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The Peter McCormack Show
#050 - Eric Kaufmann - How Wokeness Hijacked the West
02:01:13
Eric Kaufmann is a political scientist, professor, and author specialising in cultural politics, demographics, and the rise of woke ideology, advocating for post-progressivism and free speech in academia and society. In this interview we discuss how...
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- [00:00]
Jonathan Haidt
So there is this trend kind of in the elite culture that's been building. And what's happened partly is that the Republican Party used to be just the party of low taxes and more money in your pocket. So if you're rich, you know, if you're educated, you tended to be rich, you vote for them. But so that's been changing. Now the Republican Party stands for the cultural right more than the economic right. And so what you have with these elites is people are economically to the right. They want low tax, but they're culturally to the left. They believe in maybe open borders. They believe in, you know, low cost labor. They believe in WOKE because they think that's how you're a good person.
- [00:37]
Pete
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- [01:30]
Jonathan Haidt
Good to meet you. Yeah.
- [01:31]
Pete
I've been trying to digest as many of your articles as possible. You've written a lot.
- [01:38]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, well, I've been around a while.
- [01:40]
Pete
Well. And I noticed on the different places that you write, yeah, you kind of tailor for the audience, but I think Unheard, the stuff you write on, Unheard was some of my favorite stuff. I also listen to you with Jordan Peterson.
- [01:53]
Jonathan Haidt
Good, great. Yeah, yeah, he's. I mean, of course he's. He's his original style. Right. But, you know, it's great to get on there.
- [02:01]
Pete
Well, look, I. I have this thesis that there's three types of interview podcasts like this. You get two smart people, so that's you and Jordan. Then you have a moron, a smart person. So this is what this will be. And sometimes you get two morons together.
- [02:15]
Jonathan Haidt
But you're way too humble.
- [02:19]
Pete
People will tell you, I'm a Moron. No, no, listen, great to meet you. Really interested to talk to you because I think we're quite a strange time. Right?
- [02:26]
Jonathan Haidt
It is a weird time and yeah, I mean, I'm happy to. I mean the whole Canadian tariff thing is another, you know, because as Canadian and just getting that vibe and the shock and horror of an entire country and then it's. You realize it's a bit of a negotiating ploy.
- [02:43]
Pete
Yes. Can we bring this down a touch? I'm just thinking of the camera. Just pull it down. Yeah. Then I can see you. Yeah, I. I mean I love Canada. I've been a bunch of times.
- [02:52]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, good.
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Pete
Yeah, yeah, I went, I went a couple of months ago, I went to see Taylor Swift in Vancouver.
- [02:56]
Jonathan Haidt
Won't really for the night. That's keen.
- [02:58]
Pete
Flew out of the girlfriend one night, watched Taylor, flew back.
- [03:03]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, not good. The jet lag didn't catch up with you then?
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Pete
No. I love Canada though. I love it. I spent a lot of time there. The only place I found super weird was when I went to the Capitol.
- [03:12]
Jonathan Haidt
Ottawa.
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Pete
Yeah. I drove from across the border through. Can't remember the border.
- [03:19]
Jonathan Haidt
New York to Kingston.
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Pete
No, I came across from Montreal. Detroit.
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Jonathan Haidt
Oh, Detroit. Yeah.
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Pete
And drove all the way through.
- [03:27]
Jonathan Haidt
Wow. Yeah, it's quite a drive.
- [03:29]
Pete
Me and Kurt did it together.
- [03:31]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
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Pete
But Ottawa was a strange place.
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Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
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Pete
It made me understand how Canada's. I don't know what your views on where Canada is at the moment, but it made me.
- [03:41]
Jonathan Haidt
And it's a whole topic, you know.
- [03:43]
Pete
Well, I feel like because you travel to other parts of Canada and everyone's cool, everyone's nice, hard working people, good people. And you're like, how's Canada got so weird? And you go to Ottawa and you're like, oh no, this is. Yeah, this is why it's got weird because everything's weird and it just Obviously they. They create the weirdness out.
- [04:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah, that's one. One aspect of it for sure is all those civil servants. But unlike the us, they can actually cut them quite quickly. Like when a conservative government comes in, they often shed tens of thousands just like that, which in a smaller country is quite a hit. So it's. Anyway, those are all the nuances. But in terms of the. How much of that in depth nuance do you want here?
- [04:28]
Pete
Or just go with the flow? Tell me whatever was.
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Jonathan Haidt
I don't want to bore your listeners.
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Pete
No, you won't bore them. Definitely won't bore them.
- [04:35]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay.
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Pete
I think they probably want to hear your perspective because in some ways I feel like. I feel like the US Is a term ahead of Canada, and I think Canada is about a term ahead of the uk You've got an election looming.
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Jonathan Haidt
Yes.
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Pete
Which looks like Pierre Boyev. I don't know if I pronounce his.
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Jonathan Haidt
Name correctly, is usually butchered by Anglo Canadians. To Pauliev.
- [04:57]
Pete
Yes. I'm a big fan of his interview where he's eating the apple.
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Jonathan Haidt
Oh, yeah.
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Pete
But it looks like you're going to get a Conservative administration, and then we're stuck here with a Labor Party that doesn't really reflect labor. Historical labor policy. You know, policies focus on the working class, and there's a. There's a big movement towards conservatism, whether it's through the Liberal Conservative Party or reform. So I'd be intrigued to see what you think is happening. Because it's a new world order.
- [05:32]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to just. There's, you know, each place is a little bit different and the mix of stuff like what's happening online now matters in a way. I would have said even in 2016, it didn't matter for elections. Yeah. So there's a lot of interesting things that are going on.
- [05:49]
Pete
Well, we had a little email exchange, and you talked about post progressivism.
- [05:54]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
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Pete
So I read the interview, despite it being available to listen to, and it made me think, you know, a lot about this is that essentially we've been in an era of progressivism. And so I wanted to really ask you about, well, how did we get here and why did everything get so weird?
- [06:14]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and do you. Should we. Are we rolling or.
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Pete
We're rolling.
- [06:19]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, we're sorry.
- [06:20]
Pete
Yeah. This is the interview, man.
- [06:21]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay. Right. Well, that's a big question. So how did we get where we are? I mean, that story goes back, you know, in some ways it goes back to the French Revolution 200 years ago and the rise of. But more recently, let's just take the last 100, 120 years. There was this movement called liberal progressivism out of the US in the first. First decade of the 20th century. People like John Dewey and Jane Addams. And for the first time, here was a movement that combined being left on the economy kind of with being very kind of liberal culturally. Those two things used to be very separate. And in fact, people who were left economically were often quite what we would consider conservative culturally. So something what the original progressive movement of the late 19th century believed in prohibiting alcohol, restricting immigration, for example, they had some quite conservative. What we would consider conservative views. But then they also believed in doing something for the poor. They saw cities as kind of wicked and sinful, but they were. They believed in social improvement, in social action. What happened is in the early 20th century, you now get a group of people who take part of that, which is the let's do charity and social action part. But then they dump the prohibition of alcohol, the restriction of immigration, the worries about the city, all that stuff goes away. And then they take on some of these liberal attitudes which had been only attached to pretty free market type people. So we're living with the outworking of the logic of liberal progressivism as it starts in the early 20th century, gets stronger through each of the wars, because kind of communism falls, fascism falls, total free market capitalism falls. We come up with this mixed welfare state. But this idea of being liberal left on culture just goes from strength to strength. Now it starts off, it's mainly talking about white ethnics, Jews and Italians, and these people having their right to their culture and whatever. And it was pretty moderate in many ways. But then as we get into the 1960s, it then starts to take off and we get more radical stuff coming in, examples. So we get, you know, affirmative action. So, so what was the liberal progressives were mainly concerned with white immigrant groups. They now, you know, when we go to the 1960s New Left, who are the inheritors of this left liberalism on culture, they now are focused on racial minorities. The whites have kind of assimilated and melted, so they're focused on racial minorities. And the first things are, for example, you know, taking a very romantic attitude to urban riots, burning down neighborhoods, you know, romanticizing the Black Panthers, who are extremely violent, often terrorist in their, in. In their ambitions. Affirmative action, this idea that essentially there should be goals and timetables for achieving equal outcomes in proportional quota terms for jobs and contracts, and then later universities. So that's a really radical idea. It's already happening in the late 60s. So when Donald Trump, he just rescinded President LBJ Lyndon Johnson's executive order on affirmative action, that's from the late 60s. So they had gone off the rails already by then. And that's the beginnings. And then the other stuff happens a little bit later. Like, so you have affirmative action first. The stuff around political correctness happens in the late 80s, early 90s. So by 1991, you got 300 leading US universities that have these speech codes. You've got university newspapers that made fun of affirmative action being shut down by ucla. So a lot of the stuff we're familiar with in The Great Awokening was already going on, but just not at the same scale and only on the campus. Not in the New York Times, not in the newspapers, but on the campus. It was happening. What's driving it and what's driving it is basically I look at it a bit like, you know, how your DNA unfolds over your lifetime. It's like a computer program. Okay, so this is like, you think of these ideas, what I will call cultural left liberalism, which is basically the overlap of two ideas, one which says you should trans, you should reject tradition, you should always go for difference rather than commonality and always be expressing yourself against whatever traditions or social restraints there are. So that's kind of what I'll call what some have called modernism. Daniel Bell, who's a critic of all this, or expressive individualism. So that's one strand of this, this kind of liberation thing. The second strand of this is what, what you can call equality and humanitarianism. We're going to be really nice to the very weak and we're going to want to make the, the last first. And this sort of kind of bleeding heart liberalism is the other part of this. If you crank the dial on both of those, you know, instead of talking about, you know, real harms to minorities like discrimination and, and police beatings, we're, we're now talking about microaggressions. You know, you raised an eyebrow, you said they, they, they were very articulate. You said anybo get ahead in Britain. These are all things that are interpreted as denying the reality of systemic racism. So that's kind of what I mean by the dial just keeps getting cranked and cranked and cranked. And there are these three kind of waves where the craziness goes up. It then calms down a bit and then it goes up again but to a higher place. So there was craziness when I first went to university in the early 90s around political correctness, but it's even crazier now. The number of professors being fired, the number of speakers being no platformed is, is much higher. So the scale is just higher. The degree of hair trigger sensitivity around different phrases. You know, it used to be things which, you know, they used to have, there used to be actual real racist incidents in dorms in university in the 90s. Now they're almost all fake, they're almost all hoax. That's what I mean is they're just, all of these things are just being taken up a notch, up a notch. But the basic out, the basic idea remains the same. And So I don't think the ideas are that different. I just think the dial's been twisted and it's, and it's spread off the campus. There were, there's a lot of crazy ideas on campus in the 80s. The critical race theory that's beginning in the 70s and the 80s, it's not new but, but sticking it in schools and shoving it down people's throat in schools is new. So it's a. Spreading out and making it mass social media helps on that.
- [13:20]
Pete
So does a lot of the root rot of this come from academia then?
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Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, in a way I would say that these ideas start, they start in the general, amongst small groups of bohemian intellectuals, really small numbers of people, no influence at all. They then as the universities start to expand in the 60s, they're sucked into these universities. That gets, allows them to spread the centralized television media instead of local radio. That takes over in the 60s. You get all of these mechanisms for expansion of what used to be just a small number of really avant garde out there, humanitarians and artists. Well suddenly that's taken off and get, getting crazier as it takes off. But I think what's noticeable, like if you take the 2010s up until our moment, what you can really see is these ideas spread off campus and we can track that using big data. For example, if you look at the terms, so called social justice terms like systemic racism, white supremacy, homophobia, you know, these sorts of words were used pretty heavily already in academic articles in the 70s, 80s and 90s, you know, and 2000s. It's not till we get the social media and we get the new media model which relies on clicks and virality on social media. And then all of a sudden all of these terms are showing up in the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these main, and, and the Times of London. So all of these, you know that, that used to be a kind of firewall between. Not a firewall but the mainstream media used to be much more sensible. You know, the New York Times was really critical of Black Panthers and, and, and the these 60s radicals. You know this. The New York Times would quite button up. Now they're beating the drum along with the crazy academics about you know, systemic racism and they get a nut case like Nicole Hannah Jones and to do her 1619 project that the US slavery was the founding of the United States and that gets a prize. What was the name of the literary prize? I'm trying to remember. But anyway, this is all something that's now mainstreamed in the Press when it used to be actually just narrowly on certain campuses, you know, Berkeley only in the gender studies or racial studies department, maybe a bit of sociology. But this has really kind of burst that kind of blood brain barrier and now it's just everywhere.
- [15:53]
Pete
So what, the social media aspect kind of amped it up because there are what, many more voices, independent voices, who now get. Because everyone gets to have a voice with social media. And there's a group of people, we've gone through a period of fear of cancellation, you know, so I think on certain issues people have held private opinions which are different from their public opinion.
- [16:15]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, you know, yes and no. I mean, I think it depends. So in, in the police, I have no doubt the average officer doesn't go along with the rainbow stuff to anywhere like the same extent as their police force. But in academia, a lot of this stuff is supported by a majority of academics, like, so mandatory dei, what are called DEI statements. So you have to pledge that you will advance diversity, equity and inclusion. What, before you can apply for a grant and apply for a job that, what are basically political loyalty oaths or litmus tests. That's supported by academics? Yeah, in elite institutions, like 2 to 1. Now, it's the latest survey I've seen shows they sort of step back a little bit from that 2 to 1, and it may be like 55, 45, but.
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Pete
But it sounds like coercion.
- [17:07]
Jonathan Haidt
It is coercion, because they don't. Because they're in a bubble, you know, universities, the left outnumbers the right. Like if we take social sciences in Britain, academics, it's 9 to 1, left to right. If we take it in the US, it's 13 to 1, maybe 14 to 1, and the 1 is in the closet. So they're in an echo chamber and they. And when you're in an echo chamber and all the studies show this, you just push each other towards the extreme. There's no check on the extremism. So they think this is just. No, this is just being a nice person. And then when you point out, well, actually, diversity and equity, which means equal outcomes, if you want equal outcomes, you're going to have to treat people equal, unequally. So you're going to have to discriminate against, say, white applicants to Harvard and Asian applicants in order to get enough African Americans to make their quota. You know, they think, oh, no, this is just equality. But no, what it is is it's unequal treatment. So you discriminate against an equally qualified white person, let's say and, and they just don't see that because there's no one's pointing it out to them because they're only amongst like minded people. So they just kind of think this isn't political. But of course it is inclusion that I bit is basically about. Well, I have to stifle your free speech because you know, I mean, you might upset a member of a quote unquote marginalized group and you know, that would be not very inclusive. So the point there is that clamping down on free speech again they just rationalize it to themselves, you know, no, we're being, we believe in free speech, it's just that, you know, your speech makes someone feel unfree. So it's not free speech. I mean, so that's the way they reason. Right.
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Pete
What is there a psychology to this in that say somebody new who's entered the profession is presented with this oath, they have to swear to that. They don't fundamentally believe it to begin with but in doing so they become co opted into it and over time they do start to believe it themselves and support it. Is there a psychology to it, I wonder?
- [19:11]
Jonathan Haidt
I think there might be. I think that some do follow that path. But I think for the most part there's a self selection process where it's made very clear just in the jokes people tell. They joke about Brexit, they joke about the conservatives. You know, if you are conservative or a Brexit supporter, you're going to steer clear of that social environment. So you're going to, you're not going to go into get a PhD or go into academia because that's not a place you feel welcome because people are quite openly going to discriminate against you. So I think there's a certain degree to which that environment repels prospective people who might go into an academic career. And I've done research on this which shows that if you take right leaning graduate students at the master's level, like 2/3 of them will say their department's a hostile environment. Three quarters of conservative academics will say their department is a hostile environment for their political beliefs. So the hostility is pretty obvious. And so, you know, all other things being equal, if you are on the right, you'll just take another career route. You'll maybe go into a think tank or you know, you'll go to be in journalism on a conservative newspaper. So yeah, so that the problem is this, the pipeline then becomes really, really, you know, a monoculture and it reproduces a, a lack of viewpoint diversity. So everybody is, is in A bubble. And those who aren't are in the closet. And so, yeah, that's where we are right now.
- [20:41]
Pete
And so is, is that a, is that a reason why we've ended up with such a. So for example, in the uk we had Liz Truss in here. She talked about how the civil service has become very much a left leading part of government. It's very hard for somebody in government to, to work against those parts of the civil service. And that if you're not overtly conservative, you end up swinging to the left. And is that because the people we're producing from academia are predominantly on the left and they're affecting these institutions which has led us to this place where the, I would say the liberal Western democracies have become very left leaning. I mean even the conservative party now I consider them a left wing party.
- [21:26]
Jonathan Haidt
No, I think you're right on the things that, you know, many of us care about. I think they are left leaning, you know, migration, culture. But what I'd say is here's what I think's going on and you can, if you look at, for example, US has very good data on a lot of things which, you know, they tend to have. And so one of the things they have data on is political donations by profession. Now granted only a couple percent of the population give more than 200 to a party, but if you look at the Republican Democrats split in political donations by profession, you look at, not academics, fine, Hollywood, fine. That's just overwhelmingly to the left. It's been to the left for a while. But all of these professions, not just those, have been heading left wing. So now it's lawyers and it's doctors and it's, you know, even people working in the insurance business, like everybody is, is all of those professions are now donating more to the left than to the right. Tech, you know, all of, despite a few Elon Musk's, you know, was overwhelmingly donating to the left. So there is this trend kind of in the elite culture that's been building. And what's happened partly is that the Republican Party used to be just the party of low taxes and, and more money in your pocket. So if you're rich, you know, if you're educated, you tended to be rich, you vote for them. But so that's been changing. Now the Republican Party stands for the cultural right more than the economic right. And, and so what you have with these elites is people are economically to the right. They want low tax, but they're culturally to the left. They, they believe in maybe Open borders. They believe in, you know, low cost labor. They believe in woke because they think that's how you're a good person. So I think the rot.
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Pete
Sorry, do, do they believe it or do they act that way to be accepted within the inner circles? Because there was that interview that Rogan did with Mark Andreessen and he said, as you know, he used to be historically a Democrat voter and everything that's happened weird under the Biden administration and I think certainly started under Obama's administration, but bled through. He said he's shifted to the right. He was supporting voting for Trump and he said I'm no longer invited to certain dinner parties. So we talk about the liberal dinner parties in London. There's certain, I think, beliefs that people hold to stay within. It's like a status game.
- [23:52]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, well, okay. And there's been a few books, you know, Rob Henderson's book and Batya and Gar Sargon and Vivek Ramaswamy. They're all talking about this idea of, well, capital and it's all about status. I'm less of a believer in that. I mean, I think it is to some extent. But, but I've done a survey where you're anonymous when you do a survey. And, and I, I do a little scenario like let's say in your organization some there's a proposal to have, you know, 30% women and 20% minorities, you know, a quota or there's a proposal that everyone must sign a diversity statement affirming their commitment to dei. Would you vote for this at a meeting where you had to raise your hand? Would you vote for it privately where you didn't have to reveal your identity? And what you kind of see is actually there's a significant group of people who, who support. And it's close to 50% amongst people with degrees. It's not 50, but it's close. Who support this stuff and would do it even if it was anonymous. Now there are some who said, okay, well I would do it, support it anonymously, but I would actually go the other way. But if. Sorry, I would actually go the other way anonymously. But, but in a meeting I would probably raise my hand. So there's a small number of people.
- [25:13]
Pete
Who, who now it's a social coercion.
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Jonathan Haidt
There is a certain element of this, but I think that people who say, oh well, it's just spiral of silence and most people are not woke. I don't think that's true. I think, well, most people aren't woke, but I think in these professions, it's evenly balanced. And so when it's evenly balanced and you toss in the reputational status stuff, I think that tips it over. And so I think that's what we're facing. And so I think the problem actually is quite deep. I don't think the universities, by the way, are creating the problem. The studies we have show people's views don't change much from when they enter and leave university. What they learn in class doesn't affect them very much. That's not the issue. The issues, it's happening in the schools. And so the evidence that I've seen in the studies I've done show if you're at a school that is heavy on critical race and gender ideology, you're going to have more views on affirmative action, white guilt and so on that are to the left. And, and I've, I've showed that in a study with Zach Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute. And it's pretty substantial to the point where if you have a mother who's Republican and you go to a school where they're teaching the maximum number of these critical race theory, critical gender concepts in, in school, and a mother who's Republican and you're in a school that doesn't have any of this, it's like you're twice as likely to be a Democrat controlling for, for anything you can think of. So, yeah, the schools are really where this is occurring. And that's one of the reasons I say in my book Taboo, that the, the real place we need to target for reform is the curriculum, teacher training, the hiring and firing of teachers. It's got to be really ruthless, otherwise the indoctrination will continue. And the young are way more woke than the old. Like a young leftist in this country or in the US is twice as intolerant of speech as an old leftist. They are more likely to say Britain is a racist country. They're more likely to, you know, buy into, you know, they're. If you ask, should J.K. rowling be dropped by her publisher, it's substantially more. It's like among young people under 25 is 50. 50. Yeah, she should be dropped. No, she shouldn't. Anyone 45 and up, it's like low single digits. So we've got this kind of time bomb coming our way now. There's, there is some positive stuff in there which is amongst the young people, which is really that the, the group that isn't so convinced by woke is starting to mobilize and get a bit more anti. Get more anti woke. So they're now young people. You got strong anti woke and strong woke. So they're really polarizing. But. And that's happened in the last two. Two years, 18 months.
- [28:06]
Pete
Where's the strong anti woke coming from? I know, for example, I could say within my household, it's coming from the parent. Right, all right. But I don't know where, Sorry, when you refer to school, because I know in the US school can mean university school here means pre university school.
- [28:22]
Jonathan Haidt
I mean like primary and primary. Yeah, and secondary.
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Pete
Yeah, yeah. By the way, I mean, I'm always surprised to hear a child with conservative opinions because when you talk about, you know, when you put some of the questions to them, I think kids learn a playground empathy and they, you know, if you turn around to a kid, my daughter, when she was, I don't know, say she was 10, if I said to her, you know, should we give money to everyone who's not got a job? And you know, should we. Should we make it illegal to say bad words and insults? She probably would say that because she's a kid and you would expect that. I think, I think it's hard for a kid to understand the downstream consequences of that.
- [29:02]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's true. I mean, on the one hand, you're right, but on the other hand, if we compare, we have some surveys where they've asked the same question to, you know, there was a survey of a college in the us the Smith College. Now it's a relatively liberal place, liberal arts school, but they asked the same question in 2016 as in 2000. People should be allowed to say what they express their opinion. Even that if that offends people. You know, in, in 2000, that Smith College students, all like 18 to 20. In 2000, it was like three quarters said they should be allowed. They should be free to say, say what they want, even if it offends some people. 2016, that's down from 75 to below 50 now. So that's a shift. Same question, same age. The only difference, same college. The only difference is 16 years. And on a larger scale, something called the general social surveys asked this question about should these people be allowed to speak or teach? And they have six categories. Militarist, communist, homosexual, and one of them's racist. What's interesting is on all of the others, everything's been getting more tolerant. But on the one that said racist, I, out of those six, you know, was getting, oh, yeah, yeah, the racer should be allowed to speak. That was going for a while and then it turned the other way and now actually the younger you are, the more anti, allowing the racist to speak. So that kind of tells you something. And what I think it tells you is this, this ideology which is what I woke, which I define as making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, sexual identity groups. You're making those groups sacred and elevating them and therefore they cannot be offended in any way. And so you're really intolerant of anything around those identities. And so that's what we're seeing. And I think over time those people are now being raised with these values. They enter the workforce, they become the staffers in, you know, Google's and Microsoft and, and then they, or New York Times, they revolt when they don't get their way. You know, this is coming up from the young and, and so this is why I say, I mean unless we get a hold of the education system, I don't see how we start this runaway train.
- [31:22]
Pete
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- [35:02]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay, where does it come from? I mean it already was there in a few dots. The most radical places, maybe the Hackney school district in the 80s in the Greater London Council. There were a few little places where the activist teachers would go Berkeley or Brooklyn in, you know, in the us These few school district, Toronto in Canada. Few places. That's the sort of beginning of COVID 19 and then it sort of has a leap. Like in Canada in the early 90s, the government, they had a very leftist provincial government come in and decree that this had to go into all the schools. And now a core, a Conservative government came in and took it out supposedly. But the teachers unions love this stuff. They're always been, the teachers unions have been on the left for a long time and on the, in the forefront of a lot of this stuff. Only a question of how many activists they could field to push this. So I think it was there, but probably in, in a much smaller number of places now it's maybe supercharged a little bit by, you know, like the 2010 Equality act here in Britain. But the education schools, you know, you read Chris Ruffo's book, a lot of this so called critical pedagogy is taking root in the education schools and those are what the new generation of teachers and administrators are brought up in and they're going to implement. So the survey I did in Brenton showed like 3 in 418 to 20 year olds I surveyed in the sample had been exposed to at least one of six critical race and gender ideology ideas like unconscious bias, systemic racism, patriarchy, many genders, you know, so at least one of those six, there are a couple of others which I can't remember off the top of my head. But you've got high penetration in the US it's 95, so it's not as high. But one of the things we noticed was that the 18 year olds who were still in school in Britain were getting a higher dose of this than the 20 year olds. In other words, it was still rising, whereas in the US it was pretty flat. It was already more or less at saturation point. So this has kind of come in brought in by activist teachers. It's all under the radar. You know, the Tories, you know, have been ineffective in forcing schools to, to have curriculum transparency, to publish their materials online or to get rid of this stuff altogether through inspections. I mean they're going to be, of course they're going to be fought tooth and nail. But you know, if you compare with what Ron Desantis in Florida or now Trump is doing in the U.S. i mean granted the federal government doesn't control schools, but still in the US at state level, I mean nothing like that was happening here. It just very vague. Well, we don't want to upset the teachers so we're going to give them really weak guidance. So Sajid Javits said, well, you know you can't indoctrinate in class. It's against the law, which it is. But his definition of what is political, he sort of said, well, you can't say Black Lives Matter is great, but you can, you know, you can talk about, you know, racism is bad, that's okay. But he doesn't, he didn't actually specify that using a term like systemic racism is political and therefore is not allowed. If he, if he was serious, he would have had four or five pages of detail of this is allowed. This isn't allowed. This is the line. He didn't do that. He, he did something so broad you could drive a truck through it.
- [38:29]
Pete
But when you say, get a grip of the schooling, is your belief that these as ideas should be removed from education or should be included but debated and discussed?
- [38:41]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So this is where we get into the terrain of realism versus, you know. Yes. In the ideal, we would have the two sides presented fairly. Students debated. In the survey I did, we found that about seven in 10 of those, when they heard these concepts, they said these were taught as truth. And the opposite view was not respected, respectable. You know, do we trust the kind of teacher who wants to teach this stuff to fairly present the case for both? And this is one of the reasons why. Yeah, I'd love to have those debates. I'm a free speech guy. But I think with schools where these kids are captive and they're minors and there are so many activist teachers in the system and there's almost no, you know, very few on the right, I just don't believe that these people can teach this fairly. And so there's going to be indoctrination. I think it's better to just get it out and keep it out. And that's narrow. It's a shame, really, because, you know, you ideally would like to have them read Glenn Lowry and Coleman Hughes on the one side and then you can read Ibram X Kendi. But unfortunately, I just don't think that's realistic. And maybe in the future it'll be realistic and we can bring it back in. But I think for now, given what's happening with the indoctrination, I think the only thing that is realistic is to just take the politicized stuff out of the classroom and have them do the ABCs.
- [40:12]
Pete
But you're going to have a problem then with the activist teachers. How do you recruit a different or more. I'm going to a diverse, political, diverse set of teachers. I'm introducing DEI to reduce D to remove dei. But how do you get more conservative opinions within teaching?
- [40:31]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, there are some things you can do like, you know, removing the requirement for a degree, for example, making it easier to retrain as a teacher if you've been in the workforce. So those routes, you know, getting rid of the accreditation, anything in the accreditation system that forces you to subscribe to DEI type concepts, you know, if you root and branch reform all that stuff and make it less of a hostile environment, then you might get some more diversity. And there already is some. Look, teachers are not on the whole, as left wing, as academics. We, you know, the data I've seen from YouGov on that would show that there are actually some teachers, you know, more teachers who are not on the left. But I suspect they aren't as numerous amongst head teachers or in the influential positions around the social science subjects. Maybe they're teaching sciences or something like that. I think it's more realistic to depoliticize because the other thing too, and I guess this is where it's not just about discriminating against conservatives or making a hostile environment. I also think what's happening is that the leading edge of the culture, the leading edge of the culture has been left liberal extremism, what I would call left liberal extremism. That's how you show you're an enlightened person and a really moral person. And the people who go into the cultural opinion forming professions therefore exemplify that. So the, you know, there's a deep problem in the culture that has produced and gone down this road. How do we turn that around? And you know, because there's two different ways of doing this. I mean, one is the populist route, which says we're going to harness the two thirds, majority of the population that isn't woke and we're going to simply reform these institutes. And I'm in favor of that. But it's not enough because you've got to win the battle of ideas long term. Which means now that's happening online. Online's been very important, shows like this in starting a counter movement that can grow and eventually produce at one time, maybe people who will go into academia or teaching and start, or even Hollywood and start to change publishing and movies and everything. But that has got to, that's the end point of a long process because, you know, the other side has been at this for a century and in a very serious way for 50 years. So.
- [43:00]
Pete
Well, we're stacking wins.
- [43:03]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes, well, we're.
- [43:04]
Pete
Yeah, you gotta stack wins. You got. I think we had to End, cancel culture. That had to end because there is a there. If. Look, I know in the different. I'm involved in football. I know in there there's, there's fears, there is a left wing swing within football. There's fears of speaking out on certain issues. And I think people, once people have had the fear removed that you won't be canceled. That independent thought, however a controversial might be, is acceptable. We need those. I think you start to stack wins and I feel like, look, Trump is certainly leading something in the US But I don't know if he is. There's an argument, say he is leading a counter revolution or he is responding to the desire for a counter revolution. I think it's a bit of both. But they're starting to stack these wins and I mean sat in the seat just before you as Rupert Lowe, who's an MP for reform. The Overton window has shifted on reform now. It's come from being something you talk about secretly. What do you mean you voted for reform. Now it's like, what do you mean you aren't voting for reform? What are you voting for? The. So I think there, there is this kind of counterculture movement which is, when you talked about this kind of post progressivism, it's like, are we entering it or we in it?
- [44:15]
Jonathan Haidt
Right, okay, well, that's a good point because this is something that I'm working on. So I've got a conference in June where I'm bringing over, you know, it'll be in, in, in Britain. I mean, it's not, it is, it's not an open conference as yet. As yet. Although you can probably come. But, but yeah, the aim here is to rethink the social sciences in academia. And so I have this term post progressivism. What I'm basically arguing is, okay, we've got the populist movements that, you know, we've had strong populism for 10 years now in the West. But I, I just, I'm interested in the high culture and the elite culture and we do see some interesting things. You know, you obviously have the, the musks and the Zuckerbergs and some of the tech people. But again, I still think it's a minority moving from left to right. You New York Times and, and mainstream media backing off, criticizing council. They've all had their editorials against, you know, Washington Post had an editorial against diversity statements. They're trying to hire some conservatives. Bezos said he wants some conservatives. You know, the New York Times has some now they may not be maga. But, you know, at least they're trying a little bit. And there is a, you know, there's criticism of dei, of parts of the trans agenda, again with, with fits and starts. The New York Times kind of flipped and flopped. And, but that's a big change from where they were in, you know, 2016-2021, that sort of period. So there's been some reflection by the elites that realize, like, maybe we took this too far and maybe this isn't a great idea. And so there. But, but the question I would have is, okay, that's, that's elite, typically older senior liberals who are, you know, they realized, yeah, Trump won. This is pretty convincing. We have to change what we're doing. There's also October 7th and all that seen on TV. And, and this is a real problem if you're starting to get these young people who are thinking Hamas is great. So, so there's a whole bunch of things happening that have changed some elite minds, although I don't want to overstate that. But the question is, can we actually then get that to, to shift even more and to actually be a proper shift in the elite culture away from DEI and away from this obsession with race, gender and sexuality and, and equity? And, and is that possible? Could we get to a place where they might, you know, say that, yeah, actually, immigration's an issue, like Canada, where I'm from. It's become, in the last six months, permissible to question immigration in a way. It was just not. It was a national religion. And, and now, yeah, a lot of people, including even the mainstream press, is questioning immigration levels. So, yes, that is a big change, but I still think it's fragile because, you know, the younger generation has been imbued, and particularly the younger generation that's kind of elite has been imbued with these ideas and they are going to be taking over. And so I think we haven't seen anything yet. I mean, I, I don't, I'm not saying that it's lost. I'm just saying that we have to be prepared for when the millennials are the median voter and the median corporate leader. And, and, and I just don't know whether they're going to more or less overthrow the, the free speech culture when they become in power. But I think there is a moment of reflection right now in the elite culture. Now, there are times in history where elite cultures shift. Like, we've been in this progressive moment, I say, for 60 years, and, you know, 1965 to 2025, it's been about identity, you know, with a few, you know, three major awokenings. But it's all been in the direction of, you know, for, whether it be race, whether it be sexuality, whether it be feminism, they've all been rising and becoming more influential and getting more radical at university level.
- [48:19]
Pete
Can I ask you something on that? So if we've had a period, period of six years of progressivism, are there valid wins in there for the progressives? Like if you study it as an academic, are there things you think, no, that was good. It's good that we had that moment in time where this was achieved.
- [48:35]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. And this is, this is sort of a point I make in my book is a lot of, this is what I'd call overreach. So you have things which were good in the first place. In the first while, you know, you want to have anti discrimination law so you don't get blatant discrimination against black people in the construction industry in Philadelphia. I mean, all of those things were very blatantly happening or against women, you know, groping of women at work or whatever. So there's a lot of stuff that, that made sense when it was about equal treatment and, and, and blatant forms of obvious harassment. But once you move from that to okay, well, no, no, it's not enough to have equal treatment. We need to have equal results, you see? Right. And that, that shift or it's not enough to have no harassment at work. But you know, even, you know, I don't know, even telling, even having a, making a joke about Ayatollah Khomeini as supreme Leader. That's Islamophobic. I mean, this is just one of the harassment cases that came through. Or Gogan, you know, Mara nude portrait picture is somehow, you know, offensive to women. You know, this is, what I mean is sort of taking it too far. So a lot of this stuff is, starts out reasonable. So then it goes off the deep end.
- [49:52]
Pete
The first awokening was kind of okay, we got some good things out of it.
- [49:57]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, it's not as simple as that. So. So in fact there were things, there's even things like in the third awokening like MeToo where, you know, it's about the Harvey Weinsteins and the pigs, you know, getting them reported, making that easier. I mean, that's all to the good. But likewise, in the first awokening, we had, you had overreach in the first awokening. So for example, and starts early. So something like affirmative action, I think is overreach. Going from non discrimination to quotas. Already in the 60s and 70s, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the. On The Black family, 1965 was attacked as racism when he was pointing out things which have stood the test of time, which are social science. Like when you have family breakdown, that's going to be a problem for the black community. And he was absolutely right. And that was shelved by the Johnson administration to radioactive. So that's already happening in the 60s. We were already getting canceling in the 60s, just not as much of it. So all of these problems were there and have gotten worse. But a lot of the stuff is, you know, clearly if it's about equal treatment, gay rights, you know, these sorts of things which are about equal treatment, then that's to the good. But then where are the brakes to prevent this stuff from going overboard? And we don't have any, is the answer. And that's why all of these things have been going overboard. Because there's nothing in left liberalism to check itself. It's just out of control because whereas on the economy there is a check because you've got the left. Liberals believe in markets to produce wealth, but they believe in the welfare state to redistribute. If you have too much welfare state, then you're going to crowd out investment in economic growth. So it's naturally got its own check on the culture. It's just, you know, we're going to go to the max on, you know, getting rid of dead white males and more diversity, more inclusion. There's no limit to it. And so it just goes off the deep end.
- [51:54]
Pete
Is there a case they, the progressives, essentially, by the by, you know, over the last 10 years they got to a point where they won everything. There's nothing else for progressives to win. So we had to go. The pendulum had to swing even further.
- [52:05]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [52:06]
Pete
Because, you know, I mean, you know, UK is a very tolerant country. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's bouts of racism and anti Semitism, but generally speaking, I don't think it exists much at all. I think there's a guy, Zubi, yeah, I love this quote, he has the. The demand for racism outstrips the supply. But I think he has a really valid point there that people are trying to find it more than it actually exists. You know, we're very tolerant. There's not a problem being gay anymore. I don't find there's much homophobia. I mean, I think it's difficult for maybe a footballer to come out as gay. I think there's been One. But generally speaking, I think we're quite tolerant and I think maybe there's a demand to find new things because we got everything. The progressive one.
- [52:49]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth there in the sense like if you look at these, the number of hoaxes. I mean, Wilfred Riley, who's an African American academic and he's done a whole book on these race hoaxes, or Coleman Hughes, who's another upcoming and really, really good African American writer. But he's pointing out that there is almost this kind of. There's this phrase. Oh, what is it called? Where if, if a phenomenon becomes less common, then you invent more of it. And I'm trying to remember, they've done these experiments with trustworthy and untrustworthy faces where they can, with a computer simulation, they can vary the number of untrustworthy and trustworthy looking faces. And they ask people what, what share of these you think are trustworthy and untrustworthy? And essentially the share remains the same. They just see a trustworthy face that's maybe borderline and they'll relabel that as untrustworthy. So you have this phenomenon where when something be. Or crime, when it becomes less common, you start to see other things as crime. So crime's always increasing, you know, so there's this just general tendency. But yeah, this is where the other thing too is these movements are. People become really attached. It's part of their identity. And so these movements have to keep innovating. Like we did gay. Okay, now we got to do trans, got to keep the energy going and take it to the next level. And that's why the logic just keeps unfolding towards extremism because they have to keep it fresh and vital.
- [54:22]
Pete
And then you get minor attracted people. Yeah, which is, I mean look, a lot of this stuff, it's. I think it's. It was really interesting over this last two, three, four years, pretty much since COVID where everything started to get too weird. He started to. I started to believe that I did. Well, let me put it a different way. I don't know where people got their theoretical frameworks from for some of the ideas they were having. But I believe that people coming out with fundamentally stupid statements and my worry was it was that the opinion leaders were coming from social media where it wasn't so much a meritocracy, it was more like a Shaolin match. It was an accumulation of likes and follows that created this merit. But it wasn't a true meritocracy. It wasn't like You've earned this within the academic, academic world where you've written papers, you debated, you just got online and shouted a lot. And I, Yeah, and I'm worried that it had come from there and, and there was this culture of having to follow the norm. Well, this is the norm. Like she.
- [55:18]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I, I think that social media put all this stuff on steroids.
- [55:23]
Pete
Yeah.
- [55:24]
Jonathan Haidt
The like button, you know, and the fact you could see how many likes. So if you, if somebody said something and, and you did a comment like, oh, that's a bit racist, and then you got 500 likes and a thousand lines, and then that's a pylon and that, that you used to not be able to do that. But I don't think that's the whole story. So I, and certainly in my book, I, my argument is this is actually much older and I remember the, the early 90s political correctness. You know, let me ask you this question. When was it okay in polite conversation to say immigration is way too high in Britain?
- [56:00]
Pete
I mean, in Canada, only over the last few months.
- [56:03]
Jonathan Haidt
Right. So, you know, you talk about cancel culture, but I cannot remember a time in Canada up until the last six months, let's say. But where it would have been okay to pen a newspaper editorial saying immigration should be reduced. You'd have to couch it only in economic terms. I mean, so what I mean is there were speech restrictions actually on many issues. And the reason that you weren't allowed to talk about immigration is because, well, that would be insensitive to who? One of the sacralized groups. Race. Right. So it's racist to talk about immigration. And that's what I mean is that I. And that's not a new thing from the social media age. That's way before. And something similar on what was seen as sexist, for example, speech or toxic masculinity. I. So I think, yes, these things are accelerated by social media, but they go well, well back. And I think immigration is a key one because it's not like culture war is not just about culture war. I try to make this point that if you can't have a conversation about immigration because that's seen as offside, so you are seen as offending a member of a racial group. So you're not being inclusive by talking about immigration, then you can't have a conversation about immigration. And so the only option is to say more of it. That's the only thing. And if someone says we should have more of it, you can't say no. And because of that, immigration goes out of control or the US can't control its border because, well, a largely white country deporting non white immigrants would be. The optics are equals racism and therefore you can't do it. And so you just don't do it. And so what happens, you get an out of control border. And so there are all these effects that come out of these speech restrictions. Another one is, oh well, more black people are winding up in jail. That's systemic racism. So we need to empty the jails and defund the police. And oh, what happened? Oh, we had a huge murder spike and it's all these black people being killed. Oh boy. You know, so that's what I mean is that crime and immigration and all these other bread and butter things actually go out. You know, these downstream effects of woke. It's so it's not just what you can say in a newspaper or a classroom. It's, it's, it reverberates and has a huge effects on education on, on maybe if we aren't teaching kids about pride in their nation, then none of them are going to join the military or the police. And, and, and so all of a sudden we can't recruit a military, which means you got no foreign policy. Like so, so no one's thinking about these things until all of a sudden it gets to a breaking point. Like in Canada, the breaking point was, oh, well, we're letting in all these people and now the house prices are out of control and the GDP per capita is tanking and oh, okay, crisis time, you know, so no one could say anything until it blew up and it became a crisis.
- [59:05]
Pete
I feel like the trans issue became the breaking point for many progressives themselves to even take a step back. You know, I felt my sense amongst the circles I'm in was this became a subject whereby it forced a lot of women to reconsider their views. I listened intently to your interview with Jordan Peterson and there was the section where it talked about the different views based on whether your gender. Women tend to be a little bit more on the liberal progressive woke side for whatever reason you could probably explain. But when the trans issue started to come into their space, into their spaces, their change rooms, their sports, et cetera. It forced a number of women, not all, but a number of women, to stand back and say, well, hold on a second, this is my breaking point.
- [59:55]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [59:57]
Pete
Is that a fair observation?
- [59:59]
Jonathan Haidt
It is a fair observation with a few caveats. So I'd say it's still the case that women are more in favor of trans. The trans activist agenda than men are actually, you know, to allow transnatal male like trans women into women's spaces. You'll get more agreement from women than men on that question, partly because women are more left wing, but they're taught to be empathetic, which in today's terms, not in the terms of 1900 where empathy was, had something completely had a different meaning and therefore they're more likely to support trans, so called trans rights. Right. I think that there are, you know, some gender crit. You know, there are a small number of very literate, particularly lesbian women who understand this stuff deeply, who've been marinating in it for decades. And they are the ones who understood the pitfalls and the dangers of this and raised the alarm and, and have developed somewhat of a following now with J.K. rowling and others. So yeah, the trans issue and the other thing that's interesting about the trend, I think it's not so much the male, female element of this, but the fact that, you know, within the population support for, you know, you know, biological males in women's sports is, is, you know, 15%. It's really low. It's like an 85, 15 split. So it's, it's heavily stacked against. So even in polite, you know, upper middle class liberal circles, most people at least, certainly in my age bracket would not be in favor of, you know, biological males and women's sports.
- [61:41]
Pete
But it's still happening. Yes, I mean, so as I mentioned, I have, I own a football team. We have a men's side and a women's side. I'm not aware of any incident of a trans male joining a men's side. It might have happened.
- [61:57]
Jonathan Haidt
Right.
- [61:57]
Pete
I'm just not aware of it. But I'm certainly aware on the women's side of trans women who are in women's sides or competing or available and exists. It is a subject that you're encouraged not to talk about. I've tried to talk about it to people, I've talked privately. I don't think I've. I think I've spoken to one person who supports it and I've spoken to more than 100 people from players to managers to coaches to chairs of other team, to people who work in the football authorities. I've even been advised in the football authorities not to approach this subject stance, keep away from this. It's too much of a hot potato, but it still exists. This episode is brought to you by Leden, the only bitcoin backed financial service that I personally use. So whether you're looking to earn interest on your Bitcoin, get a loan without selling your assets or buy more Bitcoin with ease. Leden has the tools to help you manage and grow your wealth. Now with Leden, you can earn interest on your Bitcoin and USDC holdings or unlock the value of Bitcoin with secure low interest loans, all without needing to sell your stack. Leden is built for Bitcoiners who want more flexibility with their assets. So if you want to find out more, please head over to Leden IO MrObnoxious to get started, that is Leadn IO MrObnoxious this episode is brought to you by river, the best platform for Bitcoin investing and financial services. Now, whether you are just starting out or managing a large holding, river has everything you need to maximize your Bitcoin journey. Now, with zero fee recurring buyers, you can stack SaaS automatically without worrying about hidden fees. And for high net worth individuals, river offers private client services giving you personalized support, secure custody and and deep liquidity that can help you manage and grow your Bitcoin portfolio. And for businesses, river provides business accounts allowing companies to securely hold and manage Bitcoin as part of their financial strategy. Visit river.com today and find out more. That is river.com which is R I V E R.com this episode is brought to you by Ledger, the most trusted Bitcoin hardware wallet. Now, if you're serious about protecting your Bitcoin, Ledger has the solution you need. Their hardware wallet gives you complete control over your private keys, ensuring that your Bitcoin stays safe from hacks, phishing and malware. And I've been a customer of that since 2017. Love the product. Use it for my Bitcoin. I use it with my Casa multisig for protecting the football club's Bitcoin too. Now, with Ledger's sleek, easy to use devices and the Ledger Live app, managing your Bitcoin has never been more secure or convenient. And whether you're a longtime holder or new to the world of bitcoin, Ledger makes it simple to keep your assets protected. So if you want to find out more, please do, head over to Ledger.com and secure your Bitcoin today. That is Ledger.com, which is L E D G-E-R.com that is Ledger.com so are.
- [64:53]
Jonathan Haidt
You saying that most people would rather those biological males not be on the women's team?
- [64:58]
Pete
Yeah. Not play at all. For two reasons. The sporting competition. It's unfair, all right? And secondly, it's what was the other reason. So it's for sporting.
- [65:12]
Jonathan Haidt
Dangerous, maybe.
- [65:12]
Pete
Sorry, Sporting integrity and danger. Yeah. There's a. I don't want to particularly call somebody out, but I know of, for example, one player who's a goalkeeper, six foot four. Yeah, yeah. A built, tall, strong biological male who has transitioned to be a trans female. That to me adds an element of danger to other players if that goalkeeper's running out divivables into. So it's something that I want to discuss. I'm trying to discuss, but there's real pushback even doing this right now.
- [65:45]
Jonathan Haidt
What's pushing back? I'm curious as to. Is it because these people are afraid of the law? Is it that they're afraid of being radioactive to, you know, elites of some kind or. Or dinner parties? You know, what is it? That's.
- [65:59]
Pete
Well, so the. Let's. Let's start with the rules by the football association. It's on a case by case basis and I think it's an annual hormone test.
- [66:10]
Jonathan Haidt
Okay.
- [66:11]
Pete
So there's no consideration for historical bone growth. There's no lung capacity, heart size. No. Yeah. Which a lot of that to me comes down to spawn integrity. So the rule exists that players can play, and that's been established now, that trans women can play for women's sides. I think there's a range of reasons why it is and isn't being talked about. So even me having this conversation, once this comes out, there may be somebody who views this and go, pete's transphobic. He has a women's football side. They'll try and cancel me. They'll make some criticism. There may be from the back of that this may lead to certain pressures on people who play for my. Even though these are my views, people who play for my side management or coaching in my teams, they might feel under pressure now to quit. They might say, you know, people say, why are you. Why are you playing for Pete's side? He's transphobic. So there's social pressures that exist within there. From the people I've spoken within the football association, they said, just don't go near. This is a hot potato. I could possibly end up fined.
- [67:16]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, okay.
- [67:17]
Pete
I could possibly end up being suspended. I mean, we don't know the actual rules, do we? Are you uncomfortable me even talking about this? I'm fine with it. Yeah. But you understand why.
- [67:27]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, what, because one of the debates is over how much of this is downstream of the law and compliance and avoiding lawsuits and therefore it's a self interest thing.
- [67:37]
Pete
Yeah.
- [67:37]
Jonathan Haidt
Or how much of this is in what choices. My view is that there are a set of sacred totems, sacred symbols. And I mentioned race, gender, sexuality, the historically marginalized groups. Anything which deemed offensive to those groups is seen as, as a profaning of the sacred. And then so you, you are excommunicated. That is canceled for that reason is you have violated the sacred and you are now toxic to the entire community, moral community. It's like a religious metaphor because the thing is very similar. And so now you've got this radio around the, whether it be the race taboo or it be the sexuality taboo. And so in this case the taboos around trans. It's a bit like kryptonite. So if you're tarred with this kryptonite and you're radioactive, and then you're radioactive to other people and if they associate with you, they get some of that stuff on them and they're radio. So you see what I mean is that this whole thing is. So I think that in this case you're right, that is a bit of a spiral of silence and everyone might actually be opposed to it, but there's also different levels. So I think there's a lot of euphemism. So someone says, oh, Pete's transphobic. And that label comes to be attached to you. Now that person might even actually oppose biological males and women's sports, but he's not heard somewhere that you're transphobic, not knowing what that means other than that's a taboo violation. And so you're, you, you have on the top of the tin label that says transphobia. You open the tin up and you realize, oh, well, he just doesn't want, you know, biological males and women's sports because it's, it's a danger and it's not fair and blah, blah. But they never look into the tin and there's a lot of this game playing around. So if I take the words diversity, equity and inclusion, oh, who could be against those things? They're all such nice sounding words until you say, oh, diversity and equity means anti white, anti male, anti Asian discrimination. Now that doesn't sound too good. But this got the nice sounding label on the tin or the label says inclusion, you open it up and it's about, oh, canceling people, suppressing speech, censoring, punishing. Oh, that doesn't sound very, we don't like that. But on the top of the tin it says inclusion. So I think there's a lot of these euphemisms that are laundering These very illiberal ideas, and that's one of the ways that the woke gets its stuff through, is people don't open up the tin to see what's inside. And this velvet glove, all they see is the velvet glove, not the iron fist of restriction and discrimination and all this other stuff.
- [70:21]
Pete
Here we go.
- [70:23]
Jonathan Haidt
This was a 17 year old girl.
- [70:26]
Pete
That repeatedly asked a player during a match, are you a man? She was banned for six matches. Hold on, scroll up. Let me read the article. A protest over the football Association's transgender inclusion policy took place outside Wembley before England's men's match against Republic of Ireland. It was sparked by the banning of a teenage girl over remarks she made to a transgender opponent in grassroots match. So what is the background the FAA calls a complex case? Earlier this month, a 17 year old female footballer was banned for discrimination. She was found to have repeatedly asked a transgender opponent during a match, are you a man? Anti discrimination organization Kick it out forwarded the case to the FAA and then it considered was considered by the FAA National Serious Case Panel which adjudicates on disciplinary matters and football, blah, blah. BBC has not seen a ruling, but it's been claimed that the 17 year old who reportedly has suspected autism, had denied being transphobic, had concerns about her safety and taught guidance from the referee over the eligibility of a trans opponent. She's not been named for age, but was banned by the panel for six matches, four of which were suspended. So she's been banned for asking the question. Right.
- [71:35]
Jonathan Haidt
And what it doesn't mention there, of course, is that philosophical belief that, you know, sex is biological and that, you know, someone who's biologically male shouldn't be in women's sports is also a protected characteristic now. And so actually if this went to court, her side would be saying, well, look, you know, my philosophical belief in gender critical feminism is a protected characteristic against their. Oh, my gender identity is protected. But hey, it's my free speech. I expressed my view, which is protected. So in court should win. Now the question then becomes, well, fa, did this rule, does the FA have the right to set rules which are beyond the law? And that's another legal question. I think that the law of the land should be pushing much more forcefully on all of these. Anything that's publicly funded, okay, you can't intrude on the Catholic Church if they have their own rules around who gets to be a member, whatever. But something that's publicly funded, that gets public money, I think should have to adhere to the law as written on the books. So that would mean if they suspend, they're going to lose funding. In my world, they should be losing money or they should be regulated not to be allowed to do that, in my view, because they're essentially saying, we care about protecting this characteristic called gender identity. We don't care about protecting this characteristic, which is philosophical belief.
- [73:07]
Pete
I've received two bans and fines from the FAA recently. One because I called another manager of a team a cock on Twitter. So I broke a rule with that.
- [73:16]
Jonathan Haidt
Oh, wow.
- [73:16]
Pete
He was abusive to one of our players. And also in our program I got a picture of me holding an AR15 on holiday in America. Yeah, there was complaint against that photo and that was upheld and I was fined for having that photo. Even though.
- [73:31]
Jonathan Haidt
Could you have taken the FA to court?
- [73:33]
Pete
I mean, I can do, but you know, I could. On grounds of free speech.
- [73:37]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's what I mean. Now, of course that's. It's expensive and time consuming. Yeah.
- [73:43]
Pete
I think it's a cool photo.
- [73:44]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's a good photo.
- [73:45]
Pete
And some people are like, you're a dick. Why are you doing this? But my point is, I know the FA suppresses speech. I know there's a code of following what the FA says and I just want to challenge it, but I know there's a risk. If I in this interview say to you, I fundamentally believe trans women should not play in women's football. If I banned them from my team, if I ban my team from playing teams, if I questioned, there's a possibility I would be now hauled up in front of the fa. This interview might lead to an FA charge itself for even questioning it. And that takes us back to the problem is, well, we need free speech to at least debate the issue.
- [74:22]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, exactly. Now, and the problem is these intermediate organizations, right? So it's not that the government is saying, you can't say these things or we'll throw you in jail. Although of course there are problems and worries over non crime hate incidents and all these other things. But it's these associations. It could be your university, could be the nhs, it could be the accrediting board for psychologists in the province of Ontario in Canada. It could be all of these. These boards are often captured by WOKE activists or people who are prioritizing so called social justice over free speech. How do we bring the. And I think we're in a. So this is one of the problems I have with, with liberals and I'll say, you know, they say, well, we, the threats to speech are from government. We can't be using government against institutions. And my view is no. You know, there are many times where you need to use government against institutions. So, and we have plenty of examples, like when the universities in the southern US were saying no black students can enroll. The American federal government actually sent the troops in and they, they made them accept black students because it's the individual right. They have the right to go to these publicly funded universities. Similarly, when the institutions get corrupt and rotten, like a police department might become corrupt, there's a case for it being taken over or a school might become, We've had schools taken over by Islamists. They need to be taken into special measures and similar. So these institutions like the FA and others shouldn't be allowed to just do whatever the hell they want if they are dealing with the public. If the FA says no black people are allowed at any premiership game, should they be allowed to do that? No. Right. So we already accept limits on these institutions. And similarly, I think they should not be allowed to say, discriminate against protected philosophical beliefs. Again, if they do that, they should be fined and regulated. And so I, and this is, and this gets into a big debate is that I, my view is you do need to use elected government against these censorious institutions which are violating civil liberties in order to create a freer society. That means we have to clamp down on the institutions to release the citizens. So if the university is punishing people for speech, you need something like the Higher Education Freedom of Speech act, which was only watered down by Labor. But to say no universities are going to be fined and regulated so that they're actually obeying their free speech obligations because they're transacting with the public. So I do think there's a lot that government can do.
- [77:00]
Pete
But government has to support free speech itself.
- [77:02]
Jonathan Haidt
Right?
- [77:03]
Pete
Right. You know, if you have a government who can't, where the prime minister can't define what a woman is, they're not going to protect this kind of speech.
- [77:13]
Jonathan Haidt
Correct.
- [77:13]
Pete
And if they're weaponizing speech against the electorate, they're not going to protect speech.
- [77:18]
Jonathan Haidt
Right. But one of the arguments that, that some of the classical liberals make as well, oh, government, that's just the worst thing. Now my view on this is, okay, labor, let's say they don't believe in, if labor doesn't believe in free speech and they start throwing people in jail for saying this trans woman is not a woman and is a man, okay, it's bad, but we can vote them out. It's in the papers, it's scrutinized it's open. If it's happening in the FA or the NHS or universities, it's all behind closed doors, rarely leaks out. Occasionally it makes it into the papers. But basically these institutions are unaccountable. They're non transparent. It's much more democratic to have it being done by an elected government, which most people elect. People don't elect the fa. It's its own set of laws.
- [78:08]
Pete
With a monopoly.
- [78:09]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah. And so I think it's perfectly legitimate for the elected government to regulate and set the parameters for these associations instead of deferring to these associations. And of course, in different jurisdictions, the courts, like in the us, they say, oh, no, actually the government and the law trumps these particular institutions. And there was a decision recently which made that clear. Whereas in Canada, they allow these institutions to rampantly discriminate on the basis of race, to censor free speech, they're allowed to do whatever the hell they want and it's completely violating the Constitution. But because they're a, oh, you know, independent professional body, they get to do whatever they want. I don't think that should be the case. And so I have that disagreement. And I think what you're seeing with Trump right now is where they're going after all of these bodies. They're saying you have to get rid of your dei, you know, and they're making this illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. They're rescinding affirmative action. So they're doing all of these things and they're showing, I think the way Ron Desantis and a number of other red state governors showed that you can start to knock back the cancel culture and the censorship that these institutions which call themselves autonomous and they say, oh no, university autonomy is a sacred part of academic freedom. Well, no, it's not. When you're violating the academic freedom of your staff and students by censoring them, you don't have that freedom. We're actually going to limit your freedom. So we have to limit the freedom of these institutional bodies in order to maximize human freedom. That's what I believe.
- [79:52]
Pete
And so the Trump administration, this four years, this next four years is going to be really important for this kind of counterculture movement against progressivism. As the pendulum swings back and people, voters here in the uk, I think many are looking across the Atlantic and thinking, I want some of that. And so that's hopefully going to drive us towards this post progressivism era or into this post progressivism era.
- [80:22]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, it's going to be influential. And you can see it in different places now. In Canada, a few provinces have put in place laws much weaker. But to say, okay, if someone changes pronouns, then the parents have to be informed if they're under age 16 or something. And in one province they've, you know, gone after the actual materials being used in classrooms. So, and that's all inspired by the Americans and not similar. And they have school board politics now, which has been inspired by the Americans. So there's, there's a certain degree to which this stuff does influence. But I, with the post progressivism, I just want to make a distinction between a populism that says, well, two thirds of the population is anti woke, which is roughly what it is in U S, Canada, Britain. Their views should go in government and in the institutions. The institutions should reflect the popular view. It shouldn't be the view of a small minority. So it's about breaking into these institutions and letting the air from the, the public get into these very protected spaces. That's one thing that's about politics, populist politics. But the other thing, what I'm calling post progressivism is actually about elite attitudes, right? And it's about elites saying, you know, we overstepped, I'm not as confident about these values anymore. Actually the 1619 project actually trans. These were not good ideas actually. And the rethinking that's happening in the elite can change the culture. And now you even have little, you know, there's now a small, these small movements in academia. You know, I've got, there's a movement in the humanities which doesn't we. Should we just be criticizing Shakespeare all day and saying how misogynist and racist this is. Isn't this gonna like turn off people and wasn't there some good in Shakespeare? And so you're actually getting small movements that are doing a bit of pushing back at the high cultural level or, or what I'm trying to do with social sciences, with this countercultural social science to say, you know, there's been a distortion of questions in academia and we need to rebalance and so trying to organize, to have a movement, have journals start to push back. So I think the elite culture might, there's a chance that it could start to move the other way. I'm not necessarily sure if that's going to last. I mean, but in the past, you know, if you take the issue of immigration, elite opinion in America between 1890 and 1910 was pretty uniformly anti immigration after being pro immigration. And then after the 1910s it gets pro immigration again. But you had that kind of 25, 20 year period. So you can sometimes get the elite opinions shifting. Is that going to happen now? And the reason I think there's a chance it might happen also is not just the populace, but there are a whole set of problems that it's very hard to see. What progressivism, which is basically cultural left liberalism, what is its answer to, for example, the mental health crisis among young people, the collapse in birth rates? What's its answer to populism and polarization? I mean, yes, they'll probably say, oh, well, we just have to clamp down on free speech and censor people. But I mean, you know, they don't really have good answers to a lot of the problems that we're facing.
- [83:46]
Pete
But is it because they caused some of these problems is the falling birth. I mean, the falling birthright? I think there's two solid strands of argument. One, maybe feminism, but two, economic. The need to go into the workplace, the need for people to work, that women have to work longer. And later, I think technology and the dating scene has changed fundamentally. I think all those things have contributed to it. But part of that is feminism has contributed to it. I think a lot of the liberal economic policies have led to government being too big, the balance between public and private being distorted, which has led us to a stage where we've got high tax, high inflation, high borrowing. You can put a lot of the fault at their door. So that would require them to have a moment of reflection, to say, well, we've contributed to this. Who likes to do that?
- [84:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, yeah, I mean, yes, and I think some of that reflection is finally starting to happen.
- [84:46]
Pete
But just one of them in the elites.
- [84:48]
Jonathan Haidt
In the elites, yeah.
- [84:50]
Pete
But is that. And does the changing. Sorry, I'm interrupting a bit here, but is the changing elite viewpoint? Because if you are an elite, you have to protect power, status, finances. And so if there is a shift against your power status and finance, you're willing to shift. Some will move fast and Mark Henderson will move first. Mark Zuckerberg will move first. They will see the winds of an Elon Musk and follow or see that their power. I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg almost certainly has gone with the wind.
- [85:19]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [85:20]
Pete
Power, status, finance. He was willing to censor on behalf of the Biden administration. Now he's willing to change his moderation policy on behalf of the Trump administration. Is elitism just protectionism?
- [85:35]
Jonathan Haidt
I think it's partly that, yeah. I mean, DEI and the esg, for example, the funds that were investing in this ESG I mean, they weren't doing as well. The DEI was costing them money. But I think it was becoming more politicized, more of a hot button topic and more costly to them. And so I think, yeah, that was part of it, but I don't think it's the whole. In fact, I don't even think it's most of the story. I think a couple of things, I mean, one, I remember talking to a journalist on one of the, on a, in a left wing magazine in the US who said he was probably the only sane journalist on that magazine. And he sort of said after 2016, I think it was 2017, he said, we need Trump to win again to convince my colleagues that they have to, you know, can't just double down and keep going business as usual. And I think the fact that, you know, they could say, well, Trump, he didn't win the popular vote and maybe there was some Russia collusion, whatever, but now the fact he had this convincing win, I think with all these Latinos voting for, you know, they're having to sort of say, actually we're going to, and certainly from a practical point of view, if we want to be in power, we're going to have to try and moderate on some of these things. And so you saw Kamala Harris wasn't identity politicking the way she had been in previous elections. And, and, and, and, you know, even AOC dropping the pronouns from her Twitter handle. You know, all of these things were happening as a result of understanding that this is costly now. So I think there is some self interest going on, but I also think there's some genuine rethinking going on that.
- [87:10]
Pete
That, you know, they're not just hibernating for four years.
- [87:15]
Jonathan Haidt
I think there's, there's both reactions. So you are like the Democratic National Convention. They were just as woke as they've ever been. But at the same time, you have New York Times and Washington Post. And I think also October 7th, some of those scenes, you know, did have an impact on certain minds to say, actually, do we really want this in our young population? Do we want these people to be, you know, celebrating a terrorist organization? I think a whole confluence of things came into what's known as this vibe shift, which I do think can be enduring. And the reason I say it can be enduring is because the problems, it's very hard to see what progressivism's answer is to problems like collapse. They don't even want to talk about the birth rate. They think that's more or less Misogynist and anti feminist. To even talk about birth rate's a problem. Yeah, but they would say, well, this is. Either it's eugenics or it's anti feminist or, you know, we don't want to talk about. Oh, okay. If we have to talk about it, it's because we're not egalitarian enough and women can't move in and out of the workforce, which is not entirely false, but I just don't think. And also, what about the teen mental health crisis? This is heavily correlated with being very left wing. It's heavily correlated with being not heterosexual. You know, a lot of these indicators just look really bad, and there is no clear answer coming out of the left. And as a result, I think also intellectually, you know, there's no new ideas coming from. I mean, it's a moribund space. All the action, all of the new thinking is more or less coming out of the right. So the energy, what's cool, what's kind of. Kind of classic, is. Is all on the right. I just don't know that the left can continue to just double down with the same old ideas and inspire people the way they. They did maybe in the past. And they don't really have the answers to a lot of these very pressing problems that only the right's talking about. Yeah.
- [89:14]
Pete
And I think there's also been the shift where vice has become a virtue, which I'm stealing from an interview I saw on Rogan, but vice has become a virtue. The difficulty in cancelling people. And it feels like the right has memed a lot of this into existence by making fun of the left. And the left haven't had a good response to being made fun of. That's interesting.
- [89:38]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [89:39]
Pete
And it just seems like the right is having more fun at the moment. Moment.
- [89:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, that's. I mean, there's. That's an interesting dimension. I mean, I'm not as up on the online culture of the meme. I mean, I. I know what a meme is, but I'm not as aware of how this is being used. But I'm told this. I mean, it's true that the left, you know, they don't have the comedians, they're not producing the music, the movies, all the things that you go back to the 60s. You know, there was. It was a period of high creativity, you know, starting with Dylan going through, you know, the 60s and all the great bands and. And, you know, there was great comedy in the 70s. And so, you know, you had quite a strong arts scene. They may have been on the left, but they were producing things people wanted and now, you know, woke movies. It's just really not that creative and, and stay in your lane as an author. And so, so I think there are a whole bunch of problems with the left now. Now, it's not to say there's, they can't contribute, you know, contribute anything. And, and of course, the right does go too far. And I mean, you could you look at what Trump's doing on tariffs and, and saying they want to take over Canada and all these things.
- [90:42]
Pete
So, I mean, yes, but isn't, isn't, isn't he trolling?
- [90:45]
Jonathan Haidt
He, he, he may be trolling, but you could make the argument that, you know, is that really the greatest way to keep your allies on board? And also, if you just take it from the perspective of national conservatism, you know, it's not just about the U.S. you've got these battles, these culture wars are occurring across the West. You know, if you alienate, you know, your national conservative allies in other countries because you've, you're trying to say, well, they, they should become the 51st state. Yeah, I just think it's not going to help you longer term. So I think there's probably some areas where, you know, the right is overstepping, but there's, they're just so far behind. And I mean, there's so much yardage to make up on culture. A lot of it's understandable. So sometimes what looks radical probably isn't like rescinding Lyndon Baines Johnson's executive order on affirmative action. Yeah, yeah. It's like 55, 50, 60 years old, but it should be rescinded. It may look radical, but it isn't. So some stuff just needs to happen, but in other cases, it's going too far.
- [91:54]
Pete
So the argument I've heard is that in a time where whatever you think of Putin and Xi Jinping, they look like strong leaders. And America, over the last few administrations, the leadership has looked quite weak and that really what Trump is trying to do is bring back strong leadership within the US Administration to give a better negotiating position at the table with these other world leaders. There is no real intention to invade and take Greenland, and there's no real intention to make Canada the 51st state. But really, he stacked two wins this week with the Mexican border and the Canadian border. He has disbanded U.S. aid, which I've seen both sets of arguments for. And there's probably some great work that they have done. There's also endemic corruption within it. But It's a show of strength, a show of power from what is the largest industrial base and largest economy in the world. Yeah.
- [92:58]
Jonathan Haidt
I mean, and I think a lot of these things, there's like an optimum place to be. You don't want to be rolling over, but if you're too belligerent as well, and especially if you're not following through, then people will price that in as well. And I just kind of think, like in the Canadian case, for example, which I'm somewhat close to, what's happened with this threat is all of a sudden all of Canada is thinking, oh, my God, we're so vulnerable and we have to start diversifying our oil exports. And of course, that's going to push exports of Canadian oil maybe to China. It's not a good thing necessarily, because actually, I think I would rather the Canadian economy be integrated in the US Than with China. China. So I just think there are all these other effects that can happen as a result of the. I think it's. You've got to hit the optimum. Right. And I think you can also with foreign aid and free trade, I mean, to some extent, you would rather have your fruit picking rather than bringing in large numbers of illegal immigrants to pick fruit or, you know, things. Maybe those. Those things should be done in Mexico. And so there's a degree to which if you offshore, then you don't have to have so much immigration. And so in a way, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot by trying to have everything in. In America by saying, we're not going to buy Mexican produce. Okay. So we have to set it up in America, which means we got to have more immigrants in to pick that. I just think it's. It's. Yeah, I mean.
- [94:30]
Pete
Well, I mean, one of the criticisms of Trump was he wasn't particularly effective in his first term, so maybe in this second term, he's pushing really hard to be seen as effective. Maybe he'll get the balance right in his third term.
- [94:42]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I think he's doing a lot.
- [94:43]
Pete
Yeah, there's a joke in there.
- [94:45]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah, I know. No, I think he's doing a lot of good things on dei on the border. I just think that. I mean, there's certain strands that I'm less keen on. So I like the cultural side of national populism, but the economics, I'm not really as much of a fan of. You know, I. I don't think protectionism is actually really going to work for a whole bunch of reasons.
- [95:10]
Pete
It never does.
- [95:11]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I Don't think it does. And also with the, with the, you know, the rule, the rules based order does help to keep. You know, we have had a decline of the rate of warfare since 1945. And, and there are good things about the rules based order and it's worth investing in, in NATO and all these things. So I just don't think you can just say, ah, they're all exploiting us and screw them. Of course, you can play a certain amount of hardball, but I just think that side of this populism, I think, needs to be. I got a piece coming out in City Journals soon where I'll try. I've got this term rational populism, which I'm trying to talk about where.
- [95:45]
Pete
Well, please do. Because one of my issues I have with the treatment of populism is where it's spoken as a pejorative. And you certainly see it from the left where they talk about populist leaders as a pejorative. But to me, populism is a democratic response to an elite that is ignoring and stealing from the peasants. And so I think a populist response is always a democratic response. It's a leader who's identified the fact that there is this disconnect between the working and maybe middle class and the elites. And so this treatment of it as unilaterally a pejorative, I dislike. I watched an incredible interview with Steve Bannon. For all the criticisms there are that exist of him when he talks about the erosion of the working class in America, he was brilliant on it. When he talked about his father working for the telephone company and they used to have shares in the company, they were still. And they could build wealth, they would work for the company and build wealth. And that was taken away when they were forced to sell. Honestly, I thought it was brilliant. Wasn't so keen on some of his tactics for supporting Trump, just to be clear for anyone who's listening. But again, I personally, myself, I'm very interested in populism as an idea. I don't like this massive wealth gap we've had. I don't like this intellectual legal gap we have where the elites can control people through suppression of speech or the weaponization of the courts. So I'm really interested in populism. When you say rational populism, it's like, okay, is this populism without the bad bits?
- [97:21]
Jonathan Haidt
Well, now, first of all, I want to say I agree with almost everything you said there in the sense that populism historically, you know, when you get an elite where there are two flavors of the same opinion. Or you know, and we know from all from political science studies that elites tend to get their preferences, you know, and even when you have different parties, one on the right, one on the left, you know, elites tend to lean towards being liberal on cultural things and right wing on economics. So they want free markets, but they want social liberalism. And you know, even a bit of wokery is, is congenial and large scale immigration is also congenial to their sensibilities on balance, because you can't totally generalize.
- [98:04]
Pete
So they want to keep their money and be the good person at parties.
- [98:07]
Jonathan Haidt
Exactly, exactly. And have plenty of help around the house. And so, you know, there is always, there is a gap across all western publics, particularly on these issues like immigration, between elites and masses. And there have been studies of politicians and the voters. And so you can very easily, you know, the liberal riposte is to say, well, we can have many different interest groups in society fighting it out to get there and they, and making compromises. And therefore we don't need populism. Populism is anti pluralist. It wants to crush out dissent and it wants to impose one vision of the true, authentic, pure people. Now problem here is that in fact you can have many different competing groups, but they can be aligned. Like if they're all pro immigration or they don't want to challenge the taboo over restricting immigration, then actually they're not representing maybe a majority of the population. And, and so there's a failure of democracy. And so populism is the only way you can fight back against the interest groups that exist in the established system. So it's absolutely central to democracy.
- [99:18]
Pete
Now is it a rebalancing then?
- [99:20]
Jonathan Haidt
Yes, it is a rebalancing. When special interests have had their way, when elite interests have had their way, who may be more articulate, more organized. We know, for example, that people who hold left wing views are much more likely to post on social media, to attend meetings, to be involved in protests. They're just more political, more organized. Their view therefore tends to get, they tend to get their way on culture and what, and maybe on the right, business groups are more organized and push their way on the economy. But the point is that cultural conservatism is at a disadvantage systematically from established interests. And so it's perfectly legitimate to have a populist movement that tries to rebalance the system, bring those neglected voices back into the system. Now can they? Are there dangers? Yeah, absolutely. Of course, one thing in populism is A tendency to go for the emotions. One of the, you know, I think one of the criticisms might be that populism doesn't build. You know, if they're, if they're just saying, burn it all down, all these institutions are corrupt. We need to get rid of the Department of Justice and the Ministry of Education, all this. Okay, fine. But I think there needs to be a vision for constructing something new that hopefully will also command bipartisan national unity. You know, so I think it's, it's also having the constructive vision. That's what I think might sometimes be missing in populism or certain types of populism. And equally, maybe they aren't, you know, you do, you shouldn't be gratuitously offensive to groups. You could, you know, you should tell the truth, but don't go out of your way to offend. You know, you don't want, you know, and so sometimes, you know, Matteo Salvini, you know, what, he, he might say really nasty things about African immigrants. I mean, that, this is something that you wouldn't want to see. You do want to have some boundaries. Another example, you know, might be George Wallace in the US who was a southern segregationist. Populist and, you know, segregation today, segregation forever. You know, though, it's fair enough for parties to try and sideline those views because, you know, that's, that's, that makes sense. But to sideline someone who says, like, should Sweden be just having so many immigrants? You know, I disagree with sidelining the Sweden Democrats or the AfD who just want to make a point. That is a legitimate point. And so these are not always black and white. I think that it has, you have to use your common sense in some cases. Yeah, certain populists. If you had a populist party that was about segregation, you know, it's absolutely fine to try and sideline them. However, in another case where it's a perfectly legitimate point of view, it's not okay to sideline them. And, and so the problem that you see from the liberal elite was they wanted to take this strategy of sidelining populists and just use it against anybody who. They didn't hold their cultural views. And that's so.
- [102:11]
Pete
Yeah, but, but populism is a threat to their own control.
- [102:18]
Jonathan Haidt
You.
- [102:20]
Pete
Well, so, for example, I think there's kind of an acceptance at the moment in the uk we have a uniparty. We have a Left of Centre party in Parliament and the opposition is a right of centre party, but there's very little difference. They're Both high tax, high surveillance parties that haven't done anything to protect the civil liberties. And so you get a slightly different flavor of the same government from either. But reform is the threat. Reform is the growing threat. They just took the lead in a poll yesterday from YouGov and Sky News. And either party, whether it's elected MPs or even the kind of media lovies, whether it's the restless politics guys or the BBC will always refer to the Farage as a populist party. As a populist party. But they say it in a way, like it is a pejorative because they are the threat. They argue less on policy, more on personality. It's its own version of identity politics between the populist and the incumbent. Uniparty.
- [103:28]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, I mean, I think to the extent they're attacking the man rather than the ball, they're trying to sort of stick a label on called populist so that they don't actually have to deal with the arguments. That's intellectually dishonest. Now, now it's fair enough to say, okay, outsider parties or, you know, people who represent groups that are outsiders. You know, you can call that populist. The academic in me says, sure, he's a populist, fine. But what I would say is there's nothing what's so bad about a populist. In fact, populism is necessary. Now sometimes you, of course, can have extremist populists who are a threat to minority rights and maybe in, I don't know, maybe in Pakistan. I mean, in South Africa you do have these parties that are, are nuts in a way.
- [104:15]
Pete
But I mean, but you get extreme left parties and extreme conservative parties as well. So.
- [104:19]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, but people will talk about, you know, Corbyn or Sanders also as being populist. I think that's fair enough. At least the academics will accept there's left wing and right wing populism. Chavez is a left wing populist, for example. But I think, you know, the question about Britain, what's interesting now, of course, is with reform and the rise of reform is they've got some real issues. I think the Tories actually are more split and are in transition. So they are in transition from a solidly wet, culturally liberal party to a split party where some of them want like a generic and some minority probably want them to move towards reform. Kemi is somewhere in the middle. Her instinct on culture wars is sounder than her instinct on immigration. So she's not the right, maybe, perhaps not the right person, but you know, I think longer term we'll see. I mean in Canada you had a Reform Party and the Tories and they eventually had to merge to win elections. And so it's not clear yet to me that reform is going to have enough support to win outright majorities on its own, its own and may it may ultimately have to join with the rump of the Tories. I mean part of it, part of, you know, the big question will be whether reform can get to 30% instead of being in the mid-20s. And that depends on that rump Tory 20 to 25% vote. If those people are just died in so dyed in the world Tory they couldn't contemplate voting for anybody else, then this isn't going to happen. But if they are willing to see where the wind's blowing and eventually say maybe reform is the way it goes, of course what that means is reform is then going to have to professionalize, have cost out its policies and be much more organized for okay, if we do take power, what are we going to do day one? And there are all these questions that they're going to have to have to answer. But I think it's a good thing for British democracy because the Tory party is just was not responsive to their voters. So their voters voted for Brexit to reduce immigration and they ramped it up. Of course they should be punished.
- [106:30]
Pete
Yeah, it's a fascinating time. Okay, so what comes next? I mean for the progressives, can it course correct. Can there be a useful side of progressivism that comes back which does defend the important things, which is non discrimination civil liberties. Can it cause correct. Will it cause correct.
- [106:52]
Jonathan Haidt
I'm a little more pessimistic. I think the senior elite liberals can course correct. And some of them are already doing this, some not all. In fact, many probably aren't. My worry is the upcoming generation of progressives I think are even more radical and how you're going to but keep those people out and tell them to change their spots after you've been pushing and indoctrinating. I just.
- [107:18]
Pete
Which generation are we talking about here?
- [107:19]
Jonathan Haidt
Like Gen Z millennials, younger millennials? I mean those people who are all in on. We're all in on Black Lives Matter and all in on Rainbow Lanyards and you know, are those people gonna be told, well no, sorry, those were things from yesterday, don't believe in those anymore. See, the problem I have is I don't think that the core of what it means to be on the left has changed. It's still, still revolving around race, gender and sexuality. In my book, I talk about the mid-60s anti racism taboo, which is unbounded and has led to. It's just expanded and expanded and expanded. What is racism has just expanded. So going hiking is racist. But the problem is this is still the center of what it means to be on the left. It's not like we've gone back to class and the working class. No. So as long as those symbols are the most sacred ones that you can be canceled for within the movement, they're never going to change. And I don't see how they get out of that cul de sac of the sacred values and the taboos and this bundle of identity stuff, which is what motivates their activists. And of course they're more and more, you know, in higher education, you know, a university educated elite movement, it's not a movement of workers. It's drifted away from the working class. So how they get back to that, I just don't, I don't know. And so I just don't see that I'm a bit pessimistic there. But I do think where I am more optimistic is I think the right, there's kind of a marriage of the old classical liberal center and the national conservative right. They agree on a lot of stuff. And you see that in the marriage of the tech bros and people like J.D. vance and Trump, that there is this coming together of the classical liberal rationalists and the national conservatives. And that I think could become another intellectual poll that eventually becomes more influential in the high culture. And all of this, the online space and podcasts is starting now to have a bigger and bigger impact. I read somewhere that like 45% of Canadians under age 30 had seen the, the interview between Jordan Peters. Jordan Peterson interviewed Pierre Poliev, who's the conservative leader. And it was watched by some huge percentage of Canadians, particularly younger Canadians. Like that would just never have happened in the past. So these online spaces are really now starting to shape opinion and voters.
- [109:49]
Pete
Connor, you watched the Trump interview with Rogan, right? Did you watch the J.D. vance one? You didn't? I think I may have seen clips. I mean your generation, you're. I always ask him, this is my son, by the way. I don't know if I mentioned that. Okay, but you, you, you consume podcasts and interviews in that format, right? Do you ever, do you ever put Sky News on BBC News?
- [110:13]
Jonathan Haidt
No, I wouldn't say so.
- [110:15]
Pete
Unless it's in the background. No. So, so it's quite interesting. Like I said, Rupert Lowe Was here this morning. Yeah, I follow it. Followed him on Twitter, replied to a post. He followed me back. I sent him a message, said, do you want to come on the podcast? Here he is. Yeah, we did it. And I had the same. I've interviewed Richard Tice, I've interviewed Ben Habib, I've interviewed Nigel Farage. My. To try and get to the Conservative Party and the Labor Party is very hard. I've had a. I've had one Labor MP recently. The interview's come out. Mike Tapp, great guy, actually. Guy. Very modern labor guy. Understands. Media understands. But to. Trying to get to the. It's. I'm trying so hard. I mean, I want Kemi here. I want to have a chat.
- [110:55]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, yeah. You know, will Cammie not come on or.
- [110:58]
Pete
Well, it's just getting to these people, and it's going through the handlers and getting through. I think they have a fear of doing things like this, but I don't think they understand the shift that is happening where it's. But this is. I think I think of this as. And by the way, we have to thank, you know, the likes of Rogan for creating this space Right. For us. This place where you have this open conversation for two, three hours. There's nowhere to hide. And. And you get to make mistakes, and that's okay. It's a bit more real life. But the reform guys, they're doing the podcast.
- [111:32]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [111:33]
Pete
You will see Tice, you will see Farage, you'll see Lee Anderson, you will see Rupert Logue on here. Winston Marshall, trigonometry. They're doing them all. Yeah, but the Conservative and Labour Party members aren't really doing it.
- [111:50]
Jonathan Haidt
That's. That's really. I mean, that's fascinating because I. I think.
- [111:53]
Pete
But. But look, in America, Trump did it.
- [111:55]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [111:55]
Pete
J.D. vance did it. They did Rogan. They did Theo Vaughn. I can't remember the other ones they did. I mean.
- [112:00]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah.
- [112:00]
Pete
I don't know if you saw Trump with Theo Vaughn. It was hilarious. They're brilliant. And you get to see that side of them. Kamala didn't do it.
- [112:07]
Jonathan Haidt
No, no, you're right about that. I mean, they aren't comfortable doing it. And yet what's interesting is, you know, if you look at the audience for these podcasts and the YouTube channels, often there's a lot. First of all, often it's more centrist than you think. And it's so. It's more politically mixed than you think, number one. And it's often better educated than you think. And so actually A lot of the ideas coming out of the podcast world, this is not, you know, Alex Jones, this is, these are ideas that are percolating in. So if you take just. And it happens almost by osmosis, so it might be that somebody who's a centrist substacker like Matthew Iglesias will read a right wing substacker or follow, you know, a right wing podcast and those ideas will kind of percolate in towards the edges. And so like a guy like Chris Rufo, for example, you'll get academic papers from centrist academics that will say, of course I hate Rufo, but it's important to listen to what he's saying on this. So actually then what happens is these ideas start to enter the mainstream, not the left, but they will enter the center. And then once they're in the center, the left has to deal with them somehow. And so even though we may not think about it and the ideas that are on these sorts of programs do start to work their way towards the mainstream. And this is kind of what I think is interesting is when I talk about the high culture, I think it, it may deny it, but it's actually being influenced by these populist currents now, not by Alex Jones, but by the more intelligent end of the populist currents. They're having to say actually and especially as the audiences just grow and grow and grow because they're more interesting, let's face it.
- [113:55]
Pete
Well, and the numbers, I mean, yeah, our list trusts interviews. Over half a million people have viewed that one. I mean look, and we've got other ones that are much lower. I don't know what this will do. But you know, you go into the show like this, you're gonna, you can, you can depend on who you can potentially reach. Hundred thousand other shows, I mean I've seen ones on Trigonometry and Winston, they've done high hundreds of thousands, some in the millions. Yeah, those numbers are probably going to be and be a better place for you to go than a five minute commentary on Sky News or even 30 second commentary. So I think it's a more interesting space. So I'm conscious of time. I've been very generous with your time. If you were to give advice to maybe someone to awoke younger generation person at the moment sat there with their ideas which you are fundamentally challenging them with. What, what would your advice for them to be to a woke person. Yeah. What would you say?
- [114:53]
Jonathan Haidt
It's very hard to convince somebody who is very much drunk the Kool Aid. What I would say is to try, I would try to get underneath their values, right? So if they say we need to be emotionally safe, you know, LGBT people have experienced emotional trauma, you know, I might say so is there an argument that the emotional, that they haven't experienced that trauma, that that's something they've thought themselves into? I mean, just let's think about how these traumas are created, right? I mean, is it the case that it's just at birth or is it, you know, and at what point there is a trade off between wanting to protect people, people from speech and essentially canceling people. So if you say that you need to protect this person from being offended cause that's traumatic to them, then what you're saying is you don't believe in free speech. You know, try to get at the fact like, okay, there may be, you may go on the social justice side of the ledger and say, I would rather suppress speech to keep everybody feeling emotionally safe. But just so that they understand that in fact they're being illiberal. So they don't like being called illiberal. Now they'll try and twist that around and say no. Well, you know, by protecting marginalized groups from speech, we're actually enabling them to speak. And so actually we are the free speech. You know, they'll, they'll twist this thing out of all, you know, out of all sense making in order to make it align with their. Because they want to consider themselves liberal. So one way, one method of talking to them is to say no, you're actually betraying the principles of liberalism. And, and, but, but ultimately, look, I think the other thing that's interesting with the young people is, you know, if you look at Britain, I've looked at the, you know, if you look at a number of questions on immigration and on same sex, different sex bathrooms, you know, there's been a big shift. People in the center are now moving into the anti woke spot. So I know, I think the fact you're now going to get these two camps means, you know, they're going to have to engage with each other as a generation. And so the fact you're now getting these quite defined groups means that I don't think they can just be in the bubble all the time because it used to be there was the woke, but you know, the woke had their views and everyone just shut up and went along to get along. But now that there's a developing anti woke, quite strong anti woke thing now it's Britain's young people are more to the left than young People in other countries. But I think even in Britain, I think it's there, it's moved in 18 months. I think this will continue. And so I think even in Britain there is hope that that woke side, particularly the slightly more moderate woke side, can begin to say, yeah, you know, I can't be so dogmatic. They have a point. I need to listen to some other viewpoints. I'm not saying that the convinced woke are going to really change, but I think maybe the ones who are mildly woke, there's hope for them, but the.
- [117:51]
Pete
Real hope is get them while they're young in the schooling system and indoctrinate them with.
- [117:57]
Jonathan Haidt
I agree. I mean, I think we have to get hold of the school system. It's not lost. If you have a major shift in the culture, then that will also encompass people who've been indoctrinated and they will change if there's a major vibe shift. So it's not a complete dead loss. But I think we need to be paying attention to schooling and indoctrination. The last thing I also try to mention is this term empathy and be kind, right, which is at the center of a big strand of this. Be kind to who? I always say, well, so this is another way to answer awoke is be kind to who? White people, conservatives, women, right. So they want to be kind to trans, to, you know, black people, to indigenous, whatever they want. There's certain groups which they feel empathy towards and other groups which they are hostile. So the more empathetic you are towards group A, the more hostile you're going to be to whoever you think is oppressing group A. So you become really intolerant of conservatives, for example, or of white people. And so this idea of empathy is, it's always empathy towards one leads to less empathy towards the other almost always. And there's been studies that show this. In fact, people who see who read about white privilege become less empathetic to white poor people than they were before. And so, and we've seen this time and time again in history. So empathy is actually no guide to morality. It's all about who your empathy empathizing towards and who you are hostile towards. And so this idea of empathy is such a crock. It has to be. It's not a total crock, but it has to be taken apart to say, tell me, who are you empathy empathetic towards? And throw a few groups in there that you know, they're not empathetic towards and see if what they say, well.
- [119:42]
Pete
Listen, look, great to meet you I really enjoyed working through a number of your articles. There's so many. Obviously I can go through everything, but I still. I cannot believe the amount stuff you produce. We didn't even get to talk about the course at Buckingham University.
- [119:56]
Jonathan Haidt
Right. Which I should have talked about because I hope people take it well, say.
- [120:01]
Pete
What the course is and then I think we should get you back one day. Has the course started?
- [120:05]
Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, you can sign up anytime. It's my pinned Tweet. It's a 15 week open online course on woke, the only one going. And so, yeah, I encourage people to sign up. It's low cost. And this is again, partly. Universities should be teaching this. We study communism and fascism and nationalism and all the other ideologies. This is an ideology that is so powerful. Absolutely. We need to be studying it. But of course, academics find that too uncomfortable. And that's one of the reasons. Just one example of how academia is failing is it's just not studying things that it finds ideologically uncomfortable.
- [120:47]
Pete
Well, look, we could have talked for hours. I think maybe come back one day and we'll talk about the course itself. But yeah, love your writing. I'm gonna continue to read it, especially the stuff on Unherd, because I'm a regular reader of theirs. Anyway, keep doing your thing. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
- [121:01]
Jonathan Haidt
Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
- [121:03]
Pete
Yeah. Thank you to everyone for listening. See you soon.