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April 24, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:47
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Sensitivity Brigade vs Comedy 00:02:54
I'm Piers Morgan uncensored tonight.
Labour's Diane Abbott is suspended for incendiary claims that Jews, gypsies and travellers haven't experienced real racism.
Was she flat wrong to argue that racism is, well quite literally, a black and white issue or debate?
And Harry and Meghan blame the media, of course, and who else, for creating an exhausting circus by dwelling on past events.
This is after the pair of them have spent the last three years whipping up an exhausting circus by whining repeatedly about past events.
Is this even by their standards their most hypocritical statement yet?
And Netflix faces a fan backlash for casting a black Cleopatra.
But after scandals about straight actors playing gay roles, able-bodied men playing disabled characters and Americans playing purgans, should we care?
Or is this actually the whole point of acting?
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well good evening from London, welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Barry Humphries was a lifelong antidote to the sensitivity and scandal that now dominate our culture.
For more than 50 years he roasted, regaled and enraptured audiences in the UK, America and his native Australia.
Quite simply, he was a comedy legend.
They've found me a better seat.
Oh, sorry, Mike.
What is it?
I've gone my hands.
Oh, it's an ointment, I'm sure.
I was just giving myself a quick application before the show.
You're a man who speaks his mind.
A man who refuses to learn from his mistakes.
That's a lovely attitude.
You have to wonder if the characters he played with such affection and comic mastery for half a century would survive even a single night on air today.
This was a straight white man who performed in drag to satirise snobbery and suburbia.
As Dame Edna, he was merciless.
No cultural trope and no celebrity excess was ever off limits.
As Les Patterson, the lecherous Aussie cliché, he was misogynist, racist, homophobic, and about everything else in between.
Yes, he was shocking and offensive, but that is precisely what he was mocking.
And his audiences were always in on the joke.
Last time I saw Barry Humphreys was a few years ago at a star-study lunch in London.
His guests included Liz Hurley, Tracy Emmin, Jimmy Carr, Nigela Lawson, all of whom were in regular fits of laughter.
I asked him then if he'd had to tone down his stage act to appease the sensitivity brigade.
The Rise of Barry Goodman 00:03:08
No, he roared.
Les Patterson is the last offensive man standing.
I can get away with anything as long as it comes out of his mouth or out of Edna's.
And he was right.
Barry Humphreys had a unique ability to mock his own characters, mock himself, and to mock the world around him all at the same time.
More than once, he turned on me.
You inspire strong reactions as I do?
I quite like that.
He didn't have to say anything else, sadly.
But no malice, just mischief and joy of a good jape.
And by having the gall to offend everything and everyone with his self-reverential wit, he made us ask questions about ourselves and our society that otherwise wouldn't have been asked.
He'll be greatly missed, and so too will Len Goodman, another straight talking icon that we sadly lost today.
Like Barry Humphreys, Goodman fizzed with charisma and with fun and with plain speaking.
He had that special, you can't say that, sparkle, which he exhibited perfectly during the late Queen's Platinum Jubilee.
My wife did coronation chicken yesterday for her tea, and I've never had it before.
No, I've never had, you know, curry and curry powder.
No.
My nan used to call it all foreign muck.
So I'm not worried about.
But I must say it was delicious.
All hell broke loose after he said that.
There were calls for him to be cancelled for being a racist.
But if you actually listen carefully to what he was saying, he was talking about what his nan in the early part of last century used to say about things like curry powder.
Not what he personally now thinks.
And that's where we are in society.
People don't listen.
They don't care.
They just want to rush to judgment and cancel.
As a master ballroom dancer and judge, Goodman also exhibited remarkable patience and politeness when he tried to make a dancer of the impossible.
You want the hold?
Yes, the hold, please.
No, no, five points of contact.
Just to start moving, Lennon.
We'll worry about the camera angles later.
Little turn.
No, you are a natural.
I am the new Ed Bulls.
I'm coming to the strictly dance floor.
Oh, good to see you.
He was famous for saying, you're a seven.
He was a ten.
And in Goodman and Humphreys, we've lost two great performers whose legacy should be that we should all try to be a little bit more like them.
Risky, funny, honest to a fault, and allergic to all things woke.
There are lots of humorless people in today's world who see offense and outrage where we used to see wit and wisdom.
I launched this show about a year ago today, actually, or is tomorrow, with a clip from another dearly departed legend who summed this up better than anybody, the Australian cricket genius, Shane Warren.
Denying Jewish Racism Exists 00:15:18
In this politically correct day and age, we've just got to be a little bit careful, but sometimes just say get stuff to the fun police.
Exactly.
So to mark the first anniversary of Piers Morgan Uncensored and Talk TV, and to pay tribute to these departing legends, I'll say it one more time.
Fun police, just get stuffed.
We'll be talking more about Barry Humphreys a little later, including Dame Edna's prescient words on the royal family in an extraordinary interview with me at Williams' wedding.
But first, the Labour MP Diane Abbott's political future is hanging by a thread.
After comments she made in the Observer newspaper, she suggested that Jewish people, along with gypsies, Irish people and travellers don't suffer the same racism.
They undoubtedly experience prejudice, she wrote.
This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
It's true of many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads can experience this prejudice, but they are not all their lives subject to racism.
In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus.
In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote.
And at the height of slavery, there were no white seeming people manacled on the slave ships.
Well, Diane Abbott issued an apology for this extraordinary rant with the ridiculous excuse that the remarks were from an initial draft, which she has so far failed to produce and which nobody believes actually exists.
Why would you send an initial draft to a national newspaper for publication as a letter?
Labour leader Sakir Starmer has suspended her for anti-Semitism.
Well joining me now is the journalist whose article Diane Abbott was responding to, Tomiwa Omilade, along with Black Lives Matter activist Iman Aiton and former Labour MP Chris Williamson.
Well welcome to all of you.
All right, let me start with you Tommy Wawa.
An extraordinary chain of events.
You write a piece for The Observer and you make an argument that racism in all its guises is racism.
Seems a pretty straightforward argument to me.
And Diane Abbott, who, to be fair to her, has been subjected to a lot of racism, particularly from social media, for being a black female MP.
But then she writes this letter.
And the letter is not just tone deaf.
In my estimation, when I first read it, I thought this must be a parody.
Someone trying to deliberately mock her.
It wasn't.
It was genuinely what she believes, that somehow you can't be subjected to the same kind of racism as a black person if you're Jewish or if you're Irish or if you're a gypsy.
She doesn't explain how, well, what if you're a black Jew, of which there are a number of black Jews?
Take me back to when you wrote the original piece.
Did you ever imagine that someone like Diane Abbott would come forward and say this?
Definitely not.
And I think it's worth emphasizing that it's not just a case of Diane Abbott not imagining Jewish people being subject to the same kind of racism as black people.
It's the case of her arguing that Jewish people can't be subject to racism at all.
They can only be subject to prejudice, as she describes it.
As if you have red hair.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, unbelievably crass analogy.
Extremely offensive.
And many people rightly pointed out the example of the Holocaust, which was one of the greatest acts of racial atrocities in the past century.
And yeah, so she subscribes to a very strange but increasingly popular definition of racism, which only looks at racism in terms of what she would call prejudice and power.
So certain minority groups can't be victims of racism because they're not subjects, they can't be discriminated against, basically, which is completely patently false.
When did you know about the letter?
I discovered the letter about 11 a.m. yesterday.
Yeah.
Quite extraordinary.
Okay, well, let's go to Chris Williamson.
So Chris Williamson, you were an MP.
You had to leave an MP over the whole ongoing saga under Jeremy Corbyn of this issue of how the Labour Party deals with anti-Semitism.
But today you were defending Diane Abbott.
Why?
Well, Piers, in your opening remarks, you described her letter as an extraordinary rant.
It was anything but an extraordinary rant.
I mean, she was merely stating a fact.
I mean, the truth is that Jewish people in this country don't experience racism by and large.
And certainly not to the same extent as black Muslims and people from the African Caribbean community.
And as you said in her letter that you quoted from, I mean, she talked about the way in which black people obviously were subjected to apartheid in South Africa, and that didn't apply in the same way to Jewish people or people from other backgrounds if they didn't have black skin or pigment to their skin.
So I think what she was saying was really stating an obvious fact and it's been taken out or blown out of all proportion.
There's 120, a letter, 126 words long, and it's been blown out of all proportion by the usual suspects.
Exactly the same characters that came after me, that came after Jeremy Corbyn, that weaponized anti-Semitism.
And you talked about, you know, there could be black Jews, and you're absolutely right.
There are.
One of the most prominent black Jewish members of the Labour Party was Jackie Walker.
She was the vice chair of Momentum.
She was accused of anti-Semitism extraordinarily and was suspended and then expelled.
We had children of Holocaust survivors who were members of the Labour Party who were accused of anti-Semitism, bringing the party into disrepute and were expelled.
And indeed, the Jewish Voice for Labour have done some number crunching and they've calculated that you're considerably more likely now as a Jewish member of the Labour Party to be suspended or expelled than you are if you come from any other background, as it were.
So, you know, this is nothing to do in reality with anti-Semitism.
This is all about trying to protect criticism or to prevent criticism of Israel gaining any traction.
Why is that inflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism?
I've let you answer at length.
Why in that case has Diane Abbott unreservedly withdrawn her remarks and disassociated herself from those remarks?
Well, obviously you'd have to ask Diane, but I suspect it's because she's trying to save her parliamentary career.
People are running scared.
The worst thing you can do is to apologise, particularly to bad faith actors.
And this is nothing to do with, I mean, they're not really concerned about anti-Semitism.
And the truth is, what they want to do is to destroy the last semblance of any support for the kind of socialist ideals and anti-imperialist ideals that Jeremy Corbyn represented when he was the leader of the Labour Party.
Electron member was very, very popular.
Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party after an investigation into anti-Semitism within the party under his leadership.
Hang on, hang on.
This included a former Labour MP, Luciana Berger, who describes constant and violent anti-Semitic abuse.
She said Corbyn's supporters called.
Well, hang on, no, you'll let me finish.
Called me Judas, a zeo-Nazi, an absolute parasite, told me to get out of the country and go back to Israel.
Labour's John Mann said his wife had been threatened with rape by a left-wing anti-Semite.
Corbyn lost Labour whip after saying the investigation was dramatically overstated.
But that's not what other people think.
And frankly, when you are prepared to literally sit here now and defend Diane Abbott, saying Jewish people, along with Travellers and Irish people, were not required to sit at the back of the bus, given that we know six million Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust, including millions who were forced to sit literally in the back of buses and taken to their death in gas chambers.
If you can't understand why I've just pointed out, if you can't understand why that is not incredibly offensive to Jewish people, there's something wrong with you.
No, I'm sorry, there's something wrong with you, Piers, if we're going to get personal, when you're trying to sort of conflate what Diane Abbott said with some sort of Holocaust denial.
It's an absurdity.
And just look, let me take you back to what I said.
Children of Holocaust survivors were accused, Labour Party members were accused of anti-Semitism and thrown out at the Labour Party.
People like Luciana Berger, these are right-wing neoliberals and they're not Zionists as well.
Let's also remember that.
Same with John Mann.
He's an out-and-out Zionist and they are weaponizing anti-Semitism shamelessly in order to try to destroy that kind of anti-professionalism.
But they're not.
Let me just make this point.
Piers, but there's just one important quote.
It's really important you hear this one.
Shiloma Ohlone, a former cabinet member in the Israeli government, was on Democracy Now 21 years ago, actually.
And she was asked about this issue of anti-Semitism and she said, these were her words, it's a trick and we always use it.
And they use it, she said, in order to deflect criticism of Israel.
And this is what this is all about.
Nothing to do with concern about anti-Semitism.
People like Tony Greenstein's son of a rabbi.
Jewish people in this country do not, do not experience prejudice racism.
That's a fact.
Many, many Jewish people have stated who live in this country that they've experienced racism.
And what Diane Abbott's letter did was it said that what Jewish people go through is never racism, it's a form of prejudice as if you have red hair.
That is a disgusting thing to have said about a group of people six million of whom lost their lives in a Holocaust purely because of their ethnicity.
This is not Jewish people.
Look, Diane Abbott's record is second to none in standing up to racism.
In the same way that she doesn't know what racism is.
She's no idea what racism is.
Ken Livingston, well, hold on a minute.
I think somebody like Diane Abbott actually has got more idea about what they're doing.
She thinks you can only experience racism if you're a black person.
That's not true.
It's palpably not true.
Well, no, no, no.
Well, hold on a minute.
If you ask me, that's what she said.
She talked about bigger people.
Literally what she said.
People can experience prejudice, but racism is a different thing.
I think she does make a valid point.
Do you think Jewish people have been subjected to racism, just to clarify?
Well, I think Jewish people have certainly been in the past been subjected to racism and certainly have been subjected to bigotry and prejudice, there's no doubt about that.
But that isn't the case today.
And indeed, look, you know, I've speaked to a rabbi today, in fact, who's doing a tour of this country, just flown in from the United States of America.
And, you know, he's very, very critical, as many Orthodox Jews are actually of Zionism.
And he said all religious Jews actually oppose the formation of Israel.
Okay, listen.
I don't want to get into that argument.
It's just about the weaponization of anti-Semitism.
It is the existence of anti-Semitism.
And when people like Diane Abbott, notwithstanding her own racism experience, when they deny Jewish people in particular, but also Irish people and travellers, all groups of whom have been subjected to appalling racism in the last hundred years, when you say that no Jewish people get racism today, that is just not only a bare-faced lie, because we know they do.
We know the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in both the UK and America is real.
So you're denying that.
What are the statistics actually?
You're denying these people racism.
What are the statistics?
And what you don't seem to understand is by doing that, by downgrading what Jewish people go through, that actually makes you anti-Semitic.
But Jewish...
Hold on a minute.
What are Jewish people going through in this country in reality?
Why don't you ask them?
What do I do?
I speak to you.
Why are you speaking to Jewish people?
I've just told you.
I've been told that people.
I'm talking about Trenton Grinson, Jackie Walker, Cyril Chilson, the son of Holocaust survivors, too.
His mother and father survived Auschwitz and he was thrown out of the Labour Party accused of anti-Semitism.
All right, let me bring it.
It's clearly nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
Actually, it's got everything to do with it.
It's about denying it.
It's about denying the fact that Jewish people are subjected to racism.
Let me bring it in Iman, you've been waiting patiently.
Iman, look, I read that letter and I was horrified by what Diane Abbott wrote because there shouldn't be a competition for who gets the highest grade of racism.
Racism is racism is racism.
That's it.
And Jewish people are subjected today to racism and to anti-Semitic attacks.
We know this.
So when people who have literally recently been members of our parliament deny that, and when people like Diane Abbott, who've been shallow cabinet ministers, for goodness sake, when they talk in this language, if you're Jewish or if you're Irish or a traveller and you've been subjected to proper racism with very dangerous consequences on occasion, you find this sickening.
You think, how could this be happening in my country?
Okay, so I think, well, not I think.
Her statement was inaccurate, ill-informed, ill-advised.
It was an ill-conceived, clumsy attempt to explain the nuances and complexities of prejudice and racism.
So where did she go wrong when she spoke about prejudice versus racism?
And of course, when she alienated everyone in the process.
So let's just be clear.
What is prejudice?
Prejudice is a preconceived fault.
Everyone has it.
It's unavoidable.
And it's also the foundation of every form of discrimination you can think of, including racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.
What is racism?
It is the manifestation of your racial prejudice.
And that can be towards an ethnic group or racial group, which includes Roma, Gypsy, travellers, etc.
And how does all of this manifest?
It manifests itself overtly, which is racial prejudice.
That is obvious, deliberate, and direct.
It manifests itself covertly, which is racial prejudice that is subtle and discreet.
It manifests itself institutionally.
Hold on a second.
Let me get there, please.
Institutionally.
And last but not least, global racism.
So I actually am trying to tell you that that is the point I believe she was trying to make.
I believe she was trying to make it.
She didn't make that point.
Hold on a second.
I told you she made it clumsily.
I think she made it.
She made it clumsily.
She didn't make that point.
No, no, no, no, you're giving her a pass and a way out.
That's something she never said.
No, let me finish.
Let me finish.
You spoke about the things that she referred to in terms of the ships, etc.
What I'm talking about is the racist system of global oppression and exploitation of black people.
That's ultimately what I think she was trying to get to.
And that differs to the everyday experiences of discrimination.
She clumsily tried to make that point and didn't make it.
Let me bring Tommy Walter back.
You've heard varying degrees of defense for this.
What do you make of it?
I think it's still indefensible.
And she was quite plain as well in what she said.
Yeah, it wasn't ambiguous.
Casting Controversy Explained 00:10:19
Yeah, yeah, there was very little rumor.
I've seen people really working hard to try and give her a way out.
She must have meant this.
I think she knew exactly what she was writing.
It's a letter to a newspaper editor for publication.
You know, you get every syllable right.
I don't believe all this initial draft nonsense.
It wasn't a sort of throwaway tweet or a Facebook comment.
It was a letter intended for public as well.
But you've heard someone who was a Labour MP until very recently just state as a fact that no Jewish people are subjected to any ongoing racism whatsoever.
That is a demonstrable lie.
Yeah, it's a demonstrable lie.
It's inaccurate.
That's the point.
She confused.
No, no, I'm not talking about Diane, but I'm talking about the Labour MP who just wrote.
But even still, you're still saying that it's indefensible.
She made an inaccurate comment.
We failed to present her argument cogently.
No, okay.
Look, we've got to leave it there.
But the truth is, I don't think she stumbled or misspoke.
She wrote a letter to a newspaper with quite deliberate phraseology, and then all hell broke loose.
And now she's trying to lie her way out of it.
And that, I'm afraid, is almost as shameful as what she originally wrote.
Anyway, got to leave it there.
Tommy Wall, thank you very much indeed.
Who would have thought a column could spark this kind of thing, right?
Quite amazing.
Iman, thank you.
And Chris Williamson, thank you.
Well, I said next, should actors be able to play characters of a different race, sexuality, or physical ability?
Isn't that, after all, what acting is all about?
We'll be discussing the huge backlash to Netflix casting a non-Egyptian woman as Cleopatra next.
Welcome back to Piers Morgan on Sensor.
The big budget Netflix series on Cleopatra has been hit with claims of cultural vandalism over the casting of black actress Adele James in the lead role.
Cleopatra's precise heritage is a point of scholarly debate.
There's no evidence that she was black and the casting has caused major controversy in Egypt, spurring a lawsuit and claims that program makers are erasing Egyptian identity.
It's not the first casting controversy.
We've seen, of course, the backlash is normally the other way around.
Brian Cranston was lambasted for playing a disabled character in the upside, as was Jake Jillnall, who starred in The Prince of Persia, despite not being Persian or a prince.
And of course, Eddie Redmain, who issued a grovelling apology for playing a trans woman in the Danish girl.
So is casting Cleopatra as a black woman culturally insensitive?
Should we care?
Isn't the job of an actor, after all, to act?
Well, joining me now is legendary Egyptian comedian Bassim Yusuf and author of the case for canceled culture, Ernest Owens.
Well, welcome to both of you.
Okay, let me start with you, Ernest Ewings.
Off you go.
Yeah, I think that this is ridiculous.
I think that she is in full range to play Cleopatra.
I think people should remember that there was controversy when the late, great Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra and people thought that it was inaccurate for a white woman like her to play the character.
History has said that there is some racial ambiguity around Cleopatra's identity.
She's definitely not white.
And I think to even assume that Egyptians do not carry some level of African ancestry that can have a darker skin complexion is also historically inaccurate.
So I think she's more of the idea of what Cleopatra would look like more than Elizabeth Taylor would be.
And you didn't see as much backlash for Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra compared to that.
That's a fair point.
So let me go to you, Bess.
I mean, that is a fair point.
Liz Taylor was the biggest movie star in the world at the time she played Cleopatra.
She was not Egyptian.
What's the difference?
Well, first of all, this was Hollywood before it was informed.
This is where 1961 when Cleopatra by Elizabeth Sayer, we're not crazy about Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra either.
That was also inaccurate.
I don't know where do you get the idea that we're happy that she played the role.
As a matter of fact, 1961, Cleopatra movie was banned in Egypt and many Arab countries because of Elizabeth Taylor's stance towards the state of Israel because they supported them.
So I don't know where does he get this information.
Second of all, this is the same Hollywood that in 1956 they cast John Wayne at Janke's Khan.
So this is a time where Hollywood didn't know any better.
Now, the problem for me, it's not about color.
It's not about white and black.
This is a very reductive way to talk about things.
This is the way that Americans talk about it.
I'm very sorry.
Like, I come from Egypt.
Egypt has a very diverse color palette.
People can look like me or they can look deeper, skin tone, like Anor Sedat, who comes from a Nubian origin.
It's not about black and white.
It's about the continuous culture appropriation and falsification of history that has been done by what the so-called Afrocentrist movement.
The Afrocentric movement started the last century as a way in a good intention to teach African Americans about their rich history of West Africa, the great empire of Benin, of Ghana, of Songali, the great empire of Mali.
But the thing is, that's why you find people like Kevin Hart, who subscribes to these theories, who claim that his ancestors built the pyramids.
I'm sorry, your ancestors had their own wonderful civilization in West Africa.
They are culture appropriating my culture, calling the people of Egypt of today, despite their skin tone, that they call us as invaders.
We call them intruders, and they are being erased from our own history.
This is something that Hollywood has done over the years.
I understand.
But let me throw this back at you.
This point that we've had so many cases now where people talk about appropriation with actors, be it their sexuality, be it their gender on occasion, whatever it may be.
And ultimately, I always come back to one point, which is shouldn't actors do what their job description is, act?
I mean, shouldn't any actor be able to play any part, actually?
And once you start making exceptions for that rule, where do you stop?
Is that question for me?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, first of all, this is not a work of fiction.
This is a documentary.
This is a documentary.
This is a huge difference.
This is not the little mermaid, which is like a fictional character where anybody can play anything.
Cleopatra came from a Macedonian Greek origin.
And the thing is, it's not about like the skin color.
As I don't, we don't care about if they're black or white.
It's about how Hollywood is so culturally sensitive and they're so sensitive about all kinds of minorities.
But when it comes to my people, we seem to be erased.
A couple of years ago, they announced that Galgado, an ex-Israeli soldier who condones her government actions, the atrocities against Palestinian children, she was going to play Cleopatra.
For me, this is even a bigger insult.
And Galgado is not black.
It's not about black and white.
It's about this idea of Hollywood always stealing the culture of my own people.
I don't care what Charleston Histon tells you in the Ten Commandments or Steven Spielberg tells you in The Prince of Egypt, but I am sorry, Jewish slaves did not build the Great Pyramid.
This has been debunked many times by historians.
Let me bring it to the corner.
But I think it's like we are the only people who are not allowed to tell our own children.
We are the only people who are not allowed to talk about our own history.
Let me bring Ernest for us.
I can add this.
Hang on, hang on, Ernest.
Let me ask you a question, Ernest.
How would you feel if a white actor was chosen to play Nelson Mandela?
I think that there is historical inaccuracies there.
I think that, you know, I think what he's confusing is race and nationality.
And I also think that that is why you don't see as many black actors upset at Cynthia Rivo, who is British, who played, you know, Harriet, because we understand the nuances of racial identity compared to nationality versus the identity of the African diaspora.
So no one's upset about the fact that David Onuyalu played MOK.
There may be some people, but others didn't because we understood the nuance of racial identity.
So when we're talking about race and nationality, those are two different things.
But I think the issue that I want to push back on what he said earlier is that there are other actors in this film that are playing Egyptians that do not look like Cleopatra or come from there.
And I just feel like the energy being focused on Cleopatra is why some people are pushing back because this actress could easily look by identity, looks closer to what Cleopatra could look like.
But the rest of that cast is fairly white.
And you're not saying anything about those individuals.
You're only focused on Cleopatra, who's being played by this black actress.
But when you look at the other cast, I don't think they're all Egyptian.
I don't think they all represent the cast.
All right, let me bring up.
Okay, let me bring back Basem.
I mean, if this was in a theater production, I could imagine this happening without people creating much of a fuss.
Is it because it's a Hollywood movie and Hollywood's put itself in the vanguard of cultural appropriation?
It's a documentary.
Hollywood has been erasing my people from the 10.
We are not allowed to tell our own history.
And I'm sorry, I have to disagree with the gentleman.
It's not about, it's not just Cleopatra.
Everybody in that movie, her court, everybody who's supposed to be Egyptian, they look like they came from West Africa, from the south of the Sahara.
We, as Egyptians, are being called intruders and invaders in our own culture.
This has been going on systematically.
I don't want to wake up one day and find the Museum of the African American Culture and History claiming the stolen Egyptian artifacts in the British Museum to be theirs.
And now I'm hearing that Zendaya, the very popular actor who I would love her to play any, but Zendaya ethnically is half Nigerian, half German.
And now she's going to play.
Where are the Egyptian actors?
Where are the Arab actors who suppose it?
And the thing is, even like historically wise, you see in the trailer, it's like, I don't care what they told you, but Cleopatra was black.
Who's that woman?
Why is African-American people telling my own history?
She is, there's all of these pseudo-science and pseudo-history has been going on and it has implications.
Elon Musk and Paid Accounts 00:15:05
No, I am sorry.
African people from West Africa did not build the pyramids.
Okay.
Kyliopartra did not like that.
And also Jewish people do not build the pyramids.
It is time for Hollywood to listen to the people who own that history.
So you made that.
One more thing.
I'm going to say one more thing.
Egypt, Egypt, Egypt had 30 dynasty over 2,700 years.
We had kings and queens from the kingdom of Kush, from Nubia, from Libya.
This area had bled into each other and expanded and shrunk into each other.
I understand exactly what I mean when I say nationality or heritage or ethnicity.
You both made your point strongly.
It's an interesting debate.
Thank you both very much indeed.
Well, I'm sensitive next.
It's been a weekend of chaos and confusion over Twitter's blue ticks.
I'll reveal what Elon Musk said to me about mine next.
Welcome back to Piers Milk.
I said Elon Musk's Twitter has removed blue verified ticks for accounts previously deemed notable in an attempt to persuade famous and professional users to pay.
Well, the move triggered outpourings of self-pity from many celebrities this weekend.
It was actually quite nauseating, as well as considerable confusion as many blue ticks then reappeared, apparently at Musk's personal whim.
We're joining me now is Seth Dylan, the founder of satirical site Babylon B, which is a favorite of Elon Musk's.
I'm a talk-to-view contributor Esther Krakow, associate of Daily Mirror, Kevin McGuire.
I talked to View Presenter Nicolas Order.
Let's do a quick rundown.
Who's got a blue tick?
Have you paid for it?
I have.
You paid individually?
Yes.
And you did too?
I had one for years and then it disappeared and I paid to have it back.
Kevin?
I've got one, but I'm not paid for it.
So we checked this out just now.
It looks like your company, The Daily Mirror, my old paper, may have bought a company account and you've got one as an affiliate.
So I'm like an agricultural laborer with a tied cottage.
I leave the mirror, I lose my blue tick.
And Seth Dylan, let me ask you: do you have a blue tick and have you paid for it?
I do.
I had the legacy one and now I pay for it.
So my situation was that I have got about 8.4 million followers.
I was curious, what would Elon do with people who've got really big follower accounts?
Because clearly we have a bit of bang for the buck on Twitter.
And the truth was we all got the ticks taken away.
And then mysteriously yesterday, we woke up and found that everyone was, I think, over a million followers had had their blue ticks restored, whether you paid or not.
Now, I was quite happy to pay, but I haven't paid as things down, but I've got my tick back.
So what's really going on here?
Did Elon just not get the kind of take-up from people with blue ticks he was hoping for?
Or is he just chucking stuff at the wall?
What's going on?
It's a really good question.
There's a lot of chaos and confusion.
I mean, I wish I understood it.
Honestly, I don't really understand why we're charging for verification.
I do think there were problems with the verification system before.
They were kind of handed out on favors.
They were handed out.
There were people who should have had them, who didn't get them.
So there were things that could have been fixed about that system, but abolishing it and charging people for it.
I just, I personally don't know what the value is to a regular user who subscribes to get the blue check when it, when anyone can subscribe to get it, what value does it really have?
I mean, it conveys that you're not a bot, I guess, because you're willing to pay for something.
You put a credit card down, but doesn't the substance of your tweets convey that you're not a bot?
Well, it does, but actually, I'm not sure about that.
I think that when you saw them all stripped away from high-profile people, it was quite hard to know if they were the real one unless you buried yourself into their feed.
So I think it's the immediate identification of people who are who you think they are.
And there are lots of scammers out there, as we know.
Well, that was one of the struggles that Elon actually direct messaged me personally because I raised a particular issue, which is quite a few of the big phone operators in the UK are not supported by Twitter Blue.
So you couldn't actually register to pay because they weren't supporting your phone provider.
So he wasn't aware of this and he replied to me, we're looking into this.
Then he said that he thinks they fixed it.
But before I could then go through and test that, my blue tick came back, which I think means that there's a balance, isn't there?
Because when I see these famous people whining about it, paying $8 a month, it is pathetic.
And also, I think they really do think they're the ones doing Elon Musk a big favor and the rest of us by being on the platform when all of us, whoever we are in the public eye, we all get an enormous amount of value from Twitter.
It goes both ways.
I mean, look at YouTube's model.
YouTube's model is they share revenue with creators who are bringing value to the platform.
And that makes a lot of sense.
It means everybody wins because YouTube is bringing in the best talent and the best talent is making money and getting rich on YouTube.
Nobody's really making any money on Twitter.
I mean, you can drive traffic to your website, but you're not monetizing on the platform.
And so Musk has talked about finding ways to do that, but he really seems to be looking at generating revenue off these subscriptions rather than sharing revenue with content creators.
I do think that there is a place for him to be rewarding those talented people who are bringing, who are engaging and are bringing a lot of people onto the site and keeping them on the site, making Twitter sticky.
Those are the people that you want to be monetized and happy on your platform and sticking around no matter what silly mistakes you make or what you do because it's just too valuable to leave it.
Right.
Let's come to the panel.
I mean, Esther, the problem Elon Musk has got, he's paid 40 odd billion for Twitter.
And he said already the value is probably halved.
So he's, you know, he's got rid of thousands of staff.
He's trying different ways of monetizing it, but he's got to make it pay.
Otherwise, it won't be a Twitter.
Well, yeah, he has to make it count.
I think one of the things he tries, he's...
Why should it be free?
I mean, why should the grasping expectation of the world now that everything has to be free?
Especially because a lot of people actually spend hours on Twitter.
So really, you should pay for it.
Getting great content for free, but also being able, in my case, to promote columns, to promote TV shows with all the residual financial benefit that comes from that, promoting books.
You know, I just think it's absolutely a two-way street.
And for $8 a month, it's a bargain, yeah.
Yeah, but he'd be making money out of you because you'll bring so many pairs of eyes, you can then sell out.
So it's a two-way street, but why shouldn't I pay?
Well, you can pay if you like, but maybe people others can't afford it.
But it's also a balance, right?
Because back in the day, people used to complain that Twitter was too vanilla because it just depended on ad revenue and sponsorship.
But now it depends on the users who are actually paying to get their blue ticks and be verified and ads as well.
So you can have a balance of it.
Nicolas, what do you do with that?
I think it's so important that we have a proper verification process.
The reason I pay for, well, I had a legacy account and was verified.
As a women's rights campaigner, I had a lot of survivors come forward, whistleblowers come forward.
They needed to know that I was who I say I am.
So whatever happens going forward, I agree.
I think it probably could be quite useful to have some people paying for Twitter.
But aside from that, we need a proper robust verification system.
I was impressed that he contacted me directly.
I don't know him.
I don't know.
I've never been dealing with it.
He direct messages.
We're quite an exchange about this particular issue.
Obviously, I then asked for an interview on him.
I didn't get a no.
But I don't know.
I think he's trying everything.
I do think Musk is one of those guys, as with SpaceX and as with Tess and others.
Early on, he had a lot of teething problems.
But boy, did they come up with that?
No, this was mad.
This is a mad idea.
And out of 400,000 people who had verified legacy accounts, only 500, including myself, actually paid for it as a result.
Pizza, you get your interview.
But it's all for him contacting you shows.
He's running it in a very confused way without a clear strategy.
Or he has a very fat music.
Or he has a very Inquisitive mind about how to resolve it.
Seth, before I let you go, do you think if you were a betting man, would you bet on Elon Musk still owning Twitter in a calendar year?
Yeah, I think he'll still own it.
I'm not exactly sure who's going to buy it off of him.
It all depends on what he ends up doing with it and whether he adds value.
I think that he's gotten it to a place where he said it's basically cash flow net even, like it's breaking even at this point, which is a huge improvement over what it used to be.
He laid off a lot of people and he can still run the platform.
In that sense, he's running it better than it was run before.
It's certainly a lot leaner than it was run before.
I don't understand paying.
I get what you're saying about paying for the service.
A lot of people, I would argue that we bring a lot of value to the service.
So we're bringing something there already because we have a huge following and a lot of people who engage with us.
But a lot of people who are using that platform, it makes sense for them to pay for it, maybe, but why for verification?
They're not even putting up an ID when they get verified.
I'm not even sure what the verification badge means right now.
The whole thing is kind of convoluted and confusing.
But what Musk is doing is hysterical the way he's trolling these people.
It's all entertaining.
No matter what it's very entertaining.
So Stephen King was trying to score points by saying, you know, I don't want this money because he gave him a free blue tick.
I don't want your largesse.
You know, I want you to donate money to Ukraine.
And Elon Musk responded by saying he's donated $100 million to Ukraine.
That is a bit of a slam dunk.
A slam dunk bit of trolling right there.
Seth, cruiser to talk to you again.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Well, Elon Sensor's next.
Harry and Megan.
Oh, God.
They spent the last three years creating a circus through interviews, an exhausting circus, through books, TV series, and so on.
But according to them, it's the British media, once again, that's to blame.
It's us that is on our own creating the exhausting circus, not them with their antics.
We'll debate that after the break.
Welcome back to Piers Morgan on Sensor.
Harry and Megan blame the media again, of course, for creating an exhausting circus by dwelling on past events.
You've got to laugh, haven't you?
The brass negative.
They were responding to an article published in the Telegraph over the weekend, which said the Duchess of Sussex didn't feel she received a satisfactory response to her concerns about unconscious bias in the royal family in a letter to the king.
That's the same unconscious bias which Harry now says was never intended to mean racism.
God forbid.
In response, Team Sussex said, Megan is going about her life in the present.
Any suggestion otherwise is false and frankly ridiculous.
And they encouraged tabloid media to stop exhausting.
Stop the exhausting circus that they alone are creating.
Well, I'm back with Esther, Kevin, and Nicola.
Nicola, let's start with you on this one.
Apparently, it's the media creating the exhausting circus surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Your thoughts?
I would agree with that.
Oh, please.
I would agree with it wholeheartedly.
In this case, this was a letter that was written.
Did we go on Oprah?
Did we do a six-part Netflix series?
Did we do a 420-page win-a-thon kiss and tell book?
Not at all.
Did we go on James Corden on an open top bus around Hollywood while bleating about privacy?
Did we do any of these things?
But that was their side of their story, a story that had been told by the tabloid media on their behalf, not necessarily with their consent, for many, many years.
It's disingenuous of you, Piers, to say that we don't in the media create a circus around this.
A lot of our jobs depend on it.
Esther, some laughs.
Well, I think, I don't think it's fair for them to create all the circus with the Netflix deals and all of that and then feel like now is the time that they get to switch it off, right?
That is how it works.
If you choose to do this, if you choose to invade your own privacy and many other people's privacy in this way, you cannot then turn around and tell them, actually, now it's enough.
Now it's enough.
We have to move on.
They're not just saying it on their own side.
They're saying it for the behavior.
They're not saying they're necessarily wrong.
This is how certain things are.
It's just what I loved about the original.
But the original story was so great that Mega Mark was unhappy with the response from a man who's about to be king of his country, crowned.
I mean, for God's sake, who do you think you are?
Kevin, I'm going to spare you any royal jack.
I want to talk to you about this.
This is Rishi Sunak and his, well, I'm not quite sure what you call it other than something Kim Jong-un would be proud of.
This is him just traveling around Whitehall with a bunch of police on bicycles.
Let's just watch a bit of this.
They're running.
They're cycling.
Which reminds me when the Secret Service ran by Trump, do you remember?
And Kim Jong-un had this kind of thing.
And then somewhere in the middle of it all was a little car with Rishi Sunak in it.
Is he getting delusions of grandeur here, Kevin?
Rishi Jong-ung was worried.
Was worried that Extinction Rebellion protesters were going to jump out and stop his car.
There's the ludicrous.
Kim Jong-un on the left.
And on the right, just a bunch of...
Yeah, at least he had cyclists.
It was so weird.
I admire the fitness of some of those metropolitan police officers.
They didn't have to run far.
Why not just have the normal motorbike outriders?
I want it to be a small man syndrome.
He's a short blow.
He has to make up for it.
See, I'm very disappointed you're being so sizist.
Really, picking on someone because of their height is very unlike you, Nicola, given just how much virtue you have signaled over the years.
You mentioned Extinction Rebellion.
I can't let this go.
This is absolutely hilarious.
So you remember I said on Thursday what a bunch of frauds they all are and how they never practice what they preach these people.
So the Sun revealed that Gail Bradbrook, one of the leading Extinction Rebellion drivers, that she drives a diesel car and buys imported food wrapped in non-recyclable packaging.
There she is, caught in the supermarket, disobeying, this is Waitrose.
I was in there myself today, disobeying every rule that she lectures the rest of us about.
Esther?
Well, it's to be expected.
But this is the thing, though.
Most Extinction Rebellion eco-activists tend to be actually from very privileged backgrounds.
I mean, the guy that invaded that snooker tournament, he apparently grew up in a very lavish part of Cambridge and went to private school.
It's not surprising.
Some of the fruit she had was flown 17,500 miles before she got into a diesel car.
Any defence?
Very, very little.
Nicola, given you're now the chief defender of the Indefense, quick chance to defend this.
Given the society we live in, I think it would be impossible for her to live a life that wasn't in some way hypocritical.
So rules for me, but not for thee.
Well, she's trying to make, I suppose, it's not a good look.
It's not a good look.
It's brazen, flaming hypocrisy.
But she doesn't decide where waitrose source fruit and veg.
Where's she going?
Nicola, great to have you make your debut on Piers Monk Census.
Come back.
Last time didn't end so well between you and I. We're making progress.
Kevin, Esther, good to see you both.
That's it from me.
What are you up to?
Keep it uncensored.
Good night.
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