Ben Shapiro sits down with Piers Morgan to discuss the Meghan Markle and Harry and Meghan's relationship, and why it's so important that we talk about it. Plus, we discuss J.K. Rowling, Andrew Tate, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and what the United States should do about it all. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Daily Wire Plus podcast Daily Wire, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, USA Today, and CNN. He's also the co-host of CNN's "The View" and hosts his own show, "Piers Morgan Uncensored," which you should check out. Ben is a frequent contributor to CNN and USA Today and is one of the most well-known journalists in the world. He is also a frequent guest on CNN and Good Morning Britain, and has been a regular guest on Fox News and other media outlets. Piers and I have sat down together every couple of years for the past decade, getting into new ideas and arguments, and we've become friendly opponents. We appreciate our ongoing conversation and appreciate the ongoing conversation. Thank you so much for being a friend and supporter of The Ben Shapiro Show. Sincerely. -Ben Shapiro - The Daily Wire + Dailywire Plus Subscribe to Dailywireplus on Apple Podcasts and other Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code to receive 20% off your first month's mailbag discount when you shop at Dailywire plus get 10% off the entire month for the rest of the month, plus a FREE VIP membership offer when you become a patron! Get exclusive ad-free version of the show listening to the show for two months only through Audible and Audible, Podcoin.com/TheBenShaw1919 Become a supporter of DailywirePlus on Audible Connect with Ben Shapiro and other VIP memberships, and receive a discount code: BenShawPlus VIP at Audible. and learn more about him on the show only in the show will get 25% off his next month, and get a FREE ad-only deal, and he'll get an ad discount when he becomes available for VIP access to his VIP membership starts starting at $99/month, plus he gets a discount on his first month only, and also get access to the VIP discount starts next month only he gets full access to VIP access starts after May 1st, September 9th, 2019.
00:00:00.000I had an editor of my first paper, The Sun in London, and he said to me recently, the single most annoying thing about you was I used to scream at you when you got something badly wrong.
00:00:28.000Piers Morgan and I have sat down together every couple of years this past decade, getting into new ideas and arguments.
00:00:33.000By now, we've become friendly opponents, and we appreciate our ongoing conversation.
00:00:37.000Piers began his distinguished career in media writing about culture at The Sun, where he brushed shoulders with countless celebrities, all of which advanced his own notoriety, of course.
00:00:45.000He worked at several British newspapers before becoming a TV personality in the mid-2000s, including BBC specials, America's Got Talent.
00:00:52.000I met him while he was working as a late-night talk show host at CNN.
00:00:55.000He was even the winner of the Celebrity Edition of The Apprentice in 2008.
00:00:59.000He now hosts Piers Morgan Uncensored, which I recently joined, and you should check out after this.
00:01:04.000The show launched about a year ago and has been breaking news and stirring up internet controversy ever since.
00:01:08.000Piers is a fascinating news personality to watch because, as you'll hear in the episode, Piers' politics don't quite fit into any one box.
00:01:15.000As an example, he's a liberal, but he'll mock President Biden and wokeism.
00:01:18.000He's also critical of former President Trump, but during Trump's term, Piers publicly defended the administration's achievements.
00:01:24.000In March 2021, Piers lost his job on ITV's Good Morning Britain when he critiqued Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and said that Meghan Markle was a liar.
00:01:32.000And so he lost his job for failing to back down.
00:01:34.000We start this episode on the chaos in British life over the past few years, from Harry and Meghan to Brexit.
00:01:40.000We'll also discuss JK Rowling defending femininity, Andrew Tate defending masculinity, and we'll trade some opposing views on the Russia-Ukraine war and what the United States should do.
00:01:59.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, and I am excited to welcome back to the program Piers Morgan.
00:02:05.000For all of you who want to see a bunch of extra content that you're not going to get to see unless you pay for it, you actually have to subscribe over at dailywireplus.com for all of the extra content with all of our great guests.
00:02:16.000Okay, so why don't we just jump in with the thing everyone wants to hear from you about, which is, of course, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
00:02:43.000Because if you remember, my exact phrase that apparently was so problematic was, I wouldn't believe Meghan Markle if she read me a weather report.
00:02:52.000And that has really stood the test of time.
00:02:56.000So for folks who don't understand, like, how that even materialized in the first place. You have sort of an insider view on who Meghan Markle is.
00:03:02.000And the reason that she's relevant is for two reasons. One, because she really will not just leave and take the privacy she so desperately apparently wants. And she just won't take it.
00:03:11.000That's one reason. The other is that she is sort of emblematic of both a woke generation and an attention-seeking generation. Yes.
00:03:18.000She is kind of the TikTok generation, but morphed into one human being.
00:03:22.000And so when people look at her, there's some people in the United States still who are kind of warm to her claims of victimhood and this idea that she's being very emotionally open.
00:03:29.000And there are other people looking at her like, this is the most bratty person I've ever seen in my entire life.
00:03:32.000But you have some actual personal experiences that led up to it.
00:03:35.000I knew her a bit before she met Harry, and she seemed perfectly normal, albeit like most L.A.
00:03:41.000But she seemed fine, you know, perfectly normal.
00:03:43.000And there was a weird series of events.
00:03:45.000One was the wedding, where she suddenly fell out spectacularly with her father, who we now know had brought her up on his own for quite a few years, actually.
00:03:54.000And she sort of disowned him, and that all seemed a bit sort of brutal and weird, because he was just a guy out of his depth, couldn't handle the media, he was being bothered by paparazzi.
00:04:03.000Eventually, he did a deal with one of them, where he would pose for good pictures of himself, and that was it.
00:04:22.000When they got married, it was a huge celebration in the UK.
00:04:25.00032 million pounds worth of taxpayer money was spent, and nobody begrudged them.
00:04:29.000She was the first biracial bride in the royal family.
00:04:32.000That was a big moment for a very multicultural country like the UK.
00:04:36.000And all the headlines were pretty euphoric, actually.
00:04:39.000Contrary to the narrative they're now trying to make people in America think about what was happening.
00:04:44.000But then over the next few months, there's a series of, you could call them missteps, or you could call them classic examples of brazen, woke hypocrisy.
00:04:54.000Two people wanting to position themselves, for example, as eco-warriors.
00:04:58.000You know, we want you to all watch your carbon footprint.
00:05:03.000And then they'd catch Elton John's private plane like a taxi service.
00:05:07.000Or she would preach about poverty in a tweet from their royal Twitter account on the same day she had a half-a-million-dollar baby shower in New York, here, with a bunch of celebrities and flew back on Amal Clooney's plane.
00:05:22.000And so this went on, and it was one after another.
00:05:24.000And because of the hypocrisy element, the British media in particular were very critical, very scathing, saying, hang on a second, you don't get all the palaces and the servants and the privileged life.
00:05:36.000For this, right, you have to toe the line, you have to do the job, which involves often quite dreary duty as a member of the royal family, but you get to be one of the biggest stars in the world on the global stage in return.
00:05:50.000She, in particular, didn't seem to understand this.
00:05:53.000She thought that actually being a member of her family was wearing a tiara, getting a fabulous wedding, and then doing what the hell you like.
00:05:59.000So, they began to just do a load of stuff which annoyed people, and they got the criticism, in my estimation, they thoroughly deserved.
00:06:06.000And at that point, they developed this victim.
00:06:09.000narrative that they were terrible victims of this brutal, racist British media and the horrible British people who were all turning on them for no reason.
00:06:19.000And so over time, Harry's inbuilt hatred of the media, which goes back to when his mother died, I knew his mother very well, that all began to blow up again, as did his resentment of his family and the fact that William, his older brother, is the heir to the throne and he isn't.
00:06:36.000And then you put it all together and then you get Megxit, where they leave the country, they leave the royal family, and they wanted to have their royal cake and eat it.
00:06:44.000They wanted to stay half in, half out, do the good stuff, get all the trinkets, make all the money out of it, but not have to do any of the duty.
00:06:50.000And that was where you get to the place of the kind of chasm between them as a royal renegade family and the monarchy and the British royal family left behind.
00:07:00.000And now you have them doing a Netflix series about their life, incredibly self-intrusive, The most gossipy royal book that's ever been published, including accounts of Harry's conversations with his father and his brother at Prince Philip's funeral service.
00:07:18.000And you just see a pair of people earning a ton of money purely by trading off trashing their family and trashing the institution of the monarchy, which afforded them their royal titles, which make them the money.
00:07:32.000And to your point in the question, they've come to kind of encapsulate that mentality of the woke brigade, this sense of entitlement, self-righteousness, we're right, you're wrong, we don't have to play by our own rules, only you have to.
00:07:47.000And it's all pretty grubby and tawdry, and they've now ended up as a South Park, you know, mock-a-thon, which has got us all rolling in the aisles, and probably reflects where they've now got themselves, which is they're a global laughingstock.
00:08:00.000So, one of the things that Prince Harry's been hanging his hat on, in terms of his critique, has been, as you mentioned, the media.
00:08:06.000And for Americans who don't follow the media over in Britain, I'm one of them, I didn't spend a lot of time with the British media, as evident from my obviously amazing interview with Andrew Neil, where I had no clue who he was.
00:08:17.000Why don't you introduce us to sort of the British media scene?
00:08:19.000Because it is a very rough and tumble place, in a way that— I don't think that the American media is quite the same kind of beast.
00:08:27.000I think what's different about America is you don't have the volume of national newspapers all concentrated in quite a small geographic space.
00:08:34.000So, you know, you can drive through Texas, in the time it would take you to drive from one end of the UK to the other, and you still have time to spare.
00:08:41.000So, to put the size perspective out there, that's the difference.
00:08:45.000So, you have state newspapers, you have city newspapers, town newspapers.
00:08:49.000You've got a few national papers, but not as many.
00:08:52.000We have, like, 12, 13 national newspapers, all scrapping for the same 60-odd million inhabitants of the United Kingdom.
00:09:00.000So, it's a bit more intense, I would say, is the main difference.
00:09:04.000I think when it comes to the royals, the media are the royals' best friend and their toughest critics.
00:09:10.000We're their best friend collectively because without the media oxygen, this royal family, a monarchy, would go the same way of most other European monarchies.
00:09:19.000They would just disappear into oblivion.
00:09:23.000The people's support is reflected through the media.
00:09:26.000It's a, you know, it's a connection between the three things, the public, And the royal family and the media and all three basically fuel each other.
00:09:36.000So I felt that Harry's view of the media was completely clouded by the death of his mother.
00:09:43.000His mother was killed by a drunk driver in a French tunnel, not by the paparazzi who were more than a thousand yards behind them.
00:09:52.000When it happened, they didn't cause the accident.
00:09:54.000But his mother was constantly pursued by the paparazzi, and he saw this, and he blames the paparazzi for killing his mother, and therefore he blames the media, even though they weren't British paparazzi, actually.
00:10:05.000So, he has this fixated hatred of the British media.
00:10:57.000Meghan Markle is someone who's basically got rid of almost her entire family on her side, apart from her mother.
00:11:03.000Her entire family on the father's side, including her father, which is incredibly sad.
00:11:08.000And now she's wrestled Harry away from his family.
00:11:12.000So how happy they really are in this mansion in California, when they have no connection now with any of their family, bar one or two people.
00:11:21.000I find it very hard to believe that makes anybody happy.
00:11:43.000in British history, because we haven't had a coronation in my lifetime.
00:11:46.000The Queen, of course, reigned for over 70 years.
00:11:49.000So, it should be a moment of great celebration, but what's going to happen if these two are there with their Netflix cameras in tow?
00:11:55.000It's going to be just another part of the Meghan and Harry circus.
00:11:58.000So, a lot of anger back home about this.
00:12:02.000Interesting to be in America again and feel the reaction to the South Park mockumentary, because it's clear that they're losing a lot of support here as well.
00:12:11.000So in a second, I want to ask you about — you've covered a lot of very famous people.
00:12:14.000You mentioned Prince Harry in sort of the not-the-brightest-bulb category.
00:12:19.000When you're covering these personalities, I want to ask you, how many of them do you think are motivated by malice, and how many of them do you think are just plain dumb?
00:12:27.000Which is, I think, the unspoken secret of both American and maybe all of global politics.
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00:13:34.000So you mentioned Prince Harry in terms of personality and him not being particularly bright and being kind of vapid, actually, and that was pretty evident from his book.
00:13:41.000Any man who writes about facial cream and his Todrick in a word, I have to admit, I know a lot of words.
00:13:47.000I did not know that word until I read it.
00:14:00.000But, you know, this raises a question that I get a lot when I'm covering politics.
00:14:05.000And that is people are constantly, when they watch politics, assuming that if something goes wrong or something is bad, that the reason that that's happening is because of malice.
00:14:12.000That is because there is somebody who is ill-motivated, who's attempting to put one over on them.
00:14:16.000Or there's a cadre of people who are extremely competent and evil who are attempting to do something.
00:14:21.000And so something bad happens and their first move is, who is this cadre of evil people that we can go after and blame for the thing?
00:14:27.000What you said about Prince Harry rings true to me, not just about Prince Harry, but it rings true for, I would say, 85% of the people who are in politics.
00:14:34.000Many people are just incredibly stupid.
00:14:36.000And this tends to burst the bubble of a lot of people who watch politics, because we like to believe that the people who lead us have some semblance of IQ and actually can rub two neurons together.
00:14:44.000But it turns out that many of them cannot.
00:14:46.000You've been covering politics a lot longer than I have.
00:14:48.000Well, certainly in British politics, for example, Boris Johnson became prime minister.
00:14:52.000Now, Boris Johnson is a bumbling buffoon, if you look at him.
00:14:56.000I mean, he doesn't even brush his hair.
00:15:00.000But underneath it is quite a sharp brain.
00:15:02.000But I once interviewed him for GQ magazine.
00:15:04.000Years ago, and I said to him, he was then planning to become London Mayor, and I said, Boris, you know, people always say to me, oh, Boris Johnson, he's a buffoon, but I always defend you and say that underneath the buffoon exterior lies quite a smart, calculating, political brain.
00:15:18.000And he said, well, they're very guided appears, he said, but you must consider the possibility that lurking beneath the buffoon exterior is an actual buffoon.
00:15:28.000You may not have been joking, but I think that, yeah, look, I think the reality in Britain, I'm not quite sure how it works on the pay structure in America, other than to run for president is very expensive, so it immediately rules out vast swathes of the people.
00:15:40.000In Britain, we pay our politicians a meagre amount of money comparative.
00:15:44.000You know, to be a top politician, you might get $100,000 a year.
00:15:48.000You and I know that is not enough to attract high-caliber people, unless they really see political life as an absolute vocation.
00:16:37.000You know, the tulip patch is bare, to continue the analogy.
00:16:41.000In America, I think there's probably a slightly higher standard, but, you know, not much.
00:16:46.000I mean, I don't think you look at the American cabinet like you do the British cabinet and think, these are the brightest people in the country.
00:16:52.000You think these are the people dumb enough to actually wanna do this because the media scrutiny is intense, drives a lot of people away from it.
00:16:59.000And it's a tough, hard job and the rewards aren't great.
00:17:03.000As you actually end up in the White House, the rewards aren't great.
00:17:05.000So I think the system itself doesn't lend itself either in this country or in my country to attracting the best people.
00:17:13.000When if you think about it, that's really bad because what you want in a democratic society is that the people in power are actually the brightest people in the country, making decisions that affect everybody else.
00:17:24.000So, it seems to me, you have a sort of...
00:17:28.000Far too much mediocrity, not enough great talent.
00:17:31.000And the victim of that is the populace that then has decisions taken that affect their lives directly by people who aren't very competent.
00:17:39.000So, I want to take a step back here and have you explain to me the current state of British politics, because I look at this from afar, and I have, you know, sort of baseline-level knowledge of British politics and British political history.
00:17:50.000I cannot for the life of me understand what is going on.
00:17:52.000Meaning, I look— Well, let me explain to you.
00:17:53.000The central fulcrum of everything was Brexit.
00:18:08.000He spoke well, he was eloquent, and so on.
00:18:11.000But then, under pressure from the right wing of his party, he suddenly decided to capitulate and allow a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union.
00:18:25.000I think there's a strength in numbers, and I think the United States of Europe, if you like, is far more powerful together than it would be individually.
00:18:35.000My side lost, and the Leave vote won, led by Nigel Farage and other characters like that.
00:18:54.000It was like Trump being made president here.
00:18:55.000It split the country in two and made it very visceral.
00:18:59.000Then you have the explosion of social media, which is compounding with tribalism on both sides, and it all gets very fractious.
00:19:05.000And the Conservative Party then had to try and make this work, which has proven to be incredibly difficult, because Brexit actually doesn't really work.
00:19:13.000So it sounds good, you get your freedom, your autonomy from the rest of Europe, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it's painful and expensive, and people are fed up with it already.
00:19:22.000Doesn't mean it won't work, but it means at the moment, we're now seven years after that referendum took place, and there's no sign of it working.
00:19:29.000So eventually the clock's gonna tick, and people will realise we shouldn't have done this, I think.
00:19:35.000But the Conservative Party went on a sort of weird journey of leaders who were either completely incompetent, shockingly mediocre, so we had Theresa May, who was pretty awful, then Boris Johnson, Who was a buffoon, who didn't think rules applied to him, very Trump-like in his way he went about his leadership.
00:19:59.000During COVID, he was having lots of parties allowed in his Downing Street home.
00:20:04.000He says, most without his knowledge, but certainly for one, he was fined by the police for knowing about it, whilst dictating the rest of us had to be locked down and so on.
00:20:11.000So he then got bounced out over a slew of scandals, really.
00:20:15.000It was replaced by Liz Truss, who came in out of nowhere, really, and said, right, here's what we're going to do to fix everything.
00:20:22.000I know it's a terrible financial climate at the moment.
00:20:25.000I know we're coming out of a pandemic that's been ruinous for the economy.
00:20:28.000But what we're going to do is slash taxes, and that's going to lead to enormous growth immediately, and we're all going to be fine.
00:20:34.000It was like this fairy godmother had come along to sprinkle a bit of dust.
00:20:41.000Who doesn't want to see taxes slashed?
00:20:43.000The trouble was she had no way of paying for it, and didn't say how she paid for it.
00:20:46.000So when she did this, the markets tanked, the pound tanked against the dollar to a record low, and she had to resign after 44 days.
00:20:54.000The Daily Star tabloid newspaper actually had a lettuce, and they put the lettuce there and said, we'll see who lasts longest.
00:21:01.000The lettuce outlived Liz Truss in the last 10 days, which gives you some idea of the farce and also how ridiculous the whole thing was.
00:21:10.000And then she got replaced by the person she'd beaten in the previous leadership campaign, Rishi Sunak, former Goldman Sachs guy, knows the economy, very serious.
00:21:18.000He had predicted everything that would happen if she won, and it happened.
00:21:22.000So it's been a farcical ride, really, but the fulcrum at the start of it, for all of this chaos, was Brexit.
00:21:29.000Right, so the reason that I was confused about all of this is because I look at the Conservative Party in Britain, which is sort of a more moderate version of the Republican Party in the United States in a lot of different ways, and I don't see a lot of sort of unifying principles inside the Conservative Party.
00:21:42.000So you had Boris Johnson, who is a big spender, who is an environmentalist, like a very green leader, somebody who was socially left-wing.
00:21:51.000So how was that wildly different from many of the people he was opposing?
00:21:55.000And then you saw Liz Truss come in and she proposed what is, by most accounts, a fairly conservative political program.
00:22:01.000I'm of the belief that the Bank of England essentially purposefully tanked her prime ministership because they certainly could have held it up for another couple of weeks, but they decided not to.
00:22:09.000They would prefer to allow the bond market to basically— Well, they kind of freak when the market's freak because the problem was she just went She hadn't costed it out.
00:22:16.000She didn't say, here's how we pay for this.
00:22:18.000And as you know, when markets see uncertainty, then they freak, right?
00:22:22.000So maybe the Bank of England could have done, but actually, I don't blame them because it was total carnage.
00:22:28.000Well, in any case, I have a hard time seeing what exactly the Conservative Party stands for.
00:22:33.000And so you're starting to see this massive upswing for a Labour Party that was basically left for dead about three years ago, when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn, who's an actual communist nutjob.
00:22:44.000And now, of course, he's been supplanted by sort of a mystery figure, almost.
00:22:51.000Former head of the public prosecutions, a very smart lawyer, quite a dull guy.
00:22:55.000I mean, by common consent, he's not Mr. Charisma, but he's... He's actually pushing, from what I see, some pretty strong anti-crime policies.
00:23:10.000There's really not much difference between them.
00:23:13.000If you actually changed their names and had them saying the same stuff, it wouldn't sound that different.
00:23:18.000The difference was Truss, who tried to be old-school conservative, but she evoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher.
00:23:25.000But she did it, I think, historically incorrectly.
00:23:28.000Margaret Thatcher, when she first came into power, and she was leader, she won three elections, but when she first came in, she inherited a very difficult economy.
00:23:38.000And she actually increased some taxation to get the economy back onto a level keel.
00:23:43.000Then she cut income tax in particular significantly and became known as the big tax cutter.
00:23:48.000But she understood you've got to get the economy stable first.
00:23:51.000This trust pretended to be Margaret Thatcher, but actually ideologically she just got her history wrong.
00:23:57.000Rishi Sunak realized this, and I think, well, therefore, he's probably the best person right now to try and guide us to a more even place.
00:24:17.000You could really interview the head of a Labour Party and Rishi Sunak right now, and they wouldn't sound significantly different.
00:24:25.000So looking at the political situation and looking at sort of the broader overall situation for Great Britain, what do you think are the biggest problems facing Great Britain?
00:24:32.000I mean, we see these sort of system-wide problems in the West.
00:24:35.000Brexit is the biggest problem, which is in addition to all the other problems facing every other country.
00:24:40.000Every country was hit by the pandemic.
00:24:42.000In varying degrees, depending on how they handled it.
00:24:45.000But Britain has got the slowest-growing economy of any of the major European countries because of Brexit.
00:24:52.000So, unfortunately, all roads really lead back to that.
00:25:04.000But they're no different to any other country.
00:25:06.000The French have that, the Germans have that, the Spanish have that, the Italians have it.
00:25:10.000What distinguishes Britain, in terms of its woeful economic performance comparative to most of those countries, is Brexit and the fallout of this severance from the EU, which has turned out, by common consent even for many people who voted to leave, so far to be a failure.
00:25:27.000So do you think that we're going to see, and I'm going to ask you this in a second, a sort of wave of actual regulatory cutting, a wave of making it easier in the economy, not just in Britain, but in Europe overall, and also a wave of conservatism in terms of the spending?
00:25:42.000Because obviously we're in the middle of this massive inflationary cycle that has eaten all of Europe, has eaten the United States as well.
00:27:12.000It allowed us to outsource a lot of our problems.
00:27:14.000It allowed us to bring down costs while simultaneously spending oodles and oodles of money that actually don't exist.
00:27:18.000And now we're starting to see inflation, not starting in the last several years, raging out of control.
00:27:23.000It seems like we may be entering a bit of a ...to use a British history phrase, a winter of discontent here for all of Europe and for the United States as well.
00:27:30.000What do you see as sort of the economic future here?
00:27:32.000I think the next year is going to be very difficult.
00:27:34.000It may not be quite as bad as some of the biggest doom-mongers feared.
00:27:38.000The main reason for that, though, is a...
00:27:41.000A situation which remains extremely flexible, which is the Ukraine war.
00:27:46.000So the energy pressure on energy prices has eased in the last few weeks and months, because it looks like the Ukraine war is now in for a longer haul.
00:27:56.000It's not as unstable a situation as it seemed at the start, which created all the energy crisis.
00:28:01.000But it wouldn't take a lot, as we know.
00:28:03.000You know, if Putin was to suddenly use a tactical nuclear weapon, as he keeps threatening to, for example, what impact would that have on the global economy, on energy prices and so on?
00:28:14.000So, I think it is actually a lot more unstable than people think.
00:28:17.000That's why I think you're seeing the markets very schizophrenic.
00:28:20.000They're up and down, up and down, up and down.
00:28:21.000Nobody's really quite sure what to make of this.
00:28:24.000So, I think it's very hard to predict.
00:28:25.000I mean, all the ones who are paid to predict these things have been made to look a bit stupid in the last few years.
00:28:44.000Secondly, what will happen with Ukraine?
00:28:46.000Because that is really dictating a lot of the pressure, which is on many countries now.
00:28:52.000Not the United States, actually, because you're not as dependent, of course, on energy as other countries.
00:28:57.000But look at Germany, who were warned repeatedly by Donald Trump.
00:29:01.000To their face in video clips you can see online.
00:29:04.000You know, he warned them, your reliance on Russian energy is madness.
00:29:08.000And they all ignored him, and now look, he was right.
00:29:12.000Between that and all of Europe deciding to listen to the ramblings of a Swedish teenager about energy policy, it turns out that you're going to cut yourself off from your economic base.
00:29:20.000This does raise the question of Ukraine.
00:29:21.000So you've been obviously extremely hawkish on Western policy in Ukraine.
00:29:25.000There's a sort of split on the right in the United States, at least with regard to Ukraine.
00:29:29.000More isolationist sentiments cropping up on the right.
00:29:49.000The United States is always in good shape comparatively to the rest of the world because of all of that.
00:29:54.000However, you know, the case that hawks have made is that if the United States does not continue to fund the Ukraine war, that Russia will end up winning.
00:30:03.000The converse case, which I think is sort of a moderate peacenik case, moderate dovish case, is one that I've made on occasion and Henry Kissinger has made.
00:30:11.000And what that is, is we all know where this is going.
00:30:13.000We know what the end point of this war is.
00:30:14.000And the end point of this war is very likely that Russia is going to end up retaining large parts of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk.
00:30:20.000And everybody knows that that's what the end point here is going to be.
00:30:25.000I think that that would have been the case early on.
00:30:28.000I think that's when Kissinger was saying this.
00:30:30.000I'm not sure when he last said this, but nobody expected Ukraine to still be in the battle in the way that they are, or doing as well as they are, or for the Russians to be struggling militarily as they are.
00:30:42.000And the longer it's gone on, the more I think the Ukrainians, inspired by Zelensky, who's not a perfect individual by any means, You know, he was a former TV producer, you know, comedian, did Dancing with the Stars in Ukraine, and suddenly he's propelled into becoming a wartime president.
00:31:00.000It reminded me a little bit of Winston Churchill in that sense, where Churchill was a bit of a joke before World War II.
00:31:05.000You know, denounced by his party, flip-flop between parties, no one really took him seriously.
00:31:10.000And then when confronted with the biggest challenge of his lifetime, he rose to that challenge magnificently.
00:32:35.000Why would he stop if he wins another chunk of land of Ukraine?
00:32:38.000But secondly, when did Americans, particularly Republicans, When did they actually think it was a good thing that a dictator like Vladimir Putin invaded a democratic country in this way, with such impunity and such a barbaric way, attacking maternity hospitals and so on?
00:32:58.000And just thought, actually, that's not our concern.
00:33:03.000And I compare it not to the second Iraq war, which was a fiasco fought over a false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and a false link between him and 9-11 when there wasn't one.
00:33:16.000But the first Gulf War, When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, it was not a NATO country, and America was right in there, was storming Norman, leading the way to kick him out and restore the sovereignty of Kuwait.
00:33:30.000And I don't remember many Republicans saying that was a terrible thing to do.
00:34:34.000If one missile... You're saying, oh yeah, we'll give them half of Montana.
00:34:36.000If one missile, but the United States is also the most powerful country in the world that's not reliant on anybody else in terms of our own self-defense and preservation.
00:34:42.000If you're an American, your first question is not, how do Ukrainians feel about Ukraine?
00:34:46.000Your first question is, what is in America's interest?
00:34:48.000And so the argument that I've made is that overall American foreign policy has been quite Wilsonian in sort of intent for the last century.
00:34:55.000And that's not been great in a lot of different ways.
00:34:59.000The sort of idea that should be pursued is that realism in America's interest can coincide with things like military support for Ukraine in order to achieve America's interests.
00:35:09.000America's interests in Ukraine are, as you mentioned, not allowing dictators to run roughshod over borders, maintaining an American-led sphere of influence that guarantees freedom of waterways, for example, freedom of trade.
00:35:20.000Restraint in terms of military use of force that threatens all the supply lines so we don't end up back in sort of a 2020 situation.
00:35:25.000Why would Putin's ability to have this nuclear arsenal change your thinking about how you deal with it?
00:35:31.000When did a nuclear deterrent become something that a dictator could use as a stick to threaten people?
00:35:38.000Well, I mean, throughout the entire Cold War.
00:35:40.000I mean, the entire Cold War, the United States didn't go against the law specifically because of that, right?
00:35:43.000Why would he launch a nuclear strike, knowing it would lead to his immediate If he believes that the alternative is his immediate evisceration, meaning that if he's pushed all the way to the wall, the theory goes... You think Russian generals would go along with that?
00:35:56.000Knowing that them and all their families immediately die?
00:35:58.000Well, I mean, I'm not sure that it's worth the bet, but that's the question for America.
00:36:08.000I mean, if he loses 200,000 troops in Ukraine, which is what he will lose.
00:36:12.000Right, but China, China look at that, and they've got nuclear weapons, and they go, oh, okay, so all you've got to do is threaten to use nuclear weapons, and the Americans back off.
00:36:35.000Once you blink on this, and I think it's a really fundamental point, it is basically a form of cowardice to say, if somebody threatens to do something, the school bully threatens to punch you in the face, And you have the ability to defend yourself.
00:36:48.000You've got the same weapons that he has.
00:36:50.000If you allow that bully to win, and you back off because you're worried about what he may do to you, everybody loses.
00:37:05.000The question becomes, what does the off-ramp look like?
00:37:07.000Because what the Biden administration has said, as long as it takes and we don't know what the off-ramp looks like.
00:37:11.000And the question becomes for Americans, OK, so How long does this go on?
00:37:15.000We're now seeing some unintended side effects.
00:37:17.000China is suggesting that they're going to get involved by shipping weapons via Moscow and all the rest in an obvious attempt to sort of bring this thing to a conclusion and get everybody to the table because China doesn't like what's happening very much either.
00:37:28.000It was all fun and games when Russia was becoming a proxy oil state for them.
00:37:31.000When Russia's actually on the verge of possible collapse, then China starts to worry a little bit more because they're on their border.
00:37:37.000So the question becomes, what does that off-ramp look like?
00:37:40.000And does there have to be some off-ramp that allows Putin— I don't think you give him an inch.
00:37:47.000And by the way, every American I know, every American I know, if I said to them Vladimir Putin invades any part of the United States and takes an inch of territory and claims it as his own, Every American to a man and woman that I know would say, absolutely not in a million years, I'd rather die.
00:38:08.000In other words, there's a moral inconsistency because that's Ukrainian position.
00:38:13.000Why the hell should they give up even one inch of their land to this murderous dictator?
00:38:19.000The point that I'm making here is that I totally agree with Ukrainians who say they don't want to give up one inch of land.
00:38:23.000I'm just not sure that America has to agree with Ukrainians that what's in America's best interest is not for the Ukrainians to give up one issue.
00:38:28.000Well, only if America cares about freedom and democracy and saving a sovereign country from being taken over by a Russian dictator.
00:38:33.000Well, I mean, they've been saved, meaning Ukraine— Also, you're in it— Prior to this— Prior to this— You've already committed $110 billion to this, right?
00:38:55.000Why should he be allowed to grab any of it?
00:38:57.000To prevent further loss of life, further American expenditure, possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, China getting involved indirectly.
00:39:28.000And he absolutely refused to give an inch to the Nazis.
00:39:32.000And in the end, he managed to make people believe in Britain that we could win.
00:39:38.000And Zelensky has been doing the same thing with his people.
00:39:42.000Well, they've gone from a terrified populace to now thinking a year in, You know what, we can win this. That's an incredibly powerful thing, which we had in the UK back in World War II, and the Americans helped us win that war, obviously, significantly.
00:39:57.000And Ukraine needs America to step up now and finish the job.
00:40:01.000And the job, the end game, is that Ukraine do not give up an inch, and Putin is seen to lose.
00:40:08.000I don't think in a moment he's ever going to unleash a nuclear attack on anybody because if he did that's the end of him and Russia and everything he's built up and everything he cares cares about, his family and all his possessions. He's a very materialistic guy. He's built up a huge personal fortune of yachts and cars and mansions and so on. He's not an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist who is quite happy to lose his life in the cause. He's not that kind of person. So why should we be barrelled by fear in the face of this guy simply because
00:40:38.000It's not really fear of him as much as it is fear of the unknown.
00:41:42.000Tens of millions more he can bring on to the battlefield.
00:41:46.000So that's not the way that you deal with someone like Putin.
00:41:50.000I think the way you deal with him is the way the Americans have been doing, but time to step it up, with the help of the Europeans, by the way.
00:41:55.000Shouldn't be just America on its own ever.
00:41:57.000Britain has led the way in Europe, and we should be doing more.
00:42:04.000to give Zelensky the airpower he's been asking for, to give him more tanks, to give him more firepower, and to actually repel the Russians from Ukraine.
00:42:13.000And that is the only way you deal with a dictator.
00:42:16.000And anything that is reductive from that, giving him an inch of new land to steal like he did Crimea, I think is a surrender.
00:42:24.000And I don't think the Ukrainian spirit would allow that.
00:42:27.000And I don't think the American spirit has ever been that you give a dictator like Vladimir Putin a win in that way.
00:42:35.000Okay, so in just a second, I want to shift topic, and I want to talk to you about another controversial area, and that is the handling of COVID, which has varied across the pond.
00:42:51.000It turns out, if you just keep spending money, that's a terrible way to get out of inflation.
00:42:55.000You've seen the impact on the stock market.
00:42:56.000You've seen the impact on your savings.
00:42:58.000Your money is just not worth as much as it used to be.
00:43:00.000Hedge against inflation by owning gold, whether that is physical gold and silver in your safe at home or through an IRA in precious metals, where you can hold real gold and silver in a tax shelter retirement account.
00:43:09.000I bought gold from Birchgold in preparation for uncertain economic times.
00:43:12.000Diversification is just a smart business strategy.
00:43:34.000I'm not saying take all of your stocks, sell them all and buy gold.
00:43:36.000I'm saying take some of your stocks and sell them and buy gold or take some of the cash that you got sitting around and put it in gold again.
00:43:41.000Diversification is just a thing that smart investors do.
00:43:46.000Okay, so let's get into more controversy.
00:43:52.000So COVID policy, obviously, has been an area of tremendous controversy.
00:43:56.000It's been my opinion that, frankly, a lot of the institutions that promised that they were going to be able to actually handle things were blowing up data that they didn't actually have.
00:44:05.000Many of them were exaggerating the power of their ability to control this thing, that many of them were pushing things like mask mandates, which were Wildly ineffective, that the promises that were made on behalf of the vaccine, well, I tend to be what would pass for moderate on the right side of the aisle these days.
00:44:20.000I believe that the vaccine was good for people who are elderly and obese to take.
00:44:24.000But I myself, I was 37 when I took the vaccine.
00:44:29.000And at the time, the reason that I took it is because it had been promoted by the federal government and by Pfizer that this thing was 99% effective in preventing transmission.
00:44:35.000And my parents were with us and they were above the age of 65.
00:44:38.000And so I figured, okay, well, A friend of mine in his early 50s is still in a coma after nearly three years now because there was no vaccine and it would have saved his life.
00:44:50.000I think what didn't work was the certainty that some of the data was put forward to the public about I'll give an example where I did a complete U-turn, which I have no problem talking about or admitting, because I was too self-righteous in believing the scientific data.
00:45:07.000So when they said, for example, that if you don't have the vaccine, you can transmit the virus, but if you do have it, you can't, I believed them.
00:45:16.000And because I believed them, because they were so emphatic that that was the case, that if you got the jab, you couldn't transmit it, I then got very censorious about people who didn't have the jab.
00:45:28.000And there are tweets of mine which I've left up, and I get reminded of them regularly, and quite rightly, because I believed the science, and the science was wrong.
00:45:37.000And because I believed the science and then got too emotionally overwrought by all this, I was saying, well, then people should be punished if they don't have the vaccine.
00:45:46.000Obviously, I don't think that now, because once it was established that that was wrong, once it was established if you had the vaccine, it made little difference to your ability to transmit the virus as to whether you didn't, then it becomes a matter of personal choice.
00:45:59.000But it wasn't when I was being censorious, but it taught me a lesson.
00:46:02.000In these health crises in particular, don't be too censorious, because you can't be certain they're right.
00:46:09.000So, actually, I wish I had been more critical of the scientists than I was.
00:46:16.000It doesn't mean to say I would become an anti-vaxxer, because I believe the vaccines were incredibly effective and saved millions of lives.
00:46:22.000And I will always believe that, and I think most scientists agree with that.
00:46:26.000But it does mean that, you know, for instance, masks at the start.
00:46:29.000The reason we were told the masks were ineffective and shouldn't be used was because they actually wanted to use them around the world for health care workers, right?
00:46:38.000So they didn't want the public running out and taking all the masks when they weren't enough to go around.
00:46:56.000So there's people like, you know, it's like the Japanese soldiers, you know, 20 years later out of the World War II still wandering around saying, is it over yet?
00:47:15.000And I think it's an important lesson which I would now try and use to advise other people, which is, if it's scientific guidance in the middle of a really serious crisis, don't believe government modelers.
00:47:31.000who might have a vested interest in wanting just to take the easy option, shutting everything down.
00:47:36.000If they are going to shut everything down, put huge pressure on those government bodies to make sure that people who have other things outside of COVID get properly taken care of.
00:47:45.000Because now the secondary wave of this pandemic are all the people who didn't get treatment for cancer and health disease and so on, which is, I think, disgraceful and should never have happened.
00:47:54.000But also, be able to look at yourself.
00:48:09.000So I'm not talking about the lunatic fringes of this debate.
00:48:12.000I'm just talking about the way I behaved, I think, was wrong.
00:48:17.000I think I shouldn't have been so censorious because now I can realize the stuff I was being censorious about, I gained my self-righteousness from false information.
00:48:29.000I actually think it's quite powerful to admit that and to say I was wrong.
00:48:33.000And so when people say to me on Twitter all day long as they do, you know, well, there you go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fine.
00:48:38.000But if you are one of the anti-vaxxers who really are anti-vaccines full stop, I don't want to hear from you either.
00:48:43.000So I'm talking really about the more moderate people who quite rightly Well, more skeptical than I was about things like transmission, because they were right and I was wrong.
00:48:59.000And the one thing I never was in favor of were the mandates, specifically because Oddly enough, the data they were pushing at the time led me to be anti-Mandate, because there are two things they were pushing.
00:49:09.000One, that it was 99.99% effective in preventing death and serious disease, and two, it was 99.99% effective in preventing transmission.
00:49:15.000Well, if the first is true, then you don't have to worry about transmission so much, meaning anybody who wants to get vaxxed can get vaxxed.
00:49:20.000But it is kind of amazing how the scientific community blew itself out in terms of credibility by making Exorbitant claims about the vaccine.
00:49:28.000Today, they'll still make exorbitant claims about the vaccine.
00:49:31.000I mean, the CDC is now adding to the VAX schedule for small children, the COVID vaccine.
00:49:57.000When you see someone like Lombardi in Italy collapsing, and Italy has the second best healthcare system in Europe, when you saw that happening and thousands of people dying every day, it was terrifying.
00:50:06.000And there were no therapeutic treatments at the time.
00:51:17.000There's a Fauci rule that I have, which is never trust someone with authority who has a giant portrait of himself in a magazine photoshoot of him.
00:51:24.000That's always a terrible sign as to what's about to happen.
00:51:28.000Well, this does raise the question of the 2024 race, because one of the people who was made incredibly prominent by a lot of the COVID controversy was Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, who really was guided by the data.
00:51:38.000I remember I talked to Ron, it was July of 2021, and he was walking me through the data as to why he was pushing back against the mandates, why he was opening up everything, and why everything had been open for a long time.
00:51:50.000It was actually 2020, it was June of 2020, so it was before the vaccines even, and he was talking about how he didn't think lockdowns were effective, and he was citing chapter and verse in terms of the studies.
00:51:57.000He stood against a media that made him the villain.
00:52:00.000Andrew Cuomo was the hero somehow, he was the villain, and he's reaping the benefit of that now.
00:52:03.000And I ask you about the 2024 race in just one second, but first, When the going gets tough, there's one thing you can count on to have your back.
00:54:14.000And he's bold, and he's articulate, and he has a good message which he pumps in a smart way.
00:54:20.000In many ways he's Trumpian in policy but without any of the baggage or the rhetoric or the tweeting or the sort of madness.
00:54:27.000And whilst that all worked for Trump first time around in 2016, I don't think it can work again when there's someone like DeSantis who can give you the good stuff without the bad stuff.
00:54:37.000But the Republicans have got to sort that out because I think that Biden is sitting there Basking in the unexpected glory of not being completely shellacked in the midterm elections, probably to his own surprise.
00:54:49.000Everybody assumed there'd be this massive red wave.
00:54:52.000It's never really materialized, other than in Florida.
00:54:54.000So I think that it's very interesting to watch what Biden does.
00:54:57.000He might be waiting to see does DeSantis get in the ring or not.
00:55:01.000Because if he doesn't and it's Trump, Biden might think, well, I can take down Trump.
00:55:31.000It's been very unpredictable in America.
00:55:33.000That's been in the UK for a long time.
00:55:35.000Yeah, when you look at Trump's campaign, it does feel a lot more lackluster.
00:55:39.000And my theory of why it feels lackluster, I mean, obviously, you know, certain things are no longer fresh.
00:55:43.000I mean, the sort of out-of-the-box authenticity of Trump, where he's just going to say whatever he's thinking on the toilet, and it's just going to come out.
00:55:48.000You're like, wow, that's something I've never seen any politician do ever, usually for a reason.
00:55:52.000But like, that's amazing that people are actually being that open and authentic.
00:55:57.000It has grown a little bit old when it's all grievance-based, when it's all personal grievance-based.
00:56:01.000I actually think that this week, Trump did the first good thing I've seen him do in his presidential campaign when he took a bunch of water over to East Palestine, Ohio.
00:56:07.000I think it's actually the first attempt he's made to sort of reconnect with the people who made him president in the first place.
00:56:13.000He also has to stop whining about losing the 2020 election, right?
00:56:16.000I've tried to tell him this to his face, on the phone, and whenever we've spoken.
00:56:51.000They've moved on to more important things in their life.
00:56:54.000And if Donald Trump can't leave that behind him, I don't think he has a chance.
00:56:58.000This has basically been the case that I've been making is that in 2016, his pitch, and it was a pretty good pitch, was, the reason that they hate me is because they hate you.
00:57:05.000Until five seconds ago, I was hobnobbing with all these people.
00:57:07.000Hillary Clinton was at my wedding, right?
00:57:44.000And then you have the midterms, where most of his preferred candidates lost.
00:57:49.000You add it all up, and Trump's gone from being this amazing, stunning vote winner, who actually won the White House, being the least qualified guy to ever do it in history, against the most qualified candidate in history, and he's gone to being someone who looks like a perennial loser.
00:58:03.000And that's not a great pitch, actually, for the Republicans going forward.
00:58:08.000I think they'd be much better advised to go with young and fresh.
00:58:12.000Now, looking at the Democratic side of the aisle, you mentioned Biden.
00:58:14.000Biden, as you pointed out before, and this is obviously true, would be 86 finishing his second term.
00:58:20.000He does not appear to be fully alive at this point.
00:58:23.000It's kind of a small miracle that he is still halfway functional from time to time.
00:58:28.000But apparently that's enough to sort of get him to 45% in the polling.
00:58:33.000He's got his gander up since the midterms.
00:58:35.000I mean, he just is exuding an air of a bit more energy and vim about him because I think he was as surprised as the rest of us.
00:58:43.000And his heart rate has actually achieved almost normal human levels now.
00:58:46.000I actually think he was probably thinking, we're going to get completely wiped out and then I'm going to announce I'm not going to run again.
00:58:57.000But off the back of the midterms, he's just been a different kind of character.
00:59:01.000He's still been Biden-esque and we've had those senior moments which come every now and again.
00:59:06.000But I watched him in Ukraine and he was pretty fired up and pretty, you know, commander-in-chief.
00:59:11.000Actually quite ballsy to go to Kiev with missiles flying around and to stand there with Zelensky.
00:59:18.000And I thought, yeah, I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican.
00:59:21.000That's quite a ballsy thing for your Commander-in-Chief to do.
00:59:23.000So I don't think he's a spent force at all.
00:59:27.000And I think if the Republicans end up with Trump again, Biden could win again.
00:59:31.000And that should be their calculation, really.
00:59:33.000How do you best win the White House back?
00:59:35.000Do you go with the guy that's proven for the last three years to be a loser?
00:59:40.000So looking at sort of what Biden is doing right now, one of the interesting moves that he seemed to make right after the midterms is he shifted his message a little bit.
00:59:54.000He was doing a lot of the wokeness, he was doing a lot of the radical social policy, and then it seemed like he was Somehow kind of trying to push back into almost Clintonian third-way territory.
01:00:02.000Suddenly he started talking about how we were going to save the Rust Belt, how we were going to reshore a bunch of jobs, how he was going to essentially refocus on economic redistributionism and investment in various American projects.
01:00:15.000I think that's going to fall apart on him fairly quickly, because I don't think that his coalition can actually do that.
01:00:18.000Last week, he brought out an executive order, which is one of the most sweeping executive orders I've ever seen in American politics.
01:00:24.000It was an executive order declaring that equity would lie at the root of literally every government agency.
01:00:28.000And equity obviously means equality of outcome, not equality of rights.
01:00:33.000So every government agency would be directed to now adopt an equity agenda and figure out exactly how they were going to make it so that groups in the United States had equal outcome, which is extraordinary.
01:00:42.000Most equity agendas I've seen in America End up being unequal.
01:01:06.000And the same thing was true of Stalin.
01:01:07.000It's a fanciful notion that you can get to equity.
01:01:09.000And when you do that among groups, and the idea is that any evidence of disparity is evidence of discrimination, therefore the system is to blame for all of these disparities, you get to some pretty ugly places pretty quickly.
01:01:19.000I wonder what you make of the Democratic coalition and whether you think that Biden even has the ability within his own coalition, which is essentially college-educated white women and I wouldn't put it past him.
01:01:37.000I think he's quite a skillful political operator, actually.
01:01:40.000You don't spend 50 years in Washington as he has.
01:01:43.000Also, it's quite a steely streak, which I think comes from the devastating blows he suffered personally.
01:01:50.000He lost a wife and a baby in a car crash.
01:01:52.000He lost his beloved son, Beau, in his 40s.
01:01:56.000And I think that's given him an emotional steal, actually, which I've seen flashes of since the midterms.
01:02:04.000I think it's a mistake of the Republicans to think this is a doddering old fool and we can't possibly lose against him.
01:02:11.000Because they lost against him last time and they really did take really a bit of a beating in the midterms, I would argue, comparative to where people thought the Republicans were going to end up.
01:02:21.000So I think I wouldn't underestimate Biden's ability to pull off another shock and to do it by moving more to the center in the way you said.
01:02:31.000Certainly you hear him saying a lot less woke stuff these days.
01:03:01.000Obviously, calls to censor you have resulted in you actually losing a job for the great sin, as we discussed earlier, of saying that Meghan Markle is not a trustworthy human, which, as it turns out, maybe The most obvious statement in human history.
01:03:13.000But, you know, the Woke Brigade seems to have its way in nearly every area of certainly American life.
01:03:19.000And that seems like it was translating across the pond as well for the past several years.
01:03:23.000Do you think that they have now stepped so far that the movement against them, they've hit their high watermark?
01:03:50.000They're actually rewriting vast swathes of Roald Dahl's children's books in a ridiculous manner where apparently fat is offensive but enormous is fine.
01:03:58.000I mean, Tractors can't be black because it might be racist.
01:04:08.000And it kind of shocked people on the woke side to think, my God, even by our standards, this is completely nuts.
01:04:15.000So once that starts to happen, and you see the reaction being very different to how it was with Doctor Sears, once you see that happen, I believe the worm has turned.
01:04:48.000People who operate it and promote it, who think that anyone who doesn't agree with their worldview, which is often a very warped view of the world anyway, must be shamed, vilified, abused and cancelled.
01:04:58.000That mentality is becoming more and more unpopular.
01:05:03.000And I think that the ones doing it are beginning to realize that.
01:05:08.000It's a war for free speech and freedom of expression and all the freedoms we normally take for granted.
01:05:13.000But it's been a ridiculous assault on those freedoms.
01:05:17.000It's going to be kind of amazing that maybe the two key figures in the rollback of Wokeness are going to be children's authors from Britain, right?
01:05:30.000I've had a few spats with her on Twitter.
01:05:32.000When I got told to f*** off by Jim Jeffries on the Bill Maher show for saying that Trump wasn't Adolf Hitler, which I didn't think was unreasonable.
01:05:40.000But when I got told to f*** off, she tweeted, is there anything more delicious than seeing Piers Morgan being told to f*** off on live TV?
01:05:47.000So she's no friend of mine, and I'm no friend of hers.
01:05:51.000But the fact that she has been so ridiculously persecuted and abused and threatened as a woman for simply standing up to protect women's rights against a grotesque attempt to trash those rights is one of the most absurd things of modern life.
01:06:11.000The fact that you can espouse a belief in biological sex, and you're the problem, And that you can end up in a situation, as we saw in Scotland recently, with a male rapist putting his hand up and saying, I'm a woman, at his trial, so he can get put in a woman's prison where there'll be fresh targets for him, and it works, and he goes in there as a woman until there's such an outcry that not only has he then moved back, and I say he because I don't think he ever intended to be a proper woman,
01:06:39.000It gets put back in a male prison and the Scottish leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has to resign because of the furore he caused by this nonsensical gender limitless gender identification nonsense.
01:06:51.000That's where this goes if you don't actually battle it.
01:06:56.000Rowling, one of the most popular authors ever in history, I mean the most popular, could just stand up for women's rights, to protect women, to make them feel safe, to battle for fairness and equality on things like the sporting field and so on, that she gets treated the way she did.
01:07:12.000If that doesn't tend to shiver down people's spines, I don't know what should.
01:07:16.000We'll jump back in in just one moment.
01:07:17.000This conversation does continue here, but only for our Daily Wire Plus members.
01:07:20.000We're going to get into a lot of hot topics, including the blowback against wokeism.
01:07:23.000We're going to get into Andrew Tate and masculinity.