Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome a special guest: Twitter personality Titania McGrath (A.K.A. Andrew Doyle). Titania McGrath is a self-described activist, healer, and radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest. A regular on the live-slam poetry scene, Titania regularly performs at arts festivals, deconsecrated churches and genderqueer spiritual retreats. Her unique blend of art and activism has been variously described as 'inspiring', 'groundbreaking' and 'woke'. You can check out Titania's new book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Topics Discussed Who is Titania McGrath? How do her tweets work? What are the targets of the satire? What is the nature of satire? Does Titania punch down? What is white privilege? Can comedy redeem culture and society? BREXIT Intersectionality/Wokeness Where's the line we shouldn't cross in satire? Subscriber Portion starts at 00:39:12
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
And here we are.
We are sitting here with, well, Titania McGrath, the Twitter personality.
We're sitting in the presence of wokeness itself.
The goddess.
Now, she has a manly voice, so that's weird to adjust to.
But I'm open-minded.
I'm open-minded as well.
Yeah, we're not going to discriminate.
She's also completely a man who looks nothing like her picture, but he identifies as Titania McGrath.
His name's Andrew.
I just blanked on your last name, Doyle.
Doyle, yeah.
It's fine.
I'm blank on names on the podcast.
That's like my name.
I don't remember my name.
That's my running joke.
It's quite a generic name, particularly in Island.
Everyone's called that.
I was afraid if it wasn't Doyle, then it would sound weird to say Doyle if it was like.
Well, it would be weird if it wasn't my name.
Yeah.
Luckily, that is my name.
Where's that coming from?
It's okay.
So if you guys don't know, we need to set this up.
Andrew has a Twitter alias.
It's a fake Twitter account.
How would you describe Titania?
I would say she is a radical intersectional feminist slam poet and activist who is very well, she likes to say how oppressed she is.
You know, she revels in victimhood, but she's really rich.
She's got a trust fund.
She's got a timeshare.
She's got, you know, her parents give her everything.
So that's the type of person it is.
And so therefore it's a satire of a particular type of person that I'm sure we all recognize.
But we don't have anybody like that here in California.
No, it's alien to you guys.
It must just be a UK thing.
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
Well, yeah, if you're on Twitter, you ought to give this.
Yeah, if you haven't.
Well, yeah, a warning to our listeners.
She's a little foul sometimes.
You know, feminists love talking about private parts.
That's just how they are.
I always bring it in there.
Everything comes back to...
She wants to be shocking.
She thinks she's really shocking and radical and avant-garde.
And she's actually an incredible conformist.
So that's what's quite, I mean, I don't know if you saw, what's her name?
Mona, the radical, the activist, the Egyptian activist, standing outside the White House the other day.
She tweeted out and she was swearing and saying, flowerbed from porpoises.
The patriarchy.
Monkey.
Misogyny.
Pterodactyl.
I mean, it was really eloquent, you know.
She had the red head and she was two middle fingers upon the bottom of the corner.
And you could just see.
So edgy.
Exactly.
It's like, this isn't shocking.
You know, that's what we used to do when we were 12.
I just want to explain to people about swearing.
Like, kids don't get how to curb back things.
Like, they don't.
So you just have to tell them, don't swear because you're going to overuse it.
You're not going to use it, right?
So the power is when it's used carefully and used well.
So a kid's being a rebel, but when you're an adult and you're swearing to be rebellious, it's not, nobody's like, oh my gosh, she's so rebellious.
And no one's going to listen to you either.
I mean, this is the other thing.
If you're serious about your cause, and I know a lot of them are, then you should be trying to persuade people if you're just shouting flower bed.
You, motherfucker.
Turnip.
They might just walk away preaching to the choir.
They might just leave.
Yeah.
Think, you know, I'm going to go and talk to an adult instead.
Yeah.
That would be a more productive use of my time.
So I have not read Titania's full book yet, but I was picking up some highlights from her explaining her history.
The book is called Woke.
Yeah.
A guide to social justice.
And so it's her kind of autobiography.
I don't know.
Or her.
It starts off with that and she's kind of explaining it.
The first chapter is about her life.
That chapter is called My Struggle.
Yeah.
And what's that the name of Hitler's book?
Well, she doesn't speak German, so she wouldn't know that.
And then the book goes through chapter by chapter trying to outline the problems with the world.
So there's a chapter on Islamo-feminism.
There's a chapter on free speech.
There's a chapter on the toxic masculinity, you know, that kind of thing.
So it's covering all the bases, and she's basically telling you what to think because she thinks that you can only be free if you think the way that she thinks.
Yeah, so in this section, she's explaining how oppressed she was as a child, even in her childhood, raised by rich parents.
She says, who is expected to sit still and not complain?
I had been breastfed for the first six months of my life.
Did my mother not realize that I was a vegan?
Did she even care?
Either way, this was abuse.
It's a sad story.
It's terrible.
Before I was even out of the crib, I was self-harming with my nappy pin.
By the age of four, I was suffering from both anorexia and chronic overeating.
When these two conditions occur simultaneously, it can be difficult to spot because the victim ends up eating a regular amount of food on a consistent basis.
The balance of the two.
It's a tricky one, yeah.
And then she says, but I was bleeding inside.
My insides were literally full of blood.
Everything she says has a kind of sense of profundity.
Yeah.
You know, I think she thinks that she's saying these things that are earth-shattering.
And Kyle's just reading your book right now.
I'm going to read this poem, part of this poem.
I can't read the whole thing, but it's called I Victim.
Should I find the flower bud button?
You have dined upon my succulent gusset like a rageler.
Hobgoblin, filching power, or a Chinese assassin with fat hands.
But I am woman.
I rise like the bewig toad of probity, spitting matriarchal cannonballs into the open groin of porpoises.
I shall feed you banjo meat from Satan's buffet.
My revenge is gluten-free.
But you see, because it's slam poetry, you should do it in a vaguely urban accent and also probably leave pauses in odd places.
Yeah, odd pauses.
That's what she would do.
You know, because she's a posh white girl who, when she goes into slam poetry, tries to sound a bit black.
You know, there's that level of pretension about her.
We have a female robotic voice that we have insert into the show every once in a while if she needs to correct us or something.
It might be interesting to have her name's Cynthia.
Have Cynthia do some Cynthia do some slam poetry.
Read her poems.
I'm down for that.
A little boy's Brexit.
Why are we leaving Europe?
Mommy?
Mrs. Wilson says I'm doing really well at my French lessons.
And Maisie wants to learn Irish dancing.
And we all love to eat pizza on Friday nights.
Why?
Does Teresa May hate us so much?
That's creepy.
You've got a robot that steps like how from 2007.
It's just like a Siri type.
Yeah, it's like Siri correcting us.
So we're like, what was that movie?
And we forget.
And then she comes in and says, this was the movie.
I'm sick of Siri.
I just got this Apple Watch that talks to me every now and then.
It thinks I'm saying things.
And it interrupts and says, what is that you want?
And I don't want anything.
Shut up.
And it also tells me when I'm not being active enough.
You haven't stood up enough.
Get out of my life.
Wow.
Yeah, it's really invasive.
You sound pretty oppressed.
I mean, that is a form of oppression, isn't it?
I still like the watch.
It looks good.
And, you know, I'm going to keep it, but I'm going to talk about it all the time as well.
Well, that's really a benefit.
Yeah.
You buy this product, you spend six or seven hundred bucks on it, and you get to be oppressed.
I mean, it's great.
I love social justice activists on their smartphones complaining about microaggressions, but of course the very smartphone that they are delivering this message on was produced by exploited Chinese children.
But that's okay.
That's okay.
You can't see them.
No, no, I mean, they're grateful for the work.
I mean, what else are they going to do?
Well, they're just waiting for the amazing iPhone that socialism would produce.
Yeah.
Can you imagine how good?
It would work.
It would be made of wood.
But it would, you know, you shouldn't dismiss it before seeing what they come up with.
So you were, you weren't out.
So before you were secretly this Titania persona.
Yeah, we'd like to have a coming out story.
How long were you?
Okay, so.
And I guess what was the impetus to actually create it?
You've probably told this a million times, but I have.
It's very boring.
I had an idea to make an account.
My assumption is that we have...
What percentage of our audience do you think has seen this?
It's just the Twitter people.
Yeah, exactly.
I see it shared on Facebook where people will screenshot and say, can you believe this?
You know, and they think it's real.
That's the other thing we got to get into.
We'll talk about loving your satire.
Yeah.
Well, I say for people who aren't on Twitter, who have a life, you know, I mean, I always forget that lots of people are on Twitter.
That's a lot.
Most people are smart and not.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so it was started in April 2018.
So what's that year and a half ago, something like that?
And I was, I suppose, well, I'd been working at the time on a character called Jonathan Pye, who is a YouTube character who is a news reporter and is very left-wing and berates the right.
And a lot of the stuff was sort of anti-right-wing satire.
What do you mean by working on?
As in, I was co-writing that.
Okay, because I was like, wait, you created that guy?
How'd you do that?
No.
I was the guy who created him is the guy who plays him.
And we wrote it.
Oh, he's not real.
No, no, no.
Like, he's a character.
He's a character.
And we wrote that together for three years.
One of the videos went very viral in America.
That was after Donald Trump's election.
Right after the election.
We wrote that.
I shared it.
The night of the election, we stayed up all night and got drunk in a hotel and wrote it together.
And then that did very well in America.
But of course, the point of that video is we were mock attacking Hillary Clinton for losing rather than Donald Trump for winning.
And so it became quite popular amongst sort of right-wing people, which was odd because most of his videos were anti-Trump.
Anyway, so I'd been working on that.
And of course, I like to mock the extremes of any kind of political movie.
So I'd be mocking the right an awful lot.
And I thought, I'd quite like to mock the left as well.
And I think the social justice movement is absurd.
And so I created the character and it was sort of very cathartic to have a go at this stuff.
And I love doing it from behind a persona because I think there's a great long centuries-old tradition of satire behind personae.
And so, yeah, that's what I was doing for a while.
And then I had no intention of coming out.
And I was outed.
Weirdly, though.
Was it like doxed or something?
No, what happened?
There was a newspaper in London called the Sunday Times.
They found a, they read an advanced copy of the book.
So the publishers have sent the book out everywhere.
And so they read an advanced copy of that.
And then they compared it somehow to articles I'd written, political articles I'd written online, and found that I'd quoted similar sources.
It was a real piece of investigative journalism.
And what she did was she whistled it down to me and someone else, a friend of mine called Lisa Graves, who's also a satirist.
And so what she said is, I think it's one of these two.
And then the next week, someone found a sort of smoking gun that linked it to me.
But what had happened was I was outed the week that the book was released.
And therefore, it became a big news story in the UK.
And I went on TV to talk about it.
So actually it really helped the publicity to the book.
But it looked calculated.
It looked like I sort of, in a very Machiavellian way, decided to out myself just at the time that I could make some money out of it.
And that wasn't the case.
I really hadn't done that.
Sure, sure.
And the only difference is now Because the people who hate her, which coincidentally, other people she's mocking, come after me a lot.
You know, they throw a lot my way.
And before, of course, they didn't know it was me.
So, you know, but that's fine.
I haven't changed the character.
I just get used to ignoring people on Twitter.
Yeah.
Is that, I mean, have you ever had any outside of Twitter interactions based on the anger?
Well, no, because most people don't, they're not going to come up and confront you.
Yeah.
They're not going to be hanging out in your front yard or something.
Yeah.
I mean, I know there are some that do that.
I haven't had anyone do that.
It's pretty rare.
What's your home address?
So my home address is, let me think of someone I hate.
42 Grange Road, Lingfield, West Sussex, RH191BE.
All right, so go and check that person out.
That doesn't sound like a real address.
One of those weird British addresses.
It's someone I dislike.
So go and have to Google this now.
I was trying to think what the White House address was.
Something in Pennsylvania Avenue.
I believe so.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Yeah.
You probably know more than I do.
Well, I'm a tourist, right?
You know, yeah.
So I have a star map in Hollywood.
I'm going to go and talk some.
Oh, we could take it.
We can take you around and show you.
I know where Snoop Dogg lives.
Do you?
Yeah.
Oh, he's a friend of mine.
Oh, you already know him.
Yeah, I'm in with Snoop.
Yeah, it's fine.
My wife saw him at Walmart once.
Well, so I've been told that if you hang around in Beverly Hills, you will see these people around.
It would be quite fun.
I never go up to celebrities, though.
I never do that.
I find it really.
I'm not one of those guys either.
I find it embarrassing.
And I'd like to, I think it's always good to tell people you enjoy their work, but I also think it's going to annoy them, right?
I wouldn't be surprised if just that awkward, like, yeah, thanks.
Yeah, exactly.
Unless you've got something insightful to say.
Yeah.
Then I just.
Like, your work is terrible.
I hate everything you've ever done.
Yeah.
I did meet.
I mean, sometimes if I meet someone I admire, a celebrity I admire in a social situation, like someone that, you know, that's different.
You know, that's nice and that you can talk to the person then.
I've met one of my comedy heroes in London once called Victoria Wood.
You won't know her because she won't be known here.
She was a major meter.
She died last year, two years ago.
And I met her and she was very prickly and very kind.
And I, of course, there's that.
But I wasn't that disappointed because I'd heard that about her.
But she's such a genius that I was a bit tongue-tied talking to her.
Yeah, I don't know what to say.
What am I going to say?
Yeah, exactly.
What are you going to say?
I mean, what are you going to say to them that they've not heard before?
And they don't know you.
The weird thing with people, you know, stars is you feel like you've known them your whole life and they have no clue who you are at all.
It's like, why start a relationship on that foot?
Yeah, exactly.
You've sort of conjured an idea of what you think they are.
Exactly.
So what is it that you think is so easy to make fun of when you write satire, when you do satire about the left?
I don't think any of this is easy because I think you need to try and get it right.
And I've got it wrong a few times.
But I think it is rich pickings because we're in a particularly odd period of time where the people who are dominant culturally and are the people with a lot of power think they're the underdogs.
And that hasn't really happened before in a way that I can pinpoint.
So, you know, the kind of the woke social justice crew that, I mean, they dominate Hollywood, the media, the arts, the law in the UK, journalism, education, certainly the higher education, certainly universities in the UK and the US.
So they are incredibly powerful, predominantly bourgeois, predominantly rich people who are crying about their oppression, right?
So, and of course, what the social justice movement does is it legitimizes bullying.
It makes it okay to say the most horrible things, to dox people, to physically attack them in the case of Antifa.
And so, and yet these are the people claiming to be oppressed.
So I mistrust, I don't like bullies full stop wherever they come from and whatever they think.
And I certainly don't like a movement that claims to be the good guys in order to behave in an abhorrent way.
So that's why I go after it.
But that's why it's inherently funny in of itself insofar as someone who's a millionaire who writes for a left-wing newspaper telling poor white people how privileged they are is funny.
It's already funny.
So you just have to find a way to sort of make it even funner and expose it.
But that's what you guys do.
I mean, I'm preaching very much to the choir.
Well, I do see a parallel with the way that the religious right used to be in America is that we did control a lot of the cultural elements.
And we still had that attitude like we were oppressed.
Right.
You know?
And that's why we've been the butt of jokes for 50 years.
And rightly so.
It's not.
Anyone who claims to be oppressed had better be oppressed.
Very few people in America and the UK are oppressed.
In terms of like, there aren't people asking you, you know, where are your papers?
You know, you can't, you know, we're going to control where you live and what you say and all this sort of stuff.
You know, oppression is a strong word.
And I think it should be reserved for actual oppression, you know, because I think it degrades the people who have had to live through.
I mean, this is why this promiscuous use of the word Nazi and fascism and all of that is so, not only is it historically illiterate, but it's also really offensive to the people who live through genuinely fascistic regimes, which currently exist in the world, but also historically, such as the Nazi regime and Mussolini.
And I just think it's a really, that's a sort of genuinely offensive thing.
You know, I don't, when people say that Donald Trump is a Nazi and the people who vote for him are Nazis, I think, okay, well, I haven't seen him as yet attempt to instigate a one-party state and to violently shut down the Democrats.
I haven't seen that happen yet.
So, you know, don't use the word until it's appropriate.
So sloppy.
Yeah.
Have you ever had anybody?
Because you have people that mistake Titania as a psycho-feminist and they hate those kind of women.
So they get in a big argument.
Have you had anybody who is like, oh, yeah, she's great.
I'll follow her because I love her and she thinks just like I do.
There was the feminist Naomi Wolf, famous feminist.
She agreed with something she wrote on Twitter.
She shared it.
She's like, yeah, here's her.
She replied.
Here, here.
She replied to it.
There was a number of times people have taken it seriously.
Yeah, ever heard of Naomi Wolfe?
Happened this week.
Sorry, it happened four days ago.
There was a face of the French social justice movement.
Now, I don't know her name.
Oh, that sounds awful.
She retweeted one of Titania's tweets approvingly.
And then there was an article in a French magazine sort of gloating about this, saying that the head of...
Let me see if I can find it.
Okay.
And...
And, you know, it does happen a lot.
And I think it's because what Titania is saying isn't a million miles away from what these people are actually saying.
I think that's what it is.
I mean, what I try and do is I try and exaggerate.
And I try to hint in some way within the tweets themselves that it is ridiculous.
But that doesn't always register.
Yeah, one thing I love that you do is with Titania, she will retweet actual articles or op-ed pieces or whatever and be like, yeah, this is right down my alley.
Yeah, exactly.
you know kind of exactly take it to its logical conclusion oh here's the so this is someone now i i apologize if i mispronounce this The woman is called Rokaya Diallo.
Okay.
It's not a name I'm familiar with, so that's why I don't know how to pronounce it.
So there was an article in the Atlântico French magazine, and they call her the famous face of social justice.
So she retweeted.
Yeah, I mean, so that's that's encouraging.
I mean, part of part, you know, you know, it's fun.
Like, the best fun is when people think it's true.
Yeah.
I got into loads of rows yesterday or two days ago when she tweeted about veganism.
I don't know if you saw this tweet.
And then I screenshotted a lot of the arguments she was having and I posted them.
Those are hilarious.
And I do that every week or so.
So I'll give you an example.
So this was how many days ago?
Yeah, this was two days ago.
So what she tweeted was, yeah, she tweeted, all animals are naturally vegan.
The food chain is a myth created by men to justify eating meat.
And then there were like, and you see here I've tweeted four different arguments, debates that she's had with people.
One woman came back saying, no, cats' spiky teeth are perfectly adapted to catching and holding prey, as well as chewing through tough skin and crunching up on bones.
And then Titania replies, nonsense.
All of my pet cats have been vegan.
I tend to get a new one every few months because cats have such a short lifespan, unfortunately.
But so that's fun.
Like, I enjoy the, and that's not mean.
I don't think that's mean.
I think that's either, because nine times out of ten, whenever I argue with someone and post a screenshot, they come back later and say, oh, that's actually really funny.
And they end up following her.
And I like that.
I don't do this sort of nasty chat, you know?
But I always stay in character as Titania.
If they want to talk to me about my genuine political, they can go on my own Twitter account.
That's not normally where people go if they want to shout at me.
Because what's the point?
If you shout at Titania, she'll just, you look like an idiot.
It's funny, all of the really nasty ones, they don't go after Titania because they end up looking stupid.
And plus, I think because she's got so many followers, they then, the followers attack them.
So I think people want to steer clear of it.
Twitter is a, it's a cesspit, isn't it?
It's just like horrible human behavior.
It's the worst.
You know, it brings out the worst in people.
It is kind of the best.
That's something I love about doing satire on Twitter because it's just so it's so insane on there already to just kind of show up in a mask.
It's like showing up in a Halloween costume at a political debate or something.
It's the wild west, isn't it?
You might have said something before, but we all feel here at the Babylon Bee that we're not very confrontational.
We're not very like, I'm not going to argue with a relative about politics.
No, you believe that's interesting.
But then on the Babylon B, we'll go and attack an issue where we'll, you know, we like putting on the Batman mask and, you know, or the Joker mask, whichever it is.
That's satire, isn't it?
And there's nothing, you know, that's good.
I mean, I wonder if there's a certain personality that's geared towards that, like putting on this act.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it probably is something to do with being non-confrontational, I guess.
I mean, I'm not a confrontational person at all.
I'm not.
I mean, I found myself in this really weird situation where I'm half of my career is comedy and satire and the other half is political commentary.
So I often, I go on TV a lot to talk about politics in the UK and I'm touring.
I'm doing a tour of the UK.
Are you part of the Nazi party there?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm fully paid up nuts.
I've got Hugo Boss uniform and everything.
And so I'm touring the UK with a commentator called Douglas Murray, who's a conservative commentator in the UK.
And we're touring, and the tour is called Resisting Wokeness.
And we've already had a lot of angry responses to that.
And so that's a political discussion thing.
So that's my other side of my life.
But what's odd about that is I kind of just fell into that.
I'm not, I don't like, I certainly don't like arguments when they get nasty and when people start shouting and throwing things.
I like polite disagreement and discussion.
I revel in that.
But I'm certainly not confrontational.
But I also expect other people not to be as well.
And that's why I'm endlessly surprised at the hostility, because I don't feel threatened when someone disagrees with me.
I imagine we disagree on an awful lot politically.
I don't feel threatened by that.
And I also am not sufficiently arrogant to think I'm right about everything.
And I'm willing to be persuaded on things.
And I think it would be so lovely if absolutely everyone felt that way.
That sounds quite arrogant as well, if everyone felt like me.
But what I'm saying is like, no, no, I'm sort of saying the opposite.
I'm saying that, you know, if I'm wrong about something great, tell me why.
Rather than just asserting that I'm wrong.
And let's have that discussion.
That's more fun.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think there's something connected to that.
Yeah, although that said, as a stand-up, I've also directly attacked or mocked ideas and people through my own voice.
So I have, you know, but then my stand-up persona is a lot more confrontational than I am.
You know, the Andrew Doyle on stage is a bit of a hacksaw, to be honest.
And a bit, you know, and that isn't really me.
I see it as a character as well.
Yeah, yeah.
To be honest, even though it's my name.
It makes sense.
Yeah, I think that the cathartic to join the Babylon B because I was just, I've worked mostly in kind of Hollywood-ish, you know, comics and animation and stuff like that.
And, you know, you just can't.
Any majority?
Any major names you want to drop on?
I'm going to drop names.
No, go for it.
Everybody's heard them already.
We do have the name drop button.
We haven't got to use that much.
Oh.
Just say Nick Offerman so we can use the button.
Nick Offerman.
Name drop.
Well, I said I knew Snoop, dog.
So we forgot about the Snoop dog.
We'll have to add him in post.
We'll add him in post.
I'll try and deliberately drop some names.
Drop some names through the, but the thing is, a lot of the name drops.
If you had anybody who like, I guess you couldn't say this, if you had anybody who's like, oh, I secretly love your account, but I can never say it publicly.
Lots.
Oh, my goodness.
I get that all the time.
I get people.
They tell us off the air.
Yeah.
You won't know that mostly British.
Boris Johnson.
Yeah, but then you know, I can't.
But then you get the, no, actually, you get the all the British people I know.
Everybody, Ricky Dubai.
It's weird.
He probably does like it, actually.
Oh, no, he's being open about that.
You get the, in America, it's actually mostly the famous conservatives who like it and are openly, you know, and it's, and I, uh, but then it's actually the people on the left who like it who tend to message me secretly.
Okay.
And they say, you know, I really like what you're doing, but I can't share it.
Or I really like this tweet, but I'm not going to retweet it.
And I get that.
I get that because people want to make a living, don't they?
And they don't want to make themselves into a pariah.
And, you know, I'm, I, I, I've, I mean, I've lost work over my politics.
And I, I don't, that's not me trying to say I'm a victim.
Like, that was my decision.
You know, I went into that knowing that that could and probably would happen.
But I've reached a point in my life where I don't care.
I think it's much better to be honest.
I have no, I'm sort of buying it.
I just know how self-destructive it is to tell lies.
It is that simple.
And there are also some things I just cannot not speak out about because I find it, I would consider it morally wrong, actually, to remain silent on certain things.
Do you feel like you represent more of the average person in the UK?
Like when I feel like the average person, like actually pushing back into wokeness, actually being cool at talking about ideas rather than having a sense of humor.
It feels like it's an elite kind of an elite or a certain culture that's really loud on lying.
Yeah, I mean, well, we're all individuals with different ideas about different things.
But I think one thing I can say is that the vast majority of people are pretty decent.
The vast majority of people want to have discussions and are smarter than people think.
My guiding principle in terms of everything I write and say is I always assume that the people who are reading are smart and I don't talk down to people and I don't, you know, and that's not what the social justice movement does.
Are you punching down?
Well, I don't punch down.
I hate that punching down thing anyway.
I do too.
Because I sounds like punching down to me.
Well, okay, so I don't think that you can have these rules about where you punch in comedy.
Don't think that works because everyone's idea of up and down is different.
That's the first thing.
I don't punch down insofar as my targets have always been those in power in one way or another.
And that's my decision.
But I'm not going to try and legislate against what other comics, what targets they choose.
I think it's got to be an individual decision.
I can defend all of my jokes.
And I don't think I'm not a, I don't joke cruelly.
I don't joke in a nasty way, but that's my own.
But that's not to say that you can't.
And I know some comics who have done some brilliant, caustic, and pretty unpleasant comedy, actually.
But it's skilled.
It's just not something I would do.
Yeah.
But I guess people would probably say within the woke framework that just by being a male mocking a feminist, you're already punching down, right?
Well, they're idiots.
That's pretty much all I can say about that.
That's a genuinely stupid thing to believe.
I agree.
So women are idiots.
Is that what I'm saying?
I think we need to just let's yeah.
Let's just be clear on that.
That's great.
Now someone can clip that and they can use that against me.
Yeah.
Get back in the kitchen.
Stumps.
Just clip that.
And now we're on record laughing at it.
Yeah.
It's in minefield.
I'm bringing the whole thing up.
So, I mean, obviously, you're, we talked about this a little bit.
Your material's been mistaken for real.
You know, the first time I saw it, I'm like, what is this?
Who is this crazy person?
And sometimes people will say that when our satire is mistaken, it's real.
They'll say, well, that's because you're not doing it right.
No, that's not true.
I think there is a.
I think there's a line, but I'm wondering what you think about, you know, is satire that could possibly be passed off as real.
It's not a good satire or bad satire somewhere in between.
Okay, I think it's really interesting to try and dance around that line.
Yeah, right.
I like the so sometimes I'll tweet something that I know is so ridiculous that no one's going to think it's real.
Even then, someone does.
Always.
So there's those sort of tweets.
There's some of the ones that are more.
And those sort of tweets to me are more like bait, you know, because I want to see who falls for them.
But then there are the tweets that are just jokes, you know, that are either self-contradictory or have kind of a joke structure about them.
And then there are the tweets that are as close as possible to what people actually say.
Like, for instance, now, was it Rosanna Arquette?
She's the very woke actor, right?
One of them.
Yeah.
They're all woke.
Who did a tweet about how she said something like, I'm paraphrasing here, but something like, I'm so deeply ashamed every day of being white.
And I literally cut and paste the tweet and posted it as Titania about an hour after she did.
Word for word.
Word for word.
No, literally cut and paste.
Including the typo.
I just put it out.
And of course, the joke there is double because it's either the people who think I wrote that originally or it's the people who know that that was something that I'm making a comment on her.
So I like dancing around that area because a lot of this stuff is pretty much self-satirizing.
So it's nice just to throw it back out there.
And I think that's a lot of fun.
We should try that.
We're just going to copy our headlines from straight from other DNSs.
But you know, there was an academic study in America about fake news and it tried to list all these websites that were counted as fake news.
And part of that was things that they politically don't agree with, like Breitbart, or partly it was actual fake news websites.
Or it was The Onion.
The Onion ended up on there as well as being, and it said that this should be classed as fake news.
And there are lots of people saying that you should always have to put parody at the start of parody articles, which undermines the entire point.
We've been battling that a little bit.
I think that's a disastrous thing to do.
It's like a comedian laughing at their own jokes, you know.
Here's a joke.
Yeah.
I'm very interested in the way in which the stuff that you produce satirically can mirror, I mean, literally mirror what's happening in the real world and exposing that.
Because if that is the case, then something's wrong.
Something's going very badly wrong.
And I'll give you an example of there's a very woke newspaper called The Independent in the UK.
And Titania hoaxed them.
I don't know if you know about this.
So it's one of the mainstream publications in the UK.
And they just publish any old woke nonsense, right?
And they published an article which called for comedians to be prosecuted under hate speech laws.
Obviously hoaxed and ridiculous and authoritarian.
And in that article, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence, it spells out, Titania McGrath wrote this, you gullible hacks.
And they published that.
And it's still up.
It's still online.
My agent's getting all these nasty emails from them saying, is this true?
But what that tells you, of course, is that there are pretty low standards in the woke media.
They're not even going to do a basic background check of an author who has no online presence.
I mean, this was a guy called Liam Evans, just made a name up, right?
Liam Evans.
And it's just as long as the message is right, they'll just publish it.
They won't even edit it so that the code doesn't work.
They didn't even think, that's why I put the code in because I thought if they have any editorial integrity, the code won't work.
They'll just change a word here or there.
They didn't put it out there.
We talked with those two academics who put out those woke social justice papers and got them published in all these journals.
Yeah, but they read the grievance studies paper.
If it agrees in the agreement studies paper, right?
So it's like if it agrees with my worldview, we're not going to check it at all.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, they rewrote chapter 12 of Mein Kampf in the language of intersectional feminist theory, and that got published in a major feminist article, a newspaper, not a newspaper journal.
And, you know, I think what Peter Pogosian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose did was a great service to anyone who cares about academia, actually.
But they're now being hounded by the academics because they've exposed something fraudulent about their own.
And of course, if I were an academic still, I would be saying this is good for us.
You know, this will make us, this will force us to raise our standards and stop publishing stuff that has literally no substance.
But self-reflection and self-awareness is not the strong point of such people.
So how's it been?
I assume you might just my guess is that your politics are more left-leaning than right.
I would say so, yeah.
I mean, that's been the interesting thing, being a more conservative person is probably we, you know, while we're more conservative, there's kind of the crazy red hat-wearing side on our side.
And I think maybe it's kind of the analog to, on the left, that you have your...
Sure.
And I like mocking both.
I think Titania is mocking the extreme left or those who identify as left.
But when she gets into the arguments, often it's the more rabid right, the more angry, the more extremes on the right who argue with her and get angry with her.
So when I publish those screenshots of those, I'm mocking the right, you know?
So I think it's nice to be an equal opportunities offender.
That's what we get.
I mean, probably a large chunk of our angry male is from the right.
Yeah, will be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Because we're lampooning their, you know, we often lampoon Trump and stuff too.
I mean, I like it when people make fun of my side.
Totally.
Because I can look at it and go, oh, that's funny.
That is a tendency of the crazy people in our movement.
Like, I like it, you know.
Yeah, of course.
And it makes you, it helps you to improve.
You know, someone is showing you your flaws.
And, you know, that's always a good thing.
I also think it's great.
I actually, in a lot of ways, think that the right and the left getting their extremes becoming more exposed.
Yeah.
Like, I don't think we'd be talking right now.
And Peter Bogoshan, and he was on our show.
Yeah, they're leftists.
Yeah, there's a lot of people that are.
Lonnie, that even wrote the atheist book, How to Make Atheists.
How to convert people to atheism.
Or praying for them.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sure he's grateful.
We'll give you an opportunity at the end here to accept Jesus into your life also.
Well, I am a Catholic, so I just assumed, you know, although I think don't evangelical Christians think that Catholics are complicated.
It depends who you talk about.
Am I not the Antichrist?
Because I'm regarding this.
Well, the Pope is.
The Pope is the Antichrist.
Can I be the Whore of Babylon?
Can I do that?
Yeah.
I think that position's I could rock that look.
That would be great.
On the back of a dragon?
Yeah.
Beautiful.
I'm a big G.K. Chesterton fan, so I have to be cool with Catholics.
Do you?
Yeah.
Well, it's not, you know, I'm from an Irish background.
So, you know, my mother's from Northern Ireland from Derry.
So, big, big Catholic family.
You were saying in the car on the way here that you think that Jesus is a socialist.
Yeah, well, and he pretty unambiguously said, if you're rich, give your money away.
Let's not get into that because we're not going to.
But it's pretty unambiguous.
I mean, there are some sort of metaphorical things going on in the Bible, but that one is quite clear.
Well, it was good talking to you.
All right.
Okay.
Bye.
All right.
Did I just kill a conversation?
I was just trying to.
Does that upset you?
Makes them interesting.
Does that upset you?
I'm very triggered.
I'm very triggered.
I'm going to hear it all the time.
Yeah.
Because he fed the 5,000.
I actually think the interesting thing about Jesus is that he takes people who are way over on the left and calls them to more personal responsibility.
And he takes people that are way far on the right and maybe tells them, oh, maybe you do have some social responsibilities.
Right.
So dealing with bigger principles, you know, he isn't saying seize the means of production.
But there are some principles within there, fundamental Christian principles of selflessness and helping people, basically.
And that is something I think that is good from a left or right-wing perspective.
Yeah, totally.
I don't think what Jesus was saying is go out and make as much money as you can and screw over the poor.
I don't think.
I need to reread the Bible.
Maybe I have to read the original Aramaic or something and then that'll come across.
That's an idea we mock a lot, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
Go and make Republicans of all nations.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we have a special treat for you.
Oh, yeah.
We're going to break into our subscriber portion now.
So this next part is behind the paywall.
You know, people got to pay for this.
So it's got to be good stuff.
Is that what you're doing?
Yeah, you need to give us some like so I can't just do what I've been doing and just chatting.
I've got to.
You've got to start thinking.
You're going to reveal some people.
Oh, because I'll be able to do that.
I can ditch the.
I know I can do some gossip.
This stuff is only going to be heard by our paid subscribers, so you can say a little more gossipy stuff.
Okay, that's good.
I've written down a list of words that British people pronounce wrong, and I'm going to hand it to you.
You people bastardize our language, and you know, and we're going to have them read it.
Do we have to flower?
So we can mock them.
Bastardize isn't that good.
That's not a swear word.
The word bastard isn't a swear word.
It's an illegitimate child.
Yeah, yeah.
Bastard sword.
Bastard eyes.
Bastard.
Yeah.
Samurai.
That was a comic.
Bastard samurai.
Just trying to get in on this bastard talk.
So this is.
So words that we spell that.
That's what we're going to do.
We don't know that you say wrong.
Say wrong.
That you pronounce wrong.
Interesting.
And we're going to.
And I want.
And some crazy stories from the craziest life stories.
Yep, no problem.
Yeah.
Titillating ones.
Yeah.
Sectionally?
No, I thought you were Christians.
What that's flowerbed.
We're going to do a lot of bleeping.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
If any white people are listening, what would Titania's parting words or parting advice be for these white people?
Kill yourself.
Thank you.
Yep.
Beautiful.
Yep.
All right, everyone.
Well, you can get Titania McGrath's book, Woke, A Guide to Social Justice.
I assume you can get it on Amazon.
Yeah, it's great.
There's a whole chapter against capitalism.
So get it on Amazon.
Do that.
Yeah, it's a perfect way to do it.
Yeah.
And yeah, so check that out.
And we want to thank.
Yeah, you can also follow Andrew.
And you can follow him.
Yeah.
You can follow him.
I have a normal Twitter.
I have my normal Twitter.
Do you want to just do this interview and we'll just.
Yeah, okay.
So I have the normal Twitter, which is AndrewDoyle underscore com.
So you can send me messages and abuse there, which is normally what I use it for, which is just a conduit for anger.
And then Titania McGrath at Titania McGrath is the account.
So that's what you can do.
I'm not on Instagram because I don't want to learn something new.
Yeah, we've talked about time length.
We hate Instagram.
I feel like there's a lot of pressure having to record my life visually.
Although I might, maybe I'll take a picture of us here.
Yeah, that'll be something to do.
I have done, I am on Instagram and I post things every now and then but I don't really know how it works.
You need to get a good filter that makes your face into Titania.
And you can take selfies because that's what it's all about.
Oh yeah, yeah.
I hate selfies.
But she would like Instagram.
Titania would like selfies, right?
Yeah, but there's only one picture of her and she looks the same in every picture.
But a lot of women like that.
Well, they all look the same, don't they?
They are the same.
They have that angle, they know what angle.
They have that face they make, yeah?
The duck lips.
Yeah, the pouting.
Yeah, the pout.
Well, thanks for coming across the world.
We have the pond all the way from the UK just from Babylon B.
We really like that.
That's the only reason I'm here.
It's all the way to Ranchi Cucamunga.
Is that where you are?
So thank you.
Yeah, thank you very much.
All right.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
We have to stop taking anyone seriously who uses the phrase dog whistle.
It's like my friend Douglas Murray.
If you are hearing the dog whistle, you are the dog.
Let's talk about Trump.
Yeah.
Here we go.
Privacy.
Oh, wrong.
Do we have a buzzer?
What should it be?
What should it be?
privacy well i mean if you're do you say something's privet So I've been very surprised meeting the people who I've been told for years are monsters and discovering they're very nice.
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And in that article, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence, it spells out Titania McGrath wrote this, you gullible hacks.
And they published that.
And it's still up.
It's still online.
My agent's getting all these nasty emails from them.
Yes, because she's a sophisticated poetess and therefore understands that a haiku needs to have five syllables, then seven syllables, and five syllables.