hi everyone its Brendon O'Neil here before we kick off with this episode off the Brendan O'Neill show and with this brilliant conversation with Heather McDonald on kovat 19 and the future of freedom I wanted to tell you about how you can help spiked spiked has no pay wall we are free to read and free to listen to and we intend to stay that way and one way we can stay that way is with the help of you our readers and our listeners if you like what we do then please consider making a donation one off donations are always gratefully received and incredibly helpful but the best way to help spiked is by becoming a regular donor even five pounds a month can make a huge difference and help us to continue doing what we're doing times are tough right now for everyone but if you appreciate the work spike does in asking difficult questions and pushing alternative views then please do consider becoming a regular donor it will make a huge difference to donate just go - ww-wait - online comm and press the big red donate button that's www-wait - online.com and press the big red donate button thank you and now on with a show [Music] we've been conditioned now the rhetoric in our newspapers inevitably every story is terrifying so storage of creamer virus across the country in most states you're talking about a couple hundred of deaths that is nothing compared to cancer deaths compared to heart disease deaths compared to suicide compared with drug addiction we're going to get a lot more suicides we're gonna have a lot more drug addiction deaths if this continues it can not go on hello and welcome to the Brendan O'Neill show with me Brendan O'Neill this is a podcast in which an esteemed guest joins me to talk about the big ideas the bad ideas the problems and the controversies of life in the early 21st century in this episode I am delighted to be joined by Heather McDonald Heather is an American commentator essayist author and attorney she is the Thomas W Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute she is also a contributing editor to city journal and a New York Times bestselling author she has written numerous books including the diversity delusion how race and gender pandering corrupt at the University and undermine our culture the war on cops how the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe and the burden of bad ideas how modern intellectuals miss shape our society heather has also rather put her neck on the line in relation to the cove in nineteen crisis she has called him to question the way our societies have responded to this virus so it is very fitting and important that she is a guest in this latest lockdown episode of the Brendan O'Neill show so Heather we're talking at an extraordinary time half the world's population is under lockdown and the most basic fundamental freedoms have been taken away from people in countries like France and Italy and the United Kingdom I'm not allowed out of my flat unless I have a very good reason I could be stopped by the police I know it's the same in other countries too and the global economy seems to be in freefall or certainly heading for freefall do you think this is hysteria or do you think there is some justification to these extraordinary measures well Brendon I am of course absolutely in sympathy for people who are losing family members to this virus but to be honest I wake up everyday and think maybe this will be the moment when I understand the degree of hysteria and that moment of enlightenment never comes the numbers simply do not support the wholesale destruction of livelihoods of billions of people across the globe in the United States we now have 22,000 deaths that's compared to about two million deaths a year in the United States you take out New York City deaths or New York State deaths and you get 12,000 deaths in the u.s. that is a pittance of what we experience every year from heart disease from cancer people will say well those are not communicable nevertheless a death is a death and I am fed up with the argument that to be concerned about the utter gutting of the extraordinary complexity beauty and creativity of our market economy is somehow heartless whereas to be focused exclusively on a shutdown to protect the lives of overwhelmingly elderly people who again deserve all of our love and all of our care that that is compassionate I reject that equation it is compassionate to care about these shutdowns because people's lives are being blighted possibly forever I think that's been one of the most frustrating things for anyone who raises criticisms of the lockdown or raises concerns about what has been done right now across the world in a relatively uniform way one of the most frustrating things is that people will fire back at you and you've had a lot of this and we've had a lot of this the few voices in the UK raising similar concerns have had this - people will fire back you care about the economy more than and it's a real false dichotomy because the economy is people's lives it's people's lives in the sense firstly that it is the way in which we produce things it's the way in which we create wealth that it leads to the building of homes and hospitals and schools and everything else but also because as you're saying they're a huge economic downturn would have an incredibly detrimental impact on human lives on health potentially on life expectancy so isn't this really a question of lives versus lives without getting into we might come back to the the question of whether that this is a trade off which is a really ugly term but isn't this fundamentally lives vs. lies in terms of what we have to grapple with in in a morally mature way of course it isn't it is exactly the role of any policymaker to think about those trade-offs because we are always in a world of a finite resources whether it's health whether it's attention put on this issue versus that issue the third world is going to be devastated by this these are countries that are already on a tightrope when it comes to being able to provide basic decent living standards for their people and when we are decimating their export markets and their ability to work in order to participate in the world economy I fear social unrest of a very very large proportion something that could also frankly hit the developed world if this continues and again it is a question of life and livelihood people who have invested their entire lives and building up a small business cannot continue I think the left can be perhaps excused in its indifference or blyve the sort of unconcerned about this because they have a faith in government stimulus spending that somehow the government is perfectly substitutable for the private economy they are oblivious to the fact that we are not going to have a private economy left to tax in order to get the massive trillions that are going to be spent in basically fake money to try and revive a lot of businesses that are simply beyond repair at this point but what I'm most amazed at is by some of my colleagues in the Marke conservative point of view who also seem to be placing their hopes on these government bailouts that I think is extremely naive there is simply no way that any amount of government spending can recover what we are losing on a minute-by-minute basis with these shutdowns absolutely I want to come back to the question of the left and the right in fact in a moment because I think particularly the role of the left in the UK has been absolutely fascinating in this crisis but firstly I just want to go back to one of the pieces you've written on this controversy and which got you a fair bit of flack in the New Criterion headlined compared to what which was published on the 13th of March and your argument which I found convincing was that there is a very distinct possibility that our response to Co vid 19 could in the long term proved to be more destructive than covert 19 itself one thing I want to ask you is when you were writing that it seems so long ago now that the number of global deaths was 5123 now of course it's it's more than that in the United Kingdom alone and it's a over a hundred thousand around the world it has the spread of the disease altered your thinking at all or is this the kind of thing if we are serious mature adults in terms of how we understand the world and how we understand novel new viruses is this something we should have expected and seen coming I'm still unpersuaded that the numbers to date justify wholesale destruction of the global economy and the discussion of billions of people's livelihood we have in the United States every year 2.8 million deaths so now if you take out New York suite in the u.s. you have 12,000 deaths the numbers simply do not stack up a hundred thousand globally I haven't checked but I would be interested to know and I want to look into this how many live who lost in the Rwandan Civil Wars my guess is is more than that if we have 2.8 million deaths a year in the United States again I don't know what the global deaths are but they are going to be many many times that I am willing to bet anything that this disease and again I am NOT under estimating the tragedy people who cannot help their loved ones who are forced to see their parents isolated in a hospital ward fading away by themselves I am not under estimating the stress that the hospital workers in the most overburdened hospitals are are faced with and the extraordinary fatigue and worry that they're under but again I just don't see the numbers and all come to - what we are doing here yes I think one of the irritating things in relation to this discussion is people like you and others who's raised concerns will often be accused of not caring about older people's lives but one of the points you made very well I thought was that in order to create the conditions in which people can live long healthy lives and that will need certain forms of medical care and care etc you do need a healthy economy you do need a productive economy you do need a private economy that can be taxed and and money that can be spent on the creation of those kinds of services so the accusation that anyone who criticizes the lockdown approach to this viruses is ageist and anti old and uncaring towards those who are most vulnerable to this virus seems to me to not wash at all and again by I asked the question again compared to what society as a matter of course engages an implicit cost-benefit analysis so again here in the United States so far to date 22,000 deaths take out New York State you got 12,000 obviously New York deaths are important but New York is very suah generous with its population demographics and its density but we'll take just 22,000 deaths in the United States we tolerate about 40,000 highway deaths a year those are completely predictable we know year-to-year that 40,000 people children middle-aged people elderly people are going to die we could easily lower that number by half by by three-quarters by mandating that nobody drive more than 25 miles per hour at any given time and we have made a implicit collective decision to say no we're willing to sacrifice 20,000 25,000 30,000 lives in order for our convenience of being able to drive fast and get to our work or get to a recreation or go on a vacation we know every time we undertake a construction project a major construction project or mines or building a bridge that there will be a certain percentage of death but we tolerate that because we think the greater good there is more benefit to creating that facility or that public infrastructure and so the idea that any kind of cost-benefit analysis is heartless and cruel is preposterous because it is how society has to operate okay I want to dig down a bit into the question of why this approach has been adopted so you and I agree and there are a few others too that this is a high cost potentially very destructive approach and you know we will discover over time how problematic this approach has been but I want to dig down into what's causing it one thing that strikes me is the uniformity of the approach so in incredibly diverse countries from South Africa to India to Australia which has had so few cases and very few deaths right through to France Italy in the United Kingdom and also to the United States a very similar approach has been adopted it's more severe in some countries for example in France you pretty much need a government slip of paper to leave your house whereas in the UK we can still go out if there's a justifiable reason so there are differences but there's a uniformity in terms of the idea being that in order to get through this crisis in order to get through this health issue we have to sacrifice democracy and freedom and economic life so what what strikes you as being the key motivator for the adoption of that strategy for dealing with a novel new virus well that is the absolutely most profound question that I find myself asking and first of all let me just take issue with one of your phrases which was we're facing potential economic damage we are facing economic damage right now people's lives are being completely destroyed by this you know the New York Times's absolute schizophrenic it'll have a banner screaming headline one day about you know 16 million more claims for unemployment and you know of saying I cannot continue or I cannot survive like this and then the next day it will be railing against the the fat cat you know plutocrats that are trying to persuade Trump to save the stock market so it's the the economic damage hurting the people at the bottom end of the ladder the most is going on right now but as far as your question about why is it the same the uniform response across so many different societies it is stunning to me because I will confess Brendan that I would have grabbed for an explanation that would suffice for the West which is the safety is impulsed in universities and and the desire for safe spaces and an almost decadent choice a sense of threat that is cut off from anything real but the fact that we see cultures and countries that are very far from the type of identity politics and victimology that reign above all and the anglo-americans fear of of Britain the United States Australia Canada and to a certain degree in Europe as well is is fascinating now the other side would today yeah it's because this is a real threat and people that are experts in public health know something that you are assiduously blind towards the very fact of that uniformity shows that this is not any cultural madness but is something that is quite real and the response is justified either that or that the mentality of the West which is now so used to invulnerability has taken over to some degree in the rest of the world but I don't know what did what is your explanation my explanation would be along similar lines actually I think the thing that has concerned me is that the thing that I hoped hadn't happened which is the exportation of the Western cult of vulnerability and the Western cult of apocalypticism as well has been possibly more successfully exported than I otherwise had imagined but I think in relation to the developing world question which you raised earlier as well strikes me as just completely an utterly extraordinary and such a ticking time bomb of problems I mean I cannot believe that in India for example you know millions upon millions of people the largest movement of people since the partition of India have been sent home to their villages no discussion of how they might travel there no concern about the thronging of huge numbers of people in the streets which is a which is exactly where the virus could potentially spread and absolutely no focus on what they're supposed to do in order to make a living and how they're supposed to get food if they're being thrown out of the cities and sent back to the country South Africa - I find it extraordinary that in a country like South Africa with such high levels of poverty in which people live together cheek-by-jowl very often the idea that you can enforce a lockdown in that country and it won't have a destructive impact strikes me as it just remarkably idiotic and of course perfectly predictable there's already been violence in South Africa as a consequence I think one interesting facet of this just in relation to the developing world and I want to come back to the Western culture in a moment the very people who claim to care about the developing world seem to have had an incredibly dismissive approach to how destructive a lockdown will be in those countries even more so than in US I couldn't agree more and I'm very glad you articulated much more clearly and bravely than I had the courage to do but the exact my instinct would be and I was censoring myself to say that there is some mindset of the West that has now taken over the rest of the world and I also agree it is just amazing to me whether it's in a global context or in a national context the breezy and difference of those people who put themselves forward as champions of people of color and the poor although they care more about color than economic class these days that are willing to consign countries and communities to obsolescence to premature death disease that comes from poverty and again the left I guess the only explanation and exoneration I have is that they have a counterfactual but sincere belief that government deficit spending is adequate substitute for the trillions of complicated market decisions pricing mechanisms the extraordinary beauty and sort of precision of supply chains and so that will make it all okay but nevertheless they can see what's happening at this very moment and yet they continue to insist that everybody stay home you know who knows who will write the history of this but I have to assume that if reason prevails this period will be looked upon as a instance of almost unprecedented global madness [Music] you're listening to the Brendan O'Neill show if you like this podcast and spikes other podcasts and also the articles and essays that spiked publishes every day please think about giving us a donation spikes content is free and we want to keep it free and donations really help us to do that head over to spikes donation page now at WWDC Ike - online.com so if we look at the West because the West is particularly the United Kingdom and the United States I think those are our countries who's whose culture you and I have a better understanding off than possibly some of the global cultures around the world so let's look at some of that because I think you made a point there which is incredibly important and I fear has been overlooked by some of the people who are discussing this crisis and the lockdown and the reaction of what are societies to the virus which is the role and the interplay of pre-existing cultural narratives and pre-existing worldviews and the way in which they have determined to a large extent how we have responded to the virus and how we perceive of risk and how we perceive of threats and it strikes me that you talked about safe spaces and you know the culture of victimology and the culture of fragility and it strikes me that those things have played an incredibly important role in the way in which we've understood the virus and the way in which we have responded to the virus and in fact in some ways I would argue this current extraordinary unprecedented ridiculous moment we're all living through is actually an illustration of how deeply ingrained and influential those kinds of ideas had become in our societies how much do you think the problem we face is that the virus has hit us at a time in which we are so uncertain of ourselves and so convinced of our fragility against external risks well once again I really can't say it much better than you just did I admire your eloquence and and your ability to state things honestly I that is again it's it's very true and one notes that the people who are the most insistent about the fanatical social distancing are the elites I mean I I'm sure you've seen this in Britain I'm amazed I get my exercise in Central Park Central Park in New York City is huge you know it is it is massive open space we've got fresh air when I'm out there I am not wearing a mask because I want to get exercise yesterday I walked behind a bench somebody was sitting on a bench I walked behind the bench separated by several yards the guy sitting there turned around so he was facing me otherwise he would have met his back to me and said how about some social distancing so apparently I'm supposed to put myself maybe you know a swimming pool length away from him the idea that the virus is going to leap across yards and yards of empty space and infect somebody is completely delusional the fact is what we're seeing is that it's mostly communicated in close quarters high communication within families and yet the degree of paranoia that I seen out there in among Manhattan nights who will swerve you know dodge I mean I'm I had a horrible bike accident because some runner went on into me because she was trying to avoid a person who was out there I don't even know who she was seeing that was not she felt socially distanced enough I don't know even if our national leaders like President Donald Trump or Boris Johnson summoned the courage to say that the public health experts are not the only people who deserve to be listened to at this point the people who deserve to be listened to those are being thrown out of their jobs even if they do the right thing and say we are going to start strategically opening up the economy I don't know whether it's gonna come back to life because people have willingly embraced such a degree of terror of paranoia of frenzied fear at this point that I don't see them being willing to go back to a restaurant or to a concert hall and engage in normal life it is amazing again you're you're at much greater risk in New York City of being hit by a delivery bicycle or a speeding car than you are walking outside in Manhattan and getting coronavirus it's it's the numbers simply don't add up I've had exactly the same thought in my darker moments over the past few weeks of lockdown which is the question of what happens when the lockdown is eased and eventually when it comes to an end which it must the question of whether life will bounce back to normal the optimist in me hopes that it will but the realist in me thinks that this is such an extraordinary moment and we've seen such a valorisation of social distancing as an approach to life that it will actually be quite difficult to go back to you know the mass society that those of us who live in New York or London or Paris had gotten used to and actually had quite liked and so I'm worried about the impact even a short lockdown we've currently been in lockdown in the UK for around three weeks now I think it will have a potentially very detrimental impact I wanted to ask you about the question of freedom in relation to this because I think you you're absolutely right that what we're witnessing in relation to this virus is the impact of pre-existing cultural ideals in relation to a virus that is quite novel and new and strange and and unpredictable and all those one thing that strikes me is that whenever I've raised criticisms of the lockdown people will say to me oh you just want the freedom to infect other people which which are which I think is such an extraordinary and revealing phrase because when I when I sat down and thought about it I realized that actually within certain circles freedom had been seen as an infectious thing already that this predates the virus you know the idea of toxic words damaging words the notion that if Heather McDonald comes to speak at your campus it will pollute your soul or or damage you in some way a speech in particular has been seen as an infectious dangerous diseased phenomenon you know that the rise of the word phobia for example suggests that there's a mental illness component to certain ideas Islamophobia transphobia homophobia so I think in relation to the freedom question and the speed with which some of our societies have sacrificed freedom in a in a willing way that I think is very influenced by the degraded way in which freedom had been viewed for quite a long time actually and I I just want to buttress something you said earlier Brendon about will we really be able to throw off this frenzied social distancing let's note that there was one alleged and wholly unsuccessful shoe bomber I don't know how many years ago now twenty years ago and as a result we are all still taking off our shoes when we go through airport security unless we have signed up for a pre-screening program and people have simply accepted this for one alleged shoe drama on an airplane that probably would not have succeeded anyway so one would hope that the habit and the the way we conducted ourselves would would restore itself but it looks to me like people again are remarkably willing to add another degree of massively disruptive risk aversion at the commands of the authorities and taking off your shoes is far less disruptive to the economy than saying you're not going to be within six feet or a couple of yards of anybody so yeah I mean the idea I used to talk about dangerous words and that somehow one is literally put at risk by non-orthodox ideas I've also been struck in the current moment by the really virulent anger that is directed at anybody that descents you know whether that should be understood in a different category from the mob hysteria that enforces ideological orthodoxy on campuses that I've experienced I'm sure you've experienced I don't know I mean they would say the reason that we are lashing out with such contempt and hatred towards anybody who suggests that these lockdowns are going too far and they're wreaking too much damage to for too little benefit they would say well because lives are at stake this is a you know objectively different than than trying to banish somebody who challenges the idea of widespread campus rape or black lives matter the police are the biggest threat facing minorities in America I don't know but from my perspective that looks at these numbers and says a hundred thousand global deaths is a drop in the bucket compared to what goes on every single year it's a mystery no I really agree with that I think that's a that's a very important point and it strikes me that what's very interesting I feel is that the the same people who say that you can't raise these concerns about the response to Kovac 19 because lives are at stake are actually the kind of people who would have said that in relation to other issues previously if you criticize the transgender idea for example you will cause people to kill selves if you criticize any aspect of racial politics or if you criticize the notion that the police in the United States are inherently racist which I know that you and others have done you are giving license to violence which could impact on people's lives so what makes me skeptical off the notion that it's wrong to raise these questions in relation to covert 19 because lives are at stake is that we've heard that argument so many times over the past few years it's one of the most cynically censorious arguments which is that if you say this thing or express this idea people will pay with their lives but I wanted to ask you about the response to dissent because the way I measure the importance of talking about an issue is if it's very difficult to talk about that issue I think if it's difficult to talk about something that probably means it's really important to talk about that thing and the response to you and some of the things that you've written in the response to others in the UK and Europe who number of people unfortunately who've raised questions about all of this has been an incredibly intolerant accusatory response which is designed I guess to shame people into silence but it strikes me that it's precisely in a moment of emergency and we're told constantly that this is a global emergency it seems to me that it's precisely in a moment like that that freedom of speech and dissent become incredibly important because if society has been asked to sacrifice fundamental freedoms surely we need to ask pressing constant questions about whether that's valid or not absolutely and in one sense I know I feel honored by the attacks I wish I was that much of a threat to the reigning orthodoxy I fear I don't think I am I never would presume to be but it is amazing that a few voices are not allowed to be heard if people are so confident that their analysis of the situation that their prescriptions are fully justified despite the destruction of the livelihoods of poor people the the fact that their their life expectancies are going to be cut by massive amounts if their villages lose any kind of export market if they're so certain that they're right why are they so afraid of having disparate arguments and you know that let the facts meet in the marketplace of ideas and let people evaluate all the evidence and come to their own decisions the dogma of certainty is always something that raises my heckles because when people head into a public discussion with such certitude it always suggests to me that actually they probably need some probing some questioning and some dissent thrown their way in order to you know improve the intellectual and in this case physical health of society but I wanted to talk a little bit about the culture wars and a lot of the stuff that you've been writing about for a long time in your book the diversity delusion and in lots of the stuff that you've written about campus stuff and the campus culture wars and the campus controversies because one of the questions that has come up fairly publicly in relation to kovat 19 is the question of whether a crisis as serious as this in which we are being told that we must pull together as a society or else we will be screwed whether it will weaken the culture wars and open people's eyes to the ridiculous nature of that kind of narcissistic navel-gazing culture that has existed for a few decades now or whether it will in some way energize it and and draw some of those bad trends even further to the surface what's your view generally speaking what's your view on what the impact of this will be on identity politics and all those problematic cultures the signs are not good right now you still have the dance of the diversity Dean's in American College is proceeding apace even as millions are losing their jobs Harvard is just bringing in a new Dean of belonging and inclusion that has come in from NYU somebody that was working on multicultural understanding for NYU and Dubai MIT just brought somebody in from a Southern University to be the equity and inclusion manager there so nothing is changing in this grotesquely overpriced parasitic edifice of diversity sin occurs that are driving tuitions in the United States at private universities and public to just obscene levels like seventy five thousand dollars a year and I also recently this last week we saw the virus being racialized with the charge that blacks and Hispanics had a higher death rate than whites in their respective cities or states this was a charge that now had turned for the people that are prosecuting it the medical personnel have gone overnight from heroes to being bigots because claim is that that doctors and nurses are denying care out of implicit bias to minority suffers the statistics on which these claims are based are completely bogus the death rate for inner-city residents is compared to the death rate for an entire state population that is completely different demographically the higher rate in some places and in some places it's minuscule a higher rate for blacks than for whites is completely predicted by what we already know regarding the comorbidities that are the most certain accompaniments of coronavirus deaths the heart disease the diabetes the obesity the AIDS drug addictions hypertension blacks have higher rates of those now the left will say structural inequality me another explanation as behavioral choices in any case this is not a race issue and to make it one is to inject poison into a political debate that is fraught enough and and helps nothing I can guarantee you that the doctors and nurses who are working on the front lines are completely indifferent to somebody's color what I've also noticed is that the alleged disparities in death rates for coronavirus are minut compared to the death rate disparities that are caused by urban violence you know in New York City blacks are about 22% of the population they make up about 28% of coronavirus deaths well in New York City blacks make up about 65% of homicide deaths in Chicago black eight and three percent of homicide deaths even though they're a little under a third of the population as opposed to about 68 percent of viral deaths these crime disparities these homicide victimization disparities have been taboo you may not talk about them because to do so would lead logically to discussion of homicide commission rates because it is thanks to astronomically higher rates of crime commission that blacks have higher rates of dying from street crime so I do not see any cessation at this very moment of poisonous identity politics and my guess is is that the campus culture of narcissistic highly privileged students thinking of themselves as victims is going to redouble when they come back in fact I'm sure you've seen this in the UK but here you have leaked students saying that they're under so much trauma and stress that they should all get A's for the semester that it's asking too much of them to continue in a admittedly non ideal learning environment of working online but nevertheless that the claims are being made again of it's the the stress that is so unbearable that they should all be exempt from ordinary expectations [Music] you're listening to the Brendon only also subscribe now so that you never miss an episode and it would be great if you could give us a rating and maybe even a review that is a really good way to help new listeners discover the show you mentioned the piece you wrote about the racialization of the virus and in fact that was one of the pieces that shifted my mind towards the opinion that this period will intensify the politics of identity and intensify the supposedly woke culture that has had a destructive impact on American and British society in particular over the past few years the one thing that really stood out in your piece which I just found deeply disturbing and actually quite depressing was the fact that senators like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have actually asked for doctors supposedly implicit biases to be investigated and that gives rise to this very contradictory situation where on the one hand we are told this is the worst catastrophe to befall our societies for a very long time and we must all pull together and do our bit by sacrificing our freedom but on the other hand the politics of identity grates even against that kind of social role that we are expected to play because what it does it just undercuts any sense of social solidarity constantly by looking for bias and Prejudice and the victimization of certain groups over others so it doesn't this raise the question of you know you and I will disagree with many other people about how serious the coronavirus impact is but this does is the question of if our societies were to face an incredibly serious threat externally it would be almost impossible for them to organize collectively against that given the narcissistic divisive culture of identity politics absolutely you know I wonder generally do we have the character left the cultural resources the cultural capital to fight a world war I don't know would we have people willing to go off and lose their lives in a culture of safety is a number one and number two with the identity politics and one can say well this is the Achilles heel Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker in saying they want to take vital resources if this is such a crucial moment they want to take vital time and money away from looking for a vaccine figuring out other other types of health means that will protect people to continue what is already a multi-million dollar industry in the United States to search out to smoke out alleged heteronormativity in maths in computer science and medical training implicit microaggressions you name it this shows that they're not really serious that they know that this is not you know the end of the world they would say it is the end of the world we can do both and it is because microaggressions and implicit bias are themselves lethal sources of threat as well as the corona virus and so we have to proceed on both fronts I would say again it shows that part of them realizes this is not something that is threatening civilization itself but yeah I don't know we have been so divided demographic change has been leveraged into a caste system of victimology the trans phenomenon is a you know very successful effort to be at the top of the totem pole of victimhood but that particular hierarchy cannot last there will be something that transcends it maybe it'll be people who survive coronavirus I don't know but we certainly do not seem to have the unity I mean I look at here in the United States we have three main talk-show cable channels CNN MSNBC and Fox News and they are absolutely poles apart ideologically each the caricature of the other both is blind in their outlooks but when I listen to MSNBC and CNN who are the left-wing side and Fox News is the right the mostly gratuitous sniping against Donald Trump some of it justified I mean Trump is unfortunately his all-too-familiar character flaws the narcissism the thin skin has been sadly on display nevertheless I think he and the rest of the federal government are operating in complete good-faith they're trying to do the best they can the idea that the federal government has magical powers to somehow produce millions of pieces of personal protective equipment or ventilators on demand is ludicrous but the sniping that goes on the pettiness again belies the charge that this is a national crisis and you think of the differences in either the Great Depression of the 1990 20s early early 1930s or World War two with the producers of culture pulling together to produce works of uplift and national unity this is a very very different moment absolutely and we've actually had a serious sorry a similar phenomenon in the UK with sniping at Boris Johnson it that there was some respite when he was in hospital and especially when he was in intensive care when there was a little bit of let up on the kind of sniping at him but I found it quite extraordinary because I think there are absolutely criticisms that can be made off Boris Johnson's government and the approach that they have taken to Co vid 19 I think there are criticisms that can be made of the lack of protective equipment and the lack of testing and it seems like it's going to take us another few weeks before we have any testing regime in place absolutely fine to criticize those things but what I found extraordinary and this touches on a word that you've used quite a few times in this discussion which is safety ISM because it strikes me that the culture of safety is emerged this profound moral immaturity and this notion that the government has to protect us from every single inconvenience and every single unpredictable event so the thing that is it most frequently said about Boris Johnson by the liberal media here that small-l liberal media is that he is responsible for deaths from kovat 19 and that strikes me as just so on the one hand I just think it's a cruel thing to say but more importantly than that I think it speaks to precisely the culture that you've been talking about and writing about which is that if we create a society in which people expect protection from every single inconvenience every single difficult idea every single up-and-down in whether it's a you know a supposed mental health problem which is very often just emotions or a problematic speaker on campus or being bullied in the playground or whatever else it might be I think what happens as a consequence of that over time is that you create a culture of entitlement in which people expect to have this force field around them throughout their lives and and I think that cultivates an incredibly immature attitude towards very real things like disease and disaster and unpredictable events and turmoil and all the stuff of human life have you seen something similar in the US where there is this expectation which largely in the UK context comes from the left this expectation that it's completely and utterly unacceptable for anyone to die or suffer and if they do it's all Trump's fall or Boris's for or someone else's home absolutely and it is it is a product of the elites that in fact enjoy lives of health prosperous and flourishing that is unimaginable I'm always so struck by the beauty the joy and the sorrow of the baroque of whether it's the music or architecture people creating works of such unbelievable grandeur and nobility and complexity at a time when life expectancy was half of what it is now where it was normal to die in childbirth where people went through life with the most galling of untreatable diseases and yet their cultures were able to create an aesthetic of beauty and grandeur that is simply beyond our capacity we have no interest in it now our art is ironic the postmodern it is a repudiation of craft of technique of accomplishment it is incessantly narcissistic the you know the whole installation art that is simply a form of self-involved complaint of a political ignorant Vendetta and we are decadent in our expectation of a life without death and in fact it is the case that many of us go through life for decades without an experience of death if our grandparents are relatively healthy it may be that nobody around us dies five hundred years ago people were experiencing death constantly so many works of art are the death of children not just you know Mahler and and the kinder totally lead of Richert but ben jonson riding on the death of his children they saw that life was filled with suffering we now have it entitled that it isn't but it is an entitlement enjoyed overwhelmingly by the elites it's not true in the third world and you know people in in lower classes I think are probably a little more realistic on the other hand I mean I one also notices the utter willingness to take risk I mean here in New York you know that the the bike delivery people go you know wrong way in the wrong direction against the light crosswalks you know mowing people down right left without any concern you know that they're putting their own lives at risk much less everybody else so there is a different risk calculus that people make in poverty-stricken countries where life does not have it seems quite the same value but but here absolutely we have an entitlement mentality that death should be off stage and that's a good thing I mean I'm not I believe me I'm not promoting death I'm not deaf is ever good but it seems like the the demands are extreme and you know what I've noticed as well as the the catch-22 that were in I heard yesterday a congresswoman from the state of Washington which is where we had the start of this at a nursing home saying well we can't open up again because only 2% of the populace have been infected and so what she meant you know we have no herman herd immunity which is something that Boris Johnson in his first phase of strategy there wanted to create well we don't have herd immunity presumably because of the shutdowns so how are we ever gonna open up again you know and I think we have to be willing to say if we open up we will have more deaths we will that we we've got to accept that the way we accept 40,000 highway deaths for some greater good and in this case it's a good that is much greater than the convenience of being able to drive 75 or 80 miles an hour on highways and it's the good of a global economy that is the only way that human beings can possibly hope to realize their individual gifts their ideas their capacity to love and share and create if we destroy this and I feel like we're in a house that is being eaten away by invisible termites and for the moment things kind of look okay as empty as New York is as disturbing as it is we're still getting food but any moment it could collapse and if the wealthy elites who are sheltering in place here in New York who have not decamped for their country homes could not get their Fresh Direct overnight deliveries of fresh eggs and milk and produce and pasta but the economy hit them in the places where they are accustomed to I think we may have a see a different calculus being made I completely agree with that and I've also noticed the class differential not only in relation to risk more broadly but specifically in relation to this current moment and when I walk through London now London is a complete ghost town I've never seen the city like this is just extraordinary is it's both beautiful and terrifying to see these places that are usually swarming with people having not a single person in them but the people I do see are the delivery guys often hanging out in close proximity and talking and waiting for their orders and they're no doubt going to wisdeth the the fancy food off to a middle class upper middle-class households somewhere in a nice part of London so all of that I think is incredibly striking the the differential attitudes towards risk and life that exists in in classes and between the elites and working people I think is a rich source of discussion I want to ask you just two more quick questions before we end firstly in relation to the left and the right it's too broad a question to get into but one of the things that strikes me in relation to the United Kingdom and I wonder if it's similar in the United States you're absolutely right that the economic pain is happening right now people are claiming unemployment insurance in the US or universal credit in the UK in unprecedented numbers and this is effectively universal credit in the UK is effectively poverty assistance and a million more people are now claiming it than were claiming it previously that's extraordinary and terrifying but I wanted to ask you about the left's role in relation to this because in the UK if this gives rise to the recession or depression that some people are predicting it will be historically unprecedented because it will be the first recession in history that the left actively campaigned for and which that which they campaigned for in in defiance of every single voice that said listen can we wait can we think about this can we just think about what the consequences might be is there a similar dynamic in the United States where the left has lined up behind the lockdown thesis in a in a relatively uncritical way no there's been nothing likes we always hear about that the 1918 flu we did not shut down the world economy it's just it's beyond belief I've never seen anything like this and I would say picking up on an earlier point in your current question part of the problem is is that the left we don't have these sort of factory organizers anymore the left today are the elites they are the knowledge workers they are the college grade holders they work by office so they can shelter at home because they work from their computer they do not need to be in a particular workplace handling particular goods they are with ABS distractions and they're in the professional leads they are lawyers they are foundation executives you know academics they do not understand supply chains they do not understand the difficulty of getting trucks to come from a port that has brought parts from abroad or from another Factory in the UK or in the United States at a certain price that now is completely decimated they do not understand farmers that are plowing under fields of fresh cabbage and strawberries and pouring milk down the gutter because they have no understanding of an economy that is based on manufacture and trade of goods and again that is something that is this is what Hayek tells us it is based on so many pricing decisions so many intersections of supply and demand curves that is beyond the government anybody to be able to replicate so they can shut it down because they have no idea what it is like to them it's just they can continue sending out their emails and writing their chronicles of what it's like to have to try and homeschool their children and their jobs are secure but the people who depend on a global chain of supply demand manufacture transport predicting consumer demand that is now completely haywire those people are not having a say in this matter it is we are being run by the elites and yes they are trying to destroy the government again I am I'm not I'm not a prone to conspiracy theory you know it's it's going perhaps to me a step too far to say that this is all being done to take down Trump in the United States because again it's the question you is there are many people many people in the world who do not have Trump as a president who are engaging in the same activity so I can't say that there's people on the right who are saying that the United States this is all a way of of may curing that Trump does not get reelected nevertheless one can just note the parallel tracks of interest here that that what they are doing certainly aids in their effort to bring down the Trump presidency and frankly you know what we're witnessing is a story of extraordinary dimensions when it comes to Donald Trump I mean I wouldn't call him a tragic hero because that gives them too much dignity but but it is amazing the story of hubris and Fortuna striking down somebody who makes fortunes on the stock market and the economy for fairly reasonable reasons I mean the economy was doing very well under him and now to have this come out of nowhere I mean we should all be back reading the Oresteia or Sophocles because none of us have the emotional drama dramatical imagination to understand these reversals of fortunes that we've been seeing I really agree with you I think your description of the class differential to the lockdown is equally applied to the United Kingdom we have a situation here where the left elites are almost relishing the lock down because they can carry on working they can do their public sector work they can do their managerial tasks they can make their podcasts and they're all on Instagram making sourdough bread and to them it's it's this interesting experiment and and they don't seem to have a single thought for the millions upon millions of people construction workers plumbers others who who cannot work at the moment and who feel that their agency and their self-determination has been completely ripped away from them in an incredibly visceral way and I think one of the interesting crashes that will come out of this I hope anyway we'll be between the the knowledge sectors of the of the elites who as you say dealing in quite abstract terms and and those people who are actually incredibly productive and incredibly important to the functioning of society and I think that will be a worthwhile lesson for our societies to learn but I want to ask you one more question before we end it's an impossible question in some ways but what do you think is the way out of this because if we listen to the experts and I agree with the point you made earlier which is that our governments have become over a lion on expert voices and far too cushioned to the voices of ordinary people who are suffering in the right now if we listen to the experts then there's no way out for a long period of time we could be in lockdown for three months six months 12 months 18 months social distancing might exist for years to me that is completely and utterly unsustainable completely destructive of economic life social life and humanity itself so in your opinion would you end the lockdown right now or would you what would you say is a preferable way for us to get out of this predicament we currently find ourselves in I am right when I hear people whether it's Zeke Emanuel here even found she's saying yeah we're gonna be doing this you know lockdown 2.0 or 3.0 they're insane they're insane and and my Gorge Rises every single morning I have I have now reached the point where I say it has to end now we have to start opening businesses Trump has talked about some sort of risk analysis of looking at different parts of the country to see the risk I mean again if you take out New York the numbers elsewhere that we get we've been conditioned now the rhetoric in our newspapers inevitably every story is the terrifying surge of common virus across the country the devastating toll that has taken in most states you're talking about a couple hundred deaths in most states in the United States that is nothing compared to cancer deaths compared to heart disease deaths compared to suicide compared to drug addiction we're going to get a lot more suicides we're going to add a lot more drug addiction deaths if this continues it can not go on and so I think the thing that needs to be done Trump and the Boris Johnson but you know his speech yesterday suggested he is now lost the fortitude to say we have got to start planning at least for the end they've got to say there will be some deaths due to coronavirus we will do everything we can to protect the most vulnerable populations we will practice voluntary social distancing people in businesses will be given the means that they need to protect themselves but we need to recognize that the only possibility for human flourishing for human life is to allow people to go back to work start creating for each other start engaging in this voluntary exchange where you survive by providing other people what they want that is a thing of beauty as Adam Smith recognized it's a it's a form of moral life to participate in the market and yes these business small businesses are not going to come back to life you cannot throw printed inflationary money at them and say okay now magically you know The Sorcerer's Apprentice reconstitute yourself it's not going to happen and so I would say today tomorrow we have to start opening it up again Heather McComb thank you very much thank you so much Brendon as fabulous conversation [Music] thank you for listening to the Brendan O'Neill show we'll be back with another guest and more discussion don't forget to subscribe and in the meantime keep reading spiked at wws piked - online.com
