Douglas Murray: The Dangerous Dishonesty of the Modern Left

[Music] it is possible that some of you watching tonight have yet to read anything by the brilliant british author douglas murray possible but highly improbable i'd suggest since murray's invaluable insights into the cultural and political madness of our time appear frequently in many publications that you and i respect his book the strange death of europe immigration identity islam spent almost 20 weeks on the sunday times bestseller list when it was published in 2017 and has been published in more than 20 languages his latest work the madness of crowds gender race and identity exposes the new ideology that forms the creed of the new modern left it was the most important book i'd read in a decade i felt last year when when i read it when it first came out murray's insights into identity politics online shaming intersectionality cancel culture all those things of the modern woke world map out the dark terrain on which the battle of ideas is being fought douglas murray joins us from london doug it's a great pleasure to welcome you to watercooler it's very good to be with you douglas you wrote in the magnets of crowds last year we are going through a great crowd derangement in public and in private both online and off people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational feverish herd-like and simply unpleasant in the light of everything that's happening now you must have some grim feeling of vindication sadly they have yes uh earlier this year when the carved crisis hit i had a moment as i'm sure a lot of us did where i thought maybe the sort of craziest bits of identity politics and more are going to take a back seat you know maybe now we've all got some serious issues to worry about maybe unserious issues will bother us and detain us a little less i thought you know now now at the very least even if we don't all get ill and die um you know our living standards is gonna decline and and much more and i thought well in that case we'll all have real complaints and we won't have so much time for people with totally fraudulent and made-up complaints you know in a time where actual aggression feels like it might be growing uh um uh microaggressions might might take a back seat and that was my view early on in the crisis the carbon crisis and then i just saw that whole thing blow right up and in fact what has been revealed in recent months is that what i describe in the mans of crowds uh seems to have just gone on steroids for the last three or four months and it's um it's both vindicating what i say in the manners of crowds and very worrying for me because what i say in that book as you know is is really in part a warning it's it's an attempt to to decontaminate an area of or a lot of areas of thought that have been willfully contaminated by dishonest and disingenuous actors and unfortunately uh it seems that those dishonest and disingenuous actors in all of our countries have been having the time of their lives you describe the increasing speed with which this movement rolls on with every ever greater absurdities things that were perfectly okay five minutes ago suddenly hanging on the covet 19 crisis seems to have accelerated the madness even more yeah there is a there is a i wrote about this early on in the crisis that i was very worried immediately by the way in which there seemed to be a policing of the boundaries not just of discussion but of investigation that seemed to me very troubling i was alarmed for instance that there were groups including think tanks and investigatory bodies who were saying um these are the things that should be looked into and these are the things that should not there's a think tank that claims to study extremism in the la in london where i am which immediately said that it is a conspiracy theory to claim that the uh virus may have come from a laboratory and and i was just shocked amazed at the way in which so fast on such a huge issue there was the the attempt we've seen on lots of other issues but attempt on a brand new issue to just box in what should be looked at and should be said should be thought about i am very very opposed to that on this issue as on any other i'm i'm always for the widest possible discussion because i always suspect that if you have the widest possible discussion you've got the largest chance of getting to the truth and that if you allow people to box things off and say you can't say this you can't think about that you've got a disproportionate likelihood of unnecessarily hurtling yourself and your society into error and i do think that's something that has been going on in this crisis as in the ones i write about in the book let's try and put the manners of crowds in context doug if we may and understand where this cultural arrogance began you set up your book with a pertinent observation by the late ken minogue about the progressive urge to slay dragons it's as if they see themselves as a george sitting out to eradicate horrible evils to turn the world into a better place the interesting thing for me is that ken wrote that book almost 60 years ago yes i i'm a a great admirer of ken minogue and his thought of course a very distinguished australian born philosopher and i'm privileged to know him a bit in his later life just a wonderful man great great guy to be with and uh he and his book the liberal imagination i think it was used this analogy i mean one of ken's geniuses it seemed to me always was that he he had that skill that we used to associate with philosophy and thought which was the skill to take highly complex ideas and make them understandable um this of course is exactly the opposite of the current age where the idea of anyone involved in ideas is to take really quite straightforward ideas and concepts and make them sound completely unintelligible um anyhow you know ken had that first skill in abundance and in in that book he refers to george in retirement syndrome as being one of the risks that liberalism can end up in and i and i i credit this to him and i i extend the metaphor what minogue was saying was that that liberalism had within it this tendency to to keep on searching for causes to fight in order to justify its existence so that it could end up um like saint george in retirement that is that george got so much credit for slaying the dragon that he might be tempted to go around the land looking for other dragons to slay and if there are paucity of dragons he might find himself swinging his sword at ever smaller creatures until eventually one day saint george might be found swinging his sword at thin air and um i believe i explained i think that what minogue said then very very prescient and accurate is is absolutely what has happened to the liberal mind in the last few decades in recent years and and the redux is something like this and i see it very clearly in australian society i haven't been there for about i think 18 months but i follow events fairly closely there i think in australia as in britain and america what you have is a type of rampaging liberal who wants desperately to be uh the sort of person who gets your claim that say people did or the stonewall inn in 1968 or were joining martin luther king in the march on washington or were the suffragettes and these may all be very good things to have been and our society says you know how much we admire the people involved in these various liberal liberation causes uh the thing is of course is that uh today the people who want to be deemed to have exactly that amount of uh virtue to being exactly that good and involved in those good causes are at best um sort of staggering around the land looking for chickens to machete and um and in actual fact i think in most cases swinging their swords at thin air you know the gay press such as it is in all of our countries is left you know trying desperately to find some regional politician who once said something on social media that wasn't totally in accord with 2020 views about gays um you know the they they they're desperate to find misogynist absolutely desperate for it and then you have this what i've always described as one of the oddest things of our age which is the the fact that the desire to find racism uh uh is in very disproportionate uh um context to the actual extent in which we have racism in our societies thank goodness uh society's are not racist certainly they're not tolerant of racism and so we have what i've always described is this supply and demand problem where the the so-called anti-racists have a huge demand for racists there's just not that much of a supply of them um and and that's a problem for them uh because these enemies give their lives meaning and the the vindication they feel if they can be claimed to be within the orbit of the great human rights protesters and causes it gives their lives purpose so i think and i think this has become a perversity of modern liberalism as ken minogue warned that we have people swinging their swords at thin air we should of course address the semantic confusion over the word liberal in australia being a liberal is on to be on the side of sanity i think you're talking about liberals in the american sense here yes yes this term shifts it's it's one of several big terms in our day which shape-shifts according to which continent you're on but yes indeed i mean by the way i should stress i mean i've always thought of liberalism as a good thing to be in the classical sense i approve of liberalism i regard myself as a classical liberal but yes the form of liberalism i'm describing there is the is what we really really end up having to call leftism i think if martin luther king was uh to make his famous i have a dream speech today he'd probably be immediately cancelled on facebook for posting incorrect thoughts he he famously said of course that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and now it appears the color of your skin is all that matters we have indeed i say in the madness of crowds it's taken half a century for martin luther king's disciples to completely invert his dream uh we actually have figures like the deeply sinister deeply sinister fraudulent i think figure robin d'angelo an american academic who happens to be white by the way who with her book white fragility um has actually gone around the country in america giving lectures saying that what matters most is the color of your skin and that actually people who start talking about the content of character rather than skin color are to use one of the terms of the jargon of the age problematic exactly 50 years we go from martin luther king to this croc fraud uh robin d'angelo hawking this idea that robin the the the the of robin d'angelo is that martin luther king's totally wrong and that what matters is skin color not the content of character and this is this is of course this is extraordinary perversity about this um because as i see it and as i've tried to warn people you you either have martin luther king's dream or you've got hell when it comes to race relations and if i can explain that one of the reasons for that isn't just uh philosophical it is it isn't just moral it is and i warn people try to warn people it's deeply practical i mean in a country like my own in britain let alone the united states um the white population is the majority and i don't think that it is sustainable for a bullying vociferous minority who happen to be black or white or any other color to go around telling majority populations that they are wicked and evil and have nothing good about themselves and to do so in the name of anti-racism and to say that some people are better than them because of the color of their skin this this this is something which i uh have have been deeply worried about seeing and i saw it incidentally when i was in australia uh uh last summer before last um i did a tour around a number of australian cities and i noticed that there as much as here you have this idea for instance of certain things can be said by certain people by dint of their character traits or characteristics and cannot be said by other people this is what i describe in the mountains of crowds as the problem of the speaker not the speech that we've become almost uninterested in what uh uh the content of somebody's speech is like we've become less interested in the content of the character it's all about who the speaker is it's why people say speaking as a and then you know always give some trait they believe qualifies them to speak and this is just a small example of something that dr king was saying no it would be the content of your words just like it would be the content of your character that would matter it shouldn't be necessary if people stand up and say speaking as a in order to justify whether what they're about to say is of worth or not and it's deeply deeply uh mistaken as a long-term strategy because as i say majority populations i believe will not tolerate being told basically shut up and so i i warn about this but i i feel like i've warned about it uh without effect because in the time since i first wrote this people just stampeded exactly down the dangerous disastrous path that i'm trying to warn against martin luther king jr also insisted that black people should be good citizens that civil rights couldn't be separated from civil responsibilities to obey the law pay one's taxes have a certain citizenly regard for others harvey milk the lead of the stonewall movement made similar arguments about the rights of gay citizens the black lives matter movement on the other hand is very different it's about burning and looting cities ripping the social fabric apart if you like rather than making it stronger yes well well that as i warn about i think i think i may be the first writer to point this out as you know i take these identity issues one by one i do i do gay first because it's the one crampon i have on the wall of social justice theory not that i get any credit for it of course for my opponents but uh i i say in the gay chapter that opens the book there was always a strand in gay liberation gay rights which presented being gay as not just something that i what as i think of it as being just something some people are and it's a really rather uninteresting characteristic um but actually as a foundational thing from which a whole political um uh project then emerges so uh this is what i described as the gay and queer divide gays just want to basically get on with their lives and and and uh you know do all the same things everyone else does and uh queers uh believe that uh being gay is just the first uh step and then after that you've got to bring down capitalism and introduce marxism and a whole load of other stuff and and i i mean most gay people are not on board for that project but there was always a radical fringe who thought that was the point and it's the same thing in feminist theory i take on in the second chapter in the manners of currents the relations between the sexes and i partly do it because you know i i mean i i think it's totally impossible that we have this situation where men are not allowed to ever talk about women i mean i i i have this really old-fashioned view uh the the sexes have got to get on it's probably good for the future of our species that they do or at least find some kind of compromise and it can't be this dangerous cancelling for men and women to to to talk about relations between sexes and we have always had a problem though because just like in gay there's always been a problem where some feminists have believed that it's not enough just for women to have equal rights it's not enough for women to be able to pursue whatever it is that they wish to pursue in their lives a very very laudable aim most almost all people agree with this but there was always a strand in feminism that said no no the job of women is then to to bring down a whole load of stuff to bring down patriarchy and the family and capitalism and marxism and you get the drift it's all part of the same pattern and there are always people who said this in equal rights on racial matters and other things and i say these people in each of these realms should be regarded with very very great suspicion and should have been pushed back against a lot more in each of these cases there are people and campaigns who have used uh the call for equality whether it's lgbt equality or quality of insects or racial equality have used these traits in order to try to to use it as a battering ram to smuggle in behind it a very clear and consistent political and social policy and i think that conservatives in particular in every country have been very very slow on the uptake of identifying that's what it is uh it's been going on very clearly in recent months where uh black lives matter have been using the totally laudable call for racial equality equal racial rights equal treatment under the law and much more and have been smuggling just behind the front phalanx of that blm's core uh desires including the bringing down of capitalism the introduction of marxism and much more and these are disastrous things to wind up alongside each other of course because you can get majority populations in all of our properly liberal countries like australia and britain behind each of these rights claims you can get majority populations behind each of them we do not live in a deeply you know uh homophobic societies we don't live in deeply anti-female societies or misogynistic societies we do not live in deeply racist societies and people know that and they have a decency and they want equality but the minute that these things all get tied up with completely radical attempts to disorientate and then destroy the societies that we live in you lose people and that's why i call anybody in these movements to to get these things separated to separate out the radicals the marxists the anarchists from any legitimate rights claims douglas you see as i do a religious element in this movement i hesitate to use the word religion because for me that devalues the the positive religious faiths that are part of our community but a sociologist would recognize many of the same functions in woke faith if you like it it's a way of binding people together with a shared world view and excluding uh the apostates yes yes to that extent by the way i've come to the conclusion that it would be better described as a cult uh i agree that durkheimian you know lends through it to understand it is probably a useful one but by this stage we're talking much more about cult-like behaviors than we are religious behaviors the religious behaviors are not just the binding issues but the fact that we have so many spillovers from organized religion that appear to be manifesting in these social justice movements i'm thinking particularly of things like the desire to atone uh the the desire to alleviate guilt uh the the attempt to impose guilt and feelings of guilt on others um this a much more very recognizable particularly recognizable from what i might call spilt christianity to you t.e hume's famous uh a description of romanticism and and this is really spilt christianity we're dealing with in parts of the social justice movement uh and you see that sometimes by the way completely openly there were there were scenes in american streets in june july where people were white people were actually flogging themselves in the street and black people were coming over and trying to stop them saying we don't want this brother we don't want you to do this and and these white maniacs are like bleeding and welted on their backs you think wow i mean i i mean you can see that occasionally with sheer uh you know religious festivals but i thought i thought i would expect that from like white americans here we are with something as i say you know our societies really haven't seen since middle ages and um and so those those sorts of things say yes there's an obviously religious uh type of spilt religion here the reason i say it's actually cult-like is because the further the social justice thing goes along the more you can see cult-like traits for instance the call to separate from your family if your family do not have the right views increasingly you know your grandparents are racist and if they do not get with the project you must break off from your grandparents i mean by the way these are wicked wicked things to say wicked wicked things to do to try to split up families like this can you imagine anything more more upsetting for a grandparent than for their grandchild to come back from college and and tell them you've got the wrong ideas grandma grandpa and so we can't see you anymore and it's really disgusting on a human level what's being taught at the moment but these sorts of traits the call to for companies and others to pay tithes you know give over a portion of your income to the approved group the this is cult-like behavior we we would recognize this in any other context and i'm surprised it's taken us so long to recognize it with these people but they should be called out for this by now yeah but the thing is it's repentance without forgiveness isn't it i mean there are many examples of people in your book who are hounded by the offense seekers on twitter for incorrect thoughts but no matter how much they grovel they can never redeem themselves in the eyes of their accusers i'm thinking for instance of that that poor old benedict cumberbatch who you mentioned in your book he foolishly used the term colored actors if i remember correctly when what he should have said of course was actors of color well well he he had an advantage because poor old benedict um there were two things by the way i mean the the thing he was attacked for was it was just fantastically ludicrous even by the standards of our highly ludicrous age uh i mean he referred to colored people when that month's uh thing was people of color in america it was acceptable to say color people still in britain and by the way the naacp the national association for colored people in america hasn't changed its name so a a different standard was being applied not for the first time uh depending on the speaker but the other thing of course was that benedict cumberbatch did have an advantage was he had a big pr team around him as all you know mega famous mega rich hollywood actors do uh most people aren't in that situation and uh if they misspeak by saying something that this week you're not meant to say even if the naacp still called the thing you're not meant to say um you uh most likely just find the whirlwind coming at you and you don't know what's hit you and it's all over and you haven't got a pr team and by the time you scramble to get any help you know you're totally unsalvageable um so yes this this is a this is one of the most ridiculous trends of the age and by the way the one that can be pushed back at most i've developed um a serious a lack of sympathy for prominent figures who complain about things they're not allowed to say because i honestly think that our generation is the luckiest generation in history every single thing our forebears did before us contained far more risk than anything any of us have to face in our lives all we have to do is speak and speak the truth as we see it and i'm just struck by the fact that the bullies and it's just nothing more complex than that the bullies in the social justice movement have persuaded adult after adult to shut up not to speak and it's pathetic i think and i don't think we have to go along with it i don't see any reason why we do we should we could be more organized we could be cleverer definitely in avoiding certain traps but there's no way that adults in positions of power and indeed people without any position in our societies should be this fearful of using language and of discussing ideas and that's why i say the matters of crimes i say you know i identify all these we've got to be able to talk about lgbt we've got to be able to talk about men and women we've got to be able to talk about race and we shouldn't have them feel like every time any of us in our private or professional lives goes on to any of these really interesting and important subjects we are dealing with an imminent death scenario it shouldn't be like that so let's talk about the lurch to authoritarianism which is a notable characteristic of black lives matter and similar movements uh you may have seen in the state of victoria right now we essentially have an authoritarian state government ruled by the chief health officer who has the power to send in the police into your home without a warrant and authorized destruction of your property the conversation of your property and uh the police of course have been using this with enormous enthusiasm i mean last week they arrested a pregnant woman in her pajamas in her own kitchen for a facebook post is that part of this uh growing authoritarianism you warn about i think there is some overlap uh i think the common thing is is is different in that uh every every time the police in any of our countries get given extra powers there are always people within them who will use them we have that in the uk certainly early on the covert crisis i think is still going on to some degree now but the very beginning in the uk we had things like you know uh police telling people not to play in their own gardens you know um uh actually the public health advice of the government didn't say don't play in your own garden um but you get police who misinterpret or don't understand uh and of course you get ones who want to overreach there's always going to be a certain portion of people in the police force who are absolutely thrilled at new powers that come their way um i'm never particularly thrilled at such powers because i think that always the police misuse them i think of things like the man which counted terrorism legislation in my own country was was used uh for totally other purposes you know we had a case where a council once used counterterrorism legislation to find people putting their bins out on the wrong night you know and and i say this not because the ludicrous example but because it's an absolutely typical example of what happens police overreach the use of powers once given for other purposes but i i yeah you you know a lot about more about this than i do but i've watched this case in victoria and others there uh with considerable concern because i i actually i underestimated the extent to which at the beginning of the covert crisis the sort of public health overreach was going to occur i thought that there would be a um a much more reasonable uh understanding of what the limits were and i was wrong on that i mean i think that by now it's becoming clear that there are going to have to be much much clearer strictures about police overreach than there are we've had it in the uk police officers you know really overreacting on video with people you know caught not wearing a mask on a basically empty train carriage and this sort of thing we are going to have to get these delineations right um because you know for the immediate future uh the health officials um are working in effectively a sort of a magisterium akin to the magisterium that the law existed in until quite recently you know a totally and indeed science a totally unopposable um system you know this is the one you can't argue against now public health and we should be worried about that were you surprised at the scientific debate about something as serious as a pandemic quickly became dragooned into this culture war i i don't think it happened that quickly i think it's taking a little time to clarify so that now there is a clear political delineation it seems that broadly speaking i think i'm right in saying this is the same in australia but certainly in america and britain the um broadly speaking the left remains for instance very pro-masked and the right is a bit more skeptical of masks and there is obviously a civil liberties angle to this i think there are other things going on and i think we probably can't ignore the extent to which there are spillovers of the specific cultural situation that america is in at the moment you know one of one of the things that black lives matter shows is you know a reminder that american culture war issues spill over into every other english-speaking country in particular with extraordinary force very fast you know i mean the british police don't have the problems the american police do but we get the protests anyway and i think it's the same with the divisions over the covet uh political divisions in america the political divisions are clear and they are clear and have been throughout whereas um again in britain and like australia there was a degree of political unanimity from the beginning in america there was not at any stage political unanimity because america is in an election year and the number of democrats uh earth saw that this was a means to get donald trump out of office and so at this stage everything including the wearing of masks or the non-wearing of masks is a deeply political issue a politicized issue and it's all down to what happens in november i mean i honestly believe that there are democrats for instance who are actually um content with continuing to crash the american economy because they believe it's the best means to get donald trump out of office in a few months time and um i think the versions of that argument versions of that political divide that right left divide have spilled out into all of our countries but there is also obviously an underlying um issue where people on on the right have a certain proportion of the right libertarian right you might say in particular have always been skeptical of government and further government overreach uh because they they believe they know where where that always goes but yes it it it has politicized uh and and i think these are these are two at least the main reasons why talking about cancel culture can you explain douglas from your point of view in london why tony abbott our erstwhile former prime minister with great accomplishments to his name in the form of trade in the in the field of trade has become you know a figure of hate for the british media all sorts of uh horrible and untrue things have been said about him in the last couple of weeks what on earth is going on it's uh it's just the craziest thing that's happened in the last few days uh can i give a quick example before this happened we've been a weird weird cultural example of this for some time in the uk we had it with my late friend roger scrutin uh 18 months ago or so when the government here tried to appoint him to an unpaid advisory position on building commissions in the uk and this unpaid advisory position was highly controversial when he was put into it and uh the left just just came for him and eventually they really tried to destroy him and they called him all the names of the age and uh fortunately he was uh able to be um his career was was saved but they tried everything and threw everything at him and i mentioned that because something very similar happened with tony abbott and by the way i said something very similar to what i said about the scrutiny example with the abbott example last week the very lazy british broadcast media finally get on to discovering tony abbott because there was this rumor that he was going to be involved in british trade negotiations by the way i should stress i admire tony abbott enormously i think he's he is a remarkable politician i've seen him up close a number of times in australia and elsewhere uh he is of course i mean anyone who's become a prime minister is is by nature this is you know to achieve the absolutely top uh rank in politics and to think that such a person would be willing to help uh britain in trade negotiations being so experienced as he has been in that in australia and so successful in australia is something this country my country britain should take as an enormous compliment it's something that we uh i personally have stressed i i think we should feel very proud and grateful for grateful remember that uh anyhow of course the broadcast media uh doesn't operate like bad it operates on a gotcha uh paradigm and a very ignorant uh journalist from sky news in britain which is very different from sky australia sky news in britain has become a deeply sort of woke organization a very very unwatchable channel it has a presenter called k burley who the other morning just started accusing um tony abbott of being and we could all sing the song in exactly the same order so let's do it he was accused of being a homophobe of being a misogynist of being wrong think uh i think she oh he's of course a climate change denier uh uh i don't think she said he was a transphobe but i'm sure she was gearing up for it and uh i watched this with just amazement at any journalist being able to embarrass themselves this much but what was more worrying was that she was doing this to a british minister in that case a very weak conservative matt hancock uh who was just blustering his way in response and instead of saying you know uh you're defaming a great friend of this country and a great man uh sort of said uh well he knows about trade and i don't know about the misogyny homophobia and all these two things but i mean obviously homophobia and misogyny is terrible and the climate change now is terrible and you know so these very weak conservative politicians did that for a couple of days and it sort of caught on you know uh the guardian our main left-wing propaganda rag in the uk uh uh that's uh that's not not really sound very well i should stress by the way the spectator magazine outsells the guardian now all right please by the way so the failing uh um guardian you know ran on its front page you know questions over misogynist abbott trade role by the way eventually the british government did uh um show that it had some balls and and appointed tony abbott quite rightly to the post they wanted to but there was clearly a sort of wobble at some point on thursday or friday i made an intervention at the spectator saying how preposterous this was and saying as i said with scrutin by the way that if you can't appoint tony abbott you can't appoint anyone you know if a former prime minister of our closest ally uh isn't appointable then no one's appointable who do you think is going to is going to make the mark if tony abbott doesn't you know and how low grade do you want to go do you want to find somebody who's never achieved anything in their life but never said anything and has a totally sort of you know a clean track record of of you know of exactly all of 2020 social beliefs and there's weirdly somebody who expressed 2020 social beliefs throughout their lives um i mean these are preposterous demands and and of course in the case of tony abbott they're all so they were lies that were being spread about him the broadcast media particularly k burley and skying news we're just broadcasting lies about and they didn't know anything about tony abbott and here's the thing and as i i said in defense not only is it the case that if you can't appoint tony abbott to such a role you can't appoint anyone secondly it's deeply ungrateful and dishonest of the british media to act in this way when somebody is doing britain a favor and an honor to wish to serve and to help this country at a very important moment in our history but thirdly i don't give a damn anymore i am fed up of it like i think a lot of people i was i was fed up of seeing my friend roger scrutin gone over like this i'm fed up of seeing tony abbott gone over like this i don't care anymore as i said for all i care tony abbott could be a fire breathing paisley height on the issue of sodomy you know he could have spent decades walking around with placards like ian paisley um i wouldn't care he could still be the best trade ambassador and particularly i don't care when it's dishonest claims saying things like he once said something about women in the late 1990s that julie gillard then 12 years ago in order to get herself out of a corner claims means he doesn't like women i i don't believe this anymore and we shouldn't believe it and we shouldn't fall for it but these are these are like the spell words of our time and they chucked them out at everyone they did it to tony abbott thank god it didn't work on this occasion uh but they do it to everyone and it's high time that more adults stood up against this and said no you don't get to use these rights claims as weapons to beat people with and win a war on dishonest terms and uh i'm i'm delighted this was resolved but i am very angry still that it was possible for a conservative government to wobble in the face of opposition like this you know we have a 80-seat conservative majority in the uk and sometimes you get the impression that we live under completely labour party control doug there's so many discussions arising from your book we're clearly not going to get through them all but let's just encourage people to read the second edition which has just been published with the updates on covet 19. but you'll mention of that fine journal the spectator which of course has an australian edition reminds me that i recently got censored on post on facebook for posting a piece pointing to a spectator australia article i should confess that the piece was by my wife incidentally who'd written about the great medical research including here in australia that's being invested in trying to find promising new ways to treat covid19 without a vaccine vaccine what what what's so offensive about that that's fancy you're not the first victim of anti-spectator bias um spectator phobia i might call it um it's rife in the social media companies this particular phobia i occasionally have readers who write to me and say they've been banned from facebook for a time or suspended for sharing an article of mine it always makes me feel absolutely terrible by the way because you know i am i i i don't find myself i feel like somebody who's brought brought unhappiness into another home you know brought a problem into somebody else's life um but of course it's not my fault and it's not the reader's fault this is like it isn't your fault and it's not your wife's fault it's the fault of the social media companies they have and as you know in the masterclass i write a chapter on tech uh because i spent a certain amount of time in silicon valley trying to work out what's been going on tech is doing a lot of things in our lives that we've underestimated and one of the most striking is of course that at this stage the tech companies are finding themselves doing something i don't think they did anticipate they should have anticipated but i don't think they did anticipate which is that they ended up having to be in their view a sort of sensor or they had to end up behaving like publishers behave a decider of what is acceptable in their publication now by the way this is a basically impossible task if you're facebook because there's too much material it's not like editing a magazine or a newspaper millions and millions of people on the platform and you just can't do it and i think it's a sort of fool's errand and i i my own view is that the social media companies can make sure that illegal things do not go on i.e you you know you can't put bomb making manuals on social media but but what they've done consistently is to go for everything a step below that and a step below that and there are several reasons for that i should stress the first is a very practical one silicon valley is and the people who are the sort of content checkers are almost unanimously like everyone else in silicon valley from the political left and the political far left this isn't just anecdotal this has been demonstrated the obama administration when they when the democrats lost in america all those people who worked for obama went to silicon valley same in the uk liberal democrat leader nick clegg former deputy prime minister failed as a politician in the uk immediately gets hoovered up by facebook and becomes one of their chief you know officers and and then brings in all of his failed third and fourth rate low-grade ruddy lib dem mp and and lib dem friends to come and work at facebook see you the people who want to decide what you and i and everyone else can know and say and read are all of the political left without exception there is no there's even less right wingery in a silicon valley than there is in academia these days and so these decisions are all made by the left and what's more they're ignorant they're wildly ignorant they're kids i mean this is one amazing thing i sometimes think when you see censorship debates and silicon valley i sometimes think these are people who've never read anything they don't know that we've had all of these debates many times before in our history we had them in england in the 17th century we had them in england and elsewhere in the 19th and 18th centuries we've had them in the 20th century repeatedly facebook and others behave as if we've never had these debates about censorship and they have actually taken upon themselves the decision to for instance decide what people can or cannot say about covid that's how you get into this preposterous situation that you and your wife are in where where the oldest running magazine in the english language the spectator can run a piece but facebook a new relatively new i mean a real you know upstart by spectator standards upstart company of uh um of i know what it is 20 years standing thinks it can decide that the spectator's content isn't a reproducible well to hell with these people we need to cause a much bigger fuss about it it's outrageous that they think they can limit the the remits of the debate they know in my experience far less than the average member of the public on these matters their so-called experts are no such thing they desire to limit debate they desire to have a power and do have a power which is deeply deeply disturbing because in my opinion absolutely nobody at facebook or any of these companies is remotely qualified to decide what you or i or anyone watching can know absolutely none of them they're not qualified they're not knowledgeable enough they're not grown up enough they're just out of short pants and this has got to be a much much bigger scandal because these people have too much power and it has to be taken away from them one way or the other well as you say douglas to hell with a lot of them let's celebrate the positive things about modern technology like the ability to have conversations with great people like you and it's their next best thing to having you here and let's hope we can start lifting these border restrictions soon and get you back it would be great to be back with you i tell you thanks very much for joining us oh it's a huge pleasure best to everyone there

Channel: Menzies Research Centre

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Id: MlSI7fCYh-I

Length: 48min 17sec (2897 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020