Dec. 11, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Alright, there is a ton I have to talk to you guys about this week. | ||
| As you probably know, I was in Israel last week where I was invited to speak at a video conference. | ||
| The remainder of the week was spent wandering the streets, talking to people about peace, and eating ridiculous amounts of hummus. | ||
| Spending most of my time in Tel Aviv, I saw people of pretty much every race, color, religion, ethnicity, and nationality living side by side. | ||
| I heard Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, and several other languages being spoken simultaneously in restaurants and cafes. | ||
| I saw a coexistence in a part of the world that has very little of it. | ||
| I also spent a day in Jerusalem. | ||
| If you saw the video that we posted a couple days ago, I tried to show how close these religious sites are and give a little context to an extremely small yet complex city. | ||
| Walking through the old city of Jerusalem, I explored the Jewish and Christian quarters and stopped for falafel in the Arab quarter. | ||
| I felt it was important not just to talk about these places as we do, but actually to live them as well. | ||
| I exited the old city at the Damascus Gate, where literally a day before, a Jew had been stabbed. | ||
| While there was no doubt the neighborhood was tense, there was also a feeling that this was life, and life goes on. | ||
| Unfortunately, I heard about the San Bernardino terrorist attacks while on the beach in Israel. | ||
| I can't really explain to you guys how incredibly surreal it was to be so far away from something so horrific happening 60 miles away from where I live while I was 7,600 miles away from home. | ||
| Adding to the surreal feeling was that I was in the epicenter of a country that deals with terrorism in some form or another pretty much every day. | ||
| Suddenly I had people asking me what it was like to be in America with all our mass shootings. | ||
| The world felt completely flipped on its head. | ||
| On the 14-hour plane ride back to Los Angeles, I read What's Left by my guest this week, Nick Cohen. | ||
| Nick is a writer for Time, Spectator, The Observer, and Standpoint. | ||
| His first book, What's Left, is an absolute must-read if you dig what we do here. | ||
| Though What's Left was written in 2007, Nick absolutely nails so much of the lunacy We've been talking about on the left these days, from their dishonest tactics of lying about opponents' views to aligning themselves with people who would just as easily have them killed. | ||
| He goes on a journey through history to show how the far left has so often strengthened the very ideas that they purport to be against. | ||
| There were so many passages of the book that I felt like could have been written today that it was almost like reading something from the future. | ||
| He nailed the regressive left before the term was even out there. | ||
| Speaking of the regressives, you didn't think I was going to get through a show without mentioning them, did you? | ||
| Yeah, not going to happen. | ||
| One of the issues I've called them out on consistently is that if they don't stop smearing the liberals willing to talk about Islamic extremism, that they're going to hand our future to the far right. | ||
| We're seeing this right this very second across Europe as far right parties are winning elections and gaining in the polls from France to Belgium to Sweden and more. | ||
| This is clearly coming to the American shores right now, too, as Donald Trump just this week called for denying Muslims entry into the United States. | ||
| Obviously this is idiotic, over the top, and ridiculous, but it can only exist in a climate where fear of real discussion has been stifled. | ||
| If we aren't afraid of talking about Islamism, especially the difference between people and doctrine, then we can finally have an honest conversation about refugees, immigration, and everything else. | ||
| But if we do as the regressives are doing this very second, by making no distinction between people who are trying to talk about serious issues versus people who trade on fear, then we help the real xenophobes and silence the reformers. | ||
| Even as a kid, I always loved John F. Kennedy's famous quote, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. | ||
| It's lofty and big, but it hits something that is extremely human. | ||
| Sometimes fear in things is scarier than the actual thing itself. | ||
| That's not to say that radical Islam isn't scary, but we also feed that fear if we don't deal with it honestly. | ||
| Now though we live in a time when people are incredibly fearful, and much of it is with good reason as we've seen the spread of an evil ideology with no signs of letting up. | ||
| That doesn't mean we have to be afraid to speak out against it or silence those who dare to do so. | ||
| Actually, of course it means the exact opposite. | ||
| Fear is what the regressives and the far right are both going to use to splinter us against each other so they can gain power. | ||
| The world is in a strange, fearful moment right this very second. | ||
| We can either give in to our worst impulses or try to be better. | ||
| I'm pretty sure you guys know which side I'm going to choose. | ||
| As we sat in a packed restaurant in Tel Aviv, I asked a friend how he feels about all the stabbings. | ||
| Without missing a beat, he said, we have to keep living. | ||
| We have no choice. | ||
| I think we could all use a little of that spirit right now. | ||
| Let's not give in to fear fed to us by terrorists or fear fed to us by politicians. | ||
| Let's keep fighting because if we don't, choice is exactly what we're going to give up. | ||
| My guest this week is a writer for The Observer, The Spectator, Time, and Standpoint. | ||
| He's authored two books, You Can't Read This Book, and What's Left. | ||
| I just read What's Left, and I'm thrilled to have him here. | ||
| Nick Cohen, welcome to the show. | ||
| My pleasure to be here. | ||
| So Nick, I was telling you right before we started, I just read the book, so all of your thoughts in What's Left are, they're right at the tip of my brain right now, and I loved it. | ||
| I have been so in this regressive left thing, this far left thing, that your whole book is about, and you saw it, you saw it early, so I wanna get to that, but before we start, give me some of your liberal credentials, because I want people to know that you're a lefty. | ||
| Because we're gonna talk shit about the left, so I want people to know you're an actual lefty. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Well, I'm from, in Britain, in Europe, you wouldn't call me a liberal, you'd call me a socialist. | ||
| I'm from the socialist left, which, for whatever its problems, and they are manifest, they're manifold, and presumably covered at great length in America, used to believe in things like secularism, in anti-fascism, in feminism to an extent in being a part of the party of progress and it used to have some idea of what to do with the world and I gradually realized looking around me that this was no longer the case that if you like if you want to put it in sort of really um | ||
| rather rubbish terms really, that I didn't leave the left, the left left me, that's not really true. | ||
| But there was no longer a universal left-wing message which meant that people around the world | ||
| could say that we're oppressed and we're oppressed by hideous reactionary forces, | ||
| the left-wing will force us. | ||
| So being in the UK, I've had a bunch of my guests have been lefties in the UK that are talking about the same issues that you're talking about. | ||
| What is going on in the UK that I think woke you guys up to this before it was awoken in America? | ||
| Because really here, it's only in the last year, I think, that liberals are waking up to what's going on on our side. | ||
| Yeah, we've got a saying over here, Dave, that whatever happens in America happens in Britain and Europe five years later. | ||
| I think for once it's the other way around. | ||
| I think that really big arguments and big battles we've had in Britain in particular are now coming to America. | ||
| You know, the causality has been reversed a bit. | ||
| There's been the most ferocious rouse here. | ||
| Which I'm pleased about, because I'm a polemicist, I'm a political animal. | ||
| I don't believe that being PC and nice and kind and gentle is a way of sorting out problems. | ||
| It's often a way of covering them up. | ||
| But there have been huge rows in Britain, really since 9-11. | ||
| In my case, since the Iraq War, which might seem rather odd, but Your older viewers may remember, your frankly decrepit viewers may remember, that once Saddam Hussein was an enemy of the left. | ||
| Left-wingers used to campaign in favour of rights for the Kurds and call Saddam Hussein a fascist. | ||
| So in my case, it wasn't 9-11, it was 2003. | ||
| With the Iraq War, and I said as I was thinking, well, you know, what happened to all that, my youth? | ||
| Why are, why are you European leftists? | ||
| For good reasons, you know, hell, you never need a good reason to, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose George W. Bush. | ||
| But why, why, why was it that there was simply no concern for Kurds in Iraq, for socialists in Iraq, for trade unions in Iraq, who had been until the Late 80s. | ||
| There'll be demos about them, there'll be petitions for their support, they'll come and stay at my parents' home, all that kind of thing. | ||
| And you thought, well, what happened there? | ||
| And once you start asking that question, it's a very simple question. | ||
| Who are your friends? | ||
| Who, to use old left-wing language, are your comrades? | ||
| Who are you sticking up for? | ||
| Whatever, however critical you want to be of American policy or British policy. | ||
| And I'll repeat again, I'll repeat it throughout this interview, There are always good grounds to be critical of American and British policy. | ||
| But who are you actually supporting? | ||
| And then you get some rather ugly answers. | ||
| And you find a sort of great vacuum on most of the left, there are many good left-wingers, but on most of the left where a principled ideology ought to be. | ||
| Yeah, so right there, I mean, you hit a lot of the book. | ||
| So a lot of the book deals directly with Iraq and how it woke you up, as you just said, and the horrible things that Saddam was doing, and the horrible things that the Ba'ath Party was up to. | ||
| So before we get into that, because I was actually surprised how much of your journey was through Iraq, but before we get into that specifically, the phrase regressive left, so it was coined by Majid Nawaz, and it's really taken off here, and at the beginning, At the beginning of the book, you mention that you didn't necessarily have a word for this, and you said you didn't want to get too hung up sort of on words. | ||
| Do you like the phrase, regressive left? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I wish I thought of it, Dave. | |
| But there's something else. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| What's Left came out in 2007. | ||
| My God, I mean, I lost jobs because of it. | ||
| All hell broke loose when I published it. | ||
| But the reason I didn't... I love the phrase, aggressive left, and it's absolutely right. | ||
| The reason why I didn't put a name to it is this. | ||
| You can say very easily, oh, this is just the far left. | ||
| People who used to be Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, what have you. | ||
| But here's the problem when you interrogate these attitudes. | ||
| They go way, way, way into the mainstream. | ||
| It's people who don't consider themselves left-wing at all. | ||
| I mean, typically in Britain, I'm sure this is true in America as well, from what I've seen. | ||
| It's people in broadcasting. | ||
| It's people in universities. | ||
| It's people in schools. | ||
| It's people in publishing. | ||
| It's people who are, you know, you have to define themselves as quite faithfully liberal, but then have a load of ideas, a load of baggage on them, the terrible ideas which started on the far left. | ||
| And this is what drove people wild in Britain when this book was published. | ||
| Because I wasn't just talking about some people on the fringe, I was sort of talking about people, I mean, here in Britain we'll say BBC-type people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who never consider themselves extreme, always consider themselves moderate and neutral. | ||
| And I would say, but look, these ideas that began on the far left, it's okay to go along with regimes and movements that want to segregate all the women, kill all the homosexuals, Kill the Jews. | ||
| Kill any Muslim who, of his or her own free will, decides to change their religion or, you know, decides there is no God, there is no Allah at all. | ||
| You're going along with all of this. | ||
| It wouldn't matter if it was just the extreme. | ||
| What matters is that this is permeating Yeah, so you hit on a lot there. | ||
| And that's what drove people wild about the book. | ||
| Yeah, so-- | ||
| I mean, to me, that was so obviously true. | ||
| And it seems to be true about America at the moment as well. | ||
| Yeah, so you hit on a lot there. | ||
| So partly it seems to me that it's a little bit like the phrase, you know, | ||
| the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| That these people, and I think you hit on this a bunch, that these people, they have good intentions | ||
| in that they don't want extra war. | ||
| And we have had a ridiculous, both of our countries, right? | ||
| in the UK and me in America. We're all with you. | ||
| Right, we have had plenty of ridiculous, unnecessary wars. | ||
| We've done all kinds of things, drone strikes, all of these things that we on the left are not thrilled with. | ||
| But you make a really good argument for what is the alternative? | ||
| That we basically just give up on all of these people that live under these horrible theocracies, and that's what put these people in the far left in bed with some really terrible people. | ||
| Yeah, it's also, Dave, If you were to get a time machine and go into the future, say 50 years into the future, there are bound to be all kinds of ideas that are accepted, that are just on the fringes of American society at the moment, that all your great pandandrums in the media, Time magazine, New York Times, barely even think about, will be the common sense of their age. | ||
| That applies to bad ideas as well as good ideas. | ||
| A really bad idea started on the far left, I would even say it wasn't even a left-winger at all, after the collapse of communism, after the end of socialism. | ||
| Remember, socialism defines what it means to be a left-winger for a good hundred years, you know, from the 1880s through to the 1980s. | ||
| Then that all goes. | ||
| Then suddenly there are all these people, I mean Noam Chomsky is a classic example to me, who have that same spirit but no longer have an ideology they can believe in. | ||
| And so what do they do? | ||
| They start just saying, well anyone who is against the West can't be all bad. | ||
| Anyone who is against the West, it has to be the West's fault. | ||
| We are the root cause, to use a phrase that's been repeated to death. | ||
| And then you suddenly find people who call themselves radicals, or progressives, or socialists, or even feminists, going along with movements which are anti-progressive, anti-socialist, anti-radical, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-everything, anti-liberal, in the classic sense. | ||
| Actually, movements that have stepped out of a liberal nightmare, if you look at their effects. | ||
| But because they're anti-West, That's all that matters. | ||
| It's because there's no longer a positive program for being left-wing. | ||
| They just seize on anybody who is against America, against, to use their rather contentious language, we can have an argument about it if we want later, against imperialism. | ||
| And that just starts on the extremes, like good ideas start on fringes, and it comes into the mainstream. | ||
| Now that's not wholly the fault of the mainstream liberals, you know, never Let George W Bush off the hook, never let our leaders off the hook. | ||
| Part of it is a perfectly possible reaction. | ||
| The results are terrible. | ||
| And not just in, you know, poor countries. | ||
| What about people in America? | ||
| What about people in Britain? | ||
| What about people in my country? | ||
| Muslim women are now being told, well, you've got to go to the Sharia course. | ||
| Well, these are free women in a free country. | ||
| They're not second-class citizens. | ||
| They don't have to have some theocratic legal system saying their evidence is worth half a letter a man. | ||
| Right, but somehow if you as a white guy say that, then people go bananas and you're pushing your views on them, even though you're the one that's abiding the laws of your country, which is what they're governed by. | ||
| Well, no, I'm afraid the laws of my country are slightly worse than that, in that, you know, there's a danger, we're not quite there yet, we'll have parallel legal systems. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll have a system that in civil cases, divorce cases, which, you know, big deals, a Muslim woman will... the law seems quite content to say we can settle this in a Sharia court. | ||
| But this is kind of racist, is it not? | ||
| If you were to say to a white woman, you have to go to a court where your evidence is worth half the value of a man, You know, all liberal opinion across Britain, across America, across the world will go wild. | ||
| This is sexism, this is misogyny, this is patriarchy. | ||
| But it's okay when it happens to a brown-skinned woman. | ||
| In the name of liberalism, we are creating the classic double standard of pre-liberal days that white-skinned people have more rights than brown-skinned people. | ||
| So this is not just an issue for How people are treated in Saudi Arabia or Iran or any other country with a ultra-reactionary, I would say, and theocratic legal system. | ||
| It's here now in our own societies. | ||
| And it does seem to be that liberals ought to decide what type of liberalism they believe in. | ||
| Do they believe in liberalism means we've all got equal rights and universal values? | ||
| Or does liberalism mean, well, there's one law for one group and one law for another group, depending on their culture? | ||
| Does part of this seem to you that it's just the end game, this is the end result of identity politics? | ||
| We're going through right now in America this really strong phase with identity politics. | ||
| Tell me about it, we're getting it here. | ||
| Right, so we're all divided on sexuality and race and just everything that you can divide people on, we're divided on it right now. | ||
| And is part of this just that you saw the end game of all of this sort of before we did? | ||
| I don't claim to be a prophet, I don't actually believe in prophets, or gods, or Bibles, or Korans, or Talmuds, or any of that stuff. | ||
| To me, there is a big, big vacuum opened up at the end of the 20th century, with first of all, as I said before, it may not mean so much to you in America, you know how big... In Europe, and a lot of the world, the collapse of socialism, the collapse in the belief of the planned economy, of nationalised society, But also the collapse of a kind of, not collapse, but a marginalising of liberal optimism. | ||
| Liberal optimism just says that, look, there are universal human rights. | ||
| Doesn't matter what your skin colour is. | ||
| You know, it doesn't matter what your religion is. | ||
| You can't say, oh, it's my culture to oppress women. | ||
| You can't say that everyone would laugh at you. | ||
| And actually now they don't laugh at you. | ||
| And that allows identity politics. | ||
| Which sounds fine, which sounds fine. | ||
| You know, I've got a lot of, you know, I read these reports of black students at Yale, and you think about history of black oppression in America, and you can understand them. | ||
| They're still kids, they go a bit nuts. | ||
| But identity politics has, and you think, well, you know, okay, let them have their, their fuss. | ||
| But identity politics has a hugely dark side, because you have no answer when the people who say we are the masters of your identity, We are the community leaders. | ||
| We are the mullahs. | ||
| We are the rabbis. | ||
| We are the priests. | ||
| We control this group, this bloc. | ||
| And we say, you're a part of our group, our bloc, our community. | ||
| And we say that you don't have the same rights as a white Anglo-Saxon woman at Yale has. | ||
| We say, you know, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to you. | ||
| It's against your culture. | ||
| And that hasn't been thought through at all. | ||
| Right, so we split people into these little boxes, but then what we end up caring the least about is the people that are in the smaller boxes within those boxes. | ||
| Well, as Marjorie Nawaz says, or you mentioned earlier, Marjorie has this wonderful phrase, what about the minorities within minorities? | ||
| You know? | ||
| What about the liberals, the dissidents, the free thinkers, the blasphemers, the women, the gays, the people who say, what the hell? | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| This group, I'm not a Muslim or a Jew or whatever, I'm American. | ||
| Right, and that to me is the ultimate irony here, is that the spectrum of people that I've brought on the show and that now I've connected with on Twitter or wherever it is, is I'm not judging any of these people based on their color or their religion or their ethnicity, I'm basing it on their ideas, which is the most liberal idea. | ||
| Yeah, well, you're actually treating them as individuals, which is a very, very liberal idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God help you. | ||
| The other problem with identity politics is this, is when you stop treating people as individuals, you kind of... Identity politics is a slippery, treacherous conjunction. | ||
| You can either have identity or you can have politics. | ||
| Politics means You don't just look at people and say, there's a bloc, in this instance, what we're talking about, the Muslims. | ||
| What do you mean there's a group called the Muslims? | ||
| Because when you say that, you normally end up handing over the right to speak to these Muslims, without asking their permission, to the most reactionary people in it, the people who want to enforce a communal identity and want to enforce it, first of all, I know there's all this paranoia going around after the Paris attacks and those awful events in California, but first and foremost, want to enforce it on their own kind, on their tribe, enforce their taboos on them, to keep them down. | ||
| And the worst side of it is, I think it's been particularly bad in Britain and America, because we have this identity politics, multicultural problem that you've had, is Well, you know, what about the men and the women who say, hold on a second, this guy who says he's a community leader doesn't represent me. | ||
| I've never voted for him. | ||
| I don't agree with him. | ||
| What about this man who says he's a priest, a rabbi, a mullah? | ||
| You know, I don't believe in all this crap. | ||
| Or I only partially believe in it, or I believe in bits of it. | ||
| But you then start treating me as if this guy owns me, or as if this group owns me, without my permission. | ||
| the huge weakness to date, it's where an awful lot before we go | ||
| on to great questions on you know, with a Saudi Arabia with Syria, you know, what are we going to do about Islamic | ||
| State is where everyday cruelty happens in our societies. It's | ||
| where men and women who need a confident liberalism, a liberalism that believes in human rights, a liberalism that | ||
| says, well, actually, we're not going to say that what matters | ||
| first and foremost about you is your colour or your creed. | ||
| They need them to help them, and they turn around to the very people who ought to be able to help them, and they're not there. | ||
| In fact, they're on the other side. | ||
| In fact, they're on the other side. | ||
| That's the key piece, because it's not just that. | ||
| They're actually working to stop the reformers, and by calling everyone racist, and all of this stuff. | ||
| And then, you know, what we have going on, very much so in America right now, is that Donald Trump just this week says, we're going to close the borders to all Muslims. | ||
| He throws red meat to the right. | ||
| He probably does more good work for ISIS recruiting than he could possibly do. | ||
| But unfortunately, he's been strengthened by a weak left. | ||
| You talk a lot about that, actually, about how this far left group, now what we're calling the regressives, ultimately end up strengthening a lot of ideas that they should be against. | ||
| And that's what we're seeing with Trump. | ||
| And vice versa. | ||
| Yeah, and vice versa. | ||
| I was in a meeting today at The Guardian, which is... | ||
| It's where I work and I love the place. | ||
| But you know, it is Britain's leading lettering newspaper. | ||
| And people in the audience, their first questions were about Donald Trump. | ||
| You know, their first questions were, you know... And you could see, and perhaps I'm reading too much into the audience members and such, but Donald Trump was stopping her taking on reactionaries in, you know, on his website. | ||
| So, you know, you've got... It's very hard to get the notion that there are two extreme rights. | ||
| There is the white extreme right, and I wouldn't, until a few weeks ago, have said Donald Trump was on it. | ||
| He seems to be heading that way now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And there is the religious extreme right, the Islamist extreme right. | ||
| And you need to fight them both for the same reasons. | ||
| and with the same arguments. | ||
| It is very difficult. | ||
| People seem to find that very, very difficult to do. | ||
| Strikes me as the only principle position, but I imagine if I walked onto any campus in America | ||
| and said that, there'd be no platform. | ||
| Not only would there be no platform, but they'd be trigger warned, | ||
| they'd go into a safe space, all the other stuff we're talking about. | ||
| And then, you know-- | ||
| I didn't realize they were so frightening then. | ||
|
unidentified
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(laughing) | |
| Right. | ||
| I've had several guests that I didn't think were that frightening, | ||
| that for some reason have to have trigger warnings issued before they speak on campuses. | ||
| So look, a lot of this is happening in Europe first, which is another reason that I'm talking about it so much because I don't want it to take hold here the way it has taken hold in Europe. | ||
| What do you make of the far right parties that are now winning across Europe, right? | ||
| Marie Le Pen just won in France. | ||
| I now see that in Denmark and in Sweden. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons for that, Dave. | ||
| I mean, the European Union, it's not like the USA. | ||
| It's trying to be like the USA without the common culture, the common institutions. | ||
| And as I'm fond of pointing out to people in the EU who want to be like the USA, The USA had one hell of a civil war before it became the USA for today. | ||
| I mean, do you want that? | ||
| There are other reasons. | ||
| There's two things I want to say. | ||
| One you might quite like, the other maybe less so. | ||
| The thing you might quite like is, we seem to agree on this, is this. | ||
| You can't run around shrieking your head off, having trigger warnings and safe spaces when, I don't know, a celebrity or a politician makes a slightly off-color remark about homosexuals. | ||
| Or women, or slightly sexist mark about women and have it leading the news and columnists on the New York Times needing a cold shower to calm themselves down afterwards. | ||
| And then ignore religious homophobia, including deadly religious homophobia among ethnic minorities. | ||
| You just can't do that without paying a price. | ||
| Because don't think people aren't watching you. | ||
| You know, don't think the rest of society, a lot of political writing on the left as well as the right, it's like it's a private club, you know? | ||
| They just talk to themselves, like, you know, the right watches Fox News, the left watches Jon Stewart, you know, they just talk to themselves. | ||
| It's like a private club and everyone understands the rules. | ||
| And they forget there's outsiders watching, they forget outsiders are saying, you bloody hypocrites. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, you will have one rule for white people. | ||
| And another lawful arrest, and you will not stand up to go back against universal principles. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| That does matter. | ||
| Political correctness in Britain has become this kind of swear word. | ||
| And it doesn't mean stuff that you would understand by political correctness. | ||
| It means deep, deep, deep hypocrisy, misgovernment, ill-government. | ||
| So that's all true. | ||
| You can blame the left for that. | ||
| On the other hand, you know, people How badly am I allowed to swear on your program? | ||
| Swear away. | ||
| Bring it. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| People who vote for Donald Trump, there has to come a point where you just say, well, fuck off. | ||
| You're voting for Donald Trump. | ||
| You're voting Marine Le Pen. | ||
| We will try. | ||
| We will not give up on you, your fellow citizens. | ||
| But there comes a point where you just say, well, to hell with you. | ||
| You are our opponents. | ||
| The difficulty is, and it has come, I don't know if the American viewers know about this, we've now got The worst type of leftist leading our opposition party, the Labour Party, who's like a caricature. | ||
| If I had to write an example of what the worst of left is in Britain... Jeremy Corbyn. | ||
| A guy called Jeremy Corbyn, yeah. | ||
| The only good thing about him becoming Labour leader is books I wrote are now selling, you know, like hotcakes. | ||
| But I mean, my selfish point of view aside, you know, is You've got a terrible right in America, with Trump in France, with the National Front in Sweden and Denmark and all these places. | ||
| Poland and Hungary is popping up all over Europe, not just because of immigration radicalism, partly because the European single currency has been one of the great economic mistakes. | ||
| And then you've got a left In a space where principled lefts would be, certainly in Britain, you've got this kind of joke figure that would go along with any organization, however fascistic, as long as it's anti-West. | ||
| So, you know, lots of people are feeling a bit politically homeless over here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does it all feel like a perfect storm to you, what's going on right now? | ||
| And again, this is the stuff that's after your book when we talk about the refugees and some of the economic problems. | ||
| In Europe and, you know, dealing with radical Islam. | ||
| It was going on while you were writing the book, obviously, but it seems, it seems to me we have like five things right now that are all working at the same time. | ||
| Then you toss in social media, you toss in, you know, that we see videos from everywhere. | ||
| Now we see, we can see beheadings, we can see bombings, you know, so you can see, you can see religious violence and you can see state violence all the time. | ||
| That we really have all of this happening at once and it's leading to a very strange place. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think one thing, Dave, we can say with certainty that whoever it was, Francis Fukuyama, who said after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is the end of history, history's over. | ||
| Boy, was that a stupid thing to say! | ||
| And you can't, you can't... Let me go back to the point I made to you right to the start, that the weirdness and the hypocrisy and the awful betrayal of people you get on people who call themselves a left comes when they don't have a socialist alternative. | ||
| The Soviet Union falls, socialism collapses across the world, no one believes in it anymore. | ||
| And that was fine for a while, if I may generalize in a very glib way, That was fine for a while because capitalism, we'll call it what you will, seems to be a great success story. | ||
| Seemed to work. | ||
| That's why Francis Fukuyama was not such an idiot when he said history was over. | ||
| Well, ever since the crash of 2008, that system of liberal capitalism has failed. | ||
| And that's why you've got this feeling of, you know, perfect storm, too many things coming at us at once. | ||
| It is not entirely... | ||
| There's a wonderful phrase by the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci. | ||
| The old is dead, the new cannot be born. | ||
| In that interregnum, many strange forms will appear. | ||
| It seems like that. | ||
| We don't know what comes next. | ||
| We're not sure of what we've got. | ||
| We're not sure it works anymore. | ||
| We're not sure it works for, you know, ordinary middle-class Americans watching your program. | ||
| You know, their pay isn't going up. | ||
| The super-rich are getting richer. | ||
| The American dream doesn't seem to quite work anymore, even with Obama. | ||
| It's not quite clear where the alternatives to that are. | ||
| So you get these strange, abhorrent, freakish forms which Going to that point, what about some of the tactics these guys use? | ||
| And I want to talk a little bit about Chomsky, but first we can talk just sort of in the more broader sense. | ||
| Well, now it's on the main screen. | ||
| Going to that point, what about some of the tactics these guys use? | ||
| And I wanna talk a little bit about Chomsky, but first we can talk just sort of in the more broader | ||
| sense. | ||
| When I've seen the way these guys debate, or the way they treat topics, | ||
| and again, everyone's racist and all that, they don't seem to mind if they get caught in lies. | ||
| They love just throwing out the bomb, and then it spreads like wildfire on social media. | ||
| And there's that famous saying, it takes one second to lie, | ||
| but it takes a lifetime to get it back or whatever it is. | ||
| And it seems that a series of these guys, they love this, and I don't know, look, again, I'm not on the right, so I can't, I don't like the right, I've never been part of the right, so I police them differently, but I don't wanna see this from my guys. | ||
| So what do you think about just the tactics that they're using themselves? | ||
| Well, before we go any further, Dave, one question to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Plain speaking, open heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Is it, does the right behave any better than that? | ||
| No, they... | ||
| Look, they don't. | ||
| Look, I'm dealing in America with Trump right this second with over-the-top bombasticity. | ||
| So, and again, this is why, look, I'm a guilty liberal in that sense, that sometimes I feel bad. | ||
| I spend so much time on the guys on my side. | ||
| And then I'm afraid, you know, people ask me all the time, am I afraid that ultimately this will strengthen the right? | ||
| But to me, it's like, if we don't stand up now, well, then the game is over. | ||
| We just hand it to the right, which is what's happening, I think, with Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there is a long tradition of lying on the left. | ||
| If you go back to Stalin, he got gullible people to believe in show trials where people confessed to impossible crimes that weren't committed. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| I'm less I'm less concerned about left and right than this. | ||
| Here's something that happens with new media. | ||
| You now have states. | ||
| Fox News, I think, is a pretty bad thing. | ||
| I think its main audience seems to be liberal journalists looking for easy material to write. | ||
| But it's a bad day. | ||
| You've got nothing to do. | ||
| You've got no ideas. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'll turn on Fox News. | ||
| You've now got states Russia and Iran most noticeably. | ||
| Producing propaganda channels that are dedicated to pushing half-truths, conspiracy theories, lies. | ||
| You know, a jet shot down over Ukraine. | ||
| There's television channels in English who are pumping stuff out. | ||
| So, you know, whereas once if you're on the left in America, you just have to go on and on about Something Nixon was putting out or something in the Wall Street Journal, even something on Fox News. | ||
| And if you're on the right in America, you were complaining about New York Times, you know, deliberately covering something up. | ||
| Now you've suddenly got whole states with their secret services, their foreign offices, their propaganda arms behind them, pumping material into the West, which is incidentally taken up by both the far left and the far right. | ||
| It's very difficult, certainly in Britain, as I say, things have gone much, much further than they have in America. | ||
| It's very, very difficult to tell apart the people who support Putin, for instance, and Russia today. | ||
| You know, you've got Marine Le Pen doing it, who is the leader of the French far-right party. | ||
| You've got George Galloway, who's this strange combination of leftists and Islamists in Britain. | ||
| You know, I mean, and so you've got A kind of murder of the extremes against liberal democracy. | ||
| And they're both equally keen on Putin. | ||
| They're both equally sympathetic to Iran. | ||
| What matters to them most is building a conspiratorial narrative. | ||
| So in a lot of ways, we really could blame sort of mainstream media for this craziness, right? | ||
| Because it seems to me that for a long time, mainstream media, which had no competition before the digital age, they did such a poor job that then they handed everything over to the digital side. | ||
| And I think for a while, the online media, for the first few years of it, I think they did do a really nice job in breaking stories and getting out information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no! | |
| Yeah, that you wouldn't get otherwise. | ||
| And now it seems like the gloves are off and now anything's true. | ||
| Nobody knows who to trust. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of truth in that. | ||
| And I don't accept some kind of binary division between new media and old media. | ||
| There's good journalism and there's bad journalism. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| But here's the problem, Dave. | ||
| If you are me at The Guardian or The Observer or on the LA Times, you talk to reporters on the LA Times, When you've done a terrible job, you're allowing all these cranks, these fruitcakes, these flim-flam merchants from all over the world to walk all over you, the man or woman at the LA Times will say, look Dave, our business models collapse. | ||
| We're trying to staff bureaus in Peking, in Beijing, in Tehran. | ||
| Give me a break. | ||
| We can barely get a reporter up the road to San Francisco. | ||
| The business model for, if you like, serious journalism, particularly serious foreign journalism, is getting hard and hard to sustain. | ||
| Although I'm sure the LA Times and newspapers and across America So the gap is just being filled. | ||
| And what worries me is, it's not people talking rubbish or people talking drivel. | ||
| to try and keep it going but you know in the end the lack of money talks you know money talks but | ||
| the silence that comes from the lack of money is a silence which just which just closes debate so | ||
| the gap is just being filled and what worries me is is not people talking rubbish or people talking | ||
| drivel is you know they always have is where are you going to get the reliable reports on | ||
| what is happening in Peking? | ||
| Where are you going to get the reliable reports on how Putin is manipulating European opinion. | ||
| That's getting hard and hard to do. | ||
| Okay, well, as someone that I consider an expert in this space, how do you decide who to trust? | ||
| I really don't know anymore. | ||
| I follow a lot of different organizations, right, left, middle, as reputable, and some off the deep end, and I try to pilfer out some knowledge and some truth, and I try not to only follow things that reinforce my beliefs, which is another huge problem that social media has given us. | ||
| But how do you decide who to trust? | ||
| Well, I mean, David, you're probably going to accuse me of being horribly old-fashioned and stuff, but, I mean, there are still organisations I trust, you know. | ||
| I still trust an article on the New York Times newspapers. | ||
| Yeah, unless it's... | ||
| Because I know there's a very, very strong editing process there, and its opinion pages are separate, and what have you. | ||
| Now, that may change as the business model for journalism goes down, but I still do. | ||
| Well, look, they had an op-ed on the front page for the first time in 95 years, just this last week. | ||
| How disgraceful. | ||
| How disgraceful. | ||
| Yeah, let's go around. | ||
| Let's go around and have a demo. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| We don't want your bloody opinions, we ought to say. | ||
| Give us some news. | ||
| I'd read a paper that had that on the front. | ||
| All right, so let's back up for a second. | ||
| Let's talk for a few minutes about Noam Chomsky, because you talk about him a bit in the book. | ||
| It's not a tremendous amount. | ||
| But I have a friend who is on what I consider in this regressive group. | ||
| And a lot of times we'll be debating back and forth about this stuff. | ||
| And I'll be giving him as much historical knowledge as I have. | ||
| and as much factual knowledge as I have. | ||
| And then he'll sort of always end everything by saying, well, I don't really know about that, | ||
| but I read some Chomsky and I'm just kind of giving it back to you. | ||
| And I think you sort of hit on that also in the book that there's just this belief in this guy | ||
| that maybe isn't fully warranted, or he's been very good at waving off the things | ||
| that don't quite agree with his worldview. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting for two reasons. | ||
| I mean, born without... I mean, he's an old guy. | ||
| I don't want to come on, you know, just shout him down. | ||
| But I mean, he's adopted some pretty disgraceful positions. | ||
| Denying the massacres of Bosnian Muslims and going along with people who... It's the 1990s and going along with that. | ||
| And never admitting he's wrong. | ||
| And building this very, Chomsky's writing, it's very poor writing in terms of English, but it builds this very dense web. | ||
| And like your friend, once you're in, you're like a fly caught in the web. | ||
| It's very hard to get out. | ||
| But that's kind of fisking. | ||
| Do you say fisking in America? | ||
| I know what fisking is, but I don't know if people really say it. | ||
| You say, look, this man, this is all from a point of view. | ||
| It's sort of made up. | ||
| And actually, when you think about what he's doing, it's quite disgraceful. | ||
| But here's why I thought Chomsky was worth devoting a chapter to. | ||
| You are a young radical on an American campus and you get your Chomsky. | ||
| You read all his books and you think, well, what kind of society are you aiming for? | ||
| There is no social vision. | ||
| There's nothing that the progressives and socialists who run through American history from the 1880s would recognize. | ||
| They'll just say, this is all just saying America's shit. | ||
| Forgive me. | ||
| America's shit. | ||
| America would probably never have happened. | ||
| The Pilgrim Fathers would probably have turned around on Plymouth Rock and gone back to England. | ||
| The whole thing is a disaster. | ||
| Everything it does is wrong. | ||
| I think it's a lie. | ||
| And you think, well, that's a ridiculous world vision. | ||
| Funnily enough, here's the thing. | ||
| It's really easy to buy into. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you don't have to commit to anything. | ||
| You know, the regressive left, which I really like that phrase, well, let's take the regressive left, the chompskian left, the post-socialist left, on the one hand, it has very, very little to say positive. | ||
| On the other hand, that's kind of easy for everyone to sign up to. | ||
| You just have to think that Washington is a pile of shit. | ||
| Well, you know, I mean, Washington DC is a pile of shit. | ||
| Well, that's easy enough. | ||
| That the State Department doesn't know what it's doing. | ||
| Yeah, fine. | ||
| The CIA is wicked. | ||
| Instead of having a left wing, you had to make really positive commitments for. | ||
| You know, 40 years ago, I could have come on your program and said, I'm a socialist, right? | ||
| I'm a socialist. | ||
| And your audience might have said, oh, well, Nick Cohen, he's a socialist. | ||
| That sounds good. | ||
| We'll go along with him. | ||
| He says, and I say, I want massively high taxes, or I want to nationalize this and that. | ||
| And people who would have been agreeable would say, well, back off and say, hell, I don't want anything to do with this. | ||
| You know, this guy is threatening my living standards. | ||
| Now you just have to say that everything you read is a lie, your government's evil, and so suddenly that's actually, because you're making so few positive policy commitments as Chomsky does, it's suddenly very easy to go along with him. | ||
| You know, I go to the homes of people here in London, which is a very expensive city. | ||
| I go to the homes of the richest people I know and their books by Noam Chomsky on the Yeah, on their shelves. | ||
| And that's because, funnily enough, for all the supposed radicalism, that kind of left without a positive programme of just the critique is no threat to them. | ||
| It's no threat to the wealthy. | ||
| It's no threat to the powerful. | ||
| It's no threat to the bankers on Wall Street. | ||
| You know, it's something lots of people, when they're quite justifiably often pissed off their government, Or because, you know, they've got a conspiracy theory mind, or because they all look trendy. | ||
| Everyone can sign up to that. | ||
| A genuine left-wing programme is hard. | ||
| A genuine left-wing programme makes friends and enemies. | ||
| But this kind of pseudo-left, this regressive left, it's terribly easy to believe. | ||
| Too easy, I think, for any successful political movement. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, because I was really embedded in it for a couple of years, and I guess I hadn't pieced this all together, what you're talking about right now, but part of my frustration was that we never talked about solutions. | ||
| We always could talk about problems, right? | ||
| It was always, you know, the American industrial complex and bombing and race and whatever, but there were never solutions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that does get to what you're saying, that it's sort of... As soon as you offer a solution, you're gonna piss some people off. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And you have to make a commitment. | ||
| And as soon as you make a commitment, then people can say, well, Dave Rubin believes in this. | ||
| Well, this is wrong. | ||
| It's very easy to just say it's all a conspiracy. | ||
| It's all shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That way you don't expose yourself. | ||
| You're not making a positive programme and sticking your neck out there. | ||
| I want you to see who shits you down. | ||
| So speaking of conspiracy theories, one of the through lines throughout the book, and then you do devote a chapter to it in completion, is that in all of these movements, somehow blaming the Jews, it always comes around to blaming the Jews. | ||
| Now the language has changed, now it's blaming Zionists. | ||
| Get it right, Dave. | ||
| No one says Jews anymore, it's Zionists. | ||
| Right, now it's not politically correct to say Jews, so you just say Zionists or you say Israel or whatever it is, but you really did lay out an interesting piece in almost every example throughout time that they were always, on both sides, the capitalists would say the Jews are socialists, the socialists would say Jews are capitalists, and every other which way. | ||
| What do you think that is about? | ||
| I think you probably just explained it with this conspiratorial thing and the other, right? | ||
| Yeah, well, look, here's the problem. | ||
| If you genuinely think that your State Department your CIA, your president, for all their many, many faults. | ||
| And I'm sure they're legion. | ||
| But if you genuinely think that they, for instance, secretly blew up the Twin Towers | ||
| and then let Al-Qaida take the blame, that they invented a way to go into war in Iraq, that Obama | ||
| is... it applies to the right as much as the left, you know. | ||
| Obama isn't a real American, he's a secret Muslim from Kenya, you know. | ||
| If you genuinely believe in all that, you have to believe in an extraordinary view of the world, where a handful of people can fool the entire population, the sheeple. | ||
| Well, once you start thinking like that, who are those handful of people historically, you know? | ||
| You start down that road, you end up in the Jews. | ||
| What I found shocking, being called Cohen... I was going to mention this. | ||
| Yeah, and I think some of, you know, your liberal American Jews will find it shocking, because I say we're five years ahead of you, when it comes and hits them, is this. | ||
| I never expected to find anti-Semitism on the left. | ||
| Perhaps I was being naive. | ||
| But it is quite extraordinary, the extent of it, and it's quite extraordinary how it's tolerated, how it isn't called out. | ||
| So do you think some of that, when I hear people say that, and first real quick, we should mention, so you just mentioned your last name Cohen, you're actually not Jewish. | ||
| No, my family abandoned their religion for the reasons of Marxism, so you know, I'm from an ex-communist family of about 1900. | ||
| Jews wouldn't have me as Jewish, but you know, you call Cohen, Dave, it's not unnatural for people to think you're Jewish. | ||
| And also, you're Jewish. | ||
| But here's the problem. | ||
| If you look at antisemitism, antisemitism has virtually nothing to do with Jews. | ||
| Antisemitism Became in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and the Tsars and the Nazis, it was a way of fighting progress. | ||
| It was a way of saying, look, you, democracy, human rights, women's rights, you know, all these, you shouldn't believe in them, it's, they're all fakes, they're all frauds, there's a, they're all, behind them is a puppet master pulling the strings and that puppet master executes. | ||
| You would have thought there's a left that believes in democracy and human rights would be, for its own sake as much as anything else, on alert the whole time for the dangers of anti-Semitism. | ||
| But actually, you know, going back to Chomsky, they believe in democracy. | ||
| They believe human rights is all for all. | ||
| They believe it's all a lie. | ||
| So that's one reason why they end up there. | ||
| Well, not Trump's scheme itself, but that's one reason people end up there. | ||
| And they don't understand what goes with it. | ||
| They don't look at organisations like Hezbollah or Iran and say, hold on a second, OK, They're anti-Semitic. | ||
| But that's just because of Israel. | ||
| And then they don't say, but look at the way they treat women, look at the way they treat homosexuals, look at the way they dismiss human rights, the way they dismiss democracy. | ||
| They don't say that anti-Semitism absolutely goes along with that. | ||
| And once you accept anti-Semitism, you have to not just throw out anti-racism, | ||
| but you have to throw out all your progressive principles. | ||
| 'Cause historically, anti-Semitism has always been used by ultra-reactory movements, | ||
| who again, the left should be against. | ||
| Right, so this, I always say when it comes to this, and I was just in Israel last week, | ||
| and at the top of the show when I did my piece, I was saying how I saw coexistence there. | ||
| I was in Jerusalem. | ||
| You know, I ate falafel in the Arab quarter. | ||
| I saw Israeli policemen helping Muslim women move a box. | ||
| I saw ultra-Orthodox Jews. | ||
| I mean, that doesn't happen anywhere in the Mideast, except for Israel. | ||
| And of course, not to say everything's perfect there, and there's all sorts of political problems and religious problems and all that, but the only place that has any progressive values in the Middle East is Israel, and they hate all of us. | ||
| Well, yeah, but I mean, look. | ||
| You shouldn't engage in whataboutery. | ||
| And there's a lot of whataboutery on the left. | ||
| There's quite a lot of whataboutery on the right, you know. | ||
| You say, someone says, well, there's problems on the West Bank, there's problems in Gaza, and you say, what about Syria? | ||
| Which actually is quite a good whatabout. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, which is a hell of a whatabout when you think about it. | ||
| But, you know, you shouldn't say, that doesn't mean the Palestinians shouldn't have their own state, that doesn't mean there aren't horrendous problems with the Israeli right. | ||
| And you shouldn't sort of romanticise Israel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At all. | ||
| But yeah, but here's the thing, is the problem, the problem is, is this, is one of the great reasons for, I would say, the liberal difficulty in understanding radical Islam is there's a very good liberal impulse that assumes the world is rational, you know, that assumes that if there is this terrible terroristic movement that will blow up the Twin Towers, We knew if they had chemical weapons or nuclear weapons they could use against civilians, they would. | ||
| There must be a root cause for it. | ||
| There must be some rational explanation that we can satisfy, that we can appropriate these evil gods. | ||
| They can't just be that angry against us. | ||
| It's not partly our fault. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a lot of that actually right after the Paris attacks because I saw immediately my friends on the left saying American foreign policy, American foreign policy, even though two days later, you know, Boko Haram killed 140 people and obviously that has nothing to do with American foreign policy. | ||
| But there's this rationalization, even though at the same time the people who did the Paris attacks were saying this is for religious purposes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Your friends on the left just ought to go and read the history of Nazism, the history of communism. | ||
| Yes, there are rational reasons that you can blame. | ||
| You know, you could say if, if, you know, bombs go off at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, your friends on the left say, oh, it's their fault. | ||
| They saw the cartoons of Mohammed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People are slaughtered at a grocery supermarket in Paris, the Hypercalifragilisticexpialidocious supermarket. | ||
| Oh, it's their fault. | ||
| Because of Israel. | ||
| Because Israel's occupying the West Bank. | ||
| So, okay, you kill the satirists, that's okay. | ||
| You kill the Jews, that's okay. | ||
| People are slaughtered at a football stadium that starved the parents. | ||
| People are slaughtered at a rock concert. | ||
| People are slaughtered at Cambodian restaurants on the Parisian boulevard. | ||
| Well, that's kind of their fault because, well, we're not quite sure. | ||
| American foreign policy, maybe French foreign policy. | ||
| Now, these are sort of rational explanations and there's a bit of proof in them. | ||
| The problem is every step you take seems rational and liberal but every step you take takes you away from rationality and liberalism and you end up like the very murderers you're trying to explain because you accept their whole ideology but you don't understand it. | ||
| You don't understand that they are not people who are sitting there Saying, well, we've got a rational grievance, like someone about to file a claim at a county court. | ||
| They have a utopian totalitarian ideology. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And having lived through the 20th century, or a last bit of the 20th century, when utopian ideology is called millions and millions of people, we still don't understand that someone like Islamic State says, we think we can create heaven on earth. | ||
| We think we can create a caliphate that will govern the whole earth. | ||
| And this will be paradise. | ||
| And to do that, what's it matter if 1 million, 2 million, 10 million people are killed? | ||
| They think they're explainable, they don't understand anything. | ||
| Yeah, so that actually is the ultimate irony, because on one hand, you're saying, well, look, if we took everything, if we did whatever it is they want us to do, right? | ||
| We took all our troops out of here, we stopped bombing here, whatever, then suddenly they'd like us more. | ||
| But that's not what they're saying. | ||
| So it really is, it's the most ironic piece of this. | ||
| What they want you to do, Dave, is become them. | ||
| That's the only way they'll leave you alone. | ||
| And so, here you go, I mean, your friends in California, I'm probably, you know, I've met them, I'm sure they're lovely people. | ||
| Some of them, some of them. | ||
| But, you know, I'm sure they think of themselves as anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, I'm sure they're fine on trans issues, you know, I bet some of them don't even eat meat. | ||
| But they will then, through thinking they're being logical, ...end up defending the most sexist, racist, homophobic, illiberal movements on Earth. | ||
| And do so in a... This is not a point made by me, it's a point made by a very brilliant French philosopher. | ||
| Do so in a very narcissistic way. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's all our fault. | ||
| We are the centre of the world. | ||
| You know? | ||
| If something terrible happens, it must be down to us. | ||
| Not that people in the rest of the world have their own agency. | ||
| Not people in the rest of the world can't be just as wicked or stupid as we can. | ||
| They are infants, they are children who are goaded by us. | ||
| It's all down to what we do. | ||
| We are still, you know, the narcissist, the ego, the people at the centre of it all. | ||
| Yeah, I think when I had Douglas Murray on, he illustrated that point. | ||
| He said, look, the world could go to hell in a handbasket and it'll have nothing to do with America. | ||
| You know, there's, you just can't, it's just child, it's childlike thinking. | ||
| All right, so. | ||
| And treats, incidentally, treats Muslim populations as children. | ||
| You know, it's infantilizing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it says, it says, look, we're adults. | ||
| We're, we're these white Western Europeans. | ||
| We can handle satire. | ||
| We can handle our leaders and gods and bishops and Clerics, my God, you can't do it with those Muslims. | ||
| They're like toddlers, you know, like violent little delinquent children. | ||
| You show them a cartoon they don't like, they start blowing the place up. | ||
| Yeah, ironically, that's what George W. Bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations, which I keep crediting Bill Maher with, but apparently it was George W. Bush, which is mind-blowing in itself. | ||
| That is a very, very good phrase, and it's true. | ||
| Actually, it's worse than soft bigotry. | ||
| It does keep people down because, look, Muslim men and women watching your program in California, does it really help them when they're going out looking for a job, or looking to get on in life, or want to be treated with respect, or want to be treated with equal? | ||
| If liberals are saying, oh, well, you know, they're very, very funny people, these people. | ||
| You have to be very careful what you say in front of them. | ||
| One cartoon and they'll blow the top of my head. | ||
| It doesn't help them. | ||
| It doesn't help them be full citizens, to be treated in a totally different way from everyone else. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| All right, so I have one more for you. | ||
| I could do this for five hours with you, so you'll have to come on again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's midnight here in England, you know? | |
| But I want you to have your tea and go to bed. | ||
| So I'll end with this. | ||
| Look, you wrote What's Left in 2007. | ||
| That was eight years ago. | ||
| So let's fast forward eight years from now. | ||
| It's 2023. | ||
| Give me a little hope, if you can find some hope. | ||
| But if you can't, then give me where you think we're going to be at eight years from now. | ||
| Well, that was actually funny enough, that book was quite hopeful, and I still consider myself a left-winger and I wrote that, but I'm less so now. | ||
| If there's hope, it will rely on liberals, intellectuals, feminists within the Muslim world, within Muslim communities in the West, taking on their extremists. | ||
| And I just hope that the shame which has descended on Western liberalism It's one of the most shameful periods of history that when those Liberals and those Democrats and those Feminists take on their extremists, fucking Western Liberals, because they want to do what they're meant to do and support them, instead of supporting their enemies, instead of making excuses for their enemies, for once, live their principles, or otherwise they'll just give up, give up, shut up, say actually we're not really Liberals at all, we just want to go to the beach, have a beer, don't care, we don't really care about other people, | ||
| But either give up or show some solidarity. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that, and I do like a well-placed fuck, so that was really nice, too. | ||
| You guys can pick up either of Nick's books, wherever books are sold, or you can download an e-book, however you do that. | ||
| I did it, so you can probably figure it out. | ||
| Nick, it was really, it was an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I hope we can do this in L.A. | ||
| in person next time. | ||
| I'd like to. |
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