Juno News - No room for dissent (ft. Brendan O’Neill)

00:00:00.000 hi there everybody welcome to the Rupa Subramania show I am Rupa Subramania in today's episode we

00:00:24.600 are honored to have Brendan O'Neill he's a prominent British journalist and author he

00:00:30.480 joins us to discuss his latest book a heretics manifesto essays on the unsayable in his book

00:00:37.680 O'Neill fearlessly challenges the prevailing orthodoxies and dominant narratives that have

00:00:43.200 taken over society with clarity and insight he examines contemporary beliefs surrounding gender

00:00:49.980 identity politics racism and climate change questioning the uncritical acceptance and

00:00:55.860 dogmatic nature of these ideas in his essays O'Neill advocates for the resurgence of heresy

00:01:02.460 and dissent in our increasingly polarized world he calls for a return to reason open debate and

00:01:09.240 the pursuit of truth values that he believes are crucial for a thriving society join me as we

00:01:16.380 delve into these arguments and ideas presented in his book and explore the importance of

00:01:22.000 challenging prevailing narratives promoting intellectual diversity and reinvigorating

00:01:27.600 enlightenment thinking in our modern age well welcome to the show Brendan it's a real honor to

00:01:33.700 have you here and I just absolutely loved reading your book let me start by asking you you know your

00:01:42.240 book starts with a provocatively titled chapter her penis and and does a brilliant job documenting how

00:01:50.580 this term regularly shows up in news reports uh in outlets and publications especially in the UK 0.95

00:01:57.240 and these are uh publications across the ideological spectrum left to right um why does this term what 0.92

00:02:05.380 does her penis really mean and why does this term matter so much well okay well firstly thank you for 0.68

00:02:11.900 having me on the podcast absolute pleasure to be on um thank you for that question people are lots of 0.98

00:02:17.680 people are quite struck by the first chapter because it is quite a confronting chapter and I wanted it to be a 0.96

00:02:23.580 confronting chapter and the opening sentence in the book is we need to talk about her penis and I I I mean 1.00

00:02:30.040 it's it's funny on the one hand and it's kind of I think it probably makes people laugh but it also I 0.93

00:02:34.900 think drags them head first into the questions that I want to raise with my book which is really about

00:02:41.960 how language is being manipulated in order to manipulate thought I think that's one of the great

00:02:48.280 and terrifying themes of our times and I think one of the points I make in the introduction to the book

00:02:54.000 is that I'm increasingly of the view that the term cancel culture is not sufficient to describe the

00:02:59.760 era that we're living in I understand the attraction of the term cancel culture it's short it's

00:03:05.080 alliterative it makes sense many many people understand what you're talking about when you say

00:03:10.460 cancel culture so I get it and I use it but I think we have to look beyond that and understand that we're

00:03:17.580 living through a period of counter enlightenment a period of extraordinary intolerance a period of new forms

00:03:26.000 of authoritarianism which I think are designed to alter not just what people say but how they think

00:03:32.640 in their minds and how they relate to other human beings so the reason I opened with that chapter her

00:03:37.980 penis is just to get to use that that two word phrase as an example of how everyday language is changing

00:03:46.880 around us sometimes imperceptibly sometimes without us really noticing you wake up one day and suddenly 0.99

00:03:52.400 her penis is an acceptable phrase that people are using in the media in courts of law in the political 1.00

00:03:59.260 sphere we have the leader of the Labour Party here in Britain Keir Starmer keeps getting into trouble 0.99

00:04:05.260 because he can't answer the question what is a woman and his most recent answer he said look 99% of 0.99

00:04:11.360 women don't have a penis which opens the possibility that around 1% do have a penis and so the whole 0.99

00:04:17.440 the way in which ideas that we took to be true and scientifically provable and useful for understanding 0.98

00:04:25.740 ourselves and other people the way in which they can be overhauled so in such a slippery way and without

00:04:32.600 any protest or really without very much discussion I find that worrying and I think it suggests we live

00:04:39.260 under a new kind of cultural authoritarianism which values people's subjective views of themselves

00:04:45.980 over objective reality and that's something I think we need to question and push back against

00:04:51.720 so why does it feel like uh just sticking to that first chapter I was struck by the fact that pretty

00:04:59.620 much everybody across the political and ideological spectrum seem to be on board with the use of

00:05:05.120 pronouns and gender ideology um in general what what is going on there did some kind of consensus emerge

00:05:11.720 that uh that that we're not that we're not aware of I mean and how do we explain this consensus

00:05:17.160 yeah it's really striking the the the speed I think historically speaking the speed with which it

00:05:24.040 became elite consensus opinion that you can change sex and in fact going even further than that the idea

00:05:32.420 that there is such a thing as a gendered soul which might not match up with your biological casing 0.99

00:05:38.720 I consider that to be a pretty religious idea a quite superstitious idea it's not something that

00:05:44.540 I believe to be true I think it's an idea that is born from um the narcissistic needs of a small group

00:05:52.240 of people which then gets embraced by the establishment as a politically correct value an idea that you all

00:05:58.520 must bow down before but I don't accept the idea of a gendered soul I don't accept the idea that um there 1.00

00:06:06.080 are men out there who are really female they have a female brain or a female soul I think that's quite 0.88

00:06:11.120 a misogynistic idea there's more to being a woman than feeling there's more to being a woman than just 0.71

00:06:16.560 desiring to be one in your mind and I don't accept the idea that young women who are the growing number 0.76

00:06:23.200 of people undergoing hormonal intervention and sometimes surgical intervention growing numbers of them

00:06:28.760 are young women very often they're young lesbians I'm deeply disturbed by the fact that we now live 1.00

00:06:35.320 in a society in which a young lesbian can be subjected to hormonal interventions to correct her to make her 1.00

00:06:42.680 the correct sex as if there's something wrong with being an 18 year old girl who is attracted to other

00:06:47.880 girls um you know really she must be a man let's let's change her and and one of the points I make later on 0.89

00:06:54.440 in the book I talk about the case of Alan Turing the great computer expert science hero of uh the

00:07:01.960 second world war and uh the mid 20th century here in England um he was of course famously arrested for

00:07:09.400 homosexual behavior um he was given a choice he could either go to prison um or he could undergo hormonal

00:07:17.320 treatment which was really a form of hormonal castration so he was given estrogen which gave him

00:07:24.280 breast material it gay it made his voice more high-pitched it made him very very depressed he 0.99

00:07:29.880 didn't want these changes to take place it basically feminized him as a way of neutering what was seen as 0.91

00:07:35.800 his sinful homosexuality now we look upon that with absolute horror today and um Britain is often trying 1.00

00:07:43.320 to make amends for its grotesque treatment of Alan Turing we just we recently put him on the 50 pound note

00:07:48.600 here which is a great honor in this country basically as a way of apologizing for what we

00:07:53.720 did to him and yet we now do the same thing to young people in the 21st century we do the exact

00:07:59.640 same thing we give young men hormonal interventions that give them the appearance of having breasts which 0.78

00:08:06.200 make their voices high-pitched which make them the supposed correct sex which give them the same sexual 0.99

00:08:11.800 problems that Turing suffered as a consequence of his estrogen treatment but we call it transgenderism 0.98

00:08:18.120 we call it um gender affirming health care we give it all these euphemistic names which i think is really

00:08:25.000 quite Orwellian and is a bit of a disguise for something that's actually quite problematic

00:08:30.520 so um the fact that all of these things are kind of nodded along by so many different sections of the

00:08:35.960 political establishment i think that speaks to the absence of critical thinking um it speaks to a

00:08:42.920 culture of conformism so few people are willing to deviate from elite consensus opinion especially

00:08:48.360 if you're in the elites and you want to stay in the elites you want to move in those circles you want to

00:08:54.680 have those opportunities make those advancements you can't break away from elite consensus opinion in that

00:09:01.400 in that situation so it reinforces itself all the time through the necessity of maintaining the elite

00:09:07.400 group itself and they so they speak in their own language they have their own special linguistic cues

00:09:13.720 they they say my name is so and so my pronouns are such and such they have these rituals that you have to

00:09:20.680 perform in order to be a member of that class and the fact that that performance is a continual demand

00:09:28.040 of people within that uh strata of society means that it is constantly being reinforced and then it

00:09:33.720 goes reinforced through education through the university system through popular culture through

00:09:39.880 social media and it has this drip drip effect into the young generation in particular so yes there's a

00:09:45.640 real culture of conformism and one of the reasons i wrote my book and called it a heretics manifesto is

00:09:51.160 precisely because i think we need some more heretical kickback against ideas that have bizarrely become

00:09:58.360 quite conformously accepted yeah you know you um i found this um sentence very striking in that first 0.98

00:10:05.480 chapter you say that uh her penis uh is a term that even rape victims might have to utter at some point 1.00

00:10:13.240 um you know it really you know when you when you put it that way it's really quite jarring it really puts 0.97

00:10:17.960 it into context how do you believe how do you think that this impacts uh social cohesion for example

00:10:24.520 i think it's i think it's having a devastating impact even though if we can't quite appreciate

00:10:31.800 that yet i mean i'm lucky enough to live on turf island britain is often referred to as turf island

00:10:37.160 especially by some american activists they can't believe we have so many trans exclusionary radical

00:10:44.120 feminists here which basically means women who don't accept the idea that a man can become a woman 1.00

00:10:49.160 jk rowling is at the top and there are many many others um i'm really happy to live on turf island

00:10:55.160 i'm happy to live on an island where there are so many women who are speaking out and standing up for 0.99

00:10:59.720 their sex-based rights um and um taking action to defend their spaces and their freedoms i think

00:11:07.320 that's a really positive thing but i think in relation to um the question of how we got to a

00:11:13.720 situation where lots of other sections of society including law and the police now accept a term like

00:11:20.840 her penis i mean that is really the question of our age how do these things happen so for example the 0.94

00:11:27.800 police there was a freedom of information request to police forces here in the uk asking them if they 0.99

00:11:33.720 record crimes as having been committed by a man or a woman depending on their sex or on how they

00:11:40.200 identify and many police forces said they record crimes as by the preferred gender of the alleged

00:11:48.520 criminal rather than by his or her biological sex and some police forces even do that with rape

00:11:55.320 so rape is defined in english law as the non-consensual insertion of a man's penis into various parts of a

00:12:03.400 woman's body that's how it's defined in law and yet the police have taken it upon themselves to 1.00

00:12:08.920 accept the idea that the male rapist standing before them is a woman if he says he's a woman and

00:12:14.760 what you end up with is something really creepy i think something straight out of 1984 you know one

00:12:21.160 of winston smith's jobs in the ministry of truth was to rewrite old newspaper articles to make them

00:12:26.920 conform with the ideology of the of the current ruling party that's what's happening now so we have

00:12:32.680 news articles here in britain and i've seen them around the world as well where they will say woman

00:12:37.640 arrested for rape of a minor and it's just not true that's a lie that that headline is a lie much of

00:12:44.040 the article itself is a lie it wasn't a woman it was a man and one of the examples i give in the book

00:12:50.040 is of a story that was in the new york times which said 80 and it was on the bbc as well bbc news

00:12:57.480 83 year old woman arrested for murdering and decapitating a woman in her 60s and i saw this

00:13:03.720 headline and i thought hold on 83 year old women don't do that i can't think of any instance in

00:13:08.680 my lifetime where an 83 year old woman has murdered another woman and decapitated her 83 year old women

00:13:14.520 tend to be quite small quite frail certainly not murderously inclined of course it wasn't an 83 year

00:13:21.080 old woman it was an 83 year old man who had murdered women before so the new york times was lying to us

00:13:27.400 the bbc was lying to us you had to get to the very last line of the bbc article to find out that this is

00:13:33.800 a transgender woman i.e a man so they're lying to us and and um one of the consequences there are numerous 0.92

00:13:42.360 problematic consequences there firstly if the media doesn't tell us the truth about something as serious

00:13:48.840 as as an act of rape or an act of murder why should we trust them to tell the truth about anything

00:13:54.440 um and when the media elevates ideological needs over objective recording of facts that calls into

00:14:03.720 question the entire pursuit of truth and whether the pursuit of truth is even possible in an era in

00:14:08.520 which subjective delusions now count for more than objective reality but then one of the bigger problems

00:14:14.920 as as you've alluded to is that we end up in a situation where rape victims feel pressured to

00:14:21.320 refer to their rapists as female and one of the points i made in my book is firstly they rape you then

00:14:27.960 they get your pronouns and um if you think about that the impact of that new york times article on the

00:14:34.520 women that that man had harassed and assaulted and killed over numerous decades it was it was depriving

00:14:43.720 them of the right to tell their story their story their story is that they were attacked by a man

00:14:50.200 they were brutalized by a man that's not only their truth it is the truth and they were being subtly

00:14:56.680 deprived of that by a supposed newspaper of record which took it upon itself that um to say that the

00:15:04.360 the rapist and the murderer's truth is more important than their truth and that is a judgment that

00:15:11.080 i think goes against not only reason and objectivity but against human decency and so when you have a

00:15:18.360 situation where political correctness is overriding human decency itself i think we're really reaching a

00:15:26.040 a sad situation absolutely and you know one of the key themes uh in your book um is the importance of

00:15:34.040 of free speech and your concerns about the rise of compelled speech uh here in canada there are several

00:15:41.080 uh instances uh you know where free speech has been suppressed and the chilling effects uh cancel culture

00:15:50.520 for lack of a better term i agree with you it sounds rather benign i agree with your criticism of

00:15:55.800 the term i think we need something something else that captures the you know uh you know the uh

00:16:03.480 captures the importance of what's going on um the chilling effects cancel culture has had on free

00:16:08.200 speech i've interviewed like a 17 year old a high school student here in canada who was recently

00:16:14.200 suspended from his catholic high school for protesting against gender ideology uh compelled speech and all of

00:16:21.240 this is clearly very very problematic um and you and you you know and you say the the free speech is

00:16:27.800 important and the right to offend is also very important but in a world of unfettered uh uh free

00:16:33.800 speech does something such as hate speech exist um i think i have a real problem with the term hate speech um

00:16:46.120 i've always felt uncomfortable with the idea of hate speech um i mean obviously there is racist speech

00:16:51.960 there is misogynistic speech there is anti-semitic speech um there's holocaust denial there is white

00:16:58.760 supremacist speech i mean no one denies that those forms of speech exist they're on the internet people

00:17:04.040 can see them um i'm such a free speech absolutist that i think even that kind of speech should be free it

00:17:10.200 should not be interfered with by the state because i think there's a benefit from

00:17:14.280 um knowing that that kind of speech exists because it allows us to see what these hateful individuals

00:17:21.160 and hateful groups are saying what they're thinking where they are where they need to be challenged where

00:17:26.920 they need to be confronted i think there's a real danger even when we're talking about genuinely racist

00:17:31.800 speech there's a danger that suppressing it will actually allow to fester and grow in new communities

00:17:38.200 online hidden from from um reasoned society a really good example of that is france france outlawed

00:17:45.320 holocaust denial 25 years ago maybe 30 years ago a long time ago now france has a very serious problem

00:17:53.160 with anti-semitism and with anti-semitic speech a very serious problem arguably the most serious problem

00:17:58.280 in in western europe if not the whole of europe um and i think that's partly a consequence of the

00:18:03.960 censorship um not entirely of course there are numerous social um and cultural issues in france

00:18:11.240 that mean that um all sorts of regressive views take hold in certain sections of society

00:18:16.360 um but one issue is the censorship so these this stuff has to go underground the holocaust deniers have

00:18:22.360 to hide away make their own websites and so on and make their own little networks and therefore it's

00:18:27.640 difficult to call them out or to highlight them and and to challenge them so even genuinely hateful

00:18:33.320 speech i don't think should be censored but i think the problem i have with the term hate speech is that

00:18:37.880 so much stuff gets collapsed under that term so it's not just the racism and the anti-semitism and the

00:18:43.400 misogyny and and whatever it's also um jk rowling writing a brilliant long considered essay about women's

00:18:53.560 rights that is now transphobia that is a form of hate speech apparently or it's um people who criticize

00:19:01.400 mass immigration and who say that there needs to be some form of controls on immigration now as it

00:19:06.360 happens i'm i'm quite liberal on immigration which which gets me into all sorts of trouble with some

00:19:11.640 of my allies on other issues but there you go that's life um but there are many people who are critical

00:19:17.720 of mass immigration and um they get called racist that's the xenophobia and even you know just to take

00:19:24.680 the example of brexit here in the uk i think brexit was a very important working class revolt against

00:19:30.840 the technocratic elites against the newest the new elites and um we're the people who voted for it

00:19:37.320 which includes me we're called euro phobic we're called xenophobic we voted out of um a place of hatred

00:19:44.600 so all sorts of things even genuinely held perfectly legitimate political views are now redefined as hate

00:19:51.560 speech and one of the points i make in the chapter in my book on hate speech um is that i think one of

00:19:58.360 the issues with this branding of certain views one of the paradoxes that i talk about is that we live

00:20:04.040 in societies that are absolutely obsessed with controlling and suppressing hateful speech and yet

00:20:09.800 public life feels more hateful than ever it's such an interesting paradox to me i mean you know hatred

00:20:15.800 is the lingua franca of social media you know when they have the twitter mobs and they are the things

00:20:20.920 they say about um gender critical feminists or about black members of the conservative party or 0.76

00:20:27.720 about someone like priti patel who was our indian heritage um home secretary here for a few years

00:20:34.440 they say the most obscene things woke people say it people who have words like love is love in their

00:20:40.760 twitter bios and the the pride flag and of course their pronouns people who in every other situation would

00:20:46.200 say they are against hatred or if you look at university campuses they are awash with speech codes

00:20:52.760 controlling hate speech and yet if a pro-israel person tons turns up or a gender critical feminist turns 1.00

00:20:59.080 up they there will be orgies of hatred they will smash windows these students they will scream abuse

00:21:07.400 so one of the points i make is that i'm worried that the empire of hate censorship that we all live

00:21:13.880 under now where we all live under states that want to control supposedly hateful speech actually green

00:21:19.800 lights hatred because what it does it hangs a sign around people's necks which says this person is a

00:21:25.480 hateful person a bad person they are destructive to social life whether it's a gender critical feminist

00:21:31.960 or someone on the right or a canadian trucker or a danish trucker or a dutch farmer anyone who deviates

00:21:38.680 in any way from the consensus they are hateful people and therefore you may hate them in fact

00:21:45.720 you must hate them because unless we cleanse society of their um dangerous ideas we're we're all in big

00:21:51.480 trouble so i think that's the paradox of hatred it it it presents itself as an attempt to control hatred

00:21:58.680 in society but it actually gives us a license to loathe certain groups and certain people and it

00:22:04.120 exacerbates hateful discussion in contemporary life yeah um in in this chapter um the the love that

00:22:11.640 dare not speak its name um you refer to a there a therapeutic turn in society from one uh of liberation

00:22:20.760 to a more managerial technocratic society in which our individual individuality has been diminished um i

00:22:28.680 found this very striking it was possibly one of the most interesting things that i you know saw in

00:22:34.840 the book what do you mean by this and can you elaborate yeah so um yeah that chapter is specifically

00:22:42.520 on um the rise of woke homophobia exactly so yeah the way in which um i guess the argument i'm making

00:22:50.200 in that chapter is that all the progressive ideals that we sometimes take for granted i'm using the word

00:22:55.800 progressive in the english sense which means something good i know it has different meanings

00:22:59.480 in different parts of the world yeah uh but the progressive ideals that we take for granted can

00:23:05.000 easily fall away if when if we're not vigilant and if we don't defend the freedom to to think and to

00:23:11.080 speak and to defend those ideals so i think what's happening with um the the trans ideology and its

00:23:17.640 impact on young gay people in particular i find incredibly incredibly worrying um but one of the

00:23:23.080 points i make in that chapter in in in talking about that issue as you say is that um i think one of

00:23:30.360 the big differences i think one interesting thing about woke activists and the woke elites is that they

00:23:36.760 see themselves as the heirs to the progressives of the 1950s and the 1960s they see themselves as the

00:23:44.280 heirs to the civil rights movement in the united states or the gay liberation movement across the western

00:23:49.080 world or the of course the feminist movement the second wave feminism in the 60s and the 70s 0.61

00:23:54.600 they see themselves as the heirs to that and my argument is that actually they are the opponents

00:23:59.480 of that they are uh they are a um a blot on those progressive leaps forward in human history

00:24:06.680 and that's why i get very frustrated when people say that anyone who criticizes wokeness or political

00:24:11.480 correctness just wants to turn the clock back to a time when women were in the kitchen and 1.00

00:24:15.480 um black people and white people were segregated and gay people didn't have normal lives for me

00:24:21.720 it's the entire opposite it's it's the fact that those breakthroughs were made in the western world

00:24:27.160 and were very positive that i am now concerned about this movement and this ideology that i think

00:24:31.960 is threatening them and so i think generally speaking what's happened is we've gone from

00:24:37.000 a culture of liberation a culture we've gone from movements that wanted to free themselves from

00:24:43.720 state intervention state control the judgments of the moral majority as it was referred to

00:24:50.200 who basically argued for autonomy for the right to live freely and for the right to make their own

00:24:56.200 choices so that was the women's movement uh the gay liberation movement uh the civil rights movement

00:25:01.800 you know basically leave us alone um frederick douglas um going back to the 1800s he was the

00:25:08.120 uh slave turned abolitionist he was once asked what can the white man do to help uh freed slaves and he

00:25:17.160 he basically said just leave us alone just let us get on with it some of us will fail some of us will

00:25:22.920 succeed but just give us the freedom to try so that was the kind of culture that we had in in these

00:25:28.520 progressive movements over the past 60 70 80 hundred years i think what we have now in the woke movement

00:25:35.800 is the precise opposite we have a movement that is very authoritarian that is um constantly seeking

00:25:43.560 validation from the state rather than freedom from the state which wants everyone to respect

00:25:49.720 it to respect its pronouns to bow down to genuflect to its ideologies and if you don't you're in big

00:25:55.480 trouble they will cancel you they will no platform you so it's the polar opposite of the culture of

00:26:01.640 liberation what we live under now is a managerial regime in which we are all expected to submit to

00:26:07.400 the expertise of lifestyle gurus um the welfare state um other social actors who presume to know better

00:26:16.120 than we do ourselves how we should run our lives how we should live how we should raise our children

00:26:21.640 um how we should speak how we should think so the drift from a culture of leave us alone and let us live

00:26:29.160 freely to a culture to a culture in which people don't trust themselves to be free and instead

00:26:35.960 call on the authorities to um recognize them and look after them and tell us exactly how to raise a

00:26:44.360 child in the first six months and exactly how we should speak to a person of the of a different race

00:26:49.640 in the workplace and exactly how we must um make ourselves felt and and what words we should use

00:26:57.080 there's this desire to be told all the time how to behave and what to do yeah i think that's so

00:27:03.000 worrying and i long for that older era in which people said look we're capable of running our lives

00:27:09.160 let us do it so but how did we get to this point how did we get from this liberating force that gave

00:27:14.600 us women's rights gay rights um to this present morass of a you know some bewildering confusion

00:27:22.040 of gender and sexual identities how do we get to this point that's that's the question that i that

00:27:27.800 i'm often you know i often ask i don't really have the answer to it yeah it's a it's such an interesting

00:27:35.560 question and there are so many different cultural factors and changes in society that i think contribute to

00:27:41.800 that one idea i've had which is difficult to articulate and i'm not even sure if i'm right

00:27:47.320 is that um i think there's a there's a power it's a paradoxical situation where some of these

00:27:53.080 liberatory movements which i think were very positive possibly contain the seed of their own

00:27:58.440 demise and possibly contain the seed of the culture that we currently live under so elizabeth lash quinn

00:28:04.360 wrote a brilliant book about race experts maybe 20 years ago um and she just looked at how the civil

00:28:11.320 rights movement itself which she is entirely in favor of and the heroic martin luther king of course

00:28:18.600 she said that it it gave rise over time to an academic culture of not um liberation from segregation

00:28:27.880 and oppression but racial management management of the relations between the races and need to control

00:28:35.400 how black people and white people interact and of course that now has exploded into the most poisonous 1.00

00:28:41.560 racial racial culture in workplaces and so on where you have people like robin d'angelo uh the queen of

00:28:47.880 white fragility and her book being used in workplaces across the western world to basically reprimand white 0.98

00:28:55.560 workers divide them from black workers um enforce these new forms of racial workplace management i would say 0.62

00:29:04.040 it's very beneficial to the boss class that's one of the most striking things about identity politics

00:29:09.240 so there are some people and i think the um if you look at the gay liberation movement for example i

00:29:15.480 think the way in which it went through various different phases i think the aids crisis played an

00:29:19.880 enormous role in weakening its desire for autonomy and giving rise to this um desire for medical protection

00:29:27.720 uh for bringing homosexuality back under the purview of the medical elites which it had only just liberate 0.93

00:29:35.080 liberated itself from so there's that factor as well but i think generally if we're looking at the

00:29:39.960 different cultures i think the rise of a therapeutic culture which emphasizes people's weakness rather

00:29:45.240 than their strengths emphasizes their um their inability incapacity rather than their capacity

00:29:53.640 also a changing political culture especially on the left moving away from one that believed in

00:30:00.040 individual sovereignty and freedom to one that believed that uh the structures of the welfare state

00:30:06.360 must play a a more uh a more important role in how people run their lives and then on top of those

00:30:13.400 two a general culture of a general downbeat culture in the west post particularly post cold war when the life

00:30:21.960 seems to be sucked out of western politics that it starts to lose its dynamism however phony that

00:30:28.040 dynamism might have been in the cold war era there was at least some sense that the west was the free

00:30:34.680 world and the east was the unfree world so there was an there was an an element of dynamism and confidence

00:30:40.120 in the west and then even that gets drained away so i think the the rise of the therapeutic culture the

00:30:46.040 shift of the left in particular and and that includes much of the professional managerial elites

00:30:51.400 away from believing in free sovereignty and freedom towards believing in social control

00:30:56.600 and the general culture of misanthropy and mistrust across the west i think they all played

00:31:01.640 an important role in dragging us i think over three or four decades from a period in which we expected to

00:31:08.200 be free into this new period and we expect that we will be controlled yeah um you have a chapter uh on

00:31:14.920 islamo censorship uh where any criticism of uh islam is cancelled and uh and uh termed as racist islamophobic

00:31:24.520 uh term that i hadn't heard of hijabophobia where criticism of uh the hijab is uh seen as hijabophobic um

00:31:33.080 you know how do we get to this situation where islam uh essentially has this cordon sanitaire erected around it 0.99

00:31:40.920 uh by the thought police but it's certainly not the case when it comes to christianity for example or

00:31:47.320 hinduism where uh regressive practices and fundamentalists are routinely called out by the

00:31:55.160 same progressive elite who now bend over backwards to shield islam from a similar legitimate criticism 0.68

00:32:01.640 it's just extraordinary the i find the culture of censorship around islam to be so

00:32:08.760 terrifying and chilling and really problematic for i think social stability i think it has a profound

00:32:15.400 impact on society that i think lots of people don't appreciate i mean the point i make in that

00:32:19.800 chapter is is that it's just extraordinary that in the uk for example um we had the fatwa against

00:32:26.520 salman rushdie in um the late 1980s issued by iran of course but supported by significant

00:32:33.480 sections of the muslim community in britain um salmon rushdie is a british citizen not born in britain

00:32:39.400 but he's a british citizen he's also a knight of the realm here he's a sir so he is very important to

00:32:44.920 this country um there was a a willingness among some sections of the cultural elite to protect him

00:32:51.160 others kind of slightly abandoned him and said well if he hadn't been so mean about islam he

00:32:55.160 wouldn't be facing these problems there was a culture of cowardice as well but at the same

00:33:00.040 time that iran was issuing this death threat this death warrant against a man for being rude about

00:33:07.640 islam the british civil society itself was coming up with new rules and regulations to prevent people

00:33:14.680 from being rude about islam it's such an extraordinary moment in cultural history where one of the most

00:33:20.360 famous authors of our time is laboring under a death warrant while civil society is inventing

00:33:26.600 the idea of islamophobia or at least pushing it further and further so the running mead trust the 0.99

00:33:31.800 running mead trust is an anti-racist charity here in britain it really came up with the contemporary

00:33:37.240 definition of islamophobia in the mid-1990s so we're talking four or five years after the fatwa

00:33:42.760 um and it defined islamophobia as hostility to islam and and it very clearly makes the case that

00:33:50.840 it's not just racist abuse aimed at people from the muslim community i don't know anyone who would 0.99

00:33:57.640 disagree that racist abuse against uh brown muslims as most of them in britain are i don't know anyone

00:34:04.440 who would disagree that that's a terrible thing and society has responsibility to keep it in check

00:34:09.880 but it was talking about hostility to islam it was talking about even terms like islamic fundamentalism

00:34:16.760 it says is an unacceptable term because it's offensive to muslims to tie the word islamic to

00:34:21.480 the word tech fundamentalism or the word terrorism uh the muslim council of britain which is a an

00:34:27.720 organization here has taken this idea even further and um it recently criticized the daily mail um

00:34:35.640 because it interviewed one of the usidi women who had been enslaved and raped by isis and she said

00:34:41.800 during the interview that um the people who were oppressing her and and raping her they thought it

00:34:47.800 was sanctioned by islam and the daily mail quoted her words and the muslim council of britain rebuked the

00:34:54.040 daily mail saying it's unacceptable to suggest that isis is driven by islamic ideas even though these were

00:35:01.480 the beliefs and the words of a woman who had experienced the most extraordinary horrors i just

00:35:07.400 found that staggering and extraordinary and um the police here in britain the counter-terrorist police in

00:35:13.160 in in london have openly discussed they haven't done it yet but they've openly discussed moving away

00:35:20.120 from terms like islamic islamic terrorism or islamist terrorism to using phrases like faith claimed

00:35:26.840 terrorism and they're talking about not using the word jihadi and instead using the word terrorist or

00:35:32.840 something um so and if you look at their discussions what's very interesting is they openly say changing

00:35:39.960 the language in this way could be a way of improving community relations so again you have the manipulation

00:35:45.720 of language to manipulate how people think and the truth of the matter is the vast majority of terror

00:35:51.400 attacks in europe over the past 10 years have been islamist terror attacks hundreds of people have

00:35:58.040 been killed in europe hundreds including 21 at the manchester arena here in britain one of the worst

00:36:04.760 terror attacks um of all time in this country i was at a morrissey concert earlier this year and it was

00:36:10.840 really interesting because um obviously morrissey's from manchester and he said to the audience um you

00:36:17.160 all that you all know the name myra hindley but none of you know the name of the man who blew up

00:36:21.880 the manchester arena uh she killed whatever six kids he killed 21 so why don't you know his name the

00:36:29.480 audience just went quiet um but i thought it was a very good question and i think there is this culture

00:36:36.200 of amnesia around islamist terrorism we're encouraged to forget we're encouraged to move on

00:36:42.360 we all sang the oasis song don't look back in anger after the um manchester arena bombing which summed up

00:36:48.520 our attitude to these atrocities and more broadly there is this culture of there's this rather

00:36:55.000 racially paternalistic culture coming from the woke left and from the elites which says um muslims need to 1.00

00:37:02.760 be protected from offensive speech and rigorous discussion about their religion and therefore we're

00:37:07.880 going to censor it and everyone loses out as a consequence of that we lose out our freedom of

00:37:12.600 speech our freedom to criticize one of the great world religions and the muslim community is effectively 1.00

00:37:18.760 reduced to a second class community who require special measures to protect unlike any other community 0.96

00:37:25.160 they require special measures to protect them from ideas that they might find difficult or challenging and

00:37:31.000 that infantilizes them so it infantilizes public discussion and it infantilizes muslims so i find it a 0.95

00:37:36.840 a curiously racist idea and one that of course is a grave assault on freedom of speech yeah no

00:37:44.120 absolutely um you know you also advocate for uh intellectual courage and the willingness to

00:37:50.440 challenge uh prevailing orthodoxies how do you suggest that people do this uh you know one of the

00:37:57.240 things that i encounter uh very frequently is that people are just people people will agree people will

00:38:04.440 privately agree with you but they're very very afraid to come out publicly and take a position

00:38:10.520 or come on the record um because they have genuine concerns they might lose their job their kids might

00:38:17.240 get suspended from school and so on and so forth the list goes on how how do you know how do you suggest

00:38:23.480 people develop these qualities in a in a society that is increasingly very discouraging of dissent

00:38:30.760 it's such a good question and it's a difficult one to answer because

00:38:35.320 i often say you know we have to have the courage of our convictions and say what we believe and so on um

00:38:42.360 and but that's quite easy for me to say because it's my job to do that and um that's what i do for

00:38:47.480 a living so i'm i mean i guess i'm in a privileged position to use um contemporary language um i know

00:38:54.040 it's more difficult for other people i know that there are women i get emails very often from women 0.99

00:39:01.000 in particular if i say something on tv or radio that is uh gender critical i get email from women

00:39:06.360 saying i wish i could say this i'm glad i can't say it i'm glad you're saying it um and there are other

00:39:11.560 issues as well on which people feel that they can't speak out because there is a stifling culture and

00:39:16.520 i think one of the one of the grimmest impacts of cancel culture is um is not you know people

00:39:25.320 will often say well look at jk rowling she's still speaking or look at kathleen stock the um british

00:39:31.080 professor of philosophy who has got into a lot of hot water for her gender critical views they will say

00:39:36.360 look at kathleen stock she speaks at oxford she writes article newspaper articles i think that's missing 0.92

00:39:42.440 the point the point of council culture is the chilling effect it has across society it's the

00:39:47.160 message it sends to people who have less power than jk rowling who have less money than some people

00:39:53.800 who have less job security who know what will happen to them if they speak out they know they

00:39:59.480 will suffer enormously so it's very difficult but i but even having said that i do think it some the

00:40:06.520 people who can speak out must speak out and i think they're the ones i'm most i'm least forgiving

00:40:11.960 off are those people who are in the media who do have a platform who are fairly comfortable who are

00:40:17.000 not likely to get sacked because of the position they're in when they don't speak out on certain

00:40:22.680 issues um on the encroachment of wokeness into reason and truth and freedom when they don't speak

00:40:29.240 out i find that incredibly worrying and disappointing and i give an example in the last chapter of the book i

00:40:34.680 give an example i give a few examples from history in fact of people who spoke out in circumstances

00:40:40.280 which were far more difficult than ours so i tell the story of william tyndale for example who is one

00:40:46.120 of my heroes he was um a quite zealous protestant reformer in the in england in the early 1500s

00:40:53.880 and um he translated the bible into english which was an offense punishable by death if you if you

00:41:00.520 publish the bible in english it was only supposed to be in latin because only our moral superiors

00:41:05.240 were allowed to read it and the rest of us had to just nod along to whatever they decided to read to

00:41:10.520 us in church on on a sunday um if you publish the bible in english you were burnt at the stake and he 0.69

00:41:17.000 thought no i have to do it he went to germany to do it you couldn't do it in england he smuggled his

00:41:22.120 bibles back into england um his his supporters would read the bibles by candlelight and be ready to throw

00:41:29.720 them away if anyone knocked at the door i mean that's the risk they were taking to to exercise

00:41:34.680 their freedom of conscience and their freedom to read um and eventually the authorities caught up

00:41:39.800 with him he was hunted as an outlaw across germany they caught up with him they imprisoned him they

00:41:45.560 found him guilty of heresy uh they strangled him to death and then they burnt him at the stake

00:41:50.760 and you just think to yourself what drove him to keep doing this what drove him to keep publishing

00:41:57.640 his bibles keep translating the bible he also invented the pocket bible so that people would

00:42:02.600 have a smaller version of it that they could hide away um what made him do this and you just think

00:42:07.880 it's because he was so convinced of his right to read the bible and he was so convinced of ordinary

00:42:14.280 people's ability to understand things for themselves which at the time was a completely revolutionary

00:42:21.080 idea and arguably it's become revolutionary again under the woke tyranny that tends to treat ordinary 0.97

00:42:26.360 people as idiots who need to be protected from offensive ideas it was a revolutionary idea and 0.95

00:42:31.720 one that he was willing to give his life for and i just think those examples from history are really 0.99

00:42:37.400 instructive and which is why i tell some of them in the book um instructive for those of us who want

00:42:43.480 to put our heads above the parapet and who think that the risk is worth it because what we're talking

00:42:49.080 about here is defending truth reason scientific reason objectivity equality freedom tolerance freedom

00:42:58.760 of speech these are values worth risking your reputation for and worth risking your jobs for

00:43:06.200 thankfully we don't have to risk our lives for them anymore because people in the past did that for us

00:43:11.560 and i think it's worth feeling inspired by the heretics of history

00:43:15.000 as we go forward and do do a bit of heresy today yeah i think one of the unfortunate consequences of

00:43:21.400 this therapeutic turn in society where you know as you say uh the importance of the individual has

00:43:27.400 been diminished you're meant to believe that you're weak and uh and you need help and that sort of thing

00:43:35.480 is that we have become rather weak compared to people who came before us who've had to fight these

00:43:41.800 extraordinary uh fights uh at great risk to their lives um and um you know uh but you're i i don't

00:43:50.360 know if you agree with me but i feel like um the west in particular um you know we're become a bunch of

00:43:57.560 weaklings you know um i'm sure there are a few of us who are speaking out and a few of us who uh stick

00:44:07.240 our necks out there and we we take uh these positions but i i i sometimes i feel like the

00:44:13.800 vast majority of people uh surrounding uh the few are just weak and they're always afraid and how you

00:44:22.200 know why have we become so afraid it's interesting isn't it i do agree with you about that um there is a

00:44:30.680 culture of passivity and um self-doubt um not the good kind of self-doubt where you kind of question

00:44:38.360 yourself and your ideas all the time but the bad kind which doubts one's own capacity even to act

00:44:44.120 in the world without the scaffolding of therapeutic intervention and social advice and um lifestyle

00:44:51.480 advice yeah there is a there's a real culture of um people thinking that they need experts to hold

00:44:58.600 their hands all the time and that's one of the great crimes of censorship i think the great crime

00:45:03.400 of censorship is the worst thing about censorship is not even that it stops someone from speaking

00:45:07.960 which is terrible but that it stops the rest of us from making up our own minds that is censorship's

00:45:13.480 greatest crime is to um is to say to us you don't have to think for yourself because we've done it for

00:45:21.160 you we've decided on your behalf that this idea is too dangerous this book is too will trigger you

00:45:26.680 too much this film is too obscene so we've made the decision so you don't have to use your moral

00:45:32.520 muscles you don't have to use your mental muscles you can just sit you can just stew in your own

00:45:37.800 ignorance and be very comfortable there and over time that weakens our moral muscles and they they

00:45:44.760 get weak through under use and in fact that's an argument that's been made throughout history john

00:45:50.680 milton made it in england in the 1600s um john stuart mill made this argument in the 1800s in his

00:45:57.240 book on liberty both of them and others as well made the argument that it's only through exercising

00:46:03.480 moral judgment and making decisions for ourselves that we become free active members of society and

00:46:09.640 when you're no longer called upon to do that when you're no longer called upon to make your own mind up

00:46:14.520 about ideas or to make your own judgments about how to run your life or how to raise your family

00:46:19.480 because someone else is doing it for you then in john stuart mill's words our only responsibility

00:46:25.560 is to become ape-like imitators we are ape-like imitators of people who have told us what to do

00:46:31.320 and what to think and i think there's a culture of that now it's a culture of we will imitate the

00:46:36.440 advice of our superiors and then it's it's exacerbated by the therapeutic culture which makes it even worse

00:46:43.240 because that entices us all the time into a relationship of dependency with medical experts

00:46:49.080 therapeutic experts lifestyle experts who apparently have the key to everything um so it's it's kind of

00:46:57.320 depressing i do think there's a class differential which is very important i think i kind of straddle

00:47:03.560 two worlds i come from a working class community in london an irish community um all my family do normal

00:47:11.240 working class jobs they don't do anything like what i do um and so that that is a very useful

00:47:19.080 thing it keeps me quite grounded and none of them buy into any of this at all they are incredibly robust

00:47:26.520 they do hard jobs difficult jobs so you you have to be robust uh but they're also robust in their

00:47:32.360 relationships and in how they think and and and um with each other with their children they're firm they

00:47:38.200 they they you know they don't be a wimp you'll hear that you would never hear that phrase in a school

00:47:43.640 these days it would be considered very offensive to say to a child don't be a wimp don't be a telltale 1.00

00:47:49.000 don't be a snitch sort it out yourself that's what they used to say to us at school uh but they don't

00:47:54.120 anymore but i hear that in working class communities there's a desire for children for children and young

00:47:59.640 people to be resilient but then in other sections of society including those who have the most influence

00:48:05.240 over culture um it's it's very different they want to encourage the young to feel frail to worry that

00:48:13.720 their self-esteem is going to be damaged all the time to to try and cushion themselves from um

00:48:19.560 difficult ideas so i think that class differential is important to understand in terms of thinking about

00:48:24.920 how this might play out um over time how it might play out but i do think that um generally speaking

00:48:34.200 the more that the culture of wokeness and the culture of social authoritarianism and the culture

00:48:39.560 of censorship grows and grows the worse the problem of um public weakness will become because we will not

00:48:47.480 have any pressure at all to think for ourselves or to to decide for ourselves so i think these two

00:48:53.480 things go in hand in hand wanting a more resilient um satisfying confident public life in which

00:49:02.520 people are confident and more willing to engage with each other more willing to talk more willing

00:49:07.960 to debate more willing to uh argue if you want that then you have to carry on challenging all the

00:49:16.360 expressions of anti-human sentiment that we see in contemporary society so i think it's it's a really difficult task

00:49:22.200 challenging this culture of weakness but i think it can be done yeah finally for you uh final question

00:49:28.600 for you brendan what do you hope readers will take away from your book um how do you envision this

00:49:35.720 heretical mindset um shaping society uh moving forward i think i hope they enjoy it i hope they find it

00:49:45.960 funny and interesting that's the first thing i guess um but then i hope they take away from it just the

00:49:51.880 sense that heresy is a good thing and one of the points i make is that virtually every freedom and

00:50:00.520 right and comfort we enjoy is the gift of people who dare to be heretical and it's just important to 0.98

00:50:07.560 remember that not to be nostalgic not to um obsess over the past too much but just to be aware that um

00:50:14.920 lots of the things we take for granted today in terms of what we know about the world or the fact

00:50:19.560 that we think women should have equal rights to men or the fact that um black people should not be 1.00

00:50:24.760 segregated from white people or the fact that the sun is actually at the center of the solar system not

00:50:31.880 the earth all these pieces of knowledge and information and progressive ideas that we hold

00:50:36.760 very dear are all the products of people who were willing to go against the grain all of them every

00:50:43.320 single one of them and um george bernard shaw made this point he said all great truths begin as

00:50:49.880 blasphemies and it's just worth reminding ourselves of that all the time um we're we're called blasphemers

00:50:56.360 now if we say that men are men and women are women or if we say that um the vote for brexit

00:51:03.560 was a positive vote which should be seen through to its very end or if we say that net zero is a

00:51:10.760 problematic ideology which will impact harshly on working class communities in particular if you say

00:51:16.360 any of these things now you will be called a climate change denier you will be called a transphobe you

00:51:22.840 will be called a racist you'll be called a basically a blasphemer but i think even in the face of all

00:51:28.360 that it's important to carry on because all great truths begin as blasphemies and we have to accept the

00:51:35.080 category and the position of a heretic in order to expand freedom more broadly over the coming years so

00:51:43.240 i hope people take the message that bravery has a lot to recommend it courage is an incredibly important

00:51:51.240 virtue and those who can be courageous should be in order that we might challenge the irrationalism and

00:51:57.400 the unfreedom that we are sadly living through at the moment well um a heretics manifesto essays on

00:52:04.520 the unsayable i urge you all to get a copy of brendan o'neill's latest book i think it's it isn't just a

00:52:10.920 critique it's a call to action inviting us all to become heretics uh in an age of conformity uh thank

00:52:18.520 you so much uh for joining me brendan and i really hope to have you back here again soon thank you so much

Juno News - June 22, 2023

No room for dissent (ft. Brendan O’Neill)

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