Alan Jones and Graham Richardson interviewing Jeremy Griffith on the ‘Richo & Jones’ Sky News Australia television program, 12 February 2020
An article by Jeremy Griffith in The Spectator about the dangerous psychology of the left wing attracted extraordinary interest not only in Australia, but all over the world. In an email to subscribers, The Spectator described it as follows: ‘Sometimes something that makes it all crystal clear comes along. And so it has been with Jeremy Griffith’s, The fury of the left, explained. It’s going global because of the simplicity of its message: the right stands for reason, the left dogma. It’s booming in the States.’
As a result, Jeremy was invited on to the Richo & Jones show on Sky News Australia, hosted by Australia’s leading broadcaster Alan Jones, to discuss his article against the backdrop of the Left’s irrational response to Australia’s bushfire crisis.
See excerpts of the TV interview here:
Transcript:
Alan Jones: When we spoke a couple of weeks ago to Jeremy Griffith, the Australian biologist, he provided some staggering and authoritative observations…Jeremy Griffith said simply, ‘eucalypts are incinerators from hell dressed up as trees’…‘(greenies especially should note this) we have to view eucalypts as being like dangerous crocodiles planted tailed down ready to destroy lives and our world’ ‘with estimates of over a billion animals having been killed by this summer’s fires.’
Jeremy Griffith says there has to be a complete change of mindset when thinking about eucalypts that recognises their true nature. Now David Bowman is a forest ecologist at the University of Tasmania has asked ‘What the hell have human beings done? We’ve spent a dangerous plant all over the world.’ We don’t need inquiries. But the real enemy here is ideology and left-wing fanaticism. We thought we’d bring back Jeremy Griffith, and he joins us right here, the Australian biologist. Jeremy good to talk to you. Thank you for your time. But I mean you’re talking into an empty tank, aren’t you?
Jeremy Griffith: Yeah it’s very difficult. This is the problem. Humans suffer from an extreme psychosis and there’s a limit to what they want to see and they prefer just to find some cause they feel good about at the exclusion of any rationale or common sense.
Alan: You see you sum it up brilliantly in a recent piece that appeared in The Spectator Australia. You said ‘the management of our forests comes down to how to combat the irrational religious fanaticism of tree hugging Lefties’, the ‘religious fanaticism’. That’s the problem isn’t it?
Jeremy: Everywhere we look.
Alan: Here they are, look at our pictures. They are all eucalypts. They’ve survived. Everything around has been wiped out. They survive. And they allow off the tree all this litter that comes onto the ground, and it’s a furnace isn’t it? There they are, wherever you go. And we’ve got a stack of them! We spoke, last time we spoke, not one media outlet reported a word you said. It was at the height of the bushfires, you were saying basically just check out these eucalypts. Look at them, they’re all eucalypts. You quote the psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has commented on this attachment that people have to climate change as the new religion. He said, ‘People have things within their personal scope of experience that are difficult to deal with and that they’re avoiding and generally the way they avoid them is by adopting pseudo-moralistic stances on large scale social issues so that they look good to their friends and neighbors.’ That’s at work here, isn’t it?
Jeremy: Absolutely.
Alan: Explain that human phenomenon.
Jeremy: Well it’s the human condition. Humans are, suffer extreme psychological difficulty with life, and it’s always the temptation to find some cause that brings them some relief from that insecurity at the expense of any rational, sensible, common sense analysis. And so you end up with this war between this pseudo idealism…
Alan: It’s true isn’t it…you’re saying, why is it—because you’re sort of being a bit philosophical about this—why is it, when you can’t have fire without fuel and you must reduce the fuel and you must do something about the eucalypts and the ordinary man says, as Graham just said, ‘Well here it is. What are we doing about it?’ Why is there no action on those basic issues?
Jeremy: And the most basic issue with the bushfires is surely that these things are incredibly fire-adapted. They’re extremely dangerous and that’s not being fully acknowledged and the possibility of having to replant our forests, any suggestion of that nature is just, it confronts this problem of the irrationality of fanaticism from extreme left wing…
Alan: But see, Graham, this man’s spoken about this…
Jeremy: That’s right and that’s the problem. Everywhere we look is this fanaticism of the Left threatening: the millennials, Jeremy Corbyn and, in politics, just want to share everything and the irrationality of that, and there’s no questioning of that…Look, eucalypts, we’ve got to be honest. Eucalypts, it’s like living with a psychopath in your midst. And if it was a human and a psychopath you’d lock them up. So we’ve got to face that reality and think about them sensibly rather than just feel, get some feel good relief from hugging them…Well as Rebecca Weisser reported, ‘In Portugal and Spain they are starting to cut down the eucalypt forest saying these are too dangerous. We don’t want them’. So it’s a possibility that at some point, I said, in the future we may have to come to accept that we need to replace some of our eucalypt forests.
Alan: Ours are all over the world!…
Jeremy: I think we’ve got to deal with the underlying problem which is the fanaticism of these feel good industry of the on the Left and the PC movement. Everywhere you look it’s paralysing our ability to think rationally and behave rationally and so that’s what my article in The Spectator this week was all about, last week was all about, trying to deal with that, how we can bring rationale, understanding to the danger of, reason versus dogma.
Alan: Yeah.