TRIGGERnometry - Melanie Phillips: "The Left is Racist"

Episode Date: December 8, 2019

Melanie Phillips is a Journalist, Broadcaster and Author. We recommend Melanie's most recent books: *Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity: https://tinyurl.com/wervvjs *The Legacy: https://tinyurl.com/vtm8sez 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. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is an author, journalist and social commentator. Melanie Phillips, welcome to Trigonometry. Hello, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you here. It's been a while in the making this interview. It's great to finally get you on the show.

For anyone who doesn't know who you are, which is not many people these days, but there are some, I'm sure. Tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are, what has been an abridged version of your journey through life. Oh my goodness. Well, I am currently a columnist for the Times newspaper and I write books and I do quite a lot of broadcasting and a certain amount of public speaking. and I was known many moons ago, probably before you even started to exist, because I'm so very old. I was known to be a guardianista. I worked for the Guardian and the observer for the best part of 20 years. And for the first period of that time, I thought that I was one of them.

And then I realized rather crashingly that I wasn't. And from then on it was sort of downhill all the way into a pit of infamy in which I progressed to the Sunday Times, which was a kind of convalescent home. And then the Daily Mail, which was a bit like going from a convalescent home to Mount Vesuvius in full eruptions. And then the lava washed me out of the Daily Mail. And I'm now very happily ensconced at the Times, which is extremely civilized as a newspaper. So I've had quite a journey and my journey through newspapers reflects my journey politically to my former comrades on the left. Not that I ever thought I was the left, I thought I was a liberal, I still think I'm a liberal, but in those days when I worked for The Guardian, I thought

that being a liberal and being left wing were pretty well the same thing. And that was not least because everyone used to talk of themselves as the liberal left. And I thought being liberal was good and being left was good and that we were all marching under the same banner of believing in truth as opposed to lies and justice as opposed to injustice and fairness and equality and the oppressed against the oppressor and all those good things and progress and reason, rationality. And I still believe in all those things, but the break came when I came to understand or believe that my former comrades on the left are on the exactly other side of all those things.

Well, you started to use reason and logic. I did. And that was a terrible shock. And then I observed to my complete horror that, and to begin with, my complete perplexity, that literally like that, the first column I wrote, which offended against the dogma of the left, I was immediately ostracized. I immediately became something that was against the left and therefore had to be the right. And it took me a long time to put a lot of stuff together. And a long time before I felt able to or ready to leave what I can

it to be my family, my political family, but I did leave it and have basically fought them ever since. And in response, they never engage in the arguments with me. Instead, they label me with increasingly ferocious labels in order to silence me. So to begin with, I became right-wing overnight. And then when I didn't stop, when I went further and further issue by issue down this terrible hill of infamy, I became far left and then ultra left and then fascist and then Nazi, which is great since I'm a Jew. And then they discovered I was a Jew and I was the wrong kind of Jew because I supported Israel. So then I became the mad Likudnik warmongering Zionist Jew. And then when I Still kept going, I became deranged and insane.

So then I became the deranged and insane, warmongering Nazi, Zionist, fascist Jew. And then it becomes quite difficult to think what else they can throw at me. So that's basically the person you're interviewing. I thought you'd like to know. And all those titles are actually great names for an Edinburgh show. A bit of a mouthful, yes.

That would be. Well, it's a pleasure to have another deranged Nazi Jewish. show. We've got two of them now on one show, which is, I'm sure, a rarity. Whenever we speak to people from around different political positions, my sense, our sense, to some extent now is the kind of things that you talk about. The question I really want to ask you, if I dig really deep, is, are we living through the last days of the Roman Empire? Is that what's happening here in terms of the West and the collapse of, the potential collapse of a civilization? Is that where we are?

It certainly has felt... Is that overstating the case? No, no, no. Understating it, I think. I've thought for literally many years that this is a civilization that's hurtling towards the edge of the precipice without even realizing there's a cliff. It's just completely blind. And I think that what's been happening, I would say since the Second World War, we can talk about why I think that was a, major watershed. I would go back further and say, I think that the First World War was also

a major watershed. And I would go back even further and say the seeds of this were actually sewn in the 18th century enlightenment and have just unraveled over the time. But I would say that certainly in the last 50, 60, 70 years, it's been unraveling. And I would say it is a retreat from the, or a repudiation, a lot of belief in the fundamentals of Western modernity. I think that a profound demoralization set in as a result of the Holocaust and the Second World War, which occurred in the very crucible, very heartland of high Western culture. Germany was, you know, a country which thought of itself as the sort of quintessence of reason and progress and high culture. You know, they all loved Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven.

And, you know, they played people to the gas chambers to the tunes of Mozart. Okay, so the West knew that. And the West, I think, then, was totally demoralized. If we could do that, if that's what Reason has done, we've had it with Reasons. And we've had it with the nation state because they believed the story that they told themselves in the West was that Hitler was a nationalist. And I think that was also a misunderstanding because Hitler wasn't a nationalist. Hitler despised people who believed in the nation. He thought they were petty and silly and ridiculous.

He was an imperialist. He believed that he was put on earth to recreate the Holy Roman Empire. So he was a Remainer? Well, let's not quite go. Let's not quite go back. But he certainly wanted to invade people. And, you know, if Britain hadn't been nationalist and, you know, so really full of what it stood for. We're both Romanians, by the way.

We both voted Remain. Let me not even insinuate that you have anything to do with Hitler. But anyway, I think that that sort of set him a kind of demoralization, which made the sort of governing bodies of the West, the political and intellectual bodies that control our culture, very vulnerable to a whole series of anti-Western nihilistic, destructive ideas, which is where we are now. So you've mentioned these nihilistic, destructive ideas. I mean, it's very, very dark terms that you're using. Could you pinpoint a couple of them that you think are particularly destructive? Well, yes.

I mean, the destruction of the traditional family and the destruction of the concept of education. Those two things, education and the family, I think, are what underpin a society. They give a society its shape. And I believe that the traditional family of a mother and a father bringing up their children, while not ideal, in every respect and in every circumstance, for sure, is nevertheless, broadly speaking, the best way to produce emotionally healthy individuals who will go on and, you know, do well in life. And we kind of got rid of all that because we thought it was entirely wrong to have a hierarchy

of values, entirely wrong to have a hierarchy of family or any other kind of cultural background because that meant that people who weren't from that background might feel, would feel, disadvantaged, put down and so on. So we had a level playing field so no family background could be privileged. And so the result, I think, has been misery. for unquantifiable numbers of children and women in whose name it was done. So that's the first thing. The second thing was education.

And that was where I first came to grief at the Guardian. The second column I wrote saying, maybe something's going wrong with education. It's not entirely the fault of Mrs. Thatcher. And then the world fell in me because of course, every bad thing was the fault of Mrs. Thatcher. And the education world was entirely blameless, as you know, as a former teacher. But I charted over those years in the

Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it.

Avocardo green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials, designed to actually support your body properly rather than just hold you in one position until morning. The craftsmanship is real. These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps.

My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home, your bed is the one that pays you back every single night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support.

Go to avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Late 80s. I charted in my journalism what I saw was going on in education, which I sort of sat through all the debates. And it was mainly the educational hierarchy in universities which was dictating this. And basically the orthodoxy that came out which you could not challenge was that the very idea of education as a means of transmitting a culture down through the generations was inherently illegitimate in the world.

West because Western culture was inherently racist and colonialist. So you must not transmit it down. Instead, all these ideas that went back to Rousseau and let a child be free and the child brings to the educational experience what is infinitely superior to anything the adult world can impose upon it. So you got rid of the idea of structures and you let the child find its own way in the world and the teacher became a facilitator. This may have changed by the time you were a teacher, I don't know.

Probably got worse. It's got worse. So the teacher had a backseat. The teacher would not impart the teacher's own knowledge. Heaven forbid it should, the teacher should direct a child anywhere. The teacher would just stand back while the children basically were left in my view to stumble through a world without a map. And I thought that was just appalling.

And I watched children being told that they were left. could read at the age of seven. Their parents thought they could read and they couldn't read. They were guessing words. Why were they being taught, not taught to read? Because teaching a child to read involved a structure and a structure involved progress at different levels. And that meant that some children will be faster at learning to read than other children. And that meant that the children who were slower at learning to read would have an identity problem for the rest of their lives and would be full of self-doubt. So you'd have no structure. So no child was taught to read.

It sounds ludicrous. That's what happened. And I read book after book theorizing why this was the way forward. So I watch the education system be destroyed as a system of transmitting a culture. And it became something quite different. It became rather confused. And over the years subsequently, it's gone back and forward a bit. It's been pulled back.

It's been pulled forward again. So it's a bit of a mess. And to be frank, I haven't followed it in that detail for some years. But that's what I wrote then. And so I thought then, and I still think, those two things going down sort of laid the groundwork. And then you had this whole business of following on from that. I mean, these things were all based on the idea that the individual is supreme.

By the individual being supreme, what was meant was that what the individual subjectively thought must take precedence over any imposed authority from outside. What I believe to be right for me, was right and nobody could tell me that there was anything wrong in it. And that went not just for the educational system, not just for family backgrounds, it went for cultures. So heaven forbid, suddenly, that the West could say to itself, we're better than other cultures. So what did that mean? What did that mean? According to the people who produced this doctrine, it meant that you

have the brotherhood of man. It meant that because the West would no longer look down on others, Therefore, everybody will be so happily involved in nurturing each other in a kind of brotherhood of man. We're all friends and even Stevens together. They hadn't met any Russians. There will be no prejudice. Prejudice and bigotry be excised from the human heart and there would no longer be war. But what it also meant was rather important that a liberal society could not say that it was better. than any other. So we couldn't say that we stand for, you know, the cardinal tenets of a liberal

society, you know, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equality between men and women, and all the other stuff. We couldn't say that was better than any other. So this is the road to disaster. If a society can no longer assert that it believes in its values, then it's over. So, and then all these things led to other stuff. And now we're in a sort of, this, you know, the identity politics, a bit like the French revolution onwards, in all revolutions, eat their own. So identity politics and intersectionality means that everyone's eating each other. So, you know, first of all, we had, you know, the gay rights movement, and then we had

transgender, and now gay is eating transgender and transgender is eating gay. And it's like what? So we're descending all the time into ever more widening circles of absurdity and, I think, damage and destruction. So I've been writing about this for, you know, decades. Which is why it's a pleasure to have you on. And I was going to, I don't know if you're familiar with Titania McGrath, this Twitter. I am. Andrew, who's a good friend of us, he's the man behind that.

And he paraphrased Ben Shapiro's quote, which is facts, don't care about your feelings into feelings don't care about your facts. That's right. And this is what you're really talking about, this era of subjectivity. Essentially, what you're talking about is the erosion of the concept of truth. That's correct. The erosion of the idea that there is a truth. Correct. That can be measured, that can be observed, that can be elucidated through debate and discussion.

That's right. And that is the road to road, surely, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, without truth, you can't have reason. And without reason, you can't have modernity in the West. And, you know, here we have this tremendous paradox that, at a moment, time when we pride ourselves, you know, as a society, Western society, that this is the era of supreme rationality and reasons. So we're so reasonable, we're so rational. We've done

without religion, you know, because we think that religion is superstition, it's bunk. And we're, you know, this is because we are rational people. We believe in the intellect and, you know, we think. And yet we've abolished the idea of objective truth without which there's no irrationality. So these things don't make sense at all. They don't add up first, you know, not for a second. And that is not acknowledged either because the other thing is that all these doctrines I've been talking about, because they are associated so strongly with this idea that this is the way we repair the world. We have been through this cataclysm of the Holocaust, First World War, Holocaust, war, communism, mass murder. Right. We've got a

avoid all that. So we have to eradicate war, we have to eradicate prejudice from the human heart, we must go forward as a global community of the brotherhood of men and women. Fine. So who could possibly object? Because this agenda of all these ideologies that are to do with the perfection of the world, if anyone objects, they are not just wrong. They are, must be bad people because they're objecting to the perfection of the world. There can be no deviation from them, therefore. So again, the irony is that in an era which is so supposedly rational that it's done away with obscurantist religious belief, this is a religious belief. It has all the upertances, not just of religious belief, but of what I would call medieval apocalyptic,

Christian belief when, you know, you had dogma that couldn't orthodoxes that couldn't be gainsaid. You had heresy trials. You had heretics. You had dissidents. You had inquisitions. And then you had mass burning. So we don't have mass burnings anymore.

But instead, we destroy people's reputations and their professional careers. Same thing. We cannot abide as a society. We've created ideologies which cannot be gainsaid. and anyone who does gainsay them is consigned to various circles of hell. And so how do we push back against this movement? Because you're insinuating that it is a battle. Brexit.

And the B word happens again, ladies and gentlemen, we're back where we're starting. Is it really Brexit, do you think? Well, this is complicated and it sounds absurd to say Brexit, because, you know, was Brexit got to do with all this? I believe that all the time I was writing out all this stuff, I was getting a lot of support from the public, all of whom I could see, you know, they were in hiding. They were all being told that the beliefs they had, which contradicted all these ideologies, were not just wrong, but despicable.

They were despicable people. And then Brexit happened and I thought, ah, 17.3 million people actually think like. me because not that they think like they thought like me in every one of these issues, but broadly, the underlying assumption of what I would call the intellectual political establishment, which was to do with this business of, you know, the nation is basically a bad thing and the idea of a culture being better than any other is a bad thing and all that's that sort of stuff. and that anyone who objects to that is an imbecile and bigoted and a little Englander, what was David Cameron's famous phrase, you know, fruit cakes, closet loomies, closet racists.

All those people said, you know what? We have a vote now to show that that's not true because we want our country. We want to govern our country as an independent nation because we believe in democracy and we believe in governing our country. and we want to be able to have our own culture expressed through our own laws made by our own democratically elected parliament, which can't be overturned by a foreign court. Now, I believe that that was not in the front of people's minds, but that's basically what they were on about. And then, so Brexit happened. And I thought, when I woke up, I had two, that morning, I had two thoughts. One is that, huh, well, what do you know?

Possibly Britain might survive after all. And my second thought was, nah, it'll never be allowed. This will be a fight to the death. That was my second thought. And then I don't want to give you a seizure, but then the election of President Trump happened. And I thought the second shoe has dropped. Because whatever you think about President Trump as a person, and I have a number reservations about him, to put it mildly.

What he stood for was, again, the American people saying, we don't want what we are being told we have to have, a borderless country. We want our country. We want to be able to say that America stands for something which we will defend and we'll welcome people in, but we have to be a country under the law. we cannot have this mass law breaking on the basis that there shouldn't be any border laws because we're all a brotherhood of man. And they were called racist and rednecks and bigots and they elected their guy. And then in Europe, the entire political establishment has agreed for decades that the nation is the source of everything that went wrong in Europe.

the entire establishment. And so the people of Europe were told, you want to have your own culture? That's, that's the road to Nazism. No, you will have what we will give you. And guess what? They're voting for populist parties, some of which, in my view, are simply parties which are saying, you know what, we just want to have our own culture back. And some of them are obnoxious. They are racist. They come from, you know, they have Nazi or fascist pasts. And it's a mess. But it's because the people have no alternative. So you have those three things happening, which I believe signify a great movement of the people, not unifiedly. By no means unifiedly. On the contrary, there are these great fights going on as hereover Brexit, blah blah, blah, Trump, totally divisive. But it's a fight now that wasn't in existence before. There is a fight on between two sides. One is basically pro the basic ideas of the West and the other is not. That's an exaggeration.

And there are people who want a bit of both. I don't want to imply that people are totally on one side or totally on the other side. But that's broadly how I see it. So there is a kind of chink of light except that battle is joined. And who knows how it's going to end? and it could become extremely messy and even... Could become. Violent, no, but messy in the sense of violent.

Oh, really? It's already violent in parts on the continent of Europe already. And my fear is that that's going to get worse because this great civilizational division which is now opened up, it's very hard to see how it can be, how it can be, how it can be joined up. It is a proper division between different ways of looking at the world. I see a lot in what you're saying, particularly on the national identity sense, because one of the things that, you know, I'm originally from Russia, but I've lived it for a long time, so I can kind of see things from both perspectives. One of the things I was fine, quite shocking about

some British people is the level of embarrassment they have about their own national identity. They've imbibed this idea that this country is somehow evil and bad. and they have to be embarrassed for being, but they have to apologize in a very British way for being British. And I've always found that a very strange thing for a nation to embrace. Well, you know, the joke,

you must know the joke about, you know, if you're British and someone treads on your foot, you say, I'm so sorry. I mean, that's what the British do. We apologize. But I think the whole of the West has been imbued by this idea that we have kind of,

We've been born into original sin, the original sin of colonialism, the original sin of empire, the original sin of slavery, as if we invented it all. You know, and in a way that's, see, one of my main quarrels with the left is that they are so racist. They insist on perceiving the world through the prism of their own cultural beliefs. So this idea of being the originators of things like slavery, it's simply not true. And also this idea that everyone in the world is basically reasonable because we are so reasonable, because we are the acne of reason. And it's like an imposition. So, you know, we collectively in the West don't even try. to understand cultures which are completely different from ours.

We will not have it, they're different. They have to be the same as us. We have to see them through the prism of us because we carry everything before us. To me, I find that so, at the very least, patronizing, but I believe it to be racist, fundamentally racist. That it's not that we in the West think we're so much better than everybody else. We think that nobody else can be any different from us. It's not possible because we are just, you know, what we stand for is self-evidently wonderful.

And do you not think as well, I think you touched on it, sort of the culture of individualism versus a culture of the community, because the liberals are hyper individualistic. If you even look at identity politics, it's about separating people. And, you know, you often say people who vote to remain, I could go and live and work in 27 other countries around the world. Most people don't want that. most people just want to stay and live and work within their own communities.

A certain number of people do, but the majority of people do not want it. I couldn't agree with you more. People, it's sort of almost a universal condition. People need to feel that they belong. They need to feel rooted. And they want to feel rooted. They want to feel that they can have families in safety. and that they have, they feel, they would feel rooted in a community.

And then the larger community, which is a nation, in which they make common calls with others, so that they feel safe, they identify, they belong. Now, there's a whole bunch of people who I think have grown up in recent decades, who are, who don't live like that. Their lives are much more international. list. And they tend to be people who have higher education and very, very good jobs. And they work for multinational companies or they work in multinational arena. And they travel a very great deal. And they believe themselves to be citizens of the world because they don't have an allegiance to a

locality. Why should they? They don't need it. Whereas everybody else does need it. And they look down on the people who need it and they consider that to be racist. Well, it's not racist. It's just of human nature to be like that. So I think that does explain quite a lot of the division, unfortunately. But again, it's a very unpleasant attitude that, you know, anyone who's not like me says this upper class is an inferior being. They're racist, they're bigots, their rednecks, they're imbeciles. Excuse me?

And it's also as well, that sort of hyper-liberalism, that individualism, which I admit I'm that type of person. very, I see, that's how I see myself, whatever else. It doesn't make you happy. The connections that actually make you happy are the connections with your friends, your family, the people that you surround yourself with, the comfort you take from seeing your family. It's not really in achievements or travelling around the world.

I mean, it looks great on Facebook, but that's about it. Well, I think there's a lot of unhappiness around because, I think again, we've told ourselves collectively to believe in a chimera which is happiness is the aim. Everything is to make us happy. And the more we try and make ourselves happy, the unhappy we become. Because I believe there's something that's more important to us than happiness, more fundamental, which sounds pompous, but I believe it to be true, which is a meaning to life. And if you have no meaning to your life, If you believe, you know, you're a random purposeless atom, you know, sort of accidental combination of synapses, which happens to be whirling around at this particular point in time. And your only function in life is to sort of find stuff to have and possess and make yourself happy.

It's all pointless. And so you don't become happy at all. And it sounds awful to say this. But, you know, true happiness often comes from, it sounds so pious to say this. But happiness comes from other people. It comes from, you know, being nice to and doing good to other people. And looking out for other people before yourself. And we're living in such a virtue signaling world where we're all sort of, you know, wearing our moral virtue on our sleeves.

But it's all meaningless. It's all stuff that doesn't actually concern us. It doesn't require anything from us necessarily. And it's the people who don't go around wearing it on their... but just get on with life by looking after each other. I'm putting others first, really putting others first. That's where I think a much greater sense of purpose in life and a much greater sense of satisfaction

and ability to accept stuff as it is, which is, I think, the source of tranquility, which a lot of people just don't have. They don't have tranquility. And ironically, what you're saying is tied into Judeo-Christian Christian values. I'm glad you mentioned that. He's prepared well for him. I happen to believe it's quite important. I mean, this is the irony that the things that we as a secular society tell ourselves that we value like putting others first conscience and compassion and fairness and justice and justice and

truth. We pay lip service to all these things and we tell ourselves that it's only because we've got rid of religion that we have all these things. And the people who are religious want to reverse all that. They want to put us all in chains and they're obscurantists. They don't have reason. And this is so completely the opposite of the truth because if I want to give my liberal friends total apoplexy, I say what I believe to be the case, that reason and compassion both were given to us in the Hebrew Bible. I mean, I am a Jew, and that that was disseminated through the West through Christianity. Until the Hebrew Bible came along, we didn't have a rational universe. I mean, the Hebrew Bible is predicated on the idea that there is a purpose to the universe, that there was an intelligent creator.

intelligent creator and that therefore there are natural laws which can be interrogated by people we call scientists. That was the beginning of science in the West. It's also had the revolutionary idea of a linear narrative of history as opposed to the world going around around in circles. Hence the West has progress. Hence the West has science. Hence the West has reason.

Without the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that gave it expression in the West, we wouldn't have those things. The West wouldn't be the West. My liberal friends don't like me saying. I have an absolute fit. They start talking about the Greeks. Well, I mean, you know, Greeks were great guys. They did a lot, you know. What did the Romans ever do for us? But anyway, the Greeks did a lot. Fine. But, you know, so getting rid of Judeo-Christian stuff is not getting rid of obscurantism and rubbish and imbecility. It's inviting it in. Well, whether you believe in God or not, You can't not acknowledge that our civilization is based on those values of Judea Christian. People do deny it.

I know, but I mean, it's crazy. You can not be a religious person yourself as I am not. Absolutely. But the truth is still the truth. Precisely. This is problematic now, of course. It's very problematic. People cannot accept what you've just said.

You know, if you don't believe in God, then it's all rubbish. And you can't sort of not believe, but realize that that's what lies underneath the things that we value. As you've just said, I mean, it's... And is that because it's exclusionary

to other religious groups? Or what is the logic behind not acknowledging this kind of fundamental? No, I think it's that we've made a god of materialism that we have told ourselves that what we see is all there is. that only the things that have a corporeal existence are real, that everything else is a fiction, the flying spaghetti monster,

as Professor Dawkins once put it. But when you look at a lot of science, I'm not a scientist, and I'm open to the accusation that, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about with I'm not a scientist. But as I've been given to understand by scientists, who I do respect very much, a lot of physics in particular and other sorts of science, they are kind of, you know, there is, the idea that there is stuff that actually proves it all isn't the way science works.

It works through hypothesis and falsification and challenge and so on. And a lot of the physics that has emerged in recent years is, you could say, a species of faith, because it is a leap. It's a hypothesis. So the distinction between faith and science, I think, is a false one. I think that a particular kind of faith gave rise to science. And science, in certain respects, has come in recent years to believe that there is something, that there is an element to existence which science not only doesn't yet have the ability to fathom out,

but will never fathom out. No, I'm not saying this, what I'm hearing a scientist say. Well, the conspiracy theorists on the internet are going to be happy. The Jews are behind it all after a whole. Hi, guys. We're very excited to announce at Trigonometry that we've got a new sponsor. Now, some of you might be wondering with Constance is. Very sadly, he has unfortunately been deported.

Brexit means Brexit. No, I'm joking. He obviously hasn't been deported. He's been sent to the USA to help out with a trial. Now, thanks to our friends at beer52.com, you get the opportunity to sample eight beers absolutely free. All you need to do is go to www.bibre52.com forward slash trigger and pay £4.95 for postage and packaging, and it's all yours. So that's a word beer, followed by the numbers five and two.com forward slash trigger. Beer 52 are global pioneers when it comes to beer.

They travel the world tasting and sampling the best beers small batch breweries have to offer. Things have included Germany, Korea, Norway, Finland and California, which isn't a country. The beauty of beer 52 is they don't hold you to ransom so you can leave anytime you want. All you have to do is go to www.bibre52.com forward slash trigger to claim your 8.330. beers plus if you mention the show you will get an extra two free beers which means you'll be able to get drunk on your own watching trigonometry like an absolute legend so all you have to do is go to www.bibir 52.com forward slash trigger speaking of the jews we haven't pissed off enough people so let's talk about israel because you you have some pretty strong views i heard a number of

talks that you gave on the subject. And it's something that I think is probably fair to say we don't really know much about. It doesn't stop me from tweeting. Typical liberal millennial is what you are. But there is this it's very difficult

to talk about it, especially if you don't know anything about it. But the fundamental narrative about Israel essentially is that as a compensation for the Holocaust, the Jews were given a piece of someone else's land in the Middle East where they've settled and now there is a battle over that piece of land because of that original sin if you like, which is a viewpoint that frankly up until I

started listening to some of your talks was unshakable in my understanding. Yeah, absolutely. Because I don't know, I honestly don't know enough about it. That's the default narrative. Yeah. Yeah. So is in what way is that not the case, Melanie? Every single thing that you just said is untrue. Most of your conversations, that'll make him happy. Obviously, it's a big subject. But the idea that the Jews had no connection

to the land of Israel until a guilt-ridden West took them out as a remnant of the Holocaust and stuck them into someone else's country is the opposite of the truth. So what is the truth? The Jews are the only people for who, whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, hundreds and hundreds of years before Islam was even invented and before the Arabs invaded. The Jews were the original nation, the

original nation upon which America and Britain, in a kind of mystical fashion in Britain, modeled themselves. Why do I say that? They were a nation because they were a people in a particular area of land which they governed according to laws they made and which they defended. Now, they were a nation for several hundred years under various kings. And then they were basically kicked out and then they returned, then they kicked out again. And then that land of Israel was occupied by vast numbers of different civilizations, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Arabs, various sorts of Muslims, Christians, crusaders, and for a long period the Ottoman Turks, who are Muslim but not Arab. And then we get to the turn of the last century.

and they grew up in Britain as a result of, mainly as a result of evangelical Christianity, a movement to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland. And these people were called Christian Zionists. And the kind of apogee of Christian Zionism in political terms was the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It was a cabinet which was dominated by Christian Zionists. And they believed that it was their duty to help the Jews return to risk, restore their ancient homeland. Long story short, as you will know, after the First World War, the entire Middle East was carved

up between Britain and France, which, you know, in self was a questionable activity. And they created various... Makes from those straight lines on the map, though, doesn't it? Well, yes, slightly more complicated than straight lines, but anyway. So, you know, some of these countries that they created, you know, you could say that's very questionable. But basically, the precursor of the United Nations, which was then the League of Nations, in the 1920s, decided that as a matter of international treaty obligation,

Britain would be given custodianship of what was then called Palestine, a name given to it insultingly by the Romans in order to erase its Jewish identity. The British would be given custodianship of Palestine, called the mandate, under which Britain would be under a binding treaty obligation to return the Jews to their ancestral homeland to recreate it. Now what was Palestine at the time? Well, a bit of it, a very large chunk of it, was promptly given away to the Arabs by Winston Churchill to become Transjordan, which is now Jordan. So what did that leave as the territory within which Britain had a binding duty undertaken by the world body of the time to return the Jews as a matter of historic right.

What was that territory? It is what is now Israel, what is called the West Bank and Gaza. That is a territory to which the Jews alone were given the right to return because they alone had ruled it. Terms which have never been abrogated, even though the League of Nations is no more, It gave rise to the United Nations. But the United Nations took on, in its charter, it took on all the obligations of its predecessor unless they were specifically abrogated. Those terms had never been abrogated. So what then happened was, although the Arabs at the time, around 1917, 1918, King Faisal, notably, and one or to others,

they said, we welcome back the Jews to their ancestral homeland. They used this term because it was in their own religion, in an in a nighal. this was a Jewish homeland. And then a lot of stuff happened. Basically, the British, having undertaken, in the first place, this duty to settle the Jews in their ancestral homeland, the British colonial office at the time and the colonial administrators who were put into Palestine to administer this mandate did everything they could to stop it. And they, among other things, brought in an Islamic firebrand. This was at the time when Islamism, as we know it, political Islam, was growing. It was sort of invented after the First World War. And they brought in, the British brought in a particular

Islamic firebrand called Hajamin al-Husseini as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And he incited, He was brought in to incite revolt, and he did. There were then pogroms after pogroms after pogroms of the returning Jews. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium.

Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discharging. Discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable mom's this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. The thing then blew up into a three-sided war. Jews and Arabs and British. Well, basically, at various times, all fighting each other. Scroll on, the British threw in the towel, gave it over to the United Nations. The United Nations, Britain by this time, had reneged on its obligation to settle the Jews in the land.

Britain had decided the only way to solve this was to give a portion of this land to the Arabs in order to shut them up and stop them from fighting. And in accordance with that, the British closed the gates of Palestine at the time when the Jews were starting to be exterminated in Europe. That's what happened. And then the United Nations took over. The war finished. The United Nations took over.

United Nations said, just like Britain had said, right, two states. Two state solution, one for Jews, one for the Arabs. And just as with every occasion since then, the Jews said, what? You're going to take this away from us? Fine. Fine. Give us anything, anything, because we're desperate. And the Arabs said, what? Jews here? Never. And they invaded or they went to war against the Jewish homeland. There was what's called the War of Independence, which amazing. the Jews won against all the odds. Subsequently, there have been, I forgotten how many two, three, four offers of a state of Palestine to the Arabs, which are made by Israel. At every occasion, the Arabs have refused and have gone to war or have stepped up terrorist activity against Israelis. Now, before we go any further into that part of it, I just want to come back to this homeland idea, this idea that many, many, centuries ago a certain if we strip away their identities and we just go many many

moons ago a certain group of people had a kingdom in this area and after that there have been ten civilizations or 15 civilizations that have come and lived in this land and now for some reason it's it's kind of I mean isn't it a bit like me going well I used to you know I grew up in this flat in Moscow and now I want to be resettled there and all the neighbors have agreed to kick out that guy who lives there now and put me in that flat instead is Is it not been like that? Well, no, it's not like that.

First of all, the Jews never left the land. They were always coming back to it, even under occupation. There was always a Jewish presence in the land, and from the mid-19th century onwards, there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. That's the first thing. The second thing was that the land at the time of the mandate was very sparsely populated. The people who were there were mainly nomadic Arabs, but they didn't have. an identity. They were, they considered themselves to be part of Syria, which was created,

or Bedouin. There was no such thing as Palestinians. Palestinians were the Jews. But there were people who lived there. There were people who lived there, yes. And then because the Jews started coming back, Arabs started, Arabs and others started pouring in from neighboring Arab lands. And the British then let them come in, even though, though they were, many of them, illegal immigrants. They let them come in because they wanted to stop a Jewish homeland. So it's not a question of kicking people out. It's a, it's, and it's not a question of, you know, people who had some sort of mystical attachment to some country. You're talking about the Jewish people who have been persecuted in virtually every country

in which they've settled. No country ever has ever wanted them, apart from India and China, which have never had a problem with their Jewish populations. But in Europe, no way. Nobody wanted them. And it was in respect of that, as well as the fact that they were the original nation and have always wanted to go back, that they were considered to have the right to go back. So is this kind of perpetual persecution what I'm just trying to get this logic? politically clear because of Jews in Europe.

Is that what uniquely in the history of humanity gives Jews the right to resettle a land in which they didn't have that much of a presence? No, no, it was their country. But a long time ago. Oh, okay. So why do people think that if they think that it was the Palestinians country a long time ago, that's, that means that they should have it. But they were living there in the 19th century? But they weren't.

There was no such thing as the Palestinians. There was no such thing as the Palestinian people. There was no Palestinian people until it was invented in the mid-1960s. There was these nomadic Arabs who lived there. Yeah, but they didn't want a country of their own. The Jews were a nation. They had a country of their own. And it was taken away from them.

And then they were persecuted around the world. And so it seemed only decent and fair that they should have it back. And a lot of people at the time thought that was absolutely fine. But there was a resistance whipped up, which was basically a religious resistance, in my view, and remains basically a religious resistance. Because if you look at the Arab world, the Muslim world, unfortunately, and look at the Palestinian Arabs and what they are producing day by day in terms of what they teach their children and the materials that they put out, it's not really accurate just to say

it's anti-Israel, indeed it is. And it's certainly the case of the case of the case of the case of that they want, in my view, and I think this is proven by what they say and what they do and their insignia and their flags and their materials, they want Israel gone. They don't want Tuesdays. They want Israel gone. But it's much worse than that. What they're producing day by day is anti-Jewish venom. Crude, conspiratorial, Jews are uniquely the source of evil in the world. That's what they're producing. That's where they're teaching their children. to hate. And people in the West just have no idea of this because it is never, ever reported.

And so I got into a lot of difficulty because until the year 2000, I'd never been to Israel, never wanted to go. I thought, there's a British Jew. I was, you know, it was great. It was fine. It was nothing to do with me. And I'd bought into quite a lot of the stuff that, you know, we'd been talking about. about because if you don't know about the Middle East, why would you think any

different? And in in in 1982 when I was at the Guardian I was brought up very sharply against the fact that as a British Jew I spoke as a matter of fairness about why there seemed to be a double standard in the reporting of Israel at that time, as opposed to reporting of Syria. Syria at that time had murdered or caused to be killed between 15,000 and 40,000 opponents of President Assad, the father of the President Assad. And it was virtually not reported at the garden. It was a few paragraphs. It was nothing.

Whereas Israel was at war in the Lebanon. And it was a front page story every day. It was furious editorials. it was outrage or not paid. And I said, why is there a double standard? And that's when I realized the racism of the left because I was told, of course, there's a double standard. You don't expect us to treat the developing world like us.

The developing world is not brought up as we are to respect human life. Consequently, we can't judge them by our standards. That's racism. I went, what? So let me get this right. If someone's born into the developing world, they're not entitled to the same rights to life and liberty as we are. Isn't that racism?

And they said, why are you so upset? We do you, the great honor, I became you. Like that, you. We do you, the great honor of assuming that you and Israel, and I became Israel. that you and Israel adhere to the same principles as we do, respect for human life. So we judge you by our standards. And what's more, you tell us that you are morally superior to us, so we should judge you by higher standards. And that's when I realized the anti-Semitism of the left and the racism of the left.

And that's when I first realized that my naive belief that we were all marching to the same teud, behind the same banner of decency was not the case. They were on the other side. And then I didn't do any more stuff about any of that for a long time. And then in the year 2000, when the Intifada started, the second Intifada, as it was called, something very similar happened. Israelis are being blown to bits in pizza parlors and cafes and on buses in Israel. And several thousand were murdered. And from the get-go in Britain, Israel was totally condemned for taking condign action to stop it. And as a matter of justice and fairness, I said, what is this? Why are you behaving like this? And everybody went, oh, she's a Jew. She's not properly

British. And that was when I realized as a British Jew, you could not support the Jewish people as a people, not allowed. And that's when I realized something was very, very badly wrong with Britain's attitude to Jews, not just to Israel, but to Jews. But those two were bound up together because Israel was being presented, not least by the BBC, as basically the fount of all evil in the Middle East. It was an aggressive country. It behaved illegally. All of this, in my view, as I came to believe over many years subsequently, all of it was a lie. But that's what everyone was told. And so consequently, if you were a Jew standing up for all this, then of course you were also evil. Of course you were. And this was a shattering,

really shattering set of developments for me. And eventually, kind of long story short, or shorter, I came to put all that together with all the other stuff we're talking about, all the other stuff we're talking about, because it's all to do with, as you said, Constantine, truth and lies. It's basically what it's about. When you pair it all that, people are telling themselves lies about reality. They're living in a world of fantasy, which they purport, they want us to believe is the reality. They tell lies about other people and that they don't realize that they're lies because there's no such thing as a lie anymore. There's no such thing as truth. Everything is a matter of opinion. Everything is a matter of opinion.

So you can't ever win an argument. So all these things, it seemed to me, I'm, you know, syncopating a lot of stuff. It's a big topic. It's a big topic. I want to ask you something about anti-Semitism because I know one of your books deals, one of your recent books deals with that. Glad you mentioned my recent books.

Well, actually, I wasn't going to talk about your book just yet. But I wanted to ask you about Jews in general. And why is it the Jews, we're not really part of this progressive stack, as they call it? We're not oppressed in the same way, in this view of the world. Oh, yes. You're all, you're a woman there for you're oppressed more than I am. We don't do the intersectionality somehow. It doesn't seem to cover Jews for some reason.

Absolutely not. You know, as you mentioned earlier, I think historically, certainly one of the most oppressed minorities in the history of humanity. Absolutely, the most persecuted. So why don't we get the credit? And we're so tiny. Yes. You know, we're such a tiny number.

So I won my oppression points. I want my BBC diversity. You know, they need a Jewish Nazi on the BBC. Constantine, obviously you just don't realize Jews run the world. Ah, yes. They run the media. I forgot about that. They run the banks. They run the law. They run medicine. They're into everything. This is the default position. Jews cannot be victims because Jews are powerful. Why are they powerful? Because they are behind capitalism.

This is how the thinking is. So you have the most persecuted people on earth who are the most powerful people on earth. And this is the thing about anti-Semitism. It simultaneously treats Jews as lower than animals and as the most supernaturally powerful force ever known in the history of mankind, simultaneously. The most powerful and the most animalistic and useless. Simultaneously. There is no prejudice like it.

So I'm afraid that the whole intersectionality thing and the whole anti-Israel thing is based fundamentally on anti-Semitism. Big caveat. That does not mean that people who think Israel is disgusting are necessarily anti-Semites. To me, an anti-Semite, you have, you know, I can't look into people's souls

and understand what's motivating. them. And it's perfectly possible to believe all the garbage about Israel and, you know, not believe that Jews are awful people. But what I'm saying is that the discourse about Israel is fundamentally anti-Jew, because there is no other country, people, or cause in the world that has ever been subjected to this level of obsessional, hysterical, vilification based on entirely on falsehoods and which elevates Israel, just like the Jews have always been elevated in anti-Semitic discourse, since time immemorial, as being the world's single, most evil or destructive or harmful entity. Exactly the same characteristics that applied to traditional

anti-Semitism, which are unique to it, are applied to the treatment of Israel, and it's not a coincidence. Do you think this, sorry for instance, let me just finish the Jew stuff. Let me finish the Jew stuff. It could be misinterpreted. Everything we say can be misinterpreted on the internet. But I just want to finish this thing because Jews are successful as a group comparatively to other groups. I think that is probably fair to say, statistically speaking. And you look at what's happening to Asians in America in terms of Harvard and I don't know if you've followed the story, basically very people who have a high SAT score in America are disproportionately Asian, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and they get discriminated

against applying for university. So is it more that just as a successful minority, you don't fit the narrative of intersectionality? Is that maybe why that we don't fit the narrative and therefore we're not included in the oppression metrics? Well, but you mentioned, you know, Asians. They're included. Well, Japanese and Chinese probably not so much. Not so much, no, but they're not excluded. I mean...

They're not given affirmative actions, what I'm saying, right? Certainly in American universities, for example. They're punished, in fact, for being clever, essentially, or well-educated and hard-working. There is, yes, there is, there is something about that. And with Jews, it's even more so because the, the disproportion between the tiny number of Jewish persons and their achievements, Nobel Prize winners, is I think I'm right in saying it's more extreme. The disproportion is more extreme than anyone else. So there is more resentment.

I would say it's resentment. I wouldn't say it's something that, oh well, you know, we don't have to look after them, so they're all right. It's more resentment because I hear it. I hear it the whole time. Jews are controlling. They're controlling the banks. They're controlling capitalism.

They're controlling the media. I hear it the whole time. it's definitely what happens on this podcast of me controlling everything go for it um I was a couple of questions number one would you say that anti-Semitism is on the rise of friends who are Jewish and

state that and state to openly and state in particular on the left that has become more open and people who actually now feel more liberated to say anti-Semitic things definitely definitely I think I mean I do get a bit impatient because I think you know I've thought this for a long time. And it's only really since Jeremy Corbyn came to power in the Labour Party that it's become a thing that's been talked about. If one talked about, tried to talk about

anti-Semitism on the left previously, we were people like me. In fact, probably just me. I can't think of anybody else who was saying it. But I was told, you know, you're waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise the crimes of Israel. Excuse me? Okay. And that's because the whole business of Israel was always wrapped up in this. And a lot of it, you know, it was very hard to separate it out. And then Jeremy Corbyn came on the scene. And then the whole thing exploded in the Labour Party as an issue in the way that I'm sure that you know. And as a result of all of that, people have felt emboldened because nothing's been done. to put these people back behind, underneath their stone, people have become increasingly emboldened

to say stuff which would have been not said so openly just a few years ago. But it's been there, it's been building for a long time. And I believe it's intimately connected with Israel and support for the Palestinians. Because if you're supporting people who are in the Palestinians, who are saying, week in week out, the Jews control everything. They're the source of evil in the world. They control capitalism. They control the banks.

They control American foreign policy. Then why are people so surprised when people in the Labour Party say it when they're supporting that? I remember when the Iraq war happened, the Iraq war was not exactly uncontroversial. But I remember being told it's a conspiracy between. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Washington to put our boys at risk. It was completely untrue. But Jewish conspiracy had to be.

Had to be. And that was openly said, openly said by all kinds of people. And my, this is a moment to this goes this. My grandfather was originally Lebanese. And he was vehemently anti-Israel and particularly very upset. with Israel's treatment of Lebanon. Did he not have some reason to be upset by Israeli behavior? This was when?

This was, well, he's passed away now, but this was particularly in the 60s and the 70s and talking about how Lebanon was essentially leveled in particular Beirut. I'm not sure about the 60s and 70s, but I remember the 80s, as I say, the 82 invasion of Lebanon. And that was because it was being, used as the base for the PLO in order to continue to try and annihilate Israel.

So yes, Lebanon got badly used, but Lebanon, you know, have become, unfortunately, as it still is, the landing ground for a genocidal war. And now it's even much, much worse, much worse. There are something like 140, 160, about 140,000 minimum missiles pointing at Israel, embedded in Lebanon, in people's apartments, underneath their apartments, in their apartment blocks. The whole of the population is hostage. So that if Israel wants to stop its own annihilation, it has to flatten Lebanon. That's the situation. Now, whose fault is that?

Is that Israel's fault? How would you feel if Britain had one missile pointing at it from Wales? It has 150,000 missiles which can cover the whole of Israel. It's like a missile per sheep in Wales. Everybody goes, oh well, you know, the Israelis, you know,

I mean, after all, what right do the Jews have to that land anyway? I mean, you know, they got rid of the indigenous population. Really? Really? That's the level of this discussion that goes on the whole time. No one in this country has any idea about what I've just said, about 140,000 missiles. No one cares.

If one were to say, Britain, guess what? 140,000 missiles. Everybody go, well, yes, I know. But, I mean, you know, Israel, I mean, really, I mean, if only would they just, all die. That's the reaction. And if there is heaven forbid a war,

you can imagine what the BBC is going to say. It's all going to kick off when Israel retaliates. We don't care about the Israelis in shelters, living in shelters as they are in the south now from the missiles from Gaza. We don't care about that. We don't report that.

But when Israel retaliates, ah, that's the story. So there you go, mate. Granddad didn't know what he's talking about. Melanie, we're running out of time, unfortunately. So let me ask you a couple of things before we let you go. The first thing is you've made a career of writing, I would say, into the void between what the kind of media establishment says and what people think.

I think that's probably a fair observation. And you've written two books recently, which I know you mentioned haven't been reviewed, and no one seems to know that they're on sale. So tell us a little bit about that and how that's happened. Well, for reasons which really pass my understanding, I find it very difficult to get published in Britain and have done for about 25 years. I was told 25 years ago that I was blacklisted by every major publishing house. You would think that I would sell books.

You think I was quite well known in Britain. You would think the publishers might like to make some money out of me. They're much more interested in stopping me from ever having my ideas published. Anyway, so I've always had difficulty for getting published. and my last two books were published last year by a small publisher in America. And for various reasons, these books have not been reviewed by any mainstream publication in Britain, partly because no one knows that they exist and partly because one of the ones. ways that people try and silence me is by pretending I don't exist. They will not review my books.

Anyway, I say there's not out of any self-pity, but just as a matter of fact that people don't know these books exist. You can't find them in the bookshops. They're not on sale here. You can buy them on Amazon. And it's particularly unfortunate because here in Britain, I'm known. And people want to stop me from writing, as it were, or being being bought. And in America, people don't know I exist. So I kind of fall between the two stools. But I did publish, I have published last year two books, one of which is a little memoir that I wrote. It's called Guardian Angel, my journey from leftism to sanity. And it's not a top pro I can say it. And it's basically what we've been talking about. It's how I changed from being, you know,

that basically the child and darling of the left to being the she-devil of the Western Hemisphere. and through the prism of what happened to me and why I reacted in the way I did, and there's quite a lot of personal stuff in it as well. I kind of tell the story, I think, of what happened to Britain and the West, in my view, as a cultural, sort of things we've been talking about. So that was published last year, and I also published my first novel in which I was interested to explore in fiction, the themes which have preoccupied me for some years, which is basically, again, we've been touching on this. But the novel is about my anti-hero in the novel is a British Jew who doesn't want to be a Jew and who tries to pretend that he's not what he is because he's embarrassed and ashamed of it and because he doesn't really know anything about it. And through a series of events, he is forced to confront it in a way which it's not actually resolvable because it's a conflict which isn't easily resolved. But he comes to understand that, first of all, there's stuff about his identity that is valuable that he never actually has taken advantage of and he regrets that. And secondly, that he comes to understand, which I believe to be the case, that one's identity is something one can't run away from.

That it is what you are what you are. And if you run away from it, then there's either a void or there's some sort of reckoning. So it's to do with fractured identity about a modern British Jew. It's about the persistence, the unique persistence of anti-Semitism, and it's about the pull of history. And it's a small canvas. It's based in Britain today and in modern day America and Israel. The plot is also set in medieval Britain and in Holocaust Poland. So small canvas and small themes.

So that's called the legacy. They both sound fascinating. I look forward to reading them. Well, thank you. Because like everyone else, I didn't know they existed until this very conversation. No, well, it's, you know, at this point, I will, you know, basically get down on the floor and chew the carpet quietly while you look the other way. But it's very, very, very annoying because the people who have read it, I mean, there are lots of, if you look on Amazon, you'll see lots of lovely people who've written very lovely stuff. And they say things like, this is all.

page turner, I couldn't put it down. And I'm thinking, why can't you tell somebody in the media this? But they don't. Anyway, so no one knows it exists. They exist, but they do exist and they can be bought on Amazon. And it's very good of you to mention them. I'm very grateful. And trigonometry fans now do know they exist and we'll be no doubt getting the books very soon. But we've got one more question for you, Melanie, before we let you go. Which is always, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be talking about? Well, it's something which, you know, I mean, I've avoided controversies so far in my conversation. I've touched on the most easy subjects.

Everyone's going to be saying, we've all agreed with this. Why is this woman controversial? So there's one topic which we haven't touched, which is like the killer of killers, which is man-made global warming. Boom. There we go. See what I mean? Let's do it.

All right, quickly. It's a scam. It's a fraud. a hoax. Is the climate not getting warmer, Mallee? The climate changes that are occurring are in no way out of the ordinary in respect of the climate changes, fluctuations over the period of, over history. There is no evidence whatsoever that anything out of the ordinary is happening.

Climate goes up, down, blah, blah. This is a very big subject, you may imagine. I've written about this since 1988 when it was invented, when I realized instantly that it was a fraud. When I say a fraud, I'm speaking loosely. What I really mean is that it's a theory which has been supported into an unchallengeable orthodoxy by a number of factors. First of all, you don't get grant funding as a scientist in these sort of climate-related areas unless you produce research which basically upholds a theory.

The second thing is that it's based on a set of, it's largely based on computer modeling. And as I was told right at the start, climate is one of the most, if not the most complicated set of feedback mechanisms, etc. That there is in existence. And the computer modeling simply cannot cope with this. It cannot cope with the variables that you have to feed in. And so it's almost inevitable that it will not produce something which is true as a means of trying to estimate the future, forecast the future. It can't do it. And then the third thing is the actual frauds.

the actual frauds, of which there have been a number in which scientists have simply falsified information, which has led to a number of very, very distinguished scientists who have worked for the IPCC as expert reviewers of the evidence to walk out of the IPCC when their own research was being falsified and misrepresented, and when the IPCC was basically producing false research. that also. I wrote about this in the world turn up, Saeeda, which has published in, was it 2010? I can't remember, something like that. I wrote a chapter because it seemed to me to feed into what we've been talking about, which was the gallability and credulousness of a society which tells itself that it's operating on the basis of scientific evidence and rationality, but for which

this particular issue is to me an example of how that's been turned on its head. And of course, someone like me comes along and says all this and people say, well, she's not even a scientist. And so she's bound to be wrong. And 97% of all scientists, but it basically think that, you know, something terrible is happening. Well, the 97% figure is itself fraudulent. It was based on a misreading of evidence. And there are hundreds of the most prominent scientists. And I've listed some of them in my book. I've listed them in what I've written. They sign petitions.

And, you know, despite the fact that there is this penalty on scientists who buck the trend, put it mildly, there they are. And yet they're completely ignored, completely ignored. BBC issued an edict, science cannot be gainsaid. There is no need in the interest of balance, this is the BBC, it's journalism, in the interest of balance, there is no need to have any alternative view of climate denier on with a proponent of man-made apocalyptic climate change. So this is to me, just as we were saying before, this is a other, you know, medieval apocalyptic, this really is apocalypse now. It's a medieval apocalyptic

belief system which has heretics, it has inquisitions, it has penalties, my goodness it has penalties. I'm just going to clarify now, right, just to simplify this argument, are you saying that Greta Thunberg is wrong? No, she's saying she's the Messiah. I'm saying she's a very naughty little girl. Well, we're going to leave it there. The climate change is a thing. that we want to get into and we're going to talk to scientists from both sides. We wish we had more time to discuss it with you, but unfortunately, our time is up. Melanie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people follow you on Twitter and find out about everything that's going on with you? Oh, well, I have a website, which is easy to remember.

It's melaniephillips.com, on which I post all my work, including blogs and links to my published articles and links to appearances on TV and stuff. On Twitter, my Twitter handle is at Melanie Latest. And what else am I on? That's it, I think. We'll post all the links and links to buy your books in the description of the video in the audio so people can get that. I'm in your debt.

No, we are very much in yours. As always, follow us at TriggerPod on our social media, and we will see you in a week from now with another brilliant episode. See you next week, guys. Bye-bye. knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle.

Restrictions apply.