Claire Fox; Academy of Ideas Founder talks debating, JK Rowling, cancel culture and 1984

About this episode

Claire Fox, founder of the UK's Academy of Ideas and Battle of Ideas Festival, and a former Living Marxism publisher, joins Vance for a wide-ranging conversation on free speech, cancel culture, and the collapse of open debate. They discuss the mechanics of her live-debate festival model, the financial precarity facing universities dependent on foreign-student tuition, the ballooning of university enrollment targets and student debt, and the emergence of "woke" corporate culture in the wake of George Floyd's death, including mandatory unconscious-bias trainings functioning as workforce discipline. Fox draws a direct 1984 parallel to cancel culture's "two minutes of hate," recounts the JK Rowling/Harper's letter controversy, and connects her own experience of Brexit's political realignment (old left/right allegiances dissolving) to the fracturing of American party politics. She closes discussing the Academy of Ideas' precarious lack of state or corporate funding and her fondness for Vance's Monsanto-era outreach as a model of engaging critics directly rather than avoiding debate.

“People are being punished as we speak and people are losing their livelihoods. I mean, it feels to me like a modern version of McCarthyism. People are being named, shamed, reputations ruined. I mean, there's nothing worse than being called a bigot. I mean, it will destroy your career.”

“You've got situations now where HR departments are mandating that staff do white fragility training, unconscious bias training... it's a fantastic mechanism for disciplining the workforce.”

“If you champion Martin Luther King and saying that what's important is somebody's character and not their skin color, that is now considered to be racist... How did that happen?”

Key moments

• Fox opens cold with the McCarthyism comparison to cancel culture before any introduction (mob).
• Vance describes the aftermath of bringing Jordan Peterson to the American Farm Bureau — Slate branding him a Nazi supporter within hours and colleagues secretly supportive but publicly calling for his firing (mob, institutions).
• Fox details a senior colleague being pressured over refusing unconscious-bias training, framing HR-mandated trainings as tools for internal "snitch culture" and workforce discipline.
• Fox connects George Floyd's killing to a pre-existing "brewing" culture war, arguing the aftermath quickly became unrelated to Floyd himself as statues fell and curricula were "decolonized" (mob, legacy).
• Vance and Fox discuss 1984's "two minutes of hate" as an understatement of, rather than exaggeration of, present social-media and campus dynamics.
• Fox recounts the Harper's letter on free speech being signed by 150 intellectuals (Chomsky, JK Rowling) and immediately being met with retractions and hounding — cancel culture cancelling an anti-cancel-culture letter.
• Fox explains the JK Rowling/trans-women controversy in detail, describing self-identification policy effects on prisons and women's shelters.
• Fox and Vance connect Brexit's cross-party realignment to American politics' fracturing party coalitions (a trade unionist and a conservative councillor uniting on Brexit).
• Fox describes literally feeling "what civil war would feel like" during the bitterness of the Brexit reversal attempts — families splitting over the vote.

Notable quotes

“There's one big corporate that was sponsoring the festival... they say we can't sponsor this year because of the impact of the virus... and then the next day I heard that they were making a multimillion pound donation to Black Lives Matter.”

“We live through those two minutes of hate as a kind of norm... he's describing the world we live in, isn't he?”

Predictions made in this episode

• If free speech and open debate continue to be suppressed by corporate and institutional cowardice, the resulting silencing will actively fuel the growth of white nationalist/alt-right movements by forcing people into extreme, unspoken resentments.
• The Academy of Ideas will not have financial reserves to sustain operations beyond the end of the year without new sponsors, given the loss of corporate funding and refusal to take UK furlough money.