Douglas Murray

00:02keep this about a fist away okay and we're live douglas first of all thanks for joining me appreciate it great pleasure to be with you looking forward to talking to you you've become uh an example to me or your conversation with sam harris become an example to me of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas right because of this jamie pull that thing up this is a tweet that someone sent out and he got a strike a community guideline strike just for listening just for putting you on his playlist a conversation between sam harris and you and uh he this man um or i don't know if it's a man i'm i'm i just assumed i'm i'm a problem i'm part of the problem part of the patriarchy p t r k c c x on twitter uh that is his screen name his or her or zura screen name on twitter and got a community guideline strike for just putting this

01:07now i brought this up to i was having dinner with some friends one of them who used to work at google and someone who's there was a highly ranked person at youtube i brought this up and the exact quote was uh that was because it's hate speech and i said you said that so flippantly i go please tell me the contents of the conversation do you know what they talked about i go how did you say that she goes well i'm sure if someone marked it as a community guideline right that or or as a strike a community strike what does it call it community guidelines yeah that they must be hate speech i'm like do you understand this is douglas murray and sam harris i i bet i bet that's not what the conversation was about i i bet it wasn't too i'm trying to think what we did talk about now it's making me nervous i mean but i know that i know it definitely wasn't hate speech by any

02:01sane definition of those words um that you this is this sort of thing is very disturbing too very determined and you notice it happening with other people yes and that's disturbing enough it's more disturbing of course when it happens to you but slightly surreal uh i mean i know sam harris a bit um not a hateful person my most sort of yogic calm blissed out west coast of america friend and i'm pretty amazed that anyone at google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth with hate street hate speech unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like or that words don't matter anymore well that's what i'm concerned about i'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these we don't even have to name the organizations but certain organizations are extremely left-leaning and i mean it's probably better than being

03:04extremely right-leaning it really is it's probably better than them being white supremacists white nationalists hate groups it's probably far better that they're radical lefties but it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that because things like that limit free speech and they limit the free discussion of ideas i don't i didn't listen to your your conversation i i think i listened to a little bit of it but i i didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the n-word halfway in i'm sure i'd remember i'm sure i'm sure you would i sure would have heard about it blushing more at this moment um i had another thing that i talked about with this uh same person i brought up jordan peterson and you know that there's there's issues with every time he's on podcast the podcasts get flagged for demonetization and the exact words

03:56were he's a troublemaker and i'm like what in the are you talking about like are you listening to his conversations he is very articulate and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that i think we should all be discussing so to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker to me it's symbol simplified or symbolizes what we're what we're dealing with today this is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication it is and whenever i've had a chance to speak with people in that kind of world in that sort of role the question i always want to ask among other things is do you know where this is going to lead do you know what it's going to do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words do you know what happens for instance down the road if if you keep on saying that sam harris and

04:51douglas murray having a conversation about something is hate speech do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're going to be able to get away with this is what's being created all the time at the moment it seems to me this this idea that you you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside not just stuff i don't agree with or things that i would argue with or debate with but hate speech it's just i think very very dangerous down the road you can see exactly the trail that bit of gunpowder goes to i can where do you think it goes i think it goes to a point where people become cynical about any any claims made about anyone and the likelihood is that if 99 times you've seen sam harris douglas murray joe rogan jordan peterson whoever

05:45called hate speech then the hundredth time that somebody uses the term hate speech might be on somebody who is engaging in hate speech and all your defenses are going to be down you've got nothing you're very likely to become a very unlikely sorry to become skeptical um and think i'm really going to dig down most of us don't have time we don't have time to to find out every single thought and word that someone has uttered or thought and so it seems very likely to me that down the road very very bad people were able to get through the gates because we kept on making erroneous claims frivolously for our own short-term gain and for our own short-term comfort and will end up basically bringing the gates down completely i agree with you and i i think there's been a lot of discussion lately as well that i agree with where when you make these ridiculous claims about conversations

06:44you you empower you actually empower radical people who oppose left-wing ideology they get more extreme you empower the extremists because they know that you are incorrect they have evidence of it they see your ridiculous behavior and the other really disturbing aspect of it is these are the people that are distributing speech right i mean i mean think about how many discussions are viewed daily on youtube it's stunning yeah um no they're um there's so much i mean we're at the beginning of this aren't we because i mean there's a long way for this to run a long way for the censorship to run along you can't help thinking among other things that the people trying to make the rules at the moment have no idea of the fact that these debates have happened before right or have not bothered to look into them and seem to think that history started with them and i just wish that among

07:39other things with social media people realized we we have been through this several times before at least and and the lessons are pretty clear they are not that you can limit speech in order to obtain political nirvana for instance nor are they that you can simply use as i say for short-term gain accusations you know to be wrong right in order to further a short-term political goal we we know all this we've been through it printing press we went through it with john stuart mill we went through it with milton i just wish these people had any idea of the fact that history started before their parents conceived them well it's such the the whole culture of uh tech today is such a progressive thought bubble it's it's an echo chamber and it's very very like i said it's better that they're really progressive and open-minded and left-wing than radical right wing i think it's better

08:41yeah no i agree i mean if if by radical right wing you mean you know okay you're racist or something yeah of course um although these people have all as i say all the ability to create those people right um which is empower them which is something you don't want actual racists and nazis to have legitimate grievance claims and you don't want them to be able to disguise themselves as something they're not so i say i i had a friend who um a lot of friends involved in the northern ireland conflict many years ago in the uk not that many years ago one writer had a beautiful phrase about it where you got to a stage where everyone was killing everyone he said you also got to the stage where truth was whatever you were having yourself and um we're not far away from that that place where i say what you call is hate speech you say what i say is hate speech let's call the whole thing off

09:41we're not very far away from there actually yeah it's uh it's very strange that this uh this echo chamber is being so reinforced and that very few people are stepping out and saying well wait let's take a look at this objectively and the people that do do that are signaled out as being racist or sexists or homophobic or transphobic or what you know fill in the blank whatever's convenient yeah and but it's not surprising that more people don't want to stick their heads up right that's perfect because i mean if you had a normal job uh you worked in a normal office or shop or something you you really don't want this coming towards you right um i mean this this can tear apart and tear down people who spend a lifetime demonstrating they are not the thing that they're being accused of so if nobody knows anything about you you have no particular persona out there you have no particular back

10:38record you don't want this thing coming to tear your life down right because recovering from that accusation is almost impossible and it would take forever it is basically impossible and all that you do along the way is to to keep reminding people of the charge that's true and if you were to ever win on a technicality like everyone would have forgotten oh yeah that's the uh that's the racism that's the rapist yeah i mean the guy who was pro-rape isn't it yeah i remember him yeah it's so simple but it's i feel like we're in some strange adolescent stage of communication and there's been a bunch of talk lately uh there's there was some something that i tweeted earlier today some new technology that they believe where ai is going to allow people to literally see other people's thoughts right and i i am i mean i am forever optimistic but also terrified and

11:32my feeling is that our transition from language here this new ai system can see what you are thinking which is just what the hell does that mean i'm i'm concerned but also optimistic i feel like we're in this transitionary period from regular communication to written communication to written communication online right to speech online video online where there's this instant access to all this and these ideas are being debated and tossed around like beach balls in real time and ideas are being distorted uh people's positions are being distorted for other people's gains and that there is this willful misuse of the truth and that something is going to come along that's going to combat that but at what price i mean the only i can't see what would come along to do it other than people rebelling against it their own free will as it were it doesn't seem like that's happening

12:32though it seems like there's there's a few people that are wrecked like yourself and there's many others that are recognizing the problem with this there's people talking about the problem of it online but for the most part the mass of people are engaged in this and it's also it's idea sport there's idea sport going on where their side they want their side to score sure sure well that's almost all politics in your country at any rate yeah for sure at the moment is um how can we make sure that the other side trips up on this uh i've i thought this i've written this all through the metoo era that uh in in your country and in mine people basically are willing to go for somebody who is a political opponent who does something very minimal and they're willing to defend somebody on their own side who does something bigger yes and you can see it all the time it's

13:23just there are different standards that apply to your own side than apply to the other and people don't seem to be hiding it very much anymore not at all um they really don't have the ability to hide it no we had a case recently in the uk where um somebody who was a great hero to the left for all sorts of complicated reasons um was is accused of some fairly very serious groping accusations among others and exactly the left-wing mps who had been claiming that somebody who had sent out a tweet about a woman's breasts in 2009 should never hold any role in public said that this person who just happened to be offended an icon of theirs was a changed man and we have to recognize it's 18 months ago now and you know my favorite video on this was uh there was a guy who is uh some religious christian man on television and he was talking about trump and he was talking about who trump was

14:19before he became president he goes but i don't know about you but i found jesus and i did not have a past put praise jesus and he's saying this in everyone's chair he whoever he was before he found jesus like as if trump got into office he was like you know what i'm a new man i found jesus i got the jesus pass all that stuff that i did the last 70 years well some people some people do treat that there was a journalist malcolm mugler very distinguished figure in the media um some years ago but who it was often noted that his he converted catholicism and he uh a mutual friend once said that it was noticeable that malcolm margaret always attacked a vice immediately after he had become incapable of it himself when it was clear the margaret didn't have as much sex as he did fairly often in his youth sex was a big problem it's a giant problem and needs to let everybody know yeah virtue

15:20signaling to the highest degree let everybody know this is awful all that pleasure and flesh stop it i wouldn't have it i had a lot of it but i won't have it anymore not in my bedroom it's just i don't know man i'm just i'm hopeful i'm hopeful that we're gonna work through this but i'm also disturbed because no one's at the wheel there's there's no particular logical human being that's out at the wheel that has a real rational sort of solution for all of these issues it's just chaos and in-fighting the problem is again it comes back to think about the truth being whatever you're having yourself we don't have anyone that we might mutually agree on as some kind of umpire yeah i mean that's becoming that's becoming part of the problem who who i mean i'd be very suspicious of any umpire put forward but but where would you roughly look for one um i mean i like to think that truth still

16:19matters but you know when you discover that a lot of people don't seem to particularly care for it or willing to sacrifice as i say for some other purpose including winning a goal um it's hard to see how you could uh adjudicate in this era but just one other thing which is a lot of this has to do with whether or not the online world can forgive this seems to me to be a really central thing one of the one of the uh things that came up the case i i said recently about this 2009 case of somebody in britain who tweeted about a woman's breasts among other things was he mistook twitter for a conversation with friends and how did he do that you know i mean he's in public office no no he's a journalist oh okay and uh but was was going to get a public office anyhow but the point is is that you know we don't really know what the rules of that are i mean like what if you were a bit of a dick 10

17:19years ago like that right on a medium that people were still finding their way on and now you are genuinely you moved on your kids right and and yet the the breast tweet is always with you i mean it's it's a sort of dystopian nightmare that you'd always be stuck with your worst joke right you you'd be stuck with your lowest sort of crassiest moment this came up recently with bill maher right bill maher there was something that he wrote i think in 1989 right which is insane i mean 29 years ago he wrote something and uh people used it recently against him and 29 i don't know how old billy is i i don't think bill is even 60. so we're talking about something that he wrote when he was in his 20s he's a struggling stand-up comedian the um the the the the internet is very good for this isn't it because you can you can you can dig up everyone everyone's made and everyone's everyone's screwed up

18:21apart from you you know apart from yourself you know it's uh um we had somebody uh recently in in in britain who who everyone wanted to go for suddenly and they found an article he had written about saying he didn't agree with holocaust denial laws okay he said he just thought it was a bad idea for free speech you know um uh when the when the internet was for seconds trying to find out other stuff about him they found an article which said i'm a holocaust denier so you know prosecute me sort of thing which he isn't a holocaust tonight it's just nobody bothered to read beneath the headline and so suddenly in the middle of the thing where everyone was tearing apart his life they also said andy's a holocaust denier and that was that that was that and then like something he wrote 15 years ago and it wasn't even something he wrote it's a headline of something

19:08uh and yeah and everyone and again that nobody cares get on to the next victim uh everyone's a nazi you know it's almost like people i mean it's obviously the case of living in glass houses and throwing tons of rocks but it's almost like everyone is just trying to throw as many rocks as they can before rocks start coming their way because they know it's inevitable well i i thought i thought until failure was the object of life in the modern era was to prove everyone else was a racist nazi misogynistic transphobe and then you win you somehow you got a coronation or something everyone would say oh you're the person who's good but now yes it seems everyone is aware that it's it's it's a mexican gunfight yeah i have a friend of mine who had been on this podcast before back when he was a radical lefty his name's jamie kilstein and he's a stand-up comedian

20:06and he was a real radical social justice warrior male feminist lefty and they turned on him radically what did they do horribly well they found out he was trying to have sex with girls that came another one and it was all it was just having sex it was it mean he lit he mean he didn't rape anybody he didn't grope anybody he just you know right he threw some passes right and and and as we know unless passes are 100 successful yes yeah oh yeah the same exact pass could be your future wife right right and this one just fell 15 yards short no room but he he took a long time off of social media and a long time off of performing and he came on he was really brave about it he talked about who he used to be and he said he was in this frantic state where he was just constantly attacking people just attacking people and then checking his twitter to see who responded to that attack and

21:05where people are on his side you know are people agreeing with him is he getting those social justice points that he wanted and he was really honest about the feeling that he got the anxiety that i think a lot of people engage in on a daily basis a lot of if you go to people i there's quite a few people that i follow that seem to just always be in conflict and i just go to watch i'll just go to their page almost like i'm watching a fist fight in a backyard right and they're just it seems like this is they're addicted to this constant seesaw of emotions and this interaction and it clearly is it releases the necessary chemical in their brain they get they get upset when they step away from it for a bit i i don't engage in any of that that bit of it because i've seen certainly a lot of the most mediocre minds in my generation brought low by this yeah i mean there are some

21:53people who i admired until i followed them on social media and and now i just think you know you're the shouty angry person who's who's like a drunk at closing time desperately flailing around with your fists and looking for somebody to fight with yeah and and to what end you know i mean the other another experience i had i've had in recent years that led me to not want to engage in this is is walking around and at various events in sort of breakout things you people who you know really people i've admired in the past all saying things like uh did you see that uh do you see i flamedx on twitter i i do you see what i i tweeted about that person i i think these used to be serious people yeah there's some these used to be serious people engaged in serious things and here they are engaged in these flailing fist fights and often often let's face it on things which

22:55if you didn't do it like that seeking out the fight are the sort of thing that would allow for normal human interaction i mean how many disagreements do we have with people in our personal lives all the time if we wanted to right uh you didn't vote this way that way i mean some people would mind about that but you know i i know you think slightly differently from me on this particular issue you you don't say let's have that out now once and for all you um you find ways to live with people's difference and different opinions and you know i mean you're not going to get everyone exactly in line i mean that we all knew that before the age of social media and now it seems to be the only aim what do you think that is i mean you think it's what we were discussing earlier that it's idea sport and then you just get caught up and like someone volleyed your way and so you

23:39have to smash that tennis ball back their way it is something like that i mean i i can't say i haven't felt the vicarious pleasure of some of that myself you know that old chinese proverb about um sitting by the river watching the bodies of your enemies float by um i had a big sense of that the other day when somebody i deeply disliked came a cropper on social media at the same time as somebody else i deeply disliked was being held by the french police on serious charges and i thought that was a i felt like the chinese proverb then that's all right and so i i can i can see why people feel it sure and of course people who they could never normally get to who they've got to right i mean i think that's i think that's the big uh the the big thing of you know look i poked that you know what in the eye yeah um i never engaged on social media for precisely that reason no matter what

24:33that reason among others that you would never i would never want somebody to know they could get to me even if they even if you just block them there's many people who take pride even in their heading they say i am blocked on twitter by all these people and and actually i do sometimes read what people say send to me um and i've never blocked anyone because i sort of think you should remind if you put your ideas out there you might as well be as open as possible to receiving them back some time ago when i got into a row with the with the turkish president about uh about something uh i got all these turkish uh sort of accounts setting this up there's one guy who just repeatedly sent me uh pornography of animals having sex with i don't know it was very it was very hardcore and um and so i used to go down the feet there that guy and i didn't even block him actually

25:22because i sort of thought well somewhere in turkey he's a really angry man desperately finding horse pornography to send to me and in a way i felt so sorry for him that that was how his life had come up you know the end his life had come to at this stage that i i couldn't even block him and also he'd be like i'm the donkey porn guy who got blocked by douglas he'd get a certain fame what was his motivation for sending you this stuff he i had um it was because well the short story is a couple years ago uh the turkish president tried to get the german chancellor to imprison a german comic for a very rude poem he'd read on air on german television that was insulting about the turkish president and the german authorities actually started a case against the comedian for insulting the turkish president edwan and i decided to launch a a an offensive poetry competition to offend the turkish

26:28president and there was a thousand pounds cash prize and it sort of took off and in the end the now foreign secretary entered and won yes really that was great yes it was really good because at the same time that the germans were looking at imprisoning a comedian the the now foreign secretary of the uk was guilty of precisely the same alleged crime i.e meaning it wasn't a crime it couldn't be a crime a couple other people did a wonderful uh dutch comedian friend hans johnson sort of did a similar thing a time he he decided to do an interview live on dutch television explaining how much he hated erdogan because he still owed him money from the he'd given edwan in the sauna and and the dutch authorities were looking at actually looking they were asked if they would prosecute him but anyhow but but this was this was i had a great time with this of course and i wrote a limerick

27:24explaining how um abusive i wanted people to be about edwan that it was necessary to be highly defamatory and you you wouldn't get away with it if you just called him a wanker or something so i wrote the opening verse and invited the world to contribute which they did and it became among other things the highest paid poetry competition in the world if like me you wrote a limerick for just five lines this is 200 pounds of line i mean no no uh poetry uh uh magazine could pay you for such uh uh such um such work so anyhow on the basis of that i became very very unpopular in turkey and uh there were many um and many pieces talking about how this gay atheist terrible edwan hater in britain was exactly what we were up against so him and his poems oh my god wow yeah so the german government was actually considering prosecuting this guy how how far did they take it uh he was

28:24taken over questioning i know he had to retain lawyers i i'm fairly sure they did only drop it in the end because of the international attention that was paid to it there was this you see there was this law on the books that still said it was a lazy majesty law about defending foreign rulers and he had he had done it for such an important reason as well which was to say you know we in germany should have the right to be rude about edward particularly erdogan who you know from was promoted from mayor to prime minister now to president wants to be sultan you know i mean he's a very bad man locked up more journalists per capita i think than any other uh country in the world other than china which i don't think we can get the stats on uh a very very evil i think man who who has led his country backwards in the last 20 years and is is in the process of trying to destroy a wonderful

29:16country and um if you can't be rude about him if you can't pretend that he sleeps with animals um which is what the german comedian started with then somewhere down the line you won't be able to say anything about the imprisoned journalists either and so on and um since also by the way people don't seem to spend much time worrying about the turkish journalists erdogan and prisons um the least they paid attention when i said that uh he and angela merkel got up to really filthy filthy acts in the zoo well obviously the worst case of retaliation for humor is probably charlie hebdo right i mean which is a terrible and unfortunately many people um weren't defending the murder but we're talking the murderers i mean i think yeah how many i think was 11 people murdered yeah and under police and a police officer but they were saying that instead of concentrating on the murder which was done

30:22completely out of this reinforcing their rules of their ideology and in retaliation for any mocking of that ideology instead of that they were talking about how racist charlie hebdo was yeah there was a lot of that in fact my friend jamie killstein was a part of that right he was on television back in his super social justice warrior days talking about that don't you wish among other things that people said no i'm not talking about something if they don't know about it yeah you know my guess was that until until the murders i mean an infinitely small number of people knew about charlie hebdo outside of france right i found myself in the wake of that uh in studios with people who i know had just googled charlie abdul the day before i know that they just gone to wikipedia and right and read an english version of a claim about what that magazine was about goes back to the thing about my

31:18point about the journalists in the holocaust denial thing that just just root around a bunch of people being killed this doesn't seem to vindicate my side's ideology therefore let me find what i can do to defame them and oh good somebody charlie abdul once did this cartoon that was off color and i can't understand what the the words are beneath it but i'll i'll claim it's racist i mean people were actually doing that yeah there actually there were there was a um there was one cartoon that was used against charlie hebdo after the massacre uh that was a joke against the front national and the claims they were making about a black woman in the sarkozy government but because they the joke and the if you didn't speak french it wasn't clear apparently but and if you knew nothing about recent french history you knew nothing about the social the sarkozy administration and the and

32:09the minister in question these people just went to it and said racist cartoon not noticing that the cartoon was actually a joke about racists but they didn't they didn't bother to find that out and i thought that i thought that whole thing among many many other things was deeply worrying from that point of view because it means that in the immediate aftermath of something that should be so damn clear a bunch of people can just try to reframe the narrative yeah and re and change the history of a publication yeah um claim it is just something different and and for a lot of people of course that was very um that was very convenient because after all if charlie hebdo's staff actually were these racists then you know you didn't need to worry too much about them or why you'd been silent on the issues they'd spoken up about yeah the narrative had then been that these people

33:08had been mocking this disenfranchised marginalized group right in society and that they had it coming yeah in some very strange way and it's part of me struggled with that because i was like is this some people just have contrarian instincts everybody's going left they just go well i don't like it and they want to go the other way there's so many people that have that instinct and then there's as you said before this uh headline mentality they read the headline and don't look any further into it even if it's a headline about a headline right it's there's that's all they need they're armed with enough facts they slam their laptop down and start debating yeah and um and in that case as in many others totally lose sight of the only thing that matters the only thing that matters in that case being is it ever right to make apologies for people walking into an office

34:03and gunning down people for an opinion you don't like the answer to which has to be of course no has to be has to be no yes and yet in these moments so we had one 20 years before with the rushdie affair the satanic versus affair in these moments you discover you don't have the allies on your side you thought you did in the wake of the rusty affair in 89 uh it was people from the right and the left in britain who started making excuses for the ayatollah you know we had the the chief rabbi then of the uk jacobus to his to his shame said both mr rusty and the ayatollah have offended people's feelings as if salman rushdie had in you know called on all novelists to go to tehran assassinate the ayatollah if they had a chance um you had uh um somebody like a right-wing conservative minister uh jeffrey howe who said that said that russia had done had really offended britain he'd been rude about

35:07britain as if that had anything to do with anything um there was a uh one there was one famous uh case of of a conservative peer who said about rushdie that he it wouldn't uh bother him if a group of young muslims took mr rushdie into an alleyway and taught him some manners um so you and you had that from the left as well bernie grant labour mp famously said at that point that burning books wasn't a problem for him um and uh that was when they were burning the satanic verses in bradford so so you get these weird coalitions of people who suddenly turn out not to get the point not to get the point not want to defend and then of course you get the cowards who say things like well it wasn't my sort of novel you know i i didn't think the novel was all that good midnight's children i could cope with but the sanic versus he lost me with a plot as if that means that then you can call

35:59for the death of the author rather than just give it a bad review how is he now is salman rushdie still in hiding i know he does a lot of interviews now and it seems to be more relaxed yes he seems to be i don't know the the specifics he um there was an assurance i think given some years ago in the labor year labour government that with tehran that they would not actively uh encourage the murder of rushdie anymore um how nice how nice of them that's a freezing of relations um not unfreezing relations uh but but you know the point i wanted to make was that that's again we've all we've been through these things we know how it plays out with the charlie hebdo uh um events and the murder of the staff and the contributors to that magazine we knew in the immediate aftermath what was going on and that that there were people who just wanted to make excuses and and you still

36:59hear that everywhere i mean i i've heard it on every single free speech debate in my adult life um i remember the university debate i was growing up and i remember in every one of the things in recent years from the danish cartoons to the uh jewel medina scandal uh were published in london was firebombed for publishing a novel that was actually amazingly fawning about muhammad to charlie abdul and since you you just get these this strange group of people from right and left some believers some non-believers who always just come up with these arguments and and say things like well i didn't find the cartoon very funny or well i never i never took that magazine seriously or i i didn't think it was right when they did this and it's just they just don't for some reason have the fortitude to just save you anything that matters in the in the wake of that which is no do you think that's because

37:59islam is unique in their approach to anything that goes outside the lines of what they feel is oh absolutely acceptable i mean in terms of like they will murder you if you draw muhammad yeah this is this is this is what's been described as the internalization of the fatwa um if if uh i'm sure you've had this experience man it's actually worse now that the presumption is worse than the actual reality i i have quite often people saying to me no i'd like to write this piece about x but i don't know if i can because you know i might get a yes death sentence and actually i always say what are you talking about write it um fortunately so far i haven't given that advice in the person then being in any way under any actual danger let alone being killed right but and i think i might feel differently if that was the case um but but that's but there is an over compensation occurring at the moment

38:58and it goes far far within the within the boundaries of what actually could plausibly get you into any trouble whether or not the trouble is you know legitimate to get into or not um so that now yeah i've had many journalists in recent years particularly since charlie hebdos will sign up to me and say well i quite like to do this but i don't i don't dare and you know i'm talking about for like very basic reporting and things they're not people saying hey i decided to draw a great big cartoon of muhammad with a great big dick and uh you know uh having sex with the pope or something you know it's not that it's never that it's never people saying i'm really just so keen to draw muhammad today douglas what did i do it never is that it's always something way way way down i'm thinking of even like saying something critical of certain regimes so so the internalization of the

39:55fatwa since 1989 which has been exacerbated now by the killings of charlie hebdo and elsewhere and the attacks on the generals posted in denmark means that we are in this period where where people are really hyper hyper sensitive and they really shouldn't be because it really isn't that bad it's not as bad as they think but this is you know you can do so much work if you if you say to people i've got kalashnikovs on my side i mean the extent and people in free societies like other really really loathe to admit this but it's the classic bounce it's a classic sort of a mob trick you know knocking on someone's door i'm very uh disappointed in you but my friend here my huge friend uh is uh is uh really angry and i'm just holding him back you can do an amazing amount of work if you're willing to pull that kind of trick and if you can persuade people and it's

40:54actually the case that there are people you're holding back then you can make enormous inroads like that well especially when there's actual evidence that people have been murdered and have been absolutely one of the more fascinating things about charlie hebdo to me was the refusal of any of the mainstream media to show any of the cartoons yes you had to go online and i felt like this was a they gave up the reigns of information to the internet i mean it was it was a real transitionary moment in our culture yes everyone went online to see what they yeah i mean funny place to go apart from your parents you know i mean like they were still under the impression these must be you know incredibly pornographic cartoons that were really really viciously attacking somebody um but no most anyone young can uh could find this out for themselves and you're right they they gave up the

41:42uh the space to the net and they all they all had again these sort of rubbishy arguments of their own about it i tried in britain to get the press to do it at one go a couple of days after the massacre and um got pretty close uh that if everyone says sorry i am spartacus tactic if everyone did it at once then it would be okay but it would make it easier and the argument you always get about that is and it's a very persuasive argument is that the editor of the met than magazine or newspaper might get protection and so on but you know a girl from the typing pool sort of thing and which is what happened actually in some of the satanic verses killings and stabbings and things you know it's like a norwegian translated japanese translation you know it's it's people who under no security protocol could possibly end up all getting protected and on the basis of fearing that the boss

42:45almost always says no one of the more uniquely american responses to the charlie hebdo attack was they had a draw muhammad contest in texas yes i followed that yeah that was fascinating and some guys showed up and started shooting at the building and they were killed almost immediately yes which is because they're in texas and that's just not the place to around true although i mean it's worth mentioning that i mean the the the editor at charlie had police protection in paris and they just i mean i suppose they were not worth dwelling on but i mean they uh the the battle trained uh people who were sent from yemen yeah to carry out that operation we just were better prepared than french authorities realized um well very few people are really ready to militarize cartoonist offices yeah i mean and that's really almost what you would have to do you would have to have

43:43you know navy seals with bulletproof vests yes and then locked and loaded and then let's face it i mean the whole thing then you do start to question you know like well is this cartoon that funny right now yeah and that that's what they actually have done at charlie they have um they did a little while ago say look we're not going to keep doing this well didn't they have muhammad making out with someone like almost immediately yeah immediately afterwards that's right yeah um but after about a year or so they they stopped uh they said they didn't want to do muhammad again and uh and uh and you can't blame them i mean this is the thing isn't it you i i'm sure you have this experience but um in these sorts of times i i always get uh people on the apart from the turkish donkey porn guy other people on twitter send me things like you know well why don't you draw

44:30muhammad right sort of stuff sure and first of all i'm i'm not a cartoonist but uh secondly the the way in which this is always presented is amazing because it's always from like xeno warrior princess 1293 you don't have the guts to draw muhammad murray and you know like well well you don't even know the guts have your own name on twitter mate so uh but but there's there's a bit of of egging along what happens in those cases um i don't want to draw muhammad i don't want to piss people off by drawing the cartoon but what i do want to point out is that you if you if you don't defend people's rights to draw things without getting murdered yes then you're living in an insane society yeah and and then there's a another thing which we all know what comes next i mean my point about this has always been think of something smaller than a cartoon to do right okay

45:26i mean i still deserve the right to be amazed we call something a cartoon crisis and keep it for straight face right you know we're gonna have to militarize in garland texas because there's a cartoon crisis natural progression could easily be you are you're not allowed to draw the cartoon then from there you're not allowed to speak of drawing right and then from there you have to show that you have a very certain idea in your head of what is good and what is bad so you have to show that by verbalizing something so you're forced to force to verbalize something and and uh let's face it it's not as if it's just the cartoon that's the problem is it i mean it's a novel it's uh so on and so forth and that's one of my big beefs about this is is that uh i don't want to not say what i think is true and even if that does offend you know one point three or four billion people this is often said in

46:22in tones that are not entirely unthreatening uh if if uh abdul or somebody else can't draw a cartoon mohammed then then i know that exactly in tandem with that is somebody saying and you douglas or you joe you or anyone else can't say what you find in the texts or what you think about this religion and and you can join the rest of uh of the society in being brave and uh you know going to the book of mormon on a friday night for a laugh and it is a laugh but don't you dare think of applying to islam the same kind of speech you would apply to mormonism right and and that that i that i won't do i just i just won't join in on that and um despite there being you know a price to pay for that but i just won't not say what i think is true in these matters are you aware of what they did with south park yeah south park south park it got very crazy where they not only could not draw muhammad they

47:26couldn't draw muhammad in a bear suit so then they had to have muhammad in a bear suit in an armored car so you couldn't even see him but it was implied that muhammad was inside the armored car in a bear suit and still but they did muhammad's voice didn't they muhammad like went yeah they they gave him a screwy voice so that was okay as long as you joke about the voice of muhammad you're okay but don't you dare show him it's insane but it's really weird as well because because actually again they all make presumptions it's just not true it's not true that nobody ever drew muhammad it's not true there are uh illustrations in books that are still on sale of very old illustrations of muhammad throughout islamic history just before they knew better bro they didn't know better they got a new note from muhammad muhammad was like look i don't like these drawings of me

48:18and not cut it out yeah kill on people they don't show my best side and but but this is this is this is a very strange position to be in because south park ends up yes holding the line then south park yes like weirdly it's like you know fatwa against south park well i didn't see that headline coming um and again everyone internalizes and everyone thinks well you know i i i i admire them in their mormon work but i wouldn't not sure i'd follow them in their muhammad works so and then the whole culture tilts it um and that's that's i think where we are at the moment on this and i uh i i've just you know the cartoon will never be funny enough the the joke will never be funny enough the novel will never be good enough and so on and and then in the end the speech will never be worth speaking enough i i a little while ago had a very clear experience of this i read about on the

49:12radio in britain where i was in discussion with a muslim cleric who's a sort of reformist figure admirer in some ways who in a discussion about something said well you know also muhammad um prophet muhammad peace be upon him was was he took criticism in his own life he took criticism very very well he never minded people criticizing him and i was like that's absolute crap that is real crap i mean whatever else you can say he mohammed not really good on this on the criticism of himself bit and i gave an example of a female poetess who he had killed because she criticized him and this guy went absolutely apeshit and refused to continue and so on and because you gave an actual because i gave an historical example from his own religious texts and uh and in the end it was a pre-record and in the end the bbc were like douglas can you find another way of trying to make the same point and

50:14you know and and that was what we had to do i mean wait a minute another way of making the same point rather than pointing out the historical text that showed that muhammad did have a female poet killed yes he just what other way would there be to make that point that is hard but that's the ultimate way to make that point exactly which is by pointing to the texts and the facts but you know i i can think of no other situation in which somebody has veto rights like that yeah in a normal discussion and it's because they're terrified of the retaliation yes i mean i knew everyone in the production box was like oh no what's douglas done and how can we stop it affecting us what was his cleric's response to that he yeah he he just he uh went yeah that's a bit nuts and uh wouldn't continue unless i you know wouldn't say that and so what did he deny that it was in the text

51:08oh yeah yeah i said i was making it up and i was a liar i'm used to that but that that's a crazy thing for him to say when someone could just read the text yeah but they're banking on nobody doing that well not in this day and age don't bank on that yeah this is this is one of the really interesting things isn't it because although it's true you can like suppress a lot of this you know we do live in an age when basically anyone can google and find texts and they can show it's a book that a billion people have read i'm not sure they've read it but yeah well possess it how many people you think read it how many people you think read the bible like if you had a guess there are a number of christians in this country there are those tests aren't they they sometimes do the humanist society you hated a few years ago asking very basic questions of self-professed christians

51:58about their knowledge of the texts and very few like you know my favorite is self-professed christians with religious tattoos like hey man you got to read the whole book like you are literally showing on your skin right that you didn't read the whole book you didn't pay attention don't do that yeah this is leviticus it's a leviticus that's got the implications against the writing i think so if you read the video there's a heck of a lot you can't do if you if you if you go down leviticus i can't wear two pieces of different cloth yes exactly yeah leviticus is a wonderful book it's gonna be it's very good for the mo heads leviticus wasn't the one which was the book where the guy um called upon the she-bear to kill the children who were mocking his baldness do you know about that one no my favorite especially as a bald guy this guy was getting mocked by uh children

52:58kids and god called upon a she-bear to come down and tear apart these children who were making fun of his bald head here uh elijah and the two bear two kings yeah look at that wow went up to bat if you are going to intervene in human affairs for anything this would be the time that's when god's got to step in listen you can't have this kind of stuff going on young kid young kids came out from the city and mocked him and said to him go up you bald head go up you bald head which is very mild and when he looked behind him and saw them he cursed them in the name of the lord all caps then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 lads of their number and he went from there to mount carmel it's like you know no big deal it's over got it done um that's that's yeah that's my favorite uh reading from scripture was the one of the end of uh one of the books i come which one it was

54:00i was a chorus when i was younger it always made me laugh there was a this is the destruction of the city of nineveh and it finished i think not only finishes chapter but the whole book it says you know and and low in that in that city were 40 000 human souls that were destroyed and and also some cattle cattle just by dis association got some cattle bad cows there are bad cows god had to up those cows too um but no the um god the bald head one that's uh that's hilarious that's that's the that yeah that's a heck of a time to you know to tread into him not even an insult no your bald head is just an accurate description i mean that is not an insult if you like you ugly sloppy bald-headed loser okay yeah then maybe god needs to step in and and why do they specify that they're female yeah yeah why is it female 42 of their number yeah 42 kids and two bears for one head those are

55:03some ass kids need to learn how to run that doesn't even make sense how the does bears even catch all 42 of those kids what kind of kids are they raising over there in bethel all right let's get you to get the out of there well they're all sitting around waiting their turn yeah what i mean trying out curse words till one causes the bears to come down you shaggy bear that didn't work you shaggy mangy dirty stinky bear boldhead yeah there's so many of those stories that are so strange but i mean i bet i bet that uh that most if we if we were to go to the the people who who say that their questions in the polls and ask them about we don't even need to go the bald head bear right old testament is they don't accept most people don't even bother reading that because it's just it's almost too crazy yeah but uh but but very very little knowledge even about very basic things um

56:01you know even commandments and so on so right so that's the case with the religion that america and britain is known best with christianity so there's no reason to assume that that's not the case with islam as well isn't that just the case with people i mean it seems to be the same thing that we're talking about with headlines someone reads the headlines they don't bother reading into it and then they accuse someone of something it's almost like with religion i'm a christian and i'm a christian man oh really please tell me about the bible right it's um there's something by the way i've often thought this is one of the reasons why there's it's possible to get a certain fanaticism going within muslim communities on some issues to do with blasphemy is i think is to do with a realization of this you said that this was the case about our prophet i didn't know that i he did what

56:51i've had this uh all my life with with uh arguing with various muslims about things the um they very rarely know the problems in their own tradition and when you bring them up they're like what the what he did what like the christians with the bald beds and this causes a really serious problem for them because they are told from the cradle that that they are following a religion founded by the most perfect man imaginable and if you discover that if you it's like you know no there's no description of helen of troy in the ancient text why does nobody describe helena troy why does nobody say did you know she was sort of she had this beautiful blonde ringlet sort of it's because it actually catches on as a theme because everyone makes helen of troy their most beautiful woman if you start to describe you'd be like i'm not into redheads you know everyone would put something on

57:50helena toy becomes the person upon you with whom you put all of those things and in the same way muhammad becomes if you say is the perfect human being people will just throughout their lives put the kind of things they think are perfect on to muhammad you must be very kind very generous for caregiving and so on so that if you then say well what about when he then did this i think it just causes an extra hurt this is something they'll have to get over of course because i mean we can't go away and not identify these these issues um but it causes in the short term an enormous enormous pain i have a an example i gave recently in the book of um somebody i spent some time with a couple years ago an extraordinary man called morton storm um he was a danish bikers and a big in a biker gang in denmark went to prison and in prison about 2000 or so he converted not just to islam he converted

58:47to al-qaeda basically he's not not a common person in any way and uh he ended up being the main go-to person for something called the head of al qaeda in the yemen and in fact was asked to give him a get a wife for our lucky to supplement his wife collection and uh a mortal store among other things ended up falling out with al qaeda and ended up working for the cia and danish intelligence and ended up helping lead them to aolaki who was then droned by obama in 2011 or so anyhow i once said to morgan storm um what was the moment that made you get out of uh al-qaeda and he had such a fascinating answer because he he came out of al-qaeda and islam at the same moment he says what was happening was he was sitting in his he he was waiting for package for an al-qaeda drop off to get then from him to aolaki and the the the person carrying the package was late and then really laid

59:45and he was sitting in his apartment somewhere in germany i think at that point and he was so pissed off about this and he had a laptop that was there on the table and he thought basically how can i express my pissed softness with my al-qaeda colleagues for wasting my time like this so much and he went to google and he typed in contradictions in islam and began to read whoa that was how he got out wow that's what did him in he was just being late he just started reading again they told me this they never told me that i never knew that and that was so as i say he's a very very uncommon person but but i think that might be happening quite a lot more than we know people just googling things finding stuff out for themselves it's the most dangerous religion to leave because they kill apostates they do yeah so what's how is he dealing with that um well he he lives in hiding i mean wow

60:50yeah yeah fancy man he read a book called agent storm about it two years ago one of the weirdest conversations that i ever saw anybody have with someone who is a believer was dawkins i think it was was having a conversation with someone and he asked him point blank whether or not he believed that muhammad split the moon oh yes i think i know this was with a very close enemy of mine called maedi hassan who worked for al jazeera and who richard dawkins did an interview with and i think he that's why he fluffed something earlier on uh dawkins that he didn't take him on then he took him on on this that's right and i think that hassan said yes yes he said yes and then it led to this terrible problem which is a really interesting interesting problem of our era which is then dawkins said i can't believe that somebody or said afterwards i can't believe that somebody

61:45could be a working journalist and believe that you know mohammed flew to the moon on a half-human horse right um and of course i mean there's a interesting point there yeah but of course we do quite rightly allow people to believe bizarre and insane things well sure in christianity and if we started saying you can't have public office or working journalism if you profess to be of this particular faith then we wouldn't get anywhere we wouldn't have anyone left how does the story go muhammad flew to the moon on a half human horse yeah and split the moon with a sword is that what he did yeah i can't remember he could have then been attacked by female bears but i can't remember no i can't yes he it's the night journey which is uh uh central and how does the moon get glued back together again is it glued back together it looks like it is i haven't looked close

62:36maybe i need to pay more attention it's just the the fact that a perm you know i believe this was a few years ago let's just say it was 2010 that this interview or that this debate took place yes even around them eight years ago that someone would be comfortable saying oh that they believed that oh well you see i got into a little bit of trouble richard dawkins got annoyed about me uh because i took the mickey out of him for dodging the one earlier in that what was the earlier one he i i'm great at mario as as everyone is i'm sure but um he he knows exactly where the cliff edge is and in that interview he uh he was asked on al jazeera by this uh uh interviewer he read out the bit from the god delusion about uh you know there's a great bit of rhetoric about the most the god describes god as something like the most appalling narcissistic murderous blah blah blah character in all of fiction

63:37it's a terrific piece of writing and the interviewer says the dawkins do you you uh you stand by that there's a description of the christian god and dawkins says yes he says you stand by it as a description of the jewish god and says yes and then he says and what do you say the same thing about the muslim god and i just knew exactly what's happening richard dawkins says um about the muslim god i don't know so much which he he as i say he he he he thinks i shouldn't rip him on this and the thing was what i noticed was that just i just i've i completely felt him he's been a very brave and brilliant writer and thinker on these matters nobody's done more in some ways but he i knew exactly what was happening he was staring right over the cliff edge and somebody was behind him nudging yeah and that if he had have said as it were live on al jazeera oh yes allah you know the total bastard

64:33then uh you know you don't know maybe that's maybe you're then in real trouble yeah and so he stepped back from the brink there and i rather cruelly perhaps took the mickey out of him after his forehead i said that it was just that richard dawkins was demonstrating the survival instinct of his species but i i feel bad about it but it is true it is true but we've all been there to some extent what was his response to that though to my to your criticism uh he um well he basically he i i think he did take it on board in a way um slightly complex reasons but i i i i know he was also annoyed that i was where he i think he felt that i was doing that to him then yeah you do it right right right um and that is very common uh in that i've had that a lot in my life of in this particular area of people trying to egg me over why don't you say that of course and uh and you know that they're the

65:36people who'll be a million miles behind you oh yeah they with their ears plugged yeah behind a wall i always have a very i always have a very very visual aid of it somebody who actually is a terrific reformer in islam now and another cleric who once described me he went to fight for the mujahideen in afghanistan and uh you know 30 years ago now and described to me he's not a very fightingly like person but described how he did actually sort of rile them up to sort of run over and get at the soviets and he's like you know we're all agreed yes we'll go over yes and i go and he and they are forward and guys guys and everyone else has stayed in the trench and i've always thought this is exactly the uh uh the experience of anyone in this area nice is that there's inherent danger and this criticism even this discussion right now i'm sure these people right now firing up their

66:29webcams and writing blogs and tweeting and getting upset about it it's awesome any rational discussion of that particular subject you could kind of get away i mean i get criticism from uh christians but it's not scary right yes that is um that's that is a big difference at the time being isn't it this is this is something that's just so important a nuance that almost never gets added in but of course we all just assume it so we don't think it's worth saying but we are aware that any religion or thought like this could be this dangerous at different phases yes you know we might have wanted to be in spain in certain points in the last millennium sure um we might not have wanted to be a catholic center at certain points or protestant descent with others and so on and so forth we all know that yes it's just that at the moment that's pretty quiescent and uh and quiet and of course it's less

67:27quiet here than it is in my country i mean i can't imagine the anglican church becoming militant about anything at any point soon uh you do have some angrier types of christian here than we have in my country and so it's easy for me to think they're slightly less uh uh risky at some point in the future than than you might but but it's just we do recognize this could happen elsewhere as well it's just at the moment it's it's it's not the quakers they really don't send me a death threat from one year to the next right rather nice people there's a an inherent danger of a retaliation from people who are more radical christian that if this continues and if you see more and more of uh more and more attacks from people of muslim faith you could possibly see a retaliation from people especially in this country like after 9 11 there was an extreme amount of of hate for muslims and irrational hate

68:30most people who have done nothing wrong directed at sikhs yes well there was a lot of that out of ignorance they just didn't they didn't i mean that was the most disturbing because sikhs are pretty interesting people and the fact that they just instantaneously with no information at all and no understanding out of complete ignorance attacked them i i uh i have i i second to no one in my gloominess about some of the things that we're going to go through in britain and europe in the coming years but um i recently had a reason to be even more gloomy about one aspect of it relating to this which is this we had uh three big bad terrorist attacks last year in the uk including the manchester arena bomb where 22 young people were blown up on a monday night for going to hear ariana grande and after the third of those attacks which was on london bridge when uh three people who actually known the

69:29authorities as they generally are slashed people's throats on the street and ran to borough market as people were drinking and like stabbed people while shouting this is for allah after the third of those attacks it was felt like oh god is this really just going to keep happening what are we going to do about it and what can we do and after the manchester one in particular there was this kind of thing of everyone saying apart from john lennon's imagine there was a racist hit don't look don't look back in anger and these themes it's like we weren't meant to think anything other than that we weren't meant to be angry anyway and uh then then just a terrible thing happened from another direction uh outside finnsbury park mosque which is a mosque with a very troubled and bad history in london a guy from wales in a van drives into the crowds as they're milling around outside the mosque kills

70:28one man and injures a number of others that guy by the way just show how complex all this can get is he was tried found guilty last month in the courts in the uk he uh he had been he's obviously very mentally deranged and he had a history mental illness and all that sort of thing as very often people do in these situations but he uh he had watched the bbc drama called three girls which is the first time that the bbc had really addressed the issue of the rotherham uh rushdale rape gangs that happened in the last decade in the uk which is still a saw that's going on where about 1500 girls in one town alone were basically abused by gangs of muslim mainly pakistani men and it's a very very ugly business partly because it was so awful that nobody that nobody at the state of the police level any else wanted to look into it and they are now in the government inquiry so they they

71:28didn't look into it so worried about being called racism islamophobic and so on the press did a lot of not being interested in this as well eventually after all these years the bbc makes a documentary called three girls about three of the girls who suffered from these rape gangs and then a man in wales sees it and gets so enraged people say at the local pub he was railing against the bloody muslims and all this sort of thing and then he hires a van and drives into a crowd of people outside a mosque and you have this awful feeling that the bbc didn't want to deal with the issue that the program was about for years because it was so awful and ugly and sounded like something made up by some kind of nativist racist you know it's had everything um and then they do and then it turns out remember the public sees it and drives a van into a crowd yeah i mean

72:21you know this this sort of couldn't get more complex in a way so and i thought after that okay maybe maybe the maybe the bbc were right maybe they shouldn't maybe they should cover up the gang rape of 1500 girls maybe the public can't cope with it maybe they will get into vans now as it happens i know the british public i think fairly well and i think that that guy in wales is a very very unusual figure i don't think it's very common i don't think everyone's going to do that i don't think we're all like that wicked madman but i don't know i mean i don't know for sure everywhere i don't know what the i don't know what happened in this country in various other countries if there were three attacks like that in quick succession i don't know but this is this is really like it is going to get complex it's already complex and the response to it is complex too how do you

73:14how do you if you if you are a journalist if you are a television channel how do you report on this do you think about the responsibility of alerting someone to these actual real atrocities that's going to force them to react on innocent people that did nothing in front of this mosque that the fact that these people in this mosque are somehow or another connected to these people that did these horrible crimes just by virtue of the fact they're in the same religion that's insane too yeah it's all insane it's i mean it seems to me the only the only way through it is to say first of all i i mean i don't i i read the american press all the time i think that it's it's worse than the british press in in in that self-appointed role of believing its task is to stand between the public and the facts you know and sort of negotiate between the two uh see what they think the public can cope

74:02with or should know and then feed them that um the american press seems to me to be rife with that that temptation as ours is but it seems to be the only way around this is is to not not give in to that and to try just to publish the facts when they happen because it's just obviously seems to be much worse we always know in political scandal what's worse the cover-up it's always the cover-up right and that that may be the case with all this maybe maybe the the argument for just the papers explaining stuff that's happened is maybe that's maybe that's all they can do and that it one could just say to them it'd be a lot worse if you bottle this up because otherwise people will get the idea that there is some conspiracy to cover over certain stories and and they'll be on to something in fact if you think about the millions of people that must have seen that

74:57the story on the rape of 1500 the fact that only one person responded that way right it's pretty extraordinary in and of itself yes yes i i would have and i would have thought on some of this i mean you know i don't know again i mean there are there are lots of examples one could use but when something bad happens like the manchester arena attack i'm i'm amazed in a way that people are so decent i mean i'm so pleased they are but they we really we don't go out looking for people to attack you know that the public certainly in britain i can be saying i think it's the same in america the public we're not really lynch mobs waiting to be got going again but the expectation that we are is the only possibility of creating us in such a way um it's only by treating us as if we can't deal with ugly things that go on that you could see the situations where you began to

75:55see the situation in which that all goes wrong in that different way yeah i mean i don't envy their position especially trying to pick up the ball from here yes with all the history and all the terrible things especially in england with so many attacks over such a relatively short period of time where there was a very small history of that before yeah it seemed like this immediate eruption of all these issues yes and i mean the country in some ways i write about my latest book most is france where uh i guess you the book comes out in translation there in a couple of months time very interesting to see what happens because uh france ahead of even i mean we mentioned charlie hebdo but that 18 months or so it had was just i mean again it all sort of disappears now every day's got bad news of some kind but you know to have a um a major western capital city with 130 people

76:51killed in an evening with multiple suicide bombings and people being gunned down from mopeds as they're sitting outside a bar and you know another group of people going into a rock concert and and you know going through the disabled section and shooting everyone one by one in the disabled section and gunning everyone else down and catching them in the lavatories and shooting them i mean that happened in one night alone in paris then the parisians didn't become you know they didn't become wicked terrible people or anything but they have i think these i think that the a lot of these terrible events that happen they actually what happens is they sink down to a lower level of our consciousness so that we what actually happens is we we we get over the immediate thing quite fast but that something at the foundational level changes i had a a case nobody really wanted to linger on

77:45but there was one in in november in the uk on oxford street where uh because of course everyone does after these attacks they always say you know we will not be changed everyone tries to sort of channel the spirit of churchill and all that sort of thing um i in church you'll hear me roar and and so on and uh and actually the the facts are otherwise in november on oxford street there was a all we know is that there were two men who may have had some disagreement on the platform of a tube of a tube platform whatever happened it was misunderstood by crowds and it developed into a stampede out of the tube station then all the way down oxford street people were locked and barricaded into the big department stores uh a pop singer called olly murs tweeted out to his million followers you know there are shots of being fired i'm in the back room of the store h m and this sort of thing and other

78:38people claimed that the truck had gone down oxford mowing people down they've seen bodies the police said it was a major terrorist event they were on top of and and the press were all you know running the stories turned out nothing happened nothing happened the next day two men handed themselves into a local police station saying they thought they might have been responsible for it but they were let off without any charge what i'm saying is they thought they might have been responsible for it because they'd been in an argument they'd had an argument maybe they they won't say we were responsible for the whole thing but like right they were asking for information um and they were let go but but my point is is that is that we we can simultaneously say we will not be cowed and also actually be at the stage where if you just hear a bang yeah everyone goes running you you don't

79:26want to be the last person to figure out what's going on so as soon as something you think is happening people in this day and age when there's just this recent history of horrible things happening over and over again in orlando here i mean there's just so many of them that people just instantaneously want to react and then like in the vegas shooting one of the things that was very confusing about the vegas shooting is people would go into casinos they would flee from the concert into casinos and then talk about a shooter and then people would say there's an active shooter at the tropicana there's an accident it always happens there's always that so i never believe immediate aftermath there's always a claim of other other shooters there's always a claim of something that turns out not everywhere they were they were claiming there were shooters all over the city but there was no

80:13actual shooting in these other casinos it was just reports of active shooters yeah that's a and and by the way if if you're interested i i there's a fascinating thing about why this happens and i wrote a book some years ago about bloody sunday a terrible event in northern ireland in 1972 and one of the things i went through all the tests of everyone who'd seen one of the most interesting things was the number of people whose memories were just totally different from what we know actually happened and yeah one of the conclusions i came to was that there's a book by harvard professor but they're called the seven sins of memory uh about this but one of the things that clearly happens is after any very traumatic event or very terrible event where people are effectively in the situation of a war zone when they were just shopping or the comments at the moment before is

81:01that our memories immediately become even more suggestible than they are already and the most obvious thing of suggestibility in these situations is that the situation was was worse around you and you came off better than you did and that's almost always the case um the the the shots that were quite quite a bit away were very close um uh you you you have to your memory without knowing it we all do it our memory tells us we behave better than we did and that the threat was worse because this is our we're one of our ways of coping i think um but but it's a terrible thing and obviously with i mean with these uh school shootings and things that are going on here at the moment i mean this is obviously um one of the things you might i watched your podcast the other day where you were discussing this with the latest one with the florida and uh and i think the you know the sort of

81:59in a way bafflement going on in this society about this is understandable yeah the i mean it's the unimaginable horror of being involved in that situation your mind is just not prepared to cope with that i mean maybe if you are a soldier and if you experience combat exactly and you know how to uh stay calm in a fire fight because you've been in a bunch of them but for the average person i mean it's one of the reasons why i witnessed testimony it's one of the worst pieces of evidence you could ever get including i mean about it about basically everything about fist fights you know anything oh yeah no we all have examples in our own lives i've seen you know friends who've been through the same thing we know that they've been through the same thing and yet they have two totally different rights of course yeah what happened i mean that's that's a real problem but

82:45now you have this thing here where i mean in some ways even worse than we do with of the search to notch it up for your own political side or against the enemy yeah the same thing with the twitter the twitter point but that i mean this this obscene glee that goes on after any terrorist attack in europe but i think also here as well the attempt to immediately call it for the other side or for your side or whatever um and to to try to use terrible events as a way to justify whatever your own team is yes i i have i i find it's amazing with the gun debate here and i would find it amazing coming from a different society on it but the way to sort of notch it up for one side or the other in it and i don't know it's you've got a real problem on this i've been watching a lot of it uh from the perspective of the gun owners and the nra members and the the people that want to defend the idea

83:43of having guns even of arming teachers and you're looking at their perspective on it and their perspective on it is all about their rights all about the constitution all about the bill of rights all about protecting the second amendment all about it's gun ownership being taken away gun ownership under attack the nra under attack they're coming after our guns and this is this constant battle of ideas that's on twitter not addressing the actual issue i mean sorry no it's okay i mean watching this thing uh arming teachers yeah that's insane i mean this is samuel jackson had a great quote about it but even it's you know he uh he put it on twitter like someone tell a who's never been in a gun fight the problems of arming a bunch of teachers right yeah somebody said someone who's been in a gunfight please tell yeah somebody said somebody said anyone who thinks it's a good idea

84:37giving teachers guns has clearly never seen one try to use an overhead projector ah yeah there's there's samuel jackson look at that 306 000 likes so you know it was an effective tweet this is the world we're living in youtube check the number it was only yeah you got three tweets it can't be true nobody likes you i i i thought there was a very pertinent one a few years ago in new york on fifth when um somebody shot their colleague and um outside the office came back his disgruntled work shot the quality and locally there were some policemen around the corner and they came out and started firing at the guy who'd done it i ended up wounding about 11 pedestrians like well you would wouldn't you of course i mean i'm not saying by the way we have we have our own problems but i mean this is a big problem for americans but i kind of have more guns and we have people i i mean

85:30i completely understand why the amendment exists and i think it's a very good idea for the time and i think it's a very understandable idea to hold on to it now but um but why can't people say for instance i mean we all have abstract ideas we have to hold on to but we and we all in our countries have like weird things that other people don't understand i mean you might think it's odd to have a hereditary constitutional monarch for instance right it is weird it's a great way to put it it's strange and uh if you're starting from now you might not do that um but but clearly with the gun ownership thing it is we are willing to take bad things happening quite often because we want to hold on to the second amendment well the second amendment has been around forever the bad things happening quite often is really from columbine on i mean there was a few of them before there was the austin texas

86:25uh tower shootings but it seems i mean again i i mean just it's such an obvious point and i don't understand like i say snotty brit who's saying something about america it's not at all welcome but it seems obvious that you just you could do a lot more damage with a semi-automatic rifle than you can with a knife and most people we see this in the terrorism as well there are really committed terrorists who don't commit acts of violence unless they can get hold of the means to do it right because we often think well why don't you just like go out with a knife some people do but most people actually want to go out in that way and what they see as being a blaze of glory right so they like stopping them having the means of getting that very easily seems to me very obvious but that isn't to say that i mean of course i think you made a point the other day it's like saying if you say everyone who

87:20has a gun is part of the problem then obviously not because it's like saying everyone who's got a truck is a part of the problem but there is there are obviously two things one is the psychological and whatever the social issues are that cause this to keep happening and that that is obviously very very important to try to get to the root of but you can get to the root of that or try to get through that and also recognize that people having access to some of the weapons they have access to in this country must be a part of the problem it has to be and there also the idea that you should just be able to go out and buy a gun without really understanding how a gun works at all yeah and which is exactly how you do it i got my first handgun license in 1994. um that's when i bought my first handgun and i just went and bought a handgun they did a background check on me that's

88:13it i mean i went to the range they showed me what the safety is point at this put the earphones on make sure you don't blow yours out bang bang bang and then you leave with a gun i mean once your background checks clear they find out you're not a criminal there's not much to it there's a there's a giant problem with that if you want to drive an automobile you have to show that you understand the laws you have to understand you have to sit with an expert who's to sit there a driving instructor they have to go through it with you they have to watch your movements they have to watch you make turns they have to wouldn't wouldn't you imagine that it would be a good idea to have some sort of a clinical evaluation of a person that's going to going to buy a gun and here's another thing there was an article recently that was saying contrary to popular belief most school shootings are not

89:01committed by people who are mentally ill well that's a stupid thing to say you know why because if you're you're committing a school shooting right you're mentally ill exactly okay period then on top of that what they're ignoring conveniently and this is another headline thing psychiatric medications right these people are almost entirely on some form of psychiatric medication whether it is anti-anxiety pills whether it's anti-depressants whether they're they're all i'm not saying that correlation equals causation i'm not saying that but to say that they're not this is just a this is click bait headlines exactly they're mentally ill 100 100 of them are mentally ill there's there's a uh uh um a conservative commentator in the uk called peter hitchins who always makes a point after islamist terrorist attacks in europe that there's a large number of them as well as other types of attack

89:54who seem to be on some kind of medication yes and my point is always i'm very very happy to have that conversation i think we need to have that conversation and we also have to have the other parts of it as well yes so you're right it's the same here i can't see why we can't have all of this it's the same thing that we were talking about earlier it's these idea sports right these wars people don't want to give up their idea they don't want to give up any ground whatsoever on their second amendment rights whether it's owning a 50 caliber tank gun or whether it's uh having a a gun for home safety or for hunting they don't want to give up anything and they feel like it's a slippery slope the people that i follow online that are tweeting about this on a regular basis and you can go to a lot of them like they're making videos about it dana lash and uh colin is

90:45actually his name is it's not colin's co-lion co-lion noir noir he's very very vocal about it i'm reading all this stuff it's like all anyone's taking into account is that this idea that they're coming after your rights right and and emphasizing the idea of a good person with a gun that can protect people in these terrible situations which can happen as well but what what we have to address that's what we're talking about we have to address how the do these crazy people get guns why why are so many people on mental health medications yeah yeah well that's a huge it's a huge i can't understand we always have that this is wanting to have the conversation about it but there's very little done on it that's one thing i'm very struck with we we uh we we have in all our countries i miss slipped into a very weird attitude towards this type of medication yes very weird very

91:38just very accepting of something that radically alters the way your mind works and i don't know maybe it's maybe it's because there's not an incentive drug companies obviously don't have an incentive quite the opposite uh to look into it but it's another example of the the set of the set of things we should be thinking about at the moment and looking at which we just don't why don't we because it's sort of shut down because we shut it down ourselves i uh i think it's just such a range of issues this is the case with and it's always the same thing it's always that if you address the question difficult as it might be you are attacking an individual who might suffer from it yeah who might be upset by us addressing the question um i mean i i have a lot of suspicions about all sorts of things i'm a very you know skeptical person as it were about things that i'm told so i'd like to look into

92:32into things i'm amazed at the number of things in in our societies that we just don't discuss and they're all the things that we ought to be discussing um issues like mental health issues uh issues that have to do with the social presumptions that are going on left right and center at the moment where you're not meant to discuss things that apart from anything else very very interesting and very important um and i just see it everywhere um this might by the way so this is a slightly strange segue to make but there was a fascinating one in in britain a couple of days ago uh um a slightly lighter subject but there was not that much either but um there's a diver in the uk called tom daley who married a screenwriter from hollywood called dustin lance black and it was announced a couple of weeks ago on valentine's day that they were having a baby and there was a photograph of them

93:26holding a scan they sent out on their twitter the two men who are married who have ultrasound scanner and all the papers and the bbc and evidence reported saying uh dustin and tom are having a baby and i mean i'm gay and i'm i don't think i'm homophobic but i look this house i think how like is how someone else involved i mean you know there's the old joke yeah gays i can't have children doesn't mean we can't keep trying um but i just look at his eyes nothing in the articles about this tells me anything i would like to know like i know that they didn't just have a role around and woke up in the morning and one of them was preggers i know that and i know that there has to be a woman involved at some point we know this but we are meant to just like adapt okay great cool and it's almost as if it's set up so that somebody says uh wait uh isn't isn't isn't a woman isn't there a uterus at

94:29some point so that then everyone goes ah bigger right homophobe racist sexist xenophobe yeah everything whatever we've got yeah and and of course somebody did really well somebody from the the daily mail wrote a column saying come on two dads isn't the new normal sort of thing and of course then everyone piled in on that and all the all these advertisers withdrew their advertising but really but this was just on this was like literally literally until the day before yesterday it was possible to say i don't think two guys can just like have sex and make a child literally that was okay until the day before yesterday and it's not okay today so what will not be okay tomorrow and i just think i think and i wrote about it and uh and uh maybe a couple other people ended up doing it too but i i think that's really interesting like a lot of this other i think it's really interesting about this

95:23that you are the things that seem very obvious to us all the things you're not meant to write about almost as if they're like booby traps waiting to go off yeah and and i just think why don't more people pile on in right um because we could have a heck of a time and we might also solve something well people don't want to pile in on anything revolve involving gender or sexuality it's just too scary it's a landmine field they just especially as you said earlier people with regular jobs yeah if you get called out for being a racist or homophobe or anything along those lines you're doomed sure it's um it it but in that case anyone who does have a voice uh as a writer or speaker whatever broadcaster i think has a disproportionate duty to do so right to do i mean there's no point in just repeating those same new lies uh there's a disproportionate duty to try

96:27to break them down yeah um i come in one of my favorite quotes that one from h.l menken who says you know that history was always progressed by jolly fellows heaving dead cats into sanctuaries and going roystering down the byways of the world and um i just i i wish that there were more dead cat heavers because he's not he's not such a bad job you can make a living sometimes and um and it's it's it's one of the only things worth doing if if we're all going to be told lies and expected to go along with them whether it's about terrorism or or gay parenting or mental health or anything else whole set of them it's a really target rich environment it is and i think there's more people doing that now than ever before but it's more people like you and i who can kind of get away with it yeah i don't know why do you think you get away with it by the way me yeah because you can't take me

97:24seriously right i'm a cage fighting commentator and a dirty comedian right i mean nobody's listening to me and taking me seriously in that regard yeah well sort of it's it's uh i just first of all i'm a kind person i think that helps like i'm not a mean person right when i'm saying these things i'm saying these things from i'm going what what the is this like here was one that i thought was really fascinating and this is one of the a great example of how strange we get on subjects uh caitlyn jenner when when caitlyn jenner transitioned right um that was the primary thing that people were talking about oh my god she's a woman now and it was right after she had been spacing out behind the wheel slammed into a woman and pushed her into traffic in a head-on collision and the woman died and that was almost just completely forgotten yes completely forgotten yes

98:22not only that she doesn't believe in gay marriage right like what you're you have the wrong spokesperson i mean you could not have a more wrong spokesperson yeah but yet espn and glamour woman of the year and these all these different things and athlete of the year wearing dresses and fabulous and glam and let's get your your chin shaved down right because that's who you really are who you really are is not this person there no you gotta you gotta shave your chin down it's it's it's it it goes back to the thing about the the almost as if you're being dead yes you're being dared to discuss it i said this to sam harris i got him into trouble just on his podcast by saying this and he didn't attack me apparently he got a whole load of transphobe accusations because of me saying something but i said to him i thought what was happening was that we were being asked

99:14not only to agree that caitlyn bruce jenner become caitlyn general that caitlyn jenner was a woman but that but that you had to find her attractive yes you have to say she's beautiful and and i find those those ones are just there there was one the other way it's a bit like that they gave her anything it's like i dare you you just you just try pretending pretending that tom and dustin can't have a baby um and and it was the same with a little while ago there was a boy in britain who uh was i kind of whether he he wanted to turn up to school in a dress so he's like nine years old and like there was a row i can't remember whether the school said yes or no but it was a big thing and then it became a weigh-in on the behalf of the nine-year-old trans kid i've got lots of questions to ask there yeah and and then it became uh that the nine-year-old kid was a was

100:05was a became a model for a fashion shoot and then it's like find the nine-year-old boy who says he's a girl attractive and say it's beautiful how much more do you want to push people like no they're rewarding they're like like isn't she lovely right like what are you doing to us like what are you trying to make us agree to like what's what's the cause of all this have you i mean you must have been thinking about this like what this is this bizarre illogical conversation that falls into these very convenient yeah well cut grooves that you're really not allowed to slide the ideas out of what's causing this i think it's so many things one is one is that it's possible this is what happens when the economics goes wrong i've got a feeling the economics what i mean is that if people's if people aren't seeing like way it increases in their living stance i mean my generation i know i'm 38

101:16i just above this generator but a generation ever so slightly below me um is becoming aware that friends it won't get on the property ladder at all maybe uh property ladder meaning owning a home owning a home the things that their parents generation got not easily by any means it wasn't wasn't easy for boomers but that that somehow they're going to have it harder than their parents generation or might not enjoy the living standards that their parents generation enjoyed might be certainly in western europe coming home it might be occurring to them what do you do in those such situations um you've got to have other things to to get worth from if for instance you're not going to own a home until you're 40 and that point if you're a woman like your career you need to have children but you can't afford to take the time off work and you might not be able to start a family and then

102:10you're trying to start a family in your 40s and it's harder very hard and a whole set of other things like that that are definitely delayed for new generations now i think that it's possible i'm not i'm not saying it's certain but it's it's possible it seems to me that that generation might discover new gods and might want to enforce the new rules just as avidly as the old gods wow and and there is an element of that going i i can't understand why otherwise every time i talk about the things we've talked about today there would just continuously be this very angry reaction not oh that's interesting you know i never thought of that i mean i think probably like you know i mean it's quite hard to shock me or to upset me uh you know oh that's interesting you know why do you think that but so why do i always get this like we've got to stop him uh other than that these are new

103:09commandments that we're breaking and and why so and i mean they're all sort of connected aren't they these things they're all attempts to but they're all attempts to something like purity which disturbs me the sort of if we could just get everything in a row you know you even hear that thing get in your lane yes god i hate the people who say that that's okay get in your lane oh do you think you are you know i mean yeah what's my lane i think i've said it a few times you know but i mean sorry but but only people that needed to stay in their lane new york i'm different new york times yes i was really on the plane over okay no i'm reading your time on the plane over and uh and there's a there's a question there's a uh there's you know agony aunt we call it what do you call self-help whatever advice column this woman says she was on the on the train a couple days ago and there was a man

104:05who came on with his girlfriend he was being really abusive to her and it just kept happening and he was really it was kind of nasty broadly violent situation uh she doesn't know what to do other people in the character move away is it and she's and of course you can see what's coming the combination of it is she says she gets off the train she wonders whether she should have said something but she says conscious of her white privilege and that these people were people of color and i am reading this i'm thinking what you now now if you saw a man of different skin pigmentation from you abusing a woman of different skin pigmentation from you the right thing is not to defend the woman that seems like a just a real justification for being a coward yes it must be but but i found the advice was you know you did sort of the right thing maybe you should have spoken

104:58to an official or something but there was no kind of so all this stuff all this weird get in your lane no no no it's your uh privilege you know way up your privilege i mean that's a good way to make society have a nervous breakdown isn't it way up your privilege you know privileged scorecards i mean my god i am but but all of these things seem to it's almost as if people think if we get the the lanes correct everything will be sorted and here's the problem is that first of all the means of doing this are just hideous i mean hideous they accentuate racial difference they accentuate sexual and gender difference they accentuate everything else um and the destination is horrible it is not the nirvana they think that they're creating so this is a really good moment to try to look at some of this and to talk about it and to think about as widely and as freely as we can

105:59and yet and yet the effort is to do the opposite i think you're onto something with the idea that this radical progressive very restrictive line of communication ideology that we're experiencing we're talking about is coming from a lot of people that don't have a religion yes they're atheists or they're at the very least agnostics modern progressives very rarely religious yes and um this must be for somebody who's a non-believer like myself this is a painful thing to look at but again we have to think about it but that's isn't that an interesting thing as well because you think of yourself as being on a team with these other atheists or agnostics but i mean you don't but i'm saying as an atheist yourself you have to look at it that way you've already lumped yourself in with them yes i i i had i was speaking at a campus in the u.s a little while ago and i spoke to a

106:49guy who's a really really clever student who is a free thinker he said he said uh after you were talking he said you know he'd have some hideous experience at a local free thinker society you know where everyone was like get in your lane and he was like i thought that being among free thinkers like the rest would all be good no no no they uh their free thinkers turn out to be just as able to be blindfolded if you you know on certain things down wouldn't you imagine this of course self-proclaimed free thinkers would be even more inclined to adopt a rigid ideology they're proclaiming themselves to be a free thinker and and it's possible this comes from that you know the the uh the older joke about sensors you know that the sensor knows everything that the people are really into and i spoke once to a man who was on the british border film classification

107:44he said all day watching really hardcore pornography deciding what could be legalized and all that sort of thing you must have a very dark view of humanity well that's what justice wasn't justice scalia's uh interpretation of pornography i don't know how to describe it but i'll know it when i see it right exactly like why are you a judge and it may be but it may be that these people that a lot of conservatives have this thing that one becomes rigid about something because you've seen into the abyss because you don't know you might and behave in a certain very terrible way and so you you want to pull back from that chaos you want to pull other people back as well seems to me that a lot of so-called free thinkers self-designated free thinkers may well have these glimpses and may well think i don't know what's holding this together and therefore might precisely for that reason be

108:41disproportionately rigid on almost any new ideology that came along get in lane yeah yeah i i like this idea that this is almost like a substitution for religion it's almost like there's an inherent need that we have because human beings have operated under these patterns for so long we clearly have this need to be upset to pretend we didn't know you know yeah it's it's interesting because the more you like we found ways to mock it right and one of the ways to mock it and i think that that's important and that mockery although it seems trivial what it does do is let people know how ridiculous other people feel those ideas are yes and then it makes them re-examine themselves because they don't like being mocked the term social justice warrior is wonderful for that because it just makes you look like such a fool you know i'm a social justice warrior yes you know

109:39it's like that i was a colleague of mine a spectator in london called rod little wrote a few years ago any any man who says he's a feminist clearly just is seeking a shag oh for sure for sure well amazing it's one thing to want equality but to proudly state that you're a feminist is it's almost i've joked around about it like i see what you're doing yeah yeah you don't run fast you can't pick things up there's still like the i get it somebody said it's about a party in britain uh they said that they described themselves as an anti-racist party and as a comedian who said it actually makes makes you think they might be racist it'd be like saying you're an anti-pedophilia children's agency you think who is the comedian that said that that's hilarious that's so true it's so true it's it's virtue signaling to the highest degree it's like you're you're putting up your flag of moral superiority

110:38standing on your high ground but it is it is it obviously means a great deal to to these people but yeah but then the question is just how to how to invite them not to think like that i think mockery mockery is one of the best ways because it just lets them know that other people think it's preposterous so it's not achieving the desired result the desired result is oh look at this amazing person there's incredible progressive ways of thinking not like oh look at this transparent who's just trying to get laid you know i mean that's that's how a lot of us see it but they don't see that we see it that way and some of the i mean it's in in a lot of ways a lot of our behavior is uh it's experimental you know i mean people are experimenting with various different ways of gaining uh social preference points well this is this is why i would say even if even if

111:30people aren't believers there are things they can learn from religion and from tradition and i've always thought that the um i've always thought there's one central insight to the judeo-christian tradition which i wish that the social justice warriors bore in mind and that is that's the garden of eden and and and the the what can't we call the crooked timber of humanity just just to recognize the central truth which is in that tradition and in others that that we're not born in this situation of russoian uh perfection uh or goodness but quite quite otherwise we are we are this very very uh uh contorted being which is part which is capable of incredible greatness and beauty and kindness and forgiveness and also capable of their opposites and that's and that it's not it's not that you are one and other people are the other but all of us all of us uh uh both

112:35all the time and so there never is a victory and there never is a win other than trying to deal with and restrain your own worst impulses in the life that you have and honestly express all the issues that arrive while you're trying to do that absolutely and and and trying to tell the truth where you see it and and giving voice to it and trying to i mean you know this is just it just seems so clear to me that that if people if people could realize this is the central problem of the thing that you and and i and others all face is the the desire to claim that the that somebody who disagrees on an issue isn't just of a disagreeing mind but evil and that in any you know we we have in britain we are wracked at the moment still by 18 months after a single vote on a single matter of governance we are still wracked by really unpleasant politics from brexit yeah

113:39and i suspect it's it's not i hate the overlap of the two but it's probably something like the trump uh events here but again and again you come back to the same thing which is just instead of thinking one side is entirely right and the other entire one this isn't to say you give up on objective fact or anything else but just consider that your opponent might be approaching this with an honest motive and might have honest reasons for disagreeing with you and in the absence of that and with media just endlessly feeding us whatever it is we know our own side happens to think um in the absence of that i just see our trenches in both our countries just being dug deeper and deeper until until there's just no hope of being able to even shout over the top and be heard and one can only get to that stage if if as i say you recognize that it's it's it's not a constant fight against nazis

114:36you know i mean it's by the way and also never to forget that the nazis didn't seem like the nazis to a lot of people when the nazis were being the nazis um uh but it's just it's just not as easy as that no it's not you know but it's it's an easy way to demonize the other side yeah it's an easy way to prop up your side it's a it's a cheap trick it is but going back to where we started what if the cheap trick ends up having some terrible consequence of making all of our defenses go down um you know if the conversation off with that community guidelines strike like good lord yeah this is this really is a very very strange time very strange always was douglas thank you very much i really really enjoyed this conversation i really appreciate it and your book that is out now is strange death of europe it's called immigration identity islam and uh it's available if you can find any bookshops

115:48left but it's all you got to get it online you can get it online as well there's a few barnes and nobles out there all right thank you douglas murray ladies and gentlemen great pleasure thank you my pleasure foreign