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March 12, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:26

Piers Morgan On The Royal Family: UNCENSORED

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	I had an editor of my first paper, The Sun in London, and he said to me recently, the single most annoying thing about you was I used to scream at you when you got something badly wrong.
	And he said, you just suck it up.
	And then an hour later, you bounce into my office with a big grin on your face with a scoop that you got.
	Of all the things anyone's ever said about me, I would say that is probably the best trait that I have.
	is the ability to bounce back.
	Piers Morgan and I have sat down together every couple of years this past decade, getting into new ideas and arguments.
	By now, we've become friendly opponents, and we appreciate our ongoing conversation.
	Piers began his distinguished career in media writing about culture at The Sun, where he brushed shoulders with countless celebrities, all of which advanced his own notoriety, of course.
	He worked at several British newspapers before becoming a TV personality in the mid-2000s, including BBC specials, America's Got Talent.
	I met him while he was working as a late-night talk show host at CNN.
	He was even the winner of the Celebrity Edition of The Apprentice in 2008.
	He now hosts Piers Morgan Uncensored, which I recently joined, and you should check out after this.
	It was a lot of fun.
	The show launched about a year ago and has been breaking news and stirring up internet controversy ever since.
	Piers is a fascinating news personality to watch because, as you'll hear in the episode, Piers' politics don't quite fit into any one box.
	As an example, he's a liberal, but he'll mock President Biden and wokeism.
	He's also critical of former President Trump, but during Trump's term, Piers publicly defended the administration's achievements.
	In March 2021, Piers lost his job on ITV's Good Morning Britain when he critiqued Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and said that Meghan Markle was a liar.
	And so he lost his job for failing to back down.
	We start this episode on the chaos in British life over the past few years, from Harry and Meghan to Brexit.
	We'll also discuss JK Rowling defending femininity, Andrew Tate defending masculinity, and we'll trade some opposing views on the Russia-Ukraine war and what the United States should do.
	Hey, hey, and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, and I am excited to welcome back to the program Piers Morgan.
	For all of you who want to see a bunch of extra content that you're not going to get to see unless you pay for it, you actually have to subscribe over at dailywireplus.com for all of the extra content with all of our great guests.
	Piers, great to see you again.
	Good to see you!
	Okay, so why don't we just jump in with the thing everyone wants to hear from you about, which is, of course, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
	That is the— Do we have to?
	We have to.
	It is a moral obligation to talk about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
	So, I have to say that your takes originally on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were apparently very controversial.
	I thought they were good at the time.
	But those things have aged like fine wine.
	Probably the best aging take, I would think, ever.
	I mean, like, the greatest stake.
	Like, just aged for years.
	Yes.
	The taste is amazing.
	Because if you remember, my exact phrase that apparently was so problematic was, I wouldn't believe Meghan Markle if she read me a weather report.
	And that has really stood the test of time.
	So for folks who don't understand, like, how that even materialized in the first place. You have sort of an insider view on who Meghan Markle is.
	And the reason that she's relevant is for two reasons. One, because she really will not just leave and take the privacy she so desperately apparently wants. And she just won't take it.
	That's one reason. The other is that she is sort of emblematic of both a woke generation and an attention-seeking generation. Yes.
	She is kind of the TikTok generation, but morphed into one human being.
	And so when people look at her, there's some people in the United States still who are kind of warm to her claims of victimhood and this idea that she's being very emotionally open.
	And there are other people looking at her like, this is the most bratty person I've ever seen in my entire life.
	But you have some actual personal experiences that led up to it.
	I knew her a bit before she met Harry, and she seemed perfectly normal, albeit like most L.A.
	actresses I'd met.
	But she seemed fine, you know, perfectly normal.
	And there was a weird series of events.
	One was the wedding, where she suddenly fell out spectacularly with her father, who we now know had brought her up on his own for quite a few years, actually.
	And she sort of disowned him, and that all seemed a bit sort of brutal and weird, because he was just a guy out of his depth, couldn't handle the media, he was being bothered by paparazzi.
	Eventually, he did a deal with one of them, where he would pose for good pictures of himself, and that was it.
	So that was all going on.
	And we were thinking, well, hang on, this is a bit weird.
	And then, in the months and months after the wedding, you suddenly saw the pair of them more from a beloved couple.
	I mean, they were.
	When they got married, it was a huge celebration in the UK.
	32 million pounds worth of taxpayer money was spent, and nobody begrudged them.
	She was the first biracial bride in the royal family.
	That was a big moment for a very multicultural country like the UK.
	And all the headlines were pretty euphoric, actually.
	Contrary to the narrative they're now trying to make people in America think about what was happening.
	But then over the next few months, there's a series of, you could call them missteps, or you could call them classic examples of brazen, woke hypocrisy.
	Two people wanting to position themselves, for example, as eco-warriors.
	You know, we want you to all watch your carbon footprint.
	They would say this in speeches.
	And then they'd catch Elton John's private plane like a taxi service.
	Or she would preach about poverty in a tweet from their royal Twitter account on the same day she had a half-a-million-dollar baby shower in New York, here, with a bunch of celebrities and flew back on Amal Clooney's plane.
	And so this went on, and it was one after another.
	And because of the hypocrisy element, the British media in particular were very critical, very scathing, saying, hang on a second, you don't get all the palaces and the servants and the privileged life.
	For this, right, you have to toe the line, you have to do the job, which involves often quite dreary duty as a member of the royal family, but you get to be one of the biggest stars in the world on the global stage in return.
	She, in particular, didn't seem to understand this.
	She thought that actually being a member of her family was wearing a tiara, getting a fabulous wedding, and then doing what the hell you like.
	So, they began to just do a load of stuff which annoyed people, and they got the criticism, in my estimation, they thoroughly deserved.
	And at that point, they developed this victim.
	narrative that they were terrible victims of this brutal, racist British media and the horrible British people who were all turning on them for no reason.
	But it really wasn't like that.
	And so over time, Harry's inbuilt hatred of the media, which goes back to when his mother died, I knew his mother very well, that all began to blow up again, as did his resentment of his family and the fact that William, his older brother, is the heir to the throne and he isn't.
	So William will be king, Harry won't.
	And then you put it all together and then you get Megxit, where they leave the country, they leave the royal family, and they wanted to have their royal cake and eat it.
	They wanted to stay half in, half out, do the good stuff, get all the trinkets, make all the money out of it, but not have to do any of the duty.
	And that was where you get to the place of the kind of chasm between them as a royal renegade family and the monarchy and the British royal family left behind.
	And now you have them doing a Netflix series about their life, incredibly self-intrusive, The most gossipy royal book that's ever been published, including accounts of Harry's conversations with his father and his brother at Prince Philip's funeral service.
	I mean, quite extraordinary.
	And you just see a pair of people earning a ton of money purely by trading off trashing their family and trashing the institution of the monarchy, which afforded them their royal titles, which make them the money.
	And to your point in the question, they've come to kind of encapsulate that mentality of the woke brigade, this sense of entitlement, self-righteousness, we're right, you're wrong, we don't have to play by our own rules, only you have to.
	And it's all pretty grubby and tawdry, and they've now ended up as a South Park, you know, mock-a-thon, which has got us all rolling in the aisles, and probably reflects where they've now got themselves, which is they're a global laughingstock.
	So, one of the things that Prince Harry's been hanging his hat on, in terms of his critique, has been, as you mentioned, the media.
	And for Americans who don't follow the media over in Britain, I'm one of them, I didn't spend a lot of time with the British media, as evident from my obviously amazing interview with Andrew Neil, where I had no clue who he was.
	Why don't you introduce us to sort of the British media scene?
	Because it is a very rough and tumble place, in a way that— I don't think that the American media is quite the same kind of beast.
	I'm not so sure.
	I think what's different about America is you don't have the volume of national newspapers all concentrated in quite a small geographic space.
	So, you know, you can drive through Texas, in the time it would take you to drive from one end of the UK to the other, and you still have time to spare.
	So, to put the size perspective out there, that's the difference.
	So, you have state newspapers, you have city newspapers, town newspapers.
	You've got a few national papers, but not as many.
	We have, like, 12, 13 national newspapers, all scrapping for the same 60-odd million inhabitants of the United Kingdom.
	So, it's a bit more intense, I would say, is the main difference.
	I think when it comes to the royals, the media are the royals' best friend and their toughest critics.
	We're their best friend collectively because without the media oxygen, this royal family, a monarchy, would go the same way of most other European monarchies.
	They would just disappear into oblivion.
	They need the support of the people.
	The people's support is reflected through the media.
	It's a, you know, it's a connection between the three things, the public, And the royal family and the media and all three basically fuel each other.
	So I felt that Harry's view of the media was completely clouded by the death of his mother.
	I completely understand that.
	I've always said that.
	His mother was killed by a drunk driver in a French tunnel, not by the paparazzi who were more than a thousand yards behind them.
	When it happened, they didn't cause the accident.
	But his mother was constantly pursued by the paparazzi, and he saw this, and he blames the paparazzi for killing his mother, and therefore he blames the media, even though they weren't British paparazzi, actually.
	So, he has this fixated hatred of the British media.
	Everything is the media's fault.
	And when you watch the interviews he gave with his book, it was almost comical.
	You know, when they both went on Oprah Winfrey and accused the royal family directly of being racist, we all saw them do it.
	They basically said a member of the royal family expressed concern about the skin color of their baby.
	That's an allegation of racism.
	I mean, inarguably.
	And yet, two years later, Harry promoting his book, he didn't put it in the book, this incredible revelation, which caused so much damage.
	He then says, well, we didn't say they were racist.
	It was the media.
	British media.
	British tabloids.
	Completely deluded.
	Obviously it was from him and his wife on global television.
	So there's a delusion there.
	I think it's not the brightest bulb in the tulip patch, Harry, to put it politely.
	I think she is very manipulative.
	Meghan Markle is someone who's basically got rid of almost her entire family on her side, apart from her mother.
	Her entire family on the father's side, including her father, which is incredibly sad.
	And now she's wrestled Harry away from his family.
	So how happy they really are in this mansion in California, when they have no connection now with any of their family, bar one or two people.
	I find it very hard to believe that makes anybody happy.
	So, on one level, it's sad.
	Another level, it makes me quite angry, the damage they've caused to the monarchy.
	I think most British people are sick and tired of them.
	The polling has them now below Prince Andrew, which I didn't think would be humanly possible.
	So, you know, it's a mess.
	And you've got the coronation coming.
	It should be an enormous moment.
	in British history, because we haven't had a coronation in my lifetime.
	The Queen, of course, reigned for over 70 years.
	So, it should be a moment of great celebration, but what's going to happen if these two are there with their Netflix cameras in tow?
	It's going to be just another part of the Meghan and Harry circus.
	So, a lot of anger back home about this.
	Interesting to be in America again and feel the reaction to the South Park mockumentary, because it's clear that they're losing a lot of support here as well.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about — you've covered a lot of very famous people.
	You mentioned Prince Harry in sort of the not-the-brightest-bulb category.
	When you're covering these personalities, I want to ask you, how many of them do you think are motivated by malice, and how many of them do you think are just plain dumb?
	Which is, I think, the unspoken secret of both American and maybe all of global politics.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	So you mentioned Prince Harry in terms of personality and him not being particularly bright and being kind of vapid, actually, and that was pretty evident from his book.
	Any man who writes about facial cream and his Todrick in a word, I have to admit, I know a lot of words.
	I did not know that word until I read it.
	It's very posh.
	British phrase for a man's genitalia.
	Well, Hedgar, first of all, man's genitalia, I mean, that's a whole other subject.
	Maybe a woman's genitalia.
	Let's not even get into a man's genitalia.
	Right, but first of all, yes, agree.
	But, you know, this raises a question that I get a lot when I'm covering politics.
	And that is people are constantly, when they watch politics, assuming that if something goes wrong or something is bad, that the reason that that's happening is because of malice.
	That is because there is somebody who is ill-motivated, who's attempting to put one over on them.
	Or there's a cadre of people who are extremely competent and evil who are attempting to do something.
	And so something bad happens and their first move is, who is this cadre of evil people that we can go after and blame for the thing?
	What you said about Prince Harry rings true to me, not just about Prince Harry, but it rings true for, I would say, 85% of the people who are in politics.
	Many people are just incredibly stupid.
	And this tends to burst the bubble of a lot of people who watch politics, because we like to believe that the people who lead us have some semblance of IQ and actually can rub two neurons together.
	But it turns out that many of them cannot.
	You've been covering politics a lot longer than I have.
	Well, certainly in British politics, for example, Boris Johnson became prime minister.
	Now, Boris Johnson is a bumbling buffoon, if you look at him.
	I mean, he doesn't even brush his hair.
	He has this ridiculous voice.
	But underneath it is quite a sharp brain.
	But I once interviewed him for GQ magazine.
	Years ago, and I said to him, he was then planning to become London Mayor, and I said, Boris, you know, people always say to me, oh, Boris Johnson, he's a buffoon, but I always defend you and say that underneath the buffoon exterior lies quite a smart, calculating, political brain.
	And he said, well, they're very guided appears, he said, but you must consider the possibility that lurking beneath the buffoon exterior is an actual buffoon.
	You may not have been joking, but I think that, yeah, look, I think the reality in Britain, I'm not quite sure how it works on the pay structure in America, other than to run for president is very expensive, so it immediately rules out vast swathes of the people.
	In Britain, we pay our politicians a meagre amount of money comparative.
	You know, to be a top politician, you might get $100,000 a year.
	You and I know that is not enough to attract high-caliber people, unless they really see political life as an absolute vocation.
	They're not doing it for the money.
	And it also encourages, of course, people to be then corrupt.
	Because if you're earning very, very little money, but you have access to power, then that is the lethal cocktail.
	Where the temptation is there, you don't have money yourself, you can make it by being corrupt.
	So that, I think, is always a self-defeating thing.
	I would personally pay politicians in Britain Three or four times what they're being paid.
	It wouldn't be popular in the short term with the public, but you would attract a higher caliber of person to be political figures.
	I think most of the politicians I've met in British sides, certainly in the last 10 years, have been shockingly mediocre.
	I mean, just on an intellectual level, incredibly lame.
	Just not very bright people.
	You know, the tulip patch is bare, to continue the analogy.
	In America, I think there's probably a slightly higher standard, but, you know, not much.
	I mean, I don't think you look at the American cabinet like you do the British cabinet and think, these are the brightest people in the country.
	You think these are the people dumb enough to actually wanna do this because the media scrutiny is intense, drives a lot of people away from it.
	And it's a tough, hard job and the rewards aren't great.
	As you actually end up in the White House, the rewards aren't great.
	So I think the system itself doesn't lend itself either in this country or in my country to attracting the best people.
	When if you think about it, that's really bad because what you want in a democratic society is that the people in power are actually the brightest people in the country, making decisions that affect everybody else.
	So, it seems to me, you have a sort of...
	Far too much mediocrity, not enough great talent.
	And the victim of that is the populace that then has decisions taken that affect their lives directly by people who aren't very competent.
	So, I want to take a step back here and have you explain to me the current state of British politics, because I look at this from afar, and I have, you know, sort of baseline-level knowledge of British politics and British political history.
	I cannot for the life of me understand what is going on.
	Meaning, I look— Well, let me explain to you.
	The central fulcrum of everything was Brexit.
	So, David Cameron was Prime Minister.
	He'd been Prime Minister for quite a few years.
	He was kind of mediocre, but chugged along, and everyone was, like, fine with him.
	He wasn't an inflammatory guy.
	He was quite charming, personally.
	He spoke well, he was eloquent, and so on.
	But then, under pressure from the right wing of his party, he suddenly decided to capitulate and allow a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union.
	And I voted against it.
	I thought it was a crazy thing to do.
	I think there's a strength in numbers, and I think the United States of Europe, if you like, is far more powerful together than it would be individually.
	My side lost, and the Leave vote won, led by Nigel Farage and other characters like that.
	And I respected that result.
	I respect democracy.
	That was the will of the people.
	Nearly 17 million people voted for this.
	It was an enormous vote.
	The whole election, the referendum was enormous.
	But it was incredibly divisive.
	It was like Trump being made president here.
	It split the country in two and made it very visceral.
	Then you have the explosion of social media, which is compounding with tribalism on both sides, and it all gets very fractious.
	And the Conservative Party then had to try and make this work, which has proven to be incredibly difficult, because Brexit actually doesn't really work.
	So it sounds good, you get your freedom, your autonomy from the rest of Europe, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it's painful and expensive, and people are fed up with it already.
	Doesn't mean it won't work, but it means at the moment, we're now seven years after that referendum took place, and there's no sign of it working.
	So eventually the clock's gonna tick, and people will realise we shouldn't have done this, I think.
	But the Conservative Party went on a sort of weird journey of leaders who were either completely incompetent, shockingly mediocre, so we had Theresa May, who was pretty awful, then Boris Johnson, Who was a buffoon, who didn't think rules applied to him, very Trump-like in his way he went about his leadership.
	During COVID, he was having lots of parties allowed in his Downing Street home.
	He says, most without his knowledge, but certainly for one, he was fined by the police for knowing about it, whilst dictating the rest of us had to be locked down and so on.
	So he then got bounced out over a slew of scandals, really.
	It was replaced by Liz Truss, who came in out of nowhere, really, and said, right, here's what we're going to do to fix everything.
	I know it's a terrible financial climate at the moment.
	I know we're coming out of a pandemic that's been ruinous for the economy.
	But what we're going to do is slash taxes, and that's going to lead to enormous growth immediately, and we're all going to be fine.
	It was like this fairy godmother had come along to sprinkle a bit of dust.
	And of course, it all sounded great.
	Right?
	Who doesn't want to see taxes slashed?
	The trouble was she had no way of paying for it, and didn't say how she paid for it.
	So when she did this, the markets tanked, the pound tanked against the dollar to a record low, and she had to resign after 44 days.
	The Daily Star tabloid newspaper actually had a lettuce, and they put the lettuce there and said, we'll see who lasts longest.
	The lettuce outlived Liz Truss in the last 10 days, which gives you some idea of the farce and also how ridiculous the whole thing was.
	And then she got replaced by the person she'd beaten in the previous leadership campaign, Rishi Sunak, former Goldman Sachs guy, knows the economy, very serious.
	He had predicted everything that would happen if she won, and it happened.
	So it's been a farcical ride, really, but the fulcrum at the start of it, for all of this chaos, was Brexit.
	Right, so the reason that I was confused about all of this is because I look at the Conservative Party in Britain, which is sort of a more moderate version of the Republican Party in the United States in a lot of different ways, and I don't see a lot of sort of unifying principles inside the Conservative Party.
	So you had Boris Johnson, who is a big spender, who is an environmentalist, like a very green leader, somebody who was socially left-wing.
	So how was that wildly different from many of the people he was opposing?
	And then you saw Liz Truss come in and she proposed what is, by most accounts, a fairly conservative political program.
	I'm of the belief that the Bank of England essentially purposefully tanked her prime ministership because they certainly could have held it up for another couple of weeks, but they decided not to.
	They would prefer to allow the bond market to basically— Well, they kind of freak when the market's freak because the problem was she just went She hadn't costed it out.
	She didn't say, here's how we pay for this.
	And as you know, when markets see uncertainty, then they freak, right?
	So maybe the Bank of England could have done, but actually, I don't blame them because it was total carnage.
	Well, in any case, I have a hard time seeing what exactly the Conservative Party stands for.
	And so you're starting to see this massive upswing for a Labour Party that was basically left for dead about three years ago, when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn, who's an actual communist nutjob.
	And now, of course, he's been supplanted by sort of a mystery figure, almost.
	Former head of the public prosecutions, a very smart lawyer, quite a dull guy.
	I mean, by common consent, he's not Mr. Charisma, but he's... He's actually pushing, from what I see, some pretty strong anti-crime policies.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He's talking about upping the police in rural areas, for example.
	Yeah, I mean, it's very hard now to distinguish between this Labour Party and the Conservative Party.
	Really.
	There's really not much difference between them.
	If you actually changed their names and had them saying the same stuff, it wouldn't sound that different.
	The difference was Truss, who tried to be old-school conservative, but she evoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher.
	But she did it, I think, historically incorrectly.
	Margaret Thatcher, when she first came into power, and she was leader, she won three elections, but when she first came in, she inherited a very difficult economy.
	And she actually increased some taxation to get the economy back onto a level keel.
	Then she cut income tax in particular significantly and became known as the big tax cutter.
	But she understood you've got to get the economy stable first.
	This trust pretended to be Margaret Thatcher, but actually ideologically she just got her history wrong.
	Rishi Sunak realized this, and I think, well, therefore, he's probably the best person right now to try and guide us to a more even place.
	I interviewed him recently.
	He's a very smart guy, takes the job very seriously.
	You're not going to get him partying all night long and so on.
	But you're right.
	I mean, what is the heart of this Conservative Party?
	You wouldn't recognize it.
	You really wouldn't recognize it.
	You could really interview the head of a Labour Party and Rishi Sunak right now, and they wouldn't sound significantly different.
	So looking at the political situation and looking at sort of the broader overall situation for Great Britain, what do you think are the biggest problems facing Great Britain?
	I mean, we see these sort of system-wide problems in the West.
	Brexit is the biggest problem, which is in addition to all the other problems facing every other country.
	Every country was hit by the pandemic.
	In varying degrees, depending on how they handled it.
	But Britain has got the slowest-growing economy of any of the major European countries because of Brexit.
	So, unfortunately, all roads really lead back to that.
	Other stuff has compounded it.
	The cost-of-living crisis, the energy crisis because of the Ukraine war.
	All these things have had an effect.
	Of course they have.
	But they're no different to any other country.
	The French have that, the Germans have that, the Spanish have that, the Italians have it.
	What distinguishes Britain, in terms of its woeful economic performance comparative to most of those countries, is Brexit and the fallout of this severance from the EU, which has turned out, by common consent even for many people who voted to leave, so far to be a failure.
	So do you think that we're going to see, and I'm going to ask you this in a second, a sort of wave of actual regulatory cutting, a wave of making it easier in the economy, not just in Britain, but in Europe overall, and also a wave of conservatism in terms of the spending?
	Because obviously we're in the middle of this massive inflationary cycle that has eaten all of Europe, has eaten the United States as well.
	It's pretty much gone everywhere.
	You're seeing the Bank of England raise interest rates at historic levels at this point.
	Are we about to see sort of the rubber hit the road when it comes to economic policy?
	I'll ask you about that in just one second.
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	Okay, so talking about sort of the economic problems that are faced by Great Britain and also by the continent as a whole.
	We've basically, I think, in the West been living in a dream factory for a long time.
	Globalization covered a lot of ills.
	It allowed us to outsource a lot of our problems.
	It allowed us to bring down costs while simultaneously spending oodles and oodles of money that actually don't exist.
	And now we're starting to see inflation, not starting in the last several years, raging out of control.
	It seems like we may be entering a bit of a ...to use a British history phrase, a winter of discontent here for all of Europe and for the United States as well.
	What do you see as sort of the economic future here?
	I think the next year is going to be very difficult.
	It may not be quite as bad as some of the biggest doom-mongers feared.
	The main reason for that, though, is a...
	A situation which remains extremely flexible, which is the Ukraine war.
	So the energy pressure on energy prices has eased in the last few weeks and months, because it looks like the Ukraine war is now in for a longer haul.
	It's not as unstable a situation as it seemed at the start, which created all the energy crisis.
	But it wouldn't take a lot, as we know.
	You know, if Putin was to suddenly use a tactical nuclear weapon, as he keeps threatening to, for example, what impact would that have on the global economy, on energy prices and so on?
	So, I think it is actually a lot more unstable than people think.
	That's why I think you're seeing the markets very schizophrenic.
	They're up and down, up and down, up and down.
	Nobody's really quite sure what to make of this.
	So, I think it's very hard to predict.
	I mean, all the ones who are paid to predict these things have been made to look a bit stupid in the last few years.
	So, I think it's hard to predict.
	But it really depends, I think, on certain big things from the UK point of view.
	One, can Brexit be made to work?
	And I think that's a massive if.
	There's no sign of it so far.
	Secondly, what will happen with Ukraine?
	Because that is really dictating a lot of the pressure, which is on many countries now.
	Not the United States, actually, because you're not as dependent, of course, on energy as other countries.
	But look at Germany, who were warned repeatedly by Donald Trump.
	To their face in video clips you can see online.
	You know, he warned them, your reliance on Russian energy is madness.
	And they all ignored him, and now look, he was right.
	Between that and all of Europe deciding to listen to the ramblings of a Swedish teenager about energy policy, it turns out that you're going to cut yourself off from your economic base.
	This does raise the question of Ukraine.
	So you've been obviously extremely hawkish on Western policy in Ukraine.
	There's a sort of split on the right in the United States, at least with regard to Ukraine.
	More isolationist sentiments cropping up on the right.
	There's some on the left as well.
	But that's not unusual.
	The United States has always had a very strong isolationist sentiment because we're geographically incredibly lucky.
	We're surrounded on two sides by Canada and on the other side by Mexico and on two sides by ocean.
	So we can basically isolate ourselves over here.
	We can be autarkic and have all of our resources.
	We're fine.
	The United States is always in good shape comparatively to the rest of the world because of all of that.
	However, you know, the case that hawks have made is that if the United States does not continue to fund the Ukraine war, that Russia will end up winning.
	The converse case, which I think is sort of a moderate peacenik case, moderate dovish case, is one that I've made on occasion and Henry Kissinger has made.
	And what that is, is we all know where this is going.
	We know what the end point of this war is.
	And the end point of this war is very likely that Russia is going to end up retaining large parts of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
	And everybody knows that that's what the end point here is going to be.
	I don't think that's true.
	I don't think that's true.
	I think that that would have been the case early on.
	I think that's when Kissinger was saying this.
	I'm not sure when he last said this, but nobody expected Ukraine to still be in the battle in the way that they are, or doing as well as they are, or for the Russians to be struggling militarily as they are.
	And the longer it's gone on, the more I think the Ukrainians, inspired by Zelensky, who's not a perfect individual by any means, You know, he was a former TV producer, you know, comedian, did Dancing with the Stars in Ukraine, and suddenly he's propelled into becoming a wartime president.
	It reminded me a little bit of Winston Churchill in that sense, where Churchill was a bit of a joke before World War II.
	You know, denounced by his party, flip-flop between parties, no one really took him seriously.
	And then when confronted with the biggest challenge of his lifetime, he rose to that challenge magnificently.
	That's the way I see Zelensky.
	But Churchill wasn't perfect either, but he came At the right moment at the right time.
	So I think the fundamental importance to me of why Equimus win is for the reasons that you just articulated.
	Vladimir Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union.
	He wants to be a modern-day czar presiding over the once great Soviet Union again.
	And I think he smelt weakness.
	I think he looked to what happened with the Afghanistan withdrawal.
	And I think he thought, hmm, no Trump.
	Biden looks weak, threw the towel in in Afghanistan, didn't seem to care.
	Now's the time to test the Americans.
	Because the Ukrainians can't do this without America.
	You know, they could do it without the British, they could do it without the Germans, without the French.
	But let's be completely clear, you're the number one superpower in the world.
	You still have, I think, 50% of the world's military hardware.
	And the Ukrainians need the American support or they can't win.
	But I think they can win with enough American support.
	So the question then becomes, why should America keep investing the money?
	Well, the alternative is you let Putin win.
	Win being, he takes the existing Crimea, which he took in 2014, takes large swathes of the Donbass, and he just takes the land he wants.
	A, if that happens, he won't stop there.
	I'm absolutely certain of it.
	He didn't stop after Crimea.
	Why would he stop if he wins another chunk of land of Ukraine?
	But secondly, when did Americans, particularly Republicans, When did they actually think it was a good thing that a dictator like Vladimir Putin invaded a democratic country in this way, with such impunity and such a barbaric way, attacking maternity hospitals and so on?
	And just thought, actually, that's not our concern.
	It's never been the American way.
	And I compare it not to the second Iraq war, which was a fiasco fought over a false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and a false link between him and 9-11 when there wasn't one.
	But the first Gulf War, When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, it was not a NATO country, and America was right in there, was storming Norman, leading the way to kick him out and restore the sovereignty of Kuwait.
	And I don't remember many Republicans saying that was a terrible thing to do.
	In fact, quite the opposite.
	They thought it was a great thing to do, and there was great American pride in the military operation to kick Saddam out of Kuwait.
	The only difference between that and Ukraine Is that, A, it's more important, Ukraine, strategically and geographically, I think.
	And secondly, Vladimir Putin has nuclear weapons.
	Well, it's that second factor that I think is leading a lot of people to take pause.
	Meaning that, let's say, that he gets the deal that I proposed before.
	That he comes to the table, he says, I'll cut it out.
	Why should the Ukrainians give him an inch?
	Well, it's not about why the Ukrainians should give him an inch.
	It's why the United States should back the Ukrainians in not giving him an inch.
	Why should the Americans encourage Ukraine to give up an inch?
	To avoid the worst scenario, which would be the use of a tactical nuclear weapon.
	What would you feel if Vladimir Putin threatened American mainland with nuclear weapons?
	Believe me, on an emotional level, I totally understand where Ukrainians are coming from and I'm rooting for them.
	Well, what would you feel then?
	What would all the American Peaceniks at the moment.
	They want to give up the land.
	Listen, there's no question.
	Peaceniks invaded Montana.
	If one missile... You're saying, oh yeah, we'll give them half of Montana.
	If one missile, but the United States is also the most powerful country in the world that's not reliant on anybody else in terms of our own self-defense and preservation.
	If you're an American, your first question is not, how do Ukrainians feel about Ukraine?
	Your first question is, what is in America's interest?
	And so the argument that I've made is that overall American foreign policy has been quite Wilsonian in sort of intent for the last century.
	And that's not been great in a lot of different ways.
	The sort of idea that should be pursued is that realism in America's interest can coincide with things like military support for Ukraine in order to achieve America's interests.
	America's interests in Ukraine are, as you mentioned, not allowing dictators to run roughshod over borders, maintaining an American-led sphere of influence that guarantees freedom of waterways, for example, freedom of trade.
	Restraint in terms of military use of force that threatens all the supply lines so we don't end up back in sort of a 2020 situation.
	Why would Putin's ability to have this nuclear arsenal change your thinking about how you deal with it?
	When did a nuclear deterrent become something that a dictator could use as a stick to threaten people?
	Well, I mean, throughout the entire Cold War.
	I mean, the entire Cold War, the United States didn't go against the law specifically because of that, right?
	Why would he launch a nuclear strike, knowing it would lead to his immediate If he believes that the alternative is his immediate evisceration, meaning that if he's pushed all the way to the wall, the theory goes... You think Russian generals would go along with that?
	Knowing that them and all their families immediately die?
	Well, I mean, I'm not sure that it's worth the bet, but that's the question for America.
	He wins, and he wins big.
	Does he though?
	I mean, if he loses 200,000 troops in Ukraine, which is what he will lose.
	Right, but China, China look at that, and they've got nuclear weapons, and they go, oh, okay, so all you've got to do is threaten to use nuclear weapons, and the Americans back off.
	None.
	The world's biggest superpower, with the biggest military, will not engage if you threaten them with nuclear weapons.
	And everyone's got a weapon as a deterrent, turns around and goes, actually, we're going to use them.
	So what are you going to do about it?
	Once you blink on this, and I think it's a really fundamental point, it is basically a form of cowardice to say, if somebody threatens to do something, the school bully threatens to punch you in the face, And you have the ability to defend yourself.
	You've got the same weapons that he has.
	If you allow that bully to win, and you back off because you're worried about what he may do to you, everybody loses.
	And America loses big time.
	And China looks at it and goes, OK, now we go into Taiwan.
	That's my thought process.
	I understand.
	The question becomes, what does the off-ramp look like?
	Because what the Biden administration has said, as long as it takes and we don't know what the off-ramp looks like.
	And the question becomes for Americans, OK, so How long does this go on?
	We're now seeing some unintended side effects.
	China is suggesting that they're going to get involved by shipping weapons via Moscow and all the rest in an obvious attempt to sort of bring this thing to a conclusion and get everybody to the table because China doesn't like what's happening very much either.
	It was all fun and games when Russia was becoming a proxy oil state for them.
	When Russia's actually on the verge of possible collapse, then China starts to worry a little bit more because they're on their border.
	So the question becomes, what does that off-ramp look like?
	And does there have to be some off-ramp that allows Putin— I don't think you give him an inch.
	So then what is the outcome?
	An inch of territory.
	And by the way, every American I know, every American I know, if I said to them Vladimir Putin invades any part of the United States and takes an inch of territory and claims it as his own, Every American to a man and woman that I know would say, absolutely not in a million years, I'd rather die.
	So, number one.
	In other words, there's a moral inconsistency because that's Ukrainian position.
	Why the hell should they give up even one inch of their land to this murderous dictator?
	The point that I'm making here is that I totally agree with Ukrainians who say they don't want to give up one inch of land.
	I'm just not sure that America has to agree with Ukrainians that what's in America's best interest is not for the Ukrainians to give up one issue.
	Well, only if America cares about freedom and democracy and saving a sovereign country from being taken over by a Russian dictator.
	Well, I mean, they've been saved, meaning Ukraine— Also, you're in it— Prior to this— Prior to this— You've already committed $110 billion to this, right?
	So— Yes.
	You just say, OK, well, we're just going to write that off and give up.
	What do you mean, give up?
	I mean— Well, that's the alternative.
	The original— No, the original goal for Putin in Ukraine was to take Kiev.
	It wasn't to take Luhansk and ask.
	Right.
	Why should he— He already had Luhansk and ask.
	Why should he get any of it?
	What do you mean, why should he get?
	He had it before this war began.
	Why should he be allowed to grab any of it?
	To prevent further loss of life, further American expenditure, possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, China getting involved indirectly.
	So fear.
	Well, I mean, that's always foreign policy.
	I don't know, actually, no.
	Any negotiated end.
	Virtually all wars end with a negotiated end.
	World War II, Winston Churchill was encouraged to do exactly this.
	He was encouraged to basically give up, right?
	Because the losses would be too great.
	Because the damage that the Nazis would do would be too overwhelming.
	It wasn't worth it.
	Do the deal, Winston.
	Do a deal.
	Give up.
	And he absolutely refused to give an inch to the Nazis.
	And in the end, he managed to make people believe in Britain that we could win.
	And Zelensky has been doing the same thing with his people.
	Well, they've gone from a terrified populace to now thinking a year in, You know what, we can win this. That's an incredibly powerful thing, which we had in the UK back in World War II, and the Americans helped us win that war, obviously, significantly.
	And Ukraine needs America to step up now and finish the job.
	And the job, the end game, is that Ukraine do not give up an inch, and Putin is seen to lose.
	I don't think in a moment he's ever going to unleash a nuclear attack on anybody because if he did that's the end of him and Russia and everything he's built up and everything he cares cares about, his family and all his possessions. He's a very materialistic guy. He's built up a huge personal fortune of yachts and cars and mansions and so on. He's not an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist who is quite happy to lose his life in the cause. He's not that kind of person. So why should we be barrelled by fear in the face of this guy simply because
	It's not really fear of him as much as it is fear of the unknown.
	I think it's fear of him.
	It's fear of him.
	He's the guy with the finger on the button.
	Not necessarily.
	I mean, so to quote Kissinger again, one of the things that we can't foresee is what happens if Putin goes down in Russia.
	Let's say Putin goes down, who comes next?
	Right?
	This is one of the concerns, is Putin loses— Could it be a lot worse?
	Yes.
	I doubt it.
	I've read that.
	I doubt that.
	But again— I mean, they could lose territorial control of the entire state, and then you have 2,500 nuclear weapons rolling around.
	You don't take on the school bully in the playground because there's another— Hang on, let me finish the analogy.
	There's another big lump in the playground that might come along, it might hit you even harder.
	No, at some point, you've got to give the school bully a smack in the face.
	Has he not been given a smack in the face?
	No.
	He's lost 150,000 troops.
	It's the worst losses they've had since World War II.
	He doesn't care about that.
	Nor does he care about the sanctions, which have been completely ineffective.
	Because of the squeeze on energy, he's been able to make a ton of money out of energy.
	So, the sanctions have a word, at all.
	And on the battlefield, he's lost a ton of his soldiers.
	He doesn't care about that.
	He's got a ton more.
	Tens of millions more he can bring on to the battlefield.
	So that's not the way that you deal with someone like Putin.
	I think the way you deal with him is the way the Americans have been doing, but time to step it up, with the help of the Europeans, by the way.
	Shouldn't be just America on its own ever.
	Britain has led the way in Europe, and we should be doing more.
	Germany should step up more.
	France should step up more.
	Concerted effort here now.
	to give Zelensky the airpower he's been asking for, to give him more tanks, to give him more firepower, and to actually repel the Russians from Ukraine.
	And that is the only way you deal with a dictator.
	And anything that is reductive from that, giving him an inch of new land to steal like he did Crimea, I think is a surrender.
	And I don't think the Ukrainian spirit would allow that.
	And I don't think the American spirit has ever been that you give a dictator like Vladimir Putin a win in that way.
	Why would you?
	Okay, so in just a second, I want to shift topic, and I want to talk to you about another controversial area, and that is the handling of COVID, which has varied across the pond.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	But first, the government, they keep raising the interest rates because it's the only tool they have to keep inflation under control.
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	Okay, so let's get into more controversy.
	This is fun.
	So let's talk about COVID policy.
	So COVID policy, obviously, has been an area of tremendous controversy.
	It's been my opinion that, frankly, a lot of the institutions that promised that they were going to be able to actually handle things were blowing up data that they didn't actually have.
	I agree.
	Many of them were exaggerating the power of their ability to control this thing, that many of them were pushing things like mask mandates, which were Wildly ineffective, that the promises that were made on behalf of the vaccine, well, I tend to be what would pass for moderate on the right side of the aisle these days.
	I believe that the vaccine was good for people who are elderly and obese to take.
	But I myself, I was 37 when I took the vaccine.
	And at the time, the reason that I took it is because it had been promoted by the federal government and by Pfizer that this thing was 99% effective in preventing transmission.
	And my parents were with us and they were above the age of 65.
	And so I figured, okay, well, A friend of mine in his early 50s is still in a coma after nearly three years now because there was no vaccine and it would have saved his life.
	So I believe the vaccines worked.
	I think what didn't work was the certainty that some of the data was put forward to the public about I'll give an example where I did a complete U-turn, which I have no problem talking about or admitting, because I was too self-righteous in believing the scientific data.
	So when they said, for example, that if you don't have the vaccine, you can transmit the virus, but if you do have it, you can't, I believed them.
	And because I believed them, because they were so emphatic that that was the case, that if you got the jab, you couldn't transmit it, I then got very censorious about people who didn't have the jab.
	Very censorious.
	And there are tweets of mine which I've left up, and I get reminded of them regularly, and quite rightly, because I believed the science, and the science was wrong.
	And because I believed the science and then got too emotionally overwrought by all this, I was saying, well, then people should be punished if they don't have the vaccine.
	Obviously, I don't think that now, because once it was established that that was wrong, once it was established if you had the vaccine, it made little difference to your ability to transmit the virus as to whether you didn't, then it becomes a matter of personal choice.
	But it wasn't when I was being censorious, but it taught me a lesson.
	In these health crises in particular, don't be too censorious, because you can't be certain they're right.
	So, actually, I wish I had been more critical of the scientists than I was.
	I wish I had.
	It doesn't mean to say I would become an anti-vaxxer, because I believe the vaccines were incredibly effective and saved millions of lives.
	And I will always believe that, and I think most scientists agree with that.
	But it does mean that, you know, for instance, masks at the start.
	The reason we were told the masks were ineffective and shouldn't be used was because they actually wanted to use them around the world for health care workers, right?
	So they didn't want the public running out and taking all the masks when they weren't enough to go around.
	That was the real reason.
	I think they lied to the people.
	They lied and said the masks were ineffective.
	Then they said the masks were incredibly effective.
	Now I see people wandering around New York outside wearing masks.
	I think they're nuts.
	Completely nuts.
	So there's people like, you know, it's like the Japanese soldiers, you know, 20 years later out of the World War II still wandering around saying, is it over yet?
	It's like, it's completely crazy.
	The pandemic has gone.
	It's now just another, I've had various family members have had COVID in the last two, three weeks.
	It's like getting a bad cold, right?
	So, but I learned a lesson.
	And I think it's an important lesson which I would now try and use to advise other people, which is, if it's scientific guidance in the middle of a really serious crisis, don't believe government modelers.
	who might have a vested interest in wanting just to take the easy option, shutting everything down.
	If they are going to shut everything down, put huge pressure on those government bodies to make sure that people who have other things outside of COVID get properly taken care of.
	Because now the secondary wave of this pandemic are all the people who didn't get treatment for cancer and health disease and so on, which is, I think, disgraceful and should never have happened.
	But also, be able to look at yourself.
	On any side of this.
	And I would say anti-vaxxers who think the whole vaccine thing was a scam and, you know, you can get your brain chipped by Bill Gates.
	I mean, all that stuff is lunacy.
	So I'm not talking about the lunatic fringes of this debate.
	I'm just talking about the way I behaved, I think, was wrong.
	I think I shouldn't have been so censorious because now I can realize the stuff I was being censorious about, I gained my self-righteousness from false information.
	And I'm not afraid to admit that.
	I actually think it's quite powerful to admit that and to say I was wrong.
	And so when people say to me on Twitter all day long as they do, you know, well, there you go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fine.
	But if you are one of the anti-vaxxers who really are anti-vaccines full stop, I don't want to hear from you either.
	So I'm talking really about the more moderate people who quite rightly Well, more skeptical than I was about things like transmission, because they were right and I was wrong.
	So I have many of the same issues.
	Obviously, I encourage people to take the vaccine in the very early days, rooted in the transmission stuff.
	Right.
	And the one thing I never was in favor of were the mandates, specifically because Oddly enough, the data they were pushing at the time led me to be anti-Mandate, because there are two things they were pushing.
	One, that it was 99.99% effective in preventing death and serious disease, and two, it was 99.99% effective in preventing transmission.
	Well, if the first is true, then you don't have to worry about transmission so much, meaning anybody who wants to get vaxxed can get vaxxed.
	But it is kind of amazing how the scientific community blew itself out in terms of credibility by making Exorbitant claims about the vaccine.
	Today, they'll still make exorbitant claims about the vaccine.
	I mean, the CDC is now adding to the VAX schedule for small children, the COVID vaccine.
	Something is ridiculous.
	It's insane.
	I mean, from the very earliest days of the pandemic, we knew this thing was not killing kids.
	Yeah.
	And yet, this is now being promoted by the CDC still.
	And then if you doubt it, then you get censored on YouTube.
	Yeah, listen, I think that's really true.
	And I think that I give some leeway for the fact it was a novel virus.
	It was pretty terrifying.
	When you see someone like Lombardi in Italy collapsing, and Italy has the second best healthcare system in Europe, when you saw that happening and thousands of people dying every day, it was terrifying.
	And there were no therapeutic treatments at the time.
	There was no vaccine.
	We didn't think we may ever get a vaccine.
	There had never been one for coronavirus.
	So it was pretty scary times.
	I mean, we forget what it was like in those first few months.
	So I do give political leaders and the science and health officials A little bit of leeway.
	Where you get less tolerant is as it's gone on.
	And they've carried on, I think, being the way that you just described.
	I think that's completely indefensible.
	I also have a massive problem with people like Anthony Fauci.
	He seems to spend all his time doing television interviews and magazine covers and receiving awards.
	Mate, you've got one job, right?
	You are the head of infectious disease or whatever it is, whatever your title is.
	Just make sure that you save as many lives as possible.
	But don't turn yourself into some weird COVID celebrity.
	He seems totally addicted to the fame part of it.
	And I thought that was wrong.
	In fact, I think that's wrong.
	Another lesson from the pandemic, there'll be many lessons from it.
	One is don't trust all the science.
	But also, public officials in the health side should just stay away from cameras, I think.
	It didn't add to anything.
	It made things worse.
	There's a Fauci rule that I have, which is never trust someone with authority who has a giant portrait of himself in a magazine photoshoot of him.
	That's always a terrible sign as to what's about to happen.
	Well, this does raise the question of the 2024 race, because one of the people who was made incredibly prominent by a lot of the COVID controversy was Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who really was guided by the data.
	I remember I talked to Ron, it was July of 2021, and he was walking me through the data as to why he was pushing back against the mandates, why he was opening up everything, and why everything had been open for a long time.
	It was actually 2020, it was June of 2020, so it was before the vaccines even, and he was talking about how he didn't think lockdowns were effective, and he was citing chapter and verse in terms of the studies.
	He stood against a media that made him the villain.
	Andrew Cuomo was the hero somehow, he was the villain, and he's reaping the benefit of that now.
	And I ask you about the 2024 race in just one second, but first, When the going gets tough, there's one thing you can count on to have your back.
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	So let's talk about the 2024 presidential race.
	So you know Donald Trump, obviously.
	You've had, you know, a lot of talks with him.
	You've talked about him.
	Made me a celebrity apprentice.
	Yeah, correct.
	A man of fine judgment.
	So, he's declared that, obviously, he is running again.
	It seems like his race so far is pretty lackluster.
	The polls show that he is still the top leading national candidate.
	There are some polls that have him trailing.
	Governor DeSantis from Florida, in particular states, a couple have him trailing nationally.
	How do you size up the race right now?
	Well, I've been writing about DeSantis for a year now.
	I think he's definitely the one to watch.
	I definitely think he could end up being the Republican nominee and could end up being president.
	He's an incredibly impressive guy.
	If you look at his resume, you know, Yale and Harvard, you know, he was a sporting star.
	He then went to Fallujah in 2007, the year of the worst casualties for America, as special counsel to the head of SEAL Team One.
	This is a man with an extraordinary Back record, really.
	Which is why I think you look at him and you think, this is a guy used to flack, right?
	He's just very calm under fire.
	Nothing seems to faze him.
	And he's bold, and he's articulate, and he has a good message which he pumps in a smart way.
	In many ways he's Trumpian in policy but without any of the baggage or the rhetoric or the tweeting or the sort of madness.
	And whilst that all worked for Trump first time around in 2016, I don't think it can work again when there's someone like DeSantis who can give you the good stuff without the bad stuff.
	But the Republicans have got to sort that out because I think that Biden is sitting there Basking in the unexpected glory of not being completely shellacked in the midterm elections, probably to his own surprise.
	Everybody assumed there'd be this massive red wave.
	It's never really materialized, other than in Florida.
	So I think that it's very interesting to watch what Biden does.
	He might be waiting to see does DeSantis get in the ring or not.
	Because if he doesn't and it's Trump, Biden might think, well, I can take down Trump.
	I did it last time.
	And actually the best way to get my base out is for Trump to run again.
	And he might well beat him again, actually.
	Different thing if it's a guy half your age.
	If, as Joe Biden is, you keep falling over on planes and you keep bumbling your words and forgetting who you are half the time.
	So if it's DeSantis v. Biden, Biden might well drop out, I think.
	If it's Trump v. Biden, Biden probably runs, is the way I look at it.
	But who knows?
	It's very unpredictable.
	It's been very unpredictable in America.
	That's been in the UK for a long time.
	Yeah, when you look at Trump's campaign, it does feel a lot more lackluster.
	And my theory of why it feels lackluster, I mean, obviously, you know, certain things are no longer fresh.
	I mean, the sort of out-of-the-box authenticity of Trump, where he's just going to say whatever he's thinking on the toilet, and it's just going to come out.
	You're like, wow, that's something I've never seen any politician do ever, usually for a reason.
	But like, that's amazing that people are actually being that open and authentic.
	It has grown a little bit old when it's all grievance-based, when it's all personal grievance-based.
	I actually think that this week, Trump did the first good thing I've seen him do in his presidential campaign when he took a bunch of water over to East Palestine, Ohio.
	I think it's actually the first attempt he's made to sort of reconnect with the people who made him president in the first place.
	He also has to stop whining about losing the 2020 election, right?
	I've tried to tell him this to his face, on the phone, and whenever we've spoken.
	It's like, it's a complete lose.
	Thing.
	If you look at the midterm elections, most of the candidates that were Trump candidates who back this stolen election lost.
	Most of them lost.
	It's a vote loser.
	It sounds whiny.
	It sounds looking back, not forward.
	Americans have been suffering from the pandemic, from a massive economic crisis.
	They want to know about the future.
	They don't want to keep hearing this guy bitching about losing an election.
	In 2020.
	They don't care.
	Most people don't care.
	They've moved on to more important things in their life.
	And if Donald Trump can't leave that behind him, I don't think he has a chance.
	This has basically been the case that I've been making is that in 2016, his pitch, and it was a pretty good pitch, was, the reason that they hate me is because they hate you.
	Until five seconds ago, I was hobnobbing with all these people.
	Hillary Clinton was at my wedding, right?
	We were all friends.
	And then I declared as a Republican candidate, and they hate you, so they hate me.
	And so I'm out here taking a bullet for you.
	And since 2020, the pitch has basically been, you need to now take a bullet for me.
	I claim that I won.
	Everyone else thinks I lost.
	You need to go out there and you need to repeat what I'm telling you right now to show your personal loyalty to me.
	And that's just a bad election pitch because it's not the job of voters to defend the guy.
	It's the job of the guy to defend the voters.
	Also, he lost.
	He didn't just lose the election.
	But he then lost Georgia, which meant they lost the Senate.
	That was a huge blow to the party, completely self-inflicted.
	All of Biden's spending would have been stopped if he had done that.
	Right, completely self-inflicted.
	And then you have the midterms, where most of his preferred candidates lost.
	You add it all up, and Trump's gone from being this amazing, stunning vote winner, who actually won the White House, being the least qualified guy to ever do it in history, against the most qualified candidate in history, and he's gone to being someone who looks like a perennial loser.
	And that's not a great pitch, actually, for the Republicans going forward.
	I think they'd be much better advised to go with young and fresh.
	Now, looking at the Democratic side of the aisle, you mentioned Biden.
	Biden, as you pointed out before, and this is obviously true, would be 86 finishing his second term.
	He does not appear to be fully alive at this point.
	It's kind of a small miracle that he is still halfway functional from time to time.
	But apparently that's enough to sort of get him to 45% in the polling.
	He's got his gander up since the midterms.
	I mean, he just is exuding an air of a bit more energy and vim about him because I think he was as surprised as the rest of us.
	And his heart rate has actually achieved almost normal human levels now.
	I actually think he was probably thinking, we're going to get completely wiped out and then I'm going to announce I'm not going to run again.
	I've done my bit.
	I stopped Trump getting reelected.
	I've done my bit and we'll move on.
	But off the back of the midterms, he's just been a different kind of character.
	He's still been Biden-esque and we've had those senior moments which come every now and again.
	But I watched him in Ukraine and he was pretty fired up and pretty, you know, commander-in-chief.
	Actually quite ballsy to go to Kiev with missiles flying around and to stand there with Zelensky.
	And I thought, yeah, I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican.
	That's quite a ballsy thing for your Commander-in-Chief to do.
	So I don't think he's a spent force at all.
	And I think if the Republicans end up with Trump again, Biden could win again.
	And that should be their calculation, really.
	How do you best win the White House back?
	Do you go with the guy that's proven for the last three years to be a loser?
	So looking at sort of what Biden is doing right now, one of the interesting moves that he seemed to make right after the midterms is he shifted his message a little bit.
	He was doing a lot of the wokeness, he was doing a lot of the radical social policy, and then it seemed like he was Somehow kind of trying to push back into almost Clintonian third-way territory.
	Suddenly he started talking about how we were going to save the Rust Belt, how we were going to reshore a bunch of jobs, how he was going to essentially refocus on economic redistributionism and investment in various American projects.
	I think that's going to fall apart on him fairly quickly, because I don't think that his coalition can actually do that.
	Last week, he brought out an executive order, which is one of the most sweeping executive orders I've ever seen in American politics.
	It was an executive order declaring that equity would lie at the root of literally every government agency.
	And equity obviously means equality of outcome, not equality of rights.
	So every government agency would be directed to now adopt an equity agenda and figure out exactly how they were going to make it so that groups in the United States had equal outcome, which is extraordinary.
	Most equity agendas I've seen in America End up being unequal.
	There's no way to achieve.
	Just by definition.
	I mean, there has never been a society in human history in which everybody is equal because human beings are not the same.
	Well, there's been Chairman Mao's Communist Party.
	It would be the nearest thing you'd have.
	The only time we're all equal is when we're dead.
	Yeah.
	When we're all dead.
	Right.
	And then we're all equal.
	But until then, even in the Communist Party, Mao lived in a real nice house, right?
	No, exactly.
	And the same thing was true of Stalin.
	It's a fanciful notion that you can get to equity.
	And when you do that among groups, and the idea is that any evidence of disparity is evidence of discrimination, therefore the system is to blame for all of these disparities, you get to some pretty ugly places pretty quickly.
	I wonder what you make of the Democratic coalition and whether you think that Biden even has the ability within his own coalition, which is essentially college-educated white women and I wouldn't put it past him.
	I think he's quite a skillful political operator, actually.
	You don't spend 50 years in Washington as he has.
	Also, it's quite a steely streak, which I think comes from the devastating blows he suffered personally.
	He lost a wife and a baby in a car crash.
	He lost his beloved son, Beau, in his 40s.
	And I think that's given him an emotional steal, actually, which I've seen flashes of since the midterms.
	I wouldn't rule him out.
	I think it's a mistake of the Republicans to think this is a doddering old fool and we can't possibly lose against him.
	Because they lost against him last time and they really did take really a bit of a beating in the midterms, I would argue, comparative to where people thought the Republicans were going to end up.
	So I think I wouldn't underestimate Biden's ability to pull off another shock and to do it by moving more to the center in the way you said.
	Certainly you hear him saying a lot less woke stuff these days.
	He just isn't saying it.
	He stopped being the president of woke because he realizes actually it pisses most people off.
	So I think this backlash against the woke brigade, as I call them, I think is real.
	And I think Biden's got smart enough political antennae to realize that's not the way he's going to win again.
	Okay, so let's talk about wokeness.
	Obviously, calls to censor you have resulted in you actually losing a job for the great sin, as we discussed earlier, of saying that Meghan Markle is not a trustworthy human, which, as it turns out, maybe The most obvious statement in human history.
	But, you know, the Woke Brigade seems to have its way in nearly every area of certainly American life.
	And that seems like it was translating across the pond as well for the past several years.
	Do you think that they have now stepped so far that the movement against them, they've hit their high watermark?
	Two words, Roald Dahl.
	Fascinating to see how that story played out.
	Because two years ago, you would have had a bunch of Wokies leaping up and down defending it publicly.
	High-profile celebrities, right?
	They did it about Dr. Seuss, right?
	They removed Dr. Seuss from the show.
	There's been a very different reaction this time.
	A lot of people on the left actually also agree it's wrong.
	It's gone too far.
	They're actually rewriting vast swathes of Roald Dahl's children's books in a ridiculous manner where apparently fat is offensive but enormous is fine.
	I mean, Tractors can't be black because it might be racist.
	The whole thing was so absurd.
	In a way, it punctured the woke balloon.
	That one story, I think.
	And it kind of shocked people on the woke side to think, my God, even by our standards, this is completely nuts.
	So once that starts to happen, and you see the reaction being very different to how it was with Doctor Sears, once you see that happen, I believe the worm has turned.
	The woke worm has turned.
	And not before time.
	I think it's always been a fad.
	It's been a very insidious fad, a dangerous fad, a very destructive fad, but ultimately most people aren't woke.
	Not by the new definition.
	Yeah, the old definition of being aware of social, racial injustice, fine, we can all sign up to that.
	That's not what this is.
	Woke now is cancelled culture.
	People who operate it and promote it, who think that anyone who doesn't agree with their worldview, which is often a very warped view of the world anyway, must be shamed, vilified, abused and cancelled.
	That mentality is becoming more and more unpopular.
	And I think that the ones doing it are beginning to realize that.
	It's not over, and it's a war.
	It's a war for free speech and freedom of expression and all the freedoms we normally take for granted.
	But it's been a ridiculous assault on those freedoms.
	It's going to be kind of amazing that maybe the two key figures in the rollback of Wokeness are going to be children's authors from Britain, right?
	Between Roald Dahl and J.K.
	Rowling.
	Yeah.
	It's kind of an amazing thing.
	The most amazing thing about J.K.
	Rowling, I don't even like her.
	I've had a few spats with her on Twitter.
	When I got told to f*** off by Jim Jeffries on the Bill Maher show for saying that Trump wasn't Adolf Hitler, which I didn't think was unreasonable.
	But when I got told to f* off, she tweeted, is there anything more delicious than seeing Piers Morgan being told to f* off on live TV?
	So she's no friend of mine, and I'm no friend of hers.
	But the fact that she has been so ridiculously persecuted and abused and threatened as a woman for simply standing up to protect women's rights against a grotesque attempt to trash those rights is one of the most absurd things of modern life.
	It's absurd.
	The fact that you can espouse a belief in biological sex, and you're the problem, And that you can end up in a situation, as we saw in Scotland recently, with a male rapist putting his hand up and saying, I'm a woman, at his trial, so he can get put in a woman's prison where there'll be fresh targets for him, and it works, and he goes in there as a woman until there's such an outcry that not only has he then moved back, and I say he because I don't think he ever intended to be a proper woman,
	It gets put back in a male prison and the Scottish leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has to resign because of the furore he caused by this nonsensical gender limitless gender identification nonsense.
	That's where this goes if you don't actually battle it.
	But the fact that J.K.
	Rowling, one of the most popular authors ever in history, I mean the most popular, could just stand up for women's rights, to protect women, to make them feel safe, to battle for fairness and equality on things like the sporting field and so on, that she gets treated the way she did.
	If that doesn't tend to shiver down people's spines, I don't know what should.
	We'll jump back in in just one moment.
	This conversation does continue here, but only for our Daily Wire Plus members.
	We're going to get into a lot of hot topics, including the blowback against wokeism.
	We're going to get into Andrew Tate and masculinity.

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