The Genius Behind Titania McGrath with Andrew Doyle [S4 Ep.14]

Hip-hop is always called out to inequalities in America. But even within it, nothing's ever been equal. This season, Lauda de Nariya podcast is tackling sexism, homophobia, and all the unwritten rules that hold the entire culture back. Listen to the Lauda de Nariya podcast from NPR Music, or wherever you get your podcast. The whole thing is fucked up. You're on the edge with Andrew Gold, and that's true crime legend Amanda Knox. The out of control drug-addled, whole-f***er Amanda Knox. If you like interviews with the world's most extreme and controversial people, then your love on the edge with Andrew Gold. Here's me talking to a real-life psychopath. How would you feel if somebody came in now and just started strangling me? Well, I do not feel connected to you, Andrew. I take you inside cults such as the Westbrook Baptist Church. Do you see any part of your father in you? I see something in me that reminds me of something that I despised in him. I feel I was going to die out there. I'll talk with intellects such as Richard Dawkins. It's funny to think of insects having sperm. How else do you think every produce happens to all of us? Before we delve into the darkest of minds. Was there violence? Yes. No one looked to string me as a skeleton, and then I can hang in my own dissecting room and teach for the rest of my death. Find it wherever you get your podcasts that's on the edge with Andrew Gold. So in the end I suppose you could say I'm paying it forward. Yeah. Paying it forward. Whoa. Paying it forward. Paying it forward. Paying it forward. Stick to the facts, ma'am. Before I published a word I was writing rap to fam. It's a revenge and a care with the rolly backpacks. Silverware, matte black, eating steve. The track you just heard is an excerpt from my brand new album Amor Fatih. You may remember the music video as I put out last year. Blast with me, straight A's and forward. This new album features all three of those singles plus seven brand new songs. Now I put my all into this project and it's a real representation of my passion for music. So if you want to listen to the whole thing, click in the description or search cold X-man on Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you listen to music. Now back to the podcast. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Andrew Doyle. Andrew is a British comedian, writer and political commentator. He's best known for creating and writing the satirical character Titania McGrath, a fictional social justice warrior who parodies extreme progressive activism. Doyle's also a frequent contributor to the spectator, spiked and many other publications, where he writes on topics related to free speech, political correctness and social justice. He's also written several books, including Woke, A Guide to Social Justice, which he wrote in character as Titania, and Free Speech and Why It Matters, which he wrote as himself. In addition to his work as a writer, Doyle has also performed a stand-up comedy and appeared on various TV and radio programs in the UK. This was a really fun and wide-ranging conversation about a bunch of different topics, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. So without further ado, Andrew Doyle. Andrew Doyle, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thanks for having me. So you are Andrew Doyle. I'll have introduced you fully in the intro to this, but people may also know you by your hilarious alter ego, Titania McGrath, which was for many years a favorite of mine on Twitter. This fake composite face blonde woman that is a cliche of social justice warrior, shibilets. And for many years, it was not known who was behind this. I was talented. You were out of will. That's right. And so I guess, and since then, you've been writing for Unheard, which is a great online magazine. Listeners of this podcast will remember I did an event with Unheard a few weeks ago in London. And you've been writing for many other outlets, and you've been on Greg Gutfield's show. You've been doing GB News in Britain. Yeah. I mean, effectively, I started by doing the sort of comedy satire route, but then because so many of the things that I was talking about, I suppose, require a bit more explanation and exploration. So I ended up writing about them in a serious way as well. Yeah. I thought that was safest because then, you know, there were so many people who sort of determined to misrepresent what I was trying to do through Titania that if all my opinions are out there in black and white and easily accessible, then hopefully that will put pay to those kind of misinterpretations. You know, because people would say, oh, you're just, you're punching down at minorities, you want to have a go at sort of gay people or whatever. And it's so far from what I'm actually doing. I thought if I just explain why I find this social justice movement in its current incantation to be such a problem, and if I sort of lay that out, then hopefully those misinterpretations would go away. Turns out that doesn't happen. People are insistent on sort of misrepresenting you and what you're about. Well, you're quite good at satire and serious commentary. And so I guess my question is a little bit about your background. Your background is mainly in comedy first, right? Yeah, sort of. I mean, I started out in stand-up or I was a playwright before I was a stand-up. So I used to do plays in very small fringe theaters. And then I started writing comedy and doing comedy sketch shows, again, in sort of small theaters in London. And the stand-up came about because I'd done a sketch show with two other guys. And we were short on material and we had like a night to go before the first show. So I just wrote, I said, well, I'll do a stand-up bit. So I wrote some stand-up. And it wasn't very good, but I enjoyed it. So then I ended up doing more of it. So that's what happened there. That's why I had to go. And then when I got into stand-up, I was also a school teacher, but I started to learn enough money as a stand-up to go part-time. So then half of the time I was teaching and half of the time I was doing stand-up. And then ultimately I started earning enough from stand-up and I thought, well, I want to do this because actually you can't really do both with ease. If you're doing stand-up in the night, because teaching is hard and it's a lot of hard work. And you end up neglecting the students a bit because you're not marking essays on time, you're not preparing the lessons on time and all the rest of it because you're out all night, very late. On the other hand, I bet you get great material from being a teacher, especially of younger kids. I never talked about them on stage. Really? I never did. No, I felt it would be kind of like a betrayal. And there's all sorts of things, obviously, because kids are insane. Yeah. And there are all sorts of reasons why I do have lots of stories from my time at school as a teacher. But I never wanted to work with that, to be honest. I didn't want to do that. I just felt it would be wrong. So where did the origin of your character to Tanya McGrath come from? Well, Tanya, the name comes from the middle of a night's dream. At least Tanya is Queen of the Fairies. And the idea of Tanya McGrath is that she's a fantasyist. I mean, I think one of the... There are a number of qualities that you can describe to the extreme social justice activists. And one of them is just to be completely divorced from reality, to embrace what they call lived experience, or my truth, my way of knowing. And then that becomes a kind of surrogate for reality. And so in that sense, I thought, and often there's a kind of collective hysteria around them, which I thought was interesting. And so Tanya, as a name, alludes to that, I suppose. But I asked a friend of mine too, because I didn't want it to be a parody. I didn't want it to be a parody of any particular individual. I didn't want it to be an attack on any particular person. So the character is a composite. So the face, my friend Lisa, who's very good on the computer, and I'm not. So she put together a... I sort of sent a photograph of a woman who I thought she would look like this. And I just googled smug woman for something. And I said, I think she should look like this. And then she added glasses to her and changed the shape of the jawline and all this sort of stuff. So the actual image is unrecognizable from what it originally was. She's a composite. So it's more a... It's a satirical take on a type of person. Because the other thing about these activists is they all speak in exactly the same way. They all use the same language, the same maxims. They use the same phraseology. They've got their own esoteric cult-like language. So the phrases they always use, such as problematic, toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, cis-heteronormativity. You can kind of piece together the way they speak. If you know the way they speak, you can put together some sort of social justice boilerplate relatively easily. They talk about their lived experience. They talk about how words are harmful and all these sorts of things. And so therefore she doesn't need to be a particular person. She just needs to be a tight. And that was the idea there. And I also thought that if I'm going to satirize this movement, it should be on Twitter. Because that's their playground. That's where they operate. So this is something I noticed when I was at Columbia too, is you can even notice there are certain words that the hardcore social justice in her circle. There are certain words they use that people around them don't use, which have nothing to do with ideology per se. So I would notice at Columbia, if someone said folks a lot, and they weren't from the South, where people which is the typical reservoir of folks, howdy folks, that kind of dialect of American, if they say folks a lot, 90% of the time they were in the social justice core. And I found that to be just an interesting kind of proxy. And it was a way of a little bit signaling like language often can be. Right. Just using these neutral seeming words that can signal that you're part of a group. I think that's a lot of it. I mean, I think the idea, for instance, of asking someone for their pronouns must be signaling to a degree. Because you don't, I don't need to ask you your pronouns, because if I'm talking to you, I'm not going to use pronouns. So pronouns are almost only ever used when you're not in the room. Right. Right. So it's a test. It's a test. It's your set is for saying, do you believe in gender identity ideology? And there's an implication there that you should. So that's why that signals, I mean, it signals, signals membership of a group, of a tribe. One thing that's always bothered me, and this may say something about the strangeness of my own mind and pet peeves, is that when you're asked to say pronouns, you have to conjugate. So for example, it's always, calm in he, him. Not just calm in he, which would imply him, it would in a hundred percent of circumstances, because you've never seen he, hers. But you sometimes see he, they very rarely. But you wouldn't see him. You wouldn't see him. It would be he, theirs. Yeah. It would be he, theirs, not he, they, right? I get. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's always, he implies him, and she implies her hers. It's all nonsense, isn't it? I mean, even, that's not the way we, I mean, 99% of people use pronouns as a substitute for a noun to, which always relates to biological sex. That's how we, that's how we use it. So the idea that it should signify a kind of gendered soul that you have, that is not immediately identifiable from, from your anatomy, is just an idea that is alien to most the vast majority of people. And what I find unusual is that vast majority have, for some reason, or a lot of them, have felt pressurized into taking on board these ideas. It doesn't make any more sense than having a business meeting and starting out by declaring your faith in, in Baal, or some sort of, you know, God. It's, it's, it's an equivalent to that. You know, it's fine if you believe you've got a gendered soul, and you're entitled to that belief and to entitled to call yourself whatever you like and use whatever language you like. But it's this, I, this controlling this imposition of saying, because I think really control is what it's about. And so far as I've decided to use these terms about myself, and I'm going to either intimidate you or to coerce you into a position where you have to use the language that I determined on your behalf. And that, to me, is kind of the seed of authoritarianism. So interesting to me is, is the burden on a transgender person to let you know what they would like to be called? Or is the burden on the whole room to, to, to normalize it by everyone saying they're pronouns so that the one person who may have pronouns that are non-obvious? Yes. So that that's always been what's interesting to me is because there's been so many rooms, and I've been in some of these rooms where we're talking about 40, 50 people that are all cisgender identifying people, like all exactly what you would think to call them by what they look like. And yet everyone is going around saying their pro-town, saying their pronouns, to make a hypothetical trans person feel comfortable or a hypothetical gender neutral person who's not even there, feel comfortable. There's all sorts of odd problems with that. One is, one, one, particularly one. But on the other hand, just to finish my thought, if there is a trans person there and says, look, I'd like to be called this, I'm 100% for calling them that, right, as a matter of politeness and respect. Sure. Yeah, I will do that to a point. I just think it's, it's, it's strange to make the burden on everyone to change the way they talk and think so as to make one person comfortable when that one person can come forward and say, look, this is how I, it's also very patronizing because it assumes that that person would be uncomfortable. And that's not true. I mean, most trans people who fall into that category of their gender identity not being obvious or not being aligned to their anatomy have developed many strategies over the years to let people know. The idea that the whole world must sort of change around them will be something that would be alien to a lot of trans people. Some trans people aren't out. And so therefore, the, the pressure that they would feel for having to declare a pronoun is not actually in their interests. Also, I'm, I'm with you. I mean, if, if a friend of mine transitions to the opposite sex, I will use the pronouns that he or she prefers and the name that he or she prefers. I think it's occurred to see that isn't difficult. But that, but I would not like to feel compelled to do so. But I'll take it only so far. I'm not going to use invented pronouns, neo pronouns, such as ji and jir, because that's just an nonsense. I'm not going to use they as singular because it's it denotes a plural. And I don't believe in sort of, because I think language needs to alter by evolution, not by imposition, because to do so is to defer to authoritarianism. So, I think that's, I think in those examples, when you're in a room full of people and everyone's declaring their pronouns, I would say I don't do this. And I would explain why I don't think anyone else should expect me to, although that creates a kind of tension, doesn't it when you do that. But I think it's important that people do. I mean, I also reject the term cisgender. I'm not cisgender because the definition of cisgender is when your biology doesn't align with your gender identity. I don't have a gender identity. And most people don't have a gender identity. So, to call yourself cisgender is to acknowledge a faith you don't believe in, if you don't believe in it. So, this is a, I kind of had this conversation with Kathleen Stock a few weeks ago, where I am more sympathetic to the sex versus gender distinction than I think you are. And then I think she is, although I'm not fully decided on this and I'm persuadable. The idea that I do think I have a concept of myself as a man, that in addition to being biologically male, I think I have a self concept that includes a picture of manhood and what it is to be a man. And that, that probably, I mean, I can imagine that being different. I can imagine feeling far less comfortable in a male body because my self concept is feminine in some way. And I can imagine it faintly, at least conceptually. I can't really empathize with what it would actually feel like. But do you? Yes. But your concept of what manhood is, is a subjective concept, right? This isn't some kind of universal preset that you can draw upon. In which case? It is subjective. I mean, it definitely relies on widely agreed upon concepts of masculinity, to some extent. But that is also probably related to biology and actual male psychological traits as someone who. So you say that you could find yourself misaligned from what your perception of all manhood is and how you feel. But the point that feminists are making is that the idea of what a man is and what a woman is or how they ought to behave or what traits they ought to embody, those things are predominantly socially constructed anyway. So this is why I sort of find the concept of non-binary, nonsensical, because none of us fit into a pure externalized, homogenized idea of what a man should be and what a woman should be, in which in which case everyone is non-binary, in which case it's a pointless term. On the Friendly A Thea's podcast, we know religious extremism infects every major pillar of society. Politics. You can't just say we're the forward party of religion. Where do you think the bigotry is coming from? Women's rights. They claim to be pro-life. This guy never talks about the like the women. LGBTQ equality. Photo with drag queen story. You don't need the procurement. American history. That is not what God wants us to do, it's just a guy who posed in front of a Confederate flag when he was running for office. Science education. That's like a science museum saying, oh creationists, yeah we'll have the evolution section. Let's end by all the way. At the same time, our society seems to be getting less religious. How does that make any sense? I'm Hemant Meht. And I'm Jessica Blinke-Greif. Every week on the Friendly A Thea's podcast, we dig into the latest news stories involving faith and culture to give you context and help you make sense of them. And give you permission to be angry about it. Whether you're a proud heretic or someone with religious doubts. Or believers curious about what the other side has to say. We're here for all of you. The Friendly A Thea's podcast. Find us wherever you get your favorite shows. Bowie, Dylan, Marley. You've heard the names and maybe you've heard their songs. But what about the stories behind the records that make Titans of music like these so universally loved and important? I'm comedian Josh Adam Myers, host of The 500. And I have always been curious about all the breakups, the partying, the sex, the death, everything that went into making this incredible art. Plus a few years ago, I realized I was listening to the same albums over and over. So I decided to go through Rolling Stone magazine's 500 greatest albums to expand my horizons and dig up some of the classics that I thought I knew more about. Each week, I have an incredible line of comedians, actors, and musicians as guests talking about why they love a particular record and how the music has impacted their lives. I've talked to Judd Apatow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon, Kim Fail from Soundgarden to join me as I work my way from 500 down to 1. New episodes of The 500 come out every Wednesday. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. There's a lot. I mean, there's so much to impact here because there's, I think there's, there is suppressed disagreement among the woke on this opinion. Yeah. On this topic, by suppressed disagreement, I mean, there are a lot of internal contradictions between different strands of wokeness that I don't think have been fully aired out or teased out because there is a tendency to, like, logical consistency is not highly valued among social justice ideologues. So what you just pointed out, which is that it's logically inconsistent to say there's no right way of being a man or wrong way of being a man, no right way being a man, no wrong way of being a woman, et cetera. That's logically inconsistent with saying, if you're a girl and you like to rough house, then maybe you're really a boy, right? Because you just invalidated those stereotypes as meaning anything. And now you're saying they mean something quite profound. But that doesn't matter to the social justice movement because it's critics outside the movement that have pointed out that contradiction really very few within it. Yeah, because the critic, there wouldn't be critics within it because the inconsistency is a feature of it, not a bug. You know, you have activists on the one hand saying that you have a kind of an innate fixed gendered soul, which transcends the biological reality. And at the same time, they say gender is completely fluid and can change from moment to moment. What is it? Either it's completely fluid and it and it and it and it fluctuates in that way, or you have to have irreversible surgery to make sure that your soul aligns with your body. The inconsistency goes right back to the origins of this, to the French postmodernist of the 1960s. If you read Jacques Derrida, there are deliberate inconsistencies, even syntactically, even in terms of what it's part of the contradictions that the creation of a kind of nebulous inconsistency is part of the theorizing, part of the process. That's where you get the idea of queering, queering something is to take something that can make sense and to destabilize it and to destabilize everything we know about it so that it is no longer coherent. So when we're having, when I try to have discussions with critical social justice adherence, I would be making a mistake if I try to reason in a way that most of us understand because they don't accept the premise of enlightenment values, such as rationality. That doesn't, it doesn't work with their worldview. Their worldview is predominantly located in feelings and emotions. And so therefore, that's why you can't actually have a discussion with a lot of certainly the most extreme activists because they are in impervious to reason. So even the very concept of a conversation goes out the window. So I just generally try to circumvent those people. So I remember one time I was in a class called Philosophy and Feminism as an undergrad at Columbia. This would have been maybe 2017. And we were reading Foucault and I, as part of the lecture, the professor made the claim that biological sex is completely socially constructed, that there are no differences between natal females and natal males that could have any implication for psychological traits, personality traits, average gender differences in orientation, etc. That was something I was extremely skeptical of her claim there. And well, because it's fairly wrong. Pretty much knew it to be false. And I had read several books on that topic. I had read Stephen Pinker and I had read Simon Barron Cohen's book on gender differences. And I was somewhat familiar with the extensive literature on gender differences, gender differences in chimpanzees, etc. So I tried to frame my objection in a way that she might accept because I knew if I said, hey, what about the whole literature on this? She would be like, that's sexist, shut up. Which you would be hostile. Yeah, she was very hostile. Especially to male students. Yeah, luckily I was black, so she was less hostile. But she was very hostile to white male students in particular. Well, they've got all the privilege. Yeah, no, it was quite the experience being in that class. It was educational, not for the reasons. But I tried to frame it in a way that she might accept, which was to point to the experience of transgender people that take cross-sex hormones and have actual psychological effects as a result. Yeah. Which is to say, it doesn't even have to be transgender individuals, actually. You could just talk about men who take exogenous testosterone to bulk up. Yeah, yeah. End up experiencing what they call roid rage, right? Like, anger symptoms as a result of excess testosterone. Right. You know, all these other kinds of personality changes. And then you just map that onto the fact that males have more of that to begin with, naturally. Yeah. How could it be that trans people and men who go on testosterone and tremble on and all these hormones experience very real personality changes? But those hormones have no effect on the average personality differences between men as a class and women as a class. And she gave a kind of hand-waving response. And I framed it in such a way to say, are you denying the lived experience of trans people that actually experience such changes? Right. How do you reconcile this? And she gave kind of a hand-waving response, oh, somehow he reconciles that. Somehow Foucault reconciles that. And I was very unsatisfied. But it goes to your point of logic and reason not being valued in social justice ideology. And that's one of my biggest problems with it. Yeah. Well, I mean, for one thing, I'd be surprised if she could point to Foucault, specifically to back up what she's saying there. But what you could probably do is point to theorists who have misappropriated Foucault to do so. But I think it's one of those debates that, I mean, I think you were right to challenge her. And I think that's a really interesting thing to do. But in a sense, it's like challenging someone who believes the earth is flat. And at that point, you think, well, why should we even have this conversation? And this is not a serious discussion. This is someone who is a disciple of an extreme faith. You won't be able to reason them out of that, because they haven't reason their way into that point of view. So I would say with someone like that, someone who just denies biological sex, first thing I'm not going to have the conversation with that. I'm not in the position. I don't have the patience to de-radicalize someone. But also, they're not persuadable. That's the other thing. What's more interesting to me about the scenario is why is it that someone in a position of authority within a higher education institution is peddling just mythology? That's more interesting to me. Why is it that the New England Journal of Medicine now says that sex is a spectrum when even I, who know very little about biology, know that that is false? How do I know more than they do? So I think what's interesting is, it wouldn't matter to me if these ideas were being peddled by the crazy activists online, the ones who have the anime avatars, the people who scream with their brightly colored hair. I wouldn't care about that because you can just ignore them. But the fact that they have somehow managed to infiltrate major institutions, higher education, medicine, science, governments, the fact that the New Zealand government is telling schools that they have to teach indigenous ways of knowing in the science curriculum. So while you're learning about the theory of evolution, you're simultaneously learning about the god of the forest whose teardrops are the origins of rainfall. And you're meant to be in that issue. Learning about that as if it's a fact or as if it's an alternative way of knowing what it's got exactly means. I'm fine with kids learning that an indigenous population believed for that as sure, but part of learning world religions. Sure, but that is not a world religion class in a science class, alongside. And when an academic put together an open letter, a number of academics signed this letter, so it's saying, we have no problem with teaching about indigenous traditions, or even respecting people's right to believe those traditions. That's all great. It just shouldn't be in a science class. And that person got fired, and other people got criticized and attacked and canceled. That's the problem is that we're kind of, I think we've been a bit too indulgent with lunacy. I think it's worth remembering that these people, although they're very powerful and occupy major positions in all major institutions, they're a tiny minority of the public, and they're certainly tiny minority of intellectuals. So we can just work around them, because they're not going to win ultimately. They can only win by proselytizing or intimidating, which they've done pretty well at so far, but ultimately it'll go where you can mock them out of existence, I kind of believe. And you don't even have to, because their views are so satirized. So this is an interesting question to ask you specifically, because you've been very much on both sides of this line of satirizing and making fun of wokeness, and of arguing against it in a serious tone of voice. But when I'm arguing against it, I'm not arguing with them. And when I say them, I mean the extreme critical social justice adherence. I don't mean the people who've been duped into thinking it's a good thing, because it sounds like a good thing, because they use progressive sounding language like social justice. I want to push back a little bit against this though, because I mean, if you forget about wokeness and just think about actual, I won't say actual, but cults, extremist religion, extremist Christianity, evangelical Christianity, Islam, etc. People do, rarely I would concede, but they do actually get persuaded out of those beliefs sometimes. I've seen it happen with the Bible Church. I don't think wokeness is any different. So I do think it's I never want to give up on the possibility, however slight of I totally agree. Persuading someone. I totally agree. I think that you've seen members of the West Baptist Church come away from that really toxic family. And you've seen Darrell Davis, the radicalized members of the KKK. But what I'm saying is I do not have the skill or the patience to do it. That's what I'm saying. I'm glad that people like Darrell Davis exist and he doesn't. I can't. I can't I can't sit down and talk to a racist, someone who thinks that they're there are hierarchies between racial groups. I can't I don't know where to begin with that. I interesting. I think I do have that kind of patience. Well, that's good. I'm I've had you do enjoyed at some some time there are these guys on the street sometimes at Columbia's campus that are evangelical Christians holding Bibles and they tell you you're going to hell. But they're also down to have a serious somewhat logic constrained argument about why they believe what they believe. The only break will eventually you hit a brick wall eventually. Yeah, but there is like, I think a surprising number of extremists have an internally logically sound structure based on false premises. So like the premise that they accept without further argumentation, which everyone has that everyone has things that are self evident. Yes. But for some people, those self evident truths are way less justifiable. So like for me, a self evident truth is that reality is real. Right. Like there is an external world about which truths can be known. Yes. And I could debate with a solipsist who believes only I am real and you're a figment of my imagination. But those are contradictory and you know, there are whole books about about why certain brute facts, brute beliefs are contradictory. But some people, their brute first principle is like, God is real, or their brute first principle is white people are oppressive. And if you bought them out there, then you really can't argue. I agree. And I think it's a really beautiful thing that you are willing to talk to those who have these extreme views. But my point is within their aside from their brute first principle, sometimes they are they are bothered by logical inconsistencies you might point out sometimes they are. Yeah. Sometimes they're not. And I can't be bothered to work out who it is I'm talking to when it comes to these beliefs. I mean, you know, I can stand there and talk when someone says gay people are going to burn in hell, that's a belief system. I can't reason them out of it. You know, maybe you can. And that's a power to you. But I sort of give up there. And I think, no, you know, I'm going to focus on the armies of the unperswaded out there. There's a lot of people who are open to persuasion. I would say the vast majority, most people are. I'm open to persuasion. I'm open to changing my mind. And I think all of us ought to be. But the characteristic of an extreme zealot is that they are on the whole not. But good on you for trying. No, no, I mean, you're right there. And that strategy may be more important because even within these institutions, New England Journal of Medicine, you mentioned these important institutions that have to one or another extent been captured by wokeness. I would bet good money, the majority of the key decision makers in those institutions are not true believers. They're terrified though. They're terrified of a 5% maybe 10% of true believers. But they don't feel they never want to be the first person to criticize. So it's like there was this, I think it was Brian Kaplan had some blog posts years ago where he said, couldn't we just stop crime easily by saying the very next person to commit a crime will get shot in the head. And insofar as everyone believed it, no one would want to be the first person to commit a crime and then crime would cease. Of course, there's no way to actually do that nor would it necessarily be just or good. But it's an interesting experiment about thought experiment about not wanting to be the first person. And that's what it is when you when something as ridiculous as we're going to teach the native raindrop theory, divine theory of raindrops in science, no one wants to be the first person to say, okay, this is ridiculous. Right. And it's the same as no one wants to be the first person to laugh at the naked emperor because you'll be the one who gets your head cut off. And it is the same thing. I mean, it's why in the book I've just written the new Puritans, I draw an analogy between the critical social justice movement and Salem and what happened in Salem because the reason that went on for a year is because those who did express some kind of skepticism were the next to be accused and ended up being hanged. So when there's those things at stake, everyone just pipes down. I mean, you must know, I mean, all of the people who have taken a stance against wokeness, we all get messages privately from people communicating their support who will not do so publicly. Oh, yeah. And this is a very, very common thing. And it's it can't be that we're all being hoaxed. You know, there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who say, look, just please keep doing what you're doing. I can't speak up about this. And I get that as well because people do have to earn money and they have to live. I do too. I get those messages regularly. Yeah. And even before I was as well known as a writer and podcaster on the national landscape, I would get those I would get people walking up to me at Columbia saying, thank you for writing that thing in the that's even braver because then they're doing out in public. Well, not quite where they can be seen. Oh, okay. Okay. You know, but so Dan Ali ways and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Hey, folks, Coleman here. If you're like me, then scrolling through the day's news headlines can leave you feeling like the world is tipping towards disaster and chaos while somehow simultaneously freezing, flooding and on fire. It's a lot to take in, but consider this. What if the constant barrage of bad news is disproportionately shaping the way you see the world? What if we're all not paying attention to what's going right? That's why you should check out the podcast What Could Go Right? Which is a brand new acclaimed weekly news podcast from the Progress Network. Each episode, Zachary Caribell and Emma Varvalucus dive into the biggest news stories and most pressing topics of our time from climate change to politics and make the case for a brighter future. And they do this with stellar guests like happiness expert and Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks and best selling author and historian, Rucker Breggman. Take it from me. These conversations will empower you or at the very least talk you off the ledge. And if you're looking for a great place to start, I highly recommend what could go rights must listen interview with Tyler Cowan, who is my favorite economist and runs my favorite blog, marginal revolution. So whether you need to pick me up or you're an optimist looking for new solutions, check out What Could Go Right? Where ever you listen to podcasts. I'm Richard Sarat. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, Bigfoot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars and they're building a colony and they're recruiting specific people of specific bloodlines and specific talents and skill sets to go onto the planet. On Richard Sarat's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk about, I read your recent piece and unheard about gender roles and the history of subversion of gender roles going back to the theater of the 17th century England and so forth. And you also had commentary there on on and your Tate and the explosion on the right of the kind of opposite flavor of gender idiocy, which is this insistence that we revive the gender roles of the 1950s, men, and men world that Andrew Tate. So I guess let's start there. Okay. What is the appeal of Andrew Tate, his explosion in 2022, especially as you note among British young British boys? Yeah, they love him really. Teenage boys. Where does that massive popularity out of nowhere come from? I'm not really qualified to say but I can speculate. Is that right? I can speculate. That's all I can do really. I think there are a number of reasons. I think one of the reasons is that boys seem to be predisposed to require authority figures or to crave authority figures. And there's a lot of research which would suggest that Christina Hoff Summers writes about this in her book, The War Against Boys. There are all sorts of reasons why there is a correlation, for instance, between boys who grow up without a father in the family between the likelihood of criminality and late life and things like that. So there's a lot of research and studies that would suggest that Andrew Tate is the kind of figure who comes along and sort of says is confident and brash and successful and gets what he wants and all that kind of thing. And therefore, his aspiration was perceived to be aspirational. Of course, this is, I suppose, this would predate the recent attempts to convict him or whatever. So that I'm sure once, if he is proved to be guilty, I think that will change this thing of him as a role model, I think. But I think really it's more to do with those kind of authority figures. But I think in tandem with that, I don't think it's a coincidence that over the past 10, 15 years, a new discourse has emerged, particularly within education, which has sort of punished boys for behaving in the ways in which they are genetically predisposed to behave. Boys are much more likely to engage in rough and tumble play than girls, for instance. And there is clearly something, I mean, you could say part of that is to do with socialization. But there's clearly a biological element to that. But to inculcate this idea of masculinity itself as being a form of toxicity, to say to boys, you are privileged and forms of oppressors, even if you don't quite use that language, but to imply that in the classroom, to sort of punish boys for not behaving like boys. Well, I think that's what explains a lot of it. And I used to be a school teacher, I still know school teachers, I know teachers who teach at boys' schools. And they say that increasingly, they think all of this social justice stuff is nonsense. And they are in Andru tight, very, very popular and figures like him. So I think it's only it was only possible for someone like Andru Tate to rise to fame so explosively and so quickly in a society that has overdone it on the message of feminism. Because the things that he says. Or one flavor of feminism, right? I think that he says they are reactionary, deeply, they're misogynist. He's a self-admitted, proud misogynist and sexist. But do you think the boys that, I mean, I'm not convinced that the boys who say they are fans of his actually support those elements of what he says, the misogyny. There's an element to of mischief here. Yeah. This is a figure who's so transgressive because society has over indexed wrong the simplistic and problematic in the old sense of that word message that boys and girls are exactly the same. That basically any deviation from any deviation you see within males and females is all socially constructed. Boys have been brainwashed to want to fight more and want to be more aggressive and like whatever they like. And basically the way you should be is the way girls tend to be. And boys are kind of like broken, evil, messed up girls. That's what the phrase toxic masculinity means really. It means that there are all sorts of ways in which men can be toxic and there are all sorts of ways in which women. Toxic masculinity is real but so is toxic femininity. Right. Like there are toxic masculinity is very recognizable. It's physical aggression. It's starting fights. It's beating up people smaller than you because you can. It's physical intimidation and violence. And we've had societies have had ways of dealing with that perfectly or not for a very long time. Toxic femininity is another thing entirely. It can be equally damaging. It can be spreading lies about you behind your back, pretending to be your best friend to your face while just backstabbing you in all kinds of subtle ways. Navigating and manipulating your social surrounding to your own advantage using your words. That's what happens when women breach that boundary of toxic femininity. And yet the only thing that's really been talked about in the conversation is toxic masculinity. And of course both of those examples you've just given can be enacted by both sectors. Sure. So it's just a matter of predominates. One predominates with men. One predominates with women. But I also wouldn't underestimate the extent to which if you tell young people that someone is beyond the pale that that makes them attractive. I mean, I spoke to a teacher. There was an assembly at this school where the head master said, basically said, you mustn't mention Andrew Tate. He cannot be mentioned. He cannot be talked about a letter went out to the parents saying this is an evil presence. So of course they all want. Of course they all of them. I don't think it means that they agree with Andrew Tate that a woman becomes your property when you get married, which is what he said. It was interesting because when he was pushed and pressed by that by Piers Morgan in an interview, he denied it first and then ended up saying the same thing again. So I don't think boys actually believe that. I'm not afraid that if boys watch Andrew Tate videos, they will turn out to be misogynist. I don't think that's what's happening here. I think it's about the idea of mischief and rebellion and whatever that would be. I think they know the narrative they're being given is wrong. Yeah, exactly. And demonizing them for traits that they have naturally. And so anyone who takes a sledgehammer to that becomes a kind of hero to them. Right. Regardless of the validity of what he's saying. What they should do is say, they should do assemblies about how Mahatma Gandhi is toxic. And you should never read it. And then everyone would end up being a pacifist. Smart. Yeah, that would be the smart thing. Interesting though to compare Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson because they are very different hugely in their message. Yet they wrote a similar wave of massive popularity that was demonized by the media and not sought to be understood by the mainstream media. And both were categorized as anti-feminists. One, I mean, Andrew Tate definitely deserves that. And Peterson in some ways depending on your definition of feminism probably. But they had very different messages, right? Like Jordan Peterson, they could both be put into that category of authority father figure that you mentioned boys need. But in very different ways. Jordan Peterson is a kind of person that will tell you to, if women don't like you, it's your fault. I mean, to some extent they're both preaching that message. But the end of Jordan Peterson, if you follow his prescriptions in life, you're going to get married probably, have one stable partner and not cheat owner, have kids, and self actualize in your career and in other ways, which the vast majority of people left and right outside of real radicals that think marriage is like a whatever bad construct. Most people would like that message. And women benefit from it equally. Whereas Andrew Tate is this other thing of just like, women are your property and do whatever you want with them and be an uber mench and be a badass. The only point of comparison that really is convincing is that their success can I suppose be attributed to that lacunar that has been left in the lives of young men. That's it. That's as far as it goes. And they're not saying the same things in any way at all. And I think to suggest they're on a continuum, I think is factuous really. Interesting though, Jordan Peterson was sort of painted as who Andrew Tate actually is. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. But that's because he became a folk devil. He's one of those people who, and what was interesting about Jordan Peterson in particular, given how many copies of his of 12 rules for life was sold, it's very easy to just read the book and see what he actually thinks. But so many people were so sort of particularly activist were far more content to imagine what they thought he should be thinking and then to attack that creation of their own imagination. I just don't think they had the patience to read a whole chapter about lobsters. Could be that. Could be the lobster thing. I thought the lobster thing was really interesting. I was like, if you want to write a hateful book, just make the first chapter all about lobsters and no one will read the rest of it. But I think it's more than that. I think it's just that they're so wedded to their historical fantasies. The same with J.K. Rowling. It would take roughly, I'd say, half an hour of googling and reading to come to the conclusion that J.K. Rowling has never said anything transphobic and does not, just simply does not hate trans people as a matter of fact. And yet you have whole areas of the online community, but also among the commentariat and media commentators who've just bought into a group collective fantasy that she hates trans people and they cannot be shifted on that. So there's something going on at the moment where the fantasy is more appealing. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You know, I can't talk someone out of their fantasy because that's their fantasy. That can only reason with people who have looked at the evidence and drawn a conclusion. And so I see Peterson and Rowling on a they're very similar in the way they have been treated, even though they're viewpoint. So I'm not so many different. I like what Peter Bogosian has been doing. I don't know if people are familiar with this, if people have been seeing his videos online, but he's been doing this for some reason in Eastern Europe. But I think in other places as well, though I think he's American. He's been going up to people on college campuses and kind of planting, colonizing a little area and making it about a question, a controversial question, such as do you believe gender is a social construct? Do you believe racial inequality is caused by systemic racism? Any of these culture war flashpoint issues and he'll set up a little area and people will say, oh, this is what I believe I'm on this side and you stand on that side. I'm on this side. He stand on that side. And he basically asks both sides very simple questions, getting at not what they think, but why they think it and how they think it. And a question he'll often ask is, what would have to be different in this reality for you to change your mind or put differently? What evidence, if it were to appear in front of your face, would change your mind? Which is a great question always to ask yourself. And it's one I often ask myself about controversial issues because there always, I mean, there always is some evidence that if it came out different, came out differently, would nudge me in one direction or another on all of these issues. And it's very useful to think about what that would be. Occasionally, he comes across someone that says, no possible change in the state of the world would change my beliefs, which is an admission that your beliefs have no connection to reality. And yet someone who says that would not be willing to make that admission because they've decided that they have the kind of sacrosanctories and it doesn't require any further evidence. And Peter can do this because partly he's so charming. I think that's a lot of it. Even when he's talking to his detractors, he doesn't lose his patience. He doesn't get angry. He doesn't get pleasant. He's inquisitive. He's asking them to talk. He isn't just talking over them. So he's really good at this. And of course, he should be. He wrote that book, How to Have Impossible Conversations with James Lindsay. And that tactic you've just described is in the book. It's included in the book that idea of asking someone what would need to change for you to change your mind. And he's thought a lot about it. He's a philosopher. He thinks in terms of he values the Socratic method, which is about asking questions irrespective of what you believe, ask the question. And that is ultimately, but the problem with that is it is tied into a Western rationalist approach and is often rejected. But what's great, I mean, as you say, those videos show you that even some of those young people who are so caught up in this, they do end up asking the questions. They become a bit more loosen up, a bit more patient. There's the one where there are people on the roof shouting down at him because he's doing one of those experiments in a courtyard at a university and they're shouting abuse at him. When they come down face to face, because he's so amenable, they end up, you can see that they won't go away having their minds changed. But the colonel will have been planted in their heads. Maybe my preconceptions about this person were all wrong. Maybe this person has a point and maybe I'll think about that a little more. And so then the next time they have that conversation, they'll have moved a bit further forward. So I think what he's doing is so immensely valuable. I think it's brilliantly done and I'm a huge admirer of Peter. Yeah, I think it's also great to broadcast examples of successful conversations. The algorithm is going to feed you preferentially examples of conversations that have gone horribly awry. And to some extent, that is the model of cable news is to engineer those conversations. Of course, which is why I tend to shy away from cable news requests that I've gotten. I wanted to ask you though, this point about you can't reason people out of things they haven't reason themselves into. I'm curious what you think as someone that has been a satirist, as well as a more serious arguer. Do you have any sense of the ratio of people that have been persuaded by your satire as opposed to your writing? I have no idea. I've had messages from people who've said that Titania did change their mind or at least open them up to a perspective they hadn't perceived before. But I have no way of knowing how widespread that view is, whether it's really had an effect at all. I don't know. I've always wondered about, is am I just making these people angrier? Is that all I'm doing? No, I don't think so. I mean, I ask you the question, but I have a strong opinion about it, which is, I think, often comedy bypasses the rational mind sometimes. If something is funny, you will find yourself laughing at it whether or not you agree with the underlying premise of the joke. Andrew Schultz is a great example of this. I did an event with him. The question is, are comedians getting at the truth? He ran through some jokes. One joke that had arguably a sexist premise, but every woman in the room is like dying, laughing. Because if you had tried to make the argument he was making in a rational or serious tone of voice, it would have struck you as offensive. Comedy and humor has a way of bypassing the parts of your mind that tend to get offended by things and it goes straight to your funny bone. If you find yourself laughing, you can no longer kind of a bit. Laughter is involuntary, I think, is the point that I'm getting at. Whereas if you make an argument I hate, I can just get angry and not accept the logic of it until the end of time. I can pretend you're not making a good point very easily. People do this all the time. But if you make me laugh, I can't pretend you're not funny because laughter is not voluntary. I think that laughter and humor has an incredibly important role to play in combating ideologies that are dominant and that need to be criticized. That's why comedians in the past were who made fun of religion when Christianity was the law of the cultural land, were so were taking their lives into their hands. But we're certainly running serious risks by making fun of religion but it was incredibly funny because you can say things in a joke that you may not be able to say as effectively to a hostile audience. Yes. There's a lot to think about there. I think you're right about laughter being an involuntary reflex and sometimes you laugh in spite of yourself and that's why a lot of the comedians- Sometimes the hardest laughter is in spite of it. It is. I do feel a lot of the comedians who've been captured by this ideology, they tend to become worse comedians. I mean, particularly this has happened in the UK where you'll go to a comedy show and it will be a sermon dressed up as comedy and people aren't laughing so much as clapping because they are applauding the sentiment that has been expressed. And to me that's the most boring. But clapping, of course, is a voluntary act. Right, exactly. Exactly. This is the key. But you're right. I mean, this is why, for instance, a comedian like Jerry Sadowitz, who's a famous Scottish comedian and magician who is the most offensive comedian I've ever seen. So, I mean, absolutely. Any line you can imagine, he would have gone past it 20 times over, which is incredibly offensive stuff. And his show, last year at the Edinburgh Finsch festival, was canceled by the venue because they put out a statement saying that the opinions he expressed on stage do not align with their values because they're not values and they're not opinions. They're jokes. And you do find yourself, when I watch his shows, I find myself laughing at things that I think and almost cascading myself for even laughing because it is so vile. And that's what comedy can do, which is really interesting. But I think there's also an interesting distinction to be made between comedy and satire. Satire often isn't funny. That's the one thing. Satire often, it comes from a different place. There's a really interesting definition by W.H. Ordon. He said that satire was angry but optimistic because it believed that it could change the world through exposing the follies of the world. But comedy is a good-natured and pessimistic. In other words, the comedian thinks, ah, well, it's all gone to hell. So, may as well just make fun of it. And I think that's a really useful way to describe the distinction. And I wonder whether, whereas comedy can make people laugh in spite of themselves, I wonder whether satire, which has a different quality, that more forensic quality and exposes those vices in a very direct way, whether that just agitates people more, upsets them more. You know, there's that story of the ancient satirists who hyponax, who attacks were so barbed and perceptive that his targets went home and hang themselves. Yeah. So, so I think that I don't know to what extent, what extent does it work? I don't, I consider it a strategy partly, but also it came out of desperation. I started doing Titania. I'd already been mocking this stuff in standard, but Titania was a satirical root, rather than telling jokes about it. I would try and embody it and try and replicate it. And, and that was my approach. And I genuinely don't know. I mean, a lot of the people who liked Titania do so because there's a sense of relief is in, because particularly back then, I mean, this was five years ago when I started it, that wasn't really being targeted much. It was being targeted, but not much. Well, it's like, it's like all the, I felt when I was aware of Titania, and I say it like, I think early days of Titania, like 2018 and 2019, it's like all the times I wanted to laugh at some ridiculous social justice statement that I had to sit quietly. Yeah. Didn't have to, but chose to. It's like all that comes out. Yeah. That all that suppressed laughter can come out and amazing to Tonya Tweet that perfectly captures the illogic or that like what this worldview is taken to its logical end. But at the same time, the people it was targeting, the people who believe in that worldview, they were furious. I mean, the anger actually, the similar to like it. Yeah, because you're right that satire inherently belittles the people that it's satirizing. So for example, the old Colbert show, where he would play just this, the Democrats picture of the Republicans of the 2000s. Yeah. And he would go on Bill O'Reilly show, right? And instead of doing what someone else might do, which is Bill O'Reilly, you're wrong, you're wrong about the Iraq war, you're wrong about abortion, you're wrong about same-sex marriage. He would say, no, I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. And he would do this character that he was, I'm going to outright wing you, but have these just like subtle hints that show how ridiculous I sound. Right, exactly. And I'm sure that angered Republicans far more than anyone who just attacked them. Particularly if there's those elements of truth in what he's doing. Exactly. That's how it always has exaggeration. But it angers you precisely in proportion to you recognize, god damn, that's kind of funny. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I mean, the tweets that I did as to Tanya that I've been most pleased with are the ones that kind of, that they've ended up saying themselves later on down the line. She would tweet something and then a few months later, a newspaper article would come out basically saying the same thing. And so that, because I got into the mindset of the way they think and the logical endpoint of where they thought. But that's why I think it's, I think really bad satire is when you haven't, you don't know what it is, you're satirizing, you're attacking a straw mat. And people have accused me of that. So they'll say, well, Tanya, there's no one says the kind of thing she says. This is just you raging against something that isn't there. But if that were the case, why do so many of her tweets then become mimicked in reality? It can't be the case. So, you know, I've read all their books, I read all their articles, I spend more time reading their stuff and then views them that are aligned with my own. You know, so that's where I think satire can be effective. It's all I've known for example, I'll just give one example from a few months ago. There was a CNN article, CNN, right? It's not fringe. No mainstream. That said daylight savings time is contributes to systemic racism. Because when we go fall back or spring forward, Black Americans that already suffer from somewhat lack of sleep, which is, I'm sure a knock on effect of being poorer as a population. Their sleep is even more disrupted because they're already poorly slept compared to white people. Okay. So therefore, daylight saving time contributes to systemic racism. Right. Right. So that's like, that's something that could have easily been a Titanya tweet, yeah, a couple years ago. Yeah. And someone would have said, oh, well, that's totally unrealistic, Andrew. There's no, I mean, the woke, they maybe they're a bit much, but they would never go that far. Right. Exactly. Right. And then that's a CNN article. Right. I mean, I've got a thread Titanya did a thread of the time she's predicted it, the time she said it first, and it's happened later. It's about 1516 on this thread. Because whenever it happens, whenever it's seen an article, I think, I tweeted that a while ago, and then I go back and find it, and then I add it to the thread. Right. There's loads of them. So it's that criticism. I mean, I take, I take legitimate criticisms if I've made a joke or I've written a tweet and it's a bit lazy, whatever, I'll take that criticism. But the criticism that I'm raging against something that doesn't exist, that's just, that's not true. That's just a tactic to try and undermine what I'm doing. Of course it exists. And of course you exaggerate, but you are often what I'll try and do is think, okay, well, this is where they've gone so far. So what's the next logical step there? And see what happens then? Yeah, absolutely. So what else is there to talk about? Whatever you like? Let's see. I don't know. That might have exhausted all the, well, we were talking about the predictions and the just wondering what your next thought was there. I had a good one, but now it's, I think it's left me and I have to accept that it's fine. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Wait a minute. It still feels like it's like on the precipice. That's okay. Well, I've enjoyed Titania a lot and I think many people have and I, a lot of people have told me, they wanted to ask you, like, where she's gone. I do it less and less. Yeah. Just because I've been doing it so long and now that I'm doing my show on GB News and I'm producing this new show with John Cleese, which is in development at the moment. Oh, that's amazing. And then I'm doing, yeah, he's brilliant. And then I'm writing a new book and so all the other stuff, I don't really have time and inevitably, because I've done it for so long, I feel like I've sort of done it and I've written two books as her. Yeah. What more? I mean, and the problem with Titania is she is a monomaniac. She's obsessed with one thing. She's obsessed with pushing the gospel of social justice and whatever conversation you would have with her. She would turn it into a discussion about toxic masculinity or white privilege or gender or something. So that means that invariably it gets repetitive when you're creating it. Right. Because these activists only talk about the same thing over and over again, which is often why you get this criticism with Titania. They'll say, oh, it's one joke, over and over again, it's one joke. But of course, that's quite a fundamental misunderstanding what it is, because what it actually is, is a replication of your monomaniac as an activist. It wouldn't make sense for Titania to start talking about completely unrelated topics. I mean, I do that in my standard. I talk about all kinds of topics and things. If they came to see my stand-up show, they couldn't go away saying there was one joke. But if you were doing a satirical representation of a particular type of activist, then yeah, it does have to kind of be one joke. It has to be one note, because that is who they are. But also, the downside of that is in terms of perpetuating her as a creative, it gets quite samey. And I think there's an element of I've just done it enough. I want to do different things. I tend not to do the same thing for too long. I was the co-writer on this character called Jonathan Pi for three years. That was a satirical character that mostly attacked the right. So Trump or Johnson over here in the UK. And after three years, he liked, well, I've done all I can with that. So I move on to something else. Titania's been going for a number of years now. I want to do other things. But what happens is, if something happens in the media that I think, oh, I should comment on that as well. Or I think something that I think would be fun. I'll still put it out there, but I just might be doing it regularly. I'll just do it every now and then. I think I remembered the thought that I had, which is I think the reason satire is so aggravating to the person being satire, good satire, at least, is because what it says about your belief is, I understand you. I understand you. I can imitate you better than you can imitate yourself. And I think people like to think that their thoughts have achieved a level of sophistication. So when someone who hates your worldview can do you better than you, it's kind of like having a great imitation done of you actually. It's belittling because if someone can replicate you, if someone could just copy you, then you're not as special as you think you are. That's a really good point. And that's why it's part of why it's so offensive to people. I think to see yourself reflected in an unflattering way. Yeah, of course. And you also, I think, is also you like to think your enemies don't even understand your worldview. Because if they understood it, then they'd agree with it. It's just they're so dumb. They're so out of touch with your sophisticated thoughts. And when they prove to you that that's not true by satirizing you very accurately, that's anger. Well, maybe that was going to say maybe that explains the degree of anger. I mean, I've written articles which people will vehemently disagree with, but nothing has come close to generating the kind of rage and ferocity that Tatanya has just from my own personal perspective. You know, I've gotten to online spats about articles or interviews I've done and people take an issue with what I've said, but they never escalate to the point of the pure hatred I've had from Dunes, Tanya. I mean, they will send threats. They will just pure add hominin attacks. Mm hmm. They say they want me to die in a grease fire, whatever they say. So that can only really be explained, I think, if they recognize some kind of truth in what I'm doing. If they do see themselves in what she's saying, I think that it also explains the denialism of saying what's Tanya says isn't nowhere near close to what actual activists say. Because I think it could be, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but it could be that they're just, it feels uncomfortably close, that they're feeling a little bit seen. I think that might explain it, particularly when people are coming from a position of power. Because Tatanya for me was always my attempt to stand up to bullies. I don't like bullies. And I see this movement as being a bullying movement and victimised people, attack them, ruin their lives. And what I find particularly unjust is that they do so while claiming the mantle of being progressive and compassionate and good and on the side of the angels, which is an incredible cloak if you're going to be a bully. So to deflate someone's power, I think generates rage, which is why tyrants throughout history have always particularly hated comedians and satirists, why it's been illegal, why they burned satirical books in England, in the bishops' ban, which was late 16th century, why the Emperor Domitian had people killed if they merely made a quip about him, why President Erdogan in Turkey, you know, has a role, he resurrected an obsolete law, which enabled him to lock up satirists who mocked him. He tried to get a satirist extradited from Germany for making a satirical video about him, almost succeeded to. Tyrants hated people with power hate to be mocked. Hannah Aron wrote about this, that the best way to undermine authorities is laughter. And so yeah, I think that explains, to a degree, the rage. I mean, it could be that they just don't like that kind of humour, I don't know. But why would you get that angry? Like, if I don't like a comic, I just don't buy tickets for that comic, it's not a big deal to me. I don't go online and endlessly scream about how unfunny and horrible this person is. That doesn't end that. Anger comes from a sense of threat that you are being made to look ridiculous. Yeah, well good, they should- Which is threatening. Yeah, right, because once people see you as ridiculous, then they no longer fear you. And if fear is how you, if it fears how you exert power, then that's- Well good, because I'm sick of these people intimidating their way into positions of power. And I think they deserve to be taken down to Pekler 2. And I think if they're feeling fear for that angry about it, then that suggests I'm doing something right. And they can right against me all they like. But I still think it's the right thing to do. So one thing Americans may be less aware of is the examples in Britain of wokeness, essentially having the backing of the police. Oh, it's incredible, yeah. And in America, I think our first amendment protections on free speech and general culture would probably prevent something like this from happening. I think it does. But can you give the American audience an example or two of this happening? Yeah, well, the UK police are trained by a body called the College of Policing. And the College of Policing basically have been captured. And so they implemented something about 12 years ago called non-crime hate incidents. And what that would mean is that, if you said something to me and I said to myself, well, I think you said something unpleasant to me because you were thinking homophobic thoughts and I phoned the police. They would log that as a non-crime hate. It's not criminal. You've just said something insulting or something. It's not criminal. It's not against the law. They're not going to prosecute you. But they'll log it against your name as a non-crime hate incident. Well, that means is, if you apply for a job, it will show up on a criminal record check and may prevent you from getting the job. So there's a lot of power within this. And within a five-year period, the police in England and Wales recorded over 120,000 of these against citizens. Most of them didn't even know these things were being recorded. In Scotland, the police have a database of jokes that they found online, which they consider troubling. And they've logged all of that as well. I mean, we come back to the, finally, we've been pushing. There's been a court case, someone who had a non-crime hate incident recorded against them, a man called Harry Miller, who had retweeted a poem that someone found offensive. And so the police visited him. And the police said to him, we need to check your thinking. That's why we're here. He said, I haven't committed a crime. Have I? They said, no, we need to get in your head and check your thinking because it could subsequently lead to a crime. That was their justification. So that did go to the High Court. And we've reached a position now finally in the UK where non-crime hate incidents will probably be scrapped. But we've had this High Court ruling. We've had the Home Secretary saying to the college policing, you have to get rid of this. And they just ignored it. They think they're above the law. We had a woman arrested last week, a woman called Kelly J. King, who also goes by the name of Posey Parker, feminist campaigner. She was arrested for hate speech, even though the whole speech was online and you can watch it. And there's nothing criminal about any of it. She just takes a view against gender identity ideology. And the police have called her to be, have said, you've got to come in for an interview. And if you don't come, we'll arrest you. And this is the policing of speech. Even if she was saying something offensive and objectionable, it still shouldn't be illegal. You're lucky, like you say, you have your first amendment. You can say something offensive and objectionable. So as long as it's not incitement to violence, according to the Brandenburg test, so long as it's not harassment, or any of those other ways in which language can be used to implement a crime, you know, espionage or blackmail or perjury, you have complete freedom of speech. And that's the way it should be. We don't have that in our country. In the UK, around 3000 people every year are arrested for offensive things they have said online, which is, wasn't there a girl? I guess a woman, maybe a young woman that got arrested for saying the N word in the context of a rap song? Yeah, she posted a friend of hers had died in a car accident, and she posted one of his favorite songs, the lyrics on Instagram. And it was a rapper, which had the racial epithets in the lyric, and she was arrested. She was fitted with an ankle tag and had a curfew. And it eventually got overturned that one. I forget her name. She's a young girl. I mean, those stories are just absolutely crazy to an American ear, and especially to think that they happen in the UK, which is one of the three to four countries in the world, we'd consider the most similar to ours. The police are, because the police have, they've taken the view, and if you look at the crime prosecution service or the government's official website and hate crime, what it says is, you can have committed a hate crime based on the perception of the victim. Now, note it doesn't say the perception of the complainant. It's already decided that there's a crime here, because someone says they're a victim. So these, this is all straight out of the lexicon of social justice. So they have been captured. In addition to that, you have a body called Stonewall, which is obviously based after the bar in New York, actually. Stonewall was a fantastic gay rights charity, which went for many decades fighting for gay equality in all sorts of ways and achieved it. And once they'd done that, they thought, what can we do now? And they went into gender identity ideology, and they have completely captured the police force. So on that particular issue, feminists are often the ones who are arrested or investigated by the police for saying something which is, quote unquote, transphobic for misgendering someone. I kind of think, I mean, Canada's completely gone. So getting Canada, you know, people do end up in court for the language they choose to use. I think you're kind of protected here. So long as the activists don't get their way, because there are activists who are saying we need to amend the First Amendment. We need to make hate speech excluded from the idea of free speech. If they win that, then it's all over for you guys. But certainly in the UK, we don't have a written constitution, you see. So we don't have that. I'm not saying there is mass censorship, but we do have a government that is pushing through this thing called the online safety bill, which will put more pressure onto social media companies to censor. We have a government that's pushed through a bill, which is basically outlawing protest if it's a little bit too noisy. And of course, protest can be noisy. That's part of it. So we don't live in a country that really values free speech in the way that it should. And I would like to see something in the UK, some sort of Bill of Rights or something where free speech is in stride. I'd like to say a written constitution where we have free speech enshrined in it, so that people don't go to prison for jokes, which has happened, that they don't get arrested for jokes or for saying offensive things. I think if people want to say offensive things, they should. If someone wants to say that all gay people are evil, and they should be second class citizens, and they shouldn't be allowed to get jobs, I think they should be allowed to say that. And then I can then choose not to associate with that person, or I can argue back, or I can protest. It's all sorts of things I could do. I could ridicule them. I could do whatever I want. But as soon as I say, actually, what I want to happen is that person needs to be arrested, so they don't get to speak anymore. Then I'm the authoritarian there, and I don't want to be in that position. And I don't understand why people would find that appealing. But there's clearly something about the human instinct that does find authoritarianism appealing. And I think that is manifesting itself in current police practice. At the moment, it looks like the high courts are pretty sound. Like we've still got good objective people in the judiciary who often overturn these decisions that get made in the lower courts. To a degree, some of the lower courts seem to be a bit captured and the police. But because it's gone into all of these institutions, education as well, particularly higher education, it's going to take so long to unpick this. You know, the police shouldn't be out in a pride parade, dancing the macarreaner in rainbow flags, because they're meant to be serving impartially. But they're actually wearing flags that now can note a belief system that most people in the country don't believe in. And that's a real problem. So I don't know how you pull away from this in terms of the UK police. They keep ignoring these instructions from the home office and what percentage of the police do you actually think believe this stuff? Very few. Or just sort of following. I think to be fair to the police that they are doing their job. I mean, they've been told that if someone phones them up and says, I heard a nasty word and I feel like I'm a victim of a hate crime, they are now obliged to investigate that. So I do feel for them. But then you get these very clearly zealous members of the police force. Because it occurs to me, a woke person rarely signs up to become a true believer rarely becomes a cop, at least in America, right? Because the cops are by definition enemies of progressive wokeness, etc. Law and order. Yeah, right. Maybe it's different in the UK. Yeah, no, it's not interesting. It's just very interesting kind of dynamic going on there. I don't think people sign up for it. I think they are told by these bodies, such as the college of policing. That's what they have to do. And that's what they have to do. And even they end up believing it, I think. Because they're told that there are 100 different genders and that you need to think of things. And I guess like, it's like, once you're already doing something, because you have to, because it's your job, yeah, you naturally are going to want to believe it's a good thing you're doing. And also, you don't want to go home at the end of the day and think you're doing something horrible. And also, most people are decent people. But the thing about the culture was, is you can you can form into the trap of thinking that there are these incredible gulfs within society. But most people are just boring, boringly nice. And so therefore, if a group like Stonewall, which has a great track record of standing up for equal rights and minorities, and they're telling you something, you're like, oh, well, then they're right and I'll believe that. And this is something I come back to all the time. I think that if the critical social justice movement was exposed, if people got past the progressive sounding language, if people realized that phrases such as anti-racism actually mean the opposite of what they purport to mean, if people could navigate all of that and realize that, no one would support it or a handful of extremists would support it. But it's because they've been very clever linguistically and it's because they describe themselves as liberal when they're illiberal and they describe themselves as progressive when they're regressive. And they say they're looking out for minorities when actually they're making life worse for minorities and all of these kind of things. So I think the police are no different from that. They want to be on the right side of history to use that phrase. Who doesn't? But I don't think, I mean, I do think there is such a thing as the right side of history. I just hope to God they're not on the right side of history because if they are, the future looks really, really bleak. All right, Andrew Doyle, thanks so much for coming on my show. Before I let you go, can you let my listeners know the latest titles of your books and where they can follow you on the internet? So my last book is called The New Puritans, How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, which is out now in America as well. And then the book I wrote the year before that is called Free Speech and Why It Matters, which is a very short book and it's like a primer. It makes the case for Free Speech all over again because I think it's the kind of thing you have to kind of restate these points in every generation. I don't think you win the battle for Free Speech and then it's done. And we see that with like the way the ACLU has gone, used to be great stalwart defenders of Free Speech and now they're pretty much anti-Free Speech. And so you need to keep making these arguments. So I wanted to write an accessible primer on that. So that's what that book is. Antitani McGrath has two books and her books are ones called Woke, A Guide to Social Justice. And the other one is called My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, which is for kids, but it's not ready for kids. All right. And where can they follow you? You can find me on Twitter, which is Andrew Doyle, Underscore.com. And you can find me and you can follow Titani if you'd like to tell me McGrath. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman Unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber-only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time. Hi. Do you know someone who has never listened to a podcast? It might sound bananas to you and me, but those people are out there. If we want the podcast industry to grow, we need more listeners. That's why this April, Tink Media is launching Adopt a Listener Month. We're asking you to find someone who says podcasts are my thing and give them a thoughtful recommendation to change their mind, something that will get them hooked. Go to tinkmedia.co slash adopt to sign up, find resources, and learn how you can get involved.