TRIGGERnometry - Toby Young on Social Justice, Unconscious Bias and Woke Corporations

Episode Date: May 12, 2019

Toby Young (@toadmeister) returns! In this episode we discuss: 00:00:53 Quillette 00:08:28 Greta Thunberg 00:26:21 Social Justice, Unconscious Bias and Go Woke, Go Broke 00:52:29 Roger Scruton 00:59:30 State Censorship Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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 (@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

Paraday presents in the red corner the undisputed, undefeated weed whacker guys. Champion of hurling grass and pollen everywhere. And in the blue corner, the challenger, extra strength, Hannity! Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Padaday. Hadiday, bring it on. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is a show for you if you're bored of 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 guest this week is the Associate Editor of the Spectator and Quillette, Toby Young. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you. It's good to have you back. You are our second returning guest as we've just discussed. Okay. You said okay as if that doesn't matter. I don't matter. I don't know. A bit disappointed not to be the first book. The male ego, ladies and gentlemen. So for anyone who doesn't know who you are, as a returning guest, tell us a little bit about

who you are, just so people who haven't seen the first interview, just get to find out how are you where you are? Yeah, well, I've been a journalist for about 35 years. I've written a column for The Spectator for the last 20 years or so, but I contribute to lots of other magazines and newspapers. I write about politics, culture, society. I'm particularly interested in the current climate of Maoist intolerance, which I know you've fallen foul of, Constantine.

And I'm working on a book about that. My initial title was Salem 2.0, the return of the religious police to the public square. That's a good title. But I'm now working on, I've got a new title, which is Rebels Without a Clue about, you know, people who are in the social justice cult, but I haven't quite decided exactly what it should be called yet. That's good, too.

Great. Well, listen, welcome back. Before we get into some of the controversies that we wanted to talk with you about, including stuff that you've personally been involved with, I mentioned that you're the associate editor of Quillette, which is a publication I've written for a number of times, and I have a lot of time for in respect. So for anyone who may not be familiar with it, just tell us what do you guys do and what that publication is all?

about. So Colette is an online magazine, which was started by a graduate student called Claire Lehman, who gave up her graduate degree in psychology. And she had a couple of kids and then decided to start this online magazine on her kitchen table. And I think she started it in 2015. Wow. And it didn't, it did. It. It didn't. It. It did. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. It. And it blew up in 2017, blew up in a good way, when James Daymore, the software engineer was sacked by Google for circulating an internal memo, challenging some of the ideological orthodoxes within the company, particularly around the underrepresentation of women in the company and in tech, more generally. When he was fired, one of the sticks to beat him with was that he'd invoked pseudoscience, that all these science he'd referred to in his memo regarding why it might be, why there might be kind of perfectly innocent, scientific reasons for why there were fewer

women working at Google and in tech more generally than men. He was ridiculed for that, told that he was invoking pseudoscience, and this was just, typical misogyny masquerading as science. And Quillette published four pieces by pretty eminent psychologists, essentially saying, no, he's got the science right. You may disagree with what he said, and there may be other reasons for objecting to what he said, but on scientific grounds, what he said is sound. There is a respectable body of literature, and he was actually echoing what is effectively

mainstream consensus. And among those scientists was Jordan Peterson, Jeffrey Miller was another one. We've interviewed him a couple of months back. He's fantastic. And it blew up. And I think the site kind of collapsed because it became so overwhelmed with people wanting to read these pieces. And ever since then, it's been a huge success. I mean, it survives more or less entirely on voluntary contributions from readers via Patreon and other similar sites.

and it's essentially, I think it was, it's been, it's quite closely linked to the intellectual dark web. They're not necessarily by the people associated with collard, partly because it publishes people like Jeffrey Miller and Jordan Peterson. We recently published Stephen Pinker, Stephen Pinker wrote, I think, a 12,000 word piece for us, which ended up becoming the introduction to the paperback of Enlightenment Now. I'm in charge of, the Quillette podcast. We interviewed Stephen Pinker for the podcast. I interviewed Jordan Peterson for the podcast. And the podcast has, you know, it's been a success. I do it jointly with Jonathan Kay, who's based in Toronto. I mean, one of the interesting things about Quollett is it has no offices. It has no real

location, even though Claire's based in Australia. So there's an editor in Toronto. There are two in London. There's one in Sweden. And we had our first Quillette social gathering in Toronto early this year. And it was the first time I'd met Claire in person. I mean, we'd communicated via Skype. First time I'd met Jonathan Kay. So it was actually lots of people there were people who'd been publicly shamed, defenestrated, lost various positions. And often former members of the liberal left, in some cases,

former members of the social justice cult, who for one reason or another had been expelled from the cult and the now apostates. And it was like all the world. almost like a support group for people who found themselves kind of mobbed on Twitter. I'm Toby and I'm an outcast. He was like that. One of them was this guy called Stephen Elliott who we published this. He was, there was something called the shitty media mentalist, which you may know about,

which was circulated in New York in 2017 by an editor at the New Republic. It was initially created as a Google document and it listed very, it was in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and it listed various male members of the media. who supposedly behaved in a kind of inappropriate way along Weinsteinian lines. And there were various accusations thrown about. And one of the people on this list was a guy called Stephen Elliott. And next to his name, it had multiple rape allegations. And he was self-employed at the time.

He had a job writing for a Hollywood studio on a sitcom. He had a book about to come out. He'd started this successful online literary magazine, which he'd handed on to some else. So, you know, a guy with a thriving career. This was the first he'd ever been, he'd ever even heard about these allegations. The allegations weren't in any way fleshed out. No names, dates, places. All it said was multiple rape allegations. So he didn't know how to begin to go about defending himself. Of course, he lost his job at the Hollywood studio. His book was buried by the publisher. Lots of his close friends started distancing themselves

from him. He was dropped by his agent. He became suicidal. And he actually went so far. is to order a suicide kit on the dark web and got the kit, wrote a suicide note, took some barbiturates, and then placed a sack, a plastic sack over his head and tightened the rope and was literally seconds away from the point of no return when he changed his mind. And since he changed his mind, he's come out fighting and he's now suing the woman who compiled the shitty medium list. And, you know, Godspeed to him. Well, speaking of controversial or challenging issues, one of the things that you've got involved with very recently is this whole Greta Thunberg, the young woman who is the face of the climate change protest movement,

the extinction rebellion and so on. And just tell us very briefly what actually happened. Well, I wrote a piece in The Spectator probably a couple of months ago after she first came to the fall, after she'd given a couple of speeches and her YouTube videos of those speeches were blowing up. And what she says in her speeches in her kind of set in her stump speech is that successive governments across the West have done nothing to try and combat climate change, that they have just been completely negligent. They've buried their heads in the sand, and they need to be shamed into doing something. And the people to shame them into doing something are schoolchildren and members of the younger generation, because it's their future that's at stake.

And there's a kind of, there's a sort of moral self-righteousness. it's sort of presented as a moral crusade, our elders have failed us for failing to do anything about this looming emergency. And unless something is done, we're all going to die. And I mean, I thought, I thought, well, this isn't quite right. There have been a number of efforts to try and tackle climate change, some of which have been quite effective. So the British government, for instance, has tried to reduce carbon emissions and has done so reasonably successfully.

So if you compare the emissions in 2017 to the emissions in 1990, they're 43% lower. Interestingly, Greta challenged that statistic when she addressed the House of Commons earlier, I think it was last week. But it seemed to me that she was someone putting herself forward in the public arrangement. arena, she was making a claim, which is part of a, you know, by any stretch of the imagination, a political platform, a political crusade. I mean, she's linked to an organization called Climate Justice, and along with the extinction rebellion protesters, they think the only way to avoid a catastrophe is to end capitalism. So, you know, she, even though it's not quite, she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't,

She doesn't often put it in such dark terms, but nonetheless, she is part of an anti-capitalist, in many cases, a movement which is an offshoot of the social justice movement. Generally, it's the same sort of people with the same kind of hard-left anti-capitalist agenda. Now, I thought if she's putting herself forward in the public arena and she's making claims which are patently factually inaccurate, it's just not true that Western government, particularly the British government have done nothing to try and combat climate change. They've done something. You may not think it's enough.

Perhaps it isn't enough, but that's a slightly different point. And it slightly undermines the whole kind of moral force of her argument. If you acknowledge that actually they have tried to do something, it just hasn't been sufficient and they need to do more. Different point, much more nuanced. But she's very much, she presents things in a very black and white way. Anyway, I thought it was fair enough to correct what I saw as factual errors. It seemed to me it was just straightforward fake news.

And it's not as if she's the only person making these claims. Almost everyone who participated in the Extinction Revelyan protest made exactly the same claim and claimed to be on this kind of moral crusade in virtue of the fact that they were the only ones willing to confront this crisis, this looming catastrophe. Everyone else and particularly older people, they didn't have the moral courage that these protesters have. You know, a very unnuanced black and white point of view, clearly wrong based on fake news or misinformation. What she had said and what she repeatedly does say I thought was misleading, so I thought was fair enough to challenge her on it.

Instead of, and the response from most people, not from everyone, but the response from most people certainly from people on Twitter for the most part was how dare you attack this 16-year-old girl, here she is trying to do something. Here she is engaging, being energetic, getting politically engaged, and you're attacking her, you're treating her as if she was an adult politician. That's absolutely disgraceful. How can you do that when you claim to be interested in children's education? That was a sort of general gist of it. I think to which the response is, well, you know, you can't put someone up. You can't endorse someone as a space. folksmen for a generation and claim that in virtue of their youth, they should be listened to.

They have a kind of purity and innocence and ability to see through bullshit in virtue of being only 16. You can't claim that they have this special authority in virtue of being 16 and should therefore be listened to, but also claim in the next breath that therefore they can't be challenged. And if they say something that's misleading or false, sorry, you just have to suck it up. But was not part of the challenge, and this is why I want to talk to you about it, that you said that she was privileged because of her mother and all the rest of them. We'll get on to that in a second. But just to conclude this point, many of the people berating me for challenging her

on the grounds that she's only 16 are also the very same people who think that 16-year-old should have the vote. I mean, you can't claim that 16-year-old should have the vote, but if they want to actually join in the public conversation, make a contribution to a public debate and get basic facts wrong that it's impermissible to correct them. Either they're old enough to vote and old enough to participate in these public conversations, in which case they should be robust enough to withstand challenge and be asked to defend things they've said if they're false, or else they're not, in which case they shouldn't be able to vote until they're 18. You can't have it both ways.

And on the education point, you know, if a 16-year-old at the secondary school that I helped set up was making a contribution to a debate at the school in which they got their facts wrong, I would hope that the teachers would correct them, not correcting 16-year-olds when they get their facts wrong because they're 16 and because you don't want to put them off getting engaged in politics and because they're trying to do something and that should be applauded. That's incredibly patronising and silly. If they get the facts wrong, it's up to us as adults to point out that they've got their facts wrong and that, you know, there may well be a very persuasive case to be made that we need to do more to combat climate change, but make that

case. Don't pretend that nothing's being done. On the privilege point, so I got mobbed earlier this week on Twitter because Gido Forks on the Gido Forks website, so this is a British political website, a blog. There was a story about how Greta's parents are reasonably well off. So her mother was a Eurovision Song Contestant on behalf of Sweet some years ago and is now, I think, a reasonably successful opera singer. The family have a kind of family authored book out, I think her father's reasonably successful. And in the headline of this piece on Guido Forks, I think there was the word privilege. I think he's changed it now, but originally there was the word privilege.

And underneath any article, you know, there are various buttons you can press to circulate the article on social media. I pressed the Twitter button and didn't think anything more of it. And then, foolish, I know, Francis. And then a couple of hours later, I got a call from Paul Staines, the guy who owns the Kedo Forks website, who's saying, yeah, what did you do? You know, and my inbox is filling up with hate mail. It must have been. And this piece is growing up. And I realize it's because you, you, you, you, you, um, you, you, um, you know, you tweeted this piece.

And I then looked at my tweet. I literally hadn't even looked at it before I, before I, you know, I hadn't bothered to look at how it appeared on Twitter. How it appeared on Twitter was something like, you know, Greta Thurnberg is from a privileged background or something to that effect. And then it didn't, it wasn't clear. I mean, the way Twitter's designed, one of the shortcomings of Twitter, it's not clear whether you are the author of the tweet

or whether you're just retweeting something or in this case hitting the tweet button beneath an article, which sometimes, sometimes it's obvious that you're just, you've just hit the tweet button below an article. You're not necessarily endorsing the views of that article. Sometimes it's not obvious. It looks as though you're actually saying what the headline in the article says. And this was a case of that. And everyone just immediate, well, like I've got, but lots of people on Twitter, enough

to get me trending, I think, in the UK, I've got number two, saying, how dare, how dare Toby Young, of all people, criticize Greta for being privileged. when he's the son of a lord. Yeah, my father was a labor life peer. And, you know, I did sort of tweet something. I wasn't actually endorsing this point of view. I merely effectively retweeted an article on Guido Volk. So, of course, no one sees that.

And I think in retrospect, it was foolish not to look at how it was going to appear on Twitter and probably actually foolish to try and tweet that article. because I don't think anyone, let alone a 16-year-old girl, should be criticized because of their background. That's a silly point to make. It's an ad hominem attack, and I regret doing that. That's why I wanted to clarify it. That's why we wanted to talk to you about it, because when I saw that, I know you're a big critic of the social justice cult, as you call out, the social justice left, and that is very much the method that they use. And I thought that was very, that, that's why we wanted to ask you about it. Yeah, no, I think it was, I think, I mean, I think, I think, I think, I think that as a, as a 16-year-old, a very articulate and intelligent 16-year-old who's made, you know, a big contribution to a debate and has pushed climate change, you know, to the top of the political agenda internationally. I mean, it's an extraordinary achievement. But I think, I think as someone in the public arena, even though she's 16, it's perfectly fair to challenge her if she gets her facts wrong. But I don't think it's fair. to say of her or if anyone else, you know, that we should discount their views because of their

background. So I regret tweeting that. I suppose a counterargument to you saying, you know, that she's got her facts wrong. And okay, what is is a particularly blunt instrument. But like you said, we're all talking about it now. And, you know, and this has been bubbling under the surface for a while and, you know, people have been slightly mealy-mouthed in it. Oh, you can't really do anything. She comes on the scene and all of a sudden it's trending. We're all talking about it. We're all discussing it. Surely isn't it a beneficial thing? Well, it's good that we're all talking about it. And it's a debate that perhaps should be higher up the agenda.

But I don't think that excuses the dissemination of what is effectively fake news. I mean, you might as well say, you know, someone could invent hate crimes, for instance. I mean, one of the editors on Quillette, well, we know about those. One of the editors on Quillette, Andy No. Yeah, yeah. has exposed a number of hate crime hoaxes. He was ahead of the curve with the Jesse Smollett case. And if you hoax a hate crime,

that's going to push hate crimes further up the political agenda. And maybe we should be concerned about the increasing prevalence of hate crimes if indeed they are increasing in prevalence. But I don't think the way, I don't think it's legitimate. I don't think you can excuse manufacturing a hate crime, perpetrating a hoax just because it's important to get hate crimes further up the agenda. Similarly, I don't think the fact that she succeeded in pushing climate change up the agenda does not excuse the dissemination of fake news. It's interesting because with Greta Thunberg, I've got to be honest. On the one hand, I do think climate change is manmade and it's happening and we do need to address it.

On the other hand, she is annoying. There is something about it. I don't know what it is. I just noticed this whole thing. And maybe it's me just got, oh, this young person is doing really well or whatever. I don't know, but she is quite annoying. I think she certainly has an unusual manner.

Well, she's autistic, isn't she? She's on the autistic spectrum. And I think at one stage, she was diagnosed with the Spurges, but that diagnosis has now fallen out of the diet. diagnostic manual of mental disorders, I think. So she's on the spectrum. But the fact that she comes off as a little bit odd and makes a virtue of the fact that she's

on the spectrum and claims that she's able to kind of detect the signal in the noise more easily because she's on the spectrum. I find that all very sympathetic. I can sort of relate to that. Well, both of us have very close family members. autistic. I have a half-brother who's autistic. And I think, you know, I wouldn't say I was on the spectrum, but I can be a little bit aspersy. And I think that's true of a lot of the people actually who contribute to Quillette. I mean, one of the characteristics of people on the

spectrum is that they're not very good at social signaling. And they don't prioritize social signaling. They prioritize truth-telling above social signaling. I think that's true in Greta's case, too. It's because they kind of get a kind of be in their bonnet, because they become slightly obsessive about telling the truth, which for the most part, I think she is with a couple of exceptions. They can ignore whatever the potential repercussions. They might be negative for their social life.

They might be negative for their careers. And we see that with a lot of quillette contributors. They tell the truth about some aspect of their subject or something they're interested in, a research topic. And as a result, they get mobbed and they lose their careers. But I think that one of the common characteristics of many of the people who found themselves at the wrong end of these Twitchfork mobs is that they are a little bit of spurgesy. And one of the difficulties, I think, with the current atmosphere within a lot of American

universities, increasingly British universities, is that they tolerate various kinds of diversity, but not neurodiversity. And some people, you know, getting the kind of speech code and the etiquette right, particularly when it comes to things like transgender, which is, you know, it's a rapidly, it's a fluid area. I mean, literally, but it's quite, the etiquette around, around transgender issues is quite fluid too. You have to be kind of really on top of, you have to be really good at picking up on social signals if you're not going to put a foot wrong in that, you know, politicians put feet wrong all the time, even, you know, quite sophisticated, intelligent people in public life,

get that kind of thing wrong all the time. Amber Rudd used the word colored on the today program and then had to apologize for it was almost, you know, hounded from public life using the word color. She's not on the spectrum. I don't think if someone like that can kind of make a mistake, imagine how hard it is for someone who is on the spectrum, but nonetheless is high functioning, isn't at a kind of university like Harvard or Stanford or Yale, to get everything right, to understand, to be able to pick up not just on the rules, but on the emerging rules, which haven't been written down yet, to be expected to get all that right is, you know, it's essentially a form of intolerance against people who are on the spectrum.

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that was from people that I know that was leveled against you is that it was sort of portrayed that you were bullying an autistic 16 year old and it was the classic case of, you know, privileged white male punching down as it were. Yeah. Well, I don't accept

that challenging some of her claims is a form of bullying. And oftentimes, if you robustly challenge something someone from a victim group has said, you get accused of bullying. And that's often a reason for no platforming people at universities. I mean, I think it was even invoked, actually, with the recent no platforming of Jordan Peterson by the Cambridge Divinity faculty. because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a I'm a proud Islamophobe t-shirt, it was argued by a kind of cabal of social justice academics at Cambridge that some Muslims at Cambridge would feel bullied

if he was given a platform by Cambridge University and allowed to lecture on the Bible at Cambridge. So, you know, that form of, that kind of tactic is a very familiar one that the social justice left uses to shut down any challenge to their nostrils. You've referenced how the social justice left is sort of a religion and you've actually used the word apostate. Could you just go into that a little bit more? What do you mean by that as in it's a sort of religion? I mean that, well, it takes on many of the characters. characteristics of some of the world's great religions. So for instance, there's a very clear moral code at the heart of it.

It shifts around a bit, but generally speaking, it's a moral community. People are constantly having to advertise their morality to prove their bona fide as members of that community and they're constantly singling out people who are, they think, outside that community, members of the out group in order to consolidate their in-group identity, they identify members of the out group and expel them sometimes in quite brutal ways or try and demonize them in quite brutal ways. They, like other religions, they have particular dress code. So, you know, it sometimes involves things which we would associate, often with pagan

religions like piercings or body paintings. I see you've got a tattooed frances, but obviously doesn't apply to everyone with tattoos. But, you know, there is clearly, there's clearly a costume. There are various, I mean, I think you could say there are various forms of worship. You know, there's a kind of, when you look at, when you look at, it was Andrew Sullivan, I think, in New York Magazine, he linked to the YouTube video of a group of protesters protesting against Charles Murray at Middlebury College in 2017. And they all got out a bit of paper and they started what felt very much like a kind of religious liturgy.

And then they all turned around in a kind of ritualized way to turn their backs on him at the same movement. And it really felt like, I think Andrew Sullivan called it one of George Orwell's smelly little orthodoxes. But it felt like a religious cult. And they looked like members of a religious cult who, who, who, who were kind of in thrall to a kind of form of mass hysteria in the same way you would say Scientologists or the Westbro Baptist Church are kind of, you know, slightly loopy.

They seem loopy in the same way, in a sort of religious, in a fervent religious way. I think there's another respect in which it's quite religious, which is the belief in the kind of, it's the evil eye. So, you know, in the voodoo religion in Haiti, there is this belief in the evil eye that you can put a hex on someone. And once you put that hex on someone, it kind of renders them unable to act. It means that they're kind of enervated and paralyzed in some way. Similarly, people think that whiteness has that effect on people. That if you don't apologize for your whiteness, just in virtue of being a privileged white person, that can kind of exert.

this kind of invisible oppressive force which can innovate and emasculate and paralyze non-white people. It almost looks like you're doing an invocation. But often people in the social justice cult invoke this kind of this idea of invisible forces that we can't see, but which are out there exerting this toxic effect on people, like unconscious bias. You know, and the science behind all this stuff is pretty threadbare. And finally, the respect I think in which it's probably most like a religion is that many members of the social justice cult set very little store by reason and rationality and logic. They often refer to those things as tools of white privilege, a way for privileged white men to preserve their dominance and their power. And that attack on reason, on the values of the Enlightenment, it takes the form of a kind of

quasi-religious counter-enlightenment project. I think the word cult is probably more accurate than religion. I'm certainly not the only person that's come up with this view. I mean, there's a guy called Michael Lindsay, who was one of the people who was involved in Sokol Square, in which a number of grievance studies journals were hoaxed and made to publish kind of ridiculous articles to show up just how ridiculous some of the material. being published in these grievance studies. Also, there was one about, you know, sexism amongst dogs,

rape culture amongst dogs in a car park in Portland or something. But he was one of the people involved in that, and he's produced this really interesting YouTube video in which he sort of looks in a very analytical way at whether or not it's appropriate to describe the kind of social justice movement as a religious cult. And his conclusion is that it is. And do you know, but do you know, that unconscious bias exists in that we just want to

be around people who sort of really, look like us and echo our same views. Do we not want that as human beings? Unconsciously? We sort of do, don't we? Really? I think most of us want it consciously. I'm not sure that...

I'm not sure that... I'm not sure that... I mean, the problem with... There's the way in which unconscious bias is exposed by diversity trainers who lead, you know,

unconscious bias training sessions, not just in the public sector, but more and more wider in the private sector too. One of the most commonly used tools is something called the Implicit Association Test, which was developed at Harvard. In this test, you sit in a chair like Malcolm McDowell in a clockwork orange, and you're shown various images and you have to kind of press kind of favorable, unfavorable, favorable, unfavorable. And the idea is that when you see an image of a black man,

you're more likely to press unfaithable than favorable. It's not quite as crude as that, but almost as crude as that. And in this way, but because you're doing it so quickly, and you're not given an opportunity to think about your responses, it supposedly reveals what you really think unconsciously. You're not given a chance to process it. You're just instinctively reacting and in that way, supposedly, betraying your unconscious bias.

And people take this test and then the tester then says, look, you've behaved in a racist way in these various, respects, you must be unconsciously biased. Hopefully you'll now be aware of that and be less biased in future. The problem with the implicit association test is, well, there are numerous problems with it, but a couple of the problems are. One, there's no consistency. So someone can be, you know, a raving fascist when they take it on a Sunday afternoon, but an out-and-out progressive liberal when they take it on Monday morning. Every time they've eaten. Depends what they've had for breakfast. That's right for practice.

But the fact that it changes each time people take it suggests that it's not revealing anything constant about someone's unconscious. And also, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between how consciously racist people are and how unconsciously racist the test reveals themselves to be. So someone, you know, a grand wizard in the CluColkite's clan might get a better score than Jeremy Corbyn.

He's not a good example. He is a bit racist. Show us a picture of a rabbi like, a better score than David Lavin. Yeah, the rabbi, I imagine he'd like literally get out of the chair. But there doesn't seem to be any correlation between, you know, discriminatory and prejudicial behavior in your score on the IAT. So it's basically, you know, if it's something invisible that they're trying to measure,

something that people aren't aware of and not necessarily, again, to kind of publicly disclose, you know, it's very, very hard to measure. And it feels to me like an invisible, force being invoked by members of the social justice cult to try and justify their claim that society is riddled with systemic racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia, even though all the public surveys that try and measure those things by actually asking people questions like, would you object if a Muslim moved in next door to you, would you object if a close family member married and African American and so forth, all those surveys suggest that racism, homophobia,

sexism, transphobia are all rapidly declining. They've all hugely declined in the last 25 years or so, particularly in the UK, interestingly, but also in the US. So what do you do with this? If you're kind of invested in claiming that America and Britain are riddled with systemic racism and sexism and homophobia and you're confronted with this evidence showing that actually it's been massively declining over the past 25 years,

you can't just say, oh, well, job done, move on to something else. You say, ah, no, this only measures people's conscious prejudice. There's something else called unconscious prejudice, and that remains, that's worse than it ever was, you know. And how do I prove it by inventing this ridiculous test, which is completely bogus. I suppose a counter argument to that is, for instance, you see something like what happened with Windrush,

where you have people of Caribbean origin who've been in this country for 50 years or whatever it may be, and all of a sudden they're being told that they have to go back and they have to return, when in fact, they are and should be British citizens, or the fact that we've seen in racism in football, we know the problem. So I take on board your point,

but it still seems to me we do still have, there is still problems in this. I don't know. No one would dispute that there are still pockets of racism, pockets of homophobia. You know, there are still some people who are openly misogynistic. No one would dispute that.

I think what's at issue is, is it worse now than it's ever been before? And that seems to be a central tenet of the kind of social justice case. It's worse than it's ever been. And unless... Fascism is about to triumph. Unless we manned the barricades, comrades,

unless we de-platform, people like Toby Young, another Hitler is going to come to power. So, you know, let's act. Let's act now. Let's get out into the streets. And that's the claim that it's getting worse and it's about to kind of go beyond the point of no return. And something action has to be taken out.

A bit like the climate change case. So no one's disputing that these things still exist and there are still some work to be done. What I'm disputing is that they've got worse. In fact, by every respectable, robust measure, attitudes have improved dramatically and populations have become much more liberal across the Anglosphere.

And to claim that, okay, to dismiss that evidence and say, oh, but what about unconscious bars? Seems to me to be a way of side-stead. what's really going on and a way of avoiding confronting the fact that actually those things, whilst problematic, are no longer huge problems. And moving swiftly on, you're talking about wokeness and you have the logo of a woke company on your chest, which for our listeners is Nike. And Nike, if you're listening, we wouldn't mind being sponsored. Thank you.

Women are equal to men. Yes, yes, give us money. I should say now that Francis gave me this show. Where do you stand on woke companies, you know, the Gillette and all the rest of it? Well, I'm needless to say, extremely skeptical. So I wrote a cover story for The Spectator a few weeks ago called the Woke Corporation. And it was about the spread of what is essentially a hard left neo-Marxist ideology, which until about 10 years ago was confined to grievance studies departments in US universities. maybe the fringes of parties like Labor and the Democrats in the US,

the Unabomber, probably one of the people who subscribe to this particular ideology. And then it spread to other universities. And then it spread from universities into public bureaucracies, political parties. Not surprisingly, quite easy to imagine that transition happening. But what is quite unexpected, I think, is that it's now beginning to spread into the private sector. And I think politically that's quite dangerous because in the past, the private sector has been a counterweight. Generally, the private sector has been quite conservative with a small C, certainly right of center. And rich folks in the private sector, large corporations have sponsored right of center think

tanks, right of center, magazines and so forth. And it provided a counterweight to the kind of liberal progressive ideology of the public sector. But what we're seeing now is that that that liberal progressive ideology is beginning to seep into the private sector. And I think one of the ways in which it's able to do this, one of the reasons that's happened, is because under the old socialist kind of dogma, capitalist companies were the enemy. The 1% was demonel. Even as recently as the Occupy protests, Occupy Wall Street and so forth, there was this demonization of the 1%. If you were an advertising executive or you worked on Wall Street, you worked for a large corporation like Procter and Gamble, you were essentially one of

the bad guys. You were part of the problem, not part of the solution. And they were worried about socioeconomic inequality, about the wage gap between the highest earning employees. in a particular corporation and the lowest earning employee in that particular corporation. And it was that kind of inequality, socioeconomic inequality, that was highlighted and targeted by the left. There's been a sort of weird sea change that's happened over the past 10 years or so, whereby that kind of inequality is now not important, or certainly not nearly as important, as inequality between different identity groups. So what matters now is equality between is the inequality between privileged white cis men and other groups like gays, lesbians,

transgender folk and so on and so forth, women, African Americans, African-Caribbeans. The mismatch in power and influence and economic wealth between different identity groups has become much more important than the mismatch at an individual level. So it's not socioeconomic inequality. It's now inequality between different identity groups. And that means that the corporations, the fat cigar smoking executives, who for years were demonized as part of the hated 1%, can now embrace the kind of love of the social justice left,

of these kind of left-wing firebrands, because they're not attacking them anymore, and they can solve the problem. They're no longer part of the problem if they promote enough women and African-Americans and gays to their boards. Provided they do that, no one gives a false. fuck anymore about the fact that the cleaner is getting one hundredth of the wage of the chief executive. That's completely by the by, provided there are enough women on the board, then that company is woke

and it gets a pass and they move on to kind of mobbing and targeting someone else. So I think that for years, clearly, being demonized by left-wing firebrands, particularly young people was a source of huge kind of psychic misery for psychological misery for the kind of members of the 1%. And now the opportunity to kind of get this kind of warm kind of flood of approval from these people. It's almost like, you know, the middle-aged man who is used to being kind of attacked by his 16-year-old daughter at the breakfast table is suddenly saying, he's suddenly able to say to her, yes, well, it may be that I'm part of a multinational global corporation. which employs people in sweatshops in Indonesia to produce t-shirts that are sold on high streets.

And it may well be that the cleaners at our company work for below minimum wage because we've worked out a way to avoid minimum wage legislation because we're that clever. But nonetheless, there are three women on our board. There are four gay people on our board. We've given money to mermaids, at which point the daughter says, that's great, Dad. Great. You know, suddenly he gets that approval of his daughter. She's no longer attacking him for being part of the person.

problem, he's now part of the solution. But one of the things that strikes me is so odd, and there's a lot of truth, I think, in what you've said, is that these adverts are incredibly unpopular, particularly often with the people who buy the fucking product. I mean, look at Gillette. There's no need to swear. There is any of the way. Shut the fuck up. When you put the podcast online, I've discovered, you're going to have to tick the unclean box now. Oh, are we? Yeah. We've always been He's a lot. He's Russian. He's unclean, anyway. ideologically, but they're incredibly unpopular

with the people who are buying the product. I mean, for Gillette to make an advert, essentially slamming men who shave, that makes very little sense. And you look at the like to dislike ratio on YouTube on some of these videos. I think Francis and I would go and make a suicide pact

to that happened to us. I think there are... I think it's... We're absolutely right. And one of the reasons I think, you know, the Brexit party is likely to sweep the board at the forthcoming European Parliament elections is because I don't think it's as though the silent majority has been just completely shut out of the kind of public conversation. And people imagine that if you even now, if you're kind of, if you're robustly pro-Brexit, that that somehow makes you alt-right or worse. far right, but nonetheless puts you completely beyond the pale. Lots of people who, for perfectly respectable, understandable reasons, are pro-Brexit, resent, you know, being shut out in this

way. And I think they're going to, they're going to signal that resentment, they're going to show what they feel about this by voting for the Brexit party in large numbers next month. But you're absolutely right. And I think one of the reasons, one of the reasons for that is partly because the executives of these woke corporations exist in tiny bubbles. I think they're just not aware the extent to which they are completely disconnected from their customers. And often you see the consequence of this, which is that it's beginning to happen amongst liberal arts colleges in the US. So at the University of Mississippi, which was,

where there was the first outbreak of kind of social justice rage on campus. There were various kind of hate crimes and there were massive protests and they went on for days. And of course, the university administration completely capitulated to the mob. And as a result, enrollment at that particular university has fallen off a cliff. You see, the same thing at Middlebury. Since the flare-up over Charles Murray's speech and the cultists appearing in that UTL. YouTube video, enrollment at Middlebury has fallen, and some liberal arts colleges, some of the smaller liberal arts colleges in the U.S. are actually going bust, which has given rise to the

phrase, go broke. Now, it may be a while before Procter & Gamble, who owned Gillette, goes broke. But I think we're going to see a lot of companies get a nasty shock when they realize just how unpopular this kind of virtue signaling, kind of racial self-flagellation and denigration of masculinity is with their kind of customer basis. Well, you saw that cafe in Australia, which charged men 18% more, it went bankrupt. The toxic masculinity tax. Yeah.

Go work. Men are the only ones who can afford it. One of the interesting things is since Quillette started, since I've been involved with Quillette, a number of woke alternatives to Quillette have sprung up. Some of them have a particular kind of anti-misogynistic theme. Others are quite kind of Corbin-esque in their outlook. and they've all, in the short, in the last couple of years, I've seen at least half a dozen of these kind of woke alternatives to Quillette

spring up and then go broke, whereas Quillette is just going from strength to spring. We always talk, and this is something that I've always meant to ask you, people banding around this term, alt-right, there's now Alt-Rite adjacent. You know, it's like using the terminology of estate agents, you know, it's adjacent to the, to the train station, whatever it is. What is the all right? I don't even know anymore. I don't even know what it's it's like the word it's like the term populist. It's just a kind of all-purpose term of abuse that liberals use to describe people who hold opinions that they don't approve of this adjacent thing that's really interesting. So um I I, I, uh, uh, Colette is often described as being alt-right adjacent.

We are apparently. Yeah, we're crypto-fascist as well. Which is when you're a fascist, but you don't know it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unconscious fascist. Unconscious fascist. When they said crypto, I'm like, great, we're going to get a sponsorship. It's his money. I don't know if you followed this flare-up in Australia recently between Christina Hoff Summers, who is a kind of libertarian feminist, and Roxanne, or Roxanne Gay, who is a kind of social justice, identitarian feminist. And Roxanne, if that's how you pronounce her name,

described Christina Hoff-Summers as being a white supremacist. and when Christina Hoffsummer's pushed back, this is on the, before the debate had even taken place, when she pushed back and said, you know, what makes you say that? What have I ever said that could remotely be construed as a defense of white supremacy? She said, oh, well, okay,

but you once appeared on a platform with Milo. And he's a white supremacist, so you're white supremacist adjacent. And Milo, I mean, you know, first of all, Milo's just married a black man. So if he's a white supremacist, he's getting his wires crossed somewhere. But secondly, you know, it's just ludicrous to think that if you stand next to someone with unpalatable views, you're somehow contaminated by their unpalatable views.

And why should it just be, if it's a form of infection, if it's sort of, if if having unorthodox opinions is viral like Ebola, you know, then presumably if I've stood next to Milo, then if I then stand next to you, you get whatever it is that's wrong with Milo as well. So why should it justify to... No, I voted remain, so I'm fine. I can just say I'm slightly concerned about this because I'm due to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union in a couple of weeks about no platforming, about whether it's ever justifiable to no platform someone. And on my side, it's Katie Hopkins. So am I going to be Islamophobic adjacent? Yeah.

That's ridiculous. Yeah, well, it's interesting you get these six degrees of Nazism that they've invented that basically ever... That's what it is. But that's what it is, because if I've, if the people that we've interviewed, some of them we disagree with on certain things, right? But if we've sat a lot of them, yeah, present company, excepting. Thank you. But you know what I mean?

And there'll be things we disagree with you about. But we just try and have that conversation. But if the mere fact of being in the same room as someone renders you untouchable, because they've got this infection. It's ludicrous. I mean, I think, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's part of the rationale for no platforming people, that if you provide them with a platform, then you're conferring legitimacy on the points of view that they espoused.

So if you disapprove of their points of view, then you oughtn't to give them a platform, and that includes having them as guests on podcasts like this. I mean, there are so many things wrong with that argument, but I think the most effective counter argument is to say, well, if Joseph McCarthy hadn't been given a platform by saying, CBS News, if he hadn't been publicly challenged over his claims, vastly inflated claims about the penetration of US public life by communist agents, he never would have fallen off his pedestal. It was only because he was given a platform by CBS News and confronted and actually forced to acknowledge that what he was saying was largely bollocks, that McCarthyism then imploded as a kind

political force in the United States. Just ridiculous. I always remember when Nick Griffin went on question time and he just looked like an absolute buffoon. For people who don't know, American, Nick Griffin was a leader of the British National Party. And he just looked like an idiot.

He was just outclass and outthought by every single person he was up against. And it was embarrassing. I mean, you know, Tommy Robinson, good example. Someone who's routinely no platform, someone considered beyond the pale, not someone who is regarded as entitled to participate in these kind of public debates. As a result, he's become this kind of cult figure.

He's standing as an independent in the forthcoming European Parliament elections. If he'd been given a platform, he would have faded out long ago. Yeah. That's an interesting argument. I never thought about it like that because Tommy Robinson, a lot of people want us to interview him and we've not done that and consciously stayed away from that. That's an interesting point. I never thought about it like that.

I never thought about it. Anyway, this is just me. I should have just done that bit in my head. I should have just done that bit in my head. Listen, there's a bunch of other stuff we wanted to talk about. Roger Scruton was an interesting thing that's happened recently. Tell us about that and your thoughts about that. Yeah, so Roger Scruton, for those of your viewers and listeners who aren't aware,

is a 75-year-old conservative philosopher, probably the most well-known and celebrated conservative philosopher currently living. He's written over 50 books, including several books about conservatism. He started this magazine called The Salisbury Review and edited it for many years. He's been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including, I think, Oxford. and he was appointed to a government body. It was a minor appointment of an unpaid position. He was made the chair of something called the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission,

which was trying to see how public housing, the appearance of public housing could be improved, how public housing more generally could be improved. And he was appointed last November. And as soon as he was appointed, various offence archaeologists started trawling through everything he'd ever said or written, dating back, you know, 30 years to try and find evidence that he wasn't a fit and proper person to serve on this public body, exactly the same as what happened to me in the beginning of 2018. And BuzzFeed in particular kind of dug up quite a few things. And these were all thrown at him and pressure was put on the conservative government

back then in November to defenestrate him. And the pressure was resisted. I thought he was, who was a goner, partly because of the way the government had more or less kind of folded at the slightest whiff of gunfire when I came under attack. But no, they decided to stand firm in Rogers' case. And he survived that onslaught. About a few weeks ago, he agreed to be interviewed by the new statesman. He used to be the wine critic of the new statesman, so he wasn't expecting to be stitched up.

gave them an interview, gave an interview to this guy called George Eaton, who's the deputy editor of the New Statesman. And before the interview was available on the newsstand, I think it may have been available online, George Eaton posted a series of tweets in which he had quote-mined things Roger had said in the course of giving this interview to the New Statesman and made it sound as though he was doubling down on some of these supposedly offensive things that have been dug up by the offense archaeologists in November and also adding to them. So I think more or less the only new thing he was accused of having said, which was supposedly

beyond the pale, was he'd said that, according to George Eaton in this tweet, he'd said that the Chinese increasingly resembled automaton's. And that's a kind of well-known racist trope that Chinese people are all the same, that they all look alike, whatever. And within five hours of this thread being posted by George Eaton, a couple of conservative MPs had weighed in saying, this is unacceptable. He doesn't belong in the government. And he was fired from the job by the, well, technically by the Secretary of State, James Brokenshaw, who had originally given him the job. But clearly the gunfire came from Downing Street.

and he wasn't given an opportunity to defend himself. No one in the government seemingly asked to see the interview or asked to listen to the tape. They just immediately responded to this Ferroarie, which George Eden had successfully whipped up on Twitter with the help of BuzzFeed. And he was fired. He was thrown under a bus. And he immediately countered with actually, actually, I didn't say that about. the Chinese people. I was making a point about the Chinese Communist Party. And actually all these other things that you have me saying, which make me sound like a frothing at the

mouth, kind of troglodyte, bigot, have been taken out of context. And in some cases, you know, ellipses had been inserted where words have been taken out, to try and make the quote kind of seem more inflammatory. And if you'd stuck those words just back in the middle of the quote, there would have been less inflammatory, let alone the context. And for a long time, me and other people, Douglas Murray, have been trying to exert pressure on the new statesman to release the audio tape of the interview between George Eaton and Roger Scruton. So we can see for ourselves whether he was quote mine, whether these quotes were taken out of context or whether this actually, George Eaton was fairly summarizing what he'd said.

And someone anonymous, for a long time, the statesman resisted. And then someone anonymously sent the tape to Roger Scruton, emailed Roger Scruton, the audio file and the audio file completely exonerates him. Shock. And Douglas Murray has written the cover story on this week's spectator defending Roger Scruton and essentially saying, look, he was hung out to dry. He was essentially, it was essentially a hatchet job. He was targeted. I mean, I don't particularly want to pillory George Eaton for this behavior. I mean, maybe he thought he was doing his job. He's reasonably young. It was a mistake. I don't think. I think his career should be ended as a result of this.

But one of the things which casts him in a particularly bad light is that when Roger Scruton was fired, he then posted a picture of himself on Instagram, swigging champagne out of a bottle. And the caption was something like the feeling you get when you get racist, homophobic, government advisor, Roger Scruton fired. Now he quickly took that down and is now embarrassed about it. But that suggests that he had a kind of an agenda. And it's a sorry episode, but in some ways, it's been quite helpful for those of us trying to defend the presence of people with conservative views in British public life.

Because it's clear, couldn't be clearer, that Roger Scruton is a victim of a miscarriage of justice and that the government reacted far too quickly to what was a fair. effectively the demands of a Twitter mob to fire this person. And now I think very embarrassed about having not kind of waited a bit and actually asked him for an explanation and perhaps asked the new statesmen to see the recording before making a decision about what to do with them. So hopefully, I don't know, I don't know how much hope for this, but hopefully it'll make it just that little bit harder for the government and other public institutions to

fire people at the behest of Twitter mobs without any kind of due process. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend,

only on Netflix May 8th. This is what worries me because if this, This is the length to which the government is prepared to go where they instantly jump on anything like that and they fire people for a perception of wrongdoing. Then where are we going to be when this white paper that we mentioned briefly where essentially the government is trying to regulate the internet in a very harsh and draconian way, where we're going to be then? Well, the really worrying thing about this is that the people, the government behaving in this incredibly intolerant, skittish way and doing the bidding of what are effectively a tiny minority of social justice activists on Twitter. If this government, which is a conservative government, is behaving like this, God knows what it will be like if Jeremy Corbyn ever gets into Downing Street. And one of the kind of alarming dimensions of this, as you say, is that the government a few weeks ago published a white paper, which is what the government does before it actually

introduces a bill in Parliament. So we know that the contents of the white paper are going to find their way into the bill. A white paper setting out its proposals for regulation of the internet. And the paper was called online harms. And it's not clear whether a new regulator is going to be created by this act of Parliament in due course or whether an existing regulator, probably Ofcom will just be empowered to regulate the internet. But Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, boasted on the day that this white paper was published, that Britain was going to have the toughest internet regulations in the world.

You're thinking, what, tougher than Saudi Arabia? Tougher than China. Tougher than Turkey. I'm not sure that's something a conservative home secretary should be boasting about. But if you look at – I actually read this white paper and drilled down to the detail and wrote about it for the spectator. And it's absolutely horrifying. So one of the things this regulator wants internet companies to do is to stop cyberbullying, to stop fake news, to stop offensive material appearing on their platforms. This is all kind of falls under

the general heading of harms. And it doesn't in any way define what might be considered offensive, what might be considered fake news or cyberbullying. It just says this is what we'll expect you to prohibit on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And the penalties proposed in this white paper for these social media companies that fail to comply with this new code of practice are unbelievably draconian. So they'll be able to, the new regulator will be able to fine a company like Facebook 5% of its global annual turnover.

Well, it's about time they paid some tax. Well, maybe they should pay tax, but they shouldn't be taxed for allowing me to post something on Facebook. But also, the executives of companies like Facebook and Twitter will be jailed if they allow this harmful material undefined to appear on their platforms. So I can post something offensive to get Mark Zuckerberg in jail. Yeah. Sounds great to me. I'm down, Javier. It's not great.

I mean, it's not great for a number of reasons. I mean, you can joke about it. But one of the most, one of the most ominous. passages in this white paper was that it will expect social media platforms to prohibit speech which is legal but which nevertheless may be harmful. So, you know, they're not just going to be expected to enforce the law when it comes to what isn't prohibited. And by the way, the law is incredibly draconian, as we've seen with the kind of police arresting people like Count Duncan. So they're not just going to be expected to enforce the law,

but to go beyond that and prohibit people saying things, which are perfectly legal on the grounds that they, and it even says that may cause direct or indirect harm. I mean, look at the wheezeal words, may cause direct or indirect. So something could be prohibited. A company like Facebook could be fined if it allows something to be published, which may not necessarily will, to actually show that it has caused any harm,

just may cause indirect harm. I mean, it's so woolly. so incredibly subjective and capacious. What are Twitter and Facebook and Instagram? What are they going to do? What are YouTube going to do in response to this? They're going to be incredibly cautious. They're not going to risk being fined for 5% of their worldwide turnover

or their executives being jailed. They're just going to ban anything remotely controversial. You guys will be banned from YouTube. You laugh now. You won't be allowed on YouTube. The owners of Mark Zuckerberg won't allow you on YouTube. Well, can I just say it's been an absolute pleasure in a previous.

We've been doing trigonometry for exactly one year. It is now over and thank you for... We have time for one more question. Right, and the question that we always finish with is, what is the one thing that people aren't talking about, but we really should be talking about? Climate change. One aspect of the climate change debate,

which is often overlooked, is that, the claim that the only way to address the imminent crisis slash catastrophe is to end capitalism. That capitalism itself is responsible for ever increasing carbon emissions and the degradation of the planet, the extinction of numerous species and so forth. And that unless you end capitalism, you know, we're all going to die. And that's simply not true. So, you know, I think I pointed out earlier that the level of carbon emissions in the UK

is now 43% what it was in 1990. In that same period, the British economy has grown by two-thirds. So it's possible for economies to grow. It's possible for capitalism to work its magic and to combat climate change at the same time. And the idea that the only way to do this is to vote for Jeremy Corbyn so he can end capitalism. I mean, people don't, I think, quite realize. the benefits that capitalism has brought. I mean, I would recommend reading Jonah Goldberg's The Suicide of the West.

He talks about capitalism, the invention of capitalism, the industrial revolution, as a miracle. You know, people were kind of, we were sort of bumping along when it comes to indexes like mortality, infant mortality, levels of extreme poverty, for millennia. You know, nothing was really changing for millennia. People were, you know, before capitalism came along, the average person was in, pain 50% of the time. You know, the average lifespan was 45, if that. You know, more than half of children born died before they got to the age of one. A vast majority of the world's population lived in extreme poverty and had to walk miles just to get water. In some parts of Africa, they still do. But capitalism has changed all that. Capitalism has radically, you know, on a scale

unimaginable by anyone born in an earlier era, has transformed human life, made us all comfortable, will give us all these incredible opportunities. And even today, it's eliminating extreme poverty at an extraordinary rate. So in 2013 alone, in one year, over 100 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty by capitalism, by the operation of the free market. The idea that we should throw that away and return to the dark ages and once again become these kind of grubbing creatures sniffing around in the mud, clutching our ribs because we're in fucking pain 50% of the time. It's just ludicrous.

but no one really addresses this. And that's why you should wear night trainers and use gym that raises, so you get the best of both worlds, guys. You get to use capitalism, plus feel smug at the same time. I would just like to confirm that racism is indeed bad. I'm anti-racist adjacent. Yes, you're cleansing yourself one podcast at a time.

Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on the show. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. If people want to follow you on Twitter, you are at Toadmeister. People want to mob me on Twitter. I'm a toadmeister. The people who want to mob you will find you without us. And always check out Toby's writing. It's always very interesting.

And check out Quillette. Of course, as I said, I've written for it. And so it's a great publication. As always, follow us at TriggerPod and all the social media. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. This is also available as a podcast, as most of you will know. And the final thing is, Francis, tell them about being unsubscribed. Yes, we have had numerous complaints of people saying that have been subscribed.

Even people say, I've been unsubscribe, I've subscribed again, and they've unsubscribed. Shadow banning. Yes, exactly. So what we need you to do, if that happens, could you please take a photo of it, send it to us? And then we will tweet Twitter, tweet Twitter, we will tweet YouTube, and they will ignore us, as they always do. But, you know, we've got to do it, and we've got to highlight it because it's not right and it's not fair. And also, as well, if you really enjoy the show and you don't feel you can tweet about it, and you don't feel you can share it, please just tell them, mate, and just tell them why. racism is awesome.

Okay, and on that, and I keep spreading the hate and we'll see you soon. I have nothing left to add. You should be careful, people will take that out of context. If you ever stand as an MEP candidate, you can see you next to Sargon.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Get all the Venezuelans out. Yeah. That's the one. All right guys, we'll see you in a week. Thank you. Bye-bye.