Hurty Words (with Stewart Lee)

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Hello, welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a guide to the use and abuse of political language. It's Amanda Nutsche here, and I'm joined this week by a returning guest you're now called, Stuart Lee. The last time you were on, we asked you if there were any words you wanted to get rid of. You said, minded, as in one of those words that nobody uses apart from politicians. Yeah, although I forgot.

that because um when i was offered to come back on this i said i am minded to return so i actually have begun to use it well the more i thought about it it's very refreshing to have you thank you I've not decided to use words in new contexts. It's a refreshing one that they use now. No, no, no. They use, what is it, uncosted? I'm going to use refreshing as much as I can. Excellent. Good. Well, I will be enticed to see how...

You get on. You will be enticed. You'll be enticed. And you'll be left feeling refreshed, I think. Oh, I hope so. This week, we're really getting to the hub of everything we've been talking about for the past year, which is, what are words for? We're really looking at hate speech, freedom of expression, variations of that term. Before we do, we normally, for our podcast listeners who get the longer show.

What have you been up to this week, Stuart? Well, I'm on tour with my stand-up show, Stuart Lee vs. The Man Wolf, which I wrote in November, December last year, about the normalisation of horrible rhetoric in entertainment and media. it looked a little bit ahead of the curve at the time. Now it's on the nose and it's at risk of becoming obsolete as the situation gets rapidly worse. Do you fear for your safety? Do I fear for my safety? Not on a day-to-day basis, but as a comedian.

I think if Farage gets in, which he may well do, and learns all the lessons that Trump has shown him, then I think it might be difficult to operate as a comedian. I mean, I'm not reliant on the patronage of broadcasters, so I'm not as vulnerable in that way. Yeah, I know. But I remember the then UKIP leader, Paul Nuttall, saying that if he was in power, he wouldn't want comedians that made fun of UKIP to be allowed to appear.

at council-funded theatres, if you keep going in. So it's kind of... You can imagine they begin to dismantle the infrastructure that allows you to perform. Sarah Pascoe, who was a guest presenter... Has she been back? Not yet, but this is only programmed to the new one. I told a story of her one encounter with Nigel Farage. It was during the whole Brexit debate, so it was a little while back. And she was in the...

Side Room, I think they were both going to appear in the same event. She thought, I'll go up and say hello. She said, I know who you are. I'm Sarah Pascoe. I'm a comedian. And Nigel Frasch instantly said, I don't find comedy funny.

Wow, that's an amazing sentence, isn't it? It is, isn't it? It's like saying, I'm disappointed in books. Yeah, or I don't find that food has any taste or something like that. Well, you know what? You sometimes wonder, don't you, about people like that? I mean, Trump, for example, just seems emotional. emotionally tone deaf to culture. He doesn't seem to have any feel for music or, you know. People say he doesn't read. Not only doesn't he read, but even trying to sub down.

topics for his perusal he won't look at them so basically you've got to boil any complex issue down to one short sentence which you say at him as he leaves the room. So it's the last thing he's heard before he goes out and speaks. But just keeping it light to start with, I believe you have an amazing anecdote about a bus. Well...

It's not entirely irrelevant. I was in Cardiff and I had to go to Newport. I was going to Newport to see Carlton B. Morgan, the old Welsh punk who's got a retrospective coming out this week called Living in Treachery. I went to the stop at the correct time. pay on the coach the coach arrived just a little bit late and by the time the bags had been loaded on I was unable to pay to get on it because technically

it had left, right? According to the app and the company, it wasn't, it had gone. I went, but it's there and there's empty seats on it. And he went, I know, but technically it's left. I mean, technically the driver was already, he wasn't even there. He was two miles away. The knock-on effect of that is that I had to get a minicab and pollute the environment and blah, blah, blah. But I just think it's kind of interesting that...

He and I, we knew it was ridiculous, but we were slaves to the reality of the... The tyranny of machines. Of the machines, yeah. And it's a kind of funny little thing. that happened because it was silly because we could see the empty seats. But also, you know, it has a kind of relevance, I suppose, to we're told to believe the information.

Yes. An AI-generated entry on me, my friend sent me, said I died in 2016. And we both knew I hadn't. Well, clearly you're not, because you're on that bus going to Newport. Well, that's the other thing. The dead me's on the bus. Were you then officially off grid? Yeah. If all machines thought you were on the bus to Newport, could you have gone in Cardiff and committed crimes? I was in a limbo, or Newport, as it's known.

The more that AI generates more information, if that information is based on false information, But that's the information we'll be told to accept. If we look, here it is. Exactly. I always put AI down at the moment as they're very, very good bullshitters. They're like candidates on The Apprentice. They say things with confidence about which they have some experience. but some of it could be wrong. And you just don't know which part of it is wrong.

And that's part of the problem because we're now kind of spending, or our governments are spending massive contracts putting AI into every aspect of our lives. Yeah, I sometimes feel this AI energy deal that's just been done with Trump is basically just using us as a huge... experiment to see how is it possible to power the servers that AI requires. I mean, we're going to need 10 times the energy to do them.

Britain, was it? Airstrip 1. I think, I think, actually in the future would be known as Battery 5. Yeah, it does feel like that. I mean, I know that, I was talking to someone last night from Tucson and they're setting up a load in the, of servers in the, in the desert. Yeah. Now there are underground aquifers for the water, but it will run out. It's really weird that we would squander the last of our water resources to enable AI to generate inaccurate information saying that I'm dead.

so great well thank you for that lovely light story about a bus before we go on to like the really heavy stuff um i must pick up on we mentioned uh really and i last week were discussing at the end of show CRINC, which is the acronym for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea Alliance, and how feeble it sounded as a menacing force.

I'm indebted. At this point, I always feel a bit like Cyril Fletcher. Do you remember Cyril Fletcher? Older people will remember. I'm indebted to Mr. Harrison. That's right. On That's Life. He sat in a corner and read, I'm indebted to Mr. Weatherswick from... for sending in this potato that looks like Gladstone. I'm indebted to Kaiser of Crisps.

That's not his or her real name. On Blue Sky, he said, I thoroughly enjoyed Strong Message here, phase two. But as I listened, I couldn't help musing that if the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea axis, crink, enticed Libya and Yemen to join, the grouping would then be crinkly. I'll leave that one with you. Yeah, it's good. It's like a very, very poor enemy in a Bond film, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crinkly wants a weapon. But the real reason we're here is to discuss...

Hurty words, a phrase used by Lucy Connolly, the recently released... Political prisoner. Political prisoner, we now must call her, otherwise we'll be taken off air. The whole question of freedom of speech. Started, I think, by Vance, who came over to Europe not long after the inauguration and said... He said a fairly inaccurate thing about anti-abortion protests. either misunderstood or chose to misunderstand a Scottish directive that...

you shouldn't protest within a certain distance of an abortion clinic. He chose to misunderstand that, that if you were praying, that was a form of protest, and that if your house was within that distance from an abortion clinic and you were praying privately in your own house, you'd be... arrested is an extremely big stretch and this became a story that he chose to amplify to give the impression that people in britain were being arrested for praying alone in their houses

And that's what he said in that speech. He amplified that story in that speech. That's right. He also said you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail, whether that's the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home. or a journalist trying to report the news. Yeah, well, that has all changed, hasn't it? Six, seven months later, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk...

We have, first of all, there's been threats to take the licenses away from main broadcasters. Jimmy Kimmel was taken off air and subsequently reinstated after thoughtful conversations with Disney. I haven't seen the transcript of those. I wonder how thoughtful they were. But Trump has said, we have a radical left lunatics out there. We just have to beat the hell out of them. And when asked by an ABC News reporter whether they...

Attorney General, Pam Bondi, whose threats to prosecute people who dispers hate speech. Who would be those targets? Trump said, she'd probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It's hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Yeah, I mean, the problem with trying to make sense of anything, Trump says it's just like a baby, isn't it?

that responds to the last thing that happened to it on a whim. What's more weird is Vance. And these statements about freedom of speech and the press, I mean, what's absolutely bizarre is that Trump and Vance's angle about the UK is that we don't have freedom of speech. Starmer maintains that we do and actually quite robustly stood up to them about that idea when they were trying to bully him in the White House. And yet, he completely cooperated this week.

led by donkeys, were projecting factually accurate information, journalism, if you like, about Trump's relationship with a paedophile onto the wall of a house where a man whose brother was also friends with the paedophile lives. Windsor Castle, and they were arrested. What was the offence? Malicious communication. Malicious? Yeah, which is communication that might upset someone, you know. Or it might upset Andrew.

Yeah, probably, yeah. He was around the other side of the quadrangle and went, oh, that's my face. Am I back? Yeah, and journalists that had criticised Trump before were not let into the press conference. And they were told it was for operational reasons. Operational reasons to be affected by weather. So, you know, we're trying to make this case that we have got freedom of speech, but for the period of Trump's visit, it was definitely suspended in a way that it isn't normally here.

So we've had for the last six months how precious freedom of speech is. Farage has deployed that argument and Elon Musk has repeatedly. He's called himself a free speech absolutist. And therefore, you know, there's a disconnect between all of that and then what happened last week when people like Kimmel made remarks, I wouldn't say even jokes, remarks about Charlie Kirk. The concerted attack on anyone who made light of the Charlie Kirk event, whether it was the killing or the reaction to it.

employers were encouraged to report other employees who might have used remarks on their social media. And then take their jobs off them. Also, Kimmel's remarks weren't really about Shirley Kirk. They were about how strange Trump's reaction to it was. It was a particular interview with Trump where he was asked,

to respond to the killing of Charlie Kirk. And he said, like, one word and then started to talk about the renovations that were happening to the ballroom in the White House. Yes, I mean, at the memorial to Charlie Kirk, he said, I hate my opponents. He praised Charlie Kirk for saying, you should love your opponents.

I hate my policy. And then he announced he was going to make a big, big announcement the next day about autism. Yeah. One of the conservative commentators has said that it was the Reichstag moment. This is Matt Forney, American right-wing journalist. The Reichstag fire was used by the Nazis who said that the communists had done it, and that meant that they could crack down on the left. So it's really weird, because if he understands the actual history of the Reichstag fire, then he knows...

What he's saying is that we can exploit this event cynically to get our own way. But he's done that. He said he's doing that. You're not supposed to say that's what you're doing. I know, because part of their critique of the left is that they have encouraged violence by... portraying the right as nazis calling the right nazis and fascists and the right have been saying we're not nazis so it doesn't help the case when one of them says

Like the Nazis, we will use this like the Nazis did the Reichstag fire. It kind of undermines the argument, which makes you think that actually this is more, isn't this knowing? Isn't this... There's something, it's beyond cynical, I'd say. There's something kind of cold about taking all of that walk, you can't see this, you can't, that has so riled them for the last five or six years.

And just using it in reverse, just re-badging it and using it back. Yeah, they want to use it in reverse, but on some level, the hive mind of the far right in America or America. It understands that there's a hypocrisy about that. So it's had to rebrand cancel culture with its own new phrase. Yeah, which is what? Consequence culture. Consequence culture. I think it is, yeah. The idea that you're not being...

cancelled that the that your cancellation your loss of your job for your comments is a kind of natural inevitability a consequence like wind or rain or just it's something just it's not like anyone's decision it's just so it's not an argument that your words have consequences

Because, of course, that's protected by the First Amendment and the freedom of speech. Just that consequences will happen to you if you do this, you know, because of consequences. It's a really interesting... bit of language yeah it's a really interesting bit of language and the battleground that allows them to do what they're trying to do will be about language when it'll be about how you rebrand fascism as consequences or

Yeah. Well, it's labeling your opponents as not just opponents, but as criminals, as enemies. I think today Trump has signed an executive order saying Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization, even though it doesn't actually exist as a... It's a very loose assembly. Yeah, yeah. The word terrorist is going to lose its meaning. And I think... That argument was used by backbenchers like Stella Creti calling...

Palestine Action, a terrorist organization, devalues the use of the word terrorism, because you then end up with... teachers and vicars being arrested for saying I support Palestine action. And by saying I support Palestine action, I'm not trying to get across the message that I support Palestine action. I'm just saying that that phrase, I support Palestine action, the government is trying to...

to suppress that phrase so it's important that we don't keep using the phrase i support that's why you had the great you know there's great responsible people wearing t-shirts saying i support plasticine action with a picture of morph on them um who i always have my suspicions about that guy was arrested and then The police said later they had to un-arrest him when they realised it was about plasticine.

There's an interesting disconnect happening, isn't there, where all entertainment is ultimately owned by about five people now. And those five people all seem to be in hock to Trump and they're lent on to drop particular people. Disney, for example, ultimately are the paymasters of Jimmy.

Kimmel aren't they and Disney owns Marvel and Disney owns Star Wars and the message of those films it's always a broadly liberal one about a little person standing up to the empire or whatever and yet the way the companies work is opposite to that i was doing a doing a show recently at the royal festival hall i started improvising with the woman in the front row and she worked for disney i thought this is interesting

I said, you own Marvel Comics, don't you? And I said, yeah. I said, so how do you think, this is why I'm not on panel shows. I said, how does it work? How does Marvel Comics work in a Trump world, right? Because Spider-Man, you're a comic. Spider-Man is the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Spider-Man would be out stopping ice. He would be stopping ice, arresting his Hispanic friends, of which he has many. And that was a key part of the landscape of those stories.

when Nixon was in, Captain America hung up the shield and stepped down for a year and called himself something else. So if those characters were following the trajectory of the... Jewish, liberal, self-educated intellectuals that created them in the 60s. They would be opposed to this government, absolutely, and to its actions. And yet, so you've got this kind of world where the entertainment corporations have inherited all these characters that come from a broadly liberal...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yet they have to... It doesn't make sense for them to function. Maybe something will emerge that is not necessarily a critique of their government because it's hidden behind... layers of allegory i'm talking about consequences man yeah maybe consequences man will be launched. I don't know how he gets his superpowers. Bitten by a Vance. Yes, yes. And so has the ability to see what consequences might occur.

depending on your actions i think you'll have to write it and try and get it funded yeah well that's going to be a hard bit yeah yeah yeah um i think that's a really interesting point that

Once they move the whole argument onto just the meaning of words and the arrival of new words for which they can supply the meaning, you then get... further and further away taken from the facts and the evidence. So the moment Charlie Kirk was killed, there was a lot of... chatter on social media about this is war as in this must be more than one person this is what i've been saying for the last five years they're all out to stop us the left the haters the so on

there's not even a single acknowledgement that evidence is required. And that makes you think by saying it's just obvious. I'm sure in a lot of people, part of you goes, Well, they seem very definite about it. I suppose that must just be the case. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was already too late. You know, before we knew anything about the shooter or his motives or his family background.

Sheila Fogarty on LBC had done a three-hour phone-in about... exactly this uh inviting people to express opinions on left violence at that point we didn't know and as it happens you know he may have some kind of agenda to do with the trans movement we don't really we still don't really know you know Compare that to the assassination of a Labour MP that happened during the Brexit campaign. That shooter, his house was full of neo-Nazi literature and he was connected with those.

groups so it's kind of and yet he clearly also was someone with a loner with mental health issues and really it does it's more likely to be you know the man that shot Ronald Reagan did it because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster yeah I mean there are other ways Other ways. Just flowers. Just flowers. But that moment was seized upon to force the issue. And, of course, the political assassination of Democrat senators.

was never mentioned. There was a study conducted by the Department of Justice in America of political violence, and it concluded that the bulk of political violence was from the right. than on the left, although from both sides. But that was taken down, that study was taken down from the Department of Justice website this week. Yeah. So... Well, a lot of things were taken down from websites in America, including the name of the aircraft Enola Gay during... Oh, that's right, because it has the...

word gay yeah during Tom's initial push because obviously the you know the assumption there was that the Enola gay aircraft that bombed Hiroshima was being used in some way to promote the gay community because there's nothing they like more than the irradiated deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And that's a fact. Lots of weird things are missing, but yeah, that does seem, the removal of that fact.

The majority of political violence from the right is obviously targeted. And we talk about this as if it's far away. It's in America. But, of course, more and more we're seeing how US politics has more than intruded on UK politics. Well, you know, if and when Farage gets... and he's got the blueprint now for how you do all this. Yes, although it would be interesting, his remarks about... So Elon Musk spoke at the London Anti-Immigration Rally, Unite the Kingdom Rally.

which is its official title. You've just called it the London Anti-Immigration Rally. You know, it's the BBC, right? You've got to provide balance. So you have to call it a patriotic demonstration of... love of britain as well yes okay the march for consequences yeah the march for consequences yeah um so musk said this this is a message to the reasonable center the people already wouldn't get involved in politics

they're quiet they just go about their business my message to them if this continues violence is going to come to you you will have no choice you're in a fundamental situation here whether you choose violence or not violence is coming to you you either fight back or you die that's the truth i think

What does it even mean? I know. And what is it relevant to? But what that's doing is taking something that at the very, before he speaks, the idea that he's about to put across to you, you would think of as being far-fetched. But he gradually makes it present by being more and more definitive about it.

He starts by saying people who only wouldn't get involved in politics. That sounds reasonable. A lot of people are like that. That feels like airy-fairy, kind of a very general, nice way of describing most people. They're quiet. They go about it. My message to them, if this continues, whatever this is, right? So you just have to work out what this is. If it continues, violence is going to come to you. Are you against this or for this? Exactly. What is this?

Violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. So he's now criticising you for being, oh, I don't want to get involved. I can't really. It's too hard. I want other people to take those decisions. No, you have to decide.

But it's not actually a decision because it's a fundamental situation. That gives it a special status because it's fundamental. Whether you choose violence or not, okay, so the option is still open, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. So you have no option.

No. Violence is definite and you have to respond with violence. And that's why he says, that's the truth, brackets, I think. Okay, but when you analyse it like that, right, that speech does seem to build. You suggest that the deliberate ambiguity... the word this is planned because it allows all the people with their different grievances whether it's about

immigration economics town planning or whatever in that crowd it allows them all to think it's about this must stop or the violence will come yes so it allows them all to think it's addressing them you suggest that the use of the word fundamental by him is

deliberate because it gives weight to the thing and that he's proceeded in three sort of paragraphs short paragraphs from this is for the reasonable center to the suggestion that they must fight against something yeah but you talk about that as if he's deliberately constructed

that. And I don't know that he does. I think he just, like all of them, he just thinks about. Exactly. But I think it's an instinctive, I think it's an instinctive mould that they have of thinking, which is to declare something as absolute and... present and therefore there is no further need to explain it or to provide evidence. There's no definite article in it. There's only this. Can I read you Farage's response to when he was asked, isn't that a bit inflammatory? Farage said...

Well, the context in which the words have been used left a degree of ambiguity. Which is fair enough for the start of it. He added, if the fight that Musk was talking about was about standing up for our rights and free speech, it was about fighting in elections to overcome the established parties, then that absolutely is the fight that we're in. Violence is coming to you. Either fight back or you die.

That's really about participation in elections. It's about making sure that you perhaps vote in person rather than using a postal vote to make sure that it really, really counts. Farage cannot know and neither can we because it's... it's this it just says this right so

Like, Farage can't know what Musk means by this. We can't know. I don't know that Musk knows what he means by this. He's probably been awake for four days. So it'd be really weird if the tipping point towards... violence in our country is based around a speech from musk in which there's an indefinite article in the middle of it the word this which we have no idea really what the this that we were supposed to fight people about or die

is i just see a menacing moment when you know the word this is spray painted on people's houses it hadn't really it hadn't really struck me how awful and sad that is that it's

There's an assumption that there's this terrible thing happening and we all know what it is, but you're not allowed to talk about it. You're not allowed to talk about it on the BBC. You're not allowed to talk about it anywhere. You lose your job if you talk about it. And that thing, whatever it is, that is this. And this, whatever this is, they need to sort that out. Because if they don't, it's going to be trouble. Well, thank you for clearing that up. That, again, is very refreshing.

Well, I was enticed towards a decision there about the word this. Yeah, there's so much else we want to talk about, but we'll have to do it another day. But at least we've got to the nub of the issue, which is consequences and this are the two words to look out for. Before we go, just resuming my Cyril Fletcher pose. Ria, Lina and I last week discussed the use of the word plastic, as in Kiyostama's complaint that reform were plastic patriots and that the Green Party were plastic progressives.

To call the greens plastic is a biodegradable red flag to a bowl. Sorry, you were going to say, Stuart. Well, I mean, I think the worst, perhaps the worst example of the plastic, you've got your plastic paddies, plastic greens, plastic Bertrand, of course. remember which was an asats version of a belgian punk and that's that's where the phrase starmer was basing it that on it's where the phrase all right because i was i was inundated by three uh tweets and skeets uh

From people explaining it, Andy skitted, plastic is a reference to Stammer's football fandom. It's what supporters call other fans who've never been near their club's matches. Kane on X, however, said plastic reference is from Mean Girls. The plastics are a group of popular vacuous girls.

school who make everyone's lives a misery i'm 60 so you have no excuse watch the film it's epic and ishbnb said i believe it's reference to plastic punks in the 70s derogatory term for people who are not real punks so actually no agreement on plastics other than plastics means plastics but you you say it's uh plastic yeah but i also think the uh the plastics may relate to

the flags that we see draped on the M6, because I took a load down and tried to burn them in the garden, and they just coagulated into a kind of plastic mess. No, they're just a patriotic fat bag. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for listening to Strong Message here. Stuart will be back over the course of the series, whatever that means. And I'll be back next week bringing you an episode from the Labour Party conference, where Keir Starmer will be making what's billed as the speech of his life.

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