Transcription
I warned you this would happen. My entire public career since 2016 has been predicated on describing what anyone could see with their own eyes. The left was going off the deep end. The first and most obvious sign of this was the response to the Brexit vote here in Britain and the election of President Trump in the United States.
As a remain voter and a Trump skeptic myself, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I devoured Einran's writings in my youth. And while much of my thinking has evolved significantly since, one quote stayed with me. "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you're facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." In other words, if events you cannot believe keep happening, you're missing something.
Because of this, even as a default liberal in 2016, I had one choice and one choice only. To ask what I was missing and seek information outside of my bubble. This incidentally was the genesis of trigonometry. But that is not what my soon-to-be former friends on the left did. Instead, they buried their heads even deeper in the sand. Something, as I've spoken about before, even ostriches are not stupid enough to do.
While Steve Bannon, who orchestrated Trump's first electoral success, and Nigel Farage, the driving force behind Brexit, went from podcast to podcast and TV show to TV show to explain exactly how they'd done it. The media and political left kept screaming about Russian interference, fascism, and stupid racist voters. And in many ways, this seemed to work, destroying people's careers, ruining their lives, and keeping them quiet through fear of being next kept the lid from flying off the pressure cooker. Speaking during the summer of BLM in 2020 when people were fired for questioning the idea of white privilege and failing to post black squares on social media. Cancel culture was an effective tool used by the left to retain cultural hegemony and prevent political opponents from winning.
Hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when all social media companies enforced woke orthodoxy and censored dissent. Feminists like our guest Megan Murphy were banned from Twitter for saying men can't become women, suggesting that COVID was likely to have originated in the Chinese laboratory. Now, the consensus view of the CIA, FBI, prominent scientists, and a wide range of reputable organizations resulted in an instant and coordinated ban across social media. These platforms even colluded with mainstream media outlets to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was blatant and undeniable election interference.
Throughout this period, those of us on the left who reluctantly voiced opposition to this behavior on the basis that it contradicted every principle the left had stood for our entire lives, namely belief in freedom of speech, science, the pursuit of truth, skepticism of big pharma, opposition to racial discrimination, free and fair elections, and so on. were told that we were not in fact on the left. On the contrary, we were now right-wing and even eventually far right.
As this cartoon from my friend Colin Wright illustrates, these smears were based on a number of things. But chief among them was a complete failure of imagination. Hard as it may be for those of us with a functioning brain to understand, many of the left genuinely thought that they would get away with this. One defining feature of wokeness is an unshakable belief in your own virtue and righteousness which blinds you to the possibility that you may be wrong or at the very least strategically misguided. There is of course a version of this on the right, but more on that later. Suffice it to say that the left thought they could censor, smear, and cancel their way to a permanent dominance of media, entertainment, education, and ultimately political power. It was therefore irrelevant whether their behavior violated their own principles. Like dictators who've been in charge too long, who somehow combined their sense of their own invulnerability with a paranoid fear of criticism and challenge. The result, an inability to change course based on real-world feedback, paired with an increasingly brutal apparatus for suppressing dissent.
Drunk on power, they refused to listen to those of us who kept warning them with an obvious and simple message. "The weapons you're using today will be used against you." And sure enough, the supremacy the left enjoyed was never going to last. Many dislike what Twitter has become since Elon Musk's takeover. I share some of those concerns, but it's undeniable that his purchase of that platform just 3 years ago changed everything. The reason it did is best summarized by Brett Weinstein, who coined the phrase "zero is a special number." The emergence of just one censorship-free platform rendered censorship on other platforms pointless and even dangerous to their business. Why ban something from Facebook when everyone will just access it on a competitive platform?
The result has been an acceleration of two connected processes. The rise of new media and the fall of legacy media, culminating in the election of President Trump in 2024. Wokeness was comprehensively defeated at the ballot box. The owners of the online platforms all turned up to kiss the ring at the inauguration, and the cultural balance of power shifted massively to the right. While I was less enthusiastic about this outcome than many of my actually right-wing friends, I was nonetheless relieved. The lunacy of open borders, blatant racial and sex-based discrimination called DEI, the legalization of crime, the increasingly counterproductive egging on of Ukraine without sufficient practical support, the mutilation of children in the name of trans ideology, and the general stench of decline had to end.
Since Trump's election, several major political battles have been fought. But so far, the right has mostly resisted the urge to take vengeance on the left at scale. Yes, individual opponents like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton had their Secret Service protection and security clearances withdrawn. Yes, the Department of Justice launched criminal probes into law firms with ties to Clinton and George Soros. But the right has not engaged in systematic cancel culture, which targets ordinary people, comedians, and hostile media organizations. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, however, appears to be the excuse some on the right were waiting for.
The mood is best summed up by Gavin McKinnis, who at least deserves credit for his honesty, if not for the utter naked vengefulness of his position. Responding to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air for accidentally or deliberately lying about the killer of Charlie Kirk being a MAGA guy, he said, "What we did in canceling Jimmy Kimmel is hypocritical. We talk about free speech and then when someone says something we don't like, we cancel them. It's not consistent with our values. And I don't give a f***. You kicked me in the balls. I'll gouge out your eyes."
Some of my right-leaning viewers will be tempted to this point to accuse me of defending the left or suggesting that there's an exact equivalence between the left and right on this issue. Let me clarify. I can't deny a certain satisfaction at being proven right after years of being smeared and attacked for warning this would happen, for trying to encourage the left to stay principled, for saying that wrong is wrong, whoever is doing it. I shed no tears for Jimmy Kimmel. Moreover, I believe his employer was right to reprimand him, demand that he apologize and withdraw his irresponsible and shameful lies about the man who shot Charlie Kirk, who according to all the evidence was a trans-obsessed radicalized anti-fascist.
The problem is, however, that Kimmel was taken off the air in response to pressure from the government. According to reports and comments by its own chairman on a recent podcast, the FCC threatened Kimmel's employer into action. While many on the right were quick to push back on Attorney General Pam Bondi when she said that she was going to go after hate speech, this latest development has been widely met with endorsement. McKinnis is more blunt than most, but I know from many private conversations that the sentiment he expressed in the clip that we just played is widely shared on the right. It's especially strange having to explain that this approach is wrong to people whose entire brand is based on their passionate Christianity.
I'm neither devout nor particularly practicing, and I'd be lying if I told you I feel no anger or resentment towards those who smeared, canceled, and bullied, who dismissed instead of listening, who punished those of us who dared to disagree. But the idea that we must resist the worst urges within us seems to me the central pillar of Christ's message. If the right does indeed succumb to the voices intent on vengeance, wrath, and resentment, that would be a disaster, not just for free speech, but for all of us. The left refused to play fair for a decade, and now the right is poised to do the same. Those of us who believe in preventing a downward spiral of endless extremism will inevitably be stuck in the middle. Because, as I've said before, if that happens, it's extremism all the way down.
If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available as articles on my Substack at constant.com days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. So, head on over there now and subscribe.
The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It so often tells you what to think is happening. And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. It's the only site and app that compares coverage from across the political spectrum and highlights which stories are being ignored entirely. See for yourself at ground.news/trigonometry. Their blind spot feed is one of my favorite features. It surfaces around 20 stories a day that are being overlooked by either the left or the right. It's a simple but powerful way to track media bias in real time. Like this. NIH scientists recently published a declaration criticizing Trump's cuts to public health research. That's a major move. And yet only 2% of the coverage came from right-leaning outlets. A new study found that 2024 saw the most armed conflicts globally since 1946. A staggering statistic. Well, you would have missed it if you'd only read left-wing news sources. Ground News gives you the full picture, headlines, ownership, bias ratings, and context, so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react to what you're told. Head to ground.news/trigonometry for 40% off their unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use, and start thinking for yourself.
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