Feb. 5, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:32:57
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 3...2... | ||
| This is your unveiling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Because now people know. | ||
| People know. | ||
| Yep, that's it. | ||
| First of all, Titiana. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| I should have chosen her an easier name. | ||
| No one can get... | ||
| It's Titania. | ||
| Titania. | ||
| Because she's named after the Queen of the Fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream. | ||
| Tell everybody your real name. | ||
| My real name's Andrew Doyle. | ||
| Do you have an issue with people now knowing that Titiana or Titania... | ||
| Titania. | ||
| Yeah, she totally eclipsed me. | ||
| I don't have... | ||
| I'm basically not alive anymore. | ||
| It's all about her, you know? | ||
| Well, I can't remember how I found out about you on Twitter, but just laughing really hard at something that you wrote that was so close. | ||
| You do such a good job of, like, blurring the line between outrageously woke and satire. | ||
| Yeah, it's that thing of trying to... | ||
| There you are. | ||
| Who's the girl? | ||
| Oh, there! | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| So the girl is a composite of four different women put together because I was worried about, you know, I don't want to get sued or anything like that. | ||
| Oh, for sure, yeah. | ||
| So it's not a real human. | ||
| Radical intersectionalist poet. | ||
| Selfless and brave, buy my book. | ||
| Activist healer. | ||
| But also I love that she's deadpan because it means that she sort of, look, every time I post something, it's like there's this po-faced woman staring at you, daring you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Don't you dare sort of challenge me. | ||
| She could be mean in a way that I'm not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So that's kind of funny. | ||
| You end up inhabiting this character who just isn't like you. | ||
| And I do end up thinking like her. | ||
| And I've even dreamt as her. | ||
| And that sounds like a lie, but I have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that's pretty scary. | ||
| I have, you know, she'll have to go eventually because I can't, like, I can't deal with that kind of, there's a psychosis, isn't it? | ||
| Well, she's so big now. | ||
| You have 420,000 followers. | ||
| It's weird because it happened really quickly. | ||
| I guess it's because there's a whole cohort of people out there who are just sick of this stuff. | ||
| Well, it's partly that, but also partly because people still fall for her all the time. | ||
| People constantly think it's real. | ||
| Oh, all the time. | ||
| When I retweet you, one of my favorite things to do is read people getting upset at you. | ||
| Like, that is ridiculous! | ||
| You think that? | ||
| That's why Trump was winning! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Never ceases to amaze me how angry people get on Twitter, even with legitimate causes. | ||
| But I watch that and I think, it's fun because I can satirize the left and the more liberal side of things through her, but then I can argue with the right-wing Trump supporters and stuff, and I can mock them as well. | ||
| So you get to have a go at the extremes. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm so shocked that people still think she's real, though. | ||
| Like, even after all this time. | ||
| It's not shocking. | ||
| You're close enough. | ||
| There's plenty of people, and I'll point you to a few of them that I follow. | ||
| I follow some people where I just bookmark them so they don't know that I follow them. | ||
| And just some of them are so goddamn fucking crazy. | ||
| And yet, I keep getting told, this is like a straw man. | ||
| These people don't really exist. | ||
| Oh, they exist. | ||
| They do. | ||
| I even once did a... | ||
| Do you remember there was a tweet by... | ||
| Is it Rosanna Arquette who's really, really woke? | ||
| Rosanna Arquette, the actor. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| She did a tweet about how ashamed she was of being white. | ||
| Is that her? | ||
| That was her. | ||
| I think it was her. | ||
| And then I just cut and pasted that tweet and put it out. | ||
| Was it Patricia Arquette? | ||
| It might have been. | ||
| It's one of the Arquettes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I did the same tweet. | ||
| I literally cut and pasted it as Tatana because I thought, like... | ||
| And some people got it that I'd just taken this other viral tweet. | ||
| And some people got the point I was making. | ||
| But, yeah, it's close to... | ||
| Some of them are nuts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, frighteningly so, to a point that it's... | ||
| It's a cult-like behaviour. | ||
| I think the basic principles of, you know, standing up against racism, sexism, homophobia, all that stuff is great. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think the woke movement isn't that. | ||
| It's a kind of weird cultish pseudo-religious thing that is beyond that. | ||
| So that you're no longer allowed to make mistakes. | ||
| You can't be redeemed. | ||
| It's got all those hallmarks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, it's like when the early Christians used to burn people out of love, you know? | ||
| It's that thing. | ||
| And that's why we get this kind of council culture stuff. | ||
| And I guess that's why I want to... | ||
| And maybe that's why it's popular. | ||
| Because people are sick of treading around on eggshells, worried about being misinterpreted or... | ||
| Even worried about fucking up and making a mistake. | ||
| I mean, what's wrong with saying something that's every now and then maybe you do say the wrong thing? | ||
| Well, it should be fine if you're a human being, but part of it is also that things are written down, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then when things are written down, you can see them over and over again. | ||
| If you made a mistake and just said something in normal human conversation, which is how we're supposed to communicate and how we normally communicate. | ||
| It just comes and goes. | ||
| But when it's written down, then it becomes something different. | ||
| But it's more than that, isn't it? | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| So there was a guy who was the editor of a cookery magazine in the UK. And a vegan freelance journalist emailed him saying, I'd love to do a thing about vegans. | ||
| And he replied and made some joke about, yeah, you can do something about how we'll force feed them meat and we'll make them eat each other. | ||
| Stupid flippant thing. | ||
| Rather than saying, I was really offended by that, can we talk about it? | ||
| I don't think that's appropriate for you to email a freelance journalist. | ||
| She screenshot the thing, put it on Twitter, made a thing of it, and he had to step down. | ||
| So I think that's the difference. | ||
| Whereas, like, saying to someone, look, calling out a mistake or calling someone out for something they've done that you perceive to be bad, that's all well and good. | ||
| But when you're using it to advertise how virtuous you are and how you're able to take someone down for the mistake that they made, That troubles me, because then it's no longer really about the issue. | ||
| Well, I think what we're dealing with when you're talking about woke culture, and I love that you made this comparison to radical religion, because I think they're the same patterns. | ||
| I think human beings have patterns that they follow, and you could say that you're not religious. | ||
| But you follow these extremely rigid ideologies that don't allow for any variation whatsoever. | ||
| They force 100% compliance. | ||
| And if you're not 100% incompliant, they will attack you, and you can't be woke enough. | ||
| One of the things you find in religion is... | ||
| People will, especially in the more radical, dangerous, and scary religions, they'll turn on each other. | ||
| They'll turn on each other for not being pious enough. | ||
| Yeah, all the time. | ||
| Yeah, that happens in woke culture. | ||
| One of the scariest things that happens to these woke people is when the woke people attack them. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, it happened with J.K. Rowling, didn't it? | ||
| It happened with J.K. Rowling because she defended It was a British case. | ||
| It was the woman who was fired from her job because she posted some tweets saying that she didn't believe that sex was a mutable characteristic. | ||
| She said there are men and women and you can't change it. | ||
| Now, that's her opinion and she's entitled to have it. | ||
| But the judge in the UK ruled that no, that's not a legitimate opinion to hold and you can be fired for that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So JK Rowling simply said, no, that's not fair. | ||
| It's her opinion. | ||
| And they went for her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though she's like, she's so woke, because she keeps retrospectively deciding that her characters are gay and all sort of stuff like that. | ||
| And, you know, Dumbledore's gay. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And she got... | ||
| They got after her. | ||
| They went after her before that as well, because... | ||
| In the Fantastic Beasts sequel with Dumbledore as a young man, there's not much overt homosexuality. | ||
| And so the LGBTQ community was saying, why isn't it more... | ||
| I mean, what do they want? | ||
| Like, double penetration? | ||
| What do they want with that? | ||
| Like, they want a full-on wizard gay sex scene. | ||
| And she got the brunt of that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like, this doesn't... | ||
| And I hate that sort of... | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| You don't need validation by seeing wizards making out. | ||
| Well, unless that's your vision. | ||
| I mean, if her vision was, I mean, if she wanted some radical sexual aspect to her story. | ||
| I don't think it was. | ||
| But if she wanted it, no, it wasn't. | ||
| Yeah, if she wants to write wizard porn, that's fine. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't even necessarily have to be porn, but I don't think you should ever try to alter someone's artistic vision. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When someone is a genius like J.K. Rowling. | ||
| I mean, think about the stuff that she's created. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, the Harry Potter series speaks for itself just in the sheer popularity of it. | ||
| For someone to step in and say, you're doing it wrong when it comes to gay sex. | ||
| Everything else is great. | ||
| Or any? | ||
| Or any? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're a fucking genius with everything but gay sex. | ||
| Also, it's not her responsibility to be the ambassador for gay sex. | ||
| And also, you know, I think it's really patronizing to gay people to say that they need to see this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that is now like a standard thing in art and movies and stuff. | ||
| So, like, you saw that with Tarantino with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. | ||
| Someone asked him, a journalist was saying, you know, like, why doesn't Margot Robbie's character talk more? | ||
| Well, he's made an artistic decision. | ||
| He hasn't thought, let's just... | ||
| The female character, I don't care about that character, so let's have a silent most of the time. | ||
| He's making a point about sort of restoring Sharon Tate to an iconic kind of status that she was denied by the Manson family. | ||
| It's a very interesting artistic decision. | ||
| And if you watch a film like that and you go away and all you can think is... | ||
| Oh, the women didn't speak enough, there wasn't enough diversity, then you're not engaging with the artwork. | ||
| The BBC did a review of Game of Thrones by series by series where they judged each episode as good or bad on the percentage points of how much female characters speak. | ||
| So don't do reviews anymore. | ||
| They just have a pie chart. | ||
| It's weird to me. | ||
| It's almost a complete misunderstanding of what the creative endeavor is all about. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, look... | ||
| Did Thelma and Louise do a disservice by not having Brad Pitt talk more? | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| That's a good example, yeah. | ||
| Come on, it's crazy. | ||
| No, it was a great movie because it was a great movie. | ||
| It's just an artistic vision doesn't have to adhere to these ideas of inclusiveness and diversity. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| An artistic vision is supposed to... | ||
| If you write about a bunch of Asian kids that want to be hip-hop artists, you have no... | ||
| You have no obligation to have white people in it. | ||
| You have no obligation to have anyone else in it. | ||
| You could have, look, you could have a movie with one character through the whole movie. | ||
| You have no obligation. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's an artistic vision. | ||
| But I've been thinking about this a lot because I think this gets to the heart of what is the problem with the woke culture and what the foundation of their belief system is. | ||
| And it's to do with this idea of, when you hear it all the time, power structures in society, you know, that there's this kind of And that's why they think there needs to be more representation and things like that in these films because they think that influences culture and influences people and maintains and sustains power and everything like that. | ||
| So that's why they're doing it. | ||
| And I think it's just a false premise, ultimately. | ||
| It is a false premise. | ||
| And the people that are doing it and the people that are perpetuating this false premise are not doing good work. | ||
| That's another part of the problem. | ||
| If you want to be a woke artist, good fucking luck. | ||
| Good fucking luck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because your stuff's probably going to suck. | ||
| Because you're thinking about that more than you're thinking about the singular artistic vision that you might have. | ||
| You're trying to put it through the filter of intersectionality and all these different variables that you have to take into consideration of how you're going to be criticized and what you're going to... | ||
| Like, as soon as you compromise yourself... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You open up the door for mediocrity. | ||
| And it doesn't sell well. | ||
| And I think that's simply because people hate being patronized. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, what's that expression? | ||
| Get woke, go broke? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, when I saw that last Star Wars film and you got the lesbian kiss, like a two-second of lesbian kiss, and I know what they're doing. | ||
| And I don't care about that sort of stuff. | ||
| You know, by all means, make a And they're rabid. | ||
| They're rabid about their need for compliance. | ||
| Everyone must comply. | ||
| There's a crazy one that I... I'll send it to you, Jamie, because I was sending it to a bunch of people about them calling for Captain Marvel to step down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because... | ||
| Let me find it for you. | ||
| Hold on a second, because it's so fucking ridiculous. | ||
| They want Captain Marvel to step down and be replaced by a gay woman of color. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, I mean, is that how the comic book was originally? | ||
| Was the original comic book a gay woman? | ||
| Well, so, no, I'm not a comic book fan, but I know that this is something that's particularly affected comic books in terms of Thor and Iman. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| We need Brie Larson to step down from her role to prove she's an ally of social justice and ensure a gay woman of color plays the role. | ||
| Let Monica, the original female, and all caps, BLACK Captain Marvel, instead of whitewashing characters for the benefit of the straight white men running Disney. | ||
| First of all, Disney is run by a woman. | ||
| This should be clarified, almost positive. | ||
| The CEO of entertainment at Disney is a woman. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's true. | ||
| They've still got Walt on ice, though, haven't they? | ||
| Yeah, they've got his head, at least. | ||
| Bob Egger. | ||
| No, but the entertainment. | ||
| The CEO of... | ||
| There's someone who runs the film division. | ||
| Whitney Cummings is explaining it to me. | ||
| About how ridiculous it is. | ||
| But isn't Brie Larson... | ||
| Whoever makes the decisions. | ||
| Isn't Brie Larson super woke? | ||
| Like, she's got a reputation for being incredibly woke. | ||
| Not woke enough if you're white. | ||
| But she was the one who said that she wanted to ban male journalists from her press junkets. | ||
| Maybe it's Fox. | ||
| Either way, I don't think you can... | ||
| That reminds me of when... | ||
| You know Camille Paglia, the academic... | ||
| Go back to that. | ||
| She tries to ban male writers from press conference. | ||
| Brie Larson made a speech about how she felt that there were too many male critics assessing her work and she wanted to actually implement some kind of strategy to prevent that from happening. | ||
| It was all over the press. | ||
| So she's about as woke as it gets. | ||
| That's not woke enough. | ||
| She needs to step down. | ||
| Because if you're really woke, you'll step down and show that you're an ally for social justice and give up those millions of dollars to some other person. | ||
| But by the way, tell the studio that you're going to do that. | ||
| They're not going to fucking just decide, oh, you want us to cast a black gay woman? | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| And does it matter which black gay woman? | ||
| Does it have to be someone who can act, maybe? | ||
| They have to be the gayest, blackest woman you can find, because if you have a half-black and kinda gay, pansexual woman, that's a part of the patriarchy. | ||
| Right, that's a problem, isn't it? | ||
| It's like when Obama fucks up, people blame it on his white side. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| You know, because he's 50% white, he's 50% problematic. | ||
| You can never have that kind of purity. | ||
| The example I was giving with Camille Piley, because she's an academic, who was asked to step down by her own students, and they said, to the faculty, you need to replace her with a queer woman of colour. | ||
| Like, who? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But why does a woman have to be queer? | |
| If you want a woman of color, see this is the thing, it never ends. | ||
| You can't be woke enough. | ||
| And once it gets to queer woman of color and they've got one of those, they go, you know what? | ||
| You should make room for a transgender. | ||
| And what if the queer woman of colour is really bad at her job? | ||
| Too bad. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You need to adapt. | ||
| You need to help her. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| And understand that society has fucked her over. | ||
| And that's why she's not as good as Camille Pagli was. | ||
| So again, it gets back to one of their fundamental premises is that they don't believe in objective truth. | ||
| They think objective truth. | ||
| This is a postmodern thing, right? | ||
| They don't believe in it. | ||
| It's also these people that you're talking about, they haven't built these structures that they want to tear down. | ||
| They're not a part of the construction of these enormous film studios, enormous entertainment empires. | ||
| So they want to step in to something that not only have they not built, but they're not capable of building. | ||
| Because they're wrapped up in this fucking wacky ideology that doesn't allow you to be creative. | ||
| So how do we get out of it? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| That's why I brought you in here. | ||
| I was hoping you'd know. | ||
| Well, I've got ideas. | ||
| I've got a few ideas, right? | ||
| Because I think we're reaching a kind of tipping point. | ||
| Like I say, there's so many people who are really sick of it, you know? | ||
| And you can't argue with a social justice activist. | ||
| You can't because they don't believe. | ||
| They think that any knowledge that you think you have is based on your background and the power structures and all that sort of stuff, right? | ||
| The Impression Olympics. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So none of it is authentic enough. | ||
| And it really foxes them, though, when they end up talking to a queer woman of colour, say, who agrees with me, and then it fucks up their entire position. | ||
| It really annoys them. | ||
| But then, yeah, so you can't argue with them. | ||
| I thought maybe... | ||
| Satire would be a good approach. | ||
| Because if they're not prepared to listen to a reason, you can mock them. | ||
| I thought that would be good. | ||
| But it just makes them really angry. | ||
| I've had so much venom for mocking this. | ||
| But of course, when you mock the priests, they get angry. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they don't feel like you have any right to make fun. | ||
| Which is, for me, as a comedian, one of the most offensive things a person can say. | ||
| It also makes you want to do it more, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it's about. | ||
| We're the mockery police. | ||
| We come in and mock when things are fucked up. | ||
| But then, because they believe in the power structures, what they're saying is you're punching down. | ||
| You're punching down. | ||
| Arguably, with woke people, you're not punching down. | ||
| You're not? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's always been my argument. | ||
| For one thing, I think you can punch down if you want. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, who gets to say? | ||
| But I think the woke people have incredible power. | ||
| And they're bullies. | ||
| And they're bullies. | ||
| They pile up together. | ||
| They go after you. | ||
| They'll do it for days on end and attack your Twitter and attack you and write articles about you. | ||
| I've experienced it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's, you know, you just preach into the choir. | ||
| You're preaching to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This whole idea that you can't punch down in comedy is the dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| Look, Sam Kinison, who's one of the greatest comics of all time, one of his best bits was about starving babies in Africa. | ||
| You can't punch any lower. | ||
| No. | ||
| Did you ever see that bit? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| I remember Kinison talking about how comedy attacks. | ||
| That's his style, for sure. | ||
| I mean, everybody's comedy is different. | ||
| Comedy does whatever it is that is funny, whether you are Stephen Wright, who's an absurdist, or whether you're Sam Kinison, who attacks. | ||
| Both brilliant. | ||
| But Kinison had a bit about those commercials where you would see Sally Fields on TV, like, save the children. | ||
| These children survive on just a dollar a day. | ||
| If you could just send money... | ||
| And he goes, you're sitting there, eating your food, you cooked yourself, and there's starving kids on TV, and you get all bummed out, and you're like, hey, why don't you feed them? | ||
| You're standing right next to them! | ||
| And he has this whole bit, hey, it just occurred to us! | ||
| We just drove 5,000 miles with the food, and we realized it wouldn't be world hunger if you people would move where the food is! | ||
| You live in a fucking desert! | ||
| And he has this whole crazy bit and it's like one of those bits that he did in 1986 and I mean at the time there was nothing like it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know like in this fucking rabid former preacher genius comedian is punching down as far as you can. | ||
| Yeah, except, you know, like, he obviously doesn't think it's funny that babies starve to death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, of course not. | |
| It's comedy. | ||
| But this is that literal-minded thing that means that that sort of stuff can't work anymore. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, it can work. | ||
| Actually, it does work. | ||
| You know, I see comics do that sort of stuff all the time, but they're not going to get very far televisually or that kind of thing. | ||
| Well, for now, but you can if you go on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of comics that are bypassing the... | ||
| Well, Netflix gives you a lot of leeway, but only if you're famous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You can get away with a lot of shit if you're famous. | ||
| Like Chappelle can basically get away with a lot of shit. | ||
| Netflix has never told me what to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I know they do if you're not a name. | ||
| I've had friends that they've told to cut bits out. | ||
| Like Joey Diaz had a hilarious Me Too bit about Terry Crews. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| About, you know, Terry Crews, who's a fucking super athlete, you know, and some guy grabbed his dick and he metooed this guy for grabbing his dick. | ||
| Some drunken agent or whatever it was, you know, in a joke way. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| I have no idea what happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Joey had this hilarious bit about it and they wouldn't let him do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're like, you're making fun of sexual assault victims. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think in any world that Terry Crews, who is a fucking tank of a man, was actually scared of this guy? | ||
| Like, this is, come on, this is not a victim in the sense of, like, a helpless person. | ||
| I get the fact that this guy was an agent, maybe had some power over his career, but the way Joey said, it was a positive, it was talking about all the positive attributes of Terry Crews. | ||
| Yeah, he was putting a spin on it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what was this for? | ||
| This was for a TV show. | ||
| Netflix, for Netflix. | ||
| And they actually stepped in and said... | ||
| Well, they didn't want the backlash. | ||
| They didn't want to deal with the bullshit. | ||
| So I wondered about that, because when I was watching the comedy at the store the other day here, and I just thought, it feels different here. | ||
| It feels like live comedy here. | ||
| People do go for whatever targets they want. | ||
| At the store, we go for it, because we realize this is the last stand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is like the ghost dance for wild comedy. | ||
| I get the impression in the UK it's not, you know, the gigs I've been playing, there isn't that quality about it. | ||
| You need Ricky Gervais to be there all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's only one of him. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the problem. | ||
| You need more of those. | ||
| He's so rich, and he doesn't have a boss, and he can do whatever he wants. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He's insulated. | ||
| It's those younger comics who are coming up, and they self-censor because they're worried about what they're going to say. | ||
| That's basically what it is. | ||
| I had an argument with a young comic. | ||
| And she said to me, you know, you don't understand because I have to go up to comics every night after they're set and explain to them why they shouldn't tell these jokes. | ||
| This was a serious conversation. | ||
| I thought, this isn't for you. | ||
| And she was a comic? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stand-up, yeah. | ||
| This was a comic in a group. | ||
| So I used to run this workshop for young stand-ups and I can't do it anymore because one of them complained. | ||
| This is serious, right? | ||
| One of them complained to The Boss. | ||
| It's a very famous theatre in London. | ||
| And one of them complained and said that one of the jokes I tweeted as Titania made her feel unsafe. | ||
| And then, therefore, I was told I couldn't do this course anymore because I developed an unsafe environment. | ||
| Oh, you made them feel unsafe? | ||
| Yeah, by a joke. | ||
| Dangerous. | ||
| That wasn't even mine. | ||
| It was a character. | ||
| Must have been a great joke. | ||
| It was probably a fucking great joke, yeah. | ||
| So good, you made someone feel unsafe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they were laughing so hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're like, I could die. | ||
| I could die from laughter. | ||
| But that's that conflation of words and violence, isn't it? | ||
| This idea that... | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| What really scares me about that is I think they believe it. | ||
| It's disingenuous. | ||
| Do you think it's disingenuous? | ||
| It's clearly disingenuous, but it's the orthodoxy, right? | ||
| Like, this is what they're pushing. | ||
| They're pushing that words are violence, and that you can be violent with words. | ||
| So that's interesting, because I... I think you're probably right in a lot of cases. | ||
| You know, when they say, like, if they see a certain image or something, it makes them feel like they've been physically attacked or they hear a certain phrase or whatever. | ||
| And they support each other in this nonsense. | ||
| But then I see some of them bawling their eyes out, crying and shaking. | ||
| And I think that's an authentic emotion, right? | ||
| Maybe it's disingenuous in some cases, but maybe some people have actually, and this would scare me more, that some people have actually convinced themselves that it is a kind of form of violence. | ||
| I'm sure that's true as well. | ||
| I'm sure that's true as well. | ||
| And I think this, again, parallels really crazy religious people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, there's people that will cut off fingers for, you know, slights against their religion. | ||
| They'll flog themselves. | ||
| I mean, people do horrendous things to themselves as punishment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So then it comes, if we are going to go with the religious motif, it comes about sort of de-radicalizing people from this belief system. | ||
| It seems like this is a part of being a human, that there are pathways that people go down. | ||
| Like, just to get away from that, here's one. | ||
| The dictator. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The horrific dictator. | ||
| When someone gets into a position of power over someone, whether it's a CEO of a company, before the Me Too movement that's out of control and is trying to fuck all of his employees and treats people like shit and sexually harasses everybody, goddammit, that seems like an archetype. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| It's like this archetype seems to almost be unavoidable with certain types of human beings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, I think you get that with the woke thing, and that the structure of wokeness is just a scaffolding for this sort of antiquated, not antiquated, excuse me, this ancient system of behavior, this religious system, and it slides right into that. | ||
| I don't think it's a... | ||
| It's a coincidence that most woke people are atheists because this is their alternative for radical religion. | ||
| I think that's probably right. | ||
| Tom Holland is a historian. | ||
| He wrote a book recently called Dominion. | ||
| He makes this case that with the absence of Christianity, in comes wokeness, that one sort of just follows from the other in a kind of – because they have The similar need to proselytize, to convert. | ||
| The similar intolerance of anyone who might not perceive the world in the way that you do. | ||
| So it has all the same hallmarks. | ||
| But also that makes me nervous about it because it's not then about persuading someone out of it. | ||
| Because you can't persuade someone that God doesn't exist. | ||
| It's based on faith. | ||
| It's based on something that's intangible. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And particularly when those same people have such power in the major institutions, right? | ||
| You know, I've always said the woke people are the minority. | ||
| You know, most people are sick of it. | ||
| Most people are fucked off with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they seem to occupy all these major roles in television, in the arts, in media, in journalism, in the law, you know, and therefore they have disproportionate clout. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Academia is a big one. | ||
| That's where the problem started. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you convert children to think that way. | ||
| You get an impressionable 17-year-old who's a freshman in college and they find this and it resonates with them. | ||
| And also they can develop social clout by adhering to this religion the same way a radical, you know, fill in the blank with whatever Christian, whatever... | ||
| sect of religion you'd like to compare it to. | ||
| It's very similar. | ||
| The more pious you are, the more adherent you are to the dogma, to this rigid ideology, the more clout you get. | ||
| And worse than that in universities, because you won't pass the course. | ||
| And what's interesting is it's not a kind of underhand thing on the part of the scholars who are now activists, right? | ||
| They are open about this. | ||
| They say quite explicitly, you know, we are activists as well as scholars, which means they're pushing a political agenda, which, of course, it didn't used to be that. | ||
| The academia used to be about objectivity and presenting different ideas and getting to the truth, but they already know the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they're going to ensure that you wouldn't even get on the course if you didn't sort of basically subscribe. | ||
| Again, it's the same sort of pattern that you see in dictators. | ||
| They're a dictator in terms of intellectual pursuits. | ||
| They're dictating to these children how you must think and behave. | ||
| And because of their position of power, because of their education, their grasp of the English language, the fact that they speak so eloquently and passionately about this, they're incredibly convincing and charismatic, a lot of them, and it's effective. | ||
| And that's why so many people come from that, and so overwhelmingly left-leaning. | ||
| Yeah, hugely. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's a real problem on the left. | ||
| It's really weird to me that I've suddenly, most of my friends now are right-leaning. | ||
| That's come out of nowhere. | ||
| I wouldn't have expected that at all. | ||
| Well, it's a shift over the last few years, and it's the reason why Trump is in office. | ||
| Yeah, 100% it is. | ||
| This is why, when people tell me the culture war is like a sideshow, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm like, it wins and loses elections, this stuff. | ||
| It's not a sideshow. | ||
| It really isn't. | ||
| No. | ||
| What was it the other day? | ||
| It was Elizabeth Warren saying that she's going to get a trans pupil, like a 15-year-old, to veto her, one of her appointees, right? | ||
| Was it Secretary of Education? | ||
| Yeah, something like that. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| But it was a 9-year-old. | ||
| Oh, was it a 9-year-old? | ||
| I thought it was like a 15-year-old. | ||
| Pull that up. | ||
| I mean, either way, that's not good, right? | ||
| No, either way, it's not good. | ||
| It's madness. | ||
| And most people think that's madness, and most people think it's weird. | ||
| Like, in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn started announcing his pronouns. | ||
| Yes, there's a... | ||
| Let me tell you, I don't know if you know what Jeremy Corbyn looks like. | ||
| No one's confused about his pronouns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| No one has ever been confused about it. | ||
| He's got a fucking beard. | ||
| Women can have beards, what are you saying? | ||
| Oh, I didn't know. | ||
| They also can have penises and men can have their periods. | ||
| Yeah, but Jeremy Corbyn's never identified as a woman as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| You know, it doesn't fit with... | ||
| Also, that... | ||
| Old school socialist, because he's a proper old school lefty socialist. | ||
| The woke stuff doesn't fit well with those people. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It feels weird, you know? | ||
| Well, the old school lefty socialist is more about compassion and income equality. | ||
| It's money. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All about money. | ||
| This is actually one of the reasons why I wanted Titania to be... | ||
| Oh, here we go. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So this was the round of applause that the nine-year-old transgender child got. | ||
| So the child stood up and said, I'm a nine-year-old child. | ||
| And Elizabeth Warren sort of instigated this big round of applause for that. | ||
| There was something else this week, though, where it was a 15-year-old. | ||
| It was someone that she decided to choose. | ||
| Yes, she'd choose. | ||
| I think it was a secretary of education, but I might be wrong. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's a quote from this. | ||
| Oh, okay, okay, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Which I, you know... | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Do you find the quote? | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| Oh, it's the wrong story, though, so... | ||
| Oh, it is the wrong story? | ||
| This is the one from October. | ||
| Secretary of Education in both Belize and public education believes in... | ||
| Yeah, but no, she was going to veto. | ||
| She was going to give the transgender student veto power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And help. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| I mean, for one thing, I wouldn't give a 15-year-old trans or otherwise any kind of political... | ||
| No, and definitely not a nine-year-old. | ||
| Any kid, goddammit. | ||
| When you're 15, you don't know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| You've only been alive for a few months. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You really have no idea what's happening. | ||
| I mean, your frontal lobes aren't developed, are they? | ||
| No, 25. In fact, let's raise the voting age. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't let them make it 30. Well, then the real problem would be war. | |
| I think Bill Maher talked about this story on his most recent episode of his show. | ||
| And so it got up in the news again. | ||
| No, but there was a legitimate news story about Elizabeth Warren talking about... | ||
| In that quote, it says that Warren indicated she wants Jacob to help her pick her... | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So it's a repeat of the same story. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So they just sort of repeated it and got a headline out of it. | ||
| I mean, I get why that advertises her commitment to inclusivity and diversity. | ||
| But 99% of people are thinking, I don't care about that. | ||
| Why don't you talk about the fact that I can't afford anything? | ||
| And that's why, if you are truly left-leaning, and if you truly care about getting a left-leaning government in power, You need to make it back class again. | ||
| Because this is one of the reasons why, like, to Tanya, I wanted her to be posh and rich. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because they're so rich, these people. | ||
| Predominantly. | ||
| They've got so much money. | ||
| Because if you have real problems, this is not what you concentrate on. | ||
| Like, you're not worried about man-spreading. | ||
| Like, who worries about that stuff? | ||
| Someone on the poverty line. | ||
| Doesn't care about the stuff. | ||
| They don't care about being represented by the skin colour of sex. | ||
| Like, you know, some poor working class mother who can't afford anything isn't going to care that Hillary Clinton's in the White House. | ||
| She's not going to think, oh, well, that's okay, then I'm represented. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Some of them would. | ||
| Some of them would like it because it will make them feel like a woman can get by and get through. | ||
| That's the aspirational message that it sends. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| I think that's fine. | ||
| But you're still stuck on the poverty line with nothing. | ||
| Poor black Americans didn't do very well under Obama. | ||
| This stuff is tokenism when what you should be doing is sort of directing inequality. | ||
| It's a big problem both here and in the UK. We've got a left movement. | ||
| I mean, we saw it with Brexit. | ||
| The reason why so many working class people voted for Brexit and indeed voted against Labour in the last election is because no one's looking out for their interests anymore. | ||
| They're worried about other things like, like you say, mansplaining, mansplaining, like toxic masculinity. | ||
| Mansplaining is hilarious. | ||
| Explaining, if you're a man, if you correct someone and they're incorrect and you're a man, you're mansplaining. | ||
| Well, then you're still mansplaining. | ||
| Well, We can't live like that. | ||
| I can't live like that. | ||
| I can't... | ||
| Where does it go? | ||
| Does it become a religious war? | ||
| Are we in a holy war for wokeness? | ||
| No, but I don't want to have to check the contents of someone's underwear every time I have a discussion with them. | ||
| I don't want to make those judgments on that basis. | ||
| Well, you need to understand and check yourself because the contents of someone's underwear does not mean that that's the gender in which they identify with. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| You piece of shit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You already fucked it up. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You're going to cancel yourself now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should. | |
| Well, I've already been canceled, probably. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That might be a good example. | ||
| That might be a good idea. | ||
| Maybe Titania gets canceled. | ||
| Maybe I should find a way to have her. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because she probably messes up sometimes. | ||
| Well, once people find out that Titania is actually a man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| Because I just... | ||
| It's funny you mentioned the transgender child because I've just written a book as her aimed at children, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because of that, have you seen this? | ||
| Well, you've seen the woke children's books, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I made a joke about one. | ||
| Feminist baby. | ||
| She's got a bullhorn. | ||
| Feminist baby. | ||
| A bullhorn. | ||
| Does a feminist need a bullhorn? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| She's screaming about issues. | ||
| She's a baby. | ||
| Yeah, but she needs to be heard. | ||
| Don't silence her truth. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Feminist baby. | ||
| Finds her voice. | ||
| Her voice is in a bullhorn? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right, there we go. | ||
| Meemaw, if she's a feminist, why is she wearing fucking makeup when she's a baby? | ||
| That's just rude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's rude. | ||
| Because that's the goddamn patriarchy. | ||
| That's socializing young babies to be sex objects. | ||
| Oh, that's a boy. | ||
| He's a feminist too. | ||
| Christ. | ||
| How does he even know what a boy or a girl is? | ||
| How many of these are there? | ||
| He's a baby. | ||
| These look like they're aimed very much at very young kids as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's aimed at the mothers and fathers of very young kids who want to let everybody know they're woke. | ||
| And they probably only pull them out when people come over the house. | ||
| Oh yeah, just put them on the coffee table. | ||
| So everyone knows. | ||
| I mean, but this is – you're scraping the surface here. | ||
| So one of the big selling books was Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, which, like, each chapter is about a major feminist icon. | ||
| That's aimed at young kids. | ||
| There's one called C is for Consent. | ||
| That's aimed at very young kids. | ||
| There's one called The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks, right? | ||
| There's sort of – You know what? | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I look at this stuff, I think, this is such flagrant indoctrination. | ||
| You're not even hiding it anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's nothing subtle about this, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, I thought... | ||
| So, I've written a book as Titania, and she's trying to... | ||
| It's called My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, right? | ||
| Because she can't get it right. | ||
| She talks to kids like they're just sociologists or something. | ||
| She can't get it right, which is fun. | ||
| And she says to them, you know, your parents hate you. | ||
| You know, you should ditch them. | ||
| Like... | ||
| I think that's the way to do it. | ||
| Well, that's what every cult does. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| One of the things that cults do, one of the hallmarks of cults is they try to separate you from your parents. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or if you get the kids young, then you can get their minds eventually. | ||
| So maybe that's... | ||
| Is that the solution, trying to make sure it doesn't get... | ||
| Get the young, maybe? | ||
| I don't know if there is a solution. | ||
| I think there are patterns that always exist, and religions pop up. | ||
| Like, why Christianity? | ||
| Why Mormonism? | ||
| Why Islam? | ||
| What causes these patterns, these ideological patterns? | ||
| What causes them? | ||
| What causes them to take hold? | ||
| What causes their followers to become rabid? | ||
| I don't know what it is, but they exist, and they exist – they have existed throughout history. | ||
| There's literally hundreds of them. | ||
| Is it a need for purpose? | ||
| Is it a need to feel that you are the one pursuing the truth? | ||
| It's certainly – there's instincts that we all have to be a part of a group and to be accepted as a part of a group, and one of the ways that you show that you're a part of that group is by rigidly adhering to the doctrine. | ||
| Well, here's one way that we might legitimately tackle this. | ||
| I'm going to say something very optimistic now. | ||
| If more people on the left can turn against wokeness, I think this will really help. | ||
| I think once they realize that it is undermining all the things they stand for, right? | ||
| It's getting Trump into power. | ||
| It's getting the Tories into power in the UK, you know? | ||
| It's dividing us up racially in terms of our sexual demographics. | ||
| It's pushing for further segregation. | ||
| It actually does all the things that the social justice movement claims that they they don't want to do and that they want to fight and if more people on the left sort of turn and the other thing here's the other thing They all think we live in this world full of Nazis and fascists and these evil crypto fascists around every corner, right? | ||
| And by making that claim, you are really helping the genuine neo-Nazis out there because you're saying, look, you're mainstream. | ||
| It's giving them much more power and attention than they deserve. | ||
| I think it's a really bad idea. | ||
| It's almost like you're acting as their PR. Yeah, you're almost making it more acceptable to be a Nazi, because you're calling everyone a Nazi, and you're also crying wolf. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So because you're crying wolf, when someone sees an act, like Charlottesville was a big wake-up call for a lot of people, because they're like, holy fuck, those are real Nazis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nazis are real. | ||
| Like, they're still Nazi Nazis, like with the swastika tattoos and everything, the tiki torches, those fucking guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a wake-up call for a lot of folks, because there's many people that never encounter people like that. | ||
| Of course, because there's not many of them. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| But they hear everybody's a Nazi. | ||
| They hear this is a Nazi, that's a Nazi. | ||
| I mean, Christina Hoff Summers gives speeches places, and they pull the fire alarm on her. | ||
| They call her a Nazi. | ||
| She's a feminist. | ||
| How is she a Nazi? | ||
| Like, even remotely? | ||
| I mean, it's insane, but she criticizes other feminists for being preposterous, and when she does that, people decide that she has not toed the line. | ||
| She's not rigidly adhering to the ideology. | ||
| She's not woke enough, so they attack her. | ||
| She's what you would think of as maybe a centrist feminist? | ||
| But that's historically illiterate. | ||
| If you think that that's fascism, then you don't know what fascism is. | ||
| And also, that's really offensive to people who have had to live through fascistic regimes to say that Christina Hoff Summers is a fucking fascist. | ||
| It is, but I don't think they care what the previous definition of fascism is. | ||
| I think we've got to stand by that definition. | ||
| We've got to root it in the actual definition. | ||
| If you want to say that Jordan Peterson is a fascist, as some people do, even though there isn't someone who is more on record, whose opposition to tyranny is more on record. | ||
| And more studied in it. | ||
| 40 years of this stuff and it's all online, should you wish to check it out. | ||
| But that involves a degree of research and actually knowing what you're talking about. | ||
| He gets pointed out as one of the more problematic guests that I have on when people point to the fact that I'm some sort of an alt-right gateway. | ||
| They point to Jordan Peterson. | ||
| It's so ridiculous. | ||
| What is this gateway business as well? | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| Did you see the Alternative Influence Network thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Were you on that? | ||
| Yeah, I was on that. | ||
| You were on that? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I said to her, I tweeted to her, I said, hey, what did I say? | ||
| I said, Barbara Walters interviewed Castro. | ||
| Does that make her a communist? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And she said, and she screenshot it and said, he's favorably comparing himself to Barbara Walters. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| You can't win. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| That six degrees of separation, that flowchart nonsense. | ||
| It's all nonsense. | ||
| It's conspiratorial. | ||
| But that was a mainstream publication, wasn't it? | ||
| That wasn't some rogue... | ||
| I mean, sure, but look... | ||
| The only people that are taking it seriously are the people that are woke. | ||
| Regular people are not going to take that seriously. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Six degrees of separation shit is nuts. | ||
| Guilt by association is nuts. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Especially when you're talking to people like me that interview literally Hundreds and hundreds of people. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But does it bother you when people throw those smears at you? | ||
| Or do you just completely ignore it? | ||
| It bothers me less every day. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I've developed this sort of anti-venom to it because I've experienced it so many times. | ||
| I used to get really upset when people call me a Nazi because I thought that's like the opposite of what I stand for. | ||
| I genuinely... | ||
| But now it's that thing of you see someone be called a Nazi or a racist even or a homophobe and you think that probably isn't right. | ||
| And that means if you do actually ever have to use those words like those awful people in Charlottesville where you should reserve that word so that we can identify those people in our midst because they do exist. | ||
| They are dangerous but there's not many of them. | ||
| But if the word has become so, it doesn't mean that anymore. | ||
| It's this thing called concept creep, you know, where the idea of the word just spreads and spreads so that anyone with the slightest point of political disagreement can suddenly be branded as neo-fascist. | ||
| That's what the McCarthyism era was all about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Find all the demons in your neighborhood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everyone's bad. | ||
| Everyone's evil. | ||
| Everyone turns on each other. | ||
| I mean, this is what North Korea does. | ||
| What North Korea has that's so brilliant is everyone tattles on everyone else. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And they're all running around scared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this is what the woke people are doing. | ||
| No one can be woke enough. | ||
| Martina Navatorlova. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| They went after her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's a lesbian, but she's not woke enough because she doesn't want trans women to compete in sports and dominate and win world records. | ||
| So she shouldn't be part of that community anymore. | ||
| I've got a real problem with the whole acronym thing, the LGBTQIA +, or whatever it is at the moment, because it keeps getting longer. | ||
| But I love it. | ||
| I want it to get longer. | ||
| What is it now? | ||
| It's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual. | ||
| Yeah, and what's the plus? | ||
| The plus is whatever fucker we've forgotten, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Aliens. | |
| Whatever isn't there, yeah. | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| I mean, I see that as, for a start, there's massive internal contradictions within that. | ||
| Like, we're seeing this at the moment with sort of lesbians versus trans people and gay rights versus trans rights, women's rights versus, you know, that's not a coherent, it's not like those people are all the same. | ||
| It's a weird gang. | ||
| It's a gang that doesn't get on with itself. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| That's why Dave Chappelle's bit about that was really good, with the T's in the back and the L's in the front and stuff. | ||
| They don't get on with each other. | ||
| And then, if you're not ideologically pure, they'll cast you out. | ||
| They'll even say you're not gay, like with Peter Thiel. | ||
| You know, when he said at the Republican convention that he was supporting Trump. | ||
| And the advocate, the gay magazine, the advocate was saying, well, he may sleep with men... | ||
| But he's not gay. | ||
| He doesn't get to be gay anymore. | ||
| Oh, God! | ||
| That's the gay press for you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's a really funny article in Out Magazine which was criticizing the new It film. | ||
| You know, the clown. | ||
| The killer clown, right? | ||
| The second chapter starts with a gay bashing at the start. | ||
| And he eats a gay man's heart in the opening scene of that film. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, spoiler alert. | |
| Sorry about that. | ||
| I was going to watch it. | ||
| And Out Magazine said, oh, Pennywise the clown isn't the gay ally we thought he was. | ||
| And this was an authentic... | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| He's a psychopathic clown, isn't he? | ||
| He eats kids' arms and drags them into the sewer. | ||
| He was your ally? | ||
| I love the gay press. | ||
| The gay press made me laugh so much. | ||
| There's one in the UK called Pink News, right? | ||
| And if you want to laugh at something, just look at their... | ||
| They did a thing recently. | ||
| I'm not making this up. | ||
| This was like two weeks ago. | ||
| The Pakistani government have announced that they're going to pay for people to transition. | ||
| They're going to pay for their surgery, right? | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because they fucking hate gay people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they're going to pay for it. | ||
| Because they only will allow men to have sex with men if the men transition to female. | ||
| So this is not a pro-gay stance. | ||
| The Pink News did a video saying, yeah, Pakistan said yes to trans rights. | ||
| This is a really empowering thing. | ||
| They hate you. | ||
| It's genuinely nuts. | ||
| So I wonder whether we should just get rid of... | ||
| The letters. | ||
| Just scrap it. | ||
| I think they should keep adding more. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, make up a bunch of different names. | ||
| Get it so it's so preposterous that even woke people are like, Jesus Christ, there's 30 letters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have letters that aren't even real symbols. | ||
| They'll have to go to different alphabets, right? | ||
| They use Prince's symbol. | ||
| Oh yeah, they could do that, couldn't they? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look... | ||
| It's in unknown territory right now. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| We're completely off the deep end. | ||
| And with this incredible ability to communicate that we have today, because of social media, we can spread these ideas. | ||
| We can, you know, and people can hop on board and other mentally ill people can, you know, decide that you are absolutely correct. | ||
| And we do need to add some Z's and X's and other shit to that. | ||
| Thing is, you say it as a joke, and then one day... | ||
| It's not a joke. | ||
| It'll happen. | ||
| I think everything's a joke, but it's not a joke. | ||
| I mean, it can happen. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| The number of times I've tweeted something to take the piss and then it's happened a few months later. | ||
| It's pretty much all the time now. | ||
| The one I often mention, because I still can't get over it, was when Titania tweeted about Mary Poppins. | ||
| There's a scene in Mary Poppins where she has chimney soot on her face. | ||
| Titania tweeted saying, this is blackface. | ||
| This is so racist, this is blackface. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Six months later, the New York Times published an article saying Mary Poppins is racist because of blackface. | ||
| Because she had soot on her face? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Legitimately? | ||
| You can find it. | ||
| It's New York Times and it's Mary Poppins and Nanny's Shameful Flirting with Blackface. | ||
| That's the headline of that article, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I'm not making it up. | ||
| And they used a screenshot of her with chimney soot on, pretty much similar to the screenshot I'd taken six months before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| It's not blackface. | ||
| It's not racist. | ||
| But it's changed so much in six months. | ||
| Things have shifted so bizarrely. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Mary Poppinsman named Shameful Flirting with Blackface. | ||
| This is a major publication. | ||
| That is goddamned hilarious. | ||
| But this isn't even like some blog. | ||
| Shameful Flirting with Blackface. | ||
| That's the New York Times. | ||
| Who wrote that? | ||
| Who's that person? | ||
| Who's that person? | ||
| I don't know who that person is, but... | ||
| Ugh, I don't even want to say his name. | ||
| Fucking Voldemort. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that the one you're not supposed to say the name? | ||
| Or what's the other one? | ||
| Yeah, you can't say Voldemort. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Jesus Christ, that is so goddamn crazy. | ||
| This happens all the time. | ||
| We had it in the UK. I don't know if this story got broke over here. | ||
| You know the new musical Cats, the film of Cats, the Andrew Lloyd Webber thing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Did you see that? | ||
| No, I didn't see it. | ||
| One of the mixed-race actors plays a white cat, and there were articles about how they've whitewashed this black actor. | ||
| But they've also turned her into a cat. | ||
| It's not a... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not a racist... | ||
| I can't remember her name, but it's... | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| Stop trying to... | ||
| Right, this is it. | ||
| Like, if you're going to... | ||
| Why not just... | ||
| This is why I say get the left on board. | ||
| Why not just reserve the accusation of racism for actual racists? | ||
| Well, I think the left... | ||
| Thinks of the woke left the same way they think of Antifa. | ||
| That they are on the fringe, but they're doing good work. | ||
| Like, they're not me. | ||
| I don't think that way, but at least they're attacking those right-wing pieces of shit that I hate. | ||
| I see. | ||
| So even though they're crazy and ridiculous, they're not coming after me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They're coming after people that I disagree with, so they don't find it... | ||
| A problem. | ||
| But it'd be one thing if, I mean, I don't support violence anyway, but it'd be one thing if Antifa were going after actual fascists. | ||
| But when they're just pepper spraying someone with a MAGA hat, or, you know, or going after Andy Ngo, you know, so a gay Vietnamese person. | ||
| Or Christina Hoff Summers. | ||
| Or Christina Hoff Summers. | ||
| Then it's difficult to take them seriously. | ||
| And they're wearing masks and hitting people with bike locks and all the craziness. | ||
| It's grim. | ||
| And they're the compassionate ones, right? | ||
| So this is the incoherence of that. | ||
| If you set yourself as this kind of moral arbiter, and you're doing everything in virtue, but you're hitting someone with a bite clock rather than engaging them in conversation, then how do you even talk to that? | ||
| How do you even address that, you know? | ||
| Yeah, you really can't, right? | ||
| What they're willing to do is they're willing to attack people that they disagree with. | ||
| They're willing to shut down discussion. | ||
| They're willing to, like, if someone wants to come and speak, And that person happens to be right wing. | ||
| They feel completely 100% justified in shutting down the speech, hitting fire alarms, telling people they don't feel safe, attacking people that are trying to come into the venue, screaming at old people. | ||
| I mean, we've seen all this stuff that happens with Antifa. | ||
| This is a serious problem that I think is going to get worse here very quickly, right? | ||
| Because up until now, I've always thought you guys are in a really great position. | ||
| You've got your First Amendment, you know? | ||
| So people will always be able to say whatever they want in this country, you know? | ||
| But you're seeing the cracks in that ideal very, very clearly. | ||
| And some people are calling for hate speech laws so that the First Amendment doesn't apply to what they call hate speech. | ||
| And that would be the – rather than just – I mean, yeah, you've got people – Setting off fire alarms, literally stopping people from speaking that way. | ||
| But I think there are people who are moving towards legislating against certain forms of speech. | ||
| Well, it's very important that this be taught and that people understand that the answer to bad speech is good speech. | ||
| Yeah, just more of it. | ||
| That's always been the answer, to get two people that have opposing ideas and have them talk and have one person who has the better ideas, who's more articulate and understands it and understands the consequences of these evil ideas and lays it out so that everybody watching can go, oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, I see. | ||
| Now I learned. | ||
| But as soon as you stop it, you know, if they say, we want Ben Shapiro to debate our person and let's all go together, that's great. | ||
| Do that. | ||
| Do that. | ||
| That's how to do it. | ||
| So why would you want, if you claim to be opposed to all these horrible ideas, why would you want those ideas to be left unchallenged? | ||
| That doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You should be celebrating the idea that these people are going to get a platform and be debated and be repudiated. | ||
| But they're worried that that person's going to indoctrinate someone and they think that they're absolutely right and that person's absolutely wrong. | ||
| And this is the argument for deplatforming people from Twitter and YouTube and all these different social media platforms. | ||
| But people aren't as stupid as that. | ||
| A lot of them are. | ||
| I don't believe that someone's going to hear someone making a fascist speech and they suddenly become fascist by osmosis. | ||
| Let me pause you there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How does someone join the Nazi party? | ||
| Well, I mean, do you mean the historical Nazi party? | ||
| No, the ones that are around today. | ||
| I mean, who the hell knows? | ||
| Morons. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Who get indoctrinated. | ||
| And that's what we're doing. | ||
| We're protecting morons. | ||
| We're nerfing the world. | ||
| But the fact is, there are so few of those people. | ||
| There are so few people who are that stupid. | ||
| That's why there aren't many neo-Nazis. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I have more faith in humanity. | ||
| I think most people are pretty keyed up. | ||
| You are a smart man, and I understand why you would think that. | ||
| But I think there are a lot of extremely gullible people. | ||
| You know how many people believe the Earth is flat? | ||
| You're aware of that? | ||
| I wonder whether those people are joking when I hear that. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| No, I've had arguments with them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I've had conversations with them in real life. | ||
| Okay, so let's take that point that there are an awful lot of stupid people out there. | ||
| Uninformed gullible. | ||
| Let's call them uninformed gullible. | ||
| Unprepared in terms of they don't have the skills to handle any sort of weird argument. | ||
| Let's say I'm wrong and my optimism about humanity is wrong-headed. | ||
| And I'm willing to accept that, right? | ||
| So let's say I'm wrong about that. | ||
| What is better? | ||
| What's the best way to deal with those people? | ||
| Is it to say we're going to no-platform all the people who are going to indoctrinate them so they never get to hear that? | ||
| But we live in a world with the Internet where people can go on their various chat rooms and they can and there they can go into those areas and they can hear those ideas unchallenged. | ||
| They don't hear the opposing view. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So surely if if there are all these swathes of gormless people out there, though, that's the environment which is going to radicalize them. | ||
| Not not a stage at some university where I agree with you. | ||
| But they want to de-platform people that would bring those people over to those websites where they would get indoctrinated. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they want to de-platform people off of social media so that those people who have these problematic ideas can't drag someone over to Stormfront or whatever radical website or... | ||
| But we know from the history of censorship that it never works. | ||
| It never works. | ||
| It always drives people towards something. | ||
| True. | ||
| But that doesn't matter. | ||
| People are stupid. | ||
| Just because you say you know it, and we do know it, it doesn't mean people are going to think that way and operate that way. | ||
| That requires restraint. | ||
| It requires foresight. | ||
| It requires some sort of an objective understanding of history. | ||
| Well, I'll give you an example. | ||
| So in the UK, there was a far right party called the British National Party, which does technically still exist, but no, there's like 10 people in it. | ||
| And the leader of that party, there was a moment where they were winning millions of votes, right? | ||
| Because there were a lot of people who were disenfranchised, particularly in working class areas, and they were desperate for some kind of... | ||
| And the head of that party, Nick Griffin, went on to our main political discussion program called Question Time, BBC One, Prime Time, and he was humiliated. | ||
| And as soon as that happened, the BNP were over within a matter of months. | ||
| It exposed to those normal people, the ludicrous and absurd nature of his viewpoint. | ||
| And that, I think, is a really heartening idea, that actually, if you hear more from these people, they are self-discrediting, right? | ||
| But if you ban them, you're almost giving them a kind of glamour, a kind of martyrdom status that they don't deserve. | ||
| And that, I think, attracts a lot of people to their worldview. | ||
| There's definitely something to be said for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's definitely something to be said. | ||
| I mean, like, I'm not in favor of banning these people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm also not in favor of these people being able to espouse hate speech everywhere they go and to be able to indoctrinate people as well. | ||
| It's like, I don't know what the actual... | ||
| Well, do you trust... | ||
| Well, I'll put it as my view. | ||
| I do not trust the state to decide what constitutes hate speech. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't believe that... | ||
| I mean, in the UK, they've proven that they're not capable of doing that. | ||
| Same as Canada. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Absolutely clearly. | ||
| So in that case, I'm for abolishing the idea of hate speech as a practice. | ||
| We have... | ||
| I don't know how much you know about the UK with this, right? | ||
| We have a thing where... | ||
| The police will investigate you for non-crime if it's offensive, right? | ||
| Non-crime? | ||
| So there's a website, the government's website on hate crime has a paragraph on non-crime hate incidents, okay? | ||
| And what they specifically say is if you've heard something, if someone said something and it's offensive to you and you believe that that person said something because you were one of the protected characteristics because of race, gender, sexuality, disability, whatever, then you report that to the police and it gets logged in the hate crime statistics as a hate crime. | ||
| Even though there's no crime. | ||
| I'll give you a very specific example of this. | ||
| There's a famous case in the UK at the moment. | ||
| A man called Harry Miller. | ||
| He was a docker from Humberside. | ||
| And he retweeted a poem that was perceived to be transphobic. | ||
| And people were upset about it. | ||
| He didn't even write the poem. | ||
| He just retweeted the poem. | ||
| The police investigated his retweet. | ||
| And he said to them, have I broken the law? | ||
| They said, this isn't a crime. | ||
| This is a non-crime hate incident. | ||
| And the actual phrase the police officer used, I'm not joking, was, we have to check your thinking. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Now that's sinister. | ||
| And then when the police were challenged on this in the media, it turns out this is standard practice in the police. | ||
| It isn't just one rogue police officer going a bit mad. | ||
| This is standard practice. | ||
| The commissioning guidelines from the College of Policing actually stipulate that this is what you're meant to do. | ||
| This is now finally being challenged in the courts, but no one stood up to this stuff. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Just a phrase, check your thinking. | ||
| Check your thinking. | ||
| By a police officer, no less. | ||
| Who's qualified to check your thinking? | ||
| I mean, you should be... | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It should be difficult. | ||
| Well, yeah, quite. | ||
| I mean, the College of Policing, who teach the police what to... | ||
| What the police officer actually said is, he said, well, we've had a workshop. | ||
| And what you don't understand is that babies are sometimes born with a male brain when they've got a female body. | ||
| I mean, literally, he was trying to lecture him... | ||
| Well, that might be true. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that the police should be able to tell you that you can't retweet something that you agree with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we have people in our country who have been... | ||
| Do you know how many people are arrested in the UK? I'll just ask, how many people do you think are arrested every year in the UK for offensive comments they posted online? | ||
| What would you guess? | ||
| It's not a trick. | ||
| I'm just interested to know what you would assume. | ||
| Arrested for offensive comments online. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me say 300. 3,000. | |
| Every year, right? | ||
| Wow! | ||
| And that's not including all the many thousands of non-crime hate incidents that are logged. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 3,000 people arrested. | ||
| Some of them will be horrible, by the way. | ||
| I've been clear about it. | ||
| Some of those comments will be horrible, nasty, racist, awful. | ||
| A lot of them are between rival football gangs and stuff like that. | ||
| But some of them are jokes. | ||
| One guy served three months in prison for a joke about Madeleine McCann. | ||
| And it was a joke that he cut and pasted from some website and put it on his own Facebook page. | ||
| Three months in prison for that. | ||
| Jesus Christ, what was the joke? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Hope it was good. | ||
| Hope it was laughing for three months while he was eating terrible food. | ||
| Better have been worth it, right? | ||
| Now he's a felon, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He has a record. | ||
| The famous one in the UK at the moment is the Count Dankler case. | ||
| Yes, I do know that one, yeah. | ||
| And because I stood up... | ||
| Explain it to people that don't know that story. | ||
| There's a guy called Count Danken, his real name is Marcus Meekin, and he's a YouTuber. | ||
| And he created his dog, sorry, his girlfriend's dog is this cute little pug dog, right? | ||
| And his girlfriend was always going on about how adorable the dog was. | ||
| So he trained the dog. | ||
| enthusiastically whenever it heard the phrase gas the Jews and he trained it to do a little Nazi salute Whenever it heard Zeig Heil right now those phrases out of that context are unpleasant You can see why someone would be offended by that, right? | ||
| But the joke was that this cute little dog is doing is behaving this vicious In fact the joke is predicated on the idea that there's nothing worse than a Nazi Well, also the joke is predicated on the fact that we all know the dog has no idea what it's doing and Quite. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| So, that's him doing the Z car there. | ||
| So, that's Buddha the dog. | ||
| Now, look, I accept that people can be offended. | ||
| Like, you know, I might be offended by... | ||
| I'm offended by all sorts of things, and that's fine. | ||
| But, no, three million people saw that video before YouTube took it down, you know? | ||
| And... | ||
| Three million people, not one complaint. | ||
| No one complained. | ||
| The police actually went to the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities and said, do you find this offensive? | ||
| And understandably, they said yes. | ||
| And the police said, great, now we can prosecute this guy. | ||
| Two-year investigation. | ||
| Found guilty in a court of law. | ||
| Ultimately fined £800. | ||
| That was what happened. | ||
| But he's got a criminal record now for whatever you think about the joke, right? | ||
| It is clearly meant to be funny. | ||
| Not only that, Cybercrime Intelligence Unit investigated all of his tweets, emails, his entire background to find any remote connection to a fascist group or a far-right group. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| They found nothing. | ||
| So there's no evidence. | ||
| So basically, in the UK, we now have someone who has been prosecuted because the judge believes that he knows what's secretly going on, what his secret intention is. | ||
| And the actual phrasing of the law under which he was prosecuted is that it is deemed grossly offensive, which is a very subjective idea, something that is grossly offensive. | ||
| Well, particularly when the fact that you have 3,000 different views, or 3 million different views, and no complaints? | ||
| No complaints, right? | ||
| That's... | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And I know the guy, because I defended him at the time, and then of course people said that I'm a Nazi apologist, which is utterly, utterly ludicrous. | ||
| But I know the guy now. | ||
| He's a nice guy. | ||
| He's not at all. | ||
| I've seen him interviewed. | ||
| What's up, Jamie? | ||
| While you guys are talking about this, I found a story that happened last week. | ||
| This is a tweet that I've kind of gone through it to verify it a little bit. | ||
| I don't want to say it's 100% accurate, but this guy got a job interview and I guess he signed up and they found this on their own. | ||
| He said he did not give them his information. | ||
| They sent him 351 pages of every tweet he ever liked that had the word fuck in it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He said, I had to get a background check for my job, and it turns out the report is a 300-plus page PDF of every single tweet I've ever liked. | ||
| Liked! | ||
| With the word fuck in it. | ||
| Enjoy your dystopian BS. There's a bunch of tweets showing it, but I looked up the company that does this. | ||
| Hold on, go back. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Update, I came home to a package containing a printout of all 351 pages of it. | ||
| Obviously the dystopia cares about wasting paper. | ||
| Here's like a for instance of what it looks like. | ||
| And have they used this to justify not giving him the job? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what happened after that. | ||
| He liked this tweet. | ||
| Merry Christmas to the toddler I saw running across Trader Joe's with a giant bottle of peppermint vodka. | ||
| And mom running after him like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Only. | ||
| family. | ||
| So flag type, bad. | ||
| Flag reason, alcohol. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Post type, liked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they changed what he was saying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's making a joke about a toddler that he saw running across Trader Joe's with a giant bottle of peppermint vodka that it had taken from its mom and the mom was like, no, no, no, give me that, give me that, give me that. | ||
| So they flagged it because there was alcohol in it. | ||
| The baby had a bottle of alcohol. | ||
| There's nothing offensive about that whatsoever. | ||
| I actually don't understand why that would be an issue. | ||
| Because they want you to be scared as fuck. | ||
| They want to be able to control your thinking and they don't want you to ever do anything that could come back to hurt the company in any way and mess with their bottom line. | ||
| I mean, that is crazy. | ||
| But even liking a tweet. | ||
| Not just writing the tweet, but liking it. | ||
| I like things by mistake sometimes because I have fat thumbs. | ||
| I just say the wrong thing. | ||
| Here's another one. | ||
| To this day, this is still the most, in all caps, big dick energy I've ever seen in a video. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| It was the guy that called his dad when he was about to win who wants to be a millionaire to celebrate that. | ||
| I know the answer. | ||
| I'm going to win. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So he called his dad, tell his dad that he's going to win because he knew he was going to win. | ||
| Now look at this, flag reason, language, bigotry, sexism. | ||
| What's the bigotry and the sexism there? | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| I don't see any bigotry. | ||
| Bigotry, in particular, sexism, that he's a man and he's showing big dick energy because he's, big dick energy is an expression. | ||
| And it's an expression for someone who is super confident in the idea that you say, well, we must have a big dick. | ||
| That's the joke about that. | ||
| But that's not sexist. | ||
| No, it's a joke. | ||
| It's an internet meme. | ||
| Big dick energy is an internet meme. | ||
| And that this is flag type bad. | ||
| Language, bigotry, sexism. | ||
| And here's the best part. | ||
| Post type liked. | ||
| He just liked it. | ||
| Like you saw, I was like, ah! | ||
| Because it is a big dick energy move. | ||
| What, to phone your dad? | ||
| Call your dad and say, I'm about to win a million, dad. | ||
| Does that classify as big dick energy? | ||
| It's not a phrase that we commonly use in the UK. We're too refined for that. | ||
| That's vulgar. | ||
| Yeah, it is vulgar. | ||
| But it's a new American thing over the last, wait, four years or so? | ||
| Like two, maybe. | ||
| Two years. | ||
| Is having a big dick sexist then? | ||
| I guess that's what they're saying. | ||
| Bigotry is the hilarious part. | ||
| You can scour that motherfucker forever and try to find some bigotry there. | ||
| The gentleman's name, if you want to read this, folks, you want to read along with his internet name is K-M-L-E-F-R-A-N-C. K-M-L-E-F-R-A-N-C. K-M-L-E-F-R-A-N-C on Twitter. | ||
| Bruce, Bruce Almighty. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| So he's a funny guy. | ||
| By the way, they don't know what bigotry means. | ||
| I'm really sick of this word being thrown around, right? | ||
| That's a real problem right there. | ||
| I mean, he should be able to sue for that one. | ||
| There's nothing bigotry about that. | ||
| Bigotry is, the dictionary definition of bigotry is an intolerance to those with different opinions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And more often than not, sorry, I didn't mean to be patronising, but it's just that whenever I hear the word being used, it's always by bigots who can't tolerate your opinion. | ||
| It's like, you're a bigot, you don't agree with everything I say and therefore you're a bigot. | ||
| You just undermine your whole fucking point. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| But liking tweets, I mean... | ||
| It's bad enough that people sort of trawl through everything you ever wrote. | ||
| But liking. | ||
| But liking them. | ||
| And what's crazy about that is this is a company that's doing this. | ||
| So there's a company that they hired that's willing to do this. | ||
| And the company labeled it bigotry. | ||
| So is the company woke? | ||
| Is this the company? | ||
| Fama. | ||
| The smartest way to screen toxic workplace behavior. | ||
| Fama is a talent screening software. | ||
| Okay, so it's software. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| To help identify problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees by analyzing publicly available online information. | ||
| Boy, would I have a hard time getting a job. | ||
| This tweet I just looked up said that another company used this company to get that information. | ||
| So it's like a background check. | ||
| Yeah, a company that he was... | ||
| What a creepy company. | ||
| Insane. | ||
| Like, that's really sinister. | ||
| Well, it seems like it's just software. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Yeah, it says talent screening software. | ||
| So it's basically, they just scan you to make sure that you pass their purity test, which no one will. | ||
| No one with any sense of humor. | ||
| I mean, if that guy, the big dick energy guy, that gets you flagged, you're a bad person because you thought that that guy who knew he was going to win a million dollars so he called his dad. | ||
| I mean, that's funny. | ||
| Is there anyone? | ||
| There is no way that there's anyone on the planet who couldn't be cancelled if you had unlimited access to their private texts and tweets. | ||
| No way. | ||
| But that's part of why people want to cancel people, because they know it could come back at them. | ||
| And there's a certain thrill. | ||
| Like, one of the things you find about people, like, here's one, right? | ||
| Whenever you see a homophobic preacher, almost guarantee that guy's gay. | ||
| Oh yeah, always. | ||
| Almost guarantee. | ||
| You know, these sinners and their homosexuality getting together and laying with men and you could see the boner just developing in their pants. | ||
| That's what these people... | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And then they always get caught with a rent boy doing crystal meth or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, and people who just have just a... | ||
| Even if you're adhering to this woke ideology and you're part of the cult, if you just have a few fucked up sketchy things in your past, You know that they could get you. | ||
| And so you just stay on the offensive. | ||
| Stay on the offensive. | ||
| But then that's the same with anyone who identifies as male feminists. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| And the number of times they're a wandering hand predator. | ||
| Anybody who identifies as a male feminist should be flagged. | ||
| They should flag them and then just go through their stuff. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| So you see it as strategic. | ||
| You see it as like, I've got cover. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I know guys who are creepers who identify as male feminists so that they could get women to think that they're woke and they're a part of the good squad and good guys. | ||
| It's just, it's a transparent ploy by sneaky men to try to fuck. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| It's the most obvious trick. | ||
| It's like the dumbest magic trick ever. | ||
| Like you could see them stuff the handkerchief into their sleeve. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| But you know, feminists used to just mean someone who believes in equality of the sexes, which is pretty much everyone, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's a problem in the word, right? | ||
| The word has feminine in it. | ||
| You should be an egalitarian. | ||
| You should be an overall... | ||
| the individual and you don't want to separate anyone, whether it's by race or gender or sexual orientation or anything, into any groups. | ||
| You love people and you want everyone to have equal opportunity, you want everybody to have equal treatment. | ||
| So you would get rid of the word feminist? | ||
| No, I would never get rid of it because I think it's empowering for some people that have grown up in suppressive environments and to be able to establish yourself as someone who's resisting something that you fought against. | ||
| Like if you grew up in a horrible environment, like maybe your dad beat your mom and you were told you're a piece of shit because you're a woman and then you finally get in with this group that tells you, no, as a feminist, you're empowered. | ||
| You're a powerful woman and I don't want to get rid of any labels. | ||
| But I would be on board with that, totally, if I thought that modern-day feminism was anything to do with empowerment. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I think it's to do with women are weak, women are victims, women need special protection. | ||
| I think it's the opposite of empowerment in a lot of feminist views. | ||
| In a lot of feminist views. | ||
| I try not to generalize. | ||
| No, sure. | ||
| But my issue is with men. | ||
| They call themselves feminists. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| You know, I just don't buy it. | ||
| I've never met one. | ||
| Everyone I've met is a creeper. | ||
| Either a creeper or the most ultimate beta male. | ||
| Well, most women don't even identify as feminists. | ||
| They... | ||
| Most women don't. | ||
| But the men that I have met, they're so obviously compromised. | ||
| Or it's men that have these really powerful women. | ||
| That's a lot of it. | ||
| It's like men who have this really powerful girlfriend, and they're kind of weak. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| You know, I have a joke. | ||
| Show me a man who claims to be a feminist who can pick up heavy shit and run fast. | ||
| They don't exist. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| I'll try and prove you wrong on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Try. | |
| Well, it's probably a guy who really likes to fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, he can fuck in a regular way, but he's just like, he's trying to cover all the bases. | ||
| He says, you know what, I'm going to be a fucking feminist too, bro. | ||
| Get them all. | ||
| This all does make sense to me. | ||
| But again, I try not to imagine what's going on in people's heads. | ||
| But you're right, so many of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have to. | |
| It just happens all the time. | ||
| So many of them, like you say with the gay preachers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gay preacher is the classic. | |
| Why would you care? | ||
| Why would you care? | ||
| Why are you so angry about gay people? | ||
| Why do you care? | ||
| Also, some of them are really camp and effeminate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you just think, okay, I know what's going on here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Clearly. | |
| I had a bit about it that there's only two types of people that hate gay marriage. | ||
| Either you're dumb or you're secretly worried that dicks are delicious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's what you get from those people. | ||
| You get this weird thing where you're trying to throw people off the trail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the people are like, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like if you show up at a hit-and-run car accident and you're like, wow, who did this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is crazy. | |
| I would never do this. | ||
| I can't even believe someone would do this. | ||
| I mean, I'll tell you what, I would never do it. | ||
| If you're looking for people, it wouldn't be me. | ||
| It's like the criminal joining the vigilante game. | ||
| It's an old trick, absolutely. | ||
| Well, cops always say that when someone's an arsonist, they're almost always at the scene of the crime. | ||
| They always show up to watch their handiwork. | ||
| Well, I'm going to think about this more then. | ||
| Because, I mean, you're sort of putting into my mind now this idea that there's a lot of the woke people are doing it in order to cover their own tracks. | ||
| Like a self-preservation kind of thing, you know? | ||
| There's definitely that. | ||
| But I think it's also they don't want any of that smoke. | ||
| They don't want any of it coming their way. | ||
| Because they see how vicious it is, right? | ||
| They see how horrible it is. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm friends with a guy who used to be woke and now he's not. | ||
| His name is Jamie Kilstein. | ||
| So how did he get deprogrammed? | ||
| He got fucking called out, man. | ||
| They went after him. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And in a small way, you know, in comparison to the way some people have gotten it. | ||
| But he recognized, like, how crazy it is. | ||
| And he also recognized that his own patterns were so problematic. | ||
| Like, he was tweeting mean things to people and calling him a sexist pig and a piece of shit and homophobic. | ||
| And he was doing it to get that love. | ||
| And then he would check his Twitter, like, obsessively. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was walking down the street. | ||
| He kept pulling his phone out of his pocket. | ||
| See how people were responding to his tweet. | ||
| And it becomes an addiction. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| People have that thing where they feel the vibration in their pocket and there is no vibration. | ||
| It's not even vibrating. | ||
| There's a term for this. | ||
| I took all of my social media apps, and this was hugely beneficial. | ||
| And I put them all on the back page of my phone. | ||
| And I put them in a folder that says... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Addict. | |
| Right. | ||
| To remind yourself of your sin. | ||
| So if I want to fuck around, I want to go on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. | ||
| I don't really go on Facebook, but if I want to go on one of those, I have to go into the addict folder. | ||
| Yeah, and remind yourself. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't go in there. | ||
| I mean, I'm getting better at it, but it does bring out the worst in people. | ||
| And it brings out the worst in me. | ||
| I find the same thing as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, everyone. | |
| We're human beings. | ||
| You know, and you can't... | ||
| I wonder the extent to which social media has escalated everything in the real world as well. | ||
| Because we haven't got adults discussing stuff anymore. | ||
| We've got children throwing mud. | ||
| That's what's basically happening. | ||
| Well, you and I are discussing things. | ||
| It's harder to find someone who can just sit down and talk to you. | ||
| But there's a bunch of people that are waking up to it. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that are getting flip phones too. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are realizing this is a bad addiction. | ||
| No, I can see that. | ||
| I've considered getting a flip phone or maybe a phone with no apps on it at all. | ||
| You know, that's not a bad idea, too. | ||
| Well, I deleted Twitter for a week and then I got so much work done. | ||
| I was so productive. | ||
| It was really great. | ||
| You could get a lot done, man. | ||
| You know, but it's just... | ||
| I get trapped in those cycles of stupid conversations where someone's arguing with a figment of their imagination. | ||
| They've sort of decided that you believe something that you just don't believe. | ||
| And they're telling you what you believe. | ||
| Well, you have the luxury of a character as well. | ||
| Yeah, but I used to before I was outed. | ||
| When did you get outed? | ||
| That was when the book came. | ||
| That was March last year. | ||
| And I was gutted. | ||
| I didn't do it, right? | ||
| Who outed you? | ||
| It was the Sunday Times in London. | ||
| How did you know? | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| So, the journalist had done this really interesting investigative journalism stuff, like Rosaminda Irwin, her name was, and she'd read loads of my political articles, because I write these articles for Spike magazine, and she'd read an advanced copy of the book, and she'd seen that some of the quotations match up. | ||
| And then she emailed me saying, I think you're Titania McGrath, can you confirm or deny this? | ||
| And I fudged it, you know, I emailed back. | ||
| I didn't lie, but I sort of fudged it. | ||
| She phoned friends of mine to ask whether it was me, and I hadn't told anyone. | ||
| Did they rat you out? | ||
| I hadn't told them. | ||
| In fact, what was great is some of my friends were following Titania and they didn't know it was me. | ||
| What was a bit bad was there were a couple of times when I slagged them off as a joke and they didn't know it was me. | ||
| Anyway, it's fine. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| But I preferred that. | ||
| I loved being in the closet, you know? | ||
| Well, have you thought about creating a new character? | ||
| I've got a couple. | ||
| Ah, shh! | ||
| Tony, Bonnie, bro, they're already looking now. | ||
| I'm not saying who they are, and they haven't got many followers, but hopefully I can build them up. | ||
| I loved just being a character. | ||
| The thing is, because the outing happened the week of the book, it looked deliberate. | ||
| It looked like I'd cynically done it. | ||
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| Well, it was a big publicity thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it helped book sales. | ||
| Yeah, I know, but I didn't, I still didn't want to, because now, you know what the big difference is now? | ||
| Is that everyone who hates her, and by the way, like, the social justice activists, their venom for this character is off the fucking scale. | ||
| I don't expect them to find it funny. | ||
| I get that they're not going to find it funny, right? | ||
| But the anger is just unbelievable. | ||
| So now it goes to me, right? | ||
| So now, whenever she tweets something that they find offensive, they go from me on to me. | ||
| Do they call you by name? | ||
| Or they reply with my name, you know, and I get screenshots sent back of me saying this is homophobic or whatever. | ||
| And I'm like, none of it is. | ||
| None of it is. | ||
| The target is never minorities with her. | ||
| The target is her. | ||
| There's no, the goalposts have been moved so far away from reality that there's no logic to any of it. | ||
| No. | ||
| You know, someone called me homophobic because I said... | ||
| I had an old tweet. | ||
| This is from 2012. Right. | ||
| They dug up a bunch of tweets about me this week. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| And one of them from 2012 said, call me romantic, but I love it when I see gay couples that are so comfortable that they can kiss in public. | ||
| I saw this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because didn't someone say that you were fetishizing gay people by... | ||
| Come on. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That was a legitimate tweet. | ||
| I was probably high. | ||
| Because that's when I feel warm and fuzzy. | ||
| And I saw a gay couple make out. | ||
| I think that was what it was. | ||
| I mean, it was eight fucking years ago. | ||
| It's hard to remember. | ||
| That's quite sweet. | ||
| So you may as well have written fucking fags. | ||
| You may as well. | ||
| You might as well have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I was legitimately... | |
| You know, it's weird, man. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| The whole thing is very weird. | ||
| But they could just call you homophobic for that. | ||
| It's just so crazy. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing we could do is like... | ||
| Well, I hate using the phrase call out. | ||
| But how about we start calling out people who misuse those words, right? | ||
| If you're homophobic, you hate gay people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You think it's nice that they can kiss openly in public. | ||
| There's no logic to it. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| It's like you're arguing with someone who's... | ||
| They're... | ||
| It's like the idea that if you leave Islam, you could be killed, right? | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| This is what happens to apostate. | ||
| An apostate, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is crazy, right? | ||
| That if you leave, it's so terrifying that someone could kill you. | ||
| But that is the same kind of religious thinking, religious crazed ideology, adherence to the dogma, no matter what, that would allow someone to think that I could be homophobic by saying that I think it's great when gay guys are so comfortable they kiss in public. | ||
| It's because they know you are in your mind. | ||
| They do this incredible mind reading thing. | ||
| That's what it's all about. | ||
| They're all psychics. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| They're all psychics. | ||
| They don't care about reality. | ||
| They don't care about what's true. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's no need for reality in their world. | ||
| If they've decided that you're a bigot, then they can use anything and everything against you, including pro-gay tweets. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Let's think about it. | ||
| They can use a pro-gay tweet to prove that you're homophobic. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| But it's kind of good because it's so crazy that logical, left-leaning people read that and they go, what the fuck? | ||
| They do. | ||
| And they go, come on, man. | ||
| And, you know, it's been positive for me in a lot of ways that they're so over the top that... | ||
| You know, like I've had gay friends go, did I know you're homophobic? | ||
| I'm like, I didn't know either. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Now I know. | ||
| But they know. | ||
| Maybe this is why they always turn most severely on people from the left who question this stuff. | ||
| They really do. | ||
| Because they expect it from the right. | ||
| I think too, yeah, especially if you look like you should be on the right and you're on the left, which I definitely do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's like, there's, I mean, you could try to figure it out. | ||
| But I think it all boils down to adherence. | ||
| Adherence, strict adherence and compliance to dogma. | ||
| And if you don't, if you're not willing to comply 100% with the ideology, they'll attack you. | ||
| Just like Martina Navratilova. | ||
| But that's why I think left and right is no longer helpful. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I think that's why there are all these weird alliances going on now. | ||
| I mean, I did this event recently with Peter Boghossian, who I know you've spoken to, and James Lindsay. | ||
| And we were giving these talks at this event in London, and we were sitting there at lunch, and there was, like, the head of the Atheist Society sitting next to this evangelical Christian pastor from America, and there were people of no faith and all faith and left and right, and it's like, but we all believe in liberty. | ||
| Like, ultimately, we all care about freedom and individual freedom, and that's the new fault line. | ||
| It's not left against right. | ||
| It's people who believe in liberty for the individual or people who want more authority to control you, and that's the real conflict. | ||
| Well, if the right really wanted to bring more people over, what they would do is establish, like, universally across the board, an appreciation for gay people, appreciation for gay marriage, an appreciation for the need to take impoverished appreciation for gay marriage, an appreciation for the need to take impoverished communities and bring them up, an appreciation for welfare, an appreciation for, you know, raising the | ||
| If they just started a few things like that, good Lord, the amount of people that would jump off that fucking ship, that sinking ship of liberal ideas, because it's just, it's infested with rats. | ||
| It's infested with rats that are chewing a hole in the very hull of the ship. | ||
| That happened in the UK. It was the conservative government that pushed through gay marriage. | ||
| Because actually that's quite a conservative idea. | ||
| Get government out of your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it should be. | ||
| Well, maybe that's what they need to do. | ||
| But I think definitely if you support the left, you need to try and dissuade the Democrats and the Labor Party from going woke because they alienate all of their major... | ||
| They do, and they don't even realize they're doing it. | ||
| But the problem is in this country, there's no room for a third party. | ||
| People don't appreciate it or believe in it. | ||
| No, you don't have that option, do you? | ||
| Maybe they kind of do. | ||
| Like Gary Johnson ran last year and some people voted for him. | ||
| But what's really happened in this country previously, historically, is that when someone charismatic came along that's an independent, they really just take votes away from the Democrats. | ||
| Yeah, so you split the vote, right? | ||
| Yeah, so the Republicans are pretty rigid. | ||
| Well, actually, here's an example against that, though, is Ross Perot. | ||
| He actually took votes away from the Republican, and that's why Bill Clinton got in office. | ||
| Bill Clinton actually won when Herbert Walker Bush was in his first term. | ||
| So he only did one term, and then Bill Clinton won when Herbert Walker Bush was going for re-election. | ||
| And the reason why he won, rather, is because Ross Perot, who was this eccentric billionaire, do you remember him? | ||
| No, sorry, I remember Ross Perot. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was an eccentric billionaire. | ||
| Independently. | ||
| Yes, independent. | ||
| And he got on TV and bought an entire half hour of primetime television to show people how they're getting fucked by the Federal Reserve and taxes. | ||
| And he was explaining, take a look over there. | ||
| See, this is what you're going to do. | ||
| They take it here and they get it there. | ||
| And he was doing all this shit. | ||
| And everybody's like, what the fuck? | ||
| And I remember everybody was all in a war. | ||
| I voted for him. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's hard to remember. | ||
| Were you worried about splitting the vote, though? | ||
| Nah, I was fucking 18. I don't know what the fuck was going on. | ||
| I don't know how old I was. | ||
| I was older than that. | ||
| I must have been 21. But am I right in thinking, there isn't that much between the Democrats and the Republicans, is it? | ||
| I mean, you don't have a real sort of left-wing, right-wing option. | ||
| They're pretty similar on a lot of things, aren't they? | ||
| It depends on who you're talking to. | ||
| You know, if there's a giant difference between Ted Cruz... | ||
| And Bernie Sanders. | ||
| There's a giant difference. | ||
| A lot of it is people are concerned with abortion rights. | ||
| That's a giant one. | ||
| And people are concerned with a Republican putting someone in the Supreme Court that is going to limit a woman's right to choose. | ||
| So social issues, that's the way the difference really lies. | ||
| Those are big ones and those are also big ones. | ||
| Those pro-life people, they, you know, they will not vote for someone who's not pro-life. | ||
| And so if you get to a position where you are a Republican, you pretty much have to be pro-life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you want the group. | ||
| So those are the sticking points. | ||
| Yeah, because they, you know, and this is, there's no judgment here, but this is their position, is that you're killing a baby. | ||
| And they're like, I don't give a fuck about anything else. | ||
| You can't kill a goddamn baby. | ||
| And so they're like, okay, okay, okay. | ||
| And so many Republicans that maybe even have had abortions themselves. | ||
| They can't be open about that. | ||
| They can't be open about that. | ||
| They have to hide it. | ||
| This is why I think someone like Sanders is a genuine left-wing option. | ||
| And why someone like Elizabeth Warren or someone who's pushing the woke thing, that would be like electoral hemlock. | ||
| I think it will just absolutely not work. | ||
| But C is they don't see that. | ||
| How do they not see it? | ||
| Because they're full of shit. | ||
| But how do they not see it? | ||
| Like Hillary Clinton was targeting all the various demographics and she was splitting the electorate up and it didn't work. | ||
| How can they not see that this never works? | ||
| Have you ever known someone who's just a real liar, like a pathological liar? | ||
| They make up a past, they make up things. | ||
| They don't know that other people can't tell. | ||
| Or that other people can tell, rather, that they're not normal. | ||
| They're not acting normal. | ||
| They don't seem genuine. | ||
| There's certain aspects of people that it's hard to tell, but some people just don't seem genuine. | ||
| And political people in particular, like when people are running for political office, that's when that shit really stands out. | ||
| Because over and over and over again, you see them doing these speeches, and over and over and over again, you see them talking about things. | ||
| And some people can sense it and some people can't. | ||
| But they can't tell. | ||
| When you're a liar, you can't tell how other people see you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you're lying. | ||
| Like, I know a guy. | ||
| I'm going to be nice here. | ||
| Not name names. | ||
| No, never. | ||
| He's gay as fuck, but he doesn't think everybody knows it. | ||
| He's... | ||
| Slamboyant, right? | ||
| He's gay! | ||
| Everyone that I know knows he's gay. | ||
| And we all wish... | ||
| You know, but he's got a family. | ||
| He's got, like, a wife and kids, and we're all speculating, like, how's this guy get his rocks off? | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| But it's just one of those things. | ||
| Like, the man is a homosexual, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I mean, if I had a bet, I'm fucking pushing all my chips in. | ||
| Right, okay, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And because of that, he acts in this really strange... | ||
| Because he's living this kind of lie of a life. | ||
| He acts in this strange way, and I don't think he realizes that people know. | ||
| And you think a lot of these people go into politics, a lot of these sort of... | ||
| They're kind of sociopathic a lot. | ||
| Yeah, there's something about them. | ||
| And so they have this fake earnestness to them. | ||
| And that fake earnestness, it will work if you're talking to 10,000 people. | ||
| If you're talking to 10,000 people about the way we can come together as a country and we can take America back! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| There's no connection. | ||
| But I always put that down to them having to follow a party line or they're sloganizing. | ||
| They're throwing slogans out there. | ||
| There's a little of that. | ||
| This is why I'd never be a politician. | ||
| I couldn't bear not to just say what I think. | ||
| You can't be a politician. | ||
| No. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| The thing is, when someone's trying to be woke, what they're doing is it has nothing to do with being genuine. | ||
| If someone's a woke politician, unless that's who they really are… A lot of them are, though. | ||
| Well, AOC, I think she really is. | ||
| Yeah, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. | ||
| I think they mean what they say. | ||
| Well, AOC is also, you know, she's not even 30. She's a 29-year-old woman. | ||
| She's idealistic, and she's got these thoughts of the future, and she's, you know, democratic socialist. | ||
| There was an article in The Spectator this week about this, that there aren't really woke people. | ||
| They're just sort of... | ||
| They're just sort of acting this out. | ||
| I wish that were true, but I don't think it is. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| And I think Trump's being very smart whenever he sort of brings people like Ilhan Omar into the limelight of focuses on AOC and focuses on them because it means that you start thinking Democrat is woke. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, it sends that sort of message. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we know it just never... | ||
| It never works. | ||
| That's why I despair with the Labour Party and the way the Labour Party went. | ||
| I want to see a proper opposition. | ||
| I want to see a proper left-wing party that cares about class issues, that cares about money, that cares about the poverty line, social mobility, whether you're microaggressions or whatever. | ||
| Compassion for people that are trying to get by in this life. | ||
| Not social justice issues. | ||
| Not nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that's the way most people feel. | ||
| That really is. | ||
| But I think it's also, this is a symptom of a very simple, not simple, excuse me, a society where it's pretty easy to get by. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're not dealing with World War II. Right. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It would be impossible to be woke if we were being invaded by the Nazis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| These would not be priorities whatsoever. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| But it would never take hold. | ||
| It takes hold in this incredibly safe environment. | ||
| Pinker's work, which shows the progression of society becoming safer and safer. | ||
| Do you know the resistance that he gets to these ideas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Where people call him some sort of a piece of shit and an enabler and a Horrible things they say to him for just talking about science and statistics and showing the trends that we live in. | ||
| Probably one of the greatest times to be alive ever. | ||
| But that's also why people are finding things to complain about. | ||
| Finding things that are issues. | ||
| Finding things to rally for. | ||
| Finding things, these causes. | ||
| I think the way that people speak at the moment is that The UK and the US at the moment are the most bigoted, racist, homophobic societies they've ever been. | ||
| And they're the opposite of that. | ||
| They're the most tolerant they've ever been. | ||
| And what's weird about that is the statistics bear it out. | ||
| So all of the studies show that the UK, Great Britain, is the most tolerant major European country. | ||
| Even the EU's own research into this shows that tolerance towards immigration, for instance, in the UK has become so much more improved since the Brexit vote. | ||
| So we are up there. | ||
| And yet... | ||
| And for some reason, as things get better and better and better, and society gets more progressive and more tolerant, claims of bigotry and racism get more and more escalated. | ||
| And that is, I think, something we could challenge. | ||
| Firstly, let's get the left to be left again and fuck all the woke nonsense. | ||
| But also... | ||
| Remind people that they're not oppressed when they say they are. | ||
| If someone claims to be oppressed, that's a very specific, extreme thing. | ||
| It's not just, well, I sense there's some unconscious bias in the world, or maybe that actor should have been a different colour. | ||
| Oppression is something very different. | ||
| Someone's asking you for your papers when you're turning every corner. | ||
| Someone's not letting you... | ||
| A proper oppression is what dictators do, is what tyrants do. | ||
| It's what they do in North Korea, where you fuck up, they'll arrest your whole family and put your whole family in prison. | ||
| And ironically, leaning towards wokeness actually starts to create oppression, like you see that guy who got his fucking Twitter check for liking funny memes. | ||
| So how is it the case that those sort of tactics – I'm not saying that that's an authoritarian company, but those tactics are straight from the authoritarian paper. | ||
| 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| So how is it that they can't see the hypocrisy of that, that they can't see that this is where this is leading? | ||
| I think they probably had no idea it was going to be that extreme when they first implemented it, and they just wanted to keep problematic people out of their office. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you're a person who is, like, say if you're hiring someone and you find out A few weeks after they're on the job that they have some really horrific posts on Twitter. | ||
| And people have found that before. | ||
| I remember there was a story. | ||
| There was a man who got outed and he had a Reddit account. | ||
| And his Reddit account was horrific. | ||
| Okay, but you're talking about genuine sort of nasty kind of neo-Nazi horrible... | ||
| I don't know if it was neo-Nazi. | ||
| I think it was like pedophilia. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Talking about pedophilia. | ||
| A lot of it was joking around and stuff, but he was just responsible for awful shit. | ||
| And so the internet people were like, fuck this guy. | ||
| Let's find out who the fuck he is. | ||
| So they found out who he is, and then they let his boss know, and they sent copies of all the shit that he had written on Reddit, and he got fired for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But that's different. | ||
| But these sorts of initiatives that are set up, you can't trust them to make those important distinctions between something that is very serious and something that could obviously end up with all sorts of issues. | ||
| Yeah, but if you're an employer, the last thing you want is one of those guys slipping through your radar where you don't know that this guy's working for you. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Okay, but I still get really uncomfortable with the idea of trawling through everyone's history. | ||
| I do as well. | ||
| Because also, a lot of these people that are saying these things, they do it for sport. | ||
| They don't really mean that. | ||
| They're not really Nazis. | ||
| There's a lot of people that do that Pepe the Frog meme. | ||
| Yeah, same thing. | ||
| They do it because it makes other people feel uncomfortable, so they think it's funny. | ||
| It feels bad, man. | ||
| He's a Nazi? | ||
| I only realized this properly when I did meet that Count Dankula guy because he showed me the Discord server, you know, the chat room they all go into. | ||
| And I was like, oh, I can't deal with this stuff. | ||
| Like, some of the stuff that was in there, I was like, I can't. | ||
| But what I could clearly see is it's like big kids. | ||
| It's like big teenagers. | ||
| They're just one-upmanship. | ||
| They're just trying to outgross each other, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so it's like, do you know the Kekistan flag? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the Kekistan flag, which is a satire of identity politics, a nation of identitarians, you know, and then they modeled it on the Nazi flag to take the piss, right? | ||
| But, of course, if you don't know that world and you're not from that world and you see that flag, you think, oh, my God, that's a Nazi flag. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so if you don't know, if you don't immerse yourself in that world, like I'm from an outsider's perspective, it took someone to show me for me to sort of get it. | ||
| Jordan had to show it to me. | ||
| Oh, did he? | ||
| Jordan had to explain the whole thing to me. | ||
| And, you know, and Jordan has taken so much heat because he posed for a photograph with these guys that had him hold up the flag of Kekistan. | ||
| And he thought it was funny because he thinks that these sort of These memes. | ||
| He's interested in the fact that people interpret them so severely. | ||
| And so extremely. | ||
| Well, they jump to the worst possible interpretation. | ||
| They assume the worst of everyone. | ||
| Well, it's because of the small percentage are actually Nazi frogs. | ||
| That's what I was going to say. | ||
| The counter-argument to that is, well, couldn't genuine fascists use this as cover? | ||
| That's the counter-argument that people use. | ||
| One thing that Dankler told me is that what happens is they'll spot these actual neo-Nazis coming into the server and they'll deal with them. | ||
| They sort them out themselves. | ||
| They've got a way of discerning it. | ||
| But that's the typical argument. | ||
| That humour and Well, that's a great way, also, if you wanted to break up a group, you infiltrate and act like a Nazi with that Kekistan flag, and then all of a sudden, everyone's a Nazi who's associated with that frog. | ||
| I mean, that's a classic government move. | ||
| I think it's incumbent on people to try and understand the culture that they're criticizing. | ||
| My friend Stephen Knight, he's an interviewer, and he went and interviewed a bunch of people on a march with the Kekistan flag and was asking them about their views and whether they're racist. | ||
| And when he spoke to them, it was quite clear that they're part of this internet culture and they think it's funny and they think it's trolling and all of that sort of stuff. | ||
| And once you realise that, if you have a generous interpretation of that, then you understand that this isn't this horrible right. | ||
| But people use this as evidence. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Of this rising fascism. | ||
| They use people joking about fascism as evidence of the rising fascism. | ||
| Those two things just don't... | ||
| And why would you want to live in a world where there are fascists? | ||
| Why would you want to believe that? | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| Like, the people who proclaim to be anti-racist, I've never seen anyone more excited to find racism. | ||
| They love racism. | ||
| They can't wait to find it under every stone in every corner. | ||
| Well, that's how they justify their actions, right? | ||
| So it just goes back to that thing, gives them purpose, gives them something to do. | ||
| Well, it's also like we were talking about with woke people, that you can't be woke enough, because once they've found all the other people that aren't following the doctrine, then they turn on each other. | ||
| They will, absolutely. | ||
| God, I'm... | ||
| No one's gone through my tweets yet and no one as far as I'm aware I'm fucking putting this out there now, but no one's done that to me yet And so and I'm like, what did I say now? | ||
| I'm doubting myself. | ||
| Is there jokes? | ||
| There must be of course. | ||
| I mean, I've been on Twitter since 2007 I've said so much stupid shit and I used to use it differently too I used to use Twitter like I would post things that I thought people would react to a silly way and I would just retweet things and not even say anything and Let's see how these people freak out about this. | ||
| You should get someone to go back over you. | ||
| They can have it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the best attitude. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Go waste your life going through my tweets. | ||
| Some people I know, they do this thing where they self-destruct the tweets after seven days. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, they do that. | ||
| I did that with Titania for a bit when, in the early days, she was getting mass reported. | ||
| And I thought, like, she kept getting banned. | ||
| I like how you talk about her like she's a real person. | ||
| I do! | ||
| That's how I inhabit the role, because I have to think of her as something other. | ||
| Do you think that when you do that, when you inhabit her, do you think that you understand and appreciate the way these people think? | ||
| And do you think that it's attractive in some way? | ||
| Yeah, I know about it because I used to study this stuff. | ||
| So I used to teach and I did a thesis which was about post-structuralism and post-modernism and a lot about Foucault and all the origins of this stuff. | ||
| So I'm familiar with it and I'm familiar with the language and I'm familiar with the ideas. | ||
| And of course, all of my friends have always been on the left. | ||
| So I know what this is all about. | ||
| And it's fun to try to think in the way that they think. | ||
| Because that's how I come up with the jokes. | ||
| What's the most extreme way I could take this obvious thought? | ||
| How can I push it as far as using their mindset, not my mindset? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's kind of a fun thing to do. | ||
| It's kind of interesting. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| It'd be very fun. | ||
| I find people that believe what they believe very strongly to be extremely attractive. | ||
| And attractive, I don't mean like I'm sexually attracted to them. | ||
| I mean attractive like, hmm, like this is weird. | ||
| Like, I watch a lot of fundamentalist religious videos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I really get fascinated by people that are all in. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| I love watching those Westboro Baptist Church music videos. | ||
| They're hilarious. | ||
| They're really funny. | ||
| I watch that and I think, God, you believe this stuff. | ||
| This is crazy to an extreme extent. | ||
| But again, they're sincere. | ||
| They are sincere, but I like it with all religions. | ||
| I've watched it with multiple different religions, with Islam and Christianity and Mormonism. | ||
| I've watched a lot of videos where people really, really, really believe. | ||
| And then the other people really believe too, and there's something attractive about that. | ||
| And I think it's – but I've watched it to try to understand it. | ||
| Because my parents, my stepdad and my mom were basically atheists. | ||
| I was raised by atheists, and before that I was Catholic. | ||
| So I was Catholic until I was first grade, and then from then on, when my mom married my stepdad, there was no religion in the household. | ||
| So I've always been kind of fascinated by people that have this intense belief in something, particularly something that's really not logical. | ||
| Like if you laid the tenets out, like, wait a minute, he came back to life? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And turn water into wine? | ||
| That's the nature of – I mean, I come from a Catholic family as well, you know, and I think my mother was a postulant nun, so it's a very – Whoa! | ||
| Yeah, Irish as well. | ||
| Heavy. | ||
| Pretty heavy, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I recently saw pictures of her in the habit, you know, it's a scary thing to see. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, the belief that you have – The faith that you have is irrational by its own definition, but that's not a threat if you have that genuine... | ||
| Part of the joy of faith, I think, is that you are believing it in spite of rational thought. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| The joy of believing in something that you... | ||
| And I think there's something about that where you like the fact that other people also aren't questioning it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, when you see people at church, one of the things they like... | ||
| I believe this, is that they like the fact that you're not questioning it either. | ||
| Good Lord's going to look after us, Sam. | ||
| Yes, he is, Tom. | ||
| And they like this sort of simple, really in-the-box kind of thinking from you, because if I know that you think like that, I can kind of predict how you're going to at least behave most of the time. | ||
| And don't we all have a – it's much more fun, isn't it, to read Someone who agrees with you than someone who's challenging you. | ||
| Because challenging takes its effort, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's exhausting. | ||
| But I think what you've identified there applies to all ideologies, whether it's political or religious. | ||
| I've noticed this with ideologues, is that when I talk to someone who... | ||
| Say someone says something really woke. | ||
| Say someone says, like, I think the movie Dunkirk should have had more people of color, which was a common criticism at the time. | ||
| Once they've said something that's that woke, I then know every other opinion they have on everything else. | ||
| They never surprise me because they've got a series of things that they believe. | ||
| And that's the same with the religious person. | ||
| Someone says, I'm a Catholic. | ||
| Well, I know what you believe about transubstantiation or whatever, you know. | ||
| And that means that you're not thinking for yourself. | ||
| Yeah, they have this predetermined pattern of behavior. | ||
| Yeah, which is why ideology scares me full stop, which is why I don't mind saying conservatives are right about some things, left-wingers are right about other things, and having the discussion and accepting that I'm probably wrong about an awful lot of stuff as well. | ||
| Like that to me is better than saying I know all the answers as like a Marxist would or a woke person would or a Catholic would or whatever. | ||
| What we need to do is create an ideology of open-mindedness. | ||
| But that wouldn't be an ideology, right? | ||
| Of course it wouldn't be. | ||
| So the anti-woke thing, they'll say, is an ideology in and of itself. | ||
| That's like saying that atheism is a religion. | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| Well, some atheists do act like religious people, though. | ||
| Give me an example of that. | ||
| Well, they absolutely know for sure that nothing happens to you when you die. | ||
| Well, you don't know that. | ||
| But the burden of proof is on those who claim that it does, surely? | ||
| Because they're the ones making the claim. | ||
| Well, sort of, yes. | ||
| If you want to say that you know for sure that you go to heaven and you ride around the clouds and St. Peter's there with a book and there's a harp and God's there, yes, the burden of proof is on you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if you want to say that absolutely nothing happens to you when you die, you're sure. | ||
| I say, okay, have you died? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've never died. | ||
| So how do you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, you've got to say you don't know. | ||
| Because as soon as you say you know something that I know you can't know... | ||
| Then I know you're bullshitting. | ||
| And you might be bullshitting about something that is logical, like atheism, right? | ||
| It's logical that there probably isn't a guy in the clouds with a harp because it doesn't seem to make much sense. | ||
| But you don't know what the fuck happens. | ||
| That is a fair point. | ||
| And Richard Dawkins addressed that point in his book, The God Delusion, because he says he is actually a de facto atheist. | ||
| There's a room for agnosticism there, like 0.001%. | ||
| He will acknowledge the possibility that there might be an afterlife. | ||
| He's also never done psychedelic drugs, and I talked to him about that. | ||
| Has he not? | ||
| No. | ||
| He's worried about it. | ||
| And I'm like, come on, bro, you're dying. | ||
| He's worried about the impact of it. | ||
| Well, he's worried about the effect on his body. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| I'm like, listen, just take a small dose of mushrooms and I guarantee you'll have a very different perspective on reality itself. | ||
| He'll have visions and he might be sort of lured into the religious side. | ||
| Well, I don't think it'll lure you into religion unless you live in thousands of years ago before science, but it would give you the idea that there is perhaps something available, there's levels of consciousness, there's things available to regular human beings that take in these molecules. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that people have been doing this, and this has been the source of religious experiences for thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| There's books written about it. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I mean, I consider myself quite a spiritual person. | ||
| I think that's fine. | ||
| That's such a tainted word, though, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| What's wrong with that? | ||
| Because spiritual is like... | ||
| Like, whenever people say, you know, that they're... | ||
| I'm spiritual. | ||
| Like, that's one of those words that, like, makes me think you're into crystals. | ||
| No, I'm not into crystals. | ||
| No, I don't mean it like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But in America, spiritual is like... | ||
| It's sort of tainted by yoga people. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Yeah, Wiccan and... | ||
| They say namaste. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I don't mean that. | ||
| Nothing wrong with that either. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's people that, they go with that. | ||
| That's their new thing. | ||
| I mean that there's something numinous about humanity and about life and about existence. | ||
| And I mean that there's something wondrous about it and there's something that is beyond the mere animal. | ||
| Oh, agreed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, for sure. | |
| That's all I mean by that. | ||
| Yeah, I think so too. | ||
| And that's why I'm deeply, deeply distrustful of people that are cruel. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons I don't like the woke lot. | ||
| Because I think pretty much everything I do is driven by a hatred of bullying. | ||
| I hate bullying. | ||
| I hated it when I was a kid. | ||
| I hated it when I was one, right? | ||
| You know, no, I didn't hate it when I was one, but I hated it subsequently when I got bullied. | ||
| But you know, that thing of like, bullying people is just the most... | ||
| It's childish. | ||
| It's the way children behave when they're trying to seek dominance over other people. | ||
| And anyone who claims... | ||
| That anyone who bullies someone so viciously and claims to be the good guy, I can't bear that. | ||
| That to me is the most… Yes, I agree. | ||
| And they feel justified in their bullying, which is fascinating. | ||
| Well, it's that thing that Steven Weinberg said about, you know, in order for good people to do bad things, it takes a form of religion. | ||
| And that's, I think, what we see. | ||
| It's all going back to what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| It is. | ||
| These patterns of behavior that we have seen since the beginning of time. | ||
| So that means we've solved it. | ||
| I think we can work out. | ||
| It's about de-radicalizing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's acknowledging that it's an ideology, but then you're faced with the criticism that you're setting up a new ideology to combat that ideology. | ||
| You probably are. | ||
| Unless, yeah, okay. | ||
| Unless you say it's about open-mindedness. | ||
| I think you have to be very strong to exist without a real clear ideology. | ||
| You have to be very strong. | ||
| Well, you have guiding principles. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you have, and there are, I do believe, some universal. | ||
| But to never submit to dogma, to never submit. | ||
| You should, well, guard against it. | ||
| And above all, be willing to listen to people you don't agree with. | ||
| You, I think, can do that. | ||
| The people that would be coerced by the Nazis to join the party because they got into a chat room. | ||
| There's a problem there. | ||
| I had a joke about people explaining something to my daughter when she was asking me why people believe things. | ||
| And I say, some people have big ears, some people have small ears, right? | ||
| Well, some people have brains that are made out of dog shit. | ||
| And that's just how it goes. | ||
| And there's not much you can do about those folks. | ||
| Unless, is that not just a failure of education, you know? | ||
| It's a little bit of a failure of education. | ||
| In some instances, it's definitely that. | ||
| But in some instances, some people are dull. | ||
| They're just not very bright. | ||
| But if we had a society where people were socialized well, you know, because I think being an autonomous adult absolutely depends on being socialized effectively as a child. | ||
| Yeah, but, you know, there's some people... | ||
| Have you ever been to a comedy hypnotism show? | ||
| What? | ||
| I didn't know that existed. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There was a big thing back in Massachusetts. | ||
| When I started doing stand-up in Boston, there was a guy named Frank Santos, and he was a famous hypnotist. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Frank was... | ||
| The best. | ||
| He was a genius at it. | ||
| And he would get people on stage like, who wants to be hypnotized? | ||
| And he did a show that was weekly at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston. | ||
| Comics, like myself, would all go to watch because it was guaranteed hilarious. | ||
| So we would go to the comedy club and we would sit in the back and watch Frank Santos bring, he would bring like 10 people on stage and he would hypnotize them in front of everybody. | ||
| And some people he couldn't hypnotize. | ||
| And I don't mean hypnotized like sit you down, because I've been hypnotized before, where they sit you down. | ||
| Like my friend Vinnie Shorman, who's a hypnotist, who works with fighters, or like a mental coach, and he basically gets you into a calm state and starts introducing ideas to you. | ||
| This is not like that. | ||
| Frank would do this publicly in front of people and he could get a certain percentage of people to just go with suggestion. | ||
| And he'd be like, you right now are having sex with Madonna. | ||
| You're on top of Madonna. | ||
| You can't even believe it. | ||
| Oh my God, you're so happy you're going to cum in your pants! | ||
| And he would do that and the guy would go, ooh! | ||
| They would come in their pants. | ||
| So someone's actually ejaculating? | ||
| Yes, they would ejaculate. | ||
| And they didn't know what happened. | ||
| And then he would go, you're going to go to sleep now. | ||
| And he would tell them, go to sleep. | ||
| And they would just drop their head. | ||
| And he would know when they were bullshitting. | ||
| And he would know when they were not bullshitting. | ||
| And I had long conversations with him about this. | ||
| I'm like, how do you do this? | ||
| And he had been hypnotizing people forever to quit smoking. | ||
| He was a legitimate hypnotist. | ||
| But he's like, some people are just really susceptible. | ||
| Is it partly performative, though, in those situations? | ||
| Is it that some of them are thinking, there's an audience there, I better do what I'm told? | ||
| I would think that, but he knew when they were not under. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dude, it was crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it's not you, and it's not him, and it's not me. | ||
| There's certain people, the people that would join the cult. | ||
| There's certain people. | ||
| So you're talking about people who are instinctively suggestible, right? | ||
| The, like, the Hale-Bopp comic cult, remember that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| The Heaven's Gate cult? | ||
| They cut their balls off and wore purple Nikes and they waited for the, and then they all killed themselves when the comet was coming. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| Actually, this does ring a bell, yeah. | ||
| Who the fuck would do that? | ||
| Who would do that? | ||
| People with really dull minds. | ||
| There's certain people. | ||
| Look, some people are tall, some people are short, some people's brains don't work well. | ||
| All right, but I think this is something where we don't agree, is it? | ||
| Because I think ultimately what you do, even if you do identify that, even if you say in society there are these people who are suggestible and just stupid, let's call it what it is, stupid people. | ||
| Yes, dull-minded, low IQ. They still have every right to live in our society and be treated well and all the rest of it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And I don't think we should just change all our laws and traditions and the way we do things because some people are going to react like idiots and some people are going to... | ||
| No, I'm with you 100%. | ||
| I'm not saying that we should. | ||
| I'm just saying it's always going to be a problem. | ||
| That's a really good way of approaching it, is to acknowledge that it's always going to be a problem. | ||
| Because this is often the argument used for censorship, isn't it? | ||
| If you put out a film that is particularly violent, of course most people aren't going to react to it, but some will. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, fine. | ||
| Some will. | ||
| But those same people could be triggered by absolutely anything. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It could be an angry word that a relative said. | ||
| It could be a news item that they saw. | ||
| We still have to live in the world as it exists and not try and absolutely coddle everyone and try and prevent any possibility of transgression. | ||
| I 100% agree with you, and I'm on your side. | ||
| But I'm saying even if you do your best, there's going to be a certain amount of people that are just not going – the education is not going to sink in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The evaluation of things on an objective level is never going to work. | ||
| That's because you're dealing with human beings and that's why when the social justice movement think that they can attain this utopia, they think they can wipe out prejudice. | ||
| I think that what you can do is you can try and limit it as much as possible and confront it where it exists. | ||
| But it is delusional to think that you're going to get rid of malevolence and human fallibility. | ||
| And oftentimes they suffer from their own prejudice. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Did you see the thing with Don Lemon on CNN with those two guys where they started mocking Trump supporters and pretending they're stupid and using a Southern accent? | ||
| And I'm like, you guys, you're being prejudiced. | ||
| That's going to be a deplorable moment. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And you're pretending it's funny, which is even more offensive as a comedian. | ||
| You know that shit ain't funny. | ||
| And Don Lemon's like... | ||
| And then afterwards, even worse, he says he didn't realize that people were being mocked, and he didn't hear all of it. | ||
| Yeah, he said he was laughing over them speaking or something, so he didn't hear the whole thing. | ||
| He didn't realize that they were saying things that were offensive. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I would never mock anyone. | ||
| Well, because some forms of prejudice are okay and some aren't okay, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The one I really love about the social justice law, maybe this is just a British thing, but they're all really ageist. | ||
| They've got a real problem with old people, right? | ||
| Old white people. | ||
| Old white people, right? | ||
| Well, there's that form of prejudice. | ||
| I think it's because of Brexit because it's disproportionately older people voted for Brexit. | ||
| So they're like, oh, I don't care about old people. | ||
| In fact, you even have like the left-leaning papers, like the Guardian and the Independent sort of talking like, well, they're all going to die off soon and then we can have another vote. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's not how it works. | ||
| It's not like old people die off and then there are no more old people. | ||
| Like, people get older, people change their minds. | ||
| But it was also really toxic. | ||
| It was this thing of like, you know, they've fucked up the future for the young and they're all, you know, it was really ugly. | ||
| And for some reason, these people who claim that immutable characteristics must be protected, doesn't matter if you're old. | ||
| They'll go for you if you're old. | ||
| Or, like you say, straight white male. | ||
| Straight white males will fuck themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't know how you can see that as anything is hypocritical. | ||
| To make that point. | ||
| You're logical and you're intelligent and you're objective. | ||
| Of course you can't, but they're woke. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, they might as well be in that Heaven's Gate cult. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Well, I think... | ||
| I wonder if a lot of it is coming from the media, is coming from the press, is coming from the... | ||
| We've got... | ||
| I don't know what it's like. | ||
| I mean, we saw that article from the New York Times. | ||
| We've got stuff like that. | ||
| We've got this paper, The Guardian and The Independent. | ||
| They are pushing this stuff. | ||
| Hardcore itself. | ||
| Every single day. | ||
| And there's a lot of hate clicks, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, so if... | ||
| Actually, shall I give you this example? | ||
| Do you know that I trolled The Independent, the newspaper? | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I wanted to test as an experiment, right, whether they would publish something really stupidly woke just because it's woke, right? | ||
| So I submitted an article... | ||
| Like James Lindsay and... | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Like, on a smaller scale, you know. | ||
| But I thought... | ||
| I wrote an article arguing that comedians ought to be prosecuted for hate speech, right? | ||
| Mentioning a few comics. | ||
| And it was so obviously a hoax and so obviously stupid. | ||
| And I made up a name and I sent it in. | ||
| And they got back to me like, this is brilliant. | ||
| We love this. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| They were really loving it. | ||
| And they published it. | ||
| It's still online. | ||
| And what's even worse... | ||
| How can we find it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's called... | ||
| The name is Liam... | ||
| If you search Liam Evans... | ||
| Is that your name? | ||
| Liam Evans Independent and the headline is something to do with comedy. | ||
| If you search that, it'll come up. | ||
| Hate speech. | ||
| How many of these online fake names do you have? | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| As a comedy aficionado, I'm appalled at discussing jokes creeping back into the industry. | ||
| And look at them underneath. | ||
| Look at the tagline. | ||
| Comedians crying free speech isn't good enough. | ||
| Hate crime laws should apply to all of us. | ||
| Now, the thing about this article, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence, it spells out, Titania McGrath wrote this, you gullible hacks. | ||
| And they published it. | ||
| And it's still up there. | ||
| And this is a mainstream... | ||
| Oh my god, that's hilarious. | ||
| It's a mainstream newspaper. | ||
| It's one of our major... | ||
| It's amazing that you were able to encode that. | ||
| Well, it also shows that they did fuck all editing. | ||
| They just took it because they loved what it was saying. | ||
| And of course, the point isn't to try and fool people or be mean to people or anything. | ||
| It's exposing this thing that the woke media, if it furthers their agenda, they'll publish anything by someone who wasn't even known. | ||
| He had no online presence, this guy. | ||
| It's just they agreed with the sentiment. | ||
| So they published it in their paper. | ||
| You could just be a random person sends it in and they're like, brilliant. | ||
| Yeah, they just agree. | ||
| And they put it in a national paper. | ||
| That was the independent. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| I can't believe they haven't taken it down yet. | ||
| They will now. | ||
| Well, I only sort of revealed it a couple of months ago in this speech I gave. | ||
| It was the one where I was with Peter and James Lindsay. | ||
| And it went online, but I suppose not many people know about it. | ||
| But yeah, they'll probably take it down now. | ||
| Yeah, now. | ||
| But you know, fuck them. | ||
| Because I actually think... | ||
| Raise your standards, you know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Stop feeding us this ideological bullshit. | ||
| I think there's an issue too with... | ||
| Online journalism that these people are basically fighting for their own survival. | ||
| There's not a lot of money in it. | ||
| It's hard to get clicks. | ||
| You have to have clickbait titles. | ||
| You have to attack people for things. | ||
| In order to get real engagement, you have to give in to a certain amount of madness. | ||
| Isn't that depressing? | ||
| That's the same reason why the most extreme ideas on Twitter get more retweets. | ||
| They get rewarded, don't they? | ||
| With likes and retweets and everything. | ||
| It's like the whole, but that shouldn't, I have a real old fashioned view of the media. | ||
| I want to hold them to high standards. | ||
| And I don't want them to be going for clickbait and saying the most extreme things. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| And I think they do it for that reason. | ||
| But I just wish they wouldn't. | ||
| I mean, save that for some, like the Huffington Post doing stuff like women are evil. | ||
| That was one headline, women are evil. | ||
| You know, stuff like BuzzFeed does it as well. | ||
| But when it comes to sort of reputable publications like the New York Times and like the Washington Post, why are they pushing this? | ||
| I think they're struggling. | ||
| So you think it's just about money? | ||
| I think that's a viable way to generate clicks. | ||
| And clicks is what generates income. | ||
| And I think there's a real issue. | ||
| I know guys who are journalists, and women as well, who will tell you that if their articles do not get a certain amount of engagement, They're in trouble. | ||
| They can't just print things. | ||
| Everything has to be something that is engaging. | ||
| It has to be attractive. | ||
| Look what Facebook's algorithm does, right? | ||
| One of the things that Facebook's algorithm does is it sort of, in some way, encourages people to be upset about things because it shows you a lot of things that you engage with and a lot of times people tend to engage with things that they're upset by. | ||
| So whether it's abortion or Second Amendment or whatever the subject is, if you have an engagement with that and you respond a lot, that's what they're going to show you over and over and over again. | ||
| And it's really more of a symptom of what human beings are attracted to. | ||
| A lot of times we're attracted to things that upset us. | ||
| But that's going to spiral further and further out of control. | ||
| What are you, logical? | ||
| The culture war is being motored, is engineered by all of this stuff out there. | ||
| That's the argument against Facebook, right? | ||
| The culture war is being engineered by algorithms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And although I'm really torn on this, actually, because I'm so against censorship in all this, you know, I really am. | ||
| Of course, me too. | ||
| But I want, if journalists and commentators had high standards and were just being honest, first and foremost, and they had integrity and they weren't just after clicks, then half of this stuff would go away, I feel. | ||
| Some of it would go away. | ||
| My question is, they weren't doing this 15 years ago. | ||
| No. | ||
| So what will they be doing 15 years from now? | ||
| Will this wear out? | ||
| Will this dry up? | ||
| So that's the question, isn't it? | ||
| Are we going to reach a tipping point? | ||
| Right, that's the question. | ||
| Right, because every time I think we're nearly at the tipping point, they double down and it gets worse, right? | ||
| So, you know, after Trump's election, for instance, right, almost immediately you had the Women's March. | ||
| And I didn't really know what that was about. | ||
| Some people were marching for feminism. | ||
| Some people were marching for environmental issues. | ||
| It was really incoherent. | ||
| A lot of them were dressed in the pink pussy hats and giant vagina costumes and stuff like that. | ||
| What are you protesting here? | ||
| And a lot of them had banners saying, not my president. | ||
| So they're protesting against democracy then in that case. | ||
| Same thing in the UK when we just had our general election, there was a big march with loads of people with Banner saying, not my Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, not my... | ||
| Well, he is your Prime Minister because we had a democratic mandate and that's how this works, right? | ||
| So I think, what are you... | ||
| But seriously, what is the point of that protest? | ||
| I think they're just showing unity. | ||
| They're showing that they're all together in their anger about this and that in the future they're going to be a combined force and they're going to make sure that this doesn't happen again. | ||
| I think there's a better way to do it without generating so much resentment. | ||
| I think there's a more sophisticated approach, which is to say that democracy is sustained on the principle of the loser's consent. | ||
| Any democracy is going to have a substantial proportion of the population who did not vote for the leader of that. | ||
| And you have to have that. | ||
| And the best way is through cogent persuasion and sensible discussion of the issues, not dressing up as a vagina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's just my view on that. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree with you in many ways, but I also think for them it's also fun to get together with a bunch of other like-minded people. | ||
| And then there's the men who joined in. | ||
| Hey, girls, I'm with you. | ||
| Okay, the fun thing I can get on board with, but the marches after Boris Johnson's election weren't about fun. | ||
| That was an explosion of rage. | ||
| I didn't see that, but it is weird to me that he looks like Trump. | ||
| He looks like your version of Trump. | ||
| I think he's not the same. | ||
| He's not the same, but he's got wacky hair. | ||
| And he's got that reputation of saying what he thinks and all the rest of it. | ||
| So there's similarities, but I don't think they're comparable. | ||
| Boris, I don't support Boris, but he's very smart. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Yeah, he's a smart guy. | ||
| You know, I've never voted for his party. | ||
| We're ignorant to your country over here. | ||
| What was his platform? | ||
| Well, so he's in the Conservative Party. | ||
| We only pay attention to the Queen and the King. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The Prince. | ||
| Whatever Prince is in trouble because he was banging chicks on Fuck Island. | ||
| Oh, Prince Andrew. | ||
| And then there was The other prince who's leaving. | ||
| We pay attention to that shit. | ||
| You're more interested in the family that they have no power at all in our country. | ||
| We're a ridiculous nation. | ||
| You stole Harry from us, didn't you? | ||
| Yes, we got him now. | ||
| You got him back. | ||
| And you turned him woke. | ||
| You turned him really woke and then you stole him. | ||
| Is he woke? | ||
| Oh my god, Prince Harry. | ||
| Yeah, so Meghan Markle is completely... | ||
| She turned him into a wokester? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And bear in mind, he used to be the one who used to go to parties and do drugs. | ||
| I don't know if he did drugs, actually. | ||
| I should qualify that. | ||
| She made him woke. | ||
| Yeah, he's super woke now. | ||
| Well, he's going to move to Canada. | ||
| It's a good place to be woke. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| But they're also saying that he can't move to Canada because if you're a royal from England, you're not supposed to have a primary residence in Canada. | ||
| Is that because it's part of the Commonwealth or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The idea is like you can't come in there and take over because if you did... | ||
| Yeah, but he's lost his title now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| So all of that stuff. | ||
| But why... | ||
| That says a lot, doesn't it? | ||
| She was pissed off. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And she just said, no, you can't have your title. | ||
| You've got to pay for your cottage, all that money you took from the taxpayers. | ||
| You've got to pay for that. | ||
| It's not a cottage, by the way. | ||
| It's a big estate, but they call it Frogmore Cottage. | ||
| But it's funny to me that you guys over here are more interested in some sort of outmoded, archaic institution like the royal family. | ||
| So there isn't really an awareness of our political situation. | ||
| We know Brexit bad. | ||
| Brexit bad. | ||
| But Brexit is not bad. | ||
| That's all we hear. | ||
| Brexit bad. | ||
| Racist. | ||
| Brexit bad. | ||
| Can I say this? | ||
| Because I know Brexit probably bores people, but the problem with the whole Brexit thing is people thought it was about race. | ||
| People thought it was like you voted for the EU if you were a good person and voted against if you were a bad person. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It wasn't that. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| We've been lied to? | ||
| You've been lied to. | ||
| Most people voted because they wanted the idea. | ||
| In fact, the poll straight after the vote said that the number one reason why people voted Brexit is they wanted the laws to govern their country to be made within their country, which strikes me as a very reasonable proposition. | ||
| If you're a Democrat, you want to be able to vote out the people in power. | ||
| You can't vote out those bureaucrats in Brussels. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| That's the principle. | ||
| It's not because we want to go back to some pre-war, nostalgic, all-white country. | ||
| This is a complete lie, and it's just experientially unsound. | ||
| I mean, I don't meet anyone like that, you know? | ||
| But that's the way it's been spun. | ||
| And also, by the way, if you're left-wing and you're supporting the EU, which is this neoliberal trading bloc that is really pro-corporate, ruthlessly so, then I don't know how you can even call yourself left-wing, to be honest. | ||
| So what is the anger in the streets in England? | ||
| It's because of the... | ||
| Well, this goes back to what we were saying about the press. | ||
| So we had six months of debate on the Brexit issue before people voted. | ||
| So people really knew what they were voting for. | ||
| They knew what these issues were about. | ||
| But the media was constantly spinning and saying, if you vote leave, you're a racist. | ||
| And if you vote to remain in the EU, you're one of the good guys. | ||
| That was the narrative they were spinning from the start. | ||
| And people would – and you know what it did? | ||
| It did that thing of generating resentment. | ||
| Did anybody step out that – That's logical and objective to say, hey, you can look at this in a different way. | ||
| But those voices got drowned out by the utter swill that was being spilt out all the time, right? | ||
| And I'm not denying that there are some racists in the UK and that some of them might have voted Leave. | ||
| There were probably some racists who voted Remain, whatever. | ||
| But there's such a minority. | ||
| And when you've got a media class... | ||
| Constantly saying to you, all you poor working class people, you're scum, you're racist, you hate, you know, whatever. | ||
| Then they're going to go in that voting booth and they're going to say fuck you. | ||
| And they're going to vote out. | ||
| And that's what happened. | ||
| And it was a big backlash against being patronized. | ||
| People hated it. | ||
| You know, and it's that, you know, I hate that narrative that we live in a racist country and that Brexit is used as evidence. | ||
| But I see it as comparable. | ||
| I think it's very different to the Trump election. | ||
| But I see the one thing that I think is comparable is that the premise, right, if you've got all these sort of woke activists who say that they believe that we live in this fascist country, and that they believe a fascist would vote for Trump, and then when Trump wins, they use that as evidence for the premise that they set up. | ||
| And that's why they double down. | ||
| Because they're saying, well, he won, so therefore we were right all along. | ||
| We're a country full of fascists. | ||
| And it's like, yeah, but your premise wasn't right. | ||
| And that's how we need to break that sort of cycle of doubling down on the same bullshit and guaranteeing Trump another term by doing so, by the way. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| It really depends on how many people get behind Bernie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And whether or not Bernie actually gets through. | ||
| The DNC does not want Bernie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, they didn't last time, did they? | ||
| No, they don't like him. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| I don't know what it is because I'm not that well-versed. | ||
| Is it because he's a socialist? | ||
| I think they have zero control over him. | ||
| I think that's part of the issue as well. | ||
| Well, you know, in the UK, the comparable figure is Jeremy Corbyn. | ||
| He's full-on socialist left-wing. | ||
| But he, by the way, hates the EU. That's the other complicated thing. | ||
| I think it's also corporate money. | ||
| He won't take anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's a socialist principle. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think the resistance is the rest of them want that money. | ||
| Is the word socialist over here just a proper dirty word? | ||
| Because you've had this history of... | ||
| I remember all that stuff about the fear of socialized medicine. | ||
| You always hear that sort of thing. | ||
| We've got an NHS that works pretty well. | ||
| We've got a National Health Service that works... | ||
| And you also have independent doctors too, right? | ||
| So if you have a lot of money, you could get a good doctor to fix your knee? | ||
| Yeah, you can go private. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If you're poor, though, the difference is... | ||
| You can get treated. | ||
| You can get treated. | ||
| If you're poor here and you haven't got health insurance, don't you just die? | ||
| No, I mean, there's Medicaid. | ||
| Is that my prejudice? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there are some systems that are in place, but they're not good. | ||
| They're not ideal. | ||
| And a lot of people get saddled down with horrible medical debt if they do get injured. | ||
| Well, I think that I've got an American friend who had a very serious illness in England, and the NHS were brilliant. | ||
| And it was like, these people, you know, this is amazing. | ||
| You know, I didn't have to pay for anything. | ||
| You know, I think there's something really beautiful about that. | ||
| I love our NHS. And I know people criticize it and say, obviously, there's going to be mistakes with such a big institution like that. | ||
| And there's going to be bureaucrats and all the rest of it. | ||
| But it's a really wonderful thing that anyone... | ||
| We're conditioned to think that anything that involves anything socialist or anything free, anything that's paid for by the government, where someone can't make the ultimate amount of profit, it de-incentivizes them from being very good. | ||
| When we think about a doctor, we want a doctor that is pushing really hard to be the best doctor so he can get a Ferrari and a big house, because that guy's going to kick ass. | ||
| That's the American mindset. | ||
| That's the capitalist mindset, isn't it? | ||
| Particularly the American mindset, because it's not just capitalism, it's exceptionalism, and it's like wanting to be number one. | ||
| I want, hey, who'd you get to do your knee? | ||
| Oh, Dr. Gettleman, he's the fucking best. | ||
| He does the Lakers, that guy does the Patriots, he's the fucking man, he fixes knees. | ||
| I go to him, you know, and so everybody wants to go, and you recommend him. | ||
| Do you know a good shoulder doctor? | ||
| Oh yeah, Dr. Goldberg, he's the man. | ||
| He does the fucking boxers. | ||
| He did Floyd Mayweather. | ||
| Like that kind of shit. | ||
| It's alien to me. | ||
| Like, you know, a shoulder doctor, you know, you just go to the NHS and they give you the doctor. | ||
| I think I'm not against the idea of incentives and people like striving to make their lives better and everything like that. | ||
| I think that's absolutely fine. | ||
| But like if Anthony Joshua, say if Anthony Joshua needs shoulder surgery, you know he's not going to NHS. If you're rich, you'll go to private. | ||
| For a good reason, right? | ||
| Because he's probably a better doctor. | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I'll tell you why. | ||
| A shoulder specialist? | ||
| Yeah, I'll tell you. | ||
| Anthony Joshua, his shoulders are everything, right? | ||
| He's a puncher. | ||
| That's his whole thing. | ||
| It's all punches. | ||
| If he blows his shoulders out, he's fucked. | ||
| It isn't the case that the NHS has substandard doctors. | ||
| It isn't the case. | ||
| And the reason for that is it's a vocational thing. | ||
| So most doctors feel an obligation, a moral obligation, to work for the NHS. And they do so for many years. | ||
| Doctors are great people. | ||
| If you go into that profession, it's because you want to help people, isn't it? | ||
| Not because you want the Ferrari. | ||
| In America, it's because you want the Ferrari. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| No, a lot of them want to help people. | ||
| Well, they're brilliant people. | ||
| It's a very difficult thing to achieve, like to be a doctor, a physician, in fact. | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| It's a lot of work, and you deserve to be paid well. | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| But I also think it comes from a moral place. | ||
| It comes from a place of good. | ||
| Ideally, yes. | ||
| Ideally, you definitely would think that, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think our NHS proves that – I mean, doctors are reasonable – they're not poor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They can have nice things. | ||
| You know, it's not – I imagine – I mean, I'm speaking out of ignorance here. | ||
| I don't know how the NHS is portrayed over here, how our health service is portrayed over here. | ||
| Do you see it as this scary communist thing where... | ||
| Oh yeah, they leave fucking forceps in people's abdomens and shit and forget to stitch people up. | ||
| Well, I'm sure that happens. | ||
| We're all human, right? | ||
| We all make mistakes, but... | ||
| Look, I have friends that have experienced socialized medicine in Canada in particular and had some really bad results. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that is one of the things that people... | ||
| Can't you experience bad results in a private system as well? | ||
| When you got to go to the doctor, pay for things if you get ill or if you get injured. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're so stupid. | ||
| Why do you have to pay for that? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a great video where a man in the UK is walking around asking people in England, what do you think it costs to do this in America? | ||
| What do you think it costs to give birth? | ||
| I bet we have no idea, right? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot. | ||
| People are like, oh, $100, like $10,000. | ||
| 10,000?! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, people go crazy. | ||
| But also, don't you think, like, if there's a cash incentive for doctors and medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, there's something really dangerous about that. | ||
| And that's why you've got people who, you know, whenever an insurance claim comes in, you've got these lawyers who are hired to try and undermine the claim and to find some pre-existing condition from years ago and leave you to die. | ||
| Because the incentive is all about money, not about humanity. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| The real scary accusations are unnecessary surgeries. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I have been suggested to have unnecessary surgery personally. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| I have avoided it and become very healthy without the surgery. | ||
| You see? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's because people want to make more money out of you. | ||
| I think it's also because if they have a hammer, they want to hit a nail. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, this is what I do. | ||
| You need a surgery on your neck. | ||
| On a small level, I experienced that when I went to a private dentist to say, what do I need done? | ||
| And he told me basically that my whole mouth was rotten and was dying. | ||
| It wasn't true. | ||
| I went to an NHS dentist and said, no, you just got a couple of issues there. | ||
| We'll sort it out. | ||
| It'll be 20 quid or something. | ||
| That's a real problem in America as well. | ||
| But this other dentist obviously wanted to make as much money out of me as possible. | ||
| It's so dark. | ||
| It's so dark that someone would be willing to do that. | ||
| Some guy got arrested recently because he was pulling teeth that he didn't have to pull. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| Yeah, it's so fucked up. | ||
| It's so fucked up that someone would do that. | ||
| So that's the downside of the cash incentive. | ||
| For bad people. | ||
| But again, that falls in the face of your narrative that people that get into medicine are good people. | ||
| They're not always good people. | ||
| They're not always good people. | ||
| Okay, I'm willing to concede that point. | ||
| And then maybe they are good people if they do it in a national healthcare system, but they're not... | ||
| If they are compromised and it becomes an issue of making money, then they might compromise. | ||
| So I think I've worked out a common thread in our discussion, which is that I tend to think that most people are generally good, and I don't think you do. | ||
| Am I right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's great when people are good. | |
| I think it's great when people are good. | ||
| But you see that as an aberration from the norm, right? | ||
| I don't think it's an aberration, but I take into consideration the fact that some people suck. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm willing to do that as well. | ||
| But I think humanity on the whole is underrated. | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| There's no way we'd be able to live. | ||
| Think about how often you go to the movie theater or a restaurant or a bar and you're surrounded by people and no one does anything bad. | ||
| Look, I live in the public eye, right? | ||
| And I do everything. | ||
| I do so many things in front of large groups of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Most people are great. | ||
| Most people are great. | ||
| I do comedy and I'm always in front of live groups of people. | ||
| 99.99999% of people are awesome. | ||
| You know, even hecklers. | ||
| They're good people. | ||
| They just get a little drunk. | ||
| Are they? | ||
| They're not in the UK. They're annoying. | ||
| They're annoying here too, but they're just drunk. | ||
| Because you can't live any other way, can you? | ||
| You can't live any other way but to trust humanity and to trust other people and to trust that people are essentially good and that's why I think ultimately these things will be subverted and end, you know, like the woke movement. | ||
| I think we have a problem in America as well with education being so fucking insanely expensive and Insurance for doctors being so insanely expensive that you get these doctors in this position where they're really over the barrel. | ||
| They have so much debt. | ||
| And so they are incentivized to try to do these unnecessary surgeries. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's a very good point, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I know absolutely nothing about your education system. | ||
| I should just put that out there. | ||
| So expensive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's not that expensive in England, right? | ||
| I think not comparable, really. | ||
| How much would it cost to do a degree here, say, for instance, if you want to be a lawyer or something? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I'm sure we can Google that. | ||
| Let's say from the first year of your university study to passing the bar, what kind of debt, Jamie, are most lawyers in? | ||
| Just college, right? | ||
| Yeah, just law school, college, law school. | ||
| Does it matter where? | ||
| Oh, does it change depending on the universe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| So Ivy League, say. | ||
| Okay, let's go with Harvard. | ||
| Let's go with the big boys. | ||
| So if you're in Ivy League, it helps you to get a job, presumably. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He graduated from Harvard. | ||
| He's the cream of the crop, my boy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, you're fucked though. | ||
| You're half a million in the hole before you even get going. | ||
| In the UK, it's standardized. | ||
| 65k a year. | ||
| That's a hell of a lot. | ||
| $65,000. | ||
| So, more than most people make a year, you have to spend on your education while you're not making any money. | ||
| So, 65k a year, just think that's stacking up. | ||
| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I suppose what they're saying is that's an investment for the future because if you do this, you'll get the great job. | ||
| Maybe, but you're almost $400,000 in the hole. | ||
| By the time you graduate in, you're not making any money. | ||
| It's nowhere near like that in the UK. It's horrible. | ||
| And we have a really good student loan system where the interest is minimal and you don't have to pay it back until you're earning a certain amount and all that. | ||
| When I went to university, I was the last year to get a full grant. | ||
| I didn't pay for anything. | ||
| The government paid for absolutely everything. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Because it was also means tested back then because my family weren't well off. | ||
| Everything got paid for. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I mean, that's ideal. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| I mean, and for sure, some people get scholarships in America as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I would just like it if people didn't have to start their life Once they're out of education, already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. | ||
| It's just such a burden. | ||
| But also, what do you do if you are from a poorer background? | ||
| How can you possibly... | ||
| You can get scholarships. | ||
| You can get scholarships. | ||
| You definitely can. | ||
| But you have to have very good grades. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, you know, I think with a lot of people that they get out of school... | ||
| First of all, a lot of people sign up for this debt when they're 17, 18 years old. | ||
| They don't even know what the fuck they're doing. | ||
| And they're going, come on, we got a loan for you. | ||
| Get in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go. | |
| Go to work! | ||
| Who the hell knows what they want to do at 17 or 18? | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| And if you don't, you get shamed. | ||
| You feel terrible for not going straight to school. | ||
| I heard this recently at Harvard specifically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sorry, I popped it up on there. | ||
| 20% of Harvard families pay nothing for their students to attend. | ||
| Well, those are probably just 20% kick-ass fucking super good students who get great. | ||
| It's like a bar of 65K for your family income you get in. | ||
| I think it's like a scholarship for long-term families or something. | ||
| But you have to have, obviously, stellar grades, right? | ||
| You have to be accepted, obviously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Obviously. | |
| Just to get into Harvard in the first place. | ||
| But do you think it's an effective meritocracy then, the U.S.? There's aspects of it that are effective, but it's definitely not perfect. | ||
| And the student loan issue is a gigantic one. | ||
| I feel like if we spend so much of our tax money on so many different things that people disagree with, how much would it cost to have... | ||
| I mean, I'm not talking about for people who don't try. | ||
| I mean, you should definitely have... | ||
| There should definitely be requirements for you to get a free education. | ||
| But it should be definitely... | ||
| Much easier than it is now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And how is your... | ||
| What you call in our country the public school? | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| Like as in if you've got nothing and you go to the local comprehensive school? | ||
| Well, the real issue is high schools. | ||
| High schools, okay. | ||
| High schools and grade schools. | ||
| Like if you're poor... | ||
| God damn it, there's some rough schools in this country, and they don't get paid much, and the teachers don't give a shit. | ||
| And there's some good ones, you know, there's definitely some good ones, and there's definitely some people, even in some bad neighborhoods, that get some good educations, but that's few and far between. | ||
| And this is the point, is that if you are from one of those backgrounds, the odds are stacked against you. | ||
| Yes, they are. | ||
| So it's all very well sort of saying that anyone can succeed if they work hard, but... | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| Yeah, no, not really. | ||
| You definitely don't get as good in advance. | ||
| I mean, if you look at when they show how well kids do in private school versus public school, pretty staggering differences. | ||
| And I see the argument both ways that the people that are in the private school, they're there because their parents care more and they pay more attention so the kids study harder. | ||
| But if those same kids are in public school and they studied just as hard, they would get by. | ||
| But yeah, they'd be dealing with crime and violence and all kinds of the shit that the kids in the private schools aren't dealing with. | ||
| And much more stress. | ||
| And more like even more stress at home. | ||
| It's a lot of issues going on. | ||
| I find it astonishing that people won't acknowledge that some people are more advantaged in certain ways. | ||
| This is why I think when it comes to social advantageous or the way in which people are prioritized or privileged over other people, it's mostly about money. | ||
| Ultimately, when we talk about privilege all the time, we hear things about white privilege and heterosexual privilege and stuff like that. | ||
| Actually, ultimately, it's about cash. | ||
| It's about who's the richest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's for sure. | |
| That's a big part of it, for sure. | ||
| And I think that stuff is obscured by all the other stuff. | ||
| Well, anybody who thinks white privilege is universal needs to go to Kentucky and see the coal miners. | ||
| Because there's some families that live in these insane rural communities in West Virginia. | ||
| They're so poor. | ||
| They're so fucked. | ||
| And everyone around them is on pills, and no one has any money, and there's just crime and just poverty that you can't... | ||
| I mean, I have a friend who's from there. | ||
| He's like, man, you've never seen poverty like this. | ||
| So couldn't they just come up with a different phrase than white privilege? | ||
| Because I get the point they're trying to make, which is that if you have two people from exactly the same backgrounds, the person of color is going to face more prejudice. | ||
| I get that point, and that's right. | ||
| But the problem is not white privilege. | ||
| The problem is prejudice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| The prejudice don't combat why people don't experience the prejudice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for the white people that do have this advantage that they don't experience prejudice, the only reason why that exists is because of racism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The actual problem is racism. | ||
| The problem is racism, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, it's not white privilege. | ||
| No, and just rhetorically, it's a really bad thing to – because people just hear the word privilege and they think, I'm not privileged. | ||
| Why are they – why – Especially poor white people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's an activist in the UK called Munro Bergdorf, and the phrase she used was, you can still be homeless and have white privilege. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good lord. | |
| And I just think, how is that a helpful thing to say? | ||
| Like, even if you could break it down philosophically and sort of prove your point, and just think in terms of how you come across when you say that. | ||
| You know, that's not... | ||
| Woke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just the religion. | ||
| They're a part of the religion. | ||
| And we really should start referring to it as a religion. | ||
| We should, but then there will be some pushback on that. | ||
| Church of Woke. | ||
| Church of Woke. | ||
| Hey, they get tax-free status. | ||
| Just show up at the Woke Cathedral and give all your money to transgender people or whatever. | ||
| They've got their high priests, haven't they? | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| They've got their saints. | ||
| They've canonized certain people. | ||
| They've got all of the hallmarks. | ||
| But I just think... | ||
| I have described it in those terms and I have done today, but is that really an effective way to challenge it? | ||
| Isn't that just going to get people's backs up? | ||
| Everything you say about it will get people's backs up, but I think at least it'll make people understand that there are some fundamental patterns in human behavior that have existed from the beginning of time. | ||
| People like structure and they like knowing where the rules are because life in itself is too open-ended. | ||
| There's too much existential angst, there's too many confusing questions that can't be answered. | ||
| There's so much going on in life itself that if you have a very rigid ideology, whether it is about a holy creator or whether it's about the fundamental aspects of society that are That are unfair and need to be rallied against, whether it's woke ideology or whether it's, you know, fill in the blank, whatever other ideology. | ||
| I just wish I could talk to them more, but they refuse to talk to me. | ||
| Well, they don't want to be... | ||
| I mean, you could talk to some the same way that Megan Phelps talked to her husband online. | ||
| You could talk to the ones that are thinking, maybe this is bullshit. | ||
| And some of them do think it's bullshit. | ||
| And I know some of them that have broken free. | ||
| I know some former woke people that have woken up. | ||
| But I also get a lot of messages from people saying, I really like the jokes you're telling, but I will never retweet them. | ||
| That too, yeah. | ||
| They can't say it, but they also want to keep their job. | ||
| You know, they don't want anybody harassing them. | ||
| There's a lot of that, right? | ||
| There's a lot of people that just want to keep their job. | ||
| Well, maybe then, when I was talking about the tipping point and when does it end, maybe it's when more people are willing to be honest about their skepticism about the whole thing. | ||
| I think that's good. | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| I think even though people are being very rabid, I think more people are going, what in the fuck is he happy? | ||
| They are. | ||
| And it's the language policing that gets so annoying. | ||
| Words are not the problem, folks. | ||
| It's actual prejudice. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, whatever it is, whatever it is, we've got this... | ||
| Telling other people what to do. | ||
| We've got this issue with wanting people to comply with the standards of behavior that we are adhering to. | ||
| Well, that's what terrifies me about it is the sheer certainty of it. | ||
| When you get into a conversation in the rare occasions where someone from the woke movement will talk to me, it's like it's never crossed their mind that they could be wrong. | ||
| That it's just not in their realm of existence that they would even possibly think for a second, maybe I've got this a bit wrong. | ||
| And that to me is a horrible, I don't know how you challenge that even, you know? | ||
| But you can't, just like you can't challenge someone who's a believer in the Westboro Baptist Church, but really does want to walk around with those God-hates-fags bumper stickers. | ||
| But they find their way out, don't they, eventually? | ||
| Some of them do, but not many. | ||
| Megan can't even talk to her mom. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, her mom won't talk to her anymore. | ||
| They even turned on the leader, didn't they? | ||
| Turned on Fred Phelps. | ||
| He died. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Did they turn on him after he died? | ||
| Said he was a sinner as well. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| That's probably why they think he died. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| You're fucking nuts, man. | ||
| If he was truly pure, he would have... | ||
| Yeah, God would have kept him alive. | ||
| He was probably thinking about homos. | ||
| You know, who knows, man? | ||
| Right, okay, okay. | ||
| At least they're consistent. | ||
| I mean, they are. | ||
| Hateful. | ||
| Hatefully consistent. | ||
| They are hatefully consistent, you know, but they don't twist – they are literally interpreting the Bible as it's – like, in a really scary way. | ||
| Yeah, a very scary way. | ||
| And the fact that it justifies some pretty horrific actions. | ||
| I mean, can you imagine if your soldier – If your son was a soldier, and your son got shot down, and you're at the funeral, and these guys are standing in front of the building where you're having a service, and they're saying the reason why your son died is because there's a bunch of people out there that are in love with other men, and they're having sex with men, and so this is the reason why, and they're going to hold up these giant placards. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| That's one of the examples that really gets me, that challenges me insofar as my free speech goes. | ||
| It's so appalling and upsetting when you see that sort of thing. | ||
| But then, I can't say that I want to live in a society where people aren't allowed to protest, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's messy. | |
| It's like everything else in human nature. | ||
| It's messy. | ||
| And those woke people need to understand that it's messy, too. | ||
| Life is messy. | ||
| You can't get 100% compliance from people. | ||
| And if you want that, you're a bully. | ||
| You know, you're being mean. | ||
| They're not going to do it. | ||
| And you're not right. | ||
| You're not right. | ||
| Especially, you're definitely not right if you're not willing to debate people on these ideas. | ||
| You don't even know if you're right. | ||
| That's what Obama was saying, wasn't it, when he said that, you know, people aren't perfect. | ||
| Don't expect everyone to be perfect. | ||
| Yes, it was brilliant that he said that. | ||
| And then, straight after he said it, there was an article in the New York Times that said, basically, what a boomer thing to say. | ||
| That's not a serious response to quite a nuanced point, is it? | ||
| No, I think every generation thinks they're going to be the ones that change the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, that's an issue as well. | ||
| I mean, every generation that comes along thinks that they have the answers that their parents didn't have. | ||
| I see signs, though, that the younger generation, so Generation Z, or Z, you'd say, are reacting against the millennial generation, and that's probably where the hope lies, isn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because actually the millennials are getting old now, and those ideas are getting a bit out of... | ||
| And the millennials are going to have to pay their bills. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The bills are coming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when the bills are coming, they're like, fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got to get my shit done. | ||
| They've got to earn some... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then they realize other people aren't working as hard. | ||
| Like, hey, socialism is great, but I'd like you to work, Mike. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So ultimately, they'll be destroyed by the realities of a capitalist society, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, ultimately, the realities of life are, show me a young man who is not... | ||
| A liberal and I'll show you a man with no heart. | ||
| Show me an old man who's not conservative and I'll show you a man with no brain. | ||
| Or Bernie Sanders. | ||
| You just get stuck to his guns. | ||
| A lot of people develop bills and they see that there's a lot of people that don't want to work hard and they make excuses for things when the reality is it's their own behavior that's been holding them back. | ||
| And there's so many realities that are uncomfortable that we have to address as we get older in life and we realize how many people have fallen into these Classical pitfalls that maybe our parents had told us about, but we thought we knew better. | ||
| When you talk about liberal, you mean left-wing here. | ||
| That's what the word is used to. | ||
| So when we use it, we don't mean that. | ||
| What does liberal mean over there? | ||
| It means sort of like the tradition of liberalism is a belief in freedom, ultimately. | ||
| It's a belief in the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, individual autonomy. | ||
| It's those kinds of principles which aren't necessarily left and right in that way. | ||
| So I actually think the liberal standpoint is the solution for To everything. | ||
| And I mean that in the classical liberal tradition. | ||
| So let me give an example. | ||
| So if you take the trans issue, right, which I know is something that just by talking about is a bit of a risky thing. | ||
| Although I think the fact that we're not having discussions and debates about that is part of the problem. | ||
| But if you take the liberal position on that, what you say is anyone has the right to identify however they want, call themselves whatever they want, have surgery on their own body, do whatever they want to do. | ||
| But then other people have the right to choose the language that they use in terms of addressing them. | ||
| Everyone has their own individual rights. | ||
| And that's the liberal position. | ||
| And that strikes me as the sensible way to do it, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a sensible way to do it. | ||
| I think we should be nice. | ||
| I don't think you could legislate that. | ||
| You can't legislate nice behavior. | ||
| I think if someone doesn't want to call a trans woman a woman, I don't think you should have to go to jail. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Because that would be an illiberal position. | ||
| The woke movement is a fundamentally illiberal movement. | ||
| Because it believes in compelled speech. | ||
| It believes in not just compelling forms of speech, but also censoring you and saying absolutely what you cannot say. | ||
| And demanding compliance. | ||
| So I'm just sick of them calling themselves liberals. | ||
| It really annoys me. | ||
| You guys definitely have a different definition of liberal. | ||
| Liberal in America is essentially mostly left-wing. | ||
| When we hear people calling themselves a classical liberal over here, we're like, oh, you're just like a sneaky Republican. | ||
| That's not what it means. | ||
| I think we need to restore the idea of liberalism as in what it actually means. | ||
| Yeah, our classical liberals. | ||
| Well, maybe Jordan. | ||
| Jordan Peterson is a classical liberal, but he's not American. | ||
| He's from Toronto. | ||
| Although everyone says he's conservative, don't they? | ||
| He's not. | ||
| I mean, he is in certain things, but he's just a believer in responsibility and hard work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a sweetheart of a guy. | ||
| He really is. | ||
| He's very open-minded and very intelligent. | ||
| And I don't disagree. | ||
| I don't agree with him rather on everything, but I definitely respect him. | ||
| And he's on to something with the liberal. | ||
| If you come from a liberal background as well, you'll be willing to be challenged and you'll be willing to listen to other people. | ||
| And I think he is. | ||
| Well, over your country, that Cathy Newman interview became huge. | ||
| So what you're trying to say is, and he's like, I'll tell you what I'm saying. | ||
| You're trying to put words in my mouth. | ||
| You're trying to distort my position. | ||
| I think 98% of all the arguments that go on on Twitter would disappear overnight if people just actually faithfully represented what their opponents were saying. | ||
| Well, if they saw each other in person and faithfully represented, that's a big part. | ||
| Although the Cathy Newman thing shows that even that doesn't necessarily help. | ||
| It did help eventually. | ||
| She was literally ignoring what he actually said and substituting it for something. | ||
| So she wasn't even talking to Jordan Peterson. | ||
| She was talking to a figment of her imagination called Jordan Peterson. | ||
| That's not the same thing. | ||
| Yes, you're dead right. | ||
| And that's not an interview. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You're dead right. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| And I think she severely underestimated who he is as a human being. | ||
| I also think she hadn't read the book. | ||
| No! | ||
| How could she? | ||
| She's so busy. | ||
| Yeah, she's a busy woman. | ||
| She's very talented, actually. | ||
| I think that was just a misstep. | ||
| Yes, I think that's the best way to describe it, a misstep. | ||
| And she's been tortured online since then. | ||
| Which I think is horrible as well. | ||
| It is, but it's easy. | ||
| It's easy for people to pick on her. | ||
| But it's good now that we've got that lesson, because that came like a meme then, didn't it? | ||
| So what you're saying is... | ||
| That's a really good example of this mischaracterization stuff, which is just so the norm now. | ||
| And now that we've got that example, it's a way to point... | ||
| You know, I used to teach critical thinking in school at an A-level, which is sort of like 16, 17-year-old kids. | ||
| And one of the first things I'd teach them is about, firstly, ad hominem attacks. | ||
| If you throw an insult, you've lost the argument. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| You've lost it. | ||
| If you don't faithfully represent what the other person's saying, you've lost the argument. | ||
| Okay, that's called a straw man. | ||
| So we've got all these things. | ||
| And yet... | ||
| Not just people on Twitter, but people in the mainstream media and politicians are failing on these basic principles of critical thinking and argumentation. | ||
| So if we can just restore it back in the educational system so people understand, once you throw the insult, you've lost it. | ||
| I couldn't agree more, but again, this is not in compliance with woke ideology. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| That's what frustrates me. | ||
| So you'd have to adjust woke ideology. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't think they're willing to do that because I think they think that they're right. | ||
| Well, yes, they do. | ||
| Yeah, and they have a religion. | ||
| And, you know, if you think that you shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain, and someone's doing that, that person's a sinner. | ||
| But if you can go back to the universities and you can reinstate critical thinking there, that will be the solution, I think. | ||
| Good luck, because you've got a lot of woke people teaching. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a problem. | |
| I know. | ||
| I'm trying to come up with a solution here. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| The solution is Generation Z. Yeah, it is. | ||
| That's a solution. | ||
| The hope lies with the children. | ||
| Yeah, but they're getting all these books like Feminist Baby. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| I don't think that shit's going to work. | ||
| I think that Feminist Baby stuff is hilarious. | ||
| And that's also millennials having kids, right? | ||
| Generation Zs are not having kids yet. | ||
| And I think the younger people will laugh at that. | ||
| I think they should. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hope they laugh at it. | ||
| I haven't read Feminist Baby yet, actually. | ||
| I don't think anybody has. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think they just buy it. | ||
| They just buy it and hope the fucking kid comes out good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Listen, man, it's been a pleasure having you on. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Yeah, it's been great. | ||
| Everybody, there is a book. | ||
| It's called Woke, A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath. | ||
| You can get it. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| My friend Bridget Phetasy was the first person to tell me about it. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| And she's another person who has become hilarious and famous on Twitter just from being logical and funny. | ||
| Well, being honest. | ||
| And being herself. | ||
| But I tell you, it's so liberating when you just realize I can say what I want. | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| It's such a wonderful thing. | ||
| You can. | ||
| And many, many, many people gravitate towards it. | ||
| And that's the beautiful thing. | ||
| You know, I don't think it's a war, so I wouldn't say we're winning a battle. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of people that get it. | ||
| I think there's every reason to be optimistic. | ||
| There's a lot of fucking people out there, man. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| And a lot of them have a voice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The noise. | ||
| I think we'll win. | ||
| The noise. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| I appreciate you being here, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks a lot. | |
| Let's do it again next time you're around. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| Thank you. |
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