Andrew Doyle’s satirical Twitter persona Titania—a fictional "queen of the fairies"—sparked outrage as both sides misread her mockery of extremism, while exposing woke culture’s intolerance for dissent, from J.K. Rowling’s attacks to the BBC’s Game of Thrones speech audits. Doyle and Rogan critique censorship backfiring (e.g., Harry Miller’s retweet investigation) and algorithms amplifying division, like The Independent publishing his fake "pro-censorship" article unedited. They argue systemic privilege stems from wealth, not race, and warn woke dogma—mirroring religious or neo-Nazi rigidity—stifles debate, even in education. Optimistic about younger generations rejecting illiberal compliance, they end by celebrating free speech as the antidote to ideological decay. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.