November 16, 2022 - 1:00pm
International Trade Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities Kemi Badenoch has warned of the rise of “new authoritarians” who “want to stop everything and ban everything”.
Speaking at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, the minister argued that young people were prone to this way of thinking even if their sentiment is “coming from a good place”. “They are trying to create safetyism,” Badenoch said, “a world where nothing bad happens, and they see liberty as a challenge to that when, actually, liberty is the thing that protects us all.”
According to the minister, this is why a “loss of epistemic authority” is now the most serious threat to individual liberty in the U.K.. Expressing fears about “people not knowing what is true and what is false,” Badenoch argued that this is “a huge problem for those of us who believe in liberty.” She further warned that “when people can’t tell what’s true and what’s false, they move into a space where they worry about how they feel and how things make them feel.” Consequently they “look to restrict free speech in particular, which means you don’t have the debate, you don’t get the ideas, you don’t challenge the problems.”
The minister, who stood in this summer’s leadership election following the resignation of Boris Johnson, was also questioned about her reputation as a culture warrior. Asked whether this epithet was fair, the trade minister responded: “Being a politician, other people try and write your story for you and you lose control of your own narrative.”
Having held the equalities brief before her bid for the Conservative Party leadership, Badenoch stressed that her job required her to protect “everyone, irrespective their sexual orientation, their sex, their race, but those are all the contentious issues that we see today.” She continued:
Despite her conservatism, Badenoch described it as “really odd” that the positions she held were considered “socially liberal not that long ago”. “I see myself very much as a classical liberal,” she said. “Because we keep moving, socially, in a particular direction […] the people who take the progressive line will assume that me trying to maintain the conservative line makes me a culture warrior. I don’t know, I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
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SubscribeHang on a minute… a politician – and a high profile, successful one at that – who can debate philosophical points from her own intellect rather than borrowing from the cultural playbook; who can find not just the right words but fresh ways of expressing her position without seeming to talk down to, or at the audience?
How refreshing is that!! It doesn’t matter whether you agree with her or not, she sets a standard of public debate that others can only aspire to, and as if she was born to it. Which perhaps she was.
Of course, there are others who can debate in similarly open fashion. What i’m pointing up here is her chosen career, and the rarity of putting oneself in the political cauldron to try to influence the world around her rather than simply commentating from the sidelines, or if “sidelines” is unfair, then at least from a position where votes are the currency. She wins mine.
Do you have a second Kemi Badenoch you could spare? We really need one here in the U.S.
Yes, it’s quite startling !
Kemi Badenoch is certainly the most impressive Tory politician I’ve seen in many years. I usually turn away when most of her colleagues in any party speak. I listen to her, though.
I was born in the early 90’s and would love to know where this mentality came from among the youth of this country. At no point do I recall in my teens or early adult life people of my age group wanting to ban things, censor people with unfashionable views (I can remember many passionately loathing the BNP for example but defending their right to an opinion) or accommodate people in favour of doing so. If anything the few matching that third example were told to mind their own business essentially. I was on the right when I was at university (10 years ago) and politics didn’t stop me making friends and drinking with liberals, avowed Marxists and even in one case, an Irish Republican. Now that seems hard to imagine from what one hears and reads.
It all just seemed so sudden and swift in a way that’s hard to understand, even as someone who lived through it. Was it overprotective parenting from the early and mid 00’s, did behaviour of teachers and other authority figures change drastically or something else?
“I was born in the early 90’s and would love to know where this mentality came from among the youth of this country.”
It comes from the same place that all insanity comes from: postmodernist academics. It took decades for their theories to filter out into wider academia and then the public consciousness, but it was there that the rot started.
Yes, you are right about the success of Postmodernism. I remember studying it in the 1990s – and I never imagined how successful it would be. But now it is impacting our daily lives and politics.
Its come from what passes for Universities these days.
In fairness, I didn’t encounter any moral judgements about my opinions until my final year when I was in a debate on a topic that was fairly divisive within the country but almost certainly slanted toward a particular viewpoint at universities. All I will say is, the students in the first year seemed particularly moralistic and believed themselves to be better than those with a different viewpoint. Far more so than anyone I had encountered in my year group or even the one below for that matter. Sadly it seems to have got worse since then.
There was a (mercifully brief) period during the ’60s when society, or at least the media, held up the youngsters parading in the streets as a harbinger of a new morality.
The majority of those youth had the nonsense thrashed out of them by reality, and are now the grandparents watching with distaste the idiot parade now going on.
The minority holed up in academia and furnished the moral foundation for such parades.
It’s the circle of life. Stupidity never dies, it just goes into hiding.
This mentality is a direct result of Critical Theory academics, pushing their own brand of unintelligible nonsense for decades. This book serves as an accessible introduction – Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay.
I read this book about two years ago and it is very good. But afterwards I remember thinking that very, very few people would read it. So what was the point?
Young people certainly would not read it because it demands time and young people are in a hurry. The internet with thousands of soundbites does not require time spent on one or two thoughts. The internet is like a mob in one of those cowboy films where the sherrif is standing for truth and the law, but the mob wants a lynching.
The BBC, for example, has shown that rational debate is a waste of time; you simply take the ‘caring’ or ‘thoughtful’ side and the young audience follows. This young audience is being told, by the way, in schools and universities that truth lies with the young – the young being the generation which hasn’t been corrupted by excess.
You seem to have a very dim view of young people which says a lot more about you than it does about them I’m afraid.
Not at all Graeme. It is actually a very caring view for a generation of young people who have been miseducated into vulnerability. And very deliberately, according to the tenets of Postmodernism/Critical Theory
Why don’t you explain to us exactly how a whole generation has been “miseducated into vulnerability”?
What, exactly, does Postmodernism or Critical Theory have to do with that?
Or, as I suspect, are you just angry that your assumptions and prejudices are being dismissed as outdated old tosh and you need to have an excuse for that so you blame whatever it is you read last about why young people are stupid?
Who exactly is this ‘us’ you presume to speak for, Graeme?
The generation in question believes men can get pregnant. Next?
‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is very good on recent trends !
Chris, there are organisations fighting back, who are worth supporting. The Free Speech Union is one of them (for obvious reasons) https://freespeechunion.org/ but also in terms of refuting Critical Race Theory, groups like Don’t Divide Us https://dontdivideus.com/ and The Equiano Project https://www.theequianoproject.com/ are doing great things.
I actually remember having some good debates with lecturers who could appreciate it when you bought some intelligent counter-arguments to the table. In one essay, I wrote a scathing view of the lack of democracy in the EU and got a 2:1 for it. Not so sure that would happen now to be honest.
Why not?
b
Plus one – can’t recommend that book highly enough. It’s comprehensive but not turgid and is even entertaining in places – if disturbing.
You are right, this book (‘Cynical Theories’) is superb – I would recommend everyone reads it. It is worth buying for the defence of liberal values and methods alone…
There is no such mentality. It is a figment of the febrile imagination of old, scared people who don’t like the fact that the world is changing (for the better) and that nobody wants to hear their bigoted views anymore.
Badenoch is just a chancer of who sees an opportunity to exploit them but her window has closed and she’ll be consigned to giving furious speeches to smaller and smaller groups of angry pensioners soon enough.
You are correct but nobody on this site will listen. I used to work in Italy and every morning the outdoor cafes were full of old, retired men who were ‘talking politics’ or ‘putting the world to rights’.
Everybody ignored them and carried on with their lives.
Exactly as will happen now. Badenoch, like Trump, can only exploit them for so long before they are gone forever.
Calm down sweetie. The soft play area is over there. x
How odd that this brave new world of which you speak – which doubtless champions the overriding importance of race, gender and identity – deems it ok to dismiss the thoughts and opinions of an entire demographic merely because of their age.
Isn’t your assumption that anyone who disagrees with you being old and bigoted somewhat stereotypical? Just how does it apply to Mrs Badenoch for a start? My son is 30 and has exactly these attitudes and beliefs. He’s open to discuss things, unlike you however. You seem to be the bigoted one.
John Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind goes a long way to explain how this shift occurred. Basically, 2013 was the first year of college graduates who’ve grown up with internet. It makes sense, the current state of the internet is riddled with little communities that ban, censor and bash anything different to themselves. This attitude is now being made manifest in the off-line world.
So, as RW says in response to your comment, it has come from intellectuals who have captured academia and other institutions. As a youngster, you might well appreciate the parallel from the movie (and book) world. In particular, the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. If you go onto substack, look for a brilliant analysis posted this week by N.S. Lyons at: the [email protected]
It was triggered- inadvertently- by the Labour Lartys two Equality Acts. Note the date. 2010. It established the idea of 9 Victim Groups – from women and non whites to gays Muslims all the way to the little known new kid – Trans. Like the accidental leak of covid from the Wuhan incubating Lab, this idea spread out via the State and State laws – not woksters on SM. But there was a deep flaw. Victims require Oppressors – and so the reverse racist assault on white male patriarchy and our structurally racist society was unleashed. Our law unwittingly supports the mad theory of Critical Race Theory It was imbibed by the BBC and MSM under the monicker of diversity and so the toxic contagion of identitarianism accelerated year after year through our culture. So here we are – with Labour not knowing what a woman is; austistic vulnerable children mutilated; white males denigrated as gammon; and all the younger generations schooled in this poison and the idea of their death by planetary fire in 7 years by the impossibly bad state school teachers. This is how it happens. Kemi must race to put out the fire , at source – in those warped State laws. Its 10 years and counting and getting stronger every year.
Brilliant. Thank you.
My greatly oversimplified theory is that there were a lot of angry disillusioned hippies who had their entire worldview rejected by popular vote with the success of conservatives such as Reagan and Thatcher, followed by the fall of Communism. They overwhelmingly rejected the ‘capitalist’ world of free enterprise and instead went into education, arts, journalism, public service, etc., where they continued to project their bitterness toward classical liberal society into their work in subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways. In this way, they were in a position to influence and indoctrinate the youth as well as greatly influence knowledge creation in general, up to and including hard sciences, deciding what qualifies as settled science vs. quackery. Eventually the oligarchs figured out how useful the hippies and their silly dreams of a unified globe were for avoiding pesky problems like national labor standards, trade unions, tariffs, elected officials, accountability to citizens, environmental regulations, etc. because those things are enforced through national governments, so peace loving equality internationalism was ultimately the greatest boon the exploiters could ever hope for. Thus out of classical liberalism came the deformed misbegotten hodgepodge of soft socialism and deferral to ‘established authority’ I call neoliberalism. In one of history’s many cruel ironies, the hippies who decried exploitation played a pivotal role in establishing the highly inequitable world of today and allowing exploitation of labor to continue in foreign countries through the mechanism of free trade. The powers that be have conspired with bitter old loser Communists to weave the worst aspects of both capitalism and communism into something much scarier than either, something approaching 1984 levels of totalitarianism. We can already see it in China, and notice who always defends the Chinese and trading with them.
Hippies?!?!? LOL! How old are you gammons? You sound like my old grandad and he’s been gone a while!
This is amazing – do you have more “thoughts” like this? You should write a book!
I’m 41 and not remotely qualified to write a book on anything. It’s just my opinion on an internet site nothing more nothing less. Don’t take things quite so seriously maybe?
I don’t take you remotely seriously, pal!
If you’re going to comment on a site like this you need to learn some manners, pal.
Or else go away and play on Instagram.
Yes with the other children.
I was considering ‘reporting’ your post as impolite or ‘offensive’, (that favoured catch-all) and then I realised the irony 😉
Ageism isn’t a good look, especially as it IS one of the 9 protected characteristics – strange the ‘most vulnerable in society’ in your post below, doesn’t include ‘that’ part of the equality act! You seem to be very angry at those who simply had the temerity to be born before you, Freud would have a lot to say about that.
Well said. People who resort to personal attack, especially against categories of people (e.g. older folks), are representative of the sort of people who are in power in politics, the corporates, government and so forth and who seek to destroy and discredit our sense of identity and historical worth. Their commentaries contain nothing of value and add nothing of substance to discussion.
In short: they are nothing less than bigots. Ignore them!
You really are one extremely nasty person. You think nothing of using ageism and rude terms to try to discredit people. Yet I bet you stand up for people who try to erase the entire concept of womanhood. Can’t you see the hypocrisy involved in that? In a democracy people have the right to a different opinion to you. That doesn’t make them “old and bigoted”. And how do you know someone’s skin colour from a posted comment. You are in fact racist.
Why the insults and apoplexy? They detract from whatever point you are trying to make.
I blame Obama. No seriously.
Around 2015, 6 years after the start of his term as the first Black President of the most influential country in the world we should have been well on our way to color-blind government and society. Instead when Michael Brown decided to fight with a police officer the first racial reckoning started. The whole “police genocide of blacks” and “systemic racism is everywhere” narratives became a crescendo in the MSM in 2015.
The lies behind these narratives could easily be argued with facts, the most obvious being the very existence of “President Obama”, and thus the new phrase “words are violence” came to prominence and simultaneously were used to block non-PC speakers throughout the Anglosphere.
This attack on free speech would have quickly died if prominent leftists (with Obama being most prominent) had come to support free speech. Instead Obama increased racial division with both government policy and symbolic actions. The success of the cancelling efforts started in 2015 has made it the leftist go to tactic for all topics now, not just racial issues.
It started with Trayvon Martin. Obama made a speech saying “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”.
I think I current situation is the logical outcome of Postmodernism, both in terms of the success of Postmodern ideas filtering out through the universities – and living in Postmodern times where the big narratives (including political ideologies) are exhausted…and critical theory is a part of this (including Critical Race Theory). But as Orwell pointed out in ‘1984’ – if there is hope, it lies in the proles…..
Badenoch is intelligent, principled and appears to be a genuine conviction politician. In addition, she has original thoughts, and is open to discussion and debate.
It’s been a long, long time since I was so impressed by an M.P. – and I look forward to the day she becomes P.M. (sooner the better).
Badenoch is intelligent, principled and appears to be a genuine conviction politician. In addition, she has original thoughts, and is open to discussion and debate.
It’s been a long, long time since I was so impressed by an M.P. – and I look forward to the day she becomes P.M. (sooner the better).
Unless conservative minded classical liberals and libertarians wake up to the way power functions in the 21st century, and get to grips with its operations, then all they exist to be is chewed up and spat out by the end of history.
There is no room for personal liberty in an age of perpetual self inflicted crises, especially for the lower classes. If you truly value personal freedom for everyone, you don’t throw a strop over transgressions against it, or wag your finger at those inclined to take it from you. You have to do some heavy lifting. You have to engineer the proper conditions that allow for liberty’s maximisation.
It doesn’t accomplish anything to simply tell woke people off for being woke, or complain about it from the margins. On the other hand, choking the ideology out of people’s heads with astroturfing, propaganda, economic disincentives, and institutional leverage would.
The conservative right has all but forgotten how to wield power, and that fertile territory has been snapped up by liberal progressives.
People respect Badenoch because she has solid principles, but holding principles that aren’t backed up by the mainstream organs of power shows no promise. We can’t blame progressives for doing what’s in their nature, we can only blame ourselves for failing to sufficiently counter it.
It’s not that conservatives in office have forgotten how to wield power, they simply lack the courage to so so. Kemi excepted.
What exactly has she done except throw some red meat to the gammons with her attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in society? What are her actual achievements in government?
She’s got your attention, that’s a start.
The bar seems to be set very low here in terms of achievements….
Please stop making racist statements. It is not illegal to be a white male.
I’m curious as to who you consider the most vulnerable?
Certainly not middle aged straight white men.
Trans kids and young adults are among the most vulnerable in our society.
The UK State wields power. Not the elected Executive. The Blairite Remainiac State consists of the vast Blob and NMI Technocracy which commandeered independent powers; these powers are protected by their European/HR laws and by their attack dogs the BBC and universities. The so called Tories have shrivelled under the weight of their attacks. Brexit has not even begun. They forbid it. And one by one the key Brexiteers are ousted by the sane senior mandarins citing bullying or partygate; Boris Priti Suella and now Raab. All ‘bullies’. We must stop pretending there is not an ongoing vicious civil war within the UK State. And the corrupt venal Leftists are winning hands down. Their revolution is too deeply embedded. They run the State. The emasculated Tories pretend to be the Government.
Excellently put Walter. Take the recent attack on Ian Duncan Smith by leftist activists. In court the Judge said it was within their Human rights to physically abuse him. This was overturned at the Court of appeal. Only for Blair’s own creation the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling. Justice is dead in this Country for those of a Conservative view.
She is outstanding and exactly what the Tories needed to survive. Wrong choice made.
She is outstanding and exactly what the Tories needed to survive. Wrong choice made.
You folks across the pond seem to be shopping for a new Prime Minister on a regular basis lately. This lady seems like she might make a good one.
You folks across the pond seem to be shopping for a new Prime Minister on a regular basis lately. This lady seems like she might make a good one.
Kemi is such a waste in the dead corpse called the Tory party.
She’s right, of course.
Thinking does not require too much intelligence. Thinking is a skill, like wood-carving; it can be learned. Humility, patience, honesty, a sense of humour; all those are far more important aids to the craft of thinking than masses of grey matter. No brain, however large, can smuggle thoughts past the wall of a brittle ego.
The basis of thinking is an ability to embrace inner conflict. If you wish seriously to think about anything, you have to dismantle your own comfortable ideas, and argue against yourself.
That’s the basis of an adversarial legal system, for instance; both sides in a case slug it out and try to make dirt of each other’s position. And, obviously, swap the lawyers, and they will easily tomorrow argue against their own position yesterday.
That seeming cynicism and amorality leads to lawyers being culturally derided as unprincipled by the hoi polloi.
However, it also points up how principle itself is an impediment to thinking.
If you’re truly thinking, there can be no sacred cows.
If the principle is a good one, it will survive being beaten up.
But this ability to hold opposing ideas in suspense, and to attack your own position, is beyond many people nowadays. It’s not that people have suddenly became more stupid since e.g. the 1970s, but we do now live in a culture of cookie-cutter secular commandments. It is the age of bug-eyed, derivate, sloganeering certainties. Everyone “believes!”; everyone falls in line with their group; everyone derives their personal identity from their group mantra; everybody has a slogan; nobody thinks any more.
Personally, I tend to blame the Internet.
She’s right, of course.
Thinking does not require too much intelligence. Thinking is a skill, like wood-carving; it can be learned. Humility, patience, honesty, a sense of humour; all those are far more important aids to the craft of thinking than masses of grey matter. No brain, however large, can smuggle thoughts past the wall of a brittle ego.
The basis of thinking is an ability to embrace inner conflict. If you wish seriously to think about anything, you have to dismantle your own comfortable ideas, and argue against yourself.
That’s the basis of an adversarial legal system, for instance; both sides in a case slug it out and try to make dirt of each other’s position. And, obviously, swap the lawyers, and they will easily tomorrow argue against their own position yesterday.
That seeming cynicism and amorality leads to lawyers being culturally derided as unprincipled by the hoi polloi.
However, it also points up how principle itself is an impediment to thinking.
If you’re truly thinking, there can be no sacred cows.
If the principle is a good one, it will survive being beaten up.
But this ability to hold opposing ideas in suspense, and to attack your own position, is beyond many people nowadays. It’s not that people have suddenly became more stupid since e.g. the 1970s, but we do now live in a culture of cookie-cutter secular commandments. It is the age of bug-eyed, derivate, sloganeering certainties. Everyone “believes!”; everyone falls in line with their group; everyone derives their personal identity from their group mantra; everybody has a slogan; nobody thinks any more.
Personally, I tend to blame the Internet.
‘She further warned that “when people can’t tell what’s true and what’s false, they move into a space where they worry about how they feel and how things make them feel.” Consequently they “look to restrict free speech in particular, which means you don’t have the debate, you don’t get the ideas, you don’t challenge the problems’
Brilliant! This is exactly how the young people who, fearful as the are, associate themselves with the nonsense of critical race and gender theory are acting.
‘She further warned that “when people can’t tell what’s true and what’s false, they move into a space where they worry about how they feel and how things make them feel.” Consequently they “look to restrict free speech in particular, which means you don’t have the debate, you don’t get the ideas, you don’t challenge the problems’
Brilliant! This is exactly how the young people who, fearful as the are, associate themselves with the nonsense of critical race and gender theory are acting.
“Badenoch described it as “really odd” that the positions she held were considered “socially liberal not that long ago”. “I see myself very much as a classical liberal,” she said. “Because we keep moving, socially, in a particular direction […] the people who take the progressive line will assume that me trying to maintain the conservative line makes me a culture warrior. I don’t know, I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
Good point.
“Badenoch described it as “really odd” that the positions she held were considered “socially liberal not that long ago”. “I see myself very much as a classical liberal,” she said. “Because we keep moving, socially, in a particular direction […] the people who take the progressive line will assume that me trying to maintain the conservative line makes me a culture warrior. I don’t know, I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
Good point.
A very impressive young woman. Possibly too clever to be PM.
A very impressive young woman. Possibly too clever to be PM.
I love Kemi Badenoch – she is definitely a future leader of the Conservative Party, likely when they crash and burn and are back in opposition. It would be good to return to some genuine conservative values for a change.
I love Kemi Badenoch – she is definitely a future leader of the Conservative Party, likely when they crash and burn and are back in opposition. It would be good to return to some genuine conservative values for a change.
Defending free speech, and opposing a kind of Postmodern relativism, should be as much a concern of those on the Left, as it is for those on the Right of politics. Sadly, it isn’t….
Defending free speech, and opposing a kind of Postmodern relativism, should be as much a concern of those on the Left, as it is for those on the Right of politics. Sadly, it isn’t….