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May 20, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:45:02
Milo: Forbidden Conversation
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I'm speaking today with Milo Yiannopoulos.
Milo is a hard man to categorize.
Part journalist, part performance artist, part agent provocateur, part comedian at wit and wit.
Yiannopoulos is a man of immense and complex self-contradiction.
He's half Greek and half Irish, but is known as an Englishman to the Americans with whom he has communicated extensively.
He's gay and Jewish by descent.
He married his long-term boyfriend and an African-American man in Hawaii in 2017, but faces frequent accusations of racism.
He is or was strangely attractive to young American Republicans and completed a successful and controversy-ridden tour of U.S. universities in 2016 and 2017.
For at least two years, he was one of the most well-known internet celebrities, let's say on the political front, caused more uproar than any other single person that I can think of.
He collected his fair share of enemies along the way.
He's often accused, for example, of being an alt-right supporter, an accusation justified in the view of those who oppose him by his association with Breitbart, for whom he was an editor.
In my view, for what it's worth, Milo was such a figure of inner contradiction and outer controversy that I believed from the beginning that his time was numbered.
Nonetheless, the circumstances of his demise were unpredictable, I would say, and that's in keeping with his apparent destiny.
After revealing details of his early sexual experiences at the hands of a 29 year old priest, whom he refused to name, he stated that he was an active participant in the events and that such occurrences were far more common and far more consensual than people were willing to admit.
I don't think he ever recovered from the controversy that those comments generated.
I should finish by saying that Milo is definitely now on the list of those who no one acceptably socially should ever speak to, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I'm talking to him.
I want to know what happened to him in his own words, and I don't really give a damn if that's politically incorrect.
Thanks Milo for agreeing to be on my channel and podcast.
Thank you very much for having me.
I take a slightly less fatalistic view of my prospects than your introduction would suggest, but certainly I went through an extraordinary tumble and I'm happy to share my thoughts about it with you.
Yeah, well, let's start by reviewing some of your history, if you wouldn't mind.
Tell me, let's start with a bit of your history in the UK before you came to the US. It's been long enough so that I think some biographical information would be useful for people.
So, tell me about your life in the UK before you came to the US. Then let's start talking about what happened to you as soon as you came over to North America.
Sure.
I had a very unhappy life, particularly a very unhappy 20s in London.
I started off as a journalist in some quite prestigious publications.
I was in a relationship that was, I don't think, healthy or happy for either person involved.
I was searching, I think.
I was looking.
I couldn't work out yet what I was, what I was for, what my purpose was.
And it wasn't until I got to America I discovered what it was.
But I started to explore at least what would eventually become my, I suppose, my civic function as bomb thrower and provocateur.
Right at the beginning of my career in journalism.
I mean, I was fairly predictably come from a broken home, not much love for or from either parent.
And I got lucky, a combination of luck and talent, writing for the Telegraph, which is the most prestigious newspaper in Britain.
And I began to notice the gap between the world that I was being asked to describe and the world that I could see existed.
At the time I was writing about technology.
I was being asked to say that Women were having a dreadful time of it in the emerging startup ecosystem in London, which as far as I could tell was the exact opposite of the truth.
And eventually these fissures got wider and wider to the point where I I sort of had this this moment where I realized that my profession was a crock of you know what?
And then if I wanted to if I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life, I should either blow it up from the inside by being one or pick something else to do and That was around the time that I attracted the attention of Breitbart, the site in the US. And I started from London writing from Breitbart in the US and at that time I didn't know what it was.
I never met Andrew Breitbart and I didn't know who he was either.
I don't think anybody knew what it was or who, what it was to begin with and it's a funny thing when you look at things in retrospect, you know, you get involved with people and organizations that develop a particular way over time and then it looks From a historical perspective, like that was self-evident from the beginning, but certainly not when you're dealing with a new organization.
Yeah, I mean it was new-ish.
I don't think that the values of Breitbart changed a lot, but I think perhaps its modus operandi, I think perhaps the way that it conducted itself as an organisation, shifted into high gear when Steve Bannon and I were there, and I was doing the cultural stuff, and Steve was using the rest of the site as a sort of battering ram, politically.
So I bear a large part of the responsibility for BrightBot becoming what it eventually became, although I don't think they've held on to that legacy very well.
I think it's a little sad the way that they're...
When I was there, we used to make the news and now they're sort of chasing after Turning Point, you know, with stories that could have been written in 2015, 16.
I don't think they've managed to maintain the...
Culturally defining excitement that was there when I was there, which I think is a function of me and Steve working together.
I suppose my center of gravity just started shifting to the US. I started getting invitations to go and speak at colleges, and one day I just sort of thought there were six of them in a row, so I thought there was no point flying home between them, I may as well just stay and just do sort of college after college.
And then suddenly I found myself Booking more of them and wondering why I should bother going home and my center of gravity editorially and in other ways was shifting to the US too so I Over the course of six or nine months began writing more about the States thinking more about the States being in it talking about it and then I suppose fast forward a year perhaps and I Was
one of the two or three people driving, you know, Breitbart as this extraordinary, momentous, fascinating, dysfunctional editorial force through the last election.
So what was it that attracted you, do you think, to the United States and the political concerns there?
Why away from the UK? I don't think Britain handles iconoclasts very well, and it particularly doesn't handle bombastic ones.
And I think a lot of people with outsized personalities find themselves investigating America as an alternative birth, because I think America has a much higher tolerance for outsized personalities.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's pretty clear that you had some of the characteristics that made people That make people stars, you know, that make people personalities.
That was obvious pretty much from the step.
Well, this is why I'm not worried in the long term about my career prospects.
You know, I had a stratospheric rise over a couple of years and, you know, a painful tumble.
But talent is talent and talent always wins.
And I've got 40 years ahead of me, you know, of whatever I choose to do with it.
So I'm not worried in the long term about my career prospects.
Good.
Well, we can talk about your dissent and the sort of catastrophe that Accompanied it and maybe about how you see yourself pulling yourself how you see Being pulled out of that.
I'd like to hear about that as well So what in the world do you think made you so attractive to American Republicans?
I mean, this is one of the things that struck me about you right from the beginning because it's not exactly like you're a poster boy for what you would assume conservative American Republicans would be attracted to and I think they quite liked the fact that I was reflecting their views in a package that you would more often think would be a liberal.
And of course I, you know, made that part of the act and part of the brand.
It's kind of like, you know, all these things and yet still a Republican.
But the real answer is joy.
There's a joylessness about a lot of conservative activists, authors and speakers.
And there's a joylessness in the intellectual dark web too.
It's a very fun-less place.
And I look out at the public intellectuals and commentators and speakers who are currently enjoying a moment in the sun, and each of them is in their own way quite joyless.
Quite devoid of mirth.
And I think that people liked my sense of mischief.
And they liked the fact that I was always smiling.
And I think it's unusual to see somebody talking about really serious things, who is the subject of the most extraordinary and relentless abuse, who nonetheless is always smiling.
And I have always been that person.
I've never stopped, not in 2017, 18 or today.
And I think people find that very mesmerizing and very attractive, because And very perplexing and difficult to understand, given the circumstances and the apparent seriousness of the topics.
I think it's to do with I mean, you know, joy is Christianity's great gift to Western civilization.
Laughter, you know, the medieval church is, you know, this place of song and of dance.
I think Christianity has become quite joyless.
The only places where there's a really impassioned, happy spirit of worship is in black churches.
But white evangelical Protestantism in the US has become I think quite suffocating and joyless.
I think the public square as a whole, in general, is a miserable place.
Twitter is a miserable place.
If you turn the television on, people are miserable.
I think there's something about me, there's something maybe missing in my brain that doesn't get ground down by it.
And I'm watching, you know, I had my, you know, moment in the sun.
Some other people are having a moment in the sun now.
That will, you know, that too will pass.
And I'm watching them and I'm watching them all getting ground down.
How do you?
Well, that's a good, that's a real question of interest to me from a psychological perspective.
I mean, you know, my suspicions, it's obviously that you're extremely extroverted.
I'm not claiming any particular brilliance for noting that.
And also that you're extremely open and that's the creativity dimension.
But I'm wondering about your Scores on neuroticism.
It's like you were you were subject to a tremendous amount of controversy and and then Quite a precipitous fall under strange and complicated circumstances and you seem to be able to survive that and You just described yourself as a relatively joyful person.
I mean, I'm a very happy person I think that Listen, conservatives are only out and off the playing field when they choose to be.
Because there's so few of us in such a wide open market.
The reason I'm not worried about my prospects in the long term is I still wake up every day with joy in my heart, brimming with energy and ideas.
I don't know anybody in public life.
Not one person in public life.
Who could have gone through what I went through and not been broken by it.
But I'm not.
It hasn't beaten me.
And I think that that's down to a combination of personal characteristics that I don't think many other people possess.
And that's Part of that is, you know, it's impossible to intimidate me, for instance.
I don't get scared of things.
I'm not scared of things.
I don't feel, perhaps to the same degree that other people do, embarrassment and shame.
So I don't mind Playing the fool, playing Falstaff, clowning, you know.
I don't mind subverting myself, laughing at myself because through that I'm able to point to truths that are real and big and beautiful and important.
I'm not an egotist, so I don't, and I think that's part of the same thing, I don't mind humbling myself because I play at having a big ego, but I don't really.
And I'm not Ground down or broken or upset by Things that, you know, that don't matter that much.
I mean, I have love in my life.
I have achieved more than 99.8% of journalists, political activists, you know, public figures.
You and I are the only people who have achieved remotely close to our level of success in our, you know, in the last 10 years worth of libertarian, conservative, IDW, you know, whatever.
Whatever this Grand nexus ecosystem is that we both belong to.
You and I are the only two people who have achieved the greatest success at it.
And I've had terrible things happen to me.
You're fortunate and nothing bad has really happened to you yet.
I can't think of anything really awful that's happened to you aside from the Cambridge thing, which I think that...
No, I wouldn't call that...
Well, I think you put that on yourself and I don't think it was...
I think you brought that on yourself and I don't think it was too much of a big deal anyway.
But nothing really bad has happened to you yet.
The worst thing imaginable has happened to me.
I had to stand up in front of the world and tell them that I had been sexually abused as a child and that this was why I'd spoken loosely and incautiously and used a formulation that I regretted about something that had happened to me and at the same time try to also say, well, I'm not going to stop making jokes about that or anything else.
For other people, I think that level of Public ritual humiliation would simply have snapped them and It didn't me and I don't know.
I mean you're the You're the psychology expert.
Perhaps you have a some insight of you on this The only person I know in my personal life a friend who has similar qualities is Ann Coulter To whom criticism is It's a game.
And she's able to very...
And the interesting thing is, you know, it's not enough to say that we're, let's say, sociopathic, because quite clearly we're both not.
We wouldn't be able to have some of the insights we do, and we wouldn't have the love in our lives that we do if we were sociopathic.
So it's not that.
But we do both have an ability to just pick things up, put them over there, and not allow them to...
To burrow in and have and that seems that seems to me to be that relatively rare combination of extreme Extroversion and very low neuroticism.
That's not the same as sociopathy.
I think you're right about that.
I think maybe that's what I've got Some people are just not that affected emotionally by negative events You know some people are devastated by the smallest of obstacles and some people can roll with punches that would Take a normal person out and continue to get back up.
Things do bother me in my personal life, but there are things that are actually significant, whether it's to do with my family or, you know, my loved one or whatever it is.
There are things that in my brain are emotionally significant, serious things, worthy of Unfettered access to my emotions if you like and they have that and they produce very strong reactions in both directions and a very passionate person I can even be hot-headed, you know when I'm Defending somebody I love for instance, but there's another world which is the professional world which is to me Just a just a big game.
It's a big fun game and this The reason I just kind of a trickster I think that's part of it.
There is a game-like element to what you're doing.
I very much see what I'm doing.
In life and will be doing for the next 40 years as playing a very complex and very enjoyable game of snakes and ladders.
And just because I hit a ladder on one of my first turns and then immediately the snake took me back to the front row, it doesn't mean the game is over.
You know, in fact, it just means you've learned the rules.
That's, I suppose, why I find it difficult to take too seriously, you know, harrowing introspection about, you know, whatever, because it's not how I apprehend the situation.
I can look dispassionately at what happened and why, and we can talk about that, and I have some ideas about that.
But...
I don't have a...
I don't have a sort of emotional...
I don't have anything to offload about it, really.
Okay.
You know, when that conversation about your early childhood sexual experiences first came out, I listened to it and I thought That there was tremendous trouble brewing there, you know, for a variety of reasons.
And if you remember, I phoned you at that point and suggested that we had a conversation and we made some efforts to manage that that never came to fruition.
And I always felt that that was unfortunate.
And so I'd like to, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about that situation.
Because you know, I had a lot of mixed feelings about what you said.
Like many people, and they weren't particularly judgmental by the way.
I mean, so you, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, because I want to get this story straight.
You related some experiences you had with a priest who was twice your age, right?
Something like that.
Yeah, approximately that.
You were about 14.
I think he was a little older than that actually.
It's difficult to judge ages when you are 14.
I think I thought that he was younger than he was at the time, and subsequently found out he was perhaps 10 years older than I thought he was.
But there was a significant age gap.
And so, arguably, he was someone who was in a position of authority, and that what he did with you was something that he shouldn't have done.
And also, It's highly probable given the nature of such things that you are by no means his only, let's say, target.
Now, when I heard you talk about that, the first thing that struck me about the way that you formulated it was your refusal to play victim.
Actually, I didn't see myself as one I know I know I know that I know that and that actually struck me is rather admirable because you came forward and said This is an uncomfortable truth, but you know I was of sufficient age to have a mind of my own and And this was something I was pursuing of my own volition.
That is how I felt at the time.
When you talk about the abuse of authority or whatever, I've never met an authority I recognize or respect.
You know, people have to earn my respect.
I have never encountered a person in a position of responsibility or authority who I have respected and deferred to merely by virtue of their office or their position.
I sort of constitutionally don't recognize authority.
So that element of it did not strike me until someone told me.
Okay.
Well, that's the thing.
Okay.
So, well, I can imagine that because I don't imagine that you were much different in some sense when you were 14 than you are now, you know, apart from obvious maturation.
You're an assertive and provocative person and you're an iconoclast and I can certainly see that That intrinsic respect for authority, which so oddly often characterizes conservatives, by the way, is quite absent in you.
That's the tabloid gadfly constantly taking potshots at the institutions that you also secretly love and are grateful for, but you are dedicated to keeping them on the ground.
It's the difference between You know, the British tabloids, which love to torment our Prime Minister, and the White House Correspondents Dinner, where journalists are seeking to participate in that prestige, rather than bring these people down to earth and make sure they never go a full day taking themselves too seriously.
So I think that's perhaps a British...
It's a bit of British...
A bit of the British psyche.
Right, right.
That seems...
Given my interactions with British journalists, that seems...
Like a perfectly appropriate statement now Despite the fact that when I heard you speak about what happened to you and my admiration for your refusal to play innocent victim I also had contradictory ideas that I think were more a function of my clinical training and There were two of them that I'd like to discuss with you.
I mean the first is You know, when you think about yourself as a 14 year old, you think about that 14 year old as yourself.
You don't necessarily think about that 14-year-old as a 14-year-old.
And you know, when you remember your 14-year-old self and then you go out and you see some 14-year-olds, it's actually quite a shock, or it can be quite a shock, because 14-year-olds are often a lot younger and a lot more clueless than you remember yourself being.
I think I know where you're going with this.
Well and so so good good well because the second part of what I thought was that like it and This is this the incredibly tricky part of this conversation as far as I'm concerned I mean one of the other things that got you in real trouble Apart from the fact that you wouldn't name your The person that you interacted with your abuser so to speak was that you made the unforgivable case I think publicly This
sort of thing happened far more commonly than people were willing to admit and I just as soon as you said that I thought man, you're you're dead in the water because Well true that may be it's not something that can be publicly discussed.
It's not I went a bit further though than just that.
I took it a step further even and said that not only is this something that happens far more often than people are willing to admit, it is a function of gay life and gay Adolescence, philosophy, whatever.
And it is a proper subject for humour.
And I insist on it being a proper subject.
Yeah, well, I wasn't even going to bring those two things up because I thought that just, you know, that merely bringing up the first part of that would cause enough trouble.
But I'm glad that you did bring the second part of that up.
Well, because there's a serious conversation that has to be had about this, and the damn conversation hasn't happened.
And I don't mean specifically about Even specifically about your particular experience, although I think it's a way into the conversation.
It's like, the first question is, well, it'd be interesting to take apart some of your claims, and I'd like to do that with your permission.
And I don't expect this to be an easy conversation.
No, I wasn't expecting to be, so go ahead.
Okay, okay, so the first thing I would say is that It isn't obvious to me that even if you were a willing participant in what happened to you when you were 14 that that justifies what happened to you on the part of the person with whom you were participating.
Well, no, of course it doesn't, but the way I apprehended it was that it was me.
Right!
And when I said a moment ago, I think I know where you're going with this, I can interject with a very small data point that I think explains how I think about this after some time in reflection, which is I have something now that I didn't have in 2017, which is a relationship with my stepson.
And He is 16.
And when I think...
Let's not...
Let's not finish that thought.
But when I consider how old he is and put myself at that age, suddenly the horror that I see in everybody else's faces, that I have never felt myself about what happened to me and therefore has never been communicated for me, a sort of acknowledgement and awareness that this is not normal and that this is a...
Horrifying and terrible things that happen to a small person.
I never apprehended it like that because I just thought of that 14 year old as me today.
Right, right.
And that's exactly what I picked up from your interview.
Until the last two years.
And now I'm experiencing getting to know a child as a co-parent, as a stepmom.
And now I get it.
Okay.
All right.
So, you know, I've seen this with my clinical clients, you know who who failed to notice in some important way that the person they were sometimes decades ago is not the person they are now and the memories they have from those times which are appropriate to those times are Are not the same memories that are appropriate to those times now, given their relative maturation.
I think that's fair.
And I think it took that change in my life circumstances to jolt me into realizing exactly what you're saying.
Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that.
So...
What's changed in the way that you view what happened to you?
And if you were interviewed, well, and I guess you are being interviewed about this right now, if you were being interviewed about what happened to you at age 14, I have two questions or three questions about that.
What do you think of the propriety of that?
How do you now view your role?
What do you think about the culpability of the person that that I would say In common parlance preyed upon you.
How has that shifted?
In the same way that there is, although it has been ruined by the progressives we both hate so much, a proper place for outrage.
It is a necessary and right human instinct and emotion that has a place.
There is also perhaps Much as it has been ruined by the progressives, a proper place for victimhood, when you are in fact actually a victim.
Right.
And I think that now I perhaps realize that I was one when I didn't know that I was one in 2017.
Yeah, well that's a hell of a thing for someone in your position to admit.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's rough, man.
And I think that that's as concise and as true an answer as I can give you.
I think that's about the answer because now I look at somebody I care about who is two years older even.
And the thought of me at that age and someone taking advantage, suddenly I get it.
I get it.
I'm like, I would kill the guy.
I would walk over there, I would shoot him in the head.
Like, I get it now.
Okay, so that's a lot different.
I didn't get it when I was...
Didn't get it when all I had to go on was my memories of being me at the time.
Yeah Well, one of the things that struck me is so absolutely absurd about what happened to you in the aftermath of that interview was that I thought okay, this is really and It's exactly what I would have expected to happen to someone like you because you're so contradictory is that Is that You actually had a claim to victim status Which you then refuse to capitalize on and then which people refuse to bloody well recognize in the midst of the interview
like the proper response to that interview should have been something like Well, here's someone who's talking about a case of child sexual abuse but hasn't realized or recognized that they were in fact Victimized in that situation and hasn't come to terms with whatever that might mean and so then common Among people who have been through these experiences,
because I have since writing about this, I wrote a little bit about this in a short book I wrote about the Pope recently.
And in other things, the brief mentions I've made of it since 2017, a lot of people have written to me with their own accounts.
And this is not uncommon.
No, I'm sure it's not!
...who have experienced this sort of thing.
And I guess there's some point in middle age where the penny drops.
But yeah, I guess there is a right and proper place to acknowledge and understand that you were a victim of something.
Again, I have to...
Another thing that upset people, I think.
Another thing that didn't do many favors.
But look, I am someone who will always...
Just speak it as I see it.
And that will have terrible consequences and it will have great consequences.
And that calculus will change over the course of the next few decades.
It wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me.
And people find that a terrible thing to come out of your mouth.
But it just wasn't.
It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
What's the worst thing?
Okay, so I got a couple of comments on that.
I mean, about 20 years ago, the American Psychological Association published a famous paper showing that most people who were sexually abused as children Recovered with very little psychological damage and that caused absolute outrage.
The US Congress in fact forced the APA, if I remember correctly, the American Psychological Association.
This is one of those unsayable truths, isn't it?
Well, they had to retract the article even though it was...
If you imagine the sort of trauma that we're expected to recognize that someone says they experience because of mean words on the internet and we have this economy based on What we all know is not true, but that, you know, these trivial frivolous things can cause some kind of actual trauma.
For an organization like that, or for someone in public life to come out and say, this huge thing actually didn't cause me that much trauma, it sort of imperils the whole victimhood economy, doesn't it?
Because if it's the case that Many or even most people who experience this simply don't have their lives ruined and defined by it.
That rather imperils the people who have made a career out of squawking victimhood for far, far less serious experiences.
And I think that's probably where...
The threat to the system kicked in.
I think that's true.
I think it's also the case that the politicians, although also looking for a cheap victory, moral victory in some sense, were also concerned that this was a potential step towards justifying pedophilia on the basis of undermining the claims of its absolutely catastrophic consequences over Decades, whereas what I saw it was was more as a testament to the fundamental resilience of human beings, right?
Isn't isn't that a positive thing?
Isn't that wonderful news that there is there?
There are these extraordinarily evil people who do depraved things, but the chances are you'll be all right You know that something like this could happen to you or could happen to somebody you love or somebody you know But that you know what chances are Things will be okay.
Now every once in a while somebody is just blown apart by it and you can never put them back together.
But that's not most people.
That's fabulous news.
But good news is the sort of thing that our current political climate, the public square in America, especially hates.
It's not so much whether it is...
It's a particular kind of reaction to, for instance, People being grateful and happy that capitalism is, you know, lifting millions of people out of poverty all over the world.
People don't like that good news because much of what goes on in public life, basically the whole journalism industry, much of the entertainment industry, I mean the whole of polite society, the whole of politically correct society depends upon Everything being terrible, in peril, getting worse all the time.
The sort of shrieking, urgent hysteria of the press is Made to look ridiculous when you point out, actually, the world's pretty great.
Not that many people go hungry.
Not that much bad stuff happens.
The bad stuff that does happen, we're discovering all the time that human beings bounce back in ways that, you know, we never even imagined.
The world ain't that bloody bad.
Nobody wants to hear that who has a vested interest in...
Yeah, well, at least if it isn't...
At least it's nowhere near as bad as it once was, which is something...
Or as bad as it profits the media to suggest that it is.
As bad as it profits the academy to suggest that it is.
These people, having relinquished their primary function, Whether it is, you know, speaking truth to power and, you know, printing the news that's, you know, relaying the news that's fit to print, or exploring the human condition, human nature, and, you know, building, you know, expanding the, you know, the horizons and the sum total of human knowledge.
The media and the academy have given up on those missions, instead replace them with an activism that depends on hysteria, but also on urgency.
There's a sort of constant drumbeat.
This is why, you know, it's always something new, always something new, always something new.
As soon as something might look like it's resolved, something ever more hysterical and new must be produced.
This is the natural life cycle, isn't it, of rights movements?
You've got the gay rights movement, which basically achieves everything it could possibly ever want.
Yet it somehow becomes more hysterical, not less, and starts focusing on ever more minor and insignificant things like transgender pronouns rather than AIDS. And now all of the gay charities are run by lesbians and are preoccupied with transgender pronouns.
You don't hear anybody talking about the fact that...
You see these posters on New York trams, on the subway, whatever they're called.
And they're saying, oh, there's a guy there and he's called Hernandez or Hernandez or whatever.
And the poster is saying his levels of HIV, thanks to his medication, aren't just undetectable.
They're not transmittable either.
Basically encouraging gay men to have sex with HIV positive other men.
I mean, it's kind of like sick.
This is because conservatives have completely stepped out of that sphere entirely.
Every time a conservative tries to say something in the gay world, even if it's with good intentions to help, they get killed.
So Republicans and even just all sensible people have simply stepped out of LGBT stuff and they just don't get involved in it at all.
So you get this sick, crazy, like, mental...
So with this, you know, the situation where they're encouraging these reckless, unsafe, horrendous behaviours, and who suffers...
The most marginalized communities of all.
Gay, black Americans have like a one in two chance of getting HIV. That's crazy.
And this is what gay charities are not talking about while they are insisting on ZZM or whatever.
This is the life cycle of rights movements when they run out of things to complain about, isn't it?
Okay, so let me ask you another personal question.
Before I turn to something that will probably get me in more trouble.
We'll see.
We'll see how that goes.
Well, you've subjected me to a therapy session.
I think you can get yourself into trouble as compensation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Well, there should be plenty of trouble emerge from this.
So, well, look, now...
One of the questions I had, again, as a consequence of watching that interview, was because, you know, you portrayed yourself as an equivalent partner in some sense, and I thought, look, that means that Milo hasn't updated his memories.
They're still the memories of a 14-year-old, and that's a problem.
And you said that that's something that you've actually rectified over the last couple of years, and so that's a very interesting thing to hear about.
But then I was also convinced that because you were still viewing what had happened to you through the lens of your 14 year old, your iconoclastic and rebellious 14 year old self, that it was possible, likely even, although not necessarily the case, that you underestimated the consequence of this interaction on your subsequent life.
And so, now you just told me that, you know, much worse things have happened to you.
Yeah, you might be right about that, because in 2017, that's what I thought.
And in the course of writing the short Pope book I just did, I asked the question, could this have affected the trajectory of my sexuality?
Yeah, well, I wonder.
Of course it could.
Well, so, in retrospect now, what do you think it did to you?
I don't think it made the difference between me being gay or not.
Okay, and why not?
Because I think that that was already happening and I think that I was aware of that and that that was very much You know some gay people talk about you know being a little bit over into gay or a lot or whatever you know some gay men can countenance or imagine having sex with women and for others it's just like you know in the way that straight men will talk about homosexual encounters.
Now I have had a few encounters with women but they were very unsatisfying and miserable for both parties and I think I'm quite, I don't, my hunch is, and I can't provide any evidence with my hunches, that this did not make the difference.
Okay.
I think that, like everybody, the mixture of nature and nurture in my case was probably swung over in that direction by a lack of good male role models in my relationship with my mother.
I distinctly remember picking Ethnic minority male sexual partners and Making sure that my mother saw me bring them home or saw me out with them to antagonize her I distinctly remember picking sexual partners to annoy my mom and that as demented as that sounds and God that's a that's that's a Chris I mean like a three-hour conversation.
No, I'm look I take trolling very seriously now I'm not saying that I went to play to annoy my mum, although I have made that joke in my age before, but I remember an element of mischief and defiance in there, which has always been at the core of my personality.
Just this reflexive and unshakable refusal to bow to any kind of authority.
And more than that also, but not just to thumb my nose at it, but to rub that authority's face in whatever it is that that authority finds the most repugnant.
Okay, well, so that's interesting.
So, first question there would be, perhaps, what in the world were you so irritated or angry at your mother about that that might have been one of your potential reactions?
I have said this in public before, so I don't mind sharing it with you, Ken.
My mother remarried, and her new husband was occasionally physically and constantly psychologically abusive, I guess, is the word that we would use now.
A deeply unpleasant home life.
I was a very private kid and I had all of these papers where I had written out poems and constructed these systems.
I just had it very highly developed in a world.
I've just lived in the realm of imagination and fantasy.
Private space and privacy was very important to me and my mother's new husband when I was at school would go into my room and shuffle things around just so that I knew he'd been in there.
So I knew that there was no space that was only mine and I knew by extension that I wasn't welcome there and that I shouldn't be there and that so long as I was under his roof I would never be my own human being and I would never have my own privacy and therefore autonomy as a human being.
And I blamed my mother for this.
I also blamed my mother for not leaving him when he hit me.
And I blamed my father for not taking me away, although I asked him to.
And that sort of began a chain reaction of resentment for both of them.
Right, okay, so most of the major authority figures in your life as parental figures had Your experience at that point was of betrayal of various magnitudes, right?
Yes, they didn't have my back.
Right.
From proper betrayal all the way down to just not having my best interests at heart, not having my back.
And, you know, all manner of experiences on that spectrum.
But I don't think I ever felt like my mother would go to the wall for me, you know?
Right, right.
That's yeah, that's rough man because one of the things you really want from at least one parent or at least one person in your life is the notion that fundamentally Man, you gotta have someone who's got your back.
I did get it later.
I did get it later in my mid to late teens with my grandmother, as so many oddballs do.
They end up skipping a generation and forming a close bond with a grandparent.
I did get it from my grandmother and I got the sort of unconditional love and support that I recognized again in the man that I'm now with.
So I have had that since in my life, and I'm not wanting for it.
I don't lack it.
I'm very happy with the amount of it that I now have.
So that's made up for it in some sense.
Oh, for sure.
Oh, for sure.
But I didn't have it at the time.
And I do remember really wanting them to hurt.
In addition to my ability to see round corners culturally and tell what's coming next, which I'm very good at, I'm also very good at intuitively figuring out what makes people tick and what drives them.
And I quickly identified that social justice warriors were hurting and wanting everyone else to hurt like they were when I very first started doing my speeches.
Because it was something I had felt myself, but only as a child.
I had grown out of it, and clearly they had not grown out of it.
But I saw in them that same sort of petty, vengeful, vindictive desire to make the world burn because they were hurting, that I had felt myself as a 13, 14, 15 year old.
And so I understood them.
And that's why I was able, and still am able, like nobody else, to get under their skin.
Because I get what makes them tick in a way that not many other people do.
None of the other conservatives who are sort of, you know, withering, you know, or contemptuous of them actually understand where they're coming from, like I do, which is why they hate me like they hate nobody else.
Right, well, because part of the thing that's so strange about you is that by all rights you should be on their side.
I should be one of them, really.
I ought to be.
Right, right, that's right.
Logically speaking, that would be your natural resting place.
So it is one of the things that well I also thought right from the beginning that that was one of the things that put you in in terrible Long-term danger of you know encountering a scandal that would do you in I mean it just seems so improbable to me that you could weather a That degree of, and that's what I mean by the paradoxical combination that you bring to the situation.
It's just, it's too many contradictory things to maintain themselves, regardless of your psychological integration or lack thereof.
I mean, I think I'm pretty well adjusted now, but I think perhaps another reason that this career stuff just doesn't bother me is that I don't I don't work in the same economy that a lot of other people do, in the prestige economy.
You wanted prestige when you asked Cambridge for that fellowship, and you sort of invited that little embarrassment on yourself because you asked for it, because although you declared...
Well, they said I asked for it, but that wasn't exactly...
If you didn't, you didn't.
But you declared war on a class of institution, you know, a higher education, to then...
Ask for or expect or be pleased to receive baubles from institutions that you have declared war on struck me as very odd and obviously destined for, you know, a mess.
That's an interesting point.
A moment of false optimism.
I don't think it's false optimism.
I think it's because you still live in the prestige economy.
Because I think that stuff matters to you.
And I think that you'd probably prefer to see these institutions fixed and to have A prestigious place within one of them, rather than to see them burnt to the ground, as so many conservatives and progressives seem to want.
They just want to tear up higher education.
I don't think you want that.
I think you want to fix it, and I think you want to be...
Well, I think, generally speaking, you know, That fixing things is better than burning them to the ground.
Well, I think you want to fix them and I think you want to be one of their crown jewels and I think you operate in the prestige economy in a way that I simply don't.
And that gives me power because I don't care.
That's sort of like a scandal from which you will not recover.
Is there somebody in polite society who will invite me to a dinner party, who won't invite me to a dinner party now, who would have in January 2017?
No.
Is there a TV show that won't have me on now, that would have in January 2017?
No.
I mean, you know, I had a blip on Bill Maher because of the college tour.
But there was no hope in hell, no way in hell I was ever going to get a TV show or anything like that.
Because unlike you, I can't bite my tongue.
And, you know, you, I think, are...
I see you maneuvering in a way that suggests that you want to do a lot of good and you're prepared to make some compromises in order to have a platform for which to do a lot of good in a lot of places.
I'm a purist and we differ in that because I can't bite my tongue.
And if I'm across the table from somebody who is an odious piece of you know what, I'm gonna tell them.
It's my greatest asset and my greatest weakness.
But it's because I'm a purist in a way that you're not.
I don't live in that prestige economy that the rest of you all live in.
And you all live in it.
The whole conservative libertarian media ecosystem, you all crave prestige.
What do you mean by the prestige economy exactly?
Position.
Recognition.
Titles.
Being a part of a sort of alternative polite society.
You don't want to be excised from the church because if you did you wouldn't have signed up with CAA. You want to be part of the church.
And I don't.
And it can be very difficult for people who are part of the prestige economy, but people who want the TV show, want the fancy agent, want this, want that, and they want to fix and rule these institutions.
It can be very difficult for those people to truly understand someone like me who genuinely can't imagine anything worse.
I cannot imagine anything more awful than having to make the sorts of constant compromises in what I say and do in order to maintain a position because I know it's doomed anyway.
Look at Roger Scruton.
He did nothing wrong.
He is beyond reproach.
He is the foremost conservative intellectual of his generation.
They just got him for saying something utterly innocuous in an interview.
They're going to get you anyway.
Nothing bad has happened to you yet.
But it's going to.
I don't say that with any pleasure whatsoever.
I sincerely do not.
Well, I've been expecting that for a very long period of time.
I'd say many bad things have happened to me.
They just haven't taken me out.
Not really.
I mean, compared to what some of us have gone through, you know, whether it's Laura or me or Alex Jones or whatever, nothing really bad has happened.
Well, fair enough.
It does depend on your comparison group.
Well, they are allowing you to grow.
I'll tell you what they're doing with you, what they did with me, which is you allow this phenomenon to blossom.
Up to the point you cannot bear it any longer.
And then you crush it.
And that is a horrifying warning to others.
Not to overstep.
So they did it with me.
They let me get as far as Bill Maher and the tour and all the rest of it.
And then they came for it.
They're letting you climb higher.
So your fall is going to be just like mine was.
And they'll get you on something else.
They'll get you on a complete nothing burger.
Because mine, let's face it, was a nothing burger.
The supposed scandal was predicated on an edited video which did not show that I said that I felt the age of consent was about right.
And it was based on a lie.
If it had been the case that everybody had seen what I originally said, they might have said, please explain this, but it would not have had the same effect that it did.
It had the effect it did because it was a deceptive, dishonest, misleadingly edited video.
Because I had created enemies on both left and right, the establishment right and the whole left teamed up to take me out.
You are walking into the same position.
So why do you see that it was the establishment right?
Because they're the ones who did it.
They're the ones who did it.
Explain that.
Well, it was the Reagan Battalion, National Review Crowd, who put that video together and shared it.
They were the ones who manufactured this because they were upset that...
I didn't give a stuff about CPAC because it means nothing to me.
I didn't even know what it was at the time.
But they were upset that I was speaking at CPAC because it was like their precious pure conservatism thing had been taken over by Trump World.
So they didn't care so much about the Bill Maher, but the National Review Reagan Battalion crowd who created and propagated and shared and whatever with this deceptively edited video did so because they couldn't bear the thought of me being the star turn at CPAC. Okay, and you think that that's why they pushed so hard on the pedophilia front?
Yes, because they knew it's the one thing that the conservative base would go, yeah?
And the left didn't take me out, the right did.
Okay, I wasn't aware of that.
I thought the left took you out too as well.
What power does the left have over me?
What are they doing to me now that they weren't doing in January 2017?
Nothing.
Well, I think what my impression, I'm not suggesting that I'm correct, but my impression was that it had something to do With the second of the two or three topics we were going to discuss, which was your claim that the experiences that you had are actually very characteristic of the gay community.
No, you see, interestingly, what actually happened about that specific thing is the entire gay liberal establishment went silent.
Because what I said was, And I wouldn't phrase it this way again because it was not quite what I meant and it was...
Let's say incautiously phrased to put it mildly.
What I said was that relationships between older men and young, I should have said younger men, are a common function of gay life.
And I think I said, I'm afraid, I think I said after a lot of drinks on a late night live stream, they can be hugely positive experiences.
I shouldn't have put it like that.
I should have said they are a function of gay life.
And in many cases, like a 35 year old man with a 20 year old or whatever, Very often that 35-year-old will sort of induct the 20-year-old into the gay way of things, show them where the clubs are, show them the ropes, in lieu of parents, because the boy's parents don't understand him, maybe don't even know, or have rejected it or whatever.
So very often there's either an avuncular or a paternal dimension to these relationships.
On that point, and indeed throughout the whole controversy, the gay left went silent.
On February 21st, 2nd and 3rd, 2017, gay journalists were nowhere to be found in America because they did not want to have that discussion because they know it's true.
Okay, so was that a consequence of abandoning you by inaction then?
No, no, no.
What I'm saying is that that's not what was so unforgivable.
That wasn't the problem.
Okay, so then, well in that case then I guess it's a matter of not so much the difference in age, but the difference in when that age difference starts.
So let's say...
So we've had a conversation so far which is presumed that the contents of what I said was important and that we should dissect it.
This is a mistake because it doesn't matter what I said.
It doesn't matter whether I was right to say it or what the nuances or vagaries are of a particular statement that I say is deceptively edited here or whatever.
It doesn't matter.
Narrative was established and it was repeated by right and left and the person was ejected from, you know, from public life and from whatever, right?
This is what's going to happen to you.
This is what's going to happen to Ben.
This is what's going to happen to Dave Rubin.
Because nobody stood up for me, The playbook became established.
And now that is your fate.
All of you.
That's how you're all going to go out.
And it doesn't matter what you say.
It doesn't matter what the subject was.
It doesn't matter what the incautious phrase was.
I mean, Candace Owens, it could have happened to her recently with her stupid...
She tripped over herself saying something about Hitler and there was a sentence that I'm sure she would phrase differently a second time.
Everyone sort of knew what she meant.
But it could, if the stars had aligned, have done to her what happened to me in February 2017.
The content doesn't matter.
It was the fact that the left and right decided to take this person out, and any pretext would have done fine.
So we've had a discussion sort of talking about, well, what was it you said that was so unacceptable?
Nothing.
It was me.
It was the fact that I had...
Yeah, but there's also the mystery.
Look, fair enough, you know, and I'm not disputing that.
That there were any number of reasons to make you a target.
But I am curious about why it was that particular interview that did it because it was very sudden.
Because I was scheduled to be the star speaker at CPAC and the National Review crowd could not handle it.
So they went through the hours and hours and hours and hours of old live streams and they found something that would They found something that would get to the Republican base.
Something they could sell to alienate me from Republicans, rather than just the left.
And then they decided this person's gonna go.
This is a power they still have, and it's a power they will leverage against the rest of you too.
My question is, we can talk a little about where I'm going to go next and what I'm going to do next professionally, because I think it might help the rest of you when this inevitably happens to you.
But this is a power that I still have.
It is a power that they can and will leverage against other people.
And unfortunately, the brightest star and the greatest standard bearer, the court jester of the movement, was allowed to be decapitated.
And because that happened, The playbook is now established for it to happen to everybody else.
And it will happen to everybody else.
It's already happened to other people.
You've seen it happen to others, right?
It happened to Sargon of Akkad.
Exactly.
In a lesser...
This is now how it's going to be.
And it didn't have to be like that.
The only way that this boycott and defenestration What could have been successful would be if Republicans said, okay, we won't invite him to anything, we won't have him on our radio shows, he's too hot to handle, too much drama, too much hassle, right?
What the left does is immediately start putting that person on conference stages and panels to get over that period of like, ooh, is this person going to become untouchable?
They drive a truck through that by immediately getting that person on TV and on conference stages a lot to drive through that and to make sure that person doesn't get removed from circulation.
That's what the left does.
When Linda Sarsour is discovered to have said something awful, suddenly she's on conference stages every two days, it seems like.
She's speaking in New York.
She's doing this.
This is not an accident.
This is on purpose.
This is the left...
Leaping into action to ensure that she survives, right?
Conservatives did the opposite with me.
They allowed the left and the establishment Republicans who hate them to dictate who would and would not be a proper subject for discussion and who should and should not have, you know, a column and all the rest of it.
And that was absolutely suicidal.
And the reason that so many other media figures were secretly happy to see it happen to me is that they're idiots who believe that this is a zero-sum game.
They think that by removing me, they create space for themselves.
This is not true.
There is nobody in the conservative or libertarian ecosystem who offers what I do.
There's not a single fucking one of you can crack a good joke.
You have your gifts, that's not one of them.
Not a single one of you is funny.
Not a single one of you could have a late night chat show, you know, that's cabaret comedy like Johnny Carson, you know?
None of you.
Nobody has filled the void left by me because I'm a once-in-a-generation talent.
And sorry to be egotistical, but it is what it is.
Nobody has filled that void, which is why I'm not worried about coming back to it and coming out of retirement, you know, and refilling it myself.
But something did happen to me, and that's that I sort of gave up on conservatives a little bit.
And so when I do return, it's going to be very much more in the mold of a more conventional comedian.
And that's what I am currently closing funding to do as we speak down here in Oklahoma.
Much more in the vein of an entertainment figure and much, much less of the politics.
That might be a relief for you.
Well, not really because I quite enjoyed it, but the effect of this hasn't been to kill me.
The effects of the cowardice of other conservative media figures and the conservative base, their failure to stick up for me in February 2017, the effect wasn't to kill me.
The effect was to lose one of their greatest and most effective champions.
Because I'm fine.
I'm doing good.
Okay, so let's talk about that being fine.
So I want to go back to...
I still have a question about the...
Older man younger man relationship issue.
Can't we talk about something else?
Well Humor me for two more minutes because there's actually somewhere I want to go with this.
Okay, so the the first issue is Where's the line property drawn in those relationships is As far as you're concerned with regards to age?
And where is it usually drawn?
So now you're trying to get me in trouble.
I'm not, I'm really not.
I don't want to get you in trouble.
I don't think there is a line to properly be drawn, because you're basically just talking degrees of degeneracy at that point, aren't you?
You know, the fact that you get saddled with this aberrant sexuality, and you then have to go out and make the best of it.
The fact that you find this paternal or avuncular dimension in a relationship with an older man that may also have a sexual component.
I mean, this is layer upon layer upon layer of dysfunction.
So you're not going to get me to say 10 years is the right gap, because none of it's the right gap.
It's all fucked up.
What's the alternative?
I mean, partly, hypothetically...
I wish conversion therapy worked.
I wish conversion therapy worked.
At least...
You've said that before.
At least in the case of lesbians, we know that we can push women back with men, and most of them will be happier as a result.
With men, on the other hand, some of us are just gay.
And...
I'm not going to be drawn on what the correct kind of...
I wasn't I wasn't trying to corner you, you know Well, I don't want to corner you this is something I'm really curious about because you made the case and you made a strong case that Relationships between younger men and older men were very common in the gay community Well, it's not me making the case.
That's an established fact.
I mean, every gay person knows that.
That's got nothing to do with me.
That's just me pointing out something that every gay person knows, which is that when people first become sexually active or aware of their sexual orientation or they first start to go out on the scene or whatever, they very often form an attachment with an older man.
It may just be somebody five years older.
In some cases, it's somebody a little bit older than that.
Fair enough.
How often do you think that that's happening at the age that it happened to you?
I think it happens all the time.
I think it happens everywhere.
And I think it's an inevitable result of having an aberrant sexuality where you have to seek out kind of alternative parental figures because yours aren't fit for purpose for this particular part of adolescence, you know?
Right, but then you just said too that this isn't an objection, that you don't see a clear Ethical pathway forward out of that.
Well, none of it's ethical.
I mean, it's all debased and degenerate.
How?
What do you mean by that exactly?
Because I think there's an element of predatoriness in almost every gay interaction and relationship.
And this is just one example where it is more obvious and more visible.
But I think that there is a predatory component in Even in gay friendships.
And you think about the way that...
Well, that might have something to do with the more, arguably, with the more predatory element of male sexuality.
Right, right.
We're gonna talk about undiscussable things.
Right, well, you take the controlling, calming, mediating influence of women out of the equation, and men just hype each other up, which is why gay men end up promiscuous, right?
Because you're taking out that That restraint.
Right, exactly.
Restraint is the word I was looking for.
You're taking out the restraint that's typically provided by the woman.
And instead you can just, you know, whatever.
Okay, so hypothetically that was supposed to be solved at least in part by the introduction of Like socially sanctioned monogamous relationships, right?
Because I've had friends I knew about heightened male promiscuity among the homosexual community and it's heightened by a substantial margin and The liberal types who I thought were reasonable and I certainly don't think all of them are Made the claim to me that the reason for that enhanced promiscuity was that all the male homosexual sexual activity had to Occurred behind the scenes and that it was impossible for men to...
That's a ridiculous argument.
Male homosexual promiscuity is obviously simply a function of what happens when you put two men together attracted to one another and you don't have the restraint of a woman.
It's obvious and also you cannot successfully box A transgressive sexual identity into, when we say, heteropatriarchal institutions like marriage, and expect gay people to just suddenly become, you know, normal, monogamous, whatever.
It doesn't work like that.
Well, it seemed to, okay, that's fine.
So, but it seemed to me that in some sense, Well, here's something else that is no doubt going to cause trouble.
It seemed to me that that was kind of part of the bargain.
Like, wasn't that the bargain?
I always thought that was part of the deal, is that, you know, in exchange for having this millstone around your neck, in exchange for the terrible agony of giving up fatherhood, which, you know, you can adopt and blah, blah, blah.
But ultimately, you know, basically, it's like joining the priesthood.
You know, you give up fatherhood.
In exchange, you get to participate in a sort of taboo-breaking transgressive experimental life that performs perhaps some kind of societal function, might even perform an evolutionary function.
You have the excitement of the marginal.
Exactly, and that's why I am the world's greatest hypocrite on one subject and one subject only and that's gay marriage.
And that's because I don't have the foggiest idea what I think still, even though I've got one.
I'm under no illusions that it is a union under the Lord, but I remain politically against gay marriage despite the fact that I got one because I met somebody who completed me and I couldn't think of anything else But of course I would marry him.
So I'm a mess on that subject.
Yeah, that's definitely a mess.
I make no claim to coherent logical positions on that one subject.
That one subject, I'm a mess.
But the reason I always was so skeptical of gay marriage is that it was robbing us of the one thing that we had, the one good cool thing about being gay, that you had in exchange for the awful horror of not being able to produce a child with the person you love in the ordinary course of sexual congress.
When you realize that, and I don't think a lot of gay people realize that ever, but I realized it quite early.
When you realize that, the bottom of your world drops out, and you have to do something else.
You have to find a purpose.
And if your purpose isn't going to be fatherhood, this is why so many gay men join the priesthood, because they want to be a different kind of father.
You know, they want to be a shepherd.
You have to find some other kind of purpose and very often for gay men that's creativity, experimentation.
It's the license that we're given by the rest of society because we We don't have this other thing.
Trying to cram...
Again, I'm a complete hypocrite on this subject because I live in total married bliss.
I live in beautiful monogamous domestic harmony.
So I'm a 100% hypocrite on this subject.
But it still feels to me a shame to condemn our experimenters.
You know the people who are so over-represented in artists and musicians and even politicians and warlords, you know, to sort of condemn them to the same, you know, the same monotonous drudgery that you breeders have to submit to.
Yes, well, I can imagine that it sort of grates against your, what would you call it, your anti-authoritarian My rebellious spirit and all the rest of it.
Poetic justice in some sense.
This is one of the many things that convinces me that God is real because there's a humor in that which could only have come from someone doing it on purpose.
You know what?
I'm going to give you something that's just going to remind you that you don't know it all.
And it's going to confound you for the rest of your life and remind you that you too are messy and complicated.
And on this one subject, you are never going to be coherent or logical.
Good luck with that.
I have another terrible question for you.
So I read Martel's book.
On the Catholic Church about homosexuality in the Vatican.
It's a very contentious book, let's say, written by a gay man who claims that homosexuality is extraordinarily common in the Vatican.
It is.
And that the kinds of relationships that you describe between older men and younger men are Common in that culture as they're common in the rest of the culture.
Yes, they are.
So I've written a book on the subject too, and I can tell you for a fact that both of those things are true.
It's called the Lavender Mafia in the Vatican.
For those viewers who don't know, it is a cabal of not just gay bishops, but specifically progressive left-wing gay bishops.
Yes.
And my book was a little bit more politically focused than his.
My book was drawing attention to the fact that the same people who want to water down the liturgy, who want for divorcees to be able to receive communion and want gay people to be whatever, they're the same people who've been covering up child abuse in the church.
And it seems that the same people who have been doing the child abuse and covering it up are also the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive reform of the Catholic liturgy and of Catholic practice.
And this, of course, resonates with what we know from other industries, doesn't it?
Just like Hollywood, just like the press, just like the academy.
The people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive free-for-all sexual liberation are the people with the Ugliest and most depraved skeletons in the closet.
The rest of us are quite normal.
So my book was more about that, but I can tell you that it's absolutely true.
The mistake that the Catholic Church has made, and I remain a Catholic despite the terrible state of the Catholic Church.
Yes, and all the other contradictions in your life.
You know...
They've never bothered me.
They've never scared me.
I'm not afraid of that.
I'm quite excited by that because I look forward to a day when I might either get closer to a resolution or be happy with not finding one.
I can imagine Ben Shapiro would be kept awake at night by this.
But I'm not, you know, because I don't need everything in my world to form into a perfect, you know, into like some sort of like Kantian or Wittgensteinian superstructure where everything has its right place and everything is perfectly organized and all the dependent things are in the right...
That's not what human beings are like.
That's not what we are.
We're much, much more complex and messy than that.
And I'm very much looking forward to 40, 50 years of exploring my own ludicrous, you know, internal nonsense.
I remain a Catholic, but the issue that the Church has had, the mistake that the Church has made, is turning a blind eye, as the Church would put it, to sin.
Turning a blind eye to rampant gay sex in a vocation that is supposed to be celibate, supposed to be chaste.
And to associate that hypothetically, Martell's claim, with the proclivity to cover up the child's sexual abuse because of it, which is his most radical claim, I would say.
I don't know if he's wrong about that.
What I would say is, the way the church would put it is, you know, if you make room for one sin, others will follow, right?
So what that means in practical terms for the Catholic Church is, because the priesthood is somewhere where lots of gay men go, and a blind eye is routinely turned to their sexual peccadilloes, even if it's just with each other and there's nothing non-consensual or abusive going on,
because it's a sexual free-for-all, because it's the kind of place where Supposedly transgressive or forbidden things happen routinely with no consequence that it becomes an institution that attracts other kinds of people who have other things to hide like pedophiles.
Where are you going to go if you have some kind of Psychiatric dysfunction or whatever it is like that you're going to go somewhere that routinely overlooks or ignores sexual wrongdoing Of course you are.
That's what Christians mean when they say, you know, you let one sin and others will follow.
They don't just mean it in the sense of personal behavior, like if you let yourself do one thing, you'll let yourself do others.
But it also works in institutions too.
And, of course, lefties will say the reason that all of these problems happen in the Catholic Church is that priests are required to be celibate.
The opposite's true.
They haven't been celibate for a very long time, and that's what's created the problem.
Because there's now an entrenched left-wing gay mafia that effectively runs the Catholic Church that has engaged in the systematic cover-up of child abuse so as to protect its own power.
And that's about as bad as it gets, you know, in terms of global institutions who have lost their way.
That is as bad as it gets.
I want a black pope because I want there to be a doctrinally conservative because all of the Catholics in Africa are like pre-Vatican II. They're serious Catholics.
And it will make life very difficult for progressives accusing a black pope from Africa of being a racist and a sexist, you know, because he actually wants Catholic doctrine to remain Catholic doctrine.
But the present Pope is basically, he is not himself a homosexual, as far as we know, but he does sit at the head of this Lavender Mafia.
And he is propped up by people like Cormac Murphy O'Connor from England and Wales, Vincent Nichols, and all these other aging 60, 70-year-old liberal cardinals.
Who are products of the 60s, who are soft on communism.
And what my book was trying to show was that The soft on communism thing is entwined with the abuse, with the wrongdoing, with everything.
They're the same people doing everything.
So, Theodore McCarrick, who has the distinction of being the world's only ex-cardinal, because Francis had to remove his cardinalcy from him, had to degrade him is the technical term.
He was Francis' envoy to China.
And he was the one who put the deal together with Francis to allow the Chinese state To participate in choosing Catholic bishops.
This hasn't happened since Gregory VII. The Catholic Church has been ferocious about choosing its own bishops, but they handed selection of the bishops over to the Communist Party in China, knowing that Catholics are routinely persecuted and killed in China, because they never met a socialist they didn't like.
And it's that particular 60s, 70-year-old child of the 60s, aging hippie liberal that lives in another planet from the rest of us and is still thinking, you know, if only they...
Sorry, there's some lawnmower, Oklahoma.
If only socialism were tried one more time, perhaps it would be okay this time.
That's the world these people live in.
And they also...
That's in your book, Hope.
Hope.
It's called Diabolical.
How Pope Francis betrayed clerical abuse victims like me and why he has to go.
It's called Diabolical.
Anyway, I talk about that in the book.
I'm not here to book the book.
But no, it's very interesting how the same people who are far leftists who are pushing for church doctrine to be watered down, which has the effect of emptying the pews.
Because when people go to church, they want the fire and brimstone.
They go to be told what to do.
They want the Bible.
They want Jesus.
They don't want climate change.
Right, right, right.
They don't want a bishop talking to them, and I'm not making this up.
There are seminaries now where the seminarians are starting to give sermons on toxic masculinity.
This is a church that has no manly men left in it.
Every man in that church is a home mom.
There are no men left in the congregations.
There are no heterosexual men left in the clergy.
And this is a church that thinks it has a too many men problem.
This is a church that...
The reason that this subject interested me in addition to my Faith is that this is another arena in which the loss of manliness and masculinity and the loss of a proper appreciation of the heroic masculine virtues has led to chaos and disaster.
Because no true father, by which I mean the sorts of fatherhood that the priests are supposed to Give up having children in order to embark upon.
No spiritual leader with integrity would stand by and watch children being abused and cover it up.
This is something that gay people do because they think what they do is wrong, so they're happy to cover for somebody else who's doing something wrong too.
A father, a real father, doesn't sit idly by while children are being abused.
He takes, you know, he takes steps to stop it and he punishes the people who have done wrong.
That's the righteous indignation and outrage of a true father.
And that appreciation of, you know, like, it's right and proper to hate the hateful and we should be outraged about it.
Well, you said that's part of what you've learned over the last couple of years.
Right, but that heroic manly virtue is something that has been sort of systematically wiped out of the Catholic Church, just like it's been wiped out of other places in public life.
It's gone from journalism, like it's gone from the academy, and it's had results that everybody knows about in all those different arenas.
So it was interesting to me writing the book, finding that most of the problems, most of the...
Things that are happening in the Catholic Church, most of the problems the Church has got itself into, basically boil down to there being no men.
It's all women and gays.
And the vast majority of the child abuse scandal and all the other things that are wrong with the Catholic Church are a product of the Church losing its connection to masculinity and simply having no men left in it.
Oh good, well good.
There's nothing controversial about any of that.
So that's quite a relief.
So We don't have to be in parallel Okay, so I want to return to something if you don't mind I I want you to tell me what you think the consequences of what happened to you when you were 14 might have been.
Okay, I don't know.
Can you guess?
I mean, look, if you're not...
I'm not unwilling to discuss it with you.
I'm not having a problem being forthcoming.
I just don't know.
The only thing that I've really thought about is whether or not it might have affected the trajectory of my sexuality.
And I think that it may well have done, but I don't think it on its own was enough to make a difference.
I think I'm probably right about that.
You've also talked about, just in this conversation, about the transgressive nature of that sexuality.
And now you've participated in that even, let's say, as an active participant.
And the question is, what did that do to you?
What did the knowledge of that do to you because you had to live with it?
I don't know if it's a fair question.
I don't know if I'm phrasing it.
No, no, you're phrasing it fine.
I just don't know the answer to it.
In the same way that I don't think anybody can know what quote-unquote made them gay, you know?
I think everybody is born with a more or less of a predilection, whether or not you believe in epigenetics or whatever.
Some people do, some people don't, but I think everybody probably has a sort of predisposition and coupled with early experiences, you end up either mostly having sex with men or not, right?
I don't think that we're ever conscious of the processes acting on us at the time, and therefore it's very difficult.
It's pure speculation based on whatever we happen to remember, trying to work out what it was that made the difference.
And I don't think it's something that could ever satisfactorily be answered, simply because we're just not aware of the processes acting on us.
I don't know if my dad not saving me from that household made me You know, sort of made some kind of misfire, rewired, like, you know, I said something haywire in my brain.
I don't know whether I resented and disliked my mother so much that I went off all women.
I don't know.
And I don't think there's ever any way to know.
And for the same reason, I don't think there's any way that I could possibly answer.
And I don't think anybody could beyond blind speculation.
And I think that most people who are...
Most people who try to explain what abuse might have done to somebody, in almost every case, I see their political prejudices and their biases at work out there in search of justification.
The truth is, I have no goddamn idea and neither does anybody else.
No one can possibly have a clue because these things are acting below the conscious level on us in a way that we cannot dissect and analyze.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
So let me, let me ask you, then let me switch topics.
So, you know, you've been less in the public eye since this scandal.
I'm retired.
I've been retired.
You've been retired.
I've been retired.
But you published your book.
Look, I sold a quarter of a million books.
I made millions of dollars.
I have more nice stuff than I know what to do with.
I have a husband I am deeply in love with.
I could die happy tomorrow.
I helped to get a president in office.
I'm one of the seven people that put Trump in office.
And that's not egotism.
That's a fact, right?
I'm one of the seven people that put Donald Trump in office.
I can die happy.
It might be you too in purgatory for you as a consequence.
What happens after I die for that particular crime, who knows?
But the fact is, I have accomplished more than the vast majority of people walking this earth.
And if I were to do nothing else professionally now, I would be infinitely more successful than all of my critics combined.
So I'm good.
There's rumors of your current state.
There's rumors that you're terribly indebted.
There's rumors...
No, no, no.
Okay, so sometimes, you know, One of the problems with trying to find out what's true about me is I like to troll journalists and I confirm or deny according to my whimsy.
So when somebody writes to me saying, is it true you're $2 million in debt?
I say, no, darling, it's $4 million.
What I won't go to the trouble of explaining is that of my many companies, the one that was funded by the Mercers, who withdrew their political investments from Steve Bannon and from me at the same time, that particular vehicle is somewhat in debt.
But I'm not in debt.
I don't have any personal liability whatsoever.
The sum total of the money I owe is about $977 to Capital One.
Because I can't get any better credit cards than that because I haven't been in this country for long enough.
I see.
So it's a corporate problem.
I might not have as much money as I had two years ago.
I don't.
But I'm not two million in debt.
One of my companies is, and will probably have to either try to fight, it will have to fight its way out of that, or it will have to, you know, go through some kind of insolvency process or whatever.
But I'm not in debt.
I just never bothered to correct the record.
And frankly, when a journalist, if a journalist wrote to me, so sorry about the noise, if a journalist wrote to me and said, are you two million in debt?
And I made the very important critical distinction between me And the business?
Yes.
They wouldn't write that up anyway.
They would take my confirmation of the figure as confirmation that I'm in debt, and just write what they wanted to anyway.
So I feel no, I mean, it's not a crime to lie to journalists, and I feel no obligation to act as their fact-checking result.
I think it's actually a crime to tell the truth to journalists, isn't it?
Amen!
Amen!
No, if somebody comes to me...
It's treated like a crime often.
If somebody comes to me to ask for a comment, I think it's a moral obligation to fuck with them.
Which is why I got myself into trouble that time before, you know, when someone shot up the newsroom, wherever it was.
Because I made some flippant comment about vigilante death squads and journalists or something.
And I didn't post it publicly.
I wasn't like inciting people to hurt journalists.
I wrote it privately.
To somebody who then published it and wrote a story about it and then they used that as evidence that I was ginning up like people murdered, whatever.
These are some of the consequences of being the kind of person who can't bite their lip, who can't hold their tongue.
So my job is to create a career in which that doesn't matter because I'm not, because my success My income, my fanbase, my profile, whatever, isn't reliant on the prestige economy, but it's also not reliant on the sort of rules of journalistic propriety or whatever.
So this is why The reason I'm in Oklahoma is I'm closing the last tranche of money to do a late night chat show.
This is the thing I alluded to earlier in the conversation.
I see.
I see.
So that's part of your future plans.
And who are you doing that with, if you don't mind me asking?
Are you still in the process of waiting to announce that?
I haven't announced anything yet.
So I'm going to do the Money in the Bank first, and then I'll do all my hires, and then I'll announce partners and all the rest of it.
But the basic, the idea of it is what I should always have been doing, which is somewhere between Bill Maher and Johnny Carson, I can do my characters, I can do my Ilhan Omar, my Dr.
Christine kind of characters as cold opens like SNL, except they'll actually be funny.
I can do monologues, I can do interviews, all the rest of it.
And I'm a live act.
I'm not one of these people that can just babble for three hours a day, like some of the podcasters can do, some of the YouTubers can do.
I just find it so boring, you know?
I don't want to just babble for three hours.
No one wants to hear the same opinions from the same four conservatives on the news every day.
It's just mind-numbingly dull.
That's not me.
I'm a writer and a live act, right?
That's where I live.
That's my happy place.
So it'll just be once a week.
And so, how are you going to protect yourself, just out of curiosity, from being censored and taken out?
Because I'm going to make it absolutely anti-fragile.
We're not going to be on social media.
We are going to encourage viewers not to share clips.
We're going to beg people not to put us on social media.
We're going to host the video on our own player, on our own website.
I see.
If you want to watch it, put your email address in.
And we can sell into the email list, right?
So we can, you know, do newsletters with authors and all the rest of it.
So it's something approximating a private subscription service.
Yes, it isn't completely dissimilar from Alex Jones's model, just without the homegrown products.
Right, well that's what we're hoping to allow people to do with this platform that we've been building as an alternative to Patreon.
You know, on a broader scale.
Well, maybe I'll be on that, if you'll have me.
Because this is the only thing I'm not banned from, perhaps.
I think these hermetically sealed little universes are the future for us.
Look, social media isn't for us.
The people who run these companies hate us.
They are dedicated to our annihilation.
They want to see us wiped off the face of the planet.
There is no point handing distribution over to people who hate.
And why would you drive up the market value of these companies by providing them free content?
Just leave!
And I'm always the person who has to do it two years before everybody else.
So this is what I'm going to do, which is just leave social media.
I'm going to spend a bunch of money converting my Facebook fans into a big powerful email list and I'm just going to leave.
There will be life after social media, trust me.
Once upon a time, people didn't imagine that there would be, no, that MySpace wouldn't still be here.
There was AOL, GeoCities, blah, blah.
The world moves on.
And in five years, no one will have a Twitter account anymore.
And you'll be wondering what on earth you were panicking about.
And the people who didn't look ahead will be lost.
I will have a three million strong email list that I write to every day with a hilarious daily column.
And they'll tune in on Friday nights to watch my show.
And I'll be perfectly happy.
Nobody can take that away from me.
What's the timeline for that?
When are you expecting to roll that out approximately?
I've pretty much semi-tolled people already, so the cat's out of the bag, so I haven't really broken the news now.
But once the money's in the bank, then it'll be six to eight weeks before we have a set built, so two months before we drop.
I'm going to have a very open gestation process.
I'm going to show pictures of the set while it's being built and all the rest of it.
We're not going to do grand announcements because I've done enough of those in my career.
So we'll just have a very iterative period of assembling everything.
And then in about two months, I will drop episode one and it will be the funniest, most hilarious, unmissable hour of television that's somehow not on TV. Produced by anybody in the country and it will be unmissable and hysterical It will teach you something because we'll have a serious component to whether it's a mini documentary or an interview or a review of something and it'll be bookended by just the funniest political satire and you know and characters and nonsense
that nobody can do but me and It's sort of what I always should have done.
It's what I've always wanted to do.
And now I have the breathing space, if you're like, well, no one's looking, well, no one's expecting daily this, that, or the other from me.
I'm in my, you know, in my first retirement period.
Well, like Cher, I will come out of retirement many times in my life.
This is, I've had this nice space where no one's been kind of down my neck to deliver anything.
Have you enjoyed that?
Like, has there been anything advantageous to you about the fact that you've been sort of pulled away from the public spotlight?
It's been wonderful.
I've been able to dedicate two years of my life to getting to know the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, you know?
And now we can go about, now I'll throw myself back into the fight.
He's got his own career and all the rest of it, but we've had something that most married couples don't get, which is two years just together, at the beginning of our life together.
Most people don't have that luxury or anything even close to it.
They immediately get bogged down in the everyday hell of, you know, who's taking the kids to school?
Did you pay the gas bill?
Crap, right?
We didn't have any of that.
We just had two years of Bliss together.
And now we have an unshakable foundation.
And if I'm away for six months, I'm away for six months and it won't make a difference to us because we don't have the same sort of vulnerabilities that a lot of newlywed couples do because we had that time together.
So to my mind, it was time well spent.
I've also been reading a lot and we didn't get to talk about anything really substantive in this conversation except my Obscure psychiatric history, but you will see that I've been reading a lot and sharpening my claws and refilling my toolkit.
And so when I do start re-entering the arena and popping up on live streams and doing interviews and things like that, you'll see that I've spent two years reading everything I can get my hands on and I'm considerably more formidable than I was two years ago.
I was already quite formidable.
Anything you'd particularly recommend?
Not at the moment.
I'm going to keep my powder dry because I have lots of fun things that I want to do with it all.
But no, I've been regrouping and plotting and sharpening my knives.
And you don't want to be the first one in front of my blades.
No, it's...
People keep expecting me to be sad or to have had some kind of terrible experience.
And the truth is I just haven't.
I've had the best two years of my life.
I've been in perfect bliss with the best man I've ever met.
And now I'm ready to get back to work.
All right.
Well, look.
That sounds like a good place to end as far as I'm concerned.
That was a nice natural conclusion, wasn't it?
That was a nice natural conclusion.
Perhaps we could do this again and talk about something substantive instead of my dreadful history.
Yeah, well, you know, you're an interesting character.
And so it was substantive as far as I was concerned.
And I think people will find it that too.
So what happened to you was very...
Singular and unexpected.
It's important that people realize that the specifics of what was said are neither here nor there.
It was the fact that the powers that be linked up and decided to defenestrate this person.
And because conservatives allowed it to happen, they lost one of their greatest champions.
And I'm going to be very successful with very profitable enterprises and perfectly happy just being funny for a living.
Because I sort of think to myself, why would I keep killing myself for people who don't deserve me?
So to some degree, the politics stuff, it's never going to be gone, but it is going to be dialed down considerably.
And I'm going to be talking about love, sex, death and money instead of, you know, Trump or whatever.
Well, maybe you spent, you know, maybe you spent enough time talking about politics.
It's not very interesting after a while, and the people who are in politics are awful.
I mean, if those of us who are kind of moving into that political sphere and who have, you know, aspirations toward being elected officials, the rest of it, they're becoming awful people.
I mean, everyone in politics is...
Dreadful, ghastly.
I don't think I want to spend 30 years talking about or thinking about those people.
I think I want to do something more fun.
So yeah, I'm gonna, I mean, not to say that there won't be characters from the political world popping up in my sketches, but, or indeed that I want to Of course, I'm going to do journalism.
It just won't necessarily be political journalism per se.
So perhaps I'll do a 20 minute mini documentary in the show where I'll go out into the country somewhere or I'll go to Sweden or I'll go to London or whatever.
But as far as the conservative movement stuff goes, the conservative base are cowards and they are ungrateful and they are indolent.
I gave a lot and paid my dues and helped get a president office.
And now it's time to do what I want to do, which is make people laugh.
Because that's the power that I have that nobody else in our world does.
So I'm going to focus on that.
Yeah, it's a hell of a power.
Robin can make people laugh, you know.
I think he makes heterosexual men, a certain kind of heterosexual man laugh.
Well, that's something, you know, there are certain kinds of heterosexual men.
I like the guy, but I don't personally find him, you know, rib-ticklingly funny.
But then that's because I like people like Joan Rivers and, you know, that kind of Universe.
So, you know, Bill Burr and whatever.
So he's maybe not my kind of comedian.
Could be.
Could be.
But anyway, this has been fun.
So thanks.
Hey, look, I've been looking forward to talking to you for a long time.
Oh, say hi to Vox for me.
I will.
I will.
He's very much looking forward to me speaking to you too.
See, that's what I wanted to talk about.
I want to talk about things like the foreword because there's interesting substantive things to do that you've managed.
Look, we'll have another conversation.
Well, we will.
Your strategy through this conversation, which is not lost on me, was to make sure that we don't spend too much time talking about you.
And you have been successful in that strategy because I've allowed you to.
But the next conversation, we will talk about you.
Because I do want to talk about the foreword, and I do want to talk about some of the things that, you know, the thing I asked you about on Australian TV and whatever, because I think that...
Well, turnabout is fair play, as they say.
Right.
And I knew you know, I did apologize to you.
That's it.
And I'm...
I did make a mistake at the Aspen Festival.
And I accept the apology, and thank you for that.
No, I think there's important substance to be spoken about, you know, as regards...
Well, important things.
God knows what else.
So let's talk about real things next time.
Well, I think when I'm feeling particularly up to a battle, I'll think about...
And I'm sure a lot of people will watch this.
So this is officially the last time I will ever speak about bloody February 2017.
So if anybody wants to know anything, you can watch this video and that's it for good.
All right.
Good.
Well, best of luck with your new endeavor.
Cheers.
Best of luck to you.
Take care.
All right.
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