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

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissinger. And this is

00:00:10.000 a show for you if you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing

00:00:15.020 about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our guest this

00:00:21.580 week is the Associate Editor of The Spectator and Quillette, Toby Young. Welcome back to

00:00:26.440 Trigonometry. Thank you. It's good to have you back. You are our second returning guest as we've

00:00:30.600 just discussed. Okay. You said okay as if it doesn't matter. I don't care. A bit disappointed

00:00:35.860 not to be the first. The male ego, ladies and gentlemen. There we go. So for anyone who doesn't

00:00:42.480 know who you are as a returning guest, tell us a little bit about who you are just so people who

00:00:47.440 haven't seen the first interview just get to find out how are you, where you are. Yeah, well, I've

00:00:51.640 been a journalist for about 35 years. I've written a column for The Spectator for the last 20 years

00:00:59.200 or so, but I contribute to lots of other magazines and newspapers. I write about politics, culture,

00:01:07.480 society. I'm particularly interested in the current climate of Maoist intolerance, which I

00:01:14.940 know, you've fallen foul off, Constantine. And I'm working on a book about that. My initial title

00:01:21.140 was Salem 2.0, The Return of the Religious Police to the Public Square. But I'm now working on, 0.90

00:01:29.740 I've got a new title, which is Rebels Without a Clue, about people who are in the social justice

00:01:35.560 cult. But I haven't quite decided exactly what it should be called yet. That's good too.

00:01:40.260 Great. Well, listen, welcome back. Before we get into some of the controversies that we wanted

00:01:44.740 to talk with you about, including stuff that you've personally been involved with.

00:01:48.060 I mentioned that you're the associate editor of Quillette, which is a publication I've

00:01:52.660 written for a number of times and I have a lot of time for and respect.

00:01:55.400 So for anyone who may not be familiar with it, just tell us what do you guys do and what

00:01:59.620 that publication is all about.

00:02:01.180 So Quillette is an online magazine, which was started by a graduate student called Claire

00:02:09.220 Lehman, who gave up her graduate degree in psychology. And she had a couple of kids

00:02:18.780 and then decided to start this online magazine on her kitchen table. And I think she started it in

00:02:25.860 2015. And it blew up in 2017, blew up in a good way, when James Damore, the software engineer,

00:02:39.940 was sacked by Google for circulating an internal memo challenging some of the ideological

00:02:47.600 orthodoxies within the company, particularly around the underrepresentation of women in the 0.69

00:02:53.140 company and in tech more generally. When he was fired, one of the sticks to beat him with

00:03:00.660 was that he'd invoked pseudoscience, that all the science he'd referred to in his memo

00:03:07.620 regarding why there might be kind of perfectly innocent scientific reasons for why there were

00:03:16.000 fewer women working at Google and in tech more generally than men. He was ridiculed for that,

00:03:22.240 told that he was invoking pseudoscience, and this was just typical misogyny, masquerading

00:03:27.820 as science.

00:03:29.720 And Quillette published four pieces by pretty eminent psychologists, essentially saying,

00:03:40.460 no, he's got the science right.

00:03:41.840 You may disagree with what he said, and there may be other reasons for objecting to what

00:03:45.120 he said, but on scientific grounds, what he said is sound.

00:03:48.340 There is a respectable body of literature, and he was actually echoing what is effectively mainstream consensus.

00:03:55.560 And among those scientists was Jordan Peterson.

00:03:57.900 Jeffrey Miller was another one.

00:03:59.180 We've interviewed him a couple of months back.

00:04:00.660 He's fantastic.

00:04:01.920 And it blew up.

00:04:03.780 And I think the site kind of collapsed because it became so overwhelmed with people wanting to read these pieces.

00:04:11.240 And ever since then, it's been a huge success.

00:04:14.700 I mean, it survives more or less entirely on voluntary contributions from readers via Patreon and other similar sites.

00:04:24.140 And it's essentially, I think it's quite closely linked to the intellectual dark web.

00:04:30.940 They're not necessarily by the people associated with Quillette, partly because it publishes people like Jeffrey Miller and Jordan Peterson.

00:04:38.580 We recently published Stephen Pinker.

00:04:41.860 Steven Pinker wrote, I think, a 12,000-word piece for us, which ended up becoming the

00:04:48.340 introduction to the paperback of Enlightenment Now.

00:04:51.740 I'm in charge of the Quillette podcast.

00:04:54.620 We interviewed Steven Pinker for the podcast.

00:04:56.580 I interviewed Jordan Peterson for the podcast.

00:04:58.740 And the podcast has been a success.

00:05:01.420 I do it jointly with Jonathan Kaye, who's based in Toronto.

00:05:04.720 I mean, one of the interesting things about Quillette is it has no offices.

00:05:07.620 It has no real location, even though Claire's based in Australia.

00:05:10.240 So there's an editor in Toronto. There are two in London. There's one in Sweden. And we had our first Quillette social gathering in Toronto earlier this year. And it was the first time I'd met Claire in person. I mean, we'd communicated via Skype. First time I'd met Jonathan Kaye.

00:05:28.540 So it was actually lots of people there were people who'd been publicly shamed, defenestrated, lost various positions and often former members of the liberal left.

00:05:41.620 In some cases, former members of the social justice cult, for one reason or another, have been expelled from the cult and are now apostates.

00:05:48.620 And it was almost like a support group for people who found themselves kind of mobbed on Twitter.

00:05:54.740 I am Toby and I'm an outcast.

00:05:55.820 He was like that.

00:05:56.880 One of them was this guy called Stephen Elliott, who we'd published this.

00:06:02.320 There was something called the Shitty Media Mentalist, which you may know about,

00:06:06.080 which was circulated in New York in 2017 by an editor at the New Republic.

00:06:11.600 It was initially created as a Google document, and it was in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal,

00:06:17.220 and it listed various male members of the media who supposedly behaved in a kind of inappropriate way along Weinsteinian lines.

00:06:25.820 And there were various accusations thrown about.

00:06:30.280 And one of the people on this list was a guy called Stephen Elliott.

00:06:33.620 And next to his name, it had multiple rape allegations.

00:06:37.560 And he was self-employed at the time.

00:06:40.800 He had a job writing for a Hollywood studio on a sitcom.

00:06:44.480 He had a book about to come out.

00:06:46.300 He'd started this successful online literary magazine, which he'd handed on to somebody else.

00:06:50.480 So, you know, a guy with a thriving career.

00:06:52.200 This was the first he'd ever been, he'd ever even heard about these allegations.

00:06:56.400 The allegations weren't in any way fleshed out.

00:06:58.480 No names, dates, places.

00:07:00.680 All it said was multiple rape allegations.

00:07:02.840 So he didn't know how to begin to go about defending himself.

00:07:05.800 Of course, he lost his job at the Hollywood studio.

00:07:08.860 His book was buried by the publisher.

00:07:11.520 Lots of his close friends started distancing themselves from him.

00:07:14.740 He was dropped by his agent.

00:07:16.020 He became suicidal.

00:07:17.240 And he actually went so far as to order a suicide kit on the dark web and got the kit, wrote a suicide note, took some barbiturates and then placed a sack, a plastic sack over his head and tightened the rope and was literally seconds away from the point of no return when he changed his mind.

00:07:44.140 And since he changed his mind, he's come out fighting,

00:07:47.740 and he's now suing the woman who compiled the shitty media list. 0.84

00:07:52.360 And, you know, Godspeed to him. 0.58

00:07:55.520 Well, speaking of controversial or challenging issues,

00:07:59.660 one of the things that you've got involved with very recently

00:08:02.780 is this whole Greta Thunberg, the young woman who is the face 0.76

00:08:06.660 of the climate change protest movement, the Extinction Rebellion, and so on.

00:08:11.600 And just tell us very briefly what actually happened.

00:08:17.740 Well, I wrote a piece in The Spectator probably a couple of months ago after she first came to the fore,

00:08:29.360 after she'd given a couple of speeches and her YouTube videos of those speeches were blowing up.

00:08:33.420 And what she says in her speeches, in her kind of set, in her stump speech, is that successive governments across the West have done nothing to try and combat climate change.

00:08:51.120 That they have just been completely negligent.

00:08:54.300 They buried their heads in the sand and they need to be shamed into doing something.

00:08:59.900 And the people to shame them into doing something are schoolchildren and members of the younger generation because it's their future that's at stake.

00:09:10.540 And there's a kind of there's a sort of moral self-righteousness.

00:09:15.840 It's sort of presented as a moral crusade.

00:09:19.260 Our elders have failed us for failing to do anything about this looming emergency.

00:09:26.700 And unless something is done, we're all going to die. And I thought, well, this isn't quite right. There have been a number of efforts to try and tackle climate change, some of which have been quite effective.

00:09:43.500 So the British government, for instance, has tried to reduce carbon emissions and has done so reasonably successfully.

00:09:51.540 So if you compare the emissions in 2017 to the emissions in 1990, they're 43 percent lower.

00:09:58.360 Interestingly, Greta challenged that statistic when she addressed the House of Commons earlier, I think it was last week.

00:10:05.540 But it seemed to me that she was someone putting herself forward in the public arena.

00:10:14.960 She was making a claim which is part of, by any stretch of the imagination, a political platform, a political crusade.

00:10:25.240 I mean, she's linked to an organization called Climate Justice, and along with the Extinction Rebellion protesters, they think the only way to avoid a catastrophe is to end capitalism.

00:10:39.340 So, you know, she doesn't often put it in such stark terms, but nonetheless, she is part of an anti-capitalist, in many cases, a movement which is a sort of an offshoot of the social justice movement.

00:10:56.960 Generally, it's the same sort of people with the same kind of hard left anti-capitalist agenda.

00:11:02.520 Now, I thought if she's putting herself forward in the public arena and she's making claims which are patently, factually inaccurate, it's just not true that Western governments, particularly the British government, have done nothing to try and combat climate change.

00:11:17.400 They've done something. You may not think it's enough. Perhaps it isn't enough.

00:11:20.240 But that's a slightly different point. And it slightly undermines the whole kind of moral force of her argument.

00:11:26.020 If you acknowledge that actually they have tried to do something, it just hasn't been sufficient and they need to do more.

00:11:30.840 different point, much more nuanced. But she's very much, she presents things in a very black 0.84

00:11:35.460 and white way. Anyway, I thought it was fair enough to correct what I saw as factual errors.

00:11:42.200 I mean, it seemed to me it was just straightforward fake news. And it's not as if she's the only

00:11:45.700 person making these claims. Almost everyone who participated in the Extinction Rebellion protest

00:11:50.680 made exactly the same claim and claimed to be on this kind of moral crusade in virtue of the fact

00:11:56.800 that they were the only ones willing to confront this crisis, this looming catastrophe. Everyone

00:12:03.300 else, and particularly older people, they didn't have the moral courage that these protesters

00:12:08.280 have. You know, a very unnuanced black and white point of view, clearly wrong based on

00:12:14.940 fake news or misinformation. What she had said and what she repeatedly does say I thought

00:12:19.720 was misleading. So I thought it was fair enough to challenge her on it. Instead of, and the

00:12:24.780 response from most people, not from everyone, but the response from most people, certainly

00:12:28.940 from people on Twitter for the most part, was how dare you attack this 16-year-old girl? Here

00:12:37.740 she is trying to do something. Here she is engaging, being energetic, getting politically

00:12:42.860 engaged, and you're attacking her. You're treating her as if she was an adult politician. That's 1.00

00:12:49.260 absolutely disgraceful. How can you do that when you claim to be interested in children's education?

00:12:54.780 That was a sort of general gist of it.

00:12:56.400 I think to which the response is, well, you know, you can't put someone up.

00:13:03.920 You can't endorse someone as a spokesman for a generation and claim that in virtue of their youth, they should be listened to. 0.88

00:13:14.100 They have a kind of purity and innocence and ability to see through bullshit in virtue of being only 16.

00:13:21.100 And you can't claim that they have this special authority in virtue of being 16 and should therefore be listened to, but also claim in the next breath that therefore they can't be challenged. 0.96

00:13:31.220 And if they say something that's misleading or false, sorry, you just have to suck it up.

00:13:35.040 But was not part of the challenge, and this is why I want to talk to you about it, that you said that she was privileged because of her mother and all the rest of it.

00:13:42.800 We'll get onto that in a second. But just to conclude this point, many of the people berating me for challenging her on the grounds that she's only 16 are also the very same people who think that 16-year-olds should have the vote.

00:13:57.500 I mean, you can't claim that a 16-year-old should have the vote, but if they want to actually join in the public conversation, make a contribution to a public debate and get basic facts wrong, that it's impermissible to correct them, either they're old enough to vote and old enough to participate in these public conversations, in which case they should be robust enough to withstand challenge and be asked to defend things they've said if they're false, or else they're not, in which case they shouldn't be able to vote until they're 18.

00:14:26.520 You can't have it both ways.

00:14:27.840 And on the education point, if a 16-year-old at the secondary school that I helped set up was making a contribution to a debate at the school in which they got their facts wrong, I would hope that the teachers would correct them.

00:14:46.300 Not correcting 16-year-olds when they get their facts wrong because they're 16 and because you don't want to put them off getting engaged in politics and because they're trying to do something and that should be applauded. 0.93

00:14:55.580 that's incredibly patronizing and silly. If they get their facts wrong, it's up to us as adults to

00:15:01.720 point out that they've got their facts wrong and that there may well be a very persuasive case to

00:15:06.880 be made that we need to do more to combat climate change, but make that case. Don't pretend that

00:15:12.300 nothing's being done. On the privilege point, so I got mobbed earlier this week on Twitter

00:15:18.780 Because Guido Fawkes, on the Guido Fawkes website, so this is a British political website, a blog, there was a story about how Greta's parents are reasonably well off.

00:15:33.020 So her mother was a Eurovision Song Contest contestant on behalf of Sweet some years ago and is now, I think, a reasonably successful opera singer.

00:15:43.600 The family have a kind of family-authored book out.

00:15:46.820 I think her father's reasonably successful.

00:15:49.400 And in the headline of this piece on Guido Fawkes, I think there was the word privilege.

00:15:53.160 I think he's changed it now, but originally there was the word privilege.

00:15:55.800 And underneath any article, you know, there are various buttons you can press to circulate the article on social media.

00:16:01.960 I pressed the Twitter button and didn't think anything more of it.

00:16:07.040 And then... 0.94

00:16:08.960 Foolish, I know, Francis. 0.65

00:16:10.660 And then a couple of hours later, I got a call from Paul Staines, the guy who owns the Keto Forks website, who's saying, yeah, what did you do? 0.99

00:16:21.740 You know, my inbox is filling up with hate mail.

00:16:25.120 It must have been used.

00:16:26.240 And this piece is blowing up.

00:16:27.740 And I realize it's because you tweeted this piece.

00:16:32.460 And I then looked at my tweet.

00:16:33.720 I literally hadn't even looked at it before I'd, you know, I hadn't bothered to look at how it appeared on Twitter.

00:16:39.720 How it appealed on Twitter was something like, you know, Greta Thunberg is from a privileged background or something to that effect.

00:16:48.420 And it wasn't clear.

00:16:50.040 I mean, the way Twitter's designed, one of the shortcomings of Twitter, is it's not clear whether you are the author of the tweet or whether you're just retweeting something or, in this case, hitting the tweet button beneath an article, which sometimes it's obvious that you've just hit the tweet button below an article.

00:17:06.300 You're not necessarily endorsing the views of that article.

00:17:09.280 Sometimes it's not obvious.

00:17:10.160 It looks as though you're actually saying what the headline in the article says.

00:17:13.300 And this was a case of that.

00:17:15.480 And everyone just immediately, lots of people on Twitter, enough to get me trending, I think, in the UK.

00:17:20.180 I got number two saying, how dare, how dare Toby Young, of all people,

00:17:28.100 criticise Greta for being privileged when he's the son of a lord?

00:17:33.400 Yeah, my father was a Labour life peer.

00:17:35.240 And, you know, I did sort of tweet something. I wasn't actually endorsing this point of view. I merely effectively retweeted an article on Guido Forks.

00:17:45.540 Of course, no one sees that. And I think in retrospect, it was foolish not to look at how it was going to appear on Twitter.

00:17:54.980 And probably actually foolish to try and tweet that article because I don't think anyone, let alone a 16-year-old girl, should be criticized because of their background. 0.77

00:18:05.440 That's a silly point to make. 0.93

00:18:06.600 It's an ad hominem attack.

00:18:08.200 And I regret doing that now.

00:18:09.920 That's why I wanted to clarify it.

00:18:11.500 That's why we wanted to talk to you about it.

00:18:13.020 Because when I saw that, I know you're a big critic of the social justice cult, as you call it, or the social justice left.

00:18:18.860 And that is very much the method that they use.

00:18:21.480 And I thought that was very – that's why we wanted to ask you about it.

00:18:24.800 I think that as a 16-year-old, a very articulate and intelligent 16-year-old who's made a big contribution to a debate and has pushed climate change to the top of the political agenda internationally, it's an extraordinary achievement.

00:18:44.760 But I think as someone in the public arena, even though she's 16, it's perfectly fair to challenge her if she gets her facts wrong.

00:18:53.420 But I don't think it's fair to say of her or of anyone else, you know, that we should discount their views because of their background.

00:18:59.860 So I regret tweeting that.

00:19:02.380 I suppose a counter argument to you saying, you know, that she's got her facts wrong.

00:19:05.900 And OK, what it is, is a particularly blunt instrument.

00:19:08.760 But like you said, we're all talking about it now.

00:19:11.460 And, you know, and this has been bubbling under the surface for a while.

00:19:14.500 And, you know, people have been slightly mealy mouthed in it.

00:19:16.580 Oh, you can't really do anything.

00:19:18.220 She comes on the scene and all of a sudden it's trending.

00:19:20.920 We're all talking about it.

00:19:21.780 We're all discussing it.

00:19:22.540 Surely isn't it a beneficial thing?

00:19:24.880 Well, it's good that we're all talking about it.

00:19:29.560 And it's a debate that perhaps should be higher up the agenda.

00:19:33.680 But I don't think that excuses the dissemination of what is effectively fake news.

00:19:39.340 I mean, you might as well say, you know, someone could invent hate crimes, for instance.

00:19:45.220 I mean, one of the editors on Quillette.

00:19:47.280 We know about those.

00:19:48.340 One of the editors on Quillette, Andy Ngo, has exposed a number of hate crime hoaxes.

00:19:56.900 He was ahead of the curve with the Jesse Smollett case.

00:20:01.080 And, you know, if you hoax a hate crime, that's going to push hate crimes further up the political agenda.

00:20:07.540 And maybe, you know, maybe we should be concerned about the increasing prevalence of hate crimes,

00:20:13.520 if indeed they are increasing in prevalence.

00:20:15.820 But I don't think the way, I don't think it's legitimate, I don't think you can excuse manufacturing a hate crime, perpetrating a hoax just because it's important to get hate crimes further up the agenda.

00:20:28.900 And similarly, I don't think the fact that she succeeded in pushing climate change up the agenda does not excuse the dissemination of fake news.

00:20:39.240 It's interesting because with Greta Thunberg, I've got to be honest, on the one hand, I do think climate change is man-made and it's happening and we do need to address it.

00:20:47.200 On the other hand, she is annoying. 1.00

00:20:49.120 There is something about her.

00:20:50.400 I don't know what it is.

00:20:51.220 I just noticed this whole thing.

00:20:54.340 And maybe it's me just going, oh, this young person is doing really well or whatever.

00:20:58.180 I don't know, but she is quite annoying. 1.00

00:20:59.900 I think she certainly has an unusual manner. 0.69

00:21:05.680 Well, she's autistic, isn't she? 1.00

00:21:07.000 She's on the autistic spectrum.

00:21:08.400 and I think at one stage she was diagnosed with Asperger's but that diagnosis has now fallen out

00:21:16.260 of the diagnostic manual of mental disorders I think. So she's on the spectrum. But the fact

00:21:22.560 that she comes off as a little bit odd and makes a virtue of the fact that she's on the spectrum

00:21:31.740 and claims that she's able to kind of detect the signal in the noise more easily because she's on 0.54

00:21:38.000 the spectrum. I find that all very sympathetic. I can sort of relate to that.

00:21:44.440 Well, both of us have very close family members who are autistic.

00:21:46.940 Right. I have a half-brother who's autistic. And I think, you know, I wouldn't say I was

00:21:54.160 on the spectrum, but I can be a little bit Asperger's-y. And I think that's true of a 1.00

00:21:59.640 lot of the people, actually, who contribute to Quillette. I mean, one of the characteristics

00:22:04.580 of people on the spectrum is that they're not very good at social signaling and they don't

00:22:11.820 prioritize social signaling. They prioritize truth telling above social signaling. I think

00:22:16.740 that's true in Greta's case too. It's because they get a kind of bee in their bonnet because 1.00

00:22:24.860 they become slightly obsessive about telling the truth, which for the most part, I think she is

00:22:29.520 with a couple of exceptions. They can ignore whatever the potential repercussions. They might

00:22:35.580 be negative for their social life. They might be negative for their careers. And we see that with

00:22:39.980 a lot of Quillette contributors. They tell the truth about some aspect of their subject or

00:22:44.560 something they're interested in, a research topic. And as a result, they get mobbed and they lose

00:22:47.920 their careers. But I think one of the common characteristics of many of the people who found

00:22:52.900 themselves at the wrong end of these Twitch mobs is that they are a little bit aspergizing.

00:22:57.700 And one of the difficulties, I think, with the current atmosphere within a lot of American universities, increasingly British universities, is that they tolerate various kinds of diversity, but not neurodiversity.

00:23:10.500 And some people, you know, getting the kind of speech code and the etiquette right, particularly when it comes to things like transgender, which is, you know, it's a rapidly, it's a fluid area.

00:23:21.820 But it's quite the etiquette around transgender issues is quite fluid, too.

00:23:27.700 You have to be kind of really on top of it.

00:23:29.220 You have to be really good at picking up on social signals if you're not going to put a foot wrong in that.

00:23:35.440 Politicians put feet wrong all the time.

00:23:37.620 Even quite sophisticated, intelligent people in public life get that kind of thing wrong all the time.

00:23:42.400 Amber Rudd used the word colored on the Today program and then had to apologize for it. 1.00

00:23:46.800 It was almost hounded from public life using the word colored.

00:23:50.080 She's not on the spectrum, I don't think.

00:23:51.440 If someone like that can kind of make a mistake, imagine how hard it is for someone who is on the spectrum.

00:23:56.620 nonetheless is high-functioning, isn't it, at a kind of university like Harvard or Stanford

00:24:01.380 or Yale, to get everything right, to understand, to be able to pick up not just on the rules

00:24:06.420 but on the emerging rules, which haven't been written down yet, to be expected to get all

00:24:11.000 that right is, you know, it's essentially a form of intolerance against people who are

00:24:16.060 on the spectrum.

00:24:18.580 That is actually a very, very good point because one of the criticisms that was from people

00:24:24.420 that I know that was leveled against you is that it was sort of portrayed that you were bullying

00:24:28.420 an autistic 16-year-old. And it was, you know, the classic case of, you know, privileged white 0.52

00:24:33.420 male punching down, as it were. Yeah. Well, I don't accept that 0.58

00:24:40.260 challenging some of her claims is a form of bullying. And, you know, oftentimes, if you

00:24:49.920 robustly challenge something someone from a victim group has said, you get accused of bullying.

00:24:59.560 And that's often a reason for no platforming people at universities. I mean, I think it was

00:25:06.340 even invoked actually with the recent no platforming of Jordan Peterson by the Cambridge

00:25:11.100 Divinity Faculty, because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a I'm a proud

00:25:19.600 Islamophobe t-shirt. It was argued by a kind of cabal of social justice academics at Cambridge

00:25:27.000 that some Muslims at Cambridge would feel bullied if he was given a platform by Cambridge University

00:25:35.320 and allowed to lecture on the Bible at Cambridge. So that kind of tactic is a very familiar one

00:25:45.380 that the social justice left uses to shut down any challenge to their nostrums.

00:25:51.720 You've referenced how the social justice left is sort of a religion,

00:25:55.200 and you've actually used the word apostate.

00:25:57.280 Could you just go into that a little bit more?

00:25:59.220 What do you mean by that, as in it's a sort of religion?

00:26:03.800 I mean that, well, it takes on many of the characteristics

00:26:12.580 of some of the world's great religions.

00:26:15.380 So, for instance, there's a very clear moral code at the heart of it.

00:26:23.420 I mean, it shifts around a bit, but generally speaking, it's a moral community.

00:26:28.560 And people are constantly having to advertise their morality to prove they're bona fides as members of that community.

00:26:39.220 And they're constantly singling out people who are, they think, outside that community, members of the out group, in order to consolidate their in-group identity.

00:26:49.840 They identify members of the out group and expel them, sometimes in quite brutal ways, or try and demonize them in quite brutal ways.

00:27:00.760 They, like other religions, they have particular dress code. 0.97

00:27:04.040 So, you know, it sometimes involves things which we would associate often with pagan religions, like piercings and body paintings.

00:27:11.440 I see you've got a tattoo, Francis, but obviously it doesn't apply to everyone with tattoos.

00:27:15.580 But, you know, there is clearly a costume.

00:27:19.140 There are various, I mean, I think you could say there are various forms of worship.

00:27:23.420 You know, there's a kind of, when you look at, it was Andrew Sullivan, I think, in New York Magazine.

00:27:28.980 he linked to the YouTube video of a group of protesters protesting against Charles Murray

00:27:35.720 at Middlebury College in 2017.

00:27:39.960 And they all got out a bit of paper and they started reciting

00:27:44.380 what felt very much like a kind of religious liturgy.

00:27:48.560 And then they all turned around in a kind of ritualized way to turn their backs on him

00:27:52.980 at the same move.

00:27:53.900 And it really felt like, I think Andrew Sullivan called it one of George Orwell's smelly little orthodoxes.

00:27:59.900 But it felt like a religious cult.

00:28:01.660 And they looked like members of a religious cult who were kind of enthralled to a kind of form of mass hysteria.

00:28:10.040 In the same way, you would say Scientologists or the Westboro Baptist Church are kind of, you know, slightly loopy.

00:28:17.240 They seem loopy in the same way, in a sort of religious, in a fervent religious way.

00:28:21.700 I think there's another respect in which it's quite religious, which is the belief in the evil eye.

00:28:31.900 So in the voodoo religion in Haiti, there is this belief in the evil eye that you can put a hex on someone.

00:28:40.780 And once you put that hex on someone, it sort of renders them unable to act.

00:28:46.980 It means that they're kind of enervated and paralyzed in some way.

00:28:50.240 Similarly, people think that whiteness has that effect on people, that if you don't apologize for your whiteness, just in virtue of being a privileged white person, that can kind of exert this kind of invisible oppressive force which can enervate and emasculate and paralyze non-white people.

00:29:09.940 It almost looks like you're doing an invocation.

00:29:12.280 But often people in the social justice cult invoke this idea of invisible forces that we can't see,

00:29:19.420 but which are out there exerting this toxic effect on people, like unconscious bias.

00:29:26.720 And the science behind all this stuff is pretty threadbare.

00:29:31.820 And finally, the respect I think in which it's probably most like a religion

00:29:35.800 is that many members of the social justice cult set very little store by reason and rationality

00:29:43.840 and logic. They often refer to those things as tools of white privilege, a way for privileged

00:29:49.940 white men to preserve their dominance and their power. That attack on reason, on the values of 0.81

00:29:58.480 the Enlightenment, it takes the form of a quasi-religious counter-Enlightenment project.

00:30:03.480 I think the word cult is probably more accurate than religion.

00:30:05.900 I'm certainly not the only person that's come up with this view.

00:30:08.720 I mean, there's a guy called Michael Lindsay.

00:30:10.560 He was one of the people who was involved in Sokal Square, in which a number of grievance studies journals were hoaxed and made to publish kind of ridiculous articles to show up just how ridiculous some of the material being published in these grievance studies.

00:30:26.420 Also, there's one about sexism amongst dogs, rape culture amongst dogs in a car park in Portland or something.

00:30:32.660 But he was one of the people involved in that,

00:30:34.500 and he's produced this really interesting YouTube video

00:30:36.820 in which he sort of looks in a very analytical way

00:30:41.000 at whether or not it's appropriate to describe

00:30:43.800 the kind of social justice movement as a religious cult,

00:30:47.280 and his conclusion is that it is.

00:30:48.920 But do you not think that unconscious bias exists

00:30:51.540 in that we just want to be around people who sort of look like us

00:30:55.600 and echo our same views?

00:30:57.760 Do we not want that as human beings, unconsciously?

00:31:00.880 We sort of do, don't we?

00:31:02.180 Well, I think, don't most of us want it consciously?

00:31:04.940 I'm not sure that, I mean, the problem with the way in which unconscious bias is exposed by diversity trainers who lead, you know, unconscious bias training sessions, not just in the public sector, but more and more widely in the private sector too.

00:31:31.140 So one of the most commonly used tools is something called the Implicit Association Test, which was developed at Harvard.

00:31:38.200 And in this test, you sit in a chair like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and you're shown various images.

00:31:46.600 And you have to kind of press kind of favorable, unfavorable, favorable, unfavorable.

00:31:51.240 And the idea is that when you see an image of a black man, you're more likely to press unfavorable than favorable.

00:31:57.760 It's not quite as crude as that, but almost as crude as that.

00:32:00.080 And in this way, because you're doing it so quickly and you're not given an opportunity to think about your responses, it supposedly reveals what you really think unconsciously.

00:32:09.480 You're not given a chance to process it.

00:32:11.400 You're just instinctively reacting and in that way, supposedly betraying your unconscious bias.

00:32:17.180 And people take this test and then the tester then says, look, you've behaved in a racist way in these various respects.

00:32:25.360 You must be unconsciously biased.

00:32:27.720 Hopefully, you'll now be aware of that and be less biased in future.

00:32:30.540 The problem with the implicit association test is, well, there are numerous problems with it,

00:32:34.340 but a couple of the problems are, one, there's no consistency.

00:32:37.980 So someone can be a raving fascist when they take it on a Sunday afternoon,

00:32:43.600 but an out-and-out progressive liberal when they take it on Monday morning.

00:32:46.940 Depends if they've eaten.

00:32:49.040 What they've had for breakfast. That's right, Francis.

00:32:51.420 But the fact that it changes each time people take it suggests that it's not revealing anything constant

00:32:56.620 that that someone's unconscious.

00:32:58.260 And also, there doesn't seem to be any correlation

00:32:59.920 between how consciously racist people are

00:33:04.120 and how unconsciously racist the test reveals themselves to be.

00:33:07.660 So someone, you know, a grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan

00:33:10.220 might get a better score than Jeremy Corbyn.

00:33:12.980 Yeah, perhaps not a good example. 0.97

00:33:14.020 He is a bit racist.

00:33:15.020 Show us a picture of a rabbi. 0.95

00:33:17.220 A better score than David Lavin.

00:33:20.640 Yeah, the rabbi, I imagine,

00:33:21.940 he's literally going to get out of the chair.

00:33:23.420 Yeah. But there doesn't seem to be any correlation between discriminatory and prejudicial behavior and your score on the IAT.

00:33:32.480 So it's basically, you know, if it's something invisible that they're trying to measure, something that people aren't aware of and not necessarily going to kind of publicly disclose, you know, it's very, very hard to measure.

00:33:46.660 And it feels to me like an invisible force being invoked by members of the social justice cult to try and justify their claim that society is riddled with systemic racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia, even though all the public surveys that try and measure those things by actually asking people questions like, would you object if a Muslim moved in next door to you?

00:34:11.540 would you object if a close family member, married, an African-American and so forth,

00:34:15.280 all those surveys suggest that racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia are all rapidly declining.

00:34:21.080 They've all hugely declined in the last 25 years or so, particularly in the UK, interestingly,

00:34:25.780 but also in the US. So what do you do with this? If you're kind of invested in claiming that,

00:34:31.500 you know, America and Britain are riddled with systemic racism and sexism and homophobia,

00:34:37.880 and you're confronted with this evidence showing that actually it's been massively declining over the past 25 years,

00:34:43.860 you can't just say, oh, well, job done, move on to something else.

00:34:46.680 You say, ah, no, this only measures people's conscious prejudice.

00:34:49.960 There's something else called unconscious prejudice, and that remains, that's worse than it ever was.

00:34:54.560 And how do I prove it? By inventing this ridiculous test, which is completely bogus.

00:34:58.540 I suppose a counter-argument to that is, for instance, you see something like what happened with Windrush, 0.62

00:35:02.720 where you have people of Caribbean origin

00:35:06.180 who've been in this country for 50 years

00:35:08.180 or whatever it may be

00:35:09.080 and all of a sudden they're being told

00:35:10.980 that they have to go back

00:35:12.120 and they have to return

00:35:13.000 when in fact they are

00:35:14.220 and should be British citizens

00:35:15.740 or the fact that we've seen racism in football

00:35:18.520 where you have a problem.

00:35:19.840 So I take on board your point

00:35:21.880 but it still seems to me

00:35:23.000 we do still have,

00:35:24.080 there is still problems in this.

00:35:25.260 No one would dispute

00:35:26.820 that there are still pockets of racism,

00:35:31.760 pockets of homophobia. There are still some people who are openly misogynistic. No one would dispute

00:35:39.180 that. I think what's at issue is, is it worse now than it's ever been before? And that seems to be

00:35:43.940 a central tenet of the kind of social justice case. It's worse than it's ever been. And

00:35:50.180 fascism is about to triumph. Unless we man the barricades, comrades, unless we de-platform

00:35:58.460 People like Toby Young, another Hitler is going to come to power. 0.91

00:36:03.600 So, you know, let's act. Let's act now. Let's get out into the streets.

00:36:08.040 And that's the claim, that it's getting worse and it's about to kind of go beyond the point of no return.

00:36:13.320 There's something, action has to be taken now, a bit like the climate change case.

00:36:17.040 So no one's disputing that these things still exist and there is still some work to be done.

00:36:22.440 What I'm disputing is that they've got worse.

00:36:24.460 In fact, by every respectable, robust measure, attitudes have improved dramatically and populations have become much more liberal across the Anglosphere.

00:36:37.600 And to claim that, OK, to dismiss that evidence and say, oh, but what about unconscious bars seems to me to be a way of sidestepping what's really going on and a way of avoiding confronting the fact that actually those things, whilst problematic, are no longer huge problems.

00:36:52.600 And moving swiftly on, you're talking about wokeness,

00:36:55.900 and you have the logo of a woke company on your chest,

00:37:00.080 which for our listeners is Nike.

00:37:02.180 And Nike, if you're listening, we wouldn't mind being sponsored.

00:37:04.460 Thank you.

00:37:06.020 Women are equal to men.

00:37:07.860 Yes, yes, give us money.

00:37:09.680 I should say now that Francis gave me this show.

00:37:14.020 But where do you stand on woke companies,

00:37:16.420 you know, the Gillette and all the rest of it?

00:37:18.240 Well, I'm, needless to say, extremely sceptical. So I wrote a cover story for The Spectator a few weeks ago called The Woke Corporation. And it was about the spread of what is essentially a hard left neo-Marxist ideology, which until about 10 years ago was confined to grievance studies departments in US universities, maybe the fringes of parties like Labour.

00:37:48.240 and the Democrats in the US, the Unabomber, probably one of the people who subscribe to 0.98

00:37:53.000 this particular ideology. And then it spread to other universities. And then it spread from

00:38:01.740 universities into public bureaucracies, political parties. Not surprisingly, quite easy to imagine

00:38:10.340 that transition happening. But what is quite unexpected, I think, is that it's now beginning

00:38:18.160 to spread into the private sector. And I think politically that's quite dangerous because

00:38:23.480 in the past, the private sector has been a counterweight. Generally, the private sector

00:38:28.980 has been quite conservative with a small c, certainly right of center. And rich folks in

00:38:37.600 the private sector, large corporations have sponsored right of center think tanks, right of

00:38:43.180 center magazines and so forth, and it provided a counterweight to the kind of liberal progressive

00:38:48.520 ideology of the public sector. But what we're seeing now is that that liberal progressive

00:38:55.940 ideology is beginning to seep into the private sector. And I think one of the ways in which

00:39:01.340 it's able to do this, one of the reasons that's happened is because under the old socialist kind

00:39:08.660 of dogma. Capitalist companies were the enemy. The 1% was demonized. Even as recently as the

00:39:15.220 Occupy protests, Occupy Wall Street and so forth, there was this demonization of the 1%. If you were

00:39:21.160 an advertising executive or you worked on Wall Street, you worked for a large corporation like

00:39:27.360 Procter & Gamble, you were essentially one of the bad guys. You were part of the problem,

00:39:32.040 not part of a solution. And they were worried about socioeconomic inequality, about the wage

00:39:39.580 gap between the highest earning employee in a particular corporation and the lowest earning

00:39:44.940 employee in that particular corporation. And it was that kind of inequality, socioeconomic inequality,

00:39:49.440 that was highlighted and targeted by the left. There's been a sort of weird sea change that's

00:39:55.520 happened over the past 10 years or so, whereby that kind of inequality is now not important,

00:40:01.040 or certainly not nearly as important as inequality between different identity groups.

00:40:05.620 So what matters now is the inequality between privileged white cis men and other groups

00:40:17.340 like gays, lesbians, transgender folk, and so on and so forth, women, African-Americans,

00:40:24.300 African-Caribbeans, the mismatch in power and influence and economic wealth between 0.89

00:40:31.700 different identity groups has become much more important than the mismatch at an individual

00:40:36.000 level. So it's not socioeconomic inequality. It's now inequality between different identity

00:40:40.820 groups. And that means that the corporations, the fat cigar-smoking executives who for years

00:40:48.060 were demonized as part of a hated 1% can now embrace the kind of love of the social justice

00:40:55.220 left, of these kind of left-wing firebrands, because they're not attacking them anymore

00:40:59.200 and they can solve the problem. They're no longer part of the problem if they promote

00:41:03.000 enough women and African-Americans and gays to their boards. Provided they do that, no 1.00

00:41:08.060 one gives a fuck anymore about the fact that the cleaner is getting one hundredth of the 0.93

00:41:12.580 wage of the chief executive. That's completely by the by, provided there are enough women 1.00

00:41:17.440 on the board, then that company is woke and it gets a pass and they move on to kind of,

00:41:22.140 you know, mobbing and targeting someone else.

00:41:24.040 So I think that for years, clearly being demonized by left wing firebrands, particularly young

00:41:32.860 people, was a source of huge kind of psychic misery for psychological misery for the kind

00:41:40.540 of members of the 1%.

00:41:41.600 And now the opportunity to kind of get this kind of warm kind of flood of approval from these people, it's almost like, you know, the middle-aged man who is used to being kind of attacked by his 16-year-old daughter at the breakfast table is suddenly able to say to her, yes, well, it may be that I'm part of a multinational global corporation which employs people in sweatshops in Indonesia to produce T-shirts that are sold on high streets.

00:42:09.200 And it may well be that, you know, the cleaners at our company work for below minimum wage

00:42:16.060 because we've worked out a way to avoid minimum wage legislation because we're that clever.

00:42:19.940 But nonetheless, there are three women on our board. 0.98

00:42:22.740 There are four gay people on our board. 0.91

00:42:24.580 We've given money to mermaids, at which point the daughter says, that's great, Dad. 0.99

00:42:28.540 Great.

00:42:29.040 You know, suddenly he gets that approval of his daughter.

00:42:31.140 She's no longer attacking him for being part of the problem.

00:42:33.240 He's now part of the solution.

00:42:34.260 But one of the things that strikes me as so odd, and there's a lot of truth, I think, in what you've said,

00:42:38.640 is that these adverts are incredibly unpopular, 0.99

00:42:43.260 particularly often with the people who buy the fucking product. 0.99

00:42:47.300 I mean, look at Gillette. 1.00

00:42:48.280 There's no need to swear.

00:42:49.160 There is no need to swear. 1.00

00:42:50.220 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

00:42:51.480 When you put the podcast online, I've discovered you're going to have to tick the unclean box now. 1.00

00:42:56.240 Oh, are we?

00:42:56.860 Yeah.

00:42:57.260 We've always been unclean.

00:42:58.340 He's all right.

00:42:59.220 He's Russian.

00:42:59.760 He's unclean anyway.

00:43:02.360 Ideologically, nothing else.

00:43:03.460 But they're incredibly unpopular with the people who are buying the product.

00:43:09.080 I mean, for Gillette to make an advert essentially slamming men who shave,

00:43:15.520 that makes very little sense.

00:43:17.440 And you look at the like to dislike ratio on YouTube on some of these videos.

00:43:21.720 I think Francis and I would go and make a suicide pact if that happened to us.

00:43:24.740 I think we're absolutely right.

00:43:28.560 And one of the reasons I think the Brexit party is likely to sweep the board at the forthcoming European Parliament elections is because I don't think it's as though the silent majority has been just completely shut out of the kind of public conversation.

00:43:49.420 And people imagine that even now, if you're robustly pro-Brexit, that that somehow makes you alt-right or worse, far-right, but nonetheless puts you completely beyond the pale.

00:44:02.340 Lots of people who, for perfectly respectable, understandable reasons, are pro-Brexit resent being shut out in this way.

00:44:09.600 And I think they're going to signal that resentment.

00:44:12.240 They're going to show what they feel about this by voting for the Brexit party in large numbers next month.

00:44:17.940 But you're absolutely right.

00:44:20.180 And I think one of the reasons for that is partly because the executives of these woke corporations exist in tiny bubbles.

00:44:33.080 I think they're just not aware of the extent to which they are completely disconnected from their customers.

00:44:40.560 And often you see the consequence of this, which is that it's beginning to happen amongst liberal arts colleges in the U.S.

00:44:47.640 So at the University of Mississippi, which was where there was the first outbreak of kind of social justice rage on campus, there were various kind of hate crimes and there were massive protests and they went on for days.

00:45:05.320 And, of course, the university administration completely capitulated to the mob.

00:45:09.760 And as a result, enrollment at that particular university has fallen off a cliff.

00:45:14.620 You see the same thing at Middlebury. Since the flare up of a Charles Murray speech and the cultists appearing in that YouTube video, enrollment at Middlebury has fallen and some liberal arts colleges, some of the smaller liberal arts colleges in the US are actually going bust, which has given rise to the phrase go broke.

00:45:35.040 Now, it may be a while before Procter & Gamble, who own Gillette, goes broke.

00:45:40.900 But I think we're going to see a lot of companies get a nasty shock

00:45:44.960 when they realize just how unpopular this kind of virtue signaling,

00:45:48.940 kind of racial self-flagellation and denigration of masculinity is

00:45:52.780 with their kind of customer bases.

00:45:54.380 Well, you saw that cafe in Australia which charged men 18% more.

00:45:58.240 It went bankrupt.

00:45:59.740 The toxic masculinity tax.

00:46:01.580 Men are the only ones who can afford it. 1.00

00:46:03.520 One of the interesting things is since Quillette started, since I've been involved with Quillette,

00:46:08.440 a number of woke alternatives to Quillette have sprung up.

00:46:13.200 Some of them have a particular kind of anti-misogynistic theme.

00:46:18.520 Others are quite kind of Corbyn-esque in their outlook.

00:46:21.900 And in the last couple of years, I've seen at least half a dozen of these kind of woke alternatives to Quillette spring up and then go broke.

00:46:32.400 whereas Quillette is just going from strength to strength.

00:46:35.320 We always talk, and this is something that I've always meant to ask you,

00:46:39.440 people banding around this term alt-right, there's now alt-right adjacent.

00:46:44.720 You know, it's like using the terminology of estate agents.

00:46:48.020 You know, it's adjacent to the train station, whatever it is.

00:46:50.960 What is the alt-right? I don't even know anymore.

00:46:52.880 I don't even know. It's like the term populist.

00:46:56.460 It's just a kind of all-purpose term of abuse that liberals use to describe people

00:47:00.720 who hold opinions that they don't approve of.

00:47:04.120 This adjacent thing, that's really interesting.

00:47:06.860 So, Quillette is often described as being alt-right adjacent.

00:47:11.440 We are apparently.

00:47:12.200 Yeah, we're crypto-fascist as well, 0.52

00:47:13.840 which is when you're a fascist, but you don't know it. 0.98

00:47:16.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah, unconscious fascist. 0.99

00:47:18.620 Unconscious fascist. 0.94

00:47:19.960 When they say crypto, I'm like, great, 0.59

00:47:21.720 we're going to get a sponsorship, is this money?

00:47:23.500 So, I don't know if you followed this flare-up in Australia recently

00:47:28.880 between Christina Hoff Summers, who is a kind of libertarian feminist, and Roxane Gay, who is a kind 1.00

00:47:38.020 of social justice identitarian feminist. And Roxane, if that's how you pronounce her name, 1.00

00:47:44.500 described Christina Hoff Summers as being a white supremacist. And when Christina Hoff Summers

00:47:49.440 pushed back, this is before the debate had even taken place, when she pushed back and said,

00:47:53.320 you know, what makes you say that? What have I ever said that could remotely be construed

00:47:58.120 as a defense of white supremacy, she said, oh, well, OK, but you once appeared on a platform

00:48:03.160 with Milo and he's a white supremacist. So you're white supremacist adjacent. And Milo, 0.82

00:48:09.140 I mean, you know, first of all, Milo's just married a black man. So if he's a white supremacist, 0.95

00:48:14.120 he's getting his wires crossed somewhere. But secondly, you know, it's just ludicrous to think 0.98

00:48:20.020 that if you stand next to someone with unpalatable views, you're somehow contaminated

00:48:25.300 by their unpalatable views.

00:48:27.320 And why should it just be,

00:48:28.600 if it's a form of infection,

00:48:29.680 if it's sort of,

00:48:30.500 if having unorthodox opinions

00:48:32.840 is viral, like Ebola,

00:48:35.600 then presumably,

00:48:37.240 if I've stood next to Milo,

00:48:39.160 then if I then stand next to you,

00:48:40.460 you get whatever it is

00:48:41.800 that's wrong with Milo as well.

00:48:43.420 So why should it just apply to...

00:48:44.700 No, no, no, no.

00:48:44.920 I voted Remain, so I'm fine. 0.87

00:48:47.100 I should just say,

00:48:48.040 I'm slightly concerned about this

00:48:49.180 because I'm due to participate

00:48:51.040 in a debate at the Oxford Union

00:48:52.920 in a couple of weeks

00:48:53.700 about no platforming.

00:48:55.300 about whether it's ever justifiable

00:48:56.800 to no-platform someone,

00:48:57.700 and on my side is Katie Hopkins.

00:48:59.560 So am I going to be Islamophobic adjacent?

00:49:02.440 Yeah. 0.99

00:49:03.720 That's ridiculous. 0.94

00:49:05.080 Yeah, well, it's interesting 0.97

00:49:06.060 you get these six degrees of Nazism 0.80

00:49:08.040 that they've invented.

00:49:09.920 Six degrees?

00:49:11.140 Well, that's what it is.

00:49:12.320 That's what it is,

00:49:13.020 because if the people that we've interviewed,

00:49:17.080 some of them we disagree with on certain things, right?

00:49:19.580 But if we've sat...

00:49:20.840 A lot of them.

00:49:21.400 A lot of them, yeah.

00:49:22.260 Present company, et cetera.

00:49:24.040 Thank you.

00:49:24.460 But you know what I mean, like, and there'll be things we disagree with you about, but we just try and have that conversation.

00:49:30.640 But if the mere fact of being in the same room as someone renders you untouchable because they've got this infection.

00:49:39.520 It's ludicrous. I mean, I think I think it's part of the it's part of the rationale for no platforming people that if you provide them with a platform, then you're conferring legitimacy on on the points of view that they espouse.

00:49:53.560 So if you disapprove of their points of view, then you oughtn't to give them a platform, and that includes having them as guests on podcasts like this.

00:50:01.360 I mean, there are so many things wrong with that argument, but I think the most effective counterargument is to say,

00:50:05.720 Well, if Joseph McCarthy hadn't been given a platform by CBS News, if he hadn't been publicly challenged over his claims, vastly inflated claims about the penetration of U.S. public life by communist agents, he never would have fallen off his pedestal.

00:50:26.340 It was only because he was given a platform by CBS News and confronted and actually, you know, forced to acknowledge that what he was saying was largely bollocks, that McCarthyism then imploded as a kind of political force in the United States. 0.65

00:50:42.280 Just ridiculous. 0.97

00:50:43.040 I always remember when Nick Griffin went on Question Time and he just looked like an absolute buffoon. 0.98

00:50:48.620 For people who don't know America, Nick Griffin was the leader of the British National Party. 1.00

00:50:53.700 And he just looked like an idiot. 1.00

00:50:54.700 He was just outclassed and outthought by every single person he was up against. 1.00

00:51:00.680 And it was embarrassing.

00:51:01.760 I mean, you know, Tommy Robinson, good example.

00:51:05.920 Someone who's routinely no platform, someone considered beyond the pale,

00:51:10.240 not someone who is regarded as entitled to participate in these kind of public debates.

00:51:17.300 As a result, he's become this kind of cult figure.

00:51:19.540 He's standing as an independent in the forthcoming European Parliament elections.

00:51:24.340 If he'd been given a platform, he would have faded out long ago.

00:51:28.860 That's an interesting argument.

00:51:29.920 I never thought about it like that because Tommy Robinson, a lot of people want us to interview him,

00:51:34.040 and we've not done that and consciously stayed away from that.

00:51:39.220 That's an interesting point.

00:51:40.420 I never thought about it like that.

00:51:42.840 I never thought about it like that.

00:51:43.800 Anyway, this is just me.

00:51:45.280 I should have just done that bit in my head.

00:51:47.500 I should have just done that bit in my head.

00:51:50.460 Listen, there's a bunch of other stuff we wanted to talk about.

00:51:53.220 But Roger Scruton was an interesting thing that's happened recently.

00:51:56.140 Tell us about that and your thoughts about that.

00:51:58.280 Yeah, so Roger Scruton, for those of your viewers and listeners who aren't aware,

00:52:02.780 is a 75-year-old conservative philosopher,

00:52:06.220 probably the most well-known and celebrated conservative philosopher currently living.

00:52:13.160 He's written over 50 books, including several books about conservatism.

00:52:19.040 He started this magazine called The Salisbury Review and edited it for many years.

00:52:26.440 He's been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including, I think, Oxford.

00:52:31.940 And he was appointed to a government body.

00:52:37.240 It was a minor appointment, an unpaid position.

00:52:40.140 He was made the chair of something called the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission,

00:52:44.720 which was trying to see how public housing, the appearance of public housing could be improved,

00:52:50.860 how public housing more generally could be improved.

00:52:53.060 And he was appointed last November.

00:52:55.800 And as soon as he was appointed, various offense archaeologists started trawling through everything he'd ever said or written,

00:53:03.300 dating back 30 years, to try and find evidence that he wasn't a fit and proper person to serve on this public body.

00:53:10.940 exactly the same as what happened to me in the beginning of 2018.

00:53:16.680 And BuzzFeed in particular kind of dug up quite a few things.

00:53:20.600 And these were all thrown at him and pressure was put on the conservative government back then in November to defenestrate him.

00:53:28.220 And the pressure was resisted.

00:53:30.460 I thought he was a goner, partly because of the way the government had more or less kind of folded at the slightest whiff of gunfire when I came under attack.

00:53:40.300 But no, they decided to stand firm in Roger's case. And he survived that onslaught.

00:53:47.800 About a few weeks ago, he agreed to be interviewed by the New Statesman.

00:53:53.100 And he used to be the wine critic of the New Statesman, so he wasn't expecting to be stitched up.

00:53:59.440 He gave them an interview, gave an interview to this guy called George Eaton, who's the deputy editor of the New Statesman.

00:54:04.100 And before the interview was available on the newsstand, I think it may have been available online, George Eaton posted a series of tweets in which he had quote mined things Roger had said in the course of giving this interview to the New Statesman and made it sound as though he was doubling down on some of these supposedly offensive things that have been dug up by the offense archaeologists in November and also adding to them.

00:54:33.380 So I think more or less the only new thing he was accused of having said, which was supposedly beyond the pale, was that he'd said that, according to George Eaton in this tweet, he'd said that the Chinese increasingly resembled automatons.

00:54:49.900 And that's a kind of well-known racist trope that Chinese people are all the same, that they all look alike, whatever.

00:54:57.160 And within five hours of this thread being posted by George Eaton, a couple of conservative MPs had weighed in saying this is unacceptable.

00:55:11.180 He doesn't belong in the government.

00:55:13.060 And he was fired from the job by the – well, technically by the Secretary of State, James Brokenshaw, who had originally given him the job.

00:55:20.880 But clearly the gunfire came from Downing Street.

00:55:24.820 and he wasn't given an opportunity to defend himself.

00:55:30.300 No one in the government seemingly asked to see the interview

00:55:34.440 or asked to listen to the tape.

00:55:36.880 They just immediately responded to this furore

00:55:39.820 which George Eden had successfully whipped up on Twitter

00:55:42.400 with the help of BuzzFeed and he was fired.

00:55:44.780 He was thrown under a bus and he immediately countered.

00:55:51.580 actually, I didn't say that about the Chinese people. I was making a point about the Chinese

00:55:57.740 Communist Party. And actually, all these other things that you have me saying, which make me

00:56:02.080 sound like a frothing at the mouth kind of troglodyte bigot, have been taken out of context.

00:56:07.660 And in some cases, ellipses have been inserted where words have been taken out to try and make

00:56:14.240 the quote kind of seem more inflammatory. And if you'd stuck those words just back in the middle

00:56:18.760 the quote, they would have been less inflammatory, let alone the context. And for a long time,

00:56:24.900 me and other people, Douglas Murray, have been trying to exert pressure on the new statesman

00:56:29.560 to release the audio tape of the interview between George Eaton and Roger Scruton, so

00:56:34.280 we can see for ourselves whether he was quote mined, whether these quotes were taken out

00:56:38.460 of context, or whether this actually George Eaton was fairly summarizing what he'd said.

00:56:42.580 And someone anonymous, for a long time, the statesman resisted. And then someone anonymously

00:56:48.580 sent the tape to Roger Scruton, emailed Roger Scruton, the audiophile, and the audiophile

00:56:54.600 completely exonerates him. Shock. And Douglas Murray has written a cover story on this week's

00:57:00.760 Spectator defending Roger Scruton and essentially saying, look, he was hung out to dry. It was

00:57:09.240 essentially a hatchet job. He was targeted. I don't particularly want to pillory George

00:57:16.560 for this behavior. Maybe he thought he was doing his job. He's reasonably young. It was a mistake.

00:57:22.740 I don't think his career should be ended as a result of this. But one of the things which

00:57:27.040 casts him in a particularly bad light is that when Roger Scruton was fired, he then posted

00:57:34.040 a picture of himself on Instagram, swigging champagne out of a bottle. And the caption

00:57:38.820 was something like, the feeling you get when you get racist, homophobic government advisor,

00:57:43.780 Roger Scruton fired. Now, he quickly took that down and is now embarrassed about it.

00:57:50.760 But that suggests that he had a kind of an agenda. And it's a sorry episode, but in some ways,

00:57:59.720 it's been quite helpful for those of us trying to defend the presence of people with conservative

00:58:08.260 views in British public life because it's clear, it couldn't be clearer that Roger Scruton is a

00:58:15.700 victim of a miscarriage of justice and that the government reacted far too quickly to what was

00:58:20.660 effectively the demands of a Twitter mob to fire this person. And now I think very embarrassed

00:58:27.160 about having not kind of waited a bit and actually asked him for an explanation and perhaps asked the

00:58:32.980 new statesman to see the recording before making a decision about what to do with him. So hopefully

00:58:38.240 I don't have too much hope for this, but hopefully it'll make it just that little bit harder for the government and other public institutions to fire people at the behest of Twitter mobs without any kind of due process.

00:58:50.520 This is what worries me, because if this is the length to which the government is prepared to go, where they instantly jump on anything like that and they fire people for a perception of wrongdoing, then where are we going to be when this white paper that we mentioned briefly, where essentially the government is trying to regulate the Internet in a very harsh and draconian way, where are we going to be then?

00:59:15.380 Well, the really worrying thing about this is that the people, the government behaving in this incredibly intolerant, skittish way and doing the bidding of what are effectively a tiny minority of social justice activists on Twitter.

00:59:34.480 If this government, which is a conservative government, is behaving like this, God knows what it would be like if Jeremy Corbyn ever gets into Downing Street.

00:59:42.640 And one of the kind of alarming dimensions of this, as you say, is that the government a few weeks ago published a white paper, which is what the government does before it actually introduces a bill in Parliament.

00:59:55.480 So we know that the contents of the white paper are going to find their way into the bill.

00:59:58.920 A white paper setting out its proposals for regulation of the Internet.

01:00:03.280 And the paper was called Online Harms.

01:00:06.580 And it's not clear whether a new regulator is going to be created by this Act of Parliament in due course

01:00:13.620 or whether an existing regulator, probably Ofcom, will just be empowered to regulate the Internet.

01:00:19.260 But Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, boasted on the day that this white paper was published

01:00:26.840 that Britain was going to have the toughest Internet regulations in the world.

01:00:30.860 You're thinking, what, tougher than Saudi Arabia, tougher than China, tougher than Turkey.

01:00:35.040 I'm not sure that's something a conservative Home Secretary should be boasting about.

01:00:39.000 But if you look, I actually read this white paper and drilled into the detail and wrote about it for The Spectator.

01:00:44.320 And it's absolutely horrifying.

01:00:47.240 So one of the things this regulator wants Internet companies to do is to stop cyberbullying,

01:00:58.780 to stop fake news, to stop offensive material appearing on their platforms.

01:01:04.900 This all kind of falls under the general heading of harms.

01:01:08.900 And it doesn't in any way define what might be considered offensive, what might be considered fake news or cyberbullying.

01:01:14.580 It just says this is what we'll expect you to prohibit on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

01:01:23.580 And the penalties proposed in this white paper for these social media companies that fail to comply with this new code of practice are unbelievably draconian.

01:01:31.380 And so the new regulator will be able to fine a company like Facebook 5% of its global annual turnover.

01:01:39.480 Well, it's about time they paid some tax.

01:01:41.980 Well, yeah, maybe they should pay tax, but they shouldn't be taxed for allowing me to post something on Facebook.

01:01:48.160 But also, the executives of companies like Facebook and Twitter will be jailed if they allow this harmful material, undefined, to appear on their platform.

01:01:58.340 So I can post something offensive to get Mark Zuckerberg in jail?

01:02:01.380 Yeah, I mean, it's great to me. It's not great. I mean, it's not great for a number of reasons. I mean, you can joke about it. But one of the most one of the most ominous passages in this white paper was that it will expect social media platforms to prohibit speech, which is legal, but which nevertheless may be harmful.

01:02:24.260 So, you know, they're not just going to be expected to enforce the law when it comes to what is and isn't prohibited.

01:02:30.940 And by the way, the law is incredibly draconian, as we've seen with the kind of police arresting people like Count Duncan.

01:02:37.920 So they're not just going to be expected to enforce the law, but to go beyond that and prohibit people saying things which are perfectly legal on the grounds that they.

01:02:45.320 And it even says that may cause direct or indirect harm.

01:02:49.360 I mean, look at the weasel words, may cause, direct or indirect.

01:02:53.720 So something could be prohibited.

01:02:55.100 A company like Facebook could be fined if it allows something to be published,

01:02:58.820 which may, not necessarily will,

01:03:01.280 they don't have to actually show that it has caused any harm,

01:03:03.260 just may cause indirect harm.

01:03:05.780 I mean, it's so woolly, so incredibly subjective and capacious.

01:03:11.040 What are Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, what are they going to do?

01:03:14.320 What are YouTube going to do in response to this?

01:03:15.860 They're going to be incredibly cautious.

01:03:18.380 They're not going to risk being fined for 5% of their worldwide turnover

01:03:21.960 or their executives being jailed.

01:03:23.560 They're just going to ban anything remotely controversial.

01:03:26.460 You guys will be banned from YouTube.

01:03:28.000 You laugh now.

01:03:29.300 You won't be allowed on YouTube.

01:03:31.740 Mark Zuckerberg won't allow you on YouTube.

01:03:35.100 Well, can I just say it's been an absolute pleasure

01:03:36.860 and a privilege to have been doing trigonometry for exactly one year.

01:03:40.580 It is now over, and thank you for it.

01:03:43.380 We have time for one more question.

01:03:45.120 Right, and the question that we always finish with is

01:03:47.720 What is the one thing that people aren't talking about, but we really should be talking about?

01:03:53.460 Climate change.

01:03:56.440 One aspect of the climate change debate, which is often overlooked, is that the claim that the only way to address the imminent crisis slash catastrophe is to end capitalism.

01:04:16.920 that capitalism itself is responsible for ever increasing carbon emissions and the degradation

01:04:25.640 of the planet, the extinction of numerous species and so forth. And that unless you end capitalism,

01:04:32.700 we're all going to die. And that's simply not true. So I think I pointed out earlier that

01:04:39.540 the level of carbon emissions in the UK is now 43% what it was in 1990. In that same period,

01:04:46.300 the British economy has grown by two-thirds. So it's possible for economies to grow. It's possible

01:04:51.940 for capitalism to work its magic and to combat climate change at the same time. And the idea

01:04:57.520 that the only way to do this is to vote for Jeremy Corbyn so he can end capitalism, I mean,

01:05:02.480 people don't, I think, quite realize the benefits that capitalism has brought. I mean, I would

01:05:07.560 recommend reading Jonah Goldberg's The Suicide of the West. He talks about capitalism, the invention

01:05:13.300 of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, as a miracle. We were sort of bumping along when it

01:05:21.260 comes to indexes like mortality, infant mortality, levels of extreme poverty for millennia. Nothing

01:05:28.400 was really changing for millennia. Before capitalism came along, the average person was in

01:05:33.800 pain 50% of the time. The average lifespan was 45, if that. More than half of children born

01:05:41.900 died before they got to the age of one. A vast majority of the world's population lived in

01:05:45.960 extreme poverty and had to walk miles just to get water. In some parts of Africa, they still do. 1.00

01:05:51.000 But capitalism has changed all that. Capitalism has radically, on a scale unimaginable by anyone

01:05:58.060 born in an earlier era, has transformed human life, made us all comfortable, given us all these

01:06:04.020 incredible opportunities. And even today, it's eliminating extreme poverty at an extraordinary

01:06:10.020 rate. So in 2013 alone, in one year, over 100 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty

01:06:17.080 by capitalism, by the operation of the free market. The idea that we should throw that away

01:06:22.140 and return to the dark ages and once again become these kind of grubbing creatures, 0.99

01:06:26.980 sniffing around in the mud, clutching our ribs because we're in fucking pain 50% of the time, 1.00

01:06:31.700 it's just ludicrous. But no one really addresses this. And that's why you should wear night 0.94

01:06:36.220 trainers and use gym that raises so you get the best of both worlds guys you get to use capitalism

01:06:41.900 plus feel smug at the same time i would just like to confirm that racism is indeed bad

01:06:46.180 and on that i'm anti-racist adjacent yes you're cleansing yourself one podcast at a time yeah

01:06:54.520 well listen thanks very much for coming on the show it's always a pleasure to speak with you

01:06:58.020 if people want to follow you uh on twitter you're at toadmeister people want to mob me on twitter

01:07:02.880 I'm a toadmeister.

01:07:04.120 The people who want to mob you

01:07:05.600 will find you without us.

01:07:07.880 And always check out Toby's writing.

01:07:10.180 It's always very interesting.

01:07:11.220 And check out Quillette.

01:07:12.240 Of course, as I said,

01:07:13.240 I've written for it.

01:07:13.880 It's a great publication.

01:07:15.560 As always, follow us at TriggerPod

01:07:17.600 on all the social media.

01:07:18.980 Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

01:07:20.420 This is also available as a podcast,

01:07:22.300 as most of you will know.

01:07:23.720 And the final thing is, Francis,

01:07:25.060 tell them about being unsubscribed.

01:07:26.560 Yes, we have had numerous complaints

01:07:29.320 of people saying they've been subscribed.

01:07:30.820 Even people saying,

01:07:31.940 I've been unsubscribed,

01:07:32.880 I've subscribed again

01:07:34.320 and they've unsubscribed me.

01:07:35.580 Shadow banning.

01:07:36.360 Yes, exactly.

01:07:37.540 So what we need you to do,

01:07:38.740 if that happens,

01:07:39.820 could you please take a photo of it,

01:07:41.680 send it to us

01:07:42.320 and then we will tweet Twitter,

01:07:44.540 tweet Twitter,

01:07:45.300 we will tweet YouTube

01:07:46.100 and they will ignore us

01:07:47.580 as they always do.

01:07:49.000 But, you know,

01:07:49.620 we've got to do it

01:07:50.260 and we've got to highlight it

01:07:51.220 because it's not right

01:07:52.020 and it's not fair.

01:07:53.460 And also as well,

01:07:54.300 if you really enjoy the show

01:07:55.280 and you don't feel

01:07:56.320 you can tweet about it

01:07:57.200 and you don't feel

01:07:58.060 you can share it,

01:07:58.960 please just tell them, mate,

01:07:59.980 and just tell them

01:08:00.700 why racism is awesome.

01:08:02.880 Okay, on that note, keep spreading the hate,

01:08:05.140 and we'll see you soon.

01:08:06.640 I have nothing left to add.

01:08:08.840 You should be careful.

01:08:09.780 People will take that out of context.

01:08:11.080 If you ever stand as an MEP candidate, 0.99

01:08:13.140 you're screwed. 1.00

01:08:14.580 I can see you next to Sargon. 1.00

01:08:16.100 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:08:17.020 Get all the Venezuelans out. 1.00

01:08:18.200 Yeah. 0.83

01:08:18.980 That's right.

01:08:19.460 All right, guys, we'll see you in a week.

01:08:20.460 Thank you. Bye-bye.

01:08:32.880 You

TRIGGERnometry - May 12, 2019

Toby Young on Social Justice, Unconscious Bias and Woke Corporations

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