Modern Wisdom - #283 - Andrew Doyle - Free Speech And Why It Matters

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Andrew Doyle is Titania McGrath, a comedian and a writer. Free speech is one of the core tenants of a modern liberal society, and yet we are seeing restrictions being placed on it across the West. In the UK Hate Speech Laws have been introduced and even America is looking at amending the amendment. Expect to learn what Andrew thinks about Donald Trump being removed from Twitter, whether cancel culture exists, why Miley Cyrus' genital preference is dangerous, what future humans will think when they look back on this period of history and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the best coffee in Britain with Uncommon Coffee’s entire range at http://uncommoncoffee.co.uk/ (use code MW20)  Extra Stuff: Buy Free Speech - https://amzn.to/3a4afyD  Buy Titania McGrath's new book - https://amzn.to/36KRNdd Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends in podcast land. Welcome back. My guest today is Andrew Doyle, the man behind the titanium a graph Twitter account, a comedian and a writer. We're talking about his new book Free Speech and why it matters. Free speech is one of the core tenants of a modern liberal society and yet we're seeing restrictions being placed on it across the west. In the UK, hate speech laws have been introduced and even America is looking at amending the amendment. So today, I expect to learn what Andrew thinks about Donald Trump being removed from Twitter, where the cancel culture exists, why Miley Cyrus' genital preference is dangerous, what future humans will think when they look back on this period of history, and much more. I always love having Andrew on the show.

He speaks an awful lot of sense, and if you enjoyed this, then I highly recommend that you go and pick up his book. It's a really easy, very accessible read. It's super short. I finished it in like a couple of days. And yeah, if you like the things that Andrew does on the internet, you will love his new book. Also, other news. I made some promises around saying, I'll do a 100k subscriber, ask me anything Q and A on YouTube and live streams and we'll start these solo episodes and all this sort of stuff. What happened was a couple of videos that we made

about a week and a half, two weeks ago, exploded the channel and we went from under 100 to 120,000 subs. So the balloons that had ordered to arrive so that we could do like this really cool picture and have a backdrop for the episode and all that. They're still not even here. They haven't arrived yet.

And we're now about to be closer to 150 than we are to 100. So I don't really know how I'm going to play this, but thank you for the support and thank you for the patience as well. There will be a lot of new things coming. There will be these solo episodes, there will be Q&As, there will be more stuff. But being honest, I was just trying to keep up with the workload of publishing a ton of videos

to take advantage of this momentum. Apparently, when the algorithm on YouTube likes you, the goal is just to keep on producing content. So, that's what we're spending our time doing. All that new stuff will be coming. It's just on the other side of a period of quite intense work for me and old video guy Dean. And now please give it up for the wise and wonderful Andrew Doyle. That doesn't look like the Amalfi coast. No, well that's where I was last time.

Not the anymore. I don't live in the Amalfi coast, I was there. I thought you were just a gentleman of leisure now just swanning around. I was visiting there for a while. I got in just before, just after they lifted the lockdown and then just before the lockdown happened again. So I literally got in just at the right time. And I'd have to say, if anyone wants to visit the Amalfi coast, wait for a pandemic.

It's the only time to see it because if you're there at any other point, it's absolutely heaving. It's impossible to negotiate. I went over to Capri, you know, the island of Capri, and it's horrendous, but during a pandemic, it's fine. Like, you can meander about, it's not too oppressive. There's not too many people. It's great. Lovely. What is free speech? Is it the same as being able to say anything without repercussions? Is it the same as being able to say anything without repercussions? It depends what you mean by repercussions. So if by repercussions you mean that the state can arrest you and lock you up or find you or you can be harassed, threatened, intimidated, pushed out of your job, then no, those are not acceptable repercussions in a liberal society.

But if you mean by repercussions, criticism, ridicule, that kind of thing, in other words, more speech, in response to your speech, even protest in response to your speech, then of course you have absolutely no right, because when people protest against your former speech, they're exercising their own free speech. That is absolutely fine as well. Yeah, I think it's actually quite simple this point, but this is a point that is missed all the time. It's really straightforward. In a liberal system, a liberal society, and this has been completely overlooked, anyone should be able to say whatever they want, and then people are able to say what they want in turn in response, and that's how it

should work. So when you hear particularly writers for the Guardian talking about how the thing is, when people talk about free speech, what they really mean is they want consequence free speech. For a start, is they want consequence free speech. For a start, no one has ever said that. I mean, literally no one has ever said that. So this is an incredible, it's not even so much of a straw man, it's too insubstantial even to be made of straw. There's literally nobody who comes close.

It's the invisible man, yeah. It's invisible man. No one has ever said that. They want the right to say whatever they want without someone criticizing them, but no one's ever said that. And if they have, then they're deranged. And we're talking about a fringe group of people. So that has to be put to rest, that over-lie.

So, no, free speech is the right to say whatever you want and for people to say whatever they want back to you. Why does it matter? Because it is the bedrock of a liberal democracy. It is the foundation of all of our freedoms. There can be no other freedoms. Any progress that has ever been made in terms of the advancement of personal liberty and social liberty has come through the exercise of free speech, of saying what you want, expressing

your thoughts. It is the root to personal autonomy. If you can't express what you feel about something, then you cannot develop. We cannot innovate without free speech. There can be no innovation. There has never been innovation without without the freedom to say what you want and particularly to say controversial things. That's how innovation happens. The very act of reason is typically a collaborative effort. The way that we evolve and learn is through a discussion with other people and expressing ideas and getting it wrong and making mistakes and all of that is part of it. So it is the linchpin of absolutely everything that we value if we value freedom.

And that's why it is alarming to me that people are so cavalier about it. I mean, you hear a lot of people online when they want the free speech skeptics, I call them, when they call it freeze peach, that really original pun. And they sometimes have an image of a peach frozen in an ice cube. They say, oh, look at you with your freeze peach. I've started to most unimaginative, I mean, they should be banned just for criminal and originality, right? But they say this stuff. But to be so cavalier about such a foundational principle is actually pretty damn disturbing. It's like they don't care and they don't realize that they are

themselves dependent on their right to free speech in order to behave like Dickheads. They need to have that right too. So, you know, it doesn't, it shouldn't be so careful about it. have that right too. So, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't free speech allow those dickheads to cause harm and offense though, and other dickheads as well. Yeah, that's the point. I mean, I'm not here to suggest again, this would be the interpretation window. Oh, you've just mocked people who use the phrase freeze peach, and therefore you're trying to shut them down, aren't you? You try to silence them, you're trying to sense them. No, criticism is not the same as censorship. I often think that people who mistake the two must be doing so willfully. They have to

be. I mean, how else could they, you know, everyone knows this? So I often get that as well, like if I, when I've mocked things in the past, people have said to me, why are you having to go, I thought you, I thought you cared about free speech. I always get all the time. It's like, yeah, I'm exercising my free speech to criticize what they said. That's kind of how it works and they can do it back to me, that's fine. It's okay. I think one of the reasons I wrote the book is fundamentally, there are so many misconceptions around free speech that so many basic misconceptions that really people should have learned about a long time ago and And you're always having to fend them off and I just like to put those things to rest and I think I think people need to have

a Sort of more sensible conception of what is meant By the concept of free speech and so most of the arguments around this topic are dealing with straw men and they're dealing with misconceptions And so if you just can just get beyond all that detritus, then we can have a discussion about the actual issues because there are some very difficult issues surrounding the topic, but we're not going to get anywhere if people don't know what free speech means. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to. I learned about ethics and meta-ethics from a buddy who's at Oxford Uni and I'd never learned this before.

And what he told me was that if you have two people trying to debate ethics who disagree on meta-ethics, the ethical discussion actually breaks down because the underlying principles that they're coming to the table holding don't support any sort of discussion on top of that, and it seems like you're trying to sort of do this here. Like, look, this is the battleground that we're supposedly playing on. We can now have a conversation, any kind of either productive or unproductive, but at least we can have a conversation because we know the rules of the game. It's exactly right. And actually, I've been wrestling with this issue for a while now,

is how do you argue against those who are incapable of argument? This is really hard, because I'm all for, I think we need more discussion, not less. I think one of the major problems that I think I've said it to you before, one of the major problems that we face at the moment is people aren't talking to each other, people from opposing political ideas, they're not saying down and talking to each other. So I'm all for doing that and I will always do that. But if someone comes into the room and wants to talk, but they're not going to use play by the rules,

in other words, they're going to just throw insults. In other words, they're going to start guessing what they think you believe, which is something they always do. They're going to misrepresent your perspective. In other words, they're just arguing with the version of themselves that they've created. If they're going to do that, then that's bad faith. You can't actually argue with someone like that. I think it's really important when it comes to argument that yes, you make an effort, you go out of your way to talk to people who disagree with you, but if they are unwilling or incapable of argumentation, then don't bother and block them. I think

you might say, well, you're creating an echo chain, but well, look, someone comes in and says, there are 32 letters in the alphabet. Let's debate. Well, I'm not going to debate that person because it's clearly not the case and if they absolutely refuse to accept the basic premise, you can't go in, you just can't go any further than that. I had this the other day where someone on Twitter was on me saying nobody, you know, he's saying everyone in this country just accepts that or just uses they all the time as a singular pronoun, right? We'd already pass the point of, you know, where you do it if you don't know the gender of the person and that's something

that's a colloquial form of the term they. But the idea that the vast majority of people do not understand they as plural pronoun is simply not true. And the only way you would think that that is the case is if you don't know people or if you're being willfully obtuse in order to win the argument. So therefore, I'm not going to debate that person you're being willfully obtuse in order to win the argument. So therefore, I'm not going to debate that person. You have to accept certain premises in order to move on. And one of them is just knowing how to argue. Why is it mostly people on the right who seem to be promoting freedom of speech? Like, we rarely hear the left complain about lacking free speech. Well, the opposite was true when I was a child. So this is something

that I think shows us that it's not a part of that issue. You know, when I was a kid, there used to be, I mean, you're too young, but there were things like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, I think, tried to, I had a campaign to try and ban David Kronenberg's film, Crash. There were all sorts of campaigns every now and then, whenever there was, I mean, it'd go back even before my time, there were campaigns against things like the last temptation of Christ, the school say you film or last time go in Paris. So there's always these sort of sensorious kind of campaigns going on and say that we should ban artistic expression of one form or another.

But it was always coming from the right when I was a kid. It was always, I mean, you just associate, I mean, then if you think of Mary Whitehouse, who was the famous campaigner, who did the cleanup TV campaign back in the the 60s and 70s, and then the video Nasty's campaign in the 80s, you know, in the 80s, they banned films like Drilla Killar, and Evil Dead was banned, you know, the Sam Raimi film. That was banned by the, by the video Nasty's scandal, and all of this was coming from the right. This was just the way that because because conservatives traditionally have a sort of, I suppose a kind of old-fashioned view of decorum and that kind of thing.

And they and but they all brought into this myth, which was very much Mary Whitehouse's thing, that popular entertainment has the capacity to corrupt the masses. And it was a kind of very snobbish idea that basically suggested that poor people were like robots who just do what they're, you know, they just see stuff and they react. Okay. That exact philosophy and idea is now predominantly expressed by those on the left. It's a weird shift. It's difficult to determine when exactly it happened,

but you'll notice they're all all calls for sort of artistic censorship or criticism which is saying, well why hasn't this film got more diversity or representational, why is this film sending a negative message about women or a negative message about gay people or whatever it might be? And when of course the role of art, it has absolutely nothing to do with messages or morality necessarily, not that art can't have a moral message if it wants to. But it always puts me off when it does. I find it quite repetitive as a form. But this is now coming always from the Guardian, always from the New States, but always from the

leftist publication. This is just where it is now. It's a very haughty, puritanical approach. This pearl clutching would be the phrase, it's a very good phrase, because you really imagine people go, you know, very camp, very kind of, all these person sets up this rude, disgusting thing. It's just shifted, and it'll no doubt shift back again, you know, every now and then you get it from the right, even now, you do, you get it when certain creative people do something that is considered offensive and you'll get that. And that will always happen. It's just a strange phenomenon at the moment, the ones who would seek to shut down forms of expression,

tend to be in the left. And of course, that is largely down to the new social justice movement, which mistrusts at its heart, mistrusts speech and sees speech as violence and conflates the two things. And pretty much everyone within that camp, I mean, there are disagreements along the way, but pretty much everyone is of the view that language has the capacity to normalize behavior and that people do follow these mechanical cues from, these mechanical linguistic

cues. And ultimately that's down to a mistrust of humanity, and particularly a mistrust of working class people. That's what you'll find, which is why they often go after working class comics, because it's the audiences that are dangerous. They're going to go after a middle class comic talking about various things,

because they're better educated audience, they understand what they do. There is a deep snorke. Ferry patronizing, isn't it? This sort of odd paternalistic, like kind of overbearing, like neo-Nani state in a really bizarre way. There was an article when the Dappel Arvs,

do you remember the Dappel Arvs, could probably see the book? Yeah, it was a little around. I have absolutely no idea, but they succeeded in having his TV show booted off, I think it was ITV2. And there was a really alarmist ludicrous article online talking about how his show was a rapist's almanac they used, I don't think they used that right, correctly. But it

was absolutely insane. And actually the whole article was hilarious because he'd obviously gone through his thosaurus and just tried to sound as learned as possible but actually by doing so came across as incredibly unlettered but when he wrote this article and people but it wasn't just that he wrote the I mean you can have some maniacs writing articles about this sort of stuff. So many people brought into it and even comedians I know signed this open letter saying we should have this band it was a weird moment although I have to say some of those who I know who did that now regret it. But of course, it was

really because Dapper Last Audits were working class. And this idea that they would watch him picking up girls and being a cheeky lad or whatever. I mean, look, it's not to my taste. I don't even know what it was. I watched it a bit of it, and I thought, it's not for me. But I don't think for a second that some working class guys are going to watch it and think, all right, I've got permission now to go out and commit some sexual assault. Incredible, incredible, it is just patronizing, isn't it? It is just a fear of people who aren't like you. Because believe it or not, it doesn't matter what class you come from, everyone knows the difference in your joke and real life.

And even if it were an outright instruction to behave badly, people don't, people do have agency, they do make decisions, you know, they don't just do things because someone tells them, but this is a belief that you can't, actually we can't get over because it's so ingrained now. It's everywhere, you know, it comes down to even Parliament, when Boris Johnson was using the metaphor of the Surrender Bill, and you had all these labour MPs saying that your language is normalising violence. People are going to hear you using military metaphors. Well, political language is full of military metaphors. Conflict, we go on to fight. We need strength.

All of this sort of stuff. But it's interpreted as incitement. Right? Well, again, this is basically a very patronizing view of humanity. It's not true. Did you see Miley Cyrus drop herself in it with a preference remarks showing underlying transphobia? I didn't. Why don't you fill me in on that one. I'm not up on my Miley Cyrus. Well, let me tell you, this is in out.com by May Rude. Not sure if that's a real name. So this is in out.com by May Rude. I'm not sure if that's a real name. So this is this is the gay press is out.com.

Will it sound a bit gay? That's only you can say that. Miley Cyrus is making waves with new comments about her sexuality in a new interview. She not only says that she prefers women to men, but also attempts to explain why girls away. How do we know this the The 28-year-old bisexual said, in an interview with Sirius XM's Barstool Radio, everyone I think can agree that from ancient times, Dix make wonderful sculptures.

Other than that, I'm not as interested. I like Dix's art pieces and sculptural. I love the shape. I think it looks really good on a table. The thing I continued, it's good if I can just get it in and go away because I don't want it eyeing me up. That's how I truly feel. I really feel good about saying that. She doesn't even deeper, adding everyone knows that tits are pretty than balls. That's what ended up

making female relationships make more sense to me. And then this cuts back to May Rude. I wish that I could say this news makes me excited and proud to be a woman and a lesbian, but Cyrus' quote is littered with transphobia. This kind of gender essentialism was left behind by most of the queer community years ago. Genitals do not equal gender, and Miley should know this, and then it just keeps on going in an age where turfs are more vocal than ever. People like Miley believe that genitals determine gender, trans women and girls are often considered to be in public. Space is trans women should be kicked blah blah blah. This isn't the first time she's gotten in hot water. She seemed to imply that being gay is a choice. I don't think that Miley meant to traffic in turf talking points, but the fact is she did and should

know that the stakes are too high for someone with as big of a spotlight on her as accidentally spreading this sort of rhetoric. Miley, I love you, but I'm going to need you to make this right, and I'm sure that Miley Cyrus really took that to heart. I'm sure the incredible entitlement of that kind of article is insufferable, isn't it? And it's not only actually, did I read that, I tweeted about it, so when I said I hadn't heard of it, it's because I read this stuff every day. It could have been anyone talking about anything.

I mean, the idea that if you find breasts more attractive than a scrotum, that is a turf viewpoint, that phrase is just ludicrous anyway, turf, that it is in some way transphobic. You see this all the time, genital preferences are transphobic. No, they're not. They're obviously not. But I shouldn't have to say that it's obviously not the case that that is true. I mean, and also the idea, listen to what she said in the article, the queer community left this behind years ago. Most gay people have genital preferences. Sorry to break this to you. The vast majority, you've clearly never been on a cruising ground. I tell you what, because it is very, very much about the genitals and don't you

tell me that suddenly people are blind. They're blind to what is in the, what is in the underwear department. They don't care. Are you kidding? You're on Grindr. That's all, that's all they care about. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, the, um, the funny, the funny thing that I saw there was it was like the, we talked about grievance hierarchies, right?

It was like the hierarchy of different things that she'd done. So I kind of had it in my head. I could imagine this kind of like quite haughty foreman working, like, looking over a building site. And he's like, looking, he goes, that feminism, women, yet check, lesbian, yet women, check. Oh, we're looking good here, mate. Oh, you haven't quite got it right. You didn't quite get it right on the transfer, but you did, yeah, I, check. Oh, we're looking good here, mate. Oh, oh, you haven't quite got it right.

You didn't quite get it right on the transfer, but you did, yeah, I'm gonna have to, I'll give you B minus, and you can hand this in at reception and we'll see if we can get you back next week. Yeah, I mean, you're like, it's a sort of calling card. I mean, for one thing,

it's such a shame we even have to discuss, like the article sounds banal, doesn't it? It sounds, why do I care? What Miley Cyrus thinks about tits? I don't care about that. It's really not interesting. I can pretty much go and take what I'm not interested in. Anything she's got to say, but that really takes a bit.

So why am I even having to talk about it? Well, it's because journalists are picking through, sifting through everything that people say, and trying to find some way to turn it into an offensive comment. How boring, what a boring existence this person must have. Did you see Jordan Peterson's interview with Decker-Aikkenhead from the Times and then the subsequent write-up? Yeah. What we thought to him.

Yeah. I didn't see it all to be fair. So I saw Michaela's response to it and I mean it was quite, I mean the snapshots I heard because I heard some of the recording and I could tell that this was a hit piece. Even before reading the final, I could tell that there was something about the smugness of the tone and the kind of combative nature of the interview that you knew that this person had already decided in advance what they thought about this situation, they were going to say what they thought about it, and then having read what actually happened. Yeah, I mean, it's a hit piece. That's what it is. It's someone who is not going in in good faith, and I think it's the wrong way to go

about an interview. If you're serious about being an interviewer, you need to sort of coax out some truths about that person, or get them to reveal some things about themselves. Not use it as an opportunity to smear someone, and particularly with someone like Jordan Peterson, who let's face it, has probably been mischaracterized more than anyone else except for perhaps Jake Rowling. The two of them are right up there as a people who, you know, when you see the level of vitriol against them and the accusations that are thrown against them, you know, particularly with Jordan Peterson who is someone who isn't even really that political, all of this stuff is weird because you read, it bears no resemblance to reality and this is what I'm talking about when they

say about arguing people who are capable of argumentation. Someone who is willing to just completely mischaracterize and not provide evidence for their mischaracterization. You can't talk to that person. They start talking to a madman. There's no point in debating someone who's literally living in their own reverie, their own vision of what the world, they would like the world to be. And that's unfortunately, while with someone like that. I've been in discussions with people online about J.K. Rowling talking about all the transphobic things she said. And whenever I said, can you quote me, something transphobic she said, they never can. Well, I mean, the fact that they never can look at Jordan Peterson, same thing. Same thing,

right? Exactly. Exactly. Precisely the same thing. Well, in their sense, it's worse because you have, you have most of his old lectures are online, so you have a verifiable record of a man who's opposition to tyranny in all its forms, including Nazism, could not be better documented. So the idea that then you can then say, he's supportive of Nazis, it's not even something you can debate because it is just so fundamentally the opposite of the truth. There's no point in getting involved in that, you know, so it is infuriating, but that's the point

which you have to say, no, right, I'm stepping back from this conversation, this isn't someone, this, the problem is that so many of these people who are living in this hallucination of a society of a world are pretty prominent commentators and interviewers for various major newspapers. So it's frustrating because you have to, I suppose what I'm saying is, the adults just need to start talking to each other and let the kids have their little tantrums and let them get on with it, but the adults need to talk to each other. I mean, you think with someone like Dekorakin heard who's like lead, invest, interview, reporter, or whatever for the times, you think that she would have been one of the adults.

I don't know much, to be fair, I don't know much about her, but I think I'm perfectly prepared to concede because of my lack of knowledge of her work that she is actually a very sensible intelligent journalist and on this occasion she allowed her passion to overwhelm her reason. I mean that is a conflict that lives in the heart of all of us and we are all likely to to fall prey to it if we have a particular bug bear about something or if we are, if we have, I mean, all of us at any time have false perceptions in the world because the key is never to lose sight of your objectivity. And I think, but it is undoubtedly the case that in that particular interview, she didn't behave in a professional way and let herself down. And the result was a poor piece of journalism. Well, I mean, is the interesting thing there talking about freedom of speech, not that she is permitted to write that swath of unrepresentative, maligned,

very preconceived ideas about a man who 15 minutes into the interview has to take a break to go and cry. In 15 minutes in breaks down talking about how other people have been positively affected by his work. And the only reason that were even given any notion of that is that Michaela had the foresight to actually record the call so that they can then put it up to the seat. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Don't you say something in the interview about how he's not in touch with his emotions,

but he doesn't have any emotion. There was something in there relating to it was it was yeah, it was it was obviously Well, that's the thing about Peterson in particular as well. He's obviously not a confrontational combative person Right, he really isn't and this this um view of him is someone who's who's in it for the fight and gets sort of gets off on On the fight is is is probably not true. I know who knows it's not true. Look at what he's saying during the very very first. He breaks the fourth wall.

He obviously thinks at least stepping in that this Decker lady is on side in one form or another. I'm going to guess that having been through the hell of all of the rehab and the trips around the world and all that stuff that he's had to do, they've filtered this very, very, very carefully to think, right, are we going to be okay? Is this the sort of thing that adds up to? It's obviously going to be worthwhile. It's the times, it's reputable, it's blah, blah, blah. He's got the new book coming out. And he breaks the fourth wall early on in that and says every time that I have one of these combative interviews, I have to take a rest afterwards, almost I feel sort of physically drained once it happens. So he's saying to her, look, I know that you're sort of

not a part of that and then slowly over time, obviously that hope just gets chipped away. Yeah, man, I mean, like, Michaela's a good mate and I really feel like that family just, like if anyone's had enough, like, Michaela's a good mate and I really feel like that family just, like if anyone's had enough, like, really after the last year. The problem is that because so much of, I hate thinking in terms of sides, but I think I just see so much evidence of those who are, you know, completely enamored of this social justice ideology, they're very quick to dehumanize

people. They're very quick to dehumanize. I mean, to the extent that they don't care if people die and will gloat if someone dies who doesn't agree with them. And that to me is an inhuman way. You've lost your humanity. As soon as you start doing that, you're not really a human being in any serious sense. In terms of your emotional capacity, you've made yourself ironically into the version of the person you're projecting onto these other people. And that is very sad. And I think the willingness to the shakeruity of someone who can see someone who's obviously been through serious medical problems, and yet you want to kick them when they're down is, it is actually unfathomable to me. I can't imagine ever getting myself into the sort of place, ever, ever where we would eat

the sort of thing. Man, that type of journalism, that sort of like very, I don't know, like if Piers Morgan lost 50 IQ points and was 20 years ago, like that's the sort of, that's still kind of like playing the heel, but with absolutely no charm to it, with no sort of good will, that's the sort of person, I don't know what Decker, Aiken head looks like, but I imagine that it's kind of like a younger Piers Morgan

with a wig and like a little bit more frumpy. I don't know what she looks like. I thought she was older though. I thought she was more established. I don't know to be fair, but I suppose what I think it is is, yeah, it depresses me when I think about the way in which people allow themselves to become these monsters. Unless you have empathy, empathy has got to be the bottom line, unless you, unless you, and I think because identity politics has become so tied to identity now, that it means that if someone is challenging a worldview, instead of welcoming that, I mean, you should, you should welcome it. And instead of welcoming

it, you see that person as a kind of, as someone who is the embodiment of evil, someone who is therefore threatening your identity, who you are, and committing violence simply by disagreeing with you, then it's very easy to get yourself in a situation where you can see that person as less than human and expendable. And that is really the heart of cancel culture, isn't it? This idea that we could just get rid of these people who think differently than us. Because, well, something that Peter himself talks about is the way in which when you are challenged, it feels painful and you get this shock of awakening. And it's a difficult process to be open-minded,

to be a free thinker, to challenge yourself and be challenged by others. All of that is really difficult. But rather than accept that actually this is a positive form of growth, you know, that kind of those mini-former destructions are a positive thing for yourself as an individual, is to get rid of and eliminate any possibility that it could happen. It's tied up with the whole idea of the safe space culture and the idea of them not being challenged and not being exposed to ideas that might be uncomfortable. What they mean by uncomfortable is challenge challenging, make you a better person,

make you a more interesting and well-rounded person. We have to, in a sense, start from scratch. All of this stuff has, you know, it means the universities, schools, everything's got to basically start from scratch again. Because at the moment, we are in this, you know, this wilderness of tigers where there's no sensible discussions going on. Everyone's out to hurt each other. No one's wanting to listen. They're just having their own individual scraps with imaginary enemies.

It can't go on forever. Does council culture exist? It's incredible to me that anyone would deny that it exists when the evidence is so overwhelming for it. I've been in conversations with people about this online and there's a couple of threads online which have hundreds and hundreds of examples of people who've lost their jobs out of for something they've said at work or something that's you know, of course it exists. I mean quite obviously I think you know the main complaint of saying, no one's been cancelled. Again, that's someone taking a metaphor literally. No one's saying that anyone is literally being

cancelled. Council culture is a shorthand metaphor for a form, a method whereby when you hear something that offends you or obsets you, typically something quite innocuous or relatively inconsequential. In other words, part of cancel culture is an overreaction, right? So you go in organs blazing and you don't stop until that person has lost everything. Their livelihood, their job, their reputation, absolutely has all got to go because there can be no redemption, there can be no forgiveness. And this happens again and again. And the examples of it are so numerous that it is impossible to deny with a straight face that it doesn't exist. Yet people do. It's the same reason. People hate to say it again, but writers for the Guardian will say, cancel culture doesn't exist because they are its chief practitioners. Remember,

this is a publication that when Suzanne Moore wrote that article, which they all disliked, most of the staff wrote a letter of complaint to try and get her booted out. Then it's the same people who will say that cancel culture doesn't exist. Well, this is hardly surprising because the culture war is largely engineered and motored by people like the people who work at the Guardian. It's their culture war. This is the Identitarian Left's culture war. But they are the same people who will say the culture war is a right wing myth.

But they're the antagonists. It's nuts. But JK Rowling said low to stuff. She hasn't been cancelled. Why is she not being cancelled? Well you know the answer to that Chris. Let's say she's a billionaire and as we all know, cancel culture over well-mingly effects poor people. And this is the other major myth about it. You know if you're a celebrity put someone in the public eye who is financially secure, it's very difficult to cancel. You know you can't cancel get, get J.K. Rowling. She's rich, she's author in

the world. You can however cancel Gilliam Philip, who's the Scottish author, who tweeted in support of J.K. Rowling. So she lost her publisher and she lost her age. And that can happen because she's expendable. You can't, no publisher in their right mind would get rid of J.K. Rowling. So no, she cannot be canceled. But that does not justify the the venomous misogynistic abuse she gets on a daily basis. I mean, that's still on a human level just morally unforgivable. However, she isn't subject to cancel culture, I will accept I will accept that. And the ones who are subject to cancel culture are normally people who don't have the means to stick up for themselves, who don't have the financial resources to do so,

who are intimidated because they go into work and suddenly they're facing a tribunal because someone overheard something they said and misinterpreted it. This isn't about someone who's gone into work and start shouting about faggots and puffs and how they should all be killed and stuff. That's the way it's portray. No, it's someone who made a joke that someone's misinterpreted as being homophobic because it hurt their feelings. And so they went and it's a different thing. And it may not even have been about gay people at all right it's the the key aspects of cancer culture is that the slight is actually often very small right and also it's possible I mean there's a lot of people now talking about how we should we should not have call

out culture we should have call in culture and actually it sounds a bit tacky but there's something in that. And so far as if you're in the workplace and someone says something that upsets your offends you, you call in, you go over to them and say, look, what you said, bother me a bit, can we ever talk about it? And you resolve your things that way.

Calling out would be, screenshot the email, put it online, let everyone know that this person is evil and should be fired and hounded. And that's quite a good distinction to me because that's what we used to do. I mean, I've had disputes at work. You know, I used to be a teacher. I used to work in a call center. I've had disputes with people and I've took them to one side and said,

comedic, gussets, and sometimes I've been writing, sometimes I've been writing. But you get, you reach a resolution because we're human beings and we can deal with conflict. And there's no such thing as a human relationship that doesn't that is devoid of conflict. But if my initial reaction was always, I want to see that person fall. I want to publicly shame that person. I want to suffer. That's not that's not justice. That's revenge. And I think that that's what that's what he's at the heart of this. And then what we mean by cancel culture is this general propensity to seek vengeance for a perceived slight that may or may not have been a slight in the first place, it may have been just the way that you perceived it. That's what cancel culture is and it happens all the time. So we need to,

again, go back to what it says, start from scratch, the idea, things we shouldn't accept, that the culture war is a right wing myth, that cancel culture does not exist, that anyone is calling for free speech without any kind of consequences or criticism. None of those things are at all true, and yet they are stated, so they are true. And this comes back to a problem that we face, and they gave us a word for it, didn't they? The word is gaslighting. That so many people in the identitarian left loved gaslight, they were loved, they were happily say to you This is a thing that is happening when it is not happening or this is a thing that's not happening when it plainly is happening They would just deny observable observable reality

And they will keep denying of the observable reality so that you start to doubt your own sanity That's what gaslighting means comes from the film gaslight, you know Where the guy is constantly lowering the lights and his wife saying why is it getting so so dim in here and he's saying it's not, it's just you. You know, so that's what they do. And yet again, they accuse others of gaslighting because that's what they do. How far do you think we are from thoughts being a crime? Like, is there a significant philosophical or symbolic difference between thinking a thing in your head and making the noises of that thing with your mouth?

Well, everyone should have a responsibility to think carefully about the things they say and they should choose what they want. Do we have to think carefully about the things we think? No, you can't. Nobody can afford to express their every unfiltered view. That's why we have a filter. You know, I mean, how could that be? Our minds are very complex things. We are continually wrestling with difficult ideas,

and everyone has thoughts that they would not express. But that's the point of socialization. That's why children sometimes say the most awful things. You know, because they just come out with it it and they say sometimes really offensive and upsetting things because they don't have that filter and they don't have that sense of social responsibility. That's something that we learn when we're socialized. The idea of criminalizing someone's thoughts, I mean, of course, it's horrific and it's the stuff of dystopia. That's why dystopian writers

such as Philip K. Dick always wrote about that kind of thing. Whether it's actually happening, is that your question, whether how far are we from it actually? Yeah, just the interesting thing that I've found is that certain groups of people would soon have a lying ally than a truthful opponent. So they would rather someone make the mouth noises that they don't believe and essentially be unreliable. Like they don't know what that person's going to do. They're evidently not being themselves or even if they don't believe and essentially be unreli- like they don't know what that person's gonna do, they're evidently not being themselves or even if they don't, they're perhaps making themselves willfully ignorant of their deception.

Yeah, yeah. Rather than someone who maybe isn't an actual opponent, maybe they're just slightly adjacent to them or maybe they're not fully on board, but is being wholly themselves and is being completely truthful. And that to me, I find that fascinating, how someone is... But I think prepared to take deception as long as it's deception on my side. Oh, well, I think though,

the view that deception is preferable to the truth. I mean, this is saying that they call preference falsification is when you say what you think is the most popular view, not what you actually think. The thing that you're meant to say, that's the phrase. It was coined by an economist, and I'm because the gutter I can't remember his name, but you can look at a preference for vocation. It's very important. Because I remember talking to someone who had been on question time, and they'd all wait, or no, misremembering, someone who knew someone had been on a question time panel,

and they said that they'd had this discussion with all the politicians, the journalists, and then afterwards in the green room, they'd all sort of said, did you really think that? No, I don't think that. And they all agreed that they actually thought the opposite. But they knew that they had to give that to say the right thing now. Very performance sort of conversation. Well, that's a fairly standard thing in politics. I mean, you know, politicians are always having to to a certain party line. The problem is that now, like you say, there are all things that we're expected to say, even if we don't believe them. And I would urge everyone

never to say something you don't believe. I think it's self-destructive to speak knowing false words. It is really self-destructive. Not only that, it means you don't know anyone. People don't know each other. I would rather know what people actually think. But I think the reason why particularly the social justice left, would rather they lived in a world of liars. Firstly, I think it's because a lot of them are liars themselves, and they are willing to be collecting their income.

Like the ringer company. Well, I guess it's just a kind of sense of the means always justified ends. I think that's really what it's about. But also, I think additionally to that, it's about this idea that it's about their belief that language creates reality. It's that post-modern belief.

That everything that happens in the world is down to the words that are expressed. And as a result of that, if you have opinions that are, shall we say, objectionable, and those opinions are articulated, then they're out, they've escaped like a poison from a lab, you know, they're like a virus and therefore what happens is that changes society

and poisons and infects society. And I think they genuinely believe that, as opposed to the truth of it, which is the opposite of that, which is that if you hear objectionable ideas out loud, you are able to engage with them and explain why they are wrong or expose the people who are expressing it, all the other things that, which is how progress works, it's why we got over slavery in the 19th century through discussion and debate and people wrangling with these then very difficult issues, but issues now that everyone, there's a complete consensus on, right? You don't reach that consensus without discussion. When I hear of people attempting to criminalize, particularly with the trans debate, trying to attempt to criminalize the language that people use, misgendering, that kind of thing, or compelling speech as Canada

is now doing, when I hear that, I think you have learned nothing from civil rights movements. You've learned nothing. The gay rights movement never did this. They never suggested we should criminalize people who used words about gay people in a certain way or didn't accept gay equality. We never had that. We had debate protest and we even had ridicule and we had discussion and persuasion. Above all, we had persuasion. And it worked.

Now, you won't find many people who are against equal rights for gay people. But the ones, the residual elements, tend to be very religious, in fact. So, again, you reach it, you reach progress is achieved through open discussion, and progress is stymied when people misrepresent their own thoughts for fear of the tyranny of the collective, of the, of the, the, the, the, the, you know, this, this, what you call peer pressure. Where does the N word fit into free speech? Recently we've had this 67-year-old New York Times right, a Donald McNeil, refired for referring to the N word. Isn't it weird that if he was a rapper and he'd said that, he'd been fine?

Was, was the context of that, that that he was quoted I believe there was a reason that was referring to referring to something else. Yeah, so I guess he's one one level removed from saying it. Yeah, well I think the truth is we all acknowledge that when I say that words and violence are two different things I'm not saying that words don't have power or indeed that words don't have baggage and when you have a word that is so associated with the evils of slavery and a certainly a word that is favored by racists, there's no getting around that. Then obviously, this is what I say about, you know, people should think for they speak because they should think not just about what they are saying, but how it is received,

that's why clarity is always important. So, having acknowledged that, then you have to talk about the intention of why the word is being uttered. If you're quoting from a text, if you're teaching of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, in which the word occurs frequently, if you're teaching Huckleberry Finn, although of course a lot people aren't now, because they say it's a racist racist book because it contains the word. Well, context is absolutely everything. Let's take Mark Twain, let's take Huckleberry Finn, right? The book wouldn't work if that word was not there because the word is a satire against, it's a book which is pro-racial equality. It is against those hypoc, because you'll notice

that the hypocrites in that novel are the adults who believe that they are Christian and good and righteous and yet they endorse slavery and it takes a child to see through the evil of slavery, right? That's the point. And that doesn't work if you sanitize the reality of what life was like for someone like Jim, for a character like Jim, right? It doesn't work. So to say that the book is racist simply because of the presence of a word that many people find offensive is to completely divorce, firstly it's a completely interpretation of what the text is about, but it's also to empower a certain word with this undue weight and say that the word in of itself is an evil word. Well, that's almost talismanic. That's almost, that's almost invested

with the kind of significance. Words are all about intent because they're how we express our ideas about the world. That isn't, I think we should be very wary of an overreaction. However, having said that, and for all my urging people to speak with Karen to not go out of their way to her to the people's feelings,

if you've decided that you want to use the word for whatever reason, that's up to you. It is not for me. If I heard that someone someone using that word or any kind of racial slur authentically from a place of racial hatred, then I would know that's not the sort of person I want to associate with and I will remove myself in that situation pretty quickly or I will say something. and I want to associate with, and I will remove myself in that situation pretty quickly, or I will say something. You know, if I feel like, and if I feel I'm not gonna get beat into a pulp, I would probably say something to that person,

I would complain. But if it's someone in a classroom quoting a poem, I didn't happen when someone was quoting James Baldwin, an academic was a bit. The best example I've heard was a teacher teaching Chinese to Americans, and there is a word in Chinese that sounds like the N word. He's trying to teach them it. Finitically, it sounds like that.

I think it's maybe like CG or two Cs instead. But it's close enough. Also, I mean, even just the fact, like I get it, that word is loaded with baggage and I have nightmares about accidentally saying it sometimes on a live stream or something. Not that, it's a word that I don't think I can't remember using because I'm so terrified

that if it gets into my lexicon somehow that it might just sneak out at a really inopportunes. It's not a wrap fan, you know? No, well, that's the thing. That's the other really fascinating thing that if you're a rapper of any, any racial descent, you can say it. If you're a rapper, you're allowed to say that word.

As many times as you want, if you can't, you can be the majority of one of your songs. Yeah, but again, there's context to that. There's context to the genre. But there was no context to Donald McNeill referring to it on a bus. That's my point. It's always got to be about, it's always got to be about context. But this is why I say the bottom line should be anyone should be able to say what they choose to say. That's it. And if they say something that's offensive and even horrible, then we have a decision

to either criticize them back or to remove herself from that situation. That's the way it's got to be. I mean, Donald McNeill was allowed to say it. It wasn't like someone came in with a big set of jaw clamps or something and was like, no, you're not allowed to finish the second syllable of that word. Yeah, what we shouldn't stand for is then this, this decision that he's a racist. Because although I'm not familiar with the case from what you've described, it's someone quoting, he's clearly not a racist. In fact, it was probably an anti-racist point of the notion.

So there's some, there's some accusations of other things that he said on the trip. And if they're true, that kind of reframes this, but it doesn't really seem like there's as much evidence and then you think why it kind of feels like that's being thrown in after the trip. And if they're true, that kind of reframes this, but it doesn't really seem like there's as much evidence and then you think what kind of feels like that's being thrown in after the fact. It's just it's so nice. We have so little truth. We have so little truth. I don't know because I don't know about the specifics of the case. Let's take the example of a teacher who is teaching James Baldwin and uses the word because the word is in the text. Right. We should not stand for anyone accusing that person of racism. It doesn't make sense. There's absolutely because we're going to accuse someone of racism. You're going to have to have more evidence than he's just quoted

a text. It's not enough, right? It's outrageous. In fact, I think he would be probably in dire election of his duty as a teacher if he didn't quote accurately, right? And often in order to make a point, even in opposition to racism, like I say with a Mark Twain example, the book doesn't work without, in other words, a book about racism, which is critical of racism,

won't work if there's no depiction of racism in it. Is it? So it's not gonna work, right? And these people have no idea about art. I remember reading, there was a feminist book called Kant written. Is that funny? I love that sentence. There was a feminist book. Cold Kant. Yeah, back in the 80s I think it was and subtitle was a declaration of

independence and I read this book or not in the 80s because it was a child, I would know, I read it in the 90s. And there was a moment in the book where I just flinched because it was talking about how feminists should go and watch films at the cinema like Thelma and Louise. And when there's a rap scene, they should stand up and scream at the screen. Shut this down. This is disgusting. How did it write? In other words, any depiction of rape

is an endorsement of rape and creates rape in society, right? And I remember reading that thinking, no one thinks this is an extreme, extreme stuff. No, and I knew a lot of feminists and none of them would have gone along with this. They'd be like, well, that's just stupid. That's just thick. because there's a difference between endorsing rape and depicting it on screen because actually when you're depicting on screen,

more often than not, you want it to look bad because it's a bad thing. Tencent to not glorify it, yeah. Quite. Quite. But now that idea is mainstream. That's the norm. You see something depicted in a film who was that there was one critic showing we need to call out David Lynch for his violence against women. He's not violent against women. He's depicted violence against certain women. He's also depicted violence against a lot of men, probably more, but that's not what you notice, is it? And this idea that artistic representation is the same as the thing. It blows my mind because it's someone who is so politicized, they don't understand art,

they don't get what art is, the word art means artifice, it is a false representation, it is not the actual thing, that's what art is, right? If you take a scene like the rape scene in irreversible, which I can't watch to be honest, I watched it once and I could never watch it again, it's so brutal, so vicious, it's an extended, it's about 10 minutes scene of the camera doesn't move and it watches this raping and alleyway and it is unbelievably upsetting. But it's meant to be, it's not saying, look how exciting this is, it's saying, look how fucking horrible this is. And that's the point and it doesn't do well actually to represent horrible things as though they're okay and as though they're just you can just get on with it right it's not it's not you know it's it's you know and it's it's incredible me to understand so when I read that book I remember thinking well no one's ever going to get on board without this is and I can't believe

I can't believe that that idea has won out. I can't believe it. That now that is the way most, not maybe I'm having my mind skewed because I just read the Guardian all the time, but a lot of people in power think that now. They think that artistic representation, representation in film needs to send a positive message. It blows my mind. You've got this quote in the book that I really liked. It says, history does not look fondly on the hubris of those who appoint themselves

as arbiters of permissible speech and thought. Their authority is only ever contingent on the wisdom of their time. Would you reckon that future humans are going to look back on this time and think? It will be fascinating, where I think I have absolutely no doubt that this will be a weird blip in human history, right? I mean, I feel like I'm living it. And I'm also very aware that, of course, we never know how future generations will perceive. But my God, it feels weird enough being in it. With all of the context and all of the upbringing and all of the understanding. So, you read the article today about how people mainly just stop wearing ties because it's

a phallic symbol of white supremacy and you just think, well, you know, that's become normal to me now. I see that sort of thing every day. It shouldn't, by the way. That should always be it like, what the hell is this kind of moment? Who's reading this rubbish mainstream newspapers, Guardian again. And we're living it, it's everywhere. I think ultimately in a hundred years time, there was a pocket of hysteria. This was a moment of hysteria that people lived through, where everyone just started denying reality. Everyone just started saying, the ACLU started putting posts out saying, there is no advantage whatsoever to being born by a logically male when it comes to sport. That just simply doesn't exist. Just statements of untruth and they call them facts.

You know it's that. I don't know if you saw that thread. They call them facts. Oh, the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, which has basically become an basically the American Civil Liberties Union, which has basically become an Identitarian activist group now. Put out a list of facts, debunked with debunking the myths, and one of the myths they debunked was the idea that there is any biological difference between men and women whatsoever. That's a myth that they're just debunking via Twitter. So well done. But you see, I think historians will look at that and say, okay, so there were all these people saying observable falsehoods and stating them with such self assurance as though they were fact, well, religious zealots, in other words.

And this was not only did this happen, but governments and businesses and corporations and HR departments and the police and schools and teachers and universities echoed these same falsehoods and everyone colluded and pretended that they were real, except for the majority of people who were standing there saying, what's going on? None of this is real. Why are you creating this fantasy land that we have to walk you by? But that's what happened, but the power for people sustained the illusion for this length of time until suddenly a thing called democracy won out. Until the dialed party finally took over and rose to prominence bearing their pitch forks

and their rocket grenade launchers. I'd hear that I would ever go into politics. I've had a number of people suggested to me. I never. No, no, no, not at all. Well, when do you start one? No, Chris Williams in part. Mate, I've done far too many party drugs

to be able to ever, but in fact, actually, that might be what gets me in. Maybe that's, maybe that is my routine. Maybe that's allowed. I think that's allowed these days, isn't it? Because most of the major politicians have admitted to some sort of drug use over the past. Fair enough.

So that might be it. I mean, I couldn't do it because I was a stand-up comedian. Still, I'm, I see, notice I use past tense there. It's because I've been locked in, I'm saying. So, pre-COVID, I used to be a stand-up comedian. Well, there are no stand-up comedians at the moment, but if you, if, you know, you could go through my old sets and take a quote out of context, you could do that with any comedian, you know, you know. And you know what politicians, they get such scrutiny over absolutely everything they've ever said, but that's not the real reason I wouldn't do it. The real reason I wouldn't do it is because I couldn't do the lying thing. I couldn't, you know, if you're a member of a party,

you have to follow the party line on certain issues and I couldn't be in that position of not saying what I thought I can't do that. I'm a terrible liar, like absolutely awful and many of my ex-girlfriends will attest to that as well. You notice I said X as well there. What are your thoughts on Trump being removed from Twitter? Is that a freedom of speech issue? So the question of big tech censorship, I suppose, is, well, firstly we have to bring the argument up to date. So when you talk about how a lot of people say censorship is just the the progative of the state, it's something the state does. That's an argument that's completely out of date, about 20 years out of date. The big tech companies operate this oligopoly. They they have they dominate the predominant

mean the predominant public forum. The predominant means of communication. They have more collective power than any nation state, but they have none of the democratic accountability that comes with it. We have to accept that they are in a unique position. If you're going to say to me that it is fine for them to determine the parameters of acceptable speech, when they not only do they own all of the major platforms to speech, they will shut down any competition in its nascent form. As we saw with Parley, so they'll say go and set up your own platform, someone does, they shut it down, right? So this is not, you know, this is the reason why

we have antitrust laws. We have it for a reason. When certain small groups of companies dominate a market, there are measures put in place to address that. I don't see why it should be any different with Big Tech. I think when it comes to Donald Trump specifically, it is, terrifies me actually, that these unelected billionaires can decide whether we get to hear from an elected president, the leader of the free world.

That's a terrifying thing. The last people that should be cheering on the power of multi-billion dollar corporations is anyone who is authentically on the left because to be on the left means that you don't support those people by the way. Sorry, this is sort of leftism 101. Read a book about this stuff. It's not difficult. You know, it's it's absolutely nuts that this would be the case. No leftist thinker going back beyond 20 because leftism has become dominated by identity politics now. None of these people are really left-wing, but go back, you know, even not even that long ago. And people would have laughed out loud. You went to a socialist meeting back in the 80s and said, yeah, we need Google to, I know, Google didn't exist, but the equivalent of Google to stand up for our, to look after us, basically, to be our parent.

Do you think that you would have been removed if he was still going to be president for four years? Well, I always thought that we're going to actually wait until he was out. And I knew that we're going to nuke his account, but I thought that we're going to do it like the day after he was out. I think that it just goes to show how braised and they're becoming. I mean, they now believe that they are more powerful than the president. They believe they're more powerful than politicians. Now, look, it's a straightforward thing. And you'll always hear that, oh, when it's a private company, they can do what they want,

argument, okay? Well, you know, that, while that is technically true, they absolutely can. I suppose they could also decide to not allow gay people on their platform if they want. I think they should face robust criticism if they decide to do that. And similarly, they should face robust criticism when they are editorializing on completely partisan lines. Let's face it, that's exactly what they are doing. So they, they do need to face not just criticism. They need to be more than that. And I think the way you do it is they, frankly, because they are now behaving like publishers,

they should not have legal protections. That's all it is. If they're going to be publishers, then they're like every other publisher, like every other media outlet and newspaper, they are responsible for the words that appear on their platform. End a story.

Because every time Twitter gets sued for a libelous thing that's there, they say, well, we're not a publisher, we're a platform, we're not responsible for what put out. Well, just change that, change rules, change section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and the way you could change it, because obviously, you know, that act was set up because of the proliferation of comments sections on new sites, it's unreasonable to expect anyone to be responsible for everything they fail to remove in a comment section. That's really unreasonable, right?

So you need to have those protections. So why not just change that law so that they're responsible so that it doesn't count for illegal content, say? So in other words, they can't be held responsible for all libelous, libelous, or illegal content. Rather than giving them license, as it currently does, the way it's phrased, they have the license to remove anything that just, they than giving them license, as it currently does, the way it's phrased, they have the license to remove anything that just they just to disagree with, or offends

them, right? No, I think as soon as you're removing content because you politically disagree or because it offends your personal sensibilities as happens all the time on Facebook and Twitter, then you are most definitely a publisher, you're editorializing end of story. So I think that's the point at which we need to have some changes to the law. So by all means, if Twitter wants to say, look, we're a private company, we're opposed to free speech, and we will only allow these opinions. You can't have these other opinions, which is effectively what it does anyway now. For instance, gender critical feminists are routinely booted off because Twitter just doesn't agree with that, right? Well, if you want that kind of platform, then say what you are. Just say what you want. Be honest and open about it. Don't

pretend that you're for free speech, which they're not. Dracking Trump will run in 2024. I mean, I hate predicting the future, so always get it wrong. Like, I think it's get it right, mate. The only thing that you've ever predicted on the show that you got wrong, I think was, oh no, you actually said the Biden was going to win as well. Yeah, so you did. No, but I think, no, I'm happy to predict, but I'm no mother-shipton. I don't think I can get over here.

Look, I think, no, I wouldn't I think no, I wouldn't have thought so. I wouldn't have thought so. I mean, I could elaborate on that, but I just... I don't think he's got the necessary support now within the Republican Party, so I just don't think he would get the nomination. But who knows who knows? My inclination as to Englishman talking about American politics, which this channel gets criticized for.

Yeah, I think American politics get really annoyed by this. Yeah, they hate it. Well, I mean, I put a video up with Carl Benjamin, the YouTuber formerly known as Saga and River Cady the other day talking about AOC and someone commented, someone commented and said, why are you two Brits always talking about American politics? And I was like, well, it's because it's far more interesting

than ours, like the closest thing that we have to AOC's, Diane Abbott. I mean, you're very close to the whole stay in your lane argument there, right? And you're, it's so we're not allowed to take any interest in world politics, that's ridiculous. And what's the harm? You know, maybe we get it wrong. That's all right. Maybe we get it completely wrong. But so... I hope for it in any case. My favorite thing that I've heard around this social media freedom of speech thing is freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of reach.

It's like because it rhymes somehow, it's got, it's yet somehow it's got more veracity to it. Yeah, it's either rhyming or repeating, repetitions the other one. If you've seen the, the UN women, the UN women account keeps putting out these tweets that are just that what was the one they did the other day? There is, there was the one they did the other day? There is no wrong way to be a woman. There is no wrong way to be a woman. There were eight times. It's like, well, I wasn't convinced by the third time.

I was being persuade and then by the eighth, I'm like, oh, yeah, man, you've nailed it. If persuasive rhetorical documents from the history, all they were were just repeating the same sentence over and over again until they wore you down into submission. I mean that's Jack Knuckleson in the Shining. That's not a serious argument. That's all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You know, it's it's insane. It's either that or the club. It's the clap emojis isn't it? If you put the clap emojis in between each of the words, that's hard hit. All the full stop after every word. See, there's very, very, very serious. It is. Yeah.

It's not an issue at the moment because no one can leave the house. But why shouldn't people protest against speakers that they don't like? They should. I don't have a problem with that. Why should they petition to get them removed from the university or the campus or the wherever? The problem I haven't, I haven't got a problem with protest at all. I think a protest is a sign of a healthy democracy and you should be able to protest whatever you like. My problem is people capitulating to protest that are clearly assanine.

Right, so if if if I for instance say I don't want this So if I, for instance, say, I don't want this speaker on campus because he eats meat, and I'm a vegetarian, and it will therefore normalize the killing of pigs. If I say something as ludicrous as that, I would expect the university authorities to say, okay, you're free to have that opinion, but shut up now, because we're not going to listen to it. We're not interested. But you know, go and have your protest, whatever. But it's the

demand, it's the threats. It's when protests literally prevent people from speaking, as in they sound fire alarms or they prevent the event going ahead or they threaten, therefore the cost of security become prohibitive. These are, that's where you are preventing someone else from speaking and that's the distinction. I don't have a problem with anyone protesting at all. I think the sort of protests I had in mind was when Steve Bannon went to Oxford to speak and there was essentially like a human wall of people in front of the entrance that started. Like I said, the distinction is clear. Peaceful protest, I'm all for. Any form of protest that turns violent, I oppose,

no matter who is doing it and for what reason, and any measures that prevent other people from making their own informed choice. So in other words, because what you're doing is if you form a wall to prevent people actually, to prevent the event taking place, you are acting in local parental, you were deciding on behalf of your peers what they can and cannot hear. That's not for you to do. What's loco parentas? In loco parentas, in place of a parent, it's a Ponzi way of saying that. But basically, that's what I think is, that's when you are threatening free speech, and that's when you are acting like an authoritarian, because what you're saying is my particular view of the world is the only one that matters. And that's the opposite of liberal democracy and what it stands for.

I've got my favorite passage from the book, and I'm going to read it out here. In an age when lived experience is often valued more than objective truth, the core tenets of liberalism, due process and free speech, are bound to be at risk. Lived experience is what we used to call anecdote evidence, a fallacious form of reasoning that has misled many into believing that hours is an essentially oppressive society, overrun by fascists and undergirded by white supremacy. Needless to say, those who lived experience tell them that this worldview bears little resemblance to reality, a quickly discounted, it would seem that lived experience only matters if it is of the approved sort.

Good words, Andrew. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Chris. Because that is something that troubles me and it's something that I've already gone into with you before about, you know, firstly, the inherent contradictions of the movement. So if you're going to say that objective truth doesn't matter and all that matters is people's lived experience and perception in other words, then you're going to have to take on board everyone's perception, aren't you? Or what you're really doing is you're saying that, no, what I meant was people whose perception

agrees with mine. And then it's a different thing, isn't it? So there's the inherent contradiction within it. But also the idea that we can just discount objective truth. Well, you know, it's so opposed to basic enlightenment values of reason and scientific inquiry. It's absolutely nuts. I mean, yeah, there are people who will say that homiopathy objectively works because I had some of that course and I got better. But you see that, we don't make these sweeping statements on the basis of that, do we? Because that's not a sufficient study that it worked for you, right? That's not sufficient, is it? What was the Darren Brown show where he did the horse racing, the system? Have you seen that one? No. You should watch it. So there's an hour long show called The System where he basically, he shows you

this process by which he picks a member of the public and he feeds them the information which horse is going to win a race. And he does it five or six times and it works every time, impossible, right? And then he shows you how he did it. And I won't tell you how he did it. But it's a similar, it's a similar thing because all we're seeing is her experience of winning every time and we're not seeing what's actually happening Which is a much bigger picture that you might even be able to guess from what I've just said Because we cannot honestly watch it's great. We cannot We cannot base our perception our conclusions about reality on our experience of reality, okay? Because if we do that

Chaos reigns as the fox said in Antichrist, you know, we we sorry That's a bit of a niche reference. I just love thats, as the Fox said in Antichrist. You know, we, sorry, that's a bit of a niche reference. I just love that film. We've seen the film Antichrist. Yeah, it's the last one, true. You know the bit where the Fox speaks. It says chaos reigns, it's so chilling. I love it.

Anyway, where was I, sorry, I'm getting, I love every time that you're on for some reason, we seem to have like really apocalyptic references. I think I first ever introduced you as like Twitter cracking and crumbling beneath your feet as you started the episode. It's always so apocalyptic. Under a Biden administration,

do you think that it's better or worse for free speech? What are your predictions there or what are your sense? I know that you don't like making predictions. I think it's worse. I think it is worse. So this is the, I mean, Trump had his blind spots on free speech which we should never be for. He was not very good on press freedom. For instance, I think if he could have had his way, he would have been quite happy to shut down his critics and muzzle his critics. I don't think they can be any doubt about that. I think the risk with Biden is that he, you know, I mean, I remember having

a lot of discussions before the election and a lot of people who were voting Biden were sort of saying, but you know, these fears that he's going to be a woke person. He was voted in because he's the non-woke candidate, right? That's why we don't have, we don't have Elizabeth Warren in the white ass because,okeness doesn't win votes, let's face it, you know, this is why Kamala Harris had to drop out the primary so early because she just wasn't popular. And so, you know, all, and then a lot of people say to me, you know, well, it's a false fear. But then within two days, a number of the executive orders are specifically

woke executive orders, specifically woke executive orders. And you think, oh, hang on a minute, this is a bad thing. Wokenness and the opposition of freedom of speech go hand in hand. They just do because, as I've said, of this belief in the power of language to form reality. And that's really what it's about. So I don't think, firstly also I don't think Biden and his administration have any appetite to address the problems of big tech censorship because big tech is on their side. At the moment, you know, it's very myopic because if you go into the, you know, they should be thinking long term here. They don't want to set these kind of precedents. So there's

that, there's also a movement as you know America to have the first amendment changed, a mainly amendment, so that hate speech is not protected speech, but of course hate speech as a formulation is just, as I say in the book, it's a kind of fudge to deal with, or to suggest that speech that you don't like is not subject to constitutional protection. That's all that that is. So, which is why I argue in the book was one of the arguments I imagine is going to get me in a bit of trouble, is that I think all hate speech laws ought to be repealed and that there is no place for hate speech

laws on any statute books in a liberal democracy. And I think under Biden and his administration, the problem of hate speech is going to get worse. As it seems to be in this country a little bit, you've got the law commission pushing now for further hate speech is going to get worse. As it seems to be in this country a little bit, you've got the Law Commission pushing now for further hate speech regulation when what they should be doing is dining existing legislation back. And they're going the other way, the SMP, of course in Scotland under Humza Yusuf,

the Justice Secretary who, as far as I can see, is a kind of maniac who thinks that you should prosecute people in their own homes for things that they say. I mean, this is properly authoritarian stuff. Like, even a lot of people on the left are like, oh, hang on a minute, this is too much, you know. This is, it's scary stuff. And the problem is we need to,

I was talking to a politician about this the other day. We need to find a way for politicians to be brave enough, just to stand up and say, because it sounds like you're saying, I want everyone to be able to be hateful, just to stand up and say, because it sounds like you're saying, I want everyone to be able to be hateful, I want everyone to say hateful things. And you're not saying that. You're talking about a much bigger picture about free speech and about the fact that the state has no place of deciding what its citizens can and cannot say, because that way tyranny lies. So it's going to take a brave politician

is, it always takes a degree of courage to defend free speech because what you're doing is you're defending the rights of unpleasant people to say unpleasant things as a corollary of what you're doing inevitably because speech that isn't controversial doesn't require protection. So it's difficult and that's why I emphasize in the book that if you're defending someone who's saying something that's utterly reprehensible. You should also make the point, just strategically, just make the point that you don't agree with what they're saying and you find it reprehensible. Be clear, because otherwise people will use it against you. They'll do it anyway, by the way. You know, I mean, like it doesn't matter what you say,

because people will just put words into your mouth. That seems to be the norm now. People will just decide what you secretly think, you know? You saw this, the other, God, Owen Jones tweeted the other day that he was saying that the reason why GB News is so popular can be explained because everyone who supports it has this fear of, is a reactionary who has a fear of progress.

So what you've done is you've just decided what's going on in the minds of all these millions of people about a program that doesn't even exist yet that you've also just decided what it's about. It's this insane degree of entitlement. I think it's, I think it's demented. The idea that you think you know what's going on in anyone's heads is on the face of it absurd, but to just casually diagnose millions of people with your cod psychology over Twitter. I can't imagine being that

entitled, that narcissistic for God's sake. You know, just before I'd sent to you, I'd be like, I'd be like, ah, should I say, should I be advertising the fact that I think I'm better than everyone else and can decide on their behalf, what they're secretly thinking? Should I tweet that? Or should I have a little bit of fucking humility? Well, not everyone has that. The thing that I can't get out of my head is I don't meet people like Owen Jones or anybody else. I don't meet a decorate can head. I don't meet these sorts of people that say these sorts of things.

Despite having met an awful lot of people, but Newcastle seems to filter out the maniacs in quite a good way. No one wants to come this far. Yeah, I think I don't know what it is. You have your own kind of maniacs, though. That's correct. Yeah, that is very true. I don't know what it is. You have your own kind of maniac, though. That's correct, yeah, that is very true. And the thing I always think, I always excuse it away in my own head by saying it's just the clout because now things that are sort of inflammatory

and cause response, they garner momentum. And I know that that can't be true. I mean, the best faith, like potential, that their words can have is that they're just using them and they don't believe them. Because if they believe them, this is a whole new magnitude of ridiculous foolishness. What you're doing there is you're trying to make sense of the inexplicable and that's an understandable instinct. It's a noble attitude, right?

It is noble. And you're also giving them the benefit of the doubt, weirdly, by suggesting that they're maybe being disingenuous, you're saying they can't be as maniacal as they seem. So that's actually quite a positive thing that you're doing there. But unfortunately, I, you know, I, on the other hand, do like to take people to face value and I believe that people mean what they say unless proven otherwise. So I'm going to assume that they do believe this and that

is a scarier world you're in there. I mean that is a frightening place. Although I do notice that in conversation such people rarely say things that are that unhinged, they tend to reserve them for Twitter. Or, you know, so I don't know what that tells us. But I, you know, I hope you're right. I hope it is just a game. And that they don't seriously believe what they say. I hope so too. Free speech and my matters will be linked in the show notes below. Have you got anything else?

Is there anything else happening in the world of Andrew Doyle at the moment? Well, just so I'm, you know, because it's locked down. I go for walks every day through fields and, you know, I don't know how to use Instagram. I don't know if I've said this, I don't know how to use it. So I've just posed pictures of what I see on my walks and they're normally sheep. And it occurred to me the other day that I think people think I've got a fetish because I just post pictures of sheep on Instagram. And it's not, so if anyone does follow me on Instagram, that's not the reason. It's just that I don't know how to use it. I don't know how to reply. I do anything on Instagram. And if I'm out in a field and there's a sheep,

I'll take a picture of the sheep because I quite like sheep. So don't get the wrong idea if that's all I'd say. New book out and a caveat around the sort of images that people can expect to see on your Instagram. Those are the two main announcements that we've got. Well, I'm not doing anything else because I'm stuck at home. So I'm only writing or walking and there is nothing else to do So I wish I had more exciting exciting news that to me is a wonderful way to finish an episode Andrew it's always a pleasure to have you on me. I hope that we get to see each other again properly at some point

But for now we'll continue doing this over the internet Thanks Chris Offends, get offends