TRIGGERnometry - The End of Woke? - Andrew Doyle

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Andrew Doyle is a Northern Irish playwright, journalist, and political satirist. | Pre-order Andrew's new book "The End of Woke" - https://geni.us/TheEndofWoke Follow Andrew on X - https://x.com/andrewdoyle_com SPONSOR. We’re honoured to parter with Hillsdale College. Go to https://hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free. SPONSOR. 👉 Listen to the NPR Politics Podcast for daily breakdowns of U.S. politics - wherever you get your podcasts. SPONSOR. Express VPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ to get 4 months FREE Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] 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. 00:00 Introduction 06:30 The Supreme Court Ruling 12:21 Is Liberalism Responsible For Woke? 26:22 Is There A Fundamental Weakness Within Liberalism? 39:15 Did We Need To Import Millions Of People From Non-Liberal Cultures? 52:48 If We'd Kept The Country How It Was Everything Would Be Fine 59:17 The Woke Right 01:08:13 The Desire For Vengeance 01:16:14 What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We were in the Western world medicalising kids because they were gender non-conforming, autistic or likely to grow up to be gay. We were fixing gay kids on the NHS doing what the Muller's in Tehran do. What would you say to the argument that wokeism, the reason it came about, the reason it took hold is because of liberalism. To say it is liberalism writ large is the reverse of the truth. woke is a failure of liberalism, not its end goal. Authoritarianism isn't something that just disappears simply because the people wielding that power have a democratic mandate.

It's perfectly possible for democratically elected government to be authoritarian. We're living through one right now. Andrew Doyle, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's been a few times. It has been a few times. It has been many times.

You were the second ever guest on the show. I was, but we're always fun. So, you know, why not do it a million more times? Well, you've written a book about a subject that there's never been discussed previously. Never. The end of work. But actually, there is a lot to discuss to do with that.

And I imagine you didn't write your book only to describe our recent episode with Deborah Francis White. No, no, but that's opportune, isn't it? Things keep happening that could have gone into the book, but the book's already written. But yes, your appearance with Deborah Francis White was a good example. That was interesting, though, because we genuinely tried to have a comment. And I kind of thought, like, at this point, maybe they've started to realize things. I know what you mean.

Well, I mean, look, she reached out to you, Fair Plater. You know, she reached out, she wanted to go on, she wanted to have that conversation. We've been saying for ages, this is exactly what we need. We need people from all sides to sit down and talk and have the conversation. But there were still all those brick walls, weren't there, in the conversation. Those, they're still sort of insurmountable obstacles that were coming up where there was just no point of possible contact, which is kind of interesting. And I think it's because when you are in that woke mindset, you're so locked in to a system of thinking

that actually breaking out of that is almost a bit like de-radicalization. at this point. It's so sort of difficult to move beyond it. Did you get the feeling that she was actually interested in the conversation? Like a genuine open conversation? I did initially, but then when I began to like just simply say that I didn't agree with something. Yeah. That's when I think it all started to. So I think she was interested in the conversation as long as there was no pushback. That was my experience. Because if you remember the whole clown bus driver analogy, right? And then, look, I thought it was a terrible analogy, but she's entitled to. to have her.

Sure. And then I was like, well, you know, I disagree for this, this and reason. And really, you know, if you were claiming that if 30% of bus drivers dressed as clowns for a year, I'd stop noticing. I just, I went in my head and I went, would I stop no, no, I wouldn't. No. And so I said this. And she was like, oh, so your brain works differently to everyone else's. And I was like, well, that's just a trick.

Yeah. You're just playing a trick because in reality, you've made a claim about how people's brain's work. And I'm saying that claim is false. Yeah. What evidence does she have that everyone else would no longer notice clown? She doesn't have that evidence. But it's an interesting point that you mentioned, because in a sense, so much that is tied into the woke way of thinking is that any dissent must be evidence of evil. Either evil or just plain wrong.

So therefore, it's going to be really hard to genuinely get those people around the table and talk through these issues that they're already so set on. Well, I'm glad she came on. And I thought we genuinely tried to have the discussion. I just thought it showed that why it's so difficult to have those conversations. Well, it's also difficult because a lot of people on that side of the debate haven't really listened to the other side. They just haven't. So, I mean, she was talking a lot about gender nonconformity when it comes to the trans issue.

But it became quite apparent that she hasn't really listened to what the other side are saying. She hasn't really listened to what women's rights campaigners are saying, what their concerns are, what they're grounded in. It's not about gender nonconformity. I mean, women's rights campaigners on the trans issue are all for gender nonconformity. They say it doesn't matter. how you behave if you're male or female, you can be male and you can behave in a traditionally feminine way or vice versa. All of that stuff doesn't matter. It's not about that. It's about

recognising the reality of biological sex and why that has an impact on women's rights and gay rights. But she couldn't see that. She tried to turn it into a question about the way that our Western society perceives gender non-conformity and doesn't allow the space for it. But that's a completely different issue. So it's just interesting to me. I mean, again and again, whenever you see these kind of online disputes or indeed offline, you know, people, you know, on the woke side, there is a kind of inability to listen in good faith to what the other side is saying and to explore it and to address the arguments as they are presented, not just this kind of weird straw man version, which is what they're attacking. I do think that the whole woke movement of the whole culture war is, which is a point I'm making the book, is about a kind of imaginary land, an imaginary battlefield. It's about imaginary hate. It's about conjuring up armies of enemies, you know, believing that the world is an area or our society is an irredeemable racist hellhole, even though every study tells us that our society is the most tolerant that has ever existed in the world ever. But it flips in your mindset if you're sort of tied to this ideology. It means that you are navigating a fictional terrain all the time. And so therefore you're not really talking to opponents. You're talking to specters of your own. imagination. And that's why it is kind of difficult, I think, to have the conversations. But,

you know, fair, I like to say, fair play for her to come on and having, and attempting it. And fair play for those who are trying to make, I mean, some people have sort of edge that way, haven't they? I mean, like, people like West Streeting, for instance, used to be of the view that trans women are women. And he didn't think beyond that. And he didn't think to what the implications of that statement are for women's rights, for gay rights, for children, etc. But he has come around to it. And the reason he's come around to it, It's because he sat down with people. He talked to people like Sex Matters, LGBT Alliance, people like that.

I don't know who specifically he's spoken to, but people of that ilk. And once you actually have those conversations, listen to the arguments, it's very difficult, actually, to reach any other conclusion than the one he has eventually reached. And it's just interesting, isn't it? Seeing him in Parliament being berated by his own colleagues, his own fellow parliamentarians, people who haven't listened, people who haven't actually understood the arguments that are being presented. So I think it's really good that you're having the forums, that you're having people on that you're talking about.

Well, one of the things you met you, I mean, you went straight to the trans issue, which has been such a lightning rod of all of this stuff. Well, we've had several things happen where streeting banning puberty blocks on the NHS, but most important, I think recently, the Supreme Court ruling, which said, you know, controversially that women are, in fact, women.

We definitely needed some judges in Perrywigs to tell us that. No, but look, they had to take it to court. Like, Four Women Scotland did an amazing job taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. They had to do. I mean, they found a way because the SMP were misrepresenting the Equality Act through their guidance. It was to do with their quotas, wasn't it, to do with their male-female quotas. So they had misrepresented it, which gave Four Women, Scotland, the opportunity to challenge it in the High Courts. And the High Courts had to clarify what the Equality Act has always said.

I was quite pleased, by the way, because that all happened as the very last draft of my book was in. So I quickly changed it, and I was able to write about it in the book, which is good, because you're right. The Supreme Court ruling is one of those seismic moments that signals the end of woke. Absolutely. Because it isn't just about the ruling. It's about all the ramifications of that, the backlash. It's going to spill out. It can't not, you know.

And it's been interesting to see the backlash. A lot of companies and charities and organizations are saying, we are going to ignore the Supreme Court ruling. A lot of individuals, a lot of a couple of lawyers even saying you don't have to, go along with it. Now, obviously they do, you know, because they are in legal hot water if they don't. But worse than that, they're actually announcing it on Twitter. They're announcing their intention to break the law. So when it does come to the court cases, they're leaving receipts. So thanks for that. It's a good idea. But, you know, you know what I mean, though? Like, if you think about where we've come in the culture war now, it is definitely the case that woke is dying. I'm not saying it will go away. It might transmogrify become something else.

but it's in its death throes. And the reason you know it are all those seismic things like the cast review, like the ban on puberty blockers, like the Supreme Court ruling, like the death of DEI, you know, DEI being stripped out of all the big companies,

McDonald's, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, you know, Facebook. So all of these things, Trump signing these executive orders regarding male and female behavior or there are only two sexes, DEI again. So all of that stuff,

Black Lives Matter being discredited. too much is happening too quickly, like an avalanche, so it won't stand up anymore. And the reason why we know this is actually the little things. It's like all those things like the Jaguar car advert, which I've mentioned in the book, because of course you know, those models, those gender-dendor fluid models, you know, just mincing around,

not a car in sight. And that looked dated. When that came out towards the end of last year, wasn't it? It looked old-fashioned. it looked weirdly passe. Now, that would have seemed normal. In the midst of the craziness of 2020, you look at that and think,

that's what everyone's doing, yeah, okay. But now it seems boring. And that's the biggest signal, I think. Things like that, things like people taking their pronouns out of their bios, not really acknowledging, just sort of getting rid of it. I mean, there's a lot of people, I think, waking up to it and thinking, how am I going to roll this back? And one of the ways you do that, I guess,

is you say, either you deny you ever had an involvement in it. That's going to be one thing that a lot of people are going to do. Maybe you say, well, I never really believed it. Or maybe you just sort of slip, get the evidence erased. Quite, you know, no more pronouns. Maybe you delete some old tweets. Maybe you just do that hope that nobody notices. And in a way that you have to, you have to give people that opportunity. Like, think about how, think about how insane we became in our society. We were in the Western world medicalizing kids because they were gender non-conforming, autistic or likely to grow up to be gay. We were fixing gay kids.

On the NHS, doing what the Muller's in Tehran do, doing what the Iranian government does when people are homosexual because you either kill them or you turn them straight, right? We were doing that. The NHS was doing that. Now, that kind of, we were segregating kids by race. In that school, the American school in London, was segregating kids by race for after-school activities.

we were implementing hugely racially divisive ideas and policy in society. We were doing all of this, thinking it was progressive, and, you know, it's such a sort of bubble of lunacy, this period of time. It's so mad. You know, we're in the eye of the storm, basically, so it's difficult for a lot of people to see it. I promise you, like, 50 years' time, historians would be like, what the hell happened there? That was a moment of hysteria. So obviously, people are going to have to find a way to move beyond it and say, well, we either didn't have anything to do with it

or we didn't understand. I mean, the Salem issue is a good example of what happened. Everyone crazy in Salem, 20 people lost their lives. Everyone thought the devil was running the village. And then the year after, no one does. The year after everyone said, we got it wrong. But because they were pious Christians, they were able to make that concession.

They were able to say, we were wrong. We got it wrong. And that's maybe what people have to do. I don't know if people are going to be able to do that. But like you said, the fact that people like Deborah are willing to talk might be a suggestion that people have started to realize they've got certain things wrong. I mean, she talked about recognizing that she was in cult-like thinking. So she's right about that, right? I mean, I think that's a very good point.

But then where do you go from there? How do you, I suppose, how do you make amends when you know what you've done is actually not just wrong, but it really has contributed to a great evil? how do you then psychologically get over that? I don't know the answer to that. You know, there's going to be a lot of people talking about this, particularly online the debate is being had, it's saying, and pointing the finger at liberalism. And one of the really interesting things in your book

is you make an impassioned defense of liberalism. Yeah. What would you say to the argument that wokeism, the reason it came about, the reason it took hold is because of liberalism. Well, I spent, the problem with liberalism as a concept is, is it, there's never been a really widely mutually agreed definition. So I spend a lot of time in the book outlined precisely what I mean by liberalism. And what I mean by liberalism is the idea of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, social responsibility, treating each other within the rule of law.

You know, you can do whatever you want, say whatever you want, think whatever you want, right up until the point where you encroach on the rights of someone else. So therefore there is built into liberalism, I feel, a sense of social responsibility, collective responsibility. That's part of it. Liberalism has often been interpreted as just a great free-for-all, a kind of anarchy. You do whatever you want and fuck everyone else. It doesn't matter what happens to other people. That's not liberty. That's license.

Those two concepts are very different. I talk about in the book, the history of liberalism, and I go back to the way that Milton talks about this. He specifically talked. He actually wrote a poem about. the difference between liberty and license. You know, he was so annoyed because he'd written a track effectively defending divorce, he didn't like his wife. And he tried to sort of intellectualize his way out of it. Okay, that's what he was sort of defending him. And lots of his peers and

those who are normally outside criticized him and said, oh, you just want a free for all. You just want to be able to do whatever you want. He said, no, I'm crying for liberty and you're talking about license. And those two things are not the same thing. So I think, you can't say that wokeness, and I know this will annoy people, like whenever I say anything like this, this really annoys people on my side, right? Excellent. Yeah, yeah, okay, well, I know this is what you want. It really annoys people.

It's not what I want, I'm just kidding, but actually, I think this is a big debate that's being had right now. Yeah, it is. I mean, James Orr, when we had him on the show a while back, he made the, you know, his view is, wokeness is a feature, not a bug of liberalism. And the reason is that the instinct to liberate more and more groups from

their oppression or from restrictions that are placed upon them inevitably produces the sort of things that we've seen because you keep looking for new group. There is no self-correction mechanism within liberalism that says, okay, we've got to a good place now. Now we have to conserve the liberty that we've created. Isn't there a self-correction in liberalism, though? The self-correction is that key principle of freedom until the point where you encroachment on someone else is free. Okay, what about gay marriage is what somebody would say. Some people, there are people, as you know, I don't agree with this view, but there are people who will say, well, gay marriage encroaches on other people

because it affects the definition of marriage. And marriage has a societal function, which is a unit that is there to produce children, therefore reproducing that society. Therefore, when you erode the concept of marriage by legalizing gay marriage, you are having an impact on other people. I'm not saying that I believe that. I'm just saying you can argue that. I know lots of people who are against gay marriage, including some gay people, by the way. But the thing is, Ultimately, marriage is wrapped up with a religious concept, isn't it? You know, that's the thing. The institution of marriage is a fundamentally religious concept. It is something, it is, as you say, to do with the family, to do with children, etc.

A religious bond, a spiritual bond. However, the state is also offering marriage. The state is also saying to its adult citizens that they can come together in a legally binding contract that entitles them to certain things, right? So it's a no-brainer for me that if the state is going to offer marriage to adults, It should offer marriage to all consending adults, you know, irrespective of their sexual orientation or sex. That doesn't mean that the state should come in and force churches to marry gay couples. So the liberal response to this is quite simple, is that, like, you can have your religious institution. You can have marriage as we see it and, you know, bar gay people from entering into that contract.

But the state can't do that because the state has to uphold the principle of equality before the law. So that's why I don't think gay marriage is at all an example of where liberalism has failed. I also don't think that woke can be seen as liberalism going too far. I think what woke is is proof of what happens when you don't apply the principles of liberalism. Woke is a failure of liberalism, not its end goal. And I suppose I should explain what I mean by that. Insofar as tied up in the woke movement, what does it mean to be woke? one of the key aspects of it.

The key element of it to me is the idea of, firstly, an obsession with group identity, a cultural revolution where you're going to try and change everything in order to achieve equity according to group identity, but that you will do so, crucially, through authoritarian means. Wokeness is authoritarianism. It is a manifestation of authoritarianism, a very specific kind of manifestation of authoritarianism.

So if you are woke, if you change society to be woke, if you apply the principles of wokeness within society, you are already an anti-liberal by definition. You are saying that my way has to be done irrespective of your beliefs. We are going to impose our values on you irrespective of what you think. We're going to make you say your pronouns. We're going to sense a certain speech. We're going to destroy art that we find problematic. We're going to cut out scenes from comedy shows that we don't like so you don't get to see them and you don't get to make the choice. All of this is anti-liberal. I think the closest synonym to woke is

anti-liberal. So to me, when people say wokeness is what happens when liberalism goes mad. Well, there are two things happening there. It could be that firstly, the various sort of definitions of woke, sorry, of liberal around the world are muddying the waters. In other words, the Liberal Party in Australia is the Conservative Party. When Americans say liberal, they think left wing. Liberal Democrats, who the hell knows what they are.

But the word means different things depending on where you are. If we go back to what liberalism, the core values of liberalism that everyone can agree on, all the great liberal thinkers from the past. It is those, it is those values that I've outlined. And none of those values, that notion of freedom, individual autonomy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, anti-authoritarianism fundamentally. None of those are compatible with wholeness. In fact, I would go so far as to say they're the antithesis of wokeness. So I don't buy this, I mean, I would love to have that argument about how it is.

What about something like DEI, since you'd like to take, for example, DEI, right? Yeah. There's nothing authoritarian about it. It's an elected government. saying, you know, we'd like to for, we'd like to introduce a bill that is obviously democratically voted for. Yes. Which says that you must have certain

groups represented at a certain level within major corporations, within government, etc. How is that incompatible? Because that is imposed against the will of the people who it affects, right? So DEI, as with all woke. But so is so laws against pedophilia.

Not true. The vast majority of people oppose paedophilia. Yes, but the people whose interested effects are supportive of that, right? Yeah, but as you know, pedophilia is a form of rape because there can be no consensual sex with kids. So already that is an authoritarian act. That is something where you are taking away the rights of someone else to gratify yourself. DEI is a good example because DEI is a substitute for meritocracy.

DEI is saying that we are taking away the rights of many, many people in society because of what we perceive to be a greater good. I think what you're really saying is, is it possible for... No, but that's not how they frame it at all. DEI says there is a problem in society, which is some people like children and paedophilia are affected by discrimination. And their natural rights to an equal workplace,

to employment, etc., being taken away from them by the institutional and other structures of society which deprive them of their rights. And here we are, brilliant liberals. We want to liberate these people from the oppression and their experience. But they're not liberals because they are making an assertion in lieu of evidence. Capitalism is evil.

You hear that all the time these days in internet clips on TV, even in real life. But has anyone actually explained what capitalism is or why it's responsible for the greatest increase in human prosperity the world has ever seen? Hillsdale College is offering a fantastic free online course called Understanding Capitalism, and I've been watching it myself. I found that the course does an incredible job of making complex concepts like the market economy, understandable. In just seven lectures, you'll learn how capitalism works with human nature,

why it relies on freedom and private property, and why it's actually a system that rewards virtue and responsibility, not greed. And this is just one of over 40 free online courses Hillsdale College offers. You can learn about the U.S. Constitution, the Book of Genesis, the Roman Republic, even the history of the ancient Christian church. Go right now to Hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll. in this course understanding capitalism. There's no cost and it's easy to get started.

And that's Hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll for free. One more time, that's Hillsdale.edu slash trigger. But they're not liberals because they are making an assertion in lieu of evidence. They're not providing evidence of systemic racism. Often they claim that it exists where there is literally evidence to the contrary. They will literally say, what was it? Was it Princeton that announced that it was systemically racist? Right? And then of course the Department of Education in America said, okay, well, then you don't get your funding because that's illegal. And of course they didn't mean it. They know they're not in system. If they were systemically racist, they would have a system of racism in place, like Jim Crow. They would have something in their documents saying we're going to discriminate according to race. As it happens, Ivy League schools do, but they discriminate against Asian American people, Asian people. And white people. Okay, so they do. But that's not the kind of systemic racism they're talking about. The implementation of DEI is predicated on a couple of things. And the first thing is, is,

predicated on an assertion of something that isn't true, right? So that in itself is already a woke authoritarian thing. What you're saying is, I don't care about your evidence. I don't care about your studies or what's real, what's true. Because remember, at the core of wokeness is also a sort of redefinition of truth. So you can have multiple truths. But they're having multiple truths in order to impose one particular truth, which is theirs. That's not a liberal thing to do.

That's an authoritarian thing to do. And if a government does it, I mean, you talk about democratic, elected governments, etc. It's perfectly possible for a democratically elected government to be authoritarian. We're living through one right now. We have an authoritarian government

here in the UK. And they were elected in quite overwhelmingly. Authoritarianism isn't something that just disappears simply because the people wielding that power have a democratic mandate.

You know, I mean, the history books are full of this. You know this. So I would say that DEI, fundamentally, something that has never been supported by the majority of the population, by a very small...

I mean, the last more in common study on this suggests that at the height of the woke movement in the UK and in America, 8%, roughly 8% of the population supported woke initiatives. And what that means is it's not just a minority view in the population, it's a minority view in every generation, everywhere, across the board. This is never, this is something that has been imposed, top down, onto a subdued population that didn't want it. A handful of activists, mostly upper middle class, powerful people wanted it, and they still want it. But it was never going to work ultimately because it didn't have that popular support.

That's what I mean when I say that it is fundamentally authoritarian. That imposition of will on someone else who does not want it to be imposed, DEI involved all sorts of things like this. It involved unconscious bias training sessions. It involved your employer probing around in your brain, trying to pick it apart and find out where your unconscious biases are, in spite to the fact that every study into this shows that those unconscious bias studies don't work, the trainees actually, they actually make it worse. They make incidents of racism

more likely in the workplace, not less. So not only does it not work, it's wrong on the on the principle. On the liberal principle, your employer shouldn't have the right to delve around in your head. That was imposed. And then when workers stood up to it and said, we don't want to be doing that. I don't want to go along and announce that I should try and be less white. I don't want to go and go along and admit my white privilege, admit that I'm a racist when I know that I'm not. And I don't want to lose out on promotional opportunities and other opportunities because I won't go along with your ideology. I don't want to announce my pronouns in my emails or at the start of meetings or whatever. And whenever that happened and those employers got in trouble, I mean, I think of that woman, Fran Itkoff, from the Multiple Sclerosis Society, volunteer for many decades, booted out because she didn't know, she didn't understand why people were picking pronouns and she didn't know why she should do that.

They got rid of her, right? when corporations are trying to impose a niche ideological movement, which has originated in the upper middle classes, onto the working class, onto the workers, and then the activists and campaigners side with the corporations over the workers, well, for a start, that's obviously not a left-wing thing. That's obviously not. We're in a position where wokeness has overwhelmingly benefited those who are financially privileged.

It has not benefited the working class. In fact, it's been antagonistic to the working class. I can't remember why it went down this road, but we started off. We started off a DEI. I suppose to wrap up, my point is that I don't think you could identify a single woke initiative that does not have authoritarianism baked into it in some way or another. And if that is the case, if I'm right about that, then to say it is liberalism writ large is the reverse of the truth.

It's when liberalism hasn't been applied. And what would you make of the argument that there is a fundamental weakness within liberalism that means that it is unable to combat other ideologies that are not liberal? For example, radical Islam, which has no interest in, how can I put it? It has no interest in being part of this culture. It wants to supersede and destroy this culture. So how can liberalism possibly combat that? liberalism said you can believe whatever you want, you do you as long as, you don't affect

anybody else. Yeah. But with radical Islam, and let's take the violence aspect away from it, we can all agree that that is something that needs to be tackled. Yes, because radical Islam is an essentially authoritarian ideology. Of course, we can all agree on that. As you know, I've got a chapter in the book about that very question. Yeah. Because it is a thorny question. It's not one that you can, I mean, I get, I totally get the opposition, right? Because if you are, if you have mass immigration policies that are admitting people to your country who are actively hostile to the idea of democracy and free speech, who actually don't want the rights of everyone to be upheld, who are anti-liberal, you are at risk, are you not, of changing the culture to a degree

where authoritarianism prevails, where that ideology prevails over the liberal ideology. And of course that is the case. That weakness is true and ought to be acknowledged. But that is not to say that there cannot be, and this is the argument I make in the book, there cannot be what I call a kind of robust form of liberalism. In other words, let's take the example of Sweden. It's a very good example, right? Because I was in Sweden a couple of years ago, and a book of mine was translated into Swedish,

and we had like a book launch. And so it was quite nice. I was mingling with people and everything, and I talk about this in the book, because one thing that stayed with me is I was talking to the locals. They're all very middle class, very liberal-minded. You know what Swedes are like? They just want to be nice to everyone.

And they're nice and beautiful. I mean, they've got it all, right? And I was talking to them, and they all wanted to talk about the immigration issue, all of them, not a racist bone in any of these bodies, right? These are all totally hyper-liberal people. And one woman said to, and this stuck with me, one woman said to me, we got it wrong. And she said it in such as plaintiff tone, we got it wrong. And they did, right? So Sweden has now got more gun and bomb attacks than any other country in the world, not at war.

It is, and there are insane problems with gang violence, ghettoization, grenades going off in the street, you know. And these are decent non-racist people who are having to accept that they created this situation. Now, how did that situation occur? Was it because there was an excess of liberalism? Was it because the liberal order said, come in, do what you want, live in your ghettos, don't learn the language, whatever, you know, that's fine. We'll tolerate absolutely everything. No, because what they were tolerating were things that were not in accordance with the rule of law. And again and again throughout the history of liberalism, the rule of law is key.

the rule of following that the dictates of the host nation is part of how a liberal nation can function. In other words, immigration wasn't really the problem. If you'd have said, you know, we're going to have porous borders, we're going to allow people in, although I would say that mass immigration at such a rate makes that impossible. But let's just say you set the parameters. You say that becoming a citizen within any given society is contingent on adapting to the mores of that particular society. It's contingent. You don't just get a free pass.

You can come to the culture so long as you adapt and acknowledge the rule of law within this culture. But of course, an authoritarian mindset doesn't do that. And there's an argument to be said that if individuals come in and say, we are going to treat women like second-class citizens, we are not going to respect your free speech, we are going to demand that you be prosecuted if you burn a copy of your own book, for instance, or that you say, okay, well, then you don't get to be in this culture because this is a society that runs on a liberal system.

But you know better than anyone that most liberal people recoil in horror at the idea of, say, removing people from this country who refuse to integrate, right? They're coming round, aren't they, to the idea of, like, criminals at least. Like, the case in Sweden, that guy who dragged that elderly woman down the stairs and almost killed her, and he was an immigrant into Sweden, he had 20 odd convictions since he had come to Sweden. He'd been in prison for rape. before he almost killed this elderly woman, right? At what point do you say, you are not making an effort to adapt to the society's norms? You have to go.

I think more and more liberal people are realizing that the liberal approach is to deport criminals. Well, I certainly agree with that, although I don't know if it's a liberal approach, and it's just a sensible approach. And it's liberal because you're upholding the rights of everyone in society. If you're not upholding those rights,

then you're not a liberal. But here's what someone who's coming at it from a different perspective might say. I mean, I'm stressed testing these arguments because I think it's really important discussion. Yeah, I'm glad you are. Is, well, did we really need the mass immigration experiment to work all this answer? No.

If we'd had, say, a more kind of identity-based society, let's say, just for the sake of argument. What do you mean by that? Just so I'm clear. If we had a government that said, you know what, Britain welcomes a small number of immigrants every year, we're going to be extremely selective because what we'd like to do is keep Britain British, right? They just said that. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, whatever. They did that. And they said mass immigration in principle is wrong. We don't want Britain to become a nation of immigrants. It never has been before. We do not want the population to become of major cities in this country

to become a majority not born in this country because of identity. We believe in identity, which is there's a British identity, there's an English identity. We want to preserve those because of their identity reasons. Would these people might say, would that not have been better, Andrew? Did we need to have millions of people come into this country to the point where the cities now look different? The crime is such a massive issue like it is in Sweden. And now we have to be like, well, maybe we should deport people who've been convicted

of rape and done 20 other crimes. I agree. It should have been obvious in advance. However, we've now had all these cautionary tales. Sweden is a cautionary tale. Sweden tells us what happens when you do this. It's now happening again in Ireland. I mean, Ireland's playing catch-up.

Yeah. But, you know, a population of village doubles overnight because they bring people in overnight so that no one can complain. Right, that is not a sustainable situation, particularly if the state is not expecting any of those individuals who are coming in to adapt to the way of life of the host country, right? You're absolutely right. We need to have an experiment to work this out.

We always knew that Britishness, whatever that, I know there are endless debates about this, and I know that no one's ever going to agree about it. To me, it's a cultural thing. To me, you know, it is about values and it is about your way of life. You know, we are all Mongols, we are all from multiple different places. We all know this, right? So, you know, but if you have a multicultural system, not a multiracial system,

I think those two things are completely confused. If you have a multicultural system where you say, preserve your own culture, but not just that hermetically seal it, live in a parallel society, do what you want, you end up with the grooming gang. No, but hold on, but what is the challenge? Or like, why can't, let's say, people from ex-country who've come to Britain only, live with other people from ex-country under a liberal system. Well, they can so long as they don't encroach on the rule of law.

But let's say they're not. Right? Well, they say they're breaking the law. No, no, no. These people live in a ghetto of their own choosing. Yeah. Right. And for a while, it doesn't seem like they're hurting anyone.

And then later you discover that they've been engaged in grooming games. Yeah. Well, like I say, the liberal system says you can do whatever you want so long as you don't encroach on the rights of others. If people are living, like, if I wanted to set up a commune and live in the middle of Worcestershire, I don't know why I plucked that out, but just with, just with my own people and we behave in our own way. That doesn't hurt anyone else, but everyone else thinks it's weird. You know, I don't know what we do. I'll leave that to your imagination, but it's

weird. But so long as it's not encroaching, that would never cause a problem. When it starts to cause a problem is when part of someone's cultural values is to negate the law of the land, right? And we've seen that again and again. And that is why, and then on top of that, you have the authorities who have decided that preserving the idea that multi, the myth that multiculturalism is a utopia that definitely works. That promotion of that myth becomes more important than the reality. Under a liberal system, you would be applying the law equally right from the start. You would never get this situation where, for instance, with the Manchester bombing, a security guard doesn't intervene because he's worried about being called racist. You wouldn't get a situation where police and

social workers and media editors say, don't talk about that crime that is being committed because it will be called racist. You wouldn't get that situation where, the police would break into a house where there are seven older Pakistani men with a naked 13-year-old girl who is inebriated and they arrest the girl for being drunk and disorderly and they ask no questions of the men. You wouldn't get that situation because what those people are doing is they are not applying the law equally. They are sanctifying group identity and the myth of multiculturalism and as a result of that they are not liberals. But are you not being utopian, Andrew? Well, no, because I don't. I'll give you a more pointed example of this, right? Let's say that

There are, just talking hypothetically here, there are parts of the country which are ghettos of a particular ethnic origin or religious background or whatever. Those people are far more, they're not liberal in their mindset. And you can't make them liberal because as liberal you can't force people to believe what you believe. Sure. They don't have the liberal view. They're very tribal. They believe that the thing that really matters about people is their ethnic and religious background. Yes.

And for that reason, they only elect representatives, for example, from their own community. Right. The police officers in that community are from that community. The social workers in that area

are from that community are mostly from that community. And because of their tribal nature, they are far more likely to only advocate for the interest of their community. They don't want to participate in this great liberal project.

They want to make sure that their community is looked after against the oppressive, racist force of the state or whatever. And therefore, when someone from that community

commits a crime, they're going to act differently. Right, well, there it is. That's the point. That's the break. But by that point, you've got millions of people in your country who live in this way. What are you going to do about it as a liberal? Well, you've just hit it. I mean, at that point, they have indeed broken the liberal system, broken the law, and that's when the state has to step in.

I mean, this is the thing. It's not the case that I'm not a utopian as far as I don't think, I don't think liberalism is utopian insofar as, because what it does fundamentally is it recognizes the imperfectability of humankind. It recognizes that there will always be problems that we always have to face and we always have to tackle as and when they emerge. But you're describing, it's interesting, isn't it? If you're talking about a kind of a ghetto, a community that has this value within it,

you have to remember that within that, there will be people who do not accord with the values of that community. We always have this, for instance, with the case of radical Islamism. We talk about preserving the culture of a particular, say, Muslim community. What about the women in that community? What about the gay people in that community who, who are not well served by the imposition of Sharia law. What about them? Why is it that when we talk about preserving culture,

we're always talking about preserving the most ultra-conservative, reactionary male, heterosexual culture within that community, not the rest of them. Whereas if you have a truly liberal system, you could have your patriarchs sounding off about gays and whatever the hell they want, but they wouldn't be able to impose those values

on the rest of the community. They wouldn't be able to tell women you must, you know, wrap yourself in a knikab when we tell you to, right? that couldn't work within that liberal system. Hang on a second. I disagree with that, Andrew, because I think it could because most of those laws,

they're not implemented by law. They're implemented by culture. That's how it works. So under a liberal system, you have to allow these cultures to flourish, including the elements of it that are deeply unpleasant. No, because the deeply unpleasant elements are the authoritarian elements.

They're the elements that are taking away the rights of other people within that culture. That's not liberal anymore. No, but there's nothing that you can do as a liberal society with women being forced to wear in the cabs, for example, because there's simply no way to police it. Oh, so you're talking about the practicalities of policing it? Yeah, that's the massive challenge, absolutely. That's why I said what you're doing is utopian,

because you're pretending these things can be addressed in theory, when in practice. Well, no, because I'm not saying that anyone has all the answers. I'm not saying that there is a kind of liberal panacea that will solve society's problems. But this is what I'm saying to, the anti-liberal wing will say, well, there is an answer. Yeah, and what is it? It's another form of authoritarianism. Yes, which they will say is preferable because it does not create these problems. And it's not authoritarianism.

It's maybe like I gave you the example. And for people watching and listening, we're playing these arguments out, without necessarily wedding ourselves to any of them. Sure, that's what we should do, yeah. Right? But the counter argument is obvious. did we really need to import millions of people from cultures that are not liberal into our country and then be like, well, now that they're doing grooming gangs, let's deal with it.

No, like I say, and that should have been eminently predictable. I don't see why anyone thought that wouldn't be. I mean, look, I'll give an example. There's a section of the book where I talk about an old, old novel by G.K. Chesterton, called The Flying In. Have you heard of this? The Flying In from 1912, I think, which imagines a Islamic Britain. And it's a strange thing to read because he talks about an Imam, a guy called The Prophet of the Moon. It's a funny book. It's a farce. And he comes over and his ideas are so persuasive, even though they're crazy.

Like he gets his, he inveigles his way into the mindset of a powerful politician called Lord Ivywood. And he's the one who implements all these things across the country. The story is a farce insofar as because of the Islamic law against alcohol. No one can have a drink. And so this group sets up a what they call a flying in. They go around with a sign selling beer, and they have to go very quickly on their donkey with their beer and their wheel of cheese. And it's very funny. But what it does is satirize the mindset of a politician who thinks he's a liberal, but really isn't a liberal. The kind of politician who thinks, I'm going to welcome in this other culture, this is a better culture for us, and impose it on society.

And what happens? It becomes a deeply authoritarian society. that the satire of that novel only exists because intelligent people have always been able to anticipate what would happen if you try and do precisely the thing that we are doing now. It is prescient in that way. You know, if you have, you didn't need to run the experiments. You absolutely didn't. Because throughout history, we've seen what happens when you allow a particular ideology to prevail. Mass immigration at an unprecedented rate where those practical concerns,

that you raise become the problem. How do you actually police it? How do you actually make sure that you can't? You can't. Once there is massive. How could absolutely I agree with you. There's no way of doing that. So don't do it to begin with. Well, but here's the issue though.

What Sweden is doing now, many people would say is illiberal. Yeah. And what they say is what do you do when you've already made the mistake? Right. How do you rectify it? And what they're doing is they're saying you can't have more than X percent of a particular community in a particular school. You can't have people living in the same apartment blocks without that being But they're doing all these things.

Yeah, but one thing at a time. I mean, Sweden is still... What else are they doing? Tell people. Well, one of the things that really disturbed me recently was that the murder of... What was his name? Salam Mameka, who had... I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. And he was an Iraqi refugee, and he'd burned his own copy of the Quran, his own book that he bought.

He did it a few times. It's a form of protest that leaves kind of a bad taste in the mouth, because obviously the image of burning books is not one that has a... particularly pleasant historical flavor to it because we know what the implications are. But nonetheless, the Nazis were raiding libraries and other people's property and destroying that was authoritarian. He was simply destroying his own belongings in an act of protest. That is something that he has every right to do. But the Swedish government were putting him on trial for effectively blasphemy, right? It was at the time of the trial,

just before his verdict that he was murdered during that TikTok live stream, The judge in the case for his accomplice, who was then sentenced, the judge in that case was said, there can be no, you don't have the right in this country to offend religion. And what he meant by that is Islam. Well, then that is Sweden. That is the Swedish government saying we're not a liberal society. We're just not. We do have blasphemy laws.

We are going to impose these ideas. So all of these other problems that have manifested because of that stuff, they will persist because the Swedish government still isn't dealing with the fundamental problems. They haven't, like, before we get to the problem, point of what do we do about rectifying the mistake now that we've gone too far? How about just impose the actual values of a liberal democracy that you can stand for? Because you can't. Because if, well, they could. No, they can't. And this is why. Because once you have millions of people who feel very strongly about the burning of a particular book, allowing that book to be burned repeatedly,

which it would be if you allow it to be one time, will create a race war. At least that's the fear the government has. I totally agree. That is a genuine concern and a real concern. And it's not one that I would dare to profess to have a solution to. What I would say is, why don't we, as a society, implement the liberal ideas that we stand by, that we claim to... For the reason I just gave you, that if you... No, we're not Sweden, though. Hold on. What do you mean? We're not as far down the road of Sweden. Are you saying that somebody being allowed to burn Korans nonstop in Britain wouldn't spark riots? They should absolutely be allowed to burn a Quran in Britain. But that's not my question. I agree with you in principle. What I'm saying

is once you have the mass immigration and the demographics that we do, if you attempt to enforce the liberal values, which you and I agree on, what you will get is violence on the streets, which is why the government is being so cowardly about defending those liberal values. Well, at the moment, I don't think that's right. Hold on. Because I am putting this to you, in a society in which you have created the demographics situation that we have, and you've created the ghettos that we have. and you've shown over decades a complete unwillingness to confront the illiberal elements in certain communities. Then at that point, you're like brave clinging to the liberal principle of being allowed to burn a book

will actually cause violence on the streets. And no government will want to do that. But I don't think we're there yet. And I know we're not, actually. How do you mean? Well, there's been a few karam burnings of late and there haven't been any riots. Okay. We aren't there yet.

One of the things we've always admired about you, the trigonometry audience, is your intellectual curiosity. You don't just want opinions that confirm what you already think. You want to understand the why behind events, policies and decisions from all angles. That's why we're recommending the NPR Politics Podcast. They break down the big stories from Washington, policy shifts, executive orders, immigration, trade, and they do it. in sharp, digestible episodes, usually 15 minutes or less. The hosts are smart, calm and focused on clarity, just like me. Whether you agree with them or not, they'll give you a lens into how a lot of the country sees these issues. And in today's world, that kind of perspective is invaluable.

So, broaden the scope of your political diet. Listen now to the NPR Politics Podcast, only from NPR. wherever you get your podcasts. We're at that precarious position. We're at that kind of tipping point, I think. We're not where Sweden is. So let me give an example of that. The guy who's on trial at the moment for burning the Quran, right, this is a great test of the culture.

Because there haven't been riots. They haven't been, and there won't be. We're not there yet. This is where I think we disagree. I don't think we're there yet. But we will get there pretty soon. Right. If the government prosecutes this guy.

if it persists with it, if as Labor wants to do, effectively introduce blasphemy law, I mean, they're not saying that, but they're talking about, let's implement the, you know, all party parliamentary group's definition of Islamophobia, which is an insane definition, by the way, it's a, what is it, a form of racism, firstly, so it's wrong already, a form of racism that is based on Muslimness or perceived Muslimness. What the hell is that? It doesn't mean anything. It's not racism. Islam is not a race, never has been, it can't be, because there are 2 billion Muslims in the world of various ethnicities, so we know it's not racism. So that's a factually inaccurate thing that they want to instantiate in law, right? Now, they're saying they're not going to introduce blasphemy codes, but they're certainly setting up all the foundations in order to do so at a later date.

So I think what we do is we look at those kind of cautionary tales like Sweden, where I agree with you, the potential for a riot, if they don't criminalize the burning of Quran, is pretty, high. We're not there yet. And I do think what one thing that we can do in our state, and I know a lot of people say it's all lost, it's all gone, it's all over, you know, demographics is history, all the rest of it. I just don't think we're there. I don't think we should give on up in it. So what should we do as little? I mean, people say to me, you know, I'm the one sort of giving up and I'm saying, I don't think that's true. I think it's the opposite. I think don't do, okay, well, what I would say is, as I don't have all the answers. I don't claim to have all the answers.

I'm exploring ideas. As it might. I don't think, and also I could be wrong. I often am. But here's the thing. I don't think that weighing in with a new form of tyranny to deal with a burgeoning form of tyranny, I think that's something you might regret later on is what I'm saying. I think history teaches us that we will regret that later on.

There are a lot of people who I know and respect who are now talking about how we should ban certain protests, you know, if we don't approve of what they're protesting, that we should sort of dilute due process, all this kind of stuff that we should censor certain things because they've led to excesses such as wokeness, such as radical Islam, etc. I just don't think that's the solution. I think what you do then is you set a precedent

that is always open to exploitation in the future. You are effectively, you are bringing in a new system. That is going to be about imposition. which you cannot anticipate where that leads. Just like violence, you know, the problem with violent protest is you can never anticipate what the end point of that violence will be. You never know where it's going to go. So just don't do it. Just do the peaceful, you know, we protect ourselves by taking those precautions early on.

One thing that we, when we say we don't want to censor some crazy imam saying that gay people are going to burn in hell or something, we're not doing it because we think it's a good thing for society that young gay people are hearing that they're going to burn in hell by some crazy hook. candid cleric, right? We're not saying that. What we're saying is that the principle of free speech that our culture depends upon is far more important than what that idiot has to say or any potential harm that he might cause. It's about weighing those two things up. I think that's something that people are often not really thinking about. You know, with the whole, with the whole Lucy Connolly case, for instance, which is a terrible case of a woman who tweeted something rash and awful in the heat of the moment, in the heat of distress, deleted it within a few hours and gets, what is it, 31 months

in prison for that. I think her case is coming, her appeal is coming up pretty soon. But that is an incredible miscarriage of justice, frankly. There was no, you know, she talked about burn the hotels for all I care, not incitement to violence, by that, for all I care. What she's saying is, I don't care if you happen to go and burn hotels. Not the same thing. But also, it doesn't have the impact. Like, she has no influence. The tweet was deleted. No hotels were burned as a result of that tweet. There's none of the fingerprints that need to be there for incitement to be proven. So it's not there. It was just a nasty tweet sent in the heat at the moment that she regretted. An apology

should do it, right? You don't need to bring in these kind of authorities. And that question, the debates I've had with people who are ostensibly a pro-free speech, but she did say, burn down some hotels. And I'm thinking, weigh it up. It's this thing I'm asking people to do, way up, way up the cost of what you are hoping to implement. In that case, you are weighing up the idea of empowering the state to lock people up for what they say against one woman putting something silly out on Twitter and horrible on Twitter that gets deleted quickly. And you're going to go with that. You're going to say, let's ignore every historical precedent that ever happens whenever you empower the the state to do this. And let's just trust that our state won't morph into that. I just think that's

nonsense. Similarly, with those of a liberal disposition, we're saying let's start making exceptions now. and let's get, let's, let's boot out the people who say the horrible things who threaten our liberalism or our democracy. There's a bigger thing to weigh up. That's what I'm trying to say is we probably need to think of the bigger picture. I don't think that sacrificing liberal principles, well, I tell you, when you sacrifice them, you don't get them back with ease. That's what history teaches us.

So that's, and again, I know what I'm saying is going to be hugely unpopular. I'm not suggesting that we do that, by the way. Sorry, I know, Francis. No, I know you're not. I know you know. But I'm also aware that, you know. There are lots of people who are suggesting. They are suggesting, and they get very angry at me for not. And, you know, this is why I had to write a whole book about it,

because I don't think it's something that you can do on Twitter. I think it's an argument that needs to be developed, explained. I, you know, I try and trace the history of liberalism, liberal thought, what I mean when I'm talking about a liberal system and how that might work. I'm talking about those bigger questions. And again, like the woke mindset where people get, and we talked about this at the start, you get so locked into a perspective.

you don't want to be challenged, you don't want to hear something else. I'm saying let's actually think about what the implications of what you are endorsing might be in the future. It's always short-term thinking, isn't it? You know, I get really troubled by that. I guess the pushback to that is people who go, well, because of everything that has happened over the last 50 or so years, particularly with mass immigration,

you can say it's short-term solutions, but when you're in a state of crisis, you need solutions and you need them rapidly. Yeah, you do, you do. Because where we're heading is deeply unpleasant to put it mildly. I guess my question to you, Andrew, is what would you say to a conservative who said this would never have happened if we had fallen the laws of conservatism? What are the laws of conservatism?

The desire to conserve one's own country and culture. And as a result of that, we would never have allowed this amount of mass immigration. in, we would never have allowed our own laws and values to be subverted in the ways that they have been in the money. Just to make it clear, Francis would be totally against that because the food would be shit. Exactly. And there would not be a lot of brown women around. Yeah, exactly.

That's his thing. Yeah, it is. But we could just allow the women in. But let's not, it's not about my argument, even though I'm correct. Those, God say. I thought I'd lie in the mood a little bit. Yeah. But I think Francis's question is a valid one, which is what is the argument to people who would

say, well, look, if we just kept the country, country the way it was, everything would be fine. Well, yeah, but I mean, every, every reactionary in history has always said that, can't we just go back a bit? Can't we just, there's a bit in a Dennis Potter play called Brimstone

and Treacle, which I really would advise people see. Where the Denham Elliott character is talking to, where he's talking to the devil, he doesn't know it's the devil, but he's talking to the devil. And he says, you know, I just want things to go back before or the immigration, before the, the devil starts to say to him, yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

Why don't we get the concentration camps? Why don't we round everyone out? Why do we do all that? And he pushes him to the point where he says, that's not really what I want. I just want things to be as they were. And it's a really interesting scene because it feels like the conversations

that are being played out now. And so far as, yeah, okay, we all have a kind of societies adapt and change and it's always going to be uncomfortable. But that doesn't mean that the core values have to change. You talk about the idea of conserving, what is it, tradition? or ways of life.

Ways of life, etc. Laws, all those things. Why would that be opposed to the liberal system that I'm imagining? I don't think it would be.

You know, if you take someone like George Orwell, who I write about in the book quite extensively, you know, he's a hardcore I mean, he's left, very far left. It's also a social conservative

as just part of him. If you read his essay, The Lion and the Unicorn, you will completely understand this point that he is a progress, in all of the ways that you would imagine. But he also believes in British, English identity, you know, fair play, the values of a country, the traditions of a country. Those things are not antithetical to the kind of the kind of world I'm imagining, I suppose.

And I kind of think it's never been, you know, we've never gone there. We've never kind of, there's always, we don't really have the liberal system in this country. Insofar as we have these hate speech laws. We have these. What is it? What was the last thing saying? the last stats, 12,000 arrested a year for what they've said online?

Yes. That's an incredible. That's not a free country. When that's happening, that's not a free country, right? That's what we should be striving towards. Freedom. We don't have it, really. The fact that people are in prison for memes at the moment. For memes.

Like, what was the one guy who put out three memes? The most offensive of which was an image of some immigrants with coming to a town near you. I think they were holding knives or something. And you know, you can look at that and there's an argument that that's offensive, etc. Prison? Really? What, like that?

The guy this week, was it this week? The guy who police took six officers in his house because of a tweet he'd put up around. The next police officer himself. And they went around to his house checking what books he's got on the shelf. They'd look to these books. Douglas Murray's books there.

What do they say? There's some very Brexit-y books in it. Well, the majority of the country voted for Brexit. It's not that niche. Like, this is that thing. You know, the reason I always bang on about the College of Policing and the plan, that's whole system. The fact that they have, they're recording hundreds of thousands of non-crime hate incidents. The fact that the Home Office tells them again and again, stop doing this.

The fact that the High Court says, this isn't lawful what you're doing. Don't do it. And they carry on. And the fact that no government has the balls to abolish the College of Policing, which is an ideological body now. It's a quango. So, you know, I think we need to get that in order. We need to get our own house in order. Like none of this is liberal. Like people think what the College of Policing is doing with its non-crime hate incidents

and with its arresting some six officers to arrest some pensioner and whack him in a cell because of a tweet he posted that wasn't even that offensive, right? They think that's what liberalism is. The argument I'm trying to outline in the book is it's not. That's what, that's when there's a vacuum of liberalism. That's when liberalism isn't there anymore. And that's what I want to see. I'm not saying it's going to happen.

Nothing I said. No one takes what I say seriously. No one's going to implement the ideas that I come up with. But what I'm trying to do is just persuade people to have those conversations. So maybe at some point in the future we might live in a government, in a society that is actually authentically liberal. And see what happens. I'll tell you what wouldn't happen. You wouldn't have Sweden. It wouldn't go that way. Watching Netflix without using ExpressVPN is like paying for a gym membership, but only being able to use the treadmill. Did you know that Netflix has different content libraries for every country? Netflix has thousands of shows, but without a VPN, you only get access to a fraction of that based on your location.

For example, I live in the UK, and last week I wanted to watch dumb money on Netflix, but it's not on UK Netflix, so I just opened the app, selected US, tapped one button to connect, and then when I refreshed the page, it was there. ExpressVPN is the VPN to choose. They have servers in 94 countries. It's compatible with all your devices. It works with other streaming services like BBCIPlay at YouTube and more. Right now, our listeners can get an exclusive deal for extra months free

when you sign up for a 12-month plan at expressvpn.com slash trigger. That's expressvpn.com slash trigger for four months absolutely free. Before we go on to the final question, there's something that I wanted to talk about because I think it's a very important conversation to have. which is, okay, wholeness is dying, for every reaction, you have an equal and opposite reaction,

and we're now in a backlash. Yeah. What do you make of that? Well, what is it you said, constantly? Because I quoted you in the book on that. You said every retardation has an equal and opposite retardation.

It does. And you're talking about the woke right, that phrase the woke right. I've been very surprised at the, how upset people get about that label. Have you? Yeah, actually genuinely. You genuinely surprised. I'm not surprised at all.

Well, maybe you're more keyed into this than I'm because, because, you know, I see the way people talk to you and James Lindsay and the people who are using the term. And I've tried to outline what I think woke right, me. But to me, woke was never about left or right anyway. Like, to me, wokeness was, I mean, I define wholeness as a short term as the cultural revolution that seeks inequity according to group identity through authoritarian means. I think that covers it. Well, you can be on the right-left or anywhere in between and still be obsessed with group identity and still be obsessed with imposing through authoritarian means your values. So, wokeness was never, for me, about left and right.

And I actually think it went so far because we misunderstood the culture war as a question of left versus right. And it never, ever was. Authoritarians exist across the political spectrum that can emerge from anywhere and any time. You know, you can't pin it down to left or right, much as people like to do so. And I think when they do that, there's a kind of tribalism there. It's like, I don't want my team to be accused of this, right? I think that's partly what's going on there. To say that there's such a thing as woke left,

people on the left who are woke and people on the right who are woke, makes complete sense to me. Of course there are identity-obsessed monomaniacs on both sides of the political spectrum who want you to shut up, who want to sense you and want to do what. And, you know, they follow the same template. This isn't, to me, a controversial thing. But I'd also say, when you talk about your quotation about retardation, which I know is a very upsetting term for some people,

but it just means to go backwards. retard. Anyway. So, no, it does. But, but, you know, yeah. So, sorry, where was? I'm talking about this idea of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of transcending the political, uh, boundary. Why is that so upsetting to be? Well, I think it's to do with tribe. I think we have to, I think right and left are redundant at this point. So I don't think talking in terms of, I think if you for many, many years, obsessively, and I'm talking here about the woke hegemony, those who were in control of all our major institutions, when they for many, many years go on about how group identity is everything.

Race, sexual orientation, sex, these are the things that matter the most, gender identity, whatever. You as an individual matters less than what group you belong to. And then you get a reaction from white nationalists. Why would you be surprised by that? You've laid the groundwork.

You've said, yeah, you should be thinking about yourself as a white man and what that means. And some people might say, well, to me, it doesn't mean shame. To me, it means pride. And some people will go even further and say, to me, I just want that exclusive enclave that you guys were describing earlier, where we just lived by ourselves in a white utopia or whatever the hell. But that's why I'm putting the arguments to you because that's where the direction of travel on the right is, particularly, I think, among younger people, particularly among men. Right.

And I think it was, as you and I have been talking about for years, it was a predictable backlash to what we've had, which is people saying identity really matters. And by the way, you're a white man, you're a piece of shit. And eventually people are going to be like, well, fuck you. And if I'm a white man, I'm not a piece share, it's actually a great thing. And let's all unite around this fact. So it's not surprising. I think the reason people get pissed off with it, A, because it's accurate. Yeah.

And B, because it's that tribal thing that you said, which is you're basically calling them the thing they hate the most. Right, right. And they hate it the most because actually at some level, that's what they are. Yeah, and no one likes to be labeled, right? And, you know, we've had this for years with woke people saying the same thing. like saying we don't like to be, you know, you're just using it as a snarl word. It's just an insult. Well, I've never used woke as an insult. I use it as a descriptive, shorthand for quite a complex, sprawling ideology, right? I mean, that's the only reason I've ever done. So I think people now taking

it as a pejorative, they're probably a lot of the people who've used it as a pejorative themselves, right? And they don't like it throwing back at them. But maybe, you know, it would be, I mean, you can reject the label, but maybe ask yourself, why are people calling me that? What is it about my behavior that invites that epithet. And perhaps it's to do with the fact that you are obsessed with group identity and want to censor everyone who disagrees and think that Western culture is over and should be demolished. I mean, maybe it's to do with that. Maybe it's the similarities with the very people you've been railing against all these years. You know, maybe it's the fact that you're dabbling in various discourses online that think, well, maybe it would have been better

if Hitler had won the Second World War. Maybe it's all of that stuff. You know, maybe it's all your constant anti-Semitism. Maybe that's part of it. You know, but my, why, you know, How can you not see the similarities between the extreme far left with the way that they talk about Jews and the way that I'm seeing more and more? I'm not alone in this, am I? I'm set on the right. But the funniest conversation with somebody about this because he was like, well, the difference is we're right. Said every tyrant in history. He was like, look, the difference is there's a lot of truth to the things that we're saying.

You know, there is discrimination against white Christians. And he was like, can you point to something? that the woke left said that was true. I was like, yeah, like black people on average probably don't have quite as good a deal as white people in our society. That's probably a fact. Yeah.

I think women, on average, probably don't get quite as good a deal as men. Now, does that mean that the woke left solutions to those issues was correct? No. No. But it's the same. Like, you know, we know that there's discrimination

against white people. We know there's discrimination against men. We know that there's been all of this stuff. Quite overt. I mean, the BBC advertising for just whites only, and not no whites in their... in their kind of internship stuff. But I don't know that the solution to that is identity policy for white people.

The solution to it, I think, is returning to the ideas that we were talking about, which is treating people as individuals. But the counter argument to all of this, which is why we were kind of focused on a lot of this, is that there are some groups who just are more tribal than others. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the idea, isn't it, how far do we tolerate the intolerant? How, you know, how far do we allow those kind of ideas to flourish when they are, when they represent an existential danger to the society.

That's a really good question. And it's a, but I don't think the sort of the jackboot sledgehammer solution, which, let's face it, has been tried many, many, many times. And always leads to the same end point, which is misery. So I just don't think that's the way. I would like to see, I would like to see a conversation about that. I mean, that particular debate is one I'm very interested in, and exactly what you said about, what do you do when a society has already gone too far?

And what freedoms are you willing to sacrifice to try and remedy it? I mean, I would say that if your solution is the further state censorship, the curbing of peaceful protest, that kind of approach, that actually your desired goals may not be realized. I don't think that's the solution. I think the one area where we should be looking very carefully at solutions is having a very, very, very clear distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

Right, and that you would have to satisfy certain conditions to have citizenship. Not only that, I think you should have different rights if you're not a citizen. Right, okay. For example, I don't think anyone who's a foreign citizen should have access to any benefits in this country whatsoever. Okay, so that, again, is a debate to be had,

and it's certainly not the same thing. You know, we're having a lot of those debates in America at the moment with the deportation of students on student visas. Yeah. Right. Well, the rules are different. And they should be. And they should be. And that's absolutely fine.

You know, it's like, you know, the analogy that I've often heard used is, you know, if I invite you into my house and you start, you know, criticizing my pelmits or whatever, I can, not as a bit camp, but, you know, I can throw you out. It's my house, right? Those people are there on a visa. You know, I've got a visa now for America. If I go out there and start burning the American flag and chanting of death to America and everything, I don't expect to be allowed to stay.

And I think that would be reasonable, right? So I do think there's different. At the same time, you can also argue that. due process still matters and that, you know, there are some concerning cases in America where due process appears to be being bypassed. And due process, by the way, is different for people who have immigrated. It's not actually as thorough as the right. But there's something there. There's the opportunity to stand up and make your defence in public. That matters, right? It's possible to have both to hold both those positions at the same time. Those who say just

get rid of them, don't grant them, you know, run roughshod over all of our conventions just to do it. That's not helpful either. I suppose is what I would say. I think as well, the thing that ties the two ends of these spectrum together and a lot of these social justice movements, and the thing that I don't think we talk about enough, are the emotions that lie underneath it, which is, to me, the emotion of vengeance, the desire for vengeance.

The feeling that they've been robbed, therefore we need to make some kind of intervention. But it's not only an intervention, it's the desire to punish. Like we saw that with the woke movement, whereas these minorities have been discriminated against, they've had a terrible time in the past, it is the fault of straight white men, therefore you were going to be punished.

And all of those movements, wherever it was BLM, Me Too, etc., etc., they all had that impetus behind them. If we look at what we shall term like the woke, right, whatever you want to call them, again, it is the desire for revenge. It is, you have made me feel terrible for this entire 10 years, you've discriminated against me, you've mocked me, you have reduced my career opportunities,

and they are right, just like the other side are right, to a degree as well. And then it's the desire for vengeance, which just means we're in this permanent swinging back and forth. It could be. I mean, I'm always a bit aware of trying to mind really, trying to work out why people do the things they do. It's likely that there are people who genuinely do believe in their ethno-state idea or whatever the hell it might be.

There are others who are doubtless fall into the category. I mean, we've seen them. We've seen them online. The whole cancel culture phenomenon was about revenge, right? Well, a lot of it seemed to me to be about revenge. And then you saw it the reverse, you know, when the assassination attempt happened against Trump and that woman from Home Depot was filmed

because she put out some stupid joke about that, you know, he should have aimed better or something like that. The guy went to her place at work. She's on a minimum wage, just some cashier, filmed her, went online, went viral, she got fired. That's cancel culture from the right. It's the same sort of thing. Elon Musk actually put a tweet out,

saying, you know, I'm having so many requests to just ban left-wing accounts. I'm not going to do that, right? So, so, look, vengeance is a human emotion that is a major driving force throughout history. And yeah, of course, that's going to be part of it for a lot of people, absolutely. And, you know, it always happens, doesn't it, when there's a sense of injustice, you want to lash out, hence the scapegoating of various groups. Scapegoating is a manifestation of vengeance. I think it's what happened in Nazi Germany. You scapegoat the Jewish population. because of what happened to after the Treaty of Versailles, and you see it as their fault.

And then, you know, so obviously that's all part of it. But that's to diagnose, I suppose, the human tendency towards those kind of impulses. But I would say just acknowledging, I think one of the healthiest things to do is to acknowledge that we all have it in us. We all have the capacity to seek vengeance. It's actually, I think we all have,

I think authoritarianism is the deed. default in humankind. And I think we sort of know that instinctively because of the way we were as kids. You know, when someone steals your kinder egg, you go and smash up their kinder egg. I'm not saying that happened to me, but something it did occur to me, right? We know that we are socialized out of that instinct for authoritarianism. And so we are able to discuss and not just lash out and punch to talk like adults. We know that that's the case. I think too often we're assuming, and a lot of criticisms of liberalism actually are, that it has a utopian, idyllic idea of human nature, that we're all just essentially good. I don't think that's true.

I think, well, certainly where I'm coming from, is that liberalism is not the norm, that you have to kind of fight for it. That actually we are, we do have a base of animal quality. We do seek revenge as an instinct, you know. I read Kenneth Williams' diaries, you know, the sort of camp actor. And he says, at one point, he says, I've just realized that every time I'm wronged, my instinct is how and when will I get revenge straight away. And I think we all feel, that's also why revenge plots work so well. That's why you watch Kill Bill and it's great, the Rath of Khan, best Star Trek film. Why?

Because we all get it. He's been fucked over. He wants to kill Kirk. I'd want to kill Kirk. Right. We all get it. So the revenge element, the authoritarian element, you know, like when people have a good, when I get parloric, on online as happens every few months, I get a weird dog pile thing. And it can come from any angle,

by the way, it can come to the far right, far left, feminists, anti-feminists, whatever the hell it is. Whenever that happens, I do sort of think, something in me says, I just wish I could shut them up. I just wish I could get rid of them, right? And I know that I don't want to do that seriously. But the thoughts there, you know, you understand tyranny, you understand power, you know, you understand just making your problems go away, making your opponents go away. Would it matter if that person who's been really horrible to me, just disappeared. Probably not. Well, imagine if you had the power to make them disappear.

That way tyranny lies. I think, and one of the key arguments of the book, is that the authoritarian impulse is the default of humankind. The liberal countries where you have free speech, where you have individual freedom, those are vanishingly rare, historically and cross-culturally and historically. They don't exist in the world today very much. We have something very precious in our country.

I say we, I'm saying at the moment, we are living under an authoritarian government. I believe that. I think the Labour government has extreme authoritarian tendencies. I also think, by the way, the Conservative Party has authoritarian tendencies. I don't think any major Western political party is absent of authoritarian tendencies, which is why it's a constant battle, which is why we have to constantly push back to it and try and strive towards that, or at least try and resist that thing which comes naturally to us.

So to say that liberalism is a utopian, naive view of the essential innate goodness of humankind, is to get it backwards. I think it's the opposite. I think what liberalism is, is a kind of armor that we build up against those natural urges that we all have and that we are socialized out of. The things that enable us to build up that armor are socialization, as I say, an effective education and a robust rule of law and, of course, free speech so that you can challenge things like unjust laws when they appear on the statute books. It's a constant negotiation. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, hard. It's harder than the... This is the other thing. The authoritarian solution, whether it comes from the right or the left, is easy. It's an easy solution. You just make your enemies go away.

You shut them up. It's done. Problem solved. That's why it's so appealing. That's why you're seeing the right turn that way. I mean, they always did it before, so why wouldn't they go back to it now? It's just so happens that we lived through a bubble where the woke left were dominant for 15 or so years. And that's now dying. What's going to replace it? It's probably going to be a bit of both, isn't? It's probably going to be elements of the woke left, coming back Phoenix-like in a different form, another disguise, you know, changing their language

as they always do so they can work around it. And members of the right adopting these authoritarian things as well. That seems to me to be the default, and it also seems to me to be the easy short-cut solution. Just get rid of it. Well,

maybe as a society, we should be saying, well, actually, let's accept that it's going to be hard and let's actually have the conversation and not just impose what we want, not least because once you set those precedents, once you make those impositions,

the backlash is going to be something you didn't anticipate. Andrew, before we go to Substack, what's the one thing we're not talking about? Before Andrew answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

Is Spotify discrediting itself by not hosting it? Hapha. You know, I'm just enjoying watching it squirm. Exactly. This is Andrew Doyle, Labour and me. If the culture magically became un-stupid tomorrow, what would you write about?

There are, Enya hasn't done an album in 10 years. What's going on there? I think that's important. Her last album was Dark Sky Island in 2015. I still can't believe he like, eh, yeah. Best album she's ever done. There's a real snobbishness about Enia. It's because it's shit.

This is what I'm talking about. This attitude right here. is exactly why she's not recording more. No, it's terrible. It's a, no, it's not. It's objectively terrible. People are really snobbish about pop music, right? All pop music is basically... No, I love pop music.

I love Michael Jackson. I love Prince. Yeah, I love... But it's all basically dispensable, right? It's not Mozart. It's not Bach. So let's just say, you know, just because something's a bit cheesy or something,

it doesn't really... It's no different than Michael Jackson or Prince or anything else. No, that is... You can get out. Also, in this... I'm a big authoritarian in here. You've gone too far. And he's got a beautiful, ethereal voice.

Genuinely great singer voice. really great musicianship, composes wonderful melodies. She created a whole sound. When you hear an Enya song, you know it's Enya, because she did that incredible thing of layering her own voice hundreds of times. Who thinks of that? She's a cheap Kate Bush. She's a cheap Kate Bush.

When did Kate Bush ever layer her voice over 200 times for an album? She didn't need to. She didn't need to. Anyway, look, I can't believe this is the thing that we're having an argument about. But look, there's that. We need to talk about that. I think we also need to talk about education. right? I think we need to talk about dealing with the educational system so that kids are actually thinking critically.

I think critical thinking has to be embedded into the educational system. It's not there. It's not there anymore. It really isn't. And I'm not saying have classes on critical thinking where you sit down and learn how to think critically. What I mean is it's got to be sort of there all the time within every subject. You know, you have to find a way. The fact that that's not there, I think explains a lot of our problem. And by the way, isn't education like everything? Like the trickle down, of that in terms of the way adults behave, the crime rates, the success rates, the success of a country,

innovation, everything. So a lot more needs to be spoken about in terms of education. I suppose we both used to be teachers, so we have that, you know. Don't get them to know. I know, I know. But the other thing is the arts. I think the arts generally, right, here's the thing. I

know so many people in this sphere about who were trying to fight the culture war, push back against the culture warriors, try and weed out the woke from society, etc. But their priority is never, rarely the arts. They talk, you know, they talk about politics and they talk about these debates and everything. But the arts is the whole ballgame, I think. If, you know, if you have every major film studio and television studio, you can't get commissioned on the BBC to write a drama unless you're basically propagating the approved message,

right? So therefore no good TV drama is being made. The woke, the woke scenario, the woke world cannot produce great art. It hasn't done so. Prove me wrong. There's no great work of art that has been produced in the last 20 years. The lessons was very good. It was fine. No, it was very good. No, no, I don't. Well-ridden, well-acted, you know.

It was fine. It was a dispensable piece of drama, right? It was like... It was better than Enya? No, well, again, like, I'm to... You're talking about popping a culture. Head on over to Substack where we continue this debate. Do you think the decline of traditional faith in the West has created a moral vacuum that

movements like this inevitably rushed to fill?