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April 9, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:22:54
Heather MacDonald
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I've been looking forward to this for ages with Heather MacDonald.
Now, Heather is, we have a mutual friend, Scott, who said, you've got to, you've got to talk to Heather.
You've got to have her on the podcast.
And I thought, well, Yeah, sure, Scott.
But is she going to be... I mean, I know that she's sound on some issues, but is she going to be like... I was frightened, Heather, that you might be unsound on the coronavirus thing, you know, that you might be a true believer in vaccines and masks and stuff.
And thank heavens we established fairly early on in our conversations, but we're trying to set up this interview, that That you're not.
You're not.
You're like me.
You're one of the freedom fighters who knows that it's a complete nonsense.
So tell me about your experiences.
I mean, in California, when did you know that this whole thing was really a scam, basically?
When did your antennae start twitching?
Well, first of all, James, your supposition was certainly based on a right reading of the odds, because what we're seeing here with the coronavirus hysteria is the feminization of our culture.
And so as a female, it was a perfectly legitimate assumption that I would be a bearer of that hysteria and the safetyism mania that has jumped out of the universities and now seems to have taken over Not just the West, but the entire world.
I began the coronavirus madness in New York City.
And we had things like the governor, Andrew Cuomo, who's obviously been impugned on many different grounds.
But early on, he uttered the phrase, if we save just one life, it will have been worth it.
Now, that sounds great.
And it sounds compassionate, but of course it's ludicrous.
You cannot make public policy based on the idea of saving one life, because it ignores all of the other lives that you're going to take, all the other costs, and it's not how we live our lives generally.
If we cared about saving 40,000 lives a year in the U.S., we would put the traffic speeding limits to about 15 miles an hour.
We allow them to be 75 miles an hour, knowing that that will result in about 40,000 deaths a year, because we value other things than saving just one life, which is convenience, speed, being able to go where you want and let out the throttle.
Other things that just were utterly nauseating.
The distinction that we had early on between essential and non-essential businesses, Who were these people making these distinctions?
To an employee, every business is essential.
You have the insanity of beaches being closed down, of hiking trails being closed down, and the utter arbitrariness of the rules.
And we're still seeing that as we are tentatively reopening now.
I'm in California now, and our magnanimous Governor Gavin Newsom is slowly, since he's facing a recall election now, is allowing certain businesses to open at 10% capacity.
How did he come up with 10% capacity?
He made it up!
They're making the whole thing up!
We knew early on what the profile was of coronavirus decedents.
In March 2020, a report came out of Italy Average age of coronavirus decedents, 80.
Average comorbidities, three.
Nothing has changed since then, and yet we have spent a year tearing down Western prosperity, destroying the future for generations to come, based on the same abysmal public policy decision-making and the sheep-like response of the public to it.
Yes.
I'm going to ask you in a moment whether you've got any theories on what's behind all this.
But first of all, I want to know...
I feel in the UK very isolated right now.
I'm one of the very, very few journalists who is extremely sceptical about, well, lockdowns obviously, masks obviously, but also about these so-called vaccines which aren't even vaccines.
I've been calling this out since the beginning and I'm pretty much the only one left.
Are you familiar with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the final scene?
It's become a sort of internet trope, as it were, or almost a meme.
These evil body snatchers take over the world and they're kind of pod creatures.
They're half plant, half alien.
And they gradually take over everyone and turn them into aliens.
And the hero is played by Donald Sutherland.
There's a big spoiler alert here because I'm about to give away the final scene but so the final scene is Donald Sutherland and he's everyone look away if you don't if you don't want to know what happens in the invasion of the body snatchers look away now the final scene you encounter Donald Sutherland and he sees this this a woman meets him and and she She recognizes him and says, thank God you're still alive.
And he opens his mouth and points to her and issues the death-curdling scream, which shows that he too has been taken by the pod people.
The point is that all my friends have been taken, all my colleagues have been taken by the pod people.
And I was wondering whether you've had similar experiences.
Everyone's just caved.
No, that's not the case here, but it is the case that those of us who are dissenters have had absolutely no effect on public policy.
There is a very vibrant group of, and you have, you know, the wonderful Toby Young there too, and lockdown skeptics, but there's a lot of growing dissidence.
I mean, I was attacked early on by conservatives for wanting to kill grandma.
Were you?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Yoram Hazani wrote a bunch of tweets against me for lacking fidelity.
And I imagine the NRO crowd were pretty feeble, weren't they?
I mean, they're kind of, sort of, Republicans.
They're conservatives in name only, aren't they, really?
I don't know what their line was, but to be honest, my own The institution, the Manhattan Institute, was much more cautious than I was early on, and so I was publishing elsewhere initially.
Was that difficult, having your institute sort of... No, I mean, I wasn't silenced by any means, but they were definitely supporting California, San Francisco Mayor London Breed for being one of the first to shut down.
But what's depressing to me is that people who've been hammering on the arbitrariness of this, on the collateral consequences that are as bad, they're worse than what we've had from coronavirus, have made no difference.
There's a talk radio host out here in Los Angeles, John Phillips, Who spends an hour every day in the most heroic enterprise of going after these two very conservative, tough-as-nails female doctors on with him.
And every single day, five days a week, they go over all of the lies that people have bought.
For a year he's been doing this.
I couldn't do it because I don't like to repeat myself and I bore myself to tears when I find myself going over the same crap.
He's been doing it for a year and it's made not a damn bit of difference.
It's very, very depressing.
And you know, the thing that has driven me crazy the most, and you mentioned the mask wearing, it's the outdoor mask wearing.
And the self-righteousness, these people, I get up as early as possible when I go walking here in Irvine.
So I don't have to see anybody wearing a mask because it drives me crazy.
But at 6 a.m.
here, there will be maybe three people in every square mile out walking or jogging.
It is empty, and yet they're wearing a mask.
And these are the people who think they're following science.
You know, if you ask them, they say, well, the science says, no, it's not.
You people are idiots.
I hate you all.
I really do.
I feel such contempt.
You don't have to even have read The press stories that Soto Voce have periodically admitted that Japan is right.
It's the three Cs.
You're not going to get infected unless you're in close contact with somebody over a continuous period of time.
The CDC's own contact tracing guidelines say you need to be 15 minutes in close contact with somebody.
And yet people are wearing masks outdoors For the most fleeting and distant of encounters.
But you didn't have to even have read those things.
Common sense suggests that if you're out in the great outdoors, passing somebody, you're each going, you know, at a good clip, you're not going to get sick.
And yet these people are out there.
I just despair.
Heather, I love you so much for saying that.
Last Sunday, I had this weird experience where I went for a walk, a country walk, with a very famous pop star.
Part of a 1980s iconic pop duo.
I won't name him, people can guess.
But anyway, we were out on this walk and it was glorious, glorious open countryside.
It was the kind of thing where you don't meet that many people and it just makes you feel so glad to be English.
It makes you feel like you've won the lottery in life.
It was one of those early spring days And we were walking up this path.
Actually, I wasn't talking to the famous pop star at the time.
I was talking to another person who I didn't know very well.
And so I couldn't react in the way I wanted to react.
I wanted to go Heather Macdonald kill mode.
And I would have done had I not been with this woman who was a bit more lefty than me.
And I knew that she wouldn't like what I wanted to do.
Coming the other way with this couple, I'd say they were probably unmarried, but sort of on the verge of getting married.
I'd say they were probably late twenties, although it's hard to say because they both had a mask on their faces.
And not only did they have masks on their faces, but you could see that they were giving this body language, which did not want to greet us even, because they were so scared that we might give them the virus.
We're talking open countryside.
I really wanted to give them a piece of my mind.
In fact, I've started getting so anti-mask.
I live on this enormous country estate, which doesn't belong to me, unfortunately.
If I see somebody wearing them, if ever I catch something, we get lots of walkers as you can imagine, if ever I see anyone wearing a mask, I am going to say to them, excuse me, can you take that off please?
You're not allowed to wear a mask on this estate.
I'm waiting for that opportunity.
I think these people are mad and they are anti-science, they are What is it that possesses people in their 20s to imagine that a country walk is improved by a mask?
What's happened to the younger generation, Heather?
It is just astounding.
I've set myself a rule, which is that as hard as it is, I am not going to be the first to start that interaction.
If somebody's walking towards me with a mask, Outdoors, and even worse, you know, shunning me, dodging.
I've had people, you know, get off the sidewalk, go into the street.
I'm not going to say anything.
If somebody reprimands me for not having a mask, then I'm going to say, please read the signs.
But it's very hard.
But I figure, let live and let live.
What's going on?
As I say, it is the safetiest ethic, and it is also virtue signaling.
And it is also where this stems from now.
I'm not going to.
I think conservatives in particular have an instinct to say it's always the government that's the problem.
The people are wise and the people are good.
But one can say that the government has turned us into walking billboards of fear in allowing the It's a fallacy to remain at large that there is any risk of outdoor transmission.
Having everybody walking around wearing masks sends the message that danger is everywhere.
And it's a very good advertising campaign that the government doesn't have to pay for.
We are all deputized into Terrifying everybody else by wearing masks.
And it's one of the many aspects of weird sort of Baudrillard hyper-reality theater that we're living through.
On our bodies, you know, physically, we are living out a lie.
We see this in the Washington D.C.
Capitol with the security theater there about all the fencing, as if white supremacist domestic terrorism is the biggest threat facing this country, which is ludicrous.
But you have these fences constructed.
It's the same thing.
It's the same as the signs now protesting anti-Asian hate, referring to white people killing Asians out of COVID scapegoating, which is not going on.
So it's very weird.
But to get back to the pandemic thing, I think we are so secure as a culture.
We have driven death away.
You know, if you listen to Baroque music, it is pervaded by, yes, moments of utter joy and elation, but also often by just a deep, profound sorrow and sadness.
And for Centuries, people lived with death all the time.
The childbirth deaths, the children dying, Ben Johnson writing poems to his dead children.
We banished it almost entirely until the end of life.
I went through probably 50 years of my life without having anybody in my close knowledge dying.
It's quite extraordinary.
And so now people in wearing masks and feeling like they're fighting against something threatening, it gives their lives a sense of being heroic and on the edge and facing risk that has otherwise been purged from Western life to an utterly unimaginable degree. it gives their lives a sense of being heroic and Yeah.
Let's savor the irony of that, that people cowering behind masks think they are being heroic, that they think they are doing their bit to save mankind.
So previous generations would have, landed on the beach at um Omaha and Utah and Sword and so on or fought at Cressy and Agincourt or whatever and now the best they can do is put a scrap of cloth in front of their mouth and and tweet about it you know and oh and maybe maybe post pictures I mean do you get this in America?
People posting pictures of themselves taking this entirely unnecessary vaccine.
No, I've not seen that.
I think that there is no more spirit-crushing, soul-destroying mantra than stay safe.
It just drives me crazy.
The classical music station that I listen to out here in LA, I love it.
There's one host who's been around since I was a child, and he still ends his broadcast, you know, be safe out there.
If that was the If that was the watchword for civilization, we would still be in huts.
I mean, the idea that you can minimize risk to zero, which is the precautionary principle, is ludicrous.
You know, we celebrated our American holiday of Thanksgiving in November of this year, and all of the public health experts and politicians were saying, You know, maybe you can have one other person in your house, but make sure that they're six feet apart and don't share food.
Don't touch each other.
Wash your hands every six seconds.
And if stay safe had been the mantra, there never would have been an America to celebrate Thanksgiving because nobody would have gotten on a boat to cross the Atlantic where the death rate by some calculus was, you know, 50% at least, where you have the colony of Roanoke disappearing off the map.
And people realize that a cost-benefit analysis is what rational people do.
Right now, we are all focusing on avoiding one particular risk.
We know now that the survival rate is 99.98% for virtually The entire population except for the very elderly and infirm and yet we're still shutting everything down for this.
I don't know what the future holds.
This is what I wanted to move on to.
There's so much I could talk to you about.
On the way to this podcast, I was just driving back from a thing, I was listening to your chat with Candice Owens, which you did last year, about the whole issue of Oh, you know, race and the idea that cops are always being blamed as kind of, you know, their sole mission is to go out and shoot a black person, which you've very effectively refuted in your research as an academic and as an author.
There's so much we could talk about, but I'm very conscious that you're very You're that rare thing, an academic who still believes in culture and civilisation, and you're actually informed, which I think unlike most, say, gender studies professors or black studies professors, you actually know your shit.
So what I wanted to talk to you really about was the rise and fall of civilizations and what it is that's happening to our culture.
I'm feeling very bleak right now.
I think that we are last days of Rome.
I think end of empire.
And I was wondering whether you sort of felt that as well.
Well, first of all, I'm not an academic.
I had aspired to be one.
I wanted to, thought I would do a PhD in comparative literature.
Yeah.
And I had been, I was foolish and stupid enough as an undergraduate to get seduced by deconstruction.
And what were you?
Oh yeah, I was at Yale in the seventies when it was at its height and Paul DeMond was there and Jeffrey Hartman and Jacques Derrida would come every year trailing his long white silk scarf and hold forth to a crowd of adoring graduate students
And I bought it because I was very interested in language and problem, you know, what I started calling problems of representation and deconstruction seemed to be the hottest thing out there and purported to be a secret knowledge about how language worked.
Its secret motto was that language fails constantly.
It was the most bizarre theory and I'm not even going to attempt to encapsulate it now because it's... But you thought you understood... Did you think, at the time, did it make sense?
Or did it never really make sense?
You just... No, no, it made sense and, you know, I was an acolyte and I'm so ashamed of it now.
I remember feeling sort of contempt For my fellow students who rejected it out of hand, I thought they were anti-intellectual, I now realize they were preternaturally wise.
I was an idiot.
But again, And it's hard to separate it from the aura that it had of being incredibly cutting edge and dangerous and possessing a secret knowledge that made the rest of humanities that was not yet on board And at Yale, the German department was kind of infamously conventional and traditional.
And so we all looked down on it.
It just shames me to say these things.
So that was my aspiration.
Eventually, thanks to Cambridge, I studied linguistics at Cambridge University and realized, wait a minute, that's real knowledge about language.
I loved speech act theory, J.L.
Austin, That started me in my break from it.
So when I came back to Yale, I heard Paul Dumont saying the same damn things that he was saying when I was there as an undergraduate, and I realized he's mad.
Like, this man is mad.
He's obsessed with these weird images of mutilation.
Anyway, so I did not do that.
So I agree with you.
I see no way out.
I just finished a piece that will be published in City Journal on what I'm calling the betrayal of the guardians in classical music.
Classical music has now come under Black Lives Matter attack.
Have you seen today in the papers that Oxford University has rejected, the music department is going to reject sheet music because it discriminates against, and also European, white European composers also, they alienate people from different backgrounds.
So maybe they should be reconsidered.
It is just appalling.
And yes, the attack on notation, that is what sets apart the Western classical tradition.
It is the only tradition that is notated.
And that notation allowed the most extraordinary It's a kaleidoscope development of styles that is just breathtaking, and it allows the magic of being able to hear what people were playing in the 15th century.
It's incredible!
Unfortunately, we don't have recordings, but we can read what they were playing.
So, yes, the rule is now, here is the basic rule for our existence.
Anything, any human activity that came out of Europe whose practitioners were predominantly white because of the demographics of Europe until very recently, is now fatally racist and should be cancelled.
It's very simple.
You can just go around, look around at any of our civilizational legacies that came out of Europe.
They were all predominantly white.
They are now on the chopping block.
So the whole tradition of Western classical music Because the greatest composers, thanks to Europe's demographics, there was no discrimination against blacks going on because there were no blacks in Europe.
It's all out.
But the betrayal of the Guardians is that not a single conductor, soloist, singer, orchestra member has stood up against this hatred and poison.
It's not a single literature professor has, not a single classics professor has.
It's coming into the science fields.
They're all coward.
They're terrified.
And what is driving it all, and this is a very, very uncomfortable thing to talk about, and people don't want to acknowledge it.
But my analysis is that what's driving this attack on colorblind meritocratic standards is the enduring academic achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand and blacks and to a lesser extent Hispanics on the other.
And because we don't have proportional representation in every single field, the only allowable explanation for that is white racism and exclusion.
Right now that is not the right explanation.
There are massive behavioral gaps, cultural gaps.
Not everybody, you have, you know, plenty of minorities who have embraced bourgeois values and are striving and are paying attention to school, involved in, you know, deferring gratification, not having children out of wedlock.
But there are, on average, significant behavioral gaps And nobody wants to acknowledge that.
And so instead we're going around our culture and saying, well, there's not a proportional representation of blacks in engineering or math or music theory.
The only allowable explanation is racism.
And therefore it all has to come down.
I like the fact that you're prepared to give an answer to the question, which is, how did it happen?
And I think that's a very good explanation.
Most people are very mealy-mouthed about these things.
Also, I did rather enjoy Candace Owens's point, which is that white people, guilty white people, are to blame for allowing this kind of stuff to happen.
They didn't need to, did they?
They didn't need to have this guilt and self-hatred that led them to destroy the Western civilization, the canon, everything that you and I were brought up to value.
We didn't have to sell these things down the river.
Right.
I mean, the guilt is understandable because it truly is an appalling hypocrisy that is very difficult to understand how the United States could have been so blind for so long to the fundamental violation of its alleged founding principles and the contempt with which Blacks were treated for so long is just heart-wrenching.
And one still is surprised by how brutal and mindless that was.
But at this point, there's a professor who's gotten fired from a Florida university for talking about Black privilege.
I'm going to say it.
At this point, our reality is In every mainstream institution in this country, black privilege.
There is not a single corporation, a single big tech company, a single law firm, a single bank, a single government agency, a single school, a single university that is not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote and admit as many blacks as possible.
Sure.
The ratios of admission to every selective school are mind-boggling.
You know, test scores and a GPA that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by a white or an Asian student are automatic admits virtually if you're a black student presenting those.
And you're right.
At this point, it is insane to tear everything down and to make excuses.
It is so condescending for white Americans to turn their eyes away from the carnage that's going on in inner city areas, which is just unbelievable.
The drive-by shootings that are going on on a daily basis, gunning down innocent, hardworking, law-abiding, bourgeois blacks and their children.
Four dozen black children were killed last year in drive-by shootings.
In their homes, one-year-olds, three-year-olds, in their homes, in their beds, playing in their front yards, in parks, at barbecues, gunned down by these mindless gangbangers.
America turns its eyes away because they don't want to talk about black crime and they are not willing to hold the inner city culture up to the same standards as they hold for themselves And that's a recipe for making sure it never ends.
Yeah.
The point you made earlier about America's race problems, I can see.
I mean, I've read about the sort of the aftermath of the Civil War and I agree.
The wounds are much fresher, much more raw in America than they are in, say, you know, we have quite a good record on that kind of thing.
You know, we, we dedicated our Royal Navy to policing the, to abolishing the slave trade.
And we, we, we sacrificed lots of white, white lives to, to, to make sure that this happened.
And yet we have the same problems in Oxford and Cambridge and all our universities.
You go to Australia, they've got the same bloody problems.
So I don't think it's enough to explain it in terms of the rawness of past relationships between blacks and whites.
I think it's more... I think it's deeper than that.
I think that there is... I'll just go with this for a while.
We know that civilizations rise and fall.
And I think that it's a bit like, if you think of human civilization as like a kind of a Petri dish and the kind of the bacteria or whatever, the things inside the Petri dish grow and they form these kind of weird shapes and things and then they die away.
I think that's what, there's something in our species which is programmed to self-destruct.
And I think what we're experiencing now is we've kind of had enough of aiming for excellence.
We've had enough of achieving, and we're ready to die.
We're ready to kill ourselves with stupid values that we've just embraced because we've got the death gene.
Anything in that, do you think?
Well, it may be that it's the triumph of democracy, the hatred of meritocracy, of elitism, and The contempt for craft, for skill.
Yeah.
And it's also the rise of the youth culture where you had capitalism being so successful that in the 1950s, for the first time in human history across the entire globe, you had adolescents with spending power separate from their parents.
And so then you had a corporate culture purveying You know, adolescent taste to these people.
And the whole development of excellence, of trying to work hard at developing an accomplishment that was equal to what our civilizational inheritance is, sort of fell down.
And so you had just the rise of mediocrity in schools.
And the idea now with art, you know, installation art, it's just preposterous.
Nobody is learning how to draw.
They're not learning in art school that basic discipline of hand-eye coordination.
And instead, you know, you just do whatever you want.
And this is obviously a longstanding complaint.
By now, it's quite a chestnut and hoary, but, you know, whether it's performance art or installation art, There is no craft involved in any of that.
And yet nobody wants to say, please, just show me you can draw.
Then you can go on and do whatever you want.
But if you can't draw, I'm not going to call you an artist.
So yes, there's been a revolt, I think, against excellence.
I still think, though, in my experience, because it's not happening yet in China.
We'll see.
I mean, China, It appears to be as safety-ist as we are, so that feminized risk aversion, the anti-entrepreneurial spirit, which now is the essence of the university, which is female-dominated, China seemed to be pretty safety-ist itself, but it is also ruthlessly meritocratic.
Yes.
And we'll see if it turns on itself.
I still think, sadly, and again, this is It's very, it's too shorthand, but I do think that the race problem is behind a lot of what's going on now in the West.
And it's also, it's weird.
You're right.
It's the Anglosphere that is worse.
You know, Macron gave a very good defense of French civilization and said, we're not going to be tearing statues down.
Whereas, you know, there you guys are, With David Hume, you know, I don't remember if it was in Edinburgh University building being renamed.
So it is a sickness that seems to be worse in the Anglosphere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you're right about the visual arts.
They were one of the first to go.
Literature again.
It became subject to kind of feminist readings, Marxist readings, the new criticism, which I can't stand either, because it wants to turn appreciation of literature into a science because it feels bad about itself that it's not a STEM subject.
So academics say, well, I know, let's try and treat the text like it's a chemical formula and let's analyze, let's take it apart.
No, sorry, no.
There was a time, I don't know when this golden age was exactly, but when people went to university to be educated, to have their minds opened, to learn from passionate, incredibly well-informed people who knew the totality of the classics.
Say you went to read classics, you'd learn the totality of the literature by people who really appreciated it.
Now, you know, if you want to read If you want to read greats at Oxford or Cambridge, basically you've got to have been to a state school, because they've got massive hang-ups about the fact that the only schools capable of teaching Latin and Greek anymore are places like Eton.
They've got established departments, but they don't want that.
They don't want boys who are already at university level by their penultimate year at school.
They want people that can say, look, this person never studied classics before, but now they're at Cambridge.
But what they're doing at Cambridge is now doing the work that in private schools would have been done at for 16-year-olds.
And they're proud of this.
But what they're doing is they're eroding classics.
Maths.
Arithmetic is apparently racist.
2 plus 2 equals 4 is a racist concept.
You know what I'm talking about.
It's across the board.
Well, again, you've made my point.
Take apart any of these assaults on our inheritance and it all comes down to race.
It all comes down to the fact of disparate impact, of an academic skills gap, of the lack of proportionality.
I ask myself, and I remember your wonderful discussion with Alain de Botton with your attack on New Criticism.
I differ with you on that, because I think that paying attention very, very closely to the text is a good thing, and that there was a risk of literary criticism and teaching before that of being too disconnected to the text.
So, whether it's possible to Find a happy medium and a resting point of looking very closely at how poems are constructed, at how novels are constructed, paying attention to the words in a way that most students don't understand that the actual choice of words matter.
If you can keep that without it then becoming the scourge of high theory and becoming deconstructive reading with the hermeneutics of suspicion, and looking for subtext, I don't know.
I think I completely agree with you on the primary obligation of anybody who's been given the privilege of curating this mind-boggling, sublime inheritance is enthusiasm and gratitude.
And if you cannot explain to students why they should be down on their knees in gratitude before this inheritance, You don't belong there, but I think that is compatible with new criticism.
But generally, yeah, I do think that we have gone far too away from that and need to return to this sense of basic gratitude.
Yes, we totally agree, but it ain't gonna happen, is it?
Actually, a side note.
You will enjoy, I promise, the first podcast I did with a guy called Jonathan Myles Lee, who was a painter.
And we talked a bit about the art thing.
And he said that there has been a backlash, that there are now these places you can go, I think there's one in Florence, where you can learn how to paint.
It's all very rigorous and old school.
And this is because parents who have the values that we do, don't want their kids frittering away their time, sort of learning how to cut a shark in half and putting it in a... whatever.
They actually want them to go on an art course where they learn how to draw.
I mean, that used to be the thing, didn't it?
You used to have to be able to draw a perfect sphere before you could move on to any of the complicated stuff.
This was just a routine part.
The craft of art was the foundation.
It was beyond which you could not go unless you'd mastered it.
Well, you know, some of the writings of John Ruskin are just extraordinary.
His attention to the movement of water and rocks, his fascination with rocks, and it is related in part to drawing.
If you draw, you learn to see, and there's a joy in that connection between the hand and the eye that forces you to look very, very closely.
It is like new criticism of reading texts, how to capture how that tree is constructed with John Constable.
And I remembered, I forgot what your point was about classics.
I just want to return to that.
I ask myself often, okay, how conservative are you actually willing to be?
Because arguably the rot set in, in the late 19th century with the spread of the German research university model to the United States, actually it began earlier because there's an interesting report that came out of
of Yale College in around 1820s about whether they should dethrone classics from the central part of the curriculum, because the pressure was already on in the 1820s to say this is irrelevant, it's not practical enough.
Yale held out for a long time.
I thought that didn't happen until 1870s when Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore adopted the German research model And we got rid of classics as the basis.
And, you know, there's a fascinating, John Stuart Mill gave a fascinating inaugural address as head of Glasgow University, defending keeping the classics as the basis of all education.
Am I willing to say we should still be making Greek and Latin the sine qua non of undergraduate education Because once you let that go, then maybe you're on a slippery slope towards all of the rot.
And it's tried to invoke gender studies because that makes it seem to the uninformed that the problem is gender studies.
And if we can extirpate that, everything else is sound.
That's not the case.
There's not a single humanities department now that isn't gender studies.
But anyway, would you be willing To say that the study of Greek and Latin, both the language and the literature, should have remained the basis?
Yeah, Heather.
Given what I know now, yes.
If I'm addressing my undergraduate self, well, I was very happy to go and read English rather than greats.
Although, I mean, it might have done me good to be familiar with the classics.
I don't know.
I'd love to read the Iliad and the Odyssey in the original, but it's a bit late.
I'm not going to take up Ancient Greek now.
But yeah, absolutely.
I think so.
And I think it's a really interesting subject about where did it all go wrong?
I was having this debate with my wife last night about this.
I was talking about the nihilism in television.
Are you familiar with Alan Watt?
I've become slightly obsessed with Alan Watt.
The name is very familiar.
I must have seen something a long time ago.
He died recently, which is annoying, because I'd love to have had him on the podcast.
But he did this riff on the different forces that lead to the death of our... that have seen the erosion of our culture.
And he was talking about television, and he was saying that if you look at television and you manage to...
Separate yourself from the tantalizing plot, which is there to distract you.
What you find is that you are being brainwashed.
You're being encouraged to think certain things which are not conducive to an enduring and powerful Western civilization culture.
In other words, you get stuff like the rejection of marriage and the rejection of the nuclear family.
You get Obviously, endorsement of drug use and all manner of kind of sexual perversion and so on.
And my wife was saying to me, well, that's always been there.
You know, you've got Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, promoting this sort of libertinism and stuff.
And I said, yeah, we talked about Game of Thrones, and we talked about my favorite series, which is very, very violent.
It's about the Gamora in Naples.
It's called Gamora.
It's very, very violent, very nihilistic.
There's virtually no morality.
In the same way, there's virtually no morality in Game of Thrones.
One of the most shocking and exciting things I thought, did you ever watch Game of Thrones?
No.
It's a universe without God in it.
It's a universe where there is no justice.
And people can die at any moment.
It's shocking and it's amoral.
I was saying that this is bad.
This tends towards cultural self-destruction.
And the wife was saying, yeah, but you enjoy this kind of stuff.
I said, yeah, I do.
But it doesn't mean I don't think it's a bad thing.
And I said, look, you compare, for example, with medieval literature, with Courtney Love and Arthurian legends.
This literature was designed to, it was improving.
It was designed to show ideals, designed to make you a better person.
And I think that literature, art has done that.
Art's been about improving us until a certain point.
And I think this probably came in sometime in the early 20th century, maybe.
It took a dark turn.
And you see this in the creation of the antihero.
The anti-hero wasn't really a figure, I mean you could argue that Satan in Paradise Lost is an anti-hero, but generally as a literary type, or a cinematic type, the anti-hero is only within our lifetimes.
So I think in a way that art is now debauched, degenerate, to use a Nazi phrase.
Yeah, I don't know if it's If an artist today would ever dare use the word beauty, that is undoubtedly also seen as Western and white.
But that was the goal for, certainly in the visual arts, throughout into the 20th century.
And yes, I mean, if you look at Opera Seria, that was about holding rulers to enlightenment ideals.
And, and struggling to say, look at, you know, you should be magnanimous, you should be, forgive your enemies, be virtuous.
But on the other hand, there is a strain in literature and the novel.
I recently reread Middlemarch for a discussion with Michael Knowles.
And I mean, Eliot's understanding of human Deception about each other and her analysis of how in conversations people can talk past each other.
They're seeing each other through their illusions.
It's just extraordinary.
She's very dedicated to the idea of duty in a way that is hard for me to take.
But you also have a lot of novelistic treatments of the oppression of bourgeois norms and the small village and not an anti-hero necessarily, but an exploration of what happens to people who violate those norms, whether it's a scarlet letter, but the female who becomes pregnant out of wedlock and has to be shunned.
Now, that was at least an honest grappling with the costs and the benefits of maintaining a norm that is beneficial for the large group of people means that individuals who violate it will have to be stigmatized.
Now, you know, the other thing that we see in modern culture is the utter liberation of individuals from a whole lot of norms that once hemmed around social life.
And so you have to wonder, like, is every evolution in social life always for the better?
Is that how things work in evolution?
I don't know, you know, on a biological analogy.
Yeah.
Are we better off without people being stigmatized for out of our lives?
I would say clearly not.
I mean, the breakdown of the family is probably the biggest social catastrophe in the United States today.
But we have freedoms that are unimaginable.
So is that always better?
Are we better off today being able to do whatever we want and not coming under that censorious A view of the small village that gets written about again and again.
Yeah.
Well, to what extent do you think that that breakdown of the family was engineered by cultural Marxism or even darker forces?
Well, the usual explanation of conservatives is that it was the result of too liberal welfare that made it more useful for a female to be single and not have a husband because she'd get more money from a welfare check than she would if they were both if she had a husband who was low income.
So it's to blame the breakdown on policy.
I don't buy that completely.
It's hard.
I think feminism played a large role in this.
Marginalizing men saying that they are not important, that the Proverbial and fictional strong woman can do it all, which is nonsense.
But it's very complicated.
I don't know.
Between the Charles Murray type explanation that we the calculus, because I don't think I don't think many people are having children out of wedlock because they've sat down and done the math.
At what the net return is from getting a government check every month, as opposed to being... I think they do, Heather.
I actually do.
I think, on an instinctive level, they may not actually do the calculations on paper, but I think it's obvious that there are advantages to playing the system.
So I do credit the underclass with a certain degree of animal cunning or whatever.
If you make opportunities for them, which we've done, if you incentivise the least productive members of society to breed through the welfare system, you're inevitably going to get the situation that we're in.
Well, to back up your point, I've spent a lot of time, more years than I would have liked, in the 90s writing about welfare reform in the United States, which was in 96, the Congress and Bill Clinton signed into law a bill that kind of tried to impose more work requirements.
It did nothing about out-of-wedlock birth rates.
But I spent a lot of time in New York City going to welfare offices and talking with people.
I found just the most amazing instantiations of the worst so-called right-wing stereotypes.
You know, the Reagan just be just a bigot.
You know, just these guys that would talk about, like, if they make me work for my food stamps, I'm not going to do it.
Like, it's self-righteous.
If you're not, I'm not going to work.
That would be, that's just an insult to me.
And being completely overt about mooching off of their girlfriend.
Who has to go and do her welfare to work parks cleanup.
And so you saw, I spoke with people that were absolutely classic examples, but I also spoke with people who in welfare offices, these are welfare mothers themselves who said, yeah, they should have done this welfare reform years ago.
People are having more babies just to increase their check, which is again, a conservative critique.
One woman said, yeah, these welfare mothers are so lazy they can't even change a 40-watt bulb in their apartment.
Again, this is not me speaking.
This is not Ronald Reagan speaking.
These are the people within the system.
So you're absolutely right.
I still wonder whether there were other cultural forces that were going on that have continued to work.
Because, you know, the out-of-wedlock birth rate Still continues to go up in this culture.
It's nationally, it's in the 40s.
The black out of wedlock birth rate is about 71%.
For whites, it's about 28%.
And for Asians and Hispanics that, you know, conservatives say family values for Hispanics, Hispanics are about 51 to 53%.
But Asians are the lowest, higher than one would expect.
I think it's about 16%.
But it goes up every year.
Yes.
Does it bring us to the subject?
Well, I'm going to bring it up anyway.
The subject of dysgenics.
I've interviewed some previous people on this podcast where we talked about how Say, as recently as Victorian times, if you were poor and no matter how many children you bred, lots of them were going to be killed off because you wouldn't be able to afford the medical care.
But with improved health care, suddenly the poor were able to have large families which survived.
Meanwhile, we've seen this phenomenon increasingly today where If you are part of the kind of professional classes and both man and woman need to work in order to maintain their living standards, they don't want children.
I mean, they have very few.
It's very rare to see people with more than Toby Young is an exception.
Professionals don't breed, whereas the poorer people do.
So inevitably, what you're doing is you're encouraging the more stupid people to breed more stupid people, while the clever people aren't breeding.
So inevitably, you're going to get a kind of... I mean, this is happening, isn't it?
A drop in IQ.
Yeah.
Well, there's two things.
Again, the baneful effects, it's hard to say, of prosperity and getting back to the universities.
You know, it used to be that those norms and those difficult stigmas of banishing the single mother from the village was because everybody was so poor that you couldn't support her.
There wasn't enough welfare money sloshing around that we can put everybody in welfare.
Now capitalism has been so fantastically successful That we're thinking of now like paying everybody to not work, which is the Andrew Yang thing.
It's just insane.
It's the most naive public policy about human motivation that I can believe.
With regards to the elites, one of the reasons here is that everybody's saving money for these damn college tuitions.
that are so outrageously high in the United States.
You know, it's $70,000, $80,000 a year.
And for what?
And then these universities have the gall to think of themselves as socially woke and left-wing when they're depending on the very wealthiest to be able to pay their tuitions.
So that's driving this as well.
But yeah, it does seem like that's another aspect of modernity, that given the option, I think, females will choose to have fewer children, regardless of the economic pressures on them, I think.
I'm not sure.
I'm speculating here.
Yeah.
No, I think that's right.
And I think you mentioned at the beginning about the feminization of our culture.
And I was thinking that one of the few countries in the world, the few major powers right now, which is kind of resisting this trend, is Putin's Russia.
You look at those images that Putin released, and they were much mocked in the West.
Putin shooting a polar bear.
Putin bear-chested on a horse.
Putin catching salmon like men used to.
And I was, it's very interesting, if you analyze the media and how it, our media, and how it treats things, it tells you something very interesting about our cultural values and the underlying, the undercurrents that it is endorsing.
And the mockery that got poured on Putin for Sure, they were propaganda shots, but they were also very popular with Russian people.
Do you remember when he hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi?
And the only thing that the Western media had to say about this event was something to do with homophobia, I can't remember what.
But I would imagine that Homophobia plays quite well with an audience.
And actually, there are similar parallels with the Muslim world right now, aren't there?
They look at what's happened in the West, the rejection of the family, rejection of the nuclear family, rejection of the notion that women are really, really good at motherhood.
I mean, they are.
Women are really good at Keeping the home together and looking after children.
But we now live in a world where the very notion of celebrating that is considered, well, what?
Anti-Diluvian, almost.
It's a kind of, you know, not something we should celebrate at all.
And I wonder whether, again, that is why we're declining as a culture.
Because we are rejecting our basic, our fundamental human jobs as men and women.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's so much to talk about.
The idea that we are putting women into combat units is so insane.
We have turned war into a means of feminist advancement.
That is not what it's about.
It's about killing people.
We are putting females into combat units.
A, they have not the strength.
It is ridiculous.
The strongest female is not going to be able to compete and pull out a 200-pound male buddy who's wearing another 100 pounds of gear from a landmine.
It's ludicrous, and yet we put the advancement of females so that they can have combat training on their records so that they can become a four-star Pentagon general.
That's more important than winning a war.
But the real problem is the introduction of Eros into combat units.
You put females into the, you're destroying the male bond and you're destroying the combat cohesion.
And it's over.
I mean, you have now fist fight to breaking out all the time.
The pregnancy rates are huge on ships.
The resentments, the jealousies, it's amazing.
We are that decadent as a culture.
That we think that it's more important for strong women to feel that they're strong together and there's no difference between males and females when it comes to war itself.
It's unbelievable.
As far as Putin, I love it because I have a friend who I send a calendar every year to because she adores Putin for precisely that reason.
I would say Bolsonaro is probably... I love Bolsonaro.
And Trump was like that as well.
Well, yes, but Bolsonaro didn't have some comment like, stop being faggots or something about, you know, the coronavirus hysterics.
It was quite extraordinary.
And yes, the high point of Trump's presidency, in my view, was when he got out of the hospital, Walter Reed Hospital, for coronavirus.
He came out on his balcony.
The New York Times presented this.
It was portrayed condescendingly.
This was supposed to be a a put down in the press that he ripped off his mask.
In fact, he just kind of removed it to talk.
But when read it and you thought this, you felt like, my male hero, he ripped off his mask.
And then he said, in his usual sort of rambling way, that I'm not going to be stuck in my basement.
I'm not going to be stuck in an attic.
We have to move forward.
And we have to adopt risk.
We have to assume that there will be risk And a leader cannot be, you know, cowed into fear and cowering, which is exactly right.
And the most amazing thing about that moment, when he told Americans we have to move forward and he said, we should not be afraid, the media went berserk.
How dare you tell us not to be afraid?
This tells us everything.
We want leaders.
You know, and these are the democratic media, what would they have made of FDR's famous, famous speech, the only thing we have to fear is fear ourself, itself.
That is the same message, but now- JFK, I mean, not FDR.
Wasn't it?
I think it's FDR during the war, the only thing- Oh, okay.
Whatever, yeah.
JFK's famous thing is don't ask what you can do if you're kind of- Oh yeah, sorry, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sorry, my bad.
Anyway.
I mean, this takes us back to safetyism.
People feel alive being frightened.
Yeah, absolutely.
I wanted to ask you about that, about Trump.
I mean, things are so bleak here.
Boris Johnson is so, I mean, I find it so upsetting, I can't even talk about what's happening in this country, But I look across America and I think, my God, you're in a really... I mean, I'm thinking dog days of the Republic.
I'm thinking the Republic is broken.
I think that all those checks and balances that your founding fathers that we sent across the pond to create your great constitution and stuff, Their work's been undone.
Is there any hope for America?
How does it come back from where it is now?
I mean, you've had your presidential election stolen by a senile guy who's a crook, who's got very close links to the Chinese Communist Party, which is your enemy.
And you've got a Supreme Court that doesn't work, doesn't do its job.
How do you get back from that?
Well, I don't think the election was stolen.
I don't think it was rigged.
I think that the hatred for Trump was so great and that there was, you don't need to resort to a rigging explanation to explain Biden's victory.
That's not to say that there wasn't ridiculously absurd rules that were put in place allegedly to honor the coronavirus.
But I think that the Biden election is quite emblematic and does represent where our country is today, which is, it was a vote for safetyism.
It was a vote, a lot of Americans want to have the government control their lives.
They have no understanding of the complexity and the heroism of private economic commerce.
They have no, it turns out, You know, we've learned that there are very few small businessmen in this country.
Most people are employees of corporations or other businesses, and they've never had to figure out how the supply chain works and make a payroll.
And so they're perfectly happy to have things shut down and believe that the government can come in with massive amounts of phony money, stimulus spending, and everything's going to be okay.
The stimulus spending is not just an adequate substitute for private economic activity.
It is actually superior.
So people voted for Biden on that ground.
They also voted for him on the grounds his constant theme during the election was white supremacy.
Americans have racism in their hearts.
They've made no progress.
We are finally going to move towards racial equity, which is ludicrous.
We've been moving towards racial equity since the 60s.
We've spent trillions of dollars on redistribution programs to try to close those achievement gaps, which will not be closed absent a radical sea change in inner city culture.
But I agree with you.
And I know that as, you know, when one is public speaking, there's kind of an unstated mandate.
You've got to be optimistic because people want to feel like they're winning.
There's hope and it is, It's a violation of oral convention to be a pessimist.
And you're going to drive people away.
But I'm going to be very honest.
And I know that I'm a pessimist by nature.
But I don't see things getting better unless people are willing to stand up to what I call the myth of bias, which is that the only allowable explanation for racial gaps in this country is bias.
As long as bias remains the only allowable explanation, the left wins, hands down.
That's over.
And the spending that we're seeing now is... We thought, like, everybody was... Mouths were hanging open at the $1.9 trillion coronavirus package.
Where are we funding that?
And then, by their own accounts, this is just a warm-up of what's coming next.
It's even bigger.
How is this not going to lead to hyperinflation?
How is this not bankrupting our future generations?
But people have no idea about the essence of economic activity, which is the private sector in a voluntary supply chain.
They think that government can just endlessly print money and everything's going to be fine.
So I'm smiling because it's like, what else can you do?
You've got to laugh at what's happening.
But I was thinking, I'm reminded of, I'm currently, I've got into audiobooks recently.
I'm old, Heather, and I've reached that age where one has to, I reckon I have to spend About an hour and a half each day, literally an hour and a half, just on body maintenance.
Like about nine months ago, I trapped a nerve in my neck, and this was the result of poor posture from sitting at a computer desk.
So now I have to do these neck exercises and these back exercises every day.
Anyway, So, while I'm doing these incredibly boring body maintenance things at night, before I go to bed, I listen to these audiobooks.
And I'm currently listening to an audiobook by Bernard Cornwell.
It's set in Arthurian Britain, except he tries to imagine Arthur as a real person in Dark Ages Britain.
So you've got Dark Ages Britain and you've got these various warring tribes living amid the ruins of Roman buildings, which their culture is incapable of recreating.
They have to kind of pillage the little bits because they don't have the technology.
It's been lost.
I reckon this is where we're going.
I genuinely think that we are reaching the inflection point where people are going to be looking back and trying to piece together what it was that we achieved, what works of literature are worth keeping.
Some of them won't even survive because Google, having created this electronic library of all the books, have kind of rendered printed books obsolete.
And what will happen is that Google will then be able to erase those works that don't fit in their politically correct narrative.
I mean, they'll have tremendous power and books will rot, they'll be thrown away, What I'm saying here is to people, apart from anything else, is keep your physical libraries, because it's going to be a bit like the Alexandrian library.
It's going to be... Well, they got burned down, didn't they?
So that's no good.
But you know what I mean?
We need to... We're going to have to... We're going to be like the monasteries in the Dark Ages, keeping civilization alive while bad things go on all around us.
I think that's where we are.
Does that sound unduly bleak to you?
No, not at all.
I, you know, the questions we're watching now in the United States with big tech, the daily shutdown of free speech and no, like we're seeing it in front of our eyes, but nobody knows what to do.
It's, it's remarkable.
So one wonders in five years, what is this going to look like?
What are we going to be allowed to say?
What every single book, you know, as again, here's the rule of thumb.
If it's white, it's out.
That's it.
It's going to, it's very, very simple.
And what's going on?
And we probably will continue with technological progress, thanks to China, because China doesn't give a damn about equity or disparate impact.
And it is ruthlessly meritocratic when it comes to science, but it's not going to preserve Western civilization.
It's not going to preserve Mozart.
Well, on the other hand, classical music right now is being kept alive by the Asians.
Bless them!
You know, they're the ones that are flooding the conservatories and orchestras.
They fall in love with Bach and Mozart and Beethoven.
There's this wonderful line in Lang Lang, a great Chinese pianist, in his autobiography where he's on his way to his first piano competition in Europe, in Germany, and he's very nervous because he said to his father, this is their culture, you know, how can I possibly compete?
This is their legacy.
And he says, his father says, This is your legacy as well.
This is the legacy of humanity.
So the Asians get that, but whether they keep Shakespeare, I don't know.
But what's going on is hatred for a civilization deemed too white and too male.
And when the females take over once and for all, you're not going to get the same civilizational advance.
I like to keep track of what I call natural experiments, which are Institutions without gatekeepers so that the feminists cannot have an argument that, well, you know, there's not 50-50 male-female representation in this organization because there's all this sexist gatekeepers at Google.
You know, the Google managers just are so misogynist that they are turning down the most qualified engineer and getting somebody who's substandard because the most qualified engineer is female.
That's basically the feminist explanation.
Well, you got to look at organizations that have no gatekeepers.
And when you do, you realize that there are huge average differences between males and females.
The best example is Wikipedia.
And it drives the Wikipedia Foundation crazy.
But editors on Wikipedia, this is anonymous.
There are no barriers to entry.
Anybody can edit Wikipedia.
The gender, just sex disproportion is huge.
It's like 90% Of all editors on Wikipedia are male.
Why?
Because on average, males are more interested in facts, in getting things right, in obsessing over the last detail about weaponry in the World War II.
And the female topics, you know, about menoblonic stiletto heels, are not particularly filled out.
You know, you'd think, okay, well, maybe the females are going to be really, really exhaustive in their use of sources.
They're not.
And the male drive for risk-taking, for abstract ideas, for tinkering, for fingering how things work.
You get the same thing with letters to the editor.
In newspapers, there's no gatekeeper.
There's no barriers to entry.
Letters to editors run like two to one, male to female.
Look at blogs, for God's sakes.
Yes.
Blogs are a new phenomenon.
There's no tradition, you know, the explanation for no females in chess.
Oh, well, there's this long misogynist tradition.
Give me a break.
That's not the case.
But blogs are new.
What would you be your estimate of the ratio of male to female bloggers?
I don't know.
You're much more familiar with this world.
I would say it's probably Three to one at least.
At least.
I was thinking more like eight to one.
Eight to one or ten to one.
You just reminded me of that wonderful Netflix series about the female chess champion.
Have you seen it?
It's very, very charming.
It's like, you know, it's like a fairy cake.
It's lovely, beautifully decorated and, you know, Yeah, it's got a nice cherry on top and it's a great experience.
But afterwards, I checked up on, you know, how plausible is it?
How many female chess players, how many grandmasters have there been?
And I think that the highest, the highest in the world rankings of females ever come is ninth.
Which is really impressive.
I mean, you know, I couldn't get that high, despite my male privilege.
But that means that there are eight men better than this amazing woman.
We tell ourselves these lies, culturally.
That's right.
I don't.
We're living in hyper-reality.
I just wrote about this for Quillette.
We saw this with the shootings in Atlanta, the patent fabrication of a lie in front of our absolute eyes.
Shameless!
The shootings in Atlanta spas and the massage parlors were driven by anti-Asian hatred.
He said, sexual lust, it had nothing to do with anti-Asian hatred.
And yet that remains the dominant narrative.
We still have people out there protesting against White supremacy, that's not what was going on here.
The shamelessness is quite extraordinary.
And yes, okay, so maybe there's a female at rank eight, but I can guarantee you that there's nobody below her probably for another 50 places.
And you know, this is what got the poor, meek, humble, nice James Damore fired from Google in 2018 because he wrote a 10-page memo saying, There's other explanations than bias to explain the lack of 50-50 gender proportionality at Google.
And he talked about the big five personality traits, which have been acknowledged for decades, and females rank very high on, and unfortunately, Damore was so naive as to use this term, neuroticism.
You know, it sounds offensive that females are more neurotic, but it just means that they're more fearful, they're more, Risk-averse and a sense of threat being around than males, which isn't to say for all you parents with your daughter and you want her to be the next Nobel laureate in physics, of course there's exceptions.
You know, we're not talking about any individual, we're talking about distributions.
Totally.
I, Heather, I could talk to you for like days and I really enjoyed this.
I'm just thinking it's, I'm going to be called to supper soon and I've probably taken up far too much of your, well, it's morning for you and you've got that Californian sun to go and, or Californian light, sorry, I don't want to talk about the weather, the Californian light.
And please will you come back on the podcast?
Because I've loved, loved having you on and I like your directness.
I mean, despite being a woman, I guess it gives me some license.
I hope that you would not censor yourself when it comes to the same topics, and I suspect you won't.
Of course, I would love to come.
It's been really lovely having you.
There's so much we can talk about, but I felt we were only just getting started.
Women in the military is just I could go on for hours about that.
I'll just tell you one really thing that really annoys me.
I go riding as often as I can, and on the way to the place where I go riding, I drive past this fire station.
Outside the fire station is a big billboard attracting new recruits and they're pictures of women and they're aimed totally aggressively at women and I think I grew up there were things called firemen they were you know There was a fireman.
This word firefighter, correct me if I'm wrong, is an invention designed to hide the gender in order to advance this world where both men and women can be firefighters.
Is that right?
I don't know about the firefighter term, but I completely agree.
I mean, we deserve to go down.
I agree with you, we're going down.
We do.
We deserve to go down.
We deserve, I mean, the idea that a female is going to pull somebody out of a burning building, again, weighing 200 pounds, it's ridiculous.
But if we're willing to do this, then, you know, let the barbarians come in and take over who have a slightly more profound understanding of human nature, the differences between males and females, and what it should take to get ahead.
That's totally true.
On that incredibly depressing note, thank you, Heather MacDonald.
It's been great having you on the podcast.
Don't forget, everyone, if you've enjoyed this conversation, as I've... how can you not have done?
Please remember to support me on Patreon and Subscribestar, because, like, freedom isn't free, and neither ought this podcast to be.
So thank you.
Thank you, Heather.
See you again soon.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
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