TRIGGERnometry - Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture with Helen Pluckrose

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

Install Pouch for FREE and start saving money today! ▸ https://joinpouch.com/i/triggernometry Helen Pluckrose is the founder of Counterweight. The recently formed organisation helps individuals resist the imposition of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) on their day to day lives. Go to counterweightsupport.com to find out more.  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 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 Kisten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We're delighted to say that our brilliant and returning guest today is the editor-in-chief of Arrow Magazine and the co-author of Cynical Theoryes with another one of our former guest, James Lindsay. Helen Pluckrose, welcome back to Trigonometry. It's good to be here. Nice to see you again. It's great to have you back on the show. We talked to you a couple of years.

ago about some of the stuff that you cover in cynical theories. But kind of a lot has happened since then. Where do you think society has moved and some of the things that you've been talking about have moved over the last couple of years? I think even since I finished writing cynical theories, we've just seen such a massive escalation of these ideas, which people have been criticizing for about 10 years now, but for about five months. people have been really becoming aware of the whole idea of white supremacy, whiteness, white fragility, toxic masculinity, cis-normativity, all of these kind of orthodoxes. But I think in the last year, particularly, it really has intensified and develops a great amount of power that is impacting.

Generally, everybody, you don't have to be at a university or, part of an activist group to be hit by this stuff now. And why do you think it's intensified, Helen? I think so many reasons, so many things have happened. And I think there's a lot of sort of sociological arguments for why this has taken off right now. But I'm mostly focused on how it's developed within scholarship and activism. Of course, the trigger for the immediate escalation was the death of George Ford. Floyd. And this, I think it's not a coincidence that this happened at a time when there was a

pandemic and people wanted something to fight and we can't really fight the virus. So with, but I think it was bubbling below the surface before this. So we saw it sort of come up in places like Evergreen College and in the knitting community and the young adult books community. So it's like this critical social justice stuff, I think, you know, most people call it wokeism, which is actually a really good word because it describes the belief that you can see these systems of power and privilege that most people can't. And it's been bubbling up and it's been erupting in various places. And what we're seeing now, particularly in the US, is a mass eruption. I would go so far and I'm, you know, I'm generally very much inclined to British understatement.

But I would go so far as to call this a genuine attempted cultural revolution, and I think it needs pushing back. I agree with you on that. You know, I remember last time we talked with you, one of the things that I was most interested in is, obviously these ideas that can be broadly described as woke come from a certain subsection of the left. You yourself are on the left.

Are you even more frustrated than you were a couple of years ago about how difficult it's become, to challenge some of the stuff while retaining your left identification. Because the moment you say anything about this stuff, people do try to push you out and claim that you're some right-wing bigger, etc. You know, there are whole sort of swathes of people who won't accept that I'm on the left because I'm neither a socialist nor a social justice activist. But I am an economic leftist with socialist sympathies.

and I'm a left-leaning liberal. So I'm just used to people now telling me that I'm a fascist or a Nazi, or sometimes because I also tend to annoy the right, particularly recently when I wrote a piece urging Americans to vote Biden. I also get told that I am a commie and an SJW. So I'm, you know, I'm just a great combination. But look, for anyone who's listening to this, who's thinking, you know what, I've always thought of myself as someone who's on the left. I've always thought of myself as someone who's liberal.

I've always wanted to look out for the underdogs in life. I've always, you know, these are my views. But equally, all this woke stuff doesn't make sense to me. What is a credible left-wing position that is not woke that you, support. Why are you a lefty? Just articulate that for people, for the positive case for being on the left. Okay, so liberalism, this is two aspects and they're not exactly the same thing. So liberalism is the desire for equal opportunity, for individuality, for universality, for freedom of speech and belief. So there can be liberals on the right, left and center. A liberal lefty, like me,

is somebody who believes in these vital freedoms, in this individuality, and not judging people by their race, gender or sexuality, and ensuring that society doesn't do so either, but has genuinely leftist policies. I would like to tax rich people quite a lot more in order to better fund the NHS and have less fewer children relying on food banks and generally have a better welfare system, and affordable housing for poorer people,

many of whom are not white, so this should be somewhere where we can sort of share interest with both the Marxists and the critical social justice activists, but they tend to be purists, the latter's. The Marxists will talk to you, but not the critical social justice people. And why is that? Why do they not engage in debates? Because surely the way you persuade somebody to your point of view,

is by talking to them, right? Yeah, that's the liberal marketplace of ideas, but what we've seen coming from the social justice left is the idea of dominant discourses, which, of course, comes from postmodernism in the first place. Well, it's got a longer history than that, but let's go with Michelle Foucault as a good grounding point here. This idea that certain discourses in society,

certain ways of talking about things, become powerful because they get legitimated by powerful structures in society, and then we all speak into them without even realizing we're doing it. And these power structures can be called things like white supremacy, patriarchy, cis-normativity, you know, the belief that people are generally the same gender as their genitals indicate their sexes. So that's when you believe in dominant discourses and marginalised discourses, you can't believe that a marketplace of ideas will work. All that will happen is that the dominant discourses get an airing and people just accept that as the truth and the marginalised people are still not heard. So this is why we hear that they are

silenced, they are erased because there's this idea that if anybody is speaking into a dominant discourse, doesn't matter if it's the President of the United States or someone with three, followers on Twitter, they're likely to be leapt upon and told precisely how they are being problematic. But isn't, Helen, isn't one of the things that is so persuasive about this, it's like the best lies. The best lies always have a kernel of truth. Isn't that particularly relevant when we look at critical race theory, because racism does exist. People are oppressed. You know, women that do have it harder when it comes to things. like worrying about their own physical safety, etc, etc.

Okay, well, I disagree with the last one. You're much more likely to become a victim of violence than I am. He keeps saying it. He nearly got mugged three weeks ago, and he keeps saying that same thing. No, I'm a real man. I can defend myself. Yeah? What actually happened was the guy tried to grab his wallet out of his hand, twisted his wrist and he was complaining for three weeks.

Six weeks, but I kept my wallet. But yeah, I mean, the colonel... of truth is racism exists. Homophobia exists. A nasty sort of bigotry against trans people exist, which needs to be separated from a belief about sex being a biological category,

which people should be able to hold. So yes, nobody I think is denying that these prejudices still exist. The problem is what we disagree about is how we go around fixing them. So between the 60s and the 80s, that was when we saw a real leap forwards in civil rights, racial equality, LGBT equality, gender equality. A whole load of legislation was passed and a big sort of cultural revolution, and it was a liberal one. So this all happened before the critical social justice ideas really started taking off, which happened at around 1989.

when these ideas really started branching. So this is the liberal thing. This is when you say, I am a human being just like you and I don't have the same rights, the same opportunities that you do. This isn't fair. We need universal human rights. And society says, yes, actually, you do.

Women should be paid as much as men. We shouldn't prosecute gay men for having consensual sex with each other. You know, this is the liberal approach and there's, it's worked. It works really well and it can continue working. But for the social justice activists, this isn't enough. After the sort of legislation had changed, what remained was changing attitudes. So racism hasn't gone away.

Sexism hasn't gone away. There are still people with horrible ideas out there. The liberals will say we need to continue arguing with these people. We need to continue discrediting these ideas, and we can see how much we have. If you're, you know, I'm 46, I see a dramatic difference in the public acceptability of using a racist slur now than I did in my 20s. I think we have got, we've seen significant improvement in my lifetime. So this is the liberal approach. We just frown generally upon people evaluating other people by their own.

immutable characteristics. It's both stupid and unethical. But that isn't how the critical social justice works. That wants to control how you speak. It wants to insist that you must be racist. You must be sexist. You must have all of these assumptions. You're not an individual with the agency and the ability to evaluate ideas and reject and accept them. That's a naive, simplistic, liberal belief. And how do you, I mean, the question I suppose that comes out of all of what you're saying is if the marketplace of ideas doesn't work for conversations with people who have this critical social justice mindset, how do you, how do we have a society and how do we manage that

if conversation isn't the answer? because it seems to me that from their perspective, they are the bringers of truth and everyone else must accept that truth. So how do we deal with that as a society? I think we need to put critical social justice in the right category. At the moment, it's in the wrong category of just being a general ethical approach to anti-discrimination, which we should sort of make into our laws, into employment policies, but it doesn't belong in this category of training like, you know,

data protection and health and safety. It's much more of a belief system. You have to believe in social constructivism. You have to believe in these invisible systems of power and privilege and the way they work and the way that they're progressing language. It's a specific belief system. So we need to apply the rules of secularism to it. So just as a Christian, or a Muslim or a Hindu may believe that they are absolutely right and that it's very, very important that everybody else in society accepts that they are right. We have these rules in places where we say, okay, we protect your right to believe that, to say that, and to live your life by it, but not to impose it on anyone else.

And that is what we need to do with critical social justice ideas. We need to put them in that box. I mean, Helen, you say that, but it's all very well-fell. for us to sit around here and say that, you know, we've got a successful podcast, YouTube show, you're a successful author, but there are a lot of people out there that if they stood up in their diversity training or whatever else it may be in their workplace, they will very lightly either be fired or have their careers stunted as a result. Yes, that is the problem and I'm hearing from thousands of them and I hear and so did almost everybody in this sphere.

and that is why we have set up what began as a discord server to triage the worst cases about seven months ago is now forming an organisation counterweight and I think we are filling the gap that is needed because while we see a lot of cases when a celebrity gets cancelled or if an academic is fired or has their paper retracted we don't see a lot of how this is affecting the average person in their daily life. Now, I hear from these people and I heard from the supermarket assistant who accidentally called a trans woman sir. And then when the customer became quite irate and said, do I look like a man to you? She instinctively said, yes, not meaning to be rude, but then got all the first. flustered and then there was disciplinary action and then she didn't know what to do and she didn't

even know anything about the trans movement so you know we're getting there there is a lot of reasons why people um who are not don't have power don't have a platform don't have um an academic background which enables them to feel confident in making arguments in writing and defending them and it's a lot harder for them to push back at this so we have set up up counterweight, which works as a caseworker system. Someone will come to us. They will say, my workplace is setting up this policy. I need to respond to it. What should I do? Then we can connect them with other people in their sphere. We can connect them with legal advice if necessary. We can connect them with me if we want to go through theoretical assumptions and what they want to

challenge with that. We can sort of produce, provide them with a personalised package and we've had a lot of success. People, a lot of our members have got themselves onto diversity, equity and inclusion boards where they've argued for a broader range of ideas on how to oppose discrimination. And we're producing accessible educational resources. So there's a lot of short articles, but there's also a YouTube channel, counterweight media, which looks at the problems with unconscious bias training, with lived experience at work, and a lot of the other, you know,

the things that people really see that just hit them in the face right now, that we, I think the way to push back at this is got to be knowledgeable and it's got to be principled. And these ideas aren't that difficult to understand. So our aim is to help people to understand, them and then to push back at them in a way that they feel safe to do so, armed with knowledge and with principle. You don't have to throw yourself on the grenade.

It's okay to want to be able to make a living. 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. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it.

Avocado green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real. 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 greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Well, it's a very good point. And of course, we have seen this idea of council culture to just absolutely take off in the last couple of years and dozens of people being hounded out of jobs,

hounded out of book deals, etc. Do you think, obviously, you've created counterweight and the free speech union is doing its part. Do you think the answer to a lot of this is going to be through the creation of institutions like the ones we've just talked about because individuals are not going to be able to resist this on their own? Yeah, I think this is what we need.

We need people who are doing the sort of big, loud, in your face, see this problem approach. And then we need people who are taking, taking a more behind-the-scenes approach like us, where, you know, we're just helping people address a problem before it gets to the point of disciplinary action or needing the free speech union. So if someone comes to us and they're a Brit, we advise them to join the free speech union as one of the first steps anyway, but we aim to help them resolve the problem before it gets the stage of needing that kind of intervention from anyone else.

And we've had a lot of success with that. It's particularly helpful that a lot of our members aren't white. So if they get themselves onto diversity, equity and inclusion boards, and they argue against critical race theory ideas, and they argue for humanist ones, or perhaps they come from a bank, which has a different culture that doesn't really value these sort of postmodern critical social justice ideas. It's quite difficult for people from one of the Abrahamic faith, for example,

to accept this idea that they don't have free will, which their faith tells them they do, and that they can't choose good ideas over bad ones. So there's a lot of ways to go at this, which are relatively safe and are aimed mostly at viewpoint diversity and freedom of belief rather than critical race theory is bad and needs to be banned. It's a very, very good strategy. Helen, you know, we see and we talk to people who have been cancelled all the time. Why is it that people on the other side of this particular argument don't believe cancel culture exists? The argument generally from the other side is that what we are calling cancel culture is actually powerless people

rising up en masse to fight back against bad ideas that are harming them. So we get the idea that, I mean, we're not going to cancel J.K. Rowling. She's too influential and too few people care about whether gender identity is real, as much as they care about, you know, Harry Potter. But she has been a major target of this because she isn't such an influential figure. And the idea is that by speaking into this discourse, which says that women is a biological category, that has certain experiences that come along with it, she is doing incredible harm to trans people.

So we saw the reaction to that from a lot of the actors, so the Harry Potter films, was to repeat the mantra, trans women are women, trans women, trans women are women, Trans women are women. And then we can see how much this is about discourse. And the idea that there's this dominant transphobic discourse that needs to be responded to by this pro-trans activism discourse in order to liberate and protect trans people, most of whom, by the way, are not trans activists of the social justice kind and don't read queer theory and are not authoritarian. lunatics. Hey, Constantine. Yeah. Are you tired of all those typical meditation techniques that leave your masculinity wanting more? Yeah, I've tried them all.

Mindfulness, Zen, Transcendental, and I still feel like my life is lacking. Well, maybe you should try Marty's Minute Meditations. Minute Meditations. Is that a pun? Yes, it is. That's right, with a comedic and mystical, Marty's Minute Meditations, podcast. We can all discover how to save our sacred masculine from our toxic modern cells. I swear to God, I prefer that advertising B-days. The podcast is available from wherever you get your podcast, and you can also visit the website

www.w.martiesminutemeditations.com. That's martiesminutemeditations.com. Might as well get a B-Dadeau while you're there. Hey, Constantine, do you like saving money? You know I do. Well, I've just found this great thing called Pouch. I know all about it. It's a brilliant free browser extension that automatically searches for

and applies discounts when you're shopping online, saving you both time and money. Well, why don't we get you a discount on a brand new jacket that makes you look as if you don't work in a B-feater? Here's us browsing for a fancy new blazer for Constantine. And at checkout, Pouch automatically popped up, found the best discount code, saving us over 20%.

Pouch works on over 3,000 UK sites. That's more than any other browser extension that offers a similar service. So you'll be guaranteed to find a bargain. And it's free to download using the link in the description. That's another bargain as well. Not as much as never seeing you in that jacket again. Actually, that's a great thing about Pouch.

Whatever it is that you're looking for, you'll find the cheapest possible price with them. Click the link in the description. and download Pouch for free. Pouch only takes a couple of clicks to install. And don't forget to pin it to your browser. Should we look for some personal training sessions for you then? No, thank you.

Okay, look, JK Rowling, obviously very wealthy. You'd imagine influential, well-connected, etc. But we've had people like Nick Buckley on our show, for example, who, to his credit, but also to his downfall during the whole BLM thing in May, of last year, he went on their website and read their policies and then went, well, maybe this isn't such a good idea given what they're advocating. And he was removed from his own charity. Yeah. This is just a guy who was helping underprivileged kids in inner cities.

He wasn't selling millions of books and, you know, swanning around in frocks. Right. So what about someone like him? What would be the argument? Surely he got cancelled, didn't he? Yeah. I, whether or not we call it. it cancels or whatever we call it, he got unjustly penalised. There was an attempt to destroy his reputation, to destroy his livelihood, because he expressed an idea that some people didn't like. Now that, that's a serious problem in a liberal society. So how is that not cancel culture? What would they say to that? I think they would say that this was a pushback against a powerful white

supremacist discourse. that is warranted because it's harming people of colour, particularly black people. So the idea that, you know, you can push back, this idea of repressive tolerance, that you just don't allow the kind of speech that they believe hurts people. If you believe reality is constructed by the way we speak about things, then language does become violence. It then becomes justifiable to respond to it by silencing people, by completely destroying their reputation from removing them from society or even from being violent to them. And why is it? You know, I just, every time you articulate it so beautifully, and I find myself really understanding it, even though it's, to me,

but why these people never seem to talk about class. They talk about white people as being a monolith without accepting that we have real problems in this country and America with white people who are in poverty, but immediately the fact that you're white means you're privileged even if you can't afford to put food on your table. Yeah, I really don't understand that. That's, this is where a kind of modern Bailey move happens.

So if you were to say this to a critical race, or an intersectional feminist, they would say class does matter. We're not saying that white people are privileged in every area. We're only saying that they don't suffer discrimination on the grounds of their race. But in reality, what actually happens if you try to bring up any kind of class issue is that it's then brought back to race. You wouldn't hear somebody say to, say, a black activist. Yes, we understand that you have, that you're, you know, you're not advantaged in every way, but one of your problems is not that you are poor. There isn't a reversal of that. We've seen two main issues come and take top priority, and that is race and trans identity

at the moment. So, there's often a lip service to class issues, but, if you were to raise the issue of, say, the number of poor homeless white men on the streets, then it would be brought up that that is a neglect of poor homeless black men and that they have an additional burden as well as being homeless and poor. So they'll find a way to bring things back. There isn't the universalism, that the humanism that, that, that, that, liberals would like to see in there. Helen, I wanted to ask you something a little bit earlier you were talking about how in

your organization you have a lot of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, etc. As a liberal, do you not resent having to say that? Because I resent that. I resent the fact that I have to say it on our show. And Francis has to say, well, actually my mom is from Venezuela. And I have to say, I am an immigrant and I am from this. but like surely can we just go back to a place where we're like this is my idea and you go that's a shit idea Constantine

and it's got nothing to do with your race. Can we just... You'll always be an immigrant to me. Do you not find that like we've already bought into their way of thinking by even having to mention all this stuff? Yeah, that's because I mean the idea of post-modernism is that it is post this liberal, epoch. So it is now understood that this idea that you and I could discuss things on the level of

ideas without power dynamics, playing into things without, you know, me not being an immigrant, you not being a woman, gives us certain kinds of privileges that need to be addressed. They just want to focus on these kinds of privileges. and that is where I think, yeah, we do need to avoid following people down this rabbit hole as far as we can, but we need to understand the rabbit hole. So quite often it's as simple as saying, I don't share the premises that your statement relies on. If someone says to you, how do you as a man have the right to address the issues of gender-based violence or something? you can say I don't share your premise that I have to have a certain identity to address a certain issue.

Well, I could just say I'm Russian, in which case it all goes out of the window. But Helen, you know what, let's just say that for the sake of argument, we accept this fact that, you know, women, trans people are more oppressed than men. People from certain ethnic backgrounds have more of a right to speak about racial issues than white people. Let's accept all that. what happens then when you get someone who's like Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equality's Commission, who comes out against this woke stuff,

or other prominent black people, or women, or trans people who don't buy into it, and they get attacked. Now, how do you square that circle? How do you explain that? If we buy into this thing that oppressed people are the ones that should be allowed to speak, you then get an oppressed person

who doesn't buy into this crap, they then get attacked. How does that work? How does that make any sense? That's where the dominant discourses come in again. So when they had the Marxist ideas, it was quite clear that there was a group of people that were oppressing another group of people. When you get Foucaudian ideas,

you've got powerful discourses. So it doesn't really matter what your identity is. Although it's about identity politics, although they'll say only black people get to speak on this, they mean black people who agree with social justice discourse. So if you are a black person who doesn't, if you are, say, a black conservative, then you have brought into a white supremacist discourse

and you are at best brainwashed. At worst, you are a traitor to your own people by trying to secure advantage to yourself by pandering to the white supremacist society. So we get a lot of people, particularly South Asian women from Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, make up our membership, who really, and they tend to be professional women,

successful women, and they tend to get a bit annoyed about having to speak about being women of colour rather than speaking about being architects or archaeologists or, you know, whatever it is. they're actually doing. So there's one of our first projects we're hoping, we're calling out at our Black Intellectual Diversity Project. And we're getting a load of black intellectuals to write a chapter on their favourite black intellectual who deals with issues of

race and racism and why they think their approach is particularly valuable. So we want everyone from Ibrax-Kedek's Kennedy to Thomas Sell. And we want them, we're going to have Marxist libertarians, Africanists, separatists, liberals, humanists, everybody, in this one book, and we're going to put those views out there. So this book, I'm hoping, it'll be a manifestation of the marketplace of ideas. And my imagined audience is a young person who wants to make up her own mind, how she thinks about politics and how she thinks about racism. And she can read these ideas from people, you know, as varied as Shelby Steele.

who takes a very sort of individual responsibility approach to people like Ebrim X. Kendi who any inequality, any disparity can only be caused by racism and it's actually anti-racist to discriminate if that's the case. And get all these ideas together. The problem we're finding is we can't at the moment get critical race theorists or intersectional feminists to write anything in a book alongside libertarians, conservatives or Marxists. So it's It's, we may end up with a chapter of that book called The Chapter That Should Have Been, in which I will set forward a lot of the arguments of some of the most prominent critical race. And then they will accuse you of misrepresenting it.

It's the same, we have the same problem on the show. Whenever we invite people like that on, they won't come on. This is a thing. I can't prove anything. I know I was invited to join a panel on intersectional feminism and then all the intersectional feminists dropped out, coincidentally. And I was invited to join a panel on whether we need to decolonize the university and the people on the yes side dropped out.

Mostly, I don't know. They don't necessarily say, I won't be on a platform with a critic of my ideas. But sometimes they do. I got publicly disinvited from the decolonised STEM symposium, even though I'd been up front with my own name and I'd put forward my own argument that I was going to make, which is that saying that STEM is white, Western and male is actually sexist and racist.

But I said it in the language, so, you know, post-colonial language. So they probably didn't understand it. But after Googling me, I was informed that I, was a danger to the other attendees and that their safety had to be considered paramount because it's just so hazardous if you go in there and suggest that people who aren't white do science as well. Helen, look, we're talking about, you know,

the intellectual aspect of it, but let me ask you a pretty brutal question, which is, isn't this just a way to exploit white guilt? I think we have to assume goodwill. I think there's always going to be opportunists in any kind of movement. I think Shelby Steele is the person who has addressed white guilt and how that can be exploited at most length. But whenever we're dealing with any individualness,

there's really strong evidence that they are seeking power for themselves in an opportunistic way, I think we have to assume that they genuinely believe what they say they believe and we have to try and address those ideas and try to find some common ground and move them from them a bit if we can. You know, you talk about finding common ground, but isn't that practically impossible if people don't want to engage in a debate or a conversation? There are many people with whom it is literally impossible because they just won't talk to you at all.

So, you know, someone like Robin DiAngelo just always refuses to debate with any black intellectual or anyone who disagrees with her. So yes, then you can't do anything. That's tolerant. Yeah. And you can't, if somebody really is sucked deeply into an ideology, it may be almost impossible to get them out. You know, we've seen people join cults before and the difficulty that they have to realize a problem for themselves usually. But I think there's a very small number of people who really are committed ideologues in this way. So I took the tribes test.

It's for America, so I shouldn't have done really. but that shows that only 12% of people are progressive activists who could have these ideas, and it included me among that 12%. Really? Wow. So I think there really is a small number of people who hold these ideas really strongly, and then there's a large number of people who are condoning and enabling them because they don't understand that this isn't a liberal and friendly thing

or because they're afraid of being considered racist or sexist or, you know, who wants to seem to stand against social justice? But quite often I'll get an email from someone saying, I think I'm the only person in my institution who has any concerns about this and I'll be able to say, no, actually, you're not. Would you like me to introduce you? And that's another major thing that we're doing. We're introducing people to each other and emboldening them.

They're finding people in their own profession and even in their own organisation who they didn't realize had the same worries that they did. And we can kind of reach a kind of tipping point. Helen, the one thing that I always find really sad about this, obviously people losing their jobs, having their careers blighted is the thing that I find really tragic is when this tears apart families. We get emails from people saying my daughter no longer speaks to me,

my son and daughter have fallen apart as a result of this. Is that particularly common or does that tend to be in the minority? I don't... If you read Renéido Lodge, for example, I've just finished natives by Akala. And we're looking at people who are mixed race, but who identify as black because of how people do tend to be racialised.

And yeah, there's an alienation that can occur if you get too deeply into these ideas. One case study that we're about to sort of anonymously talk about as well is about a parent of an eight-year-old boy who has been taught about white supremacy and anti-blackness and has become very upset and he isn't sure how to think now about his parents, you know, his mother is white, his father is black? What is he supposed to think about this? Is he half bad? This is the really kind of upsetting thing.

And I know how easy it is to get sucked into this. When I was researching for one of our papers, I read about six of these books in two days. And then I decided to try and unwind by watching CSI, or something. And there was a scene in which a mixed-race student graduated and she came out and she hugged her parents. And I thought, oh, look, how lovely. She loves her mother even though she's white. I think, what has happened to my brain? And it's really horrible. Helen, and I think it's so exciting that with counterweight, you're giving people a way to not get cancelled

and to be able to express themselves and to think about the stuff honestly with integrity. And I think that would be a really important part of the process of pushing back. We hope that with what we do on this show giving voices to different people, we're giving people at least an opportunity, as you say, to know that they're not the only ones. that is such a huge chunk of the feedback that we get as well. Do you think that although all those things are very good, there's going to have to be some legislative changes in the future because of how deeply embedded these ideas are now within the legal framework?

I mean, a lot of people are now taking a critical look at the Equality Act of 2010 in the UK. Do you think there is some legislative work to do on this as well? I do. I mean, I am not, I'm not qualified to speak on law very well, that we have been talking to lawyers about it. And what seems like the thing to do is to take the part of the Equality Act, which speaks of philosophical beliefs as a protected characteristic and make and define that much more clearly as viewpoint diversity. So we have a situation where a Christian employer could not force a Muslim employee to be trained to believe that Jesus is the son of God. We also need to have the right for people to opt out of being trained to detoxify their masculinity or overcome their whiteness and their white fragility. People have to be able to say, I don't believe what you believe, and I don't have to. And Helen, why is it that certain industry,

seem more prone to this than others. I mean, it looks at this point that most of them are toppling like dominoes, but the first ones to fall were the arts and those types of industries. I think, obviously, this is coming from the humanities. There's a departure from sort of empiricism and rationalism and liberalism

in the humanities anyway, because it's largely about thought experiments, about human emotionally and experience. So it's going to be, we're going to find more of this kind of theory arising in cultural studies than we are in physics. So that's not really surprising. But I don't, but we see the effects that it has on the sciences

and sort of indirectly. And even some scientists, I've just written a response to one of them who thinks our fat studies paper should be reinstated. We agree it should. So where he argues that, you know, that fat studies really isn't such a terrible thing and people should be allowed to argue for us. And I think, yes, they should. But it still is actually not, it is very, it is radically anti-scientific.

And so I'm going to point. out that it's both silly and dangerous. It's an interesting point. I mean, if you think about it, we've had so much talk about the need for censoring people who are skeptical about lockdown or the efficacy of vaccines or whatever else. But for the most part, until this point at least, you've been able to tell people to be overweight, which is terrible for them with no censorship whatsoever. It's an area that needs to be sort of looked at, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, this is where we need, again, some nuance, which just,

doesn't come with the sort of really simplistic black and white social justice approach. There's always a kernel of truth in there. There is evidence that heavily overweight people are less likely to be offered jobs which their weight is irrelevant to. And there's evidence that they're less likely to visit their doctor with any other kind of problem because they know their doctor will just tell them to lose weight. So, you know, are problems there. There's a need for advocacy, but it can't be anti-scientific. It needs to accept that obesity is a genuine problem, that it is a health condition that needs treating, and that it isn't a reason to be unkind to or discriminate against obese people. It's not

really that complicated, but social justice makes it. And Helen, what is the end game? Because it has to be an end game to what these people want. What do they actually want? I think. And is it attainable? Is this second part to that question, I would add? Unlike with something like Marxism,

where there's a clear end goal of the proletariat at owning the means of production, that isn't what we're seeing with social justice. People are feeling as though they have awoken to a reality that they didn't realize was there. And they're still feeling at the beginning stages where we're picking apart these dominant discourses that make us believe that men are stronger than women

or that people who have a penis are a man or that racism underlies everything. We have to... It still feels very much like it's at a beginning stage. so the project is finding it. So one of the tenets of anti-racism formed by a group, which includes Robin DiAngelo, states the question is not,

did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in this situation? So that's what people are looking for. We're looking for how racism manifests. And once you find a way to say that it has, then you've got it right. and you've managed to unpick and show an aspect of the white supremacist system. And so the end game is to continue doing this, dismantling speech,

revealing structures of power that exist within attitudes, biases, unconscious bias, microaggressions, etc. Make it all visible. Then once everything is out, then there's a hope that we can rethink everything in ways that aren't racist, sexist and homophobic. But of course, we're starting from the presumption that any encounter is going to be racist or sexist. So it's confirmation bias at best. But Helen, doesn't this make you a very angry person? So for instance, if I spent every single minute of every day walking around looking for ways in which people have been sexist, racist, whatever it is, aren't I just going to be a very fundamentally angry person? Because I'm looking for the,

negative in everyone. Yeah, I mean, this is, if you look at, if you Google microaggressions on something like Twitter, a word that will often come up is exhausted. People say that they feel exhausted by microaggressions because they have trained themselves into this way of thinking. And, I mean, an example I tend to give of it is if we were to imagine a black and a white customer, entering a shop at the same time and a white server whose job is to go and offer them help, which one should she approach first? If she approached the white customer first, obviously they then read this situation as white supremacy. The white person came first. But if she approached the black person first, then this situation could be read as anti-blackness

and not trusting a black person to peruse the shelves on. supervised. So we're always going to see racism in everything if we're trained to look for it. So it's ultimately self-destructive and I don't think it can last, especially as it sort of fractures into smaller and smaller groups. And you have, at the moment, I'm closely following a lot of arguments between African Americans and recent African immigrants to America. And there's this sort of debate about privilege going on there. And then there's the privilege of being light-skinned or dark-skinned black person. And there's a privilege even within fat studies.

Apparently, there's people who are heavily overweight but still have a couple. kind of hourglass figure have a privilege they need to acknowledge over people who don't have that. Excellent. That sounds brilliant. Helen, I think there's a very British solution to the white, black customer in the shop problem, which is for the server to ignore them both and give them no customer service whatsoever. Just grunt at them if they could approach, yes? Exactly.

That would work. And Helen, because what this ideology leads to, is it leads to people saying things. They are actually very, very racist. I saw this tweet which went viral from this social justice activist saying that straight black men are the new straight white males. Isn't it going to come to a point where it eats itself like you said? I have argued that it will combust, but what I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm less convinced now because we seem to be forming more of a hierarchy. So at the top of the hierarchy are black trans women, obviously.

But we're losing people, we're shedding people on the way. And gay men have sort of too often declined to be social justice activists to any longer be considered marginalised. and women have been having the Karen trope and the white women tears thing since the votes for Donald Trump. So we're no longer really considered marginalized either. I think it will narrow down. It will become an extremist movement. It's going to be difficult to counteract.

but it's going to have to self-destruct at some point because it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't have an end goal that is achievable. As we wrap up the interview, we're coming close to the end now. I'm curious because you mentioned advising people to vote for Joe Biden at the top of the interview. Given everything that we've talked about, why are you advocating that people should vote for the party that is pushing through some of these ideas?

Because there are so many other ideas as well. I focus very much on critical social justice issues because that's what I've studied. I was a liberal feminist and I was of the humanities. So I'm addressing this problem because I want to fix the left. I want to make it electable again. I don't address problems on the right because I don't. think there's a right way to do conservatism. I recognize the need for conservatives. I, you know, and I respect ethical conservatives and their input that we need, as people

they're saying, can we conserve some of the good stuff, please? We don't always have to race ahead. So, you know, yeah, I can respect conservatives, but I'm focused on the left because I share the economic positions and the social positions of the left. I... No, no, but that part I get, but what I'm getting at is, you know, we have this capital, the storming of the capital, which Francis and I both obviously condemned straight away. And frankly, there were a lot of Trump supporters who got upset about that, but we don't care. That needed to be condemned just like BLM violence needed to be condemned, right? But the moment it happened, Joe Biden comes out and makes it all about race, right? So you've just advised people to vote for somebody.

I know it sounds like I'm having a go. I'm just trying to think this out in my not having a lot. I'm not having to go to you at all, but you have advised people to vote for a guy who's literally, as his first action, in this heated moment, makes everything about race. We know, yeah, when, if the Democrats get in,

then we know that the fight against critical social justice is going to need to become more intense. So that's not, I don't have any kind of belief that if we vote left-wing governments in, then all the social justice, problems will disappear. They won't. They will get emboldened. However, we do now have an opportunity, Americans do, to reject this idea that we all need to gather together and oppose the right. So that's what's often said to me, why are you criticizing the left when you're on the left?

We should be solidarity against the right. Well, now, the Democratic Party has won. This is, the time for the liberal lefties, for the socialists who value reason and evidence and are not social justice activists, to push back at this, to try and actually get their own house in order. They don't have the excuse of fighting Trumpism anymore. They need to sort their shit out. But there's one question that I actually really wanted to ask, because we talk about privilege, yet we don't talk about a privilege that I believe really exists. And, no one seems to want to address, which is beauty privilege. I'm very privileged.

But we joke about it. It is a real thing. But no one talks about it. You're more likely to be more likely to be more popular, have more jobs offered to you if you're hot. Why don't we talk about it? Well, actually, high is a massive privilege. We're all revealing all our sore spots at this point.

But yeah, I mean, you know what? I actually think if you made beauty privilege that big, people would actually claim to be privileged. They'd be like, yeah, I'm really privileged. I'm so handsome. Yeah, no one's going to say I'm ugly, I'm oppressed. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is, when it comes to something that's innate,

there's often, you know, there's been a lot of feminist objection to beauty privilege because it is essentially sexualising women and taking away any focus on them as people. There's pressure to be beautiful. So there's that kind of thing. We don't see a focus on the kind of issues that really are a lottery. So intelligence, beauty, whether you come from a supportive and loving family, these are really individual and genetic things that we can't do much about socially. So it's not of huge interest to people on the left generally.

and I understand that to a certain extent. I think, yes, we're not all going to be supermodels or sports stars or, you know, quantum physicists or whatever. We're going to have quite a few of us being quite average. And we need for those people to also have work that isn't soul-destroying and that they can afford to live on. Yeah, they can host a YouTube show. Helen, I wanted to just first of all to say from both Francis and I

that we're really glad the counterweight is now a thing. We will be supporting it with everything that we've got. We encourage all our viewers to go and check it out and to become members of that and the Free Speech Union because these are two organizations that will be critical in dealing with some of the problems that we've created for ourselves. So thank you for coming on the show and thank you for starting it. And before we let you go, as you know, we have one more question for you, which is always,

what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be. Okay, so here's the thing, and as I've pointed out, I am quite single-minded. There's often this argument about whether or not the implicit association test works and whether unconscious bias training works. And this is what it revolves around, and, you know, there's a lot of evidence that it doesn't. But what gets missed with this conversation is that your employer doesn't actually have the right to know what's going on in your head in the first place. You can have whatever biases you want. What they have the right to demand is that you behave well to your colleagues.

So there needs to be more focus on the individual's freedom of conscience and their freedom to keep their conscience private. Absolutely. And there's another question I want to ask before we go, Helen. are we white and fragile? You are. The two of you are. I am slightly brown and very resilient. I'm afraid brown fragility is also a thing.

Oh, for fuck sake. Well, excellent. On that very happy note, Helen, tell everybody, obviously people should get cynical theories if they haven't already. Where can they find out more about counterweight? Okay, so there's counterweight support.com is the website

which hopefully by the time this airs will be up and there's counterweight media on YouTube where we have a lot of short informational videos and you can seek a caseworker if you need one or just resources by going to either of those fantastic thank you so much for coming back Helm great chatting with you

and thank you all for watching and listening we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode or live stream and they all go out at 7pm UK time. Take care guys and see you soon.