Konstantin Kisin: A Russian's Love Letter to the West | Stories of Us | PragerU

if you truly thought that America was this racist sexist homophobic hell hole you certainly wouldn't stay here what is this magical Utopia to which you would rather move and by the way why haven't you my name is Constantin kissen and this is my story I an author writer and I host a YouTube channel called trigonometry I was born in 1982 in the Soviet Union in Moscow not many people really truly believed in communism by this point what there was though is still a very strong residual fear about expressing your opinion being critical of the regime being critical of Communism I remember as a 7-year-old going to school on the first day and my parents sitting me down before I went and saying they're going to teach you some things in school that are very useful you know physics math biology history they're also going to teach you some things that are not useful that my parents will make fun of and Mark at home which was the ideological stuff because of course in the Soviet Union you would also have to pass various how successfully indoctrinated have you been exams and classes but if word ever got out that my parents contradicted the state they'd be in big trouble which unfortunately happened in 1979 my grandfather in a private conversation said that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was wrong one of the people who was there and reported him to the KGB in previous decade he would have just been sent straight to the gag or or just killed but because it was getting later on they only only got him fired from his job got his wife fired from her job and got his kids that's my father and my aunt kicked out of their college education but it didn't stop there Russian politics was very very corrupt at the time and my father was falsely accused of tax evasion and they said to him this is what we're going to do to you we're going to put you in a in a cell with criminals rapist or whatever or you can disappear and so my father basically fled the country under a false identity it completely ruined his life and then my parents sent me to boarding school in England I distinctly remember him saying to me you know like we're sending you there so you have a better life than us when I went to boarding school I barely spoke any English so it was a pretty tough adjustment but what I saw in the West Was this unbounded opportunity the freedom to make your own decisions the freedom to succeed or fail on your own Merit and that became very apparent to me very quickly that this was a very different Society than the Soviet Union where it mattered very little how hard you tried I couldn't finish my college degree because I ran out of money and so I had to drop out I started my own translation business and I did that for 10 years I would go to conferences for translators and I quickly realized that unless you're making people laugh uh you might as well start handing out pillows and blankets so I started putting lots of jokes on what I was saying and people would be oh you should try comedy I was was always much more interested in satire than I was in comedy and there's a big difference for me humor was not an end in itself I I see humor as a tool that you can use to communicate ideas and thoughts it was Oscar wild I think who said if you want to tell people the truth make them laugh otherwise they'll kill you the gig that changed my life happened at the very end of 2018 a few students saw me in a comedy club and they invited me to perform to raise money for charity at the University and when I agreed they sent me what they call the behavioral agreement contract which said that they had a zero tolerance policy on racism sexism classism agism ableism homophobia biphobia transphobia xenophobia islamophobia anti-religion anti- atheism and it also said that all jokes must be respectful and kind obviously freedom of expression is important for comedy so I didn't want to censor myself just to avoid hurting someone's feelings when I turned it down a few interesting things happened first of all it was the second most read story on the BBC News website on the day that the Prime Minister was nearly removed from office by her own party that would be like Joe Biden is nearly impeached by the Democrats and the second most popular story in America is no-name comedian turns down unpaid gig from some two bit college and that told me that I was not the only one that said comedic censorship was an issue and then of course I got thousands of emails and messages from other people and what they would say to me is I'm glad you said this because I have a normal job and in my job I feel like I'm operating in a world where I have signed that contract not all feedback was positive though a lot of people in the British comedy industry who I thought I was standing up for I thought anyone who's in a creative field like that would want the ability to make jokes and it's not necessarily because they would agree with my opinions but they might want comedy to be able to push boundaries I am immediately became far right and all-right and a Nazi which great for me cuz I became the the first Jewish Nazi comedian in the world what I found instead was there are lots of normal people who agree with what I'm saying and at the same time there is this deranged elitist mindset among people who don't actually do any real work they just talk and I remember we we had a guest on trigonometry recently and we asked him about tell us your personal story and whatever and he talked about how he was so bad at every job that he ever did and then 10 minutes later he was giving us his opinion on how to run the country and I just went what you couldn't deliver milk but here you are giving your strongly held opinions about how to run the country do you not think that there's something strange about that this is the kind of person that often hates their country and thinks they can make a perfect Utopia so for example if you care about women's rights where would you rather be a woman than in America if you truly thought that America was this racist sexist homophobic hellhole Well you certainly wouldn't stay here what is this magical feminist Utopia to which you would rather move and by the way why haven't you in the same way that queers for Palestine don't seem to move to Palestine is that because they're going to get thrown off a roof I would venture to say yes people often say to me well you know we've got this woke ideology in the West and young kids are really buying into this and what's the solution and I always say get them to travel once you spend a year in Cambodia or in Africa it's very very hard to think that you are you know oppressed and your life is terrible when you when you live in a place like the United States or the UK I certainly wouldn't have the same perspective of the Soviet Union and the West without experiencing both of them it's one of the reasons I feel so strongly about the decline of Western self-belief and Western self-confidence because my parents gave all the money they had to get me here I don't want to waste that and I don't want to raise my children in the society that's being destroyed by people who don't know how good they have it I think one of the crucial elements of growing up in a free Democratic country is recognizing that whatever your particular political ideology is half the country probably doesn't agree with you you may feel that some of their political views are wrong and bad that does not not mean that those people need to be eradicated whether physically or intellectually or ideologically in some other way we cannot have a society in which both sides think that the other side is evil we're like siblings in a house we may fight and we may see the world differently but if we want the house to stand we have to pull in the same direction the thing that makes us strong is being unified it doesn't matter if I'm atheist Jewish Christian Muslim I'm American or I'm British or I I'm see myself as part of western civilization we are all United by this country that we live in by the values of this place and the ideas that it's built on thank you for watching this video to keep prageru content free please consider continuing your support for them