Mm.

How does that fall apart? I mean, h- well, it falls apart because of fragmentation.

It falls apart because you have Athens and Sparta having the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, which weakens them fundamentally with the other city states involved, Thebes, et cetera.

And that opens, uh, that makes them so weak that the Macedonians can effectively take over.

Philip II can run ravage over them, paving the way for his son, Alexander the Great- To make incursions into Persia.

But it was the fragmentation.

He couldn't have done it unless Greek, Greece was falling apart from within.

Mm-hmm.

So what is their definition of woke, and what is your definition of woke? Yeah, I mean,

that's a problem, isn't it? Because the term has been through so many evolutions.

It actually originates from black vernacular in the US of staying woke, being alert to racial injustice, which is something that pretty much everyone would agree with.

I mean, if that were the case, then I would be woke.

Of course, it got hijacked.

It got hijacked very much in the early 2010s by certain campaigners who had a very authoritarian instinct, who believed in censorship, who weren't really out for kindness.

You know, they created an entire notion of cancel culture where they would vilify and destroy people's reputations on the basis that they didn't agree with what they had to say.

But what did you learn when you set up that character and many people started to take her seriously?

Anyway, sorry, I've interrupted you.

No, but you're right.

You could say the language is indelicate, and it connects to Jesus.

And therefore, if you wanted to read it in a certain way, you could see it as offensive.

But of course, it's not a blasphemous poem.

That's a very narrow reading.

Be very wary of anyone who tells you that poetry has a very literal meaning, because of course, it absolutely doesn't.

But if our words are rendered meaningless, it makes that very difficult.

what's happened over a period of time, isn't it?

Yeah.

So the real thing that should happen in the UK is they should scrap the College of Policing.

They should set up a new body to train the police that is fit for purpose.

But no one has the, there's no political will to do that.

So the threat that we see to free speech in the UK, the fact that so many people are being arrested and investigated for non-crime or for offensive speech and sometimes even going to prison for offensive speech.

The reason that's happening is that activists are training the police to do that and the government is doing nothing about it.

like I mean more fierce because they fear that more people are speaking up against them now

I mean, how did we...

Yeah, I mean...

I mean, Five Pillars would claim they made no threat whatsoever.

What they did is they published an image of John and where the tour he's undertaking and said that it's outrageous that venues would allow, I think they called him a renowned Islamophobe or something ridiculous like that.

Of course, the problem with that sort of thing is, you know, many critics have pointed out that sort of, exposing him, targeting him to a lot of unsavory types.

So that was the problem there.

But, you know, that word Islamophobia is a meaningless word.

And, you know, the middle to upper classes – of course their culture and values are the good ones.

Tell me why you wrote it and, and, and what you learned and all of those things.

Well, it's not the sort of book I ever envisaged that I would have to write.

Um, you know, I think if you go back 10, 15 years, the idea that free speech, which is obviously what- the seedbed of all our liberties, would be something that we, we, we would have to defend would have probably seemed a little bit ridiculous to me because I, I basically took it for granted.

I thought that everyone was on, on that side.

Um, but I fear that something has happened, uh, particularly over the past 10 years or so, and it is connected, I feel, with the, the rise of this social justice movement or what we might call critical social justice or however we want, we want to call it.

A lot of people call it the woke movement.

What- what- however you want to label that ideology, which at it heart- at its heart, has a real mistrust of free speech.

so you get a quasi-criminal record.

What's Arizona...

Well, it depends.

I mean, where I was living before, I was in quite a douchey area.

And in fact, I was living in a sort of tower block, which was known for being where the OnlyFans models live.

So, I mean, the pool outside my balcony was just full of OnlyFans models, male and female.

Everyone there looked like a model.

Sometimes they were filming each other.

Yeah.

It's a waste of taxpayers' money if you devote millions to a debunk- prebunking project." I mean, h- how do we go about, um, uh, denuding these people of, uh, influence?

I think, well, I mean, they've already started creating the index, by the way.

There, there were supplementary, uh, uh, materials appended to the publication of this report which listed various examples of in- misinformation.

As you say, these were all trawled from, uh, this, uh, European Digital Media Observatory, um, uh, publication over five years, which they trawled through or got AI to trawl through for them.

But you ended up with phrases like, uh, "Imani Caliph is a man," who obviously that's the, the, the boxer who won in the women's boxing category at the 2024 Paris Olympics, uh, but now has been banned from future Olympic Games and future, future games because- Uh, for refusing to take a sex test.

Um, so a, a statement like that, which is almost certainly a statement of fact, is now in a column produced by a, a body commissioned by the government as an example of, of misinformation.

Now, as to the question of what you then do about that, you know, I mean, you said, I think, how do you persuade Andy Burnham, uh, that this is shoddy? You can't, I don't think.

Um, why don't they just kind of, you know, try and persuade us in the kind of conventional democratic way? Why not just take their arguments into the public square and do their best to defend them? Why this constant sidestepping of debate? Why techniques like cancellation, no-platforming, delegitimizing their opponents by smearing them as kind of bad actors, trafficking in mis and disinformation, and hate speech, and so on and so forth? W- w- why don't they, you know, go for the more conventional and potentially more effective way of winning the argument? Because what they're doing isn't working.

Mm-hmm

... and scrutiny, uh, the most powerful elements of society.

But then, all of a sudden, this movement came along, which we might call wokeness or critical social justice or whatever you want to call it, which was effectively a new, powerful force in society, uh, which no one was ridiculing.

Um, it was as though for all of us, this one closed system of thought had somehow successfully, uh, portrayed itself as the underdog and therefore became ring-fenced from satirical attention, which is an interesting, unprecedented thing.

You know, normally we know the church, the state, the government, whatever, we know who the powerful people are, and we know where the satirist's target will be.

But this was a group that said, "If you mock us, you're actually punching down."

Yeah.

And you know, we have this similarly j- just today in the House of, in, in the House of Commons.

Women are throwing themselves at

him.

That's what I was going to get to, is that, you know...

while the acts are perpetrated by a very small psychopathic minority, what is more concerning is the support for it more broadly.

And you point to something very, that is a very disturbing trend.

I mean, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or otherwise known as FIRE, Their last survey is the most horrific at all.

I mean, I think it's coming up as over 30% of students in the US who think that violence is sometimes acceptable to shut down a visiting speaker if they don't agree with their views.

And so if you look at it from the lens of the progressive, at least in the way that it's presented nowadays in mass media and academia, I would be an anti-Semite if that was the way I thought of the world.

What they are effectively saying in Parliament is that we want to support the idea of effectively criminalising clinicians who want to do some kind of explorative therapy, and therefore fast-track gay kids onto that pathway of sterilisation.

So they are supporting gay conversion therapy, but I must add, without knowing that they are supporting gay conversion therapy.

I've been really shocked when I hear the speeches of people like that.

They just don't understand the issues.

They just don't know what they're talking about.

And yet they are promoting this very dangerous, anti-gay, homophobic ideology through the statute books if they got their way.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, you know, it's the worst thing that a parent can hear.

Of course, people are gonna go along with this.

You, you know, they say, "Would you rather have a trans child or a dead child?" Now, the problem with that is that's been debunked.

We know that's no longer the case, right? So we know that, you know, I mean, last year we had a, a letter to the Wall Street Journal from 21 leading specialists in gender care for gender diverse youth.

Uh, and they all said, "The fact is there is no evidence, uh, that puberty blockers are connected to a reduction in suicidal ideation." It's just not there.

Um, and then the key thing I think was last month, which was when there's a m- there's a, a study, uh, published in the British Medical Journal, and this is a group of Finnish adolescents who have been monitored, uh, between 1996 and 2019.

Isn't it amazing, this sort of cycle and the, the, the way the pendulum swings each way, and now it's the s- the medical people and who would say they're on the left or something, and then it's-

Tell us how that worked its way out in the woke debates.

Well, I mean, you could say that this ties into your previous question about the origins of wokeness, insofar as you can trace back a lot of the, uh, the presuppositions of woke activists in the work of the French post-structuralists of the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, or indeed you can bring into that the precedent of the Frankfurt School and its mistrust of popular culture.

And, you know, you can find these strands, but the problem is that the woke movement as such doesn't have that kind of intellectual coherence or history to it.

It seems to take the theorizing of these people and start from that base point.

So for instance, when you come to the idea of Foucault or the idea of society being, uh, effectively grids of power, and that these invisible power structures permeate absolutely everything and particularly perpetuated through discourse, that's just taken as a given in the woke movement.

This is why they say words are violence, and they are so pro-censorship and pro-hate speech laws.

The idea being that if we can just control what people say and when they say it, and even control the, what words mean, or in that very Orwellian, chilling way, reduce the, the, the, the, the potential vocabulary so that certain ideas simply disappear because there's no way to describe those ideas.

Do you have a sense of where one should draw the line in terms of state intervention, effectively prosecuting people for saying things and not being persuaded by their freedom of speech excuse for doing so?

Can you tell them a little bit what's happening and your journey?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting hearing Deepak and Natasha say about their particular story, because, of course, artists have always been the most free-thinking of people.

The people who do say what they think, they're not meant to all agree.

They're meant to just be expressing something about themselves.

And if you're not allowed to do that as musicians, then what good is it? What's the point? You're not really creating anything.

You're just mimicking something else.

So that's not really art.

Well, I mean,

It's

very embarrassing.

And when Trump says that Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill, that has got to be the understatement of the millennium.

It's absolutely incredible.

You know, he didn't want to support the U.S. when it came to Iran early on.

He wouldn't let American warships launch from British bases.

He then reneged on that and said, OK, well, you can do it for defensive purposes.

Andrew, why is Keir Starmer so weak on radical Islam? What's the reasoning, you think,

... just in the fear of being arrested.

But the, but the problem for Reform will be: do they have the guts to do what Trump did? Do they have the guts to come in and say, "Look, we need to scrap the civil service..." Well, you can't scrap the civil service, but you need to sort of bleed it dry.

You need to, you need to give it a good rinse, right? You need to get rid of the...

'Cause there have been whistleblowers in the UK civil service who've said, "We're not going to do what the elected politicians say.

If, if they come in and say there's an, a- an immigration problem, we're just going to stymie that.

We're not going to do what they want." We've got, uh, police who are routinely investigating people for their opinions.

Uh, just to put that into context, by the way, if we're talking about this deep state that we've got to clean out, our police force is trained by a body called the College of Policing.

... and they're the good guys.

See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com.

I recently got piled on by a group of gender-critical feminists.

I have to say a minority of gender-critical feminists fall into this category because I mentioned that in the past when I've spoken about close friends of mine, trans-identified close friends of mine, I have used the pronouns that they prefer.

I never do it in my reporting.

I get really angry when I see the BBC referring to a sex offender or a murderer as she, when it's clearly a man.

I think that's just misleading the public.

So I never do anything like that.

What about

between 80 and 90% of adolescents who were referred for gender treatment at the Tavistock were same-sex attracted.

So that's practically all of them.

In other words, what you have is a situation where gay children or children who are likely to grow up gay are being fixed or heterosexualized on the NHS because it could be all sorts of reasons.

It can be internalized homophobia, it can be homophobia within the family.

Whistleblowers from the Tavistock have made clear that there was endemic homophobia there, not just from staff, but from parents who didn't like the idea of having a gay kid.

There was a joke at the Tavistock clinic among staff about how there's not going to be any gay people left, which means they knew full well what they were doing.

not just

that.

(laughs)

And, and successfully.

There is a, uh, an element of the, uh...

How can we put it? The intimidatory...

It's a, it's a movement that attracts bullies and sociopaths, right? Because if you are a sociopath or a psychopath even and you want to inflict as much pain on other people, this is the perfect movement for you because you can do it, but you do it under the guise of compassion and love.

Perfect, right? That's...

Of course you do it.

for this sort of stuff? Or how do you think it sort of slots in to your existing world view of, of this kind of-

Mm-hmm.

It looked old-fashioned.

It looked weirdly passe.

Now, that would have seemed normal a few y- in, in, in the midst of, uh, the craziness of 2020 you'd look at that and think, "That's what everyone's doing, yeah, okay." But now it seems boring (laughs).

And that's, that's the biggest signal, I think.

It's things like that, things like people taking their pronouns out of their bios, not really acknowledging, just sort of getting rid of it.

I mean, there's a lot of people, I think, waking up to it and thinking, "How am I gonna roll this back?" And one of the ways you do that, I guess, is you say...

Mm-hmm.