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Epstein's Missing Figure
00:15:08
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| I'm Douglas Murray on Uncensored. | |
| Tonight, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Professor Stephen Hawking are among the high-profile people named in bombshell documents connected to Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| But are we missing the most important figure in all of this? | |
| Jeffrey Epstein himself? | |
| We'll investigate. | |
| And do court cases and ballot bans only make Donald Trump's chances of winning the White House stronger? | |
| We'll look forward to the U.S. presidential election that will shape the world. | |
| And from James Bond to Doctor Who, our trigger warnings and an obsession with inclusion and diversity ruining our most loved shows. | |
| Actor and comedian James Dreyfus will join me live. | |
| Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan, Uncensored. | |
| Good evening and welcome to Uncensored, where it's my final night holding the fort for Piers. | |
| He's going to be back on air next week. | |
| However, if you're missing Mr. Morgan's hot takes on the really big topics, then he is still very active on social media. | |
| Here's one of his overnight posts. | |
| We're three days into the transfer window and Arsenal still haven't signed a striker or even made a move for one. | |
| What the hell are you waiting for, Artita? | |
| Arteta? | |
| Well, we're all thinking it, aren't we? | |
| Even if we're not saying it. | |
| Anyway, on to other matters. | |
| And there really is only one place to start this evening. | |
| Court files and documents containing previously hidden identities of people associated in some way with the late notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are now unsealed. | |
| And the names revealed are a mix of the scandalous, President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, the surprising, Professor Stephen Hawking, and the truly surreal, David Copperfield, the magician. | |
| Now, the first thing that has to be said is that the inclusion of a name in the documents doesn't mean that that person is guilty of any illegality or indeed inappropriateness. | |
| But, let's be honest, being on Jeffrey's secret list isn't something you'll be rushing to put in the hobbies and interests section of your CV. | |
| Overall, however, my take on this dark story is that even with the list now out in public, there are still more questions than answers. | |
| And the number one question for me is this. | |
| Who exactly was Jeffrey Epstein? | |
| Was he merely a very rich sex offender with a lot of famous friends who enjoyed taking a ride on his private aeroplane or visiting his luxury island? | |
| Or was there something else going on? | |
| One theory, which I myself have heard from trusted associates, is that Jeffrey Epstein was an invention, deliberately and carefully created by those who wanted to keep an eye, perhaps even a leash, on the rich and powerful. | |
| Here's a friend of mine, the physicist Eric Weinstein, talking to my guest from yesterday, Chris Williamson, about his meeting Jeffrey Epstein for the first time. | |
| And my take on it instantly was this is not an actual human. | |
| This is a construct of someone's. | |
| Someone has created a fake human being called Jeffrey Epstein, who's a mysterious currency trading financier with crazy rules so that no one would ever invest with him. | |
| And I think that was to keep people from seeking his investment services. | |
| I mean, you know, he's labeled disgraced financier, but nobody has a record of trading with him. | |
| And so the theory goes, Epstein was an asset created in order to trap powerful people in compromising positions, which could then be used in order to control them. | |
| The Russians call that compromise, and they are very good at it. | |
| Now, I don't know if this is even close to being true, but I will say this. | |
| In 2024, simply claiming something is a conspiracy theory doesn't necessarily make it false. | |
| Not anymore. | |
| And the more that comes out about Epstein, including still very mysterious circumstances surrounding his death in custody, means that I'm willing to at least consider alternative narratives other than the one being fed to us through official channels. | |
| Now, joining me now is the author and investigative journalist Vicki Ward, the author of War Against the Jews, and Jeffrey Epstein's former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and the man I mentioned in my monologue, physicist and podcaster, Eric Weinstein. | |
| Thank you all so much for being with me tonight. | |
| First of all, Vicki Ward, if I may, you wrote, were commissioned to write an incredibly important article way back in 2003 about Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| It was called The Talented Mr. Epstein. | |
| And you've since said that there were significant efforts to sort of keep some of your revelations out. | |
| What exactly happened there? | |
| Well, you know, what happened there was Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| You know, he was an extraordinary manipulator, not just of young, vulnerable women, but of rich, powerful men. | |
| And, you know, what happened in my reporting was that, you know, I still don't know all of the details, but I had the on the record allegations of two sisters, two women. | |
| And, you know, those allegations were cut from my story. | |
| And, you know, Jeffrey Epstein had gone to great lengths to meet with then editor of Vanity Fair. | |
| And at the same time, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was a formidable person to write about. | |
| You know, he threatened me. | |
| I was pregnant with my children. | |
| And he told me that if he didn't like what I wrote, he would have a witch doctor place a curse on my unborn children. | |
| He told me he'd found out where I was giving birth. | |
| You know, I add, this didn't stop me from reporting the absolute best that I could. | |
| And I did debunk some of the claims he made about his own financial professional life. | |
| But, you know, the whole thing was, Douglas, a nightmare. | |
| Can I ask you also, Vicki, just quickly, were there any of the names that were released today which surprised you? | |
| No, I didn't know about David Copperfield. | |
| And I don't think I'd read about Stephen Hawking. | |
| But no, they didn't surprise me. | |
| I mean, you know, I've been covering this story for over two decades. | |
| So I was very familiar with a lot of this. | |
| I mean, what it just did was solidify a picture by putting specific names in places. | |
| But I think that unfortunately, the documents still don't show a different part of Jeffrey Epstein's life, which is the manipulation of the powerful people. | |
| It was a horrific portrait of this horrific sexual subculture in his homes, but it didn't explain why people like Bill Clinton and massive philanthropists like Leslie Wexner, why they wanted to be around this man. | |
| And I'm sure your other guests are going to have a lot of insight into that because it wasn't because he had a whole group of underage women around him. | |
| Thank you, Vicki. | |
| Can I just come next to Alan Dershowitz? | |
| Thank you so much, Professor Dershowitz, for being with us. | |
| First of all, of course, you were Epstein's lawyer at one point, and you were also named in these released documents today. | |
| How do you respond to this? | |
| Well, first of all, the woman who accused me has now admitted that she may have confused me with someone else, may have been a case of mistaken identity, and she's dropped all of her legal charges. | |
| I first met Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| I was introduced to him by the lady Rothschild. | |
| And she asked me to meet him because he was a major contributor at Harvard. | |
| And I agreed to meet with him and went to some seminars that he conducted at Harvard with president of Harvard, with major, major academic figures. | |
| But from the day I met Jeffrey Epstein until the day he died, I have had sexual contact with one woman and one woman only, my wife. | |
| And so I was one of those who wanted these papers to be released. | |
| My disappointment is that only some have been released. | |
| I want everything to be released because they will confirm the fact that I did nothing wrong. | |
| And they would also shed light on other people who have been accused, some truthfully, some falsely, some falsely. | |
| But the key point is that we can't have just partial releases of material. | |
| In many of these cases, the accusation is there, but the rebuttal is not there or the disproof is not there. | |
| So for the public to form a valid judgment, you need a full release. | |
| I don't need that because in my case, the woman who accused me has admitted that she may have mistaken me for someone else. | |
| But I think others may very well need the full evidence to be exculpated into proof. | |
| But some don't want it because they may very well. | |
| On that, just very quickly, I mean, President Clinton is mentioned more than 50 times in these documents, and he maintains he never visited Epstein's island. | |
| Donald Trump's also mentioned in there. | |
| But do you think politicians and others should explain their exact links with Jeffrey Epstein? | |
| Yeah, for example, I'll give you a story. | |
| I was having dinner. | |
| This is a name-jumping story with Caroline Kennedy, the former president's daughter, and her husband, and Bill Clinton, and another couple. | |
| And the phone rang. | |
| This was on Martha's Vineyard. | |
| And the Secret Survivor was president. | |
| The Secret Service gave him the phone. | |
| He went away and walked for about 15 minutes, had a vibrant conversation. | |
| I didn't hear it. | |
| And then he came back with the phone and saying, Alan, somebody wants to say hello to you. | |
| And he handed me the phone. | |
| It was Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| So this was way before any accusations or anything was suggested about Epstein. | |
| But obviously, Clinton and Epstein had a friendship. | |
| And in most cases, in my example, my friendship totally terminated the day the accusations came out. | |
| I did serve as his lawyer, but never again socialized with him once I had heard these accusations. | |
| I think that's probably true of some people. | |
| In other cases, people continued to have a friendship with him, even after he served his sentence in prison. | |
| And they do have some explaining to do, but that doesn't prove guilty. | |
| Let me bring in Eric Weinstein who's been patiently waiting in LA. | |
| Eric, we heard earlier a bit of your description of Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| You met him once more than 20 years ago. | |
| Can you just quickly briefly recap what your impression was? | |
| Simply that he was introduced to me in a financial context. | |
| I was interested in investment in a so-called carry trade in foreign exchange. | |
| He didn't seem to have any interest in that. | |
| He said that he was a currency trader. | |
| There was no obvious evidence that he was a currency trader. | |
| He didn't speak like one. | |
| And he seemed to be very interested, as per the previous comment about Stephen Hawking, in my work on what might be called post-Einsteinian physics. | |
| In particular, if you check out his sponsorship of a conference that he held in the Virgin Islands called Confronting Gravity, he was very interested in science. | |
| This obviously is an area with potential military applications. | |
| He was a very strange person from beginning to end. | |
| I don't really believe when you say that, that he was a strange person. | |
| I mean, describe some of the things that were odd in that first meeting, that one meeting. | |
| Sure. | |
| I don't hear anyone mention the fact that he used an American flag as a tablecloth, making his dinner table look like both a coffin and a trap for you to stain the flag of your own country. | |
| He brought in a woman who I think he introduced as an heiress, who was brawless, that he bounced on his leg at a financial meeting in an attempt to create a distraction. | |
| The whole thing was completely surreal from beginning to end. | |
| I think one thing that you can learn about this is that he created an incredibly intriguing world. | |
| There was no hint. | |
| I think this was like 2003, 2004. | |
| So this is before he gets into trouble in Florida. | |
| And, you know, the whole thing was like a scene out of a movie, and you both wanted to be nowhere close and to know everything about it. | |
| And I walked out of there, called my wife and said, I just met a human being who does not appear to be a normal human being. | |
| He appears to be a construct. | |
| Somebody appears to have constructed something that looks like a financier, but if you scratch the surface, doesn't behave like one, doesn't seem to know a lot about science, although he's very interested in science. | |
| Nothing made any sense. | |
| Up was down, left was right, black was white. | |
| Well, we're going to have to take a short break, but I want to keep all three of you here because I want to get back after the break into this really crucial question of who Jeffrey Epstein actually might have been. | |
| Who do we think he was? | |
| We'll be talking about that and much more after the break. | |
| Welcome back to Uncensive. | |
| Still with me today are author and investigative journalist Vicki Ward, author of The War Against the Jews and Jeffrey Epstein's former defense lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and the physicist Eric Weinstein. | |
| Let me just very quickly, Eric, I just wanted to ask you quickly, what you were saying before the break. | |
| What is the actual allegation you're making? | |
| Who do you think Jeffrey Epstein actually was? | |
| I don't know. | |
| That's a great question. | |
| But I knew that he wasn't who he said he was almost from the instant I started speaking to him. | |
|
Epstein and Intelligence Links
00:10:34
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| If I had to make a guess and you're calling for speculation, I would say that he really belonged to what is almost certainly the covert operations community and that he did not appear to have a prime broker. | |
| Nobody seemed to have traded with him. | |
| Nobody seems to ask questions around him. | |
| So it's very suspicious that we don't, for example, ask for Form 13F. | |
| If he was a major hedge fund trader, it's almost impossible to move through the markets without leaving a wake. | |
| If you have to speculate, I would say that he probably belonged to covert operations for one or more nations. | |
| And that what we're looking at is a very strange. | |
| You can shake your head, Alan, but it's also the case that I don't necessarily believe that you stopped associating with him personally at the time of his conviction in Florida, because I think there are pictures of you at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics socializing with Pinker Trivers. | |
| I don't know. | |
| You tell me. | |
| I'm going to have to go back to Alan Deuschwitz on that. | |
| Alan Deushwitz, how do you respond? | |
| Well, before that, no, he was not a member of any intelligence agencies. | |
| I'm quite sure of that. | |
| And he was not a hedge fund guy. | |
| In fact, once, this is a, you never want to tell humorous stories about Jeffrey Epstein, but he once said to me he wanted to sue a newspaper of the defamation. | |
| And I said, why did they call you a pedophile? | |
| He said, no, they called me a hedge fund guy. | |
| He was very upset at being called a hedge fund guy. | |
| I don't know what his financial business was, but I can be relatively certain he was not an asset for the. | |
| Can I just ask why you're so certain about this? | |
| Because it does seem to have been an intelligence gathering operation of some kind or a compromise situation or blackmail situation, something like that, surely. | |
| It's possible, but I never saw any evidence of that. | |
| He was a guy from Brooklyn, grew up in Coney Island. | |
| He was very curious. | |
| He wasn't as smart as he thought he was. | |
| He didn't know as much about science as he thought he did. | |
| But I can tell you that people like Steven Pinker and people like Stephen Gould and people like the president of Harvard thought he asked good questions during the seminars that we all attended. | |
| Those seminars, I never attended a seminar after I represented him. | |
| My relationship did terminate. | |
| I continued to take his phone calls after that. | |
| Look, I don't know who Jeffrey Epstein is. | |
| He was very, very, I didn't even want to meet him initially, but Lady Rothschild assisted. | |
| And then some people at Harvard said they wanted me to put together some people to attend seminars of his. | |
| And I did that. | |
| And we learned a lot. | |
| I knew people at Harvard that I had never known. | |
| He's been on the faculty for 50 years, men and women. | |
| Vicky Ward, let me just come back to Vicky Ward quickly. | |
| You've been waiting patiently, but I mean, a man who apparently boasted to associates that he had compromising material, film footage, and others of important individuals. | |
| And that's not the normal way in which anyone behaves, is it? | |
| Right, Douglas. | |
| So, I mean, one thing we did learn in the papers that came out last night is that, you know, he did, in some of the depositions, ask the women who claim that they were sent out to men to give them very detailed descriptions of what had happened so that he could use it to blackmail them. | |
| I've never seen that spelt out quite so specifically before. | |
| And then to your point about, you know, the question, who was Jeffrey Epstein? | |
| Here's what we do know that is not speculative. | |
| He did know the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. | |
| He did know Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. | |
| He did know very well Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, that the pictures of all of these men, there's a picture of him, I think, I believe with the Pope. | |
| There was a picture, you picture of him, all sorts of world leaders and, and we know that, even after he got out of jail in 2010, you know um he, he was clever enough to use the connections he had with the academics, with the, the former president of Harvard, with these other world leaders, to draw in other billionaires like Bill Gates. | |
| He understood how very rich, powerful people around the world connect with each other. | |
| He understood what very rich, powerful people want from each other. | |
| He understood how to connect the plutocracy and the elite. | |
| Does that mean he was an asset? | |
| I don't, you know, there is, there is speculation, but it is he. | |
| He certainly was a manipulator of the 0.001 percent. | |
| Um, Eric Weinstein. | |
| Quickly, just coming back to you, if I may quickly um uh, I think a name that quite a lot of people have been rather surprised to see on this list, for perhaps several reasons, is professor, the late professor, Stephen Hawking. | |
| Uh, what on earth we meant to make of this? | |
| Well, I mean, there's two separate things. | |
| One is that uh, the state of physics uh, is bizarre in that um, it's one of the most consequential things you could possibly study for military purposes um, and at the same time, it has been sort of more or less run into the ground. | |
| Um, so Stephen Hawking was uh of interest, probably for the same reason that uh Jeffrey Epstein was much more interested in talking to me about um Post-Einsteinian gravity than he was in talking about carry trades on. | |
| What professor Dershowitz says is very strange to me, because he advertised to me that he was a currency trader uh running a massive uh hedge fund out of the Lard House in New York on Madison Avenue, and I dropped off documents there. | |
| So something is really not gelling, and one of the really interesting things would be to have very extensive discussions, uh to try to figure out who this person is, because the person who presented himself to me was much more like the person who presented himself to Vicky than the person who presented himself to Alan Dershowitz. | |
| Now, what I would say is that he had also extensive contacts apparently, with the Harvard mathematics department, both through Benedict Gross and through uh Martin Nowak. | |
| Um, Harvard is all through the story and, as we are learning, Harvard is a very strange place. | |
| Uh, I was there for about 20 years. | |
| Uh, it is sort of an extension of the U.s government in an unacknowledged capacity, and it has the only university to really have the power to effectively change the narrative of academics in particular very consequential fields. | |
| Now, the other thing about Stephen Hawking that you should just know is you should probably do a search on the word San Bernardino and Stephen Hawking. | |
| Uh, it was not uh, a secret that uh, professor Hawking had a very healthy appetite for life, and that this is not a new revelation. | |
| Nor is the fact that he was associated with Jeffrey Epstein a new revelation, so that there's something very peculiar about the way in which we are forgetting a tremendous amount. | |
| I would also recommend looking up the name Craig Spence. | |
| If the suggestion that this sounds like a completely insane idea that he was connected to intelligence uh, Craig Spence is the antecedent uh apparently, of Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| It's just very strange that all these things made the papers. | |
| There's extensive documentation on the internet. | |
| We pretend that we don't know. | |
| Let me just go quickly. | |
| Alan Dershwitz, I guess you wanted to come back in Well, of course he knew Stephen Hawkings. | |
| There are newspaper reports about Stephen Hawkings having come to a conference on his island where he had conferences. | |
| So far, not a single one of the names that have come out has surprised me. | |
| I had heard all of it before, but as the judge in the Second Circuit, Cabranis, once said, if there's an accusation made in court papers, it's to be less believed than an accusation made to the media. | |
| Because if the accusation is made to the media and it's false, you can sue for defamation. | |
| Whereas if the accusation is made in court papers, there's a privilege. | |
| And so the judge said, look skeptically at accusations made in court papers. | |
| Look, I want everything out. | |
| I want all the theories out there, all the documents. | |
| Let the public decide. | |
| There are people who don't want things. | |
| They have things to hide, but people like me who have nothing to hide, who are not in any way embarrassed about any of these revelations, because we know we did nothing wrong. | |
| We're the ones who want all these papers out, all these documents out. | |
| And I'm hoping the judge will now release everything, every single document. | |
| I find that very interesting because one of the things that I find very intriguing is that Jeffrey Epstein appeared to know all sorts of things about me that were not public and seemed to require almost a periscope into my life, in particular, scientific things about me that probably flowed through the Harvard department that I was from which I took my PhD. | |
| I don't think that you're grasping how strong the circumstantial case is, that this person was somehow attached to intelligence and may have benefited from things like state secret privilege and other forms of exotica in the law. | |
| Let me finish with just asking a very quick but pretty important question of each of you one by one, if you may, just very quickly. | |
| Of course, the other thing that makes the whole thing bizarre is the manner of his death. | |
| Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself, Vicky? | |
| I think that whatever happened, he had help. | |
| It didn't happen just by himself. | |
| Alan Dershowitz? | |
| I have the same view. | |
| I think he probably killed himself, probably paid off guards to close the TV and other things, but I don't exclude the possibility that there may have been third parties involved. | |
| I'm not sure. | |
|
UK Politics and Trump Risks
00:10:34
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| That's why I want to complete everything coming out. | |
| Enough speculation, enough inference. | |
| Let's get to the facts. | |
| And Eric Weinstein? | |
| If I had to speculate, I would say that I've never met a person less likely to terminate his own life from embarrassment than Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| I would put him first on the list of a person who would be undaunted by being worldwide known as a sex offender. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Vicki Ward in New York, Alan Dershowitz in Delaware, and Eric Weinstein in LA. | |
| It's a great pleasure to have you all on. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Now, next on Uncensored. | |
| Could Donald Trump return to the White House? | |
| And could Sir Keir Starmer be the UK's next prime minister? | |
| We'll look ahead to a crucial year in politics. | |
| Welcome back to Uncensored with me, Douglas Murray. | |
| 2024 will be the biggest election year in history. | |
| More than 60 countries representing half the world's population are going to be going to the polls. | |
| Notably, both the US and UK will vote, shaping not just their own fate, but the world too. | |
| As Trump's potential candidacy for 2024 looks ever more likely, the efforts to remove him from the ballots raise a critical question. | |
| Could these attempts inadvertently play into his favour, actually bolstering his appeal among supporters and contributing to a narrative that fuels his political resurgence? | |
| Well, joining me to discuss this from Florida is the political strategist and pollster Frank Lunt. | |
| Also here in London, Talk TV's international editor Isabel Oakeshott, along with lawyer and writer Chris Dorr. | |
| Thanks so much for being with me everyone. | |
| First of all, let me come to you, Frank Luntz. | |
| I think a lot of people watching might be surprised by the possibility that Donald Trump might be making a return to the White House this year, but it looks possible, yes? | |
| Not only does it look possible, but at this point, if the election were held today, it actually looks likely. | |
| Donald Trump has been gaining over the last four months. | |
| The more indictments, the higher his numbers climb. | |
| The more condemnation, the higher his numbers climb. | |
| And you try to throw him off the ballot, his favorability actually increases. | |
| There's a level of intensity, a level of commitment among his voters that does not exist for any other candidate. | |
| So I'd have to say at this point, Great Britain, get ready because Donald Trump may return. | |
| And you think that if Trump does get the Republican nomination, I mean, he's still, if you add all the other candidates together, they still don't add up to the amount of approval among the base that Donald Trump has. | |
| So it seems like a dead certain unless he's somehow knocked out through legal reasons or something. | |
| But you're saying that you think that if it's Biden versus Trump, a replay wearying as it seems of 2020, you think that the current polls, Trump beats Biden? | |
| At this point, based on where the economy is, based on foreign policy issues, based on what's happening in the Middle East, and by the way, I'm so glad to do this because, sir, you are a hero in America. | |
| They appreciate you. | |
| They're grateful for you speaking up. | |
| And I realize that this isn't quite what this segment is about, but I wanted to do it to thank you for your wisdom. | |
| Thank you for your courage, for your conviction, for telling the truth. | |
| And that is what Trump's people think of Donald Trump. | |
| He can disagree with him, but make no mistake, his people believe that Donald Trump tells the truth. | |
| They believe it's a witch hunt. | |
| They believe he's a victim. | |
| They believe this is a persecution. | |
| And that's why they back him so strongly. | |
| Well, thank you very much for that, Frank Luntz. | |
| I'll come back to you. | |
| But just with me in the studio, Isabel Oakeshott, if Donald Trump does become president again in 2024, what does that mean in Britain? | |
| Because this country's government doesn't seem prepared for it, and a Labour government certainly wouldn't be. | |
| Well, it means a roller coaster ride. | |
| I mean, what it would hopefully mean is that the UK-US relations become a little bit more important again. | |
| I mean, Trump is an anglophile. | |
| He loves this country. | |
| He loved the Queen. | |
| He's very pro the UK. | |
| Again, it might raise some hopes of a UK-US trade deal, which seems to have dissipated. | |
| So I think in theory, it would be a good thing. | |
| But that said, if we have a Starmer government, you know, probably less so. | |
| What I was going to say, coming to you, Chris Dorr, I mean, if Labour were to win the election this year, and again, all of the polls would seem to suggest that. | |
| If Trump was in the White House and Starmer's in number 10, what does the special relationship look like? | |
| Well, I think the more important thing is it's frankly astonishing that anyone thinks that a dangerous sociopath and a proven and a habitual liar like Donald Trump would be a good thing for anyone, particularly someone who expresses himself in so many dangerous ways about world affairs, particularly his affinity for Vladimir Putin and so forth. | |
| I think it's a good idea. | |
| That is so exaggerated, the whole Putin thing. | |
| I mean, it's such an old and lazy trope as well. | |
| I'm sorry to bring up the whole, oh, Trump's really pro-Russian. | |
| I mean, honestly, I mean, are we going to really replay this whole thing again? | |
| Well, we're not replaying it because the fact is it's a truth which people is uncomfortable to people. | |
| But you're right. | |
| It's one of the many hundreds and hundreds of problems with Trump politics. | |
| What you just said, I mean, there was a whole thing about the Russiagates conspiracy in the US, investigations and so on. | |
| It came up with a great big nothing burger. | |
| I mean, isn't part of the problem, whatever your views on it, I mean, all the allegations, there are plenty of criticisms you can make of Donald Trump. | |
| But whenever you get into the kind of, you know, Russian collusion sort of stuff, isn't that exactly the sort of thing that makes voters do what Frank Luntz is pointing to, which is they say, you know, everyone's been lying about this guy. | |
| We don't believe anything that the media says. | |
| We don't believe anything the commentators say. | |
| We're just going to stick with him because he's our guy. | |
| Yeah, you're absolutely right. | |
| And what that says about the vacuum in our politics, not just in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, is really tragic, isn't it? | |
| That we have an octogenarian or almost one, we have an octogenarian president, neither of whom really are fit to govern, remotely fit to govern anything, let alone the most powerful country in the world. | |
| Where are the young people? | |
| Where are the dynamic, inspirational leaders who can appeal to the whole of the population rather than just narrow partisan issues? | |
| Well, I want to bring Frank Luntz back in on that because Frank Lunt, if you've just been listening to that, we do have young leaders in the UK compared to America. | |
| Not everyone in UK politics has to be an octogenarian. | |
| But would you say that the youth that is on Rishi Sunak's side and slightly on Keir Stalma's side as well, do you think it's an electful advantage for either of them? | |
| I don't think it gives an advantage, but most certainly if you're as old as Joe Biden and have trouble completing sentences and doing press conferences and all the things that we expect of a presidential candidate, I've heard that the strategy you can see moving off that plane very quickly, that's not what he does in most of the appearances. | |
| People watch him and they think, thank you, sir, for your governance. | |
| Thank you for putting America back on the right track, but it's time for you to go. | |
| But if he does go, Frank Lunt, isn't the problem? | |
| I mean, the Republicans have quite a bit of talent actually underneath Donald Trump, in my view. | |
| There's a lot of experienced governors and others. | |
| It seems that underneath Joe Biden in the Democratic Party, there's very little. | |
| I mean, they're not going to run Kamala Harris, are they? | |
| I mean, she's got roughly the same approval ratings as the Ebola virus. | |
| Yes, that's a very good line. | |
| She's the least popular vice president since Dan Quayle, and he was the least popular vice president since Aaron Burr. | |
| You're correct. | |
| She is not going to be. | |
| By the way, that's how I can tell if anybody watched the play Hamilton. | |
| She is not going to be the nominee. | |
| But there is Corey Booker, the senator from New Jersey. | |
| There's Gavin Newsome. | |
| These are people from the next generation. | |
| Anyone, any of these candidates would run better against Donald Trump than Joe Biden. | |
| So we have to wonder, why don't they give someone else who's younger the chance? | |
| Well, the truth of it is ego. | |
| Ego, I'm afraid, and the hunger for power at all costs on the part of President Biden, which is utterly tragic for the American people, but sadly is likely to lead to an inevitable consequence. | |
| Talking of a desire for power at all costs, Isabel Oakeshott, the Conservative Party is still said to be plotting against Rishi Sunag, all sorts of internal embroilings going on. | |
| Is the Conservative Party ever going to pull itself together and survive the next year? | |
| I mean, I thought what you were going to say is holding on to power at all costs by pushing the election out as far as they can. | |
| Well, that's certainly happening. | |
| We know that. | |
| And this was quite a significant intervention. | |
| It didn't strike me as games playing. | |
| You know, he very naturally said, look, my working assumption is second half of this year. | |
| I think most of us have really thought that's when it would be. | |
| He still, of course, has it in his gift to suddenly say in a few weeks' time if something extraordinary happens and suddenly fortunes look better for the Conservatives, he could suddenly say, Actually, I'm going to go to the country in May. | |
| And just quick reform, do they chip away at the Conservative vote? | |
| I think the important thing is that they will also chip away at Labour's vote. | |
| And quite significantly, if Labour don't start saying something much tougher on immigration, that's going to be a real problem for them. | |
| Quick lightning round. | |
| Frank Luntz, you think that Donald Trump's most likely to be president in the United States this time next year? | |
| And a 51-49 advantage? | |
| Yes. | |
| And who would you bet on as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? | |
| I bet that Labour wins by a reasonably significant margin. | |
| Chris? | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| I think that's spot on. | |
| I think tragically, we have a void in our politics of really powerful, inspirational political leaders with policies that have broad appeal and actually would make a difference in our society. | |
| And that means we're left. | |
| We're left with the dross, basically, on both sides of the Atlantic. | |
| Did you just describe Keir Starmer as dropping? | |
| Well, not personally, but the Labour Party is a little bit more than a bit more. | |
|
Trigger Warnings Everywhere
00:06:10
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|
| Just want to check that. | |
| Labour's not an inspirational party. | |
| I don't think they're really getting people on fire in this country. | |
| And until that happens, as it did, of course, with Tony Blair in 97, we're not going to see that kind of movement that makes for real change and real power in the hands of a government. | |
| Would you agree? | |
| I want to see a Hung Parliament so that the people of this country get proportional representation. | |
| People are too disenfranchised. | |
| No, I agree. | |
| Proportional representation. | |
| Yeah, there's a move in the country for it, I tell it. | |
| I tell you what happens with proportional representation is you get Italy. | |
| No, you don't. | |
| But anyway, we can come back to that another night. | |
| Thank you all for being with me and thank you to Frank Luntz over there in the US. | |
| Now, up next on Uncensored, trigger warnings and storylines dominated by identity politics. | |
| Is the diversity and inclusion agenda ruining TV and film? | |
| I'm going to be joined by Notting Hill gimme gimme gimme and the Finn Blue line star, the great actor James Dreyfus. | |
| Welcome back to Uncensored. | |
| The British Film Institute has issued the early films in the James Bond series with trigger warnings. | |
| And it's not for 007's golden gun, but because they could cause offence today. | |
| And it's not just James Bond that's been shaken, if not a bit stirred, with woke controversy. | |
| The new Doctor Who was introduced to us at Christmas, shaking his thing in a fetching muscle top and skirt, whilst Star Wars announced that their next film will be directed by a feminist who says she enjoys making men feel uncomfortable. | |
| It does really seem like South Park hit the nail on the head with this recent skit. | |
| Put another gay diverse woman in it. | |
| Make it my finger. | |
| Is there a problem, people? | |
| We were just discussing ideas of what to do with the new Prince Eric movie. | |
| Put a ticket in, make her gay. | |
| Maybe we should go a different route than we did with Indiana Jones. | |
| Indiana Jones, put a ticket in, make a labor gay. | |
| So is this really the future of what we'll be watching in 2024? | |
| Joining me now to discuss this is the actor James Dreyfus. | |
| James, thank you so much for being with me. | |
| Mr. Burry, we meet at last. | |
| Tell me, this, let's start with James Bond. | |
| Does it surprise you that James Bond now needs a trigger warning? | |
| No, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest, to be honest with you. | |
| I mean, I've just read their statement about it, which is whilst we have a responsibility to preserve films as close to their contemporaneous accuracy as possible, we also have a responsibility in how we present them to our audiences. | |
| Well, no, you don't. | |
| What does that mean? | |
| Well, I don't know what it means. | |
| I mean, back in the day, we had U, A, A, A, X. All seemed pretty clear. | |
| And the Bond movies, I seem to remember, were, okay, they're not aimed at children like Doctor Who is, but the James Bond movies were teenage fair. | |
| I can't even begin to think why any of them have a trigger warning, least of all for John Barry's music. | |
| You know, one of the things that amazed me about this, James, I always sort of think we seem to be run by cultural juveniles. | |
| I'm just trying to think back on the BFI released movies that I've seen in the past. | |
| I remember about 25 years ago, they released all of the great works of directors like Eisenstein, Pier Paolo Pasolini. | |
| I saw Pier Paolo Pasolini's Sallow. | |
| I wouldn't recommend it to viewers any more than I would recommend some of the things that Eric Weinstein was recommending you look up in relation to Stephen Hawking earlier. | |
| But Sallow is probably the most disgusting film I've ever seen. | |
| And it's based on the Marquis Dessade's 120 Days of Sodom. | |
| If they're going to start putting trigger warnings on James Bond, I reckon the 120 Days of Sodom probably needs some other kind of extreme warning. | |
| Well, you know something, Douglas? | |
| I get nervous when I now see films without a trigger warning because I think, oh my God, you know, what's in this? | |
| I mean, I was watching a film this morning. | |
| I love watching horror films. | |
| I'll give you an example. | |
| And there was a warning at the start of this movie, which was given by the directors actually saying, we're warning you that sudden shots in this film will contain something that'll upset you in the name of humanity. | |
| And then I thought, okay, well, I'll steal myself a little bit. | |
| And the first image I saw was a baby seal being clubbed to death in real life. | |
| And so I immediately turned it off. | |
| I thought, oh my God, and it's disturbed me all day. | |
| That I can understand. | |
| Epilepsy warnings, I can understand. | |
| But when you're talking about things like James Bond or even cartoons, I mean, if you really want to go back, put a disclaimer in front of Bambi. | |
| Those are the most disturbing movies I've ever seen. | |
| I don't understand it, but it gives me a clue here when they say we listen to customer feedback and also continue to work closely with blah, blah, blah. | |
| Now, that tells me that they're listening to all the people that complain, not the people that are never. | |
| That brings me on to Doctor Who, because you've been involved in Doctor Who, and Doctor Who in recent years really has been following the advice of Eric Cartman in that clip. | |
| And being, they've been putting a chick in everything and making it lame and as gay as possible. | |
| And not in a good way. | |
|
Doctor Who Ideology Clash
00:03:41
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| What has happened to it? | |
| And what was your own experience with Doctor Who? | |
| Well, I had no experience of Doctor Who until I was asked to play the master by Big Finish. | |
| And I signed a letter asking Stonewall for a debate and defending J.K. Rowling from having death threats. | |
| And I thought everyone else in the world would sign it, but apparently not. | |
| And apparently then a petition was sent to this organization and I was ceremoniously dumped, but I wasn't even told. | |
| So I've heard nothing from them. | |
| So you weren't in Doctor Who because you supported J.K. Rowling? | |
| They erased me from the, I found out because they'd erased me from the front of the CDs. | |
| They did a show called Masterful, which had a compilation of all the masters. | |
| That had been played on audio and thing, and I was left out of that and all they did was put out this rather ambiguous message that transphobia will not be tolerated in any shape or form, which basically said, we believe you are a transphobe and uh no um, why are they even in this business, James? | |
| I mean, let me, let me just play you a quick clip. | |
| This is something from from the new doctor, who I can't understand how anyone thinks this is entertainment. | |
| Let's roll this. | |
| Yes, the meep. | |
| I promise I can help him get home and then you'll never see me again. | |
| You're assuming he has a pronoun true yes sorry, good point. | |
| Are you he or she or they? | |
| My chosen pronoun is the definite article. | |
| I am always the meep, I just is. | |
| This is this, is like. | |
| This is instruction, not entertainment. | |
| Well, of course it is, it's. | |
| I mean, i've always said, you know that this pronoun business is not a question, it's a test, it's a yeah, it's a test and it's now become sort of part of uh, regular daily life. | |
| I mean, the fact of the matter is still, you know, the vast majority of people don't understand. | |
| Don't understand all this. | |
| Um, children don't understand it. | |
| I've had members of my family um, you know younger members completely confused by this stuff. | |
| And I don't, I don't really understand what's it got to do with? | |
| Um, it seems like it's no longer just entertainment. | |
| It always has to have some sort of message, and the message is quite niche yes, as niche as possible, it seems, and as as unamusing as possible and as bland as possible and as predictable as possible. | |
| It's like seeing the entire culture is just sort of made to be exactly the same across the board. | |
| Yeah, that's, that's how it seems to me. | |
| But but the only positive I can see out of this Douglas is that eventually uh, you know this, this mask will slip uh, the this niche will uh be burrowed into so, so deeply that um um, people cannot ignore it any longer. | |
| So i'm hoping that this is a you know a circle uh, that will eventually end and we'll just get back to entertaining people. | |
| I mean, Doctor Who is for children and it, and it surprises me that they, they slit this in because it's obviously nothing to do with Doctor Who, it's to do with this ideology that's happening at the moment, and very quickly. | |
| Uh, James Dreyfus uh, how come, it seems now that everyone's saying you've got to be gay to play a gay character. | |
| You've got to be trans to play a trans character. | |
| But yet your former co-star, uh from Notting Hill, uh Hugh Hugh Grant, is allowed to play an umpa lumpa without actually himself being an umpalumpa. | |
|
Identity Politics in Arts
00:00:57
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|
| What's the explanation for that? | |
| Well, it's extraordinary. | |
| I don't know how he got the part, not being an umpalumpa. | |
| That's the one what I don't understand is you have people like Peter Dinklage saying, look, we've grown out of this snow white in the seventh walls of us all having living in a cave or whatever, which denies work then to little people actors. | |
| We're talking about one person. | |
| The last Woody Wonka film had the same person reproduced over and over and over again. | |
| I think this is something that's, you know, everyone wants to be a part of it. | |
| This is what happens when you have identity politics in the arts. | |
| Everyone wants to be a peacemaker. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| Thanks so much for that. | |
| It's been such a pleasure to have you on. | |
| That's it from me. | |
| And it's been a great pleasure being with you all of this week. | |
| Sadly, Piers is back on Monday. | |
| Until then, whatever you're up to, make sure it's uncensored. | |
| Good night. | |