TRIGGERnometry - Douglas Murray on Roger Scruton, Intersectionality and the Trans Debate

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry, I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:05.980 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:07.340 And this is the show for, well, this is slightly different.

00:00:11.300 So what we're doing today is we've got this amazing interview with Douglas Murray,

00:00:15.260 which in a few minutes you'll be able to enjoy for yourself.

00:00:17.560 However, you might notice that it's actually a little bit shorter than our other interviews.

00:00:22.900 And the reason for this is because we got interrupted by a wave of social justice warriors

00:00:28.040 who came down, broke down the door, started beating us.

00:00:31.340 Come on, Francis.

00:00:32.460 Why don't you just tell them what actually happened?

00:00:35.200 The room was double booked.

00:00:36.780 Yeah.

00:00:37.200 So what actually happened is we got the chance to speak to Douglas

00:00:40.600 at a secret conference, as you'll hear in the interview.

00:00:44.180 And we only had the room for a certain amount of time.

00:00:46.160 So if you feel like the interview gets cut off

00:00:48.340 at the point where it starts to get really interesting,

00:00:51.280 we agree with you.

00:00:52.600 Nonetheless, it's a brilliant interview.

00:00:54.040 I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

00:00:54.980 and when you see it you'll see that we didn't quite get into everything that we wanted to talk

00:01:00.760 about but we're very grateful to Douglas for coming on the show and hopefully he'll come

00:01:04.480 back and we can explore some of those other things in detail so with that in mind enjoy the interview

00:01:09.360 hello and welcome to Trigonometry I'm Francis Foster I'm Constantine Kissinger and this is a

00:01:21.620 show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:01:26.520 about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our brilliant guest

00:01:32.940 this week is a writer journalist and social commentator douglas murray welcome to trigonometry

00:01:38.000 good to be with you both before we get into interview i just have to say to our viewers

00:01:41.380 you can see we're on location we were a secret conference here in oxford and uh we've had the

00:01:46.260 great uh opportunity to speak with douglas so thank you for coming on the show that's a great

00:01:49.760 pleasure. You have a lot of kind of hobby subjects that you often get asked about, and we're going to

00:01:54.460 try and stay away from them as much as we can. But let's start with the Roger Scruton affair,

00:01:59.320 because it's something that's quite recent. It's something you've written about, you were

00:02:02.240 heavily involved in, in fact. For anyone who didn't follow it, just tell us what happened.

00:02:06.680 Oh, yeah. The long and short of it is that the very distinguished British philosopher Roger

00:02:12.560 Scruton, now in his mid-70s, author of more than 40 books on a range of subjects, aesthetics,

00:02:17.900 philosophy, architecture, music, gave an interview to a magazine in the UK called the New Statesman

00:02:24.720 and the deputy editor of the New Statesman, one George Eaton, misrepresented what had been said

00:02:31.580 in the interview, lied about what had been said in the interview, and caused Roger Scruton to be

00:02:36.860 fired within five hours from the position he held, a non-stipendary, an unpaid position,

00:02:44.420 advising a British government quango.

00:02:47.420 And this may seem more like,

00:02:49.920 well, I suppose a lot of people,

00:02:51.000 people who are not familiar with Scruton

00:02:52.440 or government quango may think,

00:02:53.860 well, so what?

00:02:56.540 So what is that I hold this very old-fashioned view,

00:03:01.000 which is you shouldn't be allowed

00:03:02.180 to just lie about people and get away with it.

00:03:05.040 And this was one of the most blatant,

00:03:08.760 flagrant examples of somebody doing that.

00:03:10.700 In journalism, it can happen in other fields,

00:03:12.520 fields, trades as well, but one of the most flagrant examples I've seen in my life in

00:03:17.460 journalism of somebody doing that. And I knew from the moment I read the alleged quotes that

00:03:23.120 they were untrue, because I've been fortunate enough to know Roger Scruton for almost 20 years

00:03:28.160 now. And I know that he doesn't think that the Chinese are people made up of weird robot

00:03:33.780 automatums or something. I knew that it was wrong, that this hack had said this. I looked into it,

00:03:41.200 Sure enough, Roger Scruton hadn't said that.

00:03:43.900 He'd said that the Chinese Communist Party

00:03:45.740 is trying to make the Chinese people into automatums.

00:03:49.520 That's just a lie.

00:03:51.320 And we are all, I think, sadly,

00:03:54.520 for all sorts of political and other reasons,

00:03:56.320 becoming used to a low standard of truth

00:03:59.140 in public as in private life.

00:04:01.600 But sometimes that comes right up to your door

00:04:04.060 and you've just got to stop it.

00:04:05.840 So I have worked quite hard over recent weeks

00:04:09.680 to expose this scandal.

00:04:11.200 and to try to reverse it.

00:04:12.560 And although Roger Scruton remains sacked from that government role,

00:04:17.220 it's now known and recognized widely that the New Statesman's deputy editor,

00:04:22.380 George Eaton, lied, misrepresented the contents of the interview,

00:04:26.960 and that this was dishonest journalism at its worst.

00:04:31.780 And so, yes, we turned it around a bit.

00:04:37.040 And one of the things in this affair that struck me particularly

00:04:39.540 was that I think the journalist in question

00:04:42.100 had tweeted or put something on his Instagram,

00:04:44.480 which was a picture of himself swigging champagne

00:04:47.180 for having achieved the firing of somebody

00:04:51.040 by lying about them.

00:04:52.540 Yeah, that's a particularly ugly thing to do

00:04:55.460 after getting somebody fired from their job.

00:04:59.680 George Eaton had posted this photograph on Instagram,

00:05:02.760 subsequently removed it,

00:05:04.500 but of him swigging champagne saying,

00:05:06.840 the feeling you get when you get racist and homophobe Roger Scruton fired from his government

00:05:15.900 position. By the way, the homophobe claim was particularly interesting because

00:05:22.820 the tape of the interview, which I subsequently acquired, showed that George Eaton himself said

00:05:31.520 something which by his own lights would be homophobic. The question he put to Roger Scruton

00:05:35.400 was, you've been criticized in the past for saying that homosexuality is not normal, but

00:05:40.220 that's just a statement of the obvious. That's what George Eaton says. Roger Scruton then

00:05:46.380 says, oh, well, no, when I say not normal, I mean it's not the norm in the same way that

00:05:50.680 having ginger hair isn't the norm. So this journalist says something that is homophobic

00:05:58.080 and then attributes the homophobia to the person who didn't say something homophobic,

00:06:03.140 who's the target of his smear campaign.

00:06:06.120 It's a really interesting lesson.

00:06:08.140 I think this happens sometimes in journalism.

00:06:11.980 There are times when you can just see

00:06:15.560 how the whole wretched hit job is done.

00:06:19.520 And that's what I wanted to do.

00:06:20.580 That's why I wrote a big cover piece

00:06:22.400 in The Spectator a few weeks ago now

00:06:23.920 called The Anatomy of a Hit Job.

00:06:26.260 Because, you know, I'm fortunate enough in this position

00:06:29.380 because I knew the person

00:06:31.160 who the accusations were being made about

00:06:33.560 but I mean I've been

00:06:35.720 overwhelmed by messages since as you can

00:06:37.700 imagine by more people than usual

00:06:39.500 saying look what's happened to me and this has

00:06:41.660 been said about me and so on and so

00:06:43.500 in a way I think it's resonated with

00:06:45.700 a slightly wider number of people than would normally

00:06:47.580 be the case because I think we

00:06:49.640 are all, we've all been becoming familiar

00:06:51.600 in recent years with the fact that

00:06:53.460 the media is not

00:06:55.500 honest with very basic

00:06:57.820 things, I'm not saying all the media, I'm not saying

00:06:59.580 all journalists, there were some fine journalists.

00:07:01.840 But as the model of funding in journalism

00:07:05.560 dies or at least stumbles very severely,

00:07:10.940 it's sort of hollowed out.

00:07:13.100 And I say this as a journalist myself,

00:07:14.840 it's being hollowed out.

00:07:17.360 And in the space of reporting

00:07:20.440 and having to really stick very carefully to facts,

00:07:25.400 there's been this melding.

00:07:28.240 Something's been happening.

00:07:29.580 whereby an activist like this guy, George Eaton,

00:07:34.120 can go in to try to take out an interview subject.

00:07:38.500 And the aim of the interview is therefore not an interview.

00:07:41.320 It's to do something else.

00:07:43.040 And I think that a lot of people have noticed in recent years

00:07:46.480 a tendency in television and in print journalism

00:07:52.640 to move from doing the thing that you hold yourself out as doing

00:07:56.740 and to do something else.

00:07:59.400 And once you work out what that something else is,

00:08:04.360 it's very, apart from anything else,

00:08:05.560 it's a scales from eyes moment,

00:08:07.000 because after that, people don't trust the media again.

00:08:10.080 And do you think this is a problem that arises

00:08:12.020 mainly from the left or the right,

00:08:13.680 or is it both ends of the political spectrum?

00:08:15.620 I think that can happen from any end of the political spectrum.

00:08:18.280 I mean, if you're a fool to pretend

00:08:20.760 that the right-wing press hasn't been able to, you know,

00:08:23.360 make a run of things in the past.

00:08:26.200 I mean, I suppose one thing that is happening

00:08:28.240 is that because of the age of social media

00:08:29.960 and easier access to things

00:08:31.440 that we now have the opportunity,

00:08:35.880 it doesn't always work,

00:08:36.960 but you have the opportunity

00:08:37.860 to unravel the thing in public.

00:08:43.660 So it's not just the case

00:08:44.740 that somebody can stitch somebody up

00:08:46.500 and then there's no recourse.

00:08:49.060 You know, there is now a possibility

00:08:50.660 of showing people how it's done,

00:08:53.200 which is what I did with the Scruton tapes.

00:08:54.780 and um and i think that i think that an old style hit job from some decades ago people didn't have

00:09:03.040 the sort of recourse and you couldn't explain you couldn't work out how it had happened but

00:09:06.640 i think it's more prevalent now it's faster but this is a good side because there is always a

00:09:12.740 good side to this stuff you can you can unpack it in public and do you think that's why there's this

00:09:19.000 widespread distrust of the media amongst the ordinary person because i've i've been quite

00:09:24.720 shocked i talk to people uh doing comedy a lot and a lot of people go yeah i don't watch the

00:09:29.480 bbc anymore i don't watch sky news i can't trust them i can't trust this person or whatever else

00:09:34.060 well there's lots of reasons for that and i think it's not just a trust thing

00:09:39.640 television news is a very bad way to absorb news i mean if you agree with this i stopped doing it

00:09:46.160 quite a long time ago because rolling news

00:09:50.500 is a very bad way to get information.

00:09:53.480 It's repetitious, it takes far too long

00:09:56.340 to unravel the information it's trying to give to you.

00:10:00.760 Whereas if you click down on a website

00:10:02.920 and just absorb the headlines,

00:10:04.360 and it could be the front page of the BBC website,

00:10:07.460 you just see, okay, what are the five things

00:10:09.120 that have happened?

00:10:09.960 You can do that in, that's 15 seconds.

00:10:13.160 Whereas if you're watching a rolling news report,

00:10:15.280 You've got minutes and minutes you're wasting.

00:10:18.580 So part of this is just that we are finding better ways to discover news

00:10:22.640 and to keep up with things.

00:10:25.560 So I think there's that as well.

00:10:28.740 I mean, I am struck by the fall-off in viewing figures.

00:10:31.520 And obviously one of the big developments of our time

00:10:34.700 is the fact that you can do what used to be a very prominent news program

00:10:40.360 and get very few people watching.

00:10:42.300 you can do a podcast

00:10:44.320 maybe even this one

00:10:45.860 with very few people watching

00:10:48.080 as well

00:10:49.020 but they're the right people

00:10:51.280 the right people are not watching

00:10:53.340 thank you for watching

00:10:54.720 what do you make of this

00:10:58.180 it seems to me like in recent years

00:11:00.240 the idea that rather than addressing

00:11:02.480 people's arguments we must just attack

00:11:04.440 them as individuals seems to have

00:11:06.320 taken on a whole new level and racist

00:11:08.420 xenophobe all this stuff gets

00:11:10.460 thrown around so much now that it almost feels like half the country are now racist and xenophobic

00:11:16.880 according to the media. Which of course has a danger doesn't it because it means that maybe

00:11:20.540 nobody is or nobody can be plausibly accused of it which will be a problem down the line I would

00:11:25.720 submit. You mean down the line when there are genuine racists that label won't stick because

00:11:31.800 people will go well you called everyone a racist. Yeah I think that's already happening by the way

00:11:36.000 i don't see it having the societal consequences it once had um it's like if everybody's a

00:11:43.440 misogynist i love shopping for new jackets and boots this season and when i do i always make

00:11:49.080 sure i get cash back with rakuten and it's not just fashion you can earn cash back on electronics

00:11:54.400 beauty travel and more at stores like sephora old navy and expedia it's so easy to save that i

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00:12:05.820 e-transfer, PayPal, or check. Download the Rakuten app or sign up at rakuten.ca. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.ca.

00:12:16.300 It's quite hard then to unravel or to discover somebody who actually is, you know.

00:12:22.580 So yeah, we've been having a sort of era of hyperinflation in terminology. There's no doubt

00:12:28.040 about that um and it's noise and and and i i don't take too much much of that stuff very seriously

00:12:36.840 uh and i think increasingly people are taking that less seriously um the noise is so deafening

00:12:43.760 that in the end you just have to step away from it and that's what i i do i don't think people

00:12:48.780 should seek it out at any rate i think they should try not to add to it there's always been an

00:12:54.220 aspiration certainly ever since the rise of the net

00:12:56.660 that we would

00:12:58.680 be able to have serious conversations

00:13:00.660 across political lines and I've

00:13:02.620 been struck by what a failure

00:13:04.800 it has been

00:13:05.620 actually when I first met

00:13:08.820 Roger Scruton it was because

00:13:10.640 when I was just out of university I'd

00:13:12.280 written my first book which was on literature and I was

00:13:14.640 taking a turn towards

00:13:16.520 politics and I

00:13:18.520 wanted my first job, my first internship

00:13:20.400 which then the lowest rung of the

00:13:22.660 a ladder of paid journalism

00:13:25.160 was at a website that was aiming

00:13:27.080 to bring right and left together, this is

00:13:28.800 18 years ago or so now, aiming to bring

00:13:31.100 right and left together where we could

00:13:33.080 argue out our views

00:13:34.660 not on

00:13:36.540 personalities or on

00:13:39.140 you know

00:13:40.480 the usual way in which these things

00:13:43.080 go but on their most serious grounds

00:13:45.160 to take each other's arguments as seriously

00:13:47.340 as possible and

00:13:49.240 of course it was

00:13:51.080 well the first problem was that

00:13:52.720 I remember as Roger Scruton who had identified

00:13:55.160 that I was not of the left

00:13:56.820 said to me it's about

00:13:59.200 40,000 leftists versus us

00:14:01.360 and I remember

00:14:03.280 him saying so it is actually a fair fight

00:14:05.420 but

00:14:06.980 make of that what you will

00:14:08.960 but I remember that was the case

00:14:11.160 then they couldn't resist

00:14:12.220 I'm not saying the right can do this as well

00:14:14.860 there's not a left right point but on that occasion

00:14:16.920 they couldn't resist they just wanted to keep

00:14:19.160 throwing people at like we've got to not allow that argument to get out we've got to trample

00:14:24.660 that down and that just is that is the trend i'm afraid and um i understand it because one way to

00:14:32.840 win is to pretend that you're not really playing the game and then play the game you know and uh

00:14:39.220 and that's been happening a lot in the years since but yes i mean we were always the whole point of

00:14:43.180 the optimism

00:14:46.460 some people felt in the era of the internet

00:14:48.260 was, you know, we can have

00:14:50.200 face-to-face interactions and we can respect

00:14:52.440 each other more.

00:14:54.240 You laugh, rightly.

00:14:56.720 Yes, well we've all experienced Twitter

00:14:58.460 haven't we? But do you think this is an

00:15:00.160 intimidatory tactic?

00:15:01.840 Is this a way just to shut down debate

00:15:04.140 and therefore make sure

00:15:06.400 that you have your own views to be

00:15:08.360 heard without opposition from anybody else?

00:15:10.780 Possibly, yeah, just to win.

00:15:13.180 I'm surprised, by the way, that it works so well.

00:15:18.120 There's an odd thing in our time where people seek virtue points by suffering.

00:15:26.620 It's a very strange thing in our society.

00:15:28.780 People used to admire people for heroism, and now they admire them for suffering.

00:15:33.600 So the more you can claim to have suffered, the more admiration you'll get,

00:15:37.860 and the more you'll be allowed to do.

00:15:40.120 It's a very strange inversion, and there's all sorts of reasons for it.

00:15:42.500 But it means that in the social media wars

00:15:45.200 and in the political wars,

00:15:46.180 there's this fascinating thing

00:15:48.300 where people now boast about the offence they get.

00:15:51.420 They boast about the online abuse.

00:15:54.240 You know, it's every day.

00:15:56.160 Oh, I get so much abuse.

00:16:00.320 So, first of all, it doesn't mean you're right.

00:16:03.080 That's a very important thing to bear in mind.

00:16:05.120 Just because you've got a lot of people

00:16:07.400 being really rude about you

00:16:09.020 does not mean you're right.

00:16:10.460 It doesn't mean they're right.

00:16:12.500 either. So there's this strange auditioning for respect by being the most insulted person

00:16:19.700 in the village. It's odd. It's very odd. And it's also very misrepresentative. You take

00:16:24.840 the example of David Lammy, who called the ERG and Tories he didn't agree with. He said

00:16:30.980 they were worse than Nazis. Worse than Nazis. Not just Nazis, worse than Nazis. They haven't

00:16:34.960 killed six million Jews, they've killed more, the ERG. Clearly, in David Lammy's view. Yeah,

00:16:40.580 exactly and he said that then he got a bunch of stuff on twitter some of it was horrific and

00:16:45.980 racist and he then as you say used 10 messages on twitter from some idiots as a way of legitimizing

00:16:54.240 the point of view that he made and said well look look this is what i'm talking about everyone's

00:16:59.140 doing that now yeah i'm incredibly bored of it um everybody goes in public and says oh look about

00:17:06.500 the abuse I got. Well, first of all, by the way, I mean, I don't seek to find how abused I am on

00:17:12.500 any day. It has no interest to me at all. If I started self-googling and checking what people

00:17:20.180 have said on Twitter, well, first of all, I wouldn't get any writing done. I wouldn't get

00:17:23.200 any reading done. I wouldn't see my friends and I wouldn't have a meaningful life. So I'd rather

00:17:28.720 do those things among many others than be writing Douglas Murray into Twitter and reading what

00:17:34.320 somebody has said from their mother's basement and but i'm but you know i could do i just i

00:17:41.140 wouldn't because it's it doesn't mean you've won the argument and this this appeal by the way

00:17:46.940 there's another thing which is it makes people first of all it makes people imbibe some of the

00:17:53.640 attitudes of their aggressors which i think is you know you see it people are a bit put upon

00:17:57.940 that some people you know they're going it's not what you read about me online i'm not reading

00:18:02.320 about you online you know um and we're not as absorbed about you as you are about yourself

00:18:08.720 and and and there's all sorts of personality defects you can see it it causes and um i just

00:18:18.780 i also think that people should be stronger i uh i think i actually mentioned to you yesterday at

00:18:24.180 this conference i i'm i'm worried by this thing for instance of people who say that they're

00:18:29.600 opposing anti-Semitism, doing it and boasting about how much abuse they get online for saying

00:18:37.260 that they're against anti-Semitism. And then you have examples. They don't want to single anyone

00:18:41.720 out, but this appeal to victimhood catches on. You get things like there was a Labour MP

00:18:49.900 called Ruth Smith, is it? Anyhow, she was at a meeting with Corbyn about anti-Semitism a couple

00:18:59.180 years ago and there was some low-grade trade union guy who's a notorious nutter who sort of stands up

00:19:06.360 at some point in the thing and she says something and he says something about her that's rude and

00:19:11.160 she says it's anti-semitic and she leaves the meeting in tears and then everyone writes these

00:19:16.960 pieces saying brave Labour MP forced to leave meeting in tears after anti-semitism incident

00:19:22.600 I think no no that is not the way to respond to that if you're sitting at a meeting and I say

00:19:28.920 Okay, she's a woman.

00:19:30.160 I don't know why that should mean she can't do this

00:19:32.200 or why anyone can't do this.

00:19:33.780 It doesn't matter.

00:19:34.740 If a man to a woman, a woman to a man,

00:19:36.280 woman to a woman, man to a man.

00:19:37.540 If somebody's going to go at you for being Jewish

00:19:40.140 and say something anti-Semitic,

00:19:42.800 don't leave the meeting in tears.

00:19:44.140 Turn right round to that person

00:19:45.460 and give that bastard what he deserves.

00:19:48.380 But it's like everybody has imbibed this idea

00:19:51.340 that to win would be to visibly suffer in public.

00:19:55.340 No, to win would be to turn it round on the aggressor

00:19:58.500 and make them lose.

00:19:59.960 That would be the way.

00:20:01.180 Do you not think that it's the easy option,

00:20:03.820 that what we're going for now?

00:20:04.980 It's far easier to claim that you're a victim,

00:20:07.280 to cry, to walk out, to be in tears,

00:20:09.660 than to actually go toe-to-toe,

00:20:11.820 metaphorically speaking,

00:20:13.080 and win an argument.

00:20:14.400 Sure, very much so.

00:20:16.100 Well, because also if you go toe-to-toe,

00:20:18.560 you might have to change your mind.

00:20:20.000 I mean, that's another thing.

00:20:20.660 That's the really important thing about actual dialogue,

00:20:23.680 is the possibility that you'll change your mind.

00:20:27.100 I think there's something by the way

00:20:29.320 there's something very interesting in this

00:20:30.580 Brett Weinstein was with us

00:20:32.440 in recent days and

00:20:34.000 Brett and his brother Eric both of whom I'm

00:20:37.040 very fond of and admire hugely

00:20:38.960 are both of the political left

00:20:40.220 you can have a discussion with them about anything

00:20:43.060 and

00:20:44.580 you know they're not going to try to pull a fast one

00:20:47.180 on you ideologically and suddenly make you

00:20:49.080 vote Hillary Clinton

00:20:49.840 so he's like I'm very confident

00:20:52.460 I'm very confident so

00:20:54.480 and so often when I meet

00:20:57.680 friends like that, friends of the left

00:20:59.620 and others, you know, I just sort of think

00:21:01.560 I wish all conversations

00:21:03.500 could be like this. I wish we could just

00:21:05.480 talk about what the situation

00:21:07.700 is. I wish the adults could

00:21:09.660 actually get together in a room

00:21:11.280 and the interesting thing is though is that if there's

00:21:13.620 even one person in the room

00:21:15.300 trying to do

00:21:17.500 something else, nobody

00:21:19.400 can do it. That's the thing, one of the things I've

00:21:21.520 learned in recent years has been

00:21:22.640 let me put it this way like if you were having a discussion about the theory of evolution

00:21:27.900 and you were pointing to problems in the theory of evolution like things we still don't know how

00:21:34.180 it works you could have that conversation really fascinatingly with a load of people at a really

00:21:40.040 high level but if there was one person there who was trying to do intelligent design on you when

00:21:45.720 you weren't looking you wouldn't be able to have that conversation because you'd know somebody else

00:21:49.860 had some other intent and I think it's become like that on almost every issue in our culture

00:21:55.460 we there are lots of things we could really do with talking about but we we can't do it because

00:22:03.000 there's always one person in the room maybe not on this occasion but there's always one person

00:22:07.760 in the room who whose real aim is when you're not looking to smuggle in some left or right-wing

00:22:17.360 politics or some

00:22:19.280 religion or anti-religion or whatever

00:22:21.380 and if there's just one person

00:22:23.560 playing a different game, the whole game can't

00:22:25.480 be played. Well the game we try

00:22:27.400 and play on this show is actually just to have

00:22:29.380 our guests and give them an

00:22:31.340 opportunity to say whatever it is that they

00:22:33.340 find interesting and we find interesting

00:22:35.460 unfiltered. And

00:22:37.340 obviously the major issues that you have talked

00:22:39.460 about your book and generally

00:22:41.400 that you're known to many people for

00:22:43.540 is... Books

00:22:45.540 by the way, I'm sensitive about this.

00:22:46.980 occasionally people say

00:22:49.560 I've got another book coming out next

00:22:50.960 September and some people say

00:22:53.020 your second book and I think like

00:22:54.520 sixth

00:22:55.560 we authors mind that

00:22:59.520 I know exactly

00:23:02.580 but I think it's fair to say

00:23:05.280 that The Strange Death of Europe has been a particularly

00:23:07.260 big one of yours

00:23:07.880 it sold more than my book on Northern Ireland

00:23:10.400 surprisingly to everybody

00:23:12.580 and before I ask you about that

00:23:15.680 Actually, the thing I wanted to ask you is I remember watching you probably on Question Time seven or eight years ago.

00:23:20.480 It would have been now.

00:23:21.040 Probably the last time I was invited on.

00:23:25.000 And I'll be honest with you.

00:23:26.200 I don't know whether you have changed or I have changed.

00:23:28.040 But at the time, I remember thinking, who is this angry right winger that they've got on the show?

00:23:33.840 And you strike me as the opposite of that.

00:23:36.420 And maybe I've moved away from the left to the center so much that you don't strike me as quite that right.

00:23:42.340 But you also seem to be quite mellow.

00:23:44.180 and you have a sense of humour now.

00:23:46.260 What's changed for you?

00:23:47.280 Well, I've always had a sense of humour.

00:23:49.260 I haven't always shown it, maybe.

00:23:51.300 You probably have moved.

00:23:53.380 And I probably have moved.

00:23:56.420 I mean, it would be very boring

00:23:57.580 if we just assumed positions in our life

00:23:59.260 and stuck to them until the grave.

00:24:03.640 I think one of the things...

00:24:07.000 I mean, I'm 39 now,

00:24:09.720 and that's not very old,

00:24:11.540 but it means, because I started my career very early,

00:24:14.560 it means I had some kind of public profile

00:24:17.640 for 20 years or more.

00:24:20.120 And there are certain things you learn along the way.

00:24:25.560 There are certainly edges that get knocked off you

00:24:27.360 along the way.

00:24:28.500 I have a friend who once said to me,

00:24:32.300 you must get less nervous with time,

00:24:35.640 with public appearances and television.

00:24:37.340 I know it gets worse all the time.

00:24:40.520 Infinitely worse.

00:24:41.280 And she said, but why?

00:24:42.540 And I said, well, because the more you do it,

00:24:44.820 the more you know how many things can go wrong

00:24:47.540 and how many ways they can go wrong.

00:24:50.240 And I have this stand-up comedian friends and others tell me the same thing.

00:24:53.300 Actors tell me the same thing.

00:24:54.560 You start off thinking, go on stage and just do my bit.

00:24:57.860 And then, you know, there are all these things that go wrong.

00:25:01.020 The curtain doesn't come up or the prop isn't there.

00:25:04.380 And then you start to get nervous about the whole thing.

00:25:07.440 But the point is that's not only a negative.

00:25:09.980 there's also lots of things you just learn

00:25:11.660 because you've done it a lot

00:25:13.760 and it's one of the great things of experience

00:25:15.400 I think I've

00:25:19.640 among other things learned what fights

00:25:21.900 are worth having and which are not

00:25:23.660 or at least to choose

00:25:25.800 your fights, choose them wisely

00:25:27.920 have meaningful ones

00:25:29.580 don't get unnecessarily bogged down

00:25:31.820 in ones that

00:25:32.880 aren't worth going

00:25:35.880 in for

00:25:36.360 I think on some things

00:25:40.580 I'm probably slightly more mellow

00:25:42.940 because I've accepted the catastrophe

00:25:44.780 of where we are

00:25:45.960 and I think that's worth

00:25:48.520 considering

00:25:49.840 this is what I was going to ask

00:25:51.240 because I was worried

00:25:53.340 that that would be your answer

00:25:54.520 because the book

00:25:56.020 The Strangely Earth of Europe

00:25:57.860 it is a book that struck me

00:26:00.200 simultaneously as being very accurate

00:26:01.660 and incredibly depressing

00:26:02.740 yes, sure

00:26:03.960 should have tried writing it

00:26:05.900 and so i i suspected that one of the reasons that maybe you come across as more humorous and more

00:26:15.320 mellow is that you've accepted that there's not much that we're going to be able to do about some

00:26:20.980 of the problems you've identified yeah um some things you can do but you also have to work out

00:26:29.160 at some point for your own well-being what it's worth hitting your head against the wall for and

00:26:34.520 what it isn't. And to some extent, also, if you've done what you can. I don't feel like,

00:26:44.820 I mean, I'm not moving away from, you know, it's not like I'm never going to write or speak about

00:26:49.440 any of the things I've written about in recent years. But I do feel that, you know, once you've

00:26:54.480 said it enough, you think, I don't want to just keep saying that. And maybe I've said what I can

00:27:01.080 and issued whatever warnings I can

00:27:03.060 and analysed it as well as I can,

00:27:06.200 explained it as well as I can,

00:27:07.440 and if that hasn't done the job, then okay.

00:27:11.520 And how do you come to that decision

00:27:13.380 about what to speak about?

00:27:14.980 Because when I look at you from the outside,

00:27:18.260 you come across someone who's actually quite fearless

00:27:20.560 with the way you address certain topics.

00:27:24.260 Especially there's certain things people even talk about,

00:27:27.160 even amongst their friends,

00:27:29.100 when they know there's no one around.

00:27:31.080 Those are the ones that are really worth doing.

00:27:34.420 But you see, of course they are, and they're really important.

00:27:37.320 How do you make that decision of, this needs to be discussed,

00:27:41.440 and we're not doing it, and I'm going to be the person to do it?

00:27:44.620 Well, I don't do it particularly strategically.

00:27:46.100 I think there's several things.

00:27:47.200 One is, I don't know, you may have this yourselves,

00:27:51.580 but there are some things that just get under your skin,

00:27:54.320 and you can't quite see how it happens or the order in which they come in.

00:27:58.000 the Scruton one

00:28:00.100 the way it started

00:28:00.920 got under my skin

00:28:02.200 because

00:28:02.600 this was a terrible lie

00:28:04.460 and it was being said

00:28:05.260 about a friend

00:28:05.920 and something I admire

00:28:07.620 so there's no way

00:28:09.220 I was going to have that

00:28:10.000 but that can happen

00:28:13.240 in funny ways

00:28:14.520 I think that a good instinct

00:28:17.520 in general

00:28:18.020 if anyone who wants

00:28:18.760 to be a writer

00:28:19.260 is to have an aversion

00:28:20.820 to lies

00:28:21.680 and I

00:28:22.620 now you may say

00:28:24.060 that's an awfully

00:28:25.040 target rich

00:28:26.200 environment

00:28:27.460 you're talking about there,

00:28:28.440 but there will be some

00:28:30.260 that will get under your skin

00:28:31.260 more than others.

00:28:31.880 You won't be able to know,

00:28:32.680 you won't be able to,

00:28:33.860 or at least you're in a very bad position yourself

00:28:35.780 to analyze what it is

00:28:36.920 that particularly gets under your skin.

00:28:39.640 But there just are things

00:28:40.900 that you can tolerate

00:28:42.000 more than other things.

00:28:42.920 So, you know,

00:28:46.020 horoscopes don't thrill me.

00:28:50.180 But I don't feel like

00:28:52.900 they're strong enough

00:28:53.840 and doing enough harm

00:28:55.740 that I need to campaign against them very much.

00:29:00.860 Things that do come across your path

00:29:03.340 and start to cause harm to things you care about

00:29:05.460 and lies that affect things you care about, you will.

00:29:09.540 So we all let some lies go by.

00:29:14.040 But there will be some which, for instance,

00:29:15.760 you know more about than most other people

00:29:18.080 or maybe anyone else.

00:29:19.560 And you'll go, no, no, I've got to correct that.

00:29:22.120 And other things will just be ones

00:29:23.640 you particularly care about.

00:29:24.700 and we all have different orders of

00:29:27.140 priority on that

00:29:28.640 so I don't think it's strategically chosen

00:29:31.160 or anything

00:29:31.700 but

00:29:33.840 it is interesting always to notice what are

00:29:37.180 I mean most writers are in some way

00:29:39.160 interested in

00:29:41.080 dogma, what are the dogmas

00:29:43.460 there's no point in just being a writer

00:29:45.400 and firming

00:29:47.460 up dogmas

00:29:48.740 one of the points of writing is to get to truth

00:29:51.100 the main point and that means

00:29:53.420 identifying accidentally or deliberately the things of your day that you're not meant to do

00:29:59.280 and doing them or at least looking at them and saying what is it about this thing that makes it

00:30:04.060 so sacred now i'm very fond of a quote from hl mencken who said at some point in the 20s somewhere

00:30:10.800 that um you know human progress was only ever achieved i'm not myself a great fan of the idea

00:30:16.780 of human progress, but park that for now,

00:30:19.460 that it was only overachieved by, he says,

00:30:22.760 jolly fellows heaving dead cats into sanctuaries

00:30:26.100 and going roistering along the highways of the world.

00:30:30.180 And I've always wanted to encourage

00:30:33.920 dead cat heaving into sanctuaries.

00:30:37.720 And it's so funny because every era has taboos

00:30:43.220 and every era has dogmas.

00:30:46.780 religions and it's so funny when people don't realize that they are the dogmatists and the

00:30:54.940 ultra-religious and indeed as we now have the puritans they didn't realize they're the puritans

00:31:01.600 absolutely not and what do you think is one of the great lies of our age that we haven't addressed

00:31:06.980 yet or maybe we just simply too scared to i think there's whole slews of them

00:31:15.860 I don't know where to start.

00:31:18.880 I mean, there's so many.

00:31:19.820 I think there's so many presumptions of our age

00:31:22.160 that I don't accept myself and would run against.

00:31:26.100 I think there are ones that are causing us enormous pain.

00:31:29.620 It's very interesting if you look at the tick list of

00:31:31.940 what are the issues which whenever anyone treads on them,

00:31:36.400 they're blown up.

00:31:39.760 They all have the same thing in common,

00:31:41.700 which is the society is demanding you agree to something

00:31:46.720 that it's not possible to agree to and keep your self-esteem

00:31:53.380 or at least be able to look at yourself in the mirror.

00:31:56.980 So the most obvious one is everything to do with gender and sex.

00:32:04.800 That's why trans keeps tripping people up.

00:32:07.560 Such a small issue, such a small issue,

00:32:09.500 such a minority of a minority issue.

00:32:11.700 but it keeps tripping people up because they just don't want to say the thing they're being told to

00:32:18.360 say which is that there is no difference between men and women and that we can migrate between the

00:32:24.420 sexes and that our bodies are like pieces of lego you can just stick bits onto and then if you don't

00:32:29.440 like it you can take it off again people there's that you know there's something because there's

00:32:35.080 something demoralizing about agreeing to lies this is different by the way from just custom

00:32:40.460 or politeness or being decent to people.

00:32:42.920 We all should aspire to being polite and decent to people,

00:32:47.400 but being invited to engage in a lie

00:32:50.740 ends up demoralizing you.

00:32:53.040 I don't know if you've ever...

00:32:55.100 You know, communist countries,

00:32:56.860 that was one of the things I've often thought.

00:33:01.040 I've only been to a couple of countries

00:33:02.660 still trying that wretched experiment,

00:33:04.280 but those who traveled a lot behind the Iron Curtain

00:33:09.540 or lived behind it,

00:33:11.100 often commented on the needless things

00:33:13.280 they were persuaded to agree to lie about.

00:33:16.720 And people often wondered,

00:33:18.980 why am I being made to agree

00:33:22.320 to this next implausible thing?

00:33:24.600 And the answer really was

00:33:26.240 because it'll demoralize you further

00:33:28.980 and it'll make you less willing

00:33:31.500 even than you were before

00:33:33.400 to think of yourself as an individual

00:33:35.840 with any worth.

00:33:38.300 So that's the plan.

00:33:40.440 And I don't say that that's organized.

00:33:42.660 I just think that it's subtle that people slip into it.

00:33:46.100 And I think in our own society,

00:33:48.000 we have to be really careful.

00:33:50.000 I like heretics.

00:33:51.620 I like dissidents.

00:33:52.760 I like the people who say the thing

00:33:54.240 that no one else will say.

00:33:55.400 I admire it.

00:33:58.800 And I think we have to be very careful as a society

00:34:02.800 we don't slip into on that issue,

00:34:05.160 on gender, on sex, sexuality indeed.

00:34:07.740 that we don't slip into a sort of a load of untruths

00:34:12.900 which basically will just demoralize us

00:34:16.840 because the truth is energizing.

00:34:20.940 You know, that's one of the things.

00:34:22.900 Oh, such a relief.

00:34:25.080 Such a relief not to have to lie.

00:34:28.200 No, it's true.

00:34:28.880 That's why when you go on to watch a comedy show,

00:34:31.260 when somebody's honest about a particular,

00:34:33.420 you can feel there's an electricity in the audience.

00:34:35.520 Yes.

00:34:35.840 People lean in, they crave it.

00:34:37.740 and that's obviously comedy is

00:34:39.780 one of the best tools for this

00:34:41.580 because you can't not, the laugh

00:34:43.720 the laugh of recognition

00:34:45.460 you can't stop, I mean I like

00:34:47.820 that thing when audiences laugh and then try

00:34:49.800 I shouldn't have laughed

00:34:51.840 at that. I'll be honest as comedians

00:34:53.720 we don't like it

00:34:54.700 when it's stifled their laughter

00:34:56.920 I have certain lines

00:34:59.920 I use which I

00:35:01.820 know are going to cause an audience

00:35:03.760 to laugh and then do an intake of breath

00:35:05.740 and try to pretend they didn't laugh.

00:35:07.140 It's a wonderful feeling.

00:35:08.760 It's like you've laid a trap for them.

00:35:11.220 Exactly.

00:35:12.020 Absolutely.

00:35:12.700 So sex and gender, what else?

00:35:15.560 What else are we refusing to talk about, honestly?

00:35:19.780 Oh, wow.

00:35:22.460 We don't have any basis for our morality.

00:35:24.880 How about that?

00:35:26.680 It's a biggie.

00:35:29.100 Our whole metaphysical system is in serious flux

00:35:32.840 and we're pretending it isn't.

00:35:34.180 because we no longer have God

00:35:36.380 going from belief in God

00:35:39.060 to non-belief in God

00:35:40.200 as a society

00:35:40.920 is one of the biggest changes

00:35:42.160 that can happen

00:35:42.800 I'm a non-believer myself

00:35:44.880 but I think it's very unwise

00:35:47.080 of non-believers

00:35:47.940 to pretend that it's all

00:35:48.940 just business as usual

00:35:50.100 very unwise

00:35:51.940 I mean obviously

00:35:53.060 there's an attempt

00:35:53.720 to have business as usual

00:35:55.540 by doing human rights

00:35:56.860 rights

00:35:57.800 so many rights

00:35:59.300 look at all my rights

00:36:00.500 I want more rights

00:36:01.820 and these people

00:36:02.480 should have even more

00:36:03.400 that's

00:36:05.700 what are they based on

00:36:07.920 where do they come from

00:36:09.700 who gives them to you

00:36:10.720 who can take them away

00:36:11.800 what's the idea of equality and rights

00:36:17.620 really does that work

00:36:19.500 I mean there's so much

00:36:22.200 there's so much in this

00:36:23.420 I think we've been

00:36:25.400 sort of the subject of my next book in part

00:36:27.360 I think we've been trying to

00:36:28.640 put a new metaphysics

00:36:31.320 underneath the society

00:36:32.760 in order to reassure ourselves

00:36:36.000 that it's business as usual

00:36:37.320 when it isn't.

00:36:40.540 But, you know, there's just

00:36:42.620 a whole load of questions

00:36:44.560 you have to ask down the road from that.

00:36:46.280 I come across it occasionally

00:36:48.420 in social issues.

00:36:52.880 There's one I've written about

00:36:54.040 a few times of euthanasia,

00:36:55.820 which I'm always interested in

00:36:57.660 because it's a very ugly,

00:37:00.720 difficult unpleasant subject and people have pretty strong views about it and you can very

00:37:09.620 easily show them this problem of what happens if you don't have fixed values even as aspirations

00:37:18.600 or when for instance you turn everything into a right and one of the rights becomes your right

00:37:25.160 to kill yourself

00:37:27.260 like that's a new right

00:37:29.740 a final right, last right

00:37:32.080 and you go

00:37:33.900 right, okay

00:37:34.740 and then you have people

00:37:38.120 as I've come across in the Netherlands and Belgium

00:37:39.960 who are campaigning for the right

00:37:42.080 of children to have

00:37:44.180 euthanasia

00:37:44.740 or people who are mentally ill to have euthanasia

00:37:48.200 which happens of course

00:37:49.520 on the continent, happens in Belgium and in the Netherlands

00:37:52.400 so it's a right

00:37:53.720 to say, you're mentally ill

00:37:56.700 and we completely respect you

00:37:58.760 and indeed we think that mental illness

00:38:00.500 is exactly on a par with physical illness

00:38:02.620 as the British government currently says it wants to

00:38:04.720 regard this as being.

00:38:07.000 And one of the great

00:38:08.860 things that we're going to fight for is that

00:38:10.660 you can kill yourself with the

00:38:12.700 state's help at any time.

00:38:16.140 Wow.

00:38:17.780 I mean,

00:38:18.300 my editor at The Spectator, Fraser Nelson,

00:38:20.580 has a really interesting challenge

00:38:22.820 which I sort of pass on because I think it's

00:38:24.580 he says since every

00:38:26.580 era has its taboos

00:38:28.400 and no since every

00:38:30.820 era is doing

00:38:32.540 since every era has always done things

00:38:34.940 that are just historically you look back

00:38:36.800 and you think that is nuts

00:38:38.040 why did they do that

00:38:40.080 assume we're doing some things

00:38:42.940 like that ourselves rather

00:38:44.860 than the first group of people

00:38:46.960 in human history to do nothing

00:38:48.920 nuts

00:38:49.480 and like but identify them try to identify what they might be now that like us thinking why did

00:38:57.900 victorians use children as chimney sweeps they're very small they're very small

00:39:02.960 that's amazing we don't start again um and but you know what are the things we must be doing

00:39:11.560 things i'm very sure we're doing things like i can tell you i mean the one i've just given you

00:39:15.060 is one of course we're doing things that people are going to look back on we might look back on

00:39:19.140 in our lifetimes, I think, what were we thinking?

00:39:22.260 To me, one of the things,

00:39:23.620 and this is from an outsider's point of view,

00:39:25.320 is this a situation at universities

00:39:27.160 where essentially we're censoring people

00:39:29.700 for their ideas, you know,

00:39:31.840 and then you see academics attacking one another,

00:39:34.660 you know, trying...

00:39:35.520 That's not new.

00:39:37.180 Is that not new?

00:39:38.480 Academics attacking each other.

00:39:40.620 Stop the press.

00:39:42.580 I'm a little wary of the campus wars

00:39:46.040 for lots of reasons.

00:39:47.020 One is it can often seem to be

00:39:48.400 a rather rarefied issue.

00:39:52.200 Most people still don't go to university.

00:39:54.540 Most people, you know, are not, you know,

00:39:58.460 their lives go on without reference

00:40:00.220 to the campuses of our countries.

00:40:03.220 So I worry about, sometimes about the overstating,

00:40:06.140 I worry not about the overstating,

00:40:07.780 because it can't be overstated,

00:40:08.460 but the over-focus on it,

00:40:10.660 because I think just a lot of people in their lives

00:40:12.480 have exactly the problems that people are talking about

00:40:16.020 on university campuses outside of campus.

00:40:18.280 and with no reference to campus,

00:40:20.460 never having been on a campus.

00:40:22.520 So I think the reason why the university stuff does matter,

00:40:27.960 and I mean, a second, sorry, another second caveat,

00:40:30.420 which is also students have, you know,

00:40:32.700 not always, but been nuts for a long time on certain issues.

00:40:36.100 Like a national union of students,

00:40:39.420 like when did anyone think they would be

00:40:41.280 a centrist sensible body?

00:40:43.980 You know, so like, okay, there's some stupid kids

00:40:47.140 trying some stuff out and they'll grow up

00:40:49.280 and become Labour Party MPs

00:40:51.020 like all other

00:40:52.840 NUS leaders

00:40:54.440 but you know so in a way

00:40:56.980 it's like

00:40:57.340 it's dog bites man

00:41:00.520 I think that's a legitimate

00:41:02.460 complaint

00:41:05.060 or a legitimate

00:41:06.940 suspicion to have

00:41:07.860 the bit that does matter

00:41:11.080 in the campus one is

00:41:12.700 universities should

00:41:16.840 be places for genuine free inquiry where people follow truths to whatever the end might be

00:41:24.040 um sort of the aspiration of um i think that writers should aspire to as well

00:41:30.660 when i wrote my book on bloody sunday i didn't know it would lead me to the conclusion it did

00:41:36.180 but it did because i discovered what the truth was along the way and actually it was very

00:41:39.700 uncomfortable to write at times but you know if you're interested in pursuing the truth that's

00:41:44.600 what you'll do and i think that those of us who would like to think that universities would remain

00:41:52.980 places that do that in in the social sciences as much as in sciences are it just doesn't seem like

00:42:02.100 a great a great biopsy for a society if the places where thought is meant to be best protected

00:42:10.380 from the mob turns out to be most vulnerable to the mob, or at least very vulnerable to the mob.

00:42:17.920 I find that's where we should be worried about the universities. But I think there's a very

00:42:23.160 simple answer to that, which is that universities should be defunded. I see no reason whatsoever

00:42:29.460 that if a university cannot stand up for academic freedom, that ordinary people in our country or

00:42:35.580 any other countries should be paying any of their taxes to maintain these third-rate

00:42:39.920 institutions. I think they should close. I see no point in keeping them open. I think that in

00:42:46.900 reality, we've probably got too many universities in this country anyway. I think they've turned

00:42:51.740 into business models, particularly business models trying to get money from foreign students

00:42:56.120 who they charge huge sums of money to to enrich themselves and give very little care to quite

00:43:00.940 often. That's a big thing. That's a thing everywhere. But if there are institutions

00:43:06.840 that cannot pursue academic freedom, then fine. We will not fund them and finance them. There's

00:43:13.080 no reason why money should go to universities forever if they can't do the one job that we

00:43:18.240 would expect them to do. One of the caveats you made there is about, well, these students will

00:43:22.460 grow up and become Labour MPs. And this was one of the arguments that was kind of thrown against

00:43:27.000 me when I refuse to sign the SOAS behavioral agreement form that they sent me, that why

00:43:31.340 are you picking on these poor students? Students are always a bit silly. They'll grow up and

00:43:34.880 everything will be fine. And my worry with that kind of approach is that I am not so

00:43:41.040 sure that given the kind of social justice mania that seems to have overtaken some of

00:43:45.680 our universities, that when they grow up and become labor MPs and become our judges and

00:43:52.560 become our lawyers and become our journalists and authors and writers, that they won't bring

00:43:57.960 intersectionality with them.

00:43:59.980 Oh, yeah, yeah, no, they will.

00:44:01.240 But that's already come ahead of them.

00:44:03.540 Yeah.

00:44:04.680 I mean, what is one of the most surprising discoveries for me of recent years, but the

00:44:09.380 discovery that the sort of intersectionality car crash is not a campus thing.

00:44:14.980 It's every corporation is doing this crap.

00:44:19.160 every government department is doing this crap

00:44:22.860 and it's amazing

00:44:25.000 and it's happened very fast

00:44:26.780 so that wave has already come ahead of them

00:44:29.440 yes, I mean I'm not by any means saying

00:44:34.580 these people can't and won't do damage

00:44:36.620 throughout their lives in new and inventive ways

00:44:39.400 I assume that

00:44:41.840 by the way a friend of mine always points out that

00:44:44.540 you should assume that the stupidest contemporary of yours

00:44:48.520 will end up in the cabinet.

00:44:50.980 You should assume that.

00:44:52.500 You should assume the person

00:44:53.460 you last saw lying

00:44:55.900 in a school playground

00:44:56.960 will end up being

00:44:58.880 in some important position

00:45:00.180 in public life.

00:45:01.040 The one that you've got

00:45:02.500 to watch out for,

00:45:03.180 and his friend swears

00:45:04.500 it happened to him,

00:45:05.160 was that somebody

00:45:05.720 he last saw at primary school

00:45:07.080 cheating in a test

00:45:08.300 turned out to be his surgeon.

00:45:11.760 And he said that was a very...

00:45:13.340 He said,

00:45:13.720 it's fine for everything

00:45:15.020 other than your doctor.

00:45:16.260 um so yeah if if the uh if the stupid students become doctors we've got a problem but my experience

00:45:22.860 medics are among the few that have escaped the madness anyhow no um the the specific one of of

00:45:31.020 your experience of psoas by the way is i mean that's just that's just one of these health this

00:45:36.080 is one of these health tests isn't it because it's like these these things erupt in such strange

00:45:42.280 ways in in such unpredictable or sometimes like so as rather predictable places but the the it's

00:45:49.340 just it's just as another bad health tests you know um but i i mean i'm not one one thing i've

00:45:59.520 learned in recent years has been that you you've got to be careful what thinks it has a hold over

00:46:06.800 you. So if you're going to do a gig at SOAS, and you were doing a charity gig, weren't you? So it's

00:46:14.560 not like you had an enormous desire to go to that awful campus and amuse people for your own

00:46:24.940 enormous financial gain. But I've noticed that there are institutions, universities are one of

00:46:31.380 which when they think they have something over you

00:46:36.920 then strike like a scorpion.

00:46:39.660 They can't get you until the moment they think

00:46:42.100 they've got you,

00:46:44.960 that you've got a point of vulnerability.

00:46:46.580 Like, he so wants to come to SOAS

00:46:48.960 to amuse our incredibly unamusing students.

00:46:53.920 And now we've got him.

00:46:57.060 It's the sort of way it goes.

00:46:58.880 Again, I think I mentioned to you yesterday

00:47:00.480 my general thought with universities is like that

00:47:03.340 I take the same view

00:47:05.820 Jermaine Greer takes

00:47:06.840 it's not something I enormously want

00:47:11.100 or seek in my life

00:47:12.080 to be invited to speak to student unions

00:47:14.380 at various universities across this country

00:47:16.520 or America or anywhere else

00:47:17.700 none of my self esteem relies upon it

00:47:20.220 none of my sense of self worth relies upon it

00:47:22.420 and I don't know that I'll gain very much

00:47:24.920 myself from doing it

00:47:26.200 so I'm not likely

00:47:29.060 to put myself in the situation often

00:47:31.120 of them thinking that I want that

00:47:34.020 because I don't.

00:47:36.280 But if they think you do,

00:47:38.980 then they will find a way to punish you for it.

00:47:41.640 And you mentioned about intersectionality being crap.

00:47:45.700 Why? Why is it?

00:47:47.420 Why do you disagree with it?

00:47:48.960 What are the flaws in its thinking?

00:47:51.140 Well, I've actually been reading a lot about this

00:47:54.040 and I think it should be taken seriously

00:47:56.120 because on its own lights

00:47:59.340 it's a pretty serious attempt

00:48:00.600 to restructure everything.

00:48:05.380 In brief, it's not going to work

00:48:08.280 and it's not going to work

00:48:10.100 for what are already

00:48:11.620 very evident reasons.

00:48:14.280 Everything runs against everything else.

00:48:17.100 That's one of the biggest ones.

00:48:19.320 Why is trans so painful?

00:48:21.940 It's painful because

00:48:23.220 it runs against gay and women

00:48:25.460 just for starters

00:48:26.860 just for starters

00:48:28.140 so this idea that you have

00:48:31.260 different interest groups

00:48:32.780 all of which

00:48:34.060 it's meant to lock in like this

00:48:37.520 the thing

00:48:39.680 they got from the

00:48:40.740 post-war left

00:48:43.520 was that life was a web

00:48:45.660 which you had to unweave

00:48:47.060 but they've got this idea

00:48:49.240 the interlocking sections

00:48:51.460 of society will go in like that

00:48:53.400 and then we're sort of nirvana.

00:48:57.500 In fact, it's all coming in this horrible angle.

00:49:01.360 And as I say, the trans one is an important one

00:49:03.720 because people haven't worked this out yet, I think,

00:49:06.520 but if you take what has been the presumption

00:49:10.720 of recent decades about what homosexuality is,

00:49:14.900 and that in itself is a bit of a presumption,

00:49:17.300 which I won't go into now,

00:49:18.540 but it's an interesting presumption.

00:49:21.440 It is that gay people are born this way, but the trans thing says, an effeminate young

00:49:33.720 boy might not grow up to be a gay man, but may need surgical intervention and be turned

00:49:40.380 into a girl, and that is very, very destabilizing for gay men.

00:49:46.500 The idea that a tomboy girl is not going to grow up to be a heterosexual girl or a happy,

00:49:53.500 healthy lesbian, but is somebody who could be medically experimented upon to turn into

00:50:00.080 a male with skin grafts from the arm to try to create something similar to a penis, that's

00:50:08.500 very undermining to gay people, very, very undermining.

00:50:13.060 And that's on a minority onto a minority.

00:50:16.520 With women, I mean women have fought and campaigned and argued for decades to get to the stage

00:50:28.980 where they have not any equal rights but are allowed to be not conforming to what men think

00:50:36.600 women ought to conform to being.

00:50:39.100 And then you get trans over that.

00:50:43.280 What's one of the striking things about trans?

00:50:46.940 That so many trans male to females behave like, dress like, look like parodies of womanhood.

00:50:58.660 That's a really big problem.

00:51:00.060 It's very, very offensive to an awful lot of women who don't think that, for instance,

00:51:05.780 being a woman means looking kind of like a porn star.

00:51:11.460 Or, here's another example,

00:51:13.480 one prominent trans male to female figure

00:51:16.220 who was on a panel a little while ago

00:51:18.020 sits on the panel and gets out her knitting.

00:51:24.120 Right.

00:51:25.900 When did you last see a woman knit in public?

00:51:29.220 Right.

00:51:30.580 So it's like, gosh, gosh, women are thinking,

00:51:34.460 i know they're telling me it's going to be that that's what womanhood is i thought we got past

00:51:41.820 this so intersectionality was meant to mend us all it was meant to bring all of this together

00:51:48.560 all of the injustices of the world were going to be nicely cohered no no it doesn't work because

00:51:56.620 the whole thing doesn't fit because it can't it all runs against each other

00:52:02.840 and it's a catastrophe already

00:52:07.100 and it's going to get much, much worse.

00:52:11.240 We saw that school in, I can't remember,

00:52:13.360 it's somewhere up north in Birmingham, I think it might be.

00:52:15.560 It was a Muslim school that was,

00:52:18.960 I think they were banning teaching about homosexuality

00:52:22.720 because that's what the parents wanted.

00:52:24.620 And you could just see the radical leftist heads just exploding

00:52:29.200 because it's an oppressed group oppressing another oppressed group.

00:52:32.840 Yes, yes, that's one I've pointed out a fair amount in my time.

00:52:39.580 It was one of the first things in the early 2000s

00:52:42.120 that I noticed that got me interested in the Islam thing,

00:52:45.340 which was, this runs against other minorities.

00:52:50.440 And I'm very struck by the fact

00:52:54.740 that so many people are now catching up with that.

00:52:56.860 But yes, one minority group plus another does not equal harmony.

00:53:02.840 may equal the opposite.

00:53:05.380 Well, particularly in the case of Islam,

00:53:06.960 where a lot of the attitudes that are within that community and faith

00:53:10.900 are very strongly against gay people, women, etc., right?

00:53:14.360 Yes, all of the studies suggest that there is not that much sympathy

00:53:26.660 within the Muslim communities for homosexuality.

00:53:29.360 In fact, several studies show zero tolerance, literally zero percentage of Muslims in Britain believing that homosexuality is acceptable.

00:53:39.740 I'm past, you know, pointing this out.

00:53:42.660 I've pointed out an awful lot and I've had an awful lot of grief for making that observation among others.

00:53:48.280 Personally, I'm in a slightly Marxist way quite pleased that other people are now meeting these contradictions.

00:53:56.200 Because you've been talking about it for a long time and it's vindicated.

00:53:59.160 It feels like that.

00:54:00.300 And we've run out of time, sadly, Douglas.

00:54:03.720 We could have done this all afternoon.

00:54:05.960 Douglas wouldn't want to do it all afternoon.

00:54:07.320 No, no, that's true.

00:54:08.700 It's not that big an honour.

00:54:11.060 That wasn't a joke, by the way.

00:54:13.440 That was a statement of fact.

00:54:15.000 Douglas Murray destroys trigonometry.

00:54:17.300 That's why you won.

00:54:18.060 Yeah, we'll put that underneath this wasn't an honour.

00:54:20.400 But, Douglas, the question that we always finish with is,

00:54:24.040 what is the one thing people aren't talking about

00:54:26.360 but really should be talking about?

00:54:28.140 My next book.

00:54:29.160 Okay.

00:54:32.500 Which is?

00:54:33.640 It'll be out in September.

00:54:35.040 Perfect.

00:54:35.720 Fantastic.

00:54:36.240 Well, as always, follow us at TriggerPod on all the social media.

00:54:40.240 Douglas, you're on Twitter as well and pretty active there.

00:54:42.120 Just remind everybody your handle.

00:54:43.420 I'm at Douglas K. Murray.

00:54:45.660 Douglas K. Murray.

00:54:47.020 Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

00:54:48.340 Click the bell button, next subscribe button.

00:54:51.140 And thank you very much.

00:54:52.380 We'll see you in a week's time.

00:54:53.400 Absolutely.

00:54:53.960 Thanks, guys.

00:54:54.560 Bye-bye.

00:54:59.160 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - May 26, 2019

Douglas Murray on Roger Scruton, Intersectionality and the Trans Debate

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