In this episode of the Sunday Special, I sit down with Douglas Murray to discuss his recent trip to Israel and the impact it had on him and the world at large. Douglas Murray is a preeminent British author, journalist, and geopolitical commentator who stands at the forefront of our political discourse today. Widely recognized for his incisive analysis and forthright debate style, Douglas Murray has successfully challenged politicians and the establishment media on issues like immigration, identity, identity politics, religion, and free speech. He s the best-selling author of seven books, including his critically acclaimed work on cultural transformation, such as The War on the West and The Strange Death of Europe. He is also an associate editor of The Spectator and a regular contributor to The New York Post, The National Review, and The Sun, where his Sunday column titled Things Worth Remembering harkens back to momentous speeches in history and urges readers to reconsider the fundamental principles that have shaped Western society. We also explore the contradiction at the heart of American isolationism, and the attitude shift that must take place in order for the West to course correct. You won t want to miss this profound conversation with Douglas, who has a tour that s going to be announced at some point in September, and I can t wait to go on tour with him in the U.S. Stay tuned and go check that out right now! - Douglas Murray Subscribe to the show Dailywire. to get the latest uncut episodes of the show wherever you get your favourite podcast releases. To listen to the latest podcasts, go to dailywire.fm/uncut/uncut. To find out more about Douglas Murray and his latest book, "War on the road" click here. to become a supporter of his new book, War on The Middle East, War On The West, click here and learn more about his upcoming tour, "The Strange Death Of Europe, The War On the West, The Strange, the Strange Death, The Most Beautiful People in Europe, and much more, check out his new upcoming tour of the world's Most Beautiful Nation: The War and Peace, The Quietest Country? to be sure to catch Douglas Murray's upcoming tour in the next episode of War and the Dark Side of Europe, coming soon! to visit Douglas Murray on tour in September. , click here to get a discount promo code ISRAEL, use promo code CRUCIAL.
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00:00:09.000The American isolationists always want nothing to do with the rest of the world, yet they still want America to be the top dog.
00:00:16.000And if you said to the American isolationists, you can remove yourself from the world, absolutely, but you should know that it means in the 21st century, China Or other countries, any number of other countries, will replace America as the world's dominant power.
00:00:31.000And if you are happy with that, argue it out.
00:00:42.000Douglas Murray is a preeminent British author, journalist, and geopolitical commentator who stands at the forefront of our political discourse today.
00:00:49.000Widely recognized for his incisive analysis and forthright debate style, Murray has successfully challenged politicians and the establishment media on issues like immigration, identity politics, religion, and free speech.
00:01:00.000He's the best-selling author of seven books, including his critically acclaimed work on cultural transformation, such as The War on the West and The Strange Death of Europe.
00:01:07.000Murray is also an associate editor of The Spectator and a regular contributor to The New York Post, The National Review, The Sun, and notably The Free Press, where his Sunday column titled Things Worth Remembering harkens back to momentous speeches in history and urges readers to reconsider the fundamental principles that have shaped Western society.
00:01:23.000In just the past several months, Murray has delivered a keynote address to the Manhattan Institute, traversed drug-riddled streets in New York and Philadelphia to investigate the fentanyl epidemic, and sparred with progressive commentator Mehdi Hassan at Toronto's Monk Debates.
00:01:35.000In today's episode, Douglas and I discuss his experience visiting Israel directly after October 7th and covering it for months, how the relative comfort of the West has resulted in young people searching for excitement in all the wrong places.
00:01:45.000We also explore the contradiction at the heart of American isolationism and the attitude shift that must take place in order for the West to course correct.
00:01:52.000You won't want to miss this profound conversation with Douglas Murray.
00:01:54.000Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.
00:02:09.000Before we go any further, I want to tell people that Douglas does have a tour that is going to be announced any moment, or I just announced it, one of the two.
00:02:15.000DouglasMurray.net with promo code ISRAEL.
00:02:18.000If you want to check out the tour dates and you get a discount if you use promo code ISRAEL.
00:02:57.000What's the big takeaway from having spent that much time on the ground, in the area, in a place where the media basically won't go and seem to just take the propaganda at face value?
00:03:06.000I mean, the first is that what Israel is in now is a situation that a lot of countries have been in historically, if not most at some point.
00:03:14.000I say that to go from the zone of peace into the zone of war is probably the biggest zone change anyone will ever go through.
00:03:22.000Tolstoy describes it in War and Peace, the moment before the battle begins and the moment of battle.
00:03:30.000And, you know, before October 7th, Israel was relatively at peace.
00:03:35.000One of the reasons I wanted to go there very soon afterwards, I already thought that it was quite likely, actually, that most people wouldn't focus on what had happened and wouldn't even find out much about what had happened.
00:03:46.000As you know, the standard thing that always happens with Israel is,
00:03:50.000Israel is attacked by rockets or whatever, Israel attacks back and the world's headlines are,
00:04:09.000And in the outside world, I mean, in Israel, almost everyone knows the stories of the day, the horrors and the heroism.
00:04:15.000But it was an attempt to go all the way up through the country.
00:04:19.000It was the most serious invasion that Israel has suffered.
00:04:23.000And the country, as a result, was put into a state of war.
00:04:27.000Not of its own choosing, but as I've often said in recent months, if you start a war, as Hamas did, then you should expect to have war.
00:04:39.000And that's what Hamas has had in the months since.
00:04:42.000And I think most of the world is wildly, wildly ignorant of what is going on, because they don't care about the details.
00:04:48.000Or in the case of the media, they don't have the details.
00:04:51.000Everybody in the Western media talks about what's happening in Gaza.
00:04:55.000Some of the media, I've been into Gaza with Western media, as well as others, and they have been in, but mainly people rely, as you know, just on stringers or on local journalists And they just report what they say.
00:05:12.000And there are just basic media standards that have completely fallen away.
00:05:16.000I mean, in our lifetimes, the old media standard that you report, for instance, saying, speaking from Baghdad under Saddam Hussein government restrictions.
00:05:26.000No one's done that in any conflict for 30 years now.
00:05:30.000And it was a very useful way of saying, you know at home that I can't say everything I see, but we're still trying to get across something.
00:06:23.000Tell me what you accuse the Israelis of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.
00:06:28.000The sort of expectations that the world has placed on Israel in the middle of this conflict are unprecedented in any conflict I've ever seen in my lifetime or anyone that I can even think of.
00:06:38.000The idea that in the middle of a war it is your job to resupply the civilian population of the enemy that Sympathizes with and provides cover for the army that you are fighting, that it's not only your job to go house to house, it is your job to sacrifice your own soldiers in order to protect civilians who are being used as human shields by the opposition.
00:07:00.000And then, if a mistake is made in an urban combat environment with, by the way, the single best terrorist to civilian kill ratio in the history of urban warfare, that somehow that's, it's Israel's fault, it's Israel's problem.
00:07:13.000Where do you think that sort of double standard is coming from?
00:07:15.000Well, I think one of the things that absolutely screams out at me is the astounding lack of empathy for the general population in Israel.
00:07:26.000Can you imagine anywhere else in the world where hundreds and hundreds of young people are at a rave, a peace rave, a music rave, some of them taking psychedelics, some of them not, but just having a great time, and are suddenly And things I can't describe on air.
00:07:48.000And the world doesn't have sympathy with them.
00:07:54.000If there was a rave in Florida tomorrow, and that happened, and it could, I would expect the victims, the American victims, to be the focus of enormous attention and sympathy.
00:08:13.000Not only has it not happened, in New York the other week, when an exhibition memorialising the Nova Party and the atrocities that went on there and the victims.
00:08:24.000When this exhibition is in Lower Manhattan, there are crowds outside calling for Intifada.
00:08:33.000If you were a survivor of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 or the Bataclan massacre in 2015, You'd expect the world would not be against you for being blown up.
00:09:34.000And the world doesn't know that every single soldier who's been fighting in Gaza can tell you that every day Civilians will come out of a building or something waving white flags and from the center of them will come people dressed exactly like them because amazingly enough Hamas doesn't obey the rules of war and that's just all the time.
00:09:56.000So when I hear people say you have no experience of war or urban combat say things like You haven't even begun to try to understand.
00:10:07.000But if there's an underlying reason, I think that it's that a significant amount of people in the West have been educated, miseducated, into the idea that in some way Israel is, and always is, the aggressor.
00:10:21.000Israel has done something wrong, and anything that is done in response to the something wrong can kind of be excused.
00:10:31.000And I hate that, not only because it is wildly untrue, but if you remember the last time that anything remotely similar happened in America, 9-11, there were some people, like the historian of ancient Rome, Mary Beard, who wrote in the London Review of Books that it was impossible to get out of your head after 9-11 the thought that to some extent the Americans had it coming to them.
00:10:56.000By the way, she's still all over the media, of course, and has always been commissioned by the BBC and many others.
00:11:02.000But most Americans didn't much care for that tone of voice.
00:11:08.000Most of us in Britain didn't much care for that tone of voice.
00:11:12.000But Israel is the one country which, when it's blown up or attacked, its women are... its children are... There's a kind of, yes, but...
00:11:24.000And if you go back to the yes but, what do you actually mean?
00:11:27.000What is the clause that you want to go back to?
00:11:33.000And you know, as my debating partner in Toronto the other week, Natasha Hausdorff, said, it's a very interesting one that, because a mother and father, when they're having a child, may debate whether or not they want to have a child.
00:11:47.000They may debate, if the wife is pregnant, whether or not they should abort the child.
00:11:50.000These are all very, very difficult questions and unpleasant questions that the people think about.
00:11:55.000Once a child is 70 years old, you're talking about whether or not the child should be killed.
00:12:06.000Well, the state of Israel is many decades old now.
00:12:11.000And if you believe it shouldn't have been created, you believe in murder.
00:12:15.000The state of Pakistan, which is a pretty catastrophic state, was created around the same time that Israel was created.
00:12:21.000And I know of nobody, outside of perhaps a lunatic asylum somewhere in India, who believes that the state of Pakistan should be abolished.
00:12:31.000And if they did want that, You wouldn't believe them if they said, I do want to abolish this state founded in 1947, but I have nothing against Pakistani people.
00:12:42.000I just want them exclusively to lose the right to have a state which was created and founded many decades ago.
00:12:51.000The young Americans and others who don't realize what they're calling for, plus the ones who do.
00:13:01.000So, yeah, I've remarked many times that the problem with this is not a problem for Israel as much as it is a problem for the West.
00:13:07.000That Israel, if you visit, it's actually, despite all of the internal divisions, and there are many, a pretty cohesive society that actually would like to live, actually has no death wish in the way that the West seems to have a peculiar death wish, not reproducing, not having babies.
00:13:20.000Israel's the only Western country that has above replacement rates of birth.
00:13:24.000The fertility rate in Israel is above three, and that's including areas like Tel Aviv, which is like San Francisco.
00:13:29.000Socially, and every woman there is married and has three babies.
00:13:32.000And so it's really not a problem for Israel internally.
00:13:35.000It is a problem for the West, because it seems to me that what's been happening in Israel is a manifestation of a broader philosophy that has taken over huge swaths of the left.
00:13:43.000I want to get to right-wing antisemitism and the problems there in a second.
00:13:46.000But on the left, which is really where it's predominant these days, the basic philosophy goes something like this.
00:13:51.000The world is made up of victims and it's made up of victimizers.
00:13:54.000And if you're on the ledger of victims, You're, you're, I'm glad you're a victim, it's not because you yourself have been victimized as an individual, it's because you're a member of a quote-unquote victimized group.
00:14:03.000And the way we can tell that you're a member of a victimized group is because your group is disproportionately unsuccessful in some measurable way.
00:14:12.000And this means that you must have been victimized by somebody else, particularly a member of a victimizer group.
00:14:17.000And the real problem that you have when it comes to the Jews, particularly, is that the Jews happen to be historically victimized and also disproportionately successful.
00:14:24.000So they tend to blow up the entire structure of this thought.
00:14:28.000And so the Jews must then be recast into the victimizers in order to fit this particular model.
00:14:35.000And so what you hear is Black Lives Matter in the United States saying that the Palestinians are just like black Americans in the Middle East and that the failures of Palestinian society, that's not because they've made a series of horrendous decisions for the past 75 years.
00:14:49.000That is because, obviously, of the exploitation of the overclass, of that victimizer group And I've been asked before, so why is it such a cause celebre?
00:14:57.000Because obviously you have people who are suffering all over the place, people who make bad decisions.
00:15:02.000And the case that I've made is that the Hamas-Israel conflict is the ultimate proof of skin in the game.
00:15:08.000That if you want to show your friends, If you want to show your social circle that you really buy into the victim-victimizer complex, you have to pick the case that does not fit.
00:15:17.000You have to pick that case, and you have to make the case that it does fit, because that demonstrates skin in the game.
00:15:21.000It demonstrates how deeply invested you are in this ideology.
00:15:23.000If you can make the case— Anti-colonialism.
00:15:27.000If you can make the case that these people, who are making the worst case in history for wanting to be successful, because they clearly do not, the people who have usurped billions of dollars in aid and built the biggest network of terror tunnels in human history—I mean, it's larger than the London Underground, what they built—if you can make the case that those people are the victims, And that the Jews have been sitting here, you know, building skyscrapers and technologies, that those are the actual victimizers.
00:15:48.000Well, then you really have proved your fealty to this ideology, and thus dissociated from the white supremacist group that you believe runs society.
00:15:55.000Well, you know, one of the interesting things, you know, there's a ruling conflict, particularly in counterinsurgency, which is that everyone always fights the last war.
00:16:03.000So, America with Vietnam, America post-Vietnam, Britain-Northern Ireland, Britain-Iraq.
00:16:33.000They think that it's very important to be against colonialism.
00:16:39.000Well, my country of birth got out of that quite a long time ago.
00:16:44.000There were some countries who were into it big time, like the Chinese Communist Party, hoovering up massive Drugs of Africa!
00:16:51.000But the anti-colonial movement isn't interested in colonialism in Africa unless it's done by Belgians in the 19th century, and they're really against that.
00:17:01.000Very important that King Leopold remembers posthumously not to take over Congo again.
00:17:06.000I mean, why not deal with what the Chinese Communist Party is doing today?
00:17:12.000Very, very passionate against slavery again, you know.
00:17:17.000200 years after King George III signed the Anti-Slavery Act into law in the UK.
00:17:23.000But I saw this recently in South Africa when I was there.
00:17:28.000The number of people who have been persuaded that apartheid is what's going on in Israel.
00:17:34.000I said to my South African friends, you know, your corrupt ANC government is spending down the moral capital of the overthrow of apartheid and wasting it at the behest of Iran on this false accusation against Israel.
00:17:47.000But it's amazing how many people will suck that up.
00:17:50.000And of course, you know, they've got quite a lot of questions to answer, far more than I think people who broadly agree with you or me.
00:17:57.000It still seems to me that although the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was by no means an entirely peaceful movement, just to understate things, I think that Nelson Mandela would have a worse posthumous reputation if he'd personally called for people to rip the hearts out of babies.
00:18:17.000You know, I sort of think, I think that the great, you know, unifying figure of South African history, it would have gone differently.
00:18:26.000And the reason why, as you say, the Arab-Palestinian cause has gone so differently, is that they've kept starting wars and kept losing them.
00:18:37.000And their friends and allies in the region have kept encouraging them into war, and they keep losing.
00:18:44.000And yet, despite keeping on losing, they keep being regarded as the victim.
00:18:51.000And I mean, it's a terrible curse for the state of Israel to have this almost insoluble problem of the Palestinians handed to them, and the world that can't solve it, and the region that can't solve it, and saying the Jewish state has to solve it.
00:19:10.000And it's not at all clear to me that they do.
00:19:14.000Certainly not that it's Israel's responsibility alone.
00:19:17.000And I've spent too much time in the region to believe this BS.
00:19:21.000I know how much the Jordanians loathe the Palestinians.
00:19:25.000I know how much the Lebanese loathe them.
00:19:28.000How little the Gulf Arabs care about them.
00:19:31.000So when I see people like the appalling regime in Qatar, Funding Hamas, hosting Hamas' leadership and making accusations against Israel on the world stage.
00:19:45.000And I sort of think, why are none of these kids at campuses in America, which are very significantly funded by Qatar by the way, Why are they not bothered that their university, they're always calling to divest from Israel, but they sort of have to scour the landscape to find one donor who once bought a bag of chips in Tel Aviv.
00:20:05.000And meantime, they're on a campus that has these huge buildings built by Qatar, professors funded by Qatar, which is actually an apartheid state, where there's a couple of hundred thousand very rich Qataris and a slave class of imported labor.
00:20:19.000It's like, I don't know, why don't you care about that?
00:20:22.000And then they say, oh, well, that's whataboutery.
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00:21:26.000So one of the things that's been sort of puzzling about the foreign policy scene is the differential treatment by the left of, say, Israel and Ukraine.
00:21:35.000And same thing on parts of the right, but in reverse.
00:21:37.000So, you know, the Ukraine conflict has sort of upended a bunch of traditional, say, cross-cutting Political alignment.
00:21:46.000If you had told me 20 years ago that Republicans in large part would be very much against the funding of Ukraine in its war against, in its existential war against Russia, I would have thought that that was pretty nuts.
00:21:57.000I mean, I'm old enough to remember in 2012 when Mitt Romney was supposedly speaking on behalf of the foreign policy of the 1980s and being anti-Russian.
00:22:04.000Now it's the entire left that has declared that Russia is the great scourge state, which It is, in part.
00:22:10.000And meanwhile, you have large swaths of the right claiming that Ukraine is somehow too
00:22:15.000corrupt to be supported, that Russia's going to win anyway, that the best thing that the
00:22:21.000Now, I've distinguished between two separate arguments.
00:22:23.000One is sort of a pragmatic argument about what sort of end state should be sought.
00:22:26.000Is it really worthwhile funding Ukraine to the tune of trying to take back Crimea or Donbass, where a large swath of the population actually still support Russia?
00:22:33.000But that's a different question from the sort of larger scale question that seems to be posed in parts of the right, which is, should we just get out of Ukraine entirely, the West, in terms of funding?
00:22:42.000The question I've always asked is, why would it be in America's interest or the West's interest for Russia to simply take Ukraine?
00:22:47.000But where do you think that's coming from?
00:22:49.000Well, some of it is the inevitable blowback of failed foreign policy of the 2000s.
00:22:57.000Something that's very striking to me in Republican politics has been that At some point, you might say that John McCain was a kind of pivotal figure.
00:23:05.000At some point, the so-called adults in the room stopped being respected as adults.
00:23:11.000And, you know, you can lament that, but you can also say, well, to an extent, they brought it upon themselves.
00:23:16.000You know, I remember I sort of got off that bandwagon by the time of Syria.
00:23:20.000Maybe people think that's a bit late, but I remember when I heard McCain and others saying, we know who to arm in Syria, I was thinking, I don't believe you anymore.
00:23:28.000I think we're going to make a hideous mistake again.
00:23:33.000But by the way, the West got blamed for the breakdown of Syria despite not intervening and we would have been blamed if we had intervened because some people don't know who to blame unless it's us.
00:23:45.000I do think that, yes, I think there was a huge loss of institutional knowledge and Generational self-belief, actually.
00:23:54.000I think it might be something like the post-Vietnam era in America.
00:24:00.000And of course, you know, everything's so easy to understand in the rearview mirror.
00:24:08.000I would say that in relation to Ukraine, I understand the American isolationist trend and I deplore it.
00:24:17.000Because in the case of Ukraine, I mean, if you go to the Baltic states, which are NATO members, they're really not bluffing when they say that they're worried that if Putin takes everything he wants in Ukraine, they're next.
00:24:31.000As in Vilnius recently, it's so close.
00:25:09.000And there are some people now who pretend that Vladimir Putin only wants Ukraine.
00:25:13.000And among other reasons I know that's wrong was that I was in the country of Georgia after Vladimir Putin invaded it.
00:25:19.000And so, I have enough muscle memory to remember countries that Vladimir Putin's invaded.
00:25:26.000There are a lot of people with no memory at all.
00:25:30.000But I think that's, broadly speaking, you know, what people are thinking is, we've screwed up a lot, we don't believe anyone who says they know about foreign policy, and it's all just a mess, and the world's a mess.
00:25:43.000I find it an odd tendency on the American right, in particular, because it always strikes me as being inherently contradictory.
00:25:50.000The American isolationists always want nothing to do with the rest of the world, yet they still want America to be the top dog.
00:25:58.000And if you said to the American isolationists, you can remove yourself from the world, absolutely, but you should know that it means in the 21st century China, or other countries, any number of other countries, will replace America as the world's dominant power.
00:26:12.000And if you are happy with that, argue it out.
00:26:18.000I mean, America may have got fat and lazy, but China is hungry as hell.
00:26:25.000So, you know, Work out what it means for the century you envisage.
00:26:32.000But I think that's a very strong tendency.
00:26:35.000I think on Israel it's a different thing that's going on.
00:26:38.000I mean, left-wing, you know, I've said a lot in recent months, I think one of the interesting things about anti-Semitism, and I do think the criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, because I think it comes down to the thing of not just double but triple standards.
00:26:49.000I think, as I say again, if this wild lack of empathy for the state of Israel means anything, you've got to come back to this primordial triple standard.
00:27:05.000We know it can come from anywhere, you know, and that antisemitism is a shape-shifting virus, can come from left or right, can come from everywhere at the same time.
00:27:16.000I think that one of the things that's interesting about the movement of some people on the right against Israel, and playing around with anti-Semitic tropes for sure, in a way which you could predict but maybe not expect, is that they seem to think that there's something strange.
00:27:34.000I get this a bit against myself and my preoccupation with this issue in the last year.
00:27:40.000I mean, going back many years, but particularly in the last year.
00:27:43.000People say, well, why are you so bothered about Israel?
00:29:16.000This may come across really coarse, but let me put it this way.
00:29:20.000I mean, there are lots of conflicts in the world, and I've covered a lot of conflicts involving a lot of people, but it's conceivable that at some point, fifteen million Christians could be killed.
00:31:41.000This is sort of the story of Jewish history.
00:31:43.000But the idea that you have hundreds of thousands of Westerners who are marching in solidarity With the murderers, that was on some level more disturbing to me than the actual massacre itself.
00:31:53.000Certainly not in terms of, you know, the actual amount of human suffering and the horrifying evil and barbarity of it.
00:31:59.000But in terms of the threat to the civilization as a whole, it seems to me that one of the things that we're seeing in terms of this sort of right-wing backlash that's now happening in Europe, it's very much of a piece with that.
00:32:09.000It's very much Europe and I'm hoping America saying, if we don't have any values for us to rely upon,
00:32:17.000then the people who are marching through the streets are going to end up running this place.
00:32:21.000Well, that's the other thing is what people don't realize is that they're all next.
00:32:26.000I mean, it's sort of, I'm always baffled by the fact that people don't believe
00:32:33.000the words that come out of people's mouths.
00:32:38.000The Hamas leadership, the Hezbollah leadership, the leadership in Tehran, the revolutionary Islamic government, have all made perfectly clear what they want to do with Israel.
00:32:47.000But they don't regard Israel as being the main problem.
00:32:49.000They regard it as being the main regional problem for them and their expansionist Islamist worldview.
00:32:56.000But it's America that's their biggest enemy.
00:32:58.000That's why they call America the big Satan and Israel the little Satan.
00:33:01.000And as I always say, my country of birth is a rather sweet middle-sized Satan.
00:33:11.000But you know, there's a reason they think that.
00:33:15.000And there's another way of doing it, which is here at home.
00:33:20.000Why is it you can make the following prediction with 100% accuracy?
00:33:26.000If there is a pro-Israel demonstration in America, or in Britain, or in Paris, There will be flying of the Israeli flag and there will be the flying of this flag of the United States of America or Great Britain or France.
00:33:44.000Recently I was speaking at an event in Montreal and, you know, it was about a thousand Jews and about a thousand Christians and it was in a synagogue.
00:33:54.000It was a wonderful, wonderful evening.
00:33:56.000And, you know, everyone sang O Canada and Hatikvah.
00:34:17.000But why can you predict with 100% accuracy that the pro-Palestinian, not to mention pro-Hamas, demonstrators will never, in America, carry an American flag?
00:34:31.000Why do we know, with 100% accuracy, that when 100,000 mainly Muslim demonstrators go through the streets of London on a Saturday, they will not finish the demonstration by singing God Save the King?
00:34:45.000Why do I know that with 100% accuracy?
00:34:59.000You think some stupid college kid at Berkeley or Columbia who's getting their parents to remortgage the house so they can sh** in a bucket in the center of the square of their campus and claim they're liberating some people they've never met in a region they've never traveled to.
00:35:14.000You think any of those people Actually love America and just happen to have a problem with this country they've never visited and don't know anything about.
00:35:24.000They happen to have this problem about that and they're willing to set up weird encampments and become even less educated than they were when they went to campus.
00:35:34.000You think they just, like, want mild adjustments in welfare reform in the US?
00:35:42.000This is a revolutionary movement, and it finds its first and most fevered and most flattered version in its attack on Israel.
00:35:53.000But of course it's anti-American, of course it's anti-Western, of course it's anti-British and anti-European.
00:35:59.000So, I think one of the things that's happened in the West, in America, in Britain, in large parts of Western Europe, is there's this belief, a true belief, in sort of the Francis Fukuyama theory that the end of history has arrived.
00:36:08.000And then you go to places where the end of history very much has not arrived, and all those people are thinking very differently.
00:36:13.000I remember when I visited Poland, we were visiting, we happened to be visiting Auschwitz when I was with Elon Musk, but we were in Krakow, and we were walking around with security, Polish security, and I was asking them about Ukraine.
00:36:25.000We're very much for you supporting Ukraine, because otherwise the Russians are just going to come after us and reoccupy us, because after all, they have tended to do that over the course of the last several centuries.
00:36:34.000And it occurred to me that, having grown up in America, spent my whole life in America, effectively, that that's something that, you know, if you're born in America, you've never worried about that, not a day in your life.
00:36:42.000You've never for a day in your life worried that you were going to be subjected to rule by a foreign power.
00:36:47.000If you're in Britain and you're younger than the Second World War, that's never occurred to you.
00:36:51.000And the same thing is true if you're in France or if you're in Germany, unless you're East German.
00:36:55.000And so that very idea has allowed for this fatness and laziness and this idea that, okay, we can just recede from the world and the world will go on as normal, nobody will fill that gap, and nothing bad will ever happen.
00:37:06.000All the C-lanes will stay free, all of our goods will be the exact same price as they were before any of this happened, we'll be militarily safe, everything will be cheap.
00:37:14.000On a fundamental level, I guess it's just ignorance.
00:37:18.000Well, it's ignorance and an incredible lack of knowledge of how the world has always worked.
00:37:26.000Yeah, and I think there are pretty deep roots to that.
00:37:29.000I mean, one of the ones that interests me is the whole terminology of human rights.
00:37:34.000Because a young westerner, a young American growing up today will talk in the language of human rights.
00:38:14.000Very bad people Can take it if they want it.
00:38:19.000I'm always struck by, there was one of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015, wrote a memoir about his recovery when the Islamists came in and shot all of his colleagues.
00:38:32.000He was one of the very few ones who survived.
00:38:36.000Protected by the French state to its great credit.
00:38:41.000And the great French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, who has spent years also living under armed guard across the French state because of things he said about Islam.
00:38:53.000The journalist from Charlie Hebdo describes going into a party and for the only time in his life seeing Michael Wellbeck at the party.
00:39:00.000And Wellbeck is sitting in the corner surrounded by security, pretty drunk as usual.
00:39:06.000And they see each other and Wellbeck walks over to him and said one line.
00:39:11.000It's actually a quote from the Gospel of St.
00:40:22.000The preoccupation in my mind when reading that appalling column was I decided in a dark manner that I wouldn't mind if Thomas Friedman went to see Mr. Sinoir.
00:40:31.000But anyway, it would be an awfully fast learning curve he'd be on.
00:40:34.000It reminds me of the late and unlamented British writer Robert Fisk, who was forever calling in columns from countries he wasn't in.
00:40:43.000And he was memorably, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, I think just after 9-11, he was actually in Afghanistan, for once he wasn't filing from Beirut, and he was beaten up by some Taliban types.
00:40:59.000And he wrote a whole column saying that he understood It was fantastic.
00:41:08.000It was like, yeah, no, I see, because I'm a white Westerner, you're quite right.
00:41:12.000I mean, actually, if you'd have killed me, I'd have completely understood.
00:41:14.000I mean, the Jean-Paul Sartre introductions, the Frantz Fanon of that, they're kind of like, we all must die, because if we all die, then it demonstrates that we were wrong in the first place, which is really the truth.
00:41:24.000The only way to Overcome the guilt that we all hold is for us to make ourselves subject to barbarians who wish to murder us.
00:41:33.000Yes, well, Sartre, like a lot of the French thinkers, is extremely dangerous because the necessity of blood in politics is overwhelming.
00:41:43.000You read that introduction to Fanon, you think, wow, this is disgusting stuff.
00:41:48.000It's like, I mean, a lot of the French intellectuals like that.
00:41:54.000Celine actually wrote a Bagatelle's Book on Massacre.
00:41:58.000It's not just a book expecting the atrocities of the 40s, but a how-to guide.
00:42:07.000There are some very, very dangerous people who are still being read and revered uncritically.
00:42:13.000But the thing that disturbs me about this, by the way, is that you mentioned Fukuyama earlier, and there's something very important that needs to be said that doesn't get said because Fukuyama quite rightly gets castigated for his predictions, diagnosis, usually by people who actually never read the book.
00:42:31.000There is one thing in the book that is enormously important, and it's towards the very end, which is why nobody knows it.
00:42:40.000I'm one of the very few people who made it that far.
00:42:42.000But there is a very, very important prediction that Fukuyama makes in the 90s, which is that the last man, as he talks about it in Nietzschean, I suppose, Hegelian terms, the last man, he says, may be at risk at this point at the end of history.
00:43:00.000Of rebelling for the sake of rebellion.
00:43:04.000And when I read the accounts that New York Magazine published a couple of months ago, just first-hand accounts from protesters and others on campus at Columbia, it's incredibly important to read.
00:43:21.000One of the students describes, just first-hand account, he says, as a first-gen, low-income student, first generation to come to campus, to come to any college, I learned about the rich history of protest at Columbia, and I knew that when it starts, I want to be right in the middle of it.
00:43:45.000The desire for revolution, the desire for action, the desire to fight the last culture war, whatever it is.
00:43:53.000But, you know, They have no concept of what they're treading into.
00:43:58.000A friend of mine, Clive James, in the 1960s was at Cambridge, England, when the 1968 protests weren't as big in England as they were in America, or certainly not as in France.
00:44:09.000But he remembered there was what was at the time a notorious case in the UK, where all these left-wing students were protesting, and he was there at the protest.
00:44:18.000At the hotel, which they couldn't quite remember why they were protesting outside this hotel and what it had to do with Vietnam.
00:44:24.000It seemed unlikely, in retrospect, that the American government was going to change its policies in Indochina because of a hotel in Cambridge, England.
00:44:31.000But anyway, they made one of these tenuous connections.
00:44:35.000I remember Clive said, somebody threw a brick and everything changed.
00:44:59.000The Israelis all have experience of it.
00:45:03.000But this, to an extent, I think, I've heard Eric Weinstein and I were talking about this recently, is that what seems to be happening on the campuses in America is a low-resolution version of what Hamas themselves are doing.
00:45:15.000The brilliance of Hamas is total, total distaste for the Palestinian people.
00:45:23.000The brilliance of deciding to use your own population against your enemy.
00:46:47.000Good luck if you think you can put it back in the box.
00:46:50.000So there's some focus on the revolutionaries and the people on campus, and obviously that has a long history going all the way back to the French revolutionaries or the pre-Russian revolution anarchists in the 19th century who were valuing violence pretty clearly for its own sake.
00:47:05.000They thought that there was something purgative and wonderful about the violence itself.
00:47:09.000But what's more interesting to me is the collapse of the liberal world order in the face of this.
00:47:14.000The so-called moderates who seem to be willing to traffic along these lines.
00:47:18.000In the United States, the Democratic Party Continuing to massage the shoulders of the members of the Congress who are members of Hamas, or if not members, then at least fellow travelers of terrorists.
00:47:28.000The willingness to pat on the head the protesters on college campuses by saying, well, you know, we don't want them, you know, being bad and spray painting buildings, but they're just, they have so much passion and we hear what they're saying.
00:47:40.000This attempt to sort of massage them into jet fuel for what they believe is more moderate movement.
00:47:46.000And that's the part that I find particularly disturbing, because in an adult system, you look at the revolutionaries and you say, well, the answer here is no.
00:47:54.000I mean, you guys are wrong and you should go to jail for violating the law.
00:47:58.000And also, your belief system is trash.
00:47:59.000I mean, what you believe is actually wrong and bad.
00:48:02.000But there seems to be almost a lack of an immune system on the sort of center left for this sort of stuff, to the point where it's pretty obvious, I think, to anybody who's observing politics, whether you're doing so in Europe or in the United States, that 20 years hence, These people, the revolutionaries, are going to be in control of the movement.
00:49:18.000It has to be said, as I'm sure you'd agree, one of the great things that is happening at the moment is the rebellion beneath the rebellion, where all the normal people who, like, don't want to stick a piercing through their genitals and wave it around on a Saturday and say it's for Yemen.
00:49:41.000Like, those people, the people who've seen those people, and they're just like, damn, can't we just get this away?
00:49:48.000The people coming up on them, they're fantastic, and I've got a lot of hope for them.
00:49:52.000By the way, the voter data from most elections at the moment shows this generational swing, which is long overdue, back against these people.
00:50:02.000But the people who are sort of totally deracinated, last man, revolutionary types, They seem genuinely to scare the adults.
00:50:11.000And what I can't understand is that the adults, as you say, don't say no, you're wrong.
00:50:17.000But then, again, it comes back to what they're taught.
00:50:20.000These accounts of the Columbia protests, as one of them said, you know, my first week, you know, I had to miss a class on overthrowing apartheid and struggle in South Africa in the 1980s.
00:50:31.000But a friend passed on their notes, they go, that's what you're being taught?
00:50:37.000They're not being taught anything useful.
00:50:42.000And, you know, as I've often said, the joke was on people like me, who always assumed these people would graduate with these useless degrees and totally useless people, who had no insight that was original and no critical faculties and nothing else.
00:50:57.000And I'd hoped that they would end up in the marketplace and discover the marketplace didn't want them.
00:51:02.000And unfortunately, the great monster of HR means these people moved into all of the HR departments in, you know, public office and private companies and so on.
00:51:11.000They did actually have something to do.
00:51:13.000But everywhere they go, they cause destruction.
00:51:17.000You know, one of the industries I know best, the publishing industry.
00:51:24.000Somebody who publishes one of my first books, has the reprint rights, they had a thing a little while ago because they had a town hall meeting and a junior member of staff said that he didn't want to be involved in the publication of J.K.
00:51:37.000Rowling's latest best-selling international mega-million book that was paying his salary because his non-binary friend might be upset.
00:52:20.000And as I say, going back to the parenting analogy, if you try to satisfy that, and coddle that, and encourage that, all they'll realize, we can run wild.
00:53:31.000If you're looking at gold, you should check out Birch Gold by texting Ben to 98-98-98.
00:53:34.000I think that the roots of that, there's a conservative critique of classical liberalism that goes something like this.
00:53:41.000Classical liberalism, without a set of confining values, ends up just dissolving into moral relativism.
00:53:48.000That's kind of the short version of the argument, that if all you care about is freedom of speech and freedom of speech is your core value, what you end up basically saying is that all values are the same.
00:53:56.000And so the only thing that matters is your ability to express those values.
00:53:59.000And so you have no systemic immunity to people coming in and wanting to destroy the system from the inside and saying, well, I hate freedom of speech and that's my perspective, is that there should be Sharia law here.
00:54:07.000And you say, well, that is another perspective.
00:54:09.000As opposed to sort of the values-based liberty that suggests, well, yes, freedom of speech exists and is important, but that also exists within a larger sphere in which there is a larger truth and a larger system of values.
00:54:22.000And if you rebel from inside that system to the extent that you're destroying both freedom of speech and the values, well, then you're outside the circle and out you go.
00:54:29.000Well, yeah, but that's, as you know, that's the problem that liberalism in almost every version always has.
00:54:36.000Even classical liberalism has this problem baked into it.
00:54:41.000I think that the answer to that lies in, you know, what my late friend Rod Scruton described as the widest application of the first person plural, which is the we of the nation.
00:54:54.000The idea being that people say they support a soccer team or a baseball team or whatever.
00:55:00.000I'm on wildly unknown territory as I describe this metaphorically.
00:55:06.000Desperately tiptoeing around my own ignorance.
00:55:10.000So help me if I fall really badly off course and say the thing with the baseball tournament was... But the point is that if you support a team, You will say after the match, we did really well.
00:55:27.000And the we is, I don't know, I paid for my tickets, I've always supported them, I've supported them since I was a boy.
00:55:32.000I'm there for the ups and downs and we did it.
00:55:36.000And it's interesting and it's very moving.
00:55:42.000The widest application you can do that is with the nation state.
00:55:46.000Any wider than that, You end up with, you know, the European Union, or the United Nations, or humanity as a whole, and you can't encompass all of that in that first person plural.
00:56:01.000But the nation, the nation you can include that.
00:56:05.000And my view, I mean I wrote a rather depressing book some years ago called The Strange Death of Europe and a lot of people said to me that's quite a depressing book to read.
00:56:16.000I would say you should have tried writing it.
00:56:19.000But I came to the conclusion there that nations in the West would survive or fall individually by decisions that their electorates took.
00:56:33.000And decisions that the people who they gave the task of governance to performed.
00:56:40.000And, you know, there was a Norwegian politician who said to me some years ago, there's a reason why, although we have the same energy reserves as Venezuela, there's a reason we're Norway and Venezuela's Venezuela.
00:56:52.000And the reason is that we made better decisions.
00:56:57.000So, if it doesn't take long, you can do it in one generation as we know from Venezuela, you make a couple of bad decisions and you will find that it's all changed.
00:57:09.000And I think there are countries in the West which will say, you know what?
00:57:14.000We don't much care for your abstract critique of our society.
00:57:24.000And if you don't like it, Loads of other places you can go and screw up.
00:57:30.000So I think that internationally you are starting to see the revolt of the normies, the people who just don't want to see this stuff anymore, who are tired of it.
00:57:36.000You're seeing it in the United States with the anti-left movement.
00:57:40.000A lot of that is Trump, but it's not entirely relegated to Trump support.
00:57:44.000You're seeing it in France, obviously, with the rise of National Rally as an alternative to Macron.
00:57:50.000In Britain, you would see that if you actually had a conservative party, which you haven't had for a couple of decades at this point, minimum.
00:57:57.000But, the question I sort of have about the revolt of the Normies is whether that's going
00:58:10.000It could sort of preserve the nation-state status quo.
00:58:14.000One of the things that I'm concerned about when I look at, say, right-wing European movements,
00:58:18.000is that they are also defining the we without any reference to meritocracy.
00:58:24.000So for example, if you look at sort of the platform for National Rally, economically speaking, National Rally's platform Is not a right wing platform in sort of the American conservative sense.
00:58:32.000It's not a limited government, free market, capitalistic platform.
00:58:35.000It's very much based on tariffs, subsidies, welfare increases, wealth tax is part of their platform.
00:58:40.000And so what they're doing is they're fighting back against the excesses of the left culturally and in terms of immigration, but not economically.
00:58:48.000And so I think that that goes to something deeper.
00:58:51.000And this is a theory that I've been working on, which is that, effectively speaking, since the death of church, church was the glue that held everything together.
00:58:57.000And once churches started to decline, once the intermediate institutions of society fell apart, it was very difficult to maintain a true meritocracy.
00:59:04.000Because the way that meritocracy typically works is that society, if you're going to Overbroad distinctions.
00:59:10.000You could say that there are the innovators and the producers, people who disproportionately produce, and then there's a group of people who tend to be larger, who don't necessarily disproportionately produce, sort of proportionally produce to their, you know, economic inputs and outputs are proportionate in society.
00:59:25.000And in a meritocracy, the people who are sort of the disproportionate innovators and producers tend to do really well.
00:59:31.000Well, the problem is that there are only two ways in which that division can be maintained.
00:59:36.000One is that the producers, the innovators, The elites, so to speak, go to the same church as the maths.
00:59:42.000And so when Rockefeller goes to the same church as his employees, they look at Rockefeller and they say, OK, well, we believe in the same God.
00:59:52.000And we're all the same in front of God.
00:59:54.000And then when that goes away, then the elite class, the only way they can maintain their elite status is to consistently prove that they are better at everything.
01:00:15.000There's no sense of common fabric that holds everybody together.
01:00:17.000I mean, that's just happened in France with Macron, because Macron managed, he's never called a populist, but he is a populist.
01:00:23.000And he broke apart the whole political French system, came through the center and had to create his own party once he'd been elected president.
01:00:31.000But Macron was a sort of safe pair of hands in the view of the French electorate, among other things because the former banker, and they thought he knew about the economy.
01:00:41.000In fact, his background as a banker does not confirm he did know about the economy.
01:00:45.000But it was pretty devastating for him and his party that the French economy was downgraded a week before the EU elections.
01:00:55.000If you say that you're the adult, And you have a competency and then you seem not to be competent at it, then people will go elsewhere.
01:01:03.000The interesting one with the European parties on this, you're completely right, is some of them it's a tactical thing.
01:01:09.000Once the welfare state is a certain size, you can't rail against it.
01:01:12.000I mean, of course, you could at some point when it makes you bankrupt, but that's probably too late.
01:01:17.000But I think a lot of parties in Europe have realized that if you go right wing on identity and left wing on economics, you've got a winning formula.
01:01:28.000I don't approve it because I don't think at any point you're just getting power for power's sake.
01:01:33.000Or at least you better know what you're going to do with it.
01:01:35.000I think that there's just, I mean, the central question, by the way, in Europe is a question that America doesn't have to face.
01:01:47.000The central question in Europe, which national rally is raising in France, which AFT is raising in Germany, which Fatelli d'Italia is raising in Italy, is All of these movements across the continent, and by the way, this was a big reason for British Euroscepticism, all these movements in the continent have some foundation in something bad.
01:02:15.000I think, without boasting, I'm one of the very few people who has spent a lot of time trying to work out what's going on, and know and have spoken with most of the people from across the spectrum, most of the countries in Europe.
01:02:28.000I genuinely, I put it out there as a possibility.
01:02:32.000When you realize that, you know, some of Fratelli d'Italia's bass are Mussolini-ite in a way.
01:02:41.000They certainly think Mussolini wasn't as bad as Hitler.
01:02:44.000They think they had a slightly bad rap from the 1940s.
01:02:48.000In France, why are the Lepens always, why does it always have to be a member of the family?
01:02:55.000Is it because of a desire to show the origins back in Vichy?
01:03:02.000Vlaams Belang in Belgium, collaborationist party in the war, no Vlaams Blok.
01:03:08.000The question that is raised in Europe about all of this, which pertains very, it's very, very important for America and it's very important for Israel as well in this century, is the European continent effectively Land so poisoned that nothing good can grow there for many centuries.
01:03:37.000The AFD in Germany has very good people in it who are normal conservatives, who you or I would find absolutely to be, you know, somebody you'd break bread with.
01:03:51.000And it includes some people who are almost certainly Nazi.
01:03:59.000Now, if that party, going along this ridge, stumbles slightly, they not only take down their party, they take down their country, and by extension the continent of Europe.
01:04:16.000If they get it right, and manage to tread the moderate path that is, for instance, against open borders, for integration And economic growth and many other things like that.
01:04:31.000They could not only save their party, they could save Germany, and if you save Germany, you save Europe.
01:04:37.000The whole of the future of the continent depends on a small number of people who most people in Europe have never heard of, let alone America.
01:04:51.000And again, you have to decide in that situation, do I just give it up for bad?
01:04:55.000Do I just try to find myself a bunker somewhere in Florida or Austin, Texas and wish the world to go away?
01:05:05.000And that's the paradox of isolationism.
01:05:09.000It's always attractive and it's always deadly.
01:05:13.000So to kind of bring us back full circle, it seems to me that the story of the West, which is so bizarre, is that since the end of the Cold War, it's been a civilization in search of meaning.
01:05:25.000And that weirdness has You know, really manifested in a time when the West really does not have enemies that should be durable enough to take on the West.
01:05:35.000The reality is that internally, China is a complete disaster area mess.
01:08:30.000Maybe you can't force people into seriousness other than by events, which I don't wish for.
01:08:35.000I mean, I don't want the sort of overweight girl on American campus dying her hair purple
01:08:42.000to ever actually realize the reality that young Israelis learned on the 7th.
01:08:47.000I don't want her to, but I want her to be different from the person she's becoming.
01:08:52.000How can you do that really only by a complete change of attitude?
01:08:57.000There's a reason why European economies are stagnant very often and why there's a lot of stagnation in societies, which is a lack of ambition.
01:09:06.000And lack of ambition comes from a belief that even if you are ambitious, the system's rigged against you so you won't be able to do well.
01:09:12.000That's not quite as accentuated in America, but it is here in large parts of the society, which is, you know, what is the point because, you know, there's not that much more that I get from working a low-end job than if I'm on welfare and it's just easier and so on.
01:09:33.000If you actually have a society that remembers that it needs ambition, then everything is different.
01:09:40.000I mean, and that, I do think there are very few countries which can say the future is going to be better.
01:09:48.000But if you can say it, you win everything.
01:09:52.000I mean, it would be, you know, I sort of wouldn't quite believe it if, I'm a great Francophile, I wouldn't quite believe it if somebody told me that, you know, France's greatest days are ahead of her.
01:10:31.000You can say I will become an unpleasant, bitter, vengeful person who attributes every lack of happiness in my life to something else, you know.
01:10:48.000The state didn't give me a girlfriend.
01:10:53.000And you know that, all that, the reason why I'm still living at my parents is because White supremacy or whatever you want to do.
01:11:50.000And I'm going to get somewhere in my life.
01:11:54.000And actually, my experience is that most people who are sentient, actually, if you put it like that to them, they know which one they'd rather have.
01:12:03.000The ones who know they're going to fail anyway will do the first.
01:12:07.000But the ones who are not going to fail, of course, are going to choose the second, and they must be helped on that path.
01:12:12.000So, to finish, I would be remiss if I did not ask your opinions on the 2024 election.
01:12:19.000The Bulgarian election is the one we're going to go to.
01:12:24.000Yes, the one between the former President of the United States and the dementia-ridden current President of the United States.
01:12:31.000You obviously watched the debate, I'm sure, as did the rest of us, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, if you could call that a debate as opposed to sort of a night nurse diaper changing.
01:13:33.000I don't know, like three people in this country understand what's going to happen on that and they're all surnamed Biden.
01:13:42.000All the options that the Democrats will try to cobble together seem to me hideous.
01:13:47.000Because the gerontocracy of the Democrat party has not spent long enough cultivating a good next generation.
01:13:53.000You know, Feinstein, Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, they wouldn't let go.
01:14:06.000So I think the Democrats are in a hideous position everywhere you go.
01:14:12.000Trump, if he's disciplined, if he listens to some advice, if he can avoid the traps that are set for him, that were even set the other night ineptly by Biden, To distract him from his achievements in office and get him on to the things that were not good and the pettinesses.
01:14:37.000Trump, if he's disciplined, could certainly pull it off.
01:14:43.000And Lord only knows what will happen then.
01:14:46.000I mean, it's more, may I put it this way, it's more conceivable that Trump will be president in two years' time than that Biden will be president in office.
01:15:01.000Being wheeled into a G7 meeting with Dr. Jill saying he's never been on such great form.
01:15:28.000But I don't think anybody at the age of 81 in a clear state of dementia should be trotted out by their family in order to continue to fill the family coffers and allow Dr. Jill to fulfill her fantasy of being the actual president of the United States, let alone ever having done anything other than earning an Ed degree from a university named for her husband.
01:15:45.000Wasn't it lovely that it turned out the other day that one of the people that Joe Biden is taking advice from is Hunter?
01:15:57.000What's amazing about the entire Biden family is that they're sitting there recognizing that the minute Joe's out of office, the gravy train is over.
01:16:03.000I mean, at a certain point, Hunter's finger painting stopped selling for half a million dollars.
01:16:07.000And that point is exactly when Joe Biden exits office.
01:16:10.000So having all of them there is really quite dark and sort of macabre comedy.
01:16:17.000Because Mrs. Wilson famously, her husband had a stroke and she covered over for it and ran the country.
01:16:22.000To be fair to Edith Wilson, he wasn't running for re-election.
01:16:25.000He had already won re-election at the time, right?
01:16:27.000So she wasn't like, okay, he's got to stand for a third term.
01:16:29.000It's very important that this corpse be wheeled out here for a third term.
01:16:32.000But the part that really is astonishing to me, and I think humorous and well-deserved, is this is the greatest catastrophe for the legacy media
01:16:56.000When it came to, you know, the Obama era, they would say, well, you know,
01:16:59.000sure, he's doing some things that we don't particularly like,
01:17:02.000but overall, he's such a magnificent man.
01:17:04.000There are always arguments, but there's one argument that cannot be rebutted, and that is the argument of your own eyes watching a man collapse on stage for 90 minutes.
01:17:13.000And so when you spend several years claiming to the American public that he is totally fine, sharp as a tack, doing handsprings in the back, barricading Virgil in Latin backwards, and then all of a sudden he shows up on stage And he is what everyone knew he was.
01:17:26.000And we'd seen clips of him, we'd all been saying it, but we were told that we were crazy, we were out of our minds.
01:17:31.000That exposed them so signally that they then had to do this immediate turnabout where they said, oh no, I'm shocked.
01:17:42.000Because for them to admit that they knew this all along would be to expose themselves as just party apparatchiks.
01:17:48.000So they have to fake That they are very, very shocked and offended.
01:17:53.000And that's why they're all pushing for Biden to go, even though they all knew full well that he was just the senile three weeks ago, as opposed to a week ago.
01:17:59.000It's a strange thing in much American media, which is that they think it's a team sport.
01:18:05.000And, you know, I mean, Bill Maher asked me this a couple of months ago.
01:18:09.000He said, you know, he gets a lot of criticism.
01:18:12.000He said he gets criticism from the left saying, why are you criticizing Biden?
01:18:16.000You need to just keep Trump out of office.
01:18:19.000And I said to him, it seems to me such a strange thing, because if you want to be a political operative, you should be a political operative.
01:18:24.000If you want to be in the media, you should be in the media.
01:18:28.000There's a weird crossover in America, it's true, the kind of Jen Psaki phenomenon.
01:18:32.000Like, how do you move from being that to being that?
01:19:40.000Well, Hunter does have a lot of illegitimate children, so you just never know.
01:19:45.000And Joe will never acknowledge them, so you have that as well.
01:19:48.000Well, Douglas, thank you so much for stopping by.
01:19:49.000Folks, once again, head on over to DouglasMurray.net and use promo code Israel to get information and discounts on the tour he's going to be doing in the United States.