Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Trans is so last year, with Eric Kaufmann
0 Playsin 3 days
A surprising shift is taking place in the gender and sexual identities of young people. Since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z. A medical miracle, or proof that the trans movement was a social contagion all along?
To discuss this shift, along with the broader movements in the culture wars, Will is joined by Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, and the Director for The Centre for Heterodox Social Science, Eric Kaufmann.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Eric Kaufman and Gender Identity Trends
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day welcome to Fire at Will, I'm Will Kingston. It's always struck me as a tad odd that seemingly every second Hollywood nepo baby identifies as trans or non-binary or one of those.
00:00:35
Speaker
And yet you don't hear of many trans teenagers in Mozambique or Eritrea or Somalia or Kenya. Something's going on there. And a new report that has just come out may just ah shed some light on it.
00:00:50
Speaker
My wonderful guest today, Eric Kaufman, the Director at the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, has analysed that data and come out with some fascinating insights, as he always does. Eric, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:01:06
Speaker
Great to to be back, Will. Yeah, I mean, as you said, these are some quite unprecedented findings in a way. I was just sort of trawling through, I always do whenever there's a new release of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of Fire.
00:01:22
Speaker
They have a massive undergraduate survey of, in this case, 68,000 It's been over 50,000 for several years. And so this survey goes back six years. And we can really, because of that huge sample of young people, we can really look at small groups such as those who identify as neither male nor female, but tick one of the other boxes like non-binary, for example, or questioning.
00:01:45
Speaker
I've amalgamated all of them into one category, which we're called non-binary, and which actually heavily overlaps with trans. So it's a very good indicator of trans, despite what some nitpickers have tried to suggest. And the bottom line here is that...
Cultural Shifts and Pushback Against Identity Politics
00:01:59
Speaker
Wait, just before you do, Eric, because I want to keep people in suspense for those well those finding those findings. We've got to ah got to make sure that they stay stay stay tuned in for a bit longer.
00:02:11
Speaker
Because I actually wanted to start with a wider lens, because we last spoke about a year ago, maybe 18 months ago. yeah Since then, there have been changes in the culture. I can't quite recall if Trump had been elected when we last spoke, but that ah certainly instigated that so-called vibe shift in the United States and in the culture wars.
00:02:32
Speaker
In the UK, where we are both speaking today, I think, again, there has been pushback against some of the more toxic elements of identity politics and How have you seen more broadly the changes in the culture across the West recently? What would be your key call-outs?
00:02:52
Speaker
Well, I think that, as always, I think to some degree, the U.S. sets the tone. And there, I think you could see most clearly what you call the vibe shift, which was noted as early as, I think, 2023.
00:03:05
Speaker
we But what this is, and you can see this in a number of ways, which is a shift, I guess, away from what we might call woke trends. By woke, I mean the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual minorities.
00:03:19
Speaker
And that kind of sacralization setting the tone. So if you look at the New York Times, you saw in the mid-2010s until the early 2020s an explosion in use of terms like white privilege, white supremacy, for example, and patriarchy. And a lot of these terms around sexuality, mental health, ideology, they really take off in the pages of mainstream media. At the same time, we saw a huge jump in cancellations of professors by leftists on campus and corporations jumping on the DEI
00:03:50
Speaker
bandwagon now in the last few years a lot of those trends have actually dramatically reversed and so if you look at the left's cancellation of professors on campus that's almost largely collapsed if you look at the use of term you know woke terms in the the new york times like white privilege again dramatic collapse if you look at corporations DEI earning calls, and there's been, i think John Byrne Murdoch had a piece on this or some somewhere at the Financial Times, but last two years, a real backing off of the DEI agenda, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:04:27
Speaker
So there's no question that at the elite level, senior liberals are stepping away from this. University's now 140 or 150 who declare themselves politically neutral. They're getting rid of diversity statements there. And now, of course, with Trump coming into office,
00:04:42
Speaker
DEI is under assault across government, across the diversity sector. and And in fact, they're not putting up that much of a fight. A lot university presidents seem to be ah only too happy to scrap this stuff. And so, yeah, there is definitely a shift in the culture. I'd add a couple of things. One, comparing 2016 Trump, 2024 Trump, the quote unquote resistance, the level of energy is just a lot lower on the left. And so that's a good indicator that the I think Matthew Iglesias said that the that the juice is just gone in terms of left-wing activism. There's just not the energy in the movement anymore.
00:05:20
Speaker
I think that's
Decline of 'Woke' Trends and Rise of Right-Wing Politics
00:05:21
Speaker
important. I also think that on the center-left, people like Iglesias and Ezra Klein and Noah Smith and other center-left voices are more prominent in the debate and are pushing back on trans, on woke, on some of the the most aggressive outriders of this movement.
00:05:37
Speaker
And so there is a real debate within the left, let's say within the Democratic Party, even though the that sort of woke side that's doubled down is still in control of the party apparatus, but it is more of a battle than it would have been in 2016. So those are all things that I I would say outside of outside of the United States, it's much more muted.
00:05:56
Speaker
Can I pick up on one can i one thing there? Because it's interesting that you say that the energy has been sucked out of the left. Some people would look at the marches across the United States, which undoubtedly drew huge numbers. think some people said up to 7 million across the United States in resistance to Trump.
00:06:14
Speaker
So there are obviously people who are still passionate. But what I took out of that was it wasn't particularly clear what they were marching for. It was a general, I guess, dislike of Trump. ah And then I think, you know, a large scale social gathering.
00:06:29
Speaker
It feels to me like the left doesn't ah is really struggling to understand what is its defining mission in 2025, both in the US and the UK.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there are different things going on. I think you're right about this. i mean, clearly Trump has, you know, he's doing things which with one could even from a constitutional point of view disagree with. so but But I think the bigger issue is that the left is much less certain, much less confident of its cultural progressivist agenda.
00:07:00
Speaker
And another and indicator would be the trans issue, which was part of this great awokening. In the last two, three years, the public opinion surveys show a real turning away from the trans activist position on natal men in women's spaces, sports, for example.
00:07:16
Speaker
They've lost that battle. It's very difficult for the cultural left to lose a battle because they've won pretty much everything for 60 years. Not only that, ah by the way, we're seeing the Trump administration repealing laws that are 60 years old. The affirmative action executive order of Lyndon Johnson, that's 60 years old. That's been repealed.
00:07:35
Speaker
They're now going after disparate impacts and some of these other cornerstones of the, well, what we might call the DEI apparatus, the early cornerstones. So it's not just turning back the clock in the last 10 years, but going back 50, 60 years.
00:07:50
Speaker
So it is, my view, very significant as a moment. and and the and And so, yeah, and I think if we're talking about Britain, you know, I would say that you look at the steer the Starmer government and they're you know they just got crushed in another by-election in Wales.
00:08:05
Speaker
I think it's like a deer in the headlights. They're trying to kind of walk a tightrope between their radical left fringe, which is sort of attracted to the Greens and Polanski and then those voters, they're losing over to reform. And really, they're out of ideas. I mean, they can manage things as best they can.
00:08:24
Speaker
But certainly in terms of an ideological agenda, that has been backpedaled. You know, on the trans issue, example, they had to walk that back a lot. They're more or less saying, oh, yeah, we'll get control of the borders and immigration. They're almost going after the Tories from the
End of the Progressive Era and Decline in Trans Identification
00:08:38
Speaker
right.
00:08:38
Speaker
So, yeah, I just think there's ah there's a rudderlessness to the left. And I just don't think there's a lot of new ideas. ah mean, this is one the problems. Yeah, you mentioned a term, the cornerstones of the DEI movement.
00:08:51
Speaker
I've always thought that the trans debate is the cornerstone of the DEI movement, because if you can make people believe that a man can be a woman, You can make them believe literally anything.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so if that falls, then I think it's much, I think then a lot of the other stuff around race and identity falls as well. And it's particularly falling amongst, I think, a surprising group. And it's ah the DI and identity politics agenda is becoming far less popular amongst the young.
00:09:22
Speaker
I only saw a tweet, literally just before coming on this interview, that looked at polling amongst, I think, 18 to 25-year-olds. which showed that reform was the most popular party in the UK amongst that grouping.
00:09:34
Speaker
And for a right-wing party, that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, let alone 10, 20, 30 years ago. Again, Trump was very, very popular amongst young people in the last election.
00:09:47
Speaker
There is this interesting shift to the right amongst young people. You're obviously surrounded by young people every day in your job. What do you put it down to? Yeah, it's a tricky one to be fully clear on. I mean, we know that 2020, comparing 2020 and 2024, young people in America shifted to six points towards the Republican Party.
00:10:08
Speaker
Some surveys, the surveys that lean towards less elite young people show the biggest shift to the right, whereas the ones that focus likely fire student surveys don't show a shift to the right.
00:10:20
Speaker
So it seems like this shift is more amongst non-college educated or at least non-elite university young people. It's happening in different countries. I'm surprised I would have to check out that poll in Britain because Britain's young people have been the most left-leaning in the Anglosphere, let's say, whereas the Canadian in particular young people are much more to the right compared to the British young people. keep Keep going. I'm going to do some live research. Yeah. And so, so yeah, I think there is now, of course, this is also concentrated more amongst young men than young women.
00:10:51
Speaker
There is a growing gender gap among the young in terms of politics. um And it is one thing we know is young people are more willing to experiment and to go outside the established categories. And so they would be much more likely to reject both labor and the Tories, say in Britain.
00:11:06
Speaker
They would, of course, be more likely to go to the Greens, though, or radical left alternatives as much as ah to to radical right alternatives, but they would generally tend to be less likely to go to the establishment or established parties. We see that across Europe.
00:11:20
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think this is quite an interesting development. but One thing I would say is that this vibe shift is in my, what I call it, when I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal, I called this really this maybe we're seeing the beginnings of what I call the post-progressive era.
00:11:37
Speaker
So if you think about the progressive era when cultural left was winning all the battles in public opinion, that would be from, say, roughly 1964, 1965, till the early 2020s. So that's 60 years of upward rising, almost created an aura of inevitability.
00:11:56
Speaker
I think that's coming to an end. I think if you look at various public opinions, data series, you see that They have won on, you know, black rights, gay rights, women's rights, and anything that involves just giving people the same rights as anybody else, no problem.
00:12:11
Speaker
ah so As soon as it involves a clash of values, so affirmative action, we're going to take rights away from whites and Asians to give it to black. You know, this be anything that involves, or the trans issues, it's stalled or going in reverse. So I think the whole agenda, as they try to go from individual rights to group rights, from individual level discrimination to quote unquote systemic discrimination, they've lost the argument.
00:12:34
Speaker
So what comes next is going to be really interesting. And what' what's happening is, of course, this is in a context of the crisis brought on by the decline of the family, collapse of birth rates, the failure of progressive cities in the Seattles and Portlands and San Francisco.
00:12:50
Speaker
These are supposedly the model for the progressive utopia. They can't build anything. They've got rampant problems. addiction and and substance abuse. So yeah, I think that there's now a real loss of confidence on the cultural left, which is define the left.
00:13:05
Speaker
And it's a really interesting time. And I think at the elite high cultural level, that's what I'm looking for. I already see some important shifts happening and that's going to filter down to young people. yeah I'd also add an even more simple argument for why you've seen that that shift, and that is that the left traditionally was anti-establishment, and anti-establishment is cool to young people, and now the left are the establishment.
Youth Attraction to Right-Wing Politics and Cultural Clash
00:13:30
Speaker
They are the authoritarian class, and it is the right... led by people like Trump and Farage, are the ones who are basically putting a middle finger up to authority.
00:13:41
Speaker
So there's been that fundamental shift, and you can see why, therefore, young people would would resonate with that. I found that that that data, and basically what a survey found, which I'm reading from The Telegraph, 31% of men, and you're right, so it is a male, predominantly male trend, 31% of to would support Nigel Farage's party.
00:14:03
Speaker
only 24% would back Labor. And I think very surprisingly, only 14% would vote Green. 5,000 people in the polls, that's not insubstantial. it's It's interesting data, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And I think it does show that there's pickup, certainly in the young male population for reform. Obviously, this the balance of of the vote amongst the young is still to the left yeah in Britain.
00:14:30
Speaker
That's not the case However, in Canada, where I think it illustrates your argument that the young have been so drenched in DEI and woke ideology for so long under Trudeau and and now under Carney.
00:14:42
Speaker
And actually, yeah, they are rejecting it. And in fact, you see in in a number of surveys where the young are are more conservative leaning than the old. We don't see that pattern as much in other countries, but I think it does show that particularly for young men, because there is this gender divide where women tend to back whatever is the established moral order.
00:15:02
Speaker
much more, they will conform to that moral order more as a young person, whereas young men are the ones who are most contrarian. So I think that's what's explaining part of the gender gap you're seeing among young people as regards woke values.
00:15:14
Speaker
Okay, well, i'll I'll use the fact that we're talking about young people as a slightly tangential segue into the body of the discussion. Talk to me about the report on trans or gender trends amongst young people, ah the data that you've seen, and how you have analyzed it.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, so you know academics are generally going to be pretty reluctant to type politically incorrect findings or even to look for them. So that's one of the mandates of our University of Buckingham Center is to really do this kind of research that goes against that that grain. And so one thing I've been following are the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of Fires annual student survey where we get a sample of upwards of 50,000 18 to 22 year old undergraduates. So we can look at small group trends like trans, like queer, for example.
00:16:07
Speaker
And long the long and short of it is we saw a peak of trans and queer identification around about 2023. Since then, trans identification, that is the share who don't identify as male or female, the non-binary share, is a very good proxy for trans, has halved.
00:16:27
Speaker
It's gone from you know around 7% to under 4%. So we've seen a halving of that. We see the same trend in In what time frame? Sorry, remind me. 2023 to 2025, just two years. So only two years. Two years, but it's a pretty dramatic fall, a really quite dramatic decline. Not only has that been reported in this data set, but I picked it up in two other data sets. One collected at an elite private school called Andrew Phillips Academy, which is near Boston.
00:16:57
Speaker
And then the Brown University student newspaper runs a survey. In both of those cases, they're picking up. quite a sizable chunk. In the case of Andover Phillips, three quarters or more of the student body are answering this. So we can get a pretty confident view of what's happening over time. the trends are exactly the same as in the fire data. And then after I published my tweet thread, which which ah did very well and and got a lot of attention, but then Gene Twenge, who's sort of a leading researcher, well-established academic, found the same trend in both Census Bureau data and in another survey, which
00:17:32
Speaker
parses out non-binary in France. So yeah, this is I think, the evidence is pretty strong that we're seeing very quick drop in France identification. Now, of course, that raises the question of what's behind this.
00:17:45
Speaker
And we'll get to that question. I was telling you off before we went on on air, don't know you can say on air on a podcast, but anyway, on air, that inevitably and surprisingly for me, whenever I speak to someone on this podcast about trans ideology, it inevitably rates higher than anything else we talk about. My episodes with people like Kelly Jo Keane, Helen Joyce, Graham Linehan, Sal Grover in Australia, they all have rated higher than with other people.
00:18:19
Speaker
And I've had some some, by this stage, you know, ex-prime ministers and and pretty distinguished people on the podcast. Why do you think that the gender ideology issue, which is, don't get me wrong, i think incredibly important, and I think the acknowledgement of biological reality is incredibly important, but nonetheless, it is the actual amount of people who identify as trans is a very small part of the population.
00:18:45
Speaker
Why do you think that it resonates with people and why, for example, you have had the response that you've had to to your your analysis on this issue? Yeah, that's a really, really interesting question.
Trans Identification as a Social Trend
00:18:58
Speaker
i think there's two things. I mean, one is the sort of just, there is a group of people who are just viscerally disgusted by the idea of chemically and physisurgically, you know, chopping off our kids. And, you know, so that is one element of it is just seen as a sort of real failure of safeguarding children and anything around children, you know, pedophile rings, anything like that tends to sort of get a lot of traffic.
00:19:25
Speaker
But the other part of this is, I think, the wider cultural significance, that it is just so crazy in a way that we've gone... This is the sort of most aggressive outrider of cultural progressivism. This is where they chose... The next level they chose to take it after kind of gay rights was, you know, to get, you know, friends trans women into women's spaces, for example.
00:19:46
Speaker
um And they're asking you to essentially prioritize people's feelings over facts. That is, what Jonathan Haidt would call the care, harm, and equality moral foundations are more important than the pursuit of truth and freedom of expression.
00:20:05
Speaker
So it was a kind of classic. it It is not just about this tiny group of people. It's a kind of cipher for a much wider value clash between people who prioritize freedom of speech and truth against people who prioritize what we would call emotional safety or emotional harm protection and and equal outcomes based on privilege and these sorts of values, the progressive values. So that's why I think it's it's actually very important and highly fought over. And even something like flying a progress pride flag would be a lightning rod because it symbolizes a conflict where one side wants to elevate, you know, essentially
00:20:44
Speaker
emotional safety as being the dominant value that you must succumb to over all others in society. Yeah, I think that's very well articulated. It is the ultimate symbolic debate between a belief in objective truth or, you know, my lived experience, subjective feelings, because there is nothing more binary and real.
00:21:07
Speaker
then you know whether you are a man or a woman. In terms of so where we've got to, in a very short space of time, far less young people are identifying as non-binary.
00:21:18
Speaker
The obvious well conclusion my mind is that this has always been a social contagion as opposed to a medical condition. Is that oversimplifying it?
00:21:30
Speaker
No, I think you you're you're absolutely correct. My analysis would suggest this is very much a fashion that has run out of steam and has lost popularity. If I were to say that is the overwhelming, that's the way the data really looks. It's worth saying, however, yeah it's worth considering some of the other potential explanations.
00:21:48
Speaker
I have heard on the left people say, well, what's happened is, you know, the DeSantis' trunks have been so draconian and made it so hard to be trans that trans people are going back in the closet.
00:21:59
Speaker
So we have to, well, That's an explanation. And in in the pursuit of objective truth, we need to consider it. But let's look at the data. And I just posted something today on this. The trend is exactly the same in red states as in blue states in terms of colleges located in red and blue states. So there's been no difference there.
00:22:16
Speaker
Now, if, for example, the repression was happening because of red state governors, We should have seen that in red states, let's say, before Trump got elected. We should see the red state repression being greater.
00:22:27
Speaker
Another thing, you know if there's a can ask and a question... Can I ask a question on that? That surprises me that the trend is the same in red states and blue states. I would have thought in New York and and and California, you would have seen less of a decline than in Kentucky.
00:22:42
Speaker
But you said that this is not a at a campus level. So yeah if we were to, and now we're just speculating, but I would, my guess, I would speculate is if you were to look at wider society, not just amongst the intellectual university class, but I imagine that trend line would be different amongst the red and blue states across other age ranges as a speculation.
00:23:08
Speaker
You could very well be right, and I can't, I haven't looked at that at all, but One of the things that is striking is we can even do this by, you know, the proportion of students who will lean, who call themselves conservative or liberal.
00:23:21
Speaker
We can even look at it that way. And again, the campuses where, you know, the Liberty Universities Brigham Youngs and Pillsdales that are right-leaning, you know, you now granted they have right-leaning campuses have fewer trans-identifying students to begin with.
00:23:35
Speaker
But even when we control for that, actually, the decline has been as dramatic on the blue state campuses on the liberal campuses, the Yales, the Oberlins.
00:23:47
Speaker
Oberlins saw a massive decline in the share, like 20-point decline in the share of trans identifiers between 2023 and 2025. So this is encompassing all kinds of college, all kinds of political strike.
00:24:01
Speaker
that all sort of and And in fact, when we ask, you know do you feel you can talk about transgender issues openly? There you see, again, something similar where trans people are no, in fact, they're more open They feel more free to talk about trans issues than people who aren't trans, the ones who were most repressed are the conservatives. So this idea that there is some kind of peer pressure put pushing trans back in the closet it just makes no sense at all.
00:24:25
Speaker
There is something, however, which is that the mental health of young people has really improved. I mean, it's still not great, and but it has improved quite a bit over the last three years. And in the data, that is part of the explanation for why The trans phenomenon has declined. Yeah, I found that. So you summarized these thoughts in an article for Unheard. We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
00:24:50
Speaker
I thought that was fascinating. If you asked me with no prime knowledge on whether mental health amongst young people had got better or worse in the last three or four years, I would would have, without hesitation, said it has got dramatically worse. I found that hugely surprising.
00:25:04
Speaker
but do you but Why do you think that there may act, and again, there are still huge problems in mental health amongst young people, but why you think there may have been that slight turnaround? Yeah, I mean, the pandemic clearly was the peak of the poor mental health, so maybe it's also worth saying the pandemic juiced it up to a very high level and drifting back from that hype.
00:25:25
Speaker
To reversion to the mean. Yeah, reversion to the mean, which has occurred post-pandemic, like post-2021, but it's continued, really, continued pretty strongly, and You know you could argue that it is the legacy of the hangover of the pandemic passing through the system. I don't think that's the whole story. I think that it is really interesting to argue. I don't think it's connected to social media. Increasingly, ah social media use is not down in America.
00:25:51
Speaker
And so it does beg the question, could we again be seeing possibly some kind of law? You know, this is no longer as trendy as it was to say, I'm anxious and depressed.
00:26:03
Speaker
Could there be a cultural side to this whereby? Having a mental health identity is not as cool as it was in 2020. I'm open
Religion, Cultural Identity, and the Trans Debate
00:26:11
Speaker
to that explanation. I know there's been some people who've asked this question about, do you identify with your mental health, with your state of mental health?
00:26:17
Speaker
And a very large number of young people do. And that, if if we're thinking, hopefully, maybe people no longer identifying that way means they're no longer contemplating their navel, which means maybe their mental health is improving.
00:26:29
Speaker
And Abigail Schreier makes that kind of point in her book, Bad Therapy. I'm have some fun with you and drag you into some murky waters here by including that mental health hypothesis.
00:26:41
Speaker
One could argue that you are asserting that identifying as trans or non-binary is a mental health disorder. Do you think that people who who identify trans should be deemed as people that do have some sort of a mental health disorder or some sort of condition?
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is this is a really good question because there's no question in the data. People who are trans have much worse mental health than people who aren't. So now the question there is, what is going on? And there are people who say, well, it's because they're so discriminated against or they ah don't have an easy option in a society that's organized around two genders. So therefore, they're under psychological stress. I accept that that could be part of what's going on.
00:27:25
Speaker
But equally, it could be the case that, you know, I don't know. I'm not qualified to say whether this thing 100% is. I'm sure it is for some, you know, and maybe for others, it is more biological and they can't do anything about it. but I also think there's a large amount of social contagion going on here where it's fashionable and friendly.
00:27:44
Speaker
And I do think there's a question of, know, if people are encouraged to identify in this indeterminate way as non-binary, for example, ah does that worsen their mental health?
00:27:55
Speaker
I think there's a good argument that it does. Just as I think there may be a good argument that poor mental health leads people to be more likely to not accept themselves and want to be something else. I think that's probably true too.
00:28:06
Speaker
I can't do the kick between those two positions, but I just think there's a lot of contagion and a lot of inflation of these categories. And I think it's quite you know It's a good sign, I think, that this is actually deflating. There is always going to be genuine trans people, but I think the number is just way too large compared to the genuine phenomenon.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, i know so someone like ah ah Helen Joyce will probably ah debate with you on that, but I agree that a victimhood mentality is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you keep saying that you're a victim, you'll feel like a victim and no doubt feel worse than for it, which is actually, as an aside, one of my controversial opinions that I actually think for most people, counseling can do more harm than good because it can reinforce a negative perception of oneself as opposed to coming terms to terms But anyway, that's a tangent. Well, no, Schreiter makes the same point. you know Focusing on your own thoughts is not a great thing to do. you want to be focusing on things out there in the world to be psychologically healthy.
00:29:04
Speaker
Too much navel-gazing is not good for you. So yeah i think thats yeah, I don't think that's that controversial. I mean, it is. It's not super controversial. yeah Yeah, yeah. You mentioned religion as well. How does religion play into the story?
00:29:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, I looked at religion and I didn't really find much. That is, the student body doesn't look like it's gotten more religious. Now, it is true. So a lot of these things, if you are conservative, you're much less likely to be trans. If you are religious, you're much less likely to be trans.
00:29:32
Speaker
That's all true. But if we're talking about changes over time, trans going down over time, that's not because the share of conservatives was blowing up or the share of religious people was blowing up. that That's been pretty stable.
00:29:42
Speaker
And this is one of the reasons why I think that this is very much an independent fashion or fad. Quite independent. You could be on the far left and amongst other far left people.
00:29:53
Speaker
But even in that milieu, it's not as cool to be trans as it would have been two years ago. and So I think this this trans thing is really become quite relatively detached, actually, even from the wider culture wars. You know you look at the question, should somebody who trans as a mental disorder, as as we were just talking, you know should that person be allowed to speak on campus? but The vast majority of American students say no. And so that intolerant kind cancel culture view is as high as it's always been. So there's been no real shift, I would say, to the right culturally among these young people that would explain this change, and which is why another reason why I think it's actually more enduring.
00:30:32
Speaker
It's actually really something that's fallen out of fashion. And in fact, the data show that the youngest people, the freshmen on campus are the least likely to identify this way.
00:30:43
Speaker
So I think this is going to continue actually today. So to follow on from that, because that's interesting that you say that you think in some ways that this issue is somewhat detached from the web of identity politics issues that we face today.
Persistent Race and DEI Issues in Culture Wars
00:31:00
Speaker
but I'm sure you don't have data on hand, but as a feeling, do you think that there has been any sort of a shift when it comes to other identity politics issues in the US and UK, say around race, for example?
00:31:12
Speaker
Or would you say that the trans issue is is almost an outlier in the way that it has receded from being being cool or popular? Yeah, yeah. and And I think there's two things on I actually think that these things are somewhat detached. So, for example, you know, we know the general public, including young people, are much less likely to support the trans activist position about, you know, trans women in women's spaces. Equally, they're less likely to be to identify as trans. They're less likely to identify as queer also and bisexual. So there's a whole bunch of these non-conforming gender and sexual things that have gone kind of declined in popularity.
00:31:48
Speaker
However, do think that doesn't automatically mean that the crazy craziness around race will will go. Now, of course, it is the case that DEI, there's less mention of white privilege and all of that stuff. But if you take, for example, where I'm from in Canada, an issue that's equally insane, which is this question of the residential schools as a form of genocide and mass graves, the claim that there are mass graves of of children that are buried.
00:32:15
Speaker
It's complete fantasy. There's no evidence for it. And yet it's really stubbornly refuses to die. Now, there are more kind of maverick politicians such as Dallas Brody and British Columbia that are willing to make this issue and speak out against it.
00:32:30
Speaker
But I think that it is harder to overcome the whole indigenous land acknowledge, all that sort of race stuff is a bigger hurdle. It's more sacred to the woke than trans. Trans is sacred, but it's not as sacred.
00:32:45
Speaker
for the left-hand race. And so I think this is going to be a bigger battle to get all of the sort of race-based EDI and attacks on history out of the system. It's going to take a bigger push.
00:32:57
Speaker
you You look in Canada, for example, there are politicians willing to take on the trans thing. Similarly, in the UK with labor, they backpedal on trans. But I think to to actually backpedal on the race stuff is going to be much, much more difficult.
00:33:11
Speaker
I don't think it is, automat it doesn't automatically follow and it will take a lot more pushing before we get to that. We'll get to a conversation around ethnicity and culture in just a moment because it is, you know, boy, you've done a lot of really fantastic research.
00:33:25
Speaker
But there was an interesting line that you ended that unheard article with, which was, this was a ah startling and unanticipated post-progressive development that the education and media establishments will be reluctant to acknowledge.
00:33:39
Speaker
Now, in my other capacity of as co-host at JB News. I certainly won't be reluctant to acknowledge this. um I'll mention ah this interview on the sad five Saturday Saturday 6pm.
00:33:51
Speaker
Tune in. But you're right, there are, of course, that is probably an outlier in media. But we noticed the other day that that Barry Weiss has now taken on the role as head of CBS.
00:34:03
Speaker
yes we've We've heard that there have been directives from from the owners of some newspapers to basically say, cut the woke nonsense. Do you think that the there but there may actually be some chain when it comes to the way that the media portraying these types of culture war issues?
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think there has already been some shift. I don't think you'd find the New York Times pushing the 1619 project in the same kind of craziness that they did. They have already backed off. They have featured articles from, you know, they published Chris Ruffo, I believe. You know, they publish and they have some conservative columnists. So I do think that the mainstream media has moved a little bit.
00:34:45
Speaker
I mean, they still have a progressive lean, but it's not they're not pushing the same kind of crazy they were in the late 2010s, does that mean that they're going to become perfectly even-handed? No, I don't think so.
00:34:57
Speaker
I think with this story, you can see, for example, that, you know, on the, let's call it the more mavericks, the center-left maverick publications like, you know, Yashamon's Persuasion, for example, has Brian Jean Twenge's piece. but But actually, almost all of the channels and outlets that have picked this up, like National Review, Unheard, or Fox News, or I mean, it's all on the right.
00:35:21
Speaker
and there's a real, you know, this is actually quite an important story, and yet you don't see this featuring in in any of the sort of mainstream media. Now, I know the Washington Post were interested, and so something may come out there, but it hasn't yet. so So I think it's interesting that there is still kind of skittishness, because their their readers are all progressive, and they have a very loud how well wing that will make a lot of noise in the sort of readers' comments, and they have to kind of watch their step a certain amount.
00:35:53
Speaker
But yeah, I am optimistic. I mean, I think things are definitely a lot better than they were, and I think this is an indicator of what what I kind call perhaps this post-progressive moment where more of the elite are questioning the old narrative of the right side of history. You must be on it, and it's always moving towards care, harm, and equal outcomes, moral foundations. I think that's kind of ah now people are starting to question that a lot more. So I am somewhat optimistic that, you know, even in academia, there are, even in English literature, there are there is the odd person of saying, you know, if we keep trashing Shakespeare, we can't be surprised if enrollments in English continue to decline.
00:36:32
Speaker
There are at least some voices making these points in academia. It's still a tiny minority. But it all seems to have happened in the last few years. And so I think there is some possibility that the high culture might draw back from its extreme. And we might start to see a lot, we might be at the beginning of a bigger tectonic shift.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah. You arguably made your name around talking about the relationships between ethnicity and culture.
Immigration's Impact on UK Identity and Populism Rise
00:36:59
Speaker
Forgive me, remind me the the name of your your first book? ah White Shift was, not my first book, bought but my last book.
00:37:06
Speaker
Second to last. Now, this conversation is re-emerging in the UK at the moment. People may recall that there was this debate, particularly when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister around, well, was Rishi Sunak English? And in some respects, it was this odd semantic debate about whether or not you consider the term English to be an ethnicity or a cultural grouping.
00:37:29
Speaker
that That has re-emerged with the Raise the Flag campaign. I think you are seeing more of a nativist, you know, Anglo-Saxon movement in in the UK. How have you reflected did on the cultural and ethnic tensions that we are undoubtedly seeing in this country and have been seeing over the last, let's say, 12 months?
00:37:50
Speaker
Well, I think the first thing to note and the point I made in White Shift was this is all about, know, there would be no real national populism in the West without the immigration issue. Essentially, that is the pivot around which it all rotates. And the reason immigration is important is is not only, but in large measure because of the really transformational ethno-religious shifts that are taking place across all Western societies.
00:38:19
Speaker
You know, the U.S. s becoming majority non-Hispanic white around 2050, Britain becoming majority non-white British in the early 2060s, Canada... And in pla in places like like London already.
00:38:33
Speaker
Already in this Leicester's and London's and Birmingham's, that's already happened. Young people, I think it's 40% minority and school system in England. So, yeah, i mean, we've got dramatic ethnocultural shifts going on.
00:38:46
Speaker
And we ended in addition to that, we had post-pandemic, you know, the largest huge immigration surges in in Britain, in Australia, in Canada, you in the United States. you had these big surges. They've all increased the importance of immigration to the public.
00:39:02
Speaker
Canada, where which has had historically high immigration, but the issue of immigration has never had the pickup that it has had in the last year. It is now, you know, there was a poll, 71% of Canadians think immigration is too high.
00:39:16
Speaker
this This was the poster child for the the new multicultural high immigration society. Yeah, and I think in Britain, what what we're seeing is the Tory party was elected, you know, under Boris Johnson, it was going to deliver Brexit. Brexit was 40% of Brexit voters put immigration as their number one issue. That's back in 2016 when the rate of immigration was less than half of what what it was in the Johnson period.
00:39:40
Speaker
And so, yes, it's a great sense of betrayal. And then ah at the same time, you had the small boats crisis, which continues to sort of boil. And yeah, I think there's just a frustration. And of course, under a labor government, which doesn't really, you know, they'll do it.
00:39:55
Speaker
They will address it. But you know, its heart their heart really isn't in this. And they will prioritize the kind of human rights conventions that have made it so difficult to deport people over enforcing borders. So I just think that kind of has led to this upwelling of popular anger really that's manifested itself in the flags going up across cities and towns across the UK, English and British flags kind of protesting.
00:40:19
Speaker
And then of course you have You, for example, have the large march that Tommy Robinson was involved in. To what extent these marches are barometers, it's not clear, but certainly the opinion surveys reform is absolutely crushing it in local elections. so They just got 36% in a Welsh local election where this was very solid left-wing labor territory. And yeah, so I think that is as the mood, but it's a very similar kind of mood.
00:40:46
Speaker
across a number of Western countries, Ireland, you know Canada, and and I just think this is- Australia as well. Australia, yeah and then Western Europe, we where we may see a the RN come into power in France. We've got the AFD in Germany hitting new height.
00:41:03
Speaker
We've got Maloney in Italy already. So I just think that this is this is a civilizational question mark. out The last thing I would say, however, is the idea that this is Only the ethnic majority engaging in some kind of exclusion, I think, is not the right paradigm.
00:41:19
Speaker
I think anytime you get to see the fine-grained public opinion data, you see there's a significant share of ethnic minorities and members who of where people are not members of that core ethnic group who also want less immigration. In Canada, you know poll after poll always seems to show this, that the non-whites are as opposed to immigration as the whites. They're as likely to say, even something like, there are too many visible minorities in Canada's immigration flow. Non-whites are more likely to agree with that statement than white people are.
00:41:50
Speaker
in in In the U.S., the non-white Trump voters and the white Trump voters are absolutely identical in their views of a question like, you know, European Christian civilization needs to be protected, and these kinds of questions. So what I i would say what i would caution is that I think this is a broader hal defensive cultural nationalist movement that is embraced by people of a range of different ah racial backgrounds.
00:42:13
Speaker
And I think, you know, as a symbol of that, you can live at reform and Zia Yusuf, the party chairman, as an example of that. But but yeah, I think that people who just are attached to a particular way of life, which includes a certain ethnic composition. Yeah, a a majority with minorities.
00:42:30
Speaker
They don't want this thing to be transformed very rapidly. These are going to be the big issues that define coming period. And this is why populism will remain strong until the mainstream parties get hold of immigration, get hold of In addition, whats what what you find is not only do they not have hold of immigration, but they are using restrictions on free speech to try and limit opposition.
00:42:54
Speaker
And that is a sort of force multiplier for these protests. Yeah, I couldn't agree with
Ethnicity, Cultural Identity, and National Character
00:43:00
Speaker
that more. My final question goes to the, so what you you were just talking about there was both race slash ethnicity and culture.
00:43:09
Speaker
Now, they are distinct concepts. and I think the left particularly has tried consciously to try and conflate them. But nonetheless, you can't change your race race or ethnicity.
00:43:20
Speaker
but you can make cultural decisions. That's generally why we think that racism is abhorrent, whereas, well, I still at least believe that if you make a choice about a religion or whatever, you should be free to be criticized for that.
00:43:34
Speaker
Now, On ethnicity or race, do you think it is important that a country like England does still remain majority ethnically white or ethnically Anglo-Saxon or whatever you want to call it?
00:43:51
Speaker
And if so, why is that important? Yeah, I think this is this is a key point because a lot of even right-wing politicians will say, oh, well, you know, ethnicity and color doesn't matter as long as they subscribe to British national.
00:44:02
Speaker
I don't think that's correct. I'll just try and explain why. So there's a difference here between the individual level, which is who can be English. Someone like Rishi Sunak, I think, is English, is a member of the English nation, absolutely.
00:44:15
Speaker
That's a different question from the collective question, as how is Britain distinctive in the world? What characteristics make Britain or England distinct ah distinct in the world at large?
00:44:27
Speaker
And let me explain it little. with an example, using the the example accents. and There was once a ah sort of very politically correct Canadian judge in a sort of citizenship ceremony who said all accents are Canadian accents. and What did he mean? He meant that everybody at the citizenship ceremony had a different accent and they were all Canadians.
00:44:45
Speaker
And they all those accents are Canadian accents. And at the level of who can be an equal citizen of the country or even equal national, that's absolutely right. So there is no accent requirement for being Canadian or British.
00:44:58
Speaker
But at the level of the aggregate, what makes Canada distinctive in the world, that is a ridiculous statement. There are Chinese accents and French accents the Canadian accents. So let's just take now the same analogy. and If you collapse it, if you say, well, no, there's a Canadian accent and that's not a Chinese or a French accent. And and in fact, there is something that's distinct. It's Canadian.
00:45:21
Speaker
And someone says, oh, you're excluding people if they have different accents. You're saying they're less Canadian. Well, it depends. Like, Yes, at the level of the country as a whole, if the Canadian accent declines, the country becomes less Canadian.
00:45:34
Speaker
At the level of the individual, if you don't have a Canadian accent, you can be equally Canadian. Now, let's take the example of race or ethnicity. At the level of the individual, yeah, Rishi Sunak is as as English as anybody else.
00:45:46
Speaker
But at the level of the country as a whole, if the country loses its ethnic character and and its racial and religious character and it becomes a minority, you know, white British, for example, it is less British than it was.
00:45:58
Speaker
That would be my assessment. But if you were then to say, oh, well, that means you're excluding someone who's not white. No, as with the assent, you are committing what's known as the fallacy of composition. The same thing, if I were to say, i think that the health service in Britain is not working well, and you were to say, oh, you're you're accusing doctors and nurses of doing a bad job.
00:46:18
Speaker
See I mean? The system level is not the same as the individual level. So this is where I would say, yeah, it's absolutely the case that Britain needs to, and you know, it it would be better for Britain, it would retain its character better if it if actually did not have a rapid transformation. Now, of course there is going to be transformation just simply from demographic momentum.
00:46:39
Speaker
But you could see a world where, yes, there was some melting and absorbing of different strains into this ethnic majority. But what was prioritized was the ethnic majority lineage.
00:46:51
Speaker
And so, i you know, if I were to say, and this is the point I make in White Ship, there should be a project of saying we need to slow down the level of immigration in order to have time to absorb people into the ethnic majority.
00:47:04
Speaker
and And so what you are doing is you are preserving that ethnic majority over time. Because I think if you lose that and you and you become a polycentric society, that's fine. There are such places and they're not all disasters. You know, the Trinidad's and the, oh, I don't know. I mean, yes, Lebanon is obviously not a great place, but there are other examples of where you have these polycentric societies, maybe Mauritius They seem to work okay.
00:47:27
Speaker
Sometimes they don't. I just think that you're more likely to get politics running on ethnic lines, ah less unity in the country when you go for that kind of truly polycentric model, as opposed to when you have an an ethnic majority, which I would add 70% of the world's countries do have an ethnic majority of at least 50%. So that is the standard.
00:47:48
Speaker
And I think losing that would dramatically transform the country. Yes, it is interesting how no one ever blames China or Japan for wanting to protect their ethnic majorities. I'm a tad frustrated we've got a hard stop because there is a whole other podcast and episode, I think, on this particular topic. So I may have to steal another hour of your time, Eric, to talk about that one in the coming weeks.
00:48:11
Speaker
But as usual, an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you for coming on. Well, it's been a slight. Thanks very much.