Sept. 22, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:10
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(dramatic music) | |
| Joining me today is British author, journalist, and political commentator, Douglas Murray. | ||
| He is also the Associate Director of the Henry Jackson Society and Associate Editor of The Spectator. | ||
| Douglas, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Very good to be with you and to see you in person. | ||
| I don't know how we haven't done this in person yet. | ||
| I haven't been in LA. | ||
| Yeah, what in God's name are you doing living anywhere else besides LA? | ||
| Well, it's actually not my favourite bit of America, I have to say. | ||
| I find it slightly uncentred and rootless. | ||
| It's also because I don't drive, so LA is sort of hell because you can't walk anywhere. | ||
| Well, I know you're not making that up because you were stuck on a plane for about four hours last night. | ||
| You arrived at like 2 a.m., then we tried to send a car to get you this morning. | ||
| That took some time. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's almost as if it's me being difficult. | ||
| No, actually, I managed to watch three films before the plane even took off last night. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| New York. | ||
| Anything good? | ||
| No, all awful. | ||
| Well, I don't watch many films. | ||
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They're all bad. | |
| Almost always bad. | ||
| Almost always bad. | ||
| Do you feel you're at your intellectual best right now? | ||
| Because you didn't get much sleep. | ||
| Are you ready to do this? | ||
| I am. | ||
| Depends how rigorous you want to be. | ||
| Well, I've got some pretty rigorous questions right here. | ||
| But I think that's an interesting way to kick off because you're somebody that, you know, everything that I see you write and the events that you speak at and the talks that you give and all that stuff, I mean, you have to be at your intellectual best pretty much all the time. | ||
| I don't know if you feel you always are, but what kind of pressure does that put you under just to be one of the people that, you know, you have to have a cohesive set of thoughts and be able to defend them all the time? | ||
| Not sure you have to have a cohesive circle. | ||
| I don't envy politicians for having to have the thing of having to turn up, say the right thing, never be off message and all that sort of thing. | ||
| I kind of feel that I'm a writer, I can I can have bad days. | ||
| I can change my mind on things. | ||
| I can nuance things, texture things, or I can be garbled one day and, you know, nobody says, oh my God, he's a total train wreck. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| If they did, I wouldn't care. | ||
| Well, it's funny you say that, because right before we started we were talking about social media a little bit, and you were saying how you don't respond that often or pay that much attention to that. | ||
| I'm not on Facebook, I'm on Twitter. | ||
| I use Twitter as a way to communicate to the few people who care, you know, anything I write or appear on. | ||
| But I don't talk to the world, as it were. | ||
| I don't think it's doable. | ||
| I think it drives people mad. | ||
| I've seen some of the least, you know, relatively promising minds of my generation slightly wrecked by social media. | ||
| You know, you wouldn't seek out people to shout at you in the street. | ||
| You wouldn't, if they did, say come over here and say this to me on a more regular basis and do it when I wake up and turn over in the morning and turn my phone on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I do think that people have to find a sort of reasonable way to live in this strange, strange world, which is even stranger in L.A. | ||
| obviously. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's much stranger in L.A., and we are going for dinner tonight. | ||
| I'm going to show you how weird it can get. | ||
| If you think you know what's weird in L.A., I'm going to really show you tonight. | ||
| Tell me a little bit, so we've done this once before, and it was about two years ago, and I had just started doing an interview show. | ||
| We talked about a lot of the problems that we both have with the left and the rise of Islam and some of that we're gonna cover here. | ||
| But I thought maybe we could just talk about a little bit about your history first and what kind of brought you to be one of the few people that is so outspoken on some of these issues. | ||
| What made you care about the free speech stuff, about what's happening in the West, all of this stuff? | ||
| When did that really spark in you? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I mean these things are easier to Recognizing other people than they are in yourself. | ||
| I've written about a lot of different things in my life. | ||
| I started writing very young. | ||
| I became a published author. | ||
| I wrote my first book when I was 18. | ||
| It came out when I was 19 or 20, I think. | ||
| And that was on literature, or literary figure. | ||
| And then I started writing about politics. | ||
| And the one thing which somebody once said to me about me, as it were, that I thought was probably somewhere near the truth was that somebody once said that I had a very low tolerance threshold for lies. | ||
| And I think there is something in that. | ||
| I genuinely, maybe it will wear out at some point, but maybe I'll just overdose, as it were, on lies. | ||
| But I just, I find, I don't like being told lies. | ||
| And I don't like it about historical things. | ||
| That's why my first book was partly about, I think, a set of historical misunderstandings that had happened in relation to the figure I was writing about. | ||
| And I wanted to correct them. | ||
| And then in politics, of course, if you have a low tolerance threshold for lies, maybe it's just not the right area to go into. | ||
| Yeah, that was my next question. | ||
| Maybe you picked an odd thing to be writing about. | ||
| Maybe I just got into surfing or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But politics and political lies, you know, galvanizes me. | ||
| And I suppose the other thing is that I'm not a Political not. | ||
| I don't really care who's running in that district for which party and which party they voted for four years ago. | ||
| I sort of think it's interesting. | ||
| It's not what I spend my life feeling particularly impressed or enamored with. | ||
| But I do think that if you care about the culture in the widest sense, as I do, then you've got to be interested in politics. | ||
| You've got to take some attitude towards it. | ||
| And let's say not in order to further your Political goals or something, if you want to do that you should really be a politician. | ||
| But I think in order to try to safeguard the culture, I mean, I don't even mean the culture, I mean really to safeguard the practice of culture really. | ||
| And that's what politics seems to me to be very largely for. | ||
| I'm quite interested in taxation, I'm not very interested in it. | ||
| I just want the circumstances to be right for the culture to thrive. | ||
| Yeah, so when people say, oh, you know, I'm not a political person or something like that, I hate that phrase because it really, what are you actually saying? | ||
| You're like, you're either pretending that you're above it or you somehow don't need it. | ||
| And yet politics, you're right, it's about creating the conditions so that you can do all of the other things you care about. | ||
| I think what a lot of people mean when they say that is, I'm not a party person. | ||
| I'm not going to bore on about the Labour Party or the Conservative Party or the Democrats or the Republicans. | ||
| I think that's what people mean. | ||
| But in any case, a lot of people who said that some time ago don't say that anymore. | ||
| In fact, maybe the more they said in the past they weren't a politics person, the more now they're shrieking and gibbering and storming. | ||
| Yeah, do you think there's a danger in that? | ||
| So we had all these people that, you know, whatever that meant to them, they weren't politics people, but now everybody's shrieking and screaming and everyone's in the part of it that you just said doesn't really do it for you, that piece of the day-to-day racehorse stuff. | ||
| And that's why I try to focus on the philosophical stuff because Who's running for this or all of that stuff? | ||
| Yes, it's important at some level, but it's the bigger picture stuff that I think really matters. | ||
| Yes, and to a great extent in your country and in mine, there is a type of person now who I think has got politics all the wrong way around. | ||
| Maybe it is, as they say, people who didn't pay much attention to it in the past, but there are people who are now I think putting onto politics an amount of weight that it can't bear. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| It's about their entire existence, as it were. | ||
| And I wouldn't want that to be the case at all. | ||
| I mean, I had with a colleague some time ago sort of informal competition after the Conservative Party won the 2015 election in Britain. | ||
| I had an informal competition to say, you know, what's the nuttiest thing anyone said? | ||
| And the best was this woman at The Guardian who wrote a column saying that basically she cried herself to sleep every night and she woke up in the morning crying. | ||
| Sometimes she stopped crying. | ||
| She woke up and she thought, oh my God, I've had a nightmare. | ||
| No, it's true. | ||
| And then she burst into tears again. | ||
| That person shouldn't really be in the community, should they? | ||
| I have views on who I want to win and at any one time which party I'd vote for, but I cannot imagine any scenario In which I became such a gibbering wreck that I just wept all the time. | ||
| Or, because she might not have been telling the truth, this con. | ||
| Or thought it wise to say to people, that's the state I'm in. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Well, it shows her victimhood. | ||
| She's such a victim, she can't sleep. | ||
| The best is when you see the Huffington Post or one of these pieces, probably in The Guardian too, where it's not just them that are crying. | ||
| Their children are waking up having nightmares about Trump. | ||
| My three-year-old's having a nightmare about Trump. | ||
| Mummy, mummy, what should I tell my three-year-old now he's asking about Trump? | ||
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I know, tell him to go to sleep! | |
| You know, it's so funny, I tweeted this out a couple months ago, but in the middle of the election, you know, all these articles are being written, how Trump is affecting kids, this whole thing. | ||
| So I asked, I asked my, at the time, I think he was five or six, my nephew, I said, what do you know about Donald Trump? | ||
| He looks at me, he's like, he has bad hair and a red tie. | ||
| And I was like, that's what? | ||
| That's what a kid would think. | ||
| All right, so I want to talk about your book, but I thought before we get into that, I want to do a little bit more on just sort of language in general and the free speech thing. | ||
| So when you come to America, because we have some extra protections, for now at least, on free speech that you guys across Europe don't have, do you feel an extra degree of freedom? | ||
| You don't strike me as someone that ever bites your tongue, but when you come here and know that we have such a great free, or do you see something a little different here, perhaps? | ||
| I think you do. | ||
| I mean, I think you've just got to separate out between what your legal rights are, as it were, and what the actual practice is these days. | ||
| Yes, legally, I mean, there's nothing I say that's illegal in Britain or Europe, and so I don't particularly feel any sort of free air to say anything here, because there's nothing I would say here that I wouldn't say there, and vice versa. | ||
| It's true that having an amendment to your constitution that actually writes this into law is a very useful thing to have. | ||
| We of course don't even have a constitution in Britain which has its own advantages and problems. | ||
| But I think these things have to be slightly divorced from the reality of the practice as is at the moment. | ||
| And at the moment I think you're probably in a worse situation than we are in Britain or Europe in relation to speech. | ||
| Mainly because of a generation of people who are growing up and are the most privileged generation in history who seem to think that speech is violence and that in response to violence you should be violent. | ||
| And if you make that leap then the response to somebody speaking is to hit them or to shut them down or to burn them. | ||
| A building or to get them killed or whatever you want and I see that all the time all over the place. | ||
| Somebody I know in Holland who was there just a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people in the press have been demonizing him and they say his house was attacked two nights ago in Amsterdam and there's lots of that going on. | ||
| Loads of target selection. | ||
| And I think all this is very, very worrying. | ||
| But I do think that in general, you seem in America, to make terrible generalization, to be slightly further down the road of certain manias about this. | ||
| It seems to have embedded itself more. | ||
| This idea of being wounded or even hurt by words. | ||
| And yeah, you've got all of the SJW stuff slightly worse, I think. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that's maybe just that, in and of itself, could be just a cultural thing, that Americans kind of scream about things more, we're a little more hysterical, you guys are a little more polite? | ||
| I was asking a friend in New York about this the other day. | ||
| I wonder whether the, you know that thing you always hear in America, this is the most important election of our lifetime, every single one, and it's always, I mean, by the way, I'm fascinated by the language hyperventilation in this country. | ||
| I was fascinated by that moment before the last election when Bill Maher said, look we called Senator McCain a misogynist and we were just doing it trying to get him and we recognised he wasn't and then we did it on him and then we realised he wasn't really. | ||
| Romney wasn't really a misogynist but now this guy is. | ||
| So I'm fascinated by this thing of basically a lot of sort of chickens coming home to roost in some ways. | ||
| You kept running the language down and now you're in this. | ||
| But I said to this friend of America the other day, maybe the, as it were, the hyperventilation of politics is one of the ways in which you keep your democracy fresh. | ||
| I mean, maybe you have to live at that pitch. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't particularly want to live at it myself all the time, but perhaps the kind of, this is always the most important moment ever, is important for this democracy. | ||
| Maybe it's better than sort of It doesn't really matter, or it's never gonna be as good as that again. | ||
| I'm gonna ruminate on that one a little bit, because I think you can argue it both ways. | ||
| I think, I mean, it's what you're saying. | ||
| I can see a problem with that level of hysteria all the time, and you're right. | ||
| When Bill Maher said that, and, oh yeah, yeah, the left was saying all these horrible things about McCain, we did it about McCain, we did it about Romney. | ||
| This is the real one. | ||
| Well, you've cried wolf to the point now that What did you expect to happen? | ||
| In an odd way, is that a pro-Trump argument? | ||
| Strangely, like, he was, of course, what was gonna happen here. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you tried it with some decent, sort of, center-right people, but of course you're gonna get this then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe, maybe. | ||
| I'm resistant, myself, to the... | ||
| to introducing Donald Trump to almost any discussion because it almost always derails. | ||
| After almost everything that happens in the UK in the last year or so, he's going, "Well, | ||
| how will this affect Donald Trump?" | ||
| I'm going, "Stop talking about Donald Trump. | ||
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Allow other things in the world to exist as well." | |
| So you're saying when, I think your mayor of London was saying, "We don't want Trump | ||
| to come here," you'd be okay if Trump showed up, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
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Donald Trump has made an official visit to Paris. | |
| He's made official visits to Germany. | ||
| So quite a lot of allied countries by now. | ||
| I think it's outrageous. | ||
| I think people should protest if they want to protest. | ||
| And I remember the protests against George W. Bush when he came to London during his presidency. | ||
| And they were some very, very vehement protests. | ||
| But I don't mind people protesting, of course, is that right? | ||
| But I just, I think this attempt to say, I mean, our most important ally, and particularly at an important time in our national history in Britain when we need to be reforming our alliances and renewing them, to say F off To the president of your closest ally, seems to me to be very, very unwise, as well as rude. | ||
| Yeah, is it one of those things where it's just the easy answer? | ||
| You know, just, oh, don't let him hear, it shows how good we are, don't let him hear. | ||
| But actually what you do, you actually do damage to probably the most important relationship that these countries have. | ||
| Absolutely, I mean, when the mayor of London says we don't want him in London, you go, well, he's in Paris, he's in Berlin. | ||
| Like, what have you achieved? | ||
| At best, you'll damage, among other things, the economic relations between Britain and America. | ||
| So, nice work, Mr. Mann. | ||
| Nice work. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| All right, so we're almost at your book. | ||
| So I thought this is the good transition here. | ||
| I was listening to, I think it was your, not your last discussion with Sam Harris, maybe the one before that. | ||
| And you guys were talking about language and sort of the slow erosion of what's happening in the West. | ||
| And the rise of Islam, a lot of the key stuff that we all kind of talk about. | ||
| And you were talking about how we're going to be arguing about gender pronouns as all of our rights are going to be taken away from us. | ||
| You said it far more eloquently and with some better adjectives. | ||
| But I thought it was a really interesting point that our eye is not on the prize. | ||
| No. | ||
| In that we're not focusing on what's really important. | ||
| We're worried about things that I think it's crucial. | ||
| Not to say transgender rights aren't important, but they're not the big picture stuff. | ||
| How important is all of that, focusing on the right things? | ||
| I think it's crucial. | ||
| People can be interested in whatever they like, but I also have the right to tell them | ||
| I think they're wasting their lives. | ||
| Gender pronouns, all of this sort of thing. | ||
| These, this is... | ||
| There is, by the way, behind all this, something very strange I started to notice. | ||
| Among all the fascinating things about this, one of the ones that interests me most is why you get this introduction to almost every discussion As if we as human beings are sort of solvable things. | ||
| I find this fascinating. | ||
| Most of the trans stuff is, you know, identify that you're of the wrong gender at an early stage. | ||
| By the way, I'm very suspicious about all that, but I can think of a lot of effeminate young men who Shouldn't have drugs even encouraged towards them. | ||
| Yeah, when you say that you mean you're suspicious of the way we're treating them or of the sort of psychological? | ||
| The psychological thing in general, but let's say in the case of somebody actually does genuinely feel that they are in the wrong body and so on that there is just this awful thing in it as in so many other discussions at the moment of and if you nix that You'll be right. | ||
| And I think, no, no, no, once you sort that out, you'll face all the same problems everyone else faces in their lives, and maybe some new ones. | ||
| But this is, I hear this in the race discussion in America, I hear it in the gay discussion in America, in a whole set of them. | ||
| It's as if, it's as if if we get the formula right, I just think this is a fascinating mistake. | ||
| I don't think we live our lives as solved or solvable beings. | ||
| And we are engaged, it seems to me, particularly in this society, in America, in this strange attempt to sort of get the minutiae right. | ||
| And apart from being deeply navel-gazing, it seems likely to me that we may be missing all the really important things that are going on. | ||
| I have this sort of haunting view always that we all feel like we've really sorted out every aspect of LGBTQI rights. | ||
| Just as China becomes the most important power in the world. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| I think it's a fascinating piece because I was going to talk a little bit more about this at the end, but you're gay and I asked you in our last interview right at the end, By that fact alone, how much does that give you an extra sensitivity to all of the other things that you're talking about? | ||
| You have a vested interest, you and I, and I think all of us, I think all humans all together, have a vested interest in keeping the West alive. | ||
| But I think as a gay person, it's particularly important that the last places of tolerance in Western thought are kept alive. | ||
| Yes, I have to say, in my own case, that's not particularly a galvanizing thing, I have to say. | ||
| I mean, I think being gay is kind of boring as a subject, in a way, because certainly for my generation, I mean, we sort of, if you came out, you came out, and by your twenties, like, who wants to keep going on about that? | ||
| Albeit I understand it why people did before. | ||
| You know, there's not a career or life, as it were, in just being a gay. | ||
| I mean, it's not a full-time occupation. | ||
| Only so many of us can be in reality TV. | ||
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There's only so many fashion gigs on Bravo. | |
| And it's never particularly influenced my politics. | ||
| And in fact, I may have said this to you before, but I'm generally very opposed to the idea of politics being about What am I myself and how can I get the world to most accommodate itself towards me? | ||
| I think it's a mistake. | ||
| I think politics should be a search for some kind of truth or the best arrangement that allows the truth to occur and you know your own involvement in it or your own comfort in it is of importance but it I mean, I wouldn't want somebody who said, I'm totally into this because I'm fighting for myself and that's it. | ||
| In fact, by the way, sorry, since you mentioned it, on some of this stuff, on the Islam stuff, for instance, actually the first warning siren to me was not a treatment of gays, it was a treatment of Jews, which I became sort of increasingly noticing there was a problem a couple of decades ago now. | ||
| But it was that. | ||
| How were you seeing that in British society? | ||
| Well, I was worried about it because I started to notice that there were things that were being said that I thought wouldn't come around again. | ||
| And as I say, I'm not Jewish myself, but you can notice these things and not need to, as it were, have a personal vested interest in it. | ||
| I suppose one other thing I'd say about this is I generally think the atomization of society into groups with their own interests is one of the things that's causing all this mess in America at the moment. | ||
| I don't see why the job of gays should be just to sort of fight for the gays and the job of the Jews should be to fight for the Jews and so on and so forth. | ||
| I think the idea of sort of looking out for each other is surely the point in a republic and yet that point seems to be lost. | ||
| Right, so is that where this intersectional crew has really lost it? | ||
| Because they're sort of getting what you're saying, that we should be looking out for each other. | ||
| That should bring all of these minority groups together. | ||
| Except instead of that, they're vying for most depressed. | ||
| They're vying for most depressed, and most ridiculous, and most hyperventilating, and all of that. | ||
| But the intersectionality people, I mean, there's two big things. | ||
| One is, they are the prime culprits of this thing of the myth of solvability, the myth of human solvability. | ||
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Right. | |
| If we just, if we get the Rubik's Cube right, and okay, the games get there, and then we get the trans end, and then this people here, and then the non-binary, and then this, and then the Muslims can get there, and then... And we can all think exactly the same! | ||
| And we can all think exactly the same, and speak in exactly the preferential order that we're allowed to speak in. | ||
| It'll all be fine. | ||
| Whereas my view is, you'll still have every single problem of the world ahead of you. | ||
| You'll still have to work out what your foreign policy is. | ||
| A whole load of stuff is coming. | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| But the second thing is they are obviously breaking apart American society. | ||
| I don't think that's too much of an exaggeration because they started at the universities and it's trickling across everything else. | ||
| And I've been having really interesting conversations with people about this in recent years in Europe as well as in America. | ||
| And one of the things I'm sort of slightly confident about here in America is that you do have an answer to it. | ||
| And it's an answer you've had before. | ||
| You know, the problem of the identity politics thing is we're already starting to see that apart from being wrong in itself and I think morally suspicious and selfish, you can't stop what you're going to create on it. | ||
| You can't have racial rights for every group and racial pride rights for every group and always hold back white, you know, pride, whatever. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| At some point it's going to break. | ||
| You can't keep bashing heterosexual men and not expect at some point that there's going to be some kind of response. | ||
| So if everyone's allowed their group apart from the majority or whatever, then at some point that's going to get nasty and I can see it coming so clearly. | ||
| Yeah, I mean we see it now. | ||
| And it's already started. | ||
| And the thing is that in America you had the answer to this, which is what Tocqueville mentions. | ||
| The deal of being in the Republic is you don't do that. | ||
| You deal with each other face-to-face as citizens. | ||
| You don't do it as just people coming to hawk something in the marketplace, but face-to-face as individual citizens in the Republic. | ||
| And this is the only way out. | ||
| Um, but I think there'll obviously be some mania before you get back there again. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny. | ||
| May you get back? | ||
| May we, yeah. | ||
| Emphasis on may. | ||
| You know, it's funny, the way I do the show, I try not to talk about individual people too much because I'd always rather focus on the ideas. | ||
| But as you're saying this, I'm thinking of something very specifically that Linda Sarsour, who I'm sure you know, I spent an evening with Linda Sarsour in Brooklyn some years ago. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, a couple of years ago. | ||
| How did that go before I tell you my little antidote? | ||
| I don't think we got on roaringly. | ||
| I sensed some sexual tension, actually. | ||
| There was a bit of sexual tension in the room. | ||
| Unavoidable. | ||
| But no, the fact is, actually, we were asked to debate the Croc phantom word, Islamophobia. | ||
| At the Brooklyn Art Museum, and I like a challenge, and I think our mutual friend Ayaan Hasyali was also meant to be there, but various things happened. | ||
| The Garland shooting happened, and it was decided it wasn't safe for Ayaan. | ||
| I still did it and things, but yeah, the whole thing, it started off with the other side sort of giggling about the fact that Ayaan couldn't even turn up, you know, sort of using it against her. | ||
| As if Ayaan's afraid of anybody. | ||
| Yes, I saw her before she became, as it were, infamous. | ||
| I thought she was a very nasty, very bitter, very un-American, actually. | ||
| I just say that because she knows, like all demagogues, how to introduce herself. | ||
| And introduce herself as a proud Brooklynite, a proud American, a proud Palestinian, etc. | ||
| I thought in an interesting order, but it was clear that she sort of really hated America, or at least hates the America that exists currently, because it was me that ended up having to explain to the audience that, for instance, the New York police don't just go around persecuting Muslims. | ||
| You know, it's just a willful misrepresentation of of the American authorities at every turn. | ||
| So I thought she was very dishonest, very unpleasant. | ||
| But I mean, I've come across her type all my life. | ||
| Yeah, and the only reason I mentioned her is because of what you said previously, which really was about assimilation. | ||
| The whole point of America is to assimilate. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that speech she gave about two months ago, where she called for a jihad, and then suddenly the left was defending the word jihad, and the white supremacists in the White House, Yes. | ||
| But I thought the key part of it, put jihad aside, put white supremacy aside, | ||
| the key part was when she said we're not here to assimilate. | ||
| I thought that is the antithesis of the American project, this | ||
| amazing melting pot that we have, where we've done for the most part | ||
| multiculturalism right, multiculturalism right, where Europe has failed in a lot of | ||
| ways and she was saying no. No, absolutely. | ||
| And I thought that was more dangerous than the other stuff. | ||
| Absolutely, of course. | ||
| I mean, as you say, Bam, put aside the fantastical idea that what she was suggesting was, you know, you should sort of have a jihad by kind of going and just really struggling in front of a Jew. | ||
| Spiritually, yeah. | ||
| I'm just struggling in front of this Israeli. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's just one having a turmoil. | |
| Yeah, this is what I recognized the night we met. | ||
| I mean, she really doesn't like this country. | ||
| By the way, I mean, we all have a problem about that, what you do about that. | ||
| It seems to me she's a sort of very rabid sectarian sort of Palestinian nationalist who happens to live in Brooklyn. | ||
| But, I mean, really what you do about it is that people identified that, recognised it, and called it out for what it was, what it is, and there just aren't very many people who do that still. | ||
| I mean, you know, we all take sort of baby steps on this, don't we? | ||
| As you say, you know, you end up with the left sort of defending, well, she probably meant this, and why don't you just say, look, she's not speaking. | ||
| as a critic of our society who wants to sort of mildly improve it. She's speaking as an opponent of our | ||
| society because she doesn't like it. Now I've encountered this I | ||
| say all my life in my opponents | ||
| and the very close enemies I've made in Britain and across Europe | ||
| a certain type of person of that ilk who clearly speaks as an opponent of the society. | ||
| They don't like it. | ||
| And, of course, among other things, all you can do to point out then is to say, you know, amazing you're here really, isn't it? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the Catch-22 of... | ||
| What we've got in the West, right? | ||
| We're going to have to let in all sorts of voices. | ||
| That's the beauty of this thing, and it also creates a little bit of the thread. | ||
| All right, let's talk about your book. | ||
| First off, I love the title, The Strange Death of Europe. | ||
| I thought using the adjective strange was particularly interesting. | ||
| Why did you choose the word strange, not slow or a series of other things that you could have used? | ||
| The first is it's a nod which not many readers will get to a slightly known history textbook called The Strange Death of Liberal England, which described the decline of the Liberal Party in the early part of the 20th century. | ||
| But that sort of isn't needed, as it were, to know it, although there is a slight similarity. | ||
| Yes, the real thing is it is odd. | ||
| I mean, it's a curious way to go. | ||
| And I think if you'd have said to anyone of one or two generations ago, That this would be what Europe's issues would be in the 21st century. | ||
| That basically it couldn't find any way not to just allow the world to walk in and join them. | ||
| That those generations would have been surprised. | ||
| Yes, it is strange, but I try to explain why. | ||
| In order to explain it, I try to explain it not just from the first-hand accounts and the statistics and all that sort of thing, but the deeper philosophical reasons why this is happening. | ||
| I think lots of books do bits of that, but I want to just say, look, this is the whole overall picture. | ||
| This is what we're actually living through. | ||
| And this is why. | ||
| Yeah, so the subtitle is Immigration, Identity, and Islam. | ||
| Does that order have any meaning to you in the way you phrase those three words? | ||
| Not particularly. | ||
| I mean, it centers on the 2015 migration crisis when Angela Merkel opened the doors of Europe and couldn't really find a way to shut them again. | ||
| But they'd already been open for a long time, as I explain. | ||
| No, I mean, these are the three massive things that are preoccupying, I think, not just Europe, but Europeans at the moment. | ||
| The immigration crisis, where the publics of Europe just want it to stop all across the continent. | ||
| All the polls all show the same thing. | ||
| The public want it to slow down. | ||
| Or stop. | ||
| So that's the immigration bit of it. | ||
| The identity bit of it is the very, very painful thing which people aren't very good at talking about. | ||
| Maybe I'm not very good at talking about it, but I think it's just there underlying everything. | ||
| What is this thing? | ||
| What is it to be a European? | ||
| Who can be European? | ||
| Can anyone be? | ||
| And is Europe a home for the peoples who've been in Europe, or is it home for anyone in the world who wants to move in and call it home? | ||
| These are very, very big questions. | ||
| Yeah, these are big ones. | ||
| And then the third one of that is the Islam bit, which I mentioned, because it's obviously the sharpest bit of this. | ||
| You can have somebody move in. | ||
| I know you can have a Nigerian Christian move into a bit of the south of England, and they will have issues they bring, as everyone does. | ||
| They will have their own ideas, as everyone does, their own culture they've walked in from, and everyone does. | ||
| But it would be the person of another background, from another community, another faith, who would be coming in with The issues that are really starting to gnaw at Europe, we find this very hard to talk about and it's getting easier very very slowly. | ||
| But you know our big worry is, we've not been great on the integration, all of our leaders say this, all the European politicians admit this now. | ||
| But the bit that is worrying us is the Islam bit because I think there's now a general awareness that maybe this is the bit we can't digest or we're finding it unusually difficult to digest and incorporate. | ||
| I don't say it's impossible by the way, I just think for all sorts of reasons it's proving very hard and may in the years ahead prove far worse. | ||
| So I know that you often make the distinction, like most educated people, you make the distinction between Islam as a set of ideas, as any religion is simply a set of ideas, versus Muslim as people. | ||
| In this case, Do you think that there is something unique? | ||
| I mean, this is always what triggers my friends on the left. | ||
| If you say that there is something unique about the set of ideas of Islam that is different than the set of ideas, if we just take the big three monotheistic ones, that is different than the set of ideas of Judaism or Christianity, or at least how they're practiced, I think is the more operative part, because you can look through all the books and there's plenty of bad stuff in the Old Testament. | ||
| Do you, at the end of this, do you believe that it's just incompatible, that this set of ideas is incompatible with the set of ideas that the West is trying to preserve? | ||
| I think unreformed Islam presents a very significant values challenge, and it's probably not reconcilable. | ||
| If we have, as it were, the Islam of most Muslim countries, it's very hard to see how that's doable. | ||
| I think all of this is very painful, isn't it? | ||
| Because, first of all, we live, in any case, in an age of relativism already, where, for perfectly good reasons sometimes, you know, we sort of pretend it's all sort of the same, you know, like I might be a Muslim, you know, you might be a Christian, she does yoga, and it all comes out in the wash, pretty much the same. | ||
| And I just think that, to begin with, that's obviously not true. | ||
| I mean, it's very strange to To want to concentrate on everything other than the premises and origins of a belief structure. | ||
| And as I've often said, stop me if I've said this to you before, but I mean, you know, there are all sorts of problems in the Christian religion and in Christian history, but as I've often said, you know, just carry out the thought experiment that instead of getting up at the Sermon on the Mount and saying, you know, love thy neighbor and forgive people endlessly, Jesus had said, if your brother offends you, chop his head off. | ||
| Would Christianity's history have been more bloody or less bloody? | ||
| I think we can all agree it's going to be more. | ||
| Or find the Jew behind the tree? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know Jesus didn't say that. | ||
| But if Jesus had got into the hole, like find the Jew behind the tree and slaughter him, | ||
| whatever the context, then there would be even more Christian anti-Semitism than there | ||
| has been historically. | ||
| So I just think these things matter. | ||
| And all this is very, very painful for a reason that I go into in some depth in the book, which is that in recent years we in countries like Britain, and I think in America have Had the luxury of sort of describing ourselves in terms that, among other things, have been universal. | ||
| That what we have, it should also be universal. | ||
| Now this is a very big, this is always a debate within liberalism, of course. | ||
| Is liberalism something we have or something we, as it were, expound? | ||
| And expand. | ||
| And in recent years, I think that a certain moroseness has landed across Europe. | ||
| Among other things, because of a growing awareness that maybe what we have is very unusual. | ||
| And that we have become disassociated from the roots from which what we enjoy grew. | ||
| And this is a problem. | ||
| There's a German legal theorist I quote in the book who puts this as one of the central conundrums for Europe. | ||
| Is it possible Is it possible that the thing we're enjoying and living through can survive without the connection to its roots? | ||
| And I believe that the roots of the West and of Europe in particular are fairly clear. | ||
| And it's a combination of things. | ||
| It's the inheritance of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. | ||
| It's obviously the inheritance of the Christian civilization that washed throughout the continent. | ||
| And then the refining fire of the Enlightenment and skepticism and all these things. | ||
| And of course we go on endlessly about the other things that have added to it, but broadly speaking that is what made Europe Europe and what made a European a European. | ||
| They breathe this air. | ||
| But the sort of the last man at the end of that, which I fear modern Europeans are, is in this strange position of finding it hard to even identify Where he and she has come from, let alone being able to return to those roots and nurture them. | ||
| Because we all have, I have, I'm sure you have, a conflicted set of views about this. | ||
| You know, is it necessary for other people to believe? | ||
| Those of us who have sometimes been tempted to hope that, for instance, scepticism is enough, constantly depressed by the discovery that, for instance, somebody may be a free thinker about God, and that's it from a free thinking point of view. | ||
| From then on it's tribe all the way. | ||
| And, you know, we're all living through this. | ||
| But it's for Europe, I think, that the combination of A historically unprecedented movement of people into the continent at the same time that this sort of breakdown of what we are ourselves is going on is a fatal thing. | ||
| So there's a lot there that I wanna hit, but what you said right at the beginning, which is that if Islam, if unreformed, we're not allowed to reform. | ||
| So I think that's particularly interesting for the space that you and I sort of exist in, because I have many allies who are reformers. | ||
| I have allies that are ex-Muslim, I have allies that are Muslim, and many, many people that I've interviewed that you know. | ||
| But they're treated horribly, horribly. | ||
| And every time they're allowed to get a platform or talk, it's actually by the evil conservatives, or the evil right, or all the things that people who don't like me will say about me, or say about you, or any of that stuff. | ||
| That makes the job a gajillion times harder. | ||
| Well, I say in the book, towards the end when I try to rouse myself to some prognostications about all this, that this is the worst possible sign. | ||
| Not just that the people that we might talk about in these terms are so few, and between us you and I might have them in our phone books. | ||
| Not just that, but who are the ones that are most under pressure and under risk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They really are the good guys. | |
| To say that this is a tragedy for Islam is obvious. | ||
| But it's always been my view that we should try to avoid making ourselves a casualty of Islam's civil internal strife. | ||
| And I think we haven't done that. | ||
| I think we've spent recent decades almost deliberately running towards a fight that didn't need to involve us. | ||
| So the tragedy of Islam becomes the tragedy of the West as well. | ||
| I hoped this could be avoided, but I think it can't. | ||
| And I think, as I say, the worst possible sign for the future Is that it's, you know, Hamid Abulsamed in Germany who lives under protection. | ||
| It's Majid Nawaz who comes in for all the grief in the UK. | ||
| It's Ayaan Hirsi Ali who followed the Dutch integration ideal more than anyone who ends up having to leave Holland. | ||
| These are very, very bad signs. | ||
| You know, you can still live openly as a Hamas military commander in London. | ||
| Your life's fine. | ||
| Yeah, you'll be celebrated in some ways, right? | ||
| I mean, this is a huge problem. | ||
| All right, so let's knock out each one of these words. | ||
| We've sort of hit, I think, a bit of each one already. | ||
| On the immigration front, when you said that Merkel just opened the doors, I see a lot of different There's a lot of stuff written about her that she either intentionally, you know, you get sort of the conspiracy people that she wanted to destroy Europe or she hates her own country and all this stuff. | ||
| I try not to impugn everyone's motives, but when this happened in 2015 and there was this combination of refugees and immigrants and migrants and nobody could figure out what was happening and we saw videos of people, just thousands of people just running across borders and all this stuff, and an odd amount of them that seemed to be men in their 20s and not women and children and all that. | ||
| Which implies that they're often migrants looking for work. | ||
| Even the EU's own figures, the Frontex figures, say that the majority of the people who came in 2015 have no right to be in Europe. | ||
| Which is fascinating, and somehow even if you say that, you'll be labeled whatever. | ||
| But what do you think her intention was in 2015? | ||
| Well, this is why I try to go back to the beginning, not just with history, but also with the philosophy on this. | ||
| I don't impute terrible motives to her. | ||
| I think that she was blackmailed by history. | ||
| was facing a truly terrible humanitarian crisis which was undoubtedly going on and I stare this in the face and I travel around and speak to many many migrants from all over the world. | ||
| I've been to many of the countries they've fled from but I also go to speak to them in the countries that they arrive into and speak to them in the camps and certainly have met and listened to more migrants than I think any of my critics. | ||
| But, you know, it's easy to exaggerate the ease of the situation that she faced, or the ease of the solution to it, and I think that shouldn't be done. | ||
| It was a genuine crisis, it remains a genuine crisis, and the biggest imaginable moral question So, we also know that at the moment that she made the decision in 2015 to basically suspend all border controls, I suggested in my book, but since my book has come out, it's already now been confirmed by somebody who was with her at the time, that what happened in particular was somebody said to Merkel, we cannot have German border guards repelling migrants and the photos go around the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is just condemned because of history? | ||
| Yes, it's what one French philosopher calls the second career of Adolf Hitler. | ||
| It's an ugly way of looking at it, but it's not entirely implausible. | ||
| This is another go-round, this terrible, terrible history and past. | ||
| But, you know, it's not conspiracy. | ||
| I show in the book how much it's more what we call in England cock-up. | ||
| I've always tended towards a cock-up view of history because if you see politics up close as I have done quite a bit throughout my life, you know that it's not really people pursuing grand sort of schemes really, it's people who haven't done the job before because you can't and there is no qualification that gets you in position beforehand and trying to deal with not long-term things but tomorrow morning's headlines and you know media action the next hour and they They drown below the surface of this babble. | ||
| That's how politics happens these days. | ||
| Right, which is not the way that both sides talk about politics. | ||
| They want to make it seem like the other side has constantly this grand plan and everything's going according to plan. | ||
| As I say in the book, every single thing we thought would happen didn't happen. | ||
| And nothing that has happened was expected. | ||
| I go back to the 50s, you know, the guest workers who were the first people who came in after the war. | ||
| The first migrant waves into Europe, from Turkey and elsewhere. | ||
| As Merkel herself said in 2010, we expected them to go home. | ||
| That's an incredible mock-up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But then we expect them to go home. | ||
| Then they didn't. | ||
| Of course, they wanted, having tasted First World, you know, economics, among other things, they wanted to bring their families. | ||
| And, of course, if you have your families, you'll have more children, and you'll enter the schooling system, and then you'll need health care, and then you'll need this and that. | ||
| Especially if the state's giving you a lot of those things. | ||
| And that's why we are where we are. | ||
| Where, you know, the 2011 census identified people who call themselves white British on the census as a minority in London. | ||
| A minority in 23 out of the 33 London boroughs. | ||
| It's why all the demographic projections from across the continent show Europeans, I think, not to overstate it, losing the place they had to call home, or at least becoming a minority in it. | ||
| And this, you know, there are some people who talk about that in the sort of language of, ha ha, the empire strikes back, now you're getting a taste of it, you went round the world and now the world's come to you. | ||
| And among other things, I warn those people, just be careful of that language, the language of punishment. | ||
| Because if the language of that is, as it were, the punishment for colonialism, then down the road you'll create a movement that will say, well, we managed to end colonialism. | ||
| Yeah, and then they'll come for you too, no matter what you do. | ||
| So with that being said, so the identity part then is obviously inextricably linked to this. | ||
| When you see this sort of what seems to be the rising white identitarian movement or European identitarian movement or whatever, What do you make of it? | ||
| Do you view it purely as the natural reaction to this? | ||
| Is there anything legitimate out of that? | ||
| Are there parts that are not racist, or is it truly based in race? | ||
| I'm very, very worried about this at the moment, I have to say. | ||
| Very, very worried. | ||
| If you have people saying, I'm proud of the color of my skin because it's this skin color, of course there will be some people who do the opposite. | ||
| Somebody said to me the other day, I've only seen questions, are you proud of being white? | ||
| And I said, no, of course not. | ||
| Why would I be proud of pigmentation? | ||
| But I then turned around and said, no, if you ask me if I'm proud of my culture, I'd say of course. | ||
| But it's something else than that. | ||
| It's not really about pride in the culture. | ||
| Some years ago I wrote a piece about this for a book the Prime Minister Gordon Brown was editing on Britishness. | ||
| And I said, I don't think of these things in terms of patriotism. | ||
| I think of it in terms of gratitude. | ||
| I feel gratitude for what I've been lucky enough to be born into. | ||
| I'd love it if other people who wanted to be part of it became a part of it. | ||
| And I think they can. | ||
| And I think it shouldn't be and can't be racially exclusionary. | ||
| I mean, it's madness. | ||
| But it's a madness that seems to me that some people will be falling into. | ||
| By being pushed and by being ignorant and other things, but you know, I come back to this thing, there will be some people who will, and I've found this a lot in conversations across the continent in the last year or two, there will be people who will grab a bit of the identity thing for themselves for tactical reasons. | ||
| We will get to this goal and we'll use a dishonest tactic just like you're using it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there will be other people who will say, no it's not just a tactic, it's what I feel, it's what I believe. | ||
| I just strongly urge people not to go down that route. | ||
| Strongly urge them not to go down the route of identifying by an accident of skin pigmentation. | ||
| But to say if you want to talk in terms of values and in terms of civilization and of culture, you cannot make it exclusionary like that. | ||
| But the point about this is it's That can't only be that it's the, as it were, white young guy who's told that. | ||
| You've also got to tell it to the angry young black demagogue who's telling people of their own skin colour to isolate and congregate around race. | ||
| Everyone's got to make the deal, as it were, on this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I just am filled with, you know, concern about this. | ||
| And that probably has a little something to do with the word strange, because it seems to me that it's possible that the ship has already sailed on this, perhaps more in Europe than in America, because you guys had an integration problem already, which is finally being acknowledged now, but then you also have this new set of people. | ||
| So even if everything was fantastic with all the people that were there and all the integration before 2015, What do you even do with just the new set of problems? | ||
| Let me give you an example, by the way. | ||
| In Scotland, there's a small amount now, but a Catholic-Protestant, mainly centered around football-supporting Celtic Rangers, they go by religious affiliation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Still. | |
| Still! | ||
| Because of a movement of Catholics from Ireland into Scotland, Long time ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me give you another example. | ||
| I had a very dear friend who died recently who was a brilliant, very, very brave man called Sean O'Callaghan who was a double agent within the IRA during the Troubles and he got up to the top of the IRA command and he was informing all the time to the Irish state and saved many, many lives. | ||
| He was an extraordinary, extraordinary man. | ||
| I wrote an obituary for him and others of his friends did. | ||
| One of the most negative In fact, one of the only negative pieces about Sean was in the Boston Globe, who referred to him as a grass, as somebody who, after he'd come out and written his memoirs, came to hawk them around America. | ||
| Not just selling a book or promoting a book, hawking a book. | ||
| Why would that appear in the Boston Globe? | ||
| Only because, a very long time ago, a large number of people from Ireland arrived in this country, settled in Boston, and held on to their Irish identity. | ||
| And some of them held on to a belief that the IRA, a murderous, murderous, sectarian gang, were, as it were, their people. | ||
| So all these centuries later, The attitude in the Boston Globe, when a man who risked his life to save many, many other people's lives dies, is to attack him basically as a grass and a snitch. | ||
| Okay, that's the movement of Catholic Irish people into America. | ||
| Who on earth thinks that when you bring the entire ...developing world into Europe, including very, very large numbers of young men from the Muslim world, that this is going to be sorted out by next February. | ||
| Or roughly this time next year. | ||
| So does this show, I use the phrase lazy thinking a lot, but maybe that's not the right way. | ||
| It shows an inability to think. | ||
| You know what you said about Merkel in 2010, it's like, well, we thought they were gonna leave. | ||
| That's not lazy thinking, that's, man, did you even think, I mean, you know it's pretty good in Germany. | ||
| You know if you let people in. | ||
| Is there ever been a self-imposed group of people that left a Western country to go back? | ||
| Do we? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Once people, you know, realize that the economics works better in Western Europe than it does in Sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| Of course, of course they come. | ||
| But we, I mean, we're just so torn about this and I think we have to rouse ourselves to more than moroseness. | ||
| We're torn about it, it seems to me, because we're not sure why, and I'm pretty sure why, but as cultures we're not entirely sure why It should be our right to keep anyone out. | ||
| I mean, I hear this obviously in America. | ||
| America has a different issue, of course. | ||
| It's legitimate to say America is a nation of immigrants. | ||
| It's not legitimate to say that about Britain. | ||
| It just hasn't been, until the late 20th century, a nation of immigrants. | ||
| It's been a very, very static population. | ||
| Even the Norman Conquest, a thousand years ago, shifted the population by about 5% in the UK. | ||
| So, you know, I understand that in America the whole thing to do with immigration is a bit harder. | ||
| People feel they're talking not about them, but about you or me. | ||
| And in Europe that is a bit of the case now. | ||
| There are people who talk in those terms, but there's also just this additional thing of by what right? | ||
| By what right would I be allowed to say anyone can't come? | ||
| Now, I think there are all sorts of ways you argue it. | ||
| I mean, the law should matter. | ||
| And the law should matter. | ||
| The difference between legal and illegal is everything. | ||
| Look, I'm not a Canadian. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Because we have a border. | ||
| And that means that a Canadian has to obey the laws of Canada, and I have to obey the laws of the United States. | ||
| People think that even and of itself is somehow controversial. | ||
| By the way, what a beautiful thing it has been watching Justin Trudeau have to face this reality. | ||
| It's so easy for politicians, in Europe we've seen it a lot, you've seen it here in America, Canadians have seen it. | ||
| It's so easy to grandstand on this. | ||
| Let them in, open the doors, because when the effects happen, hopefully you'll be out of power and you'll be retired somewhere in a nice area with lots of people like you, which was your dirty little secret all along. | ||
| Right, he'll move to New Zealand or something. | ||
| Isn't that where they're all moving, New Zealand? | ||
| That's fine, maybe. | ||
| But yeah, Trudeau is one of the people who sort of berated And morally grandstanding. | ||
| And then, of course, when there's movement of people from America across the Canadian border, they start to get worried. | ||
| Bill Gates, by the way, at the beginning of the migrant crisis said that America should take in the same proportion of migrants that year as Germany did. | ||
| Germany took in an extra 2% of its population in one year alone. | ||
| And Bill Gates said, we should take in the same numbers in Germany, as Germany did in America. | ||
| Well, interesting enough, only a couple of months ago Bill Gates did a reverse ferret on that. | ||
| Actually, no, he said in a set of remarks that if Germany continues like this, it's going to destroy it. | ||
| Well, imagine if Bill Gates, instead of being the world's richest man, had been in charge of anything. | ||
| Then you'd have gone through what Germany is going through, And it would have vastly outlasted him as this will outlast Merkel and all of us. | ||
| So the issue, it seems to me, there's two things I can point out. | ||
| One is demanding that our political leaders in particular think through things beyond the two-year electoral cycle or the four-year electoral cycle or, more importantly, just tomorrow morning's headlines. | ||
| You might have a bad morning's news. | ||
| It's a lot better than fucking up your country. | ||
| It's a lot better. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And the second thing about this is we have to develop the ability to have an adult discussion about these things that recognizes. | ||
| It's not between, you know, you're for the migrants, I'm against them. | ||
| Or, you know, you're Churchill, I'm Hitler. | ||
| You're Chamberlain, you're Hitler. | ||
| Just to have the discussion on recognizing these are different opinions about our future. | ||
| And that, you know, I say toward the end of the book that we have the tools for doing this. | ||
| Aristotle showed us a long time ago. | ||
| This is just a competition between virtues. | ||
| Angela Merkel very understandably felt the human virtue of mercy. | ||
| To be merciful towards people who are trying to come. | ||
| And I say yes, but there is another virtue competing with that, which is the virtue of justice. | ||
| And not just justice for the people of the world wanting to come and have a better life, but justice for the peoples of Europe. | ||
| If you have the discussion on those terms, between competing virtues, not between good and evil, right and wrong, Churchill-Hitler, me good, you Nazi. | ||
| Then you might be able to get somewhere in this discussion. | ||
| But it's as if we've sort of wounded ourselves before even starting at the start line. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as two people that try to engage in that, I think that's what we consistently try to do. | ||
| And I see you debating all sorts of people from every walk of life. | ||
| Yeah, I have a promiscuous debating. | ||
| You've debated basically everybody. | ||
| Some people are now in prison, not because I had debated them so much they were prosecuted, but I mean, you know, I've debated lots of people. | ||
| I'm sure you've sent a couple people to mental institutions after they've had to deal with your wit and wrath. | ||
| If somebody is out in the general public and has a platform and they want to debate, I always have the view, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not to say I'll debate anyone, by the way. | ||
| Sometimes people go, oh yeah, you wouldn't debate me, and I think you've got two Twitter followers and you're nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and you're a blue fox on Twitter. | |
| Yeah, you're like Xena Warrior Princess 19. | ||
| No, I'm not good at debating. | ||
| She's after me too, that woman. | ||
| She really wants to debate. | ||
| All right, I think we got a nice holistic piece of this here. | ||
| So I want to just shift all together to end this on a Something somewhat uplifting. | ||
| As someone that does all this, that you speak about this stuff, you deeply care about this stuff, I worry about this stuff constantly. | ||
| I'll be staring off into nothing in the middle of the day and I'm literally worried about the fate of the Western world. | ||
| I wish I was playing video games again as much as I used to. | ||
| Yeah, you lost me there, by the way. | ||
| I lost you on the video game thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what do you do for fun? | ||
| What do you do to just forget all this stuff and just enjoy yourself and be human? | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I... well... I know you don't like this type of question, because this is... Well, I'm rather careful about, as it were, private... | |
| Matters. | ||
| I'm very happily in a relationship of many years. | ||
| I love my family. | ||
| I've got wonderful friends. | ||
| I see them a lot. | ||
| To relax. | ||
| I mean, I read. | ||
| I read all the time. | ||
| Not just because it's enjoyable, but because it's just endlessly learning and thinking. | ||
| So it's just so stimulating sometimes when you have that thing of what I describe as catching up with a truth you'd always known was there. | ||
| The thrill of recognition that you get from reading that I think is harder to find in video games or television. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I do a lot of reading. | |
| I'll shift this a little then. | ||
| So what would you say, more importantly than that, to the person that's watching this, the type of email that I get all the time, the person that is just a regular person, you know, working a regular job, that sees these problems, that hears you, that is not a bigot and is not a racist, but is genuinely afraid of doing what you do every day, which is say what you think? | ||
| That they're genuinely afraid of just putting their thoughts out there, be it on social media or be it, it's getting to the point where they're afraid to talk to their own spouses about these things. | ||
| I know. | ||
| What could you say to somebody to give them a little bit of a boost on that? | ||
| I tell you what, the water's not as cold as people say. | ||
| It really isn't. | ||
| I mean... It's hard, this one, isn't it? | ||
| Because if you... There has been a lot of focus on the negatives, certainly in some of the things we're talking about today, in recent years. | ||
| And there's a sort of growing feeling, and actually one of the recent interviewees, a Google guy, is a demonstration. | ||
| The more that stuff happens, the more that people keep down, Um, and, um, it's very hard to, I mean, you can't be brave for other people. | ||
| You can't tell other people, you know, speak up. | ||
| But, uh, uh, I think we can encourage each other, too. | ||
| I mean, um, you know, sometimes people approach me in a sort of, uh, you know, oh, yeah, I don't, I just want a chain on, like, you must, it must be really hard, hard for you to, like, live, and so on. | ||
| No, it's great. | ||
| I have cocktails with my friends, I go to concerts, I read things I want, I enjoy the music I love, and I travel where I like. | ||
| I go all over the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're not going to need any extra security tonight, are we? | |
| I hope not. | ||
| We're going to Beverly Hills, I think we'll probably be there. | ||
| Depends if you pick a fight with anyone today. | ||
| But no, I mean, it's, you know, there's a sort of exaggerator. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I'm asking you this question, because I do think it's partly in people's minds. | ||
| You start speaking and then you realize, oh yeah, somebody said some bad stuff about me, but I'm still here. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So people, quite a lot of the time, young journalists and things saying, you know, I'd really like to write this, but you know, I don't dare, and all this sort of thing, and you know, I'll get this. | ||
| No, just see. | ||
| And just write it. | ||
| And I mean, no one ever awarded somebody for a career in journalism where they said nothing. | ||
| Although there are some writers at the New York Times, you could say. | ||
| But, you know, you just do it. | ||
| And if it doesn't work, I'm very lucky in that I've spent my career saying what I think and being able to earn a living, precariously but successfully. | ||
| And I feel like I can write for almost any of the newspapers I want to write for, and almost all of them will have me, and I love writing for the range of them. | ||
| I'm very lucky to do this, but it's not like that's rare. | ||
| I mean, it's still legal to say what you think. | ||
| And so I just hate it when people say, I really admire you for saying what you think. | ||
| What the hell do you do? | ||
| But it's only that we all get used to the idea. | ||
| And just one other thing, which is, just also, I don't know about you, but I find myself more and more tolerant of people's opinions. | ||
| Just more and more tolerant of it. | ||
| I mean, I see people driving themselves mad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I just sort of think, I mean, there are some things, if somebody, you know, I discovered they were into, you know, kiddy fiddling or something, and I'd have something to say to them. | ||
| But pretty much, you know, on politics and all sorts of things, I find myself like, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| And, you know, it's fascinating. | ||
| And who would want to keep all that down? | ||
| And, you know, as long as we agree on the parameters, as long as we agree that, you know, we don't shoot and stab each other, which is obviously up for negotiation it seems at the moment, but as long as we don't do that, then what's the problem? | ||
| Just speak. | ||
| Don't expect somebody else to do it for you. | ||
| Don't siphon it off like some wing of government, like the Free Speech Center. | ||
| It's for you to do. | ||
| It's for us to do. | ||
| It's for everyone. | ||
| That's how you end an interview. | ||
| Douglas Murray is on the Twitter. | ||
| I have just been informed. | ||
| Via the teleprompter. | ||
| You're 1,000 followers away from 100,000. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I know you're monitoring this constantly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You must have these. | ||
| I think we can get you there. | ||
| Should I do something like, if I get to 100,000 followers, I'll do something? | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We should discuss it. | ||
| We'll discuss it over drinks. | ||
| All right, for more on Douglas, follow him on the Twitter. | ||
| He doesn't care that much, but I want the man to get to 100,000. | ||
| It's Douglas K. Murray. |
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