Dec. 2, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:07
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
[outro music] | |
| Hey guys! | ||
| So as most of you know, we are building out our home studio. | ||
| So I am sitting outside right now doing a direct message right off the top of my head. | ||
| We've got a lot of cool stuff going on. | ||
| We've got the walls built. | ||
| The floor is going in tomorrow. | ||
| We've got lighting, air conditioning. | ||
| Our cameras are getting in there, soundproofing. | ||
| Should be ready to roll in about a week or two. | ||
| But for this week, we are continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty, which I've loved so far. | ||
| We've had Professor Randy Barnett from Georgetown University. | ||
| We've had Steve Davies from the London School. | ||
| Of economics, and this week we have Joanna Williams from Kent University and the editor of Spiked Online, the education editor of Spiked Online, and we're going to talk about education. | ||
| We actually shot the interview already, so I can tell you that we did talk about education. | ||
| Since we don't have our studio, my good buddy Larry King and our friends over at Aura TV lent us their studio for this, and we got to the ins and outs of education. | ||
| What Actually is education. | ||
| What is a well-rounded education? | ||
| Should an education come from the government or from a family or something in between or from a community? | ||
| We talk about all this stuff and you know it's so related education in and of itself is so related to everything else that's going on right now because With all of this political craziness between the election and Trump and tweets and free speech and all of this stuff, it all fits in that if you have a well-rounded education, when people come in with easy answers, well if you're smart and you've been educated well and you understand history and language and politics and the rest of it, then you can't be swayed that easily. | ||
| And I think right now what's happening in our country is that we have so many people who are so poorly educated that all they're doing all the time is reacting But what we need is a well-educated populace that understands how our electoral college works, that understands how the voting process works, how basic math works. | ||
| I'm not that good at math, but basic science, all the things that actually affect our lives, that we learn through a well-rounded education. | ||
| So Joanna and I, we shot the interview a couple days ago and we had a great discussion on what education actually is and what the role of your family and your friends and your community, how it's | ||
| part of it and are there some things that shouldn't be taught in school that | ||
| should only be taught at home? I think you guys are gonna really dig it | ||
| and by the way education and this whole conversation really is so locked | ||
| in with what's going on here. You know the big thing at the moment is Trump this | ||
| tweet about not burning the flag. | ||
| Some people are saying he actually was just trolling Hillary and the Democrats because in 2005 she was co-sponsor of a bill that was going to cause fines and possibly criminalize burning the flag. | ||
| So maybe he is trolling everybody. | ||
| He's now getting the left to defend free speech and free expression, which I'm really into, right? | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I don't know that we should have the troller in chief. | ||
| We should have the commander in chief. | ||
| And even if he is just trolling them to ultimately get the left to be more on board the side of free expression, which would be pretty meta, and that's some 4D chess right | ||
| there. | ||
| Even so, the idea that he would put out there via tweet or however he wants to do it, | ||
| the idea of that if you burn the flag you could somehow be a criminal or something like that or be fine, | ||
| I think that's extremely dangerous. | ||
| So we're in uncharted territory here, but as I said just two weeks ago when I sat out here | ||
| and I did the video called "Don't Freak Out About Trump," | ||
| There's opportunity, you know what I mean? | ||
| There is feelings on every side. | ||
| On the Trump side, on the conservative side, on the liberal side, on the progressive side, the regressive side, the rest of it. | ||
| On the centrist side, there is a feeling that something, that there's movement here. | ||
| That all of us are kind of trying to figure out what's going on and figure out how to proceed and who our allies are and who we have to try to bring to our side of the argument. | ||
| But you know how you bring somebody to the argument? | ||
| You bring them to the argument with a well-reasoned and educated argument. | ||
| Not just with cries of racism and bigotry and all that stuff. | ||
| And unfortunately, as it will come to no surprise, all I've seen the left really do since the election is just double down on that. | ||
| I thought maybe there was going to be an interesting opportunity of reflection. | ||
| I've seen some articles about it, but I haven't seen that put into practice anywhere. | ||
| So that's why I think you're going to really enjoy this week because we talk about education, And it's so indicative of a healthy society has good education. | ||
| We need better education around here. | ||
| I think that's what I'm trying to bring to you guys a little bit. | ||
| All right, so enjoy the interview with Joanna Williams, and then we're gonna be doing some more live streams before the studio built out, and then we got some great guests planned, and I'm psyched about what's going on. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| Continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week-- | ||
| As you guys know, we're building out our home studio right now, and my good pal Larry King was nice enough to lend me his studio. | ||
| My old studio used to be built in this very room, but Larry lent it to us today. | ||
| My guest this week is an author, the education editor at Spiked, and senior lecturer of higher education and academic practice at the University of Kent, Joanna Williams. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm very excited to talk to you because we are going to talk about education. | ||
| That might be the most important thing out there. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| I think it is and I think what's really interesting is how much more important it seems to have become over just a very few years. | ||
| It seems like everybody feels a need to go to university nowadays and parents are always so worried about how well their children are doing at school and I think that's quite new. | ||
| I don't think it used to be the case, go back 20 years, I don't think it was quite the case that everybody felt they had to go to university and People were so pressurized about how well their kids were doing at school. | ||
| Yeah, so before we get to the pressure situation and all the stuff that you talk about related to it being more about grades than learning and credits and all that stuff, how about you basically just define education for me? | ||
| What do you think is actually a good, well-rounded education? | ||
| Well, I think education should be about knowledge. | ||
| You should know more when you leave school than you do when you start at school. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| So far I'm with you. | ||
| Do you know what? | ||
| You say it makes sense, but it's actually a very controversial thing to say, and I've been challenged upon this so much, because as soon as you say kids should know more when they leave school than they do when they start school, people will say to you, well, what knowledge? | ||
| Who should decide? | ||
| What it is that children should know. | ||
| Shouldn't children just be free to explore and to use their imaginations and to develop as individuals? | ||
| And this idea that you actually teach them something and you actually pick what you think is the best thing that children should know. | ||
| And this goes for university students as well. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Then you suddenly you become some kind of elitist authoritarian who's imposing white culture or an elitist culture Right. | ||
| I didn't realize that education was now an elitist culture, but I think in a lot of respects it is. | ||
| But you can do both of those things at the same time, right? | ||
| I mean, you can select what information to teach a child and expand their knowledge, while at the same time not stifling their creativity and ability to be themselves, right? | ||
| I mean, you don't see those things as mutually exclusive. | ||
| No, in fact I would actually say that the more knowledge you give them then the more you enable them to be free to use their imaginations and to become creative, thinking, critical individuals because they've got some basis to form that creativity, to spark that criticality. | ||
| But the problem nowadays I think is that So many people, so many educators, bizarrely enough, think that you can miss out that first stage, that you can miss out teaching people any actual knowledge and just jump straight into the let's be critical, let's be imaginative, let's be creative bit. | ||
| Without doing the groundwork first. | ||
| And I think the more you actually teach people stuff, proper stuff, then the more you enable them to be free thinking, creative, critical individuals. | ||
| So I know that this portion isn't totally your expertise, but as I was doing my research for this, I kept thinking, I have a two year old niece who is just going into whatever that, that's not elementary school. | ||
| Kindergarten? | ||
| Not even kindergarten. | ||
| It's, you know, preschool, whatever. | ||
| It's just to sort of socialize and take naps and stuff like that. | ||
| It sounds pretty great, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much do you know or pay attention to just sort of the process of younger learning? | ||
| I know your focus is really on universities and stuff like that, but how much of just, you know, it doesn't have to be two year low, but from two to say 18, how much of that is important to you and important to what leads to the stuff that you really care about at the university level? | ||
| I think it's all important. | ||
| I think it's all really important. | ||
| But, you know, the bizarre thing as well is that So many people who are involved in education, like I say, they talk the rhetoric of creativity, imagination. | ||
| Child-centred is the language of the day. | ||
| You know, everybody's got to be very, very child-centred. | ||
| And yet when it comes to two-year-olds, like you're talking about, we can't leave them alone. | ||
| So, you know, between two and ten or whatever it is, it's like people need to micromanage every step of their day, everything they do. | ||
| I mean, if I was running a nursery for two-year-olds, I think I'd have nice toys, big open area, you know, this is for kindergarten kids, and leave them to get on with it, leave them to play, to form friendships, relationships, fall out, fight, take risks. | ||
| Which is all a part, that's a type of education. | ||
| It's not necessarily the quest of knowledge per se at five years old, socializing, but socializing is education, right? | ||
| It is, but I think the best socializing is done, obviously, you know, you have the relationship with the parents, the relationship with the teachers, but ultimately kids need to be left alone as well. | ||
| So my daughter's 10 in her school this week. | ||
| It's anti-bullying week. | ||
| I can guarantee you one thing, the poor teacher next week is going to have so many more kids coming to see him to say that they're being bullied because essentially what these kids are being taught is that the normal everyday interactions that you have when you're 10, where you're falling out with people, making up with people, that that is now bullying. | ||
| And instead of just leaving the kids to get on with it, to sort it out for themselves, they're being told, oh no, this is bullying. | ||
| Right, and now you have to tell on them. | ||
| This is kind of emotionally traumatic. | ||
| Yeah, you have to sort of tell on them. | ||
| Don't sort it out for yourself, go and tell the teacher. | ||
| Yeah, so now I know a certain amount of people are going to hear that, because I've seen this when I've said something like that. | ||
| I'm not pro-bullying, but I do understand that when I was a kid, There were some kids that I made fun of sometimes. | ||
| There were some kids that made fun of me sometimes. | ||
| I was playing stickball once in about fourth grade and two guys that were much bigger than me, from I think two grades over, literally picked me up and put me upside down in a garbage can. | ||
| I'm not making that up. | ||
| So I was bullied and I did some bullying, but that's all which makes you a person. | ||
| It does, but I think what's changed is that the definition of bullying has gone from being something where we were quite clear about it If somebody hits you, that was bullying and you know if you were being hit badly enough you could go and tell the teacher and you would expect an adult to intervene and tell whoever was hitting you to stop. | ||
| Suddenly now bullying has gone from being hitting to name-calling. | ||
| Now it's not even name-calling, it's leaving someone out. | ||
| So even if someone doesn't do anything bad to you, they just don't do anything to you, that is now seen as being bullying as well. | ||
| God, that reminds me of like in third or fourth grade when, you know, if it was somebody's birthday, you'd have to bring cupcakes for everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see, we didn't have that in the UK at the time, but now it's getting... Now you have, oh, we had that in the States for a long time. | |
| I remember very specifically there was one kid who I really, really hated. | ||
| And I was like, I don't want to give him a cupcake on my birthday, but you have to bring cupcakes for everybody because they're left out. | ||
| What do you think that does to children for their formative years, this sort of, because all you're doing is giving them a fake reality and I don't want to exclude kids and I get kids can be tough and rough and mean and all that stuff, but what do you think it does for their formative ability to I feel some pain, which is part of life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we use this term snowflake generation, and I think, I don't particularly like that term, but you can see how these kids are being then formed in school that nothing bad should ever, ever happen to you. | ||
| And if something bad does happen to you, it's the end of the world, and there is no way you can be expected to sort it out for yourself. | ||
| You need to go and get somebody else to come in to sort this out for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And, you know, the reason why I don't particularly like the term snowflake generation is because it lets older people off the hook. | ||
| And these kids don't go to school when they're five begging for anti-bullying weeks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's being given to them by some older snowflakes. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| This is their teachers and their headteachers who are saying, we are now going to have anti-bullying week, which I promise you won't be just a week, it will go on the whole year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But this is what teachers are doing to them. | ||
| So the teachers are telling them essentially, you are so fragile, you cannot cope if somebody gives you a slightly odd look. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you cannot sort that out for yourself and go and say to the person, why are you looking at me in that way? | ||
| You need to get some help. | ||
| So they're being conditioned to be scared of everything and everyone, and never to be able to sort anything out for themselves. | ||
| So these are then the kids who are then arriving on the college campus at university, four or five years on from this, completely unable to cope, forming relationships with each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So before they get there, What do you think the learning process should be like? | ||
| So now we've talked about the young kids. | ||
| We've had the preschoolers, we've sort of got through elementary school. | ||
| What's sort of a healthy high school education to you? | ||
| Where you're not necessarily going into the deep philosophical stuff, but maybe you're not college level, but you're not a kid anymore. | ||
| Those interesting years of high school. | ||
| I think, for me, one of the big problems at the moment with education is that the role of the teacher has become so confused with the role of the parents. | ||
| And I think the job of the parent is to kind of love the kids, obviously, but to do things like teaching them about healthy eating, to bring them up in their values, to teach them about sex and relationships, for example, that should be the job of the parent. | ||
| And it should be the job of the school to teach kids knowledge, to teach them about works of literature, about maths, geography, history, proper subjects. | ||
| And the problem is these roles have become completely blurred, so the school is stepping in and teaching sex and relationships education, teaching about consent, teaching about bullying, about friendships, and the parents are being expected to teach the maths and teach the reading. | ||
| It's utterly bizarre. | ||
| And I think what a good school education should be like is both doing more in terms of more teaching, teaching more proper subject knowledge to kids, but then, hands off as well, don't teach them about sex and relationships. | ||
| And this is a really controversial thing to say in the UK, but I don't think it should be the job of teachers to be telling kids about sex and relationships. | ||
| It shouldn't be the job of the teachers to be running anti-bullying weeks. | ||
| It shouldn't be the job of the school to tell kids what values to hold. | ||
| So the teachers are kind of overstepping the mark, I think, but also not doing enough in terms of proper teaching of subject knowledge. | ||
| Right, so do you think there's no role for, say, a seventh grade health class, where they're not necessarily teaching about sex, per se, but they are teaching about STDs, or they're teaching about drug use, or something like that? | ||
| You would say that's more of an academic thing, so you are okay with that? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I wouldn't have any of that at all. | ||
| I mean, I think, obviously, there's a case for teaching kids the biology, and that should be done in a science lesson, but as soon as you move beyond the biology, you're putting a values framework into this. So even if you take healthy eating for example, | ||
| I do not think it should be the role of the school to teach kids what to eat. So I remember | ||
| my own son when he was about seven, we'd had a very, very busy week, it was very | ||
| stressful. I got to Friday and I'm like, "Oh, we'll get a pizza for dinner." He said, "No, I | ||
| can't, I can't." | ||
| There's gluten in there! | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| Oh, no, we didn't have gluten in the UK at that time. | ||
| This is a bit more recent. | ||
| Well, you had it, but you weren't talking about it. | ||
| We weren't talking about it. | ||
| But he'd been asked by the school to keep a food diary. | ||
| This is a seven-year-old boy. | ||
| Who, you know, spent so much time running around. | ||
| He was so skinny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And had been asked to write down everything that he'd had to eat and to kind of color code it. | ||
| Green for good, red for bad. | ||
| That actually sounds scary to me. | ||
| I just think it's completely overstepping the mark. | ||
| And I'm like, well, come on, I'm your mother. | ||
| If I want you to eat a pizza, you will eat a pizza. | ||
| And I don't care how many calories it's got in it. | ||
| What kind of bizarro land that is where the mother has to trick the kid into eating a pizza. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| That's really... | ||
| But I mean I think the healthy eating is one thing but I think when it comes into sex and relationships it becomes even more horrible because it is a complete moral agenda that children are being taught and this then feeds into universities. | ||
| Where you have, certainly in the UK, demands for consent classes now. | ||
| I mean, bizarrely compulsory consent classes, where these classes are mandatory. | ||
| They must go to learn how to say no. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what do you do about the kid, so not who has a stable family and parents and parents who are going to teach them the right things, but for a kid that really is not going to get They're not going to learn how to eat properly or how to not do drugs or know things about their body. | ||
| All of that stuff, which is fully legit, and I understand you're drawing a line between personal life and the schooling system, but how can we then help those kids that obviously need it? | ||
| You're growing up, it's a confusing time. | ||
| Is there some role for the public in that? | ||
| I mean, firstly, I wouldn't overstate it. | ||
| I mean, people always throw it, you know, well, what about these really extreme examples? | ||
| These kids who are kind of growing up in a garbage can or something like that and don't have any human interaction. | ||
| I think you've got to be really, really careful. | ||
| I mean, I think the vast majority of parents love their children and want the best for their children and do the best that they can. | ||
| And it might not be textbook and it might not be what all the experts say you should do. | ||
| But there is no recipe at the end of the day for how to raise the perfect kid. | ||
| And I think we fool ourselves if we think there is some recipe for raising the perfect kid. | ||
| And I think, you know, talking to them, loving them, that is enough, actually. | ||
| And I think the vast majority of parents do that. | ||
| But, you know, there always will be one or two who perhaps don't have the advantages and don't get that love from their parents. | ||
| And that's really sad. | ||
| But do you know what? | ||
| I think teachers are human and tend to love their jobs and also tend to be fond of the kids that they teach. | ||
| And I think teachers over decades have always had an eye out. | ||
| Certainly my own teaching experience You would have half an eye out for the kid who was sitting there looking very quiet, withdrawn. | ||
| You know, if you thought someone had come to school without breakfast that day, and you would help them out. | ||
| And you would do that on a very individual level. | ||
| But the problem is when you start seeing your role as a teacher to do this to everyone in the class, that you've got to teach 30 kids about healthy eating. | ||
| That takes up so much of your time and energy. | ||
| That poor kid who's sitting there looking very withdrawn, who has come to school without breakfast, You actually don't even have the time to notice them and to give them the individual attention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because she's so busy looking after all the worried well kids. | ||
| Yeah, that's such an interesting example of sort of the collective versus the individual because by choosing the collective, in effect, you have to sort of neglect the people that need it the most. | ||
| Which is, so that's really, it's well-intentioned, I suppose, that you want to teach these kids about how to eat right, and then who do you end up hurting the most is the kid that you could have focused on. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| I think that's true, but I also think, you know, there's just such a tendency nowadays to assume the worst of people and to assume that parents are not up to the job of raising their own kids. | ||
| And that makes me feel very sad because I think it's untrue. | ||
| I think, like I said, People might not do it all according to some mythical rule book but I think most parents are up to the job of raising their kids and we're always so quick to focus on the one or two extremes and luckily they are extremes but I think most parents genuinely want the best for their kids and genuinely love their kids and they may not be raising their kids in the best circumstances or circumstances that they've chosen | ||
| But they do want the best for their children, and I think we're just always so quick to look on the bad side. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So speaking of wanting the best for their children, so you mentioned your daughter now, 10 years old, anti-bullying week. | ||
| In light of what you do for a living and the things that you care about, I mean, what do you say to her? | ||
| Either before this, during it, or after it? | ||
| Do you know what, these are real dilemmas that I face as a parent because, I mean, before Anti-Bullying Week, I promise you I'm not making this up, but the week before Anti-Bullying Week was, so I don't think you'll have this charity here in the US, but we have this charity NSPCC, which is the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the week before Anti-Bullying Week This charity came into the school to do a week-long series of workshops about sexual abuse with 10-year-olds, and they have this initiative called Pants, and it's about telling children that nobody should be allowed to touch you inside your underwear. | ||
| Again, you could say, isn't this perhaps useful for the one or two children who are being sexually abused? | ||
| But you take our school, 400 children in it, You know, 395 of them do not need to have lessons in sexual abuse. | ||
| And it creates worry and concern and fear in those children. | ||
| They've got nothing to fear about. | ||
| And it makes them suspicious of their parents. | ||
| You know, it makes them suspicious of adults who are wanting to help them. | ||
| And it creates this kind of fear in the heads of young kids. | ||
| So I get these letters home, you know, this week is sexual abuse prevention week, this week is anti-bullying week, healthy eating week. | ||
| Do they have just a regular week? | ||
| No, never, never, never. | ||
| Is there ever just a sit back and enjoy life week? | ||
| They don't have that? | ||
| Or we're not going to bother you this week? | ||
| None of that. | ||
| I mean, over the years, there's been some really bizarre things. | ||
| So this was going back a few years now, but this school was into fair trade. | ||
| And this is when she was like six. | ||
| So how can they get six-year-olds to think about fair trade? | ||
| So they made posters of bananas and pictures and cutting out and all this kind of thing. | ||
| Because kids, six-year-olds really understand the international economics. | ||
| But this is the thing, because obviously they don't understand it and there's no pretence of even teaching them about international economics and world trade. | ||
| It's just preaching and it's just values. | ||
| So when they draw the poster, they're not expected to think critically about these things. | ||
| They're expected just to buy into the values and demonstrate having met these values. | ||
| So they all want pictures of kind of bananas and then farmers saying, I like fair trade and this kind of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| With no degree of criticality there at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then if you dare criticize it, then? | ||
| You haven't demonstrated that you've met the value, so you've failed. | ||
| When did this happen? | ||
| When did this stuff really happen? | ||
| Because as I said before, when I was a kid, I bullied and I was bullied. | ||
| I remember, you know, that we were allowed to get into fights and all of that stuff and you try to settle it, you know, between the parents and not make everything national headline. | ||
| When did this happen and was it the exact same timing for the United States as it was for Britain? | ||
| I think probably quite similar in terms of timing. | ||
| I mean, I think there's lots of different things going on here. | ||
| I think you can see, for example, one very, very interesting study shows the geographical distance that children were allowed to go from their home on their own, away from home. | ||
| And you can see how since the 1970s, year on year, That distance that children are allowed to go has become smaller and smaller. | ||
| So essentially nowadays it's pretty much their back garden. | ||
| Yeah, I mean you're talking about literally like their ability to get on the bike and ride around the neighborhood. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| Which is sad, very very sad. | ||
| And you can look at kind of high profile cases I think in both the States and in the UK. | ||
| ...of children who maybe have been abducted and how this then spreads a fear through parents and this idea that we're all kind of monitoring each other all the time, so... | ||
| I let my daughter walk to school on her own, or with another boy from her class. | ||
| My fear, and this is very, very revealing, my fear was not for one second about anything that would happen to my daughter. | ||
| You know, she's a very sensible girl, she'll be absolutely fine. | ||
| My fear was, what will other parents think of me? | ||
| And it's that idea that we're all kind of checking and monitoring each other all the time, and that's really unhealthy. | ||
| What do some of the parents think of you? | ||
| As long as we're going that route. | ||
| I mean, you're public about this. | ||
| This is what you do. | ||
| Oh, yeah, she walks to school every day and everybody drives past and sees her walking to school every day. | ||
| You know, people will say funny things to me, like, oh, you're so lucky you can do that because your girl's so sensible. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| She's just a regular kid. | ||
| She's just the same as your child. | ||
| The reason why she's sensible is because I've allowed her... Right, it's not a coincidence that you got this sensible kid. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's because I've let her take these risks that she now is this sensible child. | ||
| But people come up and they will say, oh, I saw her walking to school on her own today. | ||
| And it's almost as if they just want me to know that they know that she's walking on her own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's really, it's like Big Brother stuff at a very micro level because they start, it's almost a way of, it's not just that they're surveying the kids, in a way they're surveying the parents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And now you're all kind of watching each other. | ||
| So it really, it sounds extremely perverted or something. | ||
| But again, a lot of this comes from the school. | ||
| Kids will bring home, for example, homework projects that there is no possibility of the children being able to complete these projects on their own. | ||
| And the homework projects are actually designed to involve the parents. | ||
| And it's as if the school is then checking up on what are the parents doing? | ||
| Are the parents being good parents? | ||
| Have the parents heard the child read? | ||
| So you have homeschool liaison officers who are employed specifically to work with the parents rather than working with the children bringing the parents into school and we have parenting classes in the UK now and all parents are encouraged to go to these parenting classes and it's almost as if if you turn around and say well actually do you know what I think I'm doing a good enough job I don't think I need any of this extra help or advice That in and of itself then marks you out as somebody who's not good enough. | ||
| Right, so by doing a good job... | ||
| Thus, not wanting to spend extra time in a class that you have no need for. | ||
| You then are then thought of as the outsider. | ||
| Something's wrong with those guys. | ||
| They don't want to be in the parenting class? | ||
| I guess they're not good parents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| This is crazy stuff. | ||
| So how do you peel back some of this stuff? | ||
| I think you've got to, I think. | ||
| And you just have to stand up and take that risk. | ||
| And you just have to say, no, she's 10. | ||
| My daughter, you know, she's walking to school. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| The time I think it becomes very very difficult for me personally, the time it becomes very difficult is with things like these anti-bullying weeks and say sex education classes because I obviously have strong opinions about these things but I'm also aware that I don't want to single my daughter out and I don't want her to have to carry the can for my political views and most of the time I just let these things go and then I'll ask her about it afterwards and see if there's anything that she wants to talk to me about but I won't single her out. | ||
| There's one of two things where I do. | ||
| So for example, I was talking about the healthy eating thing and they do this thing in the UK where they weigh and measure all children when they're in their first year at school and when they're in their final year at school. | ||
| So they can send a letter home to the parents to say, you know, your child is obese, your child is overweight, and you need to do something about this. | ||
| And here's some exercise classes. | ||
| Because you couldn't have figured that out on your own. | ||
| No way. | ||
| You couldn't have bought a scale and maybe fed your kid differently. | ||
| That would be impossible. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, that's the assumption that you need somebody to give you an official letter to say your child is overweight. | ||
| It's horrendous. | ||
| So I withdrew her from that. | ||
| She's not going to do that. | ||
| But most of the time, you have to let it go. | ||
| And then you just have to hope that your children pick up enough of your own values that eventually they begin to think quite critically of these things themselves. | ||
| Yeah, so it's really interesting. | ||
| So clearly you've drawn the through line between the younger child and how it affects the parents. | ||
| So now let's move right into the middle of that space. | ||
| Let's go to college, which is where you spend most of your time writing your books and researching. | ||
| So basically, you feel that colleges have become these places to just chase grades, chase credits, chase these imaginary things, but they don't Does that really make you a better person, or more functional in society, or a better member of a productive society? | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| I think it is, but I think you're almost being too positive. | ||
| Take it away. | ||
| I was taught in school very young to be positive about things, so you see what they did to me. | ||
| You can correct that. | ||
| I mean, I think there's an element of truth in what you're saying that people go there now, I think, with a far more instrumental attitude about in terms of getting credit and getting great. | ||
| I mean, the question that every single academic hates more than any other question is, Will this be on the exam? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, is this relevant for our end of term paper or are we going to be assessed on this? | ||
| And you can see if a student has, say, ten lectures in a series, they will look and they will see which ones are going to be relevant to the exam or relevant to the essay and they only turn up for those ones and the attendance will really dip. | ||
| But, you know, I think universities do so much in terms of encouraging this attitude among students. | ||
| So, whereas universities go back 10, 20 years ago, would have, certainly in the UK, mid-semester, there would be a reading week and the expectation would be that there were no classes that week and students were expected to go to the library to read around the subject. | ||
| Now, at lots of universities, That's been changed and it's not called Reading Week anymore, it's called Employability Week and they get people coming in from local businesses and from national corporations and telling students what they need to do. | ||
| to apply for a job in a particular area. | ||
| Do you know what, the students mainly just avoid these things | ||
| because I think the students have got a bit of common sense and kind of either not terribly interested in just thinking | ||
| about that or are thinking, well, I've got a few years yet | ||
| and I don't know what I definitely want to do. | ||
| But the universities are sending out the message to students from day one, | ||
| you know, you're here to get a job. | ||
| This is all that it's about, essentially. | ||
| It's about job training. | ||
| And the really sad thing is I think lots of students arrive at university | ||
| with some interest in the subject that they're going to study | ||
| and some genuine desire to want to know about that subject. | ||
| And I think something happens when they're at university Either explicitly or implicitly when they pick up on this message, it's all about the grades, it's all about just ticking the boxes of what you have to do, and it's all about getting these employability skills, or this piece of paper that you can take when you go and get a job. | ||
| Yeah, how absurd does it seem to you that when you, so you take these kids, they come from this sort of over-regulated system, you've protected them from certain ideas, you then put them in a system where the grade is the ultimate goal. | ||
| I would say almost everyone that I know that I think is a good functioning person in society has either changed their career or is now majored in one thing and is doing something else. | ||
| I was a political science major. | ||
| I just said to Larry King earlier, I may be the only one that's using this thing actually the way it was supposed to be used. | ||
| But the idea that at 18, after Whatever education you've had, even if it was perfect in your world, that at 18 to 24 or something you should be able to figure out what you're going to do for the rest of your life. | ||
| What a sad state of humanity that is actually. | ||
| It's a sad state of humanity, it's also a sad state of education because essentially it means the university is a job training centre. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that removes any quality, any value from higher education. | ||
| But, you know, where I think, this is why I'm saying I think you're being a bit too optimistic, because I think, yeah, there are some students who are just chasing the grades, but for a lot of academics, it's actually, they don't like, and I sympathise with them with this completely, They don't like the idea that they are teaching employability skills. | ||
| This is kind of neoliberal, is the buzzword. | ||
| And they don't want to think that they're operating within this kind of marketized system and they're just training people up to go and get a job. | ||
| cash in what's known as the graduate premium and you can go and get your extra wages because | ||
| you've got this degree certificate. But the problem is then in opposition to that doesn't | ||
| stand let's teach subject knowledge, let's take all this wonderful, the best that's been | ||
| thought and said and let's share this with students. | ||
| In opposition to the kind of employability, certificates, grades, stands this values agenda again. | ||
| So this is very, very similar to what's going on in the schools. | ||
| It happens in higher education too, so it's things like global citizenship, responsibility for protecting the environment, again you get the sex education, the consent classes, and all of these ideas about how to be a good person, essentially, but not work out for yourself what you think is being a good person. | ||
| But it's somebody else's idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So in and of itself, those topics, you're not against those topics being taught, but it's the way that it's all sort of being put together. | ||
| You have no problem with learning about how to be a good citizen or something, but you should learn it for yourself or something. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I don't think you go to university to have someone teach you how to be a good citizen. | ||
| They can teach you knowledge, again, for you to think critically about, for you to come to your own conclusions about. | ||
| But the problem is when universities try and teach you directly how to be a good person, how to be a global citizen. | ||
| They are imposing a particular set of values upon you and as soon as somebody starts to teach values, what they're looking for in the students again is have the students demonstrated these values? | ||
| So critical thinking goes out the window because as soon as somebody starts to express doubt, so if you take the issue of climate change, Of course I think climate change should be a topic that's taught in the universities, but it should be a topic where students are allowed to think critically about it. | ||
| They can take the data, take all the scientific evidence, but then that doesn't necessarily mean that there's one right way to interpret that data. | ||
| Or one right way to act upon that data. | ||
| And as soon as you start moving away from teaching the science of climate change to teaching, are you a responsible, environmentally aware citizen? | ||
| Suddenly you're moving away from a kind of scientific, rigorous critique to ticking boxes. | ||
| Has someone recycled their coffee cup carton? | ||
| You know, has someone remembered to turn the lights off? | ||
| I mean, we're in L.A. | ||
| If you walk out of here with a plastic... I'll give you a little warning since you're not from L.A. | ||
| If you walk out of here with a plastic bag, you can actually be shot. | ||
| Legally. | ||
| They can just... Snipers are on the roofs watching out to get you. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So watch out for that. | ||
| So the through line through everything we're discussing kind of is that there really is a political agenda here is what it seems to me. | ||
| You're talking about just sort of this very early on conformity through these kids and then you throw them into these colleges. | ||
| Now we haven't even gone this far. | ||
| We haven't even talked about safe spaces and trigger warnings and all that stuff. | ||
| But you get them there. | ||
| Their critical thinking skills have already been degraded in a certain way. | ||
| Now you inoculate them from a whole set of other ideas And then you throw them out into the real world and then they will be obedient citizens, basically. | ||
| Is that a fair through line that I drew there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, hopefully some of them will fight back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hopefully. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| And I think brighter students do and do begin to think critically and do begin to challenge. | ||
| Although, obviously, it's far harder to do that if you haven't got a basis of subject knowledge on which to form your critical opinions. | ||
| The only thing I hesitate a little bit is I always used to say this thing, you know, when students enter the real world, They will have a shock. | ||
| I'm not convinced anymore that they will because you look, certainly in the UK, at the way so many laws are enacted to clamp down on hate speech, for example, and hate speech now encompasses misogyny, for example, so if you say a sexist remark, or even if you don't say a sexist remark, but if you say something that I interpret, As a sexist remark, and I kind of label you as a misogynist, I could go to the police and say, you know, you have committed a hate crime against me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you familiar with Professor Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto? | ||
| I had him on last week, and he's dealing with this in Canada because of a new law that was passed about gender pronouns. | ||
| And you can literally report people. | ||
| I mean, exactly what you're saying. | ||
| So this is endemic all over the West right now. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So I don't think, unfortunately, that there's this big shock waiting. | ||
| I think what happens is that the students are taking the attitudes and the values that they've picked up on in higher education and they are then changing the world in that image. | ||
| But also I think the thing that I need to remind myself of over time as well is higher education, it doesn't operate in a vacuum. | ||
| Higher education is kind of part of the world as well. | ||
| So Just as we have more censorship, a more kind of censorious climate and these clampdowns on hate speech etc. | ||
| in the real world outside the university campus. | ||
| So, too, does it feed into what's going on in universities as well. | ||
| So, I really find that fascinating because I say that phrase. | ||
| I remember when my parents would say it to me, oh, the real world, one day you get out of college, it's the real world, you can't do that anymore, it's the real world. | ||
| I've used that phrase about these kids, you know, that they're going to get out of these safe spaces and they're going to be in the real world and they're going to really be screwed. | ||
| But what you're saying there, really, it is much more dark and depressing because what you're saying is that this stuff has already taken root, really, in the real world. | ||
| So, the shock for them Would be if the real world was different, but you're saying it's not. | ||
| Well, yeah, but I think, I'm sorry, I might be jumping ahead a little bit here, but I think they do still get shocks. | ||
| And I think you see this completely this past week in the reaction to Trump's victory in the US, in the UK, we saw it in the reaction on campus to the vote for Brexit. | ||
| And, you know, They will go so far to try and change the world in their own image. | ||
| So in the UK, for example, we've had quite a lot of regulations that have come into effect in the workplace. | ||
| So if anybody says anything kind of sexist in the workplace, they can be publicly shamed for making such comments. | ||
| So these students will go so far to try and change the world as to how they want it. | ||
| But then every so often, yeah, these shocks happen. | ||
| And every so often, I think, like I say, Trump, Brexit being prime examples, students and not just students, I think even more to the point academics, administrators who are working in universities, then have this complete and utter shock when they're confronted with the fact that not everybody thinks the same way as they do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think, as we've seen this past week, they just cannot handle that at all. | ||
| Right, so let's talk about some of the students that are protesting right now, because everyone knows that watches this show, I am absolutely for free speech, I am absolutely for free expression, I am absolutely for protest, all of those things, for sure. | ||
| Where I would draw the line in this case is that you can't do anything illegal in your | ||
| protest. | ||
| So if you're blocking roadways and stopping ambulances from getting there, or even if | ||
| you're just stopping someone from getting to work or going home or whatever else, you | ||
| can't break the law. | ||
| You can do it in public places, you can do it in a field, at your house, you can organize | ||
| online petitions, etc., etc., etc. | ||
| What seems scary to me about what they're doing, putting the legal part aside, because | ||
| they are blocking roadways and things like that. | ||
| and things like that is that they're protesting right now. | ||
| They're not protesting an issue. | ||
| So they're not protesting a specific law that was passed that they might find unjust or unfair. | ||
| They're protesting the results of an election that no one is contesting. | ||
| Now we can have a whole discussion about Electoral College and popular vote, but that's not what they're protesting. | ||
| They're protesting the results 'cause they don't like them. | ||
| But I think you would argue that is a very clear and direct result of everything | ||
| that they've been taught so far. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think you give them too much credit when you use the word protesting. | ||
| You're going to turn me into, I'm going to be a little darker after this. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I think it gives them, it kind of gives it too much status to term this a protest. | ||
| I mean, I think it's something far more, and I'm going to sound like a horrible person here, But I think it's much more akin to a toddler tantrum. | ||
| I mean, I was very involved with politics when I was at university. | ||
| But, you know, we never had cry-ins. | ||
| We never had primal screams. | ||
| And what you've got is this kind of outpouring of rage. | ||
| The thing that worries me as well, and the reason why I think it's not political and it's not protest, is it's being described in this very therapeutic language of grief and healing and a kind of discussion about the need to share suicide hotline prevention numbers and And you're rewarded in a way for it, right? | ||
| You're rewarded for your victory. | ||
| You know, the more you're damaged by this. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think politics generally has become so confused with this kind of virtue signaling. | ||
| And again, you see, I think you saw this very, very much in the UK with the whole kind of leave and remain in the EU thing. | ||
| And this idea that your vote to remain in the EU, or I think in the US, you know, your vote for Hillary Clinton, Kind of is much more than just a vote. | ||
| It's much more than just a tick in the box or, you know, where you stand on a particular position. | ||
| It's about you. | ||
| And you see this in, for example, Lena, what's her name? | ||
| Lena Dunham. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not going to Canada. | |
| The Canadians are all cheering. | ||
| Yeah, they're happy. | ||
| But this idea that all of these things that go on in the world are all about them, it's all about me, and so if something happens that I don't like, you know, I am devastated, I need to heal, I need to grieve, I need to cry. | ||
| So the pain is all about them, but the excuse is always about someone else, right? | ||
| Because I even saw Lena Dunham tweet the patriarchy and all that, because I saw she tweeted just a couple days ago, right before the election, saying about how evil white men and blah blah blah, but my dad was an evil white man and they're all evil, and it's like, so you can revel in the pain, that gets you very high up in your virtue signaling, so that's great, but the fault is never yours, it's always the white man. | ||
| Well I think that's absolutely true, absolutely true, really important point. | ||
| But I think it's not protesting, it's this kind of just outpouring, nebulous outpouring of nothingness as far as I'm concerned, other than look at me, look at me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I wouldn't gratify it with the label of a protest. | ||
| But then I think the second point that you make is absolutely spot on because what they're essentially doing is complaining about people, complaining about the decision that people made in that election box. | ||
| They're not saying... There's no sense of analysis. | ||
| Where did we go wrong? | ||
| Why didn't we convince people? | ||
| There's no sense of reflection to think, well, why don't people agree with us? | ||
| It's just we don't like these people who voted differently to how we wanted them to vote. | ||
| Which is exactly how a democracy is supposed to work. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| I don't know if you saw President Obama's... I did, I did. | ||
| I really thought it was one of the best moments of his presidency. | ||
| He said, it doesn't always work this way, it doesn't always work out the way you want it to work, but we have to do this peacefully and respect the system. | ||
| And I thought, wow, maybe I've been too harsh on the guy because I thought this was so great what he did. | ||
| Completely, completely. | ||
| And he's come out and said some very sensible things about the importance of free speech on campus as well. | ||
| You know, what's quite sad is that we don't really get that in the UK, that steer. | ||
| Well, sometimes you do. | ||
| I mean, Prime Minister Theresa May, she came out and said the university shouldn't be a safe space and students shouldn't, no platform speakers. | ||
| But she says that, and I don't know if this is the same with Obama, but Theresa May will say that one day. | ||
| But then she's also been responsible for bringing in It's called the Prevent Strategy. | ||
| It's supposed to stop radicalisation of students on campus. | ||
| So she's also been responsible for an awful lot of the restrictions that we have in universities at the moment about who can say what on campus, who can come to speak on campus. | ||
| So it's almost like they want to react against students but at the same time they just want their restrictions on free speech. | ||
| How much of this is just all tied into, you know, I mentioned politics before, but really political ideologies, because everything you're describing really sounds like the roots of socialism to me, and you're trying to fight it back with the roots of libertarianism, or classical liberalism, or just something about your capacity as a human versus the system that's just trying to strip everyone of their individualism. | ||
| Again, you know, I'm going to sound horrible. | ||
| I wouldn't credit it as socialism or anything like that. | ||
| I think there are different ideological standpoints here. | ||
| Well, it's artificial standards. | ||
| It's artificial outcomes that are not based in anything which I would describe, I guess, basically as socialism. | ||
| I think it comes back to something that we were talking about a while ago in relation to parenting and the perception that you have of people. | ||
| And I mean, I guess I've never really described myself as a libertarian, but I guess where I could be caricatured as a libertarian is because I do think that I trust people, you know, and the reason why I like the idea of individual freedom is because I think people are best placed to decide for themselves. | ||
| What they can hear, what they want to listen to, what they want to read. | ||
| And this is why I would be very much in favour of personal liberty. | ||
| And I think so few people have that nowadays. | ||
| And I think a lot of the kind of safe space culture and the cause for censorship from both the left and the right come from this absolute fear of people and lack of trust of people. | ||
| So this assumption that if you hear a radical Islamic cleric, for example, as a young Muslim man, you're immediately going to be radicalised and want to go off and join ISIS. | ||
| But really interesting, there's a couple of articles in The Guardian in the UK today, but commenting on what's going on in the US and commenting on the alt-right and Breitbart, and they're saying that we need to be more concerned about the impact of papers like Breitbart and the Alt-Right and the influence that they are having radicalising young white men. | ||
| So these young white men, you know, they sit in their bedrooms on their own and they read these Alt-Right websites and they're brainwashed and they have no capacity to think critically about what they're reading. | ||
| They're just brainwashed and they're radicalised and then they become misogynistic and racist and anti-Semitic. | ||
| Because of what they've read online. | ||
| But at heart, this speaks to a complete lack of trust in people and a really degraded concept of people. | ||
| They think they're idiots. | ||
| So on one hand it's sort of there's a little bit of both there because on one hand you're acknowledging that the education system has led let people to a point where it's possible that you might just sit in your room read some stuff not have the ability to critically think so on one hand right like you're agreeing that that could be possible on the other hand it's such a discount of what our faculties are. | ||
| As people, what our sort of native ability to figure out truth and critically think is. | ||
| So that's a really strange place to be. | ||
| But I am seeing this all over the US right now. | ||
| Is Breitbart going to be the wing of the Republican Party and Trumpism and all that? | ||
| And it's like, well, there are plenty of propaganda things on the other side too. | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| And I don't have good things to say about either one of them, by the way. | ||
| There's this kind of assumption that you read something and then you immediately act on it. | ||
| I mean, there's been the whole thing in the UK following the referendum for leaving the EU. | ||
| Oh, you know, the Leave campaign, it was all based on lies. | ||
| And what's really being said there is, and all these people who voted Leave, they were so stupid. | ||
| That they could not think critically, they could not differentiate truth from lies. | ||
| They just believed everything that they were told. | ||
| So it's the media just telling them that they're stupid, which is partly why they voted that way in the first place. | ||
| So they're really doubling down on it. | ||
| I'm curious, so you've mentioned this already, but how much do you see? | ||
| Do you think that Trump parallel to Brexit really is just right there? | ||
| Because I mentioned to you before, I had Steve Davies on from the London School of Economics as part of our Learn Liberty partnership and it was right before the election and he basically said, Brexit happened so I think Trump can happen and that's why it really did sort of get me around to that that this thing was real and that's why I do not mock all of these people. | ||
| Do you think that those it really all of it was a confluence of basically the same thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I think there's lots of very interesting parallels that we can draw and I think the main parallel is that it's essentially Sticking the finger up to the establishment in both UK and the US. | ||
| We've had enough of being told what to do. | ||
| We've had enough of being told how to think. | ||
| And we, in the privacy of the voting booth, we will assert our right not to be told what to do. | ||
| But I think it gives Trump too much credit, and it degrades the concept of Brexit. | ||
| I mean, Brexit, the vote for Brexit, I think, was a vote for independence, a vote for freedom. | ||
| And the most important point about the Brexit vote was it was not for any one particular candidate. | ||
| So now you see Nigel Farage coming and having his photo taken next to Donald Trump and kind of chummying up and everything. | ||
| And he's trying to claim ownership of Brexit, as if this was all his doing, and as if it was a vote for him. | ||
| It absolutely wasn't. | ||
| Right, he was a piece of it, but he didn't get power because of it. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So lots of people, myself included, voted leave, to vote to leave the EU, without for one second endorsing Nigel Farage. | ||
| You know, we did not think Nigel Farage represented us. | ||
| We did not want Nigel Farage to represent us. | ||
| I hate an awful lot of the things that he stood for and yet still felt able to vote Leave because the vote Leave was a vote for independence, a vote for freedom. | ||
| For me it was about saying I want to be able to vote out the people who make laws that have an impact upon my life. | ||
| And I think that's a really basic fundamental right of a democracy. | ||
| If you live in a democratic society, if laws are made that affect your life, you should have the right to vote out the people who are making those laws. | ||
| And under the EU, we don't. | ||
| But that said nothing about what laws you do want to have, or who you want to be governing you, or what kind of system you do want to live for. | ||
| It was a reaction against, we want that freedom. | ||
| Whereas the vote for Trump is a vote for something. | ||
| It is a vote that's going to give power to one individual. | ||
| So it might stem from the same root cause. | ||
| There might be that same desire to tell the establishment we've had enough. | ||
| But they're very, very different. | ||
| That's interesting because I definitely think both were the the F you to the establishment for sure but it's interesting because you described the the exit the Brexit exit as it was a vote for independence I think you said independence and liberty or freedom and I think a lot of the Trump people would say the exact same thing so you're saying the root cause is sort of the same but but there's a real difference in saying this guy is gonna save me verse our system has to We need to change so that we can get the right people in, so we can have that discussion. | ||
| Would we want a Donald Trump figure or would we want somebody else? | ||
| That now, I mean unfortunately not now because we haven't actually had Brexit even though we voted for it. | ||
| The vote to leave opens the door as far as I'm concerned to have that debate about who do we want to run the country, who do we want to represent us, what laws do we want to govern our society. | ||
| Whereas in America, you know, you didn't have that option. | ||
| There wasn't on the ballot box, I want to throw the system out and have a new system. | ||
| We already did that with you guys 200 years ago. | ||
| So it wasn't necessary to do it again. | ||
| So even if these things aren't completely equal, there's obviously a lot of parallels here. | ||
| So my next question to you is, you know, I've spent a lot of the last two years talking about how I see the left going off the deep end here. | ||
| And it's really been explained perfectly by so many of the things you're talking about. | ||
| If we were to look at the left, In Britain, since Brexit, did they, have they taken a look at themselves? | ||
| Have they looked in the mirror or have they just doubled down? | ||
| Because I suspect our left here is only going to get further left. | ||
| I think it's going to get more violent. | ||
| I think they're going to put more, what you would argue are unjust or foolish protests, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So did they do any of that? | ||
| Was there any, nothing? | ||
| I wish. | ||
| I wish. | ||
| No, it's really, really interesting because obviously the vote leave for the EU, vote leave won. | ||
| It didn't win by a huge margin, but it did win. | ||
| Now, the Labour Party came out, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, admittedly late in the day, admittedly reluctantly, But he came out in favour of Remain, and he argued for Remain. | ||
| And, you know, everybody knew it was a kind of open secret in the country that Jeremy Corbyn wasn't really that enthusiastic about remaining in the EU, that he actually was, by instinct, somebody who wanted to leave the EU. | ||
| Why would someone that's on the left like Corbyn want But I mean, this is where you can get into the history of the left. | ||
| And I mean, I'm very deaf. | ||
| I mean, I joined the Revolutionary Communist Party when I was at university. | ||
| You know, I'm somebody who comes from a left tradition. | ||
| But you know, when I was very passionate about being a revolutionary communist, it was not because I wanted so much more state control. | ||
| I still believed in all the things about freedom and liberty and free speech that I believe in now. | ||
| But those things weren't seen as being Opposite to left-wing views. | ||
| It was not seen as being this huge contradiction and the thing that kind of really upsets me nowadays is it's almost as if a political right has taken ownership of things like free speech and academic freedom and you have to really make the case to people that Arguing for freedom and arguing for academic freedom, free speech on campus, are not inherently right-wing properties. | ||
| No, they're liberal principles, classical liberal principles, but I guess we've just failed. | ||
| I guess we've just failed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, they were. | ||
| I mean, the same with kind of economic progress or You know, wanting to build new houses, build runways, build infrastructure in your country, progress. | ||
| You know, that was at one point not a million miles away from what the left was arguing. | ||
| So the left has completely transformed. | ||
| So Jeremy Corbyn, I think he's much more of akin to a kind of Bernie Sanders figure in the US. | ||
| And he's from that type of generation. | ||
| So Tony Benn was another kind of hero of the left. | ||
| I'm dead now. | ||
| where these people came from a tradition where they did have some skepticism about the EU, | ||
| you know, where they did have some belief in human freedom and sovereignty and democracy. | ||
| But now they're kind of made to seem like relics of a bygone era. They seem to like | ||
| old and, you know, there's a bit of a cult around Corbyn for many people, but the ideas | ||
| that they propagate are kind of seen by all the PR types now who surround the Labour Party | ||
| as being too dangerous, too out there, you know, won't win the vote, so you've got to | ||
| rein it in, you've got to argue something different. So Corbyn came out late in the | ||
| day and argued this remain position. They lost. So you'd think then it would be a good | ||
| opportunity for him to stand up and say, well, I didn't believe in that anyway. | ||
| You know, really, this was my position, this was what I wanted to argue, but no. | ||
| So you've got the Liberal Democrats, a very, very ironically named party, and you've got the Labour Party in the UK, who, you know, seem absolutely determined to argue either for a second referendum or to water down Right. | ||
| So they don't like the results of an absolutely Democrat. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| There's so many parallels here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, if they wanted to connect with the people, to me, it would seem like the logical thing to do too. | ||
| Have that period of reflection to step back to think, you know, why are we so out of kilter? | ||
| And again, you know, you see this completely in academia. | ||
| So they did a poll of academics before the referendum, and 90% of academics were going to vote remain. | ||
| And obviously, they lost. | ||
| So you see two things. | ||
| You see how, on the one hand, how this kind of real chasm that's opening up between what academics think, what members of the Labour Party think, and what the general public thinks, and also this kind of real homogeneity within academia and within the Labour Party. | ||
| They all think the same and they all think something different to what everyone else is thinking. | ||
| So I'm going to try to spin this positively again. | ||
| I have a feeling you might be able to fix me here. | ||
| But isn't, in some ways, this is the greatest strength of our democracies, for Britain and for the United States, that all the establishment, the media, the elites, the people with money, the power, all that could want something And the people in our two countries said we want something else. | ||
| Now ultimately maybe Brexit will be a bad move, maybe the Trump presidency will be a bad move, but that almost everyone in the rest of the world would be incredibly jealous of the power that we wield over the people who control us. | ||
| And do you know what? | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| And that's what gets me out of bed in the morning because it's so exciting, that possibility, that opportunity that you can change the world. | ||
| But the problem is, you know, people have got this amazing power and it's so wonderful. | ||
| And I think it really should be celebrated. | ||
| Come New Year's Eve, you know, I'll be having a glass of champagne and saying hooray for these things because I think 2016 should go down in history as the year that people stood up to these elites and showed them, no, we've had enough, we want democracy, we want to have a say in how our lives are governed and we don't like the way you're taking us. | ||
| And I think that's absolutely glorious and absolutely something that should be celebrated. | ||
| But yeah, you can see then, so I described students as having a temper tantrum. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I think this is then what you're getting from the elite in the media and academics and the political establishment is this kind of temper tantrum then. | ||
| And you think if it was any degree of rationality, there would be this step back, this period of reflection. | ||
| Where did we go wrong? | ||
| You know, why have we grown so distant? | ||
| Why has this gap opened up? | ||
| But they can't do that. | ||
| They can't get beyond the toddler tantrum. | ||
| And it's just hull abuse. | ||
| You know, you're all sexist, you're all racist, you're all homophobic, you're all horrible. | ||
| And it's not working anymore. | ||
| And it's not working. | ||
| And that's why, wouldn't it be crazy to think if 10 years ago, if someone would have said to you, you know, the way that your side, your political philosophy is going to get a win is by Britain leaving the EU. | ||
| Would you have thought they were crazy? | ||
| Probably 10 years ago? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think the... I don't think we were even having those discussions 10 years ago. | ||
| Right, so the idea of it would have been insane. | ||
| So if someone would have said that, then you would have said, well, that's a crazy idea. | ||
| Because for me, it's like, if someone would have said to me 10 years ago, the way that the social justice worries and this machine and the elites and all that would get their first loss in a long time, their first major loss would be if Trump was president, I would go, first off, they told Trump being president would be nuts. | ||
| I mean, I would go, you're bonkers. | ||
| And yet, even though I didn't support Trump, here we are. | ||
| I see a great opportunity here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think the thing that's really interesting is how, on both sides of the Atlantic, the pollsters have got it wrong, have got it so, so wrong. | ||
| And I think there's two things going on there. | ||
| I think you create this climate, and I was speaking to people in San Diego yesterday at one of these anti-Trump protests. | ||
| And so this guy said to me, oh, you know, he voted Trump. | ||
| He said, my dad's told me not to tell anyone this, as dad was stood next to him. | ||
| You know, these people, they can get nasty if you tell them. | ||
| And I spoke to a woman as well who said to me, oh, I was independent. | ||
| And suddenly later, I thought, oh, you know, I wonder if she's saying independent because she doesn't want to come out and say she voted for Trump. | ||
| So when you get this kind of response from academia, media, you know, political elite, You create this climate where people don't want to say who they're going to vote for. | ||
| They feel they can't say out loud. | ||
| And so putting that cross in the voting booth becomes this complete act of rebellion. | ||
| So I think that makes it harder for the pollsters to predict how things are going to go because people just won't say. | ||
| Why should they? | ||
| You know, they don't have to. | ||
| But people just won't say. | ||
| But, you know, the left needs to look at itself. | ||
| Why have they created this climate, this censorious, moralistic climate, where people won't say who they're going to vote for? | ||
| But then I think the other thing that's going on is the pollsters People are so much a part of this bubble and so much just have their own ideas reflected back to them that they are incredulous that people can think differently. | ||
| So when they take these polls and it comes back, oh, you know, people are going to vote remain and people are going to vote for Hillary, they believe them because that's what they think themselves. | ||
| Feels good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they don't go beyond that. | ||
| They don't question what people really think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got this kind of growing gap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, on that note, I think this is actually all been framed in sort of there was sort of there's sort of a depressing state of what's happening here. | ||
| But but a hopeful future, because some of this stuff is being unfurled and people like you are out there talking about it. | ||
| Well, I think it does. | ||
| It creates a really good opportunity for people to say, let's go. | ||
| And, you know, the future's ours, essentially. | ||
| You know, we need to convince people, take people seriously. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| Take people seriously. | ||
| And win people over with arguments, not just through crying and banning things, but actually have proper arguments with people, rational political debate, and assume that people are capable of engaging in that rational political debate. | ||
| And you can't just hurl insults and cry at people and expect them to change their minds that way. | ||
| But it means that if you do take people seriously, you do engage in debate with people, it's all to play for. | ||
| Yeah, they might say some things you disagree with and you gotta be okay with that too. | ||
| Well, I always say, if I don't look down once, it's a good interview. | ||
| I did not look at those once. | ||
| So thank you so much. | ||
| I want to thank my guest, Joanna Williams, and our partner, Learn Liberty, for sending her our way. | ||
| You can follow Joanna on Twitter. | ||
| It's at jojowilliams293. |
Export Selection