| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Net migration in 2024 was nearly a million people. | ||
| To put it in context, you're a country of 340 million people. | ||
| We're a country of just under 70 million people. | ||
| That's a huge burden to put on the infrastructure of our country. | ||
| We have a lot of Muslims in Britain. | ||
|
unidentified
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In Birmingham on Monday, Muslims did take matters into their own hands. | |
| Some carried weapons. | ||
| Inevitably, the more people you have from any community, the more issues you're going to have. | ||
| If you were Prime Minister, what would you do? | ||
| Public tolerance of wokeism is massively collapsing. | ||
| Sidney Sweeney, what's happened to Sidney Sweeney since that attempt to cancel her? | ||
| She's only got infinitely more famous. | ||
| The public in Britain view wokeism has markedly shifted in the last four years. | ||
| Twice as many people now think that wokeism is a slur, not something as a badge of honour. | ||
| I think we're going to be playing whack-a-mole with wokeism for a while yet. | ||
| Mr. Mandani is one of them. | ||
| He's never done anything really other than he is dynamic, he is charismatic, and he can pull people along. | ||
| He's a populist wokey, but we know that doesn't work. | ||
| There's nowhere in the world you can point to where socialism actually can work. | ||
| I've seen criticism of my show where people say you're the Jerry Springer of inner political debate because you just want people fighting all the time. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| I don't like it when it becomes too much of a circus. | ||
| So what is it about him that you don't like? | ||
| Tommy Robinson. | ||
| Come on, you and me, one-on-one. | ||
| There's a reason you don't want to do it because you know that I will ask tricky questions. | ||
| Hey, Rumin. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We have two interviewers and I'm going to interview you. | ||
| Although you never know. | ||
| You could flip it on me at any moment. | ||
| So we never, anything could happen here. | ||
| Last time I was in Miami, I was interviewing a serial killer for a crime documentary. | ||
| I'm getting a very similar vibe. | ||
| Well, as you know. | ||
| But at any moment, you might try and lunge at me. | ||
| I am noted as like the serial murderer of interviewers. | ||
| So no, I'm glad to see you. | ||
| Obviously, we've done each other's shows many, many times. | ||
| There's plenty of things we agree on, disagree, and I want to kind of dive in on everything. | ||
| But first, let's talk about the book for a moment because it's called Woke is Dead. | ||
| And I was thinking, it's an interesting title at this moment because it seems to me in New York right now, woke has just come back in the most nefarious, almost final form way, the combination of kind of woke and Islamism and communism and all that stuff. | ||
| And then on the other side of it, Trump has eliminated a lot of woke. | ||
| So tell me about sort of where the title came from and what do you make of... | ||
| Well, it's more an aspiration, if I'm honest. | ||
| I'll make the point in the book. | ||
| I don't actually think it's dead yet. | ||
| I think we're going to be playing whack-a-mole with wokeism for a while yet. | ||
| There are a lot of people who haven't got the memo. | ||
| Estamandani is one of them. | ||
| But I do think the public tolerance of wokeism is massively collapsing. | ||
| Look at Sidney Sweeney. | ||
| For example, as we're talking, she gave an interview to GQ. | ||
| Her GQ interview. | ||
| They put her boobs up on B-roll. | ||
| And the GQ interviewer clearly wanted her to apologise for the jeans ad. | ||
| And Sidney Sweeney was having none of it. | ||
| What's happened to Sidney Sweeney since that attempt to cancel her over that ad? | ||
| She's only got infinitely more famous and more successful. | ||
| That's an example of what I mean by woke being dead. | ||
| Two, three years ago, she might well have been cancelled. | ||
| Now, people are standing up going, I've had enough of this. | ||
| And actually, anybody else who stands up to it, I'm going to support them. | ||
| Whether it's through buying their albums or going to their movies or whatever. | ||
| I'm seeing a lot more of that. | ||
| In England, a survey came out today, actually, reported in the Times of London, and it showed that the way the public in Britain view wokeism has markedly shifted in the last four years. | ||
| So there's twice as many people now think that wokeism is a slur, not something as a badge of honor. | ||
| So it was 24% thought that in 2020. | ||
| Now it's 48%. | ||
| Again, you're just seeing a rising tide of the way people view wokeism as now something that's more of a slur than it was something to be proud of being. | ||
| What do you make of the Mamdani version of it that went from woke, like all the gender nonsense and everyone's racist and all that stuff, which I'm completely with you? | ||
| The political correctness around that has largely shattered, but that now it has sort of burst forth into what its end game was, which was really socialism or Marxism, communism, whatever you want. | ||
| In a way, you're seeing a battle with the heart and soul of the Democrats, I think, looking at it from the outside. | ||
| New York is a Democrat city. | ||
| The only two candidates who could possibly have won that were both Democrats. | ||
| One's a moderate Guomo and one's obviously progressive, far-left, brazen socialist Mamdani. | ||
| I think a lot of it was a bad choice of candidate on the moderate side. | ||
| We have the same thing in the UK. | ||
| That's why Sadiq Khan keeps being elected as mayor of London because the Conservatives keep putting up absolute doofuses against him. | ||
| I think you could say the same. | ||
| I think Cuomo was damaged goods, shouldn't have been the candidate against him on the moderate side. | ||
| The other winners for the Democrats, interestingly, that night, were mainly moderates, not the progressive left. | ||
| So you're seeing somebody who is dynamic. | ||
| He's very charismatic. | ||
| He's very dynamic. | ||
| He has never run a Welk stool. | ||
| Are you familiar with Welk stools? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He's never run anything. | ||
| The Eastern of London, they sell Welks. | ||
| They're like little cockled eels, right? | ||
| He's never even run one of those. | ||
| It's like a joke we do in England, right? | ||
| He've not even run a Welk stool. | ||
| Actually, quite hard to run a Welk stool. | ||
| But he's never run anything. | ||
| He's never done anything, really, other than he is dynamic, he is charismatic, and he can pull people along. | ||
| He's a populist wokey, right? | ||
| And they can carry young people with them right to the point of the reality check. | ||
| I get the affordability thing. | ||
| I get the fact young people are angry. | ||
| They can't pay for stuff. | ||
| They can't get rentals and so on. | ||
| Of course, I get what they gravitate to somebody who says, I'm going to sort all this out. | ||
| You're going to get all this stuff for free. | ||
| But we know that doesn't work. | ||
| There's nowhere in the world you can point to where socialism of the kind that he is spewing actually can work. | ||
| In the end, he'll just have to do what the Labour Party is now doing to people in Britain, which is they promised the earth and now they're making everybody pay the earth for it. | ||
| So my fear is that New York is going to become London. | ||
| Like, I'm really not. | ||
| London's not as bad as you guys all think it is. | ||
| I mean, every time I go, it seems worse. | ||
| Now, not in terms of necessarily government control over anything, but you do have, you have a huge, I would say, Islamist or jihadist problem. | ||
| It seems to me that every time I go, it's more visible and more obvious. | ||
| Clearly, there's some sort of cultural problem on the street. | ||
| There's also a free speech issue in your country, which I want to talk about. | ||
| But explain to me, if London's not as bad as we think it is, what is the problem? | ||
| Well, London, I always tell my American friends, to put it in context on the Islamist issue. | ||
| It is true there are, I think, 80-something Sharia courts have been reported to exist in the UK. | ||
| So you have courts that exist. | ||
| Yeah, but they're not legally binding outside of their own communities, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it's not something people feel comfortable about because you obviously don't want rival laws being established in your own country where people in that community do not obey your own laws but abide by the road. | ||
| Obviously, that's untenable. | ||
| We have a lot of Muslims in Britain, most of whom have assimilated extremely well and exist perfectly well with everybody else and exist very peacefully. | ||
| But inevitably, the more people you have from any community, the more issues you're going to have, which are not so good. | ||
| And you've seen that in certain parts of Britain now. | ||
| I think there's a general sense of communities where you feel like there's a clash ideologically between these communities and, I guess you would say, old-fashioned British communities. | ||
| And I think that's where the flashpoint has come. | ||
| A lot of that is down to successive governments, conservative and left, I think, having appalling issues in how they regulated immigration. | ||
| And it goes back to Tony Blair in the early 2000s, actually the original problem. | ||
| He opened the floodgates to Eastern Europe, actually. | ||
| But then the floodgates opened everywhere. | ||
| Then you've got illegal migrants coming over on the southern border on these small boats from France. | ||
| That's become a huge problem. | ||
| None of them can tackle. | ||
| But legal migration, I think, net migration in 2024 was nearly a million people. | ||
| Now, to put it in context, you're a country of 340 million people. | ||
| We're a country of just under 70 million people. | ||
| We're a fifth of the size of the United States. | ||
| And yet we are having a net migration in one year of a million people. | ||
| That's a huge burden to put on the infrastructure of our country. | ||
| So, what do you think the resolution of that is? | ||
| The reason I'm not bullish on the UK in general is that I see no resolution other than what will ultimately be a violent resolution. | ||
| Well, I think people talk about civil war or something. | ||
| I don't think it's going to come to that. | ||
| But I do think you need to have a much tougher government-run immigration system than we have currently, both legal and illegal. | ||
| The big problem with the legal migration, we were letting people in who were highly skilled and might contribute well to society, but we allowed them to bring almost unlimited dependence with them. | ||
| So they were bringing huge numbers of their family with them. | ||
| And this puts incredible pressure on things like the National Health Service. | ||
| Well, the National Health Service, the NHS, which was the pride of the world, actually, you know, if you go and break a leg in London next time you're over, God forbid, I don't want you to, and I'm not going to be breaking it for you. | ||
| But if you broke your leg in London, you would get free health care in a very good hospital immediately. | ||
| We've got some decent hospitals here. | ||
| We'll take care of you. | ||
| You twist your ankle on the way out. | ||
| I remember breaking some ribs, falling off a segue of all things. | ||
| Can you believe how embarrassing that was? | ||
| On a segue in Santa Monica. | ||
| And all I remember is I was flitting in and out, I collapsed my lung, broke five ribs. | ||
| It was horrendous. | ||
| I was flitting in and out of consciousness. | ||
| And all I remember is a guy in a suit with a form saying, Can you pay for this? | ||
| Right? | ||
| You don't get that in England, right? | ||
| If that same thing happens in England, we treat you, Dave Rubin, we repair you, and that's it. | ||
| Well, they would have treated you either way. | ||
| They might have just thrown you to a different hospital. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| They looked at you, they were like, ah, this guy looks good. | ||
| But they wanted money. | ||
| And that's a cultural difference. | ||
| So we're used to the National Health Service. | ||
| At its best, it's amazing. | ||
| But it was designed in the 50s for a population of 50 million people. | ||
| We now have a population of nearly 70 million. | ||
| So that's happened in 75 years. | ||
| So the infrastructure of the NHS is creaking up the seams. | ||
| If you start adding a million more people a year coming in, wherever they're coming from, you're going to start having huge pressure on the NHS, on the education system, on other public services. | ||
| And it just, it feels like Britain to me. | ||
| The real problem, it feels like it's creaking at the seam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So just one more on this. | ||
| And so, really, like in the most granular way, what do you do? | ||
| It seems to me that no one in Europe, because the same problems that you just laid out there, Germany's having their version of it, France is having. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I mean, actually, if you were prime minister, what would you do? | ||
| Well, it's difficult. | ||
| I don't pretend for a moment it's easy. | ||
| But you certainly, on the small boats issue coming in, which is, to me, is part of the problem, but it's not like the problem because you're getting 50,000, 60,000 people coming in illegally on the southern border. | ||
| You've had 10 million come in in the Biden administration. | ||
| So it's all relative. | ||
| They think it might be 20 million. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The numbers are just impossible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So they clearly just completely deliberately lost control of the border, it seemed to me. | ||
| We've not had that. | ||
| We've had successive governments trying to control it. | ||
| We've got to try and do a deal. | ||
| I keep saying, what would Trump do? | ||
| He'd say to Macron, right, here's the deal. | ||
| If you don't stop these people getting on these boats, your end, which is the only way to really stop it, once they get out there into the English Channel, really, there's hardly any way to stop it. | ||
| So you've got to stop at the French end before they get on the boats. | ||
| You just say, right, do what Trump would do: 1,000% tariffs until he sort this out. | ||
| I suspect it would get sorted very quickly. | ||
| Remember the backdrop of Brexit and how much ill-feeling that caused with the rest of Europe, with the UK coming out of the European Union. | ||
| So the French have no great allegiance to us now in terms of helping us. | ||
| Why would they? | ||
| We're no longer part of the club. | ||
| We've left the club. | ||
| So it's like, screw you. | ||
| You've got a problem at your own. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| They're not big on helping in general. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's a very French response. | ||
| But I would do the Trump response, right? | ||
| Just tariff the hell out of them until they stop it. | ||
| In terms of legal migration, they're beginning to get there. | ||
| But in terms of the assimilation of communities, I think that's the problem that is rising down. | ||
| I don't think you can have a situation where you have communities operating, as I say, with their own Sharia law courts and so on. | ||
| I just don't think that's going to work in a country like the UK. | ||
| They've got to do something about this. | ||
| Now, how you do that without inflaming a lot of tensions on both sides, I don't know. | ||
| Because at the moment, you've got people like Tommy Robinson, who over here is kind of sainted. | ||
| Let me tell you, I do not view him as a safety. | ||
| It's like a message that in certain parts of his message, he's right. | ||
| In other parts, he's woefully exaggerating the situation for his own gain. | ||
| And he's probably the worst possible messenger. | ||
| However, when he talks about the grooming gangs in the north of England, which were horrendous and were covered up and were all British Pakistani men doing this to young white girls, he's right. | ||
| So there are lots of parts of what he says, which I think he's right about. | ||
| But the idea that he's the standard bearer for kind of a solution to this, which doesn't result in a violent solution, I think is for the birds. | ||
| So his whole history says otherwise. | ||
| Yeah, so what is it about him that you don't like? | ||
| I know you guys have a bit of a history and I think maybe you banned him on the show or something. | ||
| He's not like that. | ||
| Because I see him as one of the few people standing up. | ||
| Yeah, I know he wants you to see him on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So he's incredibly disingenuous. | ||
| If you talk to Tommy Robinson, I've asked him on my show now every week. | ||
| I call him bottle job on X, right? | ||
| I was like, come on, bottle job. | ||
| Are you familiar with the phrase bottle job? | ||
| It's an English phrase that means he's got no bottle. | ||
| He lost his bottle. | ||
| He's got no guts, right? | ||
| And there's a reason he won't come on my show, but it does everybody else's shows. | ||
| Other people haven't scrutinized, as I have, actually, his track record on stuff and what the reality is. | ||
| Take the story he loves to tell on American Airways about the young Syrian boy who he lost a court case to. | ||
| He made a documentary about this boy and about how violent he was and so on and so on. | ||
| It was full of lies. | ||
| The Syrian boy sued him. | ||
| He won six-figure payout. | ||
| He knows this, Tommy Robinson. | ||
| His real name, by the way, is Stephen Yaxe. | ||
| He's not even called Tommy Robinson. | ||
| A lot of it's a facade. | ||
| He sued him. | ||
| And the film was a deliberate defamation because it was a breach of a court order. | ||
| That's why he went to prison. | ||
| He wasn't sent to prison because of a free speech argument. | ||
| He was sent to prison for contempt of court because he repeated lies he'd said about this young Syrian kid, which were proven to be untrue in a court case, which is why the kid won the court case. | ||
| So Tommy Robinson was to present himself as a great freedom of speech king. | ||
| And a lot of Americans lap this up because they don't actually look into the facts of it. | ||
| I just urge everybody, go and study the story. | ||
| Go and study the court case. | ||
| Study the resolution. | ||
| Study the contempt of court law in the UK. | ||
| He knew what he was doing. | ||
| So look, he's a conviction. | ||
| I can't speak to that, but what I can speak to is from an American perspective, when I see someone out there who's leading these marches with your flag, who's proud of your country, who wants to address all the things that you just laid out there as problems, I see that as someone that's a good guy. | ||
| I can't speak to all 10 of the things that he's doing. | ||
| So I would say this. | ||
| I think there are certain things he's right about and there are certain things he's wrong about. | ||
| One thing he's not is a good guy, right? | ||
| He's a convicted football thug. | ||
| He's a convicted fraudster. | ||
| It's not even his real name. | ||
| He deliberately defamed this kid and then went to jail because he breached the contempt of court. | ||
| So I don't think he's a good guy. | ||
| However, on things like the grooming gang scandal, he was loudly shouting about this long before many in the mainstream media were doing so. | ||
| And he was shut up and there were attempts to silence him and censor him. | ||
| And he was absolutely right about that. | ||
| So, you know, he's a complex character, Robinson. | ||
| I would love to have him on my show. | ||
| I'm sure he watches this show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think he likes it. | ||
| He likes you. | ||
| He likes me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, Tommy, if you're watching, Stephen. | ||
| Well, that's good to hear. | ||
| Tommy, come on. | ||
| You and me, one-on-one. | ||
| There's a reason you don't want to do it because you know that I will ask tricky questions about a lot of the stuff you claim is your version of events, but we both know isn't. | ||
| So, look, I don't pretend for a moment he doesn't resonate with a lot of British people, nor do I pretend for a moment there aren't certain elements that follow him who are violent right-wing thugs who just want to punch up and actually want racial lack of cohesion. | ||
| But I do think that he himself is becoming a bigger and bigger figure in Britain because of the failure of successive governments to control immigration. | ||
| So it's not like he's wrong about everything. | ||
| He's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I don't want to spend too much time on him, but I think actually, if there were other people in your country that seemingly were standing up for your country properly and dealing with these issues, then that probably his face wouldn't be out there as much. | ||
| I think that's entirely right. | ||
| And I think it's incumbent on the elected officials. | ||
| I say to Tommy Robinson, go and go and run for office. | ||
| Because it's interesting, even people like Nigel Farage, who now have all attraction with the Reform Party. | ||
| He has no truck with Robinson. | ||
| He won't take his, you know, they're very split. | ||
| So it's not like there's a sort of on the right and agreed position about this stuff. | ||
| There's not. | ||
| A lot of people view Robinson like I do, including Farage. | ||
| But I think that it's disingenuous and intellectually dishonest to say that there are not certain things he's been absolutely right about. | ||
| The grooming gang scandal was horrendous, one of the worst scandals in Britain in modern times. | ||
| And he was one of the loudest people calling it out. | ||
| Do you feel when you interview somebody that so if you have some of the people on the other side of this, on the sort of more Islamist or leftist side, that you treat them in interviews with the same scrutiny that you would treat someone like Tommy Robinson? | ||
| Yeah, look, I try and be intellectually honest. | ||
| It's like when you have like a Blazarian or Candace or some of these people. | ||
| I go after him. | ||
| I did Blazarian. | ||
| I went after him, I think, in a way that I was interesting. | ||
| I watched the Tucker interview with Nick Fuentes. | ||
| I won't platform Fuentes and he wouldn't come on. | ||
| But I accept Tucker's argument. | ||
| But I know what just happened. | ||
| Now he's going to say he wants to go on because you just said that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So now they're going to clip this and that's who he's going to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine. | |
| Then, okay, if you want to come on, just bear in mind, I will go after you about all the hateful statements you've made, including your love of Adolf Hitler. | ||
| So there'll be a slightly different tone to the interview. | ||
| My only critique of what Tucker did was I just think you give him a bit of a free run and didn't pin him to the floor in a way that ironically Tucker did to me when we interviewed each other in the desert study. | ||
| We played that clip. | ||
| He got bizarrely hostile. | ||
| Well, he was kind of tough. | ||
| I didn't mind. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| I liked Tucker, but he was tougher on me and Ted Cruz than he was on Nick Fuentes and Vladimir Putin. | ||
| There's a disconnect there, which I think is a valid criticism. | ||
| Right, which then Megan Kelly asked him about at the live. | ||
| Sure, he basically was like, well, go ahead and do your own interview, which is a little strange in light of how he treated you, but really Ted Cruz particularly. | ||
| In a way, I don't tend to critique other interviews. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| You can see it's not something I read. | ||
| No, because in a way, like you can sit, this is your show, your lair. | ||
| You can conduct this interview any way you want to do it. | ||
| I don't think it's really incumbent on me to tell other people how to do their interviews. | ||
| Tucker has a massive audience. | ||
| It's just I did notice he was a bit tougher on me than Fuentes. | ||
| So what do you make broadly of what seems to be going on with Tucker and in that space? | ||
| Putting aside how someone interviews somebody, just whatever is going on in that area right now. | ||
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| You've got Tucker, you've got Candice Owens, you've got these, and they're sort of be a moths in the YouTube cyberspace world. | ||
| They've just basically gone huge. | ||
| They get a lot of people. | ||
| Algorithms also seem to really like them, which is extremely interesting. | ||
| They do, and I'm obviously making a ton of money doing it. | ||
| And, you know, I've taken on Candice a few times, not least her ridiculous campaign against Brigitte Macron, who she keeps saying is a man. | ||
| I think the court case will establish she's a woman, and Candice will have to end up paying loads of money. | ||
| But even then, she will, I can guarantee you, twist it into some kind of pyrrhic victory for herself, albeit she'll owe me $300,000, which is the current size of our bet about whether Bridget is not aware. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Male or female, $300,000 to charity dollars. | ||
| I say that Brigitte Macron is a woman who's had three children. | ||
| It's quite easy to prove she's a woman. | ||
| No public discourse really has to be. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it's just, you know. | ||
| But, you know, I interview Candice a lot. | ||
| I find her incredibly, she's very bright. | ||
| She's very compelling. | ||
| She's a great debater, very like Tucker. | ||
| Do I agree with everything they say? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do I think they promote what I consider conspiracy theory sometimes? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The problem with just condemning all that out of hand is as the pandemic taught me and others, one person's conspiracy theory can often turn out to be actually a bit closer to the truth than the people saying conspiracy theory imagined. | ||
| And we saw that a lot in the pandemic. | ||
| I fell foul of it myself a few times. | ||
| So you've apologized. | ||
| I've apologized. | ||
| Several times I've seen this. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because again, you've got to be. | ||
| So you know, I mean, because I've got the tweets here. | ||
| The tweets are still there. | ||
| So I haven't tried to delete them or hide it. | ||
| I've owned my shame. | ||
| And my shame was this about the pandemic. | ||
| It's not that I don't think that the vaccines worked. | ||
| I think they did. | ||
| I think they saved a lot of lives. | ||
| But it is true that the scientific advice that was being put out. | ||
| I'm not with you on that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| But the point where I absolutely conceded I was 100% wrong. | ||
| And I blame the scientists, but I learned a lesson next time I won't be so compliant with what the scientists are saying. | ||
| But there was a period quite early on with the pandemic when the science advice promoted by governments around the world was if you had the vaccine, you couldn't transmit the virus. | ||
| Therefore, the presumption for the public was, well, you're going to help save lives because if you have it, you not only protect yourself in a way, but you're also not going to be infecting other people if you get the virus. | ||
| So, you know, the grandmother at home is not going to get it from you. | ||
| That's never right. | ||
| So that was that turned out to be totally untrue. | ||
| But in the period before it was declared untrue, and in fact, it made little difference to transmission whether you had the jab or not, I became incredibly censorious. | ||
| Ridiculously. | ||
| I look back and I just cringe at what I was saying, the way I was saying it. | ||
| I was too believing in what the experts were telling me. | ||
| That will never happen again. | ||
| I'd be far more questioning next time, far more journalistic, I think. | ||
| So I'm ashamed. | ||
| I said, it's fine. | ||
| I got it wrong. | ||
| And I leave those tweets up. | ||
| And people, there are certain people who just literally post them every week to the cliques. | ||
| And it's like, why are you bothering? | ||
| I've already said. | ||
| I know I was wrong. | ||
| It shouldn't have been done like that. | ||
| Do you think some of the reason that you missed it on COVID and like there's BLM stuff that you've said that's kind of sort of, I would say, insane or really misguided? | ||
| Do you think some of that is just because you came from the mainstream world? | ||
| So the ecosystem you were in just sort of circled around so many wrong people. | ||
| Yeah, I think, I think, honestly, it's a kind of fine line, isn't it? | ||
| Because I think that I try and sit in the center. | ||
| I think that whenever I've strayed too far left or right, I've normally regretted it, actually. | ||
| I think my position ideologically, I don't like to be partisan. | ||
| I don't like to be positioned into a left or right political box about anything. | ||
| I try and look at things with intellectual honesty as best I can. | ||
| Have I always been right? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Have I made big mistakes? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| I watched the Tucker thing with Megan and he talked again about how he supported the Iraq war. | ||
| I vehemently oppose the Iraq war. | ||
| We've all got our wins and losses in the causes we take. | ||
| I'm sure you would concede you have had to, right? | ||
| So none of us is right all the time about these things. | ||
| What I learned from the pandemic was it's very dangerous to be overly censorious based on information in a fast-moving health crisis or any story, BLM being another one. | ||
| Those who last sued themselves to Black Lives Matter, the organization, look, when George Floyd got murdered in the way he did, it was despicable and horrendous for us to watch it all happening over the eight-minute video, whatever it was, was an appalling thing. | ||
| I make no bones about thinking that that was one of the worst things I've watched. | ||
| And actually, yes, it should have been a moment of reflection for everybody about what we do to try and stop this happening. | ||
| However, the Black Lives Matter movement that developed and the activists behind it, you know, I look at, I do think that, for example, although I was very censorious again about the January 6th riots, make no apology for that. | ||
| I thought it was horrific what happened that day. | ||
| However, where I have sympathy with those on that side is they got treated far more severely than any of the protesters beating up police officers or smashing up shopping parades and so on. | ||
| So there was a real double standard between the way that the left-wing protesters on the Black Lives Matter marches were treated to the January 6th rioters. | ||
| For example, I can expose that hypocrisy quite willingly, regardless of which side I see it. | ||
| So, you know, I try and look at all things as fairly as I think I can. | ||
| And I try and, more importantly, I think, I get people on from all sides of the debates so that even if I'm myself not entirely certain, you know, I do this with you. | ||
| I'll get you on with somebody like Harry Sisson, whoever it may be, and I'll let you guys go at it. | ||
| And actually, I sit there and my brain whirs and I'm like, well, which one of these is actually being more persuasive to me? | ||
| That's why I think my show writes. | ||
| I think in that case, it's fairly easy. | ||
| I think you probably do resonate better than Mr. Simmons. | ||
| Although he kills it in the comments. | ||
| Well, he kills it in the comments section in that everyone hates him. | ||
| And if you just lay out calm things. | ||
| Well, so let me ask you about that because I will be completely, totally honest with you. | ||
| About eight months ago, I basically said to myself, I don't want to do Piers' show anymore because the way the debates go, all of the people, the screaming, the lunatics, the jank and just these awful people, where you have a certain set of people largely on the right who come on that are thoughtful and can explain their ideas and wadjot and all these nutbags. | ||
| And I really swore it off. | ||
| And then I did do it again. | ||
| I did it the day after Charlie died and I had to demolish Jank the way I did with receipts. | ||
| But I view it now as it's adding flame. | ||
| It's just adding fuel to the fire that nothing good is coming out of it. | ||
| And in a weird way, I don't mean that as a knock to you. | ||
| I mean it maybe as a knock to what the internet has become. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| Well, I think. | ||
| So for example, if you ask me right now, Dave, you want to come on my show for a one-on-one interview the other way, or even for maybe a one-person debate, which I did with you in person in London, which with the with that socialist, and I enjoyed that. | ||
| But the other thing I think has now become something that is not helping, that's just my. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think it's perfectly fair criticism. | ||
| And I've seen criticism of my show where people say, you're the Jerry Springer of in a political debate because you just want people fighting all the time. | ||
| It's not true, actually. | ||
| I don't like it when it becomes too much of a circus. | ||
| I don't like it when people shout over each other because the viewer can't really understand what's happening. | ||
| I do like fiery, passionate debate between people who are ideologically completely miserable. | ||
| That I love. | ||
| And I do. | ||
| And I do like one-on-ones. | ||
| And I do like just me doing an interview with one person. | ||
| So I like all different time. | ||
| This week alone, I've had Cristiano Ronaldo a week, right? | ||
| Completely different vibe altogether. | ||
| I went to Saudi Arabia and sat with two hours with Cristiano Ronaldo, the greatest football player of all time, in my opinion. | ||
| Very different, obviously, to a four-person debate with Chenk Uger or you or whoever it may be. | ||
| Sometimes I think if the story, look, the Israel war with Hamas in Gaza has been an extremely toxic and divisive thing. | ||
| So I think you're getting a lot of people with big followings who only on their own world, to their own sort of echo chambers, pump out their views and they rarely get challenged. | ||
| I like to think that what my show does, it brings together people on both sides of these debates, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, whether it's Israel and Hamas, whether it's Trump, whether it's Brexit, whatever it may be, brings people together who have strong opinions and big followings. | ||
| So they're getting a lot of traction anyway for their views. | ||
| And they actually have to meet each other and go at each other. | ||
| Do you think they're meeting each other? | ||
| Well, sometimes. | ||
| I do love it. | ||
| I have to say, I do love it. | ||
| One of my favorite things is when I can get a point of agreement, right? | ||
| Because I do think that democracy demands that we try and do that. | ||
| I do think that a lot of people, they pump themselves up and they start shouting each other. | ||
| They don't want to hear another view. | ||
| I accept that. | ||
| But sometimes I do get to a place where people can agree on various points. | ||
| And, you know, it reminded me, I remember talking to Bill Clinton when he had about a year or so crossover with Vladimir Putin when they became leaders around the same time. | ||
| And he said, you know, the thing about dealing with Putin was, if you just went out and hammered him in public, you got nowhere with him. | ||
| He said, and we would have these big meetings, him with all his team, me with all my team. | ||
| And we go at each other really hard, but we weren't really getting anywhere. | ||
| It was all posturing theater. | ||
| And eventually we throw a bout and it'd just be me and him. | ||
| So it's an interesting parallel. | ||
| And we go hard at each other. | ||
| He's a hard guy. | ||
| He said, well, then we've reached points of agreement. | ||
| And I said, did he keep his word? | ||
| He went every time. | ||
| Which I just thought was quite interesting. | ||
| That clip's gone viral quite a few times, actually. | ||
| Peter might be a very different character now, but certainly is what I've heard from other people about him. | ||
| He's extremely tough. | ||
| He's very ruthless. | ||
| He knows what he wants for Russia and so on. | ||
| But you can get to a point of agreement. | ||
| And when he shakes his hand with you, that's a deal, right? | ||
| And in a way, I see that as a kind of microcosm of what I want to do with the show. | ||
| I want to bring people together. | ||
| Look, I want to do big one-on-one interviews. | ||
| I want to do interviews with two people, one either side. | ||
| They're great as well. | ||
| I do a lot of those. | ||
| But when you have the four people, two on either side about a big issue, I make no apologies for it getting passionate and fiery. | ||
| I just hope that rather than it descending, as it sometimes does into total chaos, that actually I can calm people enough where I can try and bring them to a point where we can at least agree on various points. | ||
| And then I think it serves a very valuable purpose. | ||
| Do you think there's a fundamental reason, though, that the people that tend to be left-leaning in these debates are the ones screaming, yelling, saying all the awful things? | ||
| Can you think of one instance where someone that you brought on the right in one of these debates was doing any of the things that you're doing? | ||
| Vinny Sharlan feels pretty lightly. | ||
| No, he gets, but it's usually like, yeah, he yells a little bit, but it's like, but he's doing it kind of, he's a comic also. | ||
| He does, but he can be. | ||
| But that's fundamentally different than a lot of the crazy shit that's coming. | ||
| Yes, but you see, I'm not sure. | ||
| For instance, when it's you and Chank, for example, you remaining icily calm drives him completely nuts. | ||
| But as a viewer, I really like the dynamic of you two. | ||
| You might find it a little odd and unsettling to do it, but as a viewer, they think you've got cool hand Ruby. | ||
| You've got mad Chenk going bomb because I love Cheng. | ||
| I get on very well with him personally, right? | ||
| I do like him actually. | ||
| I go and have coffee with him in LA sometimes. | ||
| He's charming company, right? | ||
| But he just gets very wound up to the point his blood vessels start exploding. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You tend to stay very calm. | ||
| And I think the dynamic is. | ||
| Well, I think when you tell the truth, it's easy to become calm. | ||
| When you're a lying propagandist, obviously, you know, he says exactly the same about you guys on the right. | ||
| So that's what I mean about. | ||
| So if you're a viewer in the middle and you're not actually self-declared partisan, I hope you look at you both and actually sometimes one will win, sometimes the other wins, sometimes you both get a win. | ||
| It's an interesting little battle to watch if you're not on the highway. | ||
| So in that moment, when I pulled the receipts out, when I read his title text, so what's going on in your mind when you see one of this moment? | ||
| Piers, shut up and let Dave do his thing. | ||
| All right, so let's get into one that I have hit you on repeatedly on Twitter. | ||
| We've had our little things back and forth. | ||
| And again, it's always respectful, but I want to show you one. | ||
| It's a little complication. | ||
| It's about 60 seconds or so, some of the Israel stuff. | ||
| Basically waging war on a very small area of land, densely populated by 50% children. | ||
| And in the process, you're killing thousands and thousands of children and will continue to do so. | ||
| And I have resisted going as far as you have done in your criticism of the Israeli government. | ||
| I resist no more. | ||
| I think we've reached common ground about what we view is happening and has been happening through this period of this blockade, which frankly is just starvation of the people there, including so many innocent young women and children. | ||
| And I think that the incessant bombing and killing, and we don't know how many civilians have been killed, but it is on a daily basis, it looks like hundreds of people every day, with no apparent attempt, it seems to me, to have any real plan for how this ends or what happens when it ends. | ||
| How many children have been killed? | ||
|
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Pierce, Israel is not for killing people. | |
| Well, how many children? | ||
| Israel is killing children every single day. | ||
|
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Pierce, this is a blood label you're putting on Israel. | |
| No, it's not true. | ||
| No, it's not, actually. | ||
| And what you're trying to do is be very weasily with your words. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| They've then moved into a nearly three-month blockade, which to me is a criminal starvation of a populace, which should never have been allowed to happen. | ||
| The bombardment has been utterly relentless all over Gaza. | ||
| They've obliterated 70% of Gaza. | ||
| I think it's completely disproportionate to what happened to Israel October the 7th. | ||
| These hard-right, hardliners on the Israeli government cabinet, the way they've been talking now quite brazenly and openly about ethnic cleansing. | ||
| Okay, so it's weird to even have to show that and we sit in a room. | ||
| Can I make one point? | ||
| No, no, it's actually, I don't mind that at all. | ||
| I understand everything I said. | ||
| But it's interesting. | ||
| You've only shown my rhetoric this year from the three-month blockade onwards. | ||
| No, no, so I'm not sure. | ||
| And I would say it would be fairer if you'd also shown my passionate defense of Israel. | ||
| Well, you addressed it. | ||
| Which I maintained for a long time, by the way, and used to get absolutely hammered by the pro-Palestinian side in a way that I've, since this year, had more hammering from the pro-Israeli side. | ||
| Well, you addressed it there. | ||
| That's why we put that question. | ||
| And I think that's just because there has been a shift. | ||
| That's what I wanted. | ||
| No question. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that is, so first off, you acknowledge that there's been no starvation, correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't acknowledge that. | ||
| I don't acknowledge that. | ||
| Well, there was starvation of the Israeli hostages, but you where are the videos and images of the starving Gazans? | ||
| I've seen a lot, but you would dismiss them all as fakes. | ||
| No, I wouldn't. | ||
| I mean, if you can show me one, I'll tweak it. | ||
| Okay, here's my problem with this. | ||
| So the problem is all the my number one problem with this, you can say there's no starvation. | ||
| I can say there's starvation. | ||
| The UN says there was starvation, but you guys don't believe a word the UN says. | ||
| The other official bodies say there was starvation. | ||
| You don't want to hear a word they say. | ||
| Israel denies everything. | ||
| And in the end, the biggest problem is that Israel will not allow, to this day, international journalists into Gaza to do their jobs. | ||
| And I keep asking, why is that? | ||
| Because you and I can... | ||
| Well, because they're virtually all activists, not journalists. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I don't mean Palestinian journalists. | ||
| I mean international journalists. | ||
|
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No. | |
| I mean, the international journalists. | ||
| So where are the Reuters? | ||
| Let in AP, let in the BBC, let in Sky, let in Yeah, but they operate in war zones all over the world. | ||
| But so, when so, when this all ended a few weeks ago, when Trump does this thing, where are all the thousands of starving people? | ||
|
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I mean, we're seeing videos of restaurants that are to do the job. | |
| But I mean, right now, where are they? | ||
| These people have phones live stream. | ||
|
unidentified
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What do you mean? | |
| Do you see where they are? | ||
| Of course, there are plenty of videos. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| There are plenty of videos. | ||
| For me, they are not allowed to do their jobs today. | ||
|
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No, no, no. | |
| I have a big problem as a former editor of a national newspaper. | ||
|
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But Gazan, the Gazans have phones, and they're showing videos of you can say that no Gazan has starved at all. | |
| That's entirely your prerogative. | ||
| The reports by almost every official body say the opposite, but you don't believe them. | ||
| My view is you're entitled to not believe anyone, right? | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I had that thing with Meghan Markle. | ||
| Didn't believe her either. | ||
| Coughing my job. | ||
| However, the best way to get to the truth is let journalists who are used to covering in war zones, let them go in and do their job, particularly now we have the ceasefire. | ||
| So let them go in. | ||
| There is a reason the Israeli government is not letting the media in. | ||
| And I fear I know what it is. | ||
| They are terrified about what the world will uncover. | ||
| I just think that's just not. | ||
| Let them in. | ||
|
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I just think that's the one way to find out. | |
| But there are thousands. | ||
| There are quite literally, I think, almost 2 million Gazans there. | ||
| They have phones. | ||
| They're releasing videos now. | ||
| They're at restaurants. | ||
| They're out and about. | ||
| Why did none of the Hamas fighters, when they're releasing the people, look hungry? | ||
| A lot of them look fat. | ||
| They have fresh clothes and fresh air. | ||
| They've got images of Palestinians looking hungry. | ||
| And you wouldn't dispute that 20,000-plus children have died, right? | ||
| So whose fault is that? | ||
| Because this seems to be the one that most people are annoyed at you about because you keep saying proportionate. | ||
| That's the word that has bothered me with this. | ||
| So what if someone killed your wife and your daughter and kidnapped your son and raped and pillaged your whole community and all that stuff? | ||
| What would be your proportionate response? | ||
| Well, you've got to get it into the context of why I criticize what happened. | ||
| I do believe the three-month blockade earlier this year was a criminal blockade. | ||
| I believe it was deliberate starvation of a people, deliberately denying them food and aid. | ||
| Has any other country in the history of the world been told to feed the people that were not? | ||
| If you look at the Navy Convention, actually operate, well, but then no other country in the world has had the control that Israel has over Gaza, right? | ||
| Which again is a whole separate issue. | ||
| Egypt could open the door. | ||
| Of course it could, and it should. | ||
| And it should. | ||
| Nobody's annoyed at Egypt. | ||
| I don't dispute that for a moment. | ||
| And look, I've always supported Israel and its right to exist. | ||
| And when this happened, October the 7th, one of the worst things I've ever seen. | ||
| And I steadfastly supported Israel's right to defend itself. | ||
| And I still do. | ||
| However, I kept asking from early on, what would be a proportionate response? | ||
| But who has ever been asked to have a proportionate response? | ||
| Well, let me ask you, so they should have murdered a thousand people and raped women. | ||
| Let me throw it back at you. | ||
| In the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, 75 years or so, there has never been a response from either side to an atrocity by the other. | ||
| Both sides claim the other side has committed atrocities, right? | ||
| There's never been a response, anything on this scale. | ||
| So we had on October the 7th, 1,200 people were killed. | ||
| We had nearly 7,000 more wounded. | ||
| We had 255, six people who were kidnapped, including a baby, including Holocaust survivors. | ||
| Absolutely horrific. | ||
| But the reason I asked about proportionality, show me another moment in the 75-year conflict where the response has been to kill 60 times as many people. | ||
| And where you have a, well, hang on, let me finish. | ||
| Where you have a government with people like Smodrich and Ben Gavir who begin publicly, openly talking about ethnically cleansing all the Palestinians from Gaza, about annexing the West Bank, about taking complete control of all of it, to the point that Donald Trump had to step in and say that is not happening. | ||
| And credit to him for doing that. | ||
|
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It's random random ministers talking about two of the most senior people in the government. | |
| No, no, no, but them talking about things is different. | ||
|
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I mean, I hear that a lot. | |
| But is there literally, can you name one Palestinian leader, either Fatah or Hamas, that isn't for a complete genocide? | ||
| Is there one? | ||
| There isn't for a complete genocide. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Of the Israeli people. | ||
| Is there one? | ||
| Can you name one Palestinian leader that isn't for a complete genocide of everybody? | ||
| We under no illusion of what I think about Hamas are. | ||
| I think Hamas are a despicable terror group. | ||
| But so what would it take? | ||
| So, my point. | ||
| Well, my point is this: you have a unique population in Gaza, where half of them are under 18. | ||
| There is a unique proportion of kids in this part of the world, right? | ||
| So, at what point do you try and find a different way to resolve this? | ||
| It turned out that Donald Trump found a different way to do it, right? | ||
| Donald Trump did not agree with Israel continuing to just level Gaza to the floor. | ||
| He did not agree with Ben Gavir and Smodrich saying kick all the Palestinians out. | ||
| Actually, he wants to rebuild Gaza now and make it a prosperous place for Gazans to live, right? | ||
| But he also wants a two-state solution, which I don't think Netanyahu wants in a million years. | ||
| Well, I don't know that Trump wants a two-state solution. | ||
| Well, I think he's a good person. | ||
| I don't think he does. | ||
| I think ultimately, if he could achieve it where you can protect the security of Israelis, he would. | ||
| There's the only way this ever gets resolved. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't agree with that. | ||
| Well, the Palestinians already have a state, it's called Jordan. | ||
| They have a majority Palestinian population. | ||
| They're ruled over in an actual apartheid by the Hashemite. | ||
|
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But look at Norborn Island. | |
| Nobody wants to talk about it. | ||
| This is how people in Northern Ireland used to talk, right? | ||
| On both sides, you'd have implacable positions. | ||
| We can never do peace with these people. | ||
| They're terrorists, they're terrorists. | ||
| The loyalists and the IRA called themselves terrorists for seven decades, right? | ||
| And eventually, you had new clear thinking by Bill Clinton, by Tony Blair, by Senator Mitchell, and we managed to get to peace that nobody thought was achievable amongst warring people who lived amongst each other. | ||
|
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Sure, but how many similar to the Gaza-Israel border? | |
| But how many times should the Israelis offer peace? | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you're well aware that Bill Clinton says his biggest failing was getting Arafat to not accept it. | ||
| And I think Arafat should have taken that deal. | ||
| I'm completely with Bill Clinton. | ||
|
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But again, what is a proportionate demand? | |
| So what would you demand if your wife's not a family? | ||
| But if I'm an Israeli. | ||
| So here's my question. | ||
| If I'm an Israeli, or if I'm a Jew living out of Israel around the world, and I was in New York recently, more Jews live in New York than live any Jewish community outside of Tel Aviv. | ||
|
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I've written it. | |
| Not much longer. | ||
| Not much longer in Israel. | ||
| I'm not going to say. | ||
| But I look at it. | ||
| I think, do they feel safer by what's happened or do they feel less safe? | ||
| I would argue that the conduct of the way that the Israeli government has waged this war, particularly this year, has actually inflamed hatred of the Israeli government, but also by association, Israel, Israelis, and Jewish people. | ||
| I don't think it's made them more secure. | ||
| I think it's made them less secure. | ||
| So in all wars, Dave, at some point, you have to have a political solution. | ||
| The only solution that seemed to be being offered by Netanyahu, Ben Gavir, Smodric, and the others, was to raise Gaza to the floor and to expel all Palestinians. | ||
| Thankfully, Donald Trump sees it a different way. | ||
| And I thank God that he does because this had to end. | ||
| I think you're having a disconnect between what Bibi and Trump think. | ||
| I think they're completely different. | ||
| They're light on this. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No, right. | ||
| Netanyahu would annex West Bank tomorrow. | ||
| He's been in power for 20-something years. | ||
| He could have done it at any point. | ||
| Notice he hasn't. | ||
| But he hasn't. | ||
| But it's like the argument we haven't dropped an atomic bomb on Gaza. | ||
| Therefore, obviously in London War, right? | ||
| No, but there's a couple of things here. | ||
| I mean, first off, I don't think any country in the world has ever been asked to feed the people that are holding its hostage, right? | ||
| Like, have you ever called for any other country to do that or anyone? | ||
| Has anyone ever called for that? | ||
| Oh, British prisoners of war in World War II were fed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| What? | ||
| Prisoners of war in World War II were fed. | ||
| So what's the difference? | ||
| Because they were holding hostages. | ||
| They're holding their people. | ||
| I mean, to me, it seems that you as a British, you as a British citizen, you as a British citizen. | ||
| You will be held hostage in the midst of the. | ||
| But you, as a British citizen, if French terrorists came in and killed a thousand, well, what the equivalent would be, it would be many more than 1,200. | ||
| But let's say they killed 10,000 British people and they took your wife and killed your daughter, would you be calling for a proportionate response? | ||
| No, but then. | ||
| Why would you say, do whatever you have to do to get my wife back? | ||
| You should never ask what somebody who's just lost their family would do in that situation. | ||
| Obviously, they're going to be speaking from a totally different hypothetically. | ||
| If they literally took your wife. | ||
| But I don't think it matters what I think is the grieving father or husband of people who've just been slaughtered. | ||
| Governments should be above that. | ||
| Let's take a decision which takes everything into account. | ||
| And the question I come back to is: do you believe that Israel is now a safer or less safe place for Israelis and Jews than it was before? | ||
| Way safer. | ||
|
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Is it? | |
| Oh, they're external enemy. | ||
| I mean, that's empirically true. | ||
| They're external enemies from Iran to Hezbollah to the Houthis. | ||
| They're basically disposed of. | ||
| You know, there have been reports that for every Hamas fighter that's been killed, terrorist, I call them, for every Hamas terrorist that's been killed, they reckon they've been replaced five times with people with the same ideology. | ||
| But that's like saying you can't defeat Nazis. | ||
|
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Well, I agree. | |
| We dropped the story. | ||
| I agree, and I've made that point. | ||
| I've made that point myself. | ||
| But I just do, I do not think, in answer to the proportionate question, I'm very glad the ceasefire came when it did. | ||
| I'm very glad the hostages got released. | ||
| They shouldn't have been released, obviously, immediately. | ||
| They should never have been taken in the first place. | ||
| I'm very glad Donald Trump made this happen. | ||
| I fear if he hadn't got involved in the way he did and clearly directed Netanyahu to do this, the hostages would have died. | ||
| And so, you know, again, I come back to this. | ||
| What was the Israeli war aim? | ||
| The government said they wanted to defeat Hamas completely and they wanted to get the hostages out. | ||
| The hostages are now out. | ||
| Hamas is not defeated, but they are heavily dismantled. | ||
| They've accepted they can no longer have power. | ||
| The Arab countries around them have said they can't have power. | ||
| The argument now is about whether they should give up their arms. | ||
| I believe they should be compelled to do that. | ||
| The unanswered question is: will they do that? | ||
| And who's going to put the most pressure on them to do it? | ||
| I hope that it's a concerted effort by the United States and by the Arab leaders around the area who say to Hamas, you've got to give up your arms. | ||
| Then you have the opportunity in Gaza for a peaceful resolution. | ||
| But I think Israel will look back. | ||
| I've met a lot of Israelis. | ||
| I've met a lot of Israelis and Jews in the last few months who've felt that I've been absolutely right in what I've said. | ||
| Not all. | ||
| I've met others who said the same questions you're asking me. | ||
| I think they're perfectly valid questions. | ||
| I'm very happy to debate them. | ||
| But don't be under any illusion, there aren't a lot of Israelis and Jews who agree with me that the Israeli government, which is a hard-right government, Smodric and Ben Gavira are not just right-wing. | ||
| They're absolute far-right headbangers. | ||
| Meaning what? | ||
| Meaning what? | ||
| They have to do that. | ||
| Meaning what? | ||
| They want to ethically cleanse the Palestinian people. | ||
| Come on, they do. | ||
| They're in the government and they haven't taken an extra inch of the West Bank. | ||
| They haven't. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| Well, actually, that's not true. | ||
| They've been expanding settlements left, right, and center. | ||
| They haven't. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, they have. | |
| Piers, have you been to the West Bank? | ||
| You don't think there's anything to do with any expansion of settlements on the West Bank? | ||
| They build apartments. | ||
| They build apartments. | ||
| Apartments in current places. | ||
| Has there been an aggressive expansion of settlements in the West Bank during this war? | ||
| An aggressive expansion of settlements in the West Bank during this war? | ||
| No, 100%. | ||
| There has been. | ||
| Would you say it's a square mile? | ||
| I don't know the territory. | ||
| So there's no aggressive expansion of settlements. | ||
| But that's just, I mean, Piers, that's just. | ||
| But again, this is the problem. | ||
| Okay, so here's the problem. | ||
| Have you been there? | ||
|
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So here's the problem. | |
| Have you been there? | ||
| I know people will love that on the internet. | ||
| You say none of this has happened. | ||
| You see everything to the, there's nothing to see here, Governor. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Israel has done no wrong. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Have they done any wrong? | ||
| I don't know how to conduct a war exactly. | ||
| I know that if it's not my question. | ||
| Has the Israeli government done anything wrong in the way they prosecuted this war? | ||
| Not that I know. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| They're desperately trying to existential war. | ||
| You do what you have to do for your people. | ||
| As I think is exactly what you would demand of your government. | ||
| Well, except that when my government went to war in Iraq, for example, I led the campaign against it and I was proven right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think it's more complicated. | ||
| We never said that. | ||
| But that's a war across the world where there were no British people being hit. | ||
| This war didn't start on October the 7th. | ||
| This is a conflict that's been around for seven decades. | ||
| That's why I compare it actually to the war that was conducted between, say, the IRA and the British government. | ||
| Well, your government did 75 years ago offer the Palestinians a state for the first time because, as you know, the Palestinians never had a state. | ||
| It was the British manager. | ||
| I think the whole way it was organized at the start was deeply flawed. | ||
| But I also read a very interesting piece by a guy called Jonathan Friedland. | ||
| He's a British Jewish journalist who said he could have written two columns about what happened in 1947, 48, 49. | ||
| He said, and one would have been very pro-Israel and one would have been very pro-Palestinian. | ||
| And he wrote, he said that as a Jewish journalist, I think it was an interesting perspective. | ||
| I've heard both sides argue passionately, but the crux of the combined debate is that it was very badly handled and should have been handled a lot better. | ||
| You know, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes, but also hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Jewish people, as they were then, but obviously became part of Israel, were displaced from their homes in the region. | ||
| So there was a lot of displacement of people's lives, uprooting of people's lives going on. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And a lot of enforced things by countries like Britain. | ||
| You will do it this way. | ||
| I think it could have been handled a lot better. | ||
| And then a lot of the trouble could have been avoided. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's not end on this. | ||
| But you just debate, though. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm happy to do it. | ||
| I wish we had more time. | ||
| And this is why I prefer to do things face to face instead of with the screaming lunatics on the other side. | ||
| I'm telling you that no, the expansions, like if you can't even tell me they've expanded a mile, it's because you're not going to be able to do it. | ||
| But no, I don't know the exact geography, even a half mile. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Well, no, they haven't done that. | ||
| But here's the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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They haven't. | |
| My final point on this. | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| When they say a seven, you can someone built an apartment. | ||
| You can sit there and deny all of these things, to which I simply say, fine. | ||
| You might be right. | ||
| The Israeli government has done nothing wrong. | ||
| There's been no expansion of settlements. | ||
| The war has been prosecuted as the most moral army in the world going about its business. | ||
| To which I simply say, let the journalists in, let's find out. | ||
| I mean, again, I think any army is available and dropping leaflets. | ||
| Do you agree the journalists should be letting it? | ||
| Well, now you can let people in. | ||
| It's a little less dangerous. | ||
| Let them run around with the people. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what? | |
| Let the war. | ||
|
unidentified
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But these people have phones. | |
| You know, these people have phones, right? | ||
| Yes, I've seen loads of footage that contradicts what you're saying. | ||
| You wouldn't believe the footage. | ||
| No. | ||
| You just say. | ||
| We'll stop the camera and then we could. | ||
| Or we could do it right now. | ||
| I mean, if you want to bust out your phone and show me all the starving people, what I see are hordes of young men with perfectly cut hair who are in shape with clothes that you don't honestly think that life for a young Palestinian kid in Gaza in the last two years has been anything but utter healthy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, they unfortunately elected Hamas, who I don't disagree with you about a single thing you're about to say about Hamas. | |
| I agree with every word you're about to say. | ||
| Let's part that to one side. | ||
| I'm not denying for a moment that they are a despicable terror group. | ||
| I think somebody said war is hell. | ||
| It is, but ultimately, you have to resolve it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I'm very, very, they're giving us the signal. | |
| All right, we got a lot of love. | ||
| You got your alarm. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's my assistant beams in and saying, get them right out of there. | ||
| All right, 60 seconds. | ||
| 60 seconds left. | ||
| Well, this is what it's all about, right? | ||
| I mean, this really is what it's all about. | ||
| It's what we both do for a living, and it doesn't change my opinion of you in any way or anything else. | ||
| And, you know, here's the thing. | ||
| We should be able to have a spirited debate about these things, right? | ||
| And I don't for a moment claim that ultimately history will prove I was completely right about everything. | ||
| This is just my honesty held view, though. | ||
| I don't come at it from a partisan perspective. | ||
| I think if people look at my record over the entire war, for example, I've been very pro-Israel for a long time. | ||
| I became increasingly critical of Israel. | ||
| I've been steadfast in my hatred of all things a mass. | ||
| So people can judge me accordingly. | ||
| But you and I can have a spirited, fiery debate, right, without any problem. | ||
| And I know at the end of this, we'll shake hands. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And if we see each other, you come to London, we'll go to my pub, we'll have a pint, whatever, have a nice dinner. | ||
| It should never impact on that. | ||
| I saw Jon Stewart said a really interesting thing last week where he was talking about, you know, if you've got like very, obviously he's a liberal. | ||
| If you've got a big right-wing, you know, headbanger of an uncle and it's Thanksgiving, do you snub him? | ||
| As a lot of people on the left want to do. | ||
| It's a big thing. | ||
| The progressive left, you don't. | ||
| Or, you know, the same way that if you're a conservative, should you snub some progressive left woke member of your family? | ||
| Most of us would prefer not to get shot at this point. | ||
| No, no, I agree with. | ||
| Listen, I totally agree. | ||
| And the woke left's war on free speech is the cornerstone of my book and culminates eventually in things like the murder of Charlie Kirk, which is where if you try and silence debate and free speech, that's what happens. | ||
| And if you call everybody a fascist or a Nazi, that's what happens. | ||
| So that's all covered in the book. | ||
| But I think what's really important, the point he made was that even if you have an uncle and you're a liberal and your uncle's very right-wing, that he may have other qualities like Jon Stewart's uncle has, which are incredibly great qualities. | ||
| Why would you pillory somebody or disown somebody because one part of their makeup doesn't suit you? | ||
| That's where wokeism has taken us, I think. | ||
| It's taken us to a thinking that if you don't sign up to my worldview, I'm going to shame you, cancel you, disown you, destroy you, maybe ultimately try and kill you. | ||
| That, as I point out to them, is the personification of fascism. | ||
| And yet they would say they hate fascists more than anybody else in the world. | ||
| So there's an underpinning hypocrisy that runs right to the heart of wokeism, and it's that. | ||
| Fortunately, I'm not a leftist. | ||
| Otherwise, I could have poisoned your coffee. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| If you're tired of the mainstream media circus and want more honest conversations, go check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |