March 1, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:01:08
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I sent a tweet, it was last November, I think, about, you know the film Mary Poppins? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews, right? | ||
| I've seen it once or twice. | ||
| You've seen it, right? | ||
| So she ends up covered with chimney soot on her face, and so Titania tweeted saying this was blackface, and there was a picture of Julie Andrews with chimney soot. | ||
| This is blackface, it's disgusting. | ||
| And then five months later, the New York Times ran an article saying exactly that, right? | ||
| So I predicted it, and it's almost like, I'm not saying I've got magical powers or anything, but it is that thing of How can you... When real life is catching up with you so much, there's virtually nothing that I could tweet that eventually won't happen. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report, and according to the Senate Inquiry, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| Quick reminder, guys, that the Rubin Report app is here. | ||
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| For more info, go to rubinreport.com. | ||
| And more importantly than that, joining me today is a comedian, author, and dissector of social justice, Andrew Doyle. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Nice to see you. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| It is going well. | ||
| I feel this is overdue for many reasons. | ||
| Because, you know, as a guy that came from the left and started saying these people are no longer liberal and what's this social justice thing and intersectionality and all of it, you are sort of the king or the queen Don't misgender me, but it's one or the other, yeah. | ||
| Sure, I think I've- Of this. | ||
| You are the king or the queen of this thing. | ||
| I mean, I've heard that similar. | ||
| I mean, I'm accused of often going over to the right, which isn't really the case. | ||
| You know, I don't see, you know, I come from a leftist background, but I think that conservatives are right about some things. | ||
| I think left-wing people are right about other things. | ||
| And, you know, I think if you subscribe to an ideology wholesale and you just say, that's me, I'm going to agree with those points, then you're not really thinking for yourself. | ||
| and that scares me a little bit, so I don't do that. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well, we're gonna have to clean up some of that in the course of this next hour. | ||
| Now, I'm a little confused, though, because when we were pitched you, | ||
| this is your book, by the way. | ||
| Well, it's Titania's book, yeah. | ||
| Well, so this is the confusion. | ||
| So I thought that we were having Titania McGrath on the show. - Yeah, she's not available. | ||
| Well, she's out and about. | ||
| It's called "Woke" and it's a guide to social justice. | ||
| And I thought we were having Ms. McGrath. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yet here we end up with you. | ||
| So I'm a little confused. | ||
| Can you possibly dissect this for me? | ||
| Well, she's out and about, she's doing her protesting, I guess. | ||
| She's probably gluing herself to someone's front door who's considered a negative influence on society. | ||
| That's her kind of thing. | ||
| But actually, the truth is she doesn't exist. | ||
| So I created her. | ||
| You're blowing my mind, man. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's not a revelation, really. | ||
| It was April 2018, and I thought, I'm going to create a fake character to satirise the social justice movement. | ||
| Well, the excesses of the social justice movement, you know. | ||
| And so I wanted to do this sort of slam poet, very pretentious, young, Very narcissistic, very privileged person who wants to nevertheless say that she's oppressed. | ||
| So reveling in oppression and victimhood and all of that stuff. | ||
| This is quite a recognizable type of person. | ||
| Yes, I've seen one or two of these people on the Twitter. | ||
| It's kind of funny, you know, because there's a lot of them, particularly in the UK, there's a lot of these sort of left-leaning people. | ||
| They tend to write for things like The Guardian and The Independent and they're very all about their victim status but they come from sort of independently millionaire backgrounds and they don't see that that's funny. | ||
| I find that hilarious. | ||
| And of course they are funny and the other thing about them of course is they don't want to sit and debate and reason and talk and so therefore the best thing to do I think is mock them and poke fun of them. | ||
| And the hope was that if I presented their own sort of failings to them through this caricature, who obviously says things that are beyond what most normal people say, it is a sort of caricature, it is an extreme, but I thought it might maybe start some kind of process of self-reflection potentially. | ||
| It doesn't, it just seems to have got them angry. | ||
| Well, it's funny because when I see Titania's Twitter account, when I first saw it, so this is now a year and a half ago or so, it's hard to tell what's satire anymore because the things that you or she is tweeting about, they sound very much like the stuff that we're constantly thrown at by mainstream media, actually, even though you're trying to be over the top and quite absurd. | ||
| Well it catches up. | ||
| So I'm doing my best. | ||
| I'll give you an example of this. | ||
| So I sent a tweet, it was last November I think, about, you know the film Mary Poppins? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. | ||
| I've seen it once or twice. | ||
| So she ends up covered with chimney soot on her face. | ||
| So Titania tweeted saying this was blackface. | ||
| There was a picture of Julie Andrews with chimney soot. | ||
| This is blackface, it's disgusting. | ||
| And then five months later the New York Times ran an article saying exactly that. | ||
| Right, so I predicted it, and it's almost like, I'm not saying I've got magical powers or anything, but it is that thing of, you know, how can you, when real life is catching up with you so much, there's virtually nothing that I could tweet that eventually won't happen. | ||
| You know, when I did a joke tweet about the Queen, it was the Queen's speech at Christmas, and I was saying that she should, listing the things she should have said, and I was saying that she should have said what about the new royal baby and how it should be raised as gender fluid. | ||
| And then, lo and behold, that was raised by Megan a few months later. | ||
| It's like, well, you know, on one side it's funny, and then it also depresses me a little bit that these things happen. | ||
| Okay, so before we get too far into the psychology of it, can you just explain a little bit of your background? | ||
| As you said, you grew up kind of lefty, comedy, all of that stuff, just for the people that don't know. | ||
| Okay, yeah, so I've been a writer for a long time. | ||
| Well, I started out in academia and I wanted to get out of that pretty quickly. | ||
| What were you teaching? | ||
| I was teaching Shakespeare. | ||
| I was teaching the Shakespeare module at Oxford University. | ||
| Was there a connection between the social justice thing and wanting to get out of teaching? | ||
| Well, I was in Wadham College at Oxford, which is known for being the most woke Oxford College, before the word woke was even being used by most people. | ||
| It wasn't connected, no. | ||
| I just thought, I'm stuck in libraries all the time, it's quite depressing, and I thought I'd better get out of that. | ||
| So I went out, I started writing comedy plays and doing stand-up in London. | ||
| And then I ran out of money and I had nothing so I was teaching. | ||
| So I took up sort of secondary school teaching. | ||
| I did that for about seven years and all the while I was doing stand-up and all the while I was writing plays and writing stuff like that. | ||
| So that's my sort of background and I've been on the comedy circuit for a long time now, about 15 years now. | ||
| How woke is Oxford generally? | ||
| Because I've seen, I was there a couple times when I was on tour with Jordan and I spoke at Oxford Union and I thought the questions were really rich and interesting, but then you could feel that there is this strain of something getting into the oldest, greatest place of higher learning, like this scary thing. | ||
| There's evidence to suggest that the most privileged students, the most privileged people, the richest in other words, are far more likely to be social justice activists, right? | ||
| And Spiked Online does a survey of universities every year and every single year it's determined that the ones that are the worst offenders when it comes to censorship, when it comes to free speech, tend to be from the kids who are the poshest, who have the most stuff, right? | ||
| So it's not really surprising that you get the The woke elements at Oxford. | ||
| But as a kind of caveat to that, what I would say is, you know, I do talks at universities around the country, and what I've noticed is the kids are often great, and they're often not these sort of snowflakes that people make them out to be. | ||
| They want to be challenged. | ||
| I mean, a number of the people that I've spoken to, they want to be challenged, they want to hear the other side, even if they don't necessarily agree. | ||
| It's generally the academics I did a talk at a university recently where the students were great, they wanted to be challenged, but then the politics department refused to publicise my appearance because they said any talk that was antithetical to woke culture was against their diversity policy. | ||
| So they boycotted it completely. | ||
| So I often find it's my generation that are the worst when it comes to this stuff. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| I'm 41. | ||
| If you don't mind me asking, you're a Gen Xer. | ||
| I'm a Gen Xer, yeah. | ||
| It's so interesting, because I agree with that, even though we see the snowflakes at colleges and the screaming people and the memes of all that stuff, that it does seem to really come from the academic layer. | ||
| I was given a talk about six months ago at a school, And a guy came up to me after, he was older than an average college student, and he told me that he was a veteran, and he started college late. | ||
| He said that he was in a philosophy class earlier in the day, and the philosophy professor instructed them not to go to Dave Rubin's alt-right talk that evening. | ||
| And he said, I'm a little older than these students, so I didn't want to embarrass the teacher in front of the class, so I went up to him after, and I said, can you tell me what alt-right opinions And the professor basically said, well, I don't know, but I've read that. | ||
| And he was like, I tried to ask, get the professor to come here, but then of course he wouldn't come and the rest of it. | ||
| But yeah, the idea that they're just being hit with this stuff when they're the most impressionable. | ||
| Exactly, but some of the university professors, I think it takes a certain degree of education to say things like that because it's stupidity. | ||
| It's a kind of learned stupidity, which is really, it's really odd, isn't it? | ||
| And I think it's because when I was at university, there was all this kind of post-structuralism. | ||
| There was all this kind of focus on Derrida and Foucault and all that kind of thing. | ||
| And it was sort of dying off a few years ago. | ||
| And now that's gone mainstream. | ||
| And I don't know why. | ||
| I find that really weird. | ||
| Do you have suspicions as to why it's gone mainstream? | ||
| Any theories? | ||
| I don't know why, and I'm often asking this question. | ||
| I do want to know what it is. | ||
| I can't fathom it, actually. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It involves a kind of substitution of slogans for a lack of thought. | ||
| You know, so you get these phrases like lived experience. | ||
| So all of the phrases that are right here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what this means is, you know, when you discuss this stuff with a social justice activist, When I talk to a social justice activist, I know what their opinion is about absolutely everything. | ||
| As soon as they've said one thing, they're just repeating a script. | ||
| And that to me is really, that's not freedom of thought, right? | ||
| That's an ideological adherence. | ||
| And they use these phrases, and then when you challenge them on the phrases, they don't know what to do with that. | ||
| To them, lived experience is just, well that ends the discussion, right? | ||
| Well actually, lived experience, we used to call that anecdotal evidence. | ||
| And we used to dismiss it, you know? | ||
| But now it actually has some kind of weird weight. | ||
| If you come up with these sort of phrases, these sort of phrases that have this kind of academic sound about them, this jargon, this intersectional quality, it's a way of giving weight or ostensible weight to very flimsy ideas, that's what it is. | ||
| So it's like a kind of substitute for thought. | ||
| So before we go too far into those flimsy ideas, and I've listed all the words that you've got on the book here, and I wanna get your take on all of these things. | ||
| But just for the few people that might be watching this go, oh, Rubin's got another right winger on to talk about how evil the social justice warriors are. | ||
| When you say you come sort of from the left, from a UK perspective, What does that actually mean? | ||
| And maybe how is that a little different than the American perspective? | ||
| Well, liberal means something different in the UK. | ||
| I mean, bottom line, I guess where I fall on the spectrum, well, firstly, what I should say is I don't think there's anything wrong with being conservative. | ||
| So when people say I'm a conservative, I'm like, well, so what? | ||
| You know, that's fine. | ||
| I don't happen to be, but I don't see an issue if I were. | ||
| If I were, I would just own the label. | ||
| It's not a problem. | ||
| It took me a long time to get to that part. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Well, but you know what it is? | ||
| Partly it's because they first call you a series of other much worse, so they call you far-right and alt-right, and then when the average person realizes that doesn't stick, then they just throw conservative, and then at that point it's like, all right, you want to call me conservative? | ||
| Well, they throw those words because they don't know what they mean. | ||
| I mean, alt-right, it's really easy to check, you know, alt-right is white nationalist, you know, then you can't get away from those connotations. | ||
| Yeah, so you're not... | ||
| White nationalist. | ||
| So you can take that one off. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So yeah, so if I was to say, where am I politically? | ||
| It's somewhere between what we'd say social liberalism and socialism. | ||
| Somewhere dancing around that, but I'm quite culturally conservative, so there's elements of that as well. | ||
| But I guess I, you know, I believe in the welfare state. | ||
| I believe in proportionate taxation for people who are earning more. | ||
| Not to excess, but just enough to kind of... So you're definitely more left-wing Right, sure. | ||
| I'll give it to you. | ||
| Kind of just to curb the excesses of capitalism but not to get rid of it entirely. | ||
| I believe in equality of opportunity. | ||
| I believe in social equal rights and human rights and so all of those sort of things which I think on the whole put me in that left-wing bracket. | ||
| I'm not instinctively nationalistic although I understand why people are. | ||
| I just don't have that in me but I don't think it's a poisonous thing. | ||
| So is the problem for someone that holds those sort of, so what that sounds to me is sort of like an old school Democrat. | ||
| You want some social programs and curb what you might see are the excesses of capitalism. | ||
| But I also want to curb the excesses of the state. | ||
| Like I don't trust the state. | ||
| Right, so that's sort of interesting, because it's sort of like, that to me is what we would call here a blue dog Democrat, that you don't want the state to do everything. | ||
| We don't really have those Democrats anymore. | ||
| I want the state to stay out of people's private lives. | ||
| You know, I find that In the UK, they've already proven that they can't be trusted on all sorts of issues. | ||
| The fact that they're criminalizing people who tell certain jokes, for instance. | ||
| The fact that they don't see the difference between a joke and the literal truth. | ||
| That means that to me, I don't want them getting involved in curbing people's speech. | ||
| And I think that the free speech... I mean, you've got a First Amendment, you're okay. | ||
| Yeah, for now. | ||
| We don't have that. | ||
| And we have an unwritten constitution, which means it's constantly being reinterpreted, and sometimes quite badly. | ||
| So as a free speech guy and a guy that's out there doing pretty controversial stuff, how cognizant are you aware that you don't have the First Amendment, right? | ||
| So comedians here, you can say whatever you want. | ||
| Every time Trump tweets, these edgy comedians tweet, they tell him to go kiss off or whatever they say. | ||
| And Trump doesn't send the police, the Gestapo doesn't knock on the door, you're good to go. | ||
| But in the UK, you don't have certain protections. | ||
| Okay, so it doesn't affect me so much. | ||
| So I've never made the claim that I'm being silenced, right? | ||
| I'm actually in a really privileged position. | ||
| I don't have a boss. | ||
| I can say whatever I want. | ||
| I'm a comedian and a writer, so I do say whatever I want. | ||
| I've never felt that I'm being censored. | ||
| The concern is that actually the people who do... I mean, look, say if I was still a teacher. | ||
| Could I send the tweets that I send at the moment? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I would get in a lot of trouble. | ||
| I know people who have got in trouble at work because of jokes they've made or things that have been misconstrued. | ||
| A lot of people over in the UK are now talking to their friends at work over WhatsApp, which means that their jokes get encrypted, right? | ||
| So that's really weird, isn't it? | ||
| The idea that you must encrypt your jokes in case they're overheard. | ||
| Encrypted by a company that's owned by Facebook. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| So I mean, on the whole, I think we do have freedom of speech. | ||
| I don't think there's a big freedom of speech crisis. | ||
| What I mean is, you have to be vigilant about it. | ||
| You have to be careful and you have to stand up. | ||
| And we've got a situation where the police are... There was a guy in Humberside who retweeted a poem which was deemed to be transphobic. | ||
| And then the police phoned him up and said, we need to check your thinking on this. | ||
| And he said, well, what's my crime? | ||
| And they said, and I'm not kidding, they said, this is a non-crime hate incident. | ||
| And that's standard police practice. | ||
| So that's a worry. | ||
| Well, so every few weeks I see one of those tweets. | ||
| It's usually from the Sussex Police, right? | ||
| Is that who it is? | ||
| Oh, it's all over the place. | ||
| I mean, it's West Yorkshire Police. | ||
| It's been the Glasgow Police as well. | ||
| It's various police departments. | ||
| They literally tweet out things like, if someone that you know said something that you might've taken offense to, please let us know. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I mean, how much more Orwellian can you get? | ||
| Right, and you know, whenever you use that word Orwellian, people say you're being cliched, but there is no other word for it. | ||
| What else are you going to call it? | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| So while I'm saying, you know, this isn't to the point of a kind of authoritarian state, right? | ||
| But when you see these things, you have to stand up and say, no, we can't have this. | ||
| We've got to get rid of this. | ||
| And if you don't, that's where the slippery slope begins. | ||
| Well, do you think it's partially that people just don't stand up? | ||
| So for example, you keep doing what you're doing. | ||
| We know Douglas Murray and Peter Lloyd and Paul Joseph Watson. | ||
| I mean, there's plenty of people all over the political spectrum that do stand up to it. | ||
| They haven't grabbed people and brought them to the gulags yet, but it's just like, we just need more people to stand up and then they'll kind of paper tiger disappear. | ||
| The trick is you've got to stand up for people you don't like. | ||
| I understand why people don't want to stand up for the right thing. | ||
| There's a thing called preference falsification where you say what you think is going to be best received as opposed to what you actually think. | ||
| I understand that impulse. | ||
| It's a protection, isn't it? | ||
| It's a kind of shield. | ||
| But if everyone was a bit more courageous... When I defend someone's right to say something and I don't like what they've said, Invariably I get told that I'm endorsing what they've said. | ||
| So this is fundamental misunderstanding. | ||
| I think generally with free speech is a kind of fundamental misunderstanding of what it is, you know. | ||
| Nobody is saying there shouldn't be consequences to speech. | ||
| Nobody is saying that. | ||
| They're saying that if you're consequent, if you want to argue back, ridicule, whatever, you know, that's protesting. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Great. | ||
| All for it, right? | ||
| It's when you get the police involved, you know, and it's not the same as perjury or libel laws or those kind of things which are all harassment or which are already covered by law, you know. | ||
| And the other one I get all the time is, well, you can't shout fire in a theatre. | ||
| Actually, you can, but you're a bit of a dickhead, and to be honest, if you do that, the theatre authorities are well within their rights to ask you to leave. | ||
| Right, there's a little confusion, like some legal confusion that has sort of become lore about the fire in a crowded theatre. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| You can't incite a riot, basically. | ||
| So, with the incitement of violence thing, I imagine there are circumstances where there's a mob and someone's talking to the mob and saying, go and get that person. | ||
| Yeah, well that you can't do. | ||
| Right, sure. | ||
| So we have laws that cover incitement to violence. | ||
| But the trouble is, this is another example of the state getting it wrong. | ||
| So recently we had a debate in the UK Parliament because Boris Johnson and the Conservatives were using language like the Surrender Bill to describe a bill that relates to the Brexit negotiations. | ||
| And they were accused of using military language which incites violence. | ||
| It's called a metaphor, right? | ||
| Honestly, like so many people on the sort of liberal left social justice group, they don't understand basic metaphor. | ||
| They don't understand it. | ||
| They don't understand jokes, right? | ||
| They take them completely literally, right? | ||
| There's an example of this. | ||
| So there's a comedian called Andrew Lawrence in the UK who posted a joke online. | ||
| And I'll say what the joke is, probably is offensive, right? | ||
| So this was the joke. | ||
| So the joke... | ||
| Yeah, brace yourself, right? | ||
| So the joke was basically that the statistics on suicide between men and women are not comparable. | ||
| And so, you know, more men kill themselves than women. | ||
| So therefore, if feminists really care about equality, they should kill themselves, right? | ||
| Now, it's not the joke and it's not people being offended. | ||
| I think people should be allowed to be offended and they've got the right to be offended. | ||
| That's not the issue. | ||
| There was a petition which called for him to be, you know, deplatformed from the BBC, even prosecuted. | ||
| And what they said was this was inciting women to kill themselves. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Now, if your opinion of women is that low, that you think they're so stupid that there's just these little drones that just will kill themselves if they hear a joke about it. | ||
| And that concerns me, this kind of literal mindedness about metaphor, about jokes, about art. | ||
| You know, you get that in Hollywood all the time. | ||
| Like, we need to represent women in a certain way. | ||
| So let's make the Charlie's Angels reboot, which nobody wants to see because it's clearly social engineering. | ||
| It's clearly, you people, you think the wrong way and we're the Hollywood people and we're going to tell you how you should be thinking. | ||
| That is rebarbative to people. | ||
| It just puts people off. | ||
| It's so interesting, this idea that we have to take all of these old movies that were classics and then just remake them with women as if the women can't watch the old ones or appreciate them. | ||
| I mean, the Ghostbusters is the easiest example. | ||
| When they did the all-woman remake, I watched it. | ||
| I have no problem watching an all-woman cast of Ghostbusters, but the movie was freaking horrible. | ||
| No one cares about this stuff. | ||
| This is the thing about this. | ||
| You don't need to educate these fans, particularly science fiction fans, particularly comic book fans. | ||
| They've done this a lot with changing the genders and the race and the sexual orientation of various major characters. | ||
| These are already the outsiders, these comic book fans. | ||
| These are people who have no issues with this. | ||
| It's like a school mistress finger-pointing and jabbing at people when they don't need that education. | ||
| It generates a lot of resentment. | ||
| People hate it. | ||
| Do you think it's also sort of funny, I think especially with the gay thing, the way that they sneak in these messages? | ||
| So it's like, the two that I could think of, and I'm sure you have like a gajillion more, but the two that really struck me as like, they're just like smacking you with this in the worst way, is in Avengers Endgame. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| the one gay character was just the guy in rehab, who I guess maybe went on a date with a guy | ||
| and Captain America's like, "Good for you." | ||
| Like that, so that was throwing the gays like the tiniest bone. | ||
| No pun intended, it was just like, "Ah, see, we did something gay. | ||
| "It has nothing to do with the superheroes "or anyone you give a shit about, but it's something gay." | ||
| And then the other one was in "Rise of Skywalker," | ||
| where at the end, that woman has that lesbian kiss and it's like, again, it's not a real character, | ||
| it's not anyone anyone cares about, but we did something for the gays. | ||
| So it's just like, take our little pity. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
| But also, like, the gays don't need your pity, right? | ||
| I don't need to see pink stormtroopers, and I don't need to see gay people in Star Wars for me to feel okay about stuff, you know? | ||
| Anyway, there's been C-3PO for years, there has been gay representation in all of the Star Wars films. | ||
| Him and RTD2 have been in a robo-sexual relationship? | ||
| Yeah, quite explicit, yeah. | ||
| And I don't need to see that. | ||
| I mean, they did the same with Avengers, like you say. | ||
| They did the same with the JK Rowling, the Fantastic Beasts stuff. | ||
| And they were saying that it wasn't gay enough. | ||
| He said, "This is the point. | ||
| "So you've got Dumbledore, "but it's not explicitly gay enough. | ||
| "What do you wanna see him as someone?" | ||
| Right, you wanna see him-- | ||
| I don't know, getting fisted or something like that? | ||
| I mean, is that really what you need? | ||
| Can I say that? | ||
| Sorry, I don't know. - You can, you can. | ||
| You can say that. - I mean, I don't need to-- | ||
| I don't know that people wanna hear you say it, but-- | ||
| No, I know, sure. - You can, Dumbledore getting fisted is not-- (laughing) | ||
| I don't, right, I think it's really patronizing. | ||
| Yeah, I think ultimately that's what it is Like so so much of what drives what I do is I hate the way these people patronize minority groups I hate that because I think they're it's the opposite of what they say it is, right? | ||
| So if you claim to be fourth wave feminism, right which claims to be all about empowerment of women It's not it's about treating them like children It's about victimizing them. | ||
| It's actually genuinely misogynistic, but it's sort of papered over with this kind of sheen of we're doing something progressive. | ||
| I don't think there's anything progressive about any of this stuff. | ||
| And the other thing I hate about it is I think it legitimizes bullying. | ||
| I think the social justice movement... I hate bullies. | ||
| I can't stand them, right? | ||
| And if you stand up against them, they get even more vicious, right? | ||
| You must have noticed this, right? | ||
| It's funny, all of the signals about how good you are, like putting pronouns in your bio on Twitter, or putting a rainbow flag up there on Twitter. | ||
| Why is it, whenever I get brutally attacked on Twitter, those are the people, when I go to their bio, oh, pronouns. | ||
| And I'm not saying that the pronouns themselves are making a connection with trans people. | ||
| I wanted a legitimate answer to this. | ||
| I've asked this question before. | ||
| Why is it the case that the most vicious, the most bullying, and the most unpleasant characteristics tend to come from those people? | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| I mean, I have some theories as to why, which maybe we should unpack a little bit, but it's so interesting, because just last week I tweeted something to that effect. | ||
| Why are the worst people on Twitter, the angriest people, it always is the he, him, they people, Or they have all the flags or all these other things. | ||
| Now, again, I have no problem with trans people, obviously, and I have no problem with the general idea of justice, if you mean equality, but why are they also, I mean, I think the reason for that is it has something to do with personal responsibility, right? | ||
| I mean, they've outsourced their personal responsibilities so they don't have to take care of their own lives. | ||
| It's just be angry at the system as opposed to sit up with your shoulders back, as that guy said. | ||
| I mean, I imagine a lot of the people are well-intentioned. | ||
| I imagine if in your mind you've converted someone into this monster, this Nazi, then it legitimizes you being horrible to that person. | ||
| But of course, the instinct to be horrible to another human being is an instinct that we all have that we have to keep down and make sure that's why we're civilized. | ||
| We're civilized out of that kind of behavior. | ||
| And it worries me that this kind of thing legitimizes that stuff. | ||
| And I don't like it. | ||
| But likewise, I don't want to demonize people who put pronouns in their bio. | ||
| That's up to them. | ||
| It's not an issue. | ||
| But why is that correlation there? | ||
| You have a theory. | ||
| I don't know what the answer is. | ||
| Well, someone said if you stare into the abyss, the abyss might just stare back. | ||
| Someone did say that. | ||
| Someone said that. | ||
| I think there's something to that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They start becoming everything that they need. | ||
| Well, they're not doing themselves any favors. | ||
| This is the thing is because I think you and I, you know, we both care about opposing racism, opposing homophobia, opposing sexism, all of those things. | ||
| And what upsets me about this stuff is it makes those causes look stupid. | ||
| It makes them look daft. | ||
| I mean, there was the couple of years ago in Philadelphia when the gay pride march changed the gay rainbow flag. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they added a black stripe and a brown stripe. | ||
| And they did the same in Manchester last year for Manchester Pride. | ||
| And they were saying it wasn't racially inclusive, they needed black and... Because as though the rainbow flag is a literal representation of the skin colours that are acceptable in the gay community, you know? | ||
| And I had to Tanya write about this because she was saying, oh well, wait a minute, the rainbow in the sky hasn't got a black and brown stripe, so we need to petition meteorologists to find a way to modify the process of refraction and dispersal to make sure that the electromagnetic spectrum isn't racist, you know? | ||
| Because it is... | ||
| It is that ludicrous. | ||
| But isn't that the irony that they're the ones that thus inject racism into everything? | ||
| So right, like nobody in their right mind, no clear thinking person ever thought the rainbow flag in and of itself was excluding anybody. | ||
| The point was you're gay or something bi, whatever the hell you are. | ||
| go to the parade, zippity-dum-do-dah, and then they're the ones that say, | ||
| now race has to sit on top of that. | ||
| Right, well, this is the intersectional thing. | ||
| And this is why I'm of the view that we should just ditch the rainbow flag | ||
| and ditch the LGBT acronym, or LGBTQIA+ or whatever it is now. | ||
| I know they keep changing it. | ||
| I think we need to ditch it. | ||
| I think what this stuff is doing is dividing us up as much as possible, making things much, much worse. | ||
| And, you know, I stop short of saying that it is homophobia or racism as such. | ||
| I think it's a new kind of racialized thinking, which isn't helpful. | ||
| It means that you're hyper... I mean, being aware of racial issues is important, right? | ||
| But being hyper-aware to the point that you only see that, or you see that first and foremost, But isn't that racist? | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| You don't wanna push that last moment to go from, you're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's not racist, it's not evilly intentioned. | ||
| No, because I think racism has to be about intention. | ||
| I get why you'd want to call it racist, but I think because it is about intention, I would step back from that. | ||
| I think they genuinely believe what they're saying. | ||
| I think all of them do. | ||
| This has come up with a lot of my guests. | ||
| You know, that there's sort of the foot soldier versions of it, and then there's the people that are really stoking it. | ||
| So like in America, like I would say Linda Sarsour and a lot of the Bernie surrogates, they're really stoking this hatred. | ||
| I would say they're bad actors. | ||
| But the average genderless person on Twitter, I think, is just being, 19 year old, is just being used by them. | ||
| My stance on that is what I always assume people are telling the truth even if I suspect they're not. | ||
| I know that sounds contradictory but I'll explain. | ||
| The reason for that is I think part of the problem that we have with political discussion and debate and discourse at the moment is that everyone's just imagining what the other person is thinking and they're arguing against that so in effect they're arguing against themselves. | ||
| So what I say is well look if you can defeat the argument the argument is defeated irrespective of whether they mean it or not. | ||
| So just focus on that, you know? | ||
| I mean, Linda Sarsour's argument is, you know, she comes across as quite an unpleasant individual, and I'm sure that maybe she has got some bad, potentially, but I'm not going to assume that because I could be wrong. | ||
| I really could be wrong about that, you know? | ||
| Well, okay, fine, but I don't know the woman. | ||
| And by the way, when she was getting de-platformed, they wanted to de-platform her from Queens College. | ||
| I defended her, and I got a lot of shit for it, but I didn't defend her as a person. | ||
| I defended the idea that if she was invited, you gotta let her speak. | ||
| From a pragmatic point of view, it's better just to address the arguments as and when they come. | ||
| But also it strengthens your own position because that's what people do with me all the time. | ||
| I mean 98% of the arguments I have on Twitter are people telling me what I think about things and getting it 100% wrong. | ||
| So if I'm not going to, I have to extend the same courtesy. | ||
| And we all have to do that. | ||
| Otherwise we're going to be constantly fighting with shadows and ghosts. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about how this stuff sort of infected, or at least from my perspective, seems to have infected the Labour Party in the UK, and maybe why it did? | ||
| That's your lefty party, for people who don't know. | ||
| Yeah, so the Labour Party is Jeremy Corbyn's party. | ||
| Now, Jeremy Corbyn comes from a very old-school socialist, he's like a Bernie Sanders kind of figure. | ||
| Those sorts of people don't sit well with woke politics. | ||
| It doesn't actually work because they're class conscious. | ||
| And what you'll find with most social justice activists is they don't care about class issues. | ||
| And the reason they don't is a lot of them are rich. | ||
| So, you know, it doesn't really affect them. | ||
| And the Labour Party then found itself in this muddle. | ||
| It had Jeremy Corbyn announcing his pronouns before speaking. | ||
| It had one of their members, Harriet Harman, saying that she was going to create a pink bus to tour the country to try and encourage women to get into politics. | ||
| So it's very kind of patronising because they just see pink, don't they, women? | ||
| Oh my god, why wouldn't you if you see a pink bus? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sold. | ||
| So all of that kind of stuff, and because there's now this correlation between this woke idea and left-wing politics, I don't think there's anything left-wing about it, right? | ||
| But it's been sort of seized upon people who call themselves left-wing but don't really know the difference between left and right. | ||
| And it's infected the party to such a degree. | ||
| But actually having said that, These sort of ideas have also infected the right-wing parties. | ||
| So, you know, I'm constantly told, well, because I claim to be fighting against an establishment, okay, but of course Trump's in power over here, Boris Johnson's in power over in the UK, so we have right-wing governments, right, ostensibly. | ||
| But that said, culturally speaking, and indeed even within the government departments, you still have some woke ideas going on and sort of driving the narrative. | ||
| So that's what happened with Labour, I think. | ||
| I think the other big thing with Labour was Brexit. | ||
| So Brexit became a sort of linchpin for the woke mob to latch onto. | ||
| And what they did is they do what they always do. | ||
| They turned it into something it didn't mean. | ||
| So they said the Brexit vote is about whether you're racist or not. | ||
| You're voting yes I'm racist or no I'm not racist. | ||
| No what it really was is do we want to remain in a neoliberal trading bloc. | ||
| That's what it really was. | ||
| But that's not what the debate was about. | ||
| So it got misinterpreted and misconstrued and then the Labour Party, when they ran this time, said they were going to support a second referendum to try and undo what just happened. | ||
| That kind of authoritarian instinct, rerunning a referendum, saying the people got it wrong, that's woke 1.0. | ||
| That's straight, that's right there. | ||
| But at the end of the day, is it because they don't really care sort of about what's right? | ||
| Like in a way, they don't care about democracy. | ||
| They don't care that the people voted for Brexit. | ||
| They care that they have enough power I think again there's a lot of well-meaning people in the Labour Party. | ||
| I think they've convinced themselves through a process of the last three years that the people didn't know what they were voting for. | ||
| So when I spoke to a member of Corbyn's shadow cabinet just after the Brexit vote back in 2016. | ||
| And she said, there's no way we're going to reverse this. | ||
| This is going to happen. | ||
| And actually, as it happened, they all did try eventually. | ||
| And I think it's that process of convincing yourself that people were misinformed, that they just did what Russian bots told them to do. | ||
| You have the same over here with Trump. | ||
| Almost everything that I say is given to me originally by a Russian bot. | ||
| It's a really lazy thing which people do when they don't want to deal with the fact that some people don't agree with them. | ||
| You can't run a democracy that way. | ||
| One of the things that frightens me the most, and it's happened over here as well as you know, is that this thing of the loser's consent isn't really present anymore. | ||
| We have to have a situation in a democratic society where we come to terms with the fact that a substantial proportion of the population are going to be led by people they did not vote for, and we all accept that. | ||
| If we lose we have to accept that. | ||
| It's like the most important thing in a certain regard. | ||
| It's so important. | ||
| And that's been led astray and I think that's to do with this social justice mentality. | ||
| I'm very aware when I talk about this because social justice sounds so wonderful and it sounds like I'm knocking something that's really good. | ||
| Same with the woke word. | ||
| I mean, the word woke comes from the black civil rights movement. | ||
| And I actually see that that was appropriated by these people, right? | ||
| I'm, you know, the black civil rights movement, the gay rights movement of the 60s, the new left, the feminist movement. | ||
| That was all great. | ||
| And they knew that free speech was important. | ||
| And this lot come along and they try and unpick all of that stuff. | ||
| Undo it all, right? | ||
| Reverse it. | ||
| That's why I call them reactionaries. | ||
| Because that's what it means. | ||
| It means that you're uncomfortable with change. | ||
| And that's the word that's thrown at people like us all the time. | ||
| It's them. | ||
| They're the ones that are uncomfortable. | ||
| They're the ones that think the civil rights movement got it wrong. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, even now, you could just see on MLK Day, they start turning on the things that MLK said. | ||
| I mean, this idea that you should judge people on the content of their character, that doesn't really work on the woke calculator. | ||
| How long before they completely deplatform MLK or cancel him? | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I've got a bit in the new Titania book I've just written where she rewrites his I Have a Dream speech, because she wants it to be about intersectionality. | ||
| She wants it to be about judging the color of his skin, not the content of your character. | ||
| You know, she wants to- He was a bigot, that guy. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Well, self-hated black man, that's it. | ||
| It's that internalized racism, I guess. | ||
| Do you think that some of this is starting to turn partly through comedy and through art? | ||
| So we mocked the Star Wars Avengers version of this, but your national hero, J.K. | ||
| Rowling, did put up a tweet that had a certain anti-diversity message. | ||
| Yeah, but did you see the backlash? | ||
| Can you tell the good people about what happened there? | ||
| Yes, so what happened was there's a woman called Maya Fustata who was, there was a tribunal in the UK because she'd been dismissed from her work because of some tweets she'd sent, or Facebook posts I think, where she basically said that she believes that you cannot change sex. | ||
| She thinks that biology is immutable and that we have immutable biological characteristics, which is her opinion and she has the right to that opinion. | ||
| And her point was not to disrespect trans people, she was just, I mean we go through this every freaking week, but all she was just saying is that biology exists. | ||
| That was in essence what she said. | ||
| Well I mean it's like what Blaire White said, like if there is no biological sex there's no such thing as trans. | ||
| Irrespective of the people being angry about her opinion, it was the fact that she was fired that was scary. | ||
| And then it was the fact that a judge in the UK said that that was not something you were allowed to say. | ||
| You could legitimately be fired for saying something like that. | ||
| So that's what's a bit scary about that. | ||
| So J.K. | ||
| Rowling merely tweeted and said, I support this woman. | ||
| She was saying you should be able to sleep with whoever you want and identify however you want. | ||
| The liberal position! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she's a lefty. | ||
| She's a lefty her whole life. | ||
| And I think on this stuff you've got to take the liberal position, which is anyone has the right to identify however they like, to live the life however they like, to call themselves whatever they want. | ||
| What they don't have the right to do is demand that someone else calls them those things, to monitor and police someone else's language. | ||
| I mean, if I get married to my boyfriend and I say to someone, I want you to call this person my husband, but they're a Christian fundamentalist and they say, I don't recognise that, I can't Force that person to do so. | ||
| I can argue with them, I can explain to them why I think it would be polite, and that's my right. | ||
| But it's their right, totally legitimately their right, not to do so. | ||
| So the best thing wouldn't be to call them a Nazi and then try to get the state power to put them in jail? | ||
| It's weird, it's not persuasive. | ||
| You know, it's so weird though, isn't it? | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It's not a good strategic... | ||
| Thing to do, you know, I think we've learned that over the past few years we have but all right | ||
| So JK basically offers a defense of what this one said and then everyone got everyone | ||
| Go right everyone goes mad because everyone they say she's a transphobe and which she absolutely is not | ||
| Yeah, and and and and also she she committed the cardinal sin, right? So, you know that artists | ||
| Particularly one way inclined there's a kind of very homogenous group think amongst artists amongst comedians particularly | ||
| And you get a lot of flack if you don't quite subscribe to those ideas and and she she did | ||
| That's why I don't think it's going to be from art and creatives that this thing changes, because they're part of the problem. | ||
| To be honest, I don't think it is going to come from that. | ||
| But when you see like Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes where he just scorched everything that this book is about and the hypocrisy of Hollywood and just all of the awful ideas of intersectionality and all of those things. | ||
| That's gotta give you a little hope. | ||
| But it does, but I mean, that was brilliant, but that's because he's in a position to do what he wants. | ||
| You know, when he did that speech, there were a lot of, even comics, even famous left-wing comics in the country were saying, oh, he's now like a right-wing, literally calling him right-wing, saying he's a right-wing, he's part of the establishment. | ||
| These are the very same people that like 10 years ago would have cheered him attacking the hypocrisy of the most pampered people on the planet, let's face it, you know? | ||
| And he was there to do that job. | ||
| But to call that right-wing is depressing. | ||
| No, I don't think it's gonna come from Artists and creative he can do that because he he is answerable to no one like he's in he's in that enviable position But if you're working a normal job, you can't do that. | ||
| You can't say these things yet people are it isn't about state censorship It's about self-censorship. | ||
| It's about the fact that people feel really nervous about what they say at the moment and I Know I don't you know I wish I could I don't want to speak ill of artists and stuff because I love them and I you know I have an ingrained respect for anyone who wants to create something But I think they're I think they're part of the problem rather than the solution, you know Do you think that gay men, for some reason, have a unique position in standing up to this thing? | ||
| It seems to me that there's a series of people. | ||
| You're going on tour with Douglas Murray. | ||
| For the first year that I had read Douglas' stuff, I didn't even know he was gay. | ||
| Now we've become good friends, and he's truly out there talking about this stuff, and he does a really interesting dissection of why you should separate the T from the LGBT thing. | ||
| But it does seem to me that there's a bunch of gay men That are sort of leading the fight against this. | ||
| Do you think there's a reason for that? | ||
| There's something, well, there's the conflict, I think, between certain elements of the extreme trans ideology, which just doesn't sit well with gay rights. | ||
| You know, because they would say that you can't be same-sex attracted, right? | ||
| And because they don't want to see biology, you know? | ||
| And that's a problem for gay men. | ||
| I think there is that fundamental problem there. | ||
| Also, I think it comes from freedom of thought. | ||
| I think a lot of gay people, particularly maybe slightly the older, maybe the X generation, you did have to sort of think for yourself. | ||
| You know, a lot of gay people who were growing up when I was growing up, they ended up in straight relationships and straight marriages, you know? | ||
| But the ones who could sort of think for themselves and think outside the box were the ones who sort of embraced who they were. | ||
| Wait, that's interesting. | ||
| So a lot of gay people that you knew maybe 20 years ago ended up in heterosexual marriages. | ||
| Yeah, some did, yeah. | ||
| Sort of like, meaning that they became straight or meaning that they just sort of couldn't fight the... | ||
| No, I don't think. | ||
| The idea of normalcy or something. | ||
| Well, you know, back then it was a very different world. | ||
| I mean, everything about society did coach you to be straight and sort of, and you did just assume that you were. | ||
| And so I think it takes a certain kind of mindset to understand that actually you're not, to accept that you're not. | ||
| And I, very different now. | ||
| You know, we live in a totally different world now. | ||
| We have everything's, everything's completely equal and everything's, everything's fine. | ||
| Yeah, I do know some people. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to name names really. | ||
| I know some people who are in straight relationships, but they're not really in so far as they, you know, they dabble. | ||
| And I think that's, it's just a generational thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, plus now we were in Endgame with that guy, the psychologist. | ||
| I have to say, I haven't actually seen Endgame. | ||
| I mean, it's literally, it's the most pathetic. | ||
| They're sitting in like a self-help group. | ||
| And this one guy is like, I survived, you know, what happened at the end of Infinity War. | ||
| I survived it, and I went on a date. | ||
| And then the Captain America's like, oh God, it's wonderful. | ||
| The thing is, I don't like superhero films, firstly, so I'm gonna put that out there. | ||
| But also, I just think they're silly. | ||
| They're people flying around in capes. | ||
| I can't get on board with that. | ||
| Like even with Batman, even with the Dark Knight, where everyone says it's really serious art. | ||
| Oh, that's good. | ||
| It makes me laugh, it's silly. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, it's for kids. | ||
| So anyway, but yeah, all I know is- A cape guy who doesn't like capes. | ||
| Very bizarre. | ||
| Exactly, I know, and I'm Catholic. | ||
| No, but that thing about... All I know is I read an article in the Guardian about Endgame and it said it was great but the fat shaming broke my heart and I just thought, come on. | ||
| Oh, because Thor was fat. | ||
| Yeah, they made Thor fat and you know... Well, there's something quite funny about Norse God letting himself go, isn't there? | ||
| Of course it was funny! | ||
| But even that, I'm glad you brought that up actually, because that's been popping up lately. | ||
| That now, if you say anything about people that are fat, I don't like mocking or bullying someone about their size. | ||
| It's like you're almost not allowed to say that being fit or eating right or taking care of yourself is actually something you should aspire to. | ||
| Which we all inherently know is true. | ||
| It doesn't mean we all do it all the time. | ||
| A lot of people had a go at Cancer Research UK, which is a charity in the UK. | ||
| They recently put a number of posters up on the tube saying that obesity is now the most common cause of cancer. | ||
| It's actually overtaken smoking. | ||
| And then a lot of social justice activists went crazy and were saying, you're fat shaming, you're going to cause more deaths. | ||
| And calling them some really unpleasant words. | ||
| These are good people. | ||
| These are good people who are trying to help people. | ||
| I think there's not there's nothing I mean you don't want to mock or attack people for their size but on the same token it's not good to tell kids it doesn't matter what you eat it doesn't matter how overweight you are because they're gonna die younger like that's that's it you know and I think why can't we just accept medical reality? | ||
| Yeah, it's really... Am I going to get accused of fat shaming for saying that? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's very clear you're a fat-a-phobe or a weight-a-phobe or something, something. | ||
| So when you first came out with Titania, did... | ||
| The character wasn't originally associated with you fully, right? | ||
| I was in the closet. | ||
| Yeah, you were in the closet. | ||
| And then you were outed? | ||
| I was outed, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, can you talk about that? | ||
| So you create this character. | ||
| I wanted to be anonymous. | ||
| And it just meant that I was free to sort of say whatever I want. | ||
| I wasn't worried about it. | ||
| What happened was, I wrote the book, and then in the week that the book came out, there was a bit of press interest about it. | ||
| And so there was a journalist at the Sunday Times Rosamund Irwin, I think her name was, who did some investigative work and sort of dug up... She read a lot of my political articles and she'd read an advanced copy of the book and she worked out that some of the quotations were similar. | ||
| It was a really good job. | ||
| Wow, like a real journalist. | ||
| Yeah, proper investigative journalist. | ||
| So far. | ||
| And she whittled it down to me and a friend of mine, Lisa Graves, who runs a character called Jarvis DuPont. | ||
| I don't know if you follow him. | ||
| He's a really funny parody account. | ||
| You should follow him. | ||
| Her, sorry, she's just transitioned. | ||
| She whittled it down to us, and then a comedy website called Chortle found the smoking gun, some sort of book festival brochure which accidentally named me. | ||
| It was someone from the publisher who accidentally named me as the author. | ||
| Wait, when you had signed the deal for the book, did you have assurances from your publisher? | ||
| Just verbal. | ||
| We just decided it would be better if I didn't come out. | ||
| It just so happened that it came out the week the book was published. | ||
| And that ended up with a lot of publicity as a result of that. | ||
| And the story then became that it was me who was behind the character. | ||
| But the only difference is I've never changed the way she speaks. | ||
| I've never changed the character. | ||
| I've never censored myself. | ||
| The only difference is that now whenever I tweet something that maybe is a bit contentious, I get the attacks. | ||
| I get the deluge. | ||
| I had it recently where I tweeted a joke and it was an anti-racist joke. | ||
| It was mocking a racist stereotype. | ||
| And people, of course, because they're very literal minded, interpreted it as being a racist joke. | ||
| And so I got lots of people attacking me online personally and calling me racist and Nazi and all the rest of it. | ||
| So that's the downside of it. | ||
| So everything being equal, you would have preferred to have kept these two personas, or the human and the persona separate, just for an artistic freedom, right? | ||
| Yeah, and also, yeah, I would. | ||
| And it's nice, it's nice because you get into a character, you start to think like her, I start to dream as her, I know this isn't healthy, but all of that sort of stuff, I like that. | ||
| I like the idea of inventing characters and writing behind characters. | ||
| And it also affects the interpretation, because now people interpret the character on the basis of my personal politics, or misinterpret, as the case may be. | ||
| Right, so as someone that at least originally intended to be an anonymous character online that is no longer anonymous, what's your take on just generally the tenor of what people talk about on social media and how much of it is done through anonymous accounts? | ||
| Oh, loads of it is. | ||
| That's why it's such a cesspit, right? | ||
| The thing about Twitter and the thing about all of that stuff is that people are... the anonymity frees them up to be horrible. | ||
| To be even worse and to say things that they never would. | ||
| Even when they're not anonymous. | ||
| I've had situations where people have said the most horrible things online. | ||
| When you meet them, it's a different story. | ||
| So that element of it... | ||
| But on the other hand, it does enable, I think you should be able to have satirical accounts and parody accounts and all the rest of the sort of stuff. | ||
| So I think it's a good thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense now after the J.K. | ||
| Rowling thing that we discussed and enough of these conversations, like what do you sense would be the thing that would need to get us to the tipping point where we start, are we starting to get there? | ||
| I'm sensing that something's happening. | ||
| I think that at least maybe through the American election now. | ||
| I tweeted at the beginning of the year that this is the year it implodes The intersectional thing can't hold for an election like this, and it's partly what you said about why Jeremy Corbyn doesn't fit in with the intersectional thing. | ||
| I think we have a version of that with Bernie here. | ||
| You do. | ||
| I mean, we know that intersectional identity politics loses elections, right? | ||
| Mark Lilla wrote about this in his book, The Once and Future Liberal. | ||
| We know that across the board, that always happens, right? | ||
| Identity politics, Hillary Clinton, dividing people up into their gender, their race, and everything, saying, I'm gonna target this demographic, doesn't work, right? | ||
| And worldwide it doesn't work, which is why the right is winning basically everywhere right now. | ||
| Here's the problem you have, though, is that the intersectional left, for want of a better term, they come up with this premise, and their premise is that they know that anyone who is right-wing is secretly a fascist, anyone who votes for Donald Trump is secretly a Nazi, okay? | ||
| So then when he wins, they point to that and say that's evidence that our premise was right. | ||
| So, you know, after the last one, I wrote this Jonathan Pye video about Hillary Clinton losing and saying it was the left. | ||
| The left need to re-evaluate their position. | ||
| They need to re-think about the way they're going. | ||
| But they didn't. | ||
| They doubled down and they made it worse. | ||
| I genuinely at that point thought they would There would be a period of self-reflection. | ||
| I think we all thought it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what they did instead is they said, this proves all of our worst fears. | ||
| It's a kind of circular reasoning thing. | ||
| And that's why I worry it might not get better that quickly. | ||
| Because if Trump wins again, which I'm pretty convinced he will, then what will happen is they'll take that as further evidence that we live in this crypto-fascist state. | ||
| And they'll just accelerate all the crazy mania that they've been doing over the past few years. | ||
| Do you think our institutions are able to stand up against this? | ||
| So this is sort of what you hinted before about what's happening with Brexit with you guys, but even what we see out of the left now, they wanna get rid of the electoral college. | ||
| They wanna add Supreme Court justices. | ||
| They don't want states' rights. | ||
| These are now structural things that I think if Trump wins again, which I agree he's going to, short of some really cataclysmic thing happening, That what their move is gonna be, well, not only do you figure out a new way to try to impeach him and you just don't accept elections anymore, but it will be to attack every one of the last vestiges of our functioning democracy. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And that's why I think we do need to seriously consider the tactics here. | ||
| And I've gone for the satirical route. | ||
| I also write argumentative articles, but let's face it, These people aren't really willing to be persuaded. | ||
| I mean, they often won't turn up to debates or arguments because they don't want to discuss. | ||
| But you said to me right before we started, you do something that I do, which is that if someone has a Q&A, you try to bring up people that disagree with you first. | ||
| That's what I want more than anything. | ||
| I want the discussion to be opened up. | ||
| At the moment, it's not. | ||
| So I think tactically, We have to think about setting an example, right? | ||
| So anyone who believes in freedom and liberty needs to... we need to firstly ditch this guilt by association thing, right? | ||
| So we need to be able to talk to people we don't agree with. | ||
| You know, if I appear on a show, when I appeared with Tucker Carlson on Fox News and people accused me of being the same as him, it's like... | ||
| I'm sorry, I'm sure we disagree on all sorts of things, but he was really nice to me about the book. | ||
| We had a good discussion about the book. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| When we met six months ago, we met in the Fox affiliate here in LA. | ||
| We were both doing Tucker at different times. | ||
| I was walking out as you were walking in, and it was like, do we both have disagreements with Tucker? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Have I brought those disagreements up in public with Tucker? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I'm not going to play that game anymore. | ||
| And I think more people need to say, look, firstly we need to stop accusing people of guilt by association. | ||
| So just because you talk to someone doesn't mean you sort of, by osmosis, sort of take on board all of their beliefs and ideas. | ||
| That's the first thing, right? | ||
| I think we need to reinstate a kind of critical thinking in schools at the lowest level. | ||
| And what I mean, I used to teach critical thinking at A-level and it was seen as kind of like the DOS subject, right? | ||
| Where you talk about the basics, you know, things like If you throw an insult, if you start mudslinging, you've lost the argument. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's over for you, right? | ||
| Well, no one believes that now, do they? | ||
| No. | ||
| Even the politicians don't believe that now. | ||
| So we need to reinstate that idea. | ||
| You need to listen to what other people are saying. | ||
| You need to not intuit the motive of what other people are saying. | ||
| You need to not translate what they're saying into something they haven't said, mischaracterise your opponent, which is the straw man thing. | ||
| All of that stuff. | ||
| So we need to start in schools, but then the other big problem is universities. | ||
| We need to somehow, and I don't know how to do that, But I think maybe just going after the social justice warriors as I do, and I don't even like that phrase, social justice warriors, because I think it's a kind of demonising term. | ||
| I think just mocking and poking at that beast will only agitate the beast. | ||
| And I think there's got to be something that we do that is a bit more ground level, you know what I mean? | ||
| And I think it is to do with education. | ||
| Well, it's funny because whenever I give talks at colleges, this always comes up. | ||
| Kids will always say to me, well, what do you do? | ||
| I have a friend that's been overtaken by this thing. | ||
| What do I do? | ||
| And I always say that I think the best thing you can do is just be a little bit better than they are. | ||
| Every time you're in a conversation and then they jump on you and attack you, Try to just be a little bit better. | ||
| And it doesn't mean just endlessly take crap. | ||
| It doesn't mean just be beaten into oblivion. | ||
| But if you consistently try to be a little bit better, and at the end, instead of just walking out of the restaurant and telling them you're never gonna see them again, you say, yeah, we'll pick this up again next time. | ||
| It's hard, it's work. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| Do you know why it's so hard? | ||
| Because, I mean, you're pretty good at this on Twitter. | ||
| I try, but I fail all the time. | ||
| So do I. | ||
| If someone comes to you and says you're a fucking Nazi scum who should burn in hell, right, so my instinct is to fight back. | ||
| I do believe you should stand up for yourself. | ||
| You stand up against bullies all the time, right? | ||
| My instinct is to mock them or get vicious and I've sort of taught myself not to. | ||
| I think it's wrong. | ||
| And there's a way to do it. | ||
| Actually, do you know what? | ||
| I think if someone comes to you in that way, I think you should just block them. | ||
| I think you need to get rid of them, right? | ||
| Because my rule on Twitter is if someone said that to me to my face on the street, So if someone came up to me and says, you're an ugly, box-headed, Nazi scumbag, would I say, OK, well, let's talk about that a little more. | ||
| Let's tease out the nuances of your argument there. | ||
| I wouldn't do that. | ||
| I'd probably walk away. | ||
| So the equivalent's going to be on Twitter. | ||
| But I mean, I've never blocked someone on Twitter for just disagreeing. | ||
| If you come with me with something, with a disagreement, a polite disagreement, let's have it. | ||
| Let's talk about it. | ||
| I always think the funniest thing is when I see people that I know that are, many of them have books here, great academics, great thinkers, philosophers, historians, and yet online, they're literally arguing with pink anime foxes, and it's like, they won already. | ||
| Pink anime fox for the win, because the fact that you gave them any of your attention, and yet we all get sucked into this monster. | ||
| It's quite funny though, isn't it? | ||
| I love anything that bursts a pretentious bubble. | ||
| When you see an academic saying, fuck you, throwing down the emojis, it's like, you don't need to footnote that one. | ||
| That's not sophisticated. | ||
| Are you shocked that so much of this, we've talked a little bit from a UK perspective and American perspective, but that this is happening all over the world at once? | ||
| Because I get as much email, and I just had a couple Swedes on the show talking about how they've been completely, their whole society's been completely infected by this, but I get as much email from Australia and Canada and a ton from India, actually. | ||
| There's something really interesting happening in India. | ||
| I'm getting a ton of email from India lately, that all over the world this thing has But this is why I don't think it's on its way down. | ||
| It's so tempting when you see a thing like the J.K. | ||
| Rowling thing or something like every now and then to think, oh, that's it, the tide's about to turn. | ||
| But it isn't really. | ||
| I mean, it is spreading. | ||
| And yeah, it's absolutely international. | ||
| It's mostly in the English-speaking countries at the moment, but it is spreading beyond that. | ||
| Well, you know, it's funny, just to totally clarify what I mean. | ||
| When I say it's going to implode this year, I don't mean it's going to be destroyed, like stamped out. | ||
| What I think is that the American election is going to cause it to be fully exposed. | ||
| So that for the masses that aren't really paying attention to this, many more of them will realize how bad it is. | ||
| There's no evidence, as you were saying, that they're gonna suddenly be like, oh, we lost another election, we should stop calling everyone Nazis. | ||
| That's not gonna happen. | ||
| But I think that for that group of people that are just sitting on the sidelines that kinda watch this and they're like, eh, what's going on here? | ||
| I think something so crazy is going to happen in our election. | ||
| And we can feel it already. | ||
| Warren calls Bernie a sexist. | ||
| You know, like, Booker gets out, so now they're all racists. | ||
| Like, all of these things, it's gonna just become so obvious that I think we're gonna be able to get more of the, whatever that middle sliver of people is. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Maybe it's because the majority of people aren't into this stuff. | ||
| You know, it's always been the case that it's just a minority of people, and it's... | ||
| Excuse me, it's a minority with a lot of power. | ||
| That's ultimately what it is, right? | ||
| I mean, I've said this before, but I do believe that the woke left are dominant in the media, in arts, in journalism, in the law, in education, in quangos, government quangos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it say something about those jobs, do you think? | |
| It's probably relating to class. | ||
| I mean there's a good reason why the woke movement is predominantly bourgeois, right? | ||
| They come from privately educated backgrounds on the whole. | ||
| And it's, you know, you've never had to struggle for anything. | ||
| And there is some sort of odd desire to be oppressed. | ||
| This odd desire to be a victim. | ||
| I don't really understand that. | ||
| And I guess that's the correlation. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So you have another book. | ||
| I have another book, yeah. | ||
| Coming out. | ||
| When does the book come out? | ||
| In spring. | ||
| I think it's early May. | ||
| Wait, what's the title of the new one? | ||
| The title is My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism. | ||
| So this is a children's book? | ||
| It's a children's book by Titania McGrath, yeah. | ||
| She's going after the kids market. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because she doesn't want to miss a trend. | ||
| Because you've had this. | ||
| You've had loads of these woke children's books, right? | ||
| Books like Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls and C is for Consent. | ||
| There was that one. | ||
| There's The Little Girl Who Gave Zero Fucks. | ||
| It's for lots of things. | ||
| Catholic, yeah. | ||
| It's all of these little children's books which are basically about intersectionality and about white privilege and mansplaining and all this sort of stuff. | ||
| Now I think it's really funny. | ||
| These books are doing really well by the way. | ||
| And there's a Guardian journalist in the UK who's like independently millionaire, very wealthy. | ||
| She wrote one about the Supreme Court and so everyone's getting on this. | ||
| So, I thought she would. | ||
| I thought Titania would totally do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the thing is, so I've just finished the book and she gets it all wrong. | ||
| Like, she can't speak to children, she doesn't know. | ||
| She still uses the jargon and expects them to understand all the words, you know. | ||
| Because when she was born, she claims that when she was born her first words were, seize the means of production, you know. | ||
| So she thinks that kids just understand this stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, it's been really fun. | ||
| And I'm going to make it look like a proper children's book with illustrations and all the rest of it. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| But it's going to be horribly inappropriate. | ||
| And then you're going on tour with Mr. Douglas Murray. | ||
| With Douglas Murray, which is great. | ||
| So the tour is called Resisting Wokeness, which sounds quite provocative I suppose, but what I really want to do is get people to discuss this stuff. | ||
| People are feeling that they're in a society where they don't feel able or comfortable to say what they believe to be true. | ||
| Anymore so we want people to come along and have that discussion and we're gonna go around the UK We're gonna end up at the Hammersmith Apollo In London and we're gonna it's it's basically we're gonna be talking through the issues trying to actually work the issues out I mean we've even talking to you today like there are things that I'm not clear on and I want to talk more about it To and I'm willing to be persuaded. | ||
| You know, this is the this is the the main reason I think for talking to people you don't agree with is you might be wrong Like there are all sorts of things. | ||
| I'm probably almost certainly wrong about right and I want to know what they are I mean, yeah, you can say You know, I can argue with people to refine my argument. | ||
| That's a selfish perspective. | ||
| I think it should be, well, actually, it's good to be proven wrong, isn't it? | ||
| So Douglas and I are gonna tour, and it's really good because we come from different political backgrounds. | ||
| Yeah, Douglas is a conservative. | ||
| He's a conservative. | ||
| We have different views on all sorts of things. | ||
| On this matter, we share the same concerns. | ||
| I've found it so weird over the past few years that I've made all these new allies, these new friends. | ||
| That's actually, that was where I wanted to go just for the end. | ||
| Oh, I'm anticipating. | ||
| Yeah, no, well, you got it already. | ||
| I guess I don't even need to ask you the question, But through all of this that you have been through, and writing books, and being in the Twitter fights, and the world of this, and talking about something that's so culturally relevant, are you shocked by the people on the right? | ||
| Because I still, because I sometimes am still shocked by how welcoming these people are. | ||
| And I still, one of the things that the genderless, anonymous people on Twitter will say, Dave, the right's being nice to you now, but they're just using you. | ||
| They're just using you as if I'm some sort of incapacitated moron, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, I have no volition over my own thoughts or something. | ||
| And it's like, I think that I've seen great intellectual flexibility with these people. | ||
| I don't agree with them on everything, on abortion and a few other things, you know what I mean? | ||
| But they're willing to talk it out. | ||
| The truth is that, the boring truth is that most people are nice, basically. | ||
| You know, the vast majority of people are just decent. | ||
| And you've just got the extremes on both sides who discolour the entire movement, whatever movement they're a part of. | ||
| You know, it's like the trans activists on the whole are decent people. | ||
| It's the minority, the really angry, violent group that just... | ||
| You know, really make it hard for all the others. | ||
| And so we've got the same thing. | ||
| I'll be honest, because I come from the comedy circuit, most of my friends have always been on the left. | ||
| And I've heard these people demonize the people you're not meant to talk to. | ||
| I've heard them mischaracterized. | ||
| And then now, doing what I'm doing, A lot of conservatives like what I do, which is great, and you meet them, and they're really great. | ||
| And some of the people in particular, who I've been told steer clear from, have turned out to be just the sweetest, nicest people, and they're nothing like the public persona. | ||
| And the irony is, some of my friends that I've lost, who are famous lefties, have turned out to be the monsters. | ||
| They've turned out to be the bigots, the ones who will... I had one guy shouting at me in a bar, calling me a Nazi, over and over again, and I'm thinking, I mean, you're not a good person. | ||
| It's really sad. | ||
| I did this conference in London recently with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. | ||
| This was something which was organised by a group called Sovereign Nations. | ||
| It's run by a guy, Michael O'Fallon, who is an evangelical Christian, right-wing. | ||
| Pete told me he couldn't believe he was doing an event like this and yet these people were amazing. | ||
| Such a nice guy though and then you get to the event and I'm sitting there at lunch with like the head of the Atheist Society next to like an evangelical pastor, left-wing people, right-wing people, Muslim, Christian, Atheist and you just think this is what's happening now. | ||
| So it's like, it's people are finding these alliances of people. | ||
| It's not about left and right now, right? | ||
| We have to get rid of that. | ||
| It's about if you believe in liberty or if you want authority figures to run everything. | ||
| It's liberty versus authority which is something that John Stuart Mill talked about. | ||
| That's where the alliances come. | ||
| It's people who want freedom. | ||
| And I think it doesn't matter if you're right-wing or left-wing or whatever. | ||
| If you believe in that, then we've got something in common. | ||
| And we can talk about that. | ||
| And the other thing is we all have to get together and work for this. | ||
| Because if we lose that, we can't have all the other conversations we want to have about abortion, about gay rights, about whatever. | ||
| Because nothing happens. | ||
| If you don't have freedom of speech, you've got nothing. | ||
| I often say it, I don't know what it says about me, but I have On Liberty in my nightstand. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I have a little copy of it. | ||
| It's readable! | ||
| It's totally readable. | ||
| I think people are intimidated by it because it was written a long time ago, but it's readable. | ||
| It's thin! | ||
| It's thinner than this! | ||
| Well, no, it's quite a big font. | ||
| It's thin, it's great, it's intersectional because his wife helped him write it, which he often doesn't get credit for. | ||
| There's a lot going on in that book. | ||
| And it's articulately expressed, and we need to get back to those core principles of liberty. | ||
| And that should be the standard point, is that you are allowed to argue with me and disagree and say whatever you want. | ||
| You just can't arrest me, you can't beat me up, and that should be the limit. | ||
| But people don't agree with that anymore, do they? | ||
| Andrew Doyle, you are a true radical. | ||
| And I don't know that I can have you back here, but... Too controversial? | ||
| Too controversial, but we'll see. | ||
| I'm gonna have to see what the Twitterati thinks about this. | ||
| I know what they think about me. | ||
| Should we send people to... I always send people to a Twitter account, but I don't know... Titania's or...? | ||
| Well, it depends which you want. | ||
| If you want to send abuse, go to me. | ||
| That's andrewdoyle underscore com. | ||
| And if you want to go for Titania, she's at Titania McGrath. | ||
| Simple as that. | ||
| He brought it to a close. | ||
| Thanks for watching, everybody. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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