552. Trump's Red Card Saga and Germany's Far-Right Machine

22:58So I think that, and you, so when you say fight fire with fire, I think this is where it's so, so difficult. And, you know, we're going to talk later about you, you interviewed Maximilian Krar, the very, very, very right-wing German politician. When do you get to a point where you actually say somebody that I wouldn't have platformed before, now I will. When do you get to the point, let's take the issue of election denial. Well, I've heard you before saying, I will not give a platform to somebody who denies the election. Right. That means you can't talk to Republicans, presumably, because most of them - Which is why I had to drop that.

23:33I held onto that for about three years, Alistair. I had that as a hygiene test when I was a host at MSNBC. I told my team, we're not going to book any Republican who's an election denier, which means you basically can't book Republicans. Right. Because they're all election deniers now. The few who were not have been cleared out from the party. Donald Trump reasserted his control. Maybe if Ron DeSantis or someone else, Nikki Haley had won the primary in 2024, they might have been able to move on from it. But Trump has an iron grip on the party. It's now a condition for being in the party. Every judge they nominate, Alistair, I don't know if you've seen the hilarious, well, not hilarious, but black comedy hearings on Capitol Hill when a judge is nominated and a Democratic senator says, did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?

24:11And they refuse to answer the question. A judge, someone going for a judgeship will not answer because they're scared that Trump will pull their nomination. So this is the America we live in now. Yes, I can't have that hygiene test anymore because I'm a journalist who needs to interview people and there's no one left if you kind of have those hygiene tests. And you're right. But just to go back to your point about fire versus fire, I'm not saying that Democrats should break the law. I am saying that you need to forget about norms. For too long, the Democratic Party was the party of norms. We can't do that because we've never done that before.

24:38There's no precedent for that. That would be violating the norms and the decorum and the decency of our politics. It was Michelle Obama, who I'm a great admirer of, going and giving that speech and getting huge applause and saying, when they go low, we go high. No, no. When they go low, you go lower. That is what we have to do in politics right now on the left, because the right have no standards left. They're not following any norms. Alistair, let me give you one obvious example. When the Democrats, when Biden was in office, there's a thing called the filibuster in the Senate, which allows the minority party to block the president.

25:07And the Republicans used it to block much of Biden's agenda. And a lot of us said to Democrats, get rid of the filibuster. It's not in the constitution. It's not that. Get rid of it. No, no, we can't do that. It's part of American democracy. It's part of our heritage. It's a convention. And guess what? Now they're not in power. Trump and the Republicans are threatening every day that they're going to get rid of the filibuster. So this idea that you can just kind of play along and everyone will respect the rules. Trump has made it very clear. His understanding of politics is a mob boss understanding of politics.

25:33His understanding of football is a mob boss understanding of football. And you have to respond in kind. The other thing that really struck me again this week was the issue of pardons. Pardons strikes to the heart of the sort of corruption of the American soul in so many ways. So he pardoned a load of people this week. Some of them not serving very heavy sentences, but they're all for offences against the Clean Air Act. Now the Clean Air Act, as you know, is a big part of the American sort of fight against the climate crisis. Of course, he wants to reverse all that. But he actually said that these guys were jailed for trying to fix their car.

26:08Okay? In other words, they were jailed for pretty serious offenses related to emissions from exhausts, okay? Yeah. But on a kind of industrial scale. Jailed for trying to fix their car. And then he also pardoned another donor. And, you know, I checked with a friend in the States that it didn't even make the media. Another donor gets a pardon. It doesn't even make the media anymore. You're probably the only person covering it right now. He is the master. He's the master fabulist. He's the master at making up stories. He makes these excuses up. He bullshits. He gaslights. He gish gallops. This is the problem.

26:43And the corruption story, the pardon story and the corruption story are inextricably linked, right? So we've had lawyers now tell the media publicly. There've been stories recently. Lawyers saying in our circles, white collar lawyers know, if you pay a million, two million, five million, you'll get a pardon, right? It's just an accepted system now. And again, the pardon power is corrupt on a bipartisan level. Presidents of both parties have done dodgy things with pardons. I wish we could amend the constitution and get rid of that pardon power. The public don't like it. It's abused all the time.

27:10But Trump has taken it to a whole different level. He's pardoned over two terms, 70 fraudsters. On day one of his presidency, he pardoned every single January the 6th, rioter, insurrectionist, detainee, convict. Even his own vice president said he should only pardon the nonviolent ones. Trump said, F it, pardon them all, right, according to Axios. And he pardoned everyone. So this is the abuse of the pardon power. He's pardoned people who have donated to his campaign. He's pardoned friends of his. He's pardoned people he doesn't know, but who have business links with friends he does know. And then when he's asked about it, to go back to the point you and I raised earlier about why don't people ask him about the red card, about him not knowing about football.

27:45When he was asked about the Binance guy, the crypto guy who he pardoned from China, I forget his name, Trump said, guess what? I don't know the guy. I don't know anything about the case. All right, then why'd you pardon him? Answer, because he does know him. And he's really got big into crypto. And crypto accounted for 1.4 billion of the 2.2. Isn't it funny that it's crypto that's at the forefront of the corruption allegations against Donald Trump and Nigel Farage? I mentioned the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan book. Fiona and I were in France last week, and we were on driving, listening to it.

28:16It's one of those books, it's a very good book, and it's clearly very, very well researched, but you have to stop. You have to keep going for maybe half an hour, then you say, I can't do this anymore. You've got to stop. And the thing that really struck me, there is not a single nice person in his orbit. When you read it page after page after page after page event after event hour after hour the kind of nastiness the trivia the horribleness of of the lot of them there's no niceness in it and i just that's what i find so sad because this is the america that's being projected to the world and then as we said earlier there is this other america i should say before we go to the break maybe we've had our trip reporter i don't know if you know we have this podcast has its own reporting team obviously she's called izzy she's been in new country asking on this 250th anniversary what they think about Trump and the state of America.

29:14And she actually had people crying to her about the state of it. She had Latinos who were scared to give their names, and she had others who were describing the demise of the American dream. My favorite quote about the American dream this week was from Jens Stoltenberg, former prime minister and now finance minister of Norway, who said that the American dream is more alive in Norway today than it is in America. And I think there's something in that. I saw that. That was in Nick Kristof's piece, I think, the former NATO chief. Correct. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And he's got a point. And Scandinavia definitely has more upward mobility and meritocracy than the US under a corrupt Trump.

29:50The Haberman Swan book is a phenomenon. I interviewed Jonathan recently about it. And you're right. That is a key distinction between the first and second terms. In the first time, he at least pretended to have some quote unquote grownups around, people who might know what they're doing, who weren't just MAGA ideologues or grifters. You know, your Jim Mattises, who was defense secretary and a few others, handful of people. I remember writing a piece for the New Statesman ahead of the inauguration or just after the inauguration in 2017. And I called the Trump administration at the time a cacistocracy, government by the worst people.

30:21And I feel like I was a little uncharitable to that administration because it's really this administration that is truly, truly cacistocratic. Kash Patel, rfk jr jd vance go down the line stephen miller uh just the worst people uh christy noem uh just the worst people he surrounded himself with and i said this when i was at msnbc years ago that the fundamental divide in american politics today is not just left versus right or you know up versus down rich versus poor it is decent versus indecent are there any decent people left in american politics on the right i don't see any they will hopefully emerge if you're right that we should be more optimistic about the United States than the UK.

30:57Well, I didn't say I'm optimistic about the right. I don't think they'll emerge on the right. They'll emerge elsewhere. I think the right is a lost cause, especially with the algorithm. Okay. Now, I also received a fascinating text from a mayor after we briefly discussed Roy and I devolution on the podcast last week, and Vicky Spratt, who presented a brilliant miniseries on Gen Z for us. She's going to be writing about that this weekend in our Sunday read to get the newsletter pieces. You sign up to the newsletter via the link in the episode description. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about Germany, a country you and I are both very, very interested in, and some really interesting things going on both in the political scene and their media landscape too.

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32:53welcome back to the rest is politics with me alistair campbell and me meddy hassel in washington dc now meddy deutschland i mentioned in the first half that you interviewed maximilian krar now just those who don't follow german politics as closely as you and i do maximilian krar is a a major a senior figure in the alternative for deutschland but he's also i think one of the more, tell me if you think I'm right or wrong, I think he's one of the more intelligent in that he understands there is a risk to the survival of the AFD if they go so far right that a constitutional court says, sorry, you guys are against the constitution.

33:34And there is a case pending or a case being developed against people like Bjorn Hucker in Turingia, against some of the young alternative deutschland people some of whom have just been uh elected to the board of the afd so let's just let's just talk a little bit about that first of all how long and hard did you think before you sat down and interviewed him for al jazeera this is in your head-to-head program yes and secondly what did you make of him and what do you make of the strategy that they seem to be pursuing which is we've got to admit it is being successful in electoral terms and also being successful in splitting this view that the firewall that keeps the other parties well away from the AFD may be fracturing, not least under pressure from senior figures in the media that we'll talk about in a minute.

34:27Yeah, so the big question of whether to interview him, to go back to our earlier discussion about election deniers, this is so depressing, isn't it, Alistair, that we live in a world now where you kind of have to drop all these hygiene tests and walls as a journalist as I am and have to ask questions of people who you don't really want to have to platform. But yes, I mean, years ago, I've been presenting head to head on Al Jazeera English, I think for about 14 years now. We launched it in 2012 with Richard Dawkins, if memory serves me correctly. And we discussed with teams over the years, I've had discussions with producers, should we have someone on from the AFD?

34:59And we always said, no, we don't want to platform this party too close to neo-Nazis, too far right. Why would we do that? We don't want to platform fascists. But it came to a point where the AFD, whether we like it or not, are so now in the German mainstream, are so enshrined in the political system of Germany. They are leading in the polls, sadly. They are leading in the polls for the Saxony-Arnhalt big state election later this year. They're the second biggest party in the Bundestag, in the German parliament. So at what point do you say, you know what, we need to actually hold them to account, just like everyone else?

35:29The old system of saying, well, just ignore them and hope they go away, that hasn't worked. Now, that doesn't mean I think you should platform them everywhere and anywhere. I don't think you should be having chummy interviews with them on breakfast TV. But I do think if you do it, you've got to do it in a sustained, challenging, interrogatory way, which is what Head to Head was built for. So we kind of slightly arrogantly said, okay, if anyone's going to do it, we should do it because we have a format, a one-hour, sustained interview. I have a very good research team that helped me prep very in-depth questions.

35:59We have a panel of experts to support me. We have a live audience, which always holds a politician's feet to the fire in a way that even journalists cannot. And so we thought, let's have him on head to head. And he agreed to come on. He was actually a last minute change because the previous guest from the AFD, Marcus Fronemaier, had just come back from Russia and had got into a controversy in Germany as being too close to Putin. And he pulled out of our show. And then Maximilian Kraut agreed to join our show. Kraut is an interesting character because he's part of what is basically a neo-fascist party, but he has a smile.

36:28He has a charm. He has a sense of humor. He has a handkerchief in his pocket. Yes, very stylish. Says, I have Muslim friends. I love the Turks. In that way, very Trumpy. And in fact, he's been described and has described himself as Germany's Trump. He's not the leader of the party. That's Alice Weidel, who is a very interesting person herself. She's a lesbian co-leader whose partner is Sri Lankan. And again, they wheel out her partner to say, we can't be racist. Our leader's partner is Brown. But this is a party that is very racist, is very Islamophobic. He didn't have any response to my questions about their Islamophobia, other than to try and kind of pretend he hadn't heard about it.

37:05But it is a very dangerous moment for Germany, because as you mentioned, for people who are not aware, the German system post-war allows for the constitutional court to say this party, this movement can be banned as neo-Nazi, as a threat to democracy. and the German intelligence service said the AFD is an extremist group. And when they gave that label, the AFD went to court, the court stepped in and paused it while they investigate that label. So right now we can't call them a far-right domestic extremist group because the German courts have put that classification on hold while it's being investigated.

37:36But I would point out 72 % of Germans think it's an extremist group according to the polls, but they might end up in power. Would you, for example, would you do an interview with Bjorn Hocker, who's the leader in Turingia? Who said actual Nazi slogans. Where a court has said you actually can describe him as a neo-Nazi. Would you platform him? It's a tricky one. Probably not unless I have to. Let's say he's on the verge of becoming Chancellor of Germany and I'm offered an interview with him. Would I take it? Yes. But, you know, I think we've got, as journalists, we've got to decide when and how is the right place and the right peg and the right location to do these interviews.

38:14My worry is that you head down an American path where you just platform everyone all the time and treat everyone the same. And I think that's a mistake. And even in the British media, you know, there's some interviewers who do tough interviews. There's some who don't do tough interviews. And if you are going to have these very controversial figures on, you really have to be prepared. My problem is a lot of journalists aren't prepared for interviews. So if you're going to, you know, I would advise against a random British journalist just turning up to interview Krah because he'll run rings around you.

38:37He knows the subject better than you do. You won't be prepared for all the, you know, the gaslighting. Do you think he left that interview with you feeling that he had achieved his objectives? Because I felt, I watched it the other night and I felt he, I abhor what he stands for, but he did quite a good job of pretending that the things that you said he stood for, he didn't really stand for them. And you can't hold him responsible for everything that every member of the AFD has ever said. And I thought he did it quite cleverly. I agree. I agree. He's a very clever guy. And it was an interview.

39:10You know, there's some interviews I walk away from, Alistair Ramla. Yeah, that was a slam dunk. It was very easy. And that clip goes viral because the guests made a fool of themselves. This clearly wasn't one of them. He's clearly a smart guy. And it's interesting. I asked my team later, I wonder what a Marcus Fronmire interviewer looked like, because he doesn't have the charisma or humour. And this is the thing about fascists. The funny, charismatic ones are the really dangerous ones. The reason why Donald Trump is still a singly more dangerous figure than J.D. Vance is because Trump, whatever you think of him, has charisma.

39:37He's able to make people laugh. He's able to dominate a room. J.D. Vance has the charisma of a wooden chair. So I'm less worried about J.D. Vance as a threat to American democracy. I think it's more plastic chair. He's not even wood. He's not even wood. So cry definitely has that charisma and that enables you. I mean, my defense of that interview would be to say what I was able to do, I hope, was to put on record what the AFD actually stands for rather than what they think they stand for. So, for example, there's an exchange in there that people can watch where I said, well, what do you think about the fact that your manifesto talks about Muslims the way that Hitler talked about Jews?

40:08And he said, oh, you can't just bring up Hitler. I said, yes, here's the evidence. I bring receipts. Your manifesto says Islam is an alien religion. Muslims don't belong in Germany. This is exactly the language that was used about Jews in Dishterma in the 1930s. And he said, oh, I don't know anything about that manifesto. I never heard about that manifesto. So it was a very important moment there to put that stuff on the record. And again, this is about appealing to the broader public. I'm not going to change his supporters' mind or his mind, obviously. And you mentioned the firewall with Mertz.

40:33I mean, that is the big question. Will the German mainstream political establishment say, well, actually, the public love the AFD, so we've just got to get on board with them. And I think some of us have to resist that and say, well, actually, 72 % of Germans think the AFD is an extremist group. They are polling number one, but they're polling at what, 30 % in a PR electoral system? In the East, even higher than that in some places. Let's just turn to the firewall, because this is the other big story that's been going around the German political scene in the last few days. So there's a podcast called Wenn Sie Wüsten, If You Only Knew.

41:06And they reported that Merz in March had had a meeting with the CEO of Axel Springer, a big media group which now owns the Daily Telegraph. A guy called Matthias Dupfner, who I think sort of fancies himself as a bit of a German Murdoch, but he doesn't want the baggage that goes with the sort of Murdoch label. But he's very, very interested in his own views and pursuing his own views. They bought Politico. He regularly writes in Politico. and what the this podcast Wenzel Wüsten what they alleged was that Mertz and Döpfner had a huge row because Döpfner said was pressuring Mertz to drop the firewall essentially to say you're not going to be able to fix our economy unless you work with these people because etc and according to this report Mertz said once is enough meaning we had this back in the 1930s and then the meeting ended with Duffner saying, you're going to regret this.

42:07Now, denials, some of them a bit in the sort of non-denial denial kind of phase, but very strong denials from Duffner. So I've been looking into this guy and I've been looking in, I read Bilt and I read Velt fairly regularly, but I don't think you need a podcast revealing that he has these views. You can see it in the newspapers. I then watched a podcast, this guy as I say has his own podcast. He interviewed Nigel Farage. Now Nigel Farage is a British political figure. Nigel Farage, for various reasons, best known to himself, doesn't want to come on the rest of his politics. But he goes and spends an hour talking to this guy who's asking him questions like, do you think you're ready to be prime minister?

42:49What would the relationship with America be like if you were prime minister rather than Keir Starmer? Snigger, snigger, snigger. And so I'm starting to think this guy clearly is the sort of person who probably But he is pressuring Matt, even though he's denying it. And as I say, this is of special interest, I think, now because he's got this British newspaper, The Telegraph, as well. But then I read some of their editorials. I think they're pushing in this direction. Now, they're entitled to do that, if that's what they believe. But say you believe it. Say you believe the firewall has to go. Don't sort of, you know, do this behind-the-scenes stuff.

43:28and have they had a poll of their readers a survey and it looked to me like one of those where you had to kind of you had to volunteer to give your view and a very large majority said they thought the firewall had had its day so i just wonder what you i wonder what you think is going on in the mind of somebody who's a major media owner in germany now in the uk and and how difficult that might become for a german chancellor who's not very strong right now well first of all to be careful what you wish for when you say they should just say openly. I think they will very soon. I think they're building to that moment where they will just very openly mainstream the AFD and say, well, why wouldn't we do a coalition with them?

44:07This is what the public wants. And I think we need to have a broader conversation as well about the role of mainstream liberals and conservatives in mainstreaming the far right, whether wittingly or unwittingly. You know that in Marxist political thought on the left, there is this line, a derogatory line, which is scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. This idea going back to the Weimar Republic in the 1930s, that it was mainstream liberal centrists who welcomed Hitler and the Nazis into the political system, thinking we can control this guy. And I think, you know, you don't want a repeat of that, obviously, where you think Matthias Dupfner and Friedrich Merzik, we can control Alice Weidel and the AFD.

44:40I'm not saying Merzik should do it. I'm saying, if that's what Dupfner believes, and if that's what he wants his newspapers to do, fight for it. I mean, look, this is a guy who, just to give context to your viewers and listeners, This is a guy who sent texts to his senior editorial staff ahead of the 2020 election saying we should all pray for Donald Trump's re-election. This is a guy who runs Politico, which is kind of in the US. I know you have Politico in the UK now as well, but in the US, it is seen as the gold standard of kind of impartial Westminster Beltway political journalism. He bought Politico in 2022.

45:15He writes in Politico, as you say, Politico staff have objected internally to him turning their outlet so partisan and going out and giving these partisan statements about politics, about Islam, about Israel. I should also point out to your listeners and viewers that if you work for Axel Springer, one of the core values, it's called one of the essentials, is to defend Israel's right to exist. You must support Israel in that way. Otherwise, you're encouraged to resign or you're fired. And I think we can't ignore the role of Israel right now in the German political debate. We've seen German mainstream politicians act in a very authoritarian way towards pro-Palestine protesters, towards Jewish Germans, anti-Zionist Jewish Germans who've been protesting the genocide.

45:55I don't know if you've seen us, the horrific scenes of German police dragging nonviolent, unarmed people, women off the streets. That kind of authoritarianism, you know who that helps in the long run? It only helps the far right. Same thing in the UK with Palestine action. When you act in an authoritarian way as a center left or center right party, the ultimate beneficiary of that is the far right, because that's where the political spectrum moves towards. That's where the energy and the center of travel goes towards. So in Germany, it is very worrying that they're on the rise. It is very worrying that this media mogul who owns the Telegraph, owns Politico, owns, I think he owns Built as well.

46:29He has this power to kind of set the political agenda in these places, is backing Nigel Farage. And Alistair, if you look at all these far right parties, you will find these billionaire media and tech moguls behind a lot them. You will find Elon Musk backing the AFD as well. You will find Rupert Murdoch with his fingers in a lot of these pies. You will find Matthias Dupfner now supporting a lot of these groups. He's obsessed with Islamism. He's obsessed with Israel. And that's why he's supporting a lot of these far-right parties. I should point out, a lot of these far-right European parties traditionally have been very, very anti-Semitic.

47:02But in recent years, they have reconfigured themselves as super pro-Israel. Before we leave, Herr Dupfner, though I think we'll come back to because it'd be very, very interesting to see whether he plays the same sorts of games in the Telegraph, which is fair, you know, well to the right, I would argue, of the papers that he's in charge of in Germany. But the other link, which you may or may not be aware of, is that his son, and I know you shouldn't, you know, dob the sons in with the dad the whole time, but his son, Moritz, was chief of staff to a gentleman by the name of Peter Thiel, who I think you'll know very, very, very well, and that Peter Thiel is now a big investor in Dupfner Jr.'s big startup.

47:45And it is interesting how this guy has, I think, changed. I mean, he used to be somebody you see very traditional German business in terms of the way he dressed. He now dresses very much in the kind of Silicon Valley, Andy Burnham, black vest type mode. I think he now sees Musk, Thiel, Bezos as his milieu, as opposed to, you know, the kind of the German business class. So I don't think he'll like the kind of German Murdoch label, but I think that's kind of what he's becoming. Do you think he wants the German Musk label? I mean, Musk has interfered a lot in German politics. He's spoken at the AFD rallies, just like he spoke at Tommy Robinson rallies.

48:27Peter Thiel is a deeply disturbing figure, also former PayPal ally of Elon Musk, part of the quote unquote PayPal mafia in Silicon Valley. Thiel spoke at Donald Trump's first Republican convention in 2016, a gay right-wing tech boss who is very Christian, talks about the Antichrist all the time, thinks Greta Thunberg may be the Antichrist, just to get a sense of how nutty Peter Thiel is. Had dinner with lots of white supremacists that came out a few years ago. Wrote an essay about 15 years ago saying, I've come to the conclusion that freedom is incompatible with democracy. He's a libertarian, wants to, he's one of these guys who wants to like build a, you know, a colony on Mars or in the middle of the ocean where there's no government and no regulation.

49:11And these are the guys, unfortunately, running a lot of our politics on both sides of the Atlantic, worryingly. Somebody got hold of some of these sort of, you know, private comments, which included free the West, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riffraff. The Aussies, that's the East Germans, are either communists or fascists. They don't be in between. Disgusting. I'm all for climate change. We shouldn't fight climate change, but adjust to it. And again, to go back to my point earlier, We can't talk about this stuff in a vacuum. When you read out that quote where he's going after Muslims and he's obsessed with Islam and Islamism and Muslim immigration, again, that is a mainstream issue, right?

49:43Mainstream politicians have entertained and promoted that idea as well, have said Islamophobic things, both Democrats and people in the Labour Party. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of us, not just for moral reasons, do you have to stand up to bigotry, but also for political reasons, because all you're doing is you're helping the Overton window move further and further to the right. I know this goes back, and this goes back to, unfortunately, your time in government as well, Alistair, where the Labour Party's position was, well, you've got to try and appease these people on the right.

50:07That's how you win them over. And it doesn't. When you meet a fascist halfway, all you do is embolden that fascist and the fascist narrative. And that's what we're seeing across Europe right now. I mean, on that, though, do you think, so for example, you and I both had lots of experience, and I, on kind of as it were, both sides of the fence with politics. But it is interesting. So, you know, this podcast, we have this motto, disagree agreeably. And we did. When we first mentioned, for example, that we, you know, might like to have Nigel Farage on. Now, as it happens, it's never come about because he's not agreed to do it.

50:41But lots of our listeners said, no, we don't want you to do that. We don't want Nigel Farage. And then we said the same about Rupert Lowe. I threw out an invitation to Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe, likewise, he said I was a traitor. Don't know what I've done to be a traitor, but I'm a traitor. And therefore, he didn't want to do it. but likewise then lots of our listeners and viewers said no we don't want you um interviewing people like rupert lowe but i'm kind of with you on this i think you have to engage i'm not you know the bjern hooker thing is very very interesting because i think i would like to sit down with him but alistair how though that's the question and i no disrespect to your podcast and i do a podcast too but i do think we live in an age of podcasts and a lot of politicians do enjoy the fact that we live in an age of podcasts just look at what donald trump did in the last election He avoided a lot of tough interviewers, but he did a bunch of podcasts.

51:28He did the Joe Rogans and the Theo Vons and all of those guys, the Andrew Schultz, I think he did as well. He did a bunch of podcasts and a lot of those podcasts, especially the right-wing podcasters, it was all just fun and games, right? And politicians now like doing podcasts over doing Sunday morning shows or tough political interviews because they don't get asked follow-up questions. They're confronted with a podcaster who doesn't understand politics or doesn't have a team of people writing forensic questions for them. And I think that is a problem, right? As much as I love independent media, I run an independent media company.

51:58I have a podcast team. I do worry, though, with my kind of political nerd hat on looking at political history, if politicians are able to find these safe spaces, fine. If you had Nigel Farage on, I'm sure it would be a very lively interview. But my worry is if Nigel Farage just pops up on podcasts as a whole, you're not going to get the kind of grilling or investigative journalism you might get in more traditional mainstream outlets. And that's my concern. I'm for grilling these people. I'm not for kind of quote unquote engagement for engagement's sake. And I do think that agreeing disagreeably thing, there has to be a line for that, right?

52:31Do you agree disagreeably with a neo-Nazi, with a fascist, with a racist, with a Holocaust denial, with a climate change denial? What point do you say, I can't actually agree disagreeably with you? I can't disagree agreeably about whether up is down, hot is cold, black is white. Reality, right? And I think that's where we're going to have these kind of tortured conversations as the right gets more deranged, more disconnected from reality. What do the rest of us do? And my position is you still hold the people in power to account, but you try and understand and engage with their followers, for sure.

53:03You need to understand what ordinary people, Ordinary people who are voting for the AFD, who are voting for reform, who are voting for the Republican Party, we can engage with them and try and understand, are there any legitimate grievances? Have they been misled? Is there something that actually is powering this populist anger that we need to take seriously? You see, look, I think if I were sitting down to interview somebody, well, let's say Rupert Lowe, let's say Rupert Lowe did it. I would want to give him the opportunity to see where he comes from his background how he made his money and all that and I'd like to do that in a very conversational way I think then when it came to what I think he stands for and how repellent I find some of those views I would I would want a listener to be aware of that's how I felt but I wouldn't want that to dominate the interview I would want I thought you did it well with Crar to be fair I'm not just blowing smoke at your back cycles you're there i thought you did it well because anybody watching that nobody would um ever think that you were giving him you weren't giving him an easy ride nor were you just sitting there saying what you think about him you were confronting him with the reality of things that he had said and done the things that other people said and done now and you were sometimes because you didn't have time you were letting him slide away with stuff that you in your heart knew he was being disingenuous obfuscatory you can't cover everything even enough no you can't and you you you end up sort of boring the ass off everybody because you're just going down sort of a little rabbit hole another example i would give when we interviewed alexander vucic the president of serbia some people think we were too soft on him but i actually i don't agree with that because if we'd have just again just gone at him again and again i was right about kosovo you're wrong about Kosovo.

54:48Let's revisit Kosovo, what have you. I just don't think that informs debate. You also interviewed the president of Syria, who until very recently was a wanted Al-Qaeda leader. Yeah. And look, I'll be very honest with you. Thank you for blowing smoke up my arse. It makes this very awkward then to say this in response, which is there's a lot of people who are going to be mad at me for coming on the show with you because of Iraq, right? You and I fundamentally disagree on Iraq. I think what you did in Iraq was horrific. I think what Tony Blair did was horrific. That's something you and I will never agree on.

55:14And if we were having an Iraq debate, we'd probably get very, very lively now where we'd probably be shouting at each other. And I think that's, but I still come on the show. First of all, I don't think you're a fascist or a traitor, obviously, Rupert Lowe, these people on the right just throw around these ridiculous phrases. But, you know, if I wouldn't come on the show to do the show with you, if you were just abusing me as a Muslim, right? All I'm trying to say is we all have our red lines and our hygiene tests. And, you know, some people have draw the line here, some people draw the line there.

55:42And I think, you know, for me, I'm in a position now where I was more hard line on my lines, as it were. But now I just want to talk to as many people I can within reason, right? Within reason. I've still got to have some kind of hygiene test. Like if you ask me, would I have Tommy Robinson on my show? No, I don't think there's any value in having Tommy Robinson on for an interview. It would only help him and his cause. It's not like we'd have any kind of good faith conversation. And I do think that's an important criterion when we judge who we're going to talk to. Can you have a good faith conversation with that person without it turning into a grift or just a shouting match or abuse or without it turning into a vehicle for one of the guests to just push their bullshit agenda.

56:20And I think that's a key question we have to ask ourselves. But I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think when people come into the comments of your show or my show and say, you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have done this, I've got that all the time. It's very easy to say, you know, for the armchair pundits, it's very difficult for those of us who are in the middle of this crazy political moment trying to work out, well, who do we talk to? Who do we ask questions to? What audiences do we address um and i i think it's a work in progress alistair yeah on the tommy robinson point uh over in australia a guy called carl stavanovich i don't know if you've followed this but he's like a big deal tv presenter for the breakfast program on nine channel nine the today program i think piers morgan was on his show recently i may have seen it no piers morgan has talked to him recently um but the reason piers morgan was talking to him is because this guy has had to leave his job on Channel 9 because he did a very tame interview with Tommy Robinson on his own podcast.

57:13Missed that. Yeah. Mehdi, it's been lovely to talk to you. Thank you for saying you still disagree with me about Iraq. I'm stunned to believe that. I thought, you know. I'm sure you were shocked. I'm sure you were shocked to hear that revelation. Absolutely shocked. Although, as I said in our interview with Ben Rhodes, I do kind of, I still kind of have lots of soul searching about that and lots of other things. But I think this point, I do think, and now I'm glad that Zetio is coming to, you know, you've largely been based in the US, you're now coming to the UK. I do think we need more media that's just challenging, challenging of the media and more challenging of politics as well, which is kind of what we try to do from a pro-politics, pro-good journalism perspective.

57:57We do try to do that when the rest is politics. But I think it's good to have more of it around the place because I do think that the, I hate the phrase the mainstream media, but people know what I mean. It's in big trouble. It's in big trouble in part because of economics, in part because of people like Musk and Zuckerberg doing the vileness that they've done, but also in part because I don't think they've really got to grips with the pace of change in the world and how we all need to adapt to that. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the plug for Zotero UK, which we just soft launched last month.

58:26great to be on the rest of politics. See you soon.