TRIGGERnometry - Brendan O'Neill - Why We Must Dissent

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Brendan O'Neill is a British political commentator and author. He was the editor of Spiked from 2007 to September 2021, and is currently its chief political writer. Once a Trotskyist, O'Neill was formerly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and wrote for the party's journal Living Marxism. O'Neill currently defines himself as a Marxist libertarian. Brendan's book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1913019861 Brendan's website: https://brendanoneill.co.uk/ Brendan's writing: https://www.spiked-online.com/author/brendan-oneill/ SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ ‘What is Enlightenment?’ short essay by Immanuel Kant: https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/What-is-Enlightenment.pdf Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What we're living through is a counter-enlightenment, a reversal of enlightenment values themselves, an assault on reason and truth and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. I was really shocked the last time I was in LA. We have homeless problems in London and we have poverty problems in London, but LA is off the scale. So they say, it's their free choice, relax. If they want to defecate in public and shoot up in public,

do whatever else they want to do in public, that's freedom. But that's not freedom. That's degradation. That is self-degradation, but it's also social degradation. It's the unwillingness to make judgments, the criminalisation of moral judgment. Let everything happen, let everything go, you know, don't be judgey. That's, I think, underlies a lot of these people. Well, once you take away truth, you take away right and wrong, and then you can't make a judgment.

Yeah, exactly. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishol. And this is a show. for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today returns to the show for the third time. He's a journalist and the author of a new book, A Heretics Manifesto, Essays on the Unsaible.

Brendan O'Neill, welcome back to Trigonometry. Hi guys, pleasure to be here. It's great to have you back. Everybody knows who you are at this point, so we won't do the usual, who are you, how have you got to hear? The one thing I will say is your new book is excellent, and one of the reasons it's excellent is that I feel like a lot of people who, have clicked to watch this, maybe, or listen to this, maybe like, well, they've had Brendan on. We know what Brendan thinks. He believes in free speech. But you actually, with your new book, you've done a great job of introducing some new ideas and some new concepts. And that, I imagine,

isn't actually an easy thing to do in the current environment where it seems like everyone's talking about everything now. Yeah. Well, that was, well, I'm pleased to hear that. That was the aim of the book. It was to dig down a little bit more historically into some of the ideas that people like us are talking about. Freedom of speech, tolerance, the new age of unreason and how do we challenge it. So I wanted to dig down and just look at the historical precedence to that. Where did it come from? What are the similarities in the past in relation to the problems that we face today? So I look at that in relation to the idea of the witch hunt, the idea of this kind of stifling conformism that we face today on so many issues. The cancel culture, the cancellation of people for saying

controversial things. So in the book, I look at how those things have taken place in the past, how they take place in the present, and what are the links between those two different eras. So I hope people will read the book and see that the problems that we face today are not particularly new. They may express themselves in a different way. But these kinds of things have been problems that people have faced throughout history. Indeed, they have. And I mean, let's be honest, Brendan. Some of the titles are the chapter titles. So, little bit provocative, aren't they? In particular, the first chapter title, which is... Her penis. There we go. Her penis. You know, when I sat down and thought to myself,

I'm going to write a book on heresy called A Heretics Manifesto, I knew from the very beginning that the first chapter was going to be called Her Penis and that the first line of the whole book was going to be, we need to talk about Her Penis, which is the first line of the book. I knew from the very beginning because I thought to myself, I need to drag the reader into the book. I need to grab the reader and make sure that they know what this book is about. And also, I just think that the phrase, her penis is such a brilliant encapsulation of the problems we face today. So the question I ask in that chapter is how did that two-word phrase become an accepted part of everyday discussion? You see it in the media. You see it on the BBC and in the Times, the

newspaper of record. You see it in courts of law when they're having trials over rape and sexual assault. You see it from the mouths of leading politicians and cultural figures. They will literally say those two words, her penis, which in my view is in a rational term. It's a term that would have made no sense to people 10 or 15 years ago. It makes no sense to me now. I think the only pronoun that should ever come before the word penis is his, the male pronoun. So in that chapter, the question of how language gets manipulated. How are we encouraged? What are the mechanisms through which we are encouraged or forced in some instances to say something as untrue and regressive and ridiculous as her penis? So that one, I wanted that to be...

But how does that happen? Tell us what are the mechanisms? I think it's various things. I think there's cultural pressure on people to buy into the trans ideology or the woke ideology more broadly. There is cultural pressure for people to agree that a man can become a woman simply by declaring that he is a woman. We know there's cultural pressure because anyone who refuses to do that can be cancelled. They can lose their job. They can be no platform. They can be blacklisted on university campuses.

We know the cases of Maya For Starter, for example, or Kathleen Stock. Posey Parker down in New Zealand, people who have either been blacklisted from respectable society or attacked by feral mobs of misogynists, which is what happened to our mutual friend Posey Parker, Kelly J Keene. So there is this cultural expectation that you will genuflect to the trans ideology and that you will adopt its language and you will adopt its ideas. And if you don't, you face punishment, you will be branded a heretic. So I wanted the first chapter of a heretics manifesto to be on the issue of trans and on the issue of a phrase like her penis and what that tells us about the authoritarian times we live in. And it is a very authoritarian time because it's asking you to deny biology and fact. And in the book, I think you give an example of Caitlin Jenner.

Yeah. Well, one of the most, I think, the reason the trans ideology to me is so interesting in relation to the question of heresy. and the way in which we're forced to believe certain things and banished from public life if we refuse to believe them, is that the trans ideology, as you say, absolutely demands that you reject the evidence of your own eyes, reject the light of your own reason, and instead bow down to what the establishment has decreed to be correct and right and truthful.

And it really is astonishing. Another example I give in the book is the New York Times and the BBC a few years ago, they published an article about a woman in her 80s who murdered and decapitated another woman, a woman who was in her 60s. And I was reading this thinking, hold on, women in their 80s don't murder other women.

I can't think of any instance in my lifetime where that's happened. They suddenly don't decapitate them. Women in their 80s tend to be quite small, usually a bit frail, certainly not murderously inclined. So I'm reading this thing. What the F is this about? You get to the very last line in the BBC article and it says this is a trans identified person. You get halfway through the New York Times article and it says this person was previously a man previously identified as a man. So it's a man. It's a man who murdered a woman. So you read something like that and you think to yourself they're lying to us.

They're gaslighting us on a daily basis. They're saying things to us that are simply untrue. They're saying to us, two plus two equals five, which is what happens, of course, in all worlds 1984. And if you disagree, if you say actually two plus two equals four, and this woman that you're talking about is actually a man, you will be branded a bigot, you will be cast out of polite society, you will be demonised. So I was very interested in the way in which gaslighting has become utterly mainstream. It comes from the mainstream media. The New York Times and the BBC, These are esteemed media outlets who are telling us that a woman murdered a woman and it was simply untrue. And what, coming back to, this is one of the things I'm thinking about a law.

I think I was once probably under the impression that this is all driven by the sort of pink-haired people on college campuses. But increasingly, I'm starting to be persuaded by the idea that a lot of people are going along with this because it's easy. because they don't want to have problems at work, because they don't want to be the one, they don't really care. It doesn't really affect them. And if it does, they'll sort of make peace with it because they don't want to make a fuss.

And it seems to me like it's almost like those people are far more numerous and therefore far more dangerous than the people who may be expressing these ideas out loud in extreme ways. Yeah, I think it's a mixture of different kind of responses to these problems. And then the question that I'm always asking myself is how these ideas get institutionalised.

I'm so interested in how consensus is forged and enforced. I find that such an interesting topic of our times. So I think you're right. So there are the true believers. I think the pink-haired people on campuses and in the trans lobby itself, they're the true believers. There are also the political opportunists. There are sections of the Labour Party, sections of the media establishment, who really go along with this because they think it's a way to demonstrate their virtue, to prove that they're

down with the new ideologies and with young people. So they really run with it too. Kirstama is a perfect example when he says 99.9% of women don't have a penis, which leaves hundreds of thousands of women who potentially do have a penis. So he buys into that irrationalism because he thinks it will benefit him politically. And then there are lots of other people who I think don't speak out. Now I'm generally quite sympathetic to those people, because I think one of the most pernicious impacts of cancelled culture is not that it tries to take down people like J.K. Rowling or Ricky Jervais, you know, these people are uncancellable in many ways. They're too big, they're too famous, they're too rich, they can't be cancelled. But what it does do is it sends a message to the rest of society. It has

this chilling effect where it says to everyone else, listen, if even J.K. Rowling, one of the most important cultural figures in modern Britain can be subjected to rape threats and death threats and vile misogyny on a daily basis simply for saying that biology is real and women are women and women should have their own rights. Imagine what could happen to you. Imagine what could be done to you, a lowly, ordinary woman or man who has a normal job. Imagine how much you will suffer if you say the same thing. So council culture casts this shadow over everyone's lives. And it is, discourages people from saying what they believe to be true. So I have an element of sympathy, I think,

with those people who feel that they cannot speak out because the culture now is so intense and so intolerant and so ferociously censorious that people feel that the consequences of speaking out are too severe. So I think across the board, the way in which these things get institutionalized are firstly through the lobbying of people who really believe them,

the cowardice of the political establishment who won't stand up for reason, and then the understandable reluctance of ordinary people to put their head above the parapet. But you also think that cancelled culture is not really the right way to describe what's going on. There's something else. It's possibly a more nuanced analysis of the situation. Could you expand upon that, please, Brendan? Yeah. So in the introduction to the book, I make the point that I'm frustrated with the term cancel culture. I use it all the time. It's a very convenient term. The public understands what it means. I hate this idea that the public doesn't know what wokeness is or what cancel culture is. Everyone has an instinctive understanding of what these things are. So cancel culture is a useful term. It has people recognize what it stands for. But the point I make in my book is that it's not sufficient to describe the problems that we face today. Because I think a term like cancel culture, it's become almost kind of quaint, kind of a kind of cute term, it's kind of quite light and quite flimsy. It gives the impression that the problem

we face today is the occasional cancellation of well-known people, the occasional attempt to cancel you guys from speaking or performing your comedy, or from preventing Kathleen Stock from speaking at Oxford University. We're encouraged to think that that's the key problem. That is a very serious problem, which we should always confront. But I think what we're living through is a counter-enlightenment, a reversal of enlightenment values themselves, an assault on reason and truth and freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. So it runs, it's like the term nanny state. I've never really liked the term nanny state because it sounds like Mary Poppins. It sounds too flimsy to describe the way in which the contemporary state thinks it has the right

to intervene in your life and tell you what to eat, how many times you should exercise, how you should raise your children. The argument I make in the book is we need new terms to describe this intense authoritarianism and this reversal of the enlightened values and the commitment to reason that define modern society for a long time. It's such a great point

because the term cancel culture, it doesn't encapsulate what's going on. And one of the things that I see coming down the path and I think a lot of people do is there's this rise in misogyny and there's a real rise in humiliation. homophobia. And it's really worrying because you see some of the old tropes that we used to see in the 80s, suddenly you start seeing them again and it starts being resurrected.

I couldn't agree more. You know, one of the things I find most frustrating as an anti-woke person is that people think if you criticize wokeness, if you criticize political correctness, you must be an old white conservative man who wants to, there's nothing wrong, by the way, with being an old white conservative man, more power to you guys. And you want to turn the clock back to the 1950s. Women in the kitchen, homosexuals living in shame, living in the shadows, you know, to a past that they think was better than what we have now. For me, it couldn't be more different.

The reason I'm worried about wokeness is because I think it's undoing all the great progressive gains of the 1960s and the 1970s. women's liberation, racial equality, colour blindness as an approach to everyday life, gay liberation, all those great things that happened in the 60s and the 70s where we said to ourselves, listen, people should live as they want to live, black people and white people should be judged absolutely equally within society. There should be no racial judgment whatsoever. Women should have the same rights as men. All those positive leaps forward, I think, are now threatened by the culture of wokeness. So wokeness depicts itself as the air to the civil

rights movement, but I think it is the usurper of the civil rights movement. So it now says that you should judge people by colour rather than character. You should obsess over race. You should wear racial goggles every single day. White people are privileged. Black people are in pain, their victims. And that's how you need to judge these racial categories. It is anti-women. It has rehabilitated misogyny, look at the vile abuse that gender-critical feminists get, or the way in which supposedly woke trans activists want to invade women's spaces and undermine women's freedom of association. And it is homophobic. We now have a situation which is almost unbelievable where young lesbians and young gay men, young gay boys, 15, 16, 17 years old, the vast majority of whom would have gone on to become

homosexual adults, perfectly happy, are now being subjected to medical intervention, hormonal correction. If you're a young woman who fancies other woman, you must be a man. If you're a young man who is attracted to other young men, you must really be a woman. Let's correct you, let's give you the medicine, let's change your body so that it accords with your sexual feelings. That is what they do in Iran. Iran is second only to Thailand in terms of gender reassignment surgery. And that's not because Iran is a great pro-trans hip country, it's because it is violently homophobic. And it would prefer to turn gay men into women and lesbians into men rather than have gay men and lesbians in its society. We're now doing the same thing in the

West. So the reason I'm concerned about wokeness is because I think it represents an almost violent reversal of the wonderful positive, progressive, liberal gains of the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, and that's my key problem with it. And the problem is as well is that in many ways, it's very well-intentioned though, isn't it? That's part of the problem because you're fighting against good intentions. It is, they think they're well-intentioned, yes, absolutely.

And they, if I were to say to them what I just said to you guys, they would be horrified. They do genuinely think that they're in the same world as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. I mean, you know, I don't want to be crude about it, but they genuinely think that fighting for the right of a biological male to go into a woman's bathroom and sit down on the toilet and do his business is the same as Rosa Parks fighting for the right to sit on wherever the hell she wanted to on the bus. They genuinely think they are the same thing.

And what I want to say to them is they are not the same thing. Rosa Parks, when she sat on the front of the bus and refused to move, she was striking a blow not only for her own dignity, but for the rights of people, regardless of their race, regardless of their skin color, to engage in public life as they choose. That was an incredibly important and positive moment in modern society. When a biological male demands the right to go into a woman's bathroom,

He is being antisocial. He is intruding upon other people's already won freedoms. He is actually trying to turn society on its head by saying, I should be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, regardless of the consequences, regardless of how it makes women feel, regardless of whether women feel threatened or not. So I just think they are wrong when they think that they are the heirs

to those great movements of the 60s and 70s. And the argument I would make to them is, look, I know you think you're doing good. You feel well-intentioned. But the movement that you are part of is having an incredibly destructive impact on people's freedoms, freedom of speech, women's rights, gay rights, and racial equality. And other things that I thought we had already agreed were good things. I think it's impossible to win that argument in that. the environment that we operate in now for precisely the reason you identified earlier, which is if this is a counter-unlightenment, which I think is the perfect way to describe it,

then the concept of truth itself ceases to have the definition that it has had for hundreds of years now. And so if a man can transform the truth of his nature by incantation, as I'm fond of saying, you know, Abra-cadabra, Stacey, now he's a woman, then all of the things that you've said don't matter because he is Rosa Parks. Yeah. Right. So the question I want to ask you, Brandon, and it's one that I've been wrestling with

and we've been wrestling on the show for some time is, if this is a counter-unlightenment, what does it say about us and what does it say particularly about the role of religion in society? Because I see a lot of people now, and I think quite rightly, going, maybe we were a little bit too quick to throw away the religious traditions with the bathwater of religious dogma, right?

Maybe we were a little too eager to throw down all the things that came from the past. Maybe in seeking to liberate gay people and women and ethnic minorities and so on from the stifling oppression that they were experiencing, we actually decided that it is in fact our mission to constantly tear down everything that comes from the past. And so, of course, we must do this now. What does it say about the current moment and the religious element? I'm particularly keen to hear thoughts on that. That's such an interesting question. And I feel so torn on a question like that, because one day I wake up and I feel really radical. I feel like a revolutionary leftist because I think to myself, I want to tear down the

House of Lords, which is undemocratic. And I want to, you know, have this extraordinary amount of industrialization and progress, and I want Africa to have exactly the same kind of life that we have in the West. I want that kind of revolutionary forwarding of capitalist society and industrial society. So some days I wake up and I feel very revolutionary. Other days I wake up and I feel quite conservative because I see the idea of motherhood being torn down and the idea that a bloke can breastfeed his baby, which is an obscenity in my view. And I see schools being bent to the woke ideology and kids being taught all this LGBT plus alphabet crap, excuse my language, and I think I'm not in favor of that. And I feel very

conservative in fact in relation to education because in my view, education is about society transmitting the best of its knowledge, the best of its traditions to the next generation. It is not the role of schools to inculcate kids with woke ideas and political correctness. Isn't it, though, because if the role of schools are to inculcate the ideas of the society and wokeness is the elite ideology, it is the purpose of schools. Well, yeah, but then that needs to be turned on its head. But you see my point, though, right? I do see your point.

And what we need to get back to, this is why, you know, when you see Muslim parents in Manchester at the moment protesting against LGBT education. We've got all the complaints documented. A child said to his teacher, my mom's going to have a baby boy. The teacher said to a child, you don't know what that baby is.

It'll decide it's gender when it grows up. We have been living side by side with the gay community. We have a gay capital, as they call it, Canal Street, you know in the city center we've been living side by side we work together there's never been any issues with you know the LGBT community the concerns are with the safeguard and inappropriateness and the age appropriate content that we're seeing is being pushed down the throats of our children and it's not even remaining in the PSHSC or the RE um subjects it's been it's been spread across the board you know it's going into art it's going into math I don't understand for the life for me

why it's going down this route. Muslim parents in Birmingham did it four or five years ago as well. And they got loads of flak, including from the left, which is usually very sympathetic to Muslim parents. But they got loads of flak. There are huge uprisings of minority parents in America at the moment. Muslims, Armenians, Latinos,

African Americans, and of course white parents as well, gathering at school gates saying, stop telling our kids there are 72 genders. I am completely on the side of those. people. I'm not a religious person. I'm not naturally a conservative person, but I'm completely on the side of those people because what they're saying is very positive, which is that we should not be telling kids that there are a million genders, and we should not be teaching them how to give blow jobs, and we should not be doing all these perverse, weird things. We should not have the

pride flagging classrooms. You can put it wherever you want outside of the classroom, but not in the classroom. You should be teaching kids the three hours, reading, writing arithmetic. You should be teaching them the history of their country. You should be teaching them how to be good citizens, how to be knowledgeable. So I'm completely on their side. So I think I do feel torn in relation to the question that you raised because on the one hand, there are things I want to tear down. There are things I want to rip apart. There's a revolutionary spirit I still have. I want to say the unsayable as the subtitle to my book suggests. But on the other hand, there are things I think

it's important for us to preserve. And one of the things it's important for us to preserve is scientific reason, the idea of truth, the idea of universalism, all these things that we benefited from in relation to the Enlightenment, I think those things are worth preserving. But in relation to the religious question,

I'd be interesting to hear what you're thinking is on that, because I feel torn on that too, because on the one hand, the issue I always had with the new atheists, like Richard Dawkins, and to a certain extent, Christopher Hitchens, who I'm a huge fan of, my issue with the new atheism is that it was, in many ways, it was about mocking religious people. It was about mocking these stupid rednecks and chavs and Irish Catholics, which is my background, who believe in God, you know, uneducated, ignorant people. And it was about basing. basically saying that the idea that humankind is special that we were designed, that we are above everything else, is a ridiculous idea.

And what I want to do is find a humanistic way to make the same argument. I want to find, because I don't believe in God, and I am not a religious person, even though I was brought up religiously. What I'm interested in is finding a post-God humanistic way to say, yes, humankind is a social. superior species. We are different to every other living creature on this planet. There is something special about us. There is something wondrous about us. It's like I want to defend the idea of wonder, the mystery of how human beings are so incredibly intelligent and morally inclined. So the question then becomes, do you need God to do that? Or can you do that in a post-God environment? And I think that's the struggle lots of us facing. That's why I brought up the question, because when

I was, Jordan Peterson had me on his podcast, he grilled me about this for three hours, and we went around and around. I wrote a piece on my substack recently called The Atheism Delusion. I don't know if you saw that. So I'm thinking about this quite a lot now, and it's my answer on a pragmatic level, forget the philosophical level, and pragmatic level is this. We have a society in which many, many people are not religious, and they also require the same things that we all require, which is meaning and purpose, a sense of right and wrong, a sense

of what's true and false, a kind of orientation towards having some kind of investment in the society that they live in and an orientation towards seeing it prosper and grow into the future. And to the extent that that can be achieved without religion, someone like me who is agnostic and someone like you who doesn't believe in God, we can, I'm sure, totally get behind that. The problem is, I do start to wonder, and my issue with the new atheism is that once you've taken God off the pedestal and you've put the superior in your words,

human being on it, who gets to decide what's true? Right? Because I can pull out a scientific study that shows transitioning is helpful to children at this and the... Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah.

Right? So once truth is... Once there's nothing that's kind of above us that we all take for granted that's passed down to us that is outside of us. Yeah. It's very difficult to then have people who differ politically agree on a certain set of values that are just embedded in society. Yeah, I get that.

My argument would be that the only way to understand truth or arrive at truth is through freedom. I know that might sound facetious, but I think that's a very real prospect and something that people should consider. You know, I think it's people have been talking for a long time about the God-shaped whole in modern society. What do we do after God? How do we define what is right and wrong? Do the Ten Commandments matter anymore in the absence of God?

So these are very real questions and very real issues that people are talking about and concerned about. But I think the point I would make, make is that in my view, and I know this probably is offensive to religious people, all of those values, all of those kind of God-delivered ideas that people generally agreed on and still do to a certain extent. They really came from man. They really were written by man. I don't believe that there is a God. I don't believe that God did give tablets to Moses or hide in a bush and talk to Jesus Christ or anything like that. I don't believe that happened. So these,

are the creations of man in a very positive way. And we know that there is a close link between Christianity and the Enlightenment and between the religious struggle for freedom of conscience and the right to express oneself and the right to believe what one wants to believe and then the subsequent development of enlightenment values, the freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, the freedom to think how you want to think. So I'm not someone who poo-poo's religion. I was brought up religiously. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy I went to Catholic schools from the ages of four to 18. I benefited from them enormously.

I was educated by nuns in a school that was built around the bottom of this convent on top of a hill. So it was great. It was wonderful. And it benefited me enormously. But I do think that there has to be a way in which society, precisely through exercising its freedom to think and its freedom to argue and its freedom to dissent, can arrive at something that we can generally agree to be true. And I do think that the, you know, John Milton made this point in the 1640s.

He said that the greatest crime of censorship, the reason that censorship was so obscene and offensive and counter to everything that is human is because it restricts us from discovering the truth. Because what it says, the terrible thing about censorship, and I make this point in my book, is that it says you don't have to worry your tiny little head about what is right and what is wrong,

what is true and what is false, because we will decide for you. Some greater superior establishment figure will decide on our behalf what is right and what is wrong and they will tell us. And John Milton made the point in that great moment of revolutionary upheaval during the English Civil War, he said, that's an offence against people.

And the only way in which we can genuinely believe that something is true is if we struggle for it in the realm of freedom and we make the argument and it is countered and people push back against it and we keep making the argument and we through that process, through that process of freedom, through that process of engagement, we might arrive at what we can agree, generally speaking, to be a true fact. The more we go through this journey, and the more I've seen these views metastasized and spread through society, the more I think that the left created this stuff, and it's actually the left who are going to solve it. The left are really the ones who are going to actually solve this problem if it's solvable. So, for example, with the trans issue, the people who make the headway are the Rosie Duffields. Yeah. They're the J.K. Rawlings. The people, the people, who are the nice, woolly, lefty liberals who will come out and criticise this, who are strong enough to do so. I think the right, although they may present really good ideas and their

criticism is maybe incredibly valid, they're not as palatable. It's really important for left-leaning and left-wing people to stand up. Would you agree on that? I would agree on that, actually. And I say that as someone who I still consider myself a leftist. Most people don't bring it. No one does. Everyone keeps telling me I'm a fascist and I'm a far right. And I'm like, what? I'm a communist. I don't know what I am.

Who knows what these words mean anymore? Everything's been thrown up in the air. In a romantic way, I still consider myself a leftist. But even as I recognize that it has no meaning anymore. Because if left wing now, whether we like it or not, left wing now means supporting the censorship of women because they're evil turfs. It means supporting young lesbians having double mastectomies. It means supporting cancel culture.

It means... Brilliant, hold on. Why do you say this? Because your argument sounds a little bit like being on the right now means you support Hitler. A little bit. Like, there are some people on the fringes of the right who believe, who are Nazis. There are some people on the fringes of the left who believe all this crap. Now, I hear your argument in my head already.

It's in the institutions and that's how it's being. enforced. But just flesh that out for people. Why do you say being on the left means that? Because there will be lots of people who watch this show who think they're on the left that don't support that. Oh, absolutely. And I love those people. And I consider myself one of them. It's because it's, what I mean is what society has defined left wing to mean. So I don't think that that is left wing. I don't think that is genuine leave left wing at all. It's like Brexit. You know, that's another can of worms, but when people said that the left-wing approach to Brexit is to support the European Union, I was like, no. Have you forgotten Tony Ben and Peter Shaw and Barbara Castle and all these

great historical left-wing figures from the Labour movement in the UK who were hugely anti-European Union and in favour of British sovereignty and British democracy? So very often what gets called left-wing is not really left-wing at all. But I think the situation we have to face up to is that we do live in a society where the presumption, at least, even if it's incorrect, the presumption is that to be left-wing means to be pro-trans, pro-trans kids, pro-cancel culture, in favor of the rehabilitation of racial thinking, although it's never called that.

It's called, you know, let's police white fragility, let's defend victimized black communities. That's what it means. And to my mind, that's a great tragedy, but that is what it means. And what it means to defend trans kids, what that means in the real world is supporting the hormonal intervention into young people's lives, supporting the surgical mutilation, if I can say it, of young lesbians, of young women, which I think is a grotesque tragedy. And I hope in 20 or 30 years' time, people will look back in horror. and look at it as a controversy on a scale of the thalidomide controversy,

that society could knowingly, consciously do this without having the restrictions and the common sense in place. So I don't think of any of that as left wing, but that is what left wing has come to mean. So I think those of us who think we're lefty or liberal or chilled out or countercultural, we have to grapple with that. We have to grapple with the fact that that's what it has come to mean, which I think is a problem. That doesn't mean I am...

Do you think that's a smear? Because there are times where I do actually think that's a smear. Because when people go, oh, you're on the right, therefore that means that you hate black people. That means that you mean this. I mean, you go, well, that doesn't mean any of those things. That's a ridiculous thing to say. Yes, it is. But I think it can become a smith.

It can become a smear if you caricature it too much. But we do have to face up to the fact that just in a very measurable, provable way, the people who now define themselves as left wing are pro-EU. They're pro-trans, they're pro-trans surgery. They tend to be pro-cancel culture, although they're obviously exceptions. That is what it means. And it's worth arguing against that. It's worth saying, in my view, it's always worth

saying that the left used to be countercultural, used to be libertine, it used to be very much in favour of freedom. You go back to the French Revolution, which is where the word left comes from, people who stood on the left side of the assembly and people who stood on the right side of the assembly, the people who were on the left side of the assembly in France, the parliamentary assembly, were the most radical, the most in favour of freedom, the most in favour of individual sovereignty and national sovereignty and revolutionary ideas. That's where it comes from, but it has changed enormously. And one of the things I find interesting about the contemporary left, in the UK and other countries too, is their distance from ordinary people, their distance from working class

people. Because the left used to be the one section of political society that was in touch with ordinary people that wanted to fight for their economic interests and their cultural interests and their rights. It's now the complete opposite. If you talk to a supposed lefty now, within five minutes, they will be raging about gammon, right, which basically means the lower orders. They will be raging about Brexit voters, the low information masses, they don't know what they're doing, they're ignorant, they're xenophobic, they're racist, they're obese, they're feckless, all those ideas that you would once have heard from hard right-wingers,

you now tend to hear from people who claim to be left-wing. So I do think we have to face up to the fact that we live in a world in which those terms of right and left probably mean very different things to what we would understand them traditionally to mean. And that's the world I think we have to grapple with. And Brendan, picking up on what Francis said earlier about many of these problems coming from the left, I'm curious, you mentioned the nanny state earlier, and I would describe what I think people mean by that is a growing and increasing interference in the lives of ordinary

people and their individual decisions about how to live their life, how to raise their children, you know, all sorts of other things from the government. And that seems to me to be an idea that's spreading incredibly rapidly. And wherever you look, I mean, you look at, you know, gas prices go up, the government's got to give people a handout. Interest rates go up, the government's got to step in. This has happened, the government, the government, the government, we're all, we're all, it's almost like whenever there's a problem now, it's always the government that's supposed to

fix them. And that seems to me to have two consequences. Yes, on the one hand, it means you are more protected. But the people who protect you, it's like your dad saying to you have 15. You can do whatever you want when you move out, right? You can do whatever you want when you're not living under my roof. And we're all increasingly now living under the government's roof. Is it any surprise that the government is telling us, don't say this, don't think this, don't go here, don't drink this, don't consume that?

That's a good point. I think the more that we get sucked into the remit of government assistance, you will get sucked into the remit of government control. I mean, that's the logic of that. COVID was a good example. COVID is a very good example of that, the whole lockdown idea. I think, yes, we live in a situation in which, tragically, I think lots of people look, very often their first instinct is to look to the government for assistance.

I do think that speaks to a great fraying of community solidarity and community connections. You could have gone, you could go about 40, 50, 60 years. And if people were hard up for cash, or they didn't know how to make ends meet, or they didn't have anyone to look after their kids, had to go out to work, you would turn to your neighbours. You would turn to your family. You would turn to those people around you. You know, my parents are Irish immigrants.

They came to this country in 1970. The idea and they were incredibly young the idea that they would ever have turned to the state I mean there were restrictions on their ability to do that but the idea that they would ever have done that was Unimaginable Unimaginable it would have been the last on their list of things that they would do Instead they struck up friendships they mixed in other Irish circles You would say who might look after my kids who might do this all those things I think are fraying and one of the consequences of the that fraying is that people do turn to government and then you start to develop this assumption

that the government will always look after you. But the point that we need to remind people off is that the government very rarely has our best interests at heart. And that's not because they're particularly evil or anything like that, but just because it's the machinery of government. It has lots of things to do. It doesn't particularly care about the individual or the struggling mum or the dad who needs someone to look after his kids or whatever else it might be. So the way in which I think people feel ever more reliant on the government for handouts, for welfare, for childcare, for lockdown, protecting us from disease, whatever else it might be, I think that speaks to a tragic hollowing out of the solidarity that once knitted people together.

And not only did it knit people together, but it knitted people together in opposition to external forces who said, We'll look after you, but we knew they wouldn't. So the absence of those kind of community connections and that social connectedness is, I think, one of the things that underpins the nanny state. And the lockdown is a perfect example of that. Because I think what the lockdown did is that it further corroded social connectedness. Because it criminalized social connectedness. It was a crime to go outside of your house and to knock on your neighbor's door

and to say, shall I buy you some food? Shall I come in and keep your company and watch TV for the night? Shall I go to my sister's house across town and help her look after our kids? They were criminal offences. So one of the chapters in my book is on COVID as metaphor. And the point I make is that the tragedy of lockdown is that it institutionalised the idea that human beings are toxic. We are diseased. We are a problem not only to ourselves but to other people.

and we need to be controlled and cajoled and kept in our own space and forced to behave in a certain way. So I think going forward, the impact of the Nanny State is going to get worse and worse, and we need to develop some really good arguments to counter it. And it also betrays a certain kind of helplessness within people, where people feel that they're no longer in control of their lives and they feel completely disempowered. Absolutely. So, you know, when I see the Nanny State, you know, there is this argument that I see on sections of the right, which is, you know, the sheeple, you know, the idiot public who bought into lockdown

and who buy into the Nelly State and who nod along to all this stuff that we're getting told. I feel so uncomfortable with all of that stuff. It really, to me, it echoes the arguments that you hear from sections of the left about the low information public, the stupid Brexit voter, you know, the stupid northerners, didn't know what they were voting for. There was that great placard in Westminster at one of the pro-Brexit rallies where a woman had a placard saying, I'm a dumb northerner who knew what she was voting for. So there was that, on the left you see those elitist arguments, but you also see them from sections of the right in terms of the sheeple, the idiots, the dumb masses.

And I feel uncomfortable with that because as someone who adheres to the old ancient Roman phrase, nothing human is alien to me. I try to understand where people are coming from. And I think one of the reasons people feel that they can't turn to their neighbors or they have to rely on the government or they have to follow the lockdown rules or they have to do all these things is precisely because they have been so ferociously atomized and alienated from everyone else and told constantly that they don't know what they're doing and the state does know what it's doing. If you have that message drilled into you again and again and again,

there is going to come a point where you start to lack the confidence to act on your own volition and to act on your own judgment. And I think that one of the points I'm making my book is that that's what we need to recover. We need, you know, the enlightenment is built on the idea that people know how to run their lives.

I would encourage all your listeners and viewers to read Emmanuel Kant. He wrote an essay. Emmanuel Kant is a very difficult Enlightenment thinker to read. It's hard to work out what he's talking about. But he wrote an essay called What Is Enlightenment, which you can Google and find online. It's really short. It could be published today. He basically says there are too many apron strings attached to ordinary people.

We have physicians who tell us what. to eat. We have spiritual leaders to tell us what to think. We have books that tell us how to behave. We need to push all of that aside and think for ourselves and use our own moral reason and moral judgment to act in the world and to act in our own lives. That was the Enlightenment idea. And so when we talk about living in a counter-enlightenment, the Nanny State is an expression of the counter-enlightenment. The lockdown was an expression of that counter-enlightenment. Cancel culture is an expression of that counter-enlightenment. All of these ideologies which constantly say to us,

you don't know what's best, you don't know what to think, you don't know how to behave, so we have to tell you. So it basically is about recovering some of those, that enlightenment self-confidence in ourselves. There's one thing that no one wants to say as part of that conversation that I feel needs to be said, which is it's not true that everyone knows how best to run their life. what is true is that it's preferable to behave as if that's true

and to bear the consequences of your own bad decisions yourself but we don't seem to ever air that part of it we don't ever say you messed up and now you're in debt and now you've got to pay it off right you messed up and you did this and now you've got to take responsibility and if we're not willing to say that nothing else works This whole thing breaks down. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think most people know what's best for themselves and their families.

I trust that you two know what's best in your lives. That's because you don't know as well enough. Maybe I need to find out a bit more. Most people that you meet in the public on the street, you know, you know this from your own lives. The people, you know, people you know who are not in the public eye at all. They know what they're doing. They know how to raise their kids. Most people do know, but you raise a really important point,

which is that some people are stupid. Let's be honest about it. Some people don't know. They make bad judgments. But even that, I think, is part of the Enlightenment freedom that I'm talking about. It's the right to make wrong choices. And actually, John Stuart Mill talks about this on Liberty, published in the 1860s, I think, where he says that even if it's true, that the government has a better idea than this person,

this dad or this mom or this drunken on the street. even if it's true that the government has a better view of that person's life than that person themselves, still that person must be allowed to make their own judgments. Because it's only through the process of making your own choices, making your own judgments, making your own mistakes, that you might potentially learn something and that you might actually correct yourself and you might actually think, I need to improve. And some people don't.

Some people just... I suppose, let me just push back on that. So we spend a lot of time in America and we love America. but if you go to San Francisco or any city in the United States, you see homeless people wandering around, drug addicted, clearly incapable of functioning on any level, any level whatsoever. The argument is, well, it's cruel to keep these people in, you know,

mental hospitals or drug counseling. They should be free to live their lives. That doesn't really work on a purely practical level, because what it leads to is San Francisco. Yeah. And that isn't good for anybody. Yeah, or San Francisco, as our mutual friend, Michael Schellenberg calls it. I don't disagree.

I think there is a point at which the defense of freedom becomes something else. It becomes the defense of self-destruction. We have to be very careful in working out where that line is. But you see it, I've seen it in San Francisco. I've seen it in Los Angeles. Last time I was in Los Angeles, I was horrified. It's every big city in America, including in Red States, by the way. Unbelievable.

I was in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago. There's just people wandering around, harassing people sitting outdoors, just mentally ill people. And they're not, they're not, that's not freedom. No. That's not freedom. I agree. And I was really shocked the last time I was in L.A. You know, we have homeless problems in London and we have poverty problems in London,

but LA is off the scale. You know, there are tents and tents on the streets and people living on the streets. You don't even know if some of them are alive or not. You're literally walking past people who could be dead. It's third world conditions. It's really shocking. You say that I lived in the third world.

This does not happen. Right, right. This doesn't happen in Russia, in Ukraine, in Armenia, in Uzbekistan. I have never seen anything like this in the third world. It's horrendous. There's no question about that. are smaller scale versions of it, I think, in Europe. I go to Ireland a lot and I go to Dublin on my way to Galway, which is the place I'm mostly go to. And even in Dublin, you'll see

some of these problems expressed in a smaller way. You'll see long queues of people for methadone and so on on certain streets. And so there are lots of problems. I think the issue there is that I think some people confuse freedom with non-judgmentalism. That's the problem. That's the problem. And so I am a fervent defender of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, freedom of association. The vast majority of human beings should enjoy those freedoms and have every ability to do so. But there is a section of society who fall under the radar or who fall on hard times and I think what contemporary Western elites do is that they use the language of freedom to, to justify those people's self-destruction. So they say, it's their free choice, relax.

If they want to defecate in public and shoot up in public and do whatever else they want to do in public, that's freedom. But that's not freedom. That's degradation. That is self-degradation, but it's also social degradation. That individual should not be experienced in such horrific living conditions.

And the other people in that society, whether it's San Francisco or Dublin or whatever else it might be, should not have to observe those living conditions. So that's another failure of solidarity, another failure of sense, another failure of reason. And there are situations, I think, extreme situations in which society should make a judgment, which is very unfashionable these days,

and should say we judge that these people, their behaviour is so self-destructive and also socially destructive, that action needs to be taken to try to get them on the stray and narrow. Sometimes that will work, sometimes it won't, but the effort needs to be made. But it's the unwillingness to make judgments,

the criminalisation of moral judgment. Let everything happen, let everything go, don't be judgy. That's, I think, underlies a lot of these points. Well, once you take away truth, you take away right and wrong, and then you can't make a judgment. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And it's also as well, because we talk about Nanny State, and look, I'm in agreement with you, and pretty much everything that you say, Brendan, But there are elements of the Nani state that we need. You know, Islamic fundamentalists need to be trapped.

They need, you know, something needs to be done. You know, at some point the state needs to step in. Do you see what I mean? You can't just let people just be completely free. There needs to be checks and balances. And I think where the discussion gets really interesting is where we talk about what checks, what balances, how much freedom,

And actually, when does the state needs to step in? Because I feel that the libertarian argument, not saying that you're presenting it, of just maximum freedom, whatever else, it doesn't work in reality. I think one of the issues, I don't disagree with that. I think one of the questions in relation to Islamic fundamentalism is the question of when you intervene. So I am very much, I'm so pro-freedom of speech that I think... I thought you were going to say something else. No, no, no. I'm so pro-freedom of speech that I even think Islamic radicals should be allowed to go on campuses and make their speeches and so on and say, you know,

stupid kaffirs and backward, regressive non-Muslims, you know, beat your wives. I'm a real free speech extremist. I think people should be allowed to say those things. And I know that makes some people uncomfortable, but that is what I believe. But then there is the question of when does the state have the right to intervene. So there does obviously come a point where extremist ideas and extremist ideology crosses the line into some form of behavior, some form of action, some form of conspiracy. And if you look at the failures over the Manchester Arena bombing, I've read all three of those inquiry reports, and I encourage everyone to read them. It's absolutely astonishing. The failures, at every level, the failure to clock that the bomber was

planning this, they completely failed to do that. The failure to clock on the night itself that this young fellow was walking around with a massive rucksack for hours before he detonated it. And in fact, one of the people who worked at the Manchester Arena said he didn't accost this young man because he was afraid of being accused of racism. That's where the obsession with Islamophobia gets you. You don't even want to walk up to a young bloke with a rucksack at 9 p.m. at a Manchester Arena, Ariana Grande concert in case someone calls you racist. And then the failure after the fact and the way in which we don't talk.

about that bombing. We don't talk about Islamic radicalism. We don't talk about Islamic terrorism because you might offend apparently the Muslim community. So there are huge failures across the board from the state and from society in relation to radical Islam. But I do think it's worth tussling with a question of when it is justifiable for the state to intervene because they think you've gone beyond rhetoric into something else. But the broader point I would make on freedom in response your question, Francis, is that I think it's an important point. Freedom is not necessarily nice. It's not necessarily a good, comfortable thing. Sometimes freedom gives rise to horrible things and ugly ideas and racist ideas and prejudice ideas and hate speech. I'm one of those

people who thinks that even hate speech shouldn't be censored because the best way to challenge those regressive ideologies is in the public realm. It's in the open, free space where you can deploy reason and truth to counter the arguments of people who we all agree are backward and regressive and prejudiced and dangerous. You know, the classic example is Holocaust denial. That's banned in many European countries. It was banned in France around 25 years ago because it's a racist ideology. We all know it's a racist ideology. And France now has one of the worst problems in Europe of anti-Semitism. It has one of the worst problems of Holocaust denial for various social reasons.

And I think the censorship contributed to that. Because if you force these things underground, you create a situation where they can fester and grow and they can take hold amongst isolated communities in particular. And in France's case, immigrant communities who feel cut off from the mainstream. and they latch onto these dangerous ideologies. So freedom can be uncomfortable and it can feel dangerous and it can feel like you're allowing all sorts of problematic ideas to have free reign and what are we going to do with them.

But that is always preferable. One of the points I'm making my book is that freedom of speech is always preferable to censorship because censorship is far more likely to unleash prejudice and violence than freedom of speech ever is. And it's worth remembering that. And we saw that it's a great point because we saw over COVID with the suppression of the lab leak discussion. And actually what happened, and it seemed to me, was that we tended to get this explosion of conspiracy theories.

Yeah. Where people were actually saying a variety of different things. And as a result of that, you know, the people are scandemic and all the rest of it. And you saw people who I regarded as friends and at one point being perfectly reasonable, suddenly descend into, a form of madness in many ways. I couldn't agree more. And it's one of my big concerns coming out of the COVID era is the way in which I actually think that the COVID deniers, the people who think that it was a scandemic, I'm sorry,

but I think what they've done is unforgivable because they have trounced the very important discussion we need to have about lockdown. We need to have a very important social, open discussion about whether lockdown was the right policy, when is it justifiable to lockdown society? Did we go too far? Did we have too many? Does it need to be institutionalized in law or can we have a voluntaristic approach as they did in Sweden? These are important discussions. But what the scandemic lobby have done and the anti-vax lobby and others who think the WEF has got its puppeteering hands behind all of this, they have blown apart that discussion by polluting.

it with ideas that are just cranky and conspiratorial and crazy. So I have no truck with these people at all and it's won me few friends and lost me some followers. But I don't care because it's important to defend reason and truth. And another example is the Ukraine issue, I'm afraid to say. I think Ukraine has now started to become bound together with the lockdown conspiracyism. You know, Zelensky is just a puppet. He's just a W-E-F actor. He used to use. to be an actor, ooh, that's suspicious. You know, you know... That is about the sophistication level of the argument.

That is what it is. And, you know, why are we supporting Ukraine? Why are we sending them weaponry? Why are we doing this? It's cynicism that masquerades as criticism. And it makes me very uncomfortable. And what I want to say to these people is, look, I agree with some of your points in relation to the nanny state or wokeness or the trans ideology and so on.

But you lose me when you... jeopardize important discussions about lockdown, important discussions about Russia's barbaric imperial invasion of Ukraine by introducing all these cynical elements, introducing the idea that these are conspiratorial measures that were introduced by people that we have no control over, because that's undemocratic, it's illiberal, and it feeds into the very climate that I think people like us are supposed to be challenging. There you go. The title of this episode is going to be Brendan O'Neill controlled opposition. That's me.

Brendan's great to have you back on the show. Before we head over to locals, where our fans will ask you their questions. Tell us, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? God, that's... I always forget that you guys ask this question. Even though we remind us.

I know, even though you remind me, and we've done it before, I'm never really prepped. I think... Well, the first thing to say is that we are now finally talking about the things that we should be talking about. We are talking about the transing of kids. We are talking about the problem of lockdown. So there are some good things that we're talking about.

I think we do need to talk more. We are talking a lot about freedom of speech, but I do think we need to talk about it more. I mean, it is the issue that I am most obsessed with. I do think we need to start to dig down into terms of what we mean by freedom of speech, how expansive we think it should be, does it apply to everyone?

Does it apply to our radical Islamist friends? There is still a discussion to be had, I think, about what freedom of speech means. One of the things that worries me about the freedom of speech question at the moment is that very often people are defending me speech rather than free speech. And I fear that even gender critical feminists, and I'm a huge fan of gender critical feminists, they will often go to the barricades in defense of gender critical feminist freedom of speech. But if you were talking about dapper laughs going onto a campus and making a few kind of off-coloured jokes

or some right-winger going on campus and saying, I don't like all these immigrants coming over here, they would probably go quite quiet. So I still think even though freedom of speech and cancelled culture and all those things have become part of common discussion, there still needs to be a more rigorous everyday debate and analysis of how important freedom of speech

and how far it should go. Brilliant. Brendan, thank you for coming back. We're going to head over to locals. Make sure you get the book of Heretics Manifesto, and we'll see you on locals. When is it right and when is it wrong to ally yourself with groups are ideologically different

when you have certain common causes but strongly disagree on other issues?