All right. I'm with Andrew Doyle again, everybody. Welcome back to Walk-Ins Welcome in person. In person. So good to see you. I know. I know. It's so fun. What brings you to Austin? Well, I'm actually, I'm living in Arizona now. So I've moved from England over to Arizona. So it's not that far here. It's just a short flight.
That's a pretty big move. It is a big, it's for a pasty Brit to go to Arizona. I don't go near the sun here. Like I can burn at night. So I just, I just completely stay out of it. It's crazy. Cause I'm in the desert now. Yeah. There are scorpions. There are rats.
snakes there are cacti that are bigger than me that is not what I'm used to in the leafy suburbs of Hertfordshire no what what it's so like wet and and dreary oh it's dreary yeah yeah that's our character though that's why the british are the way they are well how do you do you go hiking or anything
That's far too much effort. Sometimes I go for walks in the countryside where I live. What part? Are you in Scottsdale? Yeah, I'm in Scottsdale, which is really nice. It is nice. Yeah, it's really good. I have been exploring a bit. I've been to Tombstone. Okay. Because I'm quite into the OK Corral and the cowboy kind of thing. I went to a rodeo. Oh, fun. There isn't someone who's more incongruous at a rodeo than me. Have you been to Sedona?
Yes. Sedona's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. So it is beautiful. It is incredible. It's amazing. There's a lot of natural beauty in Arizona that's crazy. There's all of that. And also, I will say, people are nicer. than in London, where I normally spend a lot of my time. In London, people don't really talk to you. People don't smile at you. There's a lot of mistrust. Here, everyone's really polite.
In Scottsdale. London seems like it's going through it right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. London is a problem. When was the last time you were home? Not long ago, just a couple of months ago. So I had Jewish friends who recently went and they were saying that they didn't know if they'd be able to go back. There is over anti-Semitism.
going on in London. Like, crazy. I mean, there were... That's crazy. Yeah, and the police don't really do anything about it. So, you know, there were charges dropped when some Islamist activists were driving through a Jewish area of London shouting...
anti-Semitic slurs and threats and that was just completely dropped like no one cares and of course you have these various pro-Palestine marches and most of the people there aren't there to be anti-Semitic and aren't there to cause trouble but there's a sizable minority who are and they do explicitly call for violence against jewish people nothing really happens there do you think there's like a something in the gut of western people that is like
It gets activated. I mean, clearly we see it in Islam. There's an anti-Semitic streak. Yes. To say the least. But... Do you think that there is something in the West, too, that seems to like...
Rise up. It always recurs, doesn't it? It's so... I'm obsessed with how weird it is. It's the Venn diagram, the far left and the far right. This is where they totally love each other, totally agree. And it always comes back. I mean, I've seen... a lot of over antisemitism, like proper kind of, on X, I mean, like on social media, like proper kind of dishtermer.
caricatures of jewish people like stuff you thought was eradicated you know we don't have that anymore do we apparently we do like yeah crazy conspiracy theories like everyone at the moment i think i think it's because we've had
experts, media, politicians, all of those lot lying and getting caught out in lies for the last five years or so. So now people are... not going to will they're not going to defer to the judgment of experts but instead they believe absolutely any right crank online who says anything so i know people who used to be just skeptical you know journalists some of them are now saying the
Dinosaurs were a fake and they were created by a cabal of Satanists to run the world. And they mean Jewish people. And they believe all this stuff. And they say that this cabal of Satanists pick the world leaders and they gather in cellars.
to decide what should happen and they drink the blood of christian children or whatever the hell it is sacrifice owls whatever it might be but they are and they mean it like they've lost their fucking mind i have this like bit that i'm trying to work out and for the stage and it's like whenever anyone says to me in dead seriousness candace owens says and that it's like you're in this scene and it's
zombie apocalypse where a bunch of you are hanging out and then you realize someone in your party got bit and you're like oh shit you've been bit so many people willing to believe anything but why believe we need to put you in a cage the room because it's contagious yeah it is so here's the thing like you know These people started out by being annoyed because they were being lied to. And they talk about how you need to have more critical thinking. You need to just read beyond the headlines.
But in order to have critical thinking, you have to apply that consistently. It also means when someone says to you, actually, did you know the moon landings didn't happen? You have to actually think about that, look into it. Don't just say, yeah, that's true because I heard it online. That must be true. But you can find evidence to support really any belief. Yeah, of course you can, yeah.
And I don't blame people for believing every conspiracy theory because they were told, particularly COVID, really broke people. They were told that things that were true were conspiracy theories. That's a hard one because it was a disease with such a low mortality rate and yet the whole of society got shut down. And then renowned epidemiologists who said, this isn't the way to do it. Just shield the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with it. The fact that children were not vulnerable.
We knew they weren't vulnerable to this, and yet schools got shut down. That makes people think, well, what's going on? Why that reaction? There must be something else. And then the renowned epidemiologist... totally reverse course. And they were like, racism is the real virus. Oh, you know, I particularly liked the experts, the medical, was it a medical journal? They wrote about how the Black Lives Matter protests, because you have to shut everything down, but the Black Lives Matter protests.
We're fine. The virus wouldn't spread there. because the virus supported the cause. I don't think they said that, but they said something like... The virus also had BLM signs in their front yard. Exactly. If you look under a microscope, you see the little black fist and you think, okay. No, I think it was... Their argument was that systemic racism... was so deep and nasty and evil that it was worth the spread of the virus for that.
But even that argument is weak. Either there's a life-threatening virus that you shut everything down or there isn't. Right. You can't pick and choose when it's sort of okay. And you had people losing their small businesses. You couldn't go to AA meetings, but you could go.
to liquor stores yeah you couldn't you had like people were dying alone and they were like but go protest what i loved was when you were when i was on a plane there was that weird moment where you were allowed out you were but you had to wear the mask and all that and on the plane
You could take the mask off if you were eating or drinking. No, it was insane. Right. So I just nursed a glass of wine for the whole flight. And that was fine because the virus respected the fact that I was in the midst of nourishment and wouldn't spread at that moment. It was a very considerate virus. That's what I would say about COVID. I also think it was very considerate that...
It knew that it shouldn't spread when you were walking to your table in a restaurant. But once you were seated at the table and took your mask off. This makes me think it must have been developed. in a lab because because no virus is naturally that considerate and that feels very much like eastern
you know, decorum, doesn't it? It does actually, yes. It's very obedient. So maybe it is a Chinese, that makes sense. Maybe it was developed in a lab. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a polite virus. It was about the politeness. It was very subservient. It was just trying to set an example.
For the rest of the viruses that just spread recklessly. That's what it was trying to do. This was a virus that got in line. It obeyed rules. Great. When it comes to the viruses, it's the best. The one I admire the most on an ethical level. Yeah. That's what I would say.
Yeah, I think this was the beginning of the end, like the end of woke as in your most recent book. Yeah, but I should say, because a lot of people say, oh, are you saying in this book that you think it's all over? We can just go home, forget about it. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that.
So much has happened. There have been some seismic shifts, which mean that it's started to decline. And that could take years, right? Because academia is completely infested, schools, all sorts of corporate bodies are completely still infected with it. But if you think about the things that have happened, DEI is being scaled back throughout major corporations, Facebook, Walmart.
mcdonald's meta you know all of that stuff you've got the executive orders that trump signed regarding men and women's sports you've got sporting bodies internationally saying actually maybe it's not a good idea to have men
playing sport with women. You've got in the UK, we had a major Supreme Court ruling that said that sex means biological sex inequality law. So you can't just pretend that that's not a thing and allow... men for instance in women's prisons so that was a that was a major shift we had the cast review into puberty blockers so that and that's
a four-year rigorous study by one of the top pediatricians in the UK. Objective, she had no skin in the game, and she was saying there's no evidence for gender-affirming care for youth. There's no evidence this is beneficial. Puberty blockers have all sorts of risks attached to them. This is a mass experiment on kids who, let's face it, are predominantly gay, autistic.
Yeah. Have other comorbidities. It's one of the biggest scandals. It's like lobotomies. It's up there. Yeah, it is. And but all of that now, now that, you know, all of these these changes have come about. So what I think is that what I'm proposing in the book. is that Woke can't come back to where it was at the height of 2020. You know, it's because it's all built on sand.
And the other thing about it is, I mean, the studies I cite in the book by More in Common show that even at the height of the woke popularity, it was only ever supported by between 8% and 10% of the population of the US and the UK. So that means this was a top-down thing. No one accepted it. It was never accepted, even among left-leaning Democrat voters. I mean, that last poll about men and women's sports, 67% of Democrat voters said they opposed that. So that was a non-partisan issue.
With that in mind, I don't think Woke could ever have sustained, because it was always built on fantasy. But it hasn't gone, because the elite, the ones who pushed it, are scary people. Yeah. And they're going to double down, and they are doubling down, right? They definitely seem to be in the UK. Yeah, they're going for... Well, in the UK, they're ignoring the Supreme Court ruling. Like, the Scottish government is ignoring...
the highest court in the land. They're saying, no, we don't agree that men who identify as women can't use women's bathrooms. We have a president who's ignoring a Supreme Court ruling as well. And it's about TikTok. Is that right? I don't know about this one. Yeah, it should be illegal.
They ruled that it's illegal and that it should not be operating. And it is the one area where he's acting like a dictator or a king. Is that because he's popular on TikTok? Well, no, I don't know what it is. Yeah. Although. I have my theories, but it's also the one area where the left won't call him out for it because they want TikTok. Of course they do. So it's the one area where we could point to him and go, hey, you are, this is, you're ignoring.
yeah well Trump the law and you shouldn't be and nobody's calling him out on it that's so strange I was laughing though because I was we covered on dumpster fire this week the um I'm like obsessed with the Gen Z revolutions in Nepal and Indonesia. Right. And I was like, maybe this is why, though. He knows that Gen Z will overthrow the government. Yeah, well, there's a lot of them.
I mean, the thing is, my understanding of that is that because TikTok is a Chinese-owned company, my understanding is not necessarily that TikTok is an agent of the government, but that the government is entitled to submit to any company to give its data.
to hand its data over at any time yeah is that is that correct so well all they really need to do is divest so they were just saying you need to divest from basically giant state owned china and be owned by an american company have the information based here it's all going to china that makes sense and the ccp refused so
Well, that's suspicious. Why would they refuse? Interesting. But Trump, you know, Trump has his authoritarian moments. I mean, he believes that you should go to prison for burning a flag. I absolutely can't get behind that. Yeah, that's a weird one. That's a very weird one to me. Although I will say this and I'm not justifying it. When I was a kid, I never understood. I understood like, okay, it's your property. You should be able to do whatever you want. What I didn't understand.
was that it was like, I understand supporting free speech, but this was an action. So that was always very confusing to me as a kid. Yeah, but it's free expression. Free expression. And it's that thing of like... You can burn a copy of your own book. Right. You know, and some, you know, we've got, in fact, it's interesting because in the UK, someone's just been convicted only just a couple of months ago of burning a copy of the Quran.
as a form of protest outside the Turkish government. This is a guy called Hamit Koskan. Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, well, he burned the... because he was protesting against President Erdogan of Turkey, who he perceives is fostering Islamism within his own country. So the best place to protest that is outside the Turkish embassy, right, in London. He burns a Quran, his own copy of the Quran.
Two bystanders, one of them attacks him with a knife. Another one kicks him. A Deliveroo driver kicks him while he's on the floor having been stabbed. Now... In that case, the judge actually... I'm not joking about this. The judge actually said, because you were attacked by a guy with a knife and this other guy, that proves that what you were doing was likely to incite violence. In other words, that's victim blaming. That's like saying...
We think this was a potentially insightful act. And there's the proof. You got stabbed for it. Yeah. That's absolutely crazy to me. Yeah, that is crazy. I mean, he has a lot of weird... I think he just was... I think Trump just... ordered there's like this it's like the longest protest that has existed in dc i think it's like for peace or something and it just is there and he didn't like it because it was an eyesore they had a big
blue tent someone told him it was an eyesore and he basically made them like get rid of them so this was an aesthetic judgment he just didn't like the look of the thing yeah yeah oh well actually quite like that the idea if you're going to be a tyrant at least be you know someone with an eye for what looks good Right, that's fine. He just didn't like how trashy it looked. I'm like, have you seen all the gold in your plays? But this is the thing, I think...
And this is an argument I make is I think authoritarianism is not specific to any one side of the political spectrum. I think every major political party in the West has a degree of authoritarianism. It's somewhere. You know, I think the Democrats are a lot worse. And I think they are because they've overtly, I mean, Tim Waltz said in that vice presidential debate that the First Amendment didn't cover hate speech.
And it's interesting because in CBS's transcript, they missed that bit out. But he did say it. Oh, how convenient. Yeah, really convenient. He did say it. And I thought that to me was the most significant part of that debate. That was really chilling. Well, even this past week, I have, I'm like the FCC stuff.
As we're talking, it's like the Jimmy Kimmel was fired and everybody's up in arms about the FCC and they're saying this is chilling. And I'm like, more chilling was Pam Bondi and Trump's loose. throwing around of hate speech last week. I'm so surprised she did that. That's more chilling to me than... This, which I think was a foregone conclusion, I think Carr is a sycophant who likes to try and show off for president because he surrounds himself with bootlickers.
They should have just shut up and stayed out of it. Disney had already decided to fire him the day before. And now Disney gets cover. Yeah. Basically. And it's like. somebody right before we logged in, who's like a legal scholar. Con Carroll, he was tweeting. He's like, people who think you can just rip licenses, you have no idea how this process works. It's a total legal process that takes weeks and months and years. It's not something that.
you can just like get rid of so it's weird isn't it i mean the pan bonnie thing she shouldn't have used that phrase hate speech she has rolled back on it she said she didn't mean quite what she said but that she must know that that is the phrase that that the left have always used to say
We need to censor a speech we don't approve of. She must know. So just that phrase should be retired, right? Entirely. Hearing it out of conservatives mouth too. It's so bad. Just like, what? This is what they've been fighting against for. I mean, but she says she misspoke or whatever, but you know that. She's just not great at this. No. But then the Kimmel thing's interesting because, you know, you're seeing loads of people saying, oh, this is cancel culture, et cetera. Like, this is...
This one is actually a bit more complicated insofar as his ratings were already plummeting. I'm sure that ABC were looking for an excuse to get rid of him. They have been. They've been trying to offload all these guys for years because they just sink money into them and their ratings are horrific and they don't want the leftist.
throw some huge like they're using trump to get rid of all these guys exactly and i think this this idea that uh council culture means that you in the workplace can say whatever you want with no like i'll give you an example so i used to be a teacher if I'd have gone into my classroom and thought, fuck the curriculum, I'm not going to teach what I've signed a contract. I'm going to teach. I'm just going to swear at the kids. So your mother's a whore. What are you dressed like that for?
Hey, you looking at me, you little fucker? No, if I did that and then they called me in and fired me, I couldn't then say, oh, free speech. Because I signed a contract saying I was going to do a job, right? Now, Jimmy Kimmel signed a contract saying he was going to, because it's not just a comedy show, it's also a commentary show. And I've hosted a show like that on British TV. It's tough. So I know that you can't just...
say something that's factually wrong about the news and then say, that's satire. No, he said something that was factually wrong and he fucked up. Really, the correct approach would have been to course correct, apologize, say that was incorrect. Well, Disney wanted him to apologize and he said he was going to double down. And then the advertisers started pulling all their stuff. The affiliates were like, fuck this. All of the local news stations. Because part of the...
There are only four networks in America that are have to go by these guidelines in the FCC. Yeah. And this is what we would call the commons. And it has been absolutely. dominated by the left yeah and it's there's been no pushback and no real way to actually push back but this is
You do have some standards that you have to abide by if you're on one of these networks. You can go start a podcast. You can go to cable. It's literally four networks that you have to abide by this standard where it's like, all right. You can't say factually incorrect things or slander half of America. This idea that it's against free speech, if you fail to fulfill your job description and are fired for that, that's not a free speech issue. It's so weird to me. Guys.
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Since the horrific Charlie Kirk murder, all these people saying really horrible things, and I've been shocked by the extent of that. But I'm still uncomfortable with someone who works on a supermarket checkout, says something horrible online, then loses their... livelihood that's a minimum wage person can't afford i think that is a problem i don't think that should happen but if you're for instance a health professional uh and you're calling for murder on your timeline
that kind of disqualifies you from the job. That's not the same thing. So for instance, in the UK, we have the Oxford Union at Oxford University, the oldest, most famous. debating society. At the core of its charter is free speech. We are about free speech. The president-elect, the incoming president, was gloating and celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder. Now, I would say...
that disqualifies him from running a free speech society if he's saying, and he debated Charlie at the Oxford Union a few months ago. Yeah. Now, if he's saying, and lost, he was trans, if he's saying that he's happy when his political opponents die, He is not qualified to run a free speech society. It would be like me being, I don't know, some sort of hyper-religious guy, you know, and then running the atheist society. It would be like...
When Rachel Dolezal was a president of the chapter of the NAACP, do you remember? And she was outed as white. Yeah. You know, it's when people said, oh, she should step down. That wasn't cancel culture. They just thought that maybe a white woman shouldn't be running an organization for black civil rights. Right. So...
You know, it's important to get this right. Yeah, I think a lot of the problem, too, is that so much of cancel culture, too, was... people who are self-destructive who got to hide behind cancel culture as well yeah yeah so i saw this a lot on the right like these fucking unhinged maniacs alcoholics just off there running their mouth mentally ill tweeting threatening people and it's like then they'd get banned and they'd be like this is cancel culture it's like or you're just
A violent psychopath who's harassing people. We used to know this. If you're working in a school, why would a school keep you on if you were calling for violence? Or if you were promoting maps. Right. This is, it's so, it's so pathetic to me. Like, it's clear to me what counts. Like, I think you have to sort of assess things individually. Like that woman, you remember when after the Trump assassination attempt, there was a woman who worked.
in some supermarket minimum wage and she had said something really stupid like why couldn't he aim better or something right now that's a reckless horrible thing to say right whatever um someone went in filmed her asked her about it that went viral she was fired i think that's that's there's no need for that no like that's not she's not in a position of power she's not giving out health care she's not teaching kids like her horrible views don't affect her ability to scan your
barcodes right so you've just got to kind of put it into perspective and just let You know, anyone could be cancelled if you had access to absolutely everything anyone has ever said. Yeah. So there has to be some degree of leeway and understanding that some people fuck up and say horrible things. And I think people will recognise that they did say horrible things. And also people don't realize I mean you and I have done
lived this. We've done lived this. We've done deep dives into this stuff. We've lived it. I was thinking about, I don't know if you remember this guy. He was one of the earliest ridiculous cancels. Who was there? And he was the guy who was wearing the Hawaiian shirt. I can't remember. He was like. Yes. Yes. And he had like a woman friend made it for him and had some like. naked women on it and then the women were offended by it at this conference he went to and they
destroyed this man, publicly came after him. Justine Sacco is another one. I remember logging in and seeing what was happening to her and going, I don't think this is great, guys. This seems a little psycho. She made a joke on Twitter, flew in a plane.
She was making a joke about going to Africa. Yeah. And she said, I hope I don't get AIDS. Just joking. I'm white. Yeah. Something like that. Like something like that. Yeah. And which is like a joke you would hear on fucking kill Tony, by the way. And it's also obviously a joke. Yeah. But she was in public. relations and like it wasn't good it's not like stupid thing to do but the idea that you lose your entire livelihood with no redemption for that for a joke is you know
the guy who got, there was a cop that got fired for donating $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse. What? Yeah. Wow.
that's like this is this is the kind of thing that this is that's why when people are talking about they're literally i'm seeing people online going first they came for jimmy i'm like are you Like, it makes me want to lose my mind because I'm like, it shows me that you have been part and protected by the power that has existed in this country because you have no idea what's been going on for the last decade.
Our president was shot at twice. People were people got they the president literally said he hoped that people weren't vaccinated would die. Basically, like experience a long winter. They gaslit everybody about his dementia. I could go on and on. Remember the guy who got canceled because he was cracking his knuckles and they thought that he was showing the okay symbol? I didn't know about that one. I mean, I could go. Yeah.
The list is long. The list is very long, right? There's no self-awareness. In fact, I've seen a lot of these people crying about Jimmy Kimmel online, a lot of the prominent accounts. A lot of people have found the screenshots of where they gloated. about Roseanne Barr getting fired or something else. You know, these are hypocrites. What they're basically saying is, when someone from my side of the political aisle gets fired, that's wrong.
But you guys, that's fair game. You've got to be consistent about this stuff, surely. And that goes for the right as well. That's why I think they need to be consistent on cancel culture as well and not go down that road where anyone who says anything that you're upset by, you get canceled. I think that's bad.
In the UK, it's worse because we have the police involved, right? No, you guys, I think the UK is last. I think Douglas Murray was right. Do you know what? Well, I've left it for a reason. Yeah. And I do think... I don't know how much you know about or how interesting it is to Americans about the UK, but...
We have a body called the College of Policing. They train the police in England and Wales, but they are activists. They've been captured by activists. I don't know why I always think the police... Because do they have guns? Yeah, well, some of them, not many. They have like billy gloves, right? They have truncheons. I just don't think they're like, it's like I just imagine them like running around. I'm like, what does that training look like? They don't have any guns.
No, they use severe language. They're very disciplined. They're very tall, a lot of them. Yeah, this is why there's out-of-control violence in Europe right now. But they do have some guns. A few of them have guns, but not to the extent of here. They've got like a rod. Yeah, they've got a rod. But these are people who've got the power to handcuff you. This is why they're going after people for tweets and not Pakistani rape.
Well, they said with the Pakistani rape gangs that they didn't want to sow community division. They were worried about... I mean, some of the stories about that are so crazy. Horrific. I mean, I talk about it in the book because they...
The report, there's been the J report. There's been, you know, we now have absolute confirmation that a lot of people in power knew about it. They didn't say anything because they didn't want to be perceived as racist. They were terrified. That accusation of racism is now so powerful. It costs lives.
These girls raped, sometimes killed. You know, in the Manchester Arena bombing at the Ariana Grande concert, in the subsequent report, one of the security guards actually admitted he saw the guy with the bomb, with the rucksack, suspicious.
Guy by himself. He didn't approach because he feared he would look racist if he did. Over 20 kids were killed because of that decision. Well, I'm not blaming him. It's because of the guy with the bomb. But what I'm saying is that fear of being called racist has massive consequences. Oh, yeah. In the grooming gang scandal, I mean, there was one story about a 13-year-old girl was found by police drunk and naked with seven middle-aged Pakistani men, and they arrested the girl.
And they didn't question the men at all about why she was there, what the circumstances were. You had parents going to the police saying, my daughter's being abused and they're accusing these people of racism. Absolutely insane. This failure to apply the law.
because because the uk police have been trained to be activists they have like they won't so for instance uh lucy connolly so there's this mother of one who uh was a childminder she posted a a nasty tweet after the uh the murder of those girls at the yoga class um she thought it was an asylum seeker it wasn't as it happens she posted a nasty tweet saying
go and burn down the hotels for all I care, the hotels with the asylum seekers in. She served over a year in prison. She got sentenced to 31 months. She deleted that tweet within a couple of hours. She regretted it. It was never her intention to incite violence. It didn't incite violence.
But then the other day, an influencer in England with over 200,000 followers, much more power, much more influence, said, kill them all about right wing commentators, about Charlie Kirk. Just kill them all. The police said nothing to see here.
So the police have in the UK an ideological perspective. They will prosecute and choose to prosecute people if they don't align with their views. It seems like there is a big, like... charlie kirk or what was that like the robinson rally or whatever tommy robinson yeah yeah what was that for well what's happened with tommy robinson is he's uh effectively pushed who is he He's a complicated figure.
He was the founder of the EDL, which is the English Defense League, which was perceived by many to be a far-right racist body. Got it. Many years ago, though. The EDL does not exist anymore. It was many years ago. He's been convicted of fraud and all sorts of things. So he's got a dodgy background as well. But he's also...
I think quite clearly, been targeted in situations where he shouldn't be targeted by police. He's become a kind of hate figure for the left. For instance, there was one occasion a couple of years ago when he was at a march, a pro-Israel march. And they just, the police forced him to leave with no justification whatsoever. So there's been a lot of strangeness around him. He's an ambiguous figure. I think there's no getting around that. But the majority of those people, and it could be...
up to a million people on that march in London. We don't know the exact figures because everyone makes up their own figures. But the majority of the people there aren't even necessarily there for him. They are there to say, we are sick. of this situation. We're sick of the police arresting people for tweets. It's not just about that. It's about the fact that the government doesn't listen to them. The government has ignored their concerns for so long. Mostly about immigration.
You know, that's what really what that march was about. You know, I mean, in some towns, they've been changed. They're unrecognizable. You know, we have had sexual assaults of girls because, you know. Ultimately, if you import a huge number of people from a culture where women are not valued. Yeah. Especially Western women. Yeah. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who's in those hotels, every asylum seek, every refugee.
will break the law. Not at all. But a sizable minority have and will because they don't value women. I mean, there was a case in Birmingham where a Muslim man had raped a 13-year-old. And he didn't get jail time because the judge said, well, you didn't understand that you weren't meant to do this because of your Islamic upbringing. I've quoted that in the book because people won't believe me. Yeah.
This man said in court, I didn't think that women were any more valuable than a lollipop you dropped on the floor. And he said this in court. And the judge agreed that, you know, when you're Islamic, how are you to know not to rape? Wow. How are you to know? That's a real thing. Are you familiar with Annette Wilf? No. Annette Wilf? She's an Israeli writer and she's brilliant, but she calls this Westplaining.
Westsplaining. It's such a good term. It's like where you're taking the Western mind and trying to apply it to like a completely different culture and making excusing and making making justifications for it from the West. Western point of view. It's so patronizing and kind of racist. Like not to hold people to the same standards because you think they couldn't possibly know better. That to me is the kind of height of racism as far as I can see. But you're also saying that you have no...
desire or expectation that you integrate. Right. You're in that statement. You're saying, okay, you didn't know better and we don't expect you to know better. But if you're moving as somebody to a culture, I think there should be some...
expectation that you're going to integrate in that society. It should be a condition of citizenship, right? I mean, quite clearly, that shouldn't be a controversial thing to say. And nor should it be controversial to say that some cultures have certain moral standards that are worse than others, right?
perfectly content saying that a culture that believes that young girls should be genetically mutilated and thinks that women are nowhere near as important as men or should be not valued as men. You're talking about the left. Yeah, yeah, right.
Or that gay people should be thrown off buildings. And you could be talking about the far left right now. Right, exactly. I have no problem saying that culture is worse, right? If you're saying that, you know, these queers for Palestine, I'm sorry. Okay, just go there.
Go to Palestine, have your little pride march. See how quickly... I'm sure Hamas would join you, wouldn't they? They'd bring their flags. They'd be like, yeah, we're well up for this. What are you doing? I mean, it's such a luxury belief. It is. We saw this... There was a trans rights protest in London recently. And one of the people on the platform was shouting trans rights. No, what did he say? One struggle, one fight, Palestine, trans rights. I'm like.
You don't know Hamas, do you? No. You don't know what you're saying here. That to me is mind-blowing, the cognitive dissonance there. But it's almost like a kind of fetishizing of other cultures. Yeah. It's almost like this idea that... Anyone on their hierarchy of oppression can do no wrong, which is the most patronizing attitude conceivable as far as I can see. And it still weirdly puts them at the top.
Well, it's a power grab, right? Because it's like, oh, we need to feel bad for all these other sadder cultures that don't understand things. It's like a very strange inversion that happens where it still makes you... supreme to another culture so much of this is about power though yeah there's so there's something so powerful about say that saying that you're standing up for the victim that you're the hero you're the savior i mean it just it it's like crowning yourself with your own halo
Like the sense of power you get from that and lording it over other people. I mean, that's partly it, I guess. I reckon a lot of them do think they're doing good. Yeah, I think they do. They have blinkers on. They don't really understand these cultures that they're... protecting you know not at all you know not at all i want them all to go there i i mean i remember when i was in egypt i've been
Yeah, India. It was like the women would like huddle around me when I was on the bus in India because they knew the men will just try and like... you know snipe and grab and like they're always they travel in gangs it's very intimidating it's um yeah and that and that's that's it's worth really emphasizing like a race essentialist would say or a racist would say that's because they're all like animals and
That's the way they are naturally. Whereas if you're being realistic about this, it's about culture. It's just culture. Like if, you know, it is not a controversial thing to say that a man is not more innately likely to be a rapist if they're born in... Pakistan over Scotland. But if they're raised in that culture where women are demeaned and degraded, of course, they're more likely to be a rapist. I remember talking to, I thought...
I would talk to a lot of young men when I was in India and there, this was during like the woman who got raped on the bus, that famous horrific, horrific story. And then there was a couple and of Swedish bikers and. that i was there in india my dad got a freaking like also bleeding ulcer when i was there because he was like please come home and the
I would talk to the men when I was in like Kerala. I was staying on the West Coast and the young guys, I would be reading the paper and it's like, they really were like, well. Yeah, I mean, if a woman's out after dark, she's... asking for rape like they did and this was young men so they it wasn't like this i because i had thought oh this is just old world yeah and it will be something that maybe this culture grows out of a bit as the the globalization effect kind of
takes over yeah yeah and there's a little bit of it but a lot of it was still just they were like well yeah of course you want to be raped if you're out late and you're a woman i mean this idea that they were like what what is wrong with you why do people ignore that though why do people ignore the
overt cultural distinctions that are just in i mean like in the uk we have 85 i think roughly 85 sharia courts right now we have a there's a parallel legal system right wow now they don't people will say well they don't have actual legal power but they do settle disputes within islamic communities and if you're a woman you get the short shrift there you don't get a good deal
with that that shouldn't happen in the uk you should have one system of law those should be abolished overnight that's crazy i didn't even know that existed yeah yeah but people and and you know you have muslim feminists saying
Can you please look out for us and get rid of these courts, right? But people won't do it. That's like Yasmin Mohammed's fight. Exactly. And what's really annoying about that is these sort of leftists who claim to be pro-women's rights, pro-equality. No, they don't give a shit.
What they're saying is we don't care about Muslim women. No. We care about white women. We don't care about Muslim women. But they don't care about white women either. No, they don't. That's true. If they're of a low class and getting... Rape by Pakistani rape gangs. Well, they see them as an acceptable cost for multiculturalism, apparently. Like, it really does astonish me, the level of willful blindness. I think they are deliberately...
Anything that comes along that disrupts their narrative, they just block out. They pretend it's not happening. Why don't they just address the reality of what's going on? And sometimes those realities are going to be uncomfortable. But that's what living in a society means. You deal with the difficulties. Yeah. Like this utopian nonsense that absolutely everyone in the world wants freedom. You can just...
Delete borders, just a robe. It's fine. Everyone wants the same thing. Everyone wants democracy. Didn't work out in Sweden, did it? They had a complete open border policy, right? And now Sweden has Islamic gangs. It has the highest rate of gun and bomb attacks of any country not at war, with the exception of Mexico. Wow. And just 15 years ago, Sweden was one of the most peaceful.
Low crime rate countries. Have they changed that policy? Well, they've now just two years ago elected a right wing government. Why do you think that is? I went over to Sweden because a few of my books got translated into Swedish and I went over for like a book launch.
And it was one of those, you know what Swedish people are like. They're so sweet and liberal and kind and compassionate and all the rest of it and polite. And I was mingling with all these very nice liberal middle class Swedes and they all wanted to talk about the immigration thing. Wow. And they were all saying the same thing. One woman said to me.
We got it wrong. And I saw in her eyes this horror of what they'd done. We got it wrong. They just thought, let everyone come in. Don't even ask them to assimilate. Let them have their own little areas. And they'll want to. Yeah, let... Grown men pretend that they're kids and sit in a classroom. Don't ask them to learn the language. Don't do anything like this. And it's all going to be fine. No, there's grenade attacks on main streets in Stockholm.
I remember I had a friend of mine in the early days that this was happening, a Swedish stand-up comic called Tobias Pearson. And he sent me a message. I don't mind naming because I've quoted him in the book. and he said it was okay i sent him he sent me a message saying there are gun attacks like he's a lefty yeah liberal not a shred of racism in him at all he's like but there are gun attacks every day there are bomb attacks every day and this is because our left-wing government
It's just trying to pretend it's not a thing. Right. So now, of course, the population is swinging right. Right. But if any government, left or right, just applied the basic liberal principle. which is that equality under the law. Everyone gets treated the same. You don't get special rules because of your skin color or anything. Or your religion. Nothing like that. Just apply the law, then it would...
it would kind of be okay. Even the immigration issue, if it was a condition that integration was part of that. you wouldn't have this issue. It is tough because we have like opt-outs even in America because of religious exemptions and stuff like that. Like for things like vaccines and there are areas where you can opt out of. Well, this was actually a big fight in Virginia around the gender stuff because the Muslims did not want their kids learning all this weird gender shit.
And it was the religious people and they were trying to get opt out of it. And they it became this big fight. I think it went to the Supreme Court. I believe they won. Right. Or it's still I think they won. But. They were saying and so it is weird where you're where you have, but they were the only people who could fight it. And then they were joined by more conservative parents who weren't necessarily like religious. They were just like this gender stuff is fucking weird.
And I don't want my kids. I love that collision, though. Like when Muslim women will say, I'm not going to go to a gym, which is meant to be a female gym and a female changing room and have men in there.
And of course, for religious reasons, they absolutely can't do that. But the intersectional activists will say, but they're actually women. But then they're confronted with... a muslim telling them we don't want this right and they don't know which way to go then because they're going to offend one of their gods like aren't they they're going to offend the the creed of
of Islam or the creed of diversity and gender. Yeah, so much of the, I just interviewed Yaakov Katz. Katz, he's a journalist in Israel. Yeah. And he has a new book out, which is fantastic.
while Israel slept. And they went into this deep dive of like, what happened? How did this, how did October 7th happen? You mean the security? The security failure. Yeah, yeah. And a big part of it was that they were applying this Western mindset to hamas and they thought they were just content to take the money so they were like we knew cutter was giving them 30 million dollars a month yeah yeah a fucking month and they thought
They told themselves this story. They call it concepsia. It's this idea of a paradigm that they all believed from the top down. And they just said, oh, they're happy to take this money. They're happy to, they want to be a part of this. They're just. doing their own thing. Yeah, yeah. Even though I was like, didn't you guys wonder where that money was going? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was saying, you know, because he's been sitting, he's sat in and...
you know, parliament, he sat in briefings and he was like, I've looked at some of these spreadsheets and it didn't add up. And I was like, guys, where is this? Like, you should be getting 360 million and here's the like a year and here's the budget for. and it's just a hundred and fifty where is all this nobody was like nobody noticed there were tunnels being built yeah I mean Hamas
Took all that money, which could have been spent on those people. Yeah, you weren't wondering why there weren't resorts and life was getting better. Exactly. That's crazy to me. They just told themselves that they were enriching themselves. That's why they were living. you know, as billionaires in another country, they really convinced themselves that the money was what they wanted. But what gets me about that is...
You can have this romantic ideal of what these people are and think they're the same as you and want the same things, except they tell you that they don't. They tell you that, yeah. When all these people are on these marches saying from the river to the sea, Palestine will be... They honestly believe that if you just... eradicated that boy, that everyone could live together in peace and harmony. Hamas wants to eradicate the Jews. Yeah.
The Hooties have it on their flag. Death to the Jews. Like they couldn't really be more explicit about their aims, could they? That's why I love this woman, Annette, because she's like, I stopped listening to Western media and I started all. Only listening to Arabic because they actually are very savvy and they will say different things.
For the West than they say to the Arab world. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, just yesterday or two days ago, the head of Hamas was saying there are Jews all over the world. Go kill them. What are you doing? Yeah. He was like, there are 7 million Jews all over the world. That's just here. So go out and start murdering them. And then people say, well, we don't, you know. It's like that Islamist attack in Westminster.
Someone runs in with a knife, screams, this is for Allah. And one of the people who was there says, we'll never know the motive. Just scream the motive in your face. That's like the shooter with Charlie though. Yeah, quite. They're like, it's literally like whatever he carved on the bullets. I mean, a lot of it is memes. I do think it's tough to track a lot of this stuff politically now, too, because these young men, it's a little bit boomerish to put these guys.
on the left right paradigm because they're so immersed in online culture and it is memes and trans and griper and all of this stuff gets mixed in the middle and it's it's Are you familiar with like the Zizians? Never heard of the Zizians. It's the trans. cult that is they're like an armed trans cult they killed um i think it was a border patrol agent one of them they're they're radicals i mean these are these are armed radicals this guy was with a
person who is into like furry porn. I mean, we're real far down the internet rabbit hole. But that, I mean, even in sort of the more mainstream... wing of trans activism violence is just normal like in terms of the rhetoric in terms of the language you can't go to a mainstream trans pride march without seeing placards saying decapitate turfs or kill jk rowling yeah or you know there was a trans
march in london where a guy who thinks he's a woman stood on stage and shouted if you see a turf punch her in the fucking face and of course you always get bad apples in any movement right that wouldn't bother me in of itself it's horrible
But everyone cheered. The whole crowd cheered and applauded. And I kind of think if that were me and that was my movement, I would be thinking, whoa, I don't want to be part of this. This is fucking crazy. But that's what I'm wondering about normie liberals this week. in the wake of Charlie Kirk being murdered and having not everyone, but a large portion of people cheering for this openly on social media.
like administrators, teachers, just, I can't tell you how many people texted me and said, Bridget, I had no idea so many people around me were this would be this happy about this. And I had a comedian friend who's like, she was like, it's been so upsetting seeing how many people are cheering for this. And I'm like, wouldn't you at some point?
As even a liberal go, huh? Yeah, well, there's lots of videos I've seen of Democrats saying, I'm never voting Democrat again. This is it. Like, this has been a massive wake-up call. I've actually been really shocked myself about the extent of it. Yeah. It's normie. It's normie. It's normal. Yeah. You always get it a bit, right? You always get a few idiots. Yeah, like a random. Yeah, yeah. Like...
Back when there was a bomb attack on Margaret Thatcher back in the early 80s by the IRA, there were some people gloating about that. Someone was killed there. There was when Margaret Thatcher died, there were lots of people on the left gloating about it. We've had that forever. Yeah, but this is different. This is...
Overwhelming numbers. Mainstream people. Suzanne Moore, who's a left-wing columnist who now writes for right-wing publications because she believes there's two sexes. So many of us. She's a proper socialist, right? Or proper lefty. And she wrote an article saying... Loads of the people I know from my professional life are celebrating this death. I'm shocked. Yeah. The extent of this, it isn't just we didn't see it before because we didn't have social media before. This is the numbers of this.
is so much higher. There is a real rot. Now, look, I would draw a distinction, right? The far left and the far right have always been nutcases, right? My concern is when... The extremist ideals on both of those sides start seeping into mainstream culture. And I think the mainstream left has a real problem with celebrating violence and a dehumanization.
And just a lack of basic human compassion. There's a viciousness within that that you don't see in the mainstream right to the same degree. You certainly see in the far right, but not to the same. I can't imagine. So, for instance, if a left wing commentator.
The equivalent of Charlie Kirk on the left was shot. Which there isn't one, by the way. Okay, but I don't want to name names because it sounds horrible. We're talking about murder here. But you know what I mean? If it was a figure like that who was shot and killed, you wouldn't see mainstream right wing. columnists writers even just people online and tiktok celebrating or gloating you might see one or two right you wouldn't see thousands and thousands there is a problem on the left
And that's why I think it's incumbent on mainstream leftist commentators to get their own house in order. Yeah, but they're not. Because now they're all going, just we Jimmy. Yeah. And why? Were they spending ages? Rather, if you can't unequivocally come out and say someone being murdered for their opinions is wrong and evil, if you can't unequivocally do that, and instead you say, let's have a look at some of the things he said that were nasty.
implying that maybe he sort of deserved it. It was so many statements like, I don't agree with somebody being murdered, but he was a hateful bigot. You're like, what are you doing? Did you see Ryan Long's thing that he did where it was like trying to draft something with empathy? It's not that I agree with every single thing. Yeah, exactly.
And also the lies about it. Have some intellectual curiosity, right? Don't just assume that the folk devil of Charlie Kirk that has been created for you by other people is the truth. Go and watch some of the videos. You can cherry pick a quotation here or there that doesn't sound good. You could do that. with anyone by the way but misrepresenting like so there's a politician in the uk called alistair campbell
a very notorious politician with a big following, huge following, said online, you know, well, he did call for gay people to be stoned to death. He never did. And if he'd have taken five minutes. to watch the clip in its full context rather than believe these idiots online, he would have known that. And I actually think someone in his position of power has a responsibility to do a tiny bit of research before you slander a dead man so egregiously. Stephen King did the same fucking thing.
He at least came out and said he apologized. And so did Alistair Campbell, to be fair, in the end. But just it's so like if I was going to say a statement about that, someone who's just been murdered, I would. Firstly, I wouldn't. Yeah. I give a bit of basic human time. Yeah. But if I were, I'd check absolutely everything and make damn sure that what I was saying was true. This is disgusting. And also, by the way, we've had prominent leftists.
misusing the word fascist, misusing the word Nazi as a catch-all for anyone they don't like at all. now actual nazism is terrifying if actual nazism was on the rise and dominant you would want to stand up and take arms against it because it is a unique evil and so a lot of people now are convinced that nazism is back It's not. It's gone. There's a handful of neo-Nazis. Charlie Kirk is no... He was one of the good ones. He's against fascism. He's against Nazism. So the misuse of that word...
Now, I'm not blaming anyone but the shooter. Like, the shooter's the one who's responsible. But the misuse of that word raises the temperature. The misuse of that word convinces deranged people that they're doing something righteous when they take up arms against it. Like, it's just... It's not difficult to read a history book. Yeah, this is what I've been saying all week long. I've been saying, read a book. I'm begging you to read a book. I'm begging you.
I'm sounding quite angry. Sorry. I know we want to keep it light, but. No, I don't need to keep it light. It is frustrating. It's very upsetting. I've written a chapter in the book is about the definition of fascism. I go back to Mussolini's original essay on fascism. I say, this is what this fucking thing means. means and and also that you know the one thing unequivocally that we can say because there are
Various definitions of fascism and disagreements amongst people about what qualifies and what does not. However, what we can say with unequivocal certainty is every fascistic regime that has ever existed, the one thing they share is the violent suppression of their political opposition.
Now, the person who shot Charlie Kirk, that was a fascistic, that was a thing that fascist regimes do. Right. Unequivocally. Right. So if you are really against fascism, you should have been the first to say that was wrong. rather than celebrating a fascistic mode of behavior. And these are the people who've been shouting about fascists for ages, seeing fascists in every shadow. And when actual fascism emerges...
When you've got people saying they want to wipe out Jews, for instance, they don't call them fat. They don't call out the actual fascism. Or when you have a lot of people celebrating, like this was something. It's also just, have you read Ordinary Men? Nope. It's all about essentially like how you end up as someone who's cheering for, like how you are a German going about your day watching train.
filled with people or how you end up a guard in Auschwitz like how that can you and a lot of it is thinking you are the good guy you're justified you're morally righteous and that's what so for me has been so chilling about seeing everybody cheering. Part of the problem is you have conservatives who have been, they're usually quiet in their friend groups. They usually just sit and they nod.
Because they know that they're... the minority they listen to their friends talk and they go oh I know my friends are insane I know they think this that or the other thing but I'm gonna like let it slide and just keep my opinion to myself I'm not gonna challenge them I've written about this a lot, about how one of the minute moments that I realized I was voting for Trump was at a dinner party that summer after he was nicked and nearly assassinated.
And people were talking and they were just, they were drinking and, you know, okay. But they were just going, saying things like, oh, you know, do I think that he, it was like so close, just saying. In polite society, like they basically wished that he had been shot. Yeah. And it's like, I know you're drunk and maybe you didn't play the tape for it and look at what that looks like. And I wasn't going to get into a big thing with them about it. But I was like, you are.
okay with saying this at a dinner party. That's crazy to me. It's crazy that you think that this is an you are the good guy. It was the kids pulling down the posters of the kidnapped kids after October 7th. Like I'm the good guy, you think? But you're right, they convince themselves. That's what's chilling about it. That's what's scary about it. They don't think that they're, these are good people. I know these people. I know their heart. I know they take care of their family.
That's what's unsettling about it. I think what it shows is that the power of ideology to rot the soul, to erode your humanity, because if you are completely ideologically thinking... then nothing matters more than your creed. Nothing at all. And that includes human life. That includes babies taken from Israel and murdered. You can rip that poster down because... your goal is higher even than that. That's a willing sacrifice that you're willing to make. Like they do...
I mean, it's interesting what you say about that ordinary man, which I haven't read and I should, because I saw there was a BBC documentary. My husband's obsessed with this book because he's a therapist. So he's like so obsessed with how you psychologically get to a point where you're openly right. on Facebook like yeah kill them all or he deserved it anyone could get there if they get captured by an ideology and we're all susceptible and this documentary I saw about
the Holocaust and it was a BBC documentary. It was filmed back in the 70s or something where these people were still alive. They interviewed an elderly German woman who had written to the Gestapo. to say there's jews living next door you need to do something those jews were taken away and killed and
They present her in this documentary with the letter that she wrote. And she says, I don't remember. She said, that's my name and that's my signature, but I don't remember doing that. And it's really chilling because she was so caught up in what was going on. She behaved in a monstrous way that led to death. But she doesn't now recognize herself in that. That sort of thing makes me think that the complacency of thinking...
You could never become that. Yeah. And I've seen... Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he cites Solzhenitsyn and this idea that... Because Solzhenitsyn says in the Gulag Archipelago, you know, wouldn't it be great if we could just, if there were just good people and bad people and you could put all the bad people over there and then the problem's gone. But he says no, because good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and he's dead right.
we're all susceptible and i've seen people i know and comedians in the uk a lot of them celebrating the death of charlie kirk and a lot of people online and people who should know better people who i think like that woman in 10 years 20 years time will look back and think did i actually say that did i did i just openly online declare to the world that i have no human compassion i have no humanity did i just do that
I mean, it's at that level of sociopathy, I think. Yeah. When you are celebrating an innocent man being killed. In front of his family. I think what's hit so hard about this is, yeah, partly that. Also, that his intention was to go to a place where he knew he would have opposition, to a place where he could open up discussion at a university campus, the home of free speech, where he could talk.
and debate. And what was great about Charlie is he would make a point of hearing people out. He wanted a platform for the other view. He would tell the crowd, stop booing them, let them speak. And for that, he was killed. That's why... It is so, I think it hits so hard. Yeah. Because it feels like an attack on something bigger than even one man. It was. That's a tragedy in of itself. But it's this, I mean, you're not- Because by the way, we all do this.
I have friends who do this for a living, who go out and speak. There's a reason that I really feel comfortable at mothership because they have such high security. And I'm not huge, but I'm big enough that I'm still a target.
when I like have to like I had a weird person I was doing a show here and I stopped it for many reasons but one of them was like I had a weird person here one night and it was just uncomfortable and I was like this is I the only time I have to look myself is when i do events like this yeah and i don't fucking know no like i i don't know if there's like some weirdo who's gonna yeah and and you know political violence it is worth emphasizing that political violence is rare and
And it has always happened. But what's new about this, I think, is the support from the mainstream, the complicity, the idea that this is a good thing. That suggests to me that you're right. Anyone who's willing to speak in public, put their neck out, say something.
that is not necessarily popular, that offends these ideologues is at risk. And I don't think we're going to have outdoor speaking events now, really, on campuses, things like that. I think it'll all have to be indoor. I think security will have to be ramped up. terrorism kind of works it like people will be nervous to say what they that's the point isn't it that's the point and that's that's a real i mean it's just the whole thing has been so horrific this this particular
You know, and people say, well, why weren't you upset about this and that? And like, there's something about. First of all, it's the first political assassination we've had in like 50 years. And so it's not like when was it was like. Was it RFK? I mean, who is the last? Kennedy's Bobby Kennedy. So, I mean, but also he wasn't a politician. No, he didn't have political power. That's why I think even if.
You know, Trump, the assassination attempt on Trump was shocking. This is in another level. I mean, both are obviously appalling. Yeah. This is in another level. This isn't someone who had political power. I mean, he had a lot of political power.
But he wasn't an elected representative who was, you know, exactly. But he was influential. He was influential, sure. And he had robust political opinions. But in a country where, in a country predicated on the free exchange of ideas, you can't do that anymore.
What have you got left? Yeah, I've been really grappling with, and I'm curious on your take because I had this essay that I've been writing forever and I finally finished it. I don't know if I'm... really that happy with the final product that made it to the magazine but i'll deal with it it and it's this idea of like but the right and it's something i just started noticing because i was very much like little miss both sides and
I noticed it in myself was I fundamentally, as somebody who came from progressivism, liberalism, the left, whatever. believed that I was good and they were bad. That was just kind of a default thing that was in me. And then I had to kind of root that out over the past years because I did notice that and people called me out on this.
that anytime I would criticize the left, it was like a knee-jerk reaction that I had to also go, but the right, but Trump. But I would have to balance it with some... It was like an apology. Like, oh, I'm criticizing the left, but the right did this too. And I stopped really doing that and just taking aim at the left at a certain point because I felt like...
what I did realize was because there's this like rubber band effect of, but the right exists in our whole society. It existed in academia and media and everything. And it, it's the, the kind of center-left classical liberal defense of... is always in service of more power to the left. It does not work in the direction of the right because the minute the right even goes like a fraction to the right to correct for the excesses of the left, everybody starts...
Freaking out and going, oh, like literally Hitler, it's fascism, it's Nazism. And there's no equivalent of that on the left. You can go. There's no but the left. You don't ever hear this. You don't ever hear it like, oh, we're criticizing the right, but the left. Yeah, exactly. You're starting to, but you have...
mutilating kids, burning down cities. The media will carry water for all of this. The Luigi and me and Gioni stuff was fucking disgusting. I know that we have an issue with health care, but assassination culture is not the way. It's just we cannot have this in a polite society. The stats are horrible on that as well. Communists will disagree with me on this, by the way. But the numbers of kids on the university campus now support political violence.
has been escalating. It's chilling. They don't get, they don't understand like where this goes. So there's no, my question though is in this asymmetrical Power dynamic where you have had one side that is perfectly happy to wield power in ways that are not like silencing the New York post before the election using the government and, and. cohesion with big tech to silence people around COVID. When you have that going in one direction, how do you...
Correct that. How do you wield power to correct it? So I think strategically, I think there's nothing wrong with identifying problems on all sides. And I do it myself. But I think at the same time. you have to be targeted sometimes. And sometimes you're identifying a particular problem and you should be focusing on that problem. And the...
I think what you're talking about, I suppose, is this whataboutism idea. Like if you criticize the left doing this, well, what about them? They're doing this. What about them? They're doing that. Well, so what? I'm focusing on this at the moment. Yeah. And actually, you also have to be alert to disproportionality, right? If we're talking about...
cancel culture overwhelmingly that's a problem of the left sure there's examples on the right but overwhelmingly it's a problem of the left yeah similarly with political violence and support for political violence right overwhelmingly the support for political violence is in the mainstream left not the mainstream right So that is where your focus is, right? So that's legitimate.
But you will have people saying, well, what about this right winger who supports this or this? Well, now they're trying to say the right is capitalizing on cancel culture. And I'm like, cancel culture is going back 10 years. And they'd always say a tweet resurface. I always joked like it's a dead body in a lake.
Like it just floated to the surface. So no, you went digging for it. You look for it. You're using somebody's 10 year ago opinion to destroy them now. These are things people are saying right now. People are being held. everybody on the left was perfectly okay with these are people who wrote
articles and all kinds of stuff that was like, debanking is good for democracy. Deplatforming, the sitting president of the United States, good for democracy. Cancel culture is good for democracy. Also, it's not cancel culture. It's a...
accountability culture. So you had the left wing that... understood or at least espoused all these beliefs five minutes ago and now suddenly they're free speech warriors and it's like you're fucking full of shit they're just hypocrites you don't believe this no they didn't they never believe you it's in service of power
They should be cheering on the firing of these people over the Charlie Kirk issue. If they genuinely believed that cancel culture was good for democracy, they should be all about this. But they're not. Because they're hypocrites and they don't really have any principles. And that's the problem is that I'm pushing back against this. I'm somebody who's been very like free speech absolutist. I do think you should be able to say whatever. I do not think that this.
This was a free speech issue with Jimmy. I think it's a government malfeasance combined with a corporate decision that now they get to use the government to cover up for their decision. Why did the FCC even have to get involved? Because he's an idiot. and he wanted to show off for Trump. It's like Trump is surrounded by bootlickers and then they asked Trump about it because he's also just a guy who loves being praised and he'll take this as a win.
be like ah we got rid of jimmy yeah exactly like but they've given them ammunition haven't they by even saying anything it's so I'm so mad at that administration because this should have just it was a complete self-own yeah like they should have just fucking said nothing and shut up and we would be not even having this discussion right now. But I think when you talk about...
these people saying, but the right, I think those people are worth ignoring because you're focusing on the hypocrisy of people who call themselves progressive, who call themselves liberal, who call themselves left-wing, and they're attacking all of these people. But how do you pull it?
how do you like, this is what's so complicated is like there, there, when you, I'm even talking from like a government point of view, how do I think like you mentioned, there's been a lot of, of like, pulling back i don't like that it's executive orders because you're going to have another president that's just going to reverse them all i hate that let's try and codify some of these things into law but how do you wield power
It's like this has been such a one-sided fight because the right does tend to... actually believe in their principles of free speech and they have been fighting for people even on the left who are getting canceled yes yes and speaking up for them dave chapelle all kinds of people and then When something like this happens, they'll go, oh, what about free speech? You don't believe in it? When you're like, he was lying.
He was lying and he got caught lying during doing his job and got fired for it. Yeah. And you understood this five seconds ago. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just a lack of familiarity with free speech and what free speech means. And people twist it according to their own political agenda. I think all of this suggests to me that we shouldn't be thinking in terms of left and right really now. We should be thinking in terms of those who believe.
in authoritarianism and those who believe in liberty and that's probably the fault line now yeah but i'm i'm being called a cheerleader for authoritarianism why because i've been tweeting i'm like you guys where the fuck were you because the people who are like Like, oh, Jimmy, they feel like everybody should be making these statements about free speech. I don't think those people are reachable because I don't think they're being honest. Yeah. The truth is, you've said it yourself.
Where were you over the past 10 years? If they weren't there over the past 10 years making these complaints, they're not being honest now. Some of them were classical liberals who were. However, they have their own little pet things where they would have justified authoritarianism.
in COVID, around Trump getting deplatformed, around certain right-wing figures getting debanked. Like you'll find that they were not consistent when it was like their thing. I think anyone who has a record of that kind of hypocrisy can be safely ignored.
on this issue I think if they start screaming about free speech because of Jimmy Kimmel and they haven't been screaming about these other things I don't think in fact if they've been cheering on the censorship of others in the past and now they've got a problem with it I think they can be safely ignored. I've actually got to the point now where I think there's a whole cohort of people who I'm not even going to bother engaging with because they are not honest.
They've proven that they're not honest. They're not consistent in their principles. They don't apparently have any principles. It's like those people cheer, anyone cheering for the death of an innocent man. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. I'm not interested in talking to you. I think you're irredeemable at this point, actually, from my perspective. of the patients.
And then I'm like, what would Charlie do, though? Would he try and reach them? Yeah, but I'm not Charlie Kirk. I don't have his patience. No, I know. It's like that Daryl Davis guy. Like that godsend. You know the Daryl Davis guy who de-radicalizes members of the KKK? Yeah, but have you seen...
the documentaries with him where he's fighting with the BLM guys and they're like oh what did you de-radicalize like seven people in your life they'll give him shit do you know how hard it is to de-radicalize a KKK member I know like that's not bad
that horrible but they were they they're still they're okay but they're there's a like really interesting interaction where they are fighting about it and they're like giving him shit they're like oh wow seven people in your whole lifetime career try doing radicals try doing one
I mean, like these people are like some people are just lost in their ideology to the extent that they cannot be reached. And if they can be reached, it takes a special kind of person like Charlie Cook, who will stand up and have the patience to hear them out, let them speak. And I don't have that patience.
I have it up to a point. Like I want to have a debate and I want to have a discussion with people who are genuinely up to hearing other views and having a debate and defending their views. What I won't do is have a conversation with an ideologue who is going to lie about what you are saying, misrepresent your intent.
intentions, knowingly and willfully misrepresented, they're not interested in a discussion. That's like trying to reach the most religious zealot and tell them their God isn't real. At that point, you have to sort of say, there are enough people, I think, who are somewhere in between. who are wedded to a particular ideological view, but they haven't completely closed their minds to the possibility they might be wrong. They haven't been completely radicalized.
Those are the people I think it's worth reaching because I also think that's the majority. I think that's the majority. But I think I would say if you are celebrating death online, you're probably in that. realm of the unreachable at this point I think do you think that it's just because it's like like a cool thing to do it might okay I accept that maybe there's a sense of people getting swept up in a kind of hysteria or a kind of expectation that this is how
They're meant to behave. It's like a signal that they're in tribe, which is fucked up. Like you should be evaluating your tribe right now if that's your in tribe signal. You're right to correct me on that insofar as you're right. Because maybe in a few weeks time, they'll be like. Oh, I bet it's why was I saying that? What was going on? I just got caught up. I have seen now so many times.
the susceptibility of people to get caught up in hysteria, to say things they don't mean. I mean, my last book was based on the Salem witch trials, where really decent, God-fearing people... suddenly started executing their neighbors. And then a year later, they all said they got it wrong. They all repented. They all said, what were we doing? Like they were horrified by what they did. Well, so tell that to Bridget.
The first witch that was burned. The first one who was hanged, who I mentioned in the book. Yeah, because I remember you saying, that doesn't sit well with me. Bridget was hanged. That's the first thing. Yeah, first one. But, you know, they did... They did realize it was wrong. They did get it wrong. And that shows that you're right. I shouldn't write people off. What I'm saying is on a personal level, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered to sit with some frothing maniac applauding.
assassinations yeah i can't be bothered sitting down with a kkk leader who thinks that white people are gods or whatever i can't be bothered with anyone who is just so it's so you know knee deep in their ideology that they can't move i can't personally be bothered with those people anymore i will talk to the people who will talk
Yeah. But I don't have the patience for it. Yeah, I'm getting dragged because I had this tweet that went very viral. But I was like, you literally had a man. America just watched a man get murdered. And then. a lot of their friends and neighbors and family celebrating this around them and you think and then all you guys are out here like um like whatever they were saying like the
I stand with Jimmy or like first they came for Jimmy. I'm like, are you fucking nuts? You're detached from what happened to average Americans for the past 10 years because they haven't really made a big stink out of it. They went to work. They're like the normie.
americans and they are out that is i'm like you are tone deaf you are missing this moment if you think they are nothing but out of fucks to give but you not think though there's a lot of people maybe on the democrat side on the left side who have seen all of this stuff that we're describing and are now thinking twice like maybe there's going to be more of an awakening and more of a realization
I think I've definitely seen that. There was this one video that was going around. It was a young progressive girl, and she was like, I have been reformed. It led her back to God, actually. Oh, really? She said that it woke her up completely from a darkness that she was in. When you realize you're hanging out with monsters. like that's a scary moment that's a scary realization you know yeah these are monsters like
It's monstrous to celebrate death. It's monstrous. I don't know if I could call them monsters, but it is monstrous. Well, I mean it metaphorically. Yeah, no, no, no. I know. I couldn't be, I don't know anyone anymore in my life.
Like some of the people I used to know and I used to hang out with, I've seen them celebrate. I don't know anyone in my life now who would celebrate for anyone's murder. And I wouldn't want to know those people. And I wonder whether... just you know seeing the extent of the vitriol something might now shift and it may also be you know if you take my view that wokeness is on the decline and is going to die and it's just going to take a while is it may be the case
that the diehards, the people who've invested so much of their lives in this ideology, they're going to behave like cornered rats at this point and they're going to get more extreme and more violent. And you're going to see more of this. That's what I'm worried about. I'm worried about like domestic, you know, mass casualty terrorism, things like that. I'm worried they lost and now the bullets started flying. Yeah, because they have lost. But they lost the culture.
Because this truly is a culture war. If you want to say that Charlie was a victim of something, he was a victim in a culture war. Yeah, exactly. And this is... It could be like that uncomfortable Franz Ferdinand moment where it's just like, all right, we can't get along anymore. We just don't see eye to eye. Although I think a lot of Democrats are looking around like shifty eyed. Like I didn't realize so many of you.
were this far gone or this crazy and it could even shift in in in subtle but important ways for instance you know i saw the other day on a british tv it was only yesterday a british tv program mainstream program a commentator said that charlie kirk was far right and hateful and she didn't just let it go she pushed back she said no that that term isn't accurate
That isn't what he was. Can you defend it? And the guy just started stammering and he couldn't defend it. And she kept going. Now, if mainstream presenters, irrespective of their political affiliation, don't just let the phrase Nazi go. or fascist or whatever they actually push back and say okay you've made that allegation it's a very serious allegation
Now you have to defend it. If they just did that, the landscape could shift. Yeah. If we stop misusing language to such a degree that we dehumanize people in that way. And smear them in that way and just let it go. Because a lot of this, I think, has come from the mainstream tolerance. I mean, in the UK... It's so much of it has come from it. Well, we've got our current deputy prime minister. He's called Trump a fascist. He said that...
pro-Brexit conservatives were worse than Nazis. That's now a guy who's the second guy in power in the UK, right? Now that's infantile. That's the politics of the creche, right? What you need is people like that to be challenged on that. and to say and for people to you know interviewers to say hang on a minute you can't just say that and not be not have any pushback and i i'm sensing
that that's going to change now. People are going to start using terms with greater accuracy. People are going to be condemnatory of those who call for violence and support violence rather than letting it slide. I hope so. But what I think the risk is... As you say, people on the right are now pushed and pushed and pushed and they are sick of it. And they're the ones with all the guns. You don't want that civil war, believe me. Because that's the side that'll win. And they've been, I mean...
This is something that I've been wrestling with even today because I saw Clara Lehman and she was like, a mob is a mob is a mob. It's something I've said. I've written columns about this. And my own priors are being challenged at the moment because... If that was true, wouldn't cities be burning right now? Like if they're in that instead of vigils. Doesn't that tell you something that there aren't that, you know, that.
Compare George Floyd to Charlie Kirk. That is really important. I mean, I've seen all these people. And so I'm like, is that true that a mob is mob? I mean, I think when you get in a mob, they've done enough studies that you lose your mind. Yes, you do. Yeah, there's something about being in a mob. Yes. But this is, I don't know. I've been forced to, I've written a lot about this. Like I'm in a position where I'm being forced to go, well.
How come we're seeing candle vigils, the only people who have been arrested since Charlie was... as of recording this, since Charlie was murdered, were people who were protesting from the left at vigils. Yes. So no one on the right has been arrested for any violence since...
He was killed. That's fucking crazy. Because there is an endemic problem with violence on the mainstream left that isn't there on the right. I mean, I come back to this point. We've seen all these people talking about statistics of violence and talking about how the majority of domestic...
terrorist violence has come from the right or the far right. And they show you these graphs and it looks very convincing. And then you look into it a bit more and you realize that because political violence is so rare, if you extend the parameters by a year, it suddenly flips the other way. So it's like those people.
People who say, oh, far right terrorism is so much more severe than Islamist terrorism. Look at these stats. But they've started the stats after 9-11, haven't they? Or they leave 9-11 out. Or they leave that out. They included in the recent one, they included the Oklahoma.
city bombing which doubles the right way exactly and they left out it was like that swan meme where you're like why'd you leave webinar exactly so that so i suppose what i'm saying is because political violence is so rare you can cherry pick your statistics and set your parameters to get the result you want at any point. It's also who gets labeled a terrorist. Right, there's that as well, because the language is being misused. But what I would also say is...
So what's more important to me, weirdly, at the moment, although obviously I hate political violence wherever it comes from, but what's more important to me is the mainstream support for it, the propensity to riot, the propensity to call for death. That's really far more.
observably far more of a problem on the left. And as you say, if it wasn't, there would be riots right now in the street and there aren't. So that's a reckoning that I think the American left have to deal with. I think I saw somebody, it was really smart. I believe it was like... Red Sea, Stephen Miller, not the one that works for the administration. I think it was him. He was saying people canceling.
People like calling out people and calling their employees, which I don't love this, like where you're calling someone's employee because they tweeted something, unless you work in health care or with children or in a position of authority, if you're a bagger, whatever.
it's not a great impulse, but he was like, this is their mostly peaceful protest. Like this is the right wing. Sure. And he's like, and you don't want to see the other. No, no. Because we actually lived through this in 2022 where it was like.
nice country you've got here would be ashamed if anything happened to it that was like the entire rhetoric leading up to that election yeah it was just like i wouldn't want to burn this country down if you guys make the wrong decision well how did it not happen after trump's assassination attempt there were no riots nothing nothing at all nothing not only that i didn't expect anything like that tells you something i i was i was surprised that there weren't some
well-armed militias in Idaho. Like, you know, there are definitely factions in this country that I thought for sure might like march in the streets. And I mean, I think a lot of it, too, was, you know, Trump kind of standing up and whatever. show like whether that showboating overwhelmed his fear that he stood up and was like fight fight fight because I've talked about this like can you imagine the chaos
In the moment between him being shot and us not knowing what was going on with him. Like wondering if he was dead or alive. That response. I don't care which side of the political. I wouldn't have done that. Are you kidding? I'm just screaming and running for the hills. Like that was admirable. Maybe it was just instinct, but it tells you something about the man.
Like, that was kind of incredible. And then, of course, an iconic photo. I know. Of him with blood in his face with a flag. The guy is a master of media. I mean, even recently in your country, he was eating spaghetti. Did you see that picture? Oh, that was hilarious. Shoving it in his mouth.
And they treat it like a gotcha. But that's why people like Trump. Because even when the king's there, he'll just shovel it in like a pig at the trough. Because why not? Because the king's just another bloke. it's just like a really it's funny and it was hard I didn't know how to grapple with it you know doing what we do being like
I, I'm very hyper aware of clown nose on clown nose off. It's why, even though in dumpster fire, we'll be making fun of everything and being satirical and joking. I always do deep dives into things and they're like, Bridget, it's just jokes. Who cares? I'm like, yeah, but we've got it.
to be factually accurate i try very hard i'm like we can't just be spreading bullshit we have to make sure we're getting it right even if we're joking about it just because i don't i don't want people getting the news for me but i also don't want to just be like running with something that's just not true. People get their news from comics, actually. Unfortunately, I don't think that's great. No, it's not. But we do have the kind of Jon Stewart clown nose on, clown nose off. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you can go, we saw this the other day. Somebody did it where it was like, oh, you said this. And he's like, yeah, but then it was just satire. And it's like, I was just saying, haha, go kill everyone. And it's just satire. And I don't like that.
instinct either and when we've been kind of like haha the unicorns dance while the world burns on dumpster fire and then charlie got murdered and we have been moving towards this moment i i have friends online who've been saying for a long time someone's gonna get
killed because the left excuses a lot of this rhetoric that's right and behavior and he's like someone's gonna get killed someone does get killed and i was like i don't know how to handle this dumb on dumpster fire because i don't want to be like and i I just shot direct to camera, no script, totally was honest, was crying, actually, once I started opening my mouth.
I have 1,700 comments on that video. It has 60,000 views. It's not like it has millions of views. It is. And I've been getting DMs and emails and people were like, thank you for being.
human about this yeah just trying to like grapple with it because i think a lot of people what i've learned from just doing it that way we didn't do any ad like what am i going to do a fucking ad break right now like and now although it might have been funny if i had done an ad break but the human response is what is required in that in that kind of moment
I think that's it. Yeah, yeah. And people were really, because I was like, I don't know how pundits do this, truly. Like, just put their face on and, like, go start with their hot takes. Like, you're, and these, a lot of these people are, were, I didn't know Charlie. So it was like very... unsettling and from the reaction i've received it has been people just are really struggling with this and again this is where i think the left trying to make this like jimmy kimmel
A person who hated them, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Jimmy did not hide his disdain. He basically sounded like everyone cheering for Charlie's death in a mild way. Yeah. He actually said he thought that people who weren't vaccinated should, we made fun of this on dumpster fire, should not be able to go into hospitals. So this is a person who is...
also hates them and they're trying to make him this martyr. And it's like this, Charlie was the martyr. Yeah. You're not gonna, you are tone deaf. You're like missing the whole climate right now. If you think that this is gonna.
is going to be the thing that I think you're feeling it though especially because it's what you do as well you put your you express your opinions freely you disagree you know this is why Ezra Klein has written about this you know in the New York Times I think yeah and it's been attacked by his own party party yeah for saying i'm mourning for him yeah and uh and he and what was great is he when he got attacked he doubled down and said no
This is the human response. The human response is to mourn for an innocent man who's been killed for doing what I do. That's why it resonates. And that's why I think it disturbs anyone who cares about freedom and freedom of speech.
And like you say, we've been warning for a long time, someone's going to get killed because there's too much tolerance for this. I think in the UK, we see this all the time. We see these threats. You know, J.K. Rowling says that she gets so many death and rape threats, she could paper her house. Oh, yeah.
And it's just constant. And yet we have people like Graham Norton, who's a famous UK presenter, saying, well, she's just being held accountable. Yeah, they call this accountability culture. Okay, so what does... Why is it a woman saying that women's rights are predicated on the recognition of biological sex? Women's rights matter. Gay rights matter. Why are these views, why do they require accountability? And furthermore.
Why should that accountability take the form of rape and death threats? And I would like to ask Graham Norton that. There's no way he'd get into a debate with me about this, clearly, because he doesn't want to talk about it.
because he's just like everyone else who lacks the intellectual curiosity to read what she said and understand it he's just decided that she is the devil that they've described so we have we have this really weird phenomena at the moment where the reality of a human being is disregarded in favor of the folk devil created by whoever it might be jordan peterson's an example jk rowling's an example charlie kirk obviously an example all of these people and even to an extent trump
you know, Kamala Harris, like anyone to an extent, they're projecting something that isn't really real. They're attacking some, they're creating a monster to attack it. Now that's delusional enough. But when you actually start physically attacking the person as the substitute for the monster that you think they are, that's when it gets really, really dangerous. Well, that's why I worry about this. I really worry, yeah. I mean, I worry that woke didn't end.
And I thought maybe it did. But now maybe I worry that it's kind of spun up to, well, we're anti-fascists. We need to take matters into our own hands. So I think that's why at the heart of this is to get back to the definition of fascism and to stop saying because they're called Antifa, antifascist, that means they're antifascist. No. They are borrowing from fascists' playbook by wanting to violently suppress their opposition. It's like saying the Democratic Republic of Korea.
is a real democracy because they call it that. Have you seen that meme where it's like, somebody was like, they did the meme because Antifa was named a terrorist, like terrorism organization this past week. Yeah. And people are like, it's not an organization. It's an idea. And it's like, no, they have a logo. They have chapters. And people have infiltrated them. And they have an organizational structure. I admit that there are.
places that are separate but use the same ideology in the way that islamism spreads as an idea and you get various little groups and etc that's true but they have this deranged ideology and there's this deranged belief that the people they're attacking are fascists all the while embodying the key core
value of fascism yeah right so that and so in a sense we have to stop tolerating that i think we have to stop it the the violent i mean obviously it's scarier in america because you have the guns yeah And in the UK, the trans activists, I think, in the UK can often be even more violent in their rhetoric. There's a website.
which if you've got the stomach, you should look at called Turf is a Slur. Someone's collected screenshots of trans activist threats on women. Oh, I've seen this. Their fantasies about what they want to do. Yeah, I've seen this. It's grotesque, violent misogyny. Yeah. Like it's really, really ugly. And it goes on and on and on. Misogyny in a dress. Yeah. And the thing is, if I come back to this point, if I was in a movement and that was normal.
And I was seeing that from my peers all the time. I get out. Yeah. And so that is now. That's what I'm hoping. It's an endemically violent movement. And the problem here is, of course, those people have access to weapons as well. Yeah. So. what what so there is a real risk i mean your fear isn't unfounded and we've seen it you know it's already happened yeah um and what if it happens more and and it and it could and i think how do you deal with that well
This is why the cultural matters. This is what you're doing now in Arizona. Yeah. Which is just creating like stories. I think it's store. I think we need. More stories. Well, we've set up a production company and I'm working with Rob Schneider and Graham Linehan. My friend, Martin Gawley, he's a writer, producer. We're setting up, we've set up this Friendly Fire Studios. We want to create stories.
comedy that's funny and not not not preachy right imagine that um you know we want to do movies we want to do all this sort of stuff and it's early days like you know we've we've i've been working on a few scripts i've been working on sitcom we've written various things And hopefully we'll get up and running and we'll get things filmed. I think most of us got so sick of every mainstream broadcaster preaching at you. Yeah. Disney. How did Disney scupper their most valuable?
franchise in Star Wars by turning it into a conduit. for a for an ideology did you see them trying to like get men back it's like you had star wars you had you had a lot of male-centric you had a cash cow and you killed it yeah why like why it's crazy but now they're learning now that now they've lost
I mean, millions, right? Well, and now the left's boycotting them. Right. Yeah, exactly. Now they've got no one left, right? But imagine that, like I say, like that statistic, the woke only ever 8%, 10%. And you're going to target them? Oh, that's how we're going to make money. Let's just cater towards these crazy ideologues. Alienate 90% of our potential viewership. That's the Democratic Party right now, though. They take the 20% on every 80-20. It's like...
Like every 80-20 divide in this country, you can reliably guarantee that the Democrats will lean into the 20%. Because I don't want them in power. Yeah. I'm glad they're doing that. You know, they're going to scupper themselves. I mean, when it comes to the arts. We are so lost. Like, I mean, I'm learning more by being over in the US. I feel in the US, although there are some crazy outlets who will do that, there's more of an opportunity.
for people to write something different, to write something new. In the UK, your options are really limited. The BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, is completely captured by genderism. So you can't do anything. And I wouldn't be able to submit a script to the BBC without them saying, oh, but this doesn't have the correct message. Can we shoehorn in the correct message? Right. That's crazy. And anyway, like.
and I used to be a panelist on the moral maze as a BBC show. And I, you know, I have appeared on, I'm not saying that they completely have blacklisted me or anything, but they wouldn't be interested in the scripts I produce because they're, you know, this is a.
A state broadcaster that created a film for kids which taught them that there were over 100 genders. So you know where they're standing. Yeah. This is a state broadcaster who refused to report on the WPATH files the revelations that the world's... the world professional association of transgender health the world leading advocates for gender affirming care the leaked files from within that organization showed that many leading people knew
That a lot of these kids couldn't consent to the treatment. They knew a lot of them had mental illness issues. They knew. They all knew. It should have been the end of WPATH. The BBC. Haven't even mentioned it once. The biggest medical scandal in my lifetime. It's crazy. Just not mentioned. I emailed them. It's crazy. Many times. I've emailed the press office. I got nothing for months.
I did a TV special. They were like, leave us alone. Yeah, no, but they just ignored me. Which is fair enough. They don't have to, but they are the state broadcaster. It's not just anyone. It's not a private company. And they eventually got back to me with a single line.
editors choose the stories from a variety of options on any given day and then i went back i said yeah but this is one of the biggest scandals in our lifetime i got the same line back again from the same robot at the bbc now i did a two-hour special on the w path files i interviewed michael schellenberger mia hughes i interviewed doctors uh professionals in psychotherapy uh and
We talked about what was exposed, why it's significant. I brought in a trans campaigner to get the other side. We did all of that. And this is GB News. This is a small network in the UK. Why can't the BBC do that? That was a dereliction of Judy. They're so captured. They're so lost. Almost I don't think the BBC can be saved at this point. They're pretty good.
politically in terms of party politics they'll hold the left and right to account ideologically they're completely fucking lost yeah so in the in the uk if you want to be a comedian you want to be a uh a theater a playwright theater's gone in the uk it's totally gone you know you have to announce your pronouns at the start of rehearsals you know you have to land acknowledgement land acknowledgement hasn't come to the uk yet it's to the romans like who would it be
Anglo-Saxons, Romans, the Druids at some point. The Druids had Anglesey for a while. Did we do that? It's difficult with you. I mean, that's an Australian thing, by the way. But that maybe that'll come to the maybe that'll come to the UK. It's an American thing, too. American thing as well. Yeah. Crazy. But, you know, in the but there's so we're a small island and there's a limit.
You've got Channel 4, which is completely ideologically capped. Every channel, every channel, really. So where do you go? If you're a creative, the comedy scene is full of people now gloating about Charlie Kirk's death. That's so horrific. We have people routinely having their shows cancelled. We've even had police involvement with comics. My friend Graham Linehan was arrested.
at the airport for three tweets right that's what's going on in the uk so obviously i'm off graham's off you know we've come to the us because here although you have your fair share of crazies Oh yeah. And certainly in Hollywood and the arts industry. Right. But here you can set up a company and you can do something. There will be outlets.
There are lots of outlets. There's loads of options. And the culture has shifted. A lot of these outlets that were somewhat captured have gone, ah, well, we lost our entire audience. Yeah, but the UK, you don't have that. I mean, if you were a theatre writer in the UK, every play that I see... is a sermon dressed up. What are you doing in Austin right now? So in Austin, well, I've just come here to talk to you and I did another podcast the other day and I wanted to see the mothership.
and i wanted to see what was going on because a lot of people are coming to austin and i'm interested in that are you in town tomorrow i'm in town for the next couple of days yeah i'm um performing in little boy oh It's sold out, but I'll get you on the list. I'd love to see that. And if you want to see any other shows while you're here, I can help you out. That would be great. That'd be great. Because I want to see what's going on here because I'm interested in these places.
where creatives there's a lot going on here yeah this feels like a hub i know scottsdale isn't there yet uh but we're getting there we're like we've got like you know we're we're we're creating stuff there nashville's a hub kind of really yeah like i love this idea of just going somewhere new rob obviously moved from la uh to arizona and getting stuff made and maybe you know and the other thing is as you know
I've been doing this stuff for ages. I've been commenting on this stuff for ages. Yeah. I did the Titani McGrath character. You're like, I want to pivot. That was a creative thing. At least I had some creative thing there. But now I want, you know, my background's stand-up. I know.
playwriting and musical theater writing i've written a lot of musical i can't do that anymore because of this i get dragged in you know what it's like i mean i've quoted you in my book because you talk about being the accidental pundit and it's like you get dragged in Because it matters to us. Because if you're in the creative industry and you see suddenly the most ostensibly free thinking of people suddenly conforming to every orthodoxy.
It actually affects us. Yeah. Not just on a practical level of the business of getting stuff commissioned, but also emotionally.
And vocationally, because we don't want this industry to be like this. And I didn't want to. Yeah, I just that's what I was saying on my Charlie Kirk thing. I'm like, I didn't want to do this. I moved to L.A. to be a comic and to write stories. And so and there is a. robust and i think like you're involved and there's lots of people who are trying to build just they're building seven studios in texas yeah like big ones so the industry a lot of my friends are auditioning
getting work here so the industry is definitely you we still are humans we still need entertainment yeah until you know civil war or whatever yeah and um and so i think that like it it's decentralized now which i think is actually quite good hollywood is dead and we had it for a while with the internet but then of course you had youtube demonetization there were various ways they're better now
but they are better now. They're better. So, you know, we have, there's other outlets. Like the culture shift did open things up, I think. And this is great because- You have Kill Tony- Kill Tony. On Netflix. Yeah. Like that's crazy. That would not have happened. Two years ago, even. The gatekeepers don't have the power anymore. That's what's great. I mean, when, do you remember when all those Netflix employees protested against Dave Chappelle? Yeah. And the CEO said, well, bye then. Kick rocks.
you know, that's it. Yeah. It was the same in the UK. There was, cause obviously publishing is captured completely. They have so many activists in publishing. Publishing is tough. I'm trying to sell my book right now and I don't know. If I didn't, I mean, I have got a public, I've got a main. mainstream publisher but you know he's he fights for me you know and he gets stuff done like when that it was
When J.K. Rowling published her children's book, The Ichabog, and all the staff at the publishing house revolted, the CEO said, Too bad. If you don't want to work for us, go. But this is my point, even about Jimmy Kimmel. If he was making money, they wouldn't be getting rid of him.
They wouldn't get rid of him. Yeah, capitalism always wins. This is the fucking West. His ratings have been plummeting for ages. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. Don't fuck up and then complain when you get fired for fucking up, right? That's as simple as it is. But I love this. The gatekeepers, they've enjoyed their power so much. And activists have enjoyed the fact that they can contact the gatekeepers and get stuff, you know.
My friend who got her show cancelled in Brighton because a couple of activists phoned up the venue and said, we feel unsafe. Her material makes us feel unsafe. Cancelled. Done. Show not going ahead. That happens again and again. people arrested. You know, that is going to stop now. I actually think Graham's arrest has changed something. It's shifted something. Yeah, that did shift, it seems. Because he's a comedy writer.
He's done tweets. He's arrested by armed police at the airport. His blood pressure soars to stroke level, dangerous level. He has to go to hospital. He's texting me saying I'm in hospital because I've been arrested. I'm like, what? What's going on? I know, it's crazy. And now, but lots of people are saying this is too much. And in fact, his case was discussed in Congress here. It was being discussed in the mainstream press everywhere. And people are now saying, okay.
I mean, I wrote an article for the Washington Post about the problem of free speech in the UK, and I gave loads and loads of examples. And because the Washington Post readership are basically a bunch of drones who only believe the left-wing propaganda, all the comments were full of like, just denial. None of this is happening. Yeah. This is a right-wing pundit. Why are you platforming, et cetera? What I'll tell you about the Washington Post, which is brilliant, is every...
Fact I mentioned in the article was fact-checked. Yeah, yeah. Robustly. They still do this in some publications. Well, they are the best at fact-checking stuff. And everything was factually true. And all the comments... could do is deny the truth that's all they had so but you know that's not gonna that's not gonna work anymore yeah i love that this is changing i am feeling really positive about
I think it's something about being in the sunshine as well, living in a desert that enables me to write and be creative. I wake up in the morning. I don't look out the window and think, this is grisly. I look out there and I think, there's a...
A bloody hummingbird. Yeah. On my balcony. No, it's amazing. What the hell is that? Yeah. And those things, by the way, I could believe that they're machines, Chinese spies. Yeah. Because they float right in front of you and then they dart away. They're incredible beasts. It's the only bird that can fly backwards.
They are incredible. I've actually invested in some flowers to try and attract more of them. Yeah, get the nectar thing. The tubular flowers they like, the red ones. I think they're beautiful. And just to be able to, I just drive down the road and I'm in the desert and I loved, I went to a rodeo.
For God's sake. Yeah. I've got a Stetson. What's going on? Like, this is not my world, but I love it. Yeah. And I love the fact that everyone's nice. And you go into the centre of Scottsdale, you go to the shops. And there's families having ice cream. There's people enjoying themselves. You go into the centre of London, try and get an ice cream. There's groups of people menacing, staring at you. What are you doing here? There's a sense of threat. There's a sense of violence everywhere.
None of that here. Yeah. So I think this has been great for the creative spirit. Graham's loving it. He's loving writing comedy again because he wasn't, you know, he was cancelled from the, one of the top comedy writers in the world. Yep. He won. the Lifetime Award for comedy from the Comedy Awards, five BAFTAs, an Emmy. Yeah, he's brilliant. Hasn't been able to- I mean, you're both brilliant, both of you. Oh, but he's got all the- But he's like-
He's decorated brilliant. And he hasn't been able to work in the industry in the UK for eight years because he said women's rights matter and gay rights matter and biological sex is important. And for that. They said, never again can you work. And they're all now coming around, I think, saying that he was right all along. But now he's in Arizona. Now he's in Arizona. Now he's here. So you've lost that one. And I'm, you know.
What's your biggest defect of character? I have many. I think I'm oversensitive. I think I'm... I think I... Not that I... I don't take disagreement personally. I like it. But when people are... overtly abusive i take it to heart and i shouldn't yeah because i've had so much of it you would think that i've got a really i get that i get that but i don't because i think i tell you what it is that bothers me about it i think it's the injustice like
you don't know me, you don't know anything about me, but you've decided this stuff about me. And, and, and it's sort of, I hate my pet hate, which I have to get over. is being misrepresented and lied about. I know. Right? So even like- My husband always yells at me for this. I'm like, I'm being messy. He's like, Bridget, this is part of the deal. This is what they do. This is part of the deal of what you do. And I'm like, someone is lying.
on the internet. Oh my God. Let it go. I can't put myself out there and expect people not to lie about me. That's what they will do. That's what they will do. I expect to get attacked. But when I get misrepresented, I get like very. fired up about it and my husband's like he'd fucking let it go Bridget it's funny like the other day I was looking uh which you should never look at comments on things right and there's a there's a review of my book on Amazon
that says it's a pro-fascist text that supports violence against political opponents. This could not be more an explicitly anti-fascist book. Do you know what? The opening epigraph of the book, the opening quotation is an anti-Nazi quote, right? And it's explicitly anti-violence in all its forms. So this is someone who hasn't read it, obviously. And it's someone who's just decided based on the title that I'm an evil Hitler or whatever. But I even read that and think...
But that's so the opposite of what it is. That's wrong. And I'm annoyed about it. But why should I get annoyed about it? People are going to lie. Like part of the deal is that people are going to lie. What are my other flaws? I think I'm too cowardly. I think my instinct when there's a violent moment is to move away and run. And I wish I wasn't like that. That's an instinct. Whenever I've been in a violent situation, I remember I was with a group of friends.
and these thugs came up and head one of them headbutted my friend who was right next to me and started laying in and my body just walked ran and and and of course objectively i should have been like come on then i did kung fu bring it on motherfuckers but instinct my body just took me somewhere else That's cowardice. I think I'm a physical coward. I don't think I'm an intellectual coward because I'm always up for the fight. I think I'm a physical coward. What are your biggest assets?
That's... It's difficult to answer that without sounding like a dick. I think... I suppose it's a positive thing that I won't... I won't lie, I suppose. That's one thing. And if I see something I care about that I think is unjust, I have to say something. I think that's a positive, but it gets me in a lot of trouble as well.
Like I just won't like friends. Someone said to me recently, like if you just because because I often criticize my own side and stuff when they when they do things. He said, if you just didn't do that, you'd get more followers. You'd get more of a thing. But it's a kind of.
it's a reflex with me like if i see something that i deeply get something i'll say something about yeah um but maybe that's a flaw too maybe i should know when to just back off and just not you know not do it i've been like ever since the charlie thing i've just been my kids been just a little like feisty and i'm like oh this is because i've been too online like i know that it's me being too not present can i just say that's my biggest flaw like
When I see, when I get piled on online, I stay and I watch and I read it. I don't do that. I've just been obsessed with like the breaking news and the discussion, the discourse. And I need to just not. What I think you and I probably share this, what we probably need to be able to turn our phones off and leave it alone. Yeah. And I am guilty of that insofar as if I just left it alone, if I just let people say their lies and ignored it.
But I have to get involved. I have to counter the lie. And that, you know, if someone lies about you and then you say online, but that's not true. And this is what I actually said. They say that's proof that you're lying and you're lying now. And therefore, I come back to that point of. There are some people you can't reason with. Don't even bother. Yeah. And I think I need to learn. Although I don't think I ever will. No. Because I've been like this for years now. And I just.
I will always, I will always. I'm so glad you're in the States. It's fun, isn't it? It's such a. Yeah. Well, let's, um, let's, uh, get together before you go. Where can we? Yeah. I want to see your show. Yeah, I'm opening Little Boy. So it's just a quick 10 minutes. Do you know what I love about here? Because I've done a few stand-up gigs now here. And it's funny because when I was first asked to do one, Rob asked me to open for him. And it's a big venue. It's a big room.
And I'm like, I'd just been writing all this new material, but it was all about British politics. I was like, these people don't know who Keir Starmer is. We don't even understand how your politics work. No. So I stripped out all the British stuff and I realized I had about...
three minutes and so then I had to do some older material that would work but it was actually fun and I thought this is great and I love that where I've done different gigs so I did one in Knoxville and they were great what a great crowd and they were really listening and really like
shop and then i did one in a casino oh yeah and they were so drunk yeah and so rowdy and i found myself becoming rowdy back at them yeah and that was kind of fun too but in a different way i love the challenge actually of kind it feels a bit like starting again like i know
I started again. It is because I can work a British crowd. I know what a British crowd is. And I know they'll get all the references and I don't have to worry. And here I have to be, it pushes me creatively because I have to start rewriting, rethinking.
appreciating that some things won't quite land in the same way that's really interesting to me so i i beginner's mind i mean i've been i've been writing scripts so much but now i'm thinking i know when i was at the mothership last night i just thought do you know what i want to start doing more stand-up gigs again in america
Scottsdale has a good scene. Right. And I haven't done any in Scottsdale. Oh, you should. So that's maybe what I should. And it will be like starting again. And so does Phoenix. I mean, there's definitely like places you can easily get up. Yeah. I'm just so used to doing bigger crowds now. doing a smaller crowd again and starting it like almost like that keeps you honest
Yeah, maybe. I mean, even all the big guys over there will be like, I'll go do that room and eat shit. And it's because it keeps like, especially once you're famous, you just get like laughs because you're famous, even if you're not funny. Yeah. And there.
I think like doing those smaller rooms where they're like, I don't care who you are, even if you are famous, it's like more intimate. It does keep you honest. I think it's great discipline. It's a great thing. I got up last night and I came in hot and the room was just not having it. And I was like, oh, OK.
Back it up. Back it up. Well, I used to, I did a tour once where I opened for a well-known act and these were big, like 3,000 seaters and we were touring the country. And of course, I knew that no one knew who the hell I was. I had actually co-written half of the acts.
material but they didn't know that so they didn't know that i was half of that character um so you would always get when you went on stage this kind of disappointment a sense of who's this we didn't pay for this and i really enjoyed that challenge of having to kind of
win them round you gotta earn it you gotta earn it yeah it's so great and although to be fair when i've opened for rob he does this really nice thing which he announces me as his friend that i brought over and and so they're predisposed to like you and that sort of helps a little bit yeah but yeah the opening set
when you're not the thing they paid for is a tough gig, right? And I like, I'm often opening the room. So like I just opened for Landau at Mothership and I was like, I'm always the cold open and the room is just cold. And some rooms are drunk and rowdy and some rooms are.
warm and open and some are just like last night you could tell they were just like Thursday night crowd like it's like the you're just you're like why are you out tonight why aren't you it just is a weird always Thursday nights and so it was just like a weird vibe and I had to I came in and I was just like all fired up about Jimmy Kimmel and they were like
not having it i was like this needs some work we'll move on you've got a weird system in america like because i was at the mothership last night and i was watching and i've seen it before and i i'm sort of clocking into it because in the uk you always have an mc In the UK, you always have someone come out. Oh, you're a host. Who hosts. Yeah, we tag team. Whose job it is to warm everyone up. That's true in New York. Oh, is it? In New York, there's, right, they have hosts in New York pretty much.
Yeah. They have an MC. Because there are some comics who are particularly skilled at warming up a room and who interact and do that so well. And do the crowd work. But then sometimes you don't want to burn the crowd work for the open, like the headliner sometimes. But that's the skill. It's almost.
like not to be too good yeah like so i mean because i run a comedy night in london a monthly night called comedy unleashed which we set up by the way because we there was such group thinking the uk comedy scene and we were saying we're going to platform the people you don't want to platform and we've been doing that for five six years now uh and we've got a set of like three or four rotating MCs whose particular skill is interacting, warming it up.
Not being so good that the next act is a letdown. Yeah. No, you know, and it's such a skill and I can't do it. I mean, I'm so in awe of the people who do it well. But I know it's like in The Mothership last night, you had a guy come out. It was an act. It was a cold. It was straight in.
it's five minute set then the next one and they introduce the next one and they introduce the next like a relay thing yeah there's nothing like what you do in the uk and it's actually more risky uh because someone's coming out and just doing a set without the warmth That's a really interesting challenge.
I love it. My friend Tony Casillas over there, he's a comedian. He's like, that's because you're a psychopath. I was like, no, I just like that challenge. Do you like it when the audience is getting a bit cold? Do you like it when the idea... I mean, I really, I like...
I felt like you started over again because I took a break in 2019. It was getting weird. I felt weird doing it in L.A. And then I got married, had a baby, moved, and then started getting back up. And now... I I've surrendered to my innermost self that I am a comedian like I I think there was always a part of me that wanted to just be like I can leave that behind and now I'm like my husband will be like get on stage like he knows when it's been too long for me
and I live far away from comedy I'd probably do it a lot more if it wasn't such a drive but it's like a 45 minute drive and so we're moving towards that as well. Right now I'm doing what I can. I have a toddler, but I think, um, I, yeah, I love it. I love like the awkwardness, even like a horrific, but I had a fucking. nightmarish bomb nightmare. It was literally I kept waiting to wake up. I'm going to tell this story. I've never told it. I was opening for Colin Quinn.
when he was at Mothership, a genius. Like a comedian. Colin is so supportive. He loves me. He gets me. He is behind me 100%.
We have my friends are coming. They're friends with the governor. So Governor Abbott comes and I'm trying I'm doing 20 minutes and trying some stuff that was working the night before. It worked perfectly. The audience was with me. It's stuff about like immigration and there's a. joke about abbott that's not offensive yeah and i do it the first set with abbott it's okay but the i kind of lose the audience then rogan shane gillis
Fucking Tony Hinchcliffe. I'll roll it. They're never there on the weekends because they're all opening. They're doing theaters and fucking stadiums and shit. Shane wanted to go see Colin so they all roll in and I was like oh god I was so nervous I was petrified yeah they're in the audience they're in the
They were just up in the green room because they came to say hi to Colin and see a set and whatever. And so I was like, oh, shit. And then Colin's like, well, you guys going to get up? You're here. Like, get up and do some time. And I was like. He's like, Bridget will open and then you guys can jump up. And they weren't sure when I got on stage. So I get up and I'm so nervous. I can feel like I'm up there. I don't think even they were. I don't think all of them are watching my set. And then I'm.
eating. At some point, I just lose the audience and I'm like eating a dick. It was like the worst I've done on that stage maybe ever. Knowing it was the night not to do that, right? Knowing it was the night not to do it. I was so... I've never been so nervous. And then I finished my set. It's a closing joke that has literally never failed me. And it gets nothing. It's just silence. And I'm like.
Well, okay, and then someone hands me a fucking post-it, and it says Rogan on it. And I'm like, oh, my God. Now we have to bring up Rogan. And so I'm like, but there's something really funny about that. The worst possible time. So now I know Rogan's behind in the curtains waiting to get up. On a nothing, on a completely dead silent audience. And I'm like, well, we have a celebrity drop in. That's really funny. That's really funny. We have Joe Rogan.
And then he gets up and like the audience loses their mind. It was amazing. It was amazing to be able to bring him up. He brings up Shane. The audience goes crazy. And then Colin gets up and he's like. Bridget said there's a celebrity drop, and I'm like, what the fuck am I, chopped liver? I was like, please wake me up. It was a nightmare. I thought Rogan was going to ban me from the club after that. I'm not kidding. No, but he knows that this can happen to anyone. There's stories.
People bombing on that stage that have never been welcomed back. Really? But I think it's funny sometimes when it's going so badly and you've done it the night before and it's... It was killing... yeah exactly that's funny i've even laughed on stage at the lack of response it was it was so i was like oh my god i'm gonna get banned i'm gonna get banned that does happen for everyone it was at some point that does happen you know and i
think like what's the worst that can happen so they don't laugh so what mind you that sounds pretty bad no that is a nightmare it's like i'm good please wake me like i'll never get there but you've done gigs since there haven't you you've done gigs since they've done really well so it's fine yeah no it was
it was definitely like, I wanted to die. I wanted to die. But isn't that what's great about standup, that exhilaration of, you never know how they're going to go. You never know which way it's going to go. It was, it was special. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much where can we find you and your book well I guess well this book is out in America on January the 6th sounds ominous um and that it does sound I mean that's not deliberate um
But the date, I mean, but it's already out in the UK. You can get it. I think you can get it on Audible and Kindle in America. And then I'm on substat at andrewdoyle.org, which I... update really very regularly and then uh yeah twitter i suppose x okay andrewdoyal underscore com um but i'm hoping in the coming months years well i've got a visa now
I'm legal, right? Good. So I'm not... Ice, leave me alone. I'm here. I'm fine. Like, if you want to... Like, hopefully I'll have some shows. Yeah. And stuff. And maybe I'll start doing some more stand-up again. Like, because I... You know, I... I was doing it a lot in London, but it's a different, it's totally different.
It's the best. It's such a rush. So I think that'll be, if I have time. Everyone's like, why don't you take beta blockers? I'm like, I don't drink or smoke weed or anything anymore. This is like the high, the only high I get is the adrenaline rush. Yeah, exactly. It is exciting. I like the idea of Americanizing my humor as well. It's sometimes just a matter of finding a reference that is the equivalent of the British reference that'll land in the US, you know?
Well, this was fun. Yeah, it was fun. Thank you. We covered a lot. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being here as always. This has been Walk-Ins Welcome with Bridget Phetasy. I'm Bridget Phetasy and you're welcome. That's the dumbest line.