WBD5101 Audio Transcription

The Culture Wars with Michael Moynihan

Release date: Wednesday 8th June

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Michael Moynihan. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Michael Moynihan is a correspondent for Vice News and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast. In this interview, we discuss identity politics and its effect on framing issues such as the Russia Ukraine conflict. We also cover culture wars, toxicity, mainstream media, and freedom of speech.

“You can convince people of these things much easier now because they believe that speech is violence and nobody likes violence…there’s a reason, a very specific reason that you recast words as violence because nobody wants to be opposed to free speech.”

— Michael Moynihan

Interview Transcription

Michael Moynihan: So, you guys are over here doing a bunch?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we come out for two weeks, we make two months of shows and we go back.

Michael Moynihan: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Moynihan: Just in New York, or you go LA and New York?

Peter McCormack: This one's New York and Nashville.

Michael Moynihan: Nashville?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, a lot of Bitcoin people there.

Michael Moynihan: I see.

Peter McCormack: And then, previously we did Austin, we did enough in Austin.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: We did LA and SF, and then we did Miami and DC.  Usually, we can get 60% of the guests in the location and the other 40% fly in.

Michael Moynihan: It's not a bad gig, is it?

Peter McCormack: We want to do them all in person.

Michael Moynihan: I can understand.  That's what the pandemic fucking ruined.  Everybody can say, "We'll just do it on Zoom".  I'm like, "No, can you please come to the studio?" and that's oftentimes hard, but I much prefer it.

Peter McCormack: Do you do any of them remote?

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, we do, just because people are difficult and there's three of us and one of the guys was living in San Francisco.  He moved out there to be in the universe of those people.

Peter McCormack: Well, this is why we move around, so we know we can get people in different places, and we can pull certain people in on a flight, but there's certain people who won't come.  We're not Rogan level; everyone goes in.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, and he flies people to Austin now, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Moynihan: You have to be in Austin, he doesn't do any remotes.

Peter McCormack: No, but eventually, I think the next step is, we'll have one place in the US and one in the UK, and then ultimately, one in one place, but it probably won't be a Bitcoin show.

Michael Moynihan: Have you done Rogan?

Peter McCormack: I haven't done Rogan.  I don't think he knows or gives a fuck about me.

Michael Moynihan: He's not a Bitcoin guy.

Peter McCormack: No, and I think he appreciates it, but I don't think he wants to do a Bitcoin show. 

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, it would have to be pretty remedial, and I don't know if he'd want to do that, right.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's funny; if you asked all the bitcoiners, who would you want, very few people would vote for me, because most bitcoiners hate me.

Michael Moynihan: You're a polarising figure, I've noticed this.

Peter McCormack: I'm not a gun-toting, libertarian, carnivore.

Michael Moynihan: Yes, you're a vegan Marxist?

Peter McCormack: I'm British, so I like a health service, and I don't mind a bit of tax and I don't want guns, because I think they're stupid.  They're fun, but they're stupid to have in society.  And a lot of them want a society or a world where it's complete anarchy and no government, and I just think that's fucking stupid.

Michael Moynihan: A sort of Peter Thiel universe.

Peter McCormack: Well, Peter Thiel wants it because he can build the walls and he can buy the tanks, but most people can't.

Michael Moynihan: That's exactly right.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm not that guy and some of the things I'm a leftist on, so that pisses people off.  I'm also not super into the technical detail, and I think the Bitcoin people out there, they want someone like Michael Saylor on, who's going to go into the detail.  But I actually think I would be good on it, because I don't want us to talk about Bitcoin for three hours.  But whatever, we will see; one day, maybe.

Michael Moynihan: I don't know, I'm bored by people who think the same thing as me.  I honestly have no interest.  I mean, if I want to talk to myself, I'd just stay at home.  I do sometimes.

Peter McCormack: Well, we have a subject we need to get into today.

Michael Moynihan: What's that?

Peter McCormack: We need to talk about what's going on in Ukraine/Russia, because even though it's a Bitcoin show, right, we don't always cover Bitcoin, we cover adjacent subjects.  We had Scott Horton booked, but we had him booked before the war, didn't we?  So, we had him booked on, and I just like talking to him.  I think he's an interesting guy.

Michael Moynihan: Very smart guy.  I disagree with him on a lot, probably almost everything, but he's a very, very bright guy.  I have a lot of respect for him, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I like him.  I heard a whole series on Tom Woods' show and I thought he was great.  So, we'd had him before, I'd been on his show.

Michael Moynihan: Listening to Tom Woods will get you yelled at by people in the Bitcoin world, right?  Isn't he just a gold bug?  Oh, no, that's Peter Schiff I'm thinking of.

Peter McCormack: No, Peter Schiff, up there.  Oh, we forgot Schiff!

Danny Knowles: We've not got Schiff.

Peter McCormack: We forgot Schiff!  We usually have a picture of Schiff in the background.  Have we got the BLOCKCLOCK?  We usually have some ode to Schiff.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, he's a jerkoff!

Peter McCormack: No, they love Tom Woods.  But he is a libertarian who isn't a full Bitcoin bug yet.

Michael Moynihan: Tom Woods?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  He's a bit on the dodgy libertarian end, where we're not on, so…

Peter McCormack: We are on, yeah, we're recording.

Michael Moynihan: We're recording? 

Peter McCormack: We're recording now.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, shit, you sneaked up on me like that!

Peter McCormack: That's the best way to do it.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, my goodness.  I mean, it is for you, probably not for me.  I was about to say something.

Peter McCormack: Well, you should say it.

Michael Moynihan: He's not my cup of tea, I'll just say that.

Peter McCormack: I like Tom Woods' show and I listen to it, but I'm definitely not in agreement with him on a number of issues.

Michael Moynihan: I should say, I don't listen to his show.  I should, if I'm going to say bad things.

Peter McCormack: I'll be drawn in on particular guests, but I'm not in agreement with him, because I'm not a libertarian.

Michael Moynihan: So, what are you politically?  Do you have ideology that you kind of organise your ideas around, or they organise themselves around?

Peter McCormack: I would say I'm a right-leaning progressive with libertarian empathy.

Michael Moynihan: So, you just covered everything; you're designed to confuse me!

Peter McCormack: Well, no, so in the UK --

Michael Moynihan: What would you be in the UK?

Peter McCormack: I'm a Conservative.

Michael Moynihan: You're a Conservative?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's the only party I've ever voted for.

Michael Moynihan: Really?  Okay.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I get called a leftie a lot in the US, but I think that's because --

Michael Moynihan: You're a Tory wet for us.

Peter McCormack: No, you know what I think it is?  I think you have the American right, and the rest of the world is left of that.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm considered a leftie here, but I'm considered a rightie in the UK.  But, it depends on the issue.  I would say, is it a classic liberal who is fiscally conservative, socially progressive?  I think that's where I am.  I think tax is too high and we should have smaller government, but I also like the fact we have a National Health Service.

Michael Moynihan: So, something of a Thatcherite in a way?

Peter McCormack: A little bit, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: I know that is a dirty word these days, particularly in the media class.  When Thatcher died, it was really interesting to watch from the outside, because American Conservatives venerate her.  They shouldn't, because there are a lot of things they would probably disagree with Thatcher on.  But watching the reaction in the UK was pretty interesting.

Peter McCormack: Well, some people celebrated her.

Michael Moynihan: Quite aggressively!

Peter McCormack: They think she was a Nazi!

Michael Moynihan: "Ding-Dong!  The Witch is Dead", right?  That was what was -- didn't they try to make that number one; wasn't that the number one song?

Peter McCormack: I can't remember. 

Michael Moynihan: You might want to factcheck that one.  There is some Thatcher-related song that the attempt was to make it number one and I'm not sure if they succeeded, but I was like, "Man, that's a pretty aggressive response to somebody who these days, particularly in the world of American Conservatives, would be rather mild.

Danny Knowles: They did.  It got to number two, it never got number one!

Michael Moynihan: Look at that!

Peter McCormack: But I think the difference in the UK is, you can be politically aligned, but the circles of the Venn diagram can overlap.  Whereas, in the US, they can't touch anymore.

Michael Moynihan: Not these days, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Every topic, your position is one or the other.

Michael Moynihan: The polarisation of America and the polarisation, I think the UK is probably lagging behind thankfully, because obviously nobody wants that; but I think it really has been the culture war issues.  When you see people like Ron DeSantis in Florida, who I don't think really cares about these things very much, but has a larger stage than he wants to be on, is really exploiting them.  I mean, what is the purpose of somebody saying, "What is your political ideology?"  Mine has always been effectively anti-communism, in a 1970s and 1980s way, because my interest was always Soviet history and the rest of it, not from a place of, "I like these guys"; quite the opposite! 

But DeSantis, they passed the bill for a Victims of Communism Day in Florida, and it was part of the school curriculum.  Now, this is something that I would be instinctually on that side, but I don't like the exploitation of this stuff for political reasons.  You go to these rallies and people are fist-pumping and they know nothing about the issue, but they know which side they're on.  It's like the old communist thing was, "Tell me where do you stand?"  "Sag mir wo Du stehst", as the Germans said, "What side are you on?" and that's what the culture wars have become in the US, and I really can't stand, I really, really don't.

I'm effectively on the same side as these people on a lot of this stuff, particularly when it comes to, for lack of a better phrase, "wokeism", which I think has been a poison in so many ways.  But unfortunately, the people you find arguing the same points as you are not often the people you want to go to a party with, or hang around with.  Maybe that's just me!  But I meant that, because I see it in the UK quite a bit too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's happening, but we haven't had the same explosion.  And I think the debate around certain issues isn't so divided.  I mean, COVID was a great example.  Whether you were pro- or anti-vaccines had nothing really to do with whether you were Conservative or Labour.

Michael Moynihan: Sure, that's a weird thing, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  But here, look, I know there are a bunch of Republican people who probably did get vaccinated, but the general consensus was, and you know it, because here in New York, I see a lot more masks; I didn't see fuck-all masks in Austin recently --

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, it's really funny, yeah.  It's a social signal.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the kind of general pro-lockdown, general pro-vaccine, seemed to be very much a Democratic side of thing.  Whereas the general scepticism, anti, was Republican.  That's not a UK thing; that wasn't like Conservatives were.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, and it's kind of not a Europe thing either, because the thing that was so odd about it was that Americans were discussing this and blaming -- look, I could go on for five hours about the things you could blame Donald Trump for, who I'm very much not a fan of, and have a five-year record of not being a fan of; but there was an instinct at a certain point to blame him for everything.  He's an easy scapegoat; he asks for it.

But that point, when it came to these people who opposed lockdowns and this was a very uniquely American thing, that was the frame, I was like, "Are you guys looking at the riots that are happening in The Netherlands, in France, in Berlin?"  I mean, Berlin was like a big hotspot of rejection of this kind of "authoritarian" regime of COVID lockdowns.  We put a uniquely American spin on it and we're very good at that, but it's not a uniquely American phenomenon.

Of course, prior to COVID, that was the terrain of the left, to be vaccine sceptics; that was typically the kind of goop that, what's her name, Gwyneth Paltrow?

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: That kind of universe, that hippy anti-vaccine thing, was always considered to be something that was specifically found on the left, and God did that change in the past couple of years.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I mean, the divisiveness here is really weird, and it's kind of frustrating, because it's become so divisive that again, if you get into particular subjects, you can't even get to a civil debate about these points now.  It's like, "You're a cuck [or] you're a statist [or] you're a fucking moron, you're an idiot, you've got a low IQ".  It's like, "Can we just even discuss it?"  Recently, I'm quite interested in the Second Amendment, I think it's an interesting topic.  I've read it and to me, it seems open to interpretation.  It seems like it doesn't say, "Every person, everywhere, can have any weapon they want".  And I've tried to have that conversation.

Michael Moynihan: And of course, there are limits on that too.  I mean, since the late 1930s, you can't have an automatic weapon.  People think there's automatic, but no, there's semi-automatic and that's legal, but we do have limitations on what people can have.

Peter McCormack: But even if you disagree with those limitations, you want to get to the point of conversation, "Well, where is the limitation?  Can anyone have a nuke or chemical weapons?  Should we put tactical nukes outside schools?"  If anyone thinks anyone should have any weapon, they're a fucking idiot in my books, but most rational people have a line and it's like, "Okay, we agree there's a line, so we agree there should be rules.  Shall we have a little discussion about where that line is and what the impact is?"

Michael Moynihan: The thing that's interesting about America, and I think it's a geography too, I mean you can drive from Brighton to Scotland in, what, five hours or something; something like that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, about that, right.  I drive five hours and I'm in Massachusetts.  That's a contiguous land mass where we're all the same.  When you get that big, I think the thing that's most interesting is that people in my world of journalism, and this is true of the people out there in what is derisively called "Flyover country", they're right about this, we have no understanding of them at all, none whatsoever.  It's such a curious thing to people, and it goes both ways.  It's like the effete liberals who are, everybody's bringing their kids to trends, readings at the library or something, that's what people actually think.  And then you go there and you're like, "Why are there all these crazy people with guns?"

Actually, they're not the problem with the guns, they're actually not.  I mean, they might be the problem politically, if you're trying to fight against the NRA or any lobbies that support looser gun laws.  But as far as people that are problematic with guns, they don't live in Chicago.  I mean, there was 56 shootings in Chicago last weekend.  Well, that was two weeks ago; I haven't checked this week, because it was Memorial Day, I decided not to look at the Chicago shootings for one week.  But generally, that's where it's happening.  I mean, you hear "mass shootings", they're not mostly kids in schools, they're mostly six people getting shot in gang violence in the gang side of Chicago.

So, we don't really have an understanding of who the other people are.  And then, the polarisation; look, I think it's better that we don't have three channels for news anymore.  I mean, you had that in the UK, I lived in Sweden for a long time.  It was only until the 1990s that the Swedes had more than three channels, right, early-1990s, as there's regulations against having more channels.  We have more now, but good God, does it really set us on these separate paths.

I mean, there's no doubt about that.  You can say it's a good thing or a bad thing; I like more choice.  That's another one of my ideologies; choice is a very good thing.  But people play in their cloistered little corners and nobody has any interaction with the other people, and that's a problem; particularly when I go out and talk to people.  I mean, I've been to so many Trump rallies, just as a journalist, and these people, they're all so nice.  Every crew I've ever had, they're the nicest people in the world.  Everyone's so nice, they try to understand you, but they don't know anything.

Peter McCormack: I went to a Trump rally, I loved it!

Michael Moynihan: It was fun, wasn't it?

Peter McCormack: Great.  I think the people are brilliant.  But I also love a lot of traditional Southern US culture.  I like country music.  I don't like and listen to it, but I like the experience of it.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, yeah!

Peter McCormack: I like Whiskey.  We're going to Nashville and I can't fucking wait.

Michael Moynihan: It's really fun, it's a really fun town.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I like Republican people, I think they're fucking awesome.  I don't agree with them on a lot of stuff.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, me too.

Peter McCormack: And I tend to sometimes find that I agree with Democrat people on a lot of things politically, but I also then find I sometimes don't want to spend time with them.  There's this weird kind of…

Peter McCormack: My ex is Swedish and we came to American for the first time in the mid-2000s, and we were talking to these people at a party in Brooklyn, it was absolutely perfect.  And she's a social democrat, leftie, art school, all the rest of it.  And we're talking to this woman, and she starts going off about this guy that she went on a date with, or whatever, it was very "Curb Your Enthusiasm". 

She was like, "I found out he was a fucking Republican" and looked at Joanna, and she came back to me and she was like, "How did she know that I wasn't a Republican?  Why did she just presume that I would agree with this deep hatred, not even a dislike or, 'I don't know if I can deal with this', like, 'Can you believe it?  I met somebody --'".  It's like Eichmann in Jerusalem, like a Nazi in a glass box ready to be tried!

She was like, "Why is that?"  I was like, "You're in Brooklyn, we're in our little places.  We don't talk to those people or about those people".  And she ended up like you, really enjoyed Southern culture, because it was just hospitable, politically very different.  I mean, I'm sure it's not something that she wants to vote based on, but there's just a very weird thing in New York that I've always felt at dinner parties, it's always a great place to go.  I don't say much anymore, but I used to be a total fucking asshole.  I'd go in there and… 

The trick is do this.  Go to a dinner party and be like, "You know who I really can't fucking stand?  These fucking Christians" and everyone's like, "Oh, I know".  Just replace that with a different religion and see if you can get through the dinner party; like, "You know who I really can't fucking stand?  Muslims" and everyone's like, "Excuse me?"

Peter McCormack: "What the fuck did you just say?"

Michael Moynihan: The silverware planks on the table and it's like, "Get out, it's time for you to go!"  It's like, these things, everything's so fraught, and there's just a code that you have to adhere to, whether you know it or not, and whether they know it or not.  There's just this kind of natural code for how to exist in certain urban centres in America, and I find it very suffocating sometimes. 

It does mirror some of my views, and the music I listen to, the novels I read, etc.  I grew up in Massachusetts, for fuck's sake; this is not alien to me.  But I do like getting out from it, because people who say, "I just really like to travel, I like to go to different cultures", it's like, "You don't want to meet Americans who are different from you, but you do want to go to Swaziland and pretend, 'This is amazing, these different cultures'.  You don't like that", and that's the thing.  Being around people in the US who have different opinions is becoming such a weird sport, because people love to get into it with you too.

Peter McCormack: You do hear that in the UK though.  I can't believe I'm bringing this up two interviews in a row, but --

Michael Moynihan: Jeremy Corbyn?

Peter McCormack: No, Tinder!  You will get people saying, "No Tories"!

Michael Moynihan: Oh, yeah, "Tory scum".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I'm not dating you because you're a Tory".  And you can try and explain to them the economic reasons why you vote Conservative and why some of the policies of someone like Corbyn will completely fail and bankrupt the country; they don't care, you're Tory scum.  So, you do get a bit of that, but I think we benefit from the release valve of not being a two-party system.  You don't have that release valve where you can go, "They're being too crazy, I'm just going to vote --"

Michael Moynihan: You kind of are a two-party system, but I mean the Lib Dems exist and then --

Peter McCormack: It's a release valve.

Michael Moynihan: It's a release valve, I think that's right, yeah.  But when I was growing up and watching British comedy and stuff that Ben Elton would produce, people like that, there was a consistent theme of the Tories.  I mean, when I was young, I didn't know anything about this stuff.  I was thinking, "Man, these Tories sound really bad, these bastards".  I mean, there was literally a Rik Mayall TV show where he was Alan B'Stard, who was a Tory MP.  It was just a crazy culture.

I don't know what the result was in the UK, but when you have popular culture where your party is always considered the moustache-twisting, evil, petting a cat and planning some sort of mass murder, how that affects you.  I mean, this stuff does drive these culture wars, whether they know it or not.  It's like, yeah, "Tory scum" are two words I know that go together, and I'm not British.

Peter McCormack: Well, I don't think it helps that, I think it's definitely the last two Prime Ministers, but a lot of Conservative Prime Ministers went to Eton, which is a highly privileged school.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, Harrow, Eton kind of club.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is that club, it is that background, and it is that route to success and leadership.  That doesn't help.

Michael Moynihan: I mean, the Tories were that way too.  My friend, Andrew Sullivan, who I'm sure you know, who told me last time we talked, or maybe I think it was on the podcast, that he went to school with Keir Starmer.  I mean, Labour has a very similar pedigree in a way, but it's being a class traitor, which is what FDR was, and there's a book about him called Class Traitor.  The idea that you come from unbelievable, almost pornographic wealth, it's the obligation for you to turn your nose up and reject it.

The great example of that in the UK is the Mitford family, where you have some that embrace fascism, and Decca Mitford, a nurse, moves to America, moves to Oakland, becomes friends with the Black Panthers and becomes a communist.  It's like she rejected that class thing.  We don't really have that, and I know it's a cliché at this point to say, "The class things are so different".  We do have it, but it's just on a much smaller scale, and it means less to people. 

We don't understand the fact that there are people in the UK who come from this amazing privilege but have no money.  It's an amazing thing to me; have crumbling castles and no money.  No one has any idea where the money's coming from at all.  It's a very, very British thing, the crumbling castles of the old aristocracy.

Peter McCormack: I don't know about that!

Michael Moynihan: It's true!

Danny Knowles: People have stately homes that they just can't keep up.

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah, I know, because you see them come up on Rightmove and you're like, "Fucking hell, look at these properties", and the inside is absolutely terrible.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, and it's just people who once had a position where they got things, and no one really understood why!  It just dissipated.  I mean, I know a number of people like this, who have the plummiest of accents and empty bank accounts; it's amazing.

Peter McCormack: I think that's an old dying part that you can --

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  I mean, I just referenced the Mitfords; I'm really not living in the modern age!

Peter McCormack: But I also think there's the levels between politicians within Labour and Conservative that are coming together.  I mean, Keir Starmer, I don't know where he went to school, maybe he went to private school, but it's not Eton I don't think he went to.

Michael Moynihan: I don't think so.  The Bullingdon Club types, right?

Peter McCormack: I just think there's Eton and then there's private schools, and I just think it's a different thing.  But we do have that release valve.  If the Conservatives are getting a bit too Nazi, you can vote Lib Dem; and if --

Michael Moynihan: It's the Nazi release valve, yeah!

Peter McCormack: Well, you've got the Nazi-type Conservatives, who are always going to vote Conservative, and you've got the communist-style Labour people, who are always going to vote Labour.  But then, you've got this middle ground, that if they do go too Nazi, you go Lib Dems; and if Labour go way too communist, you go Lib Dems.  And then suddenly, the Lib Dems have the chance to gain some power in government, because neither party has enough seats.

It happened recently, and unfortunately it wasn't good for Lib Dems, because they gave away too much to the Conservatives, but at least you have that release valve where you can go, "I can't fucking vote for that, but I can go in the middle here.  It's just like here; flip a coin.

Michael Moynihan: I don't vote.  I truly don't vote, I haven't in a long time.  And people don't understand this.  It is itself a choice, it's a political choice.  I'm not failing in my civic responsibility, I am actually living out my civic responsibility by protesting that I hate both parties and the people that are put up.  I mean, I will vote in local elections where it actually matters.  But if you are registered in Massachusetts, you're registered in New York City, what's the point of voting; honestly, what's the point?  I mean, the differences are so large.  And they're like, "What if it was down to one vote?" and I say, "Then I would vote".

You see these contested places where it's very, very narrow.  That's a place to vote.  I mean, I lived in DC.  These are fucking Syrian elections; 98% for Bashal al-Assad.  I mean they're 98% Democratic, it's a one-party state; what is the point?  Particularly, all of these attempts in this country at third parties have usually flailed, because they have a hammer lock on the process and they're going to keep you from getting on the ballot in certain places; it's a very undemocratic thing.  So, we're locked into this, and we just have to deal with it unfortunately.

Peter McCormack: I do think it all plays out though, because this culture war, not only is it not good for America, but everyone looks to you, and what happens in America, eventually there's a lag and it bleeds out to the rest of the world.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, unfortunately.  I think it's turning now. 

Peter McCormack: The failed attempts, the cancels.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, to go back to Margaret Thatcher, "This lady is for turning".  It is time to turn, and I think that is happening, and you see these things that people post.  I mean, somebody just posted a screenshot -- this is a perennial, it happens every time -- of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Ricky Gervais' new special.  12% for the critics and 98% for the viewers, kind of thing.  And, it's a cheap little thing, 7 reviewers or something, 12 reviewers, but it does underscore a real issue, that there is a disconnect between the people who are the gatekeepers of culture and those who are the consumers of culture.

When you saw the Netflix thing, and I think this is just one example of how this is turning, and the, what is it, Ted Sarandos, I think his name is?  I always want to say Theranos, and then I think it's that scam company, right!  It's like Ted Sarandos, he was fucking people, "You don't want to work here?  Work somewhere else.  It's not a public works project, you don't have a right to work here", but that's very different than some of the previous iterations of the same conversation.

The same thing happened at Spotify with Joe Rogan, and I was getting some information from some people there that are like, "This is totally insane".  Netflix I think fired a bunch of those people that were in that universe that believe that the workplace is a place to fight culture wars, and this is, I think, an absolute result of the change in university culture, because so many of these people are young.  And they're coming out swinging and they're not saying, "Let's lick our wounds, we lost this battle", they are outraged that they're losing it.  They're like, "Fuck you, you guys are trying to kill me.  This is language that is going to murder me".  That kind of stuff is so extreme and so wild, that when it starts infiltrating the normal culture, seeps into the groundwork, people start calling it what it is; insanity.

The fights are much harder when they're just in these little worlds of Twitter and podcasts, etc.  But when it starts, that's the thing that I don't like the tactic, but you've got to give DeSantis credit if you want to.  He's fighting that battle publicly, for very, I think, sleazy political reasons; but once it does get into the culture, people are like, "Wait!"  And I think the real issue in that is the one that I never talk about, and never talk about on the podcast, is the trans stuff, just because I do talk to people about -- who cares about Lia Thomas, or whatever, the swimmer?  I don't really, but I think a lot of people see that as the culture changing in a way that they don't like.

I mean, National Review, the Conservative magazine that William F Buckley started in the early 1950s, 1954, 1955, in their mission statement there's a very famous sentence.  He said that National Review is, "Standing athwart history, yelling stop" and that's what people feel right now.  They're standing athwart what's happening and they want to yell stop, because this is not an ethnic thing.  I mean, I did a piece for Vice in Starr County in Texas, swung pretty hard towards Trump.  It's the most Hispanic district in America, 98%, 99%. 

I met all these MAGA people that were Mexican Americans, and the interesting thing is we -- I say we; educated white liberals, put it that way, love these categories.  We're not supposed to say, "Black people are this way, white people are that way", that's bad, but we do get it; we get to do that.  And we say, "Hispanics, Latinx people think a particular way".  Then they run up against what's happening in Texas and they're like, "What the fuck is going on here?"  Just go down and talk to them, because a lot of immigrants, first, second generation, are bring-up-the-drawbridge immigrants.

They're like, "We're good, we don't want those people in Central America, not so good on the Ecuador stuff, maybe not from El Salvador, lot of gangs there".  These are people I talk to.  We in the media talk about race incessantly, identity incessantly.  The rest of the country doesn't.  And if they do, they talk about it in a very different way, and particularly when it comes to Hispanic, I mean good God.  Peruvians are the same as Mexicans or the same as Cubans.  I mean, good Lord, you put these people in the same room, they might fight each other to the death.  They have very different attitudes about what the world is, but they've been flattened by people who with the same breath tell you not to make broad statements about racial groups, and then do the same thing, because it's a good way of doing it, rather than a negative stereotype.

All this stuff is stupid and you can see it in just the responses from people in polls and elections; it's kind of insane.

Peter McCormack: I mean, that was a big lead-up for us to talk about Ukraine and Russia as well!

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, they don't like each other very much either!  The Hispanics of Europe!  Don't take that out of context.

Peter McCormack: Well, someone put you in touch with me on Twitter, because as I said, I had Scott on, I like Scott, I think he's interesting.

Michael Moynihan: Me too, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And the timing was such that we had him booked, he turned up and a war had just broken up and he's an anti-war guy and I was like, "Look, I don't feel I can miss this opportunity to talk to you".  So, we had the conversation.  Unfortunately, his knowledge and recall of history is way beyond mine, because he's an anti-war guy, he's studied every part of this.  I haven't, I have to go with my vague assumptions of, "Okay, well yeah, Russia's authoritarian, Putin likes to put bullets in the back of people's heads and assassinate people in the UK.  He seems to have invaded a sovereign country.  That to me looks pretty bad".

Michael Moynihan: Bad guy, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "Bad guy.  A bunch of people are being displaced, there's a humanitarian disaster, people are dying".  I feel pretty comfortable with those statements, maybe tweeting some things out saying, "Why are people simping for Putin, he's a fucking dictator, etc".  Then the reactions come in, "None of this is NATO expansion.  This is provocation".

Michael Moynihan: Ukraine, by the way, is not in NATO.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Michael Moynihan: I know, but I always like to point that out to people who are saying that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but they were saying they wanted to join, etc.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, they've been wanting to join since 1991; it's a long time ago.

Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is, there are the people saying it is provocation, and then there's people talking about Nazi battalions, which seemed to be an issue, but a small issue.

Michael Moynihan: It is real, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It is real.  And then, corruption in Ukraine, so all this stuff was coming up.  But I was like, "I'm pretty sure there's Nazis in every country in the world".

Michael Moynihan: I mean, ahead of the Wagner Group, the Russian -- it's called Wagner for what reason?  Because of Richard Wagner, the antisemitic composer.  One of the guys who started it has an SS tattoo on his neck, and he's Russian and he's not serving the people of Eastern Congo right now, for instance, one of many places, Syria, etc.  So, yeah, it's a thing that exists in a lot of places.

Peter McCormack: But there's also clear corruption in Russia.  Putin's entire base was built on corruption and rewarding the oligarchs, etc.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, it's a kleptocracy for sure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I'm like, these exist in both, but a group of people are one way, a group -- it's a culture war again, it's absolutely a culture war.  But in my mind, I still can't get my head beyond the point that there seemed to be an unnecessary invasion of a sovereign country, and 8 million people displaced, whatever it is now, complete destruction of cities, people being killed, certainly war crimes happening.  How are some people not seeing that for what it is?

I spoke to Scott and at the end of it I was like, "I can't argue back, because I don't understand these topics as much as you".  And then somebody tagged me in a post and said, "You need to talk to Michael", and here we are.

Michael Moynihan: Well, thank you, whoever that person is!  I mean, where do you begin with that?  All those things are bad things, and none of those things allow a country to invade and violate the sovereignty of a neighbouring country.  There are treaties in place, the Budapest Memorandum 1994, where Russia agreed to abide by the sovereignty of Ukraine.  Because Ukraine, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, became I think the third largest nuclear power in the country, because they were all based there, keeping in mind Chernobyl's in Ukraine, and that was part of the deal of the disarmament was, "Okay, we'll hand these over and you grant us our sovereignty".

The NATO expansion thing has been a line that we've heard since NATO expansion, "Oh, they said, 'Not an inch to the East'".  I mean, none of this was codified, by the way.  Here's the thing that's interesting about this.  When you have these things that you say you won't do X, and there's large diplomacy at stake, you codify them into treaties, into agreements, etc.  There's none of that.  And, as if to prove the point that NATO is necessary, the Russians invaded two countries in the region, both of which had NATO aspirations but were not members of NATO, for the very reason that was demonstrated when they were both invaded, and that's Georgia -- I was in Georgia right after that invasion in Gori -- and then it's Ukraine.

So, now it's backfired on Putin; and for the people who think that NATO is such a horrible, maligned influence, "Oh, it's not a defence", it is a defensive thing.  We can talk about Libya and stuff like that.  But in this region, they're not invading anyone, right.  The Warsaw Pact, this was when NATO was created as a counter to the Warsaw Pact, and as somebody just said, and I can't take credit for it, "The Warsaw Pact is the only pact that invaded -- the only invasions it did were two of its own countries.  It invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia"!  So, the Warsaw Pact is invading people within its own space for showing some sort of independence in 1956 and 1968.

But that said, Finland, Sweden -- I live in Sweden -- that was a debate that has been -- I mean, the Swedes are opposed to NATO, being a member of NATO, and for the first time ever since the last 1940s, over 50% of respondents and polls in both Sweden and Finland wanted to join NATO, and now they're in the process of doing that and they're negotiating with Turkey, who is trying to use this as a political -- a country that shouldn't be in NATO by the way.  But yeah, this is a pretty obvious thing.  You don't want to be invaded and you want to join an alliance of people that will have your back; there's nothing complicated about this.

Ukraine has been threatened from the very, very beginning of the Russian Federation at the end of the Cold War in 1991.  Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the guy of the unfortunately named Liberal Democratic Party, who died about a month ago, made a career out of threatening Ukraine and saying it should be taken back into Mother Russia.  You can have these conversations and arguments about whether, historically, Crimea -- Putin talks about, he's upset at Khrushchev for Crimea and giving it away to the Ukrainians; okay fine.  You don't invade them though.  You have these conversations with the proper channels, invading them in a way that is so destructive, and the destruction that I saw when I was in Ukraine is a horror; it's unbelievable that this is happening in 2022 in Europe.

I mean, the defence of this has shifted from a defence of Putin.  I mean, they all claim that they're not sycophants of Putin though; I've met a number who actually are, particularly Conservatives, like Catholic Conservatives, "National Conservatives", they call themselves, that they love that Putin pushes back on the trans stuff.  He made a comment at the beginning of the war about, "You in the West, you have all trans rights", and all this stuff, and all the people that you want on your side are salivating, "See, he's one of us".  It's a very easy, silly thing to do.

But yeah, I don't understand how, at this point -- well, look, I'll say this.  The conversation has shifted to, "Should we supply the Ukrainians with arms and how much, and are we risking World War III?"  That's the thing, ad infinitum, World War III.  Well, we're not risking World War III, they are, I'm sorry to say.  You don't invade Ukraine, none of this happens.  But I don't know how the Russians who couldn't take Kyiv are going to successfully launch World War III, and with what allies; not a lot of people that are on their side, except for the Syrians.  And they're thankful, because the Russians came in and turned a bunch of parts of Syria into parking lots, a massive series of war crimes that nobody paid attention to at the time, by the way; and we didn't pay much attention to Georgia either.

Where does Putin get this idea?  Nobody stopped him.  And I think he underestimated the Ukrainian response and the European response and the American response too, particularly Poland, which had been kind of squishy on how they treated Moscow; not now.  I mean, the Poles are ready to fight, and the number of people that have joined the army has increased by 20%, 30%.  I mean, they're on war footing really.

Peter McCormack: When were you last there?

Michael Moynihan: So, I was there probably three weeks in, four weeks in, something like that.  Refugees were still streaming out; now, they're going back.

Peter McCormack: And, what parts did you travel to?

Michael Moynihan: So, we started in Poland and around the border, and then we were in Lviv and then north of Lviv.  And then, I had a crew, we were supposed to go to a training facility, waking up the next morning to go to this training facility, and the air-raid siren that we heard the previous night was because the facility had been hit.

Peter McCormack: Holy shit.

Michael Moynihan: And, 35 people, some of whom were with the unit we were with the previous day, which is an international unit, there were some Brits and Americans, but there were a lot of Poles, Baltic people, people who have a long history of Russian aggression.  So, they're going there to fight, and that's a really interesting thing.  Poles are there to fight, Estonians are there to fight.  I mean, the second largest, for the first I think month of the war, after the US, supplier of weapons, money and material to Ukraine was Estonia.

Peter McCormack: That's incredible, because that's a country at rest, because --

Michael Moynihan: $1.4 million, or something like that.

Peter McCormack: But also, geographically --

Michael Moynihan: It shares a border with Russia, and it also has a very large Russian-speaking minority, which is usually what happens.  In 1939, the Germans invaded Poland with the excuse of Danzig, Gdańsk, and they used a lot of other excuses, but ethnic Germans.  Volksdeutsche, they called them.  The same thing is true in Czechoslovakia.  Those are those ethnic Germans. 

Russians do that too.  This is like, "We have people who speak Russian".  Yeah, why are there people who speak Russian in Ukraine?  Because, when you occupy Ukraine, sometimes people go and live there and remain there and keep their language, and they should be treated fairly.  There wasn't a huge bit of evidence that they were being treated horribly unfairly either; there was no genocide of people.  I mean, the war has been going on in the Donbas region since 2014.

But yeah, as far as morally, I don't think there's a convincing argument that what the Russians have done is defensible in any way.  I mean, I find it completely impossible.  "Well, you should respect their sovereignty".  Well, they're a sovereign country.  If they want to join NATO, it's their fucking business.  Why does it need a big bully neighbour to tell them what they're allowed to do; they shouldn't, right, it's madness to say.

Then, of course, when they make noises they want that -- I mean, the 2014 Revolution, they were turning away from Europe and people were very upset about that, because a promise was broken that they would be a more European-facing country and not a Russian-facing country.  It's an absolutely losing proposition, with a sclerotic economy; and what was then a semi-authoritarian country, which is now a full-on dictatorship at the moment, and don't let anyone tell you differently, it's a dictatorship.

Peter McCormack: What was the scale of the destruction that you actually saw?

Michael Moynihan: For me, we were trying to go places that made it difficult.  I am not a journalist that likes to go take pictures in front of burned-out tanks.  What we were doing was, we were doing a story on foreign fighters, and the foreign fighters were coming in through Poland and the points where they were being dispersed was from Lviv.  And, I have wanted to go back, particularly to Kyiv, which is now liberated and not quite back to the way it was, but there's a lot of people there, and there's traffic jams and I've been talking to people there that I know, it's getting close to what it looked like prior to the war.

But as far as the destruction, the destruction that I saw was being at the train station, shooting at the train station, and by the way being stalked by what we presumed were members of the Secret Police, that gave us a really, really hard time.  They said, "Why were you in Crimea?  You were filming in Crimea".  I was like, "No, we weren't filming in Crimea", and I think they saw that it was Vice and that Vice had done something.  But they were like, "We're going to detain you", kind of thing.  It was a pretty dodgy…

We had a Ukrainian guy there that was arguing on our behalf, but it was a very tense atmosphere.  Of course, there are security checkpoints everywhere, but that was -- I mean, the scale of the destruction you see in a human way, of a train station full of women and children, no men; there's some men saying goodbye, and there's old men too, but it's just people trying to pack on trains to get out that night.  And, there were people that were left there, and you'd go back the next night, and it's just a mass of humanity, and it's really the most depressing thing I'd ever seen, children crying.

I mean, we shot this guy who was inconsolable, literally what seemed like a Hollywood thing of touching the glass of the train for his little daughter, and they were going to Denmark and he was staying to join the military, because he was forbidden from leaving.  18 to 60, you can't leave.

Peter McCormack: You can't leave, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: So, seeing that scale and then being on the border too and seeing people trying to get out was horrible.  We went to a few soldiers' funerals in the kinds of places that we were the only media there, because it was far off and friends of friends knew people, a couple of hours north of Lviv.  And somebody was killed in Luhansk and the entire town came out, and it was a real horror to see.

Peter McCormack: And how serious is, or what is the scale of this Azov Nazi Battalion thing?  Because, you know Maajid?  He's a British journalist who was on LBC.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, Nawaz, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, he was on the Rogan show recently.  I thought he was interesting, did a good show.

Michael Moynihan: He's gone a little round the bend, that one.

Peter McCormack: Well, his Twitter feed for a good couple of months was very much focused on these Nazi battalions, and I just don't know how relevant that was, and whether that was some kind of unnecessary misdirection to what was actually happening.

Michael Moynihan: Partially.  I think, in the spirit of honesty, you have to say that the Azov Battalion was founded and it had the Wolfsangel kind of thing, which they just changed, by the way, to the derision of so many people who are tracking this and obsessed with Azov.  The thing about Azov is that there are certainly Nazis in it, there are Nazis in Ukraine.  I saw a guy who had a patch on at the train station and I said, "What's that patch?" and he's like, "You don't want to know", and I was like, "I think I already do know!"  So, that stuff, you actually see and that's real.

But there is a party in Ukraine that reflects those views, and I believe it's called Svoboda, which is freedom in Ukrainian Russian, and it doesn't break 1%, they don't get into parliament; they're not a popular party.  Are there people in those military?  Yeah, they're foreigners too.  I mean, I did a piece for The Daily Beast a long time ago about a Swede, who had gone to Ukraine to fight and was a neo-Nazi, notorious in Sweden.  So yeah, they exist. 

The thing about it though is that Azov has gotten bigger, much bigger, and they are more than that now.  I don't doubt in any way that there's still a lot of these scumbags in there.  But you are talking about, and again this sounds like a cliché response, but we're talking about a Jewish President of a country.  They're also very good fighters.  Everybody that I talked to has said the exact same thing.  I talked to a lot of military people and they're like, "They're our best and they're totally fucking fearless, and they have the experience, because they've been fighting since 2014".  After Crimea, they were organised after that.  So, they have a lot of battlefield experience and yeah, they're letting them fight.

I don't believe though that it is a reflection of Ukraine as a country, that it's some sort of insipient Nazi Fourth Reich or something, that is run by a Jewish Prime Minister.  That strikes me as rather insincere.  But it is important to point out that that definitely did start as a far-right battalion, but I think it's a lot more than that now.

Peter McCormack: Have you dug into much about opinion within Russia?  I bring it up over a friend who's married to a Russian lady, discussed this widely with him.  He travels to Russia regularly with her.  But after the war started, they had a phone call with the girl's mother.  And the view was very much, "Yes, Putin's protecting Russia from an expansion of Nazis", and she fully believed this.  Have you dug much into the understanding?  Because, I know there are people in Russia who are vehemently anti this war.  I saw a video recently of a concert where people were protesting against it.  But is this an age demographic thing?

Michael Moynihan: 100%, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, does the youth get this is bullshit?

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  I mean, I was in Venezuela once and the Chávez Government at that point had shut down all the newspapers, all the opposition newspapers; there was one remaining.  And they said, "Well, there's the internet", and it's like, "Well, no, the Chávistas know exactly what the Putinistas know in the Kremlin, is that over a certain age, people are getting the news where they always got it, from television, and that is the thing.  There is no independent television in Russia.

There is Rain TV, and that was shut down at the beginning of it, and Echo Moscow, the radio station, that was shut down too.  So, that's when you're in a full dictatorship at this point.  If you cannot go out and say, "I think this war is garbage and I think you're lying, false pretences and we're killing our young", and the rest of it; and remember here, the high count, and this is from the Ukrainians, you can't trust this, is 30,000.  But we have a lot of stuff from Russians themselves that put this number at around 15,000; I think the UN has estimated 15,000.

Peter McCormack: And what's the size of the army; is it 180,000?

Michael Moynihan: I don't think it's the actual size of the army, because it's unclear now, because we're trying to figure out what the conscripts are and they've pulled people in.

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: But the better example is that there was a conflict that essentially helped bring down the Soviet Union, and that was the idiotic invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, ultimately until Gorbachev negotiated that pull out.  15,000 people died in that entire war, which happened in about a couple of months here.  So, you would imagine there's a point which is why you control the information.  You have 15,000 people whose father died, whose son was killed in the war, etc.  That backlash is inevitable.  It's going to start and you'll be seeing it in small places. 

But as far as controlling information, if you dare to call Russia anything other than a dictatorship, I fear you're -- a friend of mine had to escape Russia under the cover of night dressed as a delivery person to get out of her apartment, dressed as an Uber Eats, because they were being monitored.  This is not a country you want to live in, and particularly when it comes to newspapers, there's no newspapers left.  There was Novaya Gazeta and that's gone.  That has now gone, and they went online and they said, "If you refer to it as a war and not a 'special operation', you'll be shut down".  The Editor of that paper, who won a Nobel Peace Prize, was attacked, paint thrown on him.

Peter McCormack: Well, isn't it like a ten-year prison sentence for calling it a war?

Michael Moynihan: 15, I think now.

Peter McCormack: 15, for calling it a war.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  This is not a government who's too confident in its own foreign policy, when you have to throw people in jail.  I mean, this is, in a way, kind of worse than what happened in the Soviet Union during the Afghan War, because at least after Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and then you had the Gorbachev period where things were opening up and people were protesting more openly, old stuff like soldier Nietzsche is being published, and then that war is happening and people are speaking out against it.  Now, if you do that in Russia, you're in for a pile of trouble.

I once had a conversation with Gary Kasparov, when I said something about public opinion.  And he said, "There's no public opinion, you don't know.  You cannot get good answer in Russia, you have no idea", and I was like, "Yeah, fair enough".  And he went and explained the nerves that people would have even responding to polling, and that's gotten a lot worse now, particularly in a war footing, when the dichotomy is somebody who supports Mother Russia and its fight against Nazis, because the great patriotic war was a fight against Nazis; before by the way, it was an alliance with the Nazis, then it became a fight against the Nazis.  You doing that again, you're a traitor.  And that's pretty much the only option; you're a supporter or a traitor.

So, yeah, it's a bad thing, and I've spoken to people, one older woman in particular who gets her news from TV One, and they just can't imagine that people would lie to them like that.  I get that, in a way.

Peter McCormack: But can the youth get the news from their phones?

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, they do.

Peter McCormack: Can they get VPNs?

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, they do, and VPNs are banned obviously in Russia.  You can't legally have a VPN.  And when you go to Russia, there are no Russian VPNs.  I mean, I used a VPN when I was in Russia, they told me to, burner phone on a VPN, and there's no Russian IP addresses; it's all neighbouring countries and stuff.  You're not allowed to use VPN.  Always a bad sign too, when you're not allowed to use VPN.  Iran, China, Russia, these are not nice places.

Peter McCormack: Do you think it's fair when people criticise the fact that there seems to be a large international support for Ukraine, whether it's Eurovision, or supply of weapons, or raising money; yet Yemen has been ignored for years?  I kind of do.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  I probably disagree on this slightly.  I think you're right in the sense that people should pay more attention to this other stuff.  I think the way that people process this stuff is, they're not thinking about it.  But what they are understanding is that when they see a place like Yemen, there is an expectation.  Yeah, sure it's people that look like you.  They dress like you, they look like you, they listen to the same music, they go to see football matches, etc.  That is an echo with people.  But also, when a bomb blows up in Beirut, do you pay more attention to that; or the bomb that blows up in Glasgow?

Peter McCormack: Glasgow, because you don't expect it.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, and that's the thing with Yemen, is that it's a long, protracted war.  And I'm not saying this is the right way of looking at it, I'm just saying that people do have an attitude that in that region, there is a very recent, shall we say, tendency towards conflict.  In Ukraine, particularly if you go to somewhere like Lviv or something, it looks like Paris.  It's this beautiful, very European-looking -- we've all been to European capitals.  I think that is the resonance. 

When people inject race into that, that it's because we don't care about the brown people, I don't buy that.  You can't say that there aren't people who think that way, maybe there are, I can't say that there aren't.  But I would say that overwhelmingly, that instinct -- but it also has to do with the fact that the Ukrainians are incredibly good at propaganda.  And I don't think propaganda's a pejorative term, I just think it's a descriptive term.  They're very, very good at it.  You could just watch certain channels and Twitter feeds and think that the Ukrainians are winning.  And they were, in the north of the country, but not right now in the east of the country.  But they did a great job of ringing that kind of moral bell that says, "Come and help and support us".

So, I think that that response is understandable, but I don't think that we should ignore the other countries that are going through this stuff.

Peter McCormack: Well, using propaganda as a pejorative term, that's a really interesting point, because I saw a lot of criticism.  It's like, "Well, this is just propaganda, they're not really winning the war".

Michael Moynihan: But, what do you want them to do?!

Peter McCormack: There's almost this disgust.  It's like, "Yeah, but hold on, it's a tool, you've got to give hope".

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, Coca-Cola's trying to sell its product, they're going to have an ad where it makes it look really delicious.  The job of Zelenskyy and the Government in Kyiv is to sound the alarm that their country -- because, they're a smaller, weaker country, they need people's support, and they did a good job of galvanising the world; and that is both with weapons, and we can talk about that, whether that's a good idea, and I'm mixed on that, of like $40 billion from the US Government.  But I do believe that they should be supported for sure.

I think there's no doubt in my mind that the Zelenskyy regime is responsible for getting people on the battlefield from the UK, saying immediately, "We have international brigades, come and sign up and we'll take care of you".  And I talked to a lot of these people and a lot of them were professionals.  I talked to a British guy from the Isle of Wight who had been there since 2014.  He's like, "I'm relocating from the Luhansk/Donetsk region and coming up here to fight.

Peter McCormack: There's been some heavy criticism towards Zelenskyy, to the point where certain, I would say more independent podcasters/Twitter people, I can think of one.

Michael Moynihan: Michael Tracey.

Peter McCormack: Well, maybe, I wasn't thinking of him.

Michael Moynihan: We've had him on our podcast, he's going to come back; he said he'd come back and talk to me about him.

Peter McCormack: But they've referred to him as "evil".

Michael Moynihan: That's wrong.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I thought that was wrong.

Michael Moynihan: No, I mean I disagree with these people vehemently.  It drives me kind of crazy, to be honest.  There are war crimes on every side, always.  There's not a conflict in history where this isn't true, and Americans came into a concentration camp in 1945 and machine-gunned the guards.  I think it's the right thing to do, but they need due process; we need to apply this fairly.  So, you see Ukrainians, I don't know if this has been verified, committing some war crimes, pretty brutal stuff, shooting people in the knees and all this, and it's on all these Twitter feeds, all these people.  That's when I get a little uneasy.  You're not posting images from Bucha, you're not, you're just not doing it.  Why are you doing this from one side?  I mean, it's very important to denounce all this stuff.

Peter McCormack: It's back to the culture war, right, because if you support Ukraine, you're supporting the latest thing, it means you were pro-vaccines, it means you're pro-abortion; and if you're against the current thing, it means…  But again, I think this is a US thing, it's a culture war thing.  I have not really seen much in the UK where people are defending Russia, or blaming the West; I've not seen it, but I've seen a lot of it here.  And it was like, "Shit, we have to pick a side again".

Michael Moynihan: Well, the interesting thing is that I interviewed Stephen F Cohen, who passed away last year before the war started, and John Mearsheimer together, the two doyens of anti-war, well, realist foreign policy, and they were making these -- it was incredible to see.  They were defending the arrest of Pussy Riot.  They'd gone so far, or particularly I think Stephen was, of defending the actions of the regime, which was, "Okay, now you're transgressing that line". 

That was the Noam Chomsky thing that always bothered me.  You can hate American foreign policy, but when you start defending the other guys, who are probably worse, just because you're so obsessed and wrapped up in your hatred of American foreign policy, that's what gets to that point.  I think what's interesting now is that it's not ideological in the sense that it used to be. 

The Cold War, it was the far left, where Stephen Cohen lived in the far left; and by the way, just in fairness, Stephen Cohen was a very, very good historian of Stalinism, but he was also a little too pro-Soviet for my taste.  I mean, he was a good historian, give him credit for that, but he was a guy on the left.  The Nation Magazine in America took a very particular line on the Soviet Union.  It got better over the years, but they did.  Then it was the right who were the Cold Warriors.

Now, it's the anti-war rights, I don't know where I'd put somebody like Scott Horton, and I wouldn't say that he's pro-Russia at all, I don't get that from him at all.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think he's just an anti-war libertarian.

Michael Moynihan: Exactly, and that's kind of confusing if he's a right or left.  He's just somebody who has principles and sticks to them, and I admire that.  But there are others I think that are basing their reaction to this series of foreign policy decisions on their domestic political agenda, which is very troubling.

Peter McCormack: Of course.  If Trump had been re-elected and Trump was making the same decisions as Biden…

Michael Moynihan: I think we'd be having a different conversation, yeah, a very different conversation.

Peter McCormack: It's one of these things I've talked about recently, it's this massive criticism of mainstream media.  Obviously, personal attacks where people are saying, "You just follow the mainstream narrative", and there are some people who are contrarian to every mainstream narrative, as a point of principle.  But if you do that, you're going to be wrong on certain issues.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, you're a fucking idiot, you really are.

Peter McCormack: But we have had this growth of independent people who are kind of interesting, but we also have the same problem with some; there's audience capture.  Somebody I've been very critical of is Tim Pool, who historically I thought was an interesting guy when he used to make his videos of Chernobyl and it was kind of interesting.  He said he was a liberal, but I kind of had him down the middle.  He's just been completely captured.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, 100%; it's cartoonish, yeah.  I mean, I think I probably always had a negative view of him from stories that I heard from him back in the day.

Peter McCormack: Well, I didn't know, but I liked his videos.  His YouTube at one point was him making microdocumentaries that were interesting, and then it became daily videos of commentary, and then he just was captured by the right.

Michael Moynihan: I've seen this happen to a lot of people recently.

Peter McCormack: It happens a lot, and that's not me being pejorative about the right.  I think right have valid points, or things I agree with, and I disagree with left or right.  But he has been fully captured to the point where he has a single stream of thinking, which doesn't seem to have any balance at all.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, I never understood this.  I mean, think about it for a second.  Why would it be that you have the same opinion as everybody else, or you're a Republican or something, that you would have an opinion on war, guns and abortion; why would they all be the same?  It doesn't make any sense for me.  There's no ideological uniformity to those things.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's two things.

Michael Moynihan: Some are motivated by religion, some by broader ideology, but there is not a lot of sense to me that people on particular sides all have the same set of beliefs.  It's always surprising to me that there's not more deviation.

Peter McCormack: Well, I think it depends on the individual.  I think in the minds of some people, there is deviation, but depending on their social standing they can't deviate.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, for sure.

Peter McCormack: Ted Cruz cannot, in any way say, "Hey, maybe we should have a chat about the Second Amendment"; he can't do it at that level.  But then there's people who've maybe just got a small social media social standing, but they can't step out of their echo chamber, because they'll be banished.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of money to be made in this too.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's the other incentive.  But there is also, and I bring it up on the show all the time, because I encourage everyone to read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.

Michael Moynihan: It's a fantastic book.  Jonathan is one of the smartest people out there too.

Peter McCormack: I think what that book does is give you a reason to go, "Okay, you disagree with me, but I understand there's reasons why you disagree with me and let's have a conversation about that".

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  It's kind of heartening that that book was so influential to so many people.

Peter McCormack: But not influential to enough people.

Michael Moynihan: Not to enough people!  I mean, that's every book I've ever found influential, like I need more people to read this and they don't.  But Jonathan is right about that.  We started this conversation about polarisation, and I am somebody who believes that it's not a problem that can be solved.  I mean, it's a fool's errand trying to correct this, because the corrections for this are always mildly authoritarian.  So, when you have these conversations, "Tucker Carlson is responsible for the Buffalo shooting"; this is what people are saying.  I don't believe this at all.

Peter McCormack: Why are they saying that though?

Michael Moynihan: Because the guy, the racist kid that shot all those people, was toying with the idea of replacement theory, which has a number of iterations.  The most banal one is people saying that the demographics of the country change and therefore the voting patterns change.  But as I was talking about Hispanic people, that's not entirely true.  But people have those conversations.

But the other one is, "The white race is being replaced", the racist version of that.  That was where he lived, and he was on 4chan and some weird subreddits and never mentioned Tucker Carlson in his manifesto, which was plagiarised from the Christchurch Shooter.  So, it's that kind of universe. 

Peter McCormack: Right, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: And people decided to take this horrible tragedy and make some political points and that they hate Tucker Carlson, accused him of being a Kremlin stooge, etc.  And my question in response was, "What are you planning on doing about this?"  So, he says these things that might have been the spark plug for this kid's murderous rampage, I mean this kid who had murdered cats and put them in bags, and just a disturbed child.  What do you do?  "Well, we need to regulate speech", is usually their response.  I mean, there's nothing else you can do.  It is regulation of speech, it is not, "We need more free speech to counter this".  It is always a regulatory response.

So, when people want to fight the culture war and change these kinds of little perverted incentives that come from bad actors, or whatever, I don't want them to disappear, because they're always going to exist.  A lot of people in the past have tried to make them disappear, and I can give you the names of countries and the time periods in which this happened, and it did not end well.  I think people overstate the problem in the UK, but I do find it very scary that a police officer can show up at your door because of a tweet; that's not a good thing.  Is it happening on a mass scale?  No, it's not, but it happens enough that I think it's unsettling.

Peter McCormack: I mean, you're aware I was in court two weeks ago?

Michael Moynihan: I was not.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I can't go into the details, but I'm in litigation for 14 tweets.

Michael Moynihan: 14 tweets?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, three-year litigation that went to trial.

Michael Moynihan: That's the Twitter version of a mass murder; 14 tweets!

Peter McCormack: I know, but it was having an opinion about something, and --

Michael Moynihan: You can't even state what the content -- I mean, because the tweets were public, presumably?

Peter McCormack: The tweets are public.

Michael Moynihan: But you can't even mention what they were?

Peter McCormack: It's best not to, because we're waiting --

Michael Moynihan: Over-abundance of caution?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we're waiting for judgement from the judge.  But the point being is, if you're going to google my name and "litigation" or "trial", you'll find it and you'll see what I've said.  I couldn't be sued for this in the US.

Michael Moynihan: No, thank God.

Peter McCormack: But I am in that situation.  Mine is peculiar and there are scenarios where you could argue a similar thing to what I've done could be libel; it could be.

Michael Moynihan: Is it political or personal?

Peter McCormack: It's personal, which could have an economic effect.  But I understand, I think libel is a thing, and I think you can destroy someone's life with false accusations, so I get it's a thing, I don't know how to deal with that.  But in the UK, it's weaponised so you can't say things.  For example, I can't say everything right now to you now, sat in a different country, because there is that caution, which also puts other people in a position where they can't make similar criticisms.  So, it puts people in a position where now, I am now in a position where I have to think about certain things I say, because I can't risk litigation which leads to bankruptcy.

Part of my job is that weird world where I'm half podcaster, but there's a journalist aspect to what I do.  But my journalistic freedom is restricted, which makes me aware that the UK, across the spectrum of news and media, has restrictions, because I know every one of these large media organisations will be always fearful of litigation.  It's fucking terrible.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, I mean yours isn't, I presume from the little that you've said, is not one of these examples of a British feminist who says a woman is a person that was born with a vagina, something like that; we've seen these things.

Peter McCormack: It's not that, but it's not far off that.

Michael Moynihan: It's not far off that.  If you kind of reverse engineer the idea behind it, there's some idea of protection, right.  We're protecting people from harmful speech, and that is a legacy of a lot of things in British law.  But you can convince people of these things much easier now, because they believe that speech is violence, and nobody likes violence; I'm opposed to violence.  There's a reason, a very specific reason, that you re-cast words as violence, because nobody wants to be opposed to free speech.

Nobody is going to say, "I don't agree with free speech".  If you can find one of those people, they'll be very much an outlier.  But if somebody says, "Well, I don't like violence, and I think doing violence to people, well that changes things quite a bit, doesn't it?"  And, when you do that in the US, there is always…  I mean, we talk about hate speech here.

Peter McCormack: It's the same in the UK, we have hate speech laws.

Michael Moynihan: But you have laws, we don't.  So, we've taken the concept without the legal framework.

Peter McCormack: So, you've socialised it.

Michael Moynihan: We socialised it, exactly right.  In saying, "Well, this is hate speech.  I'm opposed to hate speech".  Well, I don't know what hate speech is.  Ricky Gervais making jokes, very funny special by the way, is that hate speech?  Well, they're jokes, so is that a separate category?  Then you start wrestling with them in their own mud, and you don't want to do that, because these are people that are not interested in a robust, honest debate.  They're interested in winning, and how do you win?  You cut off the other side.

I want to protect the speech of the worst people on Earth.  I don't want David Irving to go to Jail in Austria.  I don't think that Holocaust denial laws have done anything.  There are people that -- the run-off election in France that almost happens every French election is with Front National, whose founder was a Holocaust denier, and they do very, very well.  Jean-Marie Le Pen minimised the Holocaust from the day he had a microphone in front of him.  This stuff doesn't work.

Peter McCormack: And actually, in fairness to that, Marine Le Pen, they've actually, to try and become politically favourable and advance their position, she's actually had to become a little more tolerant, she's had to adjust.  And it's better to do that through public opinion than through fear.

Michael Moynihan: Well, they did it for public opinion and people say, "Well, look, it's a success", but that's not how the person's going to govern.

Peter McCormack: No, of course.

Michael Moynihan: It's just a bit of a public lie to make sure they don't end up in the dock.  And remember that Brigitte Bardot ended up in the dock in -- is that Bardot?

Peter McCormack: That's Brigitte Bardot.

Michael Moynihan: Look at you, you fucking Islamophobe!

Peter McCormack: That's my favourite photo.  People listening won't realise; I've got a Brigitte Bardot tattoo.

Michael Moynihan: That's amazing, I didn't see that, that's hilarious.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I actually have this as a large screen print in my house.

Michael Moynihan: I could have chosen so many examples!

Peter McCormack: Do you know this photo?

Michael Moynihan: The cigarette in the mouth?  Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's just one of my favourite photos ever taken.

Michael Moynihan: It's from Breathless, I think, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Michael Moynihan: But she was hauled into court, because she said something about Islam, because you know, she's an animal rights activist and it was something about Halal slaughter, or whatever it might be.  But regardless of what it was, it didn't really matter.  I mean, for her to be hauled into a court, this iconic French actress, who's kind of in her dotage at this point, and they're bringing her into court, and I think it was Michel Houellebecq who was prosecuted too in France for saying, "Islam is the stupidest religion".  Well, it's a set of beliefs, that's it.  You can just say it's a stupid set of beliefs, that's fine. 

But to be prosecuted for that sort of thing, there are plenty of people in this country, I don't want to overplay their power, but there are plenty of people in this country who would love to see that sort of stuff implemented here, and I think every journalist should have been frothing at the mouth when people suggest these things.  I mean, there was a guy named Carl Cameron, used to be on Fox News; these ex-Fox News people do a lot of work to expunge their guilt, and he was on CNN and he said, "We need the government to intervene", and he's talking about Tucker Carlson, his former co-worker.  He said, "People should be going to jail".  He's a journalist. 

The journalist host said, "Amen to that, I totally agree".  Two journalists on CNN talking about how another journalist, whether you roll your eyes at that term to apply to Tucker Carlson or not, he is one, we don't get to make those value judgements based on his opinions, and saying that he should be prosecuted and going to jail because of something that was not even mentioned in this crazy shooter's manifesto.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's like blaming Quentin Tarantino; it's exactly the same issue.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, I know, there are so many people that are normally on the left, it depresses me, because this is a world that I like to inhabit in some ways, I'm a liberal person in a lot of ways, but there are a lot of people who are taking up the Christian Conservative mantle from the 1970s and saying that this stuff has to -- and there's kind of an audience for it, and on the right too.  JD Vance today said, in an interview I think this morning, that he was calling for a full-scale ban on pornography.  I mean, this is madness.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's probably coming from the religious point there.

Michael Moynihan: For sure, but this is not something that even Christian Conservatives campaigned on in the past 20 years.  You'd be hard pressed to find somebody that was a contender in a Republican race who was on the Christian right that would make an issue out of banning pornography.  But I think the atmosphere is such right now that people like talking about banning things.

I like the opposite talk, I like the talk of liberalising everything, letting people do and say what they want, particularly when it comes to things that don't hurt other people.  This is the basic liberal principle, isn't it, "It doesn't hurt anybody around me, so please fuck off".  I think that should be most people's base instinct, "Please fuck off.  Do not bother me, because it's not bothering you", pornography or whatever it might be. 

But it's a societal ill.  That's the kind of Christian Conservative version of, "Speech is violence".  This is an unquantifiable ill, it's a societal ill, and this is why we're so off.  Crime is down, rape is down, all that stuff's down, by the way.

Peter McCormack: But it's not so long ago, I mean I talk to my kids, I'm like, "You guys don't know.  There was a time when there was no internet".

Michael Moynihan: You want to hear my daughter say, "Fuck off", at 11 years old.  She's like, "Could you please stop telling me how things used to be?"!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it from my 12-year-old.  But I explain to them that there was a time when there was no internet.  We had four channels on TV and we couldn't phone each other and we turned up for meetings on time; it was a different time.  But back then, maybe the news was even more propaganda, but it was a very small stream of information that we got that was from a certain number of TV channels, to 6.00pm news maybe, and a certain number of papers.  You knew they were politically biased, but it was a very small stream of news.

Now, we're processing the opinions of thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, all coming in at real time, and we've just not acclimated to this.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah.  I think also that the bad assumption is that when an opinion comes across the transom, that people are going to be affected by it, because one of our favourite things to do is just to condescend everybody.  People in mainstream media, or people who have been doing this for a long time, I shouldn't say mainstream, think everyone's a fucking moron.  I mean, this was sharpened so much in 2016.  How could 60-odd million people vote for this sociopath?  These people cannot be trusted. 

That was, I think, the biggest long-lasting damage of Trump, was the change in the mind of people that Americans did this, they can't be trusted, which okay, I can have a debate with you, I disagree with you; whereas, I think the more sensible conversation was, "How did it get to this point?"  That was the conversation people in the mainstream were not willing to have, because it did certainly turn the cameras on them a little bit.  You go out in the middle of the country and talk to people and they feel ignored, left behind, and very specifically condescended to.  That was the most common reaction when I ask people about this stuff.  They say, "You have contempt for us and you condescend to us".

People would call me "Fake news".  I mean, I got this a million times, they wouldn't talk to me.  And when the camera went off, they were nice, but they were like, "You're going to fuck me over, because you're going to say that I'm racist and I'm this, etc" and I'm like, "No, no", and they were like, "Yeah, they all say that!"  That was the hardest part of reporting on this stuff in Trump times, was getting people to -- I think this idea that Trump created this zombie, I think he definitely contributed to it, of everything's fake news; yeah, he put a little phrase to it, a catchy phrase.

Peter McCormack: He branded it.

Michael Moynihan: He branded it, yeah, exactly.  But before, to think that people didn't think that before?  Good God!  Particularly now when you see a guy I do the podcast with, one for subscribers the other day -- you should subscribe to The Fifth Column, by the way.

Peter McCormack: Subscribe.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, wethefifth.substack.com.  There's a lot of traffic to get here, I've got to be able to --

Peter McCormack: Do them!

Michael Moynihan: He was telling me that he watched the new Marvel movie, I don't know, these fucking things, and he was like, "There was a woman named America Sancha Gonzalez, or something and she was from some planet where she has two mothers".  I'm literally going to a book party for a book on the gay history of Washington DC after this.  I'm fine with that, but it's really, really strange that they're trying to so desperately to shoehorn it in.  They have a trans pin on, and all this stuff.

That, I think, is the thing that I think people are like, "What the fuck is going on here?"  They don't hate people at all, they don't.  I mean, they just are like, "Why is this happening?  I just don't understand why everywhere I go, people are trying to retune my brand".  It's like a carburettor, we're trying to get the mixture right of the fuel and the air until I get the right thoughts, and that's what happened after the BLM stuff, George Floyd; and everywhere you went, Amazon, everything.

I mean, I was driving on Waze today, I drove from the east of Long Island today, and I swear to God, there's little icons on the map for women-owned businesses.  I'm like, "Yeah, but are they shitty businesses?  She could be a Nazi, I don't know, is she a woman Nazi?  Are they women who have the right policy?  I don't know".  But who the fuck is choosing this?  Nobody is choosing this; it's to assuage their own fucking guilt.

Peter McCormack: Do you know there's a downstream problem that that's caused, I'll give you an example.  So, I made a film in El Salvador and spent a lot of timing going around the country understanding, and there's a real issue --

Michael Moynihan: Bitcoin-related?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I kind of stepped out of the Bitcoin thing, just looked for the real issues.  I went to a facility which helps get addicts off the streets; I went to a concert, there was quite a progressive concert, there were trans groups there; I spent time with men, women, everything; I went to a charity which helps get women, who've been trapped in gangs, and sex workers off the streets.  There's a real issue with the patriarchy and violence towards women there.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, absolutely.

Peter McCormack: It's a genuine, real issue that needs dealing with.  And when I interviewed Bukele, I brought it up.  I asked him about the patriarchy and the issues, and he replied.  But today, one of the comments comes up in YouTube; it's not the first one, there's been a few, and it's like, "Fuck you, McCormack, bringing up gender issues".  I was like, "Hold on a second.  This isn't me saying, 'Let's have women-owned businesses on Waze', this is me saying there's a significant issue with violence towards women.  This should be talked about, this should be dealt with". 

But the down of the Waze app, or those kinds of things, is causing people not to give a shit about real issues.

Michael Moynihan: I think that's very well put, I think that's exactly right.  I mean, the thing for me is that I have to do the throat-clearing.  I was out debating pro-gay marriage stuff before gay marriage became law in the US; I always have to do that.  My position on this has been very clear and I am left of left on these issues.  But the thing is, I'm not objecting to -- I mean, I still don't really object to it, I haven't seen the film, but mentioning that film, it's not objecting to the existence, it's objecting to the reason.  People feel that they have to shoehorn that into everything for themselves.

No one is going to watch this movie, even in a kind of drip-drip way over time and say, "You know, I really didn't like gay people and now I do, because of that Marvel movie".  It's really about themselves, and I think you're absolutely right that when people start reacting to that, and I see this in the Tim Pool's of the world, not to pick on any specific example of him, but people in that kind of universe, in which all of this stuff is -- if somebody says a bill that has something to do with trans rights, broadly speaking, some of them aren't crazy, it's not a bad thing!  But everything, the redefining of the woman has become, we have to fight this on the beaches, in the air, we shall never surrender.  This is crazy.

Peter McCormack: Well, the reaction to wokeism is anti-wokeism, which both are fucking irritating.

Michael Moynihan: If I were to have to put the blame somewhere, which is not something you really have to do; but if I were to say, "What is the etymology of this; where did it start?" I would say it started with them!  Because the thing is, I made this joke the other day on the podcast --

Peter McCormack: Them being who?

Michael Moynihan: The kind of insane, really over-the-top woke.

Peter McCormack: Oh, of course, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: It's like, there's a counterreaction that you never expect and you probably should have.  This is like the invasion of Iraq for me.  You maybe should have predicted that ISIS would come out of this and it wasn't going to be Berlin in 1948, this flowery democracy, we didn't really foresee that; we should have.  And people who make these arguments that are so outside of the mainstream, and they're like, "Well, fuck these people, they don't agree with me", it's just not the way of transforming a culture; it's the way of transforming a culture into a very hateful one, and one that is at loggerheads over every issue, all the time, and I don't like living in that.

I don't like living in a culture where, whether it's on one end that I'm fearful that the offence archaeology will get me, they're sifting through something you wrote 20 years ago or something.  I mean, Ricky Gervais' joke in that special, I don't know if you saw it, because it's social commentary and comedy and he had a very funny joke about Kevin Hart being fired from the Oscars because of a tweet that he apologised for in 2011.  Someone screenshotted it, they put it up and he lost the job.  They asked him to apologise again and he said, "I already apologised, what do you want me to say?"

Ricky Gervais made a very funny joke that's a good point, and I'm going to do the joke great harm, but he basically said, "Who would have guessed that ten years ago, there wouldn't have been a controversy, which it wouldn't have been a controversy, that a woman has a vagina and was born with a vagina?"  No one said that, because it wasn't a thing, it just wasn't controversial.  But going back to that now might get you -- and that's the thing, this ex post facto thing of, we have to go back and see, "Did you know then?  How come you didn't foresee what was going to happen?"

Some of that stuff is obviously not applicable if it's genuinely hateful, but there's a lot of stuff that is kind of borderline.  I mean, I'll say a word now that you can cut it and loop it and cancel me for it: when I was growing up, the word "retard", because I grew up in Massachusetts and everyone in America knows, in the Boston action they say retarded, "That guy's fucking retarded!"  That was every person and nothing was documented, there were no phone cameras.  But if you probably had me as a kid, that probably would have been said a lot.

Peter McCormack: You have to futureproof yourself now, that's the problem.

Michael Moynihan: You do.  I stopped talking!

Peter McCormack: Just from the moment of birth, you have to futureproof yourself for every scenario.

Michael Moynihan: That should be your next company, Futureproof!

Peter McCormack: Futureproofing humans, but you do, and it's fucking bullshit.

Michael Moynihan: I imagine you're a big target, you know, you have a big following.  Anyone gone through your garbage and found anything of interest?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I got a couple of recent ones through COVID, because I once said, "It's now the pandemic of the unvaccinated", because at the time, I'd read this article that said, "Most of the people coming into hospital are unvaccinated, and so I researched and I put that tweet out.  That keeps getting brought up.  Also, when I got my vaccine, for a laugh, I decided to make a tinfoil hat, and I got the nurse to take a photo of me and I put it up, and people are memeing me with that.

Michael Moynihan: By the way, that first tweet isn't wrong.  The people that were dying were unvaccinated.

Peter McCormack: Well, I know that.

Michael Moynihan: What was the objection?  That people were just transmitting it?

Peter McCormack: I think the objection to that is that the tweet is coercive to people who should be getting a vaccine who don't want to, and I think that's the point.

Michael Moynihan: What a power you have then!

Peter McCormack: No, I don't.  What I should have done is quote-tweeted it and said, "This is an article I've read; I wonder if there's some value in it", but I attributed the quote to myself by not quoting it.  I didn't think it through, I was pro-lockdown at the very start.  I said, "I am pro-archaic lockdowns", because it wasn't what was coming out of China, it was what was coming out of Italy. 

I think there's also a clash between me having built this profile, but I'm British European, I'm from England, but the large majority of my audience is in the US, so I'm always on the left of everyone I pretty much meet within this audience.  Stuff happens, but look, the thing is --

Michael Moynihan: It hasn't pushed audiences away.  I mean, you have an audience and people are apparently fine with that, right.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, because there is this, what is it, the 80% exhausted, the silent majority, whatever, we get the emails from; they appreciate what I'm doing.  I can't win against these people, I'm not going to flip who I am just to be who are they.  I often say, Danny tells me to get off the Twitter comments.

Michael Moynihan: Do you read them?

Peter McCormack: The YouTube ones.  I read some of them, and then I just go on and I say things like, when they're really angry, "Well, just don't listen to my show" or, "I'm sorry, I see the world differently from you".

Michael Moynihan: Does it have any effect on you when you read that stuff?

Peter McCormack: It has done, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: That's why I stopped.

Peter McCormack: Somebody else approves them now.  And also, I had a very dramatic exit from Twitter.  I was like, "I'm done, fuck this shit".  Somebody said something about they were glad my mum was dying, and that was after some other bullshit.

Michael Moynihan: An anonymous account, I assume?

Peter McCormack: No, it wasn't, and actually some people chased him down and got him fired for it, which I didn't agree with; I didn't agree with that.  I mean, it was an awful thing.

Michael Moynihan: Do you agree with it being public though, in the sense that people retweet it, or whatever, and say, "This is who this person is.  Don't be a rat and go to their job though"?

Peter McCormack: I support that, because that's a speech, but don't get him ratted out for his job.  His soul has to live with the fact that he's --

Michael Moynihan: Did he apologise to you?

Peter McCormack: No, he actually tweeted again.  But his soul has to live with the fact that he's a fucking loser.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, piece of shit!

Peter McCormack: And when I found out the job he was sacked from, I was like, "Well, you're just a fucking loser.  You've got a shit job, you live in a shit place and life isn't good for you, so you're punching up", and whatever.  But Danny is my producer, but he's my therapist and my counsellor and my advisor.

Michael Moynihan: God, Danny, I hope he pays you well.  Don't take any Bitcoin!

Peter McCormack: We have a phone call every morning pretty much, when he's in Oz and I'm in the UK, and we have a talk.  And when I'm struggling, I'm say, "Look, I'm really fucking pissed off, I'm getting all this shit".  So, I had this dramatic exit.  I was like, "I'm fucking done with this.  Fuck Twitter, fuck you", and I gave up.  And you know what, I had a great month, but I missed it.

Michael Moynihan: You did?

Peter McCormack: The way I explained it, it's like when you go to a party, but you drive and you can't drink and everyone's getting drunk and you're like, "Fuck, they're all having fun", and I kind of missed it.  But I also missed the point that I think I'm a little bit contrarian in the Bitcoin land, because I am a British person who's willing to have opinions that don't fit in with the standard Bitcoin views that some people have.  I was like, do you know what, it's actually probably useful though.  I might really fuck these people off, I might really trigger them, but at least I'm out there just saying something alternative and different.  I'm bringing different people on the show, who maybe aren't right or libertarian.  So, I felt like I maybe have a duty, so I came back and started triggering people again.

But yeah, I've had people try to cancel me in a rage.  I mean, I had one very popular writer of a very, what is seen as the most popular book in Bitcoin, who tried to cancel me, and it's not the kind of thing you would expect him to do.  We had a minor disagreement, I compared his views on modern art to the Nazis on Twitter, he wrote to all my sponsors!  Yeah, yeah, he wrote to all my sponsors.

Michael Moynihan: I was wondering what the hinge moment was, "I compared him to a Nazi"!

Peter McCormack: He doesn't like modern art, he calls it degenerate art.

Michael Moynihan: He actually used the phrase "degenerate art"?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he used degenerate art.

Michael Moynihan: That's literally a Nazi phrase, "Entartete Kunst", as they say in German.  Are you serious?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Museum of Degenerate Art.  So, I might have made a comment on Twitter.

Michael Moynihan: How do you not make the Nazi reference, good Lord!

Peter McCormack: I just said, "The last people to refer to modern art as degenerate art was the Nazis".  He was offended by this and he wrote to all my sponsors, essentially threatening them if they carried on sponsoring me, which was fucking ridiculous.  I mean, this is a guy whose book and life and career is about censorship resistant money, but is so weak in his own views, and is so weak with regard to opinion and free speech that he's tried to censor me.  I mean, it's complete hypocrisy.

Michael Moynihan: There's something amazing about it in this kind of universe that we live in, that you had a potential run-in with cancellation, a Bitcoin guy who does a Bitcoin podcast, with another Bitcoin guy who wrote one of the most -- and it was about art.  I mean, it's fucking insane!

Peter McCormack: I mean, this is art itself!

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, it is, performance art, because it shows you, in some sense, the rot and how -- would people have done the sponsor thing 15 years ago, if there was an internet, it was not social media internet, and you had an online thing, or you even had a print magazine; would they write to your sponsors?  No.  This is something that has been proven effective, because companies are skittish and, "Oh, that might be bad.  It's best not to do it, we don't want to be on the wrong side of it".  The corporate response to this stuff has been really alarming, to be honest.

Peter McCormack: Well, mine was great.

Michael Moynihan: They said, "Fuck you"?

Peter McCormack: Well, one said literally, "Fuck you"; the other, we had to have a call and I was like, "If you want to cancel me, cancel me", and they were like, "No, we're not going to, but is there a way you two can get on?"  I saw this guy again at a conference.  By the way, I think he's in the wrong, but I saw him and I went, "Shall we forget about it?"  He shook my hand.  A few weeks later, he's fucking slagging me off on Twitter again, which is fine, that's your free speech, that's your whatever.  But how can you be out there and build your career on Bitcoin, but try and censor someone because they disagree with you?  It's fucking ridiculous.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, that just seems to be contrary to the nature of why one would be involved in it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the sad thing is, I've never talked about this publicly to this level; the sad thing is, I know Danny's going to be thinking, "Pete, maybe we should cut this".

Michael Moynihan: Don't cut it.

Peter McCormack: But the point being is that, if it becomes public or people discuss it, there will be a group of people who will still side with him whatever, because he fits in their ideology and I don't.

Michael Moynihan: And he's a sort of libertarian type?  That's the kind of default.

Peter McCormack: I mean, he certainly talks like a libertarian.  I actually don't know the answer to that question.  Is he a libertarian?

Danny Knowles: It's a hard one.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he very much does not trust government, anti-COVID lockdowns, anti-mandates, anti-anything that probably comes from the government or a central place.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, he certainly doesn't believe in the government structures we have today.  But he likes monarchies.

Michael Moynihan: He's an anarcho-capitalist, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he likes monarchies.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, he's a Curtis Yarvin type, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I don't think he believes in dinosaurs as well.

Michael Moynihan: You're giving me an honest accounting of this.  You said that is Nazi phraseology when you said "degenerate art", and that was actually the thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  There was background to this though.  So, the background to this was --

Michael Moynihan: Did you sleep with his wife or something?

Peter McCormack: No, no.

Michael Moynihan: That would be great, "I left out this detail that I've been fucking his wife for six months!"

Peter McCormack: No, I put out this tweet once, "You're an idiot if you don't think humans cause climate change".  I never named him, I just put that.  And he came up in my DMs and said, "You're a fucking --" he called me a retard actually, "You're a retard.  People like you shouldn't have a platform.  Shut the fuck up", just losing his shit, and then he blocked me.  And I saw him at another conference and I was like, "Hey man, listen --"  By the way, I'm British, right, you fall out with someone, you go up and shake hands and say, "Let's have a beer, forget about it".

So, I went up to him and said, "Hey man, we're kind of on the same team here with this Bitcoin thing.  Can we just accept we think about climate change differently, but still be friends?"  He was like, "Yeah, yeah", so we shook hands.  And then, two weeks later, he's slagging me off on Twitter, so I was like, "Fuck this", and that's when I called him a "Batshit crazy psychopath" and…

Michael Moynihan: I mean, that seems reasonable.

Peter McCormack: I think it was fair.

Michael Moynihan: I mean, I can't imagine getting that exercised about climate change if you're not a climate change scientist and you write about Bitcoin.  But I don't know, it's a tribal thing, I guess, that you're not in the tribe and everybody outside of the tribe is an enemy, I guess.  I don't know.  I see these people, I don't interact with them anymore, because I used to be the person who mixed it up, and then I realised it was bad for my mental health, and probably my physical health too, because I would get so pissed off at this stuff.  And it doesn't matter.  It could be an egg, a Twitter egg, and I would be annoyed and have the instinct to respond.

Of course, every single person in my life was like, "What does it matter, some random person, they have 40 followers?"  And I'm like, "Yeah, but it's out there and somebody could find it, and I need to tell them that it's wrong".  It's like that New Yorker cartoon, "Come to bed" and he's like, "No sorry, honey, there's somebody who's wrong on the internet".  That is like me, I couldn't do it.  So, I backed away from Twitter, and I didn't feel any obligation to any of the people that follow me on Twitter, they fucking pay me!

So, I don't tweet very much.  And then once in a while when I do, people are like, "Oh, wow, you're coming out of your shell again?"  But the combat, I am not interested in, because we get them on the podcast, and then it's a totally different thing.  I want them to come and try to punch me in the face, I want them to spit at me, because I want the same persona, because I think it's absolute cowardice when people talk this tough game and then come on the show and are just like, "Oh, hey, how's it going?"  No, do it.

Peter McCormack: But that's the point, and that's why I'm a big fan of this, and that's why I support.  That's why Danny always says, "Listen, Pete, just do it in the show".

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, have you thought about having this guy on the show?

Peter McCormack: He could come on tomorrow and I'd have the conversation with him.

Danny Knowles: He's been on in the past before.

Michael Moynihan: Before the incident, before the Nazi incident and the wife shagging!

Peter McCormack: Twice now, I've gone up to him and said, "Hey, let's forget about it".  It's actually three times, and three times he's shook my hand, and then afterwards he's done.  And, so be it, I just think it's weak character.  It's not how we do things in the UK, but it is what it is.

Michael Moynihan: Is he American?

Peter McCormack: No.  This isn't the worse thing that's happened to me.  I can think of one person in life who's been in my life who I would never shake his hand and be friends again with, because he fucked my wife.  That's literally the only person.

Michael Moynihan: Oh, was that actually true?

Peter McCormack: No, not this guy!  I'm just saying, the only person in my life is that --

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, you don't want to shake that person's hand now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, fuck that guy, I hope he gets fucking hit by a truck.  But anyone else, I don't care.  I've fallen out with people over all kinds of shit.  Forget about it; life's too short.  If he wants, of course, let's forget about it, let's go fight for Bitcoin.

Michael Moynihan: I hope that I didn't provoke you to talk about the wife thing and you've talked about that publicly before?

Peter McCormack: Oh, I've talked about that publicly before, yeah.

Michael Moynihan: Okay, I didn't know, I was going to think that was an incredible victory for my counter-interviewing style, "He just told me somebody fucked his wife"!  Okay, so that's public, you've talked about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah, people know about that.  That's why I'm a cuck!  But that doesn't matter, because the downstream thing of that is I've got this whole new career because my life changed, and I'm okay with that.

Michael Moynihan: That was a result of your life falling apart?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, basically my marriage broke up very quickly, I developed a drug and drinking problem.

Michael Moynihan: What type of drugs?

Peter McCormack: Cocaine.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, it's always the good one.  It's great, I have to say.  I mean, I avoid it now, because it's all fentanyl and all this stuff.  But it's the one, if you're going to get hooked on something, I'm sorry to say!  Kids, don't do it, it's bad!  But it's not heroine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm nine years clean, I'm glad it's over for me, but life collapsed, my advertising agency collapsed because I wasn't going to work, and then I end up taking a year off work, I end up on a retreat in Italy run by Rich Roll, vegan ultra-athlete.

Michael Moynihan: Wait, I'm sitting across from you.  You've done very well in Bitcoin, you're known in this world, you're a big guy with tattoos, and you're describing an eat, pray, love scenario, where you went on a retreat after your life falling apart?

Peter McCormack: Well, it's all linked.  So, what happened was, I take a year off work, my mum gets cancer and she's very sick.  She goes vegan as one of the recommendations, so I was like, "I'll do that with you".  I'm travelling across seeing her, I'm vegan with her, and I'm off the cocaine, but I'm trying to get rid of my anxiety, so I go running every day.  And then I end up discovering this podcast by Rich Roll, who's a vegan ultra-athlete.

So, I'm going running every day, and I'm just going through all his back podcasts, which are either about running or meditation or yoga or veganism, and I'm just listening to it every day, and it turns out there's this retreat in Italy.

Michael Moynihan: And this is not stuff you were interested in previously?

Peter McCormack: No, I didn't give a fuck.

Michael Moynihan: Yoga, and things like that?

Peter McCormack: No, I didn't give a shit.  I did yoga, meditation and running to get rid of panic attacks; I was having severe panic attacks and anxiety.  Anyway, so I end up in Italy and I'm hanging out with him and all the other people on this retreat.  And at the end of it, he does a one-to-one session with everyone, and I assume he said to everyone, but he's like, "If you're ever in LA, look me up".

So anyway, I get back to the UK, I'm like, "Fuck it, I'm going".  So, I booked a flight to LA, my friend was living there, Justin, so I went and stayed with him and I was like, "Hi, Rich, I'm here".  I went over to his house and then a few days later I was like, "Look, I like your job.  I've got no career at the moment, I think I want to be a podcaster".  I'd just bought some Bitcoin to buy cannabis oil for my mother off the Dark Web, so that's how I discovered Bitcoin.  He's like, "Well, this is how you start a podcast". 

He sent me an equipment list, I order it all off Amazon, and then I contact this guy, Luke Martin, who I mentioned earlier before we started, and I was like, "Hey, I'm about to launch a podcast, do you want to be the first guest?"  That was 17 November 2017.  Then, here we are, four and a half years later, I've done 510 episodes, I've interviewed the President of El Salvador twice and started making films.  It's such an unbelievable set of circumstances.  So really, the guy who fucked my wife, I'm like, "Thank you".

Michael Moynihan: He made you a wealthy man.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he changed my life.

Michael Moynihan: He actually got rid of something that you didn't want around anyway, your wife.

Peter McCormack: Well, she's, yeah, you're just saying.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, I know, I'm just saying.  I don't want to get in too deep, but I'm just saying, there's probably some other silver linings.

Peter McCormack: It was shit for my kids, but the silver lining is, I've got this incredible life, I've got this new friend, Danny, who I'd never have met, this new friend, Jeremy; we travel the world, we make this podcast.  It's not a job really.  I get to make films, I've been to 40, 50 countries.

Michael Moynihan: All out of that retreat?

Peter McCormack: No, all out of a chain of events, which includes an affair, a drug addiction, a mother being sick.  All those things had to happen for me to be in this scenario.  If the affair doesn't happen, I don't quite my job, or I don't quite the advertising industry; if my mother doesn't get sick, I don't end up buying Bitcoin to buy her cannabis oil; and my mother doesn't get sick, I don't go vegan with her, so I don't discover Rich Roll.  So, all those things conspired to me ending up being at this retreat.

Michael Moynihan: It's a memoir, you know.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, in some ways, yeah.  I mean, if I get successful and anyone cares.

Michael Moynihan: No, in some ways, it's a memoir.  I mean, you pitch that to a publisher and it's a memoir.  It's not only just an amazing turn of events, it has all the lessons in it and that's what people need when they're in situations like you were in.  You found it in a podcast, other people find it in other people's stories.

That's what I did in similar circumstances.  You look and you seek out people that have had catastrophes like you, but you get to the end of their story when you're in the middle of your journey.  As Lionel Trilling said, "The middle of the journey, it's a horrible place.  But when you can get to the end of somebody else's, it mitigates all the bits in the middle", so that's probably worthwhile to actually write about it.

Peter McCormack: Maybe one day.

Michael Moynihan: Can I sell it for you?  I'll just be your agent!

Peter McCormack: You can be my agent.  There is one other thing I want to ask you about, because you brought it up; I've written down one note.  You mentioned going to Venezuela; I went to Venezuela, so I just want to talk about that.  I went during Maduro, and it was one of the most profound experiences of my life.  I mean, I loved the country.

Michael Moynihan: It's a great country, people are amazing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, unbelievable.  I went to the border at Cucuta; it was where I made my first film.  It's a bit shit, the film.

Michael Moynihan: First one always is.

Peter McCormack: But I went to Cucuta at the border where people were streaming across, then I went into Venezuela.  I saw east and west Caracas, how they're completely different.  I saw how people are completely brainwashed for a dictator, how you can be actually brainwashed for a dictator.  But I met an amazing group of people and I just fucking loved it, and I want to go back.

Michael Moynihan: I'm not allowed to go back, I think for multiple reasons, but I think Americans now, they don't get journalist visas anymore.  And, there was a small tourism industry on Margarita Island and places like that.  Actually, when I was leaving, I was checking into the plane behind John Lithgow, who was coming from I think a vacation on Margarita Island.

But yeah, we can't go now, and there's all the back and forth that Americans do very well with Cuba and Venezuela, and just totally pointless bans on travel.  But I have been obsessed with the country since Chávez took power, made a lot of Venezuelan friends, very close friends, and people in interesting positions, many of whom have left the country, some that are still there, one in particular; and I've been talking to somebody else about doing a narrative podcast about one particular fascinating figure in Venezuela, who's known to some people, but not known to many, but he's a very influential player.

It's a country like that in the language of Chavismo, which was just boring liberation theology; you saw that in El Salvador, and all that stuff, half religious and half Marxist; it became what they always do, we don't need to have this debate anymore, it ends in an oligarchy of very rich bully bourgeoisie, as they call them, and they just opened a Ferrari dealership, I think, a couple of weeks ago in Caracas.  No joke!  This is a place where -- and the mistake people make is to think that Chavismo was fine and Maduro killed it.

Chávez made a hash of the country, destroyed it.  And then Maduro turned it up a notch, destroyed it even more, and then actually started arresting people, where Chávez was a little more selective.  A judge, named Maria Afiuni, did some little things here and there, and shut down newspapers, and shut down…  It was a uniquely interesting thing of, "Let's not do it like the old thing.  We won't renew their broadcast licence, RCTV", because they have to have a licence; every country does that.  So, they didn't shut them down, they just didn't renew their licence, and that kind of thing.

Then it became more and more authoritarian, and it's a tragedy, because it was the richest country in South America, incredibly advanced in the 1960s and 1970s; of course, never had a good government, but that's an endemic thing in the region.  But to watch a country that has the largest proven oil reserves outside of Saudi Arabia, heavy crude in the Orinoco Basin, have to send it to America to be refined because they fired everybody at PDVSA, the state oil company, because they were protesting Chávez and they were going on strike.

It's a leftie regime that's essentially a labour union.  People were striking and they fired them all and replaced them with sycophants, and the country collapsed.  This is the thing, end this on this Putin thing too, it's that you ride high on oil that's $140 a barrel.  They're like professional athletes in America, who get a $30 million contract; they spend it all in one year, and they hurt their knee and they never play again and they're broke.  They lived like they were going to get $30 million every year, and it's the case in Venezuela; oil prices are always going to be high, and that's it, it's the only part of the economy that was even -- that was barely functioning, but that's where all the money came from.  And then it collapses, and --

Peter McCormack: All these state employees.

Michael Moynihan: I mean, it is wild and the slums there are super-depressing.  We made a film there, which I was actually a producer on.  I mean, I've been a host for a long time, but this one that I produced with my old friend, Ryan Duffy, about murders in Venezuela.  It came out in 2012 and they had, I think, 20,000 murders that year.  I mean, America, a country of 340 million people, had I think 13,000 that year; they had 20,000 in their country of 30 million.  And the government had stopped counting them, stopped releasing numbers, rather than fix it.

So, journalists would go to the one morgue in Caracas and count the bodies as they came in during the day, and that's how they would get a tabulation of how many people were being killed.  But we went out on ride-alongs with the police, and just to see a country that used to be so mighty and of such wealth just descend into lawlessness, violence and political extremism, which is essentially what happened.  But it's a great country, I love it.

Peter McCormack: We went into the barrios as part of my documentary, and this is me being a naïve wannabe journalist, went along with just some guy and his van, went in and did our interviews and left.  I said to the guy afterwards, "Should we have probably had security?"  He was like, "Yeah, we probably should have.  There's a lot of kidnappings round here".

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, they kidnap you and try to get money within a day, and if not they kill you.  It's the only South American country that plays baseball, because of American involvement in the oil industry.  There's a lot of professional baseball players from Venezuela, and their mothers get kidnapped, they get kidnapped, because they earn money.  Ugueth Urbina, relief pitcher, his mother was kidnapped, I think maybe twice, or he was kidnapped and she was.  But that's the economy of the country in so many ways, and it's depressing.  But better days ahead, but I've been saying that for 20 years and nothing's happened.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, look, not the interview I thought we would do, loved it, hope we do this again. 

Michael Moynihan: I do too.

Peter McCormack: I really, really enjoyed it.

Michael Moynihan: I loved it, this is great, fantastic.  I like meandering conversation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, me too, man.  Did we talk about Bitcoin?  Yeah, we did, we talked a little bit about Bitcoin.  We can get away with that.

Michael Moynihan: Yeah, we're fine.  I don't have a ton, but I'm sad now; that's all I'm going to say.

Peter McCormack: We all have that story!

Michael Moynihan: I have sadness, profound sadness!  And much like internet comments, do you know what I did?  I deleted all of the apps that give me price alerts!  I just deleted them, because if I don't see them, it's not happening, right.

Peter McCormack: We're still early, man.

Michael Moynihan: You're one of those guys?  You tell me everything's cool and everything's fine?

Peter McCormack: We'll see, man.  By the way, listen, thank you for coming on.  It's called The Fifth Column?

Michael Moynihan: The Fifth Column, yeah, check it out.

Peter McCormack: Check out The Fifth Column podcast, and yeah, hope we do this again, man.

Michael Moynihan: Thanks, man, I appreciate it.