Highlights of Janet Albrechtsen on The Young IPA Podcast

The Australian columnist and IPA Board Member Janet Albrechtsen joined the Young IPA Podcast to discuss a range of issues. Here are some highlights.

On Milo Yiannopoulos

• “Boy, do we need Milo.”
• “He sees himself very much as the cultural disruptor. If Trump is the political disruptor, then he’s the cultural one. He takes the view of [Andrew] Breitbart that politics is downstream from culture so the real battle is on the culture front.”
• “He’s showing up the growing totalitarianism of the left.”
• “If we don’t get a handle of where our culture is going then we’re not going to get the politics right. Trump was very much a reaction to so many things in America. In a similar way, not the same way, to Brexit in the UK…and Milo is representative, I think, of millennials who’ve had enough of the stultifying political correctness that they’ve seen from elites. Whether it’s in the media and Hollywood. They’re basically just putting the finger up to the elites.”
• “I think he seems himself as deliberately provocative to you show you how the left respond to things they don’t like.”

The rise of political violence

• “You only have to look at our current political situation in Canberra to realise people are pretty damn fed up with what’s going on and wonder who the hell’s looking out for us anymore. So I think you could see people getting more and more angry on both sides by the way, and we’ve seen that this week with people getting cross with Sam Dastyari in a pub and getting very aggressive, but we’ve also seen people like Pauline Hanson attacked in the same way. And of course, the media never responds in quite the same way when someone on the right is at the forefront of the aggressive attack.
• On a recent event at Rutgers university: “It was the black libertarian who came in for the most abuse from the audience. Because he made a point – a very simple point when you think about it – that those on the left who are proponents of identity politics who are so offended by white supremacists in fact have the same approach to race – they treat it as beautiful and special – as the white supremacists do. And both are a terribly retrograde movement.”

How to encourage free speech on campus

• “It’s having people like [IPA Campus Coordinator Renee Gorman] out there. Renee is absolutely fabulous on campus. She’s funny, she’s articulate, she’s smart. These are the people we want to hear from. So the more Renees and the more we hear from people like Renee, people will start to think “perhaps I should listen.”

To listen to the full interview, listen to The Young IPA Podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud and our website.