#184 - Helen Pluckrose - Liberalism, Free Speech & the Authoritarian Turn

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Peter McCormack Show

Episode #184 – Helen Pluckrose: Liberalism, Free Speech & the Authoritarian Turn
Date: June 17, 2026
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Helen Pluckrose

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Episode Overview

In this rich, candid conversation, Peter McCormack sits down with author and academic Helen Pluckrose to dissect the current state of liberalism, free speech, and the rise of authoritarian movements across the political spectrum. Drawing on philosophical traditions and personal experiences, Helen discusses how liberal values have been eroded, misunderstood, or "hijacked" by identity politics and critical social justice ideologies. The conversation traverses topics like generational change, the digital age's impact on discourse, the nature of cancel culture, institutional capture, and the challenge—and necessity—of defending classical liberal principles amid polarized politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Foundations and Erosion of Liberalism

Timestamps: 00:00 – 23:20

• Helen’s Definition of Liberalism:
  • "At the root of liberalism is the belief let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided they harm nobody else nor deny them the same freedoms." – Helen Pluckrose (00:00)
• Complacency and Loss of Vigilance:
  • "We've stopped recognizing liberalism as something we do and need to maintain, but as something that we are owed." – Helen (00:29)
• The 90s vs. Today:
  • Both discuss the shift from a ‘leave people alone’ consensus to a world dominated by over-analysis, digital hyperconnectivity, and pressure to curate identities online.
• Cancel Culture and Permanent Mistakes:
  • Helen shares how youthful folly is now indelibly recorded and policed, unlike previous generations (09:59–11:09).
  • "Kids saying radical, hostile or stupid things is something that they need to be able to say." – Helen (11:09)

2. Identity Politics, Language, & the Rise of Critical Social Justice

Timestamps: 11:36 – 36:01

• Critical Social Justice as ‘Woke’:
  • "James Lindsay and I call critical social justice is more commonly known as woke. It is very, very difficult to navigate." – Helen (11:47)
• Problematisation of Language:
  • Increasingly, any term or statement can be scrutinized as problematic—racist, sexist, ableist—making honest discourse fraught (13:36).
• The Authoritarian Drift:
  • Both left and right are adopting authoritarian measures instead of defending open debate.

3. Liberalism’s Worldwide Meaning & America’s Confused Terms

Timestamps: 14:16 – 21:17

• Liberalism vs. Conservatism Misunderstood:
  • "Liberalism, as I defend it... is the opposite of authoritarianism. So liberal conservatives... and the progressive side both have grounding in that tradition." – Helen (14:16)
• How US Politics Skewed Understanding:
  • "When I hear somebody in the UK conflating liberal and Left... they're often getting a lot of their political understanding from the US." – Helen (16:10)

4. Institutions, Politics, and the Inevitable Drift

Timestamps: 24:31 – 32:20

• Why Institutions Get ‘Captured’:
  • "It's very difficult to keep ideology out of institutions. We never really have." – Helen (26:25)
• Liberalism’s Role:
  • Liberalism’s ongoing fight is to prevent domination of institutions by single ideologies.

5. Equity, DEI, and the Meritocracy Debate

Timestamps: 32:20 – 40:13

• The Problem with Pursuing Equity Over Opportunity:
  • "The objective of pursuing equality of opportunity is breaking down barriers… To pursue that further is the pursuit of equity as the outcome which requires group-based identity politics and discrimination itself, therefore undoing and reversing…" – Peter, paraphrased and elaborated by Helen (36:01–36:33).
• Liberalism vs. Identity Politics:
  • Helen details her “bar chart” analogy: Liberalism aims for universal access to rights, not group-based redistribution (36:33).

6. Trans Issues and Queer Theory’s Influence

Timestamps: 40:13 – 48:11

• Trans Rights and Women’s Rights Clashes:
  • Explores why the trans debate is so fraught and why affirming self-ID can, unintentionally or not, become misogynistic (40:13–41:33).
• Biological Reality vs. Queer Theory:
  • Helen critiques queer theory’s denial of biological categories (45:55–47:27).

7. Authoritarianism & Backlash Problems

Timestamps: 52:00 – 73:20

• Postmodern Roots of Woke Identity Policing:
  • "The postmodern idea then, that oppressive power is perpetuated through language. It's not just about legal structures… It's about unconscious bias..." – Helen (49:09)
• Speech Suppression Fosters Backlash:
  • "The idea that you ever can defeat ideas by suppressing speech is just not supported by any evidence at all." – Helen (72:30)
• Backlash in the UK:
  • Clamping down on speech led to the rise of Reform and ‘Turf Island’ stereotypes, further dividing society.

8. The Horseshoe: Illiberalism on Left & Right

Timestamps: 73:20 – 84:00

• Dangers of Illiberal Responses:
  • "Some of [the right] want to impose Christianity on everyone or absolutely ban anything that could be considered woke... We're getting this illiberal right." – Helen (73:27)
• Need for Liberal Coalitions Across Politics:
  • "If you separate out those two axes... liberalism is the higher order value that is the one that we need." – Helen (84:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the defense of unpopular speech:

  • "I would have a very radical stance in defence of freedom because not everybody can be arrested... We should make them go to court. And we should then also insist on being in prison, not, not paying off… making it absolutely untenable… for the government to continue to penalize people for speech." – Helen (54:49)

• On institutional capture:

  • "It's very difficult to keep ideology out of institutions. We never really have… Preventing institutions from being dominated by one ideology or another is really liberalism's main job." – Helen (26:25)

• On cancel culture and generational intolerance:

  • "We have seen people being cancelled for making... a homophobic slur when he was 15." – Helen (09:59)
  • "Kids saying radical, hostile or stupid things is something that they need to be able to say." – Helen (11:09)

• On critical social justice and ‘woke capitalism’:

  • "The identitarian movement really isn't anti capitalist. It works very much on using the forces of capitalism and corporatism..." – Helen (58:34)
  • "There's nothing convincingly anti capitalist about this." – Helen (60:39)

• On the failure of suppression:

  • "The idea that you ever can defeat ideas by suppressing speech is just not supported by any evidence at all." – Helen (72:30)

• On the liberal response required:

  • "If we could have the liberals on the left pushing out and trying to marginalize their illiberals and the liberals on the right trying to do that with theirs… anybody who wants to preserve... liberals democracy… to bring those together to do that." – Helen (84:48)

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Guidance and Takeaways for Listeners

For navigating today’s ideological landscape:

• Understand the basics: Know that “knowledge, power, and language” are at the core of critical social justice frameworks (65:57).
• Recognize DEI or identity-focused initiatives often stem from the belief that all knowledge is constructed to serve the powerful, manifesting in language policing and mandatory trainings.
• Build quiet alliances: "There are always more allies than you think." – Helen, offering a story about gentle humanist-style dissent gathering support (68:30).
• Defend free speech as a universal, not partisan, value; challenge suppression—regardless of which group enacts it.

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Recommended Resources from Helen

• Website: hpluckrose.com – “The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain”
• Book: The Counterweight Handbook
• Further reading: We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi

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Final Thoughts

Helen and Peter exemplified cross-ideological curiosity and respect. The episode calls for a realignment around liberal values—individual liberty, viewpoint diversity, robust free speech—while cautioning against both left and right authoritarian currents. Both agree that “liberalism is the higher order value” (84:00) and that only by preserving a truly open society can Western democracies avoid self-destruction.

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Transcript

[Helen Pluckrose]

At the root of liberalism is the belief let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided they harm nobody else nor deny them the same freedoms. I think people have got complacent. We've stopped recognizing liberalism as something we do and need to maintain, but as something that we are owed. I would have a very radical stance in defence of freedom because not everybody can be arrested. The idea that you ever can defeat ideas by suppressing speech is just not supported by any evidence at all.

[Peter McCormack]

Perhaps some form of revolution is what we're headed towards.

[Helen Pluckrose]

A liberal revolution. Yes.

[Peter McCormack]

This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron the AI Cloud for the Next Big Thing. Iron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is Irene.com right? Good morning, Helen, how are you?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I am very well.

[Peter McCormack]

Thank you for coming in. I've been very excited to talk to you ever since Chelsea spoke to you. I'm. I would say I'm in the. I feel like I'm in the final act now for me, I'm 47. I'm preparing to hand over life to my kids and trying to make sense of world where like I had a great time in the 90s growing up in the 90s and I see a very confusing world where we are putting a lot of pressure on kids with trying to consider the world and have a position, a political position and I don't really understand what's going on with politics. So I was very excited to talk to you because I want to understand how we've lost that amazing world I grew up in.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah. As a Gen x myself and 4 years older than you and absolutely refuting your sense of being past. Certainly does seem that during the 90s we were just a lot less neurotic when we were getting towards a place where there was a consensus of leave people alone unless they're hurting you, that we could take people on their own terms. I mean, I think it's easy to have rose tinted spectacles here and to think that things were a lot easier than they were, but there certainly was much more openness and tolerance. People are a lot less neurotic. I keep speaking to millennials and Gen Z at the moment about how neurotic they're getting, particularly with regard to their sex lives. It's. Yes, it is troubling really.

[Peter McCormack]

How, how are they Getting, you're writing about their sex lives.

[Helen Pluckrose]

You see the, the discourses about women who, you know, body count and ideals of masculinity. I mean we have the end cells growing who are claiming that women are only interested in the top 5% of men or whatever it is, maybe 20%. And then we have the, the sort of the, the young women going even more feminist in a way that is downright misandrist. And then we have the, the social conservatives rising and, and saying that, that women really need to get married at 18 and not go to university and have 12 children by the time they're 25. And I, I would say yes, it's certainly getting, getting neurotic.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you, do you think we're over analyzing the world these days? Because my, my memory in the 90s, the reason I liked it is and we mentioned before, I did kind of want to talk about phones and algorithms a little bit, but to give you the memory that you probably had is that if you went to meet somebody, a friend, you had to turn up on time because there was no way of texting and saying I'm going to be five minutes late. It's like I'm meeting you at Woolworths at 1 o'. Clock. You had to be there at 1 o'. Clock. Maybe you'd wait around for a few minutes. But, but now we're constantly connected and we're constantly connected to information and we're constantly connected to opinions. We didn't have that. I used to go and get my skateboard and go skateboarding and go to a concert and watch, and watch the concert and now we have it. It's just like all the kids are connected all the time. Could that be something overanalyzing?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I, I think so. Certainly being too online, being curating your, your yourself, your, your presentation constantly online. I, I am quite convinced by the writing of, of Jonathan Haidt on, on this the, the Anxious Generation. And I know he's a lot, he's had a lot of pushback from some sort of really data based empirical researchers in the, in the field who say that he is kind of narrowing into too much on, on this. He's making it the sole issue when there is not convincing evidence that say removing phones from schools do anything. So I think yeah on those, those fine grained details, I think that's still, it's still very much up in the air. But with regards to whether, whether it is generally better to have a life lived face to face where we're, we're properly interacting with people in the same space as them rather than virtually and rather than having to always kind of upload your, your life to Instagram. And so I know that the concerns particularly with young women have been that there's been an increase in insecurities about their bodies, about their weights, about their attractiveness. Young men, it's been more to do with gaming and porn taking them away from sort of healthy social interactions. And I think anybody who says that this isn't a problem at all is fooling themselves.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you think the pushback has been a bit unfair?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I don't know. I think I find John Hight very, very persuasive. I cannot see that. I have a 22 year old daughter myself. I can't see that kind of growing up with this expectation to be texting constantly. Last night she was watching a film in her bedroom with her friends in their bedrooms connected by just, just online. There's no sharing of popcorn, no, no chatting with it. And I, I do think that's, that's a shame. But at the same time she has very, very niche interests which are to do with Japanese anime. Yes, anime, but, but more manga. And she'll be very cross if, if I get the, the sort of what the, the graphic novels and the, the manga mixed up.

[Peter McCormack]

All I remember is Akira from when I was a kid.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Very sort of villain based graphic novels. I think she's into. And you just don't find at school, at university there's not a lot of people who do share her interests.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I think we also, I think, I think Jonathan Hyde's right. I read the book, I thought it was incredible. I actually wrote to piss off my daughter. I wrote to the headmaster and said I think you should ban phones in school. But one of the things that really stuck out to me is that loss of play in that. I know I used to hide out of my bedroom as a kid but I didn't have a phone so I'd be making things or creating things and some of that creativity is lost. But I think there's another aspect is the financial pressures of life. We kind of have the luxury of prosperity in that. When I was a kid, my mum did a week shop and she cooked dinner every night and we all sat down, ate together. We'd become a little more mobile with meals and organization and so perhaps that's another thing that's contributed to it. And then when you talk about your daughter's niche interests, that's one of the benefits of the Internet, right, is that we have the Ability to find our tribe.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes. And that's certainly very much been the case with me. My real life friends who I've had for a long time, they still glaze over when I talk about my interests. It was finding Twitter in fact, and I just started tweeting my thoughts out and then an increasing number of people came to watch me doing this and then people started asking me to write for things and there is actually people who are interested in analyzing the world in the way that I do, whereas my real life friends still not so much.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, tell me about the world then. What have we lost? How did we lose it?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I don't really want to think in terms of. In such nostalgic terms. I do think that and this isn't even really my area, I haven't been sort of looking at specifically at how, how society has changed, how our interactions have changed. I've looked much more at how theory has developed, how, how ideas have changed around knowledge, power and language that, that I can certainly speak to. But I would say that we are overthinking. We are much more connected via. Via digital means which adds pressure to. To curate ourselves. Nothing ever goes away. I am very, very glad that there. When I was in my early 20s, because I was an idiot and the things that, the things that I believed then as I was trying to find my span, I was alternatively an extremely devout Christian radical socialist, a feminist and an anti feminist from within, sort of from about 14 to 24. As I was just trying to exploring these things and not in a particularly reasonable way. Lots of radical statements and foolishness which I think is absolutely normal.

[Peter McCormack]

It's part of growing up.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah. And I think young people now, they're not getting so much that if they say something it is going to be monitored by a load of other people online. If it is a foolish thing, if it is something that goes against the current zeitgeist or the sort of dominant moral orthodoxy, it can stay with them forever. We have seen people being cancelled for making. I think it was a one celebrity. It was a homophobic slur when he was 15.

[Peter McCormack]

So they dug something up.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes. They found online he'd used a homophobic slur at the age of 15, which isn't pleasant but is also very much at a time when boys are trying to work out their own sexuality. They're perhaps posturing a little bit too hard. This should not, I would suggest, be taken as an indication of somebody's intolerant attitude that they're going to have for the rest of their Lives.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, Connor, what percentage of boys you went to school with do you think have made a homophobic slur at some point as a joke? A hundred. 100? 100 have probably done it.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I would have thought so. My daughter sort of experienced the same thing as trying boys are still trying to say I'm not gay. And a way to do that is I think to say something discouraging. If, yes, if you're going to start to start bullying people, making them miserable, then we're into a new territory. But kids saying radical, hostile or stupid things is something that they need to be able to say.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you think this moral orthodoxy has taken the flare out of life?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think we've always had one. It's very difficult to.

[Peter McCormack]

Quite dominant now though.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think the one that we've had now is the, the, what I call critical social justice. James Lindsay and I call critical social justice is more commonly known as woke. Is very, very difficult to navigate it. It sort of works so intensely on problematizing language. There really is nothing that cannot be problematized if somebody is, is inclined to do so. We can find almost anything to be, to be, to be racist, to be sexist, to be imperialistic, to be ableist. And I think when you've got young people, particularly anxious ones, I myself have suffered from ocd and this is, is terrible. If you are trying to, trying to, trying to think about how to speak, if you're overthinking things, if you're looking into things too much in a really sort of paranoid, overly conscientious way, it can drive you absolutely insane. So when I, when I was working with my organization Counterweight, where we helped people who were getting canceled in their workplace who are facing disciplinary action, not believing the right thing or saying the wrong thing, we found particularly that people in the realms of tech engineering, the emergency services, were saying things that were really, I would say more blunt, not sort of keeping up with the political discourse, which I do think people have a right to do and with a big overlap of autism. So when you have such a language centered, intensely focused kind of ideology, it makes everybody into a nervous wreck.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I can imagine. So where does it come from though? Like, how did this happen? Because it's a weird thing, Helen. So I would say when I came out of school and went into university and came out of university, I would have considered myself quite liberal, quite friendly, quite kind, generous, cared about people wanted a society that was the same. And something over the last 10 to 15 years has really changed me, which has pushed me more into the. The right, the conservative side, because what I've. What I thought was liberalism, and I don't understand all the terms themselves, so you, please do correct me, seems to have morphed into something else.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think probably what I would. At the root of liberalism is the belief let people believe, speak, live as they see, provided they harm nobody else nor deny them the same freedoms. And from this we have a sort of valorization of constructive debate of different opinions of viewpoint diversity. We have those democratic values. We have a kind of a preference of reform over revolution. So I would question people who see liberalism as opposed to conservatism. So liberalism, as I defend it and as the philosophical tradition of Locke, Payne, Mill, Smith does, is the opposite of authoritarianism. So liberal conservatives, they have this focus on personal responsibility, on individuality, and particularly the cautious attitude where they do not like revolution. They want to reform things carefully. This sort of Burkean idea there. So liberalism has a very strong grounding in the conservative tradition, but it also has a grounding in the progressive. I would say it doesn't have much grounding in the sort of socialist side. The socialists have always been extremely critical of liberalism, but the more progressive side, the side that has said, yes, let's not have barriers in the way for women, for racial minorities, for religious minorities, for sexual minorities, that's also grounded in the liberal tradition. So I've been trying to kind of break down this idea of liberalism as opposed to conservatism, which really isn't something that we in the UK have thought. This idea comes very, very much from America.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, tell me more.

[Helen Pluckrose]

So the Americans have separated out with their political parties. They have come to call the left liberals because for so long, what they were dealing with was authoritarian, sort of culturally conservative Christianity. So the, the pushback against that, for greater freedom, for freedom of speech, for freedom of belief, has come from the left. So over time, they have come to call the left liberals. Most of the rest of the world doesn't. I was just in, in Italy talking to an LGBT group. They very much understand liberal as on the right. So do a lot of the other sort of the low countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany. If I go and speak in any of those, I have to say, when I'm talking about liberalism, I'm not talking about conservatism, I am talking about freedom. And the same is the case in Australia and New Zealand. Of course, Australia, the Conservative Party is called the liberals. So this idea that when I hear somebody in the UK conflating liberal and Left, I can usually tell that they're not speaking from the Anglo tradition or the, the European tradition. They're often getting a lot of their political understanding from the US which we're doing more and more now.

[Peter McCormack]

Is that a flip in the US Though? Has there been a flip there?

[Helen Pluckrose]

A flip from what to what?

[Peter McCormack]

Well, so a flip from the liberals being conservatives or if they. Has it always been.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, no, I think the. If you're talking about, say it in the parties, it used to be that the Republicans were more freedom orientated and more progressive in certain ways. That's why their colors are the wrong way around and they have the reds on the Republican side and the blue on the Democrat because that used to be the more progressive party. But no, I think when it's. I think we've certainly seen a flip to a greater authoritarianism from, from the left in the US this is where the critical social justice movement comes from. And it is at its strongest and most authoritarian there. But it has been the idea of the left being associated with liberalism, with greater individual freedom has always been on the left because the authoritarianism has been more associated with the right. I mean, the America is the country that is most founded explicitly on liberal principles. You could really boil them down to the belief that every man, now person is created equal with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, you go through that and the First Amendment and this is the philosophy of Locke, Payne and later, later Mill. So the liberalism really is. That's why I said that liberalism isn't always reform based. It's not entirely opposed to revolution because the American Revolutionary War was the ultimate liberal revolution.

[Peter McCormack]

And the founding document established the ideas of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness afterwards.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes, I mean, this is where liberalism has historically been revolutionary and it has been because it came into play after the Enlightenment in order to push back at state authoritarianism and to set up democratic systems and remove barriers from individuals. So the, the U.S. i think revolution can be considered legitimate from a liberal standpoint when there isn't a way to resolve the authoritarianism you're dealing with via democratic and dialogic means so that the Americans could not vote themselves into being an independent country because the voting was happening in England. So that revolution was necessary. The revolution was, was necessary to then establish this democratic liberal system. And so now I'm often arguing with American conservatives who think that they oppose liberalism, but they really mean the left. And when I speak to them and say, do you support your Constitution? Do you support the right to Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Your founding documents. Are you, are you patriotic in this way? And I quote to them George Washington saying, I want to see as, as we get more liberal, I want to see America at the forefront of liberal. And this, this is very much an American conservative value. And I, I would just start in a very long monologue here, but I love it really like conservatives, traditional conservatives, to stop seeding liberalism to the left in the same way that I did not want the left to cede freedom of speech to being a right wing value. I, I don't want conservatives to think liberalism isn't, isn't their thing.

[Peter McCormack]

So, so what's happened to liberalism then? Because has it been hijacked or has it been butchered?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think people have got complacent.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes.

[Helen Pluckrose]

My idea, you know, after, after the Second World War, as we started moving into a, a more liberal consensus that, that we just really could just leave people alone unless they're, they're hurting us, that, that we can live and, and let live, we, we should value individual liberty. There was a lot of fighting for this. At one point as we're coming, we had the fascist rising, the communist rising, the liberals are fighting back. At least if you look at the parties that were really almost equally dominant around the time of the Second World War, you had the conservatives who focused on conserving that, you had the left who were focused on the sort of left wing economic policy and you had the liberals who were focused on individual liberty. It didn't belong to, to anyone, either one of the other parties. So we had these three sort of progressive conservative and freedom orientated currents and the liberal one essentially won. Now what I think has happened as generations have passed is that we have become spoiled. We've not had to fight for anything. We've stopped recognizing liberalism as something we are, do and need to maintain, but as something that we are owed so people will see some kind of authoritarianism. I've not been allowed to say this. Where's this liberal society that I supposedly live in? And I have to say, well, have you been doing it? When was the last time you saw somebody being penalized for expressing a view that you yourself don't agree with? And when did you say nope, I may not agree with what they say, but I defend to the death the right to say it. If you've not been doing this and a lot of us haven't been, then these values are going to fade. We're going to be seen as something we passively have a right to without actually maintaining.

[Peter McCormack]

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[Helen Pluckrose]

I. I think so. I think you have to keep a strong view of. Of why we support freedom of speech, why we support freedom of belief, religious freedom, individual liberty, generally, economic freedom. Well, yes, this is the liberal position I have said where I am more economically left wing. I sort of favor more sort of nationalized services, particularly healthcare and education, and sort of welfare programs. This is where I am least liberal. So other liberals, particularly libertarians, who are often the sort of purest form of liberal from that philosophical standpoint, will say to me, you're not properly a liberal if you support progressive taxes. And I have to say, well, yes, that is where I am more left.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, interesting. Let's prod that for a bit. Okay, so I would say I'm economically liberal. I believe in the freest markets we can possibly achieve. Just because the history of this podcast was primarily an economics podcast. And so a lot of time I've spent studying, talking to people about how the state captures the money printer, uses the money printer to, let's say, offer benefits to chosen groups, continues to build the debt, the debt builds inflation, which is very damaging for the lower middle class, which we're seeing right now. I mean, the cost of living at the moment is a crisis, and wages are not keeping up. And so people are struggling. So I'm definitely more in there. But if you consider yourself a liberal, but you also believe in the state should provide education and health, isn't part of what you've studied that these are institutions that get co opted which ultimately destroy liberalism? Is there a contradiction there?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I don't think there's a contradiction. I think it's true that it's very difficult to keep ideology out of institutions. We never really have. And this is why liberalism emerged for one particularly strong reason. So within education that's typically been dominated by religion, by Christianity, specifically Protestantism, we only started letting Catholics and Jews attend universities at, in the end of the 19th century. And so we, we've had. Preventing institutions from being dominated by one ideology or another is I think really liberalism's main job. It's there, it's, it's one job if anything, protecting individual freedom of belief and speech and facilitating a viewpoint diversity and an atmosphere where we can argue for, for everything where there are, there are no holds barred. So I mean we, if you could say if we didn't have institutions, we couldn't have institutional capture. But I'd suggest that might be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay, interesting. So is liberalism really an idea that comes from the fight for liberty? Once you have liberty, it gets captured by politics because politics is essentially group based ideas, group based ideology. So I'm kind of spitballing what I'm trying to think through my brain at the moment. But so is politics itself antithetical to liberalism?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Not, not, not antithetical. Liberalism will struggle to, to keep an open playing field there, to stop any of it from becoming authoritarian. But it is also the only thing that actually is trying to do that. It's not as though before there was liberalism, there wasn't a politics, an ideological capture. I mean, I, my area of study is medieval, late medieval England. And so I, I particularly like to study some 1300-1700 so I could see the effects of the Reformation.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Helen Pluckrose]

And if, if we're looking back there and the, the, the feuds, the polarization, the conflict that that was happening in it, any decade of these four centuries really would put our understanding of the culture war in a totally different perspective. We're grading on a different curve here. So when we have had these, these big feuds between particularly Catholics and Protestants, but not, not, not even limited to that. And the America was founded by Puritans because dissident Protestants were being persecuted by establishment Protestants. So we, we have this, these Ideological sort of polarized tribes always. That's not a product of any specific political or intellectual development. That's a product of humans.

[Peter McCormack]

So if we, if we consider now the political landscape in the UK at the moment, it's quite fiery. Is anyone truly representing traditional liberal ideas?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think people are presenting from all over the place. I was, despite being on the left, I was particularly impressed by Kemi Badenoch's recent talk about the equality duty in public service. And I think she found a very good balance there. So she was obviously trying to walk the line between Labour, who is still not recognizing that there is sort of identity based bias going on here. There's a lack of meritocracy and is still focusing too much on trying to even up outcomes, which is not a liberal thing to do at all. And then there is reform which wants to sort of get rid of the equal, Equal Rights act completely.

[Peter McCormack]

Do you agree with that?

[Helen Pluckrose]

No.

[Peter McCormack]

Okay.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think we, we do need something because the, the understanding of the, the, the sort of broader equal protection of equal rights is that negative liberal one. That is the, the prevention of, of, of, of overt discrimination. And, and this is, is the point that Badenoch made in, in her speech which I, I think was, was very good. She was pointing out not to actively discriminate by identity is removed. Those on the right who are already noticing that institutions are being quite biased against straight white men are not going to have grounds to object to any institution discriminating against straight white men. So the balance between that is not to just enable any institution to discriminate by identity as they see fit, which in some could result in discriminating against women or racial minorities, but a lot more could also result in discriminating against men, white people. But to prevent, to act against. I think that this, this duty to consider identity. The closest we can get from the liberal perspective, which I think Bednock really does do well as a liberal conservative. If you wanted the epitome of a liberal conservative, I'd say that's her. And that is just prevents taking away any responsibility to try to even things up by identity.

[Peter McCormack]

But shouldn't DEI have failed with the Equalities act?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Dei? Well, in what sense? There's a process that it should have quotas.

[Peter McCormack]

Advertising for certain groups to be applying for positions implies there is discrimination.

[Helen Pluckrose]

There is and there shouldn't be.

[Peter McCormack]

Interesting. So why have an Equalities act when people can enact policies which in pursuit of equity are discriminating?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I think that would indicate that the anti discrimination legislation is not Working, I think that's where.

[Peter McCormack]

Or people too scared to challenge it, possibly both.

[Helen Pluckrose]

But I think what has happened with the critical social justice movement in particular is that it's kind of, it's hijacked the liberal approach. Between the 60s and the 80s when there was that big drive to homosexuality was decriminalized, it became illegal to discriminate against people on the grounds of their sex or their race, except in particular very few conditions and, or to pay people differently and, and on the grounds of their sex mostly and to you know, only allow mortgages and loans to, to men. These kinds of things. These are what the liberal tradition would say are barriers. So it's not that we're taking any action to try to promote the interests of one group in looking at barriers that are in the way of one group and removing them to enable a meritocratic, meritocratic society where people can succeed on their own merits. I think a lot of people, particularly sort of progressives mostly, but conservatives have also very much come to be on board with this recognition. I think there was a moment of cultural shame that recognized that Britain had been involved in colonialist slave trading, the patriarchal, homophobic, the ideas that people had thought were normal, that were, were healthy, that were justifiable. Really quite recently there was a, a sort of growing belief I think across political device that it's really not okay to stop women from doing certain jobs. It's not okay to prosecute people for having sex with another cons adult if they happen to be the same sex. It's, it's not okay to enslave black people. You know, so there is this, this shame. And I, I don't think that that

[Peter McCormack]

will enslave anyone really.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, yes, but the justification was on the grounds that they were black and a lower form of humans. So I, I think the, the aim to, to undo that thinking which was very positive and I think was happening in a positive way from sort of the 40s through to the, the 90s was, was, was then hijacked by the critical social justice movement who are then saying we're continuing this work. We're continuing the work of the civil rights movement, of the, the liberal feminists, of the gay rights activists and for a long time people, it took people a long time to realize no, actually you're, you're not, you're having these, these new identity based theories that the problem previously was with identity politics, with white identity politics, male identity politics. You're repeating the same problems.

[Peter McCormack]

So, so what you're saying is Help me understand this is that the, the, the objective of pursuing equality of opportunity is the breaking down of barriers that unfairly discriminate maybe against certain groups. And that's a noble and good pursuit. To pursue that further is the pursuit of equity as the outcome which requires group based identity politics and discrimination itself, therefore undoing and reversing.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah, it's not on a continuum where if you do enough removal of barriers, you then end up sort of privileging certain groups that it has been presented as such. The way that I describe the difference between liberalism and identity politics is if you imagine a bar chart in which 100 is the line in which everybody has access to all of the same freedoms, rights and opportunities. And then each bar is a certain group, identity group, and you look at it and you see who is falling below those bars. Now historically it has been women, it has been racial minorities, religious minorities and sexual minorities. So when liberals have acted to remove those barriers, they do not have their, their eye on the group. They're not saying we should do this for women because they're women and we care about women's interests. We're looking at that 100% bar that should be universal and looking at where it isn't universal. So we're not going into identity politics itself. It's just that these identity groups happen to have been prevented from reaching that bar by earlier identity politics.

[Peter McCormack]

Right. They can't basically, they can't accept the per capita reality. So they're trying to change the. So, so what you're, you're saying is essentially I want to create, I want to remove all barriers that stand in the way of people pursuing what they want in life, which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But within that you cannot pursue equity because you're not accepting there are per capita differences in gender, race.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah. If that, that comes from a different mentality in which people say, well I, I have a particular interest in this group. And then you. So for a very sort of long standing one that has taken this, this stance that sort of precedes the critical social justice movement has been feminism. So radical feminism, for example, has always said we are a movement for women, by women, about women, we are there for women's interests. They have not claimed to be liberal with the radical branch and trying to ensure that everybody has the same rights. Liberal feminism did, but that, that women's, what is in women's interest is what we going to achieve. Now if this means disparaging, disadvantaging men, that is not outside of the remit. And so once the critical social justice movement arose with its identity politics, it's doing the same thing. It's saying what is in the interests of, of this group. And when it's been the, the trans movement, for example, it's in this, the interest of this group for everybody else to affirm a totally different concept of sex, gender than they, than they previously had. So we're now seeing the rights of trans identified people not to feel included as trumping the rights of everybody else to have their own understanding of men and women as a biological sex category. And also the reality of that as it can affect safety and fairness when it comes to women's spaces and sports. So this is where the liberals of any group and the identity politics of any group are always at odds because the liberals are always saying no, look at the line, look at the universal. Your principles have to apply across this. This has to be an individual meritocratic thing that has universal rights. We can't be saying the interests of this group, the interests of that group.

[Peter McCormack]

So is, hold on, so is pro trans misogynistic.

[Helen Pluckrose]

It can come from a pro misogynist, from a misogynistic position. I don't think it generally does. I think it's, it's.

[Peter McCormack]

Could it unknowingly be misogynistic?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I. People can certainly argue that it, that it is because. Particularly because the idea of gender identity is so much based on stereotypes that a lot of, a lot of feminists have argued that it is a regressive sexual stereotypes that if a boy is more interested in feminine things, in dolls and pink and pretty things, then reserve it must be a girl. Which is a sexist stance. And the reality of it, the sort of accepting self ID doesn't impact men very much. They're not going to be afraid if they encounter a trans man in the bathroom.

[Peter McCormack]

I agree.

[Helen Pluckrose]

They have a fear of their privacy, for example. They may feel that that's violated. Particularly gay men who are meeting up for nookie. Essentially, yeah, they don't really want trans men there. But men are not afraid and they're also not threatened in their sporting categories or if they're having to share a prison cell with a trans man. So it does affect women.

[Peter McCormack]

See, it's a really interesting one because I had this discussion with somebody recently where I was saying I have a. My position on trans is quite discriminatory in that I have no issue with the trans man competing in men's sports. None at all. But I absolutely do take issue with Trans women competing in women's sports because of the biological advantage and the potential danger. And I say that somebody who owns a football club that's got a men's and women's side. And so I, and again, I don't care if a trans man comes into the same dressing room as me when I go to the gym, but I certainly don't want a trans woman sharing a bathroom with my daughter. So I hold quite a, I say a discriminatory position there. Does that make me illiberal?

[Helen Pluckrose]

No, you, you can be, just certainly be discriminating when, when, when in response to material reality. So at the root of the liberal tradition, because it comes from the Enlightenment tradition, is the focus on evidence based epistemology. That epistemology of trying to understand what is true as what corresponds with reality is deeply embedded in the liberal tradition. And this is why we have the marketplace of ideas and this idea that ideas should do battle with each other, because the idea is, which is not actually what happens, that people should be. There's an expectation of evidence and reasoned arguments. And this is how we discover what is true. We become less wrong.

[Peter McCormack]

We've reached consensus.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah, well, I think really on the level of truth, if you believe that a truth claim that isn't actually true, you then need to say, particularly in the realm of science, you then need another scientist to be able to come and say, I don't think this is true. Here's why I don't think it's true. Here's the evidence that what I think is true. And for these ideas to do battle. This is how, how medicine advances, this is how technology advances, this is how societies which have had that liberal underpinning of enabling freedom of speech and free debate have advanced so much more in, in knowledge, in techno, in science. But we've kind of diverged from, from your, your point which was it, is it illiberal to, to, to be more, more worried about trans women in women's spaces and trans men in men's space?

[Peter McCormack]

Not even worried about it, just to be against it.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah. To say, no, we don't, because this is a difference of fairness and safety. This is based on the reality.

[Peter McCormack]

So we can have preferences, we can have legal preferences when we have an issue of safety.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I think if we go back to that central principle, let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided it does not harm anyone else, nor denies them the same freedom. If you have trans women living, believing, living and speaking as they see fit, but they're doing it in women's spaces then harm can result. Not, not always but in, in a condition where harm can result, such as in context sports, harm can result. So this is the one area in which liberals say we coercion or banning of things is justified because harm can result. A trans man who runs headfirst into another man on a rugby pitch is only going to injure himself herself. However you, you think of trans men because it's she has the female skull, she had been through the female puberty, she's at greater risk of, of concussion. It is perfectly liberal to say I, we would allow trans men to take that risk for themselves by competing against men. But not to say trans women can decide for themselves to treat against, to compete against biological men because that's harming other people.

[Peter McCormack]

So, so the trans mover in some ways, if you, if you step back and look down, was it one of the most interesting topics within your field to try and discuss and navigate with others?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I am actually so sick of gender. I really dislike the queer theory which is, is the most modern.

[Peter McCormack]

What's queer theory?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Queer is the branch of the sort of postmodern derived theories that underlie the trans movements. The queer queer theory is the one that holds that categories of sex, gender and sexuality have been socially constructed in order to constrain people and keep them, to discipline them. It's a way to make everybody, all men be masculine and attracted to women and all women be feminine and attracted to men. And the way to liberate them, anybody who does not fit that category of masculine and unattracted to women is to just get rid of those categories to say that they're, they're a social construct and we could have imagined things differently, we could have had five sexes or

[Peter McCormack]

it's biological reality as well.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah. So it's a denial of biological reality. Quite explicitly. It came out as a response to scientific discourses which, which Foucault, Foucault calls bio power.

[Peter McCormack]

I again I was discussing this with Connor's mun the other day. It's biological reality really hits home. If you ever go on a safari and you see the gender based roles that do exist within the jungle, there's a natural reality. Look, we are different. We have a more evolved brain, we have more reasoning, we have empathy, we have all those things that differ us but with inside us is still a biological reality. And yes, there's been some divergence for some people, but there's still a biological reality. Right?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes. I mean it's a, it's a massive over Correction. The, the sort of, the evidence based based stance and, and the individualist stunts with, with people who, who do diverge from masculine man attracted to women is accept this. Unless they are hurting anybody else, we accept this. Some people will be gay, some women will not be that feminine, and some men are just not that masculine. And it's okay. Nobody needs to have panic about this so that the aim there has been to be more accepting of people who just don't, don't fit the sort of feminine sort of heteronormative norm without trying to just dismantle biological reality and deny that we are a dimorphic sexually reproducing species.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah. See, that's when I look back to the, again the 90s and the noughties again. You know, we went through it probably a similar age is that, that there was an acceptance on, you know, there were feminine men and masculine women and gay people and, and we all just kind of live side by side. I know that look, some people have had difficult experiences of being discriminated, but generally it was progressive in an okay way. Right. It was a progressive in a way that just felt like society had adjusted to the reality of some people's lives in a way that, that was, that was fine. I mean you would have, you even had, you know, you get gay Republicans now and you get gay conservatives and, and you won't find Republicans voting against a politician because they are gay. Like we made that progress. It's almost like we've reached the point of progress where we needed to get to. And some people, as you said before, like with the chart, they had to take it, but it's progress a bit more.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think what very specifically what happened was what you are describing there is a liberal attitude.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah.

[Helen Pluckrose]

It leave people alone unless they're hurting you. And this is what has been very successful because at this point, between the 50s and the 80s, the activism that was going on was appealing to a sense of justice, a sense of universality. So you know, women feminists were saying some of them were men. Of course we're saying we're full, fully competent adults and we, we want to have the same right to access the same sort of jobs and professions and earn the same amount of money as you do. And black people like Martin Luther King particularly was saying, I have a dream about that my children will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That's very effective because it's an appeal to other parents, saying, I'm a parent like you, I Want what you want. People on both the left and the right. This is why liberalism, I would argue it was so successful. It appeals to the personal responsibility, sort of fairness intuitions of the conservative and the sort of progressive individual focus of the, of the left. And what happened, I, I would argue and have argued is that as these battles began to be won, we had achieved a lot of legal equality. Attitudes were starting to change, but they're not going to change entirely. So the postmodern idea then, that oppressive power is perpetuated through language. It's not just about legal structures and things you can measure and see. It's about unconscious bias. It's about the way we talk about things. It's about who gets to decide what's knowledge. So we need to deconstruct that. And this is when that second wave of movements of critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, intersectional feminism arose around 1989, 90, in order to say, okay, we now need to start reconstructing things, but we've won these legal battles. But removing barriers isn't enough. This is what Kimberly Crenshaw says in her sort of groundbreaking Mapping the Margins about intersectional feminism. She said, the liberals, they just want to remove barriers and then let people get on with it. And they think that it'll work itself out if we just leave people alone to get on with it. That is, is false. She said, we need to go with identity politics. We need to go with postmodernism, where we're looking at the discourses and the way people are speaking and thinking, and we need to, to, to kind of intervene on their thinking, essentially. So this is when identity politics has come back and language policing has come in.

[Peter McCormack]

Authoritarianism in some way. Interesting. So this, it's really interesting because I would never have called myself a liberal liberal, but I think I must be a liberal.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I think most people are.

[Peter McCormack]

It felt like it became a bad

[Helen Pluckrose]

word when, when did this, this happen? Because as you say, we are a very similar age.

[Peter McCormack]

And, and I've, I'd say my late 30s.

[Helen Pluckrose]

So you, in your late 30s, you, you were perceiving liberalism as, as.

[Peter McCormack]

I don't think I thought about it like you would think about it like an academic. I think I just became intolerant of what the left had become and felt like the word liberal had been hijacked to become by the progressives. And that had led us to a world where a lot of crazy was happening. And so I, I kind of, I guess it's just, it's just the use of terms because I kind of anchored myself to libertarianism because as a trajectory I want more freedom, I want, want free speech and I'm almost an absolutist on that. I want free markets, free association, I want all forms of freedom. Not as a utopian end goal, just as a trajectory. That's what I'll anchor myself is. But the term liberal, I just, I don't know, it just made me shudder.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I, I wonder if, if that's, if that's, that's more recent though. Because potentially maybe in, in my, my observation, we had a fairly good understanding of liberalism, not necessarily as a strong freedom orientated thing, but as when liberalism was misunderstood in the UK sort of previously it was misunderstood as a kind of status quo, preserving centrism, an establishment. While America was understanding liberalism as left and much of Europe and Australia were understanding it as right. Say that Britain really largely still understood it as, as the underpinnings of, of liberal democracy, as the sort of million Lockean sort of.

[Peter McCormack]

But is that philosophy, is that at an academic level?

[Helen Pluckrose]

No, I really wouldn't have have said so. I would, I think when most people of my generation have said liberal they have meant leave people alone unless they're hurting you.

[Peter McCormack]

Perhaps, perhaps then it's the, the cycle that's happening in that the break from what liberalism is towards what we have now, which is more illiberalism. Perhaps I'm being sucked into the fact that maybe we need another revolution to restore liberty.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I would go with that. People often accuse me because I'm a liberal. We still have this idea that liberalism, you know, liberals just, just sit around talking about ideas all the time and congratulating themselves on their open mindedness and we don't do anything. But no, I would have a very radical stance in defense of freedom. One thing I started thinking about and talking to people about that I would really like to do is have a kind of a database. I want to get everybody on board with the freedom of speech issue. So things that people have been arrested or investigated for saying which they should have the right to say. Most commonly criticism of gender identity or immigration. I would like there to be a mass movement of people as soon as somebody is arrested saying this, hundreds, thousands of people saying this because not everybody can be arrested. Those of us who do get arrested, I, I think we should go to court. We, we should not, not take cautions or, or concede in any way. We should make them go to court. And we should then also insist on being in prison, not, not paying off of fines and things make it absolutely untenable on a, a sort of logistical level for the government to continue to penalize people for speech.

[Peter McCormack]

Yes, there's 650 of them.

[Helen Pluckrose]

You can't lock everybody up. And that is what I think the kind of revolutionary sort of activist things that I think liberals need to be doing.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, the challenge with that would be is that whether or not we are still a liberal free country because the Green Party movement is certainly an illiberal movement to me with people in there who consider themselves as liberals. Yeah, they refer to themselves as liberals. I've seen it.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well if on the Twitter, if some of them them do, then they're likely buying into an American or they just don't know what they're talking about because generally the people most, the people are most politically engaged. So the Marxists and, and Socialists particularly are very, very critical of liberals and liberalism because they just see that as pro capitalism, which it is and on the right and then the sort of central tenets of say critical race theory and the anti racism is critique of liberalism. Queer theory and trans activism has critique of liberalism. The WOKE generally, if they're at all sort of politically aware even on that pop level, they know that liberalism is this status quo preserving pipeline to conservatism and fascism.

[Peter McCormack]

Well I have some sympathy for that as well at the moment in that I don't actually believe we live in a truly capitalist society anyway because of the state. This tax the billionaires movement which has come from certainly more the left but certainly some of the Marxists. I think there's some, I think part of it, their, their rationale is sound because a lot of wealth has been created through inflation that's coming from state expanding the money supply. So actually this is my area so I don't expect to have an answer. So I think I've got some sympathy for their ideas there. I just have no sympathy for the being anti capitalist in its true term, which is free market capitalism.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I would say and this is a common sort of criticism from the Marxists and socialists that the, the WOKE movement, the identitarian movement really isn't anti capitalist. It works very much on using the forces of, of capitalism and corporatism where you've got this unholy alliance. I don't know if you read Vivek Ramaswamy's WOKE Inc.

[Peter McCormack]

I've interviewed him.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Ah, so. Well he's, I think he's quite nuts now but that book was really very, very good and it tied in with exactly what, what I was seeing where you have these sort of big corporations who are willing to pay diversity and unconscious bias trainers, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to enable them to enforce their ideology on the minds of workers. It works really quite well because then they are not taking any responsibility for any kind of disparities or discrimination that is happening. They're saying it's the workers faults, it's all happening in their unconscious minds. We will gesture at this by, by retraining their minds. We won't actually look at the systems that we have and genuinely enable upward mobility. So when I last looked at the height of the, the critical social justice movement, it was $9 billion a year social justice training industry and, and this was, you know, when you've got somebody like, like Ibram X Kendi talking about the, the, the, the twin evils of capitalism and racism and then he's charging $25,000 an hour and he's, he's not. Which I, I suggested to him, you know, then kind of dividing what he's paid for this among all the people who helped put on his talk and the people who set out the chairs and cleane.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, you can't do that.

[Helen Pluckrose]

There's just, there's nothing convincingly anti capitalist about this.

[Peter McCormack]

Hold on. So the WOKE corporate movement was offensive rather than defensive. Like there was, there was a, there was a balance sheet benefit as opposed to being defensive and feeling like oh we should do this.

[Helen Pluckrose]

So I don't want to be cynical about this. I don't know how this symbiosis between corporatism and wokeism has happened. I, I think it, it more organically served both purposes of enabling the, the WOKE to spread their ideas and enabling the sort of heads of corporations to gesture at doing something, get good PR without actually doing anything. I, I think that has happened more organically that rather than that the WOKE are all sort of secretly know that they're capitalists and corporatists and, and are just kind of hiding it behind rhetoric. The Marxists will argue, argue this, they'll argue that they absolutely know that they're endorsing and supporting capitalism. But I don't think they do. I think they're, they're, they're activists. They don't, they're frequently the sort of, the successful but not hugely successful a group who are really doing quite, quite well but in their sort of knowledge production areas but they're not the sort of top 1%. So it is quite convenient for them to say I'm going to make things better by Focusing on anti racism and trans rights and the evils of that 1% while ignoring the fact that they are actually quite wealthy themselves and not really doing anything to help. Did you see Musa Al Gharbi's book We, we have never been woke. That's very much about that.

[Peter McCormack]

No, I'm gonna write that down.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I'm slightly critical of it because he's not terribly charitable about the, the anti woke which includes me. But his, his main argument is, is very good. It is that this is a sort of a bourgeois upper middle class movement overwhelmingly that that is trying to increase its own status, income and power by kind of gesturing at helping these vulnerable people and the problem being far above them without actually helping anybody.

[Peter McCormack]

The problem with the anti woke movement is there is the, I guess the anti woke movement restored to restore itself to liberal principles and then there's the anti woke movement that became conservative authoritarianism which was proper horseshoe theory really.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I think the, the anti woke has never I think been very well understood and I've written a called what is going on with the anti woke about this because when you're defined by being anti something you could come from any other position at all. It's, it was a lot like the new atheist movement. If you just, if you're defining yourself by one thing you don't believe in, you're not, you're not really going on the principles that you do believe in. So somebody could be anti woke I'd say on the grounds of anti racism because they're a white supremacist or because they're a black intellectual who does not appreciate having their views prescribed for them. And I been saying for quite a while I do consider myself anti woke because I think there's too much now just sort of trying to write off all of the anti woke as this authoritarian right wing thing. I am anti woke in the same way that I am very critical of religion because I see this as an authoritarian problem.

[Peter McCormack]

It's new barriers.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yeah, but I am coming from a liberal, liberal perspective. I am, I am pro liberalism. So I will be anti the woke. Right. As well. And that absolutely is a thing.

[Peter McCormack]

So how would somebody listen to this, make sense of this in their life? Because it's quite an academic discussion from your side, not from my side. Quite an academic discussion. There's lots of different terms, theories, ideas. Yeah, it can become quite complicated and you know, just a normal day to day person just like I just want to go to work, earn some money and look after my kids and not have some Crazy indoctrination with them. How do you advise people to make sense of this? Because you, you have your organization.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I did have, and. Oh, you did have my, my book, the, the Counterweight Handbook is, is based on, on this. And it does break things down into chapters. And when writing it, I always write to, to one person who had them in mind. And it was one of our firemen. Okay, so this was an intelligent and committed guy who didn't have higher education, didn't have a background in this. So that's kind of aimed at people who want to understand it without, I think being really embedded in political discourse is probably even more significant than the academic theories. But yes, I can see how people who've just wanted to live their life, then they suddenly get hit by these things, these coercive trainings. What the hell is this? That's what I see over and over again.

[Peter McCormack]

And how did you advise me?

[Helen Pluckrose]

People explaining how, how the theories work is, is an important first step. It's understanding that because people are just so bewildered by what can, what, what are even are the ideas behind it. And the ideas behind it is that knowledge has been constructed by the powerful in the service of, of power. So what we think we know is true is actually just a, a construct of straight white men of those who, who want to advance their own interests. This is then, this oppressive power is then perpetuated through language, the way that we talk about things. So we all have to dismantle the way we're thinking and the way we're talking and, and change it into the way that they are that want us to speak. So it's this, this knowledge, power, language. And that's really much more simple than you'd, you'd think. And it is quite easy to grasp. And this is why it's got so popular with activists who aren't geniuses. And if you understand this is what they're trying to do, if they're trying to say, well, you will be a white supremacist. If you're white, you have been socialized into believing that you're superior, you will have patriarchal views. If you're a man, you can't help but believe yourself superior to women. You have been socialized into all of these ideas because it suits the, the purposes of, of the powerful. And you automatically accept things such as men and women are biological categories. And then you, you can you continue oppressing people by speaking as though this is true? You need to stop speaking as though this is true. So this is what they're trying to impose on people. And then we looked at ways in which people can recognize if it is arising that the language of diversity, equity and inclusion, the sort of problematizing style, the, the, the ways that, that, that, that it's being imposed on people. Recognize when this is happening. Then have a look at your, your surroundings. So who is around you? How much support do you have here? Have you. Is everybody sort of afraid to speak out at all? Are they kind of contributing to a culture in which everybody believes, that everyone else believe, accepts what's going on here? They accept these beliefs because nobody's standing up to it. So we sort of talk to people about, about ways to gently sound out other people, find out how much, how many other people are concerned about it.

[Peter McCormack]

Got any allies around you?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes, and there always are so many more than, than people have thought. We had a wonderful success story with, with that in, in which one, one woman who was a South Asian historian, her herself was getting very worried about the post colonial discourse and everybody in her sort of academic department seemed to be going along with it. And she started just sort of speaking because she was not a, she was quite a conflict averse person. She didn't want to cause a symptom. She started speaking in more sort of humanist ways. She stopped using the language of colonialism, she started using the language of individualism. And gradually people started sounding her out and they ended up forming this network of as South Asian academic historians pushing back against it.

[Peter McCormack]

I kind of hoped, I kind of hoped that we would get a network of companies who would have strong leaders who would say we are a liberal company and we support free speech and we support the ideas of free thought and we will debate them here because I know full well somebody said it to me once, they said, think about politics. There's two things. It's what you say and what you think. And all that matters is what you think when you're at the ballot box box. But in the certain environments you can't say what you think. You can't say that. If you work in media or certain areas of sport, professional sport culture, the Hollywood, there are, there are opinions you can't have. You don't really tend to get Republicans who win Oscars, for example. It's very. Yeah, even Matthew McConaughey has had to tow a very difficult line between where he's clearly a Republican and trying to follow the orthodoxy of Hollywood. And I know here in London especially lots of people I know, like they say they're reformed voters. I can't Admit this, it work. I'll be hounded out.

[Helen Pluckrose]

This is the worry because those ideas don't go away. The idea of authoritarians always is that if you stop people from being able to say this and you retrain their brains, then they'll just suddenly sort of, that they'll gradually come to realize that you were right and it will all settle down. No, what you get is a backlash. Eventually people cannot speak in, in their, in, in their workplaces. They are online, they are forming groups, they are talking, talking about it. They're getting themselves angrier and angrier and we get a backlash. The idea that you ever can defeat ideas by suppressing speech is just not, not supported by any evidence at all. And this is the example that I try to give Americans mostly at the moment when they are continuing, some of them on the left, to say, well, we should be able to suppress some speech. What happened in the uk? What did the police particularly clamp down on? What were people investigating and having their thinking checked for saying it was, was mostly that they, they didn't believe in gender identity and that they thought immigration was too high and that they questioned whether Islam really is the religion of police and compatible with liberal democracies. It was these cluster of things. There was an off. This, this was just removed. This became unspeakable in mainstream institutions. We, we had gender critical feminists, no platforms and threatened. We, we had cultural conservatives, also no platform. We had the police turning up to investigate people who were doing this. It just was not speakable.

[Peter McCormack]

We arrested a grandma for praying.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes, okay, that's a different, I know

[Peter McCormack]

it's a different category, but I'm just

[Helen Pluckrose]

saying that's where we went mad outside of that one. But what happened as a result of this? Did this clamping down actually help to improve attitudes towards trans people or immigration? Have we seen that happen, happen?

[Peter McCormack]

It did the opposite.

[Helen Pluckrose]

We've seen alternative spaces grow up, some of them ethical, principled, open to dialogue with people with different ideas, but a lot of them really sort of cloistered, incestuous idea factories that became more and more twisted. And then on a general level we are now known as turf island. And reform has just completely demolished the two party system by sort of charging into the lead with popularity on a platform specifically critical of immigration. So if you wanted to increase acceptance of trans people and immigration, crushing that down was the worst possible thing that you could do.

[Peter McCormack]

But nothing's been known from that, which is why society is so divided and perhaps some form of revolution is what

[Helen Pluckrose]

we're headed towards a liberal revolution. Yes, because this is what I keep arguing with people on the right now is that a lot of those who saw very well that they know why they backlashed against the identitarian left and then they start having very, very similar views themselves. Some of them want to impose Christianity on everyone or absolutely ban anything that could be considered woke rather than seeing it out. You're not allowed use these words now of diversity, equity and inclusion. You're not allowed to say pray if you're Muslim now. So we're getting this illiberal right. And the arguments that I have, I just published one in Skeptic arguing against just banning gender studies rather than dismantling it via ideas. They see that, that the average person reacted very, very strongly against the authoritarianism on the left. There was increasing support for the right. It enabled a backlash. But they don't seem to see that if they start trying to impose their own ideas on everyone, this is very likely to happen in the same way.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, it's so interesting because you and I, you're probably more to the left than I and I'm probably more to the right, but there's probably a huge amount we would agree on and the things we disagree on. We could probably have a good conversation about it and debate it and stay French. Whereas the new left, I just, I can't, I can't even. I can't even begin a conversation. I've tried, I've attempted, and there's nothing we agree on. We are diametrically opposed on everything usually framed around freedom. And so it's to the point where I just, it's all. It's almost not worth it.

[Helen Pluckrose]

They're not going to be open to debate because I think you're still coming from thoughtful, thankfully, from this liberal standpoint that we can achieve something.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, yes.

[Helen Pluckrose]

They don't believe you can. They believe that if you allow certain ideas to be spoken, they will just be amplified, they will contribute to that dominant discourse. The responsible thing to do is try to shut down that speech.

[Peter McCormack]

And that's why you have come and you are sat here and we're having that conversation. And I've invited a lot of people from the left who I've had a handful cancel beforehand. They've watched, watched interviews and I'm not going there. Or they don't reply. They won't go. I'm saying, look, you can see I'm open and curious and I'm not hostile and I just want to have a conversation, but they just refuse to even have the conversation. And I think that's wholly damaging to society because it requires a certain amount of coercion or authoritarianism in the end, which ultimately leads to the wrong type of violence. It's not a violent pursuit of liberty.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think at root, it's an utter disrespect for people's ability to have their own mind, evaluate ideas for themselves. They always have to protect people from these discourses. If you take the liberal stance, you are respecting the power of the individual to reason. You could be a bit idealistic about that and put far too high a value on it. But this is why we bring together people with different ideas, is so they, they can argue with each other. But the, the, the postmodern view, the, the identitarian view, it just does not consider that a possibility. It's, it makes me quite viscerally angry because it's essentially telling people, we will think for you. You don't know what you really mean. You are speaking into these systems that are socialized, white supremacy, patriarchy, et cetera, and you don't even know that you're doing it. So you. We have to get at your unconscious bias. We have to dismantle your whiteness and detoxify your masculinity. And it's so presumptuous. It's so authoritarian.

[Peter McCormack]

Two plus two equals five. Oh, wow. Well, listen, this has been amazing. Okay. I'm really glad you came in and had this conversation with me. I do want to ask, can we return ourselves to sanity without a violent revolution? Or is just this the natural cycle of society?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I hope that we can. What I've been working on recently is I'm talking to people about focusing on the liberalism in their own groups. So I think liberal conservatives are going to be really, really important at the moment, because when the illiberal elements on the left arose, the liberal lefties like me, well, not me, but other liberal lefties dropped the ball because they did not accept that there was a problem. They did not recognize the author, authoritarianism. They were looking at the right and saying, you're way more of a problem. We need to maintain solidarity. We'll gloss over or minimize this until it became a really huge and unavoidable authoritarian problem. Now we are seeing the backlash from the right. My concern is that liberal conservatives are going to make the same mistake. They're going to look at the elements among themselves which could be considered woke right or illiberal right or post truth right to kind of mirroring the postmodern right. And they're going to say, okay, maybe they're a bit over enthusiastic or that they're just a fringe. You know, we've really got to defeat the woke. That's the big threat. Still we need to maintain solidarity. This no enemies to the right. That figures like Matt Walsh was saying, no. So what I think is essential is for liberal conservatives and traditional conservatives, those who, who don't particularly consider themselves liberal, but they do have the values of liberal democracies, they do have those traditional conservative values to look at the post liberal populists, the illiberals on the right and say no, you do not represent the conservative tradition. You do not represent the ideas of individual liberty, personal responsibility, cautious reform over revolution. These are not our ideas. You don't have the dignity, the restraint, the background here. And to marginalize them. Because what we're seeing as we polarize is that the loudest, most unreasonable voices get louder. They do battle with each other. People retreat into tribes and they become less willing to challenge their own. If we could have the liberals on the left pushing out and trying to marginalize their illiberals and the liberals on the right trying to do that with their. They're conservatives or they're rightist. I would not call the far right conservatives. I think that's, that's not, it depends

[Peter McCormack]

what far right is. Because I get called far right sometimes and I'm like, I'm pretty sure I'm not far right.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, well, so do I. But I, I think if you say illiberal. Right.

[Peter McCormack]

So sorry, just to full circle, just what, so what would the liberal position on immigration be? Because then there, there has been a call for lots of reimmigration. Is that illiberal or is that.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think you can, it's a tough one for me. Well, liberals, because we're like herding cats. The strongest kind of no, no borders argument has always come from the libertarian.

[Peter McCormack]

Even they disagree on that.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes, but so, so you can have a liberal argument for there being no justification for limiting immigration at all. I, I would say that I would not agree with that. I think the, the liberal conservatives generally have the strongest stance here because their, their sort of ethical argument is that we want to welcome people who want to come and live here because they like our values, they like the values of liberal democracy. They, they respect that, they want to assimilate to it. And so we, we need policies which, which, which makes the vetting of this really quite difficult.

[Peter McCormack]

That's reasonable.

[Helen Pluckrose]

And so they can, they can come in and they can Contribute to, to our country?

[Peter McCormack]

I think it's reasonable. But, but what about specifically the re immigration issue? The deportation of people who don't agree with our values?

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think.

[Peter McCormack]

Is it the same argument?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, yes, I, I think so. If you've got people who, you know, haven't been here generations and they are, they've been granted access to live in this country and they are then having views strongly hostile to the country. I don't think it would be an illiberal argument to say that, well, no, you don't have the right to stay here. We do want people who will uphold the basic liberal principles.

[Peter McCormack]

An enemy of the new left?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, yes, they're the ones who've canceled me.

[Peter McCormack]

Have you been cancelled?

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I'm not welcome in academia.

[Peter McCormack]

Of course not. And who is these days? There's only the new left.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well that, that's where I, where I was, I was going to be a feminist historian but then I, I pointed out that sexual selection is Israel and racism is not innate and it just all went horribly wrong. And you know, the hoax project didn't help.

[Peter McCormack]

But, but you don't have freedom. You have the real freedom outside of that.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes, I, I'm, I, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not really welcoming in left wings in a lot of left wing spaces. Now the, the socialists who are also critical of the woke, they, they, they'll platform me, but the sort of general left sprint left wing spaces. The conservatives, I've not been yet. The conservatives, I, I spit. I have to speak this, this is the thing with a lot of people who, on the left who have been critical of the left because the conservatives, although those on the right have been more welcoming of them, they speak on those platforms. It, it looks as though they have gone right and some have gone right, but a lot of people have not gone right. But it looks as though.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, I think it's because this, the things that we will agree on are the most important things which are freedom, where we possibly disagree on maybe on the role of the state, how big, small it should be and what it should be involved in. I probably want involved in less than you do.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Yes.

[Peter McCormack]

And that's an, that's an area we can debate and have a good discussion on. But it's, I guess, I guess what we're saying is it's where the center ground arguments are and should be.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I think if you separate out those two axes where you, you've got progressive and conservative or left and right sort of on the economics and then You've got liberal and authoritarian or libertarian and authoritarian if you, if you prefer. And I, I, I have argued that liberalism is the higher order value that is the one that we need, that individual liberty, those democratic processes that we need to make everything else work. So I want to try to, to bring together the liberal leftists, the liberal conservatives, liberal Christians, liberal Muslims, liberal everybody, anybody who wants to preserve the fundamental underpinnings of liberal democracy, which is also the fundamental underpinnings of what we consider Western Western civilization, to bring those together to do that.

[Peter McCormack]

Well, I hope we do and I hope you're right because it's been a certainly post Covid, a really interesting and weird period. It's been fascinating. I think I'm going to want to do this again with you at some point. I've got some reading to do first, one of your books which I have said at home and I'll try and come a little bit more hostile and actually spark a fight with you, but I was just too curious and too interested what you had to say to have an argument today.

[Helen Pluckrose]

I've got this, this wonderful tweet from somebody who I, who I, who I admire, a libertarian guy and I just, I just keep it up because he said, sigh. Sometimes you're so smart and sometimes you say commie. I think that's where we, yeah, probably.

[Peter McCormack]

Yeah, yeah. Is it a known libertarian?

[Helen Pluckrose]

He's got a large account. Libertarium V. Probably only Twitt. Bitter, popular.

[Peter McCormack]

I'm a, I'm a Dave Smith fan. I follow Dave Smith a lot. And Tom Woods. Okay, yes, let's do that. Let's let me go and do some reading and then I, I will prepare myself for a fight with you on where I think you're a commie and you think I'm a fascist and we'll agree where we are in the middle. Helen, is there any way you'd like to send people to buy your books or let's read more about you.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Well, I would love people to, to join me on hpluckrose.com the overflowings of a liberal brain because that is is open to everybody who's not an authoritarian and we have good chats there.

[Peter McCormack]

I think I would like you to become a much bigger, louder voice because I think the left has been hijacked by the wrong people, authoritarians and thought police and I don't think it's been healthy for our society and I hope we restore ourselves to a more a grounding on liberal values, as you'd say. Thank you thank you for coming in. I appreciate it.

[Helen Pluckrose]

Thank you for having me.

[Peter McCormack]

And thank you to everyone for listening. We'll see you soon.