Glenn Beck sits down with Douglas Murray to discuss his new book, The Madness of Crowds, and why he thinks we are all at war with each other. Glenn Beck is a conservative commentator and author. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC, and is a regular contributor on Fox News and CNN.
00:00:00.000Today's podcast is one you are going to I'm telling you, there's like three places in this where our guest just goes and you're going to want to save it and listen to it every day.
00:00:16.640On Monday, the New York Times ran a dubious story about French President Emmanuel Macron.
00:00:23.600They called him the French Donald Trump because he had the audacity to criticize the American media for supporting Islamic terrorism.
00:00:34.360Macron used to be their guy, remember?
00:00:37.340But he committed the sin of nationalism, criticism, freedom of thought.
00:00:43.220Apparently, in the left's version of reality, you're just supposed to let Muslim terrorists decapitate your citizens.
00:00:49.560A vengeful dogmatism has overtaken the left and it threatens to destroy liberalism as we know it, erasing the ideas, the methods and the values that have guided us for centuries.
00:01:05.100And as you will find out today, we are leading the rest of the world.
00:01:09.520The rest of the world, the left in the rest of the world is actually pushing back on some of this stuff.
00:01:17.580There's a great book called The Madness of Crowds.
00:01:21.140It's written by Douglas Murray, and he writes about this spirit of accusation, claim, grudge that has just overtaken Western society.
00:01:30.340Well, Douglas is a guy that the left can't stand him, which has become an incredible compliment, quite honestly, for any of my friends and anybody I respect.
00:01:41.780He regularly faces death threats for his views.
00:01:45.120The associate editor of Britain's Spectator magazine is living a life in a way of Jason Bourne, and he doesn't give a flying crap.
00:01:55.540His goal is to give you permission to think differently.
00:02:00.760Now is the perfect time to talk to Douglas Murray.
00:02:05.420He just came back from a several month trip here in the United States.
00:02:10.320And it's better to talk to him now than it even was over the summer when the riots were at their worst, when the madness of the crowds was on display.
00:02:19.140Riots are supposed to happen in the summer, right?
00:02:39.580Please welcome Douglas Murray to the Glenn Beck podcast.
00:02:44.100So, have you spent extra time in the mirror just trying to move your hair just, because I do, move your hair just perfectly so it looks as full as it used to?
00:04:30.860I've just returned from five weeks in America, and I think it's worse than anyone realizes.
00:04:37.480I think that, for instance, all this talk about fake news and all that in recent years hasn't even brushed the surface of what's going on in America.
00:04:46.140The problem in America, if I could put it in a nutshell, is this.
00:04:50.340It's not that you disagree in America about what's happening.
00:04:53.620You don't disagree about your interpretations.
00:04:56.000It's not just that people have different information flows.
00:04:59.180You can no longer agree in America about what you've just seen with your own eyes.
00:05:03.880You see the same footage and you come away with different conclusions.
00:05:08.680And the 2020 election is probably the most dire example to date of that happening.
00:08:49.520The Democrats who spent four years pretending the 2016 vote was somehow rigged by the Russians, something they never showed an iota of evidence that proved it, now have to try to pretend that there is no voting fraud problem in the American voting system.
00:09:09.600Here's how America could agree on something, because Donald Trump's got to pull off a tricky one as well.
00:09:14.420He's got to try to prove that not only is there definitely some voting problems and fraud around the edges, but that it's so widespread and organized that actually it reverses the result of the election.
00:09:25.720It's something I don't think he can do, and I don't think he's been able to show so far, but how about whoever's president after January the 20th inaugurates the commission to work out whether or not the American voting system is actually in any way vulnerable in the way that both parties have now pretended that it is?
00:09:45.700So a good place to start, but I don't think here's the problem.
00:09:50.420There's something else in America that we used to believe in truth, justice and the American way.
00:10:02.740The American way is obscene to even talk about.
00:10:06.880And justice no longer prevails because the people at the top, they get away with murder.
00:10:16.700But I mean, for instance, you guys over in England, I think you had a couple of of your parliamentary members actually resign because they did something during covid.
00:10:37.500The kid, the California legislature, while they're shutting it down, is over in a conference in Hawaii and nobody cares.
00:10:46.380So, yeah, we had a scientist, a scientist who, in classic British fashion, turned out to be getting getting his leg over with his mistress in the other house whilst telling the rest of the nation to be confined to barracks.
00:12:13.160We ran a piece in The Spectator in London recently about this, which raised what I still regard as being a rather important question, which is what were the Europeans meant to do after they'd found America?
00:12:25.080Were they meant to just go back home and say, we found this enormously large landmass, but I don't think it has any potential.
00:12:33.680It's not a particularly prime piece of real estate.
00:12:40.940Were they meant to return and say, shh, nothing there?
00:12:44.020You know, people acted in history the way they did.
00:12:47.420But now, of course, with our current obsession with judging everyone in history, we've come to this decision that all these people were reprehensible people.
00:12:55.820And here's a key thing, because we've seen this in Europe as well, in Britain and in Europe.
00:13:00.380If you want to completely change the course of a country's future, the best way is to rewrite its past.
00:13:08.360It's a very effective way of doing it.
00:13:10.240You know, in Europe, for good reasons, people were, for the last seven or eight decades, seriously put off nationalism.
00:13:20.140They were told that everything to do with national identity was dangerous stuff, because if you felt pride, you might end up invading your neighbor and taking a portion of their land.
00:13:31.060And twice in a century, European nations have done that.
00:13:34.220And the blame was, I think, slightly erroneously put on nationalism.
00:13:38.720But ever since, Europeans have been told, in order that they don't go and invade a neighboring country anytime soon, that they can't trust themselves and their histories are dark and bad and untrustworthy and a lot more.
00:13:54.640That our histories are colonialist, are slave trading and oppressive and much more.
00:14:00.480I wrote about this a bit in The Strange Death of Europe, which resonated a lot with American readers, I know.
00:14:05.260I know that exactly the same thing has been done with Americans in our lifetimes.
00:14:11.300You know, the European sort of distrust of our past, I like to think that Britain was apart from that.
00:14:16.920But the European continent's distrust of its past had some good reasons.
00:14:21.460That Americans should be told to completely distrust their past, that they're born into guilt, that the whole of American history is just slavery and oppression and hierarchies of oppression is one of the things at the root of this.
00:14:36.660Because if you were always awful and horrible and acted reprehensibly, why should anyone trust you in the future?
00:14:43.200All right. If you are motivated to do something and start speaking out, you need to educate yourself.
00:14:48.740And I want to talk to you about a new book called Not Free America.
00:17:31.100What is the, what is the plan after this that, that people, uh, you know, you like to think the best of, of people on the other side that might be doing this, but I can't come up with anything that doesn't end in just evil.
00:17:45.540It just doesn't end in, in absolute darkness and chaos.
00:17:50.540Well, here's, here's one possibility of what's happened.
00:17:53.400Um, I, I, I lay some of this out in the manners of crowds that, um, I think that we've had a vacuum in the West for some years.
00:18:02.320In fact, as I, I, you wrote about this in my last two books, there's an existential crisis that's been going on underneath the West.
00:18:12.260You can, uh, applaud that or deprecate it, but it, it, it, it's, it's happened.
00:18:16.700And the, the, the, the faith withdraws, um, as it withdraws underneath people, a whole set of questions open up and they're like trap doors.
00:18:27.240You know, people don't like to address them, but they, they know they're there.
00:18:31.040Where do, for instance, human rights come from, who, who institutes them?
00:18:36.220I don't know, someone, and then eventually rise.
00:18:40.240Maybe, maybe they just, like everything, it's just a trap door, uh, beneath which there is just chaos, this darkness.
00:18:48.980Now, this is, this is one of the deep, deep problems of our time.
00:18:54.240The, the, the, the thing that has most plausibly tried to step into this vacuum is the thing that the radical left was working on for years,
00:19:04.460which has now become visible on a daily basis in all of our sense-making organs, all of our media, uh, government, government institutions,
00:19:13.600wall street, the big banks, all of the fortune 500 companies, which is this claim that purpose in life and meaning can be found in searching for equity.
00:19:23.960And that as long as we can get to a stage where all human beings end up at the same top of the same mountain, that is human purpose and happiness.
00:20:00.820It's taken seriously now rather too late when vice presidential candidates are talking about equity and insisting on instituting it in American life.
00:20:10.620When you have street thug movements that seem to think erroneously, obviously, but seem to think that if they smash enough skulls and enough Starbucks storefronts, then at some point we reach justice.
00:20:25.400You know, these people think they mean it.
00:20:44.700So I want to get to that in a second, but I want to, I want to clear up one thing.
00:20:50.160I think one of the appointees on the COVID task force for Joe Biden just said today that, um, they wanted to make sure that the vaccine would go out, uh, to provide equity.
00:21:06.720And so there would be an equitable distribution of the vaccine.
00:21:12.660Now, if you came to me, and I think a lot of Americans just think that this is what it means.
00:21:17.320If you came to me and said, look, um, African Americans, uh, higher percentage, uh, you know, get, get the disease.
00:21:47.800And by the way, the problem with all of this is that there's a whole set of things that just haven't been addressed.
00:21:52.680Anyway, I mean, in the U S like the UK, you have this issue of minority ethnic communities who seem to be particularly disproportionately affected
00:24:20.480I have friends in America who, since the Black Lives Matter movement have got going, have told me with terror what they have gone through.
00:24:27.980I have a friend who, in, uh, in a church group, somebody, people she's known for years, somebody in a church group, uh, starts going on about Black Lives Matter and what books the white people present should read.
00:24:41.600She gets a message a couple of days later from somebody in the group saying, I think your silence was telling.
00:24:46.020That's the sort of thing going on all over America at the moment.
00:24:50.980And as I say, you are obsessed by skin color because the people who are obsessed about it the most with the darkest possible motives are now, have now persuaded the rest of the nation to tiptoe and to say nothing and to live in guilt and fear and silence.
00:25:06.420You can see it everywhere in your nation.
00:25:08.820Your bookstores are filled with this moral effluence, which tells people, tells people you're racist, you're guilty, you're awful.
00:25:25.920I think Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have one thing in common besides the hair, um, they, both of them, uh, appealed to people who felt they had no voice and no one was listening to them.
00:25:45.660And Donald Trump, I don't know about Boris Johnson.
00:25:49.720We've been busy over here, but Donald Trump, he's the only politician that I've ever seen.
00:25:54.820And I was not a fan of his to begin with.
00:25:57.640Um, but he actually did the things that he said he was going to do.
00:26:04.380He actually was trying to tear some things down that were wildly unjust.
00:26:10.860Now that he is possibly not the next president, most likely not the next president.
00:26:17.560People feel like, well, if he can't do it, how can I, what chance do we have?
00:26:28.540It's all sorts of arguments that one can make about this.
00:26:30.480I mean, I agree with you that broadly speaking, Donald Trump did a few big things.
00:26:34.000Um, I, I also, I mean, I think the number of things he didn't do, which conservatives have paid the price for him saying he was going to do without the advantage of him actually doing them is quite substantial.
00:26:45.460Let me, let me, let me, let me rephrase this.
00:26:48.620I was not a fan of Donald Trump, uh, and especially his style, but I came to the point to where what he said about the press exposed the press because they lived up to it.
00:27:02.780The Russian collusion, uh, because he fought against it.
00:27:07.960He kicked down some doors that I don't think he knew he was kicking down.
00:27:12.120There were some things that happened because he's a wrecking ball.
00:27:17.840As, um, I think it was, uh, Dave Rubin who pointed out that the people who complained that he wasn't a panther in a China shop, uh, forgot that, you know, they, they voted for a bull in a China shop, not a panther.
00:27:30.360Uh, uh, Trump didn't have the ability to slink around the vases.
00:27:35.260Um, but, but, but yeah, I mean, here's the most irritating thing, of course, about the, the, the whole Trump era is probably now going to be have to be seen is that for four years.
00:27:46.860And we've had a version of this in Britain, but for four years, his opponents thought that the public didn't know the negative aspects of his personality or couldn't see them.
00:28:26.220I called every leading member of the press in 2016 because I didn't like him, but I said to them privately and publicly, guys, this is a huge learning curve.
00:28:39.680There is something going on that you are not seeing and you will make it much worse if you don't see it now.
00:28:49.280None of them had any desire to even learn.
00:29:18.660I think quite often the bottom the bottom falls out and there's just ever more chaos.
00:29:22.760But I do think that Trump may have shown something that I've intuited for a while, which is this.
00:29:29.780Our countries, Britain, America, perhaps in particular, were going in the wrong direction.
00:29:36.880And everything in the state, including the foreign services, intelligence services and much more, was all headed in the same slightly wrong direction.
00:29:47.480For instance, on China, the most obvious one.
00:29:50.500Now, the American public have this moment of genius like the British public do, which is they vote in spite of everything they're told to do, because they sense that something about the direction they're going in is fundamentally wrong.
00:30:05.780And what I think we've seen in the last four years in both our countries has been that course correcting on these big, wrong directions that we're going in has to be done, but was not possible in the four years we've had so far.
00:30:24.400Which raises the question, what is actually needed?
00:30:27.700Because it's not like Biden and Harris are going to take on the undercutting of America by China.
00:30:32.500It's not as if they're going to tackle the diminution of America as a world power.
00:30:37.720It's not like all of the other things that the American voters sense about the downhill trajectory of the country are going to be righted in the next four years.
00:30:48.700So I don't think I think this is where I may be a little more pessimistic than you are on this.
00:30:55.800I think that that is why one of the reasons why Donald Trump was fought against so hard is because he was stopping this.
00:31:09.540He would have stood in the way of the Great Reset and all of this stuff that is happening that is taking us to greater globalization, greater, you know, one world order, if you will.
00:31:24.080Well, all the things that we sense, I mean, look, you know, nationalism, you know, aspirin is bad for you in big doses, too.
00:31:35.380So nationalism isn't bad as long as and I come from Texas, so I understand I don't come from here, but I live here.
00:31:43.940And Texans always say, don't now, don't you say anything wrong about Texas?
00:31:48.760And and they will they will talk to you all day long about how great Texas is.
00:33:04.240I think I think it can be a lot of demoralization and a lot of feeling there's nothing that people can do.
00:33:11.840And I think it has to be hit back against.
00:33:13.980And if I say so, I mean, this is a small T conservative answer, but it has to be answered by going back to the things that have served us well in the past.
00:33:23.760I completely agree with you on what you say about nationalism, by the way.
00:33:28.620I mean, sure, nationalism can lead to wars, but the Trojan Wars was started by love and nobody's tried to ban love because it can lead to wars.
00:33:44.280It's just we haven't had the kind of crazily large scale demonstration of how it goes wrong that we've had with nationalism in the 20th century.
00:33:53.300Look how bad look how badly Marxism went wrong.
00:33:56.680And we haven't even learned the lesson of that.
00:33:58.800So things have to go really badly wrong for everybody to get the lesson.
00:34:02.740I mean, how bad how look at I've never been one.
00:34:07.000I've always hated the movies where they're like, I don't I don't work for a country.
00:34:43.580I mean, whatever you think of him, we're just wow.
00:34:46.360What a situation to have come to in our own lives where unelected people whose motives, apart from their profit motive, aren't even widely understood, could be able to do that to the leader of the free world, whatever you think of him.
00:35:02.300It's an astonishing path to come to in a very short space of time.
00:35:05.940Very quickly, if I come back to this point, we have answers that have seen us through before.
00:35:13.700Again, it goes back to this thing that Trump was trying to do at Mount Rushmore.
00:35:16.720America is replete with examples, people, heroic figures, heroic happenings and occasions that could see you through this period.
00:35:26.720It's just you have to look on them with understanding and love and forgiveness for where they've gone wrong, not with this attitude of superiority, which has been taught to generations of American students.
00:35:39.320How do you do that when when the entire system is being run by radicals now?
00:35:46.980I mean, you know, when you have the teachers union running the Department of Education, when you have the media and then you have social media, you have all of the power structures going the opposite way.
00:36:02.500How does the how how do the people, even if it's half, how do you stand up without a power structure?
00:36:10.480Well, you know, we've seen it before many times in human history.
00:36:16.260This is a particularly strange example because we live in a form of liberty and also mass disinformation.
00:36:23.740In Mads of Crowds, I give the example of Google image search.
00:36:27.020I'm sure you know it that that you just just look at what Google image search gives you back.
00:36:55.900You mainly get portraits of black people in history because Google's decided that for you.
00:37:01.740Google decided what you're going to see.
00:37:03.680You're not going to be able to see the rich and brilliant culture and achievements of the people of Europe.
00:37:08.460You're going to be force fed your anti-racism five a day like a good boy.
00:37:13.720Now, this is what Google are able to do.
00:37:16.240But totalitarian societies tried this in a different way for decades, and it was possible to break through them.
00:37:25.200And let me give you one quick example.
00:37:26.580In the era behind the Iron Curtain, people in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere were taught to imbibe lies on a daily basis.
00:37:37.320They were told lies about their past, including their recent past.
00:37:41.020They were told lies about their present.
00:37:43.140They were told lies about their future.
00:37:44.720But it was possible, and I know many of the people who are involved, it was possible also to find your way out of that, to be taught your way out of it.
00:37:53.920There was in those days something called the Underground University of brilliant academics and thinkers and others from left and right who went into the former Eastern bloc at some risk to their own lives
00:38:03.860and told people things that were true, taught them the classics, taught them Plato, in top rooms where they would sidle out silently in order that the neighbors wouldn't inform on them.
00:38:16.700It was possible, even in the darkest hours of the 20th century, to be able to bring truth to people who had been fed lies.
00:38:25.040So if it was possible then, it's possible now.
00:38:28.060So I agree with you, and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here on everything, but I do want to challenge you to be able to hear the response of strength.
00:38:42.200It was possible in Czechoslovakia, it was possible in Poland, because they didn't have the security state that we now have in the United States or in the Western world or anywhere in the world.
00:39:04.260So you don't need the neighbors reporting on you because they have everything that they need on you.
00:39:10.740Sure. I mean, the security state in the former Eastern Europe was much more rigorous and serious in its punishing effects than anything we have now, thank goodness.
00:39:20.680What is new, I agree, is that there is an inviting of the sensor, of the corrector, of the teacher into your life.
00:39:29.600But I come back to this point, there will also be technological ways out of that.
00:39:34.300I mean, you know, you remember at the beginning of the Internet, people said things like, the Internet is going to be this wonderful resource where everyone learns more and we're all going to be better educated.
00:40:45.720Absolutely everything that human beings discover and come across can be.
00:40:49.560But we can rescue them for the good as well.
00:40:51.580I am not down on the idea that if a young person can find out the amount that a young person can now, then a number of them, however large or small in number, will find their way through to truths and knowledge which previous generations, including ours, could only have dreamt of.
00:41:09.840And it's my experience that a smart young person today has a better opportunity to get to truths than anyone else and is in the process of doing so.
00:41:22.060I mean, sure, a load of people are just spending their time imbibing cat videos, which doesn't do any great harm, but a number are doing that.
00:41:30.760But equally, what you and I were going, I had to find a book to know what was in it.
00:41:36.840We had to get hold of it, buy it, save up for it or whatever.
00:41:40.560Same with music, same with everything else.
00:41:44.620I'm always bang on about this, but it's true.
00:41:46.440We can have the opportunity to solve so many things these days.
00:41:50.740We have the opportunity to answer things which our forebears never even knew they could start to think about.
00:41:58.420And it's in the hands, literally in the hands of every single young person.
00:42:04.780And one of the things, that's one of the reasons why I try to clear away always the sort of what I think of as the debris that the radical left keeps putting in front of young people's lives.
00:42:16.660All of the nonsense about equity and quality and all of these things is to try to clear some of that away so they spend as little time as possible on it and get to the thing in their lives that they should be doing.
00:42:27.600Because it's the best imaginable time that they're living in if they can just get through the traps that have been put in their place.
00:42:39.020I don't think America would have ever put up with this COVID stuff of just the federal government wanting to take over, you know, and tell us exactly what to wear, where to go.
00:42:51.180We would have never closed our businesses down.
00:43:12.540And I worry about, you know, and I think it's true.
00:43:18.080People say that there's, you know, there's all kinds of different people, people who are entrepreneurs, but not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur.
00:43:24.280Some people just want to show up, do their work and leave.
00:43:27.500But it seems like there's a growing class of people in America that just want it done for them, just want it easy, want it done for them.
00:43:36.480If you could pay me and I could sit at home and watch Netflix, I'm going to sit at home and watch Netflix.
00:43:40.380And so there's this this diminishment of what America used to mean.
00:43:48.040We used to be people who are like, you know, we'd see the moon and go, let's go there.
00:43:52.100Yes, I think there's several reasons for this, by the way.
00:43:58.560One is it goes back to this thing about trust and trusting yourselves.
00:44:02.160It's the same with individuals as it is for a nation.
00:44:05.380Europeans were told not to trust themselves because if you got kind of outgoing as a European, you might invade France again.
00:44:14.680I'm slightly I'm slightly joking about it, but not much.
00:44:19.100Not much. It's the same with masculinity in our day, for instance, because everybody is obsessed with where masculinity can go wrong.
00:44:27.960They've decided that one of the answers to it is to feminize men and make sure that masculinity is looked down upon.
00:44:34.840It's just it. By the way, there was a good example just yesterday.
00:44:37.160Vogue magazine, which weirdly has turned from this totally frivolous publication into this sort of frivolous publication.
00:44:44.340Plus SJW ism, which is a really ugly combination, you know, sticks Harry Styles, my own countryman on the cover in this sort of really hideous sort of dress thing.
00:44:54.120It's it's it's just one tiny, silly example of something that's ongoing, which is don't trust men, particularly don't trust masculinity.
00:45:02.640Why? Because men go out and they they they explore and they they climb peaks and they they reach places.
00:45:10.900And then some of them can sometimes do bad things with it.
00:45:14.340And it's one of the great tragedies of this generation that so many people are being told limit your ambitions.
00:45:20.560Don't trust yourself. The same goes with women as well.
00:45:23.040It's just particularly pronounced with men, limit your ambitions, sit on the sofa, watch the box set, the Netflix series, and don't dream big because you can't be trusted and you can't trust yourself.
00:45:36.080I think it's a lamentable thing. And all I can hope is that enough people are persuaded and are told, no, don't listen to that.
00:45:43.760Don't take the the the Xanax like thing of our era and get off that as fast as you can and get out and do things that would make your predecessors and your ancestors proud.
00:45:56.920Live up to the extraordinary, heroic examples you've been given.
00:46:00.960Don't just focus on the few things and more than many things where things went bad.
00:46:05.760Don't just focus on that. And as a result, limit your horizons, your your your potential, because what's the point of getting to the grave?
00:46:12.620Having been a cringing, pathetic, doubting figure your entire life?
00:46:18.100Sure. Some people will be like that, but they're to be pitied, not to be aspired to.
00:46:24.360Let's let's go to the continent here for a second. Let's go to France, France.
00:46:32.560I'm tired of in America being told we need to be more like France, but lately I wouldn't mind being more like France.
00:46:40.580France seems to be I mean, in in today's world, it's almost like Winston Churchill could come from France in today.
00:46:50.860Today's world. Macron said this what a couple of days ago that he thinks the New York Times and places like that that are saying that France is just this racist place have lost their founding principles.
00:47:05.120He's right on that. And then he went into we will stand against racism and anti-Semitism and we will not get rid of our history.
00:47:15.000We will not get rid of our statues. We will not do these things.
00:47:18.920I haven't heard that from a leader except Donald Trump. Is that going to work in France?
00:47:26.420It does work in France. I completely agree.
00:47:29.300Look, it's harder from a British person's mouth than it is from an American mouth.
00:47:34.480And to say that they were brave. What?
00:47:38.740Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's it's it's it's it's that sweet enemy.
00:47:42.600Yeah, it's cool. But I think that this is our problem, not theirs.
00:47:48.180I think that the French Republic has shown extraordinary courage, stoicism and resilience in recent years.
00:47:55.020I don't think that America or Britain would have got through remotely as easily as it as France has of the last five years after incessant attacks of the kind it has gone through.
00:48:04.720It is the American left that has gone rancid and rotten.
00:48:10.480And that's what Macron was pointing at in his conversation with The New York Times and indeed his letter to the Financial Times.
00:48:17.500Wait, wait, wait. Can you wait? I want to interrupt you for one thing, because you said the the American left is.
00:48:23.200Do you believe that this is an American left problem that we have spread this disease?
00:48:29.180Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an American problem.
00:48:32.080It's the American left that cannot do patriotism and leftism.
00:48:37.020The French left have no problem with this.
00:48:39.380The French left are totally capable of defending the Republic of France and also having certain views on trade unions, for instance, that the right don't share.
00:48:48.240It's the American left that's gone into this weird place where if you believe in the left, you can't believe in America.
00:48:53.300There are very proud movements, patriotic movements on the continent, in France and elsewhere that believe in left wing principles, which I happen mainly not to share, but also agree on the future of the country.
00:49:05.480And this is where Macron is on totally safe ground domestically.
00:49:09.300You know, he said when the statues when BLM started off this year in America, obviously it's been going for some time.
00:49:14.660But when it started off this year after the George Floyd death, Macron was was the only one out of the apart from Trump.
00:49:21.720Macron said no statues are coming down.
00:49:24.860We're not erasing any of our history in Britain, by the way.
00:49:27.540Boris Johnson waited until the statue of Winston Churchill was attacked in Parliament Square before he blundered out and actually found the courage to say something.
00:49:35.100But Macron, Macron knows he's got unity from the French on this.
00:49:38.620And there's a reason why, which is that the founding principles of the French Republic are very, very deeply dug and they're not planning on giving them up.
00:49:47.460Now, American leftists have decided to give theirs up.
00:49:50.680I thought that what Macron said in recent days attacking the American left wing media was superb.
00:49:56.740And I wonder whether a certain type of American Democrat, the sort of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Scoop Jackson, like Democrats that remain in the voting, might think, yeah, there was a day when we used to be able to be proud of America without being called racist.
00:50:14.840Maybe we could do something with that memory.
00:50:16.580Do you think that when you were over here, because I can't figure out how this election happened the way it did, other than there's a bunch of Democrats who are not socialist, not Marxist.
00:50:29.640But they also didn't like the chaos that they thought was really stemming from Donald Trump, but it was equally stemming from the left.
00:50:40.200And they thought, oh, you know what, if we just get this old guy, if we've seen him for years, he'll just make things calm again.
00:50:47.240Not understanding the power behind him is really from the left.
00:50:51.700Is that your take of what happened here?
00:50:55.640Yeah, I thought that Peggy Noonan, a very brilliant observer of this, I think, got it right.
00:51:01.640But after the COVID week, when Trump had COVID, she wrote in a column in the Wall Street Journal that she thought that maybe Americans had tired of Donald Trump.
00:51:11.180They just want to vote back to normal.
00:51:14.200And they would see in this, you know, she said that they had got caught in the reality show.
00:51:28.440There never was, actually, but there particularly isn't in this era.
00:51:32.340And the idea that Joe Biden, who isn't in the first flush of youth or capability, would be the answer at this time isn't something I particularly recognize.
00:51:45.540And I think that percentage of white male American voters, by the way, again, we don't have this discussion in Britain.
00:51:53.140We don't have everything broken down by ethnic group.
00:51:56.540But white American male voters who didn't vote for Trump this time, I would have thought to a degree are in that group who, yes, think that Biden is some kind of return to normality.
00:52:09.140I think it's I think that's not the case.
00:52:11.340I think that the attempt to reset the course of American travel that Trump ineptly or otherwise attempted in the last four years will will will not continue.
00:52:24.540I think that Biden will get America back into all of the things that were going wrong, including international agreements which were going wrong.
00:52:32.040And I think that this will require a stronger, clearer and more organized answer in four years time from the American right.
00:53:54.340One of the tests of whether or not you can get back to any healthy situation in America is, can you credit your opponents with having done anything right?
00:54:06.980Can you credit, for instance, that the UAE deal, Bahrain, Sudan, much more?
00:54:17.780Can you credit that Donald Trump did something good in that?
00:54:20.760If they can't, and I haven't heard that from anyone.
00:54:26.060All the people who talked about peace in the Middle East just didn't ever credit it.
00:54:30.460It would do so much good in America if somebody could credit that the person on the opposite side, when they've done something right, has done something right.
00:54:40.200It is funny, I was just having a meeting before we talked, I was just having a meeting with my producers, and I said, the one thing I want to make sure is that we don't become CNN.
00:55:24.840You know, because you can also hear around the world, when we are allowed to travel much, I can travel a bit now, but when we can travel a lot, I do travel an awful lot.
00:55:35.400I travel around the world all the time.
00:55:37.380And, you know, America going badly wrong isn't just a matter for America.
00:55:44.440People think, I've noticed in America in recent years a sort of liberal parochialism that's emerged.
00:55:51.340They think they know all about the world.
00:55:55.520And one thing they particularly don't know is that actually the world has looked to America, for an example, in running democratic elections efficiently and properly and respecting the results, in arranging transitions of power peacefully, in doing good at home as well as abroad, in correcting errors in your country where they exist.
00:56:18.740But the world has actually looked up to America on this.
00:56:22.960And if you get it this badly wrong now, the tragedy isn't just yours.
00:56:27.720It's that other countries around the world that looked to you will not look to you and they will look elsewhere or they'll look inwards.
00:56:36.000And I personally speaking as somebody on the edges of the American era of dominance say that that would be a deeply regrettable day to arrive at because all the other contenders for your role, all of them will make the world infinitely worse, not better.
00:56:53.440So the responsibility Americans have to get this right is not just the responsibility for yourselves alone.
00:57:04.720Douglas, I was talking to Dave Rubin the other day.
00:57:50.300I found it despicable what I saw in America in recent weeks.
00:57:55.820I thought it was despicable that you could go to cities like Portland, as I did, to cities like Portland and Seattle, which used to be not the first-rate American cities, but they were proud cities.
00:58:09.020They were cities where people worked and they grew up these cities.
00:58:15.760I found it despicable to see not just the total immiseration of these places by anti-fascists that are actually fascists, parading around and beating up journalists and threatening to kill people who disagree with them and destroying public property and destroying private property.
00:58:32.860And the citizenry being in this disgusting situation of having to put – and some of them said it to me clearly, it's not just my interpretation – putting things in their windows that are don't hurt me signs.
01:00:28.780All of these things that are compiled, one on top of each other.
01:00:33.920And now we have people who are openly saying 70% of the country is racist.
01:00:41.000They're openly saying, if you voted for Trump or enabled him, tweeted for him, did anything, there needs to be some sort of a punishment.
01:00:48.520There needs to be some sort of re-education.
01:00:51.080What I asked Dave was, I've never understood until recently how people in 1934 or even 35 after the Nuremberg laws were passed, how Jews stayed.
01:01:50.440There's just endless, endless further bits of darker gray.
01:01:54.400I happen not, I don't believe that history is an endless reworking of the 1930s.
01:02:02.100I think that it's one very, very informative era, which we need to learn from and which we don't.
01:02:07.520But one thing that is different today is, and this was what was so shocking in California and Oregon in particular, is the citizens in America who think they are living in a situation they don't have to live in.
01:02:21.420You know, it isn't like Germany in the 30s.
01:02:26.620It isn't like behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period.
01:02:31.840You can't actually legally be killed for voicing an opinion.
01:02:40.280You can be, I'm fed up by, I say, by the way, if people on the ideological right in America moaning to me about what they put up with, they say things to me like, oh, you should see what I get on Twitter.
01:03:07.900So here's a challenge to people in America.
01:03:09.700You have the optimal conditions and comparatively, by historical standards, the easiest situation.
01:03:16.260So don't grouse to me about how you might lose an invitation to a drinks party or how your prospects in some area of life might be impaired.
01:03:27.880Dress yourself to a better area of life.
01:04:40.640And I think what America hears too little of.
01:04:46.340Let me go back to let me go back to Islam for a second, because I think we're going back to a period to where we're going to start excusing Islam again.
01:05:18.720And I never could understand how the two could come together.
01:05:21.760But I don't, I don't think they have anything in common, except they both want to win, are ruthless about it, and both will kill to be the last one standing.
01:05:35.500I don't, do they have anything else in common besides the destruction of their enemies?
01:05:44.120There's a pact that has been breaking down in recent years.
01:05:47.980The, all these sorts of pacts break down eventually.
01:05:53.920You know, we mentioned France, certainly.
01:05:56.620The bit of the French left that was sympathetic to the Islamists has diminished in recent years.
01:06:03.760Really pleasingly diminished and necessarily diminished.
01:06:06.940It would diminish in America, by the way, as well.
01:06:09.760If you had one night in New York where a few hundred people were gunned down with Kalashnikovs and blown up in suicide bombings at major stadiums in New York by a bunch of Islamists, I reckon that some of those, you know, those sort of Islamists licking leftists in America would pipe down a bit.
01:06:31.340Yes, if you had a year in America where if you, you know, your most prominent secularists were massacred at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year, a priest saying mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral was was beheaded at the altar, as happened in France.
01:06:46.400I reckon that some of your Islamist licking leftists would shut up a bit as well in America.
01:07:24.360The Islamist licking left in the UK is not as vocal as it used to be.
01:07:29.520Those people I was writing about this 20 years ago, those people who used to march, you know, the sort of vegans for Sharia sort of groups, you know, those those people hived off.
01:07:40.560You know, the gay rights activists who are marching alongside the Al-Muji Haroun, they they they they fell away.
01:07:47.120Um, so is it is it is it in time for Europe?
01:08:12.100No, I mean, I'm a Londoner born and bred and you could say that I don't that I don't have a great view of it because I know it so well.
01:08:18.800But I would I would say I have a pretty good view of it.
01:08:21.520I in the strange stuff of Europe, I try to give what I think is the most realistic analysis of what has been happening.
01:08:27.160It is the case that there are very sectarian areas of of the UK as there are across the continent.
01:08:35.960Quite often, by the way, when people said to me in the last decade, come and see my area of Sweden or Denmark or somewhere.
01:08:43.340And I went I would sort of not be that shocked because I said, well, I've seen former mill towns in the north of England that have changed completely in my own life.
01:08:51.000I said I'm not that easily shocked by it.
01:08:53.380And you could say that I was as a result kind of complacent.
01:08:56.580I don't think I am complacent about it.
01:08:58.320What I think has happened is there has been a massive demographic demographic shift in Europe and a religious shift in Europe, which has been completely underestimated by everybody in charge.
01:09:12.220And those of us who identified it have been made to pay some price for doing so.
01:09:19.620But other people have exaggerated the situation.
01:09:22.700The problem in Europe is very serious.
01:09:24.520Indeed, it is what Macron said the other week.
01:09:27.620We have parallel societies that have emerged.
01:09:31.440But there are parts of the UK which are not pleasant.
01:09:38.480I don't think there's any that I would fear walking into.
01:09:43.600I've had my own troubles with that in the past.
01:09:46.080But I don't think it's as bad as some particularly American commentators have tried to say in recent years.
01:09:51.460But I don't think anyone has ever accused me of actually underestimating this particular problem.