Coleman Hughes - Blasphemy, reparations and counter-culture

[Music] hello and welcome to marshall matters with me winston marshall at the spectator offices in london today i'm joined by american writer author and musician coleman hughes this is a little bit different this episode because as well as coleman being a guest on martial matters this is also been recorded for his podcast conversations with coleman so this is a joint podcast coleman thank you so much for having me on your show and thank you so much for coming on to mine hey winston it's great to be on your show and welcome to my show thank you um yeah i'm delighted to uh have you on i've actually been a great admirer of yours for quite some time and i think i told you this in person when we met in new york earlier this year but i first came across your writing uh i think it was the coilette pieces you wrote uh in 2018 and uh they were a voice it was a voice when i was living in new york at the time actually and and uh at the time that everyone was talking about uh it was the race literature then was uh uh writers like tanehasi coates and patrice khan colors and i was reading all of that and then i read your um coilette pieces and a lot of references to thomas allen a completely different type of thinking and then to my surprise discovered that you were a rapper and a uh i shouldn't perhaps have been so uh uh surprised as um uh you know uh you're obviously a very talented guy but you went to juilliard and you have this huge musical uh background first and foremost um i guess the surprise is that you're such a good you're such an impressive writer but also such an impressive uh musician um so uh you know i might be i might be inventing this memory but around that time that you would have discovered my colette pieces i think i remember someone showing me a picture of you with jordan peterson and you at this point were known to the world as the lead guitarist and banjoist of mumford and sons and jordan peterson was one of the few people that really supported me and amplified my early colette essays and was possibly the reason even you were reading them so i could be inventing that memory but i do have a faint glimmer of a memory of of oh this guitar player from mumford and sons took a picture with jordan peterson yeah that that's right yeah um he came to our studio in mid uh 2018 we were making uh the record delta and we had lots of people in and he was um certainly someone that i discovered him through i think a sam harris podcast he did and then he had this there was one interview he did with joe rogan where he reconciled science and religion and metaphysic in a way that i'd never really heard before and it and it and it really blew my mind and actually making that record he was um really influential uh particularly or certainly on me and and the and and pushed me and you know he talks a lot about um sort of the the line between order and chaos and from a musical point of view there's there's so much to that in in that you and not just in the music itself and that you need to leap into chaos um to find them to find the magic but also in the songwriting process you need to put yourself in in in that place that is chaotic to uh you know even if it's internal chaos to to really um uh say the most important things or write the most important songs to you i know that sounds a bit grandiose but it certainly had a a big uh he had his work had a big influence on me and and he wasn't a a political influence for me it was it was more philosophical and yeah in that sense did you happen to see the beatles documentary the get back well i haven't seen hours of yeah yeah the eight hours of rehearsal footage no the peter jackson yeah yeah i mean it's pretty interesting from from a songwriting perspective and also interpersonal dynamics of a band i'm curious what you would think as someone that was in an extremely productive touring famous band for what 10 years 14 yeah 14 years what you would have i mean you should just watch it because there's clearly just a love affair between paul and john the whole time and a kind of sidelining and condescension towards george harrison but the the net result of whatever their thing is just works out in the end and it was very cool to get an inside look at a situation that that you know you've probably been in a lot sort of composing with a band there's one aspect of uh being being in a band that is is both difficult but i think also um leads to a great quality of work is a sort of sense of competitiveness or a sense of trying to impress each other um and if someone brings in a song you want to do a better song and and i can imagine that being in like in football in terms having like a messi and a renata at the same time i imagine they're perfectly friendly but they're they want to the the success of the others wants them makes them want to up their game and compete with them so i i i difficult as that often is in the band i think it makes for uh greater output uh in the in the long run i think for my audience we should give a little history of your involvement with mumford and sons and the reasons you chose to left to leave the band in uh was it 2021 that's right so uh in march 2021 uh which was in the middle of lockdown i don't know what 12. um i tweeted about a book now i'd been tweeting about books throughout my uh lockdown it was one of the themes of my social media and the book i tweeted about was andy knows unmasked which is a documentation of far-left extremism in the states and somehow and i do sort of feel like it was an act of god it completely blew up and before and just for people just for people recollection when you talk about far-left extremism we're talking a lot about places like portland and seattle portland where andy noah has spent a lot of time and actually been assaulted by antifa protesters who he is infamous to and and hated by um so go ahead yeah so and and as you can be more specific it's it's not antifa in history it's not antifa in 1930s london it's not antifa in uh 1960s italy it's antifa specific today in america and it's those it's portland and i it covers the um blm riots uh through 2020 and that book uh then that tweet rather uh kind of miraculously blew up um uh it was a congratulate congratulatory tweet because he just had just been published and i didn't have that many followers and it blew up and um before long it was uh a kind of segment on tucker carlson and the view and um i then put out an apology for um uh putting out the the for the people who had been offended by the tweet and after a few months of careful reflection uh i decided that uh i couldn't uh i i hadn't anything to apologize for um except for uh pulling the rest of the band into this hot button issue because antifa and far left extremism like uh trans stuff like abortion stuff is a very divisive issue and uh i decided i wanna just read the i wanna read the tweet for people too so they have context congratulations at mr andy know finally had the time to read your important book you're a brave man and this is in a context where andy had been very publicly beaten with scars all over his face and i believe had to go to the hospital as a result of a beating that was started by antifa so to say he is brave is to say he's a journalist going into the line of fire of violent people who hate him and have assaulted beaten him to a pulp before well quite and and in the period after my apology he and this i think was in may april or may yeah april or may 2021 he was beaten again and when that uh he was in portland and there's and there's video footage of that beating and when when i saw that i i decided i really i was right he was a brave guy in in reporting on that stuff um there's a lot of um accusations thrown at him that he's far right i couldn't find any actual evidence of that and um so i came to the conclusion that for me to stand by my apology would be to stand by a lie and uh i didn't want to be part of that lie but at the same time i didn't feel like it was fair on the band for them to suffer and they would have suffered for example i was due to dj festival and i'd been pulled from that festival because someone else on the bill that they'd hoped to book had publicly criticized me and called me a fascist and radio stations threatened to pull the band so there were real-life repercussions for that opinion and uh so i came to pollution i couldn't stand by my apology but at the same time uh it wasn't fair on the rest of the band for them to suffer and uh so my decision was to leave the band and stand by my convictions my earlier convictions actually what's curious for me about the story is um this ties in with your song blasphemy because in your song blasphemy um there's two parts to that uh firstly it's uh that you have an opinions that you have suffered for um amongst your peers uh i think one of the lines is you you got booted from an event or um you lost friends for having certain opinions that's not that's not exactly the the line but it's something like that right and um and then it the second half of the song is the taboo opinion that you i suppose the hill that you died on which was reparations or rather being against uh reparations being played paid in america to um the descendants of uh those who uh suffered under the slave trade under slavery in america rather so for for me it's curious you're curious to me because that's uh very similar or certainly a lot of echoes of my my experience and and i suppose i've got two questions for you and that is it's the issues of reparations but then also the real life experience of um being uh ostracized for having the wrong opinion yes so i guess take it take it in reverse order my experience was was definitely different than yours because you were in a famous band i guess there's there's sort of three levels of cancellation there's me having been a normal person and getting heat online for an opinion that people don't like and and that can be difficult and you it could even come with security issues people making death threats and so forth then there's to be in in your range of fame that you were in where you're really that stratum is the red meat of cancellation because you're famous enough to really have a name and for for people to pay attention to the fact that you've done a tweet but you're not kanye famous where you're uncancelable and you have total [ __ ] you money and [ __ ] you fame or when kanye says you know agree with it or not when he says cancelable stuff you can you can complain but he's still kanye he's still going to drop an album next month and everyone's going to listen to it so you were in this in between zone um so i i think that's probably the worst place to be in terms of the ability to express opinions about difficult sub subjects or controversial subjects you know what's what's interesting to me is you know reparations is very polarizing in america race issues are highly polarizing in general so i really i stepped into an issue that i felt strongly about but that i knew i had every reason to expect based on my knowledge of american culture am i having lived here my whole life that the people who hated my opinion were going to deeply hate it so in that sense it's always shocking to get that level of hate for the first time i think for a human being we're we're social creatures and you never quite know what it's like until you experience it i think but i did sort of know that i was stepping on the land mine and was choosing to do so because i felt very strongly about the issue can we talk about the issue of reparations just sure yeah yeah for my for my audience so you not only did you write various articles and i should say in in this song blasphemy it might be the only song certainly the only rap song ever that actually quotes the spec or cites the spectator which seeing as i'm in the spectator building right now i feel like i ordered where does it cite the spectator well in the introduction of the song there's a narrator saying he's written for coolett and the spectator oh that's right that's right that is right i can't imagine um there's another uh reference to the spectator so prominent in pop culture um but uh so taking uh reparations as a as an issue not only were you writing uh in in these um magazines and papers but you were uh you also went to the united states house judiciary in june 2019 to argue bill h.r 40 uh to argue against uh reparations so maybe for my listeners what's what's the story in america over reparations what's the debate and uh and since 2019 where uh how things developed so my position it's it's not exactly right to say it was against reparations full stop because i believe in paying reparations to living victims of any government sponsored atrocity right living victims of the holocaust many got reparations i support that um you know so my position was actually that living victims of segregation and the jim crow system in the south which we all now view as one of the great moral stains of our history someone like my grandparents for instance grew up under segregation in dc it would make perfect sense to pay them reparations for having grown up in an apartheid system that we that we now look back on with horror to give someone like me reparations for being six generations removed from slaves that makes no sense and there's no precedent for that in the history of reparations like once you once you miss the victims themselves or their children i'm i'm unaware of any serious precedent much less a pattern of states finding the sixth great grandchild of someone um and cutting them a check in order to atone for the suffering visited upon their great great great grandparent and the truth is i think i mean the taboo truth is that the link between something awful that happens to me and that being that vibration being felt by my great great great great great grandson that link is not at all clear i mean causation and and the way people's lives change in a single generation i mean there's like there's no reason to believe actually that i am materially harmed there's no way to know i would say that i'm materially harmed by the fact that my great great great great great great grand uh parents were slaves and that's in no way to minimize the enormal an enormous moral horror of slavery it's it's just to say i don't think that you know most black americans are you know under the age of 40 under the age of 35 even so um that's the that's the case i was really arguing against and i guess going go ahead what's the what's the if you were to strongman the position for reparations how would you articulate that okay well the the if i were to steal man the position in favor of reparations i would say well in the first place we've paid reparations many times before to many other groups japanese americans obviously holocaust survivors and the the this basically the the the sum of crimes against black americans from slavery and jim crow have created a circumstance where black americans on the whole are less wealthy than they would have been had they not experienced those government sponsored crimes essentially so it is up to the government to restore black americans to where they would be but for slavery but for jim crow and reparations is the way to do that so actually uh where this where you would probably it sounds like you'd agree is that there are communities in america who are the descendants of slaves who remain and those communities remain poor communities uh who uh and that uh where they are economically is partly because of that their history and so that's a problem that america needs to deal with generally speaking and you're you would i imagine you would agree that yes whoever it is who's suffering left behind there should be perhaps or maybe you wouldn't but maybe there should be government action but it shouldn't be in the form of reparations so i actually would not agree with the first statement so i i the problem of intergenerational poverty in america i view as a very complicated and independent problem i don't think that you can say slavery and jim crow are the reason why there are you know x percent maybe 20 percent uh or whatever the poverty rate is currently in in the black community that that's why it is you know everyone who's every black person who's poor is poor because of slavery and jim crow i mean i i do not believe that at all i think um every single human being every single american has a story of why they're situated where they are situated that has a lot to do with themselves and their parents has a lot to do with a lot to do with the hands that their their parents were dealt but every story i mean just think of any friend that you have who is who has a rags to riches story or or something like the opposite of kind of backsliding into the middle class story and how complicated any given one of those stories is not even a single one of those stories can be reduced to a single historical event from the 20th century much less than 19th and 18th centuries so to say that black people in america poor black people in the hood in america today are there because of slavery and jim crow that is a fashionable but completely simplistic sorry that's not my that's not what i'm proposing though i i i more i'm saying that it's one of the reasons might be that historically they come from from that horrible background that not i'm not saying it's the only reason but it might be one of the one of let's say 100 reasons why oh sure yeah no i mean totally i would totally grant that yeah i mean i i uh sort of with you my grandmother was a holocaust survivor and the idea that i would get reparations for what her family and went through see it would it doesn't seem quite right to me but i i agree with you and uh in that i think it was in the early 50s that germany paid israel uh reparations and actually only last year uh i think it was in march 2001 the the iraqi government uh in initiated the yazidi survivor law where um female and children survivors of the isis atrocities in northern ark were iraq were paid reparations uh or are being paid reparations as a framework for them to be paid reparations for the suffering but that ties in with your argument very much that they are the direct sufferers of you know they are the victims themselves rather than the progeny of them yeah and an analogy i've made i mean as was true for the japanese americans who were interned in world war ii i would add um i i've made an analogy before which is that when you meet someone who's say their parents had a really hard life their parents were from poverty and struggle but they themselves grew up with privilege there are people in that position that sometimes try to assume the the struggle of their parents as their own identity right like sort of try to claim the the street cred of their parents when in fact they as an individual don't really have any and i i this has always come across as a kind of phony and a little bit insincere thing to do i think most people sort of see through that kind of act as as not the most honest way to have your identity the honest ways to say well i grew up with a lot of privilege my parents didn't just fully represent that reality rather than try to assume right basically what we are encouraging all of black america to do with this reparations angle is to do that whole phony thing on mass to assume the suffering of people that were actually slaves people that actually did suffer and take on that mantle as if we ourselves suffered it which is a pathological thing to encourage people to do well this obviously is an idea that has a real stronghold in your peers if you felt so compelled to write the song blasphemy and presumably this is the blasphemy you're you're talking about and it's an idea that's that's so strongly held that you were ostracized from your friend group or is that is that right to believe the lyrics over the years in new york i i've developed friend groups that are from very different walks of life so the the friend group that ostracized me was um the brooklyn underground hip-hop community which was mostly black um many of which came from poverty um but beyond either of those the the crucial variable is that they were basically the their only concept of politics was pro-black politics and so they saw me as going against pro-black politics and that's extremely taboo in that circle what i was saying may have been a controversial take in my other circles but it wasn't necessarily a cancelable offense um with most of my friends so is that brooklyn hip-hop scene a politicized scene is is oh yeah yeah yeah for sure and so what does that the the sort of the pro-black politics that you described what what is that what's the how would you describe it it's i would say it is roughly the the political valence of black lives matter i'm not sure that they necessarily would like the black lives matter global network but it's it's pretty much like graft your stereotype of the of the politics of blm of a strong blm supporter that's kind of the center of the spectrum of that scene right and so have you uh then now making your music under uh cold man have you have you had any other pushback or have you found a new community uh in which to create with or or are you sort of creating a lot alone from that how is how is it now working in the music industry um seeing as you're so publicly against the the tide politically yeah so i mean i make all my rap music alone although i always have what i used to do with on the scene is kind of do shows together with other people um but i've always by personality like to work alone so that it hasn't been much of a sacrifice in terms of sort of recording with other people because that's not ever something i i did it sometimes but but not very often um but yeah not having access to to people that used to be my friends that i used to do shows with um has been annoying but yeah you know i've like i said i've i've i've had a lot of friends in a lot of different walks of life from the jazz world to even the non-jazz world classical and rock musicians to um you know as a writer i've met a lot of people that have become my good friends and so i have i had a lot of people to fall back on when i lost certain friends i wasn't feeling lonely um or if i was i had the capacity and resources to to solve that by hanging out with other people if i wanted to okay so actually it hasn't it hasn't impeded you you're making music and and uh it's just not going it's you found a new sort of new avenue for it and you a new way yes that's right yep yep i found a new avenue okay well that's that's um that's certainly encouraging um uh what one thing that i i thought but i'm sorry i will say i will say i've had to in many ways i've had to create that avenue for myself whereas before i could walk down avenues that already existed you know i've had to really put my shoulder to to the wheel and build my own musical platform build my own artist identity you've had to do more of the heavy lifting whereas normally you would be able to sort of outsource that stuff or rely on on other labels you've done it yourself well let me formulate it actually more in what i'm trying to say is that because i testified before congress against reparations when i'm as a rapper now talking to publicists or and i know you've had you know your dealings with publicists but you know all the intermediaries in the music industry that you need to deal with in order to be an artist i have to do you know 10 layers of damage control to get them to talk to me because they can google me and see that i've had these cancelled opinions right so is that impossible no it's it's totally possible but it just it just means there's that many more layers of resistance between me and anything i want to do in the mainstream music industry and i've still done it but behind the scenes there's been like the cost in my time and effort and my my manager's time and effort in busting through those walls has been immense yeah i i i thought about that a lot because i've had a similar experience in that even if the music industry is very small there's and and pretty much everyone knows each other and even if even the people that i know are sympathetic or or agree with me uh on certain things they're almost all all of them are at the mercy of their clients so for example if you had um a publicist or a manager and then you went on their roster they might be fine with it they might not have a personal problem with your opinions and be happy to take you on but uh in hiring other clients or their existing clients might see you on the roster and be oh why is that person on the roster they they're problematic they're controversial i can't work with you and even if they don't do that the fear that they might do that will will be a wall for people to work with let's say you and me i imagine that's a look that's one of my theories i think no i think that makes a lot of sense and um well this is something i wanted to ask you which is i've noticed that sometimes the fear of cancellation is outsized to the reality and that's that's actually a feature not a bug that's how it works and i it's another analogy i've used before i just re-watched the pirates of the caribbean movies this weekend because of johnny depp being so in the media there's a scene in the first movie at the beginning where johnny depp pulls into this port and there's three corpses rotting corpses of pirates hung there by the british as a warning to the rest and he kind of takes his hat off to his fellow pirates like and you know the point of hanging hanging those corpses there is not that most pirates get caught or should really fear getting caught the truth is the vast majority of them do not get caught the point of hanging the minority that do get caught in a very visible location is to create an outsized sense of risk so that you feel you're much more likely to prefer these things these things to happen to you and that creates that's supposed to act as a widespread deterrent right so that basically is how this works it's it's like is the person that manages you really going to lose business well in in most cases maybe not but just the small visible examples of people getting cancelled are like um they act like rotting corpses for the rest of the world to see and to run from even if the likelihood of it happening is is quite low i think that's a superb analogy and i think you're absolutely right and i think that the people who are hanging the corpses realize how effective it is and that's why they're being so successful now in in in various ideologies they know that they can scare people um uh in in you know in in having these scalps they know that how effective it will be and um and but when the but the even when they're not necessarily there's not that many of them behaving that way mm-hmm yeah which right which leads me to my other question for you which is um so as i was saying reparations that's an issue i knew i was stepping into that had a long history of being controversial um but merely merely opposing current american antifa i mean that that is somewhat controversial like on a university campus but you know in the wider society looking at what the crazy people in portland do today and post videos about doing beating up journalists like this this stuff they seem crazy they look crazy doing it we're you know we're not talking about the wider black lives matter protests necessarily we're really talking about the the hardcore antifa guys that identify as as antifa merely retweeting a book congratulating an author that's been beaten up by them and is writing writing a book against their practices and goals it seems like such a tame thing to do and i guess my question is what would have happened if your bandmates had said [ __ ] the mob all you did was tweet about a book that we actually deep down we all know we agree with we kind of all know maybe not all of us but the vast majority of reasonable people do not agree with the folks that start burning buildings that start throwing molotov cocktails we run the other way we stay inside we disagree with them by the very fact of our behavior in fact um so what if they had just said you know what [ __ ] the mob what you did we're in a crazy moment we're just going to hunker down we're not going to apologize we're going to let it blow over and i think that the fans will see that you're not some fascist um maybe a couple fans will leave but i think our fan base understands who we are what do you think would have happened if they had said that do you think mumford and sons would still be touring like you know your album records would still be selling et cetera i think that's a really good question that should be asked to them i think that's a question for them not for me um but i what i do think um uh uh how well i do think that the the picture painted by that question is that yes okay why do society agrees that it's bad to throw to try and burn down federal buildings but the um the the strength the the the people who are pro-antifa um or let's say um pro the extreme progressives or no i'll phrase it differently i think that the progressive um uh worldview and um politics uh or or people with those politics have real control over the culture in the way that um uh that there is not an opposition uh with it within the culture so i i think that when you look at um the institutions of uh let's say the music industry or hollywood they are captured by these progressives and and i'd say extreme progressives in a way that there is a fear to um be to speak out which i don't think represents the whole country sorry that wasn't a very clear answer but no no no no that makes sense i mean my i the sense i've gotten from talking to people in the tv industry for example is that most of them you know the the attitude the word for the attitude they have towards the far left is terror that's it like if you if you catch them in an honest moment over a beer where they have no reason to lie to you they're comfortable it's i'm terrified of cancellation especially if it almost doesn't matter but especially if you're a straight white male it's just you know every decision i make whether it's to green light a tv show to to sign an artist is a decision that could lead to my cancellation and that can't those cancellations only seem to come from from one direction at least for the hollywood folks very few of them are being you know you know canceled for platforming communists or something like that or so certainly no one's being troubled cancer platforming uh um communist although as a side note i would say that that i've certainly seen conservatives and right wingers happy to cancel almost as readily as progressives and i saw this particularly when i apologized for reading that book then a whole uh horde of right wing is saying now i hope you get cancelled so actually i do think that the conservative or a vast amount of large groups of conservatives are not anti-cancer culture they're just anti themselves or the people who agree of them being cancelled but uh yes they are they're that's a really important distinction to me they're not anti-cancer culture and in principle many of them the nasty online ones um especially they don't like the fact that the culture is more controlled by the left and and therefore they're not really able to cancel people to the extent the left is able to cancel people because they control most of the culturally powerful institutions yeah but then as to examples of people let's say you mentioned people working in tv who are nervous to green light uh whatever show it is or um i think that they are right to be scared now the difference in my position is that you know i've made money and i'm a big boy i can i'll be all right but if you uh don't have a huge amount of savings and you've got a mortgage and you've got to support a family the idea of actually losing all that and and the the world in which you support that that needs the income and and your uh your job it's not just losing a job you lose a lot and so i totally understandable why those such people would be um nervous or scared totally yeah i i never i never want to imply or certainly ever call anyone a coward for not speaking out because everyone is differently placed to deal with the consequences of speaking out you might have family you might have no safety net um and so you know a lot of people that want to speak out against uh an absurd restriction on common sense arguments and ideas will end up listening to podcasts like mine or yours and supporting them as a way of doing their part when they can't actually afford to say what they think at their job or or worse among their friends that's that's the scariest part is if you can't say what your thoughts are around the people that you're choosing to be around because you like each other so much that's what friends are it's like if you can't talk to them then we're sort of doomed and and i remember as well uh issuing my apology a lot of uh political pundits saying never apologize you shouldn't have apologized and i got a bit annoyed at that because i wanted to say you don't [ __ ] know what pressure i'm under here and and so and i've recently seen uh interestingly there's a an english singer called sam fender who's in his mid-20s and he's from newcastle he's a young geordie lads he's he's playing arenas here he makes great music it's kind of springsteenie and last week he was photographed in the pub with johnny depp and jeff beck in newcastle because uh johnny depp's uh on a tour of the uk as i guess a celebration tour um and um he posted on instagram uh with a couple of heroes in the pub something like that and a couple of days later issued an apology i'm so sorry for calling him a hero essentially throwing uh debt under the bus and um now although i think that's a bit uh it strikes me as a a bit unfair on death in that scenario at the same time i don't know what pressure fender is under um behind the scenes and so i i you know wouldn't criticize him necessarily or you know i'm gonna i accept the fact that i don't know the whole story um but we're talking about this apologizing thing yeah i've encountered this never apologize idea mostly from the right which um you know i i also think it's wrong i think the right attitude is to apologize if and only if you actually feel if and only if your considered self thinks you did something wrong like the the part of yourself that reflects and has time to think if that part of you believes you've done something wrong that is exactly when you should apologize if you have the freedom to act in a principled way if you're thinking about you know your business tanking and you just have to make practical calculations that's another matter but you should apologize when you mean it and if you believe you did nothing wrong then you should not apologize the the only counter to that and it's a small it's a small nuance is that if you're at a dinner table say and you say something that you don't think is offensive but you look around and you see someone aghast and you and you know that they're offended you might say oh i'm so sorry have i offended you tell me you know what what have i said you know you you would you would start by apologizing i'm so sorry i didn't mean to finish what's offensive so there is um unfortunately when you get into sort of tweeting things where tweeting you might it might be a similar response to that oh i'm sorry i didn't say what's the um what's the what's the problem but actually when you tweet something you're actually making a public statement so it's kind of a twitter maybe deceives you into thinking you're just chatting but actually you're making public statements um but that that's a specific you know a little a little nuance to it a little yeah no i agree with that i think you know i never i've been in this situation a few times too where i just say something and i can see someone is just grievously offended by by what i've just said suddenly and i you know i'm a pretty i'm not a very confrontational person in those situations like i don't i feel no need to get to the bottom of it at dinner i'm happy to move on and talk about the weather so saying i'm sorry in that situation is a way of signaling that i'm i'm happy to let it go if this is an emotional topic for you i've got no idea what baggage you bring to the issue and i respect that and like let's you know let's talk about the latest episode of how i met your mother or whatever um so but but that's actually not the same meaning as i apologize for because a real apology to me it only counts if you describe exactly why you were wrong it's like this is what i did that was wrong and i did it because of this shitty selfish reason and there was no excuse for it that that's really that's a full apologies like a description of what you did wrong why why you did it and why why there's no excuse for it and why it's nobody's fault but your own that's really a full full-throated apology a quick i'm sorry can just be a way of signaling that i'm happy to move on to a more congenial topic yeah no i agree with that um one uh thing that i think makes you stand out uh particularly amongst the the counter-culture uh so to speak is that or it seems to me that the counter-culture doesn't have much of a culture and and it's rather just a lot of criticisms of um the excesses of progressive thought and um the progressive culture as we've discussed already dominates in hollywood music perhaps tv you know netflix well actually netflix did uh not kowtow to the anti-chappelle or gervais um critics so so maybe it's not so bad there anymore but um it seems to me and i was just read douglas murray's latest books which actually curiously relates to your song blasphemy not only because it has a chapter on uh reparations or against reparations but uh you you uh he also talks about tiny timper i think is is the name of the the white guy in america who was killed in a similar way to george floyd and and you referred to him in in blasphemy but um uh the the thing about douglas's book is that he criticizes uh progressives but and his answer is it's which he touches on a little bit is to celebrate the great things about the west the western canon and western literature and art and architecture but it's only a small a small part of the book and where you're different is that you are actually creating a culture you are making music and you're not just writing and criticizing you're actually offering something new and uh struck me there's a guy called andrew doyle i'm not sure if you're familiar with this um guy but i yeah he's a funny guy that does the parody character right he's the man behind titiano mcgrath um which is spoof you've met him and he um he is a very prolific writer he's written a book on free speech i interviewed him on this podcast on my podcast and um he has a show called free speech nation he writes regularly and i bumped into him the other day curiously on holiday and i learned that he was a playwright first and foremost and he asked me the question well firstly i was like how did i not know he was a playwright and because he's so consumed by um you know criticizing uh or or you know commentating on on on the culture wars or or politics and um uh it never occurred to me that he was i never knew that he was he was a playwright and he asked me that you know winston you're doing you you said something like you're you know you're commentating on this stuff you're writing you're criticizing policies but what are you making and what what do you really want to be doing and it's a it's a great question because there's so much energy going into criticizing um progressive excesses let's say or or the other side um but the counter culture doesn't seem to have much of a substantial culture and yet you you are one of the few people actually putting the effort into creating one yeah i remember one time i was at a museum many years ago reading the descriptions of every piece of artwork and these were new commissioned pieces of art at some museum in new york and almost every description of the new piece would include the language and philosophy of intersectional feminism in some way the philosophy of intersectionality or critical race theory and words like anti-capitalists would get thrown around uh in other words the justification for the art there's a philosophy behind that art and it was all the same philosophy it was all one i was familiar with from the halls of columbia university in barnard where i was a student and i thought to myself well isn't it strange that all of the art in this museum has the same philosophy it's like shouldn't you expect that there would just be one painting that was a pro capitalist painting or something like that like even one artist that just kind of had the opposite philosophy and did a doodle at least and um you know i started thinking about that and and this gets to exactly what you're talking about the question is sort of where is the conservative art where is the conservative music um there's actually a hilarious clip from family guy where it's it's almost like it's not quite a cutaway but it's sort of like peter griffin talks to the camera about how you know why every hollywood movie has a sort of vaguely liberal or left-wing punch line he's like something like how many movies have been written about like the old guy stuck in his ways that like gets his mind opened to you know new people or new race it becomes a little less racist or a little less homophobic or whatever it's like where are the where the hollywood movies where the punchline of the movie has a kind of you know conservative lesson right a nugget of wisdom that a douglas murray or roger scrutin would write about about saying you know valuing traditions not throwing away traditions too soon or any of the other kind of nuggets of wisdom that that conservatives tend to focus on um he's like can you name a single movie that that has that moral of the story i think the truth is you actually can name movies like that but it was an interesting comment on the perception of a political skew to the whole art and culture um world the to me um you know i i don't exactly know about this because it seems to me that there is a good deal of non-progressive art i mean so let's like let's the the immediate thing that comes to mind is that if you look at the big comedy the biggest comedians today in american britain are gervais rogan and chappelle and the biggest shows are i or two of the biggest shows are south park and family guy now it's not to say that any of those are conservative in fact you can say definitely chappelle is not conservative but you might say but certainly south park and family guy aren't conservative either sure but they're certainly they they ridicule um progressivism and so conservatives would enjoy and do enjoy those shows and and and those um stand-ups so it's it's weird to think of any art as being conservative or or even progressive right specifically although that does exist and like there are bands that are explicitly communist that have communist messaging and so you can have that does sort of exist but lower down apart from apart from those big stars there isn't a kind of or if there is it's people are very quiet about their politics if they're also creating art um beneath that there's also those behemoth artists yeah and i think sometimes the contradictions are so huge and and in front of us that we never talk about it so for example progressives would see themselves as as broadly supportive of hip-hop as a black art form you know kendrick lamar got the pulitzer prize i think well deserved i think his new album is genius and he he's incredible but broadly speaking there's nowhere you will find more misogynistic lyrics than in hip-hop and in mainstream hip-hop and you know the objectification of women and all the rest but the same progressives that are absolutely staunch on the any anything relating to respecting women will never say a word you know almost never never say a word about the the just like constant hoes of [ __ ] hoe [ __ ] in in you know every third rap song and uh you know i've always found that to be kind of hilar hilarious i i always thought it was really interesting to watch you know girls that went to barnard and you you know used they pronouns and um didn't you know read one fake article about the wage gap and couldn't stop telling you about about it but then would then go go to a like a rap concert in new york and listen to trippy red call her a [ __ ] all night and be like this is great and totally not a contradiction there's a curiously in in hip-hop culture american hip-hop culture there's uh there's a history of celebrating rags to riches and celebrating wealth and money and glamour and you you know it doesn't take much to think of a hip-hop video with a bouncing car and uh jewelry or bouncing ass and so oddly though but those are cons you know those are conservative ideas um and you know about free market and working and working you know earning your money in in a way that's a conservative opinion that you don't hear rap songs about steak and like let's have the state you know do more this and let's have uh the state you know control healthcare or something like that i'm not sure i can think of them as quickly um so in a sense you could say hip-hop has a kind of conservative uh tradition to it oh totally i mean i would you and i wouldn't be the first to make that point that where in american culture are you going to find the most resounding defense of owning a gun being ready to use it making lots of money in a capitalist system and being kind of retrograde in your attitude to women not from fox news from mainstream hip-hop yeah um can i ask you about your um your book uh i i understand that you're writing and that when we last spoke you told me that it's called racialized um i'm not sure how much you've gone public with it but we can obviously cut this if you haven't if it's not time to talk about it yeah it may not be time to talk about the title you can talk about the the content i guess because it the title is something that can be reworked and negotiated with the powers that be but but yeah i mean basically i'm trying to i'm trying to write a defense of the concept of colorblindness colorblindness is a dirty word now if you if you google color blindness race google those two words so that you don't get articles about you know like people that can't see colors literally you know black cones and rods in their eyes you'll get i mean at least i got in my google filter you know 10 straight articles on why color blindness is the wrong approach to race and really the the people that advocated that decades ago were wrong-headed and naive and what we have to do now is really focus on seeing race seeing me as for instance a black person and you as a white person and the way to a healthy equilibrium on race is to crank up the dial on our racial identities and how much we care about what race we are um and and not only that but the idea is that's the only way to sort of get to get past jim crow and slavery and racial discrimination it's like we we can't do that if we're going to ignore race that's the idea the prevailing idea now uh certainly in the elite and that also comes with a whole package of race-based laws like you know affirmative action and covid racial preferences and and all the rest you know diversity and inclusion hiring so i'm trying to write a book that just makes the full case for color blindness that we need a national reset on race where we say look horrible things have been done in the past nobody's denying that but the way to fix that is not to double and triple down on uses of race um in the other direction right that that's not the way out an eye for an eye as the saying goes makes the whole world blind so i'm trying to argue that we just need a national reset where we re-commit to the principle of race is meaningless like skin color is is an absurd way to an absurd variable to form your identity around it's an absurd reason to ever feel divided from anyone else it's absolutely stupid and meaningless and all of the the quotes and sentiments that have now become cliche from martin luther king and the civil rights movement they are cliche precisely because they are so true and we risk sort of repeating those mantras and cliches to the point where we actually don't hear them anymore and don't don't use them as our guiding lights in our public policy and in our relationships with other people yeah i i it's so palpable for any english person to go to america uh and and it's always sort of been like this even before the escalation in in the in the uh culture wars i guess uh from 2015 but in in america it's so people are defined by their race even if it's not uh or or um it's it's talked about so much more than in britain where until recently again and certainly since george floyd uh before that race was it wasn't such a spoken about thing it and and and the racialization of of britain is or to see everything through the lens of race has is seems so uh regressive and it's been quite shocking to to see us adopt those uh that what i see as a kind of american mindset okay it's like slightly irks me um when people say that only because especially people from european countries where you've had a history where your ethnic groups and ethnic divisions have been purposely bounded by borders and slaves and colonies were kept overseas you know for where there was where in america the challenge we faced was that when slavery ended the slaves were living right next to the masters you know that was a challenge that was never faced by european countries with cut which kept their colonies hundreds or thousands of miles away and so it's it was a different challenge to begin with and it was you know the difference in the american identity is that it's not it was never supposed to be an ethnic identity so are you hopeful that america can find or or can can get to a place of color blindness do you think it's possible in a nation of so many different groups of so many different religions and uh different beliefs that they can be united under those those liberal enlightenment ideas on which it was founded so it will never fully win i i don't expect my principles to ever fully win out what i do think is possible is for us to do much better than we've been doing and for a critical mass among people with power people in the elite um who let's face it are more the ones that are going to be reading reading a book of this sort to begin with and who who are more of the ones that are creating this problem like this this problem of woke race obsession is overwhelmingly an elite problem mostly what working class people expect when they come to america is a a facially race neutral system in which they can work their ass off that that's what people don't ex you know asian americans aren't expecting to come to a country where they're going to get asian-american benefits right they're expecting to come to a country that hopefully will not discriminate against them or hold them down and will give them a chance to come to to live the american dream and that that's been the expectation for hundreds of years in this country is i'm gonna go to a place where i won't be persecuted that has a legal system in place that will treat me as an individual and i will be able to fight my way in this in this system right um but but what what i would hope is that a critical mass of people in power will be able to say no to race obsession and to say yes to enlightenment ideals and procedural fairness and treating people as an individual rather than a member of their racial group and the more people do that the more we are you know steering steering our ship through this storm in a way that will allow it to survive um and and will minimize interracial inter-ethnic conflict so i know so to answer your question no we're never gonna be perfect or anything close to it but i view what i'm advocating for as someone who's akin to someone who's advocating for peace rather than violence right like you never actually expect to zero out the violence but at the very least you wanna know that you're going in the right direction right and what i fear we've lost is that no one even talks anymore about the desire to be a colorblind nation in the in the 70s and 80s and 90s you had people like thurgood marshall you even had radicals like the black power movement in the 60s when they wrote their manifesto for the movement they said yeah eventually we would like to become colorblind but on the way there we're gonna have to do a lot of racial reckoning and seeing race right now you don't even hear that you don't even hear the first caveat where they say eventually we want to be colorblind it's only the second half which is we want to see race forever and ever so if i could even get more people to admit that eventually we want to be colorblind we want to more and more push people away from identifying strongly with a race of human beings a subcategory of human beings then i will consider it a success i fully support you in that um coleman thank you so much for uh speaking uh with me and uh absolutely winston thank you so much for coming on my show as well i i i i feel very honoured to be uh uh speaking and on your show and um i uh uh hope we can speak again and um absolutely yeah um my my i'm gonna treat my listeners to your song blasphemy um so they can hear your artwork and your music rather and um uh yeah it's been a pleasure amazing but before you go can you tell my podcast listeners how to listen to your podcast absolutely so uh i have a podcast called marshallmatters here at the spectator and you can listen on all usual podcasts outlets and on youtube where i interview people across the creative industries to find out what indeed is the state of the arts awesome thanks winston thanks coleman mr coleman hughes is a columnist for quillette he's had pieces published in the new york times the wall street journal the national review the city journal and the spectator he's studying philosophy at columbia university and we appreciate your attendance and you're recognized for five minutes sir back with the pen took a sabbatical at it again look at my attitude after they call me a time and ray call me a coonis at 10 [ __ ] at 10. don't tell me who to offend losing a few of my friends yeah i've been booted from public events and it was always something i sent cause it was class for me never was like an audacity point [Music] that all the [ __ ] is passing me trust that you ain't seen the last of me pray i don't end up like calvary's over some blasphemy make it official charge me for thinking and put me in prison serving a sentence for sentences written should have known better than having opinions got about 100k in my minions i could lose half and still fill up a building with a few extra despair like michelin let me stop there cause i know what you thinking you just saying [ __ ] for white people [ __ ] you ain't hanging with the right people bro i bet they keep you on a tight leash before they bring you out so you can fight people let me school you like boy q with the bucket hat drop your [ __ ] uncle ruckus act stop forgetting that you [ __ ] black cause the pigs won't want your hands up and the pistols at your [ __ ] back [Music] [Music] our hands up for these white coppers your hands out for these coke dollars and that ain't the half of it this [ __ ] don't stay in the past does it we built the nation from scratch honey and we still acting the cash from it so get out the way ain't trying to hear what they pay you to say ain't nothing changed 10 to 1 wealth ratio yesterday it's the same as today so go ahead make a name for yourself do what you got to do for the fame and the wealth i say it backwards you were out in the cell factors you ain't nothing but a cracker is still slavery slavery slavery you dwell on the past but letting it go that requires more bravery and last time i checked they all in the grave are they in mauritania i pass on a check for my lowest fee uncle sam couldn't pay for me huh i feel with my heart but think with my head mix up the parts and we all end up dead race is a fake idea put it to bed ain't no debate i said what i said my name is my name cole man i got love for the world and my soul man i am black i am white i am all man we are stuck in between like toe jam i'm an american i'm the american i really don't give a [ __ ] about the color of keratin or who you ferret in i had a greek is my therapist i made this beat from a theremin that ain't the [ __ ] i inherited from the culture that me and my parents live and it's still gas like serenity so i'm a little bit even killer i okay you heard i'm unapologetically from the verb but like apostle paul i bring i'm in the business of brute facts you see i'm in the business of new blasphemies i've taken bullets for two magazines and back and you shout to me like advocacy chill chill chill chill he was presumptive but he still has a right to speak like i need your permission all of you tripping i'll leave you blinded by colorful vision all of the stories you tell are too simple y'all heard a floyd but y'all ain't heard a temper i don't fear getting shot by a cop i feel my mind getting brainwashed by a mob i feel right getting made from couple wrongs i feel what i call truth y'all gonna call blasphemy never was lacking audacity point to a flaw in a fallacy right on a different mentality committing that blasphemy that all the [ __ ] is passing me trust that you ain't seen the last of me pray i don't end up like calvary over some blasphemy

Channel: The Spectator

Views: 6,415

Keywords: The Spectator, Spectator, SpectatorTV, Spectator TV, SpecTV, The Week in 60 Minutes, TWI60

Id: _wRN8uWji_s

Length: 76min 54sec (4614 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022