521. Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast – Episode 521: "Reform, R*pe Gangs and the Rot of the UK | Matthew Goodwin"

Release Date: February 13, 2025

In Episode 521 of "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast," Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a profound conversation with Dr. Matthew Goodwin, a former UK political science professor who has transitioned into political activism. The discussion delves deep into the decay of UK institutions, the alarming rise of systemic issues such as rape gangs, and the emergence of the Reform Party as a potential savior for British society.

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1. Introduction to Dr. Matthew Goodwin

Dr. Goodwin begins by outlining his academic journey, detailing his tenure at various UK universities, including Bath, Nottingham, Manchester, and finally the University of Kent. He shares his disillusionment with academia, citing a shift away from the pursuit of truth and genuine academic discourse towards ideological rigidity and bureaucratic control.

[00:00] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "What we've been living through is an elite class imposing policies on everybody else, the consequences of which they are not going to have to endure."

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2. The Decline of UK Academia

Both Peterson and Goodwin lament the transformation of universities into bastions of radical progressivism. Goodwin highlights the overwhelming left-leaning dominance, mandatory diversity statements, and the suppression of dissenting voices within academic circles.

[08:22] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "Back in the 1960s, for every one conservative academic, there were three academics on the left. Today, for every one conservative classical, liberal academic, there are 10 academics on the left."

The conversation underscores how these changes have stifled academic freedom and discouraged genuine intellectual debate, leading to increased frustration among scholars who value objectivity and empirical evidence.

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3. The Political Landscape: Uniparty and Elite Dominance

Goodwin critiques both the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK, describing them as the "uniparty" that has abandoned its traditional values in favor of a liberal, progressive agenda. This alignment, he argues, has led to policies that are out of touch with the majority of voters, such as mass uncontrolled immigration and the aggressive pursuit of net-zero emissions.

[24:14] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "We are living through the effects of a political project that was embraced by both the established left and right by the uniparty that was really united by a set of policies that voters are now beginning to reject."

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4. The Rape Gang Scandal: A National Crisis

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the harrowing issue of organized rape gangs in the UK, predominantly involving Pakistani Muslim gangs targeting young white working-class girls. Goodwin emphasizes the systemic nature of this abuse, the involvement of police and social workers, and the prolonged neglect by British authorities.

[56:21] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "Lucy Lowe, Victoria Goglia, Charlene Downs. These are girls who were murdered when they were 12, 13, 14 years of age."

Peterson expresses shock and frustration over the minimal global recognition of these victims compared to figures like George Floyd, highlighting societal and institutional failures to address and acknowledge such atrocities adequately.

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5. The Role of Tommy Robinson and Public Activism

The podcast explores the influence of Tommy Robinson, a controversial figure who brought attention to the rape gang issue. Goodwin acknowledges Robinson's role in voicing concerns that mainstream institutions ignored but criticizes his provocative methods, suggesting that working within the electoral system is a more effective path for change.

[70:00] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "The only way we can change Western societies today... is through the ballot box."

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6. Emergence of the Reform Party: A Beacon of Hope

Goodwin introduces the Reform Party as a viable alternative to the entrenched political elite, aiming to realign UK politics with the interests of ordinary citizens. He praises the party's platform, which focuses on ending mass immigration, reducing government spending, prioritizing national interests, and revamping policies like net-zero.

[75:58] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "Reform is a common sense position... a party that could just as easily win over the working class in Northern England and Wales in the industrial heartlands as it could win over disillusioned Conservatives in the Tory shires."

The conversation underscores the growing public support for the Reform Party, now leading in national polls, and its potential to catalyze a political realignment akin to historical shifts seen in other democracies.

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7. Responsible Citizenship and National Sovereignty

Peterson and Goodwin discuss the philosophy underpinning their political visions, emphasizing responsible citizenship and the restoration of national sovereignty. They argue against top-down elitist governance, advocating for subsidiarity—the principle that decisions should be made as close to the citizen as possible.

[81:49] Dr. Matthew Goodwin: "National preference... the people of that country should ultimately be prioritized... pushing back on Net Zero."

This segment reinforces their commitment to reestablishing a societal structure that values family, cultural identity, and the sovereignty of the nation over globalist agendas.

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8. Concluding Insights and Future Directions

As the conversation wraps up, both speakers express optimism about the potential for change through political activism and electoral engagement. They touch upon upcoming events, such as conferences organized by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), aiming to further these discussions and mobilize support.

[88:42] Jordan Peterson: "I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation at ARC in mid-February."

The episode concludes with an acknowledgment of the challenges ahead but underscores a shared belief in the possibility of reversing the institutional rot engulfing the UK.

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Notable Quotes:

• Dr. Matthew Goodwin [00:00]: "What we've been living through is an elite class imposing policies on everybody else, the consequences of which they are not going to have to endure."

• Dr. Matthew Goodwin [08:22]: "Back in the 1960s, for every one conservative academic, there were three academics on the left. Today, for every one conservative classical, liberal academic, there are 10 academics on the left."

• Dr. Matthew Goodwin [24:14]: "We are living through the effects of a political project that was embraced by both the established left and right by the uniparty that was really united by a set of policies that voters are now beginning to reject."

• Dr. Matthew Goodwin [56:21]: "Lucy Lowe, Victoria Goglia, Charlene Downs. These are girls who were murdered when they were 12, 13, 14 years of age."

• Dr. Matthew Goodwin [75:58]: "Reform is a common sense position... a party that could just as easily win over the working class in Northern England and Wales in the industrial heartlands as it could win over disillusioned Conservatives in the Tory shires."

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Conclusion

Episode 521 of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's podcast offers a critical examination of the systemic failures within UK academia and politics, spotlighting grave societal issues like the rape gang crisis and the detrimental effects of mass immigration. Through his dialogue with Dr. Matthew Goodwin, listeners gain insight into the dire state of British institutions and the potential pathways toward restoration and reform. The conversation champions the rise of the Reform Party as a beacon of hope for those seeking to reclaim national sovereignty, prioritize ordinary citizens, and dismantle the entrenched elite agendas that have led to widespread disillusionment and societal decay.

Transcript

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

What we've been living through is an elite class imposing policies on everybody else, the consequences of which they are not going to have to endure.

[Jordan Peterson]

A trillion dollar cost net zero plan was passed through Westminster with 20 minutes of debate.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Mass uncontrolled immigration has fundamentally weakened Great Britain. Boris Johnson did the opposite of what he promised voters he would do you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Want to just describe what you see as the reality of the rape gang.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Situation in the Everyone around the world has heard of George Floyd. Nobody's heard those names. These are girls who were murdered when they were 12, 13, 14 years of age. Not a single police officer, social worker, council official, member of Parliament has had any serious consequences for turning a blind eye to this.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't even know how to conceptualize this and remain out of the domain of radical conspiracy theory.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Foreign.

[Jordan Peterson]

I was pleased to sit down today with Dr. Matthew Goodwin. Dr. Goodwin was a professor of political science in the UK, but he's turned his attention in recent years to to developing a more public presence on the political front. He didn't really believe that it was appropriate for him to be engaging in political action as a professor, but he also got, let's say, sick and tired of working for the increasingly woke university. And so we started our conversation with a discussion of the pathologies of modern academia and tried to analyze exactly why the institutions had become so hidebound and ideologically rigid and punitive and also investigated whether there was anything that might be done about that apart from say, making new institutions. I can't say we came to a particularly optimistic conclusion. Then we turned our attention to the UNIT Party in the uk, the strange co option, let's say, of both the Conservative and the Labour Party into this woke utopian green idealism that characterizes so much of modern politicking and talked through as well the rise of the Reform Party in the UK as an antidote to the top down elitism, let's say the destructive top down deindustrialization elitism that characterizes the political the attitudes of the political class in the uk. We also discussed the relationship between the policies and philosophies of this new emergent Reform Party. We compared and contrasted them with the political attitude that's emerged in the United States under Trump, collaborating, let's say with Elon Musk and the rest of the Trump Avengers and as well the alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which is a group that I helped found in the UK that was designed to produce a philosophical equip, philosophical alternative to the machinations, let's say, of the Wef davos and UN crowd. So join us for that. Matt, maybe you could start by letting the viewers and listeners, especially those who aren't in the uk, know who you are.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Yeah, sure. Well, I. I'm a recovering academic. I was a professor of political science for. Well, since 2015. I was a university academic for 20 years. And over the last year I've basically moved more into the public debate, into political campaigning, having left the universities. But in terms of my background, I've also worked, I've been seconded to government departments, I've advised various prime ministers and presidents here in Europe about political issues. But now, to be frank, I've become so concerned about the state of my country that I've entered the public debate in a much more political way.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, let's start with your university background then. What university were you at last?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

I was at the University of Kent, having previously gone through the universities of Bath, Nottingham and Manchester here in the uk.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, and so what was it that apart from the dismal state of your country, let's say, which I think you share with my home country, Canada, what was it about academia and maybe even more specifically about your sojourn as a professor in political science that disenchanted you with academia?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

I think essentially what I saw over the last 20 years was higher education in this country, much like in North America, completely lose its way. It increasingly lost touch with the original mission of higher education. The universities I was working at were no longer really interested in the pursuit of truth, in good faith debate, in scientific knowledge and evidence, especially in the social sciences. I know that you've spoken on this show to my good friend Eric Kaufman, who has experienced the same here in the uk and to be frank, Jordan, I just got sick of it and I decided, you know, life is short. I wanted to try and do something about what's happening in not just the UK but in the west today. And my university ran into financial problems and I decided this was a great moment to exit and try and have an impact on the wider conversation. And that's what I'm doing and that's why I'm with you here today.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's delve into the details, both practical and personal with regards to the universities because, you know, now it's been a while since I've been actively involved with the university. It's really been since 2017. And you know, I now and then have this sense that maybe I'm exaggerating the, the catastrophe that, that the universities have become because I was involved in it so deeply, personally. So let me review for a minute what I see as the major problems, and maybe you could expand on that. I'd like to know as well what you experience personally. Okay. So the first thing that happened to me, I would say around 2013 or so, was that I noticed that my graduate students, particularly the females, were starting to get nervous about lecturing about gender differences in personality. And that actually turned out to be a big problem for my lab because I'm a personality psychologist, and one of the things we do is look at sex differences in personality. And then I noticed I was starting to get nervous about that, and that really set me back on my heels, because I was never nervous about anything that I lectured about, particularly because I tried to base what I lectured about on what I knew, what I'd learned, what I had investigated. It was pursuit of the truth as far as I was concerned. And I was apprenticed in a lab where truth mattered. And then, well, and then things got worse. The DEI people moved in and the administration ballooned out of control. And university tuition prices continue to expand in expense. And the research boards, which I always had trouble with all the way back to the 1980s, they became impossible to deal with. So that while I had ramped up my ability to do research, I would say I probably improved my speed at doing research by a factor of 50, given computational technology. I was doing research more and more slowly because it was. Took forever to get through the research ethics boards, which had nothing to do with research ethics as far as I was concerned. And then, And. And then there was the overwhelming tilt, the radical left. Okay, so that's my spiel. And so it became dis. Motivating, unmotivating to continue. So tell me what your experience was as a professor, as a lecturer and a researcher.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, I think in many ways, Jordan, our stories are somewhat similar within higher education. If you look at the uk, the stat that I always remind people is Back in the 1960s, for every one conservative academic, there were three academics on the left. Today, for every one conservative classical, liberal academic, there are 10 academics on the left today. If you look at the rigorous surveys of how faculty has changed over the last half century or so. And so within that, what you've seen, as I'm sure many people in North America will also relate to, you've seen the rapid expansion of the university bureaucracy, the politicization of the university bureaucracy, which for an academic like me, found its expression in having to do things like mandatory diversity statements, whereby every time I went for a research Grant. Every time I went for a job, I had to swear allegiance essentially to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda. I had to decolonize my university reading list. But more than that, Jordan, to be frank, I was sick and tired of watching many of my colleagues, good people, Kathleen Stock, Noah Carl, Eric Kaufman, among others, being harassed, bullied, intimidated and chased off campus because they were saying entirely legitimate, reasonable things that happened to violate this orthodoxy on campus. And I felt sorry for my students. I felt sorry for their parents who were paying for this education. And it was particularly for me, actually. It was the experience of going through the Brexit referendum. Okay, I mean, just to paint a brief picture, prior to 2016, with the votes for Brexit and Trump, I was, by all metrics, a very successful academic. I was one of the youngest professors in the uk. I had no problem getting research grants. I attracted a lot of money from the research councils. I published it for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press. I published in the most prestigious academic journals. And this was part of what I would call the BB era in my career before Brexit. Now, when 52% of voters decided they wanted to leave the European Union, and I publicly expressed my acceptance of that, I didn't campaign for Brexit, but I said, well, if 52% of people want to leave, okay, let's leave the European Union. And I wrote some op eds saying perhaps how Britain could take advantage of this. Well, everything in my career after that changed. I mean, I can only describe it as being something similar to what I experienced when I was at high school, being bullied by kids in a boys school. Notoriously difficult environments. But academics really did launch a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation. I was taken off research council peer bodies. I struggled to publish. Suddenly my research grant applications were rejected. So, you know, this isn't the sort of complaint of an academic that never had these things. I just noticed such a tangible shift. And after a while, you know, you have to look yourself in the mirror and you have to ask yourself, do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this? Because I was becoming very depressed. I wasn't particularly pleasant to be around. You know, it wasn't a nice environment. I have a family, friends. People were saying, you know, what's going on? What's the matter? And I just said, you know, this is crazy. I don't want to spend the rest of my life like this. And I, I looked at what was happening at the University of Austin. I looked at what was happening at the University of Buckingham. Here in the uk, I looked at things like, you've got the Peterson Academy. I said, well, here are parallel structures, parallel institutions. Okay, so that's important. We should be supporting that. But I also started to campaign for something called the Higher Education Free Speech act here in the uk which was the first piece of legislation that created a legal duty on universities here in the UK to protect and promote free speech and academic freedom on campus. And thankfully, that was passed, although the current labor government is now defanging that law. And we can come on and talk about that. But I decided basically I wanted to do something about the state of my country and the state of the West. And to be honest, I concluded that I couldn't really do that while remaining a university professor. I do believe in the importance of neutrality, of objectivity. You know, I don't think university professors should be politically active to the degree that I want to become politically active. And so I made a decision. I said, okay, I'm going to walk away from this after 20 years and I'm going to actually try and enter the wider public debate and try and give people a voice.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, two. Two observations about what you just said. The first is.

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[Jordan Peterson]

What was. I think it was Ernest Hemingway who famously hit one of his characters when asked how he went bankrupt, Famously said, gradually, then suddenly. And I've watched institutions, large institutions, including corporations, devolve and die. And it happens gradually, then suddenly. And I think it. I think this is how psychopathology develops in people, too. You hit a point where a positive feedback loop of some sort develops. And you kind of pointed to that, I think. So you imagine that as the number of radical left wing professors increases, the cost of not being one of them increases, and then it increases to the point where anyone who isn't someone like that, who has options leaves because they can, and then the people who are left are either incompetent and can't leave, or are the radicals themselves. Well, this happens in companies all the time. If a company has a bad quarter or two, often the 10% of people who are hyper productive leave because they can, and then the company's in desperate straits almost immediately, even though it may still have most of its employees. Okay, so there's that. And then the other comment I would make that's, that's horrible, really, it's a horrible observation, is that, I mean, are we really at the place where the institutions of higher education that we're supposed to function not only to educate young people, but also to act to some degree as intellectual stewards of the political, economic, social and psychological environments? Let's say they've abdicated their responsibility. They've become, they've become so irresponsible and so corrupt that they actually can't do that anymore. Like one of the things I've been wondering, I've been contemplating the reality of the rot at universities. And one of the things you have to ask yourself when many large institutions of the same type rot all at the same time, you have to ask yourself whether or not the reason that they're rotting, the, the simplest reason that they're rotting is because they're dead. They're actually dead and they're not savable. And, and I kind of think that might be the case. I, because I've, I've tried to think through how you could save them, but you can imagine here's the situation. They're way too expensive, they're way too centralized, they're way too dependent on government money. They're way too radical in their thinking. There's far too many administrators and. Well, and that's enough. That's like six. That's like six terrible problems. And my experience watching large organizations fail is that if they have two major problems, they're done. And I think academia has six. And I can't even hypothesize how. Well, and then he adds this one final observation would be the younger the professor, given everything we've said, the more likely they are to be radical in their orientation. And that means the longer their tenure as tenured professors before this scales might be rebalanced. And so I can't even think, okay, so you left and you started acting in a more political way. And you said you had some personal reasons for that, including the fact that you didn't think you should be a political actor as a. Yeah, as a professor. But do you see, like, I can't imagine that you're happy to see the demise of these great institutions. I mean, if we lose Oxford and Cambridge, for example, that's a complete bloody catastrophe.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

But do you think. I think, look, I think they're gone. I really think they're gone. And I've had this debate with many friends and colleagues of mine, much, you know, much more successful academics than me. I mean, you know, people I really respect, historian Neil Ferguson, among others, and the way they talk about academia in the 80s and 90s is something I don't personally recognize from my experience. I think the universities, the legacy universities, Jordan, are gone. Donors constantly say to me, well, I'm going to buy or invest in an Oxford college and I'm going to reform it. Well, you and I both know. You and I both know is disillusioned academics. That the moment that collides with the reality of the ecosystem of higher education, the ethics committees, the research councils, the bureaucracy, you and I both know what will happen. Any attempt to reform the legacy universities will get tied up immediately in paperwork and ideological motivations. That's what's going to happen.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, we also didn't add to the panoply of problems the fact that the research journals themselves have been captured and corrupted. Academics have to pay to publish in them. They have libraries over the barrel, they charge them an arm and a leg completely inappropriately and they put everything that researchers write behind a paywall. And then it takes two years to publish like this is. That's insane. In a world where you can write something and publish it to an international audience in one day, the fact that it takes two years to publish a peer reviewed article means that you're stuck in like 1830, if that. It's terrible.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, absolutely. But there are also ideological scams. And that's when I became very disillusioned. I watched the grievance studies hoax play out whereby clearly fraudulent papers were submitted to social justice journals and then revealed to have been authored by Peter Boghosian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. I watched the Michael Laqueur scandal whereby a researcher had claimed that a randomized control trial involving gay canvassers talking to voters face to face made Them more supportive of same sex marriage. It turned out he had fabricated his data, but that was accepted without question by the most prestigious journals in academia. I saw the Roland Fryer scandal at Harvard, you know, the nightmare that he had to go through to publish a finding that challenged the orthodoxy on campus, in that case, that African Americans were not more likely to be killed by police. And I was just watching one scandal after another and just realizing, you know, the whole thing is rotten. You know, the industry, the sector that I'm working in, it needs root and branch reform. So I left. And I think in many ways for me, the universities, at least in the UK are really a symbol of a much deeper rot that has set in into our culture and into our civilization. The institutions, the public sector, taxpayer funded institutions have become politicized, they've become deeply corrupt, they've become utterly disconnected from the vast majority of ordinary people in this country. And they've been imposing top down a political agenda on everybody else that is really supported BY Only about 10 to 15% of radical progressives within Western populations. And that is what I've seen not just in universities, but within government departments, within Westminster, you know, within the civil service, within the federal state bureaucracy. And you know, I think people are sick of it. I think they can see this for what it is, which is political indoctrination.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so, yeah, well, the, we have a new leader who will likely be the next Prime Minister in Canada if he takes over the Liberal Party, which is the kind of classic ruling party of Canada. Mark, Mark Carney, who is the governor of the bank of England. And I just read his book Values, which is a very bad book from the perspective of literary quality, let's say, for a variety of reasons. But worse than that, it's like Trudeau, our current Prime Minister, has been a WEF follower for, I don't know, the last 15 years, let's say. But he didn't have the originality or the ability to come up with the ideas really to implement them all that effectively, although he's pretty much crippled Canad's economy. But Mark Carney, he's like a WF leader and there's every probability that he'll be Prime Minister at least for, for an interim period and maybe longer than that. And so, and then I, I've been to the UK many times and have great admiration for that country, for your country. It's a, it's a terrible thing to see it decay and slip away and, and it's, it's, it's terrible to Watch, for example, you people contend with energy prices that are literally five times more than they need to be, at least five times. Mark Carney said, for example, that 85% of fossil fuel stores across the world have to be kept in the ground. And at the same time, he promises the denizens of my home province Alberta, which is oil rich, that somehow magically they'll all be supplied with green jobs, whatever the hell they are to replace the fossil fuel jobs that you know, actually exist. And so I don't know, I mean my country, Canada has gone down the insane woke rabbit hole like the universities. But I think your country, at least at the moment under the labor government is even, ah, maybe you guys are worse, which is a hell of a contest to win. So, so let's expand on that. Yeah, go ahead.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well look, I think it's just important for people who are not in the UK but have been asking us Brits the same question. You know, what the hell is happening to the uk Right. That's a question I get from many Americans, Canadians and others. And the answer is that we are living through the effects of a political project that was embraced by both the established left and right by the uniparty that was really united by a set of policies that voters are now beginning to reject. Net zero mass uncontrolled immigration, much of it from outside of Europe. The imposition of radical woke progressivism within public sector institutions, doubling down on a London based economy. We don't really produce anything anymore. We're closing factories across northern England, we're closing steel factories in the name of net zero and climate change. And a broken model of multiculturalism that most recently found its expression in the rape gang scandal across more than 50 towns in the country. Now many voters over the last 30 years have gradually looked at this elite consensus shared by the established left and right and they said, you know, we've had enough. We want a different politics, we want a different kind of culture. And that is why I actually think you're beginning to see now what America saw in 2015, 2016. You know, we're beginning to see radical political change in this country as I'm talking to you now. In early mid February 2025 in the national polls, Nigel Farage and the Reform Party are now number one. Labour and the Conservatives are now trailing this disruptive party similar to the Canadian Reform Party in the early 1990s. We're beginning to see a serious pushback from, from voters who have had enough of this. And in Europe too, Jordan, you will know In Germany, Austria, Sweden, we are, I think, beginning to see a sustained public led pushback to the policies that have dominated Western democracies for the last 30 to 50 years.

[Jordan Peterson]

So let's talk about net zero in the UK for a moment. I just interviewed Kemi Badenoch, who's the new leader of the Conservative Party and in, in the uk, for everybody who's watching and listening. And she noted her initial, her resistance to Net zero when it was initially formulated. But she also pointed out, and I just, I don't even know how to conceptualize this and, and remain out of the domain of radical conspiracy theory. You know, she pointed out kind of like Keir Starmer when he talked about the fact that this experiment, mass migration, was something that was perpetrated from the top down consc. And that everyone who opposed it was gaslit and that was also conscious and oops, we're sorry about that. But Bednox Badnox said that that something approximating a trillion dollar cost net zero plan was passed through Westminster with 20 minutes of debate. It's like, so I just don't know how to conceptualize this. It's like first of all, what were the Conservatives thinking? Like, what was their, what was their motivation? Was, was it merely that they were trying to look like planetary saviors and to Virtue Signal despite the fact that they were Conservatives or like, how do you want. Or was it the fact that like Keir Starmer, they were completely enamored of the Davos WF crowd, which they regarded as like, somehow more stylish than, you know, the mere plodding pedestrians in the Parliament?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, you're answering your own questions in a way, Jordan, because the answer is they're not Conservatives. What has happened to the Conservative Party, one of the oldest, most successful parties in the history of democracy, is that it has completely abandoned its ideological roots. It's become a Liberal party. The vast majority of MPs in Parliament, Conservative MPs are essentially Liberal MPs. They are the ones that put mass immigration on steroids. They are the ones that put Net Zero on steroids. They are the ones that put gender ideology on steroids. And Kami Badenoch is claiming that the party has learned its lessons, that she's going to change direction. But in reality, because of the structure of the Conservative parliamentary party, because it is dominated from top to bottom by Liberals, even if Kami Badenot believes in what she's saying, she knows deep down she will not be able to fundamentally change the direction of travel. So what I think we need is a bit like what America has witnessed over the last 10 years, which is a complete replacement of not just the Tory party, but the dominant establishment in this country, which is clinging to a consensus that is fundamentally out of touch with what I mean, mass immigration. I'll give you one example, Jordan. We can come back and talk a little bit about net zero, but to me, mass uncontrolled immigration has fundamentally weakened Britain, Great Britain. It has undermined our prosperity, it has divided our society. Nobody ever voted for it. Boris Johnson did the opposite of what he promised voters he would do when he was elected in 2019. He said he'd lower immigration, he'd put it on steroids. 86% of all migration into Britain is now coming from outside Europe, from what I would argue are culturally incompatible nations. They're more impoverished nations. And the evidence that we now have from various government bodies that are now finally admitting that actually this is a net fiscal cost to the UK taxpayer, before you get to things like the rape gangs, before you get to things like Islamist terrorism, before you get to things like sectarianism on the streets of Britain that we've seen since the 7th of October, just at an economic level, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Yet it was imposed on everybody by both the established left and the established right. So my theory of British politics here is that the voter backlash to mass immigration is going to be the new Brexit. This is going to be a major fault line in our politics. And the Tories, the status conscious Tories, and you're right, Jordan, because they are more interested in winning social status from London Liberals, from the luxury belief class, from what Rob Henderson and others have talked about, they are more interested in accruing social status from the London bubble than they are at saving this country. And that is a reality about the Tory Party. They've completely sold this country down the river. In fact, one minor example that I think will give international viewers a real sense of what I would argue is a betrayal. It was the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson when it was in office, that even removed a requirement for companies in Britain to advertise jobs in Britain before they advertise them overseas. They didn't even prioritise British workers within this national economy. They just completely opened the floodgates. And the end result is what you see around us today, which is zero growth, massive amounts of debt, no productivity, declining GDP per capita, while we're also pursuing this net zero madness, closing steel factories across northern England in order to deal with this political vanity project. For an elite class that doesn't apparently seem to care about anybody else in this country. So I'm deeply worried about the direction of travel, but the Tory party is not going to change the direction of travel. You know, if an architect demolished your house, you wouldn't invite the architect back to do it again, would you? And I think in the same way, you know, it was the Tories that really demolished Britain. So why on earth would you invite them back to have another go? I think we need wholesale political change.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's see if we can get to the bottom of things here a little bit. You're outlining a scenario where both the right wing party, the conservatives centrist right party and all the other parties were taken over by the same progressive mob, let's say, that took over the universities. It's something like that. And so the distinctions between the parties start to become irrelevant. But then we have to ask ourselves, what are the motivations of the people who, who orchestrated and participated or at least and, or at least didn't oppose the takeover? So let me lay out a couple of theories and you. I'm going to go a little astray here. But, but I really do want to get to the bottom of this, you know, because I'm trying to figure out what the fundamental error is. We see it, let's say it's the same error manifests itself in virtue signaling on the environmental side with regards to net zero and virtue signaling on, on the multicultural, liberal tolerance side with regards to mass immigration. And so underneath that there's this claim of tolerant moral virtue that requires no effort personally and that requires other people to make the sacrifices. Okay, so let me, let me lay a structure underneath that. And you, and I'd like to know what you think about this. So I've been investigating classic religious stories in the Old Testament and the New, and I've, I found an interesting parallel about, about a class of sin, you might say, in both of those sources. Old Testament, New Testament sources. So one of the Ten Commandments is to not use God's name in vain. And you see, people think that means don't curse. That's the popularized idea, but that isn't what it means. It means don't claim to be motivated by divine purpose. So to use God's name when you're actually pursuing your own selfish agenda, right? So don't subvert the divine to your own ego, your own motivation, your own status, because status is very important to people, right? It's a free fundamental psychological motivator. And Status determines longevity, for example, and status determines mating, attractiveness among men, socioeconomic status. It's a pro. Okay, so you can subvert that process by falsely claiming moral virtue. Now, the same thing happens in the New Testament because the Pharisees, who are Christ's primary enemies are the virtue signalers. Christ tells the Pharisees, who are the leaders of popular religious movement tradition at that time, that the only reason they proclaim their allegiance to God and the prophets they purport to worship is so that they can have the best seats in the synagogues and accrue social status. And he compares them to tombs that are whitewashed on the outside and full of rot on the inside. And it's actually that accusation that's one of the primary reasons that he ends up crucified. So the reason I'm, the reason I'm, I'm telling you this, it might seem a bit obscure, but the reason that I'm bringing this up is because I don't think that we've come to grips with how powerful the temptation to accrue moral status falsely. So that's reputational status, how deeply seated and absolutely destructive that is. And like, absent a better explanation. And Rob Henderson, of course, that you, who you pointed out, has touched on this with his idea of, of what's.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

What'S the name of his luxury belief class.

[Jordan Peterson]

Luxury, sure. Luxury belief class. Look how good I am. Right. And so, so first of all, I'm kind of curious about what you think of those ideas. Then I'm curious about whether you have any alternative explanation for this because it's a systemic rot. Right. We talked about the universities. We already decided, for what that's worth between us, that they don't look salvageable. But you really extended that argument to the, to the political parties themselves, with the possible exception of reform, which we can talk about in a moment. So where do you. Two things. What would have, how you would have you characterized your political orientation prior to your departure from the universities, let's say. And then, and then what do you think of. What's your explanation for the pervasiveness of this rot?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, I, I think the, the answer to the first question is I, I would describe myself as. I mean, it sounds very vague, but as somebody who, who simply cares a great deal about his country and somebody who is, in very broad terms, on the side of the forgotten majority of people who share small c. Conservative values, particularly on cultural and identity issues, who want to reform the economy so it works for ordinary people, but feel that they're no longer really in the conversation. And I don't feel as though my politics have changed over the last 20 years. What I think has happened is that we have been living through over the last 10 years the greatest radicalization of the elite class in Western societies since the 1960s. And I've seen this not just in terms of the universities, but actually in Westminster. And I think the answer to your second question is to go back again to this idea of the luxury belief class. What we've been living through is an elite class imposing policies on everybody else, the consequences of which they are not going to have to endure. And I think you can see that in everything from mass migration, which across Europe, the evidence now is overwhelming. Serious academics, people like Professor Jan Van Der Beek, have shown this. The influx of low skill, low wage migration from the Middle east and Africa is a net fiscal cost to European economies. If you looked at it simply through the lens of a cost benefit analysis, you would simply say, this makes no sense. We've got to radically change the way we're dealing with migration, yet still the elite class won't change it. So obviously this is about the accruing social status for themselves. But there's something else going on here too, which is the enforcement of these taboos within our conversation around migration, around what John McWhorter and others would call the new religion, the sacred values that we cannot question. Pro net zero, pro migration, pro diversity in all of its forms. And that's exactly why, for example, Jordan, we didn't get to the bottom of the rape gangs crisis, because it was people's fears within the elite institutions of being seen to be racist, being seen to be conservative, being seen to be Islamophobic or whatever word you want to, whatever term you want to choose, which stopped people from getting to the truth. So the imposition of these taboos, the imposition of these social norms, of trying to tightly control the national conversation through hate laws, through these Orwellian things we have in the UK called non crime hate incidents, which again are sort of police measures that are designed to stifle debate and discussion. All of this, I think, is about controlling the supply of information, stigmatizing alternative opposition to the elite project, and trying to use these taboos to basically impose this elite project from above. And the losers, of course, are ordinary people who are asking themselves questions like, well, well, why are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of young white working class girls being raped in Great Britain and nobody talked about it for 30 years, like, that's A question a lot of people in this country are asking. I think they might. Why didn't the legacy media do anything about this? And by the way, a legacy media in this country that is now complaining about Elon Musk talking about it. Whereas the reality is, if legacy media had been doing its job by actually pursuing truth and taking the rumors seriously from the 1980s about girls being put on heroin and cocaine and alcohol and being gang raped in northern towns across this country and being trafficked from one town to the next, if journalists had taken that seriously, we wouldn't have had. According to one mp, she estimates perhaps up to a million children from the 1980s have been abused to some extent by these gangs. And the enforcement of these taboos is going on today, which is what makes it so remarkable. Even after the rape gang scandal. We've got a Labor prime minister, Keir Starmer, who's now come out and said, well, if you want to discuss the rape gangs, if you want to ask questions about the rape gangs, I'm not going to give you a national inquiry into this issue. But also, and I quote directly, you are jumping on the far right bandwagon if you're talking about this issue. So again, it's an attempt to control the conversation, to suppress dissent, to suppress opposition. And ultimately, I think it is partly about individual social status, but it is also about maintaining and protecting this ideological project. I think fundamentally, that's what it's about.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay. So. So it's about protecting the pretentious claims to unearned moral status of the elite. But then we might ask ourselves, do you have any sense of why it was the progressive ideas, so to speak, that emerged to dominate the universities? Like, I, I can't quite, I can't put those two things together. Is it that the, is it that progressive? Is it that what progressive ideas actually do, as Rob Henderson say, might indicate, is that is, is the progressive ideology nothing but the proclivity of the privileged elite to cover themselves in unearned moral glory? And is, is the temptation so profound that that's the natural course of things? Like, because you might say, well, why wasn't the progressive movement working class, you know, or why was the elite movement towards moral status virtue signaling? Why did that take this leftist twist? And I can't quite put those things together. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, I think over the last 50 years, my view is that the nature of status fundamentally changed. It moved away from wealth and resource into the realm of ideology and belief. And that became a key indicator of, for the elite class to accrue status. To say, actually it's not just that. It's not just that. I've got a butler, I've got a house, I've got wealth, I've got money. It's that, you know, I know the vocabulary of radical progressivism. I know what white privilege means and I, you know, I know what white guilt means. And I'm going to, you know, latch onto this sacred religion and ensure other people have to, have to, you know, hear the word and do the work. I think, I think, I think that's part of it, but I think also.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, okay, so let's imagine. Okay, okay, that's a good hypothesis. So let's imagine this. Let's say, look, when I was at Harvard in the 90s, I taught there in the 90s. That place was firing in all cylinders. And that was the same at McGill. When I trained there as a clinical psychologist. I really liked being at McGill. I had excellent compatriots there and the, the education I received by and large was extremely high quality, especially on the research side. And then when I went to Boston and taught at Harvard, I thought the undergraduates were great. I had excellent graduate students. The administrators served the faculty, particularly the senior faculty. The senior faculty were the smartest and most well informed people I'd ever met, by a lot. And everyone was devoted to their work to the point where we had very short faculty meetings because everyone wanted to get back to their lab. It was really good. Okay, so now imagine that we had a period of time after World War II where the elite universities, the high quality universities really were high quality. They were merit based and high quality and they set up a reputation system that was valid. Okay, now imagine that the cluster B psychopaths and the narcissists and the histrionic anti merit types invaded those institutions that, that had developed this new currency of status that you referred to, which would be educational accreditation. But it was valid. Well, now you can game it. Now you can game it because it's been established and I really see that this happened at Harvard, for example, with, with the promotion for example of gay to the position of president. It's like what the hell was going on with that? She didn't have the academic credentials to be hired at a second rate, at a, in, as a professor in the second rate department. So, okay, so imagine that the universities built up a reputation, a real, they were really markers of credibility. And then the system got gamed. Maybe that's the right explanation. But now you place go ahead.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Yeah, just something on that. I think something else happened too, though, and ultimately it depends on whether you view the radical progressive takeover, which I personally think has peaked. I think it's now on the. It's in retreat. I think Trump has got the woke ideology, whatever your favorite term, I think it's on the back foot. But if you ask yourself, well, why did it emerge? I think there are those who say it is a kind of radicalization of cultural Marxism and so on, but there are those, Eric Kaufman, among others, who I'm persuaded by, who say, no, actually this is a radicalization of liberalism. Like, this isn't cultural Marxism. This is the inevitable extension of liberalism which became so consumed with minority rights and emotional harm that particularly within universities, emotional safetyism, protecting minorities, racial, sexual and gender minorities from harm, from perceived emotional harm, was basically prioritized over the pursuit of truth, objective science, objective knowledge. And that just filtered through everything. And the moment the North Star became this notion of harm, of protecting people from harm, everything trickled down from that. Now, that's what I saw in universities, is what I see in left and right in politics, this endless obsession with dei, this endless obsession with anti racism training, this endless obsession with apologizing for what happened 500 years ago. It is, I think, fundamentally this sacralization of minorities that is lying at the heart of this ideological revolution.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, let me add another ugly dimension to that line of argumentation. And this is something. I haven't talked much about this publicly, but at least not in this context. But I think it's probably worth broaching it. So I did a research project in 2016, just before my academic career blew up, where we were looking at predictors of politically correct authoritarianism. First of all, we established that such a thing existed. All protestations to the progressive of the progressive social psychologists. To the contrary, there was a coherent set of left wing authoritarian beliefs and you could identify them statistically. Then the question was, what predicted them? Okay, we found three major predictors and we had no a priori presumption about this. The first predictor was low verbal intelligence. And so when you ask yourself, well, how could people be daft enough to believe such things? Is, well, one of the answers to that our research showed was that, well, people who swallowed those ideologies weren't that smart. And so they were very much likely to dominate those academic sub disciplines that attracted the least cognitively able people. Okay, so it was a big predictor that the correlation between IQ and politically correct authoritarianism was higher than the correlation between cognitive ability, IQ and grades. It was a whopping predictor. Now here's the. So that's bad enough. Here's the kicker though. There were two other major predictors. Three actually. The first was being female.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

I was going to say that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. The second was having a female temperament. That was an additional predictor over and above being female. The third was having ever taken a politically correct course. Okay, so now that you know, you pointed out that this ethos of harm avoidance, let's say something like that, this protective ethos started to dominate. Well, no one has been courageous enough or foolhardy enough to broach the possibility that the reason for that is that the universities became dominated by not only women. This is even worse. I might as well go in all the way. Childless women. Yeah, right. And that's.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, that. Actually, actually there are a couple of papers on that, Jordan, I'm sure you've seen. I think Corey Clark and I've read a couple, I think showing basically the feminization of higher education over the last 50 years. But there's something else, listening to you that, that just came into my mind. I don't know if you've read it. There's a book by a psychologist called Luke Conway that came out, I think a year ago called Liberal Bullies. And what he has done, which is fascinating is he's gone back and looked at all the old stuff on right wing authoritarianism and the scales that they used comparing right wing authoritarians with left wing authoritarians. And of course the old argument, this is going back 50 years of social science, was that you don't get left wing authoritarians, you only get right wing authoritarians.

[Jordan Peterson]

What a lie that was.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

And the whole literature has just been debunked because what Conway is saying, well, if you actually, if you change the scales because they were measuring right wing authoritarianism differently from left wing authoritarianism, if you use the same scales on both, what you find is that so called liberals are actually more prone to authoritarian impulses and tendencies than conservatives. And if anything explains the last 15 years in Western politics, the kind of great awokening all of the fanaticism and dogmatism that we saw around Black Lives Matter and the social justice movement. It's this take. I read his book and I was like, there it is. So basically social scientists were misleading everybody. I would say maybe they knew about it, maybe they were just lying to people. And here we have evidence that if you identify as highly liberal, you are more prone to authoritarian impulses. Than conservatives.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay. So they were definitely at least lying by omission. Like, I got into the study of left wing authoritarianism, sort of sideways, because I'm a personality and clinical psychologist, not a social psychologist. And the people who studied right wing authoritarianism, or authoritarianism, let's say, were social psychologists. And so then I had to master the social psychological literature. And I found to my absolute bloody shock what you just described, which was that for 60 years the social psychologists essentially had insisted that there was no such thing as left wing authoritarianism. And I thought, well, what do you mean there's no such thing as left wing authoritarianism, For Christ's sake, who did, who the hell do you think was? Who do you think Stalin was? And Mao? That's not left wing murderous authoritarianism. And that's why we did this research. But, but here's another thing that's, that's horrible. And I don't know if Conway has dealt with this and I didn't know about the book and I will read it. See, the pattern of cancel culture is the same pattern as female antisocial behavior. So there is a literature on antisocial behavior that's sex typed. So antisocial males are violent, they're physically violent, and they're criminal for that regard. And they tend to get thrown in prison because of it. Because we don't tolerate violent crime. White collar crime is not so bad. You can defund a million people out of their pension, but you don't want to mug someone. And you know, I can understand that because people are afraid of being physically assaulted. But we definitely have a differential scale of justice when it comes to economic damage. Anyways, female antisocial types, they don't use physical aggression. They use gossip, reputation savaging, and like camouflaged aggression. Right. And so you could imagine. I mean, this is a very ugly hypothesis, but there's no reason to assume that women are going to be any less pathological in their social behavior than men. It'll just take a different form.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

So I was just going to say, I would say the evidence on cancel Culture, you know, comprehensive, rigorous surveys across the west is pretty consistent in showing that the female scholars, especially young female PhD students, are consistently the most likely to endorse a range of cancel culture measures. They're the most likely, for example, to say that we should sacrifice academic freedom and free speech on the altar of protecting minorities from harm. So I think that's a big part of the story. I mean, again, it's controversial and the fact that we would struggle to have this debate at an Oxford Union debate or on Cambridge campus is itself a reflection of the problems within universities. I think it's an enormous part. And in politics too, by the way. I think if you look at the people who have been most dogmatic when it comes to the debates over migration net zero, who have refused to look at the issue of the rape gangs have refused to give the country a national inquiry. Routinely, I mean, routinely it's been prominent women in national political life. And I think there's also, by the way, been a lot of hypocrisy there too. I mean, if you just take the case of the rape gangs, you know, the whole MeToo scandal, you know, middle class, liberal, middle class liberal professional women who didn't say anything at all about young white working class girls being raped, harassed and abused by, by Muslim gangs. And you know, there's just, I think people aren't stupid. They can see a lot of this stuff that's, that's playing out before them.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's a good thing that neither of us have academic jobs anymore because if we had had them, this conversation would have done them in for like seven different reasons. Okay, let's turn back to the rape gang issue because, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound. And so if you don't mind, what I would like you to do is, you know, I've looked at the rape gang issue as much as I possibly could as an outsider to the. You to the uk. Right. And was shocked by it. Absolutely shocked beyond comprehension that such a thing could even be vaguely possible. I couldn't even believe it when I first started to investigate it, which was probably about 15 years ago, by the way. And so the first thing I'd like you to do for people who are watching and listening and for me is just to. Do you want to just describe what you see as the reality of the rape gang situation in the UK? Just lay it out. You mentioned 50 cities and up to something approximating a million victims. So tell us, tell us what you believe to be the case in the UK with regards to these rape gangs. Define them and then tell us what the case is.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Yeah, so the first thing I would say is that this will go down in history, I think, as the biggest scandal in British society. One that much of the establishment deliberately ignored and downplayed for half a century. What we are talking about, to be clear, is the sexual exploitation of mainly young white working class girls, often from very damaged, broken homes, vulnerable girls. The organized industrial scale rape and sexual assault of those girls by predominantly Pakistani Muslim gangs of men operating in alliance with one another, trafficking those girls from one town to another, often having some kind of connections with police, social services. We have police officers who have been arrested and being brought before courts because of their involvement with these rape gangs. And the rumors of this really began Jordan from the 1970s, 1980s. But it wasn't really until 2011, when one or two rogue journalists started to talk about the issue, and some prominent political activists and campaigners too. But this was instantly branded a topic of far right politics. It was seen as low status to talk about it in Westminster. And then as the transcripts came out of these girls, as the number of towns increased, as I say, upwards of 50 towns and cities across the UK, lots of young girls coming before court saying they were put on heroin, they were put on cocaine, they were told they were targeted because they were white, they were non Muslim and they were trash, they were white prostitutes. Those are words that were used in the court transcripts. And as the evidence simply became unavoidable, we then started to get these local inquiries into key towns like Rotherham, a town where 1,400 girls at least, were raped and sexually assaulted by these gangs. Towns like Oldham and Telford. And it wasn't really until actually the beginning of 2025, that the release and the recirculation of some of those transcripts, in conjunction with Elon Musk, drawing attention to it, basically forced Westminster, forced the elite in Britain to actually do something and talk about this crisis in a much bigger way. But even then, they said, actually, we're not going to have a national inquiry into this issue, which is outrageous, because this is clearly a systemic national crisis that involves social workers, police officers, Muslim communities, gangs of men. It's been going on for 30, 40 years. Some of these girls, by the way, have been murdered. I just want to mention a few names. Lucy Lowe, Victoria Goglia, Charlene Downs. Everyone around the world has heard of George Floyd. Nobody's heard those names. These are girls who were murdered when they were 12, 13, 14 years of age. You know, like you, I'm a father. I find this absolutely despicable. And even when, in some of these cases, even when fathers in desperation were trying to get their daughters back, were trying to save their daughters from these gangs, they were then arrested, they were then told that they were breaking the law. So every aspect of this scandal is utterly hideous. And the fact that our labor government, which has announced 25 national inquiries for other issues, cannot bring itself to launch an inquiry. This time around also tells you a lot. It tells you that labor is scared about the scale of this crisis. It tells you that labor officials are probably implicated in this crisis. And we do know that some labor officials have been implicated in this crisis in local towns in England. It tells you that this crisis probably goes much deeper within the state than we currently are being led to believe. And it tells you again that because the victims are white working class girls, that within the matrix of social justice ideology which dominates many of the public sector institutions, they are simply not seen as being fashionable or important enough to warrant the same level of attention and concern that other groups in our society receive.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, let's see if we can sort out why that is. Because you might assume that if the elites that we were describing have a harm ethic, like a harm reduction ethic, that you might associate with a maternal instinct gone astray, that the, that a logical target for an empathic impulse like that might be underprivileged working class girls. Like, it doesn't seem to stretch the bounds of credibility unless, and you know, I think I've maybe detected this as a strain in British society because I'm a bit of an outsider looking in. Unless part of the motivation for the virtue signaling on the part of the people who are ignoring this, including upper class women, is to separate themselves as much as they possibly can from any hint whatsoever of contamination with that lower class status is that. I know that's a harsh judgment, but.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

No, I think there's a lot, Yeah, I think there's a lot to do with that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let me add another layer to that. And again, I'm speaking as an ignorant man. You know, I'm not a citizen of the UK and I'm trying to sort out what the hell's going on there. As an outsider, you know, I really became aware of the grooming gangs as a consequence of my knowledge of Tommy Robinson. And I started watching him about 15 years ago and I interviewed him last year. My wife first, and then, or my wife and I, she, it was actually at her instigation and then we did two interviews. And my sense with Tommy was, you know, I kind of understand him because I was raised in a working class environment, by the way, and so I understand what sort of character he is. And he's also super bright, he's remarkably intelligent, and, you know, he's got a checkered past. But my sense of Tommy Robinson, and I'm more than happy to hear your take on this, is that he, he's, he's a representative of the working class. He saw what was happening to the girls in his community, including his own cousin, who fell prey to these gangs. And he started to make quite the damn fuss about it and he wasn't afraid to point fingers, particularly in the direction of the Pakistani rape gangs. And we have to talk about the fact that they're. Well, you know, because we're already in serious trouble in seven different ways. They're Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. That's the ones we're concentrating on. And at the moment in the uk, from what I understand, and this has been the case for quite a while, to specify it, that carefully and precisely, let's say, opens you up to accusations of being like a far right neo Nazi, like Tommy Robinson, let's say. So tell me what you think about Robinson and the reaction to him. I mean, I know people like Piers Morgan. I get along fine with Pierce, he's treated me great. We've had lots of good discussions. He's certainly no fan of Tommy Robinson and he's pilloried in the British press as a general rule. I know there was a huge demonstration, what, last week, 100,000 people. I heard the legacy media never bloody well reported it anyways. See, Tell me what you think about that mess.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

So I've always found Tommy Robinson interesting for a number of reasons. We're a similar age. He grew up in Luton, which is very close to the town I grew up on the outskirts of somewhere called St Albans. I'm very, you know, he reminds me of lots of the guys I grew up with. You know, I don't want to make it too personal. My background was somewhat similar, not, not stable, certainly wasn't middle class. And so when I saw him first breakthrough in 2009, 2010, drawing attention to this issue, I kind of, you know, I sort of understood where he was coming from and the anger and the frustration that was driving that. Now, where I departed from Robinson is that I felt at the time that being so provocative, and this was between 2009 and 201314 with his movement, the English Defence League. By being so provocative on the streets, I felt that he was playing into the hands of the State, that he was becoming useful for the state, which was then saying, well, if you talk about these issues, you're like these guys. And I think he's obviously been on a journey. He's not the same person today that he was then. But I think the reality of Tommy Robinson is that he would not have become a prominent significant figure in our national political life, which he is. Were it not for the sustained failures of the British state to deal with the issues that he has been campaigning on, had they taken this issue seriously, had they investigated the rumors, had they looked at the rise of radical Islamism as well, particularly within some of the communities that Robinson knows very well, then he wouldn't have become a significant figure. So he certainly gave voice to some of the issues that were being ignored, as did, by the way, a few other people at the time, some renegade journalists and so on. But I think all. I think at the same time, though, and this is a. It's a sensitive conversation because I think everybody who cares about this issue cares very strongly about it, Right? My view is that the only way we can change Western societies today, we can save Western civilization, we can reassert the values that we care about is through the ballot box. That's my view, that the only way forward is by appealing to a majority of concerned citizens, by bringing together a broad coalition of people who say, actually, enough is enough. I'm not going to have this project imposed on me anymore. I'm not going to support mass uncontrolled immigration. I'm not going to be told that little boys can become little girls and little girls can become little boys. I'm not going to see my country, my home, be denigrated in this way. I want to push back through the ballot box. And to me, that's the only viable alternative, plausible way forward. It's not to say that I think these people are wrong to be highlighting these issues, but I think if you're serious about bringing about change, changing things, changing policy, changing government, I think the ballot box is the way forward. I don't think Britain has the same culture as France, Italy and other countries whereby street protest is embraced or supported. I think we have a very distinctive political culture in this country, which social scientists have talked about from the 50s onward. We have a civic culture we're very skeptical of. What? Anything that might look like it's aggressive. Anything that might look like it's challenging the rule of law. And I think ultimately it's about what approach do you think is really the most viable way to bring about change?

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so you're. Okay, so if I'm reading this correctly, your criticism of Robinson would be that he took the protest route. Let's say, rather than working within a system that you still regard an electoral system that you regard as viable, and you have your reasons to regard it as viable.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

I mean, let me just put it a different way. I think path dependency really matters in politics. I think where you start determines your eventual destination. So if you start with a movement that's very combative, provocative, that is associated with, rightly or wrongly, it was associated with drinking and conflict and fighting with cops and whatever, it's just going to be very difficult for you to change the public perception, right from where you start basically determines your eventual destination. Now, what I'm interested in, I'm interested in movements that are winning 30, 40% of the national vote, as in, I want to get things done. I want to do what Trump's doing in the U.S. i want to come in and say, right, we're slashing the state, we're getting rid of dei, we're ending mass uncontrolled immigration. We're going to have a serious strategy for integration.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

We're going to push back on Net zero. I'm interested in that. I'm not interested in a purity spiral over on the corner here as to who's been talking about this issue for the longest period of time. I respect people who are ahead of the curve on issues like that, but I'm ultimately interested in how do you actually save a country? What's the most viable way of doing that?

[Jordan Peterson]

Look, there's two ways we could take this conversation now, and we have to kind of decide between them because we're, we're going to run out of time, although we have an additional half an hour on the daily wire side. So what we could do, we could take apart the Pakistani Muslim immigrant issue and see if we could discuss the separate contributions of each of those three attributes to the rape gang phenomena. Right. That's a hard thing to do, but, but it would be, it would be worth doing. The other thing we could do, because I don't think we can do both, is we could further discuss the plan that you just described or the vision that you just described in Relationship, let's say, to the, to the Reform Party and Nigel Farage. And we could talk about how it is that you might reinvigorate UK civil society and move it away from this virtue signaling Net zero and multiculturalism, idiocy. And so do you have a preference for one of those directions?

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, personally, I would want to focus on how we realign politics and save this country. That's where I'm investing a lot of my effort. I have a plan for that. I think I have something that looks pretty credible. I'm involved in the plan to try and do that. I'm speaking across the country at many events alongside people like Nigel Farage and I'm interested in thinking about how do we realign this country in the way that Canada was realigned for a period of time, in the way that America is currently being realigned. What does that actually look like? Because for the first time in history, I think it's actually possible, as you and I are talking right now, Reform is number one in the national polls. Okay. It's on 25, 26%. It needs to really get to about 31% to win a majority at the next election. I think that's possible. I genuinely do. I think there's so much volatility in British politics at the moment. I think it is possible for this movement to actually do what the Labour Party did in the early 20th century when it emerged to replace the Liberals. I think there is an enormous opportunity for reform to do that, principally but not only because of the mass immigration crisis. So that's where I'm spending a lot of my time. And the rape gangster is part of that. But to me that's a symbol of the failure of our state policy of multiculturalism. It's a symbol of the failure of mass immigration and it's a symbol of this woke political correctness, the fact that so few people were willing to talk about it, that has created this enormous vacuum that you're seeing now playing out in the national polls.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's do that. Okay, so let's start with this. So could you detail out your. Both your association with and your understanding of the. I guess we're going to concentrate on the Reform Party in, in the UK and differentiate that from, well, the current Conservatives, maybe even the classic Conservatives in the uk. So how are you associated with reform? What do you think of Nigel Farage and what he's doing? And how would you distinguish reform from the. Whatever the Conservatives are now, the net.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Zero Conservatives, let's say the Liberal Conservatives, I think probably many people in Britain would call them or the uniparty. They're indistinguishable from the Labour Party. Look, I think many people in Britain know, I mean, I'm friends with Nigel Farage. I've known him for 15 years. I'm very sympathetic to what he's trying to do. I speak at Reform Party rallies and conferences and I have a close association with the party because I believe fundamentally it's the only political movement that we have that is capable of bringing about the kind of change this country needs to see if it is to be saved. And by that I mean ending mass uncontrolled low skilled, low wage migration from outside of Europe. I mean fixing our borders by leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, by reforming the laws that Tony Blair brought in, including the Human Rights act, by dramatically reducing the £15.3 billion that we spend in foreign aid every year and making sure that our public services work for British people before we send money to China, India and elsewhere. I mean pushing back against the net Zero project. And I mean investing in non London areas in places outside of the capital and investing in people outside of the elite minority. Now, I have come to the view the Tories, the Conservative Party, are completely incapable of doing those things. They are the architects of the mess that we see around us today. They are the architects of our national decline. And the Labour Party is part of that. I do not view Reform as merely a new Conservative Party that would be selling it short. I view Reform as a none of the above party, neither left nor right, as a party that could just as easily win over the working class in Northern England and Wales in the industrial heartlands as it could win over disillusioned Conservatives in the Tory shires. Look, Jordan, I'll be honest with you. I don't think Nigel Farage has all the answers and I don't think the reform movement is the perfect movement. But what I think is that Britain is, for the first time really in generations, is ideally positioned for a full blown political realignment. And I think Nigel Farage and Reform are the vehicle that can be used to bring that about.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let me compare and contrast your Reform Party agenda, let's say, with the agenda that we put forward, perhaps more on the philosophical side, with this alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We have a conference coming up in London, February 17th to 19th. We'll have about 4,000 people there. I think that what we're aiming at has what they're. To some degree, they are overlapping Venn diagrams with what reform has been proposing. So we have five major policy initiatives, six, because we added an initial, an additional one. So let me just lay those out. And I want to do that, not to advertise art precisely, although that's, you know, handy, but to give us structure that we can use to take apart the reform platform. So cheap, reliable, plentiful energy in all of its forms to drive energy costs down so we don't starve the poor people to death, let's say allied with something approximating responsible environmental stewardship. But that doesn't mean nature worship, and it certainly doesn't mean there's too goddamn many people on the planet, a rekindling of the narrative that the west is founded on, and a restoration of appreciation for the fundamental principles that the free west is predicated on. I'll give you an example. 100% of Protestant and Catholic majority countries outside of Africa are highly functional Western democracies. There's a reason for that and no one will talk about it. And so that needs to be discussed. We're not a fan of government media corporation collusion. So it's anti fascist in the genuine sense. We're very pro family. We don't think there are too many people on the planet. We think that monogamous, child centered married couples are the appropriate environment for children and the foundation of a civil society. And that's. Well, that's basically insofar as those aren't policies, they're axioms. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so I'm wondering perhaps what you think of those, but also more specifically, how you see that in relationship to what the Reform Party is doing, maybe even what the Trump administration is doing in the United States.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Well, the first thing I would say is, congratulations, Jordan, you are a reformer. If you believe all of those things, then you share the platform of reform. And I look forward to seeing you at arc. But in my mind, there are two principles that differentiate this movement from what we might call the uniparty. In my mind, and I'm not speaking in an official capacity for reform. The first is the principle of popular sovereignty. I think reform believes that the true source of power, authority and legitimacy lies not with a distant elite, but with the people. I believe that ultimately the relationship in politics that matters is vertical. It runs from the people to those they elect to represent them on their behalf. It does not run horizontally from one group of elites in Westminster to another group of elites in Davos to another group of elites in Washington. So I believe foremost in the principle of popular sovereignty. That's what got things like Brexit over the line. And that's what will get many other common sense positions over the line. The second principle that I think unites reformers and certainly is something I believe in, is the principle of national preference, namely, that in every aspect of our country, our home, I believe from housing to the economy to our culture, identity and history, that the people of that country should ultimately be prioritized, that if limited housing is available, if limited places on the National Health Service are available, if we have money, we should focus on fixing our home before helping other parts of the world. That's not to Say we don't want to help other parts of the world. It's just about the ranking and the order of preference. Those are the two principles that I think put the reform movement clearly apart from the uniparty. Because both the Labour Party and the Tory party have shown consistently that they don't respect the values and the voice of ordinary people. And they have shown quite clearly that they don't have much of an interest in prioritizing and protecting our home and the things that make our home distinctive, its identity, its culture and its sense of collective memory or its history. So to me, reform is a common sense position. Almost all of its policies, from migration to the borders to the economy, almost all of them are supported by large majorities of people and they used to be advocated by mainstream politicians. It's just as I say, the elite class has drifted so far to the cultural left. We had a survey recently in Britain by some social scientists and they found that Labour and Tory MPs are closer together ideologically than Tory MPs are to the average voter. Right. In other words, the Conservative movement have moved so far to the cultural left that they've basically abandoned ordinary voters. They're indistinguishable basically from their labor colleagues. Now, nobody could say that about reform MPs. They are bang on basically where the average voter is on these big cultural and identity questions. So that's how I see it, and I see it's a correction to a system that has become deeply corrupt and ideologically homogenous.

[Jordan Peterson]

I should have pointed out too, given what you just said, that one of the primary focuses of ARC as well, and this overlaps with the principles that you just laid out, is the principle of responsible citizenship, hence the name alliance of responsible citizens. And it is predicated on the idea that sovereignty property inherits in the people and that society not only can't be, but shouldn't be governed by top down elitist rule, by, let's say, forced compulsion and fear that ordinary people aren't so ordinary and that they have to, that it would be best, all things considered, for them to adopt responsibility for their own sovereignty and to govern their own affairs. That's partly an emergent consequence of the principle of subsidiarity, which is an ancient doctrine of social order that has been classically viewed as the alternative to tyranny and slavery. And so, okay, and so that's in keeping with your, While you're, let's say, something like a return to the people, which is a deep, obviously a deep British tradition, maybe the deepest of British traditions and something that you Brits have given to the world. Most fundamentally, it'd be a catastrophe to see that disappear.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

But I'd just say just about the conversation that you're sparking with arc, you know, you have to understand, Jordan, that that is essentially the only place that is having that conversation here in the uk. I mean, if you look at the long term forecast of where we are headed as a country, by 2100, our fertility rate is forecast to be 1.3, well below the replacement level of 2.1. It's currently at about 1.6 at the moment. We also now know that between today and 2047, which again isn't really that far away, 22 years, our population is forecast to grow by another 10 million people, obviously all of whom will come from outside of the uk. Migration is the only driver of. It is the only driver of population growth in this country because more people are now dying than being born among the British population. So migration is the only driver of population growth while our fertility rate is collapsing. So what I'm saying is, if you want to have a conversation about pro family policy, okay, what does that look like? How can we support families outside of tinkering with the tax system? How could we actually radically have bring about a pro family culture, right? And people say, oh, you can't do that. Well, I say, well, look what they did with smoking. I mean, look at how you know that that changed the culture, right? You suddenly convinced everybody Israel has done it. Israel has done it. Now, interestingly, Israel has. Israel has had a lot more success than countries like Poland and Hungary, also countries I know well, now, how has Israel done it? Israel's done it by making it clear that actually the survival of the nation, the survival of the people is dependent upon them all assuming responsibility and playing a role in that enterprise. Now, somehow Western nations have to come up with something similar, something that is existential, that appeals to the soul and appeals to that sense of responsibility, because I don't think tax changes and all that stuff are really going to do it. But again, family. So that conversation is happening at arc. It's not happening with our mainstream political elite. The effects of migration, they're not talking about the evidence that is being accumulated that is showing this is gonna be a disaster over the next 10, 20, 30 years. What we're doing, like Canada is we are pushing our country into a population trap. And what do I mean by that? I mean that we are basically pushing ourselves into a position whereby the capacity of the State to provide basic public services is being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of demographic change. That's a population trap. So if you cannot provide basic health services, basic housing, if you cannot keep people safe on their streets, and you're being sort of flooded with demographic change, well, welcome to a disaster, because that is what is unfolding not just here, but also, by the way, in countries like Sweden. I mean, most of your viewers, I suspect, won't know this, but since Christmas, you know, we're speaking in February 2025. In the last month, there have been more than 30 bombings in Sweden. 30 bombings.

[Jordan Peterson]

None of that's covered with.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

None of that's in the mainstream media. Again, conversations that I have that are being had, thankfully, in this new ecosystem of podcasts, of shows, of daily wire, new universities. That is one of the reasons, one of the few reasons why I am actually optimistic, because we are now beginning to force a conversation about family policy, about the rape gangs, about the future of the west, about how we reframe our understanding of our history, about how we share a sense of patriotism and a belief in the values that have driven this thing we love called Western civilization. That's one of the only reasons I'm actually optimistic that this new ecosystem has taken off to the extent that it has done.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, well, okay, first, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation at ARC in mid February. And it is a conversation because we're trying to figure out how to move toward the implementation of these, let's say, broad scale philosophical visions that we're putting forward. And there's obviously a conversation to be had. Well, I think with the conservatives as well as with reform, but certainly with reform. And you know, I'm, I'm certainly attending very carefully to your concerns about the capture of the conservatives because it fact that they're still promoting Net zero seems to me to indicate quite likely that that capture is pretty complete. But in any case, we've got many things to talk about and there is some reason for optimism. I think maybe what we'll do on the daily wire side, for those of you who are watching and listening, is I think maybe we'll return to the issue of the rape gangs because there's some more delving into that. I'd like to do both on the pessimistic and the optimistic side, because I'd like to take apart the contributing factors on the side of the perpetrators, like just exactly who are they and why are they doing what they're doing, apart from, you know, issues of pure unadulterated lust with some, you know, with some genuine sadism mixed in there. So I think we'll do that on the data ware side. Apart from that, I'd like to thank you for talking to me today and for being so forthright. That's a hell of a conversation to have to have. There's so many terrible things to delve into. And I'm looking forward to seeing you at ark.

[Dr. Matthew Goodwin]

Thanks, Jordan. Looking forward to seeing you as well.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Much appreciated. And to all of you watching and listening on the YouTube side, thank you very much for your time and attention. Thanks to the Daily Wire for making this possible, the film crew here in D.C. i'm in D.C. today at the prayer breakfast. And. Well, we'll, we'll continue our conversation for another 30 minutes behind the Daily Wire pay wall.