#281 — Western Culture and Its Discontents
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 12 minutes
Words per Minute
170.21198
Summary
Elon Musk has acquired a controlling stake in the social media giant, but what will that mean for the future of the site under his control? And what will it mean for free speech on the site? And what does this mean for our understanding of the First Amendment and the role of free speech as it pertains to social media platforms like Twitter and other social media sites like it. Is this a good or bad thing? And does it change the way we think about what's going on on social media as it relates to free speech and freedom of speech? And is it even possible that Elon will be able to improve the site in the long-term, or will it continue to erode the quality of the service it provides to its users and users' experience? And will it be enough to fix the problem of moderating the site, or is it just more of the same old censorship and hate speech we ve seen in the past? We'll talk about that and much more in this episode of The Making Sense Podcast. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of the show. Subscribe to the podcast and/or subscribing to our other podcast, Making Sense to get immediate access to all the latest episodes. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, we don't need to pay for your ad-free listening experience! We make the podcast made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers only. by you, the listener! Thanks to our sponsorships, our listeners make the show better, better listening and better listening to our podcasting experience, and we improve our quality of listening to the making sense and making sense of our podcast. -Sam Harris and the podcast becomes more of your listening experience, more of you understand what we're listening to you, your brain gets better and less of you listening to us, and you become more of a place to listen to us listening to more of us making sense, more like you, and more of this podcasting more of what we all of us understand us, more understanding us, less of us, better of you, more listening, and less stuff like that, and so on and more understanding you, you get it, more profound and more like us, you'll get more of that, you're helping us all a better of it, right Thank you, Thanks for listening, friend us, thank you, friendlier, more thoughtful of you're making sense?
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
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the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
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Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to
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add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the
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podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you
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enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Well, a lot happening out
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there in the world. I think a brief comment on the immense amount of attention and controversy
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sparked by Elon Musk planning to buy Twitter. It seems like that is happening. It could still
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not happen, but it seems like it's more likely than not at this point. I have been fairly astounded by
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how much of what has been said about this on both sides seems to miss some obvious points. Again,
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from both sides. On the left, there's been a fair amount of hysteria around a billionaire,
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and one as outspoken and opinionated as Elon, buying Twitter and therefore controlling such an
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important media property. Well, billionaires control so much of what's important that there's
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nothing new there. And from the right, there has been a lot of celebratory nonsense about how much
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is guaranteed to change under Elon's stewardship. If I was going to summarize my opinion here, I think
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I'm agnostic as to whether or not Elon can actually do much to improve Twitter. There's some obvious
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things he could and should do, and I trust will do, like cleaning up a lot of the bots and not doing some of
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the very stupid things that Twitter has done in the service of its moderation policy in the past. The people on the
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left that think that Twitter did not have a problem with heavy-handed moderation either weren't paying
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attention or agreed with that heavy-handed moderation for ideological reasons, right? I mean, literally
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someone got kicked off for life, I believe, for tweeting, men are not women, right? That was considered
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hate speech in the context in which she tweeted it. And meanwhile, ISIS and the Chinese Communist Party,
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I mean, all of these groups have accounts in good standing at that point, right? So that's crazy.
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And insofar as Elon is going to insist upon a more transparent and ethical moderation policy,
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that will be to the good. But in truth, if moderation were easy, someone would have figured it out by now.
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And, you know, I'm not especially close to this problem technically and what algorithms can do to
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solve it. But it just seems like there are always going to be apes in the loop, at least to adjudicate
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someone being kicked off and reinstated. You need people at a certain point to process these claims of
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who should be kicked off and who shouldn't. And what you have in front of you are an endless series of
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judgment calls, some of which are trivially easy and some of which are really hard, right? And I don't
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see how that problem ever goes away. So I don't see how you don't always have enormous numbers of
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dissatisfied people in the wake of even the wisest moderation policy. Now, for the so-called free speech
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absolutists who seem to not want much of a moderation policy and who are claiming that Twitter's or any other
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platform's attempts at moderation in the past amounted to censorship, first of all, we already know what an
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unmoderated or effectively unmoderated platform looks like. You go over to 4chan or 8chan and see what no
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moderation gets you. Here's where any sane moderation policy parts ways with the First
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Amendment. Everything happening over at 4chan and 8chan is protected by the First Amendment. I think those
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platforms should exist. Right now, there are things on there that might be illegal, right? Child pornography
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and any other video record of a crime that was perpetrated for the purpose of creating the video.
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There are laws against all of that. People should go to prison for that stuff. Totally understood. But
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that leaves immense scope for absolutely obnoxious and soul-destroying poison that can be spread on a
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social network and which most of us want nothing to do with. And there are legitimately hard calls. Like,
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for instance, I think every platform should have a no-doxing policy. And the people who have been
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kicked off Twitter, people like Alex Jones and even Donald Trump, I think, should have been kicked
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off. And they should have been kicked off largely for their knowingly marshalling their crazy followers
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to dox and harass and effectively ruin the lives of identifiable people on the platform. Right? That is
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what was happening. Jones and Trump knew that's what was happening whenever they targeted an individual
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on social media. And it was absolutely despicable. But there is no bright line between malicious doxing
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and necessary journalism. Right? As users sort of know it when you see it. Do I think that members of
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ISIS should be doxed? Absolutely. Right? Show me some terrorist atrocity with people caught on cell phone
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cameras or security cameras? Do I want those people identified? Do I want them caught by the cops? Of
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course. But do I want somebody who has an opinion that is not shared widely by the woke mob doxed by that
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mob and hunted as an apostate out in the real world because of what happened to them on Twitter? Of
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course not. But again, this is a hard problem to solve. And there will be edge cases. And I just don't
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see how that problem goes away by taking Twitter private or by cleaning up all the bots or by implementing
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an appropriate algorithm. There are still going to be people at the end of the day trying to figure out
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where the edge cases are and what to do about them. So I think the right and the left have much of this
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wrong. I think appeals to the First Amendment are generally misleading. I think we want platforms that have
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coherent moderation policies that prevent them from becoming like 4chan and 8chan. And I certainly wish
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Elon the best of luck in developing such a policy, implementing it, and in making Twitter better than
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it is. I think Elon's claim that Twitter is the town square and that it's absolutely crucial to make
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it much more in line with the First Amendment is an understandable but I think ultimately dubious one.
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Twitter isn't the town square. There are many successful influential people who are not on Twitter.
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The problem is that most people in tech, most people in journalism, most academics, and certainly
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Elon among them, are addicted to Twitter. And I think it's pretty clear, or it should be, that in almost
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every case that addiction is counterproductive. It's not to say that Twitter isn't useful. I'm still on
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it. I still find it a valuable source of news and recommendations. Occasionally it's a great spot to
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connect with someone who I wouldn't otherwise connect with. But I have pulled back a lot because I witnessed
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a fair amount of the dysfunction of over-engaging with the platform in my own life. And I certainly
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see that dysfunction well advertised in the lives of others. So there are many reasons not to be on
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Twitter or not to be on it much. And there are many people who are thriving who are not on it. So it's not
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the town square. You have not lost your personhood if for some reason you get deplatformed from
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Twitter. So I think the analogy to the town square is a false one. And I think the notion that any legal
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speech must be tolerated on the platform is going to lead to a truly awful place to be. And then people
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will be free to leave and start a new platform. Anyway, this topic comes up however briefly in my
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conversation today. And in the end there'll be much more to say about it. But I think creating a social
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media platform that actually works, that becomes a place where smart, well-intentioned people are wise
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to spend their time, I think that is a really difficult problem to solve. And I certainly hope someone
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solves it. Anyway, those are my two cents. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with
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Douglas Murray. Douglas is a friend who's been on the podcast before. He's the author of several books,
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most recently The War on the West, which we talk about in depth. His previous books were The Strange
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Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds. He's also an associate editor for The Spectator. He writes for
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several other publications. He's immensely prolific. And as you'll hear, he is always great to talk to.
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We get deep into his book, The War on the West. Before we do, I go fishing for some areas where we
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might disagree. And actually this question of moderation on social media platforms is one of
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those areas. We talk about the problem of hyper-partisanship on the left and the right,
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and the primacy of culture. We talk about the problem with Trump and use the Hunter Biden laptop
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controversy as a lens there. We talk about the deplatforming of Trump and Alex Jones specifically.
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And then we get into the topic of his book, Proper. We talk about the new religion of anti-racism,
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the problem of inequality, the 1619 project, the history of slavery, moral panics, the strange case
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of Michel Foucault, and other topics. Anyway, it's always great to talk to Douglas. I hope you enjoy
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this conversation as much as I did. And I bring you Douglas Murray.
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I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for joining me again.
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So we have a lot to talk about. First, I should apologize to our listeners for canceling the
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live Zoom event, which had been scheduled for this podcast. But as I told you offline,
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the house across the street from me was being demolished. And rather than have sounds of the
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apocalypse intrude upon our recording, I had to forsake my Zoom recording space in order to go
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just for the pure audio experience. So there we are.
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I'm in New York, Sam. So it's permanent Armageddon noises in the background here. So we could have
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Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you have a new book, which we will definitely talk about. That book is The War
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on the West. And it is a, in case it's not obvious from the title, it is a passionate
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defense of Western culture of a sort that only you could muster. And it's a fantastic read. It's
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actually a doubly fantastic listen. I read some of it and listened to the rest of it. And as I did
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with your last book, I can't remember if you, I don't think I heard the audio for The Strange Death
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That wasn't done by me, sadly. Yeah. Only this one and Madness of Crowds.
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Yeah. So both of those, Madness of Crowds and your new one, The War on the West, you read. And
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it's one of the great pleasures of having ears and a brain to which they're connected is to hear you,
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reading your own stuff is great, but to hear you reading quotations from people you deem to be
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either insane or sinister. And giving it the topspin of derision is just amazing. So I recommend that
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people listen to the audio. That's very kind of you to say so. I actually, I enormously enjoy doing
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my own audio books, partly because I find it incredibly funny. And with Madness of Crowds,
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as with The War on the West, I had to apologize repeatedly to the sound engineers and explain to
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them. I wasn't laughing at my own jokes. I was laughing at the things I quote, because so often
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they're ridiculous on the page, but they're even more ridiculous when you say them out loud.
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Yeah. And just some of your own writing also gets the benefit of your reading. And there are lines
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that really are laugh out loud funny, which I'm not sure everyone would discover on the page quite as
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That's very kind. There was one in Madness of Crowds, I remember, that was much better on
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Audible, which was I quoted somebody referring to something as being literally like Adolf Hitler's
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Mein Kampf. And I say, not just any old Mein Kampf, but Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
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Yeah. So you've had a tremendous amount of fun at the expense of the left, and we will get into that.
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But I want, I mean, one thing I noticed when I announced this conversation, when I announced the
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Zoom event, I got some of your hate mail on social media, and some of my own, perhaps. And I think
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many people were expecting that any conversation between the two of us about the derangement of the
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left would just be an exercise in confirmation bias, right? We're basically going to agree about
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Yeah. And so I think it would be good for us to remain alert to any areas where we actually
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might disagree. I mean, I think we will fully agree, perhaps with tiny little shadings of gray
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somewhere when our attention is directed to the left and to the topic of your book. But I think if we
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talk about the right at all, that we may find some differences of opinion.
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I mean, one area of difference for me, maybe we can just start here. Because I do see, again, we totally
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agree about the central problem in its leftist form. But I do see that a similar thing happening on the
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right, and you don't tend to focus on it. And I guess my, I do have a general question as to why, but let me just
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spell it out for you. I think the generic problem that we both see is that there's now a concern
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with identity that seems to supersede any honest engagement with ethics or facts or even a concern
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about whether one's own beliefs are internally consistent, right? So there's just immense double
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standards and instances of hypocrisy and just shoddy thinking happening under the aegis of identity
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politics. But I'm finding this both on the right and the left. And I mean, so on the, you know, there's
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this obsession with group difference and victimhood. There's the same willingness to destroy institutions
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without any thought as to what could replace them. There's the right has just grown demented by
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conspiracy theories and a cult of personality, you know, under Trump. And so on the left, you'll see
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people deny that, you know, there's anything strange about being told that all white people
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inherit the original sin of racism, or that there's anything strange about a new book titled
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Anti-Racist Baby, right? I mean, this is where we'll get deep into this when we hit your book. But
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on the right, we see people denying that there's anything wrong with Trump or the January 6th attack
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on the Capitol, or the big lie about the 2020 election. So I guess my question for you in search
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of possible disagreement here is, is why focus exclusively on the left? Well, the first thing is
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I don't. And I'm always, I'm sure like you, Sam, I've become aware of quite easily of who doesn't
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read me. And, you know, actually an interviewer said to me the other day, you know, what, what do
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you, what do you think about what people think about you sort of thing? And I said, I just, I don't
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really know what they think. I don't spend that much time trying to absorb it. But I know when people
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don't read me, and I know that one of the signs is when people say you only talk about X, when
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actually I write about a pretty wide range of subjects. I write three to four national newspaper
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columns a week. And I wouldn't be employable if I wrote about only one issue.
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Well, let me just to claim not to be guilty of not reading you because as I, because I
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do, perhaps only is too strong. But I mean, so you and I both have several friends and
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colleagues. And in certain cases, it might be former friends and colleagues who have been
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fighting from the same trench as the two of us aimed at the left, but they've focused entirely
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on the left, right? I mean, and some of them appear to have lost their minds, or at least
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lost certain principles of intellectual honesty. And I won't name names. I know, I know, you
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know who I'm talking about. And, you know, I certainly don't put you in that category.
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But there's no question that you, this book you've just written, is entirely focused on the
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Yes, well, because I see the left as providing the assault that I'm trying to push back against,
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identify, and I think inoculate us against. But I mean, I'm by no means silent on problems
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on the right. Obviously, I'm more politically aligned with the right than you are. And, you know,
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I don't particularly mind that, albeit the right that I knew from the UK is rather different from
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some of the American right. But that's not to dodge matters. It's simply to say, as I say,
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about people not reading me, I mean, anyone who reads, you know, what I write will know
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that I've consistently critiqued my own side. I mean, for instance, and let me just rattle off a few
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that come to the top of my mind. Immediately, January the 6th happened, I wrote in the main
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conservative newspaper in the UK, this sits solely at the feet of Donald Trump. He led his troops to the
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top of the hill. And what did he expect them to do? I make no apology for that, got plenty of
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criticism for it for people, but I still will not regard and do not regard the attack on the US
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capital as being nothing. And have consistently said that among other things, you know, whatever
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happens with Donald Trump himself, you cannot claim that what people around him were saying was not
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essentially up to and past the point of what we call incitement. That seems perfectly clear.
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And I've, and I've, and I've written about that repeatedly. And let me give you two other quick
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examples. There are on the American right things, and I've been in America for a year now, there are
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things which do not exist anything like the proximity to the political center on the American
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right than what exists in Britain. We'll give you a couple of examples. An obvious one is conspiracy
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theories. Another one is like very unpleasant forms of prejudice, which, again, would totally knock you
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out of the race in the UK. Just in fact, I spent New Year's Day this year, not taking a break, because
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a, I won't name him, but a very ugly, unpleasant right winger in the US had been had spent his new
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year tweeting about people, one particular person who he described as having a Rothschild physiognomy.
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And I spoke to Barry Weiss and said, this is, this is where the right goes wrong. This guy is
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actually affiliated with some conservative institutions in the US. It seems to me totally
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intolerable that flagrant antisemitism should be anywhere near the center of the American right,
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and immediately criticized him for this. And got, I have to say, I mean, absolutely no reward in
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return, only a heap of bile from right-wingers who thought that he was either ignorant and didn't know
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what he was saying, or that there was nothing wrong with talking about people having a Rothschild
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physiognomy. And thirdly, I'd say just off the top of my head, at the moment that Russia invaded
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Ukraine, I saw that a part of the right in America was going very wrong indeed, as was a part of the
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right in Europe. And I immediately used my column in The Spectator, which is the oldest right of
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center magazine, the oldest weekly magazine in the English-speaking world. I used my weekly column
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there to talk about the right that had gone wrong on Russia, how it had been misled, how it was lying,
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how it was providing counterfactuals, counterinformation, how it was pumping out Russian
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disinformation, how it had fallen for Vladimir Putin and been taken for a ride. Again, I say this,
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not just because anyone can go and search this stuff, but because I don't think I ever make,
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ever have any problem with saying what I think about people who are identified as being on my
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own side. And there's a reason for that. It's not tactical. It's because I don't want to be a
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million miles near these people. I wouldn't want to be near these people. So when people say,
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and they did with that person I identified who was obviously a nasty little anti-Semite,
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when they said, oh, you've no idea how many people are going to turn on you about this,
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I don't care. Why would I care? Why would I care? Why would I want to be aligned with people who
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thought that Vladimir Putin was the savior of Christendom and a devout, honest Christian who
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must sort of provide the bulwark to the madness of left-wing liberalism? Of course not. I don't
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want to be anywhere near these people. And as for the Trump point, by the way, I mean, sorry,
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it sounds like only because of the nature of the question. I don't want to sound too self-defensive,
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but no less a platform than the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida
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last year. I was on a stage with several people you'd know, and the question of Trump came up.
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I criticized Trump in front of an audience that was mainly supportive of him. And I said,
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there is something absolutely unsustainable about the fact that in front of an audience like this,
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I mean, various people like Ted Cruz had spoken as well. And I said, one of the only dissenting
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notes of the conference, and I said, among other things, it is totally unsustainable that you have
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this situation where at a conference like this, somebody asks a question about Donald Trump,
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and everyone on the panel pretends to know less than they know about him. They pretend not to know
00:24:09.180
that he's got a really horrible character, for instance, and pretend that merely his ability to
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win is what we like, and therefore we'll park everything else. We'll pretend that January the 6th
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didn't happen, and that it's just the libertards going mad. I said that in front of that audience.
00:24:27.720
Again, I'm not searching for popularity, but I would not want to be on the stage, which included
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people who simply uncritically praise Donald Trump and join in with it. Why would I want to be anywhere
00:24:38.820
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm very glad I gave you an opportunity to get that off your chest, because
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you're often lumped in with the people who do not make those points, which I think are absolutely
00:24:52.580
just necessary concessions to political sanity, and it's a problem. So I just, you know.
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By the way, sorry, one other whilst I'm at it, which is I said immediately after, I covered the US
00:25:03.400
election for a number of newspapers, and I traveled around about 10 states in the days before the 2020
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election, in the weeks before the 2020 election. Went everywhere from, you know, sort of across the
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country, covered a Trump rally in Florida. And the minute that the results came out, the right started
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to lie about them. I said then, and again in The Spectator, I said, this is going to be a real
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problem for us, because these people are going to waste our time for years. They are going to waste
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our time with this conspiracy about this election, and they don't realize that they're not just wasting
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our time, they're wasting their own, because they will do the crucial mistake that always happens
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when people fall into this, as some Democrats did after 2016. They will fall into the mistake of
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thinking that they won, and as a result, they will not do the necessary self-searching that you need
00:25:50.400
to do when you've actually lost an election and work out why you've lost. You know, so it's to their
00:25:56.160
own fault as well. It both demeans their opponents and it demeans themselves. I said that straight away.
00:26:02.480
Yeah, so let's, again, before we dive into the left side of the chaos.
00:26:10.780
Yeah, no, I just want to see if I can find the generic essence of our problem first. I mean,
00:26:17.280
I think we both are worried about what appears to be a derangement of our culture, and culture is not
00:26:25.720
this expendable thing. Culture really is the operating system for humanity at this point. I mean,
00:26:32.720
we have, you know, insofar as we surmount, you know, mere nature, you know, red in tooth and claw,
00:26:40.360
we arrive fully in culture, and it's just the basis for every epistemic and emotional and ethical
00:26:51.100
engagement with our shared social reality. And, you know, politics is a strand of that,
00:26:57.960
but there's much more to it than politics. And what we're seeing now is an environment
00:27:04.040
wherein misinformation and moral panics and social contagion are getting made immensely worse
00:27:13.160
by social media and current trends of, you know, loss of trust in institutions and just other forms
00:27:21.380
of fragmentation of society. And again, this is, you know, whatever we're going to say about the
00:27:26.220
left, as crazy as it is, and as easily seen to be in your recent book, you know, on the right,
00:27:33.140
we have QAnon and the other odious exports from Trumpistan. I mean, just the amazing thing on the
00:27:41.400
right. I mean, the moment I can't forget, and really it was the point of no return for us,
00:27:47.560
I thought, politically, was when we had a sitting president repeatedly not commit to a peaceful
00:27:54.700
transfer of power in the event that he lost an election, right? He was given multiple opportunities
00:27:59.160
to do this, and he refused. And the Republican Party was okay with that. And I mean, this precedes
00:28:06.660
January 6th, right? And all the knock-on effects of that. But the, just in the run-up to the election,
00:28:15.240
when we have a president who won't commit to the, arguably, the most important norm politically in
00:28:22.760
our system, you know, upon which everything else that matters is anchored politically, and that the
00:28:29.720
Republican Party just swallowed that without comment, it just, it seemed to me to be, it was a sign that
00:28:36.980
we actually could lose our democracy in the hands of this buffoon. And I mean, I know you were, you
00:28:44.240
objected to that at the time as well, but it's so many people who will delight in the contents of your
00:28:51.960
book, and who want to hear everything we have to say about the craziness on the left, just didn't
00:28:58.040
care about that, you know? And I'm just, yeah. I say several things. I mean, one is, several years
00:29:05.660
ago, our mutual friend Jordan Peterson and I did a discussion on video about where the left goes
00:29:12.160
wrong, which was a discussion which I thought was really very interesting, very generative. And because
00:29:17.840
of this idea that Jordan kicked off, which was, you know, we sort of have a clear idea of where the
00:29:22.240
right goes wrong politically and playing games of racial superiority, for instance, authoritarianism
00:29:26.940
and much more, we don't have an absolutely clear blueprint, by contrast, of where the left goes
00:29:31.200
wrong. And I think that's a totally accurate statement, and I think that it is a big problem.
00:29:35.940
Where is it in collectivism? Where is it within the social justice movement that the left starts,
00:29:41.960
you know, how do you end up with the gulag? And we had a very interesting discussion about this,
00:29:45.800
and one of the things, looking back on it, and I've said this since, including to Jordan,
00:29:49.320
I said this to him, indeed, when we did a discussion, a podcast, on his podcast a couple of days
00:29:53.680
after January the 6th, I said, when we did that discussion several years ago, we did it in the
00:29:58.700
belief that it was clear where the right went wrong and that the right was therefore unlikely to go
00:30:02.920
wrong. And we can no longer make that assumption. We're having to revisit those statements, those basic
00:30:11.880
underpinnings that we thought everybody had. We do actually have to revisit them. And we did,
00:30:17.660
by the way. And again, I don't say this by any means to search for praise, but neither Jordan nor
00:30:24.720
I got any particular love from followers for this. But I said to him, this is a very important thing,
00:30:32.860
that two figures who are more identified as being on the right than the left, certainly,
00:30:36.060
make it plain that this is where the right goes wrong. And the discussion we had included us,
00:30:43.940
I thought, rather helpfully, helping each other to the following realizations. I think the best
00:30:48.640
way I could sum it up is, I said, if you went back five years from where we were then to, say,
00:30:55.420
like 2015, and you said there was going to be a time in 2020 in American politics where a significant
00:31:01.980
amount of the right is going to believe the following, that no media is telling the truth,
00:31:07.520
that no politicians tell the truth, that the law courts are all totally corrupted,
00:31:12.920
that every one of the intelligence agencies is totally corrupted, that the ballot is totally
00:31:18.640
corrupted to the extent that an election is going to be stolen. But you have one great virtue on your
00:31:24.660
side. There is one virtuous man in the republic. And you know who that man is? It's the dude off The
00:31:29.300
Apprentice. Yes, Donald J. Trump. Now, if you just said that to anyone in 2015, they just said,
00:31:36.240
oh, sorry, and also the vice president, Mike Pence, he's also completely corrupted and not a
00:31:43.340
conservative. If you just said that to somebody in 2015, they just said that you're a maniac.
00:31:49.440
How is that going to happen? How am I going to end up in a position where the only man
00:31:53.700
who I'm going to trust and possibly turn up to the Capitol and risk my life for and risk other
00:32:01.440
people's lives for is Donald J. Trump of all the people? Yes. That's a point I've almost made before
00:32:12.340
in the following form. Back in 2015, I would have said that there was literally not a single
00:32:18.660
Fortune 500 company in America that would have ever had the thought, the situation is really
00:32:26.940
grim for us. What we need is a complete rebooting of our organization. We need to bring in a new CEO.
00:32:32.980
We need to find them. And we have found the most competent, most inspiring person for the job. And
00:32:39.000
that man is Donald Trump. Yes. That would have been... We've done a headhunting exercise,
00:32:43.060
guys. And we've come back with a song. A man of high integrity. That's what we need.
00:32:49.460
Never knowingly told none truth. Yes. So this is definitely a problem. And it's a problem of,
00:32:56.220
I would say, particularly of the American right. And the problem is, obviously, that there is
00:33:02.260
something that Trump taps into, which they fear that nobody else can. And I don't know whether they're
00:33:07.740
right or not. I have no electoral crystal ball. What I do know also is that there's one other
00:33:12.520
interesting, which is worth highlighting, which is that for some years, I think, in the cultural realm
00:33:19.680
and others, there was a perception on the conservative side that conservatives had played
00:33:25.420
too nice. That basically what happened was the left advanced incrementally and sometimes actually
00:33:32.140
in bounds. That it enjoyed rubbing the right's noses in its defeats. That conservatives were too
00:33:41.100
gentlemanly to ever do anything other than slightly slow down that progress of the left or to fight
00:33:47.920
another... to fight the next battle they were going to lose. And that this was the sort of trajectory of
00:33:54.160
politics. Now, again, I'm not saying that I agree with it or disagree with it or whether it's true or
00:33:57.700
not. That was a perception on the right. And that the point that Donald Trump came along, as far as it
00:34:04.400
seems to me... And I, by the way, I tried to persuade... I tried for most of his presidency not to write
00:34:08.300
about him because I thought that since everyone on the planet had a thought, it wasn't particularly
00:34:12.720
worth my while adding to the melee. And I thought the same with Brexit, incidentally, after the Brexit
00:34:18.020
vote happened. Not that they're connected. But I just... I tend not to... if everybody on the planet
00:34:22.600
is writing about the same thing, I tend not to want to join in the cacophony. And also because it
00:34:27.600
seemed to me there was relatively little to add. But just to return to this point, that, you know,
00:34:33.800
there was this perception on the right, particularly in America. And they did something
00:34:40.380
which I think is both understandable and reprehensible, which was to essentially choose
00:34:46.400
as a tool of fight, a weapon of fighting, the weapon that they believed would most upset their
00:34:51.640
opponents. It effectively goes to that instinct to hurt your enemy, not to just win, to kick them
00:34:59.420
in the balls. And Donald Trump was that dirty fighter. And the right suddenly, or a section
00:35:05.580
of the right, suddenly got excited about that. They got excited about the fact there was somebody
00:35:09.800
who took the fight to the enemy, who, you know, literally calling them the enemy, who would
00:35:15.100
derange the other side. You know, all that sort of liberal tears sort of thing.
00:35:20.000
It was rejoicing in it, saying, basically, we're so fed up because we've spent years being
00:35:25.300
bullied. And so we're going to have some fun being the bully. And that is, as far as I can
00:35:31.180
see, the dynamic that led to Donald Trump. And because the Republicans don't know whether
00:35:36.620
they can tap into that feeling of resentment without his aid, they're sort of sticking around
00:35:42.660
him. That's why you have this ludicrous dance that's going on at the moment when no one will
00:35:46.840
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's one, again, in the service of looking for some place where
00:35:54.380
that we might discern some daylight between us, I think there's going to be very little.
00:35:58.960
But there's one instance that I am genuinely undecided about. I mean, in the rubble of our
00:36:07.080
information space, one thing stands out to me recently. I don't know if you've written
00:36:11.340
about it, or I think I've heard you comment about it briefly on a podcast. But the Hunter
00:36:16.600
Biden laptop scandal, right? That is a, I genuinely don't know what I think should have happened
00:36:25.160
there. Because let's just summarize the state of our knowledge currently is that it was treated
00:36:31.100
like a product of Russian disinformation at the time. There were a bunch of former intelligence
00:36:37.740
chiefs signed a letter saying this is, you know, classic fake news out of Russia. And it
00:36:44.120
was treated like, you know, pornography, journalistically, and suppressed by social media, Twitter, I
00:36:52.680
think, delinked New York Post's account. I think you couldn't forward the story any longer.
00:36:58.680
And all of this was done, you know, immediately before the election, this was the some kind of
00:37:05.240
October surprise. And at the time, I didn't know what to think about it. I, you know, I didn't know
00:37:10.740
any more than anyone else knew who was being denied access to the information. Except I did know one
00:37:18.020
thing, which is, I didn't care if Hunter Biden had severed heads in his basement, right? I mean,
00:37:25.420
like, there was literally nothing you could have told me about Hunter Biden, that would have been
00:37:31.340
relevant to me, when the goal was to keep Trump out of office, at that point, right? Because it was
00:37:37.600
just, I did view Trump given, you know, the aforesaid non commitment to the most important principle of
00:37:44.820
the survival of our democracy, I viewed him as an existential threat. And given what had happened
00:37:50.400
in 2016, with Comey, reopening, you know, the email, right, the case into Hillary Clinton's emails,
00:37:58.360
we know that, you know, though her failure to win the presidency was certainly overdetermined,
00:38:02.960
we know that in the in the last 11 days of the campaign, that was the coup de grace, right? With,
00:38:09.780
you know, and this could have proved the same for the election of Biden, because it was it was going
00:38:16.540
to be this bright, shiny object that was going to captivate everyone and suck up all the oxygen.
00:38:21.560
So I honestly don't know what I think should have happened there, because I think you and I will
00:38:26.860
agree that there really is a problem when you have the are preeminent sources of journalism,
00:38:32.680
pretending that a significant story is, in fact, a non story. You know, I guess I should close the
00:38:40.420
loop on this is recently been admitted by the New York Times, in an article to which they gave
00:38:45.640
very little oxygen that, oh, sorry, guys, this really was a story. And it was legitimate. And
00:38:52.460
there are all kinds of heinous things on that laptop. And who knows, to what degree it it suggests
00:38:59.200
the corruption of, of Joe Biden and the Biden family in their engagement overseas. So I don't
00:39:06.080
know, I don't know how you feel about that. But I, I don't know what the counterfactual is what what
00:39:11.440
might have been done differently, that would would have been within bounds ethically,
00:39:16.040
journalistically. But it's just, I just, I don't know what I would change about the past,
00:39:24.580
I should declare an interest. I do write a weekly column for the New York Post, which is
00:39:28.940
the paper that broke the story, of course. I wasn't actually writing for the Post at the time,
00:39:33.800
more, apart from occasionally. And now I'm a regular. So I just add that as a, as it were,
00:39:39.340
just in case anyone thinks there's a conflict of interest. But I had no, no involvement in the
00:39:43.600
Hunter Biden laptop story, but I know the people who were involved in it. I think that it was a
00:39:49.280
catastrophic mistake to silence the Post, America's oldest newspaper, at that moment,
00:39:55.140
I thought it was a decision by a few big tech companies, who were basically helping Biden out
00:40:02.580
to win the election. The contents of the laptop, there's a good book by a colleague of mine,
00:40:07.640
the New York Post, Miranda Devine, who did a lot of the work on the story,
00:40:11.680
one of the people who had access to everything on the laptop. There's a very good book about it now
00:40:15.440
called Laptop from Hell, which, which, which if you, if you read, or even you read excerpts from,
00:40:19.980
you'll see that the problem is, I mean, I should stress, I'm not that prurient person. And I
00:40:25.280
actually have no, I mean, nobody's not prurient, but I have genuinely have no interest in the rather
00:40:30.220
sad private life of Hunter Biden. And I would have thought that a lot of the story would have
00:40:35.960
got caught up with that was people looking at dick pics and, and falling asleep with smack beside him
00:40:42.740
and this sort of thing. I have no interest in that. And I don't think it would have made any serious
00:40:46.740
change to the election. That wasn't the real story. The story was, as you mentioned, the fact
00:40:53.340
that Hunter Biden had been making money among other pieces, places in Ukraine, to the tunes of
00:40:58.740
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, to sit on the board of an energy company in a discipline he
00:41:03.400
doesn't have in a country he doesn't know, in a job he wasn't doing. Now, does that matter? You might
00:41:09.100
say no. What matters has come across in some of the emails, which now not only the New York Times,
00:41:13.960
but the Washington Post has said, okay, the emails are true. And by the way, they could have done all of
00:41:18.280
this back then. It wasn't hard to, you could have called up anyone who was on the receiving end of
00:41:23.160
any of the emails, of the many emails that are on the laptop and say, is this actually an email from,
00:41:28.240
from Hunter Biden to you? And they could have confirmed or denied. It would not have been a
00:41:32.920
hard story to have chased up and followed up as the Post did then. But none of the rest of the media
00:41:37.840
came in behind. And the things that are on about the business thing should concern people. I mean,
00:41:43.340
I think the top of American politics is more corrupt than almost any other civilized nation,
00:41:49.280
it has to be said. There is something outrageous about the amount of money that can be accrued at
00:41:54.440
the top of American politics, both during and after office. And that is not exclusive to any one party.
00:42:01.200
I think that it is, I mean, whenever there's a financial scandal in the UK, by comparison,
00:42:09.500
Yeah, exactly. Somebody was, there was a backbench Labour MP at the time who
00:42:13.740
went into incredible trouble because she expensed a whirlpool bath that cost 800 pounds. I was in
00:42:19.420
America, this would be absolutely nothing, you know, compared to Nancy Pelosi's share deals.
00:42:24.840
But the point is, is that, is that, is that the interesting thing in the laptop was Hunter saying
00:42:30.740
to his daughter, for instance, whatever I do to you in your life, know that, that I will never do what
00:42:36.700
my father did to me and demand half of all the money I earn. Now, that is a very interesting story
00:42:42.520
of true. If it's true that there is, that Hunter Biden makes money and the father hives part of it
00:42:48.200
off, and we know that the uncle takes, look, the problem is, is that nobody on the left, as far as
00:42:53.600
I can see, particularly wants to engage in this. Why? Because they'll say, but Trump. They don't like
00:42:58.620
it, they wish it away, and they'll say, but Trump. Well, that is exactly what the right does with
00:43:03.440
some of the Trump stuff. They say, but Biden, but Democrats, but Hillary. And so they should
00:43:10.200
have published. I don't think the private prurient stuff would have made any difference. But I think
00:43:14.900
that a realization that the top level of American politics is, is wildly corrupt, where there is,
00:43:23.220
that family members of people, again, in both parties, become rich when their relatives enter
00:43:29.660
the White House, Congress, or what's more. I think that is something that's worth confronting.
00:43:34.760
Would it have changed the results of the election? I don't know. Nobody does know. But the New York
00:43:39.320
Post was completely right to run, because this was a hell of a story. And the rest of the media were
00:43:45.440
woefully gave themselves away by not reporting. And the media companies revealed what was revealed
00:43:52.840
after the election, which was, anyone could tell, which was a lot of the tech bosses and others
00:43:57.220
were so desperate to make sure that Trump didn't win the election, that they were willing to suppress
00:44:01.880
news that was negative about Biden. I think that's a scandal. I think it is part of the thing that
00:44:08.420
leads to this ever-increasing distrust in every single entity of power and information.
00:44:13.920
Yeah, no, I agree. I just think that Trump, given his, I would argue, treasonous non-commitment
00:44:23.520
to the most basic principles of our democracy, he's a singular problem that had to be solved at
00:44:31.680
that moment. Well, I would have said that American democracy, let's take the idea of Trump being a
00:44:38.680
kind of stress test of the American Republic. The American Republic survived him. Now, you might
00:44:46.500
I do. By the skin of our teeth. But it survived. Court survived. The democracy survived.
00:44:52.780
But it was down to a handful of people who would just not accede to his demands. Had Mike Pence
00:44:59.020
done as instructed, had a few Republican election officials done as instructed, we would have had an
00:45:07.700
absolute constitutional crisis, the resolution to which was just non-obvious.
00:45:12.000
Absolutely. But they did stand up. Lindsey Graham did say on the floor of the House on the 6th of
00:45:20.000
January, I have asked repeatedly for evidence of this fraud in the election, and he doesn't provide
00:45:27.260
it to me. So I agree that too many people went along with it. There were mad theories going around.
00:45:34.740
Almost none of it has stood up since. But let me just return to this issue of the laptop,
00:45:41.940
because it's important in terms of this issue of trust in American politics, which disturbs the
00:45:47.300
hell out of me. The problem with the Post story was not just the suppression of the story, but what
00:45:52.060
you described, Sam, the joint letter by intelligence chiefs saying this is classic Russian disinformation.
00:45:58.100
Here's the problem. In my view, every single person who signed that letter should lose their pension,
00:46:04.740
should be disgraced. Why? Because these were people involved in the NSA, the FBI, the CIA,
00:46:11.320
who became political actors in order to support the suppression of a newspaper breaking a story
00:46:17.140
that enabled Joe Biden to be elected president. It was a wildly political intervention.
00:46:23.200
Except, Douglas, we know that there was massive Russian meddling into every aspect of
00:46:31.620
the conversation. I mean, on social media, with the hacking of the DNC, there was a continuous assault
00:46:40.020
upon our democracy with a kind of information warfare campaign from Russia. So it was certainly
00:46:46.080
plausible to think that this might have been a Russian compromise of some kind. You know,
00:47:00.240
themselves up in American politics in recent years
00:47:03.900
politicized institutions that should never have been politicized
00:47:08.560
overemphasized this allegation that the democracy has been hacked.
00:47:12.220
The Democrats did it immediately after the 2016
00:47:16.740
point to make to some Democrat listeners. But what Donald Trump did in 2020 was unforgivable.
00:47:23.400
But part of his ability to get away with it, I believe, came from the fact that there were so
00:47:28.820
many Democrats who were not willing to believe that he had been legitimately elected in 2016 either.
00:47:33.580
In other words, what I'm saying is, you might say it's a 1% injection of falsehood or a 5% injection.
00:47:39.300
But the point is, is that it was already up for grabs in America that the ballot was not secure,
00:47:45.320
that the vote was not secure, that you could be hacked by Russia and actually it didn't matter.
00:47:50.840
Now, here's the thing. You're now at this stage, and I wrote this some time ago, and if you translate this into the British context,
00:48:00.800
conservatives, never mind, we can put the left to the side for the second, but I can do the same exercise on the left,
00:48:05.760
conservatives didn't believe that any of the following institutions were on their sides.
00:48:17.540
the GCHQ, if they believed that all of these institutions and more were against them,
00:48:25.740
They would be something else, but they would not be conservatives.
00:48:28.840
You cannot be a conservative if you believe that there are no
00:48:32.380
institutions in the state that are trustworthy.
00:48:35.760
Since what's so strange about the Republican Party at the moment, you could argue it's not at all conservative.
00:48:44.220
And again, the problem with this is that there is an element in everything that they believe on this that is true.
00:48:49.900
It is true that the intelligence services, for instance, in the U.S., have massively politicized themselves unnecessarily.
00:48:57.560
They have therefore ended up losing the trust of even the political side that would be most likely to be nascently supportive of them as an institution of state.
00:49:12.180
when in our lifetimes before could you have imagined a situation,
00:49:15.540
not when the left derided and dismissed the heads of the armed forces,
00:49:19.420
including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
00:49:21.120
but where the right did, you know, that's the extraordinary terrain that we're now in.
00:49:26.980
Yeah, no, it was, and we were in there quite early on when, just during the campaign,
00:49:33.040
when Trump derided John McCain and his service as a, you know, a war hero and prisoner of war
00:49:39.780
and suffered absolutely no political penalty for it.
00:49:43.820
Oh, I remember very clearly sitting in a friend's house in America the day that that story broke on the front of the post,
00:49:51.580
and I remember this friend who'd been in politics all her life saying,
00:49:53.860
that's him done, you know, and of course it wasn't.
00:49:57.500
Well, I mean, it happened that on the right there wasn't that much love for John McCain,
00:50:00.540
it turned out there was a certain amount of respect and not much love for him.
00:50:02.980
But still, for somebody who had skipped the draft to be deriding somebody who'd spent years in a prison of war camp
00:50:12.880
and who had refused to leave until his men had left was a very, I agree, a very strange and sinister turn of things.
00:50:22.540
So where do you sit, this is an adjacent lurid topic,
00:50:25.900
where do you sit on the subject of de-platforming people like, well, Trump is one case from Twitter,
00:50:33.660
but maybe a clearer case is someone like Alex Jones.
00:50:37.100
Are you a free speech absolutist of the sort that you think that,
00:50:43.400
forgive me for leading the witness quite this hard,
00:50:46.580
think that private companies should be forced to give a megaphone to someone like Alex Jones,
00:50:52.500
who is, you know, with every tweet is ruining the lives of identifiable people?
00:51:01.780
I mean, I certainly think Trump should be on Twitter.
00:51:04.960
But why wouldn't you take the company's eye view of that?
00:51:10.120
You know, if I start a social media platform tomorrow,
00:51:14.000
why should I be forced to put any particular person on who I want to exclude?
00:51:18.240
Well, effectively, it's a thing that Elon Musk pointed out the other week when he started his bid for Twitter,
00:51:23.220
which is whether we like it or not, Twitter is the public square.
00:51:27.560
And this dance between private company and that is a tricky one.
00:51:36.340
However, it is true that if the tech platforms decide to down-regulate you,
00:51:46.040
Yeah, but clearly, but all of these companies have terms of service,
00:51:50.740
which if you violate them by declaring a change,
00:51:57.680
you would think that ramping up the risk of nuclear war
00:52:01.680
or singling out private individuals who you know,
00:52:09.720
will be doxed immediately and have their lives ruined.
00:52:12.980
And then, in fact, that's why you target them, right?
00:52:18.760
A Washington Post reporter just did that to someone.
00:52:21.460
You know, a Washington Post reporter, Taylor Lorenz,
00:52:26.620
the private individual who runs this account called Libs of TikTok,
00:52:36.580
been complaining about what it's like when a Twitter mob comes for you
00:52:42.020
A couple of weeks later, she doxed this person who runs this account.
00:52:53.140
But, I mean, the courts are taking care of him,
00:53:05.640
and just one other thing, it's an obvious point to make.
00:53:08.540
It doesn't quite solve the deeper point you're trying to get to,
00:53:18.260
that if a platform like Twitter actually cared about,
00:53:31.080
Al-Akhshari Taibur carried out the Mumbai massacre,
00:53:33.760
remained on Twitter until a couple of years ago,
00:53:35.420
and I actually alerted one of the heads of the company
00:53:37.200
to the fact that I thought this was a bit too close to home
00:53:51.280
have ended up having to understand free speech,
00:53:53.680
and seem apparently not to have thought about the subject
00:53:59.780
and they get inept people to ineptly police these platforms.
00:54:04.900
and it may actually be an impossible task, right,
00:54:07.780
to actually moderate billions upon billions of posts effectively,
00:54:18.020
you know, doxing is an unrecoverable error on this platform,
00:54:31.820
and if you see irregularities in its enforcement,
00:54:36.120
So, a Washington Post writer is probably up for defenestration also,
00:54:45.380
but it just seemed clear that the most prominent examples of people,
00:54:52.220
you have parents whose six-year-olds were murdered,
00:55:13.580
because of his insane cult that is following them.
00:55:28.100
I mean, if you and I were on the board of Twitter,
00:55:32.560
Well, I don't think there's any obvious solution.
00:55:55.780
who are willing to put out on social media things.
00:56:12.420
and someone will say you don't look great, fine.
00:56:32.860
and celebrate it and are laughing at him and so on.
00:56:37.780
about your private life on this bloody platform?
00:56:44.320
or anyone who just were thrown into this situation,
00:56:51.440
is a result of them feeding the beast themselves
00:56:55.560
And there are things that if you put out there,
00:56:57.100
you're just not going to get 100% positive likes back.
00:57:36.420
Yeah, well, I think that it's just a natural fact