Transcription
Only 50% of young women hold a positive view of men. Fewer and fewer women are having children. They're waiting later and later. The so-called feminization of society. Is this what you had thought might happen?
Females go around with this chip on their shoulder all the time. They value the alleged creation of community and allies and empathy far more than they do the pursuit of truth.
You'd have thought the feminists would be standing up against illegal immigration. Young women are still voting for the party like the Green Party that would increase that. That's the thing I don't quite get.
It's the masculization of females because females are told, "Be like a male and your competitive spirit." A lot of females feel like they have to go around looking for reasons to feel offended and oppressed. Cardinal sin in Western societies now is alleged racism. It trumps everything else. And it doesn't help that the likes of Obama, so-called centrist Democrats, are doing photo shoots with Saram Mamani. They seem to be winning actually on tickets that are pretty radical.
Fortunately, younger people don't yet vote in the numbers that older people do, but if they start to, we're really screwed.
Heather McDonald, great pleasure to speak with you.
Fabulous being with you, Winston.
I've been reading for you for years. As I was just telling you, you've been calling out the diversity delusion, writing very dangerous literature along the way. And um, so nice though.
That's a compliment, by the way. You want literature to be dangerous.
Okay, good.
Uh, and the thing I want to talk to you about is another thing you've been talking about for a long time. Not just the top university delusion, but the feminization of society. Something you've called out for a long time. I heard you, I think it was on Tucker Carlson. We might be able to pull up a clip.
Well, the fact is it's unpyc to say so, but females do prefer marrying alpha males. We're living in a culture that is trying to obliterate alpha males and create an alpha female. There's every single cultural message is sending to males that they're toxic, and we have an outpouring of philanthropic effort, government effort to try and promote females. Managers are paid based on how many females they hire and promote. Every philanthropy is pumping out the "you go girl" women in STEM. Uh, and meanwhile, males are simply being told that they're toxic, that they're responsible for a rape culture. Uh, this isn't to excuse males, you know, checking out of the economy. But we have to be very realistic that what we are creating here is a systemic, uh, culture of contempt towards male success. And that's got to have an effect.
This is some years ago. Mhm.
Women don't, women want to marry alpha men and they don't want beta men, and society is being feminized. And you know this idea of toxic femininity.
Sorry, toxic masculinity. Toxic femininity is another thing.
Well, it is. Now, what's interesting is sometime later, maybe let's say we're, we're into the second generation of of woke, whatever this it is now, and some of the results are in. Not only is there, I would say, an actual toxic masculinity with the manosphere, not all of which is bad, but there's aspects to it that are al, they're certainly alpha males, maybe not not the alpha males that we might have wanted. But there's also something that's happened to women and actually, this is probably more shocking, which is, and there's a New Statesman polling that's just come out. I don't know if you saw this, but they show, and this is in Britain, but I think it's the same in America. Young women 18 to 30 are substantially more negative toward men than vice versa. Only 50% of young women hold a positive view of men. 72% of young men hold a positive view of women. Among women under 25, this drops to 35% positive for for women, uh, opinions on on men. At the same time, we have fewer and fewer women having children. They're waiting later and later. So, the so-called feminization of society, is this the sort of results we could have imagined? Is this what you had thought might happen?
Well, I have become a lot more educated about females than I was 30 years ago. Uh, to me, perhaps the most concerning aspect of the feminization of the university, the corporation, government, is the total disregard for the value of rationality, for free speech, for, uh, sensible cost-benefit risk analysis, and instead, government by teaching by emotion, phony empathy, uh, and an indifference to the need to pursue knowledge and the fragility of social order. We know by polling data after polling data, if you ask males and females, whether they're in academia or outside of it, which do you value most? The pursuit of knowledge or not hurting people's feelings by alleged hate speech. Uh, the males overwhelmingly favor the pursuit of truth, the use of discourse, argumentation to arrive at truth. And females, it's flipped completely. They value the puditive creation of community because they create community by excluding those that disagree with them. So it's extraordinarily totalitarian. Uh, but they value the alleged creation of community and allies and and, uh, empathy far more than they do the pursuit of truth. Western civilization has been built on the passionate desire to know, to try to unlock the secrets of the universe, of nature, of physical laws. And that occurred because of a competitive drive and a competitive hunger to understand. That those are male traits overwhelmingly. There's always exceptions, but those are male traits. And with females in power, we're going to get a lot less of that. And in fact, we are quickly unwinding the progress that we've made thanks to the western male.
Hm. So this is specifically in the domain of power though, right? Because firstly, they are sweeping generalizations and even I'm like, trying to think, wow, that's that sounds quite harsh against women.
Yeah.
Uh, but obviously women are absolutely fundamental to society, not especially in the realms of care, of childing, absolutely family, they are the lynchpins. Uh, this more women have, despite what I said at the beginning of this conversation, more women have children than men. It's in a sense, women who are pushing evolution. Um, but perhaps I'm, I'm stepping back too far. But women play an important part of that. And but you're sort of saying, you have argued that the traits that were good for that realm are not so good in other realms. Is that, is that right?
Exactly. Exactly. And sorry, one has to generalize. There are statistical averages and if you know statistics, and of course you do, I'm not, uh, attributing this ignorance to you. You know that individual instances that contradict a statistical norm don't undermine that norm. Uh, one can say on average, uh, males are taller than women. If you come up with a 6'5" female who's shorter than the 5'8" male, that doesn't mean that the norm isn't true. And obviously, there are females who excel and exceed many, many males in their desire for capacity for hard-edged rational thinking. But the averages clearly show there's, uh, in the field of psychology for decades, there's been five psychological traits, the big five as they're known. Um, and one of them is neuroticism. Now, we had in 2016, a very emblematic and and prophetic instance of a poor, uh, computer scientist working for Google who wrote a 10-page letter that he circulated to the Google workforce saying, pushing back against the assumption that was universal, not just at Google, but also across Silicon Valley, that the lack of 50/50 50 representation in high-tech has got to be due to discrimination against competitively qualified female engineers. So Google was going around, you know, doing its diversity initiatives, hiring on double standards, uh, because that's the only allowable explanation. If there isn't proportional representation of any given allegedly oppressed groups, whether it's females or blacks or Hispanics, it's got to be due to discrimination because we can't acknowledge group differences. So James Deore, this Google engineer, wrote a memo that said, "Well, maybe, uh, females on average are interested in other types of fields. Maybe on average, uh, they're not the ones, and we can look, see this, that are at 2:00 AM coding in the computer science lab surrounded by a bunch of cold pizza husks, because they have that drive. They would rather be doing other things." And Deore, to his, uh, eternal predition, mentioned the higher rate of females on the scale of neuroticism. People freaked out. You're calling females neurotic. But neuroticism is one of those traits. It means risk aversion, uh, a greater sense of vulnerability, a greater fragility, a worry, you know, concern that for decades, females have scored much higher than males on.
So that is a documentary.
Useful traits for to child wearing.
Exactly. Exactly. A lot of this has evolved over millennia, you know, millions of years. And now we have said we discredit, uh, child rearing. You know, women have been told since the 1960s that their proper place was competing to make partner at at Covington and Burling, Paul Weiss. These are these elite New York law firms, uh, you know, spending their 12 hours a day drafting interrogatories in in corporate litigation rather than, uh, being the using their maternal instincts to create a home that is lovely, that is beautiful, uh, where children feel nurtured, uh, and and all of that has now been completely disparaged.
So this is what I want to get to. It's not how the feminization of society has affected men. I'd like to come to that. Nor indeed how the feminization of society has affected society, but specifically how the feminization of society has affected young women. Because it doesn't, it's not necessarily apparent to me that women have become more feminine. Their politics are way more totalitarian. I mean, they're hard left now, increasingly hard left. And in Britain, the Green Party is supported by young women.
They are, uh, I don't think they're explicitly communist, but they advocate for Leninist policies against property rights, for example.
And women support this. And women's a tendency to o to support open borders, um, more than more than men. Men, Hamas, Hamas, uh, women have a tendency to support these things which actually might hurt women more than anyone, as we've seen with, let's say, the grooming gangs.
What's curious to me also is that if it, if society is being feminized, then wouldn't this mean that women will have more children, because it's, it's inducive to those things. But on the contrary, women are having fewer and fewer.
So that's the kind of, uh, is that a paradox?
Well, first of all, we have to be careful with terms. You could say society's being feminized in terms of the decline of rationality, the rise of completely insane public policy based on a failure to cost-benefit analyze things like with COVID. You know, we're going to shut down the entire economy, uh, put millions of small business owners permanently out of work in order to allegedly, as the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, said at the time, "If we save just one life, it's worth it." I'm sorry, that's not a valid, uh, way of of measuring things. Um, so you have the rise of irrationality in the public sphere. But with regards to females themselves, you could almost, in this isn't the proper term, but in one sense, and I'm, it's a very specific one that I'm going to explain, it's the masculization of females. Because what I've observed and written about is the hysteria around so-called campus rape. That was really big under President Obama. And you had the Obama, uh, White House drafting these rules for sexual assault hearings on college campuses that were a complete travesty. The male didn't have any opportunity to confront his accuser, to cross-examine. He wasn't given sort of advanced notice of the charges against him. Uh, and and he could be condemned of sex for sexual assault on preponderance of evidence, which is 51%. So it's a very, very low standard. Um, but this hysteria came out of the idea that there was this epidemic of campus rape, which was absurd. If that was the case, you know, the the famous statistic was one in four undergraduate females will be raped at some time during their college career. If that were the case, you would have seen a stampede to create more single-sex colleges that mothers could send their daughters to without walking into a level of sexual violence that aspires to be like an African civil war when, you know, rape is being used as a war instrument.
It's preposterous. Instead, females keep applying to colleges. At University of Virginia, which was one of the, you know, classic rape campuses because it had a lot of fraternities. Every Saturday night, the females still go trooping down Rugby Road to go to the frat parties where they're allegedly going to be drugged and, you know, while they're unconscious, be raped. What was really going on there was voluntary drunken hookups that the females would engage in and the next day would regret. And they would then convert their regrets because here's another example of the innate, uh, emotional differences between males and females kicking in. Males are evolutionarily designed to propagate as widely as possible, to spread their seed as widely as possible. And they frankly, I'm sure, again, I'm generalizing and I'm know there's many males that do not conform to this, but their reaction after the fact to kitis is not all that emotionally deep. Whereas females who have much more to invest in their egg and its protection and nurturing, do after intercourse feel some a pang, an emotional pang with the male. And that they'd see the guy they just had a drunken one-night stand with be completely oblivious to them in in chemistry class the next day. And out of sort of vengeance, they would call it rape. But what was going on there in part was the message that the male and female libido are indistinguishable. That females should seek non-committed sex, casual sex with as much abandon as males and should be as indifferent to it after the fact, which violated their biological natures. And again and again, females are told, "Be like a male and your competitive spirit. You know, your your worth is going to be measured by your professional accomplishments." And females go around with this chip on their shoulder all the time. You know, we've got the, you've got this in the UK, too. I'm sure that females make 74% on the dollar of for every male, which is completely a phony statistic. It doesn't take into account, uh, the hours worked and whatnot, but but a lot of females feel like they have to have some sort of one-upmanship with males and go around looking for reasons to feel offended and oppressed. And and that to me is the height of delusion because I'm in a lot better position than you are in this society as a female than as a male. I get opportunities that you are going to be completely denied.
So whilst you've been arguing about the feminization of society, there's been the masculization of femininity.
Right. Up to a point.
Up to a point. Point because it's, well, the point is it hasn't really affected the, uh, the valuing of of rationality and it hasn't affected, uh, the the drive to create. I mean, I,
You're very rational, or are you, are you saying you're an anomaly?
I don't, I wish I were more rational. Uh, I'm not going to judge how rational I am, but I am perfectly prepared to cop to the what I regard as the, uh, unfortunate aspects of females. Whether I have the fortunate ones, I don't know. But but you know, the, the, we're sp, we're taught, we're taught again to see any disparity as proof of discrimination. So if there's not a lot of females in any individual field, it's got to be discrimination. I have spent the last year or so observing the photos of the AI entrepreneur tech startup people. There is no barrier to females. In fact, females, as far as getting venture capital, they are welcomed with open arms. We saw this with the fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, who came up with a phony medical device that was going to cure a liver or kidney disease. People were throwing millions, if not billions of dollars at her because they were so happy to finally have a female tech entrepreneur that they could back. George Schultz was backing her. It was just unbelievable. She had an honor roll of of the VCs in Silicon Valley and and the political elite. So there are no barriers to females. You look at the newspaper, it's all male. It's all male. It's incredible the people that are starting these tech companies now. It's not a legacy company, they are males because they have, it's the same drive that, you know, led Vasco Dama to try and figure out how to navigate, uh, around the Atlantic Ocean, that led to the exploration, the circumnavigation of the globe.
So you're saying it's different in tech than it is in AI?
No, it's the same. It's, it's driven. Females are just not pushing themselves into that world. There are no barriers. There are no gatekeepers.
All right. Okay. I see what you're saying. There's no gatekeepers. The argument is always there's gatekeepers that are discriminating against female.
I collect natural experiments of gatekeeperless environments, environments without a gatekeeper. So, you can't blame the gatekeeper. And I've, I've invoked this before. The the perfect example of this is Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which is anonymous crowdsourced.
It's right. Well, that,
Yeah.
That's a different story. But let's just look at the gender issue. Um, nobody prevents anybody from editing a Wikipedia entry. It's blind. There's no barriers. And to Wikipedia Foundation's utter dismay and horror, about 90% of the editors are male. Nobody's keeping out the females. They just don't have that same drive for facts, for documentation. And even the putitively female entries on like Manolo Blahnik stiletto heels, they're very short, they're very thin compared to an obscure battle, uh, in the Civil War. So,
So, just to color in, illustrate your point a little further, is I think I just saw an article that now in America, for the third time in American history, women are getting have more of the jobs than men. And that's something to do with, I think, healthcare boom. But it is the case that it's, it's in terms of employment. This doesn't mean there's non-employment work, you know, let's say like care, as I keep going back to. Uh, it's, it's the bars, the to entry aren't there like they were before. But if I can go back a step to your point about rape on campus.
Yeah.
So let's take for the sake of argument that those students were in fact being raped and it wasn't, as you describe, uh, regret and sort of repackaged or or kind of psyched themselves into thinking it's something else. It's not necessarily the case that they would act differently. Now, that might sound a bit weird, but in Britain, we have time and time again, case and case again, stories, uh, only this last week, there's been at least three that I've seen of illegal immigrants coming and raping British women. And you'd have thought the feminists would be standing up against illegal immigration. They'd be standing up against what's going on around the asylum seeker hotels. And indeed, some of them are. There are a handful of them. They're branded as far right, as as always. But if you look at the data, young women are still voting for the party like the Green Party that would increase that.
That's the thing I don't quite get. That's the thing I want to unlock with you. That, that, that contradiction. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. It's just irrational and it shows that there is a hierarchy of left-wing values, as there's, of course, a hierarchy of conservative values. We know that a more left-wing podcast would have sort of a mirror image, I'm sure, of what we're talking about. But, um, it is, it's a total failure of the ability to think systematically. M.
Um, and it's the cardinal sin in Western societies now is alleged racism. It trumps everything else. It trumps murder. I recently wrote about a, the New York Times's coverage of a absolutely horrific, uh, uh, lethal assault committed by a Haitian immigrant in the United States. Brutal. And for the Times, they ignored the murder until Trump posted about it and made an, uh, immigration point that we need to end the program that is bringing all these Haitians in. And for the New York Times, the sin was Trump's, Trump's alleged racism, not the murder. Uh, and so for these females who are voting continuously for open borders, that's because I, there's, there's a lot going on there. Um, part of it is, I mean, what if you want to put the best possible light on it, you would say they're compassionate towards the underprivileged of the world and they want to share widely the benefits of Western civilization. And so, we're not going to say, "We're here, we're going to keep you out." That's the best possible, um, interpretation. One that I think is probably more accurate is that the West has been overrun now by an ideology of self-destruction. The West is the only civilization on the planet today that is determined to both erase itself demographically and two, to discredit its unparalleled achievements and to exaggerate its common faults.
I, I don't know if you've,
This is the progressives you're talking about.
Yeah, the progressives. They dominate, they dominate Western elite thinking. So,
Still now, still in Trump 2.0, you, you still feel that? I mean, there's been such a pushback now against that sort of ideology. Sure, there'll be institutions that still, uh, universities, presumably, that that's the case. But there's such a huge ecosystem now that have have have risen with Trump in opposition to that. It's almost like part of America is finding its confidence again. When Charlie Kirk was horrifically murdered, look at the funeral service for him at that stadium down, I think it was in Phoenix. You just think, of course, that was for a very specific thing, but you think these are actually people who Charlie Kirk loved America, loved the West. He represents a big movement. And so it seems to me that there is actually a pushback against that. We're in, we're in a position where although the progressive anti-Western ideology continues, not least here in New York with Mandani, but there is actually a growing confidence, a pro-Western confidence.
Well, um, first of all, I would say America is still part of Europe, and so it all kind of averages out. So Europe, there's, I am, I follow with extreme interest and admiration the conservative parties in Europe, whether it's the Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, or Chagga in Portugal, or you've got now a variety of them, Reform UK in Britain, Austria, Holland, they're everywhere. Nevertheless, uh, the elites, particularly in Europe, are completely still in in the saddle. Well, I agree with you. EU, I mean, what the, the fall of Orban is going to unleash, and already has, just an extraordinary acceleration of the elite control over discourse. But I would, my, the, if you want an American perspective, just as I sort of look for hope in in Europe when it comes to the education system, because I think that you guys are at least marginally still, your standards are still a little stronger than they are in the United States with regards to the expectations of knowledge on the part of students. I can understand you wanting to see the United States as ground for real hope. What it feels like to me here is that this is a very temporary change, and that all of the same players are still there. They have not been dislodged, and it's going to come roaring back.
You think so?
When the Democrats, absolutely. I, at the start of Trump, I, I sort of toyed with the idea that four years of being led by a president who was not cowed by the race hustle, who was not going to fall down and play dead if somebody called him a racist, whose basic attitude was, "I don't give a damn. You know, you can call me a racist all you want. It doesn't scare me." That that would give courage to the people who are being, their lives, their their educations are being blighted by this fantasmic conceit of systemic racism. That maybe this will have a change. And certainly, if we had 12 years of a Republican, uh, leadership in Washington, then I think you could hope for real change. At this point, though, uh, the universities are are still there. The faculty is still there. The media is still there. Uh, and so I,
And it doesn't help that the likes of Obama, the so-called centrist Democrats, are doing photo shoots with Saram Mamani, right?
Who's very much socialist, you know, Gaza type. So, which way the Democrats go, and they seem to be winning actually on tickets that are pretty radical, right? And the younger generation is very different. And, uh, it's, it's, it's very different from the traditional Democratic party. And fortunately, younger people don't yet vote in the numbers that older people do. But if they start to, we're really screwed. Because they are the closest to the universities, and the universities here and in the UK are the source of this anti-Western hatred that has been the dominant ethos in academia now since the 1960s, progressively worse with each decade. I'd like to pick up on one thing, the anti-racism, or rather your point that being called a racist is the worst possible thing. And part of Trump's power was he didn't give a damn.
Yeah.
And that, that gave people, um, confidence. And obviously the power of being called racist, and that goes back to the Second World War. I think it's just since then that's been the most potent thing. It's worse to be a racist than anything. It's worse to be Hitler than it is to even be the devil, as Jonathan Pio came on the show and described. Um, there's a new generation of young men, and I alluded this earlier, alluded to this earlier with the manosphere.
Right.
And the, whatever the manosphere is, a very broad term, and it includes, uh, perfectly like apolitical sort of health and fitness gurus, and then it is more extreme. It's not just your Andrew Tates, but you're Nick Fuentes and the Groper movement. And
I think part of Fuentes's power or appeal, perhaps, is that he doesn't care
about being called any of these things. He's been called racist his whole life because he was brought up in this woke society that you've been calling out for years.
And he's been told his whole life that he is racist. And simultaneously, by being called racist, he is presumably learned the lesson that it's okay to be racist to each other because it was racist to call him that. And and now he's unapologetically racist.
And he will say he loves Hitler. He loves Stalin. All of these radical things. Perhaps it's a troll. Perhaps it's just to wind it up. But his popular polarity grows every time he does that because it shows that he doesn't care. And it seems to me that the groperism isn't nothing. That exists. And so this is one of the other bastard children of the feminized society that you've been calling out. And it seems to me that maybe for that generation, that generation who have no link to the Second World War, it's, it's going to be a different, uh, story. Do you, do you see what I'm saying?
Could be. And it's, it's maybe a battle or a race between the universities to be able to continue brainwashing young people into a hatred of Western civilization and a self-destructive guilt complex, and enough people that are saying, "We're not going to accept that. You know, we can see with our own eyes the real reason for disparities in the criminal justice system or in academia. Uh, and you, you like Trump, you can't scare us with that." So, it's hard to know. And, you know, one wants to know the numbers that are following Fuentes and and other, uh, iconic classes, a neutral term, uh, of of those people that are seemingly immune from fear at being called racist. So how, what do they really represent? We, we don't quite know. But it's true, I do hear when I speak to college students that
There is a lot of support for this. And partly, you know, it's maybe it's the usual stupid adolescent reflex to reject authority. Sometimes that's a good thing, like once in 24 hours is a good thing, like Tiananmen Square. It's a good thing for young people to reject the Chinese Communist Party. By and large, though, they should be a little more circumspect and and wait until they can try and figure out whether there's values in the traditions that they're, you know, throwing off as as just bigoted and whatnot.
But that's what they're doing. They are rejecting.
They're rejecting the, they're rejecting woke. So it's the same instinct of doing what is against the establishment.
So how long that lasts, I don't know. And and whether they get co-opted somehow. But it is,
That's a, that is a, a positive sign. And,
Wait, what's a positive sign?
If, if they're going to continue, uh, rejecting it. Now, whether they're rejecting it enough, rejecting woke for woke, woke for troll, Nazi. Well, that's the issue. And and whether they're, it would be good if they channeled their cynical, um, reflexive rebellion into more public speech and public action in favor of color-blind standards, gender-blind standards, and a support for Western civilization. Uh, obviously, you don't do that by minimizing Hitler, but it would be good if, in addition to recognizing the horrific evils of of Germany, to also recognize the horrific evils of communism and the China and the Soviet Union. Uh, so that would be a contribution that maybe they could make, but not at the expense of of, uh, trivializing, trivializing, uh, World War II and and Hitler's role in it.
Yeah. So do you remember when you said the alpha male comments?
I don't actually. I don't. But is this,
It was, it was, I remember there was a time when people were talking about, uh, that term of women wanting to to, uh, always move up in their status with marriage. So I'm, I, I, I have a vague recollection of that conversation with Tucker.
Well, I don't think you're wrong. I don't think it's a wrong, uh, comment, but it's, it's just curious now the type of alpha males we've got,
Which is maybe not what we quite imagined. And I'm not sure that they're necessarily
The alpha males that women would want, right?
And I'm not also entirely clear that they're having that much sex anyway. I mean, the data is afraid. And India did a really good book on this, and we, we covered with her, is that that generation having much less sex,
Which again, that's not a masculineization, is it? It's, is it, it's not quite feminization, but the, the result of increased fe, increasingly feminized society has been a society that is, um, it's, it's kind of, uh, it's not quite feminized, it's something else. It's a peculiar place. Yeah.
Well, I'm not going to, I'm not going to ru the absence of premarital sex. Like, I don't think it's an end in itself for college students to be drinking themselves blott and having a whole series of one-night stands during college. I think they should all be studying for their chemistry exam on Monday, to be perfectly honest. Uh, and and shut up and stop talking. We don't want to hear from you. You know, I think college students should be seen and not heard because they know nothing and their views are worthless. Uh, and I don't like this whole idea now that conservatives don't have the courage to say this is what you should study. You know, there should be an absolutely inflexible mandated core curriculum. And instead, their their way of pushing back against the left-wing universities say, "Well, we need more dialogue and we need more critical thinking," not realizing that critical thinking is a term of the left.
Um, and we need, one of the phrases that really makes me want to throw up is, um, uh, what is it? Something difficult dialogues or something like that. Oh, oh, it's awful. Um, and and so really, what they should be doing in college is studying. And it's not the fact that they've got time to get themselves so drunk and and do everything other than study, just speaks to what we already knew, which is the amazing decline of expectations in colleges. So sex in itself, premarital sex, I don't give a damn. Uh, the fact that people are not having, they're not marrying and they're not having children, when they marry to the same extent, and they're deferring marriage. Those are very complicated issues. And I,
Which presumably you are not happy about.
I'm, I'm not, it's not my main issue. Like, that the natal movement is not my main issue. Uh, and,
It's not your main issue, like not something you focus on or not something you're concerned even about.
Well, there's, there's sort of an overlap there. I, I could, I guess I could get concerned about it, but, um, as as far as my analysis of it, I, I would have been inclined to attribute it to feminism and the fact that females have been told that they need to spend their 20s competing with males in these sort of soulless corporate workplaces. Although I take that back. I don't want to, I've, having just been studying the, uh, grotesque dialogue that went up on the New York Times website three days before the assassination attempt, third assassination attempt on Trump, which is these three members of the opinion elite spouting the most vacuous, uh, Marxist slogans about, you know, corporate greed and profits being theft from the from the masses. And what I don't want to say at this point, I want to say anything negative about corporations, even, you know, soulless corporations. But, uh,
I, I think to deal with some of the problems that,
Anyway, I would have attributed to feminization. But I look at South Korea, I look at the Asian countries. They are not feminist countries. Japan is not particularly feminist, to its credit, God bless it. But, but nevertheless, people are really not having children there. So something else, in addition at least, is going on, which is that, um, modernity, it, it just may turn out that if you give human beings a choice of leading an extremely cushy consumer product-filled life, they're sort of going to decide, "I like this. I don't want the burden of children." I don't know because it's a global phenomenon, and feminism isn't yet a global phenomenon. So it's, it's strange what's happening. I don't quite understand it.
But that is the corporations who have done that. It is the corporations who are, you can see it through social media. They're the ones who have atomized our youth by giving them all these things that they think they want and think that they love. But we can see it's quite clear to us or anyone who's lived a couple of days longer that it's not great for children to pursue those atomized life that they should be pursuing family, community, and investing in, uh, long-term things. So in that sense, calling out the corporations is a good. I think I think part of the reason why that the left is doing well in certain parts of the West, like London and Britain, and here in New York, is because of these corporations. Not entirely this part, partly his ideology as well. But these corporations have done a number. They're running away. It's woke capitalism. So there, that seems important, don't you think?
No, I, I would ag, you have a point possibly with regards to this latest development in the corporate world, which is the social media, and the lawsuit recently that was won by a a teenager in California claiming that the algorithms in social media had been deliberately designed to addict young people. Um, there you would have an argument that this is some kind of deliberate conspiracy and and a malignant force on the part of corporations to try and brainwash or control consumers. But you speak, and your broader critique to me sounds like frankly, sort of warmed-over leftism. Because I think, uh, and and I didn't grow up as a conservative, and so I have those instincts myself. Liberalism is the default ideology for young people unless they think their way out of it. But I would say corporations are,
Okay.
I'm, I'm not going to, I'm not going to play victimology with regards to all of us. We are making the demand. They are meeting a demand for consumers. I don't blame them. It is true. They they generated the, uh, shallow youth culture, because for the first time, stupid ignorant adolescence had enough spending power because capitalism had been so fabulously successful that we were so a wash in resources that parents could give their their teenage children their own source of spending power. And the corporations, for sure, came up with pop culture, with rock music, with, with, uh, the entire panoply of pseudo-revolutionary adolescent products of of consumer culture. But the fault is with us. We don't have to buy it. Uh, and and so I'm not going to say, "Oh, woe is me. I'm I'm the victim of these evil corporations." Parents should be, um, deciding what their children read and watch and and surrounding them with high culture and beauty and not simply delegate that to the to the admitted detritus of consumer culture. I'm not a, I don't consume much of it myself, but but I have to admit that at the same time that that corporations are putting out dreck, the Western civilization has also made it possible for YouTube to serve as a cornucopia of access to high culture.
Absolutely. Okay, let's find a more extreme example to play this out, cuz I, I am trying to sort of examine market failures here, cuz I, this is probably a difference between us, cuz I do think that there are examples where, and maybe this makes me a raging lefty, but I'm, I'm happy to be challenged and you can challenge me.
Um, but there must be some industries where it's the market's doing its thing, but that doesn't mean that it's doing its thing as a good thing. Let's take porn.
Right.
Right.
Now, porn is illegal in certain states in this country. Good point.
And, uh, just your argument, if you were to apply it to the porn industry, would be like, well, if the producers and the directors want to make porn films and they want to distribute it to whoever they want, why shouldn't they distribute it to whoever they want? Good point. And actually, no, there's problems when you let the market do whatever it wants, and it can, it can do serious damage to society. And why not legalize heroin? Let the market do what it wants. Legalize marijuana. I mean, marijuana is being legalized. There are limits. Now, perhaps you and I differ on when it comes to social media. I think social media, yeah, sure, everyone has a choice. Everyone has a choice not to buy heroin, but if you let things go unfettered, there are consequences. And that's kind of what I'm, I'm sort of getting at there.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, so, yeah, this is a very complicated question. I, I don't have at my fingertips, sort of neutral principles to try and distinguish. My instincts are totally with you. Um, I, I would absolutely regulate to the point of nullity, uh, pornography.
I do not believe in legalizing drug use, uh, or sales. So you agree the free markets actually in excess. I would say, I would say in a limited number of ways, but it gets just much more difficult, uh, in in other things. I think that don't have a history of tradition of human beings realizing that these things are very inimical. And also, like, I'm sort of a foodie, you know, I believe in cooking. I don't eat junk food. Um, I completely agree with the critique of of big food.
And I'm just stunned again, but but one has to also be in awe of the productivity of Western capitalism. My my supermarket here in Manhattan, which is really rundown, it's a not a fancy supermarket. It, I hate it. It's chaotic, but the, it is filled, bursting to the gills of all of these fast food crap everywhere. You can't turn around in an aisle and there's another row of some sort of packaged cookie or chip or whatever. It's everywhere. Um,
And so I'm not in favor of people eating that stuff and getting fat. I think it's, it's a violation of the human form, uh, to have people walking around that have no shape any longer. But but there too, I, I would certainly not allow food stamps and I don't know what they're called in Britain, but you know, um, the government passes out massive amounts of no strings attached cash to people to buy anything they want. I would absolutely limit it to healthy food. And in fact, what I would rather do is not give them, not give the so-called poor the option of buying it all. I say, if you really are hungry, if this is a food emergency, we've got a lot of excess cheese and dried milk and, uh, other staples. Take the food, but we're not going to allow you to buy it on crap junk food. So, I would be a paternalist there. But in other areas, I just think it's tough and it's,
But this, okay, so I think this applies to because of course this conversation has been about the feminization of society, and the reason why this specific conversation is relevant to the greater topic that we're discussing is because social media has been the weapon by which the society has been feminized. It is been the tool to do it. It's how it's been these ideologies have been propagated, not just institutions you've, you've mentioned. So, given that it's a bit like the, the fast foods, you know, in abundance without restrictions, or maybe that's a good thing. Maybe actually, seeing as I use the term weapon, maybe that's a more useful thing. You wouldn't allow under 18s or I don't know what the law is here on gun ownership. It's different, right, state to state, I imagine. But,
That there's something going on with social media. I think it's, it's part of that is that we're giving loaded guns to young children. Look at the increase in suicide rates. Young women having, uh, gender, or not just young women, but I think it's predominately young women, but gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia.
Gender dysphoria. I'm just going to interject. Excuse me.
That's a real disease. What's going on with the vast majority of the trans claimants in high school is is completely a fad. This is a social,
Contagion. Contagion. That is not real.
And what's the means of contagion?
Yeah. Okay. So, I said I'm, I'm the social media, I would say, is a different issue.
Okay.
Um,
This is, but again, you're giving people what they want, and it is no surprise to me that females are particularly,
Uh, you mean the corporations are giving them what they want.
Yeah. And but but the females that they're that obsessed with their appearance and their fitting into the peer group, that is not surprising. Fe, that is the female, uh, on average instinct to be very concerned about their own status within a peer group, uh, and their their appearance, keeping up with fashion. The entire sex object industry. We're supposed to feel like, oh, these females are being forced to go around in, you know, have their breast implants and butt implants and whatnot and wear low-cut dresses and wear stiletto heels. It's all being forced upon them. Corporations. No, it's their demand. The corporations are meeting a demand. So, uh, these are female instincts that social media makes more accessible. But I don't think it social media created.
But so going back to your earlier point, is you don't want to kind of poo-poo the the corporations. I, I actually think it's important that the corporations are poo-pooed. And my argument for that is that the, they have played a role in this. And if we don't deal with those problems, your Mamdani's and your Palanskis in my country are kind of running away with it because we're not prepared to deal with those same issues. Just because it's a traditionally a left-wing issue to call out corporations doesn't mean corporations shouldn't be called out. I think,
Well,
And if they're not called out, they run away with that narrative. But maybe I'm, uh,
Well, everything flips. You know, every power that we want to exercise, and I use "we" in brackets, I'm not assuming your politics, I'm not assuming listeners' politics, but whatever group you are, if you're in, if you're in power at the moment, and you believe that you have access to the truth and you want to exercise it to the max, you have to be prepared for the fact that it's going to flip. The other side is going to hold it. You know, this is my, just, I'm just astounded by the
ignorance of academia to realize, okay, they want to declare uh challenges to racial preferences, hate speech, and, you know, causing harm to vulnerable populations. Uh, well, how would they think if a conservative got up there and said, "We think that uh, you know, post-colonial discourse creates harm and we want to restrict that." Same here.
Um, you know, we've already seen you got the left in power and instead of saying to corporations, no more social media, they'll say you have to promote green energy. We already saw this with the ESG, so-called ESG investment, environmental, social, I forget what the G was, governance, right? So if, if, if we are going to dictate to corporations what they can and cannot do, just be aware that that tool, which has already been taken up, you know, it's already been taken up, will be used to make sure that corporations don't use fossil fuels, you know, or or do not put out advertising that is insufficiently sensitive to trans identity or to female empowerment. So I, I don't have an answer to that.
But, well, we've gone through a cycle of that, I think, which is that, uh, sort of DEI and like say, world capitalism had run away with it in the corporations in America, which, by the way, another argument against corporations, uh, but they, they had done a tremendous damage, uh, with that. And Trump 2.0 undid that immediately and made some, some of that DEI stuff illegal, rightly in my opinion.
Um, but then to come to your second point is, is which I think is about principles, right? How do we, how do we politically work by principles that we hope will be maintained when the other people have power? And what's super strange to me, both in this country and in my, in back in Britain, is that neither side are playing principles anymore so much. And I think from my perspective, it was that the Democrats cheated for so long, and we really saw this with the censorship, and they really owned things like what was then Twitter, right? That the response to that is, well, you haven't been playing fair. Why should we play fair? And then there's, there's been a response in different domains, I think, on the right and left. And, and now we're seeing the younger generation going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, that let's say the group is, they're like, why should we play by the rules? No one's playing by the rules. We just want to win.
Mhm. And it's almost like an inverse of what was maybe happening in 17th century England, where there you, you were chiseling away at liberty, sort of principles to share. Now we're chiseling away at those principles towards winning. That's the, the unspiraling I'm seeing. But maybe, uh, no, it's absolutely true. And we see this with Trump in lawfare, uh, you, you know, using the power of his office again, directing the Justice Department to do certain prosecutions, going after law firms that have are politically left-wing. Uh, and I, I'm enough of a girl in this that I don't have the stomach for that endless tit for tat. I think that, uh, that conservatives should take a high road. But it's, it's, it's absolutely the case that you get completely symmetrical flips. So one is in favor of a filibuster when it's in your favor and when it's not. Um, redistricting, you know, conservatives are now up in arms about California redistricting itself to create voting, uh, gerry. Yeah. Areas that are sympathetic to Democrats. Virginia has done the same thing. But Trump started in Texas. So it all depends who has power. It's a very difficult thing to exercise neutral principles.
But I want to go back to the beginning of your question, um, when you said that you frankly are going to embrace a certain amount of anti-corporate rhetoric or politics. I wonder this all the time when I hear that from the left, when you use the phrase corporations, that you know, they're doing some bad things. Do you specifically mean the legal structure of a corporation, which is it's owned by shareholders and it has a board of directors which oversees the direct management? And so you have, uh, liability that is distributed. Is it the, is it the corporate form that you agree with, or is corporations just shorthand for business? In which case, what's your alternative? If you think that corporations are a problem, do you want to get rid of for-profit capitalism, or, or do you just think that you want it in terms of, and, and this is kind of not fair because I'm not even sure that, you know, legal distinctions, this would you have limited partnerships instead of corporations? What is it? And, and again, it's unfair because I'm using you to a certain extent as just a stand-in for a much broader left-wing discourse. But what is it that you think is wrong here? The profit motive, or,
No, I, I'll tell you, business. So, I'm not anti-corporation. I'm certainly not anti-business. I'm extremely pro-free market. But in basic terms, I believe that all markets have failures at some point. A clear, a really simple example of that would be monopoly and monopoly power.
Mhm. This is explained by the Pareto distribution. But essentially, eventually everything accumulates. When you play the game Monopoly, eventually someone wins the whole board. For a society to function, you can't have that. You have to everyone at least being under the illusion that they can participate in the game, cuz you want them playing the game. And so in, in that sense, even if it's, they need to, well, yeah, so let's take that one aspect. I'm not against corporations, but I think corporations, like markets, have susceptibility to for corruption. And so it might be like we saw with DEI and wokeism coming into the corporations. They were driving so much the feminization that you've been writing about for years. That's a problem. And the reason they even have that power is because they're so huge and so large that they're able to dictate things in a way that people don't have a power really to oppose because there aren't other options. Let's say it might not be a monopoly we're in, but it might be a duopoly, and it might be that, okay, we could choose that corporation or that corporation for my healthcare or whatever it is, but you don't have a third option that's not corrupted by whatever ideologies. And so for me, I'm not against the structure. I'm not, I'm certainly not against free markets, trust me. But I do think that if the right, if the free market people do not identify the problems with capitalism where it's gone wrong, that is an open goal, as we say in in Britain, for political oppositions to come in with Marxism, to come in with socialism, to come with things that are just going to destroy the society. So I think it's really important to identify those problems. Is that a fair answer to your question or not?
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely fair answer. And I guess again, I am not speaking as somebody who grew up as a free marketer. I was ignorant. I, I just was not that politically, uh, oriented for for much of my childhood, young adulthood. And so I'm kind of coming late, late to these debates. I would say, first of all, corruption is a very loaded term. I mean, the, I, I don't think corporations are corrupt.
Not necessarily. To compared to real corruption that we're massively importing from the third world into the West.
Sure. And I would also say that this sounds naive, perhaps, but in fact, and, and this is kind of part of the free market dogma that I'm just going to parrot back, but I, I've sort of started to agree with it, that their power comes from their ability to satisfy consumer demands. So, we can go back and forth. You know, who creates the consumer demands? Is it just an artifact of corporate designs on unwitting, helpless cons, you know, citizens, or is it something that that is meeting something maybe people didn't know they wanted, but given the option, yeah, I'll take the damn smartphone, you know, this is great, it improves my life. Um, and as far as bigness, this again, I'm just going to channel an argument that's out there, and I don't think neither you or I are particularly expert in the issues of antitrust and how best to to regulate corporations, but there is an argument that say the Wall Street Journal will make or Steve Moore, which is that the effort to, uh, just say bigness is bad, and we're going to maybe artificially limit the size of Amazon or other massively successful companies. Uh, that unless you can really show that they have exercised illegitimate power to create a monopoly, why are we punishing them? You know, Amazon gets bigger and bigger and wealthier and wealthier because it continues to come up with extraordinarily ingenious ways to lower costs for consumers. It isn't the case, you know, that the traditional argument against monopolies is that it results in price increases because there's no competition. That's not the way our big corporations seem to work. And, uh, in one sense, you're punishing success. Now, again, I don't claim to be an expert on an on on antitrust doctrine, so I, I know there's immediate responses to that, but just to push back against what you're saying, um, I, I think that to, to focus attention on it, it's all the corporation's fault rather than that, like, um, paving the ground for a Mandani. To me, the problem with that with the more free is that it, your argument echoes, anticipates, or, you know, mimics the Mandani anti-corporate. So I would rather fight Mandani with a stronger, more articulate explanation of the beauty of free markets and trade and the, and again, you're not, you're not opposed to that, I know, but the, the courage, insight, creativity, sheer, uh, guts and persistence that it takes to create a thriving, growing concern, to be in there, face rejection by consumers, face failure, face capricious governments. I am just very grateful that every object on this table was brought to me both by present creators and by centuries of development in the West of science, technology, materials, engineering, and, and everything else.
Mhm. I, I, I think we're, we're splitting hairs a little bit. It's more, I think where we're maybe differing is tactics, right? Because you're sort of saying you don't want to, you don't want to seed the ground to Mandani the problems of free marketism, whereas we probably agree that there are problems with, there are market failures. We've established that. We agree that there are some market failures.
Some, like environmental, uncontrolled, you know. Even with Amazon, right? Because I would say Amazon, net good. It's reduced prices for the masses. It's made life unbelievably practical. But it has destroyed retail. It's destroyed brick and mortar and main streets across America. That's absolutely true. And this has been the case in Britain. I don't know about America. But absolutely it can, it can get cheap labor and treat its staff like crap, and they haven't got much they can do in contest. So there's definitely problems, even if it's a net good for society.
I know. Yeah. And, but I don't know what you do about that. You know, it's the problem is, and again, this is not my field, but once you start to regulate, it can easily become overregulation. The regulators don't know what they're doing. Again, I'm a latecomer to Friedrich Hayek, uh, but I think there's an intuitive plausibility to his argument that what is involved in creating this cornucopia of affluence and prosperity, and we are all affluent and prosperous, is a billion different decisions being taken at very specific, uh, price points, supply and demand, that no regulator can possibly understand or or properly control without itself creating unintended consequences. So I don't have the answer. I don't, I mean, these are very painful tradeoffs. And I am, uh, by nature, a conservationist and environmentalist. And so, and coming out of California and seeing the destruction of traditional California with its ranches and eucalyptus, uh, you know, plains and, and forest groves and live oaks. It, it pains me to see what I would call a lefty would call overdevelopment, but what somebody who wants a house would call finally, you know, you're building enough housing. So, I'm, I completely am with you on the, those tradeoffs. And again, I agree with you about the decimation of stores, but I don't blame Amazon for that. It's the people who are so damn lazy that they would rather just sit at home and buy everything online. It's cheaper. And, and human beings, I think, are biologically wired to get the cheapest good. It's a very interesting thing. I, it's almost like conservation of energy. You know, that we're wired maybe to eat a lot of stuff because we were used to famines that lasted for several years. Uh, and, and maybe we're wired in the same way to conserve our financial resources. But, but I don't blame Amazon for giving us very easy, cheap goods. It's, it's up to the consumer to say, you know, screw your, your really cheap screwdriver. I'm going to go buy it at, at the hardware store that no longer exists in my neighborhood because you've driven it out of business. So, I don't know.
Well, on that note, Heather, it's been great talking to you.
It's been a, it's been a journey. Well, I've enjoyed exploring these, uh, points of, uh, these fault lines and these contentions because I think it's important. It's, it's, I appreciate you challenging me very much. So thank you, Heather.
Vice versa. Thank you. We do it again.
Okay. I hope so. Thanks for watching the Winston Marshall Show with our guest Heather McDonald. Remember to press subscribe if you want to support the show. And if you head over to winston.co.uk, UK, not only will you enjoy free viewing and listening, but you'll enjoy an extended conversation between me and Heather. But otherwise, thanks for watching and until next time, be well.