On Bombshells podcast, with Fleur Elisabeth and Amy Shepard
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Hello and welcome to Bombshells. I'm Fleur Elizabeth. And I'm Amy Sheppard. And I'm so excited to be joined today by our guest Eric Kaufman, who is a professor of politics, focusing on some really interesting issues.

issues. Apparently also an ice hockey player. I didn't know that. Absolutely correct. I still get out and skate once or maybe twice a week. That's very Canadian of you. LAUGHTER

Is that in London you can do that? Yeah, you know, there aren't many places in London, but there are a few rinks and one's in Streatham. So that's my local. Oh, very interesting. This is what bombshells is for, I suppose. Have you ever watched a game? No. Actually, I was a huge Justin Bieber fan. I won't hold that against you. In the film about his life, he plays ice hockey. That's the most I've seen. But it looks terrifying.

Like, so dangerous. Whereas hockey players would look at rugby and think, that's so dangerous, they don't have any protection. But the blades...

that horrible video of the man that i did yeah i don't know that's like a once in a decade or 20 year event you know so it's a bit like i don't know what you're getting struck by like i don't want to know the event no you don't it was horrible but um anyways okay on to the actual hard hard hard topics you've just started or you're about to start your center for heterodox

Social science. Social science. Yeah. So how did that come about? Well, how did that come about was, boy, there's a whole backstory here, right? Which was I was in mainstream universities as an academic for 24 years. My last job was at Birkbeck, University of London, where I was for 20. I was professor since 2011. Now, what happens over that time period, you know, the Great Awokening comes along and I was getting a bit bolder and I was sort of, you know, making fun of the quote unquote social justice movement online a certain amount.

which led to a number of open letters and Twitter mobbings and internal investigation, the usual thing. Now, that had kind of crested about 2021 and started to come down as the awokening itself sort of tailed off. And I was kind of thinking, well, I could be here in this environment, which has a certain amount of censorship from students around.

I was worried that my research would be censored by the ethics committees, for example. And then I was also aware of Buckingham. I'd been talking to Buckingham for a number of years, but without anything firm. And I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to sort of go and give it a chance. And what I wanted to do was to set up this new center because the problem with academia, as you may probably know, is that in the social sciences, we're looking at about sort of 75% on the left,

5% to 10% on the right. The ratio is about 9 to 1 actually in Britain and it's about 13 to 1 in the U.S., left to right. What that means is if you are a conservative, you're in the closet and you don't dare sort of investigate anything that might go against the orthodoxy. So what we need is a center.

where people can investigate all of those questions that haven't been touched. It's like a ski slope where everyone's been skiing in one direction and there's just this off-piste stuff and no one's gone there. So that's where I want to go with the centre. Yeah. So it's bringing freedom back into academia, a bit more artistic, intellectual permission to go...

I want to go down this route and no one's there to say that's very unprogressive of you, Amy. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like so there's kind of like a red line or there's severe discouragement from going off piste. Yeah. I'll just give you one example. It might just be OK. Let's look at gaps in income or attainment, educational attainment between black and white or between men and women.

The only allowable explanation for any kind of disparity is...

quote unquote systemic discrimination, whether that be some kind of patriarchy explanation for a gender divide or whether that be sort of some kind of systemic racism for a racial gap, any kind of race gap. Now, what I would say is, well, that could be the explanation. I'm happy. I'm open to that. But I also want to investigate other possibilities. So it could be that, you know, look, if if we just take African-Americans, for example,

If prior to age 18, the reading level is extremely low and if that's related to things like unstable family situations, for example, that's something we have to look at as a factor. Why are there fewer black people getting into Harvard on an SAT test? Well, that could have something to do with the reading level that is being achieved in schools, which could have something to do with.

Broken homes could have something to do with what the culture emphasizes. These are all things that are off limits. And yet we need to study them because if that's the entire explanation, then this pretend explanation is actually only concealing the problem and we're never going to be able to solve the problem. That's just one example. So what I'm talking about is, yes, academic freedom, but also truth, like the truth of

which is what academia is supposed to be about, the pursuit of knowledge, that entire enterprise has been systematically distorted by ideology. Yeah. And taking that one example, there is a reason that we should be honest about why people aren't getting into, why certain groups aren't,

may not get into like Harvard. But the answer to that is clearly not to have these quotas where they can get in just because of or have a reduced offer just because of their race or they don't really do it with sex or other things. Because

When people that end up in these institutions just because of their skin colour will then find it really tough. It's not fair on anyone to do that. So, yeah, there seems to be a real lack of honesty just for virtue signalling. But it's very damaging, not only to institutions, but also to individuals.

Yeah, exactly. And Coleman Hughes, who's a very talented black writer and podcaster, I mean, he's got a new book out, End of Race Politics, where he just says, you can't just sort of show up at age 18 admitting students into university with a quota, paying no attention at all to...

levels of reading and comprehension and math and all these other skills that they've acquired from age five to 18. I mean, it's completely nonsensical. And so you dump somebody who's got, who's manifestly unqualified into a very elite university. And what happens? They sink right to the bottom of the class. They drop out. They take an easier subject. Whereas maybe if they'd gone to a, you know, a strong but not as elite university, they'd

They could have stayed in the sciences or in engineering or economics, got a good mark, got a good job. And so you're actually hurting these people. There's all kinds of other examples of this kind of thing. So if you don't want to, for example, exclude somebody who's behaving badly from school.

because there are more black people being excluded than white people, let's say. The net result of that is you've got more bad behavior in the classroom, more bad role models in the classroom, and that ruins it for everybody else, including a lot of black students. So what you're actually seeing is

Many black students are being held back because the badly behaving, very small minority of black students can't be excluded. It's another example of how that's shooting themselves in the foot. But yeah, so again, these are just examples of the way orthodoxy prevents truth seeking, really. So, well, it's great that you've been able to launch the...

Someone commented that the Eric Kaufman Centre for Heterodox Social Science almost sounds like the title of a Harry Potter novel. You were like the professor with the magic powers. But yeah, going back to pre-Bookingham, your book White Shift,

delves into the demographic and cultural shifts occurring globally. So how do you see the intersection of demographics and politics on shaping the future of nations and societies? Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, the central trend right now affecting politics and society in our time is this major ethnic shift where, you know, countries that were heavily white majority countries

You know, the U.S. in 1960 was about 85% non-Hispanic white. That's now closer to 60. But places like Australia, Canada, which were basically 97, 98% white and are now in this sort of upper 70s. Europe, again, moving. So by the time we hit 2050...

North America, Australasia will be around 50% white from what was much closer to 80, 90, 100. Europe, it's going to happen that the majority minority point will happen more towards the end of the century. Like in Britain, it'll be sort of in the 2070s and 80s. But in any case, it's happening in all these societies.

And that ethnic change, what that's doing is it's splitting. Now, what's it caused by? It's caused by obviously disparities in population growth rates and aging between the global south and the global north, but also because of satellite and cell phones and all these things which were allowing more information to flow. And you've also had a liberalization of immigration in the West. So without that philosophical liberalization, which took place in the mid-60s,

in the US and in Canada and slightly later Australia. But in all of these places, that's opened the doors to immigration from around the world. So that's what's fueling this. And that change really splits the population because people are wired differently. Some people like change, find it exciting. Other people see change as loss, see diversity as disorderly.

And that's a significant chunk of the population. And so the people who see this as a loss and disorderly are reacting against it by voting for it.

for the populist right. And the people then on the other side are reacting against the populist right by calling them bigots. And so you're now into a situation of polarization. So that's kind of where we are politically. And that's hardening into a cultural divide in country after country that's structuring politics and voting.

Well, I think multiculturalism is here to stay, no matter what we do now, because I think the floodgates have opened. So what are the best techniques and the methods to create integration, cohesion? And are we kind of too late to bring it together? LAUGHTER

Well, OK, here's the first thing. The term multiculturalism, right, it has two meanings. I mean, the on the street meaning might mean a mix of peoples. That's not usually what academics mean by the term multiculturalism. An academic, generally what we're talking about with multiculturalism is emphasizing our differences rather than our commonalities. That's what multiculturalism is about, celebrating difference.

Whereas assimilation, which is a sort of swear word in polite society, is actually the opposite. It's about emphasizing commonality and keeping your differences private or at least not emphasizing them. Directly against the kind of woke kind of thing. Yeah, because woke is all about...

Woke and multiculturalism are two sides of the same coin. We want to emphasize difference and sort of attack the dominant culture and anything, any kind of commonality. We're going to run that down. So how do we – I mean the reality is there has not been a successful integration policy anywhere recently, I would argue. If by integration we mean not –

The left will say, oh, integration just means people voting, getting a job, participating and feeling attached to Britain in some way. And my view is that that's part of integration. But deeper integration would involve integration.

Breakdown in residential segregation, intermarriage, for example, adopting the deeper identity of the whole society. And that takes much longer. It takes generations, actually. And so if you import a lot of people, you ramp up your diversity level. It takes time for assimilation to bring that diversity level down. And actually...

Too much diversity is a problem. It leads to lower trust. Very diverse countries have worse economic development outcomes. That's well established. So there are a lot of problems with too much diversity. And that's got to be stated baldly, that there's an optimum level of diversity. And it's true in organizations. It's true in societies. But right now, you're only allowed to say diversity is great and we need more of it. Yeah, I have been told by some people

very powerful HR people that tolerance is now unacceptable. We have to be actively accepting. And to which I said, you want diversity though, right? Because if you've got diversity, you're going to have difference. If you can have difference, you're going to have conflict. And so is tolerance in that case not enough? And so I was like, you're just...

You're just going to piss people off and make them more anti each other if you're going to tell them that their tolerance isn't enough. They have to be actively accepting. It's like the cognitive dissonance with these people is just...

It's just like there's a piece missing in their brain. It feels like... And it's disturbing because they're in really powerful positions. And it's just... Yeah. Well, I'm sure you've been very privy to this, but... Oh, yeah, no, I've been through diversity training and I've heard all the mantras about diversity, diversity, diversity. And, you know, yeah, I mean, it's an ideology. And if you've been bathed in this, as a lot of these people have been, you know, if you're in academia or in the media,

Or in, you know, the caring professions, you'll always be getting this ideology and you're never going to question it. Right. But the reality is that if you look empirically in the hard data, no, actually, diversity goes past a point of optimum optimal returns pretty quickly. And so, yeah, that's never. And what you just said there about toleration. Right. So the kind of classical liberal attitude is toleration. Right.

But what I would call positive liberal – so there's two types of liberalism, as Isaiah Berlin would say. There's the positive and the negative. The negative is I can swing my – I have a right to swing my arm up.

Up until it meets your nose, that's when my rights stop. So you can do what you want as long as you don't interfere with other people's rights. We have a procedure for managing that. That's toleration. That's negative liberalism. But then there's this kind of positive perfectionist liberalism. You must. You must, yeah. You must love diversity. You must love change. You know, you can't.

like tradition, you must be, you know, that is kind of what's called positive liberalism. And that's what this is all about. It's all about sort of forcing people to be what they want to be that kind of ideal. And yeah, and it's coercive. It's actually goes against negative liberalism. No, I don't believe in your coerced diversity. Oh, well, then you must be punished. Right. It's not very tolerant.

And of course, there's different kinds of diversity, right? So clearly there's ethnic diversity, but there's also viewpoint diversity, which none of these DEI people care about. In fact, they're actively trying to crush it out. So that's what universities have done. They've pushed...

ethnic diversity, which on its own may not be a bad thing if people didn't have a chance to apply and you want to broaden the pipeline out for qualified applicants. But what they also did is they sort of wanted to reduce viewpoint diversity. You must sign this diversity statement that says you pledge yourself to the equity and diversity mission. Well, I think that's culturally socialist. I don't want to sign that. Oh, no, you must or else you can't get a job or a research grant.

You see, what's happening there is they're sort of, and if you don't like that, then you're just not going to apply. So you've essentially used a political litmus test to chase anyone out who isn't on board with your idea. And this is where you come in. So, yeah. No, it's brilliant. Going back to demographic changes influencing politics.

politics of different nations. It must have been really fascinating for you with your background seeing the election of George Galloway, who really, if you saw the letter that he sent out to two different groups, to the Muslim community and the sort of native community, and the first letter says that he will do anything in his power to

defend Muslims as he has done his whole life which is great if they are under pressure but he basically won this election on Gaza and that's

Without that demographic change in that area, it could have been a completely different election result. So it must have been really interesting for you to witness that. Yeah, I mean, and demography does matter if it's a large enough shift. You know, so we know if you take the state of California, that used to be a reliably Republican state. Now...

you know, the Hispanic population and the white population are roughly the same size. I think that actually Hispanics might even have overtaken whites. That was important in, it was one of the reasons that California has now become a firmly Democrat state. So you have these shifts. Now, of course, the Latino vote is moving to the right over time. That's a different story. But yeah, that was, so that can happen. Northern Ireland, look at Northern Ireland was two-thirds Protestant in 1965. Yeah.

is now maybe 50-50. And so we've had the first Catholic, the first Irish Catholic first minister now. That's an example of how demography really matters. And if that starts to happen city by city by city, you know, there are almost no Republican major cities in the U.S. now because minorities are concentrated in those cities. That's one reason. It's not the only reason.

It's true also that the whites who live in these cities are a lot more liberal. But just to say that, yeah, ethnic demography really matters for voting because certain groups tend to vote certain ways. So what do you think has changed in the time that you wrote White Shift in 2018 to now?

Have things changed and moved on since you wrote that? Really interesting. So the book came out in 2018. I was researching it maybe in the years, well, for quite a few years before. So it comes out in 2018. The pandemic is in 2019. So that's a big change, right? Now, what the pandemic does is it cuts off immigration because people can't move around. It makes people think about health care and the economy. Right.

And so a lot of the drivers of populism are removed. And so support for national populism goes down because everyone's worrying about health care and what's going to happen to the economy. And they're very, very immediate concerns. Then what happens is we get out of the pandemic. There's this people start to relax about health issues.

The economy is still a concern because of the Russian invasion. So the economy is still quite high salience. But all of a sudden now you've got high immigration again. Like not only high, but a surge again.

In Britain, in Australia, in Canada, and in the U.S. border, you've got this enormous surge of immigration and in Europe, too. More people crossing Mediterranean. And so where are we? Well, we're right back where we were in 2016 in the popular or 2014, actually, the populist moment starting again.

So next month we'll have the European elections. Then we're going to have the U.S. election. And I think what you'll see is we're going to be... Probably the numbers are going to exceed the peak of what we saw in the... You know, during the migrant crisis of 2015-16, which was kind of like everyone was shocked to see populist right parties in Sweden and Germany topping 10%, 20%, you know. And now...

Ireland, Portugal, all these exceptions, like the real exceptions, are starting to fall. And so now everywhere has got significant populist right. Yeah. And if I'm right, Trudeau has just come out recently and said...

their levels of immigration are unsustainable or that they can't maintain it, which is a bit of a shock for us, I think. We didn't expect that Trudeau was going to be the person to say that. Do you think the time for those kind of left-wing...

Woke. I actually don't like using the term woke, but I'll go with woke. It is a useful term. I'll define it in a minute. I think it's a good term. Go ahead. But it's a time for those kind of woke left wing politicians. Is their time up?

Well, that's an interesting one. I mean, you can see, you know, look, Leo Varadkar stepped down. Nicola Sturgeon stepped down. There's pressure. Yeah, exactly. I know. So, yeah. I mean, and I think obviously Trudeau's polling numbers are absolutely horrendous right now and have been for quite a while. It's sort of like the inverse of Britain. But, you know, but the levels of immigration in Canada have just been staggering. Like, you know, twice the level that Britain's had.

And even though Britain's had record levels. Well, you are a bit bigger than that. Well, that's a total... No, no, because almost everybody's living in an urban area close to the border. I mean, it's not... Whether there's more acreage out in the countryside doesn't make any difference.

any difference. But what I'd say is that there has basically let immigration get completely out of control to the point that housing costs are spiraling, GDP per capita is falling. And only because the economics are poor are you allowed to make an argument. And even then, the Conservative Party in Canada is too chicken to actually say anything about this, partly because the people around the leader, I think, are

Again, the older liberal establishment conservative who think it's a bit unseemly to talk about this. Sounds very familiar. Yeah. Because it is so, so terrible in a way. I mean, the impacts are just so obvious. Even the Liberal Party has had to sort of say, oh, well, maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it's trying to pawn off the fault on somebody else that some external conditions have happened and it's these businesses and it's not us. But yeah, I think...

Time will tell. I still think Canada's got a way to go before reality starts to bite because people have been so sort of scared off. The elite culture is so punishing, so politically correct that you haven't yet had a populist breakthrough. The current leader of the Conservatives is more populist than his predecessors who were completely wet. But he's willing to talk the talk and

to go against the media in terms of what he says, but actually his policy positions are pretty flimsy. And he's not... He likes to pretend he's the anti-woke candidate, but he's not really willing to do anything about critical race and gender ideology. I mean, he said a little bit...

you know, late in the game after the provincial conservatives in a number of provinces sort of stated, okay, well, we're going to, you know, make schools report if a child changes pronouns to the parent. Once they did that,

Gradually, he eventually said, oh, yeah, I support that, too. But he was kind of very late and he only probably did it because he stuck his finger to the wind and realized it's like an 80 percent position. So he himself is, I just think, a standard fiscal conservative. He's not really a populist in the same way populists in, say, the U.S. or Europe are.

But it's still better than what was there before. Yeah, we see a lot of that sort of peacocking about their anti-woke policies or things like anti-immigration. Georgia Maloney talks all the talk and really hasn't gone through with it. And the Conservative Party, which was very much elected to be conservative, they'd run over the red wall with Brexit with other sort of traditionally conservative values and then have just...

completely backtracked on it all. A lot of the promises on immigration, we haven't seen them come through. But yeah, so it seems like a worldwide problem. You're from Vancouver? Yeah, Vancouver, yeah. Do you get back much? I get like once a year, maybe. Because I think they seem to have one of the biggest problems with mass immigration. I've seen lots of footage of...

queues of people going for one job interview or looking for one house to rent. And yeah, it looks like they're at breaking point. Oh, yeah. Have you noticed a difference when you go? Well, I can't. It depends. I don't tend to necessarily go throughout the city. You know, there's a certain degree of, I won't call it segregation, but a degree to which immigrants are more likely to be in certain parts than in others. So the impact will be stronger in certain areas than in others. But yeah, I think throughout Canada, I mean,

Toronto and the Ontario area has had similar problems, these massive queues for, you know, not deliveroo jobs, but warehouse jobs. And it's just it's kind of a bit crazy. But you made a good point. There was just politicians can get away with signaling that.

Oh, I'm tough on immigration. I'm tough on woke and not doing anything. And there is this kind of phenomenon where voters are operating at this level. I don't people often assume that, oh, voters are pissed off. And, you know, they and so they're going to throw the bums out. And that can be true. But I think a lot of voters don't.

operate in a lower information environment. They're not actually in touch with all the stuff we're in touch with. You know, we read the news and on social media. So a lot of, say, conservative voters will think, oh, yeah, Boris Johnson or Penny Mordaunt. They don't realize what those people stand for.

And so they can be fooled by very surface level gimmicks. And it takes more time for them to realize, oh, Boris Johnson's a sort of kind of an open borders, not an open borders, a very globalist liberal. They don't realize that. We have very short memories when it comes to our politicians and our politics, because we just I feel like I'm getting a bit gaslit by everyone who's in power because I'm like,

I swear they've been saying this for like the last five, ten years now and then they've just... Why is nobody... Why hasn't anyone remembered that they've just said... And now they're doing something completely different and they said that they were going to do this ages ago and they haven't done it. And it's so frustrating. Oh, that sound is really... A lot of my friends say to liberals or people that vote left, we hate the Conservative Party more than you do because we feel like we're being betrayed. You have this...

The left have this idea of the Conservatives all like evil, anti-immigration, really like socially conservative. It's not true in the party. It's not like that at all. But some right wingers in Britain think that we might see something like the 1993 Canadian election where the progressive Conservatives lose lots of seats to a

sort of insurgent reform party. Do you think this is accurate? And are you optimistic about the future of British politics? Boy, yeah, I lived through that 1993 Canadian election. It was interesting. I mean, obviously reform in Canada was a different beast. It was a regional Western party party.

But there was a lot of similarities in that the Canadian conservatives were very kind of wishy-washy kind of type version of conservatism. So, yeah, voters do eventually realize what's happening. And like right now in Britain, what's happened is that voters have realized actually that behind that 2019 Bojo conservatism is really just essentially mass immigration, pro-business liberalism. And so the realization does kick in. And, of course, we're seeing reform bolstered.

bumping up at, you know, occasionally hitting 16%, I think was the highest they've done in the polls. And so that really is a populist backlash against the conservatives. It's a classic, because the classic theory would be if the mainstream right drifts too far to the left, then a populist challenger will pop up and minister to the demand that the center-right party has vacated. And that's exactly what's happening with reform. If they had a charismatic leader who

Maybe a new face, maybe not Farage, maybe a new face. I don't know. But they could, I think, easily unseat the conservatives. Now, you know, some conservative voters are just these lifelong Tory, older Tory voters. Some are fiscal conservatives who want lower tax. So there's going to be a certain base for that old liberal Toryism. But I equally think most conservative voters, you know, it's like 90 plus percent want less immigration. Immigration is like the top issue for them.

It is very clear that the current Conservative Party is completely out of alignment with their base. And so there's a huge opportunity. Now, you could say that the populist right in Britain is currently led by somebody who's not particularly charismatic. They have been going in five different directions. They've been going after, you know, net zero and vaccines. And so it's not a particular... And you've had a number of players. You know, you had Lawrence Fox in there. You've got the SDP. You've got...

a whole bunch of different players. So in a way, what's needed is someone who will galvanize all of this behind them. You do. Who is that? Who do you think it might be? Well, you know, obviously Farage. Now, Farage is going to repel some voters, but he will attract a lot of conservative voters. So that is an obvious name. One thing that's interesting is, you know, Britain, if you look at Europe...

continental Europe, you know, you've had Thierry Baudet in the Netherlands, you've had Zemmour in France, you've had a number of these new faces and figures pop up. And what's not clear in Britain is, you know, is there any depth on the bench in terms of who is after Farage, who might be talented? Yes.

charismatic but also policy savvy and not too crazy you know is there such an individual and you're not seeing anyone at the moment not that i'm aware of no i'm not aware of anybody like that who's making the rounds now maybe it's the system here that yeah makes it harder but who is going to be the next forage there's a vacancy yeah i was going to say that if you too i don't know

Oh, me? No, I really... No, I would... No, the amount... Oh, no, I've done too much stuff in my life. There's that fear, what would come back in life? I'm sure Farage has done a few. This is true. But I do worry about this continuity planning because I also wonder if a bit of ego comes into it because Nigel is such a cult figure and...

I think he does enjoy the kind of, Nigel, we love this thing, he loves it. And I think you don't really... If you're that kind of person, you're kind of... He's kind of a king in his own world, isn't he? So I think if you're that kind of person, do you really want your successor to be as liked as you? A bit of male ego comes into it, maybe. And I'm thinking...

You know, I think I would really like to see a new...

a sort of Nigel continuity going on and have that person come into politics to unite everybody. But then I do wonder, in a sort of gossip, this is a kind of gossipy kind of theory of mine, that I think big egos don't actually want, on a very superficial level, they don't want their successor to be preferred to them. Right. So, and I don't know, Richard Tice is lovely, but I'm just saying. But perhaps a competitor could be useful. Maybe.

to give Nigel that push. Like, if he sees someone on his tail, then he could be like... He'll get back involved. Fine, I'll do it. Yeah. And he... I think he ticks all of the boxes with politically savvy, charismatic, obviously, and...

popular. Is that preferred? Yeah. But the other thing to think about is there's going to be a big debate after the Tories lose, which they will. There's going to be a big debate over the future of the Conservative Party between the national populists, national cons, and the liberal conservatives. Now, if reform is doing well, is a threat, that will strengthen the hand of the nat cons. And it's more likely we'll get somebody like

So one of the questions will be, if it looks like it's going to be Kemi, does she have the...

the vision, the charisma to be that figure. She might. And one of the questions is around, you know, where is she on immigration? I mean, she's very good on culture war. And I think that's very important. And we haven't heard a lot. Not as good as I think we think. Oh, is that right? But carry on. But perhaps she might understand better than the current leadership. Well, I've got to actually talk to my, speak to my voters. My voters think X, therefore Y.

I'm going to try and deliver X. You don't actually have to be a firm believer, but you have to say, well, I'm actually going to tack to where my voters are. So it's not impossible that it could be her, but it could be somebody else. So it could happen within the Tory party or could happen outside. And that'll be we'll see. I mean, I agree with some others. I think Matt mentioned this, but

that the Labour Party, once they get in, their popularity is going to go down quite quickly, as people realise this isn't sort of their dream team. Happened to the SDP in Germany, you know, the left got in and then within a very short period of time they just tanked. Because for them to deliver on all the expectations that have been pushed on them, I just think is going to be impossible. Yeah, and with all of the separate kind of alternative parties, Reform, Reclaim and SDP here...

Again, I think the thing stopping them from uniting is another layer of ego. They just need to let it go, I think. But it's kind of impossible. It's the human species we're dealing with. I think, however, the reality is probably already we're seeing reform as becoming the main alternative. Yes, it is. So SDP and Reclaim, I mean, they're getting hardly any votes. So they're not really damaging reform that much.

So I still think that it's all to do with who takes on the mantle of reform. You've got a ready-made 15, 10, 15 percent. We'll see what they get in the election. I mean, if they do as well as UKIP, that's a really important development. Yeah.

I mean, the Tories cannot get elected without getting those votes back. And I think that on its own is going to have a very salutary effect. It's going to force the conservatives to say, well, actually, we can't go the Caroline Noakes kind of liberal con route. That's just an electoral disaster. So we have to go the nat con route. I mean, that would be perhaps an outcome that might be positive if you get the right candidate elected.

who can actually deliver on a NatCon platform. So in Canada, I don't know what the media scene is like compared to ours, because I think in the UK, we've got our sort of bubbling up alternative media. We've got the Telegraph is a great source of media that's not

that left wing. And then you've got GB News, you've got Talk TV. I don't know if Canada's media has that kind of supply for that kind of alternative. Yeah, yeah. The Canadian media situation, I think, is worse than in Britain on a couple of levels. So the first is that

If we just take the sort of print newspaper side, here you've got the Telegraph and you've got the Daily Mail and you've got, you know, whatever. I know there's been editorial changes there, but you have got a right of center press here. In Canada, you have a much smaller, you have the National Post, which is smaller, but

And so it's much more unbalanced. Electronic media is completely controlled by the left in Canada. There's no diversity at all. There's nothing like a GB News or a Fox, certainly not a Fox News. Now, you have got some independent media. You've got, you know, True North and Rebel, you know, which are both. I mean, they're growing and I don't know how large their subscriber base is, but they're not yet at the level where they can really change anything.

the media climate. So what that means is, for example, something like this 215 indigenous children buried in these unmarked graves,

story, which is a complete hoax. That actually sat in the media, was parroted by politicians. Nobody questioned that. Churches, 100 churches were essentially burned because of this hoax. So you have this mass delusion, right? And it was not questioned really in the press at all, except in the sort of very small outlets, which couldn't break through. So the average Canadian, like 60% believe this and only 15%

don't believe it. So by four to one, they're believing this lie, basically. That's how powerful the ecosystem is. Now, on the other hand, it's also the case that the Canadian public is actually not very woke. I mean, this is so so on things like gender ideology or Canada as a racist country, all of these sorts of things. Actually, the Canadian public is very unwoke.

So the media has had some effects, like a story like the masquerades will stick because it's just a set of facts that nobody's contesting. But some of these attitudes like women going into or trans transgender women going into women's sports and things like that, that's not actually managed to penetrate the population and change attitudes. But they are the media is a bit of a disaster in Canada. Yeah. And with.

Also, I think you kind of touched on this with gender and the gender ideology gap, which I know, I think you've been quite interested in that. And what's happening with young women, young women in the Western world, what's happening to that gap?

To them. What's wrong with us? Not us. Well, you're, you know, yeah, this demographic of young women is, you know, very left-wing culturally. It's astoundingly left-wing in country after country. So among young people, there's this big gender gap. You know, Canada, for example, if 50% of...

you know, males under 25 are voting for the right. That's only 25% amongst females. So it's like a two to one. And that's the same in the US. And it's been widening since the 2010s. And what are all the conditions that have, do you think, has led to this point? Well, I just think, I think women, people have different theories. I mean, I think women are more likely to get behind what they see as the communal norm. Yes.

The harmonious norm that everyone, you know, that the elite institutions are saying, this is what you need to be to be a good person. You have to support DEI and, you know, you have to be trans affirming. And so women are more likely to go get in behind that. If the institutions are saying you've got to be patriotic and religious, the women will be more likely to be that. So women are more religious than men. If you look back in U.S. survey data to 1970, women were more conservative than men.

It's not until like 2004 that women started to be more liberal than men. I think, I don't know what you think, but I think that there's something almost biological about women's psychology in the sense that our survival depends on our community and how much we're embraced and accepted by

And I think a lot of that is more so being accepted by other women. So I think now... And you just... You can take it as a little snapshot, say, like a girls' group chat, which I know all girls are actually terrified of. But I know we are, because they're the most dictatorial areas of our lives. They're terrifying. But so you have to...

The exclusion that women have, like the fear of exclusion and to be a social outcast, I think it's ingrained in us because it's a survival mechanism. That's what I feel like, but it's all... Yeah, I think that would explain a lot of things that are more likely to conform to a set of beliefs and values. So yeah, I think that explains a lot of it. Now, there are some people who say, well, there's this empathy, but I think there's a...

I'm not as convinced by – I mean that is an argument that Beau Weingart and Corey Clark have made in a paper and they – and their argument is that as the female share in –

academia and teaching and all these sorts of things has been rising, we've been getting a shift towards wokeism and away from, let's just call it, pursuit of truth and academic freedom. I am not as convinced by that, that it's this demographic shift, which has been steady and not dramatic. I mean, it's more and more women are entering into graduate school and academia and everything and teaching. But

I actually think it's more to do with the fact that... So women are going to be more empathetic and emotional. But, of course, empathetic to what? Are you empathetic to the biological male who wants to enter a woman's changing room? Or empathetic to the women in the changing room who don't want the bio... Exactly. So the ideology has to tell you what to be empathetic about. Yes. So just saying women are more empathetic doesn't get you very far, I think. You know, are you empathetic about the...

who's gender transitioning wants to transition to a boy or about when they're 10 years later regretting that transition and saying, why didn't anyone warn me? Yeah.

Just saying you're more empathetic doesn't actually get you very far. So I think the ideology tells you what to be attached to. Yeah, it's funny because you can almost hear the voices of those girls going, oh, you just need to be your authentic self and you're so authentic, authentic, authentic. But they are so inauthentic when it actually comes down to it because they... But like you say, that kind of compassion is so faux. It's just... It really depends on what that...

we're being told we need to be compassionate about. So there's no, they don't have their own kind of integrity and authenticity and actually what they believe is right and wrong. So I think. But it shows you the power of the socialization, you know, in schools and social media that's really shaped this generation. You know, boys are always going to have more contrarians and rebels and so they are less affected.

But girls are more affected, right, by this ideology. Now, of course, there is a kind of ethos to that ideology. It's focused on – when I say woke, I mean making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, sexual minorities. So that's where the focus is, race, gender, sexuality, LGBT, indigenous, black, et cetera. What was interesting in the survey data, for example, women are –

You know, I did this in my recent Unheard piece. Women are like up to 50 percent more likely to want or just to agree that trans women, i.e. biological males, should have access to women's sports spaces, shelters, you name it. Now, from from a purely self-interested tribal point of view, that makes no sense at all. If you think like surely it's in the interest of women to have maximal protection, then

you know, in a jail, in a shelter, in a sports, whatever. How can it be that they're more supportive than men? And that just tells you it's not women's interests. And you can take a question like, should a speaker who says transgender is a mental disorder or BLM is a hate group,

You know, women are going to be wildly against letting that speaker onto campus, like 90%, 80%, 90%. Someone who says abortion should be banned entirely. Now, you could say abortion is more of a women's issue. The response on abortion is not any different from these other questions. So it's not...

the women defending women's rights, like, you know, say the right to an abortion, whatever it is, that's not what's driving this. It's the ideology that they are parroting because they want to be a good person and that's what you have to do. That's my theory on it. Yeah. A few things on that. One, I would very highly recommend an article by Ed West about why women are herd creatures. It's on his sub stack. Another...

Since the introduction of female vicars in the Church of England, we've definitely seen the Church of England become so much more liberal and a huge increase in female vicars over the years. It's just more and more every year. And whenever I encounter them on my Twitter feed, my X feed, they always have their pronouns in their bio, rainbow flags, and they are really liberalising the church, which actually a lot of what they are

saying online really disagrees with what the Bible teaches. There was one, Miranda Thraffle Holmes the other week said that she'd been to an anti-white conference and that whiteness is...

It's worse than the patriarchy. Do you think God is anti-white? Because I don't. I think God loves all of his children, but you're not going to teach that. But it's really interesting. Did you say it was Canada where it was 50% of men vote Conservative and 25% women? That must be really difficult for dating. Because if you... I mean, most people, I think the person that you want to...

to marry, to have a family with, you want to have shared values. And if there is that big of a gap, then this, I don't know if it's true, but I would imagine it would lead...

to a lot of the problems we're seeing with women waiting until later to have children and the fertility rate issues. Do you think that's linked? Well, the fertility rate is, I think, somewhat distinctive for a number of reasons because we see the dropping fertility all over the world and not just in the woke countries but elsewhere. But you raise an interesting point. You know, there's this...

survey, the FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression does a student survey every year. And I think one year they asked a question about, would you be willing to date a supporter of the opposite party? Or was it a Trump supporter? I can't remember one. Guess what the proportion of women who are not Trump voters, so anyone who's a Democrat or a moderate or independent, what is the share of women that

who are willing to date a Trump supporter, 18 to 22-year-old American student females that are willing to date a Trump supporter. It's got to be small. Tiny. I'm going to be optimistic and say 13%. Oh, 13? Yeah. That's optimistic. Well, if you're thinking women who don't vote right, how many of them would date a Trump supporter? What would you guess?

Percentage? I would say 20%, just to be generous. 7%. I was closer. Yeah, you were closer. I'm not surprised. Yeah, whereas a Clinton supporter was like 90% of the time.

So, yeah, I mean, there's a huge issue there. Did they have the reverse for men that would date someone the voters opposite? Well, I think this only asked about Trump. And for women, it was seven. And that number was like for non-Trump voting men willing to date a woman who was a Trump supporter. It was like 19. It was like pushing 20 percent. So it's about three times as high. But still, it's pretty low, even for non-Trump men. But, yeah, there's this very strong...

political prejudice, of course. Now, the only question is how lightly or strongly held are these beliefs, right? So if most women are just going along with the flow, but they don't really care that much, then maybe it's not going to be a serious issue. But if it is something they really think, oh, but that person's the devil, you know, then... Which they do think, I swear. Yeah. So that will cause problems. And of course, some of these dating sites now, they're saying, you know, you list your politics in some cases. Mm-hmm.

And God only knows what that's going to do. I guess men will probably conceal. I have a friend who used Hinge, this was quite a few years ago, maybe four years ago, and had conservative on his thing and said, because you can also say that you only want to see other people who have these views and you can

rate it whether this issue for you is a deal-breaker or not a deal-breaker. Oh, OK. I don't know what she chose, but she said she was conservative. And Hinge clearly isn't very good dating app because it matched her with...

Some European who said that he thinks that everyone should be taxed at 70%. And she was like, what is this? Delete the app immediately. Clearly doesn't work. But then I suppose as a conservative woman, you know, presumably you would have your pick, right? I'm guessing. It's true. Not that we'd know or anything. Yeah, you can both do well, yeah. So...

Right. Do you think that change in British politics is going to be a long march through the institutions helped by organizations like the University of Buckingham? Or will events like mass migration force a quick political change? Gotcha. Really interesting question. Well, there's two levels there. There's the kind of elite institutions like universities and the mass voting base. Mass migration, I think, is going to be a key issue here.

pushing voters to the right, to the populist right. And that might mean that it's hard for the left, harder for the left to get into power. But in terms of institutions, they are heavily controlled now by this kind of progressive consensus, which reproduces itself, partly because there's a hostile climate. So if you want to do a master's degree in history or in a softer social science like sociology or politics,

You get into a discussion group and already, you know, people are making it very clear what they think of Tories, what they think. Yeah. So you're just going to probably avoid that because it's a hostile environment. Not everybody, but and it's funny because the right of center academics, a lot of the ones that I know.

Many of them are actually quite prickly personalities. Obviously, you know, anyone who is sort of agreeable and conservative would not wouldn't last for very long. So basically, yeah, that hostile environment repels people. And so the graduate, even already at master's level, I've done survey work on this.

Conservative master's students know that there's a hostile environment and they select away from doing a PhD and going towards academia. So there's a degree to which this thing purifies itself. It's a bit like nursing becomes typecast as a female profession, so fewer men are going to go into it. But in this case, you're actually talking about active hostility. Yeah.

You know, that you pick up on. And now how does that change? Well, Buckingham – so part of the reason for Buckingham, which is the only one of 181 institutions in Britain that has any serious viewpoint diversity, even though it's still mostly on the left, I would say. But there are a few centers where we're trying to create diversity.

a critical mass of people because you need to actually create a ecosystem that is friendly enough to allow people to stop self-censoring. And we have you can see this in the student data. Likewise, if you take a university whose student body is 50/50 left to right and there are only a handful of those even in the US,

the self-censorship levels are much lower there. So people who are conservative self-censor at way lower rates. People who are on the left self-censor a little more, but only a little bit more than they would in a leftist environment. So the net self-censorship level is just a lot lower in the... And so we're trying to create some of those environments at Buckingham, my center, hopefully. We're trying to get...

You know, Doherty, we're trying to sort of be able to create more positions and more researchers to have more of an impact. Now, is that going to change the whole system? Of course not. But, you know, you might see a situation down the road like you're seeing that a bit in the U.S. where you're seeing the creation of

In the red states, every university increasingly, they're going to have to have one of these classics, Center for the Study of Civics, Constitution. What that is really about is creating a non-progressive environment. So you'll have these kind of oases, and that's where some of this countervailing scholarship can flourish. Mm-hmm.

And the reason I think that's important is, you know, most academic papers are never cited. And if they are cited, it's only by a few people. So most academic output has no impact whatsoever. What we have to have in these centers is the academic output being high impact, getting into the press, shaping the policy discussion. If we can do that, we can leverage a small number of people and to have a much bigger impact on the conversation. That's the hope here.

And now even if the mainstream of left-wing academia ignores this research, pretends it's not there, I still think it'll have an impact ultimately. You know, even something like The Great Awokening. The left didn't want to know, didn't want to know, but now slowly they're admitting and allowing that this is a thing. Or for a long time they denied that academics were predominantly left-wing. Now they accept that. Not because they actually ever...

formally accepted it, but gradually without, in a fit of absence of mind, they now kind of accept, okay, academics, academia is left wing, but no, we don't have any political discrimination, even though we've got like 10, 20 papers showing exactly the same thing. In this country, a third of academics wouldn't hire a known Brexit supporter, and the US, like 40% wouldn't hire a known Trump supporter for a job. So we have the data, it's very solid, but they're in denial about that bit of science right now. What...

Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say. What are the sort of main and most nasty bits of criticism that you've had? What's the hate about it? Have you had any? And with your book, I imagine, White Shift, that's dealing with quite controversial topics. Yeah.

So what kind of criticism do you get for that and doing this? What's that? David Aronovich, give a bit of a scathing review. He was not too bad about the book. I mean, here's the thing is that most Twitter activists don't read books. So I've never really had trouble for the book. Yeah. Almost none. Yeah. I mean, I've had one tough review that I think my book and Matt's book on national populism got reviewed by.

Somebody in – I don't know if it was the Independent, one of the left-wing papers, and gave it a negative. But that's not the problem. The problem is all social media. So the problem is when I retweet Justin Trudeau not being able to say LGBTQ –

And making fun of him or sort of not being respectful enough about Black Lives Matter or, you know, saying, oh, we've got this plus size model on a sports magazine. It's just really interesting. And it is really interesting, like from purely detached perspective, like somebody in 100 years looking back and saying, hey, here's this fitness magazine and we've got an obese person on it.

Surely that's going to be something we need to be able to explain because this is very unusual. Yeah.

You'll get the email in the inbox. You have to show up here for the kangaroo court. It's typically run by somebody who's really invested in the DEI enterprise. The top levels of the university actually are quite okay. Or they were fine. They have to understand things like the law. But...

They'll allow a lot of autonomy in these lower levels to conduct these investigations. And they're a complete joke. But yeah, but when it first happens, I mean, you really are... You don't know what's going to happen. And in academia, if you lose your job...

You won't get another one because there are 100, 150 people going after every job. You might get a job at some third rate place, you know, in a very far away from where you live, but you're not going to get a job in a sort of desirable or Russell Group University. And especially when you're notorious, you won't get a job. But even if you weren't notorious, you're not going to get a job.

It's just the logistics are just extremely difficult. There are very few positions. They're very fought over. So they really have you. And if they say, well, your punishment is, well, we're not sure, but we've given you a warning. We're not going to say, like, if you do something again, you're fired. So it's all very vague. The punishment, they string you along. It's like, well, you consider yourself warned and we don't know what we're going to do next time to you. Yeah.

And unless you get legal on them and call their bluff, then, you know, you're scared and you self-censor and you say, OK, I'm not going to do it again. I'm never going to make fun of BLM or whatever it is. And they hate nothing more than if you've got a sense of humour. I think they're extra vicious. It gets them so angry. Like you're poking fun at things like that and just kind of like holding the mirror up and going, ha-ha. So you find that makes them...

you're we're winning if we've got a sense of humor we will win with that sense of humor well yes and no like i think it's a useful thing but i i don't think it's enough and then no it's not enough on its own for sure like in the early 90s political correctness for example was lampooned in the u.s press there are a

making fun of the terms that they wanted people to say. And I can't, it's not like people kind, but something like that. Yeah, I remember that. These crazy words. So they were made fun of in the press.

And it died down, but did it go away? No. In fact, all of those things just became in the background, ambient, institutionalized to rear their head again in the 2010s. And so it's not enough for us to make fun of their excesses. I actually think you've got to engage in patient institutional reform now.

Whether that's abolishing DEI, whether that's the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, whether that's creating these centers, you actually have to put them under consistent institutional pressure and reform because the humor on its own is great in debates, but it's not actually going to seal the deal. It's kind of a way of surviving the nonsense, though. I remember it must have been...

around 2017, 2018. You know Andrew Doyle? Yeah. Do you know his character, Titania McGrath? Yes. So I bought that book, which is called Woke, by Titania McGrath. It's very funny. And I remember putting it on my...

Instagram story under a relative of mine who is very progressive. She replied to my story saying, if you like social justice, I've got so many great books to recommend to you. I didn't have the heart to tell her that this book was actually mocking it. But yeah, it's a way of dealing with it. But you were, I don't really, because I also remember my childhood, political correctness was a bit of a joke in my family. Yeah.

Yeah, we'd say, oh, that's not politically correct. And then that seemed to not be a very common phrase anymore. And it became social justice, social justice warriors. That was kind of the early 2010s, maybe. They were a big thing. And then woke people.

Woke was a word that the woke used originally. And then it was sort of adopted by us to mock them. Right. But you were like an early critic of woke in like 2018. But how do you see that? How much is the community of...

anti-woke commentators and academics changed since 2018, obviously. It's, you know, we've got woker and woker in all of these institutions, but now more people are coming out of the woodwork. Well, the online space like this is really exciting. I mean, in a way that, you know, a lot of the independent thinking is happening on the internet, on podcasts now, increasingly. Mm-hmm.

And so just, yeah, I mean, I've watched – I remember I was on Trigonometry like the third or fourth episode and it was literally up some stairs in an unlit room. And I knew Coleman Hughes. He was an undergraduate. I bought him and his friend a pizza. All these people were just at the beginning. Even Yasha Monk, who I met before, he was –

All these people. And now they're kind of big. And that's really encouraging. It's reassuring. Yeah. And I think the online space has been really the only saving grace because a lot of the institutions are gate-capped.

and the mainstream media was kind of gate-kept. So this was the only way for an alternative space. But media is more free. It's easier to set up. The barriers to entry are lower. Whereas if you think about a university, like the University of Austin has raised $250 million. They've, I think, just broken ground. I could be wrong about that in a new campus. It's just very hard to set up a new university, get your accreditation.

get a new cohort of students. You've got to have all of these things in place. It just takes a long time and it's very difficult. So there's huge barriers to entry. There's a prestige hierarchy already in place. It's very hard to dislodge. But yeah, so, but one thing I'd say is that the current awokening, I mean, now it has peaked in about 2021, and it's gone down a certain amount if you look at no platformings, firings,

Even media mentions of terms like white supremacy and racism. So it has come down a bit, but certainly well above where it was in the 2010s. But I see this as very continuous with that earlier political correctness, which I lived through showing my age. I distinctly remember lectures around feminism. You know, this has been about the early 90s.

Sexism and all these things were earnest lectures at university was happening. Now, it wasn't as widespread, but it was already happening. It was exactly the same ideology.

And that ideology is simply equal outcomes by race, gender and sexuality and emotional harm protection from speech for minority groups. That's exactly the ideology and that is exactly the ideology. Now, the only question is how much – how well institutionalized and how much has the logic of it been pushed to its maximum?

And I'd say in the 90s, the early 90s, for example, it was certain universities, certain departments. It was largely confined, almost entirely confined to university campuses. What happens in the 2010s because of social media is these crazy ideas, which had been there for decades...

In university campuses and in departments, suddenly spread into the youth culture, spread into the elite corporations. Judith Butler all over TikTok now as one example. Bloody hell, Judith Butler. Not that anyone can actually understand Judith Butler, but she's the gender-affirming one. At least in the 90s and noughties,

media wasn't as affected. Like, I was at a hairdresser's yesterday and my hairdresser was Australian. I said, I really love this Australian comedian called Chris Lilley. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. No, I don't. He did lots of...

sketch shows where he played different characters and he was just certainly as a family guy they will mock everyone they don't leave anyone unoffended but it's absolutely hilarious he like plays this gay drama teacher playing on every stereotype possible he plays a Tongan character who's like always causing problems in school and getting into trouble and I think there's one where it's like a

a woman with one leg way shorter than the other. They're just so obscure, but it's really funny. And I said, oh, I love this Australian comedian. And my hairdresser says, well, he's actually... I can't do an accent. He's actually very problematic and he was cancelled. And I was like... Sorry, I wish I hadn't told you this whilst you're about to do my hair. You come out with a sort of Mohican... And then they...

It's kind of a similar show to Little Britain Come Fly With Me, which the BBC has censored all of their most problematic episodes. And we don't have anything... Not saying... Like, a lot of that was a bit far, but...

We can't have any sort of that comedy now, whereas at least in the 90s and the noughties, pre-internet, as you say, there was the freedom in entertainment to offend. Yeah, I mean, I think British comedy has always been a little bit more timid than...

Australian and American. But it's just sad to see the censorship of things which were very widely appreciated when they came out. Yeah, well, I mean, this is where this idea of not hurting feelings, emotional trauma, emotional safety, that kind of what Rod Dreher calls therapeutic totalitarianism. I mean, that's part of the package, right? It's about equal outcomes, but also about

not emotionally offending the most sensitive member of such a group. And that's the ethos. And I guess it just hadn't spread enough off the campus. On the campus, in certain departments in the 90s, that would have been the ethos as well. It was already there. It just hadn't, the virus hadn't left the Wuhan lab yet. But now it's everywhere. You're right. And so then what it does is it sort of

asphyxiates the culture, makes the culture poorer. Because what you're talking about here is humor, which is a sort of positive benefit to everybody, to a lot of people. But there is a butt of the joke. And that can change. It might sometimes be the upper-class white person. It might be the Tongan, right? So everybody gets their turn.

That actually has a net benefit. Everyone can laugh at the other ones. And you can sort of take it on the chin if it's your group, right? But once you move to this idea where like, oh, no, you can't punch down on anyone who's got more oppression points you can't make a joke about, then that truncates the humor and leads to a much more sort of sterile environment. Yeah. So I have this kind of idea in my book.

where just like economic socialism leads to economic poverty, cultural socialism, which is basically a euphemism for woke in a way, this kind of cultural socialism leads to a cultural poverty. So our culture is getting kind of poorer because of this. So thank you so much, Eric, for coming on today. If you could just let the watchers and listeners know where they can find you, what you're up to at the moment.

Well, it's been a real pleasure, Fleur. I would encourage people to come to my Twitter at EPKAUFM. And actually, the pinned tweet is about my course on Woke. It's a 15-week open online course on Woke, which people can sign up to at any time. If you click on the pinned tweet, it'll take you there.

I've also got my book, Taboo, which is coming out on the 20th of June here in Britain. So keep an eye out for that. It's already there on Amazon. So pre-orders, welcome.

Great, yeah. Well, we were at the launch for your Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences. It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful. And I must say, it really sounds great. I was very tempted to do it myself. Maybe I will. If I ever go back to education, I will be coming to you. We'd love to have you. Yes. So if you are watching the free version of Bombshells, you've sadly come to the end. However, if you go to basedmedia.org, you can subscribe to

to the premium version for as little as £5 a month. Also, if I could just remind everyone watching and listening to email us with questions you have for us or life dilemmas for our upcoming Agniance section, then please email us at bombshellspodcast at gmail.com.

Well, it's been great having you, Eric, once again. And thank you for watching and listening. Goodbye.

Canada is sort of where I think the future lies if wokeness gets the upper hand. Hello and welcome to Offscript. My name is Stephen Edgington. As new research shows young people in Britain are unpatriotic, unconservative and increasingly exposed to left-wing ideas, I'm joined by Professor Eric Kaufman to discuss the politics of the future.

Is conservatism dead? No. I mean, it depends which country we're talking about. I think that the Conservative Party in Britain represents ideas that come from the 1970s and 80s for the most part and aren't very relevant today. But I also think that within conservative intellectual spaces and even in pockets in the Conservative Party and pockets in the think tanks today,

There's vitality there. And I think people understand what some of the emerging issues are, where to go politically in terms of where the voters are. But that thinking has yet to penetrate into the sort of real decision-making centers of the conservative party.

Can you tell us a little bit about you and your recent research? So yeah, I've gotten two reports on culture wars, broadly speaking, topics for policy exchange. One of them is on young British people and it's based on a survey with YouGov of 18 to 20 year olds, mainly concentrating on what they were taught in school.

And then the second is just a general adult survey based on the entire adult population where we're looking at people's support or opposition to culture wars, topics by which I'm talking chiefly about issues around critical race theory in the past and the teaching of history in schools.

or cancel culture and threats to free speech enlightenment values. So I'm trying to get a sense of where the British public is on these issues. I should say that I've done U.S. versions of both of these surveys as well. So yeah, that is sort of the basis of the report. And I guess one of the top-line findings really is that in British schools –

Basically, three-quarters of British school children have heard one of five critical race theory or radical gender and sexuality concepts in school from adults. And those concepts that I polled on were three race concepts around unconscious bias, white privilege and systemic racism, and then two sort of gender sexuality topics. One, the idea of many genders, and the other, patriarchy.

Three in four of these British 18 to 20 year olds, and the 18 year olds were still in school, the 19 and 20s recently graduated, said that they had heard from an adult or teacher these terms, at least one of these terms. Moreover, the 18 year olds, 78% of them had heard one of these terms.