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July 25, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:47
20230725_piers-morgan-uncensored-barbie-empowering-women-ga
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Barbie Land vs Real World 00:14:49
Drawing backlash for its anti-man sexism.
Why does empowering women have to always be about trashing men?
We'll debate.
Wildlife wildfires rage in Europe, but both of Britain's leading parties go cold on their green policies in the wake of the by-election turmoil.
Ladine Dorris is still a Conservative MP and joins me live.
Thus British pop rockers, the 1975 cause outrage in Malaysia by taking a public stand for gay rights, all very noble, but what were they doing there in the first place?
I'll talk live to renowned philosopher Sam Harris on religion versus free speech.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well, good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Love it or loathe it.
Barbie is an undeniable box office beamoth.
Hollywood's spin on the world's most famous plastic doll banked $377 million on its opening weekend alone, a box office record for a film directed by a woman or a person identifying as a woman.
And the biggest weekend for movie theatres since pre-pandemic.
But it's fair to say, not everybody is enjoying it.
Premise of the film, politically speaking, is that men and women are on two sides of a violent name and they hate each other.
All men in the film are either bigots or idiots.
Now is Barbie a smash the patriarchy feminist film?
Yes it is.
The real world and all the men in it are shown to be universally irredeemably horrible.
Well prominent US conservatives are now calling for a Barbie boycott.
Barbies are being set ablaze in the streets.
Sonic Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate, says it's brainwashing Chinese communist propaganda.
That's got something to do with flags, I think.
As always, I personally feel a measure of dignified perspective and restraint is required at moments like this.
But also, as always, I hate to say I told you so.
There are a number of Barbie characters in the movie, right?
One plays President Barbie, one plays Dr. Barbie, one plays a Barbie with a Nobel Prize in Physics, one is a mermaid Barbie.
However, all the male characters in Barbie World are simply called Ken.
So it's pretty clear where this movie is going.
This is an assault on not just Ken, but all men.
Well, I wasn't wrong, was I?
And it's even worse than I feared.
The core focus of Barbie is, oh God, the patriarchy.
The word is used endlessly in the movie, even though most people, including me actually, have no real idea what patriarchy really means.
I guess it means all men are evil until they can prove otherwise.
Women are their oppressed victims.
Anyone who disagrees is obviously a misogynist.
Barbie's message is that the only solution to all this dreadful patriarchal state of affairs is obviously for women to rule the world and preferably do so on their own without horrible men to ruin it or ruin them and their lives.
So they want to do it on their own.
There's a slight genetic problem with that though.
What happens in like 100 years?
It's all over.
If there is a plot, it boils down to something like this.
Barbie lives in Barbie World with many other virtue-signed Barbies, including a transgender Barbie, a disabled Barbie, and a black female president Barbie.
These Barbies are all powerful, while the Kens, obviously, are all second-class, useless halfwits.
Then Barbie and Ken are transported to the real world where, wait for it, men are in charge of everything and are largely despicable.
Barbie is immediately objectified.
One ghastly man shouts, give us a smile, blondie, which is a phrase that hasn't actually been used in the real, real world since probably the Second World War.
Mattel, the owner of Barbie, is represented as a macho misogynist outfit with an all-male board of alpha dogs.
The unfortunate reality is that Barbie was invented by a woman called Ruth Handler, who ran the company for 30 years as president.
To this day, Mattel has five women on its 12-person board.
Now, without spoiling all of the movie, all the stunning conclusion, he does all that for itself, of course.
Ken returns to Barbie World filled with patriarchal malice, prompting a battle of a sexes in which all of the empowered Barbies have to unite to defeat the evil idiot Kens.
My question about all this is why?
Can't we just get along?
I thought feminism was about equality.
Why does empowering women always have to be about trashing men?
The real world I live in is full of confident, high-achieving women who probably will laugh at such a derisory misrepresentation of their supposed lowly status in life compared to men.
And if anybody made a movie which depicts women as Barbie depicts men, well, they wouldn't just be cancelled.
They'd be tarred and feathered and marched through the streets.
We're to debate the Barbie backlash is Namiki Cox, the director of Matriarch.
And here in the studio, lifelong Barbie fan Esther Kraker, who I have to say looks absolutely fantastic.
That's a look you should keep.
I mean, we can all agree on this.
Also joined by socialist and author, socialist, we can be a socialist author, actually, Grace Blakely, who came as Barbie last week, to be fair, but has not got the memo today.
Plus appropriately stuck in the middle of this strong female panel is Chris Taylor, who plays one of the Kens in the actual movie, which is now one of the biggest movies of all time.
And he was in Love Island.
So I may have to finally concede that somebody connected with Love Island has actually done something with themselves, which is an incredible moment of realization and self-awareness.
Well, thanks for joining me, everybody.
Before we get down to some serious Barbie-related debate, I want us all to feel comfortable.
There we go.
We're now in Barbie World.
Okay, where do we start here?
Let's start with you, Esther, because you look fantastic.
And you saw the movie today.
I've written a column for the Sun and the New York Post, actually, same column.
Just because I feel, when I hear the word patriarchy, as often as it's said in this movie, immediately I'm like, here we go again.
Here we go again.
This sort of construct that despite everything that's happened in the last 50 years, all men are awful till they prove otherwise.
All women are downtrodden, oppressed.
And if only it wasn't for ghastly men, they'd be ruling the world.
Lily Allen said she went to see Barbie and Oppenheimer.
And the clear conclusion was if women were in charge, none of that would have happened, right?
I mean, it's just, it is exhausting to me.
I mean, I suspected this would happen when we started having a conversation about whether Barbie's a feminist icon.
And I just thought to myself, why does Barbie need to be a feminist icon?
Anyone who's grown up with Barbies knows that she's just a doll that girls like to play with.
And then 10 seconds into the film, I'm just being shoehorned with this ideology, this, you know, patriarchy this and feminism that.
And I'm just thinking it's a giant catfish of a film.
It's like going on a date wanting to see J-Lo and then, I don't know, at the end you see someone like Lizzo, for instance.
I'm just, it's completely unnecessary.
Why can't we just have a film about dolls?
The people that made this film have never seen any of the other Barbie animals.
No!
Because it's completely unrelated.
It's a giant catfish.
And I just think that's the...
And all the Kens, and no offense, Chris, we're going to come to you in a moment.
All the Kens.
They're dumb.
They're such dumb dweebs.
They've come off the center of Love Island or something.
But this is the problem.
They're so incompetent.
And it's like, how can...
And at the end of the film, they try and say, oh, but we're all humans and we're all equal.
Okay, but you've painted half of humanity as incompetent half-wits.
So exactly, how does that work?
Namika, you represent the matriarchy, which is another awful sounding word.
It seems to me, what the movie really wants to do is just replace the patriarchy with the matriarchy.
In other words, go from one thing which every woman apparently believes is the problem with the world and flip it around so that the people who suffer the problem, the oppression, and are made to look like downtrodden imbeciles are men, not women.
I don't really get that.
Why have it so awful, this atriarchy syndrome?
Why replace the P with an M?
Well, we're like in late stage capitalism.
The world's on fire right now.
Women are losing their fundamental rights, at least in my country, left and right.
We still don't make equal pay on the dollar.
We're doing emotional labor.
We're doing physical labor.
As the beautiful America Ferreira just said in her, she had a moment in her long speech.
That is why we want to replace the patriarchy, which is very top down, into a more communal, democratic way of living, which is the matriarchy.
And back when we had matriarchies, it was more democratic.
I mean, Crete of the famous island of Crete had a matriarchy where they didn't go to war.
And then everything was communal.
So I don't really see a downside of this.
I mean, right now.
So you think, just to be clear, you think if women ran the world, there'd be no warfare?
I think that we have different ways of dealing with conflict than men do.
And if it was a majority female-led environment, we would not be in a lot of these circumstances.
I mean, even women never engage in conflict.
Is that a joke?
I say we engage in conflict.
Everybody engages in conflict.
We're humans, but we don't engage in conflict the same way.
And I think this was satire.
It was art.
I'm sorry if some people wanted it to be a kids movie, but the best art, whether it's The Wizard of Oz or Barbie, is really a reflection of the times, is a reflection of the struggles.
And frankly, I don't know.
I saw, you said that you've never seen a movie like this.
When I saw that Marilyn Monroe movie, who was a complicated, beautiful artist, genius, they made her out to be a, I mean, it was despicable.
It was an assault on women.
So how about most movies out there do make women feel uncomfortable?
And my God, it's art.
Have a sense of humor.
There was satire.
It was a, you know, attacks on capitalism, climate change, warfare.
It was, it was fun.
It was labeled.
It was complicated like women.
Before I bring in Ken, let me just bring in Grace.
I know you're not into the whole Barbie thing particularly, but patriarchy, you'll definitely get to, right?
You do think.
I'm so into it.
I'm so into patriarchy.
Hello, but you really exist.
An obvious end point of the very successful attempt that we've had within most capitalist societies for liberal elites to basically take over and commodify the feminist critique, which was a critique of capitalism.
This is a massive box office, you know, hitting movie made by a huge multinational corporation that's going to make loads and loads of money that also uses like exploitative labor practices all around the world.
The problem is, you know, it's not like there was Ariana Huffington famously said, the financial crisis wouldn't have happened if it had been Lehman sisters instead of Lehman Brothers.
That's obviously completely wrong.
I personally don't even buy the idea that there are these huge insurmountable differences between men and women.
The problem is capitalism.
That's why we have gender inequality.
That's why we have racial inequality.
That's why we have all these different forms of inequality.
And unless we get that fit, that's by taking down big corporations like Matthew.
That's fine.
Everything's going to say that.
That's fine.
I have no problem with you believing that.
That's fine.
I'm glad you have no problem with me believing that.
I'm glad we agree that I have the right to believe what I believe.
Can we just leave Barbie out of it?
I don't mind them making this trash heap of a film.
It's quite hard to leave Barbie out of it when you're literally dressed like Barbie.
Yes, but let's rename the film to something, some pink feminist-like child film.
Let's do that because this Barbie film is not Barbie related at all.
Anyone who's seen any of the Barbie films, any of the animated series, who's grown up with it, this is not Barbie related at all.
Ken is not a half-wit.
Barbie is not ideologically incoherent in the way that she is in the film.
Let's just separate the two.
Well, let's bring in the smirky.
Yeah, all right, Chris.
Hey, first of all.
I'm only making a shame.
I have a historic thing about Love Island, which I'm sure is very aware of.
Let's put that to one side.
Look, it's incredible.
You're in this movie.
Thanks.
Which is now one of the biggest grossing films in history.
First of all, how does that feel?
Yeah, pretty good, yeah.
I mean, you're on Love Island, and now you're in the biggest movie in the world.
Yeah, it's fairly.
Not a normal progression for Love Island.
No, no, not really.
Yeah, it's pretty mind-blowing.
And the story about how you got this is equally mind-blowing.
You go to some premiere of a movie and you end up, or you're not there, and your mate's on, you end up going to Margot Robbie's after party.
Yeah.
And she turns out to be a massive Love Island fan.
Yeah.
Including you.
Yeah.
She knows who you are.
Yeah.
And then I started talking about Mel Jenna Taylor and the rest of history.
Was this true?
Yeah, no, I didn't make that one.
You talked about someone you knew with a micro-penis.
A friend of mine has a micro-penis, yeah.
As in, how big?
I've not a colour vooler out next to it, Piers.
I don't know exactly.
You're telling Margot Robbie.
It's small.
Tiny.
I'd say inch.
And then you have a mate.
Very large testicles.
Is that right?
My dad's best mate has very big bollocks and he can carry on.
And this is how you managed to get inside Margot Robbie's head to end up playing Ken.
I don't know.
That is what happened, but I will say I panicked.
I panicked and I just said whatever came to my head.
And it was relevant.
Like people were talking about penises, but we're not here to debate this.
This is actually.
I actually find that.
I'm like so intrigued by that.
I found the most romantic.
This sounds like one of those stories where it's like, oh, yeah, my friend needs advice about something.
And this is how you basically wooed Margot Robbie to get you in the movie, right?
Next thing, 18 months later, you're in Barbie.
I'm in Barbie, yeah.
All because of that conversation.
All because of micro-penises and big balls, yeah.
No, you get there.
You're one of Myriad Kens.
My impression of them is they're basically depicted as a bunch of losers.
And if I made a movie flipping this round and depicting women the way that this movie generally depicts men, all hell would break loose.
Do you accept that?
I accept that, but I think I feel like you're missing the point.
So I think everyone's missing the point a little bit.
So it's a comedy, right?
And we're in very dangerous territory when we start picking out comedy and saying, oh, you can't say that, you can't say that, because then we're going to live in a world where comedy is...
Well, not saying they can't say it, but there's a distinct political and social point they're making about the patriarchy, which is rammed home again and again.
I get that.
And again.
What I'm getting to is the overarching comedy, the overarching joke of the entire film is you're looking at Barbie, which is played with by children, mostly girls, and this is how they play with Barbies and Kens.
Barbie is the primary character, and Ken is the secondary character that comes in and out a little bit and is widely disregarded because the girls see themselves in the Barbie and not so much the Ken.
This idea, yeah, but hang on.
Chris, my problem with it is this idea that you go into the real world from Barbie land where all the women are in charge.
And the real world, suddenly you're confronted with this vile place run completely by men and they're all awful, even down to the depiction of the company that makes the Barbie dolls, which is so different to the reality of that company.
Hypocrisy in Gender Roles 00:08:02
Female president for 30 years.
Half the board now are women.
It's not run by a bunch of madmen executives, as this film wants you to believe.
There is no overt sexism from the company because it was basically run by women.
I don't think Mattel would want people to believe that.
I think what you're missing is the fact that it's a joke.
And a lot, a lot of people.
But we're the bust of the joke.
No, because listen, right?
Who cares?
Listen, comedy.
Exactly.
No.
Grow up.
I totally agree, Snake.
I totally agree.
Film made money.
What's wrong with that?
I totally agree with you.
My point is, if I made the movie and flipped it and was mocking women like this, you would be leading the charge.
I'd be hung, drawn and quartered, probably executed.
It's the hypocrisy at the heart of this.
And then you would say, oh, there are no comedies anymore.
No, no, no.
And then you would say, you're making a very deliberate point promoting feminism and using patriarchy as a stick to beat all men so they can prove otherwise i have a problem and then if women come on your show and say oh i've got a problem with this you say oh shut up snowflake like that is the the whole debate that we've had in recent years like you can't say anything about anything because you're a snowflake men are being snowflakes about no no you're missing my point you're totally inspiring i haven't seen that i'm sorry i'm not sure i'm not asking for barbie to be cancelled Obviously, everyone's enjoying it.
You're asking for funny.
My wife and daughter went to see it in LA a couple of days ago.
They loved it, right?
Fine.
My problem is with the argument it promotes, I'm allowed to criticize that.
That's called free speech, right?
I'm not trying to silence.
And I'm allowed to call you a snowflake for criticizing.
Yes, you are, but you're missing the point about why I'm criticizing it.
I'm criticizing the hypocrisy.
If you flipped it around, Esther, if I made a movie which lampooned women like this from a very male-dominated position, all hell would break it.
The thing is, it is hypocrisy.
I take offense at the fact that you think this is a comedy.
It wasn't funny at all.
And also, there is something like this that actually mocks women.
It's called a Dave Chappelle special.
And every time he comes out with a new special, we need to cancel him because he's punching down on the poor women.
The reality is, this film is a giant catfish and you use the Barbie name to try and shoehorn these ideologies into a kids' film.
And you can call it a comedy.
If that's your standard of entertainment, that's fine.
And I don't really have a high standard of entertainment.
I watch Love Island.
I watch Fast and Furious.
And also, how are they selling this feminine?
Let me go to Namiki for this.
How are they selling this feminist utopia?
I'll tell you how they're selling it.
They're selling it by choosing the hottest woman in Hollywood, Margot Robbie.
Everyone thinks that, male and female.
And she's making, she produces it, I think.
Right?
Her production.
So she's making tens, probably hundreds of millions of dollars as the hottest woman in Hollywood in every sense from a movie which makes out all women are oppressed by the patriarchy.
Forgive me if I laugh.
She's the walking, breathing embodiment of someone who's making the patriarchy look like a bunch of losers, isn't she?
No, I don't agree with that at all.
And I think historically there are a lot of women who had to use whatever tools were available to them.
She is beautiful.
She's also a brilliant actor.
She's also extremely intelligent.
She's also outspoken, as are all of the women and men, by the way, in that film.
Ryan Gosling is not getting, you know, the attack the way she is.
But furthermore, that's capitalism.
And until capitalism fails, which I think is the patriarchy, by the way, I think the patriarchy is capitalism.
Until it fails, people are going to do whatever they can to survive.
I mean, that is.
At what point would you have to accept on behalf of the matriarchy that the patriarchy doesn't really exist anymore?
And that basically most women I know are running rings around blokes.
At what point do you admit that?
I think you're literally in a bubble and do not open the newspaper because the way that women are under attack in the United States right now is jaw-dropping.
I mean, with the ban on abortion, the ban on women's health clinics, women being targeted, rise in domestic violence, not to mention that our pay has not moved in ages.
There's a declination in women in leadership, even though we think we should be at some sort of a parody at this point.
It's the way that women in the press and in the public are attacked by online campaigns, by corporations, by the rights of the people.
You don't think men are by you.
Have you spent even a minute in my Twitter feed?
Trust me.
This idea only women get trolled on Twitter.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Because actually, this is the problem when we get the commodification of feminism, is that we get this idea that feminism means like every, you know, CEO of every corporation being a woman or having 50% of women on boards.
That's not the lived experience of the vast majority of women, you know, alive.
The vast majority of women actually live in, you know, either in very poor countries where they're denied education or they live, you know, in situations where they experience domestic violence.
Here in the UK, one in three women will experience sexual assault at some point in their lives.
That's what life is like for most working class women.
We can't get rid of that by just saying, oh, we're going to make a couple of, you know, prime ministers or CEOs.
That's the problem with liberal.
You don't think young men ever get assaulted?
I mean, I do, but they don't get assaulted to the extent that women.
That's not the point you're likely to do.
Who gets stabbed in the streets?
It's very rarely women.
It's young men by men, right?
I think we can agree.
So there are different forms.
Violence is a problem, but it's not.
There are lots of male victims of violence.
Violence, right?
I think sexual victims.
Yes, I did.
I said sexual violence, right?
Which is a deep, deep problem in our society.
It's actually, if you look at it with inside, within and outside the home, more common than what you're talking about, kind of gang violence on the streets.
And it happens to women so much.
And when it's, oh, when it's part of a bigger narrative about racism, then it's fine to talk about violence against women.
But we're actually talking about how we tackle violence against women, unless it's a part of this wider agenda, cultural agenda, nobody cares.
And that's a problem.
Well, I care.
Ken, last word to you.
You're Ken to me.
I hope I wait with the last word from me.
Your last word.
As the resident camp.
I think everyone's just missing the point.
Oh, that it's based, it's a joke.
Greta Gerwig has done a good job of navigating a potentially massive minefield.
You're right.
If it flipped, it would be a different story.
Right, ultimately, I'll admit that, right?
But I'm talking about a doll that was made in 1959.
So in Parliament.
It took you 18 minutes, but you got to a place of saying I agree with you.
That's beside the point.
By the way, I want to end on that.
It's about women in Parliament.
There is only one.
Carve it away.
Yeah, all right, enough virtue signaling, mate.
You've ticked all the boxes.
I'm going to end by giving women what they really want from their ken.
It's this.
I'm terrified.
That's a proper Kim.
There's another one here.
Yeah.
There we go.
That's heavily photoshopped.
Not at all.
I have no words.
This is the whole.
I've got a whole raft of Ken pictures here.
That is terrifying.
Esther's actually.
Esther's gobstrom.
Thank you.
Let's leave it on that.
Rendered silent by the glory of my kingdom.
Thank you.
Chris, congratulations, mate.
Margot Robbie is one of my favourite actors, probably is my favourite actress.
I met her at an Oscar's party.
She was fabulous.
Did she tell you about how she likes unions?
No, we talked about cricket.
She's a big fan of union.
We talked about cricket.
She's an Australian, unfortunately.
And obviously, right now, right now, that's the last thing I want to talk about is bricket.
But, well, at the time, there was no Ashes series.
We had a great conversation.
Lovely woman, very talented.
Couldn't be happy that a woman is making hundreds of millions of dollars out of her looks and her talent in the patriarchy.
What a miracle.
How's she doing it?
It's really, it's incredibly that some woman is able to do that and break through this towering sexist mayhem, which inhibits all women I know, including these two downtrodden, oppressed female creatures in front of me, who I know just never feel they can even speak unless I let them.
Right, ladies?
Of course, Adrian.
Chris, great to see.
And congratulations.
Seriously.
Cheers.
From Love Island to the world's biggest movie.
That is a trajectory I never thought I'd ever witness.
So you.
You can't slate us anymore.
I can't slate you anymore.
I can't slate you.
I can't slate you anymore.
An Oscar-worthy meteor crisis.
It's amazing.
And I genuinely cute.
Thank you.
Uncensored next.
Anti-Tory Mood and Climate 00:07:19
From pink to green, both Labour and the Conservatives go cold on their environmental policies after mixed results in by-elections.
Is it really their unpopular leaders who should be taking the heat?
Edine Doris joins me live after the break.
Welcome back to Biz Organisation front page of today's Times newspaper because it's an interesting juxtaposition.
Tory retreat from green policies to woo voters, it says, next to a startling image of tourists fleeing a wildfire in roads.
Fires are raging across several parts of Greece, forcing many tourists and locals to evacuate following weeks of extreme heat across the world.
But both of Britain's leading parties appear to have decided that unravelling green policy could be a vote winner.
PM Rishi Sunak sees it as a recovery plan after two bruising by-election defeats.
Labour Party, meanwhile, is blaming London Mayor Sadiq Khan's anti-pollution policy for failing to win Boris Johnson's old seat in Uxbridge.
I don't think there's any doubt that Ulez was the reason that we lost the by-election in Uxbridge.
And I have said we should reflect on this, including the Mayor.
I've spoken to him, as you would expect.
And so there will be that reflection.
So is the Green Agenda worth trading for an electoral band-aid, or is it merely covering up a popularity crisis for both leaders?
I'm joined by Conservative MP and talk-to-visenter Nadine Dorris and the Daily Mirror's Associate Editor Kevin Maguire.
So Kevin, before we get into the weeds on this, pollution, right?
I know that Sadiq Khan's Ulez policy has not proved very popular, probably because of the way it's been executed and it doesn't quite work.
I've got to say though, on pollution in London, I'm 100% behind it.
And I'll tell you why.
For the last five years, I thought I had really bad hay fever every year.
Turned out it was all pollution.
I've got four air purifiers in my house.
I shut the windows.
I check an app every morning.
I only go out when it's reasonable.
And as a result, I've had zero symptoms when the pollen counts have apparently been raging and people have been suffering from hay fever.
I'm a complete convert.
I found out that one in 12 people in Kinsland and Chelsea Borough die from pollution-related illness.
I was shocked.
And I'm also shocked by the benefit to my health by taking pollution more seriously.
Yeah, if it was a virus causing so many deaths, 40,000 people a year dying.
We know what we're dirty through that.
Exactly.
The government would really be reacting.
Opposition parties would be piling in.
But I think because they're individual deaths, they're almost ignored.
Although there was a case last year, a coroner found a young girl had died of pollution.
Look, the plan in London is to get the dirtiest cars off the road.
It's fewer than one in 10 in those outlying areas.
Now, I understand you're a cost of living crisis, while some people will clearly kick back against that.
I understand it.
I think the fear is more widespread because people don't realise.
You could have a petrol car 16 years old and you won't have to pay this £12.50 a day charge.
You can have a diesel eight years old and you won't have to pay this charge.
Charging is crude, no question about it, but we have to clean air.
It's not just about global warming, it is about the air you can.
See, Nadine, I do think there are lots of issues around this whole green debate.
But on this issue of pollution, I do think Sadiq Khan's heart is in the right place.
I was really shocked by the impact on my health that I had year after year after year until I took pollution more seriously.
And it was pollution.
I completely agree with you.
And in fact, I think what it demonstrates, this sudden, this very sudden conversion of both party leaders to suddenly peddling back from these green policies and net zero particularly, it just shows a paucity of ambition.
They're scared as a result of what happened last week with the by-elections.
Nobody was really a winner in any of those by-elections.
They're scared and they've actually seized on what happened in Uxbridge and think this is the populist wave which is riding through Westminster right now.
We need to jump on it.
If it was ULES, that's going to work in the rest of the country.
And of course it won't.
And, you know, if anybody under the age of 40, kids in school today, this is what they care about.
They care about net zero and policies which benefit the environment for the very reasons you articulated, mainly to do with health and to do the future with the future of the planet.
But it's a pretty tragic state of affairs that we find ourselves in when a few days after a by-election, it is the ULES policy which is interpreted as a problem.
But I do find that...
Yeah, and I thought that's a bit disappointed from Kirstan.
And I'm disappointed by Rishi Sunak too about this.
You've got to take these issues seriously.
I think a lot of the problem is they overpromise, they set the targets, they can't be here.
Actually, we know we've got to move to a place where we are less reliant on fossil fuels.
We've got to move to cleaner air.
So, how are we going to do this while we don't lose tons of jobs and it doesn't cost everyone money they haven't got?
That's the calculation.
Yeah, and how you can transition the most prosperous and easiest way possible.
It's got to be the goal.
But, you know, what do party leaders really stand for?
They stand for winning the election.
That's what we're seeing.
What do these by-elections tell you about where we really are here?
Because Keir Stahmer can't have been that happy.
Yeah, but hang on.
If you're Keir Starmer, you've overturned the 20,000 majority in Selby in North Yorkshire.
The Liberal Democrats have overturned.
I've never went to see you, really, really thought you were going to.
But the direction of travel, the momentum in British politics, was seen in Selby, which Labour won, and Summit and Froome, which the Liberal Democrats took for the Tories, not in Oxbridge, where there was a specific local issue in outer London.
And I think Keir Starmer is in danger of snatching this issue across 650 constituents.
Where do you think we are politically as a country right now?
Do you think it's just inevitable that Labour will win the next election?
No, actually, it's not, and it's not for a very important reason, which most people seem to, I think, just don't acknowledge.
I think if Angela Rayner was leader of the Labour Party, that would be a far more dead cert of happening than it is with Keir Stahlma.
There is no love for Keir Stahmer.
And I remember being out on the doorstep in 97, you know, as a Conservative, people hated.
I got spat on the doorstep.
That isn't at me now.
And the reason why they hated us was they didn't hate us so much as love Tony Blair.
It was Tony Kinner.
You could argue in 92.
It wasn't particularly the list.
You could argue in 92, Neil Kunnett was more popular and more than Keir Star.
But he's lost in 87.
I mean, I remember 92, and I never thought Labour would win.
I think the reason a Labour victory isn't inevitable is...
They were further ahead at this stage of the cycle.
It's because the next election is not 70 weeks away, isn't it?
And as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics.
And as Harold McMillan, a Conservative Prime Minister, said, events are not.
And as Nadine Dorris said to me on this very show, I am quitting as a Conservative member of parliament.
And here you are.
We must play the clip, actually.
Are you actually going to quit as an MP?
Yeah.
I've resigned.
There's no way back.
Some people think you may change your mind, that you're being a bit hot-headed.
No.
Yeah.
So that was June.
You're still here.
You're still a Conservative MP.
Anyway, moving swiftly on.
So Neil Knarner.
You just whispered quietly, shall I announce what I'm doing?
Come on then.
Come on.
No, I'll do that on my own show.
Thank you very much.
Burning Religious Texts Debate 00:05:54
Wow.
So, so.
Are you staying?
Can we stop leaving Neil Kinnett?
Are you staying?
Neil Kenneth.
Hang on, no, no, no.
You're definitely leaving.
Definitely to win.
You'll hear all about it on the Friday Night Open Dean Show.
Which is not back on until September.
Can we make the points?
Neil Kinnett was actually riding high until the Sheffield rally, which was about three days before 92.
Yeah, I think he was arguing.
Things can happen.
I think that's symbolised what was going on.
People had doubts about him, unfortunately.
But we'll see.
I still think it's everything to play for.
I really do.
I think if Prishy Sunak got a bit of steam behind him and the economy starts to come back quite strongly, anything could happen.
Conversely, if neither of those two things happen, you could get a flat line.
I think the anti-Tory mood has taken all.
Have you seen Barbie yet, you two?
No.
I'm going tomorrow night.
You are?
Yeah, I'm outraged the way they're using my body double as Ken.
I heard it was your brain double.
Oh!
Nadine, have you seen it?
I never said.
No.
Do you like Barbie?
You're a Barbie fan?
So I'm not a Bobby fan and not a Barbie fan.
I'm neither, but I haven't seen it anymore.
Do you think you're being suppressed by the Patriarchy?
Exactly.
Exactly my point.
You didn't have to say a word.
I think.
Great to see you.
Look forward to your announcement on your show on Friday.
Very great to see you.
On sets the next pop rockers, the 1975 calls outrage in Malaysia by taking a public stand on stage for gay rights while copies of the Quran being burned in Sweden.
Does free speech have the right to offend even the most firmly held beliefs?
Sam Harris will be with me to discuss that.
Welcome back to Piers Bookmap Center.
Someone just tweeted me asking how I'm feeling about the cricket.
How do you think I'm feeling about the cricket?
England and Australia, dead and buried, and then the rain ruined it.
So obviously I feel sickened, absolutely sickened, but thank you for asking.
An angry diplomatic row between Sweden, a number of Islamic majority countries has erupted over the weekend.
It comes after copies of the Quran were burned and stamped on as part of protests by an Iraqi asylum seeker in Stockholm.
Pakistani protesters held anti-Sweden protests in retaliation, and Iraqi protesters set fire to the Swedish embassy in Baghdad.
The incident once again raised a debate around whether free speech always has the right to offend even the most firmly held beliefs.
Let's ask my special guest, the author neuroscientist, and host of the Making Science Sense podcast, Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, great to have you on Piers Bulgar Citizen.
Yeah, hey, Pierce, good to see you.
This line between religious beliefs, freedom of speech, is there a line that should be drawn?
Well, ultimately, no.
I mean, I think it's, we just have speech, right?
We just have a contest of ideas.
And when ideas actually matter, we really need our best ideas to be operative.
Ideas about human freedom, ideas about political tolerance, equality among people.
I mean, these are ideas that we really can't afford to compromise on.
And I would say that that extends to just a rational understanding of the way the world works, right?
So we can't compromise on scientific truth or historical truth or journalistic truth, ultimately.
And I mean, I think there's certainly scope for civility and pragmatism and politeness and picking your battles.
But the general picture here is that there's only one religion on earth at the moment that imagines that even non-members of the religion should be obliged to live by its strictures, right?
So all religions, or certainly most religions, have some concept of blasphemy.
They don't like it when their sacred objects or sacred places or sacred figures are defamed.
But there is only one religion that will murder you for doing anything like that.
And we're really without any, with a full clarity of conscience among even majorities in many communities will call for the murder of blasphemers or idolaters or others who try to traduce the sacred tenets of the faith, even if they're not part of the faith.
And that religion is, of course, Islam in its various forms.
And so there is a contest between this kind of fundamentalist intolerance and modernity.
And if we were dealing with the Christians of the 14th century, well, we would have a similar contest with Christians, but we're not, happily.
And so we have this tendency with Islam.
I hear that.
Openly burning copies of the Quran.
Personally, I'm a massive believer in free speech.
I campaign about it on this show all the time.
But openly burning copies of a religious, I think that does cross a line.
I don't think you should defend that necessarily using free speech as the defense, should we?
Well, I don't defend it as a matter of taste.
I'm not advocating that people burn the Quran, but I think we should be politically free to burn any book, right?
We should just acknowledge that books are books created by people, right?
And the idea that some considerable number of people in the Muslim world see otherwise, right, and would imagine that a specific book is more important than any specific person or a group of people, that's just upside down ethically and politically in a way that we just have to recognize.
It's just, you know, I mean, just take, you know, leave aside the burning of books.
Free Speech and Political Norms 00:07:06
Just take just the disrespect for religious traditions.
You have a Broadway play, the musical, like the Book of Mormon, right, which was very funny and which most Mormons didn't much care for.
But what they did to protest that was they took out ads, rather cheeky ads, in Playbill, the magazine that you get when you walk into a Broadway theater.
And this was all in good fun.
And it was really, you know, they tried to recruit for Mormonism within Playbill, you know, and it was delightful.
And that was a, yet they voiced their opposition to the basic project that was poking fun at their religion.
But the thing to notice, of course, is that a book of Islam Broadway musical that poked similar fun at Islam would have been and would still be unthinkable.
And not just in Baghdad or, you know, Kandahar, but in New York, right?
I mean, the security concerns that would attend such a production would be excruciating.
And that disparity should be intolerable to us.
What about this story where the band, the 1975, who are a rock band, they go to Malaysia.
They know that Malaysia has anti-gay laws, but they accept a booking to go and perform on stage there.
And then the lead singer, Matty Healy, decides to kiss his band member, male band member on stage and a deliberate act of defiance.
So it turned out that he'd done something similar in 2019 in Dubai, which also has anti-gay laws.
So it wasn't his first journey on this rodeo.
And it also came after inflammatory comments he'd made, which were perceived to be homophobic and offensive a few months ago, which came out on a podcast.
So there's a bit of hypocrisy there.
But the basic principle of going to a country like Malaysia and deliberately, flagrantly breaching the conventions of that country, is that a sensible thing to do?
You're allowed to do it, obviously.
You can do it and get all the credit you may want from Twitter for doing it.
But should people do that?
Well, I don't know.
I think you have to view that on a case-by-case basis.
I think there's an argument for not going to places where there's such religious intolerance that you just don't want to support anything about the norms in that society.
Or I suppose you can go, as this band did, and protest those norms and hopefully make a point that lands politically in that society.
And I really think that's just a judgment call.
And I could go either way with that.
But the larger point to make here, though, is that we can't afford, we, the West, we, you know, secular societies, diverse societies, pluralistic societies, globally speaking, can't conform to the religious taboos of any specific community.
I mean, right now, if you go on ChatGPT-4 and ask it to tell you a joke about Jesus, it will tell you a joke about Jesus.
And if you ask it to tell you a joke about Buddha, it will tell you a joke about Buddha.
They're not good jokes, but it'll tell you jokes.
But if you ask it to tell you a joke about Muhammad, it will refuse because of the religious sensitivities of Muslims.
And if you ask it about that incoherence, it will basically become as evasive as Andrew Tate was when you interviewed him.
Well, you know what?
I was going to reference another interview, actually, which is Richard Dawkins, when I asked him about speaking out like this in the way that you've been doing just now.
And his reply was really quite, I found it quite chilling, actually.
Take a look.
Are you worried about me?
Did you get threats because of the positions you've taken on some of these things?
When you saw what happened to Salmon Rushdie, didn't send a shutter through you.
Are you saying no, you don't want to talk about it?
Yes.
Right.
I mean, that's interesting in itself.
Because there are areas which you would prefer not to discuss.
Yes.
I should have said that before we started.
Yeah.
No, but listen, I think it's sad that you can't.
I don't think anything should be off-limits in interviews for people like you.
I mean, I thought that was really interesting that someone like Dawkins just would not answer out of fear, it turned out.
Yeah, well, I would have to ask Richard what his motive was there.
I can imagine it might not have been fear, but just the pragmatic concern that acknowledging the threat landscape is in some way unwise, right?
That you're actually increasing your security concerns by admitting that you have them on some level.
But this is just plain for everyone to see that there is this vast difference between criticizing Islam, however peripherally, however, I mean, even on the tiniest points, you know, to just surely just depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a cartoon, right?
Or naming a teddy bear or a bear in a South Park episode, Muhammad, right?
I mean, it's just, this is the kind of thing that can get embassies burned in a dozen cities, right?
I mean, this is, this is just, there's nothing like this coming from any other religion.
And that difference is important, right?
I'm not saying that people should go out of their way to criticize Islam or any other religion necessarily, though I think when push comes to shove, we have to just acknowledge that we need good reasons for believing our most important beliefs and figuring out how to organize our societies, right?
So just when people are resting on dogma, we should be increasingly impatient with that.
And we'd be impatient with astrologers if they were trying to change our laws and our politics too.
But with Islam, we have to recognize that it deserves all of the respect that every other religion does and all of the patience that every other religion does in a pluralistic and diverse society, but no more, right?
And we're literally building it into our most advanced artificial intelligence, this double standard.
And we're doing it out of fear, right?
We can call it religious tolerance, but it is just fear.
It's just, you know, we have been successfully bullied into having a double standard.
And it's dysfunctional.
It's ultimately dangerous.
I mean, the problem for Salman Rushdie was that there weren't 10,000 Solomon Rushdies the very next day as there should have been.
And that's why he had this asymmetric risk for decades and ultimately suffered a terrible attack.
We should stand shoulder to soldier with Salman.
And I'm not saying Richard wasn't doing that.
Richard's an extraordinarily brave public intellectual, and he's been on the front lines of this debate for decades.
Musk's Twitter Power Trip 00:03:30
Sam Harris, great to talk to you.
I really appreciate it.
Your podcast is making sense.
You make multiple sense.
I appreciate you coming on the show.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, take care.
And so next, a small tribute to a broadcasting great.
Well, in case you didn't think you could see anything worse than the Barbie movie, that's Victoria Beckham on karaoke in Miami with her husband murdering a Spice Girl song, which may explain why she hasn't been on tour with them for many years.
Am I wrong, you two?
Did you hear some magic I didn't?
They're just drunk and having a good time, aren't they?
I don't know what you're like singing when you've had a few drinks.
Brilliant.
My singing is a lot less than a moment.
True story.
I once got offered a recording contract in a Barbados karaoke bar at 4 a.m. by an American record company executive as I was stripped to the waist with a bandana singing Guns N' Roses version Live and Let Die.
So you're sober.
I wasn't.
I don't know about it, but if you're serious, on the spot, one of the signed me.
Twitter is going to be rebranded as X by Elon Musk.
Your thoughts?
I just think Elon Musk's tenure owning and briefly leading Twitter has been a total disaster.
No, but last time last time he had a business called X, he rebranded it as PayPal.
I mean, he has.
He's made himself staggeringly wealthy.
SpaceX has become the most successful private space company in the world.
And Twitter's revenue.
Tesla is gigantic.
Twitter's revenue.
And marketing income, sorry, has declined dramatically since he's taken over.
There have been millions of people who left the platform.
You've now got Instagram, Twitter.
I mean, there's a difference ultimately between running a social media company and running, you know, a large manufacturing organization.
And Elon Musk seems to have kind of basically got a bit of fabric.
I don't really agree.
I sort of buy into Musk in totality, warts and all.
I think he's a kind of, he's a genius.
And with geniuses comes this slightly mad stuff.
Yes, but I do think he is too close to this Twitter project.
He's on Twitter.
We know all his views because of Twitter.
Philosophist.
Yeah, and I think he's too involved to really be able to step back and see what everyone else is doing.
I bet he cracks it.
I'm not.
I bet you in two years' time, we look back at the business.
I agree with Esther about that.
And Elon Musk would have turned it around.
No, he is, because you saw the stuff about how it was a pathetic, the way he was like twigging the algorithm to make his own.
Yeah, he makes principles off the copper.
It basically seems like the power's gone to his head.
He can't see anything clearly anymore.
And he's like, if I had $260 billion, the power would go to my head.
Just FYI.
Would you approve that about it?
$60 billion?
Not yet.
But those early days, thank you for that.
I, on the other hand, would manage it perfectly.
You'd love a load of money.
You're all good socialists.
Great to see you both.
Thank you both very much indeed.
I want to end on a very sad note.
The BBC news anchor and brilliant journalist, legendary foreign correspondent, George Alagaya, has died of bowel cancer.
He fought it for nearly a decade with incredible courage.
He was an extraordinary inspiration to so many people.
One of the most beloved people in the news industry.
And a lot of friends of mine at the BBC in mourning for him today.
And we share that sense of great loss, both for us, our industry, and for the country.
I want to thank George for everything he did for journalism and for news.
That's it from me.
Whatever you're up to, keep it
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