Woke Ideology in Canada with Eric Kaufmann | No Nonsense with Pamela Wallin

hello and welcome to another edition of No Nonsense with Pamela Wallen The Economist magazine recently dedicated an entire issue to the topic of wokeism political correctness why well because there are dozens of examples every day that just make you want to shake your head the World War II famous kiss picture in Time Square a soldier grabs a a woman as they celebrate the peace Greta Zimmer a nurse George mandona a soldier they became lifelong friends but the forces of moral indignation and righteousness declared that this kiss was non-consensual then there's Google's AI if you ask for historic pictures of the Pope you'll get a woman of color or George Washington is always black Joe Biden apologizes for calling an illegal immigrant an illegal immigrant and Canada is funding something called gender transformative Deming in war torn Ukraine the examples defy common sense but Canada it seems is more woke resistant than other places so now you're about to meet Eric Kaufman he's a Canadian academic from Vancouver originally he's teaching politics in the UK K in January 24 he launched a course called woke the origins Dynamics and implications of an elite ideology at the University of Buckingham but we have he's also a fellow at the McDonald Lauer Institute which is why we've reached out to him today in Wigan in Northeast England in north northern England I guess is where you are well thanks Pamela yeah I'm actually in Northwest England it's sort Northwest okay yeah near Liverpool um area called Wigan so I'm just up visiting uh with some family there was a funeral okay and you're gonna are you going to start talking with that accent should we be prepared for well yeah so so for example saying over there is over the so I don't know whether that's politically correct uh maybe you're maybe you're offending somebody because everybody is offended by something in some context or another which is I guess what we're talking about so your your report that you released in February the politics of the culture wars in contemporary Canada what did you discover about what Canadians think about woke or about political correctness well yeah I mean I think it's it's important to just get a quick definition out there because a lot of people struggle over this but woke is simply the making SA of historically marginalized race gender and sexual identity groups and out of that comes the belief that equal outcomes in terms of whether it be race gaps gender gaps Etc should be zero at least and um also you should have emotional harm protection in other words uh one of these groups cannot be offended the most sensitive member imaginable of one of these groups cannot be offended by anything um so that is sort of the ideology and what's interesting I've done these surveys of you know nationally representative uh surveys in the US and Britain and I used a lot of the same questions I because I'm Canadian I thought well you know Canada the the policies and the politics and the media is is probably more woke than on average than what you'd see in Britain and the US I'd be interested to see if that's because the public uh is more woke and what I discovered was surprisingly the Canadian public is not actually any different than the American and British public on these questions and we asked about 50 questions around the transgender issue around critical race Theory and history uh issues and around cancel culture so the what you're suggesting is kind of the the media is leading the concern in the discussion and putting it in the window and Canadians are going yes but that's wasn't really a big concern for me yeah so the media does not reflect the views for example of a large majority of Canadians I mean if you take the trans issue as a sort of extreme example of that um you know four by a by a margin of 4 to one if we take minors getting gender reassignment surger surgery Canadians are opposed to that 4 to one you would never know that from the media for example um and you know even if you take the recent Alberta the Daniel Smith uh announcements around right gender reassignment surgery and and women in in or transgender women in in women's sports for example um the articles on that in the media would tended to be critical the people they would interview would tend to be those who are upset by this decision so you wouldn't tend to get a a kind of average person on the street who would reflect mainstream public opinion being interviewed a lot in the media um so yeah there is a Divergence between where the Press is and where the public is on these issues on on so many issues but just stick to the ones that you've studied here today there were some um uh basic kind of questions more Canadians disapprove than approve of people displaying preferred pronouns I mean they're not really that but like what what are they saying to you well these are all questions that we devised um so we were just we just put it to people do you approve or disapprove of these things now reassignment surgery it was 4 to one against the pronouns question people having pronouns in their email signatures and Facebook page I didn't expect this to go against but actually it went slightly against it was close it was a fine balance but it was slightly against and that's quite surprising because there is absolutely no way in any Canadian institution or media organization you could ever imagine that to be the case right um and that's what's quite revealing whereas in the US and Britain you know there is significant opposition in sections of the media uh these stories come up in Britain for example in the Telegraph and and the conservative party has pushed you know they've they've sort of gone to the opposition leader and said okay you know tell me what a woman is Right tried to put the labor leader on the spot and make him say what a woman is and that's that kind that's the kind of thing that doesn't happen in Canada for example even though the public opinion is identical um so it's it's quite something very interesting but I mean you see it in the states too I mean they put that to to the last Supreme Court Justice that was appointed you know can you define woman right uh so they are kind of pushing the limit are we just more polite about it we just don't like it but we're just not going to say too much well the thing about being nice and polite is it's always about being nice and polite to who so if you're if you think you're being nice to a biological male who identifies as a woman and wants to enter a woman's changing room the question then is well are you being nice to the women and the women's change right so it's a framing the way it's framed is always like no we can be nice to the transwoman without being mean to anybody else but actually the reality is it's a clash of Rights and in a democracy you have to decide that by majority vote or by something in the Constitution so I think that's a misleading framing that's often used and but I think in Canada yeah I think the the El Elite norms uh tend to be more Progressive than um the uh mass of the population right so I think and and because the med there has historically been higher trust in in media and institutions in Canada and I picked that up in the survey so even right leaning Canadians are somewhat more trusting of the media than right leaning Brits or Americans I think that gives a little more leeway for the elites and institutions to diverge from the public well I mean here we we we're just witnessing this uh in the wake of the State of the Union I mean Joe Biden when he went off the teleprompter said illegal used that word he was describing somebody who has allegedly committed a murder and then he spent the next four days apologizing for using the word illegal instead of undocumented and I think and you see it on the media people going yes but what about the woman he supposedly killed could we not be concerned about that like this is really kind of highlighting your point there who are we worried about offending yeah exactly and you know it's it's it's sort of an oppression hierarchy it's a bit like the more oppression points you have be they racial uh sexual Etc you're at the top of a hierarchy and then at the bottom is you know white straight men who have no points it's a bit like you know Ace an Ace versus a two in the card pack right so the the the whole kind of Ethics here revolves around if you are higher or lower uh in this hierarchy of Oppression and so if you're higher in the in the hierarchy then you know people need to be nice to you and if you're lower in hierarchy then no one needs to be nice to you and you don't really count in the calculus really what we should be doing is treating everybody equally uh have a color blind approach but instead it's a very color just kind of you know what's your identity okay then you get to be treated this way oh your that identity you get to be treated that way that that does take us back to the roots and you will know this better than I but I was reading through this this issue and and the term woke um goes back to 1938 black singer hudie Leed better who said on stage stay woke keep your eyes open he was referring to Black having to negotiate their way and manage the streets on scotsboro Alabama um and and then it kind of came up to modern day the 2014 killing of of Michael Brown the BLM movement George Floyd Etc um so it it's kind of but that's where it sort of started and now it spread across is that your sense as a historian academic well I mean I think originally you know you would say when black Americans didn't have their civil rights they were being treated unfairly segregated uh you know there was a good good liberal reasons to to to to have a campaign and to want people to be conscious of this Injustice and and that was a good thing and then at some point in the mid 1960s you went from Martin Luther King saying people shouldn't be judged by the color of the skin but the content of their character to you know the Lynden Johnson and others saying well actually one quality of result yeah and we need goals and timet so we have to have affirmative action which means you have to have a certain percentage of African-American contractors African-American employees once you move to quotas and equal results you then say well to get to the equal results we have to discriminate against you know it was white people it might now be Asian if we're thinking about Harvard's you know it might be we have to discriminate against Asians to get to the number of because what's never mentioned is the flip side of these polic the flip side of being nice to African-Americans by giving a fixed percentage to them in admittance to Harvard means that you have to be pretty mean to Asians by saying well their personality scores are lower so we're going to have to discriminate against them and it's always the people who are who are losing out who are ignored and no one actually talks about the fact that this is really a a clash of Rights so yeah it's been a kind of a mutation away from Classical liberalism to what I would call cultural socialism which is instead of every individual having the same amount of money and Status it's got to be every group having the same amount of money and status and and rights I mean you you really touched on something which I think is at the core of all of this which is I don't know anybody that doesn't subscribe to the theory of equality of opportunity but but when it becomes a quality of outcomes and that you have to contrive that that's where people really start to resist yeah exactly now I mean it can be the case that equality of outcome is a signal that there isn't equality of opportunity but once you've you know if you have for example an SAT test or you have a a blind audition for an orchestra you know you've dealt with that issue of inequality of opportunity and at some point you have to say well there might be other reasons other than discrimination why you might have a disparity and this this whole idea that disp arity equals discrimination is a mantra of this Equity diversity philosophy right and and that is what I would call cultural socialism and imagine if we said anything less than perfect equality of income between any two individuals represents discrimination well that's ridiculous I mean people they have different outlooks on life and so with different groups likewise some groups are going to emphasize saving and book learning and others not some groups are older than others just the average age is different you know that's all going to affect the the disparities and and we have to actually be a lot more rational about that and even-handed so I just think it's very tough in our society at least in the elite Progressive culture to accept any disparity as being in some way natural and not the outcome of something nefarious and when and when we rule out Merit as a reason for Access or promotion or hiring it really does skew the the purpose of the exercise here you know if you want the best person for the job or if you want the smartest students in the room uh then you kind of got to judge them on those grounds absolutely and and the thing is if your concern is group disparity I mean Coleman Hughes is a commentator in the US who was a new book out um quite recently and what his argument is look if you if you're concerned about a disparity in terms of people entering Harvard University it's too late by the time you get to Harvard University I mean you've got to be focusing on age zero to 10 and so if if people really care instead of trying to rig the game at age 18 they would be focusing on age 0 to 10 but they're not interested in 0 to 10 they're interested in what the elite culture is interested in which is admittance to the top corporations the top institutions and so there's no focus on what actually might help solve the problem and keeping the the donors happy too um I I want to go through a couple of the other things that are you know kind of uniquely Canadian uh on this because this is something that you know sticks troubles me Canadians oppose removing statues of Sir John A McDonald by a two to1 uh ratio because that does speak to the sense of the denial of History yeah I mean this is the remarkable that almost every John a McDonald statue's been either put away or covered up or removed in Canada and yet by a two to1 margin people are saying they don't want these statues removed and by you know a much larger margin I I can't remember the exact number but it was maybe something like 90 to 10 they don't want vigilante removal of statues they're opposed to people removing I mean if you have a process and it's the government after a deliberation that's one thing but this idea of Statute topping is totally opposed by the overwhelming majority of Canadians and yet it's been happening and with very little repercussions for the people who do it um and I think it also gets to a bigger question around history and you know you can say well Canada didn't do things perfectly um there were residential schools but again the residential schools thing you know there's a book called grave error Now by Tom Flanigan and and Champion which sort of really goes through the evidence and says you know we if we want to sort of assess the record of the residential schools we have to compare them to day schools on reserves and people who didn't go to school and when you do that actually you know there were abuses at the residential schools yeah yes there were problems but this is nowhere near the kind of awful genocidal murderous thing that is portrayed kids were not taken away to go there they were Vol sent there voluntarily I mean there's all all this context around the residential schools just completely missed and then you get something as crazy as this sort of mass Graves uh 215 body story that came out of cam loops and U one thing that was interesting in the survey is by a 4 to one margin Canadians believe that uh even though there's no evidence there really is no evidence that it happen I mean you'd have to say as a sort of If This Were a crime scene or or if you were a scientist you'd say there's just not no evidence that this but it was simply on the news 247 yeah and because come to believe what they hear whether it's that story or or is is Joe Blow guilty of committing this murder if if he's put in the window every day everybody concludes He's the bad guy well that's that's right and when you don't have any push back in the Press when the Press is all on the same page and the politicians are all on the same page right there's no opposition then of course people are going to believe it because they're not going to be reading Terry glavin in the National Post or the few voices that are pushing back on that but it is remark that in a society that is supposedly reality based something like this which is kind of misinformation in a way the fact that hasn't those stories have not been retracted or corrected is kind of a story of misinformation um Canadians are much less likely according to your results to call their country racist as are the Americans and Britain but perhaps that's because we have different experiences well the first thing to note is you know by 70 to 30 Canadians disagree with the statement that Canada is a racist country so only 30% agree and that number is over 50% in the United States for example and it's 40 in Britain so again the opposite of what you'd think from a country where critical race Theory which teaches that Canada is a racist country where that is sort of running pretty wild in in a lot of schools now we haven't done the survey my surveys in the US would suggest that 90% of American 18 to 20 year old kids have heard at least one critical race Theory term like white privilege white supremacy for example systemic racism all of which are unscientific by the way uh in the in from an adult at school and I suspect in Canada that's increased a lot and is pretty high as well um but yeah so this whole demonization of of white Canadians is because they have the fewest Depression points they're seeing as the oppressor this whole ideology really is about who's oppressor who's oppressed on the identity rounds right and so white male is the bottom of the Heap and of course it's completely illiterate historically I mean if you were to look at the way Aboriginal groups conducted themselves which is normal not because they're any different than anybody else but human history um especially as we get in from the hunter gatherer stage into the agricultural stage is a history of slavery and genocide and colonization and that's what was happening in Canada between native groups now I'm happy to have a discussion if you want to talk about how the IRA and hurons treated each other and the the West Coast Salish slavery we we can talk about that and then we can talk about yeah you know Europeans settling and colonizing and we can have a rounded discussion that's not the kind of discussion we're having it's all a morality tale of of white equals good or white equals bad and and Indigenous or others equals good and it's just such a sort of illiterate story so I just think every country's got this in its history in its past we're not having that rounded contextualized discussion well and we've seen it kind of spill over today even into the discussion about what's going on in the Middle East which is somehow the Jews um who you know went through the Holocaust who have experienced anti-Semitism in ways that are unimaginable um somehow they have now become the oppressor and the Palestinians have become the oppressed when you know there's a lot of different moving Parts in how it was the land was divided up that wasn't a yeah decision by the Jewish State again yeah it's a very complex multi-layered history without no no angels in this story but on the other hand it's this imposition of a very sort of binary black and white morality tale and it's all the same critical race lens once put those pair of glasses on that say there's a racial oppressor there's a racial oppress the oppressor does colonization genocide and settlement and the oppressed is the indigenous person of color then once you've got those lenses on it doesn't matter if you're looking at Canadian history or you're looking at Israel it's the same conclusion and it's the same very clear black and white story and you just want to turn your brain off and Shout at the bad guy that's the level I think the intellectual level that we're talking about what troubles me about all of this and these extremes as you say is that Canada truly is a country that is the product of immigration um we have long BET our futures on pluralism that everybody could come and contribute and and um and succeed and help the next guy but when you then impose policies on that that make make it difficult to see it I mean the prime minister clares that diversity is our strength but then if you don't control immigration inflows and people are straining the social services system and they're straining the schools and they're straining the housing market and they're straining the hospitals then diversity is not our strength so all of those things have to be part of a package not just one off statements yeah I mean but diversity is kind of a religion for Canadian Lees it's not looked at objectively because really in any society you have an optimal level of diversity it's not something that should just be maximized in fact if we look social scientifically you might ra you know you might actually come to the opposite conclusion which is that you know greater diversity is associated with reduced social trust Robert putnam's written about that less sense of belonging and again economic development is is is lower in um ethnically diverse societies where politics runs on ethnic lines more there are all kinds of reasons why you don't want to get too diverse you have to have a similation to reduce the diversity level to an optimal level and Canada even though it's had a certain amount of diversity although that's much exaggerated if you go certainly before about 1970 um you have a certain amount of diversity but you always had a similation actually um and that's not talked about not just people speaking English but actually intermarrying and changing identity in a deep way um and so you actually accelerate immigration then you're actually going to lead to this High diversity what putam and a number of others would call this diversity solidarity tradeoff greater diversity weaker solidarity which breeds a whole bunch of issues including polarization but certainly weaker attachment to place in community which has a whole again KnockOn effects on on E Economic Development and a whole bunch of other things so yeah this is just not allow in it seems to me that Canada's still got this race taboo around immigration that used to be there in some European countries the migrant crisis of 20156 kind of more or less killed it off in Germany and Sweden because the far right populist right who just been rising and Rising really since then made the center right say well we've actually got to talk about numbers here in Sweden we can't just say that that's a racist thing to do we have to actually reduce numbers once the center started to move that changed the whole terms of debate and now they can have a sensible debate over how many they want to let in Where's my my sense in Canada is even the conservative party is shy about talking about reducing numbers because they don't want to be accused of being racist and that's just an example of how this culture War also infects public policy right because if the definitional racism is stretched out to include not being able to pronounce someone's last name you know wanting to reduce numbers none of which is racist but can be framed as racist just shuts down debate and the tensions build up and you can't have optimal public policy so yeah I don't know how Canada gets out of this yeah we I mean we saw that in the pandemic you can't stop flights from China that is racist um you know that that kind of stuff obviously in the US I mean it's it's interesting to watch what's going on in the US on the uh illegal immigration the migrant the newcomers the words change every other day but they've got 10 million people that they don't know who they are coming across their border and now even the Democrats are starting to freak out a bit I mean you can say initially oh yeah it's great to have you know more people in and they contribute to the society etc etc but but it doesn't look like um they're getting the cream of the crop here in terms of what's Happening no and I think in a way you know Trump I I'm very critical of many of the things he says about you know the election was stolen and whatever but yeah when he says you can't be a country a country that doesn't control its borders is not a country that resonates with a lot of people it makes a lot of sense one of the definitions of a nation state is that you have a monopoly of of force and you control borders and so it's it's just astounding that that's where the Democrats are if you look at go back in history to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama I mean they were very much into border control and deportation and they had no problem with that but what's happened is that the woke element has become more and more powerful infiltrated the Democratic party and now sets the tone and tell you know so if you know even if Biden were so minded to to want to sort of Deport more and to have a more uh aggressive policy policing the Border I don't think he could do it because the the power of the doners and the foundations and the you know the woke activists is is too great um and and that's the danger but of course what that means is they're going to lose because of immigration is probably going to be the thing that costs them the election and you get a wild card like Donald Trump coming in and by the way the Latino vote who you know these are people who are tending to live in areas closer to the US border um that you know Latinos have really shifted towards the Republicans since 2008 every election every election um and uh this is one of their big issues is border security and so it just but the Democrats can't escape the strictures of political correctness and they can't have that debate but th this isn't issue the whole notion of of the borderless worlds right which is you're seeing from a a younger generation of political leaders uh but there is also at the same time we just watched Portugal I mean there's a push back in terms of how the leadership of countries that are dealing with this issue are now reacting and saying okay hold on here we're we we've got to have some rules in place this can't just be a free-for which is you go anywhere you want and somebody else picks up the bill yeah I mean you know the first the L the surge in sort of support for populist right parties begins around 2014 in Europe with increasing migration across the Mediterranean that ultimately resulted in brexit and you know record levels of support you know lean at 40 43% uh salven and the brothers and then Maloney and and you know now now there is there is almost no country in Europe Portugal used to be one of the exceptions it's now as you say 18% Was the chga vote Ireland is the next Domino to fall I believe actually you've had Mass protests against migrations Ireland was always held up as one of these great exceptions we can do migration and we're not going to be like all these other European countries well it's changing there too and I think the June European elections we're going to see the highest ever vote share for the populist right across Europe to the point where that could tip the balance of power within the European Union so we're now seeing really historic things happening uh in European politics and and by the way Britain people might say oh Britain's an exception they're going to vote in a a labor government and that's true in a way but on the otherand actually if you look at the issue of immigration that's the top concern for conservative voters and the Reform Party which is the third third party populist part has been now polling around 14% And if they get a charismatic leader they could easily they even displace the Tories in the vote in terms of vote Sheriff so I mean I think you know there is this real push back against institutions which I think have been Paralyzed by uh by woke as an ideology that you just cannot have the label racist attached to you anything you say has to be squeaky clean I think that mentality has meant that it's just impossible to discuss something like immigration without being attacked and so people want to sort of hide and the result is the pressure just builds up so is your sense from you know the the the big picture shifts there that you're you're suggesting are in play how does that play out then down on the street does that mean that people are going to go to their school boards and say you know I don't want my uh black child in a class for black child children only uh we we don't want that kind of reverse of the situation or um you know the gender issue or are are we starting to see a reaction to woke on on the streets you you get a certain amount of it on American television you see the parents who are resisting things but is it any broader than that is what's your sense that's interesting yeah in Canada you've seen some Schoolboard level activity um you're now seeing a few Premier you know started with Blaine Hicks in in New Brunswick and now Saskatchewan and Alberta and and so there it's the beginnings the green shoots of a push back as these premieres realize they've got in most cases over two to one of the you know the public over two-thirds of the public are on their side it's really an open goal they've been too scared to go at it they're tiptoeing around it on the gender issue the big question well a number of questions one is will they go after this issue of this sort of demonization of Canadian history and this whole question of Mass Graves and resident and and statues in Sir John A and all of that demonization of Canadian history I think that's where I I would say the conservatives in at the provincial level or federally need to start to move into that territory the way they've started to move into the gender territory because again as you can see with that two to1 view on McDonald or or Canada as a racist country question people are behind they want to see some sort of rectification of this trashing of Canadian history and the Canadian past um and and yeah that is going to I predict this is going to you know play a bigger role in elections this battle over the the speech boundaries over the boundaries of History what's taught in schools um now in terms of mobilization part of this depends on how how well mobilized parents are you know in the US there are organizations mums for Liberty there are Church groups you know it's more networked and organized it's less organized in Canada Britain is also not particularly well organized either I think in the places that don't have the sort of Grassroots organization you're going to probably have to rely on capturing a a political party from the Grassroots and like at the conservatives and trying to get them to focus on these cultural issues so for example in Ontario the voters are very much wanting this the the Ontario conservative party is just a liberal conservative fiscal party that is hiding from this issue what you would ordinarily expect is either a third- party Challenge on the populist side or a faction within uh the Ontario conservative party the Grassroots having a revolt and saying we want to deselect these MPS we want MPS who will reflect our views I don't know how that happens in Canada yeah I I think it was George Orwell that said those who control the past control the future and and it brings us back to that question of you know it's too late by the time you get to Harvard uh to rectify the situation we need to be dealing with what kids are learning and what kids are being taught at a much earlier age I mean I had young nieces going to school who were required to WR write essays about basically how horrible white people had been to indigenous people you know instead of turning that into a positive uh experience and saying let's learn a little bit about our history and things that we did that were bad and things that we did it's it's presumed that everything is bad and then you you get that resistance from a young person who goes but I I'm not bad well exactly I mean the you know it's interesting that you'll never get they'll never be taught about indigenous you know never never be taught that the comansi almost wiped out the Apaches in a genes or or about slavery on the West CO so do you ever this totally romanticized airbrushed view of the indigenous kind of noble savage and I I had a question on the survey um do you think you know do you agree with the statement native peoples lived in peace and Harmony until the European settlers arrived in Canada and you had slightly more agreeing with that than disagreeing but it kind of shows you how that heavily romanticize curated version of indigenous versus this heavily sort of the opposite for whites they're just bloodthirsty settlers the reality is things were pretty tough and and and and harsh and pretty awful in many ways so there's a lot of good that was brought in with the settlers as well as a lot of bad that would be sort of the way to teach it objectively but you I think the schools H that has to be the top I think a top priority uh for right of Center political parties going forward we've seen it in the US with critical race theory in schools in Virginia with yunin and Florida with d sandis but those sorts of campaigns where you were really going in and saying No this is the curriculum you're not to teach these Concepts that are unscientific and they're essentially biased Concepts right um and that's and but I think that needs to become much more of a serious thing because a study we did in the US showed that the students who were taught large numbers of these Concepts actually were much more likely to believe in affirmative action reparations white guilt all of these things so the the teaching really has an impact on those young kids um well and if you're telling kids that that math is racist right you know uh then then you're you're you're also instilling in kids that there's not much sense learning those things if it's bad and that's what troubles me the the associated concept when we when we make those declarations yeah I mean it's especially I think hard when you deal with subjects like the humanities and English literature yeah where there's been the whole you know certainly at University level is all this sort of feminist anti-racist appro approach and so a lot of people are just tuning out and sort of applications to the humanities have been plummeting because who wants to study something that's seen as toxic and and the worst thing in the world you're not gonna want to study Shakespeare if the only thing you learn about him is he's a sexist or or racist or something so in your own experience you've had this as well and I again I'm I'm not sure but you left a university that you were at because you felt that your ideas will let you have a a swigle well I know I'm making you talk a no no that's please that's okay um but I think you've had your own experience with this in terms of feeling in the academic and God knows you would not be alone if that was the case um that your views were were too conservative and therefore you were not part of the mainstream yeah I mean it was always never a problem with my department colleagues for example um but once you get a few toxic individuals who are fired up social justice activists they can make your life quite difficult they can sort of get people to launch internal complaints they can try and get you investigated um and yeah so it was a number of these radicals within the university now the top management layer was fine they just wanted these things to go away and they were you know I don't have a criticism of them but it's once you get down into the layers of activists they can sort of make your life difficult now of course the other problem is you know in Britain and North America it's about 10 to one left to right um in the social sciences amongst academics when you have a situation where it's 10 to one first of all if everybody discriminates equally it does if you're the one and they're the 10 the number of people discriminating in your favor is only one and against you it's 10 so you're going to feel you're going to have to self-censor your views a lot more right the second thing is when you get that monoculture it emboldens extremism extremists who exemplify uh this and so I yeah I sort of said well you know I've done this for 25 years I've been in the regular system and I thought you know University of Buckingham is a university that at least has a history that would mean it's going to be more pro- free speech now it's still a left leaning University and conventional University in almost every sense but the leadership is is very much supportive and so I thought well we'll put on this new course something you can't do at a regular University we're going to look at woke as an ideology the way we look at Socialism or liberalism or fascism or anything else objectively an ically but we're going to treat it as an ideology because it likes to cloak itself in the Mantra of just being nice and oh it's just something Everybody Must agree with well no actually it's Dei and and woke is an ideology and it happens to have control of a lot of Institutions we're going to study it as an ideology how it arose who supports it the politics of it the philosophy of it so that's really what I what I did and this open online course is available to anyone in the world uh you know low cost options as well if you just want lectures and readings so just check out my Twitter you want to sign up but but you're also seeing like there is starting to be some push back in larger institutions not necessarily governments but banks that have been you know with either ESG requirements or or Dei requirements saying you know we we we have to function we have to have people that know what they're doing we need to if we're trying to make money in invest in things that make money not just invest in things we like like we're starting to see the debate a at least come out of the closet a little bit Yeah there's definitely been a shift in the last few years um and Dei is coming under more scrutiny it's been cut back in corporations to some degree but I would caution against those who want to say well woke has peaked it's now fading away and it'll be like McCarthyism it'll be gone I I don't think that the reason I say that is because on so many of these attitudes it's the younger part of the population that are more woke than the older and typically that'll be within say in Canada for example liberal and NDP voters who are older are considerably less woke than liberal and NDP voters who are younger now it may not make as much difference amongst conservatives but that age difference is there also in Academia older professors are much more tolerant of free speech than younger professors and My worry is even though there's this temporary correction uh as that gen Z group becomes the median Professor employee voter right they are going to change our culture away from that Free Speech objective truth classical liberal culture into this more cultural socialist atmosphere and that's my worry as for the longer term yeah I think that's a really interesting point uh you or someone was quoting Milton Friedman on this saying that a society that puts equality before Freedom will end up with neither and uh I I think that's a good thing yeah the debate that we're we're wrestling through right now really interesting great to talk with you thanks for doing this work thanks for having me I've enjoyed every minute of it Pamela well okay let's just tell people now Eric kofman he's a Canadian teaching politics in the UK he's at the University of Buckingham this class that you can find and sign up w the origins Dynamics and implications of an elite ideology so they can just check you out at your your Zoom site or your not your Zoom your your um Twitter I know its name changes from X to but but yeah if you just go to my Twitter which is epka a FM EP cofam um the pin tweet there we just take you there um to to sign up if you want and yeah I mean the class has been I've also got a seminar option where people are on zoom and that's been really fun we've got Canadians Brits Americans uh Europeans yeah well and they can also check out because you're a fellow at the McDonald laier Institute and that's where for whom you did this report the politics of culture wars in contemporary Canada so they can find that stuff there as well yes yes pleasa please mli is doing the best work in this area so uh I definitely recommend people not just myself there's many other people have written interesting stuff there He Lovely to meet you we'll talk again I bet I bet we will I hope so keep up your good work too okay okay P we'll see we'll see you again so that is it for this edition of No Nonsense with Pamela Wallen we'll see you soon

Channel: No Nonsense with Pamela Wallin

Views: 638

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Id: f4odxH1GNPY

Length: 44min 15sec (2655 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024