Modern Wisdom - #331 - Michael Knowles - The Problem With Political Correctness

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Michael Knowles is a political commentator, podcaster, and an author. Ostensibly, political correctness is the right thing to do if you're a responsible human that is respectful of other people's emotions. Encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the words they use makes sense. But demanding for tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing the demanding are overbearing and intolerant. It’s like punching people in the name of peace. Something is obviously amiss... Expect to learn why people who respect free speech may need to restrict free speech, how political correctness lays a trap for everyone, whether Michael thinks we're closer to a Brave New World or 1984, his thoughts on Steven Crowder's situation and much more... Sponsors: Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Speechless - https://amzn.to/3vTcmxS Follow Michael on Twitter - https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles 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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Michael Knowles. He's a political commentator, a podcaster and an author, and we are talking about the problem with political correctness. Ostensibly, political correctness is the right thing to do if you're a responsible human that is respectful of other people's emotions. Encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the words

that they use makes sense. But demanding for tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing the demanding are overbearing and intolerant. It's kind of like punching people in the name of peace. So something is obviously a miss. Today, expect to learn why people who respect free speech may need to restrict free speech, how political correctness lays a trap for everyone else, where the Michael thinks were closer to a brave new world on 1984, his thoughts on Stephen Crowder's situation, and much more.

At the moment, political correctness and what is an appropriate use of language, are probably one of the most common news stories that you're seeing being pushed online, and we need to cut through the mess that is being left by a lot of deconstruction. I don't know if Michael's proposed solution is workable, but it's definitely better than the current situation where both sides aren't speaking. Free speech, absolutists and free speech deconstructionists simply aren't getting anywhere, and something needs to change if we're not going to just spin our wheels and stay in the same place for the next decade. But now, it is time for the wise and wonderful, Michael Knowles. Michael Null, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. What's the problem with politically correct speech? The problem with politically correct speech is that it attempts to transform reality by redefining words. So, I think we can all agree at the most basic level, that's what PC does. It redefines all of our terms and in so doing it hopes to redefine reality itself. The problem for conservatives, though, is that it lays a trap whereby basically any way you react to PC strengthens PC. And I use the term PC, you could also use the term wokeism or cancel culture. Part of the issue is they change all the words.

So we're talking about the same broad phenomenon. Obviously, the one way conservatives can react to help PC along is just by giving it. You just, you use the new terms, you call Bruce Jenner-She, you, whatever, you obliterate women's sports, you use all the kind of new jargon. Obviously, that gives them what they want. But then there's another group of conservatives who say, no way I'm not going along with these new standards, you can't make me do it. I'm a free speech absolutist, right? And I think a lot of us have maybe used that kind of language in the past at various

times. But the problem here is that the whole point of political correctness is to destroy the old standards, right? So if you go along with that, then you're helping them to do that. You're destroying the old standards. But if you throw your hands in the air and you say, you know what, I'm a free speech absolutist, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, I don't care, I'm a pureist, right? You're also destroying the old standards because now no one's, so either way PC gets

what it's after. And this is why, you know, the phenomenon has been in our public consciousness, probably about 30 years, a little over 30 years or so now. It's been building for more like a hundred years and it's why in that whole period of time. There is no shortage of conservatives to say, we're fighting back against PC. PC's gone too crazy. Donald Trump basically staked his 2016 campaign on this issue of political correctness, but we keep losing.

I mean, this is the first day of Pride Month where now first graders in the United States, I don't know about the UK, it's probably the same there too though, in the United States first graders are being taught transgender ideology and Kellogg serial is telling them to pick their own pronouns. So obviously we haven't done a great job pushing back against PC and I think the reason is no one is willing to stand up and offer a substantive vision to defend the old standards. Does that make political correctness conservatives fault then? Yeah, basically.

You know Chesterton, one of your fellow countrymen, had a great line where he said it is the job of the liberal to go about making mistakes, and it is the job of the conservative to make sure that they never get corrected. I think that's basically what conservatives have been doing the past 30 or so years. Part of this, I think, is because we don't want to offend anybody. We want to be very nice. We're sort of generally content. That's why we're conservative, right? That's why if we were not content, if we thought everything had to be ripped down, we would be radicals. So we don't want to be offensive, really. And then the other issue is a lot of conservatives basically share the liberal's central premises.

This is especially true in the United States because in the United States there is a robust liberal tradition, and I mean even the classical sort of liberal tradition. I always took a vote who made the observation that Americans behave like conservatives, but they talk like liberals so that language of liberty and individual rights is all, you know, it's throughout all of our founding era and really all of our history. But we don't talk a whole lot about tradition. We don't talk a whole lot about order.

We don't talk a whole lot about, well, law and order even. I mean, Donald Trump, you know, kind of brought this back in at the end of his presidency. But it takes the second position to this idea of emancipating yourself from everything, this individual autonomy. And ultimately, I think that the only logical conclusion of that is going to be this transgender ideology. And you see it actually with the development of political correctness, first you're trying

to liberate yourself from social mores, from traditions, from religion, then you're trying to liberate yourself from the family structure. So, this is a lot with second-wave feminism. And then, ultimately, you're trying to liberate yourself from nature. I know a lot of people believe that transgenderism is kind of the opposite of feminism. One says women are real and need to be protected. Transgenderism says women aren't real. Then can actually become women too. But it's kind of that logical consequence of this radical liberation, which I think is kind of the theme that defines Western modernity,

the last 500 or so years. And I think we're kind of on the fumes of that. You know, we're that not only lasts so long as you've still got some animating principle and tradition in your society, but goodness gracious, it seems like that's fallen down around us. So I just sort of think either we will defend old standards, return to tradition, if you will, or were totally lost because the momentum of the radical left, as expressed in political correctness, is just so great and it's only been accelerated in recent years. If you're stuck in this catch-22 though, and it's essentially impossible or the situation

that you've laid out is very difficult, semantically, for conservatives not to fall into one of a number of holes, or anybody that isn't a leftist to not fall into one of these holes, you don't need to be conservative to disagree with some of the semantic and lexical games that are being played. Yeah. What do you do? This is the hard lesson. I know a lot of people aren't going to want to hear this, especially conservatives.

We need to embrace a just and prudent censorship. Now, people are going to tune out. They're going to say, Michael, you're no... That's the word. That's the word. I was always suspicious of that no-old's fellow. You know you're a censer, you're an authoritarian, okay. From the very beginning of our country, there have been whole swaths of speech that you cannot engage in, that are not defended by the First Amendment or our broader free speech tradition. That includes fraud. You're not allowed to engage in fraud.

That includes obscenity. Increasingly, you are actually encouraged to engage in that, but still we have laws on the books against it from the very beginning. We were throwing pornographers in prison for obscenity as recently as 2009. It wasn't that long ago. And that was at the federal level. You're not protected from sedition in certain forms, going back to the earliest days of the country, all the way well into the 20th century. There are whole swaths of

speech that you're really not allowed to engage in. And the argument for that, by the way, is that certain speech undermines speech. Actually, I'll go back to Chesterton, who has another great line. I think he's the most quoted man in the history of the world. Chesterton says, there's a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped. You see this especially in some of the woke PC educational ideologies now. Critical race theory is the one that's very popular, but all the kind of critical theory derivations come out and they say, there's no such thing as objective truth.

If you teach a child that there is no such thing as objective truth, first of all, it's completely incoherent because you're making a claim of objective truth that there is no such thing as objective truth, but you're also undermining their education. You're not expanding the curriculum, you're not opening their minds, you're undermining the whole purpose of education, which is grounded in the existence of objective truth and higher faculties of reason and all these sorts of things. Same thing with fraud, right? If you can abuse your speech to commit fraud, you've undermined speech because now speech cannot be relied on, to convey

any sort of truth. If you rely on free speech protections to defend obscenity, you're undermining free speech because obscenity and all sorts of licentiousness undermine our own freedom. The founding fathers were very clear about this, even some of the greatest liberal writers in the classical liberal tradition. We'll say, you can't abuse your liberty to the point of licentiousness because then you've undermined your liberty. And the example I use on this is a heroin addict, right?

Right now there's a big push to legalize all sorts of drugs. You see that from the derelicts on the left, rather. But you also see it from some more libertarian types on the right. And they'll say, we got to legalize drugs because it's an unjust infringement of your personal liberty for the government to say otherwise. I think most of us have known drug addicts in our lives, right? Think of the heroin addict, who, according to the modern definition of liberty, is the freest man in the world. As long as he's got a buck in his pocket, he can go buy whatever he wants, he can shoot

up all the pinnacle of liberty, the whole purpose of the United States, right? I don't think so. I think actually we all know that man is a slave. He's a slave to his lower base passions and appetites. And this is because man uniquely has intellect and will. And we actually have two kinds of will. We have the lower will, which is when we want to just stuff our face with cookies or drugs or booze or whatever.

And then we've got a higher will. And very often they're in conflict. St. Paul writes about this. He says, the things that I want to do, I don't do, and the things that I don't want to do, I do. We all know what this means. You've got, you know, you're at the bar, and there's a cute chick at the end of the bar, and you say, I don't, don't, Michael, uh-uh, don't, but the lower part of you, it's a little devil on your shoulder, right? He says, go, go down there. So we've got the lower will, we've got the rational higher will, and the rational higher

will is mediating between the lower will and the divine will, which is this divine logic of the universe. And we have an intellect to help sort it all out. And Aristotle says this is what makes us a political animal, you know, more so than any of the gregarious animals. And the expression of that is in our speech, right, that we're, you know, we don't just grunt, we don't just holler increasingly we do actually in US Congress and elsewhere But you know in our best selves we are speaking we're persuading one another We're using these symbols of words to communicate things about objective reality and the moment that you compromise that the moment you say

There is no truth to convey or you say you're not permitted to say these these things and you're gonna muzzle everybody up We've just come out of a year where we've literally been muzzled by these masks everywhere. Then you are cutting to the heart of what it means to be human and trying to liberate oneself from reality, I think. And I think that's the whole purpose of it. And it's why the left has been so focused on this sort of thing. And unfortunately, the whole time, so many conservatives, we'll look at PC and wokeism and they'll say,

oh, it's just a distraction. Oh, who cares? If you're gonna call Bruce Jenner or she or it's not, don't get hung up. We gotta talk about real things that matter like cutting taxes a little bit more again. And you say, well, you know, I like tax cuts as much as the next guy, but if you lose our relationship

to reality, if you lose the whole culture, then text cuts in a buck 50, I'll get you cup of coffee. The problem is semantic games can be thrown away as well. It's just semantics. It doesn't really matter, but as anyone that's read 1984 knows, the breadth of your language is directly proportional to your ability to think the thoughts at the language enables. And given that the quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts, the quality of your thoughts depend on the breadth of your language restrict the language restrict the thoughts restrict the life. And yeah, as someone that adores speech and language and you know it's our language after all Michael, although you guys deploy it as best and as worst as you can sometimes. We took all the use out we did we made some alterations. We kept hold of faucet though for some reason. We dispensed with faucet but yeah you kept hold of that but yeah it is I

understand why some people think that it doesn't matter. I understand why the death by a thousand cuts the very very, very slow erosion of language, seems like there are bigger problems out there, but it's so fundamental to your ability to communicate with other people, but more importantly, to your ability to communicate with yourself, because if you can't put the thoughts that are in your head into words, even for yourself, it's really the same as not being able to think them. Because the process of formulating thoughts into words, it concretises them in a way that nothing else does. Otherwise, it's just a notion, right?

It's just this cloudy, ephemeral sort of wishy-washy thing, and you can't really grab a hold of it. You put it into words, and it takes form. And slowly eroding away at this, I think, is it's something that we should all be really concerned about. But it just smacked massively of conspiracy theory. You know, they're coming for the words. And you think, well, it's hard to find a narrative that puts across the seriousness of it

without getting caught up sounding like a cancel culture devotee yourself. George Orwell, as you point out, saw this happening 60 years ago, 70 years ago. So was he a conspiracy theorist? I'll just Huxley saw this happening around the same time. Is he a conspiracy theorist? This has been building for a very, very long time, and just because some people don't know anything about history, it doesn't make the rest of us conspiracy theorists. Orwell is very explicit.

He said, the purpose of limiting the lexicon is to limit the range of thought, exactly as you say. And just think about what the words do to you. I mean, you're so precise and insightful here to say that our consciousness, the way we view the world, comes out of the words that we use. One of the recent coinages out of the university is this phrase, justice involved person. That was my favorite. That was my favorite one from yours. It used to be young criminal. It's now justice involved youth. The justice involved youth, you think, well, hold on, the one thing I know about these kids,

the only thing I know is that they are not involved in justice. They are actually involved in injustice, but they've totally flipped it around. And so if you're thinking of young criminal, right, what image does that conjure? You say, well, okay, some guys, welcome to me, they got some weapons, maybe they're terrorizing granny or something, okay, we got, welcome maybe they got some weapons, maybe they're terrorizing granny or something. Okay, we gotta be a little harsh on them. But if someone is a justice-involved youth, well, it would be very wrong to punish them.

Another one is a bum. A bum is no longer a bum, or then they became a homeless person. Then they became unhoused. The unhoused people, well, if they're unhoused, that seems like it's kind of my fault, is it? I mean, everybody else is housed. What has happened to them that they've been unhoused?

Well, they've unhoused themselves, usually through poor choices or through mental illness or whatever, but we don't want to deal with any of that. We can never permit there to be a moral explanation or consequence for people's behavior. It's always got to be somebody else's fault. If you use all that language, I guess the clearest one is just the pronouns. If you refer to Caitlyn Jenner, even if you call him Caitlyn, that conjures a certain image. But if you refer to Bruce, the future governor of California, if you refer to him

as her, and you say, she's this and she did this, and she won the decathlon some years ago, and she did this and she did that. You're going to picture a woman. And the issue is he is not a woman, and he might very much wish to be a woman, and he might even think that he is a woman. But he isn't. And the insistence that we participate in this lie, the insistence that we participate in a delusion, is not only deeply offensive, but it is the end of society. I mean, if we cannot agree on the most basic aspects of reality, then we are not going to agree on anything else and self-government will not be possible. What it seems to me is that it's compassion poorly aimed, that a lot of the concessions that I make and I'm sure that you make with regards to your language simply out of the

lack of arsoness to be able to just get into another argument, a lot of those come from place of goodwill. They come from the place that look, I think that this is perhaps a good concession to make, or you bring up in the book that there's some variance to do with people that are mentally disabled, and there are ways to remain factually correct, which are emotively less harsh, right? So those are ways that we can play around with it, but how do you avoid that being a slippery slope? How do you stop it from going from perhaps something which most people would agree is offensive and accurate

to something which is less offensive, but still accurate to something which is neither offensive nor accurate? I love this point. By the way, it just occurs to me. I think you are the first interviewer who has read the book. This is not to knock other interviewers, but we've only just recently sent the book. I mean, it only went to the printer about a week or so ago, and we sent out some advance

copy. So I am very honored. Thank you for reading the book. Welcome to the UK, Michael. I know. It's really, people in the UK, they read, you know, they're very, sort of, urbane. There are two different kinds of euphemisms, right?

Euphemism just sugarcoats harsh realities with nice terms. And PC is certainly a form of euphemism because you're redefining all these words. But I'm not, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of censorship, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of censorship, just like I'm saying that I'm not against all forms of ostracism or cancel culture even. I'm also not against all euphemisms. When I see a woman of a certain age, I'm not going to call her an old hag. I'm going to call her a woman of a certain age. Now, that's obviously a euphemism, but it's not a euphemism that contradicts the reality.

The thing is, she is a woman of a certain age. Technically, every woman is. And technically, every single woman is. But we all know who we're talking about. We all know we're talking about older women when we say that. If I say, I'm going to go hit the water closet, or I'm going to try to affect a little Britishness here. Or if I say, I'm going to go, if a woman says, I'm going to go powder my nose,

she may very well powder her nose, you're going to do other things, but you just don't want to conjure those images in polite conversation. Okay, that's fine. If, to your example, on mental illness, or people who are a bit slower, if you call them a bit simple, a bit slow, even the word retarded was a euphemism for previous terms. And because of the euphemism treadmill, you're going to regularly change those euphemisms. It's just the way it works.

That's perfectly fine. It's not contradicting the reality. A handy-capped person. We went from cripple to handicapped. Okay, there's, that doesn't contradict the reality. It makes it a little less harsh and offensive. But then we went to handy capable. What handy, that implies that you've got extra superpowers or something.

That is contradicting the reality, right? I mean, it's not, no one wants to be offensive to anybody, but you can't make me lie. You know, you can't, I'm not going to call the woman of a certain age a hot teenager. You know, She isn't. She is an older woman. And so what PC is getting us to do is tricking us and pretending that, oh, this is a very polite thing, but lies are not polite. And I think one of the premises of the modern left is that lies are compassionate and the

truth is cruel. If you go and you tell Bruce Jenner that he's really a man and not a woman, or especially when we hear about trans youth, we're hearing more and more about trans youth because there is a social contagion aspect to this cult as well. But if you tell a trans youth, hey, Mr. you're not a woman, you actually you are a guy. And I know you're going through some problems right now and I'm sure that's very difficult, and you got to work it out. But just know this, you are a man. You're not a woman.

We would be told this is harsh, this is cruel, this is going to make people more depressed, and anxious. There's really no evidence of that, but we'll be told that. But I think it's very disrespectful to lie to people. And I think that if you live in lies, you're going to set yourself up for a very bad life. And one of the bits of evidence of this, by the way, this is totally just anecdotal, this is not scientific. None of these radical, woke, politically correct people

seem all that happy to me. I don't know about you. I've never seen, not one of them, a radical feminist, a radical leftist, a righty, you know, any of the constituent parts. I've never seen one of them that seems happy. Well, you know, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Perhaps that's because that premise is wrong. Maybe the truth actually will set you free. That's our old understanding of it. And maybe lies actually will dilute you and make your life worse.

You've got this quote where you say, no revolution can succeed if it opposes common sense. Therefore, the clever revolutionary must transform the common sense to accord with his vision. I think that really succinctly explains the inversion that we're seeing with language at the moment. Are you familiar with a concept called the retreat to the inner citadel? Do you know this? I don't actually. Let me educate you. So this is from Isaiah Berlin and he says that when the natural road toward human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain that from the world which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you

can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. So a simple way to put that would be, if your legs wounded, you could try to treat the leg. If you cannot, then you can cut off the leg and announce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. So basically, if you can't win at a game, you stop playing. You say that you never cared about the game and you create your own game with rules that you can more easily win at. So this is something that I've been trying to put in for years and a buddy explained this to me and it's a red pill that I can no longer stop seeing. So if people can't get a relationship to work, how many of them declare that all monogamous

relationships are just restricting and they go polyamorous or they can't gain status in meritocracy. So they announced that the system's rigged and they're going to keep people down and now they're going to gain status by being a critic of status structures at large or use struggle to be popular and well-liked. So you convince yourself that you're an introvert or you find losing weight difficult. So you say that losing weight has no bearing on health and that any encouragement to lose weight is an attack on your identity. Or you have trouble staying out of jail. So you say that jobs are for suckers and you just retreat to a life of crime. All of these different things, you just retreats to an inner citadel to me, seem to be a big explanation for what was seeing with much of the language.

It's, look, here are some things, some levels of discomfort that I've come up against in the world, reality and my experience are not meshing as smoothly as I would like them to. Therefore, my solution is to try and change the rules of the game so that they do. At a social level to it, it reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron story, where another terrific story where the last capable man is being hunted down because this, what you would now call woke tyranny, is trying to drag every single person down to take away excellence to utterly upend our traditional understanding of society. And say, you know, yeah, my leg can't be healed. Well, yeah, who needs legs? Legs are awful. People are very wrapped up in this themselves. A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed. And one of the issues, I suspect,

is that people are thinking of themselves a lot. If you want to break out of that, if you want to reengage with society and have a better chance at a flourishing life, it's not that you need to think less of yourself. It is that you need to think of yourself less. No one's asking you to think less of yourself. It is that you need to think of yourself less. No one's asking you to think less of yourself, but we are now told that we are not allowed

to tell the man who thinks he's a woman, that he's really a man because gosh, it would be so awful for him, it would be so. He just has this problem, and so we all need to go along with that. We're not allowed to say that it's better to be married than not to be married, you know, and going back to our example at the bar, you know, hitting the bar every night and picking

up the cute check. Well, some people just can't get married. Right. That's too bad. Yeah, people suffer. Everybody suffers, okay? You and I have suffered. Everybody watching this right now has suffered.

And the fact of that is not a reason to deny that there is such a such a thing as the good or the true or the beautiful, the fact that we don't always get to attain it, the fact that not every kid gets a perfect SAT score is not an argument for doing away with the SATs, right? It's an argument for hopefully people can work a little harder and we need to be nicer to people, maybe who can't succeed in a certain way, and we've got to bring them in and help them flourish. And they're like, yeah, sure, I'm all for that.

But don't destroy the conception of excellence, don't destroy the understanding of good and true and beautiful. And this is something conservatives have really fallen for, because what the left comes in and destroys the old standards, they'll say, look, what you think is good, I think is bad, what you think is true, I think is false, what you think is beautiful, I think is ugly. And the modern conservative response to that is like, well, I guess you're right, man,

you know, I guess, yeah, no accounting for taste. But that's pretty lame and gives away the whole game to the left. The true response has to be, you're wrong. You're wrong. We're right and you're wrong. And by the way, if you're right and we're wrong, you need to convince me of that. You need to make an argument that persuades me. But the radical subject of that we have all fallen into is what has allowed these kooky

theories to take hold. I mean, you referenced this point I made in the book earlier on, which is that the revolutions need to take control of the common sense. This is the insight that began political correctness. It began about a hundred years ago. Mark's failed to instigate his worldwide revolution. He wanted all the lower classes,

where the working class to unite across the world. They were gonna throw off their shackles and the chains of industry and didn't happen. Turns out that the working class has, feels much less of a bond to its fellow proletarians. Proletarians, then it does to its fellow countrymen, its fellow parishioners, its

fellow members of their race, its fellow, whatever the group is going to be. And so Antonio Gromschi, this brilliant Marxist theorist and communist politician, he said, ah, the problem is the conservatives have the common sense. They have the culture. And so what we need to do, if we want the revolution to succeed, we need to go in, infiltrate all of these institutions through a war of position, and then transform the common sense, such that, you know, the workers who won't get on board with our theories right now in the factory, they will be so steeped in our culture and our ideology that they will naturally

follow us. And, you know, it's hard to deny that the left has been fairly successful at that over the last 100 years. My favorite quote that summarizes that is, the left won the culture war, now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. Which is just the most accurate thing. It really does seem to me like the left

really hate the working class at the moment though. Do you get this sense? Yeah, there is a clear disdain and contempt. I mean, you see this over the past year with the exaltation of our Dr. Fauci, peace be upon him and all the other high priests of progressivism. I mean, these are the experts who know much better than the deplorable, irredeemable, bitter clinging. I mean, these are the words that just the Democratic presidential candidates and presidents have used to describe the lower classes, also known as the American people, a huge portion of the American people.

Over the past 10 years, They hold them in great contempt, and it's, I think, comes from an irony that the left purports to love humanity and fight on behalf of humanity. They're so focused on humanity. They can't concern themselves with actual humans. The humans really drive them nuts, but humanity they love. It's weird as well, because the vast majority of immigrant populations of black and ethnic minorities in America are probably going to be working class. But it seems like their label of ethnic minority has superseded their label of working class. So the culture provides them an exit route out and kind of a safe space within the leftist ideology.

Is that right? Yes. And this was Gromshe's observation, too. He said, people actually don't really identify with their job, or their economic status. Not anymore. That's right. Yeah. But they could identify much more with, say, their religion, their nationality, their race,

their whatever. And so that does give the left an added. It's why the left has done very, very well, certainly with black voters, but with other minorities too, other immigrant groups, is because they can really gin up that kind of grievance and resentment. And where it didn't exist before, they'll sort of manufacture it like they did through institutions like the Ford Foundation and other groups in the 1970s. Even the moniker Hispanic did not really exist, you know, before about 50 years ago.

The idea that someone in Mexico and Brazil and Peru and Guatemala and Spain are all somehow the same thing is quite offensive, I think, actually, but same thing with Asian, the idea that Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, all that, somehow it's all just the same is offensive and silly, but politically it's very useful. And so, you know, they've unfortunately, the left seems to understand politics quite a bit better than we do. And it's a point I make in the book. I think we, as conservatives, tend to pat ourselves on the back and we say, we understand reality so much better.

We understand speech, free speech. Oh, we're way smarter about that than the left is. But the fact is, they understand it much better. They understand its role in a polity much better, and it's how they've been able to manipulate it so successfully while we twiddle our thumbs. I definitely think they understand the delivery mechanisms better.

Now, everything that the left creates is slicker and sexier and cooler, and I know that you guys at the Daily Wire are trying to slowly sort of claw your way back into the culture at the moment, but it really does feel like the left one, the culture war, and now there's just a few silos left over from the right that are trying to sort of hold on. What about the destination for the PC types, then? Have they got an end goal that they're trying to achieve here? Does it ever stop?

So I think it is a purely negative campaign. I don't think that it is exactly like we've got the traditional moral standard, which asserts that certain things are good and true and beautiful and others are not. And then we've got the PC standard and that's going to assert certain things. I just think the PC version, the leftist version, is an inversion of the traditional. It's just seeking to destroy. And it's why leftists don't ever seem to really edify anything, right? They just, the BLM, most see peaceful protests, left rubble in their wake. I mean, it was, and they actually burned down the country. This is true of Antifa. This is true of, of so much of the leftist political action. So the only thing, if I were trying to be charitable toward the left, something I don't

do very often, but I'll try. I'll try. But if I were trying to give a charitable read, and in many ways that's what my book is trying to do, I would say that the left is interested in the most radical extreme of liberation. And the most radical extreme of liberation is self-underlining. It destroys your liberty because it requires you to liberate yourself from reality, from nature into this mad mind. Another one of your country, and John Milton, I think,

described this quite well in paradise lost, where, and actually, he described your discussion of the guy who can't get his leg to work, right? He says, well, I hate legs, you know, I don't want it. When Satan is cast down into hell, he says, well, good, who needs heaven? I don't, the mind is its own place, and it can make a hell of heaven and heaven a hell.

And of course it can't. You know, the problem is that heaven is going to be heaven and hell is going to be hell and the moral order is going to be the moral order. But people can delude themselves a lot and it will lead to misery as is happening right now. Turning the barstool upside down can only last for so long though. You can't create a foundation upon nothing. So what I'm interested in, you know, it's fascinating living through this slow-motion car crash and kind of watching it all unfold. But what I'm interested in is where this continue, where this ends up and none of us are clairvoyant, but I still do think it's a fascinating thought experiment. Okay, so just roll the clock forward. Let's say that everything becomes deconstructed and this utopia, the utopia arrives. What then? If

all of the conservatives decided that they were going to back off, what would be the end goal? Because all of the groups that we're talking about, whichever group they decide to latch onto to use as the vanguard of the next particular political push forward, that then gets sliced up and sliced up into increasingly finer and finer slivers. So it's not just black people, it's black feminists, then it's black feminists who are differently able, then it's black feminists that are differently able to, like Mexican food and then so on and so forth, you know, it just continues to be chopped and chopped up. And you think, well, that's self-defeating.

That's the snake that eats its on tail. And inevitably, all of those groups have differing, you see this with the LGBTQ plus, right? You see, the teas don't really have an awful lot to do with any of the other groups that are in there. And the Gs and the Ls actually don't have anything to do with each other other than their mutual disdain for each other because they don't care about each other sexually. And then my interesting thought experiment is where does it end up? You roll the clock forward, what happens then?

It ends up in the abolition of humanity. And what I mean by hate to sound like a bike. Yeah, but I think that's exactly what it does because it's an anti-social ideology that says we are our only obligation is toward our own selves and ultimately even to our own bassist appetites and so it views social relations such as they are as merely contractual or predatory. So you know the the traditional understanding is that we love one

another, we love our fellow man, we treat our neighbors as ourselves, and so when one loves someone, you are willing the good of the other. I'm not just, if I love you, I'm not, I'm not just going to treat you as an object for my personal pleasure, I'm actually, maybe I'll have to sacrifice. No greater love has a man than to die for his friends. Maybe I'll have to give you some tough love if you man than to die for his friends. Maybe I'll have to give you some tough love if you're going in the wrong direction. But I'm really willing it for you. But I think the modern radical vision of it

is that other people are merely around for our financial betterment, for our sexual pleasure, for our personal amusement. But this deeper foundation of society is totally gone. And actually another Englishman, CS Lewis, describes this kind of demonic love in the screw tape letters where he depicts this kind of love as a desire to consume. All your, the uncle demon loves his nephew demon

because he wants to eat him. He wants to totally devour him. So I think it ends there and then it breaks society, so no longer is man the social or political animal, but it also robs us of our speech because if there is no such thing as objective truth, and if, in some cases, we were literally not allowed to speak, you know, we're being shut up and censored from speaking the truth, then our essentially human quality is gone too. And so when I say that the end game of this radical leftism is the abolition of humanity, I mean, anything that distinguishes human beings from animals, from the beasts, would

be taken away. Our social bonds and our ability to communicate reality, to perceive truth and to communicate that. That would be taken away, and so we'd be divvied up into essentially a perfectly atomized world, just individuals with no bond to anybody else. And we would be grunting animals with sticks because we couldn't persuade anybody of anything. And we wouldn't speak the same language.

We increasingly don't speak the same language. So then politics becomes less a practice of persuasion and building consensus and much more a process of imposing one's will and interest on another person or another group, which increasingly you are seeing that happen. You're seeing the decline of deliberative government and you're just seeing a bunch of yelling and screaming and violence in the streets. And that's, so my bleak picture of that utopia is it would look a lot like a warring tribes of animals.

Well, you see this with the eco movement at the moment, right? Green, as Alex Epstein calls it, is human racism. He says that it's such self-hatred of the human race. And it's almost cool at the moment within certain circles to talk about the disdain that you have at a curse on the on the earth, destroying Mother Nature as he causes the perfect planet hypothesis that everything would be fine if only we weren't here. And yet, in the same sentence, many of those people will have an overlapping ideology with people that want to completely change

the current way that the planet is made up and the way that everybody's preconceptions about how the world works should operate. And it seems as well encouraging people to be mindful and precise of the language and the words that they use makes sense to me. But demanding tolerance becomes undermined when the people doing it insanely overbearing and intolerant. It's like punching someone in the face in the name of peace.

But to give them their due, there's a very famous infamous essay on this topic by Herbert Marcusa, who was one of the Frankfurt School critical theorists who then reappeared in the 1960s as the father of the new left. And he wrote this essay called Repressive Tolerance, and it's a diabolical little essay where he says, look, the current mainstream tolerance that we have in the West is very wicked and evil because there are certain things, there off limits, and certain things are censored and ostracized, but the dominant sort of Western view is protected. And so what we need to do is go in and correct this. And so a liberating tolerance, according to Marcusa, would not tolerate conservatives,

right? Would just censor conservatives and encourage speech from leftists. And his argument is that the conservatives are not tolerant, and so you can't coherently tolerate intolerance. And I think he actually makes a decent point, not in the particulars, but in the broader principle. You cannot have any sort of society that, no matter how tolerant the society is, that would undermine its own existence.

You just can't do it. It doesn't make any sense. And even the great philosophers on toleration talked about this. John Locke, who is the father of liberalism for goodness' sake, he wrote in the letter concerning toleration, he said, what look, we've got to tolerate everybody and we've got to be really nice and tolerant, except for atheists. We should never tolerate atheists. Those guys, man, they're because it's locked. Doesn't that align with what you suggested

at the very beginning? That there needs to be a concession. That does need to be a small amount of this that's permitted. There does. Yes. I mean, there needs to, we want to have a nice broad society. We want to be able to perceive the truth. But that is the point. The purpose of keeping an open mind is not so that it can stay open forever and your brain falls out. The purpose of having an open mind is to close it again around truth that you have perceived. A good line from this comes from Bill Buckley.

He was quoting actually a liberal president of Yale University, and he said, skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction. You've got to ultimately believe in certain things. And Buckley actually, as mainstream a conservative as it gets, he described himself as an epistemological optimist. He said, look, I think, you know,, even made fun of what a silly phrase that is. And he said, I believe a typical Bill Buckley way uses a $20 word to describe a very simple concept.

He said, I believe that some things are true. We know them to be true. And we don't need to relitigate them every five seconds. There are certain premises that our society is going to embrace. And so he said, for instance, that we don't need to constantly be entertaining the ideas of the Nazi or the Communist. These are bad ideas. They're antithetical to our civilization. And so we're done with that.

And your point is so perceptive on the self-hatred involved here. There is no country or no civilization ever in the history of the world as self-hating as ours is. I mean, we're the only people on earth who are constantly prattling and babbling on and on about how terrible we are. I know, as though we, people in the West pretend that we invented slavery. We're the only civilization in history that has abolished slavery. Slavery still exists in virtually every other part of the world except for in the West, and yet we pretend that we're

unique. We, as suppose we are unique in the fact that we abolished it. We pretend that we're the only racist civilization. We're the least racist civilization in history. Every other country in the world is extraordinarily racist. Not us. We take people in from all sorts of backgrounds and things like that. But I suspect a lot of this comes down to a very personal point, which is that people hate themselves. We've gotten to a point in society where people really seem to hate themselves and they say that their mankind is overpopulating the earth. And none of these people, by the way, who talk about overpopulation, ever want to take

themselves out of the population, you know, as always, somebody else comes out, but, you know, we kill our children through abortion a million a year in the United States. We are trying to convince people not to have children quite as much, whether for ecological or social reasons. This is why the birth rate has plummeted. I mean, it's now at Historic Lo, but you could say that every single year we seem to hit a new historic low.

We want to give away territories, seed them back to conquered peoples. It's a bizarre thing. And I suspect there's a religious component here as well. Cardinal Manning has a good line. He says, all human conflict is ultimately theological. Colton culture come from the same root word. And I suspect a little bit of that self-hatred

reflects a hatred of God in whose image we are made. And it's why there seems to be such a bizarre religious component to all of these various ideologies, notably transgenderism, which adopts a gnaustic view of human nature, the idea that our bodies have nothing to do with who we really are, that we're purely sold in contravention of the true understanding of ourself, which is that we're body and soul put together. It's curious to me that the radical left simultaneously advances these two apparently opposite

views, one that we're just meat puppets, just synapses firing off in our brain, all our hopes and joys or illusions, the materialist view, and then the other that our bodies have nothing to do with who we are and a man can be a woman if he really feels that way, the gnostics view. Their opposites, but they both contradict the traditional view, and I think actually that's a good example of the way that political correctness works. It doesn't matter what argument they're putting out in any given moment, as long as they destroy the traditional understanding of the society. Talking about the big picture and the globe at large, I often think about this.

I read a lot of existential risk, which just in case the current situation wasn't cataclysmic enough, it makes it feel even worse. And what I'm thinking is how much of the smartest minds of our generation's time has been taken up debating stupid shit over the last five to ten years or so. Literally, some of the best brains on the planet have had the lion's share of their online time spent debating whether men and men and women are women or not. And the concern is, I can't quite put my finger on it. The debates around semantics are immediately visible. You can see the unfolding of all of the consequences of at least the speech itself, not the second order or third order effect of what happens due to the speech. We can at least see the argument on its own merits, right?

But what you can't see is what happens down the line from that. What is the world that we could have had if we hadn't got caught up with this or that or the other? And it seems like you look at the Wuhan Lab leak flip flop from Facebook that occurred recently, right? That's a prime example of a semantic game being played. This type of speech is not allowed. Okay, so the speech is obvious. It's very easily defined and it's immediate. You can shut that down. But when the fact starts to catch up to the narrative,

eight months, 12 months later, you think, okay, so actually what we did was we punished people who had truth as opposed to people that had falsehood. I'm not sure if it's true. It might be it's purported, it's possible, it might be probable, but you know, at least it should have been permitted. And you think, of course, this asymmetry in the pace at which arguments are visible, I think lens, unfair weight toward people that want to play semantic games as opposed

to people that want to root what they're doing in reality because reality is always going to move more slowly. The consequences are always going to be seen down the line. Does that make sense? It does make sense and it brings to mind that meme that shows up where someone will say, you know, this would be the world if so and so had never been born and it's futuristic and it's, you know, everyone's in flying cars and everything. If only Dr. Fauci stopped speaking then, you know. This would have actually, usually, they come from the left. But right, then we'd all be in this very advanced civilization. I think that's true.

However, the thing we've got to grapple with is, is where the fault lies in ourselves. And, you know, I'm all for owning the lives and dunking on the left when they're going crazy, which is all the time. But we can't just leave it there. I mean, the fact is that the left has developed its ideas in a certain culture. And so when we say we want to defend the West

against the predations of the radical left, well, the radical left arose out of the West, right? I mean, the left, even the term, the left, goes back to the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was a historic tragedy, but that came from somewhere too. And so one does wonder, and this thesis has been advanced in recent years by people like Patrick

Denean and why liberalism failed and other writers and thinkers too. But something went wrong somewhere along the way. We somehow something went wrong somewhere along the way. We somehow lost the thread somewhere along the way. The Oswald Spengler's book, now it's not really read quite as much, but 60, 70 years ago it was read quite a bit. The decline of the West maps out why the West has to go into decline because of the circumstances that have arisen from within it.

And so I think it's very frustrating. I wish that we didn't have to spend all this time saying that men and women are women and babies are babies and there is such a thing as truth or whatever. But maybe the reason for that does not lie in, you know, just only in Herbert Marcusa 50 years ago or only in Antonio Grom she she or only in Karl Marx, but actually goes back even further than that. Where did we lose this thread? Because there are major ideas at play and ideas obviously do have consequences. I just think if we try to fix the problem solely based on the Clinton administration to the present, we're not going to get very far.

One of the things I've tried to point out in this book is that political correctness, which seems like it's 30 years old, it's at least a hundred years old. And so the modern radicalism goes back so, so far, where are we going to find those answers? Are we going to find it in science? You know, capitalist trademark over the E. So many of our debates now are so reductive and shallow over gender or babies, right? They'll say, a baby should not be killed because he has unique DNA. They say, okay, sure, yeah, I agree. That's true. He's obviously a distinct entity. But plenty

of things have unique DNA. Why should I not kill the baby? What is the baby's a human being? Why shouldn't we kill human beings? Well, because they're self-conscious. They say, well, no, a baby's not. A baby's completely unconscious, basically. Even a newborn baby is not a walking talking. The reason we do it is because humans have dignity because they're made in the image of God, because they have souls, and they are very dignified being. Well, now we've left the image of God because they have souls and they, you know, are this very dignified

being. Well, now we've left the realm of science now. We now are in the realm of philosophy and and religion. And we're very uncomfortable talking about those things. The way that we talk in the West today about philosophy and religion is like an anthropological exhibit. We talk about it like we're in a museum and we say, look, here's philosophy over here. People used to think this, then they thought, oh, look at religion. Those look at these grunting idiots used to think, whatever. We don't treat these things as though they, we don't treat Aristotle as though he tells us something about the way we're living today. We don't treat Thomas Aquinas for that matter as though he has something to say about the

way we're living today. It's not, our understanding of philosophy and religion is not a living one, and so our civilization is not a living one. It's a dying one, and that's a sad fact. I wonder how much of the difference between how the UK and America at the moment culturally is split. That's not to say that there aren't progressive crazy policies and stuff like that over here, but it really

is orders of magnitude different to where it is with you guys. How much of that do you think is because your country is based in a history which is only a quarter of a millennia old? We can roll back, yeah, fair enough, Vikings and Normans and so on and so forth were hardly genetic purists ourselves. We are a malgumation of a lot of different things.

But there's castles in the UK that are thousands of years old and we can track that history back. I wonder whether the roots lie sufficiently deep with regards to tradition over here that there are more tangible artifices that people can grab onto. Do you know what I mean? There's a genuine sense of history.

Whereas for America, you know, the history very much still is unfolding. There is still a lot to be discovered about what the country is. It just seems unfortunate that it occurred at a time where the free movement of information has enabled some bad actors to weaponize that. I think your point is totally right. Because when you even say what is the founding story of

America, you could get different answers. Is it the pilgrims? I tend to trace it, I suppose, to the pilgrims. Is it the settlers in Virginia and Jamestown? Some people would say that. Is it 1776? That was the very beginning. Nothing happened before that. I don't think that's quite fair. That's a little shallow. Is it the wild, wild west? Well, it might be, a lot of people trace it to that as well. Or is it the story we're increasingly told that we're a nation of immigrants? And really America begins at Ellis Island.

A lot of people want to believe that. Well, depending on which story you pick, you're going to have a very, very different understanding of America. And they all seem equally plausible because the country is not particularly old. Add to this the problem of totally open borders, which effectively is what we have today. And you have a country with historic levels of immigrants who have not assimilated in any way. America always did a basically good job about assimilating its immigrants.

And then when it wasn't able to do that, it would restrict immigration. And this gave us a relatively stable society. But now that's gone and so if you have a country and you at the corporate and governmental level try to replace and undermine its institutions and traditions and then you actually change the people of the country such that now a huge, something like one-fifth of the country was not born here and does not really know particularly much about the country. Well, then you're going to get a different country, you know, and the UK has probably survived a little bit better because of that weight of history.

And you see it especially at the religious level, you see this in the Catholic Protestant split, you know. The idea when Martin Luther was nailing his theses to the church door was that finally we were going to have a recovery of truth after the absolute corruption of the Catholic church and the Roman hierarchy. And what happened? Did you get a reformation? No, you didn't get a reformation.

Did you get a new singular church to challenge the Catholic Church? No. You got 30,000 churches because there was that crack. And the Catholic Church, despite its many, many problems and scandals that continue to go on and have gone on for a long time, remains, I think, because of its divine institution, but also without question, because of its history, because of its divine institution, but also without question because of its history, because of its tradition. Hellair Belok has a good line on it.

He says that he has to take it as a matter of faith that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted, but for non-believers and evidence of its divine institution is that no other institution conducted with such naivish imbicility would have lasted a fortnight. And this is certainly true. And it's true of other places with a long history. But what are we doing now, especially in this country, to our history? We're tearing down all the statues, and I think it's why the left focus is on language, and of course on our national memory, tear down Washington, tear down Jefferson. When Trump said that would happen four years ago, everyone laughed at him.

Within 18 months, they were pulling down those statues, and where does it go from here? Did you see that summer and other seasons have been added to a list of triggering terms? Did you see this? I did see this because you see summer in one hemisphere. Yeah. May not be summer in another hemisphere. Let me read this out for the people that haven't seen it. So this is Laura Hogan, add summer and other seasons to list of triggering terms. Twitter status is a think tank for the nation's brightest minds

took a hit once again when Laura Hogan announced that she will no longer use the word summer because it may be triggered for some. According to her Twitter profile, Laura Hogan is the founder and leadership coach at wherewithal the company website states that Hogan spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of engineering at Kickstarter and an engineering director at Etsy. So she makes nice posters and stuff like that.

Hogan's full tweet reads, a teeny tiny inclusive language thing I've tried to get better at this past year is avoiding Northern Hemisphere's specific seasonal language. Like, instead of this summer, I say the month I mean, or a Q3, because it might be that season for me, but not that season for everybody. Joining the call for the season sensitive lexicon, a chipmunks and squirrels, notorious for the preferring of humus as summer season over the snow-laden winters. Q3 time and the living is easy. I don't think anyone's gonna be singing that. Do you know, I love that she suggested Q3

because what she thinks she's doing is this very liberal impulse to take away all considerations of particularity, of time and of space. She's going to take away, you know, yes, you're right, it's when it's summer here, it's not somewhere, somewhere else. She's going to take that away. I'm no longer a citizen of this country or that country.

I'm no longer, I'm in the realm of the universal. Okay. But she's using terms that are used almost exclusively by neoliberal elites, the idea of Q3, what are we to? Now we're going to replace the sales report for this season. Yeah. Yeah. Finally, we're going to adopt the much more inclusive language of a McKinsey associate or someone at Goldman Sachs.

Yeah, okay. Sure. I mean, they do this so very often. You see now, you know, there's a move against the American flag in the United States. A lot of the left will protest the flag on football fields or they'll take it off of clothing or they'll say it's a symbol of oppression. But they will wave the BLM flag or the pride flag, especially now where I guess we're in Pride Month pretty soon we're going to Pride Year, it's just going to be 12 months of the

year. And I think the reason for this in part is because the American flag is particular. It exists in a place, it exists in a time, it has certain people, it's got the mountains and the various seas. But the pride flag is universal, it applies to everybody. It makes imperial claims. This is why I think they're now flying it on embassies around the world. The American flag makes no claim on someone in Iran or the Iranian society.

The pride flag does. BLM, the same thing. It describes this worldwide phenomenon of the oppression of black people at the hands of white people. And so that flies around too. They want to, in the name of liberty and tolerance, talk in these universal talks. Universities. Universities.

Yes, exactly why I'm ahead. But the irony is, it's as imperialistic as anything, it's actually more imperialistic than the national claims, which are at least somewhat modest. Well, they're bounded. They're at least bounded, but even that, even now our nation is not bounded because the borders are totally out.

Yeah, I couldn't believe that you just think that if you say good day to someone, is that it's night time somewhere, or if you say good morning, it's evening time somewhere. I don't know, man. I don't know. I can't work out if we're closer to 1984 or a brave new world.

It feels like some awful love child of both. I think it's brave new world. I agree, yes, idiot, but it's not a love child like 50-50. No. You know, sometimes in the future, it's not a love child like 50-50. No, no, no. You know, sometime in the future, they're gonna figure out how to engineer our DNA. So we're only like 10% this guy and 30% this guy and this or whatever.

I think it's about 10% Georgia or well, specifically because of the language, focus of the radicals, but I think it's about 90% Huxley, because Huxley, and Huxley actually made this point to Orwell, because Huxley was Orwell'sley actually made this point too or well because Huxley was Orwell's teacher. French teacher, right?

French teacher, right? Yes, I think so. And so... Read the book, read the book, Michael. That's right. Yeah, truly, I'm so honored because you've read the book now probably more recently than I have, so you could probably tell me things about you. Yeah, maybe.

But yes, Huxley was Orwell's French teacher and he said, you know, George, your dystopia is fine, the language stuff is good, but you think that the totalitarian government is going to rule with an iron fist and it's going to take away all people's sort of pleasures and, but no, actually what's going to happen is the totalitarian government is going to rule by by playing to people's pleasures, by getting people so drugged up on actual drugs, by getting people so over-sexed with casual, non-committed sex, that they're totally outside of their faculties of reason, and they're susceptible to being controlled. And when you look around our society today, worst opioid crisis we've ever seen,

marriage rates in the doldrums, but people having creepy sex all over the place, doing all sorts of things with any number of people, and that being normalized, we're seeing that, and we're seeing the idea normalized that any sort of sacrifice, any sort of burden, any sort of suffering is wicked and evil and has to be overcome so that we can just pursue our passion.

You do you. Don't yuck my yum, this kind of language. I mean, that's the language of Huxley's world state. That is not the language of Orwell's Big Brother. Even if you think about what social media is doing, right? It's an internal, it's a systemic rather than exogenous way to manipulate the chemicals that you've got in your body. Immediate, guilt-free pleasure. The same goes from Amazon. You know, you can, Amazon prime yourself, a lovely new item that will give you that hit while you doordash or deliver rua, Mitchell and Star Meal,

while you sit on the couch and watch million dollar produce TV shows on Netflix. It's it really is. Yeah for all of human history we've had problems of scarcity right now problems are problems of abundance. And. I think you're right I think that 1984. Might have happened. If technology hadn't enabled brave new world without the, I don't think that Brave New World can happen because it requires such sophisticated coordination, it requires a degree of siloing of information

whilst also free communication across that, and the levels of comfort and convenience that are required in order to enact a Brave New World, you need to have, it is the thing, right? So I think about this to do with existential crises all the time. How luxurious of a position it is to have an existential crisis because the only way that you can get to that situation is if the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have all been sorted so much like if you're worried about where the next meal's coming from, you don't have the luxury to concern yourself about whether you are contributing to your own highest good within the world. Right.

So yes, Brave New World. I'm with you on that, 9010. It's a language from 1984 and everything else from Brave New World, except for the Soma, which was still yet to go. Except for the Soma, though, I don't know, I guess the oxy-contin or something is the Soma now. And I think that this issue of that existential on we, people who work a lot don't have existential on we because they're busy working.

They have needs to meet. And beyond that, by the way, it's not even just that we don't work enough or world telecommuting or something. It's because there are plenty of people who can't telecommute. I mean, this was one of the arguments for the lockdowns. Is all the genius experts said, oh oh no, you can work on Zoom. And I said, oh right, none of you know people who work physical jobs. So you think that everybody can just telecommute in on Zoom.

Actually, believe it or not, there's some people who do real things in real places. So you need you plumbing fixing via Zoom, yeah, exactly. That's right, yeah, that's right. Get the electrician in on Zoom. It's not going to work very well. So yes, you've got this problem of abundance and the chemical aspect of social media is pretty clear too. The one that I get sucked into is Twitter.

I'm on Twitter a lot. I'm just the one, I don't do Facebook as much, I don't do Instagram, but Twitter I do. And I was talking to a friend of mine. He said, why are you on Twitter so much? And it just came out of me. I said, because I was talking to a friend of mine. He said, why are you on Twitter so much? And it just came out of me. I said, because I don't want to look at porn. So if I don't want to look at porn,

I still want to get the same sort of pleasure, if oxytocin, whatever. And so now instead I'm just getting sort of political, rage tweets or something. But everybody seems to be hooked on these things. And for a lot of people, I suppose it is literally porn, right? It's not even just, which is this other issue of abundance, right? I mean, truly, that there, you know, if you can think of it, there's a porn for it.

And I think it's why you're seeing a reaction among younger conservatives, you know, there was a big debate that busted out in partaking in some ways of the PC debate because we do have laws against obscenity, and yet they don't really seem to be enforced very much with porn. And the debate to ban porn or not, or to regulate porn, you would imagine it would be the old Fuddy Dutties, or against porn, and the young, you know, rap scallions or fore porn, but actually was totally reversed. The people defending porn were the boomers. The boomers who were using this kind of pseudo-quazai libertarian language of the 80s and 90s and saying, oh, well, if it feels good, do it.

And the younger people who grew up on this stuff, who I think the median age of porn exposure for boys is like 11 years old or something. And they were saying, no, man, this is really bad stuff. It's kind of messed me up. It's hard to work through. Like, how are we not regulating this? And, you know, they are obviously much more in tune with political reality than these, then these throw your hands up conservatives who get rid of all the standards. I'm so glad. I don't know by what quirk of this version of the simulation I managed to avoid upon addiction, but I'm so glad that that's not one of, you know,

of all of the vices and, and odd quirks and behavioral problems that I've managed to avoid a porn addiction. But I'm so glad that that's not one of, you know, of all of the vices and odd quirks and behavioral problems that I've managed to sidestep through life. I'm really glad that porn addiction isn't one of them because it's so inconvenient. And I suppose it's just available all the time. But you know, part of it might just be that if you're a millennial, you've kind of just missed it, or you know, maybe it was still there, I guess, when we were kids, but still dial up internet. But think about if you're a zoomer, right?

Think about if you're a kid who right now is 18 years old or something. You have had some kind of high speed device in your hand from the time you were like three. And so your brain just isn't built for that. And I think it also gets a little bit to competing theories of the mind. There's this one theory of the mind,

which is that our mind is like a steam engine or something, and we've got to just let it out. We don't want to repress anything. If you blow off a little steam, you'll feel great, and then you can go on. You said that, sorry, check that. You said that this aligned with the technologies of the day, right?

You kind of had these different sections. Who was it that was the steam thing? So coincidentally, you've got sort of Freud coming up around the same time as the steam engine, right? And so Freud is, you know, and Freudianism kind of leads to this idea that you shouldn't, you've got all these repressed desires and feelings and thoughts and you've got to just sort of let them out. And then you'll have a much healthier society.

And you then see this expressed in the kind of kooky theories of guys like Wilhelm Reich who believed that the life force, the life energy, was something called the organ, this esoteric particle, and the cause of war and cancer and death and everything was a lack of orgasms. And so he- A little bit more masturbation fixes a lot of problems, Michael. Yes, I mean, this is truly what the left is saying now, and you'll see it being taught in kids cartoons.

They'll say, you know, it's perfectly healthy, it's totally right in the words of Woody Allen, have sex with someone you love alone in a room, you know, the one person you know you love. It's perfectly good to do, it's very healthy you've got to do that during the lockdown, the New York City Health Department is saying, oh, yeah, you can't hook up right now, but you've basically, you've got to go, you know, turn the blinds down and have fun with yourself whenever you can. But this is actually the opposite of healthy, right?

The traditional view is that virtues and vices are habits, and the more you do them, the more you do them. So you, I mean, you make this point where you say, I'm glad I never developed a porn addiction. Well, I suspect part of the reason you didn't is because when we grew up, it just wasn't quite as available. But if you had a device in your hand at three years old and you were just doing this constantly,

it would be very difficult to break that. Well, I would be a... Rather than just half a logical fappa, yes. Yes. That's right on your business card, that's what I would say. I mean, this sort of, you know, I think people are beginning to recognize this a little bit more, especially as we become more digitized, as we live more of our lives virtually, as we

are zooming in to our friends and our work and our parties and things. We realize, as the language of universalism is taken over, the language of nation or country, we're beginning to realize, wait a second, I'm a, I do have a body. I am in time and space. I know I'm told that my identity has nothing to do with my body, but I think maybe I do. And you know, I think it's why Jordan Peterson has become so popular and resonates so well. He says, hey, clean your room. The things you do actually, actually do matter. And one of the really insidious aspects of political correctness is that political correctness takes old moral codes and replaces them with new speech codes. So it matters less and less and less what you do and more and more and more what you say.

It's this, you know, we've kind of created this, this prison of our own minds. And that, that way lies madness. Casting off the wisdom of old times is so dangerous. This is quote from Donald Nuth which I adore and he says, tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. So good. And yet when you have collapse of grand narratives and the lack of religiosity, you have the changes with regards to the way that

family structures are accepted and so on and so forth. It doesn't surprise me that you have this. There is, again, to use the past dual analogy, it's been upended and now it's sat in some sand. As soon as you start to pull away at the traditions of the past, there isn't anything to hold onto it. And this is coming from someone I'm from a very salt of the earth, normal northern town in the UK. All of this sort of stuff wouldn't come to us in terms of culture wars. And yet I'm seeing now, even somewhere that is fairly traditional, I'm seeing this harkening back, this desire for people to have their older ways a little bit more. And yeah, man, it's the bifurcating that you're seeing as well with regards to how sort of people are living their lives.

But again, as you brought up there, first we make our habits and our habits make us, right? You can tell anybody that you want. You can do what you want. You can eat the ice cream. But when the diabetes comes for you in 10 years' time, reality will end up winning because reality doesn't stop. And if your language and the lexical manipulation is malleable, that's going to fold around

reality as it comes in. Okay, so now diabetes is what, like an accepted side effect of you eating whatever you want because you shouldn't be told that you're supposed to diet. That doesn't seem like a very healthy way to go through things, but because the effect of a semantic gamer immediate and the consequences of a semantic game are delayed, we've come, we've got to it.

I've done it. That's what it is. I think that plays a big part in it. You have these lagging measures that occur down the line, but you have the lead measures that happen during the argument. And those are the ones that people are playing about with at the moment, but as Douglas Murray says, when the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are. If you don't focus on the here and now with the future, the consequences of the future in mind, you're going to end up with a future that you really, really don't want to live in. We do, and we also have to acknowledge something that the left gets right.

And the diabetes example is a very good one. People's private decisions and private behaviors have public and therefore political consequences, public and political are synonyms. Now, the left uses this, they'll say, look, we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not because we're gonna pay for your health care. And we've got this federal health care

for our city health care program. And so we ought to be able to tell you whether you can smoke or not. And you say, okay, well, I actually, I don't want you to tell you whether you can smoke or not. You say, okay, well, actually, I don't want you to tell me whether I can have my nightly cigar, but I do understand the logic here. And conservatives, well, obviously we want to have some sort of a private sphere.

We want certainly protections for the family, for local government, local community. It is the case that if you have a country, a vicious people, if you have a country that just engages in every vice under the sun and they are allergic to virtue, then it doesn't matter how nice your constitution looks, it doesn't matter how beautiful your Supreme Court building is, you're going to have a vicious country, that your private life will have that public effect.

And this is why, I think the collapse of religion, any kind of traditional understanding of religion is so bad here. What you've seen actually is, as religion has fallen apart, right? And religion entails that every time I commit a sin, at least my religion, because I'm Catholic, every time I commit a sin, I've got to take note of it,

I've got to count it, I've got to think of the circumstances, I have to go into a little black box and tell a man in a collar what I did to receive that solution from God. Yes. Not him. No, I mean, it's really anxiety induced. How many times have I gone to confession? Zillion times.

And every time I still think, oh, gosh, he's going to, I did this horrible thing. Oh, I did it again, too. And, but I know that I'm answerable in my most private moments and my most private thoughts, even if I break it, even if I fall short as we all do. I know that I am answerable here in the public. But for the people who say, okay, I'm done with religion, often you'll hear, I'm spiritual, but not religious, you know, it just usually means I'm not that interested in God, but I'm very interested in me, you know. I think I'm a, but not religious. It's usually means I'm not that interested in God, but I'm very interested in me.

I think I'm a pretty interesting chap. So that if you've got that idea, or even the idea that a private confession is sufficient, or if you just think about something that's fine, see as Lewis makes fun of this idea too, then there's really no accountability for what you do in private. And when there's no accountability whatsoever,

don't be surprised when that leads out into the public. I've never realized the symbolic nature of going through that process in church. I've never realized that, but it makes a lot of sense. It reduces the lag between the semantic game or the thought or the immediate action and it creates a break point in between that perhaps being instantiated as a first we make a habit then a habit to make us. The repetition of that is going to be much harder if every time that you go back and you do go to confession, you're like, what this again? This same Michael again? You know, so talking about social media, have you been watching what Stephen Crowder has been getting up to recently?

You know, I've been friends with Stephen for years and whenever he texted me, I sort of think like, what have you done on that? What did he do now? What did he do this time? What's he in trouble for? And yes, I mean, they are gunning for him, I think in a special way, because they can go after him on the jokes,

and they can say the jokes were too far, and because he's so mainstream, I think he may be the most mainstream conservative that Big Tech has really gone after. What do you think we've got to learn from his situation at the moment? Well, I love, I mean, the man has co-honace of steel. He may be a complete lunatic. He's got such brass coolions, you know? I mean, we have seen this guy be water-borted for a very long time. He's done all sorts of crazy things

that most people would not do. And he stood up to Big Tech and he will not bow down. And I think the point that he and I were discussing this the other day. You go after Alex Jones, oh, well Alex Jones, he's just a cookie for a right guy. Turns out he actually appears to have been right about everything. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's terrifyingly. It's You go after Gavin McGinnis, Gavin McGinnis found out the Proud Boys, very funny comedian, but no, he didn't, his jokes said they went too far, okay, you got to get rid of Gavin McGinnis. Now, you're going after Stephen Crowder. Stephen Crowder, I think he has the largest online following of any conservative, basically.

There's certainly in the top three. If you go after him, you take him out. They can take out any one of us. I think that's really what this is about. And I give them a lot of credit. I sometimes think if the big tech oligarchs have not gone after you at all, and means you're doing something wrong, it means that when I think of the really squishy conservative types, the ones who write for the Atlantic and the Washington Post and go on MSNBC or whatever.

I realize they're actually worse than the left because the left is being honestly dishonest, right? The left is telling you what it believes and all the ghastly things it wants to do. But these guys exist to legitimize the leftist, the liberal establishment. Their role is to act as a court gesture in the kingdom of liberalism. And so whenever you have an actual conservative raising actual questions that might seriously threaten them left,

well, they can't tolerate. You're not going to get your CNN invitation, and more likely they're going to try to boot you off like they're doing to Crowder. The interesting thing with talking about Gavin McGuinness and Alex Jones is that although those guys had huge, especially Alex, like a terrifyingly big audience and he's still holding onto it, he's broadcasting every day for ridiculous numbers of hours even more

than you guys, it certainly does feel like once someone is pulled out of the delivery mechanism of normal social media, the YouTube, the Twitter, and so on and so forth. Like, Milo, you're not bliss, where the fuck's he? You know, like what Milo? I saw him throw a half a million pound ring into the coast of Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, Milo, you've been drinking. Like that was, but I haven't seen him for ages.

I'm always still got a YouTube account, like, wow. And then he's going through all of this, other sort of stuff. But you would have thought, traditionally, if Milo had gone through something of this, other sort of stuff, but you would have thought, traditionally, if Milo had gone through something as big as that, it would have been everywhere. But you really can, X Communicado, you can take someone out of the public zeitgeist,

very easily with this. And even if, you know, let's say that Steven's got all of every single one of his four million, or whatever it is, how many subs he's got on YouTube, huge amount of subs. Let's say all of those are part of his four million, or whatever it is, how many subs he's got on YouTube, huge amount of subs. Let's say all of those are part of his private sites, the mug club thing. That's now siloed.

That's it. Shy of a very well-incentivized referral scheme, that's your audience. And you think, okay, is this it now? I get to affect these people, and that's it. As everybody knows, the way that the delivery mechanisms on YouTube work, it's not just the subscribers that see the content.

Even if you don't think about the people that view it, it's 10 or 20x the impressions, and even just seeing the content, or seeing the tweet, even if you don't decide to engage with it, counts for something in terms of moving. So I think some political commentators, specifically on the right, because I think those guys tend to try and silo themselves or create these fallback plans a little bit more as you guys have it as well, right?

You know, just in case big tech decides to come for you. I think the idea is fantastic, and it's obviously the only one that you have. But I don't really think it's an acceptable or a successful. I don't think anyone should see being cancelled and still being able to exist and make a good living as a success, because you are now taken out of the people that already subscribed to your stuff. They know and mostly agree with the talking points that you've got anyway. Yes, they need to be educated and entertained, but I don't think that should be classed as a victory if people get canceled like that. This is something so few people understand.

The utility of YouTube is not primarily as a broadcast device. It's a fine broadcast system, and there are lots of broadcast systems in that. The utility of YouTube is the ability of discovery, right? The fact that new people then are going to find your stuff. So if you get booted out and let's say you take your million person audience with you

or you're two million person audience with you for it. Okay, two million people out and who knows how many of those will remain active. That's it. That's all you've got and it will not grow and it will actually shrink over time as people die and get interested in other things and go away. Yes, that's not a victory at all. The censorship and the ostracism is real. Milo Unopolis got truly canceled, truly unpersoned, and now he's out of the public discourse.

This again ties into the trap. Conservatives are reacting to cancel culture one of two ways either they'll say, you know, Alex Jones really did say some things that are not good and that's okay, I think it was fine as long as it's just Alex and it's totally fine, right? So that's the squishes go along with it. And then the other way is we should never cancel anybody, but there is a third option here, which is we should cancel other people. And I just think that this middle idea that we should never cancel anybody has never existed anywhere. All societies have standards.

All societies have taboos. When you transgress those, they will ostracize you. This has been true. And they've furthest handles of history all the way up until the present. The question is, what is the taboo? Who is going to be ostracized? In the 1940s and 50s, we prosecuted and ostracized many communists. This was colloquially known as McCarthyism, but it wasn't just McCarthy. I mean, it was one anti-communist senator, but there was the House Committee on American Activities. There was the Hollywood Black List. These were largely distinct institutions,

and what it meant was if you were advocating the overthrow of the United States government, the way of life, if you were actively supporting the Communist Party, which is a front for the Soviet Union, then you were out, you were canceled. And I think that's a great thing. The difference is that in the 1950s, you were canceled if you were a communist, and today, you were canceled if you are not a communist.

And it's, you know, if conservatives understand this, and we say, you know, ostracizing people who are contrary to our understanding of the world and our way of life, you know, that's a fine thing. What the left will tell us and the squishes will tell us is, well, now you're no different than the left. But we are. It actually is a fine thing. What the left will tell us and the squishes will tell us is, well now you're no different than the left. But we are. It actually is a different thing to cancel communists as it is to cancel anti-communists. And it's a different thing to wave the hammer and sickle than it is to wave the American flag. And I just think that yes, politics involves form and it involves certain broad abstractions,

but it also involves substance in particular. What are you being canceled for? certain broad abstractions, but it also involves substance in particular. What are you being canceled for? That's not a very scalable solution, is it? It means that each individual broad range, each region of cancellations needs to be looked at upon its own merits. That's going to be much more effortful. That's going to be a challenge.

Well, it requires some kind of conservative unity. So right now, with the current cancel culture, which is exclusively leftist, we know the criteria. It's if you say anything that can in any way be disingenuously twisted and misinterpreted to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, phobic, phobic, whatever, you know, whatever, the list goes on and on. If you in any way contradict the leftist orthodoxies, you can be canceled. And if they just don't like the cut of your jib and you say any, like I think of my daily wire colleague, Gina Carano, who tweeted out something that was anti-Nazi,

and the left interpreted it, completely flipped it on its head and said it was pro-Nazi, or so then that, therefore, you could get rid of her. It's just because they didn't like her because she was conservative. So yes, the left is unified, and the right is not. Paul Ryan, former speaker of the House, who seems like a perfectly amiable fellow, is very much an economics focused conservative, and he really doesn't seem to care very much about cultural issues. And he just gave a speech to the other day and he said, you know, we've got to stop talking

about how they're trying to trans the kids and we've got to stop talking about these cultural things, which are just distractions. We've got to talk about the only important conservative issue, namely cutting taxes a little bit more. Once again, and I thought, you know, pal, you obviously don't know what time it is here, but we have to deal with that problem. The only thing that has united the right since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been cutting taxes.

We can't agree on anything else. And so if you can't agree on anything else, then you're absolutely right. You're not going to be able to enforce a set of standards. So I'm hoping now, I think there is some hope. You're seeing on the right the ascendancy of much more traditional serious conservatives. I'm thinking of guys like Sohrab Amari at the New York Post who just wrote the Unbroken Threads, very good book on this topic. Guys like Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law Professor, really good on that topic. Yoram Hazoni, the writer of virtue of nationalism, Israeli philosophy, is really good.

Patrick Deneen, while liberalism failed. I mean, this actually has really been emerging, this call for a substantive conservative vision. And so, I hope that we can get it, but are we there now? Absolutely not. Michael Noles, ladies and gentlemen, speechless controlling words, controlling minds will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should everyone go? Check out your stuff.

People can find me, you can find all my links at MichaeljNoles.com for now, but as you as you well note, I'll probably be booted off of social media at some point, certainly when the book comes out. So just really, I really want to thank you, though, because it's been such a blast to talk with you. And I can't believe you are the first person in public to have ever read a book that I wrote with words. So I'm very, very thrilled to be able to do it. And I would encourage everyone else to do it. Offends, get offends