"Cancelling Cancel Culture" - Part 6.

[Laughter] douglas murray is the best-selling author of six books including the madness of crowds and the strange death of europe a danube institute fellow he also serves as associate editor of the spectator in london well thank you very much john uh it's a great pleasure to be back with uh friends colleagues at the danube institute in budapest and uh thank you for the invitation to join you for what i know is already a very stimulating and high level discussion about one of the most important issues of our time all right well welcome douglas i want to ask you why it's important because when people like you and me and everyone here complain about cancer culture we're often told firstly these are private institutions mostly they can do what they want why do you care and secondly that it's not cancer culture it's accountability culture that everyone has a responsibility to stay within certain bounds and all that's changed is now we're asking more of white men um why is that wrong yes that is one of the things that's claimed it's a fallacious claim but it's claimed nonetheless and um there are several things wrong with it one is we're no longer talking about only private companies we're talking also about government we're talking about the ability what's more of private companies that have a quasi-governmental monopoly to decide what you and i and everyone else on the planet can hear private enterprises um for instance the obvious example is twitter if twitter can decide that the then president of the united states is not allowed to speak on their platform then that's that's effectively a um a quasi-governmental decision i mean it's it's a decision that decides who in an american democracy is allowed to speak directly to the people and who is not uh take another obvious example um rather close to home for those of us who are authors um when amazon decides it it when it spends years getting an almost complete monopoly on a market like the box market wipes out almost all of your local book sellers every independent bookseller is trounced by them and then the moment of almost complete domination starts to decide what books you and i and everyone else can read that isn't just a private enterprise that is an almost completely monopolistic enterprise with almost complete uh dominance of the market deciding what books are and are not able to be read um so um so first of all let's say there's a there's a big crossover being what we call this sort of private and effectively governmental um censorship another point to make is that it would be fine if the the line you just laid out was was honest when it's claimed and it clearly isn't because what we have are not actually people being held to account for statements they've made or arguments they've consistently made but for instance a darting in to take a sentence from somewhere claim that it is totally representative of a person's views or indeed their entire life and then run with the most malevolent malicious interpretation that only a hostile actor would use of that particular sentence um there are many cases now of this but but there's one other additional thing i should say about that which is that one element of that critique you just laid out is true and that this is a problem i have myself with the term cancer culture um some people are allegedly cancelled and some seem to rather like claiming they've been canceled they sort of think it gives them a certain um prestige or a lure you might say some people pretend they've sort of been cancelled but clearly you know still have outlets to write in and much more so the very term council culture is a little too imprecise for my liking i think that where it really is accurate is when when it comes for somebody who afterwards literally could not find any other way to earn a living for the rest of their life so i'm not inevitably because we're writers and thinkers we focus on the cases where writers and thinkers are allegedly cancelled most not all but most writers and thinkers can find somewhere else that they can they can um sell their wares what worries me more is is that we don't focus on the people who are not so fortunate you know who don't have a support network who have not previously been remotely known so they don't get very many supporters um and who just afterwards unlikely ever to find employment again because this is the one time they've become famous and they're famous for the most hostile and negative possible interpretation of something they once did and afterwards frankly who wants the hassle of employing such a person so that's that's that's the hardest and nastiest edge of it and in a way as i say because those people don't write books and uh pamphlet and much more they tend not to get i think the notice that they deserve i will let me push you a little on that because i think this question of defining what is council culture and what isn't council culture is pretty important now if we take what you just said and then we do a reductio ad absurdum we could get to for example a released from prison charles manson being unable to find work and saying well i've been cancelled but of course that's not what you mean andrew cuomo who's been accused now eight nine times by different people of sexual assault said the other day that the people who had accused him of sexually assaulting them were trying to cancel him that's not council culture either and i know in your work you've laid out what it is so perhaps you could share the lines for us yes um well one that i remain persistently interested in although many people in our area do not is the law um i find the law an awfully useful line if somebody has has gone to prison for instance and let alone gone to prison for murder um that's a significant stain on their character it's something which um ought to count against the chat and um and people do make their own conclusions there will be by the way and i think there ought to always be room in society for people who who do and of course a lot of church groups do this among others do believe in giving people second chances and and rehabilitation and much more there's a very important um outlet in society precisely for that um but generally the law has been seen as being an important uh um dividing line here's here's the one of the big messes we're in at the moment um almost all of the most dangerous and um defamatory allegations that can be made about an individual in our age are not provable and crucially are not disprovable either now this is a very very dangerous position to be in let me give you the most obvious example i think we could probably agree that aside from say an accusation of pedophilia probably the most damaging accusation you can make about somebody certainly in the western democracies is that they are a racist um it's a horrible charge there are people who are racists it's a it's one of the lowest and ugliest bigotries which our species is capable of but it is a bigotry we're capable of um and so to be accused of it for most people is um very very damaging it's it's much more damaging of course when it's against somebody who is simply is not a racist has never shown racial bigotry does not treat people of different skin colors and ethnicities with contempt or dislike or try to beat them up or anything else um so when the charge is leveled it causes um significant uh upset now the people who throw this charge around now have a lot of extra tools in their armory they say that when you're upset by this uh you're simply demonstrating white fragility for instance so the best thing to do is simply to confess that you're a racist and everyone who's studied the history of witch dunking will be familiar with this particular rhetorical term but but the interesting thing about this and this is something that uh roger scrutin and i talked about a fair amount of the last year of his life because it concerned him deeply it concerns me is what is one to do in a situation where you have a culture where you have this extraordinarily damaging tool and the allegation cannot be proved by the way you can tell that because the adherence of council culture the people who like to use it to say things now like a proven racist or known racist that's another favorite um as if this was proved in the court of law um and established in the court of law but here's the thing that when they they throw it around the person against whom it is used has no way of disproving it they can say but i'm not a racist and then people pull the robin d'angelo trick and say ha ha that's exactly the sort of thing a racist would say and um and there's no way out you could show i mean there are very prominent examples of this you could show as various people have well i i'm married um to a black woman for instance that now that's just the sort of thing a racist would do as cover uh but i have black children and mixed-race children aha even further undercover um and and so on uh um to the extent of course now that we have black people being called racists by other black people and they're expected to dig their own way out of this accusation this is an extraordinarily um position for a society to to have got stuck in and by the way the only answer i've ever heard come up with to try to stop that very very dangerous and damaging game which among other things demeans the meaning of terms is something that i think i first heard roger kimball of the new criterion say which is that um in this realm of manners which is effectively the sub-judicial level level what we're in at the realm of manners what to what to happen is that a charge of racism insincerely and incorrectly leveled ought to carry the same societal program as a person who is actually found to be racist so we we should not allow as a society frivolous accusations to be thrown out which when just realized to be at the very least insincere that person who leveled it should not be able to then just skip on to the next thing so on that on that vein and let me ask you one more thing and i'll hand over to rod but what should we do there are people who have either participated actively in council culture or who despite having been in a position of authority or influence have refused to condemn it or even encouraged it from the sidelines who then themselves get cancelled and whenever i for example defend those people i met with this torrent of criticism what are you doing you have to let them hoist on their own platard um i don't personally think that's the answer do you no i i i mean there is i i've suggested this quite a few times there is an obvious play which an equally insincere actor would do back which is to level frivolous accusations in return i have a i have a very um i'll give you the example quickly because i've used it before but i'm very keen on it i have a a colleague who writes a spectator in london uh called melanie mcdonough a distinguished and and wonderful writer who happens to be a catholic um she holds the catholic church's views on abortion and a few years ago was invited by a london university to speak on campus about abortion on a panel discussion and before she could open her mouth uh some female students came to the front of the stage and said that she should be no platformed because she holds the catholic church's views on abortion and melanie mcdonough rather brilliantly absolutely brilliantly went to the front of the stage and said excuse me i've got to ask you to leave because you're making me feel unsafe and uh she said um there was a look in the eyes of these young girls weren't sure what to do she and melanie mcdonald said so there we were in a standoff between two equally insincere groups of actors that strikes me as being completely true now one could do that a lot you could say well i mean i'm sorry you've called me this that's a shame because you're a well-known racist yourself or um personally i don't as i say i've put the idea out there but i would not i would not advocate it and the reason is that if we uh give in to that then the problem is having used that tool once you don't know that you'll ever be able to give up using it uh it's too tempting it's um once it's in your hands and you've discovered the joys of of lying and misrepresentation and unfairness and much more when would be the day that you'd say i think i've done all i can with this and i think i'll put that tool back in the box i don't think you can so i think it's important not to do that but but i do think that there are very very clear things that can be done to push back against this and i think that's beginning we've just had a very good example at cambridge university in the last 48 hours uh if i can just quickly take your time to lay out what happened for anyone doesn't know cambridge university has the enormous misfortune of recently having received a vice chancellor who's an exceptionally undistinguished lawyer from canada uh in the whole history of cambridge vice chancellors he's probably the least qualified person to hold the role but during his time so far he's helped institute effectively a council culture-like system in cambridge and of course as always it's one directional conservatives have been hounded out quite literally not just hounded but defamed abused and lied about from the top of the university i'm thinking in particular the case of noah carl and also jordan peterson who the university uh invited and then disinvited and tried to humiliate on the global stage it was a quite disgraceful episode at the same time the university gives birth to people like a very undistinguished alleged historian of empire at churchill college who uses her social media accounts to race bait against white people the university during this time that this particular vice chancellor has been in place has kept trying to introduce speech codes to effectively cancel people who say things that are that are um deemed by the new regime not to be acceptable and mr tupe because that's his dickensian name mr toop just the other day uh attempted to announce a new uh set of conduct policies at cambridge university we're talking about cambridge university here you know this is one of the best universities in the world um it isn't a playguard and it isn't a kindergarten it's uh the home of some of the great minds and nobel prize uh winners of the ages um mr toop's new policies included that it should become a reportable offence at cambridge if somebody raised an eyebrow whilst a member of a minority was speaking i pointed out i pointed out in the sunday telegraph that cambridge where eyebrows could not be raised is not a cambridge many of us would recognize um however as i pointed out in the sunday telegraph um those of us who are not employed or the misfortune of of studying at cambridge under mr toop um still do have the right to twitch our facial muscles and i suggested that all alumni particular donors of cambridge university ought to raise every eyebrow available at mr toop and withdraw all funding for his university for as long as the time that this very undistinguished figure is benightedly running at great institution anyhow i'm delighted that within 24 hours mr toop removed his own advice from the website said that he'd he sent it off early it contained errors and things he hadn't meant to include in the documentation the sort of excuses that would embarrass a first-year undergraduate he didn't quite say that the dog had eaten his stupid survey but he got as close as you could get the point is simply that here is a man who runs a major institution he is trying to run it into the ground and there is finally and the other the free speech union and others in britain have been at the forefront of leading his child he's finally getting some blow back on it and he's getting blow back because he's being ridiculed as he should be by his his phantasm like beliefs of what actually exists in cambridge and his completely erroneous beliefs about what a life of academic inquiry should actually entail so i'd much rather i give this story to say i'd much rather see that sort of thing good old-fashioned ridicule disdain a question of of competency exactly who are you to tell everybody in one of the world's leading universities which muscles they can twitch and when i'd like that much more than um erroneous and imprecise allegations leveled that are not sincere you know douglas i what you've discussed there at cambridge is uh an example that we hear over and over again of the men and women who have been put in charge of institutions utterly failing to protect those institutions from the woke mob uh you can in publishing for example last summer in the u.s woody allen's memoir was cancelled after a group of 20-year-olds at hachette raised hell about it and sobbed and said we can't publish this because he's been accused of molesting his daughter something he vigorously denied something that has never been proven but has shed folded in the face of this young moth this has happened at the new york times at the washington post over and over and over again the baby boomers who are in charge of the institutions will not defend the interests of the institutions and will not defend liberal principles uh and and we see this as a generational conflict i've heard before too from academic friends that they feel relatively safe conservatives relatively safe as long as the baby boomers are in charge of departments but let the post-boomers come in and they're the absolute bolsheviks so my question to you is uh give me your analysis of the role of the uh managerial elites in uh managing the decline and full of their institutions um yeah this is obviously the pattern at the moment um the pattern is that people do not wish to defend the institutions which they have been given governance of which have been they don't regard it as being that their job is to continue to hold some of the great treasures of our civilization in their hands and pass them on to the next generation they don't see it like that they see it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fundamentally re-alter and reorientate and they always do so in the same boring and fallacious direction it's all i'm afraid a spillover from america's culture wars which is flooded across the western world um very undistinguished thinkers like ibrahim x kendi um have come up with their own definitions of words uncontested as far as i can see and those definitions are then taken up by major institutions i can give you a couple of examples from the country i'm sitting in the british library recently announced that it was going to become an actively anti-racist organization and decolonized now the british library had not hitherto been widely known as some racist gathering place the kkk were very not known to exist in britain and they have never been spotted in the reading stacks of the british library um they just don't gather there um and yet uh the british library announces in in the wake of kendeism and and d'angelo ism that it will become an actively racist library what does this mean what it means is among other things that they they they send their best minds their best minds to scour the collections and find a black list of authors who have connections to the slave trade and empire now to date this crack squad of researchers have returned with among other things the revelation that some of rudyard kipling's work is involved with empire knock me down with a feather nobody could have known that this requires years of research by these sub-literates of the british library but let me give you some other examples they discovered they claimed that the late poet laureate ted hughes should be on the list why should ted hughes be on the list he's born in 1930 he dies in 1998 it's true that he was a child when the empire was still going on but he was far too young he was in short trousers to have any meaningful role in the running of the british empire they put him on the list because they claimed that an ancestor of his from the 16th century had been a slave trader now it happens that the person in nicolas pera was first of all not even an ancestor of ted hughes pharaoh died without any children so the british library's information was wrong on that count point number two mr farah had himself published a pamphlet in his lifetime condemning the slave trade so what are we to do when an institution is so run by ignoramuses so incapable of even the basic elements of research that they can come up with blacklists and put people on them when they haven't even done their work but i mention this because i could give other examples the royal academy of music in london has just announced that it also is going to be an anti-racist organization it is going to decolonize what does this mean it claims that it's going to decolonize its collection of instruments who knew who knew that the vials that they have in their collection uh were secretly the weapons of white supremacy or colonialism in the past but i give the example of the british library for a particular reason clearly ted hughes is late widow carol um made a very sharp intervention against the library and within i think three days of this smear on her late husband the library published a fulsome apology and retraction why do i highlight this for one clear reason everybody in our era when this comes at them lets it flood over them no no you come right back at them withdraw your funding threaten to take away manuscripts if you're the family of somebody so insulted do everything you can to get these people out out of power out of influence they're a menace they're ideological and they have no idea what they're doing uh if i could follow on that briefly that sort of anticipated my next question if you're a conservative institutions matter institutions matter a lot and yet uh we here now in the united states here among conservatives thinking saying that places like harvard university and other major cultural institutions are beyond saving we should just blow them up metaphorically speaking abandon them um walk away what would your advice be i mean you you seem to indicate that some of them are at least worth trying to save but how can one think one's way through that as a conservative my own view is that you stay and fight wherever you are if you are in a great institution uh you should unless everything gets very very unlivable for you you should stay and you should argue and fight your corner if you are outside of these institutions you should do what people inside the institutions are not able to do in order to help them express and this is a very left-wing term but it's one i'm very fond of express solidarity with them do everything you can to make that a practical expression um i think there's an awful lot that can be done i think there's an awful lot that isn't done i think in the american context since you mentioned harvard and it's a particular challenge in america obviously because it is the case that the again the most seen serious institutions are the ones that are most seriously compromised at this stage with too little back um a pushback against them again i simply think that among other things alumni need to organize donations need to be withheld and another option of course is to is to recognize the fundamental insincerity of a lot of the actions of these institutions yale ought to change its name and everything about itself if it's serious about the decolonizing and de-slaving or whatever it is of yale university and go all the way go all the way if you if you if you want to destroy academic integrity and much more change the name of your institution drop all of uh of the um of the names that you've got and if you're that serious why not go the full hog if you think that you've benefited from slavery pull down all the damn buildings make the whole place rubble do what follow through your own claims but of course they don't this is this is wild and grotesque play acting by most of these people so the glass what do you think about the council culture on napoleon you have maybe an objective point of view of as a british but you know that was this year the bisentenary of the napoleon des and in france emmanuel macron the french president didn't want at first you know celebrate and commemorate napoleon with a lot of accusations from the left about racism on slavery with napoleon what's your point of view about that ah that's such a wonderfully divisive question i know um many years ago i was doing a project with some former nato chiefs one of whom was very distinguished a former chief of trent staff in uh france and i remember one day over lunch him saying to me and my british counterpart um is it is it true that they teach in british schools that napoleon was a tyrant like uh like uh stalin and we said uh well he does definitely doesn't get a good rap um and however i think i placated him by telling him that british school children really aren't taught anything about history so he didn't need to worry but uh no i am there is obviously a an ongoing dispute as you well know about the the um position of napoleon in european history my own my own view by the way is that what one should be um encouraging in this regard is simply is is certainly at times is is no comment um now i mean for instance um from the british point of view we do not regard napoleon wankin regard him as being an extraordinary military leader an extraordinary political leader an extraordinary man with no doubt about that um but not as a hero um uh and however only a few miles away across the channel there is a different view of him it should be perfectly possible to accept that and to tolerate that and uh when i visited the tomb of napoleon in paris i'm i'm moved and struck by the extraordinary um reverence that he uh um still sustains and i understand it just as there are figures in british history who elsewhere may not be looked on with love but who we would revere and i i i say that because in some ways it points to an important point which is we what is happening at the moment is the consequence of a certain interpretation of american history washing across the whole civilized world and being expected to be applied everywhere and what it leaves you with is this world in which a few civil rights activists are the only permissible figures to revere and otherwise you know everyone from the past is just a completely reprehensible figure and i i think it's it's much more complicated than that and much more nuanced and it changes from country to country the country you're sitting in it in hungary has very very interesting internal discussions about elements through its own history which outside often often seem either completely straightforward and hungarians are on the wrong side um or otherwise sort of unnuanced from the outside and if you spend any time in hungary of course as you all know um there are very very tricky corners in the country's history which the country is still navigating as we're all navigating our histories and i think there is something quite wrong about an outside force let alone the same boring and ill-informed outside source forever telling the rest of the world exactly how it should interpret its own past so douglas if we could take this question of of historical figures and and add another leave to the uh the question i asked earlier about what is council culture and what's not um i don't know to what extent you agree with this there was this short lived push a few years ago to get rid of uh trafalgar um from trafalgar uh nelson from trafalgar square um and the the reason was obviously connections to slavery but it struck me at the time that that's not really why nelson is revered in britain no one says well we love we love admiral nelson because of his connections to slavery i mean we we love admiral nelson because you know he beat the hell out of the french um whereas in in jacksonville florida where i now live there is a statue of alexander stevens next to the courthouse now there was a protest uh during last summer's riots although they weren't riots in jacksonville and one of the players for the jacksonville jaguars said look this is a courthouse this is public land this is supposed to be the place where justice is dispensed and this guy was explicitly the reason we know who he is is he was explicitly a white supremacist he was explicitly opposed to the humanity and equality of african americans do you see those two things as being different because there is at the moment a real move to take down statues and some of them are tangential you know the the the poet laureate you mentioned he wasn't involved in slavery himself he didn't write anything racist but some of them are actually there because they were committed to a certain set of principles well you know much better than me about this charles but um i think that the particular complexity in the united states is effectively state rights versus national um rights i think i'm in a way this is the problem because i would answer in in a national context that it is for a country to decide what of its own past it ought to revere and whatnot and obviously people on the international stage can say you know we think that it is wildly wrong for you to put up that statue for instance in dublin there is a statue to a nazi it gets very little attention but it's the only statue to a nazi in the west that i know of i'm thinking of sean russell he died on the german u-boat he's the leader of the ira and uh sean russell's statue stands in in a park in dublin and um and and nobody from outside seems to take much interest in it um i think there should be outside interest in it i think it's perfectly permissible but if they want to continue to revere an ira loving leadership nazi um then um then i'm afraid i suppose it just speaks of them um and i think it does um i think likewise i mean i would not want the french known insult to our um our colleague i would not want the french to decide which statues ought to stand in london because it's a matter for the british but your but this comes to the root of your question which is in a way in the problem in america is there are particular states with their own [Music] histories their own pride and more and there is obviously an america a problem that there are very very deep differences of opinion across the whole of the uh republic and that this is um this is an ongoing tension i would i would in this situation um think that it should be a matter for the locals to decide to remove a statue and by the way i mean there's no reason why i should stress why apart from artistic merit there's no reason why a statue once up in the public space has to remain forever if the whole um the whole view of history changed for instance um uh or the whole interpretation of that person changed i think you should remove such things with enormous care because your own age might be the one that's got it slightly wrong i think by the way the cecil rhodes scandal in oxford is a pretty good example of that caution is best but i think it is for people who live in the area to decide and i think there's something there is there is a tension if not something quite wrong about people from another side of a continent deciding for you um what you should revere but so i don't like the example you get i mean as i said the example you give something i don't like would not want to revere but i think one has to be very careful telling people not to do so i mean after all and it's a point i've made it's a somewhat controversial point but if we're going to go for slave owners um there is a founder of a very major world religion um who was a slave owner fortunately there aren't statues to him or indeed cartoons um but it is one of the examples i sometimes give to remind people that you don't want to run this juggernaut all the way you know douglas you mentioned amazon earlier deciding that it will uh that it won't sell certain books and in effect making the decision for all of us because of amazon's immense market share you know as you're a writer i'm a writer we understand that amazon at least in the u.s has such immense market share that if it decides uses its liberty to decide that it simply doesn't want to sell this kind of book then those books won't be published because no publisher can afford to come out with a book that will not be sold by amazon so i find myself wondering you know is is it possible to fight using the tools of liberalism these sorts of decisions which have ultimate effect on our liberal democracy or do we have to allow ourselves to use illiberal tools to defend liberal democracy or is this just is that like taking the taking the ring of power and you know what i'm saying um the amazon one is is um obviously on on mines like ours um but to my mind and there may be some disagreement among us depends the extent to which we have free marketeers um or libertarians to my mind this situation should never have arisen for one particular reason any other business at any previous time in recent decades would have been put before what we in britain call the monopolies and mergers commission and it would not have been allowed to become this the way in which big tech grew to the position it is now in is is will i think be looked at with back at with astonishment in the 1980s in the uk if you had one major high street firm that dealt in a particular range of goods and you sought to buy up another you would be hauled before a parliamentary committee and questioned on every detail of it the point being that there was an a very sensible attempt to ensure that whilst the market was free it was not able to be completely dominated by for instance a single player now that seemed to me i mean there were people who have bad stories of monopolies and mergers commissions in that period um and there were mistakes that were made and there were fine judgment calls within it but there is no way that for instance it should have been possible for the planet to end up with a single bookseller um i i as i say i mean many free marketeers think that any intervention in the market is somehow um spoiling the whole thing and and twisting the invisible hand i don't think it is in the in these situations i i don't want there to be one gas supplier in the country or one electricity supplier and i don't want there to be one book supplier and that's the situation we've effectively got to and that's why it's so devastating that at this point of almost complete dominance such companies then decide to flex their ideological muscles it's the same with facebook it's the same with youtube it's the same with twitter and i think it's our own fault for allowing this to happen well you know i'll give you uh perhaps a better example in the us right now as you may be aware there are various state legislatures that are uh passing laws or at least considering laws that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in state schools uh here in hungary a couple of years ago the the government withdrew accreditation for and funding for gender studies programs in their universities i would have been the sort of person who five ten years ago would have said look i don't i don't like the gender studies programs but this the state should not get involved in telling universities what to do similarly about critical race theory but now having seen how devastating critical race theory and gender ideology has been to my own country i think absolutely there's a role for legislatures to step in to defend the society itself and to defend freedom of expression from these ideologies that if they're allowed to run rampant they will silence everybody else what do you think yes i i am i don't have any problem with it with this i mean universities unless they are private are subsidized by the taxpayer and therefore the government has a right in any country um to have some say at least in what is and is not um regarded as being a discipline i i i if if people wanted to pursue a um a d fill in homeopathy i would say they could do so at their own expense but they're not getting a penny of my taxpayer pounds likewise if somebody wants to study one of these so-called social sciences that are neither social nor sciences they should um i think not be supplemented by the taxpayer in in many of these cases um and and and there are quite a lot of reasons for that one is that they're not studies uh they're not disciplines um they are at best voodoo um uh and i don't see any reason why the taxpayer should subsidize voodoo studies and uh at their worst they are actually um simply highly politicized missiles aimed at the society which nurtures them um i i see no reason why the taxpayer should subsidize these things and i would very much like to see that not happen and i'd add one other thing to that about me which is that uh the the particular mistake that conservatives made on on this it goes as follows is that we we tended to think that the free market would out it's a similar problem to our misunderstanding about amazon and other tech monopolies we we tended to think the free market would out for instance how many of us have heard for years how many times the conferences are much more the sort of quite rightful sneering at for instance a sort of lesbian performative dance defill um and we said ha ha um they've got a shock coming after running up a huge student debt they're going to come out and discover there's no jobs for them flat out wrong the joke was on us there are masses of jobs for them they can go into any government department they can go into most media companies they can go into fortune 500 companies as diversity and inclusion commissars they can fill up the human resources departments of company after company banks invite these charlatans in major companies and corporations invite in completely uneducated demagogues to come in and tell them how to make their companies less profitable so so the joke was on us uh there turned out to be loads of gigs for these guys they didn't end up all thinking oh gosh the conservatives were right i did waste my student days let me retrain in a more societally fruitful uh discipline they didn't douglas do you think in the end we will win oh you never win um just like you never lose completely i think i think there's ways to win more and what it requires is a bit more backbone from a few more people um they're surprising people that show up to have backbone i just gave the example of carol hughes the widow of ted hughes um it's strange that one relies on a poet's widow to show some backbone but there we are good good um people with principles crop up in extraordinarily uns or extremely surprising places and so my own view is that as long as more people simply say no how dare you and who are you who are you to tell us what to do the more that happens the more doubt will be sown i i think that's the best tactic i simply think that more and more people should turn around and say i do not recognize your expertise i do not recognize that your rit runs here um carry on as much as you like but you're not wasting a moment more of my time and if that happened i think that people would see through this voodoo and its practitioners and would see that their magical spells including their magical spell words do not work and a related question at what level is this problem is it a problem in the british public at large is it a problem in the elite institutions you just mentioned in in which people who have degrees in you know lesbian basket weaving give their seminars is it a problem in parliament what's the root of it it's a problem of a minority no doubt about that uh it's a it's it's a minority issue which has an extraordinarily prominent sway as you will know among people who are in charge of major institutions um there's one particular reason for that of course which is that when the this most divisive sort of crt and other stuff comes at people um generally speaking it's not something they know about or studied particularly and they're just caught in the headlights and they panic and they say i'll give you whatever you want um that's why it's a classic shakedown tactic um most people even who aren't ideological that's how they get caught and i think those people are able to be pushed the other way quite easily if there are enough people with a bit of guts um but but yes it is a minority thing with one edition which is something that rod referred to of course which is the people coming up next um that's certainly the case in industries i know about uh well like rod i mean the publishing industry is one um it's the people who are coming up um uh who actually do think that we live in wildly racist societies where the kkk gathers in the bookshelves and uh and all of that stuff they actually do think it like a bit like that some of them are insincere of course but some are so sincere about it that uh they're positively oozing uh sincerity about it uh one of the other famous cases other than the one that rod just mentioned is is of course a jk rowling uh um affair uh where it was it was 150 people at the publishing house who said they couldn't work at a publishing house which published jk rowling's new i stress children's book called the ichabog now as i pointed out in defense of the ceo of hachette for the right to publish that book what you should do is to turn around and say if you cannot cope with the ichabod it's possible that not just this business but life isn't really for you um it it's it's going to be difficult for you if the ichabod causes breakdowns um uh so they should have been fired they should have been reagan airport worker and um and their job should have been made available the next morning uh that's obviously what should happen it didn't happen but um i mentioned it because almost all of those signatories as i understand it were members of staff who are under the age of 30. and that's not just a thing of clubbing together it is that that's where you find people who really do think things like free speech is a right-wing dog whistle word and that you know people who question certain things are so incredibly dangerous and evil and likely to cause mass murder now that we just cannot tolerate their speech these as i say mainly younger people have got a totally erroneous interpretation of their own societies they've been torted uh through the schooling system and through the education system as a whole they aren't fit for purpose in society because they have so completely misunderstood the societies they're in one would hope that they grow up and get a more accurate understanding of their society but it may not happen and it may be that in a few decades time when these people are in charge rather than simply the bully boys of these industries um that something else has to happen and that other institutions will have to spring up but there will be other answers that we have to come to because when those people do come to power if they do um you know these are the people who believe that words of violence and that silence is violence but violence is a perfectly permittable permissible tool and um i i particularly don't want to be in any profession where these people have dominance all right well let's hope you do stay in your profession douglas thank you so much for joining us this afternoon it's a great pleasure to see you all thank you

Channel: Danube Institute

Views: 184,442

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Id: KWnM_xLGpi4

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021