I’ve been thinking a lot
about debates recently..
What race is Islam?
I’m not against all Muslims!
Yes you are!
I got married last year I had
four Muslims at my wedding.
Saying that they’re getting
paid illegally less than men
doing the same job.
Oh well..
That’s not fair is it?
Well let’s go back to the first question
they’re both complicated questions.
We are.
You come on here
You’ve spoken for quite a long time
You came on here to say you..
Peaches you’ve got to stop for a minute
we’ve got to let her talk.
He lost the popular vote by nearly..
Oh woman!
Do you not..
Have you ever read Kenneth Arrow?
I’m starting to think they’re kinda dumb
not least because they seem to be
the main vehicle through which the most
annoying people on the planet
get on TV.
But I’ve been a critic of Obama
I’m a critic of the democratic party
cause I’m literally a communist!
Fair point.
For those of you with very healthy
emotional lives who don’t spend
most of their days scrolling on Twitter.
Sorry one minute…
Recently two darlings of the 
culture wars conservative right
went on flagship BBC
programmes and got dealt a bit of a mauling.
Really would you call the pro-choice..
So let me ask you this.
Why don’t you answer my question?
Sir…
Do you still want…
What’s wrong with the BBC?
Do you still want to roll back.
What is wrong…
If it’s so obvious that Andrew Marr
utterly DESTROYED Nigel Farage,
why is it that the Brexit Party’s tweet
of the exchange got shared over 2000 times
and has been viewed by over a million people.
Something doesn’t quite add up here.
By any metric you would say that Andrew Marr
was the one who came off best in that exchange
with Nigel Farage,
he seemed clear, he seemed
calm, he didn’t raise his voice
however I don’t
think
that Nigel Farage was there to win a debate
against Andrew Marr.
He wasn’t interested in making the best
points
all he wanted to do was to declare war on
the BBC.
I’ve been going round the country speaking
at packed rallies every night
and you know who’s not there?
The BBC.
And from this line of questioning now
I can see why.
You see a similar dynamic 
play out in Andrew Neil’s
now notorious grilling of
noted Kermit the Frog impersonator Ben Shapiro.
You know I’m not inclined to continue an
interview
with a person as badly motivated as you as
an interviewer.
So I think we’re done here.
It’s often said when it comes to fighting the far right that
'sunlight is the best disinfectant.'
As well as having dubious medical credibility
this metaphor’s effectiveness as a prescription
for fighting the far right is basically homeopathic.
I can’t think of a single interviewer
who’s better than Andrew Neil
when it comes to televised vivisections of guests.
But while he was able to deftly expose 
Ben Shapiro as a fraud
and a know nothing:
Why don’t you just say that you’re on the left?
Is this so hard for you why can’t you just be honest?
The central pillars of his ideology were left
intact.
This is a problem of the form itself.
The setup of an adversarial interview segment
means you’re well-placed to discredit an
individual,
less so when it comes to delegitimising an
ideology,
a social movement or its intellectual breeding
grounds.
*Sound of erotic revulsion*
What this actually showed is that Ben Shapiro
was more than happy
to disavow or modify things that he’d said
in even the very recent past.
Again it was your description of the
state of the union address in 2012 as ‘fascist’.
The wording of president Trump’s 2012 address
was bad and wrong.
Plenty of things are bad and wrong
but it doesn’t make them fascist.
And I think it’s because none of this actually
touched
the core of his racist ideology.
Case in point; Andrew Neil was able to get
Ben Shapiro to row back on an individual
racist comment he had made about Arabs.
Sure
"Israelis like to build,
Arabs like to bomb, crap and live in open
sewage.”
Well as I say in an article entitled:
‘Here’s a list of all the bad dumb things I've ever said.
that list includes”
Was that dumb?
Yes that’s a dumb tweet!
But was unable to press him
on the foundation of Shapiro’s work
“Judeo-Christian Culture”
and to be fair to Neil,
Shapiro stormed off before 
he was able to raise the question.
You’re lecturing me on Judeo-Christian culture
after you called the pro-life position barbaric?
I just asked you a question.
And I asked you a question and you failed
to answer a single one of mine.
Frankly I find this whole thing a waste of time.
But why is this important?
Because this framing sets Muslims apart
from our Abrahamic cousins: Jews and Christians,
and whats more absolves Christianity and Whiteness
more generally
of responsibility for the most deadly instances
of antisemitism
in human history.
So even though he made a complete tit of himself
Ben Shapiro was actually quite successful,
cause he was able to take a fringe idea
which has a violent following
and place it slap bang in the middle of
mainstream political discourse.
He didn’t have to win a head to head with
Andrew Neil,
his victory was getting invited on to the
BBC in the first place.
I think that ’no platform’ is a tool rather
than a moral imperative.
There’s not much of a point in saying 'no
platform’
when someone’s already got millions of followers.
What it's actually about is responsible coverage
and that means thinking about interview formats
which challenge the strategic political objectives
of your guests
rather than simply fulfilling them.
In my view that means long form content,
deep dives, documentaries.
A two minute clip with over 
a million views is never a car crash.
It’s virality of the kind
money can’t buy.
Cause here’s the thing
even when it looks like they’ve lost,
culture warriors have actually played the game
better than those who set the rules of engagement
in the first place.
