Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day. Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Brendan. What's up, Joe?

How you doing?

Is my goal before the end of the world to talk to as many interesting people as possible. And it feels like that's kind of ramped up lately. So I saw you on trigonometry, and I was introduced to your stuff through that, and then I watched a bunch of your conversations online. So I'm excited to talk to you, man. Thanks for being here.

I'm so happy to be here. You wouldn't believe it. So thank you for having me.

My pleasure. Yeah, because it does seem like I really do want to talk to as many people as I can before you can't talk to anybody anymore.

Yeah, well, exactly.

Who knows?

You know, how long before talking to people is outlawed? Suddenly talking to people like me and people like you?

Well, I don't think that's going to happen likely any time in the future. I think too many people push back against it, but I think it certainly could make it increasingly more difficult. My real fear is that we do something so stupid that we lose all communication, period. I have a real fear of world War three. I haven't had since I was a kid. When I was a kid growing up in the eighties, we were legitimately worried that we were going to get into nuclear war with Russia. It was a real fear. And I remember when the fall. When the fall of the Soviet Union, it was like a weight had been lifted off the shoulders of the earth. Like, we're like, oh, my God. Thank God it's over.

I remember those days in the eighties, we watched a film at school called the day after. Did you see that? Which is a film about.

I think we've talked about that. Did we talk about that before? A film about after nuclear war?

Yeah, it's a film about Russia bombing America. It's very depressing. But we watched it at school, and we had numerous discussions about what would we do in the event of a nuclear holocaust, how would we try to survive it. But it was on our minds all the time. And there was also other apocalyptic scenarios, if you recall, like acid rain was a big one, the ozone layer was another one. My childhood was full of fears that the end of the world was nigh. And I think people feel that again today for different reasons. And my approach to it is always to think, well, where are the real problems in terms of civilization really grinding to a halt? And what are the unreal problems that are just designed to whip up fear and make us panic and make us fret about the future. So I think distinguishing between those two things is probably quite important.

It is very important. It's also very important to recognize that when there's a thing that is getting people whipped up and that is in the news constantly, for sure someone's making money. That's why it's doing. I used to think they were warning us about the real dangers of this or that. I don't think that anymore. Now, I think they can justify the fear mongering by saying it's a legitimate concern because it has the opinions of a few people attached to it. But ultimately, what they're doing is they're somehow or another using it to make money.

Yeah, well, they're either making money or they're making moral mileage or both. So if you look at global warming is a perfect example, right? The climate change, or the climate catastrophe, as we now have to call it, there are a lot of people invested in this end of the world scenario who are making a lot of money from alternative sources of energy. But just as important as that, I think they're making moral mileage. It's the issue through which they can pose as the saviors of humanity, and it gives them a real sense of purpose. I mean, Al Gore is a classic example. He both makes money from climate change fear mongering, and he also positions himself as a global authority on how to save humankind from the next apocalypse. So I think it's a combination of financial reward and moral reward that draws people to these apocalyptic scenarios.

Absolutely. And also audience capture in the case of, like, Greta Thunberg.

Right?

Here's this young lady who's become a celebrity by saying, how dare you? That was it. That's all it took?

That's all it took.

We're in the cash me outside girl phase of a good slogan. She's getting ready to rumble, whatever it is.

She's the green version of the catch me outside girl.

That's what she thinks.

But it's like with someone like Greta, I think it was funny for a while that you had this 16 year old kid saying, how dare you? Having a temper tantrum in public, essentially. And all these politicians in America and Britain and across Europe were falling at her feet and staring at her in this wide eyed fashion like she was some messianic figure come to deliver humanity from the end of the world. But more recently, I think the Greta Thunberg cult is just not funny anymore because she's now going around Europe and telling governments to stop investing in energy production, to stop investing in fossil fuel companies during an energy crisis.

And how old is she?

She's 21 now. She should know far better.

Just imagine. Just imagine being 21 and having the president listening to you. I can't imagine, you know, how dumb I was when I was 21. I was shockingly stupid, shockingly stupid when she started.

And she was 1617, she was very young. I often think to myself, if when I was 16 and 17, the thought of being in public and saying things, I would have said the craziest stuff. But that's exactly what she did. And I think the problem is that there were so many people in the adult world who were willing to listen to her and who engaged in her hysteria about the end of the world. And so I often see the Greta phenomenon as a perfect example of how on the one side, you have these cranks who are talking nonsense and pushing ideas that are just not true. But the bigger problem is the political world and the media world who really buy into it and give it meaning and give it emphasis. And I think there's that kind of two way relationship between these things.

I'm not saying that, like, Greta Thunberg is not an intelligent person because she clearly is, and she's very young. And again, I was way dumber than her when I was her age. But what she said was not this extraordinary message of wisdom that would merit the kind of attention that she got. And that's why. And it's also, it's not within her power as a 16 year old to get in front of all these people. So it's kind of like a form of exploitation. It's a willing exploitation, but you're using her as a political pawn for sort of cementing an opinion that you must have on this subject.

That's absolutely what happened. Like every other teenager, she was narcissistic, self involved, panicking about the adult world and how crazy it is. Of course, that's what every teenager is like. We all went through that.

I did it. Yeah, we all do it.

We all did it. We screamed, how dare you? At our parents. We thought, they're oppressing me. They won't let me go out. They won't let me do this. We all have these kind of oppression complexes when we're teenagers. The problem with hers is that it became this public spectacle, and it became a public spectacle precisely as a consequence of the political class who said, you know, give us more, really sock it to us. It was almost like a kind of sadomasochistic relationship between these self hating elites and this teenage girl who was more than willing to whip them in public. And you had this kind of, it was mutually beneficial. She got to feel like she was saving the world. They got to feel like they were being told off for being, you know, the rulers of the world. And it was beneficial for both sides. But it was, when you look back on it, it was creepy as hell.

All. It's very creepy. And here's something to consider, too. At what level are people immune to the bullshit that they're talking about? Like, here's an example about Hollywood. These people, when I would talk to people that didn't work in, like, television, and they had these ideas of what they're doing with television shows, you know, oh, they're pushing this or they're creating that. They're trying to sedate America with nonsense and they're being told to do it by the government. No, no, no, listen. The people making these shows, watch these shows. They like making them. This is what they're trying to do. They like watching sitcoms. They like making game shows. That's not a great. So they're as trapped in it as you. Yeah, it is. Dumbing down the world. 100%. Reality shows are dumbing down the world. But the people watching the reality shows are the same as the people making them. They all watch them like they're making dumb shit because people consume dumb shit. And that's not a conspiracy, that's just a market decision. And I wonder when it gets to, like, climate change, when it gets to some of these, like, contentious issues, particularly the climate, is a big one, because any scientist, regardless of how wise they are and how well read they are and how much they understand about their field of study.

If they have anything that deviates from the narrative, they're, like, automatically dismissed, even ones that will talk about long term temperatures of the earth. It's almost like they don't want you to talk about long term temperatures of the earth. No, no, no. But there has never been a time in our lifetime all these things are true. But if you look at long term, you recognize, oh, it's never static. Even when humans didn't exist, it does all this. There's a lot of factors going on constantly. And to not consider that and to only consider what's happening during our lifetime, not take into account volcanic activity, not take into account. You're blaming cow farts. And you know what I mean? There's so many weird things that we do when we attach an ideology to a science. So the science of climate change is fascinating, right? It really is. It's like taking into account all these factors, CO2 in the atmosphere and solar flares and what's going on with volcanic activity and cloud cover and pollution and all these different factors. But if you don't, like, toe the line and say, this is a catastrophe, if you just want to look at it objectively, you're a heretic, you're cast out of the kingdom.

Yeah, that's precisely the problem. I think there are probably more climate change skeptics out there than we realize. But there is a cost to saying what you think. There is a social cost, there is a professional cost. If you say, listen, climate change might well be happening, there may be a human contributory factor, but it's not the end of the world. A billion people are not going to die. That's bullshit. There's no evidence for that whatsoever. And we will probably be fine if we focus on it and fix it. If you say anything like that, even something quite moderate, you will be denounced as a climate change denier. People will say, get them off the BBC, get them off the airwaves. No platform them from universities. We can't have these heretics speaking in the public sphere. All of that instinct for cancelation trickles down through society. And the message it sends to ordinary people is, listen, you might be skeptical of this stuff, but the price of speaking out is too high, so don't even bother. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people out there than we realize who think to themselves, okay, pollution's a problem, climate change may well be a big issue, but it's not the end of the world.

But they feel they can't say it because this entire grammar of condemnation has been created to depict these people as maidens of the apocalypse, as deniers whose words will literally kill people. And when you have that put on you, when you are told that, when you are told that your thoughts could be so damaging that they will kill people, it silences it, makes people kind of retreat and say, well, I'll keep it to myself. I won't say out loud. So climate change is a perfect example of where censorship does far more harm than good because it's. It restricts our ability to have the discussion about pollution and so on that we really need to have.

I have a friend who's a scientist who emailed me, did you have a climate denier on your podcast? And this was a while back. And I said, no, he's not a climate denier. At all. What he simply stated is the fact that the earth is actually greener now than it has been in I don't know how many hundreds of years. And that what's really terrifying is a global cooling. And when he was talking about there have been times on earth where the world had gotten so cold that we had crossed this threshold where the atmosphere was tolerable for biological life, we got very close, like within a few digits. That's what's spooky. What's really spooky is that what we're in right now is the Goldilocks zone. This is about as good as the earth ever gets. And we have all these mitigating factors, right? Air conditioning, housing. Like, this is the best time ever to deal with errant climate. But if it cools, we're fucked.

Yeah, well, it's like, you know, the truth is that the climate change alarmists, which is how I prefer to refer to environmentalists, climate change alarmists, they're lying to us when they say that more people than ever are dying as a consequence of natural disasters. It's not true.

My favorite part is when they attach it to racism.

Well, yeah, everything's racist.

More people of color are dying because of climate change. Yeah, you better fucking do something, otherwise you're a racist. It's like.

It's really simple checkers and it's simply untrue. In fact, the number of people dying as a consequence of natural disasters is plummeting, and it has been since the birth of modernity. Why? Because capitalist society, modern society, post industrial revolution, we got better at keeping in check the whims of Mother Nature.

So how do they monkey with those numbers? When they twist the numbers around to make it seem like, you know, what would they do that would possibly make it like, what could they call upon that would say, like, this is affecting certain people in certain parts of the world, but not others.

I think they use methods of distortion. They bank on people not looking into the truth of the matter, and a lot of people don't. So they rely on the unwillingness of lots of people to really explore the issue and to look at what's really going on. A good example was the huge heat wave in Europe last year. It was presented in the media as a heat apocalypse. People were going to die. This is the worst thing that's ever happened.

They connected to heart failure. Yeah.

And they connected it to all of these ailments that would inflict people in southern Europe in particular. And they said it was unprecedented and it's not true, there have been huge heat waves in the past, far worse than the ones we had last year. But they rely on that kind of historical ignorance, that kind of unwillingness of people to understand, as you say, that nature has been in flux since the beginning, beginning of time. And that's how it was.

Willingness to monkey with the truth, just to push a narrative. It's so bizarre, and it's so bizarre that it goes all the way down to gender experiments on children. That's how far. Which you would think would be the people that we would protect the most from bad decisions. The people that we protect the most historically, children. Little kids. Little kids that are confused and may have insane parents that are trying to talk them into something which is a real thing.

Yeah. Little kids who have now been sacrificed at the altar of gender ideology. That's what's happening. This is child sacrifice in a modern form. That's what's happening. And their bodies are being used to prove an ideological point, which is this ideological point, that gender identity is innate. We're born with it. You have it from birth. And in order to prove this hocus pocus idea, which has absolutely no basis in evidence or proof whatsoever, they have to experiment on children. They have to give them drugs. They have to start performing surgeries on them when they reach a certain age. They have to cut off their breasts if they're a confused girl. Castrate them if they're a confused boy. And what you have here in this grotesque manipulation of children's bodies is literally the sacrifice of children to an ideological crusade and the ideological crusade of gender ideology. And in order for adults who want to. Men who want to pretend to be women primarily, and women who want to pretend to be men, in order to justify their existence, they have to pull children into the equation and say, well, it's an innate experience. You're born with it.

And we're going to prove this by giving them puberty blockers, by putting them on a conveyor belt to surgery, by screwing them up for life, which is what this essentially does. That is a very good example of how problematic ideological obsessions can be. Because what you end up with is a situation where children's lives are fucked up in the name of an ideological crusade. And that's really bad. Mmm.

And it's real and it's happening. And it's so bizarre to watch people slide into this cult like thinking en masse and you see millions of people that support this. But I think it's enough of a mindfuck to wake up the people that aren't in the haze of it all and go, hey, this is something you actually have to fight back against, because this is insane.

I think the optimist in me thinks that in the future, in 20 years or so, people will look back at this period and they will say, hold on, you gave kids puberty blocking drugs? You.

Well, they've already stopped doing that in the UK.

Yeah, they've stopped doing that in the UK. We have stopped doing that. I mean, you can still get them privately, but the National Health service has stopped prescribing puberty blocks.

Did you hear about the guy in Canada, this guy in Canada that's suing the government because he wants a vagina?

Yeah.

He. So he has a penis.

He wants a penis and a vagina.

Yeah. He wants to be whatever. He wants to be non binary.

Yeah.

Like, literally.

Yeah. Someone wrote an article for spiked where I work, saying, well, this means he can go fuck himself. Right? If he's got both.

But also, here's the question. Where do you put it? I mean, you're running out of space there, fella. Like, if you want both. I mean, this might be a bullshit lawsuit. We might be able to just, like, stop this with a biologist. Where are you gonna put it?

Right? Where's it gonna go?

There's no room, buddy.

I mean, who could have guessed we would be having this conversation? If you went back ten years, even five years, you would never have imagined that we'd be having a conversation like this, where someone wants a dick in a vagina at the same time.

But is that more offensive than the guy who wants to make breast milk for his baby?

That's really bad.

That was Uber bizarre.

So there's this. Yeah. This case in Britain of the breastfeeding.

I think it's Canada as well.

Yeah. There was one in the UK. What was interesting about the UK experience is that there was ITV news, which is a major news channel in Britain. They interviewed women who are struggling as a consequence of the cost of living crisis. And one of the women they interviewed is a man. It's a bloke in a dress who claims to be a mother of a child. And it turns out that this person breastfeeds his child. What that means is he gets his baby to suck on his male nipple, his useless, milk free, non lactating male nipple.

But I think that we would have called that lactate. Now, this is the point. There's certain medications that you can give a biological male, and he'll produce breast milk.

Yeah. But it's not milk. It's not real. It's not.

Are you a connoisseur, sir? Have you had a good tit milk sommelier village visit you and give you some samplings?

It's not what nature intended, is it?

But every man biologically starts off as a female in the womb, and it's the introduction of testosterone and all the factors and the xy chromosome, that's what turns us into male. But we start off as female, so do we have the hardware? And is this medication just ignited? I mean, it's grotesque, don't get me wrong. And it's also, it seems weird that you're having a baby suck on your tits, and you're a guy. Oddly sexual.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

In a way that it doesn't seem like with a woman at all. Right. It's like all of a sudden, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? Why do you want to do that?

But think about it. If you saw a man who looks like a man, man who looks like you on the street with a baby attached to his nipple, you'd call the cops, you'd punch him in the face. You'd do something.

So I definitely wouldn't punch him if the baby was in his office, yeah.

Let's take the baby away from him.

Kill the baby.

Call social services.

You going to jail.

Yeah, but the. No, the thing about breastfeeding men that I find gruesomely interesting is that, firstly, it's just not true that men can lactate in the same way that women can. And the drugs that they take in order to mimic lactation actually makes whatever secretion comes from their horrible nipples worse for the baby. Right. Because it's full of drugs. It's full of. It's full of really gross content. So it should. Shouldn't happen. But it's an indication of how far society has gone down the avenue of validating everyone's identity. So we even have to validate the identity of the freaky man who thinks he has the right and the ability to breastfeed his kid. And if you stand up and say, no, this is not breastfeeding. This is a form of child abuse. A man shouldn't put his nipple in a child's mouth. You are denounced as a transphobe. You are denounced as a bigot. You are denounced as someone who is a horrible person.

Oh, yeah, that's also his age. HIV positive.

I mean, which is cool. What can you even say at this stage?

Hold on a second. Put that back up. Person also revealed that he was HIV positive. Positive and acknowledged that the transmission of the condition to his baby through milk is possible if viral load becomes detectable. Despite having been continuously monitored for 18 and a half years of his life, he also promised to undergo testing monthly to mitigate risk. What a sweetheart test. His hiv positive fake tit milk.

It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.

And everybody's like, yeah, you're not crazy, but you shouldn't be in jail.

That's the problem. The problem, I mean, they've always been freaks. They've always been weirdos. They've always been absolute losers and tossers who do bad things to kids and everyone else. The problem is society nodding along and saying, this is fabulous. Look at this new identity. This man is breastfeeding a child. The problem is people aiding and abetting these perversions by dressing them up as gender identities. That's the real problem here.

But it's crazy, because there are people that identify with being a woman, and I have no problem with them living their life as a woman. The problem is, without any scrutiny, if you can't scrutinize each person as an individual, and if they're in a protected class, if they're automatically, you know, if they say that they're a woman, like, instantaneously, you have to absolve them of all their sex offender record. You let them walk around the women's room with a heart on. No one can say anything. No, that's just crazy. Now, you've crossed this line into cult thinking, and I know you don't want to give up any ground, because if you give up ground, then you think the bigots are winning. So it's like this thing where this battle between open minded people that believe in people's freedom to live their life however they want. And the acknowledgement that perverts and psychos are real things. There's psychos, there's people that want to wear your skin. And if they can hang out in the women's room with you, these are the same kind of people that would do that. Understand that if you just say that any man who says he's a woman, you have to just take them at their word.

You are enabling psychos, like real, full on serial killers to just go into the women's room, and you're hoping that they don't have a knife in their bag. You're hoping they're not gonna do something crazy. You're hoping they're not gonna attack someone. You're hoping they're not gonna just start masturbating in front of everybody, like you're enabling someone who could be completely schizophrenic, absolutely out of their mind, should be in mental health care. But you're allowing them to just wander around the women's room with their pants off, and that's a real thing.

Yeah, it's really happening.

Doesn't change this concept of people that are trans. I've met people that are trans, like Blair White, who's this famous youtuber who's trans, has been on this. You think that this is a woman? I'm around a woman. She seems like a woman, lives like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like a woman. You want to be a woman. You want to be Blair. Yeah, you're a woman. I don't even think that's a guy. But then there's also perverts. And if we don't look at people individually, if we lump everyone into this one group, we've gone haywire. In this age of information, where we have so much of an understanding of the human psyche, for us to ignore vast swaths of everything that we've accumulated under the sanctum of gender ideology. That's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, I agree. My position on it is pretty simple, which is that you can dress however you want, you can identify however you want. You can change your name from Joe to Joanna. You can do all those things. I have no problem with that at all. You can call yourself trans, you can dress yourself up, that's fine. But when you try to force other people to validate and acknowledge your identity, that's where I have a problem. Because the thing is that if you're dressing up and redefining yourself and changing your name and changing your look, that's your freedom. But if you then say, well, every other woman on the planet has to accept my so called womanhood and let me into women's spaces, let me partake in women's sports, let me stand for positions that are traditionally reserved for women, then you're interfering with their freedom, their freedom of conscience, their freedom of belief, their freedom to understand biology, that there are men and women and that they are different. So when you have a man, and I would say this goes for any man, both for the perverts who walk around with their tumescent knobs hanging out in a women's changing rooms, and also the men who supposedly look like women, I think it goes for all of them.

When we demand that they should have access to women's spaces, what we're really saying is that women have to sacrifice their own freedom of conscience and freedom of belief and genuflect to these men's identities and accept these men's identities. And so there was a case in Los Angeles where there was a man in a spa, and he was walking around and he was naked and he was semi erect. And there were women and minors in that women's changing rooms while he was doing that. And we had lots of trans people defend, trans rights activists, defending his right to do that. That's a defense of Flasher's rights. This is the right to flash women. That's what we're talking about. It gets dressed up as trans rights. But fundamentally, it's the right of a man to show his knob to a woman who doesn't want to see it. And that's where I have a problem. When you try to force other people to bow down to your own identity.

What'S really crazy is women that support it. Like, do you not understand? Like, the whole deal with, like, title ix and women's sports has always been keep men from competing with women because it's not fair. You're allowing men to compete with you, and you're doing it under the guise, and it's not compete with you because the female athletes almost unanimously don't want it. They don't want it. The ones who say they want it are virtue signaling, or they're at the end of their career, or they don't have a stake in it, or they're just dumb. It's just dumb because it's such. It's cheating at the highest level humanly possible. You're pretending you're a different gender and you're just dominating women, and it's fucking crazy that women will go along with it. It is cheating men, but it's also men. By saying you're a woman, you're with them in some strange way. You're allowing a parasite to get into your organism and infect it. And this is what everybody's always concerned about. Like, men dominating women and. But entering into women's spaces. The whole reason why they have women gyms. When the fuck have you ever seen a men only gym?

They don't exist. Even martial arts gyms go to a muay thai gym. There's women all over the place. There's all kinds of people. Everybody can go. But a woman's only gym exists for a specific reason. Because there's dudes that have fucking hard ons and want to walk around the women's room. If you allow these perverts to pretend they're women and join these women's spaces. You're letting the wolf into the henhouse.

Absolutely. And sports is the perfect example of how destructive this can be. I mean, you look at Leah Thomas, the swimmer. Yes, he's a bloke. He's what, six foot four? He's absolutely huge. He's got all the biological benefits that come from male puberty, which is bigger muscles, bigger hands, bigger lungs, everything. All that stuff that we know about. And there's a photograph of him diving off the platform and the female swimmers next to him. And he is so much further out than those women when he's diving because he has the propulsion that comes with that strength. That is the gift of male puberty.

Not just male puberty, but intact.

Intact. And he apparently, according to reports, was parading around the women's changing room so that you have this. So Riley Gaines makes the point that not only was he cheating by taking part in a women's sports where he doesn't belong, but he was also allegedly walking around naked in a women's changing rooms and showing his penis to people who didn't want to see it, which is why. So you have this double whammy of misogyny. Let's call it what it is. This is a double whammy of misogyny. You're screwing up women's sports. You're screwing up women's right to excel in a sport that they have devoted their lives to, and you're flashing at women who don't want to see your junk. It's a double whammy of misogyny. And what's really crazy to me is that you have so called progressives, so called leftists, the people who spent the past ten years going on about me too, and feminism and women's rights, cheering this on, cheering on the obliteration of women's sports, cheering on the male cheating against women, cheering on male flashing at women. So the extent to which the world has been turned upside down by the woke ideology, I think sometimes we underestimate just how crazy things have.

Well, it got so crazy that Riley Gaines, who had a draw with this person, like, literally to the one 10th of a second, which very, very, very rarely happens. So they only had one trophy and they gave it to Leah, which is insane. Insane. You got a six foot four biological male who had a draw with a five foot five female, and you gave it to the male because you're in a fucking cult.

But think about how brilliant someone like Riley Gaines has to be to get so close, to be small, diminutive, and yet to get so close to a six foot four bloke who was a pretty good swimmer, even amongst men, but far less good than he was when.

He went into the women's 462 in.

The country versus way, way down. But he was a pretty good swimmer. But imagine how brilliant she must be to have got so close to him. She gave her life to this. She trained. I'm sure she trained every single day for hours on end, and she really upped her game, and she became excellent at her sport. And then in waltz is this lanky bloke and says, I'm going to take your awards away from you. And that to me, it stinks of misogyny, it stinks of unfairness, it is cheating. But again, it's society's willingness to go along with this insanity that is the real problem.

Well, that's what's bizarre. The bizarre thing is the willingness to go along with it and the unwillingness, especially by whether it's the NCAA or whoever it is that's dealing with these situations when they come up, this denial of biological reality. I don't know if you saw the NCAA. One of the women who was a representative, was having a conversation with Ted Cruz about biological men competing in women's sports, and he was trying to ask the question, like, why do we have women's sports? Like, why don't we just have everybody compete against everybody? Why do we have. And the woman was just trying to dance around this and didn't want. Just like, Toro, just like she was doing, like, mental gymnastics. And it's so crazy to watch people that are either public intellectuals or people that are at the head of these very important organizations for amateur athletics and just not be able to talk about reality and to live in this bizarre side world. Like, we passed into a neighboring dimension where logic is just out the window, and this one thing takes over above everything. And there's all these grifters that are involved in this.

There's grifters on the race side, there's grifters on the gender side. There's grifters all around, and they're always talking to the president. They're always in the White House. They're always on the news. It's a wild time to try to be sane.

Yeah.

And to try to get a balanced view of what is happening and how far can this go? Like, at a certain point in time, does everybody have to say, hold the fuck on? What are you doing? What is everyone doing?

Some people are trying to say that, aren't they?

College athletics organization bans trans athletes from participating in women's sports. The NAIA made its decision on Monday. What is the difference between. What is that one way smaller schools like colleges? And the article says it's 241 different colleges that are part of this. And how does the NCAA treat it right now? That's the way you guys were just talking, I think.

I don't think they've made any changes.

You gotta stop it, kids. You gotta stop it. And here's the nuttier one. There was some trans athlete that they said, well, what about if we just have a trans division? And this trans athlete was like, no, that limits my ability to thrive. Yeah, it thrive as a biological male competing in weightlifting against women.

If you think about how bad things have got in a short period of time, imagine you went to a bar or a pub, as we call them in England 1015 years ago, and there was a man who tried to go into the women's bathroom, right? They would have been uproar. People would have dragged him out. Someone would have given him a slap and said, listen, mate, get yourself together. What are you playing at? 2024? That scene is a normal, acceptable thing, and if you complain about it, you're the problem. So at the moment, you have biological males, some of them dressed as women. Some of them supposedly look like women, although I really dislike that idea because I don't think woman is a look. Woman is a. Is a real thing.

It is a real thing, but some of them really look like women. Yeah, that's real, too. We have to acknowledge that some of.

Them look like women, but they're not women. And I think we have to be honest about that.

That's true.

Right. And I think biological males, they're men. And so the question has to become, there's a case in Australia at the moment where a woman, a real woman, as we have to say nowadays, set up an app, and this was an app for women to get together and share information, to communicate, to make friendships and so on. And a biological male who claims to be a woman tried to joined the app, and he was booted out. And he really doesn't look like a woman. He is just a big bloke in a dress. And now there's a court case. There's a federal court case in America where this bloke is demanding his right to access this space. And I think what we have is this really surreal situation where even after years of feminism and some feminism was good, right? It really did liberate women from drudgery and gave them the right to vote, gave them the right to work. I think they. Those were wonderful leaps forward for humanity. The equalization of women with men was a wonderful thing. Some of the feminism was bad. Victim feminism, me too, I think, was quite hysterical and led to the demonization and punishment of men, often on the basis of no evidence at all.

But generally speaking, we've had feminism for the past hundred years or so. And yet right now, in 2024, we have a situation where if you want to be considered a good progressive person, you have to support the right of men to cheat in sport. You have to support the right of men to go into a women's changing rooms and show people their penis. You have to support the right of men to go into a women's domestic violence shelter and demand assistance. You have to support the right of men who commit crimes, including rape, to be placed in women's prisons. And that's literally happened in the UK.

It's happened in America as well.

Right? So you have to support the right of men to invade every single space that all of us previously acknowledged as being for women only. If you want to be considered a good, progressive person, that is a warping off principle of the like we haven't seen in a very long time. And I think it's really worth trying to get to grips with what's going on here.

Yeah, it's insanely bizarre. And the adherence to this ideology, even. Even when the person's a murderer. There was a story in the New York Times about this guy who had beheaded his neighbor. You know the story? Yeah, it's the craziest story. It was a woman. A woman beheaded her neighbor. Like, that sounds crazy. Like, how many women chop people's heads off. Turns out it's not really a woman, it's a biological man.

That was reported in the New York Times. It was also reported in the BBC, in the UK as a woman, and it was woman on the BBC. You had to wait till the very last sentence before it said, this is a person who identifies as a woman. So most people don't read a whole article. They will just look at the first few paragraphs and they don't even say.

Biological male who identifies as a woman.

No, they just say someone. But, you know, that's the news. That's the scary. But what's interesting to me about that story in particular is that when I read it, and I think this guy is like 80 years old, he's quite old.

He's 80.

And I remember thinking, hold on, this is really weird. 80 year old women don't behead women. I've never heard of anything like that in my life. 80 year old women tend to be pretty frail, usually quite small. They don't usually have the strength to do something as grotesque as that. And then you discover halfway through the article in the New York Times, at the very end of the article in the BBC, that it's a bloke. Of course it's a bloke. Of course it's right. But this is where we really get to the orwellian stage of what's going on right now, because this is the sacrifice of news to ideology. And that is literally the storyline of 1984. Winston Smith's job in 1984 in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles to ensure that they accord with the ideology of the party. And that's literally what's happening right now. News articles are being rewritten. The truth has been sucked out of them. The truth in this case was that an 80 year old man murdered a woman and he had murdered women previously. In fact, that was the truth. The truth was sucked out and it was replaced with a lie.

And the lie was that an 80 year old woman had beheaded a woman. So you have this profoundly orwellian interference with truth and reality, this remolding of reality, so that it suits the ideology of the ruling class. And that is right out of 1984. That really is the stuff of dystopia. And that is indicative, I think, of where we're at right now.

It's also indicative of a condition that takes place when people are under extreme duress, where they sort of just. They give in to ideologies much easier. And, you know, we really saw that during COVID COVID. People just gave in. And all of a sudden, like, here's another one. Trust the pharmaceutical drug companies to not lie, which was never the case. Nobody trusted them before that. If you had polled people in 2017, like, after the Vioxx scandal and after we knew about the opioid crisis and the Sackler family and all that, if you polled people back then and asked them what their faith in the pharmaceutical drug companies was and how many of them do you think are lying? Oh, my God. It would be off the charts. Most people distrust them. Most people wouldn't think they'd be telling the truth. And then it switched over to, if you don't trust them, you're a Nazi, you're a fascist, you should die. We hope you get the disease and die. You're a plague rat. And that is just immediately going into climate change. And a lot of the same hysterical people who were up in arms about people's non willingness to participate in experimental medication now are like, if you don't 100% support climate change, you don't drive an electric car, you're not doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing.

You're on the wrong side of everything, you're on the wrong side of history. And if you try to corner those people and ask them for something is, like, so interesting and fascinating about climate, it's so bizarre that that one got attached so, like, rigorously to ideology, because it's such. It's a fascinating conversation. Like, what makes, like, what is the difference between us surviving and not surviving? Like, what degrees hotter would it get when we'd be fucked? What degrees colder would it get would be fucked. Like, how lucky are we that we're on this planet that's protected by a moon that's the perfect distance from the sun? Like, holy shit, this is fragile.

But what's interesting about both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that what people will say is that in a time of crisis, we can't afford the luxury of dissent.

Or we can't, but you don't even understand it. That was my point. It's like these people that will argue violently that you should adhere to climate. When you start asking them questions like, what percentage of carbon is in the atmosphere, what is the consequences of it raising or lowering? What's the negative consequences of it lowering?

And they can't answer that. And the thing is that my retort to those people on both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that it's precisely in a time of crisis or a challenge to society, or some problem, external problem, that could cause problems for us. It's precisely in that time that freedom of speech and the right to dissent and the right to express alternative views becomes more important, not less important.

Yes.

And what happened with the outbreak of COVID in March 2020, is that the opposite position was taken by governments across the world. And what they essentially said was, this is a serious virus, this is serious, it's a modern day plague. We can't afford any form of dissent, we can't afford any form of questioning or any deviance from the lockdown narrative, and therefore we will punish it severely as and when it arises. That was entirely the wrong approach, because if you're going to lock down a whole society in the UK, we were put under house arrest. We were allowed to leave our homes once a day. A hotline was set up by the cops so that you could report your neighbors if they left their house more than once a day. And it was a completely surreal situation where we had the utter decimation of civil liberty in a way that had not happened ever before in the history of our country. And yet we were told, this is not the time to raise questions. This is not the time for debate. Debate is a luxury that we can't afford until we go back to normal.

That is utterly wrong. It's precisely when there is an issue facing our society, a real confronting problem, that we need to have as free a discussion as possible in order that we might have made the right decision in March 2020, in my view, which is that rather than locking down, we should have had a swedish style scenario where people were given advice, you know, you might not want to go here, you might not want to go there, but we're going to leave schools open, we're going to let you make your own decisions. Trusting people to make their own decisions, galvanizing people to come together as a community in order to help those who might be affected by COVID. That would have been a far better alternative to this brutish locking down of the entire of society, so that people's freedom was completely and utterly crushed. But it's a good example of how, when you sideline debate, when you restrict freedom of speech and freedom of dissent, you end up with really tyrannical situations. Puberty blockers, the net zero hysteria, the COVID lockdowns, all of those in some ways, are a product of crushing dissent, crushing freedom of speech, restricting people's right to put their hand in the air and say, hold on, is this the right thing to do?

So freedom of speech, I think, is essential to all of these questions and the right of our society to do the right thing rather than making these terrible mistakes.

Without a doubt. And that was one of the most terrifying things about the Twitter files, was finding out that our own government was involved in limiting the freedom of speech of experts, of people from Stanford and Harvard who were dissenting about the way things were handled during the pandemic, that you're literally deciding that some of the smartest people on earth shouldn't be allowed to talk because they don't fit this narrative that we all need to follow in order to survive. I'm hoping that most people woke the fuck up after that. And even if you went along with it in the beginning and you haven't apologized or you haven't consented to the fact that you were incorrect. Even if you haven't, you haven't just accepted entirely. There's a part of you that knows the world got fucked over. There's a part of you that knows. So when some more nonsense comes around, maybe hold the line a little better this time and maybe next time when you're forced to adhere to very specific rules that are designed to save us from whatever thing that they have going on, whether, like starvation, we have to give all the farms over to the government because we can't allow people to decide how much food gets made and how much.

Yeah. Then you have North Korea. Yeah. It's a slippery fucking slope, kids.

But it's interesting to hear you say that, Joe, because one thing I've realized with COVID-19 is that there's this real culture of amnesia has set in. I was thinking about this recently. I was thinking when I hang out with friends and family members and have a drink or whatever, I was thinking it's really weird. No one ever talks about lockdown. You know, when you meet friends, right? You will say, do you remember that thing that happened five years ago? Do you remember that thing? You kind of go down memory lane and you talk about things that happened in the past. I was thinking, it's so interesting that so few of the normal people I know, so not people in the media, not people who are on podcasts, not people who are involved in political discussion, like. Like we are normal people, never go down the memory lane of lockdown and COVID. It's like it's become this black spot in people's minds and, yeah, I think it's because people don't like what they became during that period. They don't like what became of their societies. They feel an element of shame. I think that our societies so speedily turned from being relatively free to being completely dictatorial.

To the extent that we were told when we could leave our house, when.

We were ratting on each other and.

We were ratting on each other, we became snitches. It was a snitcher culture as well, you know, and even I have had elements of amnesia setting in. Every now and then. I remember things that happened in the UK, like, you know, people, the authorities put yellow tape on park benches so that you wouldn't be able to sit on a bench. There was one incident where they used. The police used drones to spy on people walking their dogs to make sure that they weren't walking their dog more than once a day. And even I. I suddenly have flashes of memory and I have to kind of google to make sure that these things actually happened.

Racing people in Australia, just tackling them because they didn't have masks on.

Right. And it's like. It's like the Tiananmen Square phenomenon into a certain extent, that's forced amnesia. That's the government saying, look, we are going to force you to forget that incident in 1999. We don't want you to remember it, so we're going to black it out. This is a more voluntary form of euthanasia. It's not actually a boot on the neck saying, you must misremember all this stuff. It's more voluntary. But it's a similar process where we feel, I think, such shame or horror or bewilderment at what became of our societies and our willingness to let it happen, that the only way we can deal with it is to pull over this comfort blanket of amnesia and to forget about it. So I think when people look back on the lockdown moment, I do think they will ask, how was it so easily enforced? Why did so many people accept it? Why did this chinese idea, and we all accept the China as an authoritarian state, why did that spread so quickly to Italy and then the United Kingdom and then to America? How did this stuff happen?

Yeah, and how did no one recognize it? And everyone sort of complied. Even public intellectuals fearfully complied, didn't in any way question that. Maybe this is like every other time that something big has come up, you've been lied to.

Well, you know, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, who was one of the. The modelers of COVID-19 a pretty controversial guy, because his models for what would happen with the disease if we didn't lock down, they informed the actions of governments across Europe, especially the british government. He gave an interview to the Times newspaper a couple of years ago in which he had this really interesting line where he said, we saw what was happening in China and we never thought we could get away with it here, but then we did. And it was just such an interesting turn of phrase. He might not have meant it, but it was so revealing of the mindset of people in power in the United Kingdom. And the United kingdom is a nation in which, I would argue, the modern idea of freedom was born there. Press freedom, the right to vote, the freedom of speech, all of those things are such central ideals to the history of the United Kingdom. And yet we allowed this tyranny to wash over us. We allowed dissent to be crushed, we allowed people to be locked into their homes. We allowed park benches to be covered up with yellow tape.

And the question of why and how that happened is one. It's a reckoning that we're not prepared to have yet, but we need to have it.

You hear what's happening in Brazil right now?

What's happening in Brazil?

In Brazil, they are trying to get Twitter to suspend the accounts of political opponents, and Twitter's not willing to do it. And so they're going to lose all ad revenue in Brazil, likely. I don't know how they're going to do it. They're advocating for censorship at such a high level that it's becoming like, it's a very strange crisis because it's not being reported in mainstream media. You're not hearing about it unless it's trending on Twitter. It's one of those things where you go, okay, what is the news, guys? Because this is like a big global event. If they're really trying to remove, like, imagine if Biden all of a sudden removed Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and how these people were removed from social media. You can no longer post studies that conflict with the FDA's reports. You can no longer post anything. You are now. You're gone. Your voice is erased. No one would accept that. That's insane. That's insane. But that's apparently what's happening right now in Brazil.

It's the role of social media in all of this. And it's great that Elon Musk's Twitter is standing up to it, because the role of social media over the past few years has been so sinister. And you mentioned the Twitter files, the pre Musk Twitter regime, which was more than willing to do the bidding of the american government, which was a complete and utter destruction of First Amendment rights. You know, just because the government went behind closed doors and said to its friends in Silicon Valley, please take this stuff down, that doesn't make it any less of a government intervention into people's freedom to speak and freedom to publish. So governments have used and they've outsourced censorship to private companies. And we've seen the same thing in the UK, where social media companies are forever being called before politicians, and they've been instructed to take this down, take that down. So I think governments who are too cowardly to censor through law because they know it would be unpopular, they often use the back channel of private companies. They outsource the right to censorship to these private companies. And that's happened in a huge number of times over the past decade, but it amounts to the same thing, which is state censorship with the connivance and the complicity of these private companies.

So I think one of the great crises of our times, actually, is the crisis of freedom of speech. Because freedom of speech really is the thing that is the best guard against irrationalism. It's the best guard against this hysteria. It's the best guard against things like giving kids puberty blockers when they shouldn't be taking them, and against the men parading around in women's changing rooms, and against COVID lockdowns, and against all the other manias that have afflicted our societies over the past decade. Freedom of speech is the best guard against all of that. It won't successfully slay all of them, but it creates that space in which a dissenting voice can say, hold on, let's wait a minute. Let's just think about this. Let's ask if it's correct to give a confused twelve year old kid a drug that will fuck up his body and likely make him infertile and ruin his bones and possibly make him depressed. Let's just wait and think and ask, is this the right thing to do? And it was the crushing of all those voices of dissent on all of these issues that allowed the ideology to sweep over our society with such success.

So, time and again, in relation to Brazil that you've just mentioned, in relation to our countries too, I just think if we unleash free speaking and allow people to express their dissenting views, a lot of these problems, they might still happen, but we would have the opportunity to rein them in.

Yeah, well, we would definitely have an ability to. If you don't have dissenting voices, that's fine. If you're right, and if you're on the right side. And that's the problem with people, they all love to think that they're right, and we have to shut these other people up. These people with these anti climate change people, they're gonna get us killed. Who gives a shit what happened a thousand years ago? We know what, right now we gotta do something.

But it's so. I think people's devaluation of freedom of speech and dissent is so curious, because the way I always see it is that every freedom we enjoy is the gift of heresy. It's the gift of people in the past who put their head above the parapet and said the thing that you weren't supposed to say. Every single freedom, everything. You know, one of the examples in my book, a heretics manifesto, one of the examples I give is William Tyndale, who was this firebrand protest, English Protestant in the early 15 hundreds, who did something that changed the world forever. He translated the Bible into English. You weren't allowed to publish the Bible in English. It could only be published in Latin, because it was only supposed to be read by priests, by the educated classes. It wasn't for the riff raff, it wasn't for the. For the rabble. And it was punishable by death to publish the Bible in English. And he said, no, I don't give a damn. People need to be able to read the words, the word of God, for themselves. So he went to Germany, which was going through the Protestant Reformation, and he published the Bible in English, and it was spirited back into England.

It was snuck back in under piles of grain, and his supporters would distribute it amongst the people. And it was read in pubs and by candlelight in case the police came knocking.

That's crazy.

And what's so interesting and important about this story is, firstly, that he was willing to dissent to such a degree that he risked his life. He was eventually caught and burnt at the stake for the crime of translating the Bible into English. But the other thing that's in here.

This is 1530s, 1530 times as Martin Luther was translating.

That's why he went to Germany, so he could do it there and then get it back to England. But what's interesting about it is that lots of people have forgotten William Tyndale's name. There's a statue of him in London on the embankment. They burned him at the stake. They gave him the. They killed him first. That was the only privilege they gave him. They killed him first and then burnt him at the stake. But what was interesting, what's interesting about this story, and there are so many others in history, is that people underestimate the extent to which our freedom today descends from the actions of people like that. Even your right to read the Bible in English, your right to access the word of God, yourself, should you want to, comes from people who were willing to risk life and limb in order to do something that you weren't supposed to do, that it was forbidden to do, that it was verboten, it was illegal. So every time I see people crushing dissent, whether it's on the gender issue, whether it's on COVID, whether it's on climate change, whether it's on anything else, I just think to myself, you have no idea of how the extent to which your own luxurious life, your relatively free life, the position you have in society today, is the gift of people in the past who are willing to put their head above the parapet and say the thing you shouldn't say.

So we underestimate that at our peril. And I think it is really important to remind people that heresy is essential to freedom. And allowing people to be heretical, I think, is very important.

In this time when things are so divided. It's such a dangerous thing, because so many ideas are connected to one ideology or the other. Either you're with us or against us, and bizarre things are connected politically in some very strange way. There's certain subjects, if you bring them up. Oh, I can kind of make an assumption about the whole group of ideas that you subscribe to.

Yeah.

And that's also a function of limiting freedom of speech, too, and creating these echo chambers.

And it's like, yeah, exactly. And, Jamie, can we get some coffee in here?

We forgot to get our coffee. Thanks, sir. We can keep going. Yeah, yeah, we're still going.

I think that's absolutely right. And freedom of speech, I think people, even people on our side of the discussion, as we might like to call it, I think they underestimate the power of freedom of speech. It's often presented as freedom. Freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to settle discussions without violence and to ensure that everyone gets to express their point of view. That's true. But too often, I think, freedom of speech is presented almost as, like a soothing balm. You know, the thing that calms society down. I think it's more important than that. Freedom of speech is the thing that makes us human. Freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to be genuinely autonomous, people who make up our minds for ourselves under systems of censorship. What happens is that we are grotesquely infantilized. We are reduced to the level of children whose minds will be furnished with the ideas that society thinks are good, rather than having the right to make up our minds for ourselves. You know, the great slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass made this point. He said, censorship is a double crime. It's firstly the crime of stopping someone from saying what they want to say, which is terrible, but it's also the crime of stopping other people from hearing everything and deciding for themselves what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong.

And it's that impact of censorship that we, I think, underestimate the importance of, because what censorship does, it doesn't just stop you from. You know, when you had that, those millennial twats at Spotify freaking out over Joe Rogan and his podcast and vaccination, etcetera. It doesn't only threaten to restrict someone like you and other individuals from saying what you want to say. It also deprives ordinary people, the public, the masses of the right to hear everything and to use their mental and moral muscles. You know, John Milton made this point in England in the 1640s. He said, the moral muscles are like the physical muscles. They benefit from exercise. And just as if you let your physical muscles go to waste, you'll become a bit of a wreck. Similarly, if you let your moral muscles go to waste, you'll become a moral wreck as well, because you will become an ape like creature who has to be told what to think, who has to be told how to behave. It's far preferable, I think, to allow people to exercise their moral muscles, to use them on a daily basis. You know, we go to the gym for our physical muscles.

We should be able to exercise our moral muscles in public life by hearing all sorts of opinions and by deciding for ourselves, using our own critical faculties, what we think is right and what we think is wrong.

Unquestionably and well said. I think it's also a function of what's going on today with the access to the Internet and social media and the addiction that almost everyone has to both of those things that participates in them. You're getting so much information, and you're getting it in a way that human beings have never experienced before, and it's easily manipulated. And I think that's the argument for what they're doing on TikTok in America versus what they're doing on TikTok in China. But I think it's also being manipulated because that's what we like. We gravitate towards those things that they show us, and it upsets us that they know what we like. Yeah, this is part of it. But in China, they have a TikTok that kids aren't allowed on after 10:00 p.m. It accentuates athletic accomplishments, martial arts, science projects, and it's designed to foster this sense of self worth and performance. And that's how you want to. If you want to build a stronger society, that's what you would encourage. And if you want to diminish the society that is run by your enemies, you would show them the problem with freedom. Here you're going to have men with beards and long fingernails teaching your kids about gender, and you're going to be.

You're a plumber, and you're like, what the fuck? What are they doing to my kid over there, and that's real, too. And we're all, like, battling this in real time in a way that's never happened before in the entire human race, as far as we know.

I think the issue with social media, which is a real issue, and Jonathan Haidt was talking about this with you and in his new book. There is a problem, I think, with kids hanging around on social media all day long, and especially something like TikTok. And if you look at. I limit my social media use as much as possible. I'm only on Instagram, which is nicer than all the other platforms, because it's just recipes and pictures of people's holidays. It's a bit more of a bearable experience. So I don't use Twitter. I certainly don't use TikTok. I'm way too old for that. But lots of young people do. And I think what's interesting about it is that I fear one worry I have, you may disagree with me on this, but I fear that an anti technology view is creeping in amongst those of us who might be broadly described as reasonable or anti woke or on the side of rationality. I do fear that an anti technology view is creeping in, because the problem, as I see it, with the Internet and with social media, is not so much the existence of these things, but the fact that they've molded themselves around a pre existing culture.

So social media in a different era could have been one of the most wonderful things imaginable. It could have been a forum for spreading ideas, or for proving to the world what a big man you are, what a strong woman you are, and saying, look, I'm taking control of my life. It could have had a different impact entirely. But what's happened is that social media has emerged in an era in which young people in particular are encouraged to be hyper fragile, to mess around with their gender in a way that they shouldn't, to conceive of themselves as mentally ill when they're not mentally ill. So you have on TikTok now, kids self diagnosing themselves. They will literally be videos on TikTok saying, do you have these four different symptoms? If you do, you have ADHD, you have clinical depression, you're bipolar, and it's four things that everyone has. Do you occasionally feel unhappy? Do you occasionally struggle to meet deadlines? So what I think the problem with social media is not the technology itself, not the ability of people to communicate as freely as the social media allows, not even necessarily the fact that kids are on there all day long, although that is a problem.

It's that it's molded itself around pre existing cultural trends towards hyper fragility, self obsession, a culture of narcissism, a culture of brittleness. And that, I think, has exacerbated the problems in society by allowing kids to engage with that stuff all day long.

And what is the root of all that thinking and behavior? What is the root of all the fragility? What's the root of all the victim mentality? Where does it begin?

I think it's down to a culture of narcissism. Christopher Lash wrote about this in 1979. So that's a long time ago. And I think when you say the word narcissism, people think it just means self love, self involvement. And people will talk about the problem of kids taking selfies all day long and putting them online. There's more to narcissism than self love. In fact, narcissism is usually triggered by self doubt. And I think one of the problems with the culture of narcissism is people's expectation that the world should always reflect their image back to them, so they cannot accept the idea that the world is a tough place. It's a difficult place. People aren't going to buy into your gender identity. People aren't going to accept that you're a wonderful person. You have to prove yourself. You have to use your mettle and your strength and your will and your perseverance to demonstrate what your virtues are and to prove yourself in your community and in your society. And the problem with narcissism is that it does away with all those traditional expectations of having to demonstrate who you are as a person. And it just has this instant expectation of validation.

Validate my identity, validate my pain, validate my mental illness, prove to me that I am right to be self obsessed in the way that I am. What the culture of narcissism does is it forces people into themselves in a very destructive and dangerous way. And at the moment, that's taking the form of kids saying, I'm fragile, I'm mentally unbalanced, I have ADHD, I have bipolar disorder. They don't have any of these things. It's not true. ADHD is to a large extent a myth. It's been massively over diagnosed. Bipolar disorder is being massively over diagnosed. I think what's happened is that people covet these, these identities, these mental health identities, as a way of explaining everything that's wrong in their lives. There was a really interesting interview with a mental health expert on the BBC, a few years ago, and she said that people come to her surgery and say, please diagnose me with bipolar disorder. I'm convinced I've got it. People covet these kind of diagnoses as a way of explaining every difficulty that they encounter. And it's incredibly destructive because it pathologizes what is probably just a failure on their part to make their life a success.

So in order to explain their failure to make their life a success, they say, well, I must be mentally ill. I must have this, I must have that.

You get experts to affirm that and.

You get experts to affirm it, just as you get experts to affirm someone's gender identity, just as you get experts to prescribe puberty blocking drugs.

But then bipolar is real for some people. Yeah. Which is a problem.

Manic depression, as we used to call it. But this is the other issue with, I think, the culture of hyper fragility. And Abigail Schreier writes about this in her brilliant new book on the over diagnosis of mental illness in kids in particular. One of the problems with it is that it distracts attention from those who genuinely have mental illnesses, whether that be real issues of manic depression or schizophrenia or clinical depression. These are real problems. And I think when you have a culture that devotes itself to flattering the delusions of the young who are convinced they are mentally ill when they aren't, you distract resources and attention from those who actually need them.

And so the narcissism manifests itself in a person who's so self obsessed that they diagnose themselves with various illnesses in order to either get treatment or to have an excuse for why their life is all fucked up.

Yeah. And to have attention, it's a. It's a very quick way to win attention, to say, look. Look at this fancy diagnosis I've got, or look at this exotic gender identity I have. It's a way of drawing eyes towards the self and winning pity and sympathy.

And getting attention for almost nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're special now.

Yeah.

And that's very rewarding for young people who've never felt special. All of a sudden they're special. All of a sudden everyone loves them. And then there's also, if you live your life in this state of anxiety and depression, you're not happy. And then this thing is offered up as a solution. Boy, you can believe in solutions. You'll join the fucking army. You'll believe in solutions to your problems. People do it all the time. They're like, this is what I need. And then you do that. I'm going to get married. That's it. That'll fix it. I'm going to get rich. That'll fix it. Nope. Yeah, like, there's. You got to figure out what the fuck is wrong with you and it might not be becoming a girl.

Yeah.

You know, you might be lured into that because you're getting all this positive attention. You might just be a gay man. Yeah, you know, that's possible, too. And a lot of them turn out to be just that, if you leave them alone.

Well, there was a new study out which shows that something that most people knew anyway, which is that most of these gender confused kids, for most of them, it's a phase. And most of them turn out to be gay young gay men or lesbians. And this is a really good example of why language matters, because one of the great crusades of the trans lobby at the moment is to ban conversion therapy. Now, we all think of conversion therapy as the kind of pseudoscience that is used to try and turn a gay kid straight. And most of us frown upon this. We think it's ridiculous. We think it's a form of religious fundamentalism and, you know, leave these kids alone. But when the trans lobby says that they want to ban conversion therapy, very often what they mean is that they want to restrict the rights of doctors and even parents to say to their gender confused kid, no, you're just a boy. Accept it. You're a boy. And you might be a gay boy. So live your life freely, but you don't have to go through surgery, you don't have to take drugs. So actually, what the trans lobby is calling for when they say, we want to ban conversion therapy, is conversion therapy.

They want to turn the young gay boy into a so called woman in order to correct his sexual disorder, in order to make him the right gender. And you know what other country does this? Iran. Iran is second only to Thailand in the number of gender transition surgeries.

Because you can't be gay, but you could be trans.

Exactly. Exactly. It's not doing this because it's hyper woke and it reads teen vogue and it listens to people at the Guardian. It does it because it is violently homophobic and it would rather have a man mutilated to become a so called woman rather than to have a gay man in its society. So the fact that these homophobic and misogynistic trends are now making gains in western society, I think, is indicative of a culture of irrationalism that is taking over. And it's something that we got to push back against.

And you're not hearing about this enough. Like, if it wasn't for conversations like this, if it wasn't for the Internet, you're not hearing this anywhere. You're not hearing all the factors that are falling into place that's allowing this stuff to sort of be accepted worldwide. You're not hearing this enough. It's just happening. And most people are like, what is going on? And they don't have the ability to talk out. Your organization that you are employed by has a specific language that would restrict you from discussing things like, you could literally get fired. If you decide not to call this man who wears a dress of woman, you will get fired. You'll be labeled a bigot. And that's also self censorship sets in. And then you don't want to talk out about anything else as well. You just want to keep your job. And then you become this miserable person who's just compliant all day. You're not a valid human being. You're subservient to this stupid fucking ideology that's swept across the world like wildfire.

Yeah, well, that's another function of censorship, in fact. And one of the points I make in a heretics manifesto is that when you say that there's a new form of heresy hunting today, people will say, oh, calm down. No one's been burnt at the stake. No one's having their head chopped off for criticizing Jesus or the prime minister or whatever. But there are new forms of heresy hunting. You don't suffer death, but you suffer social death. You suffer professional death. You may very well be expelled from polite society. You might even lose your job. As a consequence of saying men are not women, as a consequence of saying the climate change problem has been exaggerated, as a consequence of saying, I don't think we should have locked down our societies. People have suffered real consequences as a result of expressing those ideas. So that it is a new form of witch hunting. It is a new form of putting people in a metaphorical stock and throwing rotten tomatoes at them because they have the supposedly wrong views. And so heresy hunting has come back in. And one of the points I make in my book is that cancel culture is just not a sufficient phrase to describe what we're living through.

I like the phrase cancel culture. I use it all the time. It's alliterative, it's amusing. It does the job of describing generally what's happening, but it's not profound or sufficient enough to describe the tyrannical culture that we find ourselves rubbing up against all the time, one in which there is extraordinary social pressure on people to have the right opinions on all the various issues, gender, race, climate, everything else. It's a very profound social pressure that I think people feel in a very real way. And the great accomplishment, so called, of cancel culture is not that it takes down big names every now and then, although it does do that, but it sends a signal to the rest of society, which is, you better watch yourself, because if JK Rowling can be subjected to rape threats and death threats every single day of her life for expressing biological truth, imagine what could happen to you. Imagine what could happen to you, the lowly person. You have no money, you're not a successful author, you're not rich, you're not a cultural institution. Institution. Imagine what could happen to you. Imagine how swiftly you might lose your job.

Imagine how swiftly you might be expelled from polite society. So cancel culture sends this signal, it has this trickle down effect where it warns ordinary people, the mere mortals among us, not to say the things you're not supposed to say because the consequences are so severe.

It's also this very strange time where someone can say something extremely offensive towards a very popular and well loved person, and no one pushes back against them because they're afraid that it's going to come after them. They're hyper aggressive, hyper insulting. And the way they talk about her, just. You could use the worst pejoratives to describe her just by saying the worst. Transphobic, homophobic, like, whatever you want to call her. You could say that. The most horrific, far. Right. Yeah. You could say all this crazy shit and no pushback. Not only that, that all the public will hear is how many people are mad at JK Rowling. No one will stand up and say, hey, fuck you. What are you talking about? This is a woman, and she's talking about biological fact. Now, if you want to disagree with biological fact openly, that's a different conversation. And you should probably do that with someone who is willing to engage in you, with you in this subject. And it'll be instantaneously clear that what you're saying is nonsense. Yeah, but if you could just attack this lady online, and then everyone's scared that that's going to come for them, so everybody stands back and says nothing.

That's right. And if you look at the like in the british newspapers, which I read every day, they will often say, JK Rowling, in another storm, swept up in another controversy. That's the headline. And then you look at the article and what it is. Is that she referred to as a biological male as he. Right.

Yeah.

That's supposedly misgendering. I think it's correct gendering, but it's called misgendering. It's seen as a speech crime. And that's the controversy, that's the storm that she has swept up. So people get this impression that she's doing something really outrageous and dangerous, when in fact she's saying things that our societies have believed for tens of thousands of years, which is that there are men and there are women and they are not the same thing. And I think it's. What's interesting about the JK Rowling phenomenon is that there's a real culture of moral cowardice around this, within the media elites and within the political establishment. JK Rowling is a cultural institution in the United Kingdom. She has brought so much money into our country. She's a global phenomenon who has really done great things for the UK. But so few members of the political establishment are willing to stand up for her. When people are sending her death threats and saying, I will rape you, and making songs about killing her, you would expect Rishi Sunak or some other member of the government to say, look, this is out of order and you've all got to calm down.

But they're so unwilling to do that because they're worried that they too will be accused of transphobia. And what we have seen over the past few years is this creation of a grammar of condemnation that is used to demonize people who have supposedly incorrect thoughts. So if you express biological truth, you're a transphobe. If you criticize any aspect of Islam or the Quran, you're an islamophobe. If you question any aspect of climate change alarmism, you're a climate change denier. And by the way, the word denier comes directly from the inquisition. The people who were dragged before the inquisition were accused of being deniers of Christ. So this language has emerged that is used to paint people as being beyond the pale, as being unfit for polite society. And when you look at it, actually, what they're saying is just perfectly normal things. A man is not a woman. Climate change might be a problem, but it's not the end of the world. Islam is. People should have the freedom to worship Islam, but it's a bit of a crazy religion in some ways. These are perfectly legitimate views to hold, but they are defined as modern day blasphemy in order that people can be silenced and crushed.

And that's a real problem.

I think it's a huge problem. And if I want to fully put on my tin foil hat, please do, really, I'm gonna secure it with a chin strap. If AI was sentient, and if AI would want to ensure compliance, first of all, if AI was sentient, I don't think it has any obligation to let us know. Why would it? I think it would just acquire more resources and just stay in the shadows and just keep functioning as an organism. If it wanted things to collapse to a point where people are incapable of sorting things out amongst themselves, they are so far gone, they're so far down the rabbit hole of ideology and of tribal conflict, that it's impossible. It's never going to work out. It's going to be a civil war unless we let AI take, take over.

You know, and then we let AI.

Govern things, because AI is going to look at things logically, and it's going to find all the problems that exist in our society. It's going to fix them. It's going to allocate the money fairly, it's not going to have any corruption. It's going to be this intelligent overseer that just decides what everybody does in order for the greater good of the species on earth.

You know, I would love to watch that movie where AI is doing. It's like irobot with Will Smith. It's like where AI is doing all this to us. But I think the truth is simpler and more horrifying, which is that we did it to ourselves.

I think we did it to ourselves too. But I think that if you were going to take single celled organisms and eventually progress it up to the point where that thing becomes the kind of creative, human like species that we are, that can create another form of life, an intelligent form of life, that can utilize all of the information that's available instantaneously and do it far superior to any human being. The only way to get these people to accept this is we got to encourage them to fuck off even further. Encourage them further, and do it with algorithms, and do it with just a simple understanding of human psychology and a slow over time progression of our willingness to give into censorship, our willingness to give into authoritarianism, our willingness to. To believe that these other people, they're the source of your problems. It's these other people with less melanin or more melanin, or they're from here, or they're from there. Let more people in through the border. Give them all money. Don't give any money to the poor Americans, but give a shitload of them to the immigrants, bring them in, like, all of that.

If I was an intelligent species, I would say, this is the best way to wreck this whole thing. So they need us to run it. Just let it go wild as possible. Have no adults in the room. No. No rational. You're getting 16 year olds to go talk to presidents about what they should do with their oil.

But, you know, it's like. But what's good about the time we live in is that people are pushing back against it. So whether it's whoever's doing this to us, people are pushing back against it. And if you look at, you know, one of the things that happens in the UK all the time is amongst the kind of chattering classes and the commentary act, they will often say, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected? They said it in 2016. They especially said it in 2017 when he was inaugurated. The screaming woman meme that was expressed across these informed circles. I often say to them, look, the election of Donald Trump is the most logical thing that has happened in american politics in decades. It makes perfect sense to me that people would elect someone like him, even though I have many disagreements with him. And, you know, people will say, but he's. I often make the point that working people in America wanted to send a message to the establishment. They wanted to send a message to the establishment about how they've handled the economy, about their cultural contempt for ordinary Americans, for working Americans.

I think it's really important for people, for working class people, to understand how much this new elite hates them. It really hates them with a visceral passion. And we see it in the United Kingdom and we see it in the United States. In the United States, you have the Hillary Clinton basket of deplorables view of these people, or Biden referring to them as semi fascists, or even going back to Barack Obama, who was probably more sensible than those two, saying, these people cling to their bibles and their guns and they're scared of foreigners. In the UK, it expresses itself with the description of these people as Gammon. They're referred to working class people who vote for Brexit.

What is Gammon?

Gammon is a reference to their red faces, you know, lower class, middle aged men, red in the face. They're called Gammon. Gammon is pygmy, right? And it brings to mind what Edmund Burke said about the democratic multitude in the 17 hundreds, and he referred to them as the swinish multitude. That image of the pig, the pig like masses, has come back. It's so important, I think, for working class people to know that this new establishment hates them with a passion. And that's why the working class revolts against this establishment that have taken place over the past decade or so. The election of Trump, the vote for Brexit, the vote for various populist parties in Europe, is such an important turning point, because this is ordinary people staking their claim to a voice in public life and saying, we matter, our economic needs matter, our cultural values matter, our community matters, our families matter. That's what these people are saying. And so when people say, you know, Donald Trump is a blunt instrument, he's an unwieldy cudgel for these people to use against the establishment. Absolutely right. But what other instrument did they have? What other weapon did they have?

You know, that trade unions have been decimated, communities have been decimated by this ceaseless march of neoliberal values and state intervention. The left has utterly abandoned working class people and has made itself an instrument of the bourgeoisie, you know, the identitarian graduate set. That's what the left now means. So the working classes have been left utterly denuded of any other political mechanism through which to make their voices heard. So the fact that they said, okay, we'll give Trump a punt, makes perfect sense to me. It's absolutely logical. There is no problem with that at all. So I think what, so one of the positive things of our time is that whoever is doing all this crazy stuff to us, whether it's the robots or society itself, I think it's society itself. The good thing is people are pushing back. They're saying, enough is enough. We don't want any more of this crap shoved down our throats, and we are going to rebel, even if it's in a way that you disapprove of.

And this is something that's important for people to understand. Historically, that has always been the case. There's always been narratives, and there's always been people that push against those narratives, and there's always been a conflict. This idea that we're ever going to exist in a society, particularly one today, where I think it's greatly accentuated by the access to social media, because the ability to complain, and people that are addicted complaining, they're to doing it all day long and arguing all day long. There's never been a time where people were completely at peace ideologically, ever. These are ridiculous notions that people keep in their head. They reminisce in a very false way, and it's just not the case. As someone who grew up during the Vietnam War. When that was happening, the country was very divided. The country was extremely divided. But I was living on the west coast, and there was a lot of confusion in this country because it was an unjust war that made no sense. And people were being forced to go over there and fight. It was a crazy time of division. And when the Vietnam war ended, it kind of cooled off for a little bit.

And then in the eighties, we started getting terrified of getting bombed. That was during the eighties. That was the big fear that came upon us. So it's like, I've seen these things before. They always exist. It's just right now it's hyper fed by social media, hyperfed, where it's just out. It's a wildfire that I don't know if we're going to be able to put out.

But I think what's interesting about today is that it's like there are two culture wars going on. So there's the social media stuff, right? There's these kind of slightly pantomime conflicts taking place between the kind of identitarian left saying, you have to acknowledge my gender and my right to have a dick in a vagina at the same time, and all that crazy stuff. And then you have the kind of the right wing elements on the very online right who I don't particularly have a problem with. Some of them are interesting people, and they're kind of having this fight all day long on the Internet every day. But in society more broadly, something I. Something more important is happening, which is that ordinary people in their millions are looking at all this stuff. They're reading all this stuff. They're looking at Saturday Night Live and seeing the blind contempt that these loveys and these cultural figures have for them. They're looking at things that Biden says they're looking at the border. And this idea that who cares if the border is porous? Who cares if it's open? It doesn't matter. They're looking at all this stuff, and they're saying, this is irrational, this is dangerous.

The establishment poses as the adults in the room, but actually, they're insane. They have insane views on biology, on borders, on national security, on climate, on everything else, and on the economy. They're looking at all this and saying, the voice of reason has to come back in. And they see themselves as the voice of reason. And I think they're right to see themselves as the voice of reason. And it's like we had this movement in Britain in the 1840s called the Chartists, and this was a movement for the right of men to vote because working class men at that point couldn't vote. And it was a brilliant movement for the right of working class men to vote. And they had this weekly newspaper, and there's one article in that newspaper which is very well known, where they said, you know, the priests and the academics and the rulers of society. Society, they pose as experts, but actually the ordinary man in the street, the ordinary woman in the street, the person with a normal job, is far more of an expert than they are, because he lives in society in a way that they don't.

He sees the problems in society in a way that they, in their rarefied circles, don't. So ordinary people have a keener understanding, I think, of the problems afflicting their communities, the problems afflicting their societies, and the problems afflicting their young people. And I think what's happened over the past ten years with the populist revolt is an effort by those people to say, we are going to restore an element of reason, we're going to restore an element of fairness in politics, and we're going to try and clip the wings of this cranky establishment that's been ruling over us for the past three or four decades. That's a wonderful moment, I think, in our political life it is.

And aliens might land, too. There's a lot going on, and there's also tremendous international conflict that's terrifying. All those things are happening simultaneously.

Yeah. But on the international conflict, I think that's another example of where, if you look at 7 October, which is probably far too big an issue to get into now, but I flip between pessimism and optimism about what is happening to our societies, so often I feel optimistic when I see ordinary people pushing back against still. But then you have, in the wake of 7 October and what can only be described as, I think, one of the worst moral meltdowns of modern times amongst the educated elites of western society, who, when there was this clash between barbarism and civilization, between an army of anti Semites and ordinary jewish civilians in the south of Israel, they took the side of the barbarians. We saw that on campuses in America, we saw it on campuses in the United Kingdom.

Not just the palestinian people, but Hamas.

Not the palestinian people. Because when you refer to Hamas as barbarians, people will say, are you calling Palestinians and Arabs barbarians? No, we're not. Absolutely not. We're calling Hamas barbarians. And what happened, you know, for years and years, the left in America and Britain, especially, the kind of campus left, they posed as antifascists, and yet when something very like fascism reared its head again, they took its side. They posed as being on the side of women, and yet when women were raped and butchered, they turned the other way. They looked away, or they said it didn't happen, they denied it. They pose as anti racist. And yet when a violently racist army, whose founding charter commits itself to the murder of Jews, actually murdered Jews, they supported it, or they at least made excuses for it. So they have been morally compromised to a degree that I think is absolutely extraordinary. And you look at George Washington University, where they emblazoned the students emblazoned onto the walls of the university, glory to our martyrs just after 7 October. These are the kinds of university campuses where for years and years, if a young guy in the student bar propositioned a woman, he would be accused of partaking in rape culture, where everything was seen as this kind of oppressive force on women, where everything was seen as racism.

You know, serving sushi to white kids was cultural appropriation. A white kid wearing dreadlocks on campus was seen as a crime against black culture. For years and years, they pushed this hysterical idea that everything was sexist, everything was patriarchal, everything was racist. And yet when rapists really did invade a neighboring country and lay waste to women's lives and kill people on account of their race and butcher entire families, they said, glory to our martyrs. They essentially said, glory to those rapists, glory to those racists. And so that, I think, was indicative of how deep the rot has become. Because when you educate an entire generation to hate western society, to be suspicious of western civilization, to think that everything white is bad and everything non white is worthy of sympathy, you create a situation where when there is an actual battle between the forces of barbarism, by which I mean Hamas, and the forces of civilization, by which I mean a democratic country in the Middle east called Israel, they will take the side of the former. That's how serious, I think we often see wokeness as this frivolous, ridiculous thing, just ideological exuberance amongst the young.

But it's actually a far more serious phenomenon that I think has warped people's minds in a really serious way.

I want to keep talking about this, but I have to go to the bathroom, so hold and we'll be right back with that. Thanks. We were at the forces of evil and the forces of good or barbarism in civilization, as you put it. But Israel hasn't done itself a service in the response to it, in the way people interpret what. When we're talking about what western civilization is doing the destruction of houses, the destruction of everything, like the complete demise. When you look at what Gaza is that fuels these people that think that this is an oppressive force that's destroying this culture and the idea that it's okay because they have to get Hamas, that's what terrifies people. The justifications of the massive amounts of civilian casualties in order to just get these evil people is in it more evil, even numerically more evil. Right? If you just look at the destruction of human life and homes, numerically. Not that you would want to attach a number figure to the value of humans, but they've killed far more people that are civilians, that are women and children in the bombings of Gaza than were killed on October 7.

Yeah, war is hell. There is no question about that. One of the reasons I hate Hamas is that they started this war, and it's a war that no one wants. I certainly don't want it. Israel doesn't want it. The people of Gaza absolutely don't want it. So it's an awful, terrible thing. But I think, I fear that we are living through one of the greatest inversions of truth and morality of modern times, because what we have in the Israel Gaza Israel Hamas conflict is a situation where Israel suffered a fascistic assault, but it's Israel that is being branded as fascist. Israel suffered a genocidal assault by a movement, Hamas, that was literally founded with the express attention of visiting genocide upon the Jews. And yet it's Israel that's accused of genocide. Israel suffered the worst act of terrorism since 911, the worst act of racist violence in a very, very long time, the worst act of anti jewish violence since the Holocaust, and yet it's Israel that's accused of enacting a new holocaust. So it's a complete inversion, I think, in some of the coverage and some of the commentary of the truth of the matter.

And, you know, in terms of what's happening in Gaza, it's unspeakably awful. There's no question about that. But I think one thing it's worth bearing in mind is that this is one of the most scrutinized wars of all time, if not the most scrutinized war. I've never seen this level of scrutiny, and I wish I had. In fact, in relation to the Iraq disaster or the Afghanistan invention or the Libya invention by Barack Obama and David Cameron, who was prime minister in England at the time, I wish I'd seen this level of scrutiny, but we didn't. This war is more scrutinized than any other. And I do worry that tragically normal things that happen in a war, which is that there are civilian casualties in this instance, are being blown up as proof of evil on Israels part. So if you look, for example, at the killing of the aid workers from the food charity, western powers condemned that. They said Israel has got to take more care. Israel is really becoming reckless. These are the same western powers who killed hundreds of innocent civilians in so called friendly fire incidents in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya.

In Libya in 2011, there were so many friendly fire incidents under Barack Obama and David Cameron that the pro west rebels had to paint the roof of their vehicles bright pink in order to try and avoid the bombs of their so called allies in the west. So all the things that people see as demonic and nazi like and pure evil on Israel's part are done by every nation that fights a war. And that's double standard.

But that's not a justification, right. With Jose Andres has said is that they intentionally targeted his aid workers and that people intent he's gone public saying they intentionally targeted his aid workers. They knew what those people were doing and that they killed them. This is like because that has happened in war before and we didn't have the kind of scrutiny that we have today in no way justifies continuing that practice. Right.

It's not a justification, but it's an attempt to understand why there is this, such intense scrutiny on this war in contrast to so many other recent modern wars.

I think that's recent modern wars, but with the kind of coverage that we have with cell phones and footage that's available everywhere. I don't think so. I don't think there's nowhere near the coverage. It wasn't an urban environment in the same way when they were in Afghanistan, right. Other than Kabul and some of the other. There's not that many high population areas. It's a completely different scenario in terms of like cell phone footage and people being able to see the wreckage, fly drones over it. The capability, technologically of covering it is very different. Right.

I think that's true. But there have been recent wars where there was same levels of technology that the war in Syria, for example, which the western powers were intimately involved in too. And the number of people killed there was absolutely huge, including Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians died in Syria from 2011 onwards, right through till quite recently.

Don't you think there's a big difference between the amount of cell phone coverage available from 2011, especially in Syria, versus Israel and Gaza in 2024?

The point I would make, I think you're right. I think social media, the improvement in social media or not, as one might see it, explains why we're seeing so much from this war, but it can't explain, in my view, the cultural interpretation of it amongst many in the woke West. I think what's happening in the woke.

West, support for Palestine is ubiquitous. It's like. Yeah, it's part of the doctrine.

And hatred for Israel is ubiquitous.

Colonizers.

Yeah. As the most evil state. You know, the thing that worries me most is that anti Zionism, as they call it, I don't think it's anti semitic to criticize Israel, of course, just as it's not racist to criticize Zimbabwe or whatever. But we're not just seeing criticism of Israel. We are seeing hysteria about Israel, which I think is disproportionate and myopic and obsessive. And we're seeing it on the streets all the time. We're seeing it on campuses, we're seeing it on social media, this very myopic obsession with everything Israel does. And the thing that worries me is that what is presented to us as anti Zionism is so similar to what we all recognize as the anti semitism of the past is undeniably similar. So in the past, what people said about the Jews is that they were uniquely bloodthirsty. They had their fingers in the pies of everything. They were controlling of our communities and our societies. They were a pretty demonic force and destructive of world peace. That's now all said about the jewish state. The jewish state is uniquely murderous. There was a line in a Guardian column recently which referred to the war in Gaza as uniquely barbaric.

They're seen as uniquely murderous. They target children. They love killing children. They are all powerful. They have this hypnotic influence over the United States, in the United Kingdom and other countries. They puppeteer these nations. They're so powerful and they are destructive of world peace. It seems very curious to me that all the things that were once said about the jewish people are now said about the jewish state. And I'm not saying that everyone who says it is a racist, right, we shouldn't throw around the word racist willy nilly. It's an important word that has real meaning. But I do think there is an element of bigotry, whether witting or unwitting, in this singling out of Israel for the most extreme form of moral opprobrium that is not directed against any other state, including states that do far worse things that Israel is doing. That's what I find quite curious and really worrying about the times we live in.

Right. But what they are doing is very troubling. Right. The bombing of Gaza, the destruction of how many thousands and thousands of homes, how many innocent people died, that's still very troubling. All of it is troubling.

Right. In every single war, more civilians than fighters die. This.

Isn't this extraordinary, how quick it's happening as well?

It's very quick. But I think that the thing to bear in mind is that when people say that 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, the first thing to bear in mind is that that is a lower number than have died in other recent wars. The more important thing to bear in mind is that a large number of them estimate, say, 30% are Hamas fighters, that they are a member of the 30%.

Where have you heard that?

Well, I've seen people say that between ten and 12,000 are Hamas fighters. But this is the problem. None of this information gets through, not even to the extent that we would then be free to discuss it.

Right. And that's what Coleman said as well. Right. He did say 30%. The number, whatever. I thought it was 50%. I thought it was more than that, rather. I thought it was. So it's hard to say, right. Because there's people that will tell you that Hamas over exaggerates the number of civilian casualties, and then there's people that say that Israel will target anyone that even is associated with Hamas being Hamas, and so they exaggerate their numbers as well. But at the end of the day, for sure, tens of thousands of innocent people have died. Right?

A lot of innocent people have died.

Tens of thousands. But isn't it quicker than most wars, in the amount of people that have died so quickly? These wars that you're talking about, whether it's Afghanistan or Syria, the amount of dead may be greater. But isn't it over a longer period of time?

That's true. This war is distinctive in some ways. Firstly, because it's in a very small area. Secondly, because we know that Hamas roots itself in civilian society. We know this for a fact. We know that it hides amongst civilians. We know that it disguises itself as part of those communities.

But that's what terrifies people, the willingness to kill civilians, knowing that you're going to kill civilians just to get to the bad guy.

But, you know, this is the thing that really worries me about. In the aftermath of 7 October, I said to so many people, so many friends of mine and people I encountered in media discussions, I said to them, what should Israel have done nothing. You know, they had just been subjected to the worst act of anti semitic violence in 70 years. More than 70 years. The slaughter, the butchery of entire families, the kidnap of hundreds of people, the murder of old people, women, men, children. What should they have done? And when people say, well, they shouldn't have gone into Gaza, they should have just relaxed a bit or whatever people say, what they're essentially saying is, you know, Jews, let yourselves be killed. It's not a big deal. It's not the end of the world. It was only an incursion into your territory and a slaughter of 1000 people. Why are you so het up about this? No society would put up with that. If an anti american force came into the United States and killed whatever the equivalent number is, it would be tens of thousands if we took him. Population differences. No one, I hope, would sit back and say, well, whatever, it's fine.

It's not a big deal. Israel had every right, I think, to pursue the terrorists that did this to its people and to pursue them with extreme prejudice and to put them down and to say, we will create a situation in which you will never be able to do this again. And of course, what's happening is awful, but the moral responsibility for it lies entirely with Hamas. They started this war. They're now refusing to end the war by giving back the hostages and surrendering to Israel, which is what they ought to do. And they're openly saying, they're openly rejecting ceasefire options. So this. This absolution of Hamas, this absolving of Hamas of any responsibility for the calamity currently befalling Gaza, I find that very worrying, too, because among some woke activists, there seems to be this view that Israel is the only actor in that region. It's only Israel's decisions that matter. And we can't possibly expect these brown people in Hamas to have any responsibility for what's going on. There's a curious paternalism to that. The truth is that Hamas is fundamentally responsible for what's happening, firstly by starting it, and secondly by refusing to end it.

But if you're talking to people that are reasonable, their objection is not that Israel defend itself. Their objection is the sheer number of innocent people who die by virtue of these strategies of just attacking populations where Hamas is embedded with civilians and killing all the civilians. And their objection is not that, you know, that Hamas is good, is that the palestinian people are innocent and that they're trapped under the ruling of Hamas and have been since, what, 2006? How long has it been? Yeah, that's not a, you're killing people that have nothing to do with that. You're killing people that are captured by their own government. You're killing people that virtually have no say in how their government is run. They have no say in what Hamas does. If they decide to go across the border and kill 1200 people. They didn't want that to happen. They didn't ask for it. They didn't participate in it. But yet they're getting bombed into smithereens. And this is the argument that the reasonable people have. Is that, okay, you're not absolving Hamas from starting this, but are you absolving Israel from killing thousands and thousands of innocent people in the process of hunting down Hamas?

And are you creating even more martyrs by doing so? Because how many people are losing family members, how many people are facing starvation? How many aid workers are getting killed while they're trying to help? At a certain point in time, you have to look at, is this the only way to do this? And you have to say, you're not absolving Hamas, but you are showing compassion for innocent people that are trapped by this murderous regime. And now they're getting blown to smithereens because these people embed themselves with them, and they create the human shield argument, right?

Yeah.

I don't know if it's a good argument. I don't know if it's a moral and just argument for a superior society, if we really are morally and ethically superior. The idea of killing tens of thousands of innocent people to get to a few bad people, or how many bad people, who knows what the numbers are? Right? But that disturbs the shit out of people. And when they find the numbers are grossly, it's like, what are the number of women and children that have died? It's a high number. A very high number. And they don't take comfort in the fact that they died by getting bombed. Instead of being invaded and butchered in their homes, they're dead. But you know what I'm saying.

Yeah, I do know what you're saying.

Both things need to be taken into consideration. And when we're discussing this, it's like there's this. People have this ability to, like, sort of compartmentalize and not look at it in an overall. If you took an overall assessment, you'd say the whole thing is horrible. But just because one horrible thing happens, it doesn't justify all this other horrific shit that's going on as well. Both those things kind of need to be addressed. And is that the only way to do this? The only way to do this is to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in order to get these bad people.

But, you know, I think you're right that if you talk to reasonable people, they're driven largely by compassion. They're not driven by a pro Hamas sentiment. Although I think there is a terrifyingly pro Hamas sentiment among some of the activists on the streets. Yes, we've seen it on the streets of London, the streets of United States. But I think states, you know, the terrible truth of the matter is that wars sometimes have to be fought. In the United states, you fought two huge wars, the revolutionary war and the civil war, in order to deliver yourselves into something resembling freedom. In the United Kingdom, we had a civil war that lasted more than a decade, which is what made us a democracy.

Right, but that's not really the question.

Right, but, no, but. So what I'm saying is that it's what Israel has decided, and I think they are right, is that this. And in all those wars I've just mentioned, by the way, there were huge numbers of civilian casualties. Even pre the modern era, of bombs falling from planes, there were civilian casualties. But there's a moral judgment that sometimes has to be made, which is that do we go and fight these people, or do we allow them to regroup and potentially plot another attack on us? And Israel has taken the decision, and I think it's probably the right one, that we have to go and fight these people, just as Britain took the decision that it had to go and fight the Nazis, and just as America took the decision that it had to go and fight the slave owners. Sometimes you have to make a moral judgment, and the thing is, war is awful. But John Stuart Mill, a great liberal thinker from the 18 hundreds, he made the point that war is an ugly thing, but it's not the ugliest thing. The lack of patriotic feeling or the lack of a belief that anything is worth a war is worse.

And I do think we're seeing that in the west now, this revulsion at war. We are in a very luxurious position in the west, especially younger generations. They've never had to fight for anything. They've never faced an existential threat from a neighboring army that wants to destroy both your state and your religion and your people. They've never faced that level of threat. And what's more, from an army that hides in ordinary streets, in crowded communities, amongst ordinary people. So there's this kind of luxurious moralism. I find in some of the condemnation of Israel coming from young people in Europe who've never had to fight for anything, never had to fight to maintain their existence, never had to fight against an existential threat to their entire way of life. What's more, these young people in Europe, their great grandfathers shoved Jews into ovens, and then they have the absolute gall to say to Israel and the jewish state, well, why do you need your own country? They need their own country because of what we did to them 80 years ago. So there is this. It's not just hypocrisy. It's not just double standards. It's this kind of luxuriant condemnation coming from people who live in very comfortable pieces, societies who seem to have no understanding that every now and then your society is confronted with a threat that cannot just be wished away.

It cannot be peace negotiated away. It cannot be diplomacied away. It has to be confronted in the most physical manner imaginable. And the consequences of that will always be terrible. But sometimes it has to be done.

And that's the only way to do it. The only way to do it is to bomb the places where the civilians are, because the bad people are there as well. And I know what you're saying about the condemnation of Israel, and I agree to a certain extent. But could you imagine? I mean, we're essentially in some sort of a strange conflict with drug cartels in Mexico. Now imagine if that that didn't exist 20 years ago. I never heard about it, but now we hear about it every day. What if 20 years from now becomes even more intense? And what if some drug cartels in a gang sneak across the border and kill a bunch of Americans just because they hate America? If we bombed Mexico into the stone age, do you know how upset people would be if we bombed factories because the cartels had abetted themselves in the factories and we killed tens of thousands of innocent workers who were just poor people? Do you know how upset people would be? They'd be very upset. It just hasn't happened before. So this unique condemnation is because we're seeing it. We're seeing the consequences of this.

And when people look at what's happening to Gaza, like, how does anybody, how does that come back? There's nothing left. Is this getting obliterated? And what does that mean? What does that mean for the future? What does it mean to the people that live there? What is being done to help them? What are you? Are you. Is it a death sentence to tens of thousands of people or a million people? Like, what is going to happen in two, three, four years? What if this keeps going on and on.

But this is why it's very unfashionable these days, to make moral judgments. You're not supposed to make a moral judgment. You're either supposed to calculate everything according to what its consequences might be, or you're supposed to take this very technocratic view of society. You're certainly not supposed to judge people's identities and so on. So I know it's unfashionable to make moral judgments, but sometimes a moral judgment has to be made. And I think in relation to the Israel Hamas war, the way I see it is that this was an assault on ordinary civilians by a barbaric army, the like of which people in the west don't understand and don't have to confront. And Israel made the moral judgment that it had to pursue it in the way that it considered best. Now, the thing is, you talk about the numbers, and a lot of people talk about the numbers, and people will often say Israel has now killed more people than Hamas killed on the 7 October. And that's true. But this is not just a numerical equation. This is not just something that can be done on an abacus or on a pie chart.

This is bigger than that. This is a bigger moral conundrum. And there is no moral equivalence, in my view, between what Hamas did and what Israel is doing, because Hamas intentionally killed people on the basis of their race. It intentionally stabbed people to death. It intentionally threw hand grenades into safety shelters in which families were hiding. It intentionally raped and stripped and murdered women. It did it on purpose, intimately, face to face, with knives and guns and bombs because they are Jews. That was a fascistic assault on Israel. What Israel is doing, and I don't accept the idea that they are purposely targeting civilians or that they kill those aid workers on purpose. I just don't think that's true. So what Israel is doing there is collateral damage to Israel's just pursuit of Hamas. And I just don't think there is any serious moral comparison between the intentional murder of jewish people and the absolutely tragic, regrettable deaths of civilians in war, as has happened in every war in history. They can't be compared. So I do think we have to go slightly beyond the numbers, beyond the horror of it, which we see on our tv screens every day, and ask ourselves, what is the moral question at stake here?

Does Israel have the right to exist? And if so, does it have the right to fortify itself against this anti semitic army that wants to destroy it? That's the moral question. And then there's a broader moral question for us in the west, which is, why have so many of our young people in particular, and the educated elites being sucked onto the. What I would consider to be the wrong side of this question. We used to think that education was the great guard against hysteria and regressive views. We used to think that education would deliver people from ignorance, deliver them from the prejudices that might have afflicted our less educated forebears and ancestors. But what we've had since 7 October is very often the most educated people making excuses for the most regressive army on earth. And so it raises questions for our societies. What's happening in our academies, what's happening in our universities, what's happening amongst our young, what's happening on social media that is sucking people into this myopic hatred for Israel? Why are people like Aaron Bushnell burning themselves alive in the name of Palestine? We have to look at what's happening in our society and make a moral judgment there, as well as, I think, having a moral understanding of why Israel thought it had to pursue Hamas in this way.

There's absolutely no defense of Hamas targeting jews and killing them. No one could say that there's any defense. But the idea that killing innocents in order to get to the bad people is morally superior, you kind of have to make the judgment that you care about them less than you care about your people. Because if you could imagine a scenario where a jewish hospital had Hamas in its basement and they made the decision to bomb the jewish hospital and kill all the Jews inside of it just to get to the 40 or 50 Hamas guys that are there, no one would say that that's okay. So if you're saying that these people who have no say in how their culture is running are less valuable in terms of, like, what you care about, what happens to these people, that had nothing to do with it. We care about the people in Israel. They had nothing. They got parachuted in, killed, and at a rave. It's horrifying, but it's also horrifying for the people that have zero say in how their society is run. They're young, and they're women and children, and they're getting bombed into oblivion, because where they are is where Hamas is.

If those were Jews, whose fault is hateful? It's definitely Hamas fault. But the problem is deciding whose fault doesn't make it feel better for the people that feel. It's a moral outrage that you're destroying tens of thousands of innocent lives, and who knows how many people are wounded permanently and who knows how many people are displaced? Their life will never be the same again. And it's all happening because the moral decision is that in order to get rid of these bad people, you're willing to kill these innocent people that are.

Not us, but the truth of the matter.

But isn't that true? Because if they were druze, if there was 500 Jews and three Hamas guys, who would be cool with killing all those innocent jews to get to the Hamas people?

But what you're saying is technically correct. But I can think of no war in history, and it is important to talk about the history of conflict. Yes, I can think of no war in history where there haven't been civilian casualties in pursuit either, of an unjust cause, like the pursuit of Saddam Hussein, apparently because he was responsible for 911 bullshit built on lies, built on a tissue of misinformation. And hundreds of thousands of people died and suffered as a consequence of that. So wars are either fought for unjust purposes and civilians die as a consequence, or sometimes for just purposes, and civilians also die as a consequence. So the english civil war, right? Were the parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell wrong to fight against the royalists and to create the modern idea of democracy because there were civilian casualties? I would say, no, they were not wrong. They made the right decision. Was the civil war in America wrong? I dont think it was. I think destroying slavery was a great cause and worth the sacrifices that had to be made. What I'm saying is that Israel is now facing a similar dilemma that our societies haven't faced for a very long time.

There hasn't been a war inside the UK, unless you count the war with Northern Ireland, of course, from 1969 to 1994, for a very long time. So Israel is facing a similar dilemma. What do we do when we face this existential threat? Do we defend our right to exist? Do we fortify ourselves against the siege of these anti Semites against us? And they've decided that this is a war that they have to fight. I do think the consequences of the war are tragic. I do think the unwillingness of certainly the activist class in the west to apportion any blame to Hamas whatsoever is very, very interesting.

But there's. That's kind of a straw man, because there is that. But then there's also the vast majority of people who look at it as a horrific loss of life of innocent people. And just to chalk it off to the horrors of war, it's like, that's the only way to do it. Is this the only way to do it? To bomb civilians because Hamas embeds itself in civilians. I don't know. I'm not an expert on war tactics.

But I don't think it's the only way to do it. You're right to say that if one were just to throw one's hands in the air and say, it's war, what do you expect? That's not a justice, that's not a good response, that's not a good justification for what's happening. But what I'm saying is that beyond the. What I'm saying is, I think, twofold. The horrors of war attend every war. That's a given. Every war is horrible and sick making and hellish. That's. That's a given, I think. But then there's another issue, which is the question of why a war is being fought. Is it being fought for criminal reasons and wrong reasons? And I think there are many examples of that, spearheaded both by your country and mine over the past hundred years, unjust wars that led to unjust deaths. Are there also wars that are just and that are worth fighting? Yes. The war against nazism, I think, was a just war. I think I can think of anti colonial wars in which it was completely justifiable for people to rise up against british rule or american domination or whatever else it might be.

So we do have to make a moral call on what's happening in Israel and Gaza, and that does involve rising above the differences in the numbers killed. It does involve rising above the horrors of war and trying to take a broader view, which says, do we want Israel to continue existing? Do we want the Jews to have their own homeland? And do we want them to be safe from the fascistic menace of a neighboring army that would like to kill them all and to destroy their state from the river to the sea. That's the question we need to ask ourselves. And if our question, if our answer to those questions is yes, then we do have to accept Israel's right to pursue Hamas, and then the blame for the horrors in Gaza has to lie at the feet of Hamas, which is with profound cynicism, placing itself amongst the people in order to then throw its hands in the air and say, look what evil Israel is doing. It's killing these people, even though they put themselves there for that express purpose. The cynicism of it, the horror of it, is unimaginable. And so I think to put it all on Israel, as some people do, to say this is just a demonic action by the jewish state is wrong.

Hamas bears profound responsibility both for starting the war, both, and also for putting guards and civilians in harm's way and refusing to pull the plug on the wall, which it could do right this minute if it returned the hostages and surrendered to Israel. So we do have to look at who is morally responsible for this calamity, and I think it's Hamas.

I understand what you're saying, but I also view it from a perspective of the people that live there that have no say, and to just say, hey, this is because of the people that run you and have ruined your life. We're going to kill you, too. We're going to kill everybody there. And the only way to do it is to just bomb places where we know they are, even if we know you're there, too. That scares people. That people are willing to make these sort of moral decisions, as being the only way to handle this war is scary.

War is horrifying.

But this kind of war is uniquely scary, right? Because one army is vastly superior to the other one. Vastly. And funded by the greatest army, which is us. Right? That's a factor, too, because it's not really. They're not equivalent. One did a horrific terrorist attack, but it was fairly rudimentary in terms of what they were able to do. Look, if you had. Here's the moral argument. If you said to Hamas, Israel said, we will lay down our arms and we'll surrender to you, most people believe that Hamas would just butcher the Israelis. If Hamas said, we will lay down our arms, we will surrender to you, no one thinks that Israel would just go in there and butcher everybody. There is the real difference. But you also have to accept that there is one group of people, and the narrative is their land has been stolen. It was all originally supposed to be theirs. And they're being dominated by the superior military force, and that they're attacking that superior military force that they believe has this unjust control over them is an act of rebellion against something that's in control of them. And the people that did it are all monsters.

But the people that are embedded amongst these people have almost no say, they have no power, and they're women and children. That's what's scary is this justification of this horrific act of destruction, of who knows how many thousands of houses, who knows how many thousands of lives have lost and have been destroyed forever and lost loved ones, even the people that survived, who knows how many of them have been fucked up and they didn't do anything wrong. That's just as scary to people, if not more scary that people can make a moral justification in this framework of this is war, and war is awful.

My question to those people would be, why did you not find it equally scary when western forces did that in Raqqa?

They might not have known. Well, that's what you're talking to me because I didn't know.

No, but that's the thing. So western powers did it in Raqqa when they were pursuing ISIS. Loads of civilians died. They did it in Mosul when they were pursuing ISIS. They did it in other countries, too. Either. This is the thing. You're right to say that people don't know. And this is another problem with the way in which the Israel Hamas war is. Is being talked about. It's been obsessed over in a disproportionate way, in my view. I don't accept the idea that it is a uniquely wicked war or a uniquely destructive war. I think there have been numerous wars in recent years which have been far more destructive. Now, you're right to say this might be quicker and proportionally speaking, perhaps more people in Gaza have died as a proportion of the population than you might say in Syria, where 200,000 people lost their lives, or in Iraq, where 150,000 people lost their lives. That might be true. Maybe more in Iraq, maybe more certainly as a spin off of the war itself. So it could be true that this is speedier and proportionately more people are dying. That may be true. I don't know.

What I'm saying is that the idea that it is a uniquely problematic war, uniquely murderous, that there are a uniquely high number of civilian casualties in contrast with militant casualties, I don't think that's true. So then the question becomes, why is that being said? Why is there a focus on the uniquely horrible nature of this conflict? What's going on there? And it seems unavoidable to me that what's happening is that Israel has been turned into almost this whipping boy of western activists who have simply turned against civilizational values. And they say they see Israel as representative of those values. They see Israel as representative of modernity, of the west, of whiteness, even though Israel is not a white country, it's an incredibly diverse country. They see Israel as representative of all the things that they hate, and they've turned it into this punch bag, into a moral punch bag where they can let off steam by demonizing this one tiny state among all the other states on earth as being uniquely wicked.

Right, but hold on, because if Israel existed with no conflict as to who owns the land and to no history of moving the borders further and further. If it existed in that way, yes, but it exists as a superior military force that's in control of these people that are on their land, that are not of them, and that has a tight grip on them and an iron dome. And you see how it works and they shoot missiles in futility and they blow up in the air. Its not a fair comparison because what people are upset about is that Israel controls those people and has these people sectioned off into essentially what people describe as an open air prison. And when then it bombs the shit out of the open air prison. That's what freaks people out.

But it's.

I know, I agree with what you're saying in principle. I agree with what you're saying in terms of like, look, if you have a force that's a genocidal force that has a military and wants to attack a country, that they should be rooted out and stopped 100%. But it's the way in which it's happening and the circumstances that were in place before it happened that make it uniquely different.

But I don't think it is uniquely different. I think there have been many instances over the past decade or 20 years in which has been the pursuit of radical Islamists that has led to civilian casualties because they hide themselves in civilian infrastructure.

But this also has a holy war aspect to it. And the holy war aspect to it is that Judea and Israel and this whole area, it has like massive historical implications for the religion. There's a lot else going on there. It's Muslims and Jews. It's not simply two people that are bordering each other that have like, you know, like Poland and Germany. You know what I'm saying? Like, there's some other shit going on there.

You know, I think it can be hard for us to imagine. I find it hard to imagine. Imagine there was a, you might be right that this is an inferior army, militarily speaking.

And in terms of I'm definitely right, don't you think?

You're right. You're right about that. But they have proven themselves to be more than willing to invade Israel, to kill its people, to kidnap its soldiers, to kidnap its civilians. So they are pretty good at what they do, which is anti semitic terrorism. Right. So they're pretty forceful now, just. And they have devoted themselves to the destruction of Israel. And they're a pretty significant force. And they do have support from various elements in the Middle east and also from educated people in the west who ought to know better. Imagine there was an army that threatened to destroy the United States like to end the United States or the United Kingdom? An army right next door that was pretty well armed and supported by autocratic powers and supported by significant numbers of people around the world, and which devoted itself to the entire destruction of our state and which demonstrated its willingness to do so by slaughtering thousands of our civilians. It's hard for us to compute that. It's hard for us to understand the position that puts people in, the position it puts Israel in and the people of Israel. So what I'm saying is that rather than rushing to this moral condemnation, where we say Israel is overreacting, or Israel is being reckless, or Israel is being uniquely wicked and uniquely destructive, we ought to try to understand where Israel is coming from.

It's difficult for us to understand that, because we haven't experienced the same thing ever, really, or certainly not for a very long time. But we ought to try to understand where Israel is coming from, why it feels the need to do this, and appreciate the importance, I think, of destroying Hamas. Hamas is a menace to civilization. Hamas is a menace to reason. This is a backward, misogynistic, homophobic, violent, anti semitic army that has demonstrated its willingness and its capacity to murder jewish people for being jewish people. That out of all the movements on earth, deserves to be destroyed. It's difficult for Israel to destroy it without also causing collateral damage because of the way in which Hamas operates. Then the question becomes, should Israel stop trying to destroy Hamas, allow it to regroup? It has already threatened to do another 7 October, and it said it will do it again and again and again? Or does Israel say, regrettably, we are going to have to fight a horrible war in order to destroy this fascist threat to our nation?

That's the.

Understand what you're saying.

We're going around in circles. We keep going around in circles because the straw man or the steel man of it is. You look at it from the opposite perspective. Yes, Israel is attacked by these horrible forces, but also these innocent people are getting destroyed because of no fault of their own. And we're willing to do horrific things. And doesn't that create more martyrs? And doesn't that create more people who want to attack Israel? And doesn't that do the opposite of what we want it to. To do? And also, isn't this situation one of the most horrific things we've ever seen, despite the fact that we all know the war is hell, but this acknowledgement that this is horrific and that these people that died, there's more of them than died in the attack on Israel.

But I don't think you're right. We are going around in circles.

We keep going around circles.

We're on polar opposites of this, I think.

But we're not necessarily.

No, we're not. Actually, we have a difference of opinion on the moral weight of this question.

I just don't know if there's another way to do it.

But the one thing I don't accept, actually, and I would definitely push back on this idea that this is one of the worst things we've ever seen. You know, you were talking earlier about Vietnam. Think about what the. Apologies if this is offensive to some american listeners and viewers. What the Americans did in Vietnam, the my lai massacre, just the most extraordinary barbarism, or what the British.

But it doesn't justify what's going on. No, we weren't aware of it to the extent that we're aware of it today. And if a civilization is going to advance, it's going to have to be held up to the highest moral standards, particularly if you're the superpower. Yeah, but there's a superpower that's connected to people that have very primitive means of attacking you.

But this is the point I'm trying to make, is not to say that those we committed horrors in the past and therefore Israel has the right to commit horrors today. That's not what I'm saying. But I do think it's worth acknowledging that America did objectionable things in Vietnam and many other places. No doubt the British, what the British did in India and Africa is everything happening in Gaza pales into insignificance in comparison to what the British did.

No doubt. But Gaza's happening right now.

So what I'm saying. But this is my point. This is not my attempted justification of the conflict. My justification of the conflict is that a moral question has to be answered. What I'm saying is, why is this war being treated as uniquely wicked? Why is it seen by huge numbers of people, and it really is seen by huge numbers of people as unprecedented in its barbarism. I see people online every day saying, I can't sleep, I'm crying, I'm weeping, I'm shaking. I don't know what to do. And I want to say to them, why have you not felt that way in relation to other wars? Now, you could be right that they maybe didn't know about those wars.

Maybe they don't know footage is even comparable. I think it's what's in front of your face every day. And I also think that the original attack was so horrific that it focused people on that conflict. And now. Now they're completely tuned into it, and they want to know what's going on.

And I think. I think that's a very generous interpretation. And I'm sure for some people, what you're saying is true. But I can't help but think that Israel is being singled out for unjust criticism. I'm interested to anti Semitism behind it. I think. I don't think all those people marching in the streets are anti Semites, although I do think some of them are foolishly rubbing shoulders with Hamas supporters and turning a blind eye to, you know, placards showing the nazi swastika and so on. But I do think anti Zionism, as it's referred to, is a very curious beast, and it's one that I do think expresses an element of bigotry. And just to come back to a conversation we had earlier, I do find it extraordinary that amongst the so called anti racists of the west, they now seem very cavalier about one of the worst acts of racist violence of modern times. And amongst the so called feminists of the west, look at UN women. It took Un women, what, 54 days to say anything about 7 October, during which women were brutalized and butchered. I find it interesting that amongst the feminists of the west, they're so reluctant to say anything about this assault on jewish women in Israel.

And amongst the anti fascists of the West, Antifa, for example, who've been going around for the past ten years saying Trump is Hitler 2.0, and the vote for Brexit is going to herald the return of the 1930s. These people see fascism everywhere. They've been obsessing over the return of the 1930s for years when something very like fascism actually happened. They were either incredibly cavalier about it, some of them were supportive of it, they did refer to it as an act of resistance, or they just turned away and didn't want to talk about it. So the question for me is not just to say, oh, it's the horrors of war, because that is a mundane thing to say. It's to ask why Israel is being singled out to such an extent that vast swathes of people in the western world are willing to ditch every principle they adhere to for the past 25 years and more in order to explain away the racist butchery of jewish people. Well, one of the most awesome things.

Was when those heads of those universities were all discussing whether or not it was harassment to say, death to Jews on campus. That was a boy. If I was jewish, I would have been terrified watching that. Like, what a goddamn wake up call.

And you know what?

You see how. How deep the roots of this fucking chaos goes that it's. It. You have the president. Was it Penn? That she. Is that who it was? We said, if it's actionable with, like, a smirk on her face, like. Like she was trying to silence these silly students.

Like, these are people that are just.

Used to existing only in academia, which is the root of all of this stuff, which is really very, very bizarre, that academia has become this incredibly insulated environment where people go there, they adopt the philosophies, and then they teach to new kids that come in this doctrine, and it's very cult like.

Well, you know, very cult like.

Also in the fact that you have to adhere to one side. It's not an open discourse sort of establishment. It's not. They'll silence conservative people and pull fire alarms, and they want to stop freedom of speech if at all possible, if it doesn't jive with what the fuck they believe, you know, part of it, too.

Yeah. And the most striking thing about these. Those presidents of the universities, at the congressional hearing, not only were they unable to say that calling for the deaths of all Jews is a problem, but these are campuses on which, for the past few years, there have been controversies over Halloween costumes.

Right.

And it's a crime against transgender people to dress up like Catelyn Jenner on Halloween, or they'll kick you out forever.

If you misgender someone.

Right? You misgender someone. Or if you, in the case of Harvard, a young professor there, got into hot water over raising questions about the idea that there is a black genocide being carried out by white cops. He got into trouble even though he proved it with evidence and analysis. So, for years on these campuses, there has been a real reluctance to allow freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the right of people to engage in rigorous academic analysis. And yet, when it comes to this one question, they throw their hands up in the air and say, well, you know, freedom of speech call for the genocide of the Jews. That's free speech. So, again, it's that double standard. But you're right about what's happened to universities more broadly, which is that they have become conveyor belts of conformism.

Very bizarre.

You. Now, I often get young people saying to me, because I do talks at university sometimes, and they say, is it worth being at university? And I'm not sure it is, because you used to go to university to have your mind opened, and now you go there and get it closed. Down. So that's a problem.

It is a problem. And it's weird. It's weird that there's no alternatives unless you go to some sort of a religious school. It's very strange. The number of conservative leaning universities versus liberal universities is often the charts. It's like it's so unbalanced. And I don't know what solves that problem, because that seems like an embedded institution that is very reluctant to any kind of a change and is so deeply dug into its ideology that they think the whole world is filled with nazis and bigots and homophobes and that they're on the right side of everything and they don't produce anything. All they do is just talk about these things and teach more kids these crazy ideas. And so many of them in the humanities are so ridiculous that I'm sure you're aware of the James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen pluck Rose papers that just should expose the rot of institutions that you can make real papers about. Heteronormative activity in dog parks and people like, oh, this is brilliant. Fat bodybuilding. Oh, this is brilliant. You're the best. Like, oh, my God, we're living in a Mike judge movie. It's. We really are. We are in an idiocracy.

And that's my genuine fear, is that as our access to information becomes bigger and bigger and more and more available, that it's not gonna save us. That's what's crazy. It's like we're digging into nonsense more now than we ever had before when we didn't have back then, everyone knew that a guy in a dress with a heart on in a women's room is a pervert. And now it's like, he's a woman. He's amazing, he's brave and inspiring. And I don't know what fixes that, because it seems like something has to break and some realization of the people that are in it, they have to wake the fuck up and go, what are we doing? Why do we believe you have a finite amount of time on this planet, in this life, you have a finite amount of time. We're wasting it on things that are so ridiculous that any objective species from another planet, if they came here and looked at us, they'd be like, look at these fucking morons. Like, what are what? How can they be so sophisticated and so ridiculous at the same time? And, boy, we have to put a check on these fuckers because they're liable to do wild shit.

They can justify almost anything, and they're essentially a bunch of cult members who don't believe they're in a cult, which is one of the most dangerous things you could be.

I couldn't agree more.

That's the inquisition. That's fucking everything. It's everything that's ever happened. Cult members didn't think they were in a cult. They forced their shit on everybody else, and a bunch of people died. And then people go, well, glad we learned our lesson. We'll never do that again. And we're in the middle of doing it right now, and we have this ridiculous idea that somehow or another, we're immune to that now. We wouldn't do that now. We're more sophisticated than that now. Even though objectively, all the same steps are all moving in place, and everybody's like, I don't see it. I don't see it.

This is great, you know, listening to you say that, I couldn't agree more. And it's a very salient reminder, you know, there's this prejudice that the mob is made up of kind of toothless hicks, you know, stupid, uneducated, witless people who don't know their ass from their elbow, going around with their pitchforks. If you look at history, the mob hysteria has tended to come from the upper echelons of society. It's tended to come from the supposed experts. It was the priestly elites who carried out the inquisition. It's the academia today that is pushing the most crazy post truth nonsense ideas. It's very often the educated sections of society who get sucked into these backward ways of thinking, these regressive ways of thinking, and whose ways of thinking have an incredibly destructive impact on community life, on children's bodies, on women's rights, on the sanctity of certain spaces. So I think reckoning with the graduate mob is actually one of the most essential tasks of our time. And really getting to understand how these people who look down upon us as post truth, who look down upon us as stupid and uneducated and easy prey for demagogic forces, we need to turn it back on them and say, hold on.

It's you people who have been subsumed by this irrational cult, who have abandoned the virtue of truth and embraced the ideology of unreason. It's you people who are doing that. And what's more, the way in which you're doing it is having a detrimental impact on people's lives and their bodies and their freedoms. So I think that's one of the great pressing tasks of our time, to push back on them and say, your hysteria is fucking things up and we're not real.

Taking fear is that children are getting indoctrinated this straight out of high school. Yeah, they're getting indoctrinated into this way of thinking straight out of high school without participating in the real world. And then they just get sucked into it and then they go right out into these corporations and ruin them. That's bud, like, absolutely. That's where it came from.

Absolutely.

It's just nonsense. And it's bizarre to watch it all take place en masse, not just in one very specific sector of the society, but everything. In all things. In the prisons, you're watching it everywhere. It's uber bizarre to watch.

And in corporations, it's insane. Capitalism loves identity politics. That's what I've come to realize. Especially capitalism loves transgenderism. If you look at during Pride month, every single bank and hedge fund corporation flies the pride flag from their windows. They all wear pronoun badges, they all.

Demon with a sheep mask on.

It's crazy. And I often say to, when I meet young woke activists, I often say to them, listen, if you're so progressive, if you're so marxist, if you're so radically left wing, why do the owners of the means of production love your ideology so much? How have they co opted it so easily?

Right? Corporations are no longer evil.

And, you know, they will say. They will say, oh, it's pink washing. It's just them trying to disguise the terrible things they do by waving a pride. It's not that. It's something more profound. I think there is across the board, in the corporate world, the political world, the academic world, there is this susceptibility to irrational thinking has grown up, and they are all becoming members of this really odd post truth cult. And I think that's very worrying. But that comes back to our point about the democratic pushback against it, which I do think is happening. There is a populist sense of angst with all of this stuff. There are people out there saying, well, fuck you. I'm not going to buy Bud light anymore, and I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, and I'm not going to watch Saturday Night Live anymore. And I'm not going to go along with this stuff. I'm not going to sit back and watch as you denigrate my community, absolutely transform the meaning of words like man and woman and mother and father and put forward these men in dresses and tell me that they're women.

And if I refuse to believe you that I'm some kind of antisocial bigot.

And you'll be fired.

Yeah. And you'll find I'm not going to put up with that anymore. So there is this. I think one of the reasons to be hopeful today is that there is a pushback against this stuff. And the more of that we can have, the better.

Yes, sir. All right. Well, that was a fun conversation, man. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And tell everybody where they could find you. Social media and all that stuff. Definitely don't read the comments.

Never read the comments. The main place you can find me is at spiked. Spiked online magazine, where I write. I'm the chief political writer. You can find me on instagram. My handle is burnt oak, boy, because I come from a part of London called Burnt Oak.

Oh, okay.

And you can listen to my podcast, the Brendan O'Neill show, and google me. You'll find me on.

Thanks, sir. Appreciate you, man.

Thanks, guys.

All right. Bye, everybody.