In this episode, Brent sits down with Joe Rogan to talk about his fear of the end of the world, and why we should all be worried about it. They talk about how the fear-mongering we see in the news comes from a place of financial gain and moral gain, and how we need to stop feeding into the fear machine. Joe also talks about why he thinks there's no such thing as an end-of-the-world scenario and why it's a scam designed to keep us awake at night. And Brent gives us his thoughts on Greta Thunberg's new song, How dare you? and how it s a good thing Greta's become a celebrity by saying something like, "Let's get ready to rumble." And we talk about what it means to be a "green girl" and how to deal with the idea that you can be a celebrity in a world where you don't need to be green. Thanks to Brent for being on the show, and for being kind enough to take the time to be on the podcast, and to have the courage to share it with the world. Joe is a great guy, and I hope you enjoy this episode. If you like what you hear, please tell a friend or a colleague about it on social media. or tell me what you think about it! and let me know what you thought of it in the comments section below! Thanks again for listening, Brent! Cheers, Brent, Joe, and Brent, and God bless you're a good dude! xoxo, Caitie, Caitlyn, and good night, and Good Luck, and Peace, Blessings, and Blessings. -Eugene, Sarah, and Much Love, - Caitlyn and Joe - EJ xo, Sarah, - Evan, and Joe, Kristy, and Ryan, and Gorms, XOXO, Caitlyn & Joe, Thank you, Sarah and Glynis, and the Crew, and Thank You, Joe, Joe Thank You! - Sarah, Rachael, and Ben, and Jack, and Rachie, and Jai, and Nick, and Matt, and all the rest of the crew at The End of the World? - The End Of The World Podcast, by the End of The World, by Night, All Day?
00:01:59.000My childhood was full of fears that the end of the world was nigh.
00:02:03.000And I think people feel that again today for different reasons and my approach to it is always to think, well, where are the real problems in terms of civilization really grinding to a halt?
00:02:15.000And what are the unreal problems that are just designed to whip up fear and make us panic and make us fret about the future?
00:02:22.000So I think distinguishing between those two things is probably quite important.
00:02:26.000It's also very important to recognize that when there's a thing that is getting people whipped up and it's in the news constantly, for sure someone's making money.
00:02:43.000Now I think they can justify the fear-mongering by saying it's a legitimate concern because it has the opinions of a few people attached to it.
00:02:53.000But ultimately what they're doing is they're somehow or another using it to make money.
00:04:09.000But it's like with someone like Greta, I think it was funny for a while that you had this 16-year-old kid saying, how dare you, having a temper tantrum in public, essentially.
00:04:18.000And all these politicians in America and Britain and across Europe were falling at her feet and staring at her in this wide-eyed fashion like she was some messianic figure come to deliver humanity from the end of the world.
00:04:31.000But more recently, I think the Greta Thunberg cult is just not funny anymore because she's now going around Europe and telling governments to stop investing in energy production, to stop investing in fossil fuel companies during an energy crisis.
00:05:05.000When she started and she was 16, 17, she was very young, I often think to myself, when I was 16 and 17, the thought of being in public and saying things, I would have said the craziest stuff.
00:05:18.000And I think the problem is that there were so many people in the adult world who were willing to listen to her.
00:05:24.000And who engaged in her hysteria about the end of the world.
00:05:28.000And so I often see the Greta phenomenon as a perfect example of how on the one side you have these cranks who are talking nonsense and pushing ideas that are just not true.
00:05:39.000But the bigger problem is the political world and the media world who really buy into it and give it meaning and give it emphasis.
00:05:49.000And I think there's that kind of two-way relationship between these things.
00:05:52.000I'm not saying that like Greta Thunberg is not an intelligent person because she clearly is and she's very young.
00:05:58.000And again, I was way dumber than her when I was her age.
00:06:01.000But what she said was not this extraordinary message of wisdom that would merit the kind of attention that she got.
00:06:11.000And that's why – and also it's not within her power as a 16-year-old to get in front of all these people.
00:06:17.000So it's kind of like a form of exploitation.
00:06:20.000I mean, it's a willing exploitation, but you're using her as a political pawn for, like, sort of cementing an opinion that you must have on this subject.
00:07:14.000It was almost like a kind of sadomasochistic relationship between these self-hating elites and this teenage girl who was more than willing to whip them in public.
00:07:54.000When I would talk to people that didn't work in television, and they had these ideas of what they're doing with television shows, You know, oh, they're pushing this, or they're creating that, or they're trying to sedate America with nonsense,
00:08:10.000and they're being told to do it by the government.
00:08:45.000And I wonder, when it gets to climate change, when it gets to some of these contentious issues, particularly the climate is a big one, because any scientist, regardless of how wise they are and how well-read they are and how much they understand about their field of study,
00:09:03.000If they have anything that deviates from the narrative, they're like automatically dismissed.
00:09:08.000Even ones that will talk about long-term temperatures of the Earth.
00:09:12.000It's almost like they don't want you to talk about long-term temperatures of the Earth.
00:09:58.000It's like taking into account all these factors, CO2 in the atmosphere and solar flares and what's going on with volcanic activity and cloud cover and pollution and all these different factors.
00:10:12.000But if you don't like toe the line and say this is a catastrophe, if you just want to look at it objectively, you're a heretic.
00:11:20.000So I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people out there than we realize who think to themselves, okay, pollution's a problem, climate change may well be a big issue, but it's not the end of the world.
00:11:30.000But they feel they can't say it because this entire grammar of condemnation has been created.
00:11:35.000To depict these people as handmaidens of the apocalypse, as deniers whose words will literally kill people.
00:11:43.000And when you have that put on you, when you are told that, when you are told that your thoughts could be so damaging that they will kill people, It silences.
00:11:53.000It makes people kind of retreat and say, well, I'll keep it to myself.
00:11:57.000So climate change is a perfect example of where censorship does far more harm than good because it restricts our ability to have the discussion about pollution and so on that we really need to have.
00:12:10.000I have a friend who's a scientist who emailed me.
00:12:13.000Did you have a climate denier on your podcast?
00:12:18.000And I said, no, he's not a climate denier at all.
00:12:21.000What he simply stated is the fact that the Earth is actually greener now than it has been in I don't know how many hundreds of years.
00:12:29.000And that what's really terrifying is a global cooling.
00:12:35.000When he was talking about there have been times on Earth where the world had gotten so cold that we had crossed this threshold where the atmosphere was tolerable for biological life.
00:12:49.000We got very close, like within a few digits.
00:13:15.000Well, it's like, you know, the truth is that the climate change alarmists, which is how I prefer to refer to environmentalists, climate change alarmists, they're lying to us.
00:13:25.000When they say that more people than ever are dying as a consequence of natural disasters, it's not true.
00:13:31.000My favorite part is when they attach it to racism.
00:13:53.000Capitalist society, modern society, post-industrial revolution, we got better at keeping in check the whims of Mother Nature.
00:14:02.000So how do they monkey with those numbers?
00:14:04.000When they twist the numbers around to make it seem like, you know...
00:14:09.000What would they do that would possibly make it – like what could they call upon that would say like this is affecting certain people in certain parts of the world but not others?
00:14:19.000I think they use methods of distortion.
00:14:22.000They bank on people not looking into the truth of the matter and a lot of people don't.
00:14:27.000So they rely on the unwillingness of lots of people to really explore the issue and to look at what's really going on.
00:14:33.000A good example was the huge heat wave in Europe last year.
00:14:55.000There have been huge heatwaves in the past, far worse than the ones we had last year.
00:14:58.000But they rely on that kind of historical ignorance, that kind of unwillingness of people to understand, as you say, that nature has been in flux since the beginning of time.
00:15:15.000And it's so bizarre that it goes all the way down to gender experiments on children.
00:15:22.000That's how far, which you would think would be the people that we would protect the most from bad decisions, the people that we protect the most historically, children, little kids, little kids that are confused and may have insane parents.
00:15:37.000They're trying to talk them into something, which is a real thing.
00:15:40.000Yeah, little kids who have now been sacrificed at the altar of gender ideology.
00:15:44.000This is child sacrifice in a modern form.
00:16:10.000They have to start performing surgeries on them when they reach a certain age.
00:16:13.000They have to cut off their breasts if they're a confused girl, castrate them if they're a confused boy.
00:16:18.000And what you have here in this grotesque manipulation of children's bodies is literally the sacrifice of children to an ideological crusade and the ideological crusade of gender ideology.
00:16:31.000And in order for adults, men who want to pretend to be women, primarily, and women who want to pretend to be men, in order to justify their existence, they have to pull children into the equation and say, well, it's an innate experience,
00:16:47.000you're born with it, and we're going to prove this by giving them puberty blockers, by putting them on a conveyor belt towards surgery, by screwing them up for life, which is what this essentially does.
00:16:57.000That is a very good example of how problematic ideological obsessions can be because what you end up with is a situation where children's lives are fucked up in the name of an ideological crusade and that's really bad.
00:17:14.000Trevor Burrus And it's real and it's happening and it's so bizarre.
00:17:19.000To watch people slide into this cult-like thinking in mass.
00:17:24.000And you see millions of people that support this.
00:17:27.000But I think it's enough of a mindfuck to wake up the people that aren't in the haze of it all and go, hey, this is something you actually have to fight back against.
00:17:37.000I think the optimist in me thinks that in the future, in 20 years or so, people will look back at this period and they will say, hold on, you gave kids puberty-blocking drugs?
00:17:48.000Well, they've already stopped doing that in the UK. Yeah, they've stopped doing that in the UK. We have stopped doing that.
00:17:52.000I mean, you can still get them privately, but the National Health Service has stopped prescribing puberty.
00:18:38.000Who could have guessed we would be having this conversation?
00:18:40.000If you went back ten years, even five years, you would never have imagined that we'd be having a conversation like this where someone wants a dick and a vagina at the same time.
00:18:48.000Is that more offensive than the guy who wants to make breast milk for his baby?
00:19:02.000Yeah, there was one in the UK. What was interesting about the UK experience is that there was ITV News, which is a major news channel in Britain.
00:19:11.000They interviewed women who are struggling as a consequence of the cost of living crisis.
00:19:17.000And one of the women they interviewed is a man.
00:19:19.000It's a bloke in a dress who claims to be a mother of a child.
00:19:23.000And it turns out that this person breastfeeds his child.
00:19:26.000What that means is he gets his baby to suck on his male nipple, his useless, milk-free, non-lactating male nipple.
00:19:35.000But I think they make them lactate now.
00:20:45.000Yeah, but the thing about breastfeeding men that I find gruesomely interesting is that firstly, it's just not true that men can lactate in the same way that women can and the drugs that they take in order to mimic lactation.
00:21:00.000Actually makes whatever secretion comes from their horrible nipples worse for the baby, right?
00:21:52.000Person also revealed that he was HIV positive and acknowledged that the transmission of the condition to his baby through milk is possible if viral load becomes detectable.
00:22:04.000Despite having been continuously monitored for 18 and a half years of his life, he also promised to undergo testing monthly to mitigate risk.
00:22:48.000But it's crazy because there are people that identify with being a woman and I have no problem with them living their life as a woman.
00:22:56.000The problem is, without any scrutiny, if you can't scrutinize each person as an individual, and if they're in a protected class, if they're automatically, you know, if they say that they're a woman, like, instantaneously, you have to absolve them of the other sex offender record.
00:23:18.000Like, now you've crossed this line into cult thinking, and I know you don't want to give up any ground, because if you give up ground, then you think the bigots are winning.
00:23:27.000So it's like this thing where this battle between open-minded people that believe in people's freedom to live their life however they want, and the acknowledgement that perverts and psychos are real things.
00:23:42.000There's people that want to wear your skin.
00:23:45.000And if they can hang out in the women's room with you, these are the same kind of people that would do that.
00:23:50.000Understand that if you just say that any man who says he's a woman, you have to just take them at their word, you are enabling psychos, like real full-on serial killers, to just go into the women's room and you're hoping that they don't have a knife in their bag.
00:24:07.000You're hoping they're not gonna do something crazy.
00:24:09.000You're hoping they're not gonna attack someone.
00:24:12.000You're hoping They're not going to just start masturbating in front of everybody.
00:24:17.000You're enabling someone who could be completely schizophrenic, absolutely out of their mind, should be in mental health care, but you're allowing them to just wander around the women's room with their pants off.
00:24:56.000And if we don't look at people individually, if we lump everyone into this one group, we've gone haywire in this age of information when we have so much of an understanding of the human psyche.
00:25:07.000For us to ignore vast swaths of everything that we've accumulated under the sanctum of gender ideology, that's crazy.
00:25:36.000But when you try to force other people to validate and acknowledge your identity, that's where I have a problem.
00:25:43.000Because the thing is that if you're dressing up and redefining yourself and changing your name and changing your look, that's your freedom.
00:25:50.000But if you then say, well, every other woman on the planet has to accept my so-called womanhood and let me into women's spaces, let me partake in women's sports, let me stand for positions that are traditionally reserved for women, then you're interfering with their freedom, their freedom of conscience,
00:26:07.000their freedom of belief, their freedom to understand biology, that there are men and women and that they are different.
00:26:13.000So when you have a man, and I would say this goes for any man, both for the perverts who walk around with their tumescent knobs hanging out in a women's changing rooms, and also the men who supposedly look like women.
00:26:29.000When we demand that they should have access to women's spaces, what we're really saying is that women have to sacrifice their own freedom of conscience and freedom of belief and genuflect to these men's identities and accept these men's identities.
00:26:44.000And so there was a case in Los Angeles where there was a man in a spa and he was walking around and he was naked and he was semi-erect and there were women and minors in that women's changing rooms while he was doing that.
00:26:58.000And we had lots of trans people, trans rights activists, defending his right to do that.
00:27:11.000But fundamentally, it's the right of a man to show his knob to a woman who doesn't want to see it.
00:27:15.000And that's where I have a problem, when you try to force other people to bow down to your own identity.
00:27:22.000What's really crazy is women that support it.
00:27:26.000Like, do you not understand, like, the whole deal with like Title IX in women's sports has always been keep men from competing with women because it's not fair.
00:27:36.000You're allowing men to compete with you You're doing it under the gu...
00:27:40.000and it's not compete with you because the female athletes almost unanimously don't want it.
00:27:46.000The ones who say they want it are virtue signaling or they're at the end of their career or they don't have a stake in it or they're just dumb.
00:29:20.000And there's a photograph of him diving off the platform and the female swimmers next to him.
00:29:27.000And he is so much further out than those women when he's diving because he has the propulsion that comes with that strength that is the gift of male puberty.
00:29:40.000And he apparently, according to reports, was parading around the women's changing room so that you have this.
00:29:45.000So Riley Gaines makes the point that not only was he cheating by taking part in a women's sports where he doesn't belong, but he was also allegedly walking around naked in a women's changing rooms and showing his penis to people who didn't want to see it.
00:30:17.000And what's really crazy to me is that you have so-called progressives, so-called leftists, the people who spent the past 10 years going on about Me Too and feminism and women's rights, cheering this on, cheering on the obliteration of women's sports, cheering on the male cheating against women,
00:30:38.000So the extent to which the world has been turned upside down by the woke ideology, I think sometimes we underestimate just how crazy things have got.
00:30:48.000Well, it got so crazy that Riley Gaines, who had a draw with this person, like literally to the one-tenth of a second, which very, very, very rarely happens.
00:30:58.000So they only had one trophy and they gave it to Leah.
00:31:17.000Brilliant someone like Riley Gaines has to be to get so close, to be small, diminutive, and yet to get so close to a 6'4 bloke who was a pretty good swimmer, even amongst men, but far less good than he was when he went into the women's.
00:31:33.000Yeah, not even close, 462 in the country versus one.
00:31:35.000He was way, way down, but he was a pretty good swimmer.
00:31:38.000But imagine how brilliant she must be to have got so close to him.
00:32:11.000The bizarre thing is the willingness to go along with it and the unwillingness, especially by whether it's the NCAA or whoever it is that's dealing with these situations when they come up, this denial of biological reality.
00:32:27.000I don't know if you saw the NCAA, one of the women who's a representative was having a conversation with Ted Cruz about biological men competing in women's sports, and he was trying to ask the question, like, why do we have women's sports?
00:32:41.000Like, why don't we just have everybody compete against everybody?
00:32:45.000And the woman was just trying to dance around this, and didn't want, just like, Toro!
00:32:50.000She was doing, like, mental gymnastics!
00:32:54.000And it's so crazy to watch People that are either public intellectuals or people that are at the head of these very important organizations for amateur athletics and just not be able to talk about reality.
00:35:37.000And so the question has to become – there's a case in Australia at the moment where a woman, a real woman, as we have to say nowadays, set up an app.
00:35:48.000And this was an app for women to get together and share information, to communicate, to make friendships and so on.
00:35:55.000And a biological male who claims to be a woman tried to join the app and he was booted out.
00:35:59.000And he really doesn't look like a woman.
00:36:36.000Me Too, I think, was quite hysterical and led to the demonization and punishment of men often on the basis of no evidence at all.
00:36:44.000But generally speaking, we've had feminism for the past hundred years or so.
00:36:49.000And yet right now in 2024, we have a situation where if you want to be considered a good progressive person, you have to support the right of men to cheat in sport.
00:37:00.000You have to support the right of men to go into a women's changing rooms and show people their penis.
00:37:05.000You have to support the right of men to go into a women's domestic violence shelter and demand assistance.
00:37:11.000You have to support the right of men who commit crimes, including rape, To be placed in women's prisons and that's literally happened in the UK. It's happened in America as well.
00:37:20.000Right, so you have to support the right of men to invade every single space that all of us previously acknowledged as being for women only if you want to be considered a good progressive person.
00:37:30.000That is a warping of principle of the like we haven't seen in a very long time and I think it's really worth trying to get to grips with what's going on here.
00:39:02.000But this is where we really get to the Orwellian stage of what's going on right now because this is the sacrifice of news to ideology and that is literally the storyline of 1984. Winston Smith's job in 1984 in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite news articles To ensure that they accord with the ideology of the party.
00:39:27.000And that's literally what's happening right now.
00:39:40.000The truth was sucked out and it was replaced with a lie.
00:39:44.000And the lie was that an 80-year-old woman had beheaded a woman.
00:39:47.000So you have this profoundly Orwellian interference with truth and reality, this remoulding of reality so that it suits the ideology of the ruling class.
00:39:58.000And that is right out of 1984. That really is the stuff of dystopia.
00:40:03.000And that is indicative, I think, of where we're at right now.
00:40:07.000It's also indicative of a condition that takes place when people are under extreme duress, where they sort of just, they give in to ideologies much easier.
00:40:17.000And, you know, we really saw that during COVID. COVID people just gave in and all of a sudden, like, here's another one, trust the pharmaceutical drug companies to not lie, which was never the case.
00:40:35.000Like after the Vioxx scandal and after we knew about the opioid crisis and the Sackler family and all that.
00:40:41.000If you polled people back then and asked them what their faith in the pharmaceutical drug companies was and how many of them do you think are lying, oh my god, it'd be off the charts.
00:41:02.000And that is just immediately going into climate change.
00:41:06.000And a lot of the same hysterical people who were up in arms about people's non-willingness to participate in experimental medication now are like, if you don't 100% support climate change, you don't drive an electric car,
00:41:21.000you're not doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing, you're on the wrong side of everything.
00:41:28.000And if you try to corner those people, And ask them for something is like so interesting and fascinating about climate.
00:41:35.000It's so bizarre that that one got attached so like rigorously to ideology because it's such it's a fascinating conversation like what makes like what is the difference between us surviving and not surviving?
00:41:48.000Like what degrees hotter would it get where we'd be fucked?
00:41:51.000What degrees colder would it get would be fucked?
00:41:53.000Like, how lucky are we that we're on this planet that's protected by a moon, that's the perfect distance from the sun?
00:42:02.000But what's interesting about both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that what people will say is that in a time of crisis, we can't afford the luxury of dissent.
00:42:13.000Or we can't afford you, but you don't even understand it.
00:42:33.000And the thing is that, you know, my retort to those people on both of those issues, COVID and climate change, is that it's precisely in a time of...
00:43:12.000We can't afford any form of questioning or any deviance from the lockdown narrative, and therefore we will punish it severely as and when it arises.
00:43:20.000That was entirely the wrong approach because if you're going to lock down a whole society...
00:43:25.000In the UK, we were put under house arrest.
00:43:28.000We were allowed to leave our homes once a day.
00:43:33.000So that you could report your neighbours if they left their house more than once a day.
00:43:38.000And it was a completely surreal situation where we had the utter decimation of civil liberty in a way that had not happened ever before in the history of our country.
00:43:49.000And yet we were told this is not the time to raise questions.
00:43:59.000It's precisely when there is an issue facing our society, a real...
00:44:03.000Confronting problem that we need to have as free a discussion as possible in order that we might have made the right decision in March 2020, in my view, which is that rather than locking down, we should have had a Swedish-style scenario where people were given advice, you know, you might not want to go here,
00:44:19.000you might not want to go there, but we're going to leave schools open, we're going to let you make your own decisions.
00:44:24.000Trusting people to make their own decisions, galvanizing people to come together as a community in order to help those who might be affected by COVID. That would have been a far better alternative to this brutish locking down of the entire society so that people's freedom was completely and utterly crushed.
00:44:42.000But it's a good example of how when you sideline debate, when you restrict freedom of speech and freedom of dissent, you end up with really tyrannical situations.
00:44:52.000Puberty blockers, the net zero hysteria, the COVID lockdowns, all of those in some ways are a product of crushing dissent, crushing freedom of speech, restricting people's right to put their hand in the air and say, hold on,
00:45:10.000So freedom of speech, I think, is essential to all of these questions and the right of our society to do the right thing rather than making these terrible mistakes.
00:45:19.000And that was one of the most terrifying things about the Twitter files, was finding out that our own government was involved in limiting the freedom of speech of experts, of people from Stanford and Harvard.
00:45:33.000Who were dissenting about the way things were handled during the pandemic.
00:45:38.000That you're literally deciding that some of the smartest people on earth Shouldn't be allowed to talk because they don't fit this narrative that we all need to follow in order to survive.
00:45:47.000I'm hoping that most people woke the fuck up after that.
00:45:52.000And even if you went along with it in the beginning and you haven't apologized or you haven't consented to the fact that you were incorrect, even if you haven't just accepted it entirely, there's a part of you that knows the world got fucked over.
00:46:09.000So when some more nonsense comes around, Maybe hold the line a little better this time.
00:46:14.000And maybe next time when you're forced to adhere to very specific rules that are designed to save us from whatever thing that they have going on.
00:46:41.000But it's interesting to hear you say that, Joe, because one thing I've realized with COVID-19 is that there's this real culture of amnesia has set in.
00:47:06.000You kind of go down memory lane and you talk about things that happened in the past.
00:47:10.000I was thinking it's so interesting that so few of the normal people I know, so not people in the media, not people who are on podcasts, not people who are involved in political discussion like we are, Normal people never go down the memory lane of lockdown and COVID. It's like it's become this black spot in people's minds.
00:47:28.000And I think it's because people don't like what they became during that period.
00:47:36.000They don't like what became of their societies.
00:47:39.000They feel an element of shame, I think, that our society so speedily turned from being relatively free to being completely dictatorial to the extent that we were told when we could leave our house.
00:47:58.000You know, and even I have had elements of amnesia setting in.
00:48:02.000So every now and then I remember things that happened in the UK like, you know, the authorities put yellow tape on park benches so that you wouldn't be able to sit on a bench.
00:48:15.000There was one incident where the police used drones to spy on people walking their dogs.
00:48:21.000To make sure that they weren't walking their dog more than once a day.
00:48:24.000And even I suddenly have flashes of memory and I have to kind of Google to make sure that these things actually happened.
00:48:30.000Arresting people in Australia, just tackling them because they didn't have masks on.
00:48:41.000That's the government saying, look, we are going to force you to forget that incident in 1989. We don't want you to remember it, so we're going to black it out.
00:48:48.000This is a more voluntary form of euthanasia.
00:48:50.000It's not actually a boot on the neck saying you must misremember all this stuff.
00:48:55.000It's more voluntary but it's a similar process where we feel, I think, such shame or horror or bewilderment at what became of our societies and our willingness to let it happen.
00:49:08.000That the only way we can deal with it is to pull over this comfort blanket of amnesia and to forget about it.
00:49:14.000So I think when people look back on the lockdown moment, I do think they will ask, how was it so easily enforced?
00:49:25.000Why did this Chinese idea, and we all accept that China is an authoritarian state, why did that spread so quickly to Italy and then the United Kingdom and then to America?
00:49:54.000Well, you know, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, who was one of the modelers of COVID-19, a pretty controversial guy because his models for what would happen with the disease if we didn't lock down.
00:50:05.000They informed the actions of governments across Europe, especially the British government.
00:50:10.000He gave an interview to The Times newspaper a couple of years ago in which he had this really interesting line where he said, we saw what was happening in China and we never thought we could get away with it here.
00:50:22.000And it was just such an interesting turn of phrase.
00:50:25.000He might not have meant it, but it was so revealing of their...
00:50:29.000The mindset of people in power in the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom is a nation in which I would argue the modern idea of freedom was born there.
00:50:39.000Press freedom, the right to vote, the freedom of speech, all of those things are such central ideals to the history of the United Kingdom.
00:50:47.000And yet we allowed this tyranny to wash over us.
00:51:15.000And Twitter's not willing to do it, and so they're going to lose all ad revenue in Brazil, likely.
00:51:21.000I don't know how they're going to do it, but they're advocating for censorship at such a high level that it's a very strange crisis because it's not being reported in mainstream media.
00:51:36.000You're not hearing about it unless it's trending on Twitter.
00:51:38.000It's one of those things where you go, okay, what is the news, guys?
00:51:41.000Because this is like a big global event.
00:51:43.000If they're really trying to remove, like, imagine if Biden all of a sudden removed Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and had these people removed from social media.
00:51:54.000You can no longer post studies that conflict with the FDA's reports.
00:52:07.000But that's apparently what's happening right now in Brazil.
00:52:11.000The role of social media in all of this, and it's great that Elon Musk's Twitter is standing up to it, but because the role of social media over the past few years has been so...
00:52:23.000You mentioned the Twitter files, the pre-Musk Twitter regime, which was more than willing to do the bidding of the American government, which was a complete and utter destruction of First Amendment rights.
00:52:35.000You know, just because the government went behind closed doors and said to its friends in Silicon Valley, please take this stuff down.
00:52:42.000That doesn't make it any less of a government intervention into people's freedom to speak and freedom to publish.
00:52:48.000So governments have used – they've outsourced censorship to private companies.
00:52:54.000And we've seen the same thing in the UK where social media companies are forever being called before politicians and they've been instructed to take this down, take that down.
00:53:03.000So I think governments who are too cowardly to censor through law because they know it would be unpopular, they often use the back channel of private companies.
00:53:13.000They outsource the right to censorship to these private companies and that's happened a huge number of times over the past decade.
00:53:19.000But it amounts to the same thing, which is state censorship with the connivance and the complicity of these private companies.
00:53:27.000So I think one of the great crises of our times actually is the crisis of freedom of speech.
00:53:36.000Because freedom of speech really is the thing that is the best guard against irrationalism.
00:53:44.000It's the best guard against things like giving kids puberty blockers when they shouldn't be taking them and against the men parading around in women's changing rooms and against COVID lockdowns and against all the other manias that have afflicted our societies over the past decade.
00:53:59.000Freedom of speech is the best guard against all of that.
00:54:02.000It won't successfully slay all of them, but it creates that space in which a dissenting voice can say, hold on, let's wait a minute, let's just think about this, let's ask if it's correct to give a confused 12-year-old kid a drug that will fuck up his body.
00:54:20.000and likely make him infertile and ruin his bones and possibly make him depressed let's just wait and think and ask is this the right thing to do and it was the crushing of all those voices of dissent on all of these issues that allowed the ideology to sweep over our society with such success So time and again,
00:54:42.000in relation to Brazil that you've just mentioned and in relation to our countries too, I just think if we unleash free speaking and allow people to express their dissenting views, a lot of these problems, they might still happen, but we would have the opportunity to rein them in.
00:55:24.000I think people's devaluation of freedom of speech and dissent is so curious because the way I always see it is that every freedom we enjoy is the gift of heresy.
00:56:20.000People need to be able to read the Word of God for themselves.
00:56:24.000So he went to Germany, which was going through the Protestant Reformation, and he published the Bible in English, and it was spirited back into England.
00:56:32.000It was snuck back in under piles of grain, and his supporters would distribute it amongst the people, and it was read in pubs and by candlelight in case the police came knocking.
00:56:43.000And what's so interesting and important about this story is, firstly, that He was willing to dissent to such a degree that he risked his life.
00:56:53.000He was eventually caught and burnt at the stake for the crime of translating the Bible into English.
00:56:59.000But the other thing that's interesting, this is 1530s, 1536. So the same time as Martin Luther was translating.
00:57:06.000That's why he went to Germany, so he could do it there and then get it back to England.
00:57:09.000But what's interesting about it is that lots of people have forgotten William Tyndale's name.
00:57:13.000There's a statue of him in London on the embankment.
00:57:23.000That was the only privilege they gave him.
00:57:25.000They killed him first and then burnt him at the stake.
00:57:27.000But what's interesting about this story, and there are so many others in history, is that people underestimate the extent to which our freedom today descends from the actions of people like that.
00:57:41.000Even your right to read the Bible in English, your right to access the Word of God yourself, should you want to, comes from people who are willing to risk life and limb in order to do something that you weren't supposed to do, that it was forbidden to do,
00:58:00.000So, every time I see people crushing dissent, whether it's on the gender issue, whether it's on COVID, whether it's on climate change, whether it's on anything else, I just think to myself, you have no idea of how the extent to which your own luxurious life,
00:58:15.000your relatively free life, the position you have in society today is the gift of people in the past who were willing to put their head above the parapet and say the thing you shouldn't say.
00:58:28.000And I think it is really important to remind people that heresy is essential to freedom and allowing people to be heretical, I think, is very important.
00:58:38.000And in this time when things are so divided, It's such a dangerous thing because so many ideas are connected to one ideology or the other.
00:59:26.000And, you know, freedom of speech, I think people, even people on our side of the discussion, as we might like to call it, I think they underestimate the power of freedom of speech.
00:59:35.000It's often presented as, you know, freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to To settle discussions without violence and to ensure that everyone gets to express their point of view.
00:59:48.000But too often, I think, freedom of speech is presented almost like a soothing balm.
00:59:53.000You know, the thing that calms society down.
00:59:54.000I think it's more important than that.
00:59:56.000Freedom of speech is the thing that makes us human.
00:59:59.000Freedom of speech is the thing that allows us to be genuinely autonomous people who make up our minds for ourselves.
01:00:05.000Under systems of censorship, what happens is that we are grotesquely infantilized.
01:00:10.000We are reduced to the level of children whose minds will be furnished with the ideas that society thinks are good, rather than having the right to make up our minds for ourselves.
01:00:20.000You know, the great slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass made this point.
01:00:29.000It's firstly the crime of stopping someone from saying what they want to say, which is terrible.
01:00:33.000But it's also the crime of stopping other people from hearing everything and deciding for themselves what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong.
01:00:42.000And it's that impact of censorship that we, I think, underestimate the importance of.
01:00:46.000Because what censorship does, it doesn't just...
01:00:49.000Stop you from, you know, when you had those millennial twats at Spotify freaking out over Joe Rogan and his podcast and vaccination, etc.
01:00:59.000It doesn't only threaten to restrict someone like you and other individuals from saying what you want to say.
01:01:05.000It also deprives ordinary people, the public, the masses, of the right to hear everything and to use their mental and moral muscles.
01:01:15.000You know, John Milton made this point in England in the 1640s.
01:01:18.000He said the moral muscles are like the physical muscles.
01:01:24.000And just as if you let your physical muscles go to waste, you'll become a bit of a wreck.
01:01:30.000Similarly, if you let your moral muscles go to waste, you'll become a moral wreck as well because you will become an ape-like creature who has to be told what to think, who has to be told how to behave.
01:01:41.000It's far preferable, I think, to allow people to exercise their moral muscles, to use them on a daily basis.
01:01:47.000You know, we go to the gym for our physical muscles.
01:01:49.000We should be able to exercise our moral muscles in public life.
01:01:52.000By hearing all sorts of opinions and by deciding for ourselves, using our own critical faculties, what we think is right and what we think is wrong.
01:02:03.000I think it's also a function of what's going on today with the access to the internet and social media and the addiction that almost everyone has to both of those things that participates in them.
01:02:16.000You're getting so much information, and you're getting it in a way that human beings have never experienced before, and it's easily manipulated.
01:02:27.000And I think that's the argument for what they're doing on TikTok in America versus what they're doing on TikTok in China.
01:02:34.000But I think it's also being manipulated because that's what we like.
01:02:37.000We gravitate towards those things that they show us, and it upsets us that they know what we like.
01:02:44.000But in China, they have a TikTok that kids aren't allowed on after 10 p.m.
01:02:49.000It accentuates athletic accomplishments, martial arts, science projects, and it's designed to foster this sense of self-worth and performance.
01:03:26.000And we're all battling this in real time in a way that's never happened before in the entire human race as far as we know.
01:03:33.000I think the issue with social media, which is a real issue, and Jonathan Haidt was talking about this with you and in his new book, there is a problem, I think, with kids hanging around on social media all day long, and especially something like TikTok.
01:03:46.000And if you look at I limit my social media use as much as possible.
01:03:51.000I'm only on Instagram, which is nicer than all the other platforms because it's just recipes and pictures of people's holidays.
01:03:58.000It's a bit more of a bearable experience.
01:04:06.000And I think what's interesting about it is that...
01:04:10.000I fear, one worry I have, you may disagree with me on this, but I fear that an anti-technology view is creeping in amongst those of us who might be broadly described as reasonable or anti-woke or on the side of rationality.
01:04:27.000I do fear that an anti-technology view is creeping in because the problem as I see it with the internet and with social media is not so much the existence of these things, but the fact that they've molded themselves around a pre-existing culture.
01:04:41.000So social media in a different era could have been one of the most wonderful things imaginable.
01:04:45.000It could have been a forum for spreading ideas or for...
01:04:49.000Proving to the world what a big man you are, what a strong woman you are, and saying, look, I'm taking control of my life.
01:04:55.000It could have had a different impact entirely.
01:04:57.000But what's happened is that social media has emerged in an era in which young people in particular are encouraged to be hyper-fragile.
01:05:05.000To mess around with their gender in a way that they shouldn't.
01:05:08.000To conceive of themselves as mentally ill when they're not mentally ill.
01:05:12.000So you have on TikTok now kids self-diagnosing themselves.
01:05:16.000There will literally be videos on TikTok saying, do you have these four different symptoms?
01:05:22.000If you do, you have ADHD. You have clinical depression.
01:05:31.000Do you occasionally struggle to meet deadlines?
01:05:34.000So what I think the problem with social media is not the technology itself, not the ability of people to communicate as freely as social media allows, not even necessarily the fact that kids are on there all day long, although that is a problem.
01:05:47.000It's that it's moulded itself around pre-existing cultural trends towards hyper-fragility, self-obsession, a culture of narcissism, a culture of brittleness.
01:05:58.000And that, I think, has exacerbated the problems in society by allowing kids to engage with that stuff all day long.
01:06:03.000And what is the root of all that thinking and behavior?
01:06:07.000What is the root of all the fragility?
01:06:10.000What's the root of all the victim mentality?
01:06:15.000I think it's down to a culture of narcissism.
01:06:18.000Christopher Lash wrote about this in 1979, so that's a long time ago.
01:06:23.000And I think when you say the word narcissism, people think it just means self-love, self-involvement.
01:06:30.000And people will talk about the problem of kids taking selfies all day long and putting them online.
01:06:34.000There's more to narcissism than self-love.
01:06:36.000In fact, narcissism is usually triggered by self-doubt.
01:06:42.000And I think one of the problems with the culture of narcissism is people's expectation that the world should always reflect their image back to them.
01:06:51.000So they cannot accept the idea that the world is a tough place.
01:07:05.000And your strength and your will and your perseverance to demonstrate what your virtues are and to prove yourself in your community and in your society.
01:07:15.000And the problem with narcissism is that it does away with all those traditional expectations of having to demonstrate who you are as a person and it just has this instant expectation of validation.
01:08:02.000Bipolar disorder is being massively overdiagnosed.
01:08:06.000I think what's happened is that people covet these identities, these mental health identities, as a way of explaining everything that's wrong in their lives.
01:08:17.000There was a really interesting interview with a mental health expert on the BBC a few years ago, And she said that people come to her surgery and say, please diagnose me with bipolar disorder.
01:08:55.000And you get experts to affirm it just as you get experts to affirm someone's gender identity, just as you get experts to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs.
01:09:04.000But then bipolar is real for some people.
01:09:09.000Manic depression, as we used to call it.
01:09:10.000But this is the other issue with, I think, the culture of hyperfragility.
01:09:15.000And Abigail Schreier writes about this in a brilliant new book on the over-diagnosis of mental illness in kids in particular.
01:09:23.000One of the problems with it Is that it distracts attention from those who genuinely have mental illnesses, whether that be real issues of manic depression or schizophrenia or clinical depression.
01:09:37.000And I think when you have a culture that devotes itself to flattering the delusions of the young who are convinced they are mentally ill when they aren't, you distract resources and attention from those who actually need them.
01:09:49.000And so the narcissism manifests itself in a person who's so self-obsessed that they diagnose themselves with various illnesses in order to either get treatment or to have an excuse for why their life is all fucked up.
01:10:29.000And all of a sudden, everyone loves them.
01:10:30.000And then there's also, if you live your life in this state of anxiety and depression, you're not happy, and then this thing is offered up as a solution.
01:11:05.000And a lot of them turn out to be just that if you leave them alone.
01:11:09.000Well, there's a new study out which shows something that most people knew anyway, which is that most of these gender-confused kids, for most of them it's a phase, and most of them turn out to be gay, young gay men or lesbians.
01:11:25.000And this is a really good example of why language matters, because one of the great crusades of the trans lobby at the moment is to ban conversion therapy.
01:11:35.000Now, we all think of conversion therapy as the kind of pseudoscience that is used to try and turn a gay kid straight, right?
01:11:45.000We think it's a form of religious fundamentalism.
01:11:48.000And, you know, leave these kids alone.
01:11:50.000But when the trans lobby says that they want to ban conversion therapy, very often what they mean is that they want to restrict the rights of doctors and even parents to say to their gender-confused kid, no, you're just a boy.
01:12:40.000And it's not doing this because it's hyper-woke and it reads Teen Vogue and it listens to people at The Guardian.
01:12:47.000It does it because it is violently homophobic.
01:12:49.000And it would rather have a man mutilated to become a so-called woman rather than to have a gay man in its society.
01:12:57.000So the fact that these homophobic and misogynistic trends are now making gains in Western society, I think is indicative of a culture of irrationalism that is taking over and it's something that we've got to push back against.
01:13:13.000And you're not hearing about this enough.
01:13:16.000If it wasn't for conversations like this, if it wasn't for the internet, you're not hearing this anywhere.
01:13:23.000You're not hearing all the factors that are falling into place that's allowing this stuff to sort of be accepted worldwide.
01:14:09.000You're subservient to this stupid fucking ideology that's swept across the world like wildfire.
01:14:15.000Yeah, well, that's another function of censorship, in fact.
01:14:19.000And one of the points I make in a Heretics Manifesto is that, you know, when you say that there's a new form of heresy hunting today, people will say, oh, calm down.
01:14:29.000You know, no one's been burned at the stake.
01:14:31.000No one's having their head chopped off for criticizing Jesus or the Prime Minister or whatever.
01:14:37.000But there are new forms of heresy hunting.
01:14:40.000You don't suffer death, but you suffer social death.
01:14:44.000You may very well be expelled from polite society.
01:14:46.000You might even lose your job as a consequence of saying men are not women, as a consequence of saying the climate change problem has been exaggerated, as a consequence of saying I don't think we should have locked down our societies.
01:14:57.000People have suffered real consequences as a result of expressing those ideas.
01:15:05.000It is a new form of putting people in a metaphorical stock and throwing rotten tomatoes at them because they have the supposedly wrong views.
01:15:14.000And so heresy hunting has come back in.
01:15:17.000And one of the points I make in my book is that cancel culture...
01:15:21.000It's just not a sufficient phrase to describe what we're living through.
01:15:27.000It's alliterative, it's amusing, it does the job of describing generally what's happening.
01:15:32.000But it's not profound or sufficient enough to describe the tyrannical culture that we find ourselves rubbing up against all the time.
01:15:41.000One in which there is extraordinary social pressure on people to have the right opinions on all the various issues, gender, race, climate, everything else.
01:15:50.000It's a very profound social pressure that I think people feel in a very real way.
01:15:55.000And the great accomplishment, so-called, of cancel culture is not that it takes down big names every now and then, although it does do that, but it sends a signal to the rest of society, which is you'd better watch yourself.
01:16:08.000Because if JK Rowling can be subjected to rape threats and death threats every single day of her life for expressing biological truth, imagine what could happen to you.
01:16:18.000Imagine what could happen to you, the lowly person.
01:16:34.000It has this trickle-down effect where it warns ordinary people, the mere mortals among us, not to say the things you're not supposed to say because the consequences are so severe.
01:17:06.000And the way they talk about her, you could use the worst pejoratives to describe her just by saying the worst transphobic, homophobic, whatever you want to call her.
01:17:17.000You could say the most horrific, far-right.
01:18:00.000And if you look at the, like in the British newspapers, which I read every day, they will often say, J.K. Rowling in another storm, swept up in another controversy.
01:18:18.000I think it's correct gendering, but it's called misgendering.
01:18:21.000It's seen as a speech crime, and that's the controversy.
01:18:24.000That's the storm that she has swept up.
01:18:26.000So people get this impression that she's doing something really outrageous and dangerous, when in fact she's saying things that our societies have believed for tens of thousands of years, which is that there are men and there are women, and they are not the same thing.
01:18:40.000And I think it's, you know, what's interesting about the J.K. Rowling phenomenon is that There's a real culture of moral cowardice around this within the media elites and within the political establishment.
01:18:54.000J.K. Rowling is a cultural institution in the United Kingdom.
01:18:56.000She has brought so much money into our country.
01:18:59.000She's a global phenomenon who has really done great things for the UK. But so few members of the political establishment are willing to stand up for her.
01:19:09.000When people are sending her death threats and saying, I will rape you, and making songs about killing her, you would expect Rishi Sunak or some other member of the government to say, look, this is out of order and you've all got to calm down.
01:19:23.000But they're so unwilling to do that because they're worried that they too will be accused of transphobia.
01:19:30.000What we have seen over the past few years is this creation of a grammar of condemnation that is used to demonize people who have supposedly incorrect thoughts.
01:19:39.000So if you express biological truth, you're a transphobe.
01:19:43.000If you criticize any aspect of Islam or the Quran, you're an Islamophobe.
01:19:47.000If you question any aspect of climate change alarmism, you're a climate change denier.
01:19:52.000And by the way, the word denier comes directly from the Inquisition.
01:19:56.000The people who were dragged before the Inquisition were accused of being deniers of Christ.
01:20:00.000So this language has emerged that is used to paint people as being beyond the pale, as being unfit for polite society.
01:20:09.000And when you look at it, actually what they're saying is just perfectly normal things.
01:20:20.000People should have the freedom to worship Islam, but it's a bit of a crazy religion in some ways.
01:20:25.000These are perfectly legitimate views to hold, but they are defined as modern-day blasphemies in order that people can be silenced and crushed.
01:20:37.000And if I want to fully put on my tinfoil hat, please do.
01:20:42.000If really, I'm going to secure it with a chins trap.
01:20:47.000If AI was sentient and if AI would want to ensure compliance, first of all, if AI was sentient, I don't think it has any obligation to let us know.
01:22:01.000But I think that if you were going to take single-celled organisms and eventually progress it up to the point where that thing becomes...
01:22:12.000The kind of creative human-like species that we are that can create another form of life, an intelligent form of life that can utilize all of the information that's available instantaneously and do it far superior to any human being.
01:22:29.000The only way to get these people to accept this is to encourage them to fuck off even further.
01:22:35.000Encourage them further and do it with algorithms and do it with just a simple understanding of human psychology and a slow over time progression of our willingness to give in to censorship, our willingness to give in to authoritarianism, our willingness to believe that these other people,
01:22:53.000they're the source of your problems, it's these other people with Less melanin or more melanin or they're from here or they're from there.
01:23:00.000Let more people in through the border.
01:23:29.000But what's good about the time we live in?
01:23:34.000Is that people are pushing back against it.
01:23:37.000So whether it's whoever's doing this to us, people are pushing back against it.
01:23:42.000And if you look at, you know, one of the things that happens in the UK all the time is amongst the kind of chattering classes and the commentaria, they will often say, you know, How on earth did Donald Trump get elected?
01:23:53.000You know, they said it in 2016. They especially said it in 2017 when he was inaugurated, you know, the screaming woman meme.
01:24:01.000That was expressed across these kind of informed circles.
01:24:07.000And I often say to them, look, the election of Donald Trump is the most logical thing that has happened in American politics in decades.
01:24:15.000It makes perfect sense to me that people would elect someone like him, even though I have many disagreements with him.
01:24:22.000I often make the point that working people in America wanted to send a message to the establishment.
01:24:29.000They wanted to send a message to the establishment about how they've handled the economy.
01:24:33.000About their cultural contempt for ordinary Americans, for working Americans.
01:24:38.000I think it's really important for working class people to understand how much this new elite hates them.
01:24:46.000It really hates them with a visceral passion.
01:24:50.000And we see it in the United Kingdom and we see it in the United States.
01:24:53.000In the United States, You have the Hillary Clinton basket of deplorables view of these people, or Biden referring to them as semi-fascists.
01:25:01.000Or even going back to Barack Obama, who was probably more sensible than those two, saying these people cling to their Bibles and their guns and they're scared of foreigners.
01:25:09.000In the UK, it expresses itself with the description of these people as gammon.
01:25:15.000They're referred to working class people who vote for Brexit.
01:25:28.000And it brings to mind what Edmund Burke said about the democratic multitude in the 1700s, and he referred to them as the swinish multitude, that image of the pig, the pig-like masses, has come back.
01:25:40.000It's so important, I think, for working-class people to know that this new establishment hates them with a passion.
01:25:48.000And that's why the working class revolts against this establishment that have taken place over the past decade or so.
01:25:55.000The election of Trump, the vote for Brexit, the vote for various populist parties in Europe is such an important turning point because this is ordinary people staking their claim to a voice in public life.
01:26:07.000And saying we matter, our economic needs matter, our cultural values matter, our community matters, our families matter.
01:26:19.000And so when people say, you know, Donald Trump is a blunt instrument, he's an unwieldy cudgel for these people to use against the establishment.
01:26:32.000You know, the trade unions have been decimated.
01:26:35.000Communities have been decimated by this ceaseless march of neoliberal values and state intervention.
01:26:41.000The left has utterly abandoned working class people and has made itself an instrument of the bourgeoisie, you know, the identitarian graduate set.
01:27:08.000So one of the positive things of our time is that whoever is doing all this crazy stuff to us, whether it's the robots or society itself, I think it's society itself, the good thing is People are pushing back.
01:27:24.000We don't want any more of this crap shoved down our throats and we are going to rebel even if it's in a way that you disapprove of.
01:27:32.000And this is something that's important for people to understand.
01:27:36.000Historically, that has always been the case.
01:27:39.000There's always been narratives and there's always been people that push against those narratives and there's always been a conflict.
01:27:47.000This idea that we're ever going to exist in a society, particularly one today, where I think it's greatly accentuated by the access to social media because the ability to complain and people that are addicted to complaining, they're doing it all day long and arguing all day long.
01:28:02.000There's never been a time where people were completely at peace.
01:28:25.000I was living on the West Coast and there was a lot of confusion in this country because it was an unjust war that made no sense and people were being forced to go over there and fight.
01:28:58.000By social media, hyperfed, where it's just out, it's a wildfire that I don't know if we're going to be able to put out.
01:29:04.000But I think it's, what's interesting about today is that there are, it's like there are two culture wars going on.
01:29:10.000So there's the social media stuff, right?
01:29:14.000There's these kind of slightly pantomime conflicts taking place between I think we're good to go.
01:29:41.000But in society more broadly, something more important is happening, which is that ordinary people in their millions are looking at all this stuff.
01:30:56.000And there's one article in that newspaper, which is very well known, where they said, you know, the priests and the academics and the rulers of society, they pose as experts.
01:31:07.000But actually, the ordinary man in the street, the ordinary woman in the street, the person with a normal job, is far more of an expert than they are because he lives in society in a way that they don't.
01:31:18.000He sees the problems in society in a way that they, in their rarefied circles, don't.
01:31:24.000So ordinary people have a keener understanding, I think, of the problems afflicting their communities, the problems afflicting their societies, and the problems afflicting their young people.
01:31:34.000And I think what's happened over the past 10 years with the populist revolts is an effort by those people to say, we are going to restore an element of reason, we're going to restore an element of fairness in politics, and we're going to try and clip the wings of this cranky establishment that's been ruling over us for the past three or four decades.
01:31:51.000That's a wonderful moment, I think, in our political life.
01:32:01.000And there's also tremendous international conflict that's terrifying.
01:32:05.000But all those things are happening simultaneously.
01:32:08.000Yeah, but on the international conflict, I think that's another example of where, you know, if you look at 7th of October, which is probably far too big an issue to get into now, but I flip between pessimism and optimism about what is happening to our societies.
01:32:26.000So often I feel optimistic when I see ordinary people pushing back against it all.
01:32:29.000But then you have in the wake of 7th of October and what can only be described as, I think, one of the worst moral meltdowns of modern times amongst the educated elites of Western society.
01:32:45.000Who, when there was this clash between barbarism and civilization, between an army of anti-Semites and ordinary Jewish civilians in the south of Israel, they took the side of the barbarians.
01:33:18.000And what happened, you know, for years and years, the left in America and Britain, especially the kind of campus left, they posed as anti-fascists.
01:33:29.000And yet when something very like fascism reared its head again, they took its side.
01:33:34.000They posed as being on the side of women.
01:33:37.000And yet when women were raped and butchered, they turned the other way.
01:34:00.000So they have been morally compromised to a degree that I think is absolutely extraordinary.
01:34:06.000And you look at George Washington University, where the students emblazoned onto the walls of the university, glory to our martyrs, just after 7th October.
01:34:16.000These are the kinds of university campuses where for years and years, if a young guy in the student bar propositioned a woman, he would be accused of partaking in rape culture.
01:34:27.000Where everything was seen as this kind of oppressive force on women.
01:34:34.000You know, serving sushi to white kids was cultural appropriation.
01:34:37.000A white kid wearing dreadlocks on campus was seen as a crime against black culture.
01:34:42.000For years and years they pushed this hysterical idea that everything was sexist, everything was patriarchal, everything was racist.
01:34:49.000And yet when rapists really did invade a neighboring country and lay waste to women's lives and kill people on account of their race and butcher entire families, they said glory to our martyrs.
01:35:03.000They essentially said glory to those rapists.
01:35:08.000And so that, I think, was indicative of how deep the rot has become.
01:35:13.000Because when you educate an entire generation to hate Western society, to be suspicious of Western civilization, to think that everything white is bad and everything non-white is worthy of sympathy, You create a situation where when there is an actual battle between the forces of barbarism,
01:35:32.000by which I mean Hamas, and the forces of civilization, by which I mean a democratic country in the Middle East called Israel, they will take the side of the former.
01:36:00.000We were at the forces of evil and the forces of good or barbarism and civilization as you put it.
01:36:08.000But Israel hasn't done itself in a service in the response to it in the way people interpret When we're talking about what Western civilization is doing, the destruction of houses,
01:36:26.000the destruction of everything, like the complete demise when you look at what Gaza is, that fuels these people that think that this is an oppressive force that's destroying this culture.
01:36:37.000And the idea that it's okay because they have to get Hamas.
01:36:43.000That's what terrifies people, the justifications of the massive amounts of civilian casualties in order to just get these evil people.
01:36:57.000If you just look at the destruction of human life and homes, numerically, not that you would want to attach a number figure to the value of humans, but they've killed far more people that are civilians that are women and children in the bombings of Gaza.
01:37:32.000I fear that we are living through one of the greatest inversions of truth and morality of modern times, because what we have in the Israel-Gaza-Israel-Hamas conflict is a situation where Israel suffered a fascistic assault,
01:37:49.000but it's Israel that is being branded as fascist.
01:37:52.000Israel suffered a genocidal assault by a movement, Hamas, that was literally founded with the express attention of visiting genocide upon the Jews, and yet it's Israel that's accused of genocide.
01:38:04.000Israel suffered the worst act of terrorism since 9-11, the worst act of racist violence in a very, very long time, the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust.
01:38:16.000And yet it's Israel that's accused of enacting a new Holocaust.
01:38:19.000So it's a complete inversion, I think, in some of the coverage and some of the commentary of the truth of the matter.
01:38:26.000And, you know, in terms of what's happening in Gaza, it's unspeakably awful.
01:38:33.000But I think one thing it's worth bearing in mind is that this is one of the most scrutinized wars of all time, if not the most scrutinized war.
01:38:40.000I've never seen this level of scrutiny.
01:38:43.000And I wish I had, in fact, in relation to the Iraq disaster or the Afghanistan invention or the Libya invention by Barack Obama and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister in England at the time.
01:38:54.000I wish I'd seen this level of scrutiny, but we didn't.
01:38:57.000This war is more scrutinized than any other.
01:39:01.000Tragically normal things that happen in a war, which is that there are civilian casualties, in this instance are being blown up as proof of evil on Israel's part.
01:39:11.000So if you look, for example, at the killing of the aid workers from the food charity, Western powers condemn that.
01:39:21.000They said Israel's got to take more care.
01:39:25.000These are the same Western powers who killed hundreds of innocent civilians in so-called friendly fire incidents in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya.
01:39:34.000In Libya in 2011, there were so many friendly fire incidents under Barack Obama and David Cameron that the pro-West rebels had to paint the roof of their vehicles bright pink in order to try and avoid the bombs of their so-called allies in the West.
01:39:51.000So all the things that people see as demonic and Nazi-like and pure evil on Israel's part are done by every nation that fights a war.
01:40:06.000But that's not a justification, right?
01:40:08.000What Jose Andres has said is that they intentionally targeted his aid workers.
01:40:14.000And that people – he's gone public saying they intentionally targeted his aid workers.
01:40:18.000They knew what those people were doing and that they killed them.
01:40:22.000This is like – because that has happened in war before and we didn't have the kind of scrutiny that we have today, in no way justifies continuing that practice.
01:40:32.000It's not a justification, but it's an attempt to understand why there is such intense scrutiny on this war in contrast to so many other recent modern wars.
01:40:43.000Recent modern wars, but with the kind of coverage that we have with cell phones and footage that's available everywhere?
01:41:17.000But there have been recent wars where there was same levels of technology.
01:41:20.000The war in Syria, for example, which the Western powers were intimately involved in too, and the number of people killed there was absolutely huge, including Palestinians.
01:41:29.000Thousands of Palestinians died in the Syria war.
01:41:33.000From 2011 onwards, right through till quite recently.
01:41:37.000Don't you think there's a big difference between the amount of cell phone coverage available from 2011, especially in Syria, versus Israel and Gaza in 2024?
01:41:48.000The point I would make, I think you're right.
01:41:50.000I think social media, the improvement in social media, or not as one might see it, explains why we're seeing so much from this war.
01:41:59.000But it can't explain, in my view, The cultural interpretation of it amongst many in the woke West.
01:42:49.000This very myopic obsession with everything Israel does.
01:42:51.000And the thing that worries me is that what is presented to us as anti-Zionism is so similar to what we all recognize as the anti-Semitism of the past.
01:43:45.000And they are destructive of world peace.
01:43:48.000It seems very curious to me that all the things that were once said about the Jewish people are now said about the Jewish state.
01:43:54.000And I'm not saying that everyone who says it is a racist, right?
01:43:57.000We shouldn't throw around the word racist willy-nilly.
01:44:00.000It's an important word that has real meaning.
01:44:03.000But I do think there is an element of bigotry, whether witting or unwitting, in this singling out of Israel for the most extreme form of moral opprobrium that is not directed against any other state, including states that do far worse things than Israel is doing.
01:44:21.000That's what I find quite curious and really worrying about the times we live in.
01:44:25.000Right, but what they are doing is very troubling, right?
01:44:30.000The bombing of Gaza, the destruction of how many thousands and thousands of homes, how many innocent people died, that's still very troubling.
01:44:40.000In every single war, more civilians than fighters die.
01:44:46.000Isn't this one extraordinary how quick it's happening as well?
01:44:50.000It's very quick, but I think that the thing to bear in mind is that when people say that 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, the first thing to bear in mind is that that is a lower number than have died in other recent wars.
01:45:01.000The more important thing to bear in mind is that a large number of them Estimates say 30% are Hamas fighters, though they are a member of the— 30%?
01:46:07.000But isn't it quicker than most wars in the amount of people that have died so quickly?
01:46:12.000These wars that you're talking about, whether it's Afghanistan or Syria, the amount of dead may be greater, but isn't it over a longer period of time?
01:46:32.000We know that it hides among civilians.
01:46:35.000We know that it disguises itself as part of those communities.
01:46:38.000But that's what terrifies people, the willingness to kill civilians, knowing that you're going to kill civilians just to get to the bad guy.
01:46:44.000But, you know, this is the thing that really worries me about in the aftermath of 7th of October.
01:46:49.000I said to so many people, so many friends of mine and people I encountered in media discussions, I said to them, what should Israel have done?
01:47:15.000And when people say, well, they shouldn't have gone into Gaza, they should have just relaxed a bit, or whatever people say, what they're essentially saying is, you know, Jews, let yourselves be killed.
01:47:41.000If an anti-American force came into the United States and killed whatever the equivalent number is, it would be tens of thousands if we took in population differences.
01:47:51.000No one, I hope, would sit back and say, well, you know, whatever.
01:47:57.000Israel had every right, I think, to pursue the terrorists that did this to its people.
01:48:04.000And to pursue them with extreme prejudice and to put them down and to say, we will create a situation in which you will never be able to do this again.
01:48:13.000And of course, what's happening is awful.
01:48:16.000But the moral responsibility for it lies entirely with Hamas.
01:48:33.000So this absolution of Hamas, this absolving of Hamas of any responsibility for the calamity currently befalling Gaza, I find that very worrying too because among some woke activists there seems to be this view that Israel is the only actor in that region.
01:48:50.000It's only Israel's decisions that matter and we can't possibly expect these brown people in Hamas to have any responsibility for what's going on.
01:48:59.000There's a curious Paternalism to that.
01:49:02.000The truth is that Hamas is fundamentally responsible for what's happening, firstly by starting it and secondly by refusing to end it.
01:49:10.000But if you're talking to people that are reasonable, their objection is not that Israel defend itself.
01:49:17.000Their objection is the sheer number of innocent people who die by virtue of these strategies of just attacking populations where Hamas is embedded with civilians and killing all the civilians.
01:49:30.000And their objection is not that, you know, that Hamas is good.
01:49:36.000It's that the Palestinian people are innocent and that they're trapped under the ruling of Hamas and have been since, what, 2006?
01:50:08.000They didn't participate in it, but yet they're getting bombed into smithereens.
01:50:11.000And this is the argument that the reasonable people have, is that, okay, you're not absolving Hamas from starting this, but are you absolving Israel from killing thousands and thousands of innocent people in the process of hunting down Hamas?
01:50:28.000And are you creating even more martyrs by doing so?
01:50:32.000Because how many people are losing family members?
01:50:34.000How many people are facing starvation?
01:50:36.000How many aid workers are getting killed while they're trying to help?
01:50:40.000At a certain point in time, you're You have to look at is this the only way to do this?
01:50:47.000And you have to say you're not absolving Hamas, but you are showing compassion for innocent people that are trapped by this murderous regime.
01:50:57.000And now they're getting blown to smithereens because these people embed themselves with them.
01:51:02.000And they create, you know, the human shield argument, right?
01:51:08.000I don't know if it's a moral and just argument for a superior society.
01:51:11.000If we really are morally and ethically superior, the idea of killing tens of thousands of innocent people to get a few bad people or how many bad people?
01:51:21.000Who knows what the numbers are, right?
01:51:23.000But that disturbs the shit out of people.
01:51:26.000And when they find the numbers are grossly...
01:51:29.000It's like, what are the number of women and children that have died?
01:51:46.000Both things need to be taken into consideration.
01:51:48.000And when we're discussing this, it's like there's this...
01:51:54.000People have this ability to like sort of compartmentalize and not look at it in an overall – if you took an overall assessment, you'd say the whole thing is horrible.
01:52:05.000But just because one horrible thing happens, it doesn't justify all this other horrific shit that's going on as well.
01:52:12.000Both those things kind of need to be addressed.
01:52:16.000The only way to do this is to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in order to get these bad people?
01:52:22.000But, you know, I think you're right that if you talk to reasonable people, they're driven largely by compassion.
01:52:29.000They're not driven by a pro-Hamas sentiment, although I think there is a terrifyingly pro-Hamas sentiment amongst some of the activists on the streets.
01:52:36.000We've seen it on the streets of London, the streets of the United States.
01:52:39.000But I think, you know, the terrible truth of the matter is that wars sometimes have to be fought.
01:52:49.000In the United States, you fought two huge wars, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, in order to deliver yourselves into something resembling freedom.
01:52:57.000In the United Kingdom, we had a civil war that lasted more than a decade, which is what made us a democracy.
01:53:03.000Right, but that's not really the question, right?
01:53:04.000No, but so what I'm saying is that what Israel has decided, and I think they are right, And in all those wars I've just mentioned, by the way, there were huge numbers of civilian casualties.
01:53:15.000Even pre the modern era of bombs falling from planes, there were civilian casualties.
01:53:21.000But there's a moral judgment that sometimes has to be made, which is that do we go and fight these people or do we allow them to regroup and potentially plot another attack on us?
01:53:32.000And Israel has taken the decision, and I think it's probably the right one, That we have to go and fight these people, just as Britain took the decision that it had to go and fight the Nazis, and just as America took the decision that it had to go and fight the slave owners.
01:53:46.000Sometimes you have to make a moral judgment.
01:53:50.000But John Stuart Mill, a great liberal thinker from the 1800s, he made the point that War is an ugly thing, but it's not the ugliest thing.
01:53:57.000The lack of patriotic feeling or the lack of a belief that anything is worth a war is worse.
01:54:04.000And I do think we're seeing that in the West now, this revulsion at war.
01:54:10.000We are in a very luxurious position in the West, especially younger generations.
01:54:14.000They've never had to fight for anything.
01:54:16.000They've never faced an existential threat.
01:54:19.000From a neighboring army that wants to destroy both your state and your religion and your people.
01:54:25.000They've never faced that level of threat.
01:54:27.000And what's more, from an army that hides in ordinary streets, in crowded communities amongst ordinary people.
01:54:34.000So there's this kind of luxurious moralism, I find, in some of the condemnation of Israel.
01:54:40.000Coming from young people in Europe who've never had to fight for anything, never had to fight to maintain their existence, never had to fight against an existential threat to their entire way of life.
01:54:52.000What's more, these young people in Europe, their great-grandfathers shoved Jews into ovens.
01:54:59.000And then they have the absolute gall to say to Israel and to the Jewish state, well, why do you need your own country?
01:55:05.000They need their own country because of what we did to them 80 years ago.
01:55:10.000So there is this, it's not just hypocrisy, it's not just double standards, it's this kind of luxuriant condemnation coming from people who live in very comfortable, peaceful societies, who seem to have no understanding that every now and then your society is confronted with a threat that cannot just be wished away.
01:55:28.000It cannot be peace negotiated away, it cannot be diplomacy'd away.
01:55:34.000It has to be confronted in the most physical manner imaginable.
01:55:38.000And the consequences of that will always be terrible, but sometimes it has to be done.
01:56:07.000What if 20 years from now becomes even more intense?
01:56:09.000And what if some drug cartels in a gang sneak across the border and kill a bunch of Americans just because they hate America?
01:56:17.000If we bombed Mexico into the Stone Age, do you know how upset people would be?
01:56:23.000If we bombed factories because the cartels had embedded themselves in the factories and we killed tens of thousands of innocent workers who were just poor people, do you know how upset people would be?
01:57:05.000But this is why it's very unfashionable these days to make moral judgments.
01:57:10.000You're not supposed to make a moral judgment.
01:57:11.000You're either supposed to calculate everything according to what its consequences might be or you're supposed to take this very technocratic view of society.
01:57:18.000You're certainly not supposed to judge people's identities and so on.
01:57:21.000So I know it's unfashionable to make moral judgments, but sometimes a moral judgment has to be made.
01:57:27.000And I think in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, the way I see it is that this was an assault on ordinary civilians by a barbaric army, the like of which people in the West don't understand and don't have to confront people.
01:57:44.000And Israel made the moral judgment that it had to pursue it in the way that it considered best.
01:57:49.000Now the thing is, you talk about the numbers, and a lot of people talk about the numbers.
01:57:53.000People will often say, Israel has now killed more people than Hamas killed on the 7th of October, and that's true.
01:58:00.000But this is not just a numerical equation.
01:58:02.000This is not just something that can be done on an abacus or on a pie chart.
01:58:43.000That was a fascistic assault on Israel.
01:58:46.000What Israel is doing, and I don't accept the idea that they are purposely targeting civilians or that they kill those aid workers on purpose.
01:58:58.000There is collateral damage to Israel's just pursuit of Hamas.
01:59:03.000And I just don't think there is any serious moral comparison between the intentional murder of Jewish people and the absolutely tragic, regrettable deaths of civilians in war, as has happened in every war in history.
01:59:40.000And then there's a broader moral question for us in the West Which is why have so many of our young people in particular, and the educated elites, been sucked onto what I would consider to be the wrong side of this question?
01:59:53.000We used to think that education was the great guard against hysteria and regressive views.
01:59:59.000We used to think that education would deliver people from ignorance, deliver them from the prejudices that might have afflicted Our less educated forebears and ancestors.
02:00:07.000But what we've had since 7th October is very often the most educated people making excuses for the most regressive army on earth.
02:00:17.000And so it raises questions for our societies.
02:00:27.000What's happening on social media that is sucking people into this myopic hatred for Israel?
02:00:32.000Why are people like Aaron Bushnell burning themselves alive in the name of Palestine?
02:00:38.000We have to look at what's happening in our society and make a moral judgment there as well as I think having a moral understanding of why Israel thought it had to pursue Hamas in this way.
02:00:48.000There's absolutely no defense of Hamas targeting Jews and killing them.
02:00:55.000No one could say that there's any defense.
02:00:58.000But the idea that killing innocents in order to get to the bad people is morally superior, you kind of have to make the judgment that you care about them less than you care about your people.
02:01:10.000Because if you could imagine a scenario where a Jewish hospital had Hamas in its basement and they made the decision to bomb the Jewish hospital and kill all the Jews inside of it just to get to the 40 or 50 Hamas guys that are there.
02:01:28.000So if you're saying that these people who have no say in how their culture is run are less valuable in terms of like what you care about, what happens to these people that had nothing to do with it.
02:01:45.000But it's also horrifying for the people that have zero say in how their society is run.
02:01:50.000They're young, and they're women and children, and they're getting bombed into oblivion because where they are is where Hamas is.
02:01:59.000If those were Jews, it's definitely Hamas' fault.
02:02:03.000But the problem is deciding whose fault doesn't make it feel better for the people that feel it's a moral outrage that you're destroying tens of thousands of innocent lives.
02:02:14.000And who knows how many people are wounded permanently?
02:02:17.000And who knows how many people are displaced?
02:02:18.000Their life will never be the same again.
02:02:20.000And it's all happening because The moral decision is that in order to get rid of these bad people, you're willing to kill these innocent people that are not us.
02:02:32.000Because if they were Druze, if there was 500 Jews and three Hamas guys, who would be cool with killing all those innocent Jews to get to the Hamas people?
02:02:42.000But what you're saying is technically correct, but I can think of no war in history, and it is important to talk about the history of conflict.
02:02:53.000I can think of no war in history where there haven't been civilian casualties in pursuit either of an unjust cause, like the pursuit of Saddam Hussein, apparently because he was responsible for 9-11.
02:03:05.000Bullshit, built on lies, built on a tissue of misinformation.
02:03:09.000And hundreds of thousands of people died and suffered as a consequence of that.
02:03:13.000So wars are either fought for unjust purposes and civilians die as a consequence or sometimes for just purposes and civilians also die as a consequence.
02:03:23.000So the English Civil War, right, where the parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell wronged to fight against the royalists and to create the modern idea of democracy.
02:03:32.000Because there were civilian casualties, I would say no, they were not wrong.
02:04:10.000Do we fortify ourselves against the siege of these antisemites against us?
02:04:15.000And they've decided that this is a war that they have to fight.
02:04:18.000I do think the consequences of the war are tragic.
02:04:22.000I do think the unwillingness of certainly the activist class in the West to apportion any blame to Hamas whatsoever is very, very interesting.
02:04:32.000But that's kind of a straw man because there is that, but then there's also the vast majority of people who look at it as a horrific loss of life of innocent people.
02:04:42.000And just to chalk it off to the horrors of war, it's like that's the only way to do it?
02:05:44.000The war against Nazism, I think, was a just war.
02:05:48.000I can think of anti-colonial wars in which it was completely justifiable for people to rise up against British rule or American domination or whatever else it might be.
02:05:58.000So we do have to make a moral call on what's happening in Israel and Gaza.
02:06:04.000And that does involve rising above the differences in the numbers killed.
02:06:09.000It does involve rising above the horrors of war and trying to take a broader view which says...
02:06:17.000Do we want Israel to continue existing?
02:06:20.000Do we want the Jews to have their own homeland?
02:06:22.000And do we want them to be safe from the fascistic menace of a neighboring army that would like to kill them all and to destroy their state from the river to the sea?
02:06:34.000That's the question we need to ask ourselves.
02:06:36.000And if our answer to those questions is yes, then we do have to accept Israel's right to pursue Hamas.
02:06:43.000And then the blame for the horrors in Gaza has to lie at the feet of Hamas, which is with profound cynicism, placing itself amongst the people.
02:06:53.000In order to then throw its hands in the air and say, look what evil Israel is doing.
02:06:59.000It's killing these people, even though they put themselves there for that express purpose.
02:07:04.000The cynicism of it, the horror of it is unimaginable.
02:07:07.000And so I think to put it all on Israel, as some people do, to say this is just a demonic action by the Jewish state is wrong.
02:07:15.000Hamas bears profound responsibility both for starting the war and also for putting guards and civilians in harm's way and refusing to pull the plug on the wall, which it could do right this minute if it returned the hostages and surrendered to Israel.
02:07:29.000So we do have to look at who is morally responsible for this calamity, and I think it's Hamas.
02:07:35.000I understand what you're saying, but I also view it from a perspective of the people that live there that have no say.
02:07:42.000And to just say, hey, this is because of the people that run you and have ruined your life, we're going to kill you too.
02:08:31.000If you said to Hamas, Israel said, we will lay down our arms and we'll surrender to you, most people believe that Hamas would just butcher the Israelis.
02:08:42.000If Hamas said, we will lay down our arms, we'll surrender to you, No one thinks that Israel will just go in there and butcher everybody.
02:08:53.000But you also have to accept that there's one group of people, and the narrative is their land has been stolen, it was all originally supposed to be theirs, and they're being dominated by the superior military force.
02:09:06.000And that they're attacking that superior military force that they believe has this unjust control over them.
02:09:15.000Is an act of rebellion against something that's in control of them.
02:09:19.000And the people that did it are all monsters.
02:09:22.000But the people that are embedded amongst these people have almost no say.
02:09:28.000They have no power and they're women and children.
02:09:31.000That's what's scary, is this justification of this horrific act of destruction of who knows how many thousands of houses, who knows how many thousands of lives lost and have been destroyed forever and lost loved ones, even the people that survived.
02:09:47.000Who knows how many of them have been fucked up and they didn't do anything wrong.
02:09:50.000That's just as scary to people, if not more scary, That people can make a moral justification in this framework of this is war and war is awful.
02:10:00.000My question to those people would be, why did you not find it equally scary when Western forces did that in Raqqa?
02:10:28.000You're right to say that people don't know.
02:10:29.000And this is another problem with the way in which the Israel-Hamas war is being talked about.
02:10:34.000It's being obsessed over in a disproportionate way, in my view.
02:10:38.000I don't accept the idea that it is a uniquely wicked war or a uniquely destructive war.
02:10:44.000I think there have been numerous wars in recent years which have been far more destructive.
02:10:47.000Now, you're right to say this might be quicker, and proportionally speaking, perhaps more people in Gaza have died as a proportion of the population than you might say in Syria, where 200,000 people lost their lives, or in Iraq, where 150,000 people lost their lives.
02:11:12.000What I'm saying is that the idea that it is a uniquely problematic war, uniquely murderous, that there are a uniquely high number of civilian casualties in contrast with militant casualties, I don't think that's true.
02:11:30.000So then the question becomes, why is that being said?
02:11:34.000Why is there a focus on the uniquely horrible nature of this conflict?
02:11:40.000And it seems unavoidable to me that what's happening is that Israel has been turned into almost this whipping boy of Western activists who have simply turned against civilizational values.
02:11:54.000And they see Israel as representative of those values.
02:11:58.000They see Israel as representative of modernity, of the West, of whiteness, even though Israel is not a white country.
02:12:06.000They see Israel as representative of all the things that they hate.
02:12:09.000And they've turned it into this punch bag, into a moral punch bag where they can let off steam by demonizing this one tiny state among all the other states on earth as being uniquely wicked.
02:12:22.000Because if Israel existed with no conflict as to who owns the land and no history of moving the borders further and further, if it existed in that way, yes.
02:12:36.000But it exists as a superior military force that's in control of these people that are on their land that are not of them and that has a tight grip on them and an iron dome and you see how it works and they shoot missiles in futility and they blow up in the air.
02:12:53.000It's not a fair comparison because what people are upset about is that Israel Controls those people and and has these people sectioned off into what's essentially what people describe as an open-air prison That's and when that it bombs the shit out of the open-air prison.
02:13:13.000That's what freaks people out, but it's I know what I agree with what you're saying in principle I agree with what you're saying in forms of in terms of like look if you have a force That's a genocidal force that it has a military and wants to attack a country that they should be rooted out and stopped 100% But it's the way in which it's happening and the circumstances that were in place before it happened that make it uniquely different.
02:13:38.000But I don't think it is uniquely different.
02:13:40.000I think there have been many instances over the past decade or 20 years in which there has been the pursuit of radical Islamists that has led to civilian casualties because they hide themselves in civilian infrastructure.
02:13:51.000But this also has a holy war aspect to it.
02:13:54.000And the holy war aspect to it is that Judea and Israel and this whole area, it has massive historical implications for the religion.
02:14:33.000But they have proven themselves to be more than willing to invade Israel, to kill its people, to kidnap its soldiers, to kidnap its civilians.
02:14:41.000So they are pretty good at what they do, which is anti-Semitic terrorism.
02:14:49.000And they have devoted themselves to the destruction of Israel.
02:14:54.000And they're a pretty significant force.
02:14:56.000And they do have support from various elements in the Middle East and also from educated people in the West who ought to know better.
02:15:03.000Imagine there was an army that threatened to destroy the United States, like to end the United States or the United Kingdom.
02:15:12.000An army right next door that was pretty well armed and supported by autocratic powers and supported by significant numbers of people around the world and which devoted itself to the entire destruction of our state and which demonstrated its willingness to do so.
02:15:27.000By slaughtering thousands of our civilians.
02:15:32.000It's hard for us to understand the position that puts people in, the position it puts Israel in and the people of Israel.
02:15:40.000So what I'm saying is that rather than rushing to this moral condemnation where we say Israel is overreacting or Israel is being reckless or Israel is being uniquely wicked and uniquely destructive, we ought to try to understand where Israel is coming from.
02:16:21.000This is a backward, misogynistic, homophobic, violent, anti-Semitic army that has demonstrated its willingness and its capacity to murder Jewish people for being Jewish people.
02:16:32.000That, out of all the movements on earth, deserves to be destroyed.
02:16:37.000It's difficult for Israel to destroy it without also causing collateral damage because of the way in which Hamas operates.
02:16:46.000Then the question becomes, should Israel stop trying to destroy Hamas and allow it to regroup?
02:16:52.000It has already threatened to do another 7th of October and it said it will do it again and again and again.
02:16:58.000Or does Israel say, regrettably, we are going to have to fight a horrible war in order to destroy this fascist threat to our nation?
02:17:41.000One of the most horrific things we've ever seen, despite the fact that we all know the war is held, but this acknowledgment that this is horrific and that these people that died, there's more of them than died in the attack on Israel.
02:18:06.000We have a difference of opinion on the moral weight of this question, I think.
02:18:11.000I just don't know if there's another way to do it.
02:18:13.000But the one thing I don't accept, actually, and I would definitely push back on this idea that this is one of the worst things we've ever seen.
02:18:22.000You know, you were talking earlier about Vietnam.
02:18:26.000Think about what—apologies if this is offensive to some American listeners and viewers—what the Americans did in Vietnam.
02:18:41.000We weren't aware of it to the extent that we're aware of it today.
02:18:44.000And if a civilization is going to advance, it's going to have to be held up to the highest moral standards, particularly if you're the superpower.
02:18:51.000You're the superpower that's connected to people that have very primitive means of attacking you.
02:18:57.000But the point I'm trying to make is not to say that though we committed horrors in the past and therefore Israel has the right to commit horrors today.
02:20:26.000I think that's a very generous interpretation.
02:20:28.000And I'm sure for some people what you're saying is true.
02:20:31.000But I can't help but think that Israel is being singled out for unjust criticism.
02:20:39.000So you think there's anti-Semitism behind it?
02:20:43.000I don't think all those people marching in the streets are anti-Semites, although I do think some of them are foolishly rubbing shoulders with Hamas supporters and turning a blind eye to placards showing the Nazi swastika and so on.
02:20:58.000But I do think anti-Zionism, as it's referred to...
02:21:03.000Is a very curious beast, and it's one that I do think expresses an element of bigotry.
02:21:08.000And just to come back to a conversation we had earlier, I do find it extraordinary that amongst the so-called anti-racists of the West, They now seem very cavalier about one of the worst acts of racist violence of modern times.
02:21:25.000And amongst the so-called feminists of the West, look at UN women.
02:21:29.000It took UN women, what, 54 days to say anything about 7th of October, during which women were brutalized and butchered.
02:21:36.000I find it interesting that amongst the feminists of the West, they're so reluctant to say anything about this assault on Jewish women in Israel.
02:21:42.000And amongst the anti-fascists of the West, Antifa, for example, who've been going around for the past 10 years saying Trump is Hitler 2.0 and the vote for Brexit is going to herald the return of the 1930s.
02:21:57.000They've been obsessing over the return of the 1930s for years.
02:22:01.000When something very like fascism actually happened, they were either incredibly cavalier about it, some of them were supportive of it, they did refer to it as an act of resistance, or they just turned away and didn't want to talk about it.
02:22:17.000Just to say, oh, it's the horrors of war because that is a mundane thing to say.
02:22:24.000It's to ask why Israel is being singled out to such an extent that vast swathes of people in the Western world are willing to ditch every principle they adhere to for the past 25 years and more.
02:22:37.000In order to explain away the racist butchery of Jewish people.
02:22:43.000Well, one of the most bizarre things was when those heads of those universities were all discussing whether or not it was harassment to say death to Jews on campus.
02:22:54.000That was a, boy, if I was Jewish, I would have been terrified watching that.
02:22:59.000When you see how deep the roots of this fucking chaos goes, you have the president of, was it Penn?
02:23:08.000Is that who it was who said, if it's actionable, with like a smirk on her face, like she was trying to silence these silly students.
02:23:18.000These are people that are used to existing only in academia, which is the root of all of this stuff, which is really very, very bizarre, that academia has become this It's incredibly insulated environment where people go there, they adopt the philosophies,
02:23:34.000and then they teach to new kids that come in this doctrine.
02:23:49.000They'll silence conservative people and pull fire alarms, and they want to stop freedom of speech, if at all possible, if it doesn't jive with what the fuck they believe.
02:24:02.000And the most striking thing about those presidents of the universities at the congressional hearing...
02:24:07.000Not only were they unable to say that calling for the deaths of all Jews is a problem, but these are campuses on which, for the past few years, there have been controversies over Halloween costumes.
02:24:19.000And it's a crime against transgender people to dress up like Caitlyn Jenner on Halloween.
02:24:24.000Or they'll kick you out forever if you misgender someone.
02:24:30.000In the case of Harvard, a young professor there got into hot water and Over raising questions about the idea that there is a black genocide being carried out by white cops.
02:24:40.000He got into trouble even though he proved it with evidence and analysis.
02:24:44.000So for years on these campuses, there has been a real reluctance to allow freedom of thought, freedom of speech, the right of people to engage in rigorous academic analysis.
02:24:55.000And yet when it comes to this one question, they throw their hands up in the air and say, well, you know, freedom of speech.
02:25:44.000And I don't know what solves that problem because that seems like an embedded institution that is very reluctant to any kind of a change and is so deeply dug into its ideology that they think the whole world is filled with Nazis and bigots and homophobes and that they're on the right side of everything and they don't produce anything.
02:27:27.000We're wasting it on things that are so ridiculous that any objective species from another planet, if they came here and looked at us, they'd be like, look at these fucking morons.
02:27:36.000How can they be so sophisticated and so ridiculous at the same time?
02:27:42.000And boy, we have to put a check on these fuckers, because they're liable to do wild shit.
02:27:50.000And they're essentially a bunch of cult members who don't believe they're in a cult, which is one of the most dangerous things you could be.
02:28:31.000You know, there's this prejudice that the mob is made up of kind of toothless hicks, you know, stupid, uneducated, witless people who don't know their ass from their elbow going around with their pitchforks.
02:28:42.000If you look at history, the mob, the hysteria has tended to come from the upper echelons of society.
02:28:51.000It's tended to come from the supposed experts.
02:28:53.000It was the priestly elites who carried out the Inquisition.
02:28:56.000It's the academia today that is pushing the most crazy post-truth nonsense ideas.
02:29:04.000It's very often the educated sections of society who get sucked into these backward ways of thinking, these regressive ways of thinking, and whose ways of thinking have an incredibly destructive impact on community life, on children's bodies, on women's rights,
02:29:23.000So I think reckoning with the graduate mob is actually one of the most essential tasks of our time and really getting to understand how these people who look down upon us as post-truth, who look down upon us as stupid and uneducated and easy prey for demagogic forces,
02:29:43.000we need to turn it back on them and say, hold on, it's you people who have been subsumed by this irrational cult.
02:29:50.000Who have abandoned the virtue of truth and embraced the ideology of unreason.
02:29:57.000And what's more, the way in which you're doing it is having a detrimental impact on people's lives and their bodies and their freedoms.
02:30:05.000So I think that's one of the great pressing tasks of our time, to push back on them and say, your hysteria is fucking things up.
02:30:13.000And the real fear is that children are getting indoctrinated straight out of high school.
02:30:18.000They're getting indoctrinated into this way of thinking straight out of high school without participating in the real world and then they just get sucked into it and then they go right out into these corporations and ruin them.
02:30:32.000It's just nonsense and it's bizarre to watch it all take place in mass, not just in one very specific sector of the society, but everything, in all things, in the prisons.
02:31:12.000And I often say to, when I meet young, woke activists, I often say to them, listen, if you're so progressive, if you're so Marxist, if you're so radically left-wing, why do the owners of the means of production love your ideology so much?
02:31:40.000I think there is across the board in the corporate world, the political world, the academic world, there is this susceptibility to irrational thinking has grown up.
02:31:52.000And they are all becoming members of this really odd post-truth cult.
02:32:18.000Watch Saturday Night Live anymore, and I'm not going to go along with this stuff.
02:32:23.000I'm not going to sit back and watch as you denigrate my community, absolutely transform the meaning of words like man and woman and mother and father, and put forward these men in dresses and tell me that they're women, and if I refuse to believe you that I'm some kind of antisocial bigger...