The Joe Rogan Experience - #1084 - Douglas Murray

Episode Date: February 26, 2018

Douglas Murray, author of "The Strange Death of Europe" which is out now, is an author, journalist, and political commentator. He is the founder of the Centre for Social Cohesion and is the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society and associate editor of The Spectator, a British magazine discussing culture and politics.

Keep this about a fist away. Okay. And we're live. Douglas, first of all, thanks for joining me. Appreciate it. Great pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to talking to you. You've become an example to me, or your conversation with Sam Harris has become an example to me

of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas. Right. Because of this, Jamie, pull that thing up. This is a tweet that someone sent out, and he got a strike, a community guideline strike, just for listening, just for putting you on his playlist, a conversation between Sam Harris and you, and this man, or I don't know if it's a man. I just assumed. I'm a problem.

I'm part of the problem, part of the patriarchy. P-T-R-K-C-C-X on Twitter. That is his screen name, his or her, or Zer, screen name on Twitter, and got a community guideline strike for just putting this. Now, I brought this up to, I was having dinner with some friends, one of them who used to work at Google,

and someone who's there was a highly ranked person at YouTube. I brought this up, and the exact quote was, that was because it's hate speech. And I said, you said that so flippantly. I go, please tell me the contents of the conversation. Do you know what they talked about?

I go, how did you say that? She goes, well, I'm sure if someone marked it as a community guideline. Right. Or as a strike, a community strike. What is it called? A community guideline strike? Yeah. That it must be hate speech.

I'm like, do you understand this is Douglas Murray and Sam Harris? I bet that's not what the conversation was about. I bet it wasn't, too. I'm trying to think what we did talk about now. It's making me nervous. I mean, but I know it definitely wasn't hate speech by any sane definition of those words. This sort of thing is very disturbing to me. Very disturbing.

And you notice it happening with other people, of course. And that's disturbing enough. It's more disturbing, of course, when it happens to you, but it's slightly surreal. I mean, I know Sam Harris a bit. Not a hateful person. Sam Harris a bit. Not a hateful person. My most sort of yogic, calm, blissed out West Coast of America friend. And I'm pretty amazed that anyone at Google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth with hate speech, unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like like or that words don't matter anymore.

Well, that's what I'm concerned about. I'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these, we don't even have to name the organizations, but certain organizations are extremely left-leaning. And, I mean, it's probably better than being extremely right-leaning. It really is. It's probably better than them being white supremacists, white nationalists, hate groups. It's probably far better that they're radical lefties. But it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that, because things like that limit free speech and they limit the free discussion of ideas. I didn't listen to didn't listen to your, your conversation. I, I think I listened to a little bit of it, but I, I didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the N word halfway in.

I'm sure I'd remember. I'm sure. I'm sure you would. I'm sure I would have heard about it. Blushing more at this moment. Um, I had another thing that I talked about with this same person. I had another thing that I talked about with this same person. I brought up Jordan Peterson. And, you know, there's issues with every time he's on podcasts, the podcasts get flagged for demonetization. And the exact words were, he's a troublemaker. And I'm like, what in the fuck are you talking about? Like, are you listening to his conversations? I'm like, what in the fuck are you talking about?

Are you listening to his conversations? He is very articulate, and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that I think we should all be discussing. So to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker, to me it symbolizes what we're dealing with today. This is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication. It is. And whenever I've had a chance to speak with people in that kind of world, in that sort of role, the question I always want to ask, among other things, is do you know where this is going to lead? Do you know what it's going to do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words do you know what happens for instance down the road if if you keep on saying that sam harris

and douglas murray having a conversation about something is hate speech do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're going to be able to get away with this is what's being created all the time at the moment, it seems to me. This idea that you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside it, not just stuff I don't agree with or things that I would argue with or debate with, but hate speech. It's just, I think, very, very dangerous down the road. You can see exactly the trail that bit of gunpowder goes to. I can. Where do you think it goes?

I think it goes to a point where people become cynical about any claims made about anyone. And the likelihood is that if 99 times you've seen Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, whoever, called hate speech, then the hundredth time that somebody uses the term hate speech might be on somebody who is engaging in hate speech. And all your defenses are going to be down. You've got nothing. You're very unlikely to become skeptical and and think i'm really going to dig down most of us don't have time we don't have time to to find out every single thought and word that someone has uttered or thought and so it seems very likely to me that down the road very very bad people are able to get through the gates because we kept on making erroneous claims frivolously for our own short-term gain and for our own short-term comfort. And we'll end up basically bringing the gates down completely.

I agree with you. make these ridiculous claims about conversations, you empower, you actually empower radical people who oppose left-wing ideology. Yes. They get more extreme. You empower the extremists because they know that you are incorrect. They have evidence of it. They see your ridiculous behavior.

And the other really disturbing aspect of it is these are the people that are distributing speech. Right. I mean, think about how many discussions are viewed daily on YouTube. It's stunning. Yeah. There's so much, I mean, we're at the beginning of this, aren't we? Because I mean, there's a long way for this to run, a long way for the censorship to run.

You can't help thinking among other things that the people trying to make the rules at the moment have no idea of the fact that these debates have happened before right or have not bothered to look into them and seem to think that history started with them and i just wish that among other things with social media people realize we have been through this several times before at least. And the lessons are pretty clear. They are not that you can limit speech in order to attain political nirvana, for instance, nor are they that you can simply use, as I say, for short-term gain, accusations you know to be wrong in order to further a short-term political goal. We know all this. We've been through it. Printing press, we went through it with John Stuart Mill,

we went through it with Milton. I just wish these people had any idea of the fact that history started before their parents conceived them. Well, it's such, the whole culture of tech today is such a progressive thought bubble. It's an echo chamber, and it's very, very, like I said, it's better that they're really progressive

and open-minded and left-wing than radical right-wing. I think it's better. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, if by radical right-wing you mean, you know, kind of neo-Nazi racist or something. Yeah, of course. Although these people have, as I say, all the ability to create those people. Right.

And empower. And empower them, which is something you don't want actual racists and Nazis to have legitimate grievance claims. And you don't want them to be able to disguise themselves as something they're not. So I had a friend who, a lot of friends involved in the Northern Ireland conflict many years ago in the UK, not that many years ago. One writer had a beautiful phrase about it, where you got to a stage where everyone was killing everyone. He said, you also got to the stage where truth was whatever you were having yourself. And we're not far away from that place where I say what you call is hate speech, you say what I say is hate speech, let's call the whole thing off.

We're not very far away from that, actually. thing off. We're not very far away from there, actually. Yeah, it's very strange that this echo chamber is being so reinforced and that very few people are stepping out and saying, well, wait, let's take

a look at this objectively. And the people that do do that are signaled out as being racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or fill you know fill in the blank whatever is convenient yeah and but it's not surprising that more people don't want to stick their heads about that because i mean if you had a normal job uh you worked in a normal office or shop or something you you really would don't want this coming towards you. I mean, this can tear apart and tear down people who

spend a lifetime demonstrating they are not the thing that they're being accused of. So if nobody knows anything about you, you have no particular persona out there, you have no particular back record, you don't want this thing coming to tear your life down. Right, because recovering from that accusation is almost impossible and it would take forever. It is basically impossible. And all that you do along the way is to keep reminding people of the charge. That's true. And if you were to ever win on a technicality, like everyone would have forgotten.

Oh, yeah, that's the racist. That's the rapist. That's the guy who was pro-rape, isn't it? Yeah, I remember him. It's so simple. But I feel like we're in some strange adolescent stage of communication. And there's been a bunch of talk lately. There was something that I tweeted earlier today, some new technology that they believe where AI is going to allow people to literally see other people's thoughts.

Right. to literally see other people's thoughts. And I am forever optimistic, but also terrified. And my feeling is that our transition from language here to this new AI system can see what you are thinking, which is just, what the hell does that mean? I'm concerned, but also optimistic. I feel like we're in this transitionary period from regular communication to written communication to written communication online. Right. To speech online, video online, where there's this instant access to all this. And these ideas are being debated and tossed around like beach balls in real time.

And ideas are being distorted. People's positions are being debated and tossed around like beach balls in real time. And ideas are being distorted. People's positions are being distorted for other people's gains. And that there is this willful misuse of the truth. Yes. That something is going to come along that's going to combat that. But at what price? I mean, I can't see what would come along to do it other than people rebelling against it, their own free will as it were.

It doesn't seem like that's happening though. It seems like there's a few people that are, like yourself, there's many others that are recognizing the problem with this, there's people talking about the problem of it online, but for the most part, the mass of people are engaged in this and it's also it's idea sport there's idea sport going on where their side they want their side to score sure sure well that's almost all politics in your country at any rate yeah at the moment is um how can we make sure that that the other side trips up on this? I thought this, I've written this all through the Me Too era that in your country and in mine, people basically are willing to go for somebody who is a political opponent who does something very minimal.

And they're willing to defend somebody on their own side who does something bigger. And you can see it all the time. It's just there are different standards that apply to your own side than apply to the other. And people don't seem to be hiding it very much anymore. Not at all. They really don't have the ability to hide it. No, we had a case recently in the UK where somebody who was a great hero to the left for all sorts of complicated reasons is accused of some fairly serious groping accusations. And exactly the left-wing MPs who had been claiming

that somebody who had sent out a tweet about a woman's breasts in 2009 should never hold any role in public said that this person who just happened to be a friend and an icon of theirs was a changed man. And we have to recognize it's 18 months ago now. My favorite video on this was there was a guy who is some religious Christian man on television, and he was talking about Trump,

and he was talking about who Trump was before he became president. He goes, but I don't know about you, but I found Jesus, and I did not have a past but praise Jesus and he's saying this and everyone's chair he whoever he was before he found Jesus right as if Trump got into office it was like you know what I'm a new man I found Jesus I got the Jesus pass all that stuff that I did the last 70 years. Well, some people do treat that. There was a journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, a very distinguished figure in

the media some years ago, but who, it was often noted that he converted to Catholicism and he, a mutual friend once said that it was noticeable that Malcolm Muggeridge always attacked a vice immediately after he had become incapable of it himself when it was clear the muggeridge didn't have as much sex as he did fairly often in his youth sex was a big problem it's a giant problem and needs to let everybody know yeah virtue signaling to the highest degree. Let everybody know, this is awful. All that pleasure and flesh. Stop it. I won't have it.

I had a lot of it, but I won't have it anymore. Not in my bedroom. It's just, I don't know, man. I'm just, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that we're going to work through this. But I'm also disturbed because no one's at the wheel. No. There's no particular logical human being that's at the wheel that has a real rational sort of solution for all of these issues.

It's just chaos and infighting. The problem is, again, it comes back to the thing about the truth being whatever you're having yourself. We don't have anyone that we might mutually agree on as some kind of umpire. I mean, that's becoming part of the problem. we don't have anyone that we might mutually agree on as some kind of umpire. Yeah. I mean, that's becoming part of the problem. I mean, I'd be very suspicious of any umpire put forward, but where would you roughly look for one? I mean, I like to think that truth still matters, but when you discover that a lot of people don't seem to particularly care for it

or are willing to sacrifice it, as I say, for some other purpose, including winning a goal, it's hard to see how you could adjudicate in this era. But just one other thought was in it, which is a lot of this has to do with whether or not the online world can forgive. This seems to me to be a really central thing. One of the things that came up, the case I said recently about this 2009 case of somebody in Britain who tweeted about a woman's breasts, among other things, was he mistook Twitter for a conversation with friends.

And... How did he do that? I mean... He's in public office no no journalist oh okay and uh but was was going to get a public office anyhow but the point is is that you know we don't really know what the rules of that are i mean like what if you were a bit of a dick 10 years ago like that right on a medium that people were still finding their way on and now you are genuinely you moved on your kids right and and yet the the breast tweet is always with you i mean it it's it's a sort of dystopian nightmare that you'd always be stuck with your worst joke. You'd be stuck with your lowest, sort of crassest moment.

This came up recently with Bill Maher. Right. Bill Maher, there was something that he wrote, I think in 1989. Right. Which is insane. I mean, 29 years ago he wrote something. And people used it recently against him. I don't know how old Billy is.

I don't think Bill is even 60. So we're talking about something that he wrote when he was in his 20s. He was a struggling stand-up comedian. The Internet's very good for this, isn't it? Oh, it's amazing. Because you can dig up everyone. Everyone's made up. Everyone's screwed up.

Sure. Apart from you. Apart from yourself. Of course. Everyone's screwed up. Apart from you, you know, apart from yourself. Of course. We had somebody recently in Britain who everyone wanted to go for suddenly.

And they found an article he had written about saying he didn't agree with Holocaust denial laws. He said he just thought it was a bad idea for free speech. When the Internet was for a second trying to find out other stuff about him, they found an article which said, I'm a Holocaust denier, so, you know, prosecute me sort of thing, which he isn't a Holocaust denier. It's just nobody bothered to read beneath the headline.

And so suddenly in the middle of the thing where everyone was tearing apart his life, they also said, and he's a Holocaust denier. And that was there. That was there. And then like something he wrote 15 years ago, and it wasn't even something he wrote. It's a headline of something. And yeah, and everyone, again, nobody cares. Get on to the next victim.

Everyone's a Nazi. It's almost like people, I mean, it's obviously the case of living in glass houses and throwing tons of rocks. But it's almost like everyone is just trying to throw as many rocks as they can before rocks start coming their way because they know it's inevitable. Well, I thought until fairly recently the object of life in the modern era was to prove everyone else was a racist, Nazi, misogynistic transphobe. And then you win. You somehow get a coronation or something. Everyone would say,

you're the person who's good. But now, yes, it seems everyone is aware that it's a Mexican gunfight. Yeah. I have a friend of mine who had been on this podcast before, back when he was a radical leftist. His name's Jamie

Kilstein, and he's a stand-up comedian and he was a real radical social justice warrior male feminist lefty and they turned on him radically what did they do horribly well they found out he was trying to have sex with girls that can't another one and it was all there was just having sex it was a mean he lit he mean he didn't rape anybody and He didn't grope anybody. He just, you know, he threw some passes. Right. And as we know, unless passes are 100% successful.

Yes. You're over. Oh, yeah. The same exact pass could be your future wife. Right. Right? And this one just fell 15 yards short. No room for error.

But he took a long time off of social media and a long time off of performing. And he came on. He was really brave about it. He talked about who he used to be. And he said he was in this frantic state where he was just constantly attacking people, just attacking people and then checking his Twitter to see who responded to that attack and where people are on his side You know are people agreeing with him?

Is he getting those social justice points that he wanted and he was really honest about the feeling that he got the Anxiety that I think a lot of people engage in on a daily basis a lot of if you go to people I there's a quite a few people that I follow that seemed to just always be in conflict and I just go to watch I'll just go to their page almost like I'm watching a fist fight in a backyard. And it seems like they're addicted to this constant seesaw of emotions and this interaction. It clearly is. It releases the necessary chemical in their brain. They get upset when they step away from it for a bit.

I don't engage in any of that bit of it because I've seen certainly a lot of the most mediocre minds of my generation brought low by this. I mean, there are some people who I admired until I followed them on social media. And now I just think you're the shouty, angry person who's like a drunk at closing time, desperately flailing around with your fists and looking for somebody to fight with. And to what end?

You know, I mean, another experience I've had in recent years that led me to not want to engage in this is walking around at various events and sort of breakout things. People who, you know, people I've admired in the past, all saying things like, do you see that, do you see I flamed X on Twitter? Do you see what I tweeted about that person? I think these used to be serious people. These used to be serious people engaged in serious things. And here they are engaged in these flailing fistfights. And often, often, let's face it, on things which,

if you didn't do it like that, seeking out the fight, are the sort of thing that would allow for normal human interaction. I mean, how many disagreements do we have with people in our personal lives all the time if we wanted to? Right. You didn't vote this way, that interaction. I mean, how many disagreements do we have with people in our personal lives all the time if we wanted to? You didn't vote this way, that way. I mean, some people would mind about that. But, you know, I know you think slightly differently from me on this particular issue. You don't say, let's have that out now once and for all. You find ways to live with people's difference and different opinions. You're not going to get everyone exactly in line. We all knew that before the age of social media, and now

it seems to be the only aim. What do you think that is? Do you think it's what we were discussing earlier, that it's idea sport and then you just get caught up and someone volleyed your way and so you have to smash that tennis ball back their way? It is something like that. I can't say I haven't felt the vicarious pleasure of some of that myself. That old Chinese proverb about sitting by the river watching the bodies of your enemies

float by. I had a big sense of that the other day when somebody I deeply disliked became a cropper on social media at the same time as somebody else I deeply disliked was being held by the French police on serious charges. And I thought that was a, I felt like the Chinese proverb then. That's all right. And so I can see why people feel it. Sure. And of course, people who they could never normally get to, who they've got to.

Right. I mean, I think that's the big thing of, you know, look I poked that you know what in the eye. I never engage on social media for precisely that reason among others. I would never want somebody to know they could get to me. Even if you just block them, there's many people who take pride even in their heading. They say I am blocked on Twitter by all these people. And actually, I do sometimes read what people send to me.

And I've never blocked anyone because I sort of think you should, if you put your ideas out there, you might as well be as open as possible to receiving them back. Some time ago when I got into a row with the Turkish president about something, president about uh about something uh i got all these turkish uh sort of accounts saying this up there's one guy who just repeatedly sent me uh pornography of animals having sex with so i don't know it's very it was very hardcore and um and so i used to go down the feed there that guy i didn't even block him actually because i sort of thought well somewhere in turkey he Turkey he's a really angry man desperately finding horse pornography to send to me and in a way I felt so sorry for him that that was how his life had come you know the end

his life had come to at this stage that I I couldn't even block him and also he'd be like I'm the donkey porn guy who got blocked by dog he'd get a certain thing what was his motivation for sending you this stuff he i had um it was because well the short story is a couple years ago uh the turkish president tried to get the german chancellor to imprison a german comic for a very rude poem he'd read on air on German television that was insulting about the Turkish president and the German authorities actually started a case against the comedian for insulting the Turkish president Edwin and I decided to launch an offensive poetry competition

to offend the Turkish president. And there was a thousand pounds cash prize, and it sort of took off, and in the end, the now foreign secretary entered and won. What? Yes. Really? That was great, yes.

It was really good because at the same time that the Germans were looking at imprisoning a comedian uh the the now foreign secretary of the uk was guilty of precisely the same alleged crime i.e meaning it wasn't a crime it couldn't be a crime a couple other people did a wonderful dutch comedian friend hans jansen or sort of did a similar thing at time he decided to do an interview live on dutch television explaining how much hated Edouard because he still owed him money from the blowjob he'd given Edouard in the sauna. And that was live on Dutch television.

And the Dutch authorities were looking at, actually looking, they were asked if they would prosecute him. But anyhow, but this was, I had a great time with this, of course, and I wrote a limerick explaining how abusive I wanted people to be about Erdogan, that it was necessary to be highly defamatory, and you wouldn't get away with it if you just called him a wanker or something. So I wrote the opening verse and invited the world to contribute, which they did. And it became, among other things, the highest paid poetry competition in the world.

If, like me, you wrote a limerick for just five lines, it is 200 pounds a line. I mean, no, no poetry magazine can pay you for such such such work. So anyhow, on the basis of that, I became very, very unpopular in Turkey. And there were many and many pieces talking about how this gay, atheist, terrible Edouard hater in Britain was exactly what we were up against. So him and his poems. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah.

So the German government was actually considering prosecuting this guy. How far did they take it? He was taken in for questioning, I know. He had to retain lawyers. I'm fairly sure they did only drop it in the end because of the international attention that was paid to it. You see, there was this law on the books that still said it was a laissez-majester law about offending foreign rulers. And he had done it for such an important reason as well, which was to say, you know,

we in Germany should have the right to be rude about Erdogan, particularly Erdogan, who, you know, was promoted from mayor to prime minister, now to president, wants to be sultan. You know, I mean, he's a very bad man, locked up more journalists per capita, I think, than any other country in the world other than China, which I don't think we can get the stats on.

A very, very evil, I think, man who has led his country backwards in the last 20 years and is in the process of trying to destroy a wonderful country. And if you can't be rude about him, if you can't pretend that he sleeps with animals um which is what the german comedian started with then somewhere down the line you won't be able to say anything about the imprisoned journalists either and so on and um since also by the way people don't seem to spend much time worrying about the turkish journalists edouard in prisons um the least they paid attention when i said that uh um he and got up to really filthy, filthy acts in the zoo. Well, obviously, the worst case of retaliation for humor is probably Charlie Hebdo, right?

I mean, which is terrible. And unfortunately, many people weren't defending defending the murder but were talking the murders i mean i think yeah how many i think it was 11 people were murdered yeah and a policeman and a police officer um they but they were saying that instead of concentrating on the murder, which was done completely out of this reinforcing their rules of their ideology and retaliation for any mocking of that ideology. Instead of that, they were talking about how racist Charlie Hebdo was. Yeah. There was a lot of that. In fact, my friend Jamie Kilstein was a part of that.

Right. He was on television back in his super social justice warrior days talking about that. Don't you wish, among other things, that people said, no, I'm not talking about something if they don't know about it? Yeah. My guess was that until the murders, I mean, an infinitely small number of people knew about Charlie Hebdo outside of France. Right. I found myself in the wake of that in studios with people who I know had just Googled Charlie Hebdo outside of France. Right. I found myself in the wake of that in studios with people who I know had just Googled

Charlie Hebdo the day before. I know that they'd just gone to Wikipedia and read an English version of a claim about what that magazine was about. It goes back to that thing about, my point about the journalist and the Holocaust denial thing, just root around.

A bunch of people have been killed. This doesn't seem to vindicate my side's ideology therefore let me find what i can do to defame them and oh good somebody at charlie abdo once did this cartoon that was off color and i can't understand what the the words are beneath it but i'll i'll claim it's racist i mean people were actually doing that yeah they're actually there were there was a um There was one cartoon that was used against Charlie Hebdo after the massacre that was a joke against the Front National and the claims they were making about a black woman in the Sarkozy government. But because the joke, if you didn't speak French, it wasn't clear, apparently. if you didn't speak French, it wasn't clear, apparently.

And if you knew nothing about recent French history, you knew nothing about the Sarkozy administration and the minister in question. These people just went to it and said, racist cartoon. Not noticing that the cartoon was actually a joke about racists. But they didn't bother to find that out. And I thought that whole thing, among many, many other things, was deeply worrying from that point of view because it means that in the immediate aftermath

of something that should be so damn clear, a bunch of people can just try to reframe the narrative and change the history of a publication, claim it is just something different. And for a lot of people, of course, that was very convenient. Because after all, if Charlie Hebdo's staff actually were these racists, then you didn't need to worry too much about them or why you'd been silent on the issues they'd spoken up about.

Yeah. to worry too much about them or why you'd been silent on the issues they'd spoken up about. Yeah, the narrative had then been that these people had been mocking this disenfranchised, marginalized group in society and that they had it coming in some very strange way. And it's, boy, part of me struggled with that because I was like, is this, some people just have contrarian instincts. Everybody's going left. They just go, I don't like it, and they want to go the other way. There's so many people that have that instinct. And then there's, as you said before, this headline mentality.

They read the headline and don't look any further into it, even if it's a headline about a headline. Right. That's all they need. They're armed with enough facts. They slam their laptop down and start debating yeah and in that case as in many others totally lose sight of the

only thing that matters the only thing that matters in that case being is it ever right to make apologies for people walking into an office and gunning down people for an opinion you don't like. The answer to which has to be, of course, no.

Has to be. Has to be no. And yet, in these moments, so we had one 20 years before with the Rushdie Affair, the Satanic Verses Affair. In these moments, you discover you don't have the allies on your side you thought you did. In the wake of the Rushdie affair in 89, it was people from the right and the left in Britain who started making excuses for the Ayatollah. We had the chief rabbi then of the UK, Jacobovitz, to his shame, said both Mr. Rushdie and the Ayatollah have offended people's feelings. As if someone Rushdie had called on all novelists to go to Tehran assassinate the Ayatollah if they had a chance. You had somebody like a right-wing conservative minister, Geoffrey Howe, who said that Rushdie had really offended Britain,

he'd been rude about Britain, as if that had anything to do with anything. There was one famous case of a conservative peer who said about Rushdie that it wouldn't bother him if a group of young Muslims took Mr. Rush into an alleyway and taught him some manners. And you had that from the left as well. Bernie Grant, a Labour MP, famously said at that point that burning books wasn't a problem for him. And that was when they were burning the satanic verses in Bradford. So you get these weird coalitions of people who suddenly turn out not to get the point, not to get the point, not want to defend. And then, of course, you get the cowards who say things like, well, it wasn't my sort of novel. You know, I didn't

think the novel was all that good. I had Midnight's Children I could cope with. But the Sanic Verses, he lost me with a plot. As if that means that then you can call for the death of the author rather than just give it a bad review. How is he now? Is Salman Rushdie still in hiding? I know he does a lot of interviews now and it seems to be more relaxed. Yes, he seems to be. I don't know the specifics. There was an assurance, I think, given some years ago in the labor government with Tehran

that they would not actively encourage the murder of Rushdie anymore. How nice. How nice of them. That's a freezing of relations, unfreezing relations. But the point I wanted to make was that that's, again, we've all we've been through these things. We know how it plays out. through these things, we know how it plays out. With the Charlie Hebdo events, the murder of the staff and the contributors to that magazine, we knew in the immediate aftermath what was going on and that there were people who just wanted to make excuses. And you still hear that everywhere. I mean, I've heard it on every single free speech debate in my adult life. I remember the Rushdie debate when I was growing up. And I remember in every one of the things in

recent years, from the Danish cartoons to the Jewel Medina scandal, where a publisher in London was firebombed for publishing a novel that was actually amazingly fawning about Muhammad, for publishing a novel that was actually amazingly fawning about Muhammad to Charlie Hebdo. And since, you just get this strange group of people from right and left, some believers, some non-believers, who always just come up with these bullshit, bullshit arguments and say things like, well, I didn't find the cartoon very funny, or I never took that magazine seriously, or I didn't think it was right when they did this. They just don't, for some reason, have the fortitude to just say the only thing that matters in the wake of that, which is no. Do you think that's because Islam is unique in their approach to anything that goes outside the lines of what they feel is acceptable.

I mean, in terms of like, they will murder you if you draw Muhammad. Yeah, this is what's been described as the internalization of the fatwa. I'm sure you've had this experience, but it's actually worse now. The presumption is worse than the actual reality. I have quite often people saying to me, I'd like to write this piece about X, but I don't know if I can because, you know, I might get a death sentence. And actually, I always say, what are you talking about? Write it. Fortunately, so far, I haven't given that advice and the person's then being in any way under any actual danger, let alone being killed.

Right. But, and I think I might feel differently if that was the case. But there is an overcompensation occurring at the moment. And it goes far, far within the boundaries of what actually could plausibly get you into any trouble, whether or not the trouble is legitimate to get into or not. So that

now, yeah, I've had many journalists in recent years, particularly since Charlie will sidle up to me and say, I'd quite like to do this, but I don't dare. And I'm talking about very basic reporting and things. They're not people saying, hey, I decided to draw a great big cartoon of Muhammad with a great big dick and, you know, having sex with the Pope or something. You know, it's not that. It's never

that. It's never people saying, I'm really just so keen to draw Muhammad today, Douglas. What should I do? It never is that. It's always something way, way, way down. I'm thinking of even like saying something critical of certain regimes. So the internalization of the fatwas since 1989, which has been exacerbated now by the killings of Charlie Hebdo and elsewhere, and the attacks on the Jyllands Post and in Denmark, means that we are in this period where people are really hyper, hyper sensitive. And they really shouldn't be because it really isn't that bad. It's not as bad as they think. But this is, you know, you can do so much work if you say to people, I've got Kalashnikovs on my side.

I've got Kalashnikovs on my side. I mean, the extent, and people in free societies like ours are really, really loathe to admit this. But it's the classic sort of mob trick, you know, knocking on someone's door. I'm very disappointed in you. But my friend here, my huge friend, is really angry and I'm just holding him back. You can do an amazing amount of work if you're willing to pull that kind of trick. And if you can persuade people, and it's actually the case that there are people you're holding back, you can make enormous inroads like that. Especially when there's actual evidence that people have been murdered and have been. Absolutely.

inroads like that. Especially when there's actual evidence that people have been murdered and have been Absolutely. One of the more fascinating things about Charlie Hebdo to me was the refusal of any of the mainstream media to show any of the cartoons. Yes. You had to go online and I felt like this was a, they gave up the reins of information to the internet

and it was a real transitionary moment in our culture Yes, everyone went online to see what they Yeah, it's the only place to go. Apart from your parents, you know, I mean, they were still under the impression that these must be incredibly pornographic cartoons that were really, really viciously attacking

somebody. But no, most anyone young could find this out for themselves. And you're right, they gave up the space to the net. They all had, again, these sort of rubbishy arguments of their own about it. I tried in Britain to get the press to do it at one go, a couple of days after the massacre, and got pretty close.

That if everyone's, that's the I'm Spartacus tactic if everyone did it once then it would be okay but or make it easier and the argument you always get about that is and it's a very persuasive argument is that the editor of the magazine or newspaper might get protection so but you know a girl from the typing pool sort of thing and which is what happened actually in some of the satanic verses killings and stabbings and things you know it's like the norwegian translators japanese translate you know it's it's people who under no security protocol could possibly end up all getting protected and and on the basis of fearing that the boss almost always says no one of the more uniquely American responses

to the Charlie Hebdo attack was they had a draw Muhammad contest in Texas yeah that was fascinating and some guys showed up and started shooting at the building and they were killed almost immediately which is because they're in Texas.

That's just not the place to fuck around. True. Although, I mean, it's worth mentioning that the editor at Charlie Hebdo had police protection in Paris and they just, I mean, I suppose they were not worth dwelling on but the

battle trained people who were sent from Yemen to carry out that operation just were better prepared than the French authorities realized. Well, very few people are really ready to militarize cartoonist offices. Yes. I mean, and that's really almost what you would have to do. You would have to have, you know, Navy SEALs with bulletproof vests. Yes. Locked and loaded.

And then let's face it. I mean, the whole thing, then you do start to question, you know, like, well, is this cartoon that funny? Right. And that's what they actually have done at Shalya. They did a little while ago say, look, we're not going to keep doing this. Well, didn't they have Muhammad making out with someone almost immediately afterwards? Yeah, immediately afterwards. That's right. But after about a year or so, they

stopped. They said they didn't want to do Muhammad again. And you can't blame them. I mean, this is the thing, isn't it? I'm sure you have this experience. In these sorts of times, I always get people on the, apart from the turkish

donkey porn guy other people on twitter send me things like you know well why don't you draw muhammad right sort of stuff sure and first of all i mean i'm not a cartoonist but uh secondly the the way in which this is always presented is amazing because it's always from like xena warrior princess 1293 you don't have the guts to draw muhammad murray and you know like well well you don't even know the guts have your own name on twitter mate so uh but but there's there's a bit of of egging along what happens in those cases um i don't want to draw muhammad i don't want to piss people off by drawing the cartoon. But what I do want to point out is that if you don't defend people's rights to draw things without getting murdered, then you're living in an insane society. Yeah.

And there's another thing, which we all know what comes next. I mean, my point about this has always been think of something smaller than a cartoon to do. Right. Right. I mean, I still reserve the right to be amazed we call something a cartoon crisis and keep a straight face. Right. We're going to have to militarize in Garland, Texas because there's a cartoon crisis. Well, the natural progression could easily be you're not allowed to draw the cartoon. Then from there, you're not allowed to draw the cartoon. Then from there, you're not allowed to speak of drawing.

And then from there, you have to show that you have a very certain idea in your head of what is good and what is bad. So you have to show that by verbalizing something. So you're forced to verbalize something. And let's face it, it's not as if it's just the cartoon that's the problem, is it? I mean, it's a novel, it's so on and so forth.

It's anything. And that's one of my big beefs about this is that I don't want to not say what I think is true. And even if that does offend, you know, 1.3 or 4 billion people, as is often said in tones that are not entirely unthreatening. or four billion people, as is often said in tones that are not entirely unthreatening. If Shaleh Abdo or somebody else can't draw a cartoon of Muhammad, then I know that exactly in tandem with that is somebody saying, and you, Douglas, or you, Joe, or you or anyone else can't say what you find in the texts or what you think about this religion. And you can join the rest of the society in being brave and going to the Book of Mormon on a Friday night for a laugh,

and it is a laugh, but don't you dare think of applying to Islam the same kind of speech that you would apply to Mormonism. Right. And that I won't do. I just won't join in on that. And despite there being a price to pay for that, but I just won't not say what I think is true in these matters. Are you aware of what they did with South Park? South Park, it got very crazy, where they not only could not draw Muhammad,

they couldn't draw Muhammad in a bear suit. So then they had to have Muhammad in a bear suit in an armored car. So you couldn't even see him, but it was implied that Muhammad was inside the armored car in a bear suit. But they did Muhammad's voice, didn't they? Muhammad went... Yeah but they did muhammad's voice didn't they muhammad like went yeah they gave him a screwy voice screwy voice so that was okay as long as you joke about the voice of muhammad you're okay but don't you dare show him it's fucking insane but and it's really weird as well because because actually again they all make presumptions it's just not true it's not true that nobody ever drew muham It's not true. There are illustrations in books that are still on sale of very old illustrations of Muhammad throughout Islamic history.

That's before they knew better, bro. They didn't know better. They got a new note from Muhammad. Muhammad was like, look, I don't like these fucking drawings of me. They're not at all. Cut it out. Cut it out. I'll start killing people.

They don't show my best side. Cut out and start killing people. They don't show my best side. But this is a very strange position to be in because South Park ends up, yes, holding the line. Then South Park gets, like, weirdly, it's like, you know, fatwa against South Park. Well, I didn't see that headline coming. And again, everyone internalizes it and everyone thinks, well, you know, I admire them in their Mormon work, but I'm not sure I'd follow them in their Mohammed work. And then the whole culture tilts.

And that's, I think, where we are at the moment on this. And I've just, you know, the cartoon will never be funny enough. The joke will never be funny enough. The novel will never be good enough and so on. And then in the end, the speech will never be worth speaking enough. I, a little while ago, had a very clear experience of this. I read about it on the radio in Britain where I was in discussion with a Muslim cleric who's a sort of reformist figure and an admirer in some ways, who in a discussion about something said, well, you know, also Muhammad,

Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, he took criticism in his own life. He took criticism very, very well. He never minded people criticizing him. And I was like, that's absolute crap. That is real crap. I mean, whatever else you can say. Muhammad, not really good on the criticism of himself

bit and i gave an example of a female poetess who he had killed because she criticized him and this guy went absolutely apeshit and refused to continue and so on and because you gave an actual because i gave a historical example from his own religious texts. And in the end, it was a pre-recorded, in the end, the BBC were like, Douglas, can you find another way of trying to make the same point? And, you know, and that was what we had to do. Wait a minute, another way of making the same point, rather than pointing out the historical text that showed that muhammad did have a female

poet killed yes he just what other way would there be to make that point that is it was hard that's the ultimate way to make that point exactly which is by pointing to the texts and the facts but you know i i can think of no other situation in which somebody has veto rights like that yeah in a normal discussion. And it's because they're terrified of the retaliation. Yes. I mean, I knew everyone in the production box was like, oh, no, what's Douglas done? And how can we stop it affecting us? What was his cleric's response to that?

He, yeah, he just, he went, yeah, a bit nuts and wouldn't continue unless I, you know, wouldn't say that. Did he deny that it was in the text? Oh, yeah. He said I was making it up and I was a liar. I'm used to that. But that's a crazy thing for him to say when someone could just read the text. Yeah, but they're banking on nobody doing that.

Well, not in this day and age. Don't bank on that. Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things, isn't it? Because although it's true you can suppress a lot of this, we do live in an age when basically anyone can Google and find texts and they can find this. It's a book that a billion people have read. I'm not sure they've read it, but yeah. Well, possess it.

They own it. How many people do you think read it? How many people do you think read the Bible? Like, if you had to guess the number of Christians in this country, it's probably... There are those tests, aren't there, they sometimes do. The Humanist Society in the UK did a few years ago asking very basic questions of self-professed Christians about their knowledge of the texts, and very few... My favorite is self-professed Christians with religious tattoos.

Like, hey, man, you got to read the whole book. Like, you are literally showing on your skin that you didn't read the whole book. Didn't pay attention in the early bits. It says don't do that. This is Leviticus. Is it Leviticus that's got the implications against writing on skin? I believe so. If you read Leviticus, there's a heck of a lot you can't do if you go down Leviticus.

You can't wear two pieces of different cloth. Yes, exactly. Yeah, Leviticus is a wonderful book. It's very good for the mohair. Leviticus wasn't the one. Which was the book where the guy called upon the she-bear to kill the children who were mocking his baldness? Do you know about that one? No.

My favorite, especially as a bald guy. This guy was getting mocked by children, fucking kids. And God called upon a she-bear to come down and tear apart these children who were making fun of his bald head. Here, Elisha and the two bear, two kings. Yeah, look at that. Wow. Went up to... If you were going to intervene in human affairs for anything, this would be the time, wouldn't it?

That's when God's got to step in. You can't have this kind of stuff going on. Young kids came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, go up, you bald head. Go up, you bald head, which is very mild. And when he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord, all caps. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up 42 lads of their

number and he went from there to Mount Carmel it's like you know no deal it's over got it done and that's that's yeah that's my favorite reading from scriptures around of the end of one of the books I come which one it was I was a chorus when I was young and always made it made me laugh there's a this destruction of the city of Nineveh it really in it finish. I was a chorister when I was young. It always made me laugh. There's the destruction of the city of Nineveh. I think not only finishes the chapter, but the whole book is. And low in that city were 40,000 human souls

that were destroyed. And also some cattle. Cattle just by association. Not some cattle. Bad cows. There are bad cows. God had to fuck up those cows, too. But no, the bald-headed one, that's a heck of a time to tread into human defense.

It's not even an insult. You bald-head? No. You bald-head is just an accurate description. I mean, that is not an insult. accurate description. I mean, that is not an insult. If you're like, you ugly, sloppy, bald-headed loser,

okay, then maybe God needs to step in and send some wolves to attack you. And why do they specify that they're female? Yeah, yeah. Why is it female bears? 42 of their number. Yeah. 42 kids and two bears. For one bald head. Those are some bitch-ass

kids that need to learn how to run. That doesn't even make sense. How the fuck do those bears even catch all 42 of those kids? What kind of kids are they raising over there in Bethel? Those kids should have got the fuck out of there. Well, they're all sitting around waiting their turn. Yeah. I mean... Trying out curse words till one causes the bears to come down.

You shaggy bear. That didn't't work you shaggy mangy dirty stinky bear bald head yeah there's so many of those stories that are so strange but i mean i bet i bet that uh that most if we if we were to go to the the people who say that their questions in the polls and ask them about we don't even need to go to bald people who say that they're Christians in the polls and ask them about – we don't even need to go to the bald head bear nightmare. Matthew Feeney Right. Old Testament is – they don't accept – most people don't even bother reading that because it's just – it's almost too crazy. Peter Robinson Yeah. But very, very little knowledge even

about very basic things, even commandments and so on. So that's the case with the religion that in America and Britain is known best with Christianity. So there's no reason to assume that that's not the case with Islam as well. Isn't that just the case with people? I mean, it seems to be the same thing that we're talking about with headlines. Someone reads the headlines, they don't bother reading into it, and then they accuse someone of something. It's almost like with religion. I'm a Christian and I'm a Christian man.

Oh, really? Please tell me about the Bible. Right. religion i'm a christian and i'm a christian man oh really please tell me about the bible right it's um there's something by the way i've often thought this is one of the reasons why there's it's possible to get a certain fanaticism going within muslim communities on some issues to do with blasphemy is i think is to do with a realization of this. You said that this was the case about our prophet. I didn't know that. He did what? I've had this all my life

with arguing with various Muslims about things. They very rarely know the problems in their own tradition. And when you bring them up, they're like, what, the what? He did what? Like the Christians with their own tradition. And when you bring them up, they're like, what, the what? He did what? Like the Christians with the bald beds. And this causes a really serious problem for them because they are told from the cradle

that they are following a religion founded by the most perfect man imaginable. And if you discover that if you it's like you know no there's no description of helen of troy in the ancient text why does nobody describe helen why does nobody say that you know she was a sort of she had this beautiful blonde ringlet sort of it's because it actually catches on as a as a theme because everyone makes helen of troy their most beautiful woman if you you start to describe it, you'd be like, I'm not into redheads.

Everyone would put something on. Helen of Troy becomes the person upon whom you put all of those things. And in the same way, Mohammed becomes, if you say he is the perfect human being, people will just throughout their lives put the kind of things they think are perfect onto Mohammed. He must

be very kind, very generous, very caregiving and so on. So that if you then say, well, what about when he then did this? I think it just causes an extra hurt. This is something they'll have to get over, of course, because, I mean, we can't go away and not identify these issues. But it causes in the short term an enormous, enormous pain. I have an example I gave recently in a book of somebody I spent some time with a couple years ago, an extraordinary man called Morten Storm. He was a Danish biker. He was in a biker gang in Denmark, went to prison and in in prison, about 2000 or so,

he converted not just to Islam, but he converted to Al-Qaeda, basically. He's not a common person in any way. And he ended up being the main go-to person for someone called Anwar al-Awlaki, who was the head of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. And in fact, was asked to get a wife for al-Awlaki, to supplement his wife collection. And Morton Storm, among other things,

ended up falling out with al-Qaeda and ended up working for the CIA and Danish intelligence and ended up helping lead them to Awalaki, who was then droned by Obama in 2011 or so. Anyhow, I once said to Morton Storm, what was the moment that made you get out of Al-Qaeda? And he had such a fascinating answer because he came out of Al-Qaeda and Islam at the same moment. He says what was happening was he was sitting in his, he was waiting for a package from Al-Qaeda drop off to get then from him to Awalaki.

And the person carrying the package was late and then really late. And he was sitting in his apartment somewhere in Germany, I think, at that point, and he was so pissed off about this. And he had a laptop that was there on the table. And he thought, basically, how can I express my pissed offness with my al-Qaeda colleagues for wasting my time like this so much? And he went to Google and he typed in contradictions in Islam and began to read. Whoa.

That was how he got out. Wow. That's what did him in. Someone being late. He just started reading again. They told me this. They never told me that. I never knew that.

And that was so, as I say, he's a very, very uncommon person. But I think that might be happening quite a lot more than we know. People just Googling things, finding stuff out for themselves. It's the most dangerous religion to leave because they kill apostates. They do. Yeah. So how is he dealing with that um well he lives in hidings i mean wow yeah yeah he read a book called agent storm about it two years ago one of the weirdest conversation that i ever saw anybody have with someone who was a believer um Dawkins, I think it

was, was having a conversation with someone and he asked him point blank whether or not he believed that Muhammad split the moon. Oh, yes. I think I know this was with a very close enemy of mine called Mehdi Hassan, who worked for Al Jazeera and who Richard Dawkins did a interview with and I think he that's right he fluffed something earlier on uh Dawkins that he didn't take him on then he took him on on this that's right and I think that Hassan said yes yes he said yes and then it led to this terrible problem which is a really interesting interesting problem of our era which is then Dawkins said I can't believe that somebody or said afterwards I can't believe that somebody could be a working journalist and believe that you know muhammad flew to the moon on a half human horse right um and of course i mean there's a

interesting point there yeah but of course we do quite rightly allow people to believe bizarre and insane things well sure in christ Christianity. It's filled with bizarre things. Exactly. And if we started saying you can't have public office or work in journalism, if you profess to be of this particular faith, then we wouldn't have anyone left. How does the story go? Muhammad flew to the moon on a half-human horse

and split the moon with a sword? Is that what he did? Yeah, I can't remember. He could have then been attacked by female bears, but I can't remember. No, I can't remember. Yes, have then been attacked by female bears, but I can't remember. No, I can't. Yes, it's the night journey, which is central. How did the moon get glued back together again?

Is it glued back together? It looks like it is. I haven't looked close. Maybe I need to pay more attention. It's just the fact that, I mean, I believe this was a few years ago. Let's just say it was 2010 that this interview or that this debate took place yes it was around then

8 years ago that someone would be comfortable saying that they believe that you see I got into a little bit of trouble Richard Dawkins got a little bit annoyed about me because I took the mickey out of him for dodging the one earlier what was the earlier one he I have a great admire of Richard as everyone is I'm sure because I took the mickey out of him for dodging the one earlier in that interview. What was the earlier one?

He, I'm a great admirer of Richard, as everyone is, I'm sure, but he knows exactly where the cliff edge is. And in that interview, he was asked on Al Jazeera by this interviewer. He read out the bit from The God Delusion about, you know, there's a great bit of rhetoric about the most he describes God as something like the most appalling, narcissistic, murderous, blah, blah, blah, character in

all of fiction. It's a terrific piece of writing. And the interviewer says to Dawkins, do you, you stand by that as a description of the Christian God. Dawkins says yes. He says, do you stand by it as a description of the Jewish God? He says yes. And then he says, would you say the same thing about the Muslim God?

And I just knew exactly what was happening. Dawkins says, about the Muslim God, I don't know so much. Which he, as I say, he thinks I shouldn't rip him on this. The thing was, what I say, he thinks I shouldn't rip him on this. And the thing was, what I noticed was,

I completely felt he's been a very brave and brilliant writer and thinker on these matters. Nobody's done more in some ways. But he, I knew exactly what was happening. He was staring right over the cliff edge and somebody was behind him nudging. And if he had have said as it were live on al jazeera oh yes Allah you know the total bastard then I you know you don't know

maybe that's maybe you're then in real trouble yeah and so he stepped back from the brink there and I rather cruelly perhaps took the mickey out of him after his Freud. I said that it was just that Richard Dawkins was demonstrating the survival instinct of his species. But I feel bad about it. But it is true. It is true. But we've all been there to some extent. What was his response to that, though?

To my joking? To your criticism. To my... To your criticism. He, well, he basically, I think he did take it on board in a way. It's like complex reasons, but I know he was also annoyed that I was, I think he felt that I was doing that to him then. Go on, you do it. Right, right, right.

And that is very common in that I've had that a lot in my life in this particular area of people trying to egg me over. Why don't you say that? Of course. And you know that they're the people who will be a million miles behind you. Oh, yeah. With their ears plugged. Yeah. Behind a wall.

I always have a very, very visual aid of it. Somebody who actually is a terrific reformer in Islam now and another cleric who once described to me he went to fight for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan 30 years ago now. And described to me – he's not a very fighterly-like person but described how he did actually sort of rile them up to sort of run over and get at the Soviets. And he's like, you know, we're all agreed. Yes, we'll go. Yes, go. And they sort of 20 yards forward. Guys, guys, and everyone else stayed in the trench.

And I've always thought this is exactly the experience of anyone in this area. Well, everyone recognizes that there's inherent danger in this criticism, even this discussion right now. I'm sure there's people right now firing up their webcams and writing blogs and tweeting and getting upset about it. Possibly, yeah. Any rational discussion of that particular subject, you could kind of get away. I mean, I get criticism from Christians, but it's not scary. Right. Yes, that is a big difference at the time being, isn't it?

This is something that's just so important, a nuance that almost never gets added in. But, of course, we all just assume it, so we don't think it's worth saying. But we are aware that any religion or thought like this could be this dangerous at different phases. Yes. You know, we might not have wanted to be in Spain in certain points in the last millennium. Sure. We might not have wanted to be a Catholic dissenter at certain points or a Protestant dissenter at others and so on and so forth. We all know that.

Yes. It's just that at the moment, that's pretty quiescent and quiet. And of course, it's less quiet here than it is in my country. One can't imagine the Anglican Church becoming militant about anything at any point soon. You do have some angrier types of Christian here than we have in my country. And so it's easy for me to think they're slightly less risky at some point in the future than you might. But it's just that we do recognize this could happen elsewhere as well. It's just that at the moment, it's not the Quakers.

They really don't send me a death threat from one year to the next. Right. Rather nice people. Rather nice people. There's an inherent danger of a retaliation from people who are more radical Christian. That if this continues and if you see more and more attacks from people of Muslim faith, you could possibly see a retaliation from people, especially in this country like after 9-11 there was an extreme amount of hate for Muslims and irrational hate most people who've

done nothing wrong directed at Sikhs yes well there was a lot of that out of ignorance they just didn't they didn't I mean that was the most disturbing because Sikhs are pretty interesting people and the fact that they just instantaneously, with no information at all and no understanding, out of complete ignorance, attack them. I second no one in my gloominess about some of the things that we're going to go through in Britain and Europe in the coming years. But I recently had a reason to be even more gloomy

about one aspect of it relating to this, which is this. We had three big, bad terrorist attacks last year in the UK, including the Manchester Arena bomb, where 22 young people were blown up on a Monday night for going to hear Ariana Grande. And after the third of those attacks, which was on London Bridge when three people who were actually known to the authorities as they generally are, slashed people's throats on the street and ran to Borough Market as people were drinking and stabbed people while shouting, this is for Allah. After the third of those attacks, it was felt like, oh, God, is this really just going to keep happening? What are we going to do about it? And what can we do?

And after the Manchester one in particular, there was this kind of thing of everyone sang, apart from John Lennon's Imagine, there was the Oasis hit, Don't Look Back in Anger. And these themes, we weren't meant to think anything other than that. We weren't meant to be angry in any way. These themes, we weren't meant to think anything other than that.

We weren't meant to be angry anyway. And then just a terrible thing happened from another direction. Outside Finsbury Park Mosque, which is a mosque with a very troubled and bad history in London, a guy from Wales in a van drives into the crowds as they're milling around outside the mosque, kills one man and injures a number of others. That guy, by the way, just to show how complex all this can get, he was tried, found guilty last month in the courts in the UK. He had been, he was obviously very mentally deranged and he had a history of mental illness and all that sort of thing as very often people do in these situations.

But he had watched a BBC drama called Three Girls, which is the first time that the BBC had really addressed the issue of the Rotherham, Rochdale rape gangs that happened in the last decade in the UK which is still a sore that's going on where about 1500 girls in one town alone were basically abused by gangs of Muslim mainly Pakistani

men and it's a very very ugly business partly because it was so awful that nobody that nobody at the state at the police level or any else wanted to look into it and they are now in the government inquiries, so they didn't look into it because they were worried about being called racist and Islamophobic and so on. The press did a lot of not being interested in this as well.

Eventually, after all these years, the BBC makes a documentary called Three Girls, about three of the girls who suffered from these rape gangs. And then a man in Wales sees it and gets so enraged. People say at the local pub he was railing against the bloody Muslims and all this sort of thing. And then he hires a van and drives into a crowd of people outside a mosque. And you have this awful feeling that the BBC didn't want to deal with the issue that the program was about for years because it was so awful and ugly and sounded like something made up by some kind of nativist racist.

You know, it's had everything. And then they do. And then it turns out a member of the public sees it and drives a van into a crowd. I mean, you know, this this sort of couldn't get more complex in a way. So I thought after that, OK, maybe maybe maybe the BBC were right. into a crowd. I mean, you know, this sort of couldn't get more complex in a way. So, I mean, I thought after that, okay, maybe the BBC were right. Maybe they shouldn't, maybe they should cover up the gang rape of 1500 girls. Maybe the public can't cope with it. Maybe they will get into vans. Now, as it happens, I know the British public, I think,

fairly well. And I think that that guy in Wales is a very, very unusual figure. I don't think it's very common. I don't think everyone's going to do that. I don't think we're all like that wicked madman. But I don't know. I mean, I don't know for sure everywhere. I don't know what the, I don't know what happened in this country or in various other countries if there were three attacks like that in quick succession. I don't know. But this is, this is really, this is going to get complex. It's already complex. And the response to it is complex too. How do you, if you are a journalist, if you are a television channel,

how do you report on this? Do you think about the responsibility of alerting someone to these actual real atrocities that's going to force them to react on innocent people that did nothing in front of this mosque that the fact that these people in this mosque are somehow or another connected to these people that did these horrible crimes just by virtue of the fact they're in the same religion that's insane too yeah it's all insane it's i mean it seems to me the only the only way through it is to say first of all i i I mean, I read the American press all the time. I think that it's worse than the British press in that self-appointed role of believing its task is to stand between the public and the facts, you know, and sort of negotiate between the two.

See what they think the public can cope with or should know and then feed them that. see what they think the public can cope with or should know and then feed them that. The American press seems to me to be rife with that temptation as ours is. But it seems to me the only way around this is to not give in to that and to try just to publish the facts when they happen. Because it just obviously seems to be much worse. We always know in political scandal what's worse, the cover-up. It's always the cover-up. Right.

And that may be the case with all this. Maybe the argument for just the papers explaining stuff that's happened is maybe that's all they can do. And one could just say to them, it'd be a lot worse if you bottle this up, because otherwise people will get the idea that there is some conspiracy to cover over certain stories and they'll be on to something. In fact, if you think about the millions of people that must have seen that, the story on the rape of 1,500, the fact that only one person responded that way is pretty extraordinary in and of itself. Yes, yes.

I would have thought on some of this. I mean, I don't know, again, I mean, there are lots of examples one could use, but when something bad happens like the Manchester Arena attack, I'm amazed in a way that people are so decent. I mean, I'm so pleased they are, but they, we really, we don't go out looking for people to attack. You know, the public, certainly in Britain, I can happily say, and I think it's the same in America, the public, we're not really lynch mobs waiting to be going again. But the expectation that we are is the only possibility of creating us in such a way.

It's only by treating us as if we can't deal with ugly things that go on that you could see the situation. It's where we began, to see the situation in which that all goes wrong in that different way. Yeah. I mean, I don't envy their position, especially trying to pick up the ball from here with all the history and all the terrible things, especially in England with so many attacks over such a relatively short period of time where there was a very small history of that before. Yeah.

It seemed like this immediate eruption of all these issues. Yes. And I mean, the country in some ways, I write about in my latest book most is France, where I guess the book comes out in translation there in a couple of months time. I'm very interested to see what happens because France had even, I mean, we mentioned Charlie Hebdo, but that 18 months or so it had was just, I mean, again, it all sort of disappears now. Every day has got bad news of some kind.

But, you know, to have a major Western capital city with 130 people killed in an evening with multiple suicide bombings and people being gunned down from mopeds as they're sitting outside a bar and, you know, another group of people going into a rock concert and, you know, going through the disabled section, group of people going into a rock concert and and you know going through the disabled section shooting everyone one by one in the disabled section and gunning everyone else down and catching them in the lavatories and shooting them i mean that that happened in one night alone in paris when the parisians didn't become you know they didn't become wicked terrible people or anything but they have i think these i think that the a lot of these terrible events that happen they actually what happens is they sink down to a lower level

of our consciousness so that we what actually happens is we we we get over the immediate thing quite fast but that something at the foundational level changes i had a a case nobody really wanted to linger on but there was one in in november in the uk on oxford street where uh because of course everyone does after these attacks they always say you know we will not be changed everyone tries to sort of channel the spirit of churchill and all that sort of thing um i and churchill hear me roar and and so on and uh and actually, the facts are otherwise. In November, on Oxford Street, there was a...

All we know is that there were two men who may have had some disagreement on the platform of a tube platform. Whatever happened, it was misunderstood by crowds and it developed into a stampede out of the tube station and then all the way down Oxford Street.

People were locked and barricaded into the big department stores uh a pop singer called ollie murs uh tweeted out his million followers you know there are shots of being fired i'm in the back room of the store h and m and this sort of thing and other people claim that a truck had gone down oxford mowing people down they've seen bodies the police said it was a major terrorist event they were on top of and the press were all running the stories. Turned out nothing happened. Nothing happened.

The next day, two men handed themselves into a local police station saying they thought they might have been responsible for it but they were let off without any charge. What I'm saying is... They thought they might have been responsible for it because they'd been in an argument? They'd had an argument. Maybe they... They thought they might have been responsible for it because they'd been in an argument? They'd had an argument.

Maybe they... They weren't saying we were responsible for the whole thing, but, like, they were asking for information. And they were let go. But my point is that we can simultaneously say we will not be cowed and also actually be at the stage where if you just hear a bang,

everyone goes running. You don't want to be the last person to figure out what's going on. So as soon as something you think is happening, people in this day and age when there's just this recent history of horrible things happening over and over again in Orlando, here. I mean, there's just so many of them that people just instantaneously want to react. And then, like in the Vegas shooting, one of the things that was very confusing about the Vegas shooting is people would go into casinos.

They would flee from the concert into casinos and then talk about a shooter. And then people would say there's an active shooter at the Tropicana. There's an active shooter. That always happens. There's always, that's why I never believe immediate aftermath. There's always a

claim of other shooters. There's always a claim of something that turns out not to be. Everywhere. They were claiming there were shooters all over the city, but there was no actual shooting in these other casinos. It was just reports of active shooters. By the way, if you're interested,

there's a fascinating thing about why this happens. And I wrote a book some years ago about Bloody Sunday, a terrible event in Northern Ireland in 1972. And one of the things, I went through all the tests and we have everyone who has seen it. One of the most interesting things was the number of people whose memories were just totally different from what we know actually happened. And one of the conclusions I came to was that there's a book by a Harvard professor called The Seven Sins of Memory about this. But one of the things that clearly happens is after any very traumatic event

or very terrible event where people are effectively in the situation of a war zone when they were just shopping or at a concert a moment before is that our memories immediately become even more suggestible than they are already. And the most obvious thing of suggestibility in these situations is that the situation was worse around you and you came off better than you did. And that's almost always the case.

The shots that were quite a bit away were very close. You have to, your memory, without knowing it, we all do it, our memory tells us we behaved better than we did and that the threat was worse because this is one of our ways of coping, I think. But it's a terrible thing, obviously, with these school shootings and things that are going on here at the moment.

I mean, this is obviously one of the things. I watched your podcast the other day where you were discussing this with the latest one with the Florida. And I think, you know, the sort of, in a way, bafflement going on in this society about this is understandable.

Yeah. I mean, it's the unimaginable horror of being involved in that situation. bafflement going on in this society about this is understandable. Yeah. The, I mean, it's the unimaginable horror of being involved in that situation. Your mind is just not prepared to cope with that. I mean, maybe if you are a soldier and if you experienced combat and you know how to stay calm in a firefight because you've been in a bunch of them,

but for the average person, I mean, it's one of the reasons why I witnessed testimony. It's one of the worst pieces of evidence you could ever get including i mean about it about basically everything about fistfights to you know anything oh yeah no i mean we all have examples in our own lives of seeing you know friends who've been through the same thing we know that they've been through the same thing and yet they have two totally different versions of course yeah what happened i mean that's that's a real problem but now you have this thing here where, I mean, in some ways even worse than we do, of the search to notch it up for your own political side or against the enemy.

It's the same thing with the Twitter point. glee that goes on after any terrorist attack in Europe, but I think also here as well, the attempt to immediately call it for the other side or for your side or whatever, and to try to use terrible events as a way to justify whatever your own team is. I find this amazing with the gun debate here, and I would find it amazing coming from a different society on it, but the way to sort of notch it up for one side or the other in it, and I don't know, you've got a real problem on this one. I've been watching a lot of it from the perspective of the gun owners, the NRA members and the people that want to defend the idea of having guns,

even of arming teachers. And you're looking at their perspective on it, and their perspective on it is all about their rights, all about the Constitution, all about the Bill of Rights, all about protecting the Second Amendment, all about gun ownership being taken away, gun ownership under attack, the NRA under attack. They're coming after our guns, and this is this constant battle of ideas that's on Twitter not addressing the actual issue. Sorry. No, it's okay.

Watching this thing arming teachers. Yeah, that's insane. I mean, this is... Samuel Jackson had a great quote about it. He put it on Twitter. Someone tell a motherfucker who's never been in a gunfight the problems of arming a bunch of teachers right yes somebody said someone has been in a gunfight please tell yeah motherfuckers somebody said somebody said anyone who thinks it's a

good idea giving teachers guns is clearly never seen one try to use an overhead projector yeah there's there's Samuel Jackson. Look at that, 306,000 likes, so you know it was an effective tweet. This is the world we're living in. Check the number. It was only, yeah, you got three tweets. It can't be true. Nobody likes you.

I thought there was a very pertinent one a few years ago in New York on 5th when somebody shot their colleague outside the office. He came back, he was a disgruntled worker, shot the colleague, and locally there were some policemen around the corner, and they came out and started firing at the guy who'd done it. Ended up wounding about 11 pedestrians.

Well, you would, wouldn't you? Of course. I mean, I'm not saying, by the way, we have our own problems, but this is a big problem for America. We have more guns than we have people. I mean, I completely understand why the amendment exists. And I think it's a very good idea for the time. And I think it's a very understandable idea to hold on to it now. But why can't people say, for instance, I mean, we all have abstract ideas we have to hold on to but we and we all in our countries have like weird things that other people don't

understand i mean you might think it's odd to have a hereditary constitutional monarch for instance and right uh it is weird it's a great way to put it it's strange and if you were starting from now you might not do that um uh but but clearly with the gun ownership thing, it is we are willing to take bad things happening quite often because we want to hold on to the Second Amendment. Well, the Second Amendment has been around forever. The bad things happening quite often is really from Columbine on. I mean, there was a few of them before. There was the Austin, Texas tower shootings. But it seems like, I mean, again,

I mean, just it's such an obvious point. And I don't want to sound like a snotty Brit who's saying something about America that's not at all welcome. But it seems obvious that you just, you could do a lot more damage with a semi-automatic rifle than you can with a knife.

And most people, we see this in the terrorism as well, there are really committed terrorists who don't commit acts of violence unless they can get hold of the means to do it. Because we often think, well, why don't you just go out with a knife? Some people do. But most people actually want to go out in that way and what they see as being a blaze of glory right so they like stopping them having the means of getting that very easily seems to me very obvious but that isn't to say that i mean of course i think

you made a point the other day it's like saying if you say everyone who has a gun is part of the problem then obviously not because it's like saying everyone who's got a truck is a part of the problem. But there are obviously two things. One is the psychological and whatever the social issues are that cause this to keep happening. And that is obviously very, very important to try to get to the root of. try to get through to that and also recognize that people having access to some of the weapons they have access to in this country must be a part of the problem. It has to be. It has to be.

And also the idea that you should just be able to go out and buy a gun without really understanding how a gun works at all. Yeah. And which is exactly how you do it. I got my first handgun license in 1994. That's when I bought my first handgun, and I just went and bought a handgun. They did a background check on me. That's it. I mean, I went to the range.

They showed me what the safety is, pointed this, put the earphones on, make sure you don't blow your ears out, bang, bang, bang, and then you leave with a gun. I mean, once your background check's clear, they find out you're not a criminal, there's not much to it. There's a giant problem with that. If you want to drive an automobile, you have to show that you understand the laws. You have to understand, you have to sit with an expert who's to sit there, a driving instructor.

They have to go through it with you. They have to watch your movements. They have to watch you make turns. They have to, wouldn't you you. They have to watch your movements. They have to watch you make turns they have to Wouldn't wouldn't you imagine that it would be a good idea to have some sort of a clinical evaluation of a person that's gonna gonna buy a gun and Here's another thing. There was an article recently that was saying Contrary to popular belief most school shootings are not committed by people who are mentally ill

Well, that's a fucking stupid thing to say You know why because if you're you're committing a school shooting, but you're mentally ill Is that okay period then on top of that what they're ignoring? Conveniently, and this is another headline thing psychiatric medications, right these people are almost entirely on some form of psychiatric medication, whether it is anti-anxiety pills,

whether it's antidepressants. I'm not saying that correlation equals causation. I'm not saying that. But to say that they're not, this is just a bullshit clickbait headline. They're mentally ill 100%. 100% of them are mentally ill. There's a conservative commentator in the UK called Peter Hitchens who always makes a point after Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe that there's a large number of them, as well as other types of attack, who seem to be on some kind of medication.

Yes. And my point is always I'm very, very happy to have that conversation. I think we need to have that conversation. And we also have to have the other parts of it as well yes so it's the same here I can't see why we can't have all of this it's the same thing that we were talking about earlier it's these idea sports right these wars people don't want to give up their idea they don't want to give up any ground whatsoever on their Second Amendment rights whether it's owning a 50 caliber fucking tank rights, whether it's owning a.50 caliber fucking tank gun,

or whether it's having a gun for home safety or for hunting. They don't want to give up anything, and they feel like it's a slippery slope. The people that I follow online that are tweeting about this on a regular basis, and you can go to a lot of them, like, they're making videos about it. Dana Lash and Colin. Actually, his name is, it's not Colin. It's Colian. Colian Noir, N-O-I-R. He's very, very vocal about it.

I'm reading all his stuff. It's like all anyone's taking into account is this idea that they're coming after your rights. Right. And emphasizing the idea of a good person with a gun that can protect people in these terrible situations, which can happen as well. But what we have to address, that's not what we're talking about. We have to address how the fuck do these crazy people get guns? Why are so many people on mental health medications? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a huge problem.

It's a huge problem. I can't understand. We always have this wanting to have the conversation about it, but there's very little done on it. That's one thing. I'm very struck by this. We have, in all our countries, I mean, slipped into a very weird attitude towards this type of medication.

Yes, very weird, very accepting of something that radically alters the way your mind works. Right. And I don't know. Maybe it's because there's not an incentive. Drug companies obviously don't have an incentive, quite the opposite, to look into it. But it's another example of the set of things we should be thinking about at the moment and looking at, which we just don't. Why don't we?

Because it's sort of shut down, because we shut it down ourselves. I think it's just such a range of issues this is the case with. And it's always the same thing. It's always that if you address the question, difficult as it might be, you are attacking an individual who might suffer from it, who might be upset by us addressing the question.

I mean, I have a lot of suspicions about all sorts of things. I'm a very, you know, skeptical person, as it were, about things that I'm told. So I'd like to look into things. I'm amazed at the number of things in our societies that we just don't discuss. And they're all the things that we ought to be discussing. Issues like mental health issues, issues that have to do with the social presumptions that are going on left, right and center at the moment, where you're not meant to discuss things that are, apart from anything else, very, very interesting and very important. And I just see it everywhere. This might, by the way, so this is a slightly strange

segue to make, but there was a fascinating one in Britain a couple of days ago, a slightly lighter subject, but there was not that much lighter. But there's a diver in the UK called Tom Daley who married a screenwriter from Hollywood called Dustin Lance Black. And it was announced a couple of weeks ago on Valentine's Day that they were having a baby. And there was a photograph of them holding a scan they sent out on their Twitter,

two men who are married who have ultrasounds. And all the papers and the BBC and everyone else reported saying, Dustin and Tom are having a baby. And, I mean, I'm gay and I don't think I'm homophobic, but I looked at this and I was like, how? Is there someone else involved? I mean, you know, there's the old joke, gays can't have children, doesn't mean we can't keep trying. But I just looked at this and I thought, nothing in the articles about this tells me anything I would like to know. Like, I know that they didn't just have a roll around

and woke up in the morning and one of them was preggers. I know that. And I know that there has to be a woman involved at some point. We know this. But we are meant to just, like, adapt. Okay, great, cool. And it's almost as if it's set up so that somebody says, wait, isn't a woman, isn't there a uterus at some point?

Right. So that then everyone goes, ah, bigot. Right. Homophobe, racist, sexist, xenophobe. Yeah, everything. Use whatever we've got. Yeah. And, of course, somebody did.

Really? Well, somebody from the Daily Mail wrote a column saying come on two dads isn't the new normal sort of thing and of course then everyone piled in on that and all these advertisers withdrew their advertising but this was just on this was like literally literally until the day before yesterday it was

possible to say I don't think two guys can just have sex and make a child literally that was okay until the day before yesterday. And it's not okay today. So what will not be okay tomorrow? And I just think, and I wrote about it, and maybe a couple of other people ended up doing it too.

But I think that's really interesting. Like a lot of this, I think it's really interesting about this, that you are, things that seem very obvious to us are all the things you're not meant to write about almost as if they're like booby traps waiting to go off yeah and and i just think well why don't more people pile on in right um because we could have a heck of a time and we might also solve some things well people don't want to pile in on anything revolve involving gender or sexuality it's just too scary no it's a landmine field sure they just they just can't walk in especially as you said earlier people with regular jobs yeah if you get called out for being a racist or a homophobe or anything along those lines you're doomed sure

it's um it but in that case anyone who does have a voice uh as a writer or speaker whatever broadcaster i think has a disproportionate duty to do so right to do so i mean there's no point in just repeating those same new lies. There's a disproportionate duty to try to break them down. Yeah. I can't remember one of my favorite quotes, that one from H.L. Mencken, who says, you know, that history was always progressed by jolly fellows heaving dead cats into sanctuaries and going roistering down the byways of the world.

And I just, I wish that there were more dead cat heavers because it's not it's not such a bad job you can make a living sometimes and um and it's it's it's one of the only things worth doing if if we're all going to be told lies and expected to go along with them whether it it's about terrorism or gay parenting or mental health or anything else. A whole set of them. It's a really target-rich environment. It is, and I think there's more people doing that now than ever before, but it's more people like you and I who can kind of get away with it. Yeah, I don't know. Why do you think you get away with it, by the way?

Me? Because you can't take me seriously. I'm a cage-fighting commentator and a dirty comedian. Nobody's listening to me and taking me seriously in that regard. Well, you obviously are. Well, sort of. First of all, I'm a kind person. I think that helps. I'm not a mean person. When I'm saying these things, I'm a kind person. I think that helps. Like, I'm not a mean person. When I'm saying these things,

I'm saying these things from, I'm going, what the fuck is this? Like, here was one that I thought was really fascinating. And this is one of the great example of how strange we get on subjects. Caitlyn Jenner. When Caitlyn Jenner transitioned, that was the primary thing

that people were talking about oh my god she's a woman now and it was right after she had been spacing out behind the wheel slammed into a woman and pushed her into traffic in a head-on collision and the woman died and that was almost just completely forgotten yes completely forgotten Not only that, she doesn't believe in gay marriage. Right. Like, you have the wrong spokesperson. I mean, you could not have a more wrong spokesperson. Yeah.

But yet, ESPN and Glamour Woman of the Year and all these different things and Athlete of the Year. Yes. Wearing dresses and fabulous and glam and let's get your chin shaved down because that's who you really are. Who you really are is not this person there. No, you've got to shave your chin down. It goes back to that thing about almost as if you're being dared. Yes, you're being dared to discuss it.

I said this to Sam Harris. I got him into trouble just on his podcast by saying this, and he didn't attack me, apparently. Apparently he got a whole load of transphobe accusations because of me saying something. But I said to him, I thought what was happening was that we were being asked not only to agree that Bruce Jenner had become Caitlyn Jenner and that Caitlyn Jenner was a woman,

but that you had to find her attractive. Yes, you have to say she's beautiful. If you didn't want to shag Caitlyn Jenner, you would just like... And I find those ones are just... There was one the other week. It's a bit like the gay parenting thing. It's like, I dare you. You just try pretending.

Pretending that Tom and Dustin can't have a baby. And it was the same with... A little while ago, there was a boy in Britain who was, I can't remember whether he wanted to turn up to school in a dress, he's like nine years old. And there was a row, I can't remember whether the school said yes or no, but it was a big thing. And then it became a weigh in on the behalf of the nine year old trans kid. I've got lots of questions to ask there.

Yeah. Yeah, and and then it became that the nine-year-old kid was a was was a became a model for a fashion shoot and then it's like Find the nine-year-old boy who said he's a girl attractive and say it's beautiful How much more do you want to push people Like no, they're rewarding. They're like, isn't she lovely? Right. I'm like, what are you doing to us?

Like, what are you trying to make us agree to? What's the cause of all this? I mean, you must have been thinking about this. This is this bizarre illogical conversation that falls

into these very convenient well cut grooves that you're really not allowed to slide the ideas out of what's causing this I think it's so many things one is that it's possible this is what happens when

the economics goes wrong I've got a feeling what I mean is that it's possible this is what happens when the economics goes wrong. I've got a feeling. The economics. What I mean is that if people aren't seeing increases in their living standards. I mean, my generation, I know, I'm 38. I'm just above this generation. But a generation ever so slightly below me is becoming aware that, for instance, it won't get on the property ladder at all, maybe.

Property ladder, meaning owning a home? Owning a home. The things that their parents' generation got, not easily by any means, it wasn't easy for boomers, but that somehow they're going to have it harder than their parents' generation or might not enjoy the living standards that their parents generation enjoyed might be certainly in western europe coming home it might be occurring to them what do you do in those such situations um you've got to have other things to to get worth from if for instance you're not going to own a home until you're 40 and that point if you're a woman like your career you need to have children but you're not going to own a home until you're 40, and at that point, if you're a woman, like your career,

you need to have children, but you can't afford to take the time off work, and you might not be able to start a family. And then you're trying to start a family in your 40s, and it's harder, very hard. And a whole set of other things like that, that are definitely delayed for a new generation. Now, I think that it's possible. I'm not saying it's certain, but it's possible, it seems to me,

that that generation might discover new gods and might want to enforce the new rules just as avidly as the old gods wow and and there is an element of that going i i can't understand why otherwise every time i going i i can't understand why otherwise every time i talk about the things we talked about today there would just continuously be this very angry reaction not oh that's interesting you know i never thought of that i mean i i think probably like you you know i mean it's quite hard to shock me or to upset me uh you know and i go oh that's interesting you know why do you think that but so why do i always get this? We've got to stop him. Other than that these are new commandments that we're breaking. And I mean, they're all sort of connected, aren't they, these things?

They're all attempts to, but they're all attempts to something like purity which disturbs me a sort of if we could just get everything in a row you know you even hear that thing get in your lane yes god i hate the people who say that that's a get in your lane oh fuck do you think you are you know what's my lane i think i've said it a few times. You know, but, I mean, sorry, but... But only people that needed to stay in their lane. New York Times. I'm different. New York Times, yes.

I was reading on the plane over. Okay, no, no. I'm reading New York Times on the plane over. And there's a question, there's a, you know, agony hunt, we call it. What do you call it? Self-help, whatever. Advice column. This woman says she was on the train a couple of days ago,

and there was a man who came on with his girlfriend. He was being really abusive to her and it just kept happening. And he was really kind of nasty, violent situation. She doesn't know what to do. Other people in the carriage, they all move away. And of course, you can see what's coming. The culmination of it is she says she gets off the train. She wonders whether she should have said something but she says conscious of her white privilege and that these people were people of color and i am reading this i'm thinking what you you now now if you saw a man

of different skin pigmentation from you abusing a woman of different skin pigmentation from you the right thing is not to defend the woman that seems like a just a real justification for being a coward yes it must be but but but i found the advice was you know you did sort of the right thing maybe you should have spoken to an official or something but there was no kind of so all this stuff all this weird get in your lane no you know no, no, it's your privilege, you know, way up your privilege. I mean, that's a good way to make society have a nervous breakdown, isn't it? Way up your privilege. You know, it's privileged scorecards.

I mean, my God, I am. But but all of these things seem to it's almost as if people think if we get the the the lanes correct, everything will be sorted. And here's the problem, is that first of all, the means of doing this are just hideous. I mean, hideous. They accentuate racial difference.

They accentuate sexual and gender difference. They accentuate everything else. And the destination is horrible. It is not the nirvana they think that they're creating. So this is a really good moment to try to look at some of this and to talk about it and to think about it as widely and as freely as we can. And yet the effort is to do the opposite. I think you're onto something with the idea that this radical, progressive,

very restrictive line of communication ideology that we're experiencing, we're talking about, is coming from a lot of people that don't have a religion. Yes. They're atheists or they're at the very least agnostics. Modern progressives very rarely are religious. Yes. And this must, for somebody who's non-believer like myself this is a painful

thing to look at but again we have to think about it but isn't that an interesting thing as well because you think of yourself as being on a team with these other atheists or agnostics oh you see I don't but you don't but I'm saying as an atheist yourself you have to look at it that way you've already lumped yourself in with them yes

I was speaking at a campus in thes a little while ago and i spoke to a guy who's a really really clever student who is a free thinker and he said he said uh the afters we were talking he said you know he'd had some hideous experience at a local free thinker society you know where everyone was like get in your lane and he like, I thought that being among free thinkers, like, the rest would all be good. No, no, no, no, no. The free thinkers turn out to be just as able to be blindfolded if you, you know, on certain things down.

Wouldn't you imagine, of course, self-proclaimed free thinkers would be even more inclined to adopt a rigid ideology. They're proclaiming themselves to be a free thinker. And it's possible this comes from that, you know, the old joke about censors, you know, that the censor knows everything that the people are really into. And I spoke once to a man who was on the British Board of Film Classification. He spent all day watching really hardcore pornography, deciding what could be legalized and all that sort of thing. You must have a very dark view of humanity. Well, that's what Justice, wasn't Justice Scalia's interpretation of pornography.

I don't know how to describe it, but I'll know it when I see it. Right, exactly. Like, why, aren't you a fucking judge? And it may be, but it may be that these people, that a lot of conservatives have this thing, that one becomes rigid about something because you've seen into the abyss, because you don't know you mightn't behave in a certain very terrible way. And so you want to pull back from that chaos. You want to pull other people back as well.

It seems to me that a lot of so-called free thinkers, self-designated free thinkers, may well have these glimpses and may well think, I don't know what's holding this together. And therefore might precisely for that reason be disproportionately rigid on almost any new ideology that came along. Get in lane. Yeah. Yeah. I like this idea that this is almost like a substitution for religion. It's almost like there's an inherent need

that we have because human beings have operated under these patterns for so long. We clearly have this need. It would be absurd to pretend have this need. Yeah. It would be absurd to pretend we didn't. Yeah. It's interesting because the more you, like, we found ways to mock it, right?

Yes. And one of the ways to mock it, and I think that that's important. And that mockery, although it seems trivial, what it does do is let people know how ridiculous other people feel those ideas are, and then it makes them re-examine them themselves because they don't like being mocked. The term social justice warrior is wonderful for that, because it just

makes you look like such a fucking fool. I'm a social justice warrior. I was a colleague of mine, a spectator in London called Rod Little wrote a few years ago, any man who says he's a feminist clearly just is seeking a shag. Oh, for sure. For sure.

Well, I mean, it's one thing to want equality, but to proudly state that you're a feminist, it's almost, I've joked around about it, like, I see what you're doing. You don't run fast. You can't pick things up. But you still like to fuck. I get it. Somebody said this about a party in Britain. They described themselves as an anti-racist party.

There's a comedian who said, it actually makes you think they might be racist. It'd be like saying you're an anti-pedophilia children's agency. You think, who was the comedian that said that? That's brilliant. That's hilarious. That's so true. It's so true.

It's virtue signaling to the highest degree. It's like you're putting up your flag of moral superiority, standing on your high ground. But it obviously means a great deal to these people. But then the question is just how to invite them not to think like that. I think mockery. Mockery is one of the best ways because it just lets them know that other people think it's preposterous. So it's not achieving the desired result. The desired result is, oh, look at this amazing person and his incredible progressive ways of thinking.

Not like, oh, look at this transparent fuck who's just trying to get laid. You know? I mean, that's how a lot of us see it but they don't see that we see it that way in some of the i mean it's in in a lot of ways a lot of our behavior is uh it's experimental you know i mean people are experimenting with various different ways of gaining social preference points. Well, this is why I would say even if people aren't believers, there are things they can learn from religion and from tradition. And I've always thought that there's one central insight to the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I wish that the social justice war is born in mind. And that is, that's the Garden of Eden and what Kant would call the crooked timber of humanity. Just to recognize the central truth, which is in that tradition and in others, that we're not born in this situation of Rousseauian perfection or goodness.

Quite otherwise, we are this very, very contorted being, which is capable of incredible greatness and beauty and kindness and forgiveness, and also capable of their opposites. And that it's not that you are one and other people are the other, but all of us are both all the time. And so there never is a victory and there never is a win

other than trying to deal with and restrain your own worst impulses in the life that you have. And honestly express all the issues that arrive while you're trying to do that. Absolutely. And trying to tell the truth where you see it and giving voice to it and trying to, you see it and giving voice to it and trying to, I mean, you know, this is just, it just seems so clear to me that if people could realize this is a central problem of the thing that you and I and others all face is the desire to claim that somebody who disagrees on an issue isn't just of a disagreeing mind, but evil. And that in any, you know, we have, in Britain,

we are racked at the moment still by 18 months after a single vote on a single matter of governance. We are still racked by really unpleasant politics. From Brexit. Yeah. And I suspect it's not, I hate the overlap of the two, but it's probably something like the Trump events here. But again and again, you come back to the same thing, which is just instead of thinking one side is entirely right and the other entirely wrong.

This isn't to say you give up on objective fact or anything else, but just consider that your opponent might be approaching this with an honest motive and might have honest reasons for disagreeing with you. And in the absence of that, and with media just endlessly feeding us whatever it is, you know, our own side happens to think, in the absence of that, I just see our trenches in both our countries just being dug deeper and deeper until there's just no hope of being able to even shout over the top and be heard. And one can only get to that stage if as I say you recognize that it's not a constant fight against Nazis. And you know,

I mean, it's, by the way, and also never to forget that the Nazis didn't seem like the Nazis to a lot of people when the Nazis were being the Nazis but it's just it's just not as easy as that no it's not you know but it's it's an easy way to demonize the other side yeah it's an easy way to prop up your side it's a it's a cheap trick it is but came back to where we started what if the cheap trick ends up having some terrible consequence of making all of our defenses go down? You know, if Sam Harris is a Nazi. Well, the both of you, I mean, when we started the conversation off with that community guidelines strike, I'm like, good Lord. Yeah.

This really is a very, very strange time. Very strange. Always was. Douglas, thank you very much. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate it. And your book that is out now is? The Strange Death of Europe.

It's called Immigration Identity Islam. And it's available if you can find any bookshops left. You've got to get it online. You can get it online as well. There's a few Barnes and Nobles out there. Alright, thank you. Douglas Murray, ladies and gentlemen. Great pleasure. Thank you.