Jon Ronson breaks down why the right are abandoning the culture war 

People don't like admitting that we still live in a class-based society because they prefer the myth that anything is possible with hard work. It allows them to both pat themselves on the back when they might've been lucky or enjoyed priviledge and chide those who are unfortunate or who have been let down by the system with lines akin to: "just work harder" or "just get a better job".

Jon is a national treasure. His curiosity and lack of judgement really marks him out and is so refreshing

The S2 episode about the media storm about some US schools allegedly having cat litter trays for kids who identify as cats…and then the interview with the teacher who explains what the real purpose is of the buckets in class ….a shocking and sad reflection on how some media sources completely twist reality to whip up national outrage and division.

I guess the question is, where does the culture war end, and the serious issues begin? I don't give a damn whether someone approves of a casting decision in a Disney movie, but I do care when people are making arguments which are then seized upon by legislators to deny people real human rights.

Very good interview, really enjoyed hearing Jon talk, good work guiding the conversation by Ed 👏

That was such a fun listen. Thanks Ron, thanks Ed.

Great interview with Jon, his work is always so interesting, informative and entertaining - no mean feat! 😊

I think the difference in Britain is that all the culture war / conspiracy stuff is not underpinned by evangelical Christianity to the extent it is in the US. The evangelicals are still a fringe in the UK, although they are growing by opening churches in deprived areas. I don't think culture war stuff translated directly from the US to the UK tends to stick or have legs. At the minute, people are very concerned about day to day living, and the Tories culture war as an answer to this comes across as extremely unhelpful and tone deaf.

Loved the first season of the podcast, the one on abortion was so fascinating 👏🏽

I love this podcast and their coverage, thanks alot joe

The right are abandoning the culture war? They're the only ones I ever hear talking about it.

Aha - I love Jon Ronson, after reading his books I got the audiobook versions too. I haven't even heard his podcast yet, but I'll tune in now!

"We want to hurt people and not feel bad about it." Well that's really easy to do now. Without the restraint that comes with seeing nearly all those we communicate with face to face on a regular basis. Maybe they're not even real people.

All Jons books are entertaining, enlightening and well worth a read

Series 2 is absolutely brilliant! Have listened to several times already

If we aren’t distracted by culture wars/wedge issues we could look at the Tories history in power !

I wish we had more media like these 2 guys in the UK. Uk nuanced media is more effortless. USA nuanced stuff can be too intense

Loved the first season, didnt know the second was out. Great interview, thanks.

I'm trans and know that the stoking of hysterical myths about trans people was definitely in full swing by 2018. The pandemic may have expedited it, though in no way is it a product of those times.

Absolutely! Distraction politics is very convenient for those in power. Assimilating blame and shifting the emphasis from their own incompetence and corruption is a ploy that, they hope will win votes.

Love Jon Ronson, very excited to find out there’s another series of Things Fall Apart

Didn't know Jon Ronson had a podcast but I love his book the Psychopath Test and the film Men Who Stare at Goats. Great guest to have on PolJoe!

Lovely to see some new material from Jon

18:34 “America is a class-based system that pretends it’s an identity based system” is an astute observation. In answer to why people get angry when you point that out… I’d suggest those of higher class (wealth) have a vested interest in the status quo, whilst those of lower class like to believe they have some power. It’s much easier these days (and getting even easier) to change your identity, how you identify. Whereas trying to move from lower class to higher class is statistically extremely difficult. The issue is compounded when we take into account some identities (Eg the black community) are systemically poor BECAUSE of their identities.

Top job, Ed, always enjoy listening to Jon speak x

Fantastic, informative , and enjoyable. Thank you.

What a convivial voice! I’m new to Jon Ronson, but enjoyed his relatively dispassionate assessment of the culture wars. He’s right that we all need to be much more self-reliant when it comes to discerning truth. But I would warn against relying on fact checkers!

so glad more are saying this. Brilliant.

As an essential worker I never personally had that time away from work or other people. I resented it at the time but now wonder if I wasn't actually lucky.

really interesting interview, thanks!

Fantastic interview. Thanks.

"People take cocaine and have sex all the time" .... I never realised I had lived such a sheltered life! 😂

Spot on, thanks

Thanks ed and jon😊💚🌍💚One world

very good interview thanks

Some much love for jon ronson

I always enjoy Jon’s work. He sounds like a lovely guy too.

Have really enjoyed many of Mr. Ronson’s books over the years. Though I sometimes disagree with opinions aired on this channel, I do like to hear many n varied opinions on topics be they Left, Right, Centre or a mixture. I’d learn very little from only hearing my own opinions parroted back to me - preaching to the choir. My favourite thing being intelligent debates. Us humans are more than capable of being wrong. “Don’t want to be wrong any longer than my ignorance of a subject allows it”. Thanks P.J. 😊❤

Ronson never disappoints

Great point about new wave of journalists being activist based rather than evidence based. Like he says, "magical thinking" - or wishfulness, or a certain naive moral sentimentality - is the bane of modern progressivism.

15 years ago immigration was seen as a culture war issue and was ignored by politicians. Thankfully nothing bad came from that approach!

"Gary's economics" has a great way of explaining Britain's economic issues

LOVE Jon Ronson. His investigations & books are such a fascinating insight in social behaviour & psychology. Big fan! Thanks Joe for organising this & for great questioning Ed 👏🏻

I've spoken to some sex workers and I can assure you that the last thing they feel when they're working is any kind of 'excitement', delirious or otherwise. I've been a fan of Jon's work since 'Them - Adventures with Extremists' which I read after seeing the documentary series of the same title, and it was that series that first alerted me to the existence of Alex Jones. The rest is, unfortunately, history. Keep up the good work, Jon. As for the whole 'Woke' thing, I'm heartily sick of hearing about it in ANY context. Sigh.

The interviewer looks like a young, Scottish Eddie Marsan and I cannot now unsee this.

I find myself drawn this kind of conversation, when I hear Ronson speak I realise that I am not a far right bigot. Inasmuch that, for me he represents a voice of compassion, nuance and thoughtfulness. Pretty much everything he says makes some sense to me. I suspect I would enjoy sitting for a cup of tea with him.

"Just because you invent a word,doesn't mean we have to use it" If only this precept were more widely accepted.

Its easy to ignore something if it does not have any worth to it, its amazing how much you can let go👍

Jon Ronson! Great investigative journalist. (If you haven't heard of him, look out for The Psychopath Test,)

This guy’s content sounds interesting where can I find it? Does he only do BBC podcasts?

Great interview ta

31:20 Were you quoting Graham Linehan?😂”…just ‘cos you come up with a word, doesn’t mean I’m forced to use it…”. Glad to see Jonno is gender sensible deep down, even if he finds it hard to admit. Must be all that compassion

A groundhog being a bean is the most accurate description

Jaw dropped wider than my Dentist visit earlier this morning.

If you want to be depressed just read the DM comments on news stories. Many people on there have gone down the rabbit hole.

Did this video actually break down "why the right are abandoning the culture war"? I don't think they are, at least in the US, and after watching this, I don't remember hearing any evidence to the contrary.

If a few weeks of lockdown did this to human beings, try to imagine what a lifetime of confinement does to animals with high levels of inate intelligence, (not to mention people incarcerated in prisons!). Just how "civilised" are we after all?

Very interesting. Particularly interested in the confirmation biases.

"Culture wars are the opiate of the masses" I'll borrow that one if culture wars do make a comeback attempt.

I remember Linehan sending his followers after me simply because I corrected him. I loved Linehan's work and had zero history with him, apart from one brief chat online about a boardgame we both liked. The second time I messaged him was a comment on one of his (somewhat excessive) anti-gun tweets. I just said I thought his stats looked quite far out on the issue. He blocked me, forwarded my message to his 485,000 followers with the message BLOCKED FOR STUPIDITY on it and, as a result, a few of his fans messaged me with things like "it's YOU who should be shot". It was a strange feeling. The creator of Father Ted was a bit of a hero to me. Then he just went for me. So yes, my brief experience of him seems entirely consistent with what Ronson says.

I got off most of the social media sites in 2018, it was ruining my already fragile mental health. I only use FB for work stuff, I don't even go on it more than once a month and the only platform I'm active on is RU-vid which I consider a media content platform, not a social media site like some people do.

One point about the Miami killings is that, in the absence of any obvious cause of death, oxygen deprivation through strangulation, choking, suffocation is a really, really obvious thing that any half-decent coroner would be looking for. This series of TFA is very good - more small scale than the first (as Jon acknowledges), but that somehow makes the foresic study of what people thought they were doing that much more human somehow.

On the subject of pseudo science in an interview with Scottish defence Kings Counsel, Donald Findlay is very outspoken about this stuff getting used in court cases. Its rise in the early 80s. Bite analysis etc and even with respect to DNA. Interesting stuff, if you find yourself in the 'big court'!

The culture war doesn’t really play as well in the UK as it does the US. I also wonder if Sunak’s gaffe in parliament when he tried to weaponise transgender issues against Labour was some kind of watershed.

A basic theory RE the lockdown induced culture war explosion: Everyday as we go about our lives events happen that we need (or choose) to think about. These vary hugely, ie we might need to think about taking our kid to a birthday party later or we might choose to think about a news event from the other side of the world. So as a society our attention is constantly spread across multiple different events. We only have capacity for so much at once, and if we have too much to think about some stuff will naturally get deprioritised. After weeks of lockdown the well of events everywhere was running dry, and so as a collective we had lots of attention to spare. Therefore our attention was much more sharply focused on anything that did happen and the topics of discussion around such things. That coupled with well documented internet induced polarisation and partisan news coverage led to arguments that were far more noisy and less nuanced than they might have been otherwise. As normal life has returned people have more things to think about and so they deprioritise culture war issues that don’t directly affect them, hence a lot of the heat is taken out of it. So it’s not necessarily the case that people are bored of culture war topics, it’s more that people aren’t bored enough to bang on about them all day long.

I have two things in common with this guy. Same glasses and same high school.

Is this an old interview I can't find anything on BBC sounds

What happened with Lene Dunham? Google says she's doing fine

He’s so way off on some of this… there is no way the legacy media is coming back to replace Twitter. Nice thought for someone that thrives in that world but Pandora’s Box has been opened.

Anyone else caught by the irony of talking about class war then extolling the virtues of (billionaire backed) old media? Not saying new media is better, but it's not one of the other. We should be looking for something better than either.

"Just because you come up with a word doesn't mean I'm forced to use it." Careful, Jon. I think that's Graham's point.

Haha. "On the right it's just straight up lying, on the left it's... ahem mnumunum-anyway it's all a distraction."

What distinction does Jon draw between magical thinking and thinking he simply disagrees with?

Yep and the primary funders of the research is Taser.

I really enjoyed the 'lock down' . I clean and prep emergency vehicles for a living . I enjoyed the car journey to work as i was almost the only vehicle on the road. I never saw any roadkill, the skies were clear, quiet and free of aeroplane trails and the world was peaceful and beautiful. I came out of the lockdown in a better mental state than I entered it. Didn't last long once normal fukwittery returned.

Audio quality is sub-potato. I can barely make out what is being said. Which is a shame, I'd really like to know.

I’ve got to 16:44 and still title is unaddressed

I witnessed a lad who had an episode in a house attacked family members ran out topless and in, found babbling round the corner lying on the ground for a bit and he was burning like he was on fire! A few days later people who didn’t know what happened were talking about him taking cocaine for his birthday earlier that night.

Noticed they changed the thumbnail 🤣

Are they abandoning it? They seem to be doubling down.

Also he admits to being wrong about Trump in 2016 but then doubles down like he knows anything about Republicans in 2024.

He's right in that's it is all about politicians distracting then looting - read The Emperor's New Clothes - it explains all this in simplified form for all to understand.

How am i supposed to understand this as someone who worked normally through "lock down" ? Oh you poor darlings how hard it must have been

glad to see a supporting role from the covid inquiry wall!

Jon Ronson is always interesting to listen to.

2 hours north of NYC is most definitely central NY, not upstate…

Thanks car manufacturer😂😂😂

Graham Lineham seems such an incongruous presence in the current trans debate. It's like Larry Grayson going after the fox hunting lobby. There doesn't seem to be any connection.

Strange calling Louis and Jon particularly compassionate towards the people they interview. Glad Jon pointed out it’s curiosity not compassion.

Need more Ed in my life

Eddie Marsan's Scottish accent is pretty decent

‘Tases’ just looked it up and it’s not called Taser because it ‘Tases’. It’s ’Tasered.’

Regarding Jon's last comment, does he think that people will also start abandoning podcasts and youtube because they aren't legacy media, or what about the proposition that youtube is now also a legacy media? RU-vid certainly leaves a better legacy memory imprint than most other papers and platforms.

Imagine how different things would be is Rowling didn't have a Twitter account.

Ronson is so interesting and light hearted with a great accent 🙏

""Nikki Hayley is more conciliatory " what the absolute f**k

Hang on, I didn't think ground hogs appeared till 2nd Feb 😲😆

Because they’re not all idiots and are finally realising that they’re being deceived.

A good natter with Jon and a cuppa.

There's a better version of this conversation on a recent Knowledge Fight episode. Also, the title of this only applies to about 2 minutes near the end. the rest of the discussion has nothing to do with it. sort yourselves out.