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

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All right, let's get into it.

The first time that we recorded, you were going from London to Edinburgh, maybe to do the fringe?

Yes, it was at the Edinburgh Fringe.

We stopped off at my house on route this year.

Yes, we did.

In 2019 or 2018?

It was a long time ago.

Yeah.

We did the podcast in your living room.

Correct.

Yeah.

It was nice and homely.

Yeah.

This is a bit more minimalist.

Yeah, yeah.

It's much more sterile.

I saw a tweet earlier on that I thought was pretty interesting.

The left's greatest enemy.

is not the right, but the hard left.

The right's greatest enemy is not the left, but the hard right.

The lunatics on your own side make you look much sillier than the opposition ever could.

Yeah.

Well, there's a problem, isn't there, at the moment, which is that

there seems to be more of an overlap between the left and the hard left, which doesn't exist to the same degree.

It does exist on the right, but not to the same degree.

So I think, I mean, I've made the case that I think the left has to really disavow the lunatics within its own house.

That's something they really, really need to do because I've been really shocked since this horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, seeing the extent of left-wing, mainstream left-wing voices attempting to justify it.

And I know that always happens.

You know, if you go back to the Brighton bombing at the Tory Party conference back in the early 80s, if you go back to the death of Margaret Thatcher, there were some people who were rejoicing in death and celebrating death.

So you always get a bit of that.

And it's always grotesquely unpleasant whenever you see it.

And

that track was number one, right?

I don't think it quite got to number one.

Oh, maybe it did.

The witch is dead.

The witch is dead.

yeah Yeah, yeah the one not hi ho it was ding dong you're confusing wizard of oz with uh with the the dwarves from snow white

and those two should be conflated in a mashup form and remixed i i think that should happen but go on but it is true that there's always that kind of thing but i didn't i've never seen the extent of it like there's thousands and thousands of them and why do you think that is because i think

Because I think there's too much of an eroded boundary between that far left and left.

You know, the mainstream left, just as the mainstream right, has a kind of responsibility to distance itself from the more egregious, crazy people on their own side, although they're not really on their side, but you know, on the further extremes of the political spectrum.

And if you don't do that, in the public imagination, the two become conflated.

What does distancing yourself look like?

It looks like saying, I don't agree when someone celebrates murder.

And who the hell is this to claim to represent my political position?

It's actually not that hard to do.

It's been very any movement.

I mean, look,

there was a clip of a trans pride protest in London where an activist stood up and shouted out, if you see a turf, punch them in the fucking face.

See a woman, so calling for violence.

Now, every movement, every protest has a few bad apples, right?

If I saw that, I wouldn't really think much of it.

What I reacted to was the crowd.

cheering and applauding that because what that tells you is that violence and violent rhetoric has been normalized within the trans activist community Right?

Because if I was at a parade of something that I really supported, some cause I really cared about, and I was at a protest and someone stood up and called for violence, I'd be like, who's that?

Can we get him off the stage?

This doesn't represent us.

I wouldn't be cheering along.

And I'd be incredibly disturbed if I saw supposed allies cheering that kind of thing.

You'd do something about it, wouldn't you?

So that's all I mean by that.

And I think the the tweet that you quoted, I presume, is alluding to this idea that, you know, increasingly there is a tolerance, if not support, but there's certainly a tolerance for the most extreme forms of violent rhetoric on the left, by the mainstream left.

And you can see that, by the way, that mainstream commentators are throwing the word fascist around and the word Nazi around, which is so dangerous.

And more than anything, it's historically illiterate.

They don't know what the word means.

What it's come to mean is a kind of catch-all.

to dehumanize,

to say, this person isn't really human.

They are a kind of embodiment of evil.

It diabolizes them.

And that's the effect of it.

And I think that's a very dangerous thing to do.

And you're seeing that really on the mainstream.

I saw this YouGov poll talking about the difference between

people on the left using violence to achieve their political goals versus those who don't.

And it seems like younger liberal Americans

are worryingly close to saying that actually, yeah,

it

can sometimes be justified.

25% of very liberals say that violence can sometimes be justified in order to achieve political goals.

Is this the FHIR

study?

There was a study by FHIR,

the free speech organization in America, which only came out four or five days ago.

And I think

this is from September 10th.

So I think it's even worse than you think.

The statistics quoted in that are really chilling.

It suggests a high propensity towards the tolerance or, I suppose, excuse-making for violence.

The idea that a speaker on campus who is espousing views you don't agree with is making you unsafe and therefore they deserve some kind of physical intervention, either a punch or, God forbid, even further, an act of assassination.

What's very disturbing, though, about that study is that the trend seems to be increasing on the right as well among young conservatives.

They're catching up.

Now, it's always been the case, according to the fire studies, that the,

it's the foundation for individual,

well, it used to be the foundation for individual rights in education, and they changed the meaning of the acronym so that it's more broad.

They kept the acronym.

They kept the acronym, but changed.

Now,

it doesn't.

Well, Greg Lukianov, who's in charge of it, is going to hate me for not knowing the new

words.

But it's still a free speech organization, but it's more...

I think what they realized is it's not just about campus.

We have to be there to protect free speech for everyone.

They're non-partisan.

They're not left or right.

They're just free speech for absolutely everyone.

And the last study was saying that, you know, whereas you've had leftist tolerance on university campus forever, it's always been the case that there's been more of a tolerance for violence, but the right is catching up.

In other words, this idea that we are becoming so tribal now.

that if you if someone disagrees with you, it is now widely taken to be a kind of attack.

And I know I've looked into studies on this.

Apparently, it's fairly natural for people when you disagree with them to take it.

Your instinct is to take it as an attack.

But that is amplified when your sense of identity is connected to a political viewpoint.

You know, because you're not, you know, if

your whole identity is wrapped up with a particular politics and someone says your politics is wrong, they're saying that you're wrong.

They're saying that you're rotten.

There's something about you that is that is bad.

And I think that's what's happened.

And actually, what Charlie Kirk was doing was exactly what we need to do.

As in, you go into the lion's den, you go to speak to people who fundamentally disagree with you and you let them speak and you give them a platform and you engage in discussion.

And that's why I think this particular murder, because political violence does happen from time to time and always has.

There's nothing new about that.

There is something so

horrific about this particular one because what what he was doing was so noble, was so much the right thing to be doing.

It feels like an attack on free speech itself, as well as being an attack, of course, on a poor, innocent man.

Question: Yes.

Do you think that the story or the reaction of Trump being shot if his head had been two inches to the right

a year ago would have been

as horrific as Charlie's was?

The reason I ask

is

there's a little bit of a sense that, sort of, well, Trump had it coming because he's the guy at the top.

He's said all of these things, he's done all of these things.

Charlie, the sort of post-mortem

roundup of

a variety of clips, some of which seem to be taken out of context, some of which seem to be him not saying what he actually said.

Yeah.

Are this sort of evidence searching to justify?

well, maybe it's not as egregious as you actually thought, as if any amount of words somehow justifies a bullet.

Well, I mean, first things first, the caveat always has to be that political violence should be considered an oxymoron.

Those two things, those two words shouldn't go together.

The reason you have the politics is to avoid the violence.

Quite.

So had Trump been killed in that assassination attempt, it would have been a human tragedy.

All political violence, all violence is a, you know, I can't endorse any of it.

But you're right to identify that it wouldn't have had the, I mean, it would have had a major impact.

It would have been seismic.

Of course it would.

But Charlie Kirk was not a politician.

He had robust political views, which he expressed, but he had no political clout.

And I think that's why it hits people harder, because he was effectively punished for his opinion.

And whatever you think about that opinion, the first thing you should be able to say as just a human being is that was.

utterly immoral, grotesque, and evil.

That's the first thing you should, you know, all of this cherry picking.

Let me find some quotations to say that he was a horrible person.

It is a way of justifying what happened, you know, I think.

One of the things that I saw that I'd be interested to get your take on, a lot of the

really well-meaning

apologies,

I don't know what you would say, like a tribute, I suppose, like a little tribute tweet or whatever.

Cheng Yuga did one, you know, people from the left that did that.

There was always a caveat in there.

Although I didn't agree with his positions, I would condemn and do all of the things.

And you're like, hey, that's nice.

I'm not sure.

I'm totally open to being wrong.

I don't know if the same amount of hand-wringing would need to be done if somebody on the left had been shot and people on the right were giving their tribute.

Yes.

I suppose it depends how you look at it.

I mean, there's been a lot of criticism of that, hasn't there?

Why'd you have to say that you disagreed with him?

Because the fundamental point is it's wrong, and you should say that it's wrong, right?

It's to protect yourself, I think, from being seen as

not having sufficient fealty to your own side because the purity spiral that exists within the left is not the same as it is in the right.

So possibly that.

But in addition to that, it could be something else.

Ezra Klein, for example, writes this article saying that he's grieving for, mourning for Charlie Kirk.

He gets piled on by the left.

Then he writes another article and doubles down and says, no, you're wrong.

And you're wrong to pile pile on me.

I am mourning for him as a human being as well.

And he makes the point that he disagreed with virtually everything that Charlie Kirk said.

But I don't think that is an attempt to appease his side.

I mean, that shows he wasn't interested in appeasing his side.

He's saying what he believes.

It could be, and maybe this is a positive.

It could be someone trying to say that,

trying to critique, I suppose, the very idea that it should make a difference if you agree or not.

You know, if someone, if someone who disagrees...

Very meta way to look at it, but yeah.

Well, it does make sense, doesn't it?

You know, you're You're standing up for the liberal principle, which is that nobody should be silenced with violence according to their point of view.

And it's very easy that, you know, people who agree with what he said to say that.

But actually, it's quite powerful when someone who doesn't comes out.

It's more powerful when someone from the left says it.

And so in order to do that, you have to make clear that you don't agree.

So it depends.

I mean, look, there could be all sorts of motivations.

I don't know.

I don't want to bombard people too much or be too harsh on them for making the point that they disagreed.

I think it can have a positive effect.

What I do take exception to is the people who either misrepresent what he said in order to attack him, which has been happening an awful lot, out-of-context clips, like you said, or not doing the basic research.

I mean, one of the big issues is we're dealing with a folk devil.

It isn't really Charlie Kirk they hate because they haven't watched anything.

that he's ever said and they haven't really engaged.

They've seen a few out of context clips.

It's the monster of their imagination that they've collectively created.

And that's why out-of-context clips work, because of course it acts as confirmation bias.

They see it.

They think, oh, yeah, that tallies with the monster in my head.

So that's great.

And you see it all along.

You know, people like Aleister Campbell, who went online and said that Charlie Kirk supported stoning gay people to death.

Now, I tweeted that clip out and said, this is categorically wrong.

And he did apologize.

I must be the only person ever to get an apology out of Aleister Campbell.

That is an achievement.

But he should have taken the effort to look into that because it's an incredibly severe accusation.

And he should know better.

You should be damn sure

that someone's actually said something like that before you say it.

And of course, what he was saying, what Charlie Kirk was saying in the original clip, is he was critiquing an organizer of a pride event who had quoted a book from the Old Testament in support of pride, about love and about compassion.

And he was making the point that...

The same book of the Bible also says that you should stone gay people to death.

So he was critiquing the idea of cherry-picking scripture for your own political agenda.

That was the point.

You know, similarly, we've had this thing about, oh, well, he supported the Second Amendment.

He said that

some deaths, because of any country that has guns will have some deaths, that that was a price worth paying for the Second Amendment.

That doesn't mean he was saying that everyone who is killed by guns, that's justifiable.

I mean, that's an incredible leap.

And in the same clip, he makes the clear point.

He says, look, 50,000 people a year die from car accidents.

and we all collectively accept that as a cost for the convenience of getting to our destination quicker so anyone who has a car implicitly supports charlie kirk's view on the second amendment it makes him an incredible hypocrite if they have a car but they're saying because actually we could all abandon our cars and save 50 000 lives a year we don't

I actually think we should all move to Waymos and driverless cars because that would reduce that fatality rate by 95% or something like that.

But nevertheless,

you know, so that's that's an example of someone taking something you said out of context using it to justify the murder i mean this stuff is it's hobgoblin like behavior it is incredibly low you seem pretty lit up by the the response to the charlie thing it's bothered me yeah it's really bothered me because it's been relentless and it's just inhumane i have this naive faith in humanity and I always think the best of people.

And I always assume that if you present the arguments, people are going to come around to it.

Or I also assume that people who disagree with me aren't doing so from a place of malevolence.

But this is malevolence and it's explicit malevolence.

And that's sort of shaken me a bit.

Yeah, it's bothered me.

You're very good at detecting that.

You're like a psychotherapist.

You've worked it out.

You're going to tease it out of me.

You weren't exactly subtle, but no, that's true.

I was talking to a friend the day after it happened.

I saw...

I saw the two videos

about it.

And

one of them is seared into my fucking hippocampus for the rest of time.

Like I'm just never going to be able to forget that scene.

Yeah.

And I spoke to a friend and I was like, mate, can you tell me

how easy or difficult this shot would be to take from this place?

He's a military guy and he's got expertise and stuff.

And he's been in and around the administration for a while.

And I just texted him and he rang me.

And he gave me a sort of a five-minute breakdown.

Interesting bit of info that I don't know if it's come out yet, still now.

According to him, Charlie wasn't shot in the neck.

Charlie was shot in the chest.

He's wearing a steel plate, and the bullet hits him in the chest and ricochets up into his throat.

Right.

So the reason that you wear steel as opposed to like a big puffy thing is that you can wear it underneath a shirt.

Okay.

And you can't tell that you're wearing it.

The disadvantage is that it doesn't absorb bullets, pings them off.

Right.

And the justification for that is: well, if you take the 360 degrees that it could come off at, or whatever it is, 180 degrees,

there's only 96.5% of them are non-fatal.

Okay.

So if it hits you in the leg, if it hits you in the arm, if it hits you in the hand, it's like you're okay, but at least it didn't go through your chest.

Yes.

But yeah, he first made that point and then immediately followed it up by saying that guy was probably going to be the future president of the United States.

The highest following among young conservative, you know, I don't know whether you saw, I don't know if this is true.

Stephen Crowder changed his bio on X from the day before to the day after, saying it was the number two conservative show in America to the number one conservative show in America.

Is that right?

This was either a doctored image, in which case I've done gun fallen for it.

Yeah.

Or.

some

timely bio updating, which we're probably going to get onto in other regards later on as well.

but

even if it wasn't the current president of the united states maybe it was someone that was going to shape the sort of future of american politics no doubt i mean he was if you watch those videos of him engaging with people i mean he is brilliant at it and he didn't always used to be i mean i remember seeing videos of him in fact seeing him live uh many many years ago and

you know he he wasn't as accomplished a debater he was getting better and better and better you know and he the thing that he'd learned brilliantly was to hear people out, to let them speak, to let them make their point, not to keep interjecting and getting angry at them, to sort of take the emotion out of it as best he could, even though obviously he was very passionate about what he believed.

And

that was so effective.

I think that's one of the reasons he was so hated, because

he had realized that the best way for bad ideas to disperse is to hear them.

And so he would allow people to express exactly what they because they would damn themselves with some of the ridiculous ridiculous logic.

And he was a fantastic communicator.

And

obviously,

there was every possibility he would have become an elected politician.

And yeah, he had that sort of caliber.

That's true.

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The last few months, there seems to have been sort of an increase in conversations around trans ideology, progressivism, woke stuff,

ratcheting up how real world the implications of

that being more inflammatory has been.

Shooters, shell casings.

It seems like the guy that shot Charlie Kirk was in a relationship with a trans person, trans roommate, and had

said that

hateful comments, dad was MAGA, had brought it up to the dad over the dinner table that he was hateful and that his comments about blah, blah, blah.

Does this comport with your perspective that woke is dying?

Well,

I know why you're saying this because I wrote a book called The End of Woke.

But as you know, I think you've read it.

You know that I'm not saying it's all over.

Let's have a party and go home.

What I'm saying is that too much has happened at this point

for it to ever have the power that it once had and in other words the process of its decline has very much begun we know this from the stats the the economist did a report into wokeness support for wokeness was at its height in 2020 around the summer of george floyd and has been declining ever since we've had some major seismic changes in the world that that can never be reversed we've had the cash review in the uk which is a study into gender affirming care for children which has uh exposed this idea that that that is in any way appropriate or effective and that puberty blockers are potentially very dangerous and unevidenced.

That's changed everything because you've had the Tavistock clinic closed as a result of that.

So the very notion of gender identity ideology has been damaged and dented in a way that it won't be able to recover from.

Similarly, you've had the Supreme Court in the UK ruling that biological sex is a thing and is protected in equality law.

That's been absolutely huge as well.

You've had DEI programmes in various various companies and corporations rolled back, even in things like McDonald's and Walmart and Facebook, Meta, you know.

So these big, big names, they're just getting rid of it because they know that it doesn't, well, actually, it's not only not effective, it can actually ramp up racism in the workplace, according to studies.

So it's a really bad idea and always was, but that's all been stripped away.

So all of this stuff is happening.

You've got Trump's election, you've got various sporting bodies.

talking about

basically saying men cannot compete in women's sports.

Now, what happens then?

I mean, I make the case in the book that wokeness was simply the latest manifestation of authoritarianism, which is a natural impulse to humankind.

And it emerges from the left and the right and everywhere in between throughout history in various forms, in various guises.

This is just the latest form, right?

And it will emerge again.

And so the point I'm making is, yes, wokeness is on its way out, but what replaces it could be just as bad.

We're bound to get another form of authoritarianism at some point.

But I think absolutely what we call wokeness is dying, but it could be a long death and it could be years and years and years before it dissipates because it has such a stranglehold, particularly in universities and particularly less so now in corporations because it's being rolled back, but in government departments, in quangos, in the UK, we have a quango called the College of Policing.

A Quango is a non-governmental organisation that effectively takes the government in trusts to run an aspect of society.

So for instance,

the College of Policing is a Quango because it directs and trains police in England and Wales, writes the guidelines for them, but it's not an elected body, right?

It comes up with this sort of stuff itself.

And they are activists captured.

They are captured by gender identity ideology, which is why police in the UK tend to turn up at your door if you say that men and women are different.

And so my point, just to finish my point about

the decline it woke, is that I think what will also happen is that the ideologues, because it's a kind of pseudo-religion, they will become more defensive and more aggressive and more extreme in the way that a cornered rat lashes out in a more extreme way than it ever has before, hence the extreme violence that we're seeing.

Do you think that these two things are correlated?

The decline of sort of widespread acceptance and this sort of pullback in terms of

the trajectory going in the right direction for people who believe this thing and the increased sort of kinetic real-world implications of it.

Well, I don't know for sure.

I think what I could always say, you know, we know that the genderist movement has always endorsed violence.

Violence and violent rhetoric has been completely normalized in that movement.

There's a website called Turf is a Slur, which collects thousands of screenshots of activists basically saying they want to kill, rape, and torture women who believe that there are two sexes.

It's very, very normalized, which is why J.K.

Rowling is continually

inundated with rape and death threats.

She said she gets so many, she could paper the house house with them.

And that's a big house.

That's Jacob's office.

Right.

So this is,

it's a real problem.

But so in a way, if this latest murder is connected to genderist ideology, which I suspect it might be, but I don't know, if it is connected to that, that just makes sense.

That is a continuation of

what that community of activists have.

created.

But on the other hand, it's also the most extreme reaction, isn't it?

And I suspect that, I mean, violence comes about when when you've lost the debate violence comes about when language doesn't work anymore and so therefore you know as wokeness because wokeness could never work it was only ever i mean what the more in common study into this says that uh the woke belief system was only ever endorsed by between eight and ten percent of the population even at its height which means it was always a minority view and it it was imposed on society from a from the top down.

It was never accepted by people.

People just went along with it because they were terrified of the key players.

It was actually predominantly an upper middle class movement.

It was pushed by the elites.

It never caught on in working class communities.

Working class people don't care about what your pronouns are.

They care about feeding their kids.

Now, that means that this is, from the start, was always an authoritarian movement.

It was always an imposition of values that people didn't accept or believe in, right?

You saw recently, what was it, Malcolm Gladwell talking about how he was on a panel and he lied about his position on gender ideology.

Now, I don't think he should have lied.

I think if more of us had said the truth, we would have got out of this sooner.

But he was probably terrified.

I mean, you've seen the way the activists behave.

They're terrifying.

And that's why any organization or corporation or body which goes woke, it doesn't take many.

It takes one or two, a handful of activists within that corporation to shift it.

And once

a body becomes woke, it forgets about its key point.

and becomes merely a conduit for the ideology.

Have you tried to, or have you managed to break down what makes it such a

effectively reproducing meme?

Like, what was it?

What are the component parts of this that allowed a single individual within a department to

well, it's not to do with the ideas being robust, is it?

I mean, it's all based on fantasy.

We don't have a gendered soul that can be misaligned with our body.

That's not a thing.

And if you want to reorganize society on the basis of that pseudo-religious belief system, you better find some evidence for it, hadn't you?

I mean, isn't it crazy that Jackie Smith, who's the government's representative spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, is asked, what is the government's working definition of gender identity?

And she can't answer the question.

She doesn't know what it is, but the government imposes various policies on the basis of something they cannot define.

So this is not something that can be sustained through debate, and they know that.

And that's why you get violence.

That's why Stonewall, which used to be the foremost gay rights charity in the country, pivoted into gender ideology and suddenly said, no debate.

That was their mantra, no debate.

We don't discuss this anymore.

You just go along with it.

Because there is no situation where the woke ideas could be debated and come out on top.

It's not possible because they are all based on absolute nonsense.

So it was never going to be able to be sustained.

So then your question is, well, why is it then that a nonsensical view can become the mainstream?

That again happens throughout history when...

Give me some examples.

Well, the Inquisition did pretty well I would say that if you're if you're going to be strapped to a rack and tortured if you don't accept the creed you might do it now I don't think the uh the woker they don't they're not strapping people to the rack but uh if they could burn people at the stake I think they would they certainly express the rhetoric to imply that they want to commit physical harm and they certainly can ruin and destroy your lives they've got a pretty good reputation at that they developed this system of council culture they can destroy everything that you've ever built for for no other reason than they disagree with you and they've done it many many times I mean, the number of the list of casualties of cancer culture are now mountainous.

They're Himalayan.

And yet they still, the practitioners, the practitioners of it will still say it doesn't exist.

Well, that's convenient, isn't it?

Yeah, it happens all the time.

It's intimidation.

I mean, it's not about

some ideas spread because they're good ideas.

Some ideas spread because people are too scared to disagree.

That's what's happened here, right?

So is it the enforcement mechanism?

was a big part of it.

Yeah, huge.

It seems like something to do with sort of

weaponized empathy this sort of lifting up of a of a maligned underprivileged group

okay you've hit on something really interesting there okay because i think it is a combination of these

well you do and and successfully

there is a an element of the uh

how can we put it the intimidatory it's a it's a movement that attracts bullies and sociopaths Right, because if you are a sociopath or a psychopath even and you want to inflict as much pain on other people This is the perfect movement for you because you can do it, but you do it under the guise of compassion and love.

Perfect, right?

That's of course you do it.

They're like a modern day clergy.

They can do, they can do whatever they want.

I mean, it's a bit like

if you were a psychopath in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, you would join a paramilitary group and 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.

But 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...

to do whatever they want and be praised for it, right?

So 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 gold

people who've been gold into believing the redefinitions of words i mean look in 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 Kathy Burke.

They 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 gold 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?

Do 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.

It's the Mott and Bailey type thing.

It's the Mott and Bailey, exactly.

The culture war 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.

That'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 when they're, you know, you know this.

They say they're liberal.

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.

You know, 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.

They are, it'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.

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Yeah, I think

most of the culture 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.

I 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 although i have to say the deep branding 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 which of course is it's a it's a rhetorical trick Antifa is a very good example, but of course Antifa is a concept.

Antifascism 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.

Like

that 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.

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 anti-fascism, who has written a book, very well-written book, outlining the background to the history of anti-fascism,

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.

These 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, they're missing, 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 supports.

And that would be...

aligned with if there is a speaker on campus who is saying something they're right okay and that's not to say that everyone who 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 Paiker

lecture or whatever?

I fear it might be coming, but I haven't seen it yet.

Right, okay.

So, I mean, this is, this has sort of always been the 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.

I'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.

I know what you mean.

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 noise.

Not the left, actually, like progressives.

I think the left, the left now, at least as far as I can see, the Kyle Kalinskies 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.

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 going to do?

The fucking trans guy, like, the trans guy is the one that you worry, oh, he's going to 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 asses 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 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.

Now, 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 like 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.

Yeah.

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.

Like 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've 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.

And 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 analysing the figures and showing that if you just extend the parameters by a year, it flips.

Or at least the difference dissipates entirely.

Bringing it up to the present day.

Because political violence is so rare.

Right.

Okay.

You're talking with such tiny numbers.

Exactly.

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.

Because 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 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

It is true and observably true that we're not seeing that on the right in that way.

There isn't that tendency, I suppose.

but as you say, if they ever did, we would be in a very bad situation.

How long Charlottesville was reverberated, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Uh, 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.

I don't, because you've been drinking

tasty carbonated hydrating beverages, free drinks, yeah, and my bladder is as a limited capacity.

This is the sort of you came to my house first, yes, it was cozy, but uh, wholly underhydrated, yes.

And now, this doesn't need to be part of the podcast, like you don't need to film me doing it unless you're all about the naturalism.

I am, and and okay, then let's go then.

I'm following.

Come with me, I've got the zoom lens, all right.

We're needing,

oh, of course, I think I wasn't getting uncomfortable with the questioning.

Okay.

Alrighty.

I said, are people concerned about the

fucking greater rebound off the wall?

I mean,

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 bad.

I mean, 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.

And I think that's what a lot of people are feeling like, because they've bought into the rhetoric, they're bought into the language.

Well, again, this is people doing good, thinking they're doing good.

Look,

you're straight back on the fluids.

You just come.

Am I not allowed to drink that fluid?

Of course you are.

No, no, yeah, that's, 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.

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.

The first conversation we knew 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.

Yes.

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.

Yeah, I know.

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.

Sure.

But

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,

that the aftershock that's happened from

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.

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.

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 falsehood wins.

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 is sterilizing young people for no reason other than ideology,

destroying women's rights, destroying gay rights, rehabilitating racism.

Actually, 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, I.

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.

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 have written books about other things, about literature, or, you know,

create other things, go back to writing scripts and comedy.

Yeah.

Okay, I want to do

take a slightly different tack than we've had in previous conversations.

Can 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.

It's, you know, which obviously, as you know, started as a legal discipline.

We 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 in my voice as a critical race theorist to study these various degrees.

You need queer theorists, you need people like Robin DiAngelo studying whiteness so that we have...

Is 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 these and 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 D'Angelo 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.

The 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 the, 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 Steelman 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, which, 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 steelman 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.

Yeah.

And 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.

And 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 counsel culture.

The only people who were able to resist cancel culture were the uncancellable billionaires, millionaires.

It also arranged a system whereby 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, retraining, reprogramming.

And if they objected,

they would probably be fired or disciplined.

And the woke would side with the multi-billion dollar corporations over the workers.

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 left.

I understand that its origins are in the left.

I completely get that,

philosophically speaking.

I understand.

But it's a perversion of Marxism.

It's a perversion of those original ideas.

So if I were a left-wing campaigner, 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.

On 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.

Okay, well, 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 distance.

Okay.

And is he online?

Is that the...

Yeah, he's on YouTube a lot.

He's got an honorary doctorate from a U, U, R, U R, C S, or whatever it's called, recently, wherever Louise Perry went.

And he debated Daniel Priestley, and he talks a lot about economic inequality, lots and lots and lots.

Well, I apologize to Gary for not knowing who 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

does it tally with what I'm saying?

Yeah, 100%.

I haven't, I mean, he's certainly left of center, massively.

So

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 fucking gender, you know, any of this stuff.

But he is hard in the paint on wealth tax, millionaires and billionaires, working people,

cost of living crisis, housing, like really fucking.

Yeah, well, that's great.

I mean, that's not to say that the super rich can't be left-wing.

I mean, if you 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, which is 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 PG Woodhouse novel.

And it's so strange here.

It's like, it's like I've dressed up and made it a satirical character, and I'm doing it.

You 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.

So, you know, when a movement is so dominated by the upper middle classes, 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 earlier 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 mega markle and the and a 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 eh 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 Brexit.

You know, all of a sudden, Brexit, it 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 on?

This is not...

Why are you 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 Labour manifesto in the early 80s, 82 explicitly said, we're coming out of the EEC.

Like Tony Benn, 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.

Left wingers understood and always understood that the EU was a fundamentally right-wing body.

How does environmentalism fold into the woke movement?

Well, 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.

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 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, it'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.

It's the best way to get...

What is it?

What's that stuff?

Like

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.

Pickled cabbage.

I don't want that.

You don't want to be swigging that in the morning.

I want yogurt.

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.

Kafir.

Now, I would say, personally, I I would support Greta Tunberg if she came out doused in Kafir 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 to the 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.

Yeah.

But 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.

Yeah.

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 balloon, a 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 is real wealth.

Right.

Time rich.

So time rich that I might not even arrive.

What was Greta Thunberg's vehicle?

Flotilla.

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, wasn't he?

He had a bit of a Geordie accent.

Did he?

Yeah, which is

I can't remember suspicious of him ever since 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 uh you know maybe they maybe environmentalists have a case right my point is it actually doesn't matter about the the details of the belief it's one of the approved beliefs within the intersectional uh

you know it's it's that it's the hydra the woke hydra if you imagine a a beast with many heads there's there's a queer theory head genderist head there's a race a BLM head, there's an environmental head, you know,

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,

two heads.

So one, yeah, let's not take the analogy too far.

But what I would say is, yeah, I mean, that's the case.

I 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.

You think for yourself hard.

It's the hardest, right?

Someone explained 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 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?

Because thinking is one of the hardest things.

It's so hard to.

You know, when you read something and you think, oh,

that's making me think in a different way.

A lot of people people just throw the book away at that point.

But what we should be cultivating, this is why in my book, I go on about with the chapter on education, because we should be instilling this idea that that's the best thing.

Like when you to challenge your certainties, you know, I just saw a tweet before I came in to see you about a university professor saying, one of my students is telling me that Queen Elizabeth I was trans.

And the slightest, gentlest pushback saying, what's your evidence for that could result in a complaint to HR.

So I'm scared to do so.

But that's an example.

A 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 with not a shred of evidence and a slight pushback will throw the whole world into some sort of tail.

The correction mechanism isn't there anymore.

What is Queen Elizabeth I was not trans, Coin?

Okay, do you know that for sure?

Okay.

You don't know how she identifies.

I can tell you it wasn't they then pronouns.

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I am interested in what's happening with the gays.

I'm very

interested, yeah.

You're coming over to our side.

Not yet.

Okay, no, well, just know.

Although the internet has had its rumors for a while, this is a funny one.

So, Spotify

miscaptioned

a sentence that I said on Rogan

a year and a half ago.

And I said, so me and my housemate, sometimes on an afternoon, we watch videos of motocross.

What a blah blah blah.

And it captioned it.

It must use AI and try to do it in context.

And 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

afternoon.

And uh, I got the number of um screenshots that went around of see tell you who I knew, knew he was always knew he was batting for the other side.

Here it is, here's the irrefutable proof.

I'm like, first off, if it was irrefutable proof, I haven't exactly been hiding it very well by sitting on the biggest podcast in the world.

Secondly, I was watching Motocross, that's the least gay thing that we can think of.

Anyway, 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've 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 who are 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.

If 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, people of the opposite sex who happen to identify into your sex, 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.

Well, me and my husband.

Your husband knows about it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Well, you know, this is a gay hookup app.

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.

I'm not on the app, by the way.

I should just emphasize that.

I imagine Grinder to me seems like

sort of the German engineering of the dating apps, there's no, there can't be much messing about on there.

No, of course not.

Right.

But this seems to really get in the way.

This seems antithetical to the philosophy, the underlying principle of Grinder.

Quite.

Again, I must, I need to reiterate that I'm not intimately familiar with this.

The lady doth protest.

Whatever.

No, no, of course.

Okay.

Yeah, you're right.

On the website, on Grindr's website, it actually says, we are not allowing you, you can filter for all sorts of preferences.

Height, weight, whatever, age.

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.

There'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 organisation of any worth in the UK,

had a conference last year where a group of genderist activists released cockroaches and 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 at 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.

When 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 particularly.

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 drag sexualized drag queen performances for kids.

But 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.

And that's why gay people really have to overtly and vocally reject the forced teaming with the QIA plus stuff.

There isn't a massive amount in common.

There's nothing in common.

The idea of sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity.

Gender identity is 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 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 believing.

Surely, I mean, look,

as far as I'm aware, from my exclusively outside of the tent position,

when it comes to the

meat and potatoes of what's going on in 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 cut.

You made the point earlier on as sort of a luxury beliefs type position, right?

That 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 Gs and the L's and the Bs, that the Gs 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 Grinder 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.

And that is...

given how important the genitals are,

that is a price.

You're really putting your money where your mouth is with that yeah has 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 mean wow that's that's tough that's not an easy thing to do

um

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.

That 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 how easy it is.

You see, 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 Grindr, 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 really exploitative, isn't it?

Because it's Jesus Christ.

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 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 like women in here who've had their breasts removed who think they're men.

And,

you know, I hate to put it crudely.

Crude in the corner.

I hate to put it crudely.

It's a boner killer.

Like

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 that they must, same reason for lesbian.

Lesbians.

Lesbians don't, they're not misandress 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's 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

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.

And 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 the 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

we

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?

Well, 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, I kind of get the most.

And the reason for that is the sex act is so powerful,

it's so potent.

And there is a disgust response with sexual activity that

you don't like, right?

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, et cetera.

Ugh, you know?

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.

And I think a lot of parents are.

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 conscious prejudice.

Yeah, I don't think it, in a lot of cases, it's just...

Like saying I'm like cockroachophobic.

Right.

Right.

Not to make the comparison.

But then on the other hand, words are fluid.

Like 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, you know, because words evolve and all the rest of it.

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.

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.

So I would say,

coming back to that disgust 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, same 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.

That was a joke among the staff.

Because they knew what they would do.

They knew that all these, all these boys that were suddenly turning up were camp gay boys.

They were going to grow up gay, or a lot of the girls just butch and would probably grow up to be gay themselves.

You know, significant.

Or not.

Or maybe not, right?

But we do know from Hannah Barnes' book on the subject that between 80 and 90%, 80 and 90% of the adolescents referred to the Tavistock were same-sex attracted.

So that's a...

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.

What the hell is going on?

I want to talk about sort of what's happening in the UK specifically with

this 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 sort of 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.

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.

It doesn't really know how to handle that, does it?

Doesn't handle it particularly well.

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.

The immigration issue, of course, is a very emotive one.

And it's difficult, therefore, to have these conversations about it.

There is a sense in which there is a conviction

among some woke activists that the idea of borders is not necessary.

There's also a kind of utopian belief that everyone around the world wants the same thing.

Every culture wants freedom.

Every culture wants...

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, right?

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.

I think there's been a real problem and misunderstanding of liberalism.

I 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.

It'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 gangs scandal was because of liberals, because they were too nice and tolerant.

The grooming gangs 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.

That'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 of liberal failure to be liberal not uh 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 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.

I think a lot of the time when people are criticizing liberalism, they're really criticizing, criticizing liberal 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 are you doing?

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.

I 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.

You 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.

Why don't they put their money where their mouth is?

Why don't they go to Gaza and Saudi Arabia and and set up at their Pride March?

Why don't they just do it?

And then you get on.

And then you test it.

And that's, you know, then you'll find out how

what a good idea that is.

You mentioned authoritarianism is the primary concern that you've got in all of its different manifestations.

Our

recent country of exit for both of us now, congratulations.

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.

I 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 girl?

The Southport killing.

Yes.

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 was a, there were riots.

But there were riots.

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.

I've been critical of the UK.

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, your stuff's hard.

Like here's there's a bit of advice or whatever it might be.

Really, really, really trying to do that.

And those, 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

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 this stuff.

They leave because the culture doesn't feel to be so positive to some.

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.

But they inherited a lot of it from the previous Conservative government.

This is my point.

Like this 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.

Well, Islam isn't a race.

So it's a 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.

And 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.

It's 30 a day.

That's more than any other country in the West, as far as I'm aware, 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 barring service checks if 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.

So 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 offence 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?

And 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 you up and saying, oh, I hear you're really healthy.

We need to talk about that.

It's absolutely insane.

And 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 that we need to change the name let'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 space, 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 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 are 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.

Authoritarianism.

Yeah.

How authoritarian is it?

Very.

And it's, and you know, you've had a vett cooper who's, you know, in the Labour government saying that she wants to ramp up non-crime hate incidents.

They're not interested.

No one in the Labour government is trying to, or has even suggested repealing hate speech speech laws.

Why 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 used, 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.

It 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 could 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.

You'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

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 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 mother and childminder who had posted online in the aftermath of those riots you mentioned after Southport.

She was very distressed.

She'd lost a 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 them 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

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.

This week, an influencer after Charlie Kirk's murder 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 commentators, kill them all.

She used the phrase twice.

The police said, oh, there's nothing to investigate here.

Why?

What's the difference between those two?

What do you think?

Well, ideological sland.

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 TERFs 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

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 investigated by the way.

I don't even think that should qualify as incitement to violence.

But 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 to 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.

And

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, that comes nowhere near the bar to 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 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 I'm almost sure if you were to look at hours

hours watched over the last six months to nine months of anything that's coming out of the UK,

it will

most of it will be American commentators doing reactions to protests, to those tours that people do where they say, I'm going to 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.

And 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.

It's 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 the Magna Carta, 1215.

The 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?

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, there are some people on the, particularly on the left in America, who are willfully pretending this isn't happening i mean i i wrote an article for the washington post where i outlined some of the more egregious examples of uh of uh british people being prosecuted and arrested for for their speech and the comment section was as 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 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.

But 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 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 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 police station.

My friend, Graham Linnehan, arrested.

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 it's great because I feel so creative again.

I've spent so many long, exactly what we were 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,

you know, Graham,

he gets a flight back to the UK.

And

you make a joke.

I did.

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 Gawler, who's a producer i used to work with at gb news who's now uh working with us at friendly fire studios and 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 blood high blood pressure um

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 palace.

I think that's where it is.

Yes.

And

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 an image of a trans rights protest.

And he said something like, you can smell it from here or something like that.

Something to do with the smell.

Not illegal, right?

Not illegal.

Another one was

he was talking about women, you know, 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 says,

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.

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 something to do with it.

It was something even more innocuous than that.

That one, the punch them in the balls, one, was the most extreme, apparently.

And so those three tweets ended up, he was in a cell, he was taken off, arrested.

One 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.

But 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.

Free Speech Union did get involved as they always do.

Thank God for what Toby's done, by the way.

I mean, mean, it's been a lifeline for so many people.

He's 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.

Doesn't look good.

Even Keir Starmer has to weigh 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.

It's great to read, where she says, says, maybe, Mr.

Rowley, you 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 crime, 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, a bit of a spicy tweet.

That joke that everybody in the UK is doing, which is saying, 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.

It sounds like a joke, but it's actually true.

If you say to the police, 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.

But just to get the police to do their fucking job.

So that, you know, 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 the U I know the US

seem to roll back some stuff to do with gender identity or become definitive?

What, UK, sorry?

Did the US did, didn't they?

Yes.

Well, there 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.

There's a a Supreme Court in the UK.

Yes, it was instituted by Tony Blair.

Okay.

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.

The 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.

And 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 interpreted the law, 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.

Now,

what would you do, though, if an activist judge had made that decision?

It would have been flipped.

How do we know this?

The former president of the Supreme Court was a woman called Baroness Hale.

And she said recently that she disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling.

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 dangerous.

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.

Now that's what's happening.

I'm getting all head up, aren't I?

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, more.

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're still, you've got the same demeanor whenever you get hit 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 like yes

is that not coming into contact with reality

people keep denying the law uh the scottish government are 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 they'll you know their ideology matters more than the law in the way that islamism same thing the 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.

Like it is going to be the case that they're going to have to be challenged in the courts and they will lose.

It's just going to take a hell of a lot, 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 so that's what that's what that ruling has done and that's um 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-edge 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 100,000 there or something.

And of course, it's somewhere somewhere in the middle.

You always have to assume.

But again, it's about narratives, isn't it?

People presenting different narratives.

Why not just tell us the truth?

For fuck's sake.

All of those people being smeared as far-right and racist, usual usual thing.

And of course, it's nowhere near true.

I'm not saying there aren't any racists there.

If you were a racist, it'd be a good place to be.

Sure, exactly.

Tiny minority, though, 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.

It's the same with Brexit.

During the Brexit debates, the media class were 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 going to be like, fuck you.

That's what swung it, I think.

I actually think the attempt 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 way?

Unite the Kingdom.

Unite the Kingdom, whatever it's called.

I mean, 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.

There's a

different races are there.

They closed the march with a black gospel choir singing.

Like, 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 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

we have to just get back to the primacy of truth, even truth that you don't want to acknowledge, right?

That's the thing.

And it's everywhere.

It's 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

the honeric, 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.

Okay.

Maybe British positive.

Let's go American positive.

Okay.

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, and there's all sorts of evidence for that.

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 cancel culture from the right.

You've seen,

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 employee 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.

But, you know, the Jimmy Kimmel thing is slightly more

complicated insofar as that decision, I believe, was made by ABC, the network, to act.

It's just been suspended, hasn't he?

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 that 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 like we

like we're just going to put the

push on it sounds like a business decision doesn't it uh it does it 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.

It's going to be a little bit more.

That'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 turn around, like we have dealt with it for long enough, therefore.

But 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.

Yeah.

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.

They're saying it wasn't that.

They'll never say that.

Well, it could be culpably denied.

Well, I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why.

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 this opportunity to get rid of the PL free card.

Yeah, because 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.

He says

people on the right are just bending over backwards to try and pretend that the shooter wasn't MAGA.

The phrasing, if you look at it, looks pretty unequivocal that he's saying the shooter was.

went.

And that's false.

That's factually wrong.

It might be a mistake, an honest mistake, but 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 apologise, this was incorrect.

What I suspect, so Kim Ork should be held to those standards as well.

What I suspect should have happened is he should have apologised and said, this was factually wrong.

I got this wrong.

Not apologise 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.

Even if I find it offensive or upsetting, I think we have to retain that.

Now,

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.

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 is being 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.

so 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?

Contact?

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 with your, who have different political views than you ought to be killed?

Well, I think you've disqualified yourself from your job.

Let's say the example of the president, the president-elect of Oxford Union, 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.

And,

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 and being fired for it is cancel culture.

When I was a teacher, if I'd have looked at the national curriculum, what I've signed up voluntarily, contractually obliged to teach, if I'd have 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.

I don't know.

And then they call 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 that, 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.

But this is a man with no, 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, like the woman who was

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 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.

I don't think she should be fired.

I think that's cancel culture.

So again, like there's no set rules.

You need to understand the nuances of this.

I've seen a trend online, mostly around the Charlie Cook 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.

And one of the first things that I've seen now is a

trend of people.

Oh, 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, yeah.

He's like the sort of peak autist of Twitter.

Anyway,

he was the particular 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 they're 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 outsize panopticon thing go on where everybody else gets to see this unfold and then all of the subsequent replies are in there.

And that feels like it feels like cancel culture in action.

Some people 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 steelman 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, we're, you know, still kind of in the aftershock of this event happening, and there's replete with opportunities for this to happen, people to tweet stupid things, people to cite them, people to get them fired, so on and so forth.

But that is a, 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.

It's that you have to be consistent on this because

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

that disqualify you from certain roles in society.

That shouldn't be a controversial point.

Okay, when Rachel Dolezal was discovered, you know, she was the president of a chapter of the NAACP,

the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

When she was outed as white,

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

a civil rights group to advance the rights of black people isn't best run by a white woman.

Are you allowed to say coloured people now?

Well, it's an older because the organization goes back a long way.

I thought people of colour.

No, I actually thought people of color had been dispensed with when we were back to...

Oh, is that right?

Well, I can't keep up.

I mean, because it was coloured people, then people of colour.

I can't see the distinction between those two, but apparently one's really offensive and one isn't.

But the NAACP predates the language shift, and it can't change its acronym because that's going to get too complicated.

So it just...

It's fire all over again.

Except fire didn't change the acronym, they just changed the the meaning.

Yeah, yeah.

But 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 of 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 rabid, I don't know.

I don't know.

Say I'm

a pagan deity worshipper that every morning I get down on my feet and I sacrifice a goat.

And I do

because I want to appease the spirit of fertility,

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.

I 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 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

demonstration of sort of some of the weird quirks of human psychology and how we're able to deal with discomfort and pressure.

And 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 tortured 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 him.

And

I can't.

I can't.

And there's something about

our actions

being

the

creator of discomfort or restriction in somebody else.

that is this sort of weird speed run 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.

Empathy as well, probably.

And the reverse is being used when you apply pressure to the employer of the person who said the thing, 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 in some way impinges on her ability to scan your pro.

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, it 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?

There's this sort of stratified out, like the rich people are supposed to have a great ascend.

You know what I mean?

There's like that, it doesn't still doesn't affect his ability to be the COO 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 that the things that you write in public reflect 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.

It 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

I think we just have to clarify what we mean by cancer 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 think it's

to me, it's a no-brainer, but I

do get frustrated at the amount of times I explain this.

And I think people, because for instance, if I say a certain person isn't qualified to do a job anymore, they say, well, that's cancer culture.

I thought you were for free speech, etc.

And then you know, you got to do this same dance all over again.

You've got to do the same explanation again.

And, um, but the principle, as I say, 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 an 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.

But

yeah, there's something in our Telegram or Signal or WhatsApp or iMessage or Twitter DMs or fucking

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.

What

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 you you know what?

I had three buckets of coffee before I came here.

Yeah.

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 not that I want some time to think about that answer.

It is a great question, though.

It is a great question.

All right.

Right.

Shall we back?

I've got the question about hair.

Oh, beautiful.

So I said.

So porous.

That's a yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is, you know, they talk about drinking like a camel.

Like, this is bladdering like a podcaster.

Yeah.

Well, run it.

Keep it going shall i just stop there's a no keep going i love this is this is um it's doing something to my brain is that the point it's the point oh my god this is the point you've been conned by me uh

both sides fucking spit roasting human centipede of why are people pointing the finger 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 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.

But 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 perceived me as someone who came from their own tribe.

It's why, to go back to Northern Ireland, it's why touts, informers, people from their own side were always more viciously treated.

You can be as a rat.

Yeah, they were the ones they tortured and brutalized more than the UDA or the UFF or the other side the UVF or whatever

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 been 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

But I think that's the purity spiral is something we should resist.

The expectation that someone on your side, quote-unquote side,

should agree with every last point.

That terrifies me.

I mean, there's a moment in the book where I talk about 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 sort of part of it.

There was a fun to it.

I don't know if those, 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 with me on this or this and this, it's 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.

Tantrums, tantrumizing, which is not a word, I'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

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.

And 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.

We'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 not, of course.

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 the equivalent of it.

Although Notes from Underground is the shortest of his books.

That's true.

You can do it in a day.

Yeah.

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 and

I didn't let you finish it.

All right, it's high-velocity stuff.

let's 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 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 naresbrook do you know naresbro i do yeah go to naresborough 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 see, visit her cave.

Does it give you,

do you get the gift of prescience by going there or what?

I didn't.

Right.

Well, we'll see.

We'll see what you can do now and then compare it in 12 months' time.

By the way, just to say,

there's a well.

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.

And it has certain chemicals and elements within it that if you leave any dead body or any inorganic material, organic 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 re-emerge.

And we'd 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 once.

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.

But nonetheless, that's worrying.

I don't think,

I mean, a lot of, 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 assembly.

What's freedom of conscience?

As in, you were free to believe whatever you believe.

Whatever your morality

within, and this is a key caveat, within the rule of law.

Right?

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.

That'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 you're just going to

rebound on you eventually.

Don'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, you know,

you can just look at history.

You, you know that this is what, 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.

Zero tolerance for people making mistakes, as you've said, with cancel culture and the things that people say.

The compiling of lists for wrongthink.

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 it's best avoided.

Andrew Doyle, ladies and gentlemen, dude.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Cheers indeed.

Nice to see you.

Where Where should people go?

Check out the book, check out everything else that you're doing.

And what are you doing?

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.

Going back to creativity, I think, is key for me because I fear that

being too steeped in the culture war for too long can drive anyone mad.

Well, you become an engine, right?

You're sort of a conveyor belt for thing, like stimulus comes in the front and a

condensed version of what that was comes out the back.

And yeah, you don't want to be the final guy in the human centipede of whatever today.

What a way to put it.

Yeah.

You know, it's just great because also, like, I

writing creatively again,

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.

So I've been rereading all the comedies and it's been just a joy.

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 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, and of course, 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 Academy, or enroll at the Peterson Academy, you can see my lectures on Shakespeare's tragedies and then soon the comedies.

And

I'll be writing, hopefully, and hopefully you'll see some sitcoms and films come out with my name attached to them.

And

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Terms apply.

Or, in the meantime, you can read my substack, which is andrewdoyle.org.

Or my book, End of Woke, is the new book that I've written, or any of my other books, if you like.

No pressure.

And so I'm easy enough to find.

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.