Piers Morgan Part II: liberalism has become unbearable [Video]

In Part I of this series, we gave our readers access to a fascinating interview given by Ben Shapiro and Piers Morgan on August 18th, 2019. Piers gives a fascinating and honest assessment of what has become of liberalism, while yet retaining his identity as a liberal. In this second part, we will offer the significant timestamps and points or topics addressed and some summary analysis.

We observe that only following the timestamps that may coincide with the reader’s own interest is not enough to get the full impact of the interview, so we strongly recommend our readers and viewers to make the time to watch the whole thing, even if in pieces. Honest reporting of any event can not be given in a five-to-ten second incendiary soundbite, which itself is one of the big rhetorical weapons deployed by many opinionated people, rather than a careful, honest and humble study of reality and how one’s personal ideology squares with reality.

We start the video slightly overlapping the previous one, at [35:13], noting Shapiro’s influence and fairness in his program. Most people in the news business or political activist business are hyper partisan.

[35:56] Hyperpartisanism plus massive overmedication (80% of the world’s pain-killers are consumed by Americans), fueled by the Internet, are helping create the massively violent hyperliberal culture.

[37:00] Piers Morgan on Brexit, perspectives as a “Remainer”, with acknowledgement that the opinion of the people spoke and it must be followed. How Morgan’s stance on Brexit changed over time. Also how Brexit was proposed as a gamble that the UK would not want to leave the EU.

[38:00] David Cameron underestimated the impact of massive immigration and disruption of local culture in the UK, perceived as having been brought on by membership in the EU overall. On the “metropolitan elites” and the rest of the country.

[41:41] On the self-righteousness of people that lose elections, and the main fact: Populism is rising because liberalism has become unbearable. Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberale. The snowflake culture, the victimhood culture and its skew towards an environment where everybody is ‘offended’ by everything. Liberals want a humourless void where nothing happens if it doesn’t suit their rigid PC way of life.

[44:30] Liberalism as a version of fascism.

[45:00] It takes forceful personalities to rise up and fight this, hence, Donald Trump and his adoption by Middle America.

[47:00] Liberal hypocrisy from The New York Times, when Trump called for unity and not racism, but the liberal mob forced the paper to change the headline of the report when Trump actually said what the liberals were screaming for him to actually say.

[49:00] The backlash against liberals from the right; Trump and North Korea, getting attacked no matter what he does about this matter. Trump as a force for peace (including with President Putin), not war.

[51:18] What makes Piers Morgan a liberal? Here the answer is surprising – he supports small, responsible government that can take difficult decisions. Governments are elected by the people to deliver on what they promised to do.

[55:09] “Nanny State” to a point, and then a discussion of how this is so with issues like getting a pet license to gun (lack of) control in the United States. The difference between the cigarette debate, the drunk driving debate and the lack of controls on gun use like the case of an eight-year-old girl who accidentally shot her instructor with a high-powered weapon. This gets deeply into the gun matter starting at [57:10]. The question: Why does a 22 year old man get nitpicked about buying a non-alcoholic beer in L.A., when an 8 year old girl is handed a gun she cannot control without any such banning principle. For Morgan the reason Americans want to have guns is because other Americans have guns.

[1:04:00] Morgan on what controls on firearms might look like. He considers AR weapons to be the same as machine guns (AR-15’s for example are semi-automatic rifles, which can be rendered fundamentally automatic through the use of a bump stock (which has been made illegal in the US at this time).

While Mr. Morgan and Shapiro sharply disagree on gun policy, they had a very fair-minded conversation about this issue as they did all the others.

One of the takeaways from this interview is that we see proof that a true interview and even a true debate can still happen in the West. It takes time to watch and listen to, but all the issues discussed in this interview were substantively discussed, and the likely outcome for any liberal or conservative who is not radicalized would be to observe that there is a lot of common ground in what Morgan said.

One of the criticisms “Never Trumpers” had with Donald Trump was that he is not an “ideological” conservative, whatever that means. If we compare his rhetoric to that of Ted Cruz or Ben Carson, that would be an accurate statement. However, President Trump’s approach is probably really far more pragmatic than it is “conservative.” This idea gets a lot of support from the kind of things Piers Morgan said about his own points of view. They are far more conservative sounding than the kind of things liberal activists and politicians like the Squad say. Yet the real issue is rationality which Mr. Morgan possesses in abundance.

This especially changed the character of the debate on gun policy at the end of the interview with Ben Shapiro. Here, Ben appears to be the more ideological position holder, displaying a strong fealty to the text of the US Constitution, while Mr. Morgan brings up very significant points about what might actually be a series of good ideas – permits for hunting weapons, magazine limits and a buyback of AR and automatic weapons to get them at least somewhat substantially removed from the national landscape.

As a Second Amendment rigorist myself, I am somewhat alarmed by such ideas, but the very careful and honest discussion on this matter did have me understanding the rationale behind Mr. Morgan’s thought. It is pragmatic, and it is good enough that it cannot be discounted. Were it such that our policy debate was as educated and thorough on all topics relevant to us today, we might get a lot more done.