The Majority Is Turning On Woke Ideology

Right now, the public—if you take a look—and I’ve done surveys in the US, Britain, and Canada. It’s the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position. That could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country, or, um, you know, that there are many genders or whatever. So, it’s roughly two to one against across 50 questions.

Let’s say in a democracy, the democracy gets to set the curriculum. I think the majority of the population would be on board with the idea of political neutrality and balance, and they see it. And I think we have the numbers to institute that now.

One of my pleas, in terms of the 12-point plan, is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on culture. Because you have a two to one, yeah, a two to one majority. These are clear wedge issues; they divide the left and unite the right.

A question like, you know, should Winston Churchill’s statue be removed from Parliament Square? If you take conservative voters, they are overwhelmingly strongly opposed to that. If you take Labour and Green voters, um, and Liberal Democrats, they’re kind of splintered. Some are strongly in favor, but many are not. So, these are obvious issues to go after.

Why haven’t conservatives gone after them? Because they’re scared of being accused of being a racist. I'll give you another example, which is affirmative action. Red states—only four red states have got bans on affirmative action, 13 have bans on abortion. Now, abortion is a relatively unpopular issue. Bans on abortion are relatively unpopular; they may have one-third support across the US population. Bans on affirmative action might have a two-thirds support, and yet there’s very little of it in red states.

How do we explain that? Well, we explain it first of all by the fact that this issue has not been important enough for conservative politicians. Hanania does a good job of talking about that. Also, the abortion lobby and the gun lobby—they’re very organized. You know, they put pressure on Republican politicians between elections. The anti-affirmative action lobby is totally disorganized and cannot hold conservative politicians' feet to the fire if they do nothing about it.

That has to change—there needs to be organization between elections. We have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians to raise the importance of this issue and to deliver on that issue now. That may be changing.

Well, I’ve seen—I’ve seen in Canada, well, I talked to a lot of conservative politicians in Canada and a fair number in the US. Although I think the proclivity for this is much more marked in Canada because it’s more left-leaning. Ten years ago, the typical conservative was terrified in Canada, saying anything that smacked of social conservatism. There was a very specific reason for that, and the reason was if anyone of them came out publicly and said anything socially conservative, then the woke psychopathic mob would take them out on social media, like as an individual, right? They’d be targeted and destroyed, and that was very effective.

The conservatives, who are also very guilt-prone, like that's the other thing too, is that the left has this advantage because especially the really psychopathic ones—because conservatives feel guilt, but radical leftist psychopaths feel none. They can use guilt as a weapon, and conservatives are very sensitive to that.

You get that combination of clear threat because it is no fun to be mobbed. It’s really, really hard on people. It drives them to not only distraction but often to suicide. You lose your job, you lose your friends, you lose your reputation. No one has enough courage to stand up beside you. The radicals had the conservatives cowed completely. And so, affirmative action is a real touchstone for that because to even question it—well, it’s changed to some degree now, not that much—but to even question it meant the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was like super high. It’s going to happen instantly, right?

But I think this is where you have what political scientists would call an Overton window of acceptable debate. Right? And if you’re outside that window, you can be canceled or you can be attacked by the press. But what we’ve actually seen in Europe and in the US is you take an issue like immigration that was taboo in many European societies—that’s no longer a taboo.

So, Sweden, for example—you could not—the sort of establishment conservative party tried to—one of the ministers tried to raise levels of immigration as an issue in Sweden in 2014. He was attacked in the media as a racist. Okay, he’s shut down. But then what that means is the next year, the Sweden Democrats swoop in on 12.5%, and of course, they’ve reached 25%.

US Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 2015-2016 to make the border a signature issue. He was willing to go there. Now, once you break the taboo, all of a sudden, as in Sweden, now all the parties are talking about immigration. The taboo is not gone entirely, but the Overton window has opened quite a bit.

In Canada likewise, we’re going to need that. Now, we’ve seen it a bit on the gender issue. Premier Higgs in New Brunswick, we’ve seen Scott Moe and Catu. That’s the beginning of an opening up of a conversation. You need a brave politician, like Higgs, to break the ice.

The next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass graves. Somebody has to sort of say the emperor’s new clothes on this thing because there is no evidence of this, and it underpins an entire government-led attack on national history, on the founders of Canada, etc.

Now, who is going to throw the first stone in that? I don’t know. But it has to happen, and I think I would argue that, in fact, the population will follow you because, for example, in the surveys I’ve done, by two to one, Canadians do not want Sir John A. Macdonald statues removed. They support the idea. Yes, he was a creature of his time. No, this idea that the residential schools are genocide, etc. I mean this—I just think somebody needs to go after that.

Have you had a chance to talk to Pierre Poilievre, the new leader of the Conservative Party in Canada? I haven’t. I’m a little concerned. I mean, I certainly think, obviously, that Trudeau was a disaster for all the issues we’re talking about. But I’m worried that Poilievre has only largely talked about economics and only reluctantly about any cultural issues.

Now, I get it; he’s well ahead in the polls. Why endanger that? Priorities—get there. Is some of that? Yeah, my sense is, though, you know, my sense is in Canada that the conservatives are a lot different now than they were 15 years ago. Like, Daniel Smith has a spine, Scott Moe has a spine, Higgs has a spine, so does Poilievre.

Poilievre isn’t pushing the cultural issues, and I think it’s partly because—and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree—if your opponent is busy slaughtering himself, you might as well just stand and watch. Well, seriously, there’s no sense causing a tremendous amount of trouble while that’s occurring.

But the conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago—like, a lot. And they’ll certainly make an issue of the sorts of things that we’ve been discussing in a way that wouldn’t have been conceivable in, say, 2010. Can I think that’s right?

I think that it’s all—but I do think it’s important for the grassroots to, to some degree, hold Poilievre to account when he’s in office. If, for example, he backtracks on defunding the CBC, if he doesn’t do anything or say anything on immigration, on culture wars, I think that—you know, my worry, having seen it in Britain, where the Conservative government came in with the support of Brexit voters and essentially did not deliver—hoping that the voters wouldn’t notice.

So, that’s my worry. But I don’t know, is the honest answer. I don’t know him or his cabinet.