TRIGGERnometry - Andrew Doyle: "Vote Left or Right, You Still Get Woke Politics"

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Sponsored by: Manscaped. Receive 20% off Manscaped products when you use the code Trigger20. Check out their products at https://www.manscaped.com Counterweight is hosting the Counterweight Conference on Liberal Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion. Use code TRIGGERPOD20 at checkout for 20% off all-access pass. Andrew Doyle is a comedian and writer. He is the inventor of the satirical character Titania McGrath and presents 'Free Speech Nation' on GBNews. He has written several books, the latest of which, 'The New Puritans', is available to buy now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Puritans-Identity-Politics-Dominant/dp/0349135320/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be not racist is a discursive form of racist violence. So you've got these anti-racist activists urging people to be racist in order to not be racist. It makes no sense. If you redefine words and then deny that you are redefining the words, you effectively end up gaslighting the world. What is a woman? It's not a gotcha question. We all know the difference, but we're expected to proclaim that we don't,

that there is no difference. If you can't sit there and tell me what a woman is, then I don't trust you on anything else. But if you say what everyone knows, you open yourself up to accusation and you can be the next to be condemned. We can't vote these people out. You can vote in a Labour government or Tory government

you're still going to get the woke. If the machinery of government is grinding in that direction, there is nothing you can do. When a school board, a county school board, not only removes the books from the shelves, but burns them and calls it a flame purification ceremony, and they can't see

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That's Trigonometry. Dot Locals.com. We'll see you there. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Today we are delighted to say returning for the 73rd time. It's our brilliant friend Andrew Doyle, who's of course comedian, satirist, TV presenter and the author of his latest book, which is called The New Puritans,

How the Religion of Social Justice, captured the Western world. Andrew, welcome back. Thank you for having me back. It's great to have you on. How are you? I'm all right. I have been on a lot.

You have been? Haven't I? 73rd is an exaggeration. An exaggeration. It's actually 79. Yeah. Because I was on the second ever one you did, I think. You were.

And you know what? You confessed to us that you were very skeptical about, and you nearly didn't come on the show. In fact, you dedicated in this book, You talked about how that brief moment of trust that you showed has resulted in our friendship. Well, exactly. I'd never met either of you. And I was very paranoid. That was my height of my paranoia. And I almost didn't come. Because I thought it was like a setup. I thought you were going to do all these gotcha questions and try and make me look like a fool. I probably did look like a fool, but that wasn't because of the way you paid.

It was a great interview. Was it all right? Yeah. I haven't watched it back so I don't know. No, no, it was great. I remember it got something like 13,000 views or something like maybe. Given that we had 13 subscribers at the time. They each watched it a thousand. Yeah. It was great. And I will confess from our end as well that we actually didn't know that much about you.

No. And we just knew that you were writing for Jonathan Pye. Yes. And we were keen to speak to him and to you. Oh, you were using me to get to him. Exactly. Yeah, fair enough. That's what we were doing.

But actually, it's funny how that's worked out because he's obviously gone in his own direction. but I think you've contributed so much to many of the conversations that we've had and frankly to just the cultural landscape in the UK. And this is one of the things that really strikes me about, you know, the personal stuff that you talk about in the book because you open with a very old good friend of yours, a fellow colleague, we won't go into the details,

you know, going after you very hard. Yes. It was a weird one. So, I mean, this is how I've opened the book. because I think so many people have lost friends through this culture war. So many people I've spoken to of sometimes family members all over the slightest point of political disagreement. And this was an event that took place in a bar in Soho. And I was out with this married couple who I've known for many years.

And we were having a great time. We're having drinks. We were a bit tipsy. But about an hour in, he started shouting at me, screaming at me, calling me a Nazi. And I thought it was a joke. And then I probed a bit and I realized, oh, no, it's not. And he's been thinking about this for a while. And then I tried to work out what it was,

and it turned out it was because he didn't like that I'd written for Spiked magazine. He, he, uh, I'd satir, one of the Jonathan Pye videos had satirized a point of view that he held. And that was basically it. And I couldn't, and I was like, but that's not fascism. Disagreeing with you slightly on political issues is not the same as calling for an ethno state. You know, it's just not the same. So, um, it was weird.

So really the book is about me trying to make sense. What kind of world? are we in now where someone who knows me, knows what I believe, knows that I'm a vocal opponent of racism, knows that I have no, that fascism is everything I stand against, knows that, nonetheless can convince himself, and this is an intelligent person, that I'm a, that I'm a Nazi. What kind of world can we be in where that can happen? So my book's an attempt to explain how we reach that point. How do we reach the point where it's casually said in the mainstream media that JK Rowling is transphobic or has said transphobic things when she actually has never

said transphobic things. How are we in this position where people are just buying into fantasies even though the evidence is there should you want to spend a minute to Google it? What's going on? So that's why I'm a really good point, Andrew. I've never, I think those of us who've been sometimes on the receiving end of some of the stuff, we haven't actually processed in some ways what the significance of what you're talking about. Like whether it's David Lammy going on the BBC and saying that Brexiters, the ERG are worse than Nazis or your friend calling you that. Like I don't think we've quite understood like what what a deranging world view it takes

for someone to think like that. We've started to accept it, haven't we? Yeah. I mean, like even with G.B. News, if you think about when G.B. News was announced, four months before it was aired, you had thousands of activists and mainstream commentators saying this is a far right echo chamber. No one had seen it. No one knew what it, not even the people who were in it, knew what it was at that point.

And then when it was on the screens and it clearly wasn't that, and there were clearly a balance of left and right wing views. And you know, GB News always makes an effort to bring people in with different voices. Even when it's clearly not what they said it was, they still say it is what the fantasy they decided on. So I think all of this, and there's so many examples of this kind, you know, I'm sure you must have the same. Ninety-nine percent of the people who attack you online, right? They will be people who've just decided what you are and created this monster of their imagination in order to attack.

I rarely have an angry critic come at me and faithfully replicate what I think. They'll say, oh, well, you believe this, you believe this. They often say I'm a privately, privately educated Tory-loving homophobic, homophobic. I get that a lot. And it's like, well, I went to a comp. I've never voted Tory and, you know, if I'm a homophone, my boyfriend better be told about that. You know, it's like, it's, they're just so wrong. And even when you point out that they're wrong and you say, no, this is what I actually believe. I mean, look, when I announced this book, the new Puritans, I had loads of tweets saying we're going to burn this book. This is the sort of book I would throw in the bin. Why are you against social justice? I'm like, well, read the

book. And you will understand that I'm not against social justice. I'm against people co-opting the phrase. But yeah, but it's become so, it is. maddening, that's the word that you're right to use that word, because, you know, this is a movement. I think, I think everyone's baffled, everyone's baffled, because, you know, most people are decent people and they want everyone to have an equal shot of things in life. And this movement comes along that uses all these really progressive sounding phrases like social justice, anti-racism, equity. And so good people are like, oh, okay, well, we should get on board with that, obviously. But they can sense and see that what the movement's actually doing is,

against all of those things. It's creating more racism. It's dividing us. It's, it's, it's not advancing the cause of social justice. It's legitimizing bullying. It's, it's got a vicious, inhuman, cruel quality about it. And we can see all of this stuff. And people can see, but they're confused because it's sold to them in this progressive language. So one thing I really realized in writing the book is that this is a battle, the culture war is a battle about language and about who gets to define words. So in order to, in the book, I have to first explain what the movement is, what it, what its objectives are, what it achieves, and all of that is counter to how it describes itself.

So it's really messy and complicated. That's why it needed a full book, because you can't just explain that straight away. You can't explain, you know, if you take the phrase anti-racism, we're all against racism. So why would you object to the principle of anti-racism? Until you read a book such as How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibrahim X. Kennedy, and you realize that what he means by anti-racism is not what we mean by anti-racism. What he means is being proactive in the discovery of racism on the assumption that all human interaction is underpinned by racism and that all white people are complicit in white

supremacy, whether they want like it or not. That's the Robin DiAngelo take on it. That, you know, these are the, and so therefore, in fact, Alana, he put, sorry, Ibrahim X. Kendi in his book says that the dichotomy of not racist and racist isn't real and that being not racist is just another form of racism. Similarly, Alana Lenton, who's another critical race hustler, said that to be not racist is a discursive form of racist violence. So to be not racist is violent. So you've got these anti-racist activists urging people to be racist in order to not be racist. It makes no sense. So you have to talk it through and explain why, if you're genuinely against racism, you have to be opposed to anti-racism. So how do people make sense of that? And this is

deliberate, isn't it? If you redefine words and then deny that you are redefining the words, you effectively end up gaslighting the world. And that word, gaslight, is their word, isn't it? Yeah, they love it. Well, it comes from that 1940 film where, you know, the husband is constantly lowering the lights and the wife is saying, why is it getting dimmer in here? And he's saying, no, that's just your head. It's all in your mind. And that's what they do to us all the time. So they'll say, this is a largely peaceful protest. There's burning buildings behind the guy, but they'll just say, oh, it's largely peaceful. Because they think, by describing something as largely peaceful, it becomes largely peaceful. Everything's about the language. And they can deny the

observable reality in front of your eyes and they'll do it and it will drive you insane. And they'll blindside you with jargon and they'll say you're too stupid to understand critical race theory, even though the fundamental precepts are not that difficult to grasp. And they'll throw jargon at you and they'll put you off. And actually, what I've tried to do in the book because I think actually this stuff is understandable. And the only way we can defeat it is if we get it, if we have a secure, grasp of what it is they're doing and how to push back against it. So that's the point. Sounds like the words of a Nazi. But... There we go.

But the point you make about words is very profound, like when you were talking about how they've changed a meaning of words. And the most obvious instance of this is a word woman. Yeah. Where suddenly, we all knew what a woman was five, six years ago, but now the word woman is up for grabs. That's just insane. Yeah. And you can see when a politician is asked, What is a woman? You know, have you seen that's like a gotcha question. Why are you using these gotcha questions? What is a woman is not a gotcha question. It's actually a means to test the honesty of the ruling class.

If you can't sit there and tell me what a woman is, then I don't trust you on anything else because I know you know what a woman is. I mean, this is the point. You see the fear in their eyes. They're terrified. Like they stammer. They reach. They obfuscate. They do anything but answer the question. Look, I'm not. I don't think we can conduct this debate with, you know... Sorry, I've offended you in something. No, no, no, no, I just... No, no, no, I just...

And the reason they're so afraid is not just because they're engaged in a lie, but because they know everyone knows it's a lie. You know, this idea that none of us know the difference between men and women, we all know the difference, but we're expected to proclaim that we don't, that there is no difference. And that's why, I think that's a very good example of, of the notion of a kind of, it's not just mass hysteria,

it's people going along with a hysteria for the sake of self-preservation, which is why in the book I've drawn a lot of parallels with the Salem witch hunts, because I think there's a really good way to understand what's going on at the moment, if you look back at that unique moment in history, which only lasted about a year in the late 17th century in Salem, and you had a small community, by the way, I mean, the Puritans of New England were not witch hunters, This is not something they did. In medieval Europe, thousands of women were burnt as witches.

This didn't happen. The Puritans weren't like this. This was a lapse. It was an aberration. And what's so interesting to me about that is you have this community of decent, good people who would suddenly believe there are witches everywhere because this small group of girls claimed that they could see them. And so, and it only lasted that short period of time.

But what happened, the key parallel here, is not just about the human susceptibility for group think or the way in which we go along with narratives if we're told to. It's not just that. It's that the elites were propagating it. So it would never have happened if when these girls started screaming that there are witches everywhere, the judges and the magistrates and the ministers have said, no, that's not true. It would have ended overnight.

But they didn't. They became complicit. They said it is true. It's like our politicians. They could all say, we all know what a woman is. Can we stop this now? They don't. They go along with it.

You know, and they say, oh, actually, yeah, there is a thing. So they go along with the activists and they perpetuate the hysteria. And that's where I think the main parallel between the two things exists. And the other thing about what I found fascinating about the Salem instance is the more I read about it, the more I realized, a lot of the elites didn't believe it. They just didn't believe it. There's a really interesting moment where one girl in court, because you know they were pointing the women on the stand saying they were sending their shape out to pinch them and torment them. they would say, oh, their spirit has just flown up to the beam. I can see it. No one else could see it, but it was the girl's lived experience. It was all the, all of the prosecutions were secured by what

they called spectral evidence. We call it lived experience. What it means is my truth. I don't need evidence. It's just my truth. I feel it. Therefore, it's true. So it's the same thing. Like just as today, the accusation of Nazi, fascist, racist, homophobe is taken as proof because that is the lived experience of the accuser back in Salem. The spectral evidence was, was, was, taken as proof and they would say and as I was saying though this one girl is a really interesting moment she pulls out a small bit of knife something that's been broken off a blade and she's cut to someone she says the witch has just dug this into me and a man at the court a local farmer said that's broke off my knife the other day and you saw that happen and you picked it up and so they knew

she'd been lying but instead of acknowledging this the magistrates say oh well let's quickly move on to the next thing. There's loads, if you read the court records, there's loads of examples of, you know, they will accuse William Phipps, the governor of the colony. They accused his wife, and the magistrates just said, let's move on. That's not real. Let's move on. They accused the acting president of Harvard College, a guy called Willard, Samuel Willard. They accused him, and the magistrate said, you must be mistaken. You must be talking about Constable Willard, who's already in jail. You've already accused him. You're getting confused. Well, does the devil get confused or do the elites know, actually, this isn't real. But if we speak out, they'll accuse us.

And that's where we're at today. We all know the difference between male and female. We all know that this anti-racist movement is making society more racially divided. But if you say what everyone knows, you open yourself up to accusation and you can be the next to be condemned. And it's a different form of condemnation. No one's going to get hanged as the stakes were pretty high in Salem. But you can, you can have your life destroyed, your reputation destroyed, your career destroyed, if you say what we all know to be true. So there are, there are parallels. And the other reason I wanted to talk about that account is that it's a really good way to get out of this. There's a lesson in Salem of how to get out of this. Firstly, it stopped because there was a tipping point. When too many

people started saying, no, the girls are lying, there are no witches. It just stopped. That was one thing. But the second thing that happened is that some of the, I think it was the deputy governor, wrote to the leading clergymen in the country and said, can we use spectral evidence? Can we prosecute on the basis of spectral evidence? And they said, no, that's not admissible. And so all of the things collapsed overnight. So I think it will just take people to stand up and say, no, the witches aren't real. We don't live in a country, you know, which is full of fascists.

We can look at the evidence again and go. and make our judgment based on evidence, not based on lived experience and feeling. And if everyone just did that, if all the people in power just did that, this would end and we'd be out of it. But in the play, the Arthur Miller play, it was John Proctor who had to sacrifice himself in order that this could come to an end. Well, that was real. I mean, so when Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible,

the figures in that who end up being hanged, Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, etc. They were real figures who were hanged because they were so devout. They weren't prepared to say, they weren't prepared to lie to save their necks because they believed in the everlasting perdition hellfire and damnation. They weren't going to damn themselves by lying.

But a lot of people did. A lot of people would just say, yeah, I've met with the devil because they were terrified of being hanged. And they said that they'd signed his book and all the rest of it. And of course, the Puritans believed in mercy. I mean, I call this book the New Puritans, but they're nothing like the Puritans of old. It's an analogy.

The Puritans of old really believed in mercy. And they had incredible leniency. leniency. The courts would let you off if you confessed to Wishcraft. But yeah, you're right. The John Proctor's of this world, that also brought... When people like him, when people like Rebecca Nurse, these local people who everyone loved, started being hanged, people got concerned. But it needs people like that. Yeah.

And what my worry is, Andrew, is I see the elites of people at the top. None of them have that level of integrity. No, but we do need people like that. And I think the way out of this hysteria, I think it is will come, there will be people who will be sacrificed along the way. The people who speak out earliest. Thanks for looking at me, mate. Well, I'm saying. The people will be cancelled.

They already have been. Yeah. You know, people like Julian Philip, Rosie Kay, people who've lost their jobs, been dragged through the courts, all that sort of stuff. And it will continue to happen. But then we'll reach a point where so many people are getting cancelled. Everyone will be like, enough, we're going to speak out about it. So I think, yeah, you're right.

Like some people will, you know, it'll be horrible for some. But it makes it easier, doesn't it, for the people to, speak out later. Yeah, it does, definitely. And, well, I was going to ask you something else, but before I do, where, if we take the analogy that you've given of the witch trials in Salem and the process by which eventually people come round to having a sensible view of these things,

where are we on that journey with this? Well, I thought things were getting better. And then, of course, the key events of the summer of 2020, where the culture were exploded into the mainstream. and all of the stuff that all three of us have been talking about for years. Remember how people used to dismiss us and say, oh, it's just a few students, you're winging about a few overzealous people on university campuses. No one says that anymore, do they?

No. Because it's now in the mainstream. The evidence of what we've been talking about is everywhere. It's irrefutable. But there doesn't seem to be any sign of the momentum slowing, does there? You don't think so? No, not really. Let me put some counterpoints to you, which I've been thinking about.

So, as you know, I've said from day one that logically it would be the trans thing that broke intersectionality. Yes. Because the level of suspension of disbelief and the level of damage, visible damage that would be done in the name of trans ideology. Yeah. Would be difficult even for people who are prepared to live with a lot of cognitive dissonance. I agree. To maintain that illusion. And we've seen the shutting down of Tavistock here in the UK.

We've seen thousands of parents now suing Tavistock. We see every day more and more detransitioners. I read this incredibly powerful piece yesterday by a parent who had transitioned. I don't know if you saw this. It was literally called, I transitioned my child. I regret it or something like those lines. Very, very powerful. You're starting to hear these stories of people who've gone along with this

and then either themselves suffered through surgery and whatever, or they've hurt children, their own children. And those voices are more and more audible now to me, combined with, you know, changes in reality. And the clinic being shut down, the Alison Bailey case, the Maya 4-starter case, you're starting to see some shifts on that issue. Are you not reassured that that is the start of the momentum at least slowing? Oh, yeah.

I mean, all of that stuff is incredibly reassuring. And I think those are signs that things might be healing. But I think because we, obviously, we talked like-minded people a lot, we maybe miss how embedded this is. I mean, closure of the Taverstock is one thing. But look at the way that the trans activists have tried to spin that as a good news story. And that actually just means that they're going to be able to open up gender clinics around the country that are more localized. Of course, it's not good news for them because it means that things will be scrutinized more closely.

But absolutely, I mean, you're right that the extremity of what they are expecting us to swallow will be its own undoing, right? Because, look, we all know that the majority of gender non-conforming children are gay or turn out to be gay in later life. So you are effectively, have a supposedly progressive movement that is effectively medicalizing gay kids. And if you'd have said that to anyone 10 years ago, who would have believed that that would be even possible?

But do people fully understand that? Gay and autistic, by the way. Gay and autistic, or people with other issues, there will be some children who have gender dysphoria, but they are the minority. So who would have believed that? Like 10 years back, who would have thought that was something

that could potentially happen? And like Salem, it all burst out very, very quickly and ended very, very quickly. This has all come about over the past 10 years and hopefully will burn out just as quickly. But it's going to take one major tipping point, I think, I don't know.

And I am reassured by stuff like that. But look, do you remember that someone put up a composite image of all the Labour MPs holding up a sign saying ban trans conversion therapy, right? Now, of course, when you dig in, that sounds great because conversion therapy, you think of like back in the day when they used to put electrodes on gay men

and try and shock them out of their homosexuality. But of course, it's not conversion therapy. What they call trans conversion therapy is a specialist, a pediatric gender specialist, talking to a child to tease out what other possible reasons there might be for this sense of dysphoria, be that homosexuality, internalized homophobia, be that autism, all those kind of things that you mention.

they say that's conversion therapy because they believe there's an innate gendered soul and this person is just and that it should be affirmed automatically whenever anyone makes that claim. So when a Labour politician holds up a sign saying ban trans conversion therapy, they're effectively holding up a sign

in support of conversion therapy because they are effectively putting gay kids on a pathway to heterosexualize and fix them. But do they understand that? No. If those politicians understood the implications of what they were saying, they wouldn't hold up that sign.

But we've reached the point where the language has been redefined and shifted so much that people don't understand what it is they're supporting. I'm convinced that the majority of people, if they had a full grasp of what the social justice movement is all about,

wouldn't support it. Very, very few would support it. Even the 13%, which is what the more in common initiative found, roughly 13% of the country would be classified as woke, would be classified as supportive of these critical social justice ideologies,

the various interlapping strands of it. even them, if they understood what it was they were supporting, I think the majority of them would back away in a heartbeat. You know, the other good thing, by the way, about that 13% figure is it shows that these people, because this is often, the culture was often mischaracterizes the old failing to keep up with the young, failing to keep up with changing trends. But they are a minority in every generation, including the young.

And that's bad news for the activists. Yeah, there's a higher preponderance of younger people, but still the majority of younger people are against it. and if those younger people understood that they are actually supporting illiberal, dangerous, divisive, regressive ideas, they would back away too. So it's all about, the way out, I feel,

is all about understanding, is all about exploding their myths. You know, they put up this brick wall of language to deter understanding. And once people understand what they're actually saying, then it won't be sustainable. And I... Go for it.

Andrew, I was going to... Something I hope you've done, me sharing with our audience. But when we were in Edinburgh, we did a live show together. And before, you know, we spent a bit of time together because the three of us were always running around. We're super busy. We actually, even though we're very good friends, we don't actually get to hang out that much. But we did hang out a little bit. And one of the things I realized about your, you is that you were very, very early to all of this. You were very early to all of this. So the falling out with which you begin the book happened way before like Francis and I were doing

trigonometry or any of that. You saw this very, very early. Yeah. First, and really, I want to ask you two things about that. First of all, what was that like for you? And secondly, why do you think you saw it that early? I think it's more, I don't think it's like I'm a nostradamus or anything like that. I think it's more that it's not in my nature to, I can't just say something that I know not to be true. It's not something I can't do it. So, for instance, and because it's all happened so quickly, like when the Brexit vote happened in 2016, and because the left and Labour has always been anti-EU,

you know, it was a sudden change. It was a sudden sea change overnight. I mean, like, even Owen Jones wrote an article saying why we need to get out of the, I think he coined the phrase Lexit, why we need to get out of the EU. This is a standard left-wing position. Jeremy Corbyn was campaigning for 40 years to get out of the EU, you know.

And all of a sudden, all my left-wing friends were saying that, oh, yeah, we're really pro-EU. they were really pro this trading block, this undemocratic, bureaucratic trading block that has capitalism at the heart of its constitution. I'm like, this isn't a left-wing stance. And so I, when I did my show in Edinburgh at the stand in 2016, so it was about a month after the vote,

so it was around the same time. So I did a pro-Brexit set, effectively. I rewrote my show to talk about that. And that was a really fun challenge because I knew all the audience would be remainers. And so I had to get them on side, before I dropped that into the show. And that was quite kind of fun.

Sometimes it wouldn't go well. Because it became hysterical. Tensors were running very high. Yeah, I mean, I realized this. And I remember putting a post on Facebook just saying, look, can everyone, you know, calm down a bit. We're not all evil. The thing got reduced.

And it was the first time I've ever seen this, where a major political issue in which everyone was engaged, people were more politically engaged than ever. People were having debates and discussions in, like, pubs. And, you know, everywhere, it was really fascinating. But it got reduced, not just by people online, but by mainstream media as a debate between good and evil, a debate between racist and not racist. And I'm like, this is not mapped onto the reality. And I started to notice this.

Vince Cable stood up at his spring conference and said that the reason people voted to leave was because they were nostalgic for the empire, which is just not a thing. There is no one who's nostalgic for empire. You might be able to find one or two crackpots here and there. There'll be a colonel in some way. Right? But none of us, that's not a, it's just not a thing, right? So this complete fantasy without any evidence. He said people were nostalgic for the time when faces were white and passports were blue and the map, the global map was coloured pink. Who are you talking about? You've just decided this thing and you've asserted it as though it's the truth. And it was the first time I was really seeing stuff like that, this people who were mistaking their own arguments for proof. And it was happening. I know that's always happened to some extent, but this was happening across the board. And it was, and the whole political landscape was, being Disneyified. There were villains and they were heroes and that was it. And I'm like, this isn't real. I could tell none of this is real. People are getting upset, painting their faces with the EU flag. They don't care about the EU. They didn't know what it was three months

ago. Right. They certainly, you know, I talked to people who were going to vote Remain and said, well, tell me about how the commission works. Tell me about the process. They didn't know what it was. They didn't know what they were voting for, right? They didn't, they didn't even bother to check. So it was just about, I'm voting, Remain, because I'm a good person and because I'm not racist. Well, you know, the EU has some pretty borderline racist policies. It has its fortress Europe immigration. But it's fine with freedom and movement within its borders. But when it comes to coming from other continents, it's pretty bad. I mean, they're paying Libyan warlords to keep people in camps. You know, it's so it's incoherent to me to say that the reason you vote to remain

is because you're pro-migration. It doesn't make sense. But doesn't this, that point is very profound? Because this is actually what all of this is about, which is people, not analysing what's going on below the surface. They just take a very cursory glance at a very complex issue like Brexit or an issue like social justice, and they make up their own minds and then they go with it. Because they are told that these people are on the side of the angels. And, you know, the girls are pointing and crying witch.

So I'll go along with the girls because they're doing God's work. And also, if I don't, they'll point at me and cry witch. So it's the same thing with Brexit. And then it was the same thing with Trump. And everything got reduced to, you know, good and evil. And it's like nothing is ever about good and evil. There are no good and evil people. It's like Solzhenitsyn says, you know,

were it possible to just separate humanity into good and evil and put all the evil people on an island somewhere, that would be great. But as he says, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and you're not going to cut out a piece of your own heart. What about Australia, though? Yeah. Yeah, okay.

They're all evil. Yeah. But yeah, no, but this is the thing. We're going to get so many, we're going to get so many emails now. Just for a cheap joke. Andrew, I didn't mean to cheapen the point you'll mention. I agree with you. I realize I've gone off tangent, but it relates to what you were saying about

in the comedy industry when I did that show in 2016. And I was just saying what I knew to be true. I made it funny, obviously, I hope. But I realized then something was going on because I think, The comedians start, I remember one comic who I'd known for a while saying to me, I hear you're supporting Brexit. I thought you were intelligent. And then people were blocking me that I'd known for years on social media,

comics, comedians. And then some of them were nervous about some of the Jonathan Pye videos I'd written, which were satirizing stuff that they didn't. And I started noticing, oh, because it used to be, I used to just assume, well, we can disagree, right? And I used to disagree with friends all the time. It was fun. Yeah.

And we'd have debates and stuff. And then suddenly the climate shifted. and to disagree meant you were the heretic, you were evil. And so I don't think it was me noticing stuff earlier. I think it was just me, I wasn't prepared to just lie. I mean, Brexit, the number of comics who were openly pro-Brexit, you could count on one of Abu Hamza's hands, right? None.

They were the fucking near my four of us. And you became like a pariah. And Andrew, but you're someone who's got an incredible amount of fortitude, but that must have been difficult to see that happen. I was just surprised that, well, I mean, the account I give in the book of that, there's things like that, the extreme things

where people scream, you're a Nazi. No, but even the fact that you were worried about coming to talk to us because you were so concerned about being misrepresented, being attacked, you know, all that. At that time, especially, though, I didn't understand it. I saw these things online. People kept saying to me online things that I didn't believe, as though I believed them.

You know, we know that you believe this. We know that you support free speech, because you support racists, and you want racist to be able to say what they want. And I'm like, I don't support race. But where have I ever said I support racist? You're just making something up and describing it to me. And at that point, now I sort of understand why it happens more and more,

because it's easier to fight with a figment of your imagination and actually engage with what people say. But back then, I didn't get it. I didn't understand it. And I was very mistrustful of people asking for interviews. Yeah. Because I thought it was always going to be a hit job. Yeah.

You know, so that's, and I'd never heard of you two. No offense. Like, we hadn't gig together. Yeah, yeah. Like, so I was like, are they... Unbelievable. You come in here, you insult us to our faces. I've never heard you.

But you didn't know who I was either. You know, that is like... But I'm not trying to dig up that incident. I guess what I'm getting at is, it's not been easy. Like, you're not someone who complains about it. It's just occurred to me that being first through the breach, you always take most of the arrows.

You know what I mean? Well, I still, to this day, don't quite understand when I catch a, you know, because there's so many comedians don't talk to me they've unfriend of me and all the rest of me. But when I catch a glimpse of something they say online, you know, I'm like, I don't recognize myself there. Like, just casually referring to me as evil

or like a far-right person. And it's like, but I'm clearly not. But if you've just decided that I am, I mean, someone comedian wrote a blog about the Comedy Unleash night recently, which is the night I run. And they started talking about how the acts at Comedy Unleash just go on stage to spout racism and attack minorities, which has literally never happened at Comedy Unleashed.

And I wouldn't book that person because that person isn't going to be very funny. That's just not a thing. Again, it's like, so I don't know even how to, I'm continually surprised by it because of my, why would you be happy to just live in a fantasy world? Why would that make you, why not, why is there not the slightest point of curiosity? If I thought there was a far right comedy night going on, I might want to see what they're actually saying there. And the thing is a great thing you can because so many of the videos are online. And when you watch them, you realize it's just, it's comedy unleashed.

It's just another comedy night where, you know, often people come and do the same sets they do elsewhere. It's just that every now and then, we cultivate an audience that isn't going to complain about being offended. We cultivate an audience that is comedy literate and understands that the comedian on stage is not literally expressing their opinions that they're expressing jokes. And every now and then a comedian will phone me up and say, can I do this night because I don't feel I can try this new material anywhere else, right? And that's a perception in the industry where people deny it, but it is a perception.

It's not that we've set up a night to platform far right people because we hate minorities or that we think that other comedians can't say what they want on other platforms. or on other stages, that isn't what we're doing at all. But it's a weird, I mean, look, when we announced the Comedy Unleashed tour recently, the hysteria from comedians was hilarious. One guy started saying, if you do this tour, you're a fucking scam. I'm an anarchist. And this is a guy who's got a radio four show, so it's not that much of an anarchist.

You know, it's like, it's weird. And then the blog and all these people going on about attacking the comics on the bill, you know, and the comics we have are from a broad spectrum of political views. they're mostly left wing because there's more left than right wing comics, but there are some right wing comics there as well. There are different comedic styles. The key thing is they're just all really funny and interesting and, you know, that are prepared to sometimes put some of them

push the boundaries, not all of them even. That's not even a criteria. But it was just, it's like, so there's a tour going around the country, which just has a variety of different acts and people go along and laugh. And people are reacting as though it's like a far right rally or something. It's weird to me. I don't, you know, I'm perpetually. baffled by it. But the whole thing is weird. Let's just be honest. This, what you've written about,

is fucking weird. It is. You see them talk to one another. And like, some of them are considered my friends at one point. I mean, they probably don't consider me a friend anymore, but they just go, yeah, they hate you now. Yeah, they do. They do. They just say things like in casual conversation, like, I'm a cis man. What the hell is going on? Yeah. You know, I'm a cis white man. It's just, it's infected language and it's infected, infected, their world view, but it's utterly normalized around these people. It's weird, isn't it? It's when the left took a turn from class to group identity. That's what happened here.

And I try and explain this thing in the book, and I see it as like a kind of hydra with many heads, you know, because you've got a strand about race, gender. And all these things are different. Like critical race theory is very different from queer theory, say, but they all come from the same wellspring. They all come from the same fundamental postmodern assumptions that, for instance, our understanding of reality is constructed through the language that we use.

That's why they're all obsessed with language and the manipulation of language. So they all have a shared body, just many different strands. And therefore it's really hard to describe them because what do you call them? Because they waged the war through language, well, for a start, they called themselves woke. In 2015, they were all calling themselves woke.

And Jack Dorsey went on stage with a stay woke t-shirt, Nika Burns launched the Edinburgh Festival by saying the next generation of comics are going to be woke and we look forward to comedy's new woke world. No one said, oh, why are you using a right-wing slur? No one said that's a snarl word. But then because people like us started using the word to describe them, because that was the word they were using themselves.

That was a courtesy. I was just using their word, right? And then they say, no, it's just a right-wing snarl word to attack us to denigrate us, anyone who uses the word. And so, but I'm like, but I can Google that. And like 10 minutes ago, you were calling yourself woke. We can check that. but they don't care about that because they just deny reality.

So in other words, if you can't name an enemy, you can't defeat that enemy in the marketplace of ideas. So any term that we come up with to describe them, they will problematize. So I call it the critical social justice movement, but that's kind of difficult to explain. You have to sort of explain it first. You could call them leftist identitarians,

but they're not meaningful. I just call them extreme progressivist. But that's misleading as well because they're not progressive, they're regressive. I agree. So whatever we come up with, there isn't a way. to sort of pin them down.

And that's another reason I wrote the book because I want to try and pin them down. And I call them the new Puritans because the analogy of Puritanism as being, you know, it's been a colloquial term for many years, which we all understand as meaning someone with a precisionist and prohibitionist, tendency, priggish, if you like,

intolerant, censorial. I'm not making, I've had lots of Christians get onto me. They're very angry. They usually are, man. But I'm not attacking the Puritans of old. I'm very clear that there's a distinction. Whereas the Puritans of old believed in their, they had a constant awareness of their fallibility.

They were constantly doubting themselves. They didn't know if they were part of the elect or the damned. They knew they were unworthy before God. The new Puritans don't. They have extreme certainty. You hear the way they talk. Never crosses their mind they could be wrong. So I'm not saying they're the same.

I'm using a shorthand so that we can understand who they are and where they're coming for. That's the attempt anyway, whether it works or not. But you said that they're not progressive, they're regressive. I would push back on that because they wouldn't identify as being regressive. They're utopians. They want to get to this magical utopian. And they think that if they keep doing what they're doing

and, you know, they force out all the bigots are racist, the transposes, all of this, they stamp it out, they destroy it. We're going to get to this beautiful utopia where we're all equal. Right. And it's not true because humankind is messy. Yeah. And the great thing about the liberal project, I mean, they reject liberalism quite explicitly. So if you read the foundational text of critical race theory, they describe it as being an anti-liberal movement.

They don't believe in liberalism. And they say, we live in a society where racism still exists. Therefore, the liberal project has failed. Social liberalism has failed. But of course, social liberalism never makes any claims that it can make humankind perfect. It's an ongoing project. And whereas what we do as liberals, is address racism and injustice as and when it happens,

what they do is they try and seek it out in the shadows and identify it where it may not exist and often doesn't exist. So they will call an institution, they will say it's institutionally racist. They'll say Oxford University is institutionally racist. And then someone else might say, but the data shows that incidents of racism at Oxford are really rare. They barely happen at all. It doesn't matter because we have some lived experience of someone who's, you know,

so therefore, you know, it must be. So that's the way they operate. And I don't think they are progressive. And I think we do need to push back in the way that you're describing. But, okay, I think why it's become so difficult is whereas before this was being peddled by activists online with anime avatars, like the people you can safely ignore, the screamers, you know, the insane ones. But now it's, it's from the elites and it's from the people in power. you know, these ideologues dominate the civil service.

They dominate the NHS, the army, the police, the government, by the way, the Tory government has presided over most of this over the past 12 years, right? They have just instituted the online safety bill, it used to be the harms bill, which talks about legal but harmful speech. Harmful speech?

So they're using the lexicon of critical social justice. They're part of the problem. When you try and describe the culture war as a left versus right issue, you completely misapprehend what's going on. It's a problem in all political parties. We can't vote these people out. You can vote in a Labour government or Tory government.

You're still going to get the woke. Because if the civil servants, it's service. If the machinery of government is grinding in that direction, there is nothing you can do. And that's why this is a problem because it is everywhere. It's in all major institutions. And look at what's happened with the leadership election, where the one candidate who actually was talking quite a bit of sense on these issues, was quite purposely excluded from the vote by members,

who would overwhelmingly have voted for Kemabedon. And this is why I think, when you say that you're more positive about the movement, because it hasn't been rooted out among the echelons of power, that's where I get nervous. And it's so easy to dismiss and mischaracterize what's going on here. You know, we get these stories every now and then of like, someone puts a trigger warning on Hemingway's, the old man, and the sea. And this did happen at university.

And they put a trigger warning saying, it contains scenes of graphic fishing. And that's... What? Graphic fishing. Yeah, that was the trigger warning. It's like animal cruelty. I guess. Graphic fish. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty graphic

because he hangs the fish on the side of his boat and the sharks eat them bit by bit. So, yeah, it's quite graphic, but it's still fishing. And they put a trigger warning on Robert Louis Stevenson's kidnapped saying it contains themes of kidnapping, which is implied in the title.

Similarly, Julius Caesar, apparently, it's got a plot that revolves around murder. Does someone get stabbed? Someone gets stabbed in Julia, Caesar. Don't read the book. You'll be very upset about it. It's absolutely graphic. So all of this stuff is funny, right?

And we can laugh at this. But then take a step and think, is it that funny? Because this isn't some activists online saying this. These are major universities. Andrew, I never found this funny because like you, I can play the movie forward. Yeah. And if you play the movie forward, you can see where this goes. There's no question about it that if this movement was allowed to carry on down that part,

the damage that would be done. And this is, as you know, the point I make in my book, which is if the West continues to engage in this, it opens up the door for other hostile actors to come in and take advantage of our division and weakness. Can we talk about the nonces? The what? The nonces. The nonces? Yeah.

You've got a whole chapter on the nonce philosophers. Yeah. The pedos. I've got a chapter on the origins of this thing. And yes, a lot of it does come from the postmodernist of the 1960s, the French postmodernist, Jean-Fonsoil Leitard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, being the most obvious ones. There's an element to of themes and ideas from the Frankfurt School.

Most notably, the, you know, people like Adorno and Max Hawkeme and people like that, the mistrust of the masses. That very much is something that comes from the, you know, they think that, you know how like social justice activists, they want to take scenes out of comedies that they seem problematic, which is streaming services are now doing, of course.

Or they want to ban films or various books, you know, whatever. that comes from this idea that if the masses are exposed to popular entertainment, they can be corrupted. And that's something that has echoes of what they believed in the Frankfurt School. You know, the cancellation of Jerry Sadowitz's show. You know, that's an adult show that is advertised at adults with so many warnings saying what it is, but the Pleasants has said, we need to decide on your behalf whether you can buy tickets for that. It's not safe for you to buy tickets for that.

And they actually said, you know, it's harmful. They described it as harmful. But that means that they believe in this idea that popular entertainment can corrupt the masses, which was the identical perspective that Mary White has had. Well, it's a very socially conservative point of view, if you think about it, which is like, you know, the low-leap, whatever masses must be...

The plebeians. The plebeians must be protected from the corrupting influence of degrading art and culture and whatever. Exactly. And to go back to your question, Foucault, and it's principally Foucault that they cite, They don't cite Marcusa of the Frankfurt School, even though he wrote an essay on repressive tolerance where he was very explicit about the need to effectively

not allow conservatives to speak, not allow right wingers to speak. So it's interesting that they don't cite that more. But they do cite Foucault and they won't have read him. And what's interesting about it, like all religions, a lot of the faithful don't read the holy texts, you know. And I had to read a lot of Foucault because I was teaching him, and he formed a major aspect of my doctoral thesis.

So, you know, I was all really steeped in this kind of, kind of stuff. But in short, the most important thing is, is Foucault's belief in this nexus of power and language that he sees power as not being this top-down phenomenon, but that it runs through all strata of society, like a grid that runs through. And that's why they always bang on about power structures and the way in which language or jokes normalize hate or legitimize violence. That's how they see it. They see this as a fundamentally linguistic discourse. That's how they comprehend reality. So you do need to understand where it's come from, I think. And that's why I don't want to alienate people or go into it too much.

It's just one chapter. I just talk about those origins in a hopefully accessible way. But the reason I brought up the nonces as a sort of jokey point is that, I mean, we know that Foucault was a bit partial to that sort of thing. He slept with underage boys, yes. Yes. And some people I see this online, I don't know how much basis there is to it, but I'm increasingly concerned that this process of never-ending deconstruction

is aimed at deconstructing all sorts of social norms. And one of them, you know, once you get past deconstructing the idea of sex and gender, then the next thing is to start calling paedophiles minor attracted people and on and on it goes. What do you make of all of that? I think I'm concerned when I see activists and academics, which are basically the same thing now.

Yeah. basically talk about minor attractive persons and how maybe we should bring them into the LGBQIA umbrella and all of that. And the thing is, it is very few people are saying that and we do have to be clear about that. I don't think this is a common thing at all. And I think it's a bit conspiratorial to sort of say

because Foucault had these tendencies, therefore he's developed these theories that now other secret nonces are picking up on... You do think that's conspiratorial, that his theories were partly produced by I don't know why he thought the way he thought or yeah, you're not a mind reader or why he created the theories he created

but I think the reason why... But the person who sort of, you know, was the foundation of transgenderism also Yes, had... John Money. Yeah. Yeah. So you're like, to me that is not insignificant.

It's not insignificant because it's morally reprehensible behavior. But it's like, why would we design society around the ideas of two paedophiles? That's not why those are. ideas took hold, though. Yeah. People weren't, within academia, people weren't elevating Foucault.

I mean, people really did. There's even a guy called David Halperin who wrote a book called St. Foucault towards a gay hagiography. He literally deifies. I mean, when I was at university, Foucault was like a god, and people would invoke him. And that was sort of an end of discussion. And I was very skeptical about Foucault. And, you know, I didn't think he was a good historian.

And I wanted to talk about this stuff. And I remember being in a conference, and this academic talked about how Foucault mentioned that this particular sexual activity wasn't or didn't happen in the ancient world and I asked the question I said how did he know and they didn't know why he knew and he used to do it just assert this stuff

it's shoddy stuff really but theoretically those ideas caught on almost by accident it wasn't because of what he thought about it's I kind of feel sometimes this stuff just happens accidentally a little bit you know

these ideas become fashionable fashion explains an awful lot. Yes. And then all of a sudden people are like, and also deconstructing the text is fun, right? If you take that approach, when I was studying an undergrad at the English literature, we weren't really reading a poem for its artistry, for its numinous quality, for the poetry of the thing. We were trying to work out which bits are sexist, which bits are homophobic, which bits are racist, and then write up that up in an essay and you get a first. It was moral detective work, right? It's, you know, it's really boring, actually, teasing out the contradiction.

in the text, trying to work out problematizing the text. Look, I used to do it myself. You know, I used to do it about Shakespeare and, and, and I find that sort of stuff embarrassing now. But that, and it's easier, it's an easier approach. And it's also, you know, my supervisor, Robin, Robbins, who I've dedicated the book to, he said to me once that all of this sort of postmodernist fashion within English literature, those books get published.

because the publishers don't understand the jargon. So you have people like Judith Butler dressing, what is it a relatively simple idea, up in 20 different clauses, overloading, really turgid prose that is just jargon-laden and unpleasant to read and lacking in clarity. But these are ideas that can be expressed with elegance

should you wish to do so. They're smart ideas, and I do understand that difficult ideas sometimes take difficult terms to explain them, but not those ideas. And so he was saying, that's why these things get published. also these theorists were constantly quoting each other,

creating this illusion that they'd generated this body of knowledge, that they were important, and then just quoting each other. And they were flimsy ideas. And that's how I think it took on. I don't think it was queer theorists trying to normalize pedophilia. I don't think that's what was happening there. Interesting. Andrew, do you think part of it as well is,

it just makes you feel good? Oh, yeah, like there's nothing more fun than judging someone else and saying, I'm more morally superior than you. Oh, it's brilliant, isn't it? Just going, look how great I am. The Pharisees had a great time, didn't they? Yeah. Of course.

And yeah, there's partly that. There's an excuse. You know, look, the Inquisitors who were strapping women to the rack back in the... They thought they were good people. And it's great because you can behave cruelly and you can bully people, but you can still call yourself a saint. I mean, what's not to like? Right.

You know? And so many of these people do this. But also, in addition to that, and again, I think that's sort of veering into trying to work out motives. And I don't think we necessarily can. do that. I think the other possibilities people do genuinely have

bought into it. They genuinely believe it. How could it be otherwise? You know, when you get like it was in Ontario, wasn't it, last year where a school board, not just a school board, a body of 30 schools, the board that controls 30 schools, removed 5,000 books from the library shelves

because they had outdated depictions of race. And they burnt a number of them. And they called this a flame purification ceremony. And then they use the ashes of the burnt books to fertilize a new tree. Isn't that beautiful? And they obviously think this is, this is Fahrenheit 451, but they think this is, to do something that's self-saturizing. And it's not just, like I said, not just activists. That's a school board that controls 30 schools, right? It's a major body. That's why it matters, right? If it was just

activist burning books, they do that all the time with J.K. Rowling's books and stuff. They've threatened to burn my book, right? I don't care about that. They can burn as many books as you want. I mean, you buy it first, right? Do that. But when a school board, a county school board, not only removes the books from the shelves, but burns them and calls it a flame purification ceremony, and they can't see what the implications of that are,

I don't believe they could have done that if they could see with any sense. I think they must have brought into this. They must think that those books are dangerous. Historical books that represent people in a way, the reason why the estate of Dr. Seuss is no longer publishing six of his books, because of outdated racial stereotypes. Enid Blyton, they'll talk about her outdated racial stereotypes. They republish Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

without the racial epithets. It doesn't make sense because it's an anti-racist book. It's a book that satirizes these sort of priggish, self-righteous, good Christian people who nonetheless enslave their fellow human being and it takes a boy to see through that, right? That's an anti-racist book. And once you take those racial epithets out,

it doesn't work. The satire loses its teeth. So to kill a mockingbird, you know, again, They can only see the language. They only see the racial epithet into killer mockingbird, and they ignore the message of the book. It's kind of like people who don't understand comedy, particularly satire, satirical comedy.

They just can't understand that somebody could be a character on stage saying something that they don't believe. It's incredible how humorless these people are. And I do find that very strange. But Andrew, the New Puritans, I really recommend people get this book and have a good read of it and we're going to ask you some questions for our locals

but I will finish. Just one question that I want to ask and the one thing I want to push back and you say you can't look into other people's minds and bar, blah, blah, Francis can. I can. I know you can. Yeah, of course I can.

But look, we all know some very, very dodgy people in our industry and they're always the most work. Yeah, sure. there is that coincidence isn't there but why do you think that might be? Because I think they use it as a tool to shield and protect themselves

and also attack other people who they perceive to be their enemies and I also think that is very likely what I won't say is that I definitively know I don't know why maybe they have bought into it but it's look I mean I say in the book you know some people don these sacred robes

out of a sense of duty and some people don them as a disguise and we'll never know which is which all we can do is really push back against the argument and push back against the ideas. You know, if you're propagating these terrible ideas that are making society more racially divided, that are attacking gay kids, all of that sort of stuff,

and you're doing it for nefarious reasons, or you're doing it because you sincerely believe it. Actually, it doesn't matter either way. We still need to treat, take the argument at face value, push back at it. An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not whether the person sincerely holds the belief. So it's just more sensible, I argue,

to assume good faith and destroy the argument anyway. And this is the best way. Because also the other thing is, if you don't do that, you're doing what they do. You're on their level there. You know, because when I present arguments in defense of free speech, they make these claims that I'm, you know, as I said earlier, that I'm trying to support fascism.

And, you know, that's not an argument, is it? So, I mean, that would be my advice. Or, you know, even if you know they're lying or you're pretty sure, just these arguments fall apart really easily. Doesn't depend on their sincerity. Andrew, thank you so much for coming back. The new Puritans, make sure to go out and grab that. And Andrew, we're going to ask you a couple of questions

that our local supporters have already submitted for you. Okay, I'm nervous. But before we do, before we do, we, as always, have the final question, which is, what is the one thing we're still not talking about as a society that you think we should be? Okay, and I knew you were going to ask this. And every time you asked me this, I forget that I was made. I was meant to prepare.

Isn't that funny? It's the only thing that I struggle to answer is that. What do I think we're talking about that we don't think we don't, sorry, what do I think we're not talking about that we should be talking about? What is an issue that you don't think gets enough attention that actually really matters? Well, to be honest, it's the issues that I wrote in the book, which I know we talk about them a lot. But I don't think the mainstream art particularly.

You know, I cover a lot of these issues on my show on GB News. and other news channels just don't touch them. And so I think we often fall into the trap of assuming that because we talk about them, everyone's talking about them, actually most people aren't. And most people don't understand it. I mean, you mentioned earlier, people describing themselves as cis.

I would suggest that most people still don't know what cis means. And they certainly don't understand that, you know, if you don't believe you have a gender identity, if you don't subscribe to that ideology, describing yourself as cis is incoherent. Like, describing anyone as cis is incoherent. because the word means someone whose body, biological sex, aligns with their gender identity. But you can't call someone that if they don't believe in gender identity.

It doesn't make any sense. So I would say, yeah, the issues that we are talking about now are the things that most people aren't talking about. Now, that might be a bit of a cop-out. No, but that makes sense to me. Yeah, okay. Great cop-out, Andrew. There we go. Andrew Doyle, thank you so much for coming back.

And thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like, this one or Orr Show, all of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We'll see on locals. Does Titania ever have sex, Titania McGraw? Uh...