Dec. 6, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| And of course, what it all clarified was the fact that the Antifa activists have a very clear policy, | ||
| which is that they want to provoke the police or need any law enforcement into something they can pretend is an act | ||
| of violence that they can catch on camera and use as an explanation for | ||
| the allegedly fascist nature of the American state. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Joining me today is a best-selling author, political pundit, and now American cultural expert, Douglas Murray. | ||
| Douglas, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's a great pleasure to be back with you, Dave. | ||
| Do you consider yourself an American cultural expert now that you spent how long? | ||
| About two months traversing our great country, seeing cities burn and going to joyous rallies and everything in between. | ||
| Are you a cultural expert of Americana now? | ||
| If I am, then there's hundreds of millions of others as well. | ||
| And it certainly does feel like that sometimes. | ||
| I do notice that many millions of cultural experts on America don't bother going there at all and don't bother traveling around. | ||
| But yeah, I spent a very, very interesting period ahead of the election, as you know, traveling all around your country to the extent that you can in these days. | ||
| I went across about six or seven states. | ||
| And was there right up until just after the election. | ||
| I spent the election in Washington, DC. | ||
| Yeah, so I thought you'd be the right guy to talk to for my post Thanksgiving show, because I thought we could get away a little bit from like the minutia of American politics, but I think getting your perspective as an outsider that spent so much time here, and that has, you know, a cohesive worldview. | ||
| So I thought we'd start by saying, so when you were here about six weeks ago or so, We actually went out to lunch one day and we were just heading back, we were heading back to my place, and we saw a Trump rally in Beverly Hills. | ||
| We did not know that there was a Trump rally, but we got out of the car and we thought, all right, let's do a little exploration and see what's what. | ||
| I think at this point, my audience knows my take on it. | ||
| What was your take on that rally? | ||
| And then subsequently you went to a bunch of others and got to see some stuff. | ||
| Yes, I mean, I wanted to get a sense of where America was ahead of the election. | ||
| I was writing from multiple states, from New York, Long Island, to California, to Oregon, to Atlanta, Georgia, Pensacola, Florida, Washington, D.C. | ||
| I did quite a good round. | ||
| And one of the purposes of it really was to try to get a sense of the temperature in America at the moment. | ||
| I haven't been in the country for a couple of years. | ||
| I've traveled there a lot in my life, but I noticed quite a lot of things that seemed new to me, or at least worse to me. | ||
| And as for that particular day, I mean, that was an interesting thing, wasn't it? | ||
| Because I thought, well, L.A. | ||
| was an unlikely place to stumble across a pro-Trump rally. | ||
| I thought it was very good-natured and diverse, to use the most important word of the era. | ||
| And I suppose the other thing that struck me was something else that I noticed in other places across my travels, which was that I actually predicted ahead of the election, I didn't know how it was going to go, but I did say ahead of the election that I thought that there was a quiet Trump vote. | ||
| One might even say an embarrassed Trump vote. | ||
| It's likely to signify something at the polls. | ||
| And one of the things was, it was only one of the examples, but was yes, the fact that I think that day, about what about one in every two cars, I just thought was beeping support for that rally in LA. | ||
| And I thought that was that was striking. | ||
| And I found I found a certain amount of other that sort of, you know, quiet Trump voter in California. | ||
| So yeah, it was one sort of pecan example of something that was definitely going on. | ||
| Was it sort of doubly surprising? | ||
| Because as someone that's a media creature and you know how the media operates and everything else, to see it on the ground and just how sort of different it was, I mean, you said the diversity word, but I mean, truly, there were blacks for Trump and Asians for Trump and Jews for Trump and Christians for Trump and gays for Trump. | ||
| Did that still shock you, even though maybe you know that the media doesn't report on this in the most totally honest way? | ||
|
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No, I'm quite hard to shock. | |
| And it can be done, but it takes an awful lot of effort. | ||
| I had assumed that a lot of people were finding their own way for themselves. | ||
| My own experience in the last few years in multiple countries has been that there are things that the media say and they bang on at and they still don't impact individuals who can come to their own decisions, particularly in our era where they can find their own sources of information and find their own groups of like-minded people. | ||
| And see through certain myths that are told. | ||
| So I wasn't surprised at that. | ||
| At the rally in Pensacola, Florida, I went to, which is a much bigger affair, of course, thousands and thousands of people. | ||
| One of many things that struck me was the good-naturedness of the crowd. | ||
| And of course, that is something which doesn't come across in almost any press coverage, which Presents the president's rallies as being rather hate-filled affairs and irrespective of whatever he says from the podium and I can't deny that I mean being a member of the press when he starts to sort of point to that when he pointed to the press gallery and started saying of the lying press and everyone started booing I suppose you know it's still part of my | ||
| The hackles go up at that. | ||
| But, you know, I was there as a member of the audience. | ||
| I signed up as an attendee and was right in the heart of it, making notes, clearly a member of the press and introducing myself as a journalist and was treated only with courtesy and kindness by the attendees. | ||
| So there was no unpleasant undertone or anything. | ||
| or anything like that. | ||
| Yeah, so you left Los Angeles. | ||
| I said goodbye to you and you said, I'm going to Portland. | ||
| And I said, why are you going to Portland? | ||
| And I think you said, I need to see it for myself. | ||
| So you went up to Portland. | ||
| What do you see up in Portland? | ||
| I slightly shot my bolt on this because I read a piece from one of the papers saying California is a failed state. | ||
| And then I went to Oregon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some people say to me, you know, why do you need to go and see this stuff for yourself? | ||
| And I just think it's an instinctive curiosity I have. | ||
| And I also, even when it is exactly what you think it is going to be, it's still interesting. | ||
| You know, Portland, Oregon was exactly what I feared it would be, but a bit worse. | ||
| I was horrified by the immiseration of the city, the total destruction of all public monuments and public buildings, the shuttering up of shops, the intimidation of the citizenry, the demoralization of the citizenry, a homelessness problem which makes even California's look minimal, and the fact that the city's basically been given over to an immiserated lawlessness. | ||
| I went with Antifa several nights in a row to, pardon the language, a fuck gentrification protest, which was my first. | ||
| Yeah, that was your first one? | ||
| Yeah, it was, yes. | ||
| I've hitherto always avoided the temptation. | ||
| I quite like gentrification, actually. | ||
| I think that Houses being made nicer and neighborhoods being smarter is no bad thing, but... Old-fashioned view. | ||
| Certainly not the view of Antifa in Portland, who sectioned off some of the streets and went through them in the middle of the night, screaming at the citizens and the house owners, telling them they were all on stolen land. | ||
| This included many black families, by the way. | ||
| Shouting at these black families, white families, families of every background, shouting at them that they were on stolen land and should get out. | ||
| Were you worried for your own safety? | ||
| I mean, you were out there with them. | ||
| I mean, people know who you are. | ||
| Yes, I was lucky enough that in the era of mask wearing, you can cover almost your entire face lawfully. | ||
| Indeed, almost compulsively. | ||
| And I've been in worse places and war zones where there's more lawlessness than that, but it was not a pleasant situation to be in what is nominally a first world city. | ||
| The second night I went with them to the protest at the ICE facility, which was a bit hairier because they were assaulting the facilities, one of the very few uh... federal buildings in the in the area uh... they play | ||
| a game of cat and mouse with law enforcement | ||
| they get closer and closer to the front of building their aim in the past has | ||
| been to barricade in the buildings put burning dumpster trucks in front of them | ||
| and then kill the people inside by burning them alive so that's their modus operandi so you can understand why | ||
| the ICE officers don't want that | ||
| and they get within a certain uh... closeness to the door and then the uh... officers | ||
| break out and uh... there was uh... firing tear gas uh... | ||
| pepper bullets and all that and people were setting fire to things in the | ||
| street and uh... | ||
| and that was uh... that was uh... unpleasant yes uh... it got uh... | ||
| uh... issue that she doubts that uh... uh... an alleyway federal officers with a bunch of other anti for with me and | ||
| uh... the offices that come point you know told us please to move | ||
| out of the alleyway and uh... it was unpleasant but i have to say that | ||
| considering the situation of the officers were as as decent and reason | ||
| one uh... uh... efficient in their duties as they could possibly be | ||
| And of course, what it all clarified was the fact that the Antifa activists have a very clear policy, which is that they want to provoke the police or need any law enforcement into something they can pretend is an act of violence that they can catch on camera and use as an explanation for the allegedly fascist nature of the American state. | ||
| It was very interesting to see these activists up close. | ||
| I thought they were all reprehensible people. | ||
| I thought they were clearly mentally in a very unstable place. | ||
| I thought that. | ||
| Furthermore, on election night in Washington, D.C., when I saw Antifa gathering in the doorways just outside the North Lawn of the White House, the world's press were pointing their cameras at the White House. | ||
| And beside them, underneath some of the doorways, I saw what was clearly Antifa gathering, because they were changing into clothes so that they couldn't be recognized by, say, CCTV cameras. | ||
| I went over to film this, because it was clear that this was what was going on. | ||
| And they became very violent, very fast. | ||
| And they are thugs. | ||
| They're a paramilitary group. | ||
| They have no place in a democracy. | ||
| It's to America's shame that they've been allowed to do what they have been doing. | ||
| They threatened to kill journalists. | ||
| They had graffitied kill Andy Ngo, a mutual friend and journalist and reporter in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| They had graffitied calls to murder him across the city. | ||
| The fact that they can then intimidate a journalist from abroad who even has the tenacity to try to catch them on a video camera or look at what they're doing is a very bad, is an embarrassment for America. | ||
| I think the whole thing's an embarrassment. | ||
| Did you get a sense that when you're on the ground with them, that there is a leader? | ||
| Because, you know, this is what Joe Biden described Antifa as an idea. | ||
| And partly what I think it seems to be is that there's no sort of known leader sort of by design. | ||
| But when you're out there with these groups, DC, Portland, wherever you are, No, of course they have a leadership. | ||
| Andy Ngo's forthcoming book will reveal a lot about this. | ||
|
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But yes, of course they have a leadership. | |
| Andy Noe's forthcoming book will reveal a lot about this. | ||
| But yes of course they have a leadership. | ||
| They don't gather like moisture or something. | ||
| I mean, they are brought together, they are organized, they advertise within their own groups what they're going to do and when, what their actions are. | ||
| They tell people what to bring or what not to bring, what to say and what not to say, what to chant and what not to chant. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, they do the whole thing. | ||
| They're an organized group. | ||
| And by the way, one of the most haunting things for me was I mean, I interviewed lots of people on my travels, including black police officers in Oregon, who I think were some of the most, the bravest, most remarkable, and I thought, restrained people I've ever met. | ||
| But one of the conversations that haunted me even more than that was speaking to an owner of a restaurant and cafe in Portland. | ||
| who had just recently had, just the day before, had had bullets, live ammunition bullets fired through the windows of his business. | ||
| It seemed because he has photos on the wall of first responders, a woman, a woman soldier, a US soldier, a man in fireman's uniform. | ||
| And this apparently makes him a representative of the fascistic American state. | ||
| Thus, live ammunition is fired by Antifa BLM activists through his business. | ||
| By the way, he is a is a black American, a very proud patriot. | ||
| And he said to me, actually, we talked about this, I said to him, you know, what do you think of the of the then presidential contender Joe Biden's claim that it's just an idea? | ||
| And he pointed to the bullet holes in his business's windows. | ||
| And he said, but An idea doesn't fire bullets. | ||
| I mean, that's it. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| So, what was your main takeaway? | ||
| Now that you've left our shores, you got to see sort of the bipolar nature of America. | ||
| We're still in this sort of election limbo at the moment. | ||
| Millions of people did not celebrate Thanksgiving with their families because of COVID and everything else, or I should say the lockdowns more than COVID specifically. | ||
| What's your diagnosis of what we're going through here? | ||
| Oh, I think you're in real trouble. | ||
| I think you're in real trouble. | ||
| All countries are to some extent. | ||
| I mean, we all have the COVID layer on top of everything else and the financial catastrophe that it constitutes. | ||
| My own country's got to find a way to pay for something like 210 billion pounds spent so far this year in the COVID era. | ||
| These sorts of sums are Very hard to recoup in taxation without crippling our economy afterwards. | ||
| We've all got a lot of trouble and we have this very testing year. | ||
| We're all still in with lockdowns and inability to see our loved ones because of a virus that is serious, but I think in my own estimation, not as bad as the thing we thought it was at the outset. | ||
| And there will be a long period of people arguing over whether we overreacted or not with this virus. | ||
| But all of these things, in a way, seem to reveal underlying problems in a society as well. | ||
| I've been struck, may I say, that in my own country there was a period of political unity at the beginning of the corona era. | ||
| We unified as a country around our health service, our Prime Minister, specifically around the Queen, And it was a very moving thing, actually, because we'd said for years in Britain we'd had no societal trust and no points of unity. | ||
| And actually, I thought we did have some. | ||
| We've lost some of it since, perhaps inevitably. | ||
| But we did have stores of trust and unity. | ||
| The one country in the world I know of where that just didn't last a second was America. | ||
| Because of the nature of the Trump presidency, because of its divisiveness, because of the era that America was in, and because it was an election year, you just had no period of unity. | ||
| And I was struck state by state. | ||
| You know, some states, life was going on, for better or worse, as if the COVID coronavirus didn't exist. | ||
| And other states, you know, you were told off if you weren't wearing your mask in the street. | ||
| So, and it seemed to be along political lines. | ||
| And I can appreciate that it is, but I also lament that in a way, because it would be good if America could even have a pandemic that reminded Americans that they're in it together in some way. | ||
| And you just, you can't even do that. | ||
|
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And may I add, by the way, one other thing. | |
| The one that worries me most now about your country is this. | ||
| I think that the The worry people have had, which is that people in America are imbibing different information streams, is a kiddie worry compared to the real one you've now got. | ||
| The real one you've now got is, you don't any longer agree as a nation on what you just saw. | ||
| That is terrifying. | ||
| That is absolutely terrible. | ||
| I've been describing that as the reality war. | ||
| That is, this isn't about the cultural battle. | ||
| This isn't about the political battle. | ||
| Those are battles. | ||
| Those are sort of small battles, but it's all framed by the reality war, | ||
| which is nobody agrees. | ||
| And even in, you know, we're holding this interview for just two or three days. | ||
| The amount of stuff that could change in two or three days even is crazy. | ||
| But, you know, when you mentioned the sort of the way we do lockdowns, I'm reminded we went out for lunch a different day and we were sitting in that little strip mall area where we ordered from one restaurant and you wanted a cup of coffee. | ||
| Or you wanted a cappuccino or something but we were sitting outside a Starbucks which was closed but they told us we couldn't get coffee because Starbucks owns the strip mall and wouldn't allow them to serve coffee even though the Starbucks was closed. | ||
| Like that's the level of insanity that we're dealing with at a micro level. | ||
| Well, you know, to a great extent the Corona era has allowed lots of bossy people to do the stuff they like the most. | ||
| I mean, there are some people who love to, you know, you can notice it in certain establishments that are open. | ||
| There are certain people who just won't do things and you ask why and they say because of Corona. | ||
| There were quite a lot of establishments, I think it was John Cleese who said famously after doing Fawlty Towers that the definition of a bad hotel or restaurant was one run entirely for the comfort of the staff. | ||
| And there are quite a lot of establishments, I think unwisely for their future, which have, I mean, airlines and lots of other things, which are doing lots of things that are quite comfortable for the staff, but make things extra unpleasant for the clientele. | ||
| But no, the bigger problem you have is you just can't agree on anything. | ||
| You didn't agree on the virus and didn't agree on any response to it. | ||
| And now we have absolutely ground zero of this problem. | ||
| Can I, by the way, say very quickly, there's only one other thing of similar gravity I've seen in a developed democracy, which is a very small thing that a lot of people didn't take any notice of at the time, but it's two years ago. | ||
| In a town called Chemnitz in Germany, there was a video released by actually, as it happened, an Antifa account that had just cropped up. | ||
| Could well have been a disinformation account, nobody quite knows. | ||
| It showed some German-looking men and some migrant-looking men and the account said that it was a migrant hunt that was happening. | ||
| It was a very serious thing. | ||
| There had been a stabbing by a migrant of a local only a few days earlier. | ||
| Tensions in the area were very high. | ||
| This video was released by an anonymous account And by hours after the release of the video, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said publicly, we cannot allow this, the hunting of human beings in Germany. | ||
| The reason I tell you this story is because of this. | ||
| The head of the domestic intelligence service in Germany said publicly, no, it doesn't show that. | ||
| Hans-Georg Maaßen, the man who was the most important, the head of the domestic intelligence service, disagreed with the Chancellor. | ||
| He said, no, it's not that. | ||
| Now, there's a dispute. | ||
| He actually was dismissed from his post that week. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, exactly. | ||
| I wrote about it at the time. | ||
| I said, look, irrespective of the details or exactly what it is that's going on, this should be a real warning moment because we've had a case where people disagree about how you interpret documents or sources and all sorts of things but for the Chancellor and the Head of the Intelligence Service to disagree over a piece of footage is very very worrying. | ||
| Then we come to 2020 in America. | ||
| More than eight out of ten Trump voters in the last poll I saw believe Donald Trump won the election and obviously Joe Biden's voters believe he won. | ||
| This seems to me a very perilous moment for democracy. | ||
| It's what I just described in Chemnitz on a national level. | ||
| You saw the same thing. | ||
| What do you think would be a responsible way for the media to talk about this then? | ||
| Because one of the things I've been trying to do for the last couple weeks here is I'm saying, look, I don't know exactly what happened. | ||
| I don't think anyone really knows. | ||
| I do know that at about midnight Pacific time here, Sure. | ||
| that about eight states that Trump had healthy leads in all stopped voting at the same exact time. | ||
| I'm not saying Trump won. | ||
| You know, now it's gonna go to the courts and there's all sorts of things happening. | ||
| But I've at least been trying to talk about it respectfully, right? | ||
| So that it allows people to say, okay, let the process work. | ||
| And then at the end, if it comes out that, yes, did I want Trump to win? | ||
| Yes, but if the courts look at everything and he doesn't win, then so be it. | ||
| But I think what a lot of people are frustrated, that eight out of 10 you just referenced, | ||
| I think what they're seeing is that the media won't even let you talk about it. | ||
| And that if you talk about it, you're going to be put on a list and you're going to be labeled a conspiracy theorist and you're going to get booted from social media and the rest of it. | ||
| And that strikes me as more of a problem maybe than what actually happened at some level. | ||
| Well, no, I disagree with that. | ||
| I mean, I think the biggest problem is if the president doesn't leave the White House and he's lost. | ||
| Oh, well, of course, that if we get there and he has actually lost, he doesn't leave, of course. | ||
| I mean, you know, look, I'm I'm sympathetic to much of your argument on this and your point of view on this. | ||
| But I mean, and I'm by the way, I'm particularly irate about the fact that there are so many Democrats who Spent four years claiming that the American voting system had been fundamentally undermined and indeed that the Russians had stolen the 2016 election, something for which they never showed us any evidence, but they asserted anyway. | ||
| Nancy Pelosi literally said that it was an illegitimate election. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| I'm irate about that. | ||
| I was irate about it for four years. | ||
| I'm irate about the fact that these same people now pretend that there is no such thing as voter fraud in America. | ||
| However, The onus at this stage is on Donald Trump and his legal team to prove that he won the election now. | ||
| I have to say, I've paid fairly close attention to this, as I say. | ||
| I mean, first of all, may I say, the thing of going to bed and the result being different when you wake up is not unheard of in elections. | ||
| I mean, in the Brexit vote, lots of people went to bed thinking that Britain was going to remain in the European Union. | ||
| I remember it very clearly. | ||
| And of course, then suddenly the results from Sunderland and elsewhere in the North of England came through and whoosh! | ||
| We were out and the same people woke up the next morning amazed. | ||
| But that's what happens sometimes in elections. | ||
| I do think that Donald Trump is behaving reprehensibly at the moment. | ||
| I think that, frankly, I am very open for any and all explanations of voter fraud as it is going on in America, as it has gone on. | ||
| I think whoever is president on January the 20th, as a point of absolute urgency, should put together a bipartisan, non-partisan, cross-partisan team to look into voter fraud, specifically mail-in voter fraud in the United States of America. | ||
| You cannot have another election after this one, which would be a third in a row, where people didn't believe the results if they lost. | ||
| So it seems to me to be a real point of urgency, this. | ||
| But on election night, when Donald Trump came out in the early hours of the morning and said, I believe we've already won. | ||
| We've won, as far as I'm concerned, he said. | ||
| I gasped. | ||
| I gasped. | ||
| I thought, oh, hell. | ||
| And there's several things about that. | ||
| One is, you better, if you're the Trump team, you better provide really good proof fast about that. | ||
| And frankly, what they've provided is not good enough proof yet. | ||
| They have been providing some things that sound to me like They are conspiracy theories, unless they've got a lot of stuff to come. | ||
| I hope that for their sake, they've got a lot of stuff to come, or there are a lot of reputations that are being trashed all the time. | ||
| Well, that's what I said from B1. | ||
| It's like Sidney Powell, she's either self-immolating in front of us, or she's about to break the greatest story in the history of modern times. | ||
| It's one or the other, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I suspect it's the first. | ||
| And I think the same with Rudy Giuliani. | ||
| You just can't give press conferences talking about dead Venezuelan leaders and think that the citizenry should... I mean, it's not just that you shouldn't treat the citizenry stupidly. | ||
| You should not mislead people's belief in the most fundamental thing in our nations, which is that we vote and some people win and some people lose and you know who's lost and who's won. | ||
| This is a really dangerous thing. | ||
| This is a dangerous element to be playing with. | ||
| And I worry deeply about the consequences of this. | ||
| But another thing to point out about this is that, you know, I mean, everyone has to lose sometimes. | ||
| I remember Michael Barone saying this to some conservative gathering I was once at many years ago. | ||
| I think when Obama won, Michael Barone said, you know, you have to lose sometimes. | ||
| You know, The evidence so far seems to be that the Republican nominee for the presidency lost this time. | ||
| Now, here's the kicker, if I may say so. | ||
| For four years, one of the questions has been, why has Donald Trump not been able to recruit? | ||
| Now, there have been some very remarkable people who have worked for him, and I wouldn't do down any of them. | ||
| I'm thinking of people like, I think, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. | ||
| Elliott Abrams and others, some very, very serious, particularly foreign policy figures who have worked for him, who I deeply admire. | ||
| But there has been a question throughout the Trump presidency, why can he not appear to get more people working with him, more experienced people working for him, older hands, more trusted figures, some non-family would be nice. | ||
| And so on and so forth. | ||
| What is the explanation? | ||
| You know, it's one of those political questions that ends up answering itself. | ||
| It's because everyone worried that at the end of the run, he would pull some crap like this. | ||
| That was why. | ||
| That was why. | ||
| I mean, I spoke to a lot of people in recent years in America and said to them, You know, an American friend and said, you know, would you consider taking this post? | ||
| Why don't you consider taking that role? | ||
| And I always noticed that, you know, early on and I would say, you know, he's got four years in office. | ||
| It's not nothing to be whatever position was being discussed. | ||
| And I noticed always this reticence. | ||
| I think Neil Ferguson on your show said, That there was always this risk that Trump was going to do something or come down in a way that was a scandal of not only Nixonian proportions, but that would make Nixon look like, you know, a sort of tea party. | ||
| No, tea party means something else. | ||
| That means something else to us. | ||
| Not a British tea party. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| A British tea party of another sort. | ||
| A cakewalk. | ||
| And I think that's... | ||
| I think that what we are seeing at the moment may be the answer to that question. | ||
| I have seen it once else in politics, in European continental politics, with a much more minor political figure, who the same question was, why can't people cohere around him? | ||
| Why don't people trust him? | ||
| And in the end, the answer answered itself, because he was going to, in the end, pull the crazy crap he pulled. | ||
| And I just, I think that unless Unless the Trump team can very, very swiftly provide evidence that is very good and persuasive, they are playing with an element that they should not be playing with, and I think it will | ||
| deeply diminish the Republican Party, if it allows it to go on. | ||
| It will diminish conservatives. | ||
| It will diminish the millions and millions of decent American voters who were trying to send a very distinct message in 2016, who were reviled for four years, insulted for four years, called every imaginable name for four years. | ||
| It will further demoralize them and weaken them. | ||
| I hope I hope if he has something, it comes out fast. | ||
| Yeah, by the way, Douglas, you know, while I'm obviously sympathetic to the campaign and I wanted him to win, I'm completely with you on that. | ||
| It's like, if there isn't anything there and they've truly done something here that was to destroy the system or completely erode trust or anything else, yeah, then it's almost the most dangerous thing. | ||
| Well, I guess it would be the second most dangerous thing, you know, compared to actually rigging the election. | ||
| So, you know, we'll find out over the next couple of weeks. | ||
| If the Democrats did actually rig the election, then it is indeed the most appalling crime against American democracy. | ||
| And there should be such a thorough investigation and so many people going to prison. | ||
| It would be the scandal of our lifetimes. | ||
|
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But if it isn't the case, then it is also a great scandal. | |
| Because you cannot lie to the citizenry about this. | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm very, I'm very open to the argument of, you know, four years ago, Hillary Clinton didn't really admit that she lost the election and spent years pretending she had only lost the election because of the Russians and something to do with a bot on Facebook. | ||
| Look, I thought that was contemptible. | ||
| I think Hillary Clinton was again playing with fire to do her the one piece of credit that one can do. | ||
| At least she didn't actually tunnel into the Oval Office and barricade herself in it after the election in 2016. | ||
| It's the one thing Hillary Clinton has going for her. | ||
| Yeah, that is the one thing I suppose. | ||
| I thought maybe we could shift this a little bit to the UK and kind of talk about maybe some parallels or just complete differences to what you guys have going on. | ||
| So you know I've been talking about this for a long time, but sort of That everything we've discussed here has sort of led to the destruction of liberalism in the United States, that we don't really have many liberals left. | ||
| I would say the few we have actually at this point are basically conservatives. | ||
| You guys have a different version of that, right? | ||
| Do you think that for some reason, maybe the history of your country, the age of your country, That liberals have been able to remain liberal without going completely off the deep end? | ||
| Or is it maybe that your Labour Party has just gone so bananas that it allowed the liberals to see it a little quicker or something? | ||
| How about some of that? | ||
| I should point out that the Labour Party is in the process of trying to de-bananify the first The first ever usage of that word. | ||
| But they just let Corbyn back in, right? | ||
| After a two-month smackdown or something? | ||
| It's shorter. | ||
| They allowed him back into the party, that's right. | ||
| They found that, although he had been anti-Semitic throughout his life, they found that a small slap on the wrist for anti-Semitism turns out to be fine. | ||
| So when people said, never again, what they meant was suspend you from the party for about a week. | ||
| It's good to know. | ||
| But can you sort of compare that to what's happened with our left and Democratic Party and what's going on with the Labour Party? | ||
| Because I think there's some lesson to be learned there. | ||
| Yes, I mean, our Labour Party became unelectable because it nominated the most unelectable far-left candidate to be the leader of the party. | ||
| A totally shambolic, morally and physically shambolic and mentally shambolic man called Jeremy Corbyn. | ||
| A lifelong history of crankery. | ||
| And you've got to think of Bernie Sanders without the charm and with a good dose of anti-Semitism thrown in. | ||
| And you've got something approximating Jeremy Corbyn. | ||
| Not a lot of charm with Bernie, but I'll go with you. | ||
| The point was inlaid. | ||
| Anyone's walking around going that Bernie Sanders is pretty charming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yes, so so they ran really far to the left, and made themselves totally unelectable. | ||
| And as a result, the Conservatives won an 80 seat majority at the election in December, a majority they've spent their time squandering, it seems to me ever since, but the Conservative Party in the UK always lets you down. | ||
| And, and yes, but I think there are some parallels. | ||
| I wouldn't say that there's a greater degree of real liberalism, true liberalism, in the great sense in the UK. | ||
| I think we have the same problems that you have in different doses. | ||
| We have the problem of the media, particularly left-wing media, and the predominance of it, but we've got very good conservative media, right-leaning media in the UK, from the broadsheets to the tabloids. | ||
| Something I thought about actually in the US, I think I was talking about it with somebody, I can't remember who it was on my estate, and they referred, I said, in passing, I said, look, I write for every major British newspaper, and it's a great honour, and I'm, you know, and they said, do you think it would be the same if you were in America? | ||
| And I said, actually, that's an interesting question. | ||
| I don't know it would be actually, because it seems to me that something very wrong has happened with your media. | ||
| Not just the broadcast media, but the print media. | ||
| I don't want to get stuck on it, but I mean, every country I know about, I know the New York Times can prove that it's lying. | ||
| So I can't read it, because any country I don't know very much about, I would assume that they're lying, but I wouldn't know exactly how. | ||
| So, you've got a very deep problem in your legacy media, and obviously a lot of people have been pointing that out for a long time. | ||
| And I wonder now, if Trump does go, those papers and magazines will be in want of an enemy. | ||
| And often, as you know, that's the worst thing for a person, is if they lose their enemy. | ||
| But yes, we don't have that many problems. | ||
| The problem we do all have, it seems to me, and you've written about this, you know about it as well as anyone, is that people have become very bad at listening to a contrary opinion. | ||
| And that is, I think that's going to prove to be a generational thing. | ||
| That there just is, I speak 24 hours after the news came out of Jordan Peterson's publishers in Canada, that there'd been wailing, gnashing of teeth, actual tears at the staff meeting, when some employees of Penguin, some of the employees of Penguin discovered that they were going to publish another book next year by a man who's actually earned them their salaries. | ||
| Quite literally, by the way. | ||
| He sold probably about 7 million copies last I heard. | ||
| So he floats, in many ways, the entire ability for them to choose all these other books that aren't going to do quite as well. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's only because of him that they can publish the sort of intersectional fictional team list. | ||
| Yeah, no, these people we keep hearing from, who chase Barry Weiss out of the New York Times, who chase Suzanne Moore out of the Guardian in the UK, who cry when they learn that a new Jordan Peterson book is going to be published and pay their salary the next year. | ||
| This is a generational thing and I don't know at this stage that we can say it's completely a political movement. | ||
| It's some kind of counter-revolution that has been going on. | ||
| It believes, as you know, that speech is harm and harm is not harm, that silence is violence and violence is fine. | ||
| It has a set of mantras, and I simply think it won't stop until it hits the reality of this life. | ||
| I don't know when that'll happen. | ||
| I just hope it happens very, very soon. | ||
| I think that everybody who cried at the meeting, I said this this morning on social media, everybody who cried at the meeting and said that they didn't want to be at the publishing house that published Jordan Peterson, bang! | ||
| Sacked! | ||
| Out! | ||
| Next morning your job is advertised so many smart young men and women should be in the publishing business and have a very very good reason to be so and could be excellent in their chosen profession and they're not because these people who have no right to be in a publishing house are in it and clogging up and making everyone stupider and so these people there has to be film. | ||
| We have to make sure that media Companies and others are not held hostage by the stupidest, youngest, most ignorant people in the room. | ||
| But is the biggest problem there that these companies, once they fall under the spell, I mean, you wrote a book about this, but once they fall under the spell, they bring in the diversity and inclusion department. | ||
| Their HR department is teaching people to watch out for white supremacism and all of these things. | ||
| Thus, they destroy their own entities. | ||
| I'm completely with you, and I run businesses. | ||
| If I had employees that were upset with me over my decision-making, goodbye, goodbye, that's it. | ||
| But isn't that the bigger problem? | ||
| That once you've let this thing in, in many ways, you're the very people. | ||
| You let the bad guys in, and now they're in the house running around. | ||
| And what can you do? | ||
| Well, what you can do is to reassert your rights as an adult. | ||
| What I see everywhere, in America in particular, is the complete retreat of the adults. | ||
| Let me give you an example. | ||
| I'm sure you've heard many times. | ||
| Thankfully, nobody has actually said it to my face or they'd have it coming to them. | ||
| But I have heard a lot of people told in recent years, educate yourself. | ||
| Everybody who says educate yourself in my observation is without exception the dimmest person I have seen speaking. | ||
| They have no right to go around being the stupidest person in the room telling everyone else to educate themselves. | ||
| They don't mean educate yourself. | ||
| They mean agree with me or else. | ||
| Well, here's a suggestion. | ||
| The adults say no. | ||
| You do not know anything. | ||
| You're 23, you've got a totalistic view of the universe that you're going to discover quite soon at some point in your life is wildly wrong. | ||
| And you are making yourself unemployable. | ||
| Here is your unemployment form. | ||
| Your job's up. | ||
| Thread for tomorrow. | ||
| That's what the adults have to do. | ||
| I'm fed up, by the way, of CEOs and heads of companies and all sorts of things. | ||
| Ever since the Madness of Crowds came out, I find that they sidle up to me. | ||
| They whisper up to me and tell me that this is what they have. | ||
| And I'm fed up with the whisperers and the sidlers. | ||
| I'm fed up with the adults. | ||
| The people at the tops of their careers, all of whom are bowing down. | ||
| It's like that video that went viral the other day. | ||
|
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You saw this weird LGBTQI plus kid thing. | |
| They're bowing down and worshipping the new God thing, which is the stupidest person in the room. | ||
| And I'm not up for the opportunity costs, societally, that that involves. | ||
| And I think nobody else should be either. | ||
| And I'm fed up of the grousing. | ||
| I'm fed up of conservatives grousing about it. | ||
| But this is the stuff that we've been talking about So it is nice. | ||
| You and I and many other people, we write books about these things. | ||
| We can write columns. | ||
| We can do shows about it and all of that stuff. | ||
| And then we get what I think you just said is the most frustrating part, which is people at companies and people in their own private lives who are just still simply afraid to do anything. | ||
| So then they'll, oh, Douglas, I loved your book. | ||
| but I don't want to take a picture with you or something like that. | ||
| You're still too out there and too scary. | ||
| That, in many ways, is the most frustrating part, don't you think? | ||
|
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Well, I think they usually love photos of me. | |
| Anyway, yeah. | ||
| They just don't want to post them on Facebook. | ||
| No, what I find is that they don't realize that what they are bringing in is mental and moral asbestos. | ||
| They don't realize that it's toxic to everyone in the atmosphere who has to breathe it. | ||
| The job of the adults is to strip the moral and mental asbestos from the building as fast as possible. | ||
| And if that means stripping a whole load of under-30s out, then fine. | ||
| There are a lot of very smart under-30s who could fill those positions and would do a great and nobler job at it. | ||
| But it is absolutely incumbent upon people, as you know, it's what I argue in the Manners of Crowds, to understand that that is what we are dealing with. | ||
| Once you play the diversity and equity game, you are infusing the lungs of your employees with this asbestos. | ||
| And you have to get it out now. | ||
| Can I just say that before we finish here, that you're in particularly fine form today, Douglas Murray. | ||
| I'm getting particularly sharp, Douglas Murray. | ||
| Douglas Murray's always sharp, but we're really getting it today. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm not always sharp. | ||
| I want to back up early. | ||
| I want to back up, though, because, look, I have a sharpie in my hand and I actually scribbled something down that you said that I didn't want to lose it because you said conservatives always let you down. | ||
| And I'm in the midst of and I think a lot of people feel that right now. | ||
| There's especially a feeling amongst the Trump side of things that, oh, if he loses, I'm done with conservatives, because we're just going to get these sort of limp-wristed people. | ||
| You know, we'll get these Mitt Romney types who will just really sort of be Democrats cloaked as Republicans or something like that. | ||
| But I'm watching The Crown on Netflix right now. | ||
| And in the current season, it is very heavily involved with Margaret Thatcher. | ||
| And I just bought one of her biographies, because every word that comes out of this woman's mouth in this show Seems right to me. | ||
| She talks about the cowardice. | ||
| She talks about the establishment. | ||
| She talks about leaders who must do unpopular things and the rest of it. | ||
| I'm not even sure what my question is there, other than conservatives will always let you down. | ||
| That's what you said before, and you guys have your own version of it. | ||
| But there are occasionally leaders that don't let you down, right? | ||
| At least for a certain amount of time? | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| The reason I say that, I mean, the Concerted Party in the UK lets us down repeatedly. | ||
| It's very bad at defending its friends. | ||
| It's very bad at standing up for its own. | ||
| It tends to give up principle. | ||
| We've got one at the moment where there's a sort of awful feeling that Boris Johnson in the post COVID era is going to basically try to save the whale and not much else. | ||
| You know, as if As if conservatives were anti Wales, right? | ||
| As if we as if we used to have meetings in darkened rooms, discussing how the oceans should be cleansed of these magnificent creatures. | ||
| You know, there's a sort of there's a sort of let's do the thing people don't think conservatives would do sort of thing and that will persuade them we're good. | ||
| You then also have that phenomenon you mentioned Mitt Romney, you have that phenomenon in America where once the conservative has been castrated by the left. | ||
|
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The left pats on the back. | |
| Oh yes, yes. | ||
| The moment that an American Republican becomes a eunuch, the left says how sexy they are. | ||
| You saw this never clearer than with John McCain. | ||
| I remember when John McCain was being described as a reprehensible, racist, bigoted, old, warmonger, much more. | ||
| I saw this with, goodness knows, I mean, we saw it with Mitt Romney. | ||
|
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You see it with George W. Bush now because, yeah, he's not Trump. | |
| And he's not Trump. | ||
| I fought quite a lot of battles in the George W. Bush era, explaining that there were still some things that were good about America. | ||
| And I remember the wild demonization of Bush. | ||
| And I'm just old enough to remember some of the wild demonization of Ronald Reagan. | ||
| This is something that happens to conservatives, and there is a tendency then for the conservative, after the point of utility or after the battle, to suddenly seek some kind of sucker from the enemy camp. | ||
| Margaret Thatcher never did that. | ||
| Never did that. | ||
| I've been watching, I've watched The Crown, by the way, as well. | ||
| By the way, it's appalling anti-monarchy. | ||
| It's so anti-the Queen. | ||
| It's appallingly rude and And misleading against multiple members of the royal family. | ||
| And I actually think, by the way, that it is really rather anti-Margaret Thatcher. | ||
| They show her to be much more... I mean they show her, for instance, if she didn't know how to behave when she visits Balmoral. | ||
| And much more, she was a much more remarkable figure than she's shown to be in the series. | ||
| So I'm delighted that you think she came across as well in the series. | ||
| Because she was even better. | ||
| I'm only about halfway through this season. | ||
| And also at the same time, I've been following this Margaret Thatcher account on Twitter, where they put up her actual clip. | ||
|
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So this isn't just... Well, she was a remarkable figure. | |
| I have all sorts of criticisms, as everybody does, of any politician, but she was a remarkable figure. | ||
| and a product of a quite remarkable once-in-a-generation figure. | ||
| By the way, there's something important about this which is, yes, she had a backbone because she had it from a sense of purpose and drive and moral belief from the beginning, but also to some extent, and the Charles Moore biography brings this out, she also found herself into Thatcher-ness as she was being Prime Minister, which is a very important thing. | ||
| The people do grow into jobs that they are in, They learn by experience, just as some people give in, so others become more resolute. | ||
| Margaret Thatcher was a great example of that. | ||
| By the way, at the end, she was brought down by small men. | ||
| And some of those small men, Michael Hesselheim, for instance, Preening, former politician in the UK, keeps popping up now to berate the UK over Brexit. | ||
| He keeps popping up as if he will ever be remembered for anything other than a spitting, vicious latter era where he attacked the British people for their vote. | ||
| And for one other thing, which was for getting Margaret Thatcher out of power. | ||
| And that is not a great legacy, it seems to me. | ||
| But there were these small men all around her, and I think, yes, it was a tendency in British conservatism then, as it is in American conservatism, and it is to some extent now, to always try to just do the easier thing. | ||
| And what it meant always, what it means always, is that the left comes up with a wildly radical proposition, and the right decides to meet them halfway between the centre and the far left. | ||
| And Margaret Thatcher knew, always, no. | ||
| That is not what a Conservative does. | ||
| I would love to see, by the way, a change around. | ||
| I'm fed up with, as I said before, the whining and the carping of Conservatives across the pond and in Britain. | ||
| I'm fed up with people who present themselves always on the back foot, not least because who would want to join a movement that was forever moaning about itself? | ||
| People like Margaret Thatcher should remind people of the nobility and the strength of good right-wing arguments. | ||
| And people should go to them as a resource and an inspiration to realize what true moral leadership consists of. | ||
| I sense that's probably a little more difficult, although the right thing to do, I sense it's a little more difficult than just being liked. | ||
| You know, like that's sort of what happens, that the conservative things... She walked through fire. | ||
| She walked through fire on everything. | ||
| The economics, by the end of her first term, it was not clear that the economics were going to turn in her favor as they did. | ||
| But she knew that she was right. | ||
| And she dragged the country from a position of serious trouble in the 1970s into the country that she left us when she left office. | ||
| All right, Douglas, now I'm gonna do the impossible with you, which is, I think I've done this with you once or twice before to end interviews, actually, but spin me the version that makes 2021 a little better than 2020, a little saner. | ||
| Whether you believe it or not, what's a map that could kind of get us to something that we could all feel a little better about, or would be a little less worrying relative to all the things we've talked about here? | ||
| Is there such a map? | ||
| Well, all of us hope, of course, that 2021 is nothing like 2020. | ||
| My own views on 2020 have been that we all have one principal job, which is to not go insane. | ||
| That's not nothing. | ||
| The job of not becoming deranged By the way, little anecdote, but everywhere I went in America, when I saw people who are old friends sometimes, sometimes new friends, every dinner table I sat at, there was an explosion at some point. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It didn't used to be like that. | ||
| I think we kept ours to a minimum, but that might've been the gin. | ||
| Actually, I should have said, except for the evening of the Rubens, I should have said. | ||
| I think apart from, yes, maybe apart from that, I just was amazed by the way in which what used to be ordinary conversations were just exploded. | ||
| And I think that's because, and I say this at the end of Matters of Crowds, as you know, which is that people have over-politicized their lives. | ||
| Politics is exceptionally important, and I take a great interest in it, as you do, and I know how much it does affect and change the lives of people. | ||
| It's not a game. | ||
| That said, It's a very unwise thing to put all of your personal stock in. | ||
| And I feel that a younger generation in particular has been misled into thinking they will find purpose and all the meaning of life in political activism. | ||
| Politics always lets you down, just like conservatives always let you down. | ||
| They always let you down, politicians, at some point. | ||
| And so it would be a very unwise thing on any estimation to put all of your happiness on a Senate race, or Congress, or midterms, or a presidential election. | ||
| Very important things, though, these are. | ||
| I hope that people don't, whatever happens in the coming weeks, I hope they don't turn off politics. | ||
| But I hope that people get a better estimation of them. | ||
| And I hope one thing above all, if I may say so, for the United States. | ||
| The United States is an extraordinary moment in its history. | ||
| Because it's clear that there is a war on the American past. | ||
| And if that war is successful in demoralizing the American people into thinking not, let's have a reasonable estimation of our past as any country should, but, we were always awful. | ||
| If that succeeds, then there's nothing good that America can ever do, because it was always rotten. | ||
| I think there's a lot of good that America has done throughout her history. | ||
| I think there's an enormous amount that America can do for good in the years ahead. | ||
| But for that to happen, there has to be some better understanding and reckoning with your past. | ||
| Because you are now at the stage where you could as a nation be overtaken by the one country, the one country, whose GDP is expected to rise this year, which is China. | ||
| I would submit to anybody who doesn't like the era of American dominance and there are things to be said against it as there are many things to be said for it. | ||
| Just imagine the world you would inherit if this goes wrong. | ||
| If America goes the way of Portland and Seattle and other immiserated places, if it cannot find pride in itself, if it loses its sense of drive and purpose, and if the American people fall for this negative version of their history, this is an incredibly important axis that the world is currently turning on. | ||
| And as somebody on the edges of the American empire, it matters as much to me As it does to very many of you at the very heart of it. | ||
| Douglas, there's nobody better. | ||
| Thanks for taking the time. | ||
| I know you're in the midst of travels and you've got a lot going on. | ||
| We will link to Madness of Crowds. | ||
| I'm sure everybody has it already. | ||
| You're in second print already, right? | ||
| Updated edition, even better. | ||
| Right up to date. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I like to think way past second printing. | ||
| Second edition. | ||
| There's some news. | ||
| Up to date, new material, new gags, new insults. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| I look forward to seeing you. | ||
| Whether it's on this side of the pond, that side of the pond, we'll figure it out. | ||
| I must look forward to it. |
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