TRIGGERnometry - Brendan O'Neill on Free Speech, Identity Politics, Grenfell & Social Medi

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill discusses freedom of speech, identity politics, victimhood, the Grenfell tragedy, social media and Jeremy Corbyn with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Buy your car today on... Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. Welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constance and Kissing. And this is a show for you, if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts.

Here at our new studio, our amazing expert guest this week is Brendan O'Neill, who's the editor of Spiked Online. Brendan, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much. Well, it's great to have you here. You are known, in addition to your writing, of course, particularly for the free speech issue. issue that you focused on so much. People call your free speech absolutist. Yeah. Are you a free speech absolutist? Yes. What does that mean exactly? It means that I think freedom of speech is absolute and there should be no

restrictions on it whatsoever. No hate speech laws, I want to scrap all of those, no public order legislation that targets speech, no libel laws, I think there should be no restrictions whatsoever and the best response to speech that is wrong or dangerous or racist or horrible is always more. more speech, never censorship, never laws, never putting someone in prison. So I'm a free speech absolutist because I think freedom of speech should be completely unfettered and let loose on the world. So you think, for instance, it should be acceptable for somebody, for instance, an imam to be able to go up on a street corner,

stand on a palette and say homosexuals should be murdered, for instance, for their... Yes. Yes. Yes. And, um, and, um, I actually have defended imams who have horrible views about homosexuality or women or whatever else it might be, which a lot of free speech activists, they actually run out of steam when it comes to defending extreme Islamists. I definitely do, I think. Right, well, and they suddenly think, oh, I can't do that. But I think, obviously, there is such a thing as incitement to violence. And that's not a free speech issue from the point of view that if you are inciting violence,

you are conspiring in the commission of a crime. So that goes beyond freedom of speech, and then you are part of a criminal conspiracy. of some description. But I think even when it comes to incitement to violence, we have to be really specific because that has become a very misused term. I was really struck that the Metropolitan Police this week or last week, they were talking about drill videos on YouTube. Drill is the latest form of grime music, lots of young black kids listen to it in London and elsewhere. Very violent music kind of praises gangs and stabbing attacks and guns and so on. So it's, and people are very scared of it. It's like the new gangster rap scare, but in Britain instead of the US. And the police made this incredibly interesting statement where they said, we're taking down hundreds of these videos because we think they're dangerous. So I think that was an act of police censorship.

And they said, even if there is no obvious act of violence that has been incited by these videos, we can still say that these videos incite violence. I thought that was really interesting, because incitement to violence now means pretty much anything you want it to mean. It basically just means that you really hate this form of speech, whether it's a drill video, whether it's Jermaine Greer going to Cardiff University and arguing that trans people aren't real women. That's also described as incitement of violence. Pretty much any

form of speech can now be described as incitement to violence. So even there, I think we have to be very specific and I would like to see evidence that the speech in question directly contributed to an act of violence before I would be willing to sanction any form of punishment. for that speech. But what's interesting about that is, is that, that argument has always been with us. If you think about the Jamie Bulger killings, I mean, 20 or years ago, that was blamed on computer video games. If you think about the school students in Boulder, Colorado, they blamed it on Marilyn Manson.

Yeah. Do you think you can ever attribute, you know, an act of violence to a particular type of thought or, oh yeah, I think you can. I think, you know, Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon, was inspired to do-side by J.D. Salangar's Catcher in the Rye. He really genuinely thought that Catcher in the Rye was giving him a message to kill John Lennon. So you could argue that Catcher in the Rye caused the death of John Lennon. Or Charles Manson and his crazy family were inspired to kill all those people in Los Angeles by the White album.

I mean, they really genuinely believed, deep in their heart, that the White album by the Beatles contained all these messages. about race wars and the piggies in the capitalist society who needed to be slaughtered and so on. They really believe that and of course you know countless numbers of people have killed because they read something in the Bible or they believe something in the Quran. So it's unquestionable that ideas can encourage people to commit violent acts. It's unquestionable that some people will look at a piece of art or read a book or hear a song and think to themselves this work of art is telling me to do something really bad.

But if you were to organize society on the basis that that might happen, then you are basically creating a lunatic asylum in which all of us are punished on the basis that one or two crazy people might do something stupid after reading Catcher in the Rye or listening to the White album. And that would be a deeply unpleasant society because there's no end of cultural products or artistic things that could be said to inspire violence or hatefulness in one former,

another. So I, but my issue with media effects theory, which is this idea that video nasties cause mass killings or video games made the James Bulger murder happen, or in the modern version, because the left, the effects theory used to be very prominent on the right among kind of old Christian women and Mary White House types and very conservative, stiff people, now it's kind of shifted to the left and it's very much more often the left now that argues about. media effects theory and will say that lads mags if they're in shop on shop shelves will cause men to become rapacious and anti-women or violence against women in films will cause men to commit violence against women in real

life so the left has utterly embraced the media effects theory my problem with the media effects theory is that it presents all people as almost like animals who just look at something and then think I must act on that and that is a very demeaning view of the vast majority of human beings who actually are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and perfectly capable of making a decision about what they should do with their lives so I would be very wary of any justification of censorship that was made on the basis that we basically are monkey see monkey do and that we see something or hear something and then

immediately feel that we have to commit a violent act on the back of it but what about the France's specific example about the Imam right who's out on saying homosexuals must be stoned to death, for example. Is that incitement to violence? Not necessarily. There is an actual example of this, which was I got into a debate with Peter Tatchel about... We had him on the show a couple weeks ago. Right.

And I agree with him on many things, but one thing that we disagreed on very much about 10 or 15 years ago, was dance hall music from Jamaica, which has homophobic lyrics. And it includes things like... It says things like throw the gaze onto the fire and things like that, you know, so quite violent imagery. And Brighton, I think it was in Brighton, some clubs started to ban this music and then people were calling for a ban across Britain that it shouldn't be played in public, that you should even ban the sale of it potentially. And Peter Tatchell, although he's generally quite good on the freedom of speech question, was on the side of banning this music precisely because he said it's an incitement to violence. And I was against that on the basis that, to my mind, that wasn't a specific. enough example of incitement to violence. I think if you're in a club at two o'clock in the morning

and you're dancing and you're drunk and there's a song on the speaker over there and probably most of the lyrics are actually quite unintelligible because it's very loud and the music's thumping and you hear someone say throw gaze onto the fire or whatever the lyric was. If you then go out and do something like that, you have completely and utterly made a free choice. You've used your free will, you have decided to do this thing, this terrible thing, and to hold the music responsible for that, I think, is ridiculous and a complete cop-out and actually calls into question the very notion of free will. Well, in the music, I would totally agree with you, but what about their mom on the street

literally saying these people should be killed? Well, even there, the question comes back to how he's saying it, the context in which he's saying it and whether he's saying it about specific individuals. If he was on a street corner and he was pointing at a gay couple and saying these people need to be killed, that's not freedom of speech. That is an incitement to violence. Particularly if there was an atmosphere around him, say there were other radical Muslims listening to him and getting heated up. And he pointed at someone specific and said they deserve to die because they're gay. That's not a free speech issue. That is what I would call incitement to violence.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is infinitely better on the question of freedom of speech than any organization in Britain, has a very clear definition of incitement to violence, which is speech where you should know as a reasonable human being that there is a clear and present possibility that your words will cause violence. So if there, and I generally accept that definition of incitement to violence, if that imam was pointing at a specific people and there was a mob around him and they were getting angry

and being homophobic and everything else and he instructed them to do something and they did it, he could be held responsible alongside them for what happened. But if he's on a soapbox saying homosexuality is sinful and homosexuality should be put to death, that's different. That's the expression of a repugnant religious conviction. As opposed to a direct call for violence against specific people.

As opposed to a direct incitement specific people to attack specific people. And the reason I think that's important to hold up that distinction is because people have been arrested in Britain for saying homophobic things in public. A Christian preacher was arrested two or three years ago because he was on a soapbox in public. He didn't inside violence, but he said homosexuality is repugnant

and he quoted from the Book of Revelations and various other things. And some young gay couple walking past took offense and phoned the police and he was arrested and he was put in a prison cell for 19 hours. And then eventually the charges against him were dropped. The police decided in their infinite wisdom that he hadn't crossed the line into committing a crime.

But he was in a cell for 19 hours. I find it terrifying that in Britain, in the 21st century, you can be put into a jail cell for 19 hours, effectively, for reading from the Book of Revelations in public. I think that's the kind of tyrannical developments that we should be more concerned about rather than the possibility that an Imam will get up in public and say those things,

which actually strikes me as increasingly unlikely because not least because a few years ago when radical Muslims marched in public with placards saying behead critics of Islam or whatever, behead the blasphemers, a lot of them were arrested and punished, which I have a problem with, but that is what happened. And subsequent to that, there have been fewer of those violently imaged protests by radical Muslims. So you've talked about some of the things of where we are in Britain with free speech and also where you'd like to be, how you're, how you're, how you're, you're, how you're, you're going to be, how you're you see the world ideally. Where are we now? What's the reality of the free speech issue in Britain today? It's really in a bad state. We have we don't have freedom of speech in Britain. Now when you say that to people they say oh but I can generally say whatever I want. Yeah you can but not everyone else can and freedom of speech by its definition either extends to everyone

or extends to no one. So who is unable to speak now? Various people have been arrested for things that they said or questioned by the police for jokes that they made. There's the example of Count Dancula who was arrested and charged with a grossly offensive crime for getting his girlfriend's pug to do a Nazi salute, which is, I told that story in Brazil at a conference in Brazil a few weeks ago, and they couldn't believe this was happening. And that's a country not long out of actual dictatorship. Count Dancel is one example. There have been other examples a couple of weeks ago. No one wants to talk about this because it is deeply controversial. A man was arrested and charged with a crime for making.

an anti-Jewish speech in a Jewish era of London, Golders Green or Stamford Hill, I don't remember which one, clearly an anti-Semite. Alison Chablos was last week, she's a notorious Holocaust and I, a vile, vile, despicable woman who was a few years ago prevented from performing at Edinburgh because her songs were included references to the Holocaust being a sham and so on. She was found guilty last week, a few days of a few days of. ago off being grossly offensive online because she posted two songs on YouTube in which she denied the Holocaust. And that's a really significant case because Britain has always refused to criminalise Holocaust denial, which I think is the right thing to do. We should absolutely challenge

Holocaust denial. We should ridicule it. We should combat it with all the army of facts that demonstrate what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. But we shouldn't criminalize it. So because she couldn't be found guilty of Holocaust now, because that's not a crime in Britain, instead she was found guilty of being grossly offensive under the 2003 Communications Act, which basically means that this is an incredibly, Section 127 of this act, which says that if you post or say something grossly offensive online, you could be taken to call. I think that Section 127 is a despicable menace to freedom of speech and has been used in an incredibly promiscuous fashion to punish all sorts of,

people including Count Dantler and others who simply say things that some people find unpalatable or offensive or nauseating or wrong. So what's the state of free speech in Britain? The state of free speech in Britain is that we have actual laws that prevent you from saying certain things. We have actual people being arrested and fined for having said things that they believe to be true or having made jokes that people find offensive. And we have the police knocking on people's doors and telling them off the things that they said on Twitter. This actually happened. One example is the young guy in Newcastle, I think, who made a joke about the Glasgow lorry

disaster. Christmas a couple of years ago, a lorry spun out of control and killed six people in Glasgow on the high street. Someone made a joke on Twitter, which I won't repeat because it was really, actually was a horrible joke. The police went to his house and told him to stop saying these things online. So free speech is in a really poor way and people I think need to realize that and they need to realise fundamentally that if we don't have freedom of speech for all these people who we

might consider to be on the outskirts of acceptable thinking, then we don't have freedom of speech. We have licensed speech. We have a situation where you are allowed to say things so long as you don't offend someone in a position of authority. That's not freedom of speech, that's licensed speech. We're all now basically speaking on license. And if we cross a line, we could actually go to call.

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I don't want to hear people having the right to talk about beheading people who don't, who are unbelievers or apostates. What's wrong with that? It's wrong for two reasons. Firstly, it's wrong because however much you don't want to hear these things and I don't want to hear them either as it happens, some people believe them.

And I think it's always wrong to prevent people from saying what they believe. It's always important to remember that one man's hate speech is another man's deeply held moral conviction. Some people really believe as a deeply held moral conviction that the Holocaust didn't happen. I think they're Barmey. I think they are all racist. I think Holocaust and all is always driven by racism. I think they are, they twist facts or they make the facts up. I think they're crazy. I think they're deluded. But they really believe that. They build their whole lives around this moral conviction.

or to give a more mainstream example, there are some people, smaller numbers than in the past, but there are some people who think that gay sex is sinful and disgusting, and if you do it, you will literally burn in hell. They genuinely believe that. And if you punish people for what they genuinely believe, then you have entered into an actual Orwellian society. So, because who's to tell when the definition of an unacceptable

belief won't be expanded and won't at some point include what you believe or what I believe or what any of us believe. So that's the first problem. You should never stop people from saying what they think to be true even if you know that it's not true. And then the second reason that we should let them say these things is because the rest of us, the audience, the ordinary people, the public, needs to have the right to hear this stuff so that we can decide for ourselves whether it's good or bad, whether it's right or wrong, and how we might confront it. I think one of the worst problems with censorship is that it infantilises the public. It treats us as these children who have to have our ears and eyes covered by gracious people in positions of authority so that we never hear things that they've decided on our behalf are wrong or incorrect or offensive. So censorship has this incredibly corrosive, infantilizing impact across society where everyone is reduced to the level of a child.

And as a consequence, you're moral. and mental muscles get weaker and weaker because they're never called into use. You never have to use them to decide for yourself, to use your moral judgment and decide, okay, that idea is bullshit. And I know this because I've thought about it, I've talked to people about it, I've read about it, and I've investigated it. John Stuart Mill makes this point in On Liberty, which is probably the best thing ever written about freedom of speech.

He makes the point that if you are prevented from using your moral muscles, if you are prevented from hearing everything and making a judgment between these different things you hear, then you are basically not a human, you're an ape, and you're following orders, and you're being instructed on how to govern your way through life. So I would say censorship is bad for two reasons. Firstly, because it stops people from saying things that they think are true and good and interesting, even if most people think they're not. And even worse, it reduces the public to the level of infants or animals who have to be protected

from things they couldn't possibly understand. So it has an incredibly corrosive impact on public life itself. So I was actually going to move on from that. No, I was going to dig in a little bit more. Okay, you go for you, dig in a little bit more. Actually, it's interesting for me because I agree with you to a large extent, not fully, but to a large extent on the principle

around freedom of speech. But the difficulty, and Francis and I have talked with various guests about this, the difficulty that we have is free speech has become so, associated with right-wing politics, with the whole right now, that when you talk about the reason that we have a problem with free speech in this country is that a Holocaust denier couldn't go to Golders Green and do an anti-Holacourse denial speech or whatever, right? I kind of, I struggle to go, yeah, that's that's the cause I'm going to, you know, get behind, you know, I struggle. You don't say that in private, mate. You're bang on it. No, but you know what I mean? Like, in principle,

I totally agree with you, but the practical reality is that the people who are now being bandied about as these champions of free speech are horrible people with whom none of us would want to have anything to do with. I completely agree. And fighting. And I get it. I get that the idea of free speech is you fight for free speech for the person you despise because anything else isn't free speech. But it's so difficult, I think, particularly in the current climate, to go, yeah, well, these Holocaust deniers, they should be free to speak. Yeah, but I think you're right. You have to defend scum in order to defend freedom for everyone. And that's always been the way freedom of speech has worked. But the way I see it, when I defend freedom of speech for like the singing Holocaust denier who is recently convicted,

I see myself as not defending her, but defending us, ordinary people. Because what I'm saying is I trust people to be able to hear these things and to know that they're wrong. I trust people to be able to use their mental faculties and come to a, a good sensible decision. What the state is saying and what all these kind of supposedly left wing demanders of censorship are saying is they don't trust us. They don't

trust people. They think we're idiots. They think we're stupid. They think we're children and they must look after us. That's the dynamic that has to be challenged. It's not as if I'm on the street corner saying I really desperately want to hear this stupid woman's Holocaust denying songs. As it happens, I have watched them and they're dreadful

and she's an idiot and everything else and they're not even catchy. So it's not as if I'm out there because I'm so desperate to hear this stuff. But I am incredibly keen to defend the idea that the great thing about freedom of speech is that it creates a situation where ordinary people are trusted to make decisions for themselves. That's the main thing about it. And that means you have to defend awful people. H. L. Mencken, the great American journalist, made this point. He said, you have to defend scoundrels because laws of censorship and laws of authoritarianism always target scoundrels first.

And if you let them fall by the wayside, it could be you next. Thomas Payne made this argument. The great Thomas Payne, the English radical, probably my one hero in history, made the point that if you don't defend freedom for your enemy, then you set in motion a precedent that will one day come and bite you on the ass. He didn't say that. He said it in better English. And that still stands. That's still true.

That is still true. And as an example, in the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s, the left in Britain, having lost the plot and given up on freedom to such a great extent, would often argue for far-right marches to be banned and for far-right protests to be banned. And the government, because the government loves banning things, said, fine, we'll do it. Lo and behold, there were some occasions when left-wing activists said, OK, now we want to hold an anti-fascist march to show that we are really serious about this. And the government said, oh no, we think that will be disruptive as well.

Now, we've sorted out the situation for you, so go home, and they ban those demonstrations as well. If you demand, if you call for people to be censored, you haven't got a leg to stand on when someone comes to censor you. You haven't got a leg to stand on. And that's what these leftist censors don't understand. The reason you have to defend free speech for fascists and racist and homophobes and Islamists and everyone else is because you have to defend, freedom of speech for yourself and that's the thing they always forget I mean it's absolutely

I was going to say I've been criticised many times on the podcast I was saying it's fascinating but you know what it was I would disagree with you and I would ban that woman's comedy songs because I hate shit comedy and I've listened to too much of it and I would pan it immediately

and it was up to you half the comedy circle oh yeah I'm mate they've been the gula And I like the fact that you criticise. You said it was horrible, it was racist, and the worst thing, not even catching. Yeah, not catchy. But we'll move on a little bit now. I find it very, very interesting. Your point about, in particular, identity politics.

Would you be able to talk about identity politics, in particular what identity politics means to you? Identity politics means to me, it really means an abandonment of the ideals of universalism and the idea that what we use, share in common is more important than what differentiates us. And this is an idea as old as time. I mean, it's most clearly expressed, of course, by Martin Luther King and his dream of a future in which people would be judged according to their character rather than the color of their

skin. That, I think, is a pretty good progressive view of how we should live. But the left, recently, the faux left, the phony left, the bullshit left, or whatever we want to refer to it as, has completely abandoned the idea of universalism or the idea that human beings have much, much in common despite their different backgrounds, despite their different skin colors, despite their different genders, and has gone down the road of this separatist, divisive, racial politics of identity.

And now what we have is a left that thinks hyper-racially all the time about everything. You know, they go and watch a movie, and then they go home and write a tumbler post about how many black people were in it, or how much speaking time the black woman had. Or they will stand up on campus and say, as a black,

or as a Muslim homosexual or as a white man and then they always make a very apologetic statement about their privileged lives. So you have this bizarre situation where the left where used to be at the forefront of challenging the whole idea of race. Basically saying race is nonsense. It's a made-up category which doesn't actually define how human beings exist or what we're like. That's what the left always said. They said it was made up and we should stop using it. using it, to now, to a situation where the left embraces the politics of racial difference, in fact, and the politics of sexual difference, and will often, and defines everyone and every aspect of life according to race, background, cultural inherited traits and so on. So I find that identity politics, I find it to be incredibly divisive and poisonous and destructive,

and I think the left's embrace of it really speaks to the the left's abandonment of some of its good traditional ideals, primarily that to be universal and to see the universal similarities in human beings is a good idea. Why do you say it's the left? Because I recognize what you're talking about on the left, but I think fundamentally it's happening on the right as well.

And that's actually, to me, a much bigger concern is the adoption of identity politics on the right, because we've seen where that leads before. And if there's one group of people that you worry about banding together on the basis of identity, identities, white men. Well, I think, you're right. I think in fact, identity politics, in its original form,

going back a couple of hundred years, comes from the right. In fact, identity politics could be seen very much as a kind of right-wing reactionary response to the Enlightenment. So you have the Enlightenment, you have this great progressive leap forward, everyone's saying, let's use our moral reason, let's have freedom of speech, let's give this idea a go that ordinary people can run their lives without having priests and kings breathing down their necks all the time. wonderful step forward for human thought and human society. And the right or reactionary elements

or romantic elements, as they sometimes refer to themselves, responded to that by basically saying, ah, but human beings are very different. So the Enlightenment philosophers often talked about man. You know, they're a little bit sexist. They didn't talk about men and women, but they talked about man, this idea of universal man. And there was one famous French reactionary, Joseph de Maistra, who responded to that by saying, what is man. All I see is Italian men and French men and white men and black men. So that's a very early expression of identity politics in response to a progressive, enlightened view of human beings as being quite universal and so on. So it comes from the right to begin

with. Tragically, I think it's really is an epic tragedy. The left then starts to adopt it really from the mid-20th century onwards and then really in a pronounced way from the 1980s onwards. And as you say, the right never really gave it up as it happens. They've always been into identity. They've always thought there are significant differences between races and so on. And now the right is embracing it again through the alt-right and through white nationalism and other things like that. I see that very much as a response to the institutionalization of identity politics by certain elements on the left and by the people. political class itself. So I think if you create a situation where you are constantly saying to people,

you're a white man, you're a white man, you're a white man, you can't say that, you're a white man, you shouldn't be here, you're a white man, you shouldn't be speaking over this woman because you're a white man. Eventually those white men are going to turn around and say, okay, I'm a white man. And that's how you're defining me and everything I do and everything I believe. So maybe that's how I should define myself and everything I do and everything I believe. So I think this new, tragic, sad, possibly dangerous movement of white men, which I still think is quite a minority, I think it gets slightly blown out proportion. I do see that as a response to this new identity politics and this encouragement, this incitement of people to constantly define themselves

by their skin colour and their sex. Lo and behold, you have a new movement of white men saying, okay, that's all we are. We're white men and we're going to stick together and we're going to have white pride. So I think that's a new manifestation of the... old right-wing identity politics and it's been encouraged and infused and shaped I think by left-wing identity politics which I think is now an incredibly powerful movement so we're talking about identity and whiteness and skin color and all these things here we are three white men or technically I mean Francis mother is from Venezuela so he's technically Latino I'm from Russia I have quite dark skin but

nominally we're still three white men well I'm Irish and we're the blacks of Europe right according to Roddy Doe okay so none of us none of us here is white But actually, when we had Andrew Dolan, I told him that when I was growing up in Russia, if someone wanted to be rude to me on the street, which happened every now and again, they would say to me, you're black, go home. Because people who have dark skin like me in Russia, they're the discriminated against minority. But anyway, in this country, we're white, right? Yeah.

Three of us talking about race in a room that's got to be a hate crime in itself. Yeah. You just wrote a recently column about how white guilt is essentially become a perverse way of signaling your virtue, and it's become almost white pride in a way. That sounds very counterintuitive. What do you mean by that? Yeah, it's all these people who are constantly checking their white privilege. And, you know, they go online, they go on Twitter, they go on Facebook, or they write articles, and they say, I'm white, I have to recognize that I have a very privilege. person, I shouldn't speak over black people, I shouldn't speak over women and so on. And I've been watching this go on for a few years now and I was thinking it's really strange

because it looks shameful. You know, they're very shamed of being white. They're very shamed of what they call white history and colonialism and empire and everything else. So they express this great shame, but they do it in such a showy, narcissistic, ostentatious way. Look at me, I'm so ashamed. And what you realize is that actually there's a real boastfulness to this checking of your white privilege and they're really making a public display of it. So I think what's going on here is that this expression of white shame or this expression of white guilt has really become a new form of white pride. Because in essence what they're saying is we are good white people. We're very socially and politically aware. We're switched on. We're sensitive to the crimes of

history. We're sensitive to the needs and interests of black people. We're good whites. Not like those other whites, the uneducated ones, the uncouth ones, the ones who didn't go to Oxford University, the ones who don't read the Guardian, the ones who don't use Twitter. They're the bad whites. So what you see is they're creating almost this new white nationalism, ironically, where they are demonstrating their decent whiteness in contrast largely to bad white people. So it's a very racially driven form of narcissism, I think, this checking of your white privilege. It's also, so not only does it demean bad whites, I think. implicitly demeans bad whites. It also demeaned black people because it's driven by this idea that black people are quite fragile and therefore there are certain things you shouldn't say

in their presence or there are certain things that we maybe shouldn't publish or there are certain speakers we shouldn't invite to campus because black people would disappear into a crisis of self-esteem which I think is also a very racially driven denigrated view of black people. So I think this idea that whiteness is this all-powerful thing and it can even induce trauma in people because whiteness is this powerful force. Actually, what that says is that white people are very strong. And black people who might crumble if you say something racist or might crumble if you invite Tommy Robinson to your campus are very weak.

So it actually rehabilitates this politically correct white guilt, which is now incredibly fashionable, actually recreates the idea that whites are the adults with great power to cause distress. and blacks are the children who might sometimes need censorship and other things to protect them from offensive ideas. I find it really repugnant. And that's one of the examples of how identity politics, when you think hyper-racially all the time, you end up rehabilitating racial stereotypes. In this case, that whites are all-powerful and blacks are weak.

And that's where this identity politics is taking us. It's taken us down a very dark alley towards the old racist politics that so many of us, spend a lot of time trying to escape or to defeat. So what do you make of the concept of white privilege in general then? I think it's bullshit. I think it expresses a very infantile way of understanding society and the dynamics within society. Do I think there's racism, of course.

But I also think racism is far rarer now than it was in the past. I think it's become this minority pursuit among pockets of people, Whereas in the past, and even I'm old enough to remember this, it was a fairly dominant ideology in Western societies. I think that's faded away and that's all to the good. But racism, yes, racism still exists. But white privilege isn't about racism, sorry to interrupt it. It's not about racism. It's the idea that you and I walking down the street will be treated differently to two black people walking down the street by other people, by shop assistants, by the police, by whatever.

That's the idea of white privilege. Yeah, but that's not necessarily true. The reason I think it's a very narrow way to understand society is because I think a far greater influence on people's fortunes is class. And that's how I think is a far better way to understand society. So the idea that, you know, people say privileged white men, privileged white this, privileged white that, the vast majority of white people don't have, don't enjoy any form of privilege and are actually quite poor or working class, the majority of them.

And the idea of white privilege is actually one that comes from the very privileged strata of society, which is academia and professors and all these kind of young people brought up in very middle class homes who go off to university and come up with these theories about white privilege. So it's this very bizarre, twisted, ridiculous idea that, you know, these, like those black kids at Oxford who are all there on roads scholarships. So they come from incredibly privileged backgrounds and they're on road scholarships at Oxford. University in the world. And they spend the whole time going on about how privileged white people are.

What, including the Polish white man who built the extension to your house? Or I don't know, the Turkish white man who cleans your toilet. What are we talking about here? There's a real unwillingness to understand the complexities of modern society and the fact that in my view, class remains the deciding factor as to your fortunes and where you go and how successful you can be. You know, this was really brought home by, there's a trans, there's a black trans woman called Monroe Bergdorf, and she gave an interview to the Guardian recently because she got

in trouble because she said all white people are racist. And she gave an interview to the Guardian and she was explaining her concept of white privilege and she said even a homeless white man has privilege. And the justification she gave was that in comparison with a homeless black man, he's got more chance of getting out. She didn't provide any statistics for that or anything like that. But the point is she comes from an incredibly privileged background. Her mother was very successful in business. She had a lovely upbringing. She now has a very lovely life. And she is telling the man who lives under a bridge and is addicted to heroin and might starve to death any moment now,

that he enjoys privilege. That's how screwed up identity politics has become. And I think identity politics increasingly looks like the revenge of the elite. And it's a way for for them to fly in the face of all the evidence and to argue that they are the victim. They are the great victims of life because the white man who's living in a skip has more privilege than they do. It's utterly surreal. I don't think it's sustainable. And I think it's a very, again, it's a very poisonous argument because it divides society

along racial lines, when in fact I think the key divide in society is still on matters of wealth and class. That's very, very interesting how you pointed that out. To me, I think that identity politics is actually one of the greatest dangers to freedom of speech in that people are unwilling to engage in debate because what people now do is they don't, like you put forward that argument, but I know that there's a counter argument to that which would just be, well, as a white man, you're not entitled to those views or opinions simply because you've never experienced a struggle in inverted commons.

and therefore completely denigrating your argument instead of actually engaging with the argument and putting forward a counter point of view, which is entirely reasonable. It's simply to attack the person speaking. And the moment you do that, I think they're all semblance of discussion and freedom of speech.

It just goes out of the window. It's dead. Yeah, it's terrible, because people's ideas and views are judged on the basis of their skin colour or their genitals or whatever it might be rather than on what they're actually saying, which runs counter to every democratic, liberal ideal,

which is that you should hear people out, have the discussion, have an open discussion, and then work out as a society what's good and what's bad and where we should go and so on. So it runs, I completely agree, it's completely destructive of freedom of speech and open debate. And what it does, it really causes people to clam up. So people feel that there are certain things they shouldn't say in public.

And lots of, when I go to campuses and so on, there's often white men who just are really unsure about whether they should say something in this meeting, well, they should just sit there. And it was really brought home. There was some demonstration in the US a year or so ago, and there was this white man on it holding up a placard saying, I was going to write a placard, but I thought we've heard enough from white men, so I won't. And that was his placard, which is, which I thought, well, apart from anything else, it's still a fucking placard.

Yeah, it's still a placard, so he's an idiot. But it was a very good, it was a very good example of how narcissistic this checking of white privilege is. because he was really saying, I'm the best white person in the world. That's what he was really saying. But it's that thing of people close down and clam up. They're not sure what they can say. And so it gives rise to one of the great scourges of our time, I think, which is self-censorship and that uncertainty and that, well, can I say this?

I've got white skin. I was born male. Am I allowed to say this? Or should I not say it? And you think what a destructive situation that is for us to find ourselves in. I think it also, the other side of it, it's not only that it is destructive for freedom of speech, it also really whips up this victim politics, because you have this competitive victimhood now where everyone is trying to demonstrate that they are a greater victim than someone else.

Because being a victim is now the way in which you win social praise, even in some cases government funding. You know, that's the basis on which lots of community groups win government funding is through saying we have all these various problems. It's the way in which you win moral or thought. through being a victim, whereas in the past, you might have won moral authority by demonstrating your autonomy and your adulthood and the fact that you are capable of governing your own life. Now, in a complete flip reversal, you win moral authority in 21st century Britain by showing

your wounds, I'm a victim, I've had a really crap life. So what that does is it encourages people to constantly exaggerate and blow out of proportion the problems they faced, you know, and so I think there's a lot of myth-making among some of these identitarians about how awful their lives have been. buy it for a minute because they're encouraged to do that because they need that victim authority. And also it gives rise to this incredibly divisive competition between different groups. Well, we're bigger victims than you. And it has this fragmentary process even within identity groups.

So even within, for example, the trans community, as it's called, even there, people will say, oh, but you're a white trans person, I'm a black trans person and we have it worse than you. Or in the gay community, people will say, oh, but I'm Muslim and gay. That's far harder than whatever Peter Tatchel has ever had to face. So this kind of complete breaking apart, even off the identity groups themselves, so that you end up with all these tiny sectarian blocks who just are constantly fighting for that moral high ground of victimhood so they can say, well, I'm the chief victim, therefore I deserve the money, and I deserve the newspaper column, and I deserve the sympathy.

So that's really bad, and I think it's had a really destructive impact on the new generation in particular, because I go to campuses and speak and I constantly meet these young people who have really plummy, posh voices, and you can tell they had a really nice upbringing. And they want to convince you that they suffer from structural oppression, that they have faced abuse and hardship every day of their life, that they are the most downtroddened community in living memory, and you just want to shake them and say that's not true. But of course, what you really should do is someone who cares about the future of society.

It's check your privilege. It's check my privilege. and try and work out why they're saying this. Why are they saying these things which are patently untrue? And the reason they're saying them is because identity politics encourages you to see yourself as weak and pathetic, whereas left-wing politics in particular, but also right-wing liberal politics,

used to encourage you to see yourself as confident and capable. And that shift is really worrying. Now, how did we get to the sage of victimhood? Because it seems to be everywhere, isn't it? Like, what you're talking about, I think a lot of people who are not interested in identity politics or all these political conversations, I think a lot of people I was speaking to someone earlier today who isn't into it at all, but this general purveying sense that now being a victim is better than not being a victim somehow,

that instead of striving, instead of trying to achieve things, instead of trying to make the best of your lot in life, instead of overcoming challenges, your job in life is to identify and broadcast to the world the challenges that you've faced. How do we get here? I was going to say, do you not think it's just simply because it's easier just to go, my life is hard then going, all right, I face these challenges, I've got to work hard, I've got to look at myself, I've got to improve, I'm going to have to take knockbacks.

I think there's an element where it's easier, but then the flip side to that is that it also makes for a shallower, lame a life. And I think when people embrace that victim script, I think sometimes they actually become quite depressed or down because they realize that their life is quite hollow because all they're doing constantly is exaggerating every problem they face and then they go out there with this victim antennae on always switched up to high so that the man who brushes past them on the tube that's an example of patriarchal misogyny

or the person who says to them to a black woman oh I love your hair where did you get it done that's a microaggression which is evident of the continued existence of racism. So they can't even engage in everyday conversation. I thought the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford, where they want to take down this statue of Cecil Rhodes, who is an old colonialist, was a good example of this,

because the students who want to tear that down described it as an environmental microaggression. So they even see inanimate objects, statues, buildings, as things that are attacking them. So I think when you have this victim identity, you perceive yourself as being constantly under attack when you're not at all. But everything, every conversation starter, every statue on the street corner, every person who just asks you a perfectly innocent question is evidence of your victimhood

and consequently evidence of everyone else's horribleness. So you go through life with a very misanthropic view of society, I think. So I think it does make things easier, but it makes for a much shallower existence. As to where it came from, I think. Trying to be a bit more mindful of things you buy, for you and your family? Well, when it comes to laundry, choose All Free Clear. 100% free from dyes and perfumes. All Free Clear uses only essential ingredients that tackle tough stains and odors.

And it's gentle on the skin. It's a powerful clean you can feel good about. So go on. Pick up a bottle of All Free Clear for your next laundry day. You know, I get attacked for left bashing, but I do think the left bears a lot of responsibility for this. And I do think that the left's turn, you know, really around the 1960s, and then it picks up hugely in the 1980s. You have this shift from a left that was interested in jobs and people having enough money and people having a nice life and people being going through life confident and capable and going on strike and making demands. When that was your view of the world, people had to be strong.

They had to be strong because every now and then, they would have to make a really firm demand for a better pay and conditions and a better form of existence. So the left then would tend to encourage people, you're a strong person. You can do this. We can do this together. Then sometimes around the 1960s and the 1970s,

the left shifts from those economic questions to cultural questions, shifts from discussing jobs and wages and the right to live in a nice house and all those practical, tangible things towards talking about issues of identity and minority life and women's issues as well, although I do think women's issues are important. There is this very palpable shift in the left's focus

and I think bit by bit that gives rise to a situation where the left becomes less and less likely to say, you're strong, you can do this, you're a capable person, and more likely to say, maybe you can't do this, maybe you're a victim. Maybe we need to set up a new community group to look after people like you. Maybe we need to get millions in funding from the government in order to do that. And slowly over time, you have a left which is very influential in local councils, very influential in local politics, and then eventually very influential in national politics, on the basis that many people in society are vulnerable,

that's their favorite word, what they call them the vulnerable, and it falls to them to help look after these people. So I think that's a really important dynamic in giving rise to a situation where people are actively encouraged to advertise their weaknesses rather than encouraged to believe in their strengths. And that's the real problem. The thing that I find very, very difficult is when people here talk about oppression. My mother is from Venezuela. You probably know a lot about Venezuela. It's a totalitarian regime. essentially if you criticize the government at one o'clock in the morning you will get a

knock on the door and you will literally disappear and then when people here talk about how they're oppressed it just it makes me angry it's it's yeah I feel the same it's it's it's complete nonsense my parents are from the west of Ireland and they grew up in pretty awful situation and that's why they moved to London because they couldn't work there they wouldn't have really got on in Ireland very well at all. So they moved to London and then they moved into a one-bedroom flat and very quickly had five children. So there were seven people in a one-bedroom flat, a council flat, and then eventually moved into a council house and so on. And that was very difficult for my parents. That was a really, that is what I would describe as a hard life, a tough

life. So when I hear people now who are at Oxford and they sound like they've been an elocution lessons for half their life and they obviously have never worked a day in their life, never mind struggled, trying to convince me that they suffer from oppression. It makes me quite angry and I think they're talking nonsense. But I think that's, but trying to work out why they do that and trying to develop a counter argument that is better than just shaking them by the scruff at their neck, that's one of the challenges I think people face now if we want to overturn this kind of politics. But I think it's like they're always chasing that dream of having experienced depression. And it's the reverse.

It's like the reverse of the American dream. Yeah, you know, you would once have chased the dream of having a house and a job and being a kind of capable member of your community. Now you almost do the opposite. So it's tragedy. Well, how much of it is it? It's interesting that you frame it like that. I've never heard a frame letter. It's a very accurate observation, I think.

It's a reverse of the American dream. How much of it is it because essentially we in the West? You know, Francis Venezuela, I'm from Russia, as I said. We in the West, we've achieved to a very significant extent what you might refer to as the American Dream. We're wealthy, we're prosperous, we're relatively free, we're relatively safe, we're secure, there's a certain kind of stability and predictability to our lives.

We don't face the kind of daily challenges that most of the other 7 billion people on the planet do face. You know, these issues are not an issue in Russia. They're not an issue, I'd imagine, in Venezuela, to anywhere near the same extent, identity politics. No, I don't know. No, I think people are more concerned with eating. Yeah, food. Strangely, weirdos, weirdos, why don't they care about the identity?

Yeah, it's not about how oppressed you are when you know. Well, that's my point, right? So how much of it is, essentially, we've solved all our basic problems, so now we need some other problems to solve because that's how I'm right. I used to think that about climate change. I'm a climate change skeptic, not a climate change denier. It's very important difference there. I do think it's happening.

And I do think humankind bears some responsibility. But I used to think similarly about climate change, which I used to think that the West had it pretty good, for the most part. Poverty, still poor people, still unemployment, and all those things that need to be resolved. But generally, pretty good. And we needed a new focus for all our angst and fury and concerns. and I always thought that climate change activism,

which seems to fizzled out a little bit, at least recently, which I find really interesting. Climate change activism, I thought, was a very middle class, largely middle class, hand-ringing campaign where I thought was exactly that. It was a way in which they could find something in an otherwise pretty nice existence that they could say, oh my God, it's the end of the world,

we have to do something about this. Whereas in the third world, they don't worry about climate change because they still don't have roads and they still don't have hospitals and they still don't have schools and they still don't have factories and they want those things. So I think there's an element of that.

I think there's an element where we've reached a certain level in Western society of comfort and general freedom or thereabouts or that's collapsing fast. And people are looking for another way to gain meaning in their lives. But the great complex question, I think,

is why they now seek meaning through victimhood rather than through other things like autonomy or the pursuit of, I don't know, hobbies and interests or the creation of new forms, new ways of living or new forms of society. There's so many, or putting your energies into recreating the space race or developing nuclear technology. There are so many positive things that even a society that's reached a pretty good level of wealth and openness could still pursue. but instead we kind of poo-poo all that stuff is really dangerous and damaging and just focus on stare at our own navels and our own victimhood so I'm interested in as to why the question of why when society reaches this level it goes it's now gone down this incredibly negative route but I think the key thing about victim politics I think is that it it works best for the people who actually aren't victims of life like middle class people academics professors well-off students and so on

But it doesn't work for people who actually are victims of life, like the poor and people looking for a job and people struggling to make ends meet. Because they still have to be strong because otherwise they won't get to the end of the week without getting hungry. So that's the real interesting split in victim politics, which is, I always think that the people who play the victim card most

must have a really nice life. Because if you are living on the streets or in a small house and you've got five mouths to feed and you're going to run out of work in a few weeks' time and you need to find more work. You can't go around saying, oh, woe is me, my life so hard, my great-grandfather was enslaved. You haven't got time for all that stuff.

You have to focus, and you have to have self-drive, and you have to magic up all your moral autonomy and self-confidence and capability in order to continue living. So that, I think, is very interesting, where I think victim politics is most pronounced among those who've had a very cushioned existence. Whereas I think it is a very unuseful politics

among those who haven't had a cushioned existence and therefore still need to demonstrate their moral independence if they're going to get through life in good shape. Moving on now, I was reading an article that Spiked magazine did and it was a very, very interesting attack on the left over Grenfell and the way that they have politicised Grenfell and used it as a way to attack right-wing politics and in particular Theresa May and her government

and how in many ways immoral that is. Would you like to expand on that a little bit? Yeah, I think what the left has done with Grenfell is really obnoxious. Well, Brent, actually, before you get into that, sorry, why don't you tell us a little bit about Grenfell for international viewers, you might not know what we're talking about? So Granfell was this unspeakable disaster

that happened in London about a year ago in which a block of flats caught fire and 71 people killed in Kensington and Chelsea, so a really nice part of London, but this was a very working class, or immigrant or lower class, block, and it caught fire very quickly, and within three hours or so, 71 people had been killed. So a really shocking incident in British history, a black mark against this nation, I would say. So a lot of questions need to be asked and answered, and there's currently an inquiry looking into why it happened and what went wrong and what we can do in the future to prevent anything like this from happening again.

What happened with the left is that almost as soon as the fire happened, they were using it, exploiting it, I would say, to make political points about things like neoliberalism and capitalism and the Tories and all these things they don't like. And creating this very childish, I think, narrative, which said, that this fire was caused by Thatcherism and neoliberalism and evil Tory rule in a way that just didn't quite stack up. It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense for a number of reasons. Firstly, Grenfell Tower has been there for ages and ages and ages and ages and the Tories have only

been in power in this country since 2010. Prior to that, the Labour was in power for 13 years. So when you read Polly Toinby, who wrote after Grenfell, in The Guardian, Polly Toinby wrote, this fire sums up the politics of the last seven years. That's exactly how long the Tories have been in power. So apparently it told us nothing about when her favoured party was in power. I just found that utterly unconvincing. And also, there were other questions that they were just unwilling to ask. Like, you know, why did people stay in their flats?

Why didn't they leave their flats? And now, through the inquiry, we're discovering that that's because the fire service, mistakenly, in my view, has a statement. put policy where it tells people to stay in their flats and it was telling people to stay in their flats right up till 2.45 in the morning, which was two and a half hours after the fire started. That was brushed over. The question of why the building was covered in cladding was brushed over, or it was simply explained, well, all the rich people in Kensington wanted the building to look nice and they've demanded cladding. Not true. In fact, the cladding is very much related to the

Climate Change Act, which encourages public buildings, particularly residential buildings, to have air, heat, to have cladding which keeps heat inside so people turn on their heaters less often. So there are so many different political, social, historical questions that influence this tragedy, like are we spinning out of control with climate change policies? Is the fire service to risk averse and unwilling to encourage people to take risks to save their lives? All these things and they completely brushed over that. They're coming out now, thanks to the London and review of books which published an amazing 60,000-word essay on Grenfell last week, which I would encourage everyone to read. Really, really interesting. And the inquiries,

they're coming out there as well. But what the left did, it just ignored all those complexities, all those difficult questions, or the possibility that, you know, left-wing officials also contributed to the situation as much as right when people did. They ignored all that and just use this tragedy to demonise the Tories and to big up Corbin, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. I thought it was deeply sinister and very ugly and in fact told us a very interesting story about how distant that new left, how distant that Corbinista left is from ordinary working class Londoners, the fact that it could exploit their horrific situation so casually. without any consideration to whether it was wise to use the tragedy to score political points.

They see these people in many ways, almost as a stage upon which they might make a performance of their own virtue. But isn't that just politics? Isn't that what politicians always do? Yeah, they do. Not all of them, but politicians do that. But I think the left in response to Grenfell did it in a really bad way and took it to another level. And I think it did tell us something very important about the opportunism of the Corbyn movement and their willingness to use any tragic event to dent the prestige of the Tories and boost the standing of the Corbyn movement. I just thought it was nasty.

Blair had the same thing. The good date of very bad news on 9-11, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I'm sure the Tories get up to exactly the same thing. Well, Blair did it with a number of instances. Blair did it shortly after the Bulger murder, which you mentioned earlier. He wasn't leader of the Labour Party then.

He was shadow. Home office secretary, yeah. Broken Britain, was he? Broken Britain. He created all these phrases. So the Blairites weren't averse to using tragedies to forward their agenda. Of course, 9-11 being the perfect example, where they used that to not any very bad news, but also to venture into the Middle East in what I consider to be a very foolish, destructive way.

Oh yeah, you don't need to tell me about the horrible. of the Blairites are kind of... But my point is, it's a general... It's the nature of politics rather than a particular thing about Jeremy... No, I think it is the nature of politics, but I think there was something specific about the exploitation of Grenfell, which is that it was very fast, very thoughtless, and I do think it suggests...

I think it is bound up with, because of course what we have now, which we didn't have in Bulger or 2011, in other instances, we have the whole social media climate. where these things can happen very quickly and you have this process of virtue signaling and this rush to demonstrate that you're a good person. So I was really shocked. So you're right. In a way, this is politics as normal, but I was also shocked by the speed and brutality with which people did it in response to this fire. We didn't even know how many people had died before they were making these political statements.

And I think it's bound up to a certain extent with the social media, the rush to signal your virtue over. what I would consider the more civilised approach of waiting in a reasoned way for more information before you have your analysis about what's gone wrong. Well see, this is a point in which we can tell our viewers and listeners that you don't use Twitter, so you're not familiar with how it works quite to the same extent, but that is the way. On a side note, don't you think social media has actually contributed in many ways to the death of nuanced journalism? Because when you think about it, you know, what journalism is now a lot of the time is you want to boost your article, You want to get hits on your article, you want to get clicks on your article,

we want to get likes. And sadly, the reality with Grenfell, with anything, is that it's incredibly complex. And it's going to take years, months, to find out what genuinely happened. And a knee-jerk reaction is never going to be accurate. But if you create a knee-jerk response, which is simplistic, it will tap into people's emotional responses, which means that you will get the likes, the hits, the clicks.

Yeah, I think that's true. I think there's this, you know, we live in a very rash times where people, they kind of virtue signaling before they think. And there's that rush to, and I think social media plays a large part in that where you are constantly thinking, well, how can I use this thing that's happened to make a statement about myself? And I think that also springs from the politics of identity and the politics of, that very narcissistic politics where you're constantly making statements about your life and your views and yourself, rather than thinking,

more rationally or more collectively or more coolly and waiting a bit. So yeah, one of the reasons I don't use Twitter is because the thought of having a gadget in my hand on which I could express my thoughts to the world at the press of a button horrifies me because I have some really bad thoughts. They're not well thought out. Some people would say they come through in my articles, but I hope I managed to fill to the mouth. We all have thoughts that we wouldn't express.

Or you might only express them to your best friend, or you might express them in a family situation. There's traditionally been this barrier between your private life and your public life. And in your private life, you might be more honest, you might break down in front of the loved one and say, my life's forming apart, but you wouldn't do that in public.

And you needed that private sphere in which you could cut loose and be honest in order to then go out into the public world as a kind of repaired, confident individual. But that line has been erased, and now people have the breakdown in public. and tweet about it. You know, they live tweet it.

And they say things on Twitter that previously they might only have kept in their head or said to a very good friend. So I don't like that direction society is going in and anything I can do to create a physical barrier between myself and that situation, I will do. But when you think about how the American president, I mean, he literally got to power using that

and everything that you've talked about just saying things off the top of his head and tweeting them out, he's actually found an audience who are willing to support him all the way. I heard he tweets on the toilet, which I thought was just terrifying. It's like even, I thought that was terrifying, first, because he's the president, and he shouldn't be doing that. But secondly, because...

Hey, the president's allowed to use the toilet. Yeah, he can do that, but you should leave the phone outside. But it's like even the, even the bathroom is now a place from which you can speak to the world. Even that place where previously you would have just gone on your own and had your whatever, privately, even then you're still saying, whatever people are saying. And I just think those boundaries between private life and public life existed for a reason.

And the key reason I think they existed was because everyone needs a sphere in which they can just be themselves and relax and get away from the kind of demands of public life and the pressures of public life and the pressures of work life and everything else. And just like, chill out. And I think the more the line gets raised,

the less we have that private zone and everything is pushed out into the public. So Twitter, I think, I don't think Twitter is the cause of this culture, but I think it has facilitated it. It's kind of, it's the technology that has molded itself around a culture that pretty much already existed, which is this culture where, you know, when Stephen Frye is diagnosed with cancer, he makes a one-hour video, YouTube video about it. Now, I know that a lot of people like that and they appreciate it but I find it strange and I think the erasure of the boundary between how you live and what you say in public is probably a really bad thing for humans it's very interesting we talk about

social media all the time and it's interesting for us because we know now given what's come out in recent months that Facebook essentially they they have people sitting there trying to make it more addictive yeah they literally have people dedicated to making it more addictive. And social media, all the studies pretty much show, social media is terrible for your mental health, right? And we both know that. On the one hand, on the other hand, we're making the show, right?

And we have to put it out, and we have to reach people, right? And social media is a great way of doing it. Can we just say from everybody here at Trigonometry, social media is brilliant. Please like the videos and follow us. We don't care by your mental health. Just stay with it. Just like us and click like. No, but that's, I think, the contrast as well,

I think we focus on the negative aspect of social media rightly, but there is also an element which is enabled communication. Like the three of us would not be sitting in this room if it wasn't for social media. I think social media could potentially be one of the greatest breakthroughs of modern times because the fact that you, you know, the downside is that people are saying things they shouldn't be saying or people now live their private lives in public. But as I said, I don't think social media made that happen. I think that had already been occurring. social media just made it easier. I think that's a cultural problem,

but on the other side of it, the fact that people can now publish stuff at the click of a button walking down the street is really good. Because in history, before the invention of the printing press, no one could publish anything except churches and monks

who used to write books and then publish them, and that's all there was. Then you have the invention of the printing press which caused this huge crisis among the church because they suddenly thought, oh crap, other people can publish books now as well, which they did,

and then that gives right. to the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and everything else, springs from the explosion of ideas that the printing press brought about. And then the internet revolution goes to stage further, which is that you don't even need to have a publisher or an editor to publish yourself. You can literally set up a website on your phone and use your thumb to tell the world what you think. That's great. So I would put the internet revolution on a par with the invention of the printing press

in its potential. The downside, of course, is that it tends to be used in a quite narrow way, I think. And as I say, it's moulded itself around a culture of narcissism that I think had been growing for a few decades anyway. Christopher Lash wrote his classic book, The Culture of Narcissism in 1979,

which I still think is the best guide to the problem of politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. So that had been going for a while, And then the internet revolution lent itself to that. So that's the problem. But the potential of the internet is extraordinary, which is the power of people to express themselves without needing to go through one of the traditional gatekeepers, whether it was a censor or someone in officialdom or an editor or a publisher.

So that's great. And I think it is bringing people together. And it is a way for people to express ideas. But it's a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, it's a really good tool for communications. But on the other hand, it has given rise to Twitch hunts and the shaming of people for having the wrong opinion and these kind of quite intolerant outbursts against anyone who's considered to have a difficult point of view. So at the moment, it's going through a very difficult birth process and there are a lot of problems with it. But I would oppose any effort whatsoever by government to control it.

I would be completely opposed to that. and I'm very worried at the moment about the way in which the government in Britain in particular is outsourcing its desire to control the internet to big companies like Facebook and Twitter. So it's constantly putting pressure on them to take down certain material or to prevent the expression of certain ideas. And I think that process of outsourced state censorship to big corporations is something that should worry us. And those corporations incidentally as we again are starting to find out. Oh, brilliant. Please boost on video. Well, yes, do watch the video, but they are not politically neutral at all. Coming from California, they don't reflect the full spectrum of opinion.

They make sure that certain videos are watched more than others. They make sure that certain people don't. I mean, James DeMore is a good example of someone who was working with Google, made some what you might call factual but conservative leaning points about men and women and whatever. And he was dismissed, and that tells you about the culture that exists there. There's no way that company then has an equal tolerance for all the different political opinion. No, we are sleepwalking into a situation where very politicized, massive companies are getting

to decide what you can and can't say in public. Because this is the new public square. You know, billions of people use Facebook. I don't know, is it a billion or millions of people use Twitter? This is the forum in which politicians speak, in which certain institutions make statements, which ordinary people gather to have conversations. So if you are prevented from being part of that, or if you are prevented from saying certain things in there,

then you are being prevented from expressing yourself in the public square. So that's a real problem. And if these California-based companies with all their vast political prejudices, which tend to veer towards phony left, that's how they view the world, if they are preventing people from joining Twitter,

or if they're banning people from Twitter, or if they are saying certain videos and ideas can't be expressed, they are controlling public life and they are controlling speech and that's worrying and they now are enjoying almost a monopoly on what isn't said in public. So that's something that is concerning. I don't know the answer to it but I think that's something people should be worried about. So how would you describe yourself politically, Brendan, and do you ascribe to sort of these Corbinista left-wing views, which now seem to be more and more prevalent in the political forum. I hate Corbinism. I'm not going to beat around the bush. I really do.

I think Corbinistas are really unattractive movement. I thought you're going to say unattractive people. Some of them might be, but that's, but it's a really unattractive movement. I think what they really symbolise is the shift that we were talking about earlier of the left from class politics to identity politics, from an interesting. and economic growth to an interest in environmental control and from trusting people to run their lives towards kind of sensoriousness and authoritarianism. These are the big shifts that have taken place on the left. The left used to believe in economic growths for more jobs and more industry and wealth. Now it wants to save the planet and stop the building of factories. The left

used to believe in universalism. Now it believes in the divisive poisonous politics of identity, woke identity politics. The left used to believe in autonomy and independence, and now it wants to nanny state every single aspect of our lives, from what we eat, to how we raise our children, to what we say in public. So the left has abandoned its core principles, and I think that's one of the big tragedies of the times we find ourselves in.

And I think the Corbinist has expressed that perfectly, because what you have here is a very middle-class movement. It uses the language of Marxism and radicalism and old labor and all this stuff. But in fact, it's a very new form of left-wing politics, which is a narrow, divisive, illiberal, anti-growth politics. And that, in my mind, is unrecognizable in comparison to what the left used to be about. So I think the Corbinistas expressed that incredibly well.

So I don't like them for that reason. I think in Britain at the moment we have this really incredibly interesting situation where I think there are two revolts, two political revolts in Britain. the real one and there's the phony one. The real one is Brexit, which is unquestionably a revolt. And you can tell it's a revolt because the entire political establishment across Europe has gone into utter meltdown in response to it and literally cannot handle the fact that these millions of stupid Britons defied their instructions and voted against the EU. I think it's the best thing to happen in British politics in at least 50 years, precisely because

it was so revolting and rebellious and an expression of a desire for change. So you have this real revolt, which everyone's freaking out about. Then you have this phony revolt, which is the rise of these middle-class corbinisters who go to Glastonbury or sing about Jeremy Corbin, and who are constantly on Twitter saying, you know, we're virtuous and wonderful and we love poor people, even though they've never met one. So you have that phony revolt, which the media's far more interested in, because it's safe, in fact. They think they're radical and red, and they all go and take selfies of themselves at Karl Marx's Gravestone and Highgate, but it's an incredibly safe revolt. It's a quite posh revolt. It's very contained within the narrow remits of identity

politics and woke politics. So I think that's the most fascinating thing about Britain at the moment. You have this phony revolt which people love and can't get enough of. And then you have this real revolt which people are terrified of. And that should tell you about which one of those is more interesting. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their cramudgeonly, Marcellus,

whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moments this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. I find it really quite sad, I think, with Corbyn's voters, and that they seem so politically unengaged almost, but also they seem to revere him as an idol. And going back to Venezuela, he refuses to condemn the Venezuelan government

for what it's doing to its people. And then you try and engage them with that, and they just shut it down. They avoid the topic. Yeah. I've tried to engage with Corbinistas on Facebook, and I got told that I vote Tory, not that I'd seen anything particularly bad about voting Tory,

it's just your political leaning. But you don't vote. No, but I don't vote to it. I've never voted Tory. I'm old school left, left centre, left wing. And also as well, that somehow by criticising him, you are alt-right. That's automatically the label that gets slapped across your chest just because you dare to have a difference of opinion.

Absolutely. I think the Corbynisters are a really good expression of the new intolerant left, which is anyone whose point of view differs to theirs, anyone who thinks maybe left-wing politics is something different to what you guys are doing, or anyone who says there's some problems with Corbyn, including who he speaks with and who he hangs out with and what he thinks about the world. Anyone who says any of that is written off as horrible and beyond the pale and a fascist, basically,

you're alt-right or a fascist or a white supremacist if you raise any of these questions. It's incredibly intolerant. They have this bristling, instinctive intolerance towards any person who doesn't fully share their view of the world. And I find that really worrying. I think it really does speak to a new kind of politics, which is very sectional and sectarian and bubble-wrapped. So you're either in this little sect or you're not. And that's not a good way to do politics. Because if you're going to do politics properly, you really do need to be open and open-minded and engaged and talking to people.

you know if you look if you go on youtube and search for old political debates between you know labour people and tory people or there's a great video debate between martin luther king and malcolm x right they had completely different views of the world one was super radical and a bit of a separatist and a black nationalist and the other was middle class decent civil rights activist but they have this really civilized debate even though they completely disagree on fundamental matters What we have now in Britain and other places is completely uncivilised debate, even though, in fact, they actually tend to agree on lots of things. It's what Freud referred to as the narcissism of small differences. And I think it's often that the less that's at stake in politics, the more furious and crazy and intemperate and intolerant the discussion tends to become.

That's one of the curious things, I think, about Britain today, which is that if you break it down, the Tories and the Labour and Labour actually agree on many fundamental things. things. They both agree that Brexit's a real problem and it's got to be ironed out or diluted. They're both into the politics of identity, as you can see from the Tories Gender Recognition Act and Corbyn never shutting up about minority groups. They both think environmentalism is really important. They agree on the fundamental matters, but they scream at each other, fascist, scum, racist. So I think it actually reveals the narcissism of small differences. It actually reveals that politics has become a very narrow business. So I always think the more shrill and intolerant and shouty the discussion becomes, the more it tells us about how there's

sadly not much at stake in politics now. Because if there was, if there were fundamental disagreements about the future of society, you would actually need to have a pretty open, solid discussion about that. But there isn't. Well, there you go. Listen, Brendan, one question we always like to ask our guests before we let them go is, is there one thing that you think no one's talking about that we should be talking about? That's a good question. I think we need to talk more about, well, it's something that I referenced earlier.

I think we need to talk more about the fact that huge swathes of mankind still live in absolute shocking dire poverty. I know that sounds like a bit of a happy, clappy, you know, something that a nun might say. But I think the reason I think that's important is because I think we have become so navel-gazing in the West, and so obsessed with our own problems, which actually aren't problems.

And we've become so beholden to a narrow-minded politics which says economic growth is a problem and the building of new cities and factories is destructive, that we just forget that four billion of our fellow human beings live in really terrible situations. So one thing that I'm very interested in is the way in which the narrow-mindedness, the narcissism, the closed-offness, of 21st century Western politics actually blinds you to far bigger problems than we have

and blinds you to the what were once considered to be the great projects of progressive politics, which was to industrialize the world and modernize the world and encourage all sorts of societies to embrace progress. If you read the Communist Manifesto, which everyone should read by Marx and Engels, it's a fascinating little book because even though it is the birth of the communist idea, the first seven or eight pages are devoted to praise. capitalism and to talking about the wonders of this new capitalist society and the fact that it has civilized all these once poor communities, it's internationalized trade, it's created these new vast cities and factories and it just praises and praises all the achievements of capitalism. And then of course goes on to say that communism would be even better. And I think the left forgets that aspect of it. The left forgets the first seven pages of the Communist Manifesto, which is this idea that it would be really

really good if all of mankind enjoyed the same kind of privileges and luxuries that we do. But we've become so obsessed with our own navels that we've lost sight of that. And I think that's really anti-human and quite tragic. Well, I think the viewers, and you particularly Francis, will agree with me when I said that has been absolutely fantastic. So, Brendan, if someone wants to follow you on Twitter, no. They cannot. They cannot. They cannot, but if they want to find you online or find your work, what's the best way to access?

They can follow Spiked on Twitter. So I edit Spiked and they can read me on Spike. They can read me in The Spectator and they can follow Spiked. Spiked is on Twitter at Spiked Online. They can follow me on Instagram. If they're young and cool enough to use Instagram, that's about it. What's your Instagram username? Burnt Oak Boy.

Burnt Oak Boy. Okay. Okay, so if they want to see a picture of your abs, you know, Go to Instagram. Go on to Instagram. Okay, if you want to follow me, I'm on Twitter at Failing Human. And I'm at Constance and Kissin. Thank you for tuning in this week.

Yeah, I think that's it. That's all the social media stuff. Follow us on at TriggerPod on Twitter and Instagram. We're also on Facebook, obviously. Anything else? And please, if you've enjoyed it, please give us a rating. A review would be very nice. Five star, please.

And also as well, if you really like it, Just recommend it to someone. That's it. Tell a friend. Thank you very much. We'll see you next week.