#93 — Identity & Terror
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Douglas Murray, an associate editor at The Spectator and the author of a new book, The Strange Death of Europe: The Problem of Western Values, about the source of Western values, and the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and other related issues. We discuss Trump's response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and how it relates to identity politics, guilt by association, and immigration. And then we finally move on to the topics that have been left out of our previous discussion of Douglas's new book: topics such as the role of Islam in Western culture, and what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century, and why it s so important to have a strong connection to tradition and tradition itself. We also discuss the recent attacks in Barcelona and in the Sistine Chapel, and whether or not we should be worried about immigration from the Middle Eastern countries. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia, for sponsoring the podcast. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore are made possible entirely through the support of our listeners. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to full episodes of Making Sense Podcasts, unlimited ad-free listening, unlimited access to our most popular podcast episodes, and access to all the best shows on the internet, and social medias, and much more! Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast, making sense. - Sam Harris . Make sense? of the Making Sense podcast and to help us spread the word about what we re doing here. of what we do here! of our podcast, the podcast is made possible by you're listening to the podcast of by becoming one of your fellow podcast listeners can help us make sense of it in the making sense of it all - of course, we don't have to pay the world thank you! and so on and so we can all be a better listening we can do better so that we can make sense more like that ! , I hope you enjoy the podcast makes sense and we can be kinder, more like you can do more of it, more of you better listening to it, and more of that, it helps us
Transcript
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Today I am speaking again with the great Douglas Murray.
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Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications,
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including the Sunday Times, Standpoint, and the Wall Street Journal.
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He's given talks at the British and European parliaments, as well as at the White House.
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I've never had the pleasure of being on a debate stage with him, but it would be an honor.
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And he's the author of a wonderful new book, which we discussed in the last podcast, titled
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The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam.
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And at the outset of this podcast, I wound up addressing what is currently the most popular
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I was going to save that for my next AMA episode, but it just made more sense to work through it
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What are your thoughts regarding the Charlottesville incident?
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Please address the many aspects, i.e. the rioting, the media coverage, the individual groups
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So Douglas and I get fairly deep into that and to related topics like identity politics,
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And then we finally move on to the topics that have been left out of our prior discussion
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of his book, topics such as the source of Western values, the problem of finding meaning
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Douglas is really one of my favorite people to speak with, and he's doing very courageous
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work on the topic of Islam and Islamism in particular.
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Like many people doing that work, he is often unfairly maligned, but he really is one of the
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most thoughtful people you could ever hope to meet.
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So it is indeed a great pleasure to once again bring you Douglas Murray.
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Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
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So, we were all set to talk about questions of human values and their link to tradition.
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I think we were going to kind of stumble upon the glories of the Sistine Chapel, having already
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talked about Islam and immigration and all of that, terrorism, etc., to our heart's content
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But now we have some major news events threatening to derail us.
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We have neo-Nazis marching and committing murders in Charlottesville.
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We have another terrorist atrocity in Europe, this time in Barcelona.
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And then I think just in the last hour or so, there are reports from Finland of a stabbing.
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And as we've said before, I mean, the thing is that some of the facts vary, but, I mean,
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And, you know, it's sort of hard to ever find anything new to say about it, although sometimes
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new people, you know, discover the facts about it and get new opinions.
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But there's not much variation in all this, as you know.
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Yeah, I think there's some new ground to cover with respect to Charlottesville.
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And I think having you on the podcast for this could be perfect, although obviously we
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But let's start with Charlottesville and Trump and the heat he's getting for his response
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to it, because I'm in hot water here with at least the moral imbecile wing of my audience
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for a tweet I sent out right after Charlottesville.
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Seeing the absolutely cretinous response to that, I added, the necessary context, of course,
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So I think it's perfect to debrief with you over this, because your bona fides as someone
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who is worrying about immigration are impeccable, obviously.
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And there's no doubt there are people in the world or even in our audience who worry that
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you may be a white supremacist or be motivated by racism.
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And if there's any point where you disagree, I'll be very interested to hear it.
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But let me just clarify what I was saying about identity politics here, because the point
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But given the response, it is clearly not obvious to some people.
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Just to give you the predictable response, I've been accused of virtue signaling in the
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You know, so racism against white people is OK, or you can only be racist if you're white.
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Something in that genre just came to me in torrents.
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So let me just clarify this and then see if you disagree.
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So just as not all religions are the same, you know, I have much more to say against Islam
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than I have against Anglicanism, though I can find something to say about Anglicanism.
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I think there's wonderful things in Buddhism, although I have negative things to say about
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And they're certainly not the same with respect to the context in which they're being practiced
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I mean, if you were practicing German identity politics in London in 1950, well, then you deserve
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I mean, this is just, you know, and the same could be true for, you know, Japanese identity
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And if you compare that to black identity politics in Alabama in 1964, which I think most sane people
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would acknowledge was not only morally understandable, but morally and politically necessary, right?
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I mean, that is identity politics, a.k.a. the civil rights movement in America.
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Now, my tweet was actually fairly carefully written.
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I mean, it starts with, you know, in 2017, all identity politics is detestable.
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And, of course, I'm thinking about the West, and I'm thinking primarily about America.
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You know, I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and divisive and retrograde movement.
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I mean, it's not to say that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little
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to recommend in what I've seen from Black Lives Matter.
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I think it is the wrong move for African-Americans to be organizing around the variable of race
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But let me just say that Black identity politics in the U.S. in 2017 is still totally understandable.
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I think it's misguided, but I think it's completely understandable.
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And in certain local cases, perhaps even defensible.
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What is not understandable, generally speaking, is white identity politics in the U.S. in 2017.
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I mean, you've got pampered doughboys like Richard Spencer, who have never been the victim of
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anything except now the consequences of his own stupidity.
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And now he gets punched as a Nazi because people mistake him for a Nazi, though he doesn't
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But you have white nationalists and white supremacists marching in the company of actual Nazis and members
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of the KKK. And that is aligning themselves with people who actually celebrate Adolf Hitler and
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Right. And so this is not the same thing as Black Lives Matter.
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And it's not the same thing as even Antifa, these goons who attack them and perhaps got
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attacked in turn. It's hard to sort out who started it there.
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These people have been attacking people all over the country and they're responsible for
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a lot of violence. I think it's a dangerous organization, but it doesn't have the same
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So I guess I'm just wondering, do you disagree with any of that?
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I think I have a slightly different take on it.
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I mean, I mean, I agree with most of what you just said.
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One is that I think it's inevitable that if identity politics runs a riot rampant among
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one group of people, it's almost always going to cause a counterforce.
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In my latest book, In the Strange Death of Europe, I mentioned how it's quite hard to see
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how you don't get, you know, nasty white identity politics at some stage as a response to nasty
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Or in other words, I think, as I said at one point, you you it's not in the long term sustainable.
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Everyone's allowed to do it on the basis of their skin pigmentation, apart from people
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It's sort of it's just hard to imagine how that would be sustainable in the long term.
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Although I agree with you, there are there are ebbs and flows in history of when you would
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legitimately have a cause among one group and and then it would diminish and so on.
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One is that it's very hard once you go down this route to know when to stop.
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Because it's it relies on the goodwill of everybody else from your background or or of the same
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I mean, it it it means that you you're not going to have an opportunist on your side.
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You always have you always have hucksters and you always have opportunists and you always
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have people who who, as I often say, remain on the barricades even after the battle is won
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because they don't have a home to go to other than the barricades.
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And that phenomenon is going to going to happen.
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And I think it's it's been happening in a whole set of of rights claims in recent years.
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And and I think I suppose thirdly that the I don't entirely agree.
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I mean, I can't see why somebody like Richard Spencer could ever be regarded as having a
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sort of, as you say, legitimate grievance, as it were.
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Not that there's any legitimate grievance that could could permit somebody going down into
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But but I disagree that it that it's not possible that, as it were, a white person somewhere
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in the States or some people might be feeling some aggravation.
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And I don't again, again, I mean, I'm talking as much like you in the in the issue of context
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to do with particular groups at this moment in time.
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I can see how a white American in a, you know, former steel town without a job and with all
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the same sort of lack of prospects as people of other skin colors in the area and so on.
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Also, on top of all of that, has to endlessly hear from the media and from a lot of rich kids
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at universities, the claim that he has got white privilege and him feeling, you know,
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particularly at this moment in time, particularly disgruntled about that.
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Now, as I say, all of this, to my mind, is is is just it's just horrible, horrible terrain,
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which I I just wish we weren't collectively stuck on.
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I mean, of course, we agreed on that sort of too obvious to say.
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But but I say it because I have to say as an outsider looking at America, it does seem
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to me that you're driving yourselves mad at the moment.
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And one of the ways in which you're driving yourselves mad is in this way in which you
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went towards something which I thought was the purpose and the dream within America, the
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dream after the civil rights achievements and so on, which was which now seems to me to
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be being thrown away and and almost bungee jump going back from after after the moment
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And I think that this is happening because people are going down the whole avenue of this
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I see it everywhere in the States, on everything.
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No, the only one I can claim to have any legitimate kind of personal insight into is the sort of gay
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I've never seen people at such a pitch of of illegitimate agitation.
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And this is why, you know, I I would say that all identity politics is toxic at this point.
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Now, again, there are local cases where this almost certainly isn't true.
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I mean, if you're going to tell me that the Rohingya Muslims need to practice some identity
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politics against the murderous Buddhists in Myanmar, OK, fine, you know, I'll sign that
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But generally speaking, in developed societies where civil society is or was well established,
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where you have norms of a kind of universal political argumentation, where the color of
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your skin is irrelevant to the position you are arguing for or should be, must be to be
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And yes, as you say, the light was just fully visible at the end of the tunnel here.
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And we've had you hit a two term black president.
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If we can't secure that as a as a durable gain for civil rights, what the hell is going on?
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But I see, I think I think this thing about, as it were, it's not just about where you
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individually or I individually or any other individual holds it.
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It's the fact that there there are always going to be people who, for short term political
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gain, do not want to exercise the same standards.
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You know, there will always be somebody who who who wants to who feels that, you know, they
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haven't had a fair enough, you know, go at things and or they just want more or they want
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to be famous or they want to be rich or something.
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And and they will claim that it doesn't matter that, you know, we've had a two term black
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The whole country is still institutionally racist.
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And we're only minutes away from slavery again.
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There's always going to be there's always going to be a reward for those people, it seems
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to me, in the situation that we are or you are in America setting up for yourselves.
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Yeah, well, so let me just again reiterate that I agree with you that in certain cases,
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even white identity politics is understandable here.
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Again, if you're talking about people who have been kind of passed over by the new economy
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and are in addition to finding it difficult to get a job, they're being told that it's good
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that it's more difficult for white people, given the history of racism.
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And then they have to confront the reality of immigration taking some jobs, say.
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But again, that doesn't map on to Richard Spencer.
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And I wouldn't want that person to go remotely near white identity politics as a response.
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It's just that it's just it's it's it's it seems to me more likely that people are going
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to be pushed in such a direction if you sustain for too long.
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The idea, as I say, that everyone has that right other than them.
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I mean, this all these things, the context of these things in a way reminds me of that
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Some years ago, our mutual friend, I think I can say friend, certainly in your case,
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Some years ago, do you remember in an interview talking about children?
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He didn't want, you know, he didn't want people to be called Christian children.
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They're just the children of Christian parents and so on.
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Your listeners will probably be very familiar with this point.
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There was this really interesting point when Richard in one interview said, you know,
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He stopped himself because he was about to say something he knew he didn't want to say.
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He said, I don't want to say there's no such thing as a Jewish child.
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Because because of the echoes we all know about this.
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And this is just that that is a horrible thing.
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And that's the same, it seems to me, slightly with what's going on with the what the identity
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Tolerant of the black identity politics, because we recognize that within living memory,
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the black communities, particularly in America, had legitimate grievances and legitimate cause
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to have an identity that they that they marched on, as it were.
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Um, and we're also aware that in living memory, uh, uh, there were, you know, white people in
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the South who, who, who, you know, lynched people and because of the color of their skin.
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So what we're doing is, is getting around and, and, and coping with the sharp corners of not
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The thing I think that's so, that's so worrying about it though, as I say, is that I hear almost
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I see only, and I hear only in America, people staking their careers and their, and their livelihoods
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and, and, and their entire occupations are making this worse.
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People setting up their own stalls in the identity marketplace.
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And I just, I mean, maybe, as I say, maybe it's just nature of the media and of people becoming
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well-known because they make the most outrageous statement or whatever, but, but I just, I'm
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not hearing in America anything to do with a sort of spirit of, of mending.
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Well, I think one way to mend it is to make the kinds of distinctions we're making now.
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It's relevant that within living memory, as you say, these kinds of atrocities and
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And, and, and, you know, as you know, you and I point out ad nauseum, it is relevant when
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you talk about Islam at this moment, it is relevant what is happening not only in living
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memory, but in, in, you know, our working memory entered consciousness two seconds ago
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with respect to the news and to not move in the next sentence to some statement of moral
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Perhaps I don't need to belabor this, but I stand by this tweet.
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I think if you can't differentiate the identity politics of black people in America from the
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white supremacist identity politics, we're seeing given voice in, in Charlottesville, you've
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got some moral calibration problems on your hands.
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That's not to say that some form of white backlash against the rampant identity politics we're
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seeing practiced in America isn't to be expected or, or, or, or understandable in certain cases.
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I mean, I just, I just look at all this with such horror because I, you know, I genuinely
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have thought for most of my life that we were getting beyond this.
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And, and I sort of still think we are, I just, I just think, as I say, that the, the standards
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that, that we might wish to apply, there will always be people who, who, who, whose careers are
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I mean, you know, in my country, in Britain, we had this, this long business with the Cecil
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Rhodes statues a couple of years ago, the roads must fall thing.
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But, you know, that whole thing really was, was whipped up by some South African students
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who happened to be Rhodes scholars who were, were, you know, basically appealing to an audience
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back home in South Africa and were, were going to make careers when they went back.
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You just, you know, there are always going to be people who are going to do that and are
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Look at, look at one other, by the way, a little hobby horse of mine, this Anne Frank Center
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in America, uh, Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and Tolerance or something.
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It's, it's, it's, it's run by a couple of just activist Democrats who are standing on the name
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of a murdered Jewish girl who they never had met or had any connection to and using this dead Jewish
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They don't like, I, I, I myself think it's, it's just grotesque beyond words.
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I think if they had any shame, they would stop, but they don't, they, they, they were furthering
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You know, they, they ran some kind of gay rights group and then they obviously rise.
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It was sort of, you know, it wasn't such running and so much fuel in that maybe.
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And then they just decided to, as I say, grab a dead Jewish girl and, and, and run with,
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And I mean, I just think this is from every community and every background and every skin color
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and everything, you just, you're always going to have these people who, who just don't want
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to exercise the standards because they need not to.
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And there's also just an impressive degree of confusion here.
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So you, so you have something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in the face of a Nazi
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rally in Charlottesville seems like an absolutely necessary institution.
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This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center is for, to combat this kind of white extremism
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But in the, in the same period, they have listed our friend and colleague Maja Nawaz as a anti-Muslim
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And as much as we've gotten the word out about that, you still have people like Tim Cook,
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the head of Apple, giving a million dollars to the SPLC in recent weeks.
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People can't cohere in a vision of what makes sense morally and politically because there's
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this identity politics and political correctness has just kind of cleaved our conversation about
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current events in ways that are just confusing to people.
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And, and the response to Trump in the aftermath of Charlottesville or the response to Trump's
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So for instance, I despise Trump as deeply and as broadly as I think any person I can
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I mean, I just think he is a conscienceless monster and, you know, I don't need to go
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I probably have 15 or 20 hours on this podcast of me railing against Trump, but leave it to
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the left to attack him in ways that make him look nuanced and judicious in the aftermath
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I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable how bad the commentary has been.
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I mean, so perhaps we can parse this and before we get off Charlottesville, because I think
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So the first point to make is that Trump failed what, as many people have said, is, is perhaps
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president can ever face, which is to condemn Nazis in our own society, right?
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I mean, like that didn't happen early and it didn't even happen to a satisfactory degree
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I mean, he just, he just has never managed to articulate what is wrong with a full embrace
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of the public square by Nazis and armed KKK members.
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I mean, we had people marching with military rifles in a U.S. city, intimidating people.
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And in the context of this march, someone gets murdered in what I'm sure will prove to be
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an actual act of terrorism, which is to say that the person who did it wasn't mentally ill,
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but was actually ideologically motivated by his beliefs, his, you know, white supremacist
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Perhaps that's been discussed in the news and I'm unaware of it, but it's absolutely
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the easiest possible thing for a sane and ethical U.S.
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president to get up and condemn this in the strongest possible terms.
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So that's what people are appropriately reacting to.
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And in addition, there's the fact that because he's been so bad on this issue and because
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he flirted with these people throughout the campaign and in the last six months and because
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he's managed to give white supremacists in our society the impression that he's on their
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side or at least giving them cover or winking at them in some sense, it's just he's in some
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sense culpable for the brazenness of this emergence of white supremacy in recent weeks.
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But what the left is also doing in response to his failure here is they're castigating
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him for things that actually are true and make sense.
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They're castigating him to the same degree for points like that Antifa were also violent,
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And it's also despicable to have them attacking in many cases, perhaps across the board, but
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at least in some cases, were actually peaceful marchers who just happened to be Nazis, right?
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But if you're a Nazi who's marching peacefully and get attacked by Antifa goons, well, then
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your violence is actually in self-defense in that case, right?
00:27:09.560
It is a morally ambiguous situation when you have these two groups in the public square.
00:27:14.340
And yet he's getting savaged for making that point as much as any other point he did or
00:27:19.680
The other thing about Trump is that he, as he always does, his narcissism and self-regard
00:27:26.900
bled through even in the moment of commenting on this political emergency.
00:27:32.440
And so when he mentioned the mother of the slain woman and talked about how she sent him such
00:27:39.720
a nice message on social media and how he appreciated that, it was so dripping with the focus on himself
00:27:49.580
So virtually everything was wrong with how he handled that news conference.
00:27:53.580
And yet the left still manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by focusing on the few
00:28:02.920
points he was making that were in fact legitimate or at least potentially legitimate.
00:28:08.580
Unless we can learn to talk about these things in an honest way, what's happened now is the response
00:28:15.560
to Trump's failure has been so uncritical of, with respect to these issues, that the left has managed
00:28:23.800
to say all of the things that make it seem like just a purely partisan overreaction to his failure.
00:28:32.020
And so the Republican base or the Trump supporting base now discount everything that's being said
00:28:41.260
And you have, of course, again, idiots and goons, anti-Trump appearing on all the major television
00:28:48.540
stations in America, saying that, yeah, we should, you know, we should bring down the statues of
00:28:54.240
Abraham Lincoln and, and, and all the founding fathers, and we should also blow up Mount Rushmore.
00:28:59.840
And, you know, I mean, you get, you get all those people coming out, making their short term
00:29:06.020
If I can say so about, about this, I mean, I, I'm, I'm, maybe it's just be, as it were,
00:29:12.020
more generous in my interpretation of this, I may be wrong on it.
00:29:15.480
But it seems to me that there are two bits of the criticism of Trump after Charlottesville.
00:29:19.500
The first was, was whether what some of what he said was wrong or right.
00:29:24.380
And the other one is whether the timing was wrong or right.
00:29:26.320
Now, it seems to me that self-evidently, the timing was obviously wrong.
00:29:30.400
You don't do a moral equivalence thing after somebody's being killed.
00:29:33.760
You just come out and condemn the people who did the killing and, and so on.
00:29:37.020
Um, the, the problem is that, that, that I think there is probably a legitimate sense
00:29:43.260
of grievance among some people in America about the fact that, that as it were, in terms
00:29:49.160
of this anti-far, um, violence and so on, you're not starting from a level playing field.
00:29:55.120
I mean, the so-called anti-fascists in America are allowed to just go onto campuses and burn
00:30:01.220
them down and, and, and, and smash everything up and still be called anti-fascists, people
00:30:07.400
who are actually the closest thing to fascists until you see the people in Charlottesville.
00:30:12.380
And, and that just doesn't get the, that doesn't get the, the, the condemnation and so on.
00:30:17.000
So I imagine that what Trump was thinking was, I'm not, I'm again, I may be being generous,
00:30:21.840
but, but my, my impression would be that he was thinking, I'm not giving them that the so-called
00:30:28.220
anti-fascists are indeed all anti-fascists and that everyone they call fascists are fascists.
00:30:34.280
But this is, again, this is a breakdown of the, of the terms. This is as a result of the overreach.
00:30:39.680
I mean, again, if, if, if you, if, if the Southern Poverty Law Center is allowed to designate churches
00:30:45.980
that don't agree with gay marriage as hate groups, then we're already slipping. If Charles
00:30:53.180
Murray is allowed to be called a fascist and allowed to be drummed off a campus and a, and a,
00:30:59.340
and a female professor he's with assaulted, and it doesn't get any sympathy or care or concern,
00:31:05.980
then we're already slipping down this problem. I'll give you a couple of examples that strike me as
00:31:11.320
fairly egregious, which make your point. And this is, I haven't really taken stock of who is guilty
00:31:18.640
here, but they're, you know, very prominent people who you and I respect as journalists in every other
00:31:24.500
context. But people tweet photos, you know, from D-Day saying, you know, alt-left rioters, you know,
00:31:33.760
attacking fascists or something like that. It's like, so, so making fun of Trump's point. And so the,
00:31:40.060
the suggestion is, is that the people who are the, the Antifa people or whoever, whoever they were,
00:31:45.980
who are fighting the Nazis in Charlottesville were the, the moral equivalent of our soldiers
00:31:53.440
during World War II. It's terrific, isn't it? I mean, it makes you, it also, by the way, how,
00:31:57.740
how cheap and easy is it? I mean, you know, the soldiers who stormed the beaches of D-Day saw their
00:32:02.480
friends and comrades shot down beside them. A lot of them saw things they'd never forget and went
00:32:07.720
through unbelievable things. Every single person there that day had a courage that, that most people in
00:32:12.680
our generation, thank God, will never have to even try to summon up or imagine. And here are these
00:32:17.340
people who just have to tweet and they make themselves feel like the moral equivalents of
00:32:21.740
those people. Again, I mean, I've said enough against Trump to hopefully never be condemned for
00:32:30.140
failing to detect any of his moral or intellectual lapses. But in this case, I will give him the benefit
00:32:38.260
of the doubt and follow you there and, and imagine that he was just trying to be fairly scrupulous about
00:32:47.320
the blame that existed on both sides and how, and what a danger this represents to civil society where
00:32:54.820
you have people, you know, members of the KKK and, and neo-Nazis marching with a permit, right?
00:33:02.500
Which is something our first amendment protects. And they're getting attacked by the people who show
00:33:09.460
up to protest. Now, I, I'm sure, I'm sure that ran both ways. Perhaps there were neo-Nazis who were
00:33:15.780
doing the attacking first, but still you can't attack members of the KKK and Nazis just because you don't
00:33:24.160
like them. I mean, that's like, if you are using force first, you are the criminal in our society.
00:33:29.200
Now, you might want to rewrite those laws. You might decide that, that at a certain point,
00:33:34.880
Nazis shouldn't be allowed to assemble. You might want to follow Germany and pass laws against Holocaust
00:33:40.960
denial or the display in the swastika. I don't think you, you do want to do that. I think,
00:33:46.920
I think our first amendment is the right way to go here, but given the laws and the norms of civil
00:33:53.500
society, you can defend much of what Trump was saying there. What you can't defend is his,
00:34:01.180
is the man and how he has practiced politics up until this point and the dog whistles he has given
00:34:07.020
to racists for now years. And so the context matters and, and that, that's what's misleading
00:34:14.520
people here. Can I, can I make two, two points to that? The first is this comes down to a consistency
00:34:20.360
point. Um, this reminds me of a, of a, of a very important issue that has come up, uh, in my country,
00:34:28.280
uh, all sorts of times. What do you, what, what do you do about a collective group of people, uh, or a,
00:34:35.240
um, a voluntary organization of people? And where do you draw the line between, um, uh, claiming they're
00:34:41.460
all responsible for something or not. Now you'll see where I'm going here, but let me give you an
00:34:45.560
example. Um, I don't think I would, there, there are, there's a mosque in, uh, in, um, not far from
00:34:53.180
where I'm presently sitting. That's, that's run by, uh, uh, among others, uh, somebody who's a
00:34:59.340
former military commander of Hamas. Okay. Um, I, I would not say, you know, that everybody in his
00:35:08.140
mosque was a terrorist or that everybody in his mosque was Hamas, or even that everybody
00:35:14.500
in his mosque was, um, sympathetic to Hamas. I just, I just would be very careful about that
00:35:20.020
for all sorts of reasons, some legal, some just practical and some to do with just not wanting
00:35:26.700
to imply to all sorts of members of the public that, you know, that whole place is filled with
00:35:33.460
terrorists because there are consequences potentially of such speech.
00:35:38.140
Now I would like to think that it was possible to be consistent on that sort of thing. As I
00:35:45.140
understand it, Trump seems to have thought, and I don't know whether this is the case or
00:35:49.160
not, that there was a, there was a protest, um, uh, happening and then the KKK and the
00:35:54.900
others show up and so on. Now that there are lots of other cases of that, um, stop the war
00:36:00.500
coalition marches, for instance, you start to stop the war coalition march. And then, uh, some
00:36:05.740
people come along with a load of stuff that like hates the Jews. To what extent can you say, okay,
00:36:12.580
everybody on that march hates the Jews. I think you can't, I think you have to say, look, it attracts
00:36:18.520
those sort of people. So what can we infer about your cause for instance? But I think, I think in order
00:36:25.380
to be, you know, uh, in order to try to think our way through this, I think we do need to have some
00:36:31.440
kind of consistency on that approach. And I think that there is a deliberate desire to say in certain
00:36:38.420
directions, actually, I need these people all to be fascists or all to be Nazis. And I reckon, you know,
00:36:46.340
I mean, I can't foresee a situation where I was on a march and was marching along and a bunch of
00:36:53.020
people with swastikas were beside me and I was okay with that. Okay. So, but I mean, it's the sort
00:36:58.900
of scenario that we've, we've seen, as I say, in similar situations. And one of the, one of the big
00:37:04.160
problems in this, it comes back to my point about the so-called anti-fascists is, as I've said many
00:37:08.980
times, they desperately need fascists. And the bar for describing people as fascists is commensurately
00:37:16.580
low as a result. And this comes down to, there's a second point I wanted to make, there's a, there's
00:37:22.660
a member of the cabinet here in Britain who I'm a great admirer of called Sajid Javid. Um, he's been
00:37:29.340
in the cabinet for some years now as a conservative MP. And he, um, was among others, among our politicians
00:37:36.140
in Britain who immediately sort of leapt on, um, you know, the Charlottesville thing and made public
00:37:40.940
pronouncements. Um, um, now he said, uh, uh, in a tweet, I think it was, you know, look, it's not
00:37:48.000
hard. I'm abbreviating. Um, it's not hard. Um, you know, we're against fascists where we support
00:37:55.020
anti-fascists. You know, I was taught that in school. This, this niggles at me because I just don't
00:38:03.360
think it's as easy as that. And I think a lot of this is, as I say, short-term political opportunism
00:38:10.200
and, um, and a desire to, I mean, I mean, as I say, who, who doesn't find it easy when the KKK
00:38:16.740
come along to condemn them? I mean, well, it turns out some people do, but it turns out the president
00:38:21.040
of the United States does. That should be a straightforward one. The one that concerns me
00:38:26.540
are all the levels beneath that, including people who can just willfully be described as,
00:38:33.820
uh, I don't know, fascist. I've just seen too much of the kind of finger pointing and fascist
00:38:38.160
claiming. And, and I know, and as I say, and I know that, I mean, just vast numbers, it seems to me
00:38:45.940
of the self-described anti-fascists are just very obviously fascistic. And so I don't see the same
00:38:53.740
simple view of this. I think that, I think there are fascists and there are Nazis. I think the KKK
00:39:00.780
fit that bill. And I think the photographs I saw... If you'd like to continue listening to this
00:39:06.600
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