The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 373. Social Justice: A Religious Movement | Andrew Doyle

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Andrew Doyle discuss the intentional irrationality of far-left doctrines using religious rhetoric despite the absence of God, their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures, regardless of need or merit, the argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art, and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma in the place of fundamental truths. Andrew Doyle is a writer, broadcaster and comedian.  His latest book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.  He is also the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters, and has written two books under the name of his satirical character Titania McGrath – Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.  - Links - For Andrew Doyle: The New Puritans (Book) https://www.amazon.com/New-Puritans-Religion-Justice-Captured-ebook/dp/B09FJL1LFF/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=623199749479&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9013202&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1165765495605452418&hvtargid=kwd-1658071450267&hydadcr=22569_13493349&keywords=andrew+doyle+the+new+puritans&qid=1688643112&sr=8-1 Andrew on Twitter @AndrewDoyle_com https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com 

Hello to everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking once again, because we've done it before, with playwright, journalist and political satirist Andrew Doyle, also known as Tatanima Graath. We discuss the intentional irrationality of the far-left doctrines that use religious rhetoric and practices, despite the absence of God, or perhaps the presence of a different God. Their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures, regardless of need or merit, the argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art, and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma to take the place of fundamental truth, and

say, purposefully doing so. Look at forward to it. Well, Mr. Darland, it's good to see you again. I think we're damn near friends or at least I like you. I don't know what you think about me, but feelings very much mutual. Jordan, thank you so much for having me. Well, that's good. Well, that's reprehensible types. You know, we need to stick together. We do. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. So the first, I thought I'd hassle you for a bit first. I got two things to hassle you about I think the first is it says on your Wikipedia page for whatever that's worth that you

regard yourself as left wing and so I think you deserve some harassment for that but also I like I don't know What the hell that means anymore and then after I've done bugging you about that I thought I'd bother you about having a PhD in early Renaissance poetry and the humiliation complete. Okay, let's start with the left wing thing. Okay, yes. Well, I first say I'd say that Wikipedia is full of errors. I wouldn't trust absolutely everything you see on Wikipedia, however, on that score,

I think it's broadly accurate. I know that, I mean, I've never voted for a right-wing party. I did vote for Jeremy Corbyn, which, to be honest, I now regret. As you should. I think if you put word to... I don't really know what left-wing and right-wing means anymore. I think the Culture War has, in fact, obliterated those two designations. I really do believe that because, you know, if you were to write down my views on most subjects and sort of give them to an impartial observer

and say, is this person on the left or on the right? I think broadly speaking, most of my values would fall into what traditionally would be considered left-wing. I think I have some sort of more conservative values when it comes to culture and education and the arts perhaps, but that's the same as someone like George Orwell, who was very much a cultural conservative as well as being a socialist. I think economically speaking, I do believe in fair proportionate taxation of the wealthy. I do believe in the welfare state. All of those sort of, I believe in redressing economic inequality, looking out for working class people, social mobility. So all of these

kind of things I think would traditionally be deemed to be left wing, but I think what the culture war has effectively done is it's substituted identity, group identity for the notion of class and money. And what that now means is that people who describe themselves as left-wing are nothing of the kind. I mean, most of the activists that you see the most vociferous cheerleaders

of the critical social justice movement tend to be, well, let's put it nicely, quite posh. They tend to have quite plummy voices, double-barrelled names, they're called things like Hugo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby and things like this. Particularly the case with environmental activists. You know those people who glue themselves to vanguard paintings and statue of David

or whatever it might be? When they talk, they are almost like a caricature, like the kind of thing that I would have invented as a joke of a kind of... And how have invented in fact? Exactly. Well, Tittani McGrath has that name because she's very, very well off.

Part of the joke with that and part of what I find so funny about so many of these activists is that they are bleeding about oppression and persecution and privilege and they're independently wealthy. They've got, they've had everything handed to them on a plate. They're not in a position to do that. Andrew, you know, you, you look.

I noticed this when I was teaching at, and with, at Harvard, at an Ivy League school, obviously, and so all of my students were the top 1%, obviously. And if they weren't at that moment, they were going to be by the time they were 40. So at worst, they were top 1% in what would you call infancy. There we go. And so you might think that'd be good enough on the privilege side, but it seems to me

that there's a small codery of very noisy people for whom being rich and privileged is not enough. They also want all the victimization privileges of being oppressed, because then you can have bloody well everything, can't you? And if you're a narcissistic psychopath, then everything is what you want, and you want it now. And I want to just follow up on that a bit with regards to this left-wing issue, eh? So you know, there's about a dozen studies now. I want to write an

article about this, or maybe even a book. There's about a dozen studies now, looking at the personality predictors of left-wing authoritarianism. And so, from 19, from the end of World War II till 2016, social psychologists in particular, and that's a rather dismal discipline, denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism outright. It was only a right-wing phenomenon, apparently. You know, I mean, Stalin and Mao notwithstanding, but it started to switch a bit in 2016. We did a study in my lab, first of all, showing that left wing authoritarianism was

a coherent, you could identify a coherent set of beliefs statistically that were associated with so-called progressive causes allied with the willingness to impose them using fear, force, and compulsion. So that's not a bad definition of left wing authoritarianism. But then a number of other studies have come out, and the most interesting ones concentrate on what's known as the dark tetrad. And the dark tetrad is a group of personality traits that were too evil to make it into the standard personality models.

They were excluded by fiat to begin with. Manipulidiveness, that's macchivalonism, psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism, narcissism, that was the original dark tetriode. But that wasn't bad enough, so the psychologists had to add sadism to it to fill in the last quadrant. And the correlation between dark tetrad personality traits and left wing authoritarianism is so high that it isn't obvious that they're distinguishable.

And so what I see is not, is it not similarly high amongst right wing authoritarians? No, it's not. So it's a different kind of authoritarianism. Yes, it look, I mean, this isn't clearly laid out yet, you know, but the focus at the moment, now, I think, first of all, anybody who's willing to use fear and compulsion and force is likely to also be characterized by those dark tetrad traits. But I think the additional pathology that emerges on the left, and this is something we can discuss, obviously, is that you have to be a particular kind of

evil snake to mask your psychopathic power-mongering in the guise of compassion. And I don't think the right-wing authoritarians do that. They, more or less, come right out and say, like, fuck you. I'm going to take everything you have, especially if you're a group I don't like. But the left-wing types, they say, well, you know, really I'm your best friend. Historically speaking, is that necessarily the case? I mean, you know, if you take the example of the third Reich and Nazism, that was underpinned by a belief, a sincere belief, a sort of quasi-religious belief that what they were doing was for the good of society. However, a parent, we might find it. Look, fair enough, man. I know perfectly well that in the 1930s, for example, as the Nazis marched towards the death camps, their primary rationale for the original implementation

of youth of euthanasia, so to speak, of mass killing was compassionate euthanasia. But then I would also say, and this is something we actually don't know, you know, that the Nazis were national socialists and their political stance was a weird mixture of what we would think of as left and right way now, right? I mean, there was the fascist component that involved the aggregation of power

at the pinnacle, corporate and governmental and media, all of that, right? So that seems kind of right-wing and monolithic, but it wasn't like they were, it wasn't, there were socialist elements in the platform as well. And so we don't know enough to sort that out, I would say, maybe on the statistical side. But doesn't all of this sort of point to the fact, or not even the fact, but my contention, that actually thinking in terms of left and right when it comes to this is kind of redundant.

I think in a way you've sort of hit it. Yeah, exactly. The debate has always been the struggle between liberty and authority. And so to go back to whether I'm left-wing or right-wing, I think I'm probably just liberal. I think there are liberal-minded people on the left, there are liberal-minded people on the right,

among libertarians, it's not something that is tied to a left right worldview. But when I hear people talking about how, trying to frame the culture war in terms of left and right, or to say that the culture war doesn't matter in there are more important things. Actually, this struggle between liberty and authority, which John Stuart Mill talks about in his book on liberty,

George Orwell has written about this. That's the thing that matters. And the recognition that there is an authoritarian impulse in humanity, that there is an enduring appeal to authoritarianism, whether you come from the left or from the right. This is something that George Orwell has to go back to. He tackled this as well. It's precise to the reason why when he wrote Animal Farm, he couldn't get it published for so long, because people were horrified by the possibility that left wing people could be authoritarian. And what he was saying is that this is something that doesn't... It's irrespective of a left wing view or a right wing view.

And I think, although you might be able to pinpoint psychological differences and tendencies among those on the left who have an authoritarian bent and those on the right who have a similar authoritarian bend. Perhaps it's more useful just to think, particularly when it comes to the culture war, in terms of who believes in traditional liberal values. I know that means something very different in America, but liberal values insofar as individual autonomy, shared humanity, freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, etc. Those kind of liberal values you can do whatever you want with your life so long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others. That's something that left and right can agree on. And the social

justice warriors, whilst they might call themselves left wing, really their movement is characterized by authoritarianism. They oppose that liberal values. That's what logs. And quite not just what it looks like quite explicitly. I mean, the early critical race theory texts explicitly, say, I mean, if you read Derek Bell, who wrote an essay called, who's afraid of critical race theory, he talks about how critical race theorists have always mistrusted liberalism. They see them, the liberal project as having failed because we still live in a society where racism exists and they take that as evidence that liberalism doesn't work rather than because

the previous societies were so non-racist. Right, exactly. They don't understand that point. Social liberalism is about an ongoing process. It's about recognizing that we live in an imperfectable world and trying to do our best with a bad lot. And the problem is that authoritarians tend to be as well, kind of utopians, even though in the case of the social justice activists, I don't think they've got a clear sense of what their final ideal society would look like. At the moment, they just seem to me to be on a sort of rampage of destruction. They probably... Well, that is what it would look like.

That is what it would look like. Just the way I've always thought that Hitler got exactly what he was aiming at. He shot himself while the Europe was burning. And it's like a big fuck you to God fundamentally. But that was because he was the personality type that would rather everyone was torn down rather than he fails. I mean, one of the things that's been in. Yeah, well that is the dark tetra type, man.

That's right. I mean, he's deeply, he was deeply narcissistic. You know, he would bore people with those lectures late at night when no one was interested. It was all about him. One thing that comes out very clearly, there's a great biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw. One thing that very much comes out about that is this guy was a narcissist, and when he knew that the game was up, he wanted everyone to pay all of the junk he could as well.

That's narcissism right there, man. That's absolutely right. Well, and he said that, you know, I mean, at near the end of the Second World War, he went when the Russians were advancing on Berlin. He continually expressed his dismay at the uselessness of the German people who had failed him. Yes, he could, exactly. And those who had failed on the, on the Eastern Front or from his perception had failed even though he put the military

in an impossible situation, couldn't take any responsibility for his own mistakes. But that kind of narcissism, I don't like comparing social justice activists to Hitler, I think that's their trick, that's what they do, they call everyone Hitler. But I think you can definitely see that combination of narcissism

and also a kind of religiosity, intolerance, and yes, exactly what you say, a desire to destroy, and you know, that if we can't get our way, we'll just destroy everything. Okay, so let's talk about that. I want to use that as a segue, and I haven't tortured you about having a PhD in Renaissance poetry. I'll get back to that. I want to use that as a segue into the religious issue, because you wrote a book here recently. Just make sure I get titled exactly right. The new Puritans, how the religion of social justice captured the Western world. And so we could talk about religious issues.

I've been thinking recently along the religious lines, let's say, that what we're seeing is just the modern manifestation of an eternal battle. And that battle is laid out first, very early in the biblical corpus in the story of Canaan Abel, because what you have in that story is two modes of adaptation, which I think roughly parallel a kind of demented narcissistic authoritarianism and a kind of responsibility, laden individualism. We can discuss that. But what happens is, can enable makes sacrifices, right?

And that's what people do when they work, because work is the sacrifice of the present to the future. And human beings uniquely work. I mean, maybe beavers work and bees, but look, essentially human beings uniquely work. I mean, maybe beavers work and bees, but look, essentially human beings uniquely work. We're willing to sacrifice the present for the future. Now, what happens in the story of Cane and Abel is that Cane appears to make bloodless and relatively low-quality sacrifices, whereas Abel's all in. And the consequence of that is Abel gets rewarded by God, and everyone loves him, and things go well for him, and Cain nothing goes his way.

And then instead of noticing that maybe he has something to do with that, he calls God out for creating an improper cosmos and really puts them on the stand. And God says, look, buddy, if you got your act together, things would go well for you. And the fact that they're not might have more to do with you than me. And Cain thinks to hell with you, God, I think I'll go kill your favorite. And so that's the story. And that's one hell of a brutal story. And then, you know, Cain's descendants, including tubal Cain, which is about four generations down the line,

they're the builders of the Tower of Babel, and also the first people who make implements of war. So there's an idea there that there's a resentful and bitter revengeful spirit that preoccupies mankind, and that it can spread out from the individual and take out the entire polity. And I can't help but see a reflection of that on the intellectual landscape now in the political domain. I mean, I think, now I'm curious about what you think about such things because you have described this new movement, let's say, as religious.

So, you know, what do you mean by that? What do you think about these more metaphysical speculations? I suppose I should be very clear about that. And in the book, I do make it clear. I've called the book The New Puritans, and I refer to the religion of social justice, because one of the things I'm very keen to do, and one of the reasons why I feel that the critical social justice activists are winning, is because a lot of people do not understand their aims. They don't understand what they're about, and that they are effectively fall for the linguistic tricks. I mean, you all know that the culture war is largely about who gets to define the meaning of words, activists often use words, but they mean the opposites. They call themselves progressive,

for instance, but I believe that they are regressive. They call themselves liberal, but they are deeply illiberal. You know, they're in favor of censorship and authoritarianism. They scream about fascism while they themselves are using fascistic tactics, such as violence, to silence political opponents. So the language, unless you understand where they're coming from, and unless you understand that there is a belief system, which is largely tied to unfalseifiable claims, which depends upon a kind of coterie of high priests, edicts from above, telling the masses what they should believe and punishing those who descend. It has all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion, at least, the idea of excommunicating heretics, sort of sniffing out heretics, searching for them and doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning them

at the stake, which is what we call council culture, destroying their livelihoods, destroying their reputations, a kind of merciless brutal, cruel and vicious quality, which nonetheless dons the guise of compassion and righteousness. I'm sure that bullies and innately cruel associate paths throughout history have probably been attracted to the priesthood, because it gives them the opportunity to have a figure of authority, to enact cruelty, and at the same time to be validated as a principled and important member of society. So I think it does- You mean like Pharisees and scribes?

Those sorts of people. Exactly, and I'm not suggesting for a second, you know, if you take something as brutal as the Inquisition, I mean, I'm sure a lot of those people involved felt that they were doing God's work and genuinely thought they were on the side of the angels, but you can be damn sure that there were some psychopaths who were attracted to those positions of power.

So when I'm saying that I talk about the religion of critical social justice, I'm doing so to try and make it accessible, I've found that if you just, because it is so baffling to everyone, most people are completely baffled because for a start, they have their own kind of esoteric language, this terminology like heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and cisgender, et cetera, words that most people just don't even know what they mean. this terminology like heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and cisgender, etc. Words that most people just don't even know what they mean. But if you see them as kind of a biblical script or a religious text,

and they do have their foundational holy texts such as Foucault and Judith Butler and things like that, if you make this analogy to religion, I think it makes the movement comprehensible. And I think in order to defeat it, it has to be comprehended. And I think most people can comprehend it. So let's try to get at something that might approximate a definition of religious. So this is how I've been thinking about it technically. So imagine that you see the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions, which you have to, because you're fundamentally ignorant. You have to presuppose things in order to move forward,

because you don't have infinite knowledge. So you have to look at the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions. Then you can imagine that some presuppositions are deeper than others. What that would mean is some presuppositions, very little, very few other presuppositions depend on, and some presuppositions many other presuppositions depend on. It's like citation depth in the scientific literature. Freedom of speech, for example, would be a presupposition in a liberal polity upon which almost

all other presuppositions rest. If you move it, you're moving the depths. So a religion specifies the deepest presuppositions and they have to be axiomatic because that's sort of where your ignorance bottoms out. You have to say, I hold these things to be self-evident before you can proceed. And that is something like the existence of a deity, as a preceptor that has to end. Right. Okay, so that's the next issue.

So I read a lot of Carl Jung years ago and very deeply. And one of the things Jung said about Protestantism, which I found remarkable, he criticized both Catholicism and Protestantism. You know, as a friendly critic, I would say, pointing out that the the Temptation that Catholicism might fall prey to is one of centralizing authoritarianism and the Temptation that Protestantism falls prey to is Fractionating individualism. He said the logical conclusion of the Protestant revolution is that every single person becomes their own church.

And so it looks to me like that's happened and what's happened. And psychologists have what you have, especially on the psychopathic, narcissistic fringes of what used to be the left, and you see this on the right as well, is the momentary self elevated to the status of God. Well, you see that in all for a lot, which I think is why, I mean, you've identified the narcissism within these kind of movements, but also the rapidity with which they resort

to religious terminology or religious ideas or religious modes of expression, for instance. You remember when the, was it outside of Netflix when the protest against Dave Shapel's show and there was that comedian protesting with a sign that said, we like Dave or we like jokes. I think they had signs like that. And a one woman cornered him and it was all caught on film.

And she screamed repeatedly in his face, repent mother. She said it again and again and again. And I mentioned that in the book because I love that that sort of combined that combination of rage and religiosity, I think really encapsulates what the movement is all about. I think in terms of the presuppositions of that movement, which it takes as axiomatic, it's not supernatural, okay? It doesn't talk about a deity,

even though it has its profits, I think, from the French post-structuralist of the 1960s. But I think it does have certain axiomatic presuppositions, such as there are power structures that dominate society that underpinned all human interaction. And these are based on the notion of group identity. And that that is how society needs to be understood. As Fiko talked about grids of power through society, power not being a top-down phenomenon,

something that sort of is latent within all of our interactions and behavior. And they see that they believe that these activists believe that they can pick this apart and understand it and remedy the wrongs in society, so long as they can identify where the power structures lie and who is exercising privilege at the expense of the oppressed. That's why critical race theorists, I mean, that it was put like this in James Lindsay and Helen Plutchrose's book that the key question that you ask, if you are a critical race theory, is not a theorist, is not a did racism take place in this situation, but how did racism manifest in this situation? Yes, right.

So it's almost like a ghostly spiritual thing that is always there. I think that's one of their major presuppositions. Yeah, well, well, then, well, so here's another way of thinking about that from the religious perspective. I mean, Milton Satan is an authoritarian narcissist and he rules over hell. And so he's a figure that's very much analogous to Mao or to Stalin, right? To he's someone who climbs the most pathological possible

power hierarchy, and then regards himself as a victor, even though he's actually the biggest loser. And so Satan is the spirit, you might say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, who rules the world by force. Now, the postmodern Neomarchist types believe that there's nothing but power. So I can't see that that's any different than a certain Christian heresy that rose up in the Middle Ages, making the claim that Satan himself was the ruler of the earth, right?

Because the notion there is that power itself is the only, or at least the ultimate motivator, and well, motivators, the right way of thinking about it. And so, and then it follows a lot of things, follow from that, right? One thing that follows from that is that there's no such thing as free speech, because there's just conflicts between different claims to power. And that if you promote free speech, that's just an indication of how conniving you are to use that entire philosophical language to do nothing but buttress your own colonialist power claims. Yes, because their theories always put you in that position where you can't win.

You know, it's similar with the critical race theory. They have their notion of interest convergence. When people say, well, they are extremely successful black individuals in our history. Baraka Barma say, someone like that, they will say the only reason that those people have succeeded is because it was in the interests of white people to fall them to succeed.

In other words, if black people don't succeed, right, so if black people don't succeed, right. So if Black people don't succeed in society, that's evidence of critical race theorists' claims. But if they do succeed, it's also evidence of their claims because that's the interest convergence. So they keep putting you in this kind of situation. That to me has to be religion without, as in religious belief, that has not been, it has merely been asserted rather than proven. The fact that they take on the very notion of rationality, enlightenment ideas, the fact that they think that those things are even part, and they also see that through group identity, that that is just

the product of some dead white men in Perrywigs. So, how do you understand? There seems to be, okay, so we figure we've got a couple of, what would you say, contenders for deity? One would be Satan himself, right? The spirit of power. The other would be the untrammeled hedonic self. It's something like that. But then there's a weird, there's a weird paradox there, not that the paradox bothers the postmodern types, that group identity is paramount. But full, what would you say? Full licentiousness on the personal front and the granting of every whim on the personal front is also requisite. And I can't quite square that coherently. Like, how is it that the radicals can push forward the notion that group

identity is the only identity, but also push forward the notion that group identity is the only identity, but also push forward the notion that everything possible is to be permitted, every individual at every moment. But you put your finger on it when you said that the paradoxes don't trouble the postmodernists. It's sort of built into their whole idea. When Derrida was writing, he was trying to write in coherently.

It's part of it. He managed to. He did manage. It's absolutely unreadable. So let me let me try and understand what you're saying here. You were talking about the idea that we see this worship of the self. Well, you're talking about so there's contenders for God, right? We have power and we have the self. And then there's an element of that that spreads out into identity. Now that the radical types definitely put forward group identity as paramount. But what do you mean by worship the self? What do you mean by licensiousness? What do you mean by do they believe that absolutely everything is permissible? That any kind of individual desire is able to

be fulfilled, because in their world, I think they're quite prescriptive, aren't they, about what's modes of behavior are acceptable and which aren't? Well, that gets extraordinarily complex because it looks to me, one of the things I see on campuses, for example, is the insistence on the left progressive front, let's say, that any form of sexual identity or behavior whatsoever is permissible, and not only permissible, but to be celebrated, but now it's complicated because at the same time, right? Every single interaction between young man

and a young woman is so absolutely dangerous that it has to be subjected to contractual validation. That's what I mean. For it can proceed. Well, yeah, well, it's a weird psychoanalytic truism, you know, that if you go too far in one direction, you simultaneously go too far in the other. And that really muddies up the water, right? So the really narcissistic types, for example, have an extremely uncertain core.

Yes. But that doesn't make them any less, what would you say, forthright in their claims that they should rule? But I can't stretch your... Go ahead. But I'm not so sure that it's about fulfilling any indulgence, no matter how depraved.

I think it's more about what they call queering society. I think it's more about, if it is in the service of demolishing the cis white heteropatriarchal structures that are in place, then that is seen as a benefit as something positive. Right. So you think that licentiousness serves the purposes of demolition. I do. What about the reverse hypothesis is that, because I would say this might be more true of Foucault, all the demolition

was put forward to license the licensiousness. Like, I don't know. I mean, this is real. I'm not sure about that. I mean, a lot of people will say that because Foucault has, as you know, a very shady past. Yeah, you might say that, or? Yeah, absolutely. And people have pointed out that there seems to be a strong correlation between some of the

founding postmodernists and shall we say, well, yeah, depraved sexual activity, sometimes pedophilia, these kinds of things. The question I suppose, are you suggesting that they created this kind of theoretical framework in order to justify that sort of behavior? is that what you mean? Well, I see, I'm not, I waver, and maybe the causality is interactive, because you could see, I see a lot of stunningly immature behavior

on the radical front from a developmental psychological perspective. So for example, a lot of the behavior I see looks to me like unsocialized two-year-old behavior because two-year-olds are highly prone to motivational and emotional whims in the short term and they're incapable of developing a shared frame of reference. That doesn't happen until kids are three. And aggressive two-year-olds who don't develop that by four never develop it in their entire life because they become alienated and they don't develop that by four never develop it in their entire life

because they become alienated and they don't make friends and they can't further their development. And so you could say, if this is sort of a Freudian id-like view, that part of what we're seeing is the expression of extremely unsucialized immature motivational and emotional demands fragmented socialized immature motivational and emotional demands fragmented with what would you say? Temper tantrum-like insistence, constant insistence, that those whims be granted immediately. And then you could say, well, the entire power critique has been erected on the intellectual front just to justify that. Although you could also reverse it and say, no, the licentiousness, which was the case you were making, the licentiousness is promoted because

it's revolutionary in a sense, and it can be used to demolish these so-called traditional power structures. Well, it has to be because they just have so many impositions on other people's freedoms. They have so many ideas of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, particularly in the arts, in film, in plays, in books, that they're forced censorship, they believe that things that are the work that horrible were, they use problematic and they like to problematize things. So it can't be the case that they just believe in a kind of global free for all. It can't be that because I think they come across more like Pharisees to me than anything else. But maybe what you're describing in terms of the temper tantrums and the things that we see from from these people is that that is just simply the natural consequence of when you have decades of academics and figures of authority saying that we ought to prioritize

our emotional responses and our own subjective view of the world over objective epistemological frameworks. Or actual practical responsibility. I mean, I saw at the University of Toronto, it was one of the things that constantly made me morally ill, was that my idiot compatriots thought that the best thing to do with young people was to teach them to protest, rather than to help them figure out how to make their way responsibly and productively enjoyable. They've created a generation that are in Fantile.

I mean, it is an infantilized world, and we see it in absolutely every strand of our culture and politics as well. And it's because, as you say, academics, by and large, are activists first and academic second. Hen and Pluckrose traces out to the, what she calls the applied turn of postmodernism, late 80s. You know, postmodernists for many years were, were quite enjoyed sort of theorizing and frolicking

about coming up with these airy, fairy ideas, not applying them to society, not seriously saying, we should reconstruct society and apply these methods. And then the applied, the applied postmodernist said, actually, we can actually change society, revolutionary society through the application of our untested theories and highly contested theories. And they did it.

And what's so tragic is not, I mean, is that it eventually worked. We're now in a situation where our government over here, the government's certainly in Canada and in the US, they are implementing these ideas, these highly contested theories in public policy, in Egypt, in the educational system. Yes, they're making the mandatory. Well, that was what propelled me into the public domain to begin with was the first move that's sort on the Trudel Liberal government front. But that's why it's speech.

But that's why surely it does merit the analogy with religion because you are imposing on society ideas that are not, that are based on belief, simply based on belief. You know, there is no evidence that reorganizing society in the way that the critical race theorists would like to do, so that we have a hyper-racialized society that focuses first and foremost on your group identity and secondarily on who you are as an individual. There's no evidence that this is making society less racist or that we seem to have agreed that the desire for demolition and destruction rules paramount even over the desire for untrammeled personal, say, self-expression. I think that is inevitable when you come from the supposition that society is inherently broken, that it is undergirded

by power structures that only support the already privileged. Okay, so let's dive into that because this is a good place to further interrogate the left issue. So, you know, a lot of the people that I talk with, Russell Brown and Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein, those are good, Eric Weinstein, those are good initial exemplars. Are more classical leftist types, and yet they're identified by the screaming radicals as gateways to the alt-right, so which is extraordinarily interesting, because it means as soon as you're no longer a useful idiot From the radical perspective you're instantly a Nazi which is very convenient for them

but Here's the here's the thing the postmodern critique that Society is to be understood is nothing but the manifestation of power is attractive partly because when social arrangements or even psychological arrangements pathologize, they do pathologize in the direction of power, right? So if you're, you can tyrannize yourself like an overlord, you can tyrannize your partner, you can tyrannize yourself like an overlord. You can tyrannize your partner. You can tyrannize your family and your community.

You can act like an tyrant on the local political stage and then nationally, right? You can do that in business as well. And that happens relatively often. So there's a core of sense in the claim that power is a powerful motivating force. Now, I think the radicals go too far when they say, everything is about power because, well, everything is a lot of things. And you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. But the problem, the problem the left therefore has, if the left is willing to be reasonable

and say, well, some social structures are corrupted by power, then the left has to figure out and can't, because I've asked like 50 senators and congressmen on the Democrat side to do this, if your left is stance is that power corrupts society, then how in the world can you tell when those who make that claim take that claim too far? And I've asked like the reason I brought up the Democrat, the senators and congressmen is because I asked every lefty I could get my hands on. And that's been quite a few over the last five years, when the left goes too far. And I even asked Robert Kennedy that recently and he said, well, I'm trying to run a campaign

based on unity. And so I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. It's like, well, the barbarians at your, all right, your gate, buddy, they've been canceling you for 18 years. So, so how do we separate out this? Well, there are so many things that you've raised there. I mean, firstly, you're right to identify that there is a kernel in truth of truth in the postmodernist claims.

The power is important. It is significant in human behavior and society and history. All of that, that is absolutely accurate. And you're also right that where they go wrong is to assume that everything is about power. Like you say, power is really important, but it's not everything. And I wonder whether reducing everything to just power structures makes things understandable easier in a way. Yeah, it means. Well, we found the best predictor. In our first study, the best predictor of left-wing authoritarianism was low verbal intelligence. Right. Because people want to be so.

Absolutely. You end up power is a good easy answer, right? It's kind of a territory. Any ideology is because it means that you're outsourcing your thinking to a set of rules. And that is what is happening. But that's why all those people that you've tried to ask this question, what happens when the left goes too far in terms of their own megalomania? They won't answer the question because the do so would be to acknowledge that there is a floor

in their ideology. There's a potential floor in their system that they're dealing ultimately with human beings. It's a set to go back to all well. It's the same reason why the Stalinists have never forgiven all well. All these people on the left have always hated him for pointing out that the left is just as susceptible to corruption as the right is, and they've never forgiven him for that. And it comes down to that idea of moral purity. I mean, one of the reasons I call them the new Puritans, again, it's an analogy. It's trying to make them accessible. It's because in their world, to deviate even slightly from this very simplistic formula that they've applied to society to make, to give them power ironically enough, to get to put them, to put them in a position where they can control

other people, but also can control their own understandings, comprehension of the world, because they've got this framework through which they can look at it. And to say, well, actually, your framework is flawed in all sorts of ways. That's harder because then you have to start thinking. And they don't want to start thinking. Thinking is the death of ideology. I think that's why you're getting that moral purity, but it's also why. I mean, you mentioned interestingly, people like Joe Rogan and Russell Brown being considered

a gateway to the alt-right, they're still traditionally politically more akin to the left, I would say, than the right. But because they've deviated slightly, you have this kind of puritanical sledgehammer coming down and saying, no, you're, you're, you're straying from what, what our ideology says you should believe. And that to me also feels like a fundamentalist religion. It feels like, you know, within a, and I'm making the distinction clearly between a religion and a fundamentalist religion, because I think even within Catholicism, the Vatican has always encouraged debate, theological debate and discussion. It's not as though they

just give you the catechism and say, that's it. There's all these kinds of discussions and debates and nuances being teased out in theological thoughts. Theologians for centuries have done that, but with fundamentalist religion, that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen with ISIS, for instance. You don't get the sort of leaders of ISIS sitting around cross-legged in their caves, saying, let's decide whether we're right about this fine theological point. That doesn't happen. So, what scares me, I think, about the critical social justice movement is that they are like a fundamentalist religion.

For some reason, I mean, this is why, and you know this, whenever you meet one of these people, whenever you encounter them online, get into some kind of discussion, you know what their opinions are and absolutely everything. Yes, yes, yes. And I turn into crank on someone's head. I've never been surprised by them. I'd like to be surprised once in a while. I've had a few occasions recently where I've gotten to conversa, you know, I fall for it.

You should just block them really because they're not people who can be reasoned with. But every now and then, I take the bait and I say, okay, what is it you think I've said? What is upset? What is the perspective that I have that you disagree with and why? And they can't do it. They just come back screaming, Nazi, whatever, and then you think, okay, well, I shouldn't have bothered trying. But they never surprised me. I just wish they would because if you're not thinking for yourself and challenging your own ideas, if you're not coming from the basis from humility, if you're not, if you're not thinking for yourself and challenging your own ideas, if you're not coming from the basis, from humility, if you're not coming to the world on the understanding that you're probably wrong about and awful lot of things, I don't think you're fully

human in a way. I think you're like an automaton, you know, you're just, you're just following us a code. You're, you're, you're, you're possessed by a principality. Right. I find it stubborn. Okay, so let me hassle you about something else. I tweeted out about Richard Dawkins here recently, and I talked to Richard Dawkins. And actually, I actually admire Richard Dawkins. I liked his book, his books. They taught me a lot in some of his essays too. And I think Dawkins is a real scientist in that he believes there is truth and that the pursuit of the truth will set you free, which by the way is a religious claim,

but he still believes that. In any case, I also think that Dawkins and Harris and the rest of the new atheists help pave the landscape for this new woke catastrophe because it's a humanistic movement fundamentally, and it's radically anti-science. And I think that Dawkins, while I know Dawkins sees that because I've been watching his tweets and I didn't talk to him. And it's certainly the case that the woke mob, I think, can take out science even more

easily than they can take out the vestiges of Judeo-Christian thought, and they're definitely going to do that. So now, Dawkins and his coderie looked out the history of the West, and they said, well, we should dispense with that medieval superstition, and we should progress down the Enlightenment trail. I've talked to Douglas Murray about this. Now, the problem with that, it seems to me. So Jung said something very interesting as well

that I'll bring up. He implied that Catholicism with all its strange mysticism and dream-like, propositional structure was as sane as people got, like that in order for people to function psychologically and to exist together socially, the belief system that united them had to have a dreamlike quality. Okay, so, and that, now the new atheists would say, well, no, no, no, we can replace all that mumble jumbo and darkness and occult mysticism with a clear-headed rationality. But what I see

happening instead, and this is on the religious front, is that in the aftermath of the death of God, what we've seen reemerges either a form of worship of power or a degeneration into a kind of polytheistic paganism, not a move forward to enlightenment type, Dawkins rationality, quite the contrary. And so one of the things I'm curious, I know Murray is uncomfortable about this. Douglas Murray is uncomfortable about this. If the woke movement is a religion, and if it's a dangerous religion, is the alternative to that no religion, or is the alternative to that whatever might constitute genuine religion?

And what do you think about that? Well, I think there is clearly something within humanity that we require a certain satisfaction from some kind of belief system, which is outside of ourself or a sense that there is something beyond ourselves. I suppose you might call it transcendence. I think there is a need for that. I think that I get that through the arts. I think that's why we create things, that's why we are creative beings, which is also why I think the woke movement is threatened by the arts and seeks to curtail it and actually to transform it into

just another propagandizing tool, because it fundamentally doesn't understand what art is. So it is interesting to me, though, to have noted that the new atheist movement, the one that you describe, they seem now to have evolved into the most woke of all. The human society. Right, right. Yeah, there's something about them

that they bought into gender identity ideology very quickly, probably before other bodies did. And the humanist society in the UK now is fully paid up in that, really quasi-religious belief system, the idea of a sex or gendered soul that doesn't match your biological form, how is that anything other than religious? How is it anything other than religious? Then actually, how is it anything other than supernatural? Really. You know, so I think. Of course. So what, but it has been interesting to me

that those were the very people, the people who were talking about rationality and to sort of claw back the primacy of enlightenment values, that they are the ones who've been most susceptible of all. Of course, this is what has got Dawkins in trouble. Right. Well, that's a stunningly devastating observation, right? Because if it turns out that those who wanted to walk down the mass

enlightenment pathway, produce children who were most susceptible to wokidiology, that's a pretty damning bit of evidence for the validity of that approach. As far as I mean, yeah, I'm trying to look at it. Well, because it's always concerned me that some of my most intelligent friend and acquaintances have fallen for the woke movement. In other words, you talk about the fact that they have a lot of the activists are very infantile in their behavior. And yet, some of the smartest people in society seem to buy into it.

It has the capacity to infect everyone, perhaps because it isn't responsive to intellectual rigor. It exists regardless of that. Right, but then that bakes the question of why it attracts the intelligent types that you're describing. Look, it originated in the bloody academy. It didn't originate, hypothetically, look, it originated in the bloody economy. It didn't originate, hypothetically, it originated not only in the academy, but in the core of the academy that was more occupied with the humanities. So it obviously appeals to the intellect, let's say.

Or is it just that we're all, we all have the capacity to become, to fall for hysteria. Is it possible that we're just at all, I mean, look, look, my book opens with a discussion of Salem, the witch hunts in Salem. And one of the key things about that, the more I read about it, and the more I was fascinated by the fact that it was these figures in authority, it was the ministers, the judges, it was the highly intelligent in the community, who were the ones who were was these figures in authority, it was the ministers, the judges. It was the highly intelligent in the community, who were the ones who were pushing this. I mean, the girls were screaming and crying witch and pointing and saying that the devil was everywhere

and they'd seen people sign the devil's book and all of that kind of thing. I see those girls as analogous with the screaming anime activists online who just shout nazi everywhere. They see nazis everywhere, the girls saw witches everywhere. I see that as very, very similar. But it would have gone away if the ministers and the judges said, no, this isn't rational. You're wrong. There's no evidence for your claims. We have to move on. But they didn't. They went along with it. That's why people ended up being executed.

It's when figures in authority capitulate to the screaming of the children. You've described the children. The activists has children. The activists themselves, I would posit screaming of the children. You've described the children, the activist has children. The activist themselves, I would posit, are not the problem. If they were all out there with their billboard, it's the enablers. It's the enablers, it's the politicians. Okay, the people in charge.

So one of the things you see as the biblical corpus unfolds itself symbolically, is an emerging relationship between the figure of Cain. And so that's that bitter figure who's out for revenge and the figure of the, what would you call it, untrammeled intellect. So for example, very rapidly after the Cain enable story, you have the story of the Tower of Babel.

And what you see there are emperors who are competing to replace God, right? They're building towers that are ever and ever higher, predicated on the proposition that they could build the tower all the way to heaven, so that's like Jacob's ladder. And thereby replace God. Then you have, you know, the Milton's God. Then you have, you know, the Milton's meditations on Lucifer. Lucifer is the highest angel of God's heavenly kingdom who's gone most wrong. And he's a stellar example of the untrammeled intellect. You know, and I kind of see this in the New Atheist movement too. It's like, we're so smart that our theories can replace the transcendent. Now, your way out of that, I think you just told me, your way out of that is your involvement on the aesthetic front with the

arts, right? Well, I think so. Well, there are two ways. There's also humility. I think I come back to that point. What you're describing is hubris and that's something which is particularly common among intelligent people, I think. Right, absolutely. Cardinal sin of the intellect is hubris. Exactly. But yes, the arts, I think, are, I suppose, are way, if they are sustained, because they satisfy that human need to understand ourselves and to explore ourselves and to interrogate our existence,

it's so important, therefore, that the arts aren't curtailed in the way that they currently are being done. Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. I agree with that. I mean, I see that the signal power of beauty, especially manifested in music, for me, speaks of something that's truly transcendent.

So here's a question for you. So is there a superordinate unity at which the arts aim and is that unity not equivalent to the monotheistic spirit? I know this is a major question, right? I'm thrown out of major question. It is a major question. Something makes the arts the arts, right?

It's their movement towards beauty, what beauty and unity transcendence, but are the arts unified? Are they the manifestation of a unitary spirit? And I see that unitary spirit is what I think is the antithesis of power. I couldn't profess to know, and I think a lot of people have attempted to find even what art is, and I think failed. I've always liked Zola's definition of art as life seen through a temperament. The idea that what the artist does is attempt to present to you his view of

the way that he sees the world on the understanding that we all see the world differently, and there is something quite beautiful about that, about expressing ourselves. Right, but it's not just variety. You know, it's not just variety, because there are qualitative distinctions between presentations of worldview. So, I mean, Dostoevsky Trump's 50 shades of gray, right? Because so there's a hierarchy of rank, right? And the greatest artist's occupy the highest rank. And that is what tilts the mortar words that transcendent unity. I think it's something like that. Well, yeah, that's absolutely right.

Genius, isn't it? Genius. That's how the canon is formed. The canon is, I think academics like to think that they're the ones who select what is in the canon. The canon is formed through influence, through, to what extent other great artists borrow and imitate and innovate in the back of the right. That's the same depth of presupposition that I was describing earlier.

But the more fundamental a text is, the more other texts depend on it. But the reason they do, the reason that artists do that is because obviously people like Michelangelo, Brahms, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, all of these are clearly the pinnacles of human achievement. They're achieving something that most of us simply cannot do. All we can do is look in awe at what they have achieved and other artists looking at that and try to come close to it or at least in some cases of extreme genius build upon it. And that is maybe satisfying something fundamental.

Well, there's a cardinal observation because the hypothesis that you just put forward is something like the purpose of art is to what would you say, to provoke the emulation of greatness. And that's based on the hypothesis that there is something transcendent that's great. You know, and that's that unity that I think that the arts are striving toward. Yeah, well, I don't know. I don't think it's conscious like that.

I don't think that we... I don't think so either. And all I can say is that artists, I think great art provokes something of the new menace in us. Right. And whether that's religious or spiritual or godly or whatever, I don't know. But it's some of the new menace in us. And whether that's religious or spiritual or godly or whatever, I don't know. But it's something.

I think it is sort of by definition, right? I mean, you know what I mean? It's like, yeah. Well, if that's not religious, then what is dogma? It's certainly religious on the experiential front. Yes, I suppose what I mean is it doesn't point to the existence of God necessarily. It just points to the existence of something beyond ourselves that we require in order to have a satisfactory life. That sounds a lot like God. Okay. Well, that will be. Well, I'm not trying to be picky. No, I know.

Well, that's the thing, man, because it is a matter of definition, you know, like I don't think God, this transcendent unity that I've been tapping towards here is something like the central animating spirit of mankind at its best. It's something like that. Now you might say, well, is that real? That's not a good question because you can't ask that question without bringing an a priori set of presuppositions about what constitutes real to bear on the question.

Like is it the same reality as the materialist atheists claim most real? Probably not. No. But that doesn't mean it's not real. It just means we can't agree on what constitutes real. Well, we can't agree on what constitutes a woman, so that's not surprising. Well, let's suggest then that, or let's agree that the critical social justice movement

is essentially godless. I think it is godless. It doesn't have, it has no yearning after that sense of the newmenace and it has no capacity to produce it. That's why no great art has ever been produced from, can you name a single work activist who has produced a great work of art in any medium or any genre?

Because I can't. I don't think I can. Okay, so that's an interesting observation. What is it? The gospel statement, by their fruits, you will know them. So if they bear nothing but bitter fruit, then you might think they're worshiping the wrong God or in your case, there are no God. But right, that was the criticism of the woke types.

I think they worship power as a God, but whatever, we're close enough on that, so we don't have to discuss it. So let's talk about artistic front here, because like I see the scientists being mowed down, like grass under a lawnmower by the woke activists. And that's going to continue, because the real scientists don't have a political boat in their body and they have no idea what's coming for them. But I'm particularly sickened by the bloody artists because the only thing they have to offer is this connection to the truly luminous.

That's true across art forms, right? They point to the luminous. And they're willing increasingly to subordinate that ideology order, remain silent in the face of this onslaught to bolster their moral self-righteousness. Yeah, that's really different from the rest. Cut in their own throats. It's horrible to watch. It's horrible to witness because genius, artistic genius can only come about by those who can think outside the box who are not conformists, ultimately.

This is a movement that demands conformity and artists of all people are the ones who are going along with it. Now, to be extent, I suppose that's always happened though. I mean, it must have always happened because people artists have to get on with the business of living. Back in my year, the Renaissance period,

the area that I studied from my doctorate, you had patrons. You had patrons of the arts in society who would effectively say, to William Shakespeare, for instance, when King James patronized William Shakespeare's company, the Kingsman, it went from being the Lord Chamberlain's men to the Kingsman and he said, they were patronized, but they could write, Shakespeare could write whatever he wanted. The great patrons of the ones who don't try to steer the artist in a certain way.

I mean, sure, you would get, for instance, at the start of Shakespeare's narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, you have this sort of sicker-fantic passage about the person to whom it is dedicated, Henry Ruth's the Earl, and that's because Shakespeare also needed to live at that point. He wasn't yet a rich man at that point. He became very, very rich, ultimately, but at that point, he wasn't. So artists do require an income. And in our day and age, for an artist to be employed, they have to satisfy a set of demands by the gatekeepers of various industries. That's theatre, the publishing industry, the comedy industry, television, executives, commissioners, all of those kind of things.

The problem is that at the moment, all of those people are entirely captured by the woke ideology. They are all its foot soldiers, or at least even in some cases, I suppose you could call them, it's clergy. And so they make these demands to artists. And I suppose, unless you are independently wealthy, what choice

have you? In other words, what this thing does is it's, you know, we can't all be a vanguard, living in complete poverty, doing whatever they want to. Well, that's a very, that's a very sympathetic account. And I have some sympathy for that account because I've seen people, many, many people who've been, who've faced the threat of cancellation. Yes. And are terrified by it, not least often because they have a family to support, let's say, but, but, so let, but let me push back on that a little bit. And you tell me if you think there's any flaws in this. Okay. So, look, as far as I can tell, your best bet in life is to play the most transcendent, iterable strategy.

And because you're gonna pay a price for what you do, no matter what you do, you're gonna pay, in fact, you're gonna pay the ultimate price, no matter what you do. So you're already screwed in the fundamental analysis. Now, and that means that your, the fact that you're gonna pay means So you're already screwed in the fundamental analysis. Now, and that means that you're, the fact that you're going to pay means that you're always confronted with a choice. And the choice is to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences or to fail to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences. Now, people will say, well, I don't want to speak

right now because look at the consequences. And I would say, well, I don't want to speak right now because look at the consequences. And I would say, well, that's always why people have lied throughout history is to avoid the consequences or to get something they don't deserve. And so I could say from the judgment perspective rather than the mercy perspective, especially to artists, it's like, I don't give a damn about your financial need. The only thing you have to offer the world is the purity of your vision. And if you sacrifice that, well, you're killing the goose that lays the gold nigs. And you might be protected in the short term, but they're going to come for

you in the future. But maybe a lot of these creative people are thinking to themselves, I will play the game as far as I need to so that I can establish myself and then I can make my own artistic choices. That's how it's done. Yeah, right. Doesn't work. That's what the faculty did. They said over and over as they rose up the ladder from graduate student to professor. Well, once I have 10-year, I'll be brave. It's like, that isn't how it works. You don't get my favorite because you're more... Yeah, okay, so you didn't do that.

So why didn't you do it? Look, I completely share your sense of dismay, and particularly from artists. You know, I think the world of academia is rather more careerist, I think. And so although I think it's just as unforgivable, it's more understandable. I think to be an artist, you have to be the kind of person whose soul-fuelty is to your muse. It has to be that. Otherwise, you're not really an artist in any have to be the kind of person whose soul feelty is to your muse. It has to be that. Otherwise, you're not really an artist in any serious sense at all. You have to be creating what it is you are personally impelled to create, whatever drives you. And you know,

there are some people who have done that in history. William Blake is a good, really willing Blake was poor throughout his life, died in poverty, and he could see all these mediocre people playing the game and becoming rich, but he couldn't do it. He was too much of an authentic artist. He wasn't able to do that. And I wish all artists could have that. But the other thing about that is actually very few people

are great artists. Most people are sort of headless of popular culture or kind of functional hacks that people can produce the entertainment that actually we do really need and require that I'm not trying to denigrate popular culture. I think it's really, really important, but it's not the same as great art, right?

So the pop music, I really enjoy pop music, but I don't pretend to myself that it's Brahms. We have those hierarchies. Higher hierarchies, by the way, which the woke would like to tear down and say, that's all about the implementation of power again and the implementation of privilege. They will say there's no difference between a- There's no such thing as quality. No, no, exactly, exactly, because it's all about subjective feeling. And they would say that there's no difference between an Elton John song and a Beethoven symphony.

They'll say there's no difference there. It's just about, you know, and to pretend that there is a problem in and of itself. And that's why I think there are two things. The way that artists could really be supported in this, partly comes from academia, partly comes from literary theorists and people who, by the way, I think

have completely lost the plot. But they need to retain the primacy of the canon of the Western canon. They need to say, actually, there are certain works of art that are greater than others. They need to be able to be bold enough to say that. Rather than stripping away chore, or Shakespeare, or Marlowe, or whatever from the canon, to make way for mediocre writers who happen to represent a marginalized group identity. Well, I see in that again, this re-emergence of the spirit of Cain

because Cain, imagine you're a mediocre artist, wannabe. And part of the reason for that maybe isn't so much that you're talentless, although that might have something to do with it, but that you're unwilling to say a true word or to paint a true brushstroke. You're too cowardly. So you're not going anywhere. Okay.

So you're getting irritated and resentful because your sacrifices aren't being appreciated by God. And so what do you do? Well, if you're Cain, you destroy your own ideal, right? Because that's what Cain, Gaines says to God, my punishment is more than I can bear. Now, that's a very ambiguous phrase, because you can't tell exactly what it refers to,

but as far as I can tell, what he means is, well, I've really spent my whole life miserable and jealous because I'm not able, and I want to be, more than anything else, and now I've gone and killed my own ideal. And so how can now I've gone and killed my own ideal. And so how can I live? I've killed my own ideal. Well, that's what these bloody woke artists want to be types are doing.

It's not just even the woke, this predates the woke. Harold Bloom used to, the great literary theorist used to write about the critical theorists, the identitarian theorist of the 90s as being the theorist of resentment. That's what he called them. I think that's exactly right. It started way back in the 60s with feminist writers trying to problematise writers such as DH Lawrence or Norman Mailor, whoever it might be, Ernest Hemingway, whatever, saying that these writers are sexist. I mean, when I was studying as an undergraduate for English literature, you basically got the highest marks if you problematized texts. If you went through a play and teased

out the homophobic elements or the racist elements, you'd get rewarded almost like you were kind of moral detective. And I think it all started there. It goes way back to that. So then I would say that's part of the prideful hubris of the intellect. So you have the second rate creative wannabes in English departments, let's say. And instead of worshiping the spirit of Shakespeare, which is what they should properly be doing and transmitting that to students, they elevate their critical capacity over and above the creative capacity of the artist, lay moral claim to the integrity of their arguments, and then propagandize to the students, and who pay $50,000 a year for the privilege. Which is why I go back to humility, because I think the only sensible or intelligent approach

to Shakespeare is humility. Similarly, you know, when we saw recently the publishing house, which publishing house was it that decided to rewrite PG Woodhouse's novels? PG Woodhouse is the greatest comic pro stylist in the English language. The idea that a group of 20-something activists in a publishing house think that they can write better than Woodhouse, think that they can improve his work by this sort of horrendous bold-erized version. Especially morally. Of course morally. It's all based on morals. So it's so infuriating. I mean, it makes me very, very angry because it's the arrogance of that that I find absolutely stunning. But similarly with reductions of Shakespeare, so there's, I just sort of review the other

day for a production of Julius Caesar by the Royal Shakespeare Company. By all accounts, it's just an identityary and mess. It's just, it's taking the play and just reshaping it to promote vogus ideas that are in fashion at the moment about group identity and the primacy of group identity and power structures, etc. And therefore, they're missing the entire play. And as an audience member, this is why I think it's better to read Shakespeare at this point because as an audience member, you are subject to whatever interpretation the director wants to impose on it. And if that director is really a preacher in disguise, then you're just going to get a sermon, not a play.

That seems to me what's happening over and over again. I saw today actually, there was an article about Macbeth, which is a trigger warning. It's a trigger warning on Macbeth at the University in Belfast, at Queen's University in Belfast, right? Now, those people are studying a module on Shakespeare, and it's actually even a secondary module. They already have a decent knowledge of the subject. This is like an advanced module where they are to really get into the weeds with this great writer. And to put a trigger warning on that is to say that the way that we need to perceive these great texts is through our particularly obsessive moralistic, identitarian lens, and that we

have to see them as morally dangerous texts. Potentially dangerous texts. Well, maybe they're exactly right on that front because if you are a woke propagandist, there is nothing more dangerous to you than the spirit of Shakespeare. Sure. And there is something dangerous actually, particularly about Macbeth. I think because I mean, I think Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays. And I think one of the reasons why I always found it disturbing even as a child, even though

I didn't really know why I found it disturbing as a child, because it's one of those that gets on school text, because it's such a short one. But actually, when you watch it, it isn't like your, like Shakespeare created so many sort of great embodiments of evil, people like Yago in Ethello or Edmund in King Lear or Aaron in Titus and Dronecats. These figures, but Beth is different because with Macbeth, you go along with Macbeth knowing that it could be you. I think it's the closest to what, when you write about Solje Nits and talking about the line of good and evil cutting through the heart

of every man, that to me is Macbeth, because Macbeth is like this incredible study or representation of what if we lived in a world where we didn't have free will? Macbeth knows everything he is doing is wrong and cannot stop it from happening. And that's, it's like when you're watching it, if you're watching a good production of Macbeth,

you are Macbeth, right? And you're falling into the vortex. You're, that's why I think. Well, that's actually like a definition of great literature. I think literature almost always portrays something like a romantic adventure and then something like the Battle of Good against Evil, depending on how that's laid out. It's a romantic battle of good against evil. Okay, but the great literary authors placed that battle in the soul of a single individual, right? So that each character contains the entire landscape of the

cosmic battle. Instead of there being some characters parsed out as good and other characters parsed out as villainous. And so then when you sit in the audience and you experience that, you're experiencing the divine drama in your own soul. Yeah, and that is just that, right? Let me throw you something out of you. So I went to Jerusalem with Jonathan Pazzo, and Pazzo is about the deepest religious thinker I ever encountered. And he was a postmodernist for a good while. And so his expert in that domain as well, which makes him a particularly vicious critic now of the postmodernist types.

Anyways, we walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. And what that is, so if you imagine a tragic story and then you embody that. And the ultimate tragic story is the worst possible thing happening to the best possible person, right? That's like, that's the pinnacle towards which all tragedy strives, you might say. And walking the via Dolorosa is an exercise

in literary experience. Because the point of that pilgrimage, so to speak, is to place yourself not only in the role of the recipient of all that brutality, but also in the role of the deliverer of the brutality, right? To imagine yourself as the mob, as yourself, as the best friend who betrays, as the like intellectually heubristic Pharisee and scribe as the hapless ruler of Rome, that's all you. And that's what literature does.

Like it walks you through that. And I think Macbeth and Macbeth and and and and plays of that magnitude are threatening to the to the woke types, most particularly because they do require that pilgrimage of moral inquiry and that does upset the ideological apple cards. So they hate art, they hate art, because it pushes past propaganda always. Exactly, that's why the passion of the Christ is the most powerful story and the most enduring story, not story, but account of the brutality that we, I mean, when you read about the experience of Jesus on the way to Calvary, can any of us be sure that we wouldn't be among the gering mobs throwing the stones? No, we can be sure we would be. We can be sure.

Certainly, we would be. The woke don't agree with that, do they? Because the woke like to judge the past, and they will say that if I had lived in the antebellum south, if I had lived in the civil war, I would have been the ones trying to free the slaves. I wouldn't have been a slave owner. I wouldn't have been one of those people who supported racial segregation, but of course they would. And in fact, they would have been the first ones. So, okay, so let's, all right. So I've been thinking about this mythological motif of the harrowing of hell. So what happens in this ultimate tragedy is that, well, first of all, the best possible person is put to death by the worst possible people in the worst possible way.

And you might think, well, that's as bad as it gets, right? Because sort of by definition, that's as bad as it gets. But you know, that isn't as bad as it gets. And that's pretty awful because, you know, you know that isn't as bad as it gets. And that's pretty awful because you know you just pointed to something is that if you're looking at history and you have any bloody sense you think I wouldn't have been a victim or a hero I would have been a perpetrator because most people were perpetrators. Although you know there are plenty of victims. I would have been a perpetrator. And so then when you realize that you likely would

have been a perpetrator and that you probably are you realize that you likely would have been a perpetrator and that you probably are at the moment unbeknownst to yourself, well then you're facing something I think that is in some ways worse than death. I think it's hell. I actually think that is that you have to understand that there is a part of you that would willingly dwell in hell before you can rescue yourself from it at all. You know, and I think that's what we're called to do in the aftermath of the 20th century and the horrors of Auschwitz to wake up and think, oh my God, there's something inside us that

is so malevolent that to gaze upon it for a second is to suffer for nightmares from nightmares for the rest of your life, but that that's also your moral obligation. And that seems to me what the harrowing of hell is, right? It's the descent through death into the realm of malevolence itself and to and to take that onto yourself. So, so when the work tried to police art, apply trigger warnings to art, censor it, remove scenes, et cetera. Are they in your view attempting to prevent that experience, that necessary human experience of confronting the worst possible version of yourself?

Is that what they're doing? That's what it looks like to me. I mean, I think they're protecting themselves from chaotic complexity, but that also denies them possibility. So that's terrible and hope. But more importantly, they're trying to shuffle off the responsibility of confronting

Satan in the desert. So there's something quite understandable about all of that, isn't there? Because it is understandable. I mean, people have done this with the arts forever. One of the most interesting things I think about King Lear, for instance, Shakespeare's King Lear, is that that was not the after 1680, roughly 1680. His version wasn't on the stage anymore. It was rewritten by a guy called Neum Tate. And that was the version of King Lear that was on the stage for 150 years. And in that version,

you have a happy ending. You don't have Lear come in, cradling his daughter who's been hanged because they couldn't cope with that. They couldn't cope. And it's not just, it's not just because I think King Lear of all his plays really represents his complete barren. I mean, it is barren. It's pre-Christian. It is godless.

It's this society where exactly what you describe, the best type of person has the worst possible experience. Inspired of what critics have said, Lear is meant to be much loved, a great ruler, who is subjected to this endless cruelty that ultimately ends in an unbearable moment. The unbearable moment is Cordelia coming in dead. His fall has been hanged. It is complete nihilism. This is a play that makes you think what if there was nothing else, what if there was

no God, what if being good didn't matter, what if the very worst things happened to the best, and they couldn't handle it. So the name tape version was what people went to see, and in the end, Cordelia gets married to Edgar, and it's a happy ending. And although that seems like a travesty to us, it actually makes sense to me as well. It makes sense why audience goers didn't want to confront that. Why would they?

Well, it's so, but, well, because I think, I don't think they would, but I think the horrible truth might be that the only way to paradise is through death and hell. Right. And that's like, I'm not saying that with any degree of satisfaction, but I don't see, you know, like, because'm not saying that with with any degree of satisfaction, but I don't see, you know, like, because look, one of the things I tried to do, I took

my studies of Auschwitz in particular, but also the Gulaig really seriously, you know, I was trying to figure out, well, I tried to put myself in the position of an Auschwitz camp guard who kind of enjoyed his job. Right, and the horrible thing is you can put yourself in that position. And the horrible thing about that is you discover all sorts of things about yourself by thereby doing so that you pretty much wish you never discovered. But the upside, and I suppose this is the redemptive upside, is that if you recognize within yourself the source of all malevolence and evil, if you can actually do that, if you'll look at that, then you can transcend it.

But there's no other way. There's no pretense. And I've been terrified of this for decades. It's what I taught my students at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. I said, you have to take upon yourself the sins of the perpetrator in order to rectify the catastrophe of the perpetrator in order to rectify the catastrophe of the Holocaust. You know, and weirdly and perversely, you know, the leftist radicals in some demented way are insisting upon that, right? They say, well, the problem is, is they put the onus on the souls of other people. They say, well, look, you powerful people, you white people,

you you privileged group people. You're the perpetrators. It's like, no, god damn it. You're the perpetrator. But it's really hard, though, for them to put themselves in that position and for them to confront that aspect of their own soul, if we want to call it that because it's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing. But also they can't do it because they don't recognize their own behavior for what it is. They don't see that they are the cruelest of the cruel. They don't see that they are themselves capable of all sorts of monstrosities, because I've seen the way they behave. It also might be Andrew that they don't see anything like something has to, okay, I always

believe that if you understood something, you could find your way forward. Like I would say that, and I think my father helped me with that in some deep way, right? He instilled that in me in some way, I don't really understand. And I was, I've always been convinced of that. And so, so one of the consequences of that is the idea that, well, if you can, if you can take it upon yourself to gaze into the abyss, let's say as deep as you possibly can, that what you will see eventually, if you look hard enough, is the light.

But you know, you have to believe that the light is a possibility, right? And maybe that's the fundamental axiom of an appropriate faith, is the light is a possibility. And if all you believe is that power rules, well, how can you look upon evil without despair? And what are the consequences for humanity? If you have a ruling ideology that doesn't enable any of us to have that experience anymore, because that seems to be a real

consequence. Well, we know what the consequences we saw in the 20th century. Right. Right. Many, many times. Well, I suppose then it's not too alarmist to say that that's where the worker leading us. So that is very different. So what it looks like to me, well, no comedy, no art, no literature, no science, no free speech, no redemption from guilt, no genuine individual identity, no up, no down, right? Just a desert of barren endeavor, right? Yes. With maybe some impulsive hedonism thrown in now and then to...

And yeah, they would deny everything you've just said. They would deny every claim that you're making there. They would say they're not trying to do any of that at all, that they want to preserve art. they want free speech to flourish. They just want to protect marginalized communities within that. That would be their argument. So the marginalized community argument is a very interesting one too. I've been trying to work that through, especially with Paixot, you know, and he helped me walk through the idea of the center and the fringe in the biblical corpus.

And so there's an idea. There's an idea, for example, in the ancient geography of the ancient Israelite times, the poor were allowed to glean on the edges of the fields. Right? So there was a border of of uncertainty around what would you say, around a demarcated territory. And that border of uncertainty was where the margin lies to be allowed to thrive. And so, there does have to be a center and there has to be a margin. But if you bring the margin to the center, you destroy the center and you destroy the margin. And that's partly why I don't buy the postmodern claim that it's compassion that's driving the centering of the marginalized because that's a serpent that eats its own tail.

And I think what we're seeing happen right now on the LGBT front is that the fringe of the fringe is devouring the fringe faster than the center even, right? Because you know that most of the kids who are surgically transitioned are would have been gay. It's 80%. Right, so that's pretty damn interesting. And so that might be the thing that breaks it apart.

I wonder if that's the thing that breaks it apart because there is now a schism within this LGBT QIAS plus whatever you want to call it, community, which doesn't exist anyway. And the schism is precisely what you describe, which is that gender identity ideology is not just a fanciful theory, a quasi-religious way of viewing the world, it's also actively anti-gay. Insofar as it does suggest, well firstly it denies homosexuality because homosexuality and gay rights have always been predicated on the recognition that a minority of people are attracted to members of their own sex. It eliminates that by saying there's no such thing as same sex attraction and that actually you should be attracted to gender or gender identity

This is why Stonewall which is the UK's foremost LGBT charity redefined the word homosexual on their website to say It's a same gender attracted. I wrote an article recently about this. Yeah, and I mentioned Nancy Kelly Non-women being attracted to other non-women right. Oh, no, non-men non-men being attracted to other non-women. Right. Non-men being attracted to other non-women. Exactly. That was the definition of lesbian now. It's non-women or attraction to non-men. It's unbelievable. And Nancy Kelly, who the CEO of Stonewall,

has said that women who want to exclude biological men from their dating pool are sexual racists or akin to sexual racism. Well, that's the logical. That's the logical. that's the logic. Right. I said this five years ago in a discussion I had at Queen's University. It's like, well, you don't think discrimination is right. No, we don't. Well, how about sexual discrimination?

Should you just lay down on the ground and spread your legs for every comma? So to speak? Yeah. Because you're certainly being discriminatory if you don't. Well, really, like fundamentally, that is the most egregious form of discrimination. They're right about that. Absolutely. A sexual orientation is a form of discrimination. Like she says, you're like a sexual racist if you don't want to sleep with someone with

a penis and you're a woman. No, you're just homosexual. Right. She's describing homosexuality there, but she's saying that homosexuality is itself bigoted. And that's coming from the head of the gay rights, the foremost gay rights charity in this country. That's insane. The inversions are incredible. You know, when I was at school, the kids, the kids who were effeminate, the boys who were effeminate, who didn't want to play football and all the rest of it, the bullies called them girls. They said, you're just girls, you're not even a proper boy, you're not a real boy.

That's what Mermaids and Stonewall says now. They say, that's what the Tava stock was doing. They're saying you're basically probably trapped in the wrong body. Let's fix you. Like you say, between 80 and 90% of adolescents referred to the Tava stock clinic are same sex attractors. That's what they do in Taran. That's the head of gender transformation, sex transformation surgery in the world. The mother's in Taran and the heads of Stonewall are peas in a pod. They're totally, they feel the same way about homosexuality. Iran and Pakistan for a while, although not anymore, were funding same sex change operations because they hang gay people from cranes.

That's why they get the death penalty for being gay. So of course, they want to heterosexualize and fix gay people. But I would never have seen this coming. None of us did. I've spoken to all these gay activists who come out of retirement basically. And they're like, we never saw it coming where, it's more dangerous now to be a gay kid

than it was when I was growing up. Far more dangerous. When I was growing up. Oh, yes. Yeah. So you guys were actually doing pretty good under the, what would you say? We've been doing all right. Some of the Judeo-Christian fascists.

I mean, we had the tender mercies of the tea activist types. You know, we had the government putting, implementing a thing called section 28 where they, they said that teachers couldn't mention homosexuality in schools unless they linked it to AIDS. That's not great. That's a terrible situation to be in. So there was that. So we had anti gay ideas from members of staff fine. If you were out as a gay kid, which no one was,

by the way, you would be beaten up. You would be bullied. You would be abused, right? But what you wouldn't have is that figures in authority wanting to chop your dick off. You would, right, right. You would, right. And that's,'t have is that figures in authority wanting to chop your dick off. Right? Right. Right. Right. And that's, that's, so it's much more dangerous now. Like, you wouldn't have politicians and the media and the commentary and gay charity saying, maybe we need to fix you. Maybe we need to sterilize you. Let me ask you, let

me ask you a question about that. And this is one that's really, well, I don't know what to make of it. I, just like the stereotypical guy who says he's not bigoted, I have a lot of gay friends and they're people I really admire. So Bjorn Lomburg, Douglas Murray, you, Andy Nol, that's four. Those are pretty stellar examples, by the way. I have a sneaking suspicion, by the way, that the genetic configuration that leads to male homosexuality is integrally tied up with creativity itself, and that's why it sustains itself in the gene pool.

That is fascinating. If true, put it aside, but because I've always wondered why you have this disproportionate relation to homosexuality in art. Well, that's the best sexuality in art. Another possibility, too, which is that if you happen to get the balance between masculine and feminine qualities exactly right as a man, you are hyper attractive to women. Right. So that's another possibility, right? So you could think of homosexuality as an overshoot of that target. Now, I'm speculating, although I think the creativity hypothesis is a better one. Imagine that homosexuality is polygenetic, but it's associated with a much higher probability of creativity.

Well, then obviously it's going to be conserved, even though it has, you know, lack of reproductive ability. It has to be associated with something stellar, because obviously it would just disappear. So, and gay men are radically overrepresented in creative disciplines, like radically. If you can get to where the heart of why that is, I'd be absolutely fascinated by that.

But that was a side point, wasn't it? That was a side point from what you have to say about. Yeah, well, yeah, well, here is what I wanted to ask you about. And I don't know what to do about this. It's like, I think that part of the problem that we're trying to figure out is back 20 years ago, we did what we could to bring, especially male homosexuality into the center, right? By legalizing gay marriage and by attempting to normalize it in some ways. Now, I think that left a lot of questions unanswered. So, here's one question. It's like, well, okay, now if it's normalized to all of a sudden, same sex relationships, same

sex sexual relationships, where do you draw the line in what the hell do you teach children? And one answer would be, you don't talk about sex at all, and another answer would be, well, you talk about gay sex, 50% of the time. I don't know what the answer is, but it really is a problem. And I think we're dashing ourselves to pieces in some ways trying to solve that problem. And I don't know what the hell the solution in the US is take your kids out of the school system. That's what the solution seems to be. So, but I don't know what you think about all that. It's so difficult because I think education is at the moment of getting it very, very wrong in terms of what they're teaching children about sex and gender and sexuality

and all the rest of it. And I think gay people are bearing the brunt of a lot of the blame here. So I think what's happening is, when you have drag queens twerking in front of children or stripping in front of children, it doesn't look good. Doesn't look good.

And because they have bracketed us all as LGBTQIA plus, it's one big thing. Then, and there's evidence, isn't there, because they have bracketed us all as LGBTQIA plus. This is one big thing. Then, and there's evidence, isn't there, that homophobia, or at least, I don't really like the word, but anti-gay sentiment, is on the rise, because I think this is gay people doing all of this stuff. It's not, it's gender ideologues.

It's gender ideologues who have taken over the LGBT community, whatever that might be. And as I've said, gender ideology is actively hostile to homosexuality. So gay people aren't the agents of these societal changes. They're the victims of it. Because now I'm getting it from both sides. So I published that article in the mail on about the pride flag. And I was getting gender ideologues piling in on me, calling me evil and telling me I should kill myself. And you know, the lovely things that the compassionate people often say. And then I was also getting right wing people, mostly from

America, calling me a sodomite and saying that I was evil and that I was going to burn in hell for my sexual orientation. So now we've got it for both sides. So great. Thanks for that. I mean, that's what the work of done. You know, it's not, and that's why, yeah, and that isn't over yet, you know, that isn't over yet. That's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And God only knows how it's going to shake out. I mean, this year's pride celebration was a whole new, uh, set of, yes, yes. They really are. Oh, I'm not bloody wonder. A month, really. Yeah, but also because it's partly because it's become so corporate.

You know, it's a site. Yeah, corporations put their flags up every, they don't put it up in the Middle East or in Saudi Arabia or places like that where it might actually make a difference by the way, flying that flag where gay people are killed for being gay. No, they don't do that, but they put it up here. They never did this by the way before gay marriage before the age of consent was equalized. They didn't do any of that. They did, they're doing it now because corporations are so in, in lockstep with the woke ideology, which is another reason, by the way, if you want to go back to this left right distinction, why I think this is so unhelpful because it's a move that is important. Right, I agree, I agree. Yeah, and I don't think there's any worse woke than woke capitalism. No, that's the bastard child of greed and ideology, man.

I mean, that's sort of monster. Well, that is right. Winged work, it can't be anything, but because capitalism is a set, you know, these are essentially money-making bodies. These are not, these are not socialists organizations. It's, it's, so there is a confusion there. And also, by the way, whenever the woke always sighed against the workers, you know, whenever I know that's so in and the poor. And so, like, so, so, so, so, that's so interesting too, because I've watched the radicals, especially in Europe over the last five years, because I was curious, it's like, well, when push comes to shove, let's say, on the climate front, are they going to sacrifice the poor on the altar of woke? And the answer is, in a bloody heartbeat, in a second, no more.

That's what the hero does. No, seriously, precisely that sits the poor, the better, brunt. That's why I don't think it. And whereas I'm probably wrong to say the work, workness is closer to the right or whatever that is. It's definitely not a left-wing movement in any traditional understanding of what left-wing means. It can't be. Now, I think we have to stop thinking about it politically altogether. Exactly. I think, fundamentally, the religious analysis is the right one, but that's a weird one, Andrew. That's going to take us some strange places because if this is actually, first of all, we're actually

making the claim that this is a spiritual battle, a? A religious battle. And that's a hell of a claim to make, you know, especially for somebody who's more tilted towards atheism. And I don't even know what the hell it means to make that claim, but I don't think it is a political struggle fundamentally. That's right. And to bring that into the LGBTQ stuff, the way that sex education appears to be run at the moment, I don't know how it is necessarily where you are, but in Wales, definitely in Scotland, definitely,

and in England, we are having similar problems. You have gender ideologues writing the curriculum effectively. So children are being told. Even nurses. Canada, after all. Oh, yeah, of course. I think of this country. I mean, we've got narcissistic, we've got,

what will we see? We've got the cardinal narcissist running our country. I mean, we've got narcissistic, we've got what will we see? We've got the cardinal narcissist running our country. He's everything woke you could possibly imagine. And he's got that psychopathic charm that lends itself to fooling gullible women. It's a perfect bloody storm. I don't see any difference between, you know, effectively encouraging teachers to promote gender identity ideology to young children as having a some kind of hook-handed Islamic cleric come in and say gay people should be burned to death. I don't really see the difference there and so far as you're promoting a really reactionary belief system

onto children when it comes to the realm of sex and sexuality. And I think that's really, really dangerous. So unless we grapple with this point or unless we as a general population grapple with the fact that sex education now is really a religious preaching, that's all it is. That, you know, you were talking about where do you stop? How much do you teach them about what? Actually, kids generally learn and figure things out for themselves, don't they? So I've always been of the view that sex education doesn't need to be as, I think people need to know the basics, but I think there's far too much of it going on. But we've reached the point where, I mean, you must have heard this audio recording

that was leaked this week from a school in England, a place called Rye College. The teacher was recorded berating two 13-year-old girls because they would not accept that one of their peers identified as a cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look. It looks silly. Well, it's pretty rude, you know. It is. It cannot let the poor girl wear a tail in all of that.

Well, you know, this is the thing. There was a report in the telegraph this week as well saying that there's a school where one child identifies as a horse, there's one who identifies as a dinosaur, there's one who quite creatively identifies as a moon and wears a cape. Now I think what's happening there is those kids are being satirical, what they're seeing. God, I hope so. No, I think they are. Go. You know, the kids that are saying, I'm a cat and I need to lie down

and I need to be stroked and I need to meow. Look, they have seen that the figures of authority, the teachers are totally capitulating to this bizarre belief system, this esoteric cult. And and, and this. I would have done that in a hard beat when I was a kid. As a kid, I would have, I would have,

hundreds of, I would have said, I'm a velociraptor and you have to, you know, and you do what I say or I'll eat you or whatever, I don't get what it is, but, but they, these kids are pushing, they always test the limits anyway. But what's brilliant about this is the teachers can't do anything about it. If I, if I, if a young child decides he's a moon and wears a cape and a teacher says, no, you're not, she's denying the sacred creed of gender identity ideology, which is in the national curriculum now. So, she'll get fired. So, this puts the kids in an incredible position of power. They're having fun with it. And this is also why I'm slightly heartened by this, because I kind

of think the kids are going to be our way out of this. I think I hope that this mad religious further will burn out because the kids see it for what it is. You know, the fact that that woman in that recording was saying that these girls were, I think she said they were despicable. I think that was the word she was despicable for not validating or accepting their friends identity as a cat. I mean, that's such an extreme position for a teacher to take. I also don't, by the way, don't think it's fair to dogpal her and bombard. And I saw some, some I'm doxing her putting her face. And look, she's just following, she's probably not a very intelligent person.

She's probably not very thinking, but she's just following what she's told to say. She's been told by all of the teacher training colleges, all of the academics in education that this is the case and you've got to go with it. And she's just doing her job. So I think that's unfair as well. I would like teachers to be more intelligent and creative and to challenge this stuff. But you know, that's not happening. So yeah, maybe it might be. So I guess we're learning why the eternal serpent always devours its own tail, right? Right. It's so interesting that it's so.

And hoping that it's so. These things push too far, start to eat themselves, you know, it's, it's, we're leaving the strangest times, man. That might be it. That might be the hope, though, right? That's so, yeah. It's an optimistic point to make, but ultimately, because I think this ideology is not sustainable, because it is. Well, we did, we did walk ourselves back from the brink of tyranny on the COVID lockdown front, right? I mean, we were, we went full totalitarian for two years, but then everybody seemed to decide maybe that wasn't such a good idea. But that's so maybe the way that we're now talk

about it. Everyone sort of, no one mentions it now, do they? It was, you know, you walk around, very few people wearing masks. People have just sort of, there kind of weird turning point where everyone just decided, actually it's a virus with a very low mortality rate, let's just not worry about it. And that just sort of happened. People have forgotten the mania, the extreme mania, people screaming at each other on the streets if they weren't wearing masks and the extreme policies, the Canadian government's reaction to the truckers who were worried about their livelihood due to lock-in. You mean stealing their bank accounts?

Stealing their bank accounts and threatening to what give them money to other to charities or something. Didn't they even, I mean, you'll know. Yeah, yeah. Go says, so $10 million was raised on GoFundMe. That's it. Yeah. And then GoFundMe decided they weren't going to distribute it to the truckers. Then they decided instead of refunding it, they were going to distribute it to a charity

of their choice. Then Ron DeSantis said, I think you better not do that or else. And then they decided they would refund it. And now the money that hasn't been refunded is in escrow, and there's a huge fight in Canada about who owns it. We haven't settled the trucker mess here at all. But the trucker can't avoid it had something to do with everybody taking those goddamn masks off.

I'm sure. I wonder how those politicians who were involved in this will feel about this in 20 years' time. I know one of your politicians claimed that the truckers were beeping their horns because they were dog whistling to fascists because the honk honk is HH and that means Hyle Hitler. I mean, that was something that was serious. Well, that's common knowledge here in Andrew. Everybody who honk is actually secretly admiring Hitler, especially if they do it twice. That is so insane. And so I wonder whether,

if I'd say, what trial level of insane? Exactly. And Salem is a good example, right? Because, you know, there's a reason I've used it in the book is that I think it gives us our clues to our way out. Because Salem happens so quickly,

it happened within just over a year, right? Late 17th century, this hysteria emerged from nowhere and fizzled out immediately. And everyone afterwards repented. All of the people who were most involved in it said, we got that wrong. What happened there? We went mad for a while there. Because they weren't, they weren't, well, this is the first, this is maybe the first widespread mental illness afflicting our new electronic nervous system. That's it. I think this is maybe the first widespread mental illness afflicting our new electronic nervous system. That's it.

I think this is a hysteria on a global scale, akin to what happened in Salem. I think it's perpetuated itself by a similar means, which is firstly just the mechanism of hysteria, which I'm not qualified to talk about, but also the fact that people in authority go along with it because they're terrified not to, you know, because in Salem, anyone said, hang on, I don't think this is right, they were the next to be executed. So you don't have politicians saying, hang on a minute, is it possible for for

human beings to change sex? Do I know what a woman is? They all know the answer just as the magistrates in Salem knew that the girls weren't seeing the devil. But it all fizzled out very, very quickly. One of the points I'm making the book is about that all of the prosecutions were secured on this thing called spectral evidence. In other words, the girls experience what we call lived experience. The girls believe that they were seeing devils and therefore that was taken as evidence. And that, that's why the case is collapsed because at the end, the deputy governor of Massachusetts wrote to the leading clergyman in the country and said, can we use, can spectral evidence be admissible in court? And they all said, no, of course not. The whole thing disappeared overnight. Everyone denied they had any partner.

These weren't witch hunters. They didn't go around hunting witches. That happened a lot in Europe. It didn't happen in New England. And so they were going to be the least stupid pathway forward for us now. And maybe God willing, that's the one we'll take. We should stop, I guess.

I don't want to because you're very entertaining to talk to. For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Andrew for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform side a little bit more personally. I want to see a bit more about what makes them tick. And so if you're interested in that, head over to the daily wire plus platform. You could throw those characters, those reprehensible right wing bastards of penny or two if you're inclined to because they are heading the fight to support free speech in the US, you know, the YouTube has been after us because I'm allied with the daily wire types. Been after us pretty badly in the last month. They took down three of my talks, including one with

Helen Joyce because you know how reprehensible good old Helen, the economist journalist is. And they also took down a talk I had with Robert F. Kennedy, despite the fact that he's running for president. And so that's YouTube and they're definitely going after all the daily wire folks. So thank you all for your time and attention and to Andrew for talking to me and helping me delve into these things, get a little bit more clearly along with everyone else. And for everyone watching and listening, we'll see you soon and to the daily wire folks, thanks for your support. Andrew, off to the Daily Wire.

Thank you very much. you