Piers Morgan and guests debate UK transgender school policies, parental rights, and the Tavistock scandal before confronting Stephen Crowder on free speech hypocrisy regarding Alex Jones and Section 230. The discussion escalates as they condemn Jones's monetization of Sandy Hook grief and analyze Mossad Hassam Yousev's renunciation of Hamas, arguing that religious identity drives suicide bombings in Gaza while acknowledging ultra-religious Jewish extremism complicates the conflict. Ultimately, the episode asserts that unchecked platforms foster toxicity and that both sides in the Israel-Hamas war prioritize dangerous dogmas over human life. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Schools Must Tell Parents00:06:21
Tonight on Piers Morgan uncensored, schools must tell parents if their child wants to change gender and children should not be punished for using the wrong pronouns.
Why is this outbreak of common sense making front page news?
Stephen Crowder is one of the most influential and controversial conservative personalities online.
He's told his millions of fans I'm a raging free speech hypocrite.
So tonight I invite him onto my platform to take him off.
And as the Israel-Hamas war sparks fears of a decades-long conflict and a radicalized generation, is religion itself the biggest problem?
I'll talk to philosopher Sam Harris.
From the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
If your child got into a fight at school, if they were being bullied, if they fell behind in their math class, you probably want to know about that.
It's your right as a parent to know things like that.
Most teachers would surely agree.
But many British schools think you have no right to know if your child decides to transition to another gender.
So much so that the Department for Education today issued detailed guidance for schools telling them they've got this wrong.
A new parent's first approach will advise that in all but the most exceptional cases, they should be urgently informed if their child asks to be known as another gender.
The guidance says teachers and pupils should not be pressured into using a child's new pronouns and should not be punished if they get them wrong.
All completely sensible.
But what's extraordinary to me is not this development, it's that it all had to be said in the first place.
For too long, we've made policy by fear of causing offence.
The consequences of that were laid bare earlier this year when that infamous video leaked of a teacher scolding pupils for refusing to accept their classmate was a cat.
I just said if they want to identify as a cow song and they're like genuinely unwrapped and they find yeah, they're into their radio.
You were questioning their identity.
I wasn't a question.
I was just saying about the gender.
I haven't said anything about them.
But where do you get this idea from that?
There's only two genders.
Gender is not linked to do with the not linked that you were born with.
Gender is about how you identify.
There is actually three large perceptions because you can be born intersex.
You can be born with male and female body parts or hormone.
In terms of gender, there are lots of genders.
If you have a drone, you're a guy in the change of one.
Yeah.
But you identify with the gender of the sexual organ that you're born with or you're with.
That's basically what you're saying.
Yeah.
Which is really despicable.
Despicable.
Think about that.
Despicable.
You would identify as the sex you were born to.
Well, those teenagers were smart enough to express a view that any sensible person in the world would agree with.
I certainly would.
For that, as we just heard, they were branded despicable and told they should go to another school.
That's how schools are pandering to a pupil who says they're a cat.
We can imagine how they're policing preferred pronouns.
In the most part, this isn't about children identifying as pets, so it must be extremely difficult for any child who's genuinely transgender to go through that process at such a fragile time in their lives.
But that only strengthens the case for involving their parents.
Pandering to Ms. Lobby led to the scandal at the Tavistock Clinic, where hundreds of kids were given powerful puberty blockers despite having very complex mental health problems.
Many of the children were simply gay.
Well, yesterday we learned that the Royal Yacht Association has decreed we should say person overboard instead of man overboard and that prisoners have been routinely referred to as they instead of he or him.
Prisoners.
Insisting on their preferred pronouns.
These things matter.
If a form of language is imposed on us, it imposes the worldview that goes with it, whether we agree with it or not.
It's exactly the kind of pandering that leads to schools being scared to tell parents these fundamental things about their children's lives.
Well joining me now, I was talking to your contributor, Paula Roan-Adrian, the political journalist Avisantina, and international editor Isabel Oakeshott.
Welcome to my dazzling pack.
All right.
Paul, I can see you raging to go off again.
Well, I'm intrigued that you've decided to open this really serious and sensitive debate by suggesting that somebody referencing themselves as a cat equates to a child who is struggling to understand.
I didn't.
I actually separated.
Well, you heard me separate the two things.
They're too completely different.
Paula, hang on.
Sorry.
You heard me separate the two things.
I read out again and reminded people of the absurdity of a teacher calling children despicable for saying it was ridiculous to allow someone to be a cat.
And then I said, but it also, there are serious issues involving people who are seriously going through the issue of transgenderism for real.
Not just a fad of being a cat.
And they're different things.
They are completely different things.
So don't miss what.
But you're opening with that as if it's somehow something to be dismissed and somehow to be treated as a joke.
And this is my problem with the guidelines.
Not to pretend it's a joke, no.
Which we have waited five years.
Parents being informed about what their children are doing at school is not a joke to me.
I'm the father of four kids who've been through school.
I want to know, if one of my kids suddenly decides to identify as a cat, I want a phone call from the school.
We've waited five years for these guidelines.
These guidelines are start off by saying it's about parents being first.
We're putting parents first.
That's wrong, Piers.
It's not about parents.
It's about the child.
It's about the vulnerable child who needs the adults around them to support them during this difficult period for them.
What it doesn't need is for the child who is vulnerable to be told, no, the parent comes first.
That's the wrong approach.
No, the parent does come first until the child is an adult.
Isabel.
Paula, if you want your child to be given medicine at school, if you want them just to have some cowpole, you have to get permission.
That has to, you have to go through a process.
I have to sign a form if I want my child to have cowpole at school for a headache or a sore throat or whatever.
It is, to me, it is negligent and bordering on abusive to allow schools just to honour a child's wishes to be known temporarily as something else without involving the children.
This is where we become confused with being child-focused and saying that the child gets everything they want.
Parental Consent Required00:10:05
That's not what I'm saying.
Being child-focused does not mean that everything the child says is right.
But what I'm concerned about is that saying parent first means that anything that the child says is always going to come second to what their parents want to be.
So do you think that parents should be cut out and red?
Let's make this a lot simpler then.
Do you think it's okay for parents to be cut out in the child?
Because that's at the heart of absolutely not.
That's at the heart of the.
So they should be involved then.
A parent must be involved in the world.
A parent must agree.
No, no, no, no.
You're missing out on a really important cog here.
So even if the parent agrees that the child would like to use a different set of pronouns, the school does not have to abide by that.
And it would only be exceptional circumstances where the school actually accepts it.
So at the moment, there'll be loads of a lot of children around the country who will be going into the Christmas period now, not knowing how they'll be identified when they're going to school in general.
You know what?
They get identified as boy or girl.
That's like the old days.
Why do you feel like that?
You don't go in and say you call me they like Sam Smith.
No, those days are done.
Piers, you're shouting.
Because it's so stupid.
Piers, you're shouting.
Let's shout about the fact that the criminal stats tell us that hate crime against transgender people have gone up 11% in one year.
Over the last five years, it's gone up to 186.
So what we need to do is...
I think that's awful.
So what we need to do is prepare any hatred towards trans people is awful.
But why do you think that there is so much mockery of trans people compared to five, six years ago?
I'll tell you why.
Because they are fighting ludicrous battles, the trans lobby, over things like demanding the right of biological males identifying as trans people.
They're demanding the rights of females.
And the more that happens, and then in Scotland, you saw Nicola Sturgeon lose her job because she was putting biological male rapists into female prisons where they could attack women.
What are we doing?
When this stuff happens, the real victims, actually, the real victims are genuine trans people who just want to have a quiet life, who go through a lot anyway, and they just want a quiet time and to be respected and tolerant by the people.
And I want to rally the troops, rally the Conservative troops and say we're going to fight the next election on the basis of culture wars and transparency.
It's not a culture war.
It's not a culture war.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
Paula, I'm sorry.
But the issue of biological males competing against biological females is not a culture war.
It is an absolute full-front assault on women's rights.
And why anyone still defends this nonsense?
It's ridiculous to me.
All of you.
We are talking about that because it's being dismissed by the people.
We're talking about schools here.
And in my opinion, this guidance doesn't actually go anywhere near far enough.
What would you like a discussion?
I don't think we should be.
Can I just talk for one second here?
Because I have tried to interject repeatedly and only been talked down.
I don't think it needs to be guidance.
I think it needs to be the actual law.
I do not think schools should have a huge amount of discretion or indeed any discretion over this.
And by the way, this is only a consultation.
So we've waited all these months, you say it's here.
It's certainly nine months since Rishi Sunak called for urgent action.
And it's only a consultation.
Look, for me, this is very straightforward.
I do not think children should be encouraged to take decisions that they may come to regret very dreadfully.
A lot of this stuff is...
As we saw on Matavas, these are the arguments that were used against children in the 80s and the 90s when we were talking about whether children could be gay.
We were talking about that.
It's exactly the same sort of rhetoric.
And remember, we shouldn't be worried about social transition.
Being gay is a sexuality.
Identifying as a cat is not a sexuality.
Come on, you know that that is a false equipment.
A massive difference.
We've discussed how we were not going to equip.
We weren't going to use the cat analogy, which is a very serious discussion.
I just heard it.
At the moment, we've got a murder trial going on, potentially because of a trans child died.
And we're talking about bullying.
But there have also been murder trials this year of trans people killing people.
So it works both ways.
No, no, no.
Come on.
Because, okay, we can't talk about that specific.
In other words, if you can take out individual stories, of course you can.
Don't amplify them.
No, if a child was killed.
But I think both of those are horrific for different reasons.
So what is it called?
What's the point?
Trans murderers do not represent trans people.
But if a child was killed because they are trans, then that is pretty important.
What's that got to do with the school?
Well, let me tell you what it is.
It's bullying them.
Then obviously that's allowing painting.
I don't see how it's going to change bullying.
We know how important schools are.
Of course, they are the locus parenti, aren't they, for our children when we send them off in the morning?
We know that.
And so what's really important, of course, is that the school has guidelines.
But what happens is it's not guiding school.
And do you know what?
That is where I would agree with you on, because at the moment, we don't have anything watertight.
It's very fluid.
We have this consultation period.
It's 12 weeks.
It's a little bit convenient that they suddenly sent out these guidelines when most schools have broken up, when most schools are coming to the end of their holidays.
So what they think that they're going to get.
I'll tell you what's been going on, Paula.
There are no doubt there are some children genuinely going through transgenderism, right?
They believe they're born in the wrong body and they have to be taken care of, cared for, respected, and everything.
I totally support that.
But there are a very, very small number of people.
What has happened in the last two to three years, there's been an explosion in people identifying as non-binary, gender-fluid, a hundred other genders, because it's trendy.
Let them.
It's a fad.
Let them.
And teachers have been traduced into going along with this and not telling parents.
And it's completely outrageous.
My family are teachers, my friends are teachers, and I spoke to them before I came on this program and I said, do you have transgender children at your school?
And they said yes.
I said, do you use their pronouns?
They all said yes.
And I told them about this new guidance.
I said, well, that's unworkable.
And why would we do that together?
How many have they got?
What, how many have they got?
How many transgender?
Very small, each.
Tiny.
But probably at one, one to each.
Right, now what about the people identifying as non-binary, gender-fluid, blah, blah, blah.
But so what?
But there was one school in Brighton where there were a thousand pupils, I think it was something like 300 identifying as non-binary or gender.
It's nonsense.
It's a bad thing.
Sorry, I don't think it is a so what.
I think that when people start having actual surgery to change their bodies in ways that it's not reversible, that isn't a shrug shrug.
We're not talking about that.
Taviscott Clinic is talking about.
So Taviscott Clinic was creating two blockers on the altar of virtue signalling nonsense and children were being mutilated at that altar and it's completely outrageous.
So that's what was going on there.
That's very different to people using pronouns in schools.
Well it's a slippery slope isn't it?
Once you start to acquiesce to kids wanting the rights to everything and they rule the roost and they have the final signal.
They're always to be comfortable in their own body.
Parental rights should be absolutely paramount.
Now there is an exception where there is a genuine belief based on teacher knowledge, social services maybe whatever, of violence towards a child who may say something like that when they go home.
That is different and that's been allowed for in this case.
No, this guidance specifically says as well, even if it's agreed by the parents and by the school, the school will not take it on.
But there's a specific criteria for kids who may be at risk.
Teachers will be able to withhold information if they believe a child could be put at significant risk.
So it's in there.
But they're not going to be using their pronouns.
Can I just tell you, that isn't unusual.
In terms of safeguarding, that's quite normal.
Teachers are always very careful to ensure that the child comes first.
And if there is a concern about risk of harm, significant harm, then they will, of course, do what they need to do in terms of contacting the appropriate professionals to ensure that the child is cared for first before the parent finds out.
That's not unusual.
What my concern is is exactly what you've just been amplifying.
This parental right over the child rights.
Yes.
No.
No.
Sorry, yes.
Yes, until they're legal adults, the parent has the rights.
That is our job.
This is why I'm glad we're actually having this debate and this is decided and the consultation period is required.
But what we should not be doing is adding flames to this culture war because it's not a culture war.
You are doing that.
And now it's about our children.
You've had Kenny Badenoff say that there is no child born in the wrong body.
How can you tell me that this is a problem?
If you had your way, Paul.
If you had your way, you'd have kids, young girls at school.
I've got a 12-year-old daughter, right?
You'd have her up against 6'5-inch biological males at 4.
Oh, come on.
You'd have her having to share the toilets and bathrooms with biological males.
It's an unattractive.
You'd have a bunch of her friends identifying as cats.
And you know what it is?
It is licensed.
It is chaos.
And actually bordering on abuse.
I think it is bordering on abuse.
I think that we will look back on this era in future as a period in which we allowed our, we actually encourage children to become incredibly confused.
And it is terrible for mental health to keep projecting all this, oh, you might be this, you might be that.
Look, the vast, vast majority of people are either a boy or a girl.
And they don't need their mind befuddled with a learning.
And we always don't need.
What we don't need is people like Sam Smith who started off as a gay man, a year later he's non-binary, then he wants to be called they, them, then he wants to be gender fluid, blah, blah, blah.
It is just faddism.
It is.
Yes.
All the kind of funnily.
And he demands.
By the way, let's not forget that this year, thanks to him and his campaign, he demanded that Brita Walls go gender neutral.
And what happened in the best individual singer category?
They're all blokes, the nominees.
Look, all men.
On page one of that guidance, it questions whether gender dysphoria is even legitimate.
It questions whether, you know, could someone get to the wrong body?
Maybe more questions should be asked.
Totally.
You're simply going, I'm actually, I'm a girl, I'm a boy when you're not.
But no one's fitting like that.
We're talking about people who genuinely feel like they're doing it because they're all chasing a fad.
It's just like in the 70s when David Bowie put makeup on, they all wore makeup.
Kids do that.
Anyways, kids living there.
Yes, someone are self-harming periods.
Yes, some people are all surprised.
Defamation and Free Speech00:14:56
I don't deny that.
And so we're going to be able to do that.
I don't deny that.
And it's really important to me.
And not come across as if nobody else is going to be able to do that.
And we know what they're not getting.
Because so many kids are being encouraged to identify as anything they like, the ones who really need help are getting lost in the wash.
So you've accepted that there are ones that really need help.
So do I.
So do I. All right.
I'm glad we all agreed.
Nice to see you all.
Uncensored next.
Am I a free speech hypocrite?
Well, I don't think we've shown that just now.
Steve Crowder has told his millions of followers that I am.
And he joins me next because I believe in free speech.
Welcome back to Uncensored.
Last week I criticized Elon Musk's decision to allow the massacre denying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to return to X, formerly Twitter.
Some people weren't happy.
They included the influential conservative personality, Stephen Crowder.
This is what he had to say on his show, Louder with Crowder, about me.
This brings us to Piers Morgan's rules for me.
He hosted Alex Jones on his very own program this year.
Piers Morgan doesn't understand what freedom of speech is.
Piers Morgan has also hosted Sahel Shaheen, the Taliban spokesperson.
Jeez.
Wahina Sif Shaida, an Islamist extremist leader.
Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Semitic Labour Party leader.
Just Pierce.
Stop.
I'm sorry.
Fraud.
Fraud.
There we go.
Well, in the spirit of hosting very controversial people on my free speech platform, I'm now joined by Stephen Crowder, who can call me a free speech hypocrite to my face.
Mr. Crowder, good day to you.
How are you?
Well, thank you, Pierce.
Merry Christmas.
And let me say off the bat, I do actually appreciate about you.
Your audience may not know how rare this is that you do these interviews live.
You don't chop them up.
You actually have a discussion.
And I've been advocating for that my whole life.
So really, I appreciate it.
Those are steps in the right direction.
Well, they are.
And to be honest with you, the debate about what constitutes free speech and whether there should be limits and if there should be what they are, I think is really interesting.
And a lot of people have strong opinions about this.
And I'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong or to at least have a debate with someone who's got strong views that don't necessarily tally with mine.
So I welcome you to the program.
Let's start with your assessment that I'm a free speech hypocrite.
So articulate to me why you believe that.
I believe the word I used there was fraud.
You earlier used hypocrite.
Okay, I don't remember saying it, but I'll take your word for it.
And to some degree, I believe it.
Look, I think that in hosting a show uncensored, and I can't see you, but I know you put up the very festive holly leaf on the globe there.
It is incumbent upon you, you will say, I believe in the concept of free speech.
Now, I'll be very clear in my definition of free speech.
It's the constitutional definition of freedom of speech.
All speech is permissible outside of a crime.
And we have very clear parameters, and these have been affirmed by the Supreme Court, as to what that is.
That's a proactive call for violence.
The crime is not the speech.
The crime is the action causing violence on purpose.
Outside of that, everything is permissible.
But for a show uncensored, and I know that you said there's a difference between across the pond there, and obviously in the United States, we have a First Amendment that you don't.
How would you define freedom of speech?
What is freedom?
See, I don't think we're as far apart as you think.
I mean, you talk about the First Amendment not protecting, for example, crime.
It's a little bit more complicated.
For example, it doesn't protect you if you deliberately defame somebody.
And my argument about Alex Jones in particular was that he's just been punished with over a billion dollar fine in one of the biggest defamation cases in modern American history for deliberately telling lies about the families of the poor victims of the Sandy Hook massacre over a sustained period of time, which led to them getting direct harassment and other criminal activity.
So I was joining all the dots there of his particular situation, and I concurred with Elon Musk's original view when he was asked about it when he first bought Twitter last year, which was he was not going to allow him back on.
He's now changed his mind, but my opinion was based on the Constitution of the United States, not protecting you if you are guilty of defamation.
Well, okay, so I'm going to have to take the rounds out of that magazine from how loaded that question was and so much misinformation there.
And that's the beauty of the freedom of speech.
You can say that.
You can speak misinformation and you have the right to, for example, saying he knowingly lied.
Look, I'm not in the business of defending everything that Alex Jones, everything that Alex Jones has said, okay?
But if you're going to say the 22 minutes out of 8,000 hours of broadcast time for which he apologized, acknowledged that he was wrong, constitutes what you are saying is proactively lying.
That is a very dangerous question.
It's not accurate.
Hang on.
Hang on.
It's not accurate.
Stephen, he did deliberately lie for a sustained period of time for years about these families.
He knew Sandy Jean.
Tell me how he deliberately lied.
He knew that.
Tell me how he deliberately lied.
He deliberately lied.
And he was found to have deliberately lied.
Tell me how he deliberately lied.
And by the way, in his defense, he tried to say that.
Tell me how he deliberately lied, please.
In his defense, he tried to play the First Amendment card and it was rejected by the judge.
Rejected.
Tell me how he deliberately lied, please.
Because he knew that it wasn't a hoax.
He knew the massacre had happened.
This is what he said.
That's incorrect.
Let's play what he said.
Yook, it's got inside job written all over it.
Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured.
I couldn't believe it at first.
People just instinctively know that there's a lot of fraud going on.
But it took me about a year with Sandy Hook to come to grips with the fact that the whole thing was fake.
Whole thing was fake.
Repeatedly.
A series of different shows he did.
You still haven't answered.
You still have an answer.
That doesn't prove that he knowingly lied.
I mean, Alex Jones is wrong about a lot.
You're a very smart.
Alex Jones is wrong about a lot.
Stephen, you and I disagree.
But he's also a friend.
Stephen wants to.
You and I disagree.
I believed it.
I'm going to respond to you.
You and I disagree about many things.
We agree about many too, right?
On this point, you're a very smart guy.
I wouldn't question that for a moment.
You and I both know Alex Jones knew that that was not faked, Sandy Hook.
You and I both know that.
So I have to split the words out that you just tried to place in my mouth.
I do not know that.
I don't agree with the premise.
And you have yet to prove it.
Here's the beauty, though.
I don't have to.
No, it didn't.
And even assuming that he didn't.
They found him guilty of defamation with your audience.
And I'm going to continue speaking as though we're having a dialogue.
Even assuming that you don't discuss the caps, that he would never pay out the far lower settlement that they have decided they would allow, considering this will go to a superior court and will get thrown out.
Even if you allow all of the people, here's the beauty of the First Amendment.
Here's the beauty of the First Amendment.
Even if you at one point commit defamation, you still don't forfeit your right to speak going on.
No, you don't agree with fundamental human rights.
I agree.
And that's not why he was banned from, that's not why he was banned from Twitter.
You know that.
He was banned from Twitter, having a pop at some guy from CNN.
I don't care about that.
I'm more interested in why Elon Musk tweeted when he bought Twitter and was asked, will he bring back Alex Jones?
He said, no, I won't allow somebody back on, having gone through the pain himself of a child dying in his own arms, one of his children.
He wasn't going to allow someone who profited from the pain of dead children to be back on the platform.
He then changed his mind, which he's allowed to do.
He owns the platform.
X is a private company owned by Elon Musk.
He can do what he likes with it.
But they also have a series of rules which are available on their website, which you can check about what is allowed and not allowed.
And they will de-platform you if you transgress those rules.
And my point to you is that the situation with Alex Jones is that he was found guilty in an American court of defamation.
And yes, it's entirely down to Elon Musk that he can bring him back.
But I agree with the first version of Elon Musk's decision-making, not the second one, based on a completely undemocratic poll he put on his own Twitter feed.
Well, I agree with you that it shouldn't be left to a Democratic poll because the First Amendment is not subject to a vote.
Right, right.
But you accept the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has a number of things which are excluded from protection, whether it's child pornography, fraud, defamation.
There's a whole list of things which you'll simply...
But that has nothing to do with speech.
No, no, but you're confusing.
But I think you've mischaracterized what I said then because I've never said he hasn't got a right to say what he wants.
He can say what he likes.
I believe fundamentally in anyone's right to say whatever they want.
The question is accountability.
And the U.S. Constitution, which you don't think I know anything about, but actually I know a lot about.
And I'm a huge-I didn't say you don't know anything about it.
I really don't believe you anymore.
From that same show you did, you basically said, I don't know much about the U.S. Constitution because I'm not American.
And that's fine.
But I have lived and worked in America over 20 years.
I have tried to really get a handle on the US Constitution.
And on the issue of the First Amendment, it is a complicated thing.
It's not as simple as saying you can say whatever you want.
Well, it is because it doesn't allow the unfettered free speech with protection.
Are you suggesting that?
It absolutely does.
It doesn't.
It absolutely does.
Barring.
Would you like me to explain?
Barring what I've already outlined.
Actual criminal behavior calling for violence against other people.
For example, Pierce, look.
But including defamation.
And I'm saying this in your defense.
For example, you made your joke about being a two-spirited penguin, right?
I thought it was cute.
I think it was funny.
And I understand the point that you were trying to make.
Okay.
You have had people accuse you of creating violence against Trent.
You know that.
And we know it's absurd.
So who defines what is actually calling for violence or if you're basically in a roundabout way, maybe causing violence?
No, unless you called for violence.
No, but you keep saying that.
You keep saying that your only barrier on free speech is crime.
And I keep reminding you that Alex Jones was found guilty of defamation.
And that is one of the things that's not protected by the First Amendment.
No, it's not protected in a cipher.
You can have civil damages and your First Amendment rights don't cease to exist.
In other words, you can pay.
You can pay the Piper for what you have done.
And you'll still be held accountable.
So someone, if someone at some point, if someone accuses you of defamation and let's say has a suit levied against you that actually, by God, is successful.
Let's say that, does that forbid you from speaking publicly thereafter?
No, you don't lose it.
It's a fundamental human right.
Not at all.
But it does allow, I'm exercising my rights to free speech to say I think he shouldn't be allowed back on X, which was the position of the owner of X until last week.
So my point is that Elon Musk has made two judgment calls about this.
One I agreed with and one I didn't.
And I'm exercising my free speech rights to say I don't agree with it.
You are, you are.
And I completely support your right to that.
The problem is Elon Musk changed his mind in the face of new information.
And if we want to have productive dialogues, we need to allow...
You know what?
This is one thing I often ask.
And by the way, I think that none of this is a gotcha for Twitter clicks.
I hope to God it's not.
How often when you were on CNN or how often when you were on your morning show there in the UK?
Or how often do you see on any news network someone say, you know what?
New information came out.
and I was wrong.
And I say that because you've done it and I appreciate it.
You said, you know what, if I knew what I know now about the COVID vaccine, specifically that if you get the COVID vaccine, you cannot transmit it.
If I knew that that was incorrect, I wouldn't have espoused the views that I did.
I think that's a beautiful thing.
And I think the problem that we have in today's society is not wanting to allow people to be wrong, to make mistakes.
In the realm of comedy, look, good jokes and bad jokes come from the same place.
Sometimes you have to risk something and it's not funny.
I agree with you about all that.
I've got to ask an opinion.
Yeah, but I agree with you about all that.
I agree with that.
That's really the bedrock of the show.
But I come back again to why I had a particular issue with the Alex Jones thing is that unlike the other circumstances you're describing, in his case, he was found guilty of a serious defamation against the Sandy Hook families.
He was fined over a billion dollars.
So far, he's not paid a dime of that money.
And, you know, Elon Musk has made two calls on him.
Like I said, the first one, I agreed with.
I don't think that people like Alex Jones should be allowed an unchallenged, unfettered public platform to spew lies, which are done deliberately, in my estimation.
Dispute lies.
Are you out of your trees here?
No, no, no.
It's assessable.
Anyone can say anything back.
People can reply to him, but no one can have a direct challenge to Alex Jones.
Like I did when he came on my show.
You picked out, for example, that he came on my show, Jeremy Corbyn, Taliban spokesman, and so on.
Yes, because in each of those cases, I put them through the mincer, right?
And I'm prepared to have them on to give them a hard time and challenge them.
You might agree or disagree with that, but they're all pretty volatile interviews.
But I was able to challenge what I perceive to be their untruths, right?
I'll show you a clip of the Corbyn one to show you what I mean.
Have a look at it.
You seem to be overconcerned with anti-Semitism.
No, no, I did not.
Should Hamas stay in power?
You've done yet.
It's actually a critical question.
It's a critical question.
Are you done yet?
No, it's the question.
Are you done yet?
Should they stay in power?
This country says they're a terror group.
Do you agree?
And should they stay in power?
Listen, I do not approve, support, or welcome Hamas.
Are you prepared to call Hamas a terror group?
Is it possible to have a rationale?
You can't, can you?
Is it possible?
Come on, answer that question.
You can't, can you?
You answer it.
No, it's my show.
You answer my question.
Now, the point of playing that clip, other than to entertain you, as I'm sure it did, is that, yes.
I hate that clip.
I hate everything about that clip.
Why do you hate it?
I hate it because I don't like Jeremy Corbyn, but I think he's a bombastic prick.
But I also think that you should have let him finish speaking.
Why?
Because then he would express bad ideas.
That's why I support Fred Williams.
But actually, in the end, I could tell very quickly he was never going to give an answer.
And therefore, we were in a game of cat and mouse, which went on so long that the viewer was left in no uncertain terms what his answer actually was.
Because otherwise, you just say Hamas or a terror group.
It's not difficult.
And in fact, two days later, he admitted Hamas or a terror group.
That was his position.
But only after I shamed him into doing it.
David Duke, the former KKK leader, he's banned from Twitter.
Government Immunity Debated00:05:04
Elon Musk hasn't brought him back.
Should he be allowed to be back on X?
Throw that at me.
Really?
You just say, I want to ask someone a straight question.
You have me here.
I'm basically a specter.
I don't appear on anyone.
You want to ask me about David Duke?
Yes.
He's because he's banned from Twitter.
Should David Duke be allowed back on X?
Yes.
I'm not as familiar with David Duke as I am with Alex, which is why I was able to point out that you cannot prove that he knowingly lied about anything.
If David Duke has called for the violence, look, if David Duke has called for the violence, actions of violence against minority groups, then no.
If David Duke has espoused horrible points of view that can be refuted, by the way, not only by other people who are on X, but by the community notes on X and on a platform where people are free to speak on both sides of the aisle, then yes.
It doesn't mean that I think he's anything other than a racist prick.
So I'm trying to work.
Can I make one point?
Yeah.
Can I make one point that I think is very, this is really, and hopefully we can agree on this because I actually disagree with you that Elon Musk can do whatever he wants with his own platform.
It comes down to this.
I think, and if you look at the historical record, I think it is far more dangerous for society to engage in a culture of censorship, of viewpoint discrimination, than it is to allow people to speak freely, barring the committing of violent crimes.
I think that we see a far worse, a far worse dystopia in our future if we allow the government and these big tech platforms to determine who can speak and who cannot.
And we've seen some very clear examples of this.
If you give me 30 seconds, let me lay this out for you.
For example, I don't think they have the right to, for example, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.
Here's why.
They benefit from Section 230.
Now, I know you have a lot of fans in the UK.
They may not be familiar with this.
Let me explain what it means.
They're basically treated like public utilities, meaning that they have immunity from liability for someone saying something on their platform.
For example, ATT here in the States can't ban you from their phone service because your racist Aunt Tilly drops an N-bomb after a few drinks at Thanksgiving.
They're a public utility.
These big tech platforms are treated as platforms where they are not legally liable for what is permitted, but that allows them to engage in viewpoint discrimination.
And then there is no accountability.
For example, the Hunter Biden laptop story, which we know, and this is why I make all references publicly available because I want to be held to account and I will be held to account, would have changed the election if the government was not.
And when I say colluding, I mean Joe Biden, Jen Sackey, Kamala Harris, Karen Jean-Pierre, calling for the removal of Joe Rogan from Spotify, calling for the removal of vaccine scientists, by the way, of mRNA vaccine scientists from public platforms.
If all information was allowed to be transmitted freely, like the platforms as they are treated under our legal precedent here and Section 230, guess what?
Donald Trump would be president.
I'm saying this as a matter of record and fact.
Millions of people would not have gotten the mRNA vaccine, specifically men under 30, and lockdowns would have lasted days, weeks, not years.
That is irrefutable, but you had the government and these platforms deciding which views were allowed and which views weren't.
And I don't think I should be allowed.
You should be allowed.
And certainly not the government colluding with five companies who control over 90% of the information in the digital sphere.
It is terrifying to me.
So you may think I'm an absolutist.
I think I'm reasonable.
No, no, I actually don't think that's unreasonable at all.
In fact, I have written numerous columns about the outrage of the New York Post having that initial expose of Hunter Biden's laptop censored by Twitter as it was then for two weeks right before the 2020 election.
I've said to Donald Trump to his face, never mind the stolen election bullshit you keep trying to pretend happened.
I said, focus on that because that probably swung the election because it stopped the media investigating properly what was going on with Hunter Biden in Ukraine and what his father's involvement would be.
I think that could have swung the election.
So I absolutely agree with you.
Let me give you a funny story about, and not only could it, it would have, according to Dr. Epstein.
Do you realize?
Now, I'm a comedian, right?
This show, that's why I appreciate you said, hey, you got a chuckle from our segment.
Some of it is tongue-in-cheek, and I appreciate that you recognize that and not try and use, you know, you acknowledge that it's a joke, whether it's funny or not.
So, as a comedian, the host of a comedy show, Rudy Giuliani was on this show.
And the first time the public ever saw Hunter Biden's laptop was on this show.
He brought it up.
He goes, I have the laptop here.
The FBI came to third my offices.
They took everything but the laptop.
I go, wait, wait, wait.
Is that the Hunter Biden laptop?
He said yes.
Episode is banned.
Suspended from YouTube.
Think about that.
Think of how terrifying it is.
It was an accident.
It's wrong.
It's wrong.
Let me ask you, though.
Yesterday on your show, you appeared wearing a t-shirt saying Alex Jones was right, changed my mind.
So my question is, what was he right about?
Oh, gosh, how much time do you have?
Well, are you talking about Sandy Hook?
No, I'm not talking about Sandy Hook.
He said he was wrong about Sandy Hook.
Right.
He apologized for Sandy Hook.
When he was sued, he said he was wrong.
Helmets for Real Men00:06:08
Eventually, but I'm saying, obviously, the shirt wouldn't be addressing that.
If it's he says I was wrong, it would be awfully daft.
But what are you alluding to then?
I'm alluding to, for crying out, if you talk about intelligence agencies spying on Americans, if you talk about what we've done with South American countries, as allowing the spread of STDs for which Hillary Clinton apologized for, if you talk about nation building where there have been underhanded deals with nations who don't have our best interests at heart, I mean, it's, you know, take your pick.
I don't believe that, for example, George W. Bush was next to the Twin Towers with an Acme plunger.
No, I'm not that kind of a conspiracy theorist.
But when Alex Jones said, look, you are going to be corralled into social media ghettos and lose your right to speak, he was right.
He's right about a lot.
And I will say this.
He's been wrong about plenty.
I am not here to defend everything that Alex Jones has ever said.
I'm willing to defend everything that I have said on my program.
But that man is exactly who you would expect him to be.
He's a friend of mine.
And when everyone else tucked tail and they ran, I'm not going to do that.
I'll tell him he's wrong.
I'll tell you where I think he's wrong.
But that man has a right to speak, just like I believe you have the right to speak.
And Pierce, if you think they're not going to come for you, oh my word, do you have another thing coming?
And I hope that you don't.
I genuinely hope that you don't.
I mean, I've had people say that I was a hate speaker because I said soccer was gay.
I do.
I think so.
You think soccer's gay?
Homosexual, yes.
You know what?
That's a whole nother debate, Stephen Crowder.
Let's have a debate about whether soccer is gay.
And if it is, by the way, I would be happy to embrace its homosexual side.
Well, I know you would.
I know you would.
But with that accent, you have to be careful.
People take you seriously.
I think it's great.
I think it's great if you're a six-year-old girl or a homosexual from Greece, to quote Nick DiPaolo.
Yeah, you know the difference in our football and your football.
We don't wear helmets to protect ourselves.
We're real men over here.
You also don't allow contact.
We're real men over here.
There's no great padding or great shoulder pads and helmets.
We just get stuck into each other.
And that's the difference.
Americans.
We like to wear helmets and carry guns.
We just use these guns.
But that's a whole other debate as well.
Stephen Crowder, I've got to leave it there.
It's been a good debate.
I've actually enjoyed the tone of this debate.
I think it's a really interesting area, free speech.
I think ultimately we agree about more things with free speech than we disagree.
But let's keep the debate going.
Thank you for joining me.
Merry Christmas, Pierce.
I appreciate it.
Angie, all the best.
Uncensored next, as the Israel-Hamas war sparks fears of a decades-long conflict and a radicalized generation.
Is religion itself the biggest problem?
Philosopher Sam Harris is with me to give his take.
Welcome back to Uncensored.
I'm joined now by Sam Harris, one of the world's great thinkers.
Sam, I know you were listening to that debate I just had about free speech.
Where do you sit on that?
And in particular, Elon Musk's reversal of his decision to keep Alex Jones off the platform eggs.
Well, I think we're pretty confused on this particular point.
I think much that is said about free speech, especially in America, doesn't really have to do with free speech when you're talking about these platforms.
For instance, these platforms have to be moderated.
It's never a question.
It's never been a question of anything like, quote, free speech absolutism on these platforms.
If they're not moderated, if you're not cleaning up some of the toxicity, X or Facebook or any of these other mainstream platforms would be like 4chan or 8chan, right?
I mean, it would just be a completely sociopathic free-for-all.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody would tolerate that.
Certainly advertisers wouldn't spend any money to be next to that.
So as much as people call him a free speech absolutist and he even calls himself that, that's never been in the cards.
And he's banned people, as you know, for a wide variety of idiosyncratic reasons.
And then he's brought Alex Jones back saying that he would never do that.
And I think it's a mistake.
I think Alex Jones is a genuinely bad actor.
I think he monetized the misery of the Sandy Hook parent in a way that's truly unconscionable and unforgivable.
And while he says he's apologized, he hasn't quite apologized for that, at least not in my hearing.
No.
You know, so he's, yeah, I just think, I think once you admit that even these public companies are platforms that are not analogous to the public square, right?
You can't simply use the First Amendment in the U.S. and say anything that's legal can be said here, right?
Because then it becomes a business that is guaranteed to fail.
So they're businesses, right?
And I think Elon's...
I also think that the hearing Stephen Crowder try to say that, well, for all we know, you implied Alex Jones would have believed that Sandy Hook was fake.
Nobody thinks that.
Alex Jones knew it wasn't staged.
Stephen Crowder knows that Alex Jones knew it wasn't staged.
We all do.
He deliberately flew with that conspiracy theory to generate vast amounts of wealth for himself.
Several hundred million dollars came off the back purely of the reaction to that conspiracy theory.
That's why he did it.
So there's a disingenuousness at the heart of that of people who defend him over whether he believed it or not.
No one with a brain thinks he believed it.
There are Sandy Hook parents that have moved 10 times since he went berserk in their direction, right?
And he knew his fans.
Very early on, he knew what the consequences of his actions were, whatever he believed.
Yeah, they were being harassed in the street.
One poor man said at one of the cases that his son's grave had been urinated on as a direct result of what Alex Jones was saying on air.
And that just made me want to cry, actually.
It was just horrific.
Let's turn to why you actually came on tonight.
Religious Symbols Unthinkable00:04:02
We had an interesting debate last night involving several people.
One was Mossad Hassam Yousev.
He's the son of one of the Hamas co-founders who then renounced Hamas and moved away.
And he said this about what's going on at the moment in the Israel-Gaza War.
Let's take a listen.
Any person who put the religious identity above the highest interest of humanity, I have no respect for these people.
The majority of the Muslim people identified with Hamas, supported Hamas.
Show me how many Muslims out there who condemned Hamas' genocide.
What was interesting about that is that he was really suggesting that the motivating factor behind what Hamas did and why people are supporting them in such big numbers in the Muslim community is because they're Muslims.
It's religion driven.
Now, you're an atheist, but what do you think of that, of this idea that it's actually really about religion?
We have a vast number of people in the Muslim community worldwide, not just in the occupied territories or in Gaza, who are powerfully deranged by religious symbols and their religious identity, which is to say it is the most important thing to them, more important even than the deaths of their own children.
We're talking about a culture, again, I'm not talking about just Palestinians.
I'm talking about the Muslim community worldwide, in dozens of countries, that has produced a seemingly unending supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years.
We're talking about societies where phenomenon that should be impossible are simply to be expected.
I mean, literally like rigging children to explode.
I mean, think of how deranging that is for an army or a police force or an NGO or anyone to have to imagine that a child isn't simply a child, but a child might in fact, under certain circumstances, be a bomb, right?
I mean, that is the situation we're in.
We're talking about a society, and now I'm talking about Gaza and the West Bank in particular, where in their schools, they teach six-year-olds the love of martyrdom, the literal aspiration to die as a martyr, and the hatred of Jews.
And many of these schools are UN-funded, right?
So this is a terrifying situation, which the world has simply acquiesced to.
I mean, the world on some level has simply accepted that there is a different standard held to the Muslim community, right?
We all understand that you can stage a play making fun of Mormonism on Broadway and it can become the biggest musical in the United States, the Book of Mormon.
But to stage such a play about Islam would be unthinkable.
And to be unthinkable, not because the First Amendment doesn't protect the freedom of speech with respect to Islam, it does, but that protection has been forfeited.
It was forfeited long ago because of the tendency in the Muslim community to erupt with just psychopathic rage in response to what it perceives to be the desecration of religious symbols.
And that should be intolerable to us, but it's, you know, we have acquiesced to it.
And the new norm is there are certain things you can't say about Islam.
There are certain symbols you can't traduce.
And it's because we know that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people will march into the streets, even in the capitals of Europe.
Some people would say that the scale, the disproportionate, as many see it, scale of Israel's response is motivated in some part, again, by a religious motivation, that some of the more hardline ultra-religious members of Netanyahu's cabinet really do want to have some kind of genocidal war with the Muslim Palestinians.
I mean, does it work both ways?
Well, it does work both ways when you're talking about a tiny minority of Jews in Israel.
Ultra-Orthodox Settlers Motivated00:00:45
I mean, the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers who, the minority of settlers who are motivated by their religious fanaticism.
Yeah, I think those religious claims upon real estate in the Middle East are not justified and they aren't, in fact, part of the problem.
And so, yes, the settlements in the West Bank are certainly provocative and they should be disallowed, right?
If we were ever going to get to a two-state solution, part of the remedy there is to disenfranchise the religious maniacs on the Israeli side.
Sam Harris, great to talk to you.
Again, I really appreciate you coming on and speaking with such pleasure.