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Speaker 2: It's time for all the.
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Speaker 1: news talks ITB.
Speaker 3: Welcome to podcasts two hundred and sixty three for November six,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four. And it is November five in the
Speaker 3: United States of America, and today is election day. That
Speaker 3: has promised some insight and coverage from early in the
Speaker 3: count and Patrick Basham from Democracy Institute releases exit poll
Speaker 3: numbers that of course will be replaced with some real
Speaker 3: life numbers in the very near future, if not already.
Speaker 3: But watching Upholster at work and seeing how accurate he
Speaker 3: and his team are is just part of the interesting
Speaker 3: game now. Whatever the outcome of Patrick delivers his usual
Speaker 3: quality commentary. Over the last few weeks, even last few days,
Speaker 3: I've realized something of importance. The FSU, the Free Speech Union,
Speaker 3: has not been overstating its case, not been for a period.
Speaker 3: I was wondering if they were in a state of overkill.
Speaker 3: It seemed that there were any number of international commentators
Speaker 3: visiting New Zealand with some more coming. But after interviewing
Speaker 3: the latest and present guest, I've realized that the FSU
Speaker 3: is on track. The discussion with Nigel big Ar and
Speaker 3: reading a lot of his work nailed it for me.
Speaker 3: Professor Bigger wrote the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one for Britain. But his work doesn't stop there. Well,
Speaker 3: actually did, but there's a story behind. It's interesting and
Speaker 3: I believe that you will greatly appreciate his analysis. But
Speaker 3: in just a moment, Patrick Basham now from the Democracy Institute,
Speaker 3: Patrick Basham. Patrick actually has been very busy, how can
Speaker 3: I say it. He's been working his butt off. After
Speaker 3: spending a few days in Doha at an investment conference,
Speaker 3: he raced back to Washington. I spoke to him from
Speaker 3: the airport. Actually he raced back to Washington to cover
Speaker 3: the election. And we had the Institute's final polling numbers
Speaker 3: twenty four hours ago, will say, and now as a
Speaker 3: result of Patrick's association with the Daily Express in the US,
Speaker 3: we have some exit poll figures. It is great to
Speaker 3: have you back on the podcast, and this is something
Speaker 3: that we've never done before and it's made difficult Patrick,
Speaker 3: as you well know by the fact that the timing
Speaker 3: of this election as opposed to this podcast, and it's
Speaker 3: their fault, not mine, that we are up against the clock,
Speaker 3: so to speak. But that doesn't mean that a lot
Speaker 3: of people are very interested in what you have to say.
Speaker 2: I was very kind of you, kind of to have
Speaker 2: me back on the program again. Or it's good to
Speaker 2: talk to you. It's such an exciting time. I mean
Speaker 2: when you say about timings, I can really appreciate it
Speaker 2: because I've been had such a whirlwind trip to Middle
Speaker 2: East and came back so sleep deprived that all of
Speaker 2: the time zones across America are challenging me with the
Speaker 2: with the polling, let alone the top there the more
Speaker 2: transcontinental one you're dealing with, But there's already lots to
Speaker 2: chew on, I think, so I think it should be
Speaker 2: an interesting conversation.
Speaker 3: All right, let's let's have a look at the exit
Speaker 3: figures that you came up with, because they are interesting.
Speaker 3: You didn't do any state by state, Am I right
Speaker 3: or wrong?
Speaker 2: Correct? The reason for that is, I mean, partly, you know,
Speaker 2: cost timing logistics, but also we just done a whole
Speaker 2: series of swing state polls and we thought that now
Speaker 2: we and the newspaper thought the national polls should be
Speaker 2: truly that and that we could pick and you know,
Speaker 2: we could instead of doing a national poll, we could
Speaker 2: pick one or two exit swing states do exit poles,
Speaker 2: and they might prove to be the pivotal ones. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's a guess. It's a guestimate, and we
Speaker 2: thought that we would be able to hoped we would
Speaker 2: be able to pick up in a national exit pole
Speaker 2: whatever what was that was changing or whatever it was
Speaker 2: most meaningful. So that's that's the sort of risk we took.
Speaker 3: Well, I think you've done the greatest number of people
Speaker 3: that you've done so far, am I right?
Speaker 2: That is right, Yes, we've done well. It was twenty
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty I think it was the was
Speaker 2: the final tally. So that's quite a bit more than
Speaker 2: we normally do and more than we would have done
Speaker 2: if we'd done individual states. So it's you know, we're
Speaker 2: pretty confident that we got our arms around those who
Speaker 2: had already voted, I mean the vote. The voting is
Speaker 2: still going on in most places, so you know, because
Speaker 2: you have to get these things done and in a
Speaker 2: little early we hope it's not premature in terms of results,
Speaker 2: but you know, you just try to you just try
Speaker 2: to nail down what you can and and cover your
Speaker 2: basis and would say your butt as well as you can.
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, as a long standing critic
Speaker 2: of exit polls, I'd be the first one to say
Speaker 2: that these are as much art as science.
Speaker 3: Are you started with the voting method?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's the interesting thing about this year's exit
Speaker 2: pole because traditionally is I'm sure your audience is aware,
Speaker 2: exit polls are usually what we used to call man
Speaker 2: on the street or person in the street, person coming
Speaker 2: out of the polling station, interviews and lots of young
Speaker 2: people would be hired at certain locations around the country,
Speaker 2: whether it was you know, UK, Canada, US, you name it,
Speaker 2: and then there asked a series of questions and those
Speaker 2: are fed back. One of the problems with that, of course,
Speaker 2: is it's it's you have to you know, it's you
Speaker 2: have to which locations do you choose? But the biggest problem,
Speaker 2: what we thought the challenge was was the fact that
Speaker 2: at the time time when we arranged this with the newspaper,
Speaker 2: we were looking at about thirty five forty percent of
Speaker 2: people had already voted for exit poles. Correct, it's now
Speaker 2: more than half before election day, So that means even
Speaker 2: if you do a fantastic job of an exit poll
Speaker 2: on election day, you're going to miss half the voters.
Speaker 2: So we thought it made you know, that's really the
Speaker 2: main reason we did what we did. And so when
Speaker 2: we started it, especially early today with the calling, it
Speaker 2: was we were pleasantly surprised that the comparative willingness of
Speaker 2: people to want the ability of people to speak because
Speaker 2: disproportionate number of people had already voted, and so we
Speaker 2: could start getting some serious data and numbers in results
Speaker 2: in you know, well before you would have traditionally expected.
Speaker 3: Are you the only one doing it this way? Do
Speaker 3: you think? Or are some of the other big boys
Speaker 3: following the same routine of calling than standing outside booze?
Speaker 2: I'm I hesitate to say, I know this definitively. I
Speaker 2: think we are. I think we are the only one
Speaker 2: exclusively using our regular polling method. Could be proven wrong,
Speaker 2: but I don't think so. I think they are mostly
Speaker 2: traditional or some sort of hybrid's that's that's my sense.
Speaker 3: Okay, So you divided that up into voting by mail,
Speaker 3: early in person and election day and the figures of
Speaker 3: twenty eight, thirty one and forty one. So let's get
Speaker 3: into the really nitty gritty the president The presidential vote
Speaker 3: is the simplest of all. I think you take it.
Speaker 2: Sure. Our exit poll finds Trump ahead by four points,
Speaker 2: fifty one to forty seven. And the point of reference
Speaker 2: here when you do an exit pole, you know don't
Speaker 2: know I mean we as you know, we finished up
Speaker 2: our final poll national poll late last week, and you
Speaker 2: don't know whether the exit pole is going to be
Speaker 2: way different in one direction or going to be most identical.
Speaker 2: This one turns out, at least in terms of the
Speaker 2: popular vote, to be very close, because our last poll
Speaker 2: is fifty to forty seven in Trump's favor. This is
Speaker 2: fifty one to forty seven. So that part of it
Speaker 2: tells us, well, I guess you might say, tells us
Speaker 2: we're going to be doubly right or doubly wrong. But
Speaker 2: it gives us some sense of security that we weren't
Speaker 2: way off. At least our methods are consistent. And of course,
Speaker 2: as exit polls. One of the problems with the exit
Speaker 2: polls the outcome of the outcomes in North America anyways,
Speaker 2: they tend nearly always to be biased towards the liberal
Speaker 2: or left wing party or candidate, and whether the results
Speaker 2: turn out to be accurate or not, and often they're not.
Speaker 2: And so we didn't know whether that might be more
Speaker 2: an outcome of the sort of method or whether it's
Speaker 2: just another the bias found elsewhere. But finding that Trump
Speaker 2: is in as good a position with those who've already
Speaker 2: voted as those were prospective voters is obviously tells a lot.
Speaker 2: And what I think it does at this early juncture
Speaker 2: when we don't means we're as we're speaking, there's just
Speaker 2: the very first little results trickling in. It tells us
Speaker 2: that what has been apparently happening on the ground, what
Speaker 2: has been measured on the ground today in America, across America,
Speaker 2: with those you know, those who are the forty one
Speaker 2: percent who were voting in person, that the comparatively strong
Speaker 2: Republican turn out, the comparatively lower Democratic turnout might actually
Speaker 2: be the case, you know, might be the case through
Speaker 2: that through the.
Speaker 4: Day, in the evening.
Speaker 2: So this is good news for the Trump side, But
Speaker 2: I'm not sure, I mean, I don't know yet what
Speaker 2: the other exit polls may or may not be showing
Speaker 2: because to release they head to head until the polls
Speaker 2: are closed.
Speaker 3: Right now, you've for demographics, you've done the list of
Speaker 3: for nineteen and it's a very interesting result. I think,
Speaker 3: let me run through it. Men, women, white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, GOP, Democrats, Independent, Catholic,
Speaker 3: and then age groups eighteen to twenty nine, thirty to
Speaker 3: thirty four, forty five to sixty four, sixty five plus urban, suburban,
Speaker 3: small town, rural, middle class and blue collar. That must
Speaker 3: have been the most difficult part of part of doing it,
Speaker 3: I would think. But what stood out to you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, a couple of things stand out, and then most
Speaker 2: of the things that have actually stood out all year
Speaker 2: because you're aware of no late and then some of
Speaker 2: your audience. Maybe our numbers haven't changed that much over
Speaker 2: the course of the year. So the things that stand out,
Speaker 2: especially if you're looking at this a new are the
Speaker 2: minority votes. That's arguably the most telling, the fact that
Speaker 2: according to our exit Paul, you know, Trump's getting more
Speaker 2: than one in five black vote and he's getting almost
Speaker 2: one in two Hispanic votes. And that you know, when
Speaker 2: you when you drill down a bit, what that means
Speaker 2: you've got more Hispanic men than women choosing Trump rather
Speaker 2: than the traditional Democrat vote. However, it's not there's not
Speaker 2: a lot in it. You know, Trump is quite popular
Speaker 2: with Hispanic women, whereas on the black side, you're looking
Speaker 2: at over thirty percent thirty thirty five percent of Black
Speaker 2: men voting for Trump. But the last holdout for the Democrats,
Speaker 2: particularly with Kamala Harris as the candidate, are black women's. Basically,
Speaker 2: I'm talking about middle aged and old, older black women.
Speaker 2: And so you you put that high that high compared
Speaker 2: to be high figure among men that can party of
Speaker 2: low figure among black women together, and you end up
Speaker 2: with sort of a little over one in five. So
Speaker 2: those two numbers alone, you know, if you ask me, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, pick pick one or two of these demographic subgroups,
Speaker 2: and you know, and make your your wager on who wins,
Speaker 2: those are the ones I'd pick because it's just historically
Speaker 2: and arithmetically, it's just really hard borrowing on impossible for
Speaker 2: the Democrats to win a contemporary American national election with
Speaker 2: only in inverted commerce, seventy eight percent of the Black
Speaker 2: vote or half of the Hispanic vote. They just can't
Speaker 2: make it up with white voters. There are only so
Speaker 2: many white liberal women to go around. You know, whether
Speaker 2: some people might view that editorially is a good thing,
Speaker 2: but in terms of the arithmetic, lectural arithmetic, for the Democrats,
Speaker 2: it's unfortunate. And that's why they count on, you know,
Speaker 2: such your uniform almost you know, universal within those electorates
Speaker 2: court and so we don't when you don't get that.
Speaker 2: The other two that jump out at me, they often
Speaker 2: mirror each other, although they aren't. They aren't the same
Speaker 2: people's This overlap is the independence who are we The
Speaker 2: exit poll has Trump up eight points. Independents don't always
Speaker 2: reflect the winner, but they usually do. And the other
Speaker 2: one is the Catholic vote. And the reason we've highlighted
Speaker 2: that is the evangelical vote is very important. It's overwhelmingly
Speaker 2: for Trump. You have atheists is much smaller, overwhelmingly for Harris.
Speaker 2: And then your sort of traditional Protestant, various Protestant denominations
Speaker 2: that tend to skew Republican. But Catholics are a swing
Speaker 2: are these swing maybe the only swing religious group block
Speaker 2: in America? They tend to go with the winner. Doesn't
Speaker 2: tend to be a big difference between the two sides,
Speaker 2: and it's very much like the independent vote. We've got
Speaker 2: an eight point lead for Trump, and that also again,
Speaker 2: you know, if you're looking at this in terms of
Speaker 2: what a history tells us, it tells us that the
Speaker 2: Independents and Catholics are going for going for one candidate,
Speaker 2: and the other candidates lost a good chunk of their
Speaker 2: minority vote which they had count on. You know, that
Speaker 2: suggests the wind is blowing in this particular direction.
Speaker 3: There are two columns that I'm interested in at this point.
Speaker 3: One is for the Democrats. The other is for the Republicans,
Speaker 3: the GOP. And the reason that I that I'm interested
Speaker 3: is because I missed it in the Republican column because
Speaker 3: it's right at the bottom. But overall, let me just
Speaker 3: explain something. This is this is a this is a
Speaker 3: row of shop what do you what would you call
Speaker 3: them polls or what? A row of vertical.
Speaker 2: Yes, they're they're stacked columns.
Speaker 3: Right, That's what I wanted. Ah, And then you've got
Speaker 3: you've got Harris at the bottom and Trump at the top.
Speaker 3: So it's blue and red and the in the GOP column,
Speaker 3: the Democrat sorry, the Republican column you've got ninety six
Speaker 3: percent for Trump voted for Trump, four percent of Republicans
Speaker 3: voted for Harris. And then on the other side, you've
Speaker 3: got ninety four percent voting for Harris and six percent
Speaker 3: voting for Trump. Now that means it's very close, but
Speaker 3: Trump came out top in that.
Speaker 2: That's right, And let's you know, be consistent whether it
Speaker 2: was Biden or Harris's Democratic candidate. For a year or two,
Speaker 2: Trump has been holding on to almost everyone who considers
Speaker 2: himself a Republican and almost everyone who voted for him
Speaker 2: last time. On the Democratic side, it hasn't been disastrous,
Speaker 2: but there's been a little bit of blea kitch compared
Speaker 2: to Trump's voters a few, you know, it's been sort
Speaker 2: of high single digits who voted for him last time
Speaker 2: was saying they wouldn't versus low single digits on the
Speaker 2: Trump side. And you know, in a close race, that
Speaker 2: makes a difference. And of course it depends how the
Speaker 2: volume of votes are for these these these two groups,
Speaker 2: and it tells you how solid Trump's vote has been
Speaker 2: all along, you know, and therefore that it was always
Speaker 2: going to be there's also are going to be a
Speaker 2: close race. I mean, he was never going to do poorly.
Speaker 2: It's a question of did he almost get over the
Speaker 2: line like he officially did last time, or didn't do
Speaker 2: last time, or with new voters and enough switchers from
Speaker 2: the Democrats, either past voters or people who maybe didn't
Speaker 2: vote last time, would he would he make it? And
Speaker 2: what's been interesting is that what they call the sort
Speaker 2: of the flippers, those who voted one way last time
Speaker 2: and then voted nipway this up. He's been winning those
Speaker 2: two to one pretty consistently. And it's not doesn't change
Speaker 2: everything those kinds of numbers because we're they're at the margin,
Speaker 2: But in a in a close race nationally or in
Speaker 2: swing states, you know, that can be everything.
Speaker 3: Indeed, I'm just skipping a hit here at the at
Speaker 3: the moment, I don't think that the details of early
Speaker 3: in person voters matter too much to us, unless you
Speaker 3: think otherwise. Well, actually, actually I'm wrong, because you're you know,
Speaker 3: you look at the the votes for Trump early in
Speaker 3: person voters, fifty seven percent for Harris and that's that's
Speaker 3: a flip? Is that not on the on on previous ears?
Speaker 2: Yes, this is the Yeah, this is the thing. Is
Speaker 2: that Harris I mean the Democrats, you know, they've been
Speaker 2: crushing previous to this election the mail vote, not just
Speaker 2: simply in terms of volume, but in terms of the
Speaker 2: spread between them and the republic The Republicans were actually
Speaker 2: sort of consciously not going through the mail, and they've
Speaker 2: turned it around this time and they vote through the mail,
Speaker 2: vote through the mail, and the Republican numbers haven't actually
Speaker 2: shifted if you should have averaged it all out across
Speaker 2: the country, they haven't shifted that much. You say, Okay,
Speaker 2: well that doesn't that isn't much of a help. Well,
Speaker 2: actually it is, because you know, we had all this
Speaker 2: male in voting because of COVID and so many people
Speaker 2: foind it convenient to do it that way. So for
Speaker 2: the Republicans to sort of maintain roughly that level is
Speaker 2: quite good, particularly when you consider that in most states,
Speaker 2: basically the swing states, the Democrat mail in vote has
Speaker 2: dropped off considerably, and so there's both the difference between
Speaker 2: the who they're voting for is condensed, and also just
Speaker 2: the volume. You know, that lead like Harris has this
Speaker 2: eight point lead upon among those who voted by mail,
Speaker 2: but there are much fewer of them, so that eight
Speaker 2: points doesn't count as much as it did for Biden
Speaker 2: when the lead was far more eight points as well.
Speaker 2: And you look at the early in person that Trump
Speaker 2: has edged them out fifty one for those they have
Speaker 2: chosen Trump fifty one over forty seven for Harris. And
Speaker 2: again that's that's a big improvement in all these different
Speaker 2: ways for the Republicans visa v. The Democrats. And so
Speaker 2: when you when you put those two together, those who
Speaker 2: mailed in their ballots and those who voted in person
Speaker 2: but early, you put it in the in the synthesize it,
Speaker 2: you know, number data wise, and you end up with
Speaker 2: going into election day Harris with a small advantage sort
Speaker 2: of two three points. And then it becomes election day
Speaker 2: becomes about who gets their people, those that are remaining
Speaker 2: roughly half to actually physically go and vote. And it's
Speaker 2: traditionally been the day when Republicans either caught up and
Speaker 2: overtook the Democrats or you know, failed to do so.
Speaker 2: So both sides had everything riding, have everything riding on
Speaker 2: the in person election day vote.
Speaker 3: Tell me something, what are recalled vote?
Speaker 2: Recalled votes are asking people who they voted for last time.
Speaker 2: If you know I did a vote last time, and
Speaker 2: if they did, who they voted for. The reason for asking, well,
Speaker 2: a bunch of reasons for ask any question, but the
Speaker 2: real true reason for asking that is to it's a
Speaker 2: kind of an insurance policy or a safety net to
Speaker 2: make sure that you're not talking to a skewed group.
Speaker 2: That is, you know, like if I if we've done
Speaker 2: this poll and our recalled vote was, you know, ten
Speaker 2: points Trump ahead ten points from twenty twenty, we had
Speaker 2: ten percent more Trump voters than were in the actual electorate,
Speaker 2: then what we would have to do, if we didn't
Speaker 2: want to chuck the whole thing out, is we would
Speaker 2: have to then weight everything for that basis to take
Speaker 2: away Trump votes and Republican volume throughout the poll. So
Speaker 2: just give you one quick example. On the weekend, your
Speaker 2: listeners might have heard about it. One or two state
Speaker 2: poles that came out that surprised everybody with how well
Speaker 2: Harris was doing. And of course it turns out in
Speaker 2: both cases the recalled vote was massively pro Biden from
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, way beyond just you know, double digits difference
Speaker 2: from how that state actually voted, And so you adjust
Speaker 2: that and suddenly Harris doesn't have this surprising lead. She's
Speaker 2: actually still behind. And so when we saw our recall
Speaker 2: vote is actually the charts, the slides don't allow for
Speaker 2: you know, decimal points. So our recall vote was actually
Speaker 2: forty nine point five for Biden to forty six, which
Speaker 2: is a little less than the official popular vote margin
Speaker 2: he won by, but not much. So that told hold
Speaker 2: us whatever else might not be, you know, kosher with
Speaker 2: this poll. Perhaps we'll find out. Then over the next
Speaker 2: couple of days, we do have a group that does
Speaker 2: those who voted last time are an accurate reflection of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. And then of course, you know you've talked
Speaker 2: to all the new voters and see what they're thinking
Speaker 2: and put that all together.
Speaker 3: Okay, One that intrigues me that I hadn't seen anywhere else,
Speaker 3: and that is new voter's choice. And the margin is considerable.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's sixteen points, which is you know, new voters
Speaker 2: are about seven percent. There's about six or seven percent
Speaker 2: who have voted before, but not that often, not that regular.
Speaker 2: And then you've got seven percent who have never voted before.
Speaker 2: And they're not all young people, most of them are,
Speaker 2: but a lot of them have folks who just just
Speaker 2: weren't interested in many and they're even registered to vote.
Speaker 2: So that is what that's obviously it's a very positive
Speaker 2: sign for Trump. But what it tells us, or reminds us,
Speaker 2: is of Trump's appeal beyond the traditional Republican conservative voter,
Speaker 2: of whom there are simply no longer a sufficient number
Speaker 2: to win a national election. And Trump has for the
Speaker 2: third time running, perhaps most expertly this time, will see
Speaker 2: he has been able to his campaigns have been able
Speaker 2: to identify, reach, persuade, motivate Americans who stopped voting ten
Speaker 2: twenty years ago, who never voted, or, counterintuitively to many
Speaker 2: this time in twenty four are only just approaching their
Speaker 2: first opportunity to vote. And he is doing. You know,
Speaker 2: his support among eighteen to twenty nine year olds, sort
Speaker 2: of your zoomers, is in the forties now, whereas last
Speaker 2: time that age group he was in the high teens. Right,
Speaker 2: So that's all going very well. And of course that
Speaker 2: a lot of those folks, some of them have voted before,
Speaker 2: but a lot of them haven't. And so these those
Speaker 2: the new voters and the occasional voters are what in
Speaker 2: the polling business you call low propensity voters, and when
Speaker 2: so many elections pliculing in America are about turnout rather
Speaker 2: than persuasion, certainly in the latter stages, and with the
Speaker 2: partisan divide so strong and so set so sort of
Speaker 2: in the cement, whichever side can identify and reach and
Speaker 2: motivate low propensity voters is almost certainly going to win.
Speaker 2: And it was part of the secret source of a
Speaker 2: lot of a secret source of all those unexpected mail
Speaker 2: in ballots the Democrats of twenty twenty. Many of the
Speaker 2: people whose names at least were on those ballots had
Speaker 2: never voted before, or hadn't voted for a long time,
Speaker 2: and even some of them, many of them didn't even
Speaker 2: know they voted in twenty twenty. But this time the
Speaker 2: Trump campaign recognized from the get go that this was
Speaker 2: how they could potentially turn an absolute squeaker They might win,
Speaker 2: they might not to have a coin toss election into
Speaker 2: one that gave them a greater chance of victory likelihood
Speaker 2: of victory. And so most of their outreach they're knocking
Speaker 2: on doors and text messages and all that kind of thing,
Speaker 2: has been to identify people who they think, for one
Speaker 2: reason or another, would be inclined to support them, many
Speaker 2: of them former Democrats, many of them independents, and get
Speaker 2: enough of them out to make a difference. And whether
Speaker 2: he wins the election or not, they've certainly made a
Speaker 2: substantial out of progress in that direction.
Speaker 3: So the expected winner, yes, is based on anything else
Speaker 3: other than the results you got in this.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's I can. I mean, if you
Speaker 2: have the time, I can explain to you why we
Speaker 2: asked these sort of crazy questions.
Speaker 3: I'll leave that to you whether you want to do it.
Speaker 2: Give me enough rope to hang myself if I forget,
Speaker 2: to thank you later. So that is one of the
Speaker 2: ways that we attempt to tease out how people are
Speaker 2: really thinking and how strong their support is for one
Speaker 2: candidate or another. Because one of the tricks we learned,
Speaker 2: you know, our first so let's say our only, but
Speaker 2: our only claims to fame in the polling world, was
Speaker 2: that we nailed the Brexit vote in the UK at
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, right. And one of the ways we were
Speaker 2: able to do that and then identify mostly successfully the
Speaker 2: Trump vote in America ever since is getting our arms
Speaker 2: around the shy Brexit voter, the shy Trump voter h
Speaker 2: and one of the ways we figured out you could
Speaker 2: do that was when you had these sort of disproportionate
Speaker 2: number of undecided voters who clearly, based on their answers
Speaker 2: to other questions, were sympathetic to Brexit or tremble whoever,
Speaker 2: whatever the cause or person may be, but wouldn't but
Speaker 2: put said and maintain they were undecided if you ask,
Speaker 2: It turns out if you ask them questions not about
Speaker 2: themselves but about others, they are far more likely to
Speaker 2: to indirectly indicate to you what they plan on doing. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: so you ask them about their neighbor, you ask them
Speaker 2: about their friends, their relatives, their wife, the people they
Speaker 2: work with, or you asked them and or you ask
Speaker 2: them so you know you're undecided. No one knows what's
Speaker 2: gonna happen. Who do you think is going to win?
Speaker 2: And it's amazing how many of these people have a
Speaker 2: really strong opinion about it's going to win. And so
Speaker 2: it's another part that have signed for Trump fifty three
Speaker 2: forty six. It's a greater margin then you find in
Speaker 2: this exit poll, or we always find there's a greater
Speaker 2: margin a few points. You know, if we find a
Speaker 2: we do a poll with most of our polls have
Speaker 2: been recently nationally Trump up by two or three. You
Speaker 2: ask the question about who you think's going to win,
Speaker 2: or who your neighbors voting for, and you get Trump
Speaker 2: up by four or six or eight. Uh, it always
Speaker 2: goes in that direction. And what I think when we
Speaker 2: think from our polls, we've been able to demonstrate that,
Speaker 2: you know, that does tell you something. But if you
Speaker 2: simply think about Trump's performance, this will be his third election,
Speaker 2: whether it's primaries, caucuses, or general elections, whether he wins, loses,
Speaker 2: whatever he does, he nearly always out votes his polling,
Speaker 2: whether it's a point five points, you know, he just
Speaker 2: the poll Most posters underestimate Trump. I mean, it's just
Speaker 2: a fact. And obviously one of the key ess this
Speaker 2: time is is that going to happen again? And I
Speaker 2: have suspected it would. I didn't know, you know, you
Speaker 2: don't know to how to what degree, But it's, uh,
Speaker 2: that's what I've always said. And again, over the next
Speaker 2: number of hours and days, I maybe be proven completely wrong.
Speaker 2: But I've been saying all year to people that the
Speaker 2: narrow lead that we've been finding consistently for Trump, we
Speaker 2: obviously we could be wrong. But if we are wrong
Speaker 2: and you ask you put a gun to my head,
Speaker 2: I'd say we are underestimating his vote rather than overestimating
Speaker 2: his vote, you know, to be you know, I don't
Speaker 2: know whether I'll be proven right or not, but this
Speaker 2: kind of a result on the exit poll suggests there
Speaker 2: might be something to my guess.
Speaker 3: Is there anything anything else apart from the any anything
Speaker 3: personal that you would like to throw into this conversation
Speaker 3: briefly checking the time? Ah, about how you think it's
Speaker 3: kind of now, or anything that's out of order, or
Speaker 3: any any election day surprise.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, intellectually, my own judgments of what will happen
Speaker 2: are based I mean, obviously I'm a greg proponent of polling,
Speaker 2: but polling can be wrong, and polling isn't everything, And
Speaker 2: there are all kinds of other dozens of other metrics,
Speaker 2: some empirical, some anecdotal, which historically have are is that
Speaker 2: proven as accurate or even more accurate than polling? So
Speaker 2: my brain, you know, I try to get my intellectual
Speaker 2: arms around all of that. And as a consequence of that,
Speaker 2: all year my brain has told me this is Trump's
Speaker 2: election to lose. Could he lose it? Yes? Will you
Speaker 2: lose it. I don't think so. I think probably not. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's where my brain has been. But for since the summer,
Speaker 2: my intuition, my gut has been on a sort of
Speaker 2: of its own. Now, therefore, I sort of when they're
Speaker 2: the same, you know how other people are and how
Speaker 2: you are latent, When you're braking your intuition are in sync,
Speaker 2: you sort of feel confident whatever that is. Even if
Speaker 2: it's bad views do you think at least you can
Speaker 2: face it. But when when they're not quite in sync,
Speaker 2: you start questioning both. But what my intuition has been
Speaker 2: telling me for a couple of months, and I've mentioned
Speaker 2: this to anyone you know unwise enough to ask, is
Speaker 2: that although you can't expect it these days, I've just
Speaker 2: had this nagging feeling that this thing could get blown
Speaker 2: wide open and it could end up being trumped quite
Speaker 2: by quite a big margin.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the club.
Speaker 2: And yeah, and now, of course you know you have
Speaker 2: to check yourself one because I have to sort of
Speaker 2: people ask me to speak to the numbers. But also
Speaker 2: you know, you want's own personal bias and all of that.
Speaker 2: But it's not a not a sense I had a
Speaker 2: year ago or two years ago, before the last election,
Speaker 2: or before the one before that. This just and I'm
Speaker 2: certainly not the first person to think or to say
Speaker 2: this out loud, but the election itself has a lot
Speaker 2: of echoes. For those of us old enough to remember,
Speaker 2: you might be late. And I'm not sure the nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty Carter Reagan race, where all of the kind of
Speaker 2: basic metrics were favored Reagan, but in terms of the
Speaker 2: conventional wisdom and the much faded polls of where they
Speaker 2: were much far fewer then, they never really had him
Speaker 2: in a great position. It was competitive, but Carter was
Speaker 2: up a lot, and then he be up and this
Speaker 2: kind of thing, and then it all broke for Reagan
Speaker 2: at the end. And I think it's less that there
Speaker 2: were specific I mean, Bragan had a great debate and
Speaker 2: things like that, but I think it was less that
Speaker 2: and more that it was always going that way, but
Speaker 2: it was hidden, you know, it was sort of under
Speaker 2: the radar stuff. And Reagan wins up winning by nine
Speaker 2: points in a race that the experts said would be
Speaker 2: one or two points either way, right, And it just
Speaker 2: it feels like that, it has felt like that. But
Speaker 2: you know, every other every day there's another media pole
Speaker 2: saying Kamala is up by two, or this swing state
Speaker 2: is you know, within a decimal point, and all the
Speaker 2: rest of it, and the crazy posters like me, we
Speaker 2: have our results that suggest, you know, it's advantage Trump,
Speaker 2: which i've you know, maintained it is up to this,
Speaker 2: up to this brain minute, and the exit pole, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, gives me more more reason to do that.
Speaker 2: But I'm looking at this exit pole and there's nothing
Speaker 2: in it that screams landslide except for the question. We've
Speaker 2: just been discussing the expected winner, which I found, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the more useful over the years in different contexts.
Speaker 2: So again, you know, if she wins big, I'll have
Speaker 2: missed both both my brain and my intuition will have missed.
Speaker 2: But that's my quasi personal take on the evening. And
Speaker 2: what that means, of course, is that I wouldn't be
Speaker 2: at all surprise surprised, will be shocked, I should say,
Speaker 2: be pleasantly surprised, you know, if he wins these blue
Speaker 2: states like Virginia and New Mexico and Minnesota and New Hampshire.
Speaker 2: And that's why, well it is in the American context,
Speaker 2: if it's an absolute blowout. If my intuition is right,
Speaker 2: then we'll know quite early because the Virginia's New Hampshire's
Speaker 2: are on these coast and Virginia's one of the for
Speaker 2: actually Virginia's closing just around now. They'll start doing the
Speaker 2: start doing the early vote counts. But you know, but
Speaker 2: if they go as they tould, as they have gone
Speaker 2: in recent elections, then we'll be waiting for others. But yeah,
Speaker 2: there's just it just feels it feels that way. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's a number of people commenting today, some famous, some
Speaker 2: not famous, who've all been i mean, on the on
Speaker 2: the not the Trump campaign, but they're on the Trump side,
Speaker 2: Trump's side pretty much wishing to win. And they've all
Speaker 2: made the same point, which is, whether they're thirty years
Speaker 2: old or sixty years old, they can't quite remember the
Speaker 2: last time that everything seemed to be lined up for
Speaker 2: the Republican to win, except for the fact half the
Speaker 2: pole say you might lose, you know, So it's I
Speaker 2: think it's on one side of the aisle at least.
Speaker 2: It's a fairly common theme that what one's seeing and
Speaker 2: reading and hearing is from you know, you might say
Speaker 2: official sources doesn't quite gel with the how how it
Speaker 2: all smells? You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just got a message in the top right corner,
Speaker 3: as you do. And all I got all I got
Speaker 3: off it before it disappeared was Trump projected to win
Speaker 3: in Kentucky and great. A couple of others followed. I
Speaker 3: think anyway, I can't exist it. Look, I'm going to
Speaker 3: let you go because I know you have other obligations.
Speaker 3: I have a challenge for you, if there is, if
Speaker 3: there is a good reason, shall we reconvene tomorrow for
Speaker 3: something that's never been done before on this podcast, and
Speaker 3: that is to do a follow up?
Speaker 2: No, absolutely, if there if there is good reason, and
Speaker 2: then we should do that.
Speaker 3: I will be enthusiastic if you if you don't answer
Speaker 3: your phone, I'll know that you didn't agree with me
Speaker 3: on the good reason.
Speaker 2: No, it probably means that I finally I've just involuntarily
Speaker 2: fallen asleep. But I don't know there's much chance of
Speaker 2: that anyway.
Speaker 3: As always, you're most generous. Let you go, and just
Speaker 3: be aware that you are much valued.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're most kindly. Always a pleasure.
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Speaker 3: Nigel Bigar CBE is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology
Speaker 3: the University of Oxford, is Chairman of the Board of
Speaker 3: the Free Speech Union, one of Prospects magazines twenty five
Speaker 3: Top Thinkers of twenty twenty four, and author of the
Speaker 3: best selling Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning. Out of those four lines,
Speaker 3: I could drive this interview with multiple feed off questions. Nigel,
Speaker 3: great to have you in New Zealand. I've been looking
Speaker 3: forward to your arrival. You are an impressive man, a
Speaker 3: very impressive thinker, and even if one doesn't agree with you,
Speaker 3: you have very persuasive powers. Welcome to the lesiond Welcome
Speaker 3: to the country.
Speaker 4: Glad to be here. I've been in New Zealand for
Speaker 4: about twelve hours and I'm joining it.
Speaker 3: So far terrific. I want to quote you a few
Speaker 3: things and then ask you a question. Following the academic
Speaker 3: freedom report by doctor James Kiersted from the New Zealand
Speaker 3: Initiative shows many experiences of academics self censoring. He was
Speaker 3: even closer than the initiative because he was a prefarre
Speaker 3: lecturer at the university for a number of years. University
Speaker 3: of Auckland's flawed policy on academic freedom took four years
Speaker 3: to draft, only for academics to rightly reject it. Damning
Speaker 3: results at the aut Law Society staff survey and a
Speaker 3: professor's equally damning response Massi University's staff survey results more
Speaker 3: evidence of self censorship at university and finally, for the
Speaker 3: moment at least, back in May, Victoria University three speech
Speaker 3: panel discussion was postponed due to backlash. So there's just one, two, three, four,
Speaker 3: five things that have happened at universities in the very
Speaker 3: recent well in the immediate past. Nigel, simple question. I
Speaker 3: think you grew up in a democracy. I was born
Speaker 3: in a democracy. We've both grown up and we know
Speaker 3: what democracy is all about. What has happened that what
Speaker 3: I've just quoted you is in play at the moment
Speaker 3: in this country, Australia, Britain, America, Canada, all the Anglo
Speaker 3: speaking world. What's happened? How did it get here?
Speaker 4: That's a great and important question, Lathon. Then you're quite right.
Speaker 4: When I first fell into trouble over my views on
Speaker 4: Colonel History in twenty seventeen, I had no idea there
Speaker 4: was a problem. I was accustomed to speaking my mind
Speaker 4: and I try and do so reasonably, but I wasn't
Speaker 4: aware that anyone would try and shut me down. So
Speaker 4: what's happened a number of different things. You certainly have
Speaker 4: the emergence of, I think a minority of very zealous
Speaker 4: progressive folk who have dogmatic views on gender, dogmatic views
Speaker 4: on the extent to which we're racist, and dogmatic views
Speaker 4: on how bad, how relentlessly colonial government was, so you
Speaker 4: have the zealous. Then, as I've discovered, you have a
Speaker 4: majority of people in universities, both students and professors, who
Speaker 4: don't know much about the issues, just want to get
Speaker 4: on with their careers and their lives conflict averse and
Speaker 4: have failed, I think, have failed to understand how much
Speaker 4: is at stake here. And then, most presently of all,
Speaker 4: you've got university administrations run by apparently grown ups who
Speaker 4: twenty years ago would have been quite firm in telling
Speaker 4: let's say, agree to students, we feel your pain, but
Speaker 4: I'm afraid you don't get to evade points of view
Speaker 4: you don't like. And that's changed. And I think it's
Speaker 4: the behavior of institutions and authorities at the top that
Speaker 4: is most decisive and most troubling. Why have they changed
Speaker 4: their behavior, Well, some of them have absorbed and critically
Speaker 4: notions like the only virtue is compassion, the only virtue
Speaker 4: is kindness, and we must do all we can to
Speaker 4: avoid upsetting young people, especially members of supposedly marginalized or
Speaker 4: victimized groups. Historically, so that's that's certain ideas have got
Speaker 4: into the bloodstream of culture, and those who lead us
Speaker 4: have absorbed those ideas. But there's also the fact that
Speaker 4: universities are businesses and highly competitive businesses, and they are
Speaker 4: desperate to retain market share and attract students and to
Speaker 4: keep donors on side. And if they perceive that certain
Speaker 4: views are going to disturb potential customers or disturb potential donors,
Speaker 4: they will quickly clamp down on those ideas. So I
Speaker 4: think it's a number of different factors that have brought
Speaker 4: us here. So there's there are They questioned later was
Speaker 4: a simple one, but the answer is a bit more complicated.
Speaker 3: Well, it needs to be complicated because it seems simple,
Speaker 3: and to get a decent answer, it has to come
Speaker 3: out as you've described it. Now you talk, you talk
Speaker 3: about universities and competition. Does that where does that place
Speaker 3: universities on the free market ticket?
Speaker 4: You know, I'm sixty nine years old later, and so
Speaker 4: when I was to university in the nineteen seventies in Britain,
Speaker 4: I think about twelve percent of every generation at university.
Speaker 4: Then it was very late, but with twelve percent of
Speaker 4: the university of the each co op going to university,
Speaker 4: the States could afford to fund my education. So I
Speaker 4: don't think. I don't think my parents paid much at all.
Speaker 4: But then around before the end of the twentieth century, governments,
Speaker 4: certainly in Britain and elsewhere, decided to expand university sector enormously,
Speaker 4: so that now in Britain it's some between forty and
Speaker 4: fifty percent of every generation goes to university. Well, the
Speaker 4: state couldn't afford to fundel that directly, so they developed
Speaker 4: a business model which partly involves partly involved students paying fees.
Speaker 4: It also involves New Zealand and Australia numbers very well.
Speaker 4: It involves attracting overseas students, not least from China, to
Speaker 4: come to our universities. But the unity depends on overseas
Speaker 4: students heavily, and they certainly depend on student fees. So
Speaker 4: in international rankings of universities, one of the categories is
Speaker 4: now student experience. Now that didn't appear twenty thirty years ago.
Speaker 4: And you know, I'm all for students being aware of
Speaker 4: excuse me, of universities being aware of how students are
Speaker 4: experiencing their university because frankly, during my undergraduate career fifty
Speaker 4: years ago, I wasn't taught very well. Frankly, So universities
Speaker 4: have good reasons as it were, You want to know
Speaker 4: how students are fairing, what the experience is. However, the
Speaker 4: danger is, and I think it's the danger that is
Speaker 4: really has been realized. The danger is you treat students
Speaker 4: like customers and if they're not unhappy, it doesn't matter
Speaker 4: why they're unhappy. They're not happy. That should determine policy.
Speaker 4: That I think is a major distortion, because students, of course,
Speaker 4: can be happy for all sorts of bad reasons. Maybe
Speaker 4: they're lazy, they don't like working. So universites can't take
Speaker 4: that serious, but they do. They do.
Speaker 3: So this is a clip on question. Students think that
Speaker 3: they run the university, so it seems why and how
Speaker 3: did they get that idea. I mean, you've partly sorry,
Speaker 3: you've partly you've partly answered that, but we're taking a
Speaker 3: step further. In my mind, that they come to university
Speaker 3: learn very quickly or be told very quickly by fellow
Speaker 3: students or however else that they they control it or
Speaker 3: control it, and so it goes to their head why
Speaker 3: were they allowed to do that?
Speaker 4: So, yes, universities are businesses. I mean they have to
Speaker 4: make ends meet. We get that, nothing wrong with that,
Speaker 4: but those at the top of the universities. Nevertheless, should
Speaker 4: remember that universities are not primarily there to make a profit.
Speaker 4: They there to survive, but they're there to educate, and
Speaker 4: university leaders should also remember that although not all wisdom
Speaker 4: lies with adults, the fact of the matter is that
Speaker 4: professors and older people usually know a lot more than
Speaker 4: younger people, and therefore they should have the as it were,
Speaker 4: the kind of self confidence, and they should have a
Speaker 4: right conception of what their businesses, which is education, to
Speaker 4: be able to say to students again, we feel your pain,
Speaker 4: we understand you're aggrieved, but actually no, we think you
Speaker 4: require this for your education. You don't get to determine things.
Speaker 4: But I think it's a combination of what I was
Speaker 4: saying before in terms of universities being excessively business like
Speaker 4: and how they can see what they're up to, so
Speaker 4: they are very sensitive, as it were, to market indicators
Speaker 4: of student student dissatisfaction. But there's also I think I
Speaker 4: wonder if there isn't also a kind of cultural change
Speaker 4: here that we're now ruled by those who grew up
Speaker 4: in the nineties sixties, and these are people who are
Speaker 4: afraid of exercising authority. I do remember I held a
Speaker 4: conference in twenty nineteen under the title Academic Freedom under
Speaker 4: Threat what is to be done in Oxford, And the
Speaker 4: observation was made that the people of my generation, who
Speaker 4: grew up or slightly younger than me, we were told
Speaker 4: that authority is a bad thing. So I would not
Speaker 4: be surprised if a lot of those olimans you shoulds
Speaker 4: actually are very uncomfortable about saying no.
Speaker 3: That actually stuns me. You'd think if you grew up
Speaker 3: in the sixties and you had a lifetime of experience
Speaker 3: behind you, buy now you do, you'd have grasped some reality.
Speaker 4: Well, you would have thought so. But that's not the
Speaker 4: way they tend to behave. I mean, I'm just aware
Speaker 4: how in my own universe, even in my own university,
Speaker 4: and Oxford is relatively clear of some of the worst.
Speaker 4: As vice Chancellor send out some circular recently exhorting everyone
Speaker 4: to be kind. I'm all, I'm all favorite of kindness,
Speaker 4: but it ain't the only virtue. And sometimes you don't
Speaker 4: do other people. You don't do them justice, and you
Speaker 4: don't you don't help them always by being kind. Sometimes
Speaker 4: you have to be firm, and they won't experience that,
Speaker 4: they will not experience that as kindness. But but you
Speaker 4: need to serve their welfare, not just their feelings. Because sometimes,
Speaker 4: as I have long said, and as I'm sure lots
Speaker 4: of younger folks here would find incomprehensible, I often say,
Speaker 4: sometimes feelings lie. You can't take them for you can't
Speaker 4: take them as indicators of the truth. And so they
Speaker 4: were grown up, grown ups for the sake of the
Speaker 4: welfare of younger, younger people. Sometimes they say, I know,
Speaker 4: I know how you feel strongly about this, but I'm
Speaker 4: totally sorry. I'm not going to yield.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Who did you say? There was the chancellor?
Speaker 4: Well, I think it was that. I don't I don't
Speaker 4: want to get Yeah, it was it was a vice
Speaker 4: chancellor at Oxford. I think who sent out a circular.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to I'm going to leap leap to
Speaker 3: the present. Oxford needs a firebrand chancellor to destroy wokery.
Speaker 3: James Price and James Price in the in the Telegraph,
Speaker 3: and I'll go further where he says. My vote would
Speaker 3: go to Professor Reverend Nigel Biggas, an academic and writer who,
Speaker 3: when dragged into the culture Wars did not apologize meekly,
Speaker 3: but took his place bravely on the intellectual barricades. He
Speaker 3: will be well known to readers of the Telegraph for
Speaker 3: his accounts of the erosion of academic freedom and failures
Speaker 3: to grasp it. Charged with thought crimes, he did not
Speaker 3: commit bigger stood up to the mob, and has provided
Speaker 3: an inspiration for many of us who wished to do
Speaker 3: the same. Like I say, I'm bringing this forward, we'll
Speaker 3: have to take a step back in a moment. You you
Speaker 3: got into this position because of colonialism, the book.
Speaker 4: A nature before that.
Speaker 3: Well, all right, so that the book magnified it. Yeah, certainly,
Speaker 3: okay either way. You you got yourself into into trouble.
Speaker 3: You got yourself for a few problems. What gave what
Speaker 3: gave you the courage to take the stands you did
Speaker 3: and survived.
Speaker 4: Oh that's a that's a great question. I've thought about
Speaker 4: it a lot, because people do say I've been courageous
Speaker 4: and brave, and my heart is warmed by that, and
Speaker 4: I'm encouraged by it, and I hope it's true. But
Speaker 4: I've often thought I feel like decorated soldiers who've been
Speaker 4: courageous on the battlefield who risk their lives to save
Speaker 4: their mates, and I suspect they also feel kind of
Speaker 4: something perplexed because they were just doing their duty. That's
Speaker 4: what they did. They didn't they didn't do it to
Speaker 4: be courageous. And so when I think about, you know,
Speaker 4: what makes me or what makes other people courageous or
Speaker 4: to take risks in doing or saying things, I think
Speaker 4: really late is simply if you care about something enough,
Speaker 4: if you care about enough, if you love it enough,
Speaker 4: then there comes a point where you just can't stand
Speaker 4: by anymore and see it crushed or damaged or defamed,
Speaker 4: and you have to speak up. But I think it's
Speaker 4: a compulsion out of love for something that makes you say,
Speaker 4: bugger it, I don't care what people think. I'm going
Speaker 4: to take this risk. So it's not that you aim
Speaker 4: to be courageous. It knows you aim to be courageous.
Speaker 4: I think it's a matter of saying to yourself, well
Speaker 4: do I care enough to stand by and see this
Speaker 4: precious thing crushed? And some people need to get up
Speaker 4: and stand up. I think also, Frankly Lateten, it's also
Speaker 4: partly personality. I'm Scot's I'm more inclined to be directed
Speaker 4: and blunt than most of my nice, gentle, polite English
Speaker 4: friends and colleagues. I'm more impatient. And also I'm older,
Speaker 4: so I'm sixty nine. At the end of my career,
Speaker 4: I was relatively safe. Other colleagues have suffered much more
Speaker 4: grievous than I. And you know, one thing about older
Speaker 4: age is that it's produced as two things which are
Speaker 4: a dangerous combination. First of all, you finally think that
Speaker 4: what you think, and secondly, you cease to carry what
Speaker 4: other people think so much so you inclined to say
Speaker 4: what you think. And I, although you know I've attracted aggression,
Speaker 4: it wouldn't be anywhere else. So I'm very glad to
Speaker 4: be saying, well, I think, because I think what There's
Speaker 4: some things that are important, and there's some truth that
Speaker 4: are important that I'm glad to say them.
Speaker 3: I can only say, excellent. Want to read you a
Speaker 3: letter to the editor. This is This is purely coincidental.
Speaker 3: It arrived this morning from a friend of mine. You
Speaker 3: took a photo of it and said it to me,
Speaker 3: not knowing that I was talking to you. It's just
Speaker 3: so coincidental. Fears of censure, the concern by doctor Jared Gilbert,
Speaker 3: sociologist at the University of Canterbury, that students don't turn
Speaker 3: up to class but would rather choose to engage remotely
Speaker 3: for courses that are not designed that way. This was
Speaker 3: for an article that appeared on October twenty eighth. Don't
Speaker 3: speak up in class and have become disengaged, claiming that
Speaker 3: they have anxiety issues. They might have missed the boat. Sorry,
Speaker 3: the letter might have missed the boat. Could it be
Speaker 3: that the Could it be that the fault of all
Speaker 3: this lies with the universities themselves and not entirely were
Speaker 3: the students. Many years ago, universities were the bastions of
Speaker 3: free thought, opened discourse and debate from professors to first
Speaker 3: grade to first year undergraduates. However, could the reasons for
Speaker 3: student disengagement outlined by Gilbert be emblematic of the decline
Speaker 3: in our university's commitment to a willingness to protect the
Speaker 3: viewpoints of all engaged in debate even though there is disagreement.
Speaker 3: One example of this was the backlash over the letter
Speaker 3: published by several University of Auckland academics in the Listener
Speaker 3: back in twenty twenty one. You may have heard of this,
Speaker 3: by the way, arguing that Matt oranger Mary is not
Speaker 3: science in the traditional sense. There was a call for
Speaker 3: these academics to be censured. Surely, if academics are going
Speaker 3: to run the risk of being censured at their own university,
Speaker 3: then what hope will ordinary students have in delivering their
Speaker 3: own views on whatever topic they might feel passionate about,
Speaker 3: not because of anxiety, but for the fear of being censured.
Speaker 4: Yep, those are unfortunately not rare phenomena. Later so, I
Speaker 4: think universities have a very very serious civic duty to
Speaker 4: create a forum where all ideas that are lawful are
Speaker 4: allowed to come into play, and where students are trained
Speaker 4: to react to ideas that challenge them more threatns no
Speaker 4: or upset them with strict justice, not to distort them
Speaker 4: in reporting, not to much represent them, not to lie
Speaker 4: about them, and trained to have the courage to think
Speaker 4: about them, to wonder whether actually this strange idea, the
Speaker 4: threatening idea, might be right, or how far it's right.
Speaker 4: But they have a universes have a duty to support
Speaker 4: an environment where all sorts of ideas, some of them
Speaker 4: are no doubt challenging, come into play, and with students
Speaker 4: are trained in the virtues necessary for us to have
Speaker 4: a liberal society, because if universities failed to do that,
Speaker 4: our public life and a political life is going to
Speaker 4: suffer in the way it now is, where people tend
Speaker 4: to shout and scream and and appeal to emotion, and
Speaker 4: they don't know how to deal with perfectly reasonable ideas.
Speaker 4: And what you've just described these New Zealand academics as
Speaker 4: saying about the difference between certain traditional Maori stories and
Speaker 4: natural science, for example, that's a perfectly sensible point to make.
Speaker 4: They should be allowed to say that, and students should
Speaker 4: be required, frankly required to deal with these things in
Speaker 4: a rational manner, and that does require the self for
Speaker 4: strange of emotion. And too many universities, not all of them,
Speaker 4: too many universities are completely oblivious to that duty. That
Speaker 4: they're behaving, as it were, simply as businesses. They've forgotten
Speaker 4: what their main purpose is. But so I agree, I
Speaker 4: think universities have a lot to do it. Also, I mean,
Speaker 4: I think it is said that mental health issues are
Speaker 4: a growing problem among students, and of course what I
Speaker 4: would what I would have called what I still call
Speaker 4: distress or even mild depression is now now trauma. I
Speaker 4: regard distress and depression as a normal, normal feature of life,
Speaker 4: and I think it's not helping kids if they are
Speaker 4: told that. But I'm also told that living life on
Speaker 4: social media does create lots of anxiety in Eurosis, and
Speaker 4: that may be a new phenomenon, in which case, when
Speaker 4: presented with kids who are really distressed at ideas that
Speaker 4: they find disturbing, universities need to treat this as a
Speaker 4: partial therapeutic problem, not allowing students to proceed without having
Speaker 4: different fund ideas they don't like, but helping students to
Speaker 4: acquire resilience in coping with ideas they don't like. Whereas
Speaker 4: I think the tendency is to take the easy option
Speaker 4: of simply allowing students to shield themselves from find things
Speaker 4: they find distressing.
Speaker 3: All right, So resilience is one of the most important
Speaker 3: aspects of life, particularly when you're growing up.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: So let's just verbally draw up a short list of
Speaker 3: things that might have might have gone wrong one way
Speaker 3: or another that have allowed kids to grow up and
Speaker 3: find themselves in this position, not understanding why it's happened
Speaker 3: and what they can do about it. The collapse of
Speaker 3: marriage is my first option, is my first offer. The
Speaker 3: collapse of marriage, the lack of father's same category, pulling
Speaker 3: the rug on kids at achievement. One of one of
Speaker 3: my sons, for instance, was at a school where he
Speaker 3: had he had three chances to submit answers to an exam. Yes,
Speaker 3: after it was over, he did. They all did. So
Speaker 3: there's no there was no pressure, there's no drive as
Speaker 3: far as that's concerned. What would you what would you
Speaker 3: add to that shortlist so far?
Speaker 4: Is it? Comment on that last point? Late? And yes,
Speaker 4: I in my own university one hears of all sorts
Speaker 4: of special measures being taken to allow students of suffering
Speaker 4: anxiety to to take exams, to retake exam because of
Speaker 4: course failing is distressing. I fail. I fail quite badly.
Speaker 4: At university.
Speaker 3: We have something in common, Well, we both.
Speaker 4: Learned there's there's life after failure. But that's but that's
Speaker 4: the point, isn't it That it's not doing students a service.
Speaker 4: It's not being kind to them to pretend that the
Speaker 4: outside world is going to forgive them all the time,
Speaker 4: or as it will ignore their failure. The outside world
Speaker 4: is going to be very harsh so so universities and
Speaker 4: parents need to get kinder to their kids in explaining
Speaker 4: to them that actually failure is a pretty normal part
Speaker 4: of human life. One needs to learn to fail and
Speaker 4: then to get them off the ground and try again.
Speaker 4: That's that's called resilience. But but I fear that's not
Speaker 4: what's happening, and students are being indulged in a way
Speaker 4: that is actually doing them harm and the adults are
Speaker 4: responsible for that.
Speaker 3: Let's say the attack on masculinity.
Speaker 4: Yes, help help me there, well, the attack.
Speaker 3: On masculinity that the boys, for instance, are not allowed
Speaker 3: to show masculine tendencies when they're at school, when they're
Speaker 3: when they're when they're growing up. Attitudes are part of
Speaker 3: the physical part of life is another part, yes, and
Speaker 3: not having a not having a shall we say, a
Speaker 3: guide through life in the form of a man in
Speaker 3: the family contributes even more.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Of course, masculinity and feminity are kind of ideal types
Speaker 4: of behavior. So so to be masculin is to be strong.
Speaker 4: It's to be willing to to to fight, to be
Speaker 4: in conflict, to have resilience and courage. Strength, femininity the
Speaker 4: ideal is no, it's it's not about fightings, about reconciliations,
Speaker 4: about relationships, it's about being kind of it. My view
Speaker 4: is that all human beings should, in different situations, be
Speaker 4: masculine and feminine. I have heard and this is plausible,
Speaker 4: I don't know what the empirical substantiation of it is.
Speaker 4: Part of the problem in universities and elsewhere is the
Speaker 4: feminization institutions often run by women. I've not plain against that,
Speaker 4: but if it's true that women tend to focus on
Speaker 4: reconciliation and conflict with avoidance and kindness and compassion, if
Speaker 4: women are too feminine, not not masculine enough, then that
Speaker 4: is certainly contributed to our problem. Because what we need,
Speaker 4: is particularly in university, is also in schools. We need
Speaker 4: our young people taught how to manage conflict responsibly because
Speaker 4: when they go into life, they're not going to be
Speaker 4: able to avoid conflict. So the question is how do
Speaker 4: you manage it responsibly? And if you avoid it, If
Speaker 4: you will kids to avoid it all the time and
Speaker 4: not to grow the virtues of patients and resilience and
Speaker 4: self restraint, then they're going to mismanaged conflict. And when
Speaker 4: they grew up to run institutions, we're all going to.
Speaker 3: Suffer the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Build twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: but that you had a big hand in. You made
Speaker 3: a you made a submission to the Public Bills Committee. Yes,
Speaker 3: and I've read it and I've read it and its outstanding,
Speaker 3: and it got if I'm not mistaken, it got passed.
Speaker 4: The bill was passed. Yeah, it was in active last year.
Speaker 3: Yes, and then it didn't. One day it was coming
Speaker 3: into fourth and the next day it wasn't.
Speaker 4: What happened change your government, the new Labor government of
Speaker 4: kas Darma I and my allies in shaping and promoting
Speaker 4: the hid K Should Be Speech Bill, which was an
Speaker 4: active in May last year. We wondered before the election
Speaker 4: whether a new Labor government would try and pull it
Speaker 4: or qualified or damage it or whatever. And there's no
Speaker 4: sign at all, none at all, that they were interested
Speaker 4: in changing what we put in position. But no sooner
Speaker 4: had the government been elected at the Secretary of State
Speaker 4: for Education Bridge At Phillipson, announced that she was going
Speaker 4: to suspend the operation of the Act and perhaps repeal it. Now,
Speaker 4: why did you do that? Well, someone from within government,
Speaker 4: a reliable source, i'm told, reported that vice chancellors had
Speaker 4: lent on the then Shadow Secretary of State because the
Speaker 4: Act would have required universities to make transparent their dependents,
Speaker 4: their dependent on foreign that is Chinese funding, and the
Speaker 4: advice chancellors did not want to have to be transparent
Speaker 4: about that, which is why they lent on the Secretary
Speaker 4: of State. That's not why the Secretary of State stay
Speaker 4: she wants to pause it or to repeal it. But
Speaker 4: we're told actually that is why the buds vice chances
Speaker 4: that have lent on her. So, yes, the Act is
Speaker 4: currently paused because we have a Free Speech Union in
Speaker 4: Britain now founded four years ago, now extremely healthy, twenty
Speaker 4: thousand members, an annual income from subscriptions alone of about
Speaker 4: a million pounds plus donations. Because we have an FSQ
Speaker 4: with a staff and a full time legal mind working
Speaker 4: on cases, the FSU has applied to take the government
Speaker 4: to court by means of judicial review. So there's bad
Speaker 4: news that Laton. Yes, the government appears to want to
Speaker 4: who perhaps repeal the Act. The good news is we
Speaker 4: now have an institution in Britain sufficiently powerful and well
Speaker 4: resourced to challenge that and to embarrass the government. In
Speaker 4: the pages of the press.
Speaker 3: Concern about threats to free speech and research in universities
Speaker 3: is sometimes dismissed as a manufactured distraction. Can I suggest
Speaker 3: that that is a very purposed claim to allow them
Speaker 3: to continue with what they want to achieve.
Speaker 4: Oh yes, later, every time I hear that, my blood
Speaker 4: pressure starts to rise. Because it's the leaders of most
Speaker 4: of our universities in Britain, throughout four years of press
Speaker 4: coverage or free speech in universities, have consistently said, there
Speaker 4: is no problem. The problem is limited to a small
Speaker 4: handful of cancelation of events and we're all committed to
Speaker 4: free speech. That's what they say. I will point out
Speaker 4: that although I probably was the first the first person
Speaker 4: to hit the pages of the press in twenty seventeen
Speaker 4: because an attempted to be maze to constrain my academic freedom,
Speaker 4: and it was in the pressook for weeks and so
Speaker 4: all of my most people in Oxford and in the
Speaker 4: university university administration who are conscious will know who I
Speaker 4: am and what happened to me. Nobody in the administration
Speaker 4: oxyd University has ever asked me to come in and
Speaker 4: talk to them of what's going on. Apart from that,
Speaker 4: you've got people like Kathleen Starkey, lesbian, a gender critical
Speaker 4: feminist philosopher. If you ever hear her speech, she's on YouTube.
Speaker 4: She is a model of reason, the model of reason.
Speaker 4: She was driven out of her job in her career
Speaker 4: at the University of Sussex a few years ago by
Speaker 4: campaign carried out by students are betted by fellow academics,
Speaker 4: and the university authorities allowed it to happen. She was
Speaker 4: driven out of a job. So I get really quite
Speaker 4: angry when I had universities an others say this is
Speaker 4: not a problem, because it is to say that you
Speaker 4: simply have to willfully ignore ample evidence of their being
Speaker 4: a problem. And if anyone's in any doubt, go and
Speaker 4: look at the website of the Free Speech Union in
Speaker 4: the UK. There are plenty of cases of people, not
Speaker 4: just universities but in other walks of life whose free
Speaker 4: speech and academic and freedom of thought is being constrained,
Speaker 4: and lawfully in many.
Speaker 3: Cases, I quite for the very beginning again. And in
Speaker 3: their June submission to the Times Education Commission, Tony Blair
Speaker 3: and Andrew o'donnis wrote that the Higher Education Freedom of
Speaker 3: Speech Bill is now making its way through Parliament is
Speaker 3: a reform in search of a problem. Since free speech
Speaker 3: is hardly a key issue on university campuses, Tony Blair
Speaker 3: lives up to his reputation or down to it? Should
Speaker 3: I say?
Speaker 4: Well? Actually, like and I used to hold a candle
Speaker 4: for Tony Blair and didn't hold a candle for Andrew
Speaker 4: Dunnas And the best I can say is that there
Speaker 4: is an ignorant statement, and given the available evidence, it
Speaker 4: is a willfully ignorant statement. And they should know better.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm sure they do.
Speaker 4: Well that case through more vulnerable, right, because there's a
Speaker 4: serious problem because, as I interimitted before, we need we
Speaker 4: need a liberal society which we all thought we heard
Speaker 4: until ten years ago, where all lawful ide years get
Speaker 4: to be expressed. And that means where we're raining orthodoxies
Speaker 4: whenever they are but orthodoxies with regard to gender self recognition.
Speaker 4: Orthodoxy is about about our societies being systemically racist. Orthodox
Speaker 4: is about that all ourcalgal history is nothing but a
Speaker 4: literary of racism and oppression. Those orthodoxies need testing, they
Speaker 4: need challenging. I think every one of them is actually false,
Speaker 4: but they are. They are determining a government policy. They're
Speaker 4: determine determining curriculating schools. And they're false, and we need
Speaker 4: a society which is able to test them and to
Speaker 4: expose how far they're false and how far they're true.
Speaker 4: And universities have an enormously important civic duty to perform
Speaker 4: in helping to shape as I said before, so they're
Speaker 4: capable of having liberal discussions. And governments have an enormously
Speaker 4: an enormous civic duty to make sure we have spaces
Speaker 4: where which are probably liberal. And all sorts of institutions
Speaker 4: and sometimes governments are failing, and the future of liberal
Speaker 4: society among us is therefore jeopardized. And it's really really important.
Speaker 4: So all those people who were trying to get on
Speaker 4: with their lives and hoping there's no problem that they
Speaker 4: had to deal with here and they can just keep
Speaker 4: their heads under the parapet. If you want a liberal society,
Speaker 4: you need to stand up, because otherwise we're going to
Speaker 4: lose it.
Speaker 3: So we've got universities. Now we've talked about them right
Speaker 3: from the beginning, but you've got students arriving at universities
Speaker 3: where I constantly hear it's a regular thing that they
Speaker 3: arrive at university and they can't even construct a sentence.
Speaker 3: They can't analyze anything, they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 3: So who's is that the result of the backwash from
Speaker 3: universities or is it providing the problem for universities.
Speaker 4: Well, it's probably listening again to do with this massive
Speaker 4: expansion of higher education in the nineties and early noughties.
Speaker 4: So so in Britain we you know, universities used to
Speaker 4: be research universities then we we we I think Margaret
Speaker 4: Thatcher actually her government decided to upgrade the status of
Speaker 4: what were polytechnics into universities. Polytechnics traditionally were about vocational education,
Speaker 4: which is very important, very important indeed, But that that
Speaker 4: meant that some some polytechnics decided to stop doing vocational
Speaker 4: education and to try and rival universities in academic research
Speaker 4: and teaching. And it also means that there are some
Speaker 4: of the weaker polytechnics who you know, as businesses, they
Speaker 4: want to attract students, but their admissions criteria pretty low.
Speaker 4: And it does mean therefore that kids are being sent
Speaker 4: to university who twenty years ago would not have gone
Speaker 4: to university simply because they're not prepared for it. Actually
Speaker 4: they have no attitude for it. They're much better off
Speaker 4: going to learn a vocational skills, so they become plumbers
Speaker 4: and whatever, because we need you know, we will never
Speaker 4: cease to need people with manual skills or artisanal skills,
Speaker 4: vacational skills. And I mean I've heard talks certainly in
Speaker 4: Britain in recent years that maybe was a mistake, particularly
Speaker 4: under the Blair government, to take an arbitrary figure of
Speaker 4: forty or fifty percent of the population to serve the
Speaker 4: knowledge economy, because actually that has led to a decline
Speaker 4: in the standards of some universities, because otherwise some kids
Speaker 4: simply couldn't cope if they were subjected to a more
Speaker 4: reduced standards. So there has been a decline in standards.
Speaker 4: And then going back to an earlier point we made
Speaker 4: about concessions made to students stuff from various kinds of
Speaker 4: mental and health. It makes it easier for them. And
Speaker 4: then also there is the issue of grade inflation in
Speaker 4: earlier years. For four decades ago, the number of students
Speaker 4: getting first class degrees was small ten percent. Maybe it's
Speaker 4: now thirty percent, and that I think is partly because
Speaker 4: of as a market competition, because you know, you want
Speaker 4: to attract good students to university. Well, if you're a
Speaker 4: university that gives first class de reason out generously, then
Speaker 4: that's one reason why student might choose to go with you.
Speaker 4: But of course it means that standards are being lowered
Speaker 4: for market reasons, and so you know, if there's are
Speaker 4: undermining their own credibility in this.
Speaker 3: Way, how much do you indulge in politics? Oh, publicly
Speaker 3: or privately.
Speaker 4: I'm now out of myself as a conservative, so I
Speaker 4: do politics at.
Speaker 3: This point of time. And by the time we are
Speaker 3: released with this podcast, they'll be counting votes. What's your
Speaker 3: thought on the American elect presidential election. I'm not even
Speaker 3: really asking you who do you think is going to win,
Speaker 3: because that's a question most people are trying to avoid.
Speaker 3: I'm just I'm wondering, if you accept the complaint of
Speaker 3: how could a country, a nation as big as three
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty million people, produce two candidates of such inferiority.
Speaker 3: That was before Biden resigned, and it's now applicable to
Speaker 3: his replacement. Now I'm not saying that's what I believe,
Speaker 3: but that's what that's the quote, and I'm wondering what
Speaker 3: your response is.
Speaker 4: Well, if the complained is about the quality of front
Speaker 4: rank politicians. Then there's not just an American problem. I
Speaker 4: think we have a general problem in the democratic world
Speaker 4: that the best people are not going to politics, and
Speaker 4: the quality of politicians that appears quite mediocre generally. As
Speaker 4: for the American situation, well, of course, although you and
Speaker 4: I look get to vote, we and the rest of
Speaker 4: the world, and not least the free world will have
Speaker 4: to suffer the result in one way or another. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean yes, of course. Donald Trump, in so many
Speaker 4: ways is this mainly crude and appears quite stupid. Sometimes.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, those who watch the effect of
Speaker 4: his policies when he was present say that with regard
Speaker 4: to deterring Russia and China, he was actually more robust
Speaker 4: than Obama and Biden. There is also the feature that
Speaker 4: whatever you think of Donald Trump himself, the fact there
Speaker 4: is a lot of Americans want to vote for him,
Speaker 4: and they are often Americans who feel left behind or
Speaker 4: ignored by the progressive elite. And I've certainly seen in
Speaker 4: my own country. I see it all the time. The
Speaker 4: progressive elites do not want to hear certain things, certainly
Speaker 4: not about immigration, and they just refuse to listen, and
Speaker 4: as a consequence of which people who are concerned about
Speaker 4: let's say illegal immigration or the rate of immigration, or
Speaker 4: that the impact of immigration on housing or parts of
Speaker 4: the country that are still languishing in post industrial ruin,
Speaker 4: the refusal of the left to pay attention to other
Speaker 4: things just means that other people who are concerned about
Speaker 4: them become increasingly illustrated and move to the right, so
Speaker 4: that the deafness of the left causes an absurge in
Speaker 4: support for the right. And I think that's to some
Speaker 4: extent to it. In so far as you find Trump
Speaker 4: apport the fault, I think lies to a large extent
Speaker 4: on the side of the Democrats.
Speaker 3: You just used a word that was in my mental
Speaker 3: waiting list. You said it, You said it lies with
Speaker 3: the with the Democrats. My belief is that there are
Speaker 3: so many lies being told now that objecting, objecting that
Speaker 3: they're wrong is a waste of time. The lies, the
Speaker 3: lies are breeding like flies, and and even even when
Speaker 3: they are discredited. And I'm thinking of three or so
Speaker 3: quotes from Trump that got twisted and thrown thrown at
Speaker 3: him from a from a different perspective. Obama was using
Speaker 3: one of them yesterday in the speech, and I can't
Speaker 3: understand why they get away with it. The only reason
Speaker 3: that I can provide is that things have standards have
Speaker 3: collapsed so much that nobody cares well.
Speaker 4: It's a dangerous supposed to be, isn't And I agree.
Speaker 4: And social media, which is so uninhibited, allows lies to
Speaker 4: spread in a way that they couldn't do informer generations.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm an academic. I try to be reasonable,
Speaker 4: and I'm sometimes perplexed as to how on earth one
Speaker 4: persuades people who are zealous and dogmatic. And I think
Speaker 4: I've come an inclusion. If people want to lie, you
Speaker 4: can't stop them. You just can't stop them. If they
Speaker 4: want to lie, they'll carry on doing it unless they
Speaker 4: suffer some kind of penalty. All one can do. And
Speaker 4: I just assisted doing this. I tell the truth as
Speaker 4: best I know it. I try and expose lies I
Speaker 4: find around me as best I can. My experience has
Speaker 4: been certainly through the success of my book. And I
Speaker 4: mentioned the editor of plum Scree, who commissioned it for
Speaker 4: blooms Free canceled it. He predicted sales up up to
Speaker 4: twenty thousand copies. It's now soul over sixty thousand copies.
Speaker 4: My experience in Oxford was putting on lectures to platform
Speaker 4: more or less conservative thinking. There's a big appetite for it,
Speaker 4: and since I've been in Australia, a lot of people
Speaker 4: want to hear what I have to say. So I'm
Speaker 4: encouraged that. You know, the lopul out there who don't
Speaker 4: buy the lies, don't buy the orthodoxies about race and
Speaker 4: gender and colonial history. They don't know very much, but
Speaker 4: they know enough to know that doesn't make sense. But
Speaker 4: who are eager to be told the whole truth? So
Speaker 4: I don't want to unestimate the problem later. And you know,
Speaker 4: most people like be talking to or not youngsters. But
Speaker 4: there's an appetet out there for the truth and whatever
Speaker 4: the difficult is, and however formidable task looks those of
Speaker 4: us well, we all have a responsibility to speak the
Speaker 4: truth as we know it, and I'm confident more people
Speaker 4: will listen than we might we might fear.
Speaker 3: Okay, I just got to quite you a headline and
Speaker 3: my question is very simple. Do you believe the following?
Speaker 3: And if so, can you explain it? But I will
Speaker 3: allow a brief explanation why the ruling class fears democracy.
Speaker 3: Do you agree with that?
Speaker 4: Yes, I do. I do because the ruling class has
Speaker 4: discovered that democratic politics will produce results they don't like.
Speaker 4: So it produced Brexit, and it may well produce the
Speaker 4: second Trump presidency. And so yes, Presa elites begin to
Speaker 4: wonder about democracy because people are getting wrong. Well, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm a democrat written and I know that democracy isn't perfect.
Speaker 4: I mean Hitler. Hitler came to pound that I said before,
Speaker 4: by normal democratic constitutional means. So you know, the people
Speaker 4: can get badly wrong, that's for sure. But the alternatives
Speaker 4: democracy are even worse. And what we have to do is,
Speaker 4: first of all, when the people give an answer we
Speaker 4: don't want to hear, we need to listen very carefully.
Speaker 4: Just in the case that people are saying something we
Speaker 4: needed to hear. What we shouldn't do, and this is
Speaker 4: what the eleite to do is to dismiss the people
Speaker 4: as ignorant, uncivilized, wicked. So those are voted for Brexit,
Speaker 4: we're all stupid white xenophobes with a salader for empire
Speaker 4: wanted to take Britain back to nineteen hundred, just as
Speaker 4: the left too often does. Instead of engaging and engaging
Speaker 4: with the reasons, the real reasons. The left too often
Speaker 4: reaches for dismissal, just just wipe it off the table
Speaker 4: and to dismiss the people. So although the people sometimes
Speaker 4: do get it wrong, elites need to listen because if
Speaker 4: they don't listen, they are going to be responsible for
Speaker 4: a violent reaction. But I'm afraid too many elites just
Speaker 4: talk to themselves and they're not honest, and they stay
Speaker 4: in their comfort zone, and they need to come out
Speaker 4: and and listen carefully and look carefully, and not just
Speaker 4: dismiss some popular view views they don't like as racist
Speaker 4: or as anaphobic or whatever.
Speaker 3: Just looking at the line of this is quite by accident,
Speaker 3: because I was about the rapid a line from your
Speaker 3: article that I'll get to in a second. That is
Speaker 3: not how the progressive lift react. What's the progressive just quickly.
Speaker 4: Well, I define a progressive as someone who believes in
Speaker 4: trans generous self identification, who believes that our societies are
Speaker 4: systemic the racism, believes that clone history was nothing but wickedness.
Speaker 4: What's more, a progressive is authoritarian, will not heed dissent,
Speaker 4: will not listen to descent, and does their best to
Speaker 4: repress it, repress it. So I'll talk about the repressive left,
Speaker 4: because they all left was more liberal. You know that
Speaker 4: they all left would have an argument with you and
Speaker 4: give reasons this plot the repressive left, they don't want
Speaker 4: an argument. They want to use power. They want to
Speaker 4: use a timidation to shut things down. So it's a
Speaker 4: combination of a certain dogmatic point of view plus authoritarian politics.
Speaker 3: You might have wondered that the of my life.
Speaker 4: What are you thinking?
Speaker 3: Oh, I can I can describe a progressive in in
Speaker 3: two words? All right, go ahead, and you send her
Speaker 3: adern by her own by her own exclamation. But but
Speaker 3: people listening to this know my thoughts on that. Soon
Speaker 3: as soon as as soon as I as soon as
Speaker 3: I heard her say that she was a progressive, I knew,
Speaker 3: I knew we were in trouble. So so now I
Speaker 3: have to get very quickly with you because I'm wearing
Speaker 3: your sin. I want to encourage the reading of how
Speaker 3: conservatives can win the culture Wars that you wrote and
Speaker 3: published only what less than a week ago in in
Speaker 3: Quadrant magazine and the current Quadrant magazine. It's the lead story.
Speaker 3: I think from memory, how conservatives can win the culture
Speaker 3: wardshould why should we read it?
Speaker 4: You should read it first of all, because you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: uh read it because some conservatives, sort of centrist conservatives,
Speaker 4: pretend that the culture wars are not important, that they're manufactured,
Speaker 4: and they're the kind of things that that nasty people
Speaker 4: on the extreme right and extreme left fight and we
Speaker 4: should rise above it. And I say no, the culture
Speaker 4: was enormously important for the safety of women, for hormongious
Speaker 4: race relations, and for the self confidence of the liberal
Speaker 4: Western the face of threats from China and Russia. So
Speaker 4: conservatives need to get in there and win the argument
Speaker 4: because important truths are at stake here, and we can
Speaker 4: win it, I think, because, as I've said, most people
Speaker 4: in our societies don't know enough about race and gender
Speaker 4: and colonial history. They're not entirely convinced by the progressive
Speaker 4: story being hoisted upon them. So if we can simply
Speaker 4: mobilize the unsure, slightly intimidated majority, I think the landscape,
Speaker 4: the political landscape, would change quickly. But some of us
Speaker 4: need to have the courage or the recklessness to stand
Speaker 4: up and say things that other people object to in
Speaker 4: the hope that we can really the troops and just
Speaker 4: encourage more people to voice their doubts because their doubts
Speaker 4: actually are reasonable and they ensure some of the stuff
Speaker 4: they're being told is false, and it is false. So
Speaker 4: we need together the troops to start exposing the falsehoods.
Speaker 3: It's a mastery as far as I'm concerned, how conservatives
Speaker 3: can win. The culture was and it's the I think
Speaker 3: the lead story in the November Quadrant magazine from Australia
Speaker 3: that I encourage everyone to read.
Speaker 4: Yes I should. I should add later that it was
Speaker 4: a Quadrant that brought me for the first time to
Speaker 4: Australia three weeks ago, and now FSU New Zealand have
Speaker 4: brought me here to Wellington.
Speaker 3: The Free Speech Union, of course. And you're talking, you're
Speaker 3: talking tonight.
Speaker 4: Talking to night in summer in Parliament, I believe I'm
Speaker 4: also talking in christ Church on Wednesday and in Auckland
Speaker 4: on on Saturdays.
Speaker 3: Excellent, Nigel Bigger. It's been a huge pleasure, at a
Speaker 3: privilege to meet you sort of. And and one day
Speaker 3: if I get to shake your hand, you can buy
Speaker 3: me a drink. I'm sorry, I'll buy.
Speaker 4: You a drink. I will, Linton, And thanks so much
Speaker 4: for having me on because these issues are so important
Speaker 4: to all of us, and it's great that you give
Speaker 4: me the maritime it's my pleasure.
Speaker 3: Thank you for now Light and swith okay mail room
Speaker 3: for two hundred and sixty three, missus producer. We are
Speaker 3: very close to the first the first announcements with regard
Speaker 3: to the election, and I think we'll just play this
Speaker 3: straight down the.
Speaker 5: Middle, absolutely latent, so let's get let's get going with it.
Speaker 5: Aileen says, it wouldn't surprise me if Queen Kamala the
Speaker 5: Kookabaro wins the election on November the fifth, Bring on
Speaker 5: the skyrockets and Roman candles. She'll be laughing all the
Speaker 5: way to the top, and so will her handlers in
Speaker 5: the background. Political dynasties are powerful in the Democrat Party,
Speaker 5: especially when they're lawyers, the Clinton's and the Obamas as
Speaker 5: recent examples. But lawyers, no disrespect, aren't economists, and as wordsmiths,
Speaker 5: they can often pull on emotions to win their case.
Speaker 5: And Eileen says, God bless America and God defend New.
Speaker 3: Zealand indeed on both counts. Now, Jenny, Jenny was watching
Speaker 3: a television interview and she was for us by what
Speaker 3: the interviewee was saying, I don't know who it was.
Speaker 3: Until I can find out, I'll just leave that apart.
Speaker 3: I'm totally perplexed. She goes on, who you can believe
Speaker 3: in this troubled world in which we live. This gets
Speaker 3: worse and worse the more it goes on. I'm beginning
Speaker 3: to think that whoever wins the election, there's going to
Speaker 3: be big trouble either way. We watched January sixth, carry
Speaker 3: on when Trump requested police protection as there was talk
Speaker 3: of trouble. Nanci Pelosi did not grant his request the
Speaker 3: extra for the extra protection, and the officers did not arrive.
Speaker 3: But there was a Democrat man who was identified by
Speaker 3: the media as being a Democrat. He was wearing a
Speaker 3: Trump hat. He was stirring up the crowd big time.
Speaker 3: No mention of that occurring. I can't think of his name,
Speaker 3: but he did get he got nailed in the end.
Speaker 3: I think he had a connection with the FBI, But
Speaker 3: I'm not totally sure. Are you able to mention any
Speaker 3: of this on your podcast?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: I can't, or is the subject much too sensitive to
Speaker 3: even try? Never roll on the fifth, Well, here we are, Leyton.
Speaker 5: Michael says, love your show, but I won't say a
Speaker 5: second Trump presidency is inevitable just yet. Too many gaffes
Speaker 5: the left wing media have pounced on at the moment,
Speaker 5: such as the Puerto Rico joke, and they don't care
Speaker 5: if women like it or not comment and Professor Lickman,
Speaker 5: who's been write nine out of ten past elections, is
Speaker 5: still predicting a Harris victory. Hopefully this will be his
Speaker 5: second incorrect prediction.
Speaker 3: Yes, you need a coin, that's all toss up. Some
Speaker 3: comments from Claire some comments regarding a letter about how
Speaker 3: easy it is for overseas people to fraudulently vote in
Speaker 3: the US election. As an expat who voted, I know
Speaker 3: it's not easy. But first, Bezos doesn't need to endorse Kamara.
Speaker 3: With almost every article favorable to her in his newspaper,
Speaker 3: it's extremely clear he supports her. I wouldn't actually count
Speaker 3: on that the moment. You might be right, you might
Speaker 3: be wrong. For an expat to vote. We need an
Speaker 3: address at our last domicide in the US. We need
Speaker 3: a social Security number, we need to fill in a
Speaker 3: voter registration and absentee ballot request, sign it and email
Speaker 3: it back. Due to time zone differences, weekends, etc. This
Speaker 3: took me about four days. Only then will they send
Speaker 3: you your ballot with strict instructions on mailing it back.
Speaker 3: That's right, mailing it back. Four years ago I voted online,
Speaker 3: but maybe because of fraud, that option was not available
Speaker 3: this year. The ballot must be placed into a plain
Speaker 3: envelope with voted ballot written on it. This envelope is
Speaker 3: then placed into another plane envelope, also with instructions on
Speaker 3: that envelope as to the mailing address and where your
Speaker 3: return address and signature goes. I wanted to track my ballot,
Speaker 3: but New Zealand post only allows those blue places to
Speaker 3: envelopes for tracking. My ballot would have been disallowed for
Speaker 3: not being mailed in a plain envelope. Crazy, my state
Speaker 3: is read my ballot wouldn't be necessarily so, but I
Speaker 3: wanted to vote for Trump so he can take out
Speaker 3: the garbage. Is to that, Thank you clear Layton.
Speaker 5: Vanessa says, just wanted to say how much I enjoyed
Speaker 5: listening to the latest podcast with your son Christian talking
Speaker 5: with you from the UK. He says he'll talk again anytime.
Speaker 5: You'll have to hold him to that.
Speaker 3: Indeed, I will I am and as a promise. Now,
Speaker 3: Allison writes once I was a listener to Candace Owen's
Speaker 3: But have you heard her in the past year or so?
Speaker 3: Her vitriol, her lies against Israel, her false and evil
Speaker 3: accusations against the IDF. The way she words thinks her
Speaker 3: serious slanders against all manner of persons such as Madame
Speaker 3: Macron and others, is oppress and difficult to listen to,
Speaker 3: so I don't online. One may look up the long
Speaker 3: letter that Dennis Prager wrote to Candace, a one time
Speaker 3: friend of his, trying to point out her errors in
Speaker 3: his gracious way. But would it be too much to
Speaker 3: say that there is no correcting Candace. When an arrogant
Speaker 3: person knows everything, what is one to do but boycott her?
Speaker 3: Her speech is so filled with deep rooted bitterness, anti Semitism,
Speaker 3: false presuppositions, and lack of knowledge of the subject that
Speaker 3: we actually have been praying that she not be accepted
Speaker 3: in Australia. Our first prayer has been answered, and also
Speaker 3: that New Zealand reject her application, waiting for our second
Speaker 3: prayer to be heard. Bless you and Carolyn Layton, and
Speaker 3: again thank you for all the hard work that you
Speaker 3: do in bringing us a superb podcast every week. And
Speaker 3: I appreciate that letter comment Allison.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Paul says, thanks for all that you do.
Speaker 5: I don't know how you do it up against ignorance
Speaker 5: so called media actors and announcers who are either too
Speaker 5: complacent to go and find the truth or more likely
Speaker 5: too lazy, pathetic and scared to speak the truth.
Speaker 3: I'll go for the second, do what is right.
Speaker 5: I'm not a religious man, but I am praying for
Speaker 5: the right outcome on Tuesday, Wednesday, New Zealand Time.
Speaker 3: And that's from Paul, Paul, and that's it. Thanks. Now
Speaker 3: we wait to see in the well. By the time
Speaker 3: you hear this, of course we all know numbers, but
Speaker 3: at the moment we speak with bated breath. Well, I
Speaker 3: was going to say ignorance that I thought, no, that's
Speaker 3: the wrong word. It could be misinterpreted without information. That's right,
Speaker 3: see you soon, see you. Now that will take us
Speaker 3: out to a number two sixty three. I have to
Speaker 3: say that it was put together under a little bit
Speaker 3: of pressure, but nevertheless we got there. I think. So
Speaker 3: if you would like to write to us Layton and
Speaker 3: New U Talks av dot co dot nz or Carolyn
Speaker 3: at newstalksb dot co dot nz. I would expect and
Speaker 3: hope there'll be plenty of commentary on the on the
Speaker 3: election outcome, part of which we have covered. I wish
Speaker 3: there was more. So it remains to be said that
Speaker 3: we shall be back for two seventy four in a
Speaker 3: few days. Until then, thank you for listening and we'll
Speaker 3: talk soon.
Speaker 2: Thank you for more from News Talks B.
Speaker 1: Listen live on air or online, and keep our shows
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