Oct. 9, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I want to start this week off by abiding by one of the rules I set up when we launched this operation. | ||
| I said that if you guys fact-checked me, I would address it on the show. | ||
| I did actually make a minor error last week, believe it or not. | ||
| While talking to my guest Majid Nawaz, I mistakenly said that Ben Carson was a neuroscientist, when in fact he's a neurosurgeon. | ||
| That was really just a slip of the tongue, but a couple of you called me out on it, so I wanted to correct myself. | ||
| Of course, at the end of the day, whether he's a neuroscientist or a neurosurgeon, one thing I hope he will not become is President of the United States. | ||
| We got a really great response to our interview with Majid last week. | ||
| Actually, when we finished, I felt like, again, we had been part of an important conversation that needs to be had more. | ||
| This, of course, is the irony of the regressives that bash people like Majid and Sam Harris. | ||
| Here you have two people from very different walks of life trying to promote secular values and coexistence. | ||
| Whether you agree with them or not on every point is totally irrelevant. | ||
| It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that these are the guys trying to find | ||
| a peaceful way forward. | ||
| Don't take my word for it, though. | ||
| Listen to them speak themselves. | ||
| And by the way, you can disagree with them on where they stand on certain issues, yet | ||
| acknowledge that they're having a very difficult dialogue on extremely heated topics that most | ||
| people are completely afraid to have in the first place. | ||
| When a journalist calls Majid a porch monkey and Sam a racist, it exposes who the real | ||
| extremists are. | ||
| In case you missed it, on Friday night's Real Time, Bill Maher had an excellent sit down with Richard Dawkins on this new split on the left. | ||
| I was thrilled to hear Bill Maher actually use the phrase regressive leftist. | ||
| Bill credited Sam Harris for coining the phrase, though from what I understand, Majid was using it as far back as 2012. | ||
| In any event, the fact that it trickled up to Bill shows you that the discussions we're having here on the show, as well as the ones that you guys are having on Twitter and YouTube, are actually making a difference. | ||
| That's the beauty of the internet. | ||
| You can get issues to actually bubble up until mainstream takes notice. | ||
| There's evidence of the awakening that I've been talking about all over the place right now. | ||
| On Twitter, someone asked me if by calling these people the regressive left, if I'm just resorting to the same type of name calling that we accuse them of. | ||
| My answer to this is 100% no. | ||
| We're giving a name to a problem we've all seen growing for a long time now. | ||
| We can debate with them on facts, if they accept facts as such, and not just cherry pick them when suitable for their narrative. | ||
| The reason I feel like naming them is so important is because I now view these regressives as the left's version of the Tea Party. | ||
| The Tea Party went unchecked by the right until it was too late, and now the Republican Party is a fractured mess often only held together by its worst beliefs. | ||
| I really believe these regressives are doing this to the left, and if we don't have the courage to stop them, then a year or two from now we'll wonder why our system is even screwed up more than it is now. | ||
| That's why talking about all this stuff is important, and that's why we're going to continue to do so. | ||
| With that out of the way, it's time to sit down with the outspoken Breitbart conservative Milo Yiannopoulos, and fear not, I won't let any of his Sith-like logic screw with my thinking. | ||
| My guest this week is a writer for Breitbart.com and a general rabble-rouser and renaissance man. | ||
| Milo Yiannopoulos, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| So when I tweeted out originally that you were coming in, half the people told me I was going to absolutely hate you. | ||
| Half the people told me I was going to love you. | ||
| The first half were wrong. | ||
| The first half were wrong, yeah? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we actually had a drink the other night. | ||
| I want to be totally transparent here. | ||
| We had a drink the other night, and we talked a little bit. | ||
| So we've gotten to know each other, however much you can, in an hour. | ||
| You are a gay conservative. | ||
| And I want to repeat that just so that the audience can be clear. | ||
| You are a gay... You think you need to repeat it? | ||
| You think it's weird? | ||
| Conservative. | ||
| Why would that be strange? | ||
| Well, people freak out. | ||
| So let's just start. | ||
| Let's just start. | ||
| What is a conservative to you in 2015? | ||
| Because I think people don't even know what sort of basic terms anymore, much less the gay part. | ||
| But let's just... What is a conservative? | ||
| I think the reason people are surprised about a gay conservative is because we have a slightly outdated notion of what conservatism is now. | ||
| The religious right in America doesn't have the same purchase on the public imagination anymore that it once did. | ||
| So it's a sort of part of the right, but not whole of it. | ||
| And the right in Europe is drifting quite quickly to the left. | ||
| So conservatism as a movement, as political philosophy, is a bit lost at the moment. | ||
| One thing we can say for sure is that people on both sides of the political spectrum are moving toward a sort of centre-right libertarianism. | ||
| And for me, the big gap between people, the big sort of defining political schism, Particularly on the internet, but I think of everybody really, is not left and right anymore. | ||
| It's becoming between authoritarians and libertarians. | ||
| The issue for the left being that there isn't much space for libertarians there. | ||
| A lot of conservatives who, you know, don't know, aren't necessarily religious, or find their own party drifting to the left, are beginning to call themselves libertarians or conservatarians. | ||
| So I think it's a more interesting distinction to speak in terms of personal liberty and freedom now. | ||
| And when you understand it like that, it makes much more sense why a gay person would be one. | ||
| Right, so the part that we sort of fall out on the same spot is the authoritarian and libertarian part of this, right? | ||
| Because we don't like the authoritarians, I think both of us are sort of libertarians. | ||
| Libertarians are thought more of in the conservative space. | ||
| But if you were to give me like a three-sentence synopsis of when you say to someone, I'm a conservative, what are the principles there? | ||
| What is the basic bullet principle? | ||
| I think you believe in individual and personal responsibility. | ||
| You believe in freedom of thought, of expression, of creativity. | ||
| You believe in free markets. | ||
| You believe that the relationship of the individual and the state should be circumscribed quite clearly and quite crisply. | ||
| So you believe that the state has a limited and quite well-defined set of responsibilities beyond which it should not stretch. | ||
| You believe in the power and value of institution and authority and community structures. | ||
| So you believe that even if, you may for example believe that even if you're not a Christian, | ||
| you still recognize that the church has something to offer, that it is a valuable institution that keeps, that makes | ||
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people behave well. | |
| We'll get to that, we'll get to that. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| But likewise, institutions like monarchy, you respect them because you understand that even though, for example, | ||
| it would be very difficult to defend the monarchy in purely logistical, purely logical terms these days, | ||
| nonetheless it works best in Britain. | ||
| It is the best system yet devised and it works brilliantly in Britain. | ||
| Even if you were to design a state today, you wouldn't come up with it. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of the Conservatives instinctively understand the value of tradition and authority and of course liberals want to tear all those things down. | ||
| So I think those are some of the things that people mean when they describe themselves as a conservative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the reason I think it's sort of a confusing term, or that all our terms have become confusing, I think, is because a lot of times now, as you sort of alluded to, in America, we think of conservatives somehow as an attachment to the religious right, which is weakening a little bit, which I think is good. | ||
| And you're saying in England, it's a little more of a respect for the monarchy, respect for traditions. | ||
| But I think a lot of people would say, well, you're just in it for the man, right? | ||
| Well, I think it's preposterous. | ||
| If you look at how many working class Conservative voters there are, why would all of these people be voting against their own interests? | ||
| If that were true, if Conservatism were really about protecting rich people, why would millions of people who struggle to make rent, or struggle to put their kids through college, or struggle even perhaps to feed their families, vote Conservative? | ||
| They do it because they appreciate the value of some of the structures around that they love, and they do it because they They believe in a certain limit of the state's power, they believe in other things that go with conservatism. | ||
| Why would so many people vote against their interests? | ||
| It's an absurd characterisation, a childish characterisation of conservatism to suggest that it is in some way just a system to protect the man, to protect the rich, to protect corporations. | ||
| I think we can all agree that corporatism and mature late capitalism, which exists in sort of intricate symbiosis with the private sector and in some cases Quite poisonous in that respect. | ||
| The bailouts of the banks in the UK, the sort of corporate cronyism that happens in America. | ||
| We've got plenty of it here too. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| I think we can all agree that's a bad thing, but it is by no means restricted to one side of the political spectrum. | ||
| Yeah, well I always say there's a reason that at least in America, you know, the 1% give basically 51% to the Republicans and 49% to the Democrats because they're hedging their bets. | ||
| So yeah, I don't believe it goes down to either party. | ||
| No, and you know, if you take the view that conservatism is about, you know, sticking up for the man, you have to explain things like | ||
| why conservatives give more money to charity, why even conservatives who aren't | ||
| religious give more to charity. There are a lot of very difficult | ||
| questions you have to answer if you want to make that argument. For me it doesn't hold | ||
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water. | |
| Alright, well that's sort of where I wanted to jump off from and just get a basic, | ||
| you know, a basic set of rules that we're sort of talking about here. I think we | ||
| sort of did that. | ||
| Now, I've done one video on Gamergate. | ||
| thing about me. Yeah, alright, well now we're gonna get into some of the interesting stuff. | ||
| So first thing that I want to ask you about is I think I found out about you originally | ||
| because of Gamergate. Now I've done one video on Gamergate, it was about a year ago. Tell me | ||
| what happened afterwards. | ||
| Well, basically, I said to the audience, I said, guys, look, I don't really understand this thing. | ||
| I don't know what's going on here. | ||
| I have a sense it has to do with some people that were upset at some of the publications and then all this doxing and misogyny and all this stuff. | ||
| But I basically said, I don't know, so I don't know that I can address it. | ||
| Now, you're in the thick of this thing. | ||
| So I thought, if we do one thing on Gamergate, can we do, like, a five-minute, really hash-it-out, honest assessment? | ||
| If you ever wanted to know what Gamergate was really about, the next five minutes are for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| OK. | ||
| We're all used to seeing these social justice warriors who want to police language, who say that extraordinary random things are sexist or racist or misogynist or whatever. | ||
| I think we're all used to, now, the press in some cases reporting on things extraordinarily badly. | ||
| Now, Gamergate has been a huge controversy with people who care about these things because both of those things have come together. | ||
| It is a consumer movement that rejects sloppy standards in reporting about video games. | ||
| Video games, by the way, are a very important part of the entertainment industry. | ||
| They're bigger than Hollywood now. | ||
| It's an 87, probably by now, 90 billion dollar industry. | ||
| Rejects sloppy reporting about that and there are all sorts of horrible infractions of journalistic ethics and conflicts of interest and the rest of it. | ||
| Wait, just to stay on that, though, for a second. | ||
| So, basically, the game companies were sort of paying the writers to give them better reviews. | ||
| Is that a sort of fair assessment? | ||
| There's been some things like that going on. | ||
| There've been people sleeping with people and writing things about them a bit too closely they shouldn't have. | ||
| Basically, it's a very fast-growing industry. | ||
| So, the press is nascent. | ||
| The press has grown up very fast. | ||
| And what was previously a trade press, you know, like, you know, tree cutters weekly or the stamp collectors monthly or whatever, has suddenly become a consumer press. | ||
| And it hasn't necessarily improved its standards commensurate with that. | ||
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Right. | |
| The second half of it is the social justice warriors we mentioned briefly. | ||
| There is a sort of insurgent move in video games from a couple of wacky left-wing feminists, and these are sort of far-left Israel-hating socialist weirdos. | ||
| Far-left feminists who say that every video game is problematic, that there is something wrong with all these video games. | ||
| Now, for some reason, The journalists have sucked all this up and have bought it all. | ||
| The same journalists who protected video games when the religious right in the 1980s and 90s said that video games turn kids into killers and violent. | ||
| Which there's no evidence of, right? | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| Those same journalists nonetheless have rolled over and accepted the feminist critique of video games and said, oh, well, video games can't make you violent, but they can make you sexist. | ||
| Now, again, There's no evidence whatsoever that's the case. | ||
| The research is, the most generous you could be is to say the research is, you know, the jury's out. | ||
| But most of the most credible research says there's nothing in it. | ||
| Right, so to be real clear on that, so that would be like, for example, in a game like Grand Theft Auto where you can literally grab a woman out of her car. | ||
| Yeah, you can beat them up. | ||
| But you can do that to a man too, so you would argue that that's not Well, first of all, it's imaginary. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| And second of all, what much of the evidence shows, actually, is that people who get stuff out of their system, and it's mainly boys who get the stuff out of their system, playing video games, are nicer to people in the real world. | ||
| Because it's that sort of boyish testosterone thing. | ||
| I mean, even as homosexuals, we have some understanding of that male need to sort of win and crush and do that kind of thing. | ||
| I like to think so. | ||
| Well, you know, you probably play sports. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But, you know, I take that out horizontally. | ||
| But there is that sort of male need to get that sort of testosterone energy out of the system. | ||
| And when boys do that in video games, much of the evidence shows that they behave nicer in real life. | ||
| Now, some studies say that video games can make you hyper-competitive. | ||
| So the FIFA games, the football games, can leave somebody a bit more competitive, can raise their testosterone levels. | ||
| But that's a very temporary effect. | ||
| There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that video games can make you sexist. | ||
| And these sort of cherry-picked, insane feminists, I mean, just the most balmy bonkers. | ||
| We'll get on to feminism later, but if you imagine the most wacky, stereotypical, blue-haired, overweight, furious, you know, fact-free, terrible lesbian, you know, lesbianic feminist, well, they're all lesbians now, lesbianic feminist kind of lunatic. | ||
| That's the sort of person that's criticising video games. | ||
| And very often the people who don't even play video games. | ||
| This is another chapter in the culture wars which we're used to from the movies and from books and all the rest of it. | ||
| So Gamergate, ordinary gamers have put up for ten years or more with their own press calling them man babies and misogynists, beating up on them basically because it's the trendy thing to do. | ||
| Because these days, progressivism and, you know, sort of hating on men that kill all white men, kind of these feminist hashtags, Are socially acceptable. | ||
| I mean, you will get no social censure from your peers as a member of the media today for tweeting one of those hashtags. | ||
| Now, obviously, if you did it the other way around, it would be a problem. | ||
| That's become fashionable. | ||
| It's become trendy for white, sort of white guilds, right? | ||
| White middle class guilds. | ||
| It's become fashionable for these people to beat up on themselves, prostrate themselves before the altar of womanhood. | ||
| Um, and say that everything that they are and everything that they do is terrible. | ||
| I'm so sorry, you know, Mother Gaia, how can I make it up to you? | ||
| Um, the reality is that actually these video games are quite good for people. | ||
| So that's the crux of it then. | ||
| It's these people, it's the gaming community that... That has risen up because it's been, it is tired of being lied about and slandered by its own press. | ||
| The press that did a really good job of defending it. | ||
| When the violence stuff was going on, when Jack Thompson in the 90s was saying video games can make you violent, the press did a really good job of rebutting him because he was conservative. | ||
| But when a liberal, when a progressive critic comes along, they fall over themselves to agree and start hating on their own audiences. | ||
| Right, and that's really interesting and it goes to really what 90% of what we're going to talk about is about. | ||
| Because, right, I remember when Joe Lieberman, who was on the right at that time, I guess he's an independent now, When he was railing against violence in video games with Mortal Kombat, I remember it was very cool to say what a loser he was and so out of touch. | ||
| The problem with gamers is they have no social capital. | ||
| Everybody hates them. | ||
| The right hates video games because it says they cause school shootings and because they're violent and deviant and dorky. | ||
| And you've got the religious right that complains that they can introduce dangerous thoughts into people's minds. | ||
| Yeah, because nobody was killing anybody in the name of God before video games, right? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that never happened. | ||
| We can talk about that later. | ||
| Some sort of thing, atheist serial killers, we'll get over it. | ||
| We were doing this in the 90s, right, and the games press did a great job of defending video games against those | ||
| charges. | ||
| They've done a much less good job, in fact they've done no job at all, of defending it against feminists who are just as wacky and just as crazy as the old religious right. | ||
| And in fact the feminists say all the same things, they hate the same things, they hate nudity and violence, all the same stuff. | ||
| This is why some very clever... Brendan O'Neill, who's a wonderful columnist in Britain, wrote in The Spectator a great thing about... It was a provocation, but it was interesting. | ||
| About how feminism looks quite a lot like Islamism in some regards, because it hates the same things. | ||
| It hates female nudity. | ||
| And it asks for the same stuff, and it uses the same language. | ||
| I did a silly quiz in my column about Anita Sarkeesian, who was the leading feminist critic of video games, or Jack Thompson, who was the 90s religious right guy, and I just sort of lined up a load of quotes from each of them and asked, you know, you had to go and you had to pick who said it, and nobody got more than five out of ten. | ||
| Which is my point. | ||
| They say the same thing in the same language and it goes to that difference. | ||
| It's not really about left and right. | ||
| It's not really about politics anymore. | ||
| The most important political distinction in people, as more of our lives move online, more of our discourse is online, as more people navigate the internet, what the internet has done to politics is very interesting. | ||
| It has turned every major culture war and every major discussion into a row between authoritarians who want to control how other people live and libertarians who either want to escape into fantasy worlds to escape whatever's going on in their life or simply classical liberals like me who believe in freedom of expression, freedom of thought, liberty of idea and believe that it is essential For the good of our species, if you like, if you want to get serious about it, that we can talk about everything openly and honestly and that there are no no-go areas. | ||
| I'm what my colleague at Breitbart, Alan Bakari, calls a cultural libertarian. | ||
| I'm not a libertarian politically speaking, but I believe that in culture there should be no boundaries and that we should be able to explore everything. | ||
| Video games are assailed on all sides, from the left, from the right, from everybody, by people who want to restrict the acceptable limits of a creative expression. | ||
| I think that's dangerous. | ||
| I think it's dangerous wherever it happens. | ||
| I think video games are the most interesting entertainment medium in which it's happening now, because the gamers are the first people who rose up and said no to the social justice warriors, and it was a horrible and humiliating defeat for them. | ||
| Right, so it's actually interesting, and then we'll move on to feminism specifically, but it's really interesting because this is sort of the awakening that I now see happening in our political discussion. | ||
| People are now hitting on this libertarian thing and fighting the authoritarians. | ||
| This is Bernie Sanders, it's Trump, it's Bernie Sanders, it's Trump. | ||
| It's Farage and Corbyn in the UK, all of the populist political movements on the left and the right, and counter-cultural, anti-establishment, libertarian leanings. | ||
| Right now, Corbyn in the UK is much more of a socialist, he's much more of a prescriptive kind of guy, but his supporters, you know, want to be able to behave terribly, and they do behave terribly. | ||
| Just this week they were spitting on people at the Tory conference in Manchester. | ||
| They want the right not just to think terrible things, like I'm a cultural libertarian, they want the right to behave Abominably. | ||
| All of this stuff comes from something we've all known for 10, 20 years. | ||
| It's increasing dissatisfaction, alienation from the political and media elites that a lot of ordinary voters feel, ordinary people. | ||
| I think pretty much everybody feels that regardless. | ||
| I think they do and even, I think we'll get on to this later, even those of us who work in the media and have quite nice lives and come from nice homes and don't really have much to complain about still feel that quite acutely and you and I think are examples of people who are a bit more alive to that, a bit more aware of the fact that political discourse and cultural discussion on television has become really, really dull. | ||
| And you've had people on your show already in the first three episodes who are very insistent about free speech and free expression and the importance of old Victorian-style classical liberalism, but also the importance of mischief and joy and a little bit of fun, like Majid Nawaz, who is a great lover of fun and mischief and loves to tease people who want to lecture him and bully him and the leftists who say to him that he's not a proper Muslim or whatever, you know, because he doesn't want to pick women in burqas or whatever it is. | ||
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Right. | |
| Which that, to me, seems racist if you say, well, he's not being good about it. | ||
| Well, it's not racism, but... You see, we started with Gamergate. | ||
| You see where we ended here? | ||
| This is what Gamergate does. | ||
| This is what Gamergate does. | ||
| And I'll tell you why it does it very quickly in a moment. | ||
| Yeah, and then bring it home. | ||
| Super right, I promise. | ||
| The reason Gamergate does this is Gamergate is the sort of final... It's almost like the final chapter in two decades' worth of internet wars. | ||
| And those internet wars have been about thought, speech, culture, politics, you name it. | ||
| Every community on the internet And every sub-community within those sites, whether it's 4channel, Reddit or whatever, has a dog in the fight in Gamergate, because they all either have a vested interest in free speech and anonymity, or they have an interest in protecting the integrity and creative expression of certain entertainment mediums, or they're individual people who have behaved terribly on the internet, who saw Gamergate as a redemptive opportunity. | ||
| So if they lined up with, you know, the women and went in with these mostly fake threats about death and rape and all the rest of it, typical leftist feminist tactics that don't stack up when you look into them. | ||
| We'll get into them. | ||
| You're going to challenge me on that? | ||
| Lining up on one side of that debate was a way of indicating whether you were for authoritarians or libertarians and it was a sort of confluence of all of these nascent arguments and wars online and Gamergate takes you in these crazy directions because in a way it's sort of the most all-encompassing war and the most all-encompassing event that's ever happened on the internet because it brought in everybody, all of the old battles, you know, | ||
| something people don't always realise is when you range up the sides on Gamergate there are | ||
| people who were involved in wars five years ago, kind of picking the same sorts of sides. | ||
| This is the best example we have yet, the most exciting example culturally we have and | ||
| journalists have done such a terrible idea, a terrible job of reporting on this, concentrating on | ||
| these fake rape threats. | ||
| Conservatives have missed the huge culture war opportunity here, shamefully so. | ||
| Leftists have not even bothered to make the arguments because they know their arguments are nonsense and they're focused on the threats. | ||
| This was such an interesting example of what I was saying earlier, the fact that on the internet it's not about left and right anymore, it's about authoritarians and libertarians. | ||
| Cultural libertarians are the rising power, and they're the people who love me, they're the people, I think much of your audience falls into the same bucket actually, they're the people who love Lauren Southern, the libertarian Canadian politician, they love Cathy Young, the great veteran journalist, they love Christina Hoff Summers at the American Enterprise Institute, Adam Baldwin, the actor, and even Eli Roth, the director, is making a movie about social justice. | ||
| You know, cultural libertarianism is on the rise because people are sick of political correctness. | ||
| People are sick of being told they're racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobic, when they know they're not. | ||
| Well, once again, I think by asking you about Gabriel, we just hit on a zillion, we hit on a zillion things. | ||
| It's such a huge topic. | ||
| Yeah, that is the beauty of it. | ||
| It's the best I can do. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So we're going to leave it there, and I'm sure the commenters are going to have a field day with it, which is great. | ||
| So let's talk about some other stuff. | ||
| So feminism, which you've already enlightened me a bit on, you really, really are against feminism. | ||
| Before I let you do your piece, now my sense is that feminism, at least the way it started, was that women wanted equality. | ||
| They wanted the same equality of opportunity that men had. | ||
| There is no doubt that most of these roads in our society have been easier for men. | ||
| I think you would argue that that's changed now. | ||
| What do you think of the feminist movement? | ||
| You were just kicked out of the Amber Rose Slut Walk two days ago. | ||
| She was in your studio today. | ||
| I'm sorry we didn't run into her because I would have given her a piece of my mind. | ||
| Why would you hate feminists? | ||
| Well, the picture you paint is perfectly accurate, or at least it was until perhaps 10, maybe 15 years ago, so only recently. | ||
| It's changed very recently. | ||
| I think most people instinctively agree with the equality of opportunity and equality of access for women. | ||
| They want women to have the opportunity to do anything they want, to rise as high as a man if they're prepared to work as hard and put the same amount of hours in, and of course I agree with that. | ||
| I think everybody agrees with that. | ||
| That's not what modern intersectional third wave, as it's called, feminism is about. | ||
| Which seems to me, and I think to a lot of women too, primarily to be about man-hating. | ||
| It is a very angry, bitter, profane, lesbianic sort of feminism that does not like men. | ||
| But don't they have a right to be angry though? | ||
| I mean, as the other? | ||
| About what? | ||
| You think women are an oppressed class? | ||
| Well, that women don't make equal money as men, often in the same jobs. | ||
| But the wage gap is a myth. | ||
| Is that a myth? | ||
| Of course it's a myth. | ||
| We hear about this all the time. | ||
| It's a myth. | ||
| It's one of those feminist myths that won't die. | ||
| Basically, if you take all of the earnings of men and all of the earnings of women and you do a simple bit of maths, then you'll get something like a 77. | ||
| What this doesn't take into account is the different choices that women make. | ||
| It doesn't take into account a variety of factors. | ||
| No reputable economist takes the wage gap seriously. | ||
| But it's repeated because... | ||
| We saw where the stuff comes from just this week. | ||
| The slut walk I was kicked out of. | ||
| A journalist for Time magazine reported that 15,000 people had come out in support of this slut walk. | ||
| I was there! | ||
| It was like maybe 250. | ||
| She blathered, she started to sort of blame other people and eventually they changed it to thousands but it was still wrong. | ||
| This sort of like sloppy ideological reporting, and I'm sorry to say that the most brazen untruths always come from the left, Just like most of the major plagiarism scandals come from the left because they believe in narrative over fact. | ||
| This is how Rolling Stone happened. | ||
| The fake rape in Rolling Stone. | ||
| It's how Duke Lacrosse happens. | ||
| All of these things happen because these liberal journalists believe that even if this one's not true, it's a really important thing for us to talk about. | ||
| So I'm with you on that, because even with some of my prior guests, like Sam and Majid, I mean, this is what they've done. | ||
| This is what they experience. | ||
| I'm with you on that part. | ||
| And they're getting the receiving end of it. | ||
| You know, these memes of like, whether it's three, four or five women, one in three, one in four, one in five women are going to get sexually assaulted on campus, which is just nonsense. | ||
| Whether it's the wage gap, which is nonsense. | ||
| You know, these things become established as part of almost, they become almost folkloric. | ||
| Right up to the President. | ||
| I mean, Obama repeats some of these statistics, but they're not true. | ||
| And if you look at the work, for example, of Christina Hoff Summer, as I mentioned earlier, at the American Enterprise Institute, who very crisply and cleanly and entertainingly debunks this stuff. | ||
| I'm working on getting her on the show. | ||
| Well, she's great, and you should. | ||
| I mean, she takes a scalpel to these guys, and it's clinical and brilliant to watch it. | ||
| None of this stuff stacks up. | ||
| So if you're trying to make the case that women have a right to be angry, that they should be angry because women have all of these injustices, well, I ask you, what are these injustices? | ||
| And every single one that's given by feminists, every example that's given by feminists, does not stand up to scrutiny. | ||
| Women are not an oppressed class in the West. | ||
| There is no rape culture in the West. | ||
| We don't celebrate rapists, we put them in prison. | ||
| Women don't earn less than men for the same work. | ||
| That's illegal. | ||
| It is true that, you know, because women are mothers, there are consequences when you get into the workplace on that. | ||
| But a woman is paid the same work as a man. | ||
| So, you know, when you say there's a way... There's confusion between wages and earnings, you know. | ||
| When you say 70 cents to the dollar, what women hear is, well, I'm going to get paid 77 cents for a man's pound. | ||
| No woman has that experience. | ||
| It doesn't happen. | ||
| There are some women who work part-time because they have children. | ||
| Well, they have children. | ||
| What do you expect? | ||
| The important thing is that we make sure that when women come back to work after they have children, that they're not disadvantaged for that. | ||
| Now, where that's happening, that's wrong. | ||
| But it is not a problem on the scale of what Sam Harris and Marjid will talk about happening to women in the Middle East. | ||
| And feminists will never talk to you about this difficult stuff because they don't want to be put in the difficult position of having to rank Islam versus women. | ||
| Right, so that's where I'm totally with you on that part. | ||
| Western world, Western feminism, complaining about manspreading, mansplaining, this constant message that men are evil and broken and wrong, toxic masculinity. | ||
| This is offensive, it's irritating, it is wrong, and it's destructive. | ||
| All right, so let's go right to that. | ||
| You wrote a piece this week about the shooter in Oregon. | ||
| And your piece basically was saying that men are being abused in the media or are so easily dismissed in society that they're acting out in crazy ways and we have to stop treating men like that. | ||
| And I know a lot of people on the left, for a lot of the reasons you're describing, will read something like that and say, you know, this is nonsense. | ||
| Men have all the power. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what I said was that at least part of the reason that some of these young men are acting out, that we have these shootings happening, at least some of the reason for that is the horrible position we've put men in. | ||
| Now, you can read every day in major new media publications that there is a problem intrinsically with being a straight white male, or just being a white man. | ||
| That somehow that gives you privileged access to certain institutions, that you are somehow problematic. | ||
| That's not the experience of young men today who go through university and are one in seven of them, is it, who put on Ritalin or Adderall because they're held up to female behavior standards. | ||
|
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It's not the experience of boys who... Well, I don't know if there's a direct connection between the... | |
| Well, of course there is. | ||
| Behaviour standards. | ||
| And we're not just doing that, but we're also changing the way that exams are marked to make them easier for women, because women don't test well in exams. | ||
| So boys are struggling, boys are falling behind. | ||
| And this is not a controversial thing, everybody knows this. | ||
| Boys are falling horribly behind girls in education. | ||
| Fewer men are going to university, more women graduate, women get higher grades. | ||
| In the workplace, for example, a Cornell study from 2015 showed that women have a two-to-one advantage going for the same job just because everybody is desperate to hire women. | ||
| The experiences of men growing up now do not reflect these horrible headlines about straight, white men. | ||
| And frankly, I think progressives have got themselves into a really weird corner. | ||
| They don't seem to appreciate the irony of criticising somebody for their skin colour and their orientation, but they do it anyway. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they would say, well, this is the group that's in power, so if they're being... Well, they would strongly claim that there is a sort of mystical force in society known as the patriarchy. | ||
| And what these feminists will claim is that the patriarchy is responsible for keeping women down. | ||
| And all of these crazy expressions, like toxic masculinity and whatever, flow from this tired old ideology about male power and all the rest of it. | ||
| Now, as Camille Pelier, the wonderful dissident feminist critic says, you know, if society had been left in the hands of women, we'd still be living in mud huts. | ||
| Thank God for the patriarchy. | ||
| It's the patriarchy that got us to the moon. | ||
| It's the patriarchy that built the internet. | ||
| It's the patriarchy that built this floor and the ceiling. | ||
| Women didn't want to do that. | ||
| It's the patriarchy that drives oil trucks and a steeplejacks. | ||
| You know, women don't want to do that stuff either. | ||
| We're perfectly happy to complain about gender representation when there aren't enough women in a particular subject field for our arbitrary quotas, but we don't make the same complaint the other way around. | ||
| Right, but men were the ones that were going out and hunting, and women were taking care of the home. | ||
| So I find that argument a little flimsy. | ||
| Well, no, there are people who say that's not a bad way to structure society. | ||
| I mean, when we start to break down those gender... Look, this all comes from this sort of discredited leftist idea that gender is socially constructed. | ||
| And if gender is socially constructed, right, if you're taught to be a boy, or taught to be a girl, rather than having a lot of that behaviour genetic, behaviour sort of encoded in you, if you like, by virtue of your chromosomes, If gender is a performance and it's a social construct, there's no reason why girls can't behave like boys and boys can't behave like girls. | ||
| Now we're beginning to start to see that fall apart now. | ||
| One of the ways in which it falls apart is the transgender debate. | ||
| We know now, now progressives are telling us that people can be born with the wrong brain. | ||
| If you can be born with a female brain, there must be such a thing as a female brain, so surely, you know, femininity can't be a social construct. | ||
| Make your bloody minds up! | ||
| Yeah, one of the things that drove me crazy on this was that, you know, everybody was saying that, or most sane people, I think, were saying that obviously Rachel Dolezal couldn't choose to be black. | ||
| She was white and she pretended to be black, but she couldn't choose it. | ||
| She was created by progressives who said that blackness was a performance, that blackness was a social construct, that race is a social construct. | ||
| Of course it isn't. | ||
| You know, we know now, because we have the computer processing power to do it, we know that when we look at the genome that there are clusters of information that map onto certain geographies. | ||
| In that statistical sense, we know now that race is real. | ||
| And we know from, ordinary people know from the common sense of our eyes and our ears, we know that people look different and behave differently. | ||
| We know that stuff. | ||
| But progressives For, you know, a variety of balmy reasons best known to themselves, have been claiming that gender and race are social constructs. | ||
| All this stuff is starting to fall apart now. | ||
| Is the gender one falling apart? | ||
| I don't want to belabor this point, but I fully not believe that people can be trans, because I know some trans people, I have no doubt. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| What I said was, the transgender debate is very interesting and very dangerous for progressives, and they haven't yet dealt with this. | ||
| If you can be born with the wrong brain, If you can be born a man with a woman's brain, that means there's such a thing as a woman's brain, right? | ||
| So what transgender patients will do is they start hacking away at themselves to make them anatomically more like women. | ||
| So they're somewhere between the two genders by the end of it, right? | ||
| They're not functioning women, but they look a bit more like women and some of their You know, some things work a bit more like women, and they have the appearance of women, and they say they have a woman's brain. | ||
| If you're going to have a woman's brain, there is such a thing as a woman's brain. | ||
| It means there's a biological basis for certain behavioural differences. | ||
| Now, you were asking me about men going out to forage. | ||
| It may be no bad thing that we let men be the hunter-gatherers, and women may indeed be happier focusing on bringing up children and building a home. | ||
| Certainly the women that I know that are in their 20s that have been told, or especially in their 30s, have been told they can have it all, they can have a career. | ||
| They're living in a horrible apartment they don't like, with a cat, they're miserable, they hate all their friends. | ||
| They're not happy people. | ||
| They've been encouraged to be single, encouraged by feminism particularly, to look how they want. | ||
| This fat positivity that is another feminist trope. | ||
| It's like you can look like what you want, your self-esteem shouldn't depend on what a man thinks of you. | ||
| Well, yes it should. | ||
| Because if you want to, you know, if you want to settle down with a man you'll like and have a nice happy life, there are certain things that men like in women, like stay thin, you know, and you may not like it, but it's a fact. | ||
| As gay men, we know men are visual animals, right? | ||
| Now some guys like fat girls, but not many. | ||
| And if you're listening to feminists who are telling you you can grow blue armpit hair, and you can burp and fart and swear, you can be Lena Dunham, this disgusting, quivering mass of horror, and that men will like you, that's a lie. | ||
| Men will not like you, and you'll be alone, and you'll be miserable. | ||
| I think a lot of people here are going to say, well, this is sort of, somehow, this is some of your gay rage or misogyny coming out. | ||
| Why would it be misogynistic? | ||
| I don't have a dog in the fire. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I don't care if you're thin or fat as a woman. | ||
| I don't want to fuck you either way. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| What I want is for people to be happy. | ||
| Happy. | ||
| And I see people not being happy because I see that women are moving in a very, very dangerous direction, told lies by wacky far-left feminist crazies who want to control other people because they're hurting inside, I think, in many cases. | ||
| Very often it's 30, 40-year-old bitter old women trying to lecture 20-year-old girls on how to behave. | ||
| It's an ugly woman-on-woman form of violence, if you like, modern feminism. | ||
| It is a nasty thing to watch. | ||
| And I see women get drawn into this, and I find it sad. | ||
| But there is, of course, one great hope and silver lining to all this, which is that feminism is collapsing in popularity among women. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| uh... in just a few years the number of american women who describe themselves | ||
| as feminists has gone from twenty eight to eighteen percent you can read in vox | ||
| right is not somewhere that would advertise this to the right although that | ||
| that may just be because of the success of the movement to no no this is women | ||
| who don't identify as feminists and they don't identify as feminists because they | ||
| see in feminism what i see which is it is turned into a bitter nasty ugly man | ||
| hating empty horror show uh... and frankly you read these blogs like jezebel which | ||
| you know which rail against men. Most women don't hate men. | ||
| Most women don't want to beat up on people for being straight or being white or being a male. | ||
| Most people are quite like a boyfriend, you know? | ||
| So they see that they don't have anything in common with these angry gender warriors who want to deny basic human nature and who make claims and give instructions that are almost designed to make women miserable. | ||
| And I think most women recognise that, which is why feminism is falling off a cliff with women. | ||
| I love how you wrap up even the things I disagree with in the social justice warrior prism, because that's my weak spot, because I'm so against that that I have to sort of acknowledge some of what you're saying here. | ||
| All right, so let's do one more thing, and then I want to spend the whole second half of this really on one topic specifically. | ||
| But I want to talk about atheism, because... | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's so boring. | ||
| So boring. | ||
| Just a couple of people wrong in a room being very angry on the internet. | ||
| So you don't like atheists? | ||
| I sense you almost think that atheists don't exist. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Lesbians don't exist. | ||
| Unfortunately, there are atheists. | ||
| So you acknowledge that there are people... There are lots of wrong people in the world, you know, and one of the kinds of wrong people are atheists. | ||
| Now, the thing I find fun about atheism, I don't really care if somebody believes in God or not. | ||
| I hope they do. | ||
| I wish they did, because I know it'd be quite nice if they joined me up there, you know, in 40 or 50 years. | ||
| You think there's something up there? | ||
| I've got a first class ticket, you know. | ||
| To up there? | ||
| She loves me. | ||
| I'm very confident about it. | ||
| There's nothing up there. | ||
| There's a lighting grid above you. | ||
| Yeah, it's built by men. | ||
| The reason I have a go at atheists is because it's fun, because they're so thin-skinned. | ||
| They're like libertarians, or they're like cyclists, or Liberal Democrats in the UK, or feminists in fact. | ||
| They're so easy to wind up. | ||
| I mean, how many atheists does it take to change a lightbulb? | ||
| And before you've even given the punchline, people are furious and there's a Reddit thread about it, and they're just so much fun. | ||
| How can you be going after the people that it's easy to go after? | ||
| I mean, every poll shows that atheists are like the most hated minority in the country. | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| These people aren't victims. | ||
| These people have some of the most celebrated public intellectuals on their side. | ||
| Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| These people have huge public intellectuals on their side. | ||
| Militant atheism, if you like. | ||
| Atheism is the trendiest thing in the world. | ||
| Every journalist is an atheist. | ||
| Everybody in the media is an atheist. | ||
| You're never going to get somebody laugh at you or look at you weirdly for announcing you're an atheist. | ||
| If you announce you're a Christian, or a Muslim, or maybe especially a Jew, all sorts of bad things happen to you, right? | ||
| Nobody, nobody looks at you funny, except me, I'm probably the only person, if you announce that you're an atheist. | ||
| So don't tell me they're victims, because this is a privileged group in society that I find it funny to take the mickey out of because they are so touchy. | ||
| This is interesting because, so when you were talking about Gamergate, part of what you liked is that there was this groundswell coming up from the bottom fighting this authoritarian system. | ||
| And I think religious people are that again now. | ||
| But I don't think we're there yet. | ||
| I get that angle, and this is what all my friends on the right say, that the religious now are the ones being oppressed and Christians are being oppressed. | ||
| I wouldn't go as far as to say oppressed. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Saying it's basically crazy is wrong. | ||
| I wouldn't go as far as to say Christians are an oppressed class in this country, because I don't think there are many oppressed classes in this country. | ||
| I would say, I can't really think of, I don't know, maybe black people still. | ||
| That's probably the only one in this country. | ||
| I don't think they're an oppressed class, but I do think I've been very ashamed of my fellow homosexuals and the way they have behaved towards Christians in some of the media circuses that have happened recently. | ||
| So I can go with you on that. | ||
| I'm deeply, deeply horrified to watch gay people treat Christians as gays were treated barely two decades ago. | ||
|
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Horrible. | |
| So I do think there's some value there. | ||
| But I do, I have noticed, you know, I did David Webb, who's going to be a guest on our show in a couple of weeks from Fox News and on Sirius XM, I was on his show when gay marriage was being passed by the Supreme Court and the law was being struck down. | ||
| It's shame, isn't it? | ||
| Shame. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get to that too in a second. | ||
| But what he said to me, just literally I think it was the first day, it was the day that it happened, was that we should really already start being, we should start policing the gays to make sure we don't start oppressing Christians. | ||
| But isn't that a little, don't we have to give it a little time? | ||
| Don't we have to let gays have a little time to work with? | ||
| To be bullies? | ||
| No. | ||
| Before suddenly accusing them? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We don't need to give gay people any time to be bullies. | ||
| They have shown, and this is something that I always find interesting about people, how they behave when they enter the corridors of power. | ||
| How people behave when they are granted the status that they have asked for for so long. | ||
| When gays are finally, not just equal in society, but held up as models of paragons of virtue. | ||
| I mean, you read Gawker or Buzzfeed, you would think that being gay was some kind of moral objective. | ||
| That being gay was better than being straight in some way. | ||
| I'm not going to say, we'll perhaps discuss that in the second half of the show, what I think on that. | ||
| But it seems like a weird proposition on the face of it, but if you read Buzzfeed or Vox or Gawker you'll get that impression. | ||
| No, I don't think gay people deserve any time to be bullies, to settle into their position in authority and I think it does gay people a lot of damage. | ||
| To see these bitter, hysterical, nasty queens bullying and lecturing and hectoring ordinary, decent, law-abiding people of faith. | ||
| And I thought it was utterly deplorable when that couple, who staged a renewal of their vows, they didn't even have a wedding, but they staged a renewal of their vows because they already had the wedding. | ||
| Solely, it seemed, to get a photo opportunity with Pizzas for Memories Pizza, which they tricked this Christian pizzeria into catering their thing. | ||
| Now, set aside the horror I think most gay people at home will feel about pizza at a wedding. | ||
|
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Pizza at a wedding is... carry the carbs. | |
| Well I know, I'm Greek and 30 and it's probably showing. | ||
| I've told your cameraman to shoot me from here. | ||
| Set that aside, how hollow and bitter, what an awful kind of human being you would have to be to turn your special day, to turn a day of appreciation and celebration between you and your family, the people that you love, into a cheap political stunt. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Gay people, in many cases, turn themselves into the worst kind of grandstanding bigots. | ||
| No, they do not need time to settle in. | ||
| They're very much settled in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I'm sort of with you on that because I do understand that, look, they purposely did this for a Christian baker. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| It's bullying. | ||
| Have they gone to an orthodox Jewish baker or a Muslim baker and forced them to do this? | ||
| The media wouldn't have nearly the fun that they have talking about Christians. | ||
| So just wrapping this around atheism. | ||
| Everything else we're going to do is gay for the rest of this after this final question. | ||
| I know, it's exhausting. | ||
| I don't even like them. | ||
| But what position of power do you think that... I don't see atheists in any position... Yes, there are a couple cool thought of atheists out there, right? | ||
| Neil deGrasse Tyson or Dawkins or whatever. | ||
| It's not about positions of power, no. | ||
| It's about social cashing. | ||
| So what do you think that the average atheist, which an atheist is only brought together by the lack of belief in a deity, what do you think? | ||
| Well no, I mean they're brought together by, you know, sort of wispy facial hair, terrible spectacle, sort of long ginger ponytails. | ||
| Um, terrible, thin-skinned, natural sort of demeanor, you know, hair-trigger temper. | ||
| These are the primary characteristics of an atheist. | ||
| I mean, socks and sandals, you know, those terrible cheap chinos, you know, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| If that's what you want to aspire to, then go right ahead. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| Catholics have all the best outfits, you know. | ||
| Rich older men in dresses. | ||
| What's not to love? | ||
| If you want a sense of style, then you become a Muslim or a Catholic. | ||
| No, I mean, look. | ||
| Atheists are... It is not just acceptable, but it is the norm in any metropolitan city in Europe or in America to be an atheist. | ||
| It is normal to be an atheist. | ||
| People look at you weird if you're not. | ||
| Right, so what's the problem with that? | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| I just think it's funny to take the piss out of them. | ||
| You just want to make fun of them, even though... I enjoy making fun of them. | ||
| I enjoy making fun out of everybody. | ||
| I enjoy making fun out of you. | ||
| I enjoy making fun of myself. | ||
| I make fun out of myself all day on my Twitter feed. | ||
| That's what provocateurs do. | ||
| Alright, well, I can accept that part. | ||
| I will grant you that part. | ||
| I won that little section, but I will grant you that. | ||
| Well, you can have one out of five. | ||
| You can have that. | ||
| I want to spend the rest of the time talking about a whole bunch of gay stuff. | ||
| Because I mentioned on the show, we've done five of these here. | ||
| I think this is our fifth episode since we've been with Aura. | ||
| I've only once mentioned anything about being gay. | ||
| I don't make it an issue unless it's relevant. | ||
| You're quite a straight gay, aren't you? | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| I mean, believe me, I'm gay. | ||
| I'm married. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm married to a dude. | ||
| Pretty gay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's not gay actually. | ||
| You are selling out. | ||
| Selling out to hetero-patriarchal institutions. | ||
| Stay gay. | ||
| Get married. | ||
| My god. | ||
| Imagine anything more awful. | ||
| So before we do that portion of this, it's hilarious. | ||
| The liberal here is the married one, and the conservative one is the one railing against marriage. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Look, I just think it's sad that, you know, I want heterosexuals to come back to an institution of marriage. | ||
| I want them to realize that it's a good thing. | ||
| I want them to become more socially conservative in that regard. | ||
|
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I don't want gay people... I mean, look, growing up... All right, so we're just going to go all in on this. | |
| I'll reverse my question. | ||
| So go, go. | ||
| Alright, I don't think being gay is particularly fun, and I wouldn't choose it for any of my children. | ||
| For example, I think Sally Cone, who said that she'd like to have a gay child, I thought was deplorable and sadistic and incredibly selfish. | ||
| So meaning what? | ||
| If Sally herself has come to a place of realisation of happiness? | ||
| No, what she said was, if she could pick, she'd rather have a gay kid, and I thought that was a deplorable thing to say. | ||
| Because what? | ||
| Because it would make your child's life so much more miserable. | ||
| But it's getting easier every day. | ||
| Don't you think that when... How old are you? | ||
| Oh, gee, you don't ask a gay man how old he is. | ||
| You really aren't a proper gay, are you? | ||
| Terrible failure as a gay man. | ||
| It's like asking a lady. | ||
| But point being, it's a lot easier for you than it was for a 30-year-old gay man 10 years ago, and it's going to be way easier. | ||
| So that's the normalcy that we're creating. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You're confusing two different things. | ||
| There's a sort of practical ease with which a gay person can go through life because there is no longer the entrenched homophobia, if you like, in wider society. | ||
| The fact that gay people can have a relationship and live together and nobody really cares. | ||
| And I don't think anybody cares anymore. | ||
| Well, I've said that for a long time. | ||
| I'm so sick of talking about it, which is why I don't... All I wanted was equal rights. | ||
| I just want to be treated as shit, not better than anybody. | ||
| I think gay people getting married and in relationships is a shame, because I quite like the dissident, naughty aspect of gay life, and I think that it's part of my gay privilege to be able to tumble out of a nightclub at 3am with a doorman on my arm and hopped off my face. | ||
| But can't you do that while still... | ||
| No, because people like you, getting married, getting a dog, living in a little house... Horrible, horrible. | ||
| No self-respecting gay is home enough to feed something like that. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what you're doing with your time. | ||
|
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What are you doing? | |
| Come home at 6am? | ||
| Who's cooking tonight? | ||
| Oh, alright then. | ||
| Well, he cooks, he's a great chef. | ||
| Awful, awful, awful. | ||
| You shouldn't be in their house long enough to keep that alive. | ||
| But really, do you really believe that? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get what you're doing here on the snark level. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| No, I do think there's some value in this, because I think that... And I think it's because gay... Look, homosexuality is a dissident, aberrant sexuality, and I mean that in a morally neutral sense. | ||
| You just mean it's the other. | ||
| The other. | ||
| No, I don't mean that. | ||
| You're not using the term correctly. | ||
| Well, abhorrent, what do you mean? | ||
| No, I didn't say abhorrent. | ||
| Look, let's set the religion stuff aside because then we're going to get into a rabbit hole. | ||
| But let's just say, you know, homosexuality is not the norm. | ||
| It is an aberrant sexuality that Mother Nature made you for a variety of reasons, right? | ||
| There's some evidence that people with higher IQs are more likely to engage in different sexual appetites, which is one of the reasons why gay people have disproportionately higher IQs. | ||
| And one of the reasons, I think, for example, that gays should get back in the closet, because we're making society stupider, because gay people aren't breeding anymore. | ||
| Whereas previously, you would have a marriage with a woman, and you would have a couple of kids, and gay men were still in the gene pool, right? | ||
| Now they've taken themselves out, and they don't have their own biological children anymore. | ||
| Like, you've got your sort of 2-5% of the smartest men in the population aren't breeding anymore. | ||
| Well, people keep saying to us, are we going to have kids? | ||
| And I say, I don't know, but we're going to keep trying. | ||
| But if you do, you should have your own biological children, because you're smarter than most people. | ||
| That was worth a laugh. | ||
| Did you catch that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| What did you say there? | ||
| We're going to keep trying? | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| I see you're so into your thing there. | ||
| No, I thought we were being serious. | ||
| All right, all right. | ||
| Yeah, no, OK, yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It doesn't work when you... Yeah. | ||
| I just, you know, it's kind of a silly thing, but it's certainly true. | ||
| The sort of average of intelligence society is sort of chugging upwards slowly, but it is definitely being retarded if five to ten percent, two to five percent rather, you know, of the smartest people in society aren't breeding anymore. | ||
| So anyway, I think that's a silly argument, but I do think it's a shame when As a gay, he's one of those people that Mother Nature has selected to be different and to test stuff out and to push the boundaries, which we'll come on to in a minute in respect to free speech, I think. | ||
| That you sort of buy into precisely the sort of socially conservative institutions which I love and I recognise are the building blocks of society, I recognise they're the basis of healthy society. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, so I'm fascinated. | |
| As a homosexual, not that gays shouldn't have them, as a homosexual you should recognise that your evolutionary function is to experiment with different Models of things, right? | ||
| And one of the ways in which gay culture and society has done that is the sort of sex-mad hedonism that I enjoy, that I think... I'm sorry that you don't have anymore, because you have this horrible mutt to keep alive. | ||
| Well, I've done... Wait, hold on. | ||
| But you're combining 18 different things here. | ||
| So, first off, I sense that a lot of what you're saying is you just... You long for the day, probably when you were 22, and you were out every night and doing all kinds of drugs and having all kinds of sex. | ||
| That hasn't really changed. | ||
| All right, so with last week, right? | ||
| So you long for that day. | ||
| And a lot of mainstream gay... Look, I live in West Hollywood. | ||
| I see what the clubs are like. | ||
| I think gays have become boring. | ||
| I think gay people have become very, very dull. | ||
| And it's a shame. | ||
|
unidentified
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Isn't that the success of equality? | |
| No. | ||
| Why would we want to be equal? | ||
| We were already superior. | ||
| Why would we want to go down to equality? | ||
| It's absurd to me. | ||
| Gay people are where Mother Nature makes her mistakes and makes her great discoveries. | ||
| Look at all the gay geniuses in history, whether it's Turing or Abe Lincoln, reportedly, or all the Roman emperors. | ||
| Look at what Mother Nature does with these aberrant, special people at the top end of the intelligence and dissident you know, scale. | ||
| Those, those, those, what Steve Jobs would call the crazy ones, right? | ||
| And this is why the tech and gaming industries are disproportionately gay and trans, because | ||
| it's those special people that have brains wired slightly differently from others, who | ||
| can make those great leaps, who can, you know, consider problems differently, who are generally | ||
| more creative and more, whatever. | ||
| I'm with you on that. | ||
| Music, art, I'm with you on all that. | ||
| Why, why, as a member of the gay master race, would you want to slump down to the level | ||
| of heterosexuality? | ||
| you should have the option. | ||
| I'm not telling you what to do. | ||
| Fine if you want the option. | ||
| What I'm telling you is you made the wrong choice. | ||
| OK, so you don't think that a lot of these people that are doing all the things that... Look, I did them. | ||
| You know, all of those things. | ||
| Sex, drugs, all of that. | ||
| I did all that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I look back on much of it very fondly, actually. | ||
| People call me a traitor to my sexuality. | ||
| You're the traitor to your sexuality. | ||
| At least I'm... I don't think my agent would allow me to tell you what I get up to. | ||
| But wouldn't you trade, so the things that you, I think you're looking at this in this nostalgic way of fun, that there was this sense of fun or something, but wouldn't you trade some of that? | ||
| Look, when you think about all the people that are having promiscuous sex and getting all kinds of diseases and all that, aren't those numbers going to directly go down because of... I don't care about sexually transmitted diseases, who gives a shit? | ||
| I don't care about that. | ||
| What I care about is the fact that There's a serious point here, it's not just the fun. | ||
| Living those fun lifestyles, and I mentioned Steve Jobs earlier, and he said that many of his innovations come from the fact that he took LSD, right? | ||
| Gay people have a licence to experiment, a licence to explore, and it's one of the reasons why gay culture, which is so To do with exploring boundaries, pushing the limits of acceptable discourse and speech and thought, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Those are all the things that I love, that I... Well, no you don't, because you've slid into... But I'm honouring all of the... No, no, no. | |
| You've just slid into this sort of boring domesticity. | ||
| It is precisely with those horizon-broadening experiences, which you have given up as a housewife or a househusband or whatever, I think I've had two weeks of having home-cooked meals and watching Netflix. | ||
| I've had two weeks of home-cooked meals. | ||
| I wanted to kill myself. | ||
| I wanted to kill myself. | ||
| People call me a trace of my sexuality, please. | ||
| No, look, I think that gay people are one of the groups in which Mother Nature, one of the groups in which Mother Nature has given license to go wild. | ||
| And that's why so many great artists and inventors and authors, whether they be gay, lesbian, whatever, right? | ||
| Because we have a unique license and unique opportunity and insight into the fringes, into that edge of culture that makes stuff interesting. | ||
| We have an ability to push further than ordinary people can. | ||
| We can say things they can't say. | ||
| For example, I can go on TV and say all manner of outrageous things about feminism only because I'm homosexual. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Let me ask you something. | ||
| Do you think I could get away with those same things? | ||
| Because obviously we have a little different affect. | ||
| People always say to me, you don't seem gay, which I... No, you wouldn't be able to get... I mean, it's kind of... They say it as a compliment to me, but... It's kind of my thing, right? | ||
| People know that I'm going to do this, so I'm sort of social justice proof. | ||
| It's very difficult to argue that a flamboyant homosexual who never shuts up about, you know, black boyfriends is in any way bigoted, right? | ||
| So it gives me... I've established myself in the public mind, the public imagination, in a way that you haven't. | ||
| So a lot of that, ironically, that's what this is about. | ||
| You like, while you in some ways rail against these people that want to be protected, like the feminists or whatever, you do like having your little protected force field. | ||
| No, I enjoy using their weapons against them, and I'm perfectly happy to use their weapons against them. | ||
| I wish I didn't have to. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you admit it. | ||
| No, I don't want to be trolling people for my whole life. | ||
| Of course I don't, you know. | ||
| But I would much rather it were the case that everybody had free, open, frank discussion. | ||
| But the media as currently constituted, if you want to push forward the discussion outside the realms of academia, in the public square, Talking to ordinary people. | ||
| For example, I write for a publication that's sort of mid-brow, mid-market publication for everyone. | ||
| The sort of digital media equivalent of a tabloid newspaper. | ||
| I want to talk to everybody. | ||
| And to push debate forward in those environments, you do have to play by the rules. | ||
| And some of those rules are based on identity politics, which I think are absurd and obscene and stupid. | ||
| But I will certainly play along with them if it helps, because so long as progressives and feminists refuse to have a debate on the basis of the facts, and insist on having a debate on the basis of identity and skin colour instead, fine, I can beat them in that too. | ||
| I'm happy to beat you on any playing field, on any battlefield you choose. | ||
| They've chosen identity politics, I can beat them there. | ||
| If they ever want to come to the table and debate properly, I'll beat them there. | ||
| Alright, so that, I think you're onto something interesting there, that you'll use their weapons, I don't like their weapons, and you're just admitting that you're using their weapons against them, and I think in a cheeky sense where you know that you're, there's a wink to what you know what you're doing. | ||
| Of course, and look, anybody who reads my Twitter feed knows You know, I know exactly what's up, I know what's going on, but they still lose anyway. | ||
| So part of the reason why I wanted to do this is because I do find that, again, while we come from different, we literally come from different countries, but come from different political parts of this, you really, at least in American media, only get one gay. | ||
| Only one gay gets out there, and it's the Bravo gay that's either on TV because they're a fashionista, or they're a sidekick to one of the housewives, or they're somehow involved in pop culture, or something like that. | ||
| Or every now and again someone can break free like an Anderson Cooper, but then sort of have to be completely asexual, right? | ||
| Never talk about their life. | ||
| And I think this is sort of interesting because we both break that paradigm, right? | ||
| Yes, and I think it's partly because we are cultural libertarians. | ||
| I would certainly describe myself as one. | ||
| I think you probably I hope you'd agree with that. | ||
| I think that we are those sorts of insurgent, counter-cultural, new media personalities. | ||
| We exist, you may not like to hear this, but we exist on a spectrum with people like Trump and Ann Coulter, probably more on the serious end of it, simply in tapping into ordinary people's frustrations with the limits and absurdities of what they see on broadcast television and what they read in the newspapers. | ||
| There is an alternative way of having a discussion which is more honest and more I mean, this kind of thing could not happen on broadcast television, for example, and that's a problem. | ||
| That's a problem for the media. | ||
| That's why I'm here. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| One of the reasons everybody hates them. | ||
| And I think we both are taking advantage of that fact. | ||
| As far as the sexuality goes, what I find interesting about You know, a liberal and conservative homosexual agreeing on so much about authoritarianism is that, well, from my point of view, homosexuality is where we experiment and, you know, drag queen culture, for example, is all about pushing the boundaries of acceptable language and thought. | ||
| We see the threats to freedom of speech, for example. | ||
| We see the authoritarian threat coming over the horizon a long time before anybody else. | ||
| And we're in a position to warn other people about it. | ||
| And there's a very serious point about this, which is not just that, you know, transsexuals hate drag queens, which is one front in this sort of progressive fracturing, because drag queens love, you know, this sort of no-holds-barred Joan Rivers-style comedy, which, you know, is the essence of gay identity, sort of pushing those boundaries in experimentation. | ||
| And transgender people who have fallen into this authoritarian mode hate that kind of stuff. | ||
| It's not just about that. | ||
| It's not just about our community fracturing, if you like. | ||
| But it's also that we see some of the serious consequences to these infringements on culture. | ||
| Because, of course, politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| And what becomes unacceptable in culture becomes unacceptable in politics. | ||
| And we recognize and we see the warning signs here. | ||
| So we're sort of the canary in the coal mine. | ||
| Yes, I think that's true. | ||
| And I think gamers did this too, you know. | ||
| I think gamers and gays have varied very similarly because gamers are marginalised people in many cases. | ||
| Disproportionately ethnic minority, disproportionately gay, disproportionately transgender in my experience. | ||
| Often marginalised personalities, often people who are retreating into video games maybe because they don't have the great social skills, often very bright. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sort of brilliant, kind of autistic, you know, methodical, very male, brilliant minds, very funny, but sometimes they don't have the best social skills. | ||
| And in that way, they're quite similar to gays because they occupy a fairly unique position in the social hierarchy of society. | ||
| And I think gamers did, in their own industry, what gay people ought to be doing in public life, which is precisely that, being a canary in the coal mine, and saying, for example, that the sort of nannying, hectoring, language policing that's happening in progressive media today is a problem. | ||
| It's a problem because, I mean, the first signs are the policing of gay sexuality. | ||
| There's a piece in The Daily Beast, I think, that said that men who express a racial preference on their Grindr profile are racist. | ||
| No, it's obviously an absurd thing to say. | ||
| It's completely stupid. | ||
| And it was some idiot middle-class white woman who decided that she was going to police gay sexuality today. | ||
| Just as we were getting to a position of tolerance, suddenly someone coming over the horizon to police gay sexuality. | ||
| It's happening for two reasons. | ||
| One, gay men have high status in society. | ||
| They become very modally called, very celebrated in the media. | ||
| So they've sort of acquired a kind of privilege. | ||
| And when the left, you know, the left is constantly engaged in the business of ranking people according to their oppression rating. | ||
| And gay men don't score very well in those games because, you know, we look good and we have money and, you know, we've basically become another kind of white man for a lot of these guys. | ||
| Right, so you would say that basically the progressives, or as I'm now calling them, the regressives, basically are done with the gays. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I sense this as coming from the progressive world. | ||
| I sense they were like, we're all for it now. | ||
| They're done with you now. | ||
| They've got your gay marriage, and now you are going to find increasingly that they come after you. | ||
| And they're going to come after you because you're being too racially insensitive. | ||
| They're going to come after you because you use the wrong pronouns. | ||
| They're going to come after you, absurdly and brilliantly, for misogyny. | ||
| People make arguments to me sometimes and they say, and it's not as credible in your case, but I can understand how they construct the argument as bonkers as it is. | ||
| They make arguments that basically boil down to, you're such a misogynist you went gay. | ||
| You know, sort of, you hate women so much I can tell why you sleep with men. | ||
| Now, it happens to be that I do think there's a large element of choice in my sexual orientation, although that goes entirely against a progressive consensus. | ||
| We'll do a whole thing on that next time. | ||
| No, the show. | ||
| But it's an extraordinary thing that they're now coming after gay people for being misogynistic, for being racist, all sorts. | ||
| You're no longer of any use to your own side, right? | ||
| They have used you. | ||
| They have put your wedding ring on your finger. | ||
| They have domesticated you. | ||
| They have domesticated you like they would a dog, like you did your dog. | ||
| They have made sure you've got the right politics, that you say the right things in public. | ||
| They have domesticated and delineated the sort of useful liberal gay idiots and put them all in little ghettos in cities like the Castro and West Hollywood and now you are the product and the chattel of the liberal left. | ||
| So I know by you, you don't mean me specifically. | ||
| No, I do. | ||
| No, I do mean you specifically. | ||
| But you know that I stand against... You've bought into all this nonsense. | ||
| No, but you know I stand against all those things. | ||
| So, you know, there's a sort of gay marriage as a way of controlling gay people. | ||
| Right, but I suspect that along the way, if you met the right person, you would want to marry that person for all the bravado... Marry? | ||
| No, I might move them into the West Wing, but I wouldn't marry them. | ||
| OK, OK, so we do have to wrap up here and we could have done three hours here and we'll do this again for sure. | ||
| But I want to get to this. | ||
| This piece that has been the through line to everything we've been discussing here, this authoritarian left, this regressive piece where they have no problem relentlessly. | ||
| Look, I could use the example of the gay rights groups here in America, GLAAD or the HRC, who will attack the pizza makers relentlessly, but will say nothing when gays are thrown off the roof. | ||
| In Iran, right. | ||
| Or even when the wrong kind of gays speak out. | ||
| There is a sort of person in America today who is homosexual and discriminated against. | ||
| It's gay conservatives. | ||
| It's much more difficult to admit you're a gay conservative than to admit you're gay. | ||
| You admit you're gay, you get slaps on the back, you get applause, you get, oh how isn't he brave. | ||
| You know, all of the social signalling about being homosexual is positive, with one exception, and that's if you're a conservative, other gays, the gay establishment, and Brittany Spinelli has written an amazing essay about this in Out magazine, it's called something like In the Reign of the Kingdom of the Magical Gay Oldies, everybody should read it, you know, it explains how the gay establishment, which is basically now done with gays, and it's sort of a self-perpetuating set of institutions to push leftist socialist principles, it's got nothing to do with gay rights anymore. | ||
| We'll treat you as what you would call an Uncle Tom in race terms. | ||
| You know, I have never in my career, as a purposeful provocateur, I don't play the victim on Twitter or in my columns because, you know, I think you should take as well as you give. | ||
| Yeah, I'm nobody's victim. | ||
| A rule all gay people learn quite early in life. | ||
| But you... See, I missed that one. | ||
| See, I did that too. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| I was shifting, yeah. | ||
| It's a rule we learn quite early. | ||
| I think you should be able to take it as given. | ||
| I never play the victim, but I've never had so much really poisonous, vitriolic nastiness as from other gays who think that my politics are wrong. | ||
| So wouldn't the ultimate success here be, you know, I've been arguing for a while now that by gay marriage being legal now in America, in the long term you actually help the Republicans because this was such an idiotic issue for so many people to have to vote on. | ||
| The idea that I had to vote on, not that it was the deciding factor, but I had to vote on whether I could get married. | ||
| It's a fucking nonsensical and painful and pathetic way to have to vote. | ||
| So I actually think ultimately this may turn into a net win for the Republicans because gays I'm not sure that's the case. | ||
| I've written about this, and I call it minority wars, the way in which, you know, if the last ten years was about setting men and women against each other, the next ten years is about all sorts of other minorities. | ||
| I mean, you know, when the Hispanic population in the US, who are not encumbered by the guilt of slavery, become the demographic majority, you're going to see some pretty brutal policing in places like Ferguson, you know, because they don't have the same kind of white middle class guilt about, you know, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| They weren't, you know, Hispanic mayors in Barely a few generations are not going to be paying multi-million dollar settlements to black families. | ||
| They're going to be sending police in with guns. | ||
| There's all sorts of horrible things on the horizon and it's driven by the identity politics of the left which are crumbling but not fast enough. | ||
| The serious point about all of this is that cultural libertarianism, which I keep hanging on about, which I think is sort of what we've been talking about, which is a word that I'm glad is catching on with people, Can we just, I know you named a few of them before, but from the article that I saw on Breitbart, I thought it was a brilliant article, we'll link to it. | ||
| It wasn't mine, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, but can we just name a couple of these people? | ||
| I know you named a few of them, but Bill Maher was included. | ||
| Bill Maher's in there, Chris Rock is in there, even though he does rely a lot on his blackness as a source of his comedy, he is somebody, for example, who's spoken up about the political correctness at colleges, on college campuses, and says he won't perform to students anymore because they're too touchy. | ||
| I think he understands this. | ||
| I think Eli Roth, the horror director. | ||
| Adam Baldwin, who's a sort of fantasy actor, and he's done a lot with the Gamergate stuff. | ||
| And then you've got... The way these things normally work is you've got a sort of vanguard of hell-raisers, like me, and Katie Hopkins in the UK, Ann Coulter perhaps here. | ||
| Now all those three happen to be right-wing, but I don't think you can... I don't think you can place people on the political spectrum. | ||
| And that's why I wanted you to mention some of the names, because what I liked about the article was that these people were from all over the place. | ||
| I think the Hellraisers tend to be conservative today simply because the establishment is liberal, right? | ||
| I think that's why. | ||
| Then, further behind that, you've got the more politically ambiguous figures like Christina Hoff Summers at the American Enterprise Institute or Cathy Young, feminist journalist, who aren't so easy to place politically. | ||
| Cathy's definitely a liberal. | ||
| I think Christina is a registered Democrat, in fact, but who nonetheless recognise the excesses. | ||
| In the wake of the chaos created by the Hellraisers, people like me kind of winding people up and And being, you know, sort of viciously teasing people I consider to be, you know, dangerous and damaging and whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
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I got it. | |
| You don't believe half of it, but you're throwing bombs. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I believe all of it. | ||
| I believe all of it, but I'm perfectly happy to accept that I will say it in the most provocative way possible, because I think the only responsible, the only appropriate response to outrage culture is to be outrageous. | ||
| You know, if you're going to tell me that I can't make jokes about skin color, I will come back at you, you know, with ten puns about me being obsessed with black venuses or whatever, you know? | ||
| For the record, you brought a Six foot six black porn star to the security? | ||
| I hired a black porn star, just because it would annoy the right people, to be my bodyguard. | ||
| Because I get death and bomb threats everywhere I go, and I don't make a big song and dance about it, except to laugh at how stupid it is. | ||
| I mean, I don't believe any feminist bomb threat is ever going to be credible. | ||
| They can't even tie their own shoelaces together, let alone wire a detonator. | ||
| I'm not worried about getting blown up by feminists. | ||
| What I am worried about is the chilling effect that they have on free speech. | ||
| Let's get back to the point. | ||
| Gay people, I think, and I think this is something in which you and I are united, having privileged access, if you like, to the limits of acceptable speech and discourse. | ||
| There's that great drag queen joke, which I love from Britain, which always gets shocks and a national newspaper wouldn't let me publish, which was She comes on stage and says, you like my new hair? | ||
| It's called the Whitney. | ||
| Black and dyed in the bath. | ||
| And people get sort of horrified. | ||
| Gay people live and love that sort of stuff. | ||
| And we see before everybody else what the serious consequences of this chilling effect on free speech can be. | ||
| And those consequences are The sum total of human knowledge and whatever is starting to be cut off. | ||
| J.S. | ||
| Mill, classical liberal, is unconscionable to modern feminism. | ||
| They don't believe some of the central tenets on which British society was built. | ||
| This is dangerous stuff. | ||
| It's dangerous stuff because of what's happening in our universities too. | ||
| I mean, just look at the sort of, look at the feminist Hegemony, you know, women's studies departments that run rampant on campuses. | ||
| Yale, I hope this is true and I'm not misremembering this, but I saw something, you know, DeRay Mackeson, the Black Lives Matter guy, is teaching a course at Yale in defensive looting, you know, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| This sort of weird, crazy... I saw a tweet about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I don't know if it's real, we'll see. | |
| But the women's studies stuff at many decent universities is scary. | ||
| It's denying human knowledge. | ||
| This stuff makes it to government policy. | ||
| And in this regard, you're not just talking about women's studies, though, because this is coming from all over the place, like Berkeley protesting Bill Maher coming as the commencement speaker. | ||
| It's progressivism generally. | ||
| I'm supposed to speak at USC tomorrow night, and I've just seen this horrendous blog post from somebody who says that I'm a sort of misogynistic hate speech merchant because I made a joke about I don't know what it was. | ||
| It was probably some joke, like, you know, feminist Barbies just come out. | ||
| When you pull the cord, it says, math is hard, let's lie about rape. | ||
| You know, some joke like that. | ||
| You know, and they paint me out as some sort of misogynistic harasser. | ||
| They're words, people. | ||
| I think that's a takeaway. | ||
| And that's really where I sort of wanted to end this with you, because, yeah, we can... Everything I've tried to do with this show so far is show that you can disagree with people, and we can go back and argue the tenets of feminism or... | ||
| Whether I think you're right or wrong about men being oppressed or the gay marriage thing, all those things. | ||
| But allow the conversation to happen. | ||
| And I think that's what the cultural libertarians that we're talking about are trying to do. | ||
| We're trying to have the conversation. | ||
| So I appreciate you coming in. | ||
| And I want to thank my guest, Milo Yiannopoulos, for dropping by. | ||
| You can check out his work over at Breitbart.com. | ||
| Follow him on Twitter, it's at Nero. | ||
| By the way, make sure to tag me in all the hate tweets, because I know there's going to be a lot of them! |
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