TRIGGERnometry - Douglas Murray: China Must Pay for COVID 19

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

Author and journalist Douglas Murray joins us again. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. And I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And our guests do not get more fascinating than the man we have back for the third time today. He's an author and journalist Douglas Murray. Welcome back to Trigonometry. It's very good to be with you both again, or virtually. Virtually, yes indeed. Indeed. Well, that is something that is obviously affecting everybody. What do you make, first of all, before we dive into lots of the other stuff that we want to talk about,

about how our societies are coping and handling the crisis and the situation? Well, I mean, gosh, there's a lot there. I mean, it depends. Individually people, you know, people's situations are varying enormously. Some people almost seem to be regarding it as being a sort of reset or some kind of vacation. Some people are being paid and being paid their salary. without the inconvenience of having to go into the office and enjoying some of the perks of that. But I think for most of us, I mean, it's just an incredibly concerning time, whether we're

through the worst of the virus or not, I don't know. But I know that in some ways it just all feels to me like the preface to something, as if this is a sort of prelude, because every day you just see news about the economic consequences of this, just wash past the... It would have been enough news for months only a little while ago. So I'm very concerned about it like everyone is and trying to see my way through this. But yeah, I mean, this is, it's like having to get used to an entirely new program, isn't it? And do you think we're focusing, because you brought up the economic consequences, and, well, I continue to exist in a sort of woke liberal bubble.

well, though currently getting expelled at a prodigious rate. But do you think we're talking enough about the economic consequences of this, Douglas, or do you think we're simply glossing over it underneath all the hysteria? Well, the problem is that the first stage of this has been dictated rightly or wrongly by the experts in pandemics, the virologists and someone, and that's, of course, crucial. But there are other factors that are now clearly, unavoidably coming into play. And, you know, we have this not easy question in our societies at the moment, which if we had

good faith societies, good faith discussions, we could have a bit more openly in the general public. But I think, broadly speaking, it comes down to, it's already clear that it comes down to what level of risk we're willing to take versus the economic hit that we're willing to put up with. My worry is that for a lot of people, this moment we're in is like the moment of, you know, the cartoon character who runs off the cliff, the legs are still spinning, and he remains in air for the time being. But, you know, no society can keep going running up debt like this. The government can't be effectively employing half of the workforce or paying for half

for half of the workforce. So that's what I worry about. And I don't know. It's an incredibly fine judgment call on behalf of governments and others. I'm just deeply alarmed by, you know, I think there was a poll last week or the week before from you gov saying that 28% of the British public don't want lockdown to end, even if the five conditions that the government has stipulated are met. and you know you think well how are we going to get back as a society how are we how are we going to

reacquaint ourselves with with the concept of the risk which we're almost certainly going to have to reacquaint ourselves with some people just like to be confined and dominated by the government I think the 28% perhaps but do you sense that just sorry to interrupt there but some people also like doing fuck all but anyway sorry yeah I know I know That isn't a small consideration, of course. As I say, I mean, if your salary is basically being paid for, you don't have to go into the office anymore and you've got, you know, a nice house of the gardens sort of thing. These could be seen by some people as being halcy in days. It's just as I say, we're off the cliff, you know, in economic terms.

But coming back to that very point, Douglas, one of the things that I was wondering about is, do you think that this corona crisis has kind of exposed how human beings just were not wired to think of trade-offs. We just think, oh, I'm enjoying this now, therefore I won't necessarily look into the future. Or, you know, these people are dying now, but I'll not even be able to think about the people who are going to die as a result of the measures we're taking now to keep these people safe. Like, we just don't seem to be able to process this idea that there are no good decisions anymore. No, that's certainly true. There are no, there are no good decisions in this particular episode. I mean, one of the things that struck me first from this, I mean, I've not spent any

part of my life thinking about pandemics before now. So, you know, I, I'm, I'm wary of the people who present themselves as experts who also hadn't thought about pandemics until now. But, you know, one of the things that struck me early on was, you know, I was thinking, about that extraordinary moment in that I've been reading a lot of Tolstoy in recent weeks, and I was thinking of one of the few works, I'd read before all this, the death of even Iliage, where there's an extraordinary moment where he thinks as he's dying, he thinks it reminds him of that time that he was on a train and thought his destination was, that thought the train was going in one direction, and then realizes it wasn't, it was always going in the other direction.

and I sort of felt something like that when this all began. It was an uncanny feeling of how an earth could something like this happen, followed by, no, this is the sort of thing that happens. This is history. This is how history feels. Things you've totally discounted because it happened in the past, happened in your time, and you have to reacquaint yourself with the concept, though this is the direction in which we go.

and you talk a lot in your previous two books I've read about you know so it seems that the West is in crisis almost when it comes to identity politics and also when you discuss it in the West in the death of Europe and it seems to me that people in the West because I spent a lot of my time growing up in Venezuela don't really understand what it's like when a society is in crisis and when a society is very very near to the point of collaboration. And I get quite anxious because you're looking around and you're thinking, this can't carry on forever. But it seems that we buried our heads in the sand. Do you think that's the case? Well, there's something I wrote about actually in the strange death of Europe, celebrated early 20th century, Spanish philosopher, wrote a pretty famous book called The Tragic Sense of Life. And I speculated there that it was Western, particularly Western European, but you could also say, of course, North American men and women who basically in the last three-quarters of a century

lost the tragic sense of life, lost a particular understanding of how life can go. And we undoubtedly slipped into this, you know, somebody must be to blame, somebody else must be able to get me out of this, this isn't fair, all of these sorts of presumptions, you know, to which, as we know from history, and most people in the world still know, the response to the universe is, well, so what? What makes you think you're special? And I think we had lost that. By the way, I don't take any comfort as some people seem to that this virus, whatever comes after it, in some way miraculously vindicates all of their thinking prior to the virus, despite never having thought about the virus before.

I keep a little notebook of the number of people who have never written about this sort of thing, who find miraculously that the coronavirus vindicates everything they said about everything else before. You know, I mean, it's like people say to me, you know, I imagine that the identity politics people will learn from this. They'll go away. You want to bet. You know, everyone is using the virus as a sort of megaphone for whatever their own

preexisting ideas were. But that's always the case. Well, we were really wanted to get into that. It'll be later. But do you not think maybe as a counterpoint of what Francis said is actually, you know, we had a guest on the show, Jim Rickards, the U.S. finance and economics expert. And he said, you know, one of the things that we're not talking about is the veneer of civilization is paper thin. And it's already crumbling.

But actually, I mean, I look around. I think people are pulling together. People are, you know, the level of compliance with what are extremely significant. restrictions on our freedom is very, very high. You know, you don't see people on the streets protesting about it. You know, we're following the rules, even as we find out, you know, the data on which they were based may or may not have been accurate. Like, I kind of, I don't feel that society is crumbling around us.

You know what I mean? No, I don't especially either. I think at one point I made very early in this was that it was striking to me that given that in a society like Britain, we'd been said to have been living in a divided society in recent years. It was, you know, unbelievably rent and broken and we trusted nobody in authority. I was just very struck by the fact that it turned out we had massive amounts of societal trust. We had trust in our politicians who we may have had criticisms of, but we broadly recognized we're trying to do the best they could in the circumstances

that we were in. We trusted the scientific advice, experts, in the U.S. in the U.S. you know, the Queen's messages have been of enormous importance. You know, and this just strikes me because, yes, we've been said to have been one thing, and then a crisis comes along, and it shows it to have been a certain amount of hot air. I do, however, think that we have had little flickers of reminders of what societal chaos does look like. I mean, I think that the glimpse into chaos we saw at the very beginning when people started stockpiling was one very, I think that's something that people won't forget once they've

seen it. And I think a second example, by the way, is that fascinating, I mean, I say it sort of talking about it as a historian, but I mean, that's just fascinating historical thing of people starting to burn 5G masks. Now that, I mean, that is the sort of thing which just, when you read about pandemics and disasters in history, you know, the outbursts of irrationality, the vulnerability to irrational ideas, the conspiracies, and to much more. Again, that's the sort of thing you read about in history books, but to see it happening here and now to the extent that, you know, there's a really perhaps necessary attempt to shut down the people spinning, the stuff that causes people to go off and do that.

It's fascinating. I mean, it's outbreaks of the irrational mind. And I think those are sort of useful for us because they provide a corrective to our presumption of our age, which is that sort of wig interpretation of history presumption, which is that things just keep getting better and better. At some point soon we can all properly put our feet up, you know. Five key master the new Jews is what you're saying of the epidemic. They'll almost certainly be connected in the conspiratorial mind. I guarantee you. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you

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content. So instead of just the one interview a week, what we're doing now is we're putting an interview on Wednesday and on Sunday. And also we're streaming live every day except for Mondays as well. So we're really taking it up a notch and you guys have responded. Absolutely. And thank you once again for tuning in, for listening, for commenting, for retweeting. But there is something as well that you could do if you wouldn't mind. Now, we know that we live in financially straightened times and things are tight. But if you can afford to contribute to trigonometry, maybe slip a little cheeky fibre into the PayPal or the patron or whatever else,

it would really help me to eat. We don't want your fiver. And Francis doesn't need to eat. Look at his fat face. What we want is a monthly subscription if you can do because that helps us to plan ahead and keep the show running. Lots of you have responded already. and we really appreciate it.

And with that, enjoy the rest of our chat with Douglas Murray. But you bring up the free speech issue, and obviously we have seen some censorship by government and big tech companies of people who have been putting out these conspiracy theories. And I was curious what you make of that, because while, as you know, I'm very strongly opposed to restrictions

on what people can and can't say, equally, I don't think in a situation where people are going out and burning things down, allowing that to be fueled by people is a good thing. So I'm genuinely uncertain where I stand. Where do you stand on that? Well, it is that very important issue, isn't it, on the incitement question, which we've all been sort of badly playing around within recent years,

primarily because certain people, for short-term political advantage, dishonestly claim that anything they don't like is incitement. But incitement as a concept in law, it does exist, and it's a very important concept. It basically is, you know, the limit is, you know, you can say all sorts of things about people, but you can't stand outside their house with a mob pointing to the house and, say, you know, attack. So it's about the proximity of the threat as well as the words. I think this is really, really tricky one for the tech companies. They are getting it wrong, but they get everything wrong because they're trying to learn on their feet

and play with tools much more powerful than they expected them to be and do it in super quick time. I mean, I think that some of the stuff I've seen that has been, that read about has been censored, it is obviously material that should be out there and able to be thought about. but I can't deny that I mean when it comes to people spreading conspiracies that you could see easily or swiftly catching on among some people in the time of already considerable confusion I don't know it's a tricky one I mean my my general belief is to leave everything up there leave everything out there but it must have crossed your minds as it has mine of you know it's worrying when you see something like

the David Ike controversy, almost beginning of this whole thing with the program London Real, which I don't know, I was interviewed on that when my last book came out and the interview was very nice and did quite a good interview and got on well. But at some point in the interview he mentioned, yeah, that's, now, this is interesting, David Ike was saying the other week and I sort of went, you know, and, and he says, yeah, you know, I was interviewing him and I just sort of thought, well, why were you interviewing him? And then of course, but then there is the follow on from that, which is the thing, as I say,

that must be on our minds that are in this, which is, well, when they interview him, millions of hits. And I mean, what is that? Who are the people? What is the gap that is being addressed there? And these people who are just enjoying playing around with some crazy, shit? Are they, um, is something about him that they're enormously attracted to? I just don't know. You should ask Francis. He keeps demanding that we get David Ike on the show. Right. The only

reason I do it, Douglas, is I just want him to explain to Constantine's face why he's a lizard. Yes, I would pay to see that man. I would. I try to explain that to a friend recently who's not from the UK and and no knowledge of David Ike. And I would say, yeah, no, no, no. He was a guy like, well, you know, he was a footballer. And then he said he was Jesus in a stel suit on live TV. And I remember it's extremely hard to explain him. It's extremely hard to explain to him.

And then, of course, you know, well, the Royal Family Lizards. And that's his argument. Yeah. And so, no, it's a tricky one. But I do think, as I say, that's one of the questions underneath all that, which is what is it? it that he's speaking to. What's everyone else missing?

Are we missing something? I don't know. But yeah, I'm worried about the fact that the tech companies are at the very least going to be hoovering up and canceling things that should be considered because some people are doing that sort of thing. And it's definitely, I think it's probably, you know, it's, it's too close. All of that stuff with Internet censorship has always come too close to comfort for some of us. You know, just as you sort of think, oh, well, they're only going to get David Ike.

You know, you discover that they, you know, they demonetize, you know, all your friends, and they've started putting watch things on people. And yeah, it's, it always comes closer to your boat than you hope. Well, there's another thing that they have been doing as well, which troubles me tremendously, which is they are playing around with the algorithms on YouTube so that what they call authoritative content is seen by more people than unauthoritative content. So if the two of us were to interview a coronavirus expert,

that would not get the same traction as CNN interviewing that same person. So they've got their hand on the levers of information, which is what I think is exposed, isn't it? Yeah, they have, as I said, they have far too much power. They're playing around with stuff that's bigger than they can cope with. They're having to relearn incredibly fast things they ought to have known a long time ago about the nature of free discussion and free debate. But by the way, one of the reasons why I said,

it's worth trying to think about why there's an appetite for some of the craziest stuff, is that, I mean, I'm increasingly wondering, you just alluded to it earlier, Constantine. I'm increasingly wondering what happens if it is clearly shown and seemed to be the case that the scientists overestimated or indeed got very wrong some of the things that have caused us all to be in lockdown now for a couple of months. I mean, so the point I made at the beginning, look at the societal trust we have, isn't that a rather wonderful thing?

You think, actually, I can easily foresee the circumstances where this completely backfires. let alone if we had to do this again or asked to do this again. I mean, if the scientists who we've been relying on and hoping are correct and trusting are due turnout to have got this badly wrong, then the conspiratorial mind will have had an awful boost, won't it? No, absolutely. Moving on now somewhat, we touched on it earlier on in the interview, but you didn't seem surprised at all that people were trying to put their own spin on the virus,

racialize the virus, you know, the fact that the virus is now fact-shaming people, it's also a racist. That didn't surprise you in any shape or form. Why not, Douglas? Well, no, because, I mean, we all come to the world with the understanding that we've, you know, put on it. One of the fascinating things is that, you know, religious people put a religious bent on things. people who believe in sort of, you know, S-JWism, that's the sort of religion to them.

It's the lens through which they understand the world. If you've approached everything up till now in the presumption that you live in a racist, patriarchal, cis-heteranormative society and that all of these things need to be pulled down in order to get to some kind of justice, then the coronavirus is simply the latest thing you can use to prove that you're right. and then you do this weird stuff that they've all been doing of, you know, the virus is anti-women, and then people point out that more men die and they say, well, the men might be doing the dying, but it's the women who are suffering from it or something.

And then you have this awful outburst of debate about whether ethnic minorities are disproportionately suffering from the virus and indeed dying from the virus. And instead of being able to even begin to have the discussion of if that is the case, why might it be, you have the, this is yet more evidence of the fact we live in a racist society. A society is so racist, we can't even import a virus from China without making it into a more racist virus. And on and on it goes. And of course, as I said, the amazing thing in a way, living through this is, is seeing something, as I say that so few people had thought about, and so many people just keep, instead of thinking, this is a new thing for me to consider, this is a new thing for our society to be thinking about.

Instead of thinking about that, thinking, how can I adapt this reality to fit my pre-existing lenses? And, you know, I feel rather sorry for the people who are doing that because, among other things, it massively limits their ability to comprehend the world around them. It limits their imagination. It limits – and the real problem, though, isn't it, is that it limits our societal capability to solve problems. That's what I mind about it.

It's like I minded this after the London riots in 2011. I minded the fact that the commission set up to look into it and why they'd happened, set up and decided in advance what the answers could. be because it just means that, well, what's the point? Why not just not have an inquiry? Why not just pretend it didn't happen or just say whatever you want? And that's the problem with this is I'm just struck by the fact that we have some really complex issues ahead of us, most obviously this competing thing between being safe as much

as we can from the virus and the economic imperative, that in that really difficult space, in a discussion we need to be able to have, we so just disastrously limit ourselves. I saw Dawn Butler was on the television, I think this morning as we're speaking, claiming that Boris Johnson's announcement last Sunday about how people should get back to work if if they can, was deliberately sending people out to get the virus. And you know, you think, oh, God, how can we be so stupid as a society to allow a discussion at that level, as if the debate is between the pro-and-ante-death parties or the, you know, pro-infecting the elderly against the pro-defending the elderly groups.

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Well, the world has gone upside down. Pierce Morgan is retweeting Ash Sarkar. And you just go, something is badly wrong here. But, you know, I see your, last time we spoke, we spoke about your latest book, which is to your left behind you. And, you product placement. Yes, well done. The madness of crowds.

Where you talk about a lot of this stuff, you know, race, gender, the trans conversation as well. Are you not optimistic, Douglas? because we have seen a few small steps in the right direction. I would say, I mean, for example, the review of the Gender Recognition Act recently came out and said that, you know, children shouldn't be allowed to transition until they become adults. Although I do take your point about we seem to have taken a very strange look at ethnic minorities suffering from the virus. When if you speak to a doctor, they go, okay, well, obviously those groups would be most affected

because they're more likely to have diabetes, be overweight, et cetera, et cetera, right? But are you not optimistic? Do you not feel like we may start to see some people become less extreme about things as a resolve? Of course, you know, the TV people, the pundits, they're going to continue because that's their live-level, right? Yeah, yeah. They can't, you know, they're TV feminists or TV race betas or whatever. But broadly as a society, do you not feel that we are maybe starting to move in the right direction? You know, let me just preface this by saying that, of course, I mean, I just, I'm deeply conscious all the time of the need to avoid the tendency to have these things vindicate your own point of view.

So I have a natural predisposition to hoping that anything, something, anything, does away with the woke shit at some point. I've got a natural predisposition because I just don't want to talk about it a moment longer than I have to. I don't want my brain cells to be clogged up with this, detritus. And so, of course, I wish it was the case. I just see that the same games being played. I suppose my short, more my, my prediction such as, I mean, it's obviously stupid to make predictions at any time, particularly now, my prediction in a way of that at the moment is this.

I think that I think the people who do that are going to double down, but the rest of society is going to have less tolerance for it. And I think that's because, and Lionel Shriver said this recently as well, that, you know, the woke stuff was always a rich time and a rich people's obsession. I mean, it happened because of a society that didn't have enough problems. You know, we didn't have enough of the things that were being complained about. It's only if you've got a society that doesn't tolerate aggression that you can decide to go to the layer below that and decide to police microaggressions. No society in history before ours would have given a damn about so-called microaggressions.

So it's a product of wealth, boredom, bad education, illiteracy and much more. But it's, I'm pretty confident that as, sadly, that as we're all suffering economically, many, many people have lost their jobs, don't see how they're going to be able to keep their finances together. I just expect that those people are going to care, or even less than they already did, if Sam Smith claims that somebody misgender him according to what he claims to be this fortnight. And I think that's fine. I think that would be a healthy thing.

I think we have, as I say, we've all had our minds clogged up by too much nonsense. But as I say, I mean, both of these things can happen simultaneously, people doubling down and the wider population saying, no, we've had enough of that. We've got real problems now, so we don't have time for your. imaginary ones. And Douglas, we've spoken a lot about the negatives of this virus and its impact, and of course there are a lot of them. Are there going to be any positives, do you think? Is there anything that's going to come out of this that might actually help society move forward?

Well, I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical of the concept of forward. I don't like this view of history, as I think we may have discussed before, I think this whole idea that we're just always going forward, it's always getting better, and even a virus can be used to get to a better place and happier people. And I just don't see that as a view of history. No, it's famous, most famous proponents, you know, highlight a load of things in the 20th century and have to ignore two massive world wars. So I'm the one, I think there are things that you could just,

to be, as it were, good in certain ways to have come from this. I do, it's a very small C, conservative thing to say, but I believe in community and the importance of family, and I believe that people find the most meaning in their lives from genuinely meaningful relationships, and that the world of sort of virtual, you know, having thousands of friends, but nobody you can rely on, is something which actually has just had a counterblast.

I mean, people are relying on their networks of loved ones. And I think that's probably, for a lot of people, provided a kind of salutary note in their lives, who are, you know, who are the people who you do want to, you know, have whatever the household bonding arrangement is that we're allowed to do at some point in the coming weeks or months, who do you actually want to be close to and able to see? I think there have been amazing outbursts in towns as well as outside of towns and cities of communities working in a way that they were fairly unsupported until now.

And that's, of course, that's a sort of view of how a nation like Britain works. It's Burke's small platoons, you know, not people being told by government, you must do this and you should organize like this, but just that the small platoons of society self-organize, self-regulation, go out there and deal with problems that they can solve. And I think that's definitely been a boost for that, and that's no bad thing. But other than that, it's quite hard to put a positive spin on a pandemic. Yeah, it was quite a big ask from Francis. But I think one of the positives, which I want to talk about in a second is China and potentially

reviewing our relationship with that country. But before we get onto that, Douglas, you're obviously someone who not only writes books, but articles as well. And I wanted to ask you what you make of the journalistic response and how that sector of our media is coming out of all of this. Because a lot of people, including myself, have criticized many journalists for the reporters, the journalists, but the reporters in the press conferences for what I felt were, you know, endless, pointless, gotcha questions and things like that. Do you think journalists overall

have done themselves proud in this episode? No, I don't think so, but I mean, that's because so few were prepared for it. I mean, I say it myself, but I'm as being guilty of this and a member of the tribe, but, you know, most people in the media and journalism did, you know, know, know nothing humanities courses at university. They are very ill-prepared for discussions about virology or science or hard maths or anything like that. And so I think that the reason why journalism's had a bad virus, as it were, is because we were programmed to do a certain type of game, which was totally insufficient for the era we find ourselves in. And the games are ones like gotcha games, which is why I think the public opinion trust, the opinion polls

will show the trust in journalism has gone so low, because people didn't really feel that was adequate to the task. And then you've got the, you know, the, I've said it before, but, you know, the U-turn game, the one of, you know, well, you said this last Sunday, but now you're saying this, isn't this a U-turn by the government? As I pointed out, the other week in a piece somewhere, you know, as any driver knows, the U-turn's a morally neutral thing. I mean, it's quite a useful maneuver at times. If you're going straight into a wall, U-turn ought to be deployed. you wouldn't want somebody to say, oh, you've just done a U-turn. It's not, as I say, if the advice changes or something, then, of course, you might

change your view. But it's that sort of thing. It's like the game of trying to expose differences between people at the top of government, that sort of thing. Well, of course, this guided the journalistic community in recent years. It wasn't fit for purpose then. it's definitely not fit for purpose now. So no, I don't think the journalists have had a great war at all.

What about the police, Douglas? Because this is another part of our institutions, I suppose, that seem to have struggled with, particularly initially, with how to deal with this. We saw a lot of police forces around the country doing seemingly very stupid things and taking liberties, if you like, and they're quite literally. No, they certainly have.

I mean, this isn't terribly surprising, by the way. I mean, there are quite a lot of examples we could point to. Across recent decades, it showed that the police, among other things, there's always a problem that they operate in a way like a gang. I mean, I'm saying internally, they always try to protect their own. They always try to cover up for each other, often with catastrophic consequences. and they can't concede when they get things wrong.

They don't do anything meaningful about it. So the police overreacted and undoubtedly in certain cases went beyond what the government would allow them to do in terms of policing. And I mean, these preposterous things like the police, you know, dying a lake to prevent people swimming in it and sending drone out to photograph dog walkers in the complete wilderness and much more. But in a way, that's sort of what I'm afraid, that's what I expect the police, which is, you know, not been operating very well as a force for a long time.

It's not terrible, but it just definitely has terrible moments. And in a way, that's, I'd expect the police to be vaguely incompetent and for some of them to massively overreach because they can't believe their luck that they can go and, you know, tell off a sunbaver, because after all, it's much easier telling off a sunbaver than it is actually going to somebody's house and they've been robbed and actually investigating the robbery and finding the robber. You know, I mean, when you think of what the police have not bothered to investigate in recent years, you know, crime that goes on, which is on CCTV, which is why the CCTV is meant to be there.

And the police don't even bother to investigate it. I mean, this happens, you know, everyone has stories of this. And of course they just can't believe their luck when they can walk around and tell people you're killing people by lying there on the grass. I'm less surprised by that than I am by the public reaction, which again, now this is a minority, admittedly, but I think we get quite an interesting insight into, again,

what history is like. Look at the people. I mean, we all have stories of it, and sometimes we read about them in the press. Look at the people willing to inform on their neighbors. I've spoken to a lot of people who have this. You know, people who, you know, people they know who say to them, you know, are you aware this is the second time you've been out today? You know, and when you hear stories like that, you know, I had in a rate to think, gosh, you know,

that's how things like East Germany, the Soviet Union, that's, that's partly. how it worked, isn't it? Because there's always a portion of the population that loves the opportunity to play this sort of combination of cometsar and policemen and policeman and purity police and, you know, cleric and curtain twitcher and all of that. There is a proportion of us. Maybe we've all got a bit of it in us, who loves that. Look at the shaming that goes on on social media when anyone can get a photo. And by the way, quite often the photos, from years ago, or months ago, of people meant to be in a public place so everyone online can say, how can these people, and they can all pile on, they feel so great about themselves, that they wouldn't do this.

And, you know, that stuff is really interesting to see come out. So I'm much more surprised at that in a way than I am at the police overreaching. And Douglas, you talked about the police, and do you think that the government, because in times of crisis, government's always introduced new taxes, they always introduce new laws. Do you think with the introduction of this app that what we're going to seize an infringement of our civil liberties, we're going to now be tracked far more than ever, and then we're just going to have to accept it? I actually don't think so particularly. I think there's itself, there's an overreaction to the overreaction, which is to claim that, therefore, we are slipping into being a police state. I don't know, the people who say that apart from anything else are the people who always claim that we're slipping into a police state. And I'd be very surprised if, after all of this, the British public, are eager to have this sort of thing going on more in their lives all of the time.

But there will be a proportion of people who will. Like that 28% we're talking about who would like to remain at home whatever happens, you know, for the end of time. There will be a portion of people who will, you know, claim, well, look how well we took that. Maybe, you know, it doesn't matter if we have more detection and following and all that sort of thing. I just, I think that'll be pushed back against. I think that I don't think I'll get an easy ride with that. And I don't think we're going to slip into some totalitarian nightmare.

Well, see, I was quite reassured by how reluctantly Boris Johnson introduced some of the restrictions. Absolutely. There seemed a very strong reluctance from him to do that. It's against all of his political instincts. You could see it in his eyes. It was like something he never, ever dreamt he would have to do. But equally, I am also somewhat persuaded by the argument that, you know, after 9-11, a lot of laws come in in America, none of them have been rolled back. You know, the counterterrorism

legislation in this country introduced in the wake of 7-7, then it's used to remove a pensioner who's heckling Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference, right? Yeah, yeah. There is, there is a sense that, I mean, most of these laws are grandfathered, I think, so I guess they should, they should be removed automatically. But there is a thing there that sometimes things don't get rolled back the way that you'd hope, even if... Yes. There is, but I've always said there has to be incredibly, I think with the example you give the counterterrorism legislation, I always thought that the answer to it is quite straightforward. You come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who misuses and misupplies the law. So, you know, the first counsellor who, you know, allows

anti-terrorism legislation to be used to spy on some... who's putting out the wrong colour bin, that person should never be near public life again, nobody who cooperated with it ever should be. You know, there does just have to be a better understanding, a better punishment of people who misuse legislation intended for very serious and specific purposes and misuse it for their own weird, short-term political convenience or to pursue a vendetta or whatever. So yes, I mean, I just think that needs very close eye kept on it. But I'm pretty confident we have a lot of close eyes on that sort of thing in the UK.

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And for the people at the back, Babel is spelled B-A-B-B-B-E-L-L-O-K-L-U-K slash play. promo code trigger. And we've been talking about a slide into totalitarianism, which is a lovely way to introduce China. How much responsibility do you think the Chinese, or rather the CCP, should take for this particular virus? Well, it all comes to their door.

Whichever explanation we end up settling on as to how this virus came about, whether it's the wet market one or the laboratory one, and whether it's seen to be entirely accidental, partly accidental or entirely deliberate, every single one of these options, the Chinese Communist Party has to pay for it. Because in every single one of these scenarios,

the central thing remains, not just that this happened in their country, possibly in one of laboratories. but that they managed to, they successfully deceived the world for months and did what totalitarian regimes always managed to do, which is to turn a local disaster into an absolutely global one. And I'm, I think that we have a very complex but necessary process ahead of us of disentangling ourselves from this country, which we have a very complex but necessary process ahead of us of us of disentangling ourselves from this country which we've with this regime i say which has which has just burnt down the world

economy and do you think um do you think it should pay reparations oh i'm for absolutely everything i think everything should be on the table i absolutely everything i look and look by the way at the disgraceful way that the cc has treated our allies and friends it's it's it's bullying of the australian government i mean you know about that douglas because many people won't know about this So the Australian, I've written about this a bit recently because I've taken certain interest in this corner of things. I think that I've written this in the past. I think this country has been very naive. The UK has been very naive about the Chinese Communist Party.

I think we've seen it solely as a sort of gold tap and ignored the downsides that always come with it. And by the way, I told this story in The Spectator last week in my column, but I heard this story. very, very good source seven years ago, that after the Dalai Lama affair, which was when David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, saw the Dalai Lama, who, of course, the Chinese Communist Party loathe for obvious reasons to do with Tibet, after David Cameron met the Dalai Lama, the Chinese Communist Party cut off trade relations with new investment deals with the UK, until David Cameron announced that he was going to socially distance himself from the Dalai Lama. and then announced he would actually never meet him again.

And after issuing an incredibly groveling apology, the next time that British representatives met with their Chinese counterparts in Beijing, a copy of the British government's apology was pushed across the desk at the British officials, who asked to stand up and read it out. And they did. And when they sat down, the Chinese Communist Party officials said, with a smile, we just wanted to know that you meant it. Now, when I heard that then, I was really bold over anyone being so supine on my behalf

or on the behalf of the British people. But that's the deal. That's the deal we've been willing to put up with, which is you get the money, you get the investment. That isn't nothing. But it means that you also have to play on their terms and there were caveats involved. And some of them are very serious. Now, in recent days and weeks, the Australian government has come across this because the Australian government, Australia has just stressed, I mean, has been learning what we are just learning now faster and ahead of time because of their location and their own trade relations in recent decades with China. And I've just noticed on visits to Australia that the public there are much more aware than they are in the UK or America, I'd say, about the fact that there are things attached to this relationship.

And the Australian government a couple of weeks ago asked, suggested there should be an official inquiry, independent, international, into how this all happened, how the virus originated and how it came to spread across the world. And after the Australian government did that, the Chinese Communist Party reacted in the way it always does. It threatened Australia. It's diplomats, its ambassador to Australia, said that the Chinese might stop buying Australian products, Australian beef, Australian wine, and that this was seen as a racist thing. Incidentally, I mean, one of the most prominent government mouthpiece journalists in China took to Weibo, the Chinese government of Twitter. And if you think that Twitter is a totalitarian, censorious monolith, you should see their Chinese counterpart.

But this very prominent Chinese, basically government stooge took to the Chinese equipment of Twitter to say that Australia was a piece of chewing gun stuck to the shoe of China, and it needs to scrape them off. And that's quite normal rhetoric from the Chinese Communist parties. officials, representative. I dare say that does sound a little bit racist, Douglas. Yeah, I know. You would have thought that. Isn't it interesting? Isn't it interesting that whilst, you know, whilst, you know, people are like,

whilst Nancy Pelosi and co are worrying about whether or not saying where the virus came from is racist. And, you know, let's not forget, it was only in late February, early March, that Nancy Pelosi was still encouraging people in America to go to their local Chinatown in order to show solidarity. And the mayor of Florence at the same time was urging the people of his city to find a Chinese person and hug them in order to defeat racism and coronavirus simultaneously, which turns out to have been the sort of reason perhaps why Florence were in lockdown faster than anyone else. But whilst we were all obsessing with this, you know, is it racist to say that it comes from China? The Chinese are perfectly willing to be as racist as they like about everyone else in the world,

as if we needed reminders of that after what they've been doing to the Uyghur people and others in recent years. So this is a classic example of where the real world meets our stupidities. You know, the real world of China and Korea doesn't give a damn about racism, doesn't give a damn about it, but knows that we do and is willing to say anything it likes about us and manipulate our fears. And so anyway, but to get back to this point, yeah, the Australians are now in this situation where China is stopping, boycotting certain Australian products.

They're basically trying to teach the Australian government a lesson for daring to stand up to them and daring to suggest an independent international inquiry into the origins of this virus. Well, you know, I think now is a time for solidarity. I'm pleased to see that New Zealand government has very much back. up our Australian friends and allies. But I just think, I think that's, that this is a fine moment for some democratic solidarity. And to say, you don't get to, you don't get to, if you're a Chinese Communist Party, bully our allies and expect us to distance ourselves from them. And I, yeah, I think everything's on the table with China after this. Nothing, nothing. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

Nothing I'm not open to. And Douglas, do you think this is the end of globalization as we knew it? I don't, well, that's a really tricky one. I mean, globalization means several different things. Partly it's a demonstration. In some people's mouths, it's a description of just the world we live in. In other people's mouths, it's a particular concept of how we should live and how international trade and travel is organized.

one version, I suppose the version you sort of mean it in, is what? I mean, the... Unless the idea that we're in this interconnected world, and that's a universal positive, and, you know, the fact that you can buy goods from, you know, Beijing or wherever it is, and that has no impact whatsoever. Oh, yeah. No, I think that this virus will have one particularly clear effect, which is that we will be much more conscious in each of our countries of supply chains.

And the need to, I mean, if we'd have had a conversation in January and we'd have been sitting here and I'd have said, or you just said, look, I think we've got to have British medicines in order never to have to rely on Chinese medicine, you know, or anything like that. I think we would have all felt it was a little bit, you know, there would be something on the edge of it, which wouldn't have sounded quite right. Especially in my accent. You know, and it'd be like, well, what's the problem with, I mean, you know, if it's cheaper and we get it and it's,

my point is that even now, just a few months later, it's a perfectly reasonable, very sensible thing to argue that, that we shouldn't be reliant on China in crucial products. And I think a lot of countries, not least the Mediterranean countries, saw the northern European countries going incredibly protectionists with certain items early on in this virus will obviously be addressing themselves to that in the coming years. On the wider thing of the globalization years, who knows, we, globalisation is an extraordinary thing

which we all rely on and we get so much good from. it's given us all an incredible boost in our standards of living the ability to enjoy products we wouldn't have been able to enjoy as well as much more. But there is always a downside. The downside of this is, I think, clearer to us now. So I don't think it's an end to globalization. I think this will be seen to have been a kind of corrective to the most glosses. Pangellosian vision of globalization.

And there is, and I wonder, I would have thought that there will be an increase in the attraction of that critique of globalization, which was already going on, particularly from America, particularly actually from the Trump administration, which is basically that the benefit does not accrue in the same proportion as the negative. That is that the benefit you and I accrue by being able to buy certain products cheaply

does not actually counterbalance, for instance, the loss of manufacturing jobs in our own countries. Now, that argument was already going on. It was quite advanced. There were a lot of people, including American president, who, obviously in favor of that or at least sympathetic to that critique, I just I think that will that was already growing and I think it will continue to grow. It definitely was. It definitely was. But I think it goes in terms of, you know, you make the point about supply change. I think it goes slightly beyond concern about medicine and wherever else it might be because people are, you know,

in economics, they talk about externalities. And this is what you're really talking. about is people are now becoming aware that when you buy a widget for one dollar from China, you do that because there's $9 of hidden cost in the back end of it, some of which is manifested in a global pandemic that causes a global depression. And that is the price of doing business with China in the way that we've been doing. And if people understand that, I think our relationship with China is going to be very different to the way that it's been up to this point. Yeah, I agree. I would not feel enormously rosy about the future if I was a Chinese Communist Party, which is bad news for them, but good news for us.

Well, we found a positive note after all, Douglas. By the way, it is remarkable when you think about it, isn't it? I mean, this hangover from the last century, there's still going on. that we've talked about very little in our lifetimes. We just, you know, I often wonder, I mean, that game that you can play of, you know, swapping communist for fascist or fascist for communists and seeing how tolerant you are of the other totalitarian. If there was a massive fascist state still in existence run by a fascist party with more than a billion people under its complete and totalitarian control.

I wonder if we would have been quite as gleeful about getting cheap t-shirts. Douglas, have you not heard Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are both fascists? Yes, that's, yeah, I know. Everyone is all right and everyone's, yeah. No, of course I'd heard that. No, I get your point. Of course I do. Someone who comes from the Soviet Union, I totally, to me, it's a foreign.

Isn't it weird? It's true. No, it's abhorrent. It's abhorrent that you can have someone go on national TV in this country and go, I'm literally a communist and that person is treated as just another person commenting. You know, if someone went on TV and said, I'm literally a fascist, I think they might be treated slightly differently. Yeah, I know it's true. I mean, her counterpart, Nick Griffin, actually denies being a fascist. But, you know, if he was to come out full fascists, I'm literally a fascist, you're trying to pretend I'm just some other kind of crazy guy. Yeah, it wouldn't have been career-making for him in the way that it was for our friend.

Well, we have found some positive, Douglas. Before we let you go, as usual, we have a question for you. But actually, before Francis asked you that question, give us a scoop. Are you working on another book at the moment? I am. I'm in the earliest stages. I'm quite lucky as an author. I have a backlog of books in my head that I know I need to write, and it's a question of what order to do them.

in. So the state that we've all been thrown into in recent weeks and months is both very uncomfortable for me and also something which is useful because I've had an awful lot of reading and things to do. And I am sketching out at the moment two books, which I've been wanting to rise. People are going to be excited. Give us a little bit what are they going to be about. I have a total rule on this that I never talk about books that I'm writing or haven't yet written. No, because what happens is you've become like one of these people in a Paris cafe who talks about their books and never writes them. Talking about books is the death of actually ever getting around to writing them. And I did in the past once talk out a book.

There was one book I should have written, which I never got around to because I talked about it so much. So I know whereof I speak on this and my incredible rousness in refusing to even play with your question is totally justified. Well, the side fact is, Douglas, is the cafes aren't open so the metaphor doesn't work really. Think of all those Parisians who are writing their books finally. Yeah, exactly. But also, you've got to understand, Douglas, I'm Russian. It's my job to push boundaries.

That's what I do. So there we go. But we've got one more question for you. And the question we always ask, which is what is the one thing that people aren't talking about, but we really should be. Oh, God. It's kind of unfair on you because you've been on the show a couple of times now. And the more you come on Trigonometry, the more difficult that question is to answer before you run out of things to say. Yeah, the thing that I'm really, sort of where we started, and it may sound like I'm dodging it.

But I do think we're not talking enough about how the hell. we pay for this. I just, I'm filled with, filled with worry about this. I've been saying for a long time, I think one of the reasons why people have been playing with crazy ideas that are not worthy of them is because very basic things had already gone wrong in the economy. I said this after 2008 crash that, you know, when the finances go bad, other things happen. We know this from history, and yet we didn't think it would happen in our own time. Well, the final. weren't bad in 2008 and we still hadn't got our way out of that. And now we're in this.

The one I'm really worried for, I have to say, is people I'm now 40, but people 20 years younger than me and 15 years younger than me who are, you know, starting out, I just, I really do think they've got a very legitimate set of concerns that need to be addressed. I just don't know how it was hard enough for my generation to do things like getting on the housing land and all that sort of thing. It was never easy, but I just don't know how this generation is going to accumulate capital. And if you can't accumulate capital, it's not clear why you should have any instinctive love for capitalism. And from that, a whole set of problems can flow.

So that's really what preoccupies me at the moment. The thing I wish we would think about is this is an almighty going wrong of the accountability. economy and what will happen as a consequence of that? What might we be vulnerable to? You know, we already discussed at the beginning, you know, this small but considerable, you know, small percentage, but a considerable number of people who are vulnerable to Ikeism. Didn't see that coming in the recent past. So what else, what else can we be vulnerable to when things go this wrong? Well, I've got to get that working. Is becoming popular among young people. I know. And, you know, the tragedy of that, as you know,

it is just because one thing isn't working as well as it should do, doesn't mean you should try again the worst thing in history. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, that is a good note on which to leave the interview. Douglas, we ask you on behalf of all of you as not to do any more interviews so you can focus solely on writing the two books that you've got coming because I think everybody's going to be very excited about seeing those come out.

And thank you as always. We encourage people to follow you on Twitter. K Murray. That's right. Yes. Somebody else had really taken Douglas Murray. I don't know who that is. Yeah, they're irrelevant and should be banned from history entirely. But you've got the two brilliant books, your most recent books behind you, the madness of crowds and the strange stuff of Europe. And we obviously recommend for anyone who hasn't read them yet to go and read them.