"Cancelling Cancel Culture" - Part 1.

[Laughter] hello and welcome my name is john o'sullivan i'm president of the danube institute here in budapest what you're about to see is a conference on the topic of cancel culture you'll be aware that all over the united states britain and europe especially in the universities and large corporations free speech is at risk speakers who hold unpopular views that is views mainly unpopular with the left are being told that they cannot speak sometimes they're dismissed by the companies for which they work sometimes their articles except are accepted by newspapers but then returned because some journalists on the paper object sometimes they're physically attacked and injured there's been a reluctance to accept that these things are happening but they are that's why we brought together a group of distinguished academics journalists and artists from several countries to discuss this disturbing new trend you'll meet them in due course but we're going to start with a voice that is used to speaking lines written by others by playwrights but who now speaks in his own voice mr lawrence fox lawrence fox was a popular actor until the council culture crowd tried to drive him from his profession but he's now taken the challenge head-on first by speaking out next by founding reclaim a new political party in the uk drawing support from both the left and the right and then by making a mural run in the city of london where he made a respectable showing in a recent telegraph article he was described as quote saying aloud what the mainstream politicians are too frightened to say challenging the stifling conformity of identity politics an actor turned evangelist preaching an alternative gospel to the false religion of woke hello thank you for having me my name is lawrence fox and i am the leader of the reclaim party in the united kingdom and i am an unwitting if not unwilling politician nowadays i was formerly an actor and i would like to tell you about how i came to be cancelled in 2019 i had as well as being an actor i was also a musician and well i am also a musician still i had written a song called the distance which was critical of cancer culture and as a result of this i was invited on uh bbc question time which is a political panel show very popular in the united kingdom i was uh speaking i was asking a question about meghan markle and whether she was hounded out of the united kingdom as she said as a result of racism i said no i didn't believe when asked my opinion i didn't believe that she had left the united kingdom because of racism owing to the fact that the united kingdom is statistically one of the most tolerant and welcoming countries on earth um she the audience member who asked me this question then said that i was a white privileged male to to which i responded um that that was a racist statement to deny someone an opinion owing to the colour of their skin and an immutable characteristic is a racist thing to say i thought the program had gone perfectly fine i thought it was a very moderately moderate view held by a vast majority of people in the united kingdom of all ethnicities and et cetera the next morning i awoke to a phone that was almost melting with correspondence from friends many saying well done someone needed to say it but at the same time the actors union equity which is also currently having a major problem in the united kingdom at the moment with members leaving it uh called for me to be denounced and to not work again essentially and this precipitated what in the twitter world is called a pylon from the virtuous members of the show business community who then decided that um i wasn't to work again i very quickly uh liaised via lawyers with equity to say please could you remove this statement of calling for me to be denounced because i have a career anyway uh they didn't i then threatened them to with legal action and in the end they would do their statement and made a half-hearted apology and by this point i'd realize the damage had been done and many members of the show business community started coming out and calling me a racist for for daring to question uh the lived experience of meghan markle or the lived experience of the lady in the audience who had questioned me so i proceeded to go into a period of deep sadness actually having spent 22 years as an actor and i thought my career is lost and i then thought to myself no something needs to be done about this we cannot have this emerging cancer culture where any dissenting view is ultimately silenced by this single and simple allegation of racism so i then formed the reclaim party with the express intention of trying to restore freedom of speech the most important cornerstone to any free and liberal democracy which allows everybody to have an equal view unfortunately one of the side effects of free speech is that you do get a few nut jobs who say silly things but that is a small price to pay for the right to everyone to speak uh we've done some polling over this issue in the united kingdom and it turns out that half the country self-censor or are frightened to speak their minds which has direct implications on government policy because if only half the debate is being had then the policy is going to be only ever going to be based on half the information so i then decided i would stand for the mayor of london an impossible task seeing as london is the cathedral city of walkery and this uh critical race theory and all of the other things that are part of the doctrines and rituals of of the modern woke religion i um managed to get 50 000 odd votes and 120 000 second preferences which i was absolutely thrilled with from uh from a standing start and it goes to show that even in this great capital city of ours there are there are people that are aware of what is going on with this horrible and burgeoning council culture so i find myself now about to release a legal remedy report to the government to for remedies to maintain freedom of speech and uh make small amendments to existing legislation which suppresses it and yes that's that's my story really i i'm not sure what what else i what else you'd like me to say or what else i can offer at this point yeah lawrence uh it's rod drear here i'm a visiting fellow at the danube institute and i'm the author most recently of a book called live not by lies which is a response to cancel culture i am uh curious to know to what extent you think that this can be addressed through politics because one of the things that's so curious and terrifying frankly about cancer culture is the way it can and does exist within the structures and institutions of liberal democracy in other words people uh the actors who are calling for you to be denounced you know they have the right to do this sort of thing and um i i don't know what what legal remedies there can be or what politic what laws could be passed to protect someone from the uh from this sort of attack could you elaborate yes i i think the political means are very difficult actually uh if i'm honest i think that every single institution uh is being hollowed out from within by those that actually support and encourage council culture so without government inter uh direct government intervention uh which the uh conservative government in the uk are saying that they're interested in free speech but um i think it's much more words and platitudes than action i think actually interestingly the most the best way to challenge it and and it's the most difficult way because it's the most expensive way is via the legal system so i am also currently involved in a defamation case uh having been called by uh tweeted out by an actress who said that anyone who hired lawrence fox was unequivocally unapologetically and unashamedly a racist so i am currently in in legal proceedings to try and to try and take this word racist which is the word used to silence all debate to the court and ask a judge or a jury i hope uh to define what that word means because we all know what the word racist means it means to discriminate against someone based on the color of their skin or to believe that certain skin colors or immutable characteristics are superior to others this modern critical race theory version of what racism is which is a combination of cultural marxism and you know the burgeoning religion of woke in terms of the oppressed and the oppressor is is a very very very dangerous way of of redefining a word which we all we all know what it means so it's a question of a combination there are there are things that can be done legally there's certainly things that can be done in terms of the equality act uh and and the human rights act but really what the united kingdom could would benefit from i believe is is something very similar to the american uh first amendment which is the which is a an eliminable right to free speech it's going to be very very difficult i thought what i thought what would happen in my career in my short political career thus far would be just to try and move the overton window back towards the center but this is this is much more difficult because ones woke up the woker enemies which essentially what we're witnessing the rise of of of of acceptable racism again real racism again this time aimed at a different group and which happens to be white people and you know as we're seeing across the world huge amounts of open anti-semitism so i think lawfare as they call it in america and um you know carefully considered going over the equality act in the human rights act will be a good beginning to this but it's a cultural issue you know and people are silenced and you know you only have to take well look at what happened to my entire career was exploded in less than a week as to why people do not want to speak and open their mouths but i think unless we do we're going to be run by we're going to be run dominated and controlled by an extremely small very authoritarian genuinely racist mob hi laurence so charles cook i write for national review in the in the states the the part of this that i find the most astonishing is the role that your union played in getting you cancelled um in the u.s recently as a new york times journalist called donald mcneil who was fired and he eventually ended up putting out this statement that looked like he'd have been extracted under torture by the khmer rouge and it turned out that the union had been against him now i'm not a big union fan but one of the arguments in favor of unions is that they are necessary to protect workers against the vicissitudes of the mob and yet what you're describing is that equity did the opposite is there any way of setting up a new union for actors and other people that is committed to defending people who speak out i think that would be a very good idea just this morning maureen lipman a jewish actress has a member of equity for 50 years has left because the president of equity and the general secretary of equity have called for sanctions against israel now as far as i'm concerned uh actors unions uh as you say are there to represent actors they're not there to um represent or involve themselves in the politics of the middle east no and certainly against the the the most important um defense of their many many jewish members so i don't know i think that what we've got is we've got it we've got people coming out of universities heavily indoctrinated into this modern critical social justice critical race theory and they are unable to show any form of introspection or understanding that others may have a different view so i think it would be it would be wonderful but you know look on social media what what happened parlor parler paula i'm not sure how it's pronounced uh tried to create a a free speech area away from the you know the sort of sewer that is twitter and they were immediately shut down it seems to me that there is a concerted effort globally certainly from the from the the technocracy and and the the big tech elites to say that certain views will not be tolerated in society ever again they will be silenced and those views happen to be conservative views so i think it's very it's very very sad there are there are great noises coming out of america in ron desantis who is a very brave man who is standing up against all of this stuff but you know what would another union what would another union achieve these views these you must extremely pro-palestine anti-israel these views if you do not hold these views in show business you will not get a job that's it there are very very very few that are willing to to speak their minds about this you know lawrence i i've been here on the continent for five or six weeks and it has been extraordinary to me to see how here in hungary also in france and elsewhere in europe this anglo-american culture war these anglo-american culture war issues have been appropriated by the left here and they're they're using it for their own purposes here in budapest for example a few weeks ago the left-wing city government erected a black lives matter statue that was painted in rainbow colors for lgbt pride the the the mayor of the district was asked by a journalist why did you do this there aren't many black people in hungary she said oh but we must stand firm against racism can you talk a bit about why this appeal how is how are these american and to a broader anglo-american culture war uh issues going global what what's the dynamic there as you see it i think social media plays a huge part in it because social media obviously doesn't have borders does it it can go across and and there is part of this modern growing woke religion is that there are no such things as borders so something which is an american problem the american issue with um you know the historical slavery and with the way that the black community have been treated in america is very very different to what is taking place in europe i think the obviously the the very hard leftists are very clever by saying black lives matter because we would all agree with that so originally we would have black lives matter protests in london for example and policemen would be taking the knee to the protesters but they i think they took the knee honestly to the belief that they wanted to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world who happen to have black skin to say black lives matter but it's only later that one realizes that that is just a trojan horse for this um very this this burgeoning cultural marxism and this um and this new woke religion it's um it's very sad and it and human beings have a desire all of us have a desire for meaning and and to and to believe we have a gap in our consciousness that some people feel that god some people thought were politics but as we removed god as as we knew him previously uh and he's and the idea of god is now a dirty idea we've replaced with a new religion and and this religion lacks any repentance and any forgiveness whatsoever were you surprised by what happened did you have any inkling before you said that you were surprised by the way that the show was received but were you surprised overall did you ever get any hint of this on sets in conversations with other actors did you sense it in the zeitgeist or did this really come out of the blue it's very interesting i i i spent 10 years working with uh an actor a lovely actor called kevin waitley who is uh left-wing not a socialist but he's a left-winger caring about the important aspects of left-wing political thinking in terms of stuff like social inequality and various other things and we used to disagree and argue frequently every single day but then as i moved into probably i'd say about 2016 2017 and the new generation of actors started coming through where and uh all casting was based around diversity of uh skin color it had nothing to do with anything other than other than that and that it remains that way to this day and i noticed that people started not to speak their minds anymore which is very odd in terms of art because the whole idea of art is to challenge um political thinking particularly and and be counter-cultural so i saw it coming and i actually it whilst i was surprised at the level of uh vitriol thrown at me interestingly in the room what i said received a round of applause so it was pretty obvious that i was speaking uh something that people understood so i was then i i was surprised but i had made a conscious decision by that point that there's no point in being involved in art if you have to shush shut up and have a monochromatic myopic view of how the world was and hence what's happened in the with the death of comedy there's very very few funny comedians left which is so sad and there's very very few films that you you have those great films the david lean robert bolt films that were told by these singular voices that were making films that they wanted to watch now you'll watch a film and the whole thing seems to be put together like a like a three-year-old's lego toy you know exactly what's happening next it challenges no part of your soul and and no no one is touched deeply anymore and i think we will get bored of it at some point but it's it's pretty sad to be involved in you know lawrence about five or six years ago in the united states i began to hear from people who had been raised under communism soviet communism either in russia or in the eastern bloc and who had immigrated to america and they were starting to say the things they're seeing happen in america this was at the beginning of the rise of cancer culture reminded them of what they had grown up with and left behind in the eastern bloc and if you talk to them long enough about it they would express real anger that no american would take them seriously that we were having we're witnessing the rise of some new form of totalitarianism do you think it's fair to describe cancel culture and all the adjacent cultural expressions uh to describe it as a form of totalitarianism why or why not yes i i do and i think what what's so concerning about it is not only are we watching a rise of totalitarianism we're also witnessing the birth of a new religion at the same time so so i see walkery as as a religion so i think it's sort of unprecedented that we've got these two things happening at the same time and and yeah i have a friend actually in new york who emigrated to new york from uh communist eastern europe and and she again she is exactly as you described she is furious she says my family fled to come to freedom and you're giving your freedom away and it it it's very difficult to understand how and why and whether whether part of me believes we may even be reaching the end of democracy western democracy and that the the final the affluence that we've been afforded has given us the ability to spawn very very intellectually fragile young people who are incapable of being challenged in any way through their thoughts so that they they beat down and suppress other people and debates so i wonder whether this is the either um democracy and western values are about to get a are just getting a kick and to be reminded what's so wonderful about it all we were witnessing the the final days the the western civilization committing suicide if you will without caring a couple of years ago i spoke to a european friend of mine who had just spent a year at harvard doing graduate work and he told me the most extraordinary thing he had learned from his year at the top american university was how fragile the american elites are and uh for exactly the reason you say he said they cannot deal with any thought or expression that makes them anxious and they have the power to suppress it he said the thing is they have utter confidence in their destiny as leaders this man said he was middle-aged he said that as a european we depend on america being strong i don't see america being strong i see america being ruled by these utter neurotics and that makes me fear for the future of europe well as a briton what does that make you think i think that america obviously you know the old adage that america sneezes and europe gets the cold is that we're going to see the rise in the uk of the same thing exactly the same thing you i i have friends who've been to university and they go in one way and they come out a totally different way you cannot communicate with them there's no there's also no logic or any reasoning reason is being thrown out in this critical thinking is being thrown away at the altar of as one says we're not offending other people to say i feel hurt by what you say some of the most important lessons one learns in life are painful and that that is just simple it's the way life has been structured but this this vision of of utopian living where nobody gets hurt nobody is ever allowed to say anything offensive it has a sort of that there is like all bad ideologies they all begin with with a with a grain of truth which is do we want to live in a more equal world do we want bet do we want to live more harmoniously that that is a noble goal but the bureaucracy and the armies of of commissars that it's going to take to make everybody behave and nobody upset anybody and everybody be equal is just it's pure communism totalitarian communism it's that's that's what that's what people are after and they haven't these these children are not taught in the united kingdom and not taught you british and european history they're taught revisionist history then they're not so and in my view revisionist history isn't history history we we were always told as i i love history we were always told who to read who was the most impartial who would offer you the the the truest and most factual and impartial insight into what happened uh you know in whichever period of history you were you were um studying but uh young people nowadays they don't learn history 40 of kids in in the uk don't do history up to gcse and there is no particular curriculum either at the moment so so that's the that's one of the main problems i think if we've got kids learning history then you know they know exactly what's coming if we carry on down this road so it seems to me there's a paradox here because on the one hand you're worried that we're heading toward the end of democracy and i share that worry on the other hand you said when you were in the room on question time you got a round of applause there seemed to be some sentiment in your favor you mentioned polling that shows that people are aware that they're self-censoring it seems that whichever poll you look at council culture is not popular in the uk or in the us and so the british public and the american public have the capacity if they want to to stop this and yet it's still burgeoning how do you explain that well i think uh essentially this is also we're in the early adopter phase of this i i don't think we're in that we're in a phase where it's i certainly think in america it's much worse than it is here but we're still not we still haven't this flower is just a bud at the moment it hasn't it's not turning it's not really blossoming yet um so i think most people just uh certainly conservative thinking people want to they they believe in personal responsibility they believe in looking after their family they believe in earning a living they believe they don't have time really to engage with you know ideological extremism so it like the rise of fascism in germany it was just too late by the time everyone realized how bad it was and that's the that's the that's the problem but i think you know this is why i exist i'm going next week to uh up to batley and spen which is uh the constituency where there's going to be a by-election where a teacher was hounded out and is now living in hiding for showing their cartoons from the charlie hebdo to in in a class on blasphemy and the government have said absolutely nothing about this and the the two main political parties will not talk about this during the election so i'm going to go up there and i'm going to say this teacher needs to be reinstated and totally exonerated and this needs to happen because otherwise we are we are bowing down to a mob and we'll see how how much uptake there is amongst the population but again this wonderful ability to silence anybody by calling them a racist and the identity the identity politics crowd know this they're very good about it most politicians that you watch on television diane abbott was doing it yesterday she she describes herself she said as a black woman and it's like well i i don't care whether a whether you're black or b whether you're a woman what's your opinion you know it's that that we need to we need to start engaging with you know because it we're not just a product of it of things that we cannot change identity politics is based solely around things that we cannot change whereas your character your awareness your ability to listen your own desire to for introspection forgiveness understanding all of that you can change the one thing you can't change is is your skin color and your sexual orientation and yet these seems things seem to be the most important things in society and i actually think to your average person they're not so we'll see is the answer but no politic mainstream political party will deal with this so i have to and it's a shame an actor has to do this you know lawrence in the united states the new york times won a pulitzer prize for its 1619 project a revisionist history exercise that uh blamed the or said the american founding was in order to preserve slavery they were heavily criticized even by some left-wing historians who said no that's not it at all but nevertheless they won the pulitzer prize and now oprah winfrey and lionsgate studios have spent a lot of money optioning the 1619 project for film and television productions this will be the history that an entire generation of young americans receive about the founding of their own country and it's a sort of thing that uh completely uh delegitimizes the us constitution and its founding so tell me what role do you think that your industry filmmaking and creative industry film and television and uh novel writing and so forth what role do you play in capturing cult the culture's memory and creating the culture's memory in favor of this soft totalitarianism uh well i think um victor davis hanson and others at the hoover institution are doing the 1776 project as well aren't they so one has to turn around and go there's two versions to this story you know and and we and that and that will be what happened i think oprah winfrey in look oprah winfrey is popular to a certain audience but there is still a huge audience who really do know the history when i was campaigning out in london for example and i met probably 15 000 people over the period of the time people are much much more intelligent than you give them credit for but ultimately the root and branch interventions need to be put into schooling to turn around and say we will not have politicized schooling and education you will not teach my young children about white privilege which they are being taught about and you will and i think the government that this problem will become in britain because it is similar to brexit which was a large cultural issue this will touch everything this cultural capture and i think that i i don't think they will end up reading the 1619 project and seeing it as red it's being discredited even one of its authors has already been discredited it's phasical we're in a phase where narrative has overtaken reality narrative is to overtake in fact narrative is crucial above all other things and that shows how fragile how how how blinkered and human beings aren't ultimately like that human beings the whole process of evolution is that the dissenting gene the outlying gene the one that pushes itself in a different direction that is how societies progress it is very very unnatural for for human beings to centralize around mistruth so i think i i don't share your your negative your your projection that 1619 will be will become factual i think that there will be a fight back and there are already is isn't there with ralston college and hillsdale and other universities in america but the whole thing has been captured this long march through the institutions has been carefully orchestrated and planned to the point where we were about to decolonize handle in the uk they're about to go the royal society of music are about to remove um problematic instruments and i'm utterly appalled at the way that the church of england have behaved as well you know the church of england essentially who their whole job is to is to unify the nation around christ if if that is what you believe but the church of england are now woker than than the rest and to me walkery is there is the devil in action so um that our own church is in bed with the devil so we we're in trouble that's what we and we're in real trouble but we're we're in an early adopter phase that you're you're average man on the street until he gets until he gets hit in the face by it he's not gonna not gonna learn stand up but we need leaders to stand up and say this is a this is a problem we stand directly against you and america has great ones and the uk does too so you know it's a it's a war that's for sure do you think you got chosen at random was it a crime of opportunity is it that other people don't talk out was it particularly what you said and where you must think about this a lot what why did this happen to you because you you i mean whether you said or not you won't be the only free speech loving actor and you won't be the only conservative actor but for some reason they came for you i think it's the ultimate betrayal that it that an actor who worked for 10 years playing a you know they they just didn't expect it coming from me and so because so it's a betrayal of show business you know the the show business is extremely woke so the fact that i from show business came out and said things like you know we may be going a bit too far with me too and stuff like that they thought right with this man we're going to make an example of so you can see exactly what happens when someone dissents against our worldview and they thought showbiz you know it's a shock for this to come out of show business you know there aren't that many openly conservative actors that i mean john voight i suppose is one of them you can tell who the conservative actors are they stay away from this issue all the time you know uh lawrence we're coming to you charlie and i are from budapest the capital of a country and a city in a region that has not yet surrendered to cancel culture what message would you have to the peoples of of eastern europe that haven't gone this far what should they know and how should they protect themselves from losing their own uh democratic freedoms well through um you know very sadly weirdly they will have a natural immunity to this stuff because of their recent history or not so recent history nowadays so there will be a generational uh immunity that is passed down to the to the children but the most important defense you can have always to say let's have the most open and broad debate that's that's the most important thing so the minute someone tries to silence any form of debate or tries to manipulate language these are the the early signs of when people try to manipulate language when we start when it started people started to say i'm a person of color rather than a colored person and one is you know absolute crime against humanity and the other one is there is a is a wonderful respectful way of treating someone you know what once these the these pieces of double things start entering people's heads we should encourage our children always to ask why questions are the most important thing and if someone can't answer a question then that you have to ask yourself whether you should trust them certainly in education my own children come home from school my youngest son came home from school very upset because they'd held their assembly in the school and um when donald trump had been diagnosed with covet and the head teacher stood up and said donald trump's been diagnosed with covid and she wanted a round of applause which she got and then my my youngest son was very very upset and he couldn't understand why people were clapping for someone being ill he didn't get it so what i do is i'm like parents who have the power to do who have the power and the understanding of what's going on always teach your children i say to them i don't mind what you think it doesn't bother me what you think you can think whatever you like but as long as you can explain to me why you think it and defend defend yourself in a conversation against me any form of silencing is is really bad for human interaction that's what i would say talk talk talk talk talk be free in your expression so what is your next move you ran for mayor you have this report coming out then what um there what we've got is we've got this by-election coming up i'm going to start a uh sort of a media outlet similar to a lot of the things that you get obviously what the danube do and uh and various in america and just make sure that this there's a home for people who who want to hear who want to hear free speech in action and because it's quite attractive if you listen to two people that disagree with each other having a conversation it's a wonderful thing actually uh and then i'm gonna we're looking pro probably if i can get a pledge from there from their two main parties that they would that they will uphold their free the right to free speech thought inquiry in the case of this grammar school teacher then i won't stand a candidate there but if they don't sign a pledge to say we're going to reinstate him or at least relocate him and find him somewhere and his family where they can begin again and condemn the actions of the school then i will stand a candidate there on that one issue of freedom of speech so when i free see freedom of speech being attacked i will stand candidates against the government and you know if you're taking if you can take five percent six percent of of a tight seat between a conservative and a labour vote you're going to create problems for the government and you're gonna and you're gonna be forcing the government to address these cultural issues our problem that we have at the moment is the conservative government in the uk have an 80-seat majority so the last thing that they're going to do is engage with anything that could make them unpopular and these can be unpopular topics so it we're in real troubled times what we need is a proper opposition which we don't have one

Channel: Danube Institute

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Length: 38min 2sec (2282 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021