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March 30, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:59
20230330_piers-morgan-uncensored-julian-assange-whistleblow
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Parents Afraid of School Policies 00:03:15
Tonight on Piers Morgan uncensored two of the most controversial prisoners in the UK, both vying for freedom.
First, he spent four years in a British jail and could face a lifetime of maximum security in the United States, but the debate still rages.
Is Julian Assange a whistleblower or a terrorist?
I'll talk to his father and his brother.
Thus Charles Bronson, arguably the most notorious prisoner in British history, loses another bid for freedom today.
I'll talk exclusively to his lawyers.
He's ever killed anyone.
Will he ever be let out?
Also tonight, British schools allow children to change their genders without even informing their parents.
Are kids being put at risk by policies of wokedom?
From London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well good evening from London, welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
If your son or daughter got into a fight at a school, you'd probably want to hear about it.
I know I would.
The same would apply if they were being bullied or falling behind in class.
Clearly, parents have a right to know what's happening in their children's lives, so they can offer support in whatever way they can.
So what about if your child decides to transition to another gender?
You probably want to know about that, wouldn't you?
I've had four kids.
I'd want to know.
But it turns out that a shocking number of schools in Britain think you, as parents, have no right to know that.
Children are being allowed to change their names, their uniforms and their personal pronouns, that dreaded phrase, using different toilets and changing rooms without their parents having a clue about any of this happening.
Just 39 of 304 schools investigated by the Policy Exchange think tanks said they informed parents if their own child said they wanted to change gender.
In many cases, parents only found out when they got a letter from the post citing their child's new name and new pronouns as a point of fact.
Think about that.
That's how the parents found out.
Their kids had decided to change their gender and their name.
Most schools surveyed said they're actively teaching the contested theory that children may have a different gender than their biological sex.
This is completely outrageous.
It's policy driven by fear of the woke mob.
Something I've talked about many times, but this isn't what I'm talking about.
Schools are so afraid of being inviscerated for not tolerating the latest whim of gender ideology that they're failing in their duty to both parents and the kids.
Scandals like the Tavistock Clinic, remember that?
Where hundreds of children were handed puberty blockers despite having other, in most cases, other complicated mental health problems, show the importance of getting this right.
Children with gender dysphoria need intensive care and support from adults with their best interests at heart.
But we shouldn't be afraid to point out that many of them might have other problems.
Others may simply be gay.
Gender identity has become a fad, a craze, virtually unheard of a few decades ago, to almost unavoidable in schools today.
When things in our society change this much this fast, we have a right to at least discuss it.
And parents should be at the very heart of that conversation.
Well, we'll debate that later in the program.
But first, it's been 20 years since the invasion of Iraq.
Sympathy for Julian Assange 00:11:53
Rightly or wrongly, few did more to call attention to the conduct of US military in that war than the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks made global headlines in 2010 by publishing linked classified files and evidence of war crimes.
Fighting against tradition to the US and 157 years in a maximum security jail, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
He was arrested after emerging and has now spent four years in Belmarsh Prison, probably the toughest prison in the country.
Supporters say he's a free speech champion who shone a light on military brutality.
Critics think he's nothing less than a terrorist who threatened national security.
My name is John Shifton.
I'm Julian Assange's father.
WikiLeaks found that Julian Assange has been arrested.
One of the most notorious and controversial figures in custody.
Assange will remain behind bars until that extradition hearing, which has been set down for the end of February.
I urge the Department of Justice to drop the charges.
The maximum jail sentence of 175 years.
Well, I'm joined now by Julian's father, John Shipton, and his brother, Gabriel Shipton, who've made that new documentary film on their fight to secure Julian Assange's release, along with security and terrorism expert Will Geddes.
So welcome to all of you.
Thank you very much to the Shiptons who are joining me from America.
Let me start with you, John Shipton.
You're Julian's dad.
It must be, regardless of the debate that we're about to have about this, incredibly tough for a father to see a son, a child, incarcerated for so long without any apparent conclusion to his legal proceedings in Belmarsh, which I've been to, which is one of the toughest prisons in the country.
Piers, it's very difficult.
And the circumstances of Julian's declining health make the matter dire and critical.
John, how often do you speak to your son?
Julian has allowed a 10-minute phone call to me daily.
I haven't spoken today, but the day before yesterday, we had a 10-minute conversation.
How would you categorise his state of mind?
Well, it goes up and down.
Generally, not good, but as we report upon the journey across the United States and then the enthusiasm with which we're greeted, this is heartening for Julian and lifts his spirits considerably.
You know, it's interesting, John.
I've been a journalist for more than three decades.
I've run big newspapers in the UK.
I've covered this story obviously extensively.
And I watched the movie the other day again in preparation for this interview, actually, just to remind myself of the whole story as it all played out.
And a large part of me has a lot of sympathy for what Julian Assange did.
He exposed some really serious things and he did it in a fearless way.
There's no question of that.
But a part of me also, when I was reminded of this, felt that his actions in the way he did it could well be categorized as reckless.
Just putting everything out there seemed to me something which, for example, as an editor of a newspaper, we would never have been able to do.
Did you, when you saw what he did, did you have qualms as his father that that particular action in just putting it all out was something that was always going to get him into this kind of trouble?
Piers, you know, first place, I have to accept your assertion and just putting it all out, which is, if you forgive me for saying so quite directly, incorrect.
There were 100 media partners with Julian, each of them responsible for a particular area.
All of this was covered in the hearing, that the redactions, the ultimate release of all of the cables unredacted, was done by cryptone.org, a John Young site in New York.
Okay, let me bring in Gabriel.
Gabriel, Julian's your half-brother.
You've made this film, you guys, because you're desperate to try and get him out, I guess, of prison.
How is that going?
What reaction are you getting, particularly in America?
Well, we're getting very emotional reactions here in the US.
We're about halfway through a 59 event tour around the United States.
People are enraged when they realize what's going on, how their rights are at stake in Julian's persecution.
People, after we do showings, people come up to us and say, you know, thank you for doing this.
Thank you for standing up for our First Amendment in the United States.
So it's really breathtaking that audiences around the US are really beginning to understand what's at stake for them in this case, their democratic right to know what governments do in their name.
You know, recently, back in October, I interviewed John Bolton.
He was former US National Security Advisor, of course, and he said this to me.
He's committed clear criminal activity.
He's no more a journalist than the chair I'm sitting on.
The information that he divulged did, in fact, put many people in jeopardy.
It undercut the ability of the United States to have confidential diplomatic communications.
And I hope he gets at least 176 years in jail for what he did.
Some very strong words there, Gabriel.
And that is a view shared by a lot of Americans.
There's no question, particularly in the political sphere, on the Republican side, certainly, who believe that what your brother did was bordering on treason.
What do you say to that?
Well, everything that Julian published was in the public interest, and he partnered with these media organisations, as John said.
So you're talking about all the largest prestige media organisations around the world who publish the exact same information.
People like John Bolton, they would like to be able to classify everything so that the public had no idea what the governments that they elected were getting up to.
And I think, particularly in the United States now, you're seeing a larger and larger movement for government accountability.
People understanding that classification of documents is totally overused.
You know, Joe Biden has classified documents in the boot of his corvette.
Trump has classified documents in the basement of Mar-a-Lago.
This overclassification of documents so that the public doesn't understand what the government is doing is really a problem for democracy.
And you have to ask ourselves, knowing about what our government does in our name is our right and our democratic right.
And do we want to live in a democracy or do we want to live in a tyranny where governments act with impunity, in secrecy, and no accountability?
Let me bring in Will Geddes now, who's a security expert.
Will, we've spoken about this before, but what is your reaction to this?
Because it is a complex issue.
You know, my journalistic side believes in free speech, because a lot of what WikiLeaks exposed was absolutely in the public interest.
But I do think there were also legitimate concerns about the sheer amount of material that was put out there, which could well have put lives in jeopardy.
What do you think about it?
Well, Piers, I agree with you entirely.
I think there are some aspects of the information that wasn't released by us, which was in the public interest.
But public interest is a very subjective word or term.
There is information that does require confidentiality.
I work with confidential information on a daily basis.
And that information has to be secured for a variety of very wide spectrum of reasons.
And one of the greatest concerns is there was simply a release of information that was not filtered necessarily, I believe, in the public interest.
And when we talk about a democracy and about there being access to certain information, that democracy can be undermined by that information or certain information being protected.
Now, I do believe in whistleblowers, and I do believe that there is a reason and also a purpose for whistleblowing.
But there was information that Assange was responsible for, whether he had acquired it himself or he was publishing it on behalf of other parties.
The problem is, is as the disseminator of that information, he was putting a lot of national security, particularly in the United States, at great risk, and also other members of obviously the intelligence community.
And that was putting lives at risk.
That's what we've got to bear in mind.
It wasn't just uncovering atrocities or misuses of power.
This was information that helps us keep our country safe against the bad guys, the terrorists out there who want to find out about how those instruments of intelligence are used and what is available to them.
Let me bring back in John Shipton.
John, in January, President Biden was accused of hypocrisy for demanding the release of journalists detained around the world while he continues seeking the extradition of your son.
What did you think of that?
Oh, you know, if I could just address a few of the items that were rattled off there as though they are as though that they're the utterings of truth.
They're simply not.
Robert E. Gates, the Secretary of Defense, in testimony to the Congress, stated categorically under oath that it was awkward, embarrassing, but no damage was done.
General Carr, giving evidence at the trial of Chelsea Manning, stated equally categorically, under oath, nobody was hurt.
So those assertions that people make founded upon conjuring up ghosts of fear, the all-of-government investigation in the Australian government made the same similar declaration, no laws were broken.
So those statements where people conjure up fears that something may have happened, something may be happen in the future, and this and that was in danger, are simply baseless assertions, rather loudly denying the fact that there are crimes involved in this, and they point to the fact that maybe somebody's endangered,
when the 400,000 Iraq war files revealed clearly that 15,000 civilian deaths had been gone unreported.
Global Phenomenon and Injustice 00:02:26
And what is it with these people that can't address the matter of what the files actually reveal and deal with that?
And then if they feel that certain secrets have been uncomfortable, then cause the United States and CIPANET to look after their own secrets.
Rather than blaming Julian and Chelsea Manning, these people can't manage their own secrets.
God's sake, man.
John, you sound weary from this.
You sound exhausted fighting this battle, Field Sun.
How do you think this ends?
You know, you just, Piers, deal with each day as it comes and try and keep a bit calm.
It's in early morning here, so I'm never good in the mornings.
After midday, I rouse up a bit.
But the ending will be the yearning for justice in people's heart and the revulsion at injustice will prevail in this matter.
Millions of people around the world join us.
Every single civil society organisation in the United States of standing has written, 27 of them have written to Biden asking for the charges to be dropped.
Sorry, to Merrick Garland, of the DOJ Department of Justice, asking for the...
The five great media legacy newspapers that partnered in this distribution of these revelations, the New York Times, The Guardian, the El Pay in Spain and Le Monde and Druspiego in Germany, have equally written to the Department of Justice head Merrick Garland and asked for the charges to be dropped.
The phenomenon and the problem is global and the phenomenon and the problem is addressed globally by people concerned with this injustice.
Dangerous Parole Board Risks 00:14:45
John and Gabriel, thank you both very much indeed for joining me.
The passion is clear and the battle goes on and Will thank you very much indeed for joining me as well.
I appreciate it.
We're coming next tonight from one notorious prisoner to another.
Today Charles Bronson's had yet another bid for freedom rejected.
He insists he's not a threat to the public.
He's never killed anybody and yet he's still in prison after five decades.
He may never come out.
Is that right?
Is that fair?
He's certainly notorious.
He's certainly been very dangerous.
Is he now?
I'll talk to his lawyer after the question.
Well he's been dubbed Britain's most violent prisoner and today Charles Bronson failed in his eighth attempt to be released on parole and almost 50 years in jail.
He staged nine rooftop protests, 10 sieges, holding at least 11 victims hostage.
He's never actually killed anybody.
So notorious is he.
He's even had a film made of his life.
Tom Hardy played him in the 2009 movie Bronson.
And then a voice note from prison which he made this week.
Bronson insisted that he loves people and isn't a threat.
Love them.
I love the world.
I'm not a f ⁇ ing filthy terrorist or a rapist or a murderer.
So who am I dangerous to outside?
More dangerousness was in the prison.
Well do you remember as Charles Bronson's lawyer Dean King for his first interview since this latest parole move failed again.
Dean, is he ever going to be let out do you think?
Well we certainly hope so Piers.
The test for the parole board is is it necessary for the protection of the public that he remains confined?
Obviously this time around the parole board have decided that he does remain dangerous.
But the issue for us Piers is very much this.
The parole board are only limited to looking at release or open conditions.
He's a category A prisoner in a prison in the prison.
Now, the only person that can progress him through that system is Dominic Raab.
And there's a lack of political will, certainly in his case, to make that progress.
I mean, look, on the face of it, for someone who's never killed anyone, it does seem extraordinary that he's had to spend most of five decades now in prison.
It's just when you get into the weeds of why they keep rejecting his parole, you start to understand the other side of this.
He was originally jailed for seven years in the early 70s for armed robbery.
He got let out twice, but both times was back in prison within weeks on other robbery offences.
He's had seven failed attempts at parole, as we said.
But he was given seven years in 1994 for false imprisonment and blackmail.
In 1997, he took a deputy prison governor staff of three inmates hostage and got five years.
In 2000, he got a life sentence for kidnapping a prison art teacher, Phil Danielson, in Hull Prison the previous year.
In a 43-hour ordeal, Mr. Danielson was beaten, stabbed, death with panic attacks and PTSD and has never worked again.
Over the course of his incarceration, as we said, nine rooftop protests, 10 hostage sieges, 11 victims.
In 2014, further sentenced to three more years for assaulting another prison governor, Adrian Wallace, held him hostage for five hours and tied him up and beat him.
There is a long, long litany of appalling incidents and violence against people trying to run prisons.
Some people's lives being completely ruined.
So, yes, it's true he hasn't killed anyone, but he's clearly been extremely dangerous.
He's got this reputation for a reason.
Of course, and we've never sought to portray him any differently.
But the...
Why would he be safe on the outside now?
Well, the argument that one of the witnesses made at the parole hearing was he's actually more risky and dangerous in prison towards prison governors and staff than he would be in the community.
But how do you know that?
Well, the parole would never know.
The parole would are looking at future.
But how do you know that as his lawyer?
Because, I mean, to have so many incidents of extreme violence, kidnapping people, falsely imprisoning them, torturing them and so on.
I mean, it doesn't sound like you could have that much confidence that if he got on the outside and somebody wound him up the wrong way, he wouldn't do this kind of thing to people on the outside.
Some of the evidence that the parole board heard during the hearing was the motivation and his progress is the best it's ever been.
The next step, the next test is to progress him within the prison to enable him to mix with more prisoners and in a less harsh regime.
When was he last violent?
2018, five years ago.
There's been no violence at all.
No violence for five years.
Do you think he's a genuinely changed character or does he just want to get out?
He's...
Or both.
It's a mixture of both.
It's self-motivated interest.
He's reached an age now where he knows if he steps out of line in the future and commits an act of violence, he's dying in prison.
But the test, the test for him will be progress in the system.
And the thing is, Piers, he's in a cell 23 hours a day.
He's supposed to have an hour of psychology a week.
So in the last year, you would expect at least 52 sessions.
He's had 13.
And the reason for that isn't his behaviour, it's resources.
The prison he's in is significantly understaffed for the money.
Someone who has terrorised prison officers and warders, why should he be given any better treatment, frankly?
I mean, he's persistently done that until, as you say, five years ago.
But for four decades, he was terrorising people in prison.
But it's not better treatment.
He's in a prison in a prison.
So the two limbs for someone to be put into that arena now is risk to prisoners or staff or persistently disruptive behaviour.
Well, as we established at the parole here, and he's not engaging in persistently disruptive behaviour.
And in actual fact, the prison service and the authorities have reduced his risk to staff to medium, which is the lowest it's ever been.
Now, one of the arguments Dominic Ra put forward at the parole hearing was he's a high risk of serious harm to the public.
Therefore, that means he cannot be released.
But the system and the reality is nine out of ten lifers are released as high risk of serious harm.
And as he said, and he's got some point to this, he's not a terrorist, he's not a rapist, he's not a murderer, he's not any of the conventional kinds of criminal.
A lot of his crimes really are inside prison against people that work there.
It's not to justify them at all, it's just to compare them to perhaps other people who are being let out on a regular basis.
You can kill people and be let out within 12 years, right?
Yeah, in some circumstances.
But I think we have to look more globally at the parole system.
This week, Dominic Raab has introduced the Victims and Prisoners Bill, which is going to enable him to stack the parole board full of law enforcement officers.
And there's credibility issues with police officers at the moment.
But parking that aside, he wants the ability to veto parole board decisions.
So then we're looking at what's the point of the parole board.
It's utterly absurd.
What's your message to Dominic Raab then?
My message to Dominic Raab is he's got enough going on in his own with his own role as deputy PM.
He's under investigation himself.
In any other profession, he wouldn't remain in a job whilst being investigated.
He'd be suspended.
Yet here he wants to interfere with the independence of the parole board, which is a court.
But only last week, the High Court handed down judgment saying a major piece of parole board guidance that he issued around recommendations from his own staff preventing them was ruled unlawful.
Now, it was only in Charlie's case that the witnesses were all able to give recommendations.
He wanted to silence them all, not allow them to make recommendations.
And the High Court has said that's mass contempt of court.
How much of the problem that your client has is to do with his notorious reputation, which he has gleefully fueled over the years, let's be clear.
How much of that notoriety is perhaps the reason he's still inside?
In other words, if we didn't really know much about him and he just did all this under the public radar, would he be out by now?
Well, it's significantly contributed, but we need to shine a light on what's called the close supervision centre.
That's the prison within the prison.
It's very difficult to get out of that system.
Do you go and see him in there?
Yeah, of course.
How often do you see him?
On average, once every six to eight weeks.
And what's I mean, how is he?
What's he like?
I only know what I've read.
I mean, personally, I've never felt at risk from him.
Never.
And I say that, having previously taken his lawyers hostage.
But, you know, he's for someone who's spent so long in solitary confinement, and that's what it is, he's actually very down to earth and very with it.
I think he's apprised the parole board.
The parole board are expecting over the course of three days him to present in a slightly different way.
And of course, he handled the pressure of the situation very well.
Have you spoken to him since this latest parole attempt?
I have.
What was his reaction?
His reaction, look, he's realistic.
He understands that for the parole board to release someone who's CSC but also category A, it's a big step.
So he's focused on the next review and our next challenge.
And our next challenge firmly rests with the Secretary of State.
Dean Kingham, thank you very much for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Well coming up, he's one of the journalists who exposed big tech censorship at Twitter after being asked to investigate by Elon Musk, Twitter's owner.
What he found about the cozy relationship between government and big tech should worry anyone who cares about free speech.
I'll be speaking to him next.
Well, when Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, he invited several independent journalists to be the social network's HQ to look through its archives.
Their findings have been published as Twitter files.
And the journalists say they show that the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google are anything but independent.
They claim they're actually a state sponsor, thought police, blocking people and stories at the request of the U.S. government, security services, even big pharma companies.
Here is Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi testifying to U.S. Congress earlier this year.
Well, indictments aren't a thing to disagree with.
Do you disagree?
They're about 40 or 50 pages.
Do you disagree with the evidence outlined in those indictments?
Well, indictments are just charges.
I just asked you, do you disagree with the evidence included in those indictments?
Yes or no?
And I understand pretty detailed allegations.
In the Mueller indictment, by the way.
You should go read the indictment and then come back and tell us if you actually think there's no proof of it.
Well, let me move on.
Some of you just want to...
Let me move on, please.
Please, let me move on.
That's how this works.
You should know that by now.
So being bossed around there, Matt Taibbi joins me now.
Matt, I watched some of that and it was entirely predictable, I think, the way that you were roughed up there.
But at the core of this, when you went through all the Twitter files, as it being called, what was your main takeaway from what had been going on?
What had been going on?
Well, I think the point of that exchange between myself and, first of all, happy birthday, Piers.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So that was Congressman Dan Goldman from New York, and he was essentially giving me a hard time because the premise of a lot of the digital censorship in America is that we had this overwhelming threat of Russian interference in the American informational system.
And he was trying to get me to agree that that was the case and that therefore censorship is justified.
And that's one of the things that we found in the Twitter files is that there's widespread communication between companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google and agencies like the FBI and DHS.
And the predicate for all of this is that there's a big foreign threat, but mostly they're policing domestic speech.
Right.
And that's, I mean, some really interesting stuff was going on with this phrase shadow banning.
For those who don't know what shadow banning is, just give me a quick explanation.
And then how much of it did you find?
How much of it did you find?
Oh, a lot.
Yeah.
So shadow banning is just these companies have the ability to basically dial all the way up to, you know, sort of massively amplified or dial all the way down to unsearchable anybody's social media presence.
And if you look on the individual pages of people, and we got a chance to do that in the cases of some high-profile accounts, you'll see that they'll be labeled with things that say things like trends blacklist or search blacklist, which means that your name can't be searched or you can only be searched by people who follow you or people who follow you can't search you.
They have a thousand different gradations that they can do.
And this allows them to more or less completely control how visible each person is compared to anybody else.
You know, what was really fascinating to me was I wrote a best-selling book called Wake Up, and it did really well.
But the entire period that it was on sale, my Twitter following slowly went down over the whole of most of last year, 2022.
It just kept going down.
It really annoyed me.
I was like, it's weird.
And over the space of about eight, nine months, I've lost about 50,000 followers.
I thought, how can I have this best-selling book?
And my Twitter following has always been going up and up and up and up into millions, millions, millions.
I mean, suddenly it all started going the other way.
And then when I read all your investigations, well, that makes perfect sense because Twitter was being basically run by a bunch of very woke people.
You probably thought my book, exposing the ridiculousness of wokery, would be the enemy to them.
And I think they're up to all sorts of tricks with me because the moment Elon Musk bought Twitter at the end of October last year, from that period to now, far from going down, I've gained about 600,000, 700,000 new followers.
So clearly something was going on.
I'm just one of many people.
But that right there was evidence to me that I was being somehow suppressed right to the point Elon bought the company.
Yeah, and that's not an uncommon story.
We heard lots of people.
I mean, I myself, my follower account was sort of at the same place for a long time.
It didn't particularly bother me.
But then suddenly I woke up one day and it started going back up again.
Illegitimate Election Censorship 00:04:22
We did see in the Twitter files, absolutely for sure, there were instances where they were saying, this person is already being de-amplified or this account is already being amplified.
So we know that they were doing that.
In some cases, it's algorithmic, and in some cases, they were actually, there was a human being going in and tinkering with the machinery with individual accounts.
So without knowing what was going on with your account, you know, it could be either one of those things.
Right.
Since Elon's taken over, obviously he's got lots of problems and challenges he's trying to work through.
And I've got every confidence he will.
He's shown that in the past with other companies.
But what are the particular challenges do you think he faces now?
I mean, if you were, I know you had been advising him, but what are the things he really needs to get a grip of with Twitter, do you think, to make it a fairer playing field?
Well, I don't really advise him.
I mean, I think that's not a relationship that I have with him.
But I think his purpose with the Twitter files was to try to restore some credibility to the platform.
A lot of people had a lot of suspicions about things that were going on sort of underneath the surface of social media companies.
And the idea of letting this all out in the open was to say, yes, these things were happening.
Shadow banning was happening.
People were being deleted.
This was being done at the behest of governments and various NGOs and think tanks for getting people taken off these platforms.
Now people know that for sure.
Maybe we can start over and create a new system that's more transparent.
I think that was the idea behind the project.
And I hope it's been successful.
I mean, the most egregious example I can think of, and I wrote about this at the time it happened, was just before the last election when the New York Post, who I write a column for, they had this big exposure about Hunter Biden's laptop.
The son of the president had a laptop full of pretty contentious stuff, potentially criminal stuff.
Certainly in the public interest to reveal this, and it was all completely accurate and genuine.
And yet Twitter decided to suspend the New York Post account for weeks because they refused to delete this information.
You couldn't even find the front page of the paper on Twitter.
I found that an extraordinary piece of censorship.
Yes, and that was where we started with the Twitter files.
And not only could you not find the story for a while, they actually prevented people from sharing it with each other in DMs, which is a tool they usually only restrict to like child pornography.
So they used the most extreme tools they had to suppress that story for about a day.
The New York Post account was locked for another two weeks.
But as we found out when we looked in the files, the entire premise for suppressing that story, which was hacked materials, they knew from the very beginning was specious.
And so it was a totally illegitimate case of censorship.
And I think a historic one in American.
Well, you know, I said to Donald Trump when I interviewed him, Donald Trump, I said, if you just stopped going on about having the election stolen and making up claims about fraudulent voting and so on, if you just stuck to what happened to the New York Post exposure of Hunter Biden's laptop, there are polls suggesting that that in itself, had it been properly out there and been properly examined and followed by the mainstream media, that could have tipped the election Trump's way.
So in a way, that is a legitimate case of potentially having the election robbed, was that the suppression of genuine journalism that was damaging to Biden actually could have been contributing to Trump losing.
It's impossible to say, but for certain it was illegitimate censorship.
And it's been very disappointing to watch the reaction of American journalists, a lot of whom I think overlook this incident just because they don't like Donald Trump.
The reality is this could happen to anybody and it could happen to any journalist and that fact should really make everybody in the business very, very nervous.
And it hasn't, which is unfortunate.
Well, Matt, you did some brilliant work on this, I know, with Barry Weiss and others.
Kids Experimenting with Identity 00:07:26
I'm so glad Elon got you in to do that, got under the bonnet.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Thanks so much, Pierce.
I appreciate it.
Well, coming next, these schools allowing children to change genders without even informing their parents.
Are people being put at risk by policies of fear?
We'll discuss that with the fact.
Welcome back.
I'm joined by the Talk2V contributor, Paula Roan, Adrian, Times radio host, Steve Abel, makes his debut on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Great to see you.
I've got a new book out, Death Under a Little Sky, which is described probably by you as gloriously atmospheric, truly excellent debut, and other wonderful tributes.
It's, I'm told, a great book.
I haven't read it yet.
I'll make a holiday today and I will go and read it.
That's a birthday present for you.
Happy birthday.
Thank you.
68 today, isn't it?
That's why I heard.
Did I read that wrong?
Good to see you.
Let's talk about this gender in schools business, right?
We talk a lot about gender-related things and some people are getting bored with it, but there are really important principles at stake here.
What did you feel, Stu?
You're a parent.
The idea that a child could be at school self-identifying with all that goes with that with the school's full knowledge and kind of cooperation, if you like, and the parents wouldn't know.
What do you think of that?
I think, first of all, it's such a difficult area.
We talked about a lot on our program as well today.
I feel sorry for teachers, first of all.
I don't know how you'd be a teacher in this situation.
You know, you come into school, a kid comes to you and says, I might have been born a girl, but I think I'm a boy.
What do you do?
You want to look after them?
You don't want them to be bullied.
But I don't think you don't tell the parents.
Well, I agree with that.
I think in the end, the only way these things get settled is if people talk openly about them.
And that means there's three people involved in this.
There's the school, the teacher, there's the kid, and there's the parents.
And why wouldn't you just talk about this stuff?
I've got a 14-year-old, and it is very striking to me.
This type of fluidity, non-binary stuff, it's definitely there.
It's there in the school.
A couple of kids.
Yeah, but it's also, it seems to me like it's, Paula, it does seem to me like a craze, right?
It seems like it's a fad.
Like it's the trendy thing now for young people at school to go, I'm non-binary, I'm gender fluid.
They're all doing it, right?
I mean, there's a school in Brighton, which is the mecca for all these things, where I think like one in 10 kids was identifying as non-binary out of a thousand.
It was ridiculous.
Obviously, they're not all, I suspect, genuinely non-binary.
They're just going along with whatever it is.
And lost in the wash will be the ones who've really got gender dysphoria, right?
So I have a problem with this.
As a parent of four kids, if I found out that a school and teachers were deliberately hiding information like the gender identities, supposedly, of my kids, I'd be furious.
You'd be furious and you'd have a right to be furious, wouldn't you, Pierre?
Do you think?
Because absolutely.
We have to understand and remember what it is a school is supposed to do.
A school is supposed to be there to look after our child and care our child.
It's essentially acting as a parent when we're not.
And it's supposed to be there to not only help our child, but to educate our child.
Now, I do wonder what the message is that we would be giving to a child if a child came to you and said, keep this a secret.
Don't tell my mum.
Don't tell my dad.
And as an adult, you said, okay, I won't.
That's not helpful either.
I agree with that.
But why does the parent, I mean, you're a parent, we're all parents.
It's the parents' job to know as well.
But Steve, come on.
As much as I love to think I'm the best parent in the whole wide world, there are going to be things about my child I don't know.
But it's not actually that.
I was struck by the numbers, the numbers of schools where this was going on.
I was absolutely shocked when I read that report this morning.
Well, it's seven out of ten.
It's seven out of ten.
They only asked 150 schools, so you can judge however you like.
But it's quite a big thing as a parent.
I mean, I'm not a very, I mean, we all can realise our flaws as parenting, 14-year-olds.
How many times did you not tell your parents things about you when you were growing up?
Plenty of things.
Exactly.
That's the point.
But the point is, the kids feel like they've got a foil.
They've got someone who's in on their thing, right?
But this is about their identity.
Don't tell their parents.
This is about their identity.
This is not like they might be sneaking a cigarette.
Do you really believe, Steve, this is about their identity, or is it just about joining the club?
I think it's about both of them.
Kids, in my experience, they experiment.
They're all over the place, particularly teenagers.
And I think to a certain extent, we've got to allow them to express themselves.
You've got to allow them to see where they are in the world.
And we've all done it.
Now I think there is a herd mentality in this area, but we've all experimented at various times in our life, particularly when we're young.
And you've got to give them a certain amount of space to do that.
What do you think about self-identity?
Which is now this massive crisis, really, where Licola Sturgeon has to basically lose her job as first minister because she just couldn't say what a woman is and couldn't understand why people were angry that a male rapist went to a women's prison.
What do you feel about the concept of limitless self-identity?
I think you can't change biology.
I think it's really easy for me as a man.
People can do what they want with their lives, but it's never going to really harm my rights.
So the conflict of rights, you have to do this all the time in law.
There's the rights of women, there's the rights of people who want to identify in a certain way.
It never clashes with my rights.
Because I'm a bloke.
People can say whatever they like.
I don't need a safe space.
I've not got any safe spaces.
That to me is a problem.
No, no, it's all in this case, it's all about the infringement of women's rights.
Exactly.
Paul, I want to show you a video clip.
This is of a coach, a weightlifting coach, male, called Arvie Silverberg, who decided that he would exploit, this was in Canada, where the rules say that anyone who self-identifies as a woman could compete in the female category.
So he was a male powerlifting coach who then self-identified as a woman, entered the women's powerlifting competition, smashed the record, obviously the all-time record of 84 KGs or something, set by Anne Andres, who was also transgender.
A man who identified, or male identifies and competes as a woman.
And he did it to prove a point about the absurdity.
Yes.
In sport, especially the absurdity of where limitless self-identity takes you.
Yes.
It's absurd.
And of course, when you look at that extreme, you are going to get the absurd.
Of course you are.
And that, when we are at the end of the absurd, we're also not helping the people who actually do want to identify.
That doesn't help them either.
And so he was right, actually, I think.
I do support him for doing that, because clearly we do need to work at this.
We do need to understand what's going on.
But shutting people out, shutting a parent out, is not the answer.
There's not a human right to compete in sport.
And I think ultimately, male biology, particularly through puberty, means you have a difference.
That's an automatic advance.
And you can respect trans people and their right to live a life, but they don't have a human right to compete in female sport.
And I think what we're seeing now, actually, is a hardening.
A lot of sporting bodies have just recognised that.
That's a relatively straightforward question.
Well, let me ask you guys two completely different questions, right?
But I want a straight answer, simple answers.
10 years' time, if he's still alive, will King Charles still be King Charles?
In other words, will there still be a monarchy?
That's the easy answer.
Yes.
Yeah, I agree.
Yes.
Easy answer.
Trans Athletes in Sports 00:02:48
And in two and a half years' time, will Rishi Sunak still be Prime Minister?
No.
No.
Really?
I think you can just...
I'm not so sure.
I think you can mount a case just about that.
Maybe the momentum is faintly swinging back.
But even if he was brilliant, and even if he had...
You know, at this stage in 1992, at this stage, Neil Kinnock was further ahead, had been ahead in the polls longer than Keas Dahmer.
He was further ahead in the polls over the Tories.
And the Tories eventually brought in safe old John Major.
And Neil Kinnock got a little bit cocky.
And safe old John Major nicked it.
You've got Conservative MPs now launching legal action against their Prime Minister.
Wait a minute.
What the hell's happening?
Oh, it's my birthday.
Yes!
Rosanna Lockwood has joined me.
Thank you, Rosanna.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
How lovely.
Come and sit down, Ricky.
Thank you.
I'm actually taking two, I'm sure you'll all agree, two extremely well-deserved weeks off.
I'm going to go to Hollywood and lie under palm trees.
And I've made the potentially career-ending decision for one of us to allow Rosanna to come and sit in my chair and host Piers Morgan Uncensored.
So she'll be Rosanna Lockwood Uncensored, which I don't even know what that is like, but we're going to find out for the next two weeks.
Well, for starters, I identify as a woman.
Yes!
So we have got that.
I can promise you, Rosanna Lockwood, unfiltered.
I'm not Piers Morgan.
Let's be honest about it.
But I will bring my own particular brand to the show.
We'll have some good interviews, some nice conversations.
Hopefully a good show for you.
I'll look forward to seeing you then.
I mean, are you opinionated?
I know you're a very good business journalist, but have you got...
I watched your Twitter feed.
You're quite gobby on there.
I'm fairly gobby.
But, you know, that's just me being a classic introductor.
It's easier to be gobby online, isn't it, than it is person to person.
But in a TV studio, come on, why not?
What an opportunity.
Let's go for it.
I will be sharing my opinions.
Some of them are different to Piers's.
You know, I hope you don't mind me saying that, but I'm a few decades younger than you.
I mean, look, it's the normal rules.
If you do really well, great.
If you do too well, not too good.
And if you do terribly, I've never heard of you.
Well, I'm 58 today.
I know what you're all thinking.
No.
Really?
You look about 40.
But because I'm treating my body like a temple at the moment, there'll be none of this cake for me.
But still, given you've made your debut here today, you can have a slice.
Oh, press your heart.
Paula, you can have a slice.
And Rosanna, you can have a slice.
Because I'm that kind of guy.
I'm all about the giving.
We volunteered to come out of the cake for you, but no one was interested at all, weren't we?
Steve, great to see you.
The book is Death Under a Little Sky by Steve Gable.
I'm told by those who've read it, it's terrific.
So thank you very much to me.
I will read it under a palm tree next week.
Great to see you all, Rosanna.
Good luck next week.
Thanks so much.
And the week after.
Obviously, I'm on alert for an emergency fly-in.
Keep it uncensored.
Good night.
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