Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

And this week, I’ll be talking to Irish-English satirist and author Andrew Doyle, whom you might know better for his fictional alter-ego, Titania McGrath, the ecosexual “radical intersectionalist poet” whom Doyle has used to skewer the pieties of ultra-woke progressives.

And yes, I used the W-word—woke—which I realise has gone out of fashion lately. I mean, wokeness counter-reaction has gone out of fashion, of course—but, to some extent, so has the backlash against wokeness, especially since the election of Donald Trump. That’s because, like so many reactions and counter-reactions that take place in the endless culture war, the enemies of wokeness have created their own cultish ideology, complete with right-wing purity spirals and mobbings—the same things we hated when it was progressive radicals who were doing it.

As Doyle sees things, in fact, normal reasonable people are now being sandwiched between two competing forms of anti-liberal ideology: the one that comes from the left, traditional wokeness if you will—and the new right-wing wokeness, which is equally intolerant of dissent, and channels all sorts of deeply regressive values, such as antisemitism and homophobia.

In fact, Doyle himself, who happens to be gay, has been targeted by this kind of right-wing woke bigot, even as he’s still fending off cancel campaigns from all those old-school left-wing wokesters who’ve been targeting him for years. For traditional small-l classical liberals, it’s a two-front culture war.

As Doyle sees it, all of this points in the direction of giving up on the conventional left-right shorthand for describing the political spectrum. A better way to see things is liberals—that’s us, people who believe in free speech and viewpoint diversity and civil liberties—versus authoritarians; no matter whether those authoritarians fly the flag of MAGA or social justice.

Please enjoy my interview with satirist and author Andrew Doyle

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Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated using AI software. While we have made every effort to ensure its accuracy, some inconsistencies or errors may remain.

Jon Kay: Andrew Doyle, thanks so much for being on the Quillette Podcast.

Andrew Doyle: Thank you for having me.

JK: I just feel like we live in strange times. If this interview were taking place a couple of years ago, I'd be talking all about left-wing wokeness—“Oh, those progressives are so silly”, and “Did you hear about the latest words we're not allowed to use?” And your alter ego, Titania McGrath, who we’re going to talk about a little later. I don’t know—she might be a little bit dormant in recognition of these strange times we live in.

But let’s cut right to the chase. You had a Substack article titled What Is the Woke Right? Can you answer that question for us?

What is “the woke right”?

A faction of “anti-woke” campaigners are now embracing their own form of identity politics.

Andrew DoyleAndrew Doyle

AD: It’s become quite a contentious issue—the phrase “woke”—because it sounds counterintuitive. It sounds like an oxymoron. The reason I was talking about that is because I’ve always perceived the culture war not to be about left versus right, but to be about what John Stuart Mill described as the struggle between authority and liberty.

And I think when I’ve talked about the woke, it’s effectively a synonym for anti-liberal, in the traditional sense of the word “liberal”. So, the idea of there being a woke right actually makes complete sense, insofar as there are liberals on the right, the left, and everywhere in between—and there are also anti-liberals across the spectrum.

So, if you see the key characteristic of the woke as being a desire to impose their values on the rest of society through authoritarian means, then of course authoritarians exist absolutely everywhere on the political spectrum. The woke left and the woke right, therefore, are simply designations for people who are politically opposed on all sorts of issues, but both believe that authoritarianism is the means by which to achieve their goals.

That’s what I was talking about in that article. Maybe we could get into it, because I tried to outline what I believe are the key characteristics of what I was calling the “woke right”—which isn’t a term I invented, by the way. It’s been used quite a lot over the last few years. But it might be quite interesting to talk about what I perceive to be those characteristics and where they have similarities with the woke left. Would that be useful?

JK: It would be useful. But first, I’m going to blow my own horn—something I do at every opportunity—because as soon as people started using the term “woke” in scare quotes, I guess a couple of years ago, I started saying, instead of “woke”, let's say “anti-liberal progressivism”. Right? The idea that people who self-identify as progressives—and who often substantively have progressive outlooks in terms of everything from income distribution to anti-racism—advocate anti-liberal strategies and slogans in order to achieve their goals.

And just to give a refresher on what liberalism means—because, here in Canada, there’s a Liberal Party; in the UK, there are capital-L Liberals and small-l liberals. Small-l liberalism means free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom from theocracy and against theocracy. And some people, including you, have identified the similarities between progressive wokeness and deflected forms of Christianity.

You know, civil liberties more generally. And there’s this impulse—I’ve often said that liberalism has no dependable constituency, because as soon as you want to shut somebody up or decide that someone is dangerous, one of the first things you do is abandon liberal values. You say, “Well, this person doesn’t deserve the presumption of innocence, because they’re such a bad person that we have to get away from that.”

So, it makes total sense that the same abandonment of liberalism would be seen on the other side of the political spectrum now that, to some extent, they’re winning the culture war. I mean, how could it not—

AD: How could it not be? There’s never been a time in history when anti-liberalism—which I think you're right to equate with wokeness—has been the singular domain of one particular political worldview. I think authoritarianism is an instinct that we all have. Some of us are socialised out of it, or it’s something we have to learn to resist.

Most kids, when they see someone they don’t like, or hear something they don’t like, just want to shut them up, beat them up, or get rid of them. There is something instinctive about the human condition that lends itself towards authoritarian thinking.

What the liberal says is: we need to cultivate a society in which we resist those temptations. In other words, we’re never going to like everyone—but we tolerate. That’s why tolerance is such a good thing. Tolerance doesn’t imply that you approve of someone; it implies that you understand the importance of a plural society, where everyone has the right to say what they want, think what they want, do what they want—right up until the point where they encroach on the rights of others. That is the essence of liberalism.

But, as you say, it’s complicated. In Australia, for instance, the Liberal Party is the conservative party. In America, “liberal” is synonymous with “left-wing”. The Liberal Democrats in the UK are neither liberal nor democratic. So, the definitions are all over the place.

Thankfully, there’s never been a universally agreed definition of liberalism. There are all sorts of different forms. But since you’ve clarified very clearly what you mean by liberalism—which is very much in tandem with what I mean—if we’re speaking within those terms, then I think it would be difficult to counter the view that, just as the woke left exists, the woke right exists. It makes complete sense to me.

JK: One of the strange things about the times we live in is that you have different domains in society where—I'm going to use the term—the woke left occupies the commanding heights, and the woke right occupies the commanding heights of other domains.

So, one example would be in universities. I think it’s still fair to say that progressives—including, in some cases, illiberal progressives—occupy the commanding heights in many universities, NGOs, certain social media silos.

But then, especially since Trump’s re-election and in red states, you’ve got political spheres where it’s 100 percent controlled by, call them, illiberal conservatives. So, it isn’t like this continuous slope where you have illiberal conservatives on one side and liberal progressives on the other, and this vast plain in the middle where liberals are saying, “Can’t we all just be tolerant and exercise political restraint?”

It’s a patchwork of fiefdoms, with a centrifugal effect, where you might have an illiberal-right legislature literally across the street from an illiberal-left university faculty. And each regards the other as illiberal—because to them, illiberalism is simply people who don’t agree with them. That situation hasn’t existed in my lifetime. That’s unusual.

AD: It is unusual. I think the way to overcome that, in terms of how we conceptualise it, is to stop thinking in terms of left and right. The culture war kind of killed off those ideas anyway. It's a hangover from the French Revolution.

We should start thinking in terms of liberty against authority. What you just described—we saw it recently with Darryl Cooper, the guy who described himself as a historian on Tucker Carlson’s show, going on about how Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II.

People called that an example of the woke right in action. But how is that any different from the panel at Churchill College, Cambridge in 2021, where academics from the woke left—people like Priyamvada Gopal and Kehinde Andrews—said Churchill was the true villain of World War II?

In other words, you have two groups of people who are politically antithetical reaching the same conclusion about the degeneracy of the West.

So, to see that as a left/right divide doesn’t help. If you see it in terms of liberalism, it makes sense. The woke left have never believed in liberalism. They like to say “woke” just means being alert to social injustice, particularly racism—but they forget to add the caveat: “and we want to change that by authoritarian means.” That’s the key.

And that’s the same with people on the right who want to reshape the world in accordance with their views through authoritarian means.

If we reconceptualise the culture war as not left vs right but liberalism vs authority, we start to see authoritarians exist across the spectrum. The goal, therefore, of people like myself—critics of the culture war—is to challenge authoritarianism whenever it arises, irrespective of political affiliations or tribes. To be consistent in applying principles.

Not to say, “Because someone on my side has veered into authoritarianism, I’ll ignore it”, but instead to apply those principles across the board and say, “No, that’s not right—wherever it comes from, we need to address it.”

As you say, there are great complexities to this next phase of the culture war. As “woke” is dying—and I think it definitely is—what happens next? It’s always the same story throughout history. The emergence of authoritarianism in another form.

It’s a kind of whack-a-mole situation. You deal with it in one regard, and then it turns up somewhere else. We’ve been through these revolutions before. When I was a kid, it was the right-wing tabloids in the UK—like the Daily Mail or the Daily Express—calling for films and books to be banned and censored. Now it’s left-leaning activist papers like The Guardian or The New Statesman doing the same thing.

It’s not about left and right. It’s about people who think their view has to be imposed by force on the rest of society.

JK: You mentioned in passing—I think her name was Professor Gopal. Am I remembering correctly that she’s the same academic who started screaming at some minimum wage worker at her uni?

AD: Yes, that’s exactly right. Her college. I think he called her “ma’am” or “mum”, and she didn’t like that. She wanted to be called “doctor”.

And of course, what you had was this situation where a very privileged, wealthy woman—she comes from wealth—was berating a working-class guy because he wasn’t being sufficiently deferential. And of course, she dressed it up in the garb of racism. There was certainly that insinuation there.

That’s something the woke left have managed to do very well—it’s a singularly middle-class phenomenon, if not upper middle-class. It’s a bourgeois movement. That’s why they talk about intersectionality, but very few of them really care about the class struggle. What they care about is their monomania for group identity.

So, it is an anti-working-class movement, which is why I’ve always taken the view that the woke movement cannot really be said to be left-wing in any meaningful sense. It’s not left-wing. The case of Priyamvada Gopal illustrates that precisely—same with the Brexit vote in the UK, where you had lots of very privileged, wealthy people saying the working class know absolutely nothing about politics and shouldn’t be allowed to have a say in our country’s future or our membership of an international trading bloc.

So yes, in terms of class—absolutely. It’s very interesting to note that the woke left has always been anti-working-class and therefore anti-left. Which is also why, thinking in terms of left and right in all of this, you start to get into very muddy quagmires very—

JK: —quickly. Yeah. This is something I encountered myself. Probably about a decade ago, I worked briefly at a highly progressive Canadian magazine, where I was kind of a square peg in a round hole. I was editor-in-chief there for a brief period.

Ironically, even though my appointment was controversial—I’m not particularly conservative, but I was seen as more conservative than the status quo—I often found myself as the token Marxist in the room. After half an hour of discussion about some article written by a grad student about how she’d been misgendered by the photocopier or something like that, I’d say: “Is this actually something people who have difficulty paying their rent worry about?”

And often, the people I worked with—very nice, respectful, and I believe well-intentioned—would speak about working-class people in a kind of dismissive way. Because, well, they don’t know about land acknowledgements. They haven’t come to terms with their gender identity. They’re very cis. And I found it all very confusing and disorienting, because at the time I naively thought about left and right in terms of things like income inequality and access to capital.

AD: That’s not naïve. That’s the traditional left-wing worldview. What’s happened since the cultural turn is that the woke movement has become more Marxian than Marxist—it substitutes money, the economy, and class for identity categories. And therefore, you get people who’ve been incredibly privileged throughout their lives berating others.

JK: But you’ve made the point—borrowing from others—that in this so-called woke right movement, there’s a kind of strange intersectionality going on. White people are focusing on their identities as white people and saying things like, “I’m from Luton, and the world hates Luton.” They’ve kind of borrowed some of the worst habits of their opponents, haven’t they?

AD: Well, whenever you have a movement like the woke—which focuses obsessively on group identity and insists that human beings must be perceived first and foremost through their group identity rather than as individuals, as Martin Luther King argued—then you’re going to get that as a response.

How can you be surprised when the people designated as “oppressors”—straight white men, or whoever—start thinking in terms of group identity themselves? It’s absolutely obvious that was going to happen. And we’re seeing more and more of it.

People are now saying, “Well, if you’re going to talk about Black Lives Matter, why can’t we talk about White Lives as well?” I noticed a post online from the guy who runs Gab—is it Andrew Torba?

JK: I think so. And Gab, for those who don’t know, I don’t even know if it still exists, but it was this right-wing alternative to Twitter, as it then was. It gained prominence because, when Donald Trump was thrown off Twitter, at least for a time, he was on this thing called Gab.

AD: That’s right. It became another echo chamber—by necessity, that sort of happened. But yes, I’ve got the quotation. He posted on X and said:

“In a multicultural, multi-ethnic society like ours, tribal identity politics is inevitable. Different identity groups will always strive to protect and promote their own interests. This is common sense. And white people are starting to wake up to this reality and realise that if they don't advocate for themselves, no one else will.”

What’s very interesting is that in his messages and tweets, he always capitalises “White”. Capital W.

JK: That reminds me—there was a big thing with the Associated Press style guide, wasn’t there? I forget how it was resolved, but they were going to capitalise “Black” but not “White” or something like that.

AD: Yes, exactly. He’s responding directly to the identitarian left’s decision to capitalise “Black” but not “White”. The Associated Press issued a statement saying, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, they would capitalise “Black” due to shared cultural history, but they would not capitalise “White”.

That’s patently ideological. And lots of media outlets followed suit mindlessly, not realising they were promoting a really regressive form of politics. Then, you had some social justice activists—I think at the MacArthur Foundation—writing a piece saying, “Actually, we should also capitalise White. Otherwise, it implies whiteness is the norm or standard.” So, grammar has to be equitable too, apparently. It got very complicated.

But the bottom line is: we’re now seeing people on the right, like Torba, capitalising “White” as a reaction to the woke capitalising “Black”. In other words, they’re mirroring their tactics, pushing back using the same tools.

More and more online, we’re seeing efforts to promote “White identity”, to advocate for group interests according to race. This is the mirror image of the woke left. That’s why we talk about woke left and woke right. They are both fixated on identity politics—on seeing people in terms of demographics, not as individuals.

And that, of course, is incredibly anti-liberal. They share that quality. We’ve opened the gateway to the mainstreaming of identitarianism, and now it’s being adopted with growing vehemence across the political spectrum. We shouldn’t be surprised to see that.

JK: I just want to pick up on that. I think the key difference between progressive illiberalism and right-wing illiberalism lies in the form it takes. Progressive illiberalism isn’t really a personality cult—it’s a cult of identity. Black vs white, gay vs straight—although gay men are like Jews or Asians, they seem to have been thrown out from the intersectional bus. It’s trans vs cis, Indigenous vs non-Indigenous—it’s very categorical.

Whereas I get the sense that illiberal conservatism is more of a personality cult—based, right now, on whatever Donald Trump says. You gave the example of someone on Tucker Carlson’s show saying Churchill was the true villain of WWII. That’s insane—but Tucker was nodding along.

And we know why it’s happening. Trump has gone all in with Russia and the authoritarian impulses that Putin represents. But I get the sense that if Trump tomorrow said, “I love Ukraine, I hate Russia,” a lot of these illiberal conservatives would immediately switch. It’s like: “Eurasia is our friend. Eastasia is the enemy. Eastasia has always been the enemy.” Don’t you think there’s a single-person personality cult?

AD: No.

JK: You don’t?

AD: I see it very differently.

JK: Maybe that’s because I’m in North America?

AD: Possibly. I don’t see it that way. I see Donald Trump and the MAGA movement as a symptom rather than a cause.

JK: But don’t you think that if he changed his mind on an issue tomorrow, he’d bring with him a large number of illiberal conservatives—whereas no single progressive ideologue like Judith Butler or Ibram X. Kendi could shift the entire progressive movement the way Trump can shift conservative opinion?

AD: I’m really not so sure. I see plenty of arguments within Republican and right-wing circles—on Russia, Ukraine, identity politics, protectionism—you name it. I don’t think Trump holds the reins in quite that way.

I think he won by a landslide largely due to the Democrats’ failures, but also because he was going to address this massive cultural problem—the woke movement. He was going to tackle it. That movement has never been popular among the American public. At its height, maybe 8% of the population supported it.

It was a top-down, imposed, unpopular movement. Trump positioned himself against it. The Biden administration, meanwhile, went all in supporting it—even though Biden was supposed to be the non-woke candidate, he became its biggest cheerleader.

People held their noses and voted for Trump, even if they disliked him personally. I think he’s not so much leading public opinion as tapping into views most people already hold.

If you take the trans issue—he doesn’t have to work very hard. He signs an executive order saying there are two sexes, men shouldn’t be allowed in women’s sports or changing rooms. That’s an 80/20 issue. Even 67% of Democrat voters support him on that.

He’s saying things that are popular. I don’t think he’s an opinion-former in that way. If he did say something outlandish that deviated from his consistent anti-woke stance, he’d get huge pushback.

I just don’t buy the idea that the public is blindly following some spiritual leader. I think it’s the other way around—he’s following popular sentiment.

JK: I think you're absolutely correct when it comes to issues like the trans issue. The Russia–Ukraine thing is different. I don’t think a huge percentage of voters had deeply held convictions on that.

But on that issue, I think Trump weaponised it in a very strange and dangerous way.

AD: But if your whole policy is “America First”—non-interventionist, staying out of foreign conflicts—then pushing for a resolution to the Russia–Ukraine war, which is taking a lot of U.S. money, is perfectly in line with what he campaigned on.

JK: I guess. But Ronald Reagan was “America First”, and for him—and maybe I’m old-fashioned—that still meant defending Europe from Russian aggression.

AD: That's right. But to be fair, that’s not what Trump was saying, was it? He was saying—quite explicitly, in fact—that the war should never have happened. “I would’ve been able to stop it,” you know, in his sort of blustering way: “I'll put an end to this on day one,” etc.

So no, I don't think he can be accused of not doing the thing that he campaigned on. I don’t think that’s true. I think it is exactly what he campaigned on. You can have a debate about the merits and demerits of that approach, but what you can’t say is that this was some kind of about-turn.

JK: Okay. I want to get back to the present moment, but I just want to deviate into some futurism here. I don’t want to dwell too much during this discussion on the trans issue—we’ve covered it a lot at Quillette.

I think we’d probably agree it was ludicrous for the Democrats to stick with the party line on the idea that men can become women by changing their pronouns, as if it were a magic spell.

AD: And they still are, by the way.

JK: It’s insane. They're already hard at work losing the next election over this issue. I’ve seen polling data suggesting that in some swing states—perhaps even the entire presidential election—this issue helped swing the result.

AD: Did you see the analysis from a Democrat think tank about that Trump advertisement?

JK: The they/them thing?

AD: Yes. “Kamala is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.” Devastating. And that advert showed a bigger swing in opinion than anything else. This was a culture war election, I think.

JK: Not to dwell on this too much, but my question is this: if we take that issue as emblematic of progressive overconfidence and overreach—“We can pretend men can become women and still win elections; we’re on the right side of history; biological sex is a myth imposed by white people on Indigenous societies”—what is the equivalent issue for conservatives?

What’s their overreach—the moment when they depart from reality and go into science fiction territory, and 90% of people are like, “What the hell are you talking about?” What is the equivalent issue for conservative woke overreach?

AD: It would probably be the erosion of secularism—the imposition of some kind of state-sanctioned Christianity. That strikes me as the equivalent.

JK: So, sticking with the parallel between woke theocracy and pseudoscience versus a more literal theocracy that you might get from a social conservative—

AD: There are two aspects here. One is the belief system itself. The other is how the belief system is implemented in society. The “how” is about authoritarianism. For example, the pseudo-religious belief in a gendered soul has been imposed top-down by the Democrats. What you’ve described—the idea that the public will just accept it, and they’ll “come around”—that’s—

JK: That’s bourgeois paternalism.

AD: Combined with authoritarianism.

JK: And sometimes, I try to point out to conservatives, sometimes they’re right. Thirty years ago, gay marriage was seen as this elite, ivory tower, college-campus idea. Now, at least here in Canada, my conservative friends are totally fine with gay marriage.

AD: But that’s because gay marriage is based on the idea that sexual orientation is something real, something that can be observed and measured.

JK: Right—I’m just saying that sometimes, the elites say, “They’ll come around to us eventually,” and sometimes they’re right.

AD: Absolutely—they’re sometimes right.

JK: Sometimes.

AD: Sometimes they’re absolutely right. But we can be pretty sure they won’t be right when it comes to a supernatural belief system.

JK: Yeah, that’s true.

AD: I know you don’t want to talk too much about the trans issue, but a simple question: why is it that everyone who’s implementing these policies—in healthcare, public policy, and elsewhere—can’t even define gender identity? No one can tell you what it actually is. And yet they're enforcing hate speech laws in Europe based on this supernatural belief that they can’t define.

JK: It's like the spark of the divine within us.

AD: Exactly. So obviously, that’s never going to be persuasive. What you can do is terrorise a population into feigning belief—like in Stalinist Russia. You can force people to toe the party line, but it doesn’t mean they believe it. That’s what’s happened with the gender issue. Very few people genuinely believe in something like a gendered soul.

So to return to your original question: that’s why I say the likely right-wing equivalent is a religious revival, a resurgence of Christianity. And I would add—specifically—a resurgence of performative Christianity.

Roger Scruton wrote a book called England: An Elegy, in which he referred to England in the past tense throughout, making the very clear point that he thought the country was dead. He talks about the Church of England and how it was never really about belief in God. Many prominent clergymen didn’t believe in God—it was about community, rules, and—

JK: —decorum and public order. Until well into the Tudor era, you were fined if you didn’t show up on Sunday.

AD: Exactly.

JK: You weren’t fined because, in your soul, you weren’t a Christian. You were fined because “this is what’s done”, and you weren’t doing what’s done.

AD: Exactly. So it’s performance. That’s what I mean. I come from a Christian family—I know a lot of genuine Christians. Some people I know have recently converted and genuinely had a transformative experience. They have faith.

But I also see an awful lot of people adopting Christianity as an identity category—who don’t believe in God at all, or at least haven’t said anything that convinces me they do.

I come from a religious background, so I’m sensitive to this. To me, faith is an authentic feeling—not tethered to evidence or reason. Most religious people I know would accept that—it’s an unreasonable belief, but one they nonetheless hold.

But what I’m seeing is people adding a cross to their social media profiles, posting “Christ is King” as a way to taunt Jews or others. They’re using Christian slogans in a way that is anti-Christian, as far as I can see—completely at odds with the teachings of Christ. It’s divisive and aggressive.

JK: In that context, the cross becomes a kind of “he/him” land acknowledgement.

AD: That’s exactly what I mean. I’m not denigrating religious belief. I’d say the majority of the world’s population holds religious faith sincerely. I’m talking about this performative perversion of religion—as a tribal marker.

And I’m seeing increasing evidence that this will become the conservative equivalent of the “gendered soul”. I’ve heard people on the woke right, if we’re calling them that, say we need a re-establishment of Christian norms in schooling, in public policy. That is: “You’re free to believe what you want, but you’re going to have to follow these basic Christian ideas.”

To me, that’s anathema to the U.S. Constitution and to the great experiment in freedom that is the United States of America.

So if we’re trying to anticipate where the equivalent of the “gendered soul” will arise on the right—it’s this. And again, with the gendered soul, we know the vast majority of politicians pushing it don’t really believe in it.

JK: No, they don’t.

AD: They absolutely don't. If they did, when they're asked, “What is a woman?” they wouldn’t panic. I mean, you can see the fear in their eyes—“Oh my God, I might have to tell the truth. What am I going to do about that?” So it's not an authentically held belief. I’m not saying nobody holds it—some people do—but generally speaking, it’s not authentic.

JK: I think maybe 20 or 30 percent of people pretend to believe it, and of those, maybe 1 percent actually do believe it.

AD: If that. I think you'd be hard-pushed to even get the numbers that high. But look, I’m not the mothership—I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I'm just going on what I've seen in terms of the online chatter from the woke right. They seem to think liberalism is to blame. That wokeness arose because we were too liberal.

My view is the opposite. Wokeness arose because we failed to be liberal. We failed to apply the principles of liberalism. Wokeness represents a failure of liberalism, not evidence of its success.

A lot of them are now saying, “Well, what we need is an alternative authoritarian system that will prevent this from rising.” In other words, someone has to be in power—it may as well be us. Whereas I would like to see a truly liberal society where everyone can do what they want within the confines of the rule of law, so long as they're not encroaching on other people's rights.

That doesn't mean a kind of free-for-all. It doesn't mean what Milton called license. Milton had this distinction between liberty and license—it's an old Christian idea. Liberty doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with no consideration for others.

My idea of liberalism is fostering a society that encourages community and social responsibility, where we live under the rule of law and support each other—but also where we are free to break the social contract if we so desire, so long as we're not harming others. And if we do that, we accept the consequences, which are usually ostracism or becoming a bit of a pariah. That’s the liberal system—which, as yet, hasn't really been realised.

JK: My attitude towards traditional religion has become very complicated. Not in terms of my personal beliefs—I'm not an observant religious person. But you know the old adage that when a person abandons religion, it leaves a God-shaped hole in their brain. And so they become highly vulnerable to totalising dogmas—whether it's Marxism, or they go all-in on Gaza, or gender ideology. They just adopt a different kind of religion.

I once spoke with two Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ostracised by their family because they wanted to go to university. They left the religion, and when they arrived on campus, the first person who handed them a pamphlet—that was their new religion.

AD: Yeah.

JK: It happened to be evangelical Christianity. So for two years, they became evangelical Christians. Then they left that, and became devout atheists and rationalists and sceptics. That became their new church.

There does seem to be this idea that we all need a church of some kind, even if we don't call it a church. But liberalism—for all its benefits—isn’t a church.

AD: I think that's inevitable. You won’t have missed the fact that the most vehement adopters of gender ideology have been the new atheists—the humanist societies. They’ve become real zealots.

JK: They need a god.

AD: They need something. I don’t know if it’s really about a god, necessarily—but it’s about purpose. It’s about meaning. A movement. Because atheism is often an anti-movement.

JK: Same with liberalism.

AD: Exactly. You mentioned that liberalism doesn’t offer you a church—but it does offer meaning. To me, it’s a kind of intellectual death to outsource my agency to someone else’s rules. That’s why the liberal system is preferable. I don’t want to follow someone else’s dictates, or look to someone else to decide how I should behave.

But at the same time, I want a sense of social responsibility. I want to live in a cooperative society. So yes, liberalism is not a church, but liberals say: you're free to join whatever church you want. You're free to believe whatever you want. You're free to do what you want within the rule of law.

That seems like a no-brainer. But I keep banging my head against the wall, because as far as I can tell, the dominant instinct in humanity is: “I’ve got all the right answers, and I want everyone else to live by my rules.” And that’s coming from the right now, just as much as it came from the left during the woke era.

JK: I promised I wouldn't talk about Gaza and the Middle East, because once you start talking about that, it's all you talk about. But I have friends and relatives for whom Zionism or anti-Zionism has become their religion. It’s all they talk about—on social media, in person.

And it’s a real issue. In some cases, I actually agree with their views—but it’s hard to be around them because they’re such zealots. Some of these friends are Jewish. But it’s clear to me that this is a phenomenon that’s separate from their Jewish belief system.

Zionism—I happen to be Jewish by ancestry, and I’m generally Zionistic in outlook—but more and more I see these two things as different churches. Or different shuls, I suppose.

AD: Right. It's why Greta Thunberg was able to transition so easily from environmental activism to overnight anti-Israel activism—because it’s part of the omni-cause. It’s the same predictable pattern.

JK: Do you have the same thing in England? Because here in Toronto, the only people I still see wearing masks are anti-Israel—effectively pro-Hamas. Gender-ideology aligned, often exercise-deprived people with three masks. They’re all obsessed with Gaza, with masking, and they all have three genders. It’s become this sort of Borg. Is it the same in England, where those three issues are fused?

AD: Yes, it is. That’s why they call it the omni-cause. When someone tells you their opinion on, say, LGBTQIA+ or Israel–Palestine or abortion, you can predict their opinion on every other subject 99% of the time.

JK: Except in these cases, they’re fringe positions. One or two percent of society supports Hamas. One or two percent are still masking. One or two percent use unpronounceable pronouns. But they all seem to be the same people.

AD: Exactly. Which is why it’s so easy to identify. Someone’s still wearing a mask, and you already know the rest. It’s like a cult.

JK: It is a cult.

AD: That’s exactly what it is. It's that thing I was talking about—outsourcing your decision-making to someone else.

JK: So what’s the equivalent for conservatives? The holy trinity I just referenced: the keffiyeh, the mask, the weird pronouns—what’s the equivalent on the right?

AD: Probably the Groypers.

JK: What’s that? That sounds like a dermatological condition or something.

AD: They’re the ones who post the frogs—the Pepe frogs—online.

JK: What is the Pepe thing? I’ve never understood it.

AD: It’s a conservative thing, but it started as an internet meme. The problem is that it spilled out into other areas.

JK: What does it mean? The only people I knew who were obsessed with frogs were progressives denouncing it. But I never figured out what the frog meant.

AD: This is internet culture I'm not really part of, so I tread carefully. My experience is that I’ve been piled on by Groypers—lots of images of frogs being posted at me for a 24-hour period.

The Pepe frog became associated with the dissident right. Some people use it as a joke. Some use it to provoke. But there’s a faction that sees it as a symbol of white nationalism and ethno-nationalism.

JK: Is the frog like Kermit?

AD: No, not Kermit. It’s Pepe the Frog—completely different. You know it when you see it.

JK: I’ve seen the image. It kind of looks like Kermit. I just never knew what it meant.

AD: Kermit’s far too wholesome. Kermit is definitely not a white nationalist.

JK: I have issues with Kermit, but they’re not political.

AD: It’s probably the cross-breeding with a pig. Morally reprehensible.

JK: It is weird.

AD: Anyway, Pepe is a provocative internet meme embraced by the Groypers. When I’ve been piled on by them, there’s been a lot of anti-gay stuff—they called me a “sodomite”. Also a lot of antisemitic and anti-black rhetoric. All of that alt-right baggage—though “alt-right” is a complicated term.

If you're looking for a fringe group that’s the mirror image of the mask-wearing, pride-flag-waving woke, it’s that—the dissident right, or the trolling, “shitposting” end of it.

Even there, I know trolls who have no racist bone in their body. But they're part of communities where racism, antisemitism, and white supremacy are normalised—and their way of engaging is to mock it. Still, that whole faction is obsessed with group identity—white identity, heterosexual identity.

They talk about gays as degenerate. They think the LGBTQ thing is degenerate. They think Jews run the world. These are antisemitic conspiracy theories. It’s all politics of grievance and resentment—the same as the woke left.

They hate liberalism. They want strict laws aligned with their values. Antisemitism is key—every illiberal movement ends up there.

JK: Completely normalised antisemitism—on the woke left and the woke right.

AD: Exactly. And then you get the purity spirals—everyone must believe exactly what we believe, or we’ll pile on. I’ve been piled on by the Groypers and by the woke left, the pronoun-flag people. They’re equally vehement, equally vicious, and equally intolerant of dissent.

They are cults. And they behave like cults. Both have this disdain for the West—they think the West is responsible for the rise of wokeness.

JK: And they say Putin was just reacting to Western provocations when he invaded Ukraine. That’s another precept you hear.

AD: Yes, exactly. That’s why you hear things like: “Maybe it would’ve been better if Hitler had won World War II.” That was the start of our problems.

You remember that Darryl Cooper guy from Tucker Carlson’s show? When the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featured drag queens parodying the Last Supper, he posted that image alongside one of Hitler marching into Paris, and said the ceremony was worse.

JK: Wow. I don’t know what to do with that. But the only other person I know who expressed ambiguity about whether it would’ve been good if the Nazis had won was a far-left Canadian named Nora Loreto.

I don’t know what became of her—she was prominent about a year ago. She tweeted, paraphrasing, that if Hitler had won, maybe there would’ve been less geopolitical space for American imperialism. Crazy.

To me, that was a cautionary tale of what happens when your brain gets captured by this kind of cult. But now there’s a direct analogue on the right—people actually musing that if Hitler had won, we wouldn’t have drag queens at the Olympics. We wouldn’t have degeneracy.

AD: Hitler was obsessed with that. He thought it was all decadence. Degenerate art. He wanted censorship—which is exactly what the woke want.

The woke right are the same. I just read the other day that Texas A&M University has now banned drag performances on campus.

JK: Which is crazy. Drag is fine—it’s funny, it’s interesting. I like drag. It’s not for kids, but—

AD: I agree. I’ve liked lots of drag. I’ve been to lots of drag shows. Drag is totally fine. The drag issue is a very good example of this. Again, we were talking earlier about the Andrew Torba example—the idea of white identitarians borrowing the tactics of black identitarians, and how one reaction produces the other.

The politicisation of drag is a really interesting case of how that’s happened societally. For instance—did you see this? There was a viral clip a couple of years ago from a church in Texas. There was a ceremony with a group of drag queens—extreme drag, with massive wigs and makeup—standing on the altar while the priest led a call-and-response with the congregation about supporting the oppressed and marginalised drag community, and the LGBTQ+.

These were Christians. What you saw there was the sanctification of drag as an oppressed identity group. More and more, we’ve seen drag queens arguing that drag should be a protected characteristic.

JK: Step back from this—my family, historically, every summer we go to this town in Maine called Ogunquit. For reasons I can’t fully explain, it’s historically been a holiday spot for a lot of gay men. It’s a beach town. As a result, there are two or three cabaret bars with drag performances—even though only about 17 people live in the town. Three drag cabarets!

When I was a kid, this was totally normal. These were gay men having fun—it was an art form, like musical theatre. But I never thought of it—and I don’t think the performers thought of it—as more than that. Just a way of expressing oneself.

AD: That’s the sanctification of identity. It’s the same with “non-binary”. “Non-binary” isn’t innate—it’s like being a goth or a punk. It’s not a thing that’s hardwired. So to claim that being a drag queen is somehow innate, and that this identity should be prioritised over material facts—that’s the problem.

JK: Do you know what Two-Spirit is? Does that term have any currency in England?

AD: Not really.

JK: It’s mostly Canadian. It was essentially invented in the 1970s and popularised mostly by white people. A Canadian trade union—the elementary school teachers’ union, I think—actually commissioned researchers to define what it meant to be Two-Spirit. I read the report. It was hilarious—unintentionally so.

It said being Two-Spirit is sacred and holy, but they had no idea what it meant—except that two things were required: one, you have to be Indigenous; two, you have to be anti-colonial. Beyond that, they didn’t know whether it was a gender, a sexuality, or what. So it’s basically: “I’m kind of confused about my sexuality, I’m Indigenous, and I hate Donald Trump.” That’s Two-Spirit.

How is that the same as being gay? How is that equivalent to being born into a fundamentally different sexual orientation?

AD: This gets to the heart of the culture war—the monomania over identity. That’s all it is. Drag queens are not oppressed. They never have been. They are, like Two-Spirit or non-binary, expressions of style or subculture. Drag is slightly different because it’s an art form.

But the reason we’re seeing support for gay rights plummet in America—the reason we have, what, five US states trying to repeal same-sex marriage—is because of the excesses of the so-called “BT+” community. Which, by the way, isn’t a thing.

Drag Queen Story Hour, sexualised performances for children, the mainstreaming of fetish culture—these things are now being blamed on gay people. But they’ve got nothing to do with gay people, by and large. It’s this identitarian, sex-obsessed movement.

The drag artists I’ve known have been deeply subversive, waspish, offensive, politically incorrect—all the things the woke are not. But woke functions like a virus. It captures and reshapes every institution it touches—including drag. Suddenly you’ve got drag performers sitting in front of children reading stories. And a small number performing sexualised routines for children.

Because at the heart of queer theory is the belief that there should be no boundaries—including age of consent. So there’s been this horrible conflation of criminal notions of sexuality with broader sexual orientation.

JK: They're acting out the darkest paranoias of traditional homophobes.

AD: Exactly. That’s why gay people are the most angry about all this. That’s why there’s a direct conflict between the LGB and the TQ.

JK: That was on my question list, actually. Some of the most principled defenders of liberalism—the people who were criticising left-wing illiberalism five, six, seven years ago, and who are now pushing back against right-wing illiberalism—are gay men.

Here in Canada, there’s a Quillette contributor named Alan Stratton, a well-known author, and yourself. There are others like Dave Rubin who have gone pretty far to the other side.

But it’s an interesting pattern. I’m projecting here, but I imagine for someone like Alan, who’s a bit older, he spent his life trying to gain acceptance as a gay man. And he did gain it—Canada legalised gay marriage in 2005. It’s completely uncontroversial now.

And then suddenly, people are implicitly tarring the LGB movement with this forced teaming: “You’re all part of the queer movement.” Which now means drag performers teaching maths to primary school kids. That’s what it means to be an LGBT champion.

AD: Exactly. That’s the risk of forced teaming two groups that are completely antithetical. The Q+, the idea of queer theory, of gender identity—all of that ultimately seeks the eradication of homosexuality.

JK: James Cantor, a sexologist here in Toronto—also a gay man—he’s spent his life counselling people on issues of sex. And he’s been horrified by this.

AD: Of course. If your rights movement is predicated on the fact that a minority of people are innately attracted to the same sex, and another movement comes along and says “sex doesn’t exist”, that’s the demolition of homosexuality.

That’s why my friends who are still on Grindr—gay hookup sites—are now having to swipe through loads of women who say they’re men. Same with lesbian dating sites—now full of men with beards claiming to be lesbians. It’s now illegal in Australia for lesbians to gather without including men.

It’s all homophobic. And I don’t usually use that term lightly—I dislike using “phobia” to shut down debate. But if you’re medically altering gay youth to make them straight—like they do in Iran—on the NHS... if that’s not homophobic, I don’t know what is.

We know from the Cass Review that 80–90% of adolescents referred to the Tavistock Gender Clinic in London were same-sex attracted. Gender non-conformity in youth is a reliable predictor of homosexuality in adulthood.

The Cass Effect

A landmark report properly emphasises the application of science, not slogans, in establishing treatment protocols for trans-identified children.

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Those are the kids being told: “You’re born in the wrong body.” So we’re heterosexualising them. Fixing them.

The Q+ movement is an anti-gay movement. And when you bundle the LGB with the people who want to eliminate them, then blame gay people for the harms caused by the Q+, it’s perverse.

JK: NHS, meaning the National Health Service in Britain. And we won’t even get into the “I” in the acronym—intersex—which is a medical condition. But for some, it's now being treated as a gender identity.

Okay, before I let you go, I want to ask about something I didn’t know before prepping for this interview: you were teaching a course at a Florida university. Are you still doing that?

AD: No, it was a short course in January at the New College of Florida. It was about wokeness. There was a lot of media attention—I missed most of it. Apparently, the president of the college was interviewed about it. There was a hit piece in The Guardian, specifically targeting me. People were furious about a course they hadn’t attended and knew nothing about. It was fascinating.

JK: Just generally—does it feel weird, maybe even slightly wrong, to keep analysing and lampooning left-wing wokeness now that Donald Trump is president again?

At Quillette, we talk about this all the time. The greatest threat to liberalism now isn’t Professor Gopal—it’s Donald Trump.

AD: There are two things. First: just because one thing is more important than another doesn’t mean you neglect the other. We can talk about more than one issue at once.

For me, the key issue is standing up to authoritarianism wherever it arises—left or right. Second: we don’t know what the next phase of the culture war will be. But it feels like a rift is opening up between the old world and the new. A bit like a Henry James novel. America is going one way under Trump, and Europe’s doubling down in the other direction under the EU.

JK: Don’t forget Canada—we’re on Team Europe now.

AD: True. Let’s call it an axis—but maybe let’s stay away from that term…

JK: It’s a kind of forced teaming—and the guy doing the forcing is Trump. By slapping tariffs on Canada, even Canadian conservatives now despise him. He’s trying to tank our economy with these stupid tariffs.

AD: That’s a separate issue from the culture war. The EU wants to ramp up censorship—it has repeatedly attempted to do so. The UK government is going hard in an authoritarian direction too. They’ve literally thrown rapists and violent criminals out of jail to make room for people who posted offensive memes.

JK: We’ve got police visiting grandmas for posting the wrong thing on Facebook.

AD: Visiting journalists too. The UK government is authoritarian. Not fascist—but authoritarian. But so are most western political parties to some degree.

So saying, “Trump is in power, so stop talking about the woke left,” is to ignore Europe and Canada, where it’s still very much dominant.

Just yesterday, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the UK announced a decolonisation project. They think Shakespeare is associated with white supremacy and needs to be reinterpreted for homophobia and racism. Just as you think woke is dying, they ramp it up again.

We should absolutely scrutinise the threats to freedom that could emerge under Trump. I’m already seeing signs—in arrests, lack of transparency, student protests. But in Europe, Canada, and Australia, we’re seeing overt threats to free speech—like the EU’s “democracy shield” and “pre-bunking” language online.

JK: It’s like pre-crime.

AD: Exactly. The EU is openly advocating censorship. And remember, it’s undemocratic. You can’t vote out Ursula von der Leyen because she wasn’t voted in.

JK: “Pre-bunk” is a fantastic euphemism—right up there with “gender affirmation”.

AD: Pre-bunking is terrifying. They’re assuming something is false and censoring it before you even see it.

JK: It’s brilliant in a dystopian way. “We’re saving you the time of having to process a lie.”

AD: The EU believes Russian bots are swinging elections. It’s true that bot farms exist. But the idea that bots change minds is false.

JK: I’ve seen studies suggesting the actual impact is negligible.

AD: Exactly. Propaganda only works on people already inclined to believe it. The EU just doesn’t trust voters. JD Vance said it well: “Stop being afraid of the electorate.”

Tim Walz, in a VP debate with JD Vance, said hate speech and misinformation aren’t covered by the First Amendment. They are.

JK: CBS edited that out of the transcript.

AD: Right. You’ve got John Kerry saying the First Amendment is a block to dealing with disinformation. The people who complain the most about disinformation are often the biggest purveyors of it—like the BBC, The Guardian, the EU.

JK: They’ve even called the Cass Review “misinformation”.

AD: Yes—dismissed as far-right. When in fact, it was a four-year rigorous, objective study by one of the UK’s top paediatricians. It should have ended gender-affirming care debates. But the battle continues.

So yes, Trump has an authoritarian streak—as do Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz. Just because Trump and Elon Musk are attacking the excesses of the woke left doesn’t mean that movement disappears. Its influence persists—especially in universities and media.

In Europe, Canada, and Australia, the reaction to Trump seems to be ramping up woke-left authoritarianism. That’s why I return to the point I made at the very start: let’s stop thinking in terms of left and right. Let’s talk about how we fight authoritarianism—wherever it emerges. Because there’s no major party in the West that isn’t authoritarian to some extent.

JK: Andrew Doyle, thank you so much for being on the Quillette Podcast.

AD: Thank you very much for having me—really appreciate it.