Is there anything more to Britain’s best known Russian emigre than a copycat apologist for trendy conservativism?
Perhaps it was John Cleese who initiated the trend. Over the last few decades in Britain and America celebrities who launched their career as comics have morphed into social commentators – from court jester to sage all in one go.
Stephen Fry is one such example and, in America, so is Dave Rubin.
The newest model off this production line is the U. K’s answer to Dave Rubin: Konstantin Vadimovich Kisin. On a one-man mission to save Western civilization from itself, Kisin takes his place among a growing mob of conservative internet influencers. These trumpet the fall of the West from their swish city offices and ranches.
Man of the Moment.
A youthful looking 41 -year-old, Kisin – self-described as a `non-binary satirist` -seems to function as a darling of the Western media right now. He co-hosts a much-loved YouTube discussion show, has a book out, makes appearances on Question Time (Britain’s most watched political round table programme) and, in 2018, spoke for the winning side in an Oxford Union debate about `wokeness`.
Kisin was born in the Soviet Union in 1982 and at the age of 11 was sent by his parents to the United Kingdom where he was schooled in the prestigious Clifton College in Bristol. He then studied history at Edinburgh University but left before finishing his degree. He scraped by for a while as a translator but found his niche as a stand-up comedian. Himself as a Russian émigré was his running joke.
His real fame, however, arrived in 2018 when he and the fellow funnyman Francis Foster had the bright idea of replicating Dave Rubin’s discussion show in their own country. Triggernometry was the result. This engaging show invites `controversial` guests onto the show for long form chats.
That same year Kisin’s career defining moment came. Due to perform in order to raise money for a children’s charity at the School of Oriental and African Studies he was handed a ridiculous `behavioral agreement` that he was expected to sign. As this discouraged him from making jokes about pretty much everybody he refused to do so. This was to be Kisin’s answer to Jordan Peterson’s disavowal of the use of `gender neutral pronouns` at his university – the stuff of headlines. Kisin could now bask in a new role as the bete noir of the `woke lefty liberal elite. (Cynics have claimed – according to Wikipedia -that Kisin had signed a similar agreement in former times without complaint).
In 2022 Kisin cemented this reputation with a written polemic entitled An Immigrants Love Letter to the West. (London: Constable, 2022). This now enjoys Sunday Times bestseller status.
Origin Story.
For someone so opposed to identity politics, Kisin makes a lot of his Russian beginnings. His comedy act was centred on this and so is his new incarnation as a doomsday prophet. He frames himself almost as a sort of Joseph Brodsky figure – that is as an individual who has escaped the clutches of Soviet totalitarianism in order to breathe freely in the West.
As theexchangegb.org put it in October 2022 to promote an event with him in:
`..he experienced first-hand the horrors of a socialist paradise gone wrong, has lived in extreme poverty with little access to even the most basic of amenities`.
The fact is that Kisin sallied forth to Great Britain in 1993. That is to say two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he did so with the funding of his father who was a minister in Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle.
This is not something that Kisin tries hard to hide. In his book he tells us:
`They [his parents] couldn’t afford to relocate the entire family, which included my younger sister, because it would’ve been too expensive. Plus my father had recently landed a relatively well paid job in Russia and it was highly unlikely that he’s be able to match that in a foreign country (P-22, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the Westpdf version).
This comes from a man who is fond of announcing that `No one gave me anything` (c.f New Statesman 21/1/23).
Sheep’s Clothing.
Apart from being Russian, Kisin’s other U.S.P is that he is not some kind of rabid reactionary. He is just a cool-headed centrist, you understand, who has seen through `the kool-aid of cultural relativism`. Yet despite this, it is difficult to discern anything in his stance – on, say, race relations, immigration, war and, above all, capitalism that is not a parroting of all the cardinal beliefs of the British right.
Kisin deploys a now familiar technique in his campaign: he erects a straw man and then shadow boxes with it.
Many a lefty household has a novel by Solzhenitsyn on its bookshelf – yet he seems to think we need educating in the evils of Stalin’s rule. Kisin’s opponent is a blue-haired authoritarian bogeyman who cannot tell us what a woman is.
Yet when I read or listen to Kisin I find myself descending an endless ladder of `Yes…buts`. Yes, it is very concerning that people can be arrested just for social media posts, yes it’s bad for society that men and fathers get denigrated, yes comedy is ruined when there are many restrictions on what you can joke about, yes state socialism can be way too centralized…BUT…I am not angry about foreign language brochures in doctor’s waiting rooms, I fail to see how the economic woes of Venezuela mean that socialism is unattainable and I am not worried that all teachers are woke these days.
The problem is that Kisin laces decent points with conservative platitudes but demands that we do not recognise them as such. He wants us to see him as nuanced – as being a centrist -but denies the same courtesy to those he disagrees with.
Kisin’s hero is Thomas Sowell. This is an academic whose blackness lends some credibility to his conservatism much in the same way that Kisin’s Russianness does.
In the Nineties Sowell was decrying the `anointed` which was his term for what are now called the `woke liberal lefty elite`. Here is a man who is outraged to see people giving money to `able bodied` beggars and whose aphorisms are similar to Kisin’s – `I am not tough, reality is tough. I’m just giving you the information`. (c.f Basic Economics, YouTube 2022]
Dubious Claims.
In his video for Prager U called Why I Left Utopia (You Tube August 2024) he slips in the claim that there were no vacuum cleaners in the Soviet Union.
This strange dig can be dispelled with ease. It took me all of five minutes to find the following image of a Soviet hoover. (I have even heard tell that they have a bit of a following and are sold on e-bay).
Likewise, early on in his book he regurgitates an old Republican canard about Bernie Sanders taking his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
The truth of the matter is that Sanders did indeed visit the Soviet Union with his new wife. He did this in 1988, when a lot of diplomatic initiatives were going back and forth between the Iron Curtain.
As Mayor of Burlington, and together with his wife Jane, who was director of the Mayor’s youth office, Sanders aim for the visit was to establish Burlington as the sister city of Yaroslavl in Russia. In this he succeeded (later and English-speaking room would be set up in Yaroslavl and Russian students attended Champlain college). Sanders -as a joke -referred to this as a `strange honeymoon` – but his real honeymoon took place a year later in St Lucia in the Caribbean. (Snopes 27-2-2020, Russia Beyond 8-3-2022).
Demagogue.
Kisin, like Dave Rubin, cut his teeth telling jokes onstage. Comedy is a scene which both requires and nurtures self-confidence and quick wittedness. Kisin has both in abundance. But being cocky and funny does not make one right. There is nothing that he says or writes that could not be gleaned from watching a few Paul Joseph Watson videos or reading a few Mail on Sunday columns. He is a populariser and, like Tony Parsons, has the gift of expressing things in pithy common parlance.
When Kisin moaned that the left-leaning press ignored him the New Statesman promptly sent Will Lloyd to go and interview him. Lloyd concluded that:
`Kisin’s observations on politics and history are relatively banal` (New Statesman, 27/1/23).
Banal it may be, but behind his easy digs and tough talking lies a militarism which is a part of the geopolitical brinkmanship of our times. His attitude to his compatriots – not just their rulers – can be summed up in what he told John Anderson in a YouTube video (29/4/22) `They’re coming for what we have`.
There is a section heading in Kisin’s book which seems as though it were written for Kisin himself. It is:
`Why we need journalists not activists`.
Lead image: rumble.com
