Transcript for:
Discussion with Douglas Murray

unfortunately we've had to edit out some important information because big Tech won't let us say that sort of thing to listen to the full uncut show go to dailywire.com subscribe the American isolationists always want nothing to do with the rest of the world yet they still want America to be the top dog and if you said to the American isolationists you you can remove yourself from the world absolutely but you should know that it means in the 21st century China or other countries any number of other countries will replace America world's dominant power and if you are happy with that argue it out but that is that is the consequence I mean America may have got fat and lazy but China is hungry as hell Douglas Murray is a preeminent British author journalist in geopolitical commentator who stands at the Forefront of our political discourse today widely recognized for his incisive analysis and forthright debate style Murray has successfully challenged politicians and the establishment media on issues like immigration identity politics religion and Free Speech he's the bestselling author of seven books including his critically acclaimed work on cultural transformation such as the war on the west and the strange death of Europe Murray is also an associate editor of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the New York Post the National Review the Sun and notably the Free Press where his Sunday column titled things worth remembering hearkens back to momentous speeches in history and urges readers to reconsider the fundamental principles that have shaped Western Society in just the past several months Murray has delivered a keynote address to the Manhattan Institute traversed drug riddled streets in New York and Philadelphia to inv investigate the fentel epidemic and sped with Progressive commentator medy Hassan at Toronto's monk debates in today's episode Douglas and I discussed this experience visiting Israel directly after October 7th and covering it for months how the relative comfort of the West has resulted in young people searching for excitement in all the wrong places we also explore the contradiction at the heart of American isolationism and the attitude shift that must take place in order for the West to course correct you won't want to miss this profound conversation with Douglas Murray stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday special [Music] Douglas thanks so much for stopping by really appreciate it great to be with you before we go any further I want to tell people that Douglas does have a tour that is going to be announced any moment or I just announced it one of the two Douglas murray. net with promo code Israel if you want to check out the tour dates and you get a discount if you use promo code Israel really excited about that's a US tour so go check that out right now tell us about the tour like where are you going to be what's going on with it doing four cities in September uh Fort Lauderdale La DC and New York and there'll be uh be a great evening uh lots of new material nobody's seen uh video footage and uh I'll be in conversation and I'm really looking forward to it it's first time I think I've been able to tour in the US since preco days so there's quite a lot to talk about why don't we start with Israel obviously you've been doing extraordinary work so what's sort of like the big takeaway I know it's a big question what's the big takeaway from having spent that much time on the ground in the area and a place where the media basically won't go and seem to just take the propaganda at face value I think there's lots of things um I mean the first is that what Israel is in now is a situation a lot of countries have been in historically if not most at some point I I say that it's it's to go from the zone of Peace into the zone of war is probably the biggest zone change anyone will ever go through tolto describes it in War and Peace the moment before the battle begins and the moment of battle everything is different and you know before October 7th Israel was relatively at peace I I one of the reasons I wanted to go there very soon afterwards I already thought that it was quite likely actually that most people wouldn't focus on what had happened and wouldn't even find out much about what had happened uh as you know the the standard thing that always happens with Israel is uh Israel is attacked by Rockets or whatever Israel attacks back and the world's headlines are Israel attacks Gaza you know that's the norm I've seen that in every conflict that I've come there since 2006 and um so I thought it was important to sort of not lose sight of the seventh and what had happened and in the outside world I mean in Israel almost everyone knows the stories of the day the horrors and the heroism but it was an attempt to go all the way up through the country it was a it was a it was the most serious Invasion that Israel has suffered and uh the country as a result was put into a state of War not of its own choosing but uh as I've often said in recent months you know there's if you start a war as Hamas did then um you should expect to have war and that's what Hamas has had in the months since and I think most of the world is wildly wildly ignorant of what is going on because they don't care about the details or in the case of the media they don't have the details everybody everybody in the western media talks about what's happening in Gaza some of the media I've been into Gaza with Western media as as well as others and um and they so they have been in but mainly people rely as you know just on stringers or on local journalists and they just report what they say and there are just basic media standards that have completely Fallen away I mean in our lifetimes the old the old media standard that you report for instance saying uh speaking from Baghdad under Saddam Hussein government restrictions I no one's done that in any conflict for 30 years now and it was a very useful way of saying you know at home that I can't say everything I see but we're still trying to get across something now they don't bother to do that they don't even bother to tell you on the BBC or any of these American channels that they don't have anyone in Gaza and as a result they'll have some Al jazer uh uh uh journalist uh who may or may not be discovered to be holding hostages in their own home whilst they're filing pieces about the horrors of the Israeli uh uh Defense Force and um so all of the coverage is completely skewed it it makes absolutely no sense it makes no sense on any unless as with Al jazer and other International media who follow their lead you just want to defame the state of Israel as much as possible but I just always say the same thing tell me what you accuse the Israelis of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of the the sort of expectations the world has placed on Israel middle of this conflict are unprecedented in any conflict I've ever seen in my lifetime or anyone that I can even think of the idea that in the middle of a war it is your job to resupply the civilian population of the enemy that sympathizes with and provides cover for the army that you are that you are fighting that it's not only your job to go house to house it is it is your job to sacrifice your own soldiers in order to protect civilians who are being used as human Shields by the opposition and then if a mistake is made in an urban combat environment with by the way the the single best terrorist to civilian kill ratio in the history of urban Warfare that somehow that's it's Israel's fault it's Israel's problem where do you think that sort of double standard is coming from well I think there's an as one of the things absolutely screams out at me is the astounding lack of empathy for the the general population in Israel I mean start with this can you imagine anywhere else in the world where hundreds and hundreds of young people are at a rave a peace Rave a music Rave some of them taking psychedelic some of them not but just having a great time and a suddenly and and things I Can't Describe on air and the world doesn't have sympathy with them where else would that happen if if there was a rave in Florida tomorrow and that happened and it could I would expect the victims the American victims to be the focus of enormous attention and sympathy didn't happen not only has it not happened in uh New York the other week when the um an exhibition memorializing the Nova party and the atrocities that went on there and the victims when this exhibition is in in lower Manhattan there are crowds outside calling for in def I mean can anyone imagine that this is if you were a survivor of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 or the batter Clan massacre in 2015 you would expect the world would not be against you for being blown up but in Israel it's different and it's the same with the media uh and it's the same with the war in Gaza some months ago a terrible terrible thing happened with three Israeli hostages by members of the ID uh coming out of a building they didn't realize that they were hostages obviously now you would have thought again first of all app just beyond appalling for the for the victims who'd already been kidnapped for months by hamz but then think of the soldiers who them this fraction of a second mistake that they'll never be able to forgive themselves for never forget the world reports it as the idea three Israeli hostages and the world say things is there nothing these these Israelis won't do they even their own and the world doesn't know that every single soldier who's been fighting in Gaza can tell you that every day civilians will come out of a building or something waving White flags and from the center of them will come people dressed exactly like them because amazingly enough Hamas doesn't obey the rules of war and will and that's just all the time so when I hear people say who have no experience of of war or Urban combat say things like I can't understand why that happened you haven't even begun to try to understand but if there's an underlying reason I think that it's that a significant amount of people in the west have been educated miseducated in the idea that to some in some way Israel is and always is the aggressor Israel has done something wrong and anything that is done in response to the something wrong can kind of be excused and I hate that not only because it is wildly untrue but if you remember the last time that anything remotely similar happened in in America 911 there were some people uh like the uh historian of ancient Rome Mary beard who wrote in the London review of books that it was impossible to get out of your head after 911 the thought that to some extent the Americans had it coming to them by the way she's still all over the the media of course and is always been commissioned by the BBC and many others um but most Americans didn't much care for that tone of voice most most of us in Britain didn't much care for that tone of voice but Israel is the one country which when it's blown up or attacked it's women AR it's children are there's a kind of yes but and if you go back to the yes but what do you actually mean what is what is the Clause that you want to go back to it's the foundation of the state and you know I um as my debating partner in Toronto the other week Natasha houseoff said it's a very interesting one that because a mother and father when they're having a child May debate whether or not they may debate whether they want to have a child they may debate if the wife is pregnant whether or not they should have bought the child these are all very very difficult questions and unpleasant questions but the people think about once a child is 70 years old you're talking about whether or not the child should be that's not anything but murder well the state of Israel is many decades old now and if you believe it shouldn't have been created you believe in Murder the state of Pakistan which is a pretty catastrophic state was created around the same time that Israel was created and I know of nobody outside of a perhaps a lunatic asylum somewhere in India who believes that the state of Pakistan should abolished and if they did want that you wouldn't believe them if they said I do want to abolish this state founded in 1947 but I have nothing against Pakistani people I just want them exclusively to lose the right to have a state which was created and founded many decades ago so this is the nub of it the Young Americans and others who don't realize what they're calling for Plus the ones who do so yeah I've remarked many times that the problem with this is not a problem for Israel as much as it is a problem for the West that that Israel if you visit it's actually despite all of the internal divisions and there are many a pretty cohesive society that actually would like to live actually has no Death Wish in the way that the West seems to have a peculiar Death Wish not reproducing not having babies Israel is the only Western country that has above replacement rates of birth the fertility rate in Israel is above three and that's including areas like Tel Aviv which is like San Francisco socially and every woman there is married and has three babies and so it's it's really not a problem for Israel internally it is a problem for the West because it seems to me that what's been happening in Israel is a manifestation of a broader philosophy that has taken over huge swaths of the left I want to get to right-wing anti-Semitism and the problems there in a second but on the left which is really where it's predominant these days the the basic philosophy goes something like this the world is made up of victims and it's made up of victimizers and if you on The Ledger of victims you're you're on The Ledger of victims not you yourself have been victimized as an individual it's because you're a member of a quote unquote victimized group and the way we can tell that you're a member of a victimized Group is because your group is disproportionately unsuccessful in some measurable way you're economically unsuccessful socially unsuccessful and this means that you must have been victimized by somebody else particularly a member of a victimizer group and and the real problem that you have when it comes to the Jews particularly is that the Jews happen to be historically victimized and also disproportionately successful so they tend to blow up the entire structure of this thought and so the Jews must then be recast into the victimizers in order to fit this particular model white supremacist exactly and so what you hear is black lives matter in the United States saying that the Palestinians are just like black Americans in the Middle East and that the failures of Palestinian Society that's not because they've made a series of horrendous decisions for the past 75 years that is because obviously of the exploitation of the overclass of that of that victimizer group and i't asked before why so why is it such a cost to love because obviously you have people who are suffering all over the place people who make bad decisions wh why this and the case that I've made is that the Hamas Israel conflict is the ultimate proof of skin in the game that if you want to show your friends if you want to show your Social Circle that you really buy into the victim victimizer complex you have to pick the case that does not fit you have to pick that case and you have to make the case that it does fit because that demonstrates skin in the game it demonstrates How Deeply invested you are in this ideology if you can make the case an colonialism colon a colonized exactly if you can make the case that these who are making the worst case in history for wanting to be successful because they clearly do not the people who have usurped billions of dollars in Aid and built the biggest network of Terror tunnels in human history I mean it's larger than the London Underground what they bu if you can make the case that those people are the victims and that the Jews who've been sitting here you know building skycrapers and and technologies that those are the the actual victimizers well then you really have proved your falty to this ideology and thus dissociated from the white supremacist group that you believe run Society well you one of the interesting things you know there's a there's a ruling conflict particular encounter Insurgency which is that everyone always fights the last war so America with Vietnam America post Vietnam Britain Northern Ireland Britain Iraq and it's always a problem in Warfare I think there's something that hasn't been thought about enough which is that it's the same with culture wars people are fighting the last culture War there are people who seriously seem to believe that this is 1968 or 1964 they seem to think that we're in the middle of the Civil Rights Act struggle in America we're not um they uh think that it's very important to be against colonialism um well my country of birth uh got out of that quite a long time ago there were some countries who are into it big time like the Chinese Communist Party who ring up massive drugs of Africa but the anti-colonial movement isn't interested in colonialism in Africa unless it's done by belgians in the 19th century and they're really against that um very important that King leapold remembers poly not to take over Congo again I mean what why not deal with what the Chinese Communist part is doing today they they don't they don't do that um very very passionate against slavery again you know 200 years after King George III signs the anti-slavery act into law in the UK um but the I saw this recently in South Africa when I was there uh the number of people who been persuaded that apartheid is is what's going on in Israel I said to my South African friends you know your your a corrupt ANC government is spending down the moral capital of the overthrow of Apartheid and wasting it at the behest of Iran on on this false accusation against Israel but it's amazing how many people will will suck that up and of course you know they they've got quite a lot of questions to answer far more than than I think people who broadly agree with you or me um it still still seems to me me that although the um anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was by no means an entirely peaceful movement to understate things I think that Nelson Mandela would have a worse postumus reputation if he' personally called for people to rip the hearts out of babies you know I sort of think I think that the great you know unifying figure of South African history it would have gone differently and the reason why is you say that the Arab uh uh Palestinian cause has gone so differently is that they've kept starting Wars and kept losing them and their friends and allies in the region have kept encouraging them into war and they keep losing and yet despite keeping on losing they keep being regarded as the victim and I I I mean it's it's it's a terrible curse for the state of Israel to have to to have this almost ins soluble problem of the Palestinians um handed to them and and the world that can't solve it and the region that can't solve it and saying the Jewish state has to solve it and it's not at all clear to me that they they do that it certainly not that it's Israel's responsibility alone and I've spent too much time in the region to believe this BS I know how much the jordanians loathe the Palestinians I know how much the Lebanese loathe them how little the gulf Arabs care about them so when I see people like the the the appalling regime in Kata uh funding Hamas hosting hamas's leadership and making accusations against Israel on the world stage you know I sort of think why are no none of these kids at campuses In America which are very significantly funded by katar by the way why are they not bothered that their University they're always calling to divest from Israel when there they sort of have to scour the landscape to find one donor who once bought a bag of chips in Tel Aviv and meantime they're on a campus that has these huge buildings built by kataar professors funded by kataar which is actually an apartheid state where there's a couple of hundred, very rich qataris and a slave class of imported labor it's like I don't know why don't you care about that and then they say oh well that's what about to it it's also what we used to call facts we get some more of Douglas Murray in just one second first in Eternal truth vegetables bad they don't taste good and if you say they do I don't believe you see here's the thing you don't really need to suffer your way through all those vegetables and they want you to like every single day you can instead use balance of nature fruits and veggies balance of nature fruits and veggies is the most convenient way to ensure you get your daily intake of fruits and veggies balance of nature uses an 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of a conundrum and and same thing on on parts of the right butt in Reverse so you know the the Ukraine conflict has sort of upended a bunch of traditional I'd say cross-cutting uh political alignments if you had told me 20 years ago that Republicans in large part would be very much against the funding of Ukraine in its war against in its existential war against Russia I would have thought that that was pretty nuts I mean I'm old enough to remember 2012 when Mitt Romney was supposedly speaking on behalf of the foreign policy of the 1980s and being anti-russian now it's the entire left that has declared that Russia is the great Scourge state which it is in part and meanwhile you have large swas of the right claiming that Ukraine is somehow too corrupt to be supported that Russia's going to win any way that the best thing that the West can do is sort of pull back now I I've distinguished between two separate arguments one is sort of a pragmatic argument about what sort of end State should be sought is it really worthwhile funding Ukraine to the tune trying to take back Crimea or donbass where large swas of the population actually still support Russia but that's a different question from the the sort of larger scale question that seems to be posed in parts of the right which is should we just get out of Ukraine entirely the West in terms of funding the question I've always asked is why would it be an America's interest or the West interest for Russia to Simply take Ukraine but you know where do you think that's coming from well I I some of it is the inevitable blowback of failed foreign policy of the 2000s it's something that's very striking to me in uh Republican politics has been that at some point you might say that that John McCain was a kind of pivotal figure at some point the the so-called adults in the room stopped being respected as adults and you know you can lament that you can also say well to an extent they brought it upon themselves you know um I remember I sort of got off that bandwagon by the time of Syria maybe people think that's a bit late but I remember when I heard McCain and others saying we know who to arm in Syria I was thinking I don't believe you anymore I don't think do uh I think we're going make a hideous mistake again um but by and by the way the West got blamed for the breakdown of Syria despite not intervening and we would have been blamed if we had intervened because some people don't know who to blame unless it's us um I do think that yes I think there was a huge loss of institutional knowledge and generational um self-belief actually I think it might be something like the post Vietnam era in America um and of course you know everything everything's so easy to understand in the rearview mirror uh everybody's an expert that but I I would say that in relation to Ukraine America I I understand the American isolationist Trend and I uh deplore it because uh in the case of Ukraine I mean if you go to the Baltic states which are you know NATO members they're really not bluffing when they say that they're worried that if Putin takes everything he wants in Ukraine they're next uh I was in vus recently it's so close it's so close um these are our allies if you want to ditch your allies well that's that's an idea um but you know come out and say it uh the Central and Eastern Europeans really AR bluffing and it's even easier to see this as a far off conflict in the US than it is in say Britain um so the Europeans are genuinely worried they of course they should pay their way in NATO of course um but they're they're not um they're not faking it and there are some people now who pretend that Vladimir Putin only wants Ukraine and among other reasons I know that's wrong was that I was in the country of Georgia after Vladimir Putin invaded it and so um I have enough muscle memory to remember countries that Vladimir Putin's invaded there are a lot of people with no memory at all um but I I think I think that's broadly speaking you know what what people are thinking is we've screwed up a lot we don't believe anyone who says they know about foreign policy and it's all just a mess and the world's a mess I find it an odd tendency on American right in particular because it always strikes me as being inherently contradictory the American isolation is always want nothing to do with the rest of the world yet they still want America to be the top dog and if you said to the American isolationists you you can remove yourself from the world absolutely but you should know that it means in the 21st century China or other countries any number of other countries will replace America as world's dominant power and if you are happy with that argue it out but that is that is the consequence I mean America may have got fat and lazy but China is hungry as hell so you know work what it means for the century you envisage and um and but I think that's a very strong tendency I think on Israel it's a different thing that's going on I mean leftwing you know I've said a lot in recent months I think one of the interesting things about anti-Semitism and I do think the criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic because I think it comes down to the thing of not just double but triple standards I think as I say again if if this wild lack of empathy for the state of Israel means anything you've got come back to this primordial triple standard um and we we we know it can come from anywhere you know and that uh anti-Semitism is a shape-shifting virus can come from left or right can come from everywhere at the same time I think the one the things that's interesting about the the the movement of some people on the right against Israel and and playing around with anti-semitic tropes for sure in a way which you could predict but maybe not expect is that they seem they seem to think that there's something strange I get this a bit against myself and my you know preoccupation with this issue in the last year I mean going about many years but particularly in the last year people say why are you so bothered about Israel and I hear that I hear that from the right the left don't care they know I'm beyond the saving but um but on the right I hear that and I think they don't realize um they think it's some weird thing like uh why you is this small state why why does it bother you I don't think they've even remotely reflected on what I'd regard as the deepest reasons to care um it seems to me if as you well know Western Civilization is based on the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem um Athens is under great assault always but it's not actually under existential assault at the moment what is being attempted by Israel's enemies is the philosophical and cultural equivalent of burning all the libraries of Alexandria this is one of the underpinnings of Western Civilization utterly utterly at risk and not in a sort of metaphorical way where people might use it as a sort of book subtitle but the real thing I mean I I you know I've sometimes thought about it this way I haven't tried this out in public before how many Jews are there in the world um 15 million 15 million okay this is this is going to come this may come across really coarse but let me put it this way I there lots of conflicts in the world and I've covered a lot of conflicts involving a lot of people but it's it's conceivable that at some point 15 million Christians could be K it would be a disaster a tragedy it's conceivable that at some point Burma India some 15 million Muslims could be killed it would be a disaster it would be a tragedy of an unimaginable scale of 20 mid 20th century scale but if 15 million Jews were killed that's the end of the story that's it now what does that mean for the Jewish people it's it's the end that the people who sore off everyone from pharaoh to Hitler disappeared in the 21st century everyone else in my view wouldn't survive either wouldn't survive either Western Civilization could not survive survive the destruction of the Jewish State because it would be among much else The Cutting away of the whole tree that we're on and uh Western Civilization would die so I regard the existential threat against the Jewish people to not just be about the Jewish people it matters deeply to me that it is about the Jewish people but it also matters to me because it's about America could America survive if the Jewish people were no more on its watch or everybody was forcibly deported from the Holy Land come on of course not could the isolationists bear the repercussions of that across the Middle East and elsewhere of course not so I find this bless and the frivolity of it to be absolutely intolerable among the Critics on the right you one one of the things that that's been so amazing about about all of this is just the sense that the West has lost its Moorings I mean I I was more Disturbed you know from a sort of Jewish perspective as a Jew tragedies happen to the Jews terrorist attacks happen to Jews Slaughters happen to Jews this is sort of the story of Jewish history but the idea that you have hundreds of thousands of westerners who are Marching in solidarity with the murderers that was on some level more disturbing to me than the actual Massacre itself certainly not in terms of you know the actual amount of human suffering and and and the horrifying evil and barbarity of it but in terms of the threat to the civilization as a whole it seems to me that one of the things that we're seeing in terms of this sort of right-wing backlash that's now happening in Europe it it's very much of a piece with that it's very much Europe and and I'm hoping America saying if we don't have any values for us to to rely upon then the people who are Marching through the streets are going to end up running this place well that's that's the other thing is what people don't realize is that they're all next I mean um it's it's sort of I don't I I I'm I'm I'm always baffled by the fact that people don't believe the words that come out of people's mouths um the hammer leadership the hasah leadership the leadership in tan the Revolutionary Islamic government have all made perfectly clear what they want to do with Israel but they don't regard Israel as being the main problem they regard it as being the main Regional problem for them and their expansionist islamist worldview but it's America that's their biggest enemy that's why they call America the big Satan and Israel the little Satan and as I always say my country of birth is a rather sweet middle-sized Satan uh a teenage Satan with Growing Pains um but you know there's a reason they think that there's a and there's there's another way of doing it which is here at home why is it you can you can you you can make the following prediction with 100% accuracy if there is a pro-israel demonstration in America or in Britain or in Paris there will be flying of the Israeli flag and there will be the flying of this flag of the United States of America or Great Britain or France if uh recently I was speaking at an event in uh in uh Montreal and uh you know it was it was a about a thousand Jews and about a thousand Christians and it was in a synagogue it was a wonderful wonderful evening and uh you know everyone sang O Canada and haika and it's wonderful I mean it's it's wonderful it's also there something sad about it because of course Jews are forever saying we are part of this country we're showing you and are very often ignored um but why can you why can you predict with 100% accuracy that the pro Palestinian not to mention Pro Hamas demonstrators will never in amer America carry an American flag why do we know with 100% accuracy that when 100,000 mainly Muslim demonstrators go through the Streets of London on a Saturday they will not finish the demonstration by singing God Save the King why do I know that with 100% accuracy because it's not about Israel it's about America it's about Britain it's about France they hate Israel first and it's the easiest one to hate but they hate everybody else next you think some stupid college kid at Berkeley or columia who's getting their parents to remortgage the house so they can in a bucket in the center of the square of their campus and claim they're liberating some people they've never met in a region they've never traveled to you think any of those people actually love America and just happen to have a problem with this country they've never visited and don't know anything about they happen to have this problem about that and they're willing to to set up weird encampments and become even less educated than they were when they went to campus and you think they just like want mild adjustments in welfare reform in the US give me a break this is a revolutionary movement and it finds its first and most fevered and most flattered um version in its attack on Israel but of course it's anti-American of course it's anti-western of course it's anti-british and to European so I think one of the things that's happened in the West in America in Britain in large parts of Western Europe is there is this belief a true belief in sort of the Francis fukayama theory that the end of History has arrived and then you go to places where the end of History very much has not arrived and all those people are thinking very differently I remember when I visited Poland uh we were visiting we had been visiting asit is when I was going with Elon Musk but we were in krao and we're walking around with security polish security and I was asking them about Ukraine I said how do you feel about that they said well we're very much for you supporting Ukraine because otherwise the Russians are just going to come after us and reoccupy us because after all they have tended to do that over the course of the last several centuries and it occurred to me that having grown up in America SP my whole life in America effectively that that's something that you know if you're born in America you've never worried about that not a day in your life you've never for a day in your life worried that you were going to be subjected to rule by a foreign power if you're in in Britain and you're younger than the second world war that's never occurred to you and the same thing is true if you're in France or if you're in Germany unless you're an East German and so the that very idea has allowed for this fatness and laziness and this idea that okay we can just recede from the world and the world will go on as normal nobody will fill that Gap and nothing bad will ever happen all the sea Lanes will stay free all of our Goods will will be the exact same prices they were before any of this happened we'll be militarily safe everything will be cheap it's on a fundamental level I guess it's just ignorance but you know well it's ignorance and an incredible lack of um knowledge of how the world has always worked um yeah and I think I think there was a pretty deep roots to that I mean one of the ones that interests me is the whole terminology of Human Rights because a young uh Westerner Young American growing up today will talk in the language of Human Rights that's against my rights you've infringed upon my rights and they don't realize that such rights as they have only exist because people created them and gave them to them and fought for them but there's nothing in nature that means your rights canot all be taken away in a moment nobody in the south of Israel on the 7th of October had any human rights none there was no there was no Divine Law that that that that that could step in and say this barbarity happening in this house must stop no very bad people can take it if they want it I'm always struck by there's a there was one of the survivors of Charlie ABDO massacre in Paris in 2015 wrote a memoir uh about his recovery uh uh when the islamist came in and shot all of his colleagues he was one of the very few ones who survived and he spent a long time recovering protected by the French state to its great uh credit um and the great French novelist the man um uh Mel Welbeck who has spent years also living under armed guard the cost of the French State um because of things he said about Islam uh the journalist from Charli Abdu describes going into a party and for the only time in his life seeing Mel Welbeck at the party and Welbeck is sitting in the corner surrounded by security pretty drunk as usual um and they see each other and Welbeck walks over to him and said one line that a quote from the gospel of s Matthew wellbe just said men of violence take it by force then he walked off into the night it's a pretty powerful scene but that's what people don't men of violence take it by force they don't ask your permission they don't care for your permission they'll take it no Young American realizes that they would say but I I will complain to somebody there must be somebody that was an actual Thomas fredman column right Thomas Freedman wrote a column about three weeks ago by the time of this a was in which he said that he wanted Hamas remain in charge of Gaza because when yakas sinir came out of the tunnels he would do a press conference and at that press confence Thomas Freedman would be present and he would ask Yak Sinar what he thought he was doing on October 7th to bring this catastrophe upon his fellows and he is sure that the gazen people would rise up and yell at Yak sinir very very loudly and like this sort of peculiar cultural centrism this this sort of this this bizarre self-obsession where everybody thinks like Thomas Freedman I was the key when reading that the the preoccupation in my mind when reading that appalling column was I ided in a dark moment they wouldn't mind if Thomas fredman went to see Mr senoir but anyway it would be an awfully fast learning curve he'd be on reminds me of the the late and unlamented British writer Robert Fisk who was forever calling in columns from countries he wasn't in um and uh he he was memorably after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan I think just after 911 he was actually in Afghanistan for for once he wasn't filing from Beirut um and he was beaten up by some Taliban types and he wrote a whole column saying that he understood it was it was it was fantastic it was like yeah now I see because I'm a white Western I you're quite right to and actually if you'd have killed me I'd have completely understood well I mean the the the Jean Paul SRA introductions the France Fon of that the kind of like we all we all must die because if we all die then it demonstrates that we were wrong in the first place which is really the truth the only way to to uh to to overcome the guilt that we all hold is for us to make ourselves subject to barbarians who wish to murder us yes well that that's s like a lot of the French thinkers is extremely dangerous because the proximity the necessity of blood in politics is overwhelming you read that introduction to Van wow this is disgusting stuff this is a it's it's like I quite a lot of the French intellectuals like that um uh Seline actually wrote a bag of P Massacre uh is not just a book expecting the the the atrocities of the' 40s but but how to guide um there some very very dangerous people who are still being read and revered uncritically but the thing that disturbs me about this by the way is that you mentioned fuky earlier and there's something very important that needs to be said that doesn't get said because fyama quite rightly gets uh castigated for his predictions uh diagnoses usually by people who actually never read the book um there is one thing in the book that is enormously important and it's towards the very end which is why nobody knows [Laughter] it I'm one of the very few people who made that made it that far but there is a very very important prediction that fuyama makes in the '90s which is the last man as he talks about it in Nan supp Gan terms the last man he says may may be at risk at this point at the end of history of rebelling for the sake of rebellion and when I read the accounts New York Magazine published a couple of months ago just firsthand accounts from protesters and others on campus of Columbia it's incredibly important to read one of the students describes just firsthand account he says as a first first gen lowincome student first generation to come to campus to come to any college I learned about the rich history of protests at Colombia and I knew that when it starts I want to be right in the middle of it what is that the desire for revolution the desire for Action the desire to fight the last culture War whatever it is but you know they have no concept of what they're treading into friend of mine Clive James in the 1960s was at Cambridge England when there was a the 1968 protests weren't as big in England as they were in America or sudden in France but he remember there was there was what was at the time in Notorious case in the UK where all these leering students were protesting and he was there at the protest you remember somebody threw a brick at the hotel which they couldn't quite remember work out why they were protesting outside his hotel and what it had to do with Vietnam and it seemed unlikely in retrospect that the American government was going to change its policies in Indochina because of a hotel in Cambridge England but anyway they made one of these tenuous connections I remember C said somebody threw a brick and everything changed we were in that Realm Of Violence that thing I described earlier that TL story described so well the kids and they are kids in America have no idea of what happens when you ENT the realm of violence now European have a memory of it the Israelis all have experience of it but this to an extent I think my friend Eric Weinstein and I were talking about this recently is that what is seems to be happening on the campuses in America is a low resolution version of what Hamas themselves are doing the Brilliance of hamas's total total distaste for the Palestinian people the Brilliance of deciding to use your own population against your enemy me for the camera the family for the camera and then we can talk about how appalling the zionists are a lot of the demonstrations in the US seem to be a low resolution version of that hit the person next to me to show the fascist nature of the state that we're up against that's very like what happened in the 60s the belief that if you provoke the Authority's divide they will reveal the true fascist mask of the capitalist state of course it never was revealed because it wasn't there but there's something like that being practiced at the moment you see it with the antifa Palestine people they're sort of they're desperate for somebody to hit the person next to them if not them they're like very eager for violence and of course like all revolutionaries they don't realize that once you unleash that it's like unleashing Pandora's Box I've seen it too many times once you once you unleash violence no one on earth can control it it's just out like a whirlwind good luck if you think you can put it back in the box so you there there's some focus on the revolutionaries and the people on campus and and obviously that has a long history going all the way back to the French revolutionaries or the or the pre- Russian Revolution anarchists in the 19th century who were valuing violence pretty clearly for its own sake they thought that there was something purgative and wonderful about the violence itself exactly um but the what's more interesting to me is the collapse of the liberal world order in the face of this right the the so-called moderates who seem to be willing to traffic along these lines in the United States the Democratic party continuing to massage the shoulders of the of the members of the Congress who are members of Hamas or or if not members and at least fellow Travelers of of terrorists uh the the willingness to of Pat on the head the protesters on college campuses by saying well you know we don't want them you know being bad and spray painting buildings but they're just they have so much passion and we hear what they're saying this attempt to sort of massage them into jet fuel for what they believe is more moderate movement and and that's the part that that I find particularly disturbing because in an adult system you look at the revolutionaries and you say well the answer here is no I mean you guys are wrong and you should go to jail for violating the law and also your belief system is trash I mean what you believe is actually wrong and bad and but but there seems to be almost a a lack of an immune system on the sort of Center left for this sort of stuff to the point where it's pretty obvious I think to anybody who's observing politics whether you're doing so in Europe or in the United States that 20 years hence these people the revolutionaries are going to be in control of the movement I'd be shocked if they are not well yeah I mean I would use an analogy that a lot of people will know from family life you're a parent You observe as I do parents and what good parenting looks like and what but bad parenting looks like and I'm sure you've observed as most people have a parent who is terrified of their child don't don't upset don't I hope I haven't done anything to upset you what can I do to make it right people who want to be friends with their children that's a ghastly place to start um uh but that that one of the parent who is scared of the child and therefore creates the world around the child so the child will not be upset it's it's a very it's a Sure Fire way to create an absolute brat of a human being who will probably never grow up but I think something like that is happening with the politicians and the generation coming up not all of them by the way has to be said as as as as I'm sure you'd agree one of the great things that is happening at the moment is the Rebellion beneath the Rebellion uh where all the normal people who like don't want to stick a piercing through their genitals and wave it around on a Saturday and say it's for Yemen um like those people the people who seen those people and they just like damn can't we just get this away the people coming up and them they're fantastic and I've got a lot of Hope for them by the way the voter data from most elections at the moment shows generational swing which is long overdue uh back against these people but the people who are sort of totally deracinated last man revolutionary types they seem genuinely to scare the adults and what I can't understand is that the adults as you say don't say no you're wrong but then again it comes back to what they're taught the the the these accounts of the Colombia protesters one of them said you know my first week you know I had to miss a class on overthrowing apartheid and struggle in South Africa in the 1980s but a friend passed on their notes and go that's what you're being taught I they're not being taught anything useful they're being they're being made into activists and you know as I've often said the joke the joke was on people like me who always assumed these people would graduate with these useless degrees and totally useless people uh had no Insight that was original and no critical fact faculties and nothing else and I hoped that they would end up in the marketplace and discover the marketplace didn't want them and unfortunately the great monster of HR means these people moved into all of the HR departments in you know public office and private companies and so on they did actually have something to do but everywhere they go they cause destruction you know one of the industries I know best the publishing industry everywhere these people go you know what somebody publish is one of my first books uh has reprint writes uh they had a thing a little while ago because they had a town hall meeting and what a junior member staff said that he didn't want to be involved in the publication of JK Ring's latest bestselling International Mega Million book that was paying his salary because his non-binary friend might be upset it's like go go no time for you we can't publish our children's books based on whether a junior employee of 22 and his first job's friend might mind no not doing it goodbye your job is up for uh ad advertising tomorrow and lots of smart people will apply I don't know why I don't know why companies don't raan airport worker like crazy but I don't know they they're scared of the kids and as I say going back to the parenting analogy if you if you if you try to satisfy that and cudle that and encourage that all they'll realize we can run wild we can do whatever we want get some more on this in a moment first Saudi Arabia recently ended its 50-year Petro dollar deal with the United States that has the potential to weaken the US dollar since 1974 Saudi Arabia has sold oil solely in US Dollars that was huge for our global economic dominance well now they want some other options if there is less demand for the US dollar what exactly happens to the value it's for reasons like this I feel it's important to diversify some of your savings in gold you can do that with the help of Birch gold right now qualifying purchases by July 31st are eligible to get a one-of-a-kind limited edition golden truth bomb it's a pretty cool gift the only way to claim your eligibility text Ben to 9898 98 protect your savings by diversifying away from the US dollar with gold Tex Ben to 9898 98 Birch gold will help you convert an old Ira or 401K into an IRA in gold for no money out of pocket right now qualifying purchases get a limited edition golden truth bomb text Ben to 98 9898 again that's Ben to 98 9898 today diversification it's just a smart business strategy it's a good investment strategy if you're looking at Gold you should check out Birch gold by texting Ben in 9898 98 you know I think that you the roots of that there there's a conservative critique of Classical liberalism that goes something like this Classical liberalism without a set of confining values ends up just dissolving into moral relativism that's kind of the short version of the argument that if all you care about is freedom of speech and freedom of speech is your core value what you end up basically saying is that all values are the same and so the only thing that matters is your ability to express those values and so you have no systemic immunity to people coming in and wanting to destroy the system from the inside and saying well I hate freedom of speech and that's my perspective is that there should be Sharia law here and you say well that is another perspective as opposed to sort of the values-based Liberty that suggests well yes freedom of speech exists and is important but that also exists within a larger sphere that in which there is a larger truth and a larger system of values and if you Rebel from inside that system to the extent you're destroying both freedom of speech and the value well then you're outside the circle and out you go AB well well yeah but that that's as you know that's the problem that liberalism in almost every version always has um even Classical liberalism has his problem baked into it um I think that that the answer to that lies in um you know what my late Friend R scen described as the widest application of the first person plural which is the we of the nation uh you know the the idea being that you know people say they support a soccer team or a baseball team or whatever I'm on wildly unknown territory as I describe this metaphorically desperately tiptoeing around my own ignorance but uh so help me if I fall really badly off course and say the thing with the baseball tournament was but the point is is that is that if you uh if you support a team you will say after the match we did really well and the wi is I know I paid for my tickets I've always supported them I've supported them since I was a boy I'm there for the ups and downs and uh we did it and it's interesting and it's very moving um you feel a part of it the whest application you can do that is with the nation state any wider than that you end up with you know the European Union or the United Nations or Humanity as a whole and you can't Encompass all of that in that first person plural but the nation the nation you can include that and my view I mean I I wrote a um a rather depressing book some years ago called The Strange death of Europe and a lot of people said to me that's quite a depressing book to read and I would say you should have tried writing it um but I came to the conclusion there that nations in the west would survive or fall in ually um by decisions that their electorates took and decisions that the people who they gave the task of governance to performed and you know there was a there was a Norwegian politician who said to me some years ago there's a reason why uh although we have the same energy reserves as Venezuela there's a reason we're Norway and Venezuela is Venezuela and the reason is that we made better decisions so if it doesn't take long for you can do it in one generation as we know from Venezuela you make a couple of bad decisions and um you will find that that it's all changed and I think there are countries in the west which will say you know what we don't much care for your abstract critique of our society we don't much care for your talk we want to keep going and if you don't like it loads of other places you can go and screw up so I think that internationally you are starting to see the Revolt of the normies that the people who just don't want to see this stuff anymore who are tired of it you're seeing in the United States with the out the anti-left movement uh you a lot of that is Trump but it's not entirely relegated to to Trump support you're seeing it in France obviously with the rise of of national rally as an alternative to macron um in in Britain you would see that if you actually had a conservative party which which you haven't had for a couple of decades at this point minimum um but it's the the question I sort of have about the Revolt of the normies is whether that's going to be sufficient so the Revolt of the normies could stop the sort of radical left in its tracks it could end Mass migration it could sort of preserve the nation state status quo one of the things that I'm concerned about when I look at say right-wing European movements is that they are also defining the Wii without any reference to meritocracy so for example if you look at sort of the platform for national rally economically speaking National rallies platform is not a right-wing platform in sort of the American conservative sense it's not a limited government free market capitalistic platform it's very much based on tariffs subsidies uh welfare increases wealth tax part of their platform and so what they're doing is they're fighting back against the excesses of the left culturally and and in terms of immigration but not economically and so I I you know I think that that goes to something deeper and this is a theory that I've been working on which is that effectively speaking since the death of church church was the glue that help everything together and once churches started to decline once the intermediate institutions of society fell apart it was very difficult to maintain a True meritocracy because the way that meritocracy T typically works is that Society if you're going to create you know over Brad distinctions uh you could say that they're the innovators and the producers people who disproportionately produce and then there's a group of people who tend to be larger who don't necessarily disproportionately produce sort of proportionately produce to their to their you know economic inputs and outputs are are proportionate in society and meritocracy the people who are sort of the disproportionate innovators and producers tend to do really well well the problem is that there are only two ways in which that division can be maintained one is that the producers the innovators the elites so to speak go to the same church as the maths and so when when Rockefeller goes to the same church as his employees they look at Rockefeller and they say okay well he's we believe in the same God we believe the same values he's trying to get me a job he's trying to give me charity he's trying to help me and we're all the same in front of God and then when that goes away then the Elite Class the only way they can maintain their Elite status is to consistently prove that they are better at everything than the mass and what that means is centralization of control and every time they fail which is the human nature you're going to fail when the elites fail then the mass looks at them and says well hold up a second you're supposed to be the elites why are you failing there there's no sense of common fabric that holds everybody together well I mean that's just happened in France with maon because mro managed he he's never called a populist but he is a populist and he broke apart the whole political French system came through the center and uh and had to create his own party once he'd been elected president I mean it was insane uh but macron was a sort of safe Pair of Hands in the view of the of the French electorate among other things because he was a former banker and they thought he knew about the economy in fact his background as Bank does not confirm he did know about the economy but it it was pretty devastating for him and his party that um the French economy was downgraded a week before the EU elections that's very tricky if you say that you're the adult and you have a competency and then you seem not to be competent at it then people will go elsewhere the interesting one with the European parties on this you're completely right um some of some of them it's a tactical Thing Once the welfare state is a certain size you can't rail against it I mean of course you could at some point when it makes you bankrupt but that's probably too late but I think some a lot of parties in Europe have realized that if you go rightwing on identity and leftwing on economics you've got to winning formula I don't approve it because I don't think there's any point in just getting power for power's sake um or at least you better know what you're going to do with it um I I think that there's just I mean the the central question by the way in Europe is a question that America doesn't have to face the central question in Europe which national rally is Raising in France which afd is Raising in Germany which forell Italia is is um raising in Italy is all of these movements across the continent and by the way this was a big reason for British are skepticism um all these movements in the continent have some foundation in something bad and it's a really tricky landscape I think without boasting I'm one of the very few people who has spent a lot of time trying to work out what's going on and know and have spoken with most of the people from across suspect from most of the countries in Europe I genuin I put it out there as a possibility when you realize that you know some of fatelli talia's base are muselin I in a way they certainly think musini wasn't as bad as Hitler um they think they had a sightly bad rap from the 1940s in France the why are the leens always why does it always have to be a member of the family is it because of desire to show the origins back in vishi maybe maybe vams balang in Belgium collaborationist party in the war and over arms block the question that is raised in Europe about all of this which pertains very it's very very important for America and it's very important for Israel as well in this century is is is the European uh continent effectively uh land and so poisoned that nothing good can grow there for many centuries we don't know we don't know actually the afd in Germany has very good people in it who are normal conservatives who you or I would find absolutely to be you know somebody You' break bread with and it includes some people who almost certainly Nazi and it's it's messy now if that party going along this Ridge stumbles slightly they not only take down their party they take down their country and by extension the continent of Europe if they get it right and manage to tread the moderate path that is for instance against open borders for integration um and economic growth and many other things like that they could not only save their party they could save Germany and if you save Germany you save Europe the whole of the future of the continent depends on a small number of people who most people in Europe have never heard of let alone America the stakes are wildly high and again you have to decide in that situation do I just give it up for bad do I just try to find myself a bunker somewhere in Florida or Austin Texas and wish the world to go away and it's it's it's that's the Paradox of isolationism it's always attractive and it's always deadly so and to kind of bring us back full circle and I it seems to me that the the story of the West which is so bizarre is that since the end of the Cold War it's been a civilization in search of meaning and the and that that weirdness has you know really manifested in a time when the West really does not have enemies that should be durable enough to take on the west the reality is that internally China is a complete Disaster Area mess it's got we could encourage it to be more so yes absolutely and and we should encourage it in my opinion to be more so their their their military is wildly overrated their demographics are completely upside down they have hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt they have complete cities that they've built that are utterly empty subsidized with foreign dollars and they got away with giving us a virus and shutting down the world and nobody minded right exactly they're weak Russia they their replacement rate is something like 1.2 they have no humans their their economy is is about the size of the economy of the State of Florida like in total it is it is a very small economy with an a super corrupt oligarchic leadership and yet they're posing a world threat Iran is almost totally broke they have no money you could completely you could you could make Iran broke tomorrow and their military Tech by way sucks I mean when they when they tried to fire 350 missiles at Israel half of those things fell inside Iran they've been spending 80 years trying to develop a weapon that the United States developed in 1945 and and and they're still failing at it they still have not been able to develop like a basic Atomic weapon on the order of North Korea and and yet these these places are a serious threat to the west and you can't say that's because of these places that's got to be because the West refuses to face up to a a harsh and difficult world and seems to prefer the sort of wall you know we're on a spaceship on our own as the machines feed us into 300 lb obesity yeah well yes that's right waiting for the virtual reality sex headset to come online um waiting for the next iteration of the art no I mean I agree I I I I think this is because of a of a fundamental attitude shift that has to happen and will happen I I think people should look at the op let do two things firstly internationally you're completely right I mean it's absurd that uh Iran or North Korea or Russia or should China should pose the threat that it does at the moment it only does because our own immune system in the west has got weak you know we kind of we get a cold and it goes full-blown something within a short space of time but the but the real thing is is is this question of of the it's happened because because of the thing you put your finger on the collapse of something you can say it's a collapse of religion there's lots of things I did a chapter in The Strange death of Europe on this what the existential problem is the West is going through but there is an answer to it and the answer might come rather like it did in Israel from events um a lot of people I spoke to in Israel thought the young generation in Israel weren't up to the challenge and my God have they proved those people wrong but you know maybe everyone in the West is waiting for it to become serious again maybe maybe you can't force people into seriousness other than by events which I don't wish for I I don't want the sort of overweight girl on an American campus dying her hair purple to ever actually realize the reality that young Israelis learned on the 7th I don't want her to but I want her to be different from the person she's becoming how can you do that really only by a complete change of of of attitude there's a reason why European economies are stagnant very often and why there's a lot of stagnation in societies which is a lack of ambition and the lack of ambition comes from a belief that even if you are ambitious the systems rigged against you so you won't be able to do well that's not quite as accentuated in America but it is here in large parts of the society which is you know what is the point because you know there's not that much more that I get from working a low-end job than if I'm on welfare and um it's just easier and and so um if you actually have a a society that remembers that it needs ambition uh then everything is different I mean and that I do think there are very few countries which can say the can say the future is going to be better but if you can say it you win everything I mean it it it would be it would be you know I sort of wouldn't quite believe it if I was great Francophile I wouldn't quite believe it if somebody told me that you know France's greatest days are ahead of her slightly hard to imagine um you could say that America's greatest days is could be ahead of her you could say that and you could certainly make it happen um and I think that that's just there's a there's a road in the woods on this one you know for every individual that's the thing it's not a societal thing it's an individual thing everyone has his choice as you know you can say I will become I will become a a an unpleasant bitter vengeful um uh person who attributes every lack of happiness in my life to something else you know the state didn't give me a girlfriend um and uh you you know that all all that that the the reason why I'm still living with my parents is because of white supremacy or whatever you want to do transphobia uh the reason why no one will employ me is not that I look like a human catastrophe but because of the patriarchy you know um you can do all that but you miserable life ahead a miserable life yeah you will spend it all just waiting through a banal hell or you can say I choose another route I choose the path of heroism I choose the path of Courage um I'll Define myself um but I'll take advice from others I'll learn the wisdom of the ages and try to build on it I'll certainly try to preserve it and I'm going to get somewhere in my life you know and actually my experience is that most people um who are sentient actually if you put it like that to them they they know which one they'd rather have the ones who know they're going to fail anyway will do the first but the ones who are not going to fail of course they're going to choose the second and they must be helped on that path so to finish I would be remiss if I did not asked your opinions on the 2024 election which one the only one that matters so obviously the Bulgarian election the one the uh the former president of the United States and the uh and the dementia ridden current presidents of the United States uh you obviously watched the debate I'm sure as did the rest of us between Donald Trump and Joe Biden if you could call that a debate as opposed to sort of a a nner diaper changing um but looking forward to this election what you have any predictions what what do you think the what do you think the why you start with predictions and then what do you think the consequences of the outcome would be on either side um well I mean the I think the most likely one the moment is that Trump wins um I I think the Democrats have finally had their really big problem exposed I'm amazed that so much the media was able to cover up for Biden um I think he's extremely cruel what his family are putting him through and I think that um he should be I mean you this is a man who if he was your father you'd take away his car keys so why he should have control of the world's largest nuclear Arsenal is not immediately clear to me um how they get him out I don't know like three people in this country understand what's going to happen on that and they're all surnamed Biden um all the options that the Democrats will try to Cobble together seem to me hideous because the gerent tocy of the Democrat Party has not spent long enough cultivating a good Next Generation Um um you know Feinstein Pelosi Schumer Biden they wouldn't let go um so I think I think the Democrats in a hideous position everywhere you go um Trump if he's disciplined if he um listens to some advice uh if he can avoid the traps that are set for him that even set the other night ineptly by Biden to distract him from his achievements in office and get him onto the the things that were not good and the pettiness is Trump if his discipline could uh could certainly pull it off um and um Lord only knows what will happen then I mean um but it's it's more may put it this way it's more conceivable that Trump will be president in two years time than that Biden will be president in office being wheeled into a G7 meeting with Dr Jill saying he's never been on such a great form I've never seen him in this frightly uh it's absolutely impossible to imagine don't you think yeah I mean the idea that he's going to serve four more years I mean the idea that he's going to serve four more days is is obviously Beyond me well my favorite thing about this this whole this whole news cycle is not anything to do with Biden himself as you say I actually feel bad for him as a human being I don't think he's a good human being I think he's a corrupt human being but I don't think anybody at the age of 81 in a clear state of dementia should be trotted out by their family in order to continue to fill the family coffers and allow Dr Jill to fulfill her fantasy of being the actual president of the United States well than ever having done anything other than earning an ed degree from a a university name for her husband well wasn't wasn't it wasn't it lovely that it turned out the other day that one of the people that Joe Biden is taking advice from is Hunter yes that was great whenever I'm looking for advice I always think what would Hunter do that what's amazing about the entire Biden family is that they're sitting there recognizing that the minute Joe's out of office the gravy train is over I mean at a certain point Hunter finger painting stop selling for half a million dollars and that point is exactly when Joe Biden exits office so you know having all of them there is is really quite dark and and this sort of maab Comedy there's a precedent isn't that because Mrs Wilson famously uh her husband had a stroke and she covered over for it and R the country to be fair for to Edith Wilson he wasn't running for re-election he he had already won re-election at the time right so she wasn't like okay he's got to stand for a third term it's very important that this corpse be wheeled out here for a third term but the the the part that that really is astonishing to me and I think humorous and well-deserved is this is the greatest catastrophe for the Legacy Media I have seen in my lifetime because for pretty much every other issue where the Legacy Media was lying when they lied on BLM they could still say well you know I can bring a study that demonstrates systemic racism when they were lying about Co well there's a lot of confusion it's the fog of War there's a lot of things happening and so I can make an argument when it came to you know the the Obama era they say well you know sure he's doing some things that we don't particularly like but overall he's such a magnificent man there were always arguments but there's one argument that cannot that cannot be rebutted and that is the argument of your own eyes watching a man collapse on stage for 90 minutes and so when you spend several years claiming to the American public that he is totally fine sharp as attack doing handsprings in the back bar heading Virgil and Latin backwards and then all of a sudden he shows up on stage and he is what everyone knew he was and we'd seen clips of him we'd all been saying it but we were told that we were crazy we're out of our minds that exposed them so signally that they then had to do this immediate turnabout where they said oh no I'm shocked I'm so shocked right they did the captain R and Casablanca right there's there's gambling going on here like they like they cuz for them to admit that they knew this all along would be to expose themselves as just party apparat checks so they have to they have to fake that they are very very shocked and offended and that's why they're all pushing for Biden to go even though though they all knew full well that he was just the scen three weeks ago as opposed to a week ago it's a strange thing in much American Media which is that they think it's a team sport and you know I I mean I'm Bill Maher asked me this a couple of months ago he said you know he gets a lot of criticism he said this on the show he said he gets criticism from people on the left saying why are you criticizing Biden you need to just keep Trump out of office and I said to him it seems to me such a strange thing because if you want to be a political operative you should be a political operative you want to be in the media you should be in the media there's a weird crossover in America it's true the kind of gen Baki phenomen like how do you move from being that to being that and everyone's fine with it there's something wrong about it but they regarded as a as a team sport and they' got to back their team I think there's just something fundamentally corrupting about that of course it's going to be um and the main thing about it is it's boring it's really really really boring everybody knows what they're going to say everybody can predict every move you know the G7 Joe was merely looking to find another parachutist he wasn't weirdly wandering off and Georgia Maloney having to do a double thing to kind of grab him back it was perfectly normal and perfectly I just well that is boring I knew they were going to say that but yeah I I I I don't think he's going to be in office in two years and if he was voted in wow what an indictment of U of of the country I mean there were 11% of the people pulled after the debate the other night who said they thought Biden did well I want to investigate that 11% well Hunter does have a lot of illegitimate children so you just you just never know and Joe will never acknowledge them so you have that as well well Douglas thank you so much for stopping by folks once again head on over to Douglas murray. net and use promo code Israel to get information and discounts on the tour he's going to be doing in the United States Douglas it's great to have you here I appreciate it it's great [Music] pleasure the Ben Shapiro Sunday special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt km associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick editing is by Jim Nicholls audio is mixed by Mike Corina camera and lighting is by Zach ginta hair makeup and wardrobe by Fabiola Christina title Graphics are by Cynthia angula executive assistant Kelly carvalo executive in charge of production is David wormis executive producer Justin seagull executive producer Jeremy boring the Ben Shapiro show 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