“Scary & DANGEROUS” Eric Weinstein vs Piers Morgan on Charlie Kirk & Free Speech
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder and the celebration of it by so-called progressive liberals, Dr Eric Weinstein has said that revolutionary thinking has become normalised. The Harvard mathematician joins Piers Morgan for an insightful discussion on strategic silence, free speech, platforming, morality and the power of ‘mustn’t’. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Chapter: For free and unbiased Medicare help, dial 910-708-7584 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter, or go to https://askchapter.org/morgan Disclaimer: Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and standalone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all your options. Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Birch Gold: Visit https://birchgold.com/piers to get your free info kit on gold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Revolutionaries at War With the System00:15:08
You have this group of people, particularly people, let's say, in their 20s now, who've not been invited into the party of Western civilization.
They are not being given the means to have babies, a mortgage, to participate in a profound way.
And they're being asked to conserve a society that is more or less using them as a protein source.
You mustn't celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.
It's an absolute, it's not a legal requirement that you not celebrate it.
Come on, man.
Have you lost your mind?
Have you lost your humanity?
This show isn't as important enough to me that I want to endanger my family and myself playing these games.
We know what morality is.
We know that this is far outside it.
And if you want to play with those people because you think that those are interesting ideas, that's up to you.
I'm not going to interfere with your free speech.
I'm not your gatekeeper.
There's one word I will repeat, which I would love to have answered next time, which is, ooh, who are you talking about?
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder, Dr. Eric Weinstein wrote, revolutionaries have been normalized as if they're liberals.
They're not.
That normalization, he says, is the fault of the media, the education system, and perhaps the Democratic Party.
A lot has been said and written about whether this violence and division are a left-wing problem, a right-wing problem, or just an internet problem.
Dr. Weinstein joins me now to talk through his thinking on this subject and more.
Eric, great to have you back on Uncensored.
Pierce, good to be with you.
Just explain to me what your overview is about where we find ourselves post-the Charlie Kirk murder.
It's an interesting spot.
I guess from my perspective, it's been fairly clear to me that we've been aggressively normalizing revolutionary thinking, and we don't recognize it when we see it.
So as a result, you have decided that you've created people who I don't really think exist.
You might call them the woke or progressives, but coming from a relatively progressive left of center family myself, we used to recognize these people as revolutionaries.
And you'll see them by their empathy.
Their empathy is entirely shifted.
So if you've seen any of the interviews of random college students asked about Charlie Kirk's murder and they're smirking or they're happy or they're making jokes.
Yeah, it's been really shocking.
What you're seeing is, well, that's the odd part.
It's not really shocking at all.
You just don't realize what you've been looking at.
Revolutionaries have a shifted empathy complex.
They're at war.
They're at war with the system in which they embed.
And the nurses administering your IV, the person making your coffee, the person at the DMV processing your driver's license is someone who is often completely unsympathetic with the society in which you exist and who would ask for its overthrow, potentially with violence.
And often violence is to be celebrated.
So, you know, there's language around this called direct action.
And I just have this feeling that effectively Americans haven't been, I don't know, in contact with revolutionary thinking enough to understand that it's an entirely shifted empathy complex.
But is it almost worse than that?
If they were genuine revolutionaries, then perhaps I would subscribe to that theory.
I also think a lot of them have been contaminated by the constant refrain that Trump's Adolf Hitler, that his supporters are Nazis, they're all a bunch of fascists.
That if you are a bit of an unhinged young brain and you keep hearing that repeatedly and you see it all over your TikTok and everything else, that eventually you sort of see it almost as a civic duty to defend your nation against these Nazis.
I think that's part of the problem.
But I also felt with, I'll come to that as well in a moment, but just on that point you make about empathy.
When I watched those clips, these weren't just like just young people being stupid, because you could kind of explain that.
But I saw, you know, teachers, university professors, doctors, all posting stuff, gleefully celebrating the cold-blooded execution of a young man with a wife and two kids who were there.
And that was something more than just, you know, a lack of empathy.
And I don't think it was linked to them seeing themselves as great revolutionaries.
It was just an absolute disconnect from normal human reaction.
I mean, I've actually interviewed genuine, medically diagnosed psychopaths who are medically deemed to be incapable of feeling empathy, guilt, and so on.
But these people aren't in that category.
What has happened to them to make them so completely detached from the reality of what they're doing?
I'm myself mystified by the mystification.
I don't know even how to talk about this, Pierce.
These people are not in a medical state.
They have loaded a revolutionary program.
And let's say when America went to war against Germany and Japan, we used phrases like the Jerry's and the Japs, and we wrote messages on munitions that we used to kill the enemy.
This is what they're doing.
They're writing on bullets and casings.
They are doing message killing.
And the odd part about it is we don't recognize that they are at war.
Now, you make the point that they're not real revolutionaries.
And this has to do with the fact that let's say a nurse who administers anesthesia and IVs, somebody with real control over your life, becomes a revolutionary.
He may have a perfectly nice life as a nurse, and he's not eager to die.
However, the program that has been loaded is exactly this program.
The first thing you do is you paint the target.
So notice the following words, fascist, reactionary, Zionist, Nazi.
As soon as you see someone painted with those terms, the empathy complex changes.
Tell me something.
Have you ever had really good lamb?
Yes, many times.
Or veal.
Yeah.
If you think about what lamb and veal are, it's one of the most upsetting concepts.
But you're given language, which is, I'll have the lamb.
No, I'll have the veal.
And you don't actually think about what it means.
And so what I'm claiming is, is that when you hear somebody talking about, oh, I'm fighting reactionaries, I'm fighting the Zayos, punch a Nazi, that guy's a reactionary far right.
That is the language used to paint the enemy so that you don't need to feel bad about the enemy dying or getting hurt.
You can celebrate this.
And this issue of message killing is something I've been talking about for a long time.
If you have something like the AP Style Guide and it says we can't print manifestos of killers anymore, the public doesn't know that there's an entire theory or a doctrine called strategic silence.
So they're sitting there watching their news, trying to figure out, well, what's the motive?
And the motive that comes through the AP style guy might be something like, the alleged mass killer is reputed to have shouted a foreign religious slogan in another language.
And you're thinking, oh, come on, you can't even report on what happened.
So that gives the illusion of a cover-up because what's going on is that the news organizations have been pre-programmed as to how they can report on this.
So you have a situation in which we have a group called the woke that don't really exist or the progressives, which are actually normalized revolutionaries, particularly within the Democratic Party.
My party has normalized revolutionaries inside the party.
There are normalized revolutionaries in the other party, the Republicans, much more around Christian nationalism and Christian identity.
And you're now playing this game where we are undoing a tolerant liberal society where the only people with real ideas are these fringe individuals.
Let me just make a point that people aren't going to have thought much about.
The normalized revolutionaries inside the Democratic Party have ideas.
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AOC has ideas.
Mamdani has ideas.
Hillary Clinton does not have ideas.
You have this group of people, particularly people, let's say, in their 20s now, who've not been invited into the party of Western civilization.
They are not being given the means to have babies, a mortgage, to participate in a profound way.
And they're being asked to conserve a society that is more or less using them as a protein source.
And as a result, the real problem is that the two parties, the centers of the two parties in the U.S., don't have ideas.
They have no offerings.
They've got revolutionaries.
They're playing with revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries are getting normalized.
There's an entire shifted empathy complex.
People, let's say, 40 to 15, which you saw around the Charlie Kirk thing.
We're having a discussion about it as if it's an individual mental health crisis.
It isn't.
This is one of the things that the human mind can be trained to do if it goes to war, which is it can't oversympathize with the enemy.
And these people are very much at war with the society that houses them.
If I can make an analogy, at some point, the Gulf Cartel in Mexico hired the Zetas from Mexican special forces as their muscle.
And, you know, I just gave an interview with the A16Z podcast where I said Antifa is in many ways the armed wing of the Democratic Party.
And I'm talking about my part.
Yeah, I completely agree.
So what's the answer?
Because I've got a new book coming out called Woke is Dead.
I say in that I don't think it's actually dead yet, but I do feel that the ideology was given a sort of spectacular repudiation when Trump got re-elected, that a lot of people looked at the way the Democrats in particular had gone down this progressive woke left path, leading to the kind of insanity of promoting trans athletes and women's sport and so on.
And they realized they kind of lost all ability to sound like they understood basic common sense.
And therefore, if we, as a society, we sort of come through years of this.
And I think most people now instinctively recoil against a lot of that woke ideology.
Therefore, the ideology is dying.
Do you agree with that?
And if not, what is the solution?
No, yeah, I don't agree with this at all.
First of all, I don't think there was woke ideology.
I think that's the name we gave to revolutionary ideology.
A revolutionary ideology doesn't die quite so quickly.
I think people are just waking up to what an actual right, what a rifle is.
I think people have the idea, well, 100 yards sounds like very far away.
If you talk to anybody who knows their way around an AR-15, it's a long time before you have to start taking in Coriolis forces and wind conditions.
I think people have no idea what Pandora's box they've opened.
And Pierce, if I could just bring it back to this program, as you know, I very much enjoy doing this program, but principally I insist that it's you and me in one-on-one.
And why is that?
It's because this program also is normalizing the most insane voices.
If you think about it, you're very capable of having a terrific one-on-one discussion, but you're also at the same time playing with people who are completely unhinged in a sort of Jerry Springerization of the discussion of our problems.
Some of those people that you have on are revolutionaries.
They're not actually normal guests.
Who are you talking about?
Revolutionary emperors.
Well, who are you talking about?
I'm not going to get into it.
You've got to give an example of what you're...
You've got to give an example, surely.
I have no problem giving an example.
I'm trying to tell you about what my issue is, is that they come to my house.
They publish my address.
What you're talking about is inviting people who have absolutely no regard for life, for family, for even normal politics.
And what I'm trying to say is we don't understand who we've opened the door to.
If you look at all of those videos asking for Charlie Kirk reactions, do you imagine you're looking at thousands upon thousands of mental illness cases?
No, you're looking at an ideology that you can't kill so easily.
And in fact, I ran a poll recently on Twitter.
Are there illiberal ideas that cannot be reversed by liberal measures alone?
The more you open the door to this insanity of trans athletes and cross-dressers in charge of our spent nuclear material, all this kind of stuff, the more you're going to have an illiberal reaction in the form of Donald Trump, MAGA, and the hardliners in the Republican Party who are going to say that we cannot afford to keep this door open to normalized madness.
Ideologies You Cannot Kill Easily00:04:06
And so, you know, I would love to have a discussion about it, but quite frankly, these people are scary dangerous.
I have not had a podcast for five years in part because of the increased threat coming from recognized revolutionary behavior.
I mean, you said recently, you wrote actually, when it comes to speech, there is shouldn't, brackets, bad, mustn't, unthinkable, can't, illegal.
If broadly celebrating political murder of national figures is merely shouldn't, we will all end up with can't.
Free speech is all about mustn't.
We bet all of society on mustn't.
What exactly did you mean by that?
Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.
Really appreciate the opportunity.
You mustn't burn the flag.
It's not that you can't.
It shouldn't be illegal to burn the flag.
And it's not that you really shouldn't because it's a bad thing to do.
It should be unthinkable.
And I want to live in a country in which I have every right to burn my flag.
And it never once occurs to me during a normal life that that would be a thing that I would even consider doing.
There's this concept of mustn't, which is cultural, which is what stops very dangerous fit ideas.
You see, the fitness of an idea determines how easily it spreads.
You can have a bad idea that's fit just the way a virus is fit in an evolutionary sense.
And so what we're really looking for is we're looking for very strong cultural prohibitions that leave us a free people with every legal right to express ourselves.
What you're starting to see is that the violation of mustn't, there is no concept of mustn't.
You mustn't celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder.
It's an absolute, it's not a legal requirement that you not celebrate it.
It's like, come on, man.
Have you lost your mind?
Have you lost your humanity?
And that is increasingly seen as funny or quaint.
Right.
So look, coming back to what you said about this show and who we platform and stuff, you know, I have people who react to me platforming you, right?
Who say you're a dangerous extremist and so on.
You've heard that yourself many times, I'm sure.
I don't view you as either.
No, I haven't heard that I'm a damn that I'm a dangerous extremist.
I don't think that about you for a moment, but I'm curious who you think we've platformed who would fit that category that you're discussing and whether you think.
You just repeated something which I don't.
Well, I'm just talking about random people.
I'm talking about random people on social media.
I'm not talking about a mainstream voice.
I'm talking about random people commenting when we do stuff.
There's always a few that pop up who think you're a lunatic, right?
As there are with everyone I talk to.
I can interview Mother Teresa.
There'd be people calling her a dangerous lunatic.
Pierce, for God's sake, for God's sake, man.
I'm a Harvard PhD with an MIT postdoc.
I've been funded by Soros and Teal.
Nobody really thinks that I'm stupid.
Nobody thinks that I'm a dangerous lunatic.
Nobody really thinks that I'm far left or far right.
There's a bunch of morons on the internet.
And if you want to decide that they have a voice, then I'm sure that some of them think I'm a robot.
Some of them think I'm a hologram.
And some of them think that I'm a space alien.
If you decide that you're going to open the discussion to those voices, I'll go get a sandwich.
You're not going to...
No, no, that's not the point I'm making.
No, no, no.
I think you're missing my point.
I've got no problem with you saying what you said about some of the people we platform.
I'm just curious who these people are that you think I shouldn't be platforming.
Because without saying who they are, it's very hard for me to assess it.
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The Gatekeeping Free Speech Paradox00:17:44
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Well, but Pierce, why would I want to repeat anyone's name who has this characteristic and profile?
In other words, what I'm telling you is we've got a country that is wall to wall stocked with high-powered rifles that allow very far shots to be made relatively easily.
And you're talking about the fact that woke is over.
No, no, there are going to be revolutionaries at various levels throughout your life.
You'll never get rid of them.
They are never going away.
And what we're talking about is we're talking about not inviting them into our lives.
Every time you ask for, what are the names?
What are the specifics?
Get into it.
I will tell you, why invite that person to a bigger audience?
Why invite that person to paint more targets with words like reactionary, Nazi, Zionist?
All of these things, alt-right, far-right, that stuff is going to get more and more people killed.
So I would prefer that we talk about this in general, which is anybody with wildly and radically shifted empathy.
You'll see somebody smiling when they're trying to destroy another person's character.
You know, you'll see a different shift in the basic notion of what makes someone happy.
You'll see people who are far more concerned with people they've never met than their own family members or even their own life.
If you want to think about this in a positive way, for example, you could remember the Abraham Lincoln brigade that went to the Civil War involving Franco in Spain.
Those were Americans who, for whatever reason, decided that they were so ideologically committed that they were willing to give their own lives in a foreign war that no one was drafting them to fight.
I'm telling you that you just, you have to understand that there's an archetype, which is the revolution.
I understand that.
The revolution.
I understand it.
But people, but people would say, okay, but Eric, people would say about you.
You know, some people say this about you, that you operate outside of mainstream thinking about a lot of things, right?
Maybe you, and I'm sure you'd be quite happy to concede that.
And so, yeah, you do.
But people will say that and they'll say, well, I shouldn't be platforming you for that reason.
So my question really, I'm not, you know, obviously it's difficult to know who you're talking about if you don't say who it is.
But my point is, who is the arbiter of who should not be platformed?
Who is the person who decides whether this person or that person is not worthy of being platformed or should be under the category of mustn't, as you put it in that paragraph that I read out?
Who is the arbiter of this stuff?
Is it you who some people consider out there yourself?
Is it somebody else?
Is there some kind of papal figure we hope?
We're determining our booking points.
Piers, are we that confused?
I mean, look, if somebody starts talking about the need to murder little children, let's say, you know, are we going to pretend that that person is potentially as outrageous as somebody who talks about the fact that maybe our taxes need to be a little bit lower?
Let me give you an example.
Let me give you an example.
I have people on who are extremely, extremely Zionist, okay, in their thinking.
And they come on and they can often talk in a way that many people find grotesquely offensive about what the Israeli government has been doing in Gaza and so on.
Now, many people on the pro-Palestinian side would say, it's appalling that I platform these inhuman, callous people who speak in such a language.
If I had someone like Smodrich or Ben Gavir on from the Israeli government and they started talking casually about ethnically cleansing Palestinians and so on.
So the question becomes, again, for me, I've got no problem with you critiquing the show, but the complexity comes for me if you don't say who you're talking about, because actually I have a lot of guests on that people say I shouldn't platform.
And often it's because their own personal positioning says that that person's dangerous, that person's an extremist.
What they really mean is they challenge what I'm thinking, the individuals who are complaining.
And I don't think, you know, the whole point of my show is I tend to bring people on who do disagree with each other and do challenge each other.
And I do one-on-ones, but I also, as you know, do occasional panels.
And I see no problem with that.
But you seem to be kind of having an all-encompassing critique of the show without being specific, which is difficult for me because I would love to debate an individual booking we've had that you're particularly sensed about, because then I can make a more sort of clear-eyed view.
But I'm curious.
Piers, I'm not trying.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to get anyone.
Yeah, but I'm trying not, I am not ever, I promise you this on air, ever going to try to send dangerous people to the home of one of your guests to terrorize them after the show.
Right.
Right?
In other words, what you're talking about largely stays on the show.
So the first cut, just the easiest cut to make here, is that a lot of these people are playing off of the internet.
It's not just a question of trading tweets or trading ideas or trading accusations.
It's a question of how can I endanger this person in their personal life?
It's a full game that is non-stop.
You know, I have a stalking mob that's been coming after me for years.
And it's like, who are they?
Well, what do they want?
Shut up.
Why do I want to talk about these people in specific?
The next point that I'm going to try to make is, if you have somebody who's supposedly a Zionist representative who's excited about the death and destruction in Gaza, please don't have that person on unless they have some governmental reason for being on the show.
And if you have some revolutionary who's worried about what's going on in Gaza and is excited about missiles falling in Israel and killing civilians, why is that person on?
In other words, there is still a thing called basic Western values that you represent, that I represent.
You and I, I think, have recently disagreed in part about what's going on in Israel and Gaza.
But my point is, you don't want to see one extra person die who doesn't need to on any side.
Neither do I, right?
And so we may have different ideas about how to accommodate.
But I think what would concern me.
I think we should pretend that some...
But what concerns me, Eric, about this is it's a slippery slope, isn't it, into real genuine suppression of free speech?
You know, what you're really saying is that I should operate a much more stringent and draconian anti-free speech policy.
I should stop platforming anyone whose views you, Eric, find really offensive.
Isn't that really what you're saying?
And isn't that actually, it goes against everything you probably think you stand for about free speech?
Yeah, I'm a huge free speech addict.
And in part, I want to make sure that free speech is always about the exchange of ideas.
Yeah, but the whole point of free speech, surely, is that the whole point of free speech, actually, is that unless what somebody says is already illegal, in other words, you are inciting an act of violence or whatever it may be, that actually, you know, hateful speech has to be tolerated.
But it seems to me like you don't want me to have anyone on here who espouses things that you personally find hateful.
And I would say that there are plenty of people who might find some things you say hateful.
I don't happen to think so, but there are people.
Now, should I ban you?
In other words, who decides?
In other words, who decides?
If you feel that...
I don't.
I don't.
I don't agree with everything on it.
But who decides?
Who decides where that line is?
This is not as hard of a problem as we're making it out to be.
It's not a question of, well, some people say this and some people say that.
There are basic concepts about dignity and human empathy.
And there are violations of them that are very profitable right now that are the precursors, the painting of targets that lead to what is called direct action.
What I'm trying to do is to alert you to something where you can sit there and you can say, look, we have a demarcation problem.
Eric, are you not asserting that we need gatekeepers?
Well, yes, at some level.
The whole point of free speech is to load gatekeeping on social pressure, not legal pressure.
And the whole point about that is that I want to hear from people who have radically different perspectives from my own, like radically different.
But I want to hear it in the context of an exchange of ideas rather than as a precursor to revolutionary violence.
What I'm trying to get at is that if you want to get into it about free speech, I've talked to you previously about physicists don't have it because of restricted data, or Brandenburg versus Ohio took it away, or memoirs versus Massachusetts became Miller versus California in pornography.
There are so many adjustments to free speech that have to do with the law trying to handle something, which we know more or less what is it that is a liberal society.
It has to do with the fact that there are so many people with good ideas who represent these various forces that we could give all those slots to people who very forcefully advocate for their side without needing to expand this to people who see that the general game involves message killing of sneaking up behind a CEO or taking a long shot at Charlie Kirk or hiding in Butler,
PA.
at a Trump rally.
I mean, wake up, man.
It's not about nobody's portraying me who's smart as a violent extremist.
It's just not true.
And what I'm trying to say is that...
No, I didn't say that.
I said there have been some people who take some of your views and they think they're dangerous or extreme.
I don't happen to be one of those people, but they exist.
They're out there.
And every time I interview, there'll be a few popping up on social media saying so, right?
So my point being, the only point of me saying that is not because I agree with them.
I don't.
I don't think you're either of those things.
I love having you on.
I love arguing with you.
I find it very intellectually stimulating.
But it just seems to me slightly perverse that somebody who is so emphatically pro-free speech sounds to me dangerously, extremistly like he wants to introduce a kind of a new gatekeeping thing to the show where only people who show a bar of empathy that you, Eric Weinstein, find acceptable could then be platformed on the show.
And that, that to me is a really dangerous road to go down.
Ironically, it is to me, you're sounding quite dangerous and extremist about how you want to suppress free speech.
I find this hysterically funny.
Pierce, if you think about it, your front door has a lock on it.
Are you a gatekeeper?
Not everybody can get into this van in San Francisco and get on your program.
You're gatekeeping every day of your life.
This idea that gatekeeping is bad, no, gatekeeping is essential.
We all gatekeep when it comes to free speech.
The problem is that again, you're not.
But I thought you argued against this in the physics world.
Haven't you said the very thing that's problematic with the physics world is the gatekeeping by the mainstream orthodoxy?
Isn't that one of your main bugbears about them?
But I really think it's as if you're trying to say gatekeeping good or bad.
It's like saying water good or bad.
If you're thirsty, water's great.
If you're hit with an avalanche, you're going to die from it or a tidal wave.
You can't say that gatekeeping is good or bad.
The question is the quality of the gates kept.
No, but my problem is that it seems to me that you, Eric Weinstein, wanted to be the gatekeeper.
You want to determine whether people's empathy levels reach your bar that warrants them being allowed to be on this show, for example.
And I'm saying that to me actually is a pretty dangerous road to go down, isn't it?
Piers, let me ask you a question.
You and I have never had a conversation about Charlie Kirk and whether or not I think highly or poorly of him.
Am I correct?
I think that's right.
Do you have any question about any question about what my reaction is to his murder?
Sure.
Emotionally.
Sure.
What is your reaction?
What is my reaction?
You tell me.
Do you think I'm excited about it?
No.
I know you're not excited about it, and I've never heard your reaction because we're both part of normal societal reality.
What we're talking about is so shifted.
I can assume all sorts of things.
You know, I speak a little Turkish.
I didn't sit down in this van expecting that maybe we were going to do this in Turkish or Russian or some other language that I fumble in.
I assumed it was going to be English.
We make assumptions about each other and ourselves and our society every day.
And as a result of that, what I'm trying to say is this revolutionary thing, I don't want to prohibit it at the level of speech at all.
But I want to say if we cannot say that people celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk are dangerously shifted from the rest of society, that it has a central core, and that we are absolutely not embarrassed.
But I would only have those people on.
I would only have those people on if they had expressed that view and wanted to come on the show and I could rip them to pieces for their inhumanity.
And the reason I would do that would be if they were already getting a lot of traction without being challenged, because I seemed my job to challenge that kind of thing and to expose it.
Now, you know, you would probably not agree with me doing that because they so obviously lack empathy.
But I want to expose that lack of empathy.
I want most people to watch the exchanges I have with these people in that eventuality and think, good on you, Piers, for showing the world what this person really is, rather than giving them a free run on social media where they may not get any pushback at all from their own echo chamber.
You know, Piers, I don't know whether you've ever heard a song called Look at Your Game Girl.
It's an unbelievably beautiful song recorded during the 1960s by a recording artist named Charles Manson, who went on to brutally murder a group of people.
It's a sensitive, beautiful song.
Now, my claim is that we have a discomfort about this because depending upon where we sample a person, we might find that they're semi-empathic, not completely empathic.
I'm not telling you what you can and cannot do.
I'm trying to say that you and I inherited a concept of mustn't.
On different continents, we didn't grow up in the same place.
We're part of a shared Judeo-Christian substrate, which I am unambiguously in favor of, you know?
And the whole idea is that our free speech and our freedom has to do with the fact that we are a highly disciplined moral people.
Even when we transgress morality, and we all do, I'm guilty of it, as are you, we know at some level that we've transgressed.
And this idea of celebrating the transgression and deciding that we are going to shift all of society into an illiberal framework, and that that is going to then require incredibly illiberal means to reverse.
Text Piers to 989-89800:04:09
I'm trying to say, look, we can do that.
If what we want to do is explore the concept that free speech and freedom and relativism and who's to say and we don't want gatekeeping and all that stuff, prepare for an infinite slide into the trough.
Okay, here's how I'm going to.
That wasn't what made.
Okay, I hear you, but here's how I'm going to end this because we've run out of time.
I'm going to get my team to send you a list of every guest we've had on this year, and I want you to tell them, before we speak again, who I shouldn't have platformed.
Deal?
Well, sorry, and then what you talk about this or I'm the gatekeeper.
Then we have a really genuine...
I'm not your gatekeeper.
No, but you are suggesting I need one, and you're suggesting a criteria, which is based around values and empathy and so on.
I'm saying that.
Piers, let me explain.
I'm saying that's the suppression of free speech because actually somebody has to determine what those values are and what the level of empathy is.
And so I think it'd be really interesting for me, rather talking like in generalized terms, who are we talking about that you think I've platformed, which is wrong.
And we can have a debate.
Look, no, what I keep trying to tell you is I don't want these people following us after your show into our lives, calling our friends our loved ones, publishing our...
Yes, what I'm trying to say is some of the people you've had on are part of that complex and trying to draw me into a specific conversation with people who are very interested in acting as the shooter did at Charlie Kirk's, as the shooter did at Butler, Pennsylvania.
What you're doing is you're trying to say, come on, man, let's have some free speech.
Let's have some fun.
Let's be open and free spirited and talk about people with whom we disagree.
Surely there is no gatekeeper.
What I'm trying to say is this show isn't as important enough to me that I want to endanger my family and myself playing these games.
We know what morality is.
We know that this is far outside it.
And if you want to play with those people because you think that those are interesting ideas, that's up to you.
I'm not going to interfere with your free speech.
I'm not your gatekeeper.
And as always, I love talking to you.
Thanks very much, Evan, for having me on, Piers.
I love talking to you.
And I simply have one word I will repeat, which I would love to have answered next time, which is who?
Who are you talking about?
Anyway, Eric, we're going to leave it there.
I really appreciate you coming on.
It's a fascinating conversation.
And maybe we'll find out.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
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