Our Last Chance To Save The West | Douglas Murray
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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 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 the world's dominant power." And if you are happy with that, argue it out. But 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, and 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 best-selling 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 harkens 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, Transcription, and Translation.

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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.

Douglas, thanks so much for stopping by. I 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. DouglasMurray.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. It's a U.S. tour, so go check that out right now. Tell us about the tour. Where are you going to be? What's going on with it? We have four cities in September. Fort Lauderdale, L.A., D.C., and New York. And there'll be...

Great evening. Lots of new material. Nobody's seen video footage. And I'll be in conversation. And I'm really looking forward to it. It's the first...

time I think I've been able to tour in the US since pre-COVID days. So there's quite a lot to talk about. Why don't we start with Israel? Obviously, you've been doing extraordinary work since the beginning of this conflict on October 7th. You spent an enormous amount of time in Israel and in Gaza. 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 in a place where the media basically won't go and seem to just take the propaganda at face value? I think it's lots of things. It's

I mean, the first is that what Israel is in now is a situation that a lot of countries have been in historically, if not most at some point. I say that to go from the zone of peace into the zone of war is probably the biggest zone change anyone will ever go through. Tolstoy 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.

There were rockets coming all the time, of course, from Gaza, but the Israelis were used to that and found ever cleverer ways to shoot down the rockets. And then when Hamas and others flooded into Israel on the 7th, Israel was suddenly in the realm of not just war, but of pure barbarism.

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. As you know, the standard thing that always happens with Israel is Israel is attacked by rockets or whatever, Israel attacks back and the world's headlines are Israel attacks Gaza. That's the norm. I've seen that in every conflict that I've covered there since 2006.

And so I thought it was important to sort of not lose sight of the 7th 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 outside, it's, I mean, I still speak to people who are pretty expert in things who have no idea that, you know, almost 4,000 terrorists came across from Gaza that day, and they were trained terrorists. Some of them were civilians who wanted to just come in for the fun.

and rob people or mutilate them. But it was an attempt to go all the way up through the country. It was the most serious invasion that Israel has suffered. And the country as a result was put into a state of war, not of its own choosing, but as I've often said in recent months, if you start a war, as Hamas did, then 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 in the Western media talks about what's happening in Gaza. Some of the media, I've been into Gaza with Western media as well as others. And so they have been in. But mainly people rely, as you know, just on stringers or on local journalists who,

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 media standard that you report, for instance, saying, speaking from Baghdad under Saddam Hussein government restrictions. 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 Jazeera journalist 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 Defense Force.

And so all of the coverage is completely skewed. I mean, wildly, disgustingly skewed. So that, for instance, an outlet like Al Jazeera can say when there was a rescue attempt at the Shifa hospital the other week, can say that the IDF soldiers went into the Shifa hospital, which is the Hamas command center, and started raping the local women. Yeah.

It makes absolutely no sense. It makes no sense unless, as with Al Jazeera 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 sort of expectations that the world has placed on Israel in the middle of this conflict are,

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 fighting, that it's not only your job to go house to house, 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 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 one of the things that absolutely screams out at me is the astounding lack of empathy for the general population in Israel. I mean, let's 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 psychedelics, some of them not, but just having a great time?

and are suddenly massacred and raped and things I can't describe on air. And the world doesn't have sympathy with them. Where else would that happen? 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 New York the other week when an exhibition memorializing the Nova Party and the atrocities that went on there and the victims. When this exhibition is in lower Manhattan, there are crowds outside calling for intifada. Can anyone imagine that this is... If you were a survivor of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 or the Bataclan massacre in 2015,

You'd 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. And it's the same with the war in Gaza. Some months ago, a terrible, terrible thing happened with three Israeli hostages were shot by members of the IDF.

coming out of a building, they didn't realize that they were hostages, obviously. Now, you would have thought, again, first of all, just beyond appalling for the victims who'd already been kidnapped for months by Hamas. But then think of the soldiers who shot them and this fraction of a second mistake that they'll never be able to forgive themselves for, never forget.

The world reports it as the IDF shot three Israeli hostages. And the world says things like, is there nothing these Israelis won't do? They even shoot 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 start shooting.

And that's just all the time. So when I hear people say you have no experience 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, into the idea that 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 America, 9-11, there were some people

like the 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 9/11 the thought that to some extent the Americans had it coming to them. By the way, she's still all over the media, of course, and has always been commissioned by the BBC and many others. But most Americans didn't much care for that tone of voice. 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, its women are raped, its children are murdered, there's a kind of yes, but. And if you go back to the yes, but, what do you actually mean? What is the clause that you want to go back to? It's the foundation of the state. And, you know, I...

As my debating partner in Toronto the other week, Natasha Hausdorff, 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 want to have a child. They may debate if the wife is pregnant, whether or not they should abort the child. These are all very, very difficult questions and unpleasant questions that people think about. Once a child is 70 years old, you're talking about whether or not the child should be killed. 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 perhaps a lunatic asylum somewhere in India who believes that the state of Pakistan should be 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 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 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 wanna get to right-wing antisemitism and the problems there in a second. But on the left, which is really where it's predominant these days, the basic philosophy goes something like this. The world is made up of victims and it's made up of victimizers. And if you're on the ledger of victims,

On the ledge, you're a victim not because 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 the real problem that you have when it comes to the Jews, particularly,

is that the Jews happened 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. - The ultimate 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've been asked before, why, so why is it such a cause to love? Because obviously you have people who are suffering all over the place. People will make bad decisions. 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 that Hamas... Anti-colonialism.

Colonize the colonized. Exactly. If you can make the case that these people 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 built. If you can make the case that those people are the victims,

And that the Jews who've been sitting here, you know, building skyscrapers and technologies, that those are the actual victimizers. Well, then you really have proved your fealty to this ideology and thus dissociated from the white supremacist group that you believe runs society. Well, you know, one of the interesting things, you know, there's a ruling conflict, particularly in counterinsurgency, 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. They think that it's very important to be against colonialism. Well,

My country of birth got out of that quite a long time ago. There were some countries who were into it big time, like the Chinese Communist Party, who bring 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. Very important that King Leopold remembers posthumously not to take over Congo again. I mean, what...

Why not deal with what the Chinese Communist Party is doing today? They don't do that. Very, very passionate against slavery. Again, you know, 200 years after King George III signs the Anti-Slavery Act into law in the UK. But I saw this recently in South Africa when I was there. The number of people who've been persuaded that apartheid is what's going on in Israel.

I said to my South African friends, you know, your corrupt ANC government is spending down the moral capital of the overthrow of apartheid and wasting it at the behest of Iran on this false accusation against Israel. But it's amazing how many people will suck that up.

And of course, you know, they've got quite a lot of questions to answer, far more than I think people who broadly agree with you or me. It still seems to me that although the 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 posthumous reputation if he'd personally called for people to rip the hearts out of babies.

I think that the great unifying figure of South African history, it would have gone differently. And the reason why, as you say, the Arab-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 mean, it's a terrible curse for the state of Israel to have this almost insoluble problem of the Palestinians handed to them 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 do, that it's certainly not 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 appalling regime in Qatar,

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 Qatar by the way

Why are they not bothered that their university, they're always calling to divest from Israel, but 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 Qatar, professors funded by Qatar, which is actually an apartheid state where there's a couple of hundred thousand 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 whataboutery. It's also what we used to call facts. We'll get to more Douglas Murray in just one second. First, an 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.

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Which means that I can pop some of that balance of nature into the protein smoothie, and that's why I am ripped beyond all imagination. Go to balanceofnature.com, use promo code Shapiro for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Shapiro, balanceofnature.com, promo code Shapiro. So one of the things that's been sort of puzzling about the foreign policy scene is the differential treatment by the left of, say, Israel and Ukraine.

That's been a bit of a conundrum. And same thing on parts of the right, but in reverse. So, you know, the Ukraine conflict has sort of upended a bunch of traditional, I'd say, cross-cutting political...

political alignment. 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 in 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 swaths of the right claiming that Ukraine is somehow too corrupt to be supported, that Russia's going to win anyway, that the best thing that the West can do is sort of pull back. Now, 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 of trying to take back

Crimea or Donbas where large swaths of the population actually still support Russia. But that's a different question from 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 in America's interest or the West's interest for Russia to simply take Ukraine? But where do you think that's coming from? Well, some of it is the inevitable blowback of failed foreign policy of the 2000s. Something that's very striking to me in Republican politics has been that at some point, you might say that John McCain was a kind of pivotal figure. At some point,

the so-called adults in the room stopped being respected as adults. And, you know, you can lament that, but you can also say, well, to an extent they brought it upon themselves. You know, 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 you do. I think I'm going to make a hideous mistake again. 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. I do think that, yes, I think there was a huge loss of institutional knowledge and generational self-belief, actually. I think it might be something like the post-Vietnam era in America. Yeah.

And, of course, you know, everything's so easy to understand in the rearview mirror. Everybody's an expert at that. But I would say that in relation to Ukraine, I understand the American isolationist trend and I deplore it. Because in the case of Ukraine, I mean, if you go to the Baltic states...

which are 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. As in Vilnius recently, it's so close. It's so close. These are our allies. If you want to ditch your allies, well, that's an idea. But, you know, come out and say it.

The Central and Eastern Europeans really aren't bluffing. And it's even easier to see this as a far-off conflict in the US than it is in, say, Britain. So the Europeans are genuinely worried. Of course they should pay their way in NATO. Of course. But 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 I have enough muscle memory to remember countries that Vladimir Putin's invaded. There are a lot of people with no memory at all.

But I think that's, broadly speaking, 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 the American right in particular, because it always strikes me as being inherently contradictory. 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 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 well as dominant power. And if you are happy with that, argue it out. But that is the consequence. I mean, America may have got fat and lazy, but China is hungry as hell. So, you know...

work out what it means for the century you envisage. But I think that's a very strong tendency. I think on Israel, it's a different thing that's going on. I mean, left-wing, 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 this wild lack of empathy for the state of Israel means anything,

You've got to come back to this primordial triple standard. And we know it can come from anywhere, you know, that 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 thing that's interesting about the movement of some people on the right against Israel and playing around with anti-Semitic tropes for sure in a way which you could predict but maybe not expect is that

They seem to think that there's something strange. I get this a bit against myself and my preoccupation with this issue in the last year. I mean, going back many years, but particularly in the last year. People say, well, why are you so bothered about Israel? And I hear that from the right. The left don't care. They know I'm beyond saving. But on the right, I hear that.

And I think they don't realize. They think it's some weird thing. Like, why is this small state? Why does it bother you? I don't think they've even remotely reflected on what I regard as the deepest reasons to care. It seems to me if, as you well know, Western civilization is based on the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem. 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've sometimes thought about it this way. I haven't tried this out in public before. How many Jews are there in the world? 15 million or so. 15 million, okay. This may come across really coarse, but let me put it this way. I mean, there are lots of conflicts in the world, and I've covered a lot of conflicts involving a lot of people. But it's conceivable that at some point 15 million Christians could be killed. It would be a disaster, a tragedy,

It's conceivable that at some point, Burma, India, 15 million Muslims could be killed. It would be a disaster. It would be a tragedy of an unimaginable scale, of 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 the end. The people who saw 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 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 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 blitheness and the frivolity of it to be absolutely intolerable among the critics on the right.

One of the things that's been so amazing about all of this is just the sense that the West has lost its moorings. I mean, I was more disturbed from a sort of Jewish perspective as a Jew, right?

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 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

sort of right-wing backlash that's now happening in Europe, it's very much a piece with that. It's very much Europe, and I'm hoping America, saying, if we don't have any values for us to rely upon, then the people who are marching through the streets are going to end up running this place. Well, that's the other thing is what people don't realize is that they're all next. I mean, it's sort of

I'm always baffled by the fact that people don't believe the words that come out of people's mouths. The Hamas leadership, the Hezbollah leadership, the leadership in Tehran, 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. A teenage Satan with growing pains. But, you know, there's a reason they think that. And there's another way of doing it, which is here at home.

Why is it 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 recently I was speaking at an event in Montreal and, you know, it was about a thousand Jews and about a thousand Christians and it was in a synagogue. It was a wonderful, wonderful evening. And, you know, everyone sang O Canada and Hatikvah. And

It's wonderful. I mean, it's wonderful. And it's also, there's 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.

But why can you predict with 100% accuracy that the pro-Palestinian, not to mention pro-Hammaz, demonstrators will never in 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?

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. You think some stupid college kid at Berkeley or Columbia who's getting their parents to remortgage the house so they can shit 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 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 U.S.?

Give me a break. This is a revolutionary movement, and it finds its first and most fevered and most flattered 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 anti-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's this belief, a true belief in sort of the Francis Fukuyama 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,

We were visiting, we happened to be visiting Auschwitz when I was with Elon Musk, but we were in Krakow and we were 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, hey,

I haven't grown up in America, so 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 are going to be subjected to rule by a foreign power. If you're 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 that very idea has allowed for this fatness and laziness and this idea that I'm

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 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 there is 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 Westerner, a 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 can not 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 divine law 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 was one of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015.

wrote a memoir about his recovery when the Islamists 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 credit. And the great French novelist, Michael Welbeck,

who has spent years also living under armed guard across the French state because of things he said about Islam. The journalist from Charlie Hebdo describes going into a party and for the only time in his life seeing Michael Welbeck at the party. And Welbeck is sitting in the corner surrounded by security, pretty drunk as usual. And they see each other and Welbeck walks over to him and said one line, such a quote from the Gospel of St. Matthew.

Welbeck 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 realize. 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 will complain to somebody."

There must be somebody who can stop it. By the way, that was an actual Thomas Friedman column, right? Thomas Friedman wrote a column about three weeks ago by the time this airs in which he

he said that he wanted Hamas to remain in charge of Gaza because when Yahya Sinwar came out of the tunnels, he would do a press conference. And at that press conference, Thomas Friedman would be present and he would ask Yahya Sinwar what he thought he was doing on October 7th to bring this catastrophe upon his fellows. And he is sure that the Gazan people would rise up and yell at Yahya Sinwar very, very loudly. And like this sort of peculiar cultural centrism, this sort of...

this bizarre self-obsession where everybody thinks like Thomas Friedman. I was rather keen when reading that. The preoccupation in my mind when reading that appalling column was I decided in a dark moment, I wouldn't mind if Thomas Friedman went to see Mr. Sinoir. But anyway, it would be an awfully fast learning curve he'd be on. It reminds me of the late and unlamented British writer Robert Fiske, who was forever calling in columns from countries he wasn't in.

And he was memorably, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, I think just after 9-11, he was actually in Afghanistan. For once, he wasn't filing from Beirut. And he was beaten up by some Taliban types. And he wrote a whole column saying that he understood

It was fantastic. It was like, yeah, no, I see. Because I'm a white Westerner, you're quite right. And actually, if you'd have killed me, I'd have completely understood. I mean, the Jean-Paul Sartre introductions, the Frantz Fanon of that, the kind of like, 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...

overcome the guilt that we all hold is for us to make ourselves subject to barbarians who wish to murder us. Yes, well, that'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 Fanon, you think, wow, this is disgusting stuff. This is, it's like, I mean, quite a lot of French intellectuals like that, Céline,

actually wrote Bagatelle's book, A Massacre. It's not just a book expecting the atrocities of the 40s, but how to guide it.

um there are 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 fukuyama earlier and there's something very important that needs to be said that doesn't get said because fukuyama quite rightly gets uh castigated for his predictions uh diagnosis 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 it. I'm one of the very few people who made it that far. But there is a very, very important prediction that Fukuyama makes in the 90s, which is that the last man, as he talks about it in Nietzschean, I suppose, Gellian terms, the last man, he says, 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 that New York Magazine published a couple of months ago, just first-hand accounts from protesters and others on campus at Columbia, it's incredibly important to read. One of the students describes, just first-hand account, he says, "As a first-gen, low-income student, first generation to come to campus, to come to any college,

I learned about the rich history of protests at Columbia, 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. A friend of mine, Clive James, in the 1960s was at Cambridge, England, when the 1968 protests weren't as big in

England as they were in America or certainly not in France. But he remembered there was what was at the time a notorious case in the UK where all these left-wing students were protesting and he was there at the protest. He remembered somebody threw a brick at the hotel which they couldn't quite remember why they were protesting outside this 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 Clive said, somebody threw a brick and everything changed. We were in that realm of violence. The thing I described earlier that Tolstoy describes so well. The kids, and they are kids in America, have no idea of what happens when you enter the realm of violence. Now, Europeans 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 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. Kill me for the camera. Kill my 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 authorities to violence, 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 protests.

trans Palestine weirdos, psycho, whatever they are, 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 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 know, there's some focus on the revolutionaries and the people on campus. And obviously that has a long history going all the way back to the French revolutionaries 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 violence itself. But what's more interesting to me is the collapse of the liberal world order in the face of this. The so-called moderates who seem to be willing to traffic violence.

along these lines. In the United States, the Democratic Party, continuing to massage the shoulders of members of the Congress who are members of Hamas, or if not members, then at least fellow travelers of terrorists. The willingness to pat on the head the protesters on college campuses by saying, well, you know, we don't want them 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. Yes. And that's the part 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. But there seems to be almost 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're 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 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 upset. 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. But 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 a surefire 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 I'm sure you'd agree. One of the great things that is happening at the moment is the rebellion beneath the rebellion, where all the normal people who don't want to stick a piercing through their genitals and wave it around on a Saturday and say it's for Yemen. LAUGHTER

Like those people, the people who've seen those people and are just like, damn, can't we just get this away? The people coming up on 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 this generational swing, which is long overdue 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. These accounts of the Columbia 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. They go, that's what you're being taught? I...

They're not being taught anything useful, they're being made into activists. And, you know, as I've often said, the joke was on people like me who always assumed these people would graduate with these useless degrees and totally useless people.

It had no insight that was original and no critical faculties or 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, somebody who publishes one of my first books has a reprint rights. They had a thing a little while ago because they had a town hall meeting and a junior member of staff said that he didn't want to be involved in the publication of J.K. Rowling's latest best-selling 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 in his first job's friend might mind. No, not doing it. Goodbye. Your job is up for advertising tomorrow and lots of smart people will apply. I don't know why companies don't Reagan Airport worker like crazy.

I don't know. They're scared of the kids. And as I say, going back to the parenting analogy, if you try to satisfy that and coddle that and encourage that, all they'll realize...

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- Yeah, I think that the roots of that, 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 in which there is a larger truth and a larger system of values. And if you rebel from inside that system to the extent that you're destroying both freedom of speech and the values, well, then you're outside the circle and out you go. Well, yeah, but that's, as you know, that's the problem that liberalism in almost every version always has. Even classical liberalism has this problem baked into it.

I think that the answer to that lies in, you know, what my late friend Rodney Scruton described as the widest application of the first person plural, which is the we of the nation. You know, the idea being that 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...

So help me if I fall really badly off course. So to say the thing with the baseball tournament was... But the point is, is that if you support a team, you will say after the match, we did really well. And the we 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 we did it. And it's interesting. And it's very moving. You feel a part of it.

The widest application you can do that is with the nation state. Any wider than that, you end up with 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 wrote 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. I would say you should have tried writing it. But I came to the conclusion there that nations in the West would survive or fall individually 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 Norwegian politician who said to me some years ago, there's a reason why, although we have the same energy reserves as Venezuela, there's a reason we're Norway and Venezuela is Venezuela. The reason is that we made better decisions.

So if it doesn't take long for, indeed, you can do it in one generation, as we know from Venezuela, you make a couple of bad decisions and you will find 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, 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 anti-left movement. A lot of that is Trump, but it's not entirely relegated to Trump support. You're seeing it in France, obviously, with the rise of national rally as an alternative to Macron. In Britain, you would see that if you actually had a conservative party, which you haven't had for a couple of decades at this point, minimum.

But 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 we without any reference to meritocracy. So, for example, if you look at sort of the platform for National Rally, economically speaking, National Rally's platform is

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, welfare increases, wealth tax is part of their platform. And so what they're doing is they're fighting back against the excesses of the left

culturally and in terms of immigration, but not economically. And so 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 held 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 typically works is that society, if you're going to create, you know,

Over broad distinctions, you could say that there are 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. They're proportionally produced to their economic interests.

inputs and outputs are proportionate in society. And in a 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 Rockefeller goes to the same church as his employees, they look at Rockefeller and they say, "Okay, well, 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's no sense of common fabric that holds everybody together. Well, I mean, that's just happened in France with Macron because Macron managed, 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 had to create his own party once he'd been elected president. I mean, it was insane.

But Macron was a sort of safe pair of hands in the view of the French electorate, among other things because the former banker, and they thought he knew about the economy, in fact.

His background as a bank does not confirm he did know about the economy. But it was pretty devastating for him and his party that 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, 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 a lot of parties in Europe have realized that if you go right-wing on identity and left-wing on economics, you've got a winning formula. I don't approve it because I don't think there's any point in just getting power for power's sake.

or at least you better know what you're going to do with it. I think that there's just, I mean, 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 Fatelli d'Italia is raising in Italy, is

All of these movements across the continent, and by the way, this was a big reason for British Euroscepticism, 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 the spectrum, most of the countries in Europe. I genuinely, I put it out there as a possibility.

When you realize that, you know, some of Fratelli d'Italia's bass are Mussolini-ite in a way. They certainly think Mussolini wasn't as bad as Hitler. They think they had a slightly bad rap from the 1940s. In France, why are the Le Pens always, why does it always have to be a member of the family? Is it because of a desire to show the origins back in Vichy? Maybe, maybe.

Vlaams Belang in Belgium, collaborationist party in the war, and Vlaams Blok. 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 the European continent effectively land 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'd break bread with. And it includes some people who are almost certainly Nazi. And 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 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 that's the paradox of isolationism. It's always attractive and it's always deadly. So to kind of bring us back full circle, it seems to me that

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 that weirdness has...

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. We could encourage it to be more so. Yes, absolutely. And we should encourage it, in my opinion, to be more so. 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, their replacement rate is something like 1.2. They have no humans. Their economy is about the size of the economy of the state of Florida, like in total. It is a very small economy with a super corrupt oligarchic leadership. And yet they're posing a world threat. Iran is...

almost totally broke, they have no money. - You could make Iran broke tomorrow. - And their military tech, by the way, sucks. I mean, 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 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 yet 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 harsh and difficult world and seems to prefer the sort of wall-y face.

We're on a spaceship on our own as the machines feed us into 300-pound obesity. Yeah. Well, yes, that's right. Waiting for the virtual reality sex headset to come online. Waiting for the next iteration of the art. No, I mean, I agree. I think this is because of a fundamental attitude shift that has to happen and will happen.

I think people should look at the opposite. We'll always do two things. First, the international. You're completely right. I mean, it's absurd that Iran or North Korea or Russia or 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 real thing is this question of it's happened 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 that 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. A lot of people I spoke to in Israel thought the young generation in Israel weren't up to the challenge. 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 mean, I don't want the sort of overweight girl on an American campus dyeing 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 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 system's 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 it's just easier and so on. If you actually have a society that remembers that it needs ambitions,

then everything is different. I mean, and that, I do think there are very few countries which can say the future is going to be better. But if you can say it, you win everything. I mean, it would be, you know, I sort of wouldn't quite believe it if, I'm a great Francophile, I wouldn't quite believe it if somebody told me that, you know, France's greatest days are ahead of her. It's slightly hard to imagine. Yeah.

You could say that America's greatest days could be ahead of her. You could say that. And you could certainly make it happen. And I think that 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 a...

an unpleasant, bitter, vengeful person who attributes every lack of happiness in my life to something else. You know, the state didn't give me a girlfriend. And, you know, all that, the reason why I'm still living at my parents is because of white supremacy or whatever you want to do, transphobia. Yeah.

The reason why no one will employ me is not that I look like a human catastrophe, but because of the patriarchy, you know. You can do all that, but you have a miserable life ahead, a miserable life. You will spend it all just wading through a banal hell. Or you can say, I choose another route. I choose the path of heroism. I choose the path of courage.

I'll define myself, 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 who are sentient, actually, if you put it like that to them, they know which one they'd rather have. The ones who know they're going to fail anyway will do the firsts.

But the ones who are not going to fail, of course, are going to choose a second. They must be helped on that path. So to finish, I would be remiss if I had not asked your opinions on the 2024 election. Which one?

The only one that matters. So, obviously... The Bulgarian election is the one we're fighting against. Yes, the one between the former presidents of the United States and the dementia-ridden current presidents of the United States. 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 night nurse diaper changing. But...

Looking forward to this election, do you have any predictions? What do you think the... Why don't we start with predictions, and then what do you think the consequences of the outcome would be on either side? Well, I think the most likely one at the moment is that Trump wins. I think the Democrats have finally had their really big problem exposed. I'm amazed that so much of the media was able to cover up for Biden. I think he's extremely cruel.

what his family are putting him through and I think that um he should be I mean you know 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 gerontocracy of the Democrat Party has not spent long enough cultivating a good next generation. You know, Feinstein, Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, they wouldn't let go. So I think the Democrats are in a hideous position everywhere you go. Trump, if he's disciplined, if he listens to some advice...

if he can avoid the traps that are set for him, that were even set the other night ineptly by Biden, to distract him from his achievements in office and get him onto the things that were not good and the pettinesses. Trump, if he's disciplined, could certainly pull it off. And Lord only knows what will happen then. I mean... But it's more...

May I 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 great form. I've never seen him in this, frankly. 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 obviously beyond me. My favorite thing about 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, without ever having done anything other than earning an ed degree from a university named for her husband. 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? 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's finger painting stopped 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 really quite dark and it's sort of macabre comedy with

There's a precedent, isn't there? Because Mrs. Wilson, famously, her husband had a stroke and she covered over for it and ran the country. To be fair to Edith Wilson, he wasn't running for re-election. 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 part 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 COVID, they said, well, there's a lot of confusions, 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 Obama era, they said, 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 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 a tack, doing handsprings in the back, barricading Virgil in 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. Yeah.

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 knew the Captain Raynaud in Casablanca, right? There's gambling going on here. Because for them to admit that they knew this all along would be to expose themselves as just party apparatchiks. So 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 they all knew full well that he was just the senile 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 mean, 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 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. If 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 Jen Psaki phenomenon. 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 regard it as a team sport, and they've got to back their team. I think there's just something fundamentally corrupting about that. Of course there's going to be.

And the main thing about it is it's boring. It's really, really boring. Everybody knows what they're going to say. Everybody can predict every move. The G7, Joe was merely looking to find another parachutist. He wasn't weirdly wandering off and Giorgio Maloney having to do a double spin to kind of grab him back. It was perfectly normal and perfectly predictable. It's boring. I knew they were going to say that.

But yeah, 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 the country. I mean, there were 11% of the people polled 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 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 DouglasMurray.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. Great pleasure.

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