TRIGGERnometry - Do Progressives Care About Jews? David Baddiel

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

David Baddiel is a comedian, television presenter and author of Jews Don't Count - available here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/jews-dont-count/david-baddiel/9780008399474 Join our exclusive community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ 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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kitten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest to date is a comedian and author of Jews Don't Count. David Badeal, welcome to Trigonometry. Hello everybody. Hello guys. Hello, Constantine. Hello, Francis. Nice to see you. Can I just say, I've got a new camera. I normally do podcasts over there on that sofa just with a laptop.

but I bought a new Logitech camera. So there's quite a lot of depths of field going on. And also, I'm worried already in a slightly neurotic, Jewish way, that it shows bits of my study that people are thinking, what the fuck is that? Like, what is that big trophy over there? Why has he put that there? Is that to say that he won the FA Cup once?

It's not. It's a trophy that I got for winning Richard Osmond's House of Games, and I didn't know where else to put it. And also these things, people are going to be thinking, what are they? Does he have some sort of disability? they're not. That's something I bought

because I do that quite a lot. I've actually got a podcast I do with Faye Ripley about just buying shit on the internet and talking about it and what that is is a chair gym

right and you're meant to be able to do this with these stuff hang on oh wait a minute this it's like a bullhaker

attached to your chair so just in case this is the best opening in the history of trigonometry mate I've got to say yeah so you can both be lazy and get ripped at the same time.

That's the idea. All my life, I've looked for gadgets that could do that for me, and none of them ever actually worked, as you can tell. But, yeah, I am the laziest worker outer in the world. I'm always trying to take shortcuts there. Apart from that, I think it looks all right. Yeah, no, it looks great. And it's good to have you, man.

Thanks for coming on the show. We're really appreciate it. I should say for anyone who's not familiar, and we'll maybe get you to talk a little bit about your career and life story as well. The title of the book, Jews Don't Count. It's not like a policy prescription. Just in case anyone from America is tuned in and go, finally someone's saying it.

You know, like that's not what it's about. I'll say that, Constantine, but there was some troll who, when it first came out, he wasn't really talking to me. He was talking to, I think, Daniel Finkelstein, who people will possibly know a little bit in Britain, but won't know. He's actually a lord. He's a Tory peer and Jewish. And he was talking about the book.

And some bloke claiming to be Jewish had kept on saying, that's hate speech. I'm going to go to the police to get this book shut down. Who would read this book on the tube? I mean, that is a good look, just sitting on the tube reading a book saying Jews don't count. Yeah. I mean, if you do take it literally, as opposed to what it clearly is, which is reported speech, summing up an attitude that I feel is prevalent, but just as a manifesto, I can see his point,

but he is the only person who seems to have taken it that way. Yeah. So it's not a, it's not a prescription from a very disaffected Jew as to how we should proceed re-Jews. No, it's summing up an attitude that I'm critiquing. Well, we'll talk about that in a sec. But as I mentioned before we started, we have a very large international audience. A lot of people in the UK for people abroad, David is a very well-known comedian who's created lots of stuff that people really love and us included. But tell everybody a little bit of your life story, David. Just, you know, how are you where you are? What has been your journey through life?

Well, yeah, I'm a comedian. I've done lots of stuff. I'm quite old, 56. And I, you know, started out as a stand-up comedian. And then after doing that for a few years, I got on telly in Britain with a show called the Mary White House Experience, which was a stand-up and sketch show, and that blew up in quite a big way. And me and a guy called Rob Newman

became the first ever British comedians to play Wembley Arena, which was great, amazing. And then me and him split up quite badly. And I then started another show with another comedian in Britain called Frank Skinner, which was about football. It's called Fantasy Football League,

and that did well as well. And I'm probably best, I hate best known for. One of the things as you grow older is the notion that the phrase best known for is what's going to be on the news when you die. And I love this thing that I did, but I do know it will be on the news when I die. And that is me and Frank and a bank called the Lightning Seeds wrote a song called Three Lions, which was adopted as the kind of English

football anthem in the 90s and probably still is the best known football pop song of all time. And it was sung by, you know, crowds at Wembley and all the rest of it and still is. And then So lastly, I've done many, many things. I've sort of returned to doing live stand-up a lot recently, although the shows are more complex and more theatrical than they used to be. I did a big show about my family called My Family, Not the Sitcom, which I toured worldwide, actually, for about two years. And it was, you know, I still think it was really fucking funny show,

but it was moving and complex about my mother and father or whatever. And I also, I just going to take too long, I write lots of books, I've written four adult novels, seven children novels. And this book that you mentioned, Jews Don't Count, is my first foray, I guess, into non-fiction. It's a polemic, it's quite short.

I can get it, actually. Hang on, see it somewhere. Have you got it? There's one. This is, just for the audience at home, this is how trigonometry shows always work. The guest just randomly stands up and walks away halfway through.

That's it, and it's quite short, and it's a polemic. It's in the tradition of, because published by the Times, Dississory Supplement of sort of without wishing to compare it in quality to that, but things that like George Orwell wrote about, I know, what did he write, like, on the working classes, whatever Orwell wrote. It's that sort of short pamphleteering book.

And that's what I've written recently and yet about the failure of identity politics, specifically when it comes to Jews. And David, I read it, I very much enjoyed it. Why did you think it was so important and so necessary in 2020, 2021 to write this book? Well, you know the question, why now? You get it a lot from if you take anything anywhere. Like if you ever go to pitch something to a TV commissioner,

they often say, why now? I always want to say, I don't know, it's just a good idea. It was a good idea 10 years ago. It's still a good idea now. And with this book, although I think it is very relevant now, and people seem to feel it's very timely. And in a way, I guess, what happened to the Labour Party during the Corbyn years.

I don't know if I could have written it or put it out quite so thoughtfully, I guess, because it was so, you know, volatile all that. And it feels to me that maybe that now you can talk about it a bit more sensibly,

although, you know, it's still very volatile, all that. But to be honestly, the book itself has been brewing for a long time. You know, I've been writing sporadically in different places about what I feel is this particular issue, which is, as I say,

the sort of like neglect of Jews. within the hierarchy of racism that people who are anti-racist care about. I've been writing about it since about 2002. And in fact, I wrote a piece in 2011 for the Daily Telegraph, which was nothing to do well before Corbyn and all that, which was called how anti-Semitism entered the zeitgeist

and was sparked off by, I think, when Galliano, not Russian, I think that's you I'm thinking of, Constantine. Galliano, the, what is he, French, designer, was found to have gone on a big Nazi rant. Well, thank you for that comparison. I appreciate it, yeah. I mean, it's quite offensive to Galliano. He'd never be dressed like this.

Because you're wearing a jacket as well. What a nice white jacket, Nazi, same thing, really. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, anyway, I wrote about that then, and I've written about sporadically. But to answer your question, Francis, during the Corbyn years,

there were a lot of friends of mine left-wing friends of mine who basically said, and this is boiling down what they said, it's decompensifying it, this can't be right, all this anti-semitism stuff, because we're left-wing, we're anti-racists,

and that's our whole thing. So it just can't be the case. We can't put it together cognitively that this is a thing. And it seems to be a thing, and it seems to be really like eating away at our project, but we don't get it. I mean, and so I ended up having conversations

and sort of one by one with these people saying, well, maybe it's about this and maybe it's about that. And it's complex. It's not an easy, straightforward thing. People think of anti-Semitism very much as coming from the far right as a kind of full-on direct thing on people who own it, who say we hate Jews and we're very proud of that. And that's part of what we like about being this person who waves a neo-Nazi flag or whatever. That obviously is not how it comes from progressives or the left or whatever. So it's more difficult to pass P-A-R-S-E. It's more difficult to do. deconstruct. And so that's what I wanted to do. All those conversations and all those times I've talked about it elsewhere, I wanted to sort of put it in one package and get it out there and see what happened. And do you think, David, the problem is, and you do actually explore it

in your book, is that people associate Jews with being white, therefore they have privilege, therefore you can't be racist against them, is one of the arguments, I imagine. Well, that's one of the arguments, although I think it's more complicated than that. And I begin, I talk about the concept of white privilege and about a slightly more complicated thing to that which I call Schrodinger's whites. Not my not I didn't invent that phrase but it's a very good one. I don't know who invented it. I just noticed it being said occasionally on the internet. Schrodinger's whites is a concept whereby Jews are considered white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer. So far right people have I mean for years not just recently recently and obviously going back a long

time considered Jews to be non-white. I mean absolutely set in stone. as part of like, say, white supremacy in America is that Jews are not part of the white races and would not be, you know, allowed in an ethno state as far as white supremacists are concerned. And that is completely kind of forgotten when progressors as they tend to talk about Jews and particularly when they kind of dismiss anti-semitism because, yeah, it seems as if it's just another branch of people saying, you know, oh, you can't be racist against white people is like, and Jews seem to be those white people, and therefore the racism is downgraded.

That in itself is, I think, a lot to do with the fact that Jews are, and I've talked about this in the book, I've talked about this a lot, the only ethnic minority who would suffer this kind of weird, double status racism, whereby Jews get all the usual stuff, they get all the low status stuff, your vermin, you're thieving, your liars, your scum, all that stuff.

but they also get a high status racism, which is you're in control of the world. You're privileged, you're powerful, you are secretly controlling all governments, etc, etc. All the conspiracy theories, so many of them come back to this notion of the powerful Jew. And then you get this weird thing whereby that isn't quite recognized as an assault,

as if it's sort of almost complementary in some way. And that's, I think, what is also bought by some people on the left, when they don't put Jews into the category of people who need to be protected from racism because they think, well, they're powerful, and so they don't need it. And you saw that example with Jeremy Corbyn and the mural. You might want to explain to our viewers and listeners what actually happened with the mural, what it was, and then go into it a little bit more.

Yeah, right. So this happened after Jeremy Corby came to power, but the thing that he did was while he was still just an MP and not head of the Labour Party, I think it was 2012. I don't know. Well, you said came to power. I was having some kind of horrible flashback as if that actually happened. He never came to power.

You became leader of the opposition. Still terrifying for Jews. No, I meant came to power in the Labour Party. Yeah. But I think in 2012, or I can't remember when it was, actually. It's in the book. But there was a mural in East London somewhere done by an artist called Mere One. And Mere One is a very good example of the kind of progressive I'm talking about

because he's a street artist and he's done a mural. of rich people playing monopoly sort of floridly on the backs of the suffering, mainly brown, world poor. And he, that was then complained about by various local Jewish people because they all looked incredibly Jewish. They all had sort of hook noses and long beards. And two of them actually were Jewish. Two of them, it turned out, we're supposed to be Rothschild and Warburg, who are these two Jewish sort of financiers who were often brought up, particularly Rothschild by people who want to say Jews control the world. Rothschild is really just a substitute for Jewish control of the world.

And so it got taken down the mural, and Mere 1 was very cross about that, and he put out a statement on his Facebook page saying, just to confirm what I said earlier, that some white Jewish folk, it's very interesting that he chose to say white. white Jewish folk, I think he said white, rich Jewish folk, but not absolutely sure about that, were upset by depictions of their beloved, hashtag Rothschild, hashtag war, though. Hashtag's very important there, because he puts it on this Facebook page, you click on hashtag Rothschild, you go straight to conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. So he's done that deliberately as well. And Jerry Corbyn, underneath his post, supported it and said it was, you know,

that it reminded him of something that happened to Diego Rivera. and mentioned Lenin or whatever. He basically said, you know, there are lots of examples of revolutionary art being taken down by the powers that be, and this is another example of it. That was essentially Jeremy Corbyn's position on it. And later on, when Corbyn was head of Lennon, this was brought up as an example of his blind spot, and that's a very complicated word, blindspot in the book about anti-Semitism. And my point is that if you are a very avowed anti-capitalist like he is, you can look at an image. like that, and presumably just want to celebrate it as an anti-capitalist. But unfortunately, the imagery of anti-capitalism is deeply entwined with the imagery of

anti-Semitism. And there's really complicated reasons for that. Some of them are straightforward to do with what I think Shaw called the socialism of fools, where, you know, just the way that some people on the left depict richness and capitalism and exploitation just seems to involve always coming back to his image of a swarthy, fat, hook-nosed bearded man counting his money. But in the book, I suggest it might have even deeper unconscious reasons to do with Christian imagery and, you know, unable to separate kind of gargoyles and evil from the image from the face of the Jew.

But my point is to a Jew, and also, I think, to a sort of ordinary, educated person, that image of that mural looked a lot like the cover of Der Stürmer, which is the Nazi newspaper that was published weekly by Julius Stryker and always had a cartoon of essentially Jews celebrating their control of the world. But Corbyn kind of couldn't see that. And I think that, and neither could mere one, by the way, which I think is as important in its own way, that someone so self-avowedly I'm of the left,

I am of a person who fights injustice, blah, blah, blah, couldn't see it and in fact was angry at it being taken down. I'm going to ask you a question of Francis actually came up with, but it's going to sound better coming from me because unlike him I'm Jewish. And he doesn't have a racist voice. Exactly. For the both of those reasons. But do you think that the allegations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party under him were exaggerated and weaponized by his enemies? Well, I talk about that in the book. I talk about how the book is, you know, short, but I try, for me, the truth is always complex.

And actually, one of the things about, you know, podcasts like yours, I think that's good that, you know, I said this before we started, that I wrote a piece about the culture wars in the Sunday Times. And I talked about being asked by, and, you know, do excuse me for saying this, but you were one of the ones in my mind, being asked by alt-write podcast to go on. Let's just make sure we put that in inverted comments for people who don't get the joke. But the reason that I would be, even though maybe, you know, would you say that that was any truth at all? Is that just unfair? No, no, absolutely not.

So how would you describe yourself in terms of your relationship to progressive thinking? I would say that we oppose, we are anti-woke, but from a centriced position. We oppose wokeness for the same reason we oppose the far right, and they hate us equally, too. So we actually get a lot of anti-Semitism, including him, he's not even Jewish. You just looks at it because the far right hates us as much as the far left. And we'll get into this, because I do have something I want to argue with you about, which is the merits of identity politics at all. Yeah, let's park that, because that's a long conversation.

And I've had that conversation a few times, and yeah, we should talk about it. about that. But my point was the truth is always complex, right? And I think, you know, that's something that you're demonstrating in your answer there, right? That actually this idea of easy tribalism is bollocks.

And one way in which I try to make that clear is that I think that anti-seminism was of course weaponised by the Tory party during the time of Corby. And I use the example of Matt Hancock getting into trouble at some thing where

was talking about the NHS and flailing really badly because he, you know, it was clear the NHS were not being supported properly. And he just mentions Corbyn, anti-Semitism as a result, to try and get out of it. And then what happens is just the crowd start booing and stamping their feet and taking the microphone away from him and just laughing at him. And I pointed out that when I was troubled by this on Twitter, which obviously a lot of my book is about social media, I just got immediately shouted down by progressives. Can't you see he's weaponising it? Can't you see he's playing a car?

And I wanted to say, yeah, this is a cognitive dissonance thing. He is doing that. I am still, as a Jew, disturbed by this mob's reaction to the word anti-Semitism. It is impossible not to be as a Jew to hear someone say, what about anti-Semitism? However, you know, Cunty it is that he's done that, to hear them stamp their feet and boo and dismiss it violently as a thing that would ever be of any concern? Well, since we've got into that identity politics conversation, we might as well get on with it.

So I found your book very good, and I think the way I felt was you identify the dots, but then refuse to connect them in my view. And I'll tell you what I mean by that, right? So for me, it's the inevitable consequence of identity politics, the Jews will be perceived as evil oppressors, just like East Asians will be, the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, basically any culture that teaches its children to value education, to work hard at school, and as a result of that succeeds, will always be seen as the oppressor. Because as far as I'm concerned, identity politics is about splitting people into groups

and then going, these are good groups, these are bad groups. And the bad groups are the ones that do well, the good groups are the ones that are struggling, Right. Do you, what would be your view on that sort of position? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase.

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These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it, fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine,

isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado green mattress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Well, okay, so the book is not a roadmap. I've had this a few times, a few times where people say to me,

you know, are you suggesting that the intensification of identity politics that are so swirled around other minorities should be applied in every way to Jews? and is that a good thing for Jews to be on the same kind of hair trigger sort of radar for off a fence and whatever? And my answer to that is that is not, the book is not that. The book is not like a piece of social planning, right? It is an analysis of the way things are. And I'm very kind of like assiduous in the book and way not to make any kind of like easy value judgments about those things. My position is this is how it is.

I mean, your point exists because, you know, you are critiquing identity politics because you feel it as a very happening thing, right? All those things you've just talked about. Now, I think the book is more valuable because there's been lots of sort of like attempts to take apart identity politics. Some are really good and some less less good or whatever. But I don't think you get to, in a way, the people I'm trying to speak to, if you're positioned. is identity politics is shit. In a way, I think, I take a neutral position on the book, which is this is what it is.

We live at a time where the language of privilege and the intensification of microaggressions against identity are taken very seriously by these people who feel themselves the guardian of that stuff, and yet they miss out Jews, or they have a different attitude to Jews. They're ambiguous around Jews. So, for example, which might make it clearer, I talk in the book how it's very much as, you know, a commandment, if you like, an article of faith for, let's call them woke people, that, you know, the people who are discriminated against can define the racism.

So, you know, a white person should not be telling a black person that isn't racist, right? and I would agree with that, to be honest with you. But my main point is whether or not I agree with it, it exists. That's definitely something Pierce Morgan gets shouted at, but online if he tries to tell Megan Markle that something isn't racist, right, or whatever. That does not apply to Jews, right? There are loads and loads. David, the reason I ask you the question is you repeatedly describe yourself as a progressive in the book,

and I think you've already said so yourself. So I guess what I'm asking is how do you square that circle of, on the one hand, you know, wanting to talk about this issue. On the other hand, supporting a worldview, which I would say will continue to contribute to discrimination against Jews. Well, because I think that I'm progressive, but obviously the book is a critique of progressives. So, I mean, actually, I met with someone yesterday who said to me that he read the book. I don't particularly see it exactly like this because I don't think in a way it goes even. into this area, but he said that the book at some level takes apart the whole idea of identity politics without saying it, because if it doesn't work for Jews, and as you say, may not work

for others, then it starts, then obviously the whole thing starts to fray, right? But meanwhile, he read it like that. At the other end, I got a review in the Times by Stephen Bush, who is a left-wing guy and I think he's a political editor of a new statesman in which he said to me I mean a bit more like you're saying I guess he said to me oh he's left wing but he doesn't believe in the language of privilege right he's a mixed race Jewish and black guy doesn't believe in the language of privilege doesn't believe in the whole concept of white supremacy and structural oppression and all that kind of stuff I might be simplified but that's the impression I got and he and he said oh you you know he essentially accused me of adhering to those ideas in the book and I said no

I'm modelling them. I'm saying this is how they are. And now I'm critiquing them. I'm really not applying any kind of value judgment to them either way. Now, I'm happy to some extent, because the book is supposed to just be attaching to a conversation, to say for people to take it either way, to be honest with you, because it's a short book and it's tactically and intellectually,

I think, more useful to say, this is how it is. This is how identity politics is. It misses out due. Here's the complex reasons why it does that. And then I've noticed, and this is just empirical, that progressives who read it just say, oh, fuck, yeah. Right?

Now, I'm not sure they'd do that if it was like, and identity politics is, you know, fucked up in all these other ways. And also, to be honest with you, my own thinking about that is complicated. You know, I think, and I, you know, So what is your own thinking about that? Tell us, that's what I really want to get to, is what is your own thinking about?

that. Yeah, but that's weird that you want to know that, Constitu. I think you want to know that because I think you do want to weaponise the book as part of the culture wars. And I don't want to weaponise it for anything. I'm just curious how you think about it because for us, but that's my point. It is complicated. And that's what I'm, I'm trying to work it out in my head still. That's what I want to hear of your view. Okay. So look, so at one point, I'm having this conversation with Stephen Bush, who's as I say is a mix writer, a Jewish person of color. Right. And at one point he says something like, because I say in the book, he appears to completely reject the language of privilege, even though he's of the left and whatever. And I say at one point something like in the book, I talk about Jews not being white, right? Not being quite white in the way that I've described. And there's other reasons why I talk about that as well, including personal kind of lived experience ones, like being beaten up myself. One of my first stand-up jokes was I've been beaten up twice in my life. once of being Jewish, once of being a Pakistani.

And that stuff that just happened to me, right? I had something very similar in my routines as well, talking about how on the same day, I was discriminated against for being a Pakistani. And then later, I got an email from a gig for a comedy show saying, oh, we've got too many white men on the bill. Right. It was about me.

Well, that's a perfect bit of Schrodinger's white, I have to say. Yeah, exactly. But in that same bit, I say that I agree that being, white brings you privileges in society that the white person may not be aware of, right? And I do agree with that. You may not, but I do agree that it definitely gives you certain head starts in life and certain other ones it may not give you when you refer to, you know, that you have to complexify it with, well, what type of white person, you know, Boris Johnson as a white person has had enormous privileges that a, you know, Northern Irish working class bloke,

you know, has not had, right? So that's what I mean by complexity. I adhere to some of it, but I think you always have to complexify it. Well, I agree with that. That's so, there's no element of this show that's about weaponizing anything, David. I just wanted to make everybody understand that. I'm just curious about how you think, that's all.

Yeah, well, that's what I don't know how else to put it really. Then I think that, well, okay, so here's another example, it's slightly adjacent to what you're saying, but I think it might help. So I get asked a lot, and I have talked in my shows, about what is okay and not okay to make jokes about, right? And obviously that's something that you've talked about as well, right? And I say you can joke about anything. It depends not the subject matter, but the joke, right?

So actually in my last show about trolls, I tell a number of Holocaust jokes, one particularly one particular one, and say, these jokes are not offensive, right? They're not just because I'm Jewish and have relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. Look at who's actually being targeted here. These are not jokes.

These are not pro-Nazi jokes, nor are they laughing at the victims. They are jokes, complicated jokes that might make people feel less alone. Or they might, I mean, I'll tell you the joke that I use, right? Which is an old, well, I don't know how old it is, but it was not. It's like a traditional joke. Someone told it to me, right? And it's about a Holocaust survivor who after the war dies of natural causes, sometime after the war, goes to heaven.

When he gets there, God asks the survivor to tell. him a Holocaust joke. So the survivor does. He tells God a Holocaust joke. And God says, that's not funny. And the survivor says, well, I guess you had to be there. I love that joke. I love that joke because, you know, it's funny, but it also says something very profound about the absence of God in the years 1939 to 45, right? That's a Holocaust joke. You can tell it. So my point is, you have to examine it on a joke by joke basis. You can't just say you can't tell jokes like they wherever. And I would say the same thing really about identity politics. I would say it works sometimes and it doesn't work at other times and you need to look at the specifics. That's a good point.

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And it's in many ways just a form of divide and conquer. It just gets, you know, we... I don't always say that, Francis. Not always, no. Sometimes I think that is the case, and sometimes it's not. not. It depends, again, on the community you're talking about, sometimes on the individual you're talking about, you know, I think it definitely can become that. And there are times when I read shit that's happening. And I think, yeah, that's totally happening. At other times, I think, like, you know, I mean, to use an example, right, I'm reading Satnam Sengara's

very brilliant, I think Empire land, right, which is about the British Empire. And there's like a thousand things in that book I didn't know about as a British person, which is, primarily what I feel myself to be, by the way, and all the shit that's in my past. I feel myself to be a British person, quite proud at many levels of being a British person. And yet I read this book, stuff about the Amritsar massacre that I don't know anything about, right? And then I do think, and this is an identity politics way of thinking, okay, these voices have been silenced. So, you know, until now, in the discussion of what it means to be British and in British history, it's a good thing that that's complexifying.

And I really don't agree with those. people who get furious about it and feel that, you know, he's just complaining and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I mean, he himself said of a ipso-mori poll that came out quite recently, which asked the question, are you proud of being of the British Empire or are you shamed of the British Empire? That's a stupid question because history is not a football team. You know, you don't just support it or feel bad if you lose. you basically, you know, try and absorb new ideas into it as time goes on. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And moving on now, David, one thing that I found particularly

interesting in the book was, and particularly because I'm a football fan, and it's a word that has been used many, many times throughout football, is used by Tottenham Hotspur, is the word Yid. And you were saying that it's a racist word, and lots of people have been discussing it since Time Memorial. Why is it to you that this word is a racist word? Well, the primary thing about that, again, everything I say in that book needs to be seen in context. So, over the 40 years that I've been going to football, you know, it started as an incredibly racist environment. And lots of work was done by football and by organizations like kick racist about football or whatever to change that. So that by the time you get to 2010, which is the story I tell about that in the book,

It's already in the program, it says that any racist abuse will lead to be a banning for life. So that's the context in which I'm talking about the why word, right? It's not just, you know, oh, is this a racist word or it isn't? Although we can argue about that separately. It's we live in a time of very high awareness of offence of those words, right? So my question is not really is that word racist. It's why is it not considered racist given how? fucking offended we are by all these other words, right?

So then what happened was, in that particular case, is me and my brother are at Chelsea, and we weren't even playing spurs. For anyone who doesn't know, because this is a global podcast, right? Tottenham Hotspur, they are a football club. They, I, you, not everyone for Tottenham Hotspur, but some of them own the word Yid, because Tottenham is a Jewish area

and they feel that, you know, claimed that as an identity and blah, blah, blah. And their own position on it is that that's somehow, you know, a nice use of the word, right? And my whole point about that is, as happened in this case, is, well, there's a number of things involved. Firstly, most Tottenham fans aren't Jewish, right? It's a myth that Tottenham fans are Jewish. There's like, if 5% of what used to be White Art Lane, you know, is Jewish, that would be massively more. There's only like 0.3% of the country are Jewish.

So if 5% of them were Jewish, that would be loads of Jews. That means 95% of them chanting the word Yid and Yid army are not Jewish. So that would be the first ever reclamation of a hate word by people who were not part of that minority. And as I've said before, the equivalent is, you know, if there had been a club in a black area, say Brickston or whatever, that had decided mainly white fans, decided we're going to adopt the N-word as our identity and enchanted N-word army, that club would have been shut down like 20 years ago. I mean, I have to say the comedian of me would like to see that.

Yeah, you wouldn't see it for very long. You could just rename it Millwolf. Yeah. So basically, the story I tell, I mean, you know, it's totally like happened a lot at Chelsea. It was always really depressing. when Yido started, because Tottenham's, some Tottenham fans, I think it has shifted a bit, but anyway, some Tottenham fans celebrate that as their identity, right, and say it's a really

positive thing. But what they're not listening to is the fact that Arsenal fans and Chelsea fans and Millwall fans and West Ham fans, it comes back that identity with menaces, with like Auschwitz charts, Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz and hissing to represent cast chambers. And in this one particular case, as I say, we weren't even playing spurs. Spurs were losing to Hull. Are you a Spurs fan, by the way? Who? Either of you. No, I support West Hammy, supports Everton.

Okay, fine. So, I think it was, they were losing to Hull. And it came up on the scoreboard. It was a boring game. We were playing Villa. And the crowd just start chanting Yido, Yido, over and over again, this incredibly aggressive, non-celebratory way. And then a bloke behind us just start shouting, fuck the fucking Yids. Fuck the fucking Yids over and over again. And then blasting through this notion that by Yids, he just means Tottenham fans. That's fine. He doesn't mean anything else. He just changed it to fuck the fucking Jews over and over again. And in terms of the context that I'm talking about, after about 10 minutes of this, my not very old brother, Iva, stands up and

says, shut up, mate. And he says, no, fuck off. And there's about to be an enormous fight. And then he just does stop. Iva sits down and says, I think I'm going to cry, which I wish they were very sort of funny but also kind of moving. But the point is no one says anything. No steward intervenes. There are no, that bloke is not banned for life. And me and my brother have to try and create a film, which we call the Y word, a short film,

to raise awareness of this is happening, which is hard to get made. Keep racing out of football at first and not interested. Don't want to do it. They've got a more important things to talk about, is it really a problem? That's what I'm talking about in the book. And actually, to come back to your point about identity politics, right?

that is really a violent form actually of anti-Semitism, right? It's properly violent when you hear a crowd and lots of people join in and whatever. And whatever your thoughts about identity politics, it's a real fucking hole in it if that is just ignored and invisible and whatever. And so you sort of have to, whatever your uncertainty is about identity politics,

grasp the nettle of identity politics and say, okay, if we are living at a time where aggressions against minority are, a problem, then can we apply it to this ethnicity as well, please? I just think you have to. No, I totally agree with you that there's a lot of inconsistency and double standard in that philosophical way of thinking about the world. I totally get that. My concern about identity politics, and I actually really like the point that you made about how it's not a universal thing. There's different elements of it, and sometimes it might be appropriate. For example, the

civil rights movement in America in the 60s was an example of identity politics, right? But the way it was conducted, it was made inclusive. So it wasn't about antagonizing groups against each other. So you're right. You're right. There's a nuance to this. And what I would say is my concern about identity politics comes much more from the way it's done as opposed to the concept in general.

I think there's nothing wrong with people who are members of a particular group of having an identity that encompasses parts of that as well. well. My worry is that we now live in a world where groups are being pitted against each other. That's what I think we oppose on the show. So I'm really glad I don't disagree with that. And I, and you know, obviously, you know, every day you see like shades of it. You see like, you know, where as you said, certain, like the other day in the Lancet, I don't know why the Lancet he wants to get involved in this shit. It's a medical journal. But the other day in the Lancet, there was a suggestion to Asian Americans that they should sort of not take pride in being successful within the medical

community or whatever because that allows racist to say, oh, look, here's a minority that's doing well and that can be weaponised against other minorities, right? And you kind of think like, this is written by a white person, not an Asian American, who are you to tell Asian Americans that they can't take pride in their own achievements? Do you know what I mean? And that's the stuff where you think it's, yeah, it's mental. Do you not think as well, and this is coming from my own perspective of it, and people who we were watching this on the show

would know of this, I'm actually, technically you could argue, mixed race, my mother's Latin American, grandfather was an Arab, so on, so forth, from Venezuela. My problem with identity politics is this. It's incredibly reductive. I believe it's, what it does is it boils people down

to, in fact, what are the most unimportant, parts of them. What I think is most important, who you are, how you see the world, the way you conduct yourself. And by just saying you are part of this group, it's incredibly shallow way of thinking. Because yes, it's a part of a group, but it's far more complicated than that. It has to be. I think it is, it is when all it is really is a way into shouting, right? Yeah. If it's just a way into shouting about, like, you know, I'm more oppressed than you, and, you know, I hate you because you're more privileged or whatever, then it's no use at all, right?

But I think, you know, firstly, I don't agree, you know, with it being useless. I think there are forms of structural oppression that affect people of colour and that also affect other people, you know, that there are gender issues and all sorts of things. They do exist, right? Inbuilt prejudice, it does exist. But in a different way, as you speak, I have to say I don't agree because I don't agree that identifying yourself in a certain way necessarily is reductive.

When I put Jew as my bio on my Twitter feed, that is enormously complex because I'm not religious. Yeah, that's something we haven't even discussed. But I'm an atheist. You know, and I'm always having to explain two twats on the internet that anti-semitism is not religious intolerance. It's racism because the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow. and I'm an 80s. I don't believe in God at all, right? But I do have a very complicated

and quite difficult to describe, certainly to non-Jews, identity that I feel very strongly of myself as a Jew, but it's not simplistic, it's not reductive. But so I would push, so I would choose, and all we're doing is talking about our experiences is one, I'll be honestly, David,

I'm really loving this conversation. So people would say to me, oh, you're white, you've never faced racism. My mother wanted to call me Francico, Heimette, Foster, Palis. I grew up in a low and middle class working class part of South London. My father was worried about racism. I changed.

I used to work at a garage when I graduated from university, doing admin as a way to money. And there was a very racist, racist, there was a lot of people in there with very unpleasant racist views. To the point where I actually, when mum gave me a lift sometimes in the morning, she had to park around the corner because I didn't want them to see the fact that my mum was brown. I know what it's like to have members of my family

been racially abused, me and my cousin got chased when we went to watch a football match. And I find when people go, oh, you're white, therefore you're this, therefore you've never experienced this. I'm like, no, that's a completely reductive way of thinking and it doesn't allow for the complexities of human emotion or in fact, race. I would agree with that.

But that comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is, you know, just as you have to examine, jokes on a case-by-case basis. You have to examine people on a case-by-case basis. And there are people, you know, and I use Boris Johnson as a fucking easy example of it, but I would say he still is an example of it, who, you know, have lived their life with all sorts of privilege,

primarily class privilege, primarily money privilege, but him being white is part of that. It's in the mix as well, because he just wouldn't have been, you know, in his generation, you know, he wouldn't have found it very easy to get into Eaton and all that shit. Is that true, though? What about Rishi Sunak?

Well, he's younger. I don't... I don't if it's true. It seems like, you know, this is a new thing you're talking about, which is partly to do with identity politics. You know, the fact is Rishi Shunak is brown and he's privileged, right? But when I was growing up, you're younger than me, both of you, but there was no fucking chance of a brown person,

but a chance of Exchequer when I was growing up at all. which is a different argument, by the way, to the fact that I put something out in the book, which is that I personally think that, you know, it's an interesting thing that Jews have never thought of as BAME. You know, it's a much derided acronym, but Jews theoretically are BAME because of minority ethnic, which is what that means,

and I very much do think that Jews are an ethnic minority. So meanwhile, I noticed that whenever BAME is celebrated, like, for example, Sajid Javid, being the first Brown Chancellor, I say, no, that's Nigel Lawson, right? They thought first Brown Chancellor, but the first BAME Chancellor was Nigel Lawson, in my opinion, right? But no one ever would grasp that as a thing.

So it's partly, you know, the whole Jewish thing is partly about that as well. It's about representation and celebration not happening. It's partly about that too. But I totally agree. What you just said, Francis, which I have to say was really moving, right? Yeah. Right? is exactly what I just said about complexity.

The truth is always complex. So, yeah, you can pass as, you know, people are always saying Jews can, although I don't think I can really. I don't think Constantine can. But people are always saying Jews can pass as white or whatever. You can pass as white, right? Yeah, absolutely. That doesn't mean that your history is like easy.

You know, and actually the example I use a bit in the book, I hate the hierarchy of race. But I'm going to use it a bit like if you wanted to sort of actually place Jews and whatever sort of people who are not immediately apparently someone who might fit into identity politics, it's worth thinking about gay men. I suppose gay is in general, but gay men are more apparent in a way for the argument, which is they have white privilege, right? They are generally economically fairly secure, right? But who's going to say, which progressive is going to say, so you're probably all right? right, as long as you don't tell anyone. As long as you stay in the closet, you're probably all right, aren't you?

So fucking shut up about homophobia. No one's going to say that, are they? But that is sort of said to Jews. You know, it's sort of in an anti-Semitic science society, people sort of say, well, you know, no one really knows of Jewish. I just keep quiet about it, and then you're all right. Yeah. Yeah.

David, it's all interesting. I'm really enjoying this conversation as well, because I think all of us might have come into this conversation with slight misperceptions about each other, and we're sort of flattening them out. we go, which I really like, I think is great. I'm going to say about that, by the way, I don't, any misconceptions I had about you, which I'm from, but I sort of didn't really, you see what I mean?

So that, I was sort of taking the piss earlier when I said about the whole podcast. That's all right. I've seen you do stand up, and I wouldn't be doing this podcast if I just thought you were, you know, just a bald or, right, I know that you're, I've still got hair, man. I've still got hair, just a little bit. God, that is the most... He's going to be seething about that for days.

Thank you, David. I really appreciate it. This is why I never actually liked Jews. No, okay. That was the wrong word. It was an ill-chosen word, right? And it wasn't in my subconscious, in any way, because I'm looking at you.

It wasn't. Sure. You know, I know that you're, you know, from your stand-up, that you're a thinking bloke. And that's the point, really. A point is that the whole cultural thing gets devolved into non-thinking responses. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's why I, you know, I really hope a lot of people watch this interview because I think this is how you talk about this sort of stuff. But David, it's a great book. I don't want to let it you go just yet. It's a brilliant book. I recommend people get it and think and discuss these issues actually in the way that we've been having. But if you don't mind, I didn't want to take a few minutes

because all three of us being comedians. And I remember when the whole countdown thing happened, you took what to me was an interesting position. someone who simultaneously describes themselves as progressive but also is a thinking person and you know you talk about you can joke about anything what is your view of this heated discussion we've been having in the comedy world about freedom of speech versus making sure we don't offend people and all of that where do you come down on that well as i said earlier i think you have to look at it on a joke by joke basis so with count dangula

I mean, actually I wrote quite a lot about that because I changed my view about that, but not completely. Well, no, not completely. So my first position, which I was on Ricky Jervais's podcast, was this is obviously, or can so easily be seen as someone taking the piss out of Nazis? Because I believe there actually was someone who was arrested by the Nazis. Do you know about this? You probably do. Yes. Because they taught their dog how to do a Nazi salute.

and the Nazis took that, fair enough in a way. I mean, you don't often hear that with the Nazis, but fair enough as taking the piss, right? And that's what it seemed to me when I first saw it, right? Teaching your pug, particularly a pug. Yeah.

To do that. And then someone got in touch with me and said, no, but you don't really understand the nature, which maybe I didn't at the time, of shit posting. Right. And the idea that shit posters do this thing, which I do understand more now, of sort of subsuming really hateful right-wing ideas into lulls, right?

Into like, oh, we're just being funny and blah, blah, blah. And he showed me this, you've probably seen it, thing from, I can't remember what the website's called now. It's called something like the Daily Stormer, which is a kind of manual for shit posters, which basically says, if you want to get kike hating ideas out there, do it under the cover of comedy, right? And pretend it's all just plausible deniability

because I was just having a laugh. So I then wrote another piece. Well, I've done the Ricky thing and then I wrote a piece for the TLS in which I said, oh right, I'm folding all this into my thoughts. I still think probably in this case, it's mainly funny. And I quoted Peter Cook and Dudley Moore,

who I think on Derek and Clive, Peter Cook says something about watching the dangers of watching Nazi stuff and he said it's terrible because I watched Doctor of the other day and then before I knew it I'd gone down to Golders Green and massacred about 200 of them right and there's no question

I think that's funny not least because again on a joke by joke basis he's taking the piss out of he's not taking the piss out of massacring Jews he's taking the piss out of the idea that people can be so easily influenced right that's what he's saying the piss at all.

And that's what my thinking is always. You always have to see where the joke is. Well, the thing with Dankin, of course, the police did go through all his online communications and they found no evidence of any kind of prejudice. So I think in his case, the evidence would suggest that he was just a joke. And I've met the guy, and he doesn't seem like a bad guy to me,

but look, that's personal. But what about the broader conversation? Do you think comedians should be, you know, wary of offending people or do you think it's just quote and quote a bunch of snowflakes ruining comedy? Like those seems to be the two polar opposites

in the... Yeah, I don't think either of those things. Yeah. I think also you have to, you know... I mean, I do think that comedy is obviously much more police now than it used to be, and I think that is an issue.

And, you know, some of the time, I think it's a conversation and it's a conversation that's worth having, and some of the time, it does. You know what? I sort of worry about it more

with the second-guessing than I do with the thing itself, if you see what I mean. So it's less for me about like, oh, here's an example of someone who got really attacked and whatever, because he did this joke or whatever,

that it is, what is that doing to the writing of comedy or the thinking before you even do the joke? And I think that is a worry. I think that a lot of people, including myself, now when about to sort of put pen to paper with a joke,

or whatever I think, oh yeah, but what are from all sides, X, Y and Z going to say, and, you know, are they going to find bad intent in this joke that isn't there? And that I think isn't good for comedy because I think you need to have a kind of free-form ability to just say what you feel. And then maybe, you know, deal with the fallout, but the sort of like stifling of your head beforehand,

I think is a really bad thing. It is. And if when you think about the greatest comedians, the comedians that we all love or respect, whether, you know, the Richard Prize, Patrice, or Neil, to Bill Hicks, whoever it may be, you know, they certainly didn't have that filter. Yeah, well, I don't know, I mean, I was turned on to comedy by Derek and Clive. That's why I'm a comedian.

I don't know it that well. Yes, I do. Yeah. Okay, but I mean, but that for me, what I thought was funny about that and brilliant about that and still do, is it was two blokes with no filter. like just quite drunk improvising both of them

comedy geniuses particularly Peter Curvello so was Dudley Moore in my opinion and as a result you get this unbelievable you know level of sort of extreme Tourette's like swearing and obscenity and whatever and it's fucking hilarious

you know some of it probably hasn't dated that well but I still think of it as really fucking hilarious and that's my worry is that that side of the brain is being closed off. Yeah, it is a worry, isn't it? And that self-censorship that you talk about is the thing that I think, I think a lot of people feel. And look, I really admire you for saying it because I know that as a progressive, that isn't the mainstream view necessarily on that side of the spectrum.

Yeah, but I mean, you keep saying as a progressive. I mean, what I am is as with Jewishness and as with the humanity that France was talking about earlier, you know, I'm just a I mean, politically, I've said this for a while, I think of myself as sort of, I think of that was a progressive, but I am basically no wing for a long time now. I was, I would have described myself as left wing growing up, very much so, but now I think of myself as my main thing is original thought. That's my thing, right? And by original thought, I mean, certainly as regards politics, but perhaps possibly with everything, I'm not going to have a pre-arranged ideological map that I'm going to impose

on any issue. I'm going to look at the issue or I'm going to look at the question that's being asked to me and I'm going to think what do I fucking think about this? Yeah. Not I'm a left wing person so I have to think like this about it. Right. So that's always been

for a long time how I've been trying to think. Well that's good to know. That is how we try to think about stuff as well. And I think all of us fail at that, right? All of us. Sometimes we all fall into ideology. But I mean, the only reason I just is an apology, the only reason I called you progressive is that's how you describe yourself.

No, you don't talk about you. I do describe myself as a progressive in the book. So that's why? Probably in terms of, you know, I think, because I do agree with some of that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. But David, it has been a pleasure and an honour. And it's, I will say, openly,

one of my favourite interviews. It's been absolutely brilliant. We close our interviews always with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? I think it's Constantine's baldness. I'm glad I brought it up now because it really isn't being mentioned enough.

Yep, absolutely. I don't think we talk about it enough. We should talk about it more. In fact, we should talk about it outside the scope of trigonometry. He gets discussed on trigonometry quite a lot, but I think we need to broaden out the conversation. Anton is our producer. Anton, darling, could you turn that into a meme, please? Let's not forget. Don't worry. Anton doesn't need to. Someone else will take care of it.

I was asked the question by fraud and I said it without self-censoring, knowing it might cause offence. But that's brilliant. That's what I love, man. David, thank you very much for coming on our alt-right podcast. We appreciate it. I hope you've managed to put up with the anti-Semitism on the show well. It hasn't traumatized. I did too much. No, no, it's been great. It's been really enjoyable. Thanks, guys.

Very enjoyable chat. David, thank you so much for coming on. Jews don't count is the book. Please go and get it. It's available everywhere. And we will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a live stream. All of them go out at 7pm UK time.

Take care and see you soon, guys.