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Jan. 24, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
50:57
Where are the Conservatives？ ｜ James Delingpole Interview
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Hello everyone, I'm interviewing James Dellingpole, a contributor to Breitbart The Spectator and various other publications.
James, how are you doing?
I'm so excited to be finally on your show, Carl.
I really am.
I mean, was it not about two or three years ago that I first approached you and you sort of remolitically said, yeah, I'll do your podcast and then you went dark?
I'm afraid it's due to my inability to organise anything, which is why I have these chaps.
I genuinely need them to do things.
It wasn't out of any malice.
No, look, the thing, we creative types, we get so needy, don't we?
We imagine that if somebody rejects us, it's a sign that they don't like us and everything we stand for.
And I was worried about that, but I'm glad it wasn't the case.
There are many people who worry about that.
With me, it's always incompetence.
So, okay.
Now we've sort of that one.
Yes.
So, I wanted to, you are one of the conservative voices that are not afraid to directly engage with cultural commentary.
Because there seems to be a kind of taboo in conservative circles about really getting into the meat of some of the arguments that are being made primarily from the left or from the remainers.
And I find it kind of frustrating.
And to be honest with you, I think you guys have opened up a hole in the market for people like me.
Why do you think that most conservatives are kind of reticent to talk about the sort of like the Black Lives Matter style social movements?
I think it's a combination of ignorance and fear.
The ignorance is a generational thing.
Lots of people of my generation are just not familiar with the concept of shit posting, with all the kind of all the websites that, well, like yours, for example, that explain what's going on in the culture wars.
Even now, for my generation, you talk about the culture wars, you're talking about something a bit niche, possibly a bit conspiracy theory.
Really?
Yeah, but people say people haven't got the frame of reference to discuss it.
But secondly, those who do vaguely understand it, it's fear.
And the left has been very good at this.
You start talking about some of the issues that we talk about, and very quickly you become, in their eyes, far-right, alt-right, or basically a Nazi.
And no one wants to be a Nazi.
Well, obviously, not even the Nazis want to be Nazis.
And I've obviously come against this very firmly myself, where I've spent a great deal of blood and treasure arguing against the alt-right.
Yeah.
To my own detriment in many cases.
And yet they will still call me a part of the alt-right, purely because I touch on these issues and I'm prepared to engage with them in my own way.
Part of your problem, part of all our problems, is that the alt-right doesn't really exist as a thing.
It's more of a monster created by the left to associate anyone they disagree with with.
So anyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler, basically.
That's their technique.
Because rather embarrassingly, actually, if you look at it, you'll find in The Spectator a piece by me saying that the alt-right is a good thing.
Well, what I meant by the alt-right, this is before, what's it called, Lufthid Spencer?
Yeah, before we carry on, I think it's best to make something clear for people who aren't really familiar.
Back when the alt-right first became a thing in 2016, it wasn't an ethno-nationalist movement, or at least explicitly so.
It was really for dissident conservatives who wanted to go against the grade of political correctness.
And many of them, like Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, all of these sort of people who categorically reject the alt-right, all claimed, oh, I'm part of the alt-right because they wanted to be a dissident conservative movement.
And then the ethno-nationalists just steamrolled it.
And suddenly it was entirely white nationalism.
And that's it.
It was a pincer movement between on the one side the ethno-nationalists who wanted to create this to covenise this term for themselves.
On the other the left said, yes, we can now associate anyone who's familiar with means, anyone who knows who Pepe de Frog is, anyone who gets on the thumb track, they're all alt-right and they're all evil Nazis.
That's how it works.
Yes, and it was an amazing boon to the left, definitely.
And the thing is, the alt-right now doesn't really even exist.
You know, these sort of the major figureheads are irrelevant.
They don't have any real traction online.
They don't have any institutional power.
They're never invited to anything.
They're constantly deplatformed.
So the idea that the left keeps making a big deal about the alt-right, it's like, well, what?
If I were conspiracy-minded, I would say that the alt-right were actually invented by the left.
They were the creator of the left in order to make anyone on the right look bad.
Well, the thing is, if I hadn't so much knowledge about the people who actually sort of like coined the phrase and were the genesis of the movement before it kind of exploded, I would probably agree.
Because, I mean, Richard Spencer is remarkably progressive in many of his positions.
He's certainly not a conservative, as I would define a conservative.
But no, these people have genuinely been plugging away with the idea of kind of a white nationalist state for quite some time, and it was just this happened to coincide.
Isn't one of our problems now that all these terms like conservative, like alt-right, they don't mean anything anymore.
They mean whatever you want them to mean.
And I think we need to redefine the terms of the debate.
I'm not even sure that libertarian versus authoritarian quite works.
Really?
Well, I think one of the problems is that I see, I used to call myself a libertarian or a libertarian conservative.
What I realise is that if you start calling yourself the noun libertarian, people then start playing with you the more libertarian than vow game.
So like you don't want to sell heroin to children.
Well, what kind of freedom-hating Nazi are you?
I was just looking at one of your recent vidcasts where a libertarian made the case for open borders.
And there is that faction within libertarian movement, quite a big faction, I think.
Very.
Which really get off on.
Yeah, let them all in.
Why not?
What's wrong with it?
And suddenly you're thinking, well, maybe I'm not so libertarian as I thought.
Well, I've had this exact conversation with many libertarians, and I have to stress them, like, it's one thing to use libertarian as a kind of catch-all description for somebody who just wants less stated theorems.
But there's a definite difference between being a libertarian and an ideological libertarian, where you're very much, you know, you find yourself reigning against the state as the source of all evil.
like you say, you know, borders of illegitimate and all of this sort of thing.
And, I mean, in this way, I'm very clear that I'm not a libertarian because, you know.
There's the other annoying factor.
Well, actually, they're the same faction.
The libertarians who think that because Patreon is a private company, therefore it's really okay if it gets rid of Sargon.
Because it's right.
They can do whatever they want, so they don't even need a term of service.
They can just get rid of that.
That's an outdated statist concept.
They're not doing anyone any favours, you know, because all they're doing is sanctioning the tyranny of silicon values.
Right, so let's talk about what you perceive to be the sort of main, I guess, I don't want to say problems of Britain because it's too specific.
I mean, like, the sort of social forces that are coming together in the problems they're creating at the moment.
Actually, you asked me what I, or I asked you what I thought would be the terms of the great divide in the world right now.
And I think for one, it's not perfect, but I think that populists versus globalists is actually quite a useful one.
If you think of the globalists as embracing Davos man, all the people who want to remain within the European Union, all the people who are mackerel, for example.
You know who you're talking about when you say a globalist.
You know you're talking about someone who is open borders, neoliberal, and all these sorts of things, compared to the populist who is more protectionist and nationalist.
Yes, you see, I'm a great believer in free trade, for example.
But generally, I suppose I do find myself allied with the populists.
I see the Trump revolution, the Bolsonaro Revolution, Viktor Orban in Hungary, the right-wing party in Poland, and so on.
Matteo Salvini, they're all part of the same trend, which is that the people around the world, the demos, have had enough of the kind of left-liberal stitch up which is obtained since the war, and probably actually started before the war.
But I think the war can be blamed just as the First World War can be blamed, in that both massively increased the size of the state.
There's that famous essay, by A.J. Potayla, describe, I forget which the story, describing the state of affairs that existed in Britain before the First World War, where really the state had little involvement in your life.
And now it very much does.
And so, I mean, one of the ways I think it's best phrased, at least nowadays, is the technocracy.
Because it really is.
And they are explicit about saying this as well.
They're explicit about saying we want the world to be governed by people who are highly educated and experts.
Experts, exactly.
And so when Michael Gove was like, I think people have had enough of experts to the globalists or technocrats, that's heresy.
That's absolutely abhorrent.
You can't say that.
But there's no doubt that the experts don't really understand what people's everyday lives are actually like from their ivory towers.
And so it was obviously widely misrepresented what Gove was trying to say.
But I think that's a fair point.
Also, one of my journalistic experiences, my dawnings of wisdom in the last few decades, is to realize that the closer you get to any given subject, the more you realise that the so-called experts have not a fucking clue what's going on.
Obviously, the global warming thing is one.
You've got this whole scientific establishment propping up essentially junk science, anti-science.
But it's also the case, for example, look at people who specialize in writing about the financial sector.
They don't really hold the financial sector up to scrutiny.
They actually play along with the consensus, which is really a stitch up enabling central banks, the banks, if you want to use that term.
It's a form of conspiracy against ordinary people.
And they carry on raking it in.
We thought, I think, those of us on the right side of the argument, that somehow Bitcoin was going to save us all, that it was going to disintermediate the banks.
But of course the banks thought that.
Because if you've got this cartel situation where you are raking it in for really not much effort, you don't want to give that up easily.
Of course.
And so I think it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise that things like Brexit and Trump happened.
I mean, you can claim it's any kind of policy position you want.
And I find that Remainers often say, well, what if the European Union actually does that you don't like?
And if I was given some final giggle, I could find dozens of examples, obviously.
But I think it's more primal than that.
What do you reckon?
Do you think it was more of a kind of reaction to the centralisation in capital?
I think it's when you say primal, one of the interesting things about Brexit is that, okay, this is not absolutely true.
But generally, the people who voted Brexit hadn't been educated.
They hadn't had, they hadn't been taught to be stupid by a university.
They're just people with real jobs and common sense.
So yeah, in that sense, it was more of a visceral thing than an intellectual thing.
But I don't think it was just a kind of animal cry of rage.
I think they may not have been to university, but these people aren't stupid.
They've just got a different way of showing their intelligence.
And their intelligence involves discussing things with their mates, looking at how it affects their lives, and realising that this is not a deal which is working in their interests.
They're not being represented by their alleged representatives in Westminster.
And this has happened across the world.
Well, since you've brought us nicely onto the subject, what do you think of Theresa May today, in fact, suggesting that no Brexit was more likely than no deal?
This is something that I don't get surprised by many things.
I understand totally where the people who voted Brexit are coming from.
I don't think any of us could have been quite prepared for the corruption and the way that the elite ganged up to defy the electorate, defy the people and tell them that they cannot have the thing that they voted for because reasons.
And the reasons kept changing.
It doesn't even matter what they are.
It doesn't even matter what they are.
And I suppose I do feel a bit of a naive fool for having woken up on the day of June the 24th, 2016, and heard the news on the radio.
I was on my way to Glastonbury that day.
And so I delayed my packing just to have a quick float and do a quick sort of commentary and stuff.
I thought we'd won.
I mean, technically, I think you'll agree we probably have won.
On paper, it looked that way.
But since then, in the two and a half years since, the Remainer elite that we voted Brexit in order to get rid of has come back big time and it looks like they're going to win.
Well, I mean, what do you think the consequences would be if, because they couldn't get a deal, they ended up going no Brexit?
Well, one doesn't want to end up being in Owen Jones' next rant about inciting violence.
And temperamentally, we are not like the French.
The French will revolve at the top of a hat, as we've seen with the Uno Journey.
However, I do think that look at the way the media has covered this story.
For the most part, they've taken the kind of soft remain or even hard Remain position.
I think there's only two newspapers, for example, The Sun and The Telegraph, which are going for no deal.
Everyone else is going for Theresa May's deal or something worse.
For people outside of Britain who don't realise how bad it is, I mean, The Independent is running an active campaign to overturn Brexit.
So, I mean, that's one of the major newspapers here.
How many signatures did they have on their petition?
And it was quite a large number.
But this is another phenomenon of our time, which is that the sort of the change org, the 350 or whatever it's called, petition, these are the left is very into being very into activism.
Yeah.
And they can get sitting to the drop of a hat.
Whereas we, on the kind of conservative side of the argument, we're conservative, we've got better things to do, haven't we?
Well, I don't know.
I sign petitions when I feel the need.
One thing that I've like everyone knows I'm effectively I've come out of the centre-left to the centre.
So now I find myself engaging with a lot of people on the right, where I wouldn't have done in previous years.
And I find the right in disarray.
I find them not really understanding the own foundation of their moral system.
And so conceding an awful lot to the I don't want to just call them communists, but.
That is such an important point you make.
I think that this rift is more fundamental than simply Brexit versus the main.
Talking about the Conservative Party for a moment, I can't think of any genuinely conservative position that the Conservative Party have taken on anything since pretty much the Thatcher era.
Which is, as a Conservative, I find slightly disappointing.
Surely, at entry level, Conservatism should be about free markets, limited government, freedom of expression.
What are they conserving?
Defense of the realm.
Yeah, what are they conserving if not these things?
Yeah.
And that was always, in my opinion, what made the Conservative Party strong, because, I mean, on social policy, I was found the weak, you know, but you don't have to have a necessarily strong position on social policy.
If your policy is, we trust you to do it.
Yeah.
You know, we trust you to figure it out.
But the Conservatives don't even do that now.
It's like Sandy Javid proposing extensions to hate speech laws to govern misogyny and ageism.
Now they're taking an active interest in social policy along labour lines, which is, I mean, I just, I don't know.
It's also noticeable that the most, many, if not most, of the female MPs in the Conservative Party are playing the identity politics third-wave feminism game, which you'd think they wouldn't if they had any sense of the bigger picture, of that this is part of, this is essentially cultural Marxism and they are therefore endorsing the tactics of the left.
That's worrying.
I agonise about these sort of things with my Conservative friends sometime and they point out to me that a lot of people become conservative MPs not really believing in conservatism at all.
It's just the best route for them to get into power, but they don't actually have any conservative ideology.
Well I agree and it bothers me because I mean I was watching some speeches from Thatcher over the past few days and just comparing the tone and confidence with which she'd put across her ideals.
Her confidence.
It was seductive hearing her explain, you know, ideologically why liberty is the best thing for this country.
And I mean, she's so out of step with what the Conservatives are now.
And I find it strange as someone who came out of the centre-left that I have to kind of try and cajole the Conservatives to actually be Conservative.
So I think at this point in history, we're actually in need of some structure and order.
So I think the left has gone too far breaking down boundaries, right?
Yeah.
I was at university in the Thatcher years, and I used to be puzzled by all those people like Alan Clark who used to talk about how sexy Margaret Thatcher was.
But the thing was, I was 19 then, and she was an old person, and old people aren't sexy, obviously you know that.
But now, I look at this stuff because quite often you see Thatcher video soundbites appearing on Twitter and stuff.
How can there have been a time where conservative politicians actually said conservative things?
It's so exciting.
Well, yeah, it's weirdly exciting.
Yeah, no, it genuinely is.
And it's strangely romantic, you know, because she's appealing to the sort of the higher ideals that I think a lot of people in Britain do hold but don't ever have articulated in public.
And so, and the sort of like left-wing consensus that dominates the dialogue would just run in terror at the idea of someone confidently, like a Thatcher standing there and projecting this outwards.
They have very few avenues on which to attack her.
We need to find more people with, well, first of all, with Thatcher's ideological heft.
And secondly, with her sense of, her spirit of attack.
I was looking at the Owen Jones encounter with Andrew Neill the other night.
And I'm thinking, whatever you think of Owen Jones, he's very effective at giving the impression to his face that this is a racist, fascist country which doesn't care about the poor.
which is trying to make life miserable for immigrants and stuff.
And it's a very simple narrative to get across, and he keeps repeating it, and he's very aggressive about the way he repeats it.
We kind of need a counter to that.
But maybe you can suggest what it is, but I don't know.
Well, I mean, I can suggest many ones, but I think that the fundamental axis of liberty is the one that the Conservatives really need to recenter their moral values again towards.
Because this is how Thatcher was attacking everybody.
I mean, I saw an interview with her as a Swedish journalist, and the Swedish journalist was effectively accusing her of being a fascist.
And she was like, excuse me, you know, my country didn't submit to fascism.
And then she's like, well, you're saying that British people are better than others.
And she was like, no, I'm saying we're better at defending our values.
And that was a really aggressive way to reframe the question and turn it back on the journalist who was accusing her of being a Nazi.
And I miss that kind of aggression against this kind of submissiveness from the left.
Even conservatives that one might have counted on, like Michael Goat, who wrote his very good book, Fahrenheit, what is it called?
I actually didn't read it.
So it's a pretty good analysis of the threat posed by Islamism to social cohesion and indeed safety in the UK.
It's not like he doesn't get the basic principles, but now here he is as environment minister.
And what's the thing that he intends to ban by 2020?
When were conservatives in the business of banning stuff?
I mean, I suppose in America they were.
In America they were very evangelical.
Right.
And I suppose but that I didn't feel that that was something that was cross-pollinated over here.
I don't never considered the Conservatives to be anti-free speech or anything like this.
In fact, that seems to have been something Conservatives could be very aggressive on because it's an unimpeachable moral good.
But that's almost of all the things that surprise me about the Conservative, the decline of Conservative, and that I think is the worst.
When I was at university, free speech was, it's a bit like the Jews.
It's clearly a bad thing attacking the Jews.
This was a given.
Because the Holocaust and stuff like that.
But not just the Holocaust, not for other reasons as well.
You go, in the same way, three speak the.
Obviously, it's a good thing.
There wasn't this kind of, yeah, I believe in free speech, but I don't believe in hate speech.
Yeah, there is no distinction between free speech and hate speech.
In fact, free speech is designed to protect unpopular speech.
Because you don't need it for popular speech.
Absolutely.
Hate speech is something that deserves protecting most of all.
Exactly, and as unpleasant as it might be, I really think that we need to go back to the idea of words are just words, sticks and stones.
You know what?
I was going to, a few years ago, and I wish I'd written it.
I keep thinking of all these brilliant literary projects, which, for one reason or another, I never get around to doing.
But I wanted to do a piece about this.
Do you remember when that American congresswoman, Giffords, got shot by some deranged person?
No, how long ago was that?
Five, ten years, about seven years ago, maybe.
I don't remember on the top of my head.
The thing was that the left instantly got on the case of explaining how it was right-wing rhetoric which created the environment.
For example, the Republicans had been using imagery in which they'd used gunsights.
We're targeting this character.
And they clearly were not inviting people to go out and get a sniper rifle and shoot left-wing politicians.
All they were saying was, this is a metaphor.
There was a time when we knew what metaphors were for, and the language of politics has always used metaphorically the language of violence because it is war by other means.
It doesn't mean that they want to kill people.
Yeah, and I think that this was best exemplified recently by James Goddard, in fact.
When he said, okay, if it's a war you want, it's a war you'll get, or something like that, to the police or whoever it was.
He obviously didn't mean he's going to pick up a weapon.
He obviously meant that he's going to speak out using his iPhone or whatever and ideologically engage in politics in the war of ideas.
You know, obviously he's not saying that he's going to go on a shooting spree or something.
Also, I was very pleased that you covered that on your most recent podcast because it seems to me you were one of the very, very few people who actually got to the heart of the matter.
I was looking at the footage.
It wasn't somebody going up to Anna Subry and saying, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
Well, it wasn't.
Sueberry is a Nazi.
Sueberry is a Nazi.
kind of catchy.
It was kind of, it was the banter you hear at football stadiums, it was It was playful.
It was not full of venom and it was not spittle-flecked, as they like to say.
And she was enjoying it because she sees the opportunity.
She was playing it up for all she was worth.
Now, we expect Anna Subry to behave very badly because that's what she is.
She's a second-rater, she's not very clever, despite the fact that she's a barrister.
She's obviously a second-rate barrister.
She's a chancellor.
She's not a real Conservative.
She's never been a Conservative MP.
So naturally, like a lot of stupid people, look at David Lamby as well, she's going to play whatever dirty tricks she can in order to get herself in the media and to win her arguments by foul means.
That's a given.
What is worrying was the degree to which the media and the rest of the Conservative Party were prepared to play along with this lie.
That's what's scary.
It's like the hide mind, the establishment hide mind very quickly decides what the media narrative is going to be.
And this was a case where I thought, hang on a second.
These were just a bunch of harmless, slightly inarticulate, but ultimately decent Brexiteers, frustrated by Westminster's inability to provide them with the thing they voted for, expressing themselves in football chants and slightly getting in Anna Subry's way when she's walking down the street.
But it was not the far-right threat made out by Owen Jones.
Absolutely.
And the way that it was portrayed by, I think Douglas Carswell said it best, they were borish oaks.
Yeah, they are borish oaks, but honestly, they're kind of representative of working class feeling and action.
You know, they don't really, they don't have the refined nature of the Westminster bubble.
They don't know how they're supposed to act in that way, but they do know that they're voters, they do know the taxpayers, and they do know that they probably voted to leave.
And Alice Subrey is deliberately trying to undermine that vote.
And so I can't believe that she's shocked, especially after the way the Romainers treated anyone leading up to the Brexit vote.
Anyone who wanted to vote leave, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
It's the mantra they've been using for the past like three years.
And suddenly, when it's turned back on them, oh god, they're horrified.
How could you say that to us?
But this is only possible if the mainstream media supports the narrative.
What they did to me the most, it became the lead news story across Sky, across the BBC, and you had Conservative MPs joining in saying how appalling it was.
Where are these Conservative MPs, when are they speaking out against far-left violence?
It seems to me that they accept it as a sort of thing we have to learn to live with.
Passive.
Unbelievably passive.
And it's infuriating.
I mean, I personally have been attacked by Antifa.
I've personally had to shove them around to get them off the stage that I was on, that they were trying to disrupt.
Where was the blanket condemnation?
It was only places like The Spectator or Spike that have the kind of finger on the pulse of what's culturally going on.
That were like, well, this is a bad thing, isn't it?
But none of the establishment would talk about it.
And I suppose it's because I'm an anti-establishment figure.
But still, I think they do themselves a disservice.
And like you say, where were they when Remain voters are chanting Nazi at people?
Where were they when leftist protesters are chucking eggs and haranguing the politicians they don't like?
Complete silence.
But as soon as it happens to an establishment remainer, oh my goodness, the sky's fawning.
What's interesting on that politics, is it called politics live?
I think it is, yeah.
That even Andrew Neal, even Michael Potillo, and Michael Potillo made a very good case against Owen Jones.
He put him down very effectively in a kind of genial way.
And the way you put people down matters so much, body language and tone and everything.
People have got to see that you're a likable person.
He did that well.
Andrew Neal, again, he acquitted himself pretty well.
But both of them, both of them could not resist the opportunity to, I hate to accuse Andrea Virtue Signaling, but Virtue Signaling is what he did with his little introduction about how bravely, how bravely Owen Jones had coped with this barricade.
Owen Jones was not threatened at any stage.
He was loving every minute.
If Owen Jones had to endure the kind of being attacked on stage physically, as you were by Antifa, or the kind of treatment that Nigel Farage routinely got from the far left on the it would be a different thing.
That kind of experience does not leave you going, ha ha ha, isn't this fun?
Yeah, hey guys, look at me.
It's upsetting.
You want to crawl into a hole and you can't cope with it.
They did not have that experience that is routine for people on the right.
And yet, here you have two of the most articulate defenders of the right-wing cause not playing none of his game.
Yeah, and it's crazy how, and as soon as they give in to this framework, then they're trapped within it and they can't escape it.
They've agreed to everything and they get to the end point where they have to basically concede that fundamentally, yes, it is right for us to police their behaviour in this way.
So now we've got them, is it a criminal offence to call someone a Nazi?
Well, if it is, the left has got problems, haven't they?
What are they going to do?
You know, and obviously they can't make it that, but Goddard was arrested anyway.
But you see, as somebody said to me the other day, they always kill the foot soldiers.
So if you want to frighten the rival mob, you kill a few of the foot soldiers hideously.
And it's why it's so important for them to take out people like you.
Because you don't virtue signal.
I've never known you virtually signaling.
You tell it exactly like it is.
You're very reasonable.
If somebody can seize an opportunity to make it seem like you are an extremist, I get it with Breitbart all the time.
I try to write the kind of articles of Breitbart not dissimilar from the articles I write for The Spectator.
Really thought through long form articles using lots of fancy phrases and words just to make the reader understand that, yeah, okay.
so it may be Breitbart, but actually you can have intelligent stuff here and anywhere.
That doesn't matter to them.
All they want to do is go, yeah, yeah, Breitbart, anything because of Breitbart is wrong.
Yeah, so it's again, it's a way of just not engaging with the argument.
And this is something the left has been very effective at: just sidestepping and corralling and containing other arguments and making them illegitimate in the eyes of conservatives.
People who should be like, well, I don't care that you're offended by that.
I'm going to extract the truth of what they've said, regardless of how unpleasant the messenger is.
And that's gone.
And I think it's trapped.
I think what is wrong for this as well is the speed of the enemy's advance.
The comparison I there's two types of zombies.
There is the stumbling zombies you get on Walking Dead, which you can outrun with fairly easily.
And then there's the zombies on World War Z who move really, really fast.
And we've got zombies moving at World War Z speed.
The boundaries of what the Edition window keeps shifting leftward so quickly that it's very hard for people who haven't got a sort of fighter's disposition to stand up to this.
Which is why there are so few of us who say the things that we say.
I completely agree.
And the left is very.
I mean, I love the analogy with an army because it feels like that as I'm watching it.
And the left is highly disciplined.
Like the leftist activists fall in line very, very quickly.
Everyone says, oh, the left eats their own.
Kind of.
Only when they're in a safe space.
Only when the left is in their safe leftist space do they turn on one another.
The second that an outsider comes in and looks like they're in ranks arrayed against them, you know, pikes forward.
You know, no questions asked.
The Conservatives are not like that.
And it's very frustrating.
Like, I see so many Conservative attacks on Jordan Peterson.
I'm just like, he is your best.
And he will always be your best.
You need to make sure that you're all in formation behind him to make sure that they're met with the same force.
Because Peterson will be the tip of the spear and just push right through them like butter.
But instead, I see Conservatives attacking him and I'm just, I pull my hair out.
What are you doing?
For me personally, obviously.
If this is July 1944, definitely the other side, the left, are the Germans.
Oh, it's extraordinary the capacity they have to recover from every defeat and to form these squat units and form very effective.
They are so much more disciplined than we are.
We're just like, la la la la, well, we're British, damn it, and we've got so much civilization behind us, and we've got all these institutions.
These are going to save us.
But actually, nothing is a given.
Every generation has to fight for the rights that the previous one fought for.
Once you start taking these things for granted and assume that they're always going to be that way, that's when the Goths and the Huns and the Huns appear at your gate.
Well, no, I completely agree.
Great point about the kind of conservative faith in institutions.
Because that's one of the main strengths of the left, is infiltrating institutions.
They are such brown-noses.
They will do the dirty work as long as in six months' time they'll be promoted to the middle management class.
And they'll fill that and they'll promote other like-minded people and this is how they fill institutions.
This is the book that I actually do want to write next.
And it's inspired by Box Day, what he wrote in Social Justice Warriors Always Doubled Down.
And he describes how every institution is being infiltrated by really a minority of social justice warriors.
But like a parasite, they take over the host and subordinate to their own ends.
It's quite extraordinary.
The army, look at it.
The army is not about defence of the realm anymore.
It's about diversity.
It's about giving women the right to die on the front line in special force units, which they're only going to undermine.
Which they don't qualify for physically in most cases.
Which they don't.
I don't either.
I'm not suggesting that.
That's a failure on women's part.
No.
Let's give it a fact.
What's the biggest worry about the British Army now?
Making sure that Muslim recruits know that when they're out on exercise in Snowdonia and they want to whip out their prayer map, their comrades aren't going to judge them, but are actually going to accommodate them and celebrate this diverse.
It's just proud.
I don't care whether the British Army is entirely women.
I don't care whether it's entirely Muslims.
I don't care whether it's entirely black people.
All I fucking care about is that when the shit hits the span, these guys are going to kill the enemy more effectively than the enemy can kill them.
That's all I care about.
Totally agree.
I completely agree.
And it drives me crazy watching them see the Kitchener poster as well.
Because the way they framed it was completely wrong.
The reason that it didn't land, because Kitchener's a great icon.
He's a great British icon.
He was a leader.
He was well respected in his time.
And he wasn't appealing to the person, even when he was saying, we need you for the army, to say king and country, things like this.
But instead, these new posters are about, we need, they talk about the individual.
We need your addiction to your smartphone.
We need your addiction to video games.
It's like, that's not a higher ideal.
So you've got two problems here.
Number one, you've got, well, I've probably got more than two.
Yeah, actually.
Two major ones.
So you've got one, you've got the recruitment for the army being outsourced to capital.
That's number one.
But number two, you've got the kind of people, senior officers, who are prepared to go along with this diversity, cultural Marxism bullshit.
And they're the ones that rise to the top and give the nod to all this nonsense.
Meanwhile, you talked to I've got friends who were in special forces and so on, and I talked to them about this, and they say it's all up as bullets.
The reason that people join the army is the same reason they've always joined the army.
It's young men, mostly young men, who want to see the elephant.
They want to test themselves.
They want to prove their manhood and know what it's like to be under fire.
Know what it's like possibly to kill somebody legally because you're defending your battlefield.
They're not in it to test their texting skills or whatever other excuses are being made.
And I worry that this trend across the West, because it's not just in the UK, America has a similar problem.
Is this not the sign that we have reached that stage of in a civilizational cycle where we're just kissing goodbye to our culture and allowing more vigorous and aggressive cultures to take over?
There's no doubt.
I mean, I think one of the main problems, like the army in America has problems enough recruiting and they're a lot more patriotic than we are.
And we are always understaffed in our armed forces.
We can never meet the recruitment targets.
And then you'll see people on TV saying, oh, well, we can't be patriotic.
They don't say it like that, but it's the attitude.
The way that they formulate the things that they say.
It's always kind of self-abasing in a way towards the institutions and the culture that we have.
And so they're not giving anyone anything to be patriotic about.
And so if the Russians invaded tomorrow, why would they stand up?
Why would they fight?
How long ago was that army recruitment campaign that just went simply be the best and it had the union flag?
Feels like a lifetime ago.
It is a lifetime ago.
It's another world.
And I thought that was a fantastic...
I mean, my dad was in the RAF, so I grew up on military camps.
I saw all of these things all the time.
And back in the 80s and 90s, they were patriotic.
You know, they had the flag on them.
They were speaking about, you know, you're protecting king, well, the realm, as it were, you know.
And now it's all about the self-interest of the individual soldier.
And it's like, sorry, that's not how an army works.
Indeed, that's the very opposite.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so, yeah, I just find it very frustrating that we're just kind of selling our own civilization off the road because I think it was something to be proud of.
There's that famous essay, isn't it, by Glob Patcher that's been doing the rounds, the one about how civilizations go from this, you know, you get this sort of the vigorous martial side and sort of the entrepreneurial entrepreneurs rising and rising.
But my previous, my last podcast were with these people who were talking about how globally IQs are declining, yes.
And they've been declining since about 1850, 1870.
So you think about the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
You had all these really super bright, bright people inventing all these amazing things like the canal system and all these technologies.
Where are they now?
We're just in a kind of...
Well, I can tell you where they are, actually.
They're currently working for Google, programming very basic algorithms for $160,000 a year because the tech giants are effectively sucking up all the talent and then keeping them occupied with widgets and things like that.
And these people, in their veal fattening pens, in their very well upholstered veal fattening pens, do they have the politics of the SJWs or is it just their senior echelon?
I mean, it depends where you are.
In Silicon Valley, it seems to be a case very much of the people manning the structures are the very far left.
And they have a natural tendency to unionize, which makes it very difficult.
You can see the difference in tone in the last, say, five or ten years with the tech giants themselves.
And Patreon and Twitter are great examples of this.
But Jack Dorsey in 2009 committed Twitter to free speech.
And then in 2015, he's saying, oh, of course we're not for free speech.
And same with Patreon.
They were meant to be an alternative to niche content that wasn't getting monetized on YouTube and various other platforms.
And now they're saying, oh, no, we're going to police the content and make a brand is what we're judging you on and things like this.
So you can see the change.
And I think it's because of the sort of middlemen in the sort of trust and safety council types.
The ones actually manning it.
And I think the CEOs at this point are kind of powerless to stop this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You put up that footage of Tim Cook talking about the sort of, well, I think he used religious terminology to describe this kind of mission.
It's a sin not to censor.
Yeah.
That's where we are.
Yeah.
And these people control the internet.
Yeah.
Where are you on that, by the way?
Because I'm of the view that actually you need a kind of a cartel busting operation going on here.
I don't see other way around it.
I don't buy into the idea that Peter Thiel is just out there itching to set up a new Patreon or whatever in order to enable conservative.
They're not, are they?
I don't know why Peter Thiel isn't doing any of that, but there seems to be some kind of interconnected global payment processing systems.
And it seems to be very far, very progressive in its outlook.
MasterCard particularly.
Exactly.
And they've been predatory in certain regards.
And I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
So conservatives have better start thinking about what happens when the progressive jack boots come for them.
Because people like me are the canary in the coal mine.
I mean, I like edgy jokes.
I like being subversive and confrontational.
And I like that kind of thing.
I find it entertaining.
And it's always done in good humour, obviously.
I'm not trying to hurt people, but I think there's a time and place to push past someone's boundaries and say, look, I'm going to say something that you'll find offensive because I think you need to be offended sometimes.
And despite this, my politics are very, honestly, very middle of the road.
There's nothing outrageous about the things I believe.
So the fact that I'm being clamped down on shows you that it's not about ideological position.
It's about a threat to the, I guess, I would call it a hegemony of the far left.
Isn't one of the extraordinary things, I think we talked about this near the beginning, how very badly the mainstream media, how little coverage it has given to one of the most important cultural clashes of our time.
Freedom of speech is about to be killed by Silicon Valley.
Where is the Daily Mail?
Where was the Daily Mail even before Georgie Gregg took over?
Where was Daker?
I'll tell you where Daker was.
He didn't get it because he doesn't spend much time on the internet.
Even the spectator, it's not really on top of it in the print edition.
It's like this terrible thing is happening, and only a few geeks or old people like me playing it being geeks, understand what's going on.
Or even know that there's a problem.
Yeah, and it's a terrifying position to win because we're kind of sandwiched between the European Union and Article 13, which is going to cause mass censorship if it goes through in 2021, I think it was, or something like that.
And then the alternative is Silicon Valley, where the this is nothing.
We know that the CEOs of these tech giants are in constant communication, and Apple being probably the biggest probably gives Tim Cook a great deal of clout.
So when he's spouting religious rhetoric from what looked like a pulpit, you can see that there's, I mean, I guess I would say that like Silicon Valley is wide awake and has a will of its own, and so does the European Union.
And they find themselves in conflict with one another.
And it's the regular person like us.
We're just stuck between these titanic forces.
Yeah.
And no one talks about it.
It's, and if that's not scary, if that's not like a...
There is this.
We are the people who know there's this terrible conspiracy going on and no one believes us because they think we're confronting her.
Well, yeah, well, I tell you what, right.
Well, I guess we'll end it there because we may as well.
But this is something I've noticed recently.
The press coverage of me has changed from being misogynist or Nazi to conspiracy theorist.
And I was just like, well, that's a step up.
It's not a moral judgment.
Yeah.
I'm amazed how respectable people have now started to using these ad hoc dismissive tags.
For example, just briefly, Rod Liddle wrote a piece in the Sunday Times, very reasonable point, saying one of the problems is that in black families, there's often not a farmer, and they're absent farmers, and this is contributing to this culture of violence and criminality, etc., etc.
How did race-baiting MP David Lammy response to this?
He put up a tweet, a series of tweets, trying to get Rod sacked for saying something that is empirically verifiable, number one.
And indeed, Lammy himself has talked about in the past.
Yeah, in 2012, Lammy said exactly that.
I mean, I've cited him as part of an argument in favour of that.
But the point I was going to make is, I was looking on Twitter, and this chat says, well, this is the kind of argument that you'd expect from a wife beater.
He's referring to Rod Liddle as a wife beater.
So I looked, as Arsene dude, to find the identity of the person tweeting this.
It was a barrister in a respectable London chambers with the initials SBP after his name.
Hang on a second.
I remember a time where barristers were the kind of people who witnessed your passport photocopy or whatever.
They were pillars of the establishment and you respected them.
If you've got barristers in London chambers playing this game where you can just write off an argument simply by dragging up something that happened in the journalist's past, which is probably exaggerated anyway, this is the kind of world we're in now and it's not a good place.
It's worrying, you know, because that's the only reason, as far as I can see to do that is to actively avoid dialogue.
Yes.
You would have thought barristers would be kind of interested in debate?
Isn't that what we do?
At least exploring someone else's point of view so they can understand what they thought.
No, instead we're going to shut them down and call them a bad person.
And as if being labelled a bad person is even an argument in and of itself.
Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that they are who they are, and they're a citizen, they're a taxpayer, they're going to engage on social media.
You haven't changed anyone's mind.
You haven't got rid of that person.
All you've done is told them, you know, given them a favour, effectively.
Yeah, that's going to work, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
How's that gonna do for dialogue and bring us together?
But um anyway James, thank you very much.
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