Who Is Titania McGrath? | Andrew Doyle

Andrew Doyle is a writer and comedian. Titania McGrath is now fully established as the Queen of the internet Woke Movement and today we get to meet the man behind one of Twitter's most hilarious and controversial accounts, Andrew Doyle. Expect to learn what it's like running Titania's Twitter account, what Andrew thinks of Little Mix's opinions on Syria, why Donald Trump is potentially the funniest president in history, why we should be worried about Britain's hate speech laws, whether cats are feminists, whether dogs are prejudiced and which is the most oppressive vegetable. Extra Stuff: Follow Titania on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com Buy Titania's Book Woke - https://amzn.to/2L4GXCc Bridget Phetasy's Article - https://spectator.us/battle-cry-politically-homeless/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - 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 - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Twitter cracks and crumbles at our feet as the man behind Titania McGrath, Andrew Doyle, joins me on Modern Wisdom. Let's say that someone hasn't seen the Titania account. How would you describe it?

• 0:09Andrew Doyle?

  I would describe it as a kind of social justice activist who are very humourless, is desperate to be offended, desperate to promote her own victimhood and is not necessarily stupid, but has swallowed this ideology to the extent that they're stopping them to think for themselves.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Questions for Titania. How would she answer? Let's see how we get on.

• 0:27Andrew Doyle?

  All right.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  Number one, are all cats feminists? Which is the most oppressive vegetable?

• 0:33Andrew Doyle?

  It's like when Little Mix tweeted about the bombing of Syria. They sent an apology saying to, "Oh, we're so sorry to the people of Syria." The people of Syria were thinking, "Great, at least Little Mix have got our back." Look, I'm not saying these people shouldn't have the right to have an opinion. Of course they do, but I don't give a shit what Little Mix think about Syria. We are living in a culture where people are self censoring out of fear of either what all peers will say, what the people on social media are going to do to you. Now, in the UK, we have a horrible situation where we have hate speech laws that have led to people being imprisoned for jokes they've written on Facebook.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Twitter cracks and crumbles at our feet as the man behind Titania McGrath, Andrew Doyle, joins me on Modern Wisdom. Andrew, welcome to the show.

• 1:13Andrew Doyle?

  Such a dramatic opening.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  I know.

• 1:15Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, it's almost apocalyptic. I like it.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of appropriate though, right?

• 1:18Andrew Doyle?

  Well, I don't know. Like a deus ex machina, I've sort of descended from the heavens.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  That's exactly why you're here.

• 1:23Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I've just got the train. It's not as exciting.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like a phoenix from the ashes.

• 1:29Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  So how have you been the last few weeks?

• 1:32Andrew Doyle?

  I'm all right. I'm just a bit knackered because I was out with a friend late last night, really late.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but fully functioning.

• 1:37Andrew Doyle?

  I'm all right. He was over from Sweden, so I didn't have a choice. I had to, I think. But yeah, I'm good, but I've been all over the place. I've been back and forth various places. I'm not a good traveller, I get really tired. So I'm just, yeah. So I'm a bit frazzled, that's why.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Totally fine.

• 1:51Andrew Doyle?

  And that's good because that means anything I say that's inappropriate, I can blame on my condition.

• 1:55Chris Williamson?

  Fatigue, 100%.

• 1:56Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  100%. So you're fringing plus Londoning and musing and tweeting and doing all this sort of stuff at the moment?

• 2:02Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, so I've got, the Titania McGrath show is on during the fringe at the moment, but I'm not there most of the time. But I've got my own stand-up show which starts on Monday.

• 2:11Chris Williamson?

  Right, and you've got to look after yourself and look after her and then somehow look after your online personas as well.

• 2:18Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I'm sort of juggling a few things, you know, you know, it's like, we're all busy, everyone's busy.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  Not, not everyone's quite as busy as you, but.

• 2:24Andrew Doyle?

  Well, no, it's never that.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  I know. Um, so can you explain why we're sat here talking about a fictional female character and you juggling Twitter accounts?

• 2:34Andrew Doyle?

  Um, because you invited me, which is very nice. Um, but also because, well, in other words, have I ended up doing this as a job?

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Andrew Doyle?

  I, I am, I do ask myself that question. Um, I started the character last year, last April, so sort of about fifteen months ago or something. And, um, more just for my own, uh, entertainment, uh, and I wanted to sort of annoy some people on Twitter, basically, and, um.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  Without it being you?

• 3:03Andrew Doyle?

  Without it being me, yeah. I, I was interested. I love, I love the idea of inhabiting a persona. I always like being behind someone else. Uh, I don't like, uh, I don't, like, even with the stand-up, I do, it's a character, really. It's not really me. So I like the idea of that distance that you get. Um, but I also thought, I was a big fan of like the satirical accounts on Twitter, that, the, the personas, you know, people like the Godfrey Elphick account. Um, and, uh, things like that. And I was really interested, so I thought I'd do it myself. And I spoke to Lisa Graves, who co-wrote the Godfrey Elphick account about it. She's based quite near here. She's based in Hull, actually.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 3:36Andrew Doyle?

  And I spoke to her about, um, about her work with the Godfrey Elphick thing. And I said, oh, you know, I've always wanted to do this. And she said, you should just do it. And encouraged me to do it. She even created the picture for me.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  Did she?

• 3:49Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. And, um, and then, uh, so I just, I just went with it.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  When did you start the account?

• 3:54Andrew Doyle?

  April.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  April this year?

• 3:56Andrew Doyle?

  Last, April last year.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  Twenty eighteen.

• 3:57Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  So it's like eighteen.

• 3:59Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, and, and then, and then she got banned so often early on, like. My whole point of it was that I was just like first I decided she was gonna be a slam poet. She was gonna be intersectional feminist, all of that stuff.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Andrew Doyle?

  She was gonna be massively contradictory, but just completely offended by absolutely everything. Uh, really privileged, really obviously privileged, but not recognizing her own privilege because she wanted to be a victim. So all the kind of stuff that we recognize. And then, um, I also made that decision early on. I wasn't gonna self censor at all. I think. One of the real problems with comedy at the moment is people are hedging their bets. They're worried about what they're saying. Uh, because they want to be successful. The makes complete sense. Um, I thought, well, I'm not, no one notices me. I can say anything. Some of the early tweets were really vile, actually. Really, um, just, just sometimes just provocative for its own sake.

• 4:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and you won't see them anymore because I had to delete them all.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, oh no.

• 4:53Andrew Doyle?

  But what would happen is I get, I got a couple of one day bans, then I got a seven day ban, then I got another seven day ban. Um, and I thought, well, you know, and then at one point. It must have been around September, something like, I don't know. She got a permanent ban. So Twitter said, they emailed saying, you are permanently suspended. You can't come back. And then there was a big uproar on Twitter, all these sort of prominent people complaining to Twitter.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:18Andrew Doyle?

  And then Twitter brought her back again.

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  Cause there's a provision on Twitter for satirical accounts.

• 5:24Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:25Chris Williamson?

  Like a protection kind of thing. As long as you, as long as it's apparent that it is.

• 5:29Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Chris Williamson?

  You can kind of get away with more.

• 5:31Andrew Doyle?

  Right. So their rule is if you, if you've got a parody account, which is a specific mocking of another person, you have to put parody in your bio.

• 5:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 5:38Andrew Doyle?

  This isn't a parody account, it's a satire account. I'm not, I'm not parodying a particular person.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 5:43Andrew Doyle?

  So, um, I'm, and people often don't understand that difference between satire and parody. So it's a different thing. Um, but. There is provision that Twitter ostensibly in their rules say that's okay, you should be allowed to do that.

• 5:54Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:55Andrew Doyle?

  Um, but they found some of the language and some of the imagery, I suppose, a bit unpleasant. And then completely banned her. Uh, or they took it literally. I don't know.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  Can you remember what the tweet was that was the full ban?

• 6:06Andrew Doyle?

  The full ban was, I'd been, uh, she was saying that she was going to a UKIP march to punch people in the name of tolerance. And that was all it was. And I imagine that was probably just incitement to violence, maybe?

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  I guess so, yeah. Didn't you incite violence against yourself last night?

• 6:22Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I did. Are you following me on Twitter then? Wow. Yeah, I did. Cause I, I can't remember what I did now. I was drunk. What was it?

• 6:30Chris Williamson?

  So, I'll tell you.

• 6:32Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  The Titania account retweeted your show flyer.

• 6:36Andrew Doyle?

  That's it.

• 6:36Chris Williamson?

  And said, um, this impostor is doing a show in the same uh place as me immediately after me. At Edinburgh, um, go see it, bring milkshakes.

• 6:48Andrew Doyle?

  Ah, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course it is.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  And then you tweeted that saying, can I incite violence against myself?

• 6:52Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, and then she replied to that.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  I didn't see that one.

• 6:55Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  I was asleep.

• 6:57Andrew Doyle?

  I started.

• 6:57Chris Williamson?

  I think you probably should have been asleep.

• 6:58Andrew Doyle?

  I started having a conversation with myself.

• 7:01Chris Williamson?

  We all do that, Andrew, it's fine.

• 7:02Andrew Doyle?

  I know. I did that at the time before people knew it was me. I had like.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  Would you call her out about?

• 7:07Andrew Doyle?

  No, she called me out on something. So I, I, I was on Sky News and I, I put out a tweet, a clip of it. And she quote tweeted it saying, look at this disgusting straight white male, um, doing this thing. And then I argued back and I pretended that I didn't realise it was satire.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay, if it was a real person.

• 7:26Andrew Doyle?

  I argued back saying, oh, look, he's really out of order. And then loads of people started going to me saying, this is satire, mate. I can't believe you fell for it. You idiot, you utter dickhead. It was really funny and I kept saying, well, it wasn't obviously a joke. And I, so I argued back at them.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  There's so many layers.

• 7:42Andrew Doyle?

  It was just fun.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  That are being built in here. So when it was very, very first new.

• 7:46Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  Did you find it quite cathartic?

• 7:47Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You could just, I just said whatever I want. I still do, but this is the problem is that I, I haven't learnt my lesson really. I, I just say whatever I want now. The difference is now, if I offend people, they come at me.

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  Deal with the consequences.

• 8:01Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, so they all come at me and I get, I get the sort of dogpiling on Twitter, which I didn't have before because people didn't know who it was.

• 8:07Chris Williamson?

  Lovely anonymity previously.

• 8:09Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, uh, so I would have preferred to still be anonymous, to be honest.

• 8:13Chris Williamson?

  So how did we get from you being this woke, social justice warrior, alter ego?

• 8:19Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Person to you now being both Bruce Wayne and Batman and everyone knowing the, the, the truth?

• 8:25Andrew Doyle?

  That was, okay, so it's a bit of a complicated one. The book was, um, the book came out in March.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  Woke, link will be in the show notes below.

• 8:32Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. Please buy that, it's the only reason I'm here. And the, the book came out in March and then Rosamund Irwin from the Sunday Times. Wrote an article in the Sunday Times. And what she did, it was actually a really impressive piece of investigative journalism. What she'd done is she'd read my book, she'd read um my articles for Spikes Online. She'd worked out that there were some quotations that were similar and some thematic similarities. And then she decided, she, so she said, I'm fifty percent certain it's Andrew Doyle, or it could be Lisa Graves who ran the Godfrey Alford account. And there was a picture of me and there was a picture of Lisa. So she'd pretty much narrowed it down to two. Lisa had also painted the portrait of Titania that appears on the book inside cover.

• 9:14Andrew Doyle?

  But she's credited, so Rosamund Irwin was saying, this seems a bit obvious if she's named. So it was a really good piece of journalism. Um, she'd phoned friends of mine, she'd, uh, I found out about this afterwards. She'd, she'd.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Motherfucker.

• 9:28Andrew Doyle?

  I know, I know. It's proper journalism, isn't it?

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  That's like, that's like forensic literary. Assessment.

• 9:35Andrew Doyle?

  Of a Twitter account, it's quite funny. Um, and then, um, good for her, honestly. And then, but the Smoking Gun came because Chortle, Steve Bennett at Chortle, I don't know how he did it. There was a, a catalogue at a book fair in Frankfurt, which had been issued by the publishers. And someone in the publishing house hadn't realised that I was to remain anonymous and put my name next to the, next to the book, but this was dating months before the book was released. So I don't know, I don't know to this day how he got it. I don't, but I must ask him one day. I think it's really interesting.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  It's really impressive?

• 10:05Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, it's impressive.

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  What was it, so there would, must have been a day or a moment when you woke up and went, fuck, the game's up?

• 10:13Andrew Doyle?

  Well, yeah, well, when I read the Sunday Times thing, I thought it'd be quite funny. I interviewed Lisa Graves, accusing her of being Titania McGrath.

• 10:23Andrew Doyle?

  As myself.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  Sold them a dummy.

• 10:24Andrew Doyle?

  So then I published that interview.

• 10:28Andrew Doyle?

  Um, but I never denied it was me. I was very careful with my wording, I've never denied it. I didn't even deny it to Rosamund Irwin from the Times. I, I, I, you know.

• 10:39Andrew Doyle?

  There was something about the phrasing when she emailed me and I emailed back, I just, I made sure.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  Very particular.

• 10:43Andrew Doyle?

  That I wasn't lying.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and then, um, but then when the Chortle thing came out, I thought, well, because I'd already turned down, I'd been offered interviews and things. They'd gone to the PR person at the, at the publisher saying, could we interview whoever is behind Titania as him or her?

• 10:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Andrew Doyle?

  And I refused those. And then, so when this came out, I thought I may as well do all these interviews now.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  Just double down on it.

• 11:03Andrew Doyle?

  And that's when I did the Piers Morgan stuff and all the interviews and things, because actually it happened the week the book was out. It really boosted it.

• 11:09Chris Williamson?

  It made it.

• 11:09Andrew Doyle?

  It was hugely helpful, to the extent that it looks like I calculated the whole thing, but I'm not that Machiavellian. I did, like, things just happen like that.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they do. Serendipity works weirdly like that, I guess. So let's say that someone hasn't seen the Titania account.

• 11:22Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  How would you describe it?

• 11:23Andrew Doyle?

  I would describe it as, uh, the kind of social justice activist who, uh, is very humorless, uh, is desperate to be offended, desperate to promote her own victimhood. Um, and is not necessarily stupid, but is, uh, but is, has swallowed this ideology wholesale to the extent that they, they, they've stopped being able to think for themselves.

• 11:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 11:44Andrew Doyle?

  And it's like any ideology, isn't it? If you just follow up an ideology without, without questioning any of its tenets.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:50Andrew Doyle?

  You end up basically mindless. You end up just like a zombie, like a kind of religious seller.

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:57Andrew Doyle?

  And that's what I wanted to, so I'm not saying, a lot of the, a lot of the smartest people I know have bought into this cult of identity politics and they end up saying really, really stupid things. It's, I saw it the other day, actually I was reading the New Yorker review of the new Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and it's a guy in the New Yorker who is obviously extremely bright, obviously, uh, but the review, in the review, he says genuinely stupid things because he's, he's seeing it through the prism of identity politics. He actually says at one point, it's a ridiculously white film, which is not a serious criticism you can level at a film. You know, it's, it's, it's really dumb. They did it with Dunkirk, when Dunkirk came out, the Christopher Nolan film, and more than one critic, three or four

• 12:39Andrew Doyle?

  made the point that, uh, oh, the, the representation of people of colour, there's not sufficient representation. It's like, if that's all you can do, if you watch that film and that's all you come out with. How many boxes is it ticking?

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Andrew Doyle?

  You know, if that's all you can come up with, then to be honest, you're not really a critic at all.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 12:54Andrew Doyle?

  You're you're just an ideologue.

• 12:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 12:55Andrew Doyle?

  Um, you know, artists don't make choices on the basis of representation and what they feel they're feeding out to society in that way. Real artists don't.

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Andrew Doyle?

  They care about the work and the integrity of the work. Um, and also this latest film by Tarantino, so much of the coverage has been his treatment of women. You know, the fact that Sharon Tate in the film doesn't speak very often. This is the man who produced Death Proof, which is an overtly feminist film, as far as I can see.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Kill Bill.

• 13:19Andrew Doyle?

  Kill Bill, both parts, Jackie Brown, which is his best film, uh, which is, uh, an incredible, um, um, characterization of this, of this. Uh, let, you know, older, middle aged black woman.

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:31Andrew Doyle?

  In in America, Pam Grier is fantastic in that film and he, you know, he sort of brought her back to the public, public consciousness. The idea that he's, he's not, he's not great at the representation of women is, is absurd, actually. I think part of it is, it started with the hateful eight, didn't it? Because there was the treatment of the Daisy Donaghy character was so violent that she'd be continually punched. Um, but he hates all his characters. Mark Mod pointed this out. He has complete contempt for all of his characters. He doesn't care about.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  No one care, no one has care.

• 13:58Andrew Doyle?

  No.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  You're totally right.

• 13:59Andrew Doyle?

  So like, why are we, why are we seeing artworks through? It it just means you, you can't, you can't, you're not judging things on their own merits anymore.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:08Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, and it's a real shame, actually.

• 14:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree. One of the things that's interesting, so for me, I'm not massively political. I'm a red blooded capitalist and have worked for myself as a sovereign individual since I was like eighteen.

• 14:20Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  So my, um, exposure to the world of politics is very, very, uh.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  Focused on myself.

• 14:30Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  Uh, my vote, if I was to vote, which I haven't in any, I've never voted once.

• 14:35Andrew Doyle?

  Really?

• 14:35Chris Williamson?

  No, never once as an educated guy. I've always been away on holiday, busy with work or doing whatever it is. But if I was to vote, one of the first things that would come up would be, how does this affect my interests?

• 14:46Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, okay.

• 14:47Chris Williamson?

  And there was.

• 14:47Andrew Doyle?

  You're capitalist. Fine. So you are political.

• 14:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, you tweeted an article which I read earlier on, which is really broken down a lot of the things I wish that I could understand. Uh, Bridget Fettacy.

• 15:00Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Um, and it's called The Battle Cry of the Politically Homeless. And what she says is that people who don't have extremist views on either sides of the spectrum or people who just aren't bothered about politics kind of get. Lambasted as being these wasteful, what is it, a cook's servative.

• 15:18Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  Um, and a waste of a vote. And then on top of that, anyone who is but is moderate.

• 15:24Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Chris Williamson?

  Anyone who has a slightly nuanced view.

• 15:26Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Chris Williamson?

  Just gets sort of thrown to the wayside. And I think that with Titania, what you're identifying is that the people who are the absolute extremes.

• 15:34Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  That's, it is funny for that reason, that people can identify, well, most people, the vast majority of people.

• 15:40Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  Can't identify with them at all.

• 15:42Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly. And that's the, um, I only read that article this morning. I think it's a great article.

• 15:45Chris Williamson?

  Amazing.

• 15:46Andrew Doyle?

  She's brilliant. She's an American comic, uh, who has had a lot of flack for just being honest about her opinions. Uh, and her opinions, as far as I can see, are not particularly controversial, you know, um, nevertheless, um, yeah, she's talking about that idea that there's an expectation now that you should be politicised. Taylor Swift got, do you remember she got so much flack for not condemning Trump? You know, and it's like Taylor Swift's silence is deafening. It's like, I don't need to know Taylor Swift's opinion on politics.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  I'm not turning to Taylor Swift for political advice.

• 16:12Andrew Doyle?

  It's like when Little Mix tweeted about the bombing of Syria. They sent an apology saying to, oh, we're so sorry to the people of Syria. I bet the people of Syria were thinking, great, thank God, at least Little Mix have got our back. Well, I don't give, look, I'm not saying these people shouldn't have the right to have an opinion. Of course they do, but I don't give a shit what Sir, what Little Mix think about Syria.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Andrew Doyle?

  That's not their, that's not their expertise, is it?

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all.

• 16:36Andrew Doyle?

  Um, so anyway, uh, yeah, so this is expected, but also what, what Bridget's talking about in that article is the way in which, um, actually, because if you express an honest opinion and then you get this kind of barrage of hatred off the back of it, it means that people are becoming nervous about just being honest. So you, the, the, the discourse is dominated by the extremes. So you have the, the woke left who, who are really myopic and just, uh, cannot see beyond their own very narrow sort of parameters. And if you step outside that, particularly if you come from the left like I do, and you step outside it just a little bit, you are the most, you're the persona non grata, you're the, you're the one they attack.

• 17:13Chris Williamson?

  Pushed straight down there.

• 17:14Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, uh, and, and so people who have moderate views, people who just want to have a discussion about some of these difficult issues, they want to. Address the nuance of, say, the trans debate. Um, they will just be lambasted as bigots. Because the big irony with this is these people don't know what the word bigot means. I mean, the definition of bigot is someone who is incapable or completely intolerant of anyone else's opinion. Someone who has a different opinion. But they, the people say nine times out of ten, anyone who calls you a bigot is normally the bigot. Because what they're saying is your opinion shouldn't be allowed.

• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, it shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't have to, it shouldn't be tolerated. So, yeah, it's a real problem. Bridget's been on the receiving end of it. Um, a lot of us have now. And of course, what happens as well is if you express an opinion that isn't within that Overton window of acceptable thought. Um, people just say, well, you're being dishonest. You're being a provocateur, you're being a shock jock. Because it's a kind of narcissistic worldview that I can't believe that someone else would have a different view than me. Therefore, this must be a lie.

• 18:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Andrew Doyle?

  Right? So, I mean, my, my, my, I suppose my guiding principle uh, is just to tell the truth, say what I think.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 18:25Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, and see what happens, right? And I, if everyone did that, can you imagine? We'd be, we'd be in a much better position, wouldn't we?

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you know, John Peterson, who is a fan favorite of the show. Um, he, his first rule, tell the truth, or at least do not lie.

• 18:42Andrew Doyle?

  He makes the point in his book about this, actually, that it's actually very self-destructive to be dishonest. Uh, and when I read that, it really chimed with me. I think that's absolutely right. The, the, you're hurting yourself.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Andrew Doyle?

  If you, if you're dishonest. Um, and he also makes the point that absolutely there are times when lying is actually the compassionate thing to do.

• 18:58Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 18:58Andrew Doyle?

  Right? Fine. Um, but actually, there's a way to do just evading the truth, as in you don't have to.

• 19:03Chris Williamson?

  Lies of omission, not lies of commission.

• 19:05Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah. If, if it's for a compassionate reason.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Andrew Doyle?

  That make, that makes sense to me. Um, but I think when it comes to just expressing your opinions and views, it's all about respecting people enough. To tell them the truth, as in, I, I, I can respect you, I can say something that I think you might disagree with. Because I respect you enough as a human being not to, I assume you're not gonna start throwing things and call me a Nazi, right? You're gonna have a debate, you're gonna have a discussion.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Andrew Doyle?

  It's actually really disrespectful to say what you think the popular viewpoint is. Uh, just for the sake of other people's uh, um, sensibilities. That's actually very disrespectful to them because you're patronizing them, you're infantilizing them, you're saying that you wouldn't be able to cope with dissent. You know, it's a bit like being at school, you know, when you're at school, like, it's a particular thing with boys at school is that. You won't say an opinion unless you're sure everyone else agrees, right? Right? Uh, and sometimes you're, you're, you're, this happened to me all the time, you must have happened to you, like. When you were a kid and someone said something and everyone was like, oh no, we don't think that, do we? Yeah, and then it's like, oh, no, I didn't mean that.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, uh, uh, uh, uh, yeah.

• 20:04Andrew Doyle?

  I actually saw a stand-up doing a bit about this this year, where he's talking about. He, when, when a, a situation arises in the news and he, he offers an opinion. A bit too early when it's not formed and then he's like, oh no, can I take that back?

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Andrew Doyle?

  And, which is what teenagers do, this is in a teenage act by the way, but, but that's what teenagers do and it's that thing of. Well, actually, we'd all be better off being honest. It'd be, it, it, we'd know who we were voting for, we'd know what people think and we'd know where we stand, we'd have our views challenged. There's all sorts of reasons, uh, why honesty is a good thing. But no matter how many times I say that, it doesn't matter, people just say, yeah, you're lying, you're, you're just lying because you wanna cause trouble or whatever. And, and that's really sad.

• 20:40Chris Williamson?

  I know. Anyone who wants to read a very good short book on lying, Sam Harris's Lying, one hour.

• 20:46Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  One hour read, and it is a one hour justification for why you should never lie.

• 20:50Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  Um, and it's absolutely great, highly, highly recommended, will be linked in the show notes below.

• 20:55Andrew Doyle?

  But I get it, I keep getting messages from people saying, I really like what you're doing, I can't tweet about it. Honestly, I, I, I had one the other day from quite a prominent actor, saying, I really, really like. I, he saw the show actually, he said, I really like the Tanya Show, I can't. Tweet about it because I can't be bothered with the backlash, I don't wanna face the backlash.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 21:13Andrew Doyle?

  So I sympathize with that, why should there, but, you know, why should there be backlash for expressing an opinion?

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, she, Bridget mentions in the article, which is the, the best way I've seen to put it, that. Um, people aren't voting out of habit or for their own interests. It's now a comment on your personal identity and worth.

• 21:31Andrew Doyle?

  Quite so, let's take the Brexit vote, where the, the media reduced it to. Leave equals bad, remain equals good. Not just the media, but sort of the people in the sort of very middle class circle. That's how they reduced it. Leave equals racist, remain equals.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  Compassionate.

• 21:49Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, and non racist, okay? It's a lie that everyone bought into, it's pathetic. And it's.

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  And we still left?

• 21:57Andrew Doyle?

  Well, we haven't left.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 21:58Andrew Doyle?

  It's that, it's that, it's that reductive thing.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Andrew Doyle?

  Of reducing actually a very complicated nuanced political question to an easy shortcut. You know?

• 22:08Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that people are doing that at the moment? Why are people reducing down difficult discussions to these real tweet length?

• 22:15Andrew Doyle?

  There's a good psychological reason. There's a thing called the cognitive miser model, which means that you, you instinctively try and find the easiest train of thought. Your mind, that you'll, you'll always go for the easiest. It actually takes a bit of effort to think about things. Um, if, if you've got this situation, for instance, with the Brexit vote, and you can just say, well, that side's good and that side's evil. Well, it's easy, it's an easy choice to make. Otherwise you have to start understanding the issues. It's a whole lot harder. I get that. Um, and yeah, it's started, it's happened a lot, happened with Trump. Uh, it's happening now with, with, with Boris Johnson. So there's going to be, it's the same thing again. It's, are you a good person? And this is why the polls never work anymore. This is why no one predicted Trump, no one predicted Brexit.

• 22:56Andrew Doyle?

  It never works because people have their opinions, they have, they have two sets of opinions. But they've got the opinions that they actually feel and they've got the opinions that they know they can express in public. Right? And those two are no longer the same. It used to be the case that they were the same. I remember talking to an old trade unionist about this. He was saying that, you know, we used to be able to talk to like some of the miners and everything about, and they would be really homophobic. They'd say like, you know, they hate fags and all this sort of, they wouldn't use fags. They'd say queers back then, when they were faggots. Um, but you know, but they were right on all these other issues. And rather than bulk at that and say, oh, well, you're obviously a fascist, I won't talk to you about anything. Uh, this guy was saying, well, what I'd say to them is, well, okay, you're right about these social issues and these economic issues. So can we now talk about your issues about sexuality?

• 23:38Andrew Doyle?

  And, and, and then it became a discussion and then people changed their minds. And that was the, that's a great thing to happen, right? But now if, say, for instance, you've got one opinion. That is not acceptable. Say you are uh anti-abortion, right? So that for for many leftists is like one of the the sins.

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  Cardinals.

• 23:57Andrew Doyle?

  Right? So if you're in that, then then suddenly we we write off you, we write you off completely.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 24:03Andrew Doyle?

  So even if we agree on other things, it doesn't matter anymore. You're now the bad person. You're now an evil person. Um. It's really unsophisticated.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is.

• 24:10Andrew Doyle?

  And and it's and it's perfectly, this is why I end up agreeing with people who on the whole I can't, I don't agree on with on anything.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:16Andrew Doyle?

  Um. And for instance, um. Let's take the free speech question, you know? So I am not a nationalist. I would never vote UKIP. On the basis that it's a nationalist party and I'm not nationalist. So fundamentally, I I don't have anything in common with them.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Andrew Doyle?

  Um. But they're right about free speech, right? So they they they recognize that there's a problem with free speech. The Labour Party and the Tory Party are both against free speech. Both of them are for hate speech laws, for instance. Uh. The Labour Party want to push uh more press regulation if at all possible. Uh Theresa May is one of the worst when it comes to free speech. I mean, she uh she sent uh she denied Tyler, the creator and entrance to the UK on the basis of a rap he'd done, right? Which was great, because then he did an anti Theresa May rap, which sounds really surreal. People forget about that, but that did that did actually happen. I didn't dream that. Um. So when you've got the two major parties who are anti-free speech, you you've got to be able to say this other party that I have nothing in common with, that actually I can't really stand.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 25:13Andrew Doyle?

  Um. I I am, they are right about that. But you say that and then all of a sudden, oh, you're a UKIP supporter. Ah, no, I'm not. I haven't voted, like, never would.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  Tiny little sliver.

• 25:23Andrew Doyle?

  They're correct about that.

• 25:24Chris Williamson?

  What they're saying.

• 25:25Andrew Doyle?

  No one gets to own principles, right? So a principle is either right or it's wrong.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:29Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, so you you should be able to say, I I don't approve of anything that person says or does. But on that, they're right.

• 25:38Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 25:39Andrew Doyle?

  Because they don't own the principle.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  There's no more room for nuance or certainty in discussions now. So the thing that keeps coming back to me, and again, I'm I'm probably a good avatar for the late person when it comes to seeing these things, right?

• 25:50Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  Because I'm not embroiled in them and it's it's.

• 25:53Andrew Doyle?

  Good for you.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  I know. It must feel like it would be heaven for you, right? Um. Looking from the outside in.

• 25:58Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  People who are getting upset at the fact that you're making comedy at these situations, to me, that is potentially the most shocking thing of all. Because Armando Iannucci must be itching at his scripts to have a go at Brexit and Boris Johnson with another season of The Thick of It, and there must be, you know, there must, it is the-

• 26:17Andrew Doyle?

  I think he said he could never do The Thick of It again. There was an article a couple of years ago, because of, because he says things have got too surreal.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, there we go. But you know what I mean? Like, to me, it looks like the perfect breeding ground. The current political climate is the perfect breeding ground for some comedy and some satire.

• 26:32Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. It's, it's ideal. People often say that to me, like, isn't it hard to satire? Like, people like Trump, who, who is self-saturizing. The funniest things said about Trump are by himself, right? They're on his Twitter feed.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 26:46Andrew Doyle?

  You know, I mean, two days ago with the Talib, you know, the thing about Rashida Talib, who'd, who'd write, sorry, I'm talking politics again, but she'd, she'd asked to go to Israel to visit her ninety-year-old grandmother on humanitarian grounds, and Israel had denied her entry in because she was likely to criticize the Israeli government. And she said, she said in a letter, I won't mention, I won't criticize you, I just want to see my grandmother. They came back saying, okay. And then she was like, oh, this is disgusting, I'm not going there, because I'm denouncing that I say certain things. It was a total political move. But then Trump tweeted about it, saying, well, the only winner in this situation is her grandmother, who won't have to see it.

• 27:24Andrew Doyle?

  Let's be honest, that's a funny tweet. Now, look, I don't support Trump, and I'm also kind of, I'm old-fashioned about policy. I don't want my politicians to be funny.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Andrew Doyle?

  I want them to be serious, because it's a serious job.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Andrew Doyle?

  But I can look at that and say, that's funny. I can look at that and say, that's a funny tweet. He has a point, even though I don't like most of what he stands for.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  Wish I'd written it.

• 27:44Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, there we go. That's not how it could. But it's, but it's funnier because it's the president.

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Andrew Doyle?

  There is something funny about the idea of the president of the United States calling Kim Jong-un fat. That's funny, because it should never happen. It's also scary, because they're both nuclear powers. You know, so the stakes are pretty high.

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  Both of them have got a button.

• 28:03Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, stake, oh, yeah, stakes are pretty high there. So again, I should reiterate, I'm not supportive of it. I wish he didn't do it.

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Andrew Doyle?

  But I also look at it and laugh.

• 28:13Andrew Doyle?

  What are you gonna do? Laughter is an involuntary response, isn't it? I don't calculate like like the woke set seem to be able to do.

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Andrew Doyle?

  I mean, the woke idea is that you you look, you hear a joke, you think about it, you assess, who are the marginalized groups? Is it punching up? Is it punching down? Uh, can I laugh at that? Yes, good. Emit laughter. They see it as this kind of transaction, right? That's not how it works. Sometimes I laugh at the most horrible inappropriate things because they are horrible and inappropriate.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Andrew Doyle?

  Because that sort of stuff reminds us why we don't talk about those things. You can see a Jerry Sadowich show, you know, and and good luck watching a Jerry Sadowich show and not being offended at some point.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, everyone's gonna get offended.

• 28:46Andrew Doyle?

  He's gonna offend you at some point. There's gonna be a moment where you think that's that's too much. You shouldn't do that. Um, and that's part of this, something quite exhilarating about that.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Andrew Doyle?

  You can be offended and laugh at it. Happens to me all the time. I'm quite sensitive. I get offended really easily. But it's my problem. It's basically.

• 29:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's funny. Um, one of the things that I've been thinking about when seeing the way that we recently had Zubie on the show.

• 29:11Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Um, because of this weird game playing.

• 29:16Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  The left's done with uh, language and social constructs and things like that.

• 29:21Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  To me, what it appears to have allowed are very clever people to game that system.

• 29:28Andrew Doyle?

  Right.

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  And Zubie's tweet about um, breaking the woman's deadlift record, PSI identified as a woman, don't be a bigot.

• 29:36Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  That is a perfect example of regaming this, the the little gaps that that have been created.

• 29:42Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  By the left in that.

• 29:43Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  Is that one of the, one of the things that you think that um, is helping us to identify where there's inconsistencies within their views and stuff like that?

• 29:52Andrew Doyle?

  I think ridicule is what does it best of all. And and and part of the way you do that is you take on board their language. The problem with that is you find yourself tempted to play them by their rules. So when they talk about privilege and all that, I've seen this happen a lot. And there's an argument about privilege and they often throw out this idea of white privilege, this blanket idea that if you're white, you are inherently privileged, which of course is not true. Uh, some white people are privileged, some aren't, right? In all sorts of ways. There's all kinds of ways you can be privileged, right? It's not just to do with race, ethnicity and sexuality. Um, but yeah, so you end up with a situation where um, people.

• 30:26Andrew Doyle?

  Buy into the victimhood thing and they'll say, okay, I've been accused of being privileged. So how can I come back and say, actually, you know, I, I went to a rough school. I went and grew up on a list day. I did right about right. And then you're getting into this competition, you're playing their rules back at them. And that's probably not healthy, you know. You can do it like you can. And when they fall foul of their own rules, which they often do, right? Did you see the, the Democrat conference in America where someone made a point of personal privilege? Yeah.

• 30:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Andrew Doyle?

  And the point of personal privilege was, guys, can you just keep the voice noise down? Because I'm very sensitive. I get sensory overload and I get triggered. Then someone said, point of personal privilege, about that point of personal privilege. Uh, don't say, guys, that's gendered language. I'm really offended by that. Don't do that. So you have people calling out each other's calling out. It's like this endless inception of wokeness.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Andrew Doyle?

  Right? So, so we could do that too. So we could, we could, we could point out where they are being triggering. I mean, let's, let's take an example. Most of the, the woke lot who are really anti Brexit tend to be incredibly ageist. They're basically saying, we can't wait for the old people to die. Old people have fucked over the country. They're basically evil. It's like, are you kidding? You're, you know, you're the person who goes on all the time about being sensitive and, and, uh, you know. And surely what ageism is part of that, isn't it? Or is that just your blind spot? So then if we call them out for ageism, we become part of that game.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Andrew Doyle?

  So I sort of refuse to play the game.

• 31:47Chris Williamson?

  So that's, that's something that I've been, I've got written down here as something that I totally can't work out, but you're going to help me do it.

• 31:53Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  You may have been in a relationship, but a lot of listeners will have been. Where your partner brings up a particular issue. You don't care about this issue.

• 32:01Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  That you spoke to that girl or, um, you didn't reply in time. Or you're, you were late or something like that. And that's not an issue that you usually would do, but they set a precedent by doing that.

• 32:14Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  And then what you find yourself doing, next time that something happens that you find them culpable for that same thing for.

• 32:21Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  Is you go, hang on a second, are you talking to that guy?

• 32:25Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  I didn't care and I still don't care, but I'm going to use the opportunity to identify your inconsistency.

• 32:31Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  Straight off the bat.

• 32:32Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  And that push and pull.

• 32:34Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  That happens in relationships, I think is very similar to what's happening here. And I almost think that looking at the way that the left has kind of adopted this.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  The way that Andy Ngo was assaulted in the street and they're taking bike lots around and throwing milkshakes at people. You know, that would have been a characteristic of the right previously.

• 32:54Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  A very aggressive approach.

• 32:56Andrew Doyle?

  Right.

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  And it's almost like they're absorbing, taking on that persona, that push and pull thing. And then you think, well, hang on a second, if you keep on doing that as the left and throwing bike locks around. There are some people on the right who have got very, very large guns.

• 33:11Andrew Doyle?

  Right, exactly. Well, there's two, there's two sort of points there. I think, I think one of them is, is, well, actually not just the left that do it. Of course, the right do it as well. We saw that with the Joe Brand case, you know, when Joe Brand made the joke about throwing battery acid at Nigel Farage. Which was obviously a joke, whether you found it funny or not, that's irrelevant. But it was most of people on the right saying she should be arrested or she should be investigated by the police. All the same people who complain about the very authoritarian treatment of comedy on the whole, right? And people who complain, you say that free speech is under threat. And then all of a sudden, they're the people saying, actually, no, but Joe Brand should be investigated because that's the inciting violence. No, you've got to be consistent in your principles, either left or right. That's really, really important because it means your own principles will get undermined.

• 33:55Andrew Doyle?

  The other point about Antifa, which the, the, the group, the anti fascist group. Now, I for one mistrust anyone who identifies as anti fascist. Let's, let me just say that. Because for a start, I assume everyone is, right? My assumption of you will be that you're not a fascist. Yeah, it's a fair assumption, right?

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, I will assume that of everyone until I hear extraordinary evidence to the contrary. If I find the evidence, fine.

• 34:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Andrew Doyle?

  But, but we have to, because there's hardly any fascists out there.

• 34:21Chris Williamson?

  It's like being an anti dog shagger.

• 34:23Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. You don't declare that, do you?

• 34:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:25Andrew Doyle?

  You don't declare that you don't have a predilection to penetrate livestock, do you? Do you? I don't know. And I wouldn't assume that you would have.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Andrew Doyle?

  You know, although now we're talking about my suspicions, you see, but look, and I see on Twitter all the time, anti fat, proud anti fascist, like you don't need to tell me that. And it makes me suspicious.

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  What you're projecting.

• 34:45Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  It's the same as the the people who, there's a statistic somewhere that Yusuf, one of the co-hosts of the show's put out. People that are very, very sort of vitriolic about um being against gays.

• 34:55Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  Are the ones that are most aroused when they see.

• 34:58Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, there's been studies into that. There's been study. I mean, they they literally measured the extent of people's arousal.

• 35:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Andrew Doyle?

  You know, to like how hard they got, basically, on the but and and it tended to be when when the the most overtly homophobic people watched gay porn. It's so it's but it's such a no brainer. Of course it is, because why would you care?

• 35:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Andrew Doyle?

  Why would you care if people have sex with.

• 35:19Chris Williamson?

  There's something lurking in the back of.

• 35:21Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, it's pretty, it's it's, you know, I mean, the data's in on that one, and it's not surprising. Um but the point about Antifa, yeah, Antifa effectively end up behaving like uh fascists, don't they? They end up behaving like.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  That's the that's the thing that's so funny about it.

• 35:34Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, like anyone who seeks to silence someone through violence is is at the very least employing a tactic that the fascists also employed. So, you know, I'd probably stop short short of calling them actual fascists. I think fascists have a very specific historical meaning, but they're certainly fascistic ten uh tendencies or or strategies.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 35:52Andrew Doyle?

  Um, I mean, I read uh Brett, Mark Bray, I think, Mark Bray's book about Antifa. And what's very interesting, it's very well written, actually, what's interesting about it is he does a very uh good job of sort of outlining all the history of the anti fascist movements.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 36:05Andrew Doyle?

  Things like Cable Street, you know, um uh where the the people confronted the Oswald Mosley's uh brown shirts. So all of that, and that's very good. There's a lot of that stuff I didn't know about. It's all very interesting. But of course, those are genuine anti fascist movements, you know, these are the, you know.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  Not the kiddies version.

• 36:22Andrew Doyle?

  Right, exactly. So what what the book fails to do, quite spectacularly, actually, is connect those movements to what is happening now.

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 36:29Andrew Doyle?

  And makes the assumption that the people we're dealing with are in fact fascists. That assumption is wrong. Okay, so some of them are fascists, some of them are white supremacists, sure, right? Most of them are. You saw, you see Trump supporters getting pepper sprayed, people, anyone wearing a MAGA hat, getting kicked to the ground.

• 36:45Chris Williamson?

  There was someone who had a make Bitcoin great again hat that got.

• 36:48Andrew Doyle?

  Really? Just because they didn't read it properly?

• 36:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they couldn't read the word Bitcoin instead of.

• 36:52Andrew Doyle?

  Now, if you can't distinguish between an actual white supremacist and someone who votes Trump, and that isn't to say that white supremacists couldn't vote Trump, they could, and they might do. But just because you vote Trump, it doesn't follow that you're a white supremacist. That will still be a massive minority of the people who voted for Trump, right? So if you can't make that distinction, then you are politically and historically illiterate. And what's worse is if you can't make that distinction, and you have that level of literacy, and you've got a baseball bat and a mask, that's a dangerous combination, right?

• 37:19Chris Williamson?

  Totally right.

• 37:20Andrew Doyle?

  You know, I mean, we saw with Andy Ngo, a bunch of white, middle-class students in masks, beating up a gay Vietnamese immigrant.

• 37:29Chris Williamson?

  In the name of tolerance.

• 37:30Andrew Doyle?

  In the name of tolerance and to, you know, to stand up against white supremacy. Are you joking?

• 37:35Chris Williamson?

  It's a Titania tweet.

• 37:37Andrew Doyle?

  So it's really funny and also horrible.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Andrew Doyle?

  It's horrible because.

• 37:40Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, Andy.

• 37:41Andrew Doyle?

  He was, well, yeah, he was hurt, he was injured, it was unjust. Um, what they should have done, now, obviously, all this stems from an article he wrote, or a couple of articles he wrote for Quillette. What you do in that case, if you disagree with a journalist, is you go up to them and say, oh, I disagree with this, can we have a discussion about it? That's it. And as soon as you hit someone on the basis of, oh, they are normalizing supremacist language or discourse, you, you know, you over-theorize to justify your own violent acts, and it can't be justified.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:09Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and it's really, really sad that we've got to this point where this is happening.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  Is all of this just reaction, is it still this big hangover from Trump being elected?

• 38:20Andrew Doyle?

  Partly. I mean, I'm sure there's a frustration, um, about it. Trump, I s- I suppose, was the start of it, wasn't it? And because people just decided that he was a fascist, because they didn't really know what fascist meant. Um, you know, he said a lot of stuff that I find contemptible, and a lot of stuff that I think you would be hard pushed. I think when he talked about Ilhan Omar and the Squad, you know, and said, send them home, or they can get, they should just go home. I mean, three of the four were born in Amer- they were born in America, and the fourth is a US citizen anyway, right? It's difficult for me to see how that can be interpreted as anything other than a racist trope, actually. Um, so, but this does not necessarily mean he's a white supremacist, that's a massive leap, uh, to make.

• 39:04Andrew Doyle?

  Again, I'd need the evidence on it. But yeah, I think I think that's the problem is that there's a sense of frustration. People were angry, understandably so, you know, it's not nice to lose, is it? And it's easier if you can then paint everyone who made that thing happen as evil. If you say that everyone who voted for Trump is as deplorable as Hillary Clinton so memorably did, and that worked out really well for her, didn't it? Then, of course, you you go on the offensive and you end up guaranteeing Trump's victory in 2020. That's what you do. That's what they've done. What would you predict? Well, he's definitely gonna win. You're okay? Yeah, I mean, the well, he's playing a very smart game because he's putting this the squad, the four Democrat politicians who play identity politics all the time. So Ina Noam, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and and Rashida Tlaib,

• 39:50Andrew Doyle?

  who are never gonna play well with the electorate because they're always going on about grievance and intersectionality and and white privilege and all that sort of stuff. That doesn't win votes, never has, never will. And what Trump is doing is he constantly talks about them to make them the face of the Democrat Party. So people like Nancy Pelosi. Giving them enough rope. Yeah, people like Pelosi are hating this, like she she she wants to distance herself from from these four. But when you think Democrat, now you think uber woke, crazy identitarians, right? And that's largely because of Trump and because the way he puts them at the center is a smart tactical move. The Democrats need to distance themselves from this kind of politics. Identity politics never works. And what's so funny about it? Why doesn't it work?

• 40:30Andrew Doyle?

  Because it divides everyone up. It says, you know, you you stay in your lane over here, you stay in your lane, we're gonna we're gonna really help you, we'll help the Hispanics, we'll help the gays, we'll help the women, you know, and everyone else, I think, what about us? What about us? You know, and then it becomes competing, competing interests. You can only win an election by unity, by by saying that we are doing what's best for absolutely everyone. And because the woke movement is essentially a movement that that rehabilitates racial thinking, it makes us think about race more, it makes us think about sexuality, and it makes us aware to the point of discrimination. And it and it and it separates us all out. And it it it wants to undo the work of the civil rights movements.

• 41:11Andrew Doyle?

  It wants to undo the work of Martin Luther King. It wants us no longer to think about content of character, but to think about color of skin. So it's a regressive, backward movement. It isn't helpful for human rights. It feeds the far right, it helps the far right. The far right is on the rise. They're still thankfully a very fringe group, but they are on the rise because of the woke movement, because of the woke left giving them all the ammunition they need. Okay, because if you constantly say that all these working class, white people, you're just privileged. All you boys, you're just rapists in waiting, uh, you know, you've got toxic masculinity, you should be ashamed of yourself, all of this sort of stuff. And then you've got the alt-right, white nationalist group saying, well, come, come to us then, we're not gonna treat you like that.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  It becomes, it becomes an almost moderate and attractive place to be.

• 41:54Andrew Doyle?

  Exactly, and that's a really terrifying prospect for me. The main reason I attack the woke left is because I'm scared of the rise of the far right. That genuinely frightens me, um, because whereas the woke left are well-intentioned, on the whole, I think they're well-intentioned. They want, they want the world to get a place, they're just in a cult, so they can't see the reality of it, right? You know, it's like anyone in a cult, they get, they, they're believing, they believe it, right? It's not evil. They, they, they see the world as full of fascists, they see the world as full of injustice, and they want to do something about it, that's a laudable aim. The problem is, the world isn't full of fascists, and they just end up hitting people with bite locks because they vote the wrong way, right?

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Andrew Doyle?

  So that's, that's, that's the problem, all of that does is generate all of this resentment and, and it's a gift, it's a boon to the genuine, like, really vile, white supremacist alt-right, just, just repugnant people who can thrive on this stuff. But what, you know, that's, as far as I can see, the only way to get beyond that is to, is to, is to take down the woke left. To make it okay to mock them again, to, to, to, to restore reasonable political conversation, that's what we need to do, it's so important.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  There must be, so there's a, a really interesting, um, podcast, Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan.

• 43:09Andrew Doyle?

  Okay.

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  And Eric.

• 43:10Andrew Doyle?

  I've seen Joe Rogan's podcast a lot, but I haven't seen that.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  So Eric is the, uh, managing director of Teal Capital, Peter Teal, one of the PayPal Matthews.

• 43:17Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Uh, companies, and he is fairly widely regarded as one of the smartest people, like, public intellectuals on the planet. Um, and he has this really interesting point he makes about how, um, the moderates on both the left and the right are allowing the extremists of that side to do all of the work for them.

• 43:35Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  And then by not shouting up as someone who's moderate left and saying, hang on a second, that's wrong. Or by being moderate right and saying, hang on a second, that's also wrong, like Charlottesville's, Charlottesville's wrong.

• 43:46Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Chris Williamson?

  Whatever it might be, you are, he, he says it with much more nuance than this, but he says essentially you're supporting it. By not, by saying, oh, well, you can, you can go out as the vanguard of your, uh, particular political leaning.

• 44:01Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Chris Williamson?

  Push them forward a little bit.

• 44:04Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah, I I think you, well, you can't shout shout louder than the lunatics, can you? That that they do, they do dominate, they really do. Um, yeah, I mean, that's a very good, I think it's, I think, for instance, in the case of Charlottesville, it is quite important for people on that side of the debate to say this is wrong. You know, it's it, you know, it's not right for Trump to suggest a moral equivalence uh between people who are opposed to fascism and people who murder in the name of white supremacy. That's not, that's not right. Well, I mean, the the the the anti fascist peaceful protesters, I'm behind one hundred percent. What I'm not behind is the ones who don the masks, commit acts of violence. That's a very different.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  Drag an old man out of his car when they're trying to redirect him in traffic.

• 44:45Andrew Doyle?

  Right, that's a very different, uh, it's important because I'm, I think peaceful protest is the way all the time, peaceful protest and ridicule. Um, but yes, certainly, so so sorry to go back to the point, sorry, I've missed, I've I've gone on a different.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh, the extremes, extremes pulling in uh for the for the moderate people.

• 45:01Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, well, I think that goes back to what Bridget was saying, doesn't it? Is that when a movement gets characterized by its worst elements, that's a problem.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 45:09Andrew Doyle?

  In the way that uh Islam, for instance, has been mischaracterized by its most reactionary elements.

• 45:14Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 45:15Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, you get the same thing here where uh suddenly you think of the left. I mean, if I say the left, what do you think of? You think of these screeching offence seekers, don't you?

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:25Andrew Doyle?

  You think of the.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  Purple hair.

• 45:26Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, you think of the worst, well, actually, that's not what being on the left means, you know? It's it's uh and and that's a real shame. So I think, yeah, I think we need to restore moderation. I think we need to be, uh, we need to stop having fealty to ideology so that we can say, yeah, broadly speaking, my principles are left wing. But that that that you've just said, this right winger has said this interesting thing, which I might take on board and actually I might adopt as well.

• 45:51Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:51Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and then and restore the nature of the individual. The individual is sovereign, as John Stuart Mill said, like the it it matters what you think. You have to have to be a free thinker, not let other people do your thinking for you.

• 46:04Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 46:04Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and that's where we've got to where people don't, they don't do that anymore.

• 46:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Andrew Doyle?

  Like, if if if you if you were on the left, saying you told me one of your principles, I could pretty much guess what all your other views are. And that that should never be the case.

• 46:16Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:17Andrew Doyle?

  You should surprise me now and then with what you think.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, uh, Jordan Peterson on G Q?

• 46:21Andrew Doyle?

  No.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  This interview is fantastic. I'll send you it for you.

• 46:25Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, wait, with Helen Lewis?

• 46:27Chris Williamson?

  Maybe.

• 46:27Andrew Doyle?

  It was a was a one to one interview, two hours long?

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, they they tried to take me down. There was lots of.

• 46:32Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  Take me down. It's got a really weird title.

• 46:34Andrew Doyle?

  I totally did.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  Um, and in that she says, uh, she starts asking him these questions and he just starts laughing at it.

• 46:40Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  And he says, because your questions are ridiculous, from the first question that you asked me.

• 46:45Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  I could have predicted every subsequent question that you were going to give me.

• 46:49Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  That's it playing out in front of us.

• 46:51Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, isn't that sad? Like, and no one wants to be predictable anyway, you know?

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 46:56Andrew Doyle?

  But I think.

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  But that's what I think that's what the left are trying to do here.

• 46:59Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  They're trying to go like, how, with how much fidelity can I become offended?

• 47:04Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  Like, with how high a resolution can I look at discrimination? Like, and and continue to one up, it's the point of personal privilege, I get this, oh, point of personal privilege, you've got guys. Like, it's the one upmanship.

• 47:17Andrew Doyle?

  I mean, I'm always a bit wary of that, just because I don't like to guess what people are thinking. I don't like to guess people's intentions, you know? So like, when we talk about virtue signalling, right, which is, I think, what you're referring to, um, it definitely goes on. Um, you know, I mean, everyone knows this, so particularly politicians do this a lot, you know, they talk about, uh, they want people to know how upset they are about a certain thing or or whatever. Um, but by the same token, I don't want to assume that what they're doing that for the worst motives. I don't want to assume that about them, you know? But I I I don't know.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  It's a problem of you having faith in people. It's a problem of you, it literally is this problem of you, uh, hoping for the best in people, and we do this.

• 47:56Andrew Doyle?

  Well, it's partly that, but it's also that, um. I can't, it's a, that goes back to the thing about not playing by their rules, right? The one, the, the thing that I get all the time is people telling me what I secretly think. That's the one common factor I get it all the time. So, so people will say.

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  What did they say you think?

• 48:11Andrew Doyle?

  Well, so actually virtually all the major criticisms of me on Twitter, the people who really go for me. Have decided that I have these secret racist thoughts, that I have internalized homophobia, uh, that I, that I, they, I, I had one the other day about how I, I may, what am I, I, I don't know. Like, who knows, right? All this stuff is like, um, you're a right wing, you're a Tory. I get that a lot of Tory. I've never voted Tory. It doesn't matter.

• 48:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Andrew Doyle?

  They know that secretly I have, they know my secret thoughts, right? And that's a problem. And if I turn around and say, yeah, but you secretly think this, then I'm just reducing myself to their level. So what I will always do is take an argument at face value. I'm never going to assume someone's lying about their argument for, for, for whatever reason. Because the argument will be demolished irrespective of the truth behind it. You can, you can defeat a bad argument, whether the person is sincere about it or not.

• 49:01Chris Williamson?

  I understand.

• 49:02Andrew Doyle?

  So that I think is a much better strategy. Um, and I'm sure there are people who are paid for extreme opinions, you know? I, I, I think we all know who we're talking about, right? People, you know, people will put extreme opinions out there because it gets them clickbait.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Andrew Doyle?

  You know, um, but the argument either stands or falls on its own merit. It doesn't really matter whether they mean it or not. Um, and also you can't demolish the argument by assuming they don't mean it, because you've got no evidence for that.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Andrew Doyle?

  That's just your speculation.

• 49:27Chris Williamson?

  You've got to defeat it on its own terms.

• 49:28Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  Or its merit. Um, I'm gonna bring up what I spoke to Zuby about the other day on the podcast, which is Mario Lopez, the guy who played A C Slater on Saved by the Bell, which you never watched, so.

• 49:39Andrew Doyle?

  I never watched it.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  It's a shame, man, honestly. It's a good TV show.

• 49:42Andrew Doyle?

  Is it?

• 49:42Chris Williamson?

  Um, so Mario Lopez says, um, this very, very over, over pedestrian.

• 49:50Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Chris Williamson?

  Um, caveat after caveat, uh, very, very mild. I'm not sure if three-year-olds should be allowed to change their gender.

• 50:00Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Chris Williamson?

  That's essentially what he says. Um, and then is annihilated. And a couple of days later, comes back with the most grovelling apology. The comments I made were ignorant. And insensitive, and I now have a deeper understanding of how hurtful they were. I have been and always will be an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ plus community. And I'm going to use this opportunity to better educate myself. Moving forward, I will be more informed and thoughtful.

• 50:24Andrew Doyle?

  Right, well, every time someone does that, it gives more power to the woke movement. Uh, and it gives, it gives that sort of Twitter mob the, the upper hand. Because it mean they know it works. It's like capitulating to terrorists. You know, once you, once you do it, they know it works and they'll do it again and again and again. We've seen it all the time. People are forced to apologize for things they said years ago, things that probably weren't even that offensive. That's not offensive. That's an opinion. So, and if he, either he believed it or he didn't, right? If he believed it, stand by it.

• 50:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Andrew Doyle?

  You know, I mean, it's short, you can change your mind about stuff.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  In three days.

• 51:01Andrew Doyle?

  Unlikely.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  To that degree.

• 51:02Andrew Doyle?

  What, what you're actually having is a lot of pressure from, you know, I mean, people can say to him, but maybe someone sat him down and said, oh, think about this, think about this. And he did change the line. That's possible, right? Um, even in that case, I would advise not apologizing. Because it just feeds the beast.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Andrew Doyle?

  You know, I, we saw this with Kevin Hart and the Oscars for, for jokes he tweeted eight years ago, ten years ago, something like that. And they were jokes. Doesn't matter if they're offensive. They were jokes. I, I don't care. Uh, so. No, again, apologies, but good for him. He didn't apologize. He said, I've all, he said, I apologize at the time. I'm not going to keep apologizing for this.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Andrew Doyle?

  You know, uh.

• 51:37Chris Williamson?

  Did you, did you see the, um, Liam Neeson thing about, was it in February time? Where he said that his, uh, close family member had been sexually assaulted.

• 51:48Andrew Doyle?

  I did see.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  By a black guy. So he walked around his hometown with a cosh.

• 51:52Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Just going into black neighborhoods, hoping to find someone that was associated.

• 51:56Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:57Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, well, hang on a second. What's this guy supposed to say? Because I found, although it's obviously quite a dark story.

• 52:04Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Chris Williamson?

  I found it very, very interesting. I was like, oh my gosh, this is, this is, how would I feel? What would, what would I do in that situation? How would I act in that situation? You're thinking about Liam Neeson, this guy with his gravelly voice. Walking around the dark streets of Ireland with this cosh in his hand. I'm like, what an amazing story. Yeah.

• 52:23Andrew Doyle?

  I can't believe he said it, actually. I can't believe he said that to a journalist and, and didn't think about the consequences of saying it. But there is something to be said for his honesty. Um, it's, but it's a horrible. It's a horrible idea that someone can be so traumatised by something, they behave in such a vile way. And by his own admission, it was a vile.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the shock, his own shock at himself.

• 52:44Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  But does that not, like, that sort of a thing educates everybody?

• 52:47Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

  That sort of a story, because I'm like, I've never heard anything like that before.

• 52:51Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Even in fiction, I've never heard anything like that before, and I think, wow. But what also, what was weird about that is it, I don't know why the woke movement got so angry about that, because actually what he was making was a really woke point.

• 53:02Andrew Doyle?

  Because they believe that, that, that white people are essentially racist anyway. And so this was just sort of bolstering their views. So I don't know why they weren't happy about this, to be honest. But yeah, they went for him. It's an unforgiving. I mean, this is the thing about the whole, the whole woke thing is you can never, if you make a mistake once, you are tired for life, you can never be forgiven. Because it is a religion and they don't think redemption is possible.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's why the Mario Lopez, you've got this window of whatever, like maybe seven days or something like that, within which you can recant.

• 53:26Andrew Doyle?

  Right.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  And as long as you do your self-flagellation over whatever particular TV station or press release it is that you do, then maybe you get.

• 53:36Andrew Doyle?

  Right, but that, I mean, and the point he was raising is that is a, in a discussion we need to have, right? The question about gender is a discussion we absolutely need to have. So anyone who knows anything about gender and has read, uh, sort of theories of gender, gender is not, as the woke movement claim, a social construct. It is a, a very, very complicated, uh, combination of social and biological factors, right? And the problem is that their faith-based position about gender, uh, has been, has been adopted, particularly in Canada, for instance, by governments. Um, and actually, we need to have a much bigger discussion before these sort of policies are, are adopted. We need to actually talk about and decide whether they're right or not. It's not correct, um, that, that, uh, gender is solely something to do with culture.

• 54:19Andrew Doyle?

  Largely, I mean, certainly the, the obvious example is that you dress boys in blue and girls in pink, whereas in fact, you know, go back a hundred, two hundred years, it was the reverse, right? So those things are arbitrary. Um, feminism, second wave feminism spent years trying to break down the idea of, of, of gender norms and gender stereotyping, right? What's wrong with a boy being effeminate? Why, why do you start questioning and saying, well, let's, let's, maybe he's a girl? Now, maybe he's an effeminate boy and that's okay. What's wrong with a girl being a tomboy, being butch? What, like, what?

• 54:48Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember, do you remember tomboys?

• 54:50Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Because tomboys haven't been around as far as I can remember for about ten years.

• 54:53Andrew Doyle?

  Well, in fact, the recent play of the, was it an Enid Blythe play, was it Mallory Towers even? And they cast a, a non-binary actor to play the tomboy character.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 55:03Andrew Doyle?

  It was an Emma Rice production. Now, this says, this says a lot. That it's almost like the concept of a, of a, of a butch girl is now something we don't understand anymore.

• 55:11Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:11Andrew Doyle?

  No, no, no, it's a boy in a girl's body.

• 55:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 55:13Andrew Doyle?

  This is deeply conservative, right? It's hugely conservative. I saw a, um, a documentary about trans kids. Where the, the parents were talking about their, they've, they said that we've got this little girl now and we're so happy. Because we don't have to watch our little boy mincing about, like, basically like a little gay. Right? So we fixed him. We fixed the problem, you know?

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 55:37Andrew Doyle?

  No, it said, and, and without any sense of self-awareness or, but actually that points to a very interesting thing about the trans debate. Which we're not really addressing is to what extent is this actually just a rehated, tainted homophobia? To what extent is this just us fixing people into rigid ideas of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman? I remember seeing a debate between a performance artist called David Hoyle. And Lauren Harries, who is a transgender woman, was formerly a man, was formerly male.

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:04Andrew Doyle?

  And Lauren said, during the interview, she said, uh, I always knew I was a woman because I used to buy lots of shoes. Right? Which actually just i- is endorsing the most base gross stereotype about women and commercialism.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 56:18Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, that you can imagine. Women aren't all Amel De Marcos, you know, they don't have, that's not what.

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  Walking wardrobes.

• 56:24Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, it doesn't mean you're a woman just because you like to, I used to play with dolls as a kid. I'm not a woman.

• 56:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Andrew Doyle?

  You know, it doesn't matter. Um, and so that's my big concern, that's what I would like to have the. I'm not saying that I know all the answers or that I have a full understanding of the situation. What I am saying is. I've read a lot about it and I would like to have a serious, proper, public discussion about these issues. Without being shouted at and called a transphobe and have someone hit me with a bike, bike lock and have a milkshake on my face.

• 56:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, being, being able to, uh, being under the age of sixteen and not being allowed to have sex. But being allowed to change your sex.

• 56:57Andrew Doyle?

  Right. It's obviously a problem.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  Because having sex will last for probably your first time, maybe about three minutes. But like, changing your sex is the rest of your life.

• 57:07Andrew Doyle?

  Right, it's it's it's a really serious, you know, but I have complete.

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  How is no one identifying this?

• 57:12Andrew Doyle?

  I have total sympathy with someone who genuinely feels that they are in in in the wrong body. Of course I do.

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 57:17Andrew Doyle?

  So so so to to suggest that to have misgivings about any kind of chemical interventional puberty inhibitor of of a of a child is not the same thing as being anti-trans rights. It should be, actually, the two are completely compatible. We need to have a serious discussion about that, right? Um, but we're not having that discussion. We're just throwing insults. It's really sad.

• 57:40Chris Williamson?

  I know. Um, so I wanted to finish with some questions for Titania, as if, how how would she answer?

• 57:48Andrew Doyle?

  Right.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  Um, so.

• 57:50Andrew Doyle?

  That's really hard.

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  I know, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to channel your.

• 57:54Andrew Doyle?

  Do you know, it's it's hard there, because normally when I think of an idea for a tweet.

• 57:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Andrew Doyle?

  I go off and walk for like fifteen, twenty minutes and and refine it.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, do you?

• 58:00Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 58:02Andrew Doyle?

  Except for last night when I just did drunk and.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  Firing away. Well, anyway, let's see, let's see, let's see how we get on.

• 58:06Andrew Doyle?

  All right.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, number one.

• 58:08Andrew Doyle?

  I'm not an improviser.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Don't worry, that's fine. Number one, are all cats feminists?

• 58:14Andrew Doyle?

  Oh, cats feminists.

• 58:18Andrew Doyle?

  She would suggest that feminism is the natural state. And therefore all animals are essentially feminist. She also believes that all animals are essentially vegan, but that they are socialized into believing that they should eat meat by our example. That's what that's what she thinks. But there's a line in the book where she talks about her, her vegan cat. Um, and she says, yeah, I mean, she does chase birds around the garden, but I think she must assume there's some kind of flying vegetable or something. And it's that thing about she just projects, projects her own ideas onto everyone else. But yeah, yeah, cats, because feminism is the natural state.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 58:53Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  Um, speaking of vegetables, which is the most oppressive vegetable?

• 59:00Andrew Doyle?

  I would say butternut squash.

• 59:01Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 59:02Andrew Doyle?

  I don't know.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  I I think courgette.

• 59:05Andrew Doyle?

  Really?

• 59:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because of that sort of French sounding G, which is how it's spelled in bourgeois.

• 59:10Andrew Doyle?

  Actually, thinking about it, it's the aubergine. Because of the emoji.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. There we go.

• 59:15Andrew Doyle?

  Which is used to represent the phallus.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  We've we've we've answered it.

• 59:18Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Chris Williamson?

  Uh, male dogs.

• 59:20Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Chris Williamson?

  Sniff the butts of males and females equally.

• 59:23Andrew Doyle?

  Right.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  But only have sex with females. Does this make dogs prejudiced?

• 59:27Andrew Doyle?

  Good question. That's not altogether true though, is it?

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  Some dogs have. Sex with other boys.

• 59:33Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah, there are, there are, there are gay dogs.

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  What about the ones that don't?

• 59:36Andrew Doyle?

  They should be killed.

• 59:38Chris Williamson?

  Fine.

• 59:38Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Chris Williamson?

  Fine. Well.

• 59:40Andrew Doyle?

  Actually, most dogs are polyamorous, thinking about it. They have they have multiple partners, so.

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  Quite woke.

• 59:44Andrew Doyle?

  They're they're pretty damn woke, yeah. I don't know.

• 59:49Andrew Doyle?

  Told you I can't improvise.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  It's hey, we've got it. We've nailed it. We've got we worked out the vegetable and we've got cats and dogs. That's really, that's the big three.

• 59:55Andrew Doyle?

  Alright.

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  That is the big three.

• 59:57Andrew Doyle?

  Is it?

• 59:57Chris Williamson?

  So moving forwards now, um, we are in the midst of Edinburgh Fringe.

• 1:00:01Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  You've got the Titania Live show. How's that been going?

• 1:00:04Andrew Doyle?

  I love it. I love it. It's so much fun. We are dividing audiences, which is exactly what it should be doing.

• 1:00:10Chris Williamson?

  How many, has have you had many people walk out?

• 1:00:11Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. We're getting it.

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  How many people?

• 1:00:13Andrew Doyle?

  I I I mean, I haven't been here for a lot of the shows, but Alice tells me every now and updates me. Every now and then, there's a there's a moment where people walk out. And what's been interesting, though, is what people walk out of Edinburgh shows all the time, remember, right? Because they've got to get to other shows and things. So you can never be sure.

• 1:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and you can't assume they're offended.

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  Always after the same jokes, though.

• 1:00:31Andrew Doyle?

  Well. Alice has had a couple of examples where people have been explicit about why they're leaving. Now, that rarely happens.

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:00:37Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and there was one the other night, she said, the the person on the front row just said, I'm sorry, I just can't, I can't do this and walked out. And I think like, look, I'm sympathetic with anyone who is offended by or upset, and I would also support their right to leave.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:50Andrew Doyle?

  I can be offended by stuff and my my view is I'll just leave. Um, I'm not going to start whinging about snowflakes and all this sort of stuff like. We all get offended by stuff and we all know what upsets us and and and sometimes it's best not to expose yourself to that.

• 1:01:02Chris Williamson?

  And everyone has different tolerances, right?

• 1:01:04Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah. I, yeah, exactly. Um. But you know, it, the, the, the purpose of satire is to annoy people as well as to entertain some other, you know, you, you, you can't, it can't be, it's not being done right. If everyone loves what you're doing, or indeed if everyone hates what you're doing, but you wanna be splitting people, that's exactly.

• 1:01:23Chris Williamson?

  Was, was that an aim when you were writing the?

• 1:01:25Andrew Doyle?

  A hundred percent, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I knew full well that it would annoy people. I wanted it to.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  They have bought tickets though.

• 1:01:33Andrew Doyle?

  Well, yeah, but a lot of people in Edinburgh don't know what they're seeing.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Andrew Doyle?

  That's, that's the problem.

• 1:01:37Chris Williamson?

  You know the problem now, you've got two good street PRs, like the street PRs are so effective, like you've got these guys out and, and they're unbelievable at their job.

• 1:01:46Andrew Doyle?

  On the other hand, I sort of want people to know what it is because I want people to enjoy. I don't want people not to, I don't want people to go to a show they're not gonna enjoy.

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Andrew Doyle?

  I think the, the tweets are more designed to annoy the general public, you know, um, people who happen upon them and don't know who she is. That's funny to me. Um, but yeah, I think if you've invested money in a show, I'd like you to enjoy it.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  For sure.

• 1:02:05Andrew Doyle?

  So, um, I do, I have said to the flies, can you just be honest about what this is, you know? Cause.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  Don't sell them a lot.

• 1:02:12Andrew Doyle?

  If people are thinking they're going to see like a stand-up show, for instance, it's not a stand-up show, it's more like a play.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Andrew Doyle?

  If people think that they're going to see, you know, some feminist thing, I mean, it's obviously mocking contemporary feminism, you know, I'd rather people just knew and didn't.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and got their money's worth.

• 1:02:26Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Um, but we're challenged for it. So, you know, you've, you've made a Twitter account, you've done all of this stuff and now there is a living, breathing, one hour manifestation of a Twitter account.

• 1:02:37Andrew Doyle?

  Yes.

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  On stage in front of you at the Edinburgh Fringe for like, what, twenty nights, thirty nights?

• 1:02:42Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, twenty, twenty-five shows, yeah.

• 1:02:43Chris Williamson?

  Why, why, what does that, how's that feel? Does it just feel like this is the most twenty-first century thing that's ever happened?

• 1:02:49Andrew Doyle?

  It's, yeah, it's an odd one, isn't it? And I certainly didn't expect it to happen. I certainly didn't, I didn't even know I was gonna write a book when I started this.

• 1:02:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Andrew Doyle?

  It wa, it wasn't that at all. Um, yeah, it's an odd feeling. And also because I know her so well.

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:03Andrew Doyle?

  Um. And then you see this sort of version of it in the flesh.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  Has it changed the way that you think about her, having seen it manifest sort of in front of you?

• 1:03:12Andrew Doyle?

  No, I I don't think it has, because during the rehearsal process, what we were doing is trying to get Alice's characterization as close as possible to what is in my head. Of course, it's not entirely possible, and of course, an actor will always bring their own interpretation to the role. So, um, but there's still this this creature in my head who is a living, breathing thing, who isn't quite what's on stage, isn't quite, because, because, you know, that's a combination of my writing and Alice's interpretation. It's something, I mean, my friends are a bit worried about me. Sometimes I I I sort of, I do talk about her in the third person. I do, um.

• 1:03:44Chris Williamson?

  If she's in the room.

• 1:03:45Andrew Doyle?

  I sort of do.

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  Is she your imaginary friend?

• 1:03:48Andrew Doyle?

  It's not quite like that, because I'm very self-aware about it. But what I mean is, I have a separate phone for her, for a start.

• 1:03:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:53Andrew Doyle?

  But, um, largely because Twitter will ban you if, you know, you don't want the same phone for both your accounts.

• 1:03:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:58Andrew Doyle?

  Because if she gets banned, I would get banned as well.

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 1:04:00Andrew Doyle?

  Twitter make you behave like a drug dealer, basically, you know, and so someone said to me the other day, can you tweet this from today, or can you retweet this from today? I was like, I haven't got a phone with me. She, she, you know, it's at home. And I just said it, and she's saying, oh, this is worrying. You're now talking about her as if she's a, she's a real thing. But it's not a psycho. I know.

• 1:04:18Chris Williamson?

  It's not a psycho.

• 1:04:19Andrew Doyle?

  No, I'm I'm I'm fully a hundred percent self-aware.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:22Andrew Doyle?

  Um, but it helps to think of her as, because I I start to think about the way she would respond to things, which is obviously the way that I would respond.

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  Has it got easier over time?

• 1:04:31Andrew Doyle?

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, um, I think when I first started it, so because I had to delete. I think the tweets are only there from, I I went through a period of deleting everything beyond seven days. Because people kept mass reporting the tweets, and that's how they do it to get you banned.

• 1:04:44Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 1:04:44Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and now.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  You don't allow enough time for them to accumulate.

• 1:04:47Andrew Doyle?

  Exactly. I don't do that anymore, just because I sort of don't care if I get banned at this point.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  I think it's to the stage now as well, where you you've been mentioned on the Joe Rogan Show, like the the absolute pinnacles of of.

• 1:04:58Andrew Doyle?

  I'm fine with the ban. I'm, you know, I I I can do more. The character's out there now.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Andrew Doyle?

  I can, I can write articles, I can write. Shows, I can do whatever with it. I don't need the Twitter account really, but I enjoy it just, I still, I'm still gonna do it, I still enjoy it.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  I bet you do.

• 1:05:11Andrew Doyle?

  Um, but the early tweets were, were not as, I think they were just quite direct and the, you know, cause there are two types of tweets that she does. There's the, the joke tweets where she, she tries to um, uh, expose the inherent contradiction of the woke way of thinking.

• 1:05:25Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:26Andrew Doyle?

  And then there's the bait tweets where she says something so outrageous, she wants people to, to take it seriously.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:32Andrew Doyle?

  And those are normally the right wingers, the, the, the Trump voters and people who take it seriously and get angry.

• 1:05:37Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:38Andrew Doyle?

  So there's the two types of tweets and then um, and I often get accused of, well, that's not, that's not even a joke, that's just, and I was like, yeah, I'm baiting someone there.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Andrew Doyle?

  You know, I, and, uh, you know, when she says that, you know, heterosexuality should be eliminated and stuff like that, you know, and she says future generations will thank us if we do that.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:57Andrew Doyle?

  You, you know that a lot of the people do get angry.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:59Andrew Doyle?

  And it exposes something about their anger as well.

• 1:06:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Andrew Doyle?

  You know, so I like having to go at both sides, to be honest. That's the point.

• 1:06:06Chris Williamson?

  It must be a fun playground to be able to have that. Um, so what do you think? Well, have you got any idea what you think's next for, to turn?

• 1:06:12Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, don't know.

• 1:06:15Chris Williamson?

  Get the, get the fringe out of the way. Don't, don't forget your lines and your jokes and stuff for your show.

• 1:06:20Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  Don't need to, that, that would be bad.

• 1:06:22Andrew Doyle?

  That would be bad. Uh, yeah, I mean, it's actually the, the stand up channel next week is like a version of the show I toured at the start of the year.

• 1:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:28Andrew Doyle?

  Um, and so it should be all right.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:06:32Andrew Doyle?

  I've got two days just to rehearse.

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:06:34Andrew Doyle?

  Um, that'll be fine. Um, I hope. Uh, what next? I don't know. I don't like doing the same thing for a long time, so I tend to try and move on. Uh, I'm considering writing a book about politics at the moment. Um, which I've been speaking to my agent about, so I might do that. It would be a serious book. I mean, I've, I like the idea of, I've approached this sort of woke movement from the satirical side. Now I'd quite like to try it from the polemical side.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  Has it, um, enhanced your understanding of politics like on a serious level, playing around and swimming in these sort of waters?

• 1:07:04Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, uh, for a start, I mean, I've, I've come from that background. I've always written about politics and I've always, um, and I've come from a kind of woke background. I know a lot of woke people, so I've, I've sort of come from that, that tradition and that, you know. Um. But yeah, it always informs me to talk to people who disagree with me. Um. It always, you know, I, I, that's what's so frustrating about so many of these people is they won't talk. They won't debate, they'll just walk away, they won't have the conversation, whereas actually I've got, you know, we've all got a lot to learn from each other. And even people who say things that I just hugely disagree with, it's great to hear what they've got to say. It's also been really useful to see the way that people perceive me.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:42Andrew Doyle?

  So, um, you know, I'm often told things that they, I think, which I don't think. But that tells me that maybe I'm not being quite clear enough in, in how I express myself, you know.

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:51Andrew Doyle?

  One of the big things I get all the time is, uh, oh, you always go on about how you can't say anything anymore, right? Um, I've never said that. I don't think it, and I've never said it. I can say whatever I damn well please, and I do. Um. The point I'm making is that in the current climate that we live in, if I was still a teacher, for instance, I wouldn't be tweeting the way I am now. Cause I'd be fired, right?

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  Very quickly.

• 1:08:14Andrew Doyle?

  So I think what is, I am in a privileged position because I'm a comedian and I can say whatever I want. And I can get away with it, but I know that if I were to go back to teaching now, I could never get a teaching job anymore. So they just do a cursory Google search and I'm, I'm over, right? I mean, when I was a teacher, I had, uh, parents complaining because they'd Googled me and, and read some of my jokes online and they complained to the head. So it was already getting a bit.

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  Touching.

• 1:08:35Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah. So, um, so it isn't that I'm saying that we can't say anything anymore. What I'm saying is most people. Who are in normal jobs, uh, not fake jobs like what I do, right? Normal job, they feel under pressure. To not joke with their workmates, they feel like they have to restrict their jokes to encrypted WhatsApp conversations. Because if they are heard and misunderstood or taken at face value, which is a common thing people do with comedy now, then they're going to lose their jobs. That is a dangerous climate to be in. We had it with Bridget's article. People are afraid to express opinions online. People who email me saying, I like your stuff, but I'm not going to say it publicly.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Andrew Doyle?

  So we are living in indisputably in a culture where people are self censoring routinely now. Out of fear of either what, what, uh, your peers will say, what the, what the people on social media are going to do to you. Because remember their tactic is often to try and, uh, stop your livelihood. You know, go after, go to your employer, complain to your employer, do it really.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  Pass it up the chain until they find a weak link.

• 1:09:30Andrew Doyle?

  Or people are afraid of the state, you know, in the UK, we have a horrible situation where we have, we have hate speech laws. That have led to people being imprisoned for jokes they've written on Facebook, actual jail time, right?

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Konstantin Kissis says that in all of Russia, every person that was jailed, I want to say last year, because of jokes they made on social media, four hundred, the UK, three thousand.

• 1:09:53Andrew Doyle?

  He's talking about arrests.

• 1:09:54Chris Williamson?

  Arrests.

• 1:09:55Andrew Doyle?

  Not, not, not, no, jail for jokes is very rare, but it has happened.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 1:09:58Andrew Doyle?

  It should never happen, by the way, but it has happened.

• 1:10:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Andrew Doyle?

  Um, but yeah, arrests, investigations, it's over three thousand in this country and four hundred in Russia, that tells you an awful lot. Um, hate speech laws should be abolished, absolutely clearly, people should be entitled to express hateful views if they want to, that's not to say I support those hateful views, I absolutely don't, but what, you've got to think on balance, what is better here, right? I'd love to live in a society where everyone was nice to each other and no one said these horrible, ghastly things, right? I'd love that, that's not the real world, there are some awful people out there who say some horrible things, but is the solution to that to give the state power to lock people away if they don't agree with what they say, because that's where we are. You've got to think about it in balance, what's the bigger picture? I'd rather live in a free society where I'm going to hear some idiot on a street corner

• 1:10:44Andrew Doyle?

  shouting about how I should go to hell because I'm gay, I'd rather hear that, right, than have a situation where the government can say, well, this is no longer acceptable, so now we're going to investigate and arrest you for that, which is what's happening. You know, the guy got investigated in Humberside for retweeting a poem about trans issues, right, he got, he got investigated, the, the police phoned him up and said, we've got to check your thinking, right? And that should never happen, but it's happening as a matter of routine, and we know this because when people complain to the police about it, they said, but this is just common across the country. If you go on the government's hate crime legislation website, it will talk about non-crime hate incidents that are logged as part of the hate crime statistics.

• 1:11:28Andrew Doyle?

  So when you, when you hear about these hate crime statistics, you've got to remember that a lot of them are people phoning the police saying, someone, someone called me gay and I'm upset about it, and that gets logged, no, no investigation needed, it's logged, because if that person perceives that it was homophobic, that's it. It's really worrying, and it is, it's not authoritarian in the way that the, you know, fascist Italy was authoritarian, but it is a kind of creeping authoritarianism and it has an authoritarian aspect to it that needs to be resisted, and we shouldn't be complacent about this stuff.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:58Andrew Doyle?

  But the problem is, no one wants to address it.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  You're very right, you are very right indeed. Moving forward, last thing, what what are the two most likely routes that you can see us going down in the, over the sort of next couple of years in terms of, in terms of how the discourse is going to mature?

• 1:12:19Andrew Doyle?

  Okay, so I've been asked this question before. The truth is, I don't know, obviously, because I'm not clairvoyant, but I do think we are reaching a kind of tipping point, right? Well, you've got, so the, the, the woke activists are the minority, and that's the consolation we should all take. They

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  Just a very loud one.

• 1:12:37Andrew Doyle?

  It's not just loud, they have power. And that's what's dangerous about them. I mean,

• 1:12:43Andrew Doyle?

  they're mostly bourgeois, they're mostly privately educated, so they tend to occupy those roles in society where they are opinion forming, you know, they, they, they overly dominate the law, journalism, the media, the arts, all of these sorts of areas, universities certainly. So you end up in a situation where they are dictating the, the, the sort of common discourse, right? But the, but the problem is they're a minority, for them, this is their problem. They're a minority and people aren't buying it. And the more they push it, the more people push back. So, you know, I mean, I hate the, the idea of dismissing millennials or the millennial generation. Most millennials think this is bullshit, right?

• 1:13:23Andrew Doyle?

  It's, it's, it is the minority, and particularly student activists, the type of kids who end up in student politics, they, they tend to be, you know, quite narcissistic, quite, so they're not, they're not representative of the student body. But everyone else is, they just want to get drunk and have fun, and they, they'll go along with it, they'll be like, okay, we won't applaud, we'll do jazz hands instead. If that, you know, if that, if that makes you happy, we'll just do it for an easy life, of course, right? Um, but it's not the norm, and then, you know, and people grow up, of course, and they go beyond that. What worries, what worries me, I mean, I personally, I blame my generation. I think it's Generation X that fostered this stuff and caused this stuff by indulging it.

• 1:14:00Andrew Doyle?

  But so what will happen, I think, and particularly Generation Z, I mean, the millennials are getting old now, right? They're they're they're past it now. I mean, this is

• 1:14:06Chris Williamson?

  It's ninety six. You've got to be born after ninety six.

• 1:14:08Andrew Doyle?

  I'm only just not a millennial. Like, people people forget this, like, the the millennial generation is it it's had its day. I mean, all the statistics seem to suggest that Generation Z are are pushing way back against this stuff. They've got no time for it. You don't even get that, that, that, you know, I think that's what's going to happen. So and and maybe they're sensing their power is slipping. And that's why they're getting more and more aggressive.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Andrew Doyle?

  That's what people do when they're when they're threatened, when their power base is threatened, they start getting, being shrieking even louder.

• 1:14:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Andrew Doyle?

  And so they won't go down easy. Um, but they'll never win because they just don't have the numbers. Uh, that and and this stuff is totally unpersuasive.

• 1:14:43Chris Williamson?

  So is the is the main fear longer term that this causes the backlash from the right?

• 1:14:49Andrew Doyle?

  Uh, well, that is a fear. Yeah. And that's why that's why we have to we have to take this woke movement down as quickly as possible. Because that's a genuine fear that that that could happen. Um, yeah, I think I think.

• 1:15:01Andrew Doyle?

  How we get, I don't, I don't know. The truth is, I don't know. Maybe they will dominate and and who knows? I mean, that would be terrible to culture to live in.

• 1:15:08Chris Williamson?

  Awful day. Yeah.

• 1:15:09Andrew Doyle?

  But I'm I like to think that most people are sick of it. Most people are gonna are gonna fight back against it and things will change for the better. But that's me because I'm an optimist. That's what I think will happen.

• 1:15:20Chris Williamson?

  I like it. Andrew, thank you so much for coming up. I've really enjoyed it. Um, the Edinburgh Fringe Show, by the time this goes up, we'll have seen whether or not you've you've had any catastrophes on stage, but I'm

• 1:15:29Andrew Doyle?

  No, no, I mean, yeah, we were worried. We thought, oh, some idiot's gonna come along and throw milkshakes or anything. Nothing like that's happened.

• 1:15:34Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely great. Well, I'm gonna bring your milkshake. I'm gonna bring it to drink to your show on Tuesday.

• 1:15:37Andrew Doyle?

  Yeah, actually, well, throw it, because actually, that'd be good publicity.

• 1:15:40Chris Williamson?

  That'll be great publicity, but I also don't want to be ousted on Twitter by Titania McGrath and her four hundred thousand

• 1:15:46Andrew Doyle?

  That's true.

• 1:15:46Chris Williamson?

  followers or whatever it is. Um, links to everything that we've spoken about today, including the articles, Andrew's Twitter, Titania's Twitter. Um, everything else will be in the show notes below. If you've enjoyed the episode, please give us a like, give us a share. Definitely give Titania and Andrew a follow. They're absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you coming and seeing me, man.

• 1:16:03Andrew Doyle?

  No, thanks a lot. Really enjoyed it.

• 1:16:04Chris Williamson?

  It's been great.