Cancel Culture Debate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Julie Bindel, Kehinde Andrews & Billy Bragg

good evening everybody and welcome to this intelligence squared event i'm hannah k and we're very excited to be staging tonight's debate on the motion council culture is threatening our freedoms now we're going to be asking you to vote twice on the motion once at the start of the debate and then again at the end and you can cast your first vote now there's a link in the description box in the video or underneath the video where you're watching um and if you click onto that you can vote for the motion against the motion and if you're still open minded now this event is free but not all our events i'm afraid and if you want to watch everything else that we've got coming up we have a special offer on our low cost subscription model we have a monthly and annual subscriptions and again in the description box down below you'll find a special code 20 off so if you enter that uh you'll be able to watch everything that we've got coming up and that includes martin amos tom friedman and john bolton in the run-up to the presidential election now if you're keen on debate we've just launched a new debate today and that is on the most motion boris is the best that we've got and now i'm going to hand over to our chair for this evening he is a guardian columnist author and broadcaster jonathan friedland thank you thank you hannah and thanks to all of you who are watching very exciting to be part of this very first live streamed debate on youtube for intelligent squared so thank you all for watching if you're watching us live or if you're watching it later on welcome now if you'd like to show your support for what intelligence squared does and of course you want to do that please hit the subscribe button and like this video and you can see the buttons for those just below your at the bottom of your screen there i should be pointing at them and it only takes a moment to do it now as hannah said for those of you who are watching live you do have a few minutes to get your first vote in we are donald trump style here we urge you to vote twice uh as he famously has uh suggested to the people of north carolina and indeed the wider united states so vote uh now though in these next opening minutes to get your first vote in and then of course once you've heard all the illuminating and enlightening arguments from our speakers you'll be in position to uh cast your second and final vote now to do that for your first vote you need to click the click the link in the description box again below this video which should say cast your first vote here so please once you've found that link in the description box below the screen cast your first vote here and then you can vote for or against our motion tonight which of course is cancel culture is threatening our freedoms that's the motion and if you walk into this debate open-minded and you have not yet come to a conclusion then you do have the option of voting undecided so those are the choices you're either for the motion that cancel culture is threatening our freedoms or you're against or you will be undecided now i've told you the question before is cancelled culture is threatening our freedoms it's my view that if 2020 had not been overrun with everything else going on namely a global pandemic a u.s presidential election a massive economic downturn i think this might well have been the big issue of 2020 because even with all those huge things going on this consumes a lot of energy and a lot of debate and uh and yet i think it may be one of the first times that we've managed to bring together people to really thrash out these issues some say of course there is no such thing as cancel culture then there are people who say look it does exist and it is a huge threat to free speech and you will notice that a group of very eminent writers recently wrote a collective letter to harper's magazine in the united states saying that this was a real threat to free speech there is a new website set up by some of those writers i think called persuasion then on the other side there's a group you say look it does exist but it is necessary it is necessary to protect the uh marginalized often marginalized voices and minority voices that have previously been too easily disparaged or cast aside and that all you that people are calling cancel culture is merely the voices of people who've had platforms of power for a long time who can't take a bit of criticism now for my own part i'm obviously wholly neutral uh tonight i sit in the chair but i'm was glad and i'm glad to be in the chair for this debate because this is a question that i approach uh with an open mind because i myself wrestle with it i am a bit undecided on the one hand i see those images of books being burnt j.k rowling's books being burnt these images that were shared online last week and that obviously appalls me with all those historical echoes and yet on the other hand i do ask myself that you know if say and i mention him only because i've written about him if david irving the uh self-styled historian but denier of the holocaust was offered a platform i would want to see that platform withheld and i would say he should be not allow that platform does that mean if i hold that view that i am myself guilty of cancel culture i don't and if i'm not right and that wouldn't be the same what then is the difference between wanting to deny someone like him a platform and those who are accused of cancelling so as i say i wrestle with this i haven't made up my own mind but today i'm fully uh neutral and in the chair all i want to do is to make sure we have a good uh and spirited debate and to do that we are delighted to have a really stellar panel of speakers tonight in the form of ayan hersey ali julie bindle billy bragg and kaiyinde andrews and i'm going to be introducing all four of those brilliant speakers uh more fully uh momentarily for now though we do have in the results of our first vote on the motion uh that cancel culture is threatening our freedoms so this gives an indication of your views as you approach this debate um for the motion that yes cancel culture is threatening our freedoms a whopping 73 percent hold that view against the motion a very small number just 11 and undecided 16 um so those are the figures going in it then is a challenge to those who are against the motion to see if they can turn that around and a challenge to those who are for the motion not to hemorrhage support by accidentally turning off people who otherwise support them now before we start i'm going to explain briefly how it all is going to work in a moment our four champion debaters are going to make their opening speeches uh they're only of about five or six minutes long and i'll be holding them to that then i'll be taking your questions and encouraging some debate between our speakers then at five to the hour the speakers will end their debate with short closing statements have to be short again i'll hold them to that and i'll invite you all to make your final vote and if all works well we will announce that at the close of the hour at 7 00 p.m london time as it stands now so do please start sending in your questions uh you can do that by typing them into the youtube chat do type out your question and if you want to direct it to a particular speaker type their name at the beginning of the question that will really help and then of course press send so without further ado we are going to go to here our speakers opening speeches and our first speaker for the motion is a an author academic a campaigner on women's rights she is a research fellow at the hoover institution at stanford university and founder of the foundation the aha foundation that bears her name her books include infidel nomad from islam to america a personal journey through the clash of civilizations and heretic why islam needs a reformation now a warm if virtual welcome for i am hersey ali jonathan jonathan thank you very much i'm here tonight to defend the proposition that council culture is threatening my freedoms i say my freedoms because in 1992 i fled my master's house when my father my master married me after his man of choice was to become my new master i looked for a place to escape i found it in the netherlands you could call it another master's house as the woke exponents of critical race theory do in their eyes any country that long ago was complicits colonialism is to this day the master's house but to me holland was a home of liberty i found an oasis of enlightenment i took jobs i sought knowledge i associated with people i liked many who had diverse views i learned to let go of my prejudices against people of other faiths gays and married couples and others i talk of my freedoms with the emphasis on me the individual not because i seek to be selfish or narcissistic but because all the subjugation i endured in somalia and saudi arabia along with every muslim girl i knew was justified in the name of collective the ummah today to my dismay i see similar threats to individual liberty freedom of association and intellectual diversity in council culture not long after i moved to the united states i noticed a change i was offered an honorary degree at a well-known university and then to my surprise and embarrassment my offer was publicly rescinded because of a petition signed by faculty and students who claimed that my views offended them they did not want to engage or debate they simply did not want to listen and they didn't want anyone else to listen either they took away the students right to have an opportunity to form their own opinion and make their own judgment i was not alone there have been 379 disinvitation campaigns at american universities since the year 2000 nearly half were successful and that is the tip of the iceberg it omits the thinkers who are never invited or whose books have quietly been deleted from curriculums worse council culture has spread in recent years from campuses to every walk of life the movies technology journalism corporations and even elementary and secondary schools julie bindle will tell you of individual instances many many of them of working class women of color without profile been bullied out of their jobs and education we've also seen the toppling of statues and monuments to this day the demands to defund the police abolish prisons and dismantle our criminal justice system continue in some american cities we've seen efforts to stunt due process along with ongoing rioting and looting sprees dressed up as peaceful protests and justified as a form of liberation such incidents of accusation group think and punishment remind me too much of the way unfree societies work society is like the one where i grew up we need to cancel cancer culture before it cancels us all but where exactly did cancer culture come from cancel culture is the tool of a fairly new creed and this creed has many labels you may have had such concepts as identity politics intersectionality or critical race theory helen black rose the british editor-in-chief of the online magazine ariel and the american mathematician james lindsey have just published a new book called cynical theories in which they make it crystal clear what council culture is and where it comes from academic departments that gradually gain social power i urge you to read it council culture is one manifestation of critical theory it's a tool used by the adherence of this cult to silence anyone who questions their orthodoxy and the methods that they deploy to achieve their goals what are their goals they say they seek to dismantle and ultimately destroy liberal order they fundamentally oppose the liberal democratic free-market society we live in they segment and view people on the basis of immutable characteristics like craze gender and ability status in particular they have an animus against the white heterosexual man claiming that he is disposed of relentless exploitation of not only fellow humans but also the planet in their eyes the wise male is relentless deadly and utterly irredeemable and any means are justified if the end is to overthrow the social order and unseat his dominance the revolution adherents of this ideology aim to achieve the reverse of liberating because the root of their movement is deeply hostile to individual and cognitive liberty it seeks absolute conformity it is merciless to those whom they think have had and it offers no path to redemption or forgiveness i'm going to have to stop you there i am herself i'm so sorry we we you've gone over the allocated time i should have said beforehand to all our speakers with that strange sound is me dinging a glass there we are as if we are in the debating chamber um it's hard for you to hear perhaps here over the line but we did we we will have a chance to hear from you again when we open up the debate more widely let me move then uh having given that warning five or six minutes each speaker holding a glass at five and doing a glass again at six uh our first speaker against the motion a reminder that the motion is cancel culture is threatening our freedoms to speak against that notion is the a singer-songwriter political campaigner one of the few people who's had a number one hit single and been the subject of the south bank show and appeared on stage at wembley and curated the left field at glastonbury he's the author of three non-fiction books including most recently the three dimensions of freedom a warm welcome for billy bragg thank you very much jonathan and thank you very much to intelligent squared for offering me this platform is council culture a threat to our freedoms well in order to address that question we first have to look at what cancer culture is and how it occurs it's broadly defined as withdrawing support for public figures and companies after they've done or said something considered objectionable or offensive now this is not a new phenomenon people have been vociferously complaining about views expressed by individuals since time immemorial socrates was sentenced to death in ancient greece for telling people what they didn't want to hear but the proponents of cancer culture say that what is happening now is of an altogether different magnitude angry mobs stirred up by online campaigns are terrorizing individuals who've done nothing more than expressed an inoffensive opinion now a recent example of such virtual vitriol was the outrage over the performance of the diversity dance troupe on britain's got talent earlier this month their routine tackled racism and paid tribute to the black lives matter movement and it drew over 24 000 complaints to ofcom the tv regulator this is the highest amount of complaints ever recorded for a tv program the troop and its leader ashley banjo was subject to a barrage of racial abuse and threats on social media now on the face of this this would appear to be a prime example of cancer culture you might expect a tabloid such as the daily mail to be up in arms that a hateful mob was trying to silence diversity's freedom of expression well the mail did produce 20 articles about the controversy but not once did they use the term cancel culture to either describe or condemn what was happening to the diversity troop instead they used their platform to stoke the anger of their readers ofcom found that only four percent of the complaints he had received came in the wake of the original broadcast the other 96 had come in the following weeks driven by the likes of the daily mail now if cancer culture really was a threat to our freedoms you'd expect it to apply across the board the male are not shy about calling out cancer culture when they see it yet something who knows what it might have been blinded them on this issue and this is not an isolated case over the past month the male have promoted boycotts of ben and jerry's ice cream because the company tweeted supports for channel crossing asylum seekers and promoted a campaign to sack bbc songs of praise producer cat lewis who called for rule britannia to be rewritten to remove its imperial connotations now any cursory review of recent high-profile cases of cancer culture will reveal a troubling pattern the victims of this trend are always defenders of the status quo but you say those who signed the recent harpers letter decrying cancer culture come from across the board you could never describe noam chomsky as a defender of the status quo this is true but sadly many good liberal voices believe that free speech is the ultimate guarantor of individual freedom and thus feel compelled to stand beside bigots and charlatans in his defense but not all freedoms are positive in a time when too many engaged in social media discourse appear to enjoy kicking the player rather than the ball we desperately need a framework in which we can all speak our minds without fear of personal abuse or physical threat no one deserves to be the target of an online hate mob but in order to stop such behavior we have to accept that free speech has limits last month a new social media site appeared specifically for those who oppose the moderation policies of twitter called parlor p-e-r-p-a-r-l-e-r it promised free expression with no censorship no sooner he got off the ground and founder john matsey was forced to initiate what he called a few basic rules the first of which was and i quote from his tweet when you disagree with someone posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section will not be tolerated now this brings a whole new meaning to the term [ __ ] posting but also illustrates why free speech alone is not enough to safeguard our liberty it relies too heavily on the assumption that people will act in good faith and that rational argument can resolve all disputes sadly that is not the tone of the times we live in politicians and their surrogates have realized that stoking division is an easier means of gaining support and seeking consensus in such a toxic environment a slavish dedication to the right of free speech above all is somewhat of a liability for donald trump's twitter feed to the depths of the q anon conspiracy the right to say what you want whenever you want to whoever you want with no comeback is undermining our freedoms like the term political correctness before it canceled culture is a trope used by reactionaries to police the limits of social change it allows the proponents of white male supremacy to portray themselves as the victims of discrimination undermining the rights of the real victims of structural inequality if you believe cancer culture really represents an insidious threat to our freedoms making it impossible for thinking people to speak their minds then perhaps you can explain how someone like boris johnson who has made racist comments about black people and muslim women for which he has never apologized gets paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to express those views weekly in the national newspaper club and is able to rise to the highest office in the land thank you thank you very much and no need for me to ding my glass there because you were came in very nicely into time let's move to our second speaker for the motion again a reminder our motion is cancelled culture is threatening our freedoms we heard ayan hassay ali earlier to make that case now our second speaker for that argument is a feminist journalist author and broadcaster who has written extensively on rape on domestic violence on sexual violence prostitution and trafficking she writes regularly for the guardian for unheard for the telegraph and the sunday times magazine and her latest book is the pimping of prostitution abolishing the sex work myth speaking for the motion that cancel culture is threatening our freedoms uh is julie bindle thank you jonathan um it's the first time excuse me and possibly the last that i'll ever be called a defender of the status quo bearing in mind that i'm a long-term victim of so-called council culture which i would rather call being silenced um billy with respect has been rather selective with his examples and so i hope that i'm going to redress the balance here by telling you about what happens to feminists fighting male violence the usual denial of cancer culture is that it's merely public figures being criticized on twitter for things they've said when in fact for feminists fighting male violence who are victims of bullying and silence they face demands that they be sacked risk losing their homes education reputations and livelihoods it's said that merely influential people this is merely about influential people unaccustomed to being questioned well i have no interest in wealthy white men complaining about their rights to be racist and misogynistic being curtailed none at all for feminists such as myself doing unpaid work to campaign to end male violence against women women and girls this is about being hounded bullied threatened and harassed mainly by men being publicly disinvited from events to speak of rape prostitution and domestic violence having organisers initially very excited about the event apologize online publicly for inviting you in the first place having been ground down by constant phone calls emails and threats to funders often by white men perhaps identifying occasionally as non-binary in order to mask their institutionalized power and privilege in the publicity for this event the position of my opponents is described as this what we are witnessing is activism by and on behalf of marginalized groups who are seeking to address the structural inequalities that have historically held them back really why then are the vast majority of victims feminists and lesbians many of whom are of color and working class most of whom you've never heard of before all of whom are progressive seeking to protect the rights we have fought for as women helen steele is a legendary environmental and anti-capitalist activist 30 years ago this week helen was a co-defendant in the libel case brought by fast food giant mcdonald's after they distributed leaflets critical of the company helen has also campaigned publicly over an undercover policing scandal after it was discovered that police officers had infiltrated social and environmental justice campaigns and had deceived activist women into relationships but this counted for nothing when in 2017 she was hounded from an anarchist book fair by a bailing mob of trans activists all of it on film helen has stepped in to defend other women who were distributing leaflets opposed to the proposed gender recognition act then take feminist filmmakers from south india vaishnavi sundar who's worked with marginalized women all of her life and successfully fought for women to be able to access morning after contraception in the state of tamil um nadu having spent years crowdfunding to make a film about women's legal rights in the workplace she found herself de-platformed across new york city from human rights organizations that had agreed to show her film her crime challenged an extreme transgender orthodoxy on twitter which amounted to saying that women have a right to single sex services the film had nothing to do with trans issues lucy massoud is a black lesbian and former firefighter after being interviewed on radio 4 about the necessity of keeping women only toilets and changing facilities which the women in the fire service fought for for years the fire brigade was deluged by trans activists and their allies demanding she was sacked one tweeted to their followers that she should be burned this was in response to lucy being re-elected as lgbt secretary for the fire brigade union transactivity stood outside grenfell tower the scene where 72 men women and children burned to death and let off smoke bombs and waved around dildos all in an effort to stop the meeting she had organised from going ahead because we were objecting at that meeting held outside grenfell tower to the calls to expel women from the party that refused the trans women and women indoctrination selena tardu does more to celebrate the lives and activism of working-class women than any other uk-based academic was banned from speaking at a conference last year celebrating sorry this year the 50th anniversary of the first women's liberation movement event linda bellos activist lesbian originator of black history month was among the speakers at a feminist event which was cancelled over fears of violence from trans riots activists karen ningala smith the founder of counting dead women who lists every woman and girl killed by men on an annual basis and this is read out in parliament so is on hansard was refused permission to rejoin the labour party because she is hostile to gender identity of course she is she's a feminist comparing these women to bigots for fighting to keep single sex spaces for the victims of rape and domestic abuse is ignorance at its finest you definitely are a misogynist if you turn away from the daily insults on social media telling such women to choke on my girl dick die in a grease fire or punch a turf as i wrote to toby young when he invited me to join the advisory council of the free speech union i declined i said i'm not actually a supporter of blanket free speech it's about being disinvited once invited it's about who gets invited who gets to speak and who doesn't and the humiliation that comes with that people actually call it no platforming but that's really inaccurate i have no issue i wrote to toby young whatsoever with not being invited to speaker places it's them respecting their invitation because of bowing to pressure from the knob heads that's humiliation that is damage uh to reputation one moment you're in your last minute julie i have a platform not because i'm rich or world famous i have that profile because i'm a feminist campaigner that's always spoken out the fact that i can write in the national newspaper about being disinvited and hounded out of events is used against me when in fact i'm prevented from doing my unpaid activist work and i can write about it in a newspaper because i'm a journalist in 2018 every attempt on the planet was made by trans activists and allies to get me disinvited from the working class library in salford where i was due to give a talk about growing up as a working-class lesbian in the northeast of england as usual nothing to do with transgender issues you may think that silencing and counseling a few [ __ ] like me jk rowling and other high-profile women doesn't count because we can always get our voices heard elsewhere but this treatment also serves as a warning to younger women at the beginning of their political lives to shut the [ __ ] up or the same will happen to them the vast majority of the victims of this horrendous misogynistic bullying are women campaigning against male violence the likes of toby young and david starkey are red herrings in this debate what i and countless other women have seen is swathes of so-called progressive men who hate feminists but instead of being clear and honest about it they call us turfs nothing less than total capitulation will satisfy them but that's never going to happen okay can we thank you very much julie mindel um again i'm only appearing to interrupt when people go over the six minute mark there is nothing else in my decision um our last speaker against the motion reminder that we are discussing cancel culture is threatening our freedom speaking against the motion is the professor of black studies at birmingham city university and a regular opinion writer for the guardian and editor there of the series blackness in britain he was part of the team that launched the first black studies degree in europe and is the author of back to black retelling black radicalism for the 21st century and coming up a new book the new age of empire how racism and colonialism still still rule the world our final speaker speaking out against the motion keen deandrews hi good evening um i was happy to hear that julie did recognize that trans activists have been a key uh a key plus people who were kind of calling out for difference in this debate but to frame that as same as male violence so sexual violence with bullying bullying women it just it shows you the problem with this side of the debate what we have here is that nobody would deny the social media particularly and people can bully you and people can push you off people can push you around people act really badly and misogyny is a bad thing nobody would deny any of it what's being what's being forcefully argued against is this idea of a cancer culture which frankly is a confliction it conflates all these things listen to julie and listen to i am and i'm i'm i'm i'm terrified we've got there we've got we've got male violence we've got sexual violence we've got critical race theories we've got people against liberal democracy i mean this whole panic about this idea that all these people are unified in this cancelling culture it's frankly nonsense and billy bragg is right the point of this is actually to silence people ironically the free speeches are actually trying to condemn free speech it is not for me to say to trans activists what they think is appropriate or inappropriate it is for them to have that right to see and if the universities want to listen to them guess what the universities have the right to listen to it nobody has the automatic right to a platform nobody at all and the question we're really talking about here is who puts limits on free speech because there have always been limits on free speech and there will always be limits on free speech and just another example of this this complete confection is if you honestly believe that universities are like paragons of left wing virtue that you really have not been to a university recently i mean i work a bit for universities they're the most exclusionary races these are socialistic places that possibly exist and the debate we kind of imagine you kind of created this false ideal where it's all left-wing marxism you're more likely to find a marxist in the pub than you are at your local university so you see what this really is is about um the dominant and unfortunately there have been people who maybe don't feel like you are on the side of the dominant but because you've kind of embraced this cancer culture um idea and the number of the people who signed that half as desired letter felt bad about it afterwards they're like well actually maybe this was a bad idea because we understand that the project of cancer culture the idea of cancer culture is actually helping on um on on shutting down debate and this where it comes to the question of when we're talking about freedom whose freedom are we referring to are we talking to the freedom of david starkey we should have been cancelled ten years ago frankly for his comments on the riots or katie hopkins who's have we talked about cancer she's been going out i don't know if he should have been shot again should have been canceled a long time ago oh kelly i've seen somebody said r kelly was a victim of cancer culture kelly's been a predator of young women for decades so i mean this is the what's happened here is you do have and this is this is about the dominant this is mostly about men a lot a lot of the time too um who haven't been challenged right and there's voices coming through and like i said they don't always come through in the in the in the nicest way as billy pointed out before this is not new the only really thing that's new about this is that you can hear those voices because of social media because of democratization the public space you can hear them and then the other thing is news that people are actually for a change listening the question is that decides what is appropriate and what isn't appropriate in this and i'd also give you an example because i think sometimes we miss the we we really miss the point here racial science up until relatively recently i mean right the idea that uh black people and jews aren't really human beings was that was being taught in universities up until the second world war that was a pretty mainstream idea now we would literally be safe we were having this discussion in 1930s britain you'd had activists on twitter and say look it's terrible this racial science is terrible we shouldn't be doing this and everybody be complaining saying oh look at this cancel culture they want to shut down the universities left-wing and we were missing the that's the parallels happening right you have so much problematic stuff coming out from the mainstream and the difference is now you have people who have voices to say yes you know this is problematic so the question is who decides the limits of speech and i would posit that the people to decide to limit speech is far better for the crowds for the audience for the masses not the mob the masses to decide than it is for those who've been for far too comfortable in their ivory towers uh with elite privilege and then i mean the final point i would make it is there's a deep fragility to this idea i mean i certainly i know billy's probably experienced uh social media pylons i can't tweet anything without getting horrendous abuse i mean all literally all the time who's the most the mp that and probably the public figure in the uk gets the most abuse is diane abbott i don't hear diane abbott crying about cancer culture because guess what if you look like me we're kind of used to this this is that we understand this we experienced this this is a day-to-day and what and any what you tend to find with those in power is when there are challenges to the status quo it's kind of breakdown it's like a meltdown who can who why should we be being criticized why should we have to put up with this oh we've been putting up with this forever i still put up with this and i'm not complaining the black panther but that also does tell you there's a double standard here about and the final five really likes i think this is a quite important point here the the metaphors here are deeply offensive the idea of the mob canceling now the mob their mob is a real thing in history the mob has really cancelled people lynching in the united states that was cancelling um tulsa oklahoma black wall street where at least we've done random burp that killed thousands of people that was canceling in the uk we've had race riots race riots are not when black people rebel against the police or other things race rats are when uh not usually white racist communities rampage through black and brown communities and cancel those that's that's the mob so let's drop this mob discussion because this is not this is deeply offensive to what we're talking about and again you use you can see how those metaphors are being used to defend very very very very problematic ideas no one's saying everything is perfect but the idea of cancelled culture what the the work that it's doing is to maintain the status quo is to defend the powerful and to shut down those who have rightly having their voices of descent thank you uh clinton to thanks to all four of our speakers uh for setting out their stalls so fluently uh we're moving now into questions from you people who are watching at home you can do is take part by uh and ask a question by typing in a question into the youtube live chat if you're watching this live and you'll see that uh just in the text below the uh image and if you want to ask question of a specific speaker do please add their name at the beginning of this question and while you're at it if you are enjoying the debate so far please do take a moment to subscribe to the intelligent squared youtube channel and you can like this video both buttons are just below the video screen there now lots of questions have come in i've got a couple of mine which i just wanted to follow up on one one for each side as it were in our debate to you first ian hersey ali um julie bindle made clear that she's not an absolutist on free speech she doesn't think absolutely everyone has a right to a platform and i wondered in your case if you do think there is a line you know i threw out at the beginning i mentioned david irving as a figure who's often cited in this context but you know are there some people that you would as it were cancel who you would deny a platform to who you think should not be invited to public platforms and if there are if you can even name one person who fits into that category aren't we then in just into a discussion about where one draws the line and as que india andrews was just saying before who draws that line i and herciali i so jonathan i think in order to answer that question you have to understand that we are now talking about two competing philosophies i adhere to the philosophy of classical liberalism where yes free speech is the right to offend and it's protected by law and if you don't like what people say yes you can in a private setting disinvite them or cancel them what have you but it is protected by the law now council culture is rooted in a completely different philosophy it is the philosophy that traces back to post-modernism they call critical justice theory and they have a notion that only they have the way and the path to social justice and if you disagree with them then they cancel you but not only in a private form they also seek authorities university authorities the government everything that they have to shut you down and to silence you and i think it is we what we're really debating are these two different philosophies all right i understand but would there be some people who you would want to see on the receiving end of exactly that kind of pressure where they were you know the universe you invited this person x was told urged not to invite them i'd give you again my david irving example or would you say no he who however obnoxious the speech you would want that person to get that invitation to uphold that invitation and have that platform without all the pylons and criticism absolutely i would say i'm a fan of john stewart mill if we have to hear what the other person has to say and if you disagree with it that is fine if you don't like it you can walk away but i am absolutely against um the efforts to silence individuals um again you know if someone is saying something you or falls or what have you let them prove themselves by doing it also you have to respect the opinion of the audience let the audience decide for itself what they want to hear and what they don't let them process it i don't think it's up to the elites to shut down other voices thank you okay thank you um let me just put one there's there's lots that have come in but i just specific to you billy bragg caina just spoke there about social media pylons and he said look anyone who looks like him or don't have it they're just used to this this comes with the territory if you say your opinion you yeah you're going to get some horrible messages on twitter is that all this is and and therefore we can sort of take it with a pinch of salt and you know or would you recognize that the treatment of for example and her name has come up jk rowling where people are literally burning books uh and sending the kind of abuse that i think you heard uh julie bindle quoting is that something worse or do you say look come on you know grow up um get a thicker skin if you're in the public square this kind of flak is gonna happen and it's not you're not being cancelled it's just a bit unpleasant no no no no no i i the the things that julie described are completely unacceptable nobody involved in the debate should have to face that whichever side of the debate they're coming from the problem is with social media discourse there are no rules we have no rules all we have is john stuart mill john stuart milne was never the subject of a twitter pylon and if he had been i bet it would have changed his mind slightly because the situation we find ourselves now is that we are unable to not just have free speech we also need to have equality in which the person you're talking to you respect their their right to say what they want to say but also we need to have accountability as well so that people can't just come in and um attack you and uh you know take you down you should we should find some way of um getting new parameters online whereby we can just sort of discuss very very difficult things very um contentious issues but in a in a way that's deliberative rather than just going straight to the pylons and this applies both sides i mean free speech equality accountability this is not a left or right wing argument this is a an argument for a new set of parameters around which we can talk to one another because twitter has arrived social media has arrived without us having the understanding that although i'm sitting in my house on my own i'm actually talking to thousands of people right now and what i say is responded by uh the people who respond to that are not always picking up the nuance of what i'm saying in some ways the curse of twitter the curse of social media is that perception always trump's intention all right look just because we've got you here a very quick one that was uh addressed directly to you from one somebody watching said should we cancel your hero billy elvis costello from the radio and bla brand him a racist because of his use of the n-word i presume the the viewer is quoting the song oliver's army there um on that what do you think no i don't i don't i don't think something costello famously used the n-word in reference to ray charles and was was vilified in the press over that people still remember it people still talk about it but he survived you know as as celebrities often do it's those people who don't have celebrity that are that are pushed around and beating up online who need protection rather than celebrities okay to you um julie bindle question again that's coming how exactly has jk rowling been cancelled when she's uh the question is millionaire i think she's technically a billionaire who still has many supporters that's not though i think the viewers think that doesn't really sound like the person's been cancelled big new book out this week etc absolutely she hasn't been cancelled she has been vilified bullied harassed and defamed um and you know just because somebody has wealth it doesn't mean that we can just treat them like dirt when in fact her crimes which in my mind don't exist uh what she has said about transgender people is perfectly fine within the um the realms of protecting the human rights of all oppressed minorities and if you look at what white male journalists have put out either in defense of her or their own views on this issue they many of them are anti-trans bigots and yet they haven't seemed to come after these men in the way that they have for women daring to say things such as trans women are trans women uh as they have with um with chimamanda for example who has been called a bigot um and screamed at during during her book uh events and women have to say barely anything whatsoever except for we need our sex-based rights and we need women-only services when we are abused and just escaping male violence now if you think that that's acceptable because that's what rowling has said then we need to have a look at what her male counterparts have said and ask the question why do they get away with actual anti-trans bigotry misogyny racism because so many of them do why are they coming after the feminists kane did you want to respond to what you've heard from uh julie bendel there i would like to respect i mean i just think i think i think the question you have to think is i mean for julie this is jk rowling is perfectly fine obviously a number of people and it's not just men there's lots of trans actors who believe it's not perfectly fine and what they're saying is this isn't perfectly fine actually maybe i know you do other jk rally thing i think released a book where the there's a serial killer he was a trans man i mean i think that that's not true not true but my point is it isn't for me for you to decide what's acceptable it isn't right if you it's for people to have their voice and have their hands and i fully admit i fully agree that some people go way too far i've had people i have people call my work to get me fired all the time but that's just a reality that we live with because we have freedom of speech it's actually ironic i'm actually making the freedom of speech argument the people can criticize and jk rowling's gonna be fine guess what she's fine she hasn't been cancelled like i said it'd say maybe i'm just on a fact-check level just because otherwise people said i don't think that is what appears in the book the articles have been written by people who've read and reviewed the book the serial killer isn't as you've described um and the the the the the row isn't there um so ben honan writes cain did you just since we've got you saying them she says quoting you says candace says the masses should dictate who's love speak should there be checks and balances for this or is he happy that in a way the decision is left to the loudest voices on social media one of the decisions isn't left to the loud voices on social media so for example if you listen to the loudest voices of social media anytime i appear on television i would not have a joke that's not what happens nobody just gives in to a massive crowd people say things institutions decide activist organization decide if they decide that they don't want to invite me somewhere i'll go okay and i won't go i'll go somewhere else i mean look this is when you democratize the alternative is that what happened previously up to this point which is those who run those institutions you are white who are male 1 elite they decide and that's why the discourse has been so bad for so long okay i just just because hold on just because julie was laughing i want to hear from julie bentley and then iron her sally was trying to get in and then billy i've got another question for you there are women including black women including working-class women lesbians who are human rights defenders who have lost their jobs who have lost their homes who have lost their college courses that they've in one instance come over from uh almost the other side of the world to take up there are women who have become homeless and jobless because the mob rule succeeded and i'm sorry but this isn't just online i have been physically attacked publicly when i'm speaking ironically about male violence towards women never the transgender issue which i do not go out and speak about and what how can you justify that of course we give in to the moderator but we don't give in to feminists saying that we are sick and tired of the misogyny it's strange how it's it's always a capitulation to those trans activists and allies who behave like a men's rights movement and who do not represent the majority of transgender people but they are obeying mob and we are their targets um ayan jose you did want to come in briefly if you can just i can put a question that's come in for billy bragg i wanted to come in and emphasize again where i started this evening which is this distinction between the individual and individual rights that we think of as universal versus groups and i think the reason why we keep talking about mobs is because this new cult that i was describing using handsome culture as a tool used to promote a view on what they think is social justice and if as the individual you come out and you say well i think there's something going on here then you are jk rowling is obviously not she's not just a billionaire and an accomplished woman but think about the people whom she is trying to give a voice those individuals who because our society is now being segmented into these groups as a woman as a young girl a teenager you are being forced to undergo certain you know hormonal and strategically um very very very you know it is terrible to to contemplate jk rowling is trying to give a voice to that individual the individual who goes to the bathroom and finds herself threatened the individual woman who is in a prison and is raped we can't talk about those individuals because every time we raise our voices which we and we need free speech for that then this cult comes along and says you're transphobic if i talk about what is happening to muslim women female genital mutilation honor killings and all the rest of it i'm accused of islamophobia so then they use a group stamp to put down and cancel and silence the individual and the individual rights and individual human rights the philosophy of liberalism protects all of that the philosophy of the council culture cancels it okay now but there you are with the into the um branding of the hoover institution right behind you you're on this debate tonight you have many platforms i think books coming out etc in what sense has someone like you been cancelled i've been cancelled and i i've of course i thought i'll tell you this i never thought it was a threat to our freedoms i think that this year because this year i'm seeing how big this thing has become the brainwashing of our children from k to 12. the thing has come out of the universities it's more than annoying just now it is really we are now entering a phase where we are seeing the closing of the young minds and it is utilitarian in its thinking totalitarian in its actions and we would be so complacent and so naive to let this thing go on okay thank you time is running out we've got only very few minutes left but two questions have come in they're related to you directly billy bragg david craig asks does billy bryant believe someone should be cancelled for suggesting there are two biological sexes male and female and then the second question from jane eyres who says why should ordinary women often working in academia risk losing their jobs this picks up what julie bindle was saying risk losing their jobs for speaking up for women's rights rights and for existing equality law but first up should someone be cancelled for suggesting there are two biological sexes male and female which i think jk the problem the problem with this um question for me is i don't believe there's such a thing as being cancelled i believe it's a chimera used by the far right to keep people quiet and in their place so i'm not really able to answer that particular question but with regard to people losing their jobs no i don't think that's right that people should lose their jobs because what they believe the problem is that many people have contracts which they can be fired at will by their employers and that's where that's where the problem comes up and in regard to anybody who is fired for what they believe in i believe they should go to an industrial tribunal but having said that is a really important thing if you were organized in an event in which you're putting across an idea julia i mean i might suggest you know one of your events uh uh you know to point out uh misogyny and to to combat male violence and and the the the guy in the sound crew in the middle of it walks on stage and makes a misogynist sort of speech you're totally within your rights to then say well i'm not working without [ __ ] again you know so there is a there is a situation in which a person's actions what they say in the public domain specifically the public domain has a an effect on your the position that you're taking and what you're trying to represent and your reputation so you are you are in that situation within your rights to say i'm not going to work with that person again i know you're not literally firing them you are saying well that you know i'm not that guy's a misogynist i'm not working with him that you would do that would you i think that's an entirely different scenario well i'm just asking you invited well then i'll answer yes of course i would i'd say to him i don't wish to work with you and your views are abhorrent but this is entirely different from being invited to speak about no i agree no violence and then being disinvited and being called a bigot in a nazi yeah yeah i agree and i was i wasn't addressing that question i was addressing the question of whether someone should get fired for what they believe in and i think this is this is one of the problems with all of this debate is the lack of nuance the lack of nuance that we're in a situation where um the culture wars come along and it's everything's black and white everything's them and us it's impossible for us to sit down and have a straightforward debate in which we recognize there are different varied situations in which we try and apply these ideas in and okay and everything comes down to those you know 280 characters thank you we are fittingly out of time for that section our q and a section and thank you to all the people who wrote in such a shame we couldn't get to all of them but let's use this we're going to have a minute summing up from each of you um and we're going to go in the reverse order that we did with the opening speeches i'm going to try and ping my glass after one minute but if you don't hear me i may have to stop saying ding ding ding but let's begin with you kenday andrews uh and see if you can uh summarize in a in a minute uh your closing argument for why you do not believe that canceled culture is threatening our freedoms so i want to stress that neither me nor billy are arguing that people don't get harassed people don't get bullied people aren't victims of violence these things all happen what we are saying is that cancer culture yes there is that's a that's a bogeyman that's a myth there is no call there is no mobber coming after you the whole idea of canceled culture is to shut down the freedoms of those who are oppressed that's the purpose of and it comes about because we're in a moment where we have a more democratic public space where people can be challenged on their views and people can say no that's not perfectly fine we don't agree and that and that and to cancel culture at the purpose of it the point of it is actually to the idea of cancer culture is against our freedom the caterpillar itself is a complete bogeyman and a myth thank you um our second and admirably brief our second uh uh of summing up speaker is going to be in one minute uh from you julie bendel this is not about cancel culture this is about being harassed and hounded for having feminist views within this whole debate that has got lost because as i said earlier i have no interest in david starkey or any white racist man or anyone with offensive views um weeping crocodile tears about how they're not allowed to espouse those offensive views but if you just took one minute to look at why so many feminists have been arrested sacked hounded and driven to terrible states of mental ill health you would see that all they are doing is trying to protect those spaces that we develop for the simple reason that until men stop raping and killing and abusing women we need those spaces it wouldn't matter if that wasn't the case so you have to take that separately from those toby youngs and those david starkeys and any of the other um uh people that are being as my good friend rachel moore and says handed their ass for actually being told that they are this their timings up with these offensive public views thank you um to sum up uh making the case against the motion that council culture is threatening our freedoms in one minute billy bragg i'm not sure become much closer to defining actually what council culture constitutes is it online abuse if so then let's call it that and have a debate about how we can hold bad faith actors to account for their behavior is it people getting fired for expressing an opinion if so then let's talk about strengthening workplace rights so that employers are not able to fire at will is it people feeling admonished by the criticism they receive for simply expressing their views well how can it be when it's merely the result of those who disagree with you exercising their own freedom of expression and provided they're not abusive and i must stress that abusive behavior is not acceptable threats are not acceptable you must respect the fact that they have every right to criticize you is cancer culture a genuine threat to our freedoms evidence suggests that it is applied in two parties and a manner to threaten the rights of everyone in society and to argue otherwise is unfortunately to give legitimacy to those who are seeking to push back against black lives matter me too and other movements struggling to hold the powerful to account okay thank you and the final minute summing up from you for the motion that canceled culture is threatening our freedoms ayan hershey ali well tonight i ask you to defend the motion that council culture is a threat to our freedoms and i ask you to be brave please stand up to the mob don't change your exchange your liberty for misery and loneliness um cancer culture is rooted in a philosophy that takes advantage of power language and knowledge they see our society only in relationship to one another and and the only prism is through power they pollute our language and they pollute our knowledge and i ask you to vote tonight for critical thinking i ask you to vote tonight against council culture it's an opportunity to repudiate nastiness bitterness and divisiveness and move toward genuine inclusivity freedom and belief of that belief and dialogue thank you thank you um and thanks to all our speakers for summing up so concisely it is now time for you those of you who are watching and following this debate for you to make your final vote are the second of your two votes the final vote on the motion that cancel culture is threatening our freedoms click the link in the description box below the video which says cast your final vote here you can either vote for the motion that cancels culture is threatening our freedoms or against it and if you're still undecided you want to abstain you can do that by voting the word undecided um while we're doing that and while all of you are voting we count those there's just a couple more uh questions that are that people did send in um i wonder just put this to you uh julie bendel first of all whether is perhaps cancel culture as we're calling it not something that is almost part of human nature to want to silence and ostracize ideologies that threaten our own point of view that question came in from somebody called 20 faces i think that's probably right but what we have now is a tsunami of misogyny within culture that women and girls are having to face um all in the the name of you know somebody else's rights which happen to conflict with ours feminists have a long tradition of supporting any person that suffers any institutional oppression we understand class as a structure we understand it as a sex class we understand it when it comes to other institutionalized oppressions but at the moment feminists and lesbians in particular are being monstered and vilified as though we literally are nazis and bigots when what we're trying to do is protect the rights that we have fought for for decades let me put one to you um cain andrews that came in from angus burn who and i thought i think this is interesting as billy bragg said we maybe are bundling two things together here the online abuse phenomenon and then the denial and rescinding of invitations and platforms if in terms of talking about the latter category angus man says is there a law about inciting racial hatred obviously there is and would that not define the scope for denying a platform in other words if a david stark or kt hopkins people you mentioned have broken the law and inciting racial hatred then yes of course those people should be denied a platform but anything less than that maybe the angus is suggesting then you just let that pass and they are allowed a platform what do you think of that well no i think one the fact there are laws about this tells us there is certainly limits and it's interesting where they get sent but that's that's ridiculous i mean people get invited don't get invited the fact that i haven't been invited to many places is a version of no platforming right your institutions decide who they want to invite and decide who they don't want to invite and certainly they shouldn't be inviting people who meant many of their constituencies find offensive particularly neoliberal regime of students and customers if you invite a speaker to the university and the students saying yeah maybe not maybe they say you should maybe maybe that's a better barometer of response than one or two academics think is a good person to invite yeah this is the famous free market of opinion isn't it that we hear so much about it's a free market until the left get their foot in the door and all of a sudden hang on a minute this is not a free market anymore we need to keep these people out you know in the end opinions have to face off against one another and this is how we move forward there's a new generation out there for whom accountability is more important than free speech and i think you can see that in the fact that the biggest movements in the 20 in the 21st century have been accountability movements they've been black lives matter they've been me too they've been extinction rebellion this is what excites young people holding the world uh to account for their problems and i think it's this this clash this clash of ideologies that causes the problem and where do you yourself stand do you value accountability more than free speech me yes i believe this needs to be a balance between free speech free speech has got to be the foundation of a liberal society fundamentally but sometimes the balance goes too far in favor of free speech and we accept people being abusive online and saying this is my right to be abusive there needs to be a balance at the moment the balance of free speech is totally out of whack you only have to need read donald trump's twitter feed to understand that so i would like to see more accountability but not at the cost of people's right to express their opinion in a way that is not abusive and threatening okay and uh just to put that to you and hear the alley we're in the era of accountability and maybe that's about time that we rest the balance away from free speech i just want to say to state as clearly as i possibly can that you cannot have accountability without free speech because you do have for free speech you have to articulate what a grievance is what the problems are and so if you want to hold people accountable you have to have free speech first i also wanted to make it absolutely clear that people like david starkey and katie hopkins as much as you disagree with them to call them far right and racist is insulting and it's abusive and it's wrong i'm now holding you accountable it is precisely to this is what shuts down debate by going around and calling people bigots only because you can't defend your position sorry shut down the people who are trying to hold you to account you are trying to deny them their right to free speech to hold you to account hopkins can say what she wants david starkey can say what he wants this is bigoted and the spirit of good faith and this is what's wrong about council culture there is no good faith it's all about shaming it's all about it's punitive it's about silencing people and it's wrong and we need to stop it yeah we should all remind camp for uh put that in the reading list right so we can we can just make sure we get all the voices out there katie hopkins katie hopkins wouldn't know good faith a bit better in the ass i mean you know she's just ridiculous you don't want you don't want people to think for themselves you want to think for them and that's what's wrong with cancer culture and the philosophy in which it is rooted ironic when your lecturer knows and how to think isn't it i mean i think look i mean i think it's a perfectly reasonable position just to describe people's views as bigoted and racist you shouldn't do that that's that's closing free speech council culture is about brainwashing and if people refuse to be brainwashed then they are silenced you can't have accountability without free speech julie what are we talking to while we're chatting julie does it does he you mentioned about toby young in that does he worry you that sometimes the people you find yourselves on platforms with might be opposed to your views i was really thinking this week about the uh death of rude by ruth bader ginsburg um abortion rights are going to be a huge issue in the american election and some of the people that have been supportive of your position on trans rights are now going to be trying to uh deny women the right to abortion does it not trouble you that feminism is kind of drifting to the right on this it troubles me massively and in fact i've just written a long essay about that saying why feminism has to be located on the left why we must not uh form alliances with bigots because within their um anti-gay package they happen to have something that's anti-trans that might on paper correspond with our concerns as left-wing feminists about self-identification for men to use uh for women's shelters etc and i don't think that um i no feminist worth assault would ever join forces with those that seek to um to to to threaten women's biological uh our reproductive sovereignty etc so feminism has to be located on the left clearly all women can fight for their rights but to ally with with trump pipes uh or those that actually are going to take our rights away on the other hand shows a lack of strategy and quite frankly it's politically abhorrent all right thank you i i know we could carry on and iron herself he wants to even some disagreement within the two camps but we do now have our results in uh let me just uh remind you the motion before us the canceled culture is threatening our freedoms when you came into the debate or switched on for the motion overwhelmingly it was 73 for the motion only 11 against and undecided were 16 i can tell you that the undecideds have gone down from 16 to just 7 and now the results are for the motion that cancel culture is threatening our freedoms 77 and against the motion um 16 an increase from 11 to 16 but the motion is emphatically carried that council culture is threatening our freedoms as i say 77 to 16 with just seven percent undecided i want to thank our all of you for watching and for voting thank you of course to everyone at intelligent squared for putting together the debate but i think you'll agree with me those who are watching that our chief thanks go to our four excellent speakers for debating so openly and as you saw in our closing minutes uh engaging with each other so a warm thank you to iron herciale billy bragg julie bindle and keinde andrews and as i say again thanks to all of you for watching and indeed turn challenge squared and a final word from our hosts uh uh over to hannah cared intelligent squared thank you very much johnny and thank you to all our speakers that it really was a terrific debate and i think we can all say that freedom of speech is alive and well at intelligence squared just a reminder if you're not already a subscriber there's a special discount available tonight if you look in the description box under your video you can see it there apply the code when you um go onto our website and then you'll be able to see all the fantastic events that we've got coming up in the future so from me and all of us intelligent squared thank you for watching and see you again soon good night

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 50,171

Keywords:

Id: KBOfye7F6vM

Length: 70min 55sec (4255 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020