In this episode, Francis and Conner are joined by Toby Young, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of Quillette, to discuss the rise and fall of the controversial online publication, and the people behind it, such as Jordan Peterson, Jeffrey Miller and Steven Pinker.
00:04:03.780And I think the site kind of collapsed because it became so overwhelmed with people wanting to read these pieces.
00:04:11.240And ever since then, it's been a huge success.
00:04:14.700I mean, it survives more or less entirely on voluntary contributions from readers via Patreon and other similar sites.
00:04:24.140And it's essentially, I think it's quite closely linked to the intellectual dark web.
00:04:30.940They're not necessarily by the people associated with Quillette, partly because it publishes people like Jeffrey Miller and Jordan Peterson.
00:05:01.420I do it jointly with Jonathan Kaye, who's based in Toronto.
00:05:04.720I mean, one of the interesting things about Quillette is it has no offices.
00:05:07.620It has no real location, even though Claire's based in Australia.
00:05:10.240So 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.
00:05:28.540So 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.
00:05:41.620In some cases, former members of the social justice cult, for one reason or another, have been expelled from the cult and are now apostates.
00:05:48.620And it was almost like a support group for people who found themselves kind of mobbed on Twitter.
00:07:17.240And 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.
00:07:44.140And since he changed his mind, he's come out fighting,
00:07:47.740and he's now suing the woman who compiled the shitty media list.
00:07:55.520Well, speaking of controversial or challenging issues,
00:07:59.660one of the things that you've got involved with very recently
00:08:02.780is this whole Greta Thunberg, the young woman who is the face
00:08:06.660of the climate change protest movement, the Extinction Rebellion, and so on.
00:08:11.600And just tell us very briefly what actually happened.
00:08:17.740Well, I wrote a piece in The Spectator probably a couple of months ago after she first came to the fore,
00:08:29.360after she'd given a couple of speeches and her YouTube videos of those speeches were blowing up.
00:08:33.420And 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.
00:08:51.120That they have just been completely negligent.
00:08:54.300They buried their heads in the sand and they need to be shamed into doing something.
00:08:59.900And 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.
00:09:10.540And there's a kind of there's a sort of moral self-righteousness.
00:09:15.840It's sort of presented as a moral crusade.
00:09:19.260Our elders have failed us for failing to do anything about this looming emergency.
00:09:26.700And 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.
00:09:43.500So the British government, for instance, has tried to reduce carbon emissions and has done so reasonably successfully.
00:09:51.540So if you compare the emissions in 2017 to the emissions in 1990, they're 43 percent lower.
00:09:58.360Interestingly, Greta challenged that statistic when she addressed the House of Commons earlier, I think it was last week.
00:10:05.540But it seemed to me that she was someone putting herself forward in the public arena.
00:10:14.960She was making a claim which is part of, by any stretch of the imagination, a political platform, a political crusade.
00:10:25.240I 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.
00:10:39.340So, 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.
00:10:56.960Generally, it's the same sort of people with the same kind of hard left anti-capitalist agenda.
00:11:02.520Now, 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.
00:11:17.400They've done something. You may not think it's enough. Perhaps it isn't enough.
00:11:20.240But that's a slightly different point. And it slightly undermines the whole kind of moral force of her argument.
00:11:26.020If you acknowledge that actually they have tried to do something, it just hasn't been sufficient and they need to do more.
00:11:30.840different point, much more nuanced. But she's very much, she presents things in a very black
00:11:35.460and white way. Anyway, I thought it was fair enough to correct what I saw as factual errors.
00:11:42.200I mean, it seemed to me it was just straightforward fake news. And it's not as if she's the only
00:11:45.700person making these claims. Almost everyone who participated in the Extinction Rebellion protest
00:11:50.680made exactly the same claim and claimed to be on this kind of moral crusade in virtue of the fact
00:11:56.800that they were the only ones willing to confront this crisis, this looming catastrophe. Everyone
00:12:03.300else, and particularly older people, they didn't have the moral courage that these protesters
00:12:08.280have. You know, a very unnuanced black and white point of view, clearly wrong based on
00:12:14.940fake news or misinformation. What she had said and what she repeatedly does say I thought
00:12:19.720was misleading. So I thought it was fair enough to challenge her on it. Instead of, and the
00:12:24.780response from most people, not from everyone, but the response from most people, certainly
00:12:28.940from people on Twitter for the most part, was how dare you attack this 16-year-old girl? Here
00:12:37.740she is trying to do something. Here she is engaging, being energetic, getting politically
00:12:42.860engaged, and you're attacking her. You're treating her as if she was an adult politician. That's
00:12:49.260absolutely disgraceful. How can you do that when you claim to be interested in children's education?
00:12:54.780That was a sort of general gist of it.
00:12:56.400I think to which the response is, well, you know, you can't put someone up.
00:13:03.920You can't endorse someone as a spokesman for a generation and claim that in virtue of their youth, they should be listened to.
00:13:14.100They have a kind of purity and innocence and ability to see through bullshit in virtue of being only 16.
00:13:21.100And 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.
00:13:31.220And if they say something that's misleading or false, sorry, you just have to suck it up.
00:13:35.040But 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.
00:13:42.800We'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.
00:13:57.500I 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.
00:14:27.840And 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.
00:14:46.300Not 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.
00:14:55.580that's incredibly patronizing and silly. If they get their facts wrong, it's up to us as adults to
00:15:01.720point out that they've got their facts wrong and that there may well be a very persuasive case to
00:15:06.880be made that we need to do more to combat climate change, but make that case. Don't pretend that
00:15:12.300nothing's being done. On the privilege point, so I got mobbed earlier this week on Twitter
00:15:18.780Because 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.
00:15:33.020So 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.
00:15:43.600The family have a kind of family-authored book out.
00:15:46.820I think her father's reasonably successful.
00:15:49.400And in the headline of this piece on Guido Fawkes, I think there was the word privilege.
00:15:53.160I think he's changed it now, but originally there was the word privilege.
00:15:55.800And underneath any article, you know, there are various buttons you can press to circulate the article on social media.
00:16:01.960I pressed the Twitter button and didn't think anything more of it.
00:16:10.660And 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?
00:16:21.740You know, my inbox is filling up with hate mail.
00:16:50.040I 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.
00:17:06.300You're not necessarily endorsing the views of that article.
00:17:15.480And everyone just immediately, lots of people on Twitter, enough to get me trending, I think, in the UK.
00:17:20.180I got number two saying, how dare, how dare Toby Young, of all people,
00:17:28.100criticise Greta for being privileged when he's the son of a lord?
00:17:33.400Yeah, my father was a Labour life peer.
00:17:35.240And, 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.
00:17:45.540Of 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.
00:17:54.980And 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.
00:18:11.500That's why we wanted to talk to you about it.
00:18:13.020Because 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.
00:18:18.860And that is very much the method that they use.
00:18:21.480And I thought that was very – that's why we wanted to ask you about it.
00:18:24.800I 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.
00:18:44.760But 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.
00:18:53.420But 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.
00:19:48.340One of the editors on Quillette, Andy Ngo, has exposed a number of hate crime hoaxes.
00:19:56.900He was ahead of the curve with the Jesse Smollett case.
00:20:01.080And, you know, if you hoax a hate crime, that's going to push hate crimes further up the political agenda.
00:20:07.540And maybe, you know, maybe we should be concerned about the increasing prevalence of hate crimes,
00:20:13.520if indeed they are increasing in prevalence.
00:20:15.820But 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.
00:20:28.900And 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.
00:20:39.240It'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.
00:21:08.400and I think at one stage she was diagnosed with Asperger's but that diagnosis has now fallen out
00:21:16.260of the diagnostic manual of mental disorders I think. So she's on the spectrum. But the fact
00:21:22.560that she comes off as a little bit odd and makes a virtue of the fact that she's on the spectrum
00:21:31.740and claims that she's able to kind of detect the signal in the noise more easily because she's on
00:21:38.000the spectrum. I find that all very sympathetic. I can sort of relate to that.
00:21:44.440Well, both of us have very close family members who are autistic.
00:21:46.940Right. I have a half-brother who's autistic. And I think, you know, I wouldn't say I was
00:21:54.160on the spectrum, but I can be a little bit Asperger's-y. And I think that's true of a
00:21:59.640lot of the people, actually, who contribute to Quillette. I mean, one of the characteristics
00:22:04.580of people on the spectrum is that they're not very good at social signaling and they don't
00:22:11.820prioritize social signaling. They prioritize truth telling above social signaling. I think
00:22:16.740that's true in Greta's case too. It's because they get a kind of bee in their bonnet because
00:22:24.860they become slightly obsessive about telling the truth, which for the most part, I think she is
00:22:29.520with a couple of exceptions. They can ignore whatever the potential repercussions. They might
00:22:35.580be negative for their social life. They might be negative for their careers. And we see that with
00:22:39.980a lot of Quillette contributors. They tell the truth about some aspect of their subject or
00:22:44.560something they're interested in, a research topic. And as a result, they get mobbed and they lose
00:22:47.920their careers. But I think one of the common characteristics of many of the people who found
00:22:52.900themselves at the wrong end of these Twitch mobs is that they are a little bit aspergizing.
00:22:57.700And 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.
00:23:10.500And 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.
00:23:21.820But it's quite the etiquette around transgender issues is quite fluid, too.
00:23:27.700You have to be kind of really on top of it.
00:23:29.220You have to be really good at picking up on social signals if you're not going to put a foot wrong in that.
00:23:35.440Politicians put feet wrong all the time.
00:23:37.620Even quite sophisticated, intelligent people in public life get that kind of thing wrong all the time.
00:23:42.400Amber Rudd used the word colored on the Today program and then had to apologize for it.
00:23:46.800It was almost hounded from public life using the word colored.
00:23:50.080She's not on the spectrum, I don't think.
00:23:51.440If someone like that can kind of make a mistake, imagine how hard it is for someone who is on the spectrum.
00:23:56.620nonetheless is high-functioning, isn't it, at a kind of university like Harvard or Stanford
00:24:01.380or Yale, to get everything right, to understand, to be able to pick up not just on the rules
00:24:06.420but on the emerging rules, which haven't been written down yet, to be expected to get all
00:24:11.000that right is, you know, it's essentially a form of intolerance against people who are
00:24:18.580That is actually a very, very good point because one of the criticisms that was from people
00:24:24.420that I know that was leveled against you is that it was sort of portrayed that you were bullying
00:24:28.420an autistic 16-year-old. And it was, you know, the classic case of, you know, privileged white
00:24:33.420male punching down, as it were. Yeah. Well, I don't accept that
00:24:40.260challenging some of her claims is a form of bullying. And, you know, oftentimes, if you
00:24:49.920robustly challenge something someone from a victim group has said, you get accused of bullying.
00:24:59.560And that's often a reason for no platforming people at universities. I mean, I think it was
00:25:06.340even invoked actually with the recent no platforming of Jordan Peterson by the Cambridge
00:25:11.100Divinity Faculty, because he had been photographed standing next to someone wearing a I'm a proud
00:25:19.600Islamophobe t-shirt. It was argued by a kind of cabal of social justice academics at Cambridge
00:25:27.000that some Muslims at Cambridge would feel bullied if he was given a platform by Cambridge University
00:25:35.320and allowed to lecture on the Bible at Cambridge. So that kind of tactic is a very familiar one
00:25:45.380that the social justice left uses to shut down any challenge to their nostrums.
00:25:51.720You've referenced how the social justice left is sort of a religion,
00:25:55.200and you've actually used the word apostate.
00:25:57.280Could you just go into that a little bit more?
00:25:59.220What do you mean by that, as in it's a sort of religion?
00:26:03.800I mean that, well, it takes on many of the characteristics
00:26:12.580of some of the world's great religions.
00:26:15.380So, for instance, there's a very clear moral code at the heart of it.
00:26:23.420I mean, it shifts around a bit, but generally speaking, it's a moral community.
00:26:28.560And people are constantly having to advertise their morality to prove they're bona fides as members of that community.
00:26:39.220And 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.
00:26:49.840They identify members of the out group and expel them, sometimes in quite brutal ways, or try and demonize them in quite brutal ways.
00:27:00.760They, like other religions, they have particular dress code.
00:27:04.040So, you know, it sometimes involves things which we would associate often with pagan religions, like piercings and body paintings.
00:27:11.440I see you've got a tattoo, Francis, but obviously it doesn't apply to everyone with tattoos.
00:27:15.580But, you know, there is clearly a costume.
00:27:19.140There are various, I mean, I think you could say there are various forms of worship.
00:27:23.420You know, there's a kind of, when you look at, it was Andrew Sullivan, I think, in New York Magazine.
00:27:28.980he linked to the YouTube video of a group of protesters protesting against Charles Murray
00:28:01.660And they looked like members of a religious cult who were kind of enthralled to a kind of form of mass hysteria.
00:28:10.040In the same way, you would say Scientologists or the Westboro Baptist Church are kind of, you know, slightly loopy.
00:28:17.240They seem loopy in the same way, in a sort of religious, in a fervent religious way.
00:28:21.700I think there's another respect in which it's quite religious, which is the belief in the evil eye.
00:28:31.900So in the voodoo religion in Haiti, there is this belief in the evil eye that you can put a hex on someone.
00:28:40.780And once you put that hex on someone, it sort of renders them unable to act.
00:28:46.980It means that they're kind of enervated and paralyzed in some way.
00:28:50.240Similarly, 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.
00:29:09.940It almost looks like you're doing an invocation.
00:29:12.280But often people in the social justice cult invoke this idea of invisible forces that we can't see,
00:29:19.420but which are out there exerting this toxic effect on people, like unconscious bias.
00:29:26.720And the science behind all this stuff is pretty threadbare.
00:29:31.820And finally, the respect I think in which it's probably most like a religion
00:29:35.800is that many members of the social justice cult set very little store by reason and rationality
00:29:43.840and logic. They often refer to those things as tools of white privilege, a way for privileged
00:29:49.940white men to preserve their dominance and their power. That attack on reason, on the values of
00:29:58.480the Enlightenment, it takes the form of a quasi-religious counter-Enlightenment project.
00:30:03.480I think the word cult is probably more accurate than religion.
00:30:05.900I'm certainly not the only person that's come up with this view.
00:30:08.720I mean, there's a guy called Michael Lindsay.
00:30:10.560He 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.
00:30:26.420Also, there's one about sexism amongst dogs, rape culture amongst dogs in a car park in Portland or something.
00:30:32.660But he was one of the people involved in that,
00:30:34.500and he's produced this really interesting YouTube video
00:30:36.820in which he sort of looks in a very analytical way
00:30:41.000at whether or not it's appropriate to describe
00:30:43.800the kind of social justice movement as a religious cult,
00:31:02.180Well, I think, don't most of us want it consciously?
00:31:04.940I'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.
00:31:31.140So one of the most commonly used tools is something called the Implicit Association Test, which was developed at Harvard.
00:31:38.200And in this test, you sit in a chair like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and you're shown various images.
00:31:46.600And you have to kind of press kind of favorable, unfavorable, favorable, unfavorable.
00:31:51.240And the idea is that when you see an image of a black man, you're more likely to press unfavorable than favorable.
00:31:57.760It's not quite as crude as that, but almost as crude as that.
00:32:00.080And 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.
00:32:09.480You're not given a chance to process it.
00:32:11.400You're just instinctively reacting and in that way, supposedly betraying your unconscious bias.
00:32:17.180And people take this test and then the tester then says, look, you've behaved in a racist way in these various respects.
00:33:21.940he's literally going to get out of the chair.
00:33:23.420Yeah. But there doesn't seem to be any correlation between discriminatory and prejudicial behavior and your score on the IAT.
00:33:32.480So 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.
00:33:46.660And 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?
00:34:11.540would you object if a close family member, married, an African-American and so forth,
00:34:15.280all those surveys suggest that racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia are all rapidly declining.
00:34:21.080They've all hugely declined in the last 25 years or so, particularly in the UK, interestingly,
00:34:25.780but also in the US. So what do you do with this? If you're kind of invested in claiming that,
00:34:31.500you know, America and Britain are riddled with systemic racism and sexism and homophobia,
00:34:37.880and you're confronted with this evidence showing that actually it's been massively declining over the past 25 years,
00:34:43.860you can't just say, oh, well, job done, move on to something else.
00:34:46.680You say, ah, no, this only measures people's conscious prejudice.
00:34:49.960There's something else called unconscious prejudice, and that remains, that's worse than it ever was.
00:34:54.560And how do I prove it? By inventing this ridiculous test, which is completely bogus.
00:34:58.540I suppose a counter-argument to that is, for instance, you see something like what happened with Windrush,
00:35:02.720where you have people of Caribbean origin
00:35:06.180who've been in this country for 50 years
00:35:26.820that there are still pockets of racism,
00:35:31.760pockets of homophobia. There are still some people who are openly misogynistic. No one would dispute
00:35:39.180that. I think what's at issue is, is it worse now than it's ever been before? And that seems to be
00:35:43.940a central tenet of the kind of social justice case. It's worse than it's ever been. And
00:35:50.180fascism is about to triumph. Unless we man the barricades, comrades, unless we de-platform
00:35:58.460People like Toby Young, another Hitler is going to come to power.
00:36:03.600So, you know, let's act. Let's act now. Let's get out into the streets.
00:36:08.040And that's the claim, that it's getting worse and it's about to kind of go beyond the point of no return.
00:36:13.320There's something, action has to be taken now, a bit like the climate change case.
00:36:17.040So no one's disputing that these things still exist and there is still some work to be done.
00:36:22.440What I'm disputing is that they've got worse.
00:36:24.460In fact, by every respectable, robust measure, attitudes have improved dramatically and populations have become much more liberal across the Anglosphere.
00:36:37.600And 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.
00:36:52.600And moving swiftly on, you're talking about wokeness,
00:36:55.900and you have the logo of a woke company on your chest,
00:37:09.680I should say now that Francis gave me this show.
00:37:14.020But where do you stand on woke companies,
00:37:16.420you know, the Gillette and all the rest of it?
00:37:18.240Well, 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.
00:37:48.240and the Democrats in the US, the Unabomber, probably one of the people who subscribe to
00:37:53.000this particular ideology. And then it spread to other universities. And then it spread from
00:38:01.740universities into public bureaucracies, political parties. Not surprisingly, quite easy to imagine
00:38:10.340that transition happening. But what is quite unexpected, I think, is that it's now beginning
00:38:18.160to spread into the private sector. And I think politically that's quite dangerous because
00:38:23.480in the past, the private sector has been a counterweight. Generally, the private sector
00:38:28.980has been quite conservative with a small c, certainly right of center. And rich folks in
00:38:37.600the private sector, large corporations have sponsored right of center think tanks, right of
00:38:43.180center magazines and so forth, and it provided a counterweight to the kind of liberal progressive
00:38:48.520ideology of the public sector. But what we're seeing now is that that liberal progressive
00:38:55.940ideology is beginning to seep into the private sector. And I think one of the ways in which
00:39:01.340it's able to do this, one of the reasons that's happened is because under the old socialist kind
00:39:08.660of dogma. Capitalist companies were the enemy. The 1% was demonized. Even as recently as the
00:39:15.220Occupy protests, Occupy Wall Street and so forth, there was this demonization of the 1%. If you were
00:39:21.160an advertising executive or you worked on Wall Street, you worked for a large corporation like
00:39:27.360Procter & Gamble, you were essentially one of the bad guys. You were part of the problem,
00:39:32.040not part of a solution. And they were worried about socioeconomic inequality, about the wage
00:39:39.580gap between the highest earning employee in a particular corporation and the lowest earning
00:39:44.940employee in that particular corporation. And it was that kind of inequality, socioeconomic inequality,
00:39:49.440that was highlighted and targeted by the left. There's been a sort of weird sea change that's
00:39:55.520happened over the past 10 years or so, whereby that kind of inequality is now not important,
00:40:01.040or certainly not nearly as important as inequality between different identity groups.
00:40:05.620So what matters now is the inequality between privileged white cis men and other groups
00:40:17.340like gays, lesbians, transgender folk, and so on and so forth, women, African-Americans,
00:40:24.300African-Caribbeans, the mismatch in power and influence and economic wealth between
00:40:31.700different identity groups has become much more important than the mismatch at an individual
00:40:36.000level. So it's not socioeconomic inequality. It's now inequality between different identity
00:40:40.820groups. And that means that the corporations, the fat cigar-smoking executives who for years
00:40:48.060were demonized as part of a hated 1% can now embrace the kind of love of the social justice
00:40:55.220left, of these kind of left-wing firebrands, because they're not attacking them anymore
00:40:59.200and they can solve the problem. They're no longer part of the problem if they promote
00:41:03.000enough women and African-Americans and gays to their boards. Provided they do that, no
00:41:08.060one gives a fuck anymore about the fact that the cleaner is getting one hundredth of the
00:41:12.580wage of the chief executive. That's completely by the by, provided there are enough women
00:41:17.440on the board, then that company is woke and it gets a pass and they move on to kind of,
00:41:22.140you know, mobbing and targeting someone else.
00:41:24.040So I think that for years, clearly being demonized by left wing firebrands, particularly young
00:41:32.860people, was a source of huge kind of psychic misery for psychological misery for the kind
00:41:41.600And 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.
00:42:09.200And it may well be that, you know, the cleaners at our company work for below minimum wage
00:42:16.060because we've worked out a way to avoid minimum wage legislation because we're that clever.
00:42:19.940But nonetheless, there are three women on our board.
00:42:22.740There are four gay people on our board.
00:42:24.580We've given money to mermaids, at which point the daughter says, that's great, Dad.
00:43:28.560And 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.
00:43:49.420And 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.
00:44:02.340Lots of people who, for perfectly respectable, understandable reasons, are pro-Brexit resent being shut out in this way.
00:44:09.600And I think they're going to signal that resentment.
00:44:12.240They're going to show what they feel about this by voting for the Brexit party in large numbers next month.
00:44:20.180And I think one of the reasons for that is partly because the executives of these woke corporations exist in tiny bubbles.
00:44:33.080I think they're just not aware of the extent to which they are completely disconnected from their customers.
00:44:40.560And often you see the consequence of this, which is that it's beginning to happen amongst liberal arts colleges in the U.S.
00:44:47.640So 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.
00:45:05.320And, of course, the university administration completely capitulated to the mob.
00:45:09.760And as a result, enrollment at that particular university has fallen off a cliff.
00:45:14.620You 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.
00:45:35.040Now, it may be a while before Procter & Gamble, who own Gillette, goes broke.
00:45:40.900But I think we're going to see a lot of companies get a nasty shock
00:45:44.960when they realize just how unpopular this kind of virtue signaling,
00:45:48.940kind of racial self-flagellation and denigration of masculinity is
00:46:01.580Men are the only ones who can afford it.
00:46:03.520One of the interesting things is since Quillette started, since I've been involved with Quillette,
00:46:08.440a number of woke alternatives to Quillette have sprung up.
00:46:13.200Some of them have a particular kind of anti-misogynistic theme.
00:46:18.520Others are quite kind of Corbyn-esque in their outlook.
00:46:21.900And 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.
00:46:32.400whereas Quillette is just going from strength to strength.
00:46:35.320We always talk, and this is something that I've always meant to ask you,
00:46:39.440people banding around this term alt-right, there's now alt-right adjacent.
00:46:44.720You know, it's like using the terminology of estate agents.
00:46:48.020You know, it's adjacent to the train station, whatever it is.
00:46:50.960What is the alt-right? I don't even know anymore.
00:46:52.880I don't even know. It's like the term populist.
00:46:56.460It's just a kind of all-purpose term of abuse that liberals use to describe people
00:47:00.720who hold opinions that they don't approve of.
00:49:24.460But you know what I mean, like, and there'll be things we disagree with you about, but we just try and have that conversation.
00:49:30.640But if the mere fact of being in the same room as someone renders you untouchable because they've got this infection.
00:49:39.520It'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.
00:49:53.560So 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.
00:50:01.360I mean, there are so many things wrong with that argument, but I think the most effective counterargument is to say,
00:50:05.720Well, 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.
00:50:26.340It 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.
00:53:30.460I 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.
00:53:40.300But no, they decided to stand firm in Roger's case. And he survived that onslaught.
00:53:47.800About a few weeks ago, he agreed to be interviewed by the New Statesman.
00:53:53.100And he used to be the wine critic of the New Statesman, so he wasn't expecting to be stitched up.
00:53:59.440He gave them an interview, gave an interview to this guy called George Eaton, who's the deputy editor of the New Statesman.
00:54:04.100And 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.
00:54:33.380So 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.
00:54:49.900And that's a kind of well-known racist trope that Chinese people are all the same, that they all look alike, whatever.
00:54:57.160And within five hours of this thread being posted by George Eaton, a couple of conservative MPs had weighed in saying this is unacceptable.
00:55:13.060And he was fired from the job by the – well, technically by the Secretary of State, James Brokenshaw, who had originally given him the job.
00:55:20.880But clearly the gunfire came from Downing Street.
00:55:24.820and he wasn't given an opportunity to defend himself.
00:55:30.300No one in the government seemingly asked to see the interview
00:55:36.880They just immediately responded to this furore
00:55:39.820which George Eden had successfully whipped up on Twitter
00:55:42.400with the help of BuzzFeed and he was fired.
00:55:44.780He was thrown under a bus and he immediately countered.
00:55:51.580actually, I didn't say that about the Chinese people. I was making a point about the Chinese
00:55:57.740Communist Party. And actually, all these other things that you have me saying, which make me
00:56:02.080sound like a frothing at the mouth kind of troglodyte bigot, have been taken out of context.
00:56:07.660And in some cases, ellipses have been inserted where words have been taken out to try and make
00:56:14.240the quote kind of seem more inflammatory. And if you'd stuck those words just back in the middle
00:56:18.760the quote, they would have been less inflammatory, let alone the context. And for a long time,
00:56:24.900me and other people, Douglas Murray, have been trying to exert pressure on the new statesman
00:56:29.560to release the audio tape of the interview between George Eaton and Roger Scruton, so
00:56:34.280we can see for ourselves whether he was quote mined, whether these quotes were taken out
00:56:38.460of context, or whether this actually George Eaton was fairly summarizing what he'd said.
00:56:42.580And someone anonymous, for a long time, the statesman resisted. And then someone anonymously
00:56:48.580sent the tape to Roger Scruton, emailed Roger Scruton, the audiophile, and the audiophile
00:56:54.600completely exonerates him. Shock. And Douglas Murray has written a cover story on this week's
00:57:00.760Spectator defending Roger Scruton and essentially saying, look, he was hung out to dry. It was
00:57:09.240essentially a hatchet job. He was targeted. I don't particularly want to pillory George
00:57:16.560for this behavior. Maybe he thought he was doing his job. He's reasonably young. It was a mistake.
00:57:22.740I don't think his career should be ended as a result of this. But one of the things which
00:57:27.040casts him in a particularly bad light is that when Roger Scruton was fired, he then posted
00:57:34.040a picture of himself on Instagram, swigging champagne out of a bottle. And the caption
00:57:38.820was something like, the feeling you get when you get racist, homophobic government advisor,
00:57:43.780Roger Scruton fired. Now, he quickly took that down and is now embarrassed about it.
00:57:50.760But that suggests that he had a kind of an agenda. And it's a sorry episode, but in some ways,
00:57:59.720it's been quite helpful for those of us trying to defend the presence of people with conservative
00:58:08.260views in British public life because it's clear, it couldn't be clearer that Roger Scruton is a
00:58:15.700victim of a miscarriage of justice and that the government reacted far too quickly to what was
00:58:20.660effectively the demands of a Twitter mob to fire this person. And now I think very embarrassed
00:58:27.160about having not kind of waited a bit and actually asked him for an explanation and perhaps asked the
00:58:32.980new statesman to see the recording before making a decision about what to do with him. So hopefully
00:58:38.240I 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.
00:58:50.520This 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?
00:59:15.380Well, 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.
00:59:34.480If 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.
00:59:42.640And 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.
00:59:55.480So we know that the contents of the white paper are going to find their way into the bill.
00:59:58.920A white paper setting out its proposals for regulation of the Internet.
01:00:03.280And the paper was called Online Harms.
01:00:06.580And it's not clear whether a new regulator is going to be created by this Act of Parliament in due course
01:00:13.620or whether an existing regulator, probably Ofcom, will just be empowered to regulate the Internet.
01:00:19.260But Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, boasted on the day that this white paper was published
01:00:26.840that Britain was going to have the toughest Internet regulations in the world.
01:00:30.860You're thinking, what, tougher than Saudi Arabia, tougher than China, tougher than Turkey.
01:00:35.040I'm not sure that's something a conservative Home Secretary should be boasting about.
01:00:39.000But if you look, I actually read this white paper and drilled into the detail and wrote about it for The Spectator.
01:00:47.240So one of the things this regulator wants Internet companies to do is to stop cyberbullying,
01:00:58.780to stop fake news, to stop offensive material appearing on their platforms.
01:01:04.900This all kind of falls under the general heading of harms.
01:01:08.900And it doesn't in any way define what might be considered offensive, what might be considered fake news or cyberbullying.
01:01:14.580It just says this is what we'll expect you to prohibit on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
01:01:23.580And 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.
01:01:31.380And so the new regulator will be able to fine a company like Facebook 5% of its global annual turnover.
01:01:39.480Well, it's about time they paid some tax.
01:01:41.980Well, yeah, maybe they should pay tax, but they shouldn't be taxed for allowing me to post something on Facebook.
01:01:48.160But also, the executives of companies like Facebook and Twitter will be jailed if they allow this harmful material, undefined, to appear on their platform.
01:01:58.340So I can post something offensive to get Mark Zuckerberg in jail?
01:02:01.380Yeah, 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.
01:02:24.260So, you know, they're not just going to be expected to enforce the law when it comes to what is and isn't prohibited.
01:02:30.940And by the way, the law is incredibly draconian, as we've seen with the kind of police arresting people like Count Duncan.
01:02:37.920So 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.
01:02:45.320And it even says that may cause direct or indirect harm.
01:02:49.360I mean, look at the weasel words, may cause, direct or indirect.
01:03:56.440One 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.
01:04:16.920that capitalism itself is responsible for ever increasing carbon emissions and the degradation
01:04:25.640of the planet, the extinction of numerous species and so forth. And that unless you end capitalism,
01:04:32.700we're all going to die. And that's simply not true. So I think I pointed out earlier that
01:04:39.540the level of carbon emissions in the UK is now 43% what it was in 1990. In that same period,
01:04:46.300the British economy has grown by two-thirds. So it's possible for economies to grow. It's possible
01:04:51.940for capitalism to work its magic and to combat climate change at the same time. And the idea
01:04:57.520that the only way to do this is to vote for Jeremy Corbyn so he can end capitalism, I mean,
01:05:02.480people don't, I think, quite realize the benefits that capitalism has brought. I mean, I would
01:05:07.560recommend reading Jonah Goldberg's The Suicide of the West. He talks about capitalism, the invention
01:05:13.300of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, as a miracle. We were sort of bumping along when it
01:05:21.260comes to indexes like mortality, infant mortality, levels of extreme poverty for millennia. Nothing
01:05:28.400was really changing for millennia. Before capitalism came along, the average person was in
01:05:33.800pain 50% of the time. The average lifespan was 45, if that. More than half of children born
01:05:41.900died before they got to the age of one. A vast majority of the world's population lived in
01:05:45.960extreme poverty and had to walk miles just to get water. In some parts of Africa, they still do.
01:05:51.000But capitalism has changed all that. Capitalism has radically, on a scale unimaginable by anyone
01:05:58.060born in an earlier era, has transformed human life, made us all comfortable, given us all these
01:06:04.020incredible opportunities. And even today, it's eliminating extreme poverty at an extraordinary
01:06:10.020rate. So in 2013 alone, in one year, over 100 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty
01:06:17.080by capitalism, by the operation of the free market. The idea that we should throw that away
01:06:22.140and return to the dark ages and once again become these kind of grubbing creatures,
01:06:26.980sniffing around in the mud, clutching our ribs because we're in fucking pain 50% of the time,
01:06:31.700it's just ludicrous. But no one really addresses this. And that's why you should wear night
01:06:36.220trainers and use gym that raises so you get the best of both worlds guys you get to use capitalism
01:06:41.900plus feel smug at the same time i would just like to confirm that racism is indeed bad
01:06:46.180and on that i'm anti-racist adjacent yes you're cleansing yourself one podcast at a time yeah
01:06:54.520well listen thanks very much for coming on the show it's always a pleasure to speak with you
01:06:58.020if people want to follow you uh on twitter you're at toadmeister people want to mob me on twitter