Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Aug. 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:06:22

Piers Morgan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 64

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	At what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people?
	It's a fundamental question for the public health of the country.
	And treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for America, right? - Hey, hey, and welcome to the show.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	I am really excited to welcome to the set, Piers Morgan.
	You know him, of course, from our infamous interview set on CNN, but also he's, of course, the host of Good Morning Britain on ITV, and he's a columnist for the UK Daily Mail.
	You can check out all of his work at DailyMail.com.
	Piers, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I would say it's a pleasure, but let's see how it goes.
	Probably too hasty here.
	Well, I mean, I do have to start off by thanking you.
	We have 100 employees, and at least, I would say, 50 of those are probably due to the fact that you had me on your show several years ago.
	I still get sent on Twitter the clip, you know, where I go after you about your little book, Being the Constitution.
	Just to clarify for your listeners and your viewers, I meant the physical size of the book, not the enormity of the content.
	I appreciate that.
	And I promise we will get to, for all the viewers, we'll get to gun control a little bit later.
	The reason I don't want to start with that is because we could do that the entire hour and then we rehash all the stuff that we've done before.
	Plus, my audience knows your position on gun control.
	Your audience, I'm sure, knows my position on gun control.
	But I promise we'll do a little bit later.
	I want to start off with asking, sort of, what is your background?
	So for a lot of American viewers, they first became familiar with you when you were on CNN or when you were on America's Got Talent.
	You've done this wide variety of stuff.
	So what was your pathway to celebrity, effectively?
	I was a journalist, so I trained as a journalist in England, and I went on to various newspapers, national newspapers, after a full training on local newspapers.
	And I became, at the age of 28, the youngest newspaper editor that Britain had seen of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's Biggest selling newspaper in Britain.
	So that was my big break.
	I owed it to Rupert very much.
	He took a big gamble on me.
	And then after two years I defected to the Daily Mirror, which was the slightly left of centre tabloid up against Rupert Murdoch's son.
	In Britain, we have, as you may know, a ferociously competitive newspaper market.
	Tabloid there, I've always said, doesn't mean tabloid like National Enquirer.
	Tabloid, it means probably New York Post, New York Daily News kind of battle that was going on.
	And we were the slightly left-of-center version of that.
	So, I then ran the Daily Mirror for 10 years, producing 3,500, 4,000 newspapers in that time.
	And then I got unceremoniously fired over a scandal involving photographs of British troops apparently abusing Iraqi civilians.
	It followed the Abu Ghraib scandal here in America very soon afterwards.
	And to this day I don't really know what those pictures were or how we came to publish them other than we did it in good faith, contrary to mythology.
	I didn't deliberately publish fake pictures.
	My own brother is a British army colonel.
	He was on the front line in Basra at the time.
	So a very, very difficult situation for me.
	I was the editor of a paper that opposed the Iraq war and then got fired over an element of that.
	So I was then thrown into the Wilderness of having had a big job and suddenly, like, I lose everything.
	Quite sobering for a few minutes, then quite, like, liberating, actually.
	And I was like, OK, I've done 10 years chained to the desk of this newspaper.
	I'm now going to go and try other things.
	And I tried a few different things.
	Then Simon Cowell rang me up and said, I've just sold the rights to a show called Got Talent, a new show that he created, to NBC.
	And I need somebody to be a judge on that.
	He's going to be as arrogant and as obnoxious as I am.
	And I can't do it because I'm doing American Idol and your name has immediately sprung to mind.
	And I got parachuted out here.
	I literally flew out the next day, met NBC executives who'd never heard of me, had to give them the full Morgan Bullshit Cell, which you yourself have heard many times.
	And I got the gig.
	And three weeks later I began on America's Got Talent, which gave me, for the first time, a profile in America.
	And I did that show for six years.
	I then did Celebrity Apprentice, which is another NBC show.
	At the same time I was doing Talent.
	And of course, Donald Trump was the host.
	I ended up winning that first season of "Ceberity Apprentice" and that also, probably more significantly in the long term, developed a friendship that I had with Donald Trump, which has lasted to this day.
	Then I joined CNN, as you know, because you were one of my repeat guests, actually, several times, and it was always good television.
	I did nearly four years at CNN and then I think Americans got pretty fed up with me and I got pretty fed up with Americans and I went home and I went back to cricket and mushy peas and proper beer, you know the warm kind and watching and playing cricket and that was a probably a good thing for all of us to have a little break from each other.
	So in a second I want to ask you about the sort of nexus between celebrity and journalism because you got to experience both in the United States obviously for a lot of folks who saw you on CNN and didn't know of your history in Britain it was like why is the guy on America's Got Talent suddenly doing a journalist thing when the truth is that obviously you had a long history as a journalist before that.
	So I'm asking where you think the proper line should be drawn between celebrity and journalism and particularly in the United States where it seems to have merged.
	First, if you've been watching how central Well, last week, China devalued its currency and markets tanked.
	about the Chinese currency, the American currency.
	It makes you think a little more about investing in crypto and blockchain.
	I know, these sound like they're something weird, but they're really not.
	All they are are a form of currency that can't be manipulated by central governments.
	Well, last week, China devalued its currency and markets tanked.
	One consequence was that Bitcoin prices actually rose.
	It might be time to seriously consider including some crypto in your portfolio and The best place to trade crypto is eToro.
	eToro is smart crypto trading made easy.
	eToro's social trading platform has over 11 million active traders and facilitates over $1 trillion in trading volume per year globally.
	You can access the world's best cryptocurrencies.
	They have 15 different coins available.
	Low and transparent fees.
	You can try it before you trade with a virtual portfolio with $100,000 budget so you can find out how it works.
	Never miss a trading trend with charts and pricing alerts as well.
	Sign up today at etoro.com slash Shapiro.
	That's E-T-O-R-O dot com slash Shapiro.
	etoro.com slash Shapiro.
	Let's talk about the merger of celebrity and journalism stories.
	So obviously, you know, there are a lot of us in the journalistic space in the United States.
	I'm an opinion journalist, so I get to give my opinion for a living.
	But journalists have now become celebrities in the United States.
	And in your case, from American eyes, even though you were a journalist first, it was a celebrity becoming a journalist.
	Do you think that's good for the country?
	How do you think journalism should be done, since you've experienced this?
	Well, in my case, I was certainly a journalist, as far as I was concerned.
	I didn't get the CNN job because of my ability to judge piano-playing pigs.
	I got it because I'd run a daily newspaper for 10 years, and they knew that.
	I also, in Britain, had an hour-long primetime interview show, which had been running for a few years, which was very successful.
	So they saw me interviewing world leaders, huge stars, and so on.
	That was really why I got the CNN job.
	It wasn't America's Got Talent.
	That was the profile to go with the back catalogue, if you like.
	I think the interesting relationship between celebrity and the media goes back a long way.
	It goes back to probably the late 60s, I think, when newspapers suddenly embraced all things celebrity.
	and they began to put celebrities on the front pages.
	If you go back to look at newspapers 50, 60 years ago, you wouldn't find many celebrities on the front page.
	You certainly wouldn't see a news agenda driven by celebrities.
	So the world of celebrity became much bigger through that period.
	Then you had the internet in the last 20 years, propelling everyone into Andy Warhol's world of 15 minutes of fame, if you like.
	You can be famous for anything.
	You can kill someone and be famous.
	Particularly in America, I think, where there's such a huge media and such a huge volume of stuff in the ether, the noise, if you like.
	And it's allowed celebrities to be journalists and journalists to be celebrities.
	Honestly, I think that there are Good sides to that and bad sides.
	The good side is that if you become a celebrated journalist, more people will listen to you.
	And if you're a good voice, an important voice in American popular culture, I think that's good.
	The bad side is that you can see now that I think a lot of people who should be impartial journalists, and masquerade as impartial journalists are now drifting towards being celebrities.
	And right now in America, in Trump's America, the only way to be a celebrated journalist is predominantly to be a liberal, Trump-hating journalist.
	And that's where it gets dangerous for me.
	When I look at CNN now, for example, when I was there, the standards and practices around impartiality were extremely, extremely rigorously enforced.
	You could not remotely be seen to be looking like you were impartial.
	You were partial politically.
	Now I look at it and I just see open sneering at Trump 24-7.
	And I'm like, OK, well, things have changed.
	Because when I was there, you couldn't do that.
	And I think that's problematic.
	America needs CNN to be impartial.
	You have MSNBC on the left.
	You have Fox on the right.
	People have always understood that.
	CNN itself becomes partial.
	I'm partisan.
	I find that a big problem.
	I find it a problem that some of their reporters want to be big stars.
	You know, anchors, they're going to be stars because they're anchoring.
	But when you're a White House reporter or correspondent, you really should be doing the late night chat shows?
	I don't think so.
	So I think that there's a line there which is getting crossed more and more, which I think is a problem for American people and their ability to cut through all this and get to the truth.
	Yeah, I mean, as I'm fond of saying, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta over at CNN.
	And I like Jim Acosta.
	Don't get me wrong.
	And he's a very good correspondent.
	He's a very good on-screen reporter.
	Do I want to see Jim Acosta doing books about Trump while he's still president and he's still reporting on him and then going on a, you know, he came on Good Morning Britain.
	Fine.
	No problem.
	I had a good interview with him.
	It's just I don't think that's probably what he should be doing.
	And I don't think it's what CNN should be doing.
	And I say that as somebody who likes CNN and has a lot of friends there.
	But they have gone so partisan.
	You know, what happens at the end of all this?
	Once you've basically abandoned your pretense of impartiality, where does it leave you afterwards?
	And for the American right, I think the critique actually does predate the Trump era.
	I really, you know, object to there's this characterization that President Trump, by ripping on the fake news media, that he was the one who collapsed trust in the media.
	And if you look at the polls, that really isn't true, particularly on the right.
	And my parents cancelled the LA Times back in the 1990s because they were detecting bias in the way that things were being reported.
	And that does raise the question as to whether we should even be aspiring to objective journalism or whether we should sort of go back to the original, at least in America, the American partisan model that was sort of prominent at the founding of the republic.
	I think holding your hands up and saying, I'm a, I'm a partisan journalist, right?
	I'm coming at this from the right or I'm coming at it from the left.
	I have no problem with that.
	I've got no problem at night flicking between Fox and MSNBC, getting a bit of Rachel Maddow and getting a bit of Tucker Carlson or Hannity.
	I think it's healthy to get both.
	I think it's probably unhealthy if you only watch one of them all the time, because they're coming at it from a skewed position and they will see the news through their own lens.
	If you see both lenses, you can, I think, work it out for yourself if you've got half a brain.
	So I agree that it's been around a long time.
	I have never known it like it is now, and I think it's being massively exacerbated by social media, which has turned us... I think you've touched on this yourself many times.
	It feels like we've gone back 2,000 years and we're back into tribes.
	You have it with Trump here in America, where it's just blind.
	You have to be in one tribe or the other.
	You're not allowed actually to say, Well, on the one hand, I think he's doing some good things here, here, here.
	On the other, I don't like what he's doing here.
	It's everything about this man and everything he does and says.
	Every time he breaks wind, it offends me, right?
	Or, I love him and everything he does is fantastic, even when Trump does something ridiculous.
	And I know that you, you know, you actually have come through as, I think, a pretty reasonable voice in all this, and I've tried to be that.
	I know it's shocking.
	You and I have found common ground.
	It's strange, you know.
	You were saying you've read most of my columns and you kind of agree with most of them.
	And I find myself looking at your Twitter feed and not being nearly as offended as I used to be.
	It's uncomfortable for both of us, right?
	But it's because I think we both come at it from the same mindset, which is actually The most important thing is to maintain the ability to have a democratic debate with people, and to be able to sit with people that you fundamentally don't agree with, and to listen to things that you find fundamentally offensive, but actually respect someone's right to think differently to you.
	And again, coming back to this tribal thing, You know, if you go back 2,000 years, you'd be in your tribe, you would never venture outside of the confines of your tribe, and you all dressed the same, you thought the same, you behaved the same, and that was the accepted way that you believed existence occurred.
	And then, as you began to move out through the years, and you began to encounter other tribes, they dressed differently, they thought differently, they behaved differently, and the tribe, the original tribe's only response to this was to find them so terrifying, these people, they had to kill them.
	And the other tribe felt the same way.
	I look at social media some days now, and I'll give an example, and we'll come to this, I'm sure, but the recent horrendous weekend of mass shootings.
	You go about 30 years, if that had happened in America, regardless of any politics, I think the country would have had a pause.
	It would have had a pause where that kind of tribal partisan shrieking was just put on hold to actually pay respects to the people who were killed and their families and the first responders and so on.
	This time, literally, you could count the seconds.
	Before the whole thing had to play out as a tribal, politically partisan debate with fury behind it on both sides.
	And I find that a really insidious and unpleasant facet of modern debate, whatever your debate.
	Yeah, there's no fundamental assumption of good faith that takes place.
	And I'm not even talking about on policy, I'm talking about on basic humanity.
	So it turns into As I've been saying all week on my podcast about this, this should be a moment where everybody goes, okay, at least we all agree that white supremacist terrorists are evil, right?
	And instead it turns into, no, you're in league with the white supremacists.
	You actually are a white supremacist.
	Or conversely, you want to take all of my guns.
	And there's no point at which anybody actually just stops and says, no, actually, this thing here, we all agree this is evil.
	Let's figure out some ways to deal with it.
	Instead, we immediately go to, how can we beat each other up over it?
	I think Twitter has been awful for this.
	Of all the social media sites, I think Twitter is by far Which is brilliant in so many ways.
	I love it.
	I mean, I use it all the time.
	Yeah, so do I. But I think in terms of embedding these tribes into these mindsets, it's been horrendous.
	It's like the boo box.
	I mean, I've described it as the boo box from Hook.
	You remember there's that scene at the beginning of Hook where they take a pirate and like, admit that you did something.
	You made a boo boo.
	And now we just throw you in the boo box.
	Then we throw scorpions and snakes in there until you repent.
	And that's what it is.
	And everybody spends their five minutes in the boo box once every couple of weeks and trends on Twitter.
	You've been through it.
	I've been through it.
	It's really ugly.
	But it's the inability to have a debate without wanting to cancel people, to wreck their lives, to make them lose their jobs, all that kind of thing.
	This no-platforming phenomenon, which has now come to Britain.
	We now have this no-platforming thing where someone like Jordan Peterson is not allowed to speak at Cambridge University, for God's sake.
	I mean, what is happening in the world when somebody with that kind of mind, you know, in many ways a brilliant mind, I don't agree with half of what he says perhaps, but I certainly can see he's got a brilliant mind and he likes to challenge people's thought process, make you think.
	What is the point of being at university?
	If you're not going there to be challenged and to have your own views challenged and to have people you don't agree with.
	I mean, that's the whole point of it, isn't it?
	And yet now suddenly, unless the guest speaker, I'm sure you get this all the time, this nonsense, you know, Bill Maher was no platform from Berkeley.
	I mean, for God's sake, Berkeley was the home of free speech.
	I required 600 police officers when I spoke at Berkeley.
	Ridiculous.
	This was the place where free speech began in the 60s.
	You know, the kind of campaigning for it.
	And now look at them.
	Now you need 600 police officers to protect you.
	Why?
	What are you going to do to these people?
	You're not going to commit a violent act against them.
	You're going to express your opinions.
	And you, knowing you as I do, will enjoy the to and fro of them coming back at you and saying, actually, Shapiro, here's where I think you're wrong.
	And having a debate.
	It's called democracy.
	So where do you draw the line with regard to the First Amendment?
	We've talked a lot about the Second Amendment before between the two of us, obviously, but the First Amendment, obviously, Britain has a slightly different standard than the United States.
	The United States is very free and very open.
	We have much more lax standards when it comes to libel and slander.
	And also we don't have any restrictions on so-called hate speech, which Europe obviously has attempted to put restrictions on.
	Where do you stand on that particular debate?
	Well, I think that any hate speech which actually acts as a catalyst for people to commit acts of violence to me is unacceptable wherever you are in the world.
	Well, incitement is illegal under the First Amendment, but it's an actual legal standard.
	You have to incite violence.
	It can't just be something that offends somebody.
	Yeah, right.
	What is more problematic for me in Britain, for example, the libel law is incredibly draconian, and the onus is on the publisher to prove that what they published was 100% true.
	It's not on the onus to the person who is suing you to prove that it's wrong.
	Now, that sounds like, OK, fair enough, until you get into the weeds of what that really means.
	You know, as a newspaper editor, I used to publish stories I knew 100% were true.
	Could I actually prove it in a court of law?
	When somebody sued us, sometimes that would be impossible, even though we all knew the story was true.
	That wouldn't happen in America.
	In America, it would have to be not just publishing a story, even if it was completely wrong, you would have to prove malice was there from the intent.
	In other words, it was deliberately designed to damage somebody.
	That's the difference.
	In Britain, that's not the case at all.
	And I think that we have a far worse all-encompassing free speech environment in my country than you do in America.
	So, you know, in our battles over the Constitution, a lot of the U.S. Constitution, I think, is extremely solid, not least the First Amendment.
	If you remember when there was a petition to be deported from America started by our old friend Alex Jones of Infowars, and it was signed by 150,000 peoples.
	So it was a White House petition, which meant the White House had to respond because it passed the threshold.
	Barack Obama actually saved me for the American people.
	It came as a bit of a shock to the American people, but he did.
	And he cited the fact that under the First Amendment, I was entitled to comment, however egregiously, to gun lovers in a negative way about the Second Amendment.
	And there, right there, was an example that I went through of the power of the American Constitution and the right to freedom of speech.
	So I understand Which do you think is healthier, the British media ecosystem or the American media ecosystem?
	Because it is very different.
	I mean, I've experienced both sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, obviously.
	I think the advantage we have in Britain is that we have, certainly in television terms, we have two 24-hour news networks which are completely impartial.
	The BBC and Sky.
	Sky, which until very recently was owned by Rupert Murdoch who created it.
	And for all the aggro that he gets over here in America for supposedly partisan, well not supposedly, obviously Fox News is nakedly partisan in many ways in terms of its right-wing coverage.
	And his newspapers have been accused of that too.
	There's no doubt that in Britain Sky News is a completely impartial broadcaster.
	So the Brits have an advantage in the sense that we have at least two places to go.
	The only cable news, if you like, that we have is completely impartial.
	The only rolling 24-7 news networks that we have are impartial.
	I mean, is that true about the BBC?
	Putting aside my own... They have a perceived liberal bias.
	And there's no doubt if you shot a harpoon around the BBC newsroom, you wouldn't catch many right-wingers.
	That is true.
	I watch it all the time and I believe it's fundamentally, at its core, it's an impartial broadcaster, in my view.
	So I think we're fortunate in that respect.
	I know Americans now who watch BBC America because they want to get a completely unvarnished opinion of what is happening in their own country.
	And I understand that.
	It's very hard when every news network in America now is biased.
	It's hard.
	Where do you go for what you believe is genuinely unbiased opinion?
	Now, not opinion, but news.
	And I think it's important to have that amid all the obviously opinionated and either side views that are being put out there.
	So in just a second, I want to ask you about, shift topics for a second, ask you about President Trump, because obviously you're friends with him and he is the news.
	Not just he's in the news, he is the news now.
	We'll ask about that in just one second.
	First, You know, whenever there's an emergency, you hear on the news about how people can't get to the supermarket and how some people are left unprepared.
	Well, don't be that person.
	And the government warns you, whether you're talking about an earthquake or a tornado or a hurricane or some man-made disaster, you're going to need something to protect yourself in terms of food at home.
	Wise Company takes an innovative approach in providing dependable, simple, and affordable freeze-dried food for emergency preparedness and outdoor use.
	Wise Company meals are designed to protect your most valuable asset.
	Your family.
	When government resources are strained, it could be days, if not weeks, before you can get some fresh food and water.
	You saw that in Puerto Rico.
	You can't rely on someone else.
	You have to rely on yourself.
	You can't know what tomorrow may bring, but you can have some peace of mind knowing that you'll be ready with everything you need.
	There's no better time to prepare than right now.
	Wise Emergency Food is an investment in peace of mind for your family.
	This week, my listeners can get any Wise Emergency or outdoor food product at an extra 25% off the lowest marked price at wisefoodstorage.com slash Shapiro.
	Plus, shipping is free.
	Wise has a 90-day, no-questions-asked return policy, so no risk in taking the initiative to get yourself and your family more prepared today.
	That's wisefoodstorage.com slash Shapiro to get any Wise Emergency or outdoor food product at an extra 25% off, plus free shipping.
	So let's talk about your association with President Trump.
	So you became friends with him when you were on Celebrity Apprentice?
	I'd met him briefly before actually on America's Got Talent.
	He came on as a guest one day and I had a little chat with him and obviously we knew all about Donald Trump in Britain.
	He was this great larger-than-life character.
	Then I'd go on Celebrity Apprentice.
	The interesting thing for me with that show was that I Day one, I met him, and he came up to me and he went, you're Rupert's guy, right?
	He used to work for Murdoch.
	I went, yeah.
	He said, you were like his youngest editors or something.
	I said, yeah.
	He said, OK, then you must be smart.
	You must be smart.
	And I was laughing, going, OK, I'm off to a good start.
	The host of the show thinks I'm smart.
	I'd also read Out of the Deal three times, so I began to play the game exactly how I thought Trump would play it and began to talk to him almost like Trump, which was definitely a successful strategy.
	What I remember being struck by is interesting.
	One, that he was over the hundreds of hours I spent with him.
	In that boardroom, it's three or four hours a session.
	And you see, you know, no one can cheat who they are for hundreds of hours.
	And I'm quite good at, you know, being perceptive about human beings through all my journalistic training over the years.
	I saw a guy that was clearly very smart, much smarter than I think his critics give him credit for.
	Very charming.
	In those boardrooms, a side I do not see enough of as president.
	He's come in, he's decided to play the whack, whack, whack president because he's getting whacked all the time.
	And almost it brings out the worst in both him and his critics, I think.
	If you read out of the deal, his whole strategy to people that criticize him is to punch them 10 times as hard.
	That's what Donald Trump's DNA is about.
	It was very successful in real estate.
	It got him elected president.
	I would like to see more of the charming Donald Trump that I saw in the boardroom.
	I think it would go a long way if he just gave us more of that.
	So, you know, I find that a frustration of somebody who genuinely likes him personally.
	But I also saw somebody very decisive, pretty solid judgment.
	He fired all the people I would have fired.
	He was very good, though, at also creating a lot of controlled chaos.
	He liked people crashing together and arguing and all that kind of theatre and drama, all the stuff we see play out now every day in his presidency.
	He definitely enjoyed that.
	He likes conflict and he thrives off it.
	Donald Trump, if you ask him, would say, I'm sure he's at his best when he's under fire.
	The problem now is that he's two and a half years into his presidency and every day it's a fire.
	It's a firefight.
	And I'm not sure the American people are being well served by this.
	And I don't blame just Donald Trump.
	I blame everybody.
	The media now is predominantly a liberal media and they just like poking the bear and the bear likes swatting them back.
	But in the middle of all this are the American people and they're like every day just seem so dramatic.
	Rather than actually, can't we just get some stuff done here amid all the shrieking and the punch-ups?
	I mean, in terms of the interpersonal, my theory about him has always been, because I grew up in Hollywood, that he's basically a performer, meaning that he is great with people who are in the room.
	And you see when he's doing a live speech that he's playing off the crowd in a way that a stand-up comedian would play off the crowd, not like a normal politician plays off the crowd.
	And that means that he's mainly appealing to the people who really are almost literally within his eyesight, that playing to the people who are out there beyond the scope of the camera It almost doesn't seem to occur to him that there are hundreds of millions of other people who are watching this in a way that it might have occurred to him doing The Apprentice, where it's explicitly a product that is made for hundreds of millions of people to watch and is being edited in the back room.
	Also, I would say that his strengths are often his weaknesses too.
	You know, the unfettered insight into the American president in real time on Twitter is fascinating and really riveting on occasion.
	But it also obviously can be very damaging and destructive as well.
	You know, he told me that he likes to wake up in the morning, he sees all the TV screens.
	If he doesn't like what he's seeing, he just gets up, does a tweet, and watches it all change in real time.
	You know, that is powerful.
	He changes the news agenda with his own hand, with his thumb.
	Boom.
	If I was his opponent, or if I was one of the Democrats running against him, I certainly wouldn't run a strategy of just screaming abuse about Donald Trump.
	It didn't work for Hillary Clinton.
	It won't work for any of the candidates this time.
	The only way you can beat Donald Trump is to play your own game against him, not the one he wants you to play.
	He wants to suck people into a punch-out.
	It's where he feels more comfortable.
	You know, he will always justify his actions, good, bad, and ugly.
	By the number of people that attack him.
	He'll say, well, look at these people.
	They're attacking me, left, right, and center.
	Why shouldn't I attack them?
	We all know that's what he's like.
	So as the media, I think you have an option, the collective media, do we spend all day attacking this guy, hoping that he reacts?
	Is that really in the best interest of how we cover this presidency, given that's what we know he's like?
	And I think at the moment, it's like they're in an abused relationship, the media and Trump.
	And it's ugly.
	And I don't think it works for the American people.
	I think too much important stuff is getting forgotten about.
	You know, every day the only story is Trump.
	Every newspaper front page, every news bulletin, every cable news show, it's just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
	Other things are happening in the world.
	We have the same thing in Britain with Brexit.
	It becomes all-pervasive, all-dominant.
	It sucks the life out of everything else.
	And it, of course, fuels the tribes that we talked about earlier.
	Absolutely.
	He's Godzilla.
	He'll destroy them.
	You can't just be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Nice Guy.
	Forget it.
	feeling like the American people are sick of the chaos.
	Suburban women don't like President Trump's personality.
	They feel he's too abrasive.
	All I have to do is basically sit here and be a human.
	And I have a good shot at winning.
	Or do you think that Trump is too aggressive for that?
	Absolutely.
	He's Godzilla.
	He'll destroy them.
	You can't just be Mr. Nice Guy or Miss Nice Guy.
	Forget it.
	It's not going to happen.
	And I'll watch all the candidates, the Democrats.
	And apart from the absolutely politically suicidal strategy of allowing the squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her friends are sucking the party so far left, they've become completely unelectable.
	In fact, completely unpopular within their own party.
	You know, People forget that the squad is not popular amongst Democrats, never mind anybody else.
	How are they possibly going to win as a party if that becomes a face and voice?
	So what does Trump do?
	Trump goes after them because he wants them to be the face and voice.
	And the challenge for Democrats, I think, at this election, if they really want to beat Trump, is they have to forget that noise, and they have to make themselves the face and voice of the party, and they have to offer a vision for America which resonates in a better way than Trump's making America great.
	Which, by the way, was brilliant marketing.
	Trump, at his heart, is a marketeer.
	I don't think he has many ideological bones in his body.
	But he's a brilliant marketeer and, as we saw last time, a phenomenal campaigner.
	And he hasn't really stopped campaigning.
	He's down doing rallies every week.
	Massive rallies.
	Huge turnouts.
	If you see the videos sometimes, they're going around the blocks.
	These people will come out and vote for him.
	You know, his approval rating is nudging up.
	So I'd say to the Democrats, yeah, you can all scream and shout and lie on the floor.
	You know, they have these sort of anniversary parties, don't they, on the anniversary of his election, where you go and lie on the floor and you scream at the sky as if somehow this is going to beat Donald Trump.
	He wants you to do that.
	You're all falling into his trap.
	And I look to all of them on the Debates the other day, the Democrats.
	And I thought, who could stand there against Trump and beat him?
	Possibly Biden.
	I've always felt that he would have been a better candidate for them last time.
	I think he would have not made the mistakes that Hillary made.
	And he seems to be gathering a bit of momentum now.
	But of the others, you look at them and you think, really?
	You're going to beat him?
	Kamala Harris or, you know, Marianne Williamson or any of them, really?
	I think, I can't see you beating him.
	And ultimately, politics is about power.
	If you don't have the power, you can't change anything.
	So you can bang on about changing the world, but if you don't get power and wrestle it away from Donald Trump, you are powerless.
	So the current strategy that the media and the left seem to have about Trump for two years, it was that he was a Russian stooge.
	Then the Mueller report came out and that, of course, completely collapsed in on them.
	Which massively helped Trump.
	So the media's ridiculous over-obsession with Russia collusion, which turned out to be complete nonsense, actually has just fueled Donald Trump and made him more popular.
	Because it looks exactly like he's been saying.
	The fake news media making something up about me, screaming about it for two years, and then it all turns out to be nonsense.
	And yet, you know, in that Mueller report there were genuine questions about potential obstruction of justice and stuff.
	But as I said to people, imagine if you're down in Florida or Texas and you're thinking, hang on, this guy was accused of something he didn't do.
	And now apparently the really bad thing, because that turned out to be untrue, is that he was trying to obstruct justice into something he never did.
	How does that work?
	Now, we know how it works legally.
	It does work legally.
	You can obstruct justice into something you didn't do.
	But in terms of the noise around the Mueller report and what that did for Trump, massively helped him.
	So I say again to the media, who are you helping here?
	By going so ridiculously over the top on such meagre scraps in the way that they did.
	And you know what it was, Ben?
	They wanted it to be true so badly that they all forgot about being journalists.
	And it was hideous to watch.
	And they all got the punishment they deserve, which is egg on their face in spectacular form.
	But more importantly, they've helped Donald Trump.
	Just as they all helped him before.
	Well, without any shift in time, they immediately moved into the secondary narrative, which obviously has been promoted thanks to the actual very real rise in white supremacist violence in the United States.
	That Trump is a racist, that he's a white supremacist, that he's egging all of this on.
	Where do you come down on this question?
	Because this is the question of the day.
	Is Donald Trump a racist?
	Is he a white supremacist?
	Is he egging it on?
	And they may be three separate questions.
	I don't think he's a white supremacist.
	And I don't personally think he's a racist because I've seen him interacting around a lot of non-white people in my time.
	I've never got a sense at all of him having any issue in terms of being, in his heart, a racist.
	However, and it's a big however, he knows his base likes it when he fires up racially incendiary comments.
	At what point, if you say enough of them, do you actually lend support to the theory that fundamentally you've become racist?
	That you're using racism for votes, that you're using racism to make yourself popular with your base.
	And that's where I've got a problem with Donald Trump and what he's been doing.
	When he said to Miss Omar Go home.
	That's a racist comment.
	You can argue the semantics to the cows come home.
	It's a racist comment to say to somebody who is an American citizen, go home, and he doesn't mean America.
	And he doesn't need to do it.
	The Squad is inflammatory enough and helpful enough to Donald Trump, politically, because they're so far left and they're getting so much oxygen of publicity.
	He doesn't need to play that card with them.
	But he did.
	And when he does that, I cringe.
	Do you think he's doing that out of strategy?
	I mean, this does come back to a question that you were speaking to before.
	There's two theories.
	From the right, the theory is that everything he does is 4D chess, underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos.
	Every move is planned.
	It's all part of a grand game that he's playing.
	And on the left, it's that he is simultaneously an evil genius and also a complete moron who doesn't know what he's doing, stumbling around in the dark.
	I don't think he's like any of those things.
	But do I think he's capable of saying moronic things?
	Absolutely.
	Do I think he's capable of saying things which are, in my opinion, racist?
	Yes.
	Do I think in his heart he's a racist?
	No, I don't.
	I definitely don't think he's a white supremacist.
	Do I think white supremacy is a problem in this country?
	Absolutely.
	There is clear and cogent evidence that it is a rising problem in exactly the same way that it was a problem with ISIS and that ideology, fueled by internet, fueled by people sitting in their homes, you know, reading and watching all this stuff late night, infiltrating their brains.
	You know, one of the big issues I think right now is how people's minds are being permeated and influenced by the internet.
	It's a huge problem.
	I've got family members and friends on Facebook who've gone nuts about Brexit or Trump.
	I've had to unfriend them.
	Unfriend your own family, right, in some cases.
	Because I can't deal with the kind of ludicrous stream of consciousness that comes out of their fingers on their social media.
	And it's driven very deliberately by groups that have a vested interest in this.
	And it's a very big problem.
	You know it.
	You have a really important influence in this country now.
	You're able to get to millions of people with these shows.
	It's why I've come on.
	Because I know how big your podcast is.
	And congratulations.
	And the reason I've come on is, I think actually, amid all this noise, you try and be balanced and you try and listen to alternative views.
	But you're in the minority.
	Most people out there who are doing the kind of thing you're doing are hyper-partisan.
	And whether it's people having an effect on Islamists who want to cause carnage or people who have white supremacist sympathies who want to cause carnage, what is driving it is they're getting influenced.
	Their brains are getting damaged.
	And in America you could add the massive over-medication as a potential factor in all this.
	You have 80% of the world's painkillers get bought and used in America.
	80% of the world's painkillers!
	What is going on?
	What's going on is this country's being massively over-medicated and you're getting young kids whose brains are getting flipped.
	They're reading all this stuff online.
	Are they Genuinely white supremacists?
	Or are they people attaching themselves to white supremacy as something to somehow filter their hatred?
	I don't know the answer to that, but I know it's a real problem.
	And it's a problem being fueled by the internet.
	It does feel like a lot of the militating social institutions have dissolved, that all of the places people used to go to meet each other and hang out in real life are gone.
	I mean, there was a poll recently that said a plurality of young people say they have no friends, which means that they're looking for some sort of connection online.
	And it's not hard to find connection with pretty terrible people online.
	In the absence of that, you're going to find the tribe.
	I mean, you're going to find whatever tribe most allows you to gravitate toward it.
	So you've had a really interesting sort of path on Brexit.
	So originally you were anti-Brexit.
	Now you say that if you came up for a vote again, you would vote in favor of Brexit.
	So where do you come, where is that coming from?
	Well, my, I think my position on Brexit was it was the referendum, which caused Brexit to happen, was driven by David Cameron, the then conservative prime minister, for pure political expediency.
	There was no real reason for him to call that referendum other than it suited him politically.
	He thought it would empower his position and his party's position to finally deal with this issue once and for all.
	The Europe issue had been bubbling away for a long time.
	So he calls the referendum in the certain belief that he would win it.
	Never crossed his mind that he would lose it.
	We'd had the Scottish independence referendum just before Brexit and he led a very successful campaign.
	To make sure that Scotland stayed part of the United Kingdom.
	So, you know, David Cameron was pretty confident that with Brexit, of course, we'd stay in the European Union.
	Why wouldn't we?
	But what he underestimated, exactly as I think the Democrats underestimated here, was that there are now basically two countries in Britain.
	You've got the metropolitan elites, for want of a better phrase, and you have the rest of the country, particularly up north, where issues like immigration have become really important.
	And there's no doubt, there's a town... I did a political show for the BBC called Question Time, the big punditry show.
	And we did it near a town near Norwich in the east of the country.
	And it's a town where in the space of 15 years they now have twice the size of population and all those who've come in to double the size of the population are from Eastern Europe, from when the border was opened in Eastern Europe.
	Now, I'm very pro-immigration.
	But you can't look at that town and the strain and stress that this has put on all their services, from hospitals to schools and others.
	And it's not because the people of that town are racist that there's been a problem.
	It's because they've just had this extraordinary change in the culture of the town that they live in.
	And no one's really thought about this or dealt with it properly.
	Now, if you replicate that around Britain, that's why immigration became the key issue in the referendum.
	It wasn't about money or about what we pay the EU.
	It was about immigration.
	And Nigel Farage and others hit that very hard.
	I kept telling David Cameron and his people, you're fighting the wrong battle here.
	It's not about money.
	It's about immigration.
	You've got to deal with it.
	And it's really about assimilation, actually, is the bigger problem.
	So they had the referendum.
	They woke up and discovered to their shock and horror.
	I voted to remain in the European Union.
	I thought the European Union is a pretty anachronistic organisation.
	It's not perfect by any means.
	But actually, I prefer Britain not to think of itself as the empire it once was, but as a major cog in the big wheel of the European Union.
	Almost the United States of Europe, if you like.
	I felt there's power in numbers and strength from volume.
	But the country voted the other way.
	And it didn't just vote the other way in small numbers.
	17.4 million people.
	voted in Britain, to leave your opinion, the biggest democratic vote in our country's history.
	And their wishes must now be respected.
	Democracy must be seen to be done.
	And in the same way that you had here with Hillary Clinton, she won the popular vote.
	So it doesn't count.
	Sorry?
	It's all about the popular vote.
	It's the Electoral College is how you get elected here.
	It's not playing a game of chess and actually playing, you know, some other thing like checkers and say, well, hang on, we're playing chess.
	We're not playing checkers.
	Trump played to win chess, not checkers.
	In Brexit, exactly the same.
	The Remainers, or Ramoners as they've now become known, have simply for three years refused to accept the result.
	They think that the people that voted to leave were too stupid.
	Rather like Democrats here think the people that voted Trump were just too stupid to understand what they were doing.
	No, they weren't.
	They like Donald Trump.
	And here's the shock for you.
	They still like Donald Trump.
	So now we're in a position where Boris Johnson's become prime minister because his predecessor, Theresa May, was a Remainer.
	And everybody knew that.
	She couldn't have any conviction about driving a train somewhere she didn't want to get to.
	Boris Johnson does want to get there.
	And the question is, can he now deliver on Brexit?
	My position is, I still fundamentally believe we shouldn't be doing this.
	But I'm much more concerned myself about the power of democracy and to see the people's will respected and delivered on by the government that's paid to serve them than I do about getting my vote to be the right one.
	In other words, I might think it's right, but the majority in the country thought it was wrong.
	And this comes back to social media in particular, the self-righteousness of people that lose elections now or referendums, right?
	And they say, no, no, no, you're too stupid.
	No, actually, we have to do this all over again.
	We should ignore the result of this election because I know more than you.
	I'm more intelligent than you.
	You're stupid people.
	That's where we've got to.
	And if that is accepted, Where every result is simply declared null and void unless liberals, let's be honest, Get what they want, democracy dies.
	So what do you make of the broader argument that's been made about Brexit and President Trump as part of the same generalized phenomenon that you're seeing in other countries in Europe as well?
	You've seen it in Italy, you're starting to see it in some of the Nordic countries, that there is a resistance to a generalized elite, people who want to control your life from top down, who may sneer at you.
	It seems to me that... Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable.
	And I speak as a liberal, OK?
	In my core, I'm probably more liberal than not.
	Although, fundamentally, I see myself as a journalist and I'd like to see both sides of all these things.
	And I can argue both.
	But liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal.
	And it's a massive problem.
	What's the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don't allow anyone else to have a different view?
	You know, this snowflake culture that we operate in, the victimhood culture, the, you know, everyone has to think a certain way, behave a certain way.
	Everyone has to, you know, have a bleeding heart and tell you 20 things that are wrong with them.
	And, you know, I just think it's all completely skewed to an environment where everyone's offended by everything.
	And no one's allowed to say a joke.
	If you said a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody, you can never host the Oscars, you know?
	So now there's no host for anything.
	The Emmys now just said they're not going to host either.
	So hosts have gone.
	And soon every award winner will go because everyone's a human and they're all flawed.
	So no one can win awards anymore because there will be no platform before they even get on the podium.
	So then no hosts, no stars.
	And no one can make any movies because we're all flawed, so no actors, right?
	So suddenly, where are we?
	The liberals get what they want, which is a humorless void where nothing happens, where no one dare do anything or laugh about anything or behave in any way that doesn't suit their rigid No thanks.
	So what's happening around the world?
	Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture.
	They're fed up with snowflakery.
	They're fed up with everyone being offended by everything.
	And they're gravitating to forceful personalities who go, this is all nonsense!
	Which, by the way, it is in most cases.
	So why are we surprised?
	I'm not surprised.
	It doesn't mean to say that I agree with all of it.
	But it means I can understand it, and I understand why the liberals, my side if you like, are getting it so horribly wrong.
	They just want to tell people not just how to lead their lives, but if you don't lead it the way I tell you to.
	It's a kind of version of fascism.
	If you don't lead the life the way I'm telling you to, then I'm going to ruin your life.
	I'm going to scream abuse at you.
	I'm going to get you fired from your job.
	I'm going to get you hounded by your family and friends.
	I'm going to make you the most disgusting human being in the world because you said a joke 10 years ago.
	And that's the attitude we're now operating in.
	It takes forceful personalities to rise above it.
	Donald Trump rose up and went like Godzilla.
	OK, you want to fight?
	I'm here.
	And guess what?
	Millions of people in middle America went, that's our guy.
	That's our guy.
	He's the one that's going to help us.
	Same thing happening across Europe.
	So one of the things that I insisted on, so we have our leftist tears tumbler here.
	I always distinguish between leftists and liberals specifically because of this.
	I think everyone cries.
	I mean, that's true.
	That's true.
	Some of us more than others.
	But the fact that there is a distinction between leftists and liberals is something that I've pushed very hard on.
	I think that there is a left.
	There's a radical left.
	Right, that's censorious and nasty.
	And then there are liberals who just want bigger government and higher taxes and more government regulation, but fundamentally agree with basic human classical liberal freedoms.
	Like we get to have a difference of opinion without you destroying my business and destroying my life and boycotting Equinox because the owner funded Donald Trump or something.
	That's a classic story, isn't it?
	Absolutely classic story that Equinox and SoulCycle, no one can ever go to again.
	Of course, I've noticed in LA, they're all going there.
	They're all screaming about it, but they're all actually going there.
	It's really about… I mean, otherwise they'd have to go to the 24-hour fitness.
	I mean, that place is downscale.
	Right, right.
	So, they're not actually going to deprive their own lives of the pleasure of SoulCycle and Equinox.
	What they want to do is virtue signal.
	They want to actually attach themselves to this and say, actually, this is so disgusting, I have to scream about it for the next 24 hours.
	I'll move on after that.
	But in the meantime, this poor guy who decided to have a fundraiser because he's allowed to, in a democratic country, he's allowed to have a fundraiser, he's allowed to like Donald Trump, the President of the United States, and he's allowed to also have business interests.
	And he's allowed to have people that come there he doesn't agree with.
	He probably doesn't agree with half the people or more that use SoulCycle.
	It's a liberal fest.
	I've been down there myself.
	That's fine.
	That's actually allowed in the world.
	You're allowed to be on a bicycle next to somebody that supports something you don't support.
	It's really allowed.
	It's OK.
	It's really OK.
	But no, he had to be hounded.
	And everybody had to cancel their... I mean, the ultimate for me was when Trump went down to El Paso and he said some conciliatory things after that shooting.
	And the New York Times had the audacity to run a headline on the front page which said, Trump urges unity versus racism, which is exactly what all the radical left and the more overtly illiberal liberals had been screaming at him to do.
	And the moment he does it, they then immediately start shrieking on Twitter that the New York Times has to be cancelled.
	As Ocasio-Cortez said, they're now supporting white supremacy.
	So they have to be cancelled, the people that wrote the headline have to be cancelled, everybody has to basically die.
	It's because they ran a headline which accurately reported what Trump, the president, had said, which may be riddled with hypocrisy and that's a separate argument, which was argued in the piece by the way, and the New York Times caved and just did a different headline because the liberal mob had come after them on social media and threatened to damage their business because they had the audacity to faithfully report what the president said that day about unity and racism.
	What's the result of that?
	The result of that is that Trump just thinks, well, why am I bothering?
	You know, why am I bothering?
	He's got a point, doesn't he?
	I mean, why is he bothering to say anything that mollifies people that hate him?
	If the reaction every time he says what they want him to say is to scream even louder.
	Whereas, what kind of Trump would you get if you actually gave him due credit occasionally?
	That's what I say to people.
	Give him credit when he's right, and then you might get a different Donald Trump.
	Read Art of the Deal, and you'll understand the man you're dealing with.
	But they don't want to understand him.
	They just want to have him as a demonising figure that they can scream about all day long because it makes them feel good.
	Well, that final point, I think, is the one that really is telling about so many folks on the left.
	AOC being a prime example.
	She put out a tweet thread where she explained that we are all rife with the virus that is white supremacy.
	She never defines white supremacy anywhere in her tweet thread, of course.
	White supremacy is just anything that she disagrees with and that she can use as a brick bat to hurl at somebody.
	That is leading to this reactionary move on the part of the right, which is, okay, I'm just going to disagree with everything you say.
	It's not that you can—if people on the left refuse to acknowledge that they are not defining terms well and not calling out their own when their own do bad things, why would they expect people on the right not to violate the game theory and just, we're now in a prisoner's dilemma where you may as well cheat?
	Trump and North Korea, right?
	So Trump initially was very bombastic about North Korea.
	Lots of incendiary tweets, right, about Little Rocket Man and so on, right?
	And the left go completely nuts, right?
	How dare you?
	You're being disgusting.
	You're supposed to be the president.
	Be presidential!
	You know, what are you doing?
	You're taking us to the brink of war.
	What are you thinking about?
	So he goes and sees Kim Jong-un.
	And he starts talking in an upbeat way, a positive way.
	He wants peace, as Trump has seemed to want about everything, actually.
	He's one of the least warmongering presidents America's had.
	You'd never believe that from the rhetoric about him.
	And yet he did the opposite to what people thought he would do.
	And so far, so quite good, actually.
	His relationship with Kim Jong-un seems to me to be serving the global interest, which is not having a war between North Korea and America.
	Same with Putin, you could argue.
	Same with almost everything Trump does on the international stage.
	He seems to me to be a force for peace, not war.
	He thinks wars are too expensive.
	And you might say, well, where's the integrity in that?
	He's just a business guy.
	OK, but isn't it better that he's forging peace with these countries than wanting war with them?
	Looking how ruinous war has been to America, both in terms of the loss of life to the servicemen and women, and also in terms of the enormous cost to the American economy.
	So why not give him some credit?
	When he's trying to forge peace, why not encourage him and give him credit?
	But no, he can't win either way.
	The only answer with Trump from his critics is to scream about everything.
	So he can't win.
	He can't actually say anything that modifies him.
	And that's a real problem for me.
	You know, I've written maybe 80 columns about Trump since he first ran as candidate.
	You can go back and check, but I'm pretty sure probably at least half would be negative.
	Half would be positive.
	Defending him against people who are refusing to acknowledge that anything he can do is actually the right thing.
	So let's talk about your general view of what government ought to do.
	So what makes you a liberal in sort of, not the classical liberal sense where we agree, but the part where we disagree?
	What do you think government ought to do?
	Well, it should be as small as possible, right?
	I don't believe in massive governments, sprawling government agencies with lots of people doing jobs they're not quite sure what they're doing, soaking up public expenditure.
	I think government should be responsible.
	It should take action, even if it's against the popular will of the people.
	You're made to be a government Because people expect you to take difficult decisions and to govern.
	An example I would use is someone like Margaret Thatcher in Britain.
	I would compare her to the other female Prime Minister, Theresa May.
	Margaret Thatcher was prepared to make difficult, tough decisions.
	She was a Conservative.
	But Theresa May wasn't.
	She just wanted to please everybody.
	I don't believe in people pleasing governments.
	I believe you are elected by the people.
	You should live up as far as possible to the manifesto that you ran on.
	And I think Trump, to his credit, has basically delivered on most of the things he said he would deliver on.
	And he certainly tried to.
	You couldn't argue that he's been elected and done a completely different thing.
	So I think that, you know, that central part of government is to do whatever the administration that's been elected has decided it wants to do.
	That's why they got elected.
	Doing what the people have elected you to do is important in democracy.
	So I believe in that.
	I don't believe in a nanny state, except to the point where the public can sometimes be too stupid for his own good.
	Do I think that government should occasionally interfere in the well-being of the people?
	Yes, I do, actually.
	So where do you draw the lines around that?
	What's the limiting principle when it comes to... Because people are very often quite stupid, as it turns out.
	And if you're on the right, you think that's the left.
	And if you're on the left, you think that's the right.
	The truth is that in personal habits, people make lots of mistakes, make lots of bad decisions.
	Where do you draw the line around?
	Where is the government's role in bettering people's lives?
	Because I think this is a fundamental distinction between liberal and conservative.
	Take cigarette smoking, right?
	Most smokers knew it was bad for them.
	They know it's bad, cigarette smoking, but they want the right to smoke, right?
	It's not a constitutional right, but they want to have the right to smoke.
	It's my life.
	Fine, okay, it's your life, but actually what has happened in countries like Britain and America in the last 20 years is you don't now go into a bar and be full of smoke if you don't want it to be.
	That, to me, seemed to be sensible government.
	Yes, you are impinging on the right of a civilian to lead the life they want to lead, which is to walk into a bar and have a cigarette at the bar.
	But actually, if most people in that bar don't want to have a cigarette, why should they be subjected to unhealthy smoke from you in the way that they were being?
	Now, is that nanny state by government to ban smoking from public places?
	I would think it was the right thing to do.
	I'm a non-smoker.
	I smoke the odd cigar.
	But most smokers I know actually shrugged their shoulders and kind of accepted it.
	And there's a kind of template there, I would argue, Mr Shapiro, for the gun debate, which we haven't had yet, but I'm sure we're coming to, which is at what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people?
	At what point do you bring them together?
	At what point do you try and reach a consensus where the smokers can still smoke or they can still have a gun?
	But actually what they can't do is go into a bar and shoot it up.
	And how do you stop them doing it?
	It's a fundamental question for the public health of the country.
	And treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for America right now.
	It might take the politics out of it, which has become so vicious and polarizing.
	In Glasgow in Scotland, they had a huge problem with knife crime.
	A lot of knife murders, young kids, mainly white kids, stabbing each other.
	So they treat it like a public health debate.
	And they've massively reduced knife crime.
	In Scotland, which has been great.
	So, you know, Nanny State to a point, I believe in people's fundamental freedoms, but the cigarette debate to me was an interesting one.
	You know, drink driving was an interesting debate in America, wasn't it?
	You go about 50 years, you could get in your car and have a few drinks and drive around.
	And then Mothers Against Drink Driving, MAD I think they were called, rose up after a particularly heinous drink driving incident, and they affected real change.
	And now you can't do that.
	Now, there will be people who still think, I want to have a few beers and have a drive.
	OK, but you can't, actually, because you might kill people.
	And they have as much right to not be killed as you do to get in your car with a few drinks.
	Here is really about externalities, meaning that the reason that we have laws about not smoking in public places, and there you'd have to distinguish for me even between public parks, which are run by the government, and public establishments, which are run by a private business owner.
	So in my view, the government actually shouldn't be involved in that.
	If a private business owner wants to have a successful business, they will stop people from smoking in their business in most cases because they're going to lose business because most people don't smoke and it's annoying to have people smoke there.
	But take the drunk driving example.
	It's a better example.
	So the drunk driving, obviously, there are obvious externalities to people weaving all over the road.
	And the way that you actually police drunk driving is by pulling somebody over who is weaving all over the road and driving recklessly.
	So you could theoretically have a crime defined as reckless driving without the actual drink being a part of it, per se, because, you know, if you drink in your home... Fundamentally, and again, this comes back to the guns debate for me, right?
	Fundamentally, you want to stop people getting in their car drunk.
	That's really what you want.
	You want to affect a cultural change in thinking.
	And the undeniable reality is that a far smaller percentage of Americans now get into a car under the influence of alcohol than used to because of the effect of that campaigning.
	And most Americans accept that.
	America, you've got to remember, one of my sort of strange things about the gun debate was that America's probably one of the most regulated countries on Earth in so many ways.
	If I want to buy a car, I couldn't believe the amount of paperwork I had to do.
	If I wanted to buy a pet dog, my God, I mean, you're there all day.
	In other words, my 21, it's now 26, but my 21-year-old son at the time, six foot two inch, long hair and a beard, with his mate, he's the same.
	Took them to Gladsters in Malibu for a lunch and they wanted a non-alcoholic beer.
	And they got refused because it didn't have their ID on them.
	A non-alcoholic beer.
	Because it has 0.001% alcohol in it.
	I didn't even know that.
	And when I asked them to explain why, they went, yeah, I'm afraid that's the problem.
	They can't prove they're 21.
	And you have to be 21 even to have a non-alcoholic beer.
	The same month up in Arizona, an eight-year-old girl went to a Bullets and Burgers had her burger, then went to the range, was handed by a former Marine a load of firearms, loaded, fired them, eventually got handed an Uzi submachine gun, fired two bullets, then lost control and shot the instructor in the head and killed him.
	A terrible tragedy.
	She will never get over that, I'm sure.
	Her parents were videoing it on their phone, and you see them suddenly lose control of the phone.
	They won't get over it.
	The guy's dead.
	His family won't get over it.
	What I won't get over is the extraordinary disparity between this draconian ruling on my son, aged 22, to have a non-alcoholic beer, In L.A., and this 8-year-old girl, I have a 7-year-old girl now, an 8-year-old girl being able to fire an Uzi machine gun, submachine gun, loaded at a gun range, and that remains legal because it's her constitutional right to do that.
	That's where I have a problem.
	It's more the disparity of the way that America regulates these things.
	Well, I think that the real question there is criminalizing recklessness.
	Meaning that it's a weird thing to criminalize a 21-year-old drinking a non-alcoholic beer.
	Right.
	And in the other case, obviously, I would think that it should be criminal recklessness to hand an 8-year-old girl a gun she's not capable of controlling.
	And that would be chargeable, in my view, you know, just under probably basic negligence laws.
	But it was.
	I mean, I don't know a particular case, but in my view, that should be, although not necessarily as an effect of banning guns per se, because as we've discussed now several times, I think that the countervailing view is that there are lots of law-abiding citizens who do want to be able to own a gun and should be able to own a gun.
	I understand why Americans want to defend themselves.
	In a country with 330 million guns, I understand why Americans... I've heard Bill Maher say he has a gun, right?
	Because he knows he has threats and he knows that they may come with guns.
	The countries are washed with guns.
	What I don't get, and this is the same debate we had before, but let me make it probably a simpler debate for the purposes of this, which is There has been an undeniable increase in the number of massacres.
	I'm not talking about shootings of two, three people.
	Mass shootings on a grandiose, horrific scale in the last 20 years.
	They are accelerating for whatever reason.
	And the firepower that's being used is ferocious.
	The guy in Dayton, in a higher reasoning, He was shot dead within 24 seconds of firing his first bullet.
	But because he had an AK-47, he was able to get off, I think, 41 rounds and hit 26 people, maybe more, of whom nine died.
	And at that point, I'm like, OK, surely, surely, if you're concerned about gun safety, and you fundamentally believe in the principle of regulation, you have it in every other part of your life, right?
	You have it in every part of your life.
	You also accept, I presume, Machine guns are bad, right?
	Automatic weapons are bad, right?
	So you've accepted regulation on guns.
	So I say, well, why can't you go a step further now?
	Accept that the preferred weapon of choice of almost every one of these massacre shooters, they all use these rifles, right?
	But that is the countervailing question, is whether what we are actually doing here is reverse engineering the regulation by focusing in on the mass shootings.
	Meaning that every year in the United States, approximately 400 people are killed with rifles.
	Approximately 1,600 people are killed with knives.
	Right.
	30,000 people die of handgun wounds.
	Many of those are suicides.
	So are we focusing in on the mass shootings because we are focusing in on the rifles?
	Or are we focusing on the rifles because we are focusing in on the mass shootings?
	Why not just go for a full gun ban, in other words?
	I don't propose a gun ban.
	I accept there are too many guns in circulation.
	It's not like Australia, where after the Hobart massacre in the mid-90s, They banned almost all guns from civilian circulation.
	Even then, only one third of guns were turned in in the Australian gun buyback.
	But that's a lot of guns.
	It's certainly a lot of guns.
	The equivalent here would be 110 million guns.
	100%.
	I mean, the murder rate in America went down faster after the Hobart gun ban.
	I know all the numbers.
	And our gun supply increased, obviously.
	Sure.
	You and I, we can argue the details.
	Yeah, we can do a whole other hour about this.
	There's a bigger thing, which is a cultural response to these kind of massacres.
	I found it extraordinary After Sandy Hook when 20 young first graders are literally blown to pieces in their classroom, that America, the number one superpower in the world, was incapable of coming together and finding a unified response to try and prevent that happening again, of any kind.
	In Britain we had a direct equivalent of Dunblane in Scotland, but there was a cultural reaction from Britain, from left and right, it was never political at all, that after 16 children were killed in Dunblane in Scotland in a similar attack, by a lone gunman that something fundamentally had to change.
	And we were very draconian, as you know.
	We banned almost all guns from civilian circulation.
	Interesting thing happened.
	For five years, gun crime ticked up a bit, actually.
	And then they said, OK, we need to make it more punitive.
	So now it's a five-year mandatory prison sentence if you're caught with one of these guns.
	And ever since that moment, gun crime has gone down.
	We have other issues in Britain, like knife crime.
	Very serious problems with knife crime.
	And the reaction from the British is the same.
	We've got to stop this.
	What can we do?
	Let's limit the amount of knives.
	Let's make it draconian to carry a knife in the street.
	In other words, our reaction to knife crime epidemic now is the same as our reaction to gun crime, which is we can't allow this to continue.
	Let's bring in laws to change it.
	And it's not left and right arguing about it.
	The three things I've always tried to campaign for here.
	Universal background checks.
	I don't think you're against that.
	Not in concept, although if it does end with a massive government gun registry, I have a problem.
	Right.
	And I understand why, because that comes back to the threat of tyranny and everything else, right?
	I get that.
	But I've always campaigned for that.
	I think there should be a limit on all magazines of 10 bullets.
	I don't understand why anyone would need more.
	You don't need it for hunting.
	You don't need a sports shooting, you can do that.
	In Britain, if you want a sports shooting, you have a license.
	Why can't you have that here?
	And thirdly, I don't see a need, a need, In the same way that the only possible need for a machine gun is to kill lots of people very quickly, I think that has now become the preferred way of using one of these assault rifles.
	And I don't understand why the argument against machine guns is this, and the argument against these assault rifles is a different argument.
	To me it's the same thing, you're just extending common sense.
	So are you talking about a ban on the sale of ARs and so-called assault rifles, which are really all semi-autos?
	Are you talking about a full confiscation?
	Because there are 100 million of those in circulation right now.
	I think you would try and do what they did in Australia.
	You would have a buyback.
	You know, you'd say, look, we are going to try.
	I know.
	I know.
	Good luck.
	Because at the moment, people are so entrenched about this, driven by political partisan debate.
	But actually, I would appeal to the concept... Also because you're talking about confiscating 100 million guns on the basis of 400 yearly deaths.
	Not confiscating, asking people to give them up.
	Well, I mean, unless you're going to punish them.
	And you're going to pay them.
	Are you going to pay them?
	Unless you're going to pay three times what they're going great as.
	Nobody's going to turn that in.
	But you have to do something, is my point.
	So I want to continue this conversation about gun control.
	If you want to hear my answer and Piers' answer and then my answer to Piers' answer and all the rest of it, you have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
	Go subscribe right now.
	Join our club.
	We really appreciate it.
	You can hear the other side of the conversation after this break.
	Piers Morgan, thank you for stopping by.
	We've got to do this more than once every six or seven years.
	You know what?
	I was waiting for the call.
	And I enjoy your podcast and I like the fact that you're prepared to sit with people who you don't agree with and who you're prepared to debate with.
	Well, it's more fun.
	I mean, it's a cornerstone of democracy.
	Without that, there is no democracy.
	So thank you.
	Thank you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boren.
	Associate producer, Colton Haas.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
	Editing by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

▲