505. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan
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So a couple of announcements first. I'm on tour again, and so if you go to jordanbpeterson.com, you can find out cities and dates, and that starts in December and runs through April, so check that out if you're inclined. The tour deals with the issues that I raise in my new book, which came out on November 19th. It's called We Who Wrestle With God, and in that book, I take apart a sequence of Old Testament stories and explain, at least as far as I'm concerned, the

at least part of what they mean. And I try to do that in a way that's comprehensible and as profound as I could make it, but also very practically applicable. And so that's a good combination of high-level abstraction and immediate practical applicability. You need to know these stories because they're the stories that are fundamentally about you and about everybody that you know and about how society is structured and our relationship with nature and the divine. So

Come to the tour, pick up the book if you're inclined. Today, I had a chance to speak with Andrew Doyle, with whom I've spoken before. We've been in touch for a number of years now. Andrew's a comedian in the UK. The infamous creator of Titania McGrath, who is one of the most effective characters ever devised to satirize the woke left. And Andrew's been at that for a very long time. So we spent a fair bit of time discussing what he's up to as an immigrant to Phoenix,

And along with Andrew, I spoke with Graham Linehan, who is joining Andrew in the establishment of a new entertainment enterprise in Phoenix with Rob Schneider and some other people. Their hope is that they can actually do some things that would be funny. And that would be a lovely thing to see since humor is in short supply in the woke totalitarian world that we inhabit now. Although maybe the comedians, the true comedians, like Joe Rogan, will in fact have their last laugh

So we talked about Graham's life in fair detail at the beginning of the podcast because he went from riches to rags, right? Quite traumatically. Graham was...

maybe the most successful sitcom writer in the UK and the man who penned a number of shows that were beloved by, well, by very large audiences. And despite that, when he had the temerity to have some perfectly reasonable opinions about perfectly reasonable subjects, his life was demolished. His marriage ended. He was persona non grata in the artistic community, which is a complete bloody catastrophe. And he,

Eventually was inclined, not by least by necessity, to sever his ties with his home country. Everyone he knew virtually died.

turned the other way. And that's a terrible thing. And Andrew, by contrast, has sort of ridden the woke wave, I would say. He's one of the few individuals, particularly in the UK, who has managed to turn the fact of the woke mob into something approximating enhanced commercial success. And so as Graham's ship was sinking, Andrew's star was rising.

In any case, they have joined forces now and with Rob Schneider to start this new enterprise. We talked about the dismal state of the UK and Europe. We've seen a revolution in the political landscape in the United States. There's one coming to Canada, but man, things are looking rough in the UK. Their true home of

common law and the tradition of free speech and the home of at least once of the greatest comedians the world has ever seen, I think. And so that's a terrible thing to see. And

The same dismal fate at the moment appears to await Europe, and so we delved into that in some detail, touching along the way the absolute pathology of the Canadian liberal landscape under our head narcissist Justin Trudeau, who's fated for an electoral defeat of unimaginable magnitude, but not for a whole year during which he'll do plenty of damage in precisely the way that a wounded narcissist would. Anyways, if you're interested in any or all of that, join us on this podcast.

So, gentlemen, welcome. I think the first thing we should probably do is let everybody know what you have done in the past to be sufficiently reprehensible to be a worthwhile guest on this particular podcast. Graham, why don't you let everybody know, well, yeah, the nature of your sins and crimes, yeah. Well, I was, for most of my adult life, I was a sitcom writer, comedy writer, and I

Quite a successful one. You know, got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Comedy Awards. Standing Ovation. I think I've won about five BAFTAs personally, one Emmy. Done about five sitcoms, three of which are kind of, you know, near household names. What were they? Father Ted was the main one. Father Ted actually was so influential that...

They say it had a little bit to do with the Irish church releasing its hold in the 90s on Ireland, you know, just because we weren't very satirical. We were very silly. We were always a surreal and silly show. And so that had more effect, I think.

something I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I am in two minds about now, uh, and actually kind of just helped limit the church's influence to some extent by simply throwing a banana peel in their way, you know? Um, so everything was going great. I had, I was asked to write, uh, an accompanying, uh, play for a Peter Schaeffer farce, which I love called black comedy, which has got the most extraordinary, um, premise. Um, and,

Uh, and that was the first thing I think, oh, and I was, I was supposed to go and teach comedy in Australia. That was the first thing that went, uh, they said they couldn't, I heard something I heard over and over again that it was security problems. You know, they couldn't afford the security. You'd hear that a lot.

Security for you or for the people that you were going to offend? Well, that's the thing. That was the first time I said, can I speak to my accusers? Can I see if I can? I know, yeah. How old-fashioned can you get? Well, this was the very earliest days when I still felt...

that there were people of good faith within things like gender ideology. And they, you just, if you just explain certain things, they would, like, for instance, one of the things that I started talking about, because I was paying attention to women who were being bullied offline, who were called TERFs, you know, and I was trying to figure all this out. But I saw that women

were getting death threats and rape threats for even discussing it. And one of the earliest things I saw was actually a Canadian story that the Vancouver rape relief had a dead rat nailed to their door because they wouldn't accept men in their, um, in their sessions, you know, or their, or, or, or whatever they're called. Is that before or after the government cut off their funding for refusing to accept men? I think it was after. And, uh, you know, I, I helped raise money for them and,

I just thought as soon as some people saw it, they would go, what? A rat nailed to the door of a rape crisis center? A dead rat, to be fair. A dead rat. What can we do to help? And there was none of that. No one stood up for me. I just started the kind of propaganda piece, a paper, Pink News, has now published over 75 stories about me.

They famously did 42 stories on J.K. Rowling in a single week, you know, so six stories a day for seven days. The world's most famous TERF? Yeah, absolutely. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, right? Yeah. That's the acronym of the day? Yeah, and as far as I could make out, it did not seem exclusionary. The feminism these women were practicing,

It was basic feminism that I... You mean the kind that believes that women exist? That women exist. Yeah, that kind of feminism. That they have value, that sex is important, and that men shouldn't be allowed in women's sports and all this type of thing. And I started saying... Especially fetishistic men? Those sorts of men? Yeah. And especially the kind of men who would want to do it. Yeah, right. Especially those kind. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so it was almost instantaneous. I lost...

Every job I got would just disappear within moments sometimes. I'm the shortest term director on any project, I think, when I was asked to direct Steve Martin's Only Murders in the Building and then, you know, put down the phone and a few minutes later got an email saying actually someone else has stepped in. And I suspect that the real reason for that was that

He being excited announced to his colleagues, we've got Graham Lillehan. And someone put up their hand and said, he's a bigot. And I think that that's basically what means I can't really work in the UK at the moment. I had a musical based on Father Ted that would have made millions. And they just took it from me, refused to make it if my name is associated with it.

Yeah, well, I've often thought that, you know, when people are no longer, what would you say, cynical and evil enough to be greedy, we're really, really in trouble. That's right. Definitely, definitely. I hate you. See, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, take over. But basically, maybe we should get rid of, I should leave the rest of it because there's so much. Well, I want to just get the story exactly straight so everyone knows. So,

Were you the most successful sitcom writer in the UK? Is that a reasonable statement? Or in the top five? Like, what do you think is fair? I think it's... I don't know. I'd say, I mean, definitely top five. Okay. Definitely that. And... There's probably not even five good sitcom writers. No, there probably isn't. No. Right, right. The tallest midget in the world. Right, right. And so, okay, now...

And you said you had three extremely famous sitcoms, one of which was Father Ted. What were the other two? The other was one called The IT Crowd, which was set, was about IT, an IT department. Because I, it was, we wrote it in around 2005 and I noticed the internet becoming a thing. And I was always told, well, I went to an early Danny Simon course, who was one of the writers on Bilko and

A lot of things that Woody Allen worked on, Neil Simon's brother, you know, and he said a sitcom should always be about social change.

So if you see something coming around the corner, write about it. So I always had my ear to... The Jeffersons or all of the family, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Kind of on the cutting edge of social inquiry. Those were extremely well-timed. Yes. The one example he gave was Mary Tyler Murphy. Right. Yeah, another great example. Yeah, absolutely. Although he used the phrase women's livers, which was very funny. He's this old guy by the way. I know. It's like 90-year-old people use that phrase. Yeah, exactly. But...

But, uh, but so yeah, so I wrote the IT crowd, like we have an early parody ad for Facebook. It was so unusual to us and I still feel that about the internet that we

We've still all got whiplash and we don't really know what it's done to us as a species. So Father Ted, The It Crowd and? I'd say the one that might be well known is called Black Books. The other is a show called Motherland that was quite successful recently. That's quite a string of hits. Yeah. Okay, so now what exactly did you do that was so unforgivable and when did you do it?

I think it was about 2016 or 17. Yeah, well, that's when things really went insane. Yeah, well, also I had a bit of, you know, Trump derangements. I don't know how you were when he won the first time, but I thought the world was going to end. I was fully taken in by...

by the, you know, the way he was being portrayed. In fact, what was being done to him was about to be done to me. Well, he said, they're after you. I'm just in the way. Right? There's some real truth in that. Absolutely. 100%. It became quite a famous statement during this election cycle. Yeah, yeah. It appealed to a lot of

Well, a lot of megatypes and a lot of people who had been cancelled unexpectedly by their friends and compatriots. Well, I always think of that Muhammad Ali line where he said, you know, the Vietnamese never called me no N-word. And I feel the same way about the left. You know, the right never called me a bigot. Right, right, right, right. And they called me a bigot for basic reasons.

things like saying, hey, you shouldn't be cutting the breasts off little girls. You shouldn't be... Yep, there's one non-hate crime incident. We can keep piling them up. There shouldn't be men in women's prisons. It's actually against the Geneva Convention to put men in women's prisons. Yeah, but what is a man, sir? All over, yeah. There's a terrible story in Ireland.

This bloke who was, you know, he had an awful childhood. He was forced by his father to rape his mother and he was severely disturbed. His name was Barbie Kardashian. And because Ireland sneaked in self-ID without allowing the people of Ireland to really discuss it, Barbie Kardashian, who hates women with a completely...

tunnel, with complete tunnel vision. In a manner you would not want to imagine ever, even in your darkest nightmares. Exactly, exactly. He's now sharing living space with female prisoners. Well, no psychopaths would pretend to be women just to get access to women. They're not that sort of people, you know. I used to say about the Catholic Church, at least priests had to learn Latin

You know, these guys, all they have to do is put on some eyeshadow and every door is open to them. Or complain about the fact that the bigots are using eyeshadow as a marker of gender and that's not fair. Yeah. Well, the rules change all the time. And that's something I didn't realize as well, is that the rules were very fluid and

Just like identity. Yeah. But it's like they try and pretend that identity is fluid by making the conversation fluid and hard to understand. I mean, part of me is very angry for the fact that no one in my career stood up for me, you know. But another part...

kind of understands because the language around this issue is so deliberately confusing. They did a... And the cost of standing up is high. Of course, the cost of not standing up is higher, but it is understandable why people... You can understand why people choose to remain silent. That doesn't excuse it, but you can't understand it. Well, there's an interesting... I can't remember who did the... People are wondering, who the hell is this guy on Graham's left? Yeah.

Hello. I know, I feel terrible that I'm talking so much. But this guy, I can't remember who said it, but he said that during the Nazi years, there's a kind of widespread assumption that everyone was afraid of being tortured by a guy with a dueling scar on his face. And he says, no, the reason that ordinary Germans went along with it for the most part was because of career advancements.

They did not want their careers to be stolen. Well, you can understand ever since COVID, ever since all this cancellation, you can understand exactly what happened in Germany. And I think they actually had far more excuse because it was a lot easier to make sure people didn't know what the hell was going on when everyone wasn't connected to everything all the time. That's it. Plus, I would also say that the...

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crimes that the Nazis were undertaking were of sufficient magnitude so that it's not surprising that people didn't believe they were happening. I mean, you know, what's his name? Michael Schellenberger, when he broke the WPATH files, he told me that he had listened to the conversation I had with Abigail Schreier, which was a very early conversation on the child mutilation and sterilization front. And he said that his response, you know, and he's liberal in his orientation fundamentally, was that

There was no way that that could be happening. And then, you know, two years later, while he investigated it in great detail and came to the conclusion that, yeah, in fact, it was happening. It was led by a pack of the most reprehensible people you could possibly imagine. Insane. It's not worse than insane. Truly malevolent and fetishistic and demented in the way that we've been describing WPATH people and

Unforgivable. So you were standing up for normal reality, and that was that, and it happened very quickly. Yeah. Okay, so let's turn to Andrew for a moment. We'll get back to you right away. So Andrew, I think people probably on this podcast are a little bit more familiar with you in all likelihood than they are with Graham, not least because of your famous character, The

Now, of course, your name is going to escape me. It's Titania McGrath. Titania, yes, of course, of course. And you wrote a book as her, which was very comical. And you had and still have...

How active is Titanium X now? Less active than she used to be. But, you know, I was very active as her for a long time. I wrote two books as her. We did a live show where I had an actress play her. We got to do a West End show in London. We only got to do one because we were booked for a week, but the person who runs the theatre found out and scotched that.

So we ended up with a deal. That's funny. It's very funny that Titania McGrath got cancelled. Yeah, well, there's that. Exactly. She probably wanted to cancel herself. But I'm in a different position from Graham because I was never fetid or successful in the way that he was. So I wasn't cancelled in a sense. All it means is that I was satirizing this movement that

And that kind of meant that I was put in the bad pen. Right, right. So you were an early part of the movement to monetize the social justice warriors. Exactly. It was as cynical as that. Someone absolutely needed to do that. So, yeah, so explain. Let's go back to the time of Titania McGrath. Explain what you were doing and then also tell everybody all the other things that you've been involved in.

Well, I suppose, I mean, like a lot of people within the comedy industry, because my background is stand-up comedy and playwriting and writing musicals and that kind of thing. A lot of people in the creative arts got dragged into this culture war because by virtue of what we do, we're on the front line of it insofar as creative people are often either teasing the boundaries of tolerance

or addressing issues, certainly with satire, when you're holding up to ridicule and scrutiny the most powerful elements of society. But all of a sudden this movement came along, which we might call wokeness or critical social justice or whatever you want to call it, which was effectively a new powerful force in society, which no one was ridiculing.

It was as though this one closed system of thought had somehow successfully portrayed itself as the underdog and therefore became ring-fenced from satirical attention, which is an interesting unprecedented thing. You know, normally we know the church, the state, the government, whatever. We know who the powerful people are and we know where the satirist's target will be. But this was a group that said, if you mock us, you're actually punching down. You're a bully. You're a bully. Even though, of course, their whole movement was legitimizing bullying.

And because of the whole thing was played... Well, it's also a movement that was based on the belief that virtually every form of interaction can be construed as a kind of bullying, given that there's no human motivation fundamentally other than that of power. Yes, exactly. So it's this power-obsessed, identity-obsessed movement

that plays with language, plays elaborate word games so that they can... Very effectively, too. Hugely effectively, so they can be the bullies and say that any criticism is bullying. They can be regressive and call themselves progressive. They can be illiberal and call themselves liberal. They can twist everything linguistically around. They can be men, call themselves men. So everything is up for grabs in that. Yeah, but that I think is the real danger, especially if you're a writer, that if you can change the meaning of fundamental word...

a combination like men and women, then everything falls apart. That's exactly right. I think, like, I've looked into this quite deeply at a psychological level, and I think you can make a strong biological case at the level of perception that there is no distinction more fundamental than the distinction between male and female. It's more...

It's more fundamental than up and down. It's more fundamental than black and white or night and day. And if you can get people to swallow the equivalence of that fundamental pair of opposites, there is absolutely no lie whatsoever that they'll resist. And in a sense, that would be fine if it was a

confined to the sort of the flesh pots of academia. If it were just the old postmodern theorists having... Or a gay club. Oh, well, fine, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Or... There's certain things that have been weaponized and one of them is the empathy that gay people feel for outsiders.

You know, they've always been very protective of them. Well, that's not quite my point. My point is that if it was just at the level of theorizing, which it was at some point until the late 80s, and then all of a sudden it became applied into society. But that's not what I'm saying. What I mean is the government now...

pursues policies based on this inversion of what man and woman means, what truth and fiction is. It wouldn't matter if it was just theorists and activists. That's my point. It's the compulsion too that's the problem, right? The fact that this is why I objected to Bill C-16 back in

about 2016. It's like, you know, I can say whatever I want fundamentally, but the government doesn't get to compel it. And I don't care if the reason is hypothetically empathy and compassion. It's like, first of all, I doubt that. And second, it doesn't matter. Well, actually, to Graham's point, there was a recent

A couple of weeks ago, the government spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, Baroness Jackie Smith, was asked explicitly, what is gender identity? What is the government's working definition of gender identity? Given that so many public health policies are being implemented on the basis of this concept, what is your definition? And she's turned it around and said, that's a gotcha. She said, you know, you should take this seriously. You know, in other words, not answering the question, fudging the answer and turning it around and blaming the person for asking in the first place.

And, you know, we have this similarly just today in the House of Commons. We have a member of the House standing up calling for blasphemy law, calling for the desecration of the Quran to be illegal. We've had cross-party discussions in the UK on the definition of Islamophobia. And it was agreed by both parties that Islamophobia is a type of racism perceived

say, based on Muslimness or perceived Muslimness, whatever that means. But it's not racism because Islam is not a race. It is a very ethnically diverse belief system. So when you have governments, and I know it's very bad in Canada, but when you have governments actually proceeding on this slippery linguistic terrain where even they don't understand the terms that they are deploying, then that means that those activists that I'm talking about have won. They've won out. And they are the most powerful, which is why...

You know, we've been satirizing them. That's why we've been mocking them, because they're in charge. We have a YouTube channel where we talk about, you know, the gender issue. And one of the important things we felt was you've got to show people it's safe to laugh at this stuff, you know, because it is ridiculous. One of the things I got into trouble for was Eddie Izzard said that he would have been a victim of the Holocaust, right?

And I said, yes, the Nazis famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair. You know, that got me called a Holocaust denier by trans rights activists. And didn't J.K. Rowling sort of, or other people supported that point of view, and they got called Holocaust deniers? Yeah, Rowling is now a Holocaust denier because, you know. Well, what can you expect from a TERF? Yeah, yeah.

Isn't that crazy? Just to come back slightly to my point about gay clubs, I think this is a really important one because I heard one of, you're going to have to tell me the details, but Foucault, is that how you pronounce it? Foucault, yeah. Foucault's, one of his observations is that in a small,

A village. There might be a guy who calls himself mayor, but he's not the mayor. He's just a crazy guy. But everyone says, oh, hello, mayor. And they listen to him and they take his advice and stuff like that. And that seems to be what affirmation is. Yes. Right. Yes. But the thing is, once you widen it throughout society, it falls apart. It's untenable once you get outside of that small village.

And what I think gay clubs were was a place where outsiders could come. You wanted to dress as a woman. You wanted to dress in ridiculous clothes. The gay club was a safe place to do all that. But that empathy has been weaponized by straight white men in, you know, AGPs who are, who are basically manipulating the empathy that both women and gay people have for the outsider. There's a problem there fundamentally that's akin to the problem of the center and the margin, right?

No, the postmodernists, the French intellectuals, assumed that the reason that any center was established was for no other reason than that of power. And so they construed the center against its opposite, let's say. That's like a dialectic of thesis and antithesis. But there's a problem with that conceptually, because the center is always a unity.

And any unity is surrounded by a margin right now. And there's an uneasy balance between the center and the margin because it's

All centers have a margin, and the margin is where all the experimentation takes place that's necessary for the center to propagate itself across time, because it has to change somewhat as it moves. But the problem with the margin is that every element of the margin has a margin, and then every element of the fringe of the margin has a margin, and if you go out far enough into the margin,

you don't encounter the oppressed, you encounter the truly monstrous. And that's a very big problem. - Yeah, but maybe part of the problem is that we no longer tolerate the eccentric

I mean, John Stuart Mill writes about the importance of the eccentric within society. The UK was always great at that, too. Right, exactly. But if you don't, and if you problematize eccentricity and demand conformity, in other words, you empower those further marginal states that you're talking about, those realms of the monstrous. I think that they're

it seems to me more that they're giving eccentrics too much power. I'm sorry, that's what you said. Well, I'm saying that those aren't eccentric. I'm saying the ones that they're empowering. But there's people like, there's one guy, famous guy in the UK, he's got a beard. He appeared on this video that a wonderful Scottish TERF who died very young, 34 years old, Magdalene Burns, absolutely wonderful, was first on the scene of the crime. And her videos are amazing. I really recommend everyone watch them. But, but,

But she did a famous one about Stonewall where this, it was the early days. So they were quite, they were quite kind of upfront about saying these ridiculous things. And he, and it was a guy with a beard named Alex Drummond. And he was saying things like, I want to expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman, you know? And Magdalene said very, you know, in one of her many famous lines, why don't you expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a man?

And there's people like him in any normal world. Someone like that would just be an eccentric whose friends tolerated him and, oh, it's just Alex being Alex. But now he's like the figurehead for a movement, a bearded woman, a bearded man woman. That also might be a consequence to some degree, an unintended consequence of the technology that unites us, the internet. Yes.

Before, if you were an eccentric, by definition, there was one of you. But now online, you can find the other thousand sprinkled throughout the world and you're no longer an eccentric, you're a movement. Yes. And we have no idea what it means, what that possibility of, what would you say, aggregation of the truly, not even the eccentric, but the monstrous. We have no idea what that aggregation means. I suppose what I mean, though, is that if we don't cherish the eccentricity

eccentricity. We don't have the arts. We don't have creativity. And so we've been demanding conformity from artists, from the most free-thinking types. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at the same time in our history, we've empowered these extremists. Yeah, well, maybe one of the ways that you can tell when empathy for the marginal has exceeded its boundaries is when the marginalized who are being empathized with

start to restrict eccentricity. When the now included marginalized become intolerant, the empathetic endeavor has gone too far. Because they've become the powerful. Yes, exactly. Because they're now making the rules. Well, Graham said to me once, you said to me once about the jester now sitting in the king's throne. Right, right. And I think that's sort of what's happening. It's a complete inversion, you know? So we don't have, I mean, this is why

Graham and I are now in America because we have to, we're going to work in America rather than, we don't think the creative arts in the UK are really fostering. Russell Brand has departed for places unknown to, into the United States for exactly the same reason. Well, exactly. I mean, we've ended up in this situation, I suppose I should clarify because Rob Schneider is setting up a new company with myself and

another producer I've worked with a lot called Martin Gourlay. And we've brought Graham in as well because Graham's in a similar situation. We're all over in Arizona. We never expected to be here. We're working on various projects now. I genuinely don't think it's an exaggeration. It sounds histrionic, but I don't think we could...

we could have the kind of artistic freedom in the UK now. I haven't written in five years. I haven't written comedy in five years. I had to write my memoir for free, basically, to be paid a bit on the back end. I don't think it's histrionic. I think people were thinking it. You need a substantive amount of creative freedom and a certain amount of

like supportive social infrastructure in order to think creatively, because you really have to be free to think creatively because it's risky. And you're going to, certainly you're going to transgress against boundaries explicitly and implicitly because while you're casting about for humor, you're going to go too far from time to time, like obviously. Yes. You know, and you know too that the best comedy is the closest it can possibly be to being offensive without quite managing it.

There's a great phrase in Seinfeld writer has, he says, laughter is a very strong spice. So if you can make someone laugh at something, then they probably will forget to be offended. Have you noticed though, Graham, the shift within the comedians? Well, you've noticed more than most, but within comedians themselves. I mean, I remember...

Years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, there was one club in London that had a document, a contract you had to sign, which sent out a list of the topics you couldn't discuss. And that was widely ridiculed within the comedic community. No one thought this was a good thing. And now there's a club in London. Now it's kind of standard. I mean, I wouldn't say it's standard insofar as most clubs don't do that. But the clubs that do, the few clubs that do, are not ridiculed. They're given awards and they said, this is the ideal now.

And you also have more than a signed contract anyway. You have comedians kind of policing each other in a more surreptitious way. There's only one kind of comedian that thrives in that kind of environment, and that's a mediocre comedian. I call them regime comedians.

That's a great phrase. Well, they're also thrilled about the regime because it's the only thing. See, one of the things I've noticed about woke books, especially the ones for children, is the illustrations are, they're absolutely hideous. They're talentless, dull, and like,

They're monstrous in their, in their what? In their incompetence. They're so bad. Well, the only possible reason you got to illustrate that book and have it published is because it has the right political message. Because no one in their right mind would look at a drawing that you made for more than two seconds without turning aside. And so you see the same thing is that this is one of the, this is certainly one of the things that I saw in universities. And it was awful is that

ideological purity was the best possible camouflage for appalling mediocrity. It's like, well, I can't do what I'm supposed to do, but I can certainly tow the bloody party line. And if you need an enforcer, well, here I am, partly because I have nothing better to do or nothing that I would like to do more, which is even worse. But

But what's great about all of this is none of this really ever caught on with the audiences. Insofar as I think generally, even though when you go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival now, most of the shows you go and see will be lectures dressed up as comedy shows, sermons in disguise. I was supposed to do a gig and they closed every venue that I tried to do. Yes, I remember that. It was just unbelievable. Like, you know, you can see here, I'm not like...

you're not evil i'm not i'm not rude or anything i try and so far wait wait until the beast will be unleashed yeah but like basically this picture has been built of me i i the way i describe it is that i'm the victim of village gossip on a global scale definitely you know like wikipedia my wikipedia page the the thing it puts for at the front is that i once compared

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gender surgeries to Nazi experiments on children. But it's like, what they... That's not so much a comparison as an identity, I would say. I'm serious. Like, I've looked into medical atrocities a lot and into the psychological motivations of the people that commit them. And I don't think the only things that I've read, and I truly believe this is the case,

The only things I've read on the medical side that are worse than what the trans-surgical butchers are doing right now are the experiments conducted on the Chinese by Unit 731 in Japan. And that is like the, for everyone watching and listening, do not go and read about Unit 731. You will seriously regret it. And that is the only trigger warning I've ever offered publicly or to my students. And I mean it, so beware. But that comparison is entirely apt.

It's entirely apt. Well, the first vaginoplasty was performed by a guy, I think his name was Gerpart, who was in the Luftwaffe and performed hypothermia experiments on prisoners at Dachau.

Yeah, well, that's Unit 731 right there, because that was what they specialised on. That's the first vagina capacity. And now they're just practising it everywhere on mentally unstable people, on people who have autism, on people who have depression. Even the intervention of puberty blockers, I mean, even that isn't justifiable if you're saying that

we all have a gender identity, something we cannot define, some esoteric essence within ourselves. And you're blocking the puberty of a child on the basis of that pseudo-religious belief. I mean, that's already unjustifiable on any metric.

I would have thought. I was assuming you accept the principle of non-contradiction and we're way past that. It's like gender is entirely fluid and it's divorced from sex except in the case of children who are confused about their gender who have to be surgically transformed into the opposite sex. Yes. I see. So I'm supposed to accept all of that including the logical impossibility to say nothing of the absolute bloody barbarism that's part of the surgery. Yeah. I mean, those surgeries, it's no wonder Schellenberger wouldn't believe it because it's,

you don't want to know anything about those surgeries. Once you clamber into the dismal realm of their actual reality and the side effects and, oh my God, and the absolute foolish and preposterous notion that surgeons are capable of creating something as complex as a vagina or a penis, the bloody things barely work when you have one that's actually real. So, well, seriously, man, it's like, we're going to make one. It's like, no,

I don't think so. Well, you know, in a lot of the photographs you see of the young girls who've had double mastectomies, we always see lots of tiny little scars along their arm. Yeah, right. And you know the way they farm the skin from the arm to make the false penis? Yeah. I once saw one of them, those false penises, and they had those little tiny self-harming scars all over them.

Yeah, that's about right. This young woman was having a fake penis that would never work, that they put in through the side. I think they have to come in from above to create the hole that the fake penis goes into.

Jesus. I mean, that's the stuff of body horror. It is. It's like one of the other things I got in trouble for early on. I said, this is a Cronenberg movie. Yeah, right? This is medical horror and body horror. Yeah, definitely. And all these kids are not being told any of the consequences of puberty blockers. I talked to Chloe. I don't remember Chloe's last name at the moment, but she was one of the very... Cole, yes. One of the very early...

Trans, desisters, let's say. Very nice girl and very straightforward. And the interview I did with her devolved quite quickly or evolved into essentially a clinical interview because I was interested in what she had been told prior to embarking on puberty blockers and hormonal transformation and then ultimately at a very young age surgery. And I asked her, so, like, so...

It's well known in the psychological community by anyone with even a modicum of training that negative emotion increases in women when they hit puberty. So if you measure levels of negative emotion, which include bodily self-consciousness, by the way, in boys and girls, they're pretty much the same. But once they hit puberty, women are more sensitive to negative emotion than men, and they stay that way for the rest of their life. And so there's various theories about that. One is...

sexual risk. One is the difference in body size that emerges between men and women at puberty, because boys and girls are about the same in strength, but juvenile adolescents obviously aren't. Certainly men and women aren't. And of course, sex is way more dangerous for women, obviously. And maybe the world as such is. Plus, they have to take care of infants. So they're more sensitive to negative emotions.

And in women, more than in men, negative emotion tends to take the form of bodily shame and self-awareness. And there's all sorts of reasons for that as well. Maybe one of them being that women are judged more harshly on their looks than men are. And it's a big difference. Anyways, this is well established and no one who's trained

is unaware of it. Women have more anxiety disorders, more depression worldwide. These are cross-culturally stable findings. Everyone knows this. And it's known that it emerges at puberty. And I asked Cole, I said, well, you know, you were unhappy with your body. What she told me was she had had fantasies of having a body like Kim Kardashian, very curvy, right? And she realized early on,

correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't really matter, that she was likely to have a boyish figure. Now, she's a very attractive girl, and men have a very wide range of

What would you say? Types. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a wide range of feminine beauty. So she had no, there was no reason for her to be concerned on that front any more than any other girl might be. And I asked her if anyone had ever told her that an increase in negative emotion is common in

in puberty for girls, or that it often took the form of body dysmorphia, because that's extremely common and might even be the norm in pubertal women. It's extremely common. And those are the first things she should have been told. Third thing, first two things, the third thing should have been, do you know that 90% of people with body dysmorphia, which is

is very common in puberty, desist by the time they're 18. And that's been the standard approach for so-called gender dysphoria for like four decades. And again, no one trained, remotely trained, doesn't know that. Yeah.

She was told none of that. 20-minute bloody consultation session, and she ended up with a double mastectomy. And even more fun, you might say, is that the surgical scars on her breasts never healed properly. So that's her life, you know, and compared to someone who's had a

reconstructed penis, she got away lucky. And that's a terrible thing to say. And so, yeah, it's just... I heard from a lady that when these mothers who have had double mastectomies and gone on to have children, when the baby cries, there's still fibers from the breast muscle in their chest and it reacts and it hurts them when the baby cries. But they can't do anything about it because...

They've cut off their breasts because, you know. Well, the surgeons will reassure the girls that you can always have new breasts installed if you change your mind. And that's one of the marketing ploys of people who are promoting this absolute bloody butchery. Didn't one person, I can't remember who said it, but one person said your breasts would grow back.

Really? Yeah. I can't remember who said it, but like, I mean, there's all sorts of kooks in this movement as well. Like, it shares with... The a priori presumption should be not only kook, but what would you say? Manipulative, narcissistic, and malevolent kook. Opportunists, you know? I mean, it just goes, like, you know, I always think about the line of men outside the courtroom going into the Giselle Mercure, is that her name, Mercure?

Giselle, you know, the woman who's raped in her sleep, her husband. Right, right, right. I always think about that line of men going in, you know, and I just think, well, you know, that's opportunity. And we all think that we're all kind of good. But there's always going to be men who, if you move the line a little bit, they're going to follow the line.

Well, there's another thing to point out on that side, too, is that our default assumption when we see a man participating in women's sports is that that person is a malignant narcissist.

Because, first of all, obviously, because all you have to do is think about it for 15 seconds. And I'm dead serious about this. It's like, okay, you're Leah Thomas. I think that was William, if I remember correctly. Yes, that's right. And that's a non-crime hate incident for those of you in the UK who want to report it. And so he's 6'4", I think that's about right. Massive shoulders, you know, a fairly powerful swimmer. I think he ranked 400th in the US among American swimmers of his age.

which is not bad, right? I mean, it's not number one, and he definitely wanted to be number one. But then you think, just put yourself in this position for a minute. You're like a foot and a half taller than the people that you're competing against and six inches broader in the shoulder. And when you get up on the podium and there's a claim, not only do you enjoy it, which is a sign that there's something seriously wrong with you to begin with, but you also are so deluded by

that you think you deserve it, and that you're a brave once victim for managing it. Now, just contemplate that. Imagine writing a script about that. Do you know how staggeringly narcissistic you have to be to accept even one of those propositions?

let alone to play yourself off as a heroic victim while you're doing it. Well, not to be embarrassed. You knock these poor women off their podium and it's like you're the forthright champion of what? Civil rights or something like that. It's so sickening. Laurel Hubbard, the weightlifter in New Zealand, was the son of a billionaire. He's like the son of, like, the equivalent would be Kellogg's, you know, something like that in New Zealand. Yes.

And he beat two indigenous women who had worked their whole lives, you know, to get to where they are. And now they've got second and third. And this man, this clear man, got first. He's an average man, but he's a hell of a woman. But what I can't—what I find difficult to explain—I'd love to see what you think of this—is—

The people who really confuse me are the people who stand by and just let it happen. I don't understand psychologically why there was such an agreement for the last five years amongst all my friends and even some family members that I had become evil. Well, I think there'd be two reasons. Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the...

camouflage in which the narcissists and butchers that we're describing enmesh themselves in

is in the camouflage of empathy. And empathy is a cardinal moral virtue. Now, the problem is, the problem starts when you believe that the fundamental essence of goodness is empathy, because that's wrong. Goodness is much more complex than a mere one-dimensional analysis would presume. But if I can accuse you of being non-empathetic, that's a pretty decent slur. Now,

Empathy also was a valid impetus or motivation for many things that were laudable. So the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, right? Now, the problem is, is that it can, and this is the problem, this has been demonstrated time and again by game theorists everywhere.

working in the biological realm, imagine you have a community of cooperators, a game that's set up so that people only cooperate. If everyone cooperates, the game can sustain itself and improve as it's played. But if you throw one

shark into the tank, then it takes everything. So empathy is a very useful foundation for social interactions. I trust you and I trust you. Great, now we can cooperate. The problem is that if you get a community of cooperators established, non-cooperators can move in and dominate. And so

There's an ambivalence between trust and skepticism that's bound to emerge. Okay, so we produced a society that was very trust-based in which empathy could function very effectively. And then it got weaponized. Now, it got weaponized by psychopaths and narcissists, fundamentally, and sadists. We know their type. They're Machiavellian, so they use language to get what they want. They're narcissistic, so they want undeserved attention. They're...

psychopathic, so they're predatory parasites, and they're sadistic. So they're fun people, and they weaponize empathy, and it's unbelievably effective. Now, part of the reason it's effective, and part of the reason I think that people didn't stand up, they didn't stand up for me in Canada, although some people did, and some journalists, none of my professional colleagues to speak of, almost no psychologists, virtually no physicians.

Agreeable empathetic people don't believe that the parasitic, predatory, Machiavellian narcissists exist. They don't have that space in their imagination and for them so. Their default assumption is that anyone who's misbehaving is a victim. Yes. Now you can even, even that's understandable because you could say, look,

80% of the people in prison were victimized. Now, not everybody who's victimized turns into a criminal. In fact, quite the reverse. So that's, you know, a rather weak demonstration. But that still also leaves the 20%, right? And they're the 20% that include the psychopathic rapists who, when the Scottish National Parliament decides that men and women are the same, decide that it's time for them to go into the women's prisons. All the agreeable people think,

Oh, those people don't exist. They're just misunderstood. Then why don't they... No, I think there's other factors in your case, though. No, because there are two other factors, I think, and one of which is that psychopaths are scary. And I think that to stand up for Graham in that situation would have made yourself a target. I think that can't be underestimated. I think that's very, very important. Oh, definitely. But I think also...

you know, I just hearing you, you're discussing now that they've aggregated online, right? Yeah, exactly. They've now got a, almost no, you can't even face your accuser. There's zero consequences of accusing someone. So that also enables everybody who delights in accusation. Right. Well, they've got, they've got a, they've got a digital militia. They've got, they've got that, but there's also the, you know, I mean, when you're talking about some of the things you're describing about the body horror stuff, about the, uh, the beliefs that we're expected to swallow, um,

I think if you would have played this conversation to someone 15, 20 years ago, it would have been incomprehensible to them what they're hearing. I think a lot of people just simply did not understand what was happening. I think it's incomprehensible to most people now. Exactly. So how can you stand up for, how can you expend that energy to understand the incomprehensible in order to defend you? I think a lot of it is simply that

No smoke without fire. So many people are saying Graham Linehan is a bigot. That's readily comprehensible in one sentence. I can understand that. But I cannot understand this whole other thing. Well, it's also cost free. Yes. Like the cost to any given person for writing you off. You know, now you might argue about that with regards to your very close friends. But like when we met at a restaurant the other night and I mentioned to you that I'd been following you on X for a long time and it was probably...

Probably took me six months of following you before I trusted you. Oh. Well, because even though I know that this thing happens all the time. Oh, yeah. And even though I know that I knew that in all likelihood you were one of the people that it happened to, I still wondered, well, you know, as everyone does, where there's smoke, there might be fire. And it's just, that's in addition to Andrew's point. It's like,

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You're asking a lot of people to defend you. They have to admit to the existence of an evil that, first of all, they can't comprehend, and second of all, they do not want to admit to. And no bloody wonder. It's not surprising. So, I mean, it happened recently where a well-known author, Boyne, John Boyne, came out and defended, who was someone who had attacked, he wrote The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, very famous novel. He had attacked Graham back in the day.

And I saw this, it was an incredible post. He wrote an apology online and said he now understands it. He's now looked into it. He says, I was wrong. You were right. I'm sorry. He said that to you. It's quite a brave thing for him to do. By doing that, he's also put himself in the fire online to a degree. But of course, every time someone does that and every time they are piled on and destroyed and demonized and monstered, it sends a message out to everyone else that you don't want to be that person. It takes a certain kind of strength. Well, it's also the case too that

A lot of this is now instantiated in law. So, for example, in Canada, if you're a physician or a psychologist and you object to gender-affirming care, which is one of those phrases that's so pathological that it's truly a miracle of deception, then the probability that you'll be reported by an activist somewhere and that you'll face at minimum death

Like years of legal entanglement at your expense with a high probability of losing your professional status and your license. Like the probability of that is virtually 100%. Is it worth exploring? I mean, the weaponization of the law in the UK. Yeah. You've mentioned non-crime hate incidents. Would it be worth me explaining...

what that is and what, because that's the key weapon that activists have. Well, we do want to delve into that because one of the things we also want to explore is why you guys decided to move to the United States. Yes. And I'm spending a lot of my time in the United States for very similar reasons and know of very many other people who are doing the same thing. It's no bloody wonder this country thrives, say, because whenever any other place becomes unstable, it's

You can flee, so to speak, if you're the least bit creative and pursue whatever it is you want to pursue here and actually be, I would say, actually be appreciated for it. Okay, so talk about the situation in the UK and define this non-crime, non-crime hate incident. I think people here find it incredible because obviously you have the First Amendment in the US. We don't have a codified constitution. It's not quite as central in the UK, freedom of speech, yeah.

Yeah, even though it's basically an English principle that the Americans adopted. That's an understatement, which is why a lot of us were so disturbed when in that vice presidential debate with Tim Waltz and J.D. Vance, Tim Waltz effectively said that hate speech wasn't covered by the First Amendment. A comment, by the way, which didn't make it to the official transcripts, I noticed. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It didn't, no. I think it was because he was speaking at the same time as Vance. That might be the excuse. Right, right, right.

chilling thing to say, though. Yeah. Well, especially when the question, who the hell defines hate, immediately exists. And the answer is, the person that you least want to. Exactly. Always, yeah. That's leveraged immediately. Absolutely. And also, waltz is a lot to...

to cover up, you know, because it's going to come out what's been happening to these kids. And he kind of made that possible in his state. Yeah, absolutely. But I think, I suppose to explain what happened in the, because I don't think people in the US will understand how the police will, well, so what happened, there was a horrific murder of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence in the early 90s. The,

And that was racially motivated. And there was a failure among the police to take it seriously in the way that they should have done. It was appraised or terrified them, which was institutionally racist. Right, exactly. So there was a report commission called the McPherson Report, which came out in 1999, which did find that there was institutional racism within the police, or there was certainly a problem within racism. That was the first time that we had a document published

which outlined the difference between crime, racist incidents as being defined as criminal and non-criminal. It didn't use the phrase non-crime hate incidents, but it made this distinction and it said that both ought to be reported. This was the recommendation of Macpherson in that report. But then you have to fast forward a long time. You go forward to 2014. 2014 is the time when the College of Policing, this is the body in England and Wales which is responsible for training all police forces across England and Wales.

And they're a kind of quango. They are an administrative body that effectively the government has outsourced the responsibility to train police in the law in this country. They invented this idea of non-crime hate incidents with one eye on the Macpherson Report. So that's the origin of it.

And they decided that if anyone perceived that a non-crime had been committed, something offensive, something that hurt them, if they perceived that it had been motivated by a prejudice or hatred against one of the protected characteristics, race, gender, sex. Which keeps expanding. In Canada, it includes gender expression, which is fashion. In UK law, it includes gender reassignment.

but it's interesting that the College of Policing changed that to trans identity. So they actually, they made it up as they went along. So you had now a system that,

implemented in UK law, not in law, sorry, implemented among the UK police, where the police were told, if anyone contacts you and says, I've been offended and I perceive it was to do with this, you report it, record it as a non-crime hate incident against someone's name. It's on file. You don't notify the person who's being recorded as such. It doesn't come up in a superficial search, but it can come up in a deep search, I believe. There's a thing called a Disclosure and Barring Service Check, which...

where if you apply for a job which is sensitive in some way, say you want to be a teacher or a carer, you have a DBS check, it will come up there. And if it is flagged there... So that's a social credit system. You won't get the job. There's no headmaster or headmistress in the world who's going to see something flag and then employ you. Zero. You're done. So you have a situation now where members of the public with a grudge can...

to weaponize this against anyone they like for whatever reason. Or systems of activists with grudges. And the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the College of Policing have explicitly said that no evidence is required for hate to be recorded. There doesn't need to be evidence of hate. It's just solely about the perception of this. Now, this all came to a head recently because it's... How could that go wrong? Well, sure. By the way, I should note that this isn't just about McPherson.

The chief executive of the College of Policing at the time that non-crime hate incidents were implemented in 2014 was a man called Alex Marshall, I think. He'd won the previous year Stonewall's top award in the country. He became an LGBT envoy. So in other words, he's an activist. You have high

high-ranking activists within the police, within the College of Policing, who are effectively dragging the police force along in their wake, often reluctantly. But the reason why this is, I think, so chilling now, and it's become, a lot of people are talking about it now, because it's effectively a form of pre-crime. It's effectively Philip K. Dick's idea of pre-crime. Their justification is,

Sorry, what do they say? They say that unless we record non-crime hate incidents, we won't be able to monitor them in case they escalate into actual crime. But of course, all crime is preceded by non-crime. It cannot be any other way. You know, we've actually superseded you characters in the UK and Canada.

I know about this. Yes. Bill C-63. Yes. I got to tell you about this bill. It's in second reading in the House. And I think the bloody liberals will pass it before Trudeau gets turfed. Right. And so not the T-E-R-F turf, but the other kind. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so this is sandwiched in the layers of a bill that purports to protect children from online sexual abuse. Okay, so, and who could object to that, obviously, even though the bill does almost nothing to actually make that, to decrease the probability of that. I've read this like five times because I can't believe it's actually true. I keep thinking, I can't say this because it can't be true. But here's what I understood. I can take you in front of a provincial magistrate

And if I can convince that magistrate that you might commit a hate crime in the next year, so a non-crime hate incident. But you might, not even that you have. You might. I might. That I'm afraid that you might. Yes. If I can show that my fear is justified, whatever the hell that means, then you can have an electronic bracelet affixed to your ankle for a year.

You can be confined to your house. Your communication with the outside world, including social media, can be restricted to virtually nothing. And for reasons that I really can't understand at all, you will be required to provide samples of your bodily fluids to the authorities on a regular basis.

I think to determine whether you've been consuming alcohol or marijuana, it's like marijuana doesn't make you commit hate crimes, alcohol might. But I think they probably got that from domestic abuse law, right? Because if you're a drunk and you're a domestic abuser, you're much more likely to re-offend. So we've surpassed the non-crime as a precursor to crime. We have fear of non-crime as a precursor to crime. Okay, let's have a competition then.

I think you're winning at the moment. A competition of stupidity. Canada's really in the forefront of this. A competition of authoritarianism and stupidity. I think we've got a few more cards to play in the UK. Insofar as, for instance, there have been estimates around a quarter of a million non-crime hate incidents recorded against UK citizens. They happen at the dinner table all the time. I think it's like 62 a day or something is the average. Especially in the UK because you guys are so cutting.

Yes.

since the government has said you can't do this. In addition to that, the high court ruled that it was effectively, they said it was a chilling, it had a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The judge compared it to the Stasi, said we've never had a Gestapo in this country. They effectively said, you know, this is not lawful.

And so in other words, the College of Policing, an individual activist group that trains the police in our country, has ignored the government twice and the high court once and has fudged the language. And now we have a Labour government

that has said it wants to ramp up non-crime hate incidents. We've had Yvette Cooper saying, these are really important. We need to record non-crime. Now, you might still be winning on the candidate front because we haven't got to the point where if I think you might commit a crime. But to give a very specific example, which is why it's been written about a lot over the last few weeks, is because a journalist said,

in the UK. Alison Pearson, Telegraph journalist, was visited on Remembrance Sunday morning by two police officers. And they said, we are investigating you for a crime of stirring up racial hatred. And she said, what is the complaint against me? What is the crime? We can't tell you what the crime is or what the tweet is. It was a tweet from a year ago. So you don't need to know the crime or the accusers, right? She asked about the accuser and they said, it's not the accuser, it's the victim.

So in other words, we don't have due process either. Now, you'll know the novel, The Trial. There's no presumption of innocence. Right. Because who needs that? Exactly, exactly. But in The Trial by Kafka, the first scene is two police officers turning up at his house and he says, what have I done wrong? We cannot tell you that. You do not need to know that. This was a replay of that. So when she describes it as Kafkaesque, she's not being hyperbolic.

It's straight out of the first chapter of the trial. And he never finds out what he's done wrong in that novel, right up until the grisly end of that novel. So, go on, sorry, Graham. No, I was just going to say, I've had three visits. I've had two visits from the police. One on a Sunday morning. As befits a big... Yes, tell him, because it'll beat Canada if you tell him about this. Well, we'll see. I've got one up my sleeve still. Oh, yeah, that's true. Okay, so yeah, tell the story. Well, I started reporting on the activities of a serial con man. Victim.

I'll be... Big Tim. Who was taking women to court, getting them put in prison cells and so on. And he called that harassment...

used it, first of all, to call the police on me, then sent me a summons. He sued me at the same time because he's what I call a prison lawyer. Oh, yeah. He knows about the law. And that's what he does. He just puts people under the stress of a... Called malignant narcissism, by the way. That's it, yeah. And then just at the end, he drops it.

You know, he owes me costs, he owes everyone costs. Anyway, found out recently that apart from all this, he was a sexual offender. He was imprisoned for sexual offenses against a 14-year-old boy. You know, this is the guy who has the British police working for him, going to people's houses and knocking on doors. Did they tell you? Actually, to be fair, that was just a phone call. They told you your sin, though, didn't they? They told me that, yeah. Oh, well, it's nothing there. Ha ha ha.

You could hear it in the voice of the guy, of the policeman on the other end of the phone. This was the first time. It was just a phone call. And you could tell he did not know what was going on, you know? And he said... Yeah, that's even worse. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's just pure procedure. Yeah.

And he said to me, can you block them on Twitter or something? And I said, I already have them blocked. I knew immediately this was a malignant and appalling person. I blocked them. I said, I blocked them years ago, you know? And he was confused by that.

You know, because he didn't, he didn't, he just didn't really know what was going on. So they just, these activists just say the right words to wind them up and they go to people's doors. The real fear I have is that you can't vote it out because all of this came about during the Tories. Yeah.

And now we've got Labour. And so, you know, whatever you get, because the College of Policing and because the police are, they do their own thing. They decide their own thing. They don't care about what they're told to do by the government. It's not a right or left issue. Both are bad. But I do think, and we've had conversations about this, I do think that with a Labour government in the UK, things are getting a lot worse a lot quicker. So no matter how stupid the Conservatives are, the Labour Party can do what

do worse. Well, it's not just now about non-crime. We've had a lot of cases since the riots in the summer after the murder of those three children in Southport. By that Christian Welshman. The ethnically Welshman. No, this is a... Yes, I know what you're doing there. He, you know, we've had people who wrote... He had an Al-Qaeda training manual. Every Christian Welshman has that. Standard Welsh practice to have that. But he...

There were riots, there was anger, there was a lot of obvious justified anger. There were also some horrendous people opportunistically turning up from the far right to attack and destroy and defame. All of that is true. But the problem is we've had people who've, in anger, have tweeted things out that I do find objectionable, you know, things that are racist, things that are unpleasant. And there's, let me give an example. There's one woman, Lucy Connolly,

And she wrote out, I don't care anymore. We should burn down the hotels that they're in. We should just, you know, I don't care. Not pleasant. 31 months in prison. Said in anger, by the way. Deleted very quickly. Said in anger. Deleted quickly. 31 months in prison. There have been a number of cases like that. And one of the common factors is that all of the judges have said that

We are setting an example. We're giving you the harshest jail term to set an example to others. Those were the court cases that were sped along so efficaciously. And previous to that, Keir Starmer had said that he wanted judges to do this. So it's all, there's a weird... Sex offenders removed from their cells to make room for these women. My problem with this is... They were victims. My problem with this is manifold. I mean, firstly...

The draconianism of the jail terms is a problem in and of itself for language, for speech. I don't approve of the speech, but there is no evidence whatsoever that that tweet by that woman caused any violence in the real world. None whatsoever. And no one can tell you different. We've had decades of research into this. We know that that's not how it works. People don't tweet and then violence happens as a direct result. Mm-hmm.

Otherwise we'd be knee-deep in violence. It's why in the US you have the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, which would mean that, first,

Firstly, there has to be an intention to cause violence, that it is likely to cause violence, and that there is imminent risk of violence. So none of these people currently languishing in prison cells in the UK for tweets meet anywhere near the threshold of the Brandenburg test. We don't have that. So the chilling effect that this has...

not just on people who are saying nasty things, the chilling effect on people expressing themselves in any way. We've got a guy who's just been found guilty of stirring up hatred because of a Halloween costume that he wore. He dressed up as the Manchester bomber, which is sick and unpleasant. That's the point. But it's Halloween too. It's Halloween. Which is like when you do... It's about horror. When you dress up in sick and unpleasant costumes. There's a kind of joke in that. It's that you're trying to outgross everything.

Everyone else. He's waiting the prison sentence. We don't know how long he's going to be in prison. But why is someone...

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Who was the comedian who got nailed for teaching his dog to do the Hitler salute? Oh, I'm involved in that story. Count Dankula. Count Dankula. Dankula. Graham should tell this because he... Okay, okay. You made it worse. Well, I...

These were the days just before I got cancelled. And I believed everything that was being told to me about the new right, you know, or the online right or whatever. Which you are now an honorary member of, by the way. So I understand. And this guy was doing these kind of videos and he did one video where he got his dog, he had a pug. It was his girlfriend's dog. It was his girlfriend's dog. Right, and he didn't like it. He didn't like it. And he shouldn't have because it was a pug.

Yes. That was a lovely dog. I've met it. So he secretly taught it to do a Hitler salute. And I, rather than seeing this as quite a funny gag to play on your girlfriend, saw it as hidden messages, anti-Semitism, all this sort of stuff. And he really was just

messing about and having a joke. And, uh, well, it's a testament to Hitler. Yeah. You know, I mean, seriously. Well, actually, didn't you have to do one of my many apologies? I don't want to drop you in. I don't want to drop you in. My apology tour. Didn't you try and stop his crowd funder from getting, I did.

I did. Something for which I'll spend a few years in limbo. Even better, by the way, for this conversation, I at the time wrote a satirical piece. I was writing this character called Jonathan Pye. I was the co-writer of this character. And we wrote this satirical piece mocking the court's decision where the character, you know, and Graham attacked me for that online. Oh, yes, he did. I think you called me alt-right or fascist or something. Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, no. I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I think it's quite funny. It's a nice little connection we have. Yeah.

Back in the day before we were friends, I was a fascist. But, you know, I did that. No, it's important to highlight these sorts of things, though, because you want to see where you're... Just like I said, it took me like six months to trust you on X. You want to see... It's not like...

Only those people are susceptible to this like mass hysteria. You got to watch and see where you're susceptible. And if you have been susceptible in some manner, you should admit it. Well, you know, at one point during the COVID epidemic, the so-called COVID epidemic,

I got vaccinated twice. Now, in my defense, I was very ill at the time and wasn't really able to think. But I did get vaccinated. But I also said at the end of one podcast, and I would say in some ways, despite some inner prompting, that people should just get the damn vaccine. And my thinking at the time was, seriously, I was like, I'll take the shots.

Here's the deal. I'll take the shots. You leave me the hell alone. And then I found out instantly that the deal was you take the shots and then you take six more and forget about being left alone. And that was the end of that as far as I was concerned. But still, I made a mistake. I made a mistake and I would say...

It was very difficult for me at that point to believe that the pharmaceutical companies had become so corrupt that you couldn't trust their vaccine policy. You know, it was easier to think that it was the more conspiratorially minded, you know, alt-right types that were pushing this doctrine. And saying something cures that cognitive dissonance.

Even briefly. Yeah. You get to turn it off just for a few seconds and think, oh, at least I've made a decision. Yeah, right. There's that too. All of this is suggestive of this idea that there is a real problem we have at the moment where there's an expectation of moral purity from all sides. I've seen a similar thing there, like where people either didn't understand what was going on during the pandemic and maybe supported lockdowns or et cetera. And they get piled on and attacked by these very sort of, almost like an equivalent of the woke people

on the sort of lockdown skeptic side as well. I don't think any particular group is immune to this idea, this kind of expectation, "Everyone must think the same way as me on every single point." Well, it's part of group identity, really. I mean, it's necessary for human beings to cooperate, to reach consensus that's almost universal on everything rapidly, right? Because otherwise we can't cooperate. No, but some things change, because I remember being at university

debating friends late into the night, drinking, rowing, but in a good-natured way. We didn't not be friends the next day because we fundamentally disagreed. We actually relished the fundamental disagreements and they were part of the friendship. That's not possible now. Well,

The net has enabled the reputation-savaging psychopaths. So, you know, the female pattern of bullying, because there's a female pattern of antisocial personality, the female version isn't violence. The female version is reputation-savaging. Right. And men can also partake in reputation-savaging. Of course. If they do that in real life, they get into a fight. Women don't, because women won't fight physically. But men will. But online, there's no...

consequences to reputation savaging whatsoever. In fact, it's probably amplified by the social media companies and the algorithms. And so I think not only can the reputation savagers aggregate, they can do so anonymously. They can levy accusations without any consequences whatsoever. And

the consequences of that are rapid and devastating, partly because it's easy to write someone off. Is it as mobilized as that, though? I don't think it's mobilized. I think it's more something has changed in the air. I think it's mobilized, too. There are definitely aggregations of activists who are weaponizing the professional colleges, for example. Yeah, sure. No, no, I think that is happening. But I think for a lot of people, they are being caught in a wave of societal change where this is just now the norm. Go on, sorry, Graham. I think it's like...

it's not just that it's weaponized, it's that the panopticon or whatever you want to call it is frictionless, right? Like there's a very funny Onion thing about arson at a party being disproved by the 60,000 photographs that were taken at it, you know? Yes. And everyone just has a different angle of a cigarette falling to the floor, you know, that was taken in the foreground. I've seen that, yeah. Yeah, and it's just because we, without realizing it, have become the apparatus of a police state

you know, but it's all, it's all just part of the fabric of our lives. We would not, it's like recently I found out,

Do you remember Pokemon Go was big for a while, so people were going down the street and they were finding Pokemons? Well, apparently, that was a company who wanted to get people to do their GPS work for them. So they got all these... They put Pokemon in places where there wasn't a GPS record of it, and they got all these people to go out and film it for them. That's smart. You know what I mean? So the...

So, you know, in the story of the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story in this regard. So what happens in the opening chapters of Genesis is you have an account of the two ways that society collapsed.

So it's propelled by the sin of Cain, and he becomes vengeful and bitter because his offerings to God are rejected. So he's a bitter and resentful individual who isn't offering his best, and he becomes murderous and his descendants become genocidal. Okay, so that's the individual pathology.

the disintegration of the descendants of that pathological individual, and then you have the flood. And so the flood is a descent into utter chaos, right? But then you have the Tower of Babel, and the Tower of Babel is equally catastrophic, but opposite. It's the

imposition of the all-seeing eye of Sauron or the Panopticon, right? And it's literally built by engineers because the people who build the Tower of Babel in the biblical accounts are the descendants of the people who build cities and machines, right? So they're aiming at the wrong goal, right? And they build this massive machine that's dedicated to the wrong ideal. And

the immediate consequence of that is that words lose their meaning and everyone is at odds with one another. Yes. You know, and it's, and we have got this problem, right? We've built this new power of Babel, which is this interconnected world, which is biologically revolutionary, right? Yes, yes. What happens when everyone's immediately connected?

Well, maybe bad ideas spread 50 times faster than good ideas. Like, we have no idea, right? Maybe the psychopaths are unleashed. And, you know, maybe there's an infinite possibility to educate everyone. Like, there's a lot of things on the table, but we have no idea what we're doing. And it's certainly the case that...

words in many ways have lost their meaning. We've talked about exactly that. We can't assume that we're referring to the same thing no matter what we talk about. And so, you know, you see in China, of course, they're much farther along the totalitarian road than we are. Maybe we won't go down that road, but

600 million CCTV cameras, right, which is about one for every two people, and they can do perfect face recognition. But if you cover your face, they can recognize you with unerring accuracy merely by gait. Every bloody thing you do is tracked. And that's certainly a road we could walk down. I mean, you go into an airport now, and before you board a plane, your picture is taken. Now you can opt out.

for now, and the gates are increasingly automated, which is all well and good and convenient when the goddamn thing's open, but pretty rough on you if they don't, because then what? We're going to talk, what are you going to do? Talk to the gate? Seems unlikely. And so, I mean, it's easy even to point to the hypothetical political causes of this. It's the progressive left. It's like...

Yeah, partly. But it's certainly partly the fact that we don't know what the hell we're doing in this interconnected world. It might be that period of time when we have this revolutionary new technology that we don't know how to handle. We don't know what it will produce. I did read somewhere that at the invention of the printing press, there were similar moments of hysteria. Yeah, a hundred years of it afterwards, wasn't it? In other words, it took a kind of calming down, a readjustment process before we understood how to deal with books. Well, it also blew the...

apart, right? Because you had the massive, what, altercations between the Protestants and the Catholics. It was a direct consequence of the printing press. Something very freeing about that. All of a sudden, you can read God's word in the vernacular, which was the church was protecting its power by preventing that. Well, it also meant eventually that the entire world was made literate. Like it was a major league transformation. So maybe, to be positive, maybe this Tower of Babel at the moment that we're

building, maybe this period we're in will have a settling down period in its wake. Well, it depends on how we conduct ourselves. Like if you guys move to Phoenix and you start your entertainment consortium and you start making comedy that can actually be viewed by people and that's genuinely funny and free, then you're going to tilt the world a little farther away from the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the Tower of Babel and towards something approximating freedom. We just need to turn that into a logo.

Yeah, that's right, if you can think of anything. You can use the Tower of Babel, although the EEC has already managed that, right? But there's something about tilting the world in that direction. I do love that. It's not new. What you're identifying really is the enduring appeal of authoritarianism throughout human history. Forever.

forever, which will manifest itself in one way or another. And it just so happens that at the moment it's manifesting itself in this way. And it seems to me that it's quicker than ever before. So it's been catalyzed in this strange way. But it feels to me as though the struggle in of itself between liberty and authority is one thing, but the struggle to recognize the threat of authority, of authoritarianism, seems to be another battle you have to have. Well, sure, because the attack doesn't come from the position you expect.

Not if it's going to be effective. Well, the Labour government don't think that they're authoritarians. They think that they're doing good. When Keir Starmer said in Parliament today that he felt that desecrating a holy book was unacceptable and divisive and awful, he wasn't thinking of the bigger picture in terms of this is a gateway to authoritarianism, blasphemy laws, you know, once you start down that line. In other words...

It's the well-intentioned authoritarian, which is particularly what we have to challenge at the moment. Or the one who wants to appear well-intentioned in the moment with no further thought or effort. Yes. Right, those are the religious hypocrites fundamentally. It's the psychopaths who are proceeding along that line. What concerns me more is the fellow travellers

who are benevolent and who subscribe to this tyranny out of a sense of this is better for the world. Those are the ones that I find harder to deal with. Well, I have less sympathy for those people, I would say, too, because...

The problem I have with them, and I think Keir Starmer, certainly Justin Trudeau fits into this category, is they want the moral approbation for being good people without doing the work. It's actually really hard to be a good person. You have to work at it all the time and against your, what would you say, alternative inclinations. So I want to tell you another story that's relevant to your venture here in the United States too. So

There's a story in the biblical texts, in the story of Abraham, that has to do with the probability that a city will be destroyed for ethical impropriety. And cities are destroyed for ethical impropriety all the time, right? They go to hell in a handbasket, and then all hell breaks loose, and that's the end of that. That happens all the time. Sodom. Well, this is the story. So angels of God visit Abraham, or God, it's ambivalent in the story, and they tell Abraham that...

that Sodom and Gomorrah are going to be destroyed in totality. And Abraham says, that's not fair. What if there's good people there? And God or the angels say, I don't think there are. And Abraham says, well, what if I can go to the city and find 50? And God says, you find 50, no problem. And Abraham, who's a stubborn bastard says, well, what if there's 40? And God says,

You know, you're pushing your luck. And I think Abraham gets him down to 10. And it's a fascinating story because this is what I think it means. And this is also why I think your venture is so crucially important. And I also think this is relevant on the day after Jay Batacharia was elected to head the NHS after being an outsider and, what would you say, cancelled.

The moral of that story is if there's 10 people in the city that are still willing to tell the truth, the city won't be destroyed. And I believe that's true because I think the truth is so powerful that if a culture hasn't become so totalitarian that everyone is silenced, there's still hope. And I do think there's still hope in the West. And the fact that you guys can come here to Phoenix, right, home of the

home of rebirth, so to speak. And you can do your thing. You can do what comedians have always done, which is to tell the truth. And God only knows what the consequence of that will be. More than, possibly more than you think. Yes. It's possibly, there's a reason stand-up comedy is so,

so entertaining and so popular. It's possible because it's possible that it's because it's really necessary. It's really necessary for you to be allowed to be funny. Because one of the things that's so cool about comedy is that people don't laugh on purpose. Right? You can't

you can pretty much tell when someone laughs falsely. And so it's actually a form of spontaneous honesty. It's pre-conscious. Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah, it's very interesting. Well, I saw recently a clip of one of the, I won't name names, but one of the very woke comics in the UK in a BBC audience.

You could tell the audience were forcing themselves to laugh because they wanted to show approval for the message that was being... The moral virtue. And I felt like, I think it was maybe Leo Kers at GB News, he was saying that that's the punishment for the woke. They have to sit through these things and force themselves to laugh. It's that distinction between what they call claptor, you know, when you see where people are applauding out of approval...

for what is being said. Aren't they good guys? What's much better is that involuntary laugh when you think, I really shouldn't have laughed at that. Well, that's the thing. It's even better than the best kind of laughter is when you're ashamed of yourself for laughing. Or for saying it. It's like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that. But it was necessary and it was funny. It's an escape valve. I've never seen riots in Dublin until last year. I think it was last year they had.

It wasn't earlier this year. Yeah. I've never seen riots in Dublin. I grew up in Dublin. I've never seen a riot in Dublin, you know. Montreal too, by the way. Really? Yeah. Horrible. Oh God, yes. And I'm not saying, I'm not making any great claims for comedy, but one of the things that it does do is that it lets a little bit of steam out when everyone notices the same thing at the same time. Right? And maybe people aren't talking about it elsewhere. Yeah.

so comedy and satire is a great place to let this steam out but we have a show called Have I Got News For You in the UK and if it's supposed to be collect the news of the recent week and you can watch it and not have a

a clue that any of the stuff we spoke about today is going on. Yeah. You know, because they deliberately avoid anything that will get them complaints. And as a result, it's like completely toothless as a satirical show. We need things that make people, that just make people feel a bit sane. That's what we tried to do with my YouTube about the gender issue. Yeah. Just wanted to make people, yeah, you have noticed that. People are. Yeah, right, right. Well, that's the reestablishment of a consensus of truth. Like, you know,

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It's much harder to make 10 people laugh in a crowd if there's only 10, than 1,000. Yeah. Right? And so there's something about the anonymity of a crowd, but there's also something about the fact that when everyone laughs together, it's the establishment of a new consensus of the previously unspoken based on the self-evident truth. Because everyone wouldn't be laughing if it wasn't true, right? Yes. It has to...

and if that wasn't a true response. And it's also sudden and uncontrollable. You know, there's another weird thing about laughter. I used to do this as a joke with a couple of my friends when we were lifting weights in the gym, because if you make someone laugh when they're in the middle of a bench press, they'll drop the weight on their chest. Well, you lose all your muscular control when you laugh, which is also extremely interesting, because it means that in the moment of laughter...

you render yourself defenseless and vulnerable, which is also extremely interesting, right? Especially because it's also intensely pleasurable. Yes, exactly. It's a very weird. But don't you find it depressing though that so many comedians, you call them regime comedians, but comedians in the UK don't recognize that this is a problem. They don't think it is a problem because their opinions are the orthodox opinions. But also, I mean, we had, we did a standup gig in Dublin. What,

four months ago or something which was cancelled on us activists phoned up Graham and I were both performing that night a couple of other comics it was part of my comedy Unleashed thing and activists phoned up the venue and they said okay we won't put it on then they're too scared yeah

And then we found another venue at the last minute and it was fine. But how can you talk to, how can any comic today say that that is a situation that's... Well, you answered that question earlier. It provides an avenue to success for absolutely mediocre people. Right. Right, and then they can say two things. I'm just as funny as Graham Linehan, for example, plus I'm definitely morally superior. And that's a big, that's a huge accomplishment. Or do they genuinely think that we are...

spreading hate through the medium of humour? Do they believe that Count Dankula was trying to recruit people to neo-Nazism through the medium of pugs? Well, I did. I can answer that. I did. He did think that, you see. I know, I know. It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. You never want to underestimate the, what would you say, the attractiveness of unearned moral virtue. Like,

In the gospel accounts, for example, the people who end up crucifying Christ are the Pharisees, right? It's Pharisees, that's religious hypocrites. Those are the people who are claiming to be good when they're not. It's the scribes, those are the academics, right? Who use truth in the service of their own self-interest

and the lawyers, and they're the ones who use legalism as an alternative to morality. That proclivity has been around forever. Yes. The temptation...

See, one of the commandments is do not use the name of God in vain. And everyone thinks that means don't swear. That isn't what it means. It means don't claim to be doing the work of the divine when you're pursuing your own self-interest. And it's really necessary to understand that that's a temptation. You know, so for example, when I said, just get the damn vaccine. Now, was I being good or was I signaling a kind of moral virtue? And I would say, no.

I think I wasn't being good at all in that situation. I think I was signaling a form of moral virtue. It's like, come on, all the sensible people like me are going to do this. And you can tell that in consequence of the fact that I've already done it.

Like I said, I can plead illness at the time, but that's still... But there's also the apparatus that I was talking about earlier. You just take it as a normal thing that you would issue a statement on it. And we all do. I remember that in the before times on Twitter. If everyone's talking about something, you sit there thinking, oh, I better come up with a joke. Who cares if you talk or not? I don't really like...

Knowing, you know, the way in the old days, you'd watch a show like The Monkees. Like, I used to love The Monkees, the TV show they had, you know. And then you'd wonder about these people and you'd hear from them every so often for the rest of your life, just in little spots. Yeah.

But now they are telling you their political opinions all day every day. Which you don't want to know. Which you either don't want to know or maybe you think you want to know and you actually don't. But worse still, they're not necessarily their opinions. They're the opinions they feel they have to transmit. Well, they're also no more interesting than anyone else's opinions. Absolutely. You know, I went and saw John Cleese, who, like, I love John Cleese. He was like a saviour to me in my adolescence.

All of my friends were John Cleese freaks, you know, and he's so funny. And I went and saw his live show five years ago, and he talked about making life of Brian and about, well, all the great movies they made. And that was so interesting. And then he talked about Trump, which was like not interesting. It was like listening to your neighbor talk about Trump. And it's, well...

I suppose that's another one of the cataclysmic problems of this interconnectedness. The bottom thing is that we're all on a stage now. As soon as you have a Twitter account or Facebook or whatever, you step onto a stage. And I think that always being...

being audience-facing is perhaps not the best thing for us. Yeah, definitely. Can you imagine having that problem when you're a teenager? Yes. And having that for the rest of your life? How many lives have been ruined? But I would say that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a celebrity expressing an opinion. And I think there's a distinction to be drawn. I mean, I've spoken with John Cleese about his... He has sincerely held convictions that he's entitled to express. But I think that is very different from...

from, for instance, to give an example, an active friend of mine during the Black Lives Matter riots was contacted by her agent and

saying, you haven't put up a black square in support of Black Lives Matter. If you don't do that, I won't be able to find work for you. That's not going to happen. So therefore, you have someone in the arts industry now feeling they have to convey an opinion that they don't sincerely hold, otherwise their livelihood will be taken away from them. Now, I think that's the risk. Part of the problem here might be, and I've certainly had this problem on Twitter, it's like,

Twitter is like talking to your friends or your roommates in college, except that it's not.

Because it goes out to millions of people. But it's performance. It's like seriously not that, even though it feels like that. And so, you know, maybe one of the rules with X, for example, or social media in general, is if you play with fire, you're going to be burned. And you're playing with fire whether the match is hot or not on social media. You know, my son has told me, he said, Dad, you have to remember when you're on X that you're actually publishing.

Right, and it's certainly the case that I spend a lot less time on any given tweet than I would on any sentence that's in one of my books. Well, I'm often catching myself in that. If I get into a Twitter spat, an argument, which I do more than I should, sometimes I think, I catch myself and I think,

Am I trying to be seen to win? Right. More than getting to the truth of the point. Right. And that's the point. Well, anger will certainly, anger will certainly motivate that. And that's when I tend to withdraw from it. If I think it's, I'm messing up now. I'm trying to humiliate this person. It's a power game now. Right. And I don't like that about myself. I'm sure everyone has it. Oh, definitely. But I think being aware of the performative element of social media, it's just not. It's hard to be aware of it though. It is. Because you just have to go click and click.

and away you go. It's just not the forum. There's no lag. It's not the forum for discussion. It just isn't. Something about it, it rewards extremism. Well, it rewards impulsive behavior. It does. It's set up to incentivize impulsive behavior. We have no idea. Impulsive behavior is a bad

medium to long-term strategy. And that's the sign, Qanon, of Twitter. And so it just might be a game that degenerates as you play it. I'm kind of confused by Elon's decision to put in the For You tab, which seems like a surefire way to create kind of discord and arguments. I just don't look at that tab. I look at the things that I'm following. Yeah, I also don't look at it because it's too pathological. Like it just aggregates bad actors. Well, they're trying to...

No one knows what to do with Twitter. So I have to ask you another question because my daughter won't forgive me if I don't. And there are other reasons too. You taught a course for Peterson Academy. I did. We live in a time when many of us think that human progress is inevitable. When it comes to the arts, this is a kind of wishful thinking.

It's the psychological complexity of his characters and his insights into human nature, not the plots. He wasn't interested in plots. Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet. This is a girl on a balcony, her lover below. Could you change a single syllable and improve it? It's not possible.

You can read Shakespeare. I don't care who you are. These are plays about human beings. This is why they've never stopped being relevant. He broadens our sense of what it means to be human. People found it very uncomfortable because it doesn't have poetic justice. His characters, Iago, Cleopatra, Titus, Cordelia, Brutus, they all think differently.

I do think that Shakespeare has the capacity to illuminate our modern world. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I like the fact that Shakespeare absolutely doesn't attempt to preach at you. It's incumbent on us to have a familiarity with, well, the greatest writer who ever lived.

Tell us about the course. So the course is on Shakespeare's tragedies. And we filmed it in London. Was it last year? I think, yes. My sense of time has completely gone. And it was excellent. And I'm not saying that just to be a sicker fan. But the whole premise...

I'm so 100% behind, which is that I was told you can teach this course in whatever way you want. You can focus on the things you want, which I think is the way to get the best out of people who want to teach. Well, we only invite people to participate who we want to hear from. And so this is something I definitely learned in academia.

It's like, once you have the right person, leave them the hell alone. And if they're not the right person, then fire them, right? Well, what's great about it as well, because that's my background. That was, you know, that was my doctoral degree was in Shakespeare. I used to teach Shakespeare at Oxford University part-time while I was completing the doctorate. It's everything. And obviously, I've retained the love of Shakespeare and I continually read him

all the time. So it's... I tell you what it is. I've been dragged into this culture war stuff by virtue of my creative work, comedy, playwriting, etc. Because you have to address this as a creative. If there's such an obstacle, such an impediment, you have a kind of duty to address it. Right. Political is an obstacle to your creativity. You can't ignore it. But it then becomes...

an obstacle to other enthusiasms in your life. Right. And for me, Shakespeare... And more lasting enthusiasms, hopefully. And actually, I think the study of the likes of Shakespeare, who the activists are trying to problematize, you know, the Globe Theatre in London, which is supposed to be the custodian of his work...

has an annual anti-racist Shakespeare webinar where sort of anti-racist experts gather to berate Shakespeare for his problematic elements. And you think- I'm morally superior to Shakespeare. I'm better than Shakespeare, right. And I think one of the great things, so in the course that I did for you, for the Petition Academy-

I started the first lecture with a question, which is why has Shakespeare as a playwright never been bettered? How can that be the case? You know, this is, he began in the late 1580s. The public theatres had only been around for about a decade. This is a new thing. This is a new medium. How is it that a man right at the start of this new thing isn't ever bettered for four centuries? How does that happen? And I hope by going through it, we sort of get to some kind of answer. But I think it's that question,

prioritization of genius, which has now become suspect within the academy. You know, the idea that his work can be reduced to the idea of just a white male effectively trying to empower other white men through his work. That's how they see art. That's how they see creativity as just a kind of conduit. Can you imagine a temptation more profound than the one that would allow you to be morally superior to the great geniuses of history just because you hold the same...

cost-free political opinions. Exactly. I mean, that is a good deal. I can barely tolerate going to museums now because you have a masterpiece and then an explanation by someone whose subtext is how they're morally superior to this

who's so outstanding that it shamed them. There was an exhibition of Hogarth in London where there was a self-portrait and because he was sitting on a chair which made of wood, the panel explained that the wood had probably come from a plantation and it's connected to slavery and therefore we need to judge Hogarth. So I think these little lectures that you get

It's so of this, it says so much about our time, but nothing about the art. Yes. And nothing about the transcendent capacity of art. And that's why I'm very careful now. It's so rooted to the year. It is, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And whenever I see, I research it very carefully now, if I go and see a production of Shakespeare, because nine times out of ten, it will be...

a mangling of Shakespeare to promote the ideology. And by the way, I don't think that's a problem if you want to... People do all sorts of things with Shakespeare. Yes. And that's fine. They're free to do that. And I don't care if you want to turn it into a pro-Marxist thing or a pro-... Whatever you want to do with it. Or queer Shakespeare. But everyone's doing the same thing. Well, when it's mandatory, it's something completely different. Yes. Even more confusing. Well, they are anyway. That's what I mean. The other thing that happens, of course, is that as soon as...

the theatrical presentation becomes woke, no one watches it. And then all the activists say, well, obviously Shakespeare is passé because no one's paying any attention to him anymore. Why is it that all, in our current culture, I think all art at the moment is, as you say, mandatory in terms of it must be conveying the message. It feels like state-sanctioned

propaganda rather than art. And that's the only way you're going to get commissioned. That's the only way you're going to get a play on. Well, no, in the UK, I mean... Oh, it's increasingly the case in classical music and everywhere in the arts and theatrical productions all across the United States. I think 50% of the theatres now in the United States are...

The prophecy is that they'll go broke within the next two years. And it's like the problem with propaganda is no one wants to watch it. So Graham, if you, if you were working, if they were letting you work today, all of your scripts would be passed by a sensitivity reader in advance. You would be told which bits you have to take out. You know, even the poet Kate Clancy, who's, you know, on the left and, you know, et cetera. She wrote this piece about sensitivity readers, her experience. She'd written a, and I will do it, not do it justice, but she, as a poet,

had used the word disfigurement relating to the landscape, relating to the... she was doing something poetic, obviously, and the sensitivity reader said that's an ableist slur. So all they can see when they read these texts is how does this either promote or oppress people on the basis of identity groups? And that's not art. I met a guy who was writing a biography of, I can't say who it is because it'll get them into trouble, but a very famous figure in the 50s

And I believe he had a heart attack from dealing with sensitivity readers because the correspondence that he unearthed. Another dead white man. Yeah. Was he old? Hopefully. Another evil. But all the stuff, all the information that he unearthed, the letters, you know, they were all using, you know, the F word for gay men or the N word and stuff like this. But this is the past.

it is the truth what's that story you tell in your book about Tom Stoppard oh yeah it was so funny but Tom Stoppard this was when Sonia Friedman who was going to produce the Ted musical which by the way we have exactly the same kind of problems with theatre in the UK in terms of funding and the Ted musical would have kept people employed for years you know so it's just an outrageous act of censorship that they've

destroyed it, you know? Um, but Tom Stoppard was, it was, I was very flattered because I was following a meeting she had with Tom Stoppard and she said, Oh, he's complaining because he does, you know, he doesn't think there should be black people in the Warsaw ghetto, you know? And, uh, and she said, but he's having them whether he likes it or not, you know? And I thought, well, would you have, uh, Jewish people in a play about the, uh, you know, the Bronx, you know, like, Oh,

What are the rules here? Is diversity only one way? Is it just visual diversity? You know what I mean? But it's extremely important. There's a diverse range of diversities, unfortunately. Yeah, but you know, you were talking about Monty Python, but Terry Gilliam, because the Olwek Theatre is now run by the people who sell its ice creams,

had to take the Stephen Sondheim musical out to Bath to get it on. Well, and Cleese also had trouble with part of the life of Brian because there's a character in it, I think, is it Chapman? Oh, Loretta. Yeah, Loretta, right, which is a very funny part of the movie, which is also a very, very funny movie. But yeah, he decides that he's a man or a woman, right? I think he said that that was overblown, that was a headline. Well, not quite. No, no. Oh, you know. Well, I've spoken to him about it. Me too, and I know that...

they had trouble with that when they were bringing the play on stage. It was the actors. They did a read. So John has done a stage version of Life of Brian. Yes. He's written a stage version. And in the reading, I think it was in New York, the actors then said, you have to take out the bit where the man says he wants to be a woman. Right.

where he wants to be called Loretta, and he wants to have babies. And John's character says, but you can't have babies. And they say, no, but we want to fight for his right to be able to have babies. Yes, exactly. And it's so prescient. It's so perfect. But he said he won't take the scene. No, that's right. He said he wouldn't do that. Which is fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. I think Eric Idlebent did need it. Oh, did he? I think so, yeah. It's so sad. But I wonder about this, and it's a broader question is,

Is it possible for artistic genius to even emerge within the conditions that we are currently creating? Well, how much artistic genius emerged in the Soviet Union? Well, that's the point, isn't it? Yeah, well, none. That's pushing it, but virtually none. So there's a great book by Victor Hugo about artistic genius, and he estimates that about three or four

major artistic geniuses emerge in every generation. That's his view about this. He says that this is, how does he describe it? He says this is God distributing himself on earth. He says every masterpiece is a kind of miracle. It's a really beautiful idea. But what I think, and he's probably right, he's talking about the big one, like Aeschylus and Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. I think he's right about me. I'm sorry about that, Graham. But you will reach Homer's heights at some point. But I think he's talking about these

He's saying that this will inevitably happen within humankind. Three or four a generation, you'll get a Mozart, you'll get a whatever. But that won't, I think Hugo takes for granted that we live in a culture that values the arts and doesn't value this. It doesn't punish it. Quite. So I don't think within the grip of this movement, with the arts so captured by this movement, that

those people cannot emerge because the conditions are simply not there. They're probably there. There probably are those Jesuses. I would say, though, at the round of time of Hugo, there would have been just as many impediments to creating art. Right. You know? So, yeah, that's the question. So how is it that under the oppression of medieval Christendom, great artists still emerged through it? What does Michelangelo do with the Sistine Chapel? He

He's given narrow parameters in terms of what he can represent, but he finds a way to... Well, as a manifestation of God on earth, so to speak, it's very hard to stop. You know, I collected Russian realist art from the 20th century, a lot of it. Like, I have like 500 pieces of it. And I looked at tens of thousands of paintings from the Soviet Union. Yes. A lot of it rough impressionism. It wasn't exactly realism. And...

Many of the pieces I got are spectacular from an artistic and technical perspective, even though to some degree they're subordinated to propaganda. But what was really cool about having the pieces around is that as we recede from the propagandistic world,

milieu of the work the art shines through. And in a hundred years, these will just be pieces of art. There'll be no propaganda left in them at all. That's so interesting, the way that true creative genius finds a way through the impediments. Yes, it's like a flower on a pavement stone. Yeah, right. But I love that. So, for instance, with Shakespeare...

you know, he can't write, produce his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis or Rabelecris, without patronage. So each poem is preceded by this effusive praise of Henry Ruthley, his patron, which you could say, well, that's dispensable. But the beauty then comes through in the poem in of itself.

Well, you could argue as well that cinema is a very interesting one because cinema is such a strange marriage of art and economics, you know? Yes. But still, we have these classic films that broke through. Well, we should probably stop with this and go over to the wire side. No, I'm very happy about it. I mean, one of the things, and this is very much worth considering, no doubt you gentlemen have already considered it, but the way that you circumvent the propagandists isn't by explicit political statement. You do it by story.

Yes, yes, yes.

God only knows what you could accomplish. And who knows what the consequence of actually producing some things that are genuinely funny might be again. It's not like there's not a market for it. I mean, Rogan's Comedy Club in Austin is just thriving and he's fostering a whole new generation of comedians who will say anything as long as it's funny, you know, and they don't allow cell phones in the crowd. You can't record any of it. And so people go out and it's such a fun place to go because everyone knows that

there's trouble afoot and that all sorts of things that can't be said will definitely be said. Isn't it quite an exciting, it's quite an exciting time. All of this oppressive woke stuff actually could produce something,

Well, if there's one thing we do as a species, it's overcorrection. So I quite like the idea of a comic overcorrection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe that's what's happening. I think that's happening already because there's so many things that are happening even within the Trump administration that are comic overcorrections, right?

Right. It's like, really? They appointed him? That's the maximally possible. That's the maximally comical possible outcome. Right. Yes. So. All right, gentlemen, we should probably stop on this side. So thank you very much for coming in to talk to me. We'll meet again.

I suspect on the podcast, especially once you guys get up and rolling, because everyone's going to want to know just exactly what the hell. Oh, yeah, we've done. They have all sorts of plans, which we didn't discuss today because it's a little bit premature to announce them. But those announcements will be coming soon.

thank you to everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side and to the Scottsdale crew here for making this possible and also for putting this together on relatively short order because we decided to do this podcast, what, yesterday? The three of us anyways and so that worked out extremely well and we're going to continue on the Daily Wire side. I think probably what we'll do there is delve a little bit more into the ugly underbelly of totalitarian wokeness, especially

I think especially in the UK and in Europe, because a correction has obviously already occurred in the United States, and God willing, that will actually have some teeth, and we'll see what happens. And in Canada, Trudeau's days are...

absolutely numbered. There isn't a chance that he's going to survive beyond next October. Now, he'll be able to do a lot of damage in the intervening year, but he's pretty much done. But Europe is in rough shape and the UK, they're in rough shape. And so I think we'll turn our attention on the Daily Wire side to a discussion of that situation and also what might be done about it that would be practical and useful. So join us for that.

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