Political Violence & The Lunatics of Your Own Side - Andrew Doyle - #1002

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
The first time that we recorded, you were going from London to Edinburgh, maybe to do The Fringe?

**Andrew Doyle** (0:06)
Yes, it was at the Edinburgh Fringe.

**Chris Williamson** (0:07)
Stopped off at my house.

**Andrew Doyle** (0:08)
Yes. Yes, we did.

**Chris Williamson** (0:09)
2019 or 2018

**Andrew Doyle** (0:11)
It was a long time ago. We did the podcast in your living room.

**Chris Williamson** (0:14)
Correct.

**Andrew Doyle** (0:14)
Yeah. It was nice and homely.

**Chris Williamson** (0:16)
Yeah.

**Andrew Doyle** (0:17)
This is a bit more minimalist.

**Chris Williamson** (0:18)
Yeah, it's much more sterile.
I saw a tweet earlier on that I thought was pretty interesting. The left's greatest enemy is not the right, but the hard left. The right's greatest enemy is not the left but the hard right. The lunatics on your own side make you look much sillier than the opposition ever could.

**Andrew Doyle** (0:35)
Yeah. Well, there's a problem, isn't there, at the moment? Which is that there seems to be more of an overlap between the left and the hard left, which doesn't exist to the same degree. It does exist on the right, but not to the same degree. So I think, I mean, I've made the case that I think the left has to really disavow the lunatics within its own house. That's something they really, really need to do because I've been really shocked since this horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, seeing the extent of left wing, mainstream left wing voices, attempting to justify it. And I know that always happens. You know, if you go back to the Brighton bombing at the Tory party conference back in the early 80s, if you go back to the death of Margaret Thatcher, there were some people who were rejoicing in death and celebrating death. So you always get a bit of that. And it's always grotesquely unpleasant whenever you see it.

**Chris Williamson** (1:27)
And that track was number one, right?

**Andrew Doyle** (1:29)
I don't think it quite got to number one. Oh, well, maybe it did.

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
The witch is dead.

**Andrew Doyle** (1:33)
Yeah, yeah, the one, not hi-ho. It was ding-dong. You're confusing Wizard of Oz with the dwarves from Snow White. And those two should be conflated in a mash-up form and remixed. I think that should happen.
But it is true that there's always that kind of thing. But I've never seen the extent of it. Like there's thousands and thousands of them.

**Chris Williamson** (1:55)
Why do you think that is?

**Andrew Doyle** (1:58)
Because I think there's too much of an eroded boundary between that far left and left thing. The mainstream left, just as the mainstream right, has a kind of responsibility to distance itself from the more egregious, crazy people on their own side, although they're not really on their side, but on the further extremes of the political spectrum. If you don't do that, in the public imagination, the two become conflated.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
What does distancing yourself look like?

**Andrew Doyle** (2:20)
It looks like saying, I don't agree when someone celebrates murder. Who the hell is this to claim to represent my political position? It's actually not that hard to do.
There was a clip of a trans pride protest in London, where an activist stood up and shouted out, if you see a turf, punch them in the fucking face. See a woman, so calling for violence. Now, every movement, every protest has a few bad apples. If I saw that, I wouldn't really think much of it. What I reacted to was the crowd cheering and applauding that, because what that tells you is that violence and violent rhetoric has been normalized within the trans activist community. Because if I was at a parade of something that I really supported, some cause I really cared about, and I was at a protest and someone stood up and called for violence, I'd be like, who's that? Can we get him off the stage? This doesn't represent us. I wouldn't be cheering along and I'd be incredibly disturbed if I saw your supposed allies cheering that kind of thing. You'd do something about it, wouldn't you? That's all I mean by that. I think the tweet that you quoted, I presume is alluding to this idea that increasingly, there is a tolerance, if not support, but there's certainly a tolerance for the most extreme forms of violent rhetoric on the left, by the mainstream left. You can see that by the way, that mainstream commentators are throwing the word fascist around, and the word Nazi around, which is so dangerous, and more than anything, it's historically illiterate. They don't know what the word means. What it's come to mean is a kind of catch-all to dehumanize, to say, this person isn't really human. They are a kind of embodiment of evil, some kind of, it diabolizes them, and that's the effect of it, and I think that's a very dangerous thing to do, and you're seeing that really on the mainstream.