#1002 - Andrew Doyle - Political Violence & The Lunatics of Your Own Side

30:47And there you can kill and maim and be lauded for it. There's a good example of a guy called Murphy, who was the leader of the Shankill Butchers, who if you go and visit his grave, it says, here lies a soldier. This man was a serial killer. He tortured people, cut them up, murdered. He's Jack the Ripper. It's like saying, here lies a soldier on Jack the Ripper's grave, although we don't know who Jack the Ripper was. You get my point. A psychopath can, and he was lauded by that community. They thought he was a hero, right? That's what this movement does. It allows the worst in society, the most, the bullies, the bullies to do whatever they want and be praised for it, right?

31:25So there's that. There's also, I have no doubt, many people within the movement who genuinely believe it, who genuinely think that what they're fighting for is compassion and justice and equality, although they call it equity. which is the opposite of equality. And a lot of the time, I think it's just people who've been gulled. People who've been gulled into believing the redefinitions of words. I mean, look, in the book, I quote two people saying the same thing. I quote the former, sorry, I quote the former Conservative Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May, and a left-wing actor and comedian called Cathy Burke.

32:07They couldn't be further apart politically. they both say the same thing. All that wokeness means is being nice to people and not being racist. Therefore, we're woke. Theresa May said in her book, she is woke and proud. But that's not what woke means. But they've been gulled into thinking that that's all it means. If you could sit down with Kathy Burke and Theresa May and say, okay, so do you support the mutilation and sterilization of gay youths? Do you support the censorship of free speech? Do you support the erosion of women's rights and the taking away of their spaces. Do you support any of this?

32:37Do you support a hyper-racialized society where people are judged first and foremost for their skin color? Do you believe any of that? They would say no, they would be horrified. But when they say we're woke, that's what they're saying they believe. What I'm saying is the culture... The Martin Bailey type thing. It's the Martin Bailey, exactly. The culture has always been about language and who gets to define the meaning of terms. And unfortunately, when you do that, when you play around with language, when you play language games, it means a lot of people end up supporting things that are antithetical to their essential belief system.

33:06That's what's happened there. I think Kathy Burke and Theresa May are anti-woke, but they call themselves woke because they don't know what woke means. And they certainly don't understand what the activists mean. You know this. They say they're liberal, they're anti-liberal. They say they're progressive, they are regressive. They say they're anti-racist, but they went to rehabilitate racism for a new generation. They say they believe in equality, but they don't. They believe in equity, which is very, very different. They say they believe in inclusion, but they actually believe in exclusion of anyone with a different point of view.

33:37It's pretty much across the board. Whatever language they use is almost always the exact opposite of what they're intending to achieve. And so you have this odd concatenation of the scary bully, sociopath, psychopath, demon types who just want to beat the world up and be applauded for it. And you also have the fellow travelers who believe that the demons are good because they're wearing a nice fancy cape. I think that's what it is. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now.

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34:49Right now, you can get up to$50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Yeah, I think most of the culture wars, because there's so few sort of original thinkers and so few people who have the agency to be able to make this sort of stuff happen. Most people are seduced by a message that feels good. Feels like the right thing to do. I don't think that that many people actually have the capacity for evil.

35:31I have the capacity... I think everyone has the capacity for evil. Okay, but most people don't have the conscience to be able to tolerate their own evil. Sure. I would say, yes, they have the capacity to do it, but in order to be able to reach that stage. But my point being that most of the worst acts in human history, I think, have been committed by people believing that they were doing good. I'm sure you're right. Yeah. If you were to, you know, a young person today who cared about, you know, what's happening to, or cared about justice, and you saw a group calling itself Antifa, anti-fascist, when you say, that's great, I'm anti-fascist, I hate fascists.

36:09Although I have to say, it's good branding, but you know, like Black Lives Matter, no one disagrees with that statement. And therefore, if you were to disagree with anything the organization said, people would say, oh, you're saying Black Lives don't matter. Of course, It's a rhetorical trick. Antifa is a very good idea. But of course, Antifa is a concept. Anti-fascism is an old, old concept. It's just been appropriated. I mean, in the way that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, no one's going to say it's actually democratic just because they call themselves democratic, right? I don't think.

36:37That rule that you have around university subjects, that anything that's got the word science in it tends not to be a science. Exactly. There we go. There we go. The lady doth protest. Well, that's it. So, you know, the thing about Antifa is that if you read, there's a book by Mark Bray, who was a supporter of Antifa and antifascism, who has written a book, very well written book, outlining the background to the history of antifascism, right, right back to Cable Street and beyond, right up until today with the Antifa movement. Where he singularly fails is he doesn't understand that the current Antifa movement has no connection whatsoever to those who stood up to the actual fascists at the Battle of Cable Street and actual fascists during the war.

37:21These are people who are taking on the mantle of something that does not connect them to it. So what can you say about, I mean, firstly, they don't know what fascism means, right? So what they are taking, but what we can say about fascism, there's lots of disagreements about definitions, right? The one thing we can say with utter certainty is every fascistic regime in history has shared one quality, which is the violent suppression of opposition. That's in unequivocal. And that is the very same quality that Antifa wholeheartedly support. And that would be aligned with if there is a speaker on campus who is saying something that you write.

37:58And that's not to say that everyone who believes that you should punch a speaker is a fascist. But what it is saying is that they are embracing wholeheartedly a key fascist principle. Have there been many or any instances that you're aware of, of right of center student supporters barricading the doors to stop people from hearing a Hassan Piker lecture or whatever? I fear it might be coming, but I haven't seen it yet. Right. Okay. So, I mean, this is sort of always been one of the big concerns that it does feel at least a little bit, and I'm hesitant of personifying political movements too much, especially not with school playground dynamics.

38:48I'm going to try and see if I can get through this in one piece. it feels a little bit to me like the right has always been seen as sort of the big bully. They're the ones who have the muscle. They've got guns. We know there's a history of them using them. They tend to sort of just be more militant or militaristic, like in their presentation, in the composition of the members of this group. And you kind of just sort of expect it from them a little bit. And with that in mind, there's always been a little bit of, well yeah sure you know the left are squawking and making these not the left actually like progressives i think the left the left now at least as far as i can see uh the kyle kalinskis of the world the sort of populist left are very much trying to distance themselves trying to bifurcate off whatever it is the lunatics of your own side versus the blah blah blah yeah um how good of a job they're doing with that i'm not sure but still like it the right has always been big bully the left has always been a little bit like well what are you gonna do the fucking trans guy like the trans guy is the one that you worry oh he's gonna come up and punch you in the street no it's the hairy biker man that's sort of asymmetry in terms of like kinetic power and it seems to me this is like old hat now from five years ago when we would have first started speaking that the real concern was if you light sufficient fires underneath the arses of the people of the big bully yeah as the younger brother right if the younger brother keeps on sort of yeah yeah over and over and you go if you do that a few too many times the retaliation in response like because what you're asking for is with restraint on one side where there is a lack of restraint on another yeah and this is because of a sort of a history of expectation and i certainly i have to assume as well that people on the right know that this is the case as well, that they're almost expected that this is the kind of response that they're going to have, that it is going to be a militaristic sort of response in that way.

40:51Now, I might be totally wrong. I'm totally open to somebody saying, no, there is just as much political violence coming from the right or on the right, or there's a bigger threat that is right of center or whatever it might be. Maybe that's the case. Maybe it's not. But at least in terms of how I'm seeing it, that personification seems to be true, that there's been more, there has been a type of leeway given to the left. Maybe some of it's top down because it's more toxically empathetic. Like it's cooler, it's currently in vogue, etc. It just plays better, right? It does play better in sort of modern, like secular meritocratic equality culture.

41:25Like it does, at least on the surface it does, even if it doesn't deliver the promises that it keeps making. The concern is if you keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing, what's the response? Well, I have no doubt you're right. I mean, a lot of right-wingers have guns, don't they? a lot of right-wingers, you know, as you say, it is like the big brother phenomenon. The truth is that, well, firstly, I think the caveat should be that political violence is extremely rare. So therefore, looking at statistics of which side is committed to more acts of violence is always going to be tricky. Because, I mean, there was a, I saw a post about the degree of far right versus far left violence in America through a certain period of time.

42:10And the right vastly was overrepresented within that. Glad I caveated what I said. Yes. But on the other hand, there was an article in Reason magazine analyzing the figures and showing that if you just extend the parameters by a year, it flips, or at least the difference dissipates entirely. You bring it up to the present day. Because political violence is so rare. Right. Okay. You're talking with such tiny numbers that a couple of incidents can flip it. Yeah, exactly. It's like those studies that talk about the prevalence of far-right violence against Islamist violence in America that tend to start after 2001.

42:43Because if you go back a year, you suddenly get an extra 3 ,000 deaths on the other side. Do you know what I mean? So it's a rare thing. So what happened the other day in Utah is a rare, rare thing. And you shouldn't say that that is reflective of a political affiliation, right? my point was that those extremes are becoming more tolerated what you can clearly see is a greater toleration for that kind of thing in leftist discourse you've also of course seen the riots you know in 2020 uh a lot of the there were a lot of peaceful protests by the way but a lot of them flipped over into riots that actually ended up with people being killed okay now uh it is true and observably true that we're not seeing that on the right in that way there isn't that tendency i I suppose.

43:30But as you say, if they ever did, we would be in a very bad situation. Remember how long Charlottesville was reverberated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I always remember thinking, like, wow, this has really got staying power. This must be a big part of American history. Yeah. Can I ask a question? No. Yes. Can I go to the toilet? Yeah, absolutely. Because you've been drinking all of my tasty carbonated hydrating beverages. I've got three drinks. Yeah. And my bladder has a limited capacity. This is the sort of, you came to my house first. Yes. It was cozy, but wholly under hydrated. Yes. And now. This doesn't need to be part of the podcast.

44:14Like, you don't need to film me doing it. Unless you're all about the naturalism. I am. Get in there. Let's go then. I'm following. Come with me. I've got the Zoom lens. All right. Don't need it.

44:27oh of course i think i wasn't getting uncomfortable with the questioning okay all righty uh yeah i said um are people concerned about the fucking greater rebound off the wall i mean what would happen if what would happen if the right rioted in the way that the left did in 2020 i mean i think it would be absolutely terrifying certainly better armed yeah it would be it would be bad i mean that's that's the point isn't it that's why i talk about getting your own house in order you know that's why i think mainstream leftist commentators should stop misusing language and stop branding everyone they disagree with as fascist and because you know it does if you genuinely thought there were fascists on the rise and that fascism was the dominant force you would have a responsibility to oppose it.

45:18And I think that's what a lot of people are feeling like because they've bought into the rhetoric, they've bought into the language. Well, again, this is people doing good, thinking they're doing good. Look, you're straight back on the fluids. Am I not allowed to drink the fluids? Of course you are. No, no, no. I love it. I love it. Ryan was like, hey, do you want another? Should we get him another water? I'm like, mate, he's had enough. You know what I mean? You've had enough. It's just my bladder that I'm worried about. That's fine. Don't worry about it. So, you know, we've been talking between me and you and a bunch of our friends in the UK, We've been talking about this stuff for quite a while now.

45:46I think the most conversation me and you had was 2018, 2019, and it's been this sort of consistent theme. I used to have a little bit that I said to my friends that were internet marketers, which was some of the smartest people of our generation have had their time taken up working out how to make people click on ads. Which I think is true. I also fear that some of the smartest people of our generation have had their time taken up working out whether a man is a man and a woman is a woman. And I do wonder about the loss of human progress and productivity. I mean, certainly not from me or you, we weren't going to do anything anyway.

46:23But from people smarter than me or you, this, the meme and the counter meme and the counter counter meme and the sort of subsequent reverberations. Yeah. That the aftershock that's happened from, um, this is something that I think is a righteous cause. That's illogical. You shouldn't be thinking about it. That's bigoted. You don't understand the problem. That's misaligned. You don't actually realize what it is that you're fighting for. Like, is this weird mimetic fucking cultural catnip that people seem to be unable to put down. And the main reason that I hope that this stuff fucks off is so that we can actually talk about other ideas i agree wholeheartedly uh it is a waste of time at the same time it's essential insofar as if you ignore it it doesn't just go away the the falsehood wins it's actually there's actually pretty much nothing more important than the difference between truth and fiction and i would say it is important when you have a movement that comes along that pretends to be progressive and is sterilizing young people for no reason other than ideology, destroying women's rights, destroying gay rights, rehabilitating racism.

47:40Actually, those are really important things. And the idea of censorship and, you know, there's nothing more important than resisting authoritarianism because it's about what kind of society you want to live in. So, you know, but I take your point. I mean, look, my background is writing musicals and drama and comedy and i've been dragged into this for this war i was dragged into this like pacino says in godfather 3 you know completely against my will um but i don't regret it or think it wasn't worthwhile but i think all the books i've written about this i would have much rather written books about other things about literature or you know create other go back to writing scripts and comedy one yeah which is okay i want to do uh take a slightly different tack than we've had in previous conversations.

48:24Can you give me, first off, the steel man case, the strongest case, fairest case that you can for what the progressive movement, what the woke movement either was or is trying to achieve at the moment? Society has made great progress since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. And there are laws to protect people from discrimination due to protected characteristics, for instance, race, sex, sexual orientation. And yet racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. does still linger in society. The question is why? And this is the key question of critical race theory, which obviously, as you know, started as a legal discipline.

49:06We have all these laws in place. We have a society where we have progressed sufficiently to understand that the consensus is that racism is wrong. Why does it still exist? And it still exists. I'm speaking as a critical race theorist here. It still exists because society is organized around the dominance of white people for the benefit of white people. And therefore, there are power structures that are embedded within society that we cannot necessarily easily see. And therefore, it is up to people like me, my voice as a critical race theorist, to study these various degrees. You need queer theorists.

49:39You need people like Robin DiAngelo studying whiteness so that we have... Is this the steel man? Yeah. Is this the strongest? This is their argument. But is this the strongest way that you could put forward that case on their behalf? Like what are they trying to achieve if you strip away the… But that's what they say. They say that they are detecting and resisting and interrupting, which is the phrase they use, these power structures that are embedded, so deeply embedded in society that we can no longer see them. This is why Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility makes the case that racism today is in a way worse than Jim Crow, because Jim Crow was an overt racist system that you could see.

50:18The current racist system is invisible, except for white women like her who can see it. Right. Now, look, I'm obviously mocking at the same time, but it is their case. Right. So that is and. You know, I don't disagree with them that racism still lingers and needs to be tackled. Right. So that is why I believe that is the steel man case, because I do agree on that point. But I don't think detecting racism where it doesn't exist, detecting it where the evidence quite clearly shows it doesn't exist. In fact, the opposite is true. That's not helpful. That's not the way you tackle racism. You tackle racism in the liberal way.

50:52which, and I know that's difficult in America because Americans don't know what liberal means. They think it means left wing. You tackle it in the liberal way. You identify it as and when it occurs and engage, right? That's, I mean, isn't that a fair way to steel man the case? I'm not convinced it's the strongest. I think it's maybe the most accurate of how they would put it forward themselves. Sure, but you're asking me to therefore defend their case better than they have. Yes. Well, it's not a defensible case. So all I can do is replicate what they say. Understood. Second idea here. Let's say that you were the person in charge of coordinating left of center political culture.

51:36And that you could lay out some battle plans in order to make the future of left contribution to politics, culture, governance, all that stuff better. Yes. What would you advise people to do? What should they be focusing on? What should they be jettisoning? You would jettison woke politics because wokeness is not authentically left-wing because to be authentically left-wing as the entire history of left-wing writing and thought tells us is to be interested in class inequality, economic inequality. And they have completely jettisoned that. They have substituted money for identity, group identity.

52:18And that's where the problem starts. That's where the problem started, what you call the cultural turn of Marxism. What genuinely, authentically left-wing people want to do, I mean, they recognize that pronouns and multiple gender identity, this is a bourgeois luxury. This is a middle-class luxury. The woke movement, calling itself left-wing, created council culture. The only people who were able to resist cancel culture were the uncancellable billionaires millionaires uh it also arranged a system whereby uh workers working class people were told that they were all racist whether they believed it or not and they had to undertake unconscious bias sessions uh retraining reprogramming and if they objected uh they would probably be fired or disciplined and the woke would side with the multi-billion dollar corporations over the workers any any movement that arranges things so that only the super rich get to say what they think cannot be said to be authentically left-wing now i understand why i get criticism for saying that because people say oh you're saying wokeness isn't on isn't left i understand that its origins are in the left i completely get that uh in philosophically speaking i understand but it's a a perversion of marxism it's a perversion of those original ideas um so if i were a left-wing campaign a socialist campaigner I would say, let's get back to the concept of the means of production, of what socialist writers have said for generations, and not waste our time with the politics of group identity, which ultimately, above all, attacks the working class.

53:55On that, sounds an awful lot like Gary Stevenson. It sounds an awful lot like the kind of lines that he's talking on. I don't know who Gary Stevenson is. Gary's economics. Ah, well, that's why, because I'm hopelessly inadequate when it comes to economics. You know Gary's economics? No. You don't know Gary's economics? Oh, okay. I can see a shock in your eyes. He is, as far as I can see, the quickest growing left of center commentator in the UK. Very nice. By a distance. Okay. Is he online? Is that the... Yeah, he's on YouTube a lot. um he's got an honorary doctorate from from uh you you are you are cs or whatever it's called recently wherever louise perry went and uh he debated daniel priestly and he talks a lot about economic inequality lots and lots and lots well i apologize to gary for not knowing i think that i highly advise that you sort of track him yeah i think he's very very worth sort of putting a gps tracker on because um does it tally with what i'm saying yeah 100 i haven't i mean he's certainly left of center uh massively so i'm i'm sure he's talked about it at some point but i really don't hear him talking about race about group identity about certainly not about sexual orientation or gender you know any of this stuff yeah um but he is hard in the paint on wealth tax millionaires and billionaires working people how cost of living crisis housing like really yeah well that's great I mean, that's not to say that the super rich can't be left wing.

55:26I mean, take someone like Tony Benn. I think he was aristocratic virtually. And he was a major left wing voice. But what I'm saying is that the activists are predominantly overwhelmingly upper middle class fighting for their own interests. Right. I mean, we see this again and again. Net zero, which is going to affect the poorest people. Worst of all, it's why the posher people. Whenever you see one of these activists throwing orange paint over a work of art and you hear them talk, they sound like a caricature. They sound like someone from a P.G. Woodhouse novel. And it's so strange here. It's like I've dressed up and made it a satirical character and I'm doing it.

56:05You know, they have names like what was the name of Hugo Ponsford was one of the names of the Colston. That's a joke. That's a joke. But it's true. um so you know when when a movement is so dominated by the upper middle classes by the by the privileged and they're lecturing you about privilege i mean for a start it's funny and it opens itself up to satire it does sound like a sketch that you would have written in your career right i mean that's that's why people saying we're the underdogs when every major billion dollar corporation is behind you when meghan markle and the and an actual prince is behind you you know when when academia is behind you when the when the when the government is behind you this is you're not oppressed like these people are the establishment um but what a ruse you can be privileged rich establishment still call yourself the underdog and still have a cause isn't that kind of interesting like so these are not genuine socialists are they they're not relinquishing their power and we saw the same with the brexit you know all of a sudden you know Brexit.

57:09It was the same thing. You know, we had people claiming to be on the left, cheerleading for an international trading bloc that has capitalism baked into the heart of its constitution. That is run predominantly by right-wing politicians, Thatcherites, right? By, you know, by people like Juncker and, you know, Donald Tusk. I mean, what's going, this is not, why are you cheerleading for that person? I thought you were left-wing, weren't you? because it was never about the eu like the eu has always left-wingers have always opposed the eu you know i think the labor manifesto early 80s 82 explicitly said we're coming out of the eec the like tony ben jeremy corbyn who's been campaigning to get out for years and then pretended he didn't as if he voted to remain there's no chance you know left left-wingers understood and always understood that the e was a fundamentally right-wing body how does uh environmentalism fold into the woke movement?

58:04Well, because I think what happens with the woke movement is that because it's an ideology, it's an ill thought through ideology, and it's more about displaying fealty to a set of causes that you don't need to know all that much about. If this is why, if you were someone I didn't know, and you said a woke thing in support of, say, Black Lives Matter or Queers for Palestine or something else, I would be able to tell you your opinions on every single subject under the sun. I've never been proven wrong on that, by the way. You know, you don't get that, that those disagreements you don't get like, it's a set of rules.

58:38It's a script. And that's why Greta Thunberg can pivot from environmental activism into pro-Palestine activism. It's easy for her. Just put on that, what's it called? A kefir? No, that's the drink, isn't it? I'd like that. It's a great drink. I've only recently discovered it. It's wonderful. Yeah. The best way to get, uh, what is it? What's that stuff? Um, uh, like, uh, cultured, like probiotic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good for you. I mean, I don't know what it's doing in there. It's better than sauerkraut, which was the other alternative. Isn't that just cabbage? But it's, yeah, it's pickled. I don't want that.

59:13I don't want that. You don't want to be swigging that in the morning. I want yogurt. I want, I want a nice tasty yogurt that says that it's good for me. It has the illusion of it's creamy, isn't it? Yeah. But it's not really that bad for you. And this is what she's been wearing. She's been wearing... Dousing herself. Yogurt. Kaffir. All over herself. Personally, I would support Greta Thunberg if she came out doused in kaffir. I would absolutely support her. I think she needs to be more performative and theatrical. Absolutely. Although I liked her taking a little flotilla to the border. Rory Sutherland was sat there a couple of months ago, and he was explaining to me just this wonderful, in his Rory way, wonderful idea that people look at a guy in a helicopter and think that that's somebody who's really rich.

59:56But they don't understand that that is a person who, yes, is cash rich, but is evidently time poor because he needs to get somewhere fast. He said, what you really need is somebody who is using a dirigible because that shows that they are both cash rich and time rich because the pace that they're going to get anywhere in a hot air blimp or a hot air balloon would be even richer because you don't even get to choose where you go. It's like, where are you going to go? Wherever the wind takes me. Now that is real wealth. Right. Time rich, so time rich that I might not even arrive. What was Greta Thunberg's vehicle?

1:00:36Flotilla. It was a flotilla, wasn't it? Yeah. It wasn't a speedboat. Exactly. So that actually is a type of privilege. Yeah, and she was Instagramming the hell out of it and she was there with the Onion Knight from Game of Thrones. He was there. You know, the actor who plays the Onion Knight, he was on the same boat. So it was a bit of a celebrity hangout. He was playing a Geordie in Game of Thrones. Was he? He had a bit of a Geordie accent. Did he? Yeah, which is dangerous. I can't remember. Suspicious of him, Everson. You should. I mean, it's a dodgy place, Newcastle. Environmentalism. Well, you know, it's just one of the, I mean, it's one of those, look, hey, you know, maybe environmentalists have a case, right?

1:01:13My point is, it actually doesn't matter about the details of the belief. it's one of the approved beliefs within the intersectional uh you know it's it's the it's the hydra the woke hydra if you imagine a beast with many heads there's there's a queer theory head genderist head there's a race blm head there's an environmental head you know that and they're all connected to the same intersectional beast if you imagine this creature you know and if you lop off a head the head grows back i think in the original myth that two heads. So one, yeah. Let's not take the analogy too far. But, uh, but what I would say is, yeah, I mean, that's the case.

1:01:49I mean, I mistrust any ideology. I mistrust anyone who doesn't think for themselves on individual issues, but will consult a chart or a book or a set of rules because it means you're not really thinking for yourself. It's the hardest, right? Someone explain this to me. Someone who knows a lot more about this than me is that there's a thing called the cognitive miser model and that we instinctively and evolutionarily, uh, always opt for the easiest solution or the thing that's easier to understand. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there might, look, that's secondhand. But that makes sense, doesn't it?

1:02:21Because thinking is one of the hardest things. It's so hard to, you know, when you read something and you think, oh, I'd...

1:02:55that's making me think in a different way. are, so I'm scared to do so. But that's an example. A young person who knows nothing about the world, because none of us do when we're 18, telling an academic who studied history that Queen Elizabeth I was trans, without a shred of evidence, and a slight pushback will throw the whole world into some sort of tailspin. The correction mechanism isn't there anymore. What is... Queen Elizabeth I was not trans, by the way. Okay, do you know that for sure? Okay, you don't know how she identifies. Well, I can tell you it wasn't they then pronouns. A quick aside, using the internet without a VPN today is like leaving your front door wide open and hoping that no one walks in.

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1:04:02And right now you can get four extra months of Surfshark for free by going to the link in the description below or heading to surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's surfshark.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I am interested in what's happening with the gays. are you coming over to our side not yet okay no well just no although the internet has had its rumors for a while this is a funny one so uh spotify miss captioned a sentence that i said on rogan a year and a half ago and i said um so i mean my housemate sometimes on an afternoon we watch uh videos of motocross uh what about and it's it captioned it must use ai and try to do it in context.

1:04:48And housemate's a very British term. Do people not use that in America? It seems not. Like roommate would be the equivalent. Housemate, no. So it transcribed it as husband. It said, me and my husband watch motocross on a Saturday afternoon. And I got the number of screenshots that went around of, see, I knew he was always, knew he was batting for the other side. Here it is, here's an irrefutable proof. I'm like, first off, if it was irrefutable proof. I haven't exactly been hiding it very well by saying it on the biggest podcast in the world. Secondly, I was watching motocross. That's the least gay thing that we can think of.

1:05:23Anyway, what's happening with woke homophobia and the gays? Well, as you know, there's a chapter in my book entitled Woke Homophobia. So thank you for teeing that up. What I would say is what's happening is that the genderist movement has been embraced among a lot of gay people because they bought into this idea that there is such a thing as the LGBTQIA plus community. The problem with that is after the first three letters, you have people whose ideology is antagonistic to gay rights. It's the opposite. It's like trying to shoehorn two opposing phenomena into the one thing. The premise of gay rights has always been that there are a minority in any given population who are innately attracted to their own sex.

1:06:09if you come along and say biological sex isn't a thing and that if you are excluding from your dating pool people of your own uh people of the opposite sex who happen to identify into your sex uh then you are in fact a bigot that is i mean let me give you an example grinder i don't know if you're familiar with grinder not this is a test not intimately yeah well me and my husband your husband knows exactly exactly uh well you know this is a gay hookup app uh you're not allowed to filter out women who identify as men on that app even though the people on the app are there for sex um i'm not on the app by the way i should just emphasize that i imagine i imagine grinder to me seems like sort of the german engineering of the dating apps it there's no there can't be much messing about on there.

1:07:04No, of course not. Right, but this seems to really get in the way. This seems antithetical to the philosophy, the underlying principle of Grindr. Quite. Again, I need to reiterate that I'm not intimately familiar with this. The lady doth protest. Whatever, all right. No, no, of course. Okay. Yeah, you're right. On Grindr's website, it actually says, we are not allowing you, you can filter for all sorts of preferences, height, weight, whatever, age. We're not going to allow you to filter out women who identify as men because that's bigoted that makes you a bigot it says it in black and white what that is is a gay hookup site shaming gay men for being gay because sexuality is discriminatory if men want to sleep with men it's not because they're bigots it's because they're gay now this shouldn't have to be spelled out again it comes back to that point why are we spending our time explaining the obvious so what you have is the genderist movement is an anti-gay movement quite fundamentally, not just because it shames lesbians for not being attracted to people with penises, not because it shames gay men for not being attracted to people with vaginas, although that's a big part of it.

1:08:09There's also the fact that it seeks the mutilation, sterilization and castration of gay youth, which I think is a pretty extreme anti-gay position. You saw LGB Alliance, which is the only gay rights organization of any worth in the UK, had a conference last year where a group of genderist activists released cockroaches and insects and locusts, a plague, into the auditorium. Right. That is the sort of thing neo-Nazis would have done, isn't it? Back in the day, had a gay conference, a gay rights conference. It is by definition an anti-gay movement, and that can't be emphasized enough. And this is why a lot of gay people hate the Progress Pride flag and say it doesn't represent them.

1:08:54When they see that Progress Pride flag, they see it as a homophobic flag, a flag that is against their interests. And that's why it's not acceptable for the mayor of London, for instance, to festoon the city with a flag that basically says gay people aren't welcome here, just because he doesn't understand the implications of how divisive that flag is. Now, this is something that's not understood in America in particular. Support for gay marriage is going down. You see a lot of people blaming gay people for the excesses of woke genderists who want to twerk in front of three-year-olds or have sexualized drag queen performances for kids.

1:09:29But that is not the gay rights people. Those are the people who are working against gay rights quite explicitly. So it's weird to blame the victims of this for perpetrating it. It's a complete misunderstanding of the situation. And it's very dangerous. That's why gay people really have to overtly and vocally reject the forced teaming with the qia plus stuff what there isn't a massive amount in common there's nothing in common the idea of sexual sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity gender identity is a uh an esoteric pseudo-religious belief system which revolves around the idea of a soul a mismatch between soul and body sexual orientation is who you're attracted to the two have actually nothing in common it's like force teaming vegans with carnivores it doesn't make sense so that's why more and more people are rejecting it and and that message i think has to be screamed loud and clear because a lot of people particularly on the right have come to the view that it's all the same thing and part of the problem is that a lot of gay people have again been gold hoodwinked into but surely i mean look As far as I'm aware From my exclusively outside of the tent position Yes When it comes to the Meat and potatoes Of what's going on With the gay community The genitals are a really big part Of that Like that's like a That's you know like a core Tenant of what's going on there Certainly an aspect Yeah yeah This needs to come into, you made the point earlier on as sort of a luxury beliefs type position, right?

1:11:08That people that live in gated communities can say defund the police because they're not the ones that have to deal with inner city crime, et cetera. Seems to me rather short-sighted if people in the G's and the L's and the B's that the G's and the L's I think are a little suspicious of anyway, but that's a separate. Some are. Yeah. They are going to get sort of shot in the foot, or at least shot in the algorithm on Grindr at some point by permitting this sort of encroachment, territory encroachment thing, this conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity, with whatever the sort of next thing is.

1:11:52And that is, given how important the genitals are, that is a price that's you're really putting your money where your mouth is with that is no one realized that that's like a potential well they have because you know your sexual orientation doesn't lie you know what you find attractive and if you if your ideology puts you in a position where you're saying i'm going to have sex with someone i do not desire just to make my cause i I mean, wow, that's tough. That's not an easy thing to do. So, you know, you have a situation now where lesbians in Australia, it's illegal for them to gather without men present who want to be there, men who identify as women, because it's considered discriminatory to exclude those individuals.

1:12:39That is an anti-gay law, quite palpably. You have lesbian dating sites are now replete with people with penises and beards. but of course lesbians i didn't realize i was a lesbian i have been my whole life there you are yeah there you are see see how easy it is you see and and you think it's a joke but you could go on a lesbian dating app and this is actually more sinister something else has happened where on grinder for instance because there's a lot of young women on there who have been told the lie that if they have surgery and take hormones gay men will find them attractive they don't and there are now straight men going on grinder to pick up women who think they're men because it's an easy because it's an easy target right now that's really now look that's really exploitative isn't it because it's jesus i know these are vulnerable people by the way these are people who genuinely think they've changed sex oh my god and they haven't okay and you see the those awful leaked screenshots of people sort of complaining like why does no one find me attractive you know i'm trying to pick up men why does that because you're a woman and you're going to gay bars i had a message from a friend who was in a sex club in berlin saying there's there's like women in here who've had their breasts removed who think they're men and you know i hate to put it in the corner i hate to put it crudely it's a boner killer like no no one in that no one in that sex club wants to have sex anymore because they don't find women attractive it's not that they hate women or they must same reason for lesbian lesbians references lesbians don't they're not misandrous because they don't want to sleep with someone with a penis it's they're lesbians this shouldn't be it's not rocket science and so this is a you know this kind of shaming of gay people for being gay isn't that weird that that's now coming from people who think they're on the left and progressive well that was a you know it still sticks in my mind i think it might be in our first ever episode where you told me about this story of a uh the father of a young boy who was pretty effeminate and had decided that he was a girl and that had been affirmed, I don't think chemically yet, but he was going to begin to identify as this girl.

1:14:49And they'd asked the father sort of how he felt about it. And he said something to the effect of, I'm just so glad that I don't need to see my little boy mincing around the garden anymore. Yeah, it was in a documentary called Trans Kids Who Knows Best. I think it was Channel 4. Sort of rehabilitated homophobia thing. The insiders and whistleblowers at the Tavistock Pediatric Gender Clinic said that homophobia was endemic among parents and even among some members of staff, some clinicians. What do you think that says about human nature, that parents are somehow more accepting of their son or daughter identifying as a different gender than they are of their son or daughter being attracted to people of the same sex?

1:15:33Well, two things. I would say it's the mentality of the Iranian regime. Because of course in Iran, they'll kill you for being gay, but they'll fund you if you want to get a sex change so that you're no longer gay. They would rather have the facsimile of heterosexuality rather than homosexuality, right? It's rampant anti-gay homophobia, isn't it? It's extreme, but I'm not surprised by it. I think, I tell you why. I mean, of all the kind of discriminatory ideas, homophobia, but I kind of get the most. And the reason for that is the sex act is so powerful. It's so, it's so potent and there is a disgust response with sexual activity that you don't, that you don't like.

1:16:18Right. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that you are, you hate people for their different inclinations, but you yourself have a disgust response. Right. So I remember seeing a video of Richard Dawkins looking at gay pornography of two elderly men having sex. And he's saying, oh, no, I don't like that, etc. But that doesn't mean he hates gay men who want to have sex who are in their 80s or whatever. It's just, and good on them if they're still doing it in their 80s, by the way. But he's saying, his response is disgust. Now, that's why I think homophobia will never go away, because I think it's an instinctive response for a lot of people.

1:16:55And I think a lot of parents... I don't want that. Therefore, it makes me feel like this. It's a question there. Is that homophobia? Well, the word is massively misused. I don't like it really, because the word implies something pathological, doesn't it? Like you have a fear. Conscious prejudice. Yeah. I don't think it, in a lot of cases, it's just. Like saying I'm like cockroach-a-phobic. Right. Right. Not to make the comparison. But then, on the other hand, words are fluid. The phrase arachnophobia is, you know, you're scared of spiders. Sometimes it's a disgust response to spiders. It's a word that, you know, we shouldn't be too literal-minded and say anything with a phobia must mean fear.

1:17:32you know because words evolve and all the rest of it um but yeah there's something about yeah the word is unsatisfactory because for instance some people who just for instance don't agree with gay marriage are branded as homophobic well that's not fear or hatred often it's just religious conviction a different thing uh often it comes from a good place right so you know a lot of my family probably are against that i don't think they're evil bigots um so i would say coming back to that discussed response, because I think that is there, because I think there is a resistance to the fact that a minority of humankind will always be attracted to their own sex.

1:18:16Same in the animal kingdom, of course. That the inability to accept that reality creates hostility. And in that sense, that kind of anti-gay, fierce anti-gay sentiment that wants to wipe out an element of reality, I don't mean genocidally. I mean, just pretend it doesn't exist. That's similar to the woke mentality. A denial of reality because it makes you uncomfortable. But I think it's always going to be there. And I suspect that is what's going on. I mean, that's why so many parents were observed to be, to have a problem with the idea of a gay kid at the Tavistock. That's why members of staff at the Tavistock had that dark joke where they would say, soon there will be no gay people left.

1:18:57That was a joke among the staff. Because they knew what they were doing. They knew that all these boys that were suddenly turning up were camp gay boys. They were going to grow up gay. A lot of the girls just butch and would probably grow up to be gay themselves. Or not. Or maybe not, right? But we do know from Hannah Barnes' book on the subject that between 80 % and 90 % of the adolescents referred to the Tavistock were same-sex attracted. So that's a hell of a lot. This feels like a gay conversion clinic on the NHS, borrowing the playbook of Iran on the NHS. You may as well get some mullah from Tehran to run the NHS.

1:19:36What the hell's going on? I want to talk about sort of what's happening in the UK specifically with... Well, this is a question for you. Is the new woke campaign in the UK about immigrants now? Is that the new tip of the spear for this sort of stuff? Or how do you think it slots into your existing worldview of this kind of... It's one of the many ideas, the idea that refugees can do no harm, that immigrants are saintly, are sanctified. And one of the things that the woke does is it sets up an oppression hierarchy and it makes excuses for... I mean, it doesn't know what to do, does it, with Islamist terrorism, for instance, because Islam is so high on their oppression hierarchy.

1:20:22It doesn't really know how to handle that, does it? It doesn't handle it particularly well. It doesn't recognize that there's a problem. And it certainly doesn't recognize a problem when there's a conflict of their own hierarchy. You know, when, for instance, Trevor Phillips' research for Channel 4 found that a majority of UK Muslims, not extremists, Muslims, felt that homosexuality ought to be illegal. I think it was 52%. Well, that's difficult for them, isn't it? Because they're pro-Islam and can't criticize Islam, but they're also pro-gay. what do you do you set up queers for palestine you know it's that kind of cognitive dissonance absolutely insane um the immigration issue of course is a very emotive one and it's difficult therefore to have these conversations about it um there is a sense in which there is a conviction uh among some woke activists that the idea of borders is not necessary uh there's also a kind of utopian belief that everyone around the world wants the same thing.

1:21:20Every culture wants freedom. Every culture wants democracy. Every culture is innately good. But there are some cultures that are worse than others. There are some cultures that believe that young girls should be mutilated, genitally mutilated for their own good. There are some cultures that believe women are less important than men. There are some cultures that believe that gay people ought to be killed. I have no qualms whatsoever about saying that that is a morally inferior culture to one that says girls shouldn't be mutilated, for instance. And I think there's been a real problem and misunderstanding of liberalism.

1:21:58I talk about liberalism in my book a lot, because a lot of people blame liberals for this, for the mess that we're in. And a lot of people will say that the liberal view is that you can kind of airdrop in anyone from any culture to any other culture, and they all want freedom, and they all want democracy. That's not what liberals believe. That's what you would call, I suppose, liberal universalism. The idea that you don't need borders, you don't need the nation state. Actually, what liberalism is about, and liberalism can only come about, is if it is cultivated over many years, over many generations.

1:22:32It's hard work sustaining a liberal society. It requires the rule of law. It requires the development of a social contract, of agreed behavior. It requires tradition. It requires critical thinking. It requires those parameters that are developed not through authoritarian means, but through consensus over a long, long time. And that's why when you demolish all of that, you demolish liberalism. It isn't right to say that the grooming gang scandal was because of liberals, because they were too nice and tolerant. The grooming gang scandal was a failure to adhere to the principles of liberalism, because what it suddenly said is, we should apply the law differently according to your race.

1:23:12That's not a liberal position. That's the opposite. Similarly with woke. Wokeness is an anti-liberal movement. A lot of people will say it's liberal. It's not. It's the opposite. If you are enforcing your ideology on someone else and mutilating kids and calling for censorship, all of these things are a failure to be liberal, not an example of liberalism run wild. It's a weird one, isn't it? Because you often hear this. I mean, it would be like blaming the Institute of Marriage for divorce. People failing and rejecting liberalism, that's not the fault of liberalism. It doesn't really make sense, but this is a huge, huge misunderstanding.

1:23:55I think a lot of the time when people are criticizing liberalism, they're really criticizing liberal universalism, and it's not the same thing. How do people square this circle between pro-Islam and pro-gay? A rejection of reality. That's the only way you can do it. So is it a marriage of tenuous convenience between the two of them? Like, how are you supposed to be queers for Palestine? Like, what the fuck is that? Well, look, there are gay Muslims and always have been. And those are the ones who, they're the people who really lose out by this woke insistence that there's no problem within that belief system against gay people.

1:24:37I mean, that's insane. It's the same as those who defend Sharia courts in the UK. I mean, there's 85, I think, Sharia courts in the UK, a parallel system of law, effectively. I mean, I know they say it has no legal clout, but the truth is that if you're a woman going to a Sharia court, you have to defer to men. And the way in which Sharia values women, which is not all that much. That's a reality. That's why Muslim feminists are continually campaigning against Sharia courts in the UK, right? What you're saying, if you're a privileged white Westerner just agreeing with Sharia courts out of some kind of intersectional belief that it's all happy, clappy and wonderful, you're basically saying that Muslim women don't count.

1:25:20You care about women and women's rights, but just not Muslim women. That's what you're saying. And similarly with the gay rights issue, you have to accept that there is a conflict and there is a problem. The statistics don't lie. The prevalence of anti-gay sentiment and the belief that homosexuality ought to be criminalized within the mainstream Muslim population is huge. That's a problem to be tackled. Is this not going to come into conflict in reality at some point? It already has. That's why you've seen queers for Palestine, that entire thing. But that's not, that's trying to merge, trying and failing to merge two things.

1:25:55Why don't they put their money where their mouth is? Why Saudi Arabia and set up at their pride march why don't they just do it and then and then you know they get on and then you test it and that's you know then you'll you'll find out how what a good idea that is you mentioned uh authoritarianism is the primary concern yeah you've got in all of its different manifestations uh our recent country of exit for both of us now congratulations uh For moving to America? Yes, correct. I got out. Yeah. Well, look, I have been critical of lots of things, and this is both bottom up and top down. I really didn't like what I saw when the riots happened after some of those stabbings and stuff.

1:26:41I saw people behaving in a way that reminded me of what it was like to go to school. Which riots were these? There was a bunch in Middlesbrough. It was after that dance class. Was it the guy? The Southport killing. Yes, that was it. Of the girls at the Taylor Swift yoga dance class. Taylor Swift yoga dance class. It was a Taylor Swift themed yoga dance class. And the kids, very young kids, were murdered. And yes, there was, okay, there were riots. But there were riots in Middlesbrough. And I know these streets. It's where me and my friends would hang out. We would have driven down. And I've been critical.

1:27:18I've been critical of the UK. day. But that's not for me to sort of try and pull the ladder up after I've managed to get out on the last chopper out of Saigon, so to speak. More so just like I really tried while I was in the UK. I employed between sort of three and 4 ,000 18 to 25 year olds over the space of a 15 year career. Like I personally coached hundreds and hundreds of young people on becoming better at business and understanding the world around them. And largely most of that was just fucking personal stuff. So you and your new girlfriend that you've been with for three weeks, yeah, stuff's hard.

1:27:52Like there's a bit of advice or whatever it might be. Really, really, really trying to do that. And that pocket of people went on to really do sometimes great stuff. And hopefully I contributed to their life. But I did feel a little despondent. I'm like, I made like a pretty big fucking dent in the populace of one city. And the tall poppy syndrome, the low standards, the like, um, um, mutual binding together over how shit things are. Like some of these things are beautiful, self-deprecating, sanguine looks at sort of British life. But when it starts to sort of live inside of you and peer out through your eyes, it can become a little exhausting, which is why a lot of the people, I think entrepreneurs tend to leave the UK beyond tax and weather and blah, blah, quality of life and all the rest of the stuff.

1:28:41They leave because the culture doesn't feel to be so positive. So I had my issues. I am now at a stage very much where I'm trying to, from here, look at, okay, what actually sort of can be done and what are the big issues? But this is very, I'm sort of like trying to look over the fence back into a house that I used to live in. Yeah, yeah. Your concern was authoritarianism. Yeah. How authoritarian is the UK in your perspective right now? Well, it's not a tyranny. It's not a despotism. It's not fascist, but it is deeply authoritarian. Yes. We have an authoritarian government. We have a Labour government that is ramping up censorship.

1:29:23But they inherited a lot of it from the previous Conservative government. This is my point. The culture war for me has never been about left or right. The worst excesses of the woke movement came about under Tory rule, under Conservative rule, under the right wing. Labour have picked up the baton and run with it When it comes to the online safety bill, for instance, that was a Tory measure, which Labour have taken and just increased it and made it worse. Labour have been trying to introduce an official definition of Islamophobia, which makes no sense because the draft definition is that it's a form of racism against Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.

1:30:00Well, Islam isn't a race. So it's starting from a factually incorrect point. Keir Starmer believes in censorship. he's a technocrat. His instincts are authoritarian. And he will always double down on this. It's very interesting when you see him in the White House with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump. And he talks about that. He's very proud of the history of free speech in the UK. But of course, he uses that word history. It's not really there anymore. There's a viral clip that's going viral this week about a woman, Deborah Anderson, I think her name is, American citizen living in the UK. Police officer turns up at her door and the footage is all there.

1:30:35And she's saying, look, you can come in, but you better have a damn good reason. And he says, I'm here because you posted something on Facebook that someone found upsetting. And she says, what is it? And no, she says, I don't need to know what it is. She says, I can write what I want on Facebook. He says, well, what I want you to do is apologize to that person. If you don't, you'll have to come down to the police station for an interview. So that's a coercive, intimidatory, you know, we've seen the Times did a recent Freedom of Information request report showing that 12 ,000 people a year are arrested in the UK for things they say online, offensive things they say online.

1:31:06It's 30 a day. That's more than any other country in the West, as far as I'm aware, or probably anywhere else in the world. We have non-crime hate incidents the police record. I think since non-crime hate incidents were instituted in 2014, there's been over a quarter of a million. I've probably got some against my name. All that is, is someone thinks you've said something offensive against their protected characteristic. You phone the police. The police don't need to investigate. They don't need evidence of hatred. They just record it against your name as a non-crime hate incident. and that can show up in disclosure and borrowing service checks.

1:31:38If you are going for a teaching job or something like that, it can actually affect your employment record. It's effectively a way for someone with a grudge to fuck up your life. And it's there. By the way, the police shouldn't be auditing your thoughts and emotions anyway in a free society. We've seen numerous viral videos of police turning up at someone's door. There was that guy, Darren Brady, the veteran who, the army veteran who was arrested, put in handcuffs on video because he caused anxiety for posting a meme, which was complaining about the authoritarianism of the pride movement. A view that I share, by the way.

1:32:09So why am I in handcuffs? Well, maybe I should be. The police, and as I've said, all of this is because the police have been trained to believe that being offensive is an offense by law, and it's their job to monitor speech. And that's because of the College of Policing. College of Policing introduced non-crime hate incidents by itself. The government didn't tell them to do it. In fact, the government told them to stop doing it. Twice. The Home Secretary, two different Home Secretaries said, you can't do that. You're police. You're meant to be investigating crime, not non-crime. I mean, that should be obvious, shouldn't it?

1:32:46And by the way, they ignored them. They're like, no, no, we're the police. We want to investigate non-crime. Right? This would be like your doctor phoning up and saying, oh, I hear you're really healthy. We need to talk about that. It's absolutely insane. And that's been going on for since 2014. Two Home Secretaries say you have to stop it. The High Court says it's not lawful. The High Court says this is plainly an interference with freedom of expression. And the College of Policing, because they're a quango with no accountability, ignore them. And then the head of the College of Policing says, well, maybe the problem is we need to change the name.

1:33:21Let's not call it non-crime haters. Let's call it something else, but keep it as if a rebranding can sort this out. This is what I mean by activists. they don't care about the law because they've created their own framework for morality and law that's why since the supreme court judgment saying that you have to provide single sex or if you do provide if you do claim you're providing single sex spaces they have to be single sex you can't let men who identify as women into women's spaces that's the law and it's always been the law and the supreme court has clarified that you still have the scottish government ignoring it the scottish government you've still got various bodies and and charities and institutions and schools saying we are going to break the law we've had them posting online saying we're going to break the law we're going to do it good luck by the way they posted it online for all to see the receipts are there so thanks for that when those go to court they'll lose quite obviously so to come back to your question which i think was about i went off on one then authoritarianism yeah how authoritarian is it very and it's and you know you've had a vet cooper who's you know in the labor government saying that she wants to ramp up non-crime hate incidents uh they're not interested no one in the Labour government is trying to, or has even suggested repealing hate speech laws.

1:34:30Why do we have hate speech laws? It doesn't make any sense. They're basically codified in three different acts, the Public Order Act, the Communications Act, and the Malicious Communications Act. And these include things like causing anxiety or distress, or in the case of the Communications Act, writing something that is grossly offensive. That's the actual phrase that's is grossly offensive. What does that mean? When the Irish government recently tried to put through their hate speech bill, do you know how they defined hatred? They said, and I quote, hatred means hatred of any protected characteristics.

1:35:07It actually used the phrase, hatred means hatred. As you know, any definition that is circular is not an authentic definition and is wide open to exploitation because you can say anything is hatred then. Well, I've decided that criticism of the government is hatred. And now we've got on the statute books, the ability to lock you up for it. Don't they know anything about history? Don't they know how this works? It's a circular definition. This is absolutely pointless. There is no agreed definition of what hatred means anyway. And by the way, hatred is a human emotion that is hardwired over many, many centuries of millennia of human evolution.

1:35:39You're not going to wipe out a human emotion with the stroke of a pen. and the people who think they can do that are tyrants well that's strong authoritarians let's go with authoritarians and uh and i think it's irredeemable because i think keir starmer's i think it's baked into his dna to be elitist and authoritarian to believe that he knows best and to believe that he should control the thoughts and speech of the public so until we get rid of him which we will we're we are in a terrible state we need to abolish the college of policing we need to repeal all hate speech legislation we need to incorporate a sensible understanding of what incitement to violence means at the moment anyone who writes something offensive is accused of incitement to violence the case of lucy connolly is very interesting so this was a mother and childminder who had posted online in the aftermath of those riots you mentioned after southport she distressed.

1:36:36She'd lost her child herself because of NHS negligence. She's very sensitive to the death of children. And she posted online something very reckless and stupid and very unpleasant, which was, I don't care if you burn down those hotels with the migrants in. It was an expression, not a call to do it, but an expression of indifference if people did do it. She served over a year in prison. She was sentenced to 31 months, served over a year. that tweet was deleted within hours and it was she had no clout no influence there was no possibility that that tweet could ever lead to violence and it didn't but she still spent over a year in prison uh this week a an influencer after charlie kirk's murder uh in england with over 200 000 followers posted that it was a good thing that charlie kirk was murdered and she said kill them all right wing right wing right wing commentators kill them all she used the phrase twice, the police said, oh, there's nothing to investigate here.

1:37:29Why? What's the difference between those two? What do you think? Well, ideological slant. That's it. That's it. We have a two-tier policing system in our country. We absolutely do. That's why women who are routinely bombarded with death and rape threats by trans activists, those activists just don't get investigated. It's fine. You can have a photograph of two Scottish politicians in front of a placard at a protest that says decapitate turfs with a picture of a guillotine in case you didn't get it and they'll say there's nothing to see here we can't work out who that is so just let's forget about that but a mother who writes a reckless tweet and deletes it almost immediately that that that would never have caused any violence and could not possibly have done so she has to spend over a year in prison someone with 200 000 followers can say kill them all and they'll ignore that now i'm not saying she should be investigating by the way i don't even think that should qualify incitement of violence.

1:38:21But what I would say is there's clearly a distinction between the way the police treat certain people. They will investigate women who misgender. They will put you in a cell for using language that offends the trans community, but they won't do it if you send a rape threat to a woman. So there's a huge problem. When it comes to incitement of violence, America has it right. America has a thing called the Brandenburg test, which came about, I think it was in the late 1960s when the leader, KKK leader called Clarence Brandenburg was prosecuted for incitement to violence. And that was overturned, I think, by the Supreme Court.

1:38:57And the standard was, well, in order to incite violence, and this is now in law in the US, in order to fulfill the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, it has to be, the words have to be intended to foment violence, likely to do so, and that any potential violence would have to be imminent. So you're talking about the kind of scenario where a demagogue is in front of thousands of followers, riles up the crowd, then points at someone and says, kill him now, and they do. That would be something that fulfills the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence. A tweet by someone with no clout whatsoever, deleted almost immediately, that didn't lead to any violence at all and was never intended to.

1:39:35That comes nowhere near the barter incitement to violence, but she still spent over a year in prison. I think Americans are horrified by the Lucy Connolly case. I think they see that and think, that can they know that can never happen here well there's an entire sub genre niche of content on youtube and lots and lots of streaming sites now which is american commentators watching the downfall of the uk right like it is so embarrassing isn't it it is a significant It's probably the single biggest online cultural export that we are giving. Is that right? I'm almost sure. If you were to look at hours watched over the last six months to nine months of anything that's coming out of the UK, uh it will most of it will be american commentators doing reactions to protests to those tours that people do where they say i'm gonna go and see the poorest town in britain and it's you know some fucking seaside town that three quarters of the high street are boarded up and everybody's on fucking Trank or something.

1:40:53And it's all of this, it's almost like all reacting to non-crime hate speech incidents and police turning up at people's doors and sort of looking at it with, I don't know, like kind of like seeing an elephant balancing on a ball in a circus or something. Like, oh my God, look at that. It is humiliating. Crazy. Yeah. But you know why? Because we're meant to be the home of free speech, right? The Enlightenment. We have the three Johns. We have Milton and Locke and Mill. We have this tradition of free speech. The most eloquent defenders of free speech have been from the British Isles. We've got the history of the Magna Carta, 1215.

1:41:28The barons forced the king to be subject to the rule of law. Freedom matters. It's in our tapestry of our history. The Bill of Rights of 1689, is it? Around then? You know, where parliamentary debate is protected. We have English common law, for God's sake. We have free speech embedded in our history in such a way that we exported it to the Americans. We gave it to the Yanks. And now they're laughing at us because we've given it up. Absolutely crazy. But then I worry as well that there are some people, particularly on the left in America, who are willfully pretending this isn't happening. I mean, I wrote an article for the Washington Post where I outlined some of the more egregious examples of British people being prosecuted and arrested for their speech.

1:42:13and the comment section was just full because the washington post readership are largely like the guardian kind of readership very ideologically one-sided and their chief objection to the article was just that they they didn't believe it they thought i was making it up and that's interesting because of all the publications i've i've written for and do write for the washington post fact checks absolutely every last thing i wrote an article about the worst novelist who ever lived and i quoted many many things in it and they asked me to chase up every single quotation They were really, really rigorous, and I really respect them for it.

1:42:42But it was fascinating that the comments for this article were saying, it just isn't happening. Well, it is happening. The receipts are there. The evidence is that it's incontrovertible that the UK is going down a very, very dark path in terms of censorship and opposition to free speech. I mean, that viral video I mentioned about Deborah Anderson, she's an American citizen. And there she is with a police officer, like some jumped up school prefect saying, you better go and apologize. otherwise i'm going to take you to the the police uh station my friend graham linihan arrested tell me tell me the story about what happened with graham well graham and i have been working on a sitcom we've been working with this company in america i've set up a company called friendly fire studios with rob schneider who's an actor comedian over here done it in arizona in scottsdale and we're having a great time and i've it's great because i feel so creative again i've spent so long exactly what we're talking about earlier defensive i've been commenting all the time now i'm creating now i'm creating i'm doing what i used to do what i always used to do and it's been great and um and you know graham he he gets a flight back to the uk and uh you make a joke i did i i'm sure i joked him in the days before about getting arrested when he goes back to the uk and then i'm with martin martin goler he's a producer i used to work with the gb news who's now working with us at Friendly Fire Studios.

1:44:04And we're sitting together. And we start getting texts from Graham, messages from Graham. I've been arrested. I'm in the hospital because of high blood pressure. And we're like, this is absolutely crazy. What happened was he flew back to Heathrow. He thought something was amiss because when he checked in, they said, oh, we've got to move your seat. And he thought something was amiss. But anyway, he landed. So he's the first to get out. police meet him five armed police five police with guns at the jet bridge from the plane i think that's where it is yes yeah and uh he sits down and they tell him that they're arresting him for three tweets that he posted earlier in the year perhaps i should clarify what the tweets were one of them was uh an image of a trans rights protest and she said he said something like you can smell it from ear or something like that something to do with the smell not illegal right not illegal uh another one was um he was talking about uh women you know because because since the supreme court ruling a lot of men who identify as women are still going into women's toilets and he's saying he said uh you know if a man is in your space and won't get out make a fuss you know call the police and if all else fails kick him in the balls and of course that's a joke it's making the point that if you can kick someone in the balls they shouldn't be in a woman's toilet right there's that joke element um but it's also the kind of advice that every father gives his daughter right again not incitement to violence nowhere close to incitement to violence and i can't remember what the third one was it was it was something to do with it was something even more innocuous than that uh that one the punch them in the balls one was the most extreme apparently but it's and so those three tweets ended up he was in a cell he He was taken off, arrested.

1:45:51One of the police officers or someone took his blood pressure, realized it was dangerously high, as it would be if you've just been apprehended by five men with guns. Or if you've recently moved to America and started eating the standard American diet. I think Graham's eating quite well, actually. He's doing all right. And so his blood pressure is into stroke risk territory. Jesus Christ. So they had to take him to the hospital. And yeah. And then, of course, the next day, you know, we got these texts and we were like, contact Toby Young, contact the Free Speech Union. This is absolutely crazy.

1:46:25Free Speech Union did get involved, as they always do. Thank God for what Toby's done, by the way. I mean, it's been a lifeline for so many people. He saved so many people from losing their jobs. The fact we even need a Free Speech Union in the UK is a sad indictment. And then it's everywhere. It's all over the front cover of every paper, even in America. Everyone's talking about it. The president's talking about it. Nigel Farage is talking to Congress about it. It's absolutely everywhere. Again, this is the export. Well, it's embarrassing, isn't it? A comedy writer, the guy who created Father Ted, is arrested for tweets.

1:47:00Doesn't look good. Even Keir Starmer has to weigh in and say, actually, this is probably not a good use of police time. It gets really funny when Mark Rowley, who's the head of the senior police officer in the UK, says, it's not our fault. The police have to, because of the law, the police have to investigate all of this stuff. Really? Well, a woman's just said, kill them all, and you're not going to investigate that. So clearly there's some discretion involved. It's not true, by the way. He's wrong. That's completely disingenuous. And in fact, Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne wrote a letter from the House of Lords on the House of Lords letter paper.

1:47:28It's great to read. Where she says, maybe Mr Rowley should tell your police officers to stop being stupid. Why don't they exercise some intelligent judgment? Because they do all the time. Because police officers all the time decide which allegations of crimes to investigate and which to dismiss as frivolous. They do it all the time. including by the way burglaries i can't be bothered with that because you're never going to get anywhere anyway but no a comedy writer who writes a tweet bit of a spicy tweet that joke that everybody in the uk is doing which is saying i bring 999 to say that there's somebody that's currently trying to rob my house they say sorry we can't get anyone over there and he says oh by the way just misgendered me and immediately they not a joke you it sounds like a joke but it's actually true if you say to the police uh you can perceive that the crime in place the crime being committed was motivated by hatred towards a protected characteristic they'll be over there in a heartbeat it's a good trick by the way you should do it um but just to get the police to do their fucking job so that you know and and the problem here of course is the police have been weaponized and have allowed themselves to be weaponized by intersectional activists to work on behalf of genderists how do you again square the circle of the uk did you i know the u.s seem to roll back some stuff to do with gender identity or become definitive.

1:48:46What, UK, sorry? The US did, didn't they? Yes. Well, there's been the various executive orders. Right. What about the UK? Did they not say that too? Yeah, the Supreme Court. The UK. UK Supreme Court has ruled that sex in the... There's a Supreme Court in the UK. Yes, it was instituted by Tony Blair. Okay. It shouldn't be there, really. Okay. But thank God it has clarified the law on this point. Right. But that seems to be... Or is the Supreme Court outside of much of the sphere of influence of some of the fuckery that's going on at the moment? Well, this is the point. The law works up until the point where activists get involved.

1:49:21The judiciary is not immune to activist judges. Can you clarify what the ruling was of the UK Supreme Court? Okay, so we've got a thing called the Equality Act, which protects all sorts of protected characteristics, sex, race, etc., and also beliefs. Now, for a long time, groups like Stonewall and activist groups have been going into corporations and charities and things and saying, if someone wants to use a toilet that aligns with their gender, you have to let them by law because of the Equality Act protection for gender reassignment, which is one of the characteristics. But that overrides the protection for sex.

1:49:58And they're saying that's the law. That was never the law. Four Women Scotland, which is a group of feminist campaigners, it's really just three women who just weren't having it. And they took on the Scottish government because the Scottish government had misinterpreted the law in this way. And they won. The Supreme Court said to the Scottish government, you've got this wrong. Sex in the Equality Act means biological sex. Because activists were interpreting it as meaning gender identity. It means sex. Um, now what would you do though, if an activist judge had made that decision, it would have been flipped.

1:50:31How do we know this? The former president of the Supreme court was a woman called a Baroness Hale. And she said recently that she, she disagrees with the Supreme court ruling. Uh, she thinks they've got it wrong. And she's been talking to some doctors who've told her that biological sex doesn't exist. Actually, that's an activist. Now that's, that's dangerous. That's the head of the Supreme Court doesn't believe biological sex exists because some doctors who also you would think should know what biological sex is also claim that it doesn't exist. This is the pernicious nature of the woke movement is that it makes intelligent people in positions of power say things that even a six-year-old could tell you wasn't true.

1:51:10Now that's what's happened. I'm getting all head up on it. It's this drink. It's this energy drink you've given me. Yeah, good, good. It's nice. Is that the plan? To get me all hopped up? Correct. And angry? Yes. Clickbait. How dare you? I won't be used in this way. Well, look, I think we can go back to before that product existed and see that you've got the same demeanor whenever you get het up. No, I know that's true. No, I'm not blaming you. So my point here is that seems like, okay, good flag planted in the ground. Yes. Is that not coming into contact with reality? That's my point. People keep denying the law.

1:51:42The Scottish government, now people are having to take the Scottish government to court because it's ignoring or overruling what the Supreme Court says. And various other people are doing the same thing. That's what they do. They just ignore the law. If the law doesn't fit their ideology, their ideology matters more than the law in the way that Islamism, same thing, the ideology matters more than the law of the land. And that can't be the case in a liberal society, in a liberal democracy. So I'm afraid when it comes to these activists, it is going to have to be lawfare. It is going to be the case that they're going to have to be challenged in the courts and they will lose.

1:52:17It's just going to take a hell of a long time. when it comes to genderism it really matters one of the interesting things about the supreme court ruling is it really really flagged up the significance for gay rights that if you go along with this genderist interpretation of the world gay rights are obliterated they correctly interpreted the sort of second and third order consequences of this happening well they were saying that you know even if you have a gender recognition certificate which creates the legal fiction that you've changed sex they were saying that doesn't mean you've changed sex because lesbians aren't attracted to a piece of paper.

1:52:50So that's what that ruling has done. And that's a relief. But as I say, if you'd just been a few years out and if Lady Hale had been in charge of the Supreme Court, it would have gone the other way. Because judges are human beings, you're always going to get activist judges. Knife-edged stuff. But you need some sort of, that's why we need some sort of means of removing judges who are prioritizing activism and ideology over the law that's going to be hard because you also want a separation of the judiciary and the executive what do you make of the counter movement in the uk so the unite the kingdom thing 150 000 people trudging through it was every unspeakable person from twitter over the last katie hopkins is there with carl benjamin and a tommy robinson cherry on top it's very interesting isn't it it's a big march and of course you have you know the marchers claiming there are many many millions there and the police saying there are only a hundred thousand there or something and of course it's somewhere somewhere in the middle you always have to assume but again it's about narratives and people presenting different narratives why not just tell us the truth for fuck's sake um all of those people being smeared as far right and racist usual thing and of course it's nowhere near true i'm not saying there are any racists there if you were a racist it'd be a good place to be.

1:54:06Sure, exactly. Tiny minority there, of course. People with legitimate concerns who are sick of being smeared as far-right and racist. People who just double down, the media class that just doubles down on this misrepresentation, which of course feeds the very beast they're trying to slay. I mean, you're going to end up with more people going on the march next time because they are reacting. They are protesting precisely that, the mischaracterization of legitimate concerns as far-right and racist. If you carry on doing it, the resentment will grow. uh it's the same with brexit during the brexit debates or the media class was smearing anyone who was considering voting brexit as far right and racist and you know what if you're neither of those things and you're told that you are because you vote a certain way what are you going to do in the ballot box you're gonna be like fuck you that's what swung it i think i actually think the uh the attempts to smear people in that way swung it the other way completely and so you get the same thing i think with the unite the right or whatever it's called what was it called by the Unite the kingdom.

1:55:05Unite the kingdom, whatever it's called. And the smearing of those, and it's very interesting because Trevor Phillips, who went there to see it for himself, and he delivered a monologue on Sky News saying they're just normal people. This isn't a racist march. Different races are there. They closed the march with a black gospel choir singing. It's just not what you think it is. and i think this this is something this is going to be the big challenge going forward is is this the threat of narrative the idea that truth is secondary to the story that you tell and that is something that we are continually battling with that there are too many people i think who are willing to misrepresent for the sake of their ideology they see it as a means to an end and that's true on the right and the left i'm afraid to say and uh we have to just get back to the primacy of truth, even truth that you don't want to acknowledge, right?

1:56:01That's the thing. And it's everywhere throughout the woke movement. You know, I mean, you might like to believe that you are neither male nor female, but you are either male or female. You can call yourself non-binary. You can ask people to say they and them. It doesn't change the fact that you are, as a matter of fact, either male or female. And we have to, I think, stop indulging fantasy. we have to get back to reality and even if it's a reality you're uncomfortable with you can be compassionate about someone who's uncomfortable with the way the world is but that doesn't mean that you reorganize the world to appease uh the uneric you know make believe world that someone else has concocted for themselves what do you think comes next you've laid a relatively apocalyptic bleak picture have i yeah i'm trying to be positive Well, okay.

1:56:52Maybe British positive. Let's go American positive. Okay. But look, actually, it doesn't need to be that at all. I don't care. I just want to know what you think. You know, we've explained this interesting arc over the last couple of decades or so, kind of how we got here and how that's coming into contact with reality. And maybe it's running out of steam a little bit. And perhaps it's going to go out not with a fizz, but with a pretty fucking chaotic bang. Well, as I say in the book, the argument is that, you know, this isn't the end of authoritarianism as woke is on the decline, as it certainly is.

1:57:25And there's all sorts of evidence for that. Um, something else will come. And you know, one of the things I warn about in the book is the rise of authoritarianism on the right. I mean, you can see it happening. What are the best examples of that? well you've seen examples of uh cancel culture from the right you've seen of of course right wing individuals who've been targeted for cancellation simply for expressing their opinions there's now a level of schadenfreude you know when you see people on the left saying ill-advised and horrible things online why not phone their employer and get them fired because you know what you've been doing it to us you've been tracking the jimmy kimmel thing yes exactly this is a good example.

1:58:07But the Jimmy Kimmel thing is slightly more complicated insofar as that decision, I believe, was made by ABC, the network, to acts that it's just been suspended, doesn't it, I think? It's suspended without a return date yet. And if you track it back, it seems like the biggest distributor of ABC to local areas around the US wants to merge with another company which requires FCC okay, and that's a Trump appointee. And the story, the sort of lineage is Trump pressure to FCC, FCC pressure to this thing. They have slid in and said, we're not going to air him anymore on these areas. ABC said, oh, fuck, we're just going to put the on it.

1:58:56Sounds like a business decision, doesn't it? It does. It does sound like a business decision. In my opinion, what Jimmy Kimmel said wasn't beyond the pale. I think that it was evidently a joke. And one of the two clips, there may be other clips I haven't seen, but the two main ones, one of them was him mocking Trump for being asked, how are you coping in the aftermath of your friend Charlie Kirk's death? And he said, I'm doing okay. I think you'll see this group of trucks that are coming over here. We're going to build a ballroom in the White House. They've been trying to get it for 150 years.

1:59:28That's a joke. He's making a joke about Trump. Yes, and he's saying this is not how a grieving friend talks about... Yeah, but you don't know what's going through Trump's head there. Of course, but his joke is this is how a toddler talks about a dead goldfish. And then his most recent one, at least the second one that I saw that I think was kind of the one that really did it, was he said, we don't know if this particular individual has got sort of MAGA-leaning bona fides, basically. and the specific wording has been debated and it's like sufficiently vague and all the rest of it. And yes, business decision and the schadenfreude and the righteous turnaround, like we have dealt with it for long enough, therefore.

2:00:09But you just, it's a difficult thing because what you're asking people that are on the right and unhappy at what Jimmy Kimmel said because he's pointing the finger at somebody that's on their camp. What you're asking them to do is take the high road in a way that people on the left haven't been prepared to do during lots of these cancellations. There's a lot of complications with this particular case. So firstly, I would need to see why the decision was made. If someone from ABC has said this is because of government pressure or pressure at the federal level, then we have a problem, the state intervening.

2:00:48They're saying it wasn't that. They'll never say that. They'll always be culpably denied. Well, I mean, there's all sorts of reasons. My suspicion, although I've got no proof of this, is that because the ratings have been declining so steeply over the past few years, they're using this opportunity to get rid of it. Yeah, because I'm like, he's not popular. It's not working. The ratings have been plummeting. So it's like, it's an excuse to get rid of him. Potentially, but I don't know, right? I don't know. There's the other issue. I mean, the wording of the MAGA thing, I mean, I watched it. It seemed pretty clear to me he was saying that the shooter was MAGA.

2:01:19He says, people on the right are just bending over backwards to try and pretend that the shooter wasn't MAGA. the phrase or the phrasing if you look at it looks pretty unequivocal that he's saying the shooter and that's false that's factually wrong it might be a mistake an honest mistake but it's it's factually wrong and you've got to remember again the added complication is it's a satirical comedy show but it's not just a satirical comedy show it's also a political commentary show now i've hosted a show like that in the uk called headliners where we blended commentary and politics with satire and humor but that doesn't mean we could say factual inaccuracies and say oh it's just satire because we knew that the show was a balance of the two and we were still subject to ofcom regulations and if we said something that was factually wrong we would correct it and say we apologize this was this was incorrect what i suspect so kim ock should be held to those standards as well what i suspect should have happened is he should have apologized and said this was this was factually wrong i got this wrong not apologize for a joke because actually the maga section wasn't framed as a joke it was framed as a comment i specifically checked that but even so there's that weird grey area with comedy and commentary going on there that makes it more complicated the added complication is to what extent did ABC actually respond to the pressure from the government if they did accept an instruction from the government to cancel it that's cancel culture that's a problem but I don't think that is the case I think the buck stops with ABC and they could have said no we're keeping the show on they made this decision I think but again I don't know the full story maybe there's more going on than I know about but the other point I think is that I will always defend the right of a comedian to make a joke.

2:02:55even if I find it offensive or upsetting I think we have to retain that. But when it comes to cancel culture, there's a big misunderstanding about cancel culture. Cancel culture is the disproportionate reaction, the bullying and targeting of someone for an opinion by contacting their employers and trying to ruin their livelihood and reputation for something they've said and something they believe. And that is something that the left or people who claim to be on the left have become very adept at. But that does not mean that if someone is fired for doing a bad job, that is cancel culture. Kimmel, by all accounts, is not doing a good job.

2:03:29That was a mistake that he shouldn't have made. But ostensibly, the reason that he is being polled, the timing of that is... But again, we don't know, right? So if it is the case that he is being fired because the government has put pressure on them to do so for political reasons, that's cancel culture. That should be resisted. If he has been fired by ABC because they've been wanting to get rid of him for ages, they don't think he's very good and he's not very good at his job. That's not cancel culture. But the reason why I'm hesitant on this particular case is there are so many complications and I don't know the full facts.

2:03:59So I can't make a call on it. But for instance, let's give another example. So if someone makes a joke about Charlie Kirk's horrific death, some idiot online working minimum wage in Walmart or something like that, should they be fired? No, I don't think they should. I think it's unpleasant, grotesque. I think, you know, I would describe it as evil to cheer on someone's death. But I don't think someone should have their life ruined because of a stupid comment online. What if you're a health worker? What if you work for a hospital and you say people who have different political views than you ought to be killed?

2:04:35Well, I think you've disqualified yourself from your job. Let's say the example of the president-elect of the Oxford Union, the most famous debating society in the world, who gloated about Charlie Kirk's death, even though he debated him in person months before. And he gloated about it online. He mocked it. He thought it was funny. Now, if you're going to be the head of an institution which is devoted, has free speech at the heart of its charter, you've just disqualified yourself from the role. It is untenable for you to run that institution. What's happened to that guy? Oh, he's doubled down and said he's staying.

2:05:14And, you know, there's also a clip circulating of him saying his political opponent should be taken out by any means necessary. All of this stuff. Here's what I say about that. He is entitled to those views and he's entitled to express those views. That doesn't mean he's qualified to run the Oxford Union. this is so weird to me that people think that failing to fulfill basic job requirements is and being fired for it is cancel culture when i was a teacher if i'd have looked at the national curriculum what i'm what i've signed up voluntarily contractually obliged to teach if i just said screw that i'm going to stand in my classroom and swear at the kids and say your parents are all prostitutes and let's not talk about english literature i just want to talk about hens or something.

2:05:56I don't know. And then they called me and said, we're going to fire you because you're not doing your job. I can't then scream free speech. This is my free speech. You'd be an idiot. So I think when it comes to cancer culture, you have to understand that it depends on the position that the person is in. Part of your job implicitly when you sign up to be a doctor is not to go online and say that you want people to die. Right? So that's not... Of course you should be fired. What are you talking about? You can't. You've made your own position untenable. Really, the president of the Oxford Union should resign.

2:06:33But this is a man with clearly no moral compass, no integrity. So of course he won't. But if he does get kicked out, I won't consider that a free speech issue. But if, you know, the woman who was... who after Trump's, after the assassination attempt on Trump, I think she was working in some supermarket and she wrote, I'm annoyed the bullet missed or something. Why can't they aim better or something like that? And then, uh, someone came in and filmed her and asked her about it. And that clip went viral and she was fired. Now that's a woman on minimum wage, can't afford to lose a job, said something stupid and horrible online.

2:07:07I don't think she should be fired. I think that's cancel culture. So again, like there's no set rules with it. It's like, it's, You need to understand the nuances of this. I've seen a trend online, mostly around the Charlie Kirk thing. Can't remember the specific example, but it was some account that had tweeted some reprehensible thing about why he deserved it or whatever. That everybody was condemning, except for the few top comments that were part of that same ecosystem. them and one of the first things that i've seen now is a a trend of people oh it was a it was a researcher at northumbria university a phd researcher at northumbria university and it was lord miles you know lord miles this dark tourism guy he went and he was captured by the taliban for nine months and came back having been given a gold mine by them fucking fascinating crikey yeah yeah he's like the sort of peak autist of of twitter anyway um he he was the particular uh respondent in this example but i've seen it happen a bunch of times people go and do this sleuthing where do they work what do they do yeah yeah who's important to them thing and then screenshot in the replies their email screenshotting the original tweet to the people that employ them or do an education institution and then tag both the original and the Twitter of the person of the group that they've just emailed to apply pressure and to have sort of this outsized panopticon thing go on where everybody else gets to see this unfold.

2:08:52And then all of the subsequent replies are in there. And that feels like it feels like cancel culture in action. Some people may say, well, this is a righteous calling to account for people that are doing and saying things and behaving in ways that require some sort of recompense or revenge or whatever it might be. But on the other side of that, I think the justified reason or the steel man case for doing the Lord Miles thing is that because there is rightly or wrongly an interpretation of two-tier policing, they feel like this is not going to be investigated unless some citizen journalism citizen policing is done and i am the guy to step up to do it so and this unique framework like mousetrap situation where you do this thing and you screenshot the thing and you put it in the replies to the original one and you you know everybody watches this shit unfold and then you know it obviously just creates pressure it creates pressure on the organizations to see that they are now in the blast radius of this original thing that somebody said and it all just unfolds and that i've seen it more obviously what you know still kind of in the the aftershock of this this event happening and this replete with opportunities for this to happen people to tweet stupid things people to cite them people to get them fired but so on and so forth um but that is a uh to me a sort of worrying development because it's just going to be a trend it's like a type of artillery that both sides can use to fire at each other that's it it's exactly that is that you have to be consistent on this.

2:10:30Because you can say these comments are horrible and offensive, and therefore the person should be fired. But some of those people will find the comments that you make reprehensible and offensive and say that you should be fired. It's not a sufficient justification. People are entitled to their opinions. And actually, it's not even about the opinion they expressed. It's about the principle, which is bigger than that, which is that people should be able to say what they want. However, as I come back to this point, there are certain views that you might express, uh, that disqualify you from certain roles in society.

2:11:02That shouldn't be a controversial point. Okay. When, when Rachel Dolezal was discovered, you know, she was the president of a chapter of the NAACP, uh, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. When she was outed as white, uh, pretending to be black or at least identifying as black, a lot of people in that organization said she should step down. They weren't trying to cancel her they were saying that maybe uh a civil rights group to advance the rights of black people isn't best run by a white woman are you allowed to say colored people now well it's an older um because the the the organization is goes back a long way i thought people of color no i actually thought people of color had been dispensed with and we were back to oh is that right well i can't keep up i mean it was because it was color people then people of color i can't see the distinction between those two but apparently one's really offensive one isn't um but the naacp predates the language shift and it can't change its acronym because that's going to get too complicated uh so it just it's fire all over again except fire didn't change the acronym they just changed the meaning yeah but so so i don't blame them for keeping the older acronym but the point is of course a civil rights group dedicated to black people you shouldn't have a chapter that that's run by a white woman okay it's not cancer culture to point that out there are certain roles that we're prerequisites prerequisites fine you know if i am a uh a rabid i don't know i don't know say i'm a a pagan deity worshiper that every morning i get down on my feet and i sacrifice a goat and i do because i want to appease the the spirit of fertility uh you know from my i don't know from my local rockery or something i don't know what it is but i do that every morning and I smear myself in the blood and I dance.

2:12:43I do this dance, this provocative dance, and I chant these sort of mantras to my deity. And then I run the Atheist Society, and I'm the head of the Atheist Society. And maybe it's in a private WhatsApp group message. Maybe I just talk about how great my God is. And maybe that gets out. But if it does get out, I've pretty much, I've been exposed. I shouldn't be running the Atheist Society. is it cancel culture for me to get fired no i'm just not appropriate for the job i mean this is this is so basic to me that i that you know you can't run the oxford union if you don't believe in free speech right it's the same thing you can't you can't run a i don't know a vegan society if you're eating three burgers every day it's an interesting uh demonstration of sort of some of the weird quirks of human psychology and how we're able to deal with discomfort and pressure.

2:13:39And it's kind of the, I don't know why I've never been tortured. I don't intend on torturing anybody, but I always think about movies where there is a James Bond type who's being taught and they're doing everything they can to him. And he's just, you know, gritting his teeth because he doesn't really think he's worth anything anyway. And he can, withstand it and then they bring the sort of love interest in or they bring the innocent local boy that he's taken in and he's helping him clean the car or whatever it is they bring him in and they start threatening it and you know i can't i can't and there's something about our actions being the uh creator of discomfort or restriction in somebody else that is this sort of weird speedrun shortcut through human psychology to like a unique type of pain it's this sort of responsibility it's guilt it's it's it's shame it's this person didn't ask for it it's sort of all of this stuff wrapped up together and this is empathy as well probably and the reverse is being used when you apply pressure to the employer of the person who said the thing yeah which is that you are implicitly or kind of even explicitly endorsing by continuing to employ them as if the perspective of a asda cashier on donald trump's shooting yeah in some way impinges on her ability to scan your your product now what this does do is mean that the higher up you get in an institution the more likely it is that your sort of executive perspective on stuff you could say that the COO of a tech company British tech company nothing to do with America operates exclusively inside of the UK is sort of culpable for his perspective around power and the use of violence around power in a way that a cashier and that feels that to me feels weird because now I'm like, well, what is it?

2:15:43There's this sort of stratified out, like the rich people are supposed to have a greater sense. You know what I mean? There's like, it doesn't still doesn't affect his ability to be the CEO of a fucking tech company, but he should be culpable in maybe a way that the cashier shouldn't. Well, just that, you know, if you have more responsibility, you should be more responsible. And you know, the things that you write in public reflects on your organization, if you are a figurehead of that organization. I don't think that's particularly controversial. But I think you're right that the person who scans at your checkout, it doesn't matter what horrible opinions they have.

2:16:17It doesn't affect their ability to do the job, and you shouldn't go after them. And also because if you do go after them, you're jeopardizing the principle of free speech itself. What you're doing is you're setting a precedent that will rebound on you without a doubt. So I think we just have to clarify what we mean by cancel culture. A lot of people don't know what it means. and we need to understand the difference between someone being fired for not being able to do their job and someone being fired for a horrible opinion i i think it's to me it's a no-brainer but i i i do get frustrated at the amount of times i i explained this and i think people because for instance if i say a certain person isn't qualified to do a job anymore they'll say well that's cancel culture you're i thought you were for free speech etc and you know you got to do this same dance all over you've got to do the same explanation again and um but the principle as i come back to this point the principle of free speech is more important than one individual who said something horrible and also i come back to this point that anyone could be cancelled at any time if you had full access to everything they've ever written jimmy carl's got a insight around that which he says the joke that's going to end my career has already been said yeah it's already out there yeah and i think you know especially if you're over 35 now you've spent sufficient time on the internet to say the reprehensible thing probably if you're over fucking 20 yeah um yeah there's something in our telegram or signal or whatsapp or i message or twitter dms or fucking it'll be jokes with your friends friends who know the context of who you are and what you really believe which means that you can say the horrible thing and the joke is that you obviously don't believe the horrible thing.

2:17:53What is driving this sort of puritanical desire to see evil in people? And this is evil of any kind because it's happening in both directions. And we spoke about the New Puritans and we did that thing last time, but it's happening in both directions. It's like this shows that they are the bigot, racist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, or on the other side, that they're the sort of un-American, unpatriotic, Marxist, communist. Right. What drives that? Okay, you're going to hate me for this. Okay. I need to go to the toilet again. Run it back. I love it. And do you know what? I had three buckets of coffee before I came here.

2:18:33Yeah. And then I had all your drinks. Fine. And that's why I'm being a bit... Performance enhancing. Yeah, I love it. Do you mind? Yeah, crack on. All right, okay. It's good. It's not that I want some time to think about that answer. It is a great question, though. It is a great question. All right. All right. We'll be back. i've got the question about hair beautiful so i said so porous that's a yeah yeah yeah this is you know they talk about uh drinking like a camel like this is bladdering like a podcaster yeah well keep it going should i just stop there's no keep going this is this is um it's doing something to my brain is that the point it's the point oh my god there's the point you've been conned by me.

2:19:12The both sides fucking spit roasting human centipede of why are people pointing the finger? So you're talking there about purity spirals and this growing tendency to conceive that if anyone disagrees with you in one slight point, it means that they have exposed themselves as being some evil individual, irredeemable. And that's a product of ideological thinking. You know from the Gulag Archipelago, the Solzhenitsyn text, he talks about how good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And it would be so easy, wouldn't it, if you could just put all the bad people in one place and all the good people in another place, and then get rid of all the bad people.

2:19:47But that's not how humanity works. What he identifies there and what that whole book is about is the human susceptibility to evil, irrespective of who or what you are. And that is something that needs to be acknowledged. But if you're an ideologue, and you believe that you should perceive the world through a set of preordained rules, any deviation from those rules is the worst betrayal i mean i think it's why i've had a particular nasty backlash from the left because they perceive me as someone who came from their own tribe uh it's why to go back to northern ireland it's why touts informers people from their own side were always more viciously treating you can be as a rat yeah you were they were the ones they they tortured and brutalized more than the uda or the you know the other side of the uvf or whatever.

2:20:31Um, because there's something more offensive to people about someone on their own team deviating. I've been dogpiled by people on the left, by gender critical feminists, even who, who I've supported for many, many years and be very vocal in my support. But because of a minor disagreement, they dogpiled me all night. I wrote about it in the book. It was absolutely intense until it got to the point where there were people talking about how they wanted to murder gay men and all the rest. And I thought, I'm not doing this. And then I turned the phone off. Um, but I think that's the, the purity spiral is something we should resist the expectation that someone on your side, quote unquote side should, should, should agree with every last point that terrifies me.

2:21:12I mean, there's a moment in the book where I talk about not rather nostalgically about my time at university, where we would sit up all night arguing, getting drunk, arguing robustly about politics and still being friends the next day. And it was all cool. And it was all part of it. There was a fun to it. I don't know if I think those days are gone. I don't think you can do it anymore. I mean, certainly I have some friends I can still do that with. And because I'm not party political, you know, they can't always predict where I stand on certain issues. And arguments do ensue, but not vicious and not just robust disagreements that's great that's what that's what we should be striving for and that's why this cherry picking of charlie kirk's videos to show how he was an evil person because he disagreed me on this or this and this it's so it's infantile actually i think the whole thing the whole culture war could be boiled down to a kind of mass infantilism you know an inability of adults to behave like adults uh tantrums tantrumizing which is not a word.

2:22:14I've just made it up, but mass tantrumizing. I just see it absolutely everywhere. I'm sick of it, actually. It bothers me. Disagreement is healthy. It's something we should be encouraging. And we certainly shouldn't feel threatened by it. Why should I feel threatened if you disagree with me on any particular point? I welcome that. Why? Because I guess, well, firstly, I might be wrong. I mean, there is a real lack of humility in all of this stuff. when someone disagrees with you if you take offense or think that that is signifies that that individual is evil that is a narcissistic response because what you are saying is my position is the default of humankind and anyone who deviates is either lying or evil or stupid how about maybe you're wrong or maybe the topic is a bit more nuanced than that and you can meet somewhere in the middle why do we argue we argue partly to refine our own position but also because we're aware that we're wrong about a lot of things at any given time and we need to be challenged.

2:23:16And also there is an element of truth to every perspective, however abhorrent it might be. There's always something in there. So why have we got into that position? Well, I think it comes back to education. I think it comes back to a failure of education and a failure of socialization. It shouldn't be a threat to hear a plurality of ideas. It shouldn't be threatening to acknowledge that we're bound to be wrong about certain things. I mean, it's an old dictum, isn't it? But the wiser you are, the more you know how little you know. And that surely should be the baseline for limited creatures that we are.

2:23:55We're not demigods. We're not capable of omniscience. So why not just acknowledge that and stop demonizing? I mean, that's the other thing. I think there's a kind of pseudo-theological aspect to all of this, which is the division of the world into good and evil. It's very simplistic. Disney's done it for years. can always spot a baddie in disney because they're ugly it's very convenient apart from hunchback and notchardom of course um but why divide the world into good and evil in that way when we know that every individual is capable of both it's kind of incoherent but we do it anyway well because most people are not reading notes from underground or fucking like the gulag archipelago because it's hard and complex and it's easier to have the big bang theory or whatever of the equivalent.

2:24:41Although Notes from Underground is the shortest of his books. You can do it in a day. We didn't finish out what does the future look like projecting out? We didn't because I've been drinking this energy drink. I went off on a tangent. I didn't let you finish it. All right. It's high velocity stuff. Let's get back into it. So what was the question again? What do you think? What happens next? You want me to do my mother Shipton and predict the future? Yeah, divination, Cassandra, whatever you want to call yourself. Do you know Mother Shipton? No. You should because you're a northerner. Okay. If you go to Knaresborough, do you know Knaresborough?

2:25:15I do. Go to Knaresborough, you can visit the cave where Mother Shipton lived. She was a medieval prophetess. Okay. She lived in a cave. Okay. And you can go and visit her cave. Does it give you, do you get the gift of prescience by going there or what? I didn't. Right. We'll see. We'll see what you come up with now and then compare it in 12 months' time. By the way, just to say, there's a little well by the cave. One of the reasons they thought she was magical is that this well was surrounded by stone animals. And they thought that she had the power to turn creatures into stone. And what it was is that well is a petrifying well.

2:25:50And it has certain chemicals and elements within it that if you leave any dead body or any inorganic material in it for long enough, it will turn to stone. And that's why people have a... You can see the stone handbags and stone shoes and things that people have left to turn to stone. It's interesting. very cool anyway um people don't know enough about mother shipton do they anyway my point was she predicted the great fire of london how about that not bad uh but she also said the end of the world would come in 1991 and i think she just said it because it rhymed and it wasn't true anyway let's move on to my own prediction and my own prediction of what will happen next and i think i make the case in the book i don't know but what is for certain is that authoritarianism as the default condition of humankind will definitely reemerge.

2:26:38And we probably better be vigilant about it and look out for where it might come from. And I am nervous about a backlash against woke authoritarianism that says, well, now it's our turn. I think that's a worry. In a way that we've already seen it with cancel culture. Yeah. Or, you know, the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, who thinks that you should go to prison for burning a flag. Well, he said that more than wants. That's not a liberal position, is it? I mean, that's an authoritarian position, and that shouldn't happen. I think what would happen is if he did try and push that through, the Supreme Court would overrule it.

2:27:12But nonetheless, that's worrying. I don't think, I mean, and again, the backlash against liberalism, because people have misunderstood liberalism, and they blame liberalism for what's gone wrong with the culture war. people are now saying liberalism didn't work so we now need our own form of authoritarianism to deal with the problems of leftist authoritarianism and that's just going to exacerbate the problem yeah it's crazy what we actually the argument i make in the book is that we need to install actual liberal values which say that you know individual autonomy and freedom freedom of speech freedom of conscience freedom of belief freedom of assembling what's freedom of conscience As in, you're free to believe whatever you believe, whatever your morality within, and this is a key caveat, within the rule of law.

2:28:00Right? So one of the aspects of liberalism that isn't understood, people think it's a free-for-all. People think they mean you can selfishly do whatever you want and there's no consequences. That's the opposite of liberalism. Because every, as I trace in the book, every great liberal thinker has said and understood that the rule of law and the social contract that we develop together is an essential aspect of the preservation of a liberal system. A liberal system can only work if you have those frameworks in place. That doesn't mean to say that the law can't be wrong, that there can't be unjust laws.

2:28:30That's why liberalism takes so long to build into society, because it's a constant negotiation of challenging the things that are wrong in society and debating them and arguing in the marketplace of ideas and all those things. And if you jettison all of that, because we've allowed woke authoritarianism to win out temporarily, then it's going to rebound on you eventually.

2:28:59Don't instill a new form of authoritarianism into society that will then establish a precedent that will undermine your own position, because that's what always happens. And you can just look at history. You know that this is where we're leading. So whether that will happen or not, I mean, a lot of the rhetoric about deportations, for instance there are people who would like to take that to an extreme degree i think uh zero tolerance for people making mistakes as you've said with cancel culture and people the things that people say the compiling of lists for wrong think all of that stuff makes me very nervous just because i know enough about i'm not a historian but i know enough about history to know where that leads and what that looks like and i know enough about history to know that is best avoided.

2:29:54Andrew Doyle, ladies and gentlemen. Dude. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers indeed. Nice to see you. Where should people go? Check out the book, check out everything else that you're doing. And what is next for you now that you're in the US? Well, I've moved to the US, as I say, to start this company, Friendly Fire Studios, working with Rob and Graham and Martin and we're writing things and we're going to hopefully start producing some things, some comedies and some films. That's the goal. you know it's early days so i can't really say too much because i don't know uh going back to creativity i think is key for me because i fear that being too steeped in the culture war for too long uh can drive anyone mad you become an engine right you sort of a conveyor belt for thing like stimulus comes in the front and a condensed version of what that was yeah out the back and uh yeah you don't want to be the final guy in the human centipede of of whatever today what a way to put it yeah you know it's just great because also like i writing create creatively again uh it's been so liberating and also you know and i'm working on a new series of lectures for the peterson academy because i did one on shakespeare's tragedies last year so i'm doing one on shakespeare's comedies now uh so i've been rereading all the comedies and it's been just a joy it's it's like breath of fresh air yeah it's like you know you're reading i mean shakespeare wrote you know he wrote what 37 plays about half of them are masterpieces so you're you're you're you know bathing in some of the greatest work that has ever been committed to paper and you are you're it's a rum it's a reminder of of what we are at risk of losing you know i think literature and art is one of the pillars of civilization and so there's nothing more rewarding than immersing yourself in that and of course that you know this was my doctorate was in Shakespeare so I'm going back to stuff I I was once immersed in and I loved it and so it's so it's so refreshing to be able to so in terms of what I'm going to be doing yeah those lectures are coming up so if you join the Peterson or sort of enroll at the Peterson Academy you can see my lectures on Shakespeare's tragedies and then soon the comedies and uh And I'll be writing, hopefully, and hopefully you'll see some sitcoms and films come out with my name attached to them.

2:32:19And if you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful and entertaining that I've ever found. fiction and non-fiction and there's real life stories and there's a description about why I like it and there's links to go and buy it and it's completely free you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books that's chriswillx.com slash books or in the meantime you can read my sub stack which is andrewdoyle.org or my book end of woke it's a new book that I've written or any of my other books if you like uh no pressure and uh so i'm easy enough to find uh just go online follow the trail of sulfur you can sniff me out i'm told that i'm evil so it shouldn't be difficult for you to locate me all right man i appreciate you thank you thank you very much