Best of the Program | Guests: Peter Schweizer & Andrew Doyle | 10/5/22

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Ready for you.

You know, you walk in late every day.

Every day.

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10 minutes before the show.

Some of us have been here forever.

Oh, it's usually after the show starts.

I almost try.

I try never to get here before the show starts.

So what are we doing today?

What do we have?

I don't know.

What are you excited about?

How could I know?

I mean, holy cow.

Holy cow.

That's a rude question to ask.

Some of us have been planning for hours for the show.

It's definitely not stew.

Today's a really, really good show.

We talked to Andrew Doyle, who we didn't get to ask any of the fun questions.

He's this comedian

and it's done some really funny stuff, but he's written a new book called

The What is It?

The Puritan.

The New Puritan?

Yeah, The New Puritans.

And it describes what we're going through, and it's interesting to hear it from the other side of the ocean because they're going, and they do blame it on us, which I think we deserve the blame, but

they're going through it in in Europe just as much as we're going through it here.

Also, this amazing nurse that decided she couldn't,

she couldn't be a nurse anymore because they were asking her to take training for implicit bias.

And she said, this is dangerous.

She's on.

She's somebody that really is just showing you how to take a stand.

We have that and so much more on today's podcast.

Don't miss a second of it.

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Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blendback program.

Peter, how are you, sir?

Peter Schweizer is joining us now.

He is with the Government Accountability Institute.

He's the president, also the author of Red Handed and the co-host of The Drill Down.

Peter, how are you?

I'm great, Glenn.

Always terrific to be with you.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

So I don't even know where to begin on this.

Can we start with the Tony Bobolinski thing?

Sure.

Oh, my God.

Absolutely.

PolitiFact.

We investigated the claims of Tony Bobolinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden on Fox News this week.

There is no credible evidence that Joe Biden played a role in his family foreign business activities.

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable.

PolitiFact is saying that when Hunter Biden has acknowledged that his dad played a role, Joe Biden has acknowledged that he played a role.

James Biden, who is Joe Biden's brother, acknowledges that his brother played a role.

And of course, you have in black and white the communications that Tony Bobolinski released and turned over to the FBI that shows Joe Biden playing a role.

So this is another example of these fact-checking organizations digging their own graves.

They have zero credibility and they're apparently prepared to die on this hill,

which let them do it.

It just means that people take them even less seriously than they do already.

So help me out.

Give me some of the hard evidence that shows that Joe was absolutely involved.

Well, first of all, you have the communications,

and the communications specifically say that Joe Biden was involved.

And so what does that mean?

Well, they would make, they would have conversations, and Hunter would refer to the big guy.

And Tony Bobolinski, he's released these messages,

would contact the other business partners who had brought him into the deal with the Bidens.

And in the communications, he would say, who is the big guy?

And they would say, that's Joe Biden, but don't talk about it.

They're very sensitive about it.

So it was acknowledged that way.

You have the communications about the so-called CEFC deal.

This is the Chinese.

energy company with Chairman Yi

that Tony was brought into.

You have the 10% for the big guy.

Well, the big guy is the word that is used in all the other communications for talking about Joe Biden.

So that's all explicit in Tony Bobolinski's communications.

You have

communications from Hunter Biden on the laptop that have been released.

There's ones where they wanted to do business deals overseas and Hunter Biden texts his business partners and says, I've run it by my dad and my dad is going to help.

So, I mean,

to me, it's patently ludicrous to even be arguing and discussing about this anymore.

You can have a conversation about how deeply he was involved, and I would argue it's pretty deep.

You can have a conversation that says, well, I don't think he was really knowing everything that was going on.

But the notion that Joe Biden was ignorant of all of this, that he didn't know anything about it, that he didn't benefit financially, that debate's settled.

And it's not settled by Peter Schweitzer or Tony Bobolinski.

It's settled by the actual communications, whether it's Hunter's laptop or the communications that Tony Bobolinski had with Hunter and with his business partners.

Do you think there's enough evidence that it is a clear, almost open-shut case for impeachment?

I do, yes.

And I do think on a couple of levels.

First of all, let's remember this is about corruption, but it's about something I would argue that's even more troubling and damaging than that.

And this is, I hope, what will be the point number one if the Republicans take the House and investigate and subpoena Hunter Biden.

Point number one needs to be not just that they got this some $31 million from these Chinese entities, but who were the actual businessmen that sent the money.

Chairman Yi of CEFC has direct ties to Chinese intelligence.

Again, it's not debatable.

You look at his bio, you look at who he worked for, he was linked to Chinese intelligence.

You look at other money that was transferred.

There's a gentleman that transferred $5 million to Hunter Biden.

He was at the exact same time business partners with the vice minister of the Ministry of State Security, whose job was recruiting foreigners to spy on China.

Unbelievable.

So to me, the question, Glenn, is, yeah, corruption, absolutely.

The question is, explain to me, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, how your family, it's not just Hunter, your family got $31 million from these four Chinese businessmen with links to Chinese intelligence.

You did no discernible service in return.

And what did the Chinese get out of the deal?

They did not send you $31 million because they think you're nice guys.

That should be issue number one.

This is a question of compromise, compromat, as they used to say during the Cold War.

And it's a question of foreign intelligence penetration of the first family of the United States.

That's issue number one as far as I'm concerned.

Russia's dominance in the global nuclear fuel market presents a massive challenge for Washington.

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said President Biden is redoubling his efforts to break the U.S.

reliance on Russian nuclear fuel, indicating domestic uranium enrichment capacity could be increased with upcoming key legislation.

We're going to get congressional support in a bipartisan way for us to make our own fuel supply cycle chain independent, certainly independent of Russia.

We have to make this happen for our own independence and for our national security.

Peter, what's the problem with that story?

What is missing in that story?

Well, what's missing in that story, Glenn, is one of the big reasons that we are so dependent on Russian uranium now.

And let's remember when the Biden administration said we're not going to take any Russian oil because of their invasion of Ukraine, they excluded cutting off the supply of Russian uranium because we're so dependent on it.

So how did we get at this state?

One of the reasons was this deal that we talked about on your program several years ago, Uranium-1.

This was a nuclear uranium company that was initially controlled by a Canadian named Frank Justra, who is a big Bill Clinton donor.

And they went over to Kazakhstan to meet with President Nazarbayev, the head of that country, and said, look, we want to buy all these lucrative mines that you have producing uranium in your country.

Give them to us.

I'm a Canadian.

This is the former president of the United States.

And we'll take good care of it.

Justra got those mines, purchased them, paid some $100 million to the Clinton Foundation for Bill showing up.

Here's the problem.

Justra then flipped and sold those mines, as well as mines that he controlled in the United States to who?

To Raslatom, the Soviet state-owned uranium company that now dominates the market.

So we have a situation where part of the reason that we are so dependent on Russian uranium, part of the reason that they have been able to almost effectively corner the global market is because Bill Clinton helped facilitate this deal that gave Russia control over uranium mines in the United States, but even more importantly, some of the most powerful and lucrative and proficient uranium mines in Kazakhstan.

And that is why we are over a barrel today.

Frank Guster made a lot of money in the deal.

Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation made a lot of money in the deal.

The problem is the American people got screwed because it enhanced our dependence on Russian uranium, and that's where we are today.

And if I'm not mistaken, because it's been a while since I've looked at this story,

it was all kind of done hush-hush, just kind of rushed through the committees.

It should have never gone through because it is

a national risk to put everything there.

And Hillary Clinton said, oh,

I wasn't involved in this at all.

I don't know.

I just know that the government found that it wouldn't be putting our government at risk and our nation at risk.

So

we're going to go through with it.

Didn't the story happen something like that?

Yeah.

So this deal, the sale of Uranium-1, which was an American uranium company, to the Russian state-owned company, Rossatom, required approval by this federal government body in the Obama administration called CIFIAS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

And you would think this is a pretty big deal, right?

Are we really going to put Putin in charge of all of this uranium?

The deal went through quickly.

Hillary Clinton, of course, has a seat on CIFIAS.

She claims she didn't remember anything about it.

And you have all these other actors of the Clinton era and some currently of the Biden administration that were involved, Glenn.

So remember John Podesta, who is, of course, an advisor to the Clintons.

His brother, Tony Podesta, was actually a lobbyist for Uranium-1

on these kinds of deals.

You had John Podesta himself that was involved in energy companies that were backed by Russian state-owned investment firms.

Joe Biden's current energy envoy who is negotiating some of these deals involving oil and uranium is a guy named Amos Hoxteen.

He was a lobbyist for a Russian company called 10X, which is basically a sister company for Uranium One.

If you look at Jake Sullivan, Jake Sullivan, who of course is the current national security advisor, signed off on Bill Clinton.

When all these deals are going down, Russian entities are paying Bill Clinton inflated speaking fees, half a million dollar a pop.

Who is approving those deals?

A guy named Jake Sullivan, who now happens to be the national security advisor for Joe Biden.

So this is a problem where it's not just something from the past, it's something that involves decision makers in the present too.

I have to tell you, it is so frustrating.

I think it is for the average person.

You know, any of this stuff would happen with, you know, me or you.

We'd all be in jail.

The Clinton Foundation is so incredibly transparent on its corruption.

You know, it goes away when Trump is in office, just goes away.

No, we're shutting it down.

And then, lo and behold, Biden gets in.

We're opening it up again, open for business.

All of the people, I mean, you're either committed to helping people or you're committed to making money and brokering deals.

And it is so transparent.

Is this thing ever going to be taken care of?

It's hard to know.

I mean, part of the problem, Glenn, is, as you know, you've studied Washington all this time, as I have.

There are ways to do corrupt things in Washington that are profoundly corrupt.

If you do them the wrong way, you're going to jail.

If you do them the right way, you can get away with it.

So we're dealing with very smart people who hire very high-priced lawyers to dance around and create subterfuge for what they're really doing to give it an air or a veneer, in my mind, of legality.

So that's part of the problem that you have inherently.

I think the ultimate solution here is shame and exposure and and the hope that that is going to lead to actual criminal investigation.

And I think, look, coming up in November, we're going to have these elections.

The balance of the House of Representatives and Senate is in question.

And my point is, you have to have independent bodies that are prepared to bring out what information we know to hold Hunter Biden in account.

It's very clear the FBI is not going to hold Hunter Biden into account.

They're not going to investigate Uranium One.

So it means we have to have congressional committees with subpoena power doing it.

That's only going to happen if the Republicans have the majority in the House and Senate.

So a lot of these matters hang in the balance as to who will be controlling Congress after the November elections.

I just hope there's enough in there that are not corrupt, that

they're not being blackmailed to not get involved or just are like, you know what, I'm going to sit on the sidelines because

I don't want my name being brought up at all.

I fear that could happen easily.

Yeah, and Glenn, I mean, look, here's the thing.

A lot of people are talking about this right now.

If we retake the House, we are going to investigate X, Y, and Z.

If they fail to do that,

that to me will be the dagger in the heart, basically, of the Republican Party and of conservatives.

Because people are fed up with the lip service being paid to we're going to hold them into account.

So that's really, I think, where the stakes are.

And you're quite right.

Just because somebody says they're going to do it in Washington, you're going to pay a price.

If you start dredging up and talking about Chinese deals involving the first family of the United States, a lot of other stuff is going to come to the fore.

And there's a lot of people in powerful positions on the Republican side who don't want that to happen either.

So that's why we've got to hold their feet to the fire.

I know you've done that.

That's what I'm hoping to do.

And let's hope the people listening are prepared to do that and let their elected officials know this matters to them and this is of profound importance.

I've told many officials in Washington, D.C.

that are Republicans, I said, you guys have one more shot.

This is it.

This is it.

If you win the House, and especially if you win the House and the Senate, and you aren't standing up and

protecting the American people and the Constitution and and putting bad guys on trial and then cleaning up the FBI and Justice Department so they can actually put them in jail.

If you're not doing that, you are absolutely done.

Just like you said, the last chance.

I'm glad to hear you believe that too.

Absolutely.

Thanks, Glenn.

It's always great to be with you.

Great talking to you.

Peter Sweizer, he is the author of Red Handed and the co-host of the podcast, The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had government accountability?

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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.

We're glad you're here.

I'm going to give you some good news.

Some good news.

First of all, can we play the cut from CNN?

So, I mean, we don't have to fact-check this.

This is their side saying this.

Democrats are losing ground with some

very important voters.

Take a look here.

This is black voters' electoral preferences in pre-election polling.

Look, black voters are the part, the core part of the Democratic Party.

And as you can see here in the race for Congress, look, they're still getting 74% support in the pre-election polling right now.

But compare that to the final polling for 2020 president and 2018 Congress.

Back in 2020, it was 84%, 85% in 2018.

So you're clearly seeing right here that there is less support for Democratic candidates for Congress among African Americans.

And you can look at the Republican column as well, and you can see that 12%,

not exactly high, but that's actually the high watermark.

It was 9% in 2020, 9% in 2018.

So basically what was about a 75, 76 point margin is now down in the low 60s.

So look, Democrats still well ahead with African Americans, but in a game in which you're trying to drive up margins, the margin among African Americans for Democrats is clearly down.

And I'll bet you that the

eagerness to go out and vote for a Democrat is also down.

You mean the passion, the passion.

Yeah.

The passion is dying.

I mean, it's not just black voters, Hispanic voters.

We're seeing the same types of things.

Even when they don't necessarily go to the Republican side to vote for the candidate, they are often abandoning the Democrat.

And this is something you're seeing across the board.

You know, what does it materialize in the elections?

I guess we'll see.

We still have five weeks to go, but that's it.

We're five weeks away from this thing now.

Joe Biden's approval rating is 42.7%.

This, according to MSNBC, they say put that in perspective with modern presidents, their first midterm.

Biden's right at the same level, Trump, Obama, and Bill Clinton,

which were brutal midterms for them and the Democrats.

The only exception in modern times is George W.

Bush a year after 9-11.

Trump, he lost the House in 18.

Obama, his party lost the party in 10.

Clinton, his party lost the House in 94.

Biden's approval rating is right in that same range.

Yeah, and there's a theory out there that somehow Democrats are going to outperform Biden.

There's been some evidence of this in the polling where these Senate races, in an environment where your president has a 39, 40, 41% approval rating, you'd expect Republicans to be performing better in some of these Senate races.

That's sort of held up in the polling so far.

It's hard to imagine a world where that plays out, though, right?

I mean, you know, like we were talking about this with Blake Masters when he was in here, or actually, I think after he had left, and that, you know, if Kerry Lake is winning the race for governor in Arizona, is there a world in which Kerry Lake wins this race and Blake Masters loses by nine?

Like, what world is that?

What situation is there that much ticket splitting in the year 2022?

This used to happen way back in the day where there would be a lot of ticket splitting.

That's almost completely evaporated over the past few elections.

I think that's possible in Arizona because Arizona has a libertarian that is running as a Democrat.

Now, you tell me when the Democrats actually wanted a

libertarian.

Running as a well, he's a

more of a Democrat-leaning person who's running as a Libertarian is what you're saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's a it's still funded,

funded by

Democrats.

Voting is, is, is almost not, it's very rarely a factor in elections.

You know,

it's always talked up.

Early polls always have these third parties up up at 8% and 10%.

And then at the end of the day, that doesn't wind up playing out.

I will say there was a poll that came out today from CBS News, Masters versus Kelly, where Kelly's only up by three.

And this race has narrowed significantly in these

weeks.

If he's only behind by two

and Carrie Lake wins and wins big,

her coattails will carry him the rest of the way.

I think.

That's sort of the question in Georgia as well, where Kemp seems like he's he's blowing out Abrams at this point.

I mean, you know, as much as he's going to blow it out in a purple state, but like going to win relatively handily, it seems, in that state.

And you wonder if Herschel Walker will be dragged along with that.

You know, obviously there's been a lot of controversy over the past couple of days with Walker that we've talked about, but there is a,

you know, where he is even.

Down a couple points, up a couple points in every poll, very, very close, a pure toss-up when it comes to the polls.

But Kemp is significantly ahead.

And is there a lot, are there a lot of people in Georgia that are going to say, you know what, I think Kemp is doing a good job as governor.

I think he's led the state well.

However, I also am going to vote for Raphael Warnock.

I mean, is there a huge amount of people doing that?

There may be.

We may find out that that's the case.

But it's a weird thing in this environment where we've seen that ticket splitting and crossing those party lines evaporate almost completely.

It's going to have to make a big comeback for these polls to be right and for the media narratives to be right.

You know,

it's interesting to me what's happening to Herschel Walker.

And it is something that you, you know, everybody has to pray on.

But, you know, he's getting such heat because he paid for an abortion.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

We should point out before we even get into the story at all, this is a one-source story from the Daily Freaking Beast.

If the story is true, it may be true.

I mean, we've talked to Herschel Walker about all sorts of problems this guy had back in the day.

Back in the day.

His story is one where he said, he led with, look, I was a disaster at one point in my life, and I've changed.

That was his entire narrative of his campaign.

But, like, we should all put this in perspective.

There's no reason to believe this story because it comes from the Daily Beast.

Have they ever reported an accurate story in the history of the publication?

Not that I know of.

Not that I know of.

Yeah.

They're hatchet jobs.

But one thing that comes to mind is I don't mind, if he was doing this now,

you know, like six months ago, a year ago, I'd have a problem with it.

But I was under the understanding that he, you know, he had made huge, huge mistakes.

Yeah.

And he is solidly pro-choice now.

Pro-life.

Or pro-life.

Thank you.

So, I mean, why?

Right.

Why would you vote for Warnock, who you know is going to use public funds for abortions?

And abortions like you can't even imagine.

Abortion festivals on the weekends.

I mean, celebrating your abortion.

Or the guy who

made a huge error.

If

he is denying it,

even if he did it, made a huge error and then is like, you know what?

It changed my life.

It changed my life.

I mean, look, we've talked to, we have literally interviewed former terrorists on the air.

Yeah.

We have interviewed criminals on the air, people who have murdered people in the past.

This is the story.

If it's a story of redemption, it's a story of redemption.

You know, this happened with, what was it, Kevin Hart?

Remember back in the day, he was going to host the Oscars, I think.

And the left, they dug up some jokes that were kind of borderline on being homophobic or something.

I don't remember the exact details of it.

And then

they tossed him out, and you didn't get to host the Oscars.

And it's like, we made the argument at the point.

If you think what he did was bad 10 years ago, and now he's coming out and saying, well, I don't do that anymore.

And I think what I did before was wrong, or that activity is wrong, and I'm not going to do that.

I'm not involved.

In fact, I want the opposite.

That's the story you want.

Yeah.

You want the story of someone who may have made terrible mistakes in the past and has now realized the error of his ways and is now doing the opposite.

In this society, no longer true.

They don't believe in

redemption.

Now, the complicated...

That is an anti-Christ, not the antichrist, but an antichrist kind of teaching.

Right.

Redemption is obviously vitally.

That's why he came.

Now, in this particular case, it's a little complicated because Walker is denying it.

So you have to, number one, believe the Daily Beast, which

it's hard to imagine anyone doing.

But secondarily, if he is, let's say, lying about this.

then it's not a redemption story.

And I guess this is what they're hanging their hats on because I don't understand why the left would care about this at all.

They They are saying it's a fundamental human right to abort children.

They should all be crossing the aisle to vote for it now.

Hypocrisy, Stuart.

They could never stand with hypocrisy.

That's not something they embrace every other opportunity.

Oh, sure.

I mean, look, you have to make your own.

I don't, you know, you've got to vote for who you think is the right person, and you've got to make your decision on this stuff.

That's for every individual to decide.

You can't let the media is certainly not the trash heap that is the daily beast decide these things for you, though.

Let me give you a couple of other things.

In Oregon,

it looks as like the tide has turned on the Democrats.

It looks like for the first time since the 80s, a Republican governor is a real shot.

And in the last, I think, nine polls, she's led

the Democrat.

In Oregon.

In Oregon.

I mean, if they're in trouble in Oregon, odds against, according to the Daily Caller, odds of the

Democrats winning Pennsylvania in the Senate race, that's also slipping.

Whitmer has endorsed a candidate.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, that candidate was investigated for alleged school shooting threats several times and was also on parole for, I think,

assaulting a police officer.

And she endorsed him, said he's fantastic.

And yeah, now that all the facts are out,

no, not so much.

Not so fantastic.

So, I mean, the things are just not going in the right direction for the Democrats.

Yeah.

Now, the Oregon race is interesting a couple of times.

You think of Oregon as just being a blue state, but their governor races have been pretty close.

I mean, five, six points has been the typical margin there.

The one thing that's a little bit,

you have to put a little bit of an asterisk on this is that there is an independent in this race that's up near 20% of the vote.

So will that hold up?

We just talked about how third-party candidates oftentimes show more in the polls early and then fade toward the end.

That could be the case here.

I hope it's not.

Who is that candidate taking people?

Johnson, an independent.

I don't know.

I don't know the race well enough to, I mean, it seems like from both sides at some level, because they're both, I mean, the average poll right now is 36, 33.

And then 18 for the Independent in the race.

So that, but that's still a pretty significant thing.

And Oregon's not a pure blue state.

It's not New York, California.

It's Rhode Island, right?

These races are tempting to Republicans.

The same thing we're seeing in Washington right now.

There's a bit of...

I think there's a chance that person wins, the Republican.

In the Senate.

Yeah.

And it's interesting.

It's hard to believe because I think we all think, okay, it's the West Coast.

These races never come through.

People have had enough.

But I think you're right.

Now, that race is within 10 points.

Tiffany Smiley is the candidate the Republicans.

Republicans really like her.

They think she has a real future.

They have a lot of hopes for her.

It's not an easy race.

Of course, Patty Murray's been around forever.

She's right around 50% of the vote, but it's like a 50-42 race right now, closer than you would normally expect in these races.

And I think you could see it getting even closer.

The last wave election

for this seat was back in 2010 when you had the Tea Party wave, the biggest wave election in 100 years for republicans that race was about a four-point race that pet for patty murray she still won but she won by four so these can get close in these states but republicans really need to have a great climate for that to actually happen i think it's there i think we just don't see it uh because there is no tea party rallies and and things like that yeah i think people are just doing it in their everyday life and they're like uh oh i'm because everybody i know oh i'm voting.

That is interesting too, Glenn.

There's not really a big protest movement on the right right now.

There's a lot of interesting, isn't it?

That is interesting.

You don't have that organized protest movement.

I don't know what the reason for that is exactly.

I mean, I think I talked to a lot of conservatives.

They're all pretty upset.

But there isn't that

organizational thing that seemed to pop up from the 9-12 project and the Tea Party back in the day, and many other times.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

Andrew Doyle, the author of The New Puritans.

Welcome to the program, sir.

Good to talk to you.

Yeah,

I have so many questions, and very few of them have to do with your article after doing some research on you.

Okay.

No, but let's get to the book first because that's the reason why I have you on.

And,

you know, your article that you wrote on Spiked online.com, How to Take on the New Puritans, is I was shocked that this was coming from somebody in the UK because this is exactly the thinking in the United States as well.

And I'm glad to see that

this is seemingly, I think, everywhere.

I think so.

I think more and more people are waking up to the problem.

It's taking longer in certain countries than others.

I think Canada is probably pretty much lost on this one.

Wow.

But certainly, you know, a lot of this stuff did originate in the U.S.

but but over here we're finding a lot of these ideas are being imported into our major institutions as well.

So you would think that something like critical race theory, which which is so sort of grounded in American history, wouldn't really make sense in a country like the UK, but actually it's just been sort of imported wholesale and applied in public policy, government policy, the police, our health service, all sorts of areas.

Similarly with gender identity ideology, all of this stuff is just being sort of passed through, rushed through our major cultural, political, educational institutions in the way that it has in America.

And now

we're seeing evidence of a kind of pushback against it.

So I've been saying for a while that this is, you know, when

Nietzsche was right, when you lose your God, men will find a God.

And we found our new God.

And this is a religion with its own doctrine and

theology.

And it is unforgiving

if you're an apostate

i think it's useful to think of it in terms of a religion as a kind of analogy more than anything else i mean it is a secular religion it's a godless religion it's it's it's it's it is different but it does have it makes it explicable if you think of it in those terms because here you have a movement a sort of fervid ideological movement that brooks no dissent at all it considers anyone who strays from its past to be heretics.

It will have you excommunicated in the way the Catholic Church used to do.

It has its own holy language, its own kind of mysterious language and phrases that it likes to use, phrases like toxic masculinity or fish heteronormativity or whatever it might be.

Trans women are women.

They just have these phrases, these shibboleths, these slogans.

And people are expected to just go along with it without thinking for themselves.

I mean, it's much like...

I suppose, like the medieval clergy, just sort of saying, we know best

to agree with us.

And if you don't agree with us, then we'll come after you.

And they've got this thing called cancel culture, which is, of course, a method of public shaming, ritual humiliation.

It can deprive people of their livelihoods, their reputation.

It's often very merciless.

It's often disproportionate to the perceived slight.

You know, someone could do something very minor, just make a misjudged comment on Twitter, and they can have their lives.

utterly destroyed.

So

it's different from Christianity in so far as it has no mercy.

Yeah, it's the exact opposite.

It's the exact opposite.

It's not believing redemption or anything like that.

So it's more like a kind of, rather than saying it's a religion, I suppose it's more like a fundamentalist religion.

You had in your article, and I'd like to talk to you about this and tie it to the book.

I thought one of the things that you said in your article that was so

powerful was the thought experiment.

Let's just...

have a little thought experiment.

And you talk about the school district in Canada would be burning burning thousands of books because the contents are offensive to modern sensibilities and that they would refer to this as a flame purification ceremony.

Yes.

Do you think that would have happened a decade ago?

The answer is no.

But you read that and you think, my gosh, I can't believe people believe this.

People have sort of not realized how quickly and rapidly they've started to accept these absolutely incredible things as normal.

I mean, that's what I was saying in the article and I say in the book is that, you know, if you'd have asked, if you can put yourself in your own mindset, as you were 10, 15 years ago, and if you could say these things would be happening now, we would be in a position where

a boy who might be a bit effeminate or a girl who likes to play football, that they would be encouraged to believe they're in the wrong body.

You would have police investigating you for non-crime hate incidents, which is very regular.

That happens in the UK.

It doesn't happen in America.

you have the first amendment, but it happens here.

You know, all of these things, you know, the Ottawa school board that I mentioned, because, you know, they burned, they removed thousands of books from 30 different school libraries and burned some of them and like you say, called it a flame purification ceremony.

And, you know, you have to be pretty historically illiterate not to see the sinister implications of that.

But no one would have believed that any of this could have happened.

No one would have believed, for instance, that you would have schools segregating people by skin colour for after-school activities, which is what has happened here in London at the America School.

It's called the American School, but it's a British school.

In fact, the most expensive day school in the UK.

In California, you had the Brentwood School segregating parents

for teacher feedback sessions, and they were segregating them by skin colour.

You've got lots of universities who now want, they already have LGBT-only dorms or are proposing dorms specifically for black students.

I mean, all of this stuff, which is incredibly, obviously regressive.

And it's all happened really over the past 12 years, no more than that.

It's all happened very, very quickly.

And people just need to put that into context and think about where they were 10 years ago.

Would anyone have expected this?

Would anyone have accepted it?

They would have said this wasn't possible in a liberal democracy, in a forward-thinking democracy.

They would have said it with insanity.

But we all now accept it.

Well, why do we accept it?

We shouldn't.

We should push back against it because it is regressive.

So

how do we fight this battle?

The difficulty that we have is that the people in charge have bought into it.

So

this wouldn't matter if it was just those crazy people on Twitter with anime avatars screaming into cyberspace and sort of calling everyone a fascist and saying that they see homophobes and racists in every shadow.

You know, if it was just the crazy activists, it wouldn't matter because we could just ignore them and get on with our lives.

But the problem is it's infected.

I mean, look, the U.S.

government is completely infected with this stuff.

It's in all, like I say, all of our major institutions.

Academia is completely overwhelmed by it, which means you have people who are supposed to be the experts in their fields misrepresenting reality for ideological purposes.

You now have leading medical journals talking about how sex is a spectrum.

Well, even I know that sex is a spectrum and I'm not a biologist.

You know, you've got, well, you had the Supreme Court nominee, Jackson, who was asked to define a woman and she said, I can't, I'm not a biologist.

You know, in our country, we have...

When you ask politicians, what is a woman, they stammer and they stutter and they don't know what to do because they're terrified of getting it wrong, even though a moderately intelligent child could tell you the answer to that.

So the problem isn't the activists.

The problem is those in authority capitulating to the activists.

And we have to find some way.

I mean, I guess they're intimidated or they've bought into it, but we have to find some way to sort of redress that.

And the reason why in the book, The New Puritans, and I called it that really because I'm making a direct comparison to what happened in Salem during that period of hysteria in the late 17th century.

And of course, it was just one year.

It was very short-lived.

Everyone who was involved repented afterwards and thought they'd made a mistake.

But it wouldn't have mattered if it was just the girls screaming witch at everyone.

It was because the ministers and the magistrates believed the girls and perpetuated the fantasy.

And it's a similar thing here.

The people screaming online, they're just the girls screaming witch or turf or whatever words they like to use or racist or fascist.

It's the people in authority who are truckling to this and going along with it.

And they're the problem, really.

So we just have to find a way to have more people who are in positions of authority to stand stand up to it, to have the courage to say, no, we all know what a woman is.

We all know that

Martin Luther King's dream of colorblindness is the ideal, that it's not a sort of version of white supremacy, which is what Robin D'Angelo argues, that actually we were going in the right direction, and this new social justice movement turned up and derailed the whole project.

And, you know, so like I say, just

people in power, they need to be braver.

So

I have a history archive and a gigantic vault with a bunch of history in it.

And we have quite a bit from the Salem witch trials.

And, you know, most people don't know

that the Salem witch trials happened, I mean, were stopped because the guy in power

was approached by two other ministers and said, you're reading the Bible all wrong.

You're reading it wrong.

So it took the leaders to stop the leader on the Salem witch drive.

Exactly.

I mean there were a number of things that were happening.

The girls started accusing very powerful people.

And you'll note in the in the court transcripts and the records that whenever they did that the ministers or the magistrates sorry they gently corrected them.

So for instance they accused the Reverend Samuel Willard of being a witch.

And of course Willard was the acting president of Harvard.

So this was not some small fry.

And the magistrates simply said to the girls, you must be mistaken.

you must be thinking of Constable Willard who you've already accused and is in jail at the moment so you see they they they only believed it up to a point

and then eventually the deputy governor of the colony wrote to the leading clergymen in the country and said by the way is spectral evidence admissible in court and what spectral evidence was was simply the girls testimony was taken as truth what we today would call the experience that's a comparison I make in the book they they saw witches therefore that was evidence in other words the accusation was taken as proof

And

those ministers got back to them and said, no, that is not admissible in court.

And everything collapsed.

All of the cases collapsed overnight as soon as that happened.

So today, you see, when you have people say that certain institutions are systemically racist, and you ask for evidence, and they say, it's our lived experience, it's the same thing.

And we have to get to the point where we say, actually, no, lived experience, spectral evidence, that's not good enough.

We need to get back to the Enlightenment values where we have rationality and evidence-led epistemology and data and reason.

And

this movement, this new religion, is completely opposed to any kind of rational thought and actually mistrusts the values of the Enlightenment as being some sort of product of dead, white, straight men.

You and your country, all countries right now in the Western world, are in real trouble

with

fuel, energy, inflation, food, all of it.

We're headed for really hard times.

Do we survive this?

Do we wake up in time?

Well, I mean, a lot of people will use that point of view to make the point that given the cost of living crisis, given the energy crisis, given the global recession, that actually we shouldn't be worried about what they call the culture war.

We shouldn't be focusing on these issues.

These are a distraction.

But actually, these issues get to the heart of what Western civilization means.

If we don't have these values that we've worked so long to refine and have secured justice and progress as we have known it within our lifetimes, then everything else collapses.

It doesn't you know,

if you don't hold fast to those values, you won't be able to deal with cost of living issues, energy issues, financial disasters.

You need to have a fundamental basis of rationality

in order for anything else to be addressed.

So I think it is far more important than than people than people realize i think people are waking up to that um and i think it's an absolute disaster when you see uh biden's administration even you know bearing in mind that biden was nominated in the first place because he was perceived as being the the non-woke democrat candidate and and look at what he's done and look at what he's pushed through and uh you know look at who's he's who he's appointed and

it it's it's it's just not the case that that that perception was accurate.

And it is damaging.

It is hugely damaging.

And

it gets to the core of what we stand for as a civilization.

And I don't think we can allow it to collapse.

And I don't think it's too hyperbolic to say that we're on the verge of collapse if we keep going down this line.

Andrew Doyle,

the book is The New Puritans,

How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.

Worth your time.

Andrew, thank you so much.

I'd love to have you on again.

That'd be fantastic.

Thanks very much.

God bless.

Andrew Doyle.

Doyle.

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