TRIGGERnometry - Brendan O'Neill: "2020 Has Been a Disaster for Freedom"

Episode Date: December 13, 2020

Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked magazine, joins us in the studio. Join our exclusive community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guest today is the editor of Spike magazine. Brendan O'Neill, welcome back to Trigonometry. Hi, guys. It's good to have you back, man. Good to be here. Listen, it's been an interesting year. Just before we started, we were talking about how, you know, I started the whole lockdown thing, strongly disagreeing with the position you guys took

and then eventually have come around to lock down skepticism, if you like. And we will maybe talk about the vaccine and all of that stuff later. But give us, we're almost at the end of the year. Give us a civil liberties view of 2020. What has happened in this time? Nothing good. I think this year 2020 has been a complete disaster for civil liberties. But I think it's even worse than that.

I think the civil liberties thing, I've been thinking about this, I think it's a bit of a red herring. in the broader discussion about freedom. I mean, civil liberties are incredibly important. The right to protest, the right to petition your leaders, legal rights, the right to silence, the right to trial by jury. All those kinds of legal rights are incredibly important, and they accentuate the liberty of the individual.

But I think there's something a bit less tangible that's really been destroyed in 2020, which is the culture of freedom. I mean, civil liberties are relatively easily reinstated. parliamentarians could just put them back on the statute books and there you are you have the right to protest again it's just been returned to us but i think the the broader culture of freedom which is the confidence of individuals to make decisions to engage in public life to take responsibility for their lives i think that's what's taken a real beating this year because when your life is

micromanaged to such an extraordinary degree that politicians are telling you who you can hug what you should eat in a pub, how many people you can have Christmas dinner with. I mean, this kind of intimate micromanagement of people's lives, I think that has a really corrosive effect on people's sense that they are capable of organising their own lives and their sense that they ought to enjoy freedom. So I think there's been a double whammy assault on freedom this year.

Firstly, there has been the legal rescinding of various civil liberties, and that's been really bad. But there has also been this extreme, extraordinary assault on the culture of freedom and on the idea that people and communities know better than officialdom how to organize their lives. Well, what would you say to someone who makes, and it's a reasonable argument to make, I suppose, that, you know, the people who've accepted this and who are now having dinner with the right number of people at Christmas and, you know, not eating the wrong thing at a pub or whatever else it might be, they are doing this for the

benefit of society to save lives to protect the NHS. whatever the slogans are, but essentially they're showing social responsibility by participating in this process. Yeah, I don't buy that. I really don't. I think it's, in many ways, it's the opposite of social solidarity. This demand for conformism, this insistence that we all must sacrifice our fundamental liberties in the name of some greater good. I think that's actually the opposite of social solidarity and community solidarity, which is exactly what you need in a pandemic. You do need people to pull together. You do need people to pull together. You do need people to say, I'm going to look after my neighbours, I'm going to deliver medicines to the old lady who

lives upstairs. You do need people in a time of crisis, and I fully accept COVID-19 was a genuine health crisis. I'm not a COVID-denier. I'm not one of those people who thinks it's a plandemic. I think it's a very serious virus, probably the most serious contagious illness since the Spanish flu. And in a moment like that, you do need people to come together and work together. But I think everything the government has done and everything the woke elites have done has grated against the possibility of people coming together. And what it has actually unleashed is an extraordinary lack of self-confidence on the part of individuals and communities because they've constantly been told, this is how you must do things and nothing else is acceptable. And it's given rise to

this kind of spying, curtain-twitching culture where we've been openly encouraged to squeal on our neighbors. And we saw some extraordinary episodes of people phoning the cops if someone went for two jogs or people taking photographs of other people in parks and putting them on Twitter and publicly shaming them as COVID-idiots. So the culture we needed, which was a culture of people pulling together, was completely undermined by the authoritarianism and the suspicion that was spread by government officials. So I think they've got it completely wrong. I think this was a serious health crisis, and in times of crisis, you do need individuals and communities to take responsibility. But what the government said was, essentially, we don't trust you to take

responsibility, and therefore we're going to write all these laws telling you exactly what you can and cannot do. It was the worst thing to do in a relation to a health crisis. But don't you think also part of the problem is, is that, isn't that almost impossible to do in the age of social media? Where somebody can see somebody doing something wrong, take a video of it, bam, it's up on Twitter, viewed by potentially millions of people in a matter of seconds? That could well be true. You know, social media does great against social solidarity. That's the great irony of social media.

It's a very divisive phenomenon in my view. I'm sure it has lots of plus sides as well. The sharing of information, connecting with people, sharing news and so on. But I think one of the downsides is that it has given rise to echo chambers and people sticking with their own tribe, distrusting others, demonising others, attacking. others, witch hunts, all that kind of stuff. So social media certainly didn't help. But I think initially in the first lockdown back in March, April, there was a strong sense of community solidarity. You remember hundreds of thousands of people signed up to assist the NHS.

I had COVID-19 and then I got all this information about how important it is to donate plasma and blood if you've had COVID-19. So I was doing that. And there were huge numbers of people who were doing that too. I know lots of people who are working in my local neighbourhood, delivering medicines, delivering food. So for the first few weeks, it was actually quite positive and people thought, right, we've been told by the government, this is going to be a three-week lockdown. It's obviously a serious crisis. People need our help. And there was, there was a sense of pulling together. But it fizzled out. And I think it fizzled out, firstly because the lockdown dragged on far longer than we had been told it would. And secondly,

because the short-lived moment of social solidarity caved in and gave way to this finger-pointing ugly climate, which is very familiar in the contemporary period, where people were denouncing COVID-Iuts and you had the likes of Pierce Morgan, who I admire her on some levels, but not in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, you know, denouncing people on television

for going to the park or sitting on benches. And the police overplayed their hand. I was in Hyde Park and I saw police. chasing people out of Hyde Park for the crime of sitting under a tree on their own with their laptop. And you just thought, well, that person is not doing anyone any harm. What's going on here? So I think mission creeped by the authorities. Their over-reliance on authoritarian measures, censorship measures. We saw big tech clamping down on anyone who criticized the lockdown, for example. All those kinds of things, I think just chipped away at people's

initial instinct. People's initial instinct was good. I have to help my neighbor. But that was undermined by authoritarianism. And I think that was a very good lesson on how authoritarianism and the instinct for chipping away at people's freedom actually undermines people's ability to take responsibility for their own lives and for their communities. And you mentioned Pierce Morgan and the erosion of social solidarity over time. I think he was a kind of human example of a bigger thing that happened, which is he was very critical of anyone who was skeptical about lockdowns, as I was at the time, frankly. But the moment his son went on a BLM protest, he was very proud of that. And I think if you extrapolate from that to a broader issue, the moment that suddenly it was

okay for people after the whole country had followed all the rules for a period of time with a lot of social solidarity, as you say, suddenly it was okay for people to go out on protest. And I think that disparity changed a lot of people's minds about the enforcement of these rules. Yeah, I thought, I think the BLM moment was really, really interesting because for a huge number of reasons. One of them was, I think it became a convenient release. People couldn't find a way out of lockdown. So part of me was sympathetic to even though I'm very critical of Black Lives Matter, the movement. I'm very critical of the woke ideology that surrounds it.

critical of the extraordinary double standards in relation to public protest. So if you go on a BLM protest, the police will literally bow down to you and treat you with kid gloves. But if you go on an anti-lockdown protest, they'll beat you off the streets and you will be demonized in the media. So I'm critical of all of that. But part of me was a tiny bit sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter uprising from the point of view that we needed a way out of lockdown. The government couldn't provide it. The left couldn't provide it because they were pretty much pro-lockdown. Labor Party was just lining up behind the government on every single measure. And the country was just heading into this constant spiral of keeping everyone locked in their

houses and the economy was going down the toilet and everything else. So I think the Black Lives Matter explosion in the summer was really people saying, listen, we need to get out of this. And that was one way people got out of it. The problem, of course, is that when other people tried, try to get out of it by protesting against lockdown or reopening their businesses or saying, I want to go to the pub. They were demonised as COVID-Idiot. So that double standard was still in play. But I think the Black Lives Matter moment, I think, was fascinating because it really cut down to size this view I had. I thought that COVID-19 would help to keep in check all the

woke nonsense that we've had to deal with over the past five to ten years. I thought all those petty, ridiculous, sensorious issues, all those identitarian questions, all that minute policing of what people say and how people behave, I naively thought that a serious, pretty historic health crisis would force us to confront the real problems facing humanity and to forget about all that woke crap that had been taking up so much of our time over the previous decade or so. And I was completely wrong because what actually happened in 2020, after a few months of all us, us all kind of struggling with COVID-19, is that that wokeness and that identitarianism and that really divisive new ideology exploded back into public life in an extraordinary way with the Black Lives Matter protests and then came to

dominate public discussion in a larger way than it had in previous years. So I think that's one question. It's really worth us tackling. How is it that even when Western society, all societies in fact, were faced with a grave challenge to health, to our health systems, to the economy, you know, a real historic confrontation that we faced, how is it that even in that situation, we still fell back on identity politics, woke politics, the transgender issue, all those things which blew up again in 2020, I find that fascinating. But do you not think as well that it was a true madness of crowds moment in that if you look at what happened directly before the BLM, we were about to kill Dominic Cummings.

You know, and people were genuinely, it felt like that, I remember reading people's Facebook pages and going, has everybody collectively lost their mind? And is somebody going to kill Dominic Cummings? Because it felt like that. It went mental. Cummings Darrangement Syndrome was a very, very serious problem. in this country. And you're right to raise it because I think people forget these things,

because often people, usually members of the cultural and political elite, not normal people, but people get swept up in these moments of hysteria and often almost violent hysteria. And then they kind of feel embarrassed about it a few weeks later and hope everyone will forget it. But we shouldn't forget things like that. We shouldn't forget that there were swarms of journalists outside Cummings flat, essentially screaming for his head. We shouldn't forget that what's that group called? Led by Donkeys was projecting all these images of sick people outside his home in the middle of this normal residential street.

And there was that real hysteria. There was an extraordinary meltdown. And the media published things about Cummings that were patently untrue. So the mirror and the observer, for example, both said that Cummings went to Durham twice. But he didn't go to Durham twice. He went once. They offered no proof for the second trip.

It fizzled out. Everyone forgot about it. Neither of those newspapers has issued an apology or a retraction. It's just faded into history. So that, I think, is a very good example of how hysteria can blow up in a pretty dangerous, destabilizing way. And that is very much linked to the broader COVID hysteria. the thing that we're talking about, which is that the initial social connection, social concern, social solidarity very quickly gave way to the kind of thing that is unfortunately far too common in 21st century Western society, which is this kind of vindictiveness, this desire to destroy people, to shame people, to harass them in public.

And I thought the Cummings Darrangement Syndrome episode was a very good example of that, this dragging, It was like a medieval spectacle dragging this man and his wife, Mary Wakefield, who just, for the record, I know, and dragging them into the public sphere, shaming them, demonising them, holding them up as sinners, who we must all metaphorically pelt with rotten tomatoes. There was something really ugly and medieval about that. That's a great word when you say sinners, because I feel like this is what it's all about, really, isn't it? because there was a religious fervor about the whole thing. And I couldn't, I was watching it. And based on what I know of the situation, he probably broke some rules, right? So he was wrong to do it.

And as one of the people who put the rules in place, you can see why people would be frustrated about that and angry about that. You can understand that. But the vitriol of it and the sort of, there was a religious thing. And you talk about these moments that we're living through. I feel like there are more and more of them. because we've almost entered this religious cultural battle, where it's two sides, both with that cultish attitude almost.

And if you're the enemy, then you must be destroyed. Yes, absolutely. I think we live in a very, very unforgiving climate, very tribalistic. There's a very pseudo-religious feel to a lot of this stuff, the pointing of fingers, the denouncing of people, but it's very Salem-like. And we've seen that numerous times over the past few years.

I think the Me Too moment was a bit like that, pointing a finger at a movie producer or an actor, and then boom, his career is gone, and everyone gets off on denouncing him as a pervert or an evil person. We've seen it with someone like J.K. Rowling, whose great sin, of course, is to question some aspects of transgenderism, while also, by the way,

defending the right of trans people to exist, and to live freely, but because she questions aspects of transgenderism, she must be destroyed. She's subjected to death threats, violent misogyny, people are sending her photographs of their penises, I mean, really vile misogynistic stuff. She's on Tinder as well then. Simply because she expressed an opinion that's not popular. And we've seen it in relation to Black Lives Matter as well. anyone who says, of course Black Lives Matter, everyone knows that Black Lives Matter as much as any other life,

but Black Lives Matter the movement is problematic and has some dodgy, eccentric views. Anyone who says that is shut down and demonised and called racist. So we've seen a lot of that over the past few years where there is this kind of incredibly intolerant attitude towards anyone who dares to speak out or dares to question. contemporary orthodoxies. And I've seen some of that myself when I've spoken on campuses, for example, at Oxford and other places where people will protest. The last time I spoke at Oxford, there was a protest, there was a gathering of about 50 people. They'd all made placards. I mean, they must have literally gathered in a room to make placards. And I remember thinking, your students at Oxford, you've surely got better things to do than make placards,

calling me evil and a hate speech, whatever they were saying. But people really devote themselves to this idea that anyone who disagrees with them or anyone who offends them, not only are you wrong, but you are evil and therefore you must be destroyed. I want to go back to a society in which you just thought those people were wrong. That was great, you know, when you thought, are that person saying something I disagree with? They're wrong. I'm going to argue with them. We're going to have a debate. Instead, what happens now is you hear someone saying something you disapprove off or disagree with, and you assume that they are the devil incarnate. it, that they are a danger to you, they will pollute your soul, they will erase you. Erasure is the kind of contemporary woke word. And so their words come to be seen as violent instruments in and off themselves. And therefore this person, this dangerous person with his violent opinions,

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That's martiesminitminotations.com. Might as well get a B-Dadeau while you're there. Do you not think the problem as well is that there are narratives, whether it's a Black Lives Matter narrative, or the lockdown narrative, and you have to swallow all of the ideas, all of the narrative. And if you don't, if you go,

well, I agree with this and I agree with that, that's not enough. You have to adhere to every single letter of their particular ideal law. Yeah, there's a huge expectation of conformism these days. And you have to conform to every single thing that these groups and individuals say. And if you don't, then you're in trouble.

And that's why I thought the incident of the Millwall fans booing as their players took the knee, in the Millwall v Derby game. I thought that was so interesting because to me, the most interesting thing about that was the response to it. So the booing itself was a relatively minor incident.

It wasn't all Millwall fans. It was a relatively small number of them. It's the kind of thing that happens at football. They boo, they chant, they say offensive things, that's what happens at football. But the response to it was staggering. You had this instant response

from the sports authorities, from the middle-class media, from the Twitterati, all these wings off establishment thinking just instantly said this is utterly unacceptable. These people are evil. We should find out who they are so that they can be banned from football. You know, all this stuff was coming out.

And that really spoke to how intense the conformist moment is. Anyone who deviates in any way whatsoever from what is considered to be the correct, way of thinking is in trouble. And that's the culture we live in. And you're right, you have to buy into the entire narrative or you will get screwed over by the new authoritarian. And transgenderism is a good example of this. There are, for example, there are lots of feminists out there who say, of course, trans people have the right to exist, they have the right to refer to themselves, how they choose, they have to write to wear what they want, they have the right to have a nice life

like everyone else. But I don't think a biological male should be allowed into a woman's changing room because there might be a 14-year-old girl and she doesn't need to see a penis, right? So they will say something like that. So they're questioning one aspect of it, which is the idea that you instantly become a woman by declaring it and then you instantly should enjoy access to all women's areas. They're questioning that one aspect of transgenderism and people come down on them like a ton of bricks. That is seen as completely unacceptable and the only option for people who raise those kinds of questions is to be shamed and harassed and destroyed. Well, we've seen it with Deborah Soh, who's a former guest of the show who's written a book

that covers this issue, people attacking her trying to get her book cancelled. And Abigail Shreier, of course, as well, who will hopefully be coming on the show soon. Again, a book being taken down, the publisher being put under all of this stuff. But let's come back to the BLM thing, because I think that that was very interesting, particularly with this booing incident, because it's interesting to me that there is no logic being applied to it, because we have had campaigns to kick races matter for a long time,

which were universally supported, kick it out, etc. Those campaigns did not see any pushback. They weren't booed, and yet people are booed. Maybe in Eastern Europe, mate. Yeah, that's how we do it. But in the UK, I mean, if you look at when a British team travels abroad, that tends to be where the racism from the fans happens. Now, I'm not saying there is no racism in British football. Of course there is. But the work to kick that out had universal support is my point, right? And yet when people choose to boo the kneeling, which is a very specific thing that is important to talk about, no one says that. It's automatically racism, automatically. And I see people.

now trying to present that kneeling is done for racial equality. Well, I mean, we've talked about BLM quite a long time. A lot of people now understand that there's an agenda behind that organization that goes way beyond that. And yet those very same people are now on Twitter saying it's racism. And I just, I don't understand how there is such a degree of conformity. And you're now seeing, I think there was booing at other games, which was. muted, so they're literally pretending that it didn't happen. Yeah. And it's, I think that raises a really important question because I think the great

tragedy of the taking the knee stuff in British football over the past few months, I mean, if you watch football, obviously you couldn't go to a game for, I don't know, five or six months, you had to watch it on TV. And if you watched a football game on TV, it was extraordinary. There were, they constantly flashed up anti-raised. messages on TV screens. Everyone was taking the knee. There was all these lectures from sports broadcasters about the problem of racism.

And I think a lot of football fans just thought, hold on, why are we being lectured? More than anyone else. This wasn't a key feature of rugby games. It wasn't a key feature of other sports. It was really central to football because that's the mass sport. That's the sports that is enjoyed by the most people.

And, you know, mostly by working class people, let's not be around the bush. And I think people felt like they were being lectured to about things that they actually are very familiar with, which is that racism is a bad thing, and it's good not to be racist. And I think the real tragedy here is that, of course,

there was terrible racism in British football in the 70s and 80s. Banana's being thrown onto the pitch. Black players getting a huge amount of flack. That stuff has almost completely fizzled out. It didn't actually fizzle out because some woke person or some guardianist or some politician said, it's bad to be racist. It fizzled out because the more that people mingled in crowds of thousands, and the more they got to know these players who happened to be black, and the more they got to know black fans and white fans, etc.,

the more they realized, look, we're all in this together, that's how it works. That's the best way to tackle the scourge of racism, is to trust ordinary people to discover for themselves through the progeny, of solidarity, that racism is a really stupid thing. And that is what happened in football. And football, I think, British football is now a really good example. It's a really great success story in terms of challenging racism, because there's far less racism than there was 30 or 40 years ago. 30% of professional players are black. Kids worship them. Fans cheer them all the time. I'm sure the Millwall fans who booed taking the knee have cheered black players

scoring a goal many, many times. Well, the player of the year last year is black. That's right. So football is a very good example of how colour means less and less to people. It might have taken a long time to get there, but we got there and it's fantastic. And, you know, when you hear guardianistas, for example, slagging off football for being this cess bit of racism, you think, hold on, are 30% of columnists at the Guardian Black? I don't think so. So who are they to lecture football, which provides extraordinary opportunities to working class black men, more than any other profession in this country? So football had got to this stage of being post, largely, predominantly post-racial. And then along come the BLM crew, and along comes this critical race theory

and this notion that you have to lecture football fans every single week about the scourge of racism and white privilege, black victimhood. And what the elites were doing was reintroducing racial thinking into football after it had been successfully expelled by fans and players and people and campaigners. That's the great tragedy here. So I think there's something very positive in fans booing, taking the need, because I think what they're really saying is, we don't want this politics in our game.

We came here to watch a game of football, not for a sermon about critical race theory. And so I think the Millwall fans, who knows what their motivation was, we can't see into their souls, but there's something positive in what they did. And it's more positive, in my view, than the establishment idea that we've got to infect football with racial thinking, because that's the kind of thing we were trying to overcome for the past 30 years. I think there's two things that we can sum up about that. There's not many racist football fans,

but if they want to be cured of their racism, just watch an all-white England team. That'll do it. That'll do it. You'll be like, no, no, we need diversity. But number two, don't you think the problem is, is that we can't legitimately criticize BLM? We can't.

The moment you do that, you get slammed or whatever else. Well, you can, you're not allowed to, do you mean? Yeah, exactly, you're not allowed to. So, by them booing, it's a sign of them showing their dissatisfaction, which again needs to be eradicated. Doesn't it show that we simply can't voice our criticisms of this particular organisation, whichever way you choose to do it?

And our political party, by the way. Yes. So, as many people have pointed out, the idea that you have to stand there and dutifully bow your head as a political organisation is essentially put onto a football pitch. It's ridiculous. And many people have said,

would you say the same for UKIP? If there was a weekly celebration of UKIP before every football match, people would say that's a bad idea. I would say that's a bad idea. But of course, when it comes to BLM, they make all these kinds of allowances. Yes, it's very difficult to criticize Black Lives Matter. And partly it's because of the name of the group, Black Lives Matter, you know, who, no one disagrees with that, apart from a handful of bovine idiots, probably, and white national. and ethno-nationalists who are, in my view, a vanishingly small group of people, but they probably disagree with it.

The vast majority of society agrees black lives matter. In fact, when I hear these kind of, you know, upper middle class white liberals screaming, Black Lives Matter, I always think to myself, what, have you just figured this out? The rest of us have known this for a very, very long time. So the slogan makes it difficult to criticise it, but I think there's a great deal to criticize because Black Lives Matter the movement, capital B, capital L, capital M, is an ideological movement, which is anti-police, anti-family, has got some very eccentric views that the majority of people do not share, including the majority of black people in places like the US and the UK,

who think family is very important, who want good policing of their areas. They don't support defund the police, especially if they live in poorer areas where policing is very important. So those views are not shared by the majority of the public, and the public has the right to register their disapproval of those political views. That's your right in a democratic society, and that includes football games. If politicians come along to football games, and BLM is essentially a new form of politician, and makes a statement or makes a spectacle and tells you to think in a particular way, you have the right to say, I don't accept this, I don't want to listen to this, I don't want this to hijack my sport. So I think the BLM football story actually points to an incredibly

important divide that exists between the elites and ordinary people. And for the elites, it seems perfectly natural that football players should bow down about a killing that took place 4,000 miles away seven months ago, whereas for huge numbers of ordinary people, that doesn't make sense. And that chasm-sized difference between the rulers of society and the people who live in society, I think, is the most interesting story of 2020. That is a very interesting story, and it's not just the story of 2020. I mean, that has been the motif for the last four years, the fact that essentially the Lee was shocked in 2016, as I was. Maybe I'm a member of the Lee.

Never thought of myself that way. Maybe not. But I was shocked by some of the things that happened that year. But my response was to sort of try and educate myself about why people felt the way they felt. And that has been continuing through. But I think a lot of it is also a response to this sort of completely meaningless virtue signaling that we now see. because three people were shot and killed by the police in this country this year and last year. So the issue of police murdering unarmed black people by shooting them just doesn't exist in this country.

And yet every single football club is doing this. And I think that disconnect seems to me like that's going to continue to get worse because, you know, when the northern clubs start playing at home, you're going to start to see a lot more working class people at football matches expressing their opinion. Absolutely. And I think you're right. The elites versus the people, I know that's a slightly crude way of putting it, but that has been the story of the past four or five years, right from Brexit onwards, although Brexit was existed even before Brexit. I'm a huge Brexit supporter. Voting for Brexit was one of the highlights of my political life. So I'm very, very pro-Brexit. I think the EU, the European Union is a racist, neoliberal, anti-working-class institution. You can see that in the way it treats migrants from Africa who are basically left to die in the Mediterranean because the European Union is so determined to keep them out of Europe. You can see that in the way it destroyed the Greek working class, the way

intervened in Italy and Ireland and other countries that were struggling economically, which was essentially to punish working class people by enforcing new forms of austerity. So it's always completely bemused me why the left in this country support. the European Union. I think that's one of the great mysteries of modern politics. They didn't always, of course, if you look back to people like Tony Ben, Barbara Castle, Peter Shaw, these kind of huge Labour figures in the 70s and 80s who were passionately Eurosceptic. So I think what happened with Brexit was ordinary people saying, look, we reject this new form of elite governance. We reject technocracy. We reject the European Union. We want a more direct form of democracy.

we want more control over our lives. And I think that was a very positive thing for them to have said, but it completely blew up this divide that exists, which had always existed under the surface, but it kind of really brought it to the fore of political life, which is this divide between the political elites who come from a particular section of society and ordinary people who have very, very different views.

So that's been the thread that's run through this decade and will run through the next decade too. And on every issue, you can see that. You can see that on Brexit. You can see it on BLM. You can see it on woke issues more broadly. There is this extraordinary disconnect between the people who run society

and the people who live in society. And whether anything can be done about that or how those tensions will play out. I think that's one of the big questions of our time. Can anything be done about it? Is there any way to heal this to divide? I mean, that's the question, isn't it, really? I don't think it can be healed.

Thanks, Brendan. No, I think it's got to be had out. Yeah. And I'm very wary of words like consensus and compromise because it's always compromise in the favor of people who are quite powerful. Whenever people talk, it's always. Well, maybe the thing is, I think as well, I sort of winced when Francis said divide,

because I don't think it's a divide. It's something else. It's not like we were united and now we're divided. what has been exposed is that two groups of people never had the same views ever in the first place. They've always not seen eye to eye. The question is whether one has too much power of the other, which I think is what we're talking about. I think that's absolutely right. And I think it's pretty clear they do have too much power.

And this year has proven that they are telling us how many scotch eggs to eat. You know, this is insane. They're telling us to open our windows on Christmas Day if we have people over. old relatives over, open your windows, so, you know, what they'll catch hyper, hypothermia. You know, this is this incredible power they have to constantly tell us how we should be living, what we should be doing, and how we should be thinking, and what we're allowed to say. I mean, really incredible levels of governance over our consciences, our daily behavior, our social lives, our intimate lives.

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dot com. That's www. dot print it big 3D.com. I'm going to get Francis a new weapon. I like weapons. Now, a lot of people

would have said, Brendan, look, I may not like or agree with Boris Johnson, but you know, 2019, end of the year, he got a huge majority by appealing to precisely the sort of people that you're talking about and not being represented

and not having their voice heard. He said he's going to get Brexit done. I think he sort of, lifted the skirt a little bit on cultural issues as well, didn't he flat, you know. So there was a lot of that. And I find it a very strange position as someone who used to vote for the liberal Democrats, that I've remained exactly where I've always been in politics. And somehow the whole cultural spectrum, I'm not talking about economy, but culturally, politics has moved all the way to the left. And I voted conservative for the first time in my life last time. And now I'm watching Boris Johnson

driving past me back towards the Greens, seemingly. So the people who had hopes that Boris Johnson would be representing their views, do you think they were mistaken? I think they will be disappointed. I think they were right to vote in the way they did. I voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 as well. For me, it was the second time I'd ever voted Conservative. I voted for Treason May as well.

I really regret having done that. I mean, there's an exclusive. Trees amaze. That'll be the title of the episode. Brendan O'Neill. I vote. Confession. No, we're going to take out the word voted and put in support.

I support Theresa May. But, you know, Trisa May, their manifesto in 2017 was very positive. On two issues in particular, it said we will do a proper Brexit, which I thought was very important because people had voted for it. And they said they would not introduce the part of the Leveson inquiry that would have forced newspapers and magazines to sign up to state regulations. So those are two issues that are very important to me, press freedom and democracy, and they promise to uphold both. Turns out they were not telling the whole truth. So I regretted doing that.

But then in 2019, I think the reason millions and millions of people, including vast numbers of working class labor voters in red wall areas, the reason they voted for Boris Johnson, it seems so clear cut to me. It's because the Labor Party stabbed them in the back. I mean, it really cannot be overstated how badly the Labour Party has treated the working classes of this country. They treat them like scum. I mean, they really do. And I think that's one of the most important political shifts in politics in this country over the past few decades has been the drift of the Labour Party away from the working classes towards becoming this kind of middle-class metropolitan machine, very woke, obsessed with issues that working class people don't really

care about. Not interested in the big economic questions off jobs and housing and the economy and people's power in the workplace and people's working conditions, all those things that Labour used to talk about. They're not interested in now in any real way. They're obsessed with ridiculous cultural, identitarian issues. And Labor, I think, over the past few years, has betrayed the working classes to a staggering degree. They turn their back. They turn their back, on the vote for Brexit, even though huge numbers of Labour supporters voted for Brexit, and even though the more working class you were, the more likely you were to have voted for Brexit, they, I think, betrayed Jewish people by allowing anti-Semitism to run riot in the party and

failing to get a handle on it. And they turned their backs on all the people who, in various ways, had been the grassroots founding members of that party. So to me, it made. absolute perfect sense that working class voters looked at the Labour Party and said, and we're not voted for you because you hate us. So we're going to take a gamble on this guy, this posh, foppish, eaten graduate who has nothing in common with us, but at least he says he will respect our democratic vote for Brexit. And I think that really spoke to how seriously ordinary people take the issue of democracy, you know, because all they have is the vote. They don't have TV shows like you guys have.

They don't have newspaper columns. They don't have a seat in the House of Lords. It's nice of Brendan to call this a TV show. Rather than two mediocre successful comedians doing something in someone else's bedroom. Well, they don't even have that, right? They don't have... Yeah, no, it's in dispute.

Now I pity that. They don't have anything like that. But they have something really important, which is... It's a very good point, Brendan. We're just joking. Yeah. You're absolutely right. have the vote. They can't call up the junior minister for whatever and dip in. They can't do anything

like that. And so, and that's, I mean, the past few years have been such an extraordinary reminder of how important the right to vote is. Because it is really the, it's the great equalizer, right? The day on which you vote is the day in which the woman who cleans Richard Branson's office has the same power as Richard Branson to determine the future of this country. And that's what happened in June 2016. Vast numbers of people said, right, the future of this country is outside of the European Union as an independent democratic nation. And that, I think, gave people a real sense of power that they were able to say that. So the fact that the Labour Party, the supposedly working class party,

turned its back on that and argued for a second referendum, which, by the way, let's not forget what a second referendum would have entailed. It would have entailed voiding the largest democratic vote in the history of this country. It would have entailed putting into the dustbin. 17.4 million votes, which would have been unprecedented in the history of this country or any serious democracy. The fact that the Labour Party was knocking on people's doors and saying, we are going to throw your vote in the bin, if you vote for us and get us into government, the least surprising thing in the political history of this country is that the working

classes revolted against the Labour Party, because the Labour Party was threatening to take away from them the only thing they have, which is the right to vote. So they invested their hopes and aspirations for their democratic rights in Boris Johnson. And I think initially he responded very well to that and he expressed real gratitude. And he said, he did that speech shortly after his victory in which he said, listen, I know you've lent me your vote and I really appreciate that and I'll do my best. But as you say, he's losing his way. And he's floating back towards. elite consensus opinion, which is not the way that red war voters think. It's not the way that most people think. So Boris, he's been dragged one way by the majority of society who are saying

we want democracy, we want less of this woke nonsense, we want to get back on the straight and narrow. But he's been dragged in another way by his bloody fiancé and all these other influences around him who are saying, let's be more woke, let's be more green, let's be more right on. That's a really important tussle, I think, in Britain right now. And the problem is as well is that if Johnson goes the way he's going, the way he's going, the way we all think he's going to go, Labour already over there, that leaves a huge sway of the electorate without someone to vote for, which is incredibly dangerous, isn't it? Really dangerous, really worrying, a real indictment of the state of politics in this country. And, you know, one of the depressing things is that whoever you vote for, you end up with wokeness.

Right? That's what's really depressing, especially if Boris goes further and further down this route. People will say, well, whoever I vote for, we end up with a woke agenda, a green agenda, we end up with all this stuff about a green New Deal, instead of what people really want to talk about, which is the creation of new forms of industry, new jobs, new mechanisms for people to express themselves, new forms of democracy, all that kind of stuff that, from my experience anyway, when I was, when I've traveled around the country over the past few years talking to, Brexit voters in particular, that's the kind of thing they want. And they will be thinking, who is going to make the argument for these things? And at the moment, there's nobody. And I think it seems increasingly, it seems to me that Boris Johnson in late 2019 was a bit of a performance. It was a bit of an act.

It was him saying, I'm Mr. Brexit, and I'm Mr. British traditions, and I'm not going to put up with all this kind of green, woke nonsense. It was an act, and a lot of us fell for it. And I think if it becomes clearer and clearer that he's not going to make good on those promises, that he's not going to get Brexit done in a meaningful way, that he's not going to hold back the tide of chattering class nonsense, that he's not actually going to stand up for British history and values and things that people think are important.

If it turns out and becomes clearer and clearer that he's not going to do all that, then I think people have no choice but to punish him at the ballot. box, but then that keeps open. By voting for Kirsta. That's the thing. The question is how you do that. And I think one way you might do that is by not voting. And that would be depressing because there's been a real sense of democratic engagement over the past few years. People have felt democratically alive. And if you look at, for example, the polls that were taken around the time of the EU referendum, people were asked, how are you making up your mind on how to vote in the EU referendum? And People were saying things like we're having discussions in the workplace.

I'm talking to my friends and family. We've had discussions in the pub. And much further down the list was, I'm listening to politicians, I'm reading the media. At the top of the list was people saying, I'm talking to my neighbours and my family and my community. So there was a real sense of democratic momentum. And if that is undermined or allowed to die because the political establishment is incapable and unwilling to make it a real. real thing, I think that would be a great tragedy. But again, it's dangerous because you have these whole swathes of people. So what do we do? Do we need a third party? Well, do we class

the Lib Dems as a partner? No, no, but we've, there've been attempts, right? You've got heritage, remain reform, reflect. Like, I mean, they all begin with art. Yeah, yeah. Retrain. Retrain, like, yeah. So we've got a lot of these parties, but are they ever going to be anything useful, are they? And will they ever challenge a duopoly that we have in this country? See, these are the big questions facing us, and it's unclear what the answers are. I mean, my view of all these new parties is led a thousand flowers bloom, you know, the more the merrier. Let's go out there, let's see what happens. I think a few of them need to kind of take themselves a bit more seriously and recognize what they're up against, which is this extraordinarily

powerful duopoly and a pretty staid, rigid electoral system. I do think we need electoral reform. I know that sounds a bit Caroline Lucas, but I do think we need proportional representation in this country. I never thought I'd say that because it's such a middle-class obsession, and I don't like to go along with middle-class obsessions. But the good thing about, I think, proportional representation is that it would open the doorway to smaller parties. It would allow people, if people got a greater sense

that it was possible that you could intrude into the corridors of power because how many votes you got would reflect the power you eventually had, that would, I think, encourage more people to set up parties, to take themselves more seriously and really to go out and campaign.

At the moment, when you know that it's going to be Labor or the Conservatives, that's it, maybe a co-eastern, every now and then, there isn't that real drive to try something new. And instead, we all find ourselves hoping that Boris will do everything for us, or alternatively, I'm sure some people, some people hope that Keir Stahmer will do everything they want him to do. So you end up investing your hope in leaders you don't really believe in, whereas I think a more, a fairer electoral system would allow people to experiment a bit more. I think that's definitely something that's got to happen.

But I think there are two things that really need to happen. Firstly, we've got to start taking democracy seriously, start taking people's voices seriously, stop writing people off just because they didn't go to Oxford, just because they don't read The Guardian, just because they live in the north and support Brexit. The way in which those people are written off, it really makes me feel nauseous.

That's the first thing we've got to stop doing. We've got to really start taking people's democratic rights seriously. And the second thing is I think we need electoral reform, root and branch electoral reform. We need proportional representation. We need to abolish the House of Lords, which I think is a complete blight on political life in this country. We need to properly remove ourselves from the European Union in order to be a mature democracy once again. And we need to fix these constitutional electoral issues in order to liberate political life and make it fairer and more reflective. of public opinion. So that's the challenge we face.

It's not impossible. If there was a party that promised to hold a referendum on abolishing the House of Lords and a referendum on proportional representation, I would be on the streets every day campaigning for it because I think those are such important steps towards a more democratic future. So any party that takes hold of those two questions in particular,

I think would win a lot of support because people recognise there's a layer we've got to break through before we can start having those really free and open democratic debates. So you won't vote for Black Lives Matter then, Brendan. We'll not be thinking of BLM. Well, Brandon, you mentioned, obviously,

we talk about woke stuff a lot on the show, but there's been a very interesting development in the last couple of weeks, which opened my eyes to the extent of the institution takeover of this worldview, which is eaten. I mean, yes, I can understand that SOAS awoke. I can understand the kids at schools, posh, sort of, I don't know, middle-class schools.

B-Dales would be the best example. Which one? B-Dales. I haven't even heard of it. It's a very progressive artsy school. Is it? Yeah. How do you know that, mate?

Because I applied to teach her and they can't be there. They just took one look at you. No, thank you. Correctly, is it? So you can understand all of that. But Eton is supposed to be this crusty old institution that indoctrinate its kids to be conservative prime ministers. And yet here they are not only being quite woke, it turns out,

but actually also being extremely contrary to the values of freedom of expression, which you would have thought an institution like that would inculcate in its pupils. So I mean, I hate to say this, but if Eton is woke, I think we're fucked, don't we? Yes, I completely agree. If Eaton falls, we're finished. Brendan O'Neill had never been expected to say that. And I think that's true. I say that as someone who, I think every kid in this country should have an Eton standard of education. I've spoken to Eaton twice, so they weren't always woke. They used to let riffraff like me in to speak. I've spoken to the students there twice over the past few years. I've mainly spoken on the issue of freedom of speech.

Eaton is this unbelievable place. It's like a super posh university, but for school children. As soon as you go in, you know that it's a place devoted singularly to knowledge and education. You don't get the same vibe. Because the one thing I always say, I say no to lots of things, but I always say yes to speaking at schools, because I think everyone has a bit of a responsibility to assist in education in whatever way they can. So, but when I speak at other schools, you don't get the same vibe at all.

You know, they're too trendy or there's discipline issues or whatever it might be. Brendan Arneill destroys Harold and facts. So it's like, so there's something incredibly admirable about Eton, educationally speaking. Sadly, it's only available to very, very rich people. And as you say, it's the school that's produced most prime minister. It's the school that produces military leaders. It's the school that has produced the people who, for a period of time, were the backbone of this country.

And if that school becomes woke and censorious and sees it's the young men who go there has been so weak and lily-livered that they cannot cope with a supposedly incorrect idea or a disagreeable idea, that's really problematic. A friend of mine said it would, it's like the Vatican suddenly becoming atheist. I mean, it really is like something's gone horribly wrong. And so I think that's very significant. I think this year there have been a lot of significant moments like that when you had the Natural History Museum saying,

we're not sure about Darwin anymore. And you think, Darwin, you know, arguably the most important scientific figure in history. And the Natural History Museum's like, well, he went on a bit of colonial. One of his research projects was facilitated by a colonial ship, and therefore he's a questionable figure. Or you had the British Museum hiding the bust of its founder because he had links with slavery in some form or other.

You've had this real outburst of self-loathing, institutional self-loathing in Britain, where the institutions, many of which were founded during the Enlightenment were the express aim of expanding human knowledge, expanding our understanding of the world and our place within it. The British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the British Library, I mean, these great institutions which are admired across the globe because they really are about consolidating and promoting knowledge.

When institutions like that are acting in this shame-faced way and saying, well, we're actually pretty disgusting because the guy who founded us 350 years ago was not very nice, and some of our exhibits were taken from Africa 200 years ago, and just behaving in this kind of self-flagellating way, then I think that's really important to recognize because it suggests that wokeness is not simply a problem of irritating blue-haired 21-year-olds

censoring you from going to campus it's a problem that actually infects the upper echelons of society who've lost faith in themselves and lost faith in the project of modernity in essence and lost faith in the values of the Enlightenment and are now essentially saying

we are horrible institutions, you probably shouldn't come here, you won't, you won't learn much and you might be offended. And when Eaton is doing that and all these museums and all these libraries, and when people like Boris Johnson are failing to stand up and say, stop being so embarrassed, defend your traditions, defend your history, promote your virtues and your values, he's not doing that, he's just kind of skulked off into Downing Street, then you know there's a real problem in British society. And that's something that we really have to hold the line against. We have to hold the line against this notion that Britain is an inescapably evil nation,

founded in the sins of imperialism and colonialism, and everything we do is horrible. That's something it's really worth challenging, because actually, over the past 350 years in particular, Britain has given rise to some of the most wonderful epoch-defying ideals of all time in terms of the struggles for freedom, the struggles for democracy, and the struggles for enlightenment and understanding the world. And if we're not going to stand up for that, what are we going to stand up for? And it's also as well the fact that it always amazes me the work movement in that it's blind spots.

So you've got people at Eton talking about social justice. How much does it cost to go to Eton? You know, it's people marching for... 41.5 grand a year. 41 and a half grand a year whilst talking about social justice. It's people on a Black Lives Matter march. But it was the third anniversary of Grenfell. No one talked about that.

That's a far more important social justice issue in this country than the murder of some poor unfortunate 4,000 miles away. The thing that really brought that point home to me this year was the events in France, actually, because you had the beheading of Samuel Patti. Virtually no one in the UK talked about it. None of our government officials made a statement. teaching unions very reluctantly. I think Prittipatel eventually did, just to be accurate.

Yeah, so Patel eventually did. But there was no big outcry. There was no big outcry. The teaching unions, after a bit of pressure, eventually made these kind of begrudging statements, which had none of the passion of the statements they made in relation to George Floyd, even though Patti was a schoolteacher and was beheaded in broad daylight for the crime of teaching his children about freedom of speech. And this is in the country that's next door to us. This is in our national. neighboring country 30 miles away, whereas George Floyd was killed 4,000 miles away. So that disconnect, I thought, was really interesting. And the thing that I found most shocking this year, I was thinking about this the other day. The bishops in this country got more angry about the

internal market bill than they did about the murder of three Christians and Nice. These were three Christians the week after Samuel Patti was killed, three people in a church and knees who were killed, one was almost beheaded for the crime of being Christians by this Islamist radical. Nothing from our bishops. They were too busy writing letters to the financial time saying the internal market bill is very bad and we should stay in the European Union. And you just think something's gone horribly wrong here. And then you have the Vicar of Dibley, the Christmas special of the Vicar of Dibli. She, of course, Dawn French's vicar is going to take the knee and talk about George Floyd, and I just keep thinking, okay, what about that young mother of three who was

stabbed to death in a church and niece because she's a Christian? Why, the question I have is, why hasn't that connected with us more? And that's another issue about the double standards in this year and the hypocrisies of 2020 and the extent to which the woke agenda dominates things so much now that we all have to bow down literally to the ideology of American wokeness because BLM is essentially an American import. But when these gruesome crimes happen in a country right next door to us, which Britain and France are the most long-standing frenemies in history, we don't say anything.

We don't talk about it. No one takes the knee. No one blacks out their Instagram page for these people. No one even talked about it more than a day after it happened. So that double standard, I think, really demonstrates the depth of the problem we face. You were talking earlier about narratives. The narrative is so clearly written by people who have an agenda. And until we start to push another narrative, one which takes these things seriously,

one which takes freedom of speech seriously, one which thinks it's really important to talk about a situation where people are beheaded for defending freedom of speech, one which says football fans must have the right to boo political ideologies and one which says people should be free to express themselves in any way they choose until we start to really successfully push that narrative I think we're going to face a really uphill struggle it's a good point and very well made but before we ask you a last question I've got one question to us as well which is we're talking about narratives

but we're seeing a whole new narrative being constructed in front of us which is the coronavirus vaccine where people who say, I'm not so sure about this. Not that COVID doesn't exist, not that vaccines don't work, or that they're a legitimate tool, which they are for fighting disease, the moment they say,

I'm not sure about this. Because it's been developed in record time, because it uses new technology. Because we don't know what the long-term effects of this vaccine potentially are. And because the virus is not as dangerous as polio, measles or one of these diseases that have been successfully eradicated through vaccination.

Why is... Just theoretic, I'm not saying... Just theoretic, I'm not saying, you know. You love it. You love a bit of... I was going to say Owen Jones. It's not Owen Jones. It's, uh...

Let's not talk about my personal life, mate. But I'm taking Sputnik 5, mate. Of course you are, patriotic to the core. But why is it that immediately... Anti-vaxxia? All of these epithets get hurled. You know, you've seen as somehow someone who is just ridiculous,

anti-science, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. I think that is one of the important narratives. And there's the way in which any kind of discussion about the vaccine is being shut down, I find really worrying. I say this to someone who's very pro-vaccination. I think vaccinations historically have been one of mankind's greatest breakthroughs. They've saved millions upon millions of lives. And it's testament to human ingenuity that vaccines exist.

So I'm very pro-vaccine. I'm very happy to take the COVID vaccine. I'm actually looking forward to it, especially if I get a freedom pass, which means I can go to the pub whenever I want. I don't think freedom passes are a good idea, but I would like to get one if that's the option. But at the same time,

I do think the attempt to demonize and clamp down on anyone who raises any questions at all is really worrying and will backfire. Because I think one of the issues with the anti-vaxxer movement, like the crankier side of the movement, is that they are incredibly suspicious of authority. They're often sometimes, actually, they're driven by conspiracy theories

and the sense that the man is out to get us and inject us with all these poisons. And censorship will inflame that sensibility because it will make them think, what are they trying to hide? When YouTube is censoring us and the government is calling us evil and everyone is saying,

we're going to destroy human life as we know it, they're out to get us. What are they trying to hide? So I think that kind of censorious approach will inflame the more conspiratorial side of anti-vaxxers. The thing that I find really funny about all of this, funny as in depressing, is, you know... Very on brand.

Who has been primarily responsible for promoting anti-vacid theories over the past 15 or 20 years? It's been establishment figures. If you go back to the MMR scandal, the idea that taking the MMR vaccine causes autism, That was promoted by the Lancet magazine. That was promoted by writers for the Guardian.

There were, you know, lovy-dovey TV dramas about Andrew Wakefield, who was the doctor who came up with this nonsense idea that the MMR vaccine causes autism. That anti-vaccine idea, that sense that the powers that be want to poison us with all these horrible injections, that comes from the chattering classes fundamentally. That's where it originated over the. the past 20 or 25 years. And so when they now turn around and say to some bloke on the internet, how dare you say this, you should be censored and we're going to demonise you. That to me just doesn't add up. My view is that I'm a free speech fundamentalist. I think we should be able to say

anything we want. And I think my take is that I'm going to defend the vaccine, especially once we have more information, and I'm going to defend to the hilt the right of people to say the vaccine is wrong, the vaccine is full of poisons, the vaccine is evil, because if we are serious about freedom of speech, we have to defend it even for people who say things that are incorrect, even for people who say things that are potentially dangerous or concerning or worrying, because freedom of speech is not just about the freedom of the person speaking, it's also about the freedom of the people who are listening, it's about the freedom of the audience to use their mental moral faculties and to decide for themselves. That's the great thing about freedom of speech.

It treats us as adults. We get to decide. We get to weigh things up. We get to exercise moral judgment, whereas censorship turns us into children whose eyes and ears are covered because the authorities know better. So I think the anti-vaxxer stuff is going to be a real test for people's commitment to freedom of speech. And we have got to defend the right of people to dismiss the vaccine, to demonize the vaccine, and to say it's wrong to take the vaccine. That's how serious we have to be about freedom of speech. This puts a very nice bow on the whole conversation, because if you remember when we started, you were talking about the culture of freedom being eroded.

And it's fascinating. We were talking before you got here about our interview with Dr. Suchari Bakhti, which is now approaching a million views, I think now. And he's skeptical of lockdowns. He didn't think the vaccine was particularly necessary. you know, controversial views on the issue, but he's a former chair of medical microbiology at a major Germany university. He's not a random guy off the internet. But in any case, the reason we were talking about it is that if you look at the comments under it that we get on a daily

basis, they're literally interchangeable comments from both sides. People who don't like him saying what he said, say, this should be taken down. And the people who appreciate his point of you say, I can't believe this has not been taken down. So the expectation now is that controversial ideas will be censored. And it's incredible. But we're running out of time. So in lieu of asking our final question, let me ask you a question that maybe it may inject a little positivity into the conversation finally, which is, I've always thought that intersectionality, workness, whatever you call it, would be destroyed by the trans issue. Because you can have all your theoretical ideas in your head.

The moment you start giving hormones to children and chopping their breasts off, that's when ordinary people are going to wake up and go, hold on a second. And I've been saying there's going to be a wave of detransitioners who are going to break this whole thing apart. And we've seen now with the Kira Bell case that I feel starting to happen. Do you think that is the beginning of something, or are you, optimistic about that? No, I am quite optimistic, actually. I share your optimism on that. I thought the Kira Bell case was incredibly important. I think she's a very brave young woman who's getting

a lot of flack simply because she regrets her decision when she was a teenager to transition to male. And then she took the NHS to court for prescribing puberty blockers to very, very young people. And I thought her victory in that court case was really important and demonstrated that individuals when they club together, she had lots of support, can achieve really important things. I think you're right. I think the trans issue is the thing that will explode a lot of this. I keep thinking, I'm hoping, if humanity comes to its senses, in 25 years' time, I can imagine us looking back on the early 21st century and thinking, hold on, we offered medical correction to lesbians, which is essentially what's happening with young women.

who are gay, who are being told maybe you're a man, maybe you should take these drugs, maybe you should mutilate your body. I think in the future we'll look back and say, we offered medical treatment to lesbians. We told young gay boys, young gay men, that they might actually be women, and we castrated them.

And we allow bloke, people with penises, to go into domestic violence refuges, women's prisons, women's changing rooms. I trust that humanity has got enough sense to realize at some point that these are really, really bad things to do. And not only are they bad things to do for women and children and for gay people,

but they're bad things to do because fundamentally they're calling into question reason itself. Because what they are doing, they're saying that if you believe in biology, if you understand that there are two sexes, if you adhere to a traditional view of manhood and womanhood, if you believe there are mothers and fathers and that they play particular roles in children's lives, if you believe any of these things which have been established for thousands of years, you're a bad person, you're a transphobe, and you must be silenced.

So even to stand up for reason and science and tradition is now seen as a bad thing that you must be punished for. So I'm hoping the Kira Bell case will open the floodgates to a lot more common sense, or a lot more people having the guts to stand up and say what they already believe, which is that biology is important, reason is important, and the meaning of words is important. and we shouldn't allow all those things to be sacrificed at the altar of a pretty eccentric identity. All classic examples are big a trick. Brendan, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, where would be the best place to do that? Spiked. Read Spike, that's where I write, and I'm on Instagram. If you want to see Brendan's abs, head over there.

And thank you, as always, for watching. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode. or live stream. Always going out at 7pm UK time. Take care of guys and see you soon.