The Joe Rogan Experience - February 26, 2018


Joe Rogan Experience #1084 - Douglas Murray

Topics
community guideline strike Virtue Signal social media interactions Charlie Hebdo Charlie Hebdo cartoons property ladder delay
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Mentioned
Charlie Hebdo Prophet Muhammad Richard Dawkins Sam Harris Caitlyn Jenner Bill Maher Erdogan Manchester Arena Jamie Kilstein Ayatollah Trump Malcolm Muggeridge Jordan Peterson Salman Rushdie Samuel L. Jackson Morton Storm Mehdi Hassan Sarkozy Helen Colin and 37 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1083 - Dom Irrera Joe Rogan Experience #1085 - Kyle Kulinski

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 55 minutes

Words per minute

167.21

Word count

19,391

Sentence count

1,577

Harmful content

Misogyny

26

sentences flagged

Toxicity

163

sentences flagged

Hate speech

47

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sam Harris and Douglas Murray have a conversation about hate speech, and someone at YouTube thinks it must be called "hateful speech" and a community guideline strike, and a man at Google thinks it's a "hate speech" strike. What does this have to do with hate speech? And why does this matter? And what does it mean, exactly, and how does it affect our understanding of what we should be talking about when we talk about ideas and ideas about ideas? All this and more on this episode of Thick & Thin, hosted by John Rocha ( ) and Alex Blumberg ( ), featuring special guest Douglas Murray ( ). This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Micah Vellian and Sarah Abdurrahman. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. The album art for the episode was done by Dee McDonnell. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Additional music by Ian Dorsch and Mark Phillips. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and we'll be sure to include it in future episodes of Thick and Thin episodes. Thanks for listening and reviewing! Thank you so much for listening, John and Alex and Sarah! Your support is so appreciated, thank you, and we're grateful for your support, and your support is greatly appreciated! Love ya, bye, bye. - The Weezer. Cheers, Cheers! - John and Sarah, Kristian, EJ & EJared, AKA John, and EJ, - EJ and Ejr. & Ej and E.M. . - Sam Harris - M.A. ( ) (A. ( ) ( ) & E.C. ( ) ( & EZ ( ) . (S. ( ), and EZY ( ) - EZC ( ) Thank you, E. (?) , EJ ( )( ) ( ), EJ( ) & JT-RKC-C-X ( ) ? ( ) , EZ & EK ( )& EJ&C-EZ ( ). ( ) AND EJ-C ( ), & EY ( ), AND EZE ( )?? ( ) !!

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:02.000 Keep this about a fist away.
00:00:03.000 Okay.
00:00:05.000 And we're live.
00:00:06.000 Douglas, first of all, thanks for joining me.
00:00:08.000 Appreciate it.
00:00:09.000 Great pleasure to be with you.
00:00:10.000 Looking forward to talking to you.
00:00:12.000 Likewise.
00:00:12.000 You've become an example to me, or your conversation with Sam Harris has become an example to me of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas.
00:00:25.000 Right.
00:00:25.000 Because of this, Jamie, pull that thing up.
00:00:28.000 This is a tweet that someone sent out, and he got a strike, a community guideline strike, just for listening, just for putting you on his playlist, a conversation between Sam Harris and you.
00:00:43.000 And this man, or I don't know if it's a man.
00:00:47.000 I just assumed.
00:00:49.000 I'm a problem.
00:00:50.000 I'm part of the problem.
00:00:51.000 Part of the patriarchy.
00:00:53.000 P-T-R-K-C-C-X on Twitter.
00:00:58.000 That is his screen name.
00:00:59.000 His or her, or Zur.
00:01:01.000 Screen name on Twitter.
00:01:02.000 And...
00:01:03.000 Got a community guideline strike for just putting this.
00:01:07.000 Now, I brought this up to, I was having dinner with some friends, one of them who used to work at Google, and someone who was there was a highly ranked person at YouTube.
00:01:18.000 I brought this up, and the exact quote was, that was because it's hate speech.
00:01:24.000 And I said, you said that so flippantly.
00:01:28.000 I go, please tell me the contents of the conversation.
00:01:30.000 Do you know what they talked about?
00:01:32.000 I go, how did you say that?
00:01:33.000 She goes, well, I'm sure if someone marked it as a community guideline, Right.
00:01:39.000 Or as a strike, a community strike.
00:01:41.000 What is it called?
00:01:42.000 A community guideline strike?
00:01:43.000 Yeah.
00:01:44.000 That there must be hate speech.
00:01:46.000 I'm like, do you understand this is Douglas Murray and Sam Harris?
00:01:49.000 I bet that's not what the conversation was about.
00:01:54.000 I bet it wasn't too.
00:01:55.000 I'm trying to think what we did talk about now.
00:01:57.000 It's making me nervous.
00:01:58.000 But I know it definitely wasn't hate speech by any sane definition of those words.
00:02:07.000 This sort of thing is very disturbing to me.
00:02:10.000 Very disturbing.
00:02:11.000 And you notice it happening with other people, of course.
00:02:14.000 And that's disturbing enough.
00:02:15.000 It's more disturbing, of course, when it happens to you, but it's slightly surreal.
00:02:18.000 I mean, I know Sam Harris a bit.
00:02:21.000 He's...
00:02:21.000 Not a hateful person.
00:02:25.000 My most sort of yogic, calm, blissed out west coast of America friend.
00:02:32.000 And I'm pretty amazed that anyone at Google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth was hate speech unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like or that words don't matter anymore.
00:02:47.000 Well, that's what I'm concerned about.
00:02:49.000 I'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these, we don't even have to name the organizations, but certain organizations are extremely left-leaning.
00:03:01.000 And, I mean, it's probably better than being extremely right-leaning.
00:03:06.000 It really is. 0.98
00:03:07.000 It's probably better than them being white supremacists, white nationalists, hate groups. 0.99
00:03:11.000 It's probably far better that they're radical lefties.
00:03:15.000 But it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that, because things like that limit free speech, and they limit the free discussion of ideas.
00:03:23.000 I didn't listen to your conversation.
00:03:25.000 I think I listened to a little bit of it, but I didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the N-word halfway in.
00:03:33.000 I'm sure I'd remember.
00:03:35.000 I'm sure you would.
00:03:36.000 I'm sure I would have heard about it.
00:03:38.000 I'd be blushing more at this moment. 0.96
00:03:39.000 I had another thing that I talked about with this same person I brought up Jordan Peterson and you know that There's there's issues with every time he's on podcast the podcast get flagged for demonetization and the exact words were he's a troublemaker And I'm like what in the fuck are you talking about like are you listening to his conversations? 0.57
00:04:03.000 He is Very articulate, and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that I think we should all be discussing.
00:04:13.000 So to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker, to me it symbolizes what we're dealing with today.
00:04:22.000 This is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication.
00:04:28.000 It is, and whenever I've had a chance to speak with People in that kind of world, in that sort of role.
00:04:35.000 The question I always want to ask among other things is, do you know where this is going to lead?
00:04:41.000 Do you know what it's going to do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words?
00:04:46.000 Do you know what happens, for instance, down the road if you keep on saying that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray having a conversation about something is hate speech?
00:04:54.000 Do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're going to be able to get away with?
00:05:00.000 Hmm.
00:05:01.000 This is what's being created all the time at the moment, it seems to me.
00:05:04.000 This idea that you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside it not just stuff I don't agree with or things that I would argue with or debate with, but hate speech.
00:05:21.000 It's just, I think, very, very dangerous down the road.
00:05:24.000 You can see exactly the trail that bit of gunpowder goes to.
00:05:28.000 I can.
00:05:29.000 Where do you think it goes?
00:05:31.000 I think it goes to a point where people become cynical about any claims made about anyone.
00:05:37.000 And the likelihood is that if 99 times you've seen Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, whoever, called hate speech, then the hundredth time that somebody uses the term hate speech might be on somebody who is engaging in hate speech.
00:05:54.000 And all your defenses are going to be down.
00:05:58.000 You're very unlikely to become sceptical and think, I'm really going to dig down.
00:06:05.000 Most of us don't have time.
00:06:06.000 We don't have time to find out every single thought and word that someone has uttered or thought.
00:06:12.000 And so it seems very likely to me that down the road, very, very bad people are able to get through the gates.
00:06:19.000 Because we kept on making erroneous claims frivolously for our own short-term gain and for our own short-term comfort.
00:06:28.000 And we'll end up basically bringing the gates down completely.
00:06:33.000 I agree with you.
00:06:34.000 And I think there's been a lot of discussion lately as well that I agree with where when you...
00:06:48.000 Right.
00:06:49.000 Right.
00:06:51.000 Right.
00:07:06.000 I mean, think about how many discussions are viewed daily on YouTube.
00:07:11.000 It's stunning.
00:07:15.000 There's so much.
00:07:16.000 I mean, we're at the beginning of this, aren't we?
00:07:18.000 Because, I mean, there's a long way for this to run.
00:07:20.000 A long way for the censorship to run.
00:07:22.000 You can't help thinking among other things that the people trying to make the rules at the moment have no idea of the fact that these debates have happened before.
00:07:30.000 Right.
00:07:30.000 Or have not bothered to look into them.
00:07:33.000 And seem to think that history started with them.
00:07:37.000 And I just wish that among other things with social media, people realize we have been through this several times before at least, and the lessons are pretty clear.
00:07:46.000 They are not that you can limit speech in order to obtain political nirvana, for instance, nor are they that you can simply use, as I say, for short-term gain, accusations you know to be wrong in order to further a short-term political goal.
00:08:06.000 We know all this.
00:08:08.000 We've been through it.
00:08:09.000 Printing press.
00:08:11.000 We went through it with John Stuart Mill.
00:08:13.000 We went through it with Milton.
00:08:15.000 I just wish these people had any idea of the fact that history started before their parents conceived them.
00:08:22.000 Well, it's such that the whole culture of tech today is such a progressive thought bubble.
00:08:29.000 It's an echo chamber, and it's very, very...
00:08:33.000 Like I said, it's better that they're really progressive and open-minded and left-wing than radical right-wing.
00:08:40.000 I think it's better.
00:08:41.000 Yeah.
00:08:41.000 No, I agree.
00:08:42.000 I mean, if by radical right-wing, you mean, you know, kind of – Racist. 0.66
00:08:45.000 Yeah, of course.
00:08:48.000 Although these people have, as I say, all the ability to create those people.
00:08:53.000 Right.
00:08:54.000 And empower.
00:08:55.000 And empower them, which is something – You don't want actual racists and Nazis to have legitimate grievance claims.
00:09:04.000 And you don't want them to be able to disguise themselves as something they're not.
00:09:09.000 So I had a friend who, a lot of friends involved in the Northern Ireland conflict many years ago in the UK, not that many years ago.
00:09:18.000 One writer had a beautiful phrase about it where you got to a stage where everyone was killing everyone.
00:09:23.000 He said, you also got to the stage where truth was whatever you were having yourself.
00:09:29.000 And we're not far away from that place where I say what you call is hate speech, you say what I say is hate speech, let's call the whole thing off.
00:09:41.000 We're not very far away from that actually.
00:09:45.000 Yeah, it's very strange that this echo chamber is being so reinforced and that very few people are stepping out and saying, well, wait, let's take a look at this objectively.
00:09:57.000 And the people that do do that are signaled out as being racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or fill in the blank, whatever is convenient.
00:10:06.000 Yeah.
00:10:07.000 But it's not surprising that more people don't want to stick their heads above that parapet because, I mean, if you had a normal job, You worked in a normal office or shop or something.
00:10:18.000 You really don't want this coming towards you.
00:10:22.000 I mean, this can tear apart and tear down people who spend a lifetime demonstrating they are not the thing that they're being accused of.
00:10:32.000 So if nobody knows anything about you, you have no particular persona out there, you have no particular back record, you don't want this thing coming to tear your life down.
00:10:42.000 Right, because recovering from that accusation is almost impossible, and it would take forever.
00:10:47.000 It is basically impossible, and all that you do along the way is to keep reminding people of the charge.
00:10:51.000 Yes, true.
00:10:52.000 And if you were to ever win on a technicality, everyone would have forgotten. 0.88
00:10:56.000 Oh yeah, that's the racist. 1.00
00:10:58.000 That's the rapist. 1.00
00:11:00.000 That's the guy who was pro-rape, isn't it? 0.99
00:11:01.000 Yeah, I remember him, yeah.
00:11:02.000 It's so simple.
00:11:03.000 But it's...
00:11:05.000 I feel like we're in some strange adolescent stage of communication, and there's been a bunch of talk lately.
00:11:12.000 There was something that I tweeted earlier today, some new technology that they believe where AI is going to allow people to Literally see other people's thoughts right and I I am I mean I am forever optimistic but also terrified and my feeling is that our Transition from language here.
00:11:36.000 It is new AI system can see what you are thinking which is just what the hell does that mean?
00:11:42.000 I'm I'm concerned, but also optimistic.
00:11:45.000 I feel like we're in this transitionary period from regular communication to written communication to written communication online, to speech online, video online, where there's this instant access to all this and these ideas are being debated and tossed around like beach balls in real time.
00:12:04.000 And ideas are being distorted.
00:12:07.000 People's positions are being distorted for other people's gains, and that there is this willful misuse of the truth.
00:12:16.000 Yes.
00:12:16.000 That something is going to come along that's going to combat that, but at what price?
00:12:23.000 I mean, I can't see what would come along to do it, other than...
00:12:28.000 People rebelling against it of their own free will, as it were.
00:12:31.000 It doesn't seem like that's happening, though.
00:12:33.000 It seems like there's a few people, like yourself, and there's many others, that are recognizing the problem with this.
00:12:39.000 There's people talking about the problem of it online.
00:12:40.000 But for the most part, the mass of people are engaged in this.
00:12:45.000 And it's also, it's idea sport.
00:12:48.000 There's idea sport going on, where they want their side to score.
00:12:52.000 Sure.
00:12:53.000 Well, that's almost all politics in your country at any rate is about that at the moment.
00:12:59.000 How can we make sure that the other side trips up on this?
00:13:03.000 I've written this all through the Me Too era that in your country and in mine, people basically are willing to go for somebody who is a political opponent who does something very minimal.
00:13:17.000 And they're willing to defend somebody on their own side who does something bigger.
00:13:20.000 And you can see it all the time.
00:13:23.000 There are different standards that apply to your own side than apply to the other.
00:13:27.000 And people don't seem to be hiding it very much anymore.
00:13:30.000 Not at all.
00:13:31.000 They really don't have the ability to hide it.
00:13:33.000 No.
00:13:33.000 We had a case recently in the UK where somebody who was a great hero to the left for all sorts of complicated reasons is accused of some fairly serious groping accusations among others.
00:13:46.000 And exactly the left-wing MPs who had been claiming that somebody who had sent out a tweet about a woman's breasts in 2009 should never hold any role in public said that this person who just happened to be a friend and an icon of theirs Was a changed man and we have to recognize it's 18 months ago now.
00:14:06.000 My favorite video on this was there was a guy who is some religious Christian man on television and he was talking about Trump and he was talking about who Trump was before he became president.
00:14:21.000 He goes, but I don't know about you, but I found Jesus, and I did not have a past.
00:14:27.000 Praise Jesus.
00:14:28.000 And he's saying this in everyone's chair.
00:14:30.000 Whoever he was before he found Jesus, as if Trump got into office and was like, you know what?
00:14:38.000 I'm a new man.
00:14:38.000 I found Jesus.
00:14:39.000 I got the Jesus pass. 0.62
00:14:40.000 All that stuff that I did the last 70 years.
00:14:44.000 Well, some people do treat that.
00:14:47.000 There was a journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, a very distinguished figure in the media, some years ago.
00:14:51.000 It was often noted that he converted to Catholicism.
00:14:55.000 A mutual friend once said that it was noticeable that Malcolm Muggeridge always attacked a vice immediately after he had become incapable of it himself.
00:15:05.000 LAUGHTER When it was clear that Margaret didn't have as much sex as he did fairly often in his youth, sex was a big problem. 0.57
00:15:16.000 It's a giant problem.
00:15:17.000 Needs to let everybody know.
00:15:20.000 Virtue signaling to the highest degree.
00:15:22.000 Let everybody know.
00:15:23.000 This is awful.
00:15:24.000 All that pleasure and flesh.
00:15:27.000 Stop it.
00:15:27.000 I won't have it.
00:15:29.000 I had a lot of it, but I won't have it anymore.
00:15:31.000 Not in my bedroom.
00:15:34.000 It's just, I don't know, man.
00:15:36.000 I'm hopeful.
00:15:37.000 I'm hopeful that we're going to work through this.
00:15:39.000 But I'm also disturbed because no one's at the wheel.
00:15:44.000 There's no particular logical human being that's out at the wheel that has a real rational sort of solution for all of these issues.
00:15:54.000 It's just chaos and infighting.
00:15:56.000 The problem is, again, it comes back to thinking about the truth being whatever you're having yourself.
00:15:59.000 We don't have anyone that we might mutually agree on as some kind of umpire.
00:16:04.000 Yeah.
00:16:05.000 I mean, that's becoming part of the problem.
00:16:09.000 I mean, I'd be very suspicious of any umpire put forward, but where would you roughly look for one?
00:16:17.000 I mean, I like to think that truth still matters.
00:16:19.000 But, you know, when you discover that a lot of people don't seem to particularly care for it or willing to sacrifice it, as I say, for some other purpose, including winning a goal...
00:16:30.000 It's hard to see how you could adjudicate in this era.
00:16:35.000 But just one other thought, which is a lot of this has to do with whether or not the online world can forgive.
00:16:43.000 This seems to me to be a really central thing.
00:16:45.000 One of the things that came up, the case I said recently about this 2009 case of somebody in Britain who tweeted about a woman's breasts among other things was He mistook Twitter for a conversation with friends.
00:17:02.000 How did he do that?
00:17:04.000 He's in public office?
00:17:06.000 No, he's a journalist.
00:17:08.000 But was going to get a public office.
00:17:12.000 Anyhow, But the point is that, you know, we don't really know what the rules of that are. 0.97
00:17:17.000 I mean, what if you were a bit of a dick ten years ago like that? 0.97
00:17:21.000 Right. 0.97
00:17:21.000 On a medium that people were still finding their way on, and now you are genuinely, you've moved on, you're kids. 0.97
00:17:29.000 Right.
00:17:30.000 And yet the breast tweet is always with you.
00:17:34.000 I mean, it's a sort of dystopian nightmare that you'd always be stuck with your worst joke.
00:17:42.000 You'd be stuck with your lowest, sort of crassest moment.
00:17:46.000 This came up recently with Bill Maher.
00:17:49.000 Bill Maher, there was something that he wrote, I think, in 1989, which is insane.
00:17:56.000 I mean, 29 years ago he wrote something, and people used it recently against him.
00:18:03.000 I don't know how old Bill he is.
00:18:05.000 I don't think Bill is even 60. So we're talking about something that he wrote when he was in his 20s.
00:18:10.000 He was a struggling stand-up comedian.
00:18:12.000 The internet's very good for this, isn't it?
00:18:16.000 Oh, it's amazing for it.
00:18:17.000 Because you can dig up everyone.
00:18:20.000 Everyone's screwed up.
00:18:21.000 Sure. 0.96
00:18:21.000 Apart from you. 0.96
00:18:22.000 Apart from yourself.
00:18:23.000 Of course.
00:18:25.000 We had somebody out recently in Britain who everyone wanted to go for suddenly.
00:18:30.000 And they found an article he had written about...
00:18:33.000 Saying he didn't agree with Holocaust denial laws.
00:18:36.000 He said he just thought it was a bad idea for free speech.
00:18:41.000 When the internet was for seconds trying to find out other stuff about him, they found an article which said, I'm a Holocaust denier, so, you know, prosecute me sort of thing, which he isn't a Holocaust denier.
00:18:53.000 It's just nobody bothered to read beneath the headline.
00:18:56.000 And so suddenly, in the middle of the thing where everyone was tearing apart his life, they also said, and he's a Holocaust denier.
00:19:02.000 And that was there.
00:19:03.000 That was there.
00:19:04.000 And then like something he wrote 15 years ago, and it wasn't even something he wrote, it's a headline of something.
00:19:09.000 And yeah, again, nobody cares.
00:19:12.000 Get on to the next victim. 0.97
00:19:16.000 Everyone's a Nazi.
00:19:19.000 It's almost like people...
00:19:20.000 I mean, it's obviously the case of living in glass houses and throwing tons of rocks.
00:19:24.000 But it's almost like everyone is just trying to throw as many rocks as they can before rocks start coming their way because they know it's inevitable.
00:19:31.000 Well, I thought until fairly recently the object of life in the modern era... 0.99
00:19:38.000 Was to prove everyone else was a racist, Nazi, misogynistic, transphobe. 0.99
00:19:43.000 And then you win. 0.99
00:19:44.000 You somehow get a coronation or something.
00:19:47.000 Everyone would say, you're the person who's good.
00:19:50.000 But now, yes, it seems everyone is aware that it's a Mexican gunfight.
00:19:57.000 Yeah.
00:19:58.000 I have a friend of mine who had been on this podcast before, back when he was a radical lefty.
00:20:03.000 His name's Jamie Kilstein, and he's a stand-up comedian.
00:20:05.000 And he was a real radical social justice warrior, male feminist lefty.
00:20:10.000 And they turned on him.
00:20:13.000 Radically.
00:20:13.000 What did they do?
00:20:14.000 Horribly. 0.99
00:20:14.000 Well, they found out he was trying to have sex with girls. 0.99
00:20:17.000 No! 0.99
00:20:17.000 Another one! 0.99
00:20:19.000 And it was just having sex. 0.98
00:20:21.000 I mean, he didn't rape anybody. 0.92
00:20:23.000 He didn't grope anybody.
00:20:25.000 He just, you know, he threw some passes.
00:20:28.000 Right.
00:20:28.000 And as we know, unless passes are 100% successful.
00:20:33.000 Yes.
00:20:34.000 You're over.
00:20:35.000 Oh, yeah.
00:20:35.000 The same exact pass could be your future wife.
00:20:38.000 Right.
00:20:39.000 Right?
00:20:39.000 And this one just fell 15 yards short.
00:20:43.000 No room for error.
00:20:45.000 But he took a long time off of social media and a long time off of performing.
00:20:50.000 And he came on.
00:20:52.000 He was really brave about it.
00:20:53.000 He talked about who he used to be.
00:20:54.000 And he said he was in this frantic state where he was just constantly attacking people.
00:21:00.000 Just attacking people and then checking his Twitter.
00:21:02.000 To see who responded to that attack and where people are on his side, you know, are people agreeing with him?
00:21:08.000 Is he getting those social justice points that he wanted?
00:21:11.000 And he was really honest about the feeling that he got, the anxiety that I think a lot of people engage in on a daily basis.
00:21:19.000 If you go to people, there's quite a few people that I follow that seem to just always be in conflict, and I just go to watch.
00:21:24.000 I'll just go to their page, almost like I'm watching a fistfight in a backyard.
00:21:27.000 Right.
00:21:28.000 And they're just – it seems like they're addicted to this constant seesaw of emotions and this interaction.
00:21:36.000 It clearly is.
00:21:37.000 It releases the necessary chemical in their brain.
00:21:40.000 They get upset when they step away from it for a bit.
00:21:43.000 I don't engage in any of that bit of it because I've seen certainly a lot of the most mediocre minds of my generation brought together.
00:21:51.000 I mean, there are some people who I admired until I followed them on social media.
00:21:58.000 And now I just think, you know, you're the shouty, angry person who's like a drunk at closing time.
00:22:06.000 Desperately flailing around with your fists and looking for somebody to fight with.
00:22:10.000 And to what end?
00:22:15.000 Another experience I've had in recent years that led me to not want to engage in this is walking around at various events and sort of breakout things.
00:22:25.000 People I've admired in the past.
00:22:30.000 All saying things like, do you see how I flamed X on Twitter?
00:22:35.000 Do you see what I tweeted about that person?
00:22:37.000 I think, these used to be serious people.
00:22:41.000 Yeah.
00:22:42.000 These used to be serious people engaged in serious things, and here they are, engaged in these flailing fistfights.
00:22:52.000 And often, let's face it, on things which, if you didn't do it like that, seeking out the fight, are the sort of thing that would allow for normal human interaction.
00:23:01.000 I mean, how many disagreements do we have with people in our personal lives all the time, if we wanted to?
00:23:07.000 You didn't vote this way, that way.
00:23:08.000 I mean, some people would mind about that.
00:23:10.000 But, you know, I know you think slightly differently from me on this particular issue.
00:23:14.000 You don't say, let's have that out now, once and for all.
00:23:19.000 You find ways to live with people's difference and different opinions.
00:23:23.000 I mean, you're not going to get everyone exactly in line.
00:23:27.000 I mean, we all knew that before the age of social media, and now it seems to be the only aim.
00:23:32.000 What do you think that is?
00:23:34.000 I mean, you think it's what we were discussing earlier, that it's idea sport, and then you just get caught up and, like, someone volleyed your way, and so you have to smash that tennis ball back their way?
00:23:42.000 It is something like that.
00:23:43.000 I mean, I can't say I haven't felt the vicarious pleasure of some of that myself.
00:23:47.000 Oh, yeah.
00:23:47.000 That old Chinese proverb about sitting by the river watching the bodies of your enemies float by.
00:23:54.000 I had a big sense of that the other day when somebody I deeply disliked became a cropper on social media at the same time as somebody else I deeply disliked was being held by the French police on serious charges.
00:24:07.000 And I thought that was a – I felt like the Chinese proverb then.
00:24:11.000 That's all right.
00:24:12.000 And so I can see why people feel it.
00:24:14.000 Sure.
00:24:15.000 And of course people who they could never normally get to.
00:24:20.000 Who they've got to.
00:24:21.000 I mean, I think that's the big thing of, you know, look, I poked that, you know, what, in the eye.
00:24:30.000 I never engaged on social media for precisely that reason among others, that I would never want somebody to know they could get to me.
00:24:38.000 Even if you just block them, there's many people who take pride, even in their heading.
00:24:44.000 They say, I am blocked on Twitter by all these people.
00:24:47.000 And actually, I do sometimes read what people send to me.
00:24:52.000 And I've never blocked anyone because I sort of think if you put your ideas out there, you might as well be as open as possible to receiving them back.
00:24:58.000 Some time ago when I got into a row with the Turkish president about something, I got all these Turkish sort of accounts. 0.95
00:25:08.000 There was one guy who just repeatedly sent me pornography of animals having sex with animals. 0.99
00:25:14.000 I don't know. 0.99
00:25:15.000 It was very hardcore.
00:25:17.000 And so I used to go down the field, and I didn't even block him, actually, because I sort of thought, well, somewhere in Turkey, he's a really angry man, desperately finding horse pornography to send to me.
00:25:31.000 And in a way, I felt so sorry for him that that was how his life had come, you know, the end his life had come to at this stage, that I couldn't even block him. 0.90
00:25:40.000 And also, he'd be like, I'm the donkey... 0.96
00:25:42.000 Porn guy who got blocked by Douglas. 0.98
00:25:45.000 He'd get a certain fame.
00:25:48.000 What was his motivation for sending you this stuff?
00:25:50.000 It was because...
00:25:53.000 Well, the short story is a couple of years ago, the Turkish president tried to get the German chancellor to imprison a German comic for a very rude poem he'd read on air on German television that was insulting about the Turkish president.
00:26:10.000 And the German authorities actually started a case against the comedian for insulting the Turkish president, Erdogan.
00:26:20.000 And I decided to launch an offensive poetry competition to offend the Turkish president.
00:26:28.000 And there was a thousand pounds cash prize and it sort of took off.
00:26:32.000 And in the end, the now foreign secretary entered and won.
00:26:36.000 What?
00:26:37.000 Yes.
00:26:38.000 Really?
00:26:39.000 That was great, yes.
00:26:39.000 It was really good because at the same time that the Germans were looking at imprisoning a comedian, the now Foreign Secretary of the UK was guilty of precisely the same alleged crime.
00:26:52.000 I.e.
00:26:52.000 meaning it wasn't a crime, it couldn't be a crime.
00:26:54.000 A couple of other people did a wonderful...
00:26:56.000 Dutch comedian friend Hans Janssen did a similar thing at the time. 0.92
00:27:00.000 He decided to do an interview live on Dutch television explaining how much he hated Edouard because he still owed him money from the blowjob he'd given Edouard in a sauna. 0.75
00:27:10.000 And the Dutch authorities were looking at... 0.95
00:27:17.000 Actually, looking, they were asked if they would prosecute him. 0.79
00:27:19.000 But anyhow, I had a great time with this, of course, and I wrote a limerick explaining how abusive I wanted people to be about Erdogan, that it was necessary to be highly defamatory, and you wouldn't get away with it if you just called him a wanker or something.
00:27:35.000 So I wrote the opening verse and invited the world to contribute, which they did.
00:27:41.000 And it became, among other things, the highest paid poetry competition in the world.
00:27:44.000 If, like me, you wrote a limerick for just five lines, this is £200 a line.
00:27:48.000 I mean, no poetry magazine could pay you for such work.
00:27:55.000 So anyhow, on the basis of that, I became very, very unpopular in Turkey. 0.70
00:27:59.000 And there were many pieces talking about how this gay, atheist, terrible Erdogan hater in Britain was exactly what we were up against. 0.73
00:28:09.000 So him and his poems. 0.98
00:28:12.000 Oh, my God.
00:28:14.000 Wow.
00:28:15.000 So the German government was actually considering prosecuting this guy.
00:28:21.000 How far did they take it?
00:28:23.000 He was taking it for questioning, I know.
00:28:25.000 He had to retain lawyers.
00:28:28.000 I'm fairly sure they did only drop it in the end because of the international attention that was paid to it.
00:28:34.000 You see, there was this law on the books that still said it was a laissez-majeste law about defending foreign rulers.
00:28:40.000 And he had done it for such an important reason as well, which was to say, you know, we in Germany should have the right to be rude about Erdogan, particularly Erdogan, who, you know, was promoted from mayor to prime minister, now to president, wants to be sultan.
00:28:55.000 You know, I mean, he's a very bad man, locked up more journalists per capita, I think, than any other country in the world other than China, which I don't think we can get the stats on.
00:29:05.000 A very, very evil, I think, man who has led his country backwards in the last 20 years and is in the process of trying to destroy a wonderful country. 0.71
00:29:17.000 And if you can't be rude about him, if you can't pretend that he sleeps with animals, which is what the German... 0.89
00:29:26.000 Comedians started with, then somewhere down the line you won't be able to say anything about the imprisoned journalists either and so on.
00:29:32.000 And since also, by the way, people don't seem to spend much time worrying about the Turkish journalists, Erdogan, in prisons, the least they paid attention when I said that he and Angela Merkel got up to really filthy, filthy acts in the zoo.
00:29:51.000 Well, obviously, the worst case of retaliation for humor is probably Charlie Hebdo, right?
00:29:58.000 I mean, which is terrible.
00:30:00.000 And unfortunately, many people weren't defending the murder, but were talking the murderers.
00:30:09.000 I mean, I think, how many?
00:30:11.000 I think it was 11 people were murdered.
00:30:13.000 And a police officer.
00:30:14.000 And a police officer.
00:30:17.000 But they were saying that instead of concentrating on the murder, which was done completely out of this reinforcing their rules of their ideology and retaliation for any mocking of that ideology,
00:30:33.000 instead of that, they were talking about how racist Charlie Hebdo was.
00:30:36.000 There was a lot of that.
00:30:37.000 In fact, my friend Jamie Kilstein was a part of that.
00:30:39.000 He was on television back in his super social justice warrior days talking about that.
00:30:45.000 Don't you wish, among other things, that people said, no, I'm not talking about something if they don't know about it?
00:30:51.000 Yeah.
00:30:52.000 My guess was that until the murders, I mean, an infinitely small number of people knew about Charlie Hebdo outside of France.
00:31:01.000 Right.
00:31:02.000 I found myself in the wake of that in studios with people who I know had just Googled Charlie Hebdo the day before.
00:31:09.000 I know that they'd just gone to Wikipedia and read an English version of a claim about what that magazine was about.
00:31:17.000 It goes back to that point about the journalist and the Holocaust denial thing.
00:31:21.000 Just root around.
00:31:22.000 A bunch of people have been killed.
00:31:24.000 This doesn't seem to vindicate my side's ideology.
00:31:28.000 Therefore, let me find what I can do to defame them.
00:31:30.000 And, oh, good, somebody at Charlie Hebdo once did this cartoon that was off-color, and I can't understand what the words are beneath it, but I'll claim it's racist.
00:31:40.000 I mean, people were actually doing that.
00:31:41.000 Actually, there was one cartoon that was used against Charlie Hebdo after the massacre.
00:31:47.000 That was a joke against the Front National and the claims they were making about a black woman in the Sarkozy government.
00:31:57.000 But because the joke, if you didn't speak French, it wasn't clear apparently.
00:32:04.000 And if you knew nothing about recent French history, you knew nothing about the Sarkozy administration and the minister in question, these people just went to it and said, racist cartoon, not noticing that the cartoon was actually a joke about racists.
00:32:20.000 But they didn't bother to find that out.
00:32:22.000 And I thought that whole thing, among many, many other things, was deeply worrying from that point of view.
00:32:28.000 Because it means that in the immediate aftermath of something that should be so damn clear, a bunch of people can just try to reframe the narrative.
00:32:39.000 And change the history of a publication.
00:32:44.000 Yeah.
00:32:46.000 Claim it is just something different.
00:32:48.000 And for a lot of people, of course, that was very convenient.
00:32:53.000 Because after all, if Charlie Hebdo's staff actually were these racists, then, you know, you didn't need to worry too much about them or why you'd been silent on the issues they'd spoken up about.
00:33:04.000 Yeah, the narrative had then been that these people had been mocking this disenfranchised, marginalized group in society and that they had it coming in some very strange way.
00:33:18.000 And it's...
00:33:19.000 Boy, part of me struggled with that because I was like, is this...
00:33:22.000 Some people just have contrarian instincts.
00:33:24.000 Everybody's going left, they just go, I don't like it, and they want to go the other way.
00:33:28.000 There's so many people that have that instinct.
00:33:30.000 And then there's, as you said before, this headline mentality.
00:33:35.000 They read the headline and don't look any further into it, even if it's a headline about a headline.
00:33:39.000 Right.
00:33:40.000 That's all they need.
00:33:42.000 They're armed with enough facts, they slam their laptop down and start debating.
00:33:46.000 Yeah.
00:33:47.000 And in that case, as in many others, totally lose sight of the only thing that matters.
00:33:53.000 The only thing that matters in that case being, is it ever right to make apologies for people walking into an office and gunning down people for an opinion you don't like?
00:34:08.000 The answer to which has to be, of course, no.
00:34:10.000 Has to be?
00:34:11.000 Has to be no.
00:34:12.000 Yes.
00:34:13.000 And yet, in these moments, so we had one 20 years before with the Rushdie Affair, the Satanic Versus Affair.
00:34:19.000 In these moments, you discover you don't have the allies on your side you thought you did.
00:34:26.000 In the wake of the Rushdie Affair in 89, it was people from the right and the left in Britain who started making excuses for the Ayatollah.
00:34:36.000 We had the chief rabbi then of the UK, Jacobovitz, to his shame said, both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have offended people's feelings.
00:34:47.000 As if Salman Rushdie had called on all novelists to go to Tehran, assassinate the Ayatollah if they had a chance.
00:34:56.000 You had somebody like a right-wing conservative minister, Geoffrey Howe, who said that Bush had really offended Britain.
00:35:07.000 He'd been rude about Britain as if that had anything to do with anything.
00:35:11.000 There was one famous case of a conservative peer who said about Rushdie that it wouldn't bother him if a group of young Muslims took Mr Rushdie into an alleyway and taught him some manners.
00:35:28.000 And you had that from the left as well.
00:35:31.000 Bernie Grant, a Labour MP, famously said at that point that burning books wasn't a problem for him.
00:35:37.000 And that was when they were burning the satanic verses in Bradford.
00:35:41.000 So you get these weird coalitions of people who suddenly turn out not to get the point.
00:35:46.000 Not to get the point.
00:35:46.000 Not want to defend it.
00:35:47.000 And then, of course, you get the cowards to say things like, well, it wasn't my sort of novel.
00:35:50.000 You know, I didn't think the novel was all that good.
00:35:53.000 Midnight's Children I could cope with.
00:35:55.000 But the static verses, he lost me with a plot.
00:35:57.000 As if that means that then you can call for the death of the author rather than just give it a bad review.
00:36:02.000 How is he now?
00:36:03.000 Is Salman Rushdie still in hiding?
00:36:05.000 I know he does a lot of interviews now and it seems to be more relaxed.
00:36:09.000 Yes, he seems to be.
00:36:11.000 I don't know the specifics.
00:36:13.000 There was an assurance, I think, given some years ago in the Labour government with Tehran that they would not actively encourage the murder of Rushdie anymore.
00:36:28.000 How nice.
00:36:29.000 How nice of them.
00:36:30.000 That's a freezing of relations, unfreezing of relations.
00:36:35.000 But the point I wanted to make was that that's, again, we've been through these things.
00:36:41.000 We know how it plays out.
00:36:43.000 With the Charlie Hebdo events, the murder of the staff and the contributors to that magazine, we knew in the immediate aftermath what was going on.
00:36:54.000 And that there were people who just wanted to make excuses.
00:36:58.000 And you still hear that everywhere.
00:37:00.000 I mean, I've heard it on every single free speech debate in my adult life.
00:37:07.000 I remember the debate growing up.
00:37:09.000 And I remember in every one of the things in recent years, from the Danish cartoons to the...
00:37:15.000 Jewel Medina scandal, where a publisher in London was firebombed for publishing a novel that was actually amazingly fawning about Mohammed, to Charlie Hebdo.
00:37:26.000 And since, you just get this strange group of people from right and left, some believers, some non-believers. 0.94
00:37:34.000 Who always just come up with these bullshit, bullshit arguments and say things like, well, I didn't find the cartoon very funny, or I never took that magazine seriously, or I didn't think it was right when they did this. 0.98
00:37:49.000 They just don't, for some reason, have the fortitude to just say the only thing that matters in the wake of that, which is no. 0.99
00:37:57.000 Do you think that's because Islam is unique in their approach to anything that goes outside the lines of what they feel is acceptable?
00:38:09.000 I mean, in terms of like, they will murder you if you draw Muhammad. 0.99
00:38:12.000 Yeah, this is what's been described as the internalization of the fatwa.
00:38:19.000 I'm sure you've had this experience, but it's actually worse now.
00:38:23.000 The presumption is worse than the actual reality.
00:38:26.000 I have quite often people saying to me, I'd like to write this piece about X, but I don't know if I can because, you know, I might get a death sentence.
00:38:35.000 And actually, I always say, what are you talking about?
00:38:38.000 Write it.
00:38:41.000 Fortunately, so far, I haven't given that advice and the person's been in any way under any actual danger, let alone being killed.
00:38:48.000 And I think I might feel differently if that was the case.
00:38:54.000 But there is an overcompensation occurring at the moment.
00:38:58.000 And it goes far, far within the boundaries of what actually could plausibly get you into any trouble, whether or not the trouble is, you know, legitimate to get into or not.
00:39:11.000 So that now, yeah, I've had many journalists in recent years, particularly since Charlie Hebdo sort of sidled up to me and said, well, I'd quite like to do this, but I don't dare.
00:39:20.000 And I'm talking about very basic reporting and things. 0.99
00:39:25.000 They're not people saying, hey, I've decided to draw a great big cartoon of Mohammed with a great big dick and having sex with the Pope or something. 0.99
00:39:35.000 It's not that. 1.00
00:39:36.000 It's never that.
00:39:37.000 It's never people saying, I'm really just so keen to draw Mohammed today, Douglas. 0.98
00:39:42.000 What should I do?
00:39:43.000 It never is that.
00:39:44.000 It's always something way, way, way down.
00:39:47.000 I'm thinking of even like saying something critical of certain regimes.
00:39:53.000 So the internalization of the fatwa since 1989, which has been exacerbated now by the killings of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere, and the attacks on the in Denmark, means that we are in this period where people are really hyper, hyper sensitive, and they really shouldn't be, because it really isn't that bad.
00:40:11.000 It's not as bad as they think.
00:40:13.000 But this is, you know, you can do so much work if you say to people, I've got Kalashnikovs on my side.
00:40:23.000 I mean, the extent, and people in free societies like ours are really, really loathe to admit this, but it's a classic sort of mob trick, you know, knocking on someone's door.
00:40:35.000 I'm very disappointed in you, but my friend here, my huge friend, is really angry and I'm just holding him back.
00:40:47.000 You can do an amazing amount of work if you're willing to pull that kind of trick.
00:40:51.000 And if you can persuade people, and it's actually the case that there are people you're holding back.
00:40:58.000 You can make enormous inroads like that.
00:41:00.000 Well, especially when there's actual evidence that people have been murdered and have been...
00:41:04.000 Absolutely.
00:41:05.000 One of the more fascinating things about Charlie Hebdo to me was the refusal of any of the mainstream media to show any of the cartoons.
00:41:12.000 Yes.
00:41:13.000 You had to go online.
00:41:14.000 And I felt like this was a...
00:41:15.000 They gave up the reins of information to the internet.
00:41:18.000 I mean, it was a real transitionary moment in our culture.
00:41:22.000 Yeah.
00:41:22.000 Yes, everyone went online to see what they...
00:41:24.000 Yeah, it's the only place to go.
00:41:26.000 Apart from your parents, you know, I mean, they were still under the impression that these must be, you know, incredibly pornographic cartoons that were really, really viciously attacking somebody.
00:41:36.000 But no, anyone young could find this out for themselves.
00:41:40.000 And you're right, they gave up the space to the net.
00:41:44.000 And they all had, again, these sort of...
00:41:47.000 Rubbish arguments of their own about it.
00:41:49.000 I tried in Britain to get the press to do it at one go a couple of days after the massacre and got pretty close that if everyone says I am Spartacus tactic.
00:42:06.000 If everyone did it at once, then it would be okay, or it would make it easier.
00:42:10.000 And the argument you always get about that is, and it's a very persuasive argument, is that the editor of the magazine or newspaper might get protection and so on.
00:42:22.000 But, you know, a girl from the typing pool sort of thing. 0.99
00:42:26.000 Which is what happened actually in some of the satanic verses, killings and stabbings and things.
00:42:31.000 You know, it's like a Norwegian translator, Japanese translator.
00:42:34.000 You know, it's people who under no security protocol could possibly end up all getting protected.
00:42:41.000 And on the basis of fearing that, the boss almost always says no.
00:42:47.000 One of the more uniquely American responses to the Charlie Hebdo attack was they had a Draw Muhammad contest in Texas.
00:42:54.000 Yes, I followed that.
00:42:55.000 Yeah, that was fascinating.
00:42:57.000 And some guys showed up and started shooting at the building, and they were killed almost immediately.
00:43:03.000 Yes.
00:43:03.000 Which is because they're in Texas.
00:43:05.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:43:06.000 That's just not the place to fuck around. 0.98
00:43:08.000 True, although, I mean, it's worth mentioning that, I mean, the editor at Charlie Hebdo had police protection in Paris, and they just, I mean, I suppose they're not worth dwelling on, but the battle-trained people who were sent from Yemen to carry out that operation just were better prepared than the French authorities realized. 0.98
00:43:33.000 Well, very few people are really...
00:43:36.000 Ready to militarize cartoonist offices.
00:43:39.000 Yes.
00:43:40.000 I mean, and that's really almost what you would have to do.
00:43:42.000 You would have to have, you know, Navy SEALs with bulletproof vests, locked and loaded.
00:43:47.000 And then, let's face it, I mean, the whole thing, then you do start to question, you know, like, well, is this cartoon that funny?
00:43:53.000 And so on.
00:43:54.000 And that's what they actually have done at Charlie.
00:43:57.000 They did it a while ago, say, look, we're not going to keep doing this.
00:44:01.000 Well, didn't they have Mohammed making out with someone like almost immediately afterwards? 0.73
00:44:05.000 Yeah, immediately afterwards.
00:44:05.000 That's right.
00:44:06.000 Yeah.
00:44:07.000 But after about a year or so, they stopped.
00:44:10.000 They said they didn't want to do Mohammed again. 1.00
00:44:14.000 And you can't blame them.
00:44:16.000 I mean, this is the thing, isn't it?
00:44:19.000 I'm sure you have this experience. 0.88
00:44:21.000 In these sorts of times, I always get people on the – apart from the Turkish donkey porn guy, other people on Twitter send me things like, you know, well, why don't you draw Mohammed sort of stuff? 0.53
00:44:33.000 And first of all, I mean, I'm not a cartoonist, but – Secondly, the way in which this is always presented is amazing, because it's always from, like, Xena Warrior Princess 1293. You don't have the guts to draw Muhammad Murray. 0.52
00:44:47.000 And, you know, like, well, you don't even have the guts to have your own name on Twitter, mate.
00:44:53.000 But there's a bit of egging along that happens in those cases.
00:44:59.000 I don't want to draw Muhammad. 1.00
00:45:01.000 I don't want to piss people off by drawing the cartoon.
00:45:03.000 But what I do want to point out is that if you don't defend people's rights to draw things without getting murdered, then you're living in an insane society.
00:45:14.000 Yeah.
00:45:15.000 And there's another thing, which we all know what comes next.
00:45:19.000 I mean, my point about this has always been...
00:45:22.000 Think of something smaller than a cartoon to do.
00:45:24.000 I mean, I still reserve the right to be amazed we call something a cartoon crisis and keep a straight face.
00:45:33.000 We're going to have to militarize in Garland, Texas, because there's a cartoon crisis going to erupt.
00:45:37.000 Natural progression could easily be.
00:45:40.000 You're not allowed to draw the cartoon.
00:45:43.000 Then from there, you're not allowed to speak of drawing.
00:45:47.000 And then from there, you have to show that you have a very certain idea in your head of what is good and what is bad.
00:45:54.000 So you have to show that by verbalizing something.
00:45:56.000 So you're forced to verbalize something.
00:45:59.000 And let's face it, it's not as if it's just the cartoon that's the problem, is it?
00:46:04.000 I mean, it's a novel, it's so on and so forth.
00:46:06.000 It's anything.
00:46:07.000 And that's one of my big beefs about this, is that I don't want to not say what I think is true.
00:46:15.000 And even if that does offend, you know, 1.3 or 4 billion people, as is often said in tones that are not entirely unthreatening.
00:46:26.000 If Charlie Hebdo or somebody else can't draw a cartoon on Mohammed, then I know that exactly in tandem with that is somebody saying, and you, Douglas, or you, Joe, or you, or anyone else, I think? 0.51
00:46:55.000 Think of applying to Islam the same kind of speech you would apply to Mormonism. 0.92
00:47:00.000 And that I won't do.
00:47:03.000 I just won't join in on that, despite there being a price to pay for that.
00:47:11.000 But I just won't not say what I think is true in these matters.
00:47:16.000 Are you aware of what they did with South Park?
00:47:19.000 Yeah.
00:47:19.000 South Park, it got very crazy, where they not only could not draw Muhammad, they couldn't draw Muhammad in a bear suit.
00:47:29.000 So then they had to have Muhammad in a bear suit in an armored car. 0.96
00:47:34.000 So you couldn't even see him, but it was implied that Muhammad was inside the armored car in a bear suit.
00:47:42.000 And still...
00:47:42.000 But they did Mohammed's voice, didn't they?
00:47:44.000 Mohammed like went... 1.00
00:47:45.000 Yeah, they gave him a screwy voice. 0.90
00:47:48.000 A screwy voice.
00:47:49.000 So that was okay. 0.90
00:47:49.000 As long as you joke about the voice of Mohammed, you're okay. 0.90
00:47:51.000 But don't you dare show him. 1.00
00:47:53.000 It's fucking insane. 0.98
00:47:54.000 And it's really weird as well because actually, again, they all make presumptions. 0.99
00:47:59.000 It's just not true.
00:48:00.000 It's not true that nobody ever drew Mohammed.
00:48:03.000 It's not true.
00:48:04.000 There are illustrations in books that are still on sale of very old illustrations of Muhammad from throughout Islamic history.
00:48:11.000 That's before they knew better, bro.
00:48:13.000 They didn't know better.
00:48:15.000 They got a new note from Muhammad. 0.99
00:48:16.000 Muhammad's like, look, I don't like these fucking drawings of me. 1.00
00:48:18.000 They're not at all. 0.99
00:48:19.000 Cut it out.
00:48:20.000 Cut it out. 1.00
00:48:20.000 I'll start killing people. 1.00
00:48:21.000 They don't show my best side. 0.99
00:48:24.000 But this is a very strange position to be in because South Park ends up, yes, holding the line.
00:48:31.000 Then South Park, yes.
00:48:33.000 Weirdly, it's like, you know, fatwa against South Park.
00:48:35.000 Well, I didn't see that headline coming.
00:48:38.000 And again, everyone internalizes and everyone thinks, well, you know, I admire them in their Mormon work, but I'm not sure I'd follow them in their Mohammed work. 1.00
00:48:47.000 And then the whole culture changes.
00:48:49.000 It tilts.
00:48:52.000 And that's, I think, where we are at the moment on this.
00:48:57.000 The cartoon will never be funny enough, the joke will never be funny enough, the novel will never be good enough, and so on.
00:49:04.000 And then in the end, the speech will never be worth speaking enough.
00:49:09.000 I, a little while ago, had a very clear experience of this.
00:49:12.000 I read about it on the radio in Britain where I was in a discussion with a Muslim cleric who's a sort of reformist figure and admire in some ways, who in a discussion about something said, well, you know, also Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
00:49:28.000 he took criticism in his own life.
00:49:30.000 He took criticism very, very well.
00:49:31.000 He never minded people criticizing him. 0.99
00:49:35.000 And I was like, that's absolute crap. 1.00
00:49:39.000 That is real crap. 0.99
00:49:40.000 I mean, whatever else you can say, Mohammed, not really good on the criticism of himself bit. 0.99
00:49:48.000 And I gave an example of a female poetess who he had killed because she criticized him. 0.91
00:49:53.000 And this guy went absolutely apeshit and refused to continue and so on.
00:49:59.000 Because you gave an actual historical example? 0.54
00:50:01.000 Because I gave an historical example from his own religious texts.
00:50:06.000 And in the end, it was a pre-record, and in the end, the BBC were like, Douglas, can you find another way of trying to make the same point?
00:50:13.000 And that was what we had to do.
00:50:17.000 Wait a minute, another way of making the same point, rather than pointing out the historical text that showed that Muhammad did have a female poet killed?
00:50:26.000 Yes.
00:50:27.000 What other way would there be to make that point?
00:50:29.000 It was hard.
00:50:31.000 That's the ultimate way to make that point.
00:50:33.000 Exactly.
00:50:33.000 Which is by pointing to the texts and the facts.
00:50:36.000 But, you know, I can think of no other situation in which somebody has veto rights like that in a normal discussion.
00:50:45.000 And it's because they're terrified of the retaliation.
00:50:47.000 Yes.
00:50:47.000 I mean, I knew everyone in the production box was like, oh, no, what's Douglas done?
00:50:51.000 And how can we stop it affecting us?
00:50:54.000 What was this cleric's response to that?
00:50:58.000 He went a bit nuts and wouldn't continue unless I wouldn't say that.
00:51:06.000 Did he deny that it was in the text? 0.89
00:51:09.000 Oh yeah, he said I was making it up and I was a liar.
00:51:13.000 I'm used to that.
00:51:14.000 But that's a crazy thing for him to say when someone could just read the text.
00:51:19.000 Yeah, but they're banking on nobody doing that.
00:51:22.000 Well, not in this day and age.
00:51:24.000 Don't bank on that.
00:51:25.000 Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things, isn't it?
00:51:28.000 Because although it's true you can, like, suppress a lot of this, you know, we do live in an age when basically anyone can Google and find texts and they can find this.
00:51:37.000 It's a book that a billion people have read.
00:51:39.000 I'm not sure they've read it, but yeah.
00:51:41.000 Well, possess it.
00:51:42.000 How many people do you think read it?
00:51:44.000 How many people do you think read the Bible?
00:51:46.000 Like, if you had to guess the number of Christians in this country... 0.93
00:51:50.000 There are those tests, aren't there, they sometimes do.
00:51:53.000 The Humanist Society in the UK did a few years ago, asking very basic questions of self-professed Christians about their knowledge of the texts, and very few...
00:52:03.000 My favorite is self-professed Christians with religious tattoos. 0.55
00:52:07.000 Like, hey man, you gotta read the whole book.
00:52:12.000 You are literally showing on your skin that you didn't read the whole book.
00:52:16.000 Didn't pay attention in the early bits.
00:52:18.000 It says don't do that.
00:52:21.000 This is Leviticus.
00:52:22.000 Is it Leviticus that's got the implications against writing on skin?
00:52:26.000 I believe so.
00:52:26.000 If you read Leviticus, there's a heck of a lot you can't do if you go down Leviticus angle.
00:52:31.000 You can't wear two pieces of different cloth.
00:52:33.000 Yes, exactly.
00:52:35.000 Yeah, Leviticus is a wonderful book.
00:52:37.000 It's very good for the mohair.
00:52:40.000 Leviticus wasn't the one.
00:52:41.000 Which was the book where the guy called upon the she-bear to kill the children who were mocking his baldness?
00:52:50.000 Do you know about that one?
00:52:51.000 No.
00:52:51.000 My favorite, especially as a bald guy.
00:52:55.000 This guy was getting mocked by children. 1.00
00:52:58.000 Fucking kids. 1.00
00:53:00.000 And God called upon a she-bear to come down and tear apart these children who were making fun of his bald head. 1.00
00:53:08.000 Here.
00:53:09.000 Elisha and the two bear.
00:53:11.000 Two kings.
00:53:12.000 Yeah, look at that.
00:53:14.000 Wow.
00:53:15.000 If you were going to intervene in human affairs for anything, this would be the time, wouldn't it?
00:53:20.000 That's when God's got to step in.
00:53:22.000 You can't have this kind of stuff going on. 0.83
00:53:25.000 Young kids came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, Go up, you bald head.
00:53:31.000 Go up, you bald head, which is very mild.
00:53:34.000 And when he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord, all caps.
00:53:40.000 Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 lads of their number. 0.99
00:53:47.000 And he went from there to Mount Carmel.
00:53:49.000 It's like, you know, no big deal.
00:53:51.000 It's over.
00:53:51.000 Got it done.
00:53:52.000 That's, that's, yeah, that's, my favourite reading from Scripture is one of the end of one of the books.
00:53:59.000 I can't remember which one.
00:54:00.000 I was a chorister when I was young and it always made me laugh.
00:54:03.000 There's a, the destruction of the city of Nineveh.
00:54:07.000 I think it not only finishes the chapter, but the whole book.
00:54:09.000 It says, you know, and low in that city were 40,000 human souls that were destroyed and also some cattle.
00:54:19.000 Ha! 0.89
00:54:21.000 Cattle just by association.
00:54:23.000 Not some cattle!
00:54:24.000 Bad cows.
00:54:25.000 There are bad cows. 1.00
00:54:26.000 God had to fuck up those cows, too. 1.00
00:54:29.000 But no, the bald head one, that's a heck of a time to tread into human affairs. 0.99
00:54:36.000 It's not even an insult.
00:54:37.000 You bald head?
00:54:38.000 No. 0.68
00:54:39.000 Your bald head is just an accurate description.
00:54:40.000 I mean, that is not an insult. 1.00
00:54:42.000 If you're, like, you ugly, sloppy, bald-headed loser, okay, then maybe God needs to step in and send some wolves to attack you. 1.00
00:54:53.000 And why do they specify that they're female? 1.00
00:54:55.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:54:56.000 Why is it female bears? 1.00
00:54:57.000 42 of their number.
00:54:58.000 Yeah.
00:54:59.000 42 kids and two bears.
00:55:01.000 For one bald head. 1.00
00:55:02.000 Those are some bitch-ass kids who need to learn how to run. 1.00
00:55:05.000 That doesn't even make sense. 1.00
00:55:06.000 How the fuck do those bears even catch all 42 of those kids? 0.99
00:55:09.000 What kind of kids are they raising over there in Bethel? 1.00
00:55:14.000 Those kids should have got the fuck out of there. 1.00
00:55:16.000 Well, they're all sitting around waiting their turn? 1.00
00:55:18.000 Yeah.
00:55:18.000 What do I mean?
00:55:19.000 Trying out curse words until one causes the bears to come down. 0.71
00:55:25.000 You shaggy bear. 0.93
00:55:26.000 That didn't work. 1.00
00:55:27.000 You shaggy, mangy, dirty, stinky bear. 1.00
00:55:32.000 Bald head. 1.00
00:55:34.000 Yeah, there's so many of those stories that are so strange.
00:55:36.000 But I bet that most, if we were to go to the people who say that they're Christians in the polls and ask them about, we don't even need to go to the bald head bear nightmare.
00:55:47.000 Right.
00:55:47.000 Old Testament is, they don't accept, most people don't even bother reading that because it's just, it's almost too crazy.
00:55:53.000 Yeah, but very, very little knowledge even about very basic things, even commandments and so on.
00:56:03.000 So that's the case with the religion that in America and Britain is known best with Christianity.
00:56:08.000 So there's no reason to assume that that's not the case with Islam as well.
00:56:11.000 Isn't that just the case with people?
00:56:12.000 I mean, it seems to be the same thing that we're talking about with headlines.
00:56:15.000 Someone reads the headlines, they don't bother reading into it, and then they accuse someone of something.
00:56:19.000 It's almost like with religion, I'm a Christian, and I'm a Christian man.
00:56:21.000 Oh, really?
00:56:22.000 Please tell me about the Bible.
00:56:27.000 There's something, by the way, I've often thought this is one of the reasons why it's possible to get a certain fanaticism going within Muslim communities on some issues to do with blasphemy. 0.97
00:56:38.000 I think is to do with a realization of this.
00:56:43.000 You said that this was the case about our prophet.
00:56:47.000 I didn't know that.
00:56:50.000 He did what?
00:56:51.000 I've had this all my life with arguing with various Muslims about things. 1.00
00:56:58.000 They very rarely know the problems in their own tradition.
00:57:03.000 And when you bring them up, What?
00:57:05.000 He did what? 0.98
00:57:07.000 Like the Christians with the bald beds. 1.00
00:57:09.000 And this causes a really serious problem for them because they are told from the cradle that they are following a religion founded by the most perfect man imaginable.
00:57:24.000 And if you discover that, it's like, you know, there's no description of Helen of Troy in the ancient text.
00:57:31.000 Why does nobody describe Helen of Troy?
00:57:32.000 Why does nobody say that she had this beautiful blonde ringlet? 1.00
00:57:36.000 It's because it actually catches on as a theme because everyone makes Helen of Troy their most beautiful woman.
00:57:44.000 If you started to describe it, you'd be like, I'm not into redheads. 1.00
00:57:48.000 Everyone would put something on.
00:57:50.000 Helen of Troy becomes the person upon whom you put all of those things.
00:57:55.000 And in the same way, Mohammed becomes, if you say he is the perfect human being, people will just throughout their lives put the kind of things they think are perfect onto Mohammed. 0.50
00:58:03.000 He must have been very kind, very generous, very caregiving, and so on.
00:58:07.000 So that if you then say, well, what about when he then did this?
00:58:11.000 I think it just causes an extra hurt.
00:58:14.000 This is something they'll have to get over, of course, because, I mean, we can't go away and not identify these issues.
00:58:23.000 But it causes, in the short term, an enormous, enormous pain.
00:58:27.000 I have an example I gave recently in a book of somebody I spent some time with a couple years ago, an extraordinary man called Morten Storm.
00:58:36.000 He was a Danish biker.
00:58:38.000 He was in a biker gang in Denmark. 0.82
00:58:41.000 Went to prison.
00:58:42.000 And in prison about 2000 or so, he converted not just to Islam, he converted to Al-Qaeda, basically.
00:58:48.000 He's not a common person in any way.
00:58:52.000 And he ended up being the main go-to person for something called Anu Awalaki, who was the head of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
00:59:00.000 And, in fact, was asked to get a wife, Awalaki, to supplement his wife collection.
00:59:06.000 And Morton Storm, among other things, ended up falling out with Al-Qaeda and ended up working for the CIA and Danish intelligence and ended up helping lead them to Awalaki, who was then droned by Obama in 2011 or so.
00:59:19.000 Anyhow, I once said to Morton Storm, what was the moment that made you get out of Al-Qaeda?
00:59:27.000 And he had such a fascinating answer because he came out of al-Qaeda and Islam at the same moment.
00:59:32.000 He says what was happening was he was waiting for a package from al-Qaeda drop-off to get then from him to al-Awlaki.
00:59:40.000 And the person carrying the package was late and then really late.
00:59:45.000 And he was sitting in his apartment somewhere in Germany, I think, at that point.
00:59:49.000 And he was so pissed off about this.
00:59:52.000 And he had a laptop that was there on the table.
00:59:55.000 And he thought, Basically, how can I express my pissed-offness with my Al-Qaeda colleagues for wasting my time like this so much?
01:00:04.000 And he went to Google and he typed in contradictions in Islam and began to read.
01:00:12.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:00:13.000 That was how he got out.
01:00:15.000 Wow!
01:00:16.000 That's what did him in, someone being late.
01:00:18.000 He just started reading and going, they told me this.
01:00:21.000 They never told me that.
01:00:23.000 I never knew that.
01:00:26.000 So, as I say, he's a very, very uncommon person.
01:00:30.000 But I think that might be happening quite a lot more than we know.
01:00:36.000 People just googling things, finding stuff out for themselves. 0.99
01:00:39.000 It's the most dangerous religion to leave, because they kill apostates. 1.00
01:00:44.000 They do. 0.95
01:00:44.000 Yeah, so how is he dealing with that? 0.95
01:00:47.000 Well, he lives in hidings.
01:00:49.000 Wow.
01:00:52.000 Yeah.
01:00:53.000 He read a book called Agent Storm about two years ago.
01:00:58.000 One of the weirdest conversations that I ever saw anybody have with someone who's a believer was Dawkins, I think it was, was having a conversation with someone and he asked him point-blank whether or not he believed that Mohammed split the moon.
01:01:13.000 Oh, yes.
01:01:14.000 I think I know this was with a very close enemy of mine called Mehdi Hassan, who works for Al Jazeera and who Richard Dawkins did an interview with.
01:01:23.000 And I think he, that's right, he fluffed something earlier on, Dawkins, that he didn't take on, then he took him on on this.
01:01:31.000 That's right.
01:01:32.000 And I think that Hassan said yes.
01:01:34.000 Yes, he said yes.
01:01:36.000 And then it led to this terrible problem, which is a really interesting, interesting problem of our era, which is then Dawkins said, I can't believe that somebody, or said afterwards, I can't believe that somebody could be a working journalist and believe that, you know, Mohammed flew to the moon on a half-human horse. 0.69
01:01:51.000 Right.
01:01:53.000 And, of course, I mean, there's an interesting point there.
01:01:56.000 Yeah.
01:01:57.000 But, of course, we do, quite rightly, allow people to believe Bizarre and insane things.
01:02:03.000 Well, sure, in Christianity. 0.93
01:02:04.000 It's filled with bizarre things.
01:02:05.000 Exactly.
01:02:05.000 And if we started saying you can't have public office or working journalism, if you profess to be of this particular faith, then we wouldn't have anyone left.
01:02:13.000 How does the story go?
01:02:15.000 Muhammad flew to the moon on a half-human horse and split the moon with a sword? 0.97
01:02:19.000 Is that what he did?
01:02:20.000 Yeah, I can't remember.
01:02:20.000 He could have then been attacked by female bears, but I can't remember.
01:02:24.000 No, I can't remember.
01:02:25.000 Yes, it's the night journey, which is central...
01:02:29.000 How did the moon get glued back together again?
01:02:32.000 Is it glued back together?
01:02:33.000 It looks like it is.
01:02:35.000 I haven't looked close.
01:02:36.000 Maybe I need to pay more attention.
01:02:40.000 It's just the fact that, I mean, I believe this was a few years ago.
01:02:44.000 Let's just say it was 2010 that this interview or that this debate took place.
01:02:49.000 Yes, it was around then.
01:02:50.000 Even eight years ago that someone would be comfortable saying that they believe that.
01:02:55.000 Oh, you see, I got into a little bit of trouble.
01:02:57.000 Richard Dawkins got a bit annoyed about me because I took the mickey out of him for dodging the one earlier in that.
01:03:03.000 What was the earlier one?
01:03:06.000 I'm a great admirer of Richard, as everyone is, I'm sure.
01:03:09.000 But he knows exactly where the cliff edge is.
01:03:15.000 And in that interview, he was asked on Al Jazeera by this interviewer.
01:03:23.000 He read out the bit from The God Delusion about...
01:03:26.000 There's a great bit of rhetoric about the most...
01:03:30.000 He describes God as something like the most appalling, narcissistic, murderous, blah, blah, blah, character in all of fiction.
01:03:37.000 It's a terrific piece of writing.
01:03:39.000 And the interviewer says to Dawkins, do you stand by that?
01:03:43.000 There's a description of the Christian God.
01:03:45.000 Dawkins says, yes.
01:03:46.000 He says, you stand by it as a description of the Jewish God.
01:03:48.000 He says, yes.
01:03:49.000 And then he says, would you say the same thing about the Muslim God?
01:03:53.000 And I just knew exactly what was happening.
01:03:55.000 Dawkins says, about the Muslim God I don't know so much, which he, as I say, he thinks I shouldn't rip him on this.
01:04:05.000 And the thing was, what I noticed was that I just, I completely felt he's been a very brave and brilliant writer and thinker on these matters.
01:04:13.000 Nobody's done more in some ways, but he I knew exactly what was happening.
01:04:18.000 He was staring right over the cliff edge and somebody was behind him nudging. 0.99
01:04:24.000 And if he had have said, as it were, live on Al Jazeera, oh yes, Allah, you know, the total bastard, then... 0.99
01:04:35.000 You know, you don't know. 0.99
01:04:36.000 Maybe you're then in real trouble.
01:04:40.000 And so he stepped back from the brink there, and I rather crudely perhaps took the mickey out of him after his forehead.
01:04:45.000 I said that it was just that Richard Dawkins was demonstrating the survival instinct of his species.
01:04:51.000 But I feel bad about it.
01:04:54.000 But it is true. 0.90
01:04:55.000 It is true.
01:04:55.000 But we've all been there to some extent.
01:04:58.000 What was his response to that, though?
01:05:01.000 To your criticism.
01:05:03.000 Well, he basically, I think he did take it on board in a way, for complex reasons.
01:05:14.000 I know he was also annoyed that I was...
01:05:16.000 I think he felt that I was doing that to him then.
01:05:19.000 Go on, you do it.
01:05:21.000 Right, right, right.
01:05:22.000 And that is very common in that.
01:05:25.000 I've had that a lot in my life in this particular area of people trying to egg me over.
01:05:31.000 Why don't you say that?
01:05:33.000 Of course.
01:05:34.000 And you know that they're the people who will be...
01:05:38.000 A million miles behind you.
01:05:39.000 Oh, yeah.
01:05:40.000 With their ears plugged.
01:05:41.000 Yeah.
01:05:42.000 Behind a wall.
01:05:43.000 I always have a very, very visual aid of it.
01:05:46.000 Somebody who actually is a terrific reformer in Islam now and another cleric who once described to me, he went to fight for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan 30 years ago now.
01:05:57.000 And described to me, he's not a very fighterly like person, but described how he did actually sort of rile them up to sort of run over and get at the Soviets.
01:06:05.000 He's like, you know, we're all agreed.
01:06:06.000 Yes, we'll go over.
01:06:07.000 Yes, they're like, go!
01:06:09.000 And he's 20 yards forward.
01:06:13.000 Guys?
01:06:13.000 Guys?
01:06:14.000 And everyone else has stayed in the trench.
01:06:16.000 And I've always thought this is exactly the experience of anyone in this area.
01:06:21.000 Well, everyone recognizes that there's inherent danger and this criticism, even this discussion right now.
01:06:27.000 I'm sure there's people right now firing up their webcams and writing blogs and tweeting and getting upset about it.
01:06:34.000 Possibly, yeah.
01:06:34.000 Any rational discussion of that particular subject, you could kind of get away – I mean, I get criticism from Christians, but it's not scary.
01:06:46.000 Right.
01:06:46.000 Yes, that is – That is a big difference at the time being, isn't it?
01:06:51.000 This is something that's just so important, a nuance that almost never gets added in, but of course we all just assume it, so we don't think it's worth saying.
01:06:59.000 But we are aware that any religion or thought like this could be this dangerous at different phases.
01:07:06.000 Yes.
01:07:07.000 You know, we mightn't have wanted to be in Spain in certain points in the last millennium.
01:07:12.000 Sure.
01:07:17.000 Yes.
01:07:21.000 Yes.
01:07:30.000 One can't imagine the Anglican Church becoming militant about anything at any point soon.
01:07:34.000 You do have some angrier types of Christian here than we have in my country, and so it's easy for me to think they're slightly less risky at some point in the future than you might. 1.00
01:07:46.000 But it's just that we do recognize this could happen elsewhere as well.
01:07:50.000 It's just that at the moment, it's not the Quakers.
01:07:55.000 They really don't send me a death threat from one year to the next.
01:07:59.000 Right.
01:08:00.000 Rather nice people.
01:08:01.000 There's an inherent danger of a retaliation from people who are more radical Christian, that if this continues and if you see more and more attacks from people of Muslim faith,
01:08:18.000 you could possibly see a retaliation from people, especially in this country.
01:08:23.000 Like, after 9-11, there was an extreme amount of hate for Muslims and irrational hate for people who had done nothing wrong.
01:08:32.000 Most of which was directed at Sikhs, as I remember.
01:08:34.000 Yes. 0.94
01:08:34.000 Well, there was a lot of that out of ignorance. 0.94
01:08:36.000 They just didn't – I mean, that was the most disturbing because Sikhs are pretty interesting people.
01:08:42.000 And the fact that they just instantaneously with no information at all and no understanding out of complete ignorance attacked them.
01:08:51.000 I second to no one in my gloominess about some of the things that we're going to go through in Britain and Europe in the coming years.
01:08:59.000 But I recently had a reason to be even more gloomy about one aspect of it relating to this, which is this.
01:09:06.000 We had three...
01:09:09.000 Big, bad terrorist attacks last year in the UK, including the Manchester Arena bomb, where 22 young people were blown up on a Monday night for going to hear Ariana Grande.
01:09:20.000 And after the third of those attacks, which was on London Bridge, when three people who were actually known to the authorities, as they generally are, slashed people's throats on the street and ran to Borough Market as people were drinking and stabbed.
01:09:38.000 People are shouting, this is for Allah.
01:09:40.000 After the third of those attacks, it felt like, oh God, is this really just going to keep happening?
01:09:47.000 What are we going to do about it and what can we do?
01:09:49.000 And after the Manchester one in particular, there was this kind of thing of...
01:09:53.000 Everyone sang, apart from John Lennon's Imagine, there was the Oasis hit, Don't Look Back in Anger.
01:09:59.000 And these themes, we weren't meant to think anything other than that.
01:10:03.000 We weren't meant to be angry anyway.
01:10:04.000 And then just a terrible thing happened from another direction.
01:10:12.000 Outside Finsbury Park Mosque, which is a mosque of a very troubled and bad history in London, a guy from Wales in a van drives into the crowds as they're milling around outside the mosque, kills one man and injures a number of others.
01:10:32.000 That guy, by the way, just to show how complex all this can get, is he was tried, found guilty last month in the courts in the UK. He had been, he was obviously very mentally deranged and he had a history of mental illness and all that sort of thing,
01:10:49.000 as very often people do in these situations.
01:10:51.000 But he had watched a BBC drama called Three Girls, which is the first time that the BBC... I'd really address the issue of the Rotherham Rochdale rape gangs that happened in the last decade in the UK which is still a sore that's going on where about 1500 girls in one town alone were basically Abused by gangs of Muslim,
01:11:14.000 mainly Pakistani men.
01:11:16.000 And it's a very, very ugly business, partly because it was so awful that nobody at the state, at the police level, wanted to look into it.
01:11:25.000 And they are now in the government inquiry, so they didn't look into it because they were worried about being called racist and Islamophobic and so on.
01:11:32.000 The press did a lot of not being interested in this as well.
01:11:36.000 Eventually, after all these years, the BBC makes a documentary called Three Girls, about three of the girls who suffered from these rape gangs.
01:11:43.000 And then a man in Wales sees it and gets so enraised, people say at the local pub he was railing against the bloody Muslims and all this sort of thing.
01:11:52.000 And then he hires a van and drives into a crowd of people outside a mosque. 0.90
01:11:56.000 And you have this awful feeling that The BBC didn't want to deal with the issue that the program was about for years because it was so awful and ugly and sounded like something made up by some kind of nativist, racist.
01:12:12.000 You know, it's had everything.
01:12:15.000 And then they do.
01:12:17.000 And then it turns out the member of the public sees it and drives a van into a crowd.
01:12:20.000 I mean, you know, this sort of couldn't get more complex in a way.
01:12:24.000 So...
01:12:25.000 I mean, I thought after that, okay, maybe the BBC were right.
01:12:29.000 Maybe they should cover up the gang rape of 1,500 girls.
01:12:34.000 Maybe the public can't cope with it.
01:12:36.000 Maybe they will get into vans.
01:12:38.000 Now, as it happens, I know the British public, I think, fairly well, and I think that that guy in Wales is a very, very unusual figure.
01:12:45.000 I don't think it's very common.
01:12:47.000 I don't think everyone's going to do that.
01:12:48.000 I don't think we're all like that wicked madman.
01:12:52.000 But I don't know.
01:12:53.000 I mean, I don't know for sure everywhere.
01:12:55.000 I don't know what the...
01:12:57.000 I don't know what happened in this country or in various other countries if there were three attacks like that in quick succession.
01:13:01.000 I don't know.
01:13:02.000 But this is really...
01:13:06.000 It is going to get complex.
01:13:08.000 It's already complex.
01:13:10.000 And the response to it is complex, too.
01:13:12.000 How do you, if you are a journalist, if you are a television channel, how do you report on this?
01:13:22.000 Do you think about the responsibility of alerting Yeah.
01:13:41.000 It's all insane.
01:13:42.000 I mean it seems to me the only way through it is to say – first of all, I mean I read the American press all the time.
01:13:49.000 I think that it's worse than the British press in that self-appointed role of believing its task is to stand between the public and the facts and sort of negotiate between the two.
01:14:00.000 See what they think the public can cope with or should know and then feed them that.
01:14:06.000 The American press seems to be rife with that temptation as ours is.
01:14:11.000 But it seems to be the only way around this is to not give in to that and to try just to publish the facts when they happen.
01:14:19.000 Because it just obviously seems to be much worse.
01:14:21.000 We always know in political scandal what's worse, the cover-up.
01:14:25.000 It's always the cover-up.
01:14:26.000 Right.
01:14:27.000 And that may be the case with all this.
01:14:28.000 Maybe the argument for just the papers explaining stuff that's happened is maybe that's all they can do and that one could just say to them, it'd be a lot worse if you bottle this up because otherwise people will get the idea that there is some conspiracy to cover over certain stories and they'll be on to something.
01:14:53.000 In fact, if you think about the millions of people that must have seen that, The story on the rape of 1500, the fact that only one person responded that way, is pretty extraordinary in and of itself.
01:15:05.000 Yes, yes.
01:15:07.000 And I would have thought on some of this.
01:15:09.000 I mean, I don't know, again, I mean, there are lots of examples one could use, but when something bad happens, like the Manchester Arena attack, I'm amazed in a way that people are so...
01:15:24.000 Decent.
01:15:25.000 I mean, I'm so pleased they are.
01:15:26.000 But we don't go out looking for people to attack.
01:15:31.000 You know, the public, certainly in Britain, I think it's the same in America.
01:15:35.000 We're not really lynch mobs waiting to be going again.
01:15:40.000 But the expectation that we are is the only possibility of creating us in such a way.
01:15:46.000 It's only by treating us as if we can't deal with ugly things that go on.
01:15:52.000 That you could see the situation, that's where we began, to see the situation in which that all goes wrong in that different way.
01:16:01.000 Yeah.
01:16:02.000 I mean, I don't envy their position, especially trying to pick up the ball from here.
01:16:06.000 Yes.
01:16:07.000 With all the history and all the terrible things, especially in England, with so many attacks over such a relatively short period of time, where there was a very small history of that before.
01:16:18.000 It seemed like this immediate eruption of all these issues.
01:16:22.000 Yes, and I mean, the country, in some ways, I write about my latest book most is France, where the book comes out in translation there in a couple of months' time.
01:16:31.000 I'm very interested to see what happens because France had even, I mean, we mentioned Charlie Hebdo, but that 18 months or so it had was just, I mean, again, it all sort of disappears now.
01:16:43.000 Every day has got bad news of some kind.
01:16:45.000 But, you know, to have a major Western capital city with 130 people killed in an evening with multiple suicide bombings and people being gunned down from mopeds as they're sitting outside a bar and You know, another group of people going into a rock concert and,
01:17:02.000 you know, going through the disabled section and shooting everyone one by one in the disabled section and gunning everyone else down and catching them in the lavatories and shooting them.
01:17:11.000 I mean, that happened in one night alone in Paris. 0.80
01:17:16.000 But the Parisians didn't become You know, they didn't become wicked, terrible people or anything, but they have...
01:17:22.000 I think that a lot of these terrible events that have happened, actually what happens is they sink down to a lower level of our consciousness so that what actually happens is we get over the immediate thing quite fast.
01:17:39.000 But that something at the foundational level changes.
01:17:42.000 I had a case nobody really wanted to linger on, but there was one in November in the UK on Oxford Street where, because of course everyone does after these attacks, they always say, you know, we will not be changed.
01:17:54.000 Everyone tries to sort of channel the spirit of Churchill and all that sort of thing.
01:17:58.000 I'm Churchill, hear me roar, and so on.
01:18:01.000 And actually, the facts are otherwise.
01:18:05.000 In November, on Oxford Street, all we know is that there were two men who may have had some disagreement on the platform of a tube platform.
01:18:16.000 Whatever happened, it was misunderstood by crowds, and it developed into a stampede.
01:18:21.000 Out of the tube station, then all the way down Oxford Street, people were locked and barricaded into the big department stores.
01:18:28.000 A pop singer called Olly Murs tweeted out to his million followers.
01:18:32.000 You know, there were shots of being fired.
01:18:34.000 I'm in the back room of the store, H&M, and this sort of thing.
01:18:38.000 And other people claimed that a truck had gone down Oxford Street mowing people down.
01:18:42.000 They've seen bodies.
01:18:44.000 The police said it was a major terrorist event they were on top of, and the press were all, you know, running the stories.
01:18:50.000 Turned out nothing happened.
01:18:52.000 Nothing happened.
01:18:53.000 The next day, two men handed themselves into a local police station saying they thought they might have been responsible for it, but they were let off without any charge.
01:19:01.000 What I'm saying is...
01:19:02.000 They thought they might have been responsible for it because they'd been in an argument?
01:19:05.000 That they'd had an argument.
01:19:06.000 Maybe they weren't saying we were responsible for the whole thing, but like, they were asking for information.
01:19:11.000 And they were let go.
01:19:13.000 But my point is that we can simultaneously say we will not be cowed.
01:19:20.000 And also, actually, be at the stage where if you just hear a bang, everyone goes running.
01:19:25.000 You don't want to be the last person to figure out what's going on.
01:19:30.000 So as soon as something you think is happening, people in this day and age, when there's just this recent history of horrible things happening over and over again in Orlando, here, I mean, there's just so many of them, that people just instantaneously want to react.
01:19:46.000 And then, like in the Vegas shooting, One of the things that was very confusing about the Vegas shooting is people would go into casinos.
01:19:53.000 They would flee from the concert into casinos and then talk about a shooter.
01:19:58.000 And then people would say there's an active shooter at the Tropicana.
01:20:01.000 That always happens.
01:20:03.000 That's why I never believe the immediate aftermath.
01:20:05.000 There's always a claim of other shooters.
01:20:07.000 There's always a claim of something that turns out not...
01:20:09.000 Everywhere.
01:20:09.000 They were claiming there were shooters all over the city, but there was no actual...
01:20:14.000 Shooting in these other casinos was just reports of active shooters.
01:20:18.000 And by the way, if you're interested, there's a fascinating thing about why this happens and I wrote a book some years ago about Bloody Sunday, a terrible event in Northern Ireland.
01:20:33.000 I went through all the testimony of everyone who had seen it.
01:20:36.000 One of the most interesting things was the number of people whose memories were just totally different from what we know actually happened.
01:20:43.000 And one of the conclusions I came to was that there's a book by a Harvard professor called The Seven Sins of Memory about this.
01:20:50.000 But one of the things that clearly happens is after any very traumatic event or very terrible event where people are effectively in the situation of a war zone when they were just shopping or at a concert at the moment before, Is that our memories immediately become even more suggestible than they are already.
01:21:07.000 And the most obvious thing of suggestibility in these situations is that the situation was worse around you and you came off better than you did.
01:21:17.000 And that's almost always the case.
01:21:20.000 The shots that were quite a bit away were very close.
01:21:27.000 You have to, your memory, without knowing it, we all do it, our memory tells us we behave better than we did and that the threat was worse because this is one of our ways of coping, I think.
01:21:42.000 But it's a terrible thing, obviously, with these school shootings and things that are going on here at the moment.
01:21:48.000 I mean, this is obviously...
01:21:51.000 I watched your podcast the other day where you were discussing this with the latest one with the Florida.
01:21:56.000 And I think the sort of, in a way, bafflement going on in this society about this is understandable.
01:22:04.000 Yeah, the unimaginable horror of being involved in that situation, your mind is just not prepared to cope with that.
01:22:11.000 I mean, maybe if you're a soldier and you experience combat and you know how to stay calm in a firefight because you've been in a bunch of them, but for the average person, I mean, it's one of the reasons why...
01:22:22.000 I witness testimony.
01:22:23.000 It's one of the worst pieces of evidence you could ever get, including, I mean, about basically everything, about fistfights to, you know, anything.
01:22:32.000 Oh, yeah.
01:22:32.000 No, we all have examples in our own lives of seeing, you know, friends who've been through the same thing.
01:22:36.000 We know that they've been through the same thing, and yet they have two totally different versions of what happened.
01:22:42.000 I mean that's a real problem.
01:22:44.000 But now you have this thing here where – I mean in some ways even worse than we do of the search to notch it up for your own political side or against the enemy.
01:22:54.000 It's the same thing with the Twitter point.
01:22:57.000 But I mean this obscene glee that goes on after any terrorist attack in Europe but I think also here as well, the attempt to – To immediately call it for the other side or for your side or whatever.
01:23:10.000 And to try to use terrible events as a way to justify whatever your own team is.
01:23:19.000 I find this amazing with the gun debate here.
01:23:22.000 And I would find it amazing coming from a different society on it.
01:23:25.000 But the way to sort of notch it up for one side or the other in it.
01:23:30.000 I don't know.
01:23:31.000 You've got a real problem on this one.
01:23:33.000 I've been watching a lot of it from the perspective of the gun owners, the NRA members, and the people that want to defend the idea of having guns, even of arming teachers, and you're looking at their perspective on it,
01:23:48.000 and their perspective on it is all about their rights, all about the Constitution, all about the Bill of Rights, all about protecting the Second Amendment, all about Gun ownership being taken away, gun ownership under attack, the NRA under attack, they're coming after our guns, and this is this constant battle of ideas that's on Twitter,
01:24:06.000 not addressing the actual issue.
01:24:09.000 I mean, I... Sorry.
01:24:10.000 No, it's okay.
01:24:12.000 Watching this thing, arming teachers...
01:24:16.000 Yeah, that's insane.
01:24:17.000 I mean, this is...
01:24:18.000 Samuel Jackson had a great quote about it.
01:24:21.000 He put it on Twitter. 0.99
01:24:24.000 Like, someone tell a motherfucker who's never been in a gunfight the problems of arming a bunch of teachers. 0.99
01:24:29.000 Right. 0.99
01:24:30.000 Someone who's been in a gunfight, please tell a motherfucker who's never been in a gunfight. 0.99
01:24:35.000 Somebody said anyone who thinks it's a good idea giving teachers guns has clearly never seen one try to use an overhead projector. 0.99
01:24:41.000 Yeah, there's Samuel Jackson.
01:24:43.000 Look at that.
01:24:44.000 306,000 likes, so you know it was an effective tweet.
01:24:49.000 This is the world we're living in.
01:24:50.000 Check the number.
01:24:52.000 It was only, yeah, you got three tweets.
01:24:53.000 It can't be true.
01:24:54.000 Nobody likes you.
01:24:56.000 I thought there was a very pertinent one a few years ago in New York on 5th when somebody shot their colleague and outside the office came back as a disgruntled worker, shot the colleague and locally there were some policemen around the corner and they came out and started firing at the guy who'd done it,
01:25:16.000 ended up wounding about 11 pedestrians.
01:25:19.000 Well, you would, wouldn't you?
01:25:20.000 Of course.
01:25:21.000 I mean, I'm not saying, by the way, we have our own problems, but this is a big problem for America.
01:25:26.000 We have more guns than we have people.
01:25:29.000 I mean, I completely understand why the amendment exists.
01:25:34.000 And I think it's a very good idea for the time.
01:25:37.000 And I think it's a very understandable idea to hold on to it now.
01:25:40.000 But why can't people say, for instance...
01:25:44.000 I mean, we all have abstract ideas we have to hold on to.
01:25:47.000 And we all in our countries have weird things that other people don't understand.
01:25:51.000 I think it's odd to have a hereditary constitutional monarch, for instance.
01:25:55.000 Right.
01:25:56.000 It is weird.
01:25:57.000 It's a great way to put it.
01:25:58.000 It's strange.
01:25:59.000 And if you were starting from now, you might not do that.
01:26:04.000 But clearly, with the gun ownership thing, it is we are willing to take...
01:26:11.000 Bad things happening quite often because we want to hold on to the Second Amendment.
01:26:16.000 Well, the Second Amendment has been around forever.
01:26:18.000 The bad things happening quite often is really from Columbine on.
01:26:21.000 I mean, there was a few of them before.
01:26:23.000 There was the Austin, Texas tower shootings.
01:26:27.000 But it seems – I mean, again, it's such an obvious point.
01:26:32.000 I don't want to sound like a snotty Brit who's saying something about America that's not – But it seems obvious that you could do a lot more damage with a semi-automatic rifle than you can with a knife.
01:26:46.000 And most people, we see this in the terrorism as well, there are really committed terrorists who don't commit acts of violence unless they can get hold of the means to do it.
01:26:57.000 Because we often think, well, why don't you just go out with a knife?
01:27:01.000 Some people do.
01:27:03.000 But most people actually want to go out in that way and what they see as being a blaze of glory.
01:27:07.000 Right.
01:27:08.000 So, stopping them having the means of getting that very easily seems to me very obvious.
01:27:16.000 But that isn't to say that, I mean, of course, I think you made a point the other day, it's like saying, If you say everyone who has a gun is part of the problem, then obviously not, because it's like saying everyone who's got a truck is a part of the problem.
01:27:26.000 But there are obviously two things.
01:27:28.000 One is the psychological and whatever the social issues are that cause this to keep happening.
01:27:32.000 And that is obviously very, very important to try to get to the root of.
01:27:37.000 But you can get to the root of that or try to get to the root of that and also recognize that people having access to some of the weapons they have access to in this country Must be a part of the problem.
01:27:51.000 It has to be.
01:27:53.000 Also, the idea that You should just be able to go out and buy a gun without really understanding how a gun works at all.
01:28:03.000 Yeah.
01:28:04.000 Which is exactly how you do it.
01:28:05.000 I got my first handgun license in 1994. That's when I bought my first handgun.
01:28:10.000 And I just went and bought a handgun.
01:28:11.000 They did a background check on me.
01:28:13.000 That's it.
01:28:14.000 I mean, I went to the range.
01:28:15.000 They showed me what the safety is.
01:28:16.000 Point at this.
01:28:17.000 Put the earphones on.
01:28:18.000 Make sure you don't blow your ears out.
01:28:20.000 Bang, bang, bang. 0.89
01:28:21.000 And then you leave with a gun.
01:28:22.000 I mean, once your background check's clear, they find out you're not a criminal, there's not much to it.
01:28:27.000 There's a giant problem with that.
01:28:30.000 If you want to drive an automobile, you have to show that you understand the laws.
01:28:35.000 You have to sit with an expert who's to sit there, a driving instructor.
01:28:40.000 They have to go through it with you.
01:28:41.000 They have to watch your movements.
01:28:43.000 They have to watch you make turns.
01:28:46.000 Wouldn't you imagine that it would be a good idea to have some sort of a clinical evaluation of a person that's going to buy a gun?
01:28:55.000 Here's another thing.
01:28:55.000 There was an article recently that was saying, contrary to popular belief, most school shootings are not committed by people who are mentally ill.
01:29:03.000 Well, that's a fucking stupid thing to say. 1.00
01:29:05.000 You know why? 1.00
01:29:06.000 Because if you're committing a school shooting, you're mentally ill. 1.00
01:29:10.000 Exactly. 0.99
01:29:10.000 Okay? 0.99
01:29:11.000 Period.
01:29:11.000 Then, on top of that, what they're ignoring conveniently, and this is another headline thing, Psychiatric medications.
01:29:18.000 These people are almost entirely on some form of psychiatric medication, whether it is anti-anxiety pills, whether it's antidepressants.
01:29:30.000 I'm not saying that correlation equals causation.
01:29:34.000 I'm not saying that. 0.99
01:29:35.000 But to say that they're not, this is just a bullshit, clickbait headline. 1.00
01:29:39.000 They're mentally ill 100%. 1.00
01:29:41.000 100% of them are mentally ill. 0.99
01:29:43.000 There's a conservative commentator in the UK called Peter Hitchens who always makes a point after Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe that there's a large number of them as well as other types of attack who seem to be on some kind of medication. 0.96
01:29:56.000 Yes.
01:29:57.000 And my point is always I'm very, very happy to have that conversation.
01:30:00.000 I think we need to have that conversation.
01:30:02.000 And we also have to have the other parts of it as well.
01:30:05.000 Yes, you're right.
01:30:06.000 It's the same here.
01:30:07.000 I can't see why we can't have all of this.
01:30:10.000 It's the same thing that we were talking about earlier.
01:30:11.000 It's these idea sports.
01:30:14.000 Right.
01:30:14.000 These wars.
01:30:15.000 People don't want to give up their idea.
01:30:18.000 They don't want to give up any ground whatsoever on their Second Amendment rights. 0.97
01:30:22.000 Whether it's owning a.50 caliber fucking tank gun, or whether it's having a gun for home safety or for hunting. 0.98
01:30:30.000 They don't want to give up anything. 0.99
01:30:31.000 And they feel like it's a slippery slope.
01:30:34.000 The people that I follow online that are tweeting about this on a regular basis, you can go to a lot of them, like, they're making videos about it, Dana Lash, and Colin, actually his name is, it's not Colin, it's Colion, Colion Noir,
01:30:50.000 N-O-I-R. He's very, very vocal about it.
01:30:53.000 I'm reading all his stuff, it's like, all anyone's taking into account is this idea that they're coming after your rights.
01:31:00.000 Right.
01:31:00.000 And emphasizing the idea of a good person with a gun that can protect people in these terrible situations, which can happen as well.
01:31:09.000 But what we have to address, that's not what we're talking about. 0.99
01:31:12.000 We have to address how the fuck do these crazy people get guns? 1.00
01:31:16.000 Why are so many people on mental health medications? 0.99
01:31:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:31:20.000 Well, that's a huge problem.
01:31:22.000 I can't understand.
01:31:23.000 We always have this wanting to have the conversation about it, but there's very little done on it.
01:31:27.000 That's one thing.
01:31:28.000 I'm very struck by this.
01:31:29.000 We have in all our countries, I mean, slipped into a very weird attitude towards this type of medication.
01:31:36.000 Yes, very weird, very accepting of something that radically alters the way your mind works.
01:31:43.000 Right.
01:31:44.000 And I don't know, maybe it's because there's not an incentive.
01:31:48.000 Drug companies obviously don't have an incentive, quite the opposite, to look into it.
01:31:51.000 But it's another example of the set of things we should be thinking about at the moment and looking at, which we just don't.
01:32:01.000 Why don't we?
01:32:02.000 Because it's sort of shut down because we shut it down ourselves.
01:32:06.000 I think it's just such a range of issues this is the case with.
01:32:11.000 And it's always the same thing.
01:32:12.000 It's always that if you address the question, difficult as it might be, you are attacking an individual who might suffer from it, who might be upset by us addressing the question.
01:32:24.000 I mean, I have a lot of suspicions about all sorts of things.
01:32:28.000 I'm a very, you know, skeptical person, as it were, about things that I'm told, so I'd like to look into things.
01:32:33.000 I'm amazed at the number of things in our societies that we just don't discuss, and they're all the things that we ought to be discussing.
01:32:42.000 Issues like mental health issues, issues that have to do with the social presumptions that are going on left, right and center at the moment, where you're not meant to discuss Things that are, apart from anything else, very, very interesting and very important.
01:32:58.000 And I just see it everywhere.
01:33:01.000 This might, by the way, so this is a slightly strange segue to make, but there was a fascinating one in Britain a couple of days ago.
01:33:09.000 A slightly lighter subject, but there's a diver in the UK called Tom Daley who married a screenwriter from Hollywood called Dustin Lance Black.
01:33:20.000 And it was announced a couple of weeks ago on Valentine's Day that they were having a baby.
01:33:24.000 And there was a photograph of them holding a scan they sent out on their Twitter, two men who are married who have an ultrasound scan.
01:33:33.000 And all the papers and the BBC and everyone else reported saying Dustin and Tom are having a baby.
01:33:40.000 And, I mean, I'm gay and I don't think I'm homophobic, but I looked at this and I was like, how?
01:33:49.000 Is there someone else involved?
01:33:50.000 I mean, you know, there's the old joke. 0.98
01:33:53.000 Gays can't have children. 1.00
01:33:55.000 It doesn't mean we can't keep trying.
01:33:57.000 But I just looked at this and I said, nothing in the articles about this tells me anything I would like to know.
01:34:05.000 Like, I know that they didn't just have a roll around and woke up in the morning and one of them was preggers. 0.90
01:34:09.000 I know that.
01:34:11.000 And I know that there has to be a woman involved at some point. 0.50
01:34:14.000 We know this.
01:34:16.000 But we are meant to just, like, adapt.
01:34:19.000 Okay, great.
01:34:20.000 Cool.
01:34:21.000 And it's almost as if it's set up so that somebody says, wait, isn't a woman...
01:34:28.000 Isn't there a uterus at some point? 0.98
01:34:30.000 So that then everyone goes...
01:34:33.000 Bigot!
01:34:34.000 Right. 0.97
01:34:34.000 Homophobe! 0.97
01:34:35.000 Racist, sexist! 1.00
01:34:37.000 Xenophobe! 1.00
01:34:37.000 Yeah, everything. 1.00
01:34:38.000 Whatever we've got.
01:34:40.000 And, of course, somebody did.
01:34:42.000 Really?
01:34:43.000 Well, somebody from the Daily Mail wrote a column saying, come on, two dads isn't the new normal, sort of thing.
01:34:48.000 And, of course, then everyone piled in on that, and all these advertisers withdrew their advertising.
01:34:53.000 Really?
01:34:54.000 But this was just on, this was like, literally, literally until the day before yesterday, it was possible to say, I don't think two guys can just, like, have sex and make a child.
01:35:04.000 Literally that was okay until the day before yesterday.
01:35:06.000 And it's not okay today, so what will not be okay tomorrow?
01:35:11.000 And I just think, and I wrote about it, and maybe a couple of other people ended up doing it too, but I think that's really interesting.
01:35:20.000 Like a lot of this other stuff, I think it's really interesting about this, that you are, things that seem very obvious to us are all the things you're not meant to write about, almost as if they're like booby traps waiting to go off.
01:35:32.000 Yeah.
01:35:33.000 And I just think, well, why don't more people pile on in?
01:35:37.000 Right.
01:35:38.000 Because we could have a heck of a time, and we might also solve some things.
01:35:45.000 Well, people don't want to pile in on anything involving gender or sexuality.
01:35:50.000 No.
01:35:50.000 It's just too scary.
01:35:52.000 No.
01:35:52.000 It's a landmine field.
01:35:54.000 Sure.
01:35:54.000 I know, yeah.
01:35:55.000 They just can't walk in, especially, as you said earlier, people with regular jobs. 0.85
01:35:59.000 If you get called out for being a racist or a homophobe or anything along those lines, you're doomed.
01:36:04.000 Sure.
01:36:06.000 But in that case, anyone who does have a voice...
01:36:11.000 As a writer or speaker, whatever, broadcaster, I think has a disproportionate duty to do so.
01:36:19.000 I mean, there's no point in just repeating those same new lies.
01:36:25.000 There's a disproportionate duty to try to break them down.
01:36:29.000 I can't remember one of my favorite quotes, that one from H.L. Mencken, who says, you know, that history was always progressed by jolly fellows heaving dead cats into sanctuaries.
01:36:37.000 Right.
01:36:38.000 And going roistering down the byways of the world.
01:36:41.000 And I wish that there were more dead cat heavers.
01:36:49.000 Because he's not...
01:36:50.000 It's not such a bad job.
01:36:52.000 You can make a living sometimes.
01:36:54.000 And it's one of the only things worth doing if we're all going to be told lies and expected to go along with them, whether it's about terrorism or gay parenting or mental health or anything else.
01:37:08.000 A whole set of them.
01:37:08.000 It's a really target-rich environment.
01:37:11.000 It is.
01:37:12.000 And I think there's more people doing that now than ever before.
01:37:15.000 But it's more people like you and I who can kind of get away with it.
01:37:20.000 Yeah, I don't know.
01:37:20.000 Why do you think you get away with it, by the way?
01:37:22.000 Me?
01:37:22.000 Yeah.
01:37:23.000 Because you can't take me seriously.
01:37:25.000 Right. 0.99
01:37:25.000 I'm a cage-fighting commentator and a dirty comedian. 0.99
01:37:29.000 Right. 0.87
01:37:29.000 I mean, nobody's listening to me and taking me seriously in that regard. 0.87
01:37:33.000 Well, you obviously are.
01:37:34.000 Well, sort of.
01:37:36.000 It's...
01:37:36.000 I just...
01:37:40.000 First of all, I'm a kind person.
01:37:43.000 I think that helps.
01:37:44.000 I'm not a mean person.
01:37:45.000 When I'm saying these things, I'm saying these things from... 0.99
01:37:48.000 I'm going, what the fuck is this? 0.99
01:37:51.000 Here was one that I thought was really fascinating. 0.99
01:37:53.000 And this is a great example of...
01:37:57.000 How strange we get on subjects.
01:38:00.000 Caitlyn Jenner.
01:38:01.000 When Caitlyn Jenner transitioned, that was the primary thing that people were talking about.
01:38:07.000 Oh my god, she's a woman now. 1.00
01:38:09.000 And it was right after she had been spacing out behind the wheel, slammed into a woman, and pushed her into traffic in a head-on collision, and the woman died.
01:38:18.000 And that was almost just completely forgotten.
01:38:21.000 Completely forgotten.
01:38:22.000 Not only that, she doesn't believe in gay marriage.
01:38:27.000 Like, you have the wrong spokesperson.
01:38:31.000 I mean, you could not have a more wrong spokesperson, but yet ESPN and Glamour Woman of the Year and all these different things and Athlete of the Year and wearing dresses and fabulous things.
01:38:44.000 Let's get your chin shaved down, because that's who you really are.
01:38:48.000 Who you really are is not this person there.
01:38:51.000 No, you've got to shave your chin down.
01:38:54.000 It goes back to that thing about almost as if you're being dared.
01:38:58.000 Yes, you're being dared to discuss it.
01:39:00.000 I said this to Sam Harris.
01:39:01.000 I got him into trouble just on his podcast by saying this, and he didn't attack me, apparently.
01:39:06.000 Apparently he got a whole load of transphobe accusations because of me saying something.
01:39:10.000 But I said to him, I thought what was happening was that we were being asked not only to agree that Bruce Jenner had become Caitlyn Jenner and that Caitlyn Jenner was a woman, but that you had to find her attractive.
01:39:23.000 Yes, you have to say she's beautiful. 0.99
01:39:24.000 You're a piece of shag. 1.00
01:39:26.000 Caitlyn Jenner, you were just like... 0.98
01:39:27.000 And I find those ones are just...
01:39:29.000 There was one the other... 0.92
01:39:31.000 It's a bit like the gay parenting thing. 1.00
01:39:32.000 It's like, I dare you. 0.97
01:39:34.000 You just try pretending.
01:39:36.000 Pretending that Tom and Dustin can't have a baby.
01:39:39.000 LAUGHTER And it was the same way, a little while ago, there was a boy in Britain who was, I can't remember whether he wanted to turn up to school in a dress, he's like nine years old, and there was a row, I can't remember whether the school said yes or no, but it was a big thing, and then it became a weigh-in on behalf of the nine-year-old trans kid.
01:39:58.000 I've got lots of questions to ask there.
01:40:00.000 And then it became, the nine-year-old kid became a model for a fashion shoot, And then it's like, find the nine-year-old boy who says he's a girl attractive and say it's beautiful.
01:40:19.000 How much more do you want to push people?
01:40:22.000 Like, no!
01:40:23.000 They're rewarding.
01:40:24.000 They're like, isn't she lovely?
01:40:27.000 Right.
01:40:29.000 What are you doing to us?
01:40:32.000 What are you trying to make us agree to?
01:40:37.000 What's the cause of all this?
01:40:40.000 You must have been thinking about this.
01:40:43.000 This bizarre, illogical conversation that falls into these very convenient, well-cut grooves that you're really not allowed to slide the ideas out of.
01:40:54.000 What's causing this?
01:40:57.000 I think it's so many things.
01:40:59.000 One is that it's possible this is what happens when the economics goes wrong.
01:41:05.000 I've got a feeling.
01:41:06.000 The economics?
01:41:07.000 What I mean is that if people aren't seeing increases in their living standards, I mean, my generation, I'm 38, just above this generation, but a generation ever so slightly below me is becoming aware that it won't get on the property ladder.
01:41:24.000 At all, maybe.
01:41:26.000 Property ladder, meaning owning a home?
01:41:28.000 Owning a home.
01:41:29.000 The things that their parents' generation got, not easily by any means, it wasn't easy for boomers, but that somehow they're going to have it harder than their parents' generation, or might not enjoy the living standards that their parents' generation enjoyed.
01:41:47.000 Might be, certainly in Western Europe coming home, it might be occurring to them.
01:41:52.000 What do you do in those situations?
01:41:55.000 You've got to have other things to get worth from.
01:41:59.000 If, for instance, you're not going to own a home until you're 40 and at that point, if you're a woman, like your career, you need to have children but you can't afford to take the time off work and you might not be able to start a family.
01:42:10.000 And then you're trying to start a family in your 40s and it's harder, very hard.
01:42:15.000 And a whole set of other things like that, that are definitely delayed for a new generation.
01:42:19.000 Now I think that it's possible, I'm not saying it's certain, but it's possible, it seems to me, that that generation might discover new gods.
01:42:29.000 I might want to enforce the new rules just as avidly as the old gods.
01:42:35.000 Wow.
01:42:36.000 And there is an element of that going on.
01:42:41.000 I can't understand why otherwise every time I talk about the things we talk about today, there would just continuously be this very angry reaction.
01:42:50.000 Not, oh, that's interesting.
01:42:51.000 You know, I never thought of that.
01:42:52.000 I think probably like you, you know, I mean, It's quite hard to shock me or to upset me.
01:42:58.000 And I go, oh, that's interesting.
01:43:00.000 Why do you think that?
01:43:01.000 So why do I always get this, like, we've got to stop him.
01:43:06.000 Other than that these are new commandments that we're breaking.
01:43:12.000 I mean, they're all sort of connected, aren't they, these things?
01:43:18.000 They're all attempts to something like purity, which disturbs me.
01:43:27.000 A sort of, if we could just get everything in a row.
01:43:30.000 You even hear that thing, get in your lane.
01:43:32.000 God, I hate the people who Get in your lane. 1.00
01:43:36.000 What the fuck do you think you are? 1.00
01:43:41.000 What's my lane? 1.00
01:43:42.000 I think I've said it a few times.
01:43:43.000 But only people that needed to stay in their lane.
01:43:47.000 New York Times.
01:43:47.000 I'm different.
01:43:48.000 New York Times.
01:43:49.000 I was reading it on the plane over.
01:43:51.000 I'm reading it on the plane over.
01:43:53.000 And there's an agony aunt, we call it. 0.99
01:43:57.000 Self-help, whatever.
01:43:58.000 Advice column.
01:44:00.000 This woman says... 1.00
01:44:02.000 She was on the train a couple of days ago, and there was a man who came on with his girlfriend.
01:44:07.000 He was being really abusive to her, and it just kept happening.
01:44:09.000 It was kind of a nasty, violent situation.
01:44:15.000 She doesn't know what to do.
01:44:16.000 Other people in the carriage, they all move away.
01:44:18.000 And of course, you can see what's coming.
01:44:19.000 The culmination of it is she says she gets off the train.
01:44:22.000 She wonders whether she should have said something.
01:44:24.000 But she says, conscious of her white privilege, and that these people were people of color, And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, what?
01:44:36.000 Now, if you saw a man of different skin pigmentation from you abusing a woman of different skin pigmentation from you, the right thing is not to defend the woman. 0.90
01:44:49.000 That seems like just a real justification for being a coward. 0.93
01:44:53.000 Yes, it must be.
01:44:54.000 But I found the advice was, you know, you did sort of the right thing.
01:44:57.000 Maybe you should have spoken to an official or something.
01:44:59.000 But there was no kind of...
01:45:00.000 So all this stuff, all this weird get in your lane, know your privilege, you know, weigh up your privilege.
01:45:07.000 I mean, that's a good way to make society have a nervous breakdown, isn't it?
01:45:11.000 Way up your privilege.
01:45:12.000 Privilege scorecards.
01:45:13.000 I mean, my God.
01:45:15.000 But all of these things seem to – it's almost as if people think if we get the lanes correct, everything will be sorted.
01:45:26.000 And here's the problem, is that first of all, the means of doing this are just hideous.
01:45:32.000 I mean, hideous.
01:45:33.000 They accentuate racial difference. 0.91
01:45:36.000 They accentuate sexual and gender difference.
01:45:38.000 They accentuate everything else.
01:45:41.000 And the destination is horrible.
01:45:45.000 It is not the nirvana they think that they're creating.
01:45:49.000 So this is a really good moment to try to look at some of this and to talk about it and to think about it as widely and as freely as we can and yet the effort is to do the opposite.
01:46:03.000 I think you're onto something with the idea that this radical, progressive, very restrictive line of communication, ideology that we're experiencing, that we're talking about, is coming from a lot of people that don't have a religion.
01:46:16.000 Yes.
01:46:17.000 They're atheists, or they're at the very least agnostics. 0.85
01:46:20.000 Modern progressives are very rarely religious.
01:46:23.000 Yes.
01:46:23.000 And this must, for somebody who's a non-belief like myself, this is a painful thing to look at, but again, we have to think about it.
01:46:31.000 But isn't that an interesting thing as well?
01:46:33.000 Because you think of yourself as being on a team with these other atheists or agnostics. 0.78
01:46:37.000 Oh, you see, I don't.
01:46:38.000 You don't, but I'm saying as an atheist yourself, you have to look at it that way.
01:46:42.000 You've already lumped yourself in with them.
01:46:44.000 Yes.
01:46:44.000 I was speaking at a campus in the U.S. a little while ago, and I spoke to a guy who was a really, really clever student who was a free thinker.
01:46:54.000 He said, afterwards we were talking, he said, you know, he'd had some hideous experience at a local free-thinker society, you know, where everyone was like, get in your lane.
01:47:03.000 And he was like, I thought that being among free-thinkers, like, the rest would all be good.
01:47:08.000 I was like, no, no, no, no, no.
01:47:09.000 The free-thinkers turn out to be...
01:47:12.000 Just as able to be blindfolded if you, you know, on certain things down...
01:47:17.000 Wouldn't you imagine this, of course, self-proclaimed free thinkers would be even more inclined to adopt a rigid ideology.
01:47:24.000 They're proclaiming themselves to be a free thinker.
01:47:28.000 And it's possible this comes from that, you know, the old joke about censors, you know, that the censor knows everything that the people are really into.
01:47:40.000 And I spoke once to a man who was on the British Board of Film Classification.
01:47:44.000 He spent all day watching really hardcore pornography, deciding what could be legalized and all that sort of thing.
01:47:49.000 You must have a very dark view of humanity.
01:47:52.000 Well, that wasn't Justice Scalia's interpretation of pornography.
01:47:56.000 I don't know how to describe it, but I'll know it when I see it.
01:47:59.000 Right, exactly.
01:48:00.000 Like, why? 0.99
01:48:01.000 Aren't you a fucking judge? 0.99
01:48:02.000 And it may be, but it may be that these people, that a lot of conservatives have this thing, that one becomes rigid about something because you've seen into the abyss, because you don't know you mightn't behave in a certain very terrible way. 0.99
01:48:20.000 And so you want to pull back from that chaos.
01:48:24.000 You want to pull other people back as well.
01:48:26.000 Seems to me that a lot of so-called free thinkers, self-designated free thinkers, may well have these glimpses and may well think, I don't know what's holding this together, and therefore might precisely for that reason be disproportionately rigid on almost any new ideology that came along.
01:48:46.000 Get in lane. 0.73
01:48:48.000 Yeah.
01:48:50.000 Yeah.
01:48:50.000 I like this idea that this is almost like a substitution for religion.
01:48:55.000 It's almost like there's an inherent need that we have because human beings have operated under these patterns for so long.
01:49:03.000 We clearly have this need.
01:49:05.000 It would be absurd to pretend we didn't.
01:49:09.000 Yeah, it's interesting because the more you, like, we found ways to mock it, right?
01:49:16.000 And one of the ways to mock it, and I think that that's important.
01:49:19.000 And that mockery, although it seems trivial, what it does do is let people know how ridiculous other people feel those ideas are, and then it makes them re-examine them themselves because they don't like being mocked. 1.00
01:49:30.000 The term social justice warrior is wonderful for that, because it just makes you look like such a fucking fool. 0.99
01:49:35.000 You know, I'm a social justice warrior. 1.00
01:49:39.000 I was a colleague of mine, a spectator in London called Rod Little wrote a few years ago, any man who says he's a feminist clearly just is seeking a shag. 0.95
01:49:49.000 Oh, for sure.
01:49:51.000 Well, I mean, it's one thing to want equality, but to proudly state that you're a feminist, it's almost, I've joked around about it, like, I see what you're doing. 1.00
01:50:01.000 You don't run fast, you can't pick things up, but you still like to fuck. 0.99
01:50:05.000 I get it. 1.00
01:50:06.000 Somebody said it's about a party in Britain.
01:50:09.000 They said they described themselves as an anti-racist party.
01:50:13.000 There's a comedian who said, it actually makes you think they might be racist.
01:50:17.000 It'd be like saying you're an anti-paedophilia children's agency.
01:50:25.000 You think?
01:50:27.000 Who is the comedian that said that?
01:50:28.000 That's brilliant.
01:50:29.000 That's hilarious.
01:50:30.000 That's so true.
01:50:31.000 It's so true. 0.84
01:50:32.000 It's virtue signaling to the highest degree.
01:50:35.000 It's like you're putting up your flag of moral superiority, standing on your high ground.
01:50:40.000 But it obviously means a great deal to these people.
01:50:43.000 But then the question is just how to invite them not to think like that.
01:50:47.000 I think mockery.
01:50:49.000 Mockery is one of the best ways because it just lets them know that other people think it's preposterous.
01:50:54.000 So it's not achieving the desired result.
01:50:56.000 The desired result is, oh, look at this amazing person and his incredible progressive ways of thinking. 0.99
01:51:01.000 Not like, oh, look at this transparent fuck who's just trying to get laid. 1.00
01:51:06.000 You know? 1.00
01:51:07.000 I mean, that's how a lot of us see it, but they don't see that we see it that way.
01:51:12.000 In a lot of ways, a lot of our behavior is...
01:51:18.000 It's experimental.
01:51:19.000 You know, I mean, people are experimenting with various different ways of gaining social preference points.
01:51:26.000 Well, this is why I would say even if people aren't believers, there are things they can learn from religion and from tradition.
01:51:35.000 And I've always thought that there's one central insight to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I wish that the social justice warriors bore in mind.
01:51:45.000 And that's the Garden of Eden.
01:51:48.000 And what Kant would call the crooked timber of humanity.
01:51:53.000 Just to recognize the central truth, which is in that tradition and in others, that we're not born in this situation of Rousseauian perfection or goodness.
01:52:07.000 Quite otherwise, we are this very, very contorted being.
01:52:16.000 Which is capable of incredible greatness and beauty and kindness and forgiveness and also capable of their opposites and that it's not that you are one and other people are the other but that all of us are both all the time and so there never is a victory and there never is a win.
01:52:41.000 Other than trying to deal with and restrain your own worst impulses in the life that you have.
01:52:51.000 And honestly express all the issues that arrive while you're trying to do that.
01:52:56.000 Absolutely.
01:52:57.000 And trying to tell the truth where you see it and giving voice to it and trying to...
01:53:03.000 I mean, you know, this is just...
01:53:05.000 It just seems so clear to me that if people could realize this is a central problem of the thing that you and I and others all face is the desire to claim that somebody who disagrees on an issue isn't just...
01:53:21.000 Of a disagreeing mind, but evil.
01:53:25.000 And that in any, you know, we have in Britain, we are racked at the moment still by 18 months after a single vote on a single matter of governance.
01:53:34.000 We are still racked by really unpleasant politics.
01:53:38.000 From Brexit.
01:53:39.000 Yeah.
01:53:39.000 And I suspect it's not, I hate the overlap of the two, but it's probably something like the Trump events here.
01:53:46.000 But Again and again you come back to the same thing, which is just instead of thinking one side is entirely right and the other entirely wrong, this isn't to say you give up on objective fact or anything else, but just consider that your opponent might be approaching this with an honest motive and might have honest reasons for disagreeing with you.
01:54:04.000 And in the absence of that, and with media just endlessly feeding us whatever it is we know our own side happens to think, in the absence of that I just see our trenches in both our countries just being dug deeper and deeper until there's just no hope of being able to even shout over the top and be heard.
01:54:24.000 And one can only get to that stage if, as I say, you recognize that it's not a constant fight Against Nazis.
01:54:35.000 And, you know, I mean, it's...
01:54:38.000 By the way, also, never to forget that the Nazis didn't seem like the Nazis to a lot of people when the Nazis were being the Nazis.
01:54:47.000 But it's just not as easy as that.
01:54:51.000 No, it's not.
01:54:53.000 But it's an easy way to demonize the other side. 0.74
01:54:56.000 And it's an easy way to prop up your side.
01:54:58.000 It's a cheap trick.
01:55:00.000 It is, but going back to where we started, what if the cheap trick ends up having some terrible consequence of making all of our defenses go down?
01:55:14.000 You know, if Sam Harris is a Nazi, then...
01:55:19.000 Well, the both of you, I mean, when we started the conversation off with that community guidelines strike, I'm like, good lord.
01:55:26.000 This really is a very, very strange time.
01:55:32.000 Very strange.
01:55:33.000 Always was.
01:55:34.000 Douglas, thank you very much.
01:55:35.000 I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
01:55:37.000 I really appreciate it.
01:55:38.000 And your book that is out now is...
01:55:41.000 The Strange Death of Europe.
01:55:42.000 It's called Immigration, Identity, Islam.
01:55:45.000 And it's available if you can find any bookshops left.
01:55:49.000 You've got to get it online.
01:55:50.000 You can get it online as well.
01:55:52.000 There's a few Barnes and Nobles out there.
01:55:54.000 All right.
01:55:54.000 Thank you.
01:55:55.000 Douglas Murray, ladies and gentlemen.
01:55:56.000 Great pleasure.
01:55:57.000 Thank you.
01:55:57.000 My pleasure.