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May 11, 2022 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:37
20220511_piers-morgan-uncensored-let-trump-tweet
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Orwellian Free Speech Brain Dump 00:08:55
Good evening I'm Piers Morgan, uncensored.
Tonight, freedom and free speech, from the shocking abandonment of Afghan women to the Taliban to Donald Trump's possible Twitter comeback and the death of comedy.
I'll discuss that with a new superstar of US late night television.
But first, it's my Orwellian free speech brain dump.
Well, George Orwell knew a thing or two about free speech.
You could fill a book with sensible things he had to say about it.
This quote especially resonates today.
At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, he wrote, a body of ideas of which it's assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It's not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it's not done to say it.
Well, incredibly, things have got a great deal worse since Orwell wrote that, because it is indeed now forbidden to say this, that or the other.
And the orthodoxy today is the draconian, illiberal worldviews stamped on public life by woke fundamentalists, this cancel culture mob, set all the rules, trampling over our rights to free speech in the process.
And anyone who doesn't conform is instantly slammed, silenced and shamed.
And much of it is, of course, politically motivated.
That's why former President Trump is barred from Twitter, even though 74 million people voted for him in a democratic election.
But Vladimir Putin, the supreme leader of Iran and the Taliban, are all still free to tweet.
This is obviously utterly ridiculous.
Now the billionaire Maverick and free speech absolutist Elon Musk, who's about to buy Twitter, says that the ban is morally wrong and he will reverse it.
And he's been supported by Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter.
Trump told me he doesn't actually want to return to Twitter, even if he's allowed to, but I reckon he'll change his mind about that.
And the point is, it should be his decision.
Liberals have reacted with an inferno of rage and panic, as they always do to everything, ever since Musk said he'd restore free speech and Trump to the platform.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan today blamed Trump for a massive spike in abuse he got online.
But even he says he's open to Trump returning, but he qualified it by adding, let's wait and see if Donald Trump has learned his lesson.
If it's the case, I think that's all well and good.
If he breaks the rules, there need to be consequences.
Well, that's fine, words.
But there's the nub of the problem.
Who decides what those rules are which are to be broken?
All racist abuse is wrong, and so is any incitement to violence.
But both of those things are already illegal.
Free speech doesn't mean you can break the law, nor does it mean you have to continue listening to somebody who's spewing something vile that you don't like.
To illustrate that, sports presenter Eli Barber has written today about how she dealt with completely unacceptable homophobic and racist comments made during an after dinner speech at a Scottish sports awards at the weekend.
She didn't demand the speaker be cancelled, but she did exercise her right to walk out, and she exercised her right to free speech to call it out on Twitter.
And that was right.
Believe me, and this may shock you, people do say nasty things about me all the time on the internet.
I don't want to cancel them, but I do sometimes block them or call them utter morants.
That too is an exercising of my right to free speech.
One of the biggest problems of Twitter is that many people on it don't seem to have any sense of humour.
My fiery interview with the Taliban's official spokesman last night got everyone talking and Twitter of course whipped itself into a frothy lather of rage about the effect I was even doing it.
One woman named Laura tweeted comedian Ricky Gervais, always a bad idea, to say, what do you think about Piers Morgan interviewing the Taliban tonight?
And she added the hashtag, disgusting!
Well Gervais replied like this, I've lost all respect for them.
I've had to add the cand laughter so that any wokies watching realise he was joking.
But not everyone knew this.
So you mean you've had respect for them, was one reply to Gervais.
I thought you claimed to be an advocate for free speech, said another.
No, you're backtracking on people.
That's because they want to air an opinion you don't like.
Incredibly, even the Daily Mirror, a national newspaper I used to run, failed to get the joke.
Ricky Gervais slams Piers Morgan for disgusting Taliban interview.
It raged.
No, he didn't.
No, he wasn't.
He was joking, obviously, but obviously not.
Otherwise, he would have got the joke.
It took another British comedian, David Bediel, to point out the bleeding obvious.
This is a great joke, he tweeted.
That's it.
That was it.
It was a funny joke.
No, it was off the back of an incredibly serious, sobering subject.
But we must never let serious things in the world mean we lose our sense of humour.
Unfortunately, jokes are increasingly an endangered species in today's miserablest mortar of a world where being mortally offended and outraged is very much in fashion.
The joyless woke brigade are so desperate to feel aggrieved, affronted, and appalled.
To which I remind them all of the advice from the late great cricket genius Shane Warren.
And in this politically correct day and age, we've just got to be a little bit careful, but sometimes just say get stuffed to the fun police.
I mean, seriously, just tell them to get stuffed.
Nobody puts all this better than the man who got me into all this mess last night, Mr. Gervais.
There's going to be a bit of that throughout the show.
See if you can spot it, okay?
Now, that's when I say something I don't really mean for comic effect.
And you as an audience, you laugh at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is.
It's a way of satirising attitudes.
Like that first joke, I use the old-fashioned sexist trope that women aren't funny.
Now, in real life, I know there are loads of funny women.
Like...
I did it again.
Well spotted.
Good.
Even as that clip ends, I know there are people tweeting me, incensed wokies, who don't get the joke, or perhaps they do get it, but pretend not to so they can virtue signal their mock outrage.
It and they are exhausting.
Well, as these tiresome wokies wail about Trump being unbanned from Twitter and half-rid excuses for journalists fail the irony test and would have failed my employment test if I was still at the mirror, real free speech champions are putting their lives on the line for the truth every single day.
Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akle was shot and killed today while covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank.
The Al Jazeera correspondent, who's also a US citizen, was hugely respected.
She's reported for decades on flashpoints in Israel and Palestine, bravely crossing between both sides to report uncomfortable truths about a complex and emotive conflict.
She was wearing a press badge.
Journalists like Shireen are the reason why we understand the world.
George Orbal himself wrote vividly about the Spanish Civil War.
A free press is the reason we know that Putin is a genocidal war criminal, while millions of brainwash Russians in a country where journalists get murdered for their job think he's saving Ukraine from Nazis.
Several journalists have already been killed in Ukraine covering the war.
Many others are out there right now risking their lives to bring us that truth.
Now you might be tempted to think that a free press can be taken for granted in 2022, but it can't.
The facts show it's in decline.
It's time we began fighting much harder for it.
More and more countries are gagging reporters.
Many use the pandemic as an excuse to muzzle journalists on the bogus pretext of protecting public health.
And according to UNESCO, a staggering 85% of the world's population lives in a place where press freedom has been restricted in the last five years.
And ironically, by their own measure, the last time press freedom plummeted to these depths was 1984, the very title of George Orwell's iconic novel.
Well, Newspeak was, of course, the name of a dystopian language in George Orwell's 1984.
It was a controlled and contorted vocabulary designed to limit people's ability to think for themselves.
Well, besides being a free speech champion, Orwell had a big imagination.
But I doubt even he would have believed that New Speaker is now being imposed on British doctors and nurses.
First, maternity services were ordered to use gender-inclusive terms like chest feeding for new mothers to avoid upsetting trans patients.
To which I say, well, what about the upset caused to women who want to identify as women and be called women and mothers and who want to be told that they're breastfeeding?
Where are their rights?
Well, now NHS bosses are being lectured on the danger of microaggressions, which is one of my least favourite words in the whole English language.
Paranoise can be worse than overt acts of hate and could cause PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Afghan Women's Rights Crisis 00:15:10
What?
What does that even mean?
People who've literally have to deal every day with patients suffering very real PTSD from life-threatening illness or terrible injuries have now got to watch their words in case it sends perfectly healthy people into a spiral of trauma.
When did we get so pathetic?
Why did we get so pathetic?
I grew up in a world where the usual advice offered to anyone who overreacted to hurtful words was sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
I kind of miss that world.
Well, coming up, how do we save Afghan women from the Taliban war?
Should Trump be allowed to tweet again?
China's zero COVID nightmare.
And one of the funniest men in America, Gregbeld, is alive.
All coming up, all uncensored.
Welcome back to Bears Morgan Uncensored.
As the Taliban regime tightens its grip over the people of Afghanistan, it's the women who are suffering catastrophically.
They're treated like chattels.
Their human rights have been taken away.
They're forced to wear full face coverings.
And if they don't, their male guardians face imprisonment.
Last night on the censor, I interviewed Taliban spokesperson, Suhail Shaheen, and challenged him on this.
Mr. Shaheen, of course, denied it was happening.
99% of the Afghan women, they are observing hijab voluntarily.
So they consider it a dignity, a safeguard for their modesty.
I asked him why teenage girls are still being banned from going to school.
We have never said they are banned.
Girls have the right to have access to education as boys.
Yeah, except they're not allowed to go to school.
So that's a nonsense.
I then asked him if his own daughters went to school.
Of course, yes.
Yeah, of course.
Of course they do, because you're in Doha and they can go to school, right?
Yeah, they are observing hijab.
They are observing hijab.
And so that means we have not denied.
Of course, one rule for his daughters, another rule for everybody else's daughters in Afghanistan.
We're joining me now, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, political consultant John Bolton, and chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, Christina Lam, who's in Ukraine.
Well, welcome to both of you.
Christina, let me start with you, because you spent so much time in Afghanistan.
Interviewing the spokesman for the Taliban was pretty dispiriting last night because I felt like he was spinning a completely bogus narrative about what is going on there.
And it seems pretty clear to journalists who are on the ground that women are being taken right back to the sort of medieval dark ages of the previous Taliban rule.
Yeah, it is very dispiriting.
It's like been one restriction after another, particularly in the last few months.
And so women can't travel on their own.
Women are not supposed to go out of their house on their own.
We thought that girls were going to be able to go back to high school in March.
And then they went that day and were sent straight back home, many of them in floods of tears.
So it's been absolutely terrible for women and girls since the Taliban took over.
And all of the hope at the beginning that this was a sort of different kind of Taliban somehow, I'm afraid now really doesn't look like that.
And this latest restriction of the hijab and in particular recommending that they should wear the burqa is really the last nail in the coffin, I think.
Yeah, I mean, John Bolton, many people would say that the Americans' sudden overnight withdrawal from Afghanistan basically handed the whole country back to the Taliban very quickly, allowed them to now suppress women all over again, and almost certainly emboldened Vladimir Putin to conclude that maybe Joe Biden wasn't up for the fight anymore, and that's why he invaded Ukraine.
What do you think of that?
Well, I don't think it was simply the withdrawal last summer.
I think in the Trump administration, critical mistakes were made, most particularly negotiating only with the Taliban about a potential U.S. and NATO withdrawal, not bringing in the government of Afghanistan.
And I think President Trump was so eager to get out of the country that he didn't really care what he left behind.
So no negotiations with the Taliban about human rights or women's rights and no participation of the legitimate government of Afghanistan until the end when they received basically a done deal from the US on the way out.
So I think the entire process of trying to cut a deal with a terrorist organization was a mistake from start to finish.
What you're seeing now, tragically, I think was entirely predictable.
Yeah, Christina, you're now in Ukraine.
It's obviously horrendous what's going on there.
But there are, well, there is a belief by many people that the Ukraine resistance is strong and that there is a chance that Russia could actually lose this.
What's your feeling on the ground there?
Yeah, I mean, the Ukraine resistance has been astonishing, really humbling.
Everybody that you meet is so united in Ukraine, pretty much, in trying to drive out the Russians.
But I'm in the East at the moment, which is where the sort of second offensive is going on.
And that's a little bit different.
I mean, we know that Russia was kind of humiliated in trying to take Kyiv in the center of the country and was driven back.
But here, the front line is much more static.
It's sort of moving a few miles back and forth.
And it, you know, looks like it could, I was near the front line yesterday.
It looks like it could go on for a very long time.
John Bolton, what is your assessment of how America and Joe Biden in particular have handled the Ukraine crisis?
And what do you make of the development today where Boris Johnson's basically said to Finland and Norway, if you come under attack from Russia, we'll be there for you.
And they're obviously lined up now to join NATO.
What do you think of NATO in all this and the way America has handled it?
Well, to start with Biden, I think the basic failure at work here is the failure to deter the Russian invasion to begin with.
I mean, nobody can be happy, regardless of NATO's performance or the Ukrainian military's performance after the Russian invasion takes place, simply because we've supplied weapons and ammunition to the Ukrainians or simply because we've imposed sanctions on Russia.
That's not a happy situation.
The objective here should have been to deter Russia from invading in the first place.
And that failed for a number of reasons, the lack of credibility of the administration, the lack of the gravity of the threats involved, and I think Putin's misapprehension of what he would find once he got inside Ukraine.
But all those failures now, that's good for historical debate.
The real question is, do we have staying power to continue this?
There were press reports a few days ago, the president of Volkswagen, for example, saying it was time to negotiate a deal with the Russians.
And you can count on the Kremlin believing that that's coming up, that the West as a whole will lose its resolve and that he will be able to take the substantial territory he's gained, notwithstanding the colossal failures of the Russian military.
Remember, this war is still being fought on Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine's still being ground into dust, and Russian forces are still way ahead of where they were the night of February the 24th.
Christina, I don't want to let you go without congratulating you because tonight it was announced to you at the Society of Editors.
You received an outstanding contribution to Journalism Awards.
So congratulations on a well-deserved award.
I've followed you for a long time.
You're an outstandingly courageous journalist.
And we've touched on today already that we saw another journalist killed today over in covering the Israel-Palestine conflict.
We've seen journalists killed in the Ukraine as well.
It's a dangerous time to be a foreign correspondent, isn't it?
But I think it's a really important time to be a foreign correspondent.
I mean, actually, Ukraine, I think in a time of, you know, lots of discussion of fake news and all of this, that actually shows the importance of journalism and being there and bringing back the stories.
I mean, some of the atrocities that me and many of my colleagues have been reporting that the Russians have done, I think, is really, it's horrendous.
It's difficult for us to hear, far more difficult for the people to go through.
It's difficult for people to read about or listen to.
But it's really important that we document those things and bring to book the people that are doing these horrendous things, whether it's, you know, raping, killing, you know, blowing up schools and hospitals.
People here say that the most dangerous place to hide now is in a school because the Russians keep bombing them.
Absolutely disgusting.
Well, congratulations on the award.
Well deserved.
Keep up your great work out there.
We need the truth and it's people like you that bring it to us.
And thanks also to you, John Bolton.
Appreciate you coming on the show.
Thank you.
Well, now one of my favourite sport stars is tennis player Emma Radikano.
She came from absolutely nowhere, of course, to stun the world and win the US Open.
She showed remarkable strength and resilience for a 19-year-old, also a very likable and engaging character.
But she forgot the golden rule when it comes to showing off your television skills in a foreign language to an interviewer.
Never ask your friends to advise you on what to say.
They will always do this to you.
Last one is about your Italian.
Did you learn some words in these days, a few days?
I did.
Is that a bad word?
A little bit.
My friend told me that one.
Don't cut that bad as well.
What does it mean, Kadid?
What does it mean?
I will tell you later.
Really?
At the end of the day.
I just sworn on camera.
I'm afraid you have, Emma, and it was a very bad word in Italian.
So congratulations to your friend who stitched you up like the proverbial kipper.
Well, I'm sensitive next.
Elon Musk said it's morally wrong for Donald Trump to be banned from Twitter.
Is he right?
Well, when I heard Elon Musk was going to reinstate Donald Trump to Twitter, I've got to admit, I smiled.
I've kind of missed it.
It's been a bit boring without him in his own particular brand of raging perma controversy.
And there were wonderful moments like this.
None of us will ever forget where we were when we read this and thought, what the hell is he talking about?
We still have no idea what he was talking about.
Nobody was safe from Trump's tweets.
He had a go at London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, calling him a terrible mayor and foolishly nasty.
This was after Sadiq Khan had allowed a big, gigantic, grotesque balloon to fly over Parliament Square during Trump's state visit.
Today, Sadiq Khan said this about the idea of Trump coming back to Twitter.
The amount of racial abuse I received on social media increased by 2,000%.
2,000% in Trump's first year.
In the last year of him being president, once he was banned from Twitter, I received the least racial abuse of any time over five years.
Well, should he be allowed back?
Joining me now is Conservative radio host Ben Ferguson.
I'm particularly activist and campaigner Gina Miller.
Welcome to both of you.
Ben, I'll come to you in a moment.
Gina, lovely to see you.
Thank you for coming to the thing.
Jack Dorsey has defended Elon Musk, saying Trump should come back.
He said he does agree, but he had got some exceptions, he said, in terms of behaviour, spam, network manipulation, illegal behaviour.
But generally, he said permanent bans are a failure of ours and don't work.
And he said that it was a business decision and they shouldn't make business decisions about freedom of speech.
I have to agree with him because, you know, one of the things that Elon Musk said was that he is a free speech absolutist.
Well, that means he's black and white.
And actually, life is shades of grey.
So it's quite worrying that he said that and he's going to be, if the deal goes through, in charge of Twitter.
But I think it's free speech is different from inciting violence or fueling hatred or the integrity of an electoral system.
But saying someone, you know, abusing someone and disagreeing with them or being harsh on them, you have every right to say that.
Right.
I mean, I thought Sadiq Khan getting racist abuse because Donald Trump criticized him on Twitter.
I didn't see Christian speech.
I don't see how you can make that connection.
Well, I thought it was a bit spurious because I didn't see Donald Trump encouraging people to be racist about Sadiq Khan.
He was criticising him.
He's got 80 million followers, including a lot of idiots, clearly, who thought it was okay to racially abuse him.
Ben Ferguson, the argument against bringing Donald Trump back is that he incited violence on January the 6th at the Capitol, and that was why he got banned.
That was the reason Twitter had at the time.
I've got to say that when you think that Vladimir Putin, the Supreme Iran leader and the Taliban chiefs are all still on Twitter, it seems a ridiculous moment that the President of the United States is not there.
Yeah, it was their excuse.
They were looking for an excuse to silence what many would argue is the most powerful man on Twitter at the time, Donald Trump, and that was their excuse.
They were waiting for an opportunity.
And you notice within a couple of hours, everything had banned him, right, from social media.
Facebook jumped on there.
Sites that allow you to sell goods even banned him because they hated Donald Trump.
And if you look at Twitter and you look at their big problem now, it's even when they say that he should come back under certain guidelines, those own guidelines still don't apply to Vladimir Putin, to ISIS leaders, to Al-Qaeda, the Ayatollah, Iran.
I mean, the list goes on and on and on of people.
You even had someone last week that threatened Supreme Court justices by giving out their addresses and say, you will not feel safe until you are dead in the ground.
And they didn't even suspend that Twitter account.
So the idea that Twitter is out there going, oh, we're going to have law and order here is absurd.
And they should allow people to come back.
Instagram Death Threats Exposed 00:05:20
And if you don't like what they say, then fine.
You as a user have the option to never look at Donald Trump's tweets again.
I mean, that's the point I would say.
With free speech, people sometimes get it wrong, I think, what free speech is.
You don't have to listen to it.
You can block people on Twitter.
I do that a lot if they're just really horrendously abusive.
I think at the moment with this whole conversation, which is actually lots of shades of grey, is that we're looking at the medium, not the message.
Because actually, there are lots of, if you did that, if you spray-painted graffiti, which incited violence, then that's illegal.
Just because you're doing it on social media, it should be the same rule.
So the rules should not be applied to the medium.
It's the message.
Would you ban Trump?
I would.
You could extend the ban, otherwise not bring him to the point.
Well, I think it wouldn't a life ban, but I think I would look at it and see that there were times when he incited hatred and he did fuel insertions and he did cause incite violence.
And those are things that are illegal in states in the America.
Not all, not free speech speeches.
So it's the line speech.
It's a line for you.
No, but no, no, freedom of speech is interesting because in the U.S. under the First Amendment of the Constitution, there is actually no legislation for hate speech as we do in most Western countries.
So territories, different countries.
They do rules.
They do differ very much.
And Twitter is a global platform, which creates its own problems.
It has huge problems there.
But not only that, you have to apply whatever the rule is consistently across everyone.
And also, you have to not just make this about celebrities or politicizing everything, because actually there are real problems with pornography, with self-harm, with lots of other things that are on this platform.
So Ben Ferguson, I mean, my issue with it is.
But that's not a free speech issue.
Well, Ben, I'm going to come to...
Let me put this to you, Ben.
I mean, I had a case on Instagram where some vile yob in this country, in the UK, posted a death threat specific to me and one of my sons on his Instagram page in public.
It's going through the legal process.
Now, it's taken 16 months, I have to say, and there's still been no charging decision.
But I was absolutely incensed that someone would target one of my kids like that with a genuinely horrible death threat.
And I've decided to pursue it.
That to me, there is a line.
And I think we do know where a lot of these lines are.
Yeah, and I agree with you, and I think that's common sense.
But this idea that Twitter should have rules like someone's a kindergarten or first grade teacher, and we're going to put you in time out in the corner because you say something that we just don't like, or you have an opinion that we just don't like, is never going to work.
And I think that's what Dorsey even understood now.
Yes, you can have rules that you can't threaten to kill somebody, for example, as you just described.
I've dealt with death threats before as well.
And when you deal with it, when it comes after your family, it is very personal.
And the fact that it takes so long to get them taken down, when you report them, but they will go after people for political speech, is where there is a clear, as he put it, black and white.
There is not a gray area here.
You either have a platform that's in favor of free speech, and you can have rules like no death threats, right?
But this idea that Donald Trump is banned, but Vladimir Putin and ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders still have their credit accounts tells you that this was about targeting him politically.
It was not about Shutting up a conservative.
Yeah, it's definitely been a bias against conservative right in terms of who gets de-platformed.
And it even went to the extent where the New York Post had their own account on Twitter de-platformed because they had a genuinely true story about a laptop belonging to the president's son.
It was ridiculous.
I think there is too much of this is being made political football.
That's absolutely true because there are real crimes happening on social media platforms.
As you said, by the way, your case, maybe you should quote my precedent, because actually the same thing happened with me, and I did get someone sent to jail for exactly that, threatening to kill me and children, etc.
So, you know, those sorts of things, those are black and white.
I absolutely agree with that.
But expressing dislike or prejudice isn't, that is free speech.
Inciting violence and actually fueling hate and destabilizing democracy.
Now, those, to me, are also black and white.
And that's what I think Trump should have been banned for, not for having views that we don't believe.
But you wouldn't necessarily give him a lifetime.
So you do believe that Trump should be banned.
Not for a lifetime.
I think, you know, what we should do, maybe a two-strike rule.
So how come put them in timeout house?
All right, final point, Ben.
This is where you lose me.
You just said that you would ban Trump.
So my question is, for how long?
And would you abandon him right before an election and use that to your advantage?
Would you wait for it right before a midterm election or a prime minister or any type of election in the world and then you let people politically know because that's good to someone that they want to shut up?
That's the problem.
If you do it the way you're describing it, it will be used to undermine freedom and democracy.
Okay, and a black person.
It's when you say something.
It's going to be undermining people like the Hunter Biden story.
The argument with Trump is, did he actually break the law by inciting the riots at the capital?
No, he did.
But there is an argument about that.
Some people think he did.
Some people think he didn't.
It's still going through courts.
We'll find out eventually what the conclusion is on all that.
But it's a very interesting debate.
I don't think there are easy answers.
I'm actually glad Elon Musk is the one to tackle them because he has a massive brain.
And I think these need a massive brain.
A bit like you, Ben Ferguson.
And certainly like you, Gina Miller.
Thank you.
Thank you both very much.
The two massive brains.
Now, what is real leadership?
Zero COVID Strategy Explained 00:05:22
The captain of West Ham United Football Club, Mark Noble, decided it was about cleaning out the dressing room floor after each game.
A remarkably humble act of selflessness by a multi-millionaire star.
But the whole idea was to send the right signal to his younger players that they're not above anything and that humility matters.
Leadership comes in many forms, but I really like this.
It reminds me of the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, who are the most successful sporting franchise of all time, anywhere in the world.
They also believe in what they call sweeping the sheds.
The most experienced and the youngest players at the end of every game clean out the dressing room.
Well, Mark Noble's example works.
He's actually inspired one of his young defenders who began doing it out of sheer fear that his captain may find out he hadn't.
Watch this.
There was a picture, I think it was after the Leon game, where you were sweeping the changer room and he sat on his phone.
Did he offer to help or not?
Let's clear this up.
The truth is, I always do it, but there was a game I wasn't at.
What one was it?
Brentford.
Brentford away, I wasn't there.
And I got a text message from Jono about eight o'clock that night.
He said, no, I was just about to walk out of the changer room and I see your face in my brain.
So I turned around and went and swept the changer room.
Fair play.
I love that.
And if somebody gets me a broom, I'll do the studio.
End of the show.
What I call leadership.
Now, China's tyrannical zero COVID policy is reaching new depths as people in Shanghai, already locked in their homes under the world's strictest lockdowns, are now banned from getting food deliveries and accessing certain hospital services.
Videos shared on social media show suspected COVID patients being forcibly quarantined.
Look at this.
Now the head of the World Health Organization has issued a rare rebuke to China saying its zero COVID policy is simply unsustainable.
I'm joined now by global public health expert, Professor Debbie Sridhar.
Debbie, lovely to talk to you.
Used to speak to you a lot on the morning show.
Great to have you on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
This zero-COVID strategy that China is still trying to follow.
You were a supporter of this early in the pandemic, before vaccines came along.
What changed your mind and what do you think of what's happening in China?
Yeah, nice to see you again, Piers.
I think early on, when we could see there were numerous vaccine trials and the early results were really promising, the idea of zero COVID was to buy time because every infection averted could let someone live into an era of vaccines, therapeutics, and actually live for years and years to come.
And I think countries like Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand recognize that, have done mass vaccination and opened up.
South Korea has no more restrictions.
New Zealand is opening its borders.
Unfortunately, China hasn't moved forward with mass vaccination.
It still has a substantial fraction of elderly and vulnerable people unvaccinated.
And if it opened up the same way that other countries have, it would have 1.6 estimated million deaths.
And so right now, it's in a difficult position because we know the true exit is science.
It's scientific tools.
But right now, China just doesn't have access to those.
And the Chinese government is in a very difficult predicament.
Which country do you think has done the best?
I read that Vietnam, for example, has had a really good pandemic.
Very low death toll, very high take-up on vaccines, etc.
Yeah, so I think the countries to look at are largely in East Asia and also in the Pacific, where they suppressed, they kept infection numbers low, but they didn't do that through daily lockdowns.
They knew their economic and social performance would really suffer under that.
So what they did instead was actually watch their borders, limit importation, have a great testing and tracing system, and therefore suppress, then mass vaccinate as soon as vaccinations became available, and then open up now back to normal.
And so they've taken a wave of infections in many cases, but the damage has been blunted because of the protection we now have through the scientific progress over two years.
I was very critical of the British government in the first couple of waves of this pandemic.
I felt they handled it really badly.
I think you shared that view at the time.
When you look now two years on, you see the overall death rate now around Europe, for example.
And the UK hasn't fared too badly because of the success and speed of our vaccine program.
So when you look at it in totality, what would your verdict be on the way the UK government has handled this?
Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Piers.
We have to look at pre-vaccine, where we saw in the first year a lot of live loss unnecessarily, mistakes made in delayed testing, not having any checks in terms of people entering the country during our first lockdown, you know, very delayed lockdown in several cases.
But actually, when you hit 2021, the rollout was pretty superb and stellar.
I think many places looked at Britain and said, wow, how did they do that?
And that really credit goes to the UK government for getting the supply of vaccines, but also the staff of the NHS.
We know people were there and working 24 hours on the weekend to get vaccines and jabs into arms, but also the British public.
The vaccination rates are absolutely astonishing, which means people showed up.
They knew it was something they could do to help us exit this pandemic.
And they got not one, but two, but three jabs.
And that's why we're able right now to have as much freedom as we do in our daily lives without the devastation that we're seeing in other places.
Final question, and it's a contentious one, because when people aired the theory that COVID began in a lab and not a wet market, they were sort of taken off social media and howled and abused and so on.
It's becoming a much more popular theory.
Humorlessness in Wokeism 00:07:21
What do you think?
Well, I think there's, you know, when initially people talked about lab leak, they talked about some kind of bioweapon.
I think virologists are clear that this was not designed by people.
This is natural in terms of its origin.
Where there's more debate is when did the spillover event happen?
Did it happen in a wet market or did it happen through a lab leak?
Knowing that lab leaks happen all the time in different places across the world.
And the Wuhan Institute of Virology does indeed do research on coronaviruses.
So I think the jury is out on this.
And what you've seen is it's becoming quite political with the WHO, the World Health Organization, just unable to get an independent mission in to do an audit of that lab to actually look for reservoirs of where could this virus be in terms of an animal population.
So we just don't know, but it is an open debate, and I think there are arguments on both sides of that debate.
Debbie, it's great to talk to you.
You've done a brilliant book called Preventable.
It's really about how we avoid getting ourselves into this kind of situation again.
It's very hard because we never know where the next pandemic may come from.
But great to talk to you.
You've taken a lot of flack for your positions that you've taken, but I've always felt you've followed the science.
You've changed your view when facts have changed.
And I think that's what scientists should do.
So I thank you for everything that you've done and good to talk to you.
You too.
Thank you so much, Piers.
Uncensored next.
Have we totally lost our sense of humor?
Is comedy dead?
We're still alive with the new king of late night US TV, Greg Gutfeld.
He's alive.
He's funny, I think.
We're about to find out after the break.
No pressure, Greg.
Welcome to the Uncensored Comedy Club when no topic is off limits and we laugh.
When do we all lose our sense of humor?
Well, one person who hasn't is comedian Ricky Gervais.
When asked on Twitter yesterday what he thought about me interviewing the Taliban official spokesman, he said, I've lost all respect for them.
It was a gag.
A lot of half-witch didn't get the gag.
Why?
Why have I lost the ability to understand humor?
In a moment, I'll speak to one of the funniest men in America, Greg Gutfeld.
But first, let's see him in action.
So it's 2021, and this monologue is on the Steel dossier.
Like a birthmark, this story never ever goes away.
Is that my fault?
No.
I would much prefer to do something on Joe Biden breaking wind at the climate summit.
That breeze was so hot, Greta Thunberg asked him to stand in front of a windmill.
But look, that fart was the only honest thing to come out of Joe since he became president.
As you know, Hillary Clinton is on her Please Don't Forget Me tour.
Now showing up on a late night show to crack wise about the guy who shellacked her like a driftwood sculpture in 2016.
Yes, Trump is her meal ticket, her free bird, her stairway to heaven.
She brought Chelsea because she's also unemployed and Bill wanted both of them out of the house before his 5 p.m. shows up.
Her name's Crystal.
Well, Greg Garfield, Joe's like, Greg, brilliant to have you on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
I had a great time with you in New York doing the five, the show that you're a superstar on.
Your own shows are the biggest show on cable in America.
Congratulations.
I want to take you back to a quote that you said, which I thought was really pertinent to the time we live in.
You said, I became a conservative by being around liberals, and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives.
You realize there's something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right.
The worst part of each of them is the moralizing.
And I thought that was so pertinent to what goes on now, especially on social media.
Absolutely.
One of the greatest things that the woke has done is that they've made humorlessness hilarious.
So what I was talking about is like when you're around the left and they're so earnest and sanctimonious and yet they get nothing done, you drift away.
Then you get into the conservative realm and you have the same kind, except they might be more religious, more moralistic in a different way.
And you move into the libertarian world.
But then even in libertarians, you find some humorlessness there.
But what wokeism has done for all of us and has united left and right and center is they have taught us how humorlessness is the funniest damn thing on earth.
I mean, the only reason why my show was a hit is because of them, right?
Cancel culture, wokeism.
I don't have to, I don't really have to do that much work, Piers, which is kind of my goal in life.
All I got to do is go on Twitter, you find the most extreme idiot, which is about 10%, right, of Twitter, and then let them do the work for you.
They do the heavy lifting with their, you know, their twisted mindset.
I mean, it was hilarious.
It was hilarious last night.
I interviewed the official spokesman for the Taliban, and somebody tweeted Ricky Gervais to say, isn't it disgusting that Piers Morgan's doing this?
And Gervais replied, I've lost all respect for them, the Taliban, right?
Of course it's just a simple gang.
But absolute mayhem erupted because most of Twitter took him seriously and just thought he was talking about, you know, this was all disgusting.
And of course he wasn't.
Yeah.
No, and it's a classic joke.
I mean, you could kind of see it coming.
It's like, you know, I call you a dirtbag, but I don't want to insult dirtbags.
It's so easy.
But the problem with Twitter, and it's part of free speech absolutism, everybody's got to be there, is that it's given an avenue for the humorless.
So they get on and they'll actually go on and they'll see the best, the funniest part about Twitter is when people come on and explain the jokes.
So I saw that Ricky Gervais tweet.
The stuff that didn't bother me was the people who didn't get the joke.
It was the people that explained the joke.
It was like a David, like there's like David Bedil.
Is that his name?
David Bedil.
Is that his name?
He's British.
He was like trying, he was like, oh, here's why this joke is so good.
And then he goes on to explain it.
And it's like, oh, God.
So you have, in Twitter, you have joke explainers.
You have the humorless contingent, which is probably now probably about 25%.
But it's just what you have to live with.
I find that to be, in my opinion, more enjoyable than the actual legitimately funny people.
I mean, without wokeism and without the humorlessness, we wouldn't have Tatiana McGrath.
Well, this brings me to two of my favorite subjects of humor, actually, which are Megan and Harry, who are planning to come and hide the Queen's Platinum Jubilee.
And I know you find them a constant source of hilarity as well.
They don't ever intend to make us laugh.
They just make us laugh through.
Oh, I got to tell you.
I love that her woke cartoon on Netflix got canceled.
There's a great story behind this.
The cartoon is called Pearl.
It's about a coming of age, right?
Which is a code word for nauseating, you know, self-involved tripe.
So what happened is, this is my favorite part.
So it's like a young girl's rise in social justice.
And you know who Megan's cartoon is inspired by?
Megan.
She made the cartoon.
It's inspired by her, which is amazing.
But that tells you everything.
That in the woke world, it is not actually about helping people.
It's a disguise.
It's a virtue signal that helps you, that makes you look good.
And there's perfect evidence of this because they never help anybody but themselves.
Parasitic Worms and Nonsense 00:03:04
And they never mean it.
They never fail.
They don't even change course.
Yeah, they never mean it.
It's never about actually anything but enriching themselves and making themselves look virtuous and preaching one thing and doing the complete opportunity.
I resent England for sending your secondhand royalty to us because now we got to deal with this.
Well, to be fair, you did.
Well, hang on, hang on.
To be fair, you lot sent two women into our royal family.
One of them led to an abdication and the other one has nearly broken up the entire monarchy.
So with respect to you, America, you're two for two and it's not looking good.
Yes.
I just love the fact that they thought that they were going to be royalty here in America.
So there was an assumption that when, and they were almost there.
I mean, they were going to get gigs everywhere.
Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, everybody was just going to give them millions and millions.
And then they had to sit in a room with him and realize, my God, they're vacuous.
He's a nice guy, apparently.
But I mean, just thoroughly vacuous.
She leads him around on a rope and, you know, and it's like, that's it?
That is the kind of sitcom I want to see.
The other thing I want to mention too, we do a nightly thing called The World's Gone Nuts.
And I want to just go into this one with you.
I'll clip my fingers and show you.
The world's gone nuts.
Apologies for the American accent there, Greg, but this is such a brilliant story.
It sums up the world we live in.
Scientists have declared that there is sexism in the naming of parasitic worms.
A team of scientists has concluded that there were apparently 596 new species of parasitic worms.
And of those, only 111, 18%, honored female scientists.
Therefore, they wanted an end to this epidemiological nepotism and cronyism and sexism.
In other words, they want more parasitic worms to be named after women.
Otherwise, it's sexism.
You know what?
I'm going to go.
I'm so tired of ships being named after women.
Now they want our worms.
They want our worms, Piers.
It's like, by the way, has anybody talked to the worms?
How do the worms feel?
Well, exactly.
And by the way, if they had named every parasitic worm after women, the women would have gone nuts saying, why are you calling us all after parasitic worms?
And how does a worm feel being called a parasite?
A parasite is not a nice word.
Why don't you call them adjunctive livers?
No, adjacent survivalists.
Because, I mean, parasitic is just so mean-spirited.
Worms have feelings too.
I can talk to you for a very long time.
I know that you made yourself the biggest star on American TV because you just laugh at all this nonsense.
It is all nonsense.
And the world has gone nuts.
But thank God you're here to help try and save us.
Greg Gutfeld, thank you.
I appreciate you coming on.
You got it.
Thanks, Piers.
Great guy.
That's it from me.
Tomorrow, we'll be back with more.
But until then, stay on Centre.
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