Transcript: Piers Morgan On UK Migrant Crisis & Tommy Robinson – PBD Podcast 682

Came on that one, fiery, 30 something million views and then it was a back and forth and then.

But also with what’s going on with London. So right now in US Mamdani just became the mayor of New York City, financial capital of the world. Prior to that, the financial capital of the world was London.

PIERS MORGAN: Right.

Comparing London and New York’s Political Landscape

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So you guys had a 400 years. We had a 400 years. And you know when Americans sometimes look at Europe and they look at EU, they’re like, wow, look, London’s lost, they’ve lost their identity. Look what’s going on to them.

And we had Dominic Tarzinski was here from Poland. He said we’ll never do what London is doing. We’ll never do what EU is doing. What can New Yorkers if you can give them advice to what look for? You guys have Sadiq Khan. I think he’s the first three term mayor in London ever. Right. Muslim guy himself. What happened to London after he came in that New Yorkers can expect?

PIERS MORGAN: It’s interesting because I think there’s been a slight mischaracterization of the comparison between Mamdani and Sadiq Khan. They’re both Muslims, but Sadiq Khan is very much a establishment Labour figure in the UK. He’s not a progressive woke left guy on many issues. Mamdani is full on self acclaimed socialist. That’s not Sadiq Khan.

Sadiq Khan, the parallel I said with Mamdani, he keeps winning elections because the opponents they put up against him have been universally useless.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: This is Sadiq.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. So he’s had a very easy run and to be fair to him, he’s won reelection twice. Mamdani was up against Cuomo who I always felt was damaged goods. I felt if you’re going to put a moderate up against him who actually was new and fresh and interesting, he probably could have done better or she could have done better. So Mamdani had a bit of a clean run against the damaged guy, I felt.

But there’s no doubt this is a seismic moment for New York. I mean, it’s the biggest city in America. It’s one of the great capital cities of the world. It’s in many ways the heart of capitalism itself. And here you’ve got a guy out there not just espousing a socialist philosophy, but seemingly utterly determined to try and deliver it.

Now, I would say, look, Mr. Mamdani, this is all very well offering everybody everything for free, but there’s a reason socialism hasn’t worked anywhere in the world for any sustained period of time. At some point somebody has to pay for this. So who’s going to pay for all this?

And the answer will be what’s happened with the Labour government in the UK. The taxes aren’t set by Sadiq. He has a tiny bit of power over local taxation. But the Labour government came in with a thumping majority just over a year ago. Massive. One of the biggest majorities of modern times. A real repudiation of years of very poor rule by the Conservative Party under a series of prime ministers.

And they promised all sorts of things. Prosperity is coming, hope is coming, all these things. And it’s been a complete disaster. And they’re now about to unleash a budget in about three weeks time, which they’re already setting the stall by, is going to be a total U-turn on all their pledges in the election campaign. They said they wouldn’t raise income tax. They’re going to say they wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t do that, they’re going to do it all because they’ve realized they can’t pay for all the promises they made.

And I think this is what’s going to happen in New York.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: How ugly things are going to be in New York.

The Socialist Challenge in New York

PIERS MORGAN: Well, it’s going to get very interesting politically, I think, because Mamdani is clearly the most charismatic figure the Democrats have had really for a long time. Since Obama, you could argue, even more charismatic than Obama for maybe he’s more engaging. Actually, I think he’s more engaging.

And look, he’s an Arsenal fan like me, a big Arsenal fan. So we have that in common. And it’s not that I object to his aspirations, it’s just that often with socialists there’s a complete disconnect between the aspiration and the ability to deliver.

Now, if we come back in two years time, let’s be clear, if Mamdani, within two years manages to deliver on his socialist agenda in a way that is deemed to be successful and popular, massive transformative moment for the Democrats leading into the next general election.

I don’t think he can. I think the opposite will happen. I think he’ll either, like a lot of these guys once they get power, pivot more to the center ground, or he will try and force through these socialist policies. It won’t work. And he will become the stick to beat the Democrats with leading into the next general election.

So there’s massively high stakes here because the Democrats have nobody else who has any real charisma. Nobody. And in fact, the most charismatic people on the left in America right now, you could argue are Mamdani, AOC and Bernie Sanders. So you’ve got a bunch of socialists dominating the news cycle for them. Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And what do you do with that right when you’re seeing that part taking place? Because, you know, on the other side, Nancy Pelosi stepping down, Newsom, you hear that voice coming up and you’re an interesting place because you do business in New York, you have a property, I believe in LA, you’re in London, you’re going back and forth. So you kind of are able to compare all those different climates.

But going back to UK London, so we see the videos, we see Tommy Robinson. I have Tommy Robinson. I know you guys have had your set of back and forth and I’ve followed it over the years of what’s happened. But what do you think about what Tommy says? Not his background, not any of the criminal stuff, not any of that stuff that maybe you guys have issues with. I’m not trying to do the personal stuff.

What do you think about what Tommy is showing when he’s going in the streets, having 100,000 people showing up? A lot of people in London finally are coming out saying the Overton window of immigration. Not even people in London. The story came out last week. They’re even more aggressively pro anti-immigration than America. They’re like, we don’t want any more of this.

For you, somebody who is from there, what have you noticed the changes in London since Muslims started entering decades ago?

Tommy Robinson and the Immigration Debate

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I think the problem has been massively exaggerated. However, there is a rising problem. That’s how I would categorize it myself.

Tommy Robinson resonates with people because of two things, I think. One, he was absolutely right about the grooming gang scandal in the north of England. It was a horrendous scandal involving almost exclusively British Pakistani men abusing young white English girls. That was the scandal and it was going on for years. It was horrific.

These girls were being appallingly abused by a particular section of the community, but nobody dared say what that community was because they were trapped in woke ideology that you can’t name a criminal that doesn’t suit the woke agenda.

And so Tommy Robinson was one of those people that early on began calling this out, and he was right to do so, and he deserves credit for doing it. Mainstream media weren’t completely oblivious. One guy on the Times actually exposed it originally and kept banging that drum.

But many people in the establishment in the UK conspired to cover it up. They didn’t want this. They thought it would be too much of a powder keg to say what actually happened, which is, this was British Pakistani men abusing white English girls. That was it. And they should have been clear with what was going on. So Tommy Robinson deserves credit for that.

Let’s not get into his background. I have my issues about it. I have my issues about some of the sanitization of who he is when he comes on American shows, because he tends to, I think, be very disingenuous, park all that.

Why is he also gathering momentum now with his marches, which used to be, you know, really a bunch of thugs running around, you know, attacking police and so on, but it’s morphed into a much bigger number of people. Many of them are completely peaceful. Many of them share his concerns about immigration failures in terms of policy failures in the country for decades now. And again, on that specific, he’s right.

And the reason he’s right is you can go back to really, it’s interesting, I think, the way this has played out. Tony Blair in the early 2000s, opened the floodgates on immigration, but to Eastern Europe. And so we suddenly had a massive influx of people from Eastern Europe into the UK, and this was deemed to be a good thing.

And then it became a thing that was slightly out of control. And then generally, immigration seemed to spiral out of control, both legal and illegal. We started getting this problem on the boats coming over from France. It’s now up to 50, 60,000 people a year are coming in illegally on these small boats. No one appears to have any idea how to stop this happening.

But more, I think, more damagingly, two years ago, we had a net migration in the UK of legal migration of nearly a million people. Now, to put it in context, we only have just under 70 million people in the UK. You bring in a million people a year legally and add them to the already creaking infrastructure.

You know, we have the much vaunted national health system. The NHS was designed in the 50s for a population of 50 million. We now have a population of nearly 70 million. So comparative to America, we’re a fifth of the size. But in comparison to where we were in the 50s, we are massively bigger population.

The strain on all of our infrastructure, all our public services has been getting worse and worse and worse in direct correlation to the size of our population. And that is what’s been fueling a lot of the anger. A lot of people add the pandemic, add the cost of living crisis. So add years of really tough times for a lot of people, particularly working class people in Britain.

And they see a lot of people coming in either illegally or with the blessing of the state, with many dependents, and they see with the illegal migrants coming over on the southern border, they get put in three, four star hotels, they get treated way better than the way that many people are living their lives who are in the country legally already. And it causes a lot of resentment.

Then you add inevitably when you get these kind of numbers coming in that you’re going to get migrants committing crimes. And when they do, this becomes a hugely inflammatory thing. So again, on that aspect of it all, Robinson is correct.

The Muslim Population Growth in the UK

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So if you look at this number, this is estimated Muslim population in UK by percentage from 1983 till today. I’m sure you’ve seen this. Half a million, 1983, 1%. And then the crack, 1 million 1997, 14 years later, and then 2 million and then 4 million and a 4.5, some say 5 million today, 6, 7% of the population.

You are flirted with the concept of wanting to run for Prime Minister. I heard. You know, whether you’re joking or you’re being serious, you know, if there is a crazy personality that could pull it off, you probably have the personality to pull it off.

But let’s just say you do. Say, you know what, I’m going to get in there and I’m being hired as a, you know, true, you know, strategic, or I’m going to run for this. Do you think this growth, the way it’s going right now getting to 10, 20, 30%. Do you think it is a good idea to keep allowing people to come in to combine the Islam way of thinking, what their ideas are and coexist with the Western ideology?

Immigration and National Identity Concerns

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I think there are certainly issues which are serious to be considered. For example, it’s been reported there are as many as potentially 85 unofficial Sharia courts in the UK now, which are not operating under UK law. They’re operating in their own law for their own communities. That clearly is not a good thing in a country like the UK.

I would say, look, we have a very high Muslim population now, comparative percentage-wise to the United States. In fact, I think we’re not far off in terms of total numbers to the whole of America. So we have a lot of Muslims who live in the UK. We’ve always been a very multicultural, very tolerant place. That’s why people want to come and live there. A bit like America, I would say the vast majority—I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—the vast majority of Muslims living in the UK have assimilated perfectly well and lived perfectly peaceful lives which contribute to society.

The problem is, I think, coming from the sheer volume of people coming in and the sheer volume coming in illegally as well, where, as you’ve had in the United States, people have actually no idea who these people really are, how radicalized they may be, what their plans may be when they get to the United Kingdom. And then you see the quite disturbing spectacle of protests, say in London during the Israel-Hamas war, where people are brazenly supporting Hamas in these protests. Hamas is a prescribed terror group in the United Kingdom. That should not be happening.

So there is a rising concern which Robinson has tapped into, and some would say—his critics would say—he’s fueled it for his own devices, but he’s tapped into a genuine concern. And the worrying thing for the government should be that as their popularity plunges, the popularity of people like Robinson and like the Reform Party under Nigel Farage, although those two don’t get on, you’re seeing a rising sentiment in the UK that we’re losing our identity as a country and what should we do about that?

Whilst preserving the UK’s historic position of being a welcoming, tolerant country, proudly multicultural, how do you juggle that with the sheer volume of people coming in and the impact that’s having on local communities? And how do you stop communities developing within communities? In other words, how do you stop the fragmentation of our society where you have little separate worlds developing in all major cities and towns?

These are genuine concerns. And for people, the old days used to be shut down these conversations by people saying, “Well, you’re racist.” We’re long past that stage. People now openly talk about this in UK on political shows and so on, and you’re no longer just labeled a racist if you express concern about immigration. Everybody feels that this is getting unsustainable. So the question is, what do we do about it?

Personal Perspective on Raising Children in the UK

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So you have how many kids?

PIERS MORGAN: You have four kids. Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So four kids, but they’re grown, right?

PIERS MORGAN: They’re 32 down to 13.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Oh, so you do have a 13-year-old?

PIERS MORGAN: 13-year-old, yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Okay, and then what’s the oldest after 13?

PIERS MORGAN: 32. Well, my youngest boy is 24.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: If you were to start all over again, and you’re 25 today and you know you’re capable, meaning you know you’re shining on camera, you’re very comfortable being under the fire. That’s your comfort zone. You know you’re going to go make money no matter where you go—here, any other country. Would you choose to raise your four kids where you’re at, or would you move out of the country?

Historical Context and Current Challenges

PIERS MORGAN: I would, and I would remind people we’ve been through a lot more difficult times than this. I think a lot gets amplified by social media, and that can be a very good thing or a very bad thing. My grandmother was 19 at the start of World War II, and she was 25 when it ended. As she always said to me, “I lost six of the best years of my life,” she said. “However, I then went from 25 to 94 and had a brilliant 70 years after that.”

So imagine living through World War II. Imagine the kind of conversations you and I would have been having about that, about the impending threat of Nazi domination, of Nazis taking over the UK. We face bigger challenges than this. This is a challenge that’s come, in my opinion, across the whole of Europe—the sweeping migration, much of it coming from countries that have been at war, whether it’s Syria, Iraq, or wherever it may be. But you’ve had millions and millions and millions of people deposed from their homes or fleeing war-torn situations and sweeping across the continent of Europe and wanting a better life for their family, which I completely understand. But it has got unsustainable.

And it’s not just a problem for the UK. It’s a problem for Germany, for France, for many of the European countries. They’re all facing the same challenges. Nobody at the moment, it seems to me, has a clear idea of what we do about this, other than I look at somewhere like the United States. I look at the way Donald Trump just slammed the brakes on the Southern border almost instantaneously and reduced the number of people coming in from two and a half million a year to literally a couple of thousand a month. And you look at that and you think, well, okay, you can control borders. You just have to have the determination to do it.

Trump’s Immigration Policy and Its Effectiveness

I also think Trump has universal support in America when he says that anyone who’s here illegally in the United States who then commits a crime outside of their immigration status should be deported. Where the flashpoint comes and where it’s an interesting thing as to whether other countries like the UK follow the Trump philosophy on this is where you start deporting people who have been here for a number of years illegally, but who have been maybe working, paying taxes, contributing to society, bringing up kids and so on. What do you do with those people?

I understand that they want to create an atmosphere of you have to come in legally and if you don’t, then you can’t stay here. I understand that. But you don’t want America to lose its inherent sense of compassion and empathy either. And I think some of the images for me of ICE running into Home Depot and grabbing people who are undocumented and wanting to throw them out, living in LA, as I do a lot of the time, the fear that’s engendered amongst the community in LA is not a good thing.

So I think there’s a balance to be struck here, albeit you cannot look at Trump’s overall immigration policy and not think it’s been extremely effective so far. And you’ve got to look at the hypocrisy of the left when they go after Trump. It’s my favorite question for my lefty friends, my liberal woke friends, and I used to identify happily as liberal. I just find nothing in common with these people.

But I say to them, “How many people did Barack Obama deport in eight years as president?” They never know. They can tell exactly how many Trump has, but they never know how many Obama did. And I tell them it’s 3 million people. Just Google it. You can Google it. So, A, they don’t want to know. B, when they find out, they’re completely shocked. C, I said he was known as “Deporter in Chief” in Mexico. That was his nickname. This guy deported more people pro rata per year than any president in the history of the United States. And yet the same rules do not apply to Obama than do to people like Trump.

So I think there’s a lot to learn from the way Trump’s gone about it, albeit with some caveats.

What Would Churchill Do?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So you said something about your grandma being 19 to 25 during the war, “I lost six of my best years, but I lived to 94, 70 years, some of the greatest years of my life.” Right? When you had to overcome that war, you had this one guy named Winston Churchill. So just curious, you’re saying Muslims that come in and they assimilate, great, no problem. I don’t have any problem. We have Muslims in our company that we work with and they’ve assimilated, they love America.

If you ask the Muslim Council of Britain, it’ll say that 75% of Muslims in Britain have assimilated and see themselves as Brits. “I’m a Brit, I consider myself proud Brit as well.” But 25% don’t, depending on the numbers you look at. How would Winston Churchill today—would Winston Churchill be tolerant with the borders? Would he be, “Yeah, it’s okay, let him come in”? Would he handle the threat? Think about how his wiring was, this is your world. What do you think he would have done today?

PIERS MORGAN: I think he’d have been tough. I think he’d have been very—

PATRICK BET-DAVID: In what way?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I think he’d be very protective of our borders in a way that he’d be very protective against the threat of Nazism to our way of life. I think that he would have understood inherently that actually having open borders, as Ronald Reagan said—the best line ever was the simplest one—”If you have an open border, you don’t have a country.” Of course you don’t. The very definition of a country is something that has a border.

So the moment you allow your border to be completely open, you’re just going to be a hostage to your own misfortune. And that’s what we’re seeing happening again. It’s a big problem for the continent of Europe. It’s not just a problem for the UK. The difference we have is twofold. One, we’re an island, the United Kingdom, and secondly, we’re detached from the European Union, not just geographically, but financially and every other way now through leaving the EU through Brexit.

So we haven’t a lot of friends in France, for example. They’re not really that bothered about helping us with the small boats crisis because why should they help us at all given the pain we inflicted on them by leaving the EU? So there’s a lot of that going on. But they’ve all got their own problems.

The Changing Face of European Cities

I was in Paris recently and you could say, I think you’d be fair to say, Paris is a very different place when you walk around to what it was 30 years ago. And I know—my wife is half Parisian, was born and raised there—and so you see it changing now. I got no problem. America is the classic example of a country where every city you go to, you’ll meet myriad people from myriad different countries, myriad different backgrounds and so on. And the United States is a great example of how this can work.

But you have to have control of your borders and you have to have a sensible, tough immigration policy. The irony for me is when you try and become—I’m an exceptional alien. That’s my status on my visa status for the United States. I always laugh. They literally call you aliens. My visa is tied to my work, and I’m here as an exceptional—I’m a little bit perturbed that I have to be called an alien, but the fact they call me an exceptional alien, I’ll take it.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Respect.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. But the amount of paperwork and money you have to spend on getting through your visa immigration status, each time I have to renew it is indicative of a country that does apply these rules. And the reason that people get so angry about those who circumnavigate the rules is a lot of them have had to do the same.

If you go through the proper process to go into a country legally or to set up your home there with your family, whatever it may be, obviously you’re going to really resent people who wash up on a small boat who might be criminals. You’ve no idea, because the UK government has no idea, by the way, who’s on these boats. For example, we found in one purge that 30%, one year, all came from Albania, which is not a war-torn country, it’s a country in Eastern Europe. But there’s a lot of gangs and these were gang members coming into the UK, predominantly the major cities, to deal in things like drugs.

So they did a deal with the Albanians and it stopped that stone dead. But now we have people coming in from other countries. So what would Churchill have done?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: What do you think he would have done?

PIERS MORGAN: I think he—what would he have done?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Seriously, what do you think he would have done? Just think his profile.

PIERS MORGAN: I certainly think right now he would have put the clamps down on more people coming in.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Would he have sent anybody back from the 7% that came here? How would he have treated some of the criminals? How would he have treated some of the knife sort of stuff that’s going on?

Immigration and Integration Challenges

PIERS MORGAN: So I would say he certainly wouldn’t have just picked out the Muslim community. We have a lot of different communities. Like I said, the grooming gang scandal in America was very high profile, attracted a lot of heat, obviously, but we have a lot of different religions, nationalities living in the UK. I don’t think he would have singled out Muslims.

I think what he would have taken a more pragmatic view and gone, we have too many people in this country now. There’s too much pressure on our public services. Some people are going to have to leave. Who are those people? Well, anyone who commits a crime who’s come in here to this country legally but commits a crime should be deported. I think most people feel that.

And then you’ve got to stop the people coming in illegally. What is the most effective way of doing that? No one’s had a good plan so far. The Conservative Party boasts about their Rwanda plan, but it was so ridiculous. It was like a tiny handful of people would have ever got on those planes to Rwanda. It was never going to work in the way they kept trying to promise it would.

So what is the most effective way to do it? I actually think that if Trump was in charge, for example, he’d probably say to Emmanuel Macron, if you don’t stop these boats leaving your shores because it has to be done at the French end, then we’re going to tariff you 1,000% on your wine and cheese coming into the UK. He would have taken a brutal move like that.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Why are they not doing that right now?

PIERS MORGAN: I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re not tougher on the French. You’ve got to do a deal with the French on this. You’ve got to say, look, sorry, you’re letting all these people get on these boats. Once they’re at sea, there’s hardly any way to stop them. And then once they wash up on a shore, they are legally allowed to remain as potential asylum seekers.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Is it fear? Is it something you guys need from them? Is it something, is it a history of, you know what I mean?

The Need for Strong Leadership

PIERS MORGAN: Patrick, it’s tough leadership. Churchill was a very flawed character in many ways. He was a big smoker, big drinker. He said some pretty ugly things over the years about people, all of these things. But he was also brilliantly talented, an amazing writer, a painter, musician, also incredibly complex, talented, brilliant man.

But when it came to our biggest ever challenge of facing the threat of Nazism, he was the one who stood up and convinced the British public, we can beat these people, when nobody else thought we could. And for that alone, he’s my greatest ever Britain, albeit like all my great Britons and all my great favorite people, flawed, right?

But I think we need a strong, probably flawed character to come forward and go, right, we have this problem. What are we going to do about it? Let’s have a proper open debate where people who contribute are not immediately branded racist if they think we have too many people in the country and too many people coming in both legally and illegally.

What are we going to do about this? And stop putting people who come in illegally in very luxurious hotel accommodation which enrages local communities who are living in far lower standards of living.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Who are some names? Who are some names? Because remember, Roger Stone was the first guy that looked at Trump and said, you hear the stories where it’s like, this guy’s going to be the president one day. You can be the president one day, you can go become president one day, right? And Trump’s like, nah, I’m a business guy, I’m doing what I’m doing. Who are some names that you say they would have the brass and the balls to go out there and put their foot down?

The Mediocrity of Modern Politics

PIERS MORGAN: Here’s the problem. I don’t really see the person. I’ll tell you why I don’t think I see that person. We now have a very mediocre tier of politicians in the United Kingdom. All the smart ones who’ve been genuinely successful in their own lives, they don’t want to poke their head into the political arena. It’s become too toxic, too damaging.

You tend to get absolutely fried for every peccadillo you’ve ever done in your entire life. Nobody who’s got probably the smarts and has been a success themselves wants to do it. So you’re left with a mediocre, it’s like being in any company and suddenly sort of lower ranking, lower middle management team suddenly run the company.

Well, there’s a reason that lower ranking middle managers, in most cases, they’re not as capable as the ones actually running the company. I feel like that about a political class in the UK, just across all the parties, there is a paucity of people that I think have the drive and the smarts to do it.

And Nigel Farage’s Reform Party are getting a lot of traction, I think by default because the others are so useless. But even he, when I listen to his economic policies, they don’t make any sense, right? He’s basically a bit of a one trick pony. He’s strong on immigration, albeit I’m not entirely sure he’s got the answers, but I hear him on the economy, I think he could be left wing.

So this is a problem. We’ve got to get back to attracting the best of the best who want to come in to run the country.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Could you see, would you be okay with a Muslim prime minister of UK?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You’d be okay. That wouldn’t do.

PIERS MORGAN: Absolutely. Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: See, that’s your concern, isn’t that at all?

Religious Leadership and Extremism

PIERS MORGAN: No, not at all. No. Listen, I don’t want a radicalized Muslim running the country. I don’t want a radicalized anything running the country. There’s a lot of radicalized elements of all religions, of all nationalities. I don’t like anyone who’s radicalized. It’s dangerous for any country to have people at the helm who are radicalized.

Do I think we have a particular problem in the UK with radicalized Muslims? I’m not convinced by that. I think there are radicalized Muslims and clearly the Muslim population is rising exponentially fast compared to other populations. So we are going to have to look at this and say, well, what do we do about this going forward in a way that you don’t look like you’re just picking on people because of their Muslim faith.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I respect the tolerance that you have of what could happen to Britain long term. Because I think sometimes when you’re in it and it’s gradual, like the whole thing about you put a frog in boiling water and you boil it slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then boom, he’s dead, it’s too late, right?

I think sometime when people are in it, they’re like, yeah, well, it’s okay with this, it’s okay with that, it’s okay with this. I think UK’s flirting would be intolerant and it’d be interesting to see who would rise up and want to do something about it.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, look, I go to a lot of Muslim countries. I’ve been in Saudi Arabia, I’ve been in…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: To me, the biggest thing is the extremists.

PIERS MORGAN: Exactly. Here’s my point, though. But also they have zero tolerance of people wanting to operate under their own laws when they go to those countries, for example. So the whole debate about Sharia law and so on, I can understand why a lot of Brits get exercised about that. Because if I went to Saudi Arabia or Qatar or somewhere and decided I would ignore the country’s laws and operate under my own laws while I was there, you wouldn’t get away with it.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Why would you be okay with that? Why would you be okay with that?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I wouldn’t.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No, no. What I’m saying is, so if you were okay with somebody who was a Muslim to become a prime minister and then say they’re the noble one, right? And they’re coming in, they actually love Britain. But it opens it up for an extremist. Like, I’m going to get in. Then they come in and they say, Sharia law. What are you going to do about it then? Because you’re making it a step ahead.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, but I don’t think you can tar the entire Muslim population with the brush of potential extremism in the same way that you get Christian extremists in America who committed appalling atrocities. I don’t assume that every Christian, I’m a Christian, I don’t assume every Christian in America is a potential extremist. I just think there’s got to be a…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You’re comparing the two?

PIERS MORGAN: No, no, I just think extremism is extremism. Yeah. It’s the same, isn’t it? It is.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No, I think extremism is extremism. To me, that’s not the part of it. But when you look at who is, like, for example, in America, I don’t care what part of the world you’re in. When Japanese came to the World Cup, you remember the story about the Japanese when they went to the World Cup? What were they doing afterwards?

At the end of the game, they were cleaning up the arena. Everyone’s like, what are they doing here? That’s what we do in Japan. So would I want a thousand Japanese neighbors?

PIERS MORGAN: Yes.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Would I want 10,000 Japanese neighbors? I don’t care what religion they are. I don’t care what God they believe in. They are their own people. They raise kids. They go and work. They don’t hate America. They don’t get up there and commit terrorists. You don’t hear stories like that from them. They just go and do their part.

Cultural Integration and Safety

PIERS MORGAN: Right. But I would argue this back. So I went to the Qatar World Cup, for example, for a week, felt completely safe. There was no hooliganism whatsoever.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: But that’s not the same as the extremists. These are two different…

PIERS MORGAN: No, I agree. I agree. But again, I think there are extremists everywhere, attached to all different groups. And I would say that I like the way the Middle East has been opening up in the last decade. I think it’s exciting, it’s dynamic.

I just interviewed Cristiano Ronaldo in Riyadh at his home there. One thing he said is it feels really safe, and it feels like it’s opening up in a way that’s good for families and everything else, and I think that’s great. I think we should be encouraging countries like that to continue the evolution that they’re on without sort of, I don’t like the tinge of you’re all potential extremists until you prove otherwise.

No, because I think it’s unfair to a whole, I mean, how many Muslims are there in the world? 1.4 billion. Are we really suggesting that 1.4 billion Muslims are all potential extremists? Because I don’t get that sense of the Muslims I know in London. I walk down my high street in London, there are Muslims running all sorts of different businesses. And honestly, they’re not extremists.

Immigration Statistics and SNAP Benefits

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Introducing the Future Looks Like Right collection. Not rush, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless. If we look at immigrants that come to America, what percentage of them are on SNAP the most? Have you seen this chart?

PIERS MORGAN: No.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Can you pull up this chart, Rob? So if you, statistics are going to show it to you. So if you look at stats on what percentage of SNAP in America, what communities are taking advantage of it the most? Rob? I think we sent it in Twitter in a group text where it breaks down who uses it the most and who doesn’t use it the most.

And stats will tell you, guess what? You’ll be able to look at that and say, okay, these communities, if it’s Armenian, if it’s Assyrian, if it’s Persian, if it’s this, I want to know about it. And then from there, you have to sit there and say, when people come here from XYZ country, they make America a great place. Let’s get some more of them. When people come here from XYZ countries, they don’t make the place a better place. Well, let’s do something about it as well.

PIERS MORGAN: Can you…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Did you find it, Rob? Umberto, can you guys send the chart? I think you know which one I’m talking about that breaks down exactly the SNAP benefits you will see in America. So while the government shutdown took place, food stamps by ethnicity, 45.6% of immigrants from Afghanistan are on SNAP. 42.4% from Somalia, 35% from Iraq. Then it’s Dominican, Caribbean native, Puerto Rican, Cuban.

So if I look at this number here, keep going all the way down, Rob. Keep going all the way down. All the way down, all the way down, all the way down. Okay, so then what do you see? Indians, 4.4%. Why are Indians not on SNAP? Indians are not Christians. I don’t care what the religion is.

Immigration, War, and Duty of Care

PIERS MORGAN: Okay?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I’m not sitting here saying, well, you know, but if you go all the way to the top and you look at SNAP, why are we inviting more from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq?

PIERS MORGAN: I mean, I need to study this in more depth. But certainly Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, I mean, these are people, I imagine predominantly who have fled war-torn countries. So they, by definition, when they come to America, going to be in poverty.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Yeah, but you know, when America was founded, it’s about getting the best to come over here, right? Like you run a business, you have one of the top shows. If when it comes down to debate, you’re running the number one show in the world when it comes down to debate. I don’t think anybody is doing a better job than you when it comes down to the debate shows.

But you would sit there and you would say, all right, can we look at the last 100 hires that we made? Yes. What school did they come from?

PIERS MORGAN: Okay.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And we’ll see a pattern. Who’s been here that has the highest retention ratio? And we’ll say University of Florida. Their tenure with our company is 3.8 years. You know, Florida State is seven months. I’m just making stuff up. FIU is 1.1. You know, such and such is like, guys, no more recruiting from FIU. I don’t know the people at FIU. I don’t know the people from Florida State. All I see is the tenure.

When they come in, they’re contributing to society in a positive way. I think from that standpoint, you have to consider who it’s coming in. I don’t care if you’re Muslim, Christian, you know, Jehovah’s.

PIERS MORGAN: Let me ask you a difficult question. So you fled your family? You’re right.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I lived there for 11 years.

PIERS MORGAN: From a war-torn place.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: We did.

PIERS MORGAN: Right. So take Iraq, for example. When I was editor of the Daily Mirror in the UK, I opposed the Iraq war before, during and after. It cost me my job in the end, after 10 years running the newspaper. But I think I was vindicated by what happened afterwards.

That war was fought on a false pretext. Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction, they never found them. And also there was this kind of subliminal, we need to respond to 9/11, we can take out Saddam. I never saw that connection. It seemed to me completely wrong. Much more arguable to go after where Bin Laden and his people were in Afghanistan.

So I look at Iraqis who were displaced by a war which many people, including me, would say was an illegal war in their country that caused utter devastation. And they come to somewhere like the United States, which has been the home for people like that ever since its inception and is lauded around the world for that, for being a place that you can come to from places like that.

But is there not a particular duty of care? Maybe I think there is. But is there not a duty of care to people who come from a war-torn place like Iraq where the United States, along with the UK and other countries wage that war, in my view, completely wrongly, in a way that caused their displacement, caused them to lose their homes, maybe lose their loved ones, and they come here for a better life, but when they get here, they have nothing.

Now that may explain some of those numbers, I don’t know. But certainly in that case, you’ve got to think, well, okay, if they’re the ones who are getting the SNAP benefits, okay, what is the correlation between the ones who were displaced because of the actions of the United States and the UK and the other allies that fought the Iraq war on their presence here in the United States? And is there a duty of care towards them?

I don’t think we should lose in the mix of all this a compassion towards genuine asylum seekers, particularly from countries ravaged by wars which we may have been complicit in starting, in my opinion, on a false pretext.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Yeah, I think that is a. I would sit there again, I would sit down. I would say, if we’re looking at anybody that’s coming in, if we cost some of this, let’s see what we can do about it right now. Of course, somebody in America could say, well, you caused all of it.

PIERS MORGAN: Right, right.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Okay, no problem. But if you’re coming to America and you hate America, I have no tolerance for you.

PIERS MORGAN: I agree with that.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And you don’t want to give anything back to the country. I have a hard time being here.

PIERS MORGAN: I agree.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: To me, you know what? It’s like, when I came here, I served the army. I’ve worked since the day I came to America, even when I was selling hats and shirts when I was 13, 14 years old. I love everything about this country. America, for me. And I think what ends up happening is when you’re in a family and was your father rich? Do you come from a wealthy family?

PIERS MORGAN: No, not at all. And I would add, my brother was a British army colonel in the Iraq war, fighting on the front lines.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Your brother was.

PIERS MORGAN: My brother was. So I just felt like I didn’t have a vested interest. You know, half my family have been pretty.

The Filtering Process

PATRICK BET-DAVID: But you know where I’m going. Here’s kind of where I’m going. Your kids, your four kids, you have money. When something happens, your money’s going to go to your kids right now, are you going to give it equally if one of them says, “I hate my dad, he’s the worst dad in the world”?

PIERS MORGAN: No, he’s a.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You’re not going to give it to him.

PIERS MORGAN: And I agree with you about people who come here and then vocally, that’s the problem.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: The problem ends up happening.

PIERS MORGAN: That’s a separate problem to the one I’m articulating.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: But no, but what I’m saying is the filtering. To me, it’s the filtering. Yes. If I see. If we do want. And by the way, the argument, some people in America are like, look, we don’t want anybody else to come in here. This is plenty, right? There are people that I’ve had on the podcast that wouldn’t even want me to be here right now. They’re like, you got lucky getting in here. Which is their argument. They have the right to have that argument.

PIERS MORGAN: How wrong is that argument?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I will tell you, I’m having this conversation. I got four kids. I’d like to have 20 kids. So I flirted with my kids the other day. This was about six months ago. I said, so it’s 50/50 jokes. It’s not 100% of a joke. So I said, hey, guys, what are you guys thinking about?

PIERS MORGAN: Surrogate.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: If daddy wanted to go with mommy and we have a surrogate, we have five girls that are going to have a surrogate, and you guys are going to have five siblings. My youngest son looks at me, tell me what surrogate is. I think I know what it is. I said, well, it’s Mommy and Daddy. It’s really our kid. But somebody carries for nine months. “I don’t want any of that.” I said, why not? “I don’t want any of that because it’s not in mommy’s belly. We run a mommy’s belly. I want someone that’s a mommy’s belly. If you guys want to make another kid, it has to be mommy’s belly.”

PIERS MORGAN: Right?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: The level of pride. This kid has to be in a Bet-David, that the mommy gave birth to the kid, I actually understand it and respect it. You understand what I’m saying? I respect it. So if somebody’s born in America and they’re kind of like, look, man, yeah, maybe we got lucky with you, Pat, but we got a lot of ones that came through and we didn’t get lucky with that.

PIERS MORGAN: Hate America.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: To me, when I think about guys like Churchill you’re talking about or Trump we’re talking about, you know, I cannot believe what he’s doing with ICE and you know, he single-handedly closed up the border. Crime has gone. Even Kamala Harris said we got the border wrong and they did a better job of it. I think there’s a little bit of flirting with tolerance and just looking the other way. Where, you know, when I talk, anytime.

PIERS MORGAN: I have somebody here from UK that.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I’m talking about UK stats. UK government doesn’t give any stats. You guys can’t even study what’s working, what’s not working. It’s like a secret. No. Because if you guys knew it would. So much more of the crime. Who was doing the crime? At least in America we can sit.

PIERS MORGAN: Down and look at.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Is black on black crime the most? Is it white on white crime? Is it white on black? Is it black on white? What is it? Percentage not based on numbers. Because of course there’s more whites living here. No one said, oh shoot, we’ll show it. Even though it goes against what the Democratic Party wants to see. No, we don’t want to talk about that. Because the fatherless communities, we need some stats.

I think if you looked at the stats and the data and it shows that any of the immigrants are coming from a certain country who assimilate, love the country, don’t want any entitlement programs, they create businesses, they create jobs, they make it safer. Let’s get more. If not, listen, keep it where it’s at. To me, that’s where it stops.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, listen, I don’t disagree with the ideology behind that. I mean, you should only want people who can come and contribute to society. I would add the caveat of the Iraq caveat, which is if you go and bomb a country and you destroy people’s lives, I do think a country like the United States, most prosperous country in the world does have a duty of care to bring some of those people into its country, as it has done with the Iraqi community.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: What if that’s a royal screw up on another administration that you never agreed with them because Trump doesn’t agree with Bush. And remember, if there’s any guy that has moral authority to say, I never supported that, worse, the guy that bought a full page ad, I think it was in USA Today, remember that one thing that he did back in the days, it’s like, “I am not for this war,” right? So maybe he’s saying, I didn’t do that.

PIERS MORGAN: Bush did that.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: That wasn’t my doing.

PIERS MORGAN: I’m changing it.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: We’re going to do different.

Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize

PIERS MORGAN: Well, the good thing under Trump is that clearly and unusually for a Republican president of modern times, he is a man who prefers peace to war. I mean, he shows that with his actions first in his first term and what he’s done now. I mean, now, I mean, this idea, the debate about whether he gets a Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for two fancy speeches eight months into his first tenure. I mean, absolutely insane. The idea Trump wouldn’t get one for simply getting the hostages released. Never mind anything else.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You want to know the craziest thing about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? You ready? You’re going to lose your mind when I tell you this. So you know how we always say eight months into being president, eight months into being president, do you know to win a Nobel Peace Prize, they have to nominate you before January 31st?

PIERS MORGAN: He did 11 days. 11 days. That’s ridiculous. That means someone did it. The day he inaugurated.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: That’s right there. The deadline for Nobel Peace Prize nomination is January 31st. The guy wins 2009, 11 days.

PIERS MORGAN: I didn’t know that. Did you not know?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: That’s the wildest story. What do you think about that?

PIERS MORGAN: Even more insane.

October 7th and Israel

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So, Piers, for you, the one thing that I think you probably have a lot of moral authority on this is the following. October 7th happens. Hamas attacks Israel. And we watch the whole thing, right? And then you do Bassem and then you host all of these debates and they’re like, wait a minute, what do they do to power? What is it going?

So you kind of go from the pendulum because I personally watch you go like this three, four times because it seems like you’re coming from a place that we’re like, they’re doing that. I’m not with that. Where did you go there day one to where are you now? Probably the most reasonable opinion is where you are today because you kind of watched it going back and forth. What’s your opinion on what happened there?

Israel-Gaza Conflict and Media Access

PIERS MORGAN: Well, first of all, October 7th was one of the most heinous terror attacks of modern times. The worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust in World War II. These are undeniable facts. Hamas committed an act that day which immediately established them as a terrorist organization, who therefore renounced any rights to any governmental power at the end of all this. So that all happened on October 7th with the scale of what they did. 1,200 people killed, nearly 7,000 wounded, 255 or 256 people kidnapped. I mean, absolutely despicable, horrific thing.

So for many months after that, to the angst of many on the pro-Palestinian side, and fury in some cases, I steadfastly defended Israel’s right to defend itself. In fact, I said they didn’t just have a right to defend themselves. But given that the Hamas official spokesman went on the airways about a week after the October 7th atrocity to say, “we’re going to keep doing this again and again,” the Israeli government had a duty, not just a right, but a duty to defend its people from further attacks from Hamas.

So, okay, I laid my credentials down. People like Bassem Youssef came on and gave me a very hard time. But I always platformed people on both sides throughout the world.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You always.

PIERS MORGAN: And the bigger the followings they had, the more passionate the better, because they were the ones getting the most of the hearing on the airwaves. And I believe my job is to hear all the voices, challenge them all, and let the viewers work out where they think the reality lies. And I continue, and I would still defend Israel’s right to defend itself. I mean, Hamas are a terror organization. I’ve never disputed that at all. And I don’t dispute it today.

So when people on the really more extremities of the pro-Israeli side accuse me of being a pro-Hamas guy, it’s so pathetic. Nothing I’ve ever said is anything other than they’re a disgusting terror group and should have no power after all of this and they should lay down their arms. And that’s going to be the big debate as to whether they do.

The Blockade and Media Restrictions

But then this year, and in particular, several things happened. One was the three-month blockade, which, you know, I’ve heard the arguments. There was no starvation, we never saw a starving Palestinian, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And one of the inherent problems actually with that and with a lot of the IDF blanket denials of things, or “we’re going to set up an inquiry and investigation when things go wrong, fog of war stuff happens.”

But the Israeli government’s persistent to this day refusal to allow independent media into Gaza to do their jobs has been a massive problem for their credibility. If you’ve nothing to hide or worry about in terms of what you’re doing, let war correspondents do their job. And as a journalist, I think it’s a fundamental principle which they have continued to abrogate in a pretty shameful way actually.

And it does inevitably raise in me as a journalist suspicions about what they’re hiding, which means they don’t want to let journalists in, particularly even since the ceasefire. Still, journalists aren’t allowed in by the Israeli government.

So the blockade I felt was likely to pass the threshold of the criminal act. You know, when you have a country that has the control over a border like Israel does over Gaza, allowing hardly any supplies of food or aid to go in, then I think that is a criminal act. Now a lot of the official bodies like the United Nations and others said the same thing, but Israel doesn’t take any of them seriously.

So again, I don’t know for sure what was happening in that period because I didn’t see any independent journalists reporting on it. I do know Palestinian journalists reporting on it and 220-odd have been killed during the conflict. So there’s not just a fog of war about this. There’s a deliberate suppression by the Israeli government of allowing journalists to do their job. International independent journalists. I think that’s to their great discredit.

So I didn’t like, I thought the blockade was just crossed every line. Then they undid the blockade but the bombardment was relentless. And I kept saying to people throughout the war from day one, I don’t know what a proportionate response is here. There have been flare-ups in this conflict going back seven decades. We have never seen anything on the scale of what Hamas did that day and we’ve never seen anything on the scale of the response by the Israeli government.

They’ve killed 65, nearly 70,000 people, the ones we know about. Obviously you take, again you have to take the figures from the Gaza-run Health Authority, the Hamas-run Health Authority Gaza, because there is no other way of establishing it. Historically those figures have normally proven to be quite accurate, but Israel keeps kind of fogging those numbers, deny them, obfuscate and so on, to which I say, well, let the journalists in, let’s find the truth. They don’t want to do that. So again, that’s my big bugbear with this, how you get to the actual.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Is it a genocide or a war?

Genocide Debate and Government Rhetoric

PIERS MORGAN: I don’t think it’s a genocide simply for one reason. The word genocide gets bandied about a lot. It means the willful, systematic destruction of a people. And I don’t think that’s what we’ve seen in Gaza, much as people on the pro-Palestinian side try and get me to say it. No actual declaration of genocide has been waged against any. I mean, even in Rwanda, they never established it as an international court, but it was a genocide.

So I didn’t know. I learned all this actually covering all this on my show. I had a bunch of genocide experts on. Many think it is a genocide, but many don’t think it is. But they all pointed out that actually the bar for reaching genocide is exceptionally high. And you know, as people have pointed out, there are other flashpoints around the world right now where probably many more people are getting killed. No one cares. No one’s putting any spotlight on it.

So I think that the rhetoric that’s come from people like Smotrich and Ben Gvir on the Israeli government side who keep, every time they gob off, and they’re very extreme, far-right guys, they clearly have had a plan almost from day one of this to turn the events of October 7th into an opportunity to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. And by that I mean to stick them out. And they’ve now been openly talking about this this year.

So once I saw that happening, I was like, okay, there are elements of this government who genuinely do want not just to dismantle Hamas and get the hostages released, they want to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza, they want to annex the West Bank. They said it. You can hear the tapes. And then I hear, “well, they don’t matter. Their opinions don’t matter.” They’re senior members of the government.

So I just felt that was, to me, yeah, I mean, this guy’s an absolute lunatic, as is Smotrich. And I’m sorry, they do matter. They’re serious players in this Israeli government. And so they have been waging a rhetorical campaign of wanting ethnic cleansing, which is a crime.

So I don’t think it’s reached the bar of a genocide simply by comparison to other places where it’s not been called a genocide. However, and I do, you know, I’ve bought the argument that if Israel clearly has nuclear weapons, they don’t admit it, but they clearly have them. If they wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, they could have done. I understand if you’re waging a deliberate genocide of a whole populace. You could do that. I get that argument. Okay.

But I do think they’ve got to be more accountable for what these guys on the government have been saying, because what they’re talking about is ethnically cleansing.

Trump’s Role in Peace Negotiations

Now, to Trump’s great credit, I think for this alone, you get the Nobel Peace Prize, never mind anything else. He got the hostages released, but he also made it clear to Netanyahu, you are not going to annex the West Bank. And I want the Palestinian people to come back to Gaza. And we’re going to rebuild this with a coalition of people helping to rebuild it and try and once and for all get this situation sorted in a way that we had with Northern Ireland, for example, near my country, where after decades and decades of conflict between warring neighbors, in the end, when nobody thought it could happen in the late 90s, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Senator Mitchell got together and they managed to barrel through a peace plan that has pretty well held steady ever since, and the killing stopped on both sides.

This can be done. It’s incredibly difficult. But I am delighted that Donald Trump, in my opinion, has barreled through some common sense into Netanyahu, who was being fueled by these guys.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Have you interviewed Netanyahu yet?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, three times, but not since the war started.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: That’s the part I’m talking about during the war. So have you reached out to him?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, yeah, he wouldn’t come on.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Why do you think he doesn’t want to answer these questions?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So you’ve invited him, but he won’t come on?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, many, many, many times. I’ve interviewed him three times before. I went to Jerusalem, went to his office for CNN back in 2011, 2012.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So if he agreed to have you on and go, you’d go to Israel to interview him?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Very interesting that he hasn’t come out with you.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay.

Past Interviews and First Amendment Rights

PATRICK BET-DAVID: In regards to, you know, you’ve had Ben Shapiro on when he was super young, when you were, you know what I’m talking about? When you had him on your, when you guys had that conversation, had Alex Jones on when he came in with the whole 1776.

PIERS MORGAN: Well, he had a petition to deport me. It was quite funny, actually, because he said that because of my opposition to criticism of the Second Amendment, that I should be deported. And in fact, Obama was president and it was done on the White House petitions page. And if it reached, I think it was a threshold of 25,000 signatures, the president had to give a verdict, and it went to like, 120,000 people signed the thing to have me deported and Obama.

I was on air at the time and the news came. “You’re not going to believe this. Obama’s just saved you for the American people.” I went, “what do you mean?” They said, “you can stay.” He said that you’re covered by your First Amendment rights which apply to anybody who’s living in America, citizen or not. You’re covered by your First Amendment rights to criticize the Second Amendment. And he was absolutely right. I was.

So, you know, I don’t want to re-litigate my whole view about guns in America. It rapidly became clear to me that whilst I may have validity to my views, these were not views shared by many Americans. And they didn’t want to hear a Brit lecturing on how to lead their lives. I get it. But on that point, they both missed the fundamental point, which is I was entitled under my First Amendment rights to criticize the Second Amendment and so I should be.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And your position hasn’t changed about Second Amendment?

Gun Control and Cultural Differences

PIERS MORGAN: Well, no, my position has changed in this regard. I would say that I come from a country that used to be steeped in guns. Everybody had a gun 200 years ago in Britain and now very few people have a gun. We had a horrific mass shooting like Sandy Hook at Dunblane in Scotland in the mid-90s. I was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time.

It led to a very interesting campaign started by a conservative prime minister, John Major, taken up by Tony Blair and Labour Province. There was a cross-party agreement that we were going to stop most private ownership of guns to try and stop this happening. Because the person who did it in Dunblane, Thomas Hamilton, had built up a big arsenal of private weapons and it was successful. And now we’ve not had a mass shooting since.

In Australia, they had a horrific one in Hobart, in Tasmania, 35 people got murdered around the same year, actually they did a buyback program and I think 600,000 or 700,000 guns got handed in and the government paid people for them. They’ve not had a mass shooting like that since Hobart. So, you know, it’s different culture, America.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Are you more open to it now?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, no. What I would say is this. America has 400 million guns in circulation. Neither Britain nor Australia had more than, you know, a tiny.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: But with all the knife crimes that’s going on in London, we have a.

PIERS MORGAN: Problem with knife crime. Okay, so.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: But why do you think you have a knife crime problem?

PIERS MORGAN: Too many knives in use on the streets. I mean, I would make the punishment for being caught with a knife on the street, extremely poor. We have a lot.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: We probably have more knives than you guys have. How come you don’t have a lot of knives?

PIERS MORGAN: You have a gun violence problem. We have a knife crime problem.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: What is the ratio of the knife to gun?

PIERS MORGAN: Gun problem in the UK? Yeah, we have hardly any gun violence at all.

Gun Violence: UK vs. US

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No, no, no, no. What I’m saying is the number of knife crime problems in UK compared to the gun crime problems that we have.

PIERS MORGAN: In the U.S. what’s the ratio? Well, I think you have still between 80 and 90,000 people a year in America die from guns. That includes suicide, which is a large number of that, but it also includes homicides and accidents. The UK has a tiny, tiny fraction of gun deaths, but also the knife victims would be a tiny fraction of that. So we’re talking a very, very small percentage of your gun deaths a year.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: If you were to be the Prime Minister, would you consider opening up and having folks in the UK have guns or you have zero tolerance?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I think you have to. I think it’s interesting. Look, there are lots of aspects of that gun debate I had here where I understood the American viewpoint. I mean, Jay Leno said to me, “Piers, it’s like you’re going to Germany and lecturing them every night on television about speeding too fast on the Autobahn, right? They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear it from you, and they definitely don’t want to hear it from your accent.”

PATRICK BET-DAVID: It’s safe to drive one.

The Gun Safety Debate

PIERS MORGAN: He said, “Look, the smart crowd know you’re right,” he said, “because too many people get killed.” He said, “But most Germans wouldn’t want to hear it from you, and they definitely don’t want to hear it from your accent.” I get it, okay? This was not a debate that could be led by a British accent.

However, I would simply put this caveat out there, and I wish I’d made the debate actually about gun safety, not gun control. The word control to the average American is total anathema. It’s like a warning sign goes off. And I get that.

But I do think in a country with over 400 million guns in circulation, with the amount of gun deaths you have a year and general gun violence, you have an almost unique cultural issue with guns in America, which never gets tackled at all. A million new guns get sold every month in America. So the number of guns in circulation rises exponentially over time. And it’s logical to assume that the number of gun deaths will rise exponentially too in line with the amount of guns in circulation.

My targets were never law abiding, peaceful people who want to use guns for shooting. My brother was a British army colonel, one of the best shots in the army. I don’t think it’s shooting for sport or in the military or any controlled environment. The problem is when you have it in such open usage in civilian usage.

To me I get the self defense thing, particularly if everybody else has a gun. But at some point I do think the amount of mass shootings you have in America, at some point there has to be a mature, non confrontational debate about what actually as a society can be done to make things safer. Let’s use the word safety, not control. And let it not be a Brit like me that leads this debate, that it be Americans having a debate amongst themselves in a way that can remain calm and rational and simply focused on reducing the number of people who get killed by guns.

Alex Jones and Sandy Hook

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Have you had Alex Jones on since that?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I have, yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So you guys have done stuff together?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, my issue with him was actually a lot of it was performative. But my issue with him was the defamation case brought against him by the Sandy Hook families. He was emerged in the case. There were graphs showing that every time he went on the airwave to lie about the Sandy Hook thing being staged and the families being behind it, two things would happen.

One, there’d be a massive spike in his earnings and we’re talking tens of millions of dollars were coming into him every time he did this on the airwaves. They showed how that worked. And secondly, you would have people then believing this who would go to gravesides and they would urinate on the graves of the child victims.

And I’m sorry, to me that’s just unconscionable that someone would do that. And this idea that he didn’t know that he was spewing lies is bullshit. Of course he knew. So he was deliberately perpetrating a lie about Sandy Hook being staged to make money and in doing so endangering the lives of all those families. I interviewed those families. I was thinking it’s unconscionable.

I had an argument with Elon Musk about it because he was going to come on my show and he pulled it at the last minute because he found a clip that someone sent him of me criticizing him for allowing Alex Jones back on the platform. You may remember when he bought X, bought Twitter, he said he was going to keep Jones off the platform because he didn’t like the way he danced on the graves of children. I agree with him. And I was disappointed when he let him come back on because I think that his whole business model was telling deliberate lies about grieving families.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: He let him back.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. Yeah.

Republican Influencer Controversy

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Interesting. By the way, you’ve had Ben on, you’ve had Candace on, have you had Tucker on? You’ve done stuff with Tucker as well, right? Okay, what do you think about what’s going on right now, especially this week? Ben Shapiro comes up, makes the video about the fact that Tucker had Nick Fuentes on and makes a 41 minute video calling him out. And how dare you have somebody that’s celebrating Stalin and Hitler and all this other stuff. Where is your position with everything that’s going on within the Republican influencer party?

PIERS MORGAN: Really interesting. I like a lot of them. I get on very well with Tucker, with Candace, with Ben. Always have done. I’ve never met or interviewed Fuentes. My only issue was Tucker gave me, we met in Riyadh in the desert by chance. We were both speaking at the same event earlier this year and we did a 90 minute interview on each other’s shows. Me interviewing him, then him going after me.

When he went after me, if you watch it back, it was very entertaining, very enjoyable. It was a good old tussle. But a bit like when he went off to Ted Cruz and stuff, he held nothing back going after me and Ted Cruz. But with Fuentes, I just felt he was oddly not doing that.

And so the question then becomes to me, well, why wouldn’t you go after someone like Fuentes? The stuff he said on the record is so appalling. In many cases, there’s so much stuff that as an interviewer you have to go after him about. So my criticism was not that he platformed him. Tucker, he’s right. He can platform anybody he likes. He’s one of the biggest platforms in the world. My only criticism was, why didn’t you give him as hard a time as he gave me?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I think that’s fair. I think that’s what I’m doing. So you would have Nick Fuentes?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I think in light of all the controversy about him, it’d be quite interesting to get him on my show and actually do an uncensored number on him where I go after him about a lot of the stuff he said on the record. I think now it’s…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You would lose your Jewish donors though, if you do that. So I just want to prepare you.

PIERS MORGAN: I don’t care about things.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I’m going to lose that kind of stuff.

PIERS MORGAN: I never care about any financial impact to anything I do. I think you’ve got to be intellectually honest in this game. I think you are. Yeah. I watch you.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: I appreciate that.

PIERS MORGAN: You know.

Intellectual Honesty and Financial Independence

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You know what I would say when I think about our jobs, what we do, versus think about the nonprofit job. The nonprofit job guys are giving you a few million dollars. They’re not going to get anything in return because they support the cause. So imagine if all of a sudden you’re like, well, you know, like heritage. We are, no matter what they tell us, we’re going to protect and be if we’re Tucker forever.

And then the next day, listen, we were a little bit inappropriate with our comments and we have changed our position because the donors threatened to walk out. So that charity, the nonprofit sector is a slippery slope because you worry about losing that 4 million dollar fund, the $2 million fund, the 3 million dollar guy that’s going to take the money away.

PIERS MORGAN: You know, I had this kind of debate about the platform people like Andrew Tate and stuff and Candace Owens on the platform. And I kind of evolved my view a little bit to the degree that I think that these people have huge, huge followings. You can either pretend they don’t, or you can accept they do.

And they either have an unchallenged platform of their own to just say whatever they want to say. Take with Candice, for example. I’ve had a couple of big bust ups with her about this ridiculous assertion that Brigitte Macron is a man. Right. I think it’s 100% bullshit. I think she knows it is. But she’s now being sued by Brigitte Macron, who will probably prove very easily she’s a woman in court. And Candace will lose, but I’m sure spin it into some kind of Pyrrhic victory and that’s her business.

But if I have her on, I challenge her about it. We have a proper old ding dong about it. And actually, I do think that probably society and democracy is better served than by having people who have big, big followings give them a platform, but challenge them. That should be the challenge for everybody. I do that with anyone.

But I just think having people who’ve got very contentious views on where you don’t challenge them, that’s an abrogation of your duty as a platformer, because otherwise what are you really doing? You’re just giving them more oxygen for views. And if you don’t agree with them.

I thought it was very interesting when Tucker went after Ted Cruz and said, “Well, what’s the population of Iran?” He didn’t know it was a viral moment and we all thought that was a brilliant moment. But you do think, well, why was there no viral moment like that out of your two hour interview with Fuentes?

You know, I can guarantee there would be. If I was with Fuentes, he’d probably give me some hammer too. Fine, fair enough, I can take it. But I do think he needs to be challenged. Fuentes has a massive following, increasingly influential amongst young men in particular, as does Andrew Tate. I’ve interviewed Tate a few times and I think I hold his feet to the fire and he gives it back. And actually young people who watch it, who maybe have a view of him that is unchallengeable from his own arena, see him being challenged, who can maybe change their views?

Most Controversial Guest

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Who did you interview in UK when he walked on the streets, you went to restaurants, people said, I cannot believe you put him on platform. Who was the number one person that you got criticism in the streets?

PIERS MORGAN: Probably Andrew Tate above everybody. I think so, yeah. He’s the most divisive figure that I interview on a more regular basis. Yeah. And it’s a tricky one. You know, I’d sort of buy into Tucker’s thing that you should, if you’ve got a platform, you should better interview the hell you like.

I mean, when he did Putin, for example, he got a lot of stick for doing it. But would any journalist turn down the chance of interviewing Vladimir Putin? And if you’re honest, would you go to Moscow and then start haranguing him to his face? Probably not.

So, you know, I would probably say, I’ll interview you, Mr. I can’t even go there because I’m on his sanctions list. But if I said, look, next time you’re in Washington or London, I’ll do an interview with you, I’d probably feel more comfortable because then you can ask him tougher questions. This is who, Tate? No, Putin.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Oh, Putin.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. So.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So have you reached out to want to sit down with…

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, we’ve had no from him. Yeah, he’s…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No from him.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, I did Zelensky in Kiev. That was good interview.

Prince Andrew and Epstein

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Yeah, he would be interesting. But by the way, where are you at with, you know, the Epstein story? And the reason why the Epstein story is interesting with you is Prince Andrew Family. He’s not a prince anymore. They changed. You have to even say the name correctly, which I don’t. What did we call him the other day? Rob? It was like a full on name that Mountbatten.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Andrew Mountbatten, yeah. So, you know, with all this stuff over the years, what’s your position with who Epstein was?

Prince Andrew and the Epstein Scandal

PIERS MORGAN: I think he was a predatory pedophile. I think that he operated with other people who knew that these girls were underage and were happy to abuse them. I’ve interviewed David Boies, who was Virginia Giuffre’s lawyer and represented many of the other victims. He’s seen the files. He thinks there are six to a dozen high profile men named in them who should potentially face criminal prosecution. Which begs the question, why do we not know who those people are? Why are they not being prosecuted?

In Andrew’s case, I had a view about this early on, which was you could legitimately say if you knew Epstein before his conviction for pedophilia, you could legitimately, I think with your head held high say, or with credibility say, “I didn’t know anything about that, but the moment I found out about it, I never saw him again.” Okay. There are people that did that. Donald Trump, I think is one of the people who had nothing more to do with him after his conviction for being a pedophile with a 14-year-old girl.

Anyone who didn’t do that is willingly continuing to consort with a convicted pedophile. Very different credibility stakes. Andrew’s problem, and his wife, Sarah Ferguson, ex-wife, had the same problem, was they made public declarations that we never saw him again after a certain time. And then the US Congress has been going through all the files and releasing emails in drops which have contradicted those claims.

It’s now clear that Andrew and his ex-wife continued to have contact with Epstein way after they publicly said I disowned him. And so they were caught lying. Which is why it’s now spiraled in the last few weeks to where Andrew has now been effectively de-royaled by his brother the King, because the King had no option. And also, if we already know he’s lying, what more is coming down the pipe from these Congress leaks? I mean, who knows, right?

So it could get worse for Andrew before it gets any better. He might well end up in a courtroom. You know, the FBI are desperate to interview him under oath. I don’t think he has any chance of ever making any return to any form of public life if he doesn’t go under oath to the authorities and say everything he knows.

I think he’s been lying. I think he obviously knew Virginia Giuffre. I think he obviously did have sex with her. I think that he has been very disingenuous about all that. And I think he’s now been shamed and disgraced and everything else, but he hasn’t been brought to any criminal account and many people will feel that he should be.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: How embarrassing do you think this is for the family? Do you think this is something where the family is sitting there saying, you know, because this is a different challenge than Harry and Meghan?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, there’s no comparison.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Right.

Harry and Meghan vs. Prince Andrew

PIERS MORGAN: Harry and Meghan are annoying little grifters who now use their royal status to trash the royal family, trash the monarchy and make millions of dollars. I don’t like what they do. I think it’s horrible.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: How miserable you think Harry is right now?

PIERS MORGAN: He looks completely…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Do you think he really is happy in love?

PIERS MORGAN: He looks like a doped out misery to me. I just think it’s the full reality. Look, who could be happy when you’re estranged from all your family? And she’s estranged from hers by the way too. Apart from her mother, her father lives 50 miles away, has never met her husband or her two kids. He’s the guy that brought her up on his own for eight years. Remember?

It’s a very weird story, the whole thing, but I think, look, the level of what they’ve done, Andrew’s on a different class, higher of shame he’s brought on the family. There’s a big difference between being grifters, making money out of trashing a family and actually being actively involved in one of the worst pedophile scandals of modern times with this guy Jeffrey Epstein. And I think that we don’t know the full story yet about Andrew, but we may well find out through the criminal process that’s ongoing.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: What do you think is more likely? Andrew being innocent, going back in a family, becoming a prince again, or Harry leaving Meghan, going back, apologizing and being received again?

PIERS MORGAN: Well, Andrew will never be a prince again. That ship has definitely sailed. I don’t think he’ll ever go to America and be interviewed. So he’ll never clear his name either. I think he’ll live a life of shame as a pariah.

I think it’s more… I mean, look who knows about Harry and Meghan. I think they kind of deserve each other. They’re kind of joined at the hip now in their situation, but almost everything they do is so cack-handed. Like the other day they went to the baseball, she posts some cringe video.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Oh my God, you have this?

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, play. This is…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: This has got to be the worst fake celebration thing I’ve seen in my life. And you met her before, right?

Piers Morgan’s History with Meghan Markle

PIERS MORGAN: You and Meghan. I actually met her once, but we’d had a… I followed four of them on Suits. I used to love watching Suits. And I followed four of the characters and she immediately direct messaged me, which is quite telling looking back on it, saying she DM’d you. Yeah. “Oh my God, I’m your biggest fan.” All this kind of stuff within about five minutes. Right?

So her and another guy called Rick Hoffman who played Louis Litt, who was her big friend on the show. The three of us then exchanged messages. All just quite fun. They’d send me clips from future episodes and so on. And then she said, “I’m coming to London, can we meet up for a drink?” I went, “Sure.” Took her to my local pub. Actually got on very well. I thought she was very nice and that’s very great. Really enjoyed it. Sent the pictures to Rick back in, wherever he was, all very nice.

And then bang. Suddenly never heard from her again. Never heard from him either. Rick Hoffman, who neither of them were known in the UK. I was like, who are you two little… What’s happened? Right? And then of course I see the story about Harry. I was like, okay, well that makes sense.

But Hoffman, you disowned me as a friend of the person now. Yeah, well, he actually was quite funny. He sent me a groveling message. I’ve still got it. Groveling message the day after the wedding, which he attended. So, “Piers, I’m so sorry. I hope you understand. It’s all been so difficult.” I was like, I’m being sucked off.

But anyway, it turned out she had a pattern. Basically disowning every single person from her life, including her father, who might somehow be a problem because obviously Harry hates the papers. I used to run a tabloid paper. I got that. But she just wanted to cut loose anybody. We saw it with friends and family and ex-husbands and so on. Anyone that might be a problem for her world plan, which was getting her claws into a British royal prince, yanking them back to California, making hundreds of millions. We’ve seen how the rest has played out.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Was the conversation that was at first flirty with the two of you or…

PIERS MORGAN: No, just… just…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Just like meeting. Nothing crazy.

PIERS MORGAN: No, no, no. Okay. No, no, no. People try to paint it. Is that so funny? I mean, you know, just look at pictures of my wife.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No, no, I get that. I’m just saying because this is them, Rob, at the baseball deal, celebrating the Dodgers. Yeah, I believe this.

PIERS MORGAN: Their home theater.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Oh my…

PIERS MORGAN: Press it. Oh my God, I kind of like geese thing. Attack. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Absolutely.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: How many times you think they did that? That’s take three or take eight?

PIERS MORGAN: One of them.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: What do you think that is?

PIERS MORGAN: Also, he’s now given an apology for wearing a Dodgers cap. You see him there in the Dodgers cap. So why is he sitting there miserable? And her gloating, given that the week before he’d been at one of the World Series games in a Dodgers cap in the Dodger owner’s dugout. None of it makes any sense. Now suddenly, a week later, he’s sitting there miserable because the Dodgers have won. Yeah, right.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Yeah, well, I mean, listen, she to me is one of the most… What’s the word I’m looking for? Cringe?

PIERS MORGAN: Annoying.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Narcissist. She has to be the combination of those three. I don’t know anybody more annoying than her. But, you know, and what’s challenging is she’s attractive. When you look at that personality, you wonder, if you go on a date, what would…

PIERS MORGAN: That…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: If you married her, what would happen? Don’t do that again. Put your hand over here.

PIERS MORGAN: Hold me.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Why don’t you hold me? Tighter. Come closer. I don’t like your mother. There’s something about your dad. There’s something about your sister. There’s something about you. I need you to stop talking to that person. I don’t think it’s inappropriate. You make me feel this. You make me feel small. Oh, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, sweetheart. This is going to be an incredible romantic journey we’re going to go on.

America’s Got Talent and Simon Cowell

By the way, crazy question. When you were on, was it Britain’s Got Talent or America’s Got Talent?

PIERS MORGAN: You did both of them.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You’re both like six years or whatever the timeline was. There’s one of them I saw. And I have to ask you this. Can you… Can you go up all the way to the part and it’s this. This is one of my favorite ones.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And go back a little bit. Go back a little bit. Go right there. Right. Okay.

PIERS MORGAN: No, no, no, no.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Go 10 seconds. So you know which one this is.

PIERS MORGAN: Okay.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Shaheen.

PIERS MORGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: He crushes, right?

PIERS MORGAN: And they…

PATRICK BET-DAVID: They put him up and he comes in, he sings the song, and then all of a sudden, Simon says, “No, no, no, we got it all wrong.” Right? And I’m sure they’re not going to let us have this in the clip, but played right from here. So he comes on.

PIERS MORGAN: Press play.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Incredible voice. Okay, so… So he’s good.

PIERS MORGAN: Right?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And Simon is doing what Simon is doing. He puts his hand up. Okay. The look on your face here, I don’t know if you remember this or not. Are you smiling?

PIERS MORGAN: I’m like… Apart from that.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Are you smiling? Because this is like… You guys know. You guys were going to do this.

PIERS MORGAN: No, no, no, no. Okay. No, no. It was never planned. Stop. This is another plan. Simon refused to allow any planning. Oh. He wanted everything to always feel spontaneous.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So why do you… Why do you smile? What do you think is going on here? Because he comes out, this guy…

PIERS MORGAN: I’m smiling because I’ve seen Simon stop people before, and he always had a fixed idea of the kind you could hear someone sing. He’s got an amazing intuitive ability to do this, where he’d hear someone sing in particular, and he would know that the type of song they were singing was not showing off their range properly. So he would often say that, “Why don’t you just try a different type of song?”

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And he crushes.

PIERS MORGAN: And sometimes they come back and it’ll be a disaster. And that’s why I’m, like, holding my hand. This kid’s great. Simon, don’t do that to this kid. But then, of course, he was great.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So this has nothing to do with the fact that it’s set up because he comes back, he does Michael Jackson.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah, he’s great.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And then from there, they love his voice so much that he ends up performing at his funeral, you know, year later, whatever the timeline is. So right after this, you come down, and I think you get Larry King’s job after this. Right. So how does that happen?

Winning Celebrity Apprentice and Meeting Trump

PIERS MORGAN: Well, actually, no, in between, I won Celebrity Apprentice, which is where I meet Donald Trump. So I was doing NBC’s America’s Got Talent, and they also then launched the first season of Celebrity Apprentice, which was the celeb version of the regular Apprentice show.

And I immediately got on well with Trump, and of course, I spent about 100 hours in the boardroom opposite him. So I got to know him very, very well because I was there right to the end. And then I won.

And when I won, I remember him saying in the live finale, he said, “Piers, you’re tough. You’re vicious. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. But you beat the hell out of everybody. You’re my Celebrity Apprentice.”

So when he won the presidency years later, this is 2008, 2016. He becomes president in 2015, 2016. And I said to him, I sent him a note. I said, “Dear Donald, you’re tough, you’re vicious, you’re probably brilliant, I’m not sure, but you beat the hell out of everybody. You’re the President of the United States.”

Did he get it? Oh, yeah. He rang me straight away. We had a brilliant conversation. He was like, he said, “Can you believe the journey we’ve been on?”

He said it again. I rang him the morning after he won. I put this in my book, the morning after he won. So he wins at like 2am, makes his victory speech, goes to bed. Now, I know he never sleeps, but I was like, even by his standards, he’s sleep deprived. So I thought, I’ll just leave it.

Rang him at nine in the morning on his cell phone and it rang and rang and eventually this very sleepy voice appears. “Can you believe this?” And I went, “Actually, I can. It’s amazing. Complete clean sweep.”

And he said, “Can you believe the journey we’ve been on?” I said, “With all due respect, Mr. President, you’ve been on a slightly bigger journey than me. I’ve gone from judging piano playing pigs to winning your show, to replacing Larry King to a morning show and now doing a YouTube channel. You have gone from making me your celebrity apprentice to becoming President of the United States twice.”

And it’s been an unbelievable journey. So I have a long time of being a friend of Donald Trump’s. I see the good, bad and ugly in him, but overall I think he is a force for good.

Trump’s Second Term Strategy

And I think this time around what you’re seeing is somebody who’s thought really carefully about all the things he didn’t get right the first time around. And the people he had around him in particular had a lot of disloyal people.

First time, you notice this time there’s hardly any briefing against him internally. Very loyal group of people he has, and I think they’re on a mission, knowing the midterms are coming. After two years, you get basically a two year window. This is why he’s gone so fast and stuff, to try and really entrench Trumpism into making America great again and we’ll see how successful he ends up being.

But I certainly think there’s more good than bad in Trump and I think people who try and over demonize him, call him a new Hitler and so on. It’s so fatuous and ridiculous and so self harming. All it did in the end was get him reelected.

Most Viewed Clip

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Yep, big name. By the way, your book that’s coming out, folks, before we talk about your book, Woke Is Dead, I want to play a clip for you. Do you know what your most viewed clip is on YouTube? Don’t go to it. Let’s first see if you can guess. Do you know what your most viewed clip is? It’s a short.

PIERS MORGAN: Really?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Do you know this or not?

PIERS MORGAN: It’s not the one from Baby Reindeer, is it?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: No. Okay, which one this is. It may be Baby Reindeer. Yeah. It may be played rap. This is your most viewed clip. 58 million views. And I think this is appropriate to play this.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Because this goes right into your book, Rob. If you have it, press play.

PIERS MORGAN: Are you so triggered by a flag? I’m not triggered by rainbow flag. I’m triggered by the fact that everywhere I go for a month, everything has to be a rainbow flag.

Well, I’m triggered that everywhere I go for the entire year, everything has to be straight. Where is it? Why is straight. Where’s my straight flag? Why am I constantly. Where is my straight flag? When have you ever seen a straight flag? Where’s my straight flag? It’s everywhere. There’s never been a straight flag.

Both of you are straight, and you’re saying you’re. Exactly. How do you know I’m straight? How dare you guess my straight. How many letters are there now in the official. Wait, let’s find. How many are there? I don’t even know how many are there. I don’t need. Exactly my point. Need to know, because it’s not about. There are so many letters now, we can’t keep up with it.

Why “Woke Is Dead”

PATRICK BET-DAVID: You can pause it right there, Rob. So what’s crazy about this that leads to your book? Woke is Dead. How? Common sense, triumphant in an age of total madness. Why did you choose to write this book?

PIERS MORGAN: Because I felt, in a way, that Trump’s reelection was the ultimate repudiation of a really insidious thing, this Woke mind virus, as Elon Musk calls it, which, for years, it kind of dominated our lives.

It was best described to me. An Australian woman came up to me in the street in London. She said, “Mr. Morgan, I hope you don’t mind me interrupting your walk. But keep it. These wokies, they’re the most joyless people in the world. They want to suck all the joy out of life.”

And I was like, what a brilliant description. Because if you think about it, the Woke disciples wake up every day. They don’t find any joke funny. They don’t think we should be watching half of the TV shows we like, the movies we like. We shouldn’t be revering the historical figures we revere. They want to tell us how to talk, how to dress, what things we can wear and culturally appropriate and so on and so on.

It’s a constant scolding, but also it’s laced with a very nasty streak, particularly from those who have “be kind” hashtags in their bios. I’ve noticed where they’re the most vicious people. And anyone who deviates from their kind of woke worldview has to be shamed, vilified, scolded, destroyed, canceled.

The Danger of Cancel Culture

And as we saw, ultimately, if you call everybody who disagrees with you a fascist, even when they’re not, and you have this sort of narrow prism which people don’t follow it, they have to be canceled. You end up with deranged minds doing what the shooter did with Charlie Kirk.

There’s a direct line that goes from that kind of thinking where you only allow one type of opinion. And the irony of someone like Charlie Kirk, who openly welcomed other opinions, would openly debate with anybody, he would go onto these campuses with thousands of people who didn’t agree with him and say, “Come and prove me wrong.”

Is it hard to imagine a better standard bearer for actual free speech in a democratic society than someone like Charlie Kirk? And he would listen to them with respect and everything else. And for that he got a bullet which killed him. And he got it from someone who put anti-fascist slogans on the bullets because he believed Charlie Kirk was a fascist, because that’s what everyone had told him.

And he didn’t like what Charlie Kirk says and believes. That is fascism. That’s the irony. These people became the new fascists.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: It is so true. I’m fully with you and I’m so glad you wrote this book, folks. If you haven’t placed the order yet, go click on a link below. Order the book. Support this message. God knows we need more of this message spreading around the world with the madness we experienced the last five years and not thinking it’s over with because it’s still there, we still got some fight to do.

We’ve shown a video earlier today of a lady who goes to a Gold’s Gym and she’s in the gym and this guy’s hanging there with his dangling, hanging out. He’s like, “What are we doing? I’m just trying to work out. I’m a woman,” and she’s a lesbian woman in the bathroom. So it’s still there in certain pockets of the world.

PIERS MORGAN: And she got banned.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: And she got banned. And the guy, ridiculous, his name is Alexis. Whatever his name is. Grant or Alexis. I don’t know what his name is, but he was allowed to stay in the gym and not the other way around. He went back into the woman’s bathroom.

Piers, great to have you on. As usual, it’s always a good conversation, and I love the fact that it’s this way around.

PIERS MORGAN: Yes.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: So I want to learn more about where you’re at as well.

PIERS MORGAN: Yeah. I really enjoyed it.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Likewise. Appreciate you.

PIERS MORGAN: Great to see you. Thank you.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Take care, everybody.

PIERS MORGAN: Bye.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: Bye.

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