Modern Wisdom - #522 - Andrew Doyle - Is Social Justice A Religion?

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Andrew Doyle is Titania McGrath, host of GB News, a comedian and a writer. There are some new puritans in town. They have their own sacred texts, their own high priests, blasphemy, unspeakable words, rites of passage, heathens and practises of sacrilege. So much so that the behaviour of many social justice activists in 2022 seems to echo very closely the behaviour of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Expect to learn why Ben Shapiro is a terrifying man, whether not calling me hot makes you a bigot, why social justice captures smart people just as much as stupid people, why tyrannies are particularly dangerous when they claim to help the oppressed, whether it's accurate to characterise the culture war as left vs right and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The New Puritans - https://amzn.to/3B1SqgW  Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Andrew Doyle, his Titani McGrath, host of GB News, a comedian, and a writer. There are some new Puritans in town. They have their own sacred texts, their own high priests, blasphemy, unspeakable words, rights of passage, heathens and practices of sacrilege. So much so that it seems the behavior of many social justice activists in 2022 echoes very closely to the behavior of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Expect to learn why Ben Shapiro is a terrifying man, whether not calling me hot makes you a bigot, why social justice captures smart people just as much as stupid people, why tyrannies are particularly dangerous when they claim to help the oppressed, whether it's accurate to characterise the

culture war as left versus right, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Andrew Doyle, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. As a man who has dedicated his life to thinking about fashion and style, I'm sure that you're familiar with the recent New York Times article redefining what hotness means, saying that hotness is no longer in the eye of the beholder, it's a mood, it's a vibe, a social media movement inspired by the rapper Megan the Stallion strikes back at the gatekeepers of beauty. You see this?

I am not familiar with this at all, but maybe it's because I don't go out in a way to find fashion articles. Wow, that surprises me. So many people, many people are expanding the definition of hotness, taking it beyond its former association with old notions of attractiveness. These days being hot no longer pertains to only your physical appearance, but includes how you move through the world and how you see yourself. Many of those pushing for a broader understanding of the term are also pushing back against the idea that you need to wait for confirmation from someone else before feeling justified and calling yourself hot.

To them, hotness is a self declaration, and that's that. Hotness is no longer in the eye of the beholder, it's a mood, it's a vibe. Emily Sundberg, 28-year-old editor and filmmaker in Brooklyn was eating spaghetti when she had a realization she was hot. There was nothing glamorous about it. It was just a solo weeknight dinner.

In the kitchen counter and Ms. Sundberg was wearing workout clothes and glasses, but she felt moved to make a video of herself as she twiled pasta strings on a fork. And succeeded in getting most of them all the way into her mouth. As she chewed with Kanye West's jailed blaring in the background, she stared into the lens with a blank expression. So this is hotness in Zoomer generation. What's the sexuality, the sexual orientation where you're attracted to people because of the way they think. Their brain. It's something like scopio sexual or something.

Yeah, yes. It's a sexual. It's a sexual. A sapio sexual. There we go. A sapio sexual. Oh my god. Yeah, I wasn't familiar with this article, but I guess it's fitting into this whole movement's obsession

with the way that beauty is not a thing. Beauty is a sort of a patriarchal Western constructs and therefore anything can be beautiful. But the thing is, something's just done. I've seen the video of her twirling her noodles or pasta or whatever it is into a mouth. I've seen it done better. First off, it's not the thing that I think of in the top echelons of hotness. And I've seen it done better.

But you don't have to ask for permission to be hot online, Ms. Sunberg said, there's not one thing that defines what hot is. It's confidence. It's the way you dress. it's the way you present yourself with the people. You don't get to decide whether you're hot. Well, for one thing, it is subjective. Let's be honest, people are attracted to different types. Some people are attracted to skinny people, some people are attracted to fat people, some people that blonds, brunettes, whatever, that's true. But you don't get to decide that you're attractive as a kind of label, right? I got you. Can I not self identify as hard? Well, I wouldn't have thought so,

because to whom? Doesn't it depend? What if someone, you know, someone who's, like, you won't be hot to a lesbian, will you? Well, maybe that's their prejudice showing. Well, if you were the head of Stonewall, that's exactly what you would think. Ah, yeah, you had to run him with them. You're not... Am I? Well, just generally you're always unhappy with them. No, I'm not...

Well, no, I am unhappy with them because I think, you know, it's such a shame that an important gay rights group in the UK is now promoting anti-gay ideas. So, yeah, that makes me a bit sad. Nancy Kelly, the CEO of Stonewall, described women, lesbians, who don't want to have sex with people with penises, who identify as women, but our male, she described them as sexual racists. I think that's a problem. She compared them to anti-Semites.

I think we used to call that kind of phrase homophobic, didn't we? So yeah, I do, my issue with Stonewall, you know, quite apart from all the other things, is that I invite them onto my show constantly all the time, and they just never say yes, because they say we don't have debate. But I want to ask them about their policies. I want to ask them why they changed the definition of homosexual on their website and their promotional materials to same gender attracted, which is not what it means. I mean, same sex attracted because gay men aren't attracted to people who identify as men, they're attracted to men. Very much about the penis with gay men. In my, sort of, tangential understanding of what

gay men like, it's very much about penis. Don't pretend that's tangential. You've done some research. Clearly you've done some research. It's about the penis and not just the penis plastic, it's about the... Yeah, I mean, that's clearly an element. And I get that there's more to same-sex attraction than genitals, that's absolutely true, but you can't feign sexual attraction and you can't relearn your innate sexual orientation, which is what they're kind of implying. What Nancy Kelly is saying in Stonewall is what the homophobes used to say to gay men, you know, you just haven't found the right girl, yeah, you know, you need to open your mind a little bit more, you need to, you know, all of that stuff.

It's just recycled ancient tropes, it's really sad. Are they saying you haven't found the right trans money yet? Well, they're suggesting that if you close off certain demographics from your dating pool, then that's the result of bigotry. But of course, everyone does that. Everyone does that in one way or another, because everyone has a type, someone that they are types of people that they are attracted to. And sure, sometimes there can be people from other categories that surprise you or whatever sexuality is complicated. But the idea that if you're not attracted to a certain type of person, you need to relearn that and examine your own bigotry impregnidious is just homophobia dressed up as something else.

It's also happening elsewhere, right? So if you can see how this hotness discussion would slowly encroach onto some sort of bigotry men that don't date bigger women would be sizes. Right. Interestingly, you don't see as much about women dating short men. There's not really as much criticism for women for doing that. No. If you've got some five-foot-five guy and he's saying, well, why is it that women shouldn't date me if I have to date fat girls?

It doesn't seem... Yeah, and this idea that you have a right to be attractive, to be considered attractive, and you have a right to go out with someone like, someone says no, isn't that the end of the conversation? No, I don't know, maybe not anymore. So this son to her lady finished up here and she said, that doesn't mean that you have to be the most symmetrically, physically perfect human being. I feel like that isn't even as desirable anymore. Our definition of attraction and attractiveness has expanded so much. Well, you're publicly stated preferences have, but you're revealed preferences. Something would tell me is going to end up with you not sleeping with the homeless guy on the street that doesn't have a job and only has like two teeth.

Yeah, quite exactly. This person's a hypocrite, right? I miss this article, I don't know how I missed it, did this go viral? I normally get sent this nonsense. Because my job now, every day, I get up in the morning and I search for this stuff. Or people send me this stuff because I obviously have to collect material from my show on the Sunday. So I don't normally miss stuff. Snuck underneath the radar. Well, I've got, I went to the heterodox academy conference, Jonathan Heitzing out in Denver. And I was sat around the table with a bunch of different people. And we were all sharing our favorite resources for where we go for interesting news articles. And I'll send them over to you once we're done. But there's one called clown worlds today that has a telegram chat. They have a telegram chat where they send out

one new story each day. And that is just if you're short on things to talk about, that will be a godsend. Oh, that's great. No, send me that, that's brilliant. Although, look to be honest, I'm not sure of stuff. Yeah, you said before you started the show, you were worried that you were going to run out of stuff to talk about if you had to do a regular segment. I'm culture wars and you're killing babies on a daily basis. Hey, Laris, because when I started at GB news, I was appearing every night on the Andrew Neal show in a segment called Wokewatch. And, uh, well, most nights, um, and there was concern.

Yeah, you're not going to be able to appear every night because there won't be a story every day. There's always a few stories every day. And then certainly for my Sunday show, which I go through everything that's happened in the week, I mean, I always have to leave a lot out. Yeah. Well, it's mad. And it's escalated a lot worse since I saw you last.

Sadly, yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of that, Ben Shapiro's presence is a terror. Organizers of a podcast conference in Dallas, Texas, through Backlash Thursday, after they took responsibility for harm caused by the daily wire podcast host Ben Shapiro's presence at the conference. Podcast movement, a major annual conference for the podcast industry issued a profuse apology on Thursday after attendees complained that Shapiro was spotted at the event near the daily wire booth. Remember that Ben Shapiro is one of the two founders

of the daily wire. Daily wire sponsored this year's conference in Shapiro is one of the two founders of the Daily Wire. Daily Wire sponsored this year's conference and Shapiro host of the massively successful the Ben Shapiro Show podcast was seen pictured walking around the Expo Arena. Did you see the first tweet that someone responded as a trans person, as a queer person, as someone with a uterus? This does not make me feel welcome. This does not make me feel safe.

One of the conference attendees posted on Twitter after sharing a picture of Shapiro standing by the Daily Wire booth. Does Ben Shapiro make me feel safe. One of the conference attendees posted on Twitter after sharing a picture of Shapiro standing by the daily wire booth. Does Ben Shapiro make you feel, you know, Ben, like, quick speaking, little hat, him? Does he make you feel unsafe? We have to get beyond this unsafe non-so. We have to stop taking it seriously when anyone says it.

It's the go-to thing, isn't it? Ben Shapiro is not a threat to anyone. He's just maybe has a different opinion than you. Like, this is, it's so childish. But it's happening all the time. This phrase unsafe, it's been used against me, of course. I've had the same thing. I lost a job because someone claimed

that my presence made them unsafe because of a joke I told. This sort of thing happens all the time. When Jerry Sado, it's the Scottish comedian, he had his show pulled at the end of a fringe last week, and the venue said that his material was making people feel unsafe. So even now, comedy promoters are claiming that words are violence. I mean, it's something you and I have discussed before. It's something that we've been warning about for a long time, but look, we just need to start laughing in people's faces when they say this stuff.

It's absolutely ridiculous. Words are not hurting you. If you're offended, then that's fair enough. Everyone gets offended from time to time. That's being human, but you are not physically harmed. The groveling apology from podcast movement said, Hi folks, we owe you an apology before sessions kick off for the day. Yesterday afternoon, Ben Shapiro briefly visited the PM-22 expo area near the daily wire booth. Though he was not registered or expected, we take full responsibility for the harm done by his presence. There's no way around it.

We agreed to sell the daily wire at a first-time booth based on the company's large presence in podcasting. Let's not forget that they've got probably two or three of the top 10 podcasts in the world at any one time. Matt Walls, she'll be up there. Ben Shapiro will be up there. The morning wire is unbelievably huge. It's this 15-minute thing. There's now making movies and blah, blah, blah. The weight of that decision is now painfully clear. Shapiro is a co-founder, a drop-in, however, and unlikely should have been considered a possibility. Those of you who call this unacceptable are right.

In nine wonderful years growing and celebrating this medium, PM has made mistakes. The pain caused by this one will always stick with us. We promise that sponsors will be more carefully considered moving forward. The pain, the pain, it was a brief visit, right? He said it, Benchbearer, briefly visited. If that's all it takes to reduce you to conceptions, then you really need to see a doctor about that because that means, I mean, I don't know what to do about this sort of stuff. I've been railing against it.

Well, I've written a book now about it. I think we need to stop tolerating it. I think we need to laugh it out of existence. I think that there is a very real place for ridicule to be used here as one of the most important pushback mechanisms, because the game that's being played a lot of the time is this sort of full intellectual lexical overload semantic game Brazilian Gigiitsu

fuckery that's going on. And trying to engage with it on a serious level kind of legitimates the position that the other side has whereas if you see what happened with PC and then with the word woke how quickly it became you can't use the word woke or ironically anymore it's not a serious term. And the reason that that happened is because people like yourself and other comedians and online commentators very quickly made it a caricature of itself.

And you can try and mandate something or how do you say, logically reduce it down so that people don't want to be associated with it, but if you just make it so uncool and socially toxic to be associated with that no one wants to use it anymore, that's it, dead in the water. Yeah, well, I've tried that. I mean, I've done a lot of the comedy stuff and the satire stuff and I've written two satirical books mocking this thing.

My new book is not that. My new book is trying to get to grips with it. However, what I would say in in my defense there, is I get what you're saying about, you know, you can't really reason. But the new book I've written isn't aimed at the woke, it is about the woke, and it's therefore an attempt to, because most of the people who support, who think that they support the woke movement or whatever we want to call them, the critical social justice movement, whatever, they don't really fully grasp what they're about. And so this is a book where we talk through what, where I try

and explain what it is that their objectives are, how really the culture war is a, a battle over language and who gets to define language. I mean, you've raised it yourself there for the typical correctness, woke. I've got a whole section of the book about the evolution of the word woke and how it was a form of self-identification for activists at one point. And then because people like me started using the word to describe them, sometimes in a mocking way, they then started to pretend that it was a right wing term that people like me had invented as an insult, which isn't true because, you know, we can check that on Google, just go back, people used to it, self-identifies work all the time. There are, I've got screenshots of loads of Guardian articles talking unironically about

being woke. So that's not true. So, but that's what they do is that because this is a culture war about language, these people who I call the new Puritans in my book continually redefine language, and then they will tell you that they haven't done so. So you're using words that you always used to use,

but now they're telling you they mean something different. So you used to think the word racism meant prejudice or hate against someone due to the color of their skin. And now you're told no, it doesn't mean that. It means an equation, prejudice plus power, and it's to do with power structures in society and therefore white people, non-white people can't be racist and etc, etc. And you're told no, the definition's changed now. Even though no one really uses it in this way, we're telling you it's done this way now. So, yeah, so I think there are two prongs in the pushback. And I think one is humour and one is satire and we can keep doing that. But I think you need the other prong as well, because I think you need

to persuade the unpersuaded and there's a whole army of decent, liberal minded people who are probably quite humorous a lot of them. They're not going to respond to the satirical approach. They might even think it's mean and particularly because they don't, they have fallen for the lexicon, they have fallen for the linguistic trick, right? They hear phrases like social justice, anti-racism, equity, and they're like, this sounds great. I'm opposed to racism. I'm for justice and equality. That's brilliant. So I will support this. And if you don't support this, then surely you're an astray reactionary. And they've fallen for that basic trick. And that's part of the point, of course. So what I'm trying to do in the book is sort of talk through what these phrases actually mean, what the implications actually are,

and how this movement is against liberalism. If I say that I make the point that I think the closest synonym to the word woke is anti-liberal and I think that's what this is. And then explicitly anti-liberal movement. If you read the early critical race theorists like Richard Delgado, he explicitly says we are against liberalism. Liberalism fails us because prejudice is built into the liberal system. So, you know, it's about language. That's my take home. Is this a new phenomenon?

Because to me, it seems like there's semantic fockery that we've got that's going on is happening at a quicker pace. Maybe it's simply that we have a record of it that's kind of kept online for everybody to see it all times and the way back machine and archive.org and stuff helps you to be able to compare what was and what wouldn't be, whereas I guess 1984

in a world where you can actually get rid of the history of things is a little bit different. Is this a new phenomenon? Have words been reinvented to be used to manipulate impressions for a long time? How does all that work? Well, I mean, there have always been people, and particularly tyrannies, have always redefined words or limited the words that can be used in any given situation. You just have to read 1984 to understand how that's working. But people have always done this. I mean, phrases such as, when the CIA started calling torture

enhanced interrogation, for instance, that would be an example. In the Gullagard Capella go there's an example of this, where Solzhenitzin talks about, and I can't remember what he says, I can check it, actually. He's talking about people who are sentenced about and I can't remember what he says. I can check it actually. He says He's talking about people who are sentenced Sentence and they don't use the phrase Sentencing they use something else by comment what it is. I'll have to find it for you at some point But they you know tyrants have always done this. They've always played word games to try and Create a false reality that you have to subscribe to I think though. There's something going on at the moment where what the social justice activists do is maddening because they don't just

modify meanings and modify definitions. Often the things that they say are the direct opposite of what they mean. And that is and it leaves you unmoored and confused. What's an example of that? Sorry? What's an example of that, where they say something that's the opposite of what they mean? Okay, so they have convinced most people that transconversion therapy is the equivalent

to gay conversion therapy. And so you had a lot of labor and peace standing there with placard saying, we want a ban on transconversion therapy. What transconversion therapy means is a young person who has feelings of gender dysphoria goes to an expert, a specialist, and especially talks to them about it.

But it doesn't just affirm the gender they think they are. It doesn't just fast track them onto puberty blockers, but says to them, let's investigate this a bit through therapeutic means that it's discussed maybe it's to do with maybe your gag and you're struggling with that. Maybe it's autism because there's a high preponderance of autistic people that fall into that category, et cetera.

And trans activists have called that trans conversion therapy. So now, labor, but what that means, of course, is you are affirming gender dysphoria among predominantly gay kids and fast tracking them on puberty blockers that will essentially heterosexualize and fix those gay kids.

So you actually have, and that is a form of conversion therapy. So when a labrym p holds a placard saying ban conversion therapy, the placard actually means I support conversion therapy. It's tough, isn't it? Yeah, well it is for you. So in the new book you say that we're living through a frenzy of conformity. What does that mean? What I mean by that is that we are expected to go along with the rubric that everyone is effectively

the overt and window is shrinking to such a degree. And if you dare to stray outside of it, if you dare to challenge some of the norms of the ideas of the social justice movement, they'll come after you, they'll continue a pariah. Even the slightest point of disagreement, and they will devastate your life, and they won't hesitate to bully you, trash your reputation, target your employer, what we call cancel culture, in other words. And so people are conforming, people are taking the path of least resistance. Now in my book I talk about Salem a lot and I draw comparisons between what happened

with the witch trials of Salem at the end of the 17th century and what we're living through now because what interests me about that is Salem, this was not a typical thing that would happen among the Puritan community in New England. They were not witch hunters. This wasn't who they were. They weren't like the witch hunters of Europe who killed burn thousands of people. This was an aberration. This was odd. And it only lasted a year.

It started very quickly. And then it died off very quickly. And afterwards, everyone said, we got that wrong. Everyone repented. You know, they knew it was wrong. They just got caught up in this hysteria. But the reason why it happened is because the elites, the magistrates and the ministers went along with it. And I think the more I've read about it, I've read a number of books about it, and the more I've read about it, I've realized that that was largely due to self-preservation,

for reasons of self-preservation. It's couple. I want the full understanding of the Salem Witch Trial and why it came about, because I've heard it, it's get bandied about as a thing that happens in popular culture, but I don't understand what went on. Well, okay, I will tell you what went on, and I talk about it extensively in my book, because I think, as an analogy, it helps us, it helps to explain a lot of what we're living through now,

but also I think it holds the key for how we're going to escape it. That's why I wanted to draw this connection. This was 1692. There's a small community, Salem Village, and it's a Puritan community. It's a very god-fearing community, very devout. The Reverend Samuel Paris has a daughter, Betty Paris, and also has a niece, Abigail Williams,

and they are young girls and they live with him, along with two slaves that he has. One of the slaves is called Ticcherbaugh, and she spent some time in Barbados, and she has all these sort of voodoo-style spells and things which are perfectly harmless, clearly. She plays these games with the kids, and she teaches all these sort of voodoo styles, spells and things, which are perfectly harmless, clearly, she plays these games with the kids and she teaches them these spells and it's not meant to be taken too seriously. Then Betty Paris starts acting in a funny way, is bed ridden and has visions and thinks she can fly and all sorts of things like this and

local physician thinks she's been possessed by the devil. Then Abigail Williams has a similar reaction and says that she has seen witches in the community. And before long, other girls, friends of theirs, people who have associated with them start saying, this woman's a witch, that woman's a witch, starting accusing people. Often the targets are quite obvious, people like Bridget Bishop, who was the first to be hanged. She was known for being wearing ostentatious, showy clothes, which was unusual in a Puritan community. She ran to taverns where people would get drunk and have fun and they'd be like, carousine late night, carousine. She's an obvious target to accuse. Also, there were rumors that she

had taken a lover out of wedlock. Suddenly, all these people start getting accused, but it mounts and it grows. Then, when people start being skeptical and saying, look, maybe this isn't real, maybe the girls are just hysterical, maybe the girls are just going through a silly season. Those people get accused as well. It soon becomes clear that anyone who casts doubt onto the girl's testimonies will themselves be accused and and hauled into court. And some of the most devout people in the community, Rebecca Nurse was one of the most devout Christian women of that community and upstanding hugely respected member of the community and she was accused of being a witch as well. She goes to court. In the courtroom, these girls point at the accused,

scream that that woman is sending her spirit out to pinch them, choke them, attack them. Sometimes they see the spirit fly up onto the beam as a yellow bird. Or they can see, or, you know, so they seal this and they describe it. And they're screaming and writhing. They mimic the actions of the

accused. So when Bridget Bishop is standing at the on the stand and she rolls her eyes because of what the girls are doing, all of the girls then simultaneously roll their eyes and it gives the impression that they're possessed and this is taken as proof that these women are in fact witches in consort with the devil. They called it spectral evidence, and in my book I compare that to lived experience because the girls say this is our truth, this is our perception, and we don't need any other evidence in that. And then they start being sentenced to death and hanged. Anyone who was accused to confess to witchcraft wasn't hanged because the Puritans believed in mercy, and they were very lenient if you confessed. So the ones that hanged and in the end, twenty were executed. They would have been the most devout of the Puritans, the most godfaring,

because they're not going to dam their soul by lying in a court of law. So there's a few reasons I wanted to make the connection with Salem. Firstly, there's the sheer hysteria of what happened there. This idea of the human susceptibility for group think, going along with false narratives, because it explains something that's quite difficult to understand. But most importantly, it's the fear that it inspired. It's the fact that people conformed. I think the hysteria may have been real among the girls. There's all

such a theories about why they were experiencing these panics. Maybe they thought they were seeing witches. We don't know. But what is for sure is that some of the judges didn't, because whenever they accused a local dignitary, someone who meant something. So they accused the governor, they accused the colony, colony's governor's wife. So the governor of the colony was a man called William Phipps. The girls accused his wife, and the magistrates in court said, you're wrong, you've made a mistake, move on, right?

That suggests to me they didn't believe it. Reverend Hale, one of the reverents, they accused his wife, they said there's nothing happened, she wasn't believe it. Rev. Hale, one of the reverents, they accused his wife. They said, nothing happened. She wasn't arrested either. All sorts of examples like this. They accused a man called Rev. Samuel Willard, who was at the time the acting president of Harvard. So very powerful man. Very godfiring, godly man. And they accused him. And the magistrate said, no, you must be thinking of Constable John Willard, who has the same surname, but he's already, you've already accused him and he's in prison. So we can move on now. So there's all these examples where we can tell that the elites didn't really

believe it. There was one moment in court where a girl pulled that small, broken off bit of a knife, a little bit of a blade with some blood and said, oh, this woman just sent her spirit out and stabbed me with this. And a man in the court said, that's from my knife. It broke off yesterday and you saw it and you picked it up. And the court just said, okay, well, we'll ignore that and move on. Even though she was just outed as a liar. So why that's important for what we're going through now is there are all these crazy activists online with avatar, anime, avatars, and they were screamer their nonsense. They see fascists everywhere. Everyone's a fascist, a homophobic Nazis,

whatever, they see it everywhere, and they probably believe it. And they're the equivalent of the girls who are pointing the finger and charging people. But then you have the politicians, the civil servants, the journals, the people who, when you ask them, what is a woman? They go, ah, well, you know, it's complicated and you see the fear in their eyes, they know that all of this is bullshit, but they're going to go along with it because they think they will preserve themselves by doing so. That's what the elites in Salem did.

That's why it went on, as long as it did, it went on for a year, just every year. So I think those comparisons are really, are really important because I think the problem isn't the activists. The problem is capitulation to the activists. We see it again and again, they are so powerful now among all of our major institutions, the civil service, they're in the NHS. The day that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the Ministry of Defence on that day put out a tweet talking about how their LGBT plus coffee morning have been such a success and we got to talk about pansexuality, which seems

frivolous, but it's the Ministry of Defence. On the same day, the Daily Mail reported that MI6 and MI5 were urging their spies to acknowledge their white privilege. Now, it wouldn't matter if it was just activists. It matters because it's the powerful people. Last year in Ontario, a school board, which is in charge of 30 schools, removed 5,000 books from the school libraries because they considered them to be offensive and harmful because they contained outdated stereotypes of ethnic groups. They burned a number of the books on a pile

and they used the ashes to first lies a tree, a beautiful gesture and they called this a flame purification ceremony. Now this is a straight out of the Nazi play, but you can't, I mean you can't, the burning of books, you're thinking of the op-em plots in Berlin, you're thinking, you know, that you can't evade that and you certainly calling it something as o'wellian as a flame purification ceremony. That wouldn't matter if it was a bunch of idiot activists burning Harry Potter books as they sometimes do and posting it on Instagram as they sometimes do.

This matters because it is a school board, a district, people in authority. And they, although they may not be caught up in the hysteria, they know that they should go along with it for their own good. The Arthur Miller, when he wrote the Crucible, which is his dramatization of the witch trials in Salem, that was written in the early 50s, I think, in 1952, 1953. He wrote that because of McCarthyism, and he was so stimulated, not mostly, he said this in an interview with the New Yorker. He said that mostly he was upset about the people in power who were going along with lies for self, you know,

for self-preservation. So it's something that happens again and again. And so I've tried in my book to draw this comparison with Salem because like I say, I think it reveals something about what we're experiencing now. And I also think it reveals how we might escape from it, but maybe we'll talk about that later on. I don't know. I've been blathering on for a while now. What is it? I understand the dynamic. I can see the parallels between the two. Why do the elites, the people who have the power decide to comply with a group of people that don't have any power. Was it important in Salem, the fact that the two girls were the niece and the daughter of somebody that wasn't super low-pressed to each, for instance, had it

have been the lowest of the low, would they have been given the same degree of room to speak? Possibly. We don't know that. I mean, possibly it was considered particularly horrifying that this was happening in a in a reverence house, in the clergyman's house. But the girls were relatively powerless. But this was the thing is that, and the girls suddenly became powerful through victimhood. All of a sudden, and this is another major parallel, I think, all of a sudden, and this is another major parallel, I think, all of a sudden, these girls had found a way to be the most powerful people in the community.

They could sentence you to death. They could have you killed. But they were also able to say they were on the side of the angels. Who does that remind you of? The incredible power that the social justice ideologues have, the power to destroy someone's life and career, if they just choose to do so, if they deliberately misinterpret or misrepresent what someone says, and they can do it by saying that they're the good guys, they're the virtuous, hashtag love wins guys, you know, that's them. So whether it would have happened if it were different girls, whether it would have started, there were a lot of sort of specific reasons why it happened early on why it started the way it did, but once it had exploded, they could have been anyone really.

But you know, the downside to that, of course, is, and the other parallel is, the girls were powerful, but no one wanted to be around them. They were also, people were scared of them. And after all this ended, a lot of them had very great difficulty in maintaining any kind of relationships, of any kind, marriages or friendships. So, and you notice that with the extreme social justice activists, if you're in that group, So, and you notice that with the extreme social justice activists, if you're in that group, you're safe, but these are people you would want to be friends with. They can turn on each other so viciously sometimes as well. They're scary people.

And when all of this ends, I can't imagine working out well for them particularly, but it's that dynamic of people using victimhood as a means to bludge and others. And I think that's where the parallel is absolutely clear. If you start to use weakness or victimhood as a, as something to be upheld, as something to be pedestalized, that seems like a very dangerous position to get yourself into because there is no limit. There is a limit to how competent you can be. Your competence is limited by your competence, right? yourself into because there is no limit. There is a limit to how competent you can be. Your

competence is limited by your competence, right? But your ability to pretend that you are a victim is basically limitless. The whole continues to go down as much as you want. Well, particularly if it's just based on lived experience. What precisely? What you feel, I mean, I could say that anything has traumatized me. And therefore, that's my lived experience. And therefore, I can decide that the innocuous thing that you said to me the other day was a homophobic hate crime. I've decided it was homophobic. And that, by the way, is current police practice. So a precise part of this, or a really important part of this, is the spectral evidence thing. It's the fact that interpretation and a low barrier for what constitutes verifiable, usable evidence,

that facilitates all of this, because without that, you actually end up crashing up against rigor and scruously. Realty. Yes. And you know, exactly right. And that's going to be the way out. At the moment, we have a police force that records hate crime on the basis of the perception of the victim alone. In other words, if someone decides that what something that someone else did was homophobic, it's recorded as a hate crime, even if that person didn't mean it that way. It doesn't matter. It's the lived experience alone. The police say it explicitly on the college

of policing website, perception of the victim, by the way, they call them the victim, rather than complainant, because of course, it's about lived experience, so we don't need a trial. We can bypass due process. Similarly with spectral evidence, same thing, but the great thing about Salem, and what eventually happened is the deputy governor wrote to,

and he should have done this straight away. I don't know why he didn't. He wrote to the leading clergymen in the country and said, oh, by the way, is spectral evidence admissible in court? And they all reply and said, no, by no means. It's not admissible. It's not, you can't use it to prosecute. And all of the cases collapsed.

So all those dead people, they were prosecuted for nothing. And that was it, done, overnight, done. And if the police and the authority figures of today and the Guardian and all the others that uphold this nonsense, if they were to say, look, you've come to me with your lived experience, but your lived experience is not evidence of anything beyond your own experience. And it cannot be extrapolated to be used as such. I can't say, based on my own experience

of being gay, the times that I've been homophobically abused or whatever. And I can't then say, oh, that means we live in a deeply homophobic country. No, it means I've experienced homophobia a few times. So my lived experience isn't invalid. And I'm not, it's not to suggest that you can't learn from other people's personal experiences. I'm not saying any of that, but it can't be used as the basis to formulate national policy. And so that's where I think the fact that Salem fell apart because of the spectral evidence was deemed in a miserable. What if we all just decided tomorrow lived experience? We can't do anything with that. We can't draw anything from that. Then this stuff ends, doesn't it? Do you believe on balance that if you were to get rid of lived experience that it would be a net positive. There will be some people out there for whom the law

or the way that pains and issues are recognized doesn't fit within existing paradigms of justifiable things. And there will be some people out there who do have a lived experience that doesn't have a precedent for them. And they go, look, I'm now no longer protected. People are no longer standing up for me. Isn't that a bad thing? Well, well, look, I'm now no longer protected. People are no longer standing up for me. Is that a bad thing?

Well, like I say, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't listen to people's experiences and we shouldn't take them seriously. What I'm suggesting is that they shouldn't be used to damn and condemn others because it's insufficient. I think that's a fairly fair way of looking at it. I think anecdotal evidence we all know is can be useful and illuminating, but it can't be anything that we basic broad conclusions on. And I think that's a controversial thing to say. One of the other elements here is that it seems like the Salem Witch Trials were based around a legislative process, right? This was happening in court and everything hinged around the lived experience stuff. What you have now, it seems to me that the situation in the modern world is a

little bit more complex because a lot of the enforcement isn't necessarily coming from the powers that be. A lot of this enforcement is coming along the sides and it's, you know, bottom up, right? It's emergent, not dictated. How do you, how are you going to deal with that? Well, it's a bit of both, though, isn't it? Because those at the top are, as I say, capitulating to these pressures from below and laws are changing and things are, you know, we, because it's capturing so many institutions, it's captured a number of, we've had a number of near miscarriages of justice as a result of this because this stuff has seeked into the

legal system as well. Thankfully it would appear at the moment that the high courts are not captured. So what tends to happen is you'll get a terrible decision in the court and it will be reversed on appeal by the higher courts. So this is one of the ways in which people like Mara for Starter eventually won her case. What was that? Mara for Starter was a tax expert, is a tax expert, sorry, who was dismissed from her job because she, how can I say, well, she acknowledged the biological reality of sex differences

because she has gender-critical views. And as a result of that, she lost a job or her contract wasn't renewed. And she took them to tribunal, because she said, well, look, this is just because of my personal beliefs. They made up all sorts of lies. They claimed she'd misjended someone at work or harassed someone and none of that was true.

And that's all now on record. But so she took them to the tribunal, but the tribunal found in the employer's favor, the tribunal found in the employer's favor and said that her opinions about biological sex differences were not worthy of respect in a civilized society. And I can't remember the exact phrase, it's a legal phrase, but it's something of that kind. So then she had to appeal, and on the appeal, it was—and it was a great thing that

my uncle started to warn that appeal, because what that means is there is now a precedent in law, it is now established in law that to believe that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable, that is now a protected belief by law. So now whenever any feminist gets fired for making that statement, the employer has broken the law and it will be reversed. So what I'm saying is we can still rely on the courts to resolve a lot of this at the

moment. But what if we don't stem this momentum and when the high courts get captured, then we're screwed because then you're in a situation like, you know, some of these medical journals that are now completely ideologically captured where you get a major medical journal massively reputable magazine talking about how sex is a spectrum. And you know, and they know it's not, and I know it's not, and I barely scrape my biology GCC, and I know it's not. But you've got the top minds in the world in this field saying something that even I know is not true. So, and that's really scary. So yeah, then you

get that legitimation crisis where figures in authority can no longer be trusted. At the moment, we can't fully trust the police, we can't fully trust the journalists, we can't fully trust the politicians, but the high courts seem to be pretty sound at the moment. Social media platforms as well, I suppose, are a huge contributor here. What about I read a post from Andrew Sullivan a little while ago earlier on this year where he thinks that we've passed peak woke. He said that peak woke was June, July, 2020. And I don't really know. I don't understand the burbling, but I'm going to try and bring him on to have a discussion about this, But I don't really understand the burbling, it's below the surface. But it definitely does seem to me, at least a little bit like the very extreme held social justice-y sort of views,

a kind of becoming a meme of themselves now. But I don't know if that's from my echo chamber. Well, I thought that before. I thought they were always a bit ridiculous. And I thought that we would just laugh them off because so many of them are really stupid. When you get, I know, like the William Hogarth exhibition in London recently where the curators had put all these really weird notices next to all the pictures, problematizing them and talking about slavery and things that weren't necessarily relevant to the pictures. And so there was one even, there was a self-portrait

of William Hogarth sitting on a chair. And the note said, the chair's made of wood, and that wood probably came from some implantation. So, you know, maybe we should, it was really, really weird. So that stuff's quite funny or when they put trigger warnings on major works of literature in universities like the Old Man and the Sea, the Hemingway book, which had a trigger warning that said warned about that this book contains scenes of graphic fishing, you know. And so stuff like that. It's funny. And but it's still being, that was applied by a major university, by academics in a major university.

We're not talking about these mad pink hair activists. We're talking about people and figures of authority. I would like to think I'm in Andrew Sullivan. I'm a big admirer of and I hope he's right. Pressiend. Yeah, that would be nice if it was the Cassandra. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, part of me thinks I can't work out whether it's an intellectual ghetto to throw these people into higher academia where they basically get, at least they're not looking after sending rockets to Mars and stuff. But then when you tell me that on the day

that Russia invades Ukraine, that MI6 is concerned about their equity coffee morning or whatever it was that they did. That makes me feel like maybe this has started to creep into other person. Maybe we're not past peak work. Maybe it is continuing to. Well, one of the things,

you know, all of this started out, obviously in the humanities. But now it is actually seeping into the sciences. So when we say it's, the problem is the next step of this is going to be, I think, I mean, I don't know, I'm not profit. I think the next step of this is going to be, how do we now read the sciences? We already had people like, what's a name? Professor Gutierrez talking about how mathematics itself operates as whiteness.

And we've had academics problematizing the notion that 2 plus 2 equals 4, which almost feels like they're trolling us, like they've picked up 1984 and they're going to troll us with that. But they mean it. But there's a really good example, which I mentioned in the book, which is in New Zealand, where the government in New Zealand has tried to incorporate Maori origin stories

into the science curricular of schools because these are alternative ways of knowing. And this is a belief system that thinks that the human race was created by the God of the Forest and that raindrops are the tears of another God's. And that is now being taught next to osmosis and peristalsis and whatever, like whatever, photosynthesis, like, oh, and by the way, when it rains, that's a goddess crying, maybe, because it's alternative ways of, and what was worse about that is a professor of the Royal Society of New Zealand actually signed a letter, was one of these people that signed a letter saying, you know, whilst it's great to respect indigenous cultures and, you know, really, really

placating that and not being at all belligerent, they just said, look, it's not, science is about the discovery of empirical truths. And so therefore, we, it's not appropriate to bring these kind of belief systems in. And then he got absolutely nailed and attacked and all of the signatories of that letter were denounced by the vice chancellor of the university by the Royal Society, by all of these major figures, and then they were told they'd caused hurt and harm. And that was the thing. So if scientists are being attacked and punished for defending science, if leading science journals and magazines are publishing things that they know not to

be true because it satisfies an ideological perspective, then that's actually going to have a major knock on effect because it's not like it's all very well in an English department. If I think that Shakespeare's sonnets are a problematic heteropatriarch know, I wouldn't want to live without the sonnets, but we could, but could we live without medicine? Could we sanitation? I think when it comes to the sciences, things either work or they don't, you know. I just, I think that might be the next battleground that maybe some people aren't quite seeing. We're seeing it creeping in. Wasn't there a tweet today actually, where someone, I think it was the scientific American? Is that right? Is that magazine? Yeah, scientific America, I think.

They tweeted out a thing about the myth of binary sex, the myth that like this really unscientific thing, that human beings before the 18th century thought understood human sex as being there's only one sex now we believe there's two sexes but actually it's all wrong there's many many many multiple sexes which they aren't and no no expert believes that i saw i saw in the economist the other day gay people are reclaiming an Islamic heritage in the old days muslims were quite tolerant of homosexuality. History is complicated and prejudice as ancient roots. Nonetheless, activists can point to periods of the Islamic past where Arab rulers were more liberal about sex. They relate to how Caliph Amin in the 9th century Baghdad had a male lover and feted gay poets. That's true. I mean, there were moments

in Islamic history when homosexuality was more tolerated. That's not a lie. But to suggest that gay Muslims don't have it hard these days, which I imagine is the implication there, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like me, that's not helpful to gay Muslim people, that kind of... So you can reclaim it.

I mean, anyone that decides to reclaim the gay Muslim heritage in modern day Baghdad, I fear would... If they took the advice of the economist would be coming up again. But I think that shows as well just how narrowly bound these discussions are. Like, it is very much... For all the talk of the bourgeois, white, cis-hatronomative people sat in the ivory tower talking like that's you Those are the people that are proselytizing about this. This is literally like how

Blinkers in your world view be for you to not realize that there is genuine harm out there And this is you know, it does feel a little bit like banging my head against a wall talking about this stuff because you're like look There are genuine problems that are occurring many of them are occurring to people that are in bit like banging my head against a wall, talking about this stuff, because you're like, look, there are genuine problems that are occurring. Many of them are occurring to people that are in minorities or groups that are genuinely oppressed. And the more that you take up people's reserve tank of fucks to be spent on something which does not justify spending it on. That means that they do not, it's the boy that cried wolf all over again. Yeah, oh, absolutely.

What was that quote from, I quoted it in another book I wrote from Muslim Girl magazine, and I think what I was talking about the Prophet Muhammad was an intersectional feminist. It was an actual, I didn't make that up. You have to, yeah, exactly. I mean, it goes back to this point, we have to acknowledge reality as it is, and we have to stop, I mean, this intersectional stuff, because we end up pitting the most reactionary elements

within Islam at the very top of this pile. It's so weird to me. Why are you doing this? Did you see me in Douglas spoke about this? Did you see that white gay privilege is now a thing? Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the know the guys are not oppressed anymore. Yeah, you are basically straight now because of your skin color. You're an

honorary straight again. Basically. Yeah. So, Helen Lewis just released a BBC for podcasts called The Church of Social Justice. What's your view on whether or not social, critical social justice is a religion because people often sort of bandy this about, is that true? That's my whole book, isn't it? But just how similar do you draw the parallels

in terms of religion, like the sacred texts, the idols, I mean, it's a way that you can understand it. If you see it as a religion, because look, it's a belief system, albeit of a secular kind, which is largely faith-based. So they believe in these invisible power structures. They believed in lived experience. They believed in all this stuff that you have to just take on trust. And the people who are uniquely qualified to detect these power structures, those who have studied whiteness studies or whatever it might be. So there's that element to it, but also it bears all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion insofar as it will not tolerate any dissent, it attacks heretics, it roots them out, it excommunicates anyone who strays from it.

It has its own liturgical can't, doesn't it? Frazes that you are expected to repeat, like trans women, our women, trans men, our men, etc. It has its own esoteric language, pseudo religious language. It has its own gods, Judith Butler, Kimberly Crenshaw, Michelle Foucault, its own saints at least. It has its foundational holy texts. It has all sorts of things in common with religion. So yeah, I think it's a really helpful way to understand it, but also the main thing, I think, is that, as Stephen Weinberg, the physicist

said, without religion, you have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things. For good people to do bad things, that takes religion. And it makes sense of things for us because the inquisitors who burn people at the stake, strap people to the rack, thought they were doing God's work, thought they were the good guys. The social justice activists who have this incredible, unmitigated rage and ferocity who will happily destroy your life,

they will end you, they are merciless and brutal, but they think they're doing good. And that I think is the, that's why it makes sense to think of it as a religion. That's why it helps us to comprehend why. Look, a lot of the people in this movement will be bullies and will be the sadists. It attracts people of that kind because they get to do what they want to do and look like the good guys and they get away with it. But most of them will be really decent people who think that they are upholding

social justice and who will think that they are combating racism and combating fascist. They probably believe that fascists are everywhere, even though all the studies tell us that they're not. So that's why I think the comparison with religion is important to understand because I don't want to just dismiss these people as all You know if you just judge them on their actions you think God these people are psychotic. They have no human empathy Just none But it can't be that kind of because I have a fundamental belief in humanity And I think some people are sociopath some people have no empathy and some of them will be part of the social justice movement sure

But I think most of them are pretty good people who just got it very wrong. Yeah, so there has to be an explaining principle. If you have a faith in human nature, you've got a quote from CS Lewis that says, of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims, maybe the most oppressive, seems like that relates to what you were just talking about there. Yes, exactly. Because I think as he goes on to say, because you've got your own conscience is on your side. I think that's right.

It's worse. It's more brutal because they think, well, it's partly because they think any dissenters or anyone who disagrees with them has the slightest point of political disagreement is not just wrong or naive or ill-informed but evil. So therefore they monster you and I get a lot of people objecting to the things I believe You know, I get a lot of people objecting to the things I believe. 99% of them don't ever faithfully reflect what I believe. It's always things they've assumed I believe. It's always things that the monster version of me that they've created believes. There is a parallel universe with a monster Andrew Doyle who is a fascist evil,

once all gay people to die, etc. All the stuff I'm accused of believing, but I don't believe any of that. And not only that, it's on record. Everything I think is really, really out there. So a little basic research would disabuse them of their views. J.K. Rowling is another example. The idea that J.K. Rowling, someone who is so sort of left-wing and empathetic and gives so much of her money away to good causes, is now routinely smeared as far right, fascist, evil, which, you know, even in the mentioned in commentary, she's called hateful and transphobic. And she's never ever said anything publicly that is hateful or transphobic. So you're you're dealing with a complete fantasy world and and that's why I wanted to write the book. I want to try and make sense of how have we reached this point where people like me who just hold liberal values and free speech and equality and are opposed to racism and discrimination

even that if someone like me can be monstered as far right and Nazi. That's why I open my book with the the story of my friend who started screaming at me that I'm a Nazi. Because I can't make sense of that, well, what is that world? That's a world in which reason and logic and rationality is just, it's gone. It's not there to fantasy world now. And I think we need to get back to reality. Let's ditch, let's jettison this fantasy perspective. Most disputes that I see online or even in the mentioning media of, uh, figments of, of someone's imagination, they are two people arguing against specters that they've conjured. They're not really listening and they're not really talking about the issues.

And I think it's really sad actually You mentioned there about JK rolling being Accused of being far right and I'm sure you get you get the same accusations as well Is it even correct? Do you think to characterize the culture war as left versus right at the moment? 100% wrong? I mean it's One of the reasons it's wrong. I mean, if you take the UK, the Labour Party, which is the traditionally left-wing party, although not very left-wing now, is completely immersed in this ideological movement and buys into a lot of it. The Tory Party, however,

the conservatives have presided over most of the problems over the past 12 years. They've led it through, they've led it happen. They are also woke. They have a the new online safety bill, which uses all of the language of social justice about how words can cause harm. They are part of the problem. Their proposal to revise the gender recognition act, same thing, they believe in gender identity ideology, or at least they will pay lip service to it. We're starting to see pushback now with, because they can see how it hasn't gone down well with the voters. So now you see that the two people who are running for the Tory leadership both coming out and saying no, there's a difference between men and women, right?

They're realising what's happening now. But this is not a right left issue. And even if it were, you can vote in a Tory government, a Labour government, you can't vote out the civil service, you can't vote out the Kwangos, all of which are completely captured by this ideology. Whoever is in government, you will have woke policies running the police, running the NHS. And it's really serious, you know, when the NHS have a policy called ANXB, which means that they house people on the basis, they accommodate people.

They have single sex wards, right? But people are accommodated according to their own gender identity, not according to biological sex. And what that means is, if I were to say, I'm a woman, they would have to put me on a ward with women. And if one of the female patients complained about my presence, the official written policy of the NHS is that staff, nurses and doctors would have to say, no, you are mistaken, there are no men

on this ward. In other words, it is written into official NHS policy that they have to gas light their patients should they raise an objection to this. When there was a sexual assault, there was a rape on a ward, and when the police turned up and said there's been a rape on this ward or if there's been an allegation of a rape. The staff at the hospital said that cannot have happened because there are no men on this ward. Knowing full well, there was someone with male genitalia on that ward. Now, so that it matters, that sort of stuff. Obviously, because there's a rape victim all of a sudden who isn't going to get justice,

because some people have decided that this is progressive somehow. There was a story that I saw that came up yesterday. Transprisoner convicted of, who was convicted of manslaughter, impregnated two inmates and then attempted to remove his testicles with a razor. A new Jersey inmate landed himself in hospital after he tried to remove his testicles with a razor, Demi Minor, who identifies as transgender engaged in self-arm after he was transferred to a men's prison because he had been impregnated to inmates while in woman's facility, according to his blog Justice for Demi, minor felt hopeless because prison officials doubted that he is transgender. I showed my medical records showing that I've been on hormones for

years and awaiting gender-affirming surgery which they're delaying. I started cutting a game with a razor. I began making an incision to remove my testicle. In my head, I just wanted the paint to stop. I just wanted to get out of this. They don't know what the hell I'm going through. More than a decade ago, Minor unleashed his hell of his own. Back in 2011, he tried to rob his former foster parents, approximately nine months after he left their charge, and then he stabbed someone to death,

who was 69 years old. However, at least one of the two women that he impregnated is keeping the baby. So the baby, so that baby is going to have two parents soon. I mean, that's obviously someone who is very disturbed, and that's obviously someone who needs help, right? But it's also a rapist who shouldn't be in a woman's facility, right? Clearly. And that, so female prisoners are some of the most vulnerable people. I mean, they may have committed a crime, but a lot of them have, I read some statistic

about the number of them that have had blunt force head trauma because so many of them have been victims of domestic abuse and it's very high. There's a lot of troubled people there. You don't want to put an intact male who has been convicted of sexual assault. That's insane. I mean, I think the reason why that was still happening is because I think people don't who has been convicted of sexual assault. What is, that's insane. I mean, I think the reason why that was, that's still happening is because,

I think people don't believe that's happening. I don't think people believe that. It sounds solidicrous, right? It sounds too impossible, but everyone's complicit. The media is complicit. There was an article on the BBC recently about a man in, I think it was in New York, and it said, so this elderly woman, 70s, late 70s, something like that,

this elderly woman cut up two of her elderly female friends and put their heads into bags and she'd already killed a few of her and you're reading this and you're thinking it doesn't sound like an elderly woman and you get to the bottom of the article and it's almost like an aside of this person, I don't transition recently. It's like, it's a man. It's a male serial killer. And that's not journalism. If you're lying to us for most of the article. And then a footnote. And then a basic footnote.

So I mean, it's, if you just skin the article, you'd think, oh, wow, that's weird. You know, there's suddenly elderly female serial killers. I mean, this is why we've got to push back on it. We've got to restore the primacy of truth. Truth really does matter. And it has the stakes are high when people are getting raped and attacked. That's, that's really serious.

Um, anyway, sorry, we've gone very serious now, but it is serious. It is, it is serious. It is serious stuff, man. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. Part of me wants the, a part of me thinks that the best way to push back against this is to, it's almost like a real life ad hominem. Oh, sorry, no, it's not. It's like a real life reductio ad absurdum, right? It's like, look, this is the most insane story that you could think of,

and it actually happens to have happened. The White Gay Privilege thing is a real world demonstration of what happens when you have intersectionality, right? When you have a hierarchy of grievance, you end up having people that are no longer, like this was something that was, it was almost prophetic, some of the stuff that was being talked about

four or five years ago. if you have intersectionality, it means that people are going to start to climb this ladder and there's one person on the planet and they're the most oppressed and that means that they can talk down to everybody else. Blah, blah, blah. So part of me thinks constantly bringing up these stories is an important part of highlighting,

look, this is actually happening, this is something that everybody needs to be conscious of. Then the other part, thanks to what does it give malign actors attention, does it co-op certain people into this movement? Do you understand what I mean? Part of it needs to be the warning and part of it needs to be the, oh shit, well, what if this makes the problem worse? Well, I think the implications of intersectionality have, I mean, I think the original idea behind it made sense. I mean, I don't know, do you know about where it came from? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that made sense to me. You know, Kimberley Crenshaw

was talking about a specific case where black women were falling through the cracks because they were facing impression for being both black and female. There's a legitimate point there, but it's become a kind of a religious dogma, based on the idea of hierarchies of privilege, and it reduces people to their demographic, and it says that you are more oppressed if you have these qualities, and less oppressed if you have those qualities, and it fails completely to take into account any kind of individual circumstances or who people are, and it often forgets about class and money, of course,

as well, that's the other thing. So it is a flawed way. And it has real life effects as well. It has very deleterious effects when, for instance, people talk about white privilege and the discourse of white privilege, while there's now reason to believe and people have

confirmed that it has muddled policy thinking when it comes to white working class kids who are, you know, among the lowest educationally in the country at the moment, it actually has an effect on people. So it's a, it hasn't worked, it's a bad idea and I think we should move on from it. What was that racism of the gaps thing that you were talking about? and I think we should move on from it. What was that racism of the gaps thing that you were talking about? Oh, well, it's the baseline of critical race theory, which is this notion that all inequalities or outcomes are evidence of race's practice. So in other words, if you can't explain why there are different outcomes, you just say, well, that must be racism. In the way that if you can't explain something, it's the God of the Gaps phenomenon, it's the equivalent of that.

If you can't explain something in nature, then it's God. God fills that whole, similarly with this, racism fills that whole. But of course, the charge of racism is really serious, and you have to be able to prove it. Well, it's kind of becoming less serious now because of its proliferation because of how many people are being accused of being a racist. I know, that's a real worry, isn't it?

The fact that when I'm online and I hear someone called a racist, I just assume that's probably not true. Yeah. It's probably, you know, J.K. Rowling is called a racist sometimes, it's called a Nazi, so you just think the word does, you know, when it's used that promiscuously, then,

then yeah, it becomes denuded of all meaning. So, uh, and it should never be the case, should it, that my default assumption is that that word doesn't, isn't, has been inaccurately applied. That's terrible. It definitely doesn't help the movement. It definitely doesn't help. It doesn't help us to communicate. Like it's just a very messy way to communicate. So I had this guy on the show, I called Gwinder Bogle, and he has this concept where he says, when intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology,

their intellect ceases to guard them against wishful thinking and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their undilusion and to very cleverly become stupid. And this is, I think, what, I mean, it's fucking brilliant. But it's what, I had a question for you, which is why is it that this seems to be disproportionately held, these viewpoints seem to disproportionately be held

by intelligent people. Why is it that their rationality hasn't been able to garb them against something which seems to be playing around up against reality? It's a swimming upstream. Such an important question. I wish I knew the answer to that. You're absolutely right, though. It does seem to be that intelligent people are particularly susceptible to this. I mean, the fact that academics are now mostly activists, right? And the fact that they've bought into this stuff.

Yeah, intelligence is no prophylactic against this belief system. There have always been intelligent ideologues of all stripes. So why is that the case? I guess because however intelligent we are, ideologies will be appealing to us because thinking is hard, even if you are really smart, perhaps possibly, especially if you are really smart. And, you know, maybe an ideology solves everything for you. It says, you know, this is, this is the way the world works. I mean, you don't have to, you don't

have to do your thinking for yourself anymore. And I think that's as true as of intellectuals as anything else. It's less about how intelligent you are and more about how your capacity for critical thinking. And I don't, I think everyone is capable of critical thought. I wonder whether people like the idea of a pre-determined framework of thinking, if you are the type of person that has vacillations about your view of the world more than the average person, because it actually, it nets you a bigger positive. If you're not somebody that is hugely inquisitive, or curious, or introspective, and doesn't hold

all of these different viewpoints in your mind at one time, there is less of a benefit to outsourcing your thinking to somebody else, because there isn't as much thinking going on in any case. I wonder whether it's almost like a relief to people that have a lot of big questions and can't find answers to them, to just go for something that is kind. It's just an answer.

I don't care if it's the right answer. It's just these A answer. Well, I think the social justice activist depend upon that, don't they? Because they are offering answers to complicated, difficult ideas. They're offering very simple appealing soundte style answers to these things. And they've already sort of problematized things because they keep redefining words and they keep telling you you don't understand this and they keep throwing jargon at people and saying you won't understand it because you haven't studied critical race theory. So just let us do

the thinking for you. We'll come in and we'll tell you what's problematic and what's not and what you should say and what you shouldn't say. Going back to what you said about religion, Island, was it Thomas Blackwell? Was he the first guy to translate the Bible into English? And before that time, who's the first? No, no, it's not. It's you first. Oh, I shouldn't have had that glass of wine.

I know it's William Tindle. It's William Tindle. Well, if this, if Google tells me, oh, it's debated. The first person to complete the English language version of the Bible dates from 1382 was credited to John Wycliffe. At 10. 10. 10.

10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. 10. Bible in the English language to work directly from Hebrew and Greek. Yeah, maybe it's, tindale Bible is on Wikipedia and we know how accurate that is. So we'll give you that. But my point being that previous to that, the only way that the regular person would have access to the sacred text were through, vicariously through the priests, right?

It was like, look, you, pure plebians, you come to me, I will tell you what God says. Not only am I the person that can convene with the divine, that is proselytizing about it, but I'm actually the only person that fully understands, literally fully understands, because you actually can't read the language, which would have been Latin, I'm going to guess at the time, you can't read what this is. Oh, that's why they resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular. Absolutely. Because it allows people to see the scriptures for themselves and begin to interpret for

themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really similar to what's going on now. I mean, look at the way that some of these ideologues write. Look at the way that Judith Butler writes with this terrible, turgid, garalus prose. That is, almost, it looks like it's engineered to confuse people. You know, these ideas that she's expressing should be able to be expressed with elegance and clarity. And if you can't do so, then you're failing. And I get that sometimes difficult concepts require difficult language. I'm not dismissing that.

But try reading her stuff. It's, you know, it's not, it's bad writing is what it is. So I think, but there's a point to it. If you can, if you throw all this jargon down, people do get intimidated. Look at, look at, whenever academic activists get in, like people like, I won't name names, actually, what's the point? When they start getting into rounds on Twitter, and they start throwing down, firstly, they simply throw down their qualifications,

they're like, I've got a PhD in this, or they do all the... As a, any sentence that begins with As a... Yeah. As an expert in that, and then they throw down this jargon, and they are counting on that deterring people. The reason why in my book, I go through critical race theory and one of the key tenets of critical race theory in clear ways, because I don't think it's very complicated. And I think anyone can understand it. And I think, but they are counting on people not understanding it.

And they gaslight all the time. They say things like, oh, yeah, you're talking about critical race theory. That's totally about law. It's a legal discipline. Yeah, that was its origins. It originated from legal scholars, like Derek Bell and Delgado. It starts with law and then it gets rolled out into education and all areas of public life. And so when you talk about critical race theory in schools, and then it gets rolled out into education and all areas of public life. And so when you talk about critical race theory in schools, and you often get, I see it all the time online, people say, you're talking about critical race theory in education,

it's not in education, it's a legal thing. And you like, there are literally, there are hundreds of articles about critical race theory in education. There are books called critical race theory in education. It's just, like you say, the plebeians to have a seat at the table. It's kind of a little bit like saying that hammer that I just hit you over the head with, that's not a weapon, that's a DIY device. Right, exactly. It's really paternalistic, isn't it?

It is so elitist. That's what really wants to be. Very wonky, very, very wonky. Exactly. It's really paternalistic, isn't it? It is so elitist. That's what that's what really wants to be very wonky, very, very wonky, but it's establishment as well. So it's basically it's the elite. I mean, I consider the woke to be like the clergy of our age, basically. And they are the elite, the elite, they are the high priests. And we're saying, you don't understand and you can never understand. So just trust me. You know, and I finished. I don't know what more to say about. I'm starting to get slightly grumpy about it. So I'll enjoy the rest of your wine. That's what you need to do. A bit more wine. More wine or less wine, I don't know which one to do. I think it's because I've had a long day. And normally

I'm very calm and measured when I talk about this stuff. But I've had a long day and half a glass of wine. I'm like, I'm just sick of it. Like, do you find yourself, here's an interesting question. Do you find yourself able to emotionally detach from the fact that you are now swimming permanently in the waters of this sort of stuff?

You know, for me, because the show has a lot of latitude, I can talk to some astrophysicist, or I can do a whatever, right? Like I can exit out of the culture wars whenever I want. And I can temper that accelerator, whereas for you, this is a lot more, a broader amount of the time that you spend working. Is that difficult for you?

Yeah, sometimes I feel like I'd rather do anything but, I do feel a kind of obligation though, because I care about this stuff, I care about liberal values, I care about this retreat, this societal retreat, this regression, and I do want to at least, to be able to say that I tried to do something about it.

But I do, on my show for instance, I will often invite people who aren't talking about these issues, talking about other things, because I do want to broaden those sort of things. Sometimes I will write an article or a piece about something that's got nothing to do with it. I've got a, I've written a chapter for a book that's coming out next month, which is about the poet Walter Delamere. And so stuff like that, I can just do something else. So that's the relieving when you get to stuff.

That's great. It's great. I just had a musical on him in Belfast, which was nothing to do with the culture, and that's great. I've just, I've got another musical in development at the moment, which is about plastic surgery in World War II. So, you know, it's quite good to be able to step out and I like getting away from it. I sort of depend on it. A lot of the stuff I read is not to do with the culture war as well. Yeah, well, I think one of the concerns that I would have, and it's thankful that, you know, my friends like you and Douglas and stuff that do jump feet first

into these discussions a lot of the time, have other things as well. Right. You see the total perverting nature of living and breathing this stuff. I actually think that James Lindsay is someone who probably suffered with that a good bit, that he just went so headfirst into this stuff and was kind of catapulted to the forefront, the battlefront of a lot of these discussions, that it just

can, it seemed to totally consume him. And I like, I, he said, he has said, hasn't he, since he was booted off Twitter, he said that actually it feels like a big relief. I haven't seen that. Where did he put that out? It was in a video I saw. I just caught a glimpse of it. That wouldn't surprise me. That wouldn't surprise me. He said that it feels like a reprieve or something. It feels like, so I get it. I like James a lot. He's a really great guy. And I think getting away from Twitter may be a wonderful thing for him. I would love to get off Twitter. That's my goal, right? Eventually.

To retire from working, no, no, no, no, no. I want to be able to get off Twitter. That's my goal, right? Eventually. Retire. Or retire from working? No, no, no, no, no. I want to be able to retire from Twitter. Well, to be fair, the book that I'm working on next is nothing to do with the culture or so, there we go. So there's, you know, I can do other things. Exciting. I'm looking forward to speaking to you about that as well.

Let's bring this one home mate. If people want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you do, where's best to go? I think either watch me on free speech nation, which is my show on GB News, which is every Sunday at 7 o'clock, or if they want to come to Twitter, I'm at Andrew Doyle underscore comm. And if they want to read my new book, it's called The New Puritans. And that is kind of my last word on the cultural base. I mean, I've basically said everything I've got to say about it. I think-

You're relying underneath that. Within that book. So I think that would be the way to, if you're interested in what I think about this stuff. And obviously, I'm very much aware that we're having a chat now and we're talking and we're only getting half the picture because there are things I'm not thinking of that I should think of and there are, and perhaps I'm not expressing myself as well as I might. But in the written word, in a book length thing, you're able to really concentrate and draw out and rewrite and clarity is all there. So that's why I'd recommend that people buy the book. Andrew, I appreciate you, mate. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah