Dec. 1, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the editor of Spiked Online and a true free speech warrior, Brendan O'Neill. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi Dave. | ||
| I've been trying to get you for like a year and a half. | ||
| You are not on Twitter. | ||
| What kind of human, in 2017, public person, editor, I hate Twitter. | ||
| I hate Twitter. | ||
| I think it's become incredibly toxic. | ||
| And it's become, it was supposed to be a tool of free speech where you could express yourself and say what you think and maybe even a space on the internet for people who have different, crazy or alternative views but in many ways it's become the opposite. | ||
| It's become a tool for shutting down free speech. | ||
| You know, the whole Twitch hunt phenomenon. | ||
| Twitter mobs, anyone who thinks outside of the kind of mainstream liberal PC box can be hounded quite easily. | ||
| So, I'm not a fan of Twitter. | ||
| Also, I have a short temper, just a warning. | ||
| Oh, then you're really doing the right thing. | ||
| So I don't think I'd be suited to Twitter because I would end up getting into arguments I didn't want to get into. | ||
| Yeah, for a free speech guy and an absolutist in this regard, the mobs and all that and the twitch policing and all of that, you're for them doing all that stuff. | ||
| You're not for stopping them doing those things. | ||
| You're just talking about the process of everyone doing all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it's a difficult one because you don't want any clampdown or restrictions on their right to be a mob. | ||
| You want to defend the right to form a mob and to say things as a mob. | ||
| But it does have an impact on freedom of speech and freedom of thought. | ||
| And it's a point John Stuart Mill makes on liberty. | ||
| John Stuart Mill often argued that the worst kind of censorship is not necessarily legal or state censorship. | ||
| It's often what he called the informal tyranny of custom. | ||
| Where there's just this expectation that you will go along with the conformist mainstream view. | ||
| And if you don't, you will in some subtle way be punished, maybe ousted from polite society, maybe a signal will be sent that you're not a good person. | ||
| I think the Twitter mob phenomenon feeds into that. | ||
| So in many ways, it can be a more insidious form of censorship than even government censorship. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting, because I say all the time now, it's that at the moment, and of course this can change, but at the moment, I'm not that concerned about government censorship. | ||
| At the moment. | ||
| That being said, what I am concerned about is that we're silencing ourselves, really because everyone is afraid of the outrage machine. | ||
| And that's why I've tried to consistently bring on people like you, who, although you're not on Twitter, who are just out there doing it, and you're still alive. | ||
| And as Douglas Murray said to me, the water ain't that cold. | ||
| You know, get out there and do it. | ||
| Yeah, I think the worst kind of censorship now is self-censorship. | ||
| Cowardice is a strong word, but I think with some people it's a cowardice about saying what they really think. | ||
| With other people it's a genuine fear that if they say what they think they will be hounded or demonised and so on. | ||
| Self-censorship is the real danger now and there's a lot of it going on. | ||
| People who are not speaking freely and openly because they fear the consequences and the consequences can be quite severe. | ||
| You can have your workplace hounded with emails saying you should sack this guy because he thinks A, B or C. Of course you can be hounded off campus by informal gangs of feminists or PC people or even trans people. | ||
| The government has no involvement in that but it does nonetheless have this very insidious profound impact on the general freedom of society and the general sense that everything should be sayable, everything should be debatable, everything should be up for discussion. | ||
| That idea is being demolished not by government jackboots but increasingly by these informal gangs of PC enforcers. | ||
| Yeah, where do you think that the companies themselves, the tech companies, so Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., what responsibility do they have? | ||
| Because everyone knows they have their own terms of service. | ||
| We're putting this on YouTube. | ||
| Nobody's forcing me to be on YouTube. | ||
| Nobody's forcing me to be on Twitter. | ||
| Again, you're not on Twitter, a wise man. | ||
| But what responsibility related to free speech do you think they have? | ||
| Because they've booted off some people that I think are actually decent. | ||
| I'm not talking about some of the people that are actually making death threats, which of course is a legal issue, but they've put some people like Sargon of Akkad, who I've had on my show a couple times, they've booted him off Twitter. | ||
| I think they have a large responsibility in relation to freedom of speech. | ||
| And there was a Supreme Court case in this country decades ago about corporate towns, which are these towns built up around corporations and so on. | ||
| And one of these corporate towns, or a few of these corporate towns, argued that they didn't have to adhere to the First Amendment because they were private entities. | ||
| And the judgment that was made in the Supreme Court case was that if you are a private enterprise which is so large that you legitimately incorporate a huge amount of public space, a huge amount of the public sphere in which people speak and in which people interact, Then you do actually have a responsibility to defend freedom of speech. | ||
| And I think that certainly goes for social media companies. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting. | ||
| Because that's now a public arena. | ||
| If you look at Facebook, a seventh of humanity is on Facebook. | ||
| Or Twitter, millions of people on Twitter. | ||
| Millions and millions of people on YouTube. | ||
| These are the new public forums. | ||
| These are the new public squares. | ||
| These are the new spaces in which people stand up, make pronouncements, get on soapboxes, hand out pamphlets, engage their fellow citizens. | ||
| So I think it's entirely legitimate to expect that the same free speech that we hope would apply in a public square would apply in these forums too. | ||
| So is there a little bit of a problem there, because we're gonna talk about your Marxist-libertarian views in a little bit, but as someone that at least going off the second part of that, the libertarian side, I know for me, the idea of having the government come in and now tell Facebook and YouTube what to do, even though I had my frustrations with them, I don't really see that as the answer. | ||
| What I see is the answer is capitalism and competition and let other companies come and hopefully, | ||
| you know, give a little competition so they have to give us a better service. | ||
| But I struggle with this one and interestingly, I see a lot of people on the right | ||
| who are supposed to be the libertarians and limited government guys, | ||
| calling for these places to be regulated, you know, sort of like they did to AT&T years ago. | ||
| Yeah, it's a difficult one because on the one hand, you don't want the government to tell these | ||
| social media companies to prevent people from saying certain things, | ||
| which is happening in Britain at the moment. | ||
| Lots of politicians are kind of ganging together to force Twitter and other forums to restrict certain things, hate speech and so on. | ||
| So you don't want that, but on the other hand you don't necessarily want the government to force these companies to preserve freedom of speech or to publish things that they might not want to publish as a private So it is difficult, there's no question about that, but my preference would be that we would encourage these kind of companies and encourage social media platforms to value freedom of speech in its entirety, which means freedom of speech not only for people who we like and who are agreeable and who are interesting and sensible and liberal and nice and so on, but also for people who are edgy and difficult and controversial and contrarian and maybe even hateful. | ||
| On the basis that it's only by having the fullest freedom of expression possible that we can all then work out what we think is right and wrong. | ||
| That's the only possibility of arriving at any kind of truth where everything is up for grabs, everything is stated publicly and then you trust the audience, you trust the viewers, you trust the listeners to decide for themselves using their autonomous minds What's good and what's bad. | ||
| That's the kind of culture we need to cultivate. | ||
| Yeah, is there a doubly difficult problem here? | ||
| Because also we don't know what's going on with the algorithms that these companies make. | ||
| So publicly they could say we're for free speech, we're for all these things, but actually they might be writing in code that could, you know, stop some of my subscribers from seeing videos or, putting me aside, could, you know, wipe out people's Twitter accounts or whatever it is. | ||
| It's like we actually don't know now the math Behind how people get information? | ||
| Unquestionably that happens and I don't have a Twitter account but I sometimes look at Twitter. | ||
| You can't live in the modern sphere without looking at it and seeing what people are talking about on there. | ||
| And what amazes me, if you look at Twitter stories for example, or the things that Twitter emphasises, it's always stuff that goes along with the Twitter mindset, with the Silicon Valley mindset, with that kind of fairly mainstream conformist mindset now you know they they emphasize the if Twitter has a kind of intersectional outburst and it attacks someone for being sexist or misogynist or racist and so on often overblown accusations Twitter will emphasize that up front it and turn it into the daily story so Twitter undoubtedly has an editorial input and control and in a sense you want to say fine that's | ||
| You can do that but then they've got to stop calling themselves the free speech wing of the free speech party because increasingly they do appear like a publication which just happens to let other voices chip in every now and then. | ||
| So basically what I'm sensing from you is that there really is no good answer here yet, right? | ||
| Because what you're saying is you want them to self-police, you don't want the government to come in, you want them to be transparent But you don't want to use force to make that happen. | ||
| So there really is no answer that we can walk away from and be like, well, all right, that's the sensible way to deal with it. | ||
| There's the idea that you're talking about that I like, the personal responsibility of the individual and the company, but that's sort of separate from what actually happens when the rubber meets the road. | ||
| There's no easy answer except that we should defend freedom of speech every single time it's under attack, whether that's in the academy, on some informal part of campus, in relation to the government, in social media, in the press, wherever freedom of speech is under attack we should defend freedom of speech and we should defend it for the very simple reason That everyone should be allowed to say what they want to say and everyone else, this is the part of freedom of speech that people forget because they always say, oh you're defending free speech for horrible people. | ||
| The second even more important part of freedom of speech is defending the right of the audience to decide for themselves what's right and what's wrong. | ||
| And that's the most important part because The problem with censorship, of course, is that it infantilizes people. | ||
| It tells you you don't have to think. | ||
| We will think for you. | ||
| We will decide for you. | ||
| And that really weakens people's moral muscles, weakens their intellectual muscles, encourages them to be childlike and infantlike and to never think about the world. | ||
| It directly feeds outrage culture, actually. | ||
| It feeds a very simplistic reading of the world, a very childish reading of the world and it dumbs down culture. | ||
| Censorship is a far greater threat to intellectualism and peace and liberty and all those things we think are good than freedom of speech ever could be. | ||
| So it's important to always defend freedom of speech in every sphere and through doing that I think we might eventually encourage people rather than forcing them To protect freedom of speech within the spheres in which they operate. | ||
| Yeah, do you think we're getting some wins right now? | ||
| I mean you're doing a tour with a bunch of people from Brett Weinstein and Laura Kipnis and Steven Pinker and a whole bunch of people in this space and you know I'm doing the college thing too and obviously Spike is working, this show is working, other people in this space, it's all working. | ||
| Do you think we're actually starting to win here? | ||
| I'm hopeful as a human. | ||
| I'm an optimist, otherwise I couldn't do this. | ||
| But there's so much bad stuff, it's hard to place it. | ||
| I veer between optimism and pessimism, which are both valuable emotions as it happens. | ||
| Optimism is good because you feel buoyant and you want to go out and fight in the world. | ||
| And pessimism is good because it makes you reflect and think, well, what's going wrong? | ||
| So I don't have a problem with either of those takes but I flip between the two. | ||
| On the one hand I'm optimistic because I see lots of young people and on this tour that Spiked is doing, the Unsafe Space Tour, where we're going to campuses and what we're trying to do in fact is move away from the pantomime debates that have been taking place on campus in recent years where Some member of the so-called alt-right will come in and irritate all the feminists and the idiots in the audience and then they will, you know, the alt-right gets a kick because they wind everyone up and then the audience members get a kick because they get to shout fascist at people they don't like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then all you do is strengthen the extremes. | ||
| You strengthen the extremes and it's all heat and no light. | ||
| And it's entertaining and everyone watches on YouTube and it gets hundreds of thousands of hits but no one learns anything. | ||
| So what we're trying to do with this tour is go onto campuses and convince people using hopefully intellectual rigor and substantial historical arguments and clever people that freedom of speech is the most important value in a civilized society and in fact civilized society is not possible without it. | ||
| So we're trying as best as we can to lift the discussion away from the rather pantomime black and white unhelpful clash that it's become, the culture war that it's become, to explain the origins of freedom and the importance of freedom. | ||
| And I'm optimistic because we're having a good reception. | ||
| I'm meeting young people in New York and Washington and other places in America who are really really keen on freedom of speech but feel like they don't have a place in which they can say how keen they are on freedom of speech. | ||
| So I'm optimistic in that sense. | ||
| I'm pessimistic In the sense that I fear that... | ||
| The argument for freedom is being colonized by people on the right who I don't think are always 100% convincing in their defense of freedom. | ||
| And the thing that particularly worries me now is the left's abandonment of the ideal of freedom. | ||
| I think that's actually the real crisis we face in Western societies now, which is that the left and so-called liberals, and you know the word liberal is about the word liberty, are turning their backs on liberty. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so I really wanna dive deep into this one, because everyone watching this, at least my audience, knows that this is where I've spent most of my time. | ||
| I came from the progressive world. | ||
| I wanted to fix the left. | ||
| Subsequently, two years later, after endlessly talking about this, I did a video with PragerU, which they titled, Why I Left the Left, because I've come to the position that liberalism, in the classical sense, the John Stuart Mill sense, no longer has anything to do with modern leftism. | ||
| So let's really go deep on this. | ||
| So first off, let's start with why are you, let's start with the roots of why liberalism should be connected to the left. | ||
| Let's just start there. | ||
| Well, the way I put it is that I didn't leave the left. | ||
| The left left me because the left abandoned everything that it used to represent. | ||
| And the way I see political correctness, which is this kind of rehabilitation of the racial imagination, so everyone is now black and white or man and woman, and this constant divisiveness and shoving people back into biological boxes from which they spent 200 years trying to escape. | ||
| Or it's illiberalism, so it doesn't want you to be controversial or daring or contrarian, it wants everything to be sedate. | ||
| Or even the modern PC people's agitation with things like economic growth or exploring nature or even, dare I say it, exploiting nature for the good of mankind. | ||
| That one can get you into extra trouble. | ||
| I mean that's super controversial. | ||
| All those things Suggests to me that the PC culture, you know, people call it left. | ||
| In my mind it runs counter to everything the left used to stand for. | ||
| I think it is reactionary. | ||
| I think if anything it's right-wing. | ||
| I happen to think left and right aren't particularly useful categories now, but it's certainly more right-wing than it is left-wing. | ||
| Do you remember a moment when it happened? | ||
| Because that's what a lot of people ask me. | ||
| They ask me when my specific wake up was or when your specific wake up was. | ||
| But do you think there was a cultural or political moment that really was the hammer that kind of whacked it and then started to go in the wrong way? | ||
| I think it's been a long standing process. | ||
| I think it's been growing for a long time. | ||
| I think you could even trace it back to the 60s when the left shifts from being interested in economic issues and the working class towards being interested in the new left. | ||
| Interested in cultural issues and the problem of advertising and consumerism and so on. | ||
| And that shift from being interested in production, how are things produced and who owns them, towards being obsessed with consumerism. | ||
| Why are we always pressured to buy things and so on. | ||
| And that was a very important shift from economy and power towards issues of culture. | ||
| And then that grows through the 70s and the 80s and it becomes the dominant theme of the left. | ||
| And, you know, the way I see it is, if I look back, because I still call myself a Marxist-libertarian, I partly do it just to annoy people because no one understands what it means, even I don't understand what it means, but I always considered the left to be Universal pro-growth, that was one of the most important parts of the left, and interested in autonomy, interested in pushing away all the priests and princes and bureaucrats who wanted to tell ordinary people how to live, and trusted ordinary people more than experts. | ||
| That's how I saw the left. | ||
| Now I see a left, a so-called left, that has abandoned those three things. | ||
| So it's ditched universalism in favour of the rabbit hole of identity politics and the rabbit hole of biological difference or historical difference. | ||
| It's ditched the argument for economic growth in favour of the cult of environmentalism and this idea that every single thing we do to the planet is destructive and maybe we should rein in growth and have less growth. | ||
| And it's ditched the argument for autonomy and the shoving aside of the bureaucrats who want to govern ordinary people's lives in favour of sacralising expertise and celebrating expertise and celebrating the state and the role of the state in governing or assisting poor people who apparently can't cope on their own. | ||
| So, if those are the three spheres of left-wing politics, and I think they are, which is universalism, economic growth in order to liberate people from poverty, and the idea that people can probably run their own lives and will make a better fist of it than government would. | ||
| I think that's what the left used to be about, going back 100 years, 150 years. | ||
| They've ditched all of that and are now very pro-state, pro-identity, pro-division and pro-planet over pro-growth. | ||
| That is what worries me. | ||
| So that's why I say I didn't leave the left. | ||
| I still consider myself a man of the radical left. | ||
| It's the left that has drifted off into a whole new territory. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why whatever it is that we are, whatever that is, that thing, and I don't even know all your political beliefs on everything, but I'm sure we have some disagreements, but whatever it is that we basically are, is becoming the widest tent. | ||
| Because I see what's happening right now, and it's like, we're taking in people all over the map that are just going, I just wanna live free. | ||
| But you know, this is the exciting thing about the period we live in. | ||
| This is where I am optimistic, and I'm generally very optimistic about where politics is going, even though it goes up and down and up and down. | ||
| You know, I still consider myself a little bit of a Trotskyist. | ||
| When I say this to right-wing friends of mine and kind of classical liberal friends of mine, they look at me in absolute horror. | ||
| And then I say to them, look, Trotsky was once asked, what does it mean to be a radical leftist? | ||
| And he said it means you want to increase the power of man over nature and decrease the power of man over man. | ||
| Now, I would live and die by that. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| I want to increase our control of nature so that we understand it better and we use it better in order to end poverty and so on, particularly in the third world. | ||
| And I want to decrease the power of man over man. | ||
| Fewer laws, fewer regulations, no censorship, no bureaucracy or far less bureaucracy. | ||
| So when I say that to classical liberals and right wing friends of mine, they get it instantly. | ||
| But what's really exciting about today is that I actually think The new alliances that are forming are incredibly interesting. | ||
| So I often find I have far more in common, even with people on the alt-right, or certainly with people on the kind of classical liberal right or the free market right, than I do with people who today describe themselves as left-wing. | ||
| I have more in common with the religious people in Europe who are currently defending freedom of speech far better than some atheists are, because religious speech is under attack in Europe. | ||
| So it's the new alliances that I find incredibly interesting and exciting. | ||
| And so I think a new dividing line is opening up and it's no longer the dividing line between where do you stand on the market or are you left wing or right wing. | ||
| It's increasingly a dividing line over do you trust Ordinary people to run their own lives. | ||
| And that sounds like a simple question, but actually it cuts to the heart of everything. | ||
| Because if you do trust ordinary people to run their own lives, you will be interested in diminishing government interference, defending free speech in all instances, because you think people can make up their own minds. | ||
| Diminishing bureaucracy. | ||
| If you don't trust ordinary people, and tragically the left doesn't anymore, you will be in favour of growing the welfare state, growing environmental controls, restricting the expansion of production and growth and everything else, and censoring speech. | ||
| So the key dividing line I think now is, do you trust people? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| It's such an interesting distinction you're making there, because the left, if you were just looking at this from higher up down, what the messaging is, it's sort of like, you're screwed, you're the little man, so we really care about you. | ||
| But what they're really saying is, give us power to control you. | ||
| These are two very different things. | ||
| And that's why I think so much of what's happening with postmodernism and intersectionality and all of this, is just lazy thinking. | ||
| It sounds good at first, like, oh, we're gonna give more money to poor people, or we're gonna, you know, if you're oppressed in this way, you should link together with someone who's oppressed in this way. | ||
| It all sounds kind of like it makes sense. | ||
| But when you get to that second layer, it starts peeling away pretty freaking quick. | ||
| This is the really shocking thing about the left today. | ||
| The left is now a movement against working class people. | ||
| And that is a turnaround in politics, which I think is historically unprecedented. | ||
| The left used to be a movement for working class people, which meant that it understood them or it sought to understand them. | ||
| It wanted to know what they thought. | ||
| It wanted to increase their power and increase their autonomy and increase their income. | ||
| That's what the left was born to do and that's what it devoted itself to doing for decades. | ||
| Increasingly, what the left represents now is it's a movement against working people. | ||
| So in Britain, on the British left, they now often refer to poor and working class people as the vulnerable. | ||
| And they see them as very vulnerable people. | ||
| Vulnerable to being exploited. | ||
| Vulnerable to the harsh vagaries of everyday life. | ||
| Vulnerable to the spin-offs of poverty and so on. | ||
| And so their argument becomes, we must protect these people. | ||
| We must save these people. | ||
| We must help these people. | ||
| What happens then over time is that it's less and less about liberating ordinary people, whether it's from the harshness of everyday life or from the dictates of bureaucracy, and it becomes more about mollycoddling them and building this therapeutic, bureaucratic scaffolding around every single area of their lives. | ||
| And as a consequence, these people have less freedom, less choice, Less sense of themselves as active citizens in the world. | ||
| So everywhere I look at the left now, particularly in Western Europe and the US, I think they are having an incredibly destructive impact on ordinary people's lives. | ||
| Which is why I still call myself left-wing, but I'm constantly conscious of the fact that to most people out there, perfectly understandably, they think that means I'm on the wrong side. | ||
| So maybe I'm fighting a losing battle because I'm trying to recover a sense of what the left used to be like. | ||
| I completely hear you, brother. | ||
| I like that you call that a bureaucratic scaffolding, because it's just this sort of fake, it's almost as if they've built this bureaucratic scaffolding on quicksand. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So it's temporarily holding this stuff up and controlling you. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's actually the foundation is sinking at the same time. | ||
| But you know what proved to me that the left is on the wrong side these days? | ||
| Was Brexit. | ||
| So in last year, 2016, 17.4 million British people, the largest number of British people that have ever voted for anything in history, voted against the European Union and for Greater sovereignty, greater popular sovereignty, greater democratic control against the EU which is an institution which is illiberal, undemocratic and also racist. | ||
| It has a two-tier immigration policy which allows freedom of movement for largely white Europeans while at the same time paying African dictators to keep their people out of Europe. | ||
| So this is an institution that I'm absolutely alarmed that anyone who calls themselves liberal or left-wing could support this vast Byzantine bureaucracy. | ||
| And that's exactly what they did. | ||
| That's what they did. | ||
| So ordinary people, 17.4 million of them, defied the advice of the establishment. | ||
| Pretty much the entire establishment was on their knees begging us to vote to stay in the European Union. | ||
| They defied the establishment, they voted against this bureaucracy, and they voted by implication and sometimes explicitly in what they said to pollsters, they voted for independence, for more control over their lives, for less bureaucracy in their lives. | ||
| It was an incredibly positive moment in British history. | ||
| In my view, it's the best thing that's happened in Britain in 25 years, politically speaking. | ||
| And it was framed as if it was some sort of racist. | ||
| It was framed, so what you have is the left instantly denounced it as racist, xenophobic, a new form of fascism, you people have been hoodwinked by demagogues, you don't know what you're doing, you're low information, this was the term they used, low information voters, idiots, imbeciles, you stupid people, how could you do this? | ||
| That, you know, there are many nails in the coffin of the left. | ||
| I think their failure to understand the positive, progressive component of Brexit might prove to be the final nail. | ||
| Because that was a very clear instance of people doing the things that people like us What I would like them to do is take a stand against bureaucracy and speak for yourself. | ||
| Be self-governing. | ||
| Desire to be in control of your own life. | ||
| That positive, wonderful Enlightenment idea which informed the left for at least a hundred years after the Enlightenment and then bit by bit they kind of lost sight of it. | ||
| That's what Brexit represented and the left's response was to call us, because I voted for Brexit, was to call us fascists. | ||
| That is the worst abdication of the left's historic responsibility that I can remember. | ||
| Yeah, and it's such an interesting way that they change words. | ||
| I mean they change definitions of words. | ||
| Fascist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were the anti-fascist. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You were trying to take the power away. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| But they consistently do this. | ||
| That's astonishing. | ||
| If you are in favour of freedom of speech, if you think there should be no controls on speech, if you think democracy is preferable to technocracy, if you think these things which would traditionally have been seen as anti-fascist, they will now call you a fascist. | ||
| They have completely bastardised that word and use it simply as a brand to denounce people who they dislike. | ||
| And you know, it's particularly pronounced in the campus culture wars, where those who defend freedom of speech most vociferously on campus are the ones who are called fascists, which is a complete reversal of what fascism is. | ||
| I was in Warsaw a few weeks ago at the Museum of the History of the Jews in Poland, which is a terrible history. | ||
| And what was amazing is that there's this whole room devoted to the Warsaw ghetto, where the Jews were piled in before they were all exterminated. | ||
| And what's amazing is that in the Warsaw Ghetto they had no free speech rights. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| The Nazis denied them any free speech rights. | ||
| And yet these underground networks developed and magazines and newspapers emerged like mushrooms after the rain, in the words of one of these people in the Warsaw Ghetto. | ||
| You know, at risk of death they published their own magazines, they published their own newspapers in bunkers, they stored them under floorboards, they secretly sold them on the street and they could be shot on the spot for doing this. | ||
| My view is that anti-fascism Fascism is freedom of speech. | ||
| That's what it is in its entirety. | ||
| Fascism is censorship. | ||
| So when I hear all these anti-far people and all these anti-fascists going around demanding the censorship of people they don't like, demanding the censorship of people who they find difficult or uncomfortable, They are behaving far more like fascists. | ||
| They are behaving far more like the rulers of the Warsaw Ghetto, who forbade Jews from publishing magazines and newspapers, than they are like anti-fascists. | ||
| And in my mind, anti-fascism, by which I mean largely the left, the left was a great warrior against fascism, was entirely about defending freedom and it was primarily about defending freedom of thought and freedom of speech. | ||
| Is the inherent problem here with the anti-fascist stuff is that The left, whoever the leaders are, whether it's in Britain or in the United States, that they've coddled these ideas for so long that they don't want to stand up and say to Antifa you can't do this because they don't want those tactics used on them. | ||
| When everyone's concerned about violence right now and how speech and violence are starting to meld together, if there was one organization that is creating illegal violence in the United States the most at the moment, it's Antifa. | ||
| one of the most underreported stories of last year was outside the Democratic National Committee | ||
| as Hillary was being nominated. | ||
| Antifa was basically burning it down. | ||
| The mainstream media barely showed it. | ||
| They show up to all these campuses and burn everything down and break store windows | ||
| and all that. | ||
| The right has its problems, and I wanna get to that too 'cause that's where you started here. | ||
| You're uncomfortable with where we've sort of been shifted to, which I think is really interesting. | ||
| But part of the issue is the left can't stand up to these people because they know | ||
| that they'll just take them out the way they've taken out everyone else. | ||
| Yeah, my view of Antifa is that it is absolutely the most ridiculous movement I can think of. | ||
| It is obscene in fact, because they present themselves as being in the lineage of people like George Orwell. | ||
| George Orwell left his incredibly comfortable life in Britain to go to Spain and fight physically against fascists and risk death. | ||
| Antifa right now is actually a very bourgeois, anti-working class, anti-democratic movement which thinks being an anti-fascist means getting an Uber into town and punching a working class Trump voter in the face. | ||
| That is incomparable to what the international brigades did in Spain or to what anti-fascists did in Greece during the Second World War. | ||
| Or to what German citizens did, who secretly plotted and acted against the Nazis. | ||
| For them to compare themselves to genuine anti-fascists in 20th century Europe is outrageous, in fact. | ||
| This is a censorious, snobby, paternalistic, ridiculous bourgeois movement which has completely lost sight of what it means to be left-wing and completely lost sight of what it means to be anti-fascist to the extent that they behave far more like fascists than they do anti-fascists. | ||
| They are censorious, they burn things down that they find offensive, they agitate constantly to shut down meetings, they heckle people so they cannot be heard. | ||
| You know who they remind me of? | ||
| One of the greatest things ever written about freedom of speech was titled A Plea for Free Speech by Frederick Douglass. | ||
| Former slave, of course, become abolitionist. | ||
| One of my favourite figures from American history. | ||
| He took part in an abolitionist meeting in Boston and it was shut down by hecklers. | ||
| Pro-slavery hecklers who invaded this meeting and prevented it from taking place. | ||
| Frederick Douglass was so shocked by this that he wrote a plea for free speech in which he said free speech is the most important freedom in the world and it's the freedom that makes tyrannies tremble. | ||
| It's the freedom that puts government on the back foot. | ||
| It's the freedom that keeps you as a citizen free and active and puts authority back in the closet where they belong, away from us. | ||
| That was an argument against the kind of thing that Antifa is doing, which is invading meetings, preventing them from taking place. | ||
| A very informal, mob-like form of censorship. | ||
| So that's what they remind me of from history. | ||
| They remind me of these right-wing Borderline fascistic, very questionable agitators who hated the idea of people having freedom, who hated the idea of people speaking freely and listening freely. | ||
| So the idea that Antifa is in any way progressive or liberal or decent is a joke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so to wrap this sort of whole first chunk together, I want to talk about this right part of this. | ||
| Because you said you're sort of uncomfortable with how this connects to the right. | ||
| Or where you suddenly find yourself allied. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not that... | ||
| I'm not uncomfortable to the extent that I can't cope with it. | ||
| And one of the problems I think among left-wingers who are libertarian, and I include myself in that number, I think sometimes they are so terrified of being called right-wing that they actually will end up ditching their own principles. | ||
| So they won't defend free speech as much as they would like to because they know they'll be called They'll be compared with Cato or Reason or some other group that they are a bit questionable about. | ||
| So it's not that I'm uncomfortable to the extent that I'm going to ditch my principles. | ||
| I would never ever ditch the argument for freedom of speech. | ||
| I think that's the key thing everyone has to do in the 21st century. | ||
| But it's simply that I think the reason the Right has managed to colonise the argument for liberty today, in particular the argument for freedom of speech, is not because they are 100% behind it. | ||
| And you can see that in the way in which they will agitate against the right of Islamists to speak on campus. | ||
| Or, you know, they will be quite favourable of punishing Beyonce, for example, for doing her Black Power dance at the Super Bowl, which Breitbart got very angry about and demanded an apology for. | ||
| And you think, calm down Breitbart. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Beyonce doesn't do apologies. | ||
| Yeah, she doesn't do apologies, and that's great. | ||
| So they're not 100% on the side of freedom of speech, but the reason they can appear to be is because the left has abandoned the field. | ||
| And the left has turned freedom into a dirty word. | ||
| And the left has given the impression that freedom is a right-wing project. | ||
| This is the great historic mistake that the left has made. | ||
| It has so thoroughly abandoned the argument for freedom of speech, and for liberty in general, and for individual autonomy, which actually used to be a central part of radical left-wing politics going back 150 years or so. | ||
| It's so thoroughly abandoned that the right can now step in and say well we are the masters of this argument. | ||
| So the left has totally screwed things up and granted the moral high ground to people on the right. | ||
| So basically by not playing they've just seeded the game. | ||
| Seeded the game. | ||
| So I understand that and I feel you're probably right in that but what I also found at the exact same time is that as I've had my own journey here and talking to people all over the map That I find a lot more intellectual flexibility with people on the right. | ||
| So if I can sit across from people that are pro-life while I'm pro-choice or even some people that are against gay marriage and I'm gay married or that I'm against the death penalty and that are for the death penalty, they'll at least have an intellectual argument about it and I see much less of that on the left. | ||
| Well, the perfect example of this, I was supposed to speak at Oxford University in 2014 on abortion. | ||
| And it was two men. | ||
| It was me on one side making the pro-choice argument, I'm about as pro-choice as you can get. | ||
| And on the other side was a right-wing man from the Daily Telegraph, which is a right-wing newspaper, who was going to make the anti-choice or pro-life argument. | ||
| Feminists at Oxford shut it down. | ||
| They said it was unacceptable for people without uteruses, which is how they described us, which I thought was quite transphobic, you know, to talk about biology in that way. | ||
| Should we tell people now that biologically you're a woman? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I should self-identify. | ||
| They threatened to shut it down. | ||
| They threatened to turn up with instruments, and they didn't mean musical instruments, to prevent this debate from taking place. | ||
| And Oxford, to its mortifying shame, agreed with them and prevented the debate from taking place. | ||
| What that told me was, here was this right-wing guy who's very anti-choice, thinks abortion is terrible, who was willing to discuss with me, and I am incredibly pro-choice, I mean, right up to the end, because I believe in bodily individual autonomy, he was willing to have that incredibly difficult debate with me, whereas the so-called left on the campus, the so-called Oxford radicals, Didn't want the debate to take place at all. | ||
| So I think you're right. | ||
| At the moment, on the right, there is more intellectual flexibility. | ||
| There's more openness. | ||
| There's more honesty. | ||
| And if I was coming of political age now, I would probably go to the right. | ||
| And I think that's where lots of sensible people are going. | ||
| And I perfectly understand why. | ||
| You self-identify as a Marxist libertarian. | ||
| I tried to work this one through in my brain for a little bit. | ||
| I've heard some strange labels. | ||
| I've heard some words that don't quite make sense next to each other. | ||
| I'm struggling. | ||
| I'm struggling to figure out how this makes sense. | ||
| Help me. | ||
| Well, partly I use that phrase because It confuses people and I think it's good to confuse people or to make them think, you know, how can this be possible? | ||
| How can these two terms go together? | ||
| And that's what people say and that's what people start to think about. | ||
| But the way I see it, you know, I'm always, with Marxism and the radical left, I'm like people are with rock bands. | ||
| I always say I prefer the early stuff, you know, before they went rubbish and awful. | ||
| And that's how I am with the left. | ||
| I like the early stuff. | ||
| If you go right back to where the word the left comes from, which is on the French Revolutionary National Assembly, the people who sat on the left side of that National Assembly in the late 1700s, that's why they're called the left. | ||
| Those people were incredibly pro-reason, pro-liberty, that's what they were fighting for, pro-autonomy, that's what drove them, and that's what drove the left, including the radical left, for at least six or seven decades after that, right through to Marx and Engels and the kind of mid-1800s writers and radicals who published manifestos and so on. | ||
| They were driven by a desire for greater liberty in life and people forget that now because of course we have this horrors of Stalinism. | ||
| The 20th century left is generally speaking a disaster. | ||
| From Stalinism right through to the left support of the welfare state and it's growing bureaucracy towards the left we have now which is indistinguishable, unrecognizable rather, from the left that existed 150 or 200 years ago. | ||
| But if you read, you know, When Marx was in his twenties, he wrote the best defences of press freedom you will ever read. | ||
| The Prussian authorities were seeking to clamp down on the free press, and Marx wrote these wonderful essays saying, look, of course the press is... | ||
| rubbish and tells lies and veers to the right and can be extreme, but it must, its liberty must always be defended. | ||
| If you read the Communist Manifesto, which I recommend to all your viewers, they must read the Communist Manifesto. | ||
| The first nine or ten pages are devoted to praising the capitalist class, praising them for the wonders of what | ||
| they created, the new system of production they brought in. | ||
| They're using... | ||
| Marx and Engels use incredibly un-PC language to talk about the smashing down of backward cultures and the spread of free trade and capitalist trade into all areas of the world. | ||
| And the way it creates the opportunity for a universal culture and more dynamism and more liberty and more choice. | ||
| So they spend a long time praising the developments that had been brought about. | ||
| It's hard to believe actually. | ||
| I don't think I've read it really since college. | ||
| It's hard to believe and it's always worth reminding people of that because the problem we face today is that we have a left that has utterly forgotten its political origins and its political origins boil down to their essence was how can we make mankind even freer than the capitalist era had already made it. | ||
| So there was a recognition that under capitalism we had greater freedom and choice than we did under any system before that. | ||
| Right, that's interesting because there seems to be no recognition now. | ||
| Now it's like that is the evil thing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Which is always coming from people that live in actually the freest societies on earth, ironically. | ||
| But you know the problem with anti-capitalism today is that it's incredibly... it hates all the things about capitalism that the early Marxists actually quite liked. | ||
| Which is international trade, the internationalisation of trade, even the consumer society. | ||
| In the Grundis, Marx wrote about the wonders of advertising and he has this wonderful passage where he talks about how great it is that capitalists are always using chatter and trying to tempt us towards buying their products. | ||
| He said that's one of the good civilising things about capitalist society. | ||
| And, of course, economic growth, the fact that people can buy more stuff, those things were the aspects of capitalism that the early radicals actually liked, but they didn't think it was enough. | ||
| And it's those things that the modern-day anti-capitalists hate, because what anti-capitalists... While they do it from their iPhones. | ||
| While they do it. | ||
| They say how much they hate it on their iPhones. | ||
| They actually, it's not so much capitalism they hate as mankind's ambitions and his interference with nature or his arrogance. | ||
| It's really human hubris as they see it that they are agitated by, not capitalism itself. | ||
| So it's a very backward reactionary movement, not at all like the early leftists. | ||
| Yeah, so linking that with your sort of Marxist-libertarian, with just those two words next to each other, so in effect you're, I get what you're saying here, you're sort of putting those two words together just to get a little conversation going, get a little bit of, look at a little bit of history and understand that not everything about Marxism, at least at the beginning, was completely evil and all that, but in effect, I think, you're making the great case for classical liberalism, if I do say so myself. | ||
| Right now, probably I am. | ||
| Because I think the crisis we face at the moment is incredibly serious. | ||
| And that crisis is a very serious crisis of freedom and a crisis of progress and a crisis of humanism. | ||
| That's the problem we face at the moment. | ||
| We live in a modern society which has lost faith in itself. | ||
| A modern society which has lost faith in its founding values. | ||
| Which are individual, if you look at the founding values of modern society going back 400, 300 years or whatever it is. | ||
| Individual autonomy, freedom of speech, the right of people to pursue happiness, to live independently, to make choices for themselves, the right to trade, all those things which were incredibly radical ideas when they first came about and remain radical ideas now, in fact, as anyone who stands up for freedom of speech or due process or free trade will soon discover. | ||
| They are still incredibly dangerous, controversial ideas even today. | ||
| The pursuit of The pursuit of happiness. | ||
| What a radical idea. | ||
| Incredibly radical idea. | ||
| Go live your life. | ||
| And you know what I love about the phrase, the pursuit of happiness, is that it implies that you have to find the happiness for yourself. | ||
| And you know, we have a lot of pro-happiness movements at the moment. | ||
| In fact, in Europe, it's now a government institution to increase happiness levels in society. | ||
| And in fact, the United Nations... Wait, what is that? | ||
| There's an office? | ||
| A happiness? | ||
| I mean, what are they doing over there? | ||
| In Britain, we have happiness advisors to the government. | ||
| And the United Nations now does this happiness index where it measures the happiness of individual nations and how it might be increased. | ||
| Which actually brings to mind Huxley's Brave New World because in Brave New World the terrifying authoritarian state is obsessed with making people happy because it thinks it can just manage people's emotions or tweak people's emotions and increase their joy of life. | ||
| But the great thing about the phrase the right to pursue happiness is that it says We trust you and we're going to leave you to carve out your path in life for yourself and to discover what makes you happy, to use your autonomy and your choice and your freedom and your interaction with other people to discover happiness. | ||
| So I've always favoured the use of those words together. | ||
| The pursuit of happiness is so much more preferable to this attempt to make us happy, which is always just an authoritarian idea. | ||
| Do you think that most people in Europe are actually jealous of the extra protections that we have here. | ||
| To me, the United States Constitution is probably the greatest document ever created. | ||
| I truly believe that the freedoms that it protects, that it guarantees and protects, This is as good as it gets, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, all of these things, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| Are you guys a little extra jealous of us? | ||
| We are a bit jealous. | ||
| I mean in France they have similar documents, the Rights of Man, and in fact both of these things come in some large part from my hero Thomas Paine, who's obviously from England, from Norfolk. | ||
| A radical who had to leave England because he was threatened with death because of what he believed. | ||
| Comes to America, works with the American revolutionaries, writes Common Sense which argues for America to break from Britain. | ||
| Then he goes to France and helps to draft the Rights of Man which is another great document of that revolutionary era which also says people are born with rights and you may not interfere with them. | ||
| I, as a Brit, or an Irish Brit, I am a bit jealous of what America and France have, which are these founding documents which guarantee liberty. | ||
| But you know, another part of me thinks they're not quite enough. | ||
| And I always think this when I come to America. | ||
| I always have this conflicting emotion where on the one hand I'm incredibly jealous of the First Amendment. | ||
| I've recently been in Boston and you see it chipped into stone and I love it and I take photographs of it wherever I see it. | ||
| I think these are the greatest 45 words ever written. | ||
| Congress may not interfere with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. | ||
| That is the best idea you could ever have. | ||
| So I love that. | ||
| But at the same time I think it's not enough. | ||
| And the reason I know it's not enough is because in the US people self-censor. | ||
| They stop themselves from speaking. | ||
| People are prevented from speaking on campus. | ||
| And I guess my issue with the First Amendment is that It stops the government from interfering with freedom of speech, and that's great, the government should never do that. | ||
| But it doesn't have anything to say, and maybe it's right that it doesn't have anything to say, about the bigger problem we face today, which is informal forms of censorship. | ||
| At the New York Law School, a couple of weeks ago, I was debating Angus Johnston, who's this anti-fascist, left-wing academic in New York, and he says he's a first- Wait, he's an actual anti-fascist or he's an Antifa guy? | ||
| Antifa. | ||
| Yeah, Antifa. | ||
| We have to be very clear here. | ||
| And he describes himself as a First Amendment absolutist. | ||
| However, he supports the new forms of censorship on campus, like trigger warnings or shutting down meetings that are too extreme and so on. | ||
| And as he said this, I thought, you know what, there actually isn't necessarily a contradiction between those two things, because you can support the restriction on any government intervention in | ||
| censorship while also giving a green light towards the more informal censorship | ||
| or the the tyranny of custom as John Stuart Mill called it which I think has a | ||
| more insidious role to play. So what I'm saying is I completely agree with you | ||
| that this document, this founding document of this nation was | ||
| probably the most wonderful moment in political history so far. | ||
| However what I think we've discovered in the decades since then and I think we've particularly discovered it in this young century is that it's not quite enough. | ||
| You know, Leonard Hand said this, one of your great jurists, 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, I can't remember, Leonard Hand said, there's no point having the defence of freedom of speech written on paper if it doesn't live in men's hearts. | ||
| And that's the problem we face now. | ||
| America has it written down on paper and that's great, but at the moment it doesn't live in the people's hearts and that's where the work has to be done. | ||
| Yeah, it's such an interesting distinction because it's almost like, it's so interesting, you're saying these are the best 45 words ever, and I think because of their passion for individual freedom, they probably felt we can't make another, we can't add another 10 words, you know what I mean? | ||
| Whatever those words would be to put the onus back on you, the spirit of it lives already in those documents, so it's like we can't add more, but I do see your point, it's interesting. | ||
| But also, if they had added something about informal censorship, that could have been a problem in itself because they could have been clamping down on mobs and the right of people to gather in public and say, well, I don't think you should say this. | ||
| And that could have been seen as a form of censorship in itself. | ||
| So it's a very difficult situation. | ||
| And I'm not saying that the Bill of Rights should or even could. | ||
| Have any kind of stipulation against informal censorship. | ||
| But I think there's a real great historic responsibility on the shoulders of those of us who believe in liberty, genuinely believe in liberty, to say that opposing the state is not always enough. | ||
| And this is where I think lots of right-wing libertarians come unstuck. | ||
| Because right-wing libertarians are obsessed, and in some ways rightly obsessed, with the role of government. | ||
| And they think, you know, we're charged too much tax, and they shouldn't take away our guns, and they shouldn't undermine our free speech, and I agree with all of that. | ||
| But they often have a very myopic reading of the crisis of liberty, so they think it's simply a function of government. | ||
| And they are often, as a consequence, insensitive to new forms of authoritarianism, informal forms of authoritarianism. | ||
| For example, Twitch hunts, groups of people, that general sense of conformism that now surrounds certain issues, which means that huge numbers of people out there, who we never hear from, are not saying what they feel. | ||
| And there was a European philosopher, whose name I forget, who says that this gives rise to a spiral of silence. | ||
| So that people just quite instinctively pick up that they're not supposed to say this in public. | ||
| And they kind of disappear into a spiral of silence. | ||
| And what happens, as John Stuart Mill said again, is that eccentricity of thought becomes more rare. | ||
| Daring thought becomes rarer. | ||
| And the problem there is that progress only comes through taking intellectual risks. | ||
| Progress only comes through people saying what they shouldn't say. | ||
| For example, that the Earth is not the centre of the universe. | ||
| When that was said, that was the most radical, controversial thing you could have said. | ||
| And if it was said today, if it was this climate, you'd be hounded on campus for saying that. | ||
| You'd be no platform, you'd be safe-spaced. | ||
| It's only through having the space in which people feel that at some level, whatever the risks, they should say what they think, that you can have human progress at all. | ||
| You know, the point I made in a speech at Oxford University recently is that Every single progressive leap forward, whether it's of the technological variety or the liberal variety or the social variety, comes from someone defying conformist diktat, going against the grain, saying something that they probably shouldn't have said. | ||
| And the more that we feel we cannot do that, the more not only are we silencing ourselves and diminishing public discussion, but we're also limiting the possibility of discovering new ways of understanding the world. | ||
| That's the real danger. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so interesting because I'm listening to you say all that and at the same time I'm thinking, I don't think there's anything they could have added or should have added that would have done it. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| But it's an interesting intellectual exercise. | ||
| Could they have tipped us off a little bit more in that way? | ||
| And maybe one day we can reanimate them and have that discussion. | ||
| Well, I think it is a difficult one. | ||
| And I think their key concern, and it's great that this was their key concern, was limiting the power of government. | ||
| And it's perfectly understandable that they did. | ||
| You know, most American colonists, or many American colonists, were people who had to flee Europe because they couldn't practice religion freely. | ||
| And they couldn't speak freely and so they had to go to this whole new nation and start doing it there. | ||
| So it's understandable that their great concern was restricting the power of government and let's be incredibly grateful that they did that. | ||
| So maybe their pressing concern wasn't with more informal forms of censorship or maybe they just thought that they couldn't actually put that into words without becoming accidentally censorious themselves. | ||
| Yeah I suspect it It's the latter. | ||
| Yeah, so I think the onus is now on us to say, thank you, that's fantastic, and we agree with you that Congress should never do those things. | ||
| But at the same time, we are now going to make the argument for freedom of speech in everyday life as a real, lived, felt experience, rather than something that's just granted to us by a document. | ||
| Yeah, well I guess that's what we're doing, huh? | ||
| All right, so we're doing okay then. | ||
| I want to shift a little bit from free speech and just hit a couple other hot-button issues. | ||
| You know, I read most of your columns, but this first one I'm actually not sure if you've written on. | ||
| Where do you stand on the the monument situation that we're going through right now? | ||
| The tearing down of monuments I think is crazy. | ||
| I think it's year zero stuff. | ||
| I think it's quite Orwellian, this attempted erasure of history in a very undemocratic fashion. | ||
| I think it's hysterical and deluded. | ||
| And I think what it really points to, which is the scary thing, is the expansion of the safe space beyond campuses into everyday life. | ||
| And so what you have now is a situation where not only do people on campus say, well, we don't want this book, or we don't want this speaker, or we don't want Dave Rubin, or we don't want this statue. | ||
| Get them off our campus. | ||
| What's happening now is that that idea is spreading into non-campus parts of public life. | ||
| And I think this actually points to the real danger of not Getting a handle on the crisis on campus, which is that you are creating a new generation which thinks that their self-esteem is so sacred that anything which interferes with it, whether it's a word or a book or an idea or a statue, must be destroyed. | ||
| And so we are creating this incredibly narcissistic, censorious generation who presume with supreme arrogance | ||
| that anything that they don't like or which offends them should be shunned from public life. | ||
| And unless we tackle that culture now, I think this whole situation of tearing things down, | ||
| silencing things, rearranging public life so that it never offends these kind of, | ||
| usually quite upper middle class, arrogant groups of people, that's gonna get worse and worse. | ||
| And to me, the tearing down of statues actually brings to mind what the Taliban did in Afghanistan when they ripped down the statues of the huge Buddhas, which had been around for thousands of years and which were an important part of Afghanistan's culture, or ISIS smashing statues in Syria, and Iraq and Syria. | ||
| And their argument, of course, if you read what ISIS says in its magazine, their argument is that these are offensive Yeah, and it's so interesting because I'm with you a hundred percent. | ||
| I am against taking all these things down. | ||
| between that kind of extremism and the kind of so-called left extremism | ||
| that we have over here. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so interesting because I'm with you 100%. | ||
| I am against taking all these things down. | ||
| I would argue that if you wanna put a counter, you don't have to put a counter monument per se, | ||
| you could put a counter plaque. | ||
| Yeah, that explains the history more I think maybe when I was asked this question once at a college and a student and I said I'm against all that a student said well Could you move some of them to museums? | ||
| I think maybe I could have that conversation for a while But it's only a small group of people that actually go to museums and you know this so there's a problem there But I'm basically with you, but even further I think If we allow this to go any further, it's already gone too far, right? | ||
| I mean, even, I don't know if you heard this one, did you hear this one about a week ago that they took at George Washington's church in Alexandria, Virginia, they took a plaque off of him because there was also a plaque of Robert E. Lee who went to the same church. | ||
| So they said, well, if we're taking Robert E. Lee down, we have to take, because George Washington was a slave owner. | ||
| And it's like, This is insane. | ||
| This is a guy who gave up his power as a commander in the army, right? | ||
| And then became the first president and all that. | ||
| But to me, the real issue is they will never stop. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| This will never end. | ||
| They will literally take down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial and they'll raze the houses of these people and churches and all of that. | ||
| You know what, I completely agree and it's the slippery slope because once you green light the removal of Robert E. Lee statues, for example, and most people will agree he's at least a controversial figure in history, in my view I would have been completely on the other side, on the side of the norm. | ||
| Right, so it suddenly seems like we're defending Robert E. Lee and that has nothing So if I'd been around then, I would have been with the North, I would have been fighting the Confederacy, and so on. | ||
| That, I hope, goes without saying. | ||
| But the thing is that once you greenlight the removal of any statue that a small group of people considers to be offensive because of their historical attitudes of these people, then there's no stopping it. | ||
| And the thing that's really shocked me is the attacks on Jefferson. | ||
| Because as far as I'm concerned, Jefferson is one of the greatest figures in history. | ||
| I mean, he's my personal hero of all of these. | ||
| Of course he made mistakes and one of his mistakes was not to grapple with the institution of slavery and he didn't know what to do about it or he was reluctant to do anything about it and there were other people at the same time who were saying we need to sort this situation out. | ||
| Yes he made mistakes but his contribution to history, his contribution to progress, his contribution to liberty Overshadows anything that these idiots smashing down statues will achieve in a million years. | ||
| So that's what's terrifying when it moves to people like Jefferson. | ||
| Because what that suggests is there's this insatiable attitude, this insatiable desire to tear down the statues or likenesses of anyone in history who didn't completely share our views. | ||
| And you know who that includes? | ||
| Everyone in history. | ||
| That includes everyone. | ||
| That includes the women who brought in the right to birth control, many of whom were eugenicists or had problems with poor families and black families. | ||
| That includes early leftists who made great breakthroughs for working class people but may not have had a great attitude to women, for example. | ||
| Everyone in history had different attitudes to us, and everyone in 40 years down the line will think that we had bad attitudes too. | ||
| Well, that's what I want people to understand. | ||
| You know, Barack Obama, when he ran the first time, was against gay marriage. | ||
| There are many videos of him saying marriage is between a man and a woman, blah blah blah. | ||
| Well, if we allow all this to continue, and then attitudes change, and then 40 years from now someone's going to watch This is the problem. | ||
| I think it was H.L. | ||
| So a Barack Obama saying marriage is between a man and a woman and attitudes will have changed | ||
| and progressives will have won and then what are they gonna do? | ||
| They're gonna blow up the Obama library that they're building right now. | ||
| Exactly, that's right. | ||
| And so this is the problem with, I think it was H.L. Mencken who made this point | ||
| that censorship and authoritarianism need to be stopped at the very start because they will always | ||
| And he said the difficult thing there is that that means you have to defend scoundrels. | ||
| He had this great word. | ||
| You have to defend scoundrels because authoritarianism is first aimed at scoundrels. | ||
| And you must defend their freedom because otherwise you will be screwed too at some point. | ||
| That's exactly how I feel when I see people tearing down Robert E. Lee. | ||
| I have to defend that scoundrel that released the statue of that scoundrel in order to preserve the idea that public space is not simply something that you can rearrange to your tastes. | ||
| History is all around us. | ||
| This is the great thing about living in an open, free, civilized society. | ||
| You are surrounded by history. | ||
| You are surrounded by the pictures or the names of people who in some way contributed to the society you live in, whether for good or for ill. | ||
| That's the great thing and it's always changing and shifting and you feel like you're in a living society. | ||
| This idea that those historic representations should be erased so you don't feel offended would turn society into this bland authoritarianism Kafkaesque nightmare. | ||
| And you know the other thing is that it's also incredibly paternalistic, because one of the arguments they use is that these statues are particularly offensive to minority groups. | ||
| So Oxford University, they want to take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes, who was a British imperialist, and the argument they use is that it's an environmental microaggression. | ||
| So they say that black students cannot walk past this statue without feeling wounded. | ||
| I think that's racist. | ||
| I think it is racist to suggest that black students have less capability of negotiating public life than white students. | ||
| So that's the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| It's the soft bigotry of low expectations, and that's a recurring argument with these new so-called leftists, which is a lot of what they're doing, in fact, rehabilitates the racial imagination, rehabilitates the racial divide, so that they end up arguing, in fact, in favor of black fragility, In a way that racists might have done a hundred years ago. | ||
| And so I have a problem with the removal of statues on that level too. | ||
| Yeah, you know it's funny. | ||
| I've mentioned this a couple times. | ||
| One of the moments when I really realized how messed up this ideology was, was a couple years ago when I heard Oprah say that, well we just need these old racist people to die. | ||
| Did you hear her say that, by any chance? | ||
| And I just thought, God, first off, these people who grew up in a completely different world, who are complex individuals, and we all are just people of our time with flaws and all of those things, but Oprah, you're going to be old one day and out of touch. | ||
| And should we just start exterminating people? | ||
| I mean, should we be like, you know what, once you hit 65, your ideas are so old, we're actually just gonna boot you. | ||
| I mean, I don't wanna give any ideas to these people. | ||
| Jump on it. | ||
| But one of the problems I have at the moment, I think one of the worst trends of our time is this sacralisation of youth, this cult of youth and this demonisation of people over 60 or even over 50 who might have different attitudes or different experiences or different views of the world. | ||
| That is incredibly pronounced in both America and Britain. | ||
| We've really seen it in Britain after the Brexit vote. | ||
| Brexit was more popular among older people than it was among younger people so we've seen lots of people arguing that maybe if you're over 65 you shouldn't have the right to vote because you won't live in society for as long as someone who's 21. | ||
| A profoundly anti-democratic argument, a profoundly anti-human argument. | ||
| It really dehumanises older generations. | ||
| And that's another issue I have with this kind of new authoritarianism, which is this implicit suggestion that the older generations are a problem. | ||
| Either to be re-educated or re-thought or ideally brushed aside. | ||
| Ignore them, don't listen to them. | ||
| And part of the culture wars, part of this creation of two Americas, you have the good America which is liberal and PC and right on and intersectional and usually quite young. | ||
| And you have the bad America which is traditional and interested in liberty, maybe a bit older, maybe a bit more working class. | ||
| The creation of these two Americas is really dangerous because It demonizes a whole swathe of the population, and it tends to demonize those who are rural, elderly, traditional, who believe in the right of free speech and the right to own guns, who believe that the Constitution should be taken seriously in its entirety. | ||
| Those people are now seen as almost sub-human, and you can call them fascists and racists and xenophobes and white supremacists. | ||
| Even if they are none of those things. | ||
| So that, the ease with which whole groups of people can now be demonized is another sign, I think, of how unhinged that kind of supposedly left culture has become. | ||
| Yeah, well, I gotta tell you, man, I knew I was gonna enjoy sitting down with you and, you know, because I read what you do and I love what Spiked is doing and I've... | ||
| You know, you guys are out there touring and all of that stuff. | ||
| I knew this was going to be good, but I feel like we got a good handle on some of this stuff in a way that for as much as I do it, I think sometimes there's some, you know, people always have more questions, but I think this is going to be one of the ones that I can link people back to and say, you really want to unpack this stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
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This is it. | |
| So it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Let's do some colleges together. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We should definitely do that. | ||
| We will talk about that. |
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