PIERS MORGAN: I didn’t think Harry could go lower than trashing his grandmother as she mourns Prince Philip, but the spineless self-pitying twerp’s attack on free speech makes HIM look bonkers not the US Constitution Piers Morgan
If the freedom of speech is taken away,’ said America’s first president George Washington, ‘then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.’
His view was shared by Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Founding Father and America’s third president, who declared: ‘Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.’
These two men helped create the initial United States Constitution and subsequent Bill of Rights that included the First Amendment which was specifically designed to protect the very freedoms they were referring to.
That Amendment states: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’
They are arguably the most important words in the entire Constitution and have afforded Americans, and American journalists, the most powerful protection for their rights to freedom of speech and expression of any country in the world.
The First Amendment is one of the things I most admire about the United States, especially coming from a country like Britain where free speech for journalists like me is now heavily regulated.
Prince Harry has just declared the First Amendment to be ‘bonkers.’ His extraordinary outburst came during an interview he conducted with actor Dax Shephard for the ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast, during which he also launched a shameful new attack on his family.
I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it,’ he said, ‘but it is bonkers. I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time, but you can find a loophole in anything. You can capitalize or exploit what’s not said rather than uphold what is said.’
Like so much of the absurd Meghan-inspired psychobabble that spews out of his mouth, none of this makes any sense, and he clearly doesn’t understand what he’s saying either.
Though we can safely assume that he just hates anything which affords any protection to journalists to say things he doesn’t like, because that has been a familiar theme from the indignant media-loathing Prince for the last few years.
It’s the same mindset that makes Meghan think she can complain to the bosses of TV networks when presenters like me refuse to believe her lies – and have them removed from their jobs if we don’t apologise for our impertinence.
But all that Americans will take away from Harry’s outburst about the First Amendment is a posh, privileged British royal slamming their Constitution and their unalienable rights to freedom of speech and expression.
It takes an extraordinary amount of entitled arrogance to mock the most revered building block of your adopted country’s history.
And lest we forget, things didn’t end well for the last British royal who tried to tell Americans how to lead their lives, George III.
Bashing the US Constitution is very dangerous territory for any British royal to meddle in, but Harry seems beyond caring about the impact of his ignorant and deluded words, and oblivious to his rank hypocrisy.
He professes to care about free speech, but like with so many of his statements, his actions suggest the complete opposite.
Harry was the kind of person that Sir Winston Churchill was talking about when he said: ‘Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.’
It’s the same double standard that we see behind Harry’s claim to be a man of compassion.
The word screams off the front page of Archewell, the foundation he and Meghan set up in their son Archie’s name.
‘Compassion in action,’ the title headline boasts. ‘Through our non-profit work, as well as creative activations, we drive systemic cultural change across all communities, one act of compassion at a time.’
How touching.
And barely a day goes by without the pair of these selfless charitable souls telling us how deeply compassionate they are.
But they’re not, are they?
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a less compassionate pair of ruthless, heartless, selfish, shameless little grifters than the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Meghan’s disowned almost her entire family, including her father, Thomas.
Just as she has tossed away anyone in her life, from her ex-husband to friends and work colleagues who’ve ceased to be of use to her on her frenzied scramble up the global celebrity ladder.
And Harry’s spent the past few weeks publicly trashing his family on any media outlet that will have him.
I didn’t think the world’s most spoiled brats could plunge any lower than their two-hour Oprah whine-athon in which they branded the royals a bunch of horrible uncaring racists without producing a shred of evidence to support their claims, and bitterly attacked the institution of the Monarchy whilst continuing to trade off their royal titles to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But Harry’s new orgy of unsavoury self-indulgent podcast tripe on was even worse.
The Prince of Compassion used his latest interview (he gives a lot of interviews for a guy who quit Britain to safeguard his privacy, doesn’t he?) to launch an astonishing rant about the terrible ‘genetic pain’ he claims to have suffered at the hands of his awful father, and then said that Prince Charles has only been such a bad parent because he himself had been treated just as badly by HIS parents, the Queen and Prince Philip.
‘I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody,’ Harry began, before immediately pointing the finger and blaming people, ‘but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically. It’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on. I started to piece it together and go ‘okay, so this is where he went to school, this is what happened, I know this about his life, I also know that is connected to his parents so that means he’s treated me the way he was treated, so how can I change that for my own kids?’
It’s shameful enough that Harry is once again publicly hammering his father in public like this, just as he did to Oprah when he sounded like a petulant teenager as he berated Charles for cutting him off financially and not taking his calls.
But for him to implicitly criticise the Queen and Prince Philip for the ‘genetic pain and suffering’ they supposedly inflicted on Charles which then got inflicted on him is beneath contempt.
Does it get any less compassionate, or more disgusting than condemning your grandparents just weeks after one of them died? Or, any more reprehensible than to compound the mourning Queen’s misery by making her feel even worse?
How terribly hurt she must have felt when she heard what her grandson had said about her.
It takes a rare degree of self-obsessed uncaring narcissism to do that to a grieving woman of 95, yet the most shocking about Harry’s outburst is that it wasn’t really shocking at all.
The guy’s hit the self-destruct button and is now unravelling before our eyes.
The only remaining question, as the front page of the Daily Mail asked last week is ‘HOW LOW WILL HARRY GO?’
I fear the answer is a lot lower.
After all, the only currency and relevance he has left is exploiting his royal status, and he has to give his lucrative new paymasters at Spotify and Netflix their money’s worth.
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