Piers Morgan addresses Russell Brand's rapid excommunication following unproven rape allegations, criticizing the "guilty until proven innocent" approach by tech giants and Parliament. He praises Rupert Murdoch's seven-decade legacy as he transitions to chairman emeritus, dismissing claims of countryside racism as nonsense rooted in wealth disparities. Morgan supports a Cambridge study on suppressing negative thoughts for mental health resilience while covering President Zelensky's $24 billion US aid request, where Will Hurd condemns Trump's false claims about preventing the war. The episode concludes with an interview featuring Australian comedian Byron Kirk and a final tribute to Murdoch. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Guilty Until Proven Innocent00:09:28
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
In the five days since allegations about Russell Brown were made public, he's been excommunicated.
It's becoming a chilling case study on guilty until proven innocent.
And how can anyone now lose everything without any due process at all?
As of today, it's been shockingly cheered on by the British Parliament.
First, Brown was dropped by his management company, his live shows were postponed, his book deal was shelved, Netflix, Channel 4, and the BBC have begun quietly dropping his content.
But in recent years, Brand hasn't relied on any of those platforms for influence.
He makes his money doing this.
So how is this fire being used?
What's the truth about it?
And why are there so many conspiracy theories?
Mainstream media and state interests continually use legitimate tragedies in an opportunistic way.
There's a little wrinkle in this where people were trying to set Ukraine up so that foreign investment opportunities would be presented.
Is this in order to reverse climate change and feed the world?
Or is it so that the entire process of food from growing it to selling it can be patented and controlled by Bill Gates?
Social catastrophes that ruin most people's lives are beneficial to financial elites.
Wars that ruin the lives of Ukrainian and Russian people are beneficial to the weapons manufacturing industry.
Now, I personally think some of what Russell Bryan says is complete nonsense and other stuff I agree with.
He's got every right to say though what he wants.
And he has also followers who love what he says.
He has six and a half million subscribers on his YouTube channel alone.
The Google-owned company though has now stripped his account of the ability to make money, at least for him.
He can still post videos.
He just can't take his cut.
Now in a sinister development, an arm of the British state is pressing other platforms to do the same.
Dame Carolyn Caroline Dynage, the chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, has written to X, formerly Twitter, TikTok and Rumble, these alternative platforms where Brand has a big following, asking them to drop him.
We are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform, she said.
We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr. Brand is able to monetize his content.
If so, we'd like to know whether you intend to join YouTube in suspending Mr. Brand's ability to earn money.
Now, Russell Brand is accused of very serious things, rape and sexual abuse.
They're grave allegations reported meticulously by exemplary journalism at Dispatches, Channel 4 and the Sunday Times.
But they remain at the moment accusations.
These are claims by people, by people who've remained anonymous.
I think the conspiracy theories about an establishment attack to crush a dissenting voice are hogwash.
But I can't think of a better way to fan those conspiracy flames than for a parliamentary committee to intervene like this.
As more people make their living online, we should be extremely concerned about the ability of tech companies to choose who gets to do that.
And in a liberal democracy, no one should have more respect for due process than Parliament.
It's not about taking sides on Russell Brand.
If he's guilty, he deserves a punishment every bit as severe as the alleged crimes he committed.
But trial by MPs or trial by Silicon Valley seems to me dangerous and wrong.
Well, to discuss, I'm joined by Daily Wire host, Michael Knowles in America.
Michael, there are lots of strands to this Russell Brand story, but let's focus on one today, which is this what appears to be an extraordinary overreach by the British Parliament, where the chair of a select committee has written to all these tech companies demanding effectively that they financially cancel Russell Brand over allegations.
What is your reaction to this?
I'm glad to see that Rumble responded to Parliament and said, no, we're not going to cancel someone who hasn't had due process of law based on mere accusations without a conviction.
That's really great.
It's unfortunate, however, that YouTube didn't need any nudging from Parliament.
YouTube decided to demonetize Russell Brand right away, based on what?
Based on some reporting of decades-old allegations, which may or may not be true.
I don't know.
Russell Brand has been pretty open about having been a derelict and a degenerate for a long period of time in his life.
But this is a very deeply concerning thing because it's not just a matter of our institutions turning a little bit oppressive.
It's not just a matter of the internet becoming less free with YouTube clamping down.
It's a matter of our whole society.
Do we have a free society or not?
Well, if we don't have due process of law, then we can't make any claim to being a free society any longer.
Right.
I mean, I don't happen to think, as many people seem to, judging by social media, that there's been some deliberate orchestrated mainstream media attempt to gag and silence Russell Brand.
So for what it's worth, I don't think that is what's happened here.
I think this is actually a spillover from the Me Too and Time's Up campaigns.
I think they've been working on it for four years.
Some of these journalists, and they finally think they have enough to publish these allegations against Russell Brand.
And that's fine.
I read the journalism with my former newspaper hat on, editor hat on.
I thought the journalism was perfectly well executed.
But, and it's a very important but, they remain allegations.
And it seems to me what's happening here is that the British Parliament is now joining in in a concerted effort by a number of entities to effectively be judge and jury on Russell Brand, to preemptively convict him of these allegations and to punish him.
Now, that just seems to me on every level, that should not be happening.
This is a blurring of institutions that we've seen build up for years now.
You see this especially on campuses.
If there is a claim of sexual impropriety on campus, what happens?
Do the students go to the police and then there's a trial over rape?
No.
What happens is a bunch of professors get together in a committee and they hold a kangaroo court and they will be judge, jury, and executioner.
They'll expel the student without any due process of law.
And in recent years, we've seen that a number of these have turned out to be hoaxes.
Well, how did they get it so wrong?
Because professors are not supposed to be the ones who are exercising the law.
They're not law enforcement officers in the same way that Parliament here is not supposed to be conducting the trial, certainly not Parliament and the media put together.
And YouTube and Rumble are not supposed to be enforcing the law.
To your point, peers, I don't think that there's a cabal of people in a smoky back room somewhere saying we've got to go get Brand.
But it is convenient that amid all of the sexual debauchery that typifies Hollywood, which we call Gamora by the sea over here, you know, everybody virtually is involved in it.
The people that tend to be held to account, even decades later, are people who speak out.
And so you look at someone like Bill Cosby.
I have no doubt that Bill Cosby did all sorts of nasty things, some of which may have been illegal.
But I think that the reason the establishment stopped liking Bill Cosby is because he said things that were politically incorrect and politically conservative.
And the same thing goes for Russell Brandt here.
The longer the time between the alleged crimes and the consequences for those crimes, the more skeptical I am about the people who are suddenly moved to prosecute.
Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt also that the way that certain strands of the media covering the Russell Brand scandal is very interesting because they've all pivoted on their positions depending on how he's been perceived with his own opinions.
In other words, when he was a left-wing darling a few years ago, he was sitting in on the Guardian editorial conferences, for example, next to the editor.
He was a highly prized columnist there for a number of years.
He guest edited the new statement, a left-wing publication.
You know, he was appearing on stage with big left-wing firebrands like Owen Jones and so on.
And it goes on and on and on.
And he was lauded despite his open bragging about his sort of pretty depraved sexual activity.
He did it to me in a GQ interview talking about, you know, just the phenomenal number of women he was having sex with and how he would look for good targets, his words stopped mine and so on.
Very kind of hunter language, which today, I suspect, someone made a good point, actually.
If social media had existed when that interview appeared, he'd have been torn to pieces by social media and it might have concentrated his mind and he might have avoided getting himself into the problems that came later and what he's experiencing now.
But there was no social media, so this stuff would appear.
But nobody moved to cancel Russell Brand then.
None of these left-wing organizations thought this was reprehensible.
Now, a lot of the same people, because he's now seen as a sort of alt-right kind of character, you know, really adopted by the conservatives now, a lot of people on the left who happily saluted and celebrated him, knowing what he was admitting in public about his activities, they're now revisionistly going back and feigning, in my view, moral outrage over what he was admitting to then.
I don't think you can do that.
Certainly.
People are comparing this to a Soviet show trial, to a kangaroo court where the people are convicted before any evidence is presented.
And I think that's a good analogy because I think it explains why these guys get off the hook for all of their improprieties for so long.
Two Tiers of Justice00:02:43
And that's so that people have compromised on them, you know, so that they put themselves in compromising positions and they get away with it until they stop towing the party line.
And then all of a sudden it becomes a political attack.
You see, even in the Times story that came out, the big transgression here seems to have been more political than sexual because the women say they were only motivated to speak out when they were contacted by journalists.
It's not as though they ran to law enforcement.
It's not as though they penned an essay on Substack or Medium or something like that.
This was a decision that was made within the media.
It's obviously a political decision because newspaper editors are political figures.
And the way that we can underscore that is just as soon as the story came out, already the political figures are getting involved up to and including parliament.
Yeah, and you see, I mean, you see a lot of double standard, I think.
And for example, the way that Donald Trump has been treated over his alleged misdemeanours and the way Joe Biden has over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and so on.
Completely different set of standards.
You know, when Trump, for example, is found with classified documents, it's the worst thing of all time and it's pretty serious.
But when they're finding in Joe Biden's garage, you know, the same journalists who've been so incensed by Trump's keeping of his documents almost don't want to acknowledge that Biden's done the same thing.
Well, don't forget, Piers, they first tried to impeach Donald Trump for colluding with the Russians.
And then that investigation, the Mueller investigation, went absolutely nowhere.
So they flipped and decided they were going to impeach Donald Trump for colluding with the Ukrainians.
And the subject was that Donald Trump had some kind of untoward improper phone call with the leader of Ukraine.
And the supreme irony here is while Donald Trump had a perfectly fine phone call, we now know for a fact that Joe Biden did exert extreme political pressure on Ukraine.
In fact, he set up phone calls with the president of Ukraine under pseudonyms, pseudonyms through which he was involved in his son's crooked business deals.
And his son was earning millions of dollars sitting on the board of a Ukrainian energy company for which he had absolutely zero experience.
I mean, it's a more blatant form of corruption when your father's vice president with specific interest in Ukraine.
It's hard to imagine.
Joe Biden's attorney general just came out yesterday, Merrick Garland, and he said with a straight face, you got to give him credit for being a supreme actor.
He said that there's only one system of justice in the United States, not two tiers of justice.
At the same time, he's ducking questions about the FBI targeting Catholics, about the FBI targeting parents.
And then the most farcical aspect of it all, which is that for the first time in American history, a former president is being indicted.
Freedom of Speech Debate00:13:17
The leader of the opposition is currently being indicted.
Meanwhile, you've got far more evidence of far more egregious crimes from the sitting president of the United States.
And what do they do?
They slap the son, Hunter Biden, with no more than a minor gun charge.
Of all the crimes that we've seen this guy commit on terabytes on his computer, they hit him on the gun charge, the one crime that doesn't implicate his father.
Total corruption.
An astonishing coincidence, you might not think.
Great to talk to you, Michael.
Thank you very much.
Piers, great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
Well, let's set to the next.
My boss, Rupert Murdoch, who owns Talk TV, is making some moves of his own.
I'll give you my take on that in a moment.
Welcome back to Piers Book on a Census.
Now, my boss, Rupert Murdoch, he's been my boss on and off for 30 years.
He's been a visionary leader.
His audacity and tenacity has helped build a magnificently successful global media empire.
And I've enjoyed working with him and learning from him.
A little earlier today, he announced his transitioning to the role of chairman emeritus of Fox and News Corps and passing control of the companies to his son Lochton.
He said in a statement to staff, our companies are in robust health, as am I. Our opportunities far exceed our commercial challenges.
We have every reason to be optimistic about the coming years.
I certainly am and plan to be here to participate in them.
But the battle for the freedom of speech and ultimately the freedom of thought has never been more intense.
Here, boss.
Well, for more, I'm joined by Fox News contributor, Joe Concher.
Joe, a big moment for us in the two companies.
I don't know about you, but when I heard this, it was like, I didn't ever think I'd hear the day that Rupert Murdoch would stand aside and hand control to someone else like this, but it is his son who's been right by his side now for a number of years.
What do you make of it?
I make that this is an epic run to end all epic runs, Piers.
I mean, you think about how long Rupert Murdoch has been at the top of the media business.
We're talking seven decades.
He was running newspapers before John F. Kennedy was running the United States.
We're going all the way back to the 50s.
And you think about it's not just newspapers, it's sports, it's media, it's news, it's every type of broadcasting that you can do as far as media conglomerates are concerned.
But when you think about what he did with Fox News, for example, launches it in 1996, smart enough to hire an innovator like Roger Ailes, who then took this network, which many people thought would crash and burn in a year or two in 1996.
By 2001, surpassed CNN, which was the only player on the block.
And for 25 years, basically since, has been number one by a country mile.
So you see the profits, you see the success here in the United States, Australia, Britain, and across the world.
And you can't find probably somebody who's been more successful in the media business than Rupert Murdoch.
No, I think he's been the greatest of them all.
I really do.
And the thing I've always loved about Rupert is he's a risk taker and a visionary.
He sees something 10 years ahead and he'll bet the bank on it.
And almost invariably, it works.
You know, not always, but invariably over those decades, again and again and again, he's backed himself.
And I think that's an extraordinary gift that some people have.
In his statement, he says, for my entire professional life, I've been engaged daily with news and ideas.
That won't change.
He talks about Lachlan taking over, a principal, passionate leader who becomes sole chairman now of both companies.
He said here, neither excessive pride nor false humility are admirable colleagues.
But I'm truly proud of what we've achieved collectively through the decades.
And I owe much to my colleagues whose contributions to success have sometimes been unseen.
And then he cites, I really like this line.
Whether the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we've left the office, the assistants who support us, or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code, we would be less successful and have less positive impact on society without your day-to-day dedication.
He talked about how his father believed firmly in freedom.
Lachlan is equally committed as Rupert is to that cause of freedom.
But there was a great line because people have been seeing this as retirement.
And I was like, I've known Rupert Murdoch a long time, three decades.
I can't ever imagine him just lying on a beach retired.
It's just not going to happen.
And there's a great telling line in the statement which confirms my belief.
He said, I'll be watching our broadcast with a critical eye.
He's probably watching this now.
Reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice.
When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon.
And he said that because he's got a real bugbear about this trend in America of people just bunking off on a Friday.
So Rupert's going to be still prowling around the newsrooms and the offices of Fox, I'm sure, and here at Talk TV on a Friday night, just to check, we're putting a shift in.
A remarkable guy, incredible work ethic, incredible drive.
I think that he loves newspapers, he loves television, he loves politics, he loves the media.
You know, he's someone who I think I've certainly had enormous respect and admiration for for a very long time.
And I've got a lot to be grateful to him for.
He made me editor of his biggest selling newspaper, The News of the World, when I was 28 years old.
And he rehired me a couple of years ago to come and do a number of things for him.
This show being one of them, columns for his papers, The Sun, The New York Post, crime documentaries for Fox Nation, they've just dropped there, a book for HarperCollins.
So that shows you his reach.
He was able to offer me everything I do in my entire life.
Rupert was able to give me that on his platforms.
And that shows you the kind of global firepower he's built with that company, or both companies.
Rupert, and Piers, I don't think it was totally about money.
I mean, obviously, you have to make money for your shareholders.
This is a business.
But I think you nailed it as far as it was a labor of love that he had a passion for this business, a passion for new ideas and innovation.
And that's why we saw the success that Fox had, because it's not about, you're right.
He's not the type of guy who's now just going to go off to the sunset and retire.
He'll probably still be very active in terms of the exchange of those ideas moving forward.
He reminds me of you, quite frankly.
I can't see you ever retiring from this business because you wake up every day and you want to go to work.
Well, also, it doesn't feel like work.
I always say to my sons, you know, one's a journalist actually, another's an actor.
They both love their staff.
And the youngest one's just left university.
I said, if you find a job you love, it actually never feels like work.
I doubt Rupert's ever woken up and thought, I've got to go to work.
I think he works incredibly hard at something he loves to do.
And that's how I always view him.
And I'm sure he does continue now.
Because the burning thing that he has, which I think is what makes all great journalists, actually, he's got intense curiosity.
You know, I saw the former editor of The Sun in Scotland, Gordon Smart.
He was talking about a car journey he had with Rupert when he was running the things up in Scotland.
And just in this car journey, as they drove around Scotland, Rupert was peppering him with just endless questions about Scottish issues, about architecture, about football, about politics, about media.
And you had to be on it.
And it really took me back to when I ran a newspaper for him, is that he had his handle on every single nut and bolt of your business.
And if you didn't, well, woe betide you.
And that's how he became so successful.
And that's why people love working for him.
Because ultimately, if you shared that philosophy of hard work, graft, have a bit of fun, but win, and winning was always the driving motivating thing, I think then you would always get on great with Rupert.
No problem at all.
But I've got a lot to be grateful to him for.
I sent him a note today saying how grateful I am, how influential he's been on my life, you know, for a long, long time.
And so it was quite a moment today, I've got to say.
Joe, I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you.
It's a big moment for the company.
But I've known Lachlan since he was a teenager.
A very, very impressive man who's been right at the right hand of his father now for quite a while, running the show.
And I've got absolutely no doubt he's going to be great too.
So I think we're in good hands.
Thanks, Piers.
I agree.
All the best.
Armour and Upward.
Yep, absolutely.
I'm joined now by my Pat, Talk TV International Editor, Isabel Oakshot, and Talk TV contributor, Paula Rohn.
Adrian.
Quite a moment, I think, for all of us.
Oh, definitely.
I mean, I joined the Sunday Times in 2006, not quite your length of service, but you know, Rupert Murdoch has been such a massive figure in journalism all this time.
And I loved his statement, you know, the bit about the cleaners.
What a beautiful touch and how much politicians could learn from that, right?
Because they so often forget the so-called little people who are not little people at all.
They are absolutely integral to the running of the place.
But the other bit I loved was his comment about the importance of freedom of speech and how it is under threat like never before.
And in the time that he has been in this industry, just in fact, if we even narrow it to the last five years, I don't think there's ever been such a threat to freedom of speech as there is now.
No, and actually, the reason I came back to work for him was because he shared my sort of fury about what had gone on at Good Morning Britain, the Meghan Markle and the sort of suppression of free speech, my ability to express opinions.
And he shared my view.
It was ridiculous.
So the mission is more important than ever, actually.
No question.
No question.
Paula, I mean, on the left, he can be a bit of a demon figure.
He's always, I think, quite enjoyed that, rattling the old lefty cages.
But what's your view about this news today?
I'm not sure that you can limit his controversies to the left, actually, Piers.
And I think in reacting to this whole concern about freedom of speech, it's important also to reference the fact that he is a controversial character to many.
But the fact is, for me, Rupert Murdoch isn't just about sport.
He'sn't just about news.
He's about how we now watch TV.
And, you know, you can remember the skyboxes going up on people's nouses.
It was massive.
Well, Premier League football is because of Rupert Murdoch.
And people do not give him enough credit for that.
He basically, it was a great documentary series recently.
It was down to him and Alan Sugar, Lord Sugar now, and his ability to put the satellite dishes up.
The combination brought football kicking and screaming into the brave new world that we now take for granted.
It's the best league in the world.
That was down to Rupert.
And at 92 years young, I cannot imagine for a moment that he would dare anyone to challenge him about the fact that he was just going to walk away.
He's not retiring.
He's not walking away.
I don't know what you call him.
It's not retirement.
I can assure you of that.
He'll be in touch, I'm sure, as much as he's ever been.
Let's move on.
Let's go to a story that I'm sure would have him shaking his head if he's watching this.
The Guardian, of course it's The Guardian, has a report, a rambler's report, basically saying that our countryside is racist because the whitest areas enjoy 144% more local footballs than the most ethnically diverse areas.
I mean, this is beyond parody, isn't it?
I mean, it could only be the Guardian.
A load of rambling, absolute rambling nonsense.
I mean, of course, it's no surprise that the most affluent areas where there are least dense population are going to have more paths.
Why they feel the need to actually add some ethnicity dimension to that?
I don't know.
I mean, it's just a desperate publicity.
Paula, you often defend the utterly indefensible on this program.
Have you got any defense for the Guardian's revelation that our countryside is racist?
It's not that I defend the indefensible, it's that I'm right.
Are you defending this?
What you have to understand is the Ramblers Association, it was a fantastic piece of research.
It not only spoke about who we are, where we are, it also spoke about what good can come from rambling, what good can come from being outside in the fresh air, rambling, being in the world.
You don't actually think the countryside is racist, do you?
Can I say that?
Don't even hesitate.
Can I just say that that isn't actually what the article was about?
And I appreciate that what you want to do is to suggest that that's what the Ramblers Association research was doing, but it wasn't.
What it was, I read it.
All white, wealthy and healthy have access to miles more public footpaths in the local neighbourhoods than poor and ethnically diverse communities in the world.
You're not studying.
Is that not true?
It's not worth doing a study.
Is that wrong to have pointed that out?
You might just as well say, shock revelation, wealthier people have bigger gardens.
So you agree with that.
So the gardens are racist.
So you're agreeing with the research.
But it's not racist.
I didn't see them use the word racist, by the way, in their research.
I didn't see them using racism.
They're using race as the context for the piece.
They said white.
That they did.
Well, then what else they referenced colour because that is a factual context of the research, isn't it?
Racist ramblers.
As I said, I didn't see them use the word race.
Wealth and Public Paths00:04:25
I heard you reference it because, and let's be frank, you want to be able to dismiss this piece of work, but actually, I don't think we should.
Bearing in mind what's happening with Rishi Sunak and his throwing away his, you know, the approach he's made in terms of net zero poverty.
I actually think he's absolutely right.
And once again, you're wrong.
No, I'm not.
I'm not.
He's absolutely right.
What he's got.
There's no suggestion whatsoever we were going to be car sharing.
No, no.
When's the government?
We're not doing that.
Rishi Sunak has rightly been worked out that actually a lot of people in this country ideologically agree that we have to move to a more net zero world, but you can't do it at such a pace that everyone runs out of cash and is left destitute.
You can't do it.
Anyway, let's move on.
I've said my piece on that.
I want to talk about stiff upper lip.
There's a survey coming out.
Cambridge studies revealed that having a stiff upper lip and suppressing negative thoughts is good for mental health.
Analysis of 120 people trained to suppress their thoughts found the modern approach of addressing trauma and problems can be worse than burying them internally.
Really interesting this because I've had a real theory about this for a while.
I know it's been contentious, but I don't think it is that contentious because I come from a family where this is how we've dealt with stuff and we don't feel like we've missed out because we're not constantly doing it a different way.
But I do feel that the idea of stiff upper lip, the concept of it, which by the way, the Queen did better than anybody, right?
The idea that somehow this has become a bad thing that we should frown upon.
This survey actually says the opposite, that sometimes actually deploying that can actually be helpful to people.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about this, Isabel, because I know you've just been through a really sad moment in your life.
Your mother has just died.
Yes.
And you've come into work, which is a kind of an example of this, really.
So tell me how you feel.
Well, first of all, my honesty, I said to you out the map, I'm so sorry, because I know that you've lost both your parents there.
It's a big moment in someone's life.
It is, it is.
But she was a good old age.
So what I always try to do is try to think of the good things.
And I'm also trying to bring my children up to be resilient because I think resilience is hugely important.
Huge.
You know, you can choose to interpret setbacks in different ways.
My dad always had an expression, I've had a minor setback, you would say, and it could often be something pretty big.
But it's about how you react to what happens.
You know, you can't always control what happens.
People die.
But what is your response to it going to be?
And I'm choosing to soldier on.
And it doesn't mean that I'm not going to have some tearful moments.
But actually, coming onto this show, we're having a really interesting debate and I'm surrounded by bright lights and friendly people.
And that's great.
And people deal with stuff in different ways, don't they?
But if you ever want a case study in how endless therapy and navel gazing doesn't work, you only have to look at our Harry, don't you?
Prince Harry.
Well, yeah, I do think that the constant obsessive conversation about it can actually have the opposite effect.
And what's interesting, Paul, about the survey, it seems to suggest the same thing.
People in 16 countries were asked to think about 20 different fears and worries they thought might happen, 20 hopes and dreams, and 36 hundred scenarios.
Data show that those told explicitly to not think about the events or distract themselves from thinking about them thought about their events less vividly and improved their mental health.
In other words, if you do just obsess with this, and I would also add in the whole dopamine element to modern society where kids are being exposed all the time to really violent, horrible imagery, whether it's pornography or war, graphic, warthing, constant, constant, constant, sharing, sharing, sharing all this stuff.
You put all this together and you end up in a real messy place, I think.
Oh, absolutely.
And to be frank, that research is not unusual.
There's been research since about 1987 that's been conducted on this suppression.
The body, the brain, naturally suppresses bad traumatic events.
That's what it does.
That's how we protect ourselves.
And CBT was actually born out of that research of trying to teach you how to manage those triggering events.
So in terms of that research, it's not that unusual.
But what I would be interested to understand is whether the 120 subjects actually suffered traumatic events.
I'm not clear.
And I think the jury is still out on whether actually the suppression works for traumatic events.
Protecting Ukraine Faster00:12:43
It's really big stuff.
I mean, for example, PTSD or veterans.
Listen, of course, I've always said that, obviously.
But that's extreme cases.
Yes, yes.
I just think generally we don't prepare young people for real life very well anymore.
We've stopped doing it.
And it's little things like...
But if you should do that, and this is the problem ultimately, who is responsible for doing that?
Parents, actually.
Actually, no, I actually think the me, I think the media actually collectively...
You mean who is at fault?
Well, no, no, no.
I do mean how they're trying to be responsible for teaching children to be resilient.
Well, I would honestly change the way we teach kids at school.
I mean, for a lot of the first thing I do, if I was running schools in this country, no more participation prizes.
If little Johnny comes last in a race, he doesn't get anything.
He understands, but the winning and losing, right?
And you have to compete in life.
When you get out of school, there's no one protecting you.
Bit of a shock.
Kids don't, they're not used to losing anything.
But exams are competing, peers.
So they do understand the concept of competition.
Yeah, but not really.
And I think we cosset them, we protect them too much.
And then in the end, they're just ill-prepared for the harsh reality of the tough, real world, which is tough.
You know, very, very tough.
But anyway, look, I've got to leave it.
But my deep sympathies to you.
And I really appreciate you coming in.
And we'll dedicate this show to your mum.
Oh, how lovely.
Because she was a great lady, Anna.
Nice to see you.
Thanks for coming in, Paul.
Next, President Zelensky is at the White House to call for more US backing for Ukraine.
But can he win over Republicans who say it's costing too much?
U.S. presidential candidate Will Hurd is up next.
Welcome back to Pierce Organized Center.
Ukraine's President Zelensky is in Washington aiming to secure another $24 billion in aid from the United States.
He's visited the capital, just arrived at the White House for an audience with President Biden.
Zelensky is a battle to win over sceptical Republicans.
Congress has already authorized more than $110 billion since Russia's invasion.
Some Republicans warned they will oppose further spending on the war, which Zelensky believes could cost him the war.
Would you want to be now to discuss all this?
It's Sarah Brown, who's just returned from Ukraine after visiting with their world, a children's education charity, and the Republican presidential candidate, Will Herb.
Well, first of all, Sarah, you've just been to Ukraine.
I went there over a year ago now and spent time with the president and the first lady.
Things were relatively quiet there, but we've now another year in and a particularly devastating toll on kids.
Tell me about that.
Well, families are needing to move to places of safety, so children's schooling is getting disrupted and they're going through quite harrowing times.
I mean, having been in Kyiv just last week, meeting with President Zelensky and the First Lady, you can see that that city is really feeling the pressures of it.
But they also, as a community of people, feel that they're all in it together and everyone playing their part.
But for children, that means families are moving away from the front line, moving away from the more dangerous areas.
Schooling's getting disrupted.
So there's a big push behind.
We've been working from their world to make sure that 70,000 laptops are getting out there, software's on there, learning materials are on there, so that even if they're on the move, they're able to continue learning.
But the meeting with President Zelensky that we had was to his focus is also to think about the youngest children, the ones that are preschool.
And I think we've learned a lot from other conflicts, other disasters, that we can't ignore the youngest children, that we need to be investing in them.
And it's really interesting to me that Ukraine is wanting to move faster and do more at an earlier stage than we've seen in other conflicts around the world before.
Right.
I mean, 19,000 Ukrainian children are believed to have been taken to Russia or occupied territory since the war began.
They're just disappearing in vast numbers.
Yeah, knowing where children are, knowing that families are safe.
I mean, obviously in the eastern side of Ukraine, there are families who, you know, that's been the connections they have.
People are moving to where they think there isn't fighting and where there's conflict.
But there are many, many other families who have been moving west.
But the other thing that's interesting is families often leave Ukraine.
Maybe they're staying in Hungary or Poland or Moldova.
But also, when they think it's a little bit safer, they're going back.
So I think for President Zelensky and certainly the organizations like mine that are working to help deliver education services and support in that crisis, we're looking for where children are and understanding that they're not always staying in one place.
So needing to be really smart about how we create safe spaces for children to be able to learn.
You know, you've been talking this morning, this afternoon, about how families and children, you know, their resilience at school, whether they can put up with the ups and downs of it.
These are children that are really going through ups and downs and learning resilience the hard way.
And there needs to be a stability that goes in there.
You know, there's a bit more effort going into schooling around maths and science and just getting some of those core subjects going.
So they're not losing at all.
Every Ukrainian has this dream of how they will go back and rebuild that country.
You know, we have the allyship, the United Kingdom, from the USA, other countries coming to help defend that country that's under attack.
And some of that defense has to be protecting children and also those really little children.
90% of the brain is developing in those first three years.
You want children who are growing in that environment to have that support, have childcare, look at what their parents are doing during the day.
Where are the children in a safe space and what are the learning programs that are being delivered for them?
Yeah, well, their world does some fantastic work.
So thank you, Sarah.
I appreciate you joining the program tonight.
Turner Will Hurdle.
Thank you, Peter.
Republican presidential candidate.
Will, it's obvious now from the rhetoric coming out of President Zelensky in Washington today that he believes if the United States was to suddenly pull funding, then that could cost him the war.
Simple as that.
Why are so many Republicans, increasing numbers of Republicans, why are they so resistant to this, given that effectively they're fighting for freedom and democracy against a Russian dictator?
Well, it's unfortunate that there's too many people in my party that are more interested in pushing Russian propaganda than actually talking about how we defend the free world.
I'm of the opinion that they have forgotten the fact that the United States and our allies have built an international order that benefits us.
And when we don't defend that order, it hurts us.
They've also failed to understand the difference between our friends and our enemies.
Let me be very clear.
Vladimir Putin is a war criminal.
You and Mrs. Brown just talked about how the impact this is having on children, and we should be doing everything to stop him.
My frustrations is actually we're not getting the support and the aid to the Ukrainians fast enough in order to prevent this from becoming a forever war.
Nobody wants that.
And we also want to make sure that the resources that are being used are being properly accounted for.
But the United States would never fight a war this way without having air superiority, without having restrictions on the use of munitions on the ground.
We should not have those requirements in order to make sure that we're defending freedom and democracy.
I also think there's a concern I would have, certainly, that if the United States was just to pull out and stop sending aid to Ukraine, and some of your rival candidates to be the Republican nominee have advocated this.
I mean, let's take a look at a little mashup we did of some of them here.
Why are you against the board of Ukraine?
Because it does not advance American interests?
Well, they have effectively a blank check policy with no clear strategic objective identified.
And these things can escalate, and I don't think it's in our interest.
The United States needs to be pushing for peace in Ukraine, not funding a proxy war with Russia.
The Biden administration is sleepwalking our great country into a world war.
I mean, I find it baffling that senior Republicans talk like that about something like this when it seems to me so clear-cut.
Russian dictator invades sovereign democratic country, steals land, murders people in virtual genocide.
Why would a Republican think that that is a good thing and not want to immediately help repel him?
Well, Piers, we need to invite you to speak in front of Congress because you're absolutely right.
And to me, it's sickening the fact that even Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, the fact that they do not understand that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, that they're more interested in kissing his butt than actually trying to defeat him, to me, is wrong.
I've spent a decade overseas.
I was in the CIA.
My job was to stop terrorists from blowing up our homeland, to put Russian spies and Chinese spies, prevent them from stealing our secrets, and to print nuclear weapons proliferators from doing their trade and having real world experience on this.
We have to remember that if Ukraine loses, then Eastern Europe is gone.
They're back into the orbit of Russia.
Western Europe is not going to care about the United States, and they're going to cozy up with the Chinese government.
The United States and our allies are in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party.
And what happens in Ukraine potentially is going to show what's going to potentially happen in Taiwan as well.
And the fact that there's too many people that understand that this isolationist streak actually hurts America is frustrating.
And it comes down to their lack of experience in foreign policy and their failure to understand how the world actually works.
And when you hear Donald Trump say, oh, I would fix it all in one day, I mean, how's he going to do that?
Short, short, well, we've actually got the clip here.
Let's watch this.
I would get him into a room.
I'd get Zelensky into a room, then I'd bring them together and I'd have the deal worked out.
Essentially, for four years, I kept them from doing anything.
Ukraine was the apple of his eye.
I said, don't ever do it.
Don't ever do it.
He would have never done it.
The war would have never happened.
You see, I just think that's so disingenuous of Donald Trump because there's no way this can be reconciled by just getting Zelensky and Putin into a room now, because ultimately, Putin will want to keep the land he's stolen.
Zelensky will want to get it back.
There's no peace deal to be done right now, it seems to me.
Piers, are you implying that Donald Trump is lying?
Of course he is.
In this case, the fact that he thinks he's going to be able to solve this problem is just one more lie.
This is just one more example of why I think Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison, not to make America great again.
And the reality is this, I believe, when we talk about what is success in this case, it is pushing the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include the Donbas and Crimea.
And it's up to the Ukrainian people to decide what any kind of future peace offering.
And we know that the Ukrainian people are resilient and are not going to accept anything less than the full evacuation of the Russians.
And the other thing that's frustrating is at a time that we know that the Russians are vulnerable, the fact that Vladimir Putin has to go to North Korea and Kim Jong-un in order to buy old, outdated equipment because things are going so poorly for him when he just had an insurgency, a former general barreling down to come to Moscow to kick him out of power.
The fact that Vladimir Putin is dealing with all this is the time for all of us to reinvest in what the Ukrainians are doing to help the Ukrainians win this war and push Russia out.
Will Heard, I could not agree with you more, honestly.
And I'm completely baffled, like I said at the start of this, that more Republicans, I mean, obviously many Republicans do share your view, but it's alarming to me to see the rising number who don't and don't see the bigger picture here.
You know, China's watching all this thinking, well, what's America going to do?
If America just bails out now on Ukraine, that is a red, that's just a, well, it's a red flag to the world, but it's a green flag to China.
Okay, well, let's go and take Taiwan then.
Comedy Career Reaction00:03:18
What's going to happen?
Not a lot.
We've run out of time, Will.
That was a rhetorical statement to end it, but I do appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
Of course.
And says the next, a 10-year-old Australian comic has gone viral around the world after leaving TV presenters in stitches with a brutal joke about vegans.
He's up next.
Well, now somebody to put a smile on your faces.
Byron Kirk's appearance on Australia's Top Rated Today show has exploded online in the last few weeks after he decided to tell my old friend Carl Stefanovic and his co-host Sarah Abbo a little joke.
This was their reaction to his joke.
Byron!
We weren't expecting that.
So what exactly did young Byron say that caused those two to corpse in that manner?
Well, who better to ask than the man himself?
I'm joined from Sydney by Byron.
Byron, how are you?
Here, not too bad yourself, peace.
I'm good, mate.
And you are the most famous young man in Australia after cracking the joke that reduced the Today Show host to quivering wrecks of laughter.
So for the benefit of our viewers, what was the joke?
A vegan and a vegetarian are jumping off a cliff to see who hit the bottom first.
Who wins?
I don't know.
Who wins?
Society.
It is a very, very funny joke.
I mean, obviously, vegans and vegetarians won't laugh, but they never laugh at anything because they never eat enough meat.
So they're always hungry.
Is it giving you the temptation now to become a comedian when you get older?
Yeah.
Any other jokes up your sleeve?
Back in your day, you had one woman.
In my day, we wonder if it is a woman.
Byron, you have a very, very near-the-knuckle humor for a young lad, but I like it.
It's great to see you.
Best of luck with your comedy career.
And congratulations on what you did to Carl because he's an old friend of mine and I've not seen him reduced to a state like that in a very long time.
So congratulations.
Thank you.
I loved his deadpan delivery, didn't you?
Someone asked me earlier, what's your favorite joke?
When I was his age, I had a joke.
It was, what did a hypochondriac have written on his tombstone?
Told you I was ill.
And then cut forwards when I ran the Daily Mirror as editor.
And Spike Milligan died.
And when he died, it turned out he'd used this joke.
And so we did a tombstone front page with the joke.
And his widow rang me a few days later and said she loved it so much, could she have a copy?
Which I loved.
So we sent her a copy.
And that was how we remember Spike.
So jokes, they always come around generationally, but I think that kid's got a big future.
That's it from me.
Whatever you're up to, keep it uncensored.
The Daily Mirror Joke00:00:22
And a final message to the boss, Rupert Murdoch.
What an amazing career.
I know you're not completely going, but today's a day where we salute you and what you've achieved.
And we thank you, everyone who works for you, for being the greatest Titan in media that I think there's ever been.
And I, for one, am personally incredibly grateful to you, Rupert Murdoch, for everything you've done for me.