TRIGGERnometry - Douglas Murray Live + Q&A： What Now For America？

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen.

00:00:09.120 And this is a very, very, very special live interview with Douglas Murray featuring a Q&A.

00:00:16.620 It is. We have so much to talk about with Douglas today. Just to give you an overview of how the

00:00:21.960 show is going to go, we're going to interview Douglas for about 50 minutes to an hour. Then

00:00:26.460 we're going to have a very short break and then we will go to the Q&A. If you want to ask a question

00:00:31.540 or for us to ask your question, the two options, you can either send us a super chat and our producer

00:00:35.960 will pick it up and give it to us. Or you can use the PayPal link, which is in the pinned comment

00:00:40.460 as well. And without any further ado, we're not even going to bother setting the context. You all

00:00:45.420 know what this is about and you all know who Douglas Murray is. There he is. Douglas, welcome to the show.

00:00:49.640 It's great to be back with you guys. I'm not going to lie, Douglas. We did consider calling this

00:00:54.700 episode of Trigonometry. Hello, Douglas, my old friend, because it has been a rather dark few

00:01:00.540 days. And let's start with January the 6th. You've written about it, but I think it's an

00:01:06.900 important moment, not only in modern history, but in the entire history of perhaps democracy.

00:01:12.640 We'll never know how big it is going to turn out. What did you make of what happened in the

00:01:17.500 capital? Yes, I was covering the US election and was in the US for about five weeks ahead of the

00:01:26.720 November election. I was in Washington, DC on election night and wrote from there and left a

00:01:33.460 few days later when it became clear that events were going to sort of rumble on and that although it

00:01:40.000 seemed pretty clear, I think it was clear from fairly early on in the night that Donald Trump had lost

00:01:46.020 the election, it seemed clear that there were a set of legal challenges and others that would have

00:01:50.260 to play themselves out and that nothing was going to happen for some time. But of course, in that

00:01:57.040 period, since the night of the election in November, Donald Trump obviously did continue to make the same

00:02:06.260 assertions that he had on the night of the election. He think, as I wrote in a number of places,

00:02:13.060 I think he said fallaciously that he had won the election and the onus was on him and his legal team

00:02:20.800 to prove that he had won the election and they couldn't prove it. They didn't. And by the way,

00:02:27.400 I think it is worth remembering that the various different strata of the American government and the

00:02:35.020 legislative process worked. There were a number of right-wing conservative figures, you might say,

00:02:41.020 who were saying, I thought slightly sinisterly after the election, well, when this goes to the

00:02:46.300 Supreme Court, you know, then it'll become clear and then we can have Trump as having won. Well,

00:02:52.480 actually, they did go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court chucked out the applications from

00:02:56.640 Trump's legal teams. And that happened in other jurisdictions as well, at state levels. And it was

00:03:03.900 clear that Donald Trump's assertion was not able to be proved. I said repeatedly that seemed to be the

00:03:10.560 case that even if there were instances of voter fraud and voter suppression, much of which isn't

00:03:17.100 particularly new in American politics, but could well have happened in a more rife way this year than

00:03:22.180 before. Nevertheless, he did not prove that it had happened to such an extent that he had, in fact,

00:03:28.760 won the election, Joe Biden hadn't. And I thought, what's more, by the way, that the claims that were

00:03:34.540 made by the Trump supporters became more and more tenuous. People said things like, I've said this to

00:03:43.200 a number of, as it were, pro-Trump platforms, that when people said things like there was something that

00:03:51.220 didn't quite feel right on the night of the election, you know, our guy was winning and then

00:03:56.440 then he suddenly was losing. And they were saying this as if that's unheard of. And I kept on saying,

00:04:04.320 obviously, to the bemusement of most Americans, but Sunderland.

00:04:10.760 You know how to use the right metaphor to explain things to Americans.

00:04:14.500 They just kept saying, why does he keep shouting Sunderland at us? Of course, all the British viewers

00:04:19.980 know this was a night in the 2016 Brexit referendum when it seemed that Remain had been winning. And then

00:04:25.660 suddenly the vote came in from Sunderland and the whole night changed course. You know, that's what

00:04:31.240 happens with elections. I think all of us can remember election nights when we thought it was

00:04:35.540 going to go one way and it's gone another. So there was nothing. So the specifics weren't proven

00:04:40.560 by Trump and his people. And the generalities became more and more tenuous. And then we get to this stage

00:04:49.100 where it seems that Trump has his sort of last, well, all the doors have been closing to him,

00:04:55.900 hadn't they? As the days and weeks have gone on since November, all the doors have been closing.

00:05:03.120 And Congress was going to vote to confirm the win for Joe Biden. And on that day, you know,

00:05:12.380 Trump calls on supporters to mass in Washington and to protest against this, basically. He says,

00:05:22.420 stop the steal. This is one of his slogans. But again, I mean, I repeat that if the election had

00:05:30.220 been stolen to such an extent that it was Donald Trump who won it, not Joe Biden, then it was incumbent

00:05:36.640 upon Donald Trump and his legal team to prove that. And they didn't. And so there was something

00:05:42.620 not just irresponsible, but reckless in calling for people to gather to protest something which was

00:05:50.540 not true. I don't want to delve into trying to understand the minds of any person who I don't

00:05:59.520 know, but I suppose it'll be up to historians to try to work out in the future whether Donald Trump

00:06:04.220 himself actually believes this at this stage or not. Nevertheless, he encouraged people to amass.

00:06:12.680 And although, as is always has to be stressed, the majority of protesters were peaceful and seemed

00:06:19.960 to be decent law-abiding Americans, a number of people turned up, a large number of people

00:06:23.760 turned up who certainly weren't. And I think that there's going to be a very interesting,

00:06:29.660 I wrote from The Spectator the other day, there's going to be a very interesting question over the

00:06:32.900 extent to which one can directly claim that the president was liable for what happened

00:06:39.880 on the Capitol because his speech, I thought, in the run-up to it was, I wouldn't say it was

00:06:50.780 incitement, but it was certainly highly inflammatory and does raise the whole question, which I think

00:06:59.220 should be on the minds of everybody of every political side. It should have been for some

00:07:03.000 time now. It's not like we should have been starting from scratch. The very interesting

00:07:06.920 question of who exactly bears responsibility for what once you raise a crowd? I mean, it's

00:07:13.900 what some of us always worry about with crowds of any size for any purpose. I think I've said

00:07:20.320 to you before how much I myself dislike them, precisely because you never know-

00:07:25.300 You wrote a whole book about it, didn't you, Douglas?

00:07:27.300 I did. And I worry, I've always worried about that because I've seen it in so many different

00:07:33.640 contexts of what happens when large numbers of people come out. And you get sincere and

00:07:39.300 serious people, as you did, for instance, in the BLM protests last summer. And you also

00:07:44.840 get very insincere people. And you get gadflies and weirdos. And that's the best and the bad

00:07:52.780 part of the scenario. And the worst part is you get the sort of people who are willing

00:07:57.400 to turn violent. And then you see scenes like we saw the Capitol and, you know, the extraordinary

00:08:03.700 and tarot side of, you know, a woman, a youngish woman being shot. For what exactly? It's a very,

00:08:14.080 it should be a salutary moment for everyone. But I think that for the president and his team

00:08:21.200 and the people around him who goaded on this particular claim, it's not surprising to me,

00:08:27.280 I think, that it was so salutary that the president finally conceded. You know, it's very

00:08:32.720 interesting that that happened finally. I mean, we've been waiting for a concession speech.

00:08:38.260 How tragic it is for America. And in fact, and of course, on a much less important scale,

00:08:44.340 how tragic it is for Donald Trump's legacy, where there were some things he achieved in his

00:08:49.300 presidency. It's terrible for his legacy that he should have, it should have needed effectively

00:08:57.000 an appalling break in at the Capitol and the death of a number of people to persuade him to

00:09:07.820 finally do what he should have done around about the 6th or 7th of November. So I think it's,

00:09:14.940 it's been a very concerning period. But it's one we, you know, that I think everybody should learn

00:09:22.640 from. And Douglas, there are calls for him to be impeached. Do you agree with that? Do you think

00:09:27.660 he should be? No, I mean, we'll see if people can come up with evidence that he should be,

00:09:33.580 I suppose. That'll be I have no particularly strong views on that. I think impeachment is a word

00:09:38.400 that's been bandied around so often in American politics and in every direction. I, in a way,

00:09:44.760 I think one of the things that's most important, I'm not an American myself, although I spent a fair

00:09:49.300 amount of my life in America and have a great admiration for the country and for the culture

00:09:54.300 of the country. I think it's just as an observer, as it were, as a friend of the country, I'd say that

00:10:01.220 I think it's very important that, in the same way as it was important that that silly, you know,

00:10:07.820 sort of chant of lock her up about Hillary Clinton didn't actually lead to Hillary Clinton being 0.99

00:10:13.660 locked up, you know, or sort of put on trial or something. So I think it's important that in

00:10:18.900 victory, the Democrats don't go for something like impeachment, just as, by the way, as I think it would

00:10:24.220 have been unwise had the Republican, again, no, politically it would have been opportunistic and

00:10:30.460 clever, but it would have been morally unwise and unwise for the health of the nation if Republicans

00:10:36.000 had held on to the Senate and Congress, for instance, and then pushed on with an attempted

00:10:40.680 impeachment of Joe Biden over family business. You know, what I'm saying here is I think

00:10:46.260 anybody who is an American, anyone who's a friend of America, wants to work out how America can

00:10:54.120 be walked back from this brink, and everything that involves terms like impeachment, imprisonment,

00:11:02.520 prosecution, and much more, of any of the two major candidates in a presidential race seems to me

00:11:08.980 to be a very unwise position to get into, because it's going to exacerbate, it's going to make people

00:11:17.140 dig down. So I myself would think that any of these moves would be unwise.

00:11:24.120 Douglas, let me ask you this. You mentioned the word responsibility, you talked about liability,

00:11:28.840 and we had Brett Weinstein, who's a friend of both of ours on the show, talking about these things from

00:11:35.300 a left-wing perspective. But let me put a question that might make people on the right, yourself

00:11:39.240 perhaps included, uncomfortable, which is you talk about the lock her up. Is there a degree of

00:11:46.240 responsibility to take for many people on the right who did not take Donald Trump seriously

00:11:53.500 when he said, I'm going to lock up my opponent? And are they now culpable to some extent for what

00:12:00.620 has happened, for the lives that have been lost, for the huge damage that's been done to the democratic

00:12:05.760 process?

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00:12:39.980 Americans in America should think about that. I think it is something they're thinking about.

00:12:43.760 I think I've been thinking about it for more than four years. I said when I was in America

00:12:51.980 recently that something very strange had happened. I think I actually said this to Brett, that I

00:12:58.260 noticed that with the perhaps exception of Brett and his wife, and maybe I should say some other

00:13:02.980 American friends, the number of dinner tables, almost every dinner table you sat down to in

00:13:08.180 America, if there were people from both different parties, where they just couldn't converse

00:13:13.020 anymore, and they just couldn't talk to each other. And I kept wondering why there wasn't

00:13:17.460 my, as it were, my steel man version of it was, and I think it's fairly accurate, that the

00:13:24.420 Democrat, my Democrat friends in America couldn't forgive the Republicans for allowing Donald Trump

00:13:29.140 to happen. And, and I think there's obviously a fair amount in there. I mean, and I think it's

00:13:37.860 something the Republican Party had been thinking about. I mean, it's not like he was the preferred

00:13:42.500 candidate of the party in 2016. I also think that, to an enormous extent, people did see some of this

00:13:55.140 coming. I don't think people saw exactly what was going to happen. But take this one, for instance,

00:14:02.500 and again, I read about this recently. Why was it always the case that, although there were some good

00:14:08.660 people who worked for Donald Trump, particularly foreign policy areas, and trade negotiations,

00:14:14.340 and much more? Why was it that he did seem always to have such trouble filling positions?

00:14:20.900 Why from the get go? I mean, and I say this, I mean, you know, I mean, friends in previous

00:14:24.900 administrations, Democrat and Republican. Why, why did my Republican friends, so many of them,

00:14:32.020 not accept jobs with Donald Trump's administration from the get go. And it was always pretty much the

00:14:39.460 same reason, which was that people just didn't trust that he wasn't going to pull some crap at some

00:14:46.500 point that was going to sully everyone who'd been anywhere near it. And I think that is, that has been

00:14:53.460 a serious consideration. I think that there have been, there were, of course, there were the Never

00:14:58.660 Trumper movement. I wrote not long ago that the question that will always, or even for recent

00:15:07.060 events that will haunt the Never Trumper movement will be whether there were things that they could

00:15:11.460 have done in the administration that would be effective. I think of people like Elliot Abrams,

00:15:17.780 who was a Venezuela representative of the president and latterly represented the administration on Iran

00:15:24.420 foreign policy, a very distinguished foreign policy figure, did a lot of good in his work

00:15:30.660 on Venezuela and in Iran. And would it, if more people had gone in, would there have been more

00:15:36.980 good? Yes, possibly. But now we all see even more clearly what the downside would have been,

00:15:43.220 which was that people would be contaminated with a president whose exit from office makes

00:15:48.580 that of Richard Nixon look positively graceful. And that is the problem. But I mean, I think that the,

00:15:59.780 I think the questions around Donald Trump were pretty much all answered in 2016 for the right,

00:16:05.940 which was, you know, could they keep him out? No. Did some of the right want to? Obviously.

00:16:13.540 Others made their peace with him.

00:16:22.420 Better, you know, better to, to, to have this person than the alternative. And, and that's,

00:16:28.740 uh, that's something I think everybody is going to be continuing to weigh up. I myself could never

00:16:36.580 understand. I mean, I, I've on a number of occasions written about aspects

00:16:40.740 of his policy praise. I think that peace deals, uh, in the Middle East that he negotiated deserve praise.

00:16:50.100 I think that he's, uh, he was, uh, the first major figure in the democratic world to recognize

00:16:56.340 the threat, uh, that in the 21st century poses and to try to do something about that.

00:17:02.740 Uh, but again, you know, you weigh that up against the rest of the legacy and it is,

00:17:07.780 it's possible that the, that all of that and much more will be forgotten, uh, amid these scenes. And

00:17:16.740 I'd add people, particularly on the activist left, who will want everything else to be forgotten and will

00:17:22.900 use the horrible events of the other day, um, as a demonstration that, uh, that, that there's nothing,

00:17:29.860 uh, uh, good to be said about not just Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the conservative side,

00:17:36.020 the right, and so on.

00:17:37.460 But, Douglas, let me just follow up quickly before Francis jumps in. Uh, the counter-argument to my

00:17:43.940 counter-argument, which, which I asked you about the rights responsibility, would be that in 2016,

00:17:50.420 only a non-system candidate like Donald Trump could have won, only someone who promised to

00:17:55.700 quote unquote drain the swamp, only someone who addressed the issues that the Republican,

00:18:01.700 not the, the standard discourse in the Republican Party ignored, only a man or a woman like that

00:18:08.340 could have broken that deadlock, could have got through the concerns of ordinary voters.

00:18:12.580 And for that reasons, uh, for that, for those reasons, even this price was worth paying.

00:18:21.220 Yes, there will be people who will say that, um,

00:18:27.140 this, this, this is a, a very tricky one, isn't it? Because it's impossible not to reinterpret

00:18:32.500 events in light of what's, what, what's happened since. Um, the Republican Party by

00:18:40.740 26 become, um, a, a worryingly, um, among other things, uh, hereditary party. By the way,

00:18:49.460 American politics, uh, is, is, does have this tendency in it in both major parties. But, uh,

00:19:00.500 the, the, the prospect of the, of being offered another member of the Bush family,

00:19:05.380 even for those of us who thought that there were things that George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush

00:19:12.580 did that were laudable or great about this family, they have to provide a quarter of American

00:19:19.940 presidents in the last half a century. You know, I mean, it's, these questions hovered, um, as you

00:19:26.500 could say they did to some extent in Democratic politics with the Kennedys, uh, you know, you

00:19:31.060 could say that with the Clintons and more. Um, but it's, it's obviously a tendency. Uh, the, the,

00:19:36.740 the Republican Party, I think by 2016, did look like it was perfectly happy yet again to sort of shoo in

00:19:42.260 somebody from a relatively small number of, um, of candidates, relatively small number of families

00:19:49.780 who might fit the bill. And, uh, and then along comes Donald Trump. And yes, I mean, famously,

00:19:58.340 sort of insults and abuses and amuses his way, uh, to the top of the ticket. And, uh, I, I think

00:20:05.860 there's a lot to be, you know, still gone over about that. There's, there's an awful lot that's

00:20:11.380 been said about it. Um, but yes, I mean, when it's, it's quite hard, I think for non-Americans to, to

00:20:19.220 recognize that the, the level of distrust and indeed contempt that is felt towards Washington.

00:20:27.620 From outside the political beltway. Uh, the only thing I can think of as being analogous to it in

00:20:33.860 UK is the way in which Nicola Sturgeon and other national populists in Scotland talk about

00:20:39.780 Westminster, you know, as if everything at Westminster is uniquely terrible and everything

00:20:46.180 that comes out from it, you know, and this is the way in which people, uh, both sides of the aisle

00:20:50.660 in America, but particularly America's side, uh, have the, the Republican side have talked about

00:20:55.220 Washington. Um, and yes, I think that to that extent, and this new candidate who came along

00:21:01.940 and sort of said to hell with them all had something going for him. One of the obvious

00:21:08.180 things from very early on was that whatever Donald Trump said, what he actually managed to follow

00:21:12.980 through on was tiny in proportion to the claims he made, you know, I mean, he, that, that have,

00:21:22.020 again, it's about magnanimity and victory probably shouldn't have said the other day that Trump was

00:21:26.820 the most disastrous. So I think he said incompetent president in American history. Um, uh, again, 0.69

00:21:32.660 I mean, I, I'm not sure it's, it's great, certainly true that to a great extent, Donald Trump, when he

00:21:40.580 had the levers of power, and this was one of the main critiques of him from the right, had

00:21:45.380 sort of knew absolutely no idea of how to control the dashboard as a whole. And, and, and yes, and to

00:21:56.180 that extent, and that was one of the reasons why he lost quite a lot of his supporters on the right.

00:21:59.700 And Douglas, we've seen his actions. We've seen the speeches. How much do you think his actions and

00:22:07.140 his speeches have undermined American democracy? Um, I think we have to be very careful to avoid

00:22:14.580 overstatement on this, you know, um, to one extent it's, you know, the whole thing is, is, uh, is, uh,

00:22:23.700 is an enormous embarrassment for America and for friends of America. And I think what's more,

00:22:31.860 that, uh, uh, uh, there is a lot to pick over and that should be picked over and what led to the

00:22:37.860 events, uh, uh, the Capitol on the 6th of January. That said, uh, I do also think it's important that

00:22:45.540 that people don't play up things like saying this shows that America isn't a democracy or

00:22:52.980 anything like this. I think there's a lot of chatter like that, which I, I can't help. Again,

00:22:59.140 I restate the extent to which the, um, the organs of American democracy succeeded and worked in recent

00:23:08.980 months. You know, the, the stress test, uh, um, has been almost inauguration, but the stress tests

00:23:20.580 has been almost, um, um, uh, completed and American democracy passed it. Uh, I referred in a column

00:23:29.380 a couple of days ago to the fact that when I was in central, eastern Europe recently, uh, I was

00:23:34.740 worried

00:23:40.820 going around, but, um, I joked me going around that part of the world and Russia that, uh,

00:23:45.620 the problem with America was that it has spent so much time exporting democracy in years,

00:23:49.540 in recent years, it forgot to keep any for itself at home. Um, but I, I worry about those sorts of

00:23:54.980 things because I worry about what people who would make those sorts of jokes would be hoping

00:23:58.660 to get, you know, um, uh, we've seen in recent days, uh, uh, president Edwan of Turkey, you know,

00:24:10.420 condemning the scenes on the Capitol.

00:24:15.540 This is, this is a man who, uh, 12 hours after a possible alleged coup against him happened to have

00:24:24.100 the names of 2,000 judges to hand to make sure he got rid of. So we won't be hearing lessons in

00:24:31.220 American democracy from president Edwan. Thank you very much. Uh, the same goes with the Chinese communist 0.95

00:24:37.300 party and I'll be careful in this. America is, has been, uh, uh, for many years

00:24:45.940 years. I think it remains. So, uh, I think that the people who would like to overstate

00:24:57.780 event way

00:25:02.180 to demonstrate some failing in democracy or much more are trying to do something else or are too

00:25:10.420 pleased for my taste with what they've seen and what they think they can get away with in their own

00:25:16.900 countries as a result of it. So I just, uh, for level heads on this as always. And I, and I, I, I,

00:25:26.660 I reiterate the, the, the, the maxim I've, I've said in recent years over so many different things.

00:25:32.900 The number one priority is do not be driven mad. Do not be driven mad.

00:25:38.980 And it's, it's, it's a very good point to make. I mean, the people who do seem to be driven somewhat

00:25:44.980 mad are the people celebrating his, uh, removal from Twitter. Well, let's just, uh, I want to get

00:25:51.620 to the big tech, but I had another question for the politics of it and maybe better coming from you

00:25:56.820 because we've, we've, we've, we've sort of asked a lot of questions about the right or the rights

00:26:01.700 responsibility, but actually, uh, there's a, there's been a role for the left in enabling what's

00:26:06.740 happened to, um, do you? Right. So I get, I guess the question that, that we, you know,

00:26:12.980 that we want to ask on, on behalf of the left is this constant demonization of the right,

00:26:21.700 this constant attacking of the right and painting as, as if they're, you know, they're evil. They're,

00:26:27.700 you know, they're wrong. They don't care about the world, painting them into a corner.

00:26:33.060 Didn't that just embolden people to support Trump and people for people to think, look,

00:26:38.660 this is where you put me. I'm going to behave badly because in your eyes, I'm a bad person.

00:26:43.700 And also add to that, of course, the, the riots that we've seen in, in, in the whole of 2020,

00:26:48.740 where, uh, political violence was essentially endorsed by the main players on the left.

00:26:53.860 Oh, yes. I mean, uh, um, uh, I, I didn't see condemnation, uh, from, uh, anything like, uh,

00:27:01.540 that of recent days or claims that, uh, everybody on, on the, uh, Democrat side dial should take

00:27:08.180 equal responsibility or anything like that. When, I don't know, protesters were allowed to assail

00:27:12.900 federal buildings in Seattle in the summer, for instance, or have been besieging, um, um,

00:27:20.020 state property, uh, for months as it happens. Uh, so I do think there's something in that,

00:27:26.500 but again, I mean, I think, I think people have to avoid, I've always thought I, I saw it as a,

00:27:31.140 as a, as a tendency among some Trump supporters. I think the tendency always has to be avoided to

00:27:36.900 say, I'd like my enemies to suffer. Um, and that seemed to be something which had crept into American 0.77

00:27:43.540 politics and which Donald Trump was a sort of answer for, for a part of the right was, um,

00:27:49.540 you, you know, look at, um, a famous example of the problem was what Bill Maher said ahead of

00:27:56.260 Trump's election in 2016, when Bill Maher, uh, had the decency and the honesty to say,

00:28:03.940 you know, we said John McCain was a racist and, um, xenophobe when he ran for, uh, president in

00:28:13.220 2008, but he wasn't, we were just saying that because we, and I know we said that Mitt Romney 0.97

00:28:20.340 was a misogynist and a racist and a homophobe when he ran for office in 2012. We didn't really 0.92

00:28:25.380 mean that what we just wanted was our, our guy to get in. And, and, and, and then he said,

00:28:32.260 but you see here in 2016, it actually is the case. It actually racist and a misogynist and a homophobe. 0.98

00:28:40.420 And the thing was that a bunch of people said, but that isn't, that's something you kept telling us. 0.96

00:28:47.220 You kept telling us that all candidates from the Republican party were racists and homophobes 0.97

00:28:54.260 and xenophobes and misogynists and hated women. And he didn't view women as people, uh, endless, 0.97

00:29:04.340 endless claims like this were made about everybody who was running from the right. So then you get

00:29:09.220 Donald Trump who, who, as I say, insults his way to the top of the ticket and Donald Trump, um,

00:29:16.660 whatever the negative, and I've said this so many times in recent years,

00:29:19.300 it was not, um, why America didn't know about Donald Trump's character or much more. It was

00:29:28.740 why they knew it and they voted for him anyway. That was the question for 2016 to be considered.

00:29:36.900 And, uh, and, and one of the answers of why they did it anyway

00:29:41.140 was, and decided that Donald Trump seemed to frankly, to use a British-ism on it, piss off

00:29:51.220 the opposition so much that this was a kind of virtue. The problem is vulnerable to that tendency.

00:30:03.700 It's a very ignoble tendency. It's one that it's worth avoiding. Uh, uh, um, this, this character

00:30:13.860 really makes my opponents froth. Therefore,

00:30:20.100 I will the democratic process, but it's, it's definitely there. And I think, and I think there,

00:30:26.420 there was obviously a huge amount of upset and disdain and, and much more on the right. Uh, but you know,

00:30:32.260 people have to take responsibility for their own action. Absolutely. And Douglas,

00:30:40.820 you know, that we, we see that, you know, people on the left, they now have, they've got their man

00:30:46.820 and they believe that everything is over. Everything is solved. We're going to now move

00:30:50.660 forward. Do you think that's going to be the case? Is racism completely finished with Joe Biden? Sexism as

00:30:55.540 well. I mean, I think, uh, the, uh, the sexism, racism stuff. I, I really do. I'm not, um, I, uh,

00:31:07.140 I think that a binary had been set up in recent years. We've talked about a bit about this before.

00:31:12.020 And obviously I write about it a bit in the matters of crowd.

00:31:14.500 Uh, if you didn't submit to a certain type of politics and a certain, all of the same things,

00:31:24.980 and you were therefore beyond the pale and unfortunately left on occasions, majority

00:31:29.940 populations allegedly beyond the pale, which is obviously not a sustainable position. Um, and, uh,

00:31:37.060 uh, I'm, I mean, we'll see, but what I've heard so far from, uh, President Lep's office, um, does not

00:31:47.300 suggest much in the way of, uh, actual reconciliation, I think. Um, and obviously Donald Trump's actions

00:31:56.260 don't. I mean, he's announced that he won't go to the inauguration, which is a perhaps

00:32:00.660 characteristically inelegant and, uh, um, indecent thing for him to decide to do. But, um, to that

00:32:10.420 extent, yeah, there will be no, uh, reconciliation from this. And if I can just quickly say so,

00:32:15.060 one of the things, again, that I picked up from my travels in America, I was traveling in seven or eight,

00:32:19.380 seven or eight states, I think. Um, uh, so a fair-ish, uh, idea of what was going on in the country.

00:32:26.980 Um, one of the things I picked up very strongly, and I wrote about in the Spectator

00:32:30.580 afterwards was, uh, my concern that America had got to this stage, not because it interpreted

00:32:36.500 events differently, but because it saw the same thing and came to different conclusions about what

00:32:41.700 it had just seen. And I, I can't stress enough the worry I think we should all have about this

00:32:47.780 and the amount of thought that everybody from every political side should put into this. Um,

00:32:52.660 there were, again, in 2016, very significant senior members of the Democrat Party

00:32:59.540 who said that Donald Trump had only got into office because of the Russians.

00:33:05.140 And it was incumbent upon them to prove that claim. And they first of all claimed that there were,

00:33:09.620 um, actual votes, uh, manipulation and voting machine manipulation done by the Russians.

00:33:16.740 And then that didn't stack up and it went on and on down to a few Russian bots.

00:33:20.740 Uh, um, and, and so they, they were willing, the Democrats were willing to play with this, uh,

00:33:28.100 very nasty, uh, uh, thing of, no, we don't really accept that this is a legitimate president.

00:33:34.100 They were willing to do that in 2016. Donald Trump was willing, as always, to go a step further than

00:33:40.500 anyone else. And in 2020 actually says, no, I, I didn't, uh, lose. I, I won. Um, and, and, and

00:33:48.820 here's the thing again, any friend of America, any American should be thinking about the polls

00:33:53.940 seem to show in recent weeks, nine out of 10 Trump voters agree with the president's claim that he won

00:33:58.980 the election, but that's a disaster. And you've got to find a way to mend that. Um, you're the,

00:34:05.300 the, the, the great, one of the great geniuses of the democratic system is not just that it allows

00:34:10.420 the victor to know that they have won, but it allows the loser to know that they've lost.

00:34:16.180 And I said quite often in recent years, if the Democrats had actually spent four years trying

00:34:21.380 to work out why Donald Trump had won in 2016, they could have done an awful lot of good for

00:34:27.860 their own party as well as for the country. If they hadn't have spent their time and wasted their time

00:34:32.420 on Russia conspiracies and much more, and just work out, as I say, why the American people knew

00:34:38.020 what they knew about Donald Trump and voted for him anyway, in 2016, in such large numbers,

00:34:43.140 that's the task worth, worth immersing yourself in. But here's the kicker to it is that that is also

00:34:49.300 something that the Republican right in America is going to have to do now. And my worry is that Donald

00:34:56.340 Trump has led them and misled them in such a strong way that they aren't, again, like the Democrats,

00:35:04.180 like so many of the Democrats after 2016, they're not going to work out why they lost. And they haven't

00:35:08.500 just lost the presidency. They've lost the Senate. They've lost the Congress. It's their worst case

00:35:14.100 scenario. And that should be when you've lost, as the Republicans have, should be the moment when you

00:35:24.020 start to work out why you have lost. And the problem, if so many Republicans don't think they

00:35:31.540 did lose, is that again, they will waste their time and they will waste everybody else's time

00:35:37.540 not mending things they could and should mend, because they haven't got through the first stage

00:35:44.820 of accepting the reality. And that's that's one of the many things about this that worries me.

00:35:52.580 We've seen the left spiral into conspiracy theory and much more violence and routine violence and much

00:36:02.420 more. And I would not be at all surprised if this motif of the vote having been stolen and it's everyone

00:36:13.300 against the people and all this. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we don't see a degeneration

00:36:19.380 on the right that mirrors the degeneration that's happened in recent years on the left.

00:36:23.380 I think it's a source of enormous concern.

00:36:27.780 Douglas, I know, Francis, you're keen to get to the Twitter point, and that's super important for us

00:36:32.020 to talk about. But let me ask you about this, because you talk about the Republicans working out

00:36:37.940 why they've lost. And as you know, some Republicans made the claim that it was Venezuelans that

00:36:42.980 interfered. So between the two of us, we've basically been responsible for the last two

00:36:47.620 elections in America. A dead Venezuelan leader. That was one of the least plausible claims.

00:36:54.500 That's how powerful the Venezuelans are. Even in the grave, Venezuelans can achieve these things.

00:37:00.100 Yeah, absolutely. But I would argue, and I don't think it's unreasonable to do so, that

00:37:07.220 had it not been for the coronavirus, Donald Trump would still be present. And if you take

00:37:13.620 that into consideration, while I agree with you, it's important for the right to work out why the

00:37:18.580 right lost on this occasion, and lost, as you say, spectacularly. I also think that a Biden victory

00:37:25.380 is papering over not just cracks, but chasms that are existent in the left. And frankly, I would say

00:37:34.900 they got once in a century lucky. And I mean, how are they going to deal with that?

00:37:41.460 Yeah, this is a very important area, this. I do think that the left America will see this as a,

00:37:51.060 apart from anything else, because of events of recent days, will see this as a total vindication

00:37:55.540 of everything they claimed. You can already see it in this sort of stop fascism sort of stuff.

00:38:04.340 They really are going to dig down on this, that 2021 was actually the year they were personally like

00:38:12.500 French resistance fighters in the 1940s. And you know, I think that there's an enormous amount of

00:38:22.180 hubris that will be occurring at the moment. And as you say, we come back to this question of,

00:38:29.940 in a way, what the trajectory might have been if 2020 had been like a normal year.

00:38:36.660 Somebody fairly close to the Trump team said to me a couple of years ago, I interviewed them,

00:38:41.700 that there were only two things they needed, that were really needed for Donald Trump to be reelected.

00:38:46.580 And this was about 18 months ahead of the election. There were only two things really that were needed.

00:38:51.940 One was that the president, that the economy needed to keep growing in America.

00:38:58.260 And the second was, and the president mustn't get us into any unwinnable forum.

00:39:04.900 He seemed to be, if that was true, and I think there's certainly a serious ring of truth about it.

00:39:09.780 If that was the case that, you know, employment kept growing, American public kept feeling the

00:39:20.500 of the president and some happy luck as well, then he could float back into office. I think that was

00:39:28.580 certainly possible. I thought quite frequently in 2020 that that was the case. And of course,

00:39:37.620 you know, by the time he went to the poll, it was a disastrous year for all of our economies,

00:39:44.820 where public borrowing, state borrowing went soaring up, GDP crashed, the economy was basically shut down.

00:39:56.900 It was hard for any president to return to the public. That famous crucial question, you know,

00:40:03.140 are you better off than you were four years ago? You know, it doesn't really matter if the answer is,

00:40:11.380 well, no, but that's partly because, or largely because of a virus that came from Wuhan and has

00:40:19.060 shut down the economies of every major country in the world. It didn't really matter if that was the

00:40:23.540 sort of small print when the main thing is, no, I'm not better off now than I was four years ago.

00:40:34.740 I can't leave my house. I've lost my job. I've got a $1,000 check from the government that's meant to see

00:40:42.900 me through months. I can't socialize and much more. I mean, it's not, it's not an optimal situation to

00:40:52.500 go back to the public in, is it? And, and so yeah, I'm sure. But by the way, I mean, we also see in

00:41:00.420 this the roots of some of what the Trump team might be trying to do in the coming months and years, which

00:41:05.860 is to claim that only, if it only hadn't been for the virus, he'd be back in. And whilst I think it's

00:41:14.420 obviously a factor, I think it would be a mistake to focus only on that because I think they should

00:41:19.300 also focus on the many other things that we could all reel off in our sleep of the negative things

00:41:26.340 about Donald Trump that would mean the American voter might not vote for him. I mean, by the way,

00:41:31.380 I still find the most interesting stat on it, uh, um, raise in, um, uh, Republican under Trump,

00:41:44.580 but the fall off of white males voting Republican under Trump, which tells you exactly the opposite

00:41:50.980 thing from the thing that the left had liked to pretend about the Trump years. But as I say, yes,

00:41:56.980 I think, I think, I think it would be a mistake because it might let team Trump off other parts

00:42:06.180 of the self-examination they and the GOP will need.

00:42:10.020 Isn't a real problem as well. The fact that Biden isn't going to address the problems that the Trump

00:42:16.180 base want addressed. He's he, you know, he's a neoliberal. He's more of the same. He's in the Hillary

00:42:21.540 Clinton mold. It's not going to address America's problems. 1.00

00:42:27.940 No, maybe no individual can though. Um, I mean, maybe that's something that

00:42:36.340 that, um,

00:42:40.980 sort of rely on a figure that combines the moral and virtues of Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill,

00:42:49.780 and, you know, and on and on. I mean, it's, it, it may not be the right perception that you've got

00:42:56.900 to wait around for that person to come along. The reforms that are needed are literally in the hearts

00:43:05.460 of every American, rather than in one person who has the fortune to be in the Oval Office. I think

00:43:11.060 there's an enormous amount of criticism that can be made of Biden.

00:43:17.860 It's that there was going to be something he would achieve in his sixth decade

00:43:22.420 achieved in the previous half century.

00:43:26.100 I think that that's certainly a problem. But in a way, again, maybe that was one of the reasons why

00:43:31.460 people voted for him, as Peggy Noonan said in the Wall Street Journal ahead of the election,

00:43:35.700 after the Corona week, when the president got Corona.

00:43:41.220 And they sort of saw Biden as, as normal. And that's a, that's a perfectly, I mean,

00:43:47.460 it's a perfectly reasonable instinct. But I agree with you. I think that there are,

00:43:52.820 I think there are serious in, I would put it this way, there are serious interpretation of the world

00:43:58.980 and interpretation of America questions, which I don't see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris addressing.

00:44:07.140 And I think, I think, if I can say so, one of them is the same one we're all struggling with in our

00:44:12.660 countries, which is the extent to which people have the right to be basically proud of their past,

00:44:21.460 of their country, of its achievements, and, and not want to change it too much.

00:44:28.100 I mean, it basically comes down to that for a lot of small C conservatives. It's just,

00:44:34.740 they, they, they love their country, think it's a force for good in the world. Broadly speaking,

00:44:40.340 this, this speaks to patriotism almost everywhere. And broadly speaking, you think your country's been

00:44:46.020 a force for good, you love it, you like it, you'd like it to continue, and continue in the way it

00:44:52.500 has been, with small modifications, but nothing vast. And I think a lot of Americans in recent years

00:45:00.980 have seen a part of the left wing project, which is fundamentally rewriting American history,

00:45:05.860 which is rewriting it in a totally negative light, which seems to have very big plans for the country

00:45:13.380 that do not seem to have the endorsement of the majority of the population, but seem, seem to

00:45:20.100 really know what they want to do. And, and, and this worries people. And, and, and I, I, I personally

00:45:25.780 think it's a perfectly reasonable instinct to be worried when, when the, the, when people come along

00:45:33.140 with a very clear project that would fundamentally change part of the nature of a country which you like.

00:45:39.060 Um, now I think that it's been over egged, deeply, deeply over egged, particularly by Trump,

00:45:45.780 the extent to which the American left does plan to change this, the, the rally of Trump's I reported

00:45:52.020 from Pensacola, Florida in late October. Uh, you know, I mean, he said, he said to the crowd there,

00:45:58.340 you know, um, if the Democrats get in, you know, uh, you won't have your guns. That's very contestable.

00:46:05.060 I mean, obviously the worst thing that can happen is to a person who's British to talk about America's

00:46:10.740 Second Amendment. But, um, I, I, the, the Democrats may change some of the laws around it, but the idea

00:46:18.100 that they will disarm the citizenry seems to me highly implausible. Uh, and much more implausible

00:46:24.820 was Trump's claim that, that if the Democrats get in, you won't be allowed your religion.

00:46:28.580 I, I, I couldn't ever see how that was a reasonable interpretation of Democrat policy.

00:46:36.260 So it can be over egged and had to be an over egg, particularly by Trump for obvious electoral

00:46:41.540 reasons. Um, but, but yes, I, I, I, I think, I think one of the central points come back to is this,

00:46:49.540 is this question of, um, just decent, reasonable people who are patriotic think their country is

00:46:57.700 forced with good in the world, don't want it very dramatically changed and should not in that

00:47:03.860 process be decried as racist, homophobe, sexist, misogynists, and all the rest of it. And I think

00:47:11.540 those people have been very freely insulted. They have been one of the only groups who are allowed to

00:47:18.020 completely freely insult in society. And this point is either a point where that could start to mend,

00:47:26.420 or it could be the point where everybody digs down, where the people who claim

00:47:34.740 that everybody who's ever voted Republican in America is a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, 0.96

00:47:41.620 sexist, fascist, who wants to storm the Capitol. Uh, they, they will, there will be people who will 0.99

00:47:47.540 double down on that claim. And there will be Republicans, uh, Trump, uh, supporters who will be,

00:47:53.780 who will be more and more embittered, uh, by the total lack of sympathy for their concerns

00:48:02.100 and reasonable concerns of that, and will double down in ways of their own, which we can only at

00:48:10.820 present imagine. So how do we bridge this divide then Douglas? Because as mentioned before, I don't

00:48:16.820 think Joe Biden is a man to do that. He's not the man to unite America. Well, he has to be,

00:48:21.700 I mean, it comes out that he, he, he has to try, uh, he and vice president let Harris have to try.

00:48:29.060 And I just, I hope they do. I did suggest immediately after the election that the world really,

00:48:35.140 let alone America, couldn't really cope with having election after election, which the results weren't

00:48:40.500 agreed upon. Yeah. And that one very good place to start to heal, to stop this thing I describe of the,

00:48:49.380 um, seeing the same event, but coming away, believing you've seen different things, a very

00:48:54.020 good way to deal with that would be, I said, whoever wins the presidency to set up a commission

00:49:00.580 of inquiry into, uh, electoral practice in America, including mail in ballots.

00:49:07.380 And I don't know exactly how you would do it. You'd have to have eminently non-partisan figures,

00:49:14.500 uh, respected individuals. I can think of very many in America of left and right as it happens.

00:49:21.460 I don't think there's a shortage of them. Uh, I think it would be, I think it would be incumbent

00:49:28.500 upon anyone who cares about the democratic process in America to, to do something like that, get a group

00:49:34.340 of people together to look at how we can make sure that next time there is an election in the United

00:49:40.260 States of America, the world's leading democracy, the most powerful and important nation on earth,

00:49:45.620 that next time there is an election, the winners know that they've won and the losers know they've lost.

00:49:50.980 And if that happens, if, if, if America could just agree on one thing, like the outcome of an election

00:49:59.940 once, that would be a start. Otherwise it is just the thing of running down your own,

00:50:08.020 your own rabbit hole, your own interpretation of events.

00:50:10.900 Well, speaking of running down rabbit holes, Francis has been trying to get this question

00:50:15.060 in for about 30 minutes. So why don't we get to it? And you know, you talked earlier in the interview

00:50:20.260 about not becoming overly dramatic about events, not talking about the end of democracy, but I will

00:50:28.180 put it to you, Douglas. I will put this to you because it's how I feel that what we have seen in the last

00:50:33.540 24 hours with not Donald Trump being suspended for a particular tweet, unless he deletes it, but

00:50:40.660 actually being permanently removed from the main way that he used to communicate with the public,

00:50:46.260 uh, followed by tens of thousands of accounts being removed. You and I and Francis and all the rest of

00:50:52.660 us have seen this happening, right? Uh, this big tech censorship now represents, I don't personally

00:51:00.260 believe if this continues, we're ever going to have a free or fair election ever again. And if that is

00:51:06.340 the case, that is the end of democracy. Would you agree with that? Would you disagree with that?

00:51:11.780 I don't think it's the end of democracy, but I think we have to start to speak very plainly about big

00:51:17.540 tech. Uh, I think, uh, big tech is the enemy of free expression, free inquiry, free thought, and yes,

00:51:28.500 possibly at some level of democracy itself. I've actually written about this for the mail on Sunday

00:51:33.220 tomorrow, uh, uh, this in recent years, the more that I've immersed myself in learning what exactly

00:51:42.420 it is that Silicon Valley is doing. Let's be under no pretense about this. Donald Trump would not be

00:51:50.580 president, were it not for Twitter, Donald Trump, because it's had its use of him. Now, here we get to

00:52:03.220 the absolutely foundational truth that I think all of us have to say more often, even when we already know

00:52:11.300 it. And that is this, the business involves the total hollowing out of every other institution in

00:52:22.020 society, other than themselves. They feed off the entire corpse, eat the whole thing for their own

00:52:30.340 enrichment, and then move on. They've done it with everything.

00:52:35.780 Everybody is now helping these big tech companies and the big tech companies are using them. It

00:52:47.940 happened with all sorts. It happened with musicians. It happened with writers. It happened with

00:52:56.900 just after sector and people just sort of said, well, we've got to

00:53:00.180 We've accepted it. It's done to journalism. I mean, it's hollowed it out. I mean, thank goodness

00:53:09.860 there are still some papers, but look at who wins the war each time it comes on now. There was a period

00:53:17.860 where the papers thought that it was useful to have big tech to increase their own platforms. But look

00:53:24.900 at what happens, like ahead of the US election in November, when the New York Post, America's oldest,

00:53:32.980 and one of the most venerable media institutions, has its Twitter and Facebook accounts suspended

00:53:42.340 because it runs a story that is negative about Joe Biden and the companies by then decide they want

00:53:47.860 Biden to win. That was an astonishing, dangerous standoff. And that America's oldest newspaper

00:53:57.940 could be silenced by the big tech was one of the many, many signs we've had that something very

00:54:07.940 dangerous was going on. That the financial model of big tech has always been that it relies on the

00:54:20.980 citizenry to correct each other's behavior or attempt to correct each other's behavior for free in their

00:54:29.300 spare time. And this enriches the platforms. This enriches Twitter. This enriches Google. This enriches

00:54:35.860 Facebook and so on. And we've known that this was the model for a long time. And the question has been,

00:54:41.780 well, how do we avoid it? I mean, we're on one such platform at the moment. You and I, we all know

00:54:50.900 the extent to which YouTube is a totally dishonest player in this, that it doesn't, it pretends to be

00:54:57.300 one thing and is another, just like Twitter, just like Facebook, just like Google. Whenever YouTube is

00:55:03.700 caught, for instance, as it did recently, taking down talk radio's channel in the UK,

00:55:11.060 because some talk radio presenters had been questioning government lockdown policy.

00:55:18.180 I mean, again, you've either got a free society or you haven't. And in a free society,

00:55:22.580 if the citizenry are all locked in their houses, and then are told they can't even talk about it,

00:55:28.740 you're in trouble, aren't you? But here is YouTube taking it upon itself to take down talk radio's

00:55:38.260 channel because of that. And then once there is the brouhaha, YouTube does the usual thing of

00:55:43.140 pretending that it was all a mistake. It's what it always does when it's caught out. It's what it

00:55:48.660 always does when it's caught out. It's the same with Twitter. Look at the extraordinary evil of

00:55:53.780 Twitter as a platform. I can do it at the moment, as can you. We should just check whether Ayatollah 0.97

00:56:00.180 Khamenei's account, yeah, the Ayatollah is still on Twitter. The Ayatollah is still on Twitter.

00:56:11.220 He's got very progressive views, Douglas. Especially on Israel. Absolutely.

00:56:15.300 Yeah, yeah. All those people, all those people who spent recent years trying to pretend that Donald

00:56:19.540 Trump was an anti-Semite, of all the things you could say about him, that he was an anti-Semite. 0.71

00:56:23.700 Here's a man, Khamenei, who has repeatedly called for the total eradication of the Jewish state. 0.98

00:56:31.940 Fine with Twitter. Fine with Twitter. No problem. The Communist Party of China's Twitter accounts, 0.86

00:56:38.900 are they still up? We can check now. Yep. Yep. The Communist Party of China is still going strong

00:56:46.260 on Twitter. President of the United States, not allowed. Communist Party of China, tick.

00:56:54.500 Verification, tick. Hold on. Well, let me push back on that then. So you've, I've just asked you if this

00:56:59.780 is the end of democracy. You've said, no, it's not. And then proceeded to give me about 20 reasons why

00:57:04.900 I would argue it is. So what are you seeing that I'm not seeing? I'm saying that I don't think we're

00:57:10.580 there yet. I think we're in a very, very dangerous position. I don't think we're there yet. But the

00:57:15.620 platforms are certainly of these platforms in recent years. And this has been such a difficult,

00:57:23.620 we've all seen it ourselves. I think everybody

00:57:28.660 with a platform. For instance, oh, you know, Twitter or something decides to chuck off some

00:57:40.660 sort of right. One really minds all that much because they don't much like the person. And

00:57:44.820 they've said some stupid things and some wicked things over the years. And so, 1.00

00:57:48.340 everyone sort of just goes along with it. But before you know it, we're here in 2021,

00:57:54.580 where the outgoing president of the United States is now in that group as well. And I've pointed this

00:58:02.740 out for some years, but one of my favorite examples of the malevolence of the platform of Twitter was

00:58:10.180 that at the same time, it was making a huge show of its bravery in, I think, maybe it was Katie

00:58:17.540 Hopkins or something had been chucked off the platform. There were still Twitter accounts for

00:58:22.900 Lashkarataiba, the terrorist group who carried out the Mumbai massacre in 2008. Lashkarataiba were

00:58:31.220 happily tweeting away. Jack Dorsey had no problem with Lashkarataiba. So you come back to this question

00:58:37.780 is, do they not have a problem with it? Or do they not know? Are they ignorant or are they malevolent?

00:58:47.220 And I think that there's a bit of both going on. You know, when the tech companies started, 0.98

00:58:54.500 they didn't know they were going to be in the position that we are all in now. I think they didn't

00:59:00.580 know. Conversations I've had with people at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere suggest this,

00:59:06.020 that, you know, they end up with a tool that makes Gutenberg look small. And they end up having

00:59:15.780 to confront the questions that grown-ups in the free press, apart from anything else, and which,

00:59:20.900 by the way, always gets a terrible ride. Everyone loves to attack the free press, the newspapers,

00:59:26.740 proprietors, writers, editorials, and so on. But the free press had been thinking about all of the

00:59:34.100 questions that Twitter and Facebook have been fumbling over for centuries. So watching the tech

00:59:43.220 platforms struggle with this is not just like, well, originally it was just like watching the slowest kid

00:59:50.500 in the class. But increasingly it's become something else. I said somewhere that watching, watching

01:00:01.060 Twitter and Google and Facebook and YouTube talking about free speech was to steal a quote from Evelyn

01:00:09.940 War, like watching a severe vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. They just have no idea what they're

01:00:20.660 dealing with. They talk about free speech and they have no idea what this thing is. And they're all

01:00:25.620 starting from scratch. And in America, of course, after 2016, the tech platforms were flooded with

01:00:32.740 Obama and ex-Obama appointees. And then, of course, when Nick Clegg loses his seat in 2017, he goes into

01:00:41.380 the senior position of Facebook and drags a load of unemployable Lib Dems in his wake, into the

01:00:48.180 otherwise unemployable Lib Dems, I should say, in his wake. So that these people are now deciding what you

01:00:56.100 and I and everyone else in the world can know and hear and say, and they are at the very least not up

01:01:04.740 to the job, at the very least not up to the job, but in actual fact are also constantly demonstrating

01:01:13.620 themselves, as with the examples I just gave, to be malevolent actors. You've seen the tweets that the

01:01:17.700 Chinese Communist Party sent out this week about re-indoctrination of Uyghur women. I mean,

01:01:24.340 this is properly propaganda that Twitter allows to go out. And I worry, as I know both of you do,

01:01:36.340 and I know all of the people with us at the moment do, I worry deeply about this, not least because

01:01:42.260 of the highly unusual situation we are in, in regards to Corona and lockdowns and much more.

01:01:48.660 And the attempts by the platforms to, as if they're starting free speech 101 course in their first

01:01:59.220 semester at the third rate university, you know, they are, to watch that being done at this time

01:02:06.580 in our history with the amount of brewing discontent there is, is, is deeply, deeply troubling.

01:02:12.660 And Douglas, you've explained it all very, very, very, very well as is, as it, as is your style. But

01:02:18.340 why is it that more people don't understand this? Why don't people get it? I try and explain to my

01:02:24.260 friends who are very intelligent people, very good careers, you know, go to good universities and you

01:02:29.140 explain this to them. They say, well, no, one's got the right to a Twitter account. What's your

01:02:33.140 problem? He was behaving like an idiot. He got kicked off Twitter. Grow up. Yeah. 1.00

01:02:39.460 Well, a lot of people don't realise the extent to which they are being manipulated by the

01:02:42.740 platforms. And I think that that is, I think that that is something you just have to hope

01:02:48.980 person by person changes. I mean, take any of the, the, the news feeds that come up with the various

01:02:56.660 platforms like Google. Um, what, what comes up on Google news or what comes up on Yahoo news? Um,

01:03:03.700 it's the same weird outlets. It's a mixture of grievance mongering, far left wingery and hello

01:03:11.780 magazine. So people have to just sign out of that. They have to, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not having,

01:03:17.780 that's not, that's not the world I'm going to live in. I'm not going to be force fed, um, like some

01:03:24.660 chimp. I'm not going to be, I'm not going to be misled like this. I'm not going to have my life

01:03:31.380 derailed like this. Um, you know, the, who was it? The comte de Saint-Saint-Simon, uh, valet was said to

01:03:40.260 have been, uh, asked to wake him up every morning with the, with the call. What was it? Uh, uh, uh,

01:03:47.540 arise, uh, comte, uh, you have great things to achieve today. Um, I don't think everyone could be woken

01:03:53.860 up with that. We, we all have great things we can achieve in our lives. And the tech platforms

01:04:00.660 have decided to feed us PAP, total PAP, and they hope that it'll satisfy us. And unfortunately,

01:04:09.300 they've got away with it for a very long time. And they've even got away with using our rage.

01:04:14.500 Yeah. Sorry, Douglas to jump in. Uh, I want to come back to the tech issue, but we've done about an

01:04:23.620 hour and I want to get to everybody's questions. So, uh, we, uh, really appreciate your time guys.

01:04:29.220 So stick around. We'll be back in a couple of minutes and we have, uh, a thank you to say to

01:04:34.180 all the people who make the show possible. So we'll see in a couple of minutes with questions,

01:04:37.860 send yours now using a super chance on PayPal and we'll get to them straight after this.

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01:07:50.100 Welcome back, everybody. I hope you enjoyed a continuous stream of us selling you stuff.

01:07:54.660 That is it for the adverts. We're going to get Douglas back on here. We've got so many

01:07:58.580 questions to talk about. Douglas, I am ashamed to have had you watch that, but nonetheless,

01:08:03.220 it was necessary. It was a great pleasure.

01:08:08.100 Listen, before we get to, we've got a question from Hannah here, which I really appreciate and

01:08:11.700 I want to get to. I actually wanted to ask you, and it's very unusual both for us and for you to

01:08:16.420 talk about individuals, but such as his caliber, I would say, and the relevance to the conversation we

01:08:23.620 were having just before we finished the interview, that I do want to bring it up. What did you make

01:08:27.700 of Sam Harris and his quite continuous demand for Donald Trump to be banned from Twitter,

01:08:34.180 and yesterday thanking Jack Dorsey for doing that? I always imagined that Sam would be very much on

01:08:42.020 the freedom of speech side of things, so I was very surprised. What do you make of that?

01:08:46.420 Sam's a friend. His views on Trump are very well known. He's made no secret of them. I just myself

01:08:57.140 would say that I still think it's the wrong decision for Twitter. I think that it is, what's more,

01:09:06.900 pathetic timing for them. I mean, it's just, it's amazing. And I think there are no thanks that should 0.98

01:09:17.620 be given or need to be given to Jack Dorsey for dumping the person he created after he's been of

01:09:27.780 use to him and his platform and his money-making machine. Fair enough.

01:09:31.780 I just disagree with Sam on that, but in my experience, you can have an awful lot of

01:09:38.100 disagreement with people and still be friends. Absolutely. Hannah says, Douglas, do you think

01:09:44.260 the UK or the US will reach a breaking point with draconian COVID-19 measures and begin not complying

01:09:50.740 in 2021? She says, in my opinion, we can win by peaceful non-compliance when people wake up to the show

01:09:57.220 and social engineering at foot. What are your thoughts? Well, I don't agree that it's simply

01:10:04.020 social engineering. I think the virus is a real thing and people should take it seriously and

01:10:09.940 should be very careful and cautious. I think that there has been throughout the whole of this period

01:10:16.740 a very difficult balance, which we by no means have always got right. And that balance is between

01:10:23.300 public health and the economy. And the public health has been given priority consistently,

01:10:30.260 and the economy has been put into a second order of priority. And at some point,

01:10:37.700 that is, I think, with the vaccine news,

01:10:42.740 it seems to others that we get out of this and are able to sort of get back to normal life

01:10:49.700 by the summer. And that the economic hit we take is able to be managed almost certainly just by means

01:11:00.900 of inflation. And this is a sort of bad, like a bad dream within a year or so. I don't know if that'll

01:11:10.340 be the case. I've been rather surprised at how pliant, in a way, the publics have been, how

01:11:25.460 is a less loaded term they have been of the advice. But I think I said to you at the beginning of the

01:11:33.780 whole virus when we spoke, I am worried, one of which is that science is perhaps the last remaining

01:11:44.500 magisterium in our society. And that seems to be fracturing and splintering. It seems to have been

01:11:53.620 last year, as people have have questioned elements of science and particularly have been questioning

01:11:58.660 whether the scientists should have precedence over the economists, to put it in one format.

01:12:04.660 I think the I'm not one of those who think that the government is going to is so I don't think

01:12:11.460 that Boris Johnson is secretly using the virus in order to think there will be examples of that.

01:12:19.700 I think there will be politicians and public sector workers and others who'll be very happy with the

01:12:24.900 powers that have accrued to them. Governor Cuomo in New York strikes me as one such candidate,

01:12:30.260 one such character who rather enjoys the extraordinary newfound powers he has.

01:12:36.580 My deeper worry, in a way, is the question that remains after this, which is

01:12:43.060 this virus could have been an awful lot worse. It isn't as bad, I think, as we thought it was at the

01:12:49.300 very beginning. It's the third such virus that has come out of China in just over a decade.

01:12:56.180 And I don't think that there is any significant likelihood that it's not going to happen again

01:13:02.260 quite soon. Because I don't forget, sorry to harp on about this, but the Chinese Communist Party,

01:13:08.660 who I hold totally responsible for this, knew what was happening, knew about the virus and didn't

01:13:13.860 tell the rest of the world. By contrast, the British government the other week, when it thought it had found a

01:13:18.660 new strain, immediately announced it to the world, did exactly the right thing, paid a certain price.

01:13:24.100 EU countries and others shut their borders to the UK for a period. But that was the responsible

01:13:29.140 thing to do. Chinese Communist authorities didn't do that. And what's more, just again, last week,

01:13:34.180 Zhang Zhang, a female Chinese journalist, was imprisoned for five years to investigate the

01:13:39.300 sources of the virus. So they're going to keep doing that. So if we've had the year we've just had,

01:13:46.820 what is the chance that it isn't going to happen again quite soon? And the precedent has now been

01:13:51.220 set that once a virus that is deadly to a certain portion of people, albeit not to the vast majority

01:14:00.260 of people, what are the chances that the next time any virus comes out, we aren't going to have the

01:14:05.700 cause to do this all again. This is why I'm not a sceptic on it. I am deeply troubled by the lack of

01:14:16.100 attention to the fact that the economy cannot cope with being put through strictures like this again

01:14:23.860 and again. We've immiserated whole sectors of the economy. And my concern is that we have set a precedent,

01:14:30.900 which means the next time that there is something like this, we'll do it again. And we can't afford

01:14:35.060 to. And at some point, the economics simply assert themselves.

01:14:39.460 And Douglas, that rather nicely leads us on to a question with Feinstein. You've answered two of

01:14:44.580 the questions. But the third part of their question was, do you think China will be held accountable for

01:14:50.900 this? No, not at all. No, not at all. Excellent. I mean, with our friends in Australia and the

01:15:01.380 Australian government asking for an official inquiry into the source of the virus some months ago,

01:15:07.300 immediately led to the most insulting strictures from the Chinese authorities, immediate

01:15:14.740 backlash from the Chinese government investment in Australia and more. We've seen, we saw that in the

01:15:24.420 UK. We saw that in the UK, what, seven, eight years ago in the Dalai Lama affair. The David Cameron

01:15:30.180 government, David Cameron met the Dalai Lama, pissed off the Chinese authorities, obviously, by doing so.

01:15:38.020 China meetings to do with the UK government. And within a certain number of months, I think it was

01:15:43.700 probably about six months or so they held out. The British government apologised to Beijing

01:15:48.260 and promised never to meet the Dalai Lama again. Now, what that shows at a governmental level

01:15:55.700 is what we also see at the tech level. Sorry to return to that. But again, Google will do things to us

01:16:04.340 that it won't do to China. Facebook and Twitter have standards they apply to Americans that they do not

01:16:12.820 apply to totalitarian regimes. So we know what they can get away with, because we know the people in

01:16:22.500 Silicon Valley who have become rich and intend to cash out before the consequences of this become

01:16:29.220 clearer. And they have, I think that they should be held responsible. Of course, I think the Chinese 1.00

01:16:36.500 authorities should be held responsible. Of course, I think we should, we should find out

01:16:39.860 what happened and how this happened and prevent it from happening again. But I think there's zero

01:16:45.060 likelihood of it happening, because too many people have decided that although the long term threat 0.99

01:16:53.380 has always been Chinese dominance, that it's worth sucking on that teat for a little while 1.00

01:17:02.180 and seeing yourself through. And that is some nation's views, some government's views, and that is some 0.99

01:17:10.180 individual's views and some company's views. And anyone who wants to learn more about this, I very strongly

01:17:21.380 recommend about what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing in recent decades internationally as well as nationally.

01:17:27.700 It's not, it's a very, very rigorous scholarly and factual book. Douglas, we had a big tech censorship moment there, where we lost you for a second, just as you made the recommendation. What is it that you recommend before I'm going to ask you?

01:17:38.180 It's called The Hidden Hand. And it's on the CCP's actions in recent years.

01:17:46.500 Let me ask you this. It's a very interesting question to me, because I think if you'd asked me this 10 years ago, I would have laughed at even the mere question being posed. But as you and I have discussed in the past, such is the nature of the pipeline of ideas from the United States to the rest of the West, that I actually think this question is becoming quite relevant, which is the nature of the pipeline of ideas from the United States to the rest of the West.

01:18:06.180 And I think this question is becoming quite relevant, which is Oli, who says, is the US cultural influence in the West a positive or a negative?

01:18:15.380 You know, that's very interesting you say that, Constantine. I think my own view on that has probably changed in recent years as well.

01:18:21.620 Well, the thing is that no nation's exports remain the same, and that includes no nation's cultural exports.

01:18:32.500 Right.

01:18:32.620 If you said we could do with more French culture, you would have to say, well, which aspects exactly are you talking about?

01:18:41.920 I can think of an awful lot of good ones, and I can think of a few bad ones.

01:18:44.680 I don't want the world's films to look a lot more like French cinema, which I find fairly unwatchable myself.

01:18:51.780 But there are vast aspects of French culture, more around the world, and to be able to absorb more myself.

01:19:01.620 I think it's the same with American culture.

01:19:03.040 I think there are periods, have been periods historically, where American culture has given an enormous amount to the world.

01:19:08.100 I think that that has stopped.

01:19:13.760 I think the positive part, and I think we've been on to the negative for some time now.

01:19:21.220 And the most negative, I wrote this in the New York Post, actually, last year, the Twitter censored New York Post.

01:19:30.760 I said, you know, I, among others, I think I'm beginning to resent the exporting of America's culture wars to my own country.

01:19:38.800 I deeply resent seeing these sort of fake Black Panther figures in Britain sort of saying, you know, F the police, as if they're some gangster from the hood in Brooklyn.

01:19:53.160 They all grew up in Wimbledon.

01:19:54.660 You know, these, these, these, these, these cultural exports from America are really, have been very troubling and unpleasant for some time. 0.99

01:20:05.220 I could do without that.

01:20:07.620 But obviously, again, I mean, it comes back to which bits of the culture.

01:20:12.820 Obviously, there remain good things.

01:20:14.700 I think that it does remain one of the most extraordinary questions.

01:20:20.100 And this is a very conservative point to make, but it does remain one of the extraordinary questions of our era, that the most important power in the world, the globally dominant culture, should have produced so relatively little of high quality, I think, is an obvious question.

01:20:43.980 I mean, an art market that is dominated by Jeff Koons, for instance, would seem to me to demonstrate a significant degree of cultural degeneration.

01:20:56.260 I think you can say exactly the same thing in American universities.

01:21:02.880 So significant aspects of American culture, I think you would have to say, have seriously degenerated in our own lifetimes.

01:21:10.800 But I'm never, I'm never willing to write the whole thing off.

01:21:17.500 Just as I was, every culture, it seems to me, has something interesting to give.

01:21:22.860 It's what you select and what you're fed is what matters.

01:21:28.600 This is from Dennis Moore.

01:21:29.960 Douglas, regardless or not of fraud, the changes to the election laws were of such magnitude that don't you agree we now have a democratic crisis?

01:21:40.800 Well, I think I come back to what I said before.

01:21:44.160 Sorry to repeat myself, but if that is the case, then it must be proved.

01:21:51.560 And I, believe me, my inbox has had enough people sending me what they regard as being comprehensive evidence of electoral fraud in the US.

01:22:05.220 Yes, I simply, I could immerse myself in the whole thing.

01:22:10.760 I could do what a lot of people do and cherry pick small circumstances and extrapolate them out onto a national level.

01:22:17.260 I'm just not willing to do that.

01:22:18.980 I am willing to trust the Supreme Court and other bodies in the United States.

01:22:26.460 And personally, as I say, again, I reiterate, anyone who does care about American democracy should certainly make sure that it is not the case next time, that the election is disputable.

01:22:44.500 Which is what happened after Florida, by the way, in 2000.

01:22:47.380 They realized there was a big problem and looked into it.

01:22:50.160 It did happen.

01:22:50.880 Exactly.

01:22:51.880 And of course, there were many people who didn't believe that George W. Bush was a legitimate president until the 2004 election, and some not even then.

01:23:01.960 And in fact, George W. Bush only sort of became, in my recollection, only became sort of at all accepted as a president around the time of 9-11, when nations had a moment of coming together.

01:23:15.900 Yeah, absolutely.

01:23:18.060 And we've talked about that earlier in the interview.

01:23:20.320 So again, if people want to look at that particular aspect of the conversation, they can go back.

01:23:25.540 Donald Jones is asking you to make a prediction about the future, which I know you love doing, Douglas.

01:23:32.180 He says, what are the prospects that the Anglosphere remains intact and later re-emerges against the wokery and a triumph for China? 0.99

01:23:40.540 Here's hoping, he says.

01:23:41.640 Well, I think it's possible.

01:23:44.960 I think everything is possible.

01:23:46.460 I mean, you know, as I'm rather fond of saying, I don't like predicting the future, because if we'd been speaking one year ago, I don't think any of us would have predicted the circumstances we would be in 2020.

01:23:59.380 And if you tried to predict what's happening now, people would have put you in a mental institution and probably would have been quite right to do so.

01:24:05.540 Absolutely.

01:24:06.020 Absolutely.

01:24:06.940 If we'd been speaking in January of last year and you said, oh, well, almost everybody will spend the year forced to remain in their houses and be celibate if they're not in a relationship, you know, that would be a tricky one to believe.

01:24:20.980 You would regard the person saying that as being in the fruitcake brigade.

01:24:24.440 Yeah.

01:24:25.460 So, and I take from that the necessity of a certain humility about predicting in the course of events.

01:24:34.620 And I certainly, obviously, as your question asks, I certainly hope that people are able to, first of all, resist the totalitarianism of our time, wherever it comes from, whether it comes from the right or from the left, whether it comes from tech platforms or, you know, anti-democratic governments.

01:25:03.220 Obviously, I hope people will resist that and will do everything I could urge them to do so.

01:25:10.040 I think that there is a particular problem with what I would describe as the disentanglement with China, which is a very big problem.

01:25:19.160 And as I said recently, I'm particularly worried because China is the only country that came out of 2020 with growth figures reported.

01:25:25.860 I think they reported growth of, I mean, you can never really believe them, but 1.8, 2.3% growth or something in 2020.

01:25:33.440 Everyone else's economy tanked in that year.

01:25:35.700 So I'm worried about the fact that China might, well, does find itself in 2021 in a buyer's market.

01:25:41.200 And this is a temptation that all our governments will have and many companies will have to get out of this, which is to basically sell to China who can buy rock bottom prices.

01:25:52.720 And I just strongly urge everyone absolutely not to allow us to fall into that situation.

01:26:02.160 It is an unfashionable thing to say, but nevertheless still true, that the Anglosphere has given the world an unprecedented amount.

01:26:13.940 I make no apology for saying that I think it's demonstrable, provable, and I think it would be to the world's detriment if the motif continued that somehow the Anglosphere was nothing other than a sort of organ of racism and colonialism and all of the rest of the rewriting that everyone has done. 0.79

01:26:37.100 But unfortunately, for all of us, a generation of people, arguably, certainly a portion of a generation, have been persuaded that the only bad things that have ever happened in history have come from dead white men.

01:26:50.540 And that if, for instance, the Chinese had discovered America and decided to stay, that America would have had a flowering relationship between the incoming Chinese and the indigenous Americans. 0.55

01:27:07.100 And that they would have got on with huge equanimity and the presentation of all slavery as if it was only something that white men engaged in and was unheard of in Africa.

01:27:20.980 And much more means that actually there is a deep hostility in our time to the notion of the West, to the notion that the English-speaking countries gave the world extraordinarily important inheritances.

01:27:35.300 And I think that there is a total failure at having a reasonable estimation or even a fair estimation of the pluses and minuses of that whole tradition, a tradition I would like to hold on to.

01:27:53.740 And many people in our time would like to burn down, but I'm just not among them.

01:27:57.580 And David has asked, is part of the problem due to people losing faith in the nation's establishments and the political process?

01:28:07.040 Are loyalties becoming more personal and tribal?

01:28:11.380 Yes, that's, well, clearly in America this is the case, and I think it's the case in most of the other democracies as well.

01:28:23.800 We certainly see it in the UK, failure of trust in institutions.

01:28:28.680 The problem is, is that, again, people lament the failure of trust in institutions, and then the institutions behave in a way that makes it perfectly obvious why you should distrust them.

01:28:40.700 I mean, there have been, look at very basic arguments over the last year.

01:28:47.260 Look at the World Health Organization.

01:28:49.920 We might have, we might have really hoped that the World Health Organization would do what it says on the tin, would do what it says in the name, that it would stand above politics, that it wouldn't be able to be infiltrated, used, utilized, politicized by China, among others.

01:29:08.420 But the more you look into it, the clearer it is that the World Health Organization is not what it says it is.

01:29:16.540 And the problem is that that happens in institution after institution.

01:29:21.620 And I do think that the problem of decrying the lack of belief in institutions is that, to a great extent, the public should have what I would simply describe as a skepticism of institutions.

01:29:34.280 The problem is when they say distrust.

01:29:39.660 And then, you know, we do find ourselves all adrift.

01:29:43.480 A very fine definition of how a society like Britain thrives is that it thrives on institutions that reflect the people, and that the people are reflected back to themselves within the institutions.

01:29:58.420 And that the courts, and the courts, and the education system, and the law, and parliament, and everything else is in this reciprocal arrangement, a reflective arrangement.

01:30:10.300 And, of course, if one lets down the other, then that's also reciprocated.

01:30:15.420 I think there's an enormous task to do in the next generation of actually legitimately building up trust of people in institutions, but not just because they're institutions, but building up the trust because the institutions are deserving of the trust.

01:30:35.880 I mean, it's not enough to say, you know, people don't trust the media if the media doesn't earn trust.

01:30:41.640 It's not enough to say people don't trust the tech platforms if the tech platforms don't earn trust.

01:30:47.120 So it's an enormous job.

01:30:49.260 But I think it has to be done because, or attempted at every level, because without it, we are all going to be fumbling in our solitudes through totally different paths with totally different information.

01:31:05.880 And I fear we will not be able to speak across these divides.

01:31:13.340 It will be what I described earlier in the American case on international scale.

01:31:18.460 Douglas, speaking of divides, changing tack radically here, and I can't tell you why I have to ask you this question, but I do.

01:31:25.000 One of the biggest issues that's been dividing our chat here at Trigonometry for the last few days is what is your favorite type of biscuit?

01:31:31.560 I hope I didn't sound too appreciative.

01:31:37.060 I didn't really like biscuits.

01:31:38.520 I mean, I...

01:31:39.020 Yes!

01:31:39.760 Douglas is one of ours.

01:31:41.700 Perfect.

01:31:42.180 Douglas, you're on my side in this debate.

01:31:44.840 I'm out.

01:31:45.660 You're out.

01:31:46.340 Good.

01:31:47.320 I'm out.

01:31:47.940 I can't take part in this.

01:31:49.160 We'll get Douglas to co-host this.

01:31:50.660 What do you mean he don't like biscuits?

01:31:51.700 He doesn't like biscuits because he's a real man like me.

01:31:54.220 Now, Douglas, a more serious question.

01:31:57.400 Richard says, as a fellow Old Etonian, what are your thoughts on the Will Nolan situation and promises to decolonize the curriculum?

01:32:05.100 I think to decolonize the curriculum we've covered pretty solidly already.

01:32:09.060 Do you think these moves are being driven by Simon Henderson, or is there evidence of a broader problem at the college?

01:32:17.240 Golly, this is kind of inside baseball, as they say, in America for some people.

01:32:20.860 Yeah, I was very lucky to be there and regard it as having given me an awful lot and got me started in many ways.

01:32:39.800 School could be as good.

01:32:41.640 And I suppose this case, I mean, I suppose he gave a speech where as far as I could see what he said, first of all, he gave it in a series which was aimed at provoking the students to think differently about issues of the day.

01:33:04.680 As I see it, what Will Nolan did was to challenge the presiding claims about the one of the era, which is that all sex differences can be attributed to societal factors.

01:33:26.420 He, I think, as far as I could see in his speech, pushed back against that and said, no, they're also biological factors, you know, as well.

01:33:35.640 However much Sam Smith wants to be a mummy, he won't be, which is not an example.

01:33:41.960 Will Nolan gave, that's one of my favorites.

01:33:43.820 He seemed to be just pushing back against this rather silly, childish claim of the day that everything in sex differences has to do with societal factors. 0.99

01:33:53.960 And it was promptly from, I think it's ridiculous, pathetic, much to Eaton's disgrace. 0.92

01:34:03.800 I think that, you know, it was always my view at the beginning of the woke thing, but what would happen would be that it would be something which would be basically imbibed by second and third rate institutions. 0.90

01:34:18.240 That is, that the sort of, the institutions would go for this because it was an easy thing to do and that the cleverer ones, the smarter ones, would not play these games.

01:34:35.720 And that, I was wrong on that, you know, as Cambridge University and other places have shown.

01:34:40.180 They, they, they, they, they're able, the top, what used to be the top institutions are capable of playing these silly games as well.

01:34:48.820 I don't think there's, I think, I don't know if I've stated, I think any educational institution loses its vitality.

01:34:58.180 Here, and discuss, and more importantly, it significantly loses its vitality when it doesn't allow things that are true to be said.

01:35:12.560 And that's what seems to me to be the case with, with, with Eaton.

01:35:16.720 Oh, Douglas, I'll put it to you that I, so that you say that it's, you know, it's a question of intelligence.

01:35:23.360 For me, it's something more fundamental than that.

01:35:26.160 Isn't it a question of character?

01:35:28.180 To stand up and say, I disagree, you are wrong, and you are objectively wrong.

01:35:33.480 But for some reason, we just have institution after institution falling to this nonsense.

01:35:39.980 And to piggyback on that, Alice Nye just literally just asked a question saying, 0.94

01:35:43.900 what is the number one thing that you recommend to people who are concerned about these issues,

01:35:48.940 you know, and who want to support the ability for free speech and free discussion and free exchange of ideas?

01:35:54.780 How do people stand up if they see what's happening?

01:35:59.200 Well, this is a very important question, and it's partly a tactical one as well as a moral one.

01:36:04.960 I do think in the UK, we have a particular part of a problem, which is that our elite institutions are in some way ashamed of themselves.

01:36:20.260 They're in some way embarrassed by themselves.

01:36:24.620 They've spent some years trying not to be, but you see it in things like the attempts at Cambridge University, Edinburgh University and elsewhere to audit themselves and find out whether they ever benefited from slavery, for instance.

01:36:39.300 It seems to me that all of these things start to nibble away at their own legitimacy.

01:36:50.000 Maybe when some of these institutions were founded in the 15th and 16th centuries, for instance,

01:36:56.820 maybe their founders didn't have exactly 21st century views on certain things.

01:37:03.100 How amazing would that be?

01:37:04.420 And having done that, there then becomes this endless legitimacy problem.

01:37:12.020 I see where it comes from.

01:37:16.700 I simply don't share it.

01:37:18.280 I think that I'm slightly bemused that within my own lifetime, almost every elite institution has become embarrassed of its elitism.

01:37:32.480 Because, I mean, for instance, the great universities and the great schools are meant to be great institutions and are meant to argue for themselves on that basis.

01:37:45.540 Not that they are exactly like everything else, but that they are not.

01:37:49.860 And, of course, when you come into the issue of private schooling in the UK, there's a particular set of landmines you're treading on.

01:37:58.800 But, as I say, I think you see the same thing in the universities.

01:38:02.380 I think you see the same thing in vast ways of the public sector.

01:38:07.340 You see it in the churches.

01:38:08.520 They seem to be embarrassed of their own inheritance.

01:38:14.040 And I would like to see people encouraged out of that.

01:38:19.260 And they obviously can be because they were encouraged into it.

01:38:23.060 It didn't come about naturally.

01:38:25.760 It came about because they were pushed into that direction to be embarrassed of their past, to be embarrassed of being good.

01:38:32.520 And as for how people can resist it, I mean, I have a very straightforward one that you may have heard me say before, which is just begin by standing up for your friends.

01:38:47.280 That's just the very first one.

01:38:48.900 When it happens to somebody close to you, when somebody close to you is misrepresented, stand up for them.

01:38:55.060 I don't know what the situation is among other teachers at Eton with the Will-No-Wand affair.

01:38:59.860 I'd like to think that lots of other teachers made their voices heard about this.

01:39:05.360 Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn't.

01:39:06.800 I don't know enough about it, actually, to my shame.

01:39:09.080 But I know, for instance, with Brett, with Brett Weinstein, I know that no colleague of his at Evergreen stood up for him when he and his wife were introduced.

01:39:20.140 And I think that one of the things we are all struggling with at the moment is that it comes back to the tech conversation.

01:39:27.820 There are versions of ourselves that have been put out online by people that are totally misrepresenting.

01:39:34.980 I think that if you went to any of our, all of these pages like Wikipedia and these awful, wicked, money-making companies that pretend to be so virtuous,

01:39:44.400 if you went to any of our pages, you'd find that they're total misrepresentations of us, deeply misrepresent our lives.

01:39:50.340 And these companies get away with it.

01:39:52.400 And they monetize on the back of it and ask you to give them money to misrepresent you.

01:39:57.860 And I think that in every little way possible, people should resist this wrong interpretation of people that is going on all the time around us.

01:40:10.500 That's just one way.

01:40:11.260 But there's, as I say, it begins with standing up for your friends.

01:40:14.480 Never let the mob take one of your mates out.

01:40:17.500 And this is a question from Thomas Sheldon.

01:40:20.160 How do you think it is that Labour, if elected, would fight against CRT, cancel culture and other symptoms of woke ideology?

01:40:29.900 How much do you think Keir Starmer gets it on these issues?

01:40:34.660 I just don't know.

01:40:38.000 I don't know Keir Starmer.

01:40:38.880 I've never met him.

01:40:39.860 And my observation is that he would simply do whatever was politically expedient.

01:40:43.440 If he thought that he would win some political points by imbibing vast amounts of critical race theory, he'd do it.

01:40:52.660 If he thought not, he probably wouldn't either.

01:40:54.780 He would obviously tend towards favoring that sort of ideology.

01:41:00.180 I mean, he obviously was one of those politicians in the summer of last year who thought that he needed to so-called take the knee.

01:41:08.000 So he obviously favors that sort of gesture politics.

01:41:13.180 But I think, well, he certainly doesn't have any likelihood of being in office for at least four years.

01:41:17.920 So it's sort of a long way down the road question.

01:41:22.800 Douglas, we'll do another 10 minutes if that's good with you.

01:41:26.260 Yeah.

01:41:26.540 Yeah.

01:41:26.960 We have a question from our regular viewers called Akil Bryan.

01:41:30.340 He says, what do you think the potential effects of a Trump-owned social media platform might be?

01:41:35.160 And this is something that has been touted by very serious people that we know personally who understand some of these things.

01:41:40.960 So it's not completely outside of the realms of possibility.

01:41:45.060 Do you agree that anything of that nature would deepen polarisation?

01:41:50.360 Well, obviously it would.

01:41:52.680 I think it is quite likely.

01:41:57.100 People were talking about it in D.C. in December.

01:42:03.600 Before, and I see it as being one of the things that obvious things that Trump would do.

01:42:07.760 And the fact that Fox and Trump sort of fell out before the election made there be a larger, more obvious monetisation opportunity for Trump.

01:42:22.560 And I certainly worried in recent months that what Trump has been doing in denying that he lost the election is building the base for Trump TV.

01:42:33.560 And I think, I think that's very likely to be what he does.

01:42:41.340 Of counter would be, but the polarisation is already there.

01:42:44.840 I mean, and I just see no, in America, I see no desire on either side to change that.

01:42:54.280 Because both sides can point to the other and say, look what they've done.

01:42:59.080 Look what they've done to us.

01:43:00.840 And as I say, I go back to the thing I said at the beginning.

01:43:03.000 And let's make them suffer. 0.67

01:43:05.040 Let's own the libs. 0.96

01:43:07.300 Let's, you know, that.

01:43:09.600 That instinct.

01:43:11.280 And so it's, in a way, as I say, it's no good worrying about the polarisation.

01:43:15.860 The polarisation is here.

01:43:17.100 The question is how to, how to, how to ever begin to, to heal it.

01:43:24.700 And we have a question from Math Art, who says, the West has real problems with a lack of quality politicians.

01:43:31.940 Especially when we have a media that is deeply interested in digging up anything and everything from a person's history to beat them with.

01:43:41.200 How can we fix this?

01:43:43.000 Well, it's true that we don't have the best kind of politicians.

01:43:50.200 We do have some good ones.

01:43:51.920 I'm, you know, I think it's very easy to beat up on politicians.

01:43:57.120 But there are a lot of people in public life in all of our countries who have actually sacrificed a fair amount to do what they think is the right thing.

01:44:07.500 And that's the case across the left and right.

01:44:09.520 And so I'm by no means cynical about everybody.

01:44:13.980 But I do think we have had a calibre of a problem.

01:44:18.640 And there are, as your question asked, there are a number of reasons for that.

01:44:22.700 An unpopular one to say is that people will take what is, for some of them, a financial hit by entering politics.

01:44:32.000 And that hit, and this seems ridiculous to most people, of course, because the salary of an MP is several times that of the average salary of the general population.

01:44:41.120 But the question for some people would be, is that hit, as it were, worth it for what you will be put through?

01:44:50.400 And I'm, again, I go back to this thing.

01:44:55.220 I'm not for waiting for the perfect person.

01:44:57.860 You know, I think to a great extent, the public have to, we have to change our own anticipations of what we expect from politicians.

01:45:07.780 I am, I don't, I don't like the assumption that a politician has to be a saint.

01:45:13.920 Or Donald Trump, you might say.

01:45:19.380 I mean, in a way, if you, if you, if you, if you, it's that old thing, if you, in the same way as if you don't allow people to speak, you'll allow the person who gets away with saying anything.

01:45:30.720 In the same way, perhaps, you know, you over interrogate people's lives and you get the person who just beyond any, any shame.

01:45:40.100 Again, might be something we've seen recently.

01:45:44.420 I would like there to be just a more honest conversation about a whole set of things that we expect from our politicians.

01:45:52.600 The media can be cruel.

01:45:54.240 I'm part of the media, so I know.

01:45:58.040 And some of it is warranted and some is not.

01:46:00.740 I do find it strange, however.

01:46:02.740 I don't want to sound like a broken record on this, but I do find it strange that there hasn't been more interrogation of people with real power in our time.

01:46:10.100 You know, if Jack Dorsey were a backbench Labour MP, you know, he would have had hell by now.

01:46:22.740 Personally, I would like to see there being, as I say, a greater interrogation of the people with serious power in our time.

01:46:29.660 Again, sorry to sound like a broken record.

01:46:33.100 You know, it turned out, as Constantine said, you know, it was it was it was Twitter that was king this week.

01:46:39.720 It was Twitter that could decide they would not platform the United States of America's president.

01:46:45.620 And in that scenario, it is Twitter that is the king and therefore the one that should be interrogated.

01:46:52.560 And when Google decides not to host Parler, it's it's Google that needs to be interrogated.

01:47:00.140 And I think that that desire to interrogate people in public life, we've to a great extent.

01:47:07.160 And I say this is a sort of failing of the media have to a great extent being focused on people who haven't really had much of the power.

01:47:13.160 I mean, look at the Senate hearings with the social media company executives.

01:47:19.460 I mean, watch any of them who has the power there. 0.91

01:47:22.760 But these people who fly in from Silicon Valley perfectly, perfectly coach and turn off their microphone, turn it on again with perfect poise and perfectly evade every perfectly ignorant question.

01:47:37.240 You know, that those are the people jetting in to pretend that they're involved in the democratic process and deigning to appear before before the Senate.

01:47:48.900 Those are the people with the real power in our time.

01:47:51.360 And, you know, and add to that, Douglas, add to that the fact that we've seen it with the Biden incoming Biden administration.

01:47:57.780 But it's true of senators as well.

01:48:00.520 Joe Biden's cabinet is packed of Silicon Valley, exactly with Silicon Valley executives.

01:48:07.360 The big tech companies give huge donations and campaign contributions to both parties.

01:48:13.480 And add to that the point that you made much more elegantly than I could about the ignorance of the people who are asking the questions and the huge power of the people answering them.

01:48:22.340 And it's a complete, it's a crazy thing that offers absolutely no recourse.

01:48:29.000 Absolutely.

01:48:29.540 I mean, let me give you a quick example.

01:48:30.720 But this is a very dangerous point for me to make, given that I'm an author and that Amazon is one of the very few things

01:48:36.240 that can sell books this year.

01:48:39.340 But I clicked on Amazon's page recently and immediately up comes an ad about how much charity money they've donated that year or recently.

01:48:48.980 Amazon has just donated X millions of pounds.

01:48:53.020 How about paying some bloody tax then?

01:48:55.820 And how about that?

01:48:59.080 You know, I mean, and case of case of Google, all of them, they all boast to us.

01:49:04.700 And as I say, feed us this path and hope that we won't notice the other things they're doing.

01:49:12.240 And sorry, I mean, we're a long way away from the question.

01:49:15.780 But I really do feel that this all wraps up into the same problem, which is that, you know, people don't go into politics.

01:49:26.860 Good people also don't go into politics because they recognize to some extent that's not where it is.

01:49:32.140 I mean, that's a big worry, isn't it?

01:49:34.060 Because, of course, it is where it is in certain ways.

01:49:36.800 But at the same time, can you honestly say that that an average MP has very much power compared to one censor in Silicon Valley?

01:49:49.440 No, absolutely not.

01:49:52.080 Hannah 89 has asked AOC telling her followers to put Trump enablers on which hunt lists cause a ripple,

01:50:00.160 as well as in regard to the worry about the left getting power.

01:50:04.460 Thoughts?

01:50:04.940 I mean, I see AOC as a sort of perfect creation of the Trumpists.

01:50:11.580 I mean, she's almost perfectly made by any Trump supporter.

01:50:17.180 She does everything in exactly the right order to whip up a rage on the right. 1.00

01:50:22.920 She clearly enjoys it.

01:50:24.140 She's got a sort of troll-like instinct.

01:50:27.820 I'm worried about, always, that people like her do actually end up having an over-exaggerated clout that is given to them by people who don't like them. 0.74

01:50:39.980 But, yes, I mean, she's one of quite a number of people who've tried this sort of stuff.

01:50:46.260 It's been going on in recent days.

01:50:47.620 I'm always interested in the way in which people want to attribute blame to blame to be held accountable for, I don't know, for instance, what happened on the 6th of January.

01:51:07.660 You know, say, okay, but if you play by those rules, if you play by those rules, then you've got to do the same thing in reverse.

01:51:17.400 You've got to do the mirror.

01:51:18.300 You've got to blame everybody on the other side for the riots that went on for weeks last year.

01:51:26.220 And I don't think any reasonable person could blame all of the Democrats for the rioting that went on in city after city last year. 0.67

01:51:36.360 And so I think, yes, it's – but AOC and others are – I mean, they're reprehensible, you know, very ugly characters.

01:51:48.300 Who – oh, I mean, gosh, if the gloves were off, you know what people like her would do, don't you? 1.00

01:51:57.300 Right.

01:51:57.560 In every stage in history, there have been people like her.

01:52:01.800 Look, there's somebody I won't name, but there's a British commentator of the left who did it before the last election.

01:52:10.080 Somebody, again, only given a platform, not because she's done any work, but because she's a loud mouth, 0.99

01:52:14.860 who's got a social media following by saying stupid things on programs. 0.97

01:52:19.540 But this left-wing commentator in the UK before the last election when she was hoping Jeremy Corbyn would get in, 0.99

01:52:24.780 at one point, you know, tweeted a famous Jewish businessman in the UK saying,

01:52:29.220 I can't wait to expropriate your stuff.

01:52:33.860 And you just – you think, okay, we're very lucky we live in the society we do,

01:52:39.980 rather than the society you'd rather like us to live in.

01:52:43.440 And I think the same when people like AOC talk about getting lists together of their opponents.

01:52:50.040 I think the same thing.

01:52:50.980 I think – I'm very glad we – I'm very glad America is in a better – in a better state than it might be,

01:52:57.460 so that your weird, totalitarian, pornography, violence fantasies can't be seen through,

01:53:07.480 can't be acted upon.

01:53:09.660 Douglas, we'll take one final question.

01:53:11.940 This is actually for all three of us, so how about Francis and I answer it first,

01:53:15.020 and we'll leave you.

01:53:15.400 It's not another biscuit one, is it?

01:53:17.540 No, no, Douglas, I can tell you the biscuit issue has been settled forever.

01:53:23.120 You are on my side, I win, everyone in the cap loses, Francis loses,

01:53:28.600 there was no fraud in this election, I win.

01:53:32.620 So the question is –

01:53:35.220 Right, he's picked this question for me because this person has a Sri Lankan name,

01:53:40.080 therefore it's rather long, impossible to pronounce,

01:53:42.700 and with my South London tones, I will be outed as a racist when I mispronounce it.

01:53:47.280 So apologies at the start.

01:53:49.240 And this is from Anirudh, I think it is.

01:53:54.100 Krishna Kumar, I'll do the surname with you.

01:53:56.580 Right, okay, you've got the easy one.

01:53:57.980 So question for all three.

01:53:59.920 What can anti-woke leftists do to recover their respectability

01:54:03.860 as an intellectual slash political force?

01:54:07.800 And the second part to the question is what about liberals?

01:54:10.620 Now the liberal thing is a bit confusing given how differently it's used in America

01:54:14.240 and in the UK.

01:54:14.940 But we do have an anti-woke leftist right here, right now.

01:54:19.300 What does he say to this question?

01:54:21.520 I think always when dealing with this is to be honest, to be true,

01:54:27.940 and to be – never, never, ever resort to the tactics of the person attacking you.

01:54:34.780 As difficult as it may seem, and you have brought this up yourself, Douglas,

01:54:37.760 is to try and meet every one of their attacks with calmness, with truth,

01:54:44.520 and also as well wherever possible to use facts.

01:54:47.820 And always accept as well that their reaction is a result of their own character

01:54:53.820 and it's nothing to do with you.

01:54:56.180 A lot of the times people, when somebody reacts, they think, well, what did I do?

01:55:00.100 But all you can really control in these situations are your own actions.

01:55:04.280 So that is where I would go with it.

01:55:06.060 I think you have to destroy them with facts and logic.

01:55:08.720 No.

01:55:10.100 You know, what I think you have to do if you oppose the woke stuff

01:55:13.540 and you are on the left, as I was, I'm very much in the centre now,

01:55:16.720 but I think what you have to do is you have to speak your mind

01:55:20.280 and know that that encourages other people to do the same.

01:55:24.240 I think that's something that we always massively underestimate.

01:55:26.740 The amount of permission we give other people by expressing our thoughts on something.

01:55:32.400 I have found that with many, many people where I've seen somebody make a comment,

01:55:36.480 and Douglas would have been one of these people for me in the past,

01:55:39.300 but many others say, you know what, I don't agree with this.

01:55:41.900 And I go, oh, wait, it's actually okay to disagree with this.

01:55:45.800 This person that I like and respect, with whom I agree on many issues,

01:55:49.700 is speaking up for this thing.

01:55:51.160 So I think for everybody who's able to, who is in the position to speak up

01:55:55.920 without losing their job, et cetera, I think by speaking,

01:55:59.920 you give other people inspiration to do the same.

01:56:02.280 And that's something you should never underestimate.

01:56:05.500 Douglas, over to you for the final word.

01:56:07.260 Yeah, no, I agree with what you just said.

01:56:10.720 I'd add one other thing, which is, I mean, the political left in the West

01:56:19.180 has had a very distinguished history, as the political right has.

01:56:24.740 It's very easy to look only at the worst people, but one should also look at the best.

01:56:32.300 And the best people on the political left, for instance, in the communist era,

01:56:37.900 the anti-communist left were absolutely crucial to the anti-communist case in the West.

01:56:45.340 They probably couldn't have done it on their own, but they were absolutely vital to it.

01:56:50.340 And I suspect that today an enormous amount of the good work,

01:56:56.760 the necessary work that will need to be done, the questioner refers to,

01:57:00.440 will be done on the left and will be people speaking to people I can't reach

01:57:06.820 who will listen to them because they are of the same political tribe.

01:57:12.380 I think that for all of us, by the way,

01:57:16.340 a great amount could be done if we just were more honest about the nature of

01:57:21.100 certain problems we need to address in our societies.

01:57:25.020 As you know, I've quite often in the past said that what tends to happen

01:57:33.280 is we get into discussions where there is, as it were, a good thing to say

01:57:36.800 and a bad thing to say, a thing you say to look good

01:57:40.600 and a thing that you would only say if you were reprehensible and bad.

01:57:43.840 And on issue after issue that I've written about in my life,

01:57:46.160 I've kept coming across this.

01:57:48.540 And I've kept thinking, why can't we have the debate?

01:57:53.020 A debate we all actually know.

01:57:55.240 I mean, I literally think of it in television terms

01:57:57.160 as being the discussion you do have in the green room

01:58:00.820 or can have in the green room but never have on air

01:58:04.460 because you go on air and the BBC or Sky or whatever interviewer plays the game

01:58:10.900 and the game runs.

01:58:15.060 And then afterwards you have a bit of the discussion you should have had.

01:58:18.640 And the reason this happens is because we don't concede what the real discussion is.

01:58:27.480 And can I just very quickly, I'm conscious of the time,

01:58:29.300 but I'll quickly give you a second.

01:58:30.400 The reason that we said last question is we were keen not to take up too much of your time.

01:58:36.240 But actually, before you go to where you were going to go,

01:58:38.460 I wanted just to remind you because I think I heard you once tell a story

01:58:42.500 of this very thing where you were on a programme debating an MP who,

01:58:49.900 do you know the one I'm talking about?

01:58:52.260 I've debated too many MPs.

01:58:54.060 I'm not trying to think of which case.

01:58:56.020 I think it was in the context of the strange death of Europe.

01:58:59.780 And you were debating the issue of Islam, I think.

01:59:03.840 And then when you went back into the green room,

01:59:06.340 an MP who'd been viciously critical of you on screen said,

01:59:11.160 Douglas, we're all with you.

01:59:12.700 Am I remembering that correctly?

01:59:14.560 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:59:15.200 It was a Labour MP.

01:59:16.700 That's right.

01:59:17.120 I was on a programme with my friend Amir Teheri.

01:59:19.940 And the MP spent all the time on air decrying my Iranian friend Amir and I 0.65

01:59:26.600 as racist, fascists. 0.85

01:59:29.500 And, yeah, off air was laudatory. 0.99

01:59:35.260 Yes, that's right.

01:59:36.980 That was an example of what you're talking about, which is why.

01:59:39.260 Yes, but, yes, because the thing is, is that it's, I mean, I said this to the immigration 0.77

01:59:45.540 debate.

01:59:46.580 The debate about immigration is never honest.

01:59:50.920 Because for some reason, the system can't allow the honest conversation you need.

01:59:57.540 And as I said in the strange death of Europe, the honest conversation is,

02:00:01.660 it's a competition between competing virtues.

02:00:04.620 On that occasion, I said it was between justice and mercy.

02:00:11.940 And in the case of the corona era, I said earlier in our discussion, I mean, that there

02:00:19.240 are competing virtues going on, effectively, the public health and the economy.

02:00:23.820 And, I mean, I have heard some of that debate, but relatively little, actually.

02:00:32.080 I mean, almost scandalously little.

02:00:34.540 And I think, I think that's odd, because we all must sense by now that that is, or should

02:00:42.940 be, where the debate would be.

02:00:46.340 And I'm not sure why, and it's something that Brett and Stanley and I have discussed quite

02:00:51.640 a bit in the past.

02:00:52.020 I'm not sure why all of our systems for sense-making keep knocking us off the discussion we should

02:00:59.240 be having, and instead push us into these discussions which are too easy and are not

02:01:06.840 fit for purpose, so that the discussion is, oh, I see you're supporting Trump, but therefore

02:01:14.560 you're a fascist, or you're supporting this, therefore you support looting, or you can play

02:01:20.000 it every way.

02:01:20.740 But what if we agreed on what big issues we could be addressing?

02:01:26.020 The inequality one is one I've said to you, I think, before.

02:01:28.980 The inequality issue is, like, oh, here's another.

02:01:32.220 What about the issue of why, particularly now, the danger that lies in our system with the

02:01:38.760 difficulty of young people occurring capital?

02:01:41.920 That is a really, really big generational question.

02:01:46.200 Why don't we see it debated?

02:01:47.640 We don't see it debated because what happens is the BBC gets on a communist and then finds

02:01:56.620 a, you know, a token right-wing maniac and thinks that they've solved or they've addressed

02:02:03.160 the question.

02:02:04.660 And the question hasn't even been started.

02:02:07.080 It's sort of been horribly lampooned.

02:02:10.240 It's been satirized.

02:02:11.980 It's a satire, what happens.

02:02:14.880 But what if we agreed that that is a massive problem?

02:02:20.740 And how do we change it?

02:02:22.320 What do we do?

02:02:23.380 Here's another one.

02:02:24.720 I'm sorry to start firing them out at hour two.

02:02:27.620 But it was earlier.

02:02:29.000 How are we going to be sure that our economies don't get out of the corona slump by selling

02:02:33.620 cheap to China?

02:02:34.540 Who's having the discussion?

02:02:38.460 It's not happening at the White House anymore, if it was before.

02:02:43.540 I'm not sure if it's happening in Downing Street.

02:02:46.500 I know it's not happening on the airwaves.

02:02:48.860 I know it's a subterranean, sometimes open conversation in parts of the press.

02:02:53.680 How do we address that?

02:02:58.500 How do we get out?

02:02:59.340 What's going to happen with our economies after this?

02:03:04.500 With the slump in GDP, the huge soaring and borrowing that we've seen?

02:03:10.240 What I worry is happening is, in the absence of that conversation, that's where we get everyone

02:03:17.740 going into their weird, weird corners and conspiracies, because we can't have the general

02:03:24.560 conversation and the serious debate that we need to have about the very, very imminent

02:03:29.120 and real problems.

02:03:30.300 We get 4chan conspiracy theories on one side and then censor everyone conspiracies on the

02:03:40.520 other.

02:03:41.900 And we're not talking about the huge thing that's happening under our feet.

02:03:47.740 You know, I feel like it's like being in a room full of people, all being distracted

02:03:58.000 whilst the carpet is removed slowly from under our feet, and we don't notice.

02:04:05.280 And I can only say this because we can't trust ourselves to have good faith discussions on

02:04:13.180 complex issues.

02:04:14.140 And the social media companies, to return to the thing I've been harping on about, have

02:04:19.320 been very happy to enrich themselves, persuading us to have pointless rows that have only fuelled

02:04:25.800 societal instability in order to enrich themselves.

02:04:30.220 They are the only people who've profited from it, and the democracies have much, much been

02:04:35.280 diminished for it.

02:04:36.380 And our public and political culture have been much diminished for it.

02:04:41.900 But we could find a way out.

02:04:44.580 And I know, because when we've talked, when Brett and I have talked on and off air, when

02:04:50.480 good faith people I know of the left and good faith people of the right get together, and

02:04:56.240 people of no political side, if they're experts, if they're people who've thought deeply about

02:05:00.940 things, you can solve problems.

02:05:02.440 It's just that nothing in our culture is set up to solve problems.

02:05:06.040 Everything, again, partly, largely fuelled by the social media platforms, is dedicated

02:05:11.120 to creating problems that are unsolvable.

02:05:14.260 And we need to find a way out of it.

02:05:17.460 Well, Douglas, no one but you could have made a more persuasive sales pitch for trigonometry.

02:05:22.660 So thank you for that.

02:05:24.040 We do try to have some of those conversations.

02:05:26.380 And if people want to understand why the housing market, which is one thing that we've talked

02:05:30.340 about with you in the past is such a problem, we interviewed Liam Halligan about this very

02:05:34.680 issue.

02:05:35.020 He's got a new book very much addressing that issue.

02:05:37.660 So we will be having these conversations.

02:05:40.180 And we thank you for being part of them.

02:05:42.800 Well, it's a great pleasure to be with you and with all your listeners and followers.

02:05:46.360 And I hope everyone stays well.

02:05:48.840 Thank you very much, Douglas.

02:05:50.340 Thanks, Douglas.

02:05:51.080 We will see you soon.

02:05:52.220 And for those of you watching and listening at home, thank you very much for tuning in.

02:05:55.720 Yes, and please remember, we have episodes going out twice a week and live streams going

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02:06:57.660 I'll see you then.

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TRIGGERnometry - January 10, 2021

Douglas Murray Live + Q&A： What Now For America？

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