Done.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: I’m done with that. They’re not polite to me. I mean, they’re calling me every name in the book. I’ve been called a murderer for not wearing a mask during COVID Right. I had reasons for doing that. I had a medical exemption even for not having to wear a mask. Still, I was called a murderer. It’s ridiculous.
So if they’re like that, as far as I’m concerned, why should I treat them any less? Let’s say aggressive?
A Message to Conservative Politicians
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And then to close, I would say, what do you have to say to the conservatives who insist upon distancing themselves from you on the grounds of your unacceptable far right views?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, I just wish these idiots. I can’t really say it any different. These idiots would realize it’s something the left is actually doing to keep them on a leash. So it’s actually harming themselves by doing so because they have to surrender policies that they otherwise might have been advocating for but now can’t because we are doing the same thing. Right?
So if we’re advocating for a certain issue, they have to stay far away from that as to not be associated anywhere near us or with us. Right. So what they’re effectively doing is they are in the attempt to appeal to the left. They’re surrendering their ability to actually set policy.
If they want to do that, that’s fine. But like I said, I wish these idiots would wisen up to what the left is doing with them. They’re putting them on a leash and they let them. They let them.
Canada and the Freedom Convoy
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So tell everyone what you’re doing in Canada and how long you’re going to be here. Christine is in Canada. She’s in Toronto right now speaking with me. She’s going to Calgary. So what are you doing in Canada? Why Canada? And any parting words?
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Well, I mean, I’ve really grown fond of Canada. And this all started with the Canadian freedom trucker did the convoy back then. And again I saw this happening And I was like, gosh, finally someone is doing something.
It was, you know, then I met a lot of people. They said, you know, you resonated, you know what we were feeling. But I was like, no, it was. If you guys hadn’t done that, if you guys had not started the convoy, I would not have had anything to resonate about. Right. So it was really, it was a one way street, it was a two way street here. But yeah, that was just spectacular what they did here. And once again I realized that this is going to be a turning point here.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It was a turning point in a variety of ways because it was the first time a western government froze people’s bank accounts.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Exactly right.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That was a turning point.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: But exactly. It was not in the sense of that it’s going to stop now. No, that’s for sure. That will force them to show their true colors. And they did. Freezing bank accounts, you just said that.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Was the worst thing I’d ever seen a Canadian government do.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Terrorists.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh yeah, it was unbelievable, right?
Forcing Truth Through Exposure
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: But they were, they were forced to show their true colors and that’s what they did. And there is this. Maybe on this we can end on this note. There is a saying in Germany. I don’t like the person who said it first, but I quote her nevertheless, we cannot force them to tell the truth, but we can force them to lie even more blatantly.
And that’s pretty much what the Freedom Truckers did. Just explain. Expose it. Expose all of their lies and their tyrannical ambitions and their totalitarianism. That’s what they did. And that’s why I just love Canada and that’s why I’m glad to be back. Even though there are some people that don’t like me being back. But I guess Canada is still a free country. And I will come here if I like and I do like Canada and I will be back.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I’ll be in Germany in the winter between January and March. I have a tour through Europe, 35 cities I think, and I can go see for myself again. I’ve been to Europe a number of times and I’m hoping to go see for myself exactly the situation.
So thank you very much for speaking with me today and for delving into the these issues and sharing what, you know, with everybody who’s watching and listening. It’s much appreciated and thank you to everybody who’s watching and listening.
It’s a very important issue, you know, because Europe is shakier than I’ve seen it in my lifetime by a lot. And that’s particularly true of, I would say, France, Germany and the UK and those are the linchpins of Western Europe, all things considered. Eastern Europe arguably is a little in a little better shape ideologically, although it doesn’t have the population or the economic clout.
But why pay attention to Europe? Well, because they’re part of the west and as Europe goes, so go us. So that’s why we’re paying attention to the AfD in Germany and trying to sort out what’s going on there politically.
Thanks for your time and attention. On the Daily Wire side, we’re going to talk about immigration and cultural differences because we haven’t got ourselves in enough trouble yet. So join us there if you’re inclined. And thanks to the Daily Wire for making this possible and to the film crew here in Toronto today for setting this up. And thanks again, Christine.
CHRISTINE ANDERSON: Thanks for having me.
DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You bet.
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