Making Sense with Sam Harris - #93 — Identity & Terror

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about identity politics, the rise of white nationalism, the events in Charlottesville, guilt by association, the sources of western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I am speaking again with the great Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including the Sunday Times, Standpoint, and the Wall Street Journal. He's given talks at the British and European parliaments, as well as at the White House. He's a truly inspired debater. I've never had the pleasure of being on a debate stage with him, but it would be an honor.

And he's the author of a wonderful new book, which we discussed in the last podcast, titled The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam. And at the outset of this podcast, I wound up addressing what is currently the most popular question on my Ask Me Anything page. I was going to save that for my next AMA episode, but it just made more sense to work through it here with Douglas. So here's the question. What are your thoughts regarding the Charlottesville incident? Please address the many aspects, i.e. the rioting, the media coverage, the individual groups present, Antifa, BLM, Trump statements, etc.

So Douglas and I get fairly deep into that and to related topics like identity politics, guilt by association, and then we finally move on to the topics that had been left out of our prior discussion of his book, topics such as the source of Western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and related issues. Douglas is really one of my favorite people to speak with, and he's doing very courageous work on the topic of Islam and Islamism in particular. Like many people doing that work, he is often unfairly maligned, but he really is one of the most thoughtful people

you could ever hope to meet. So it is indeed a great pleasure to once again bring you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure, Sam. So we were all set to talk about questions of human values and their link to tradition. I think we were going to kind of stumble upon the glories of the Sistine Chapel, having already talked about Islam and immigration and all of that, terrorism, et cetera, to our heart's content and to the

laceration of our audience. But now we have some major news events threatening to derail us. We have neo-Nazis marching and committing murders in Charlottesville. We have another terrorist atrocity in Europe, this time in Barcelona. And then I think just in the last hour or so, there are reports from Finland of a stabbing.

Maybe you have more information than I do. You're in the time zone. It just doesn't stop, Douglas. No, it doesn't. It just goes on and on. And as we've said before, I mean, the thing is that some of the facts vary, but I mean, not very much. And, you know, it's hard to ever find anything new to say about it. Although sometimes new people, you know, discover the facts about it and get new opinions, but there's not much variation in all this, as you know. Yeah, I think there's some new ground to cover with respect to Charlottesville. And I think having you on the podcast for this could be perfect, although obviously we didn't

plan to talk about this. But let's start with Charlottesville and Trump and the heat he's getting for his response to it, because I'm in hot water here with at least the moral imbecile wing of my audience for a tweet I sent out right after Charlottesville. I wrote, quoting myself now on Twitter, in 2017, all identity politics is detestable, but surely white identity politics is the most detestable of all. Seeing the absolutely cretinous response to that, I added, the necessary context, of course, is the last 200 years of human history. So I think it's perfect to debrief with you over this because your bona fides as someone who is worrying about immigration are impeccable, obviously. And there's no doubt there are people in the world or even in our audience

who worry that you may be a white supremacist or be motivated by racism. So I want to kind of walk through this. And if there's any point where you disagree, I'll be very interested to hear it. But let me just clarify what I was saying about identity politics here, because the point strikes me as absolutely obvious. But given the response, it's clearly not obvious to some people. Just to give you the predictable response, I've been accused of virtue signaling in the most abject way. This is kind of reverse racism, you know, so racism against white people is okay, or you can only be racist if you're white. I hate white people. Something in that genre just came to me in torrents. So let me just clarify this and then see if you disagree.

So just as not all religions are the same, I have much more to say against Islam than I have against Anglicanism, though I can find something to say about Anglicanism. And I have much less to say against Buddhism. I think there are wonderful things in Buddhism, although I have negative things to say about it as a religion. There are differences here, and so too with identity politics. Not all identity politics are the same, and they're certainly not the same with respect to the context in which they're being practiced in history. I mean, if you were practicing German

identity politics in London in 1950, well, then you deserve to have the shit kicked out of you, right? I mean, this is just, you know, and the same could be true for, you know, Japanese identity politics in Nanking. And if you compare that to Black identity politics in Alabama in 1964, which I think most sane people would acknowledge was not only morally understandable, but morally and politically necessary, right? I mean, that is identity politics, a.k.a. the civil rights movement in America. Now, my tweet was actually fairly carefully written. I mean, it starts with, you know, in 2017, all identity politics is detestable. And of course, I'm thinking about the West and I'm thinking primarily about America. I was commenting on Charlottesville and I believe this. You know, I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and

divisive and retrograde movement. And it is a dishonest movement. I mean, it's not to say that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little to recommend in what I've seen from Black Lives Matter. African-Americans to be organizing around the variable of race now. It's obviously the wrong move. It's obviously destructive to civil society. But let me just say that Black identity politics in the U.S. in 2017 is still totally understandable. I think it's misguided, but I think it's completely understandable. And in certain local cases, perhaps even defensible. What is not understandable, generally speaking, is white identity politics in the U.S. in 2017. I mean, you've got pampered doughboys like Richard Spencer, who have never been the victim of anything except now the consequences of his own stupidity. And now he gets punched as a Nazi because people mistake him for a Nazi, though he doesn't think he's a Nazi and perhaps he isn't a Nazi.

But you have white nationalists and white supremacists marching in the company of actual Nazis and members of the KKK. And that is aligning themselves with people who actually celebrate Adolf Hitler and the murder of millions of people. Right. And so this is not the same thing as Black Lives Matter. And it's not the same thing as even Antifa, these goons who attack them and perhaps got attacked in turn. It's hard to sort out who started it there. And I've got nothing good to say about Antifa. These people have been attacking people all over the country, and they're responsible for a lot of violence. I think it's a dangerous organization, but it doesn't have the same

genocidal ideology of actual Nazis, right? So that you have to make distinctions here and all identity politics is not the same. So I guess I'm just wondering, do you disagree with any of that? I think I have a slightly different take on it. I mean guess I'm just wondering, do you disagree with any of that? I think I have a slightly different take on it. I mean, I agree with most of what you just said. I think there are several things. One is that I think it's inevitable that if identity politics runs riot rampant among one group of people, it's almost always going to cause a counterforce. In my latest book, In the Strange Death of Europe, I mention how it's quite hard to see how you don't get nasty white identity politics at some stage as a response to nasty identity politics of other

kinds. Or in other words, I think, as I say, at one point, you you it's not in the long term sustainable. Everyone's allowed to do it on the basis of their skin pigmentation, apart from people of one skin pigmentation. It's sort of it's just hard to imagine how that would be sustainable in the long term. Although I agree with you there, there are ebbs and flows in history of when you would legitimately have a cause among one group and then it would diminish and so on. And I think there are two other things. One is that it's very hard once you go down this route to know when to stop.

And it's not just a personal judgment, is it? Because it relies on the goodwill of everybody else from your background or of the same skin pigmentation. I mean, it means that you're not going to have an opportunist on your side. Well, you know, we all know human nature. You always have hucksters and you always have opportunists and you always have people who, as I often say, remain on the barricades even after the battle is won because they don't have a home to go to other than the barricades even after the battle is won because they don't have a home to go to other than the barricades and that phenomenon is gonna gonna happen and i think it's it's been happening in a whole set of of rights claims in recent years and and i think i suppose thirdly

that the i don't entirely agree i agree with you i mean i can't see why somebody like uh richard spencer could ever be regarded as having a sort of, as you say, legitimate grievance, as it were. Not that there's any legitimate grievance that could could permit somebody going down into those fetid byways anyway. But but I disagree that it's not possible that, as it were, a white person somewhere in the states or some people might be feeling some aggravation and i don't as i get again i mean i'm talking as much like you in the in the issue of context to do with particular groups at this moment in time and let me you know throw out the obvious one i can see how um a white american uh in, you know, former steel town without a job and with all the same sort of lack of prospects as people of other skin colors in the area and so on. Also, on top of all of that, has to endlessly hear from the media and from a lot of rich kids at universities the claim that he has got white privilege.

kids at universities that claim that he has got white privilege and him feeling, you know, particularly at this moment, I'm particularly disgruntled about that. Now, as I say, all of this to my mind is just horrible, horrible terrain, which I just wish we weren't collectively stuck on. I mean, of course, we agreed on that. It's sort of too obvious to say. But I say it because I have to say, as an outsider looking at America, it does seem to me that you're driving yourselves mad at the moment. And one of the ways in which you're driving yourselves mad is in this way in which you went towards something which I thought was the purpose and the dream within America, the dream after the civil rights achievements and so on, which now seems to me to be being thrown away and almost bungee jump going back from after the moment of progress.

And I think that this is happening because people are going down the whole avenue of this identity politics in general. I see it everywhere in the States on everything. And I've never heard, I mean, I've never heard, you know, the only one I can claim to have any legitimate kind of personal insight into is the sort of gay identity politics. I've never seen people at such a pitch of illegitimate agitation. And I don't know why they're doing it. Again, I fully agree. And this is why, you know, I would say that all identity politics is toxic at this point. Now, again, there are local cases

where this almost certainly isn't true. I mean, if you're going to tell me that the Rohingya Muslims need to practice some identity politics against the murderous Buddhists in Myanmar, okay, fine, you know, I'll sign that waiver. But generally speaking, in developed societies where civil society is or was well established, where you have norms of a kind of universal political argumentation, where the color of your skin is irrelevant to the position you are arguing for or should be, must be, to be persuasive. Identity politics is a disaster. And yes, as you say, the light was just fully visible at the end of the tunnel here. And we've had a two-term black president. If we can't secure that as a durable gain for civil rights, what the hell is going on,

right? Exactly. And the Secretary of State and so on. But you see, I think this thing about, as it were, it's not just about where you individually or I individually or any other individual holds it. It's the fact that there are always going to be people who, for short-term political gain, do not want to exercise the same standards, you know, there will always be somebody who, who wants to who feels that, you know, they haven't had a fair enough, you know, go at things and, or they just want more, or they want to be famous, or they want to be rich, or something, they want to lead a crowd. And, and they will claim that it doesn't matter that, you know, we've had a two-term black president.

The whole country is still institutionally racist and we're only minutes away from slavery again. There's always going to be a reward for those people, it seems to me, in the situation that we are or you are in America setting up for yourselves. up for yourselves. Yeah. Well, so let me just, again, reiterate that I agree with you that in certain cases, even white identity politics is understandable here. Again, if you're talking about people who have been kind of passed over by the new economy and are in addition to finding it difficult to get a job, they're being told that it's good that it's more difficult for white people, given the history of racism. And then they have to confront the reality of immigration taking some jobs, say. So yes, that's understandable. But again, that doesn't map on to Richard Spencer, right? No, and I wouldn't want that person to go remotely near white identity politics as a response.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's just it's it's it's it seems to me more likely that people are going to be pushed in such a direction. If you sustain for too long the idea, as I say, that everyone has that right other than them. Of course. And that's what I see happening. other than them of course and that's what i see happening i mean by the way it's just a thought i mean this all these things the context of these things in a way reminds me of that really interesting thing some years ago our mutual um friend i i think i can say friend um certainly in your case um somebody i admire very much uh richard dawkins some years ago do you remember in an interview talking about um uh He didn't want, you know, he didn't want people to be called, I know, Christian children. They're just the children

of Christian parents and so on. Your listeners will probably be very familiar with this point. There was this really interesting point when Richard, in one interview, said, you know, there's no such thing as a Christian child. There's no such thing as a Muslim child. And then he stopped himself. He stopped himself because he was about to say something he knew he didn't want to say. And he acknowledged it. He said, I don't want to say there's no such thing as a Jewish child. Now, why do you not want to say it? Because of the echoes we all know about this. And this is just, that is a horrible thing. And he knew it and he pointed to it. It was fascinating. And that's the same, it seems to me, slightly with what's going on with the identity politics thing. We are tolerant of the Black identity politics because we recognize

that within living memory, the Black communities, particularly in America, had legitimate grievances and legitimate cause to have an identity that they marched on, as it were. And we're also aware that in living memory, there were, you know, white people in the South who, you know, lynched people because of the colour of their skin. So what we're doing is getting around and coping with the sharp corners of not that distant history. The thing I think that's so worrying about it, though, as I say, is that I hear almost nothing of mending this. I see only and I hear only in America people staking their careers

and their livelihoods and their entire occupations on making this worse. People claiming it's never been so bad. People setting up their own stalls in the identity marketplace. And I just, I mean, maybe as I say, maybe it's just nature of the media and of people becoming well known because they make the most outrageous statement or whatever. But I just am not hearing in America anything to do with a sort of spirit of mending. And this worries me. Yeah, well, I think one way to mend it is to make the kinds of distinctions we're making now. It's relevant that within living memory, as you say, these kinds of atrocities and

injustices were commonplace. And as you and I point out ad nauseum, it is relevant when you talk about Islam at this moment, it is relevant what is happening not only in living memory, but in our working memory, entered consciousness two seconds ago with respect to the news, and to not move in the next sentence to some statement of moral equivalence with respect to the Crusades. So context matters here, and perhaps I don't need to belabor this, but I stand by this tweet. I think if you can't differentiate the identity politics of Black people in America from the white supremacist identity politics we're seeing given voice in Charlottesville, you've got some moral calibration problems on your hands. That's not to say that some form of

white backlash against the rampant identity politics we're seeing practiced in America isn't to be expected or understandable in certain cases. I know. I mean, I just look at all this with such horror because I genuinely have thought for most of my life that we were getting beyond this. And I sort of still think we are. I just think, as I say, that the standards that we might wish to apply, there will always be people whose careers are predicated on not applying them. I mean, you know, in my country, in Britain, we had this long business with the Cecil Rhodes statues a couple of years ago, the Rhodes must fall thing. But, you know, that whole thing really was whipped up by some South African students who happen to be Rhodes scholars who were, you know, basically appealing to an audience back home in South Africa and were going to make careers when

they went back. You just, you know, there are always going to be people who are going to do that and are going to take advantage. Look at one other, by the way, a little hobby horse of mine, this Anne Frank Center in America. It's called Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and Tolerance or something. It's run by a couple of just activist Democrats who are standing

on the name of a murdered Jewish girl who they never had met or had any connection to and using this dead Jewish girl to attack Republican politicians they don't like. I myself think it's just grotesque beyond words. I think if they had any shame, they would stop, but they don't. They were furthering their careers. They're really, really keen on it. You know, they ran some kind of gay rights group and then they obviously realized

it was sort of, it wasn't such running and so much fuel in that, maybe. And then they just decided to, as I say, grab a dead Jewish girl and run with using her name. I just think this is from every community and every background and every skin color and everything. You're always going to have these people who just don't want to exercise the standards because they need not to. And there's also just an impressive degree of confusion here.

People just can't follow the plot. So you have something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in the face of a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, seems like an absolutely necessary institution. This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center is for, to combat this kind of white extremism in the country. But in this same period, they have listed our friend and colleague Maja Nawaz as an anti-Muslim extremist. And as much as we've gotten the word out about that, you still have people like Tim Cook, the head of Apple, giving a million dollars to the SPLC in recent weeks. People can't cohere in a vision of what makes sense morally and politically because there's this identity politics and political correctness has just kind of cleaved our conversation about current events in ways that are just confusing to people. And the response to Trump in the aftermath of Charlottesville or the response to Trump's response, it has been emblematic of this.

So, for instance, I despise Trump as deeply and as broadly as I think any person I can think of. I mean, I just think he is a conscienceless monster. And, you know, I don't need to go into that at length. I probably have 15 or 20 hours on this podcast of me railing against Trump. But leave it to the left to attack him in ways that make him look nuanced and judicious in the aftermath of this thing. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable how bad the commentary has been. I mean, perhaps we can parse this before we get off Charlottesville, because I think it's important. So the first point to make is that Trump failed what, as many people have said, is perhaps the easiest test of moral leadership a U.S. president can ever face,

which is to condemn Nazis in our own society, right? I mean, like that didn't happen early, and it didn't even happen to a satisfactory degree late. I mean, he just has never managed to articulate what is wrong with a full embrace of the public square by Nazis and armed KKK members. I mean, we had people marching with military rifles in a U.S. city, intimidating people. And in the context of this march, someone gets murdered in what I'm sure will prove to be an actual act of terrorism, which is to say that the person who did it wasn't mentally ill, but was actually ideologically motivated by his beliefs, his white supremacist beliefs. I don't think we know that yet. Perhaps that's been discussed in the news and I'm unaware of it, but it's absolutely the easiest possible thing for a

sane and ethical U.S. president to get up and condemn this in the strongest possible terms. And he didn't do that. So that's what people are appropriately reacting to. And in addition, there's the fact that because he's been so bad on this issue and because he flirted with these people throughout the campaign and in the last six months, And because he's managed to give white supremacists in our society the impression that he's on their side, or at least giving them cover or winking at them in some sense, it's just he's in some sense culpable for the brazenness of this emergence of white supremacy in recent weeks. And so that's one point.

But what the left is also doing in response to his failure here is they're castigating him for things that actually are true and make sense. And there's no distinction here. They're castigating him to the same degree for points like that Antifa were also violent, right? And they're also a dangerous organization.

It's also despicable to have them attacking, in many cases, perhaps across the board, but at least in some cases, were actually peaceful marchers who just happened to be Nazis, right? But if you're a Nazi who's marching peacefully and get attacked by Antifa goons, well, then your violence is actually

in self-defense in that case, right? It is a morally ambiguous situation when you have these two groups in the public square. And yet he's getting savaged for making that point as much as any other point he did or didn't make. The other thing about Trump is that he, as he always does, his narcissism and self-regard bled through even in the moment of commenting on this political emergency. And so when he mentioned the mother of the slain woman and talked about how she sent him such a nice message on social media and how he appreciated that. It was so dripping with the focus on himself that it was just, you know, appalling. So virtually everything was wrong with how he handled that news conference. And yet the left still manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by focusing on the few points he was making that were in fact legitimate, or at least potentially legitimate. Unless we can learn to talk about these things in an honest way, what's happened

now is the response to Trump's failure has been so uncritical with respect to these issues that the left has managed to say all of the things that make it seem like just a purely partisan overreaction to his failure. And so the Republican base or the Trump supporting base now discount everything that's being said about him in the aftermath of Charlottesville. And you have, of course, again, idiots and goons, anti-Trump appearing on all the major television stations in America, saying that, yeah, we should, you know, we should bring out, making their short-term political opportunity. If I can say so about this, I mean, I may just be, as it were, more generous in my interpretation of this. I may be wrong on it. But it seems to me there are two bits of the criticism of Trump after Charlottesville.

The first was whether some of what he said was wrong or right. And the other one is whether the timing was wrong or right. Now, it seems to me that self-evidently, the timing was obviously wrong. You don't do a moral equivalence thing after somebody's been killed. You just come out and condemn the people who did the killing and so on.

The problem is that I think there is probably a legitimate sense of grievance among some people in America about the fact that, as it were, and still be called anti-fascists, people who are actually the closest thing to fascists until you see the people in Charlottesville. And that just doesn't get the condemnation. So I imagine that what Trump was thinking was, again, I may be being generous, but my impression would be that he was thinking, I'm not giving them that the so-called anti-fascists are indeed all anti-fascists and that everyone they call fascists are fascists. Again, if the Southern Poverty Law Center is allowed to designate churches that don't agree with gay marriage as hate groups, then we're already slipping. If Charles Murray is allowed to be called a fascist and allowed to be drummed off a campus and a female professor he's with assaulted and it doesn't get any sympathy or care or concern, then we're already slipping down this problem. I'll give you a couple of examples that strike me as

fairly egregious, which make your point. And this is, I haven't really taken stock of who is guilty here, but they're very prominent people who you and I respect as journalists in every other context. But people tweet photos, you know, from D-Day saying, you know, alt-left rioters, you know, attacking fascists or something like that. So making fun of Trump's point. And so the suggestion is that the people who are the Antifa people or whoever they were, who were fighting the Nazis in Charlottesville, were the moral equivalent of our soldiers during World War II. It's terrific, isn't it? I mean, it makes you, also, by the way, how cheap and easy is it? I mean, you know, the soldiers who stormed the beaches of D-Day saw their friends and comrades

shot down beside them. A lot of them saw things they'd never forget and went through unbelievable things. Every single person there that day had a courage that most people in our generation, thank God, will never have to even try to summon up or imagine. And here are these people who just have to tweet and they make themselves feel like the moral equivalents of those people. feel like the moral equivalents of those people. Again, I mean, I've said enough against Trump to hopefully never be condemned for failing to detect any of his moral or intellectual lapses. But in this case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and follow you there and imagine that he was just trying to be fairly scrupulous about the blame that existed on both sides and what a danger this represents to civil society where you have people, members of the KKK and neo-Nazis marching with a permit, right, which is something our First Amendment protects, and they're getting

attacked by the people who show up to protest. Now, I'm sure that ran both ways. Perhaps there were neo-Nazis who were doing the attacking first. But still, you can't attack members of the KKK and Nazis just because you don't like them. I mean, that's it. Like, if you are using force first, you are the criminal in our society. Now, you might want to rewrite those laws. You might decide that at a certain point, Nazis shouldn't be allowed to assemble. You might want to follow Germany and pass laws against Holocaust denial or the display in the swastika. I don't think you do want to do that. I think our First Amendment is the right way to go here. But given the laws and the norms of civil

society, you can defend much of what Trump was saying there. What you can't defend is the man and how he has practiced politics up until this point, and the dog whistles he has given to racists for now years. And so the context matters, and that's what's misleading people here. Can I make two points to that? The first is, this comes down to a consistency point. This reminds me of a very important issue that has come up in my country all sorts of times. What do you do about a collective group of people or a voluntary

organization of people? And where do you draw the line between claiming they're all responsible for something or not? Now, you'll see where I'm going here, but let me give you an example. I don't think I would... There's a mosque not far from where I'm presently sitting that's run by, among others, somebody who's a former military commander of Hamas. Okay. I would not say, you know, that everybody in his mosque was a terrorist,

or that everybody in his mosque was Hamas, or even that everybody in his mosque was sympathetic to Hamas. I just would be very careful about that, for all sorts of reasons, some legal, some just practical, and some to do with just not wanting to imply to all sorts of members of the public that, you know, that whole place is filled with terrorists, because there are consequences potentially of such speed. Now, I would like to think that it was possible to be consistent on that sort of thing. As I understand it, Trump seems to have thought, and I don't know whether this is the case or not, that there was a protest happening and then the KKK and the others show up and so on. Now, there are lots of other cases of that. Stop the War Coalition marches, for instance. You start a Stop the War Coalition march and then some people. You start to stop the war coalition march, and then some

people come along with a load of stuff that, like, hates the Jews. To what extent can you say, okay, everybody on that march hates the Jews? I think you can't. I think you have to say, look, it attracts those sort of people, so what can we infer about your cause, for instance? But I think in order to be, you I think in order to try to think our way through this, I think we do need to have some kind of consistency on that approach. And I think that there is a deliberate desire to say in certain directions, actually, I need these people all to be fascists or all to be Nazis. And I reckon, you know, I mean, I can't foresee a situation where I was on a march and was marching along and a bunch of people with swastikas were beside me and I was OK with that.

OK, but I mean, it's the sort of scenario that we've we've seen, as I say, in similar situations. And one of the one of the big problems in this, it comes back to my point about the so-called anti-fascists, is, as I've said many times, they desperately need fascists. And the bar for describing people as fascists is commensurately low as a result. And this comes down to the second point I wanted to make. There's a member of the cabinet here in Britain who I'm a great admirer of called Sajid Javid. He's been in the cabinet for some years now as a conservative MP. And he was, among others, among our politicians in Britain who immediately sort of leapt on the Charlottesville thing and made public pronouncements. Now, he said in a tweet, I think it was, you know, look, it's not hard. I'm abbreviating. It's not hard. You know, we're against fascists. We support

anti-fascists. You know, I was taught that in school. This this niggles at me because I just don't think it's as easy as that. And I think a lot of this is, as I say, short term political opportunism and and a desire to I mean, as I say, who doesn't find it easy when the KKK come along to condemn them? I mean, well, it turns out some people do. It turns out the president of the United States does. That should be a straightforward. The one that concerns me are all the levels beneath that, including people who can just willfully be described as, I don't know, fascist.

I've just seen too much of the kind of finger pointing and fascist claiming. And I know, and as I say, and I know that, I mean, just vast numbers, it seems to me, of the self-described anti-fascists are just very obviously fascistic. And so I don't see the same simple view of this. I think that I think there are fascists and there are Nazis. I think the KKK fit that bill. And I think the photographs I saw.

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