Women, Politics, Personality, and Self Esteem | Eric Kaufmann | EP 453

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, 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 as they see it. I think we have the numbers to institute that now, and one of my pleas is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on culture.

Hello everybody! I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Eric Peter Kaufman. He's a Canadian author and a professor from the University of Buckingham. He's written a new book; it's come out in two different forms: The Third Awokening or Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution. Eric is also the author of a number of other books: Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, The Rise and Fall of Anglo America, The Orange Order, etc. He's a rare bird, you might say; he's a relatively conservative social scientist, and there aren't very many of those. In fact, I think the two of us talking are about the only two that there are. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

We talk about a lot of things today. We talk about the sacred dimension of the victim-victimizer narrative. We talk about the state of modern universities and what's being done to, what would you say, stem the tide of the radical leftists. We talk about Dr. Kaufman's presumption that much of what's happening on the culture war front isn't precisely due to the invasion of Marxists that you often hear about, or even about postmodernism per se, but more about progressive literalism, with its roots in the early 20th century, and so he makes that case. We talk about sex and the different political beliefs that are emerging, especially between men and young women.

Join us for the conversation. You're concentrating on the culture war, which continues to rage madly, especially in, well, academia and everything it touches. Do you want to tell, I thought we'd start with two things. Do you want to tell people why you entitled your new book The Third Awokening, and then maybe fill everybody in a little bit about your history with cancel culture and academia and how that ties in with your broader body of work?

Yeah, Jordan, it's great to be on the show. And yeah, I've got a new book, The Third Awokening; the title in Britain is called Taboo. What this book really is about, what it really argues, is that what we're seeing—cancel culture, for example, attacks on the past, on history—this is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a pre-existing set of ideas. It is not a deviation from this. Well, there are people who will say everything was fine in the 2000s and suddenly we've had this post-2015 deviation. My argument is actually no. What we're seeing is a continuation of a set of ideas which arguably go back a century.

So these are the ideas, really, of left-liberalism, and we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left-liberalism, a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism. People like John Dewey, Jane Addams in the United States, the origins of pluralism, the origins of the critique of ethnic majorities and national identity, and then this has sort of accelerated. Every generation, but really from the late 1960s, we get a sort of takeoff, and then we've kind of had, with social media, another acceleration.

So the Third Awokening simply means that we're not in the first one; that we've had three of these emotional outbursts and ideological awakenings. Just like in Protestantism, you have the First and Second Great Awakenings in American Protestantism, these are sort of emotional upsurges. The first one was in the late 60s, and people forget that you had Black Panthers occupying buildings armed to the teeth. You had students demanding, you know, 50 Black professors be studied, every Black student be admitted—Black studies. This is how Black studies got started, for example, through demands by people who occupied the offices of administrators.

So the late 60s, we have a number of these things. Then there's another awokening, which is in the late '80s, early '90s. That's sort of probably when you and I were coming of age, we had political correctness, Afrocentrism, speech codes, for example. "Hey ho, Western Civ has got to go!" You know, changing the curriculum, purging it of dead white males. That talk in the late '80s, early '90s. And then we have another wave which comes in post-2010. So these are, in my view, continuous; they really touch on the same set of ideas, which is really making sacred a couple of things.

Which is identities are made sacred. So I define, for example, woke—one sentence definition, people always ask, "What is the definition of woke?" Well, the definition of woke, as I mentioned in the book, is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. That's it. That's the one-sentence definition. And that is also what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral order. Out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology which says, um, so these are the sacred groups. Those groups cannot be offended. So anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a blasphemer; you're profaning the sacred, you must be excommunicated.

I.E., cancelled. The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources between these groups. So, for example, you can't have a race gap or a gender gap in terms of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities, and so on; it's got to be zero. So, equality plus emotional safety—these are the two pillars of this ideology. But the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system like loan liberalism or even Marxism; it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down systematizing cognitive thing. It's much more emotional.

We're attached concretely to the Black civil rights movement, to the Indigenous, to the LGBT movements, and it's our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning, and that's primary in the system. It's not a set of ideas like Marxism; it's actually a set of emotional attachments, and so this is very much emotional, and it's driven from the ground up.

Okay, so let me ask you, let me ask you some questions about that. Okay, so I guess you pulled out two strings there. You did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism, let's say, starting in the early 20th century, but then you are also stressing the more emotional side of it—let's call it the compassionate side. So I want to ask you—and you talked about it as bottom-up and emotion-driven—so it seems to me that there's the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number of potentially fundamental causal elements. You pointed to liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion, let's say. Other people have pointed to the role of a kind of meta-Marxism.

The Marxists, of course, divided the world into victim and victimizer, essentially on economic grounds. The difference now is that that same narrative seems to play out. There are victims and there are victimizers, but there are a number of dimensions along which that axis of inequality can reveal itself, and you talked about race, gender, and sexuality. There's other axes as well, but those are likely the primary ones. And then with regards to the emotional side, this is something I can't help wondering about, and no one is talking about it—I can understand why. We did a series of studies that were published in 2016, which was pretty much when I left the university, so it never got completed.

But we identified a group of ideas that hung together statistically that we called politically correct authoritarianism. Deviated to some degree from, say, the liberal progressive ethos in that the people who adopted that set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force. That being perhaps the primary distinction. The predictors that we found that determined whether or not people adopted those beliefs were, first of all, low verbal intelligence. That was a walloping predictor. The second one was being female, and the third one was having a female temperament, and the fourth one was having ever taken even one politically correct course.

And so one of the things I'm very curious about: See, I've been thinking that one of the things that we're seeing is the increased female domination of the university system, especially in the humanities and social sciences. And I think there's a fundamental feminine ethos that is instinctive, that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education, but that has a proclivity to divide the world up into predators and infants. And will be tied to you if you happen to fall into the predator camp. It's very tightly allied with the victim-victimizer narrative.

And you know, you do point out in your book that there is a predilection for women between the ages of 18 and 34, and this has been shown everywhere—they're way out of lockstep with every other demographic group, way more progressive, far more radically left, way more likely to identify, for example, to even claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims in some sense, which is just an absolute miracle of interpretation. So we've identified a number of streams. There's a Marxist influence, there's a postmodern influence, which we haven't talked about, there's a liberal progressive influence, there's an emotional influence, and then I don't know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination, especially of the humanities and the social sciences, plays into that. Because that's a major league cultural revolution, the fact that the universities are dominated, for example, administratively as well by females.

And so I know that's a hell of a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat, but I think that's actually really interesting, and I think it is a contributing factor. But I just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats. The first is we only see this female effect amongst young people, so older women we don't find greater support for cancel culture. It's very much seems to be among young women. The second thing is if you were to go back to 1970, for example, women were, you know, there's a survey done every year in the US. Higher Education Research Institute—100,000 freshmen, 18-year-olds entering American universities—uh, in 1970, women were somewhat more conservative than men, 18-year-old women, 18-year-old men.

And it's really not until 2004 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be more liberal than men, and that’s now widened to about 15 points. So something's happened to women in the recent period. That's the first point to note. And that's the other thing is that Fire, which stands for Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, does an annual survey in the US—55,000 respondents. So there's a lot of survey data in the book; I try and ground this as much as possible in the data. So they ask questions, for example, is it okay to shout down or block somebody from speaking? And on those questions, actually, especially using violence to prevent somebody from speaking, women are less likely than men to support that. On blocking, they're about as likely.

Where women really stand out is should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something that might be offensive? So for example, that says BLM is a hate group, that says trans is a mental disorder. There, you see a big gender gap. And you see it also amongst Republican women, by the way, versus Republican men. So it seems like the attitude, the sort of—there's the authoritarian "I want to do violence," which I think is not gendered, or may even be somewhat more male—but there's this protective "Oh, I don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt," and that I think is more female.

So I think there are some nuances here. What I would say, I mean, the way I think about it is women will tend to back up whatever is the moral order. If the moral order is a woke moral order, they’ll back that up. If it's a religious or patriotic moral order, they'll be more likely to back that up. Whereas men will be more likely to be the contrarians. I think because, you know, people will talk about, "Well, women are more compassionate," but the point is compassionate to who? Like, compassionate to—is the point—that's for sure. That’s the point. So, compassionate to the transitioner or the detransitioner, compassionate to the trans, the biological male who wants to enter a woman's shelter or woman's prison, or the women in the prison?

I mean, the ideology is what tells you who to be compassionate towards. So if we go back to the liberal progressives, Jane Addams was relatively pro-lynching, or at least thought that wasn't a bad idea because she was very, very empathetic towards white women. And so she was willing to accept that there were these Black male predators and buy into that framing. So what I'm just saying is I think what's happened is an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate towards and who not to care about.

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So, okay, so your point fundamentally is that I believe is that the ideology specifies the victim-victimizer dimension and identifies the victim. Now, do you think—when we did our study, it was agreeable, I said it was being female and having a female temperament, those were both predictors. We never saw that in any study we ever did looking at what predicted beliefs, for example. If generally, if we controlled for temperament, sex had no effect, but that wasn't the case in this specific situation, which I thought was extremely telling.

And so it's also very interesting, as you pointed out, that it's young women in particular, and I can't help, as someone, you know, psychoanalytically influenced. I can't help but think that a fair chunk of this is misplaced maternal instinct. I believe that the young women who are, by and large, childless in the years when they shouldn't be are unbelievably sensitive.

Well, let's talk about what happened in 2004. You know, you said that's when women started to shift their political priorities. Now I know from people who've been investigating this that TikTok is a particularly pernicious influence, especially with regards to the campus protests that are occurring right now. The TikTok short videos that are fostering the campus protests, at least among women, focus on compassion for the war victims to the ultimate degree, and they seem to be extraordinarily effective. But there's a real problem here that needs to be wrestled with because if it is the case that young women are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions in university institutions, for example, then we have a whole new kind of social problem on our hands.

Because we've never had—it's only been in the last 30 years that we've had the opportunity to see what female-dominant large institutions would look like, right? That's historically unprecedented; we have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have. So what do you think happened in 2004? Like, why did the tide start to turn then?

So, interpret. There's other data series that we can see changing. So political donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time. Now political donations come from people who are highly educated, relatively well-off, for example. I think what happens in the US, anyway, is you get George W. Bush, who's more of a populist, not an elite-style conservative who’s just about tax and spend, for example.

And I actually think you see, you know, he's also, to some degree, advancing the agenda of the religious right to some degree. I think this populist-style cultural conservativism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion formers, and so they start to drift away in terms of political donations. And the—if you like—the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions, the schools, the culture, just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example.

So I actually think women are a kind of reflectors of what is the dominant ethos in a society, or at least the prestige ethos in a society. So if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism, I think women would be in the forefront of that. I don't think there's anything biological. So I am more of a sociologist and a political scientist, so I tend to approach these things from a kind of sociology of emotions perspective, which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express.

Now of course that's refracted through, like, gender. So in this case, I think women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values, the dominant ideology of the elites in a society. So I'm not as convinced—why the elites? Why do you think it's okay? Why would women specifically back up the dominant ideology of the elites? Do you think that's a consequence of something like hypergamy, or what's your theory about that? Because it's weird if they're also standing up for the underdogs. Is it that they accept the elite differentiation of who's an underdog and who's a power monger?

And then—why is that associated with youth, let's say, with women? I'm trying to disentangle all that.

Well, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, one is the education system, which I think shifts in this direction in a big way. I mean, it was there in a few radical centers like Berkeley and the Toronto District School Board, Greater London Council. So you had these crazy places, but what's happened is a scaling up. So what my book talks a lot about is these ideas actually go back quite a long way, but it’s the scaling up now. It's in every school.

So I did a couple of studies with the Manhattan Institute; you know, 90% of 18 to 20-year-old Americans that I interviewed, I sent the survey to, said that they had encountered at least one critical race theory concept from an adult in school. In Britain, it was about, you know, it was a majority as well—not as high, but a majority. So it's hitting saturation level.

So that’s what women are getting in class. And then they see it in the institutions that maybe in the workplace, in the government. So they're seeing this thing, DEI, everywhere. And so they think, "Yeah, this is the way you have to be a good moral person," and they simply reinforce those values. So I think that is the biggest driver. And I don't think it's just self-interest.

So if we take a question, like, you know, should—one of the questions that I ask is, should JK Rowling be dropped by her publisher? Amongst young people, it's 50-50: drop her or not drop her. Amongst anyone over 45, it's in the low single digits. So we've got a big issue with young people. But what's really interesting is that if we take this sort of question—should JK Rowling be dropped by her publisher?

You know, women are considerably more likely to say that than men. Now, you might say, "Well, shouldn't women be sticking up for women and women's spaces and female authors?" No, actually. So women are actually going against their own interest as a tribe by supporting the gender, you know, the trans activist case on women's sports, women's shelters, women's prisons, you name it. It doesn't make any sense from a purely feminist perspective.

So I just think they're reflecting—these are the values that good people are supposed to have, and we're going to reinforce. Do you think—okay, well, it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that something like the default young female ethos is self-sacrifice in relationship to the marginalized, right? I mean, infants are marginalized; they're in danger all the time, and they have to be attended to. Everything they demand has to be granted to them.

So perhaps it's not surprising that women would sacrifice their own interests in relationship to the marginalized, because that's actually—and certainly self-sacrifice is part of what you might regard as a core in relationship to any moral ethos. The problem seems to be that it can be gamed, and it's gamed so effectively now. And then you also talked about the fact that the young people have been exposed to these courses.

So we could flesh that out a little bit. We did find in the study that I described—which was a very good study, by the way—it was only published as a master's thesis because my research career came to a rather crashing halt. But the fact that even one course had a significant effect over IQ and temperament and sex was telling, right? So now I don't know if you know this, but you might know it. You know that in virtually every state and province in North America, a teacher has to be certified.

And that's basically the faculties of education have a hammerlock on that, which is appalling as far as I'm concerned because I don't think there's a more corrupt branch of academia than the faculties of education. Terrible research, counterproductive research—whole word learning, self-esteem, social-emotional—name a stupid fad and the probability that it came out of an educational psychologist in a faculty of education is extremely high.

Do you know that the K through 2 education system eats up 50% of the state budgets in the United States? So that means, that means that since the 1960s, we have handed 50% of the state budgets to the most woke graduates of the worst possible faculties. We've done that for four generations, and now, well, and as you said, now in your surveys you're finding that the vast majority of students have been exposed to, well, what's essentially, I don't—I don't know how to characterize it—postmodern meta-Marxist propaganda.

It's something like that, although, you know, you're stressing more the emotional side of it. And so, well, I guess that—we'll discuss that a little bit too when we get to your, I'm so interested in discussing your solutions because, you know, I think the solutions to the universities is to let them perish by their own hand because they're certainly struggling mightily to do so.

So, but you're more optimistic. And so I—okay, so that's the facts on the ground with regards to state budgets. 50% of their budgets has been handed over to these propagandistic institutions.

Well, I think the schools are critical. So one of the things we're finding, for example, is that students largely are formed by the time they come on campus, and a lot of the studies of university show people's views don't actually change a great deal between when they step on to campus and leave the university. However, so we really have to focus on the school.

So one of the things we found in the study that Zack Goldberg and I did was we looked at how much exposure to critical race and gender theory concepts students had had in high school. And, you know, we take, for example, somebody who didn't get any exposure to any of these critical race concepts like white privilege, systemic racism, unconscious, or the gender concepts, many genders, patriarchy, for example.

Someone who got no exposure to that is sort of 50% to 100% less likely to express, for example, white guilt, think that, you know, whites are racist and mean, to favor racial quotas and affirmative action. All of these things jump 50% to 100% less, yes—wow. And minding, that's between somebody having no concepts and the maximum of six concepts. Similarly, by the way, for partisanship, you know, someone with a Republican mother who is exposed to no concepts, there's essentially 60% of them identify as Republican; exposed to six concepts, it drops to below 30%.

So one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K-12 education, public education, is absolutely massive and must become a top priority for certainly conservative politicians. This—if you want to have hope in the future in terms of turning this around, we've got to get at K-12 education.

Okay, so let me ask you about that. I just saw a study the other day—just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups when people believe that the culture—their culture peaked in terms of quality music, entertainment, food, peace, etc. And the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between the—about, say, 15 and 19. And, you know, there's a tremendous amount of neural reorganization that goes on at that point. So there's a big die-off of neurons between two and four, right?

So you're born with more neural connections than you ever have again in your life, and a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning. There's a major pruning in late infancy, and then there's a major pruning in the teenage years. You kind of die into your adult personality; that's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

Now, people have known for a long time that if you want to get men into the military in the proper way, you have to do that when they're young adults—the earlier, the better. By the time they're 23 or so, like, forget it; you can't tribalize them, right? We don't know exactly the critical period for the establishment of tribal identity, but you're suggesting that your research is indicating that it's actually prior to university. You know, I bet it's the same time that people develop their musical preferences, right?

Right, right. Well, yeah, I think—I mean, that’s such a good key point that you make about the neurons and brain development kind of ending in a certain way in the early 20s. That tends to manifest itself—I mean, a political scientist like myself would tend to look at these as cohort effects. So you kind of your beliefs crystallize to some extent in your early 20s, and you carry those through life.

Because right now, I think there's a complacency among a lot of people who say, "Well, you know, young people are woke, but they'll grow out of it; they'll come back; they'll have kids; they'll own a house, and they'll suddenly become conservative." I think that's quite naive in many ways. I think that U—I think that may be true in terms of self-interest paying taxes, but in terms of these core values, I don't think that's likely.

And you can see that, by the way, with religion. So secularism, non-religion started with young people, and those beliefs were sticky, and they maintained non-religion throughout life, and now we're seeing record levels of non-religion in the US and Britain, for example.

One of my contentions is, yes, there's no question that we—you know, woke has kind of peaked. We've seen a rollback of DEI in corporations to some extent. We've seen, to some extent, reduced tar—so we’ll see about that; they're pretty slippery, man. Just because they don’t have the same name doesn’t mean they're not up to the same tricks—exactly. But that as it may, in the New York Times and the Washington Post editorializing in favor of free speech and against, you know, mandatory diversity statements, what I say is that's true, and I think those senior liberals have rolled back, but I think we've got to look at this in terms of cohort change, generational turnover.

When the median voter and the median employee in an organization is a millennial or a Zoomer, they're going to carry the beliefs they have with them into midlife, and that is going to change our culture.

For example, if I say, here’s a question that we ask—YouGov asked to hundreds of thousands of British respondents on its panels: Do you favor political correctness because it protects people from discrimination, or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles free speech? No, in the British public, it's sort of 47 to 37 against political correctness.

Amongst academics, it's maybe 75 to 20 in favor. Among social science and humanities academics, young people take after that: they're about two to one in favor of political correctness. What I would sort of predict is if we run the clock forward 20 years, the median in society is going to shift from essentially being opposed to political correctness to being supportive of political correctness.

So, something like speech codes, for example, in universities will have majority support. And so I think we really have to turn this ship around while we still have a sensible population, because we can't guarantee that that's always going to be the case. And so that's why I think the schools—changing the culture in schools has to be so central.

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Yeah, so okay, so I want to bring a couple of other issues here before perhaps we turn to your solutions. Now, when we began our conversation, you said that part of this movement was the establishment of sacred identities, and I just brought that up because you brought up the religious issue as well, and I know you've done some writing about that. Additionally, I know so there's a variety of—I like the idea of sacred. See, I think what I think religion, religious ideas are axiomatic starting points.

Like the Euclidean axioms for Euclidean geometry, there are very, very many different forms of geometry, right? You just have to switch the axioms—the axioms of a cognitive system. I think the word sacred is exactly right, is that you have to accept a certain number of things on faith, and then you can build a logical edifice on top of that—maybe even a functionally logical edifice—but there are going to be axioms at the base.

And so I think that any assumption, for example, on the part of people like Dawkins that we can replace the religious enterprise with something that's purely secular is nonsense. I think what we'll get is a different set of sacred axioms. And you pointed to race, gender, and sexuality. And so, why do you—first of all, I want to know what you think about that and why you use the term sacred. But I'm also curious about your thoughts with regard to why it was that when we shed our previous set of sacred presumptions, let's say that it was race, gender, and sexuality, that rushed in to fill the void, right? So, why them? Why those axioms?

Well, I mean, there’s a sort of earlier history, which I don’t go into as much in the book for reasons of space. So, to some degree, you know, this was directed against immigrant groups, were sort of slightly protected by the liberal progressives—not as extreme as race post-1960s.

But I think to understand this, we have to go—and one of the reasons I make the argument that this is about left-liberalism is that the Civil Rights Movement, starting in the mid-50s, but really in the mid-60s, this occurs. With the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, all things which I support. But, uh, as Shelby Steele in his book White Guilt, which I recommend to everybody—he's an African American who grew up in the South—experienced what he called a dramatic shift almost overnight, where the cultural power goes away from whites, where Black people had to kind of genuflect to whites, to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they are one of the good whites to Black people.

So the cultural power flows to Black people. That doesn't mean economic power initially, but cultural power. That's what he said, and in fact, American institutions, in order to—they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the sin of racial discrimination. Once you admit, he says, you give up cultural power; now you have to admit, because these were real things—but that loss of cultural power means that you now have to fight for your moral legitimacy. How do you do that? Through virtue signaling.

So you're kind of virtue signaling that you're one of the good whites, that your institution still has moral legitimacy. So you're going to have an affirmative action program, for example, you're going to have some kind of racial sensitivity training, which is the precursor to diversity training. So a lot of these things really begin in the 60s and 70s, which is one of the reasons—and these are not Marxist things. This isn't Herbert Marcuse saying, "We failed on class; we got to move to identity," because they might do the radical revolution.

I'm—those people were there, don’t get me wrong; you had Rufo is correct and Lindsay, that at least in terms of the ideas, those ideas were there. But really what drove this, you know, President Johnson was an anti-communist; you know he was bombing Vietnam. This is not some kind of a neo-Marxist; what this was really about was kind of virtue signaling and saying, "I'm not one of the bad people."

And a certain exaggerated catastrophizing in fear of the right of conservatives—they're going to drag us back to Jim Crow, back to 1933 Germany. That constant ginning up of that alarmism—these are the three elements of the left-liberal stool that are developed. And so that’s kind of the emphasis. So I put the Civil Rights Movement as kind of the big bang of our moral order, and it is sort of the center of our moral universe now.

Once you've got this sacredness around race that you have to very tiptoe around Black Americans because you know you've done wrong and you feel a bit guilty, and then you sort of can take that sacredness—it’s a bit like kryptonite—and you can wield it. And if you're a feminist movement, you can grab a bit of that power and use it; if you are an indigenous movement, you can use it, and then you can stretch it. So it's now mispronouncing somebody's name or the Mullen Report in 1965 about the Black family that becomes a bit offensive, and you have to shove it right.

So the stretching—it's a bit like putty—you can then stretch it across to different groups, outwards to microaggressions, and this is where all the power comes from.

And I think, you know, there's another—there's well there's another interesting dimension there too that’s worth thinking about that’s more psychological than sociological. So there’s a group of personality disorders that are extraordinarily resistant to treatment and should have probably never been medicalized, in my estimation, because they're not illnesses.

So antisocial personality disorder is one of them. Criminality is not an illness, even though it's diagnosable. The associated pathologies are borderline personality disorder, which is perhaps the female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder, although I would argue it's even more toxic. Hisritic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder—that kind of fleshes it out.

Now, the people in that cluster, let’s say, they—the personality traits they show are they’re manipulative. So, if someone like that is talking to you, the only thing they’re using their words for is to obtain power over you for their immediate needs—that's it. There’s no dialogue; there's pure manipulation. They tend to be psychopathic, and so psychopaths are predators and parasites. They're histrionic, so prone to high levels of emotional display, especially negative emotion. They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status, and just to top it off, because that's not bad enough, they have a proclivity to be sadistic, which means they take pleasure in the undeserved suffering of others.

Now the reason I'm bringing this up is because that group of people uses claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain power. So there's an additional twist here that I think is stunningly dangerous, and you see it tied in with your notion that the progressive liberals have enabled the radicals. Because here's the problem: If you're empathic and progressive, you don't believe that cluster B people exist, but because everyone's a victim. But the problem is they do exist.

And it's in times when that small minority—maybe that's 4%—when they get the upper hand—and they do—they got the upper hand after the French Revolution; they got the upper hand after the Russian Revolution. It is no fun for anyone because they're chaos worshipers; their best means of obtaining power and even reproductive opportunity is in the ashes. And so I’ve spent—I spent five years working with Democrats in the US, and it got frustrating, and so I stopped doing it; but part of the reason it got frustrating is because I could never get any of the ones that I worked with—and that was a lot—to say to me when does the left go too far.

And I would point out the dangers of the cluster B psychopaths, and they just handwaved it. It’s like, "Oh, no, they don’t really mean what they say. They don’t mean what they say when they're talking about equality of outcome, for example." Kamala Harris, she doesn’t mean equality of outcome; she just means equality of opportunity. And you have—it's—it is stunning the degree to which that's an axiom belief of progressive liberals that that radical left fringe doesn’t exist or they don’t mean what they say.

That’s universal. I’ve literally not talked to one of them who—including Robert Kennedy, by the way—who was willing to say, for example, what you said in your book, which is that we better watch out for the demand for equality of outcome because I do think that's where the pathology really manifests itself. It's like, really? You want equality of outcome, do you, along all dimensions? And you're going to—how are you going to obtain that exactly except by force? Well, maybe we want force. It’s like, yeah, maybe you do.

Yeah, so there's this interplay between sociology, thought, and psychopathology that people aren't attending to, and it's very dangerous because the other thing that's terrible is that social media seems to enable the cluster B types. Because in normal conversation, they're subject to the restrictions that face-to-face interaction carries with it, like the possibility of getting hit, for example. But none of that is there on social media, and that enables, as far as I could tell, that enables this psychopathic manipulation to have essentially free sway.

Yeah, I mean, that's really an interesting set of observations. I think you're right, and I guess we're agreeing but from different ends of the telescope because I think that what's happening is this large group—so in a university, the median academic is liberal-left, soft-left, not far left—50 to 60% of the university. This is why, for example, by a 2-to-1 ratio, social science academics in elite universities support mandatory diversity statements.

So this is not something they’re being forced to do by a few crazies. But of course, as you say, there's a symbiosis between the authoritarian left and this large group of liberal-left. So my view is if we could work on at least convincing some of those liberal leftists to change course, then that will reduce—you know, it’s like unplugging a guitar from the amplifier. The liberal left is the amplifier, and the radical left is the guitar player.

How do we—and but you make another good point, which I've heard before, which is when does the left go too far? The unwillingness—and there’s really a couple of strands to this. We might call them equal outcomes and diversity is another, and inclusion is another—the EDI triumvirate. And I would say that on all of those dimensions, left liberalism really has no boundaries.

So left liberalism is sane on the economy; it believes in a mixed capitalist economy. And so left liberalism really emerges as the victor through two world wars and the Cold War as the ideology of sort of the elite cultural ideology. It's not communist, actually. I don’t think it is communist. I think it believes in a maybe a higher tax rate perhaps than the free market right, but I'm not really that concerned about the economy; it’s on the cultural side, there are really no guardrails at all.

It's just—there are—we’re not diverse enough, we’re not inclusive enough, we’re not equal enough. There’s no bound to that. So whenever someone comes along and says we should be more equal, it's like yes. What we have is this ratcheting. And that’s really where, I mean, Hania's book on affirmative action in the United States moving to this idea that, "Well, it starts out as, well, we want equal treatment." That's what affirmative action meant. Pretty soon, it was goals and timetables. Then there was disparate impact.

Well, you know, if you have a test like the SAT and certain racial groups are not represented, then that's a kind of indirect discrimination. So what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting. Now that’s quite different from a neo-Marxist takeover of institutions, a kind of Vanguard March through the institutions argument, which I think is—I’m not as persuaded—but I think there's some of that happening.

But I think it's really this sort of evolving ratcheting left liberalism because it has no boundaries—as you say, when does there be too much diversity? And we know from the studies Robert Putnam, for example, or Easterly, that too much diversity actually has negative impacts on, for example, economic development, on various kinds of examples, trust in your neighbors.

And this—this is now a—this is a finding I would call a—how can you have trust without cohesiveness? Right, right? How the hell can you manage that? Yeah, but there’s no limits, and there's no willingness to recognize we don't want to maximize these things; we want to optimize them. That is not the way the liberal left thinks. They just think more equality, more diversity, more inclusivity.

Now, of course, inclusivity means we got to have speech codes. We’ve got to clamp down on speech which might be offensive so people don't feel included; might damage their self-esteem. So this is getting at free speech to get inclusion, and I just don't know—self-esteem. Well, I've been watching these pathologies grow in psychology for 30 years, and the social psychologists in particular— they just—they've irritated the hell out of me for like three generations.

And so self-esteem—people still use that word. So here's what self-esteem is: self-esteem is trait neuroticism minus extroversion. There's no such thing as self-esteem; it's a complete bloody lie. It has no construct validity whatsoever. It's an index of your temperamental proclivity to negative emotion, and women have lower levels of self-esteem because they have higher levels of neuroticism, and that kicks in at puberty. And so this is a good example of how the educational psychologists and the social psychologists have actually perverted the whole culture because we actually believe in things that don’t exist so deeply that people use them in their speech as if they're actual facts.

Maximizing self-esteem? It’s like it’s trait neuroticism. It's extremely difficult; it's very much set temperamentally; it has a very powerful genetic, what would you say, foundation. Neuroticism doesn't differ between boys and girls, and it doesn’t kick into puberty; it's different between men and women all around the world. And you know, so we can’t lower people's self-esteem.

It means we're aiming at a target that doesn’t even exist, and we're using ideological means because we've got our measurements wrong. So, alright. So one of the things that was striking about your book—and I don’t know how to rectify this apparent paradox—you make the case that we've raised a cohort of kids who’ve been thoroughly propagandized in high school, let’s say, because that looks like about the place where it's occurring.

And your belief is that that's pretty sticky; although there’ll be some movement in a conservative direction as people get more conscientious as they get older, they get more agreeable, they do tilt a bit more toward conservatism. But you believe that a lot of those ideas will be sticky, and that means that that's going to dominate, let's say, in positions of power 10 years down the road.

But by the same token, you also believe that there’s time to turn the ship around. So let’s talk about that; you have 12 ideas, and I’m really curious to see you go through them.

So, well, you lectured for us at Peterson Academy, right?

That's right, that's right, yeah, right, right. So that's one of our answers to the problem, and that's launching, by the way, at the end of the month. Fantastic. Yeah, and it was a very enjoyable experience. I didn’t teach anything particularly controversial, but still—what I would say is there are really two different approaches to dealing with the issue.

I mean, one is what I might call libertarian, and that’s using market-based solutions, and the other is interventionist using government-led solutions. Now, I actually lean more towards the second than the first, which may jar against some of the libertarians in the audience. So for example, I think when it comes to the battle of ideas in the media, the barriers to entry are quite low: you can set up a podcast, you know, can have the impact that you're having, that Joe Rogan is having.

But when we’re talking about universities, tech firms, particularly search engines, there are natural monopolies, and there are sort of market failures. So there are first-mover advantages to being Harvard. It's going to be very hard for Harvard's reputation—I know it's dropped a little, but it's going to be hard for that rank ordering to change a lot.

And similarly with school—so the view that we should simply have school choice and that's going to fix the problem—I think it's great, but I don't think it's going to make much difference. Surveys that I've looked at, for example, show that kids who go through to private school, to parochial school, who are even homeschooled actually don't differ very much in their views.

And in addition, the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed to is relatively similar. If you think about universi— even in homeschools, it’s a little bit lower, but in the data that I've seen—which is the FIRE Foundation, Individual Rights and Expression, and also we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey—now we didn't get a ton of variation. Now, it could be that the homeschool kids—we got a selection of those homeschool kids which wasn't representative; I don’t know, maybe that’s the case, but—

Well, is it a curriculum issue? How do you account for that? Because on the face of it, that seems—I believe it with the private schools because my experience with private schools is that they tend to be as woke as the public schools—maybe not quite as much, but pretty much; the homeschool one, that’s more complex. But it’s not that easy for parents, for example, to set up a curriculum, and the curricula are well dominated by the ideology, let's say.

But how do you make sense of that?

Right, well, I think there are some differences. So on the gender ideology, there’s a bit less amongst the homeschool. Now, we don’t have a massive sample, but there looks to be some effect, but it’s not massive. And my point is, you know, if you are a really switched-on parent, you could send your kid to a classical school if you have that option nearby; that may make a difference for you. But the number of parents who are like that is quite small.

Most of them will just say, "What school is going to get my kid ahead into a top university, get the best results?" Even if they have a choice, and so most kids are just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine, and that’s my concern is not the freedom of a very switched-on parent to actually avoid these things, which is important. But most of these kids are being put through the same system, so we’ve got to, I think, get at the public school system.

So, for example, I think something like what Ron DeSantis is doing—sort of essentially banning DEI, sort of getting indoctrination out of the schools, monitoring that.

Okay, let me ask you about that because I really have mixed feelings about this. And I'll tell you why. I like Chris Rufo; I've enjoyed talking to him. I think him and DeSantis have done very interesting work in Florida. But I have a concern.

And the concern is that once you establish the precedent that the universities can be directed from the top down by the politicians particularly to set their curricula straight, you set a vicious precedent. And I believe that the work that Rufo is doing in Florida, setting up the new university, for example, and pushing back against DEI is laudable, partly because all the universities, to speak of, are woke with the possible exception of, like, Hillsdale.

Even if there is a risk of overshooting on the conservative side, they’re at such a disadvantage that practically speaking at the moment that might be necessary. But like if the universities are incapable of governing themselves—and that would go along with the faculties of education—and we turn that, we move that responsibility up the political hierarchy to the elected officials, we open the door for mass intervention in the education system for ideological reasons, and that’s like—

So I just can’t see that as—I see that as a solution with a lot of attended dangers. So I'm wondering—like I said, I understand what Rufo is doing and why and DeSantis as well, and I think they're both sensible people, but that doesn't mean that it'll always be sensible people doing such things.

No, so I would draw a very stark distinction between K-12, between the school system where you've got minors who are captive. They have to be there; they have to parrot back what the teacher says in order to get a good mark—with the universities where academics have academic freedom, for example.

So at university level, I would be opposed to critical race theory bans. I’ve taught critical race theory. I think you’ve got adults; they're choosing which courses to take. Now, I do think, however, that state governments or the government has the right to defund— not ban, but to defund, say, “Well, we’re not going to fund this kind of course.”

Now, that's a political decision, but it's not to say it’s banned; you can cross-subsidize that from your more profitable faculties, and I think that will just— it will allow it to be taught if people really want to take it.

But so I don't think we—this is practical for universities. Universities, I think there's a different set of solutions. But I think for the school system, it is perfectly legitimate to say we're going to have a politically neutral space.

More important than that, sorry, I just want to say one thing, which is you have to teach about the past. And the warts—slavery, genocide, conquest—but I don't think you should be allowed to teach about American slavery without teaching about, say, indigenous slavery or Ottoman slavery. You shouldn't be able to teach about stolen land, you know, the Americans stealing land from the indigenous, without talking about the Iroquois stealing land from the Hoh. And the Comanche committing, you know, atrocities against the Apache.

So what I mean is we need to have a fully contextualized discussion that all land is stolen land in a way. Because I think part of what the problem is, you know, 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds in the United States believe that, you know, the Native peoples—quote unquote, the Native Americans—lived in peace and harmony prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

This is exactly the problems. We have a very wise stewards of nature, and everything was peaceful and harmonious. Yeah, right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 101. It’s so pathetic.

So I think that kind of really—that sort of attempt to forge the curriculum, and now if you look historically, Canada, the US, Australia, Britain, conservative parties have tried and failed. They’ve essentially been outdistanced by the education establishment time and time again on this stuff.

That's going to have to change. They're going to have to get hold of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum and political neutrality. Britain has a law on the books that schools cannot politically indoctrinate, but what they do is they say, "Well, critical race theory is not political." They get around that.

Yeah, right. So then, okay, so that begs the next—well, that begs the next question. It’s like, once the institutions that we're discussing—the faculties of Education, let's say—once they're universally corrupted, who the hell has the wisdom or the time in order to manage something like curricular analysis?

You know, like I went to the Republican Governor's Association meeting, which was an interesting thing to do. I did that last year, and one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes me in general about the Republicans—it was a rather dull meeting.

They were trying to appeal to their donors, so I expected a bit more spice, but it was dull in a kind of competent administrative manner. So the governors would get up, and they would talk about what were essentially local micro-initiatives that were sensible and practical, but they weren't the sort of cultural transformation vision that’s necessary for people to sit down and say, "Okay, well, the faculties of education are propagandizing. What do we want our children to learn?"

Like who in the—Rufo is an exception to this, maybe, but he’s a singular sort of person. I don’t see widely—you know, I spent a lot of time talking to political people all across North America. It isn’t obvious to me that I see anywhere the kind of expertise or even the time that’s available to manage such a thing.

So how do you envision that happening?

Well, I think there are groups! So the National Association of Scholars has model curricula, civics curricula that they're developing, some of the think tanks, Manhattan Institute as well. So there are now model curricula that conservative governments could adopt.

They have to have the fight with the educational establishment, which, by the way, they have had and lost. Now, you look at, for example, DeSantis, the African American— the AP, for example, I don’t know if you recall where DeSantis rejected the AP for African American studies.

It was filled with critical race theory, forced the critical race theory to come out of that. That’s an example of what I’m talking about is you actually have to get into the weeds of this, and you have to insist, and you have to do inspection, you have to mainstream it into the inspection regime—all this very boring technocratic bureaucratic stuff.

I just think we’re going to have to get our hands dirty, get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum, and actually have that fight.

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Okay, okay. Well, let’s fare enough. I’m going to point out a couple of problems; again it's not because I don't agree with you; it’s just like you said or implied, the devil's in the details. I mean, the person who took over Twitter—that was Elon Musk, and he’s a complete bloody monster, and he’s run many difficult corporations and done impossible things.

And so he’s like, there’s one guy like that, and he fired what, 80% of the Twitter staff? And nothing happened, except the place got better. Now, the Pito distribution for large corporations or large enterprises kicks in very viciously, and so the Pito distribution, what would you say, mathematical equations indicate that the square root of the number of people in a given organization do have the work.

And so if there are 10,000 educational bureaucrats, then 100 of them do half the work. And that basically means you could fire 80% of them, and if the whole place is corrupt, you probably have to. And like, I just can’t see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that because it could easily be that 80% of teachers need to go.

Now, I know there are places like the Acton Academy and so forth that are setting up educational institutions where teachers, for example, are much less necessary because the students take a lot of the work on their own. And I’m, and I know, I understand, as you pointed out, that there are places that are producing model curricula, but I just—I’ve talked to Republican governors, for example, who’ve tried to take on the teachers’ unions in their own states and, you know, failed because the—well, because they have 50% of the state budgets and they’re insanely powerful.

They’re much more powerful, generally speaking, than the governors are. So right—

Well, so you talk about Florida, and Florida is a good model, but that's one state, you know? And so lay out some more of your ideas for how these things might change.

Well, I do think, so it’s already having an effect in Florida. I mean, the chilling effect on the CRT bans and those are being now, I think, there are, you know, many red states—and I've lost track of the number; it might be approaching 25—that are rolling this out and actually there is compliance. It’s not perfect, but I think if the Republican Party in these states is serious, it will invest political capital, and it will demand accountability.

It will ask people to sort of, you know, what are the inspections saying? You have to report to the legislature on progress, and I actually think that process—first, because I also think most teachers are—I think a lot of teachers are flexible, and actually teachers are not quite as left-wing, believe it or not, as academics, so there is actually, I think, more receptivity.

Now, you also need to open up new avenues into the profession, so you don't have to require an education degree. There are all things that you need to do. So there's a whole set of things we can do as liberal democracies. Likewise with the government getting CRT and DEI out of government is something I think we can do. I think you can—so through political appointments you have to—and you're probably going to have to fire some people; you might have to set up new agencies.

So, in the UK we have the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, where there is a new 10-person academic freedom directorate. That’s a new institution. Now I actually think that's a good thing. Now it could be that Labour comes in and defangs it, fine. I mean, perhaps to some degree this becomes a matter of political contestation because really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible majority on the cultural side can control is the elected government.

That is the only institution that we have. We don't—we haven’t got the schools, the universities, we haven’t got the civil service, the quangos. What we actually need to do is to use elected government to reform all of these devolved bodies and also institutions relying on public money.

We're not trying to indoctrinate them; our goal is political neutrality and balance. That’s it. I think that has to be the goal. That’s maybe where I disagree a bit with Rufo and some others who want to put in a different ethos based on Christianity or some other—Yoram Hazony's argument, right?

Okay, so you still think that there's enough of a centrist consensus around what neutrality constitutes for that to still be a compelling argument to people— even the left—the more liberal progressive types?

Well, you'd think at least they'd be self-interested enough to understand that neutrality throughout sequential elections might be held a lot better than domination by the radical conservative right, which is certainly a possibility, and that’s certainly something that’s emerging in Europe and could easily—well, who knows how things will play out, but it’s popping up its head in many, many places in Europe, right? The last country to go was the Netherlands.

So that’s what—for Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, most of Eastern Europe—like this is starting to happen very, very widely and could certainly continue. So neutrality, you’d think across sequential elections would be the best policy for everybody if we had enough of a consensus to define it.

Well, I’d also say too that 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. And that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or, 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 as they see it. And I think we have the numbers to institute that now.

And 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 they unite the right. A question like, you know, should Winston Churchill's statue be removed from Parliament Square? You know, if you take conservative voters, they are overwhelmingly strongly opposed to that. If you take Labour and Green voters 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—bans on abortion are relatively unpopular. They may have a 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. What—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. And also that the abortion lobby, 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—that 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 in—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, and there was a very specific reason for that, and the reason was if any one 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. And the conservatives, who are also very guilt-prone—that’s the other thing, too, is that the left has this radicals have this tremendous advantage because especially the really psychopathic ones because conservatives feel guilt, but radical leftist psychopaths feel none, and they can use guilt as a weapon.

And conservatives are very sensitive to that, so 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—and 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 you're the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was like super high. It’s going to happen imminently, 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 cancelled 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 a 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 twelve and a half. And of course, they’ve reached 25%.

U.S. 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, and the taboo is—it's not gone entirely, but the Overton window is open quite a bit.

And so 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 in Saskatchewan. 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 garment rendering attack on national history, on the founders of Canada, etc.

Now, who is going to take—the who’s 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, two to one Canadians do not want Sir John A. Macdonald's 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. So, uh, 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? Prioritize to get there is some of that, but 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.

There—Poilievre isn’t pushing the cultural issues at the moment, 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 not, you know, 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.

I think that’s right.

Yeah, and 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, say anything on immigration, on culture wars, I think that, you know—and 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.

So let me ask you a more personal question, maybe, and then I'll see if there’s some—anything else you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion. Does it—like, would you characterize yourself politically? Where do you characterize yourself politically, first of all? That’s the first question.

Ian, I think that, you know, I don’t think—I’m down the—so I think economically, I’m sort of centrist; you know, I have many centrist views. I believe in the welfare state; I actually think tackling climate change is actually a worthwhile thing to a degree and using nuclear and using a whole bunch of other—and, however, on the cultural side I think I’m very much a conservative.

And I think we are in danger of losing free speech and truth; we're in danger of losing national cohesion. And so in a whole series of issues, I’d say I’d probably lean conservative for that reason.

Okay. Is that a surprise to you? I mean, you're a rare academic, right? I mean, there—it’s not like there’s no people like you; and there are a lot more of them than there used to be. You know, I’m in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that’s got like 100 people on it, and there’s—there's more people who’ve been—well, many of them kind of slipped surprisingly into the conservative camp over years.

But it's rare; it’s still comparatively rare, and it’s particularly rare in your field, I would say, although that’s also the case in mine. So like why is that the case with you? And how did you come to these conclusions?

Well, how did you manage any degree of success while having them?

Yeah, it’s a tough one, as you probably know yourself. You know, I mean, we—anyone right of center is 5%, perhaps, in the soft social sciences, and that’s what the surveys seem to show. Now, I haven’t changed my views, really. Not really; I can’t think of any major change that I’ve had in my views since I was in my 20s.

But yeah, you keep your head down, you write, you sort of write things that are not controversial, that are in fields that are not political, and that’s what I did for many years until about 2018 or thereabouts. I was a full professor; I was head of department. I felt that I kind of did what I wanted to do in terms of publishing. I published in the major university presses and journals.

And so I just thought now's the time to actually, you know, with the populist moment and the rise of Brexit and Trump, I sort of, you know, was talking about why I think these things happened in a different way. And I was also more openly critical of the social justice movement, and that is really what got me under attack from Twitter mobs, open letters, internal investigations, right?

Which are prompted by people inside the university and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed and put in a complaint against you, and then you have to—

Yeah. Okay, well, I think what we'll do—and I'll let everybody watching and listening know this too—I want to talk to you for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side. Unless let's not step into what happened to you personally; let's do that on the Daily Wire side. And I guess what I would like to do, is there—are there some other things we haven’t talked about that you’d really like to bring to the attention of people on the YouTube side?

Well, I’d just say a couple of things. I mean, first is that I think that woke and cancel culture are connected to many different issues that are very pressing to a lot of voters, and one of them is, you know, look, the populist right is going to do very well in Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or thereabouts.

This is—really, it’s not just, you know, about free speech and truth when we talk about cancel culture; it is downstream effects. If you can’t talk about immigration, you're not going to get