We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and to the premium
version of our site as well. Today we're joined by Brendan O'Neil, columnist,
broadcaster, an author of the new book A Heretics Manifesto, Essays on
the Unsayable. Brendan, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to
be here. Emily. Why don't you tell us a little bit since I
think you were on the show maybe a few years ago, but could you
tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up as a
heretic his media climate. Good question. So, I'm a journalist based in
London. I worked for the online magazine Spiked. I was editor of Spike
for about fifteen years. Spiked as a pro free speech, pro reason,
pro enlightenment publication, a current affairs publication too, and I write for the
Daily Mail right for the Spectator, and I've been doing that kind of thing
for a very long time, and as you say, I've got this new
book out called a Heretic Manifesto, Essays on the Unsayable. I guess I'm
often called a contrarian. I don't like the word contrarian. I don't mind
it particularly, but I don't like it because it makes it sound like you're
only saying things to wind people up, to try and get on people's nerves.
And that's never why I say things. I say things because I actually
believe that they are true and important. I preferred the word heretic, I
think the way I was thinking about it as I was writing the book.
I was thinking and I sent this in a talk at Oxford University a few
years ago, and it kind of went down quite well. Every freedom and
come that we enjoy is the gift of heresy. It comes from people in
the past being willing to put the head on the block literally in many instances,
in the name of the freedoms and the knowledge and the rights that we
currently enjoy. So I just think it's important to remind ourselves of the essential
nature of heresy and descent and argumentation and free thought to the development of society
yourself, and that's an important Lesson. I think it's one of the most
interesting things about the times we live in is that the kind of consensus,
the elite consensus, is out of step with the broader consensus, which makes
the heretic the average person in a way that we've just it. It's very
different than when you had you know, maybe tipp or Gore representing moms across
America. But now the cultural consensus has shifted such is that, you know,
the rules that govern Twitter in twenty nineteen were wildly out of step with
you know, where most of the public in the UK and United States would
have been. That seems to be new, at least in modern history.
Yeah. I mean, the chasm between elite consensus opinion and the views of
everyday people is absolutely vast, and I think and hope it's getting even more
vast, and it's becoming more apparent that there is a huge cultural and moral
tension between how the elites understand the world and how ordinary people understand it.
I think that's one of the most fruitful, interesting conflicts of our time,
and it's exploded a few times over the past few years, in the vote
for Brexit, even in the vote for Trump. Whatever one might think of
Trump. I think there was something very interesting in people's desire to basically rock
the old establishment. And across Europe we're seeing people make votes and say things
and do things as a means of pushing back against the Green consensus, for
example, which people are revolting against. Dutch farmers, Danish truck drivers,
French motorists, all of them have taken to the streets in huge numbers to
protest against a Green cons There's a huge pushback in the UK against the gender
ideology. We're sometimes referred to as turf Island because we have so many turfs,
trans exclusionary, radical feminists. I'm very proud to live on Turf Island.
I have huge admiration for the women here who are willing to speak their
minds and to dissent from the new ideologies. So in different ways, there
are lots of flickers of descent coming from ordinary people, from members of the
public. And you're absolutely right that it's a bit of an interesting situation where
the consensus that we're all supposed to abide by, we're suddenly expected to is
a kind of very minority pursuit these days. It's the moral minority, really
rather than the moral majority, and we're all expected to genuflect to their eccentric
beliefs, but many of us refuse to do that, even if we get
called a heretic as a consequence. There's a great Saturday Night Life sketch from
the Arts where Fred Armison plays I don't know if you've seen this, plays
like basically a Joey Ramon type who really loves Margaret Thatcher, and it's just
it's one of those funny things where he's supposed to be this punk rock,
leather clad dude that's like really out of touch in the sense that he's like
an absolute rebel. But now you actually kind of are the rebel. If
you're like, hey, you know what, I don't mind like something that's
in the mainstream, like I think Joe Rogan has some good ideas, then
you're you're kind of punk rock now, even though you're representative of a broader
consensus. It's just a strange type of dynamic that I feel like it's different
from when the old ACLU was, you know, standing up for the right
of Nazis to march and Skokie. That was a big push against where public
opinion was absolutely and you're absolutely right about the punk rock. I haven't seen
that ski, but I will look it up because I often think about Johnny
Rotten, now referred to as John Lydon, the singer in the Sex Pistols,
of course, one of my heroes. I think he's a hugely admirable
person. He's now off the opinion that to be a punk rocker these days
means actually thinking Brexit wasn't such a bad thing. Leaving the European Union is
the democratic choice LEDs to it. He says he understands why working class Americans
voted for Trump. It's because they were being treated incredibly badly by the coastal
elites I guess, who look down upon them as ignoramuses who cling to their
guns and their bibles and live in a basket full of fellow deplorables, you
know, shark horror. They're not going to be falling at your feet if
you speak about them like that. And he also makes the point that he
hates cancel culture, and he hates the idea that it's left wing or radical
or anarchic or countercultural to cancel people. He said punk was never about canceling
people. Punk was about having some fun and expressing yourself and then giving voice
to your views, even if they seemed quite dangerous. So the way in
which someone like Johnny Rotten kind of now symbolizes a new counter culture, which
is one that I think is representative of a majority opinion, which is,
you know, let's get back to a bit of normalcy. Let's not cowtow
to every new idea that comes from the rather cut off cultural establishment. Let's
have the freedom to express alternative ideas, more traditional ideas, ideas based in
science, based in reason. That's I think where the cutting edges out of
these days, and I find that quite exciting. There was a really as
we're recording this on Wednesday, there was a really interesting essay published in The
New Yorker by Emma Green. I don't often say there was a really interesting
essay published in the New Yorker, but this one touched on some interesting points.
It was about the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which I'm admittedly not
very familiar with, but was sort of a very wise project that at one
point had people from con Right to Chris Ruffo to Ariel Schreier, all people
really like involved, but crumbled because it sounds like if the reporting is accurate,
a divide over whether or not way in on sex and gender and biology
became paramount and became really divisive. And the reason I want to pose this
question you, Brennan, is I wonder if as so many new people start
questioning the left in particular, with censorship being their gateway. A lot of
the people, for instance, who are putting RFK Junior here in the States
up to like sixteen or twenty percent in the polls, are coming along with
Maryann Williamson their gateway to the left, and the same way Trump was a
gateway to the right for some people. Is like this fundamental question of the
media, of censorship, of collusion between government and media on what you can
and could not say cancel culture. But that makes a really tenuous coalition because
at the end of the day you end up having a really hard time whether
or not to agree that intolerance involves, you know, single sex spaces in
school locker rooms. If you can't agree on that, what good is the
coalition? I suspect you would have an answer that the coalition is good and
of itself because it opposes something bad. But do you sense that a problem
for people like us. Frankly, we're willing to have these conversations. I
think it's disappointing to hear what has been happening at Fair primarily because I think
the trans issue is one of the most important issues of our time. Because
I think if we don't have the right to say that a man is not
a woman, then we lose everything. Because what we're living through at the
moment, and in fact, the opening chapter in my book, which is
called her Penis, is about this is precisely about those two words which you
often see in the mainstream media here in the UK. You see elsewhere as
well. You will be told that so and so used her penis to do
something, and it's a form of madness, it's a form of hysteria.
It's obviously not based in reason or rationalism at all. But even worse than
that, I think it speaks to the purest form of tyranny, which is
this idea the powers that be have the right to define reality itself, and
they have the right to redefine reality as and when they choose. And what
we have as a situation where they are gaslighting us morning, noon and night.
We see a man standing in front of us, and they say it
is literally legally a woman. We see a dude with a beard, still
genitally intact, and they say it's a lesbian and he should have the same
right as other lesbians to use lesbian dating apps, to go into lesbian spaces.
They're gaslighting us. They're putting pressure on us to doubt the evidence of
our own eyes, to doubt the light of our own reason, and instead
to genuflate to what they say is true, even though it's quite latently false.
That to me is incredibly orwelly, and it is tyranny in its most
in its truest form, where they think, not only can they punish opinion
or religious expression, or being a communist, or or being a distributor of
obscene literature, all the things that Sensorius at last punished in the past.
And I was opposed to all those punishments. Freedom of speech means freedom of
speech. But even worse than that, they now want to punish people who
say that someone with a penis is not a woman. And if we lose
the right to say that, we have lost all our rights, and we've
lost the right to speak the truth, to express scientific fact, and to
give real meaning to words like man, woman, mother, father, All
of those things which are the building blocks of human existence and community life will
wither away at the altar of this new ideology which says that whatever they say
is true is true. So resisting that, I think is incredibly indescribably important.
And I think anyone on our side, anyone on the kind of the
new countercultural side of this culture war, who doesn't do that has fallen at
the first hurdle, couldn't agree more with that point. Now actually, on
this exact issue, I think a lot of people have sensed that in the
UK and even in Scandinavia, the conversation about biology and sex has maybe advanced
or progressed in a progressive way faster than it has here in the States.
And one of the reasons I've seen positive is that you have you had Tavistock,
and that sort of concentrated the sample size to be sort of inappropriately clinical
about something like that, but it allowed, you know, sort of sort
of for the experiment to be run in a quicker, more concentrated way,
and for people to look at the results that everyone knew you were going to
get and see something more conclusive, but from your perspective, what actually went
on? I mean, why is it that, if you agree, these
conversations seem to have shifted more quickly in these smaller, more homogeneous countries.
Explanation is there for that? It's very interesting and the differences between countries on
the issue of transgenderism and other woke issues or however were expected to refer to
them. I think it's very interesting. So I was speaking yesterday to someone
who works at Charlie Headdo magazine in Paris, world famous magazine for a terrible
reason, and he was saying that, for example, in France, there
is still a cultural resistance to American origin political correctness, and the journey of
kind of politically correct ideas is often not always, but it's often. It
starts in America. It starts from American campuses and much among the cultural establishment,
the social media oligarchies, who are incredibly influential globally in terms of form
shaping ideas. It spreads to the UK, it tends to wash over us.
We're not very good at standing up to it. And then it gets
to France and it hits its first barrier, where you have these French professors
and these French intellectual saying no, no, we don't want this rubbish.
But it trickles through even in France, and it trickles through to Europe and
in a slightly different way. But I'm interested in the differences between countries.
One interesting thing about the UK is that we're often referred to as turf Island.
The New York Times is incredibly snotty about modern Britain. It thinks Brexit.
When I go to New York now people and I say I'm from the
UK, people look at me with extraordinary pity and sorrow because they read the
New York Times. And if you read the New York Times, which is
very often anti British propaganda, you will believe that Brexit Britain is a complete
disaster. It's a racist hell whole. It's horrible to live here. It's
full of turfs and these evil women like JK Rowling who are going around calling
women men, when in fact she's calling men men. That's the image that
people give. But I'm actually really happy to live on Turf Island. I'm
happy to live in a country where the gender ideology is very institutionalized. And
you mentioned Tavistock, which was a complete disaster. The experiments that were carried
out on children is astonished, and many of them were autistic. Many of
them were young lesbians and young gay men who would have grown up to be
perfectly healthy, happy homosexuals, but instead they were subjected to these hormonal treatments
later onto surgical treatments, really horrendous stuff. So it's bad here, But
at the same time, there is a very strong culture of resistance and a
very strong culture of descent amongst numerous women and men who are saying enough is
enough. We want to push back against it. And it's those flashpoint areas
in the culture war that I find very interesting and very fruitful for those of
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wherever you get your podcast. The response that the left has I've seen
this more and more lately. It's it's always been around, like in this
era of cancel culture, which I could say, I mean, maybe you
can pin that back to like twenty fourteen, maybe twenty twelve, but at
least post twenty sixteen. Is that look like people are flying Trump flags all
over the US. They're they're wearing their Maga hats, they're wearing their Brexit
gear, they are tweeting in support of JK. Rowling. It's not you
know, China where the police are knocking at your door, although in the
UK we have seen some actual police confrontation over speech issues and shocking ways,
but they say, listen, you can say whatever you want. What is
what is heretical to any of these statements? If you're allowed to freely express
yourself and you're doing just fine. Facts news exists, all of the sort
of Murdoch tabloids are humming along despite Prince Harry's best efforts. What's the problem.
Yeah, I get that question all the time, and I've been thinking
about it for a long time as well. The first thing that always strikes
me about it people often say it about gender critical women who haven't been successfully
canceled. So they'll always say, look at jk Rowling. She's still got
fourteen million followers on Twitter, she's still a world famous author, she's still
unfathomably rich, she's doing fine. Or they look at Kathleen Stock, who's
a professor here, who is gender critical and gets into a lot of hot
water for her perfectly reasonable views, who still has columns in the press,
who still gets to speak at universities and so on. They say, look,
she hasn't been canceled. The first thing that strikes me is that there's
always a tone of disappointment when they say. It's always like, oh,
Dan, we haven't quite managed to silence these upper to women. There's always
a tone of we're not we haven't been successful in completely preventing them from speaking.
But the second and more important point is I think those kinds of arguments
miss the point about cancel culture because cancel culture often goes after big names JK.
Rowling, Joe Rogan. If you remember when the Spotify the up starts
at Spotify, the kind of millennial and jen Z cry babies who said they
wouldn't work on his podcast because he's evil or whatever it was. They go
after big names like that. I've been canceled. I was banned from speaking
to Oxford University in two and fourteen. That caused a bit of a fuss
here. But I'm still around, I'm still talking, I'm still doing my
thing. But the point about cancel culture is its chilling impact and the message
that it sends to people in different paths of society. So you're right.
The police have knocked on the doors of gender critical women in the UK and
told them to stop saying certain things. Last year, they turned up at
the house of a man who had profaned against the Pride flag on Twitter.
He turned he put four Pride flags together so that it looked like a swasticker
and they knocked on his door and they put him in handcuffs and accused him
of causing anxiety. There are many cases like that of the police intervention into
speech and the chilling effect this has across society shouldn't be underestimated because what it
means is that women in your average workplace, for example, who don't have
a lot of power, don't have jk. Rowling's money or clout, they
know that if they put their head above the parapet and say I love JK
Rowling or I think there should be no trans women so called in my bathroom
at work, they know what will happen to them. They know they will
be demonized, they will be harassed, they will be called a turf,
they will be called a biggot, and they could very well lose their job.
That has happened, have lost their jobs as a consequence of expressing their
heartfelt opinions and in very many cases, expressing the truth. So what cancel
culture does? It very often fails to slay the big names because they're too
big. Some people are uncancellable. JK Rowling is uncancellable, which is why
she infuriates them so much. But it sends a message to everyone else,
and this is what this is always censorship's grimmaced achievement. It's a warning light
of society at large that if you go too far down this road of reasoned
opinion or controversial speech, the punishments will be severe. So I think that's
that's the most terrible thing about cancel culture. And let's talk about Prince Harry
actually, because Prince Harry and Megan Marko are on. I mean, there
are some complaints about paparazzi, legitimate. Probably he's had a tough life in
large part because of paparazzi. But they also do weaponize these arguments that are
well described as canceled culture to protect their own power, to grow, their
own power, to pad their bank accounts. And I think that's an important
point about everything you were just saying. On the one hand, even if
people can still speak, now, you're raising a generation of kids that are
going to be populating these institutions, running these institutions, and controlling these institutions
the next ten to twenty years, who may make it, indeed, the
case that we can't say these things anymore. You've seen this creeping into government
and corporate America, transnational corporations to the EU, all of these places.
One percent. And the second point to that is they're also weaponizing it for
the purposes of their own power. How have you seen that play out?
Obviously I shouldn't ask about the EU because we've discussed Brexit, but you know,
across the pond, the same thing is happening, and it's it's just
as dangerous. Yeah, that's right. I think Harry and Megan are a
good example of lots of the problems of contemporary politics, and particularly wokeness and
those kinds of issues. I think one of the most striking things about Harry
and Megan is that they complain about their privacy being invaded all the time.
They say, the paparazzi invade it, ordinary people invade it by reading newspaper
stories, the tabloids invade their privacy. And then they invite Netflix cameras into
their home to film them having an emotional breakdown. And then Harry writes a
four hundred page book and I kid you not it. I don't know if
you if your listeners have read it. I know more about Prince Harry now
than I do about some of my own best friends. It's the amount of
self revelation in that book. He talks about his genitals, he talks about
when he lost his virginity, where it happened, what it was, like
he talks in great depth about the arguments he has with his brother William and
with Kate, and it's the hypocrisy is literally blows the mind, because this
is a man who complains about his privacy being invaded, and then invade his
own privacy and the privacy of his brother, the privacy of his sister in
law, the privacy of his father, the privacy of his mother in law,
the queen, his stepmother rather the queen. Really just an extraordinary level
of hypocrisy. And I think what that tells us is exactly, it speaks
to the exactly the point you've made, which is that cancel culture. And
this kind of censorship is not about fairness or justice, or protecting oneself from
the invasions of the powerful, or protecting a vulnerable minority from abuse or offense.
It is about storing up the power of a new elite, the power
of an emergent establishment, a kind of graduate class of professional managerial elite who
are increasingly in control in the political sphere, in sections of the media and
cultural institutions, an elite to which Harry and Meghan are essentially king and queen.
That's the establishment of which they are the monarchs, and it's about shoring
up their power. And the thing is, censorship always protects the powerful.
The idea which is put about by cancel culture people, the idea that censorship
can be a way of protecting the vulnerable from offense. Firstly, that is
really racially paternalistic. The idea that it falls to well educated, largely white,
young liberals to protect black people or Muslims, or gay people, or
whoever else it might be, from ever hearing an offensive word or a difficult
idea is shockingly paternalistic. Really really is and deeply a liberal. But it's
really about protecting their own ideological beliefs from criticism. It's about protecting their new
ideological ideas and their desire to have a tighter control over what is permissible to
think and say in twenty first century society. That's what cancel culture is really
about. And I find the idea that censorship could ever be a friend of
the powerless to be so ridiculous and repugnant. Anyone who knows anything about history
will know that every progressive or liberatory movement of ever has seen freedom of speech
as its most important weapon. So the idea that censorship can now play that
role is a complete fantasy. And the perennial problem of the heretic is that
there's a sense of putting yourself out of business embedded in the question of being
a heretic because your espousing ideas that you think are right and should be widely
shared, and the better you make that argument, the less heretical you become
theoretically, And that gives this question I think the ecosystem, which is that
there are always, at least the way Western societies and governments are organizers,
there will always be some segment of the population kind of rebelling against the elite
consensus, rebelling against the cultural consensus. Whether the cultural consensus is good,
virtuous, or bad, there will always there will always sort of be a
natural part of the ecosystem. But that raises this question of what is are
a time that has already existed in very modern history that you know, we
want to get back to. Was there a norm that we already kind of
understand that we want to get back to, or or what does what do
healthy boundaries, what does a healthier ecosystem for speech really look like. That's
a good question. I don't think there has existed any golden age of freedom
or freedom of speech particularly. There have been good moments in history and bad
moments in terms of freedom and reason. But I try my best to not
fall down the rabbit hole of nostalgia, because I think if you're if you're
always chasing a golden age that existed in the past, you take your eye
of the ball of the future, which I think is the most important thing.
How do we improve society from where it currently is so that younger people
in particular have a better, freer, more comfortable life. But I think
in relation to the role that heresy plays in terms of that challenge to the
establishment, as you mentioned there, I just think sometimes I think people forget
how important heresy has been historically speaking, so I talk about I give some
examples in the Book of Heretics whose bravery literally made my life and your life
better than it otherwise would have been. And we very often don't know these
people's names. People forget their stories. They fade into the history books and
they fade into history and are forgotten. And it frustrates me when I go
to campuses like Oxford or Cambridge here in the UK to do a talk and
I'm surrounded by young, very pash, very comfortably off people who say freedom
of speech is unnecessary. It's just the tool of arrogant white conservatives who want
to say abusive things. We don't need it. And I think to myself,
you have no idea that your right to speak, to access knowledge,
to live in the beautiful surrounds of Oxford University is down to the heresies of
the past. And one example I give in the book is William Tyndale.
William Tindelle was a very early Protestant reformer in England in the early fifteen hundreds,
and he made it his mission in life to translate the Bible into English.
The Bible was only ever published in Latin. It was absolutely forbidden to
publish it in English. It was seen as the property of wise, educated,
Latin speaking priests who would tell the plebs at church what they needed to
hear. It was not your right to read the Bible. And William Tindale
said, I don't accept this. I'm going to translate the Bible into English
so that ordinary people can read it, because I trust their judgment. There
was a revolutionary idea. I mean, in some ways it's still a revolutionary
idea, and to do that he had to go to Germany. He couldn't
do it in England. He would have been executed instantly. He went to
Germany, the ecclesiastical authorities chased him across Europe and across Germany. He was
in hiding most of the time. He was publishing his English language Bibles and
sneaking them back into England, and they were being distributed among his supporters who
would had to read them at candlelight and be ready to throw them away if
anyone knocked on their door. And eventually the authorities caught up with William Tindale
in southern Germany. They arrested him, they took him to Belgium. They
strangled him to death, and they burned him at the stake. And I
I tell this story to people sometimes when I say to them, look,
next time you see a pocket bible in the English language, think about where
it came from. Because the first person to ever publish a pocket Bible in
the English language was William Tindale. And the reason he did it was so
that people could have one in their pocket, hidden away, because they wanted
to expand their mind and expand their understanding of the world in their own tongue.
And I just thought it was so important to tell that story in the
book as a way of refreshing our historical knowledge off the sacrifices the heretics made
which had a palpable impact on our lives. And in doing what he did,
William Tindale didn't only get the Bible into English. He changed the way
we understand and freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, the freedom to read,
the intellectual capacities of ordinary people. All of those things were utterly thrown
in the air and rethought as a consequence of his criminal heresy. So it's
so important to remember that fresh thinking, daring thinking, eccentric thinking have played
a key role in improving life for all of humanity. Our Catholic listeners are
going to just love that story. And I say this as a as a
Catholic myself, but I have huge admiration for Wood and Tinder. Michael Nose
makes a really interesting argument in his recent book about how conservatives that have sort
of thrown their lot in with free speech absolutism are kind of a making a
mistake, and you know, need to recognize that there's a difference between you
know, supporting a pushback on the current concept of censorship without saying, you
know, yes, let's just burn it all down and have you know,
the worst of the worst become not subversive. And that's something I wanted to
ask you about, because I do think it's an important sort of point to
internalize. I don't think these things are mutually exclusive, maybe to the extent
that Michael does, but there is something where It's like when they're conservatives,
people on the right, and even probably most people who say their free speech
absolutists, don't you know, there's a line somewhere for the most part,
and you know it's true. We live in a very crass society in the
West, and increasingly crass society, and that distinction is a useful one.
I don't know if you have thoughts on that, or if you think it's
also useful, or maybe you don't. Yeah, I do think about that.
I think it's a difficult one. I mean, I am as far
down the road of free speech as it's possible to get. I think I'm
like the old Aclu. I'm like the skoky Aclu. I would support the
right of Nazis to march through a largely Jewish town for all the reasons that
the ACLU supported it, Because if you take the freedom away from people you
hate, will soon be taken away from people you like. I think they
were absolutely right on that. I think what's happened to the ACLU is a
great shame. I don't think they're very good at defending freedom of speech,
and in more, I think they have slightly slightly elevated woke concerns over liberal
ones, and that's that's a problem I think for America and the world.
The ACLU was inspiring to many people around the world in its prior state.
It's now become slightly lost, I think. But I think, yeah,
we live in a cross society. We live in a society saturated with pornographic
images, which I think is a very real problem, and I don't know
what the solution to it is, not only on the Internet, but in
popular culture. I think the way in which the pornified sensibility impacts on popular
culture is a real problem. The fact that you have eight year old girls
listening to Rihanna sing songs about whips and chains is a problem. That's a
very old cultural reference around. Yeah, Na hasn't done a song for a
very long time. But there's a lot more you know yeah, or you
know that WAP song. I can't remember who's sang it, but that I
won't say what WAP stands stands for all of that, there's a lot going
on where I just think, Oh, that's gross, that's horrible, that's
not necessary. I don't particularly want young people listening to that or looking at
that. But I think the solution is never to give up on freedom of
speech, and it's never to say, well, let's censor that stuff,
because that just doesn't work. The solution, I think is to improve the
cultural fabric. And that's a much longer term prospect than a longer term task
and an uphill struggle. And it can seem so difficult that people prefer to
say, well, let's ban that horrible thing. That will that will fix
it. Of course, it won't fix it. People will just go and
find it somewhere else. It's about, I think, in improving the cultural
sensibility, people's cultural sense of sensitivity. It's about improving education so that the
young are more inclined to read books, reader what an old fashioned idea that
is, or even watch old movies engage with culture, Engage with it rather
than be scared of it, rather than to feel triggered by it. To
see ideas and art and beauty as things worth engaging with and worth aspiring to.
That's how it was in the past in some eras, anyway, rather
than this very instant gratification culture where you can switch on your phone and you
can get horrible images in thirty seconds, or you can listen to grotesque pop
songs, or you can do stupid, horrible things. I think that's probably
the only solution to the crassness of our era. It is to think about
how to deepen and liberate the culture from the stranglehold of this kind of aggressive,
crass ideology, rather than to say, well, we need the tool
of censorship in this instance because things have gone out of hand. Yeah,
that's a really interesting way to put it. I think. Yeah, like
drag is sort of the tragically perfect ample of the something that probably thrived as
an art form when it was subversive and relegated to the CD comedy club.
Then it is now and you know, there's it's inevitable in just about any
society that you're going to have. I mean, even people love to talk
about here in Washington, DC, how drag evolved out of one of the
first drag performers, Swan here in DC, and the Victorian era. Um,
this stuff, you know, is sort of a natural occurrence in any
Western constitutional republican society. On that note, you cover a lot of topics
in the book. You mentioned the Herpinus essay. Do you have a favorite
essay or is there one that you think makes an underappreciated point. Um.
I think I have two favorite ones. Chapter two, which is called witch
Finding, that's about the witch hunts in Europe in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds,
And I just made the point that a lot of those witches were burnt
at the stake for the crime of climate change. So this was the era
of the Little Ice Age, when freezing weather caused agricultural crops to fail and
people to starve, and great hardship for many people, and that's when witch
hunts really take off. There's a close correspondence between the lack of food and
the suffering of a community and the persecution of witches. And the witches were
openly accused of causing contrary weather, contrary winds. They were thrown into the
flames and the end date before they were done, so they were forced to
admit that they had brought about climatic instability. So in that chapter I just
traced through the witch hunting, the persecution of climate changing witches in the medieval
era right through to the persecution of climate criminals as they refer to today.
And I talk about climate change alamism and the idea that there are bad people
out there who are causing contrary winds. You know, that's now said again.
So I talk about I draw a link between the witch hunts of the
past and the witch hunts of the present. So I think I quite like
that one. And then the other one I like is chapter five, which
is called Rise of the Pigs, which is really just about how there's this
phrase in the UK called gammon, and the word gammon is used to refer
to working class, middle aged men with red faces, hence gammon, who
vote for Brexit, who are anti woke, who are not very politically correct.
The bourgeois left here refers to them as gammon. And I just point
out that in the past in England the masses were referred to as swines.
They were referred to as the Swinish multitude, and they couldn't possibly have democratic
rights because how could you trust political decision make into pigs. That's essentially what
was said in the late seventeen hundreds. And I just draw a line from
the Swinish multitude to the Gammon and I look at the Trump phenomenon as well,
and the people who voted for Trump and the way in which they were
obscenely defamed by sections of the American elites as deplorables and regressive and backward,
didn't know what they were voting for, and too stupid to be trusted with
electoral decisions. So Rise of the Pigs is about the ordinary people's assertion of
their democratic rights and how that itself is an act of heresy against an establishment
that would prefer to keep decision making to itself. So those two chapters I
think are quite nice because they trace the historical development of hysterical ideas and censorious
ideas and just make the point that these things have been a long time coming,
which is why I think it's worth to think about to try and historicize
the moment we live in, to appreciate the roots of it, and to
appreciate some of the ways out of it through understanding the great heresies of the
past and what is valuable about them. Yeah, that's so important. We
lose perspective very, very easily in the era of social media. Last question
you mentioned at the beginning of a conversation, you mentioned confidence. Actually you
had a lot bit of trouble just trying to speak at Oxford, for example.
But do you sense that this is getting better? But I do.
I don't think it means it's over. I think it means it's it's going
to be a really long kind of simmering conflict because there are now all kinds
of people with these ideologies who are just coming into power and aren't as powerful
as they eventually will be quite yet. But it does seem at least on
the Spotify stuck stood by Joe Rogan, offered him a huge deal, stood
by him, even under pressure from Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. But do
you do you sense that at all? Do you think things have changed or
where do you see this going? It's cancel culture or cancel culture are over?
Yeah. I'm an optimistic person by nature, but I do flit between
thinking it's getting better and it's getting worse. I have days when I'm happy
about how things are going, in days of when I'm a bit more depressed
about how things are going. I think there are some definitely some great developments.
Turf Island, which I mentioned, is a good one. Women standing
up and saying no, get out of my space. You're not a woman,
You're a man. That's all to the good. I think there was
a really interesting case here in the UK a couple of years back, a
few years back, where a woman who identifies as a man gave birth to
a child and she went to court to demand her right to be referred to
as the father on the birth certificate, and the Core said, I'm sorry,
this is unacceptable. This goes against reason and nature and our understanding of
the world. And I thought that was a positive development. These things I
send an important message. I think these acts of resistance, even if they're
done by wig wearing judges in dusty, old core rooms, so I think.
And there are so many interesting publications and how and podcasts and networks and
connections. You talked about coalitions. I find the new coalitions that are coming
up very interesting. Some of them work, some of them don't. I
find it interesting that I can have just as much in common with an old
conservative Catholic thinker as I might with a kind of traditional Marxist lefty who hates
woken us. I did a podcast recently with Susan Niman, who's a brilliant
philosopher, describes herself as a socialist. She's just written a new book called
Left Is Not Woke, and she argues that current wokeness has nothing to do
with what the left traditionally stood for, and you hear similar arguments from the
right as well. I find all these coalitions fascinating because what it suggests is
that the current moment we're living through is more important than left and right.
It's more important than Catholic and brodiston. It's more important communist or capitalist.
Because what's being challenged now and undermined are the foundation stones of civilization itself.
The idea that there is such a thing as truth, the idea that it's
good to use reason to try to understand the world around us, the idea
that freedom is a great cardinal quality that allows us to understand ourselves and our
world. These are the building blocks of the republics and the countries that some
of us are lucky enough to live in and when you chip away at them
and say, get rid of the dead white men from university syllabuses, stop
reading Supernoza and can't and whoever else it might because they're too white, to
stop listening to classical music because it's infected with whiteness. What's happening is that
we're witnessing a cultural war against civilization. And that's why I think these coalitions
can emerge, because people are recognizing there is so much at stake here.
And that's one of the points I really hope I get across in my book
that people fought incredibly hard for us to have the right to understand ourselves and
our world, and if we sacrifice that now, we're doing an injustice to
those people who died for those rights, and we're doing an injustice to ourselves,
and we're doing an injustice to future generations. So standing up for the
gains of Western civilization is such an important thing to do. That's a really
good way to put at the gains of Western civilization, truly, as no
matter what the modern left says. Brendan O'Neill is the author of a Heretics
Manifesto manifesto essays on the Unsayable. You can follow his work at Spiked,
at the Daily Mail, anywhere else. People should look Brendan to follow what
you're up to, and they can find me on Instagram. By the only
social media I use is Instagram. I'm on there and I've got a weekly
podcast called The Brendan O'Neill Show, so they can get that on Spotify.
Yeah, that's about it. Really there you go. Make sure to check
it out everyone. Brendan, thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks Emily. All right, make sure everyone you check out Heretics Manifesto.
I'm Emily Johnski, culture editor here at The Federalist. You've been listening to
another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the prey, all right,