361. Louis Theroux On The Settlers, The Manosphere, & Tribalism

23:27Like if we take our foot off his neck, then his foot will be on our neck. And that's very much the thinking among parts of the settler community.

23:39William:We'll get a jihadi state here, that sort of thing. Well, not wholly without merit. There's so much anger, understandable anger and resentment. And you hear a lot, well, look how many Muslim nations there are, they'll say. And we want one Jewish nation. And now they're trying to take that away from us. I also think, you know, never underestimate people's ability to just go along with whatever's happening, right? You know, Milgram's famous experiments on authority, where he found that people were willing to inflict electric shocks on strangers if someone above them was saying, don't worry, I'm in charge and you have to do this.

24:17You have to remember in the West Bank, there's several constituencies, apart from the sort of the 3 million Palestinians who live there and have lived there for generations. You have 700 ,000 settlers thereabout, of whom most of them would consider themselves non-ideological. They're living in relatively suburban style homes in settlements that are not ostensibly like stockades. They would look maybe like a suburban community in the Midwest somewhere or in the West, in Phoenix, Arizona. And they're just looking for cheap housing. And people tune out. They tune out what they don't see.

24:57William:It's half the price of stuff in Tel Aviv. Young couples go there. You get a house. A lot of them are from abroad. They might have come in and found out that they've come in from maybe Russia or America and they're getting cheap housing and various benefits that have been incentivized. And there's this extraordinary extent to which the Palestinian experience is made to be invisible. You know, the architecture and the infrastructure of the place is explicitly designed to make the Palestinian world invisible, much as prisons are here. Like I drove down to Wandsworth at the weekend and we drove past Wandsworth Prison.

25:35I was like, it's amazing how there's trees planted so that you can see Wandsworth Common on one side, but you can't actually see the prison. And a similar thing happens in the West Bank where behind walls and kind of these sort of blast walls and then a series of checkpoints, there'll be a Palestinian city that might have you know four or five hundred thousand people in it that you would never if you were a settler during driving on a settler road you would never know about so it's hard to feel compassion for something that you never see and then within the concentric ring of that you have armies following orders who have this slightly guilty way about when you interact with them sometimes not always but there's sometimes there's a bit like, unfortunately, yes, you know, we have to stop you.

26:20And they're just, as it were, like the Scottish guy, you know, sent out to Burma following orders. And then you have the engine room, which is the fanatical, ideological settler who is often not from abroad. Like it might be a homegrown Israeli, and they are following the will of God as they see it and completely committed to the vision of recovering the land you know when i talked to aria bramovich he was from texas originally but his whole thing was like if people just understood like this is going to create peace for everyone like every nation like his idea was like and they'll talk they don't talk about recovering the uh the temple mount but that's always slightly in the background the this sort of messianic idea that and then we're gonna then if we can just build the temple on the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount, then I don't quite know the theology of it, but the idea is, and then there'll be peace on earth for millions of years.

27:21So they see themselves as idealists.

27:23Anita:I mean, I've been sort of looking at your work over many years. And I think what you do is really interesting. And I think the space that you give people to speak, and also the fact that you leave the spaces in, to me is utterly fascinating. And if you work as I do, I work for the BBC, but I work in news and you don't have room for the spaces. It seems to me that you've been studying the same question for around 30 years now, which is how ordinary people end up sort of holding either extreme or fringe beliefs or whatever and then acting on them. And I wanted to bring in the thing that's, you know, blown up for you this year, Inside the Manosphere on Netflix.

28:01Anita:And just again, I mean, if you are one of the two people who hasn't seen this. Now, this is all about men selling courses and lifestyle. It's a particular brand of swaggering misogyny and they target teenage boys largely. Now, on the surface, you couldn't get something that's more different from the settlers. It's a film about land and military occupation, but watch them back to back as I have. It's all about the construction of an enemy who isn't quite human. He's not human. Communities of men who've decided that those people are outside our tribe and empathy they don't deserve it I mean am I overreaching or is that is that something that you feel well that's a really good point because when you started speaking I was like these worlds are so different one is primarily financial like those influencers online are mainly money motivated at that their outrage is often almost a kind of confected a confected almost a shop window to to what's behind which is uh an attempt to sell a uh a kind of dodgy financial product uh an app or or an online course or something whereas the settlers the ones that i was meeting they they you know they live almost in an impoverished way some of them like one of the characters i met was called malchiel and he's a horse wrangler living in a tent in a caravan it's like a gypsy encampment wasn't it

29:26William:He's like a gypsy, yeah. A lot of them look like cowboys. They have this sort of frontier, almost ragged. They have guns on their hips and cowboy hats. It's not a grift. They're not in it for the money. Daniela Weiss herself lives abstemiously. But I think you identify something correct, which is that –

29:47Anita:Oh, phew, because I thought you would agree with me and then with demolishing me. Good. No, no. But I think the part that's correct is, yes, they're identities that are constructed on the idea of an other and a kind of venomous and dangerous cabal, if you like. And a sense that there's these evildoers who attempted to outflank them and that they, in turn, have to match the perceived level of threat of the enemy by being just as dangerous or more dangerous. So I think that's very true. And oddly, in the Manosphere, it's a kind of conspiracy that they cast as having a Jewish, they put a sort of Jewish lens.

30:31They put a Jewish character on what they perceive as what they call a matrix. This sort of international cabal of powerful financiers and thought leaders who are attempting to keep the population subjugated. And among the settlers, they see the Palestinian other, a Palestinian other that's being supported by the West, by European loans and kind of sort of, I suppose, globalist kind of enemy.

31:03Anita:The anti-Semitism thing came as a surprise because, you know, I just thought they hated women. I thought they hated me. But, you know, it turns out that they have this whole idea that this is a, you know, there are puppet masters who are working all of this and anybody who opposes them is sort of being funded by or brainwashed by this cabal, as you've just described it. A satanic cabal, yeah. Yeah, satanic, you know, pointing to pictures saying, look, there you see, there's a sign that there's Satan. But what interested me is when you sort of push them, they say, and you make it very clear that it sounds preposterous.

31:37Anita:In fact, with the satanic thing, you say, are you serious? Are you really saying Satan is running the world? They'll back off it sometimes. I mean, not the Satan guy, but a lot of the time they will back down and come back. Does that mean that the manosphere, are you saying, is artificial completely? Because I really feel they hate women. I don't think that's artificial. I don't think it's all artificial, but some of it is performative. And I do think, to some extent, these modes are not binary. We all go in and out of different registers and perform ourselves in ways that aren't consistent. um i i think that i think there's a time you know i think there's times when they say things for effect that like hs ticky tocky real name harrison sullivan an essex influencer and fitness guy who we follow he there's a moment where he goes around we see we see footage of him going fuck the jews again and again chanting it and um and and truthfully i don't think there's much thought behind it like i don't think he's really particularly troubled by the idea of jewish people i think he just knows that it's outrageous and it will be picked up um i think they but at the same time i think he is genuinely sexist like in the old-fashioned sense i think he's someone who thinks that women are basically just a way for him to get his sexual needs met and at the same time he deplores the idea of women being promiscuous so it's a it's complicated like Like there's part, the internet is very lucrative.

33:11You know, if you, I sometimes say like, it's very lucrative to be a dick on the internet. It's almost become a job, like to actually like go online and be a plonker. And at the same time, it doesn't come from nowhere. They know it resonates with people, not partly because it's funny to some and partly because they're connecting with the idea of feeling disempowered and that there needs to be a reset and that men aren't getting taken seriously enough.

33:38Anita:We're going to take a break in a moment, but just before we take the break, do you not find, are you not a very depressed man? Because if it is that easy to monetize rage, I mean, why are we going on, Louis? What's the point of any of this, you know, if it's that simple? Right. Well, as a program maker, having sort of lived through this disruption of the media landscape, Ape, that part of it I find quite depressing. Like, you know, the fact that all of the big channels, the legacy channels, BBC, Channel 4, ITV are struggling, right? That I do find depressing. As a student of the human condition who has a kind of pyromaniacal pleasure in observing the degeneracy of how we are as people, like something I think I might have got from my dad, I do actually quite enjoy um it's a luxuriating in the awfulness of what we are okay well look let's uh take a break and come back after the break actually i thought willie's very keen to talk to you about your dad welcome back so just before the break we had the um tantalizing dangle of louis through his dad.

35:02Anita:Also a favourite topic of Willy Dalrymple over here. You were jumping up and down in your seat going, oh, he's dad. I know his dad.

35:09William:Well, no, I don't just know his dad. I grew up worshipping his dad. I will embarrass Louis by saying this, but for my generation that started doing travel writing in the early 80s, the Great Railway Bazaar was our Bible. And he'd sold something like 1.5 million copies. And it showed that we could just go off on trains or go wandering around sort of turkey and and write a book it was it was too good to be true but are you updating what he did is is your version of of uh you know you've got obviously got a camera rather than writing books and and you're not jumping on trains so much as sort of you know driving around and talking to people but do you feel that there's a there's a great commonality have you talked this over with him no i haven't and first of all it's a high it's high praise like it's very high praise My dad is, as you know, a serious literateur, someone who's a brilliantly gifted novelist and travel writer with an international reputation.

36:03More than 50 books to his name are garlanded.

36:07William:My Other Life is one of my favorite novels. I love that book. And I think the novels perhaps deserve more attention than they're given. The travel writing is very well read and well regarded. I grew up reading his novels first. There's a version of you in my other life. He comes to the school gates. You said you're going to go and see your kids at the school gates. Oh, geez. Yeah. I think that was my brother. Yeah, I think that was probably my brother. I've got an older brother, but there's versions of himself in various of his books. Although he's got lots of, you know, he doesn't exclusively write versions of his, some people just write versions of their own life.

36:44He doesn't do that, but there are a few that do. And he's typically got one son. so I always think it's not a conflation it's mainly my brother but I don't I never sort of set out to I you know like the short version is I always thought oh I'm supposed to be a writer like that was the family law the family thing you've got uncles that do it too yeah the family thing basically you leave university and then you write a travel book or not like that was the aristocracy of letters was a thing in in our household that was what it was the highest calling I think I probably still believe that. Anything like TV or film is kind of poor cousin in terms of the arts.

37:24I got into TV slightly displaced from the pressure of feeling, oh, I can never write a book as good as my dad's. So I thought I'll write for television and I'll write something like sitcoms were big. This was the early 90s. And then I struggled to get hired on a sitcom. and then I got hired by Michael Moore for his series TV Nation and began presenting segments. So there was never a thing like, oh, I'm going to do The Great Railway Bazaar, but as a travelogue. I don't even like travelogues on TV that much, like as a genre. You can do without Portillo, can you? I haven't watched much Portillo. I mean, I like Michael Palin, but my go-to has always been classical documentary, especially immersive documentary.

38:12where you are absolutely, you have a kind of continuity of character through the film, that maybe there's a reporter, like Alan Wicker was something of an influence, for those who can remember, that idea of someone who's immersed in an experience, who's sort of the straight man in the comic sense, in a world gone mad, navigating through, and especially where they get out of their depth in some way, and they're exposed to the extremes of the human condition. so I never I struggle with that authorial and I'm talking way too much but this is this is going to quite a deep place that authorial voice of the travel writer like and then I went here and I and I went to see the uh the Spanish steps and a man did uh vomited on my shoe and I went back to the hotel and I always thought I don't really I'm not you know I think I'm more I'd like to see I'd like to sort of see someone immersed in their lives somehow you prefer I want temple mount and

39:09William:someone shot me with the newsie. Basically, yeah.

39:13Anita:But one thing, Louis, I mean, you know, there is now this thing that's called the Theroux method. You must be aware of this, you know, sort of being slightly, very polite, slightly bewildered, asking the obvious questions again and again, and really giving the subject enough rope. And I wonder if some of them, I mean, we talked about two people here, HS Tiki Toki and Daniela Weiss. And I wonder if there are any parallels between them in that, you know, they are unembarrassable. They are, you know, is there anything else that sort of links them together in your mind? First of all, thank you for the Theroux method.

39:50I didn't know what it was. It sounds a bit like a massage technique, right? Or musicians use it, you know, to improve their posture when they're playing their instrument. The Theroux technique. It's controversial.

40:04Anita:No, yours is a method. Alexander's got the technique. You've got the method.

40:07William:I've got the Theroux method. I apologize for having propagated a journalistic method. I do think that there's parallels. I mean, just purely technically and structurally, they occupy the exact same place in their respective programs, that you see them both three times and the climactic moment of both films involves a showdown, as it were, where I basically present my case and say, here's why I have a problem with what you're doing. Having gathered my data, having done my research and due diligence, I'm presenting my case against you. She pushes me. He pushes me virtually in the sense of he actually films me.

40:46Instead of pushing me, he says something much smarter, which is he films me, live streams me, and then crowdsources questions that will embarrass me and then clips them and goes viral with me looking stupid. That's the first observation. What do they have in common objectively as people? It's just, yeah, it's I think a quality of shamelessness, you know, a quality, you know, in a culture based on shame, if you're shameless, it's a superpower. If you have no, if you're unembarrassable, if there's nothing, if you have complete conviction. and I think actually on that metric Daniela has the advantage over HS like I saw HS uncomfortable there were times when he seemed worried by things that I did

41:31William:he was terrified that he was going to get hung up yeah he did this thing which we used throughout the film which is do monologues to his followers on social media anytime I left which is great he gave it a sort of Shakespearean grammar where he was doing soliloquies between scenes you know the beginning and end of scenes like um was ever wenching this woman wooed you know except he's going like i think ferru might be trying to cook me i'm not too sure you know it's like iago isn't it um yeah but i think uh so he had that uncertainty and she she never cracked there's no there's not a scintilla of vulnerability that i ever saw in her i'm sure it's there but i

42:11Anita:never saw it i mean some people will object to the comparison and the reason they both came to my mind, I think it's because they're both the most recent protagonists of your most recent films. Who do you think would object to the comparison? Well, I suppose some people say, look, one has an ideological belief. I'm saying people who sort of follow, you know, one has an ideological belief and the other one has a six pack and makes money. You know, I guess. Which one is which? Daniela Weiss doesn't have a six pack. No, okay. All right. Very funny. Very funny. Final question, because we are running out of time.

42:43Anita:Who is the person you really want to get who's proving hard to get? Because we might be able to help you. You know, 90 million downloads. I know it's nothing to you, but, you know, they might be listening. Who do you want to get? There's so many people. I don't know where to start. I find the world of AI bafflingly intriguing. So I think someone like Peter Thiel, who runs Palantir, this...

43:07William:He would be fascinating. I was giving a lecture in LA last year, And he's giving another one upstairs on the Antichrist in the same building. But sadly, his security was a bit tight. Yeah, there's a religious dimension there. But also this sort of sense in which he seems to envision a world in which we transcend the human form. And by we, I think I just mean a handful of billionaire tech bros will upload their consciousnesses to sort of data farms and be roaming around the digital ether. Like gods. But if I can't get him, I've been trying to get Demis Hassabis, who's the most brilliant, gifted AI expert, developer, programmer in the UK.

43:53And he's up in North London. And he seems a rather benign figure. So I'd love to talk to him. And then on a more prosaic note, the comedian Peter Kay.

44:03Anita:That's going to be lovely. No one's going to push anyone. There we go. That seems more achievable. No one's going to shove anybody in that one. Yeah. Hopefully not. It's going to be quite a letdown to people who expect a certain benefit of brutality.

44:16William:Louis, to return to our settlers, my final question, the settlers, in 20 years time, where do you see that? Do you see any conceivable reverse button on what they're doing? Because it felt my biggest anxiety watching it was that it's now so strong and so irreversible. They are so full of conviction, so well organized, and the Palestinians are so much on the run that another Nakba seems more probable than not. Would you agree or what do you think? I think it's hard to see the likelihood of a shift in the balance. It seems only to be going in one direction. And more than that, and I've said this before, I think others around the world are looking at how other authoritarian and ethno-nationalist regimes are looking at what's happening in the West Bank admiringly.

45:13You know, figures like Millet in Argentina, maybe Bardella in France. There's sort of underground, international underground, I mean, not underground, but there's this sort of community of kind of in the vanguard of Trump as well. And I think, you know, to the broader point, I think they see Islam generally as a threat. I think that's how they would try and explain what they were doing. They would say like, well, we're just trying to protect ourselves. And so there's a sympathetic international constituency in the West for what is happening in the West Bank. And in the end, you know, disappointingly, even the regimes in the Middle East, from what I see, don't seem massively invested in the preservation of a kind of rule of law and basic civil rights.

46:06And those agencies that are attempting to police what's happening, like the ICJ or the UN, are just increasingly being marginalized and there's an effort to discredit them. So it is a dispiriting outlook.

46:22Anita:Listen, it's been so great talking to you. I know we have to let you go because you've got a school run. And that, as we all know, is the most important thing. Thank you so much for being with us. Louis' documentary The Settlers is on BBC iPlayer Inside the Manosphere you can find that on Netflix and until the next time we meet it's goodbye from me Anita Arnon

46:41William:and goodbye from me William Derimple thank you so much

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