Latest / The Joe Rogan Recap / Andrew Doyle (2026) - 12,000 UK Arrests for Tweets and Memes

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Andrew Doyle (2026) - 12,000 UK Arrests for Tweets and Memes · The Joe Rogan Recap

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Joe Rogan Recap and before we get going, please
• 0:03
  follow us right here on Spotify to make sure you get sight of
• 0:06
  our latest episodes in your feed.
• 0:08
  It is great to have you with us today.
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  We are stripping away some of the noise to look at a very
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  specific, and I mean frankly, an alarming shift in Western
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  democracy. We certainly are.
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  We're digging into the episode featuring Andrew Doyle.
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  Now, if you aren't familiar with him, Doyle is a satirist, A
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  playwright, and the author of The End of Woke, Right?
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  But in this conversation with Rogan, he was isn't really there
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  to crap jokes. He brought some data that paints
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  a really, really stark picture of civil liberties in the UK
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  versus the US. Uses a sobering conversation.
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  You know, we often think of the US and the UK as cousins.
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  Culturally similar shared history, of course.
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  But Doyle made it very clear that when it comes to the
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  fundamental right to speak your mind, the two nations are
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  currently living on different planets.
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  The statistic that jumped out at me immediately, and I want to
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  start here because it anchors everything else, was about
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  arrests. Doyle claimed that in the last
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  year over 12,000 people in the UK were arrested for social
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  media posts. 12,000, that's the headline number.
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  And to really get the gravity of that, you have to look at the
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  trend line. Doyle pointed out that, you
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  know, back in 2020, that number was around 3000.
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  Just 3000. Yeah, so in the span of just a
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  few years, arrests for online speech have quadrupled.
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  That is a massive, massive escalation.
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  And just so we're clear on the definitions here, when we say
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  arrests, are we talking about people coordinating violence or
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  like selling drugs online? No, and that is the critical
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  distinction here. These aren't terror cells or
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  criminal enterprises. These are arrests for tweets,
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  for memes, for comments that the state deems grossly offensive.
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  They're grossly offensive. And this really sets the stage
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  for the mission of this deep dive.
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  We need to unpack what Doyle calls anarcho tyranny.
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  Anarcho tyranny. I mean, it's a heavy term.
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  It sounds like something from a dystopian novel.
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  It does, but the definition is very practical.
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  It's the theory that the state performs a kind of double
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  movement. It acts tyrannically toward law
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  abiding citizens for minor things like a mean tweet, right,
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  while simultaneously allowing, you know, anarchy to reign when
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  it comes to actual violent crime.
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  So the police are too busy monitoring Facebook to stop a
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  burglary. Essentially, yes.
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  Doyle argues that authoritarianism hasn't arrived
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  in the West wearing Jack boots and kicking down doors.
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  It's arrived in a sheep's costume.
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  A sheep's costume. It presents itself as kindness,
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  inclusivity and safety. But the mechanism underneath, he
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  argues, is pure control. OK, let's get into the mechanics
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  of that, specifically the legal divide, because as an American,
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  looking at those arrest numbers in the UK is baffling.
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  We have the 1st Amendment, but Doyle got really specific about
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  why the laws produce such different outcomes.
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  It all comes down to the legal threshold for what is considered
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  criminal speech. In the US, the gold standard is
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  the Brandenburg test. Right.
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  Break that down for us. What does the government
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  actually have to prove to arrest me for what I say in America?
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  The bar is incredibly high under Brandenburg.
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  For a speech to be illegal incitement, 3 things have to be
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  true at the same time. You must intend to cause
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  violence, violence must be likely to happen, and,
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  crucially, the violence has to be imminent.
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  Imminent meaning like right now, not something vague that might
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  cause trouble next. Week So you can't arrest someone
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  for an abstract wish. The bad things happen.
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  But Doyle explains that in the UK, that protection just doesn't
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  exist. The statutes use language like
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  grossly offensive or causing needless anxiety.
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  See that's. Where it gets so slippery for
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  me, needless anxiety is entirely subjective.
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  What causes me anxiety? Might just be a Tuesday for you.
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  How do you police a feeling? You can't fairly, and that's
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  Doyle's whole point. It makes the law selective.
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  It gives the police this broad discretion to arrest pretty much
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  anyone they want, provided they can find someone who claims to
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  be distressed. And he had examples.
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  Oh. He brought receipts.
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  The case of Darren Brady was the one that really illustrated the
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  absurdity of it. This is the Army veteran, right?
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  Not some career criminal. Yes.
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  So Brady retweeted a meme. It was an image of four Pride
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  flags arranged to look like a swastika.
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  Now obviously that's provocative imagery.
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  Of course it's designed to offend.
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  It is, but the context matters. He was satirizing what he viewed
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  as the authoritarian nature of the modern pride movement.
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  It was political commentary. So he's using a symbol to
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  critique a movement that feels like, I don't know, basic
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  political speech. Precisely.
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  But the police didn't see it that way.
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  They showed up at his house and arrested him in handcuffs.
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  And on the video of the arrest, you can actually hear the
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  officer tell him he's being arrested because he 'cause
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  someone anxiety. Handcuffs for causing anxiety?
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  I mean, that feels like the definition of policing manners
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  rather than policing actual crime.
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  And the punishments aren't just a slap on the wrist.
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  Take the case of Lee Joseph Dunn.
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  He was sentenced to 8 weeks in prison 8.
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  Weeks behind bars for what? For posting three memes, Doyle
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  said the most severe 1 was just a picture of immigrants with a
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  caption saying coming to a town near you.
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  You might find that distasteful or rude or xenophobic, sure, but
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  prison time? To put someone in a cage for
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  that. And then there was the Lucy
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  Connolly case, which is even more complex because her speech
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  was genuinely nasty. Right, so this happened during
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  the riots in the UK, she tweeted.
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  Burn down the hotels she deleted hours later.
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  Apologize. It was a horrific thing to say
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  no. Question.
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  But she was sentenced to 31 months in prison.
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  Almost three years for a deleted tweet.
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  And Doyle isn't defending the content of her tweet.
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  He agrees it was awful. But he's applying that
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  Brandenburg standard we talked about.
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  She was a nobody with, you know, zero influence.
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  There's no imminent likelihood that her tweet would actually
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  cause a hotel to burn down. But the state treated her as if
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  she had lit the match herself. It connects back to that anarcho
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  tyranny idea. While they were throwing the
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  book at her, were they catching the actual rioters?
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  That's the friction point, Doyle says.
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  There's a 2 tier policing system.
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  A speech crime gets an iron fist, but actual violent
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  disorder often a much lighter touch, and they're trying to
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  extend that into the physical world too.
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  Did you catch the part about the banter ban?
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  I honestly thought he was joking at first.
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  I was waiting for the punchline. This is the Labour government
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  proposal about pubs. It is the proposal is that pub
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  landlords could be held legally liable if their staff overhear
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  offensive jokes or banter between customers.
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  So let's play this out. I'm at a bar.
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  I'm having a private conversation with a friend.
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  I tell a risky joke. The bartender overhears, hears
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  it besides they're offended and suddenly the owner of the bar
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  gets sued. That is the mechanism.
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  It deputizes the service industry to police private
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  conversation. It effectively kills the pub as
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  a concept. The whole point is to relax and
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  speak freely. But this leads to a bigger
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  question. How do we get here?
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  It's not just laws. Institutions have to cooperate.
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  And this is where Doyle introduces the concept of
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  institutional capture. And he starts by redefining the
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  word woke. Which is good, because that word
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  gets thrown around so much it's almost lost all meaning.
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  Doyle is very specific. He says Woke isn't about being
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  kind or aware of injustice. He defines it as an
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  authoritarian impulse that uses Kidnish and fluffy language to
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  disguise itself. Kitnish and fluffy.
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  It's disarming. Who can be against being fluffy?
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  Exactly. He uses the word equity.
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  It sounds like equality. Everyone likes equality.
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  But Doyle argues equity in this context actually means treating
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  people unequally to force equal outcomes based on group
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  identity. It's a linguistic Trojan horse.
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  That's his point, and he sees this Trojan horse inside major
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  institutions like the BBC. He accused them of significant
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  bias, mentioning an LGBT desk that effectively has veto power
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  over stories. A veto.
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  So if a journalist wants to investigate something critical
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  of gender activism, maybe a story about D transitioners,
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  this internal desk can just kill the story.
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  It can kill it before it even airs.
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  It's a choke point in the editorial process.
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  But the most absurd example of this institutional capture was
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  the hate crime reporting centers in Scotland.
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  Oh, this was wild. When Scotland introduced their
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  hate crime bill, they set up places where citizens could go
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  to report hate speech, and these centers included, I mean,
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  extremely random locations. Doyle mentioned a sex shop and a
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  mushroom farm. Hello, I'd like a pound of sheet
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  takes and to report my neighbor for a Facebook post.
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  It's completely surreal. It is, but Doyle connected this
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  fear of offensive speech to genuine atrocities.
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  He brought up the Rotherham grooming gangs and the
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  Manchester Arena bombing. This was the heaviest part of
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  the deep dive. In both those cases, people saw
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  something wrong but didn't speak up.
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  Because they were terrified of being called racist.
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  In Rotherham you had systematic sexual abuse of young girls over
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  years. Authorities knew, but they
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  hesitated to act because the perpetrators were from a
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  minority background. And in Manchester?
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  A security guard saw the bomber acting suspiciously but
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  hesitated to intervene for the exact same reason.
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  That's the why it matters right there.
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  Doyle's argument is that when a society fears a word racist more
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  than it feels a bomb or child abuse, the moral compass is
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  completely breaking. It brings up Yuri Besmanov.
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  The KGB defector from the 80s. Right.
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  Doyle referenced his theory of demoralization, the idea that
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  you confuse a society so thoroughly that people lose the
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  ability to assess truth or danger, even when it's staring
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  them in the face. You train people to deny their
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  own eyes, to avoid social stigma, and we're seeing that
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  confusion manifest in how we handle history and reality
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  itself. Which is where we get to
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  Shakespeare. Apparently we've been wrong for
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  400 years and he was actually a black woman.
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  I mean, I'm open to new evidence, but what was the
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  evidence on this one? Well, Doyle is reading a new
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  book that claims Shakespeare was actually a woman named Amelia
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  Bassano, and the author claims that Shakespeare is an anagram
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  of A. She speaker A.
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  She Speaker That feels like a stretch.
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  And Doyle noted that the author's proof of what this
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  woman looked like was a sketch that he also drew herself.
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  That's convenient. Here's the proof.
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  I drew it this morning. It's funny, but Doyle uses it to
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  show how identity politics consumes objective reality.
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  It's not about truth, it's about projecting modern obsessions
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  onto the past. Although I have to say, the
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  cyclops theory they mentioned was a great example of how
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  humans have always made-up stories to explain things.
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  Is a great palate cleanser. Yeah, for those who missed it,
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  the theory is that ancient Greeks found elephant skulls.
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  If you look at an elephant skull, the nasal cavity is this
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  giant hole right in the middle. If you've never seen an
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  elephant, you look at that and think, whoa, giant one eyed
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  monster. Cyclops, it makes perfect sense.
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  But in that case, they were trying to explain a mystery.
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  In the Shakespeare case, Doyle argues they're trying to obscure
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  reality. And Speaking of that, we have to
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  talk about gender. Doyle made a claim that sounds
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  contradictory at first, that the modern gender movement is
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  actually anti-gay. Yeah, explain that connection,
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  because usually those two movements are grouped together.
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  How is it anti-gay? Doyle cites data from the
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  Tavistock Clinic, the UK's gender identity service for
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  children. He noted that 80 to 90% of the
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  kids referred there were same sex attracted.
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  So mostly young gay and lesbian kids.
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  Exactly. And Doyle argues that instead of
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  just letting these kids grow up to be gay adults, the ideology
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  suggests they're actually straight people trapped in the
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  wrong body. He views the medicalization of
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  these kids as a new form of conversion therapy.
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  That is a massive paradigm shift and we are finally seeing the
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  legal fallout. The brick wall of reality, as
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  Doyle calls it. He mentioned a detransitioner
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  named Fox Varian who just won a lawsuit for £2,000,000 after
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  having a double mastectomy as a minor.
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  Doyle suggests lawsuits, not logic, are what will finally
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  stop this. Money talks when ideology walks.
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  Precisely, and Doyle also touched on his satirical
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  character Titania McGrath. Titania is brilliant.
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  She's a parody of an ultra woke social justice warrior.
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  But Doyle says satire is dying because reality is catching up.
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  He mentioned Ted Cruz, a sitting US senator, retweeting Titania
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  McGrath, thinking she's a real person.
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  That actually happened. And he pointed to groups like
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  Queers for Palestine, which he finds particularly
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  contradictory. Is an example of ideology just
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  overwriting basic survival instinct.
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  Let's shift gears to the future because we have technology
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  entering the mix. Doyle had a really weird
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  experience with ChatGPT that suggests the censorship we see
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  in the UK laws is being hard coded into our AI.
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  This is where the censorship becomes automated.
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  Doyle was looking for an old news article about a specific
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  crime, a matter of public record.
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  He just wanted the facts of the case.
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  Right, ChatGPT found the article, started typing it out,
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  and then just deleted it mid sentence.
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  It claimed the content violated terms of service.
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  So the AI decided the facts were too sensitive to show.
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  Probably because it involved a minority group and a lenient
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  sentence. But here's the kicker.
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  When he asked Grok Elon Musk's AI, it gave him the info
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  immediately. So we are moving into a world
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  where your reality depends on which chat bot you use.
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  This connects to what the EU is calling pre bunking, which
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  sounds incredibly Orwellian. It does.
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  Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the EU Commission, talked
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  about pre bunking as inoculating the public against
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  misinformation before they even hear it.
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  Pre bunking it sounds like minority report stopping the
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  thought crime before it happens. Doyle sees this as the ultimate
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  bureaucratic control. It's treating information like a
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  virus that the public needs to be vaccinated against, with the
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  government deciding what is a virus and what is truth.
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  And the Internet itself is getting weirder.
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  They talked about the dead Internet theory.
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  The idea that the Internet is mostly bots talking to bots.
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  Doyle found a website where bots can apparently rent humans to
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  perform tasks the bots can't do. That reverses the whole dynamic,
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  doesn't it? We thought we were the masters,
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  but now the bots are outsourcing gig work to us.
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  It creates this Hall of Mirrors effect just like the King
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  Charles portrait conspiracy they laughed about where people flip
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  the painting and claim they saw a goat or a demon it.
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  Feels like we are painting a very bleak picture here.
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  Arrests, history, rewritten AI, censorship.
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  But Doyle and Rogan didn't seem entirely hopeless.
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  They think the pendulum might be moving.
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  They do. They pointed to the recent US
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  election results and the rise of the Reform Party in the UK.
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  Joyal calls it a counter revolution.
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  The idea that people eventually just get tired of it.
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  Tired of it and realizing it doesn't work?
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  Open borders, censorship, identity politics.
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  Eventually the practical failures become too big to
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  ignore. That's the brick wall of reality
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  again. You can say open borders are
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  kind, but you can't ignore the social strain.
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  Exactly. But Doyle offered a warning,
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  didn't he? Even if woke goes away?
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  Yeah, he said. Woke is just the current flavor
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  of an innate human authoritarian impulse.
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  We all have an instinct to silence people we disagree with.
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  It's not a left wing thing or a right wing thing.
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  It's a human thing. Even if the current ideology
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  collapses, that impulse remains. It just changes costume.
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  Precisely. And that leads us to the final
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  thought. I want to leave everyone with.
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  It's something Doyle said that really stuck with me.
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  Rights lost are never regained. That's the critical take away of
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  the whole deep dive. It is if we build this
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  machinery, these hate crime databases, these digital safety
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  bills, this infrastructure for censorship, it doesn't just
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  vanish when the party in power changes.
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  The machinery is still there. So the question is, once a
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  government grants itself the power to police your anxiety or
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  your private jokes in a pub, will it ever voluntarily give
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  that power back? History suggests the answer is
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  usually no. That is something to think
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  about. Thanks for diving in with us.
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  We'll see you in the next one.