Andrew Doyle | I'm Not Exaggerating The Problem | Modern Wisdom Podcast 232

Andrew Doyle is Titania McGrath, a comedian and a writer. Expect to learn whether we need to decolonize Mars, who Andrew thinks will win the 2020 Election, why "whiteness" is a problematic term, what's happened with gay activism, whether creating a slave-themed workout routine is a clever idea and much more... Sponsor: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Titania McGrath's new book - https://amzn.to/36KRNdd Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #andrewdoyle #titaniamcgrath #socialjustice - 00:00 Intro 01:40 Updates in the Woke World 08:03 Where Are the Gay Activists? 15:50 Decolonising Mars 26:14 Defining ‘Whiteness’ 35:37 Semantic Overload & BLM 50:22 The End State of Woke Activism 1:01:43 Prediction for 2020 Election - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Doyle?

  They can say that all white people are complicit in whiteness by virtue of the colour of their skin. And they can also say that people who are non-white are also complicit in the system if they are not actively anti-racist. Remember, for these people, isn't the dichotomy of racist or not racist, because if you're not racist, that's another form of racism. The dichotomy is actually racist or anti-racist, which means you are proactively conceding your own complicity in these systems and attempting to decolonise these systems, right? So it's not good enough just not to be a racist person, to be a good person who doesn't ever say or do or support anything racist. That's not enough. You've got to be an anti-racist.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  Andrew, welcome to the show.

• 0:36Andrew Doyle?

  Lovely to be back. It's been a while. How long's it been? More than a year?

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  Just over a year. You were on route from London to the fringe, dropped in for a quick coffee and then...

• 0:45Andrew Doyle?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. It was fun. It was good. But none of that, none of that anymore. That's not how the world works now.

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 0:51Andrew Doyle?

  It's all remote.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  It is. You're, you're on, on holiday at the moment, somewhere nice.

• 0:57Andrew Doyle?

  I'm not really. I'm working. I'm on the Amalfi Coast. I'm staying in a small town halfway between Positano and Amalfi. And I'm, I spent the day in Capri the other day, so it's, and I've been to Pompeii, so it sounds like I'm having a good time. But I am here to work. And so for the rest of the week, I'm not going to leave the flat. I'm just going to sit here and write. Because I can't work at home. Too many distractions.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  You're reading some future classics, I'm sure.

• 1:21Andrew Doyle?

  No, I'm not. I'm, I'm, I'm working on a new book. And because the last two books I wrote, I wrote in Sark, the Isle of Sark. But I can't get there because of the quarantine rules. So I had to come to Italy. So, you know, it's fine. Yeah, it's a real...

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  It's a tough life, isn't it? Yeah.

• 1:36Andrew Doyle?

  No, it's good. It's good. I mean, I've got the space I need just to focus on stuff.

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  I like it. So what have been the major developments in the woke world this year?

• 1:45Andrew Doyle?

  I mean, where do you begin? It, it, it has exploded. When, when I last spoke to you... I was often accused of exaggerating the problem and people would say, well, you know, you're just complaining about the behaviour of a few rogue students here and there on university campuses or a few nutcases on the internet. And, well, I've been proven right, haven't I? Because now it's not that, it's demonstrably not that. The evidence of everything I've been writing about and talking about for the past five years is absolutely everywhere. It's incontrovertible. And if that sounds arrogant, so be it. But there you go.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  The prophet, the prophet has arrived.

• 2:19Andrew Doyle?

  I fucking told you so and you did nothing. And you attacked me. You just attacked me. I am Cassandra. You didn't believe my warnings and here we are. You know, had you heeded my prophecies, perhaps this could have been evaded.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  So other than you being one of the, one of the four horsemen, where, where is the world of, if, if there's trends, if there was like a trending in a world of woke, sort of where's it gone this year?

• 2:43Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. So it's been a kind of, just a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances. You know, we had the, obviously the pandemic and the lockdown and this created this kind of tension and this kind of, this sense of frustration. It meant a lot of people were spending more time on the internet rather than the real world, which means that they have a skewed perspective of how things are going. And, and then all of a sudden it explodes because of the death of George Floyd. So there's this, you know, what, what starts out as very important legitimate protests against police brutality. I'm personally very nervous about any kind of overreach of the state, as you know, because you know, you know about my work. So I, I do believe instances like that do require rigorous response and rigorous protest. But very quickly, it became quite clear that this wasn't about

• 3:26Andrew Doyle?

  George Floyd anymore. It was about this whole host of other issues. And it was actually more a kind of catalyst for the culture war to explode into the mainstream, which is exactly what happened. And then you have all major corporations, all major businesses, civic institutions, schools, universities, absolutely everyone in lockstep over basically issues they don't fully understand, you know? I mean, when the BBC, for instance, and Sainsbury's as of this week, telling their employees to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which is a book, which is, I suppose, the most popular example of, of, of critical race theory that we have at the moment, but it is a very. A very shoddy piece of work, which has been widely discredited and doesn't have

• 4:10Andrew Doyle?

  the kind of academic respectability. Once you move beyond that sort of niche of the kind of postmodern offshoots such as, you know, critical race theory, disability studies, fat studies, gender studies, intersectional feminism. Once you go beyond all that, people don't take Robin DiAngelo very seriously. Businesses do, corporations do. They pay her thousands of dollars to go in and shout at their white employees and tell them how racist they all are. But it's such a dangerous, divisive, backward philosophy of life. It's the idea that you divide us into oppressed and oppressor irrespective of our personal circumstances. And you, you, you, you know, it's racist in every way it is possible to be racist. You know, it degrades people of colour by telling them that they're always going to be victims, that they will never achieve

• 4:54Andrew Doyle?

  anything that they deserve to achieve. And it's racist against white people because it tells them that they are oppressive and racist. And in particular, Robin DiAngelo, who will claim that if you deny your complicity in white supremacy, that just proves you're a white supremacist, right? So this, it's absolutely appalling and abysmal. And of course, because she used the phrase, and well, people of that ilk use the phrase anti-racism to describe what they're doing. If you complain about anti-racism or make the case that anti-racism is a bad thing, it sounds like you're saying that you are for racism. And of course, the reason for opposing anti-racism is if you are concerned about actual racism. That's the problem. So this gets very complicated. There's this whole lexicon you sort of have to, you have to master before you can get anywhere. It also

• 5:37Andrew Doyle?

  makes people rightly nervous. They understand that, you know. Most people are concerned about the anti-racism in terms of unconscious bias training, implicit bias training, dividing people up. I mean, Sainsbury's literally created an online safe space for their black employees. I mean, how patronizing is that? So people are nervous about this. But they don't want to be seen to be opposed to anti-racism. It's a very clever phrase that they use. But what people have to understand is that anti-racism is a rehabilitated form of racialised thinking. In other words, it is a form of racism. And if you really care about combating racism, as I do, then you will oppose anti-racism. And you'll go back to the liberal approach, the liberal approach to combating racism.

• 6:18Andrew Doyle?

  And the reason why that's a good thing is we've got the past six decades of progress which prove that it works. And sure, it hasn't achieved a complete utopia where racism doesn't exist. That will never happen because we live in a society of human beings and there's always going to be some nasty pieces of work amongst us, right? But the best, the absolute best way, as has been proven by recent history, is the liberal approach, is that you tackle racism rigorously whenever it occurs. What you don't do is create this faith-based philosophy where there are nebulous power structures that only people like Robin DiAngelo are qualified to detect. And therefore you implement policy on that basis in the government, in the arts, in education, in the media, absolutely everywhere. And then you're solving problems that may or may not exist on the basis of this deity that you've created.

• 7:02Andrew Doyle?

  That's not the way to go about this. And we know this is the case. So people who do believe in those liberal values, those decent values of equality and fairness and looking out for people and ensuring that people aren't mistreated in society and discriminated against, those are the people who need to advance the liberal agenda. The social liberalism that has served us so well for so long that is now being utterly demolished before our eyes.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  It seems, or it feels a little bit like, you know, the God of the Gaps theory? This is kind of like the racism of the Gaps theory.

• 7:34Andrew Doyle?

  Yes.

• 7:35Chris Williamson?

  Racism is the set point. And that is the elephant in the room with regards to the anti-racism movement, that it inherently further entrenches and splits us up into groups based on race. As opposed to the Sam Harris proposal, which is a world where the colour of someone's skin would be as important as the colour of someone's hair. And we don't care that there's not enough gingers that are CEOs or brunettes that are working on the machine line or whatever it might be. One thing I've noticed this year, race really has sort of come to the forefront. What's happened with the gays this year? Is gay activism still alive and well?

• 8:14Andrew Doyle?

  The gays are the new white man, aren't they? I think that people are quite down on the gays at the moment. And there's all sorts of things that you've just kind of touched on, which are quite difficult to unpack. I mean, you were alluding to the ideal of colour blindness, which is of course the ideal, the liberal ideal, which is that, as you say, the ginger hair analogy works well. Because it doesn't mean that you don't see race. It means that you don't

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  Care.

• 8:37Andrew Doyle?

  Care. You don't care. You don't treat people differently on the basis of skin colour, which is actually a beautiful ideal that we should all be striving. That's what we used to teach children. And all of a sudden, over the past six months, suddenly all of that needs to be unpicked and unpacked and revised, based on this very reactionary agenda. I think that's absolutely heartbreaking and genuinely tragic. And yes, reactionary and regressive. It's taken us right back. And that's the thing, you don't need, you know, we've... Can anyone seriously, hand on heart, say that what has happened this year has not inflamed racial tension and made it worse? And basically made our society more racist as opposed to less racist? I mean, can anyone seriously say that with a straight face? I don't believe they can.

• 9:22Andrew Doyle?

  So that's why we do need to do something about it. In terms of gays...

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  Where are the gays, Andrew? Where have all of the gays gone?

• 9:30Andrew Doyle?

  So that's a different issue. The problem with the gay issue now is that we have, there is a kind of fission within the LGBTQIA+ community, right? So even using the phrase makes me laugh. I think we need to totally just abolish it and move on. Because the truth is, let's take Stonewall. Stonewall, which is the major charity for gay people in the UK, which has done some incredible work over the years and has now changed its entire philosophy about sexuality. And it believes, for instance, that gay men are... It's redefined, homosexuality is no longer same-sex attraction, it is same-gender attraction.

• 10:10Andrew Doyle?

  But of course, gay men are not attracted to people who identify as men. They are attracted to people who have the bodies of men, right? And that's actually quite a fundamental distinction. A lesbian is not going to be attracted to someone with a penis simply because that person with a penis identifies as female and because that person says that, well, it's a female penis. That's not because we're dealing with people's biological inclinations, sexual inclinations. It's quite deeply rooted, shall we say. So when Stonewall effectively adopt a homophobic...

• 10:42Andrew Doyle?

  Policy, right? And I use that word with caution insofar as I don't think the people at Stonewall are homophobic, but I think their new philosophy is underpinned by homophobia. In much the same way that I don't think fourth wave feminists are misogynists, but their philosophy is underpinned by a misogynistic idea that women are weak, inherently weak, and always victims and need protection, right? So it's perfectly possible for this to happen, as we have seen. So Stonewall now are obsessed with the trans issue. I mean, they're right to be concerned whenever a trans person is discriminated against, right? That is something, again, we go back to the liberal standard, which is that everyone should have equal rights irrespective of who they are or how they identify. The liberal perspective is that you should be able to call yourself whatever you want.

• 11:27Andrew Doyle?

  You should be able to do whatever you want to your body. You should have those. And of course, trans people have every right to be treated exactly the same as everyone else. What they don't have the right to do is to force other people to use the language that they want them to use, and that's really the sticking point. And there is this, of course, conflict of rights now between feminists, who for the most part, particularly second wave feminists and thereafter, believed in the idea of gender being a social construct. And of course, the trans movement, particularly the militant trans activists, believe that gender is a... They have a biological essentialist view, which is why you get this idea of being born in the wrong body. So you get this fundamental contradiction. You also have feminists who are concerned about single-sex spaces,

• 12:09Andrew Doyle?

  such as domestic violence refuge centres, for instance, or prisons, which is a legitimate concern to have. And they do not believe that biological sex is a fantasy. They, you know, and as Blair White, the trans writer in America, has pointed out, if there's no such thing as biological sex, there's no such thing as trans people. So all of this is going on. So you've got lesbians and gay men who have been pitted against trans activists, and it's not really fair because the majority of trans people don't have these views. This is a minority of activists who, for some reason, are able to sway Stonewall's entire policy and thinking on this. And Stonewall, in fact, has completely stopped listening to gay people

• 12:54Andrew Doyle?

  and has completely... and feminists, and completely overruled their viewpoint. I'm not suggesting that any particular person... Should just be deemed to be correct in this. I think we need to have a debate, right? I'm perfectly willing to be challenged on anything that I've said and for people to say I'm wrong. I almost certainly am wrong about a number of things. It's got to be the case, right? So having the discussion is important, but when you have someone just charging in and saying, "Trans women are women", well, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, what do you mean by woman? What does woman mean by your definition? What if I don't share your definition of woman? What if I think that sex is biologically ingrained and that you are fundamentally incapable of changing that? However, you can identify and you're free to identify however you want,

• 13:37Andrew Doyle?

  which is, by the way, is what an awful lot of trans people believe, right? According to this new rubric, a lot of trans people are very transphobic. And that's going to be very complicated. So what do you do? Gay men are not, gay men, gay women.

• 13:51Chris Williamson?

  It's so...

• 13:52Andrew Doyle?

  They're lower down on the hierarchy.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  The pecking order, yeah.

• 13:55Andrew Doyle?

  So because of intersectionality, which effectively, I know the original intention wasn't this, but what it has morphed into is a kind of exactly that, yeah. A kind of a hierarchy of grievance and gay people are dropping down the charts all the time.

• 14:08Chris Williamson?

  Is there any further for them to go?

• 14:10Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, relegated to the Vauxhall Conference, mate, you know? By the way, I don't know what that means, really.

• 14:17Chris Williamson?

  I just heard a man in a pub say it once.

• 14:19Andrew Doyle?

  The reason I, the reason I use that is because when I was at school, it was because I was never a gender conformant kid. It's about, I didn't like the stuff that the boys liked and I wasn't into football. And everyone was so into football, I had to pretend that I'd supported a team. And I chose Yeovil Town so that I had something to say. And apparently they got relegated to the Vauxhall Conference. And I've always remembered that phrase. I don't even know if the Vauxhall Conference is still a thing.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  I don't think it is, but you've managed to pull out a like couple of decade old reference that's still in there. It's still in there.

• 14:55Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, yeah. Well, it's very traumatic and scary. You know, if you're a boy at school, at your primary school and you're secretly doing ballet in the evenings and you're having nightmares about them seeing you in your tights and... And you're getting bullied at school and you're not considered very masculine and traditionally masculine. Yeah, those things stick, I think.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Mate, I played cricket in a state school in Stockton, sub area of Teesside Middlesbrough, whose claim to fame up until recently was only that it had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the UK. And I was playing cricket, which was like just the bourgeois arrow over the top of your head for this guy needs a kicking.

• 15:40Andrew Doyle?

  Cricket is basically PG Woodhouse and that kind of quintessential old school Englishness and Newtonian kind of, yeah.

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  Wanky, very, very, very wanky. Did you see the campaign to decolonize Mars?

• 15:55Andrew Doyle?

  I didn't. Well, it hasn't been colonized yet, has it?

• 15:59Chris Williamson?

  Let me, let me lay, let me lay this one out for you.

• 16:02Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, I haven't come across this one.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Decolonize Mars dot org, an unconference on Mars. Decolonising Mars, an unconference on inclusion and equity in space exploration will bring together a diverse group of individuals working at the intersection of astrobiology, anthropology, social justice and space exploration. The format of the event will feature a discussion as its primary objective. While there will be time for brief presentations, a significant fraction of the program will be devoted to group discussion around pressing themes which will be determined by the symposium participants themselves. The term decolonizing, decolonization refers to the undoing of the legacy of colonialism. Many people are used to hearing about colonizing Mars to talk about humanity living in space.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  Here, we examine how using a colonialist framework in space reproduces past harm from humanity's history on Earth. This event is about envisioning fresh pathways for thinking about space exploration by stepping away from the ways we usually talk about space, which is by definition, decolonizing the topic held in Decolonising Mars. And as you've quite rightly identified and James Lindsay brought up, there is an entire conference dedicated to decolonizing a planet that hasn't been colonized yet.

• 17:17Andrew Doyle?

  Are you sure this isn't a joke? I'm just, I'm just putting that out there.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  It seems, well, I mean, that is that not the subtitle to almost everything that's happened this year?

• 17:29Andrew Doyle?

  This is the problem now is that I, whenever I see an article like this or something, I have to verify it.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  Do you wonder sometimes if you wrote it?

• 17:36Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  If you've trolled yourself.

• 17:38Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, it's so, on the face of it, just insane and it's, you want to be, I mean, I, I've, I've always been banging on about, you know, how I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. I want to be respectful to all opinions and I want to be able to discuss them, but some, the problem with this social justice ideology is it is at heart so infantile. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very difficult not to start sounding like you're throwing out homonyms, you know, what, what, once you start, but it, it just is, this isn't how adults who are educated well should behave.

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  Let's not forget as well, we're not talking about, you, you, if you want to have the, those conferences that happen in Portland, where everyone calls each other comrade and has a point of personal privilege, that's fine. No, no, no, this is fucking space, right? There's no, that we, with, there's, you know, it's a vacuum out there. It's really, really scary and dangerous. And Mars is far away. I don't want, the astronauts that are going over there, there should not be an inclusivity officer on board the first shuttle to Mars.

• 18:44Andrew Doyle?

  Once they've de-colonized maths and science and then, and engineering, and then they can build the rocket that goes to Mars, I'm not going to be on, on that rocket, I tell you. Cause it's not going to get very far. And, you know, if they're obsessed with this stuff, I mean, I hope, I hope we do meet an alien race. Because, because, because these people, their first concern is going to be about whether the alien race is sufficiently inclusive and diverse. And, and they'll just shoot them, won't they, with their laser guns? And that'll be the end of that. And that'll be fine.

• 19:07Chris Williamson?

  And we'll.

• 19:08Andrew Doyle?

  That's, that's what we need. We need a fucking invasion, don't we? I, I just, I, I don't, I don't know what else to do. I am, I'm kind of, because I'm writing about it at the moment, I'm writing a book about it as well. And I just, it's reminding me of all the stuff. That's going on and I'm trying to, well, I have been for the past five years trying to get into the head of these people and and and there comes a point when you realise it is just a fundamentalist religion, that's what it is and therefore you you know, it's like trying to pick apart any kind of rigorous theology, you know, it it you it it ultimately you come, you you hit that brick wall, you know, where ultimately you just want to say, but actually I don't believe there is a a a multi-headed Hydra. I just don't, you know, I can't, so I'm not, I'm not going to accept the premise from which we build your entire esoteric religion, you know, I'm just not going to do that. And that's what we're dealing with here.

• 19:54Andrew Doyle?

  And it is a worry and I don't know what the solution, I think we need to human needs to learn things again, you know. Um, th- th- these people have been failed by education, I believe, and I I don't, I don't know what what to do about it.

• 20:07Chris Williamson?

  I I'm concerned and I brought this up with Douglas when he was on the show. My concern is that the smartest minds of our generation are being uh having their mental RAM taken up, trying to argue the fact that men and women are different. And if the great filter exists, which is a theory put forward by Robin Hanson that explains the answer to the Fermi paradox, why are there no aliens out there, there is a particular barrier that all civilizations need to get over, perhaps it's not uh do having aggressive global warming, perhaps it's um having correctly controlled and aligned artificial general intelligence, perhaps it's

• 20:45Chris Williamson?

  you know, any, any one of a number of other things, like if that great filter exists and the reason that we don't get past it is because we're playing these childish, like absolutely infantile games of

• 20:58Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  y- y- your hierarchy versus my hierarchy and I'm going to do moral grandstanding because it's a state, a signaler and blah, blah, blah. Like, we don't deserve to colonise the galaxy.

• 21:08Andrew Doyle?

  Well, the but the problem is that it's it's it's such a small, I think we do deserve, it's it's a small minority of people who've just taken over academia, I mean, that's really all it is and and and people go away to universities and they are pumped full of this stuff, which is stupid, just stupid. I mean, the the number of the arguments I've seen on Twitter and it's it's blue checked academics saying the most ignorant, stupid things and you just think, well, those are considered the most educated people in the world, aren't they? And that that's, you know, a- a- and yet, normal people know that they're full of shit. And that's a worry, that's a worry, isn't it? I I I don't know. And I don't want to sound conspiratorial, and I know that this idea of the long march through

• 21:49Andrew Doyle?

  the institutions, the Gramscaya idea is kind of considered to be conspiratorial, but well, certainly it wasn't from the outset. I mean, there were people, there were neo-Marxists who were concerned about the failure of Marxism to stir up a revolution, and they wanted to know why, and they believed that the way to do it would be through this kind of inch-meal approach, where you do infiltrate the church, say, universities, the major institutions. So there was that blueprint in place, there was an attempt, and that's not conspiratorial, because they were so open about those intentions. No, they wrote about those intentions, and and it did happen. However, I think largely it happened by accident. More than anything,

• 22:31Andrew Doyle?

  I think it happened by accident. I just think those sort of original thinkers of the Frankfurt School, you know, the Halkheimers and the Adornos, and the French postmodernists of the 1970s who were coming from a different branch, but they have these sort of overlapping concerns, they just took hold, and I think it happened by accident more than anything else, but it just it just took hold. And I mean, certainly when I was studying at university, that sort of Foucaultian idea of the world, you know, the power structures that we now hear about all the time, it was just completely compulsory, that this was just taken as a given. And then it went out of fashion, weirdly. So this obsession that we now have with language, I mean, you know that social justice activists, they're all obsessed with language and policing language, and you mustn't say this, and the reason

• 23:16Andrew Doyle?

  they think that is because they think that reality is created by language. Effectively, if you can police language, the world becomes better, and people think in the right way, you know. But all of that stems from this this postmodern overemphasis on on on language. It's why the postmodernists had no clue about the visual arts. They were totally ill-equipped to assess the visual arts, right? They couldn't do it, because they just think linguistically, obsessively, the Derrida's of the world, you know, the Jean Francois Leotards of the world, it's just obsessing with with language, and that we now have the legacy of that. But I should say, all of this stuff went out of fashion about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it's just for some reason, it's gone into the... And and you've got those sort of, you know, the worst kind of know-nothing academics who are holding on to it, and the reason

• 24:00Andrew Doyle?

  they hold on to it is because if you believe in this belief system, you don't have to do any reading, you don't have to know anything, you don't have to spend any time in the library, all you do is read a few a few sort of of these textbooks, these foundational texts, and you're good to go. It's why it really... It really makes me laugh when you hear that phrase educate yourself and the activists always say educate yourself. They don't actually mean, for a start, they haven't read Foucault and Derrida, they haven't read the things that they cite. When they say educate yourself, they mean read the one or two books they've ever read, which are probably White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.

• 24:30Chris Williamson?

  Get White Fragility on an audible free trial, that's what they mean.

• 24:33Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, or How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. They've basically got those two, maybe the Reni Edo Lodge book, maybe an...

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  What does the X stand for in Ibram Kendi? Is it a name?

• 24:46Andrew Doyle?

  He's changed his name to that. That's not his birth name.

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  Ibram X. Kendi, so it's that's...

• 24:51Andrew Doyle?

  I can only assume it's an allusion to Malcolm X and to the practice of black activists in the black power movement changing their name to an X. I don't know enough about him.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  Me neither.

• 25:02Andrew Doyle?

  All I know is I don't like that book. And I have to read these books. I mean, this is the thing that bothers me. I, you know, he's just done one called Anti-Racist Baby. I don't know if you saw that.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  I've seen it's gone out, yeah. Well, is it like a pop-up? Is it pop-up book with people in pointy hats?

• 25:17Andrew Doyle?

  No, it doesn't have pop-ups. It's one of those, it's aimed at very small kids. So it's one of those board books, you know?

• 25:25Chris Williamson?

  Big cardboard, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:25Andrew Doyle?

  Big, thick. So there's only about seven pages. You can read it in two minutes and it's thick illustrated and it's talking about how babies, I'm not kidding, it's something like babies need to be able to confess their racism and all this sort of, you know, I mean, it's just hilarious. It is funny. It really is. But these books, I mean, I keep getting them sent to me as well and I, there comes a point where they're just...

• 25:48Chris Williamson?

  Gifts, there's curses. I mean, is there anthrax in them? Like, what's going on?

• 25:51Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I feel like it's a curse. But of course, I also know I have to read them because I can't be in the position of talking about them and criticizing them unless I'm familiar with them. And I read more of that stuff than the stuff I would like to read. Or having said that, I'm in Italy and I've been reading some more interesting, there's things that are not to do with it, which is probably not what I should be doing, you know, at the moment.

• 26:12Chris Williamson?

  Entrench yourself in, yeah. Can you take us through what whiteness means?

• 26:19Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, so the notion of whiteness, I suppose the best way to think about it is a system of power. Right, so it's, and this is coming from Critical Race, this is the phrase that they always use, whiteness. It's been analogized with the Augustinian idea of original sin. It doesn't actually specifically pertain, well, there's an ambiguity. It doesn't specifically pertain to the color of your skin, the whiteness. It more pertains to a complicity in a system of whiteness, a system of oppression on the basis of race, right? So, for, this is why, for instance, very confusingly, when there was that story in America when the the Asian boys, I think one of them urinated on a black schoolgirl and attacked them.

• 27:04Andrew Doyle?

  It was a kind of a sort of, it was a horrible attack.

• 27:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 27:08Andrew Doyle?

  They were described, because they weren't white perpetrators, they were described as enacting whiteness. In other words, whiteness is a way that you oppress people of color, a system of oppression. And that you don't necessarily therefore have to be white. You could be, you could be white adjacent, which is the phrase that I, I started using last year as a joke through Titania. And now people are using it and I started thinking, did I invent this? But I probably didn't, it probably was just there in the ether, you know.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  Undiscovered knowledge.

• 27:41Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I mean, you can, because you can anticipate this stuff, you can't, that's the, that's the problem. And because fascist adjacent had become so popular, I just thought I'll start calling black people who don't have, who are conservatives, say, white adjacent as a joke. And now I'm actually seeing it everywhere and it's really bothering me and I want to work out if I did invent that. I hope so. But yeah, so that's what whiteness, so therefore to give another example. And of course, there's all sorts of books and tracts written about whiteness and trying to give it the illusion that this is something that is thought through and, and, and.

• 28:13Chris Williamson?

  Sophisticated.

• 28:14Andrew Doyle?

  Sophisticated, that is, it's too, you know, they load it with this jargon in order to give the impression that it's too complicated for you to understand. So you better just accept.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Hand it over to us. You made, you made the analogy that the same reason as to why the church didn't want the Bible translated into common parlance back in the Middle Ages.

• 28:33Andrew Doyle?

  It's why they burnt tinder at stake, because you translate the Bible, it means that they, all of a sudden, the power is devolved to the masses. It means they can interpret scripture for themselves, and that matters. You know, you don't have, you can't just say, well, you can't have a priest just say, well, you've got to do what I say, because I'm the only one who can read the sacred texts, you know. And that is the equivalent of what's happening here. So the academics are saying, well, and you see all the time, when people get into one, when your average person gets into an argument with one of these crazy academics on Twitter, they'll say, well, actually, I'm an expert in this, and they'll throw all this jargon down, and they'll frighten people away. And if, you know, actually, don't worry about it, because they're talking bollocks. They really are. All this comes from is, is these, these things are slogans that, that, that are used instead of serious thought processes. And they are, they're not to be taken seriously. So don't worry about it.

• 29:18Andrew Doyle?

  Just get them. Also, you should remind them that if they're unable to express their point with any degree of clarity, they're not expressing their point well. That's, that's the other thing.

• 29:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a mark of a, it's, it's the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a simple way. It's the mark of a charlatan to explain a complex, a, a simple thing in a complex way.

• 29:36Andrew Doyle?

  Very nice. Did you just come up with that?

• 29:37Chris Williamson?

  No, I found it on Twitter, probably, but not, not in your well. So yeah, you were saying, another example of whiteness.

• 29:42Andrew Doyle?

  Well, just to give another example of, of the, of the way in which, uh, the social justice people and the critical race people play on these ambiguities, is that, that they can say that all white people are complicit in whiteness by virtue of the color of their skin, and they can also say that people who are non-white are also complicit in the system if they, if they are not actively anti-racist. Remember, for these people, it isn't the dichotomy of racist or not racist, because if you're not racist, that's another form of racism. The dichotomy is actually racist or anti-racist, which means you are proactively conceding your own complicity in these systems and, and attempting to decolonize these systems, right? So it's not good enough just not to be a racist person, to be good, to be a good person who, who doesn't ever say or do or support anything racist. That's not enough. You've got to be an anti-racist, right? So you've got all that going on. And

• 30:27Andrew Doyle?

  then, but then, they will play on and make it racial. So then you've got like the resisting whiteness, uh, conference that was at Edinburgh University. Where they said explicitly that in the Q and A section at the end, white people were not allowed to put their hands up and ask questions. So well, in that case, you are making whiteness explicitly about skin colour. And in that circumstances, what do you do if you're mixed race? Can you speak in a low

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  How much, how much whiteness are you allowed to have?

• 30:52Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, do you get like, do you get like half a question? Or, or, you know, how do you, how do we, and also, we're all mongrels of various races. So how much do you get to speak? Do I have to have a DNA test to decide how much I can speak? So on the one hand, they like the fact that it alludes specifically to race and skin colour. And on the other hand, they will deny that it does, and that race is a social construct and all the rest of it. So it plays on the ambiguity, it plays on it. It's in the same way that they, they, they play on the idea of, of social justice and liberalism and, and they play on people's good natures and good intentions i- i- in order to get what they want. I think it's absolutely, it's absolutely ghastly. So you can have, for instance, academics who talk about how whiteness is evil and we must abolish whiteness, as we've seen from a number of, I think there was a Cambridge academic who said exactly that. But of course,

• 31:37Andrew Doyle?

  what she's doing is she's, she's enjoying the fact that she can have a pop at white people. But then she can defend herself by saying, yes, but when I say whiteness, I'm talking about this oppressive system that I've sort of, that I believe in this magical system that, that we all us fellow academics talk about amongst ourselves. So you can have it both ways. Um, it's, it's really, it's really bad.

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  It's like the, the old school closet racist comedian that would make overtly racist jokes and then say, just a joke, mate, I'm only, I'm, I'm, I'm only joking. Or the same as the, the guy who is vehemently anti-gay, but if you watch, put, put some gay porn in front of him and stick him in front of an MRI, he's got much more of an arousal response than anybody else in the room.

• 32:18Andrew Doyle?

  Right, exactly.

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  The lady doth protest too much.

• 32:21Andrew Doyle?

  Oldest trick in the book, isn't it? The, the, the bullies always used to say it's just a joke, you know, and that's, and, and of course, real comedians think through their jokes carefully and decide whether or not they are justified or not. And, and so, yeah, that absolutely, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a good analogy, actually. It's good, Chris.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, thank you, mate. I'm just loading the flattery on today. I feel great. Um, did you see the, the gym, I think, in Portsmouth had done

• 32:49Andrew Doyle?

  I did see the gym.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  The, the

• 32:51Andrew Doyle?

  A 12 years a slave course.

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes, because, because being a slave was

• 32:57Andrew Doyle?

  Again, that looked like a joke, didn't it?

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  Being a slave was hard, and so is this workout. That's a quote.

• 33:02Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I mean, being a slave is hard. And I'm sure working out, as you know, more than most people is is tough. It's not the same though, is it? But I did wonder about that, whether that was some sort of joke. Turns out it's not.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  No, really sadly not.

• 33:19Andrew Doyle?

  It's just it's just horribly misjudged. Well, look, people are going to make these poor judgments at the moment because the whole discourse is so crazy. And I imagine that was actually quite well intentioned.

• 33:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, so this is this is something else that I brought up with Douglas, that I'd had this conversation with Carl Benjamin Sargon. And I got so nervous during the process of talking about it was slap bang when Chad was happening. So like, peak race tensions.

• 33:45Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:45Chris Williamson?

  And I got so nervous, not knowing what I was supposed to say, not knowing what wasn't wasn't acceptable speech. And I'm someone who does this every single night, like four or five nights a week, I have a conversation about this. So my ability to deploy precise speech should at least be better than the layperson. And I was nervous during the day before this ambient anxiety, then after it had happened, I was listening back to it. Oh, should I have? Would I have? Could I have said that a little bit more?

• 34:14Andrew Doyle?

  Of course, because because we are living in this in this culture where people will pick apart. And you can misspeak if you misspeak even slightly, it can be used as ammunition against you. It's it is what we call cancel culture, which does exist, no matter what Omen Jones claims. And the problem is that you, you know, everyone's worried about what they say. Now, actually, being concerned about what you say, and trying to aim for precise speech is a good quality. It's something that we should all do. But but we should all there should also be a recognition that all of us will not always express precisely what we mean, because we're human beings, and we make mistakes. And also, particularly when we're dealing with such sensitive issues and complicated issues, we should have the freedom to make mistakes. I think it's very liberating.

• 34:55Andrew Doyle?

  To just not care, to just think, I am going to make mistakes sometimes. And if I do make a mistake, I'll just say, well, I made a mistake. That's not quite what I meant. And even though you've got these kind of retributive, unforgiving armies of activists out there who will use this against you, just ignore them. Just do that, the publish and be damned idea, you know, just, just, I, I, I've made a mistake. I've said it. I'm not going to apologize anymore about this. In fact, don't even apologize to them. Just say, you know, well, okay, that this was a conversation we had, something was, someone misspoke. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. We're trying ideas out. We're trying to thrash through these very complex thoughts. And if you can't accept that human beings don't speak like robots, then you're not really a human being at all.

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  I learned this year for the first time from Ben Shapiro, the term semantic overload. Are you familiar with this?

• 35:44Andrew Doyle?

  Well, I, I can work out what it means from the.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  So it was, it was, yeah. And um, he basically, he's been using it to describe the words Black Lives Matter. And that semantically overloaded, it can be multiple things at once. It's this thing when we want it to be, are you against Black Lives Matter? Well, it's very difficult to say that without sounding like you hate black people.

• 36:06Andrew Doyle?

  So it's, it's, it's back to the anti racism. It's, it's something that can have more than one meaning. And certainly, it's a very clever rhetorical trope, because of course, as you say, you cannot disagree with the phrase Black Lives Matter. No one would. This is the weird thing about it, that, you know, people making, using that hashtag and that expression, because they believe that unless they do use that expression, we're going to assume they don't believe that Black Lives Matter. It's, it's similar to, I mean, this just goes to show how much things have escalated so quickly, right? There was a thing about five or six years ago, where people started wearing safety pins as a gesture to show that they weren't racist. It was, it was a very short-lived thing. Right? So you Google it, you, I'm not, I'm not making it up. And, and it got ridiculed by everyone, including people on the social justice side. Because like,

• 36:50Andrew Doyle?

  because of course, the default assumption in a society like ours is that people aren't racist, right? So if you're wearing a safety pin and saying that anyone who isn't. Must be a race, but this is absurd, right?

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:59Andrew Doyle?

  But we are, we are now in safety pin world. Where basically unless you're saying black lives matter, you assume that black lives do not matter. But that's not true. I still stand by the point that anyone who, any decent civilized person will obviously believe that black lives matter. It's gonna, you know, you should never assume that someone doesn't believe that unless there is incontrovertible evidence that they don't. But that's the problem. It's, it goes back to the critical race theory idea that racism is present in every possible human interaction. They don't ask, was this situation racist? They ask, how did racism manifest itself in that situation? And that is the problem. So in other words, entirety of society is underpinned by racism. It's such a bleak nihilistic worldview.

• 37:43Andrew Doyle?

  It's, it's so horrible. So yes, semantic overload, when so I suppose something that can have multiple meanings and, and certainly are you to, when you talk about black lives matter? Are you talking about the, the group? Are you talking about the concept? Well, I would suggest now, whenever I hear someone using that phrase, I'm always going to assume you talk about the group. Because why would you make the statement?

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Have you noticed, have you noticed now that people are starting to use black lives matter and BLM? They've bifurcated.

• 38:12Andrew Doyle?

  Yes, well, that's the way, that's, I think that started early on as a, as a way to get around it. Because we, we need to be able to criticize BLM. Because as a movement, it has all sorts of ludicrous aspects to it. For instance, it's belief that we should dismantle cisgender privilege or attack the Western nuclear family or, or.

• 38:31Chris Williamson?

  All of which perfectly push forward the benefit and the wellbeing of black people.

• 38:36Andrew Doyle?

  Well, look at their, their, their intention to defund the police as well. I mean, which, which of course would affect areas that are working class and, you know, and there is a high proportion of, of black and ethnic minority people in working class areas. It's not going to do them any favors. So this stuff, yeah, exactly. I don't think dismantling cisgender privilege. Is something that's going to go down too well in certain black communities, I would suggest. Okay, well, I mean, if you know anything about the history of black gay people, they have had it tough in this country, in their communities because of cultural issues, religious issues and all sorts of things. I don't think dismantling the system and the privilege is going to go down well. So you're right, BLM, and of course, by saying BLM, you're avoiding having to say, I oppose Black Lives Matter.

• 39:21Andrew Doyle?

  You can say, I oppose BLM, right? And I think lots of people do. I think the idea of demolishing capitalism, right? I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with. I don't understand why schools across the country, schools like Eaton are putting out statements in support of Black Lives Matter. Private schools, right? When, if you took the Black Lives Matter agenda and applied it to society, Eaton would be razed to the ground. It wouldn't exist because it charges extortionate rates. It is the hub and training ground and cradle of capitalism, right? So to have them support a movement that wants to see them abolished is utterly retarded, right? And I know I'm not meant to use that word.

• 40:03Andrew Doyle?

  I'm using that word in its literal meaning of to go backwards before you start complaining.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Andrew Doyle?

  But see, even I'm doing it now, even I'm worried about what.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  So this is the thing, that semantic overload in this. It's even tropey now to say, oh, it's so nineteen eighty-four, isn't it? You know, Orwell prophesized all of this. I'm like, I'm so bored, so, so bored. And I can't imagine what it's like for you who's further entrenched, you know, really, really sort of swimming through the muck and the feces and the blood and the straw and just desperately trying to get out the other side. So, yeah, it's, um.

• 40:38Andrew Doyle?

  It's, yeah, it's, it's, what can you say? It's depressing. Do you not get depressed by this?

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  Massively, man. This is why I brought it up with Douglas as well. I was like, mate, I want to know what you've got to say about how to lead a good life, about what it means to have human flourishing and fulfillment. I want you to dip into your. Bottomless back catalogue of literature and understanding of how, you know, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and all these, that's what I want to learn from Douglas Murray. I don't want him to write fucking Madness of Crowds, like, you know, wonderful book and the Titani McGrath stuff that you do is fantastic, but as he brings up, like, when the barbarians are at the door, we'll be debating about what gender they are whilst we get Kalashnikov'd in the head.

• 41:23Andrew Doyle?

  Right. See, this is it. I want to be able to do other things, but, I mean, like, so, I love it when I get to write an article about something that has absolutely nothing to do with this, you know, and that's always good fun. And, you know, obviously because I write other things, I write plays, I write musicals, I do all of those things, and I'm still doing that, you know, I've just finished a new musical. But you just, it does dominate, unfortunately, and the reason it does dominate, as you pointed out, and as Douglas has pointed out, unfortunately, unless we, unless we win this, nothing else will matter anyway. So actually, it is quite important.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  Here's what else I think, another reason that I think you guys are so compelled to do it, and James Lindsay is a really good example of this, he's a man with a PhD in pure mathematics. Like, James, mate, you should be getting this to Mars, not doing fake intersectional studies on, on, on, like, dog parks. But what I think it is, is a little bit like a more incredulous version of TikTok for academics. Like, imagine what TikTok must be like for a 13-year-old, you just can't stop watching it. It's so compelling, but there's a layer of indignation as well, because it's self-contradictory and the hypocrisy's there, and we need to, there's a level of virtue as well, as you've said, we need to win this war, so on and so forth.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  But I really do think that it is the low-hanging fruit, like woke bashing is kind of the low-hanging fruit, that constantly, I can't believe that they've done this again, and then there's a new one, and there's a new one, and there's a new one, and there's a woman in a khaki one-piece with her PayPal address up on a whiteboard, telling everyone in the room that they're racist, and, you know what I mean?

• 43:01Andrew Doyle?

  And of course... The risk is always that you're going to focus on the more extreme manifestations of this phenomenon. That is, that is a risk. But the, and if it were just that, I wouldn't care, honestly. If it was just a few nutcases doing their thing, I wouldn't care. It is not that. It is not that. It is, it is institutional capture. That's what's happened. So that does matter. It matters because these are the people who make our laws. These are the people who will arrest you for quote unquote hate speech. These are the people who will educate your children. These are the people who will get, who will decide whether or not you are eligible for a degree or not, based on how, on your, on your fealty to a particular religion, basically.

• 43:41Andrew Doyle?

  So that is, I, I, it is, in that sense, a civilizational threat. And in that sense, it needs to be, it needs to be countered. It isn't the idiots on Twitter with the pronouns in their bios who are just shouting insults at absolutely everyone. Um, you can just block them and move on and, you know, they, they have limited power. Um, but the, the, the people who have, who have, uh, attained such a sort of, uh, such clout in things like the civil service, in things like the Quangos, um, you know, that's a, in the government even, in parliament. You know, these people have clout, as I say, they have power and they need to, it needs to be addressed

• 44:24Andrew Doyle?

  because it has an impact on all of us, whether we like it or not. So, you know, I, I mean, I did, I wrote an article this week actually about this, which was on Spiked, which talks about this problem of the culture war. Is that there really, there are two versions of the culture war out there. And I call it the tabloid version and the substantial version, for want of a better term. Insofar as the tabloid version is like snowflakes and, and anti-snowflakes and cucks and, uh, you know, the libtards and all the rest of it, right? So you get, you get all that going on, right? Now, I don't engage in any of that business. I don't call people snowflakes. I don't call people libtards. I'm not interested in any of that stuff, right? I don't want to own the libs because I consider myself a lib, right? Um, so all of that stuff, I don't get involved in.

• 45:07Andrew Doyle?

  But then there's the substantial version of the culture war, which is what it really is. And the culture war, what it really is, is a, a, a, a, a view of society where you value. Liberty or you value authority. It's liberalism against authoritarianism and that's, that's the culture war. The problem is that by pushing back against these really important issues, legitimate grievances where you're saying the state shouldn't be overreaching to police what people say, right? You're pushing back on that stuff and then you get mischaracterised by people who play on the ambiguity and say, oh, you're one of these snowflake bashing, uh, culture warriors. No, we are critical of the culture, of that kind of culture war and want to hasten its demise.

• 45:51Andrew Doyle?

  That's not the same thing, right? Uh, uh, we are critical of those things. What we're actually concerned about is the soft authoritarianism of the social justice ideology, which does require a serious pushback. So people have to be very careful. Don't let them do this. Don't let them say, oh, you're just another PC gone mad brigade type of person. You're just like, notice how I put in a stupid voice when I embody such people.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you really did.

• 46:18Andrew Doyle?

  But it is a form, but it is a form of stupidity and, and don't let it happen. These are things that we need to address and we need to do so seriously and collectively. Uh, and we shouldn't be put off by people trying to mischaracterise what we do as being this tabloid version of the culture war, which isn't really what it is.

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  The left has won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. That's a quote.

• 46:43Andrew Doyle?

  Who said that?

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  Naval Ravikant, uh, who's an angel investor from America, but the left has won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. Holy shit, if that's not true.

• 46:54Andrew Doyle?

  Well, uh, it's difficult. And again, we get back to the slipperiness of language insofar as I do not believe that woke activists are left wing in the slightest, uh, because they are not remotely concerned with economic inequality or class inequality, which is at the heart of what it means to be left wing. It's a very bourgeois movement, the work movement. And so therefore it's, it's, it's not really, uh, it's no surprise really that it's the more elitist universities where the posher kids tend to go that have more problems of this kind. Because of course, if you can't afford anything, you're not going to be interested about whether or not you've been misgendered. Right, are you? You're going to be interested about where you get your next plate of food from. So. That's, that's, so it's very difficult, but, but we have to say, I mean, I get into this all the time. Am I left wing? Am I right wing? What the hell am I anymore?

• 47:37Andrew Doyle?

  Because people on the left hate me so much now, and that's because I believe the left has shifted to such a degree that it has become obsessed with identity politics.

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, the Overton window, the Overton window of what is centrist, left, right, all of that has been.

• 47:52Andrew Doyle?

  I just don't buy into ideology, full stop, and that's why I feel perfectly comfortable in saying this right wing, some say someone like Roger Scruton has some excellent points about certain things, and there are some things I don't agree with him on. I don't need to be the sort of person who thinks, well, he's a right wing person, so if I'm on the right, I have to agree with everything he said, or, or Tony Benn is a left wing person, so I must agree with everything Tony Benn says. Right? Because that means you're letting someone else doing your thinking for you. I think there are good elements, there are impressive thinkers on the left and the right and everywhere in between. And, and we should be able to, to select and, and consider which elements are good and which elements are bad, or which elements we agree with and which we don't. And it, and that does not mean that you suddenly become left or right wing. The problem is, of course, that, as you know,

• 48:36Andrew Doyle?

  the idea of being conservative or right wing has just become a slur. It doesn't really mean anything. I actually don't think, I've stopped even worrying about left or right. Everyone thinks I'm right. Some people think I'm far right. Some people think I'm extreme Marxist left. I'm getting that a lot. I get trolled by alt-right people. I'm also called alt-right, by the way, but the actual alt-right absolutely hate me and troll me, and they call me a Marxist or a communist. And then, like, so no one knows what the fuck I am. To the extent I don't even know what the fuck I am, it's fine. Doesn't matter anymore. Forget it.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that was, again, that loops back to the challenge I had when speaking to Carl. That I was like, I don't know, the goalposts are moving so quickly that I thought I was playing chess and now I'm playing rugby. Like, the, the, all the rules of the game are now out of the window and I haven't got a clue what's going on. Did you see the? When Durham University went back, did you see that a group of freshers had created a group Snapchat chat and were playing a game of who could sleep with the poorest fresher?

• 49:35Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, that doesn't surprise me.

• 49:37Chris Williamson?

  But that, so that is, that's proper right versus left stuff, all about class equality, all to do with-

• 49:45Andrew Doyle?

  Exactly, yeah, yeah.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  That, so that, and I just, I was, it went semi-viral up here in the North East of England, group chat of freshers saying, can we have a, you know, it used to be like pull a pig back in university, but apparently if you go to Durham or perhaps like one of the other red bricks, now it's who can sleep with the poorest fresher.

• 50:07Andrew Doyle?

  Which is like, it goes back to the old Bullingdon Club thing of the initiation ceremony included burning a £50 note in front of a homeless person, that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, obviously, obviously this, you know, that, that is, yeah, you could say that's a class-based issue, isn't it?

• 50:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. What's, what's your prediction for the end state of all of this activism? Is it inherently self-contradictory and splintered into groups that don't agree to the point where it's going to eat its own tail?

• 50:35Andrew Doyle?

  It is self-contradictory, but it embraces the contradictions and that's why it's impossible to reason with it. And that goes right back to the postmodernists as well. And, you know, someone like Derrida, who, who was very playful and self-contradictory, so often deliberately so. And that, that means that actually it's sort of built into their system. It doesn't matter that they have contradictory thoughts and they can hold those contradictory thoughts at the same time. It, it, it really doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter that they will say that, that, well, to give the example of the, to go back to the trans example, that they, they say gender is completely a social construct, except for trans people who are born in the wrong body. It doesn't matter that that can't, that doesn't make any sense because they, they can do that. Whereas everyone else relies on the idea of rationality and rational thought. But the problem is that they would perceive that to be a sort of

• 51:18Andrew Doyle?

  heterosexual patriarchal construct. So, you know, you're back to square one.

• 51:23Chris Williamson?

  So what's, what's going to happen? We, we roll this forward. What's the end state? What do you foresee? Look into the crystal ball, Andrew, and tell us what you see.

• 51:31Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, you know, whenever I do this, I get it wrong though. Well, there's a lot at stake. So I think-

• 51:39Andrew Doyle?

  Well, ultimately, it's going to go one of two ways, isn't it? Other, I can't envisage that this can just rumble on as it is anymore. I think there were a lot of people who were sort of saying before the explosion this year of the culture war, there were a lot of people who were just saying this will always be the way. There will always be the sort of extreme culture warriors pushing their agenda and most people will just gently push back and will constantly be having these spats and these disputes. I don't think we can say that anymore. I think one side is going to have to win out. So if the culture warriors win out, if the social justice left or the identitarian left or whatever the fuck you want to call them win out, we will be living in a, under a form of authoritarianism, right?

• 52:20Andrew Doyle?

  Where people are not allowed to say certain things, will literally be arrested for saying the wrong thing and it will be very scary and dangerous. Education will be decolonized to the point where it won't mean anything anymore. Artifacts from the past, monuments from the past, a recognition of history will be swept away and we're already seeing that happening, but not, as I say, not in a crisis point, you know? It's important not to inflate these things, you know? I don't agree with mobs deciding which statues stay up and which don't, right? But ultimately, that statue of Edward Colston, you know, I don't think they should have been able to just arbitrarily decide and tear it down, but it doesn't amount to a crisis. It doesn't amount, you know, we're not talking about, as you said, the Orwellian principle

• 53:05Andrew Doyle?

  of literally revising history, throwing things down the memory hole, yet, and that's the qualifier. It's that the problem is that these are the seeds of that and you have to be vigilant against this stuff. And particularly when it comes to free speech, you have to be incredibly vigilant. It's not something that is the default of any given society. It's something that has to be fought for with each successive generation and people need to be reminded of the validity of it and the importance of it. So I think if, for instance, a government were to get in that was identity obsessed as the current Labour Party is, but they had maybe a more zealous identitarian leader. I mean, Keir Starmer wouldn't be that person, as it happens. I know he sort of toys with it a little bit, but he wouldn't be that sort of extreme zealot, identitarian type.

• 53:49Andrew Doyle?

  If you had a government like that, then you have a very dangerous situation and you have a society that is going to go backwards very, very quickly. Or the alternative is that we reach the point where, what I'm hoping is, in about 15, 20 years' time...

• 54:06Andrew Doyle?

  We will have restored the idea of liberal values and free speech and everyone will just go back to just accepting that yes, that's that's the default. That's what we should be having. And they'll almost look back at these years as like, what happened there? There was a kind of hysteria. There was a kind of weird mania that happened. And and they'll probably say, but it was it wasn't really a big deal, was it? Because it just sort of went away and it was fine. But of course, it only it only went away because people like us are pushing back against it. But we will be considered the nutcases. Like, why are we even worried about it? It just went.

• 54:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Andrew Doyle?

  I think that's what's gonna I think I fear that's what's gonna happen.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  I think I think that that really dovetails quite nicely with something I've been thinking about this year, which is been reading a lot of existential threats and existential risk work like Toby Ord's, which is what prompted my concern to do with the academics and the low hanging fruit and the TikTok. And um this year, we got a pandemic. It's been anyone who's looked at existential risk or anything coming out of the Future of Humanities Institute knew that this is one of the big ones. The control problem for artificial general intelligence is another one of them. But we got delivered touch wood, we got delivered such a like piss week pathogen.

• 55:15Chris Williamson?

  The mortality rate on it is it's just not the incubation period and the transmit ability are all okay ish. The R number could be, you know, if I was designing it one to end the human race, the R number might be a little bit higher and the incubation period where you're asymptomatic also might be a little bit longer. But we got delivered. Here's a here's the beta test. Here's the demo version.

• 55:36Andrew Doyle?

  Exactly. I know what you mean.

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  What happens? And maybe this is the ideological conceptual equivalent where people are trying to hijack all of the institutions that mean the most, like education, like children, education, higher education, the arts, popular culture, politics, all of that stuff. But they did it with.

• 56:00Chris Williamson?

  The Marxists that some people speculate are the conspiratorial pushers of this that are in the background, that are the Trojan horse that this particular ideology is trying to deliver, they chose, they got on the wrong horse, they chose to get into the wrong thing. And it was just so inherently ridiculous that we are now inoculated in the future moving forward.

• 56:20Andrew Doyle?

  Maybe, I hope so. I think you might, there might be something to that. Insofar as, I suppose the analogy is if, if we have a much more serious pandemic, we'll be better prepared for it because we've lived through this. And similarly with the social justice stuff, maybe, I don't know. But, but, but the, but the problem is that they're pretty well ingrained in these institutions now. This isn't something, it feels like it's just happened overnight, but it hasn't, it's been percolating for decades.

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. So, so it's, it is about, and again, I don't think their response is, do we, do we have a long march in the, through the institutions the other way? Do the liberals find a way to infiltrate? I, I don't know if that's the right approach either, but it's, it's going to take an awful lot to undo. But yes, I think that, that could be the case, that, that enough people are now pushing back on this stuff, that, that when the big wave comes, maybe we'll

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  I think so.

• 57:11Andrew Doyle?

  We'll be less tolerant of it, maybe.

• 57:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, precisely.

• 57:14Andrew Doyle?

  You know, because actually, this has only really happened, not so much because of the screaming activists. It's not really them. It's not the people with pink hair screeching and setting off fire alarms. It's the people capitulating to them. That's the problem. You see, what should happen? Like, let's give an example, the RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, issued a statement saying that they are systemically racist an institution, as everyone is saying at the moment, which begs the question, why would anyone want to go there? You know, I'm not, I, I'm not going to support a racist institution. I really love the fact that Princeton made that confession and was then investigated by the Department of Education, because of course racism is illegal, by the way. So, you know, I don't trust it. I don't trust it when I see companies saying, yeah, we're working hard to dismantle our white supremacy. I'm like, why are you telling me you're a white supremacist organisation?

• 57:56Chris Williamson?

  Sainsbury's.

• 57:57Andrew Doyle?

  If you don't really, you don't, Sainsbury's, right? If Sainsbury's is white supremacist, I'm going to Waitrose, man. You know, like, I'm just not having this, like.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  But you were educated at Oxford, Andrew, so it would only ever be between Waitrose and Marks and Spencer's, right?

• 58:09Andrew Doyle?

  I know, I quite like Little. What, Little has good wines, by the way. Don't let anyone tell you different.

• 58:14Chris Williamson?

  Fine.

• 58:14Andrew Doyle?

  So, listen, I, I, I would suggest, and of course, they, they don't really mean it, do they? There's no way that Sainsbury's think they're a racist organisation. Of course, they don't mean that. So, don't say it, you utter idiots. Don't say it, right? So. I can't remember what my trainer thought on this was. I can't even remember. Oh, Rada, right? So here's the example, right?

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:32Andrew Doyle?

  So Rada's statement that they were, and then of course, this, this ennobled all of these crazy students, and not all of them, just a few, to write a hundred page document of demands, saying what, how they need to decolonize Rada. A hundred pages, I'm not kidding, right? It's online. You can, you can feel it. It is the most insane unhinged document for an awful long time. It is so entitled. It reeks of entitlement. It's like we, we get to decide absolutely everything. We believe in these power structures. Everything is racist. Your institution is racist. Everything, you know, it's absolutely insane. It's like the, it's like the ravings of a madman. It's, it's like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, writing all those pages of the same sentence over and over again, because that's what it is. It's the same demand, phrased in different ways, a million fucking times.

• 59:13Andrew Doyle?

  So there's that going on, right? And, and the response to that should have been that the heads of Rada should have said, "Thank you for your concerns. You're perfectly free to leave, because we're not going to capitulate to your demands. Bye bye. Bye. Go and do your crazy shit elsewhere, right? Because we've got to teach people how to play Iago or whatever." Right? So that's what people should be doing, right? But what they don't, what they do is they say, "Oh, absolutely." They bow down, they say, because they don't want, they don't want the scandal. They don't want the Twitter storm. They don't want, so they capitulate. They capitulate. So capitulation is the problem, not the activists themselves, because the activists are always a minority. There's, there's not many of them. But now they know they can get their way, just by, so they're like toddlers. If you screech enough, they get their way, right? You've got to be disciplined with toddlers. You've got to smack them around the head and say, "No, actually, no, don't."

• 59:58Andrew Doyle?

  See, again, I could get in trouble for that.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 1:00:01Andrew Doyle?

  I'm gonna stick by that. I'm gonna stand by that.

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  Andy Nod. Final.

• 1:00:04Andrew Doyle?

  Beat up your children. Beat them up.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  Hit them.

• 1:00:06Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm sticking with that.

• 1:00:08Chris Williamson?

  Hit them with, uh, Anti-Racist Baby.

• 1:00:12Andrew Doyle?

  Hit them with Anti, a copy of Anti-Racist Baby. That's because it's hard.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Andrew Doyle?

  It's that thick board book. You could do some real damage to a toddler with that.

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Please do not, obviously, we're joking. Uh, final question.

• 1:00:22Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, wait, would you get demonetized if you leave this bit in?

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all. I don't, I, I managed to get, I, I have no idea what YouTube, YouTube loves me at the moment, but I managed to get, um, Sargon of Akkad comments on the media's view of blackface.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Monetized, brilliant.

• 1:00:39Andrew Doyle?

  And that was monetized.

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant.

• 1:00:41Andrew Doyle?

  It's quite inconsistent, isn't it? I mean, even though we were just joking about hinking a child with the book. If you wanted to, and if you were of a certain mindset, you could take that literally. Because let's face it, the social justice aren't very good at humor and working out when you're not being... And that wasn't even satire, that was just being flippant and stupid, right? But they can choose to take a stupid comment literally. The problem is that human interaction is full of stupid comments. That's part of the fun, you know? We shouldn't have to worry about saying something that might offend someone, you know? And I have to say that Youtubes of the world, the Facebooks, the Googles, they're not good at this, you know? But if you've escaped the demonetization, then good for you.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  So far, so far.

• 1:01:19Andrew Doyle?

  Because I know a lot of people who have very few, have no controversial elements. You know, didn't they even demonetize? I think YouTube demonetized Diamond and Silk, who were Trump supporters, but they're just, they're two black women who are in a fence, they never swear. They never even swear, they don't say anything, they just have political views that the social tech giants don't like, and they demonetize. It's outrageous, you know?

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Dangerous, man. Final, final question. Who is going to win the 2020 election?

• 1:01:48Andrew Doyle?

  Either way, we are in trouble, because either Victor will make the culture war worse, not better, right? And the reason for that is Biden has completely bought into identity politics, 100%, and is allowing himself to be guided in that way. And Donald Trump also has his version of identity politics, which is the sort of more sort of nationalism style version, and he's not, let's face it, particularly well-equipped to deal with this kind of crisis, right? He tends to inflame things rather than make them better. You know, fundamentally, Donald Trump likes people who like him and dislikes people who don't like him. So, and everyone knows this, it comes back to this essential narcissism. Watching those two debate was one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.

• 1:02:32Andrew Doyle?

  Neither of them are equipped to be president, and I just, I don't think either side is going to quieten down, because if Trump wins, then the social justice group will take that as further evidence that they live in a neo-fascist society. And if Biden wins, then I suppose they will be emboldened to persist with these kind of demands, such as the students at RADA make, and to reshape society according to the principles of their faith. So, either way, we are fucked.

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a prediction? Do you think, can you, I know that it's not your special, your special area, but what do you think?

• 1:03:14Andrew Doyle?

  I think Biden is going to win. I think, um, I, I, I, for a long time, I thought Trump was, I'm, I'm sure that Trump would have won, were it not for coronavirus. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty sure because the economy was doing so well, uh, and because the, it just didn't seem as though. I, I, I think though, his handling of the coronavirus, combined with this kind of general fatigue with his, uh, his behavior and the way that he tweets, he needs to get off Twitter, you know, if he wants to.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. Yeah. It's, um, if, if the election was about Trump versus, if it was just a personality contest on Biden, if that was the competition on Biden, Biden would lose. Sadly, Trump continues to make it about himself, which I think is inherently dangerous because his personality rubs people up. Even his own supporters the wrong way.

• 1:04:02Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, he does. I mean, Biden has no charisma whatsoever, but then, but then Trump, uh, it, you know, is not, let's put it delicately, is not statesman, statesman like, you see, you know, it, and I just.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  No one can, no one can have looked at the debate that they had the other week and say that that was a presidential way to conduct yourself.

• 1:04:20Andrew Doyle?

  I wouldn't be able to vote for either of them, uh, but luckily I'm not in that position of having to make a choice.

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  You don't have to. Yeah. No, I am, I don't, I think, I think you're right. I think at the beginning of 2020, it would have been Trump to continue. Um, especially given that all of the, the harbingers of the apocalypse that everyone had predicted were going to occur in 2016, didn't happen. And he did some good stuff. He did some good stuff with the Middle East. Like that was only this year, I think, when, when he, you know.

• 1:04:47Andrew Doyle?

  Oh yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a major deal that the, the, the, uh, the left wing media are not covering at all. They're saying, well, well, quite an astonishing achievement, actually.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. But, you know, so all of the stuff that was supposed to happen. Didn't happen and the economy was doing good and I think it was, was it black schooling? That he'd contributed more money to than any other president ever, including the only black one?

• 1:05:09Andrew Doyle?

  It's not about that anymore, is it? But this has become the culture war election and I'm afraid that's where we're at. By the way, my battery is about to go and I don't have a-

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  In that case, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna leave it there. Tanya McGrath's little book of intersectional activism linked in the show notes below, including some of her favorite characters from history and how you can teach your children to- That is that versus anti racist baby and that's you, perfect.

• 1:05:34Andrew Doyle?

  I think, I think, I think get Tanya McGrath's book, give that to your kids. That's the way to go. It's funny because a friend of mine, I sent it to a friend of mine and it looks like a kid's book and her husband thought it was for their four year old daughter and gave it to her and she was delighted. And then of course she had to explain, actually it's not for you.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  Sorry.

• 1:05:50Andrew Doyle?

  Which is heartbreaking, really.

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  Take that back a little, Susie. Look, Andrew, man, thank you so much. Tanya McGrath's Twitter, your Twitter, everything else will be linked in the show notes below. Enjoy the remainder of the Amalfi Coast, mate.

• 1:06:01Andrew Doyle?

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Ravenette.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what-

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.