Ep 89 | This Brit Has a Dire Warning for America | Douglas Murray | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Today's podcast is one

you are going to, I'm telling you, there's like three places in this where our guest just goes and you're going to want to save it and listen to it every day.

It's incredible.

On Monday, the New York Times ran a dubious story about French President Emmanuel Macron.

They called him the French Donald Trump because he had the audacity to criticize the American media for supporting Islamic terrorism.

Macron used to be their guy, remember?

But he committed the sin of nationalism, criticism, freedom of thought.

Apparently, in the left's version of reality, you're just supposed to let Muslim terrorists decapitate your citizens.

A vengeful dogmatism has overtaken the left, and it threatens to destroy liberalism as we know it, erasing the ideas, the methods, and the values that have guided us for centuries.

And as you will find out today, we are leading the rest of the world.

The rest of the world, the left in the rest of the world, is actually pushing back on some of this stuff.

We're leading it.

There's a great book called The Madness of Crowds.

It's written by Douglas Murray, and he writes about this spirit of accusation, claim, grudge that has just overtaken Western society.

Well, Douglas is a guy that the left can't stand him, which has become an incredible compliment, quite honestly, for any of my friends and anybody I respect.

He regularly faces death threats for his views.

The associate editor of Britain's Spectator magazine

is

living a life in a way of Jason Bourne, and he doesn't give a flying crap.

His goal is to give you permission to think differently.

And boy, are you going to.

Now is the perfect time to talk to Douglas Murray.

He just came back from a several-month trip here in the United States.

And it's better to talk to him now than it even was over the summer when the riots were at their worst, when the madness of the crowds was on display.

Riots are supposed to happen in the summer, right?

But wars.

Wars bleed into the winter.

I talked to him about what's happening in America, what he experienced, and is there a war on our horizon?

As we saw this past weekend, maybe.

Please welcome Douglas Murray to the Glenbeck podcast.

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Douglas, are we

at war with each other?

Are we at war with ideas or

war with elite?

What's happening to us?

It's a very good question.

Plunge straight in.

I've just returned from five weeks in America, and I think it's worse than anyone realizes.

I think that, for instance, all this talk about fake news and all that in recent years hasn't even brushed the surface of what's going on in America.

The problem in America, if I could put it in a nutshell, is this.

It's not that you disagree in America about what's happening, you don't disagree about your interpretations, it's not just that people have different information flows.

You can no longer agree in America about what you've just seen with your own eyes.

You see the same footage and you come away with different conclusions.

And the 2020 election is probably

the most dire example to date of that happening.

It happened in 2016.

Similar things have happened across years.

But this

is the beginning of something new.

So, what does that mean?

I mean,

I think the problem has been that we've lost our unum.

The thing that brought everybody together was liberty and freedom, the idea of constitutional rights.

We don't agree on that anymore.

So

it's not like we're even, but we're not arguing that.

So what's happened?

How are we not arguing the thing that is really the problem?

It's absolutely everything.

I hadn't been in America for two years, by the way, till this trip.

And I just noticed in two years the marked decline at every single social occasion I was at of Americans not being able to talk across a dinner table without someone losing it.

And it goes back to that thing I just said.

You're no longer agreeing on what you've just seen.

But underneath that is another one.

In America, you no longer agree on what you are as a nation.

This is actually the thing which, in his slightly inept, I think sometimes way, President Trump tried to address in the Mount Rushmore speech.

He said,

you know, I'm going to retell the story of our founding fathers because I think that people are getting the wrong story.

Absolutely that's happening.

It's not happened by a sense of gravity or something.

It's happened because some people have taught a totally different view of American history.

And part of America now believes in the view, which is, you know, we're an exceptional country.

We've done exceptional things.

you've run, as Jonathan Haidt and others have said, for seven decades off the moral good fuel of winning World War II.

There's nothing since that's been able to unify the country.

But if you plunge back into American history and get things that could unify you, they don't work anymore.

Because a part of the country says, no, not 1789, 1619.

A part of the country says, as the famously, your viewers will remember this, the CNN, I think it was, presenter, who said the the day of the Mount Rushmore speech, the president tonight is going to stand on stolen land in front of statues of slave owners.

If your founding fathers are just slave owners, America's just stolen land, you don't have anything you agree on.

You can't agree.

So,

you know, when Joe Biden gave his acceptance speech, he said that now it's time for unity.

And

I was scratching my head because I'm thinking, but I don't agree with almost everything that the left is for.

And you can't just impose unity.

What are you going to do to earn my respect now?

I mean, we used to have a respect for the president and the office, but that's long gone.

That's long gone.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, unity, I'd like unity on my terms.

Right.

As long as you like

Yeah.

It's like, we can have peace on my terms.

Right.

It doesn't sound to me like an invitation.

It sounds like a threat.

That's what this is.

We will say all sorts of things about the 2016 vote.

But you're not allowed to say anything negative about the 2020 vote.

Here's an example.

The Democrats who spent four years pretending the 2016 vote was somehow rigged by the Russians, something they never showed an iota of evidence that proved it, now have to try to pretend that there is no voting fraud problem in the American voting system.

That's a hard one to pull off.

That's a very hard one to pull off.

But here's an idea.

Here's how America could agree on something,

because Donald Trump's got to pull off a tricky one as well.

He's got to try to prove that not only is there

definitely some voting problems and fraud around the edges, but that it's so widespread and organized that actually it reverses the result of the election.

Something I don't think he can do and I don't think he's been able to show so far.

But how about whoever's president after January the 20th inaugurates a commission to work out whether or not the American voting system is actually in any way vulnerable in the way that both parties have now pretended that it is?

So it would be a good place to start.

But I don't think here's the problem: there's something else in America that

we used to believe in truth, justice, and the American way.

Truth is gone.

The American way is obscene to even talk about.

And justice no longer prevails because the people at the top, they get away with murder.

But I mean, for instance, you guys over in England, I think you had a couple of

of your parliamentary members actually resign

because they did something during COVID.

They shouldn't.

They were seen going to a party or whatever.

You resign.

Us?

No.

No, nothing.

The California legislature, while they're shutting it down, is over in a conference in Hawaii.

And nobody cares.

Yeah,

we had a scientist, a scientist who, in classic British fashion, turned out to be getting his leg over with his mistress at another house whilst telling the rest of the nation to be confined to barracks.

Yeah, he did resign, albeit he's now back.

So I wouldn't

look at us too fondly on that.

Well, we just don't have any

trust in a justice system anymore.

We believe there are two Americas.

I've never believed when for as long as the left has been saying there's two Americas, I've not believed it.

Now I do.

There are two Americas.

Yes.

Yeah, as I say, I mean, it starts from the beginning.

You don't even agree on when your country started anymore.

The New York Times pretends it started in 1619 when the first African slaves were brought in.

And another part of the country believes it happens at the time that the Declaration of Independence is signed.

And actually,

this is the same argument we had right before the Civil War in

the 1850s.

People said that it was 1619.

The other side said it's 1620.

It's the pilgrims that gave us this heritage that raised the founders towards the light.

Now we don't even consider the pilgrims.

No, I mean, they are, well, they're reprehensible figures now, aren't they?

We ran a piece in The Spectator in London recently about this, which raised what I still regard as being a rather important question, which is what were the Europeans meant to do after they'd found America?

Were they meant to just go back home and say, we've found this enormously large land mass, but I don't think it has any potential.

It's not a particularly prime piece of real estate.

I wouldn't bother with it.

Were they meant to return and say, shh, nothing rare?

You know, people acted in history the way they did, but now, of course, with our current obsession with judging everyone in history, we've come to this decision that all these people were reprehensible people.

And here's a key thing, because we've seen this in Europe as well, in Britain and in Europe.

If you want to completely change the course of a country's future, the best way is to rewrite its past.

It's a very effective way of doing it.

You know, in Europe, for good reasons, people were, for the last seven or eight decades, seriously put off nationalism.

They were told that everything to do with national identity was dangerous stuff because if you felt pride you might end up invading your neighbor and taking a portion of their land and twice in a century European nations have done that and the blame was I think slightly erroneously put on nationalism but ever since Europeans have been told in order that they don't go and invade a neighboring country anytime soon that they can't trust themselves and their histories are dark and bad and untrustworthy and a lot more that our histories are colonialist are slave trading and oppressive and much more and i think it's amazing.

I wrote about this a bit in The Strange Death of Europe, which resonated a lot with American readers, I know.

I know that exactly the same thing has been done with Americans in our lifetimes.

You know, the European sort of distrust of our past,

I like to think that Britain was apart from that, but the European continent's distrust of its past had some good reasons.

That Americans should be told to completely distrust their past, that they're born into guilt, that the whole of American history is just slavery and oppression and hierarchies of oppression,

is one of the things at the root of this.

Because if you were always awful and horrible and acted reprehensibly, why should anyone trust you in the future?

All right.

If you are motivated to do something and start speaking out, you need to educate yourself.

And I want to talk to you about a new book called Not Free America.

It's written by

Mike Donovan.

He is a guy who has been working in the civil rights

field for a long time, started the nation's largest pro bono civil rights law firm.

And it didn't start with COVID.

It didn't start, you know, around the Tea Party.

This has been going on for a long time.

Not Free America is his new book.

And as he says, the Bill of Rights has been under attack long before

any of this stuff was going on.

And if you are a person that refuses to surrender your liberty to any earthly power, you need Not Free America.

It solves the issue of citizens being used by the government, but it doesn't just tell you about the problems.

It is also a solution book.

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Find out how to stop the overreach abuse of our government and what actions you can take to do better.

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There's a

very scholarly book.

You probably really enjoy it called

Hitler's Monsters.

And it's the first.

Have you read it?

I've heard of it.

I've not read it.

You should read it.

You'd enjoy it.

It's really dense.

But it's a.

The guy who wrote it tried to write the

kind of cornerstone of

how did this happen in Germany?

What were the monsters that he called upon?

And

in reading it, you know, they went back to old ancient myths.

They went back to witches and warlocks and all of these things

because they had destroyed the national

identity.

They had destroyed

God, church, the national identity.

there was nothing.

And so, you know, Nietzsche was right.

You're going to replace it with something.

And

the Germans replaced it with science and mythology.

And that was the stuff that was really used.

I look at what's happening to us.

We are systematically

being destroyed with nothing left.

There's nothing left.

What is the plan

after this that people,

you know, you like to think the best of people on the other side that might be doing this, but I can't come up with anything that doesn't end in just evil, just doesn't end in absolute darkness and chaos.

Well,

here's one possibility of what's happened.

I lay some of this out in the madness of crowds, that

I think that we've had a vacuum vacuum in the West for some years.

In fact, as I wrote about this in my last two books, there's an existential crisis that's been going on underneath the West.

You touched on a bit of it there.

Religion recedes.

You can applaud that or deprecate it, but it's happened.

The faith withdraws.

As it withdraws, underneath people, a whole set of questions open up, and they're like trapdoors.

You know, people don't like to address them, but they know they're there.

Where do, for instance, human rights come from?

Who institutes them?

I don't know, someone, and then eventually realize maybe they're not actually inbuilt.

Maybe they just, like everything, it's just a trapdoor beneath which there is just chaos, this darkness.

Now,

this is one of the deep, deep problems of our time.

The thing that has most plausibly tried to step into this vacuum is the thing that the radical left was working on for years, which has now become visible on a daily basis in all of our sense-making organs, all of our media, government, government institutions, Wall Street, the big banks, all of the Fortune 500 companies, which is this claim that purpose in life and meaning can be found in searching for equity.

And that as long as we can get to a stage where all human beings end up at the same top of the same mountain, that is human purpose and happiness.

It's not possible.

It denies human nature.

Of course, it's totally impossible.

You saw that Kamala Harris

cartoon she sort of sent out on the eve of the election.

There'll be an awfully crowded mountaintop.

But here's the thing.

It wasn't taken very seriously at the beginning by the ideological right, by conservatives and non-partisan figures.

It wasn't wasn't taken very seriously.

It's taken seriously now, rather too late, when vice presidential candidates are talking about equity and insisting on instituting it in American life, when you have street thug movements that seem to think

erroneously, obviously, but seem to think that if they smash enough skulls and enough Starbucks storefronts, then at some point we reach justice.

You know, these people think they mean it.

They've found meaning in their lives.

They've been led into an incredibly evil place, but they think they've found it.

And

by contrast, the ideological right and those who are sort of somewhere in the center have not answered it.

They haven't said what we should do.

So I want to get to that in a second, but I want to clear up one thing.

I think

one of the appointees on the COVID task force for Joe Biden just said today

that

they wanted to make sure that the vaccine would go out

to provide equity.

And so there would be an equitable distribution of the vaccine.

Now, if you came to me, and I think a lot of Americans just think that this is what it means, if you came to me and said, look,

African Americans,

a higher percentage

get the disease.

Elderly people get it.

Apparently, teachers are, you know, on the front lines with this.

And you just, you said, look, these are the people who get it at a higher rate and have a higher risk.

We got to give it to them first.

No one would have a problem with that.

But that's not what they mean, is it?

I doubt it is.

And by the way, the problem with all of this is that there's a whole set of things that just haven't been addressed anyway.

I mean, in the US, like the UK, you have this issue of minority ethnic communities who seem to be particularly disproportionately affected by the virus.

You can't ask why.

In the UK, there are now two inquiries as to why this might be the case.

In the weeks I was in America, I didn't hear one person ask why it might be the case.

So here's the additional problem.

You just can't

inquire into anything because you've decided what the answers can't be.

What if, for instance, the answer is, and I would have thought it's sensible that it's a likely answer, if it's true that the COVID

acts particularly on

people who suffer from obesity, and if obesity is more pronounced in certain communities, those communities will suffer disproportionately from COVID.

What do you do with that?

It seems America has decided don't talk about it, don't even have that discussion, don't raise it.

Also, because we've already got the answer to everything, the answer to everything is racism.

And so you can't have any of this out in America.

It's a totally hopeless situation that your country's in.

I can only console myself that my country is in a second most hopeless situation in this regard.

You think that we're worse than Great Britain?

Oh, yeah, on this stuff.

You've got a whole set of problems which you can't answer because you can't come to the answers that might be there.

You also suffer, as my friend Eric Weinstein put it recently,

with this extraordinary situation.

We all know why it's come about historically, but

you now are obsessed with your skin pigmentation.

It's disorganized.

But

we're really not.

Half of the nation, maybe

half of the nation, and I think it is

more that skin color has been politicized now.

Sure.

I think the number probably is closer to 15 or 20% that are actually buying into this.

The other that brings it up to 50% is about politics.

But most Americans, they don't agree with this, but they don't say anything.

Exactly.

That's the point.

Of course they don't.

And that's where your nation is in this particular problem.

You know, I said before,

I hate this phrase, the silent majority, because why is the damn majority silent?

Why should it be silent?

I have friends in America who, since the Black Lives Matter movement have got going, have told me with terror what they have gone through.

I have a friend who,

in a church group, somebody, it's people she'd known for years, somebody in a church group

starts going on about Black Lives Matter and what books the white people present should read, and my friend just stays silent.

She gets a message a couple of days later from somebody in the group saying, I think your silence was telling.

That's the sort of thing going on all over America at the moment.

And as I say, you are obsessed by skin colour because the people who are obsessed about it the most with the darkest possible motives

have now persuaded the rest of the nation to tiptoe and to say nothing and to live in guilt and fear and silence.

You can see it everywhere in your nation.

Your bookstores are filled with this moral effluence, which tells people, tells people you're racist, you're guilty, you're awful.

Go away, shut up, don't speak.

Everything in your culture does it.

But here's the problem.

I think Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have one thing in common, besides the hair.

They both of them

appealed to people who felt they had no voice and no one was listening to them.

And Donald Trump, I don't know about Boris Johnson, we've been busy over here, but Donald Trump, He's the only politician that I've ever seen, and I was not a fan of his to begin with.

But

he actually did the things that he said he was going to do.

He actually was trying to tear some things down that were wildly unjust.

Now that he is possibly not the next president, most likely not the next president, people feel like, well, if he can't do it, how can I?

What chance do we have?

Sure.

There's all arguments, all sorts of arguments that one can make about this.

I mean, I agree with you that broadly speaking, Donald Trump did a few big things.

I also think the number of things he didn't do, which conservatives have paid the price for him saying he was going to do without the advantage of him actually doing them, is quite substantial.

Let me rephrase this.

I was not a fan of Donald Trump and especially his style.

But I came to the point to where

what he said about the press exposed the press because they lived up to it.

The Russian collusion,

because he fought against it, he kicked down some doors that I don't think he knew he was kicking down.

There were some things that happened because he's a wrecking ball.

Yeah,

as I think it was Dave Rubin who pointed out that the people who complained that he wasn't a panther in a China shop forgot that, you know, they voted for a bull in a China shop, not a panther.

Correct.

Trump didn't have the ability to slink around the bosses.

But

yeah, here's the most irritating thing, of course, about

the whole Trump era, as it's probably now going to have to be seen, is that

for four years,

and we've had aversionism in Britain, but for four years, his opponents thought that the public didn't know the negative aspects of his personality or couldn't see them.

And they failed completely.

And I deeply regret this because I love your country.

I love America.

I've always admired it.

I deeply regret that they've missed the opportunity and maybe now they've missed it completely

to consider what it was the country was doing in 2016 when it said we know that

we know that

we're voting for him anyway.

I have to tell you, Douglas, I called every member of the press.

I know them all.

I called every leading member of the press in 2016 because I didn't like him.

But I said to them privately and publicly, guys,

this is a huge learning curve.

There's something going on that you are not seeing and you will make it much worse if you don't see it now.

None of them had any desire to even learn.

They didn't.

They have a view that half the country is just racist, pig-headed, and stupid.

Well, you can't have a country if that's the way you view half the country.

No.

I mean, it is a possibility.

I'm not one of those who always thinks that events will fall out and prove me to be right.

A lot of conservatives do.

They sort of think, well, the bottom will fall out of the thing, and then everyone will see that we were right all along.

I'm not sure.

I think quite often the bottom falls out and there's just ever more chaos.

But...

I do think that Trump may have shown something that I've intuited for a while, which is this.

Our countries, Britain and America perhaps in particular, were going in the wrong direction.

And everything in the state, including the foreign services, the intelligence services, and much more, was all headed in the same slightly wrong direction.

For instance, on China, the most obvious one.

Now, the American public have this moment of genius like the British public do, which is they vote in spite of everything they're told to do, because they sense that something about the direction they're going in is fundamentally wrong.

And what I think we've seen in the last four years in both our countries has been that course correcting on these big wrong directions that we're going in has to be done, but was not possible in the four years we've had so far.

Correct.

Which raises the question what is actually needed?

Because it's not like Biden and Harris are going to take on the undercutting of America by China.

It's not as if they're going to tackle the

diminution of America as a world power.

It's not like all of the other things that the American voters' sense about the downhill trajectory of the country are going to be righted in the next four years.

So, how can they be righted?

So, I don't think,

I think this is where I'm maybe a little more pessimistic than you are on this.

I think that that is

why, one of the reasons why Donald Trump was fought against so hard is because he was stopping this,

he would have stood in the way of the great reset.

And all of this stuff that is happening that is taking us to greater globalization, greater,

you know, one world order, if you will.

All the things that we sense.

I mean, look,

you know, nationalism,

you know, aspirin is bad for you in big doses too.

So nationalism isn't bad as long as, and I come from Texas, so I

understand, I don't come from here, but I live here.

And Texans always say, don't, now don't you say anything wrong about Texas.

And

they will talk to you all day long about how great Texas is, and quite honestly, it is, but they don't hate your state.

They don't say anything other than, well, Oklahoma, well, Oklahoma is different, but New York,

you know, it's a great place.

It ain't Texas, but it's a great place.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But if you say, Sweden, I'm proud to be a Swedish citizen and I'm flying the flag, you're a racist.

If you are proud to be an American and fly the American flag, you're a racist.

That's nonsense.

That's nonsense.

That is what people were feeling was, look,

I love my country.

I think we're doing things that we've done since the progressive era that are taking us into dark places.

It never works out.

And now,

with Trump gone,

this vacuum is just enormous.

And I think they're going to push even harder for the things that our two countries, the people of our two countries, seem to be against.

Yeah, I think that's possible.

I think there's going to be a lot of demoralization and a lot of feeling that there's nothing that people can do.

And I think it has to be hit back against.

And if I can say so, I mean, this is a small C conservative answer, but it has to be answered by going back to the things that have served us well in the past.

I completely agree with you with what you say about nationalism, by the way.

I have always said that, I mean, sure, nationalism can lead to wars, but the Trojan Wars were started by love.

And nobody's tried to ban love because it can lead to wars.

Everything can go wrong.

And here's, by the way, here's one problem of our era.

Globalism can go wrong.

It's just we haven't had the kind of crazily large-scale demonstration of how it goes wrong that we had with nationalism in the 20th century.

It's like,

look how badly Marxism went wrong.

And we haven't even learnt the lesson of that.

So things have to go really badly wrong for everybody to get the lesson.

I mean, how bad,

look at, I've never been one, I've always hated the movies where they're like, I don't, I don't work for a country, I work for the corporation.

I've always hated that.

But they were right.

If you look at the power of Google, you look at the power, our founders did not see one thing coming, and that is that a corporation could be more powerful than a sovereign nation.

And we're there and nobody seems to care.

Yeah, I mean, you or you have social media companies that can try to mute or silence the president on the day of an election.

Yeah.

I mean, whatever you think of him, just wow,

what a situation to have come to in our own lives where unelected

people whose motives, apart from their profit motive, aren't even widely understood, could be able to do that to the leader of the free world, whatever you think of him.

It's an astonishing past to come to in a very short space of time.

But very quickly, if I come back to this point, we have answers that have seen us through before.

America is replete.

Again, it goes back to this thing that Trump was trying to do at Mount Rushmore.

America is replete with examples, people,

heroic figures, heroic happenings and occasions that could see you through this period.

It's just you have to look on them with understanding and love and forgiveness for where they've gone wrong, not with this attitude of superiority, which has been taught to two generations of American students.

How do you do that when the entire system

is being run by radicals now?

I mean, you know, when you have the teachers' union running the Department of Education, when you have the media and then you have social media, you have all of the power structures going the opposite way.

How do the people, even if it's half, how do you stand up without a power structure?

Well, you know,

we've seen it before, many times in human history.

This is a particularly strange example because we live in a form of liberty and also mass disinformation.

In Mads of Crowds, I give the example of Google image search.

I'm sure you know it, that

just look look at what Google Image Search gives you back.

It's not what you ask if you say the wrong thing, ask for the wrong thing.

So they are successful.

Let me give a quick example in case your viewers don't know.

But for instance, if you type in European people's art,

You might think you've got, I know, some Van Gogh, some Raphael, some Leonardo.

There's no shortage of images you could have of European art.

You don't get that.

You mainly get portraits of black people in history because Google's decided that for you.

Google decided what you're going to see.

You're not going to be able to see the rich and brilliant culture and achievements of the people of Europe.

You're going to be force-fed your anti-racism five a day like a good boy.

Now, this is what Google are able to do, but totalitarian societies tried this in a different way for decades, and it was possible to break through them.

And let me give you one quick example.

In the era behind the Iron Curtain, people in countries like czechoslovakia hungary poland and elsewhere were taught to imbibe lies on a daily basis they were told lies about their past including their recent past they were told lies about their present they were told lies about their future but it was possible and i know many of the people who are involved it was possible also to find your way out of that to be taught your way out of it there was in those days something called the Underground University of brilliant academics and thinkers and others from left and right who went into the former Eastern Bloc at some risk to their own lives and told people things that were true, taught them the classics, taught them Plato.

In top rooms where they would sidle out silently in order that the neighbours wouldn't inform on them.

It was possible, even in the darkest hours of the 20th century, to be able to bring truth to people who had been fed lies.

So if it was possible then, it's possible now.

So I agree with you, and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here on everything, but I do want to challenge you to be able to hear the response of strength.

It was possible in Czechoslovakia.

It was possible in Poland because they didn't have the security state.

that we now have in the United States or in the Western world or anywhere in the world.

We now have Big Brother in our home.

We welcomed him into our home.

So you don't need the neighbors reporting on you because they have everything that they need on you.

Sure.

I mean, the security state in the former Eastern Europe was much more rigorous and

serious in its punishing effects than anything we have now, thank goodness.

What is new, I agree, is that there is an inviting of the censor, of the corrector, of the teacher into your life.

But I come back to this point.

There will also be technological ways out of that.

I mean, you know, you remember at the beginning of the internet, people said things like,

the internet's going to be this wonderful resource where everyone learns more and we're all going to be better educated.

Okay, well,

that didn't work.

I don't think anyone could say.

The great thing about students is 2020 is just they know so much more.

No, you know, you know, it's funny is I was talking to my son the other day.

The one thing that can be said about students of the 20th century is they have access to so much more.

I showed my son an encyclopedia the other day because he was like, I don't know how to find the answer.

And I'm like, don't even start with me.

I want to show you how I had to find the answer.

Go to Google.

You know what I mean?

So they have access to so much, but we don't necessarily even know how to use that.

It's been the same with human beings ever since we got off our hind legs when we found fire, when we discovered the wheel.

It's been the same with everything.

It can all be used to bad purposes.

Absolutely everything that human beings discover and come across can be.

But we can rescue them for the good as well.

I am not down on the idea that if a young person can find out the amount that a young person can now, then a number of them, however large or small in number, will find their way through to truths and knowledge which previous generations, including ours, could only have dreamt of.

It's all there, and it's my experience that a smart young person today

has a better opportunity to get to truths than anyone else and is in the process of doing so.

I mean, sure, a load of people are just spending their time imbibing cat videos, which doesn't do any great harm, but a number are doing that.

But equally, what you and I were going had to find a book to know what was in it.

We had to get hold of it, buy it, save up for it, or whatever.

Same with music, same with everything else.

We have the opportunity, I'm always banging on about this, but it's true, we have the opportunity to solve so many things these days.

We have the opportunity to answer things which our forebears never even knew they could start to think about.

And

it's in the hands, literally

in the hands of every single young person.

And one of the things, that's one of the reasons why I try to clear away always the sort of what I think of as the debris that the radical left keeps putting in front of young people's lives, all of the nonsense about equity and equality and all of these things, is to try to clear some of that away so they spend as little time as possible on it and get to the thing in their lives that they should be doing.

Because it's the best imaginable time that they're living in if they can just get through the traps that have been put in their place.

Help me out on

this.

I don't think America would have ever put up with this COVID stuff of

just the federal government wanting to take over

and tell us exactly what to wear, where to go.

We would have never closed our businesses down.

Never would have done that.

I think one of the things that played a role in that is entertainment.

I think we are fat and happy and we can go home and we have never-ending entertainment and access.

Zoom is a good part of this.

And I worry about,

you know,

and I think it's true.

People say that there's You know, there's all kinds of different people, people who are entrepreneurs, but not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur.

Some people just want to show up, do their work and leave.

But it seems like there's a growing class of people in america that

just want it done for them just want it easy want it done for them if you pay me and i could sit at home and watch netflix i'm going to sit at home and watch netflix and so there's this this diminishment of

what america used to mean we used to be people who are like we you know we'd see the moon and go let's go there

yes um um

i think there's several reasons for this by the way one is it goes back to this thing about trust and trusting yourselves.

It's the same with individuals as it is for a nation.

Europeans were told not to trust themselves, because if you got kind of outgoing as a European, you might invade France again.

I'm slightly...

joking about it, but not much.

It's the same with masculinity in our day, for instance.

Because everybody is obsessed with where masculinity can go wrong, they've decided that one of the answers to it is to feminize men and make sure that masculinity is looked down upon.

It's just, by the way, there was a good example just yesterday, Vogue magazine, which weirdly has turned from this totally frivolous publication into this sort of frivolous publication plus SJW-ism, which is a really ugly combination.

You know, sticks Harry Stiles, my own countryman, on the cover in this sort of really hideous sort of dress thing.

It's just one tiny silly example of something that's ongoing, which is don't trust men, particularly, don't trust masculinity.

Why?

Because men go out and

they explore and they climb peaks and they reach places, and then some of them can sometimes do bad things with it.

And it's one of the great tragedies of this generation that so many people are being told, limit your ambitions, don't trust yourself.

The same goes with women as well, it's just particularly pronounced with men.

Limit your ambitions, sit on the sofa, watch the box set, the Netflix series, and don't dream big because you can't be trusted and you can't trust yourself.

I think it's a lamentable thing.

And all I can hope is that enough people are persuaded and are told no.

Don't listen to that.

Don't take the

Xanax-like thing of our era and get off that as fast as you can and get out and do things that would make your predecessors and your ancestors proud.

Live up to the extraordinary, heroic examples you've been given.

Don't just focus on the few things or the many things where things went bad.

Don't just focus on that and, as a result, limit your horizons, your potential.

Because what's the point of getting to the grave, having been a cringing, pathetic, doubting figure your entire life?

Sure, some people will be like that, but they're to be pitied, not to be aspired to.

Let's go to the continent here for a second.

Let's go to France.

France,

I'm tired of in America being told we need to be more like France, but lately, I wouldn't mind being more like France.

France seems to be,

I mean, in today's world, it's almost like Winston Churchill could come from France in

today's world.

Macron said this, what, a couple of days ago, that he thinks the New York Times and places like that that are saying that France is just this racist place have lost their founding principles.

He's right on that.

And then he went into, we will stand against racism and anti-Semitism and we will not get rid of our history.

We will not get rid of our statues.

We will not do these things.

I haven't heard that from a leader except Donald Trump.

Is that going to work in France?

It does work in France.

I completely agree.

Look, it's harder from a British person's mouth than it is from an American mouth to praise the French.

And to say that they were brave.

What?

Yeah, no, I mean,

it's that sweet enemy,

but I think that this is our problem, not theirs.

I think that the French Republic has shown extraordinary courage, stoicism, and resilience in recent years.

I don't think that America or Britain would have got through remotely as easily as France has of the last five years after incessant attacks of the kind it has gone through.

It is the American left that has gone rancid and rotten.

And that's what Macron was pointing at in his conversation with the New York Times and indeed his letter to the Financial Times.

Wait, wait, wait, can you wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I want to interrupt you for one thing because you said the American left.

Do you believe that this is an American left problem, that we have spread this disease?

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's an American problem.

It's the American left that cannot do patriotism and leftism.

The French left have no problem with this.

The French left are totally capable of defending the Republic of France and also having certain views on trade unions, for instance, that the right don't share.

It's the American left that's gone into this weird place where if you believe in the left, you can't believe in America.

There are very proud movements, patriotic movements on the continent, in France and elsewhere, that believe in left-wing principles, which I happen mainly not to share, but also agree on the future of the country.

And this is where Macron is on totally safe ground domestically.

You know, he said when the statues, when BLM started off this year in America, obviously it's been going for some time, but when it started off this year after the George Floyd death,

Macron was the only one out of the, apart from Trump, Macron said, no statues are coming down.

We're not erasing any of our history.

In Britain, by the way, Boris Johnson waited until the statue of Winston Churchill was attacked in Parliament Square before he blundered out and actually found the courage to say something.

But

Macron knows he's got unity from the Frenchlinist, and there's a reason why, which is that the founding principles of the French Republic are very, very deeply dug.

And they're not planning on giving them up.

Now, American leftists have decided to give theirs up.

I thought that what Macro said in recent days attacking the American left-wing media was superb, it was overdue.

And I wonder whether a certain type of American Democrat, the sort of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Scoop Jackson-like Democrats that remain in the voting rock, mightn't think, yeah, there was a day when we used to be able to be proud of America without being called racist.

You know, I remember those days.

Maybe we could do something with that memory.

Do you think that when you were over here

Because I can't figure out how this election happened the way it did, other than

there's a bunch of Democrats who are not socialist, not Marxist, but they also didn't like the chaos that they thought was really stemming from Donald Trump, but it was equally stemming from the left.

And they thought, oh, you know what?

If we just get this old guy, if we've seen him for years, he'll just make things calm again.

Not understanding the power behind him is really from the left.

Is that your take of what happened here?

Yeah, I thought that Peggy Noonan,

very brilliant observer of this, I think, got it right.

After the COVID week

when Trump had COVID, she wrote in a column in the Wall Street Journal that she thought that maybe Americans had tired of Donald Trump.

They just want to vote back to normal.

And they would see in this, you know, she said that they had got caught in the reality show.

They wanted to change the channel.

They hadn't had a chance to change the channel.

This was a chance to get back to normal.

Of course, the kick in that is

you don't get back to normal.

There isn't normal.

There never was, actually, but there particularly isn't in this era.

And the idea that Joe Biden, who isn't in the first flush of youth or capability,

would be the answer at this time isn't something I particularly recognize.

But I can understand the sentiment, and I think that percentage of white male American voters

By the way, again, we don't have this discussion in Britain.

We don't have everything broken down by ethnic group.

But white American male voters who didn't vote for Trump this time, I would have thought to a degree are in that group, who, yes, think that Biden is some kind of return to normality.

I think that's not the case.

I think that the attempt to reset the course of American travel that Trump ineptly or otherwise attempted in the last four years

will not continue.

I think that Biden will get America back into all of the things that were going wrong,

including international agreements which were going wrong.

And I think that this will require a stronger, clearer, and more organized answer in four years' time from the American right.

And we'll see if they manage it.

I don't know if they're going to manage it.

I mean, you look at...

You look at the things that the American right are for.

They're many of the same policies.

I mean, Donald Trump, Americans have been saying for a long time, what are we doing in the Middle East?

Stop it.

We're making more problems in the Middle East than the Middle East is making in the Middle East.

I mean, we have real problems.

What are we doing in bed with bad guys who are Islamicists?

There's a big difference between Islam and an Islamicist.

Know the difference.

Let's stay away from the Islamicist.

And we're about to get right back into the same policy.

It kills me that the left finally had a guy who said, let's bring the troops home.

I don't want any new wars.

And they rejected him.

They rejected him.

And we're going to go back to a guy who I think is, we're going to go all into all the mistakes we had before.

You'll certainly join back up with a P5 plus one Iran Accords.

I'd have thought that's inevitable.

That's insanity.

Of course.

And my own country signed up to it.

It's a big mistake, a big mistake.

Yeah, people,

one of the tests of whether or not you can get back to any healthy situation in America is

can you credit your opponents with having done anything right?

Can you credit, for instance, that the UAE deal,

Bahrain,

Sudan,

much more, can you credit that Donald Trump did something good in that?

If they can't, and I haven't heard that from anyone.

No.

It's funny, I'm not sure.

Just people who talked about peace in the Middle East who just didn't ever credit it.

It would do so much good in America if somebody could credit that the person on the opposite side, when they've done something right, has done something right.

It is funny.

I was just having a meeting before we talked.

I was just having a meeting with my producers and I said, the one thing I want to make sure is that we don't become CNN.

We don't become what we've despised.

If he does something right, we have to point it out.

Because I'm sick of everybody just being horrible and there's nothing good.

Of course there were good things about Donald Trump that he did.

You know, hard to admit for people on the left, but by not admitting it, you have zero credibility.

Zero credibility.

Absolutely.

And they're not willing to credit that.

And so there's just a risk that this is going to run and run in America.

I hope it doesn't.

You know, because you can also hear around the world,

when we are allowed to travel a much, I mean, I can travel a bit now, but when we can travel a lot, I do travel an awful lot.

I travel around the world all the time.

And you know, America going badly wrong isn't just a matter for America.

People think

I've noticed in America in recent years a sort of liberal parochialism that's emerged.

They think they know all about the world.

They know nothing about the world.

And one thing they particularly don't know is that actually the world has looked to America, for an example in running democratic elections efficiently and properly and respecting the results in arranging transitions of power peacefully in doing good at home as well as abroad, in correcting errors in your country where they exist.

But the world has actually looked up to America on this.

And if you get it this badly wrong now, the tragedy isn't just yours.

It's that other countries around the world that looked to you will not look to you and they will look elsewhere or they'll look inwards.

And I, personally, speaking as somebody on the edges of the American era of dominance, say that that would be a deeply regrettable day to arrive at because all the other contenders for your role, all of them, will make the world infinitely worse, not better.

So the responsibility Americans have to get this right is not just a responsibility for yourselves alone.

Douglas, I was talking to Dave Rubin the other day,

and I said,

I had two questions.

Let me ask you the same questions.

The first one:

Are we not repeating everything that has happened in the past in Europe that we all decided we'd never forget?

We'd never, I mean, are we not following the same path as the worst tenancies in the 20th century?

No, I don't think you're following all of them.

I tell you the one that you're following, which is worst, which is race.

It's the worst.

Right.

And then the

shouting down in the streets, if you disagree.

I mean, it's brown shirt stuff.

I found it despicable what I saw in America in recent weeks.

I thought it was despicable that you could go to

cities like Portland, as I did, to cities like Portland and Seattle, which used to be not the first great American cities, but they were proud cities.

They were cities where people worked and they grew up these cities.

They developed them into good places.

I found it despicable to see not just the total emiseration of these places by anti-fascists that are actually fascists

parading around and beating up journalists and threatening to kill people who disagree with them and destroying public property and destroying private property and the the citizenry being in this disgusting situation of having to put and some of them said it to me clearly it's not just my interpretation putting things in their windows that are don't hurt me signs you know they put up BLM thing I went I went with Antifa one night in Portland when they were parading through the streets cut off the streets they were parading through the streets screaming at midnight at people's homes that they were standing on stolen land and people were coming out of their their houses to clap the people screaming at them.

They were clapping them, saying, we're with you, we're with you, because

they're trying to make the mob pass by.

And that this is happening in America, and that your cities and your citizenry are cowed like this, is despicable to see.

And it's being done because people have been oppressed and they've been told to shut up and be silent.

And that is a terrible lesson, this.

And I wish Americans of all skin colours and all backgrounds could get off this as fast as possible.

It's what I've been trying to warn people in America about.

We know, I know exactly where this stuff goes.

Don't do it.

Don't imbibe this, especially not

in the guise of progress.

So let me just go over a couple of things.

In the guise of progress,

that is

Germany.

It was for a better, stronger world through science.

They had,

I mean, I've seen a million times the Germans that put signs in their butcher shop or whatever, they put those Nazi flags up or Nazi propaganda up to say, pass by, I'm not a problem.

They had the brown shirts, which were fascists, just like our black shirts.

They curbed the media and made sure of any voice of dissent was curbed.

We now have that in America.

All of these things that are compiled one on top of each other.

And now we have people who are openly saying 70% of the country is racist.

They're openly saying if you voted for Trump or enabled him, tweeted for him, did anything, there needs to be some sort of a punishment.

There needs to be some sort of re-education.

What I asked Dave was,

I've never understood until recently

how people in 1934 or even 35 after the Nuremberg laws were passed, how Jews stayed.

Why didn't they get out?

Now I understand because I look at these things and say, yeah, but it's not going to happen here.

Yeah, but they don't really mean that.

Yeah, but something will happen.

And the more I say that, the more I worry because that's exactly what they did when you took the automobile from the Jew and they had bikes, they all said, well, it won't get worse than this.

At what point do we, is there a line?

Is there something that if we ever trip across, we go, okay, all right.

This line can't be crossed.

Before it's too late?

No, because there never is a line.

It's just endless, endless further bits of darker grey.

I happen not to, I don't believe that history is an endless

reworking of the 1930s.

I think that it's one very, very informative era, which we need to learn from and which we don't.

But one thing that is different today is, and this was what was so shocking in California and Oregon in particular, is

the citizens in America who think they are living in a situation they don't have to live in.

You know,

it isn't like Germany in the 30s.

It isn't like behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period.

You can't actually legally be killed for voicing an opinion.

So why don't you voice your opinion?

You can be muffled, you can be abused, you can be...

I'm fed up, may I say, by the way, of people on the ideological right in America moaning to me about what they put up with.

They say things to me like, oh, you should see what I get on Twitter.

So what?

So what?

You think anyone in history who told the truth had an easy time?

You've got the easiest time that any opposition movement ever did in history.

Compared with Martin Luther, compared to anything in history, you've had the easiest time.

You've got the easiest time now.

So here's a challenge to people in America.

You have the optimal conditions and comparatively, by historical standards, the easiest situation.

So don't grouse to me about how you might lose an invitation to a drinks party or how your prospects in some area of life might be impaired.

Dress yourself to a better area of life.

Get yourself to a more optimal area.

Move out from the area which they can't police properly if you can.

And Americans today have a better opportunity to do that than any of the people in history that we might talk about.

So the question is why don't they do it?

They've got to do it.

You have to do it.

You cannot have these people in America living in a nominally free society, which is for the time being free, pretending that they live under the circumstances of Jews in 1930s Germany.

They don't live in glass houses in America.

Throw metaphorical stones, not the real ones.

Speak up, speak out, don't be a silent majority, be a very damn noisy majority, and don't put up with the oppression of people who are insincere, totally insincere.

You think these race hucksters who come along really, no, they want to make money, they want to win, nothing more, nothing more.

Call them out, get them, clear them out of the way, and get on to doing what you should be doing as a nation.

That was fantastic.

And

I think what America hears too little of.

Let me go back to Islam for a second.

Because I think we're going back to a period to where we're going to start excusing Islam again, and I should say the Islamists.

The left, I've always wondered,

you know, you're for gay rights.

They are definitely not.

You're for freedom for women.

They are definitely not.

And I never could understand how the two could come together.

But I don't...

I don't think they have anything in common except they both want to win, are ruthless about it, and both will kill to be the last one standing.

I don't...

Do they have anything else in common besides the destruction of their enemies?

There's a pact that has been breaking down in recent years.

All these sorts of pacts break down eventually.

We mentioned France earlier.

The bit of the French left that was sympathetic to the Islamists

has diminished in recent years, really pleasingly diminished and necessarily diminished.

It would diminish in America, by the way, as well.

If you had one night in New York where a few hundred people were gunned down with Kalashnikovs and blown up in suicide bombings at major stadiums in New York by a bunch of Islamists, I reckon that some of those you know, those sort of Islamist-licking leftists in America would pipe down a bit, don't you?

Yeah, I think it's a good idea.

I think that's why they don't do it.

Yes, if you had a year in America where

your most prominent secularists were massacred at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year, a priest saying mass at St.

Patrick's Cathedral was beheaded at the altar, as happened in France, I reckon that some of your Islamist-licking leftists would shut up a bit as well in America.

You're just very fortunate.

Your leftists in America are really fortunate that they haven't actually stared into the face of this enemy very much.

It happened on 9-11 and they managed to get over it and pretend it had gone away pretty fast.

It's why you can even see it with the tricks they pull over death rates to terrorism in America.

They always start on September the 12th, 2001.

Oh, I know what you're doing.

I can see what you're doing.

So you've had that in America.

In other countries, it's different.

The Islamist licking left in the UK is not as vocal as it used to be.

Those people, I was writing about this 20 years ago, those people who used to march, you know, the sort of vegans for Sharia sort of groups, you know, those

people hived off.

You know, the gay rights activists who are marching alongside Al Mujaharoun,

they fell away.

So

is it in time for Europe?

I mean,

I hear London is

there are many places in London that if you're a white person

or English, you're not walking down.

Is that true?

No, no, that's not true.

No, I mean, I'm a Londoner born and bred, and you could say that

I don't have a great view of it because I know it so well, but I would say I have a pretty good view of it.

In The Strange Death of Europe, I try to give what I think is the most realistic analysis of what has been happening.

It is the case that there are very sectarian areas of the UK, as there are across the continent.

Quite often, by the way, when people said to me in the last decade, come and see my area of Sweden or Denmark or somewhere and I went, I would sort of not be that shocked because I said, well, I've seen former mill towns in the north of England that have changed completely in my own life.

I said, I'm not that easily shocked by it.

And you could say that I was, as a result, kind of complacent.

I don't think I am complacent about it.

What I think has happened is there has been

a massive

demographic shift in Europe and a religious shift in Europe which has been completely underestimated by everybody in charge.

And those of us who identified it have been made to pay some price for doing so.

But other people have exaggerated the situation.

The problem in Europe is very serious indeed.

It is what Macron said the other week.

We have parallel societies that have emerged.

But there are parts of the UK which

are

not pleasant.

I don't think there's any that I would

fear walking into.

I've had my own troubles with that in the past.

But I don't think it's as bad as some,

particularly American commentators, have tried to say in recent years.

But I don't think anyone has ever accused me of actually underestimating this particular problem.

Let me end in this area.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a great book called, or wrote a great poem called The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

I don't know if you can see it.

Oh, yes.

You know it.

And it is a great lesson to us in this age.

But the last line is basically the truth, the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.

We are so

apart, anything but united.

We are not listening to each other.

We don't see anything the same.

We are not

here in America, we are not,

so many people are not even willing.

to give the other side the benefit of the doubt.

And there is real, there are real problems going on.

There's real destruction of our society and of our republic happening.

How do we get out of this?

I mean,

does it end in terror and slaughter?

Does it end in war?

I actually have thought that.

I thought it before the recent election.

On an anecdotal level, as I think I mentioned to you, I was so struck that people couldn't communicate across a dinner table anymore in America.

I was horrified by the state of American cities.

I was horrified by what had gone on under people's noses without them raising enough objections.

And I do think that this parallel society has emerged in America, which it's hard to see

how it resolves.

I think it could resolve.

You could resolve it, for instance, as I said earlier, by trying to agree on something.

That would take a leader that we don't have as of today.

I haven't seen that leader.

Well,

it also requires the citizenry.

You know,

I was interviewing a policeman in Oregon who said something very interesting to me about this.

He said, people always talk about the responsibility of the police, but they don't talk about what the responsibility of the citizenry is.

By the way, this policeman happened to be black.

It was a very, very interesting perspective.

And

I had not heard somebody say that for some time.

And I I would say this as well, though, about political leadership.

It's not enough to wish that the perfect figure comes along, the sort of combination of Roosevelt, Churchill, and

somebody else,

comes along and it leads you all to be better people.

It's something which Americans need to practice themselves through lives.

I think America, you study America, you know,

that's what the Tea Party started out as.

And then it was kind of hijacked by political, you know, party, et cetera, et cetera.

But

that was the people standing up, and it was beaten into a pulp.

Just beaten into a pulp.

So I think,

rightly or wrongly, I think there's a lot of people who are like,

we tried.

We tried.

Absolutely.

Look, I mean, to steel man each side's criticisms,

the American left seems to think that if they allow the American right to have control of anything, they will institute fascism.

And the American right seems to fear that if they leave the American left in control of anything, they'll institute communism.

That seems to be broadly specific.

So it's at this stage where, if that is the case, then you can't trust each other with anything and you've just got to keep trying to immiserate and browbeat and beat down your opponents in case they do this.

I think there are politicians in America of both sides who don't want want either of those things

and could plausibly show that.

Now, but I don't see them around because, I mean, the obvious example is, you know, you didn't used to hear Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi talking in the terms they have recently about the American right and Trump voters.

You didn't used to hear it that half the voters were racist.

Now, because the election's gone the other way this time, perhaps we'll hear the right now saying crazy things about the left that are unsubstantiated.

Maybe we will.

I'd hope not.

But here's the problem, of course, is that every time you say to people, how about you behave better, they say, well, look how they behaved to us.

I mean, I'd be completely understanding if the American right decides now to, for instance, order an investigation into the behavior of the Biden family and then try to impeach the president in his first year.

I'd completely understand it because they'd say, well, they did this to us.

It's just that it would be good if that cycle was broken, but it requires both sides to trust each other, and I'm not sure they do.

But as I say, just to go back to this point, if you could find something you agreed on, I would say this, agree on the fact that every country in history has done things wrong.

Very few have done as many things right as America.

If China had been in

the most dominant position in the last 150 years,

would the world look better or worse?

Worse.

If Saudi Arabia had been in charge of the world for the last 150 years, better or worse?

Worse.

If Germany had been in charge of the world for the last 150 years, better or worse, worse.

Try to persuade Americans that you've got a damn large amount that's been going for you and that you've given to the world.

Sure, you've made mistakes.

We can all list them.

Every American can list them.

How about listing some of your virtues for once?

How about listing some of the things you've got right?

Agreeing on them, and working out how you could do some things right in the future too?

You could do this.

I'm sure you could.

It just requires enough people of good faith.

America is an extraordinarily large country.

It should be able to find a quorum of such people.

You are refreshing to hear and to talk to.

Sometimes...

Sometimes it takes somebody outside of the family to

shake the rest of the family awake, you know?

It's nice to hear an outside point of view about America.

We don't ever hear it, especially from Americans.

But there's

something when a citizen of another country says it to us that

it

is sobering.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

God bless.

Great pleasure.

Thank you.

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