Today, I sit down with Esther Krakue, a Ghanaian-born writer and broadcaster based in the UK, to discuss the cultural ills she sees gripping the developed Western world, from postmodernist ideology to bureaucratic COVID dogma and the breakdown of the family.
“We have a crisis of the soul and of identity … Many Western countries don’t know what they are, what they stand for. They can’t even answer basic questions about what it means to be a man or woman or an upstanding citizen anymore. And so we’re just teetering along and just kind of rolling down the hill of ultimate destruction,” Krakue says.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-have-a-crisis-of-the-soul-and-of-identity-esther-krakue-how-postmodernist-ideology-has-blinded-the-west_4987394.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Esther Krakue, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Esther Krakue:
Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’m really looking forward to chatting. I was thinking of having a lighter American Thought Leaders episode for a moment, and I’ve really been enjoying all of your commentary. You grew up in a couple of very different cultures from American and Canadian, my native country, and from Polish, which is also part of my culture. What I really want to get is an external view on what’s happening in North America, and the West in general. And of course, you’re Ghanaian. Tell me about your arrival on the scene as a political and cultural commentator in the UK.
Ms. Krakue:
Okay. I originally moved to the UK when I was 14. It was primarily just for an education, and my parents made that very clear. I was studying in the UK, but then every Christmas and summer holiday I spent back home in Ghana. I was effectively spending three months to a year back home. I was strictly here for an education. And then, I finished school and I went to university. I did that, then started working.
At university I studied politics in French, so I was always quite engaged politically. I did debate and I did MUN [Model United Nations] and all the usual stuff that students do. When I graduated from university, I was working a normal job that I really did not like, as with most people when they leave university. I got involved with a student grassroots organization called Turning Point UK, which is actually the UK version of Turning Point US, which is the much bigger franchise.
Obviously, Turning Point UK is much more focused on British issues and spreading conservative values among the youth here, because clearly that’s not a very fashionable thing to do. I had my own show and I used to interview MPs and prominent figures within mainstream politics here in the UK. From there I took on a few more broadcasting gigs. I started writing a bit more. That’s how I found my voice and how most people know of me, through my activism and my work with Turning Point UK.
Mr. Jekielek:
The part that I find most interesting, I’ve been watching some of your interviews both that you’ve done and where you’ve been interviewed, is that UK culture is quite different from U.S. culture, and Ghanaian culture is quite different from UK culture. That gives you this outside view even in the conservative sphere that you’re talking about. So, what’s going on in the West?
Ms. Krakue:
An identity crisis. I had this conversation with my friends that I met because I actually realized that even as a conservative, I was a bit of a minority. I was a minority within a minority if that makes sense.
So, a bit about my background, I grew up in a standard two-parent home. My parents are Christian, Ghanaian, very traditional, very orthodox in their thinking and their values. For me, what was the norm and what I thought was normal conservative values, actually in the West it very much depends on where the Overton window is.
I would have conversations with people about the benefits of a two-parent home and social conservatism, and they would agree so far as it was within the context of the normality where they are. I noticed in the West, for instance, if you say something like, “You probably want a mother and father at home living together with their kids,” the first thing I hear is, “But what if the father is like this? But wh