TRIGGERnometry - Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture with Helen Pluckrose

00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

00:00:22.660 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, The Princess of Wales Theatre.

00:00:27.120 Get tickets at Mirvish.com.

00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show

00:00:40.920 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people we're delighted to say that

00:00:46.280 our brilliant and returning guest today is the editor-in-chief of error magazine and the co-author

00:00:51.280 of cynical theories with another one of our former guests james lindsey helen pluckrose welcome back

00:00:56.060 to Trigonometry. It's good to be here. Nice to see you again. It's great to have you back on the

00:01:02.200 show. We talked to you a couple of years ago about some of the stuff that you cover in Cynical

00:01:08.960 Theories, but kind of a lot has happened since then. Where do you think society has moved and

00:01:14.960 some of the things that you've been talking about have moved over the last couple of years?

00:01:19.680 I think even since I finished writing Cynical Theories, we've just seen such a massive

00:01:24.660 escalation of these ideas which people have been criticizing for about 10 years now but for about

00:01:32.260 five it's people have been really becoming aware of the whole idea of white supremacy whiteness

00:01:41.460 white fragility toxic masculinity cis normativity all of these kind of orthodoxies but I think in

00:01:50.160 the last year particularly it really has intensified and and developed a great amount of

00:01:56.600 power that is impacting um you know generally everybody you don't have to be at a university or

00:02:03.700 part of an activist group to be hit by this stuff now and why do you think it's intensified Helen

00:02:10.560 I think so it's so many reasons um so many things have happened and I think there's a lot of sort

00:02:17.900 of sociological arguments for why this has taken off right now. But I'm mostly focused on how it's

00:02:26.140 developed within scholarship and activism. Of course, the trigger for the immediate escalation

00:02:33.140 was the death of George Floyd. And this, I think it's not a coincidence that this happened at a

00:02:38.800 time when there was a pandemic and people wanted something to fight. And we can't really fight the

00:02:45.500 virus so we've but I think it was bubbling below the surface before this so we saw it sort of come

00:02:52.780 up in places like Evergreen College and in the knitting community and the young adult books

00:03:00.420 community so it's like this critical social justice stuff I think you know most people call

00:03:06.080 it wokeism which is actually a really good word because it describes the belief that you can see

00:03:12.640 these systems of power and privilege that most people can't. And it's been bubbling up and it's

00:03:18.080 been erupting in various places. And what we're seeing now, particularly in the US, is a mass

00:03:24.480 eruption. I would go so far and I'm, you know, I'm generally very much inclined to British

00:03:32.220 understatement. But I would go so far as to call this a genuine attempted cultural

00:03:37.460 revolution. And I think it needs pushing back.

00:03:42.640 I agree with you on that.

00:03:44.440 You know, I remember last time we talked with you,

00:03:46.620 one of the things that I was most interested in

00:03:48.500 is obviously these ideas

00:03:50.260 that can be broadly described as woke

00:03:52.640 come from a certain subsection of the left.

00:03:55.580 You yourself are on the left.

00:03:57.320 Are you even more frustrated

00:03:59.380 than you were a couple of years ago

00:04:01.100 about how difficult it's become

00:04:03.560 to challenge some of this stuff

00:04:04.860 while retaining your left identification?

00:04:08.600 Because the moment you say anything about this stuff,

00:04:11.380 people do try to push you out and claim that you're some right wing bigger etc

00:04:15.800 I'm you know that there are whole sort of swathes of people who won't accept that I'm

00:04:20.980 on the left because I'm neither a socialist nor a social justice activist but I am an economic

00:04:29.920 leftist with socialist sympathies and I'm a left-leaning liberal so I'm just used to people

00:04:38.440 now telling me that I'm a fascist or a Nazi,

00:04:41.500 or sometimes because I also tend to annoy the right,

00:04:47.900 particularly recently when I wrote a piece

00:04:52.820 urging Americans to vote Biden.

00:04:57.540 I also get told that I am a commie and an SJW.

00:05:02.600 So I'm, you know, I'm just...

00:05:04.540 It's a great combination.

00:05:05.980 But look, for anyone who's listening to this

00:05:07.980 who's thinking you know what I've always thought of myself as someone who's on the left I've always

00:05:13.440 thought of myself as someone who's liberal I've always wanted to look out for the underdogs in

00:05:18.340 life I've always you know these are my views but equally all this woke stuff doesn't make sense

00:05:25.260 to me what is a credible left-wing position that is not woke that you support why are you a lefty

00:05:33.700 Just articulate that for people, for the positive case for being on the left.

00:05:37.280 OK, so liberalism, this is two aspects and they're not exactly the same thing.

00:05:43.480 So liberalism is the desire for equal opportunity, for individuality, for universality, for freedom of speech and belief.

00:05:53.020 So there can be liberals on the right, left and centre.

00:05:56.020 A liberal lefty like me is somebody who believes in these vital freedoms, in this individuality and not judging people by their race, gender or sexuality and ensuring that society doesn't do so either, but has genuinely leftist policies.

00:06:14.620 I would like to tax rich people quite a lot more in order to better fund the NHS and have fewer children relying on food banks and generally have a better welfare system and affordable housing for poorer people, many of whom are not white.

00:06:33.960 So this should be somewhere where we can sort of share interest

00:06:38.220 with both the Marxists and the critical social justice activists,

00:06:43.500 but they tend to be purists, the latter.

00:06:47.140 The Marxists will talk to you, but not the critical social justice people.

00:06:52.920 And why is that? Why do they not engage in debates?

00:06:55.460 Because surely the way you persuade somebody, to your point of view,

00:06:59.060 is by talking to them, right?

00:07:00.380 Yeah, that's the liberal marketplace of ideas. But what we've seen coming from the social justice left is the idea of dominant discourses, which, of course, comes from postmodernism in the first place.

00:07:14.680 well it's got a longer history than that but let's go with Michel Foucault as a good grounding

00:07:22.140 point here this idea that certain discourses in society certain ways of talking about things

00:07:28.280 become powerful because they get legitimated by powerful structures in society and then we all

00:07:35.840 speak into them without even realizing we're doing it and these power structures can be called

00:07:40.480 things like white supremacy, patriarchy, cis normativity, you know, the belief that people

00:07:46.940 are generally the same gender as their genitals indicate their sexes. So that's when you believe 0.98

00:07:54.280 in dominant discourses and marginalised discourses, you can't believe that a marketplace of ideas will

00:08:00.440 work. All that will happen is that the dominant discourses get an airing, and people just accept

00:08:07.300 that as the truth and the marginalized people are still not heard so this is why we hear that 1.00

00:08:11.480 they are silenced they are erased um because there's this idea that if anybody um is speaking

00:08:19.640 into a dominant discourse doesn't matter if it's the president of the united states or someone with

00:08:24.280 three followers on twitter they're likely to be leapt upon and told precisely how they are being

00:08:31.420 problematic but isn't Helen isn't one of the things that is so persuasive about this it's

00:08:38.820 like the best lies the best lies always have a kernel of truth isn't that particularly relevant

00:08:45.440 when we look at critical race theory because racism does exist people are oppressed you know

00:08:50.580 women that do have it harder when it comes to things like you know like worrying about their 1.00

00:08:56.840 own physical safety etc etc okay well i disagree with the last one you're much more likely to

00:09:02.960 become a victim of violence than i am but he keeps saying he nearly got mugged three weeks ago and

00:09:09.180 he's saying that same thing i'm a real man i can defend myself yeah what actually happened was the

00:09:15.600 guy tried to grab his wallet out of his hand twisted his wrist and he was complaining for

00:09:19.520 three weeks six weeks but i kept my wallet but yeah i mean the kernel of truth is is racism

00:09:26.600 exists. Homophobia exists. Nasty sort of bigotry against trans people exist, which needs to be

00:09:35.720 separated from a belief about sex being a biological category, which people should be 0.55

00:09:40.940 able to hold. So yes, nobody, I think, is denying that these prejudices still exist. The problem

00:09:48.900 is what we disagree about is how we go around fixing them so between the 60s and the 80s that

00:09:57.460 was when we saw a real leap forwards in civil rights racial equality lgbt equality gender

00:10:06.780 equality but a whole load of legislation was passed that and a big sort of cultural revolution

00:10:11.940 and it was a liberal one so this all happened before the critical social justice ideas really

00:10:19.440 started taking off which which happened at around 1989 when these ideas really started branching so

00:10:27.120 this is the liberal thing this is when you say I am a human being just like you and I don't have

00:10:34.960 the same rights the same opportunities that you do this isn't fair we we need universal human

00:10:41.820 rights and society says um yes actually you do women should be paid as much as men and we 0.96

00:10:48.660 shouldn't prosecute gay men for having consensual sex with each other you know this this is the 0.71

00:10:54.720 liberal approach and there's it's worked it works really well and it can continue working

00:11:01.720 But for the social justice activists, this isn't enough. After the legislation had changed, what remained was changing attitudes. So racism hasn't gone away. Sexism hasn't gone away. There are still people with horrible ideas out there.

00:11:17.520 the liberals will say we need to continue arguing with these people. We need to continue discrediting

00:11:24.000 these ideas and we can see how much we have. If you're, you know, I'm 46, I see a dramatic

00:11:31.880 difference in the public acceptability of using a racist slur now than I did in my 20s. I think

00:11:39.500 we have got, we've seen significant improvement in my lifetime. So this is the liberal approach.

00:11:46.020 we just frown generally upon people evaluating other people by their immutable characteristics 0.98

00:11:52.900 it's both stupid and unethical so but that isn't how the critical social justice works 0.99

00:11:59.980 that wants to control how you speak it wants to insist that you must be racist and you must be 1.00

00:12:06.920 sexist you must have all of these assumptions you do you're not an individual with the agency and 0.57

00:12:12.460 the ability to evaluate ideas and reject and accept them. That's a naive, simplistic, liberal 0.77

00:12:17.880 belief. And how do you, I mean, the question I suppose that comes out of all of what you're

00:12:24.240 saying is, if the marketplace of ideas doesn't work for conversations with people who have this

00:12:31.140 critical uh just social justice mindset um how do you how do we have a society and and how do we

00:12:42.260 manage that if conversation isn't the answer because it seems to me that that from their

00:12:48.100 perspective they are the bringers of truth and everyone else must accept that truth so how do we

00:12:54.080 deal with that as a society i i think we need to put critical social justice in the right category

00:13:00.540 At the moment, it's in the wrong category of just being a general ethical approach to anti-discrimination, which we should sort of make into our laws, into employment policies.

00:13:15.940 But it doesn't belong in this category of training like, you know, data protection and health and safety.

00:13:23.500 It's much more of a belief system.

00:13:26.540 you have to believe in social constructivism you have to believe in these invisible systems

00:13:31.620 of power and privilege and the way they work and the way that they're progressing language

00:13:36.040 it's a specific belief system so we need to apply the rules of secularism to it so just as a

00:13:43.560 christian or a muslim or a hindu may believe that they are absolutely right and that it's very very 1.00

00:13:50.580 important that everybody else in society accepts that they are right we have these rules in places

00:13:55.820 where we say okay we protect your right to believe that to say that and to live your life by it but

00:14:02.720 not to impose it on anyone else and that is what we need to do with critical social justice ideas

00:14:09.040 we need to put them in that box. I mean Helen you say that but it's all very well for us to sit

00:14:14.760 around here and say that you know we've got a successful podcast YouTube show you're a successful

00:14:19.320 author but there are a lot of people out there that if they stood up in their diversity training

00:14:24.140 or whatever else it may be in their workplace,

00:14:26.720 they will very likely either be fired

00:14:28.540 or have their careers stunted as a result.

00:14:31.000 Yes, that is the problem.

00:14:32.580 And I'm hearing from thousands of them.

00:14:35.120 And I hear, and so does almost everybody in this sphere.

00:14:39.820 And that is why we have set up what began as a Discord server

00:14:43.940 to triage the worst cases about seven months ago,

00:14:47.300 is now forming an organisation, Counterweight.

00:14:50.620 And I think we are filling the gap that is needed because while we see a lot of cases when a celebrity gets cancelled or if an academic is fired or has their paper retracted, we don't see a lot of how this is affecting the average person in their daily life.

00:15:11.500 Now, I hear from these people and I heard from the supermarket assistant who accidentally called a trans woman, sir.

00:15:24.420 And then when the customer became quite irate and said, do I look like a man to you?

00:15:31.380 She instinctively said yes, not meaning to be rude, but then got all flustered.

00:15:36.480 and then there was disciplinary action and then she didn't know what to do

00:15:40.020 and she didn't even know anything about the trans movement.

00:15:44.080 So, you know, there is a lot of reasons why people who don't have power,

00:15:51.540 don't have a platform, don't have an academic background

00:15:55.760 which enables them to feel confident in making arguments in writing and defending them.

00:16:02.160 And it's a lot harder for them to push back at this.

00:16:05.000 So we have set up Counterweight, which works as a caseworker system.

00:16:10.320 Someone will come to us, they will say, my workplace is setting up this policy, I need to respond to it, what should I do?

00:16:19.060 Then we can connect them with other people in their sphere, we can connect them with legal advice if necessary,

00:16:26.800 we can connect them with me if we want to go through theoretical assumptions and what they want to challenge with that.

00:16:34.180 we can sort of produce provide them with a personalized package and we've had a lot of

00:16:39.800 success people a lot of our members have got themselves onto diversity equity and inclusion

00:16:45.360 boards where they've argued for a broader range of ideas on how to oppose discrimination and we're

00:16:54.120 producing accessible educational resources so there's a lot of short articles but there's also

00:17:02.160 a YouTube channel, Counterweight Media, which looks at the problems with unconscious bias

00:17:08.720 training, with lived experience at work, and a lot of the other, you know, the things

00:17:15.720 that people really see that just hit them in the face right now, that we, I think the

00:17:20.940 way to push back at this has got to be knowledgeable and it's got to be principled. And these ideas

00:17:25.980 aren't that difficult to understand. So our aim is to help people to understand them and

00:17:31.900 And then to push back at them in a way that they feel safe to do so, armed with knowledge and with principle, you know, not you don't have to throw yourself on the grenade.

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00:18:18.000 Well, it's a very good point.

00:18:19.700 And, of course, we have seen this idea of cancel culture 0.53

00:18:23.320 just absolutely take off in the last couple of years

00:18:26.760 and dozens of people being hounded out of jobs,

00:18:30.740 hounded out of book deals etc do you think you obviously you've created counterweight and the

00:18:36.760 you know the free speech union is doing its part do you think the answer to a lot of this is going

00:18:42.900 to be through the creation of institutions like the ones we've just talked about because

00:18:49.440 individuals are not going to be able to resist this on their own yeah i i think this is what

00:18:55.140 we need. We need people who are doing the sort of big, loud, in your face, see this problem

00:19:03.320 approach. And then we need people who are taking a more behind the scenes approach,

00:19:08.980 like us, where, you know, we're just helping people address a problem before it gets to the

00:19:15.980 point of disciplinary action, or needing the free speech union. So someone comes to us,

00:19:21.180 and they're a Brit. We advise them to join the free speech union as one of the first steps anyway.

00:19:27.040 But we aim to help them resolve the problem before it gets to the stage of needing

00:19:32.720 that kind of intervention from anyone else. And we've had a lot of success with that.

00:19:40.520 It's particularly helpful that a lot of our members aren't white. So if they get themselves 1.00

00:19:46.740 onto diversity, equity and inclusion boards

00:19:51.520 and they argue against critical race theory ideas

00:19:54.500 and they argue for humanist ones

00:19:56.520 or perhaps they come from a background

00:20:00.600 which has a different culture

00:20:02.420 that doesn't really value these sort of postmodern

00:20:06.100 critical social justice ideas.

00:20:09.320 It's quite difficult for people from one of the Abrahamic faiths,

00:20:13.820 for example, to accept this idea

00:20:15.980 that they don't have free will, which their faith tells them they do,

00:20:20.540 and that they can't choose good ideas over bad ones.

00:20:26.440 So there's a lot of ways to go at this which are relatively safe

00:20:32.340 and are aimed mostly at viewpoint diversity and freedom of belief

00:20:37.620 rather than critical race theory is bad and needs to be banned.

00:20:42.300 It's a very, very good strategy.

00:20:43.740 Helen, you know, we see and we talk to people who have been cancelled all the time.

00:20:48.700 Why is it that people on the other side of this particular argument don't believe cancel culture exists?

00:20:55.380 The argument generally from the other side is that what we are calling cancel culture is actually powerless people

00:21:04.640 rising up en masse to fight back against bad ideas that are harming them.

00:21:12.340 so we get the idea that i mean we're not going to cancel jk rowling she's um she's too influential

00:21:19.740 and too few people um care about um whether gender identity is real as much as they care

00:21:28.100 about you know harry potter but the she has been a major target of this because she isn't such an 1.00

00:21:34.740 influential figure and the idea is that by speaking into this discourse which says that

00:21:40.100 woman is a biological category that has certain experiences that come along with it. She is doing 1.00

00:21:46.360 incredible harm to trans people. So we saw the reaction to that from a lot of the actors of the

00:21:53.540 Harry Potter films was to repeat the mantra, trans women are women, trans women are women,

00:21:58.580 trans women are women. And then we can see how much this is about discourse. And the idea that

00:22:04.860 there's this dominant transphobic discourse that needs to be responded to by this pro-trans activism

00:22:11.920 discourse in order to liberate and protect trans people most of whom by the way are not

00:22:20.620 trans activists of the social justice kind and don't read queer theory and are not

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00:24:38.220 okay look jk rowling obviously very wealthy you'd imagine influential well-connected etc

00:24:45.480 but we've had you know people like nick buckley on our show for example who yeah who who to his

00:24:51.240 credit but also to his downfall during the whole blm thing in may uh of last year he he went on

00:24:59.020 their website and read their policies and then went well maybe this isn't such a good idea given

00:25:04.920 what they're advocating and he was removed from his own charity yeah this is just a guy who was

00:25:10.560 helping underprivileged kids in inner cities he wasn't selling millions of books and you know

00:25:15.380 swanning around in frogs right so what about someone like him what would be the argument

00:25:21.160 surely he got cancelled didn't he yeah i i whether or not we call it cancelled or whatever we call it

00:25:28.880 he got unjustly um penalized there was an attempt to destroy his reputation to destroy his livelihood

00:25:35.820 because he expressed an idea that some people didn't like now that that's a serious problem

00:25:41.140 in a liberal society.

00:25:43.240 So how is that not cancel culture? 0.77

00:25:44.700 What would they say to that?

00:25:46.520 I think they would say that this was a pushback

00:25:53.600 against a powerful white supremacist discourse

00:25:56.240 that is warranted because it's harming people of colour, 0.98

00:26:02.380 particularly black people.

00:26:03.440 So the idea that, you know, you can push back

00:26:10.040 this idea of repressive tolerance

00:26:14.620 that you just don't allow the kind of speech

00:26:19.260 that they believe hurts people

00:26:22.780 if you believe reality is constructed by the way we speak about things

00:26:27.240 then language does become violence

00:26:29.320 it then becomes justifiable to respond to it by silencing people

00:26:34.440 by completely destroying their reputation

00:26:37.400 from removing them from society or even from being violent to them and why is it you know I just

00:26:45.380 every time you articulate it so beautifully and I and you know I find myself really understanding

00:26:51.140 it even though it's to me palpable nonsense but why these people never seem to talk about class

00:26:57.160 they talk about white people as being a monolith without accepting that we have real problems in 0.66

00:27:02.760 this country and america with white people who are in poverty but immediately the fact that you're 0.99

00:27:08.500 white means you're privileged even if you can't afford to put food on your table yeah i really

00:27:12.900 don't understand that that's um this is where a kind of modern bailey move happens so if you were

00:27:19.940 to say this to a critical race theorist or an intersectional feminist they would say class does 0.99

00:27:26.180 matter we're not saying that white people are privileged in every area we're only saying that

00:27:31.880 they don't suffer discrimination on the grounds of their race. But in reality, what actually happens

00:27:38.600 if you try to bring up any kind of class issue is that it's then brought back to race. You wouldn't

00:27:45.940 hear somebody say to, say, a black activist, yes, we understand that you have, that you're, you know,

00:27:55.420 you're not advantaged in every way, but one of your problems is not that you are poor.

00:28:01.880 There isn't a reversal of that. We've seen two main issues come and take top priority, and that is race and trans identity at the moment.

00:28:14.260 So there's often a lip service to class issues, but if you were to raise the issue of, say, the number of poor homeless white men on the streets, then it would be brought up that that is a neglect of poor homeless black men and that they have an additional burden as well as being homeless and poor.

00:28:40.900 So they'll find a way to bring things back.

00:28:45.520 There isn't the universalism, the humanism that liberals would like to see in there.

00:28:53.560 Helen, I wanted to ask you something.

00:28:55.300 A little bit earlier you were talking about how in your organisation

00:28:57.760 you have a lot of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, etc.

00:29:02.260 As a liberal, do you not resent having to say that?

00:29:05.080 Because I resent that.

00:29:06.380 I resent the fact that I have to say it on our show

00:29:09.440 and Francis has to say, well, actually, my mum is from Venezuela

00:29:12.520 and I have to say I'm an immigrant and I'm from this.

00:29:15.820 Like, surely, can we just go back to a place where we're like, 0.99

00:29:20.660 this is my idea and you go, that's a shit idea, Constantine, 0.99

00:29:23.780 and it's got nothing to do with your race. 0.99

00:29:25.540 Can we just...

00:29:26.420 You'll always be an immigrant to me. 0.99

00:29:28.920 Do you not find that, like, we've already bought into their way of thinking

00:29:33.740 by even having to mention all this stuff?

00:29:36.000 Yeah, that's because, I mean, the idea of postmodernism is that it is post this liberal epoch. So it is now understood that this idea that you and I could discuss things on the level of ideas without power dynamics playing into things without, you know, me not being an immigrant, you not being a woman.

00:30:06.000 gives us certain kinds of privileges that that need to be addressed they just want to focus on

00:30:13.280 these kinds of privileges and that is where I think yeah we do need to avoid following people

00:30:21.980 down this rabbit hole as far as we can but we need to understand the rabbit hole so quite often

00:30:27.760 it's as simple as saying I don't share the premises that your statement just that your

00:30:34.000 statement relies on. If someone says to you, how do you as a man have the right to address the

00:30:41.060 issues of gender-based violence or something? You can say, I don't share your premise that I have

00:30:47.980 to have a certain identity to address a certain issue. Well, I could just say I'm Russian, in

00:30:52.880 which case it all goes out of the window. But Helen, you know what? Let's just say that for

00:30:59.040 the sake of argument, we accept this fact that, you know, women, trans people are more oppressed

00:31:04.500 than men. People from certain ethnic backgrounds have more of a right to speak about racial issues

00:31:09.720 than white people. Let's accept all that. What happens then when you get someone who's like 0.99

00:31:17.220 Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equalities Commission, who comes out against

00:31:21.520 this woke stuff, or other prominent black people, or women, or trans people who don't buy into it,

00:31:27.200 and they get attacked now how do you square that circle how do you explain that if we buy into this

00:31:34.060 thing that oppressed people are the ones that should be allowed to speak you then get an 0.84

00:31:38.160 oppressed person who doesn't buy into this crap they then get how does that work how does that

00:31:42.980 make any sense that's that that's where the dominant discourses come in again so when they 0.97

00:31:48.220 had uh the marxist ideas it was quite clear that there was a group of people that were oppressing

00:31:54.720 another group of people. When you get Foucauldian ideas, you've got powerful discourses. So it

00:32:01.760 doesn't really matter what your identity is, although it's about identity politics, although

00:32:08.040 they'll say only black people get to speak on this, they mean black people who agree with social

00:32:15.140 justice discourse. So if you are a black person who doesn't, if you are, say, a black conservative,

00:32:23.100 then you have bought into a white supremacist discourse and um you are at at best brainwashed 0.99

00:32:31.980 at worst you are a traitor to your own people by trying to secure advantage to yourself by 0.98

00:32:39.420 pandering to the white supremacist society so we get a lot of people um particularly 0.95

00:32:46.400 south asian women from hindu and sikh backgrounds um make up uh our membership who really and that

00:32:54.820 they tend to be professional uh women successful women and they tend to get a bit annoyed about 0.72

00:33:00.860 having to speak about being women of color rather than speaking about being architects or archaeologists

00:33:07.260 or you know whatever it is they're actually doing so there's one of our first projects we're hoping

00:33:15.940 we're calling out our black intellectual diversity project and we're getting a load

00:33:20.900 of black intellectuals to write a chapter on their favorite black intellectual who deals

00:33:26.100 with issues of race and racism and why they think their approach is particularly valuable

00:33:31.040 so we want everyone from Ibram X. Kendi to Thomas Sowell and we want them we're going

00:33:37.420 to have Marxist libertarians pan-Africanists separatists liberals humanists everybody in

00:33:44.800 this one book and we're going to put those views out there so this book I'm hoping it'll be a

00:33:51.580 manifestation of the marketplace of ideas and my imagined audience is a young person who wants to

00:33:58.000 make up her own mind how she thinks about politics and how she thinks about racism and she can read

00:34:04.900 these ideas from people you know as varied as Shelby Steele who takes a very sort of individual

00:34:10.900 responsibility approach to people like Ibram X. Kendi who any inequality, any disparity can only

00:34:18.280 be caused by racism and it's actually anti-racist to discriminate if that's the case. And get all

00:34:26.800 these ideas together. The problem we're finding is we can't at the moment get critical race theorists

00:34:31.740 or intersectional feminists to write anything in a book alongside libertarians, conservatives or 1.00

00:34:36.760 marxists so it's um um we may end up with a uh a chapter of that book called the chapter that

00:34:46.120 should have been in which i will set forward a lot of the arguments of some of the most prominent

00:34:52.600 um critical race try and then they will accuse you of misrepresenting it it's the same we have

00:34:58.960 the same problem on the show whenever we invite people like that on they won't come on this is

00:35:03.540 the thing i i can't prove any anything i i know i was invited to join a panel on intersectional

00:35:10.400 feminism and then all the intersectional feminists dropped out coincidentally and i was invited to 1.00

00:35:16.800 join a panel on whether we need to decolonize the university and the people on the yes side

00:35:23.940 dropped out mostly i i don't know i can't you know they they um don't necessarily say i won't

00:35:30.960 be on the platform with a critic of my ideas. But sometimes they do. I got publicly disinvited

00:35:38.300 from the decolonised STEM symposium, even though I'd been up front with my own name,

00:35:44.340 and I'd put forward my own argument that I was going to make, which is that saying that STEM

00:35:49.560 is white, Western and male is actually sexist and racist. But I said it in the language,

00:35:57.000 so um you know post-colonial language so they probably didn't understand it but after googling

00:36:02.940 me i was um informed that i was a danger to the other attendees and that um their safety had to be

00:36:12.200 um considered paramount because it you know it's just so hazardous if you go in there and

00:36:18.860 suggest that people who aren't white do science as well um helen look we're talking about

00:36:26.880 you know the the intellectual aspect of it but let me ask you a pretty brutal question which is 0.64

00:36:32.300 isn't this just a way to exploit white guilt? I think we have to assume goodwill I think there's

00:36:41.280 always going to be opportunists in any kind of movement I think Shelby Steele is the person who 0.85

00:36:49.860 addressed white guilt and um as sort of how that can be exploited at most length but whenever we're

00:36:57.320 dealing with any individual unless there's really strong evidence that they are um seeking power

00:37:03.720 um for themselves in an opportunistic way i think we have to assume that they genuinely believe

00:37:09.020 what they say they believe and we have to try and address um those ideas and and try to find

00:37:15.940 some common ground and move them from them a bit if we can. You know you talk about finding common

00:37:22.820 ground but isn't that practically impossible if people don't want to engage in a debate or a

00:37:26.740 conversation? There are many people with whom it is literally impossible because they just won't

00:37:33.500 talk to you at all so if you know someone like Robin DiAngelo just always refuses to debate with

00:37:42.760 any black intellectual or anyone who disagrees with her so yes then you can't do anything yeah

00:37:51.460 and you can't if somebody really is sucked deeply into an ideology it may be almost impossible to

00:38:00.860 get them out you know we've seen people join cults before and the difficulty that they have

00:38:08.760 they have to realize the problem for themselves usually but i think there's a very small number

00:38:15.100 of people who really are committed um ideologues in this way so i i took the tribes test it's for

00:38:22.860 america so i shouldn't have done really but um and that shows that um only 12 percent of people

00:38:29.600 um are progressive activists who um could have these ideas and it included me among that 12

00:38:37.660 really so i think there really is a small number of people who um hold these ideas really strongly

00:38:47.540 and then there's a large number of people who are condoning and enabling them because they

00:38:55.080 don't understand um that this isn't a liberal and friendly thing or because they're afraid of being

00:39:01.240 considered racist or sexist or you know who wants to seem to stand against social justice

00:39:08.400 but quite often I'll get a an email from someone saying I think I'm the only person in my institution

00:39:15.180 who has has any concerns about this and I'll be able to say no actually you're not would you like

00:39:21.520 me to introduce you and and that's another major thing that that we're doing we're introducing

00:39:27.560 people to each other and emboldening them they're finding people in their own profession and even in

00:39:33.200 their own organization um who they didn't realize had the same worries that they did and we can kind

00:39:39.580 of reach a kind of tipping point. Helen the one thing that I always find really sad about this

00:39:47.120 obviously people losing their jobs having their careers blighted is sad the thing that I find

00:39:51.760 really tragic is when this tears apart families we get emails from people saying my daughter no

00:39:57.600 longer speaks to me my son and daughter have fallen apart as a result of this is that particularly

00:40:02.760 common or does that tend to be in the minority i don't i when i've if you read um reniedo lodge

00:40:10.220 um for example i've just finished natives by akala and we're looking at people who are mixed

00:40:17.840 race but who identify as black because of how um people are do tend to be racialized um and yeah

00:40:27.100 there's uh there's an alienation that can occur if you get too deeply into these ideas i've um one

00:40:35.260 case study that we're about to sort of anonymously talk about as well is about a parent of an eight

00:40:43.460 year old boy who has been taught about white supremacy and anti-blackness and has become very

00:40:50.020 upset and he isn't sure how to think now about his parents you know his mother is white his father

00:40:55.200 is black what um is he supposed to think about this is is he half bad and this is the really kind 1.00

00:41:03.300 of upsetting thing and i know how easy it is to get sucked into this when i was researching for

00:41:10.520 one of our papers i read about six of these books in two days and then i decided to try and unwind

00:41:17.000 by watching csi or something and there was a scene in which a mixed race student graduated and she

00:41:23.300 came out and she hugged her parents and i thought oh look how lovely she she loves her mother even 1.00

00:41:28.840 though she's white i think what what has happened to my brain and i it it's really horrible 0.80

00:41:37.700 uh helen and uh i think it's so exciting that with counterweight you're giving people a way

00:41:44.920 to not get cancelled and to to to to be able to express themselves and to think about the stuff

00:41:51.620 honestly with integrity and i think that would be a really important part of the process of pushing

00:41:56.800 back uh we hope that with what we do on this show giving voices to different people we're giving

00:42:02.080 people at least an opportunity as you say to know that they're not the only ones that is such

00:42:07.180 a huge chunk of the feedback that we get as well. Do you think that although all those things are

00:42:15.080 very good, there's going to have to be some legislative changes in the future because

00:42:21.300 of how deeply embedded these ideas are now within the legal framework? I mean, a lot of people are

00:42:28.060 now taking a critical look at the Equalities Act of 2010 in the UK. Do you think there is

00:42:33.860 some legislative work to do on this as well. I do. I mean, I am not, I'm not qualified to speak

00:42:40.500 on law very well, but we have been talking to lawyers about it. And what seems like the thing

00:42:49.260 to do is to take the part of the Equality Act, which speaks of philosophical beliefs as a

00:42:55.840 protected characteristic and define that much more clearly as viewpoint diversity. So we have

00:43:03.860 a situation where a Christian employer could not force a Muslim employee to be trained to believe

00:43:11.600 that Jesus is the son of God. We also need to have the right for people to opt out of being

00:43:19.260 trained um to detoxify their masculinity or um you know they're overcome their whiteness and

00:43:26.440 their white fragility people have to be able to say i don't believe what you believe and i don't

00:43:31.500 have to and helen why is it that certain industries seem more prone to this than others i mean it looks

00:43:38.900 to the at this point that most of them are toppling like dominoes but the first ones to

00:43:43.840 full work the arts and those types of industries i i think obviously this is coming from the the

00:43:50.940 humanities there's a departure from um sort of in empiricism and rationalism and liberalism

00:43:59.620 in the humanities anyway because it's a largely um about thought experiments about um about human

00:44:07.940 emotion and experience so there's it's going to be we're going to find more of this kind of theory

00:44:14.820 arising in um cultural studies than we are in physics so that's not really um surprising but

00:44:23.760 i don't but we we see the effects that it has um on the sciences and um sort of uh indirectly

00:44:31.640 and even some scientists um i've just written a response to to one of them who thinks our fat

00:44:39.660 studies paper should be reinstated we agree it should so um uh where he argues that um you know

00:44:47.300 that fat studies um really isn't such a terrible thing and people should be allowed to to argue

00:44:53.520 for it and i think yes they should but it still is actually um not it is very it is radically

00:44:59.960 anti-scientific and so i'm going i'm going to point out that it's both silly and dangerous

00:45:05.860 it's an interesting point i mean if you think about it we've had so much talk about the need

00:45:10.800 for censoring people who are skeptical about lockdown or the efficacy of vaccines or whatever

00:45:16.100 else but for the most part until this point at least you've been able to tell people to to be

00:45:21.860 overweight which is terrible for them with with no censorship whatsoever it's it's it's an area

00:45:27.820 that needs to be sort of looked at, isn't it?

00:45:30.540 Yeah, I mean, this is where we need, again, some nuance,

00:45:33.620 which just doesn't come with the sort of really simplistic

00:45:38.520 black-and-white social justice approach.

00:45:41.160 There's always a kernel of truth in there.

00:45:43.640 There is evidence that heavily overweight people

00:45:47.760 are less likely to be offered jobs which their weight is irrelevant too.

00:45:53.840 so and there's evidence that um they're less likely to visit their doctor with any other

00:45:59.500 kind of problem because they know the doctor will just tell them to lose weight so you know

00:46:03.900 there are problems there there's a need for advocacy but it can't be anti-scientific that

00:46:09.540 needs to accept that um obesity is a genuine um problem that it is a health um condition that

00:46:19.760 needs treating and that it isn't a reason to be unkind to or discriminate against obese people

00:46:27.680 it shouldn't it's not really that complicated but um social justice makes it so

00:46:34.300 and helen what is the end game because it has to be an end game to what these people want what do

00:46:41.420 they actually want i think and is it attainable is the second part to that question i would add

00:46:46.400 I unlike with something like Marxism where there's a clear end goal of the proletariat owning the means of production that isn't what we're seeing with social justice people are feeling as though they have awoken to a reality that they didn't realize was there.

00:47:07.000 And they're still feeling at the beginning stages where we're picking apart these dominant discourses that make us believe that men are stronger than women or that people who have a penis are a man or that racism underlies everything.

00:47:26.000 We have to, there's, it still feels very much like it's at a beginning stage. So the project is finding it. So one of the tenets of anti-racism formed by a group which includes Robin DiAngelo states the question is not did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in this situation?

00:47:49.500 so that's what people are looking for we're looking for how racism manifests and once you

00:47:57.040 find a way to say that it has then you've you've got it right and you've you've managed to unpick

00:48:03.900 and show an aspect of the white supremacist system and so the end game is to continue doing

00:48:10.440 this dismantling speech revealing structures of power that exist within attitudes biases

00:48:18.580 unconscious bias microaggressions etc and make it all visible then once everything is out

00:48:26.600 then there's a hope that we can rethink everything in ways that aren't racist sexist and

00:48:32.760 and homophobic but of course we're starting from the presumption that any encounter is

00:48:38.900 going to be racist or sexist so it's um confirmation bias at best

00:48:45.680 but helen doesn't this make you a very angry person so for instance if i spent every single

00:48:51.660 minute of every day walking around looking for ways in which people have been sexist racist

00:48:56.360 whatever it is aren't i just going to be a very fundamentally angry person because i'm looking

00:49:01.140 for the negative in everyone yeah i mean this is um if you look at um if you google microaggressions

00:49:09.420 on something like twitter a word that will often come up is exhausted people say that they feel

00:49:15.800 exhausted by microaggressions because they have trained themselves into this way of thinking

00:49:22.760 and i mean an example i i tend to give of of it is is if we were to imagine a black and a white

00:49:31.140 customer entering a shop at the same time and a white server whose job is to go and offer them

00:49:38.060 help um which one should she approach first if she approached the white customer first 0.96

00:49:44.360 obviously they then read this situation as uh white supremacy the white person came first but

00:49:51.100 if she approached the black person first then this situation could be read as um anti-blackness and

00:49:57.700 not trusting a black person to um peruse the the shelves unsupervised so we're always going to see 1.00

00:50:04.660 racism in everything if we're trained to look for it so it's ultimately self-destructive and I don't

00:50:13.340 think it can last especially as it sort of fractures into smaller and smaller groups

00:50:18.000 and you have at the moment I'm closely following a lot of arguments between

00:50:24.560 African Americans and recent African immigrants to America and there's this sort of debate about

00:50:35.360 privilege going on there and then there's the privilege of being light-skinned or dark-skinned

00:50:41.340 black person and there's a privilege even within fat studies apparently there's people who are

00:50:50.660 heavily overweight but uh still have a kind of hourglass figure have a privilege they need to

00:50:57.280 acknowledge over people who don't have that and excellent that sounds brilliant helen i think

00:51:04.820 there's a very british solution to the white black customer in the shop problem which is for 1.00

00:51:09.780 the server to ignore them both and give them no customer service whatsoever just grunt at them if

00:51:15.960 they if they approach yes that that that would work and helen because what this ideology leads

00:51:24.360 to is it leads to think people saying things that are actually very very racist i saw this tweet

00:51:31.400 which went viral from this uh social justice activist saying that straight black men are the

00:51:36.820 new straight white males isn't it going to come to a point where it eats itself like you said 0.57

00:51:42.340 I have argued that it will combust, but I'm less convinced now because we seem to be forming more of a hierarchy.

00:51:56.120 So at the top of the hierarchy are black trans women, obviously, but we're losing people, we're shedding people on the way.

00:52:05.360 And, you know, gay men have sort of too often declined to be social justice activists to any longer be considered marginalised.

00:52:16.980 And women have been having the Karen trope and the white women tears thing since the votes for Donald Trump. 1.00

00:52:28.480 So we're no longer really considered marginalised either.

00:52:31.580 I think it will narrow down, it will become an extremist movement, it's going to be difficult to counteract, but it's going to have to self-destruct at some point because it just doesn't make any sense, it doesn't have an end goal that is achievable.

00:52:57.460 as we wrap up the interview we're coming close to the end now i i'm curious uh because you

00:53:04.240 mentioned advising people to vote for joe biden at the top of the interview given everything that

00:53:09.460 we've talked about why are you advocating that people should vote for the party that is pushing

00:53:16.040 through some of these ideas because there are so many other ideas as well i focus very much

00:53:22.400 on critical social justice issues because that's what i've studied i was a liberal feminist and i

00:53:28.740 was of the humanities so i'm addressing this problem because i want to fix the left i want

00:53:34.120 to make it electable again i don't address problems on the right um because i i don't

00:53:40.900 think there's a right way to do conservatism i recognize the need for conservatives i you know

00:53:46.920 And I respect ethical Conservatives and their input that we need as people there saying, can we conserve some of the good stuff, please?

00:53:56.140 We don't always have to race ahead.

00:53:58.720 So, you know, yeah, I can respect Conservatives, but I'm focused on the left because I share the economic positions and the social positions of the left.

00:54:09.860 No, no, no. But that part I get. But what I'm getting at is, you know, we have this capital, the storming of the capital, which Francis and I both obviously condemned straight away. And frankly, there were a lot of Trump supporters who got upset about that. But we don't care. That needed to be condemned, just like BLM violence needed to be condemned. Right. But the moment it happened, Joe Biden comes out and makes it all about race. Right. So you've just advised people to vote for somebody. I know it sounds like I'm having a go.

00:54:38.280 you i'm just trying to think this out in my i'm not having a go you at all but you have advised

00:54:42.680 people to vote for a guy who's literally as his first action in in this heated moment makes

00:54:49.680 everything about race we know yeah when if the democrats get in then we know that the fight

00:54:55.700 against critical social justice is going to need to become more intense so that that's not um i

00:55:02.240 don't have any kind of belief that if we vote left-wing governments in, then all the social

00:55:09.240 justice problems will disappear. They won't. They will get emboldened. However, we do now have an

00:55:16.900 opportunity, or Americans do, to reject this idea that we all need to gather together and oppose

00:55:25.860 the right. So that's what's often said to me, why are you criticising the left when you're on the

00:55:31.520 left we should be solidarity against the right well now in the the democratic party has won

00:55:38.600 this is the time for the liberal lefties for the socialists um who uh value reason and evidence

00:55:46.080 and are not social justice activists to to push back at this to try and actually get their own

00:55:51.900 house in order they don't have the excuse of fighting trumpism anymore they need to sort their 0.73

00:55:58.940 shit out but there's one question that i actually really wanted to ask because we talk about 0.91

00:56:05.200 privilege yet we don't talk about a privilege that i believe really exists and no one seems 0.96

00:56:10.580 to want to address which is beauty privilege i'm very privileged but we joke about it it is a real

00:56:17.000 thing but we no one talks about it you're more likely to be you're more likely to be more popular

00:56:21.460 have more jobs offered to you if you're hot why don't we talk actually hot high is a massive

00:56:26.640 privilege we're all revealing all our sore spots at this point but but yeah I mean you know what

00:56:32.840 I actually think if you made beauty privilege that big people would actually claim to be

00:56:37.400 privileged they'd be like yeah I'm really privileged I'm so handsome yeah no one's

00:56:41.480 gonna say I'm ugly I'm oppressed yeah exactly I mean this is um when it comes to something that

00:56:48.580 that's innate um there's often you know there's been a lot of feminist um objection to uh beauty 1.00

00:56:56.020 privilege because it is essentially sexualising women and taking away any focus on them as 1.00

00:57:04.640 people. There's pressure to be beautiful. So there's that kind of thing. But we don't

00:57:10.440 see a focus on the kind of issues that really are a lottery. So intelligence, beauty, whether

00:57:20.180 you come from a supportive and loving family these are really um individual and genetic

00:57:26.140 things that that we can't do much about socially so it's not of huge interest um to um to people

00:57:37.040 on the left generally and i and i understand that to a certain extent i think yes we're not

00:57:42.580 all going to be supermodels or sports stars or um you know quantum physicists or whatever we're

00:57:49.760 going to have quite a few of us being quite average and we need for those people to also have

00:57:56.040 work that isn't um soul destroying and that they can afford to live on yeah they can host a youtube

00:58:02.840 show helen i wanted to just first of all to say from both francis and i that uh we're really glad

00:58:11.220 the counterweight is now a thing uh we will be supporting it with everything that we've got we

00:58:16.520 encourage all our viewers to go and check it out and to become members of that and the free speech

00:58:21.140 union because these are two organizations that will be critical in in dealing with some of the

00:58:26.440 problems that we've created for ourselves so thank you for coming on the show and thank you for

00:58:31.260 starting it and before we let you go as you know we have one more question for you which is always

00:58:37.220 what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be

00:58:42.400 OK, so here's the thing. And as I've pointed out, I am quite single minded. There's often this argument about whether or not the implicit association test works and whether unconscious bias training works. And this is what it revolves around. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence that it doesn't.

00:59:00.280 But what gets missed with this conversation is that your employer doesn't actually have the right to know what's going on in your head in the first place.

00:59:09.500 You can have whatever biases you want.

00:59:12.880 What they have the right to demand is that you behave well to your colleagues.

00:59:17.840 So there needs to be more focus on the individual's freedom of conscience and their freedom to keep their conscience private.

00:59:27.240 Absolutely. And there's another question I want to ask before we go, Helen.

00:59:30.280 are we white and fragile you are the two of you are i am slightly brown and very resilient 0.99

00:59:37.560 uh i'm afraid brown fragility is also a thing and um for fuck's sake 0.98

00:59:42.880 well excellent on that very happy note helen tell everybody obviously people should get 0.75

00:59:51.320 cynical theories if they haven't already where can they uh find out more about counterweight

00:59:56.220 Okay, so there's counterweightsupport.com is the website, which hopefully by the time this airs will be up. And there's Counterweight Media on YouTube, where we have a lot of short informational videos. And you can seek a caseworker if you need one or just resources by going to either of those.

01:00:17.500 fantastic thank you so much for coming back

01:00:20.940 Helm great chatting with you

01:00:22.500 and thank you all for watching and listening

01:00:24.400 we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode

01:00:27.080 or live stream

01:00:27.700 and they all go out at 7pm UK time

01:00:30.280 take care guys and see you soon

01:00:47.500 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

01:00:55.020 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,

01:01:00.540 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

01:01:04.540 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:01:11.360 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:01:15.560 Get tickets at murbush.com.

01:01:17.500 We'll be right back.

`witch hunt`	Both words, anywhere in the episode.
`"witch hunt"`	The exact phrase.
`witch OR hunt`	Either word.
`"alpha male" -"high value"`	The first phrase, but not the second.
`(feminist OR feminism) AND (marriage OR divorce)`	Parentheses group alternatives.
`"decline civilization"~5`	Both words within 5 words of each other.

`misogyn*`	Any word starting with "misogyn": misogyny, misogynist, misogynistic…
`feminizm~1`	Words one letter off: catches typos and transcription errors.

`person:"Andrew Tate"`	Episodes where they host, guest, or are mentioned.
`host:"Glenn Beck"`	Episodes they host.
`guest:"Jordan Peterson"`	Episodes they appear on as a guest.
`mentioned:"Andrew Tate" -host:"Andrew Tate"`	Talked about on other people's shows.
`show:"Bannon's War Room"`	Episodes from one show.

`topics:abortion`	Episodes tagged with a topic (see the Topics page).
`summary:"Andrew Tate"`	Words in the episode summary. Summaries are machine-written and can be wrong.

`"great replacement" AND episode_date:[NOW-1YEAR TO NOW]`	From the past 12 months.
`lockdown AND episode_date:[2020-01-01T00:00:00Z TO 2020-12-31T23:59:59Z]`	From one year. Dates need the full time, as shown.
`"high value" AND misogyny_count:[100 TO *]`	Episodes with 100 or more sentences flagged as misogynistic. Also: hate_speech_count, toxicity_count, word_count.

TRIGGERnometry - January 31, 2021

Fighting Back Against Cancel Culture with Helen Pluckrose

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript