Prince Harry, who, along with his wife, Meghan Markle, separated from the British royal family a year ago, blasted his relatives in a podcast interview with actor Dax Shepard, calling the royal family a repository of “genetic pain and suffering” — an apparent criticism of his father, Prince Charles — and excoriated his new homeland, the United States, for preserving the freedom of speech in its Constitution.
Speaking to the Armchair Expert podcast, Prince Harry, fresh off another tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, which featured his wife accusing an unnamed member of the royal family of abject racism and suggesting that the British royals had no interest in assisting a pregnant woman suffering from depression, said he moved to the U.S. to break a cycle of “genetic pain and suffering” in his own family.
“He’s treated me the way that he was treated,” Harry said of his father Prince Charles, in the exchange. “There’s a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on anyway. We as parents should be doing the most we can to try and say, ‘You know what? That happened to me. I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.'”
Harry also seemed to suggest that the Queen herself was guilty of being complicit in the abuse.
“I never saw it. I never knew about it. And then suddenly I started to piece it all together and go, ‘Okay, so this is where he went to school. This is what happened. I know this bit about his life,” Harry said of his father. “I also know that’s connected to his parents. So that means that he’s treated me the way that he was treated, which means how can I change that for my own kids?”
Harry said his wife Meghan, encouraged him to dig deeper in therapy to discover how his relationship with his father had affected his life.
“Once I started doing therapy,” Harry said, “it was like the bubble was burst. I plucked my head out of the sand and gave it a good shake off and I was like, ‘You’re in this position of privilege, stop complaining and stop thinking you want something different—make this different, because you can’t get out. How are you going to do these things differently? How are you going to make your mum proud and use this platform to really affect change?'”
The answer, apparently, was to move his family — his wife and son, Archie, and his yet-unborn daughter — to California. But the situation is still far from perfect, Prince Harry told Shepard, because Americans value freedom of speech, allowing them to criticize public figures — a concept he simply cannot understand.
“I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers,” Harry told the podcast. “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.”
Americans were quick to tell the British Prince what he could do with his opinions on the Constitution’s guarantees.
“Hey, go home! We fought a war to get rid of Royals on our soil. No need to understand anything we do. Bye!!,” said one commenter on the podcast site, per the Spectator US. “You can always leave if you don’t like our constitution and please find a country where you don’t have to deal with those bonker[s] rights.”
Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX) struck a final blow, telling Prince Harry he’d just “doubled the size of my Independence Day party” in response to the Prince’s complaints.