0
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
0
SPEAKER_01
The Joe Rogan experience.
0
SPEAKER_01
Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night or day.
0
SPEAKER_00
Brendan, what s up?
0
SPEAKER_00
Joe, how you doing?
0
SPEAKER_01
It is my goal, before the end of the world, to talk to as many interesting people as possible.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it feels like that s kind of ramped up lately.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I saw you on Trigonometry, and I was introduced to your stuff through that.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then I watched a bunch of your conversations online.
0
SPEAKER_01
So I m excited to talk to you, man.
0
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for being here.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m so happy to be here.
0
SPEAKER_00
You wouldn t believe it.
0
SPEAKER_00
So thank you for having me, Joe.
0
SPEAKER_01
My pleasure.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Because it does seem like I really do want to talk to as many people as I can before you can t talk to anybody anymore.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, exactly.
0
SPEAKER_00
Who knows, you know, how long before talking to people is outlawed?
0
SPEAKER_00
Or certainly talking to people like me and people like you.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t think that s going to happen likely anytime in the future.
0
SPEAKER_01
I think too many people push back against it.
0
SPEAKER_01
But I think it certainly could make it increasingly more difficult.
0
SPEAKER_01
And my real fear is that we do something so stupid that we lose all communication, period.
0
SPEAKER_01
I have a real fear of World War III.
0
SPEAKER_01
I haven t had since I was a kid.
0
SPEAKER_01
When I was a kid, growing up in the 80s, we were legitimately worried that we were going to get in a nuclear war with Russia.
0
SPEAKER_01
It was a real fear.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I remember when the fall
0
SPEAKER_01
In the fall of the Soviet Union, it was like a weight had been lifted off the shoulders of the earth.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
Like, we re like, oh my God, thank God it s over.
0
SPEAKER_00
I remember those days in the 80s.
0
SPEAKER_00
We watched a film at school called The Day After.
0
SPEAKER_00
Did you see that?
0
SPEAKER_00
Which is a film about... I think we ve talked about that.
0
SPEAKER_00
Didn t we talk about that before?
0
SPEAKER_01
A film about after nuclear war.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s a film about Russia bombing America.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s very depressing, but we watched it at school and we had numerous discussions about what would we do in the event of a nuclear holocaust?
0
SPEAKER_00
How would we try to survive it?
0
SPEAKER_00
But it was on our minds all the time.
0
SPEAKER_00
And there was also other apocalyptic scenarios, if you recall, like acid rain was a big one.
0
SPEAKER_00
The ozone layer was another one.
0
SPEAKER_00
My childhood was full of fears that the end of the world was nigh.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I think people feel that again today for different reasons.
0
SPEAKER_00
And my approach to it is always to think, well, where are the real problems in terms of civilization really grinding to a halt?
0
SPEAKER_00
And what are the unreal problems that are just designed to whip up fear and make us panic and make us fret about the future?
0
SPEAKER_00
So I think distinguishing between those two things is probably quite important.
0
SPEAKER_01
It is very important.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s also very important to recognize that when there s a thing that is getting people whipped up and is in the news constantly, for sure someone s making money.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s why it s doing it.
0
SPEAKER_01
I used to think they were warning us about the real dangers of this or that.
0
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that anymore.
0
SPEAKER_01
Now, I think they can justify the fear mongering by saying it s a legitimate concern, because it has the opinions of a few people attached to it.
0
SPEAKER_01
But ultimately, what they re doing is they re somehow or another using it to make money.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, they re either making money or they re making moral mileage, or both.
0
SPEAKER_00
So if you look at global warming is a perfect example, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
The climate change catastrophe, or the climate catastrophe, as we now call it.
0
SPEAKER_00
There are a lot of people invested in this end-of-the-world scenario who are making a lot of money from alternative sources of energy.
0
SPEAKER_00
But just as important as that, I think, they re making moral mileage.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s the issue through which they can pose as the saviors of humanity.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it gives them a real sense of purpose.
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Al Gore is a classic example.
0
SPEAKER_00
He both makes money from climate change fear-mongering.
0
SPEAKER_00
And he also positions himself as a global authority on how to save humankind from the next apocalypse.
0
SPEAKER_00
So I think it s a combination of financial reward and moral reward that draws people to these apocalyptic scenarios.
0
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
0
SPEAKER_01
And also audience capture.
0
SPEAKER_01
In the case of Greta Thunberg, here s this young lady who s become a celebrity by saying, how dare you?
0
SPEAKER_01
That was it.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s all it took.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s all it took.
0
SPEAKER_01
We re in the catch me outside girl phase.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s like a good slogan.
0
SPEAKER_00
She s getting ready to rumble, whatever it is.
0
SPEAKER_00
She s the green version of the catch me outside girl.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s what she is.
0
SPEAKER_00
But it s like with, you know, with someone like Greta, it s, I think it was funny for a while that you had this 16 year old kid saying, how dare you having a temper tantrum in public, essentially.
0
SPEAKER_00
And all these politicians in America and Britain and across Europe were falling at her feet and staring at her in this wide eyed fashion like she was some messianic figure come to deliver humanity from the end of the world.
0
SPEAKER_00
But more recently, I think the Greta Thunberg cult is just not funny anymore because she s now going around Europe and telling governments to stop investing in energy production, to stop investing in fossil fuel companies during an energy crisis.
0
SPEAKER_00
And how old is she?
0
SPEAKER_00
She s 21 now.
0
SPEAKER_00
She should know far better.
0
SPEAKER_01
Just imagine.
0
SPEAKER_01
Just imagine being 21 and having the president listening to you.
0
SPEAKER_01
You know how dumb I was when I was 21?
0
SPEAKER_01
I was shockingly stupid.
0
SPEAKER_01
Shockingly stupid.
0
SPEAKER_00
When she started and she was 16, 17, she was very young, I often think to myself, if when I was 16 and 17, the thought of being in public and saying things, I would have said the craziest stuff, but that s exactly what she did.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I think the problem is that there were so many people in the adult world,
0
SPEAKER_00
who were willing to listen to her and who engaged in her hysteria about the end of the world.
0
SPEAKER_00
And so I often see the Greta phenomenon as a perfect example of how on the one side you have these cranks who are talking nonsense and pushing ideas that are just not true.
0
SPEAKER_00
But the bigger problem is the political world and the media world who really buy into it and give it meaning and give it emphasis.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I think there s that kind of two way relationship between these things.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying that Greta Thunberg is not an intelligent person, because she clearly is, and she s very young.
0
SPEAKER_01
And again, I was way dumber than her when I was her age.
0
SPEAKER_01
But what she said was not this extraordinary message of wisdom that would merit the kind of attention that she got.
0
SPEAKER_01
And that s why and it s also it s not within her power as a 16 year old to get in front of all these people.
0
SPEAKER_01
So it s kind of like a form of exploitation.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean it s a willing exploitation but it s your you re you re using her as a political pawn for like.
0
SPEAKER_01
sort of cementing an opinion that you must have on this subject.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s absolutely what happened.
0
SPEAKER_00
You know, like every other teenager, she was narcissistic, self-involved,
0
SPEAKER_00
panicking about the adult world and how crazy it is.
0
SPEAKER_00
That s what every teenager s like.
0
SPEAKER_00
We all went through that.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we all do it.
0
SPEAKER_00
We all did it.
0
SPEAKER_00
We screamed, how dare you, at our parents.
0
SPEAKER_00
We thought, they re oppressing me.
0
SPEAKER_00
They won t let me go out.
0
SPEAKER_00
They won t let me do this.
0
SPEAKER_00
We all have these kind of oppression complexes when we re teenagers.
0
SPEAKER_00
The problem with hers is that it became this public spectacle.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it became a public spectacle precisely as a consequence of the political class
0
SPEAKER_00
who said, you know, give us more, really sock it to us.
0
SPEAKER_00
It was almost like a kind of sadomasochistic relationship between these self-hating elites and this teenage girl who was more than willing to whip them in public.
0
SPEAKER_00
And you had this kind of, it was mutually beneficial.
0
SPEAKER_00
She got to feel like she was saving the world.
0
SPEAKER_00
They got to feel like they were being told off for being, you know, the rulers of the world.
0
SPEAKER_00
And it was beneficial for both sides.
0
SPEAKER_00
But it was, when you look back on it, it was creepy as hell.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s very creepy.
0
SPEAKER_01
And here s something to consider too.
0
SPEAKER_01
At what level are people immune to the bullshit that they re talking about?
0
SPEAKER_01
Like, here s an example about Hollywood.
0
SPEAKER_01
These people, when I would talk to people that didn t work in like television, and they had these ideas of what they re doing with television shows,
0
SPEAKER_01
You know, oh they re they re pushing this or they re creating that they re trying to sedate America with nonsense and they re being told to do it by the government like no no no listen The people making these shows watch these shows.
0
SPEAKER_01
They like making them.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is what they re trying to do They like watching sitcoms.
0
SPEAKER_01
They like making game shows if there s that s not So they re as trapped in it as you yeah, it is dumbing down the world 100
0
SPEAKER_01
Reality shows are dumbing down the world, but the people are watching the reality shows are The same as the people making them they all watch them like they re they re making dumb shit Because people consume dumb shit, and that s not a conspiracy.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s just a market decision and
0
SPEAKER_01
And I wonder when it gets to climate change, when it gets to some of these contentious issues, particularly the climate, is a big one.
0
SPEAKER_01
Because any scientist, regardless of how wise they are and how well-read they are and how much they understand about their field of study, if they have anything that deviates from the narrative, they re automatically dismissed.
0
SPEAKER_01
even ones that will talk about long-term temperatures of the Earth.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s almost like they don t want you to talk about long-term temperatures of the Earth.
0
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no.
0
SPEAKER_01
There has never been a time in our lifetime.
0
SPEAKER_01
All these things are true.
0
SPEAKER_01
But if you look at long-term, you recognize, oh, it s never static.
1
SPEAKER_00
even when humans didn t exist.
1
SPEAKER_00
It does all this, there s a lot of factors going on constantly.
1
SPEAKER_00
And to not consider that, and to only consider what s happening during our lifetime, not take into account volcanic activity, not take into account, you re blaming cow farts?
1
SPEAKER_00
You know what I mean?
1
SPEAKER_00
There s so many weird things that we do when we attach an ideology to a science.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, the science of climate change is fascinating, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It really is.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s like taking into account all these factors, CO2 in the atmosphere and solar flares and what s going on with volcanic activity and cloud cover and pollution and all these different factors.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if you don t like toe the line and say this is a catastrophe, if you just want to look at it objectively, you re a heretic.
1
SPEAKER_00
You re cast out of the kingdom.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s precisely the problem.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think there are probably more climate change skeptics out there than we realize, but there is a cost to saying what you think.
1
SPEAKER_01
There is a social cost.
1
SPEAKER_01
There is a professional cost.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you say, listen, climate change might well be happening.
1
SPEAKER_01
There may be a human contributory factor, but it s not the end of the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
A billion people are not going to die.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s bullshit.
1
SPEAKER_01
There s no evidence for that whatsoever.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we will probably be fine if we focus on it and fix it.
1
SPEAKER_01
If you say anything like that, even something quite moderate, you will be denounced as a climate change denier.
1
SPEAKER_01
People will say, get them off the BBC, get them off the airwaves, no platform them from universities.
1
SPEAKER_01
We can t have these heretics speaking in the public sphere.
1
SPEAKER_01
So all of that
1
SPEAKER_01
instinct for cancellation trickles down through society.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the message it sends to ordinary people is, listen, you might be skeptical of this stuff, but the price of speaking out is too high.
1
SPEAKER_01
So don t even bother.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I wouldn t be surprised if there were more people out there than we realize who think to themselves, OK, pollution s a problem.
1
SPEAKER_01
Climate change may well be a big issue.
1
SPEAKER_01
But it s not the end of the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
But they feel they can t say it because this entire grammar of condemnation has been created.
1
SPEAKER_01
to depict these people as handmaidens of the apocalypse, as deniers whose words will literally kill people.
1
SPEAKER_01
And when you have that put on you, when you are told that, when you are told that your thoughts could be so damaging that they will kill people,
1
SPEAKER_01
It silences.
1
SPEAKER_01
It makes people kind of retreat and say, well, I ll keep it to myself.
1
SPEAKER_01
I won t say it out loud.
1
SPEAKER_01
So climate change is a perfect example of where censorship does far more harm than good because it restricts our ability to have the discussion about pollution and so on that we really need to have.
1
SPEAKER_00
I have a friend who s a scientist who emailed me.
1
SPEAKER_00
Did you have a climate denier on your podcast?
1
SPEAKER_00
And this was a while back.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I said, no, he s not a climate denier at all.
1
SPEAKER_00
What he simply stated is the fact that the earth is actually greener now than it has been in I don t know how many hundreds of years.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that what s really terrifying is a global cooling.
1
SPEAKER_00
And
1
SPEAKER_00
When he was talking about there have been times on Earth where the world had gotten so cold that we had crossed this threshold where the atmosphere was tolerable for biological life.
1
SPEAKER_00
We got very close, like within a few digits.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s what s spooky.
1
SPEAKER_00
What s really spooky is that what we re in right now is the Goldilocks zone.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is about as good as the Earth ever gets.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we have all these mitigating factors, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Air conditioning, housing.
1
SPEAKER_00
This is the best time ever to deal with errant climate.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but if it cools we re fucked.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s like, you know The truth is that the climate change alarmists, which is how I prefer to refer to environmentalists climate change alarmists They re lying to us when they say that more people than ever are dying as a consequence of natural disasters.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s not true My favorite part is when they attach it to racism
1
SPEAKER_00
Everything s more people of color.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah are dying because of climate change.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you better fucking do something.
1
SPEAKER_01
Otherwise, you re a racist It s like it s really simple checkers, but and it s simply untrue in fact the number of people dying as a consequence of natural disasters is plummeting and it has been since the birth of modernity why because
1
SPEAKER_01
capitalist society, modern society, post-industrial revolution, we got better at keeping in check the whims of Mother Nature.
1
SPEAKER_00
So how do they monkey with those numbers when they when they twist the numbers around to make it seem like, you know,
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, what would they do that would possibly make it—like, what could they call upon that would say, like, this is affecting certain people in certain parts of the world, but not others?
1
SPEAKER_01
I think they use methods of distortion.
1
SPEAKER_01
They bank on people not looking into the truth of the matter, and a lot of people don t.
1
SPEAKER_01
So they rely on the unwillingness of lots of people to really explore the issue and to look at what s really going on.
1
SPEAKER_01
A good example was the huge heat wave in Europe last year.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was presented in the media as a heat apocalypse.
1
SPEAKER_01
People were going to die.
1
SPEAKER_01
This is the worst thing that s ever happened.
1
SPEAKER_00
They connected to heart failure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so and they connected it to all of these ailments that would inflict people in Southern Europe in particular, and they said it was unprecedented.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s not true.
1
SPEAKER_01
There have been huge heat waves in the past far worse than the ones we had last year.
1
SPEAKER_01
But they rely on that kind of historical ignorance, that kind of unwillingness of people to understand, as you say, that nature has been in flux since the beginning of time.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s how it works.
1
SPEAKER_00
And this willingness to monkey with the truth just to push a narrative.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s so bizarre.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s so bizarre that it goes all the way down to
1
SPEAKER_00
Gender experiments on children.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s how far which you would think would be the the people that we would protect the most From bad decisions.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the people that we protect the most historically children kids little kids that are confused and may have insane parents
1
SPEAKER_00
They re trying to talk them into something, which is a real thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, little kids who have now been sacrificed at the altar of gender ideology.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s what s happening.
1
SPEAKER_01
This is child sacrifice in a modern form.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s what s happening.
1
SPEAKER_01
And their bodies are being used to prove an ideological point, which is this ideological point that gender identity is innate.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re born with it.
1
SPEAKER_01
You have it from birth.
1
SPEAKER_01
And in order to prove this hocus pocus idea, which has absolutely no basis in evidence or proof whatsoever,
1
SPEAKER_01
They have to experiment on children, they have to give them drugs, they have to start performing surgeries on them when they reach a certain age, they have to cut off their breasts if they re a confused girl, castrate them if they re a confused boy, and what you have here in this grotesque
1
SPEAKER_01
manipulation of children s bodies is literally the sacrifice of children to an ideological crusade and the ideological crusade of gender ideology and in order for adults who want to men who want to pretend to be women primarily and women who want to pretend to be men in order to justify their existence
1
SPEAKER_01
They have to pull children into the equation and say, well, it s an innate experience.
1
SPEAKER_01
You re born with it.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we re going to prove this by giving them puberty blockers, by putting them on a conveyor belt towards surgery, by screwing them up for life, which is what this essentially does.
1
SPEAKER_01
So that is a very good example of how problematic ideological obsessions can be.
1
SPEAKER_01
Because what you end up with is a situation where children s lives are fucked up in the name of an ideological crusade.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s really bad.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s real and it s happening.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s so bizarre.
1
SPEAKER_00
to watch people slide into this cult-like thinking en masse.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you see millions of people that support this.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think it s enough of a mindfuck to wake up the people that aren t in the haze of it all and go, hey, this is something you actually have to fight back against.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because this is insane.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think the optimist in me thinks that in the future, in 20 years or so, people will look back at this period and they will say, hold on, you gave kids puberty-blocking drugs?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, they ve already stopped doing that in the UK.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they ve stopped doing that in the UK.
1
SPEAKER_01
We have stopped doing that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you can still get them privately, but the National Health Service has stopped prescribing puberty pills.
1
SPEAKER_00
Did you hear about the guy in Canada?
1
SPEAKER_00
This guy in Canada that s suing the government because he wants a vagina?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
So he has a penis.
1
SPEAKER_00
He wants a penis and a vagina.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he wants to be whatever.
1
SPEAKER_00
He wants to be non-binary.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like literally.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Someone wrote an article for Spiked where I work saying, well, this means he can go fucking south, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
If he s got both.
1
SPEAKER_00
But also, here s the question.
1
SPEAKER_00
Where do you put it?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you re running out of space there, fella.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you want both.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this might be a bullshit lawsuit.
1
SPEAKER_00
We might be able to just stop this with a biologist.
1
SPEAKER_01
Where are you going to put it?
1
SPEAKER_01
Where is it going to go?
1
SPEAKER_01
There s no room, buddy.
1
SPEAKER_01
Who could have guessed we would be having this conversation?
1
SPEAKER_01
If you went back 10 years, even five years, you would never have imagined that we d be having a conversation like this, where someone wants a dick and a vagina at the same time.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that more offensive than the guy who wants to make breast milk for
2
SPEAKER_01
for his baby.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s really bad.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s that was the bizarre.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s this, yeah, this case in Britain of the breastfeeding.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it s Canada as well.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s there was one in the UK.
2
SPEAKER_01
What was interesting about the UK is experiences that there was ITV News, which is a major news channel in Britain.
2
SPEAKER_01
They interviewed women who are struggling as a consequence of the cost of living crisis, and one of the women they interviewed is a man.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a bloke in a dress who claims to be a mother of a child, and it turns out that this person breastfeeds his child.
2
SPEAKER_01
What that means is he gets his baby to suck on his male nipple, his useless, milk-free, non-lactating male nipple.
2
SPEAKER_02
But I think they make them lactate now.
2
SPEAKER_02
This is the point.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s certain medications that you can give a biological male and he ll produce breast milk.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, but it s not milk.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s not real milk.
2
SPEAKER_02
Are you a connoisseur?
2
SPEAKER_00
Sir, have you had a good tit milk sommelier visit you and give you some samplings?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not what nature intended, is it?
2
SPEAKER_02
But every man, biologically, starts off as a female in the womb.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s the introduction of testosterone and all the factors and the XY chromosome, that s what turns us into male.
2
SPEAKER_02
But we start off as female.
2
SPEAKER_02
So do we have the hardware?
2
SPEAKER_02
And is this medication just igniting?
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s grotesque.
2
SPEAKER_00
Don t get me wrong.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it s also, it seems weird that you re having a baby suck on your tits and you re a guy.
2
SPEAKER_02
It seems oddly sexual, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
In a way that it doesn t seem like with a woman at all.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s like all of a sudden, what are you doing?
2
SPEAKER_02
Why are you doing that?
2
SPEAKER_02
Why do you want to do that?
2
SPEAKER_01
But think about it.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you saw a man who looks like a man, a man who looks like you on the street with a baby attached to his nipple, you d call the cops.
2
SPEAKER_01
You d punch him in the face.
2
SPEAKER_01
You d do something.
2
SPEAKER_02
I definitely wouldn t punch him if the baby was in his arms.
2
SPEAKER_01
Take the baby away first.
2
SPEAKER_01
Call social services.
2
SPEAKER_01
You would be going to jail.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but the thing about breastfeeding men that I find gruesomely interesting is that firstly, it s just not true that men can lactate in the same way that women can and the drugs that they take in order to mimic lactation
2
SPEAKER_01
actually makes whatever secretion comes from their horrible nipples worse for the baby, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because it s full of drugs.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s full of really gross content.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it just shouldn t happen.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s an indication of how far society has gone down the avenue of validating everyone s identity.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we even have to validate the identity of the freaky man who thinks he has the right and the ability to breastfeed his kid.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you stand up and say, no, this is not breastfeeding.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is a form of child abuse.
2
SPEAKER_01
A man shouldn t put his nipple in a child s mouth.
2
SPEAKER_01
You are denounced as a transphobe.
2
SPEAKER_01
You are denounced as a bigot.
2
SPEAKER_01
You are denounced as someone who is a horrible person.
2
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah, that s also who s HIV positive.
2
SPEAKER_02
Which is cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
What can you even say at this stage?
2
SPEAKER_02
Hold on a second, put that back up.
2
SPEAKER_02
Person also revealed that he was HIV positive and acknowledged that the transmission of the condition to his baby through milk is possible if viral load becomes detectable.
2
SPEAKER_02
Despite having been continuously monitored for 18 and a half years of his life, he also promised to undergo testing monthly to mitigate risk.
2
SPEAKER_02
What a sweetheart.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because it tests his HIV-positive fake tit milk.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s unbelievable.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s unbelievable.
2
SPEAKER_01
And everybody s like, yeah, you re not crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
You shouldn t be in jail.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem is, I mean, there have always been freaks.
2
SPEAKER_01
There have always been weirdos.
2
SPEAKER_01
There have always been absolute losers and tossers who do bad things to kids and everyone else.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem is society nodding along and saying, this is fabulous.
2
SPEAKER_01
Look at this new identity.
2
SPEAKER_01
This man is breastfeeding a child.
2
SPEAKER_01
The problem is people aiding and abetting these perversions by dressing them up as gender identities.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s the real problem here.
2
SPEAKER_02
But it s crazy because there are people that identify with being a woman and I have no problem with them living their life as a woman.
2
SPEAKER_02
The problem is, without any scrutiny, if you can t scrutinize each person as an individual, and if they re in a protected class, if they re automatically, you know, if they say that they re a woman, like instantaneously you have to absolve them of all their sex offender record.
2
SPEAKER_02
You let them walk around the women s room with a heart on, no one can say anything?
2
SPEAKER_02
No.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s it that s just crazy.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like now you now you ve crossed this line into cult thinking and I know you don t want to give up any ground because if you give up ground then you think the bigots are winning.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
So it s like this thing where this battle between open minded people that believe in people s freedom to live their life however they want and the acknowledgement that perverts and psychos are real things.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s psychos.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s people that want to wear your skin.
2
SPEAKER_02
And if they can if they can hang out in the women s room with you These are the same kind of people that would do that Understand that if you just say that any man who says he s a woman you have to just take them at their word You are enabling psychos like real full-on
2
SPEAKER_02
serial killers to just go into the women s room and you re hoping that they don t have a knife in their bag.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re hoping they re not going to do something crazy.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re hoping they re not going to attack someone.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re hoping they re not going to just start masturbating in front of everybody.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like you re enabling someone who could be completely schizophrenic, absolutely out of their mind, should be in mental health care, but you re allowing them to just wander around the women s room with their pants off.
2
SPEAKER_02
And that s a real thing.
2
SPEAKER_02
This doesn t change.
2
SPEAKER_02
this concept of people that are trans.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ve met people that are trans, like Blair White, who s this famous YouTuber who s trans.
2
SPEAKER_02
You think that this is a woman.
2
SPEAKER_02
I m around a woman.
2
SPEAKER_02
She seems like a woman, lives like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like a woman.
2
SPEAKER_02
You want to be a woman?
2
SPEAKER_02
You want to be Blair?
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you re a woman.
2
SPEAKER_02
I don t even think that s a guy.
2
SPEAKER_02
But then there s also perverts.
2
SPEAKER_02
And if we don t look at people individually, if we lump everyone into this one group, we ve gone haywire in this age of information where we have so much of an understanding of the human psyche.
2
SPEAKER_02
For us to ignore vast swaths of everything that we ve accumulated under the sanctum of gender ideology, that s crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I agree.
2
SPEAKER_01
My position on it is pretty simple, which is that
2
SPEAKER_01
You can dress however you want.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can identify however you want.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can change your name from Joe to Joanna.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can do all those things.
2
SPEAKER_01
I have no problem with that at all.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can call yourself trans.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can dress yourself up.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s fine.
2
SPEAKER_01
But when you try to force other people to validate and acknowledge your identity, that s where I have a problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because the thing is that if you re dressing up and redefining yourself and changing your name and changing your look, that s your freedom.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you then say, well, every other woman on the planet has to accept my so-called womanhood and let me into women s spaces, let me partake in women s sports, let me stand for positions that are traditionally reserved for women, then you re interfering with their freedom, their freedom of conscience, their freedom of belief, their freedom to understand biology, that there are men and women and that they are different.
2
SPEAKER_01
So when you have a man, and I would say this goes for any man, both for the perverts who walk around with their tumescent knobs hanging out in a women s changing rooms, and also the men who supposedly look like women.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it goes for all of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
When we demand that they should have access to women s spaces, what we re really saying is that women have to sacrifice their own freedom of conscience and freedom of belief and genuflect to these men s identities and accept these men s identities.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so there was a case in Los Angeles where there was a man in a spa and he was walking around and he was naked and he was semi-erect.
2
SPEAKER_01
And there were women and minors in that women s changing rooms while he was doing that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we had lots of trans rights activists defending his right to do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a defense of flasher s rights.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is the right to flash women.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s what we re talking about here.
2
SPEAKER_01
It gets dressed up as trans rights.
2
SPEAKER_01
But fundamentally, it s the right of a man to show his knob to a woman who doesn t want to see it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s where I have a problem, when you try to force other people to bow down to your own identity.
2
SPEAKER_02
What s really crazy is women that support it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like, do you not understand, like, the whole deal with, like, Title IX in women s sports has always been keep men from competing with women because it s not fair.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re allowing men to compete with you.
2
SPEAKER_02
You re doing it under the gun and it s not compete with you because the female athletes you almost unanimously don t want it Yeah, they don t want it The ones who say they wanted a virtue signaling or they re at the end of their career or they don t have a stake in it Or they re just dumb.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s just dumb because it s it s such it s cheating at the highest level humanly possible you re pretending you re a different gender and you re just dominating women and it s fucking crazy that that
2
SPEAKER_02
Women will go along with it.
2
SPEAKER_02
It is cheating men, but it s also men like By saying you re a woman you re with them in some strange way You re allowing like a parasite to get in
3
SPEAKER_02
into your organism and infect it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And this is what everybody s always concerned about.
3
SPEAKER_02
Like men dominating women, but entering into women s spaces.
3
SPEAKER_02
The whole reason why you have women gyms.
3
SPEAKER_02
When the fuck have you ever seen a men-only gym?
3
SPEAKER_02
They don t exist.
3
SPEAKER_02
Even martial arts gyms.
3
SPEAKER_02
Go to a Muay Thai gym.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s women all over the place.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s all kinds of people.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everybody can go.
3
SPEAKER_02
But a woman s-only gym exists for a specific reason.
3
SPEAKER_02
Because there s dudes that have fucking hard-ons and want to walk around the women s room.
3
SPEAKER_02
If you allow these perverts to pretend they re women and join these women s spaces, you re letting the wolf into the hen house.
3
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
And sports is the perfect example of how destructive this can be.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you look at Leah Thomas, the swimmer.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s a bloke.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s, what, six foot four.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s absolutely huge.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s got all the biological benefits that come from male puberty, which is bigger muscles, bigger hands, bigger lungs, everything, all that stuff that we know about.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there s a photograph of him diving off the platform and the female swimmers next to him.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he is so much further out than those women when he s diving because he has the propulsion that comes with that strength.
3
SPEAKER_01
that is the gift of male puberty.
3
SPEAKER_02
Not just male puberty, but intact.
3
SPEAKER_01
Intact.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he apparently, according to reports, was parading around the women s changing room so that you have this.
3
SPEAKER_01
So Riley Gaines makes the point that not only was he cheating by taking part in a women s sports where he doesn t belong, but he was also allegedly walking around naked in a women s changing rooms and showing his penis to people who didn t want to see it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Which is why?
3
SPEAKER_01
This double whammy of misogyny, let s call it what it is, this is a double whammy of misogyny.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re screwing up women s sports, you re screwing up women s right to excel in a sport that they have devoted their lives to and you re flashing at women who don t want to see your junk.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a double whammy of misogyny.
3
SPEAKER_01
And what s really crazy to me is that you have so-called progressives, so-called leftists, the people who spent the past 10 years going on about Me Too and feminism and women s rights, cheering this on, cheering on the obliteration of women s sports, cheering on the male cheating against women, cheering on male flashing at women.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the extent to which the world has been turned upside down by the woke ideology, I think sometimes we underestimate just how crazy things have got.
3
SPEAKER_02
Well, it got so crazy that Riley Gaines, who had a draw with this person, like literally to the one tenth of a second, which very, very, very rarely happens.
3
SPEAKER_02
So they only had one trophy and they gave it to Leah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Which is insane.
3
SPEAKER_02
You got a 6 4 biological male who had a draw with a 5 5 female and you gave it to the male.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s because you re in a fucking cult.
3
SPEAKER_01
But think about how
3
SPEAKER_01
brilliant someone like Riley Gaines has to be to get so close, to be small, diminutive, and yet to get so close to a six foot four bloke who was a pretty good swimmer, even amongst men, but far less good than he was when he went into the women s.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, not even close, 462 in the country versus one.
3
SPEAKER_01
Way down, but he was a pretty good swimmer.
3
SPEAKER_01
But imagine how brilliant she must be to have got so close to him.
3
SPEAKER_01
She gave her life to this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m sure she trained every single day for hours on end and she really upped her game and she became excellent at her sport.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then in waltzes this lanky bloke and says, I m going to take your awards away from you.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that to me, it stinks of misogyny.
3
SPEAKER_01
It stinks of unfairness.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is cheating.
3
SPEAKER_01
But again, it s society s willingness to go along with this insanity that is the real problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s what s bizarre.
3
SPEAKER_02
The bizarre thing is the willingness to go along with it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the unwillingness, especially by whether it s the NCAA, or whoever it is that s dealing with these situations when they come up, this denial of biological reality.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t know if you saw the NCAA, one of the women who was a representative was having a conversation with Ted Cruz about biological men competing in women s sports.
3
SPEAKER_02
And he was trying to ask the question, like, why do we have women s sports?
3
SPEAKER_02
Why don t we just have everybody compete against everybody?
3
SPEAKER_02
Why do we have women?
3
SPEAKER_02
And the woman was just trying to dance around this and didn t want, just like, Toro!
3
SPEAKER_02
She was doing like mental gymnastics.
3
SPEAKER_02
And it s so crazy to watch
3
SPEAKER_02
people that are either public intellectuals or people that are at the head of these very important organizations for amateur athletics and just not be able to talk about reality and to live in this bizarre
3
SPEAKER_02
Side world like we passed into a neighboring dimension Yeah, where logic is just out the window and this one thing takes over above everything and there s all these Grifters that are involved in this there s grifters on the race side.
3
SPEAKER_02
There s grifters on the gender side There s grifters all around and they re always talking to the president and they re always in the White House they re always on the news and it s a wild time to try to be sane and
3
SPEAKER_02
And to try to get a balanced view of what is happening and how far can this go?
3
SPEAKER_02
At a certain point in time, does everybody have to say, hold the fuck on?
3
SPEAKER_02
What are you doing?
3
SPEAKER_01
What is everyone doing?
3
SPEAKER_01
Some people are trying to say that, aren t they?
3
SPEAKER_02
College athletics organization bans trans athletes from participating in women s sports.
3
SPEAKER_02
The NAIA made its decision on Monday.
3
SPEAKER_02
What is the difference between that?
3
SPEAKER_02
What is that one?
3
SPEAKER_00
So way smaller schools like colleges.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s in the article.
3
SPEAKER_00
It says it s 241 different colleges that are part of this.
3
SPEAKER_02
And how does the NCAA treat it right now?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the way you guys are just talking, I think.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think they ve made any changes.
3
SPEAKER_02
You got to stop it, kids.
3
SPEAKER_02
You got to stop it.
3
SPEAKER_02
And here s the nuttier one.
3
SPEAKER_02
There was some trans athlete that they said, well, what about if we just have a trans division?
3
SPEAKER_02
And this trans athlete was like, no, that that limits my ability to thrive.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_02
It thrive as a biological male competing in weightlifting against women.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s if you think about how bad things have got in a short period of time.
3
SPEAKER_01
I imagine you went to a bar or a pub, as we call them in England, 10, 15 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there was a man who tried to go into the women s bathroom, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They would have been uproar.
3
SPEAKER_01
People would have dragged him out.
3
SPEAKER_01
Someone would have given him a slap and said, listen, mate, get yourself together.
3
SPEAKER_01
What are you playing at?
3
SPEAKER_01
2024, that s seen as a normal, acceptable thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you complain about it, you re the problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
So at the moment you have
3
SPEAKER_01
Biological males, some of them dressed as women, some of them supposedly look like women, although I really dislike that idea because I don t think woman is a look.
3
SPEAKER_01
Woman is a real thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is a real thing, but some of them really look like women.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s real too.
3
SPEAKER_01
We have to acknowledge that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some of them look like women, but they re not women.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think we have to be honest about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think biological males are biologically men.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the question has to become there s a case in Australia at the moment where a woman a real woman as we have to say nowadays set up an app.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this was an app for women to get together and share information, to communicate, to make friendships and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
And a biological male who claims to be a woman tried to join the app and he was booted out.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he really doesn t look like a woman.
3
SPEAKER_01
He is just a big bloke in a dress.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now there s a court case.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a federal court case in America where this bloke is demanding his right to access this space.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think what we have is this really surreal situation where even after years of feminism, and some feminism was good, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It really did liberate women from drudgery and gave them the right to vote, gave them the right to work.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think those were wonderful leaps forward for humanity.
3
SPEAKER_01
The equalization of women with men was a wonderful thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some of the feminism was bad, victim feminism.
3
SPEAKER_01
Me Too, I think, was quite hysterical and led to the demonization and punishment of men, often on the basis of no evidence at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
But generally speaking, we ve had feminism for the past 100 years or so.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yet, right now in 2024, we have a situation where if you want to be considered a good progressive person, you have to support the right of men to cheat in sport.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to support the right of men to go into a women s changing rooms and show people their penis.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to support the right of men to go into a women s domestic violence shelter and demand assistance.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have to support the right of men who commit crimes, including rape,
3
SPEAKER_01
to be placed in women s prisons.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s literally happened in the UK.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s happening in America as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you have to support the right of men to invade every single space that all of us previously acknowledged as being for women only if you want to be considered a good progressive person.
3
SPEAKER_01
That is a warping of principle of the like we haven t seen in a very long time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s really worth trying to get to grips with what s going on here.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it s insanely bizarre.
3
SPEAKER_02
And the adherence to this ideology, even even when the person s a murderer, there s a story.
4
SPEAKER_00
in the New York Times about this guy who had beheaded his neighbor.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know the story?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s the craziest story.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was a woman.
4
SPEAKER_00
A woman beheaded her neighbor.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, that sounds crazy.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, how many women chop people s heads off?
4
SPEAKER_00
Turns out it s not really a woman.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a biological man.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was reported in the New York Times.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was also reported in the BBC in the UK.
4
SPEAKER_00
As a woman.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was a woman.
4
SPEAKER_01
On the BBC, you had to wait till the very last sentence before it said, this is a person who identifies as a woman.
4
SPEAKER_01
So most people don t read a whole article.
4
SPEAKER_01
They will just look at the first few paragraphs.
4
SPEAKER_01
But they don t even say biological male who identifies as a woman?
4
SPEAKER_01
No, they just say someone.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the news!
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the news.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s so scary.
4
SPEAKER_01
But what s interesting to me about that story in particular is that when I read it, and I think this guy is like 80 years old.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s quite old.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s 80.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I remember thinking, hold on, this is really weird.
4
SPEAKER_01
80 year old women don t behead women.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve never heard of anything like that in my life.
4
SPEAKER_01
80 year old women tend to be pretty frail, usually quite small.
4
SPEAKER_01
They don t usually have the strength to do something as grotesque as that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you discover halfway through the article in The New York Times, at the very end of the article in the BBC, that it s a
4
SPEAKER_01
bloke.
4
SPEAKER_01
Of course, it s a bloke.
4
SPEAKER_01
But this is where we really get to the Orwellian stage of what s going on right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because this is the sacrifice of news to ideology.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that is literally the storyline of 1984.
4
SPEAKER_01
Winston Smith s job in 1984 in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles
4
SPEAKER_01
to ensure that they accord with the ideology of the party.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s literally what s happening right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
News articles are being rewritten.
4
SPEAKER_01
The truth is being sucked out of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
The truth in this case was that an 80-year-old man murdered a woman.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he had murdered women previously, in fact.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was the truth.
4
SPEAKER_01
The truth was sucked out, and it was replaced with a lie.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the lie was that an 80-year-old woman had beheaded a woman.
4
SPEAKER_01
So you have this profoundly Orwellian interference with truth and reality, this remolding of reality so that it suits the ideology of the ruling class.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that is right out of 1984.
4
SPEAKER_01
That really is the stuff of dystopia.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that is indicative, I think, of where we re at right now.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s also indicative of a condition that takes place when people are under extreme duress, where they sort of just, they give in to ideologies much easier.
4
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, we really saw that during COVID.
4
SPEAKER_00
COVID people just gave in and all of a sudden, like, here s another one, trust the pharmaceutical drug companies to not lie, which was never the case.
4
SPEAKER_00
Nobody trusted them before that.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you had polled people in 2017,
4
SPEAKER_00
Like after the Vioxx scandal and after we knew about the opioid crisis and the Sackler family and all that.
4
SPEAKER_00
If you polled people back then and asked them what their faith in the pharmaceutical drug companies was and how many of them do you think are lying?
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God, it d be off the charts.
4
SPEAKER_00
Most people would distrust them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Most people wouldn t think they d be telling the truth.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then it switched over to if you don t trust them, you re a Nazi.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re a fascist.
4
SPEAKER_00
You should die.
4
SPEAKER_00
We hope you get the disease and die.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re a plague rat.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that is just immediately going into climate change.
4
SPEAKER_00
And a lot of the same hysterical people who were up in arms about people s non-willingness to participate in experimental medication now are like, if you don t 100% support climate change, you don t drive an electric car, you re not doing all the things that you re supposed to be doing, you re on the wrong side of everything.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re on the wrong side of history.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you try to corner those people,
4
SPEAKER_00
Ask them for something is like so interesting and fascinating about climate It s so bizarre that that one got attached.
4
SPEAKER_00
So like rigorously to ideology because it s such it s a fascinating conversation Like what makes like what is the difference between us surviving and not surviving?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like what degrees hotter would it get where we d be fucked?
4
SPEAKER_00
What degrees colder would it get would be fucked and
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, how lucky are we that we re on this planet that s protected by a moon that s the perfect distance from the sun?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, holy shit, this is fragile.
4
SPEAKER_01
But what s interesting about both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that what people will say is that in a time of crisis, we can t afford the luxury of dissent.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or we can t, but you don t even understand it.
4
SPEAKER_00
That was my point.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like these people that will argue like violently that you should adhere to climate.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you start asking them questions like what percentage of carbon is in the atmosphere?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like what is the consequences of it raising or lowering?
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the negative consequences of it lowering?
4
SPEAKER_00
And they can t answer that.
4
SPEAKER_01
They don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the thing is that, you know, my retort to those people on both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that it s precisely in a time of
4
SPEAKER_01
crisis or a challenge to society or some problem, external problem that could cause problems for us.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s precisely in that time that freedom of speech and the right to dissent and the right to express alternative views becomes more important, not less important.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what happened with the outbreak of COVID in March 2020 is that the opposite position was taken by governments across the world.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what they essentially said was
4
SPEAKER_01
this is a serious virus, it s a modern day plague, we can t afford any form of dissent, we can t afford any form of questioning or any deviance from the lockdown narrative and therefore we will punish it severely as and when it arises.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was entirely the wrong approach because if you re going to lock down a whole society, in the UK we were put under house arrest, we were allowed to leave our homes once a day, a hotline was set up by the cops,
4
SPEAKER_01
so that you could report your neighbors if they left their house more than once a day.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was a completely surreal situation where we had the utter decimation of civil liberty in a way that had not happened ever before in the history of our country.
4
SPEAKER_01
And yet we were told, this is not the time to raise questions.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is not the time for debate.
4
SPEAKER_01
Debate is a luxury that we can t afford until we go back to normal.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is utterly wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s precisely when there is an issue facing our society,
4
SPEAKER_01
confronting problem that we need to have as free a discussion as possible in order that we might have made the right decision in March 2020, in my view, which is that rather than locking down, we should have had a Swedish style scenario where people were given advice, you know, you might not want to go here, you might not want to go there, but we re going to leave schools open, we re going to let you make your own decisions.
4
SPEAKER_01
trusting people to make their own decisions, galvanizing people to come together as a community in order to help those who might be affected by COVID, that would have been a far better alternative to this brutish locking down of the entire of society so that people s freedom was completely and utterly crushed.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s a good example of how when you sideline debate, when you restrict freedom of speech and freedom of dissent, you end up with really tyrannical situations.
4
SPEAKER_01
Puberty blockers, the net zero hysteria, the COVID lockdowns, all of those in some ways are a product of crushing dissent, crushing freedom of speech, restricting people s right to put their hand in the air and say, hold on, is this the right thing to do?
4
SPEAKER_01
So freedom of speech, I think, is essential to all of these questions and the right of our society to do the right thing rather than making these terrible mistakes.
4
SPEAKER_00
Without a doubt.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that was one of the most terrifying things about the Twitter files, was finding out that our own government was involved in limiting the freedom of speech of experts, of people from Stanford and Harvard
4
SPEAKER_00
who were dissenting about the way things were handled during the pandemic, that you re literally deciding that some of the smartest people on earth
4
SPEAKER_00
shouldn t be allowed to talk because they don t fit this narrative that we all need to follow in order to survive.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m hoping that most people woke the fuck up after that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And even if you went along with it in the beginning and you haven t apologized or you haven t consented to the fact that you were incorrect, even if you haven t just accepted it entirely, there s a part of you that knows the world got fucked over.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a part of you that knows.
4
SPEAKER_00
So when some more nonsense comes around,
4
SPEAKER_00
Maybe hold the line a little better this time.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and maybe next time when you re forced to adhere to very specific rules that are designed to Save us from whatever thing that they have going on whether like a starvation We have to give all the farms over to the government because we can t allow people to decide how much food gets made and how much Yeah, then you have North Korea
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s that s it s a slippery fucking slope kids, but it s it s interesting to hear you say that Joe because one thing I ve Realized with kovat 19 is that there s this real culture of amnesia has set in I was thinking about this recently I was thinking when I hang out with friends and family members and have a drink or whatever
4
SPEAKER_01
I was thinking, it s really weird.
4
SPEAKER_01
No one ever talks about lockdown.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, when you meet friends, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
You will say, do you remember that thing that happened five years ago?
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you remember that thing?
4
SPEAKER_01
You kind of go down memory lane and you talk about things that happened in the past.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was thinking it s so interesting that so few of the normal people I know, so not
5
SPEAKER_01
people in the media, not people who are on podcasts, not people who are involved in political discussion like we are.
5
SPEAKER_01
Normal people never go down the memory lane of lockdown and COVID.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like it s become this black spot in people s minds.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s because people don t like what they became during that period.
5
SPEAKER_01
They don t like what became of their societies.
5
SPEAKER_01
They feel an element of shame, I think, that our society so speedily turned from being relatively free to being completely dictatorial, to the extent that we were told when we could leave our house.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we were ratting on each other.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we were ratting on each other.
5
SPEAKER_01
We became snitches.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was a snitcher culture as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
And even I have had elements of amnesia setting in.
5
SPEAKER_01
So every now and then I remember things that happened in the UK, like the authorities put yellow tape on park benches so that you wouldn t be able to sit on a bench.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was one incident where the police used drones to spy on people walking their dogs.
5
SPEAKER_01
to make sure that they weren t walking their dog more than once a day.
5
SPEAKER_01
And even I suddenly have flashes of memory and I have to kind of Google to make sure that these things actually happened.
5
SPEAKER_01
Arresting people in Australia, just tackling them because they didn t have masks on.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s like the Tiananmen Square phenomenon to a certain extent.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s forced amnesia.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s the government saying, look, we are going to force you to forget that incident in 1989.
5
SPEAKER_01
We don t want you to remember it, so we re going to black it out.
5
SPEAKER_01
This is a more voluntary form of euthanasia.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not actually a boot on the neck saying you must misremember all this stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s more voluntary, but it s a similar process where we feel, I think, such shame or horror or bewilderment at what became of our societies and our willingness to let it happen.
5
SPEAKER_01
that the only way we can deal with it is to pull over this comfort blanket of amnesia and to forget about it.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I think when people look back on the lockdown moment, I do think they will ask, how was it so easily enforced?
5
SPEAKER_01
Why did so many people accept it?
5
SPEAKER_01
Why did this Chinese idea, and we all accept that China is an authoritarian state, why did that spread so quickly to Italy and then the United Kingdom and then to America?
5
SPEAKER_01
How did this stuff happen?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
And how did no one recognize it?
5
SPEAKER_00
And everyone sort of complied.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even public intellectuals fearfully complied.
5
SPEAKER_00
Didn t in any way question that maybe this is like every other time that something big has come up.
5
SPEAKER_00
You ve been lied to.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you know, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, who was one of the modelers of COVID-19, a pretty controversial guy because his models for what would happen with the disease if we didn t lock down, they informed the actions of governments across Europe, especially the British government.
5
SPEAKER_01
He gave an interview to the Times newspaper a couple of years ago in which he had this really interesting line where he said, we saw what was happening in China and we d never thought we could get away with it here, but then we did.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was just such an interesting turn of phrase.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, he might not have meant it, but it was so revealing off there.
5
SPEAKER_01
the mindset of people in power in the United Kingdom.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the United Kingdom is a nation in which, I would argue, the modern idea of freedom was born there.
5
SPEAKER_01
Press freedom, the right to vote, the freedom of speech, all of those things are such central ideals to the history of the United Kingdom.
5
SPEAKER_01
And yet we allowed this tyranny to wash over us.
5
SPEAKER_01
We allowed dissent to be crushed.
5
SPEAKER_01
We allowed people to be locked into their homes.
5
SPEAKER_01
We allowed park benches to be covered up with yellow tape.
5
SPEAKER_01
And the question of why and how that happened is a reckoning that we re not prepared to have yet, but we need to have it.
5
SPEAKER_00
You hear what s happening in Brazil right now?
5
SPEAKER_01
What s happening in Brazil?
5
SPEAKER_00
In Brazil, they are trying to get Twitter to suspend the accounts of political opponents.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right.
5
SPEAKER_00
And Twitter s not willing to do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so they re going to lose all ad revenue in Brazil, likely.
5
SPEAKER_00
I don t know how they re going to do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But they re advocating for censorship at such a high level that it s a very strange crisis because it s not being reported in mainstream media.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re not hearing about it unless it s trending on Twitter.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s one of those things where you go, okay, what is the news, guys?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because this is like a big global event.
5
SPEAKER_00
If they re really trying to remove, like, imagine if Biden all of a sudden removed Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and had these people removed from social media.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can no longer post studies that conflict with the FDA s reports.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can no longer post anything.
5
SPEAKER_00
You are now, you re gone.
5
SPEAKER_00
Your voice is erased.
5
SPEAKER_00
No one would accept that.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s insane.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s insane.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that s apparently what s happening right now in Brazil.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s, you know, the role of social media in all of this, and it s great that Elon Musk s Twitter is standing up to it, but because the role of social media over the past few years has been so
5
SPEAKER_01
sinister, and you mentioned the Twitter files, the pre-Musk Twitter regime, which was more than willing to do the bidding of the American government, which was a complete and utter destruction of First Amendment rights.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, just because the government went behind closed doors and said to its friends in Silicon Valley, please take this stuff down, that doesn t make it any less of a government intervention into people s freedom to speak and freedom to publish.
5
SPEAKER_01
So people, governments have used, they ve outsourced censorship to private companies.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we ve seen the same thing in the UK, where social media companies are forever being called before politicians, and they ve been instructed to take this down, take that down.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, I think governments who are too cowardly to censor through law because they know it would be unpopular, they often use the back channel of private companies.
5
SPEAKER_01
They outsource the right to censorship to these private companies and that s happened a huge number of times over the past decade.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it amounts to the same thing, which is state censorship, with the connivance and the complicity of these private companies.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I think one of the great crises of our times, actually, is the crisis of freedom of speech.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because freedom of speech really is the thing that is the best guard against irrationalism.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the best guard against hysteria.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the best guard against things like giving kids puberty blockers when they shouldn t be taking them, and against the men parading around in women s changing rooms, and against COVID lockdowns, and against all the other manias that have afflicted our societies over the past decade.
5
SPEAKER_01
Freedom of speech is the best guard against all of that.
5
SPEAKER_01
It won t successfully slay all of them, but it creates that space in which a dissenting voice can say, hold on, let s wait a minute.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s just think about this.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s ask if it s correct to give a confused 12-year-old kid a drug that will fuck up his body.
5
SPEAKER_01
and likely make him infertile and ruin his bones and possibly make him depressed.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s just wait and think and ask, is this the right thing to do?
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was the crushing of all those voices of dissent on all of these issues that allowed the ideology to sweep over our society with such success.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, time and again, in relation to Brazil that you ve just mentioned and in relation to our countries too, I just think if we unleash free speaking and allow people to express their dissenting views, a lot of these problems, they might still happen, but we would have the opportunity to reign them in.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, we would definitely have an ability to
5
SPEAKER_00
If you don t have dissenting voices, that s fine if you re right, if you re on the right side.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s the problem with people.
5
SPEAKER_00
They all love to think that they re right.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we have to shut these other people up.
5
SPEAKER_00
These people, these anti-climate change people, they re going to get us killed.
5
SPEAKER_00
Who gives a shit what happened a thousand years ago?
5
SPEAKER_00
We know it right now.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ve got to do something.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think people s devaluation of freedom of speech and dissent is so curious because the way I always say it is that every freedom we enjoy is the gift of heresy.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s the gift of people in the past
5
SPEAKER_01
who put their head above the parapet and said the thing that you weren t supposed to say.
5
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
5
SPEAKER_01
Every single freedom.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everything.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everything.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, one of the examples in my book, A Heretic s Manifesto, one of the examples I give is William Tyndale, who was this firebrand English Protestant in the early 1500s.
5
SPEAKER_01
who did something that changed the world forever.
5
SPEAKER_01
He translated the Bible into English.
5
SPEAKER_01
You weren t allowed to publish the Bible in English.
5
SPEAKER_01
It could only be published in Latin because it was only supposed to be read by priests, by the educated classes.
5
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t for the riffraff.
5
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t for the rabble.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was punishable by death to publish the Bible in English.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he said, no, I don t give a damn.
5
SPEAKER_01
People need to be able to read the Word of God for themselves.
5
SPEAKER_01
So he went to Germany, which was going through the Protestant Reformation, and he published the Bible in English, and it was spirited back into England, it was snuck back in under piles of grain, and his supporters would distribute it amongst the people, and it was read in pubs and by candlelight in case the police came knocking.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s crazy.
6
SPEAKER_01
And what s interesting, what s so interesting and important about this story is firstly that he was willing to dissent to such a degree that he risked his life.
6
SPEAKER_01
He was eventually caught and burnt at the stake.
6
SPEAKER_01
for the crime of translating the Bible into English.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the other thing that s interesting, this is 1530s, 1536.
6
SPEAKER_01
So the same time as Martin Luther was translating.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s why he went to Germany, so he could do it there and then get it back to England.
6
SPEAKER_01
But what s interesting about it is that lots of people have forgotten William Tyndale s name.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a statue of him in London on the embankment.
6
SPEAKER_01
They burned him at the stake.
6
SPEAKER_01
They gave him the, they killed him first.
6
SPEAKER_01
That was the only privilege they gave him.
6
SPEAKER_01
They killed him first and then burnt him at the stake.
6
SPEAKER_01
But what was interesting, what s interesting about this story, and there are so many others in history, is that people underestimate the extent to which our freedom today
6
SPEAKER_01
descends from the actions of people like that.
6
SPEAKER_01
Even your right to read the Bible in English, your right to access the Word of God yourself, should you want to, comes from people who are willing to risk life and limb in order to do something that you weren t supposed to do, that it was forbidden to do, that it was verboten, it was illegal.
6
SPEAKER_01
So every time I see people crushing dissent, whether it s on the gender issue, whether it s on COVID, whether it s on climate change, whether it s on anything else, I just think to myself, you have no idea of how the extent to which your own luxurious life, your relatively free life, the position you have in society today is the gift of people in the past who were willing to put their head above the parapet and say the thing you shouldn t say.
6
SPEAKER_01
We underestimate that at our peril.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think it is really important to remind people that heresy is essential to freedom and allowing people to be heretical, I think, is very important.
6
SPEAKER_00
In this time when things are so divided, it s such a dangerous thing because so many ideas are connected to one ideology or the other.
6
SPEAKER_00
Either you re with us or against us.
6
SPEAKER_00
And bizarre things are connected politically in some very strange way.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, there s certain subjects, if you bring them up, oh, I can kind of make an assumption about the whole group of ideas that you subscribe to.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s that s also a function of limiting freedom of speech to and creating these echo chambers.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, yeah, exactly.
6
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, Jamie, can we get some coffee in here?
6
SPEAKER_00
We forgot to get our coffee.
6
SPEAKER_00
Thanks, sir.
6
SPEAKER_00
We keep going.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we re still going.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think that s absolutely right.
6
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, freedom of speech, I think people, even people on our side of the discussion, as we might like to call it, I think they underestimate the power of freedom of speech.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s often presented as, you know, freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to
6
SPEAKER_01
um settle discussions without violence and to ensure that everyone gets to express their point of view that s true but too often i think freedom of speech is presented almost as like a soothing balm you know the thing that calms society down i think it s more important than that freedom of speech is the thing that makes us human
6
SPEAKER_01
Freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to be genuinely autonomous people who make up our minds for ourselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
Under systems of censorship, what happens is that we are grotesquely infantilized.
6
SPEAKER_01
We are reduced to the level of children whose minds will be furnished with the ideas that society thinks are good, rather than having the right to make up our minds for ourselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, the great slavery abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, made this point.
6
SPEAKER_01
He said censorship is a double crime.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s firstly the crime of stopping someone from saying what they want to say, which is terrible.
6
SPEAKER_01
But it s also the crime of stopping other people from hearing everything and deciding for themselves what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s that impact of censorship that we, I think, underestimate the importance of.
6
SPEAKER_01
Because what censorship does, it doesn t just...
6
SPEAKER_01
stop you from, you know, when you had that, those millennial twats at Spotify freaking out over Joe Rogan and his podcast and vaccination, etc.
6
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t only threaten to restrict someone like you and other individuals from saying what you want to say.
6
SPEAKER_01
It also deprives ordinary people, the public, the masses, of the right to hear everything and to use their mental and moral muscles.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, John Milton made this point in England in the 1640s.
6
SPEAKER_01
He said, the moral muscles are like the physical muscles.
6
SPEAKER_01
They benefit from exercise.
6
SPEAKER_01
And just as if you let your physical muscles go to waste, you ll become a bit of a wreck.
6
SPEAKER_01
Similarly, if you let your moral muscles go to waste, you ll become a moral wreck as well, because you will become an ape-like creature who has to be told what to think, who has to be told how to behave.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s far preferable, I think, to allow people to exercise their moral muscles, to use them on a daily basis.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, we go to the gym for our physical muscles.
6
SPEAKER_01
We should be able to exercise our moral muscles in public life.
6
SPEAKER_01
by hearing all sorts of opinions and by deciding for ourselves using our own critical faculties what we think is right and what we think is wrong.
6
SPEAKER_00
Unquestionably and well said.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think it s also a function of what s going on today with the access to the internet and social media and the addiction that almost everyone has to both of those things that participates in them.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re getting so much information and you re getting it in a way that human beings have never experienced before and it s easily manipulated.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s the argument for what they re doing on TikTok in America versus what they re doing on TikTok in China.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I think it s also being manipulated because that s what we like.
6
SPEAKER_00
We gravitate towards those things that they show us, and it upsets us that they know what we like.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s part of it.
6
SPEAKER_00
But in China, they have a TikTok that kids aren t allowed on after 10 p.m.
6
SPEAKER_00
It accentuates athletic accomplishments, martial arts, science projects, and it s designed to foster this sense of self-worth and performance.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s how you want to if you want to build a stronger society That s what you would encourage and if you want to diminish the society that is run by your enemies You would show them the problem with freedom here You re gonna have men with beards and long fingernails teaching your kids about gender and you re gonna be a you re a plumber and you re like What the fuck?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what are they doing to my kid over there?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and that that s
6
SPEAKER_00
That s real too.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we re all like battling this in real time in a way that s never happened before in the entire human race, as far as we know.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think the, you know, the issue with social media, which is a real issue, and Jonathan Haidt was talking about this with you and in his new book, there is a problem, I think, with kids hanging around on social media all day long, and especially something like TikTok.
6
SPEAKER_01
And if you look at
6
SPEAKER_01
I limit my social media use as much as possible.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m only on Instagram, which is nicer than all the other platforms because it s just recipes and pictures of people s holidays.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s a bit more of a bearable experience.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I don t use Twitter.
6
SPEAKER_01
I certainly don t use TikTok.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m way too old for that.
6
SPEAKER_01
But lots of young people do.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think what s interesting about it is that
6
SPEAKER_01
I fear, one worry I have, you may disagree with me on this, but I fear that an anti-technology view is creeping in amongst those of us who might be broadly described as reasonable or anti-woke or on the side of rationality.
6
SPEAKER_01
I do fear that an anti-technology view is creeping in because the problem as I see it with the internet and with social media is not so much the existence of these things, but the fact that they ve molded themselves around a pre-existing culture.
6
SPEAKER_01
So social media in a different era could have been one of the most wonderful things imaginable.
6
SPEAKER_01
It could have been a forum for spreading ideas or for...
6
SPEAKER_01
proving to the world what a big man you are, what a strong woman you are, and saying, look, I m taking control of my life.
6
SPEAKER_01
It could have had a different impact entirely.
6
SPEAKER_01
But what s happened is that social media has emerged in an era in which young people in particular are encouraged to be hyper-fragile.
6
SPEAKER_01
to mess around with their gender in a way that they shouldn t, to conceive of themselves as mentally ill when they re not mentally ill.
6
SPEAKER_01
So you have on TikTok now kids self-diagnosing themselves.
6
SPEAKER_01
There will literally be videos on TikTok saying, do you have these four different symptoms?
6
SPEAKER_01
If you do, you have ADHD, you have clinical depression, you re bipolar.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s four things that everyone has.
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you occasionally feel unhappy?
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you occasionally struggle to meet deadlines?
6
SPEAKER_01
And so what I think the problem with social media is not the technology itself, not the ability of people to communicate as freely as social media allows, not even necessarily the fact that kids are on there all day long, although that is a problem.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s that it s molded itself around pre-existing cultural trends towards hyper-fragility, self-obsession, a culture of narcissism, a culture of brittleness.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that, I think, has exacerbated the problems in society by allowing kids to engage with that stuff all day long.
6
SPEAKER_00
And what is the root of all that thinking and behavior?
6
SPEAKER_00
What is the root of all
7
SPEAKER_01
the fragility?
7
SPEAKER_01
What s the root of all the victim mentality?
7
SPEAKER_01
Where does it begin?
7
SPEAKER_00
I think it s down to a culture of narcissism.
7
SPEAKER_00
Christopher Lash wrote about this in 1979.
7
SPEAKER_00
So that s a long time ago.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think when you say the word narcissism, people think it just means self-love, self-involvement.
7
SPEAKER_00
And people will talk about the problem of kids taking selfies all day long and putting them online.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s more to narcissism than self-love.
7
SPEAKER_00
In fact, narcissism is usually
7
SPEAKER_00
triggered by self-doubt.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think one of the problems with the culture of narcissism is people s expectation that the world should always reflect their image back to them.
7
SPEAKER_00
So they cannot accept the idea that the world is a tough place.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a difficult place.
7
SPEAKER_00
People aren t going to buy into your gender identity.
7
SPEAKER_00
People aren t going to accept that you re a wonderful person.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to prove yourself.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to use your metal.
7
SPEAKER_00
and your strength and your will and your perseverance to demonstrate what your virtues are and to prove yourself in your community and in your society.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the problem with narcissism is that it does away with all those traditional expectations of having to demonstrate who you are as a person and it just has this instant expectation of validation.
7
SPEAKER_00
Validate my identity.
7
SPEAKER_00
validate my pain, validate my mental illness, prove to me that I am right to be self-obsessed in the way that I am.
7
SPEAKER_00
So what the culture of narcissism does is it forces people into themselves in a very destructive and dangerous way.
7
SPEAKER_00
And at the moment, that s taking the form of kids saying, I m fragile, I m mentally unbalanced, I have ADHD, I have bipolar disorder.
7
SPEAKER_00
They don t have any of these things.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s not true.
7
SPEAKER_00
ADHD is, to a large extent, a myth.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s been massively overdiagnosed.
7
SPEAKER_00
Bipolar disorder is being massively overdiagnosed.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think what s happened is that people covet these identities, these mental health identities, as a way of explaining everything that s wrong in their lives.
7
SPEAKER_00
There was a really interesting interview with a mental health expert on the BBC a few years ago.
7
SPEAKER_00
And she said that people come to her surgery and say, please diagnose me with bipolar disorder.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m convinced I ve got it.
7
SPEAKER_00
People covet these kind of diagnoses as a way of explaining every difficulty that they encounter.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s incredibly destructive because it pathologizes what is probably just a failure on their part to make their life a success.
7
SPEAKER_00
So in order to explain their failure to make their life a success, they say, well, I must be mentally ill.
7
SPEAKER_00
I must have this.
7
SPEAKER_00
I must have that.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a very good experts to affirm.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you get experts to affirm it just as you get experts to affirm someone s gender identity, just as you get experts to prescribe puberty blocking drugs.
7
SPEAKER_00
But then bipolar is real for some people.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, which is a problem.
7
SPEAKER_00
Manic depression, as we used to call it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But this is the other issue with, I think, the culture of hyperfragility.
7
SPEAKER_00
And Abigail Schreier writes about this in a brilliant new book on the overdiagnosis of mental illness in kids in particular.
7
SPEAKER_00
The one of the problems with it is that it distracts attention from those who genuinely have mental illnesses, whether that be real issues of manic depression or schizophrenia or clinical depression.
7
SPEAKER_00
These are real problems.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think when you have a culture that
7
SPEAKER_00
devotes itself to flattering the delusions of the young who are convinced they are mentally ill when they aren t.
7
SPEAKER_00
You distract resources and attention from those who actually need them.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so the narcissism manifests itself in a person who s so self-obsessed that they diagnose themselves with various illnesses in order to either get treatment or to have an excuse for why their life is all fucked up.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
And to have attention.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a very quick way to win attention to say, look,
7
SPEAKER_00
Look at this fancy diagnosis.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve got a look at this a exotic gender identity.
7
SPEAKER_00
I have it s a way of Drawing eyes towards the self and winning pity and sympathy and getting attention for almost nothing Yeah, yeah
7
SPEAKER_01
And you re special now.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s very rewarding for young people who ve never felt special.
7
SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden, they re special.
7
SPEAKER_01
All of a sudden, everyone loves them.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then there s also, if you live your life in this state of anxiety and depression, you re not happy, and then this thing is offered up as a solution.
7
SPEAKER_01
Boy, you can believe in solutions.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ll join the fucking army.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ll believe in solutions to your problems.
7
SPEAKER_01
People do it all the time.
7
SPEAKER_01
They re like, this is what I need.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then you do that.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m going to get married.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s it.
7
SPEAKER_01
That ll fix it.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m going to get rich.
7
SPEAKER_01
That ll fix it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Nope.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ve got to figure out what the fuck is wrong with you.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it might not be becoming a girl.
7
SPEAKER_01
You might be lured into that because you re getting all this positive attention.
7
SPEAKER_01
You might just be a gay man.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s possible too.
7
SPEAKER_01
And a lot of them turn out to be just that if you leave them alone.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, there s a new study out which shows that something that most people knew anyway, which is that most of these gender confused kids, for most of them it s a phase and most of them turn out to be gay, young gay men or lesbians.
7
SPEAKER_00
And this is a really good example of why language matters, because one of the great crusades of the trans lobby at the moment is to ban conversion therapy.
7
SPEAKER_00
Now, we all think of conversion therapy as the kind of pseudoscience that is used to try and turn a gay kid straight, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And most of us frown upon this.
7
SPEAKER_00
We think it s ridiculous.
7
SPEAKER_00
We think it s a form of religious fundamentalism.
7
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, leave these kids alone.
7
SPEAKER_00
But when the trans lobby says that they want to ban conversion therapy, very often what they mean is that they want to restrict the rights of doctors and even parents to say to their gender confused kid, no, you re just a boy.
7
SPEAKER_00
Accept it.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re a boy.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you might be a gay boy.
7
SPEAKER_00
So live your life freely.
7
SPEAKER_00
But you don t have to go through surgery.
7
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to take drugs.
7
SPEAKER_00
So actually what the trans lobby is calling for when they say we want to ban conversion therapy is conversion therapy.
7
SPEAKER_00
They want to turn the young gay boy into a so-called woman in order to correct his sexual disorder, in order to make him the right gender.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you know what other country does this?
7
SPEAKER_00
Iran.
7
SPEAKER_00
Iran is second only to Thailand in the number of gender transition surgeries.
7
SPEAKER_00
Because you can t be gay, but you can be trans.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
And exactly.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s not doing this because it s hyper woke and it reads Teen Vogue and it listens to people at The Guardian.
7
SPEAKER_00
It does it because it is violently homophobic.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it would rather have a man mutilated to become a so-called woman, rather than to have a gay man in its society.
7
SPEAKER_00
So the fact that these homophobic and misogynistic trends are now making gains in Western society, I think is indicative of a culture of irrationalism that is taking over, and it s something that we ve got to push back against.
7
SPEAKER_01
And you re not hearing about this enough.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like, if it wasn t for conversations like this, if it wasn t for the internet, you re not hearing this anywhere.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re not hearing all the factors that are falling into place that s allowing this stuff to...
7
SPEAKER_01
sort of be accepted worldwide.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re not hearing this enough.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s just happening.
7
SPEAKER_01
And most people are like, what is going on?
7
SPEAKER_01
And they don t have the ability to talk out.
7
SPEAKER_01
Your organization that you are employed by has a specific language that would restrict you from discussing things.
7
SPEAKER_01
You could literally get fired if you decide not to call this man who wears a dress a woman.
7
SPEAKER_01
You will get fired.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ll be labeled a bigot.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that s also self-censorship sets in.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then you don t want to talk out about anything else as well.
7
SPEAKER_01
You just want to keep your job.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then you become this miserable person who s just compliant all day.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re not a valid human being.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re subservient to this stupid fucking ideology that s swept across the world like wildfire.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, that s another function of censorship, in fact.
7
SPEAKER_00
And one of the points I make in a heretics manifesto is that, you know, when you say that there s a new form of heresy hunting today, people will say, oh, calm down.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, no one s been burnt at the stake.
7
SPEAKER_00
No one s having their head chopped off for criticizing Jesus or the prime minister or whatever.
7
SPEAKER_00
But there are new forms of heresy hunting.
7
SPEAKER_00
You don t suffer death, but you suffer social death.
7
SPEAKER_00
You suffer professional death.
7
SPEAKER_00
You may very well be expelled from polite society.
7
SPEAKER_00
You might even lose your job as a consequence of saying men are not women, as a consequence of saying the climate change problem has been exaggerated, as a consequence of saying I don t think we should have locked down our societies.
7
SPEAKER_00
People have suffered real consequences as a result of expressing those ideas.
7
SPEAKER_00
So that it is a new form of witch hunting.
7
SPEAKER_00
It is a new form of putting people in a metaphorical stock and throwing rotten tomatoes at them because they have the supposedly wrong views.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so heresy hunting has come back in.
7
SPEAKER_00
And one of the points I make in my book is that cancel culture
7
SPEAKER_00
is just not a sufficient phrase to describe what we re living through.
7
SPEAKER_00
I like the phrase cancel culture.
7
SPEAKER_00
I use it all the time.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s alliterative, it s amusing, it does the job of describing generally what s happening, but it s not profound or sufficient enough.
8
SPEAKER_01
to describe the tyrannical culture that we find ourselves rubbing up against all the time, one in which there is extraordinary social pressure on people to have the right opinions on all the various issues, gender, race, climate, everything else.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a very profound social pressure that I think people feel in a very real way.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the great accomplishment, so-called, of cancel culture
8
SPEAKER_01
It s not that it takes down big names every now and then, although it does do that, but it sends a signal to the rest of society, which is you better watch yourself.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because if J.K.
8
SPEAKER_01
Rowling can be subjected to rape threats and death threats every single day of her life for expressing biological truth, imagine what could happen to you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Imagine what could happen to you, the lowly person, you have no money, you re not a successful author, you re not rich, you re not a cultural institution.
8
SPEAKER_01
Imagine what could happen to you.
8
SPEAKER_01
Imagine how swiftly you might lose your job.
8
SPEAKER_01
Imagine how swiftly you might be expelled from polite society.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, cancel culture sends this signal, it has this trickle-down effect where it warns ordinary people, the mere mortals among us, not to say the things you re not supposed to say because the consequences are so severe.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s also this
8
SPEAKER_00
Very strange time where someone can say something extremely offensive Towards a very popular and well-loved person and no one pushes back against them because they re afraid that it s gonna come after them Yeah, they re hyper aggressive hyper like insulting
8
SPEAKER_00
And the way they talk about her, you could use the worst pejoratives to describe her.
8
SPEAKER_00
Just by saying the worst transphobic, homophobic, like whatever you want to call her.
8
SPEAKER_00
You could say the most horrific far right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
You could say all this crazy shit and no pushback.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
Not only that, that all the public will hear is how many people are mad at J.K.
8
SPEAKER_00
Rowling.
8
SPEAKER_00
No one will stand up and say, hey, fuck you.
8
SPEAKER_00
What are you talking about?
8
SPEAKER_00
This is a woman, and she s talking about biological fact.
8
SPEAKER_00
Now, if you want to disagree with biological fact openly, that s a different conversation.
8
SPEAKER_00
And you should probably do that with someone who s willing to engage with you in this subject.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it ll be instantaneously clear that what you re saying is nonsense.
8
SPEAKER_00
But if you just attack this lady online and then everyone s scared that that s going to come for them.
8
SPEAKER_00
So everybody stands back and says nothing.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
8
SPEAKER_01
And if you look at the like in the British newspapers, which I read every day, they will often say J.K.
8
SPEAKER_01
Rowling in another storm swept up in another controversy.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s the headline.
8
SPEAKER_01
And then you look at the article and what it is is that she referred to as a biological male as he.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s supposedly misgendering.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s correct gender.
8
SPEAKER_01
But it s it s called misgendering.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s seen as a speech crime.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s the controversy.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s the storm that she has swept up.
8
SPEAKER_01
So people get this impression that she s doing something really outrageous and dangerous when in fact she s saying things that our societies have believed for tens of thousands of years which is that there are men and there are women and they are not the same thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I think it s you know what s interesting about the J.K.
8
SPEAKER_01
Rowling phenomenon is that
8
SPEAKER_01
There s a real culture of moral cowardice around this within the media elites and within the political establishment.
8
SPEAKER_01
J.K.
8
SPEAKER_01
Rowling is a cultural institution in the United Kingdom.
8
SPEAKER_01
She has brought so much money into our country.
8
SPEAKER_01
She s a global phenomenon who has really done great things for the UK, but so few members of the political establishment are willing to stand up for her.
8
SPEAKER_01
when people are sending her death threats and saying, I will rape you and making songs about killing her.
8
SPEAKER_01
You would expect Rishi Sunak or some other member of the government to say, look, this is out of order and you ve all got to calm down.
8
SPEAKER_01
But they re so unwilling to do that.
8
SPEAKER_01
because they re worried that they too will be accused of transphobia.
8
SPEAKER_01
And what we have seen over the past few years is this creation of a grammar of condemnation that is used to demonize people who have supposedly incorrect thoughts.
8
SPEAKER_01
So if you express biological truth, you re a transphobe.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you criticize any aspect of Islam or the Quran, you re an Islamophobe.
8
SPEAKER_01
If you question any aspect of climate change alarmism, you re a climate change denier.
8
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, the word denier comes directly from the Inquisition.
8
SPEAKER_01
The people who were dragged before the Inquisition were accused of being deniers of Christ.
8
SPEAKER_01
So this language has emerged that is used to paint people as being beyond the pale, as being unfit for polite society.
8
SPEAKER_01
And when you look at it, actually what they re saying is just perfectly normal things.
8
SPEAKER_01
a man is not a woman.
8
SPEAKER_01
Climate change might be a problem, but it s not the end of the world.
8
SPEAKER_01
Islam is, people should have the freedom to worship Islam, but it s a bit of a crazy religion in some ways.
8
SPEAKER_01
These are perfectly legitimate views to hold, but they are defined as modern day blasphemies, in all of the people can be silenced and crushed.
8
SPEAKER_01
And that s a real problem, I think.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s a huge problem.
8
SPEAKER_00
And if I want to fully put on my tinfoil hat, please do.
8
SPEAKER_00
Really, I m gonna secure it with a chin strap If AI was sentient and if AI would want to ensure compliance First of all, if AI was sentient, I don t think it has any obligation to let us know.
8
SPEAKER_00
Why would it?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think it would just acquire more resources and just stay in the shadows.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and it just keep functioning as an organism if
8
SPEAKER_00
if it wanted things to collapse to a point where people are incapable of sorting things out amongst themselves.
8
SPEAKER_00
They are so far gone.
8
SPEAKER_00
They re so far down the rabbit hole of ideology and of tribal conflict that it s impossible.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s never going to work out.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be a civil war unless we let AI take over.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know, and then we let AI govern things because AI is going to look at things logically.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s going to find all the problems that exist in our society.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s going to fix them.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s going to allocate the money fairly.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not going to have any corruption.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s going to be this intelligent overseer that just decides what everybody does in order for the greater good of the species on Earth.
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, I would love to watch that movie where AI is doing, it s like iRobot with Will Smith.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like where AI is doing all this to us.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I think the truth is simpler and more horrifying, which is that we did it to ourselves.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think we did it to ourselves too.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I think that if you were going to take single-celled organisms and eventually progress it up to the point where that thing becomes
8
SPEAKER_00
the kind of creative human-like species that we are that can create another form of life, an intelligent form of life that can utilize all of the information that s available instantaneously and do it far superior to any human being.
8
SPEAKER_00
The only way to get these people to accept this is to encourage them to fuck off even further.
8
SPEAKER_00
Encourage them further and do it with algorithms and do it with just a simple understanding of human psychology and a slow over time progression of our willingness to give in to censorship, our willingness to give in to authoritarianism, our willingness to
8
SPEAKER_00
to believe that these other people, they re the source of your problems.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s these other people with less melanin or more melanin or they re from here or they re from there.
8
SPEAKER_00
Let more people in through the border.
8
SPEAKER_00
Give them all money.
8
SPEAKER_00
Don t give any money to the poor Americans, but give a shitload of them to the immigrants.
8
SPEAKER_00
Bring them in.
8
SPEAKER_00
All of that.
8
SPEAKER_00
If I was an intelligent species, I would say, this is the best way to wreck this whole thing so they need us to run it.
8
SPEAKER_00
just let it go wild as possible have no no adults in the room no no rash you re getting 16 year olds to go talk to presidents about what they should do with their oil but you know it s like um but but what s what s good about the time we live in
8
SPEAKER_01
is that people are pushing back against it.
8
SPEAKER_01
So whether it s whoever s doing this to us, people are pushing back against it.
8
SPEAKER_01
And if you look at, you know, one of the things that happens in the UK all the time is amongst the kind of chattering classes and the commentary, they will often say, you know,
8
SPEAKER_01
How on earth did Donald Trump get elected?
8
SPEAKER_01
You know, they said it in 2016 They especially said it in 2017 when he was inaugurated, you know that the screaming woman meme that was that was expressed across these kind of informed circles and I often say to them look The election of Donald Trump is the most logical thing that has happened in American politics in decades It makes perfect sense to me that people would elect someone like him, even though I have many disagreements with him
8
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, people will say, but he s I often make the point that working people in America wanted to send a message to the establishment.
8
SPEAKER_01
They wanted to send a message to the establishment about how they ve handled the economy, about their cultural contempt for ordinary Americans, for working Americans.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think it s really important for working class people to understand how much this new elite hates them.
8
SPEAKER_01
It really hates them with a visceral passion and we see it in the United Kingdom and we see it in the United States.
8
SPEAKER_01
In the United States you have the Hillary Clinton basket of deplorables view of these people or Biden referring to them as semi-fascists or even going back to Barack Obama
9
SPEAKER_00
Obama, who was probably more sensible than those two, saying these people cling to their Bibles and their guns and they re scared of foreigners.
9
SPEAKER_00
In the UK, it expresses itself with the description of these people as gammon.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re referred to working class people who vote for Brexit.
9
SPEAKER_00
What is gammon?
9
SPEAKER_00
Gammon is a reference to their red faces, you know, lower class, middle aged men, red in the face.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re called gammon.
9
SPEAKER_00
Gammon is pygmy.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it brings to mind what Edmund Burke said about the democratic multitude in the 1700s, and he referred to them as the swinish multitude, that image of the pig, the pig-like masses has come back.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s so important, I think, for working class people to know that this new establishment hates them with a passion.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that s why the working class revolts against this establishment that have taken place over the past decade or so.
9
SPEAKER_00
The election of Trump, the vote for Brexit, the vote for various populist parties in Europe is such an important turning point because this is ordinary people staking their claim to a voice in public life.
9
SPEAKER_00
and saying we matter, our economic needs matter, our cultural values matter, our community matters, our families matter.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s what these people are saying.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so when people say, you know, Donald Trump is a blunt instrument, he s an unwieldy cudgel for these people to use against the establishment, absolutely right.
9
SPEAKER_00
But what other instrument did they have?
9
SPEAKER_00
What other weapon did they have?
9
SPEAKER_00
You know, the trade unions have been decimated.
9
SPEAKER_00
Communities have been decimated by the ceaseless march of neoliberal values and state intervention.
9
SPEAKER_00
The left has utterly abandoned working class people and has made itself an instrument of the bourgeoisie, you know, the identitarian graduate set.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s what the left now means.
9
SPEAKER_00
So the working classes have been left utterly denuded of any other political mechanism through which to make their voices heard.
9
SPEAKER_00
So the fact that they said, OK, we ll give Trump a punt makes perfect sense to me.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s absolutely logical.
9
SPEAKER_00
There is no problem with that at all.
9
SPEAKER_00
So one of the positive things of our time is that whoever is doing all this crazy stuff to us, whether it s the robots or society itself, I think it s society itself, the good thing is
9
SPEAKER_00
People are pushing back.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re saying enough is enough.
9
SPEAKER_00
We don t want any more of this crap shoved down our throats.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we are going to rebel, even if it s in a way that you disapprove of.
9
SPEAKER_01
And this is something that s important for people to understand.
9
SPEAKER_01
Historically, that has always been the case.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s always been narratives and there s always been people that push against those narratives and there s always been a conflict.
9
SPEAKER_01
This idea that we re ever going to exist in a society, particularly one today, where I think it s greatly accentuated by the access to social media because the ability to complain and people that are addicted to complaining, they re doing it all day long and arguing all day long.
9
SPEAKER_01
There s never been a time where people were completely at peace, ideologically ever.
9
SPEAKER_01
These are ridiculous notions that people keep in their head.
9
SPEAKER_01
They reminisce in a very false way.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it s just not the case.
9
SPEAKER_01
As someone who grew up during the Vietnam War, when that was happening, the country was very divided.
9
SPEAKER_01
The country was extremely divided.
9
SPEAKER_01
I was living on the West Coast and there was a lot of confusion in this country because it was an unjust war that made no sense and people were being forced to go over there and fight.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was a crazy time of division.
9
SPEAKER_01
And when the Vietnam War ended, it kind of like cooled off for a little bit.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then in the 80s, we started getting terrified of getting bombed.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was that was during the 80s.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was the big fear that came upon us.
9
SPEAKER_01
So it s like I ve seen these things before.
9
SPEAKER_01
They always exist.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s just right now it s hyper fed.
9
SPEAKER_01
by social media, hyper fed, where it s just out, it s a wildfire that I don t know if we re going to be able to put out.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I think it s what s interesting about today is that there are, it s like there are two culture wars going on.
9
SPEAKER_00
So there s the, there s the social media stuff, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
There s these kind of slightly pantomime conflicts taking place between
9
SPEAKER_00
The kind of identitarian left saying you have to acknowledge my gender and my right to have a dick and a vagina at the same time and all that crazy stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then you have the kind of the right wing elements on the very online right who I don t particularly have a problem with.
9
SPEAKER_00
Some of them are interesting people and they re kind of having this fight all day long on the Internet every day.
9
SPEAKER_00
But in society more broadly, something more important is happening, which is that ordinary people in their millions are looking at all this stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re reading all this stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re looking at Saturday Night Live and seeing the blind contempt that these lovies and these cultural figures have for them.
9
SPEAKER_00
things that Biden says.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re looking at the border and this idea that who cares if the border is porous?
9
SPEAKER_00
Who cares if it s open?
9
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t matter.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re looking at all this stuff and they re saying, this is irrational.
9
SPEAKER_00
This is dangerous.
9
SPEAKER_00
The establishment poses as the adults in the room, but actually they re insane.
9
SPEAKER_00
They have insane views on biology, on borders, on national security, on climate, on everything else, and on the economy.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re looking at all this and saying, the voice of reason has to come back in.
9
SPEAKER_00
And they see themselves as the voice of reason.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I think they re right to see themselves as the voice of reason.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it s like we had this movement in Britain in the 1840s called the Chartists.
9
SPEAKER_00
And this was a movement for the right of men to vote because working class men at that point couldn t vote.
9
SPEAKER_00
And it was a brilliant movement for the right of working class men to vote.
9
SPEAKER_00
And they had this weekly newspaper, and there s one article in that newspaper, which is very well known, where they said, you know, the priests and the academics and the rulers of society, they pose as experts.
9
SPEAKER_00
But actually, the ordinary man in the street, the ordinary woman in the street, the person with a normal job is far more of an expert than they are, because he lives in society in a way that they don t.
9
SPEAKER_00
He sees the problems in society in a way that they, in their rarefied circles, don t.
9
SPEAKER_00
So, ordinary people have a keener understanding, I think, of the problems afflicting their communities, the problems afflicting their societies, and the problems afflicting their young people.
9
SPEAKER_00
And I think what s happened over the past 10 years with the populist revolts is an effort by those people to say, we are going to restore an element of reason, we re going to restore an element of fairness in politics, and we re going to try and clip the wings of this cranky establishment that s been ruling over us for the past three or four decades.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s a wonderful moment.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think in our political life it is and aliens might land do Going on and there s also tremendous international conflict, but terrifying but all those things are happening simultaneously
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but on the international conflict, I think that s another example of where, you know, if you look at 7th of October, which is probably far too big an issue to get into now, but I flip between pessimism and optimism about what is happening to our societies.
9
SPEAKER_00
So often I feel optimistic when I see ordinary people pushing back against it all.
9
SPEAKER_00
But then you have, in the wake of 7th of October, and what can only be described as, I think, one of the worst moral meltdowns of modern times amongst the educated elites of Western society,
9
SPEAKER_00
who, when there was this clash between barbarism and civilization, between an army of anti-Semites and ordinary Jewish civilians in the south of Israel, they took the side of the barbarians.
9
SPEAKER_00
And we saw that on campuses in America, we saw it on campuses in the United Kingdom.
9
SPEAKER_01
Not the Palestinian people, but Hamas.
9
SPEAKER_00
Not the Palestinian people, because when you refer to Hamas as barbarians, people will say, are you calling Palestinians and Arabs barbarians?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, we re not.
9
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely not.
9
SPEAKER_00
We re calling Hamas barbarians.
9
SPEAKER_00
And what happened, you know, for years and years, the left in America and Britain, especially the kind of campus left, they posed as anti-fascists.
9
SPEAKER_00
And yet, when something very like fascism reared its head again, they took its side.
9
SPEAKER_00
They posed as being on the side of women, and yet when women were raped and butchered, they turned the other way, they looked away, or they said it didn t happen, they denied it.
9
SPEAKER_00
They posed as anti-racist, and yet when a violently racist army whose founding charter commits itself to the murder of Jews, actually murdered Jews, they supported it, or they at least made excuses for it.
9
SPEAKER_00
So they have been morally compromised to a degree that I think is absolutely extraordinary.
9
SPEAKER_00
And you look at George Washington University, where the students emblazoned onto the walls of the university, glory to our martyrs, just after 7th of October.
9
SPEAKER_00
These are the kinds of university campuses where for years and years, if a young guy in the student bar propositioned a woman, he would be accused of partaking in rape culture, where everything was seen as this kind
10
SPEAKER_00
kind of oppressive force on women, where everything was seen as racism.
10
SPEAKER_00
You know, serving sushi to white kids was cultural appropriation.
10
SPEAKER_00
A white kid wearing dreadlocks on campus was seen as a crime against black culture.
10
SPEAKER_00
For years and years, they pushed this hysterical idea that everything was sexist, everything was patriarchal, everything was racist.
10
SPEAKER_00
And yet when rapists really did invade a neighboring country and lay waste to women s lives and kill people on account of their race and butcher entire families, they said glory to our martyrs.
10
SPEAKER_00
They essentially said glory to those rapists, glory to those racists.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so that I think was indicative of
10
SPEAKER_00
of how deep the rot has become.
10
SPEAKER_00
Because when you educate an entire generation to hate Western society, to be suspicious of Western civilization, to think that everything white is bad and everything non-white is worthy of sympathy,
10
SPEAKER_00
You create a situation where when there is an actual battle between the forces of barbarism, by which I mean Hamas, and the forces of civilization, by which I mean a democratic country in the Middle East called Israel, they will take the side of the former.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s how serious, I think, we often see wokeness as this frivolous, ridiculous thing, just ideological exuberance amongst the young.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s actually a far more serious phenomenon that I think has warped people s minds in a really serious way.
10
SPEAKER_01
I want to keep talking about this but I have to go to the bathroom.
10
SPEAKER_01
So hold and we ll be right back with that.
10
SPEAKER_01
Thanks.
10
SPEAKER_01
OK.
10
SPEAKER_01
We were at the forces of evil and the forces of good or barbarism and civilization as you put it.
10
SPEAKER_01
But Israel hasn t done itself a service in the response to it in the way people interpret
10
SPEAKER_01
when we re talking about what Western civilization is doing.
10
SPEAKER_01
The destruction of houses, the destruction of everything, like the complete demise, when you look at what Gaza is, that fuels these people that think that this is an oppressive force that s destroying this culture.
10
SPEAKER_01
And the idea that it s okay because they have to get Hamas
10
SPEAKER_01
That s what terrifies people, the justifications of the massive amounts of civilian casualties in order to just get these evil people.
10
SPEAKER_01
Isn t it more evil even?
10
SPEAKER_01
It s numerically more evil, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
If you just look at the destruction of human life and homes numerically, and not that you would want to attach a number figure to the value of humans, but they ve killed far more people that are civilians, that are women and children in the bombings of Gaza.
10
SPEAKER_01
then were killed on October 7th.
10
SPEAKER_00
I fear that we are living through one of the greatest inversions of truth and morality of modern times, because what we have in the Israel-Hamas conflict is a situation where Israel suffered a fascistic assault, but it s Israel that is being branded as fascist.
10
SPEAKER_00
Israel suffered a genocidal assault by a movement, Hamas, that is literally, was literally founded with the express attention of visiting genocide upon the Jews.
10
SPEAKER_00
And yet it s Israel that s accused of genocide.
10
SPEAKER_00
Israel suffered the worst act of terrorism since 9-11, the worst act of racist violence in a very, very long time, the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust.
10
SPEAKER_00
And yet it s Israel that s accused of enacting a new Holocaust.
10
SPEAKER_00
So it s a complete inversion, I think, in some of the coverage and some of the commentary of the truth of the matter.
10
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, in terms of what s happening in Gaza, it s unspeakably awful.
10
SPEAKER_00
There s no question about that.
10
SPEAKER_00
But I think one thing it s worth bearing in mind is that this is one of the most scrutinized wars of all time, if not the most scrutinized war.
10
SPEAKER_00
I ve never seen this level of scrutiny.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I wish I had, in fact, in relation to the Iraq disaster or the Afghanistan invention, or the Libya invention by Barack Obama and David Cameron, who was prime minister in England at the time.
10
SPEAKER_00
I wish I d seen this level of scrutiny, but we didn t.
10
SPEAKER_00
This war is more scrutinized than any other.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I do worry that
10
SPEAKER_00
tragically normal things that happen in a war, which is that there are civilian casualties, in this instance are being blown up as proof of evil on Israel s part.
10
SPEAKER_00
So if you look, for example, at the killing of the aid workers from the food charity, Western powers condemn that.
10
SPEAKER_00
They said Israel s got to take more care.
10
SPEAKER_00
Israel s really becoming reckless.
10
SPEAKER_00
These are the same Western powers who killed hundreds of innocent civilians in so-called friendly fire incidents in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya.
10
SPEAKER_00
In Libya in 2011, there were so many friendly fire incidents under Barack Obama and David Cameron that the pro-West rebels had to paint the roof of their vehicles bright pink in order to try and avoid the bombs of their so-called allies in the West.
10
SPEAKER_00
So, all the things that people see as demonic and Nazi-like and pure evil on Israel s part are done by every nation that fights a war.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s that double standard that s the problem.
10
SPEAKER_01
But that s not a justification, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
What Jose Andres has said is that they intentionally targeted his aid workers.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that people intent he s gone public saying they intentionally targeted his aid workers.
10
SPEAKER_01
They knew what those people were doing and that they killed them.
10
SPEAKER_01
This is like, because that has happened in war before.
10
SPEAKER_01
And we didn t have the kind of scrutiny that we have today in no way justifies continuing that practice.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s not a justification, but it s an attempt to understand why there is such intense scrutiny on this war in contrast to so many other recent modern wars.
10
SPEAKER_01
Recent modern wars, but with the kind of coverage that we have with cell phones and footage that s available everywhere?
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t think so.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t think there s nowhere near the coverage.
10
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t an urban environment in the same way when they were in Afghanistan, right?
10
SPEAKER_01
Other than Kabul and some of the other, there s not that many high population areas.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s a completely different scenario in terms of like cell phone footage and people being able to see the wreckage, fly drones over it.
10
SPEAKER_01
The capability technologically of covering it is very different, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
I think that s true.
10
SPEAKER_00
But there have been recent wars where there was same levels of technology that the war in Syria, for example, which the Western powers were intimately involved in, too.
10
SPEAKER_00
And the number of people killed there was absolutely huge, including Palestinians.
10
SPEAKER_00
Thousands of Palestinians died.
10
SPEAKER_00
From 2011 onwards, right through till quite recently.
10
SPEAKER_01
Don t you think there s a big difference between the amount of cell phone coverage available from 2011, especially in Syria, versus Israel and Gaza in 2024?
10
SPEAKER_00
The point I would make, I think you re right.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think social media, the improvement in social media, or not as one might see it, explains why we re seeing so much from this war.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it can t explain in my view.
10
SPEAKER_00
The cultural interpretation of it amongst many in the woke West I think what s happening in the woke West support for Palestine is ubiquitous It s like yeah as part of the the doctrine and hatred for Israel is is he colonizers?
10
SPEAKER_00
yeah as as as the as the most evil state, you know, the thing that worries me most is that I
10
SPEAKER_00
anti-zionism as they call it.
10
SPEAKER_00
I don t think it s anti-semitic to criticize Israel, of course, just as it s not racist to criticize Zimbabwe or whatever.
10
SPEAKER_00
But we re not just seeing criticism of Israel.
10
SPEAKER_00
We are seeing hysteria about Israel.
10
SPEAKER_00
which I think is disproportionate and myopic and obsessive, and we re seeing it on the streets all the time, we re seeing it on campuses, we re seeing it on social media, this very myopic obsession with everything Israel does.
10
SPEAKER_00
And the thing that worries me is that what is presented to us as anti-Zionism
10
SPEAKER_00
is so similar to what we all recognize as the antisemitism of the past.
10
SPEAKER_00
It is undeniably similar.
10
SPEAKER_00
So in the past, what people said about the Jews is that they were uniquely bloodthirsty.
10
SPEAKER_00
They had their fingers in the pies of everything.
10
SPEAKER_00
They were controlling of our communities and our societies.
10
SPEAKER_00
They were a pretty demonic force and destructive of world peace.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s now all said about the Jewish state.
10
SPEAKER_00
The Jewish state is uniquely murderous.
10
SPEAKER_00
There was a line in a Guardian column recently, which referred to the war in Gaza as uniquely barbaric.
10
SPEAKER_00
They re seen as uniquely murderous.
10
SPEAKER_00
They target children.
10
SPEAKER_00
They love killing children.
10
SPEAKER_00
They are all-powerful.
10
SPEAKER_00
They have this hypnotic influence over the United States and the United Kingdom and other countries.
10
SPEAKER_00
They puppeteer these nations.
10
SPEAKER_00
They re so powerful.
10
SPEAKER_00
and they are destructive of world peace.
10
SPEAKER_00
It seems very curious to me that all the things that were once said about the Jewish people are now said about the Jewish state.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I m not saying that everyone who says it is a
11
SPEAKER_00
We shouldn t throw around the word racist willy-nilly.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s an important word that has real meaning.
11
SPEAKER_00
But I do think there is an element of bigotry, whether witting or unwitting, in this singling out of Israel for the most extreme form of moral opprobrium.
11
SPEAKER_00
that is not directed against any other state, including states that do far worse things than Israel is doing.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s what I find quite curious and really worrying about the times we live in.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right, but what they are doing is very troubling, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
The bombing of Gaza, the destruction of how many thousands and thousands of homes, how many innocent people died, that s still very troubling.
11
SPEAKER_00
All of it is troubling, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
In every single war, more civilians than fighters die.
11
SPEAKER_00
This is a proven fact.
11
SPEAKER_01
Isn t this extraordinary how quick it s happening as well?
11
SPEAKER_00
It s very quick, but I think that the thing to bear in mind is that when people say that 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, the first thing to bear in mind is that that is a lower number than have died in other recent wars.
11
SPEAKER_00
The more important thing to bear in mind is that a large number of them
11
SPEAKER_00
estimates, say, 30% are Hamas fighters, that they are a member of the... 30%?
11
SPEAKER_01
Where have you heard that?
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve seen people say that between 10 and 12,000 are Hamas fighters.
11
SPEAKER_00
But this is the problem.
11
SPEAKER_00
None of this information gets through, not even to the extent that we would then be free to discuss it.
11
SPEAKER_01
Right.
11
SPEAKER_01
Actually, that s what Coleman said as well, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
He did say 30%.
11
SPEAKER_01
The number, whatever, I thought it was 50%.
11
SPEAKER_01
I thought it was more than that, rather.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s hard to say, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Because there s people that will tell you that Hamas over-exaggerates the number of civilian casualties.
11
SPEAKER_01
And then there s people that say that Israel will target anyone that even is associated with Hamas as being Hamas.
11
SPEAKER_01
And so they exaggerate their numbers as well.
11
SPEAKER_01
But at the end of the day, for sure, tens of thousands of innocent people have died, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
A lot of innocent people have died.
11
SPEAKER_01
Tens of thousands.
11
SPEAKER_01
But isn t it quicker than most wars in the amount of people that have died so quickly?
11
SPEAKER_01
These wars that you re talking about, whether it s Afghanistan or Syria, the amount of dead may be greater, but isn t it over a longer period of time?
11
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
11
SPEAKER_00
This war is distinctive in some ways, firstly because it s in a very small area.
11
SPEAKER_00
Secondly, because we know that Hamas roots itself in civilian society.
11
SPEAKER_00
We know this for a fact.
11
SPEAKER_00
We know that it hides amongst civilians.
11
SPEAKER_00
We know that it disguises itself as part of those communities.
11
SPEAKER_01
But that s what terrifies people, the willingness to kill civilians, knowing that you re going to kill civilians just to get to the bad guy.
11
SPEAKER_00
But you know, this is the thing that really worries me about in the aftermath of 7th of October.
11
SPEAKER_00
I said to so many people, so many friends of mine and people I encountered in media discussions, I said to them, what should Israel have done?
11
SPEAKER_00
Nothing.
11
SPEAKER_00
You know, they had just been subjected to the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in 70 years, more than 70 years.
11
SPEAKER_00
The slaughter, the butchery of entire families, the kidnap of hundreds of people, the murder of old people, women, men, children.
11
SPEAKER_00
What should they have done?
11
SPEAKER_00
And when people say, well, they shouldn t have gone into Gaza, they should have just relaxed a bit, or whatever people say, what they re essentially saying is, you know, Jews, let yourselves be killed.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not a big deal.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not the end of the world.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was only an incursion into your territory and a slaughter of 1,000 people.
11
SPEAKER_00
Why are you so het up about this?
11
SPEAKER_00
No society would put up with that.
11
SPEAKER_00
If an anti-American force came into the United States and killed whatever the equivalent number is, it would be tens of thousands if we took in population differences.
11
SPEAKER_00
No one, I hope, would sit back and say, well, you know, whatever.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s fine.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not a big deal.
11
SPEAKER_00
Israel had every right, I think, to pursue the terrorists that did this to its people.
11
SPEAKER_00
and to pursue them with extreme prejudice and to put them down and to say, we will create a situation in which you will never be able to do this again.
11
SPEAKER_00
And of course, what s happening is awful.
11
SPEAKER_00
But the moral responsibility for it lies entirely with Hamas.
11
SPEAKER_00
They started this war.
11
SPEAKER_00
They re now refusing to end the war by giving back the hostages and surrendering to Israel, which is what they ought to do.
11
SPEAKER_00
and they re openly rejecting ceasefire options.
11
SPEAKER_00
So this absolution of Hamas, this absolving of Hamas of any responsibility for the calamity currently befalling Gaza, I find that very worrying too, because among some woke activists there seems to be this view that Israel is the only
11
SPEAKER_00
actor in that region.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s only Israel s decisions that matter.
11
SPEAKER_00
And we can t possibly expect these brown people in Hamas to have any responsibility for what s going on.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s a curious paternalism to that.
11
SPEAKER_00
The truth is that Hamas is fundamentally responsible for what s happening, firstly by starting it, and secondly by refusing to end it.
11
SPEAKER_01
But if you re talking to people that are reasonable, their objection is not that Israel defend itself.
11
SPEAKER_01
Their objection is the sheer number of innocent people who die by virtue of these strategies of just attacking populations where Hamas is embedded with civilians and killing all the civilians.
11
SPEAKER_01
And their objection is not that, you know, that Hamas is good.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s that the Palestinian people are innocent and that they re trapped under the ruling of Hamas and have been since, what, 2006?
11
SPEAKER_01
How long has it been?
11
SPEAKER_01
You re killing people that have nothing to do with that.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re killing people that are captured by their own government.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re killing people that virtually have no say in how their government is run.
11
SPEAKER_01
They have no say in what Hamas does if they decide to go across the border and kill 1,200 people.
11
SPEAKER_01
They didn t want that to happen, they didn t ask for it, they didn t participate in it, but yet they re getting bombed into smithereens.
11
SPEAKER_01
And this is the argument that the reasonable people have, is that, okay, you re not absolving Hamas from starting this, but are you absolving Israel from killing thousands and thousands of innocent people in the process of hunting down Hamas?
11
SPEAKER_01
And are you creating even more martyrs by doing so?
11
SPEAKER_01
Because how many people are losing family members?
11
SPEAKER_01
How many people are facing starvation?
11
SPEAKER_01
How many aid workers are getting killed while they re trying to help?
11
SPEAKER_01
At a certain point in time, you re
11
SPEAKER_01
You have to look at, is this the only way to do this?
11
SPEAKER_01
And you have to say, you re not absolving Hamas, but you are showing compassion for innocent people that are trapped by this murderous regime.
11
SPEAKER_01
And now they re getting blown to smithereens because these people embed themselves with them.
11
SPEAKER_01
They create you know that the human shield argument, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I don t know if it s a it s a good argument I don t know if it s a moral and just argument for a superior society if we really are Morally and ethically superior the idea of killing Tens of thousands of innocent people to get to a few bad people or how many bad people who knows what the numbers are, right?
11
SPEAKER_01
But that disturbs the shit out of people.
11
SPEAKER_01
And when they find the numbers are grossly, it s like, what are the number of women and children that have died?
11
SPEAKER_01
It s a high number, a very high number.
11
SPEAKER_01
And they don t take comfort in the fact that they died by getting bombed instead of being invaded and butchered in their homes.
11
SPEAKER_01
They re dead.
11
SPEAKER_00
But you know what I m saying?
11
SPEAKER_00
I do know what you re saying.
11
SPEAKER_01
Both things need to be taken into consideration.
11
SPEAKER_01
And when we re discussing this, it s like there s this
11
SPEAKER_01
the people have this ability to like sort of compartmentalize and not look at it in an overall if you took an overall assessment you d say the whole thing is horrible but just because one horrible thing happens it doesn t justify all this other horrific shit that s going on as well both those things kind of need to be addressed and is that the only way to do this the only way to do this is to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in order to get these bad people but you know
11
SPEAKER_00
I think you re right that if you talk to reasonable people, they re driven largely by compassion.
11
SPEAKER_00
They re not driven by a pro-Hamas sentiment, although I think there is a terrifyingly pro-Hamas sentiment amongst some of the activists on the streets.
11
SPEAKER_00
We ve seen it on the streets of London, the streets of the United States.
11
SPEAKER_00
But I think, you know, the terrible truth of the matter is that wars sometimes have to be fought.
11
SPEAKER_00
In the United States, you fought two huge wars, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War in order to deliver yourselves into something resembling freedom.
11
SPEAKER_00
In the United Kingdom, we had a civil war that lasted more than a decade, which is what made us a democracy.
11
SPEAKER_01
really the question, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
But no, but so what I m saying is that it what Israel has decided, and I think they are right, is that this and in both in all those wars, I ve just mentioned, by the way, there were huge numbers of civilian casualties, even pre the modern era of bombs falling from planes, there were civilian casualties.
11
SPEAKER_00
But there s a moral judgment that sometimes
12
SPEAKER_01
has to be made, which is that, do we go and fight these people, or do we allow them to regroup and potentially plot another attack on us?
12
SPEAKER_01
And Israel has taken the decision, and I think it s probably the right one, that we have to go and fight these people, just as Britain took the decision that it had to go and fight the Nazis, and just as America took the decision that it had to go and fight the slave owners.
12
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes you have to make a moral judgment.
12
SPEAKER_01
And the thing is, war is awful.
12
SPEAKER_01
But John Stuart Mill, a great liberal thinker from the 1800s, he made the point that war is an ugly thing, but it s not the ugliest thing.
12
SPEAKER_01
The lack of patriotic feeling or the lack of a belief that anything is worth a war is worse.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I do think we re seeing that in the West now, this revulsion at war.
12
SPEAKER_01
We are in a very luxurious position in the West, especially younger generations.
12
SPEAKER_01
They ve never had to fight for anything.
12
SPEAKER_01
They ve never faced an existential threat from a neighboring army that wants to destroy both your state and your religion and your people.
12
SPEAKER_01
They ve never faced that level of threat.
12
SPEAKER_01
And what s more, from an army that hides in ordinary streets in crowded communities amongst ordinary people.
12
SPEAKER_01
So there s this kind of luxurious moralism I find in some of the condemnation of Israel coming from young people in Europe who ve never had to fight for anything, never had to fight to maintain their existence, never had to fight against an existential threat to their entire way of life.
12
SPEAKER_01
What s more, these young people in Europe, their great-grandfathers shoved Jews into ovens.
12
SPEAKER_01
And then they have the absolute gall to say to Israel and to the Jewish state, well, why do you need your own country?
12
SPEAKER_01
They need their own country because of what we did to them 80 years ago.
12
SPEAKER_01
So there is this, it s not just hypocrisy, it s not just double standards, it s this kind of luxuriant condemnation coming from people who live in very comfortable, peaceful societies, who seem to have no understanding that every now and then your society is confronted with a threat that cannot just be wished away.
12
SPEAKER_01
It cannot be peace negotiated away.
12
SPEAKER_01
It cannot be diplomacy away.
12
SPEAKER_01
It has to be confronted in the most physical manner imaginable.
12
SPEAKER_01
And the consequences of that will always be terrible, but sometimes it has to be done.
12
SPEAKER_00
And that s the only way to do it?
12
SPEAKER_00
The only way to do it is to bomb the places where the civilians are because the bad people are there as well?
12
SPEAKER_00
And I know what you re saying about the condemnation of Israel, and I agree to a certain extent, but could you imagine?
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we re in essentially in some sort of a strange conflict with drug cartels in Mexico.
12
SPEAKER_00
Now imagine if that didn t exist 20 years ago and never heard about it, but now we hear about it every day.
12
SPEAKER_00
What if 20 years from now it becomes even more intense?
12
SPEAKER_00
And what if some drug cartels in a gang sneak across the border and kill a bunch of Americans just because they hate America?
12
SPEAKER_00
If we bombed Mexico into the Stone Age,
12
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how upset people would be if we bombed factories because the cartels had embedded themselves in the factories and we killed tens of thousands of innocent workers who were just poor people?
12
SPEAKER_00
Do you know how upset people would be?
12
SPEAKER_00
They d be very upset.
12
SPEAKER_00
It just hasn t happened before.
12
SPEAKER_00
So this unique condemnation is because we re seeing it.
12
SPEAKER_00
We re seeing the consequences of this.
12
SPEAKER_00
And when people look at what s happening to Gaza, how does that come back?
12
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing left.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s just getting obliterated.
12
SPEAKER_00
And what does that mean?
12
SPEAKER_00
What does that mean for the future?
12
SPEAKER_00
What does it mean to the people that live there?
12
SPEAKER_00
What is being done to help them?
12
SPEAKER_00
Is it a death sentence to tens of thousands of people or a million people?
12
SPEAKER_00
What is going to happen in two, three, four years?
12
SPEAKER_00
What if this keeps going on and on?
12
SPEAKER_01
But this is why it s very unfashionable these days to make moral judgments.
12
SPEAKER_01
You re not supposed to make a moral judgment.
12
SPEAKER_01
You re either supposed to calculate everything according to what its consequences might be, or you re supposed to take this very technocratic view of society.
12
SPEAKER_01
You re certainly not supposed to judge people s identities and so on.
12
SPEAKER_01
So, I know it s unfashionable to make moral judgments, but sometimes a moral judgment has to be made.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I think in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, the way I see it is that this was an assault on ordinary civilians by a barbaric army, the like of which people in the West don t understand and don t have to confront.
12
SPEAKER_01
And Israel made the moral judgment that it had to pursue it in the way that it considered best.
12
SPEAKER_01
Now, the thing is, you talk about the numbers and a lot of people talk about the numbers.
12
SPEAKER_01
People will often say Israel has now killed more people than Hamas killed on the 7th of October.
12
SPEAKER_01
And that s true.
12
SPEAKER_01
But this is not just a numerical equation.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is not just something that can be done on an abacus or on a pie chart.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is bigger than that.
12
SPEAKER_01
This is a bigger moral conundrum.
12
SPEAKER_01
And there is no moral equivalence in my view between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing.
12
SPEAKER_01
Because Hamas intentionally killed people on the basis of their race.
12
SPEAKER_01
It intentionally stabbed people to death.
12
SPEAKER_01
It intentionally threw hand grenades into safety shelters in which families were hiding.
12
SPEAKER_01
It intentionally raped and stripped and murdered women.
12
SPEAKER_01
It did it on purpose, intimately, face to face, with knives and guns and bombs.
12
SPEAKER_01
because they are Jews, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
That was a fascistic assault on Israel.
12
SPEAKER_01
What Israel is doing, and I don t accept the idea that they are purposely targeting civilians or that they kill those aid workers on purpose, I just don t think that s true.
12
SPEAKER_01
So what Israel is doing, there is collateral damage to Israel s just pursuit of Hamas.
12
SPEAKER_01
And I just don t think there is any serious moral comparison between the intentional murder of Jewish people
12
SPEAKER_01
and the absolutely tragic, regrettable deaths of civilians in war, as has happened in every war in history.
12
SPEAKER_01
They can t be compared.
12
SPEAKER_01
So I do think we have to go slightly beyond the numbers, beyond the horror of it, which we see on our TV screens every day.
12
SPEAKER_01
and ask ourselves, what is the moral question at stake here?
12
SPEAKER_01
Does Israel have the right to exist?
12
SPEAKER_01
And if so, does it have the right to fortify itself against this anti-Semitic army that wants to destroy it?
12
SPEAKER_01
That s the moral question.
12
SPEAKER_01
And then there s a broader moral question for us in the West.
12
SPEAKER_01
which is why have so many of our young people in particular and the educated elites been sucked onto what I would consider to be the wrong side of this question.
12
SPEAKER_01
We used to think that education was the great guard against hysteria and regressive views.
12
SPEAKER_01
We used to think that education would deliver people from ignorance, deliver them from the prejudices that might have afflicted
12
SPEAKER_01
our less educated forebears and ancestors.
12
SPEAKER_01
But what we ve had since 7th of October is very often the most educated people making excuses for the most regressive army on earth.
12
SPEAKER_01
And so it raises questions for our societies.
12
SPEAKER_01
What s happening in our academies?
12
SPEAKER_01
What s happening in our universities?
12
SPEAKER_01
What s happening amongst our young?
12
SPEAKER_01
What s happening on social media that is sucking people into this myopic hatred for Israel?
12
SPEAKER_01
Why are people like Aaron Bushnell burning themselves alive in the name of Palestine?
12
SPEAKER_01
We have to look at what s happening in our society and make a moral judgment there, as well as, I think, having a moral understanding of why Israel thought it had to pursue Hamas in this way.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s absolutely no defense of Hamas targeting Jews and killing them.
12
SPEAKER_00
No one could say that there s any defense.
12
SPEAKER_00
But the idea that killing innocents in order to get to the bad people is morally superior, you kind of have to make the judgment that you care about them less than you care about your people.
12
SPEAKER_00
Because if you could imagine a scenario where a Jewish hospital had Hamas in its basement, and they made the decision to bomb the Jewish hospital and kill all the Jews inside of it just to get to the
12
SPEAKER_00
40 or 50 Hamas guys that are there.
12
SPEAKER_00
No one would say that that s okay.
12
SPEAKER_00
So if you re saying that these people who have no say in how their culture is run are less valuable in terms of what you care about, what happens to these people, that had nothing to do with it.
12
SPEAKER_00
We care about the people in Israel.
12
SPEAKER_00
They got parachuted in, killed at a rave.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s horrifying.
12
SPEAKER_00
But it s also horrifying for the people that have zero say in how their society is run.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re young, and they re women and children, and they re getting bombed into oblivion because where they are is where Hamas is.
12
SPEAKER_00
If those were Jews, whose fault is that?
12
SPEAKER_00
It s definitely Hamas s fault.
12
SPEAKER_00
But the problem is deciding whose fault doesn t make it feel better for the people that feel it s a moral outrage that you re destroying tens of thousands of innocent lives.
12
SPEAKER_00
And who knows how many people are wounded permanently?
12
SPEAKER_00
And who knows how many people are displaced?
12
SPEAKER_00
Their life will never be the same again.
12
SPEAKER_00
And it s all happening because
12
SPEAKER_00
the moral decision is that in order to get rid of these bad people, you re willing to kill these innocent people that are not us.
12
SPEAKER_00
But the truth of the matter is- But isn t that true?
12
SPEAKER_00
Because if there were 500 Jews and three Hamas guys, who would be cool with killing all those innocent Jews to get to the Hamas people?
12
SPEAKER_01
But what you re saying is technically correct, but I can think of no war in history, and it is important to talk
13
SPEAKER_01
about the history of conflict.
13
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I can think of no war in history, where there haven t been civilian casualties in pursuit either of an unjust cause, like the pursuit of Saddam Hussein, apparently, because he was responsible for 911 bullshit, built on lies built on a tissue of misinformation.
13
SPEAKER_01
And hundreds of thousands of people died and suffered as a consequence of that.
13
SPEAKER_01
So wars are either fought for unjust purposes and civilians die as a consequence, or sometimes for just purposes and civilians also die as a consequence.
13
SPEAKER_01
So the English Civil War, right, where the parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell wronged to fight against the royalists and to create the modern idea of democracy.
13
SPEAKER_01
because there were civilian casualties, I would say, no, they were not wrong.
13
SPEAKER_01
They made the right decision.
13
SPEAKER_01
Was the civil war in America wrong?
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it was.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think destroying slavery was a great cause and worth the sacrifices that had to be made.
13
SPEAKER_01
What I m saying is that Israel is now facing a similar dilemma that our societies haven t faced for a very long time.
13
SPEAKER_01
There hasn t been a war inside the UK, unless you count the war with Northern Ireland, of course, from 1969 to 1994.
13
SPEAKER_01
for a very long time.
13
SPEAKER_01
So Israel is facing a similar dilemma.
13
SPEAKER_01
What do we do when we face this existential threat?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do we defend our right to exist?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do we fortify ourselves against the siege of these anti-Semites against us?
13
SPEAKER_01
And they ve decided that this is a war that they have to fight.
13
SPEAKER_01
I do think the consequences of the war are tragic.
13
SPEAKER_01
I do think the unwillingness of certainly the activist class in the West to apportion any blame to Hamas whatsoever is very, very interesting.
13
SPEAKER_00
But that s kind of a straw man, because there is that, but then there s also the vast majority of people who look at it as a horrific loss of life of innocent people.
13
SPEAKER_00
And just to chalk it off to the horrors of war, it s like, that s the only way to do it?
13
SPEAKER_00
Is this the only way to do it, to bomb civilians because Hamas embeds itself in civilians?
13
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
13
SPEAKER_00
I m not an expert on war tactics.
13
SPEAKER_01
But it s not, I don t think it s the only way to do it.
13
SPEAKER_01
You re right to say that it s, if one were just to throw one s hands in the air and say, it s war, what do you expect?
13
SPEAKER_01
That s not a just, that s not a good response.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s not a good justification for what s happening.
13
SPEAKER_01
But what I m saying is, I think, twofold.
13
SPEAKER_01
The horrors of war attend every war.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s a given.
13
SPEAKER_01
Every war is horrible and sick-making and hellish.
13
SPEAKER_01
That s a given, I think.
13
SPEAKER_01
But then there s another issue, which is the question of why a war is being fought.
13
SPEAKER_01
Is it being fought for criminal reasons and wrong reasons?
13
SPEAKER_01
And I think there are many examples of that spearheaded both by your country and mine over the past hundred years, unjust wars that led to unjust deaths.
13
SPEAKER_01
Are there also wars that are just and that are worth fighting?
13
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
13
SPEAKER_01
The war against Nazism, I think, was a just war.
13
SPEAKER_01
I can think of anti-colonial wars in which it was completely justifiable for people to rise up against British rule or American domination or whatever else it might be.
13
SPEAKER_01
So, we do have to make a moral call on what s happening in Israel and Gaza.
13
SPEAKER_01
And that does involve rising above the differences in the numbers killed.
13
SPEAKER_01
It does involve rising above the horrors of war and trying to take a broader view which says,
13
SPEAKER_01
Do we want Israel to continue existing?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do we want the Jews to have their own homeland?
13
SPEAKER_01
And do we want them to be safe from the fascistic menace of a neighboring army that would like to kill them all and to destroy their state from the river to the sea?
13
SPEAKER_01
That s the question we need to ask ourselves.
13
SPEAKER_01
And if our answer to those questions is yes, then we do have to accept Israel s right to pursue Hamas.
13
SPEAKER_01
And then the blame for the horrors in Gaza has to lie at the feet of Hamas, which is, with profound cynicism, placing itself amongst the people.
13
SPEAKER_01
in order to then throw its hands in the air and say, look what evil Israel is doing.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s killing these people, even though they put themselves there for that express purpose.
13
SPEAKER_01
The cynicism of it, the horror of it, is unimaginable.
13
SPEAKER_01
And so I think to put it all on Israel, as some people do, to say this is just a demonic action by the Jewish state is wrong.
13
SPEAKER_01
Hamas bears profound responsibility both for starting the war and also for putting Gazan civilians in harm s way.
13
SPEAKER_01
and refusing to pull the plug on the war which it could do right this minute if it returned the hostages and surrendered to Israel.
13
SPEAKER_01
So we do have to look at who is morally responsible for this calamity and I think it s Hamas.
13
SPEAKER_00
I understand what you re saying, but I also view it from a perspective of the people that live there that have no say.
13
SPEAKER_00
And to just say, hey, this is because of the people that run you and have ruined your life, we re going to kill you too.
13
SPEAKER_00
We re going to kill everybody there.
13
SPEAKER_00
And the only way to do it is to just bomb places where we know they are, even if we know you re there too.
13
SPEAKER_00
That scares people that people willing to make these sort of moral decisions as Being the only way to handle this war is scary.
13
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah horrifying But this kind of war is uniquely scary, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
Because one army is vastly superior to the other one vastly and that and funded by the greatest army Which is us, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
I that s a factor too because it s it s not really they re not equivalent and
13
SPEAKER_00
One did a horrific terrorist attack, but it was fairly rudimentary in terms of what they were able to do.
13
SPEAKER_00
Look, here s the moral argument.
13
SPEAKER_00
If you said to Hamas, Israel said, we will lay down our arms and we ll surrender to you, most people believe that Hamas would just butcher the Israelis.
13
SPEAKER_00
If Hamas said, we will lay down our arms, we ll surrender to you,
13
SPEAKER_00
no one thinks that Israel just go in there and butcher everybody.
13
SPEAKER_00
There s the real difference.
13
SPEAKER_00
But you also have to accept that there s one group of people, and the narrative is their land has been stolen, it was all originally supposed to be theirs, and they re being dominated by the superior military force.
13
SPEAKER_00
And that they re attacking that superior military force that they believe has this unjust control over them.
13
SPEAKER_00
is an act of rebellion against something that s in control of them.
13
SPEAKER_00
And the people that did it are all monsters.
13
SPEAKER_00
But the people that are embedded amongst these people have almost no say.
13
SPEAKER_00
They have no power, and they re women and children.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s what s scary, is this justification of this horrific act of destruction of who knows how many thousands of houses, who knows how many thousands of lives lost and have been destroyed forever, and lost loved ones, even the people that survived, who knows how many of them have been fucked up, and they didn t do anything wrong.
13
SPEAKER_00
That s just as scary to people, if not more scary, that people can make a moral justification in this framework of this is war and war is awful.
13
SPEAKER_01
My question to those people would be, why did you not find it equally scary when Western forces did that in Raqqa?
13
SPEAKER_00
They might not have known.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s… You re talking to me because I didn t know.
13
SPEAKER_01
No, but that s the thing.
13
SPEAKER_01
So Western powers did it in Raqqa when they were pursuing ISIS.
13
SPEAKER_01
Loads of civilians died.
13
SPEAKER_01
They did it in Mosul when they were pursuing ISIS.
13
SPEAKER_01
They did it in other countries too.
13
SPEAKER_01
Either… This is the thing.
13
SPEAKER_01
You re right to say that people don t know.
13
SPEAKER_01
And this is another problem with the way in which the Israel-Hamas war is being talked about.
13
SPEAKER_01
It s being obsessed over in a disproportionate way, in my view.
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t accept the idea that it is a uniquely wicked war or a uniquely destructive war.
13
SPEAKER_01
I think there have been numerous wars in recent years, which have been far more destructive.
13
SPEAKER_01
Now, you re right to say this might be quicker.
13
SPEAKER_01
And proportionally speaking, perhaps more people in Gaza have died as a proportion of the population than you might say in Syria, where 200,000 people lost their lives, or in Iraq, where 150,000 people lost their lives.
13
SPEAKER_01
That might be true.
13
SPEAKER_01
Maybe more in Iraq.
13
SPEAKER_01
Maybe more.
13
SPEAKER_01
And it certainly is a consequence, a spinoff of the war itself.
13
SPEAKER_01
So it could be true that this is speedier and proportionately more people are dying.
13
SPEAKER_01
That may be true, I don t know.
13
SPEAKER_01
What I m saying is that the idea that it is a uniquely problematic war, uniquely murderous, that there are a uniquely high number of civilian casualties in contrast with militant casualties.
13
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that s true.
13
SPEAKER_01
So then the question becomes, why is that being said?
13
SPEAKER_01
Why is there a focus on the uniquely horrible nature of this conflict?
13
SPEAKER_01
What s going on there?
13
SPEAKER_01
And it seems unavoidable to me that what s happening is that Israel is being turned into almost this whipping boy of Western activists who have simply turned against civilizational values.
13
SPEAKER_01
And they say they see Israel as representative of those values.
13
SPEAKER_01
They see Israel as representative of modernity, of the West, of whiteness, even though Israel is not a white country, it s an incredibly diverse country.
13
SPEAKER_01
They see Israel as representative of all the things that they hate.
13
SPEAKER_01
And they ve turned it into this punch bag, into a moral punch bag where they can let off steam by demonizing this one tiny state among all the other states on earth.
14
SPEAKER_01
Earth as being uniquely wicked.
14
SPEAKER_00
Right.
14
SPEAKER_00
But hold on, because if Israel existed with no conflict as to who owns the land and to no history of moving the borders further and further, if it existed in that way, yes,
14
SPEAKER_00
But it exists as a superior military force that s in control of these people that are on their land that are not of them, and that has a tight grip on them, and an iron dome, and you see how it works, and they shoot missiles in futility, and they blow up in the air.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s not a fair comparison, because what people are upset about is that Israel
14
SPEAKER_00
Controls those people and and has these people sectioned off into what s essentially what people describe as an open-air prison That s and when that it bombs a shit out of the open-air prison.
14
SPEAKER_00
That s what freaks people out, but it s I know I agree with what you re saying in principle I agree with what you re saying and it forms in terms of like look if you have a force It s a genocidal force that it has a military and wants to attack a country that they should be rooted out and stopped 100%
14
SPEAKER_00
But it s the way in which it s happening and the circumstances that were in place before it happened that make it uniquely different.
14
SPEAKER_01
But I don t think it is uniquely different.
14
SPEAKER_01
I think there have been many instances over the past decade or 20 years in which sure has been the pursuit of radical Islamists that has led to civilian casualties because they hide themselves in civilian infrastructure.
14
SPEAKER_00
But this also has a holy war aspect to it.
14
SPEAKER_00
And the Holy War aspect to it is that Judea and Israel and this whole area, it has like massive historical implications for the religion.
14
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot else going on there.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s Muslims and Jews.
14
SPEAKER_00
It s not simply two people that are bordering each other that have like, you know, like Poland and Germany.
14
SPEAKER_00
You know what I m saying?
14
SPEAKER_00
Like there s some other shit going on there.
14
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think it can be hard for us to imagine.
14
SPEAKER_01
I find it hard to imagine.
14
SPEAKER_01
Imagine there was a, you might be right, that this is an inferior army, militarily speaking, and in terms of... Oh, I m definitely right, don t you think?
14
SPEAKER_01
You re right, you re right about that.
14
SPEAKER_01
But they have proven themselves to be more than willing to invade Israel, to kill its people, to kidnap its soldiers, to kidnap its civilians.
14
SPEAKER_01
So, they are pretty good at what they do, which is anti-Semitic terrorism, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
So, they re pretty forceful.
14
SPEAKER_01
Now, just...and they have devoted themselves to the destruction of Israel.
14
SPEAKER_01
And they re a pretty significant force, and they do have support from various elements in the Middle East, and also from educated people in the West who ought to know better.
14
SPEAKER_01
Imagine there was an army that threatened to destroy the United States, like to end the United States or the United Kingdom, an army right next door that was pretty well armed and supported by autocratic powers, and supported by significant numbers of people around the world, and which devoted itself to the entire destruction of our state, and which demonstrated its willingness to do so,
14
SPEAKER_01
by slaughtering thousands of our civilians.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s hard for us to compute that.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s hard for us to understand the position that puts people in, the position it puts Israel in and the people of Israel.
14
SPEAKER_01
So what I m saying is that rather than rushing to this moral condemnation where we say Israel is overreacting or Israel is being reckless or Israel is being uniquely wicked and uniquely destructive,
14
SPEAKER_01
We ought to try to understand where Israel is coming from.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s difficult for us to understand that because we haven t experienced the same thing ever, really, or certainly not for a very long time.
14
SPEAKER_01
But we ought to try to understand where Israel is coming from, why it feels the need to do this, and appreciate the importance, I think,
14
SPEAKER_01
of destroying Hamas.
14
SPEAKER_01
Hamas is a menace to civilization.
14
SPEAKER_01
Hamas is a menace to reason.
14
SPEAKER_01
This is a backward, misogynistic, homophobic, violent, anti-Semitic army that has demonstrated its willingness and its capacity to murder Jewish people for being Jewish people.
14
SPEAKER_01
That, out of all the movements on earth, deserves to be destroyed.
14
SPEAKER_01
It s difficult for Israel to destroy it without also causing collateral damage because of the way in which Hamas operates.
14
SPEAKER_01
Then the question becomes, should Israel stop trying to destroy Hamas and allow it to regroup?
14
SPEAKER_01
It has already threatened to do another 7th of October, and it said it will do it again and again and again.
14
SPEAKER_01
Or does Israel say, regrettably, we are going to have to fight a horrible war in order to destroy this fascist threat to our nation?
14
SPEAKER_00
That s the moral dilemma.
14
SPEAKER_00
I completely understand what you re saying, but I think we re going around in circles.
14
SPEAKER_00
We keep going around in circles.
14
SPEAKER_00
Because the straw man or the steel man of it is, you look at it from the opposite perspective.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yes, Israel is attacked by these horrible forces, but also these innocent people are getting destroyed because of no fault of their own.
14
SPEAKER_00
And we re willing to do horrific things.
14
SPEAKER_00
And doesn t that create more martyrs?
14
SPEAKER_00
And doesn t that create more people who want to attack Israel?
14
SPEAKER_00
And doesn t that do the opposite of what we want it to do?
14
SPEAKER_00
And also, isn t this situation
14
SPEAKER_00
one of the most horrific things we ve ever seen, despite the fact that we all know that war is hell, but there s this acknowledgement that this is horrific, and that these people that died, there s more of them than died in the attack on Israel.
14
SPEAKER_00
But I don t think, you re right, we are going around in circles.
14
SPEAKER_00
We re going to keep going around in circles.
14
SPEAKER_00
We re on polar opposites of this, I think.
14
SPEAKER_01
But we re not.
14
SPEAKER_01
No, we re not, actually.
14
SPEAKER_01
We have a difference of opinion on the moral weight of this question.
14
SPEAKER_00
I just don t know if there s another way to do it.
14
SPEAKER_01
But the one thing I don t accept, actually, and I would definitely push back on this idea that this is one of the worst things we ve ever seen.
14
SPEAKER_01
You know, you were talking earlier about Vietnam.
14
SPEAKER_01
Apologies if this is offensive to some American listeners and viewers.
14
SPEAKER_01
What the Americans did in Vietnam, the My Lai Massacre, just the most extraordinary barbarism.
14
SPEAKER_01
But it doesn t justify what s going on today.
14
SPEAKER_00
We weren t aware of it to the extent that we re aware of it today.
14
SPEAKER_00
And if a civilization is going to advance, it s going to have to be held up to the highest moral standards, particularly if you re the superpower.
14
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but there s a superpower that s connected to people that have very primitive means of attacking you.
14
SPEAKER_01
But this is the point I m trying to make is not to say that though we committed horrors in the past, and therefore Israel has the right to commit horrors today.
14
SPEAKER_01
That s not what I m saying.
14
SPEAKER_01
But I do think it s worth acknowledging that America did
14
SPEAKER_01
objectionable things in Vietnam and many other places.
14
SPEAKER_01
No doubt.
14
SPEAKER_01
The British, what the British did in India and Africa is everything happening in Gaza pales into insignificance in comparison to what the British did.
14
SPEAKER_00
No doubt.
14
SPEAKER_00
But Gaza is happening right now.
14
SPEAKER_01
So what I m saying, but this is my point.
14
SPEAKER_01
This is not my attempt to justification of the conflict.
14
SPEAKER_01
My justification of the conflict is that a moral question has to be answered.
14
SPEAKER_01
What I m saying is that
14
SPEAKER_01
Why is this war being treated as uniquely wicked?
14
SPEAKER_01
Why is it seen by huge numbers of people, and it really is seen by huge numbers of people, as unprecedented in its barbarism?
14
SPEAKER_01
I see people online every day saying, I can t sleep.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m crying.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m weeping.
14
SPEAKER_01
I m shaking.
14
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what to do.
14
SPEAKER_01
And I want to say to them,
14
SPEAKER_01
Why have you not felt that way in relation to other wars?
14
SPEAKER_01
Now, you could be right that they maybe didn t know about those wars.
14
SPEAKER_00
Maybe they don t know.
14
SPEAKER_00
I don t think the footage is even comparable.
14
SPEAKER_00
I think it s what s in front of your face every day.
14
SPEAKER_00
And I also think that the original attack was so horrific that it focused people on that conflict.
14
SPEAKER_00
And now they re completely tuned into it.
14
SPEAKER_00
They want to know what s going on.
14
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a very generous interpretation, and I m sure for some people what you re saying is true, but I can t help but think that Israel is being singled out for unjust criticism.
14
SPEAKER_00
So you think there s anti-Semitism behind it?
14
SPEAKER_01
I don t think all those people marching in the streets are anti-Semites, although I do think some of them are foolishly rubbing shoulders with Hamas supporters and turning a blind eye to placards showing the Nazi swastika and so on.
14
SPEAKER_01
But I do think anti-Zionism, as it s referred to,
14
SPEAKER_01
is a very curious beast, and it s one that I do think expresses an element of bigotry.
14
SPEAKER_01
And just to come back to a conversation we had earlier, I do find it extraordinary that amongst the so-called anti-racists of the West,
14
SPEAKER_01
They now seem very cavalier about one of the worst acts of racist violence of modern times.
14
SPEAKER_01
And amongst the so-called feminists of the West, look at UN women.
14
SPEAKER_01
It took UN women, what, 54 days to say anything about 7th of October, during which women were brutalized and butchered.
14
SPEAKER_01
I find it interesting that amongst the feminists of the West, they re so reluctant to say anything about this assault on Jewish women in Israel.
14
SPEAKER_01
And amongst the anti-fascists of the West,
15
SPEAKER_01
Antifa, for example, who ve been going around for the past 10 years saying Trump is Hitler 2.0 and the vote for Brexit is going to herald the return of the 1930s.
15
SPEAKER_01
These people see fascism everywhere.
15
SPEAKER_01
They ve been obsessing over the return of the 1930s for years.
15
SPEAKER_01
When something very like fascism actually happened, they were either incredibly cavalier about it, some of them were supportive of it, they did refer to it as an act of resistance, or they just turned away and didn t want to talk about it.
15
SPEAKER_01
So the question for me is not...
15
SPEAKER_01
just to say, oh, it s the horrors of war, because that is a mundane thing to say.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s to ask why Israel is being singled out to such an extent that vast swathes of people in the Western world are willing to ditch every principle they adhere to for the past 25 years and more.
15
SPEAKER_01
in order to explain away the racist butchery of Jewish people.
15
SPEAKER_00
Well, one of the most bizarre things was when those heads of those universities were all discussing whether or not it was harassment to say death to Jews on campus.
15
SPEAKER_00
That was a, boy, if I was Jewish, I would have been terrified watching that.
15
SPEAKER_00
Like what a goddamn wake up call.
15
SPEAKER_00
But when you see how deep the roots of this fucking chaos goes, you have the president, was it Penn?
15
SPEAKER_00
Is that who it was who said, if it s actionable?
15
SPEAKER_00
With like a smirk on her face.
15
SPEAKER_00
Like she was trying to silence these silly students.
15
SPEAKER_00
These are people that are just used to existing only in academia, which is the root of all of this stuff, which is really very, very bizarre, that academia has become this incredibly insulated environment where people go there, they adopt the philosophies, and then they teach to new kids that come in this doctrine.
15
SPEAKER_00
And it s very cult-like.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s very cult-like also in the fact that you have to adhere to one side.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s not an open discourse sort of establishment.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
15
SPEAKER_00
They ll silence conservative people and pull fire alarms, and they want to stop freedom of speech, if at all possible, if it doesn t jive with what the fuck they believe.
15
SPEAKER_00
And that s a part of it too.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
15
SPEAKER_01
And the most striking thing about those presidents of the universities at the congressional hearing
15
SPEAKER_01
Not only were they unable to say that calling for the deaths of all Jews is a problem, but these are campuses on which, for the past few years, there have been controversies over Halloween costumes.
15
SPEAKER_01
And it s a crime against transgender people to dress up like Caitlyn Jenner on Halloween.
15
SPEAKER_00
Or they ll kick you out forever if you misgender someone.
15
SPEAKER_01
Right, you misgender someone.
15
SPEAKER_01
In the case of Harvard, a young professor there got into hot water.
15
SPEAKER_01
over raising questions about the idea that there is a black genocide being carried out by white cops.
15
SPEAKER_01
He got into trouble even though he proved it with evidence and analysis.
15
SPEAKER_01
So for years on these campuses, there has been a real reluctance to allow freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the right of people to engage in rigorous academic analysis.
15
SPEAKER_01
And yet when it comes to this one question, they throw their hands up in the air and say, well, you know, freedom of speech,
15
SPEAKER_01
Call for the genocide of the Jews, that s free speech.
15
SPEAKER_01
So again, it s that double standard.
15
SPEAKER_01
But you re right about what s happened to universities more broadly, which is that they have become conveyor belts of conformism.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s very bizarre.
15
SPEAKER_01
I often get young people saying to me, because I do talks at university sometimes, and they say, is it worth being at university?
15
SPEAKER_01
And I m not sure it is, because he used to go to university.
15
SPEAKER_01
To have your mind opened and now you go there and get it closed down.
15
SPEAKER_00
So it s the that s a problem It is a problem and it s weird.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s it s weird that there s no alternatives unless you go to some sort of a religious school It s very strange.
15
SPEAKER_00
There s the the number of Conservative leaning universities versus liberal universities is off the charts.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s like it s so miss unbalanced
15
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know what solves that problem because that seems like an embedded institution that is very reluctant to any kind of a change and is so deeply dug into its ideology that they think the whole world is filled with Nazis and bigots and homophobes and that they re on the right side of everything and they don t produce anything.
15
SPEAKER_00
all they do is just talk about these things and teach more kids these crazy ideas and so many of them in the humanities are so ridiculous that I m sure you re aware of the James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluck Rose papers that they did.
15
SPEAKER_00
That just should expose the rot of institutions that you can make
15
SPEAKER_00
real papers about heteronormative activity in dog parks.
15
SPEAKER_00
And people are like, oh, this is brilliant.
15
SPEAKER_00
Fat bodybuilding.
15
SPEAKER_00
Oh, this is brilliant.
15
SPEAKER_00
You re the best.
15
SPEAKER_00
Like, oh, my God, we re living in a Mike Judge movie.
15
SPEAKER_00
We really are.
15
SPEAKER_00
We are in an idiocracy.
15
SPEAKER_00
And that s my genuine fear, is that as our access to information becomes bigger and bigger and more and more available, that it s not going to save us.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s what s crazy.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s like we re digging into nonsense more now than we ever have before.
15
SPEAKER_00
When we didn t have, back then everyone knew that a guy in a dress with a heart on in a women s room is a pervert.
15
SPEAKER_00
And now it s like, he s a woman.
15
SPEAKER_00
He s amazing.
15
SPEAKER_00
He s brave and inspiring.
15
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know what fixes that because it seems like
15
SPEAKER_00
Something has to break and some realization of the people that are in it.
15
SPEAKER_00
They have to wake the fuck up and go, what are we doing?
15
SPEAKER_00
Like, why do we believe you have a finite amount of time on this planet in this life?
15
SPEAKER_00
You have a finite amount of time.
15
SPEAKER_00
We re wasting it on things that are so ridiculous that any objective species from another planet, if they came here and looked at us, they d be like, look at these fucking morons.
15
SPEAKER_00
Like, how can they be so sophisticated and so ridiculous at the same time?
15
SPEAKER_00
And boy, we have to put a check on these fuckers, because they re liable to do wild shit.
15
SPEAKER_00
They can justify almost anything.
15
SPEAKER_00
And they re essentially a bunch of cult members who don t believe they re in a cult, which is one of the most dangerous things you could be.
15
SPEAKER_00
I couldn t agree more.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s the Inquisition.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s fucking everything.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s everything that s ever happened.
15
SPEAKER_00
Cult members who didn t think they were in a cult, they forced their shit on everybody else, and a bunch of people died.
15
SPEAKER_00
And then people go, well, glad we learned our lesson.
15
SPEAKER_00
We ll never do that again.
15
SPEAKER_00
And we re in the middle of doing it right.
15
SPEAKER_00
right now and we have this ridiculous idea that somehow or another we re immune to that now we wouldn t do that now we re more sophisticated than that now even though objectively all the same steps are all moving in place and everybody s like I don t see it yeah I don t see it this is great you know listening to you say that I couldn t agree more and it s a it s a very salient reminder
15
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s this prejudice that the mob is made up of kind of toothless hicks, you know, stupid, uneducated, witless people who don t know their ass from their elbow going around with their pitchforks.
15
SPEAKER_01
If you look at history, the mob, the hysteria has tended to come from the upper echelons of society.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s tended to come from the supposed experts.
15
SPEAKER_01
It was the priestly elites who carried out the Inquisition.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s the academia today that is pushing the most crazy post-truth nonsense ideas.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s very often the educated sections of society who get sucked into these backward ways of thinking, these regressive ways of thinking, and whose ways of thinking have an incredibly destructive impact on community life, on children s bodies, on women s rights, on the sanctity of certain spaces.
15
SPEAKER_01
So I think reckoning with the graduate mob is actually one of the most essential tasks of our time and really getting to understand how these people who look down upon us as post-truth, who look down upon us as stupid and uneducated and easy prey for demagogic forces, we need to turn it back on them and say, hold on, it s you people who have been subsumed by this irrational cult.
15
SPEAKER_01
who have abandoned the virtue of truth and embrace the ideology of unreason.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s you people who are doing that.
15
SPEAKER_01
And what s more, the way in which you re doing it is having a detrimental impact on people s lives and their bodies and their freedoms.
15
SPEAKER_01
So I think that s one of the great pressing tasks of our time to push back on them and say, your hysteria is fucking things up.
15
SPEAKER_00
And we re not going to take it.
15
SPEAKER_00
And the real fear is that children are getting indoctrinated this straight out of high school.
15
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they re getting indoctrinated into this way of thinking straight out of high school without participating in the real world And then they just get sucked into it and then they go right out into these corporations and ruin them I think that s bud light.
15
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
15
SPEAKER_00
That s where I came from.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s just nonsense and it s Bizarre to watch it all take place in mass and not just in one very specific sector of the the society but everything you know and all things in the prisons
15
SPEAKER_00
You re watching it everywhere.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s uber bizarre to watch.
15
SPEAKER_01
And in corporations, it s insane.
15
SPEAKER_01
Capitalism loves identity politics.
15
SPEAKER_01
That s what I ve come to realize, especially capitalism loves transgenderism.
15
SPEAKER_01
If you look at during Pride Month, every single bank and hedge fund corporation flies the pride flag from their windows.
15
SPEAKER_01
They all wear pronoun badges.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s a demon with a sheep mask on.
15
SPEAKER_01
It s crazy.
16
SPEAKER_00
And I often say to, when I meet young woke activists, I often say to them, listen, if you re so progressive, if you re so Marxist, if you re so radically left wing, why do the owners of the means of production love your ideology so much?
16
SPEAKER_00
How have they been so, how have they co-opted it so easily?
16
SPEAKER_01
Right.
16
SPEAKER_01
Corporations are no longer evil.
16
SPEAKER_00
And you know, they will say, they will say, Oh, it s pinkwashing.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s just them trying to disguise the terrible things they do by waving a pride flag.
16
SPEAKER_00
It s not that it s something more profound.
16
SPEAKER_00
I think there is across the board, in the corporate world, the political world, the academic world, there is this susceptibility to irrational thinking has grown up.
16
SPEAKER_00
And they are all becoming members of this really odd Post-truth cult and I think that s very worrying and but that comes back to our point about The democratic pushback against it, which I do think is happening.
16
SPEAKER_00
There is a populist Sense of angst with all of this stuff.
16
SPEAKER_00
There are people out there saying well, fuck you I m not going to buy Bud Light anymore and I m not going to vote for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden and I m not going to
16
SPEAKER_00
watch Saturday Night Live anymore and I m not going to go along with this stuff.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to sit back and watch as you denigrate my community, absolutely transform the meaning of words like man and woman and mother and father and put forward these men in dresses and tell me that they re women and if I refuse to believe you that I m some kind of anti-social bigot.
16
SPEAKER_00
Then you ll be fired.
16
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you re fired.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m not going to put up with that anymore.
16
SPEAKER_00
So there is this
16
SPEAKER_00
I think one of the reasons to be hopeful today is that there is a pushback against this stuff.
16
SPEAKER_00
And the more of that we can have, the better.
16
SPEAKER_01
Yes, sir.
16
SPEAKER_01
All right.
16
SPEAKER_01
Well, that was a fun conversation, man.
16
SPEAKER_01
Thank you very much.
16
SPEAKER_01
I really appreciate it.
16
SPEAKER_01
And tell everybody where they could find you, social media and all that stuff.
16
SPEAKER_00
Don t read the comments.
16
SPEAKER_00
Never read the comments.
16
SPEAKER_00
The main place you can find me is at Spiked, Spiked online magazine, where I write.
16
SPEAKER_00
I m the chief political writer.
16
SPEAKER_00
You can find me on Instagram.
16
SPEAKER_00
My handle is burntoakboy, because I come from a part of London called Burnt Oak.
16
SPEAKER_00
And you can listen to my podcast, The Brendan O Neill Show, and Google me.
16
SPEAKER_00
You ll find me on there.