TRIGGERnometry - Toby Young on Journalism, Education, Public Shaming and Offence Archeology

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

Journalist Toby Young (@toadmeister) discusses journalism, education, founding free schools, public shaming, offence archeology, hounding, classical liberalism, intersectionality, identity politics, writing for Quillette and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us 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 (@failinghuman) 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 Kissin. And this is the show for you if you're bored of watching people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our amazing guest this week is a fantastic classical liberal journalist, Toby Young. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me on the show.

And I introduced you as a journalist. How did you first get into journalists? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I first started writing for newspapers of magazines when I was a student. I was commended in the category of young journalist of the year in, God, 1985. And when I left university, I became a news trainee at the Times. And that was my first kind of proper job in journalism. I actually lost that job after six months. And the reason for that was because every morning I would come in,

and try and log on to the in-house computer system as Charlie Wilson, then the editor-in-chief at the times, and how much access you had to the kind of in-house computer system depended on your status in the office hierarchy. Because I was a news trainee, I was at the bottom of the pecking order and really had access to nothing. So I would try and log in as the editor in order to get access to everything, and we would try and guess his password for kind of five or ten minutes every morning.

And after about five and a half months, I hit on the right one, which was top man. And the first thing, I had this very kind of supercilious boss who had this kind of very languid air, long hair, lots of girlfriends, drove an open-top MG. Sounds like a legend. Yeah. And total legend, I hated him.

And so the first thing I did when I was inside the editor's kind of, I think it was called a cue, when you sent someone a message, their name came out of me. So I immediately sent a message to this, my overlord saying move your fucking car, it's in my space, the editor. And he kind of leapt up out of his chair as though he'd been kind of hit with a cattle brought and ran into the car park and moved his MG to another spot. And I thought, right, I can have some fun here.

And I read havoc for about a week. I found this memo detailing all the salaries of the most senior employees at the Times and circulated that kind of to the entire office. And then immediately people started queuing up outside the editor's door to kind of demand more money because so and so and so it was getting more than them. Anyway, and then after about a week of this, the kind of IT police tracked down the kind of miscreant who was kind of causing trouble.

And I was told to meet the managing editor for a kind of dressing down. And I went to the managing editor's office, expecting, you know, a slap on the wrist, but to be secretly kind of admired for having kind of displayed my hacking skills, you know, crucial skills for a modern journalist. And I was met by a security guard.

with a kind of see-through plastic bag containing the contents of my office drawer and escorted off the premises. So that was the end of my career as a news trainee at the times. I then went to Harvard for a year and thought I'd become an academic and embarked on a PhD at Cambridge, binned out of that after two years, started a magazine called The Modern Review with Julie Birchell and Cosmo Landismund, who were then my next-door neighbours in Islington. the Modern Review was kind of a magazine in which intellectuals and academics wrote kind of long scholarly pieces about things like Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger. We called it Low Culture of a Highbrow. Julie Birch used to describe it as smash hits edited by F.R. Levis, which I guess makes me F.R. Levis, which is kind of complimentary.

And we kept that going for four years and produced it out of my kind of bed sit in Shepherds Bush. and I thought, you know, I was Jan Werner, the kind of dawn of the Rolling Stone kind of empire. And I was going to be this kind of, you know, billionaire in years to come with private jets, because this magazine was going to be kind of so incredibly successful. It folded in 1995 after Julie and I fell out. She left Cosmo and ran off with an associate editor called Charlotte Raven, and it became a bit of a kind of news story at the time.

Anyway, I shut down the magazine, and at that point was recruited by Graydon Carter, than the editor of Vanity Fair to go work for Vanity Fair. He initially said, you know, come out for a month, you know, let's get to know each other, it'll be fun. And a month then into three months, three months, then into six months. And I was eventually, I was at Vanity Fair for almost three years

and in New York for five years. And I thought again, you know, I was going to conquer New York. I was getting into the mail, Tina Brown. You know, here was the land of opportunity. Turned out it was for me, the land of the unreturned phone call. And I crashed and burned spectacularly. returned to London in 2000 with my kind of tail between my legs,

but wrote a book about my disastrous attempts to take Manhattan called How to These Friends and Alienate People, which was published in 2001, turned into a stage play in which I played myself in the West End for eight weeks, sometimes to full houses, sometimes not. They're comedians, we know all about the very ability of watching. I know when I'd like to play to an empty house

on a Tuesday afternoon. Or sometimes a full house it feels empty. Yeah. Tell a joke and it just dies. It's terrible, isn't it? I used to get the flop sweat, you know, when it's like someone turns on the waterworks because no one's laughing at your gags.

Yeah, I'd call it Sweaty back syndrome. Sweaty back syndrome, okay, so you don't want about it. And that book was, it became a bestseller, sold it around the world. It was eventually turned into a film in which Simon Pegg played. Me, which was released in 2008, also called Had to Luz Rent and Alienate People, read a sequel called The Sound of No Hands Clapping,

started writing a column at The Spectator in 98, and they've been writing a column ever since, also an associate editor at The Spectator, got kind of into doing more political stuff around about 2008, 2009, and have been kind of fairly political since then. wouldn't quite describe myself as an activist journalist but probably on the cusp of being that um on the conservative side of things on the conservative side of things yeah yeah um so that's kind of that's my journalistic career in a nutshell and how did you get involved in education because that's

also been a big part of your life yeah well um it ran about um 2008 um my wife and i um started to look at local secondary school. So we've got four kids. And we had the children in very quick succession at one point worked out that my wife was pregnant over a five-year period for more than 50% of the time. Excellent work. Which I wouldn't recommend. My wife is a lawyer who gave up practicing law to become a full-time mum when we had our first child, which I always say is the worst of all possible combinations because she contributes nothing to the household income but can always beat me in an argument. I'd say she's gone back to work now,

so if she was to hear me saying that, she would kill me. So she now does contribute to the house. Well, you're only on YouTube, but for the rest of it turns. It's going to see her. And anyway, so we had these four kids. They were all at this really good local

primary school in Shepherd's Bush, but we were nervous about whether we're going to go to secondary school. And there are some good, it's around here, actually. There are some good Catholic, some good C of E secondary schools, but you have to be, you know, a church-going Catholic or Anglican in order to get into those schools. There were some other really good secular schools,

but the catchment areas were tiny, and practically had to live within the school gates to get into those schools. And we sat down and thought, well, what are we going to do? We can either move. We can get religion, which round here is known as

on your knees to avoid the fees. None of those options seemed... We could go private, being a freelance journalist. four kids, so it wasn't really an option. So we initially decided to move and my wife got all these details of houses in this village in Suffolk called Parham, which is near a really good comprehensive called Thomas Mills and the plan was to move to Parham in Suffolk 200 miles away, about 100 miles away and sent our kids to this good local comprehensive. But I thought, you know,

why should we have to kind of uproot ourselves and move halfway across the country just to secure a decent state education for our children? Shouldn't that be, you know, available more locally? Plus, you know, Parham happened to be where my parents-in-law live. That wasn't a big factor. I was, you know, having to move back into the basement. It wasn't quite the basement, but almost the bottom of the garden. My parents-in-law just to secure, you know, a decent education for my children. I didn't really want to leave London.

And, you know, I just felt angry about the fact that I was having to, jump through all these hoops to secure something, which should be everyone's by right if you're a taxpayer and so forth. Anyway, so I thought maybe there's another option, which is to sell up our own school. That's fascinating in itself, because most people's reactions now to that situation would be to write a massive Facebook post about how the education system is broken and everything's terrible. But you actually did this horrendous thing of trying to do something about it. Well, yeah, I think it was, I agree it's a slightly unusual reaction. I think one of the things that gave me the confidence to think that was possible

is that my father was involved in education. He came up with the original idea for the Open University, which is now the largest higher education institution in Europe with something like a quarter of a million students enrol at any one time. I think that's right anyway. And so I thought, well, if he can start a university, the least I can do is start, you know, a small secondary school. Plus at that time, Michael Gove was the shadow education secretary

and was talking about making it possible for parents to set up free schools, which have been set up in America as charter schools in Sweden and other European countries. So it looked at that point too, as though the Tories were going to kind of romp home in 2010. So it didn't seem completely beyond the realm of possibility. So I wrote this piece, not a Facebook post, it was a piece for The Observer in 2009,

saying I wanted to start what I called a country, comprehensive grammar school. So a school which combined the best of both the grammar and the comprehensive tradition. So mixed ability intake, inclusive, but uniforms, houses, Latin, grammar, Hogwarts meets Grange Hill. And I published it and I put an email address at the bottom saying anyone want to help me, you know, email me. And I got about 150 people emailing me saying and they'd love to help mainly local parents, worried about the same things as my wife and me. And I invited them all to a meeting in my sitting room,

not much bigger than this room here, and about 50 people crowded into the room. This was in sort of, I guess, September, October 2009. And out of that group emerged, a group of about 12 people, almost all of whom were complete strangers to me until that meeting. And they became the steering committee of the West London Free School. and we embarked on this kind of mammoth undertaking.

And it was at times kind of horrendously difficult. I remember when morale was at a particularly low ebb. I mean, we got nothing but The Hand from Ed Balls. Whenever we tried to, who was then the Secretary of State at DCSF, known as the Department for Chairs and Soft Furnishingsians. Anyway, but he was the Education Secretary and was totally uninterested in a kind of parent-promoted academy, which was how we built it at the time.

And I remember inviting this guy who led a person, parent group who'd successfully established a Jewish comprehensive, the Jewish Community Secondary School in Barnett, which was due to open in September 2010. So he'd effectively done what we were trying to do. It was a per-promoted voluntary-aided school. But it was about to open, you know, with the huge new buildings. It was a huge success story. And so I invited him to come and address my little group, my little merry band, try and raise morale when it was at an all-time low. And the first thing he said was, it took my group ten years. Ask 10 years of your life, you'll never get back.

I hope you realise that. And I was like, oh, Jesus. So I said, yes, but, you know, had you realised at the beginning of that 10 years, that after 10 years you'd have this kind of fantastic school embodying your vision, presumably you wouldn't have done anything any differently, would you? And it was like, are you kidding? My wife's almost left me on Bradley bankrupt. My kid's too old to go to the bloody school.

I never would have done it. But I know it would take 10 years. I was, oh, no. 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,

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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 greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com

slash trigger. Anyway, we managed to recover from that kind of low point. And in 2011, in 2011, two years later. We became the first group to sign a funding agreement with Michael Goe when he became the Secretary of State for Education. So the first free school to get the green light, and we were one of the first 24 to open in 2011. Boris Johnson opened the school. This is when he was still on speaking terms with Michael Goz.

He made a kind of friendly gag. He said, yes, the Secretary of State for Education. He's given a new word to the English language. We give they gave he gove. He goves to school. Anyway, sorry about my Boris impression. which actually isn't better, isn't it. Anyway, and we've been told a lot of things by critics of the free school's policy. We've been told that teachers wouldn't want to work at a kind of parent-run school because it would be an insult to their professionalism.

Actually, we had, you know, over 100 applicants for the head teacher position, which is, believe me, unheard of. We were told that parents wouldn't want to send their children to the school. The analogy was, you know, if your kid burst his or her appendix, you wouldn't send him or her to. to a hospital run by patients. So why on earth would a parent entrust their precious child to a school run by parents? That wasn't really run by parents. It was run by professional teachers. But nonetheless, we were massively oversubscribed. We were one of the 10 most oversubscribed mixed ability, state schools in England. Everything people said would go wrong, didn't go wrong. All the reasons people said it wouldn't work. Turned out to be kind of just false. And we got our first

GCSE results, our first set of GCSE results in 2016, and they put us in the top 10% of mixed ability comprehensives in England. We've got our first kids graduating from the sixth form this year, 83% of them have had university offers, 63% from Russell Group universities, and 40% of the kids at the school are from disadvantaged backgrounds. That was another thing. People said, they said that the only parents who'd be interested in sending their children, the critics said, to a school where Latin was mandatory for the first three years, which it is, would be kind of local middle class parents who couldn't afford or who wanted to save the money on private school fees.

And actually, it's got an incredibly kind of mixed group of kids at the school. I mean, you know, it's about a third black, Asian minority, ethnic, about 40% from disadvantaged backgrounds. it's almost perfectly representative of the local area. It's just nonsense that only white middle class people are interested in securing a kind of academically rigorous education for their children. It's just patronising nonsense. Anyway, it's been a huge success,

and subsequently the group that emerged from that meeting in my sitting room in 2009 went on to create three more schools, three primaries, also local, also doing very well. And we've just been approved to open a second. secondry in Cambridge in 2022. So that's been, you know, I've been, I thought that, you know, enjoying some success as a journalist would be kind of enriching and give my life meaning. And, you know, it was certainly kind of great to appear as myself and a one-man show in the West End and I co-produced a Hollywood movie based on the book.

The book was a bestseller, but nothing was as enriching or as meaningful. as setting up these schools and just getting involved with a group of almost complete strangers and kind of working collaboratively on this kind of project that we really thought would benefit the local community. And I think it has. I mean, originally I did it for selfish reasons because I wanted a good school to send my kids to, and three of my kids are now at the school. Two are, and one's about to start in September, and the fourth will go next year. But it's become a kind of, you know, mission since then. I've become a kind of passionate advocate for the free schools program. and don't believe what the critics tell you about it.

Last year, kids made more progress at free schools, according to the new Progress 8 measure, than they did at any other type of school. They're massively oversubscribed. They're more likely, secondary free schools, more likely to admit disadvantaged children than other schools, many much more likely to get outstanding off-stead results. I mean, the program has been probably the most successful education policy.

policy of the post-war period, I think. And do you agree with academies? Because as a lot of teachers, in particular, I don't particularly agree with the academy process. I don't believe that corporate businesses should have any place in education. Would you ascribe to that, or do you think that turning schools into independent businesses is a positive thing? I think people often misunderstand what academies are.

I mean, free schools are a subset of academies. So free schools are legally academies. Academies are often described as kind of businesses, but you can't set up an academy unless you are a charity. So every academy, every multi-academy trust in England is a charity. Some of them make a surplus, but not many do. And I think keeping corporates out of education is difficult. I mean, it's not just, that hasn't, that doesn't date back to when academies were first introduced it, long predates that, you know, the people who supply the toilet paper to the school, the people who supply the school dinners if they're externally provided, the utility providers, these are all corporations, and it would be very difficult to run a successful public education service any more than it would be to run a public health service without the involvement of, you know, the private sector. So I don't think that in itself is an evil. The question is, how well do the schools do? And is the academicisation process beneficial or harmful? And I think that's an

interesting debate, and I've just actually written an essay about that for a forthcoming book, being published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which I think was recently stunned in a Guardian staying this morning or yesterday. Ridiculous. And I think it's a mixed picture. But I don't think that schools run by local authorities fared any better. It may be. that academisation isn't a magic bullet and for that reason we should pause before insisting that every school becomes an academy but I think the programme itself

has room for improvement, it's perfectable in a way that local authority run schools seem kind of lesser. I mean one of the things that I've always noticed when the difference between academy schools and locally run schools is a difference in budgets where it appears that academy schools do get much more funding

and local authority schools get less and then you have Ofsted coming and going, oh, you know, this isn't working, this isn't working. It's like, well, we had half a million quid cut from our budget. What do you expect us to do? Yeah, I think that again is a myth put out by the critics of the kind of whole panoply of education reforms that date back to Andrew Devis and Tony Blair,

but which were kind of turbocharged by Michael Gove in 2010 and have been continued since. Academies and local authority schools, get the same money, their per pupil funding, doesn't vary according to whether they're an academy or a local authority school. In some cases, local authorities, the money is channeled via local authorities and they topslice it. And in most cases, the local authority top slice is larger than the top slice say that a multi-academy trust will take before then passing the money onto schools. And where that happens, then of course the schools get less money. But they can, you know,

they supposedly get access to services provided by the local authority in return, so it swings and roundabouts. But, you know, the West London Free School, for instance, the secondary school that I co-founded, we actually saw a bigger cut in our per-pupil real-terms funding. It was a cut of 2% if you compare 1718 to 1819, compared to some of the local authority schools, which actually saw an increase in that funding.

It's certainly not true in Hammersmith and Fulham. Toby, well let's move on to the next stage of your career because this success with the West London Free School and education meant that you were then invited to advise the government as part of a panel or a board, I think it was called. Yeah. So I was invited, well, I applied to be on this new higher education regulator called the Office for Students last year.

And I had to go through a formal application. process, so I had to submit a letter, I had to provide referees. I was then interviewed by Sir Michael Barber, the new chair of this regulator, as well as the vice chair and an independent civil servant observer. I mean, one of the criticisms made about the process by which I was appointed was that it wasn't above board, but actually I went through the same process. as all the other appointees. One of the differences was that some of the student applicants to the board had their social media vetted, whereas my social media history wasn't vetted.

But then the social media history of all the other appointees, save for the student applicants, wasn't vetted either. So I wasn't treated any differently to all the sort of 13 or so other people appointed. to this board and went through exactly the same appointment process. So you were appointed as part of a group of 13 to advise the government education. They were actually 15. So I was one of 15 non-executive directors appointed to this new higher education regulator. And the Department for Education announced the list of all the appointees at around midnight

on the 1st of January of this year. and within about, and the Guardian, they ran a story at one minute past midnight saying something like Toby Young appointed to help lead new university's regulator, which was misleading because I wasn't going to be helping to lead in any sort of meaningful sense, this regulator. I was one of 15 board members, you know, there were executives, a chief executive, a deputy chief executive, and so forth, who would be leading it. and there was a chair of this board who would be leading it, but I was one of, you know, just 15 trustees.

Anyway, that triggered a lot of people on Twitter who immediately kind of started objecting. I started trending shortly after midnight, and people then stopped. On the same day? On the same day, yeah, within minutes. Within minutes. Of this Guardian story going live.

Yeah. And can I just ask, what was your emotions when you saw that it was trending because sometimes when things happen and I go on social media and I see that I've been tagged in a post that there's a little bit of dread that enters my soul where I think

wonder what this is. Did you have that or were you intrigued? No, I suppose like you, I sort of kind of think why is this happening and sort of you have a kind of, you have a sort of slightly kind of, a slight feeling of dread

in the pit of your stomach. And then I realized it was people reacting to this Guardian story. And for the most part, coming up with kind of flimsy objections as to why I shouldn't sit on this board. I mean, the most common objection was that I didn't have a background in higher education, which was an odd objection to make for someone who was being appointed to a regulator.

I mean, you don't want a sector to be marking its own homework, or at least you don't want its homework to be entirely marked by people who are from that sector. I mean, you know, when someone who works for, or who worked for Rupert Murdoch is appointed to Ipso, the left throws up its arms in horror and talks about the industry, marking its own homework. And yet, here I was, someone who wasn't involved in higher education being appointed to a regularly, and they were throwing up their arms in horror because I wasn't, you know, a vice-chancellor of university or a professor of some kind. Just to clarify for our worldwide audience, would you mind just explaining what Ipso is, please?

So Ipso is the new press regulator that was set up in the wake of the Leveson inquiry and which replaced the existing regulator. And it's been criticised mainly by people who would like to muzzle the tabloid press because it isn't state-authorised. It's not the state-authorised regulator that Hacked-off wanted to see as a result of Leveson. It's an independent, a wholly independent regulator. and it has some people sit on it who have kind of worked in the industry

and others haven't. It's a mixture of people, as is the office for students. So it just seemed to me to be a ridiculous objection to say I wasn't fit to serve on this regulatory body because I wasn't employed by the sector I was supposedly regulating. That wasn't the objection that got the most purchased. No, that was the initial wave of objections.

And then people started trawling through my Twitter fee everything I'd ever posted on Facebook and going back through everything I'd written for the spectator and elsewhere. Fraser Nelson, the editor of the spectator, wrote a piece in my defense when this thing kind of mushroomed in which he pointed out that the top most searched for articles in the spectator's archives dating back to 1828 were all articles by me as my detractors were kind of working hard to try and uncover things that they could then kind of pull out of context and stick on Twitter and say how can you appoint this person to a kind of public body a guy called freddie de boar wrote a really good blog post called planet of the

cops in which he talked about what he called offence archaeologists people who kind of devote themselves like literally hours days of their lives just to trawling through all the things they can find about a particular target so they can then find things to be outraged about or claim to be offended by. I mean, it's a kind of weird kind of political moment in which people kind of can spend all this time trying to find things which they then claim are really upsetting and triggering and offensive and undermining their mental health and sort of destroying their sense of well-being. It's like, well, if things I've said are actually going to do that to you, why have you spent the last five days trawling through my Twitter feed in order

to try and find things that are going to upset you? And if you really think they're upsetting and offensive and should be prohibited in some way, why are you trying to broadcast them forward? Do you want to upset other people? And it's a kind of weird, kind of twisted. Of course, they're not really upset or offended. They're just pretending to be. Captain Renault-style. When Captain Renault discovers gambling is taking place at Rick's place in Casablanca, he's shocked, shocked to discover gambling's going on. And that's the kind of shock. we're talking about it to kind of make-believe, confected shock in order to try and discredit a particular person.

It's what happened with Candacula, because the police, it was actually the police in that case. I don't know if you followed this case. No one was offended by 3 million people watched the video on YouTube. No one complained about it. And then someone made a complaint. And the police went around showing the clip to people to see if they were offended.

And of course, eventually they found somebody who was offended. And this seems to be the thing. So why do you think you were targeted in this way, though? One of the interesting, just to linger for a second on that particular example, that is an example of someone who is deemed to have said something inappropriate and offensive being prosecuted, which I think is extremely sinister. But what's interesting and different about the Big Brother role played by these offence archaeologists? is it's kind of, they're not state actors.

They're just ordinary people. I mean, they're hashtag activists, for the most part. And they're kind of, it's a sort of crowd-sourced Big Brother. It's not Big Brother as presented in 1984. It's not Big Brother with the imprimatur of the state trying to shame people and denude them of their livelihoods and kind of run them out of town, as it were, on a rail, tar and feather them,

with the authority of the state. It's just ordinary people, hashtag activist, kind of assembling in order to kind of recreate this kind of oppressive, big brother figure. And for that reason, I think in some ways, that that is a source of hope, because if everyone stands up to them, then I think their power would be much reduced.

But unfortunately, because that's not happening, corporations, large bureaucracies, governing political parties, are just doing their business. So even though they're not state actors, it's just a kind of crowd assembling, an outrage mob, assembling on Twitter and on social media, nonetheless, they have this extraordinary power because various state bodies, various organs and instruments of the state, start acting, start doing their bidding. But I think the Count Dunkler case is extremely sinister,

because that's an example of the police trying to almost second-guess what an outrage mob is likely to ask them to do, should it spring up, even though in this case, as you say, it hadn't actually sprung up. So coming back to you then, you had these people trawling through your Twitter post and Facebook post. What did they find? They found a number of articles and tweets I'd written, which in their view made me unsuitable to serve on this public regulator. So, for instance, a piece I'd written, an essay I'd written, on leaving universities

in 1988, so 30 years ago, was in which I talked about how the English class system operated at Oxford and made some sort of faintly disparaging remarks, disparaging kind of description, rude descriptions of socially awkward boys. And that was taken to be indicative of my contempt for working-class boys who tried to make good through education. Paul Mason pulled this out as evidence that I was a totally unsuitable person to serve on this regular.

And he said that the reason the Tories had appointed me to this regulatory body was in order to stop working-class children going to university. That was my role. I mean, literally, I don't know whether he believes this or not, but this is what he actually said in a tweet. For those who don't know, Paul Mason is a former BBC and Channel 4 journalist turned kind of free.

Lance Corbinista activist. And you kind of think, first of all, you've totally misinterpreted this piece. Secondly, it was written 30 years ago. Even if I had said the things you're claiming I said in that article, what about all the work I've done since? At Oxford, I was involved in a widening participation program to encourage children from disadvantaged areas to apply to the university and went and talked to six forms, you know, around the country to try and persuade children who hadn't considered Oxford to apply to Oxford. I've been at that stage a member of the Fulbright, the UK-US Fulbright Commission, and we have this program in partnership with the Sutton Trust whereby we secure full scholarships for English kids from disadvantaged backgrounds

to attend US colleges. I'd set up, you know, four schools at the primary schools, we give priority to children from disadvantaged backgrounds when they apply. at the secondary school, 40% of the kids are from disadvantaged backgrounds. I mean, what's Paul Mason ever done to help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds get to university? I mean, sweet, fuck all, I imagine. But here he was, judging me on the basis of an essay he'd misunderstood, written 30 years ago, and saying, that is the reason Toby Young shouldn't be appointed to this particular regulatory body. And that was kind of typical of, I think, the way in which outreach,

rage mobs on Twitter work. They pull out particular things you've written. I mean, I said some stupid things about women's breasts, you know, after several glasses of wine at sort of four o'clock in the morning, nine, ten years ago. And those were pulled out as evidence that I was a misogynist, opposed to women going to university. And, you know, often these tweets were reproduced with the hashtag me too, as though tweeting about boobs at four o'clock in the morning, is identical, morally indistinguishable from what Harvey Weinstein's been accused of doing, which, you know, I think it's the feminist equivalent of playing the race card. You know, don't expect people to become outraged every time you use the Me Too hashtag, if you're going to use it to describe, you know,

locker room banter and not kind of rape and sexual harassment and, you know, you know, you're unpleasant predatory behavior in the workplace. But, you know, I've never been accused of sexual harassment. I've run several medium-sized organizations. I've never been accused of sexual discrimination. Never been taken to a tribunal. Nothing, anything like that. But because I, you know, I sent some unfortunate tweets

that made me a misogynist in the eyes of my critics and therefore a totally unsuitable person to be appointed to this body. What's it like emotionally when you see slowly but surely this picture being constructed of you, of who you are, which actually bears very little resemblance to the truth, but then you see more and more people

just look at it and go, well, he's obviously that person. Yeah. And, I mean, I'd find that soul destroying because it just reminds me of the play The Crucible, where John Proctor goes, that's my name, that's the only thing that I have. it is that is one of the worst things about it this feeling that you know your name is being dragged through the mud people are saying these terrible things about you and attributing these

terrible beliefs to you this awful sense that people who don't know you even even people who know you a little bit might see these things and believe they're true and that is that's an awful feeling. So probably the low point was watching question time. And... It's a massive current affairs program in the UK. Yeah, the UK's leading current affairs, flagship current affairs program, in which a panel of people discuss kind of a number of kind of buzzy kind of topics of the day.

So Dawn Butler, Labor's shadow minister for women and equalities, said on question time, that I was a eugenicist who talked about weeding out disabled people. I mean, it was just, I mean, it was just complete nonsense constructed out of whole cloth. And, you know, I've got a disabled brother. I'm a patron of the care home he lives in.

And I thought that he or any of his carers or any of his friends in that community might be watching question time and thinking, Crumbs, didn't know that about Toby, He didn't know that about my brother. He wants to weed me out. You know, this is a serious person saying this

on this flagship current affairs program. A senior politician must be true. You know, that was terrible. And I think one of the salutary things about that experience, there was also another moment when there was a House of Commons debate. Again, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Burko, in his wisdom, decided to grant an emergency debate, an urgent question about my appointment to this body.

And the kind of labour objections were led by Dawn Butler again, and just everything that came out of her mouth was wrong. I mean, it was often kind of garbled stories from how to lose friends and alienate people. And if you write a kind of self-deprecating memoir in which you tell all these terrible, embarrassing stories about yourself, then I suppose, you know, if you do then get appointed to a public body, it's inevitable that someone is going to troll through that book and try and,

and the way they present it, it's as though they, through their sleuthing, you know, through their kind of powers as kind of forensic investigators, they discovered these kind of terrible, terrible things are made. No, I wrote them all about myself in a self-deprecating memoir. But Kingsley Amos, the British author, once wrote that, you know, be careful when you make a self-deprecating remark about yourself because some little shit is bound to dig it up at some point in the future and hurl it against you.

You watched an article about pornography and that was used against you as well, wasn't it, in order to slander. It was just, it was sort of, there were moments during this kind of whole ferrory which were comic, and that was one of them. So I wrote a piece in 2001 for The Spectator, disputing that the liberalisation of the attitude of the British Board of Film Classification to pornography, whereby they were allowing more things to get through. wasn't going to result in a kind of epidemic of sexual violence. And the literature linking exposure to sexual imagery, including pornography, to sexual violence, was, you know, the evidence was incredibly threadbare. Most of the evidence is that there isn't any link at all.

Actually, most of the evidence is on the contrary. I mean, Diana Fleischman, whose episode of ours you've seen, she wrote an article, and one of the points she makes in there, the increased use of pornography reduces. It produces sexual violence and society. And you can see that at a very crude level. If you compare societies in which there's a very liberal attitude towards pornography like Sweden, Denmark, Holland,

to countries in which there's a very censorious draconian attitude towards pornography like Saudi Arabia. The incidence of sexual violence is much, much higher in those countries which have a much more draconian attitude. I made this point in this article. And in the course of making this argument, Like the misogynist that you are told him. Like the misogyn.

I described Philip Larkin, the British poet, generally regarded as probably the best British poet of the post-war period, was offered the poet laureateship, turned it down, came up with the line, all that remains of us is love, as well as the famous poem about your parents fucking you up. Anyway, he was once loitering outside a Soho sex shop, too embarrassed to go in.

and the owner came out and said, was it bondage, sir? As a matter of fact, it was. And I relayed this anecdote, which he told to Kingsley Amos in a letter to Kingsley Amos. And I described him in the course of relaying this anecdote as a fellow porn addict, not meaning that he was a porn addict or that I'm a porn addict.

It was a kind of self-deprecating remark, not intended to be taken at face value. But someone, you know, one of these offence archaeologists kind of found this piece, and the sub at the spectator put the headline at the top of the piece, Confessions of a Porn Addict. So he reproduced this piece on Twitter.

Literally, minutes later, it appeared in the evening standard. Headline, you know, new pressure mounts on Theresa May as University Tsar confesses to being porn addict, quote-unquote. And that was reproduced in the Times the next day.

I mean, one of the kind of eye-opening things about this whole experience was realizing the extent to which the mainstream media now just takes its cue from social media without doing any kind of checking. There's no, you'd expect higher standards to be shown by journalists for the evening standard and the Times than by, you know, an amateur, offense archaeologist on Twitter.

But no, they produce something embarrassing about you, and it's just immediately reproduced as though, ah, you know, they've discovered that this guy's a porn addicts. That'll embarrass the PM, you know, because the Prime Minister had effectively appointed me to this regulatory body. Anyways, it was just kind of ridiculous. But one thing I was going to say in response to your point is what was it like to see people dragging your name through the mud and this kind of horrible feeling of powerlessness that you can't do anything about it. You can object, but you're not a great witness in your own defence. People don't take that particularly seriously.

You hope other people will kind of leap to your defence. And some people did, but not that many do in these situations because people are frightened at these Twitter mobs, understandably. and for me I did think at the time this must be what it's like for people not involved in the media people who don't have any power or influence or money to see their names produced in the media that feeling of powerlessness must be what it's like for ordinary people when a story appears about them

which is completely wrong and they don't feel they can kind of they have any redress they can't well they can complain to it so and I didn't really it complain to it. So I did complain to the Guardian's ombudsman, and that was a total waste of time. So all of this happens, your name is dragged through the mud. You're eventually forced to, well, you were forced to, or did you choose to apologize and resign from this point? I decided after nine days of mounting pressure to resign and apologize. And, you know, it was becoming,

untenable situation. A petition had been got up with something like 225,000 signatures on change.org demanding, I be sacked. People who thoroughly investigated every article and checked every tweet

and made up their own mind. And there was a kind of mob of reporters outside my house waiting to kind of ambush me. You know, whenever I left or came home, my 14-year-old daughter was kind of refusing to leave the house.

My wife said that if another person came up to her at the school gate and said, you know, are you okay? She was going to hit them, you know. And what were they saying to? The other problem was. Sorry, let me just interrupt you there very quickly. With your wife, were they commiserating with you as a family or were they saying to her, are you okay coexisting with this evil misogynist, eugenist? No, I think they were saying, how are you coping with this?

kind of onslaught of abuse of your husband. And I don't even know. They were saying, are you all right, as in, you know, are you right living with this kind of vile misogynist? No, I think they were, but, you know, when people were, I mean, I wasn't there, I don't know what their attitude was when they were saying it, but generally when people kind of express pity and concern, it's always kind of tinged with a kind of little bit of glee.

just a bit of shard and frown. Anyway, the other difficulty was that the other members of the board were at this point threatening to resign if I didn't resign. And that was putting Sir Michael Barber in a very difficult position. He didn't want to have to kind of choose

between siding with me or siding with these other members of the board. And it was kind of casting a kind of huge pall over the launch of this new regulator, which I think has an important role to play. One of its jobs is going to be protecting free speech on British campuses. Another is going to be trying to stop kind of runaway salaries for wildly ever-paid vice-chancellors. Can I do something about the grade inflation at universities.

So it's got lots of important things to do, and I believe in its mission. And so I realised I wasn't. helping it any by kind of clinging on and this story kind of continuing to dominate the news. So I resigned and I'd been advised by some people that if you resign and apologize then, you know, don't expect the outrage mob to then disperse and go, oh, okay, he's apologised, let's move on, find another thing to. It just emboldens them even further. So if you, if you, if you resign and apologize, they'll just come after you and demand you step down from all your other jobs. They'll come after Frayson at the Spectator. They'll see it as an admission, a blanket admission of guilt.

Everything you've accused me of, I'm guilty of. I am this terrible person, you are right. And that is actually more or less exactly what happened. So the moment I step down from the office of students and apologized, there are various leaders of course. teaching unions demanded that I stepped down from the free schools charity. I was running, demanded that I stepped down from any involvement with the schools I'd set up. The Fulbright Commission came under pressure. Someone got a kind of page up on Facebook claiming to be a page representing other Fulbright scholars wanting my scalp. So I had to step down from the Fulbright Commission. I was an honorary fellow of Buckingham University

and I got an email from Buckingham University telling me that actually I'd misunderstood and that my honorary fellowship which was granted in something like 2011 was only for three years so it had expired in 2014 so I could no longer call myself and I like hang on a second

I spoke at this festival of education at Buckingham University last year and you build me in the program as an honorary fellow so this is news to me. Anyway, so that was their kind of sneaky sneaky way of stripping me at that particular honour. And eventually I did have to stand down from the

Free Schools charity I was running and I had to stand down from the Board of Trustees of the charity that the four schools I'd helped set up, sat within so in total I lost five positions as a result of this kind of

outrage. Let me ask you this one final thing, sorry Francis. on this from my side. I know it might seem like an insensitive question from someone like me who hasn't been through it, but I always wonder when I see somebody being smeared in this way, the previous comments being misused, by people in many cases who are no better

than the person that they're talking about. If you go through their Twitter feed, you'll find exactly the same thing. I mean, I can see why you resigned in the sense that it was sabotaging the work of the board to which you'd been appointed, and it was going to be. But in terms of your apology, Why does no one ever stand up to these people and say,

you bunch of sanctimonious, hypocritical cunt? Why don't you go and look at your own behavior? We're all flawed. We're all human. None of us never make mistakes. We're all like this. So I'm not going to apologize for being human. I'm doing my best.

Here's the work that I've been doing. I'm not going to apologize. Why does nobody ever do that? Why didn't you do that? I think sometimes people do that. and that can sometimes be a better strategy than apologising. I felt the need to apologise, partly because I did feel contrite about some of the things I'd said on Twitter. You know, there were some things that when they were reproduced,

one was reproduced on the front page of the mail on Sunday, some stupid gag I'd made about starving children. in Africa during a kind of red-nosed-day English teletone broadcast. And, you know, when that tweet was reproduced on the front page of the Mail on Sunday, my first thought was, thank God my dad's not still alive, you know, because this is so shaming.

And, yes, there were certain things I had said that I did regret saying, and so I thought I ought to apologize for saying them. But I also hoped that if I stepped down and apologized, I naively thought that that would draw a line under it, and I could continue my work with the schools I've set up and the work I was doing helping other people set up free schools. That turned out to be a mistake.

But that was my reasoning at the time. The reason I ask is, like, I understand that you were contripe about some of the things that it said. But, you know, the two of us are comedians. The number of times we've gone on stage and we've tried to make a joke about something and it just hasn't worked or it's offended someone. Speak for yourself, mate.

You were just telling me about last night, mate, don't do this. The number of times that you tried to do something doesn't quite work or you say something that's out of place or whatever, it's a normal part of human existence to make mistakes. Why does your having said something that you regret mean that you now have to be treated as this pariah? That's something I don't understand. Well, I think that's, I mean, I agree with that.

I think it's, I think that, you know, people should be judged in the round. Right. You should judge people according to the totality of their behaviour and not judge them according to the worst things they've done. It's like defining people by their worst moments, taking a lapse of judgment in which they've, you know, made a gag which didn't work and which could be. screwed as offensive to some people, taking that as the defining moment in someone's life, which then completely eclipses everything else they've done. So you could be someone who'd worked with kind of handicapped children your entire life. You could have a handicapped younger brother whom you've supported selflessly your entire life. But if you make one joke about handicapped

children, suddenly you are a kind of a terrible person and all the work you've done, everything else you've done is completely disregarded. One of the points I made in my piece about all this for Quillette that was published last week is that we've reached this kind of strange point in our society whereby virtue signalling is considered more important Trump's actually being virtuous. So not breaching speech codes, which restrict what you can say about disadvantaged groups, is actually considered more important than helping disadvantaged groups. So the fact that I've done all this work to help disadvantaged kids dating back, you know, 35 years is less important when it comes to judging my character and whether I'm a fit and proper person to serve on a public regulator

than one thing I said about disadvantaged kids in a piece in a spectator 20 years ago. Do you think that this urge and this desire and this lust to publicly shame people is inherent in our character? And if you look at the medieval times, things like the stocks, where do you think this comes from? Why do you think some people get so much of a vicarious pleasure

and just, I don't even gratitude I think is a word, to see someone publicly shamed, lose their career. When you actually know deep down, you are making a serious impact on someone's mental health and not only on their mental health, but the mental health of the people around them. I think, I think, and I've thought about this, and I think it must have something to do with the disgust instinct. It's the same root as racism. So I think a particular group in order to solidify its sense of cohesiveness,

in order to create a sense of belonging and community and common purpose, sometimes vilifies certain individuals who are, in its view, members of an out-group. And that dates back to, I think, what they're appealing to is the kind of human, disgust instinct, this sense, if something's bad for you, if it's going to contaminate you in some way, then you automatically kind of push it out and you want to destroy it. And you also think anyone else who comes into contact with it is going to be similarly contaminated and they have to be kind of cast out as well. I think it's to do with that. I think it's, you know, down the ages, as you've said, in groups have always tried to dehumanize and other outgroups.

and in some cases individuals who are emblematic of those outgroups, just in order to create a sense of identity and community within the in-group. And that's probably more likely to happen when societies are in a state of flux and when there's a lot of uncertainty, and when the identity, when the values of the in-group becoming kind of vaguer and more amorphous and less define a quick way of affirming a sense of identity and common purpose is to find some individual who they can all collectively express their disgust for and they're contempt for. And some people say to me, do you think if people realized what it was like,

what it's like for people who find themselves being targeted by these twitchfork mobs, do you think if people realize that there is a human being kind of twisting on the end of that pitchfork and that they are suffering, their families are suffering, and that there's been no due process here, effectively lynching something. someone, do you think if they realized, you know, if you made them pause and you actually explained the various shortcomings of the process, which has led to this point and the impact it's having on the individual, that they would reconsider, I don't think they would. I think it's a kind of bloodlust. And if they find out that you're suffering, you know, that just kind of makes

them even more crazy and frenzied in their desire to destroy you, like a kind of pack of walls. And do you think the fact that you're a white middle-class male who went to Oxford, do you think that made you even more fair game? Yes. I mean, I think left-wing politics has taken an identitarian turn. I mean, identity politics isn't new. It's been around, you know, since at least the 1960s. But it's generally been associated with the hard, regressive left, and that has been kept at bay within most left-wing movements, left-wing political parties. I think since the triumph of Brexit and Trump, the regressive left identitarians have seen their influence within the left increased dramatically,

partly because it's as though their claims that capitalism inexorably leads to fascism and that periods of economic uncertainty produce kind of dangerous right-wing populist movements. It looks as though their analysis has some purchase. I mean, I think they're wrong about that, and I don't think that is what's going on, but you can see if you're a kind of soft leftist, you suddenly see these things happening. It looks as though these profits to the left of you are actually onto something. And also, I think they feel that with the apparent political surge, resurgence of right-wing populist leaders and causes across Europe and across the West, that they need to kind of stick together. So it's no longer appropriate to keep the hard, regressive left at bay. they have to make common cause, at least until these kind of demons have been defeated.

So I think for various reasons, identitarianism is on the march. And you see it in universities, you see it amongst public intellectuals. You see it in public bureaucracies, in large corporations. They all seem to be suddenly dancing to the identitarian tune. And if you are a kind of apex predator in the identitarian food chain, you know, if you're a white, heteronormative male from a privileged background, worse, if you're a Tory, a Brexit-supporting Tory, with all those characteristics, then they just assume that you must have all these kind of terrible, toxic beliefs.

You must be a misogynist, you must be a racist, you must be a homophobe, because that's how you justify your privilege. It doesn't occur to them, you know, that there could be a kind of perfectly reasonable, intellectual case for free market capitalism. They just assume that anyone defending capitalism if they're a white heteronormative male, it must be because they're trying to defend their privilege and that they therefore subscribe to these kind of toxic beliefs which exclude other people from power and preserve the structural inequality, which is kind of killing people who are minorities and so forth, and people of colour and women and so on and so forth.

So I think they were very willing to believe that because I had, because I ticked all these kind of demographic boxes, that I held all these toxic beliefs. So then they set out to find evidence that I did indeed hold these beliefs and didn't take them long to find it. And I think as well, one thing, when reading your article and going into a bit of research about your case, and what I've noticed as well is it does seem,

which I find really interesting actually, because my mother's Latin Latin American and I've got a whole side of my family who are not white and all the rest of it and I just, this is entirely for my dad's side from County Leitrin, but there we go. But one thing I've noticed with people is they'll go, oh right, yeah,

but he's just a white male, therefore, you know, it doesn't matter because he's not oppressed and therefore anything that I am doing to him, no matter how unreasonable it's just a way of me redressing the balance. And that's how they justify their arguments, would you agree with that? I think that is in some cases how they justify their

arguments, yes. But it's, I think it's a way of licensing themselves to be unthinkingly cruel and dismissive and contemptuous of people who they think of as being members of outgroups. They think, you know, for years, people of colour, minorities, non-sistgendered people have been oppressed and therefore we're perfectly entitled to meet out that treatment to people who don't fall into those categories. But it's a kind of, isn't it a kind of, it's the same kind of category error as racism to think that because white men were slavers in the 18th century, that therefore every white male is in some measure. responsible for enslaving people.

Because Harvey Weinstein, in all likelihood, we don't know for sure the trial is continuing, raped someone, therefore all white men are rapists. I mean, it's exactly the equivalent error as thinking that because a person of colour commits a crime, that therefore all people of colour are criminals. And you would hope that rather than just reproduce this category error and applying and just kind of reversing it as it were and applying it to another

group of people, they would say actually that's a category error and it's wrong to judge people according to the colour of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or whether they're cis or non-sis. But they seem to have gone from saying that that's wrong which I don't think anyone would dispute whether a classical liberal or a Marxist to saying ah, it's not wrong to judge people on the basis of the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation. We've just been judging the wrong people badly. We're just going to flip it. So now, if you're a white, heteronormative male, you're a bad person. But if you're a person of colour and you're non-sist-gendered and you're a woman, then you're a good person.

Which is just, it just seems completely incomprehensible. I mean, it's a very, very good point you make. How much of the blame would you ascribe to social media? and Facebook in particular, the fact that, you know, that people now who scream the loudest, who make accusations, they seem to be the most dominant voices.

Like you, I consider myself on the left, but I look at these certain extreme members of the left, and I think you don't represent me in any shape or form, but somehow you are now seen to be the voice of the left in inverted commas. And it's again with the right, you know, you see Katie Hopkins getting wheeled out, and I've got lots of friends who are conservatives,

and they're horrified by her, and have rhetoric. I think it's, I mean, I think social media undoubtedly has played a part in coarsening political debate, lowering the standard of political discourse, making ad hominem attacks much more prevalent and much more effective. I don't think that it's wholly responsible. I mean, I think those things have always been there, some of the kind of, you know, those sorts of impulses, and even in different political periods,

you've seen kind of, you know, I mean, there was a lot of fake news. There's been fake news in US presidential elections dating back to, you know, the dawn of the Republic. But it does seem to have, it does seem to have escalated and got a lot worse since the sort of social media moment. And it'll be interesting to see if we can do anything about that. I mean, I think this is an interesting example, isn't it? I mean, it's, um, uh, uh, uh, it's, um, uh, uh, instead of trying to carve out a voice for yourselves within the mainstream media, though, you may be doing that as well. You've effectively created a different platform for yourself,

in part because you don't think anymore. You don't have the confidence that ideas will be debated and taken seriously, and we can have a proper, grown-up, mature, well-informed conversation on mainstream media anymore. mainstream media has effectively been corrupted by social media, and it's kind of sensationalist and as clickbaity now as social media. So to create a space to have a much more grown-up, well-informed conversation in which you can seriously consider different ideas and get to the bottom of things,

you have to do it outside the mainstream media and create a space of yourself to do it. I think one source of hope is in the same way that the internet has had a net negative impact on the level. of political debate here, America, elsewhere. So it's also created space for programs like this and for people like Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson and to actually have proper grown-up quite long conversations

about what really matters. And one of the reasons I think that platforms like this are important and gaining traction is because people are fed up with that kind of petty name calling, shaming, just that kind of, you know, the dominance of that kind of woke mindset that kind of permeates social media

and now the mainstream media. Well, it's fascinating that you'd say that, Toby, because if you look at our YouTube channel and the number one type of comment that we get is... It's about my personal appearance. That is true. That is actually true. Keep those coming, by the way. I'm enjoying it. But the second most common comment is BBC Channel 4 Take Now,

this is how you do an interview. I wish TV was like this. I wish more people did this. People are absolutely crying out for people to be having serious, genuine conversations, for hearing all sides, for hearing an open conversation. You know, we get a lot of hate, by the way,

for having center-right figures on. We've invited Owen Jones on. We've invited people, James O'Brien, people from the left, people from the social justice. A'Cala we'd love to have on. But the problem that I think we have now is the far left is becoming culturally hegemonic in our debate, in our conversation.

And so those people don't need to come on a renegade YouTube show because they can go on the mainstream media every day of the week and talk there and not be interrupted every three seconds and not be character assassinated. And I think that's where what we're doing here is getting the purchase that it's getting because there is no way to have genuine conversation now on television. It just doesn't happen.

It's all Cathy Newman-esque. And all you see is someone being, interrupted every three seconds and you can't have a conversation like that you know and one of the things we find as well is when we talk to somebody for a long time if there are flaws in their thinking if there are flaws in their logic we don't need to batter them into submission for that to be shown up we just need to let them talk and ask probing questions as we have done and those flaws will expose themselves without anybody being insulted or offended or anything like that so we're very grateful for you coming on and I think I think that's where the future is and I hope that's where it is

But let me ask you one final question, or two final questions. You told us you're a classical liberal. For a British audience who may be, people who don't watch Dave Rubin as we do, what is a classical liberal and what is your elevator pitch to people who may not yet be classical liberals to join that cause? Okay, I think a classical liberal is someone who believes in natural rights. They believe that insofar as the state enjoys certain powers, it's because those powers have been granted to the state by the people. And they can be taken back.

So the kind of a text for classical liberals is probably John Locke's second treatise of government in which he describes the state of nature and how rights get transformed. from people in the state of nature to the state. But we also believe in limited government, low taxation, freedom of speech, religious tolerance. We also believe in progress that actually things are getting better across the world and in particular since the creation of free market capitalism. Things have been on a really steep upward improvement curve. not just in the West, but in the developing world too.

Oh, wow, you really are Nazi. I'm kidding. Listen, the last question we always like to ask, I guess, is what do you think is the one thing that none of us are talking about that we really should be talking about? Well, one thing that slightly troubled me is the way in which people on the centre-right and the right have been using the shaming tactics of people on the left

to go after people on the left. So for instance, James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 1 and 2, and who was also directing Volume 3, was recently fired by Disney because various inappropriate things he had said on Twitter. I mean, quite a few things.

And, you know, even if I say so myself, a lot worse than the things I had said, but nonetheless, you know, things he'd said, for the most part, quite late at night on Twitter. He was trying to kind of play the role of an edge lord and kind of, and tell kind of risky, off-coloured jokes. I mean, very risky and off-color in his case. But those tweets were identified by people on the right, and they thought he was fair game because he has opposed Trump and he has demanded that people. like various directors who he thinks has sexually harassed women should be fired. So he's sort of joined outrage mobs before. He's not quite a witch finder general, but he's certainly kind of,

you know, he's complicit. So they thought, fair game. But I, and it seems to be, it seems to be just becoming generally accepted on kind of my side of the divide, that, you know, it's okay to deploy those tactics against people on the left. And the rationale is if we apply those tactics to them, then they're going to stop applying them to us in due course because they're going to realize that if we play that game, we'll lose as much as we gain. I think that we should pause and think very carefully

before embracing those tactics. And of course, I would say that because I've actually been through it and I realize how unpleasant and unfair being judged in that way is. But I also think, you know, that the correct response to this phenomenon is not to just to say, yeah, people on the left are equally guilty and here's why. But to say, actually, people shouldn't be judged according to lapses of judgment, stupid things they've said in the middle of the night after several glasses of wine.

you should take them in the round and see what they're like as human beings over the course of their lives and not just try and skewer them according to their worst possible moments. And if we do engage in the same tactics, I think we surrender any principle we have over trying to defenestrate people on that basis. And I also think that we don't need to engage. in those tactics because the left, if left of their own devices, will turn those tactics on themselves. I mean, you see it over and over again.

Mary Beard, for instance, who is, a kind of died in the world lefty, has been several times kind of targeted by Twitchfork mobs for kind of being insufficiently woke in various comments she made about the Oxfam scandal, for instance. The left is constantly going after its own. You know, there's the old phrase, the right looks for allies, the left looks for traitors.

Not always true, but broadly true. So we don't have to engage in those tactics ourselves in order to eventually make sure that this kind of public shaming stops because they will turn those tactics on themselves and in due course realize that that is no way to behave. Toby, that was amazing. Thank you very, very much. Before we go, is there anything you'd like to promote,

your Twitter or if you've got articles or books or whatever that may be? I think the thing I'd like to promote is Quillette for viewers, listeners, who haven't yet discovered Quillette. It is this online Australian magazine started by a former Australian grad student called Claire Lehman. Yeah, we're really hoping you're going to come on, Claire. I know you said you would. Next time you're in London, we'll waiting for you. And it was singled out in Barry Weiss's piece about the intellectual dark web and the New York Times magazine a couple months ago as ground zero of the intellectual dark web. I mean, it has articles by academics, intellectuals, journalists. Comedians, I've written

the last conference of them. Absolutely. And, you know, the level of debate in Inquillette is incredibly high. The standard of arguments. of evidence is incredibly high. It's all informed by kind of mainstream science. It's a scientifically literate publication. I mean, it's an extraordinary breath of fresh air. It's like a kind of beacon of light in the kind of darkling plane. And I've recently become an associate editor there. And I'm very proud to be associated with it. And I've written some things for it to. My piece about being publicly shamed six months ago appeared in Quillette last week. I could have a public. like humiliation diet because one of the things that happens when you're publicly shamed is you just

without seeming to help it you just shed pounds I need to get publicly ashamed oh that's coming yeah that's coming I've joined the gym what's a point in that you won't have to wait long just talk to a few more Nazis that's yeah yeah we'll be called Nazis and I'll have rock hard abs yeah great you'll have Nazi ads Nazi abs mate yeah that's where it's because they all look good in uniform right well well well done for plugging quillab but you are on Twitter at toadmeister toad myster check out some of Toby's articles. He's a great writer. Thank you very much for tuning in.

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Bye.