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Jan. 18, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:01:23
Sargon of Akkad (louder MONO version)
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Time Text
Welcome to the Delling Pod, as I believe it is called now.
And you are all going to be so amazingly ill to his appearance.
It is none other than Carl Benjamin, a.k.a.
Sargon of Akkad.
You don't even know how to pronounce it, do you?
No, I have no idea.
Was it just a name you picked out of the books and you thought, aye, aye?
It was just my favourite historical figure and I used him as an alias when I was, you know...
In the early 2000s, you didn't really use your own name to use an alias because nobody really took the internet very seriously.
And it's kind of a holdover from when I was, well, not a teenager, but in my early 20s.
And I just used it for every site that I'd signed up for, you know, nothing...
I hadn't even heard of him until you started using his moniker.
So tell me about him.
Oh, he was the first ruler that we can legitimately call an emperor, I think.
He ruled over a large swathe of the Middle East along the Fertile Crescent around 2250 BC, around that sort of time.
He was Semitic, not Sumerian, which is a different ethnic group.
And he...
I guess most importantly, and I think interestingly, he's the origin of the Moses birth story, in the reed basket, passed down the river.
That was his story well over 1,000 years, probably 2,000 years before Moses.
So he was in the basket or he was pharaoh?
He was in the basket.
No.
Yes.
And he was pushed down the Tigris or Euphrates, I can't remember which river.
And picked up by a gardener called Aki, who adopted him as a baby, obviously, and raised him to be a gardener in the king's gardens.
And eventually, and we don't know how this happened, because the parts of the legend that would normally tell us were broken up so it's a lacuna.
But somehow, Sargon goes from being a gardener to being the king of Kish.
And from that point onwards, he starts conquering.
And soon he's a legend.
So you've got this blend of myth and reality, isn't you?
Because you think about all the...
It's quite a common trope, isn't it, in literature, where you've got the ordinary...
You think of Joseph, for example, the ordinary person who suddenly becomes very, very powerful by mysterious means, or the boy who pulls the sword from the stone and becomes Arthur or Harry Potter or the Matrix.
Yes.
Is that for real?
Well, I mean, probably not.
The age of the character makes him essentially mythological.
Anything that we know about him or think we know about him is going to be very dubious.
Was he a goodie?
If you're on his side...
Oh, I see, right.
So he was a despot?
Well, all of them were.
Civics wasn't exactly something they taught in school back then, so the very concept of the state itself was kind of new, and it wasn't very advanced, and it was obviously imbued with many religious dimensions and things like this.
So his rise to power was often intertwined with the goddess Inanna and her favour of him, which is how they explained everything, really.
You probably have done more to revive the reputation of Sargon of Akkad than any erudite scholar of ancient times.
Well, there is a remarkable amount of art of Sargon on the internet now, which is good.
Is there any in the British Museum?
Well, not of Sargon himself.
Because of the age of the figure, there's very little on him.
But there's a huge amount of Assyrian work in the British Museum, which is amazing.
Yes, no, I love the Assyrian galleries and it makes me feel really proud that we retrieved this stuff from the Middle East where it would otherwise have been probably blown up by ISIS by now.
Yes.
Tell me, did you ever have a phase of your life when you had a proper job?
Oh, many.
What have you done before you became the thing you are today?
I mean, before I went to university, this was before minimum wage, I would be a kitchen porter and cleaner for like £3.25 an hour.
So that's George Orwell territory.
Kind of, yeah.
And then I went to university, I did a computer science degree, I hated it.
Yes, but you can do computer stuff.
Well, I could at the time.
I'm so jealous.
Yeah, but it's so boring.
It's so boring.
Actually, had you pursued it, I bet you'd be earning shit letters, wouldn't you?
Well, yeah.
But I was never really that interested in money.
I was more interested in doing something I found engaging.
Right.
So you were quite early on to this whole shitposting, edgelording.
Back when...
I remember...
Effectively, I've lived through the invention of the popular internet.
So back when I first started, I was on a 486 and we had a...
We actually started with a 28.8k modem, which was amazing for the time.
And I could actually play a multiplayer game of Doom with my friends using the telephone lines.
It was quite incredible.
And yeah, back then, when trolling first started becoming a thing, it wasn't what people think trolling is now.
It was a lot more cerebral back then, in fact.
The whole trolling is an art thing.
It was like...
It was about setting up a framework that the person would deliberately bite.
And so they would get themselves worked up over nothing.
It wasn't about trying to hurt people.
That sounds a bit like Twitter.
When Twitter's good, it's about the bans.
Yeah, exactly.
When Twitter's good, it's about the bans.
But Twitter now is just venomous, I find.
I agree, but I think it is still possible for those of us who value wordplay and sparring, it's still possible for us to use Twitter for good rather than evil.
I agree.
It is possible.
But not common.
No.
Yeah.
Let's talk briefly about the thing for which you are currently most famous, unfortunately, which is being chucked off Patreon.
Yeah.
I mean, I'd never thought...
Let me apologise, by the way.
In a recent article on The Spectator, I described you as left libertarian.
And I got taken to task in a rather pernickety way, I think, by a few of your fans saying, no, he's not left libertarian.
If you saw the recent thing he did, you'll find he's in the centre.
Yeah, it doesn't really matter.
But anyway, I'm sorry for calling you left libertarian.
That's okay.
I mean, I... When I was in my 20s, I read something like two-thirds of Capital.
I found myself a bit more socialist-y than I realised.
And as I came into my 30s and became more politically engaged, I started being a bit more critical about things I'd read and realised that, no, I'm a liberal.
I'm not a socialist.
And I was very much centre-left.
And in many ways, I still am.
I don't think my political opinions have changed all that much.
But I'm very committed to a sort of libertarian centrist worldview.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't think there are many of us on our side of the argument who didn't go through a left-wing phase.
I'm just trying to think probably Charles Moore and Douglas Murray, I suspect, didn't.
I never did.
But that's because I'm really clever.
I never...
I'm modest.
I never sold out to the stupid.
And I was also lucky.
When I was at university, which is traditionally when you go through your stupid lefty phase, we had Margaret Thatcher doing the Lord's work.
And so we didn't really need to fight political battles.
It was all kind of...
Well, this all comes down to the way that the left has been fighting the political battle, because the conservatives are frankly terrible at fighting the culture war, which is why they're losing, and they're going to keep losing, and it's disappointing to watch conservatives kind of I recoil in horror the idea of coming and having a conversation with me, because none of my opinions are particularly outrageous.
I'm just okay with having fun on the internet.
And to a lot of people, this seems highly controversial and boundary-breaking.
But who are these lots of people?
Because isn't it just the kind of SJWs?
Well, no, the people, no, no.
I mean, obviously they despise me because I oppose their ideology root and branch, but the sort of stodgy establishment conservative is watching the sand shift under their feet at the moment, and they don't really understand what's going on.
And I can help them with that, but they are too proud, I would say, in many ways.
Yeah.
We have been talking about this in the pub, not over a drink, because neither you or I like drinking before podcasts.
And also we've talked about it a bit on the separate vidcasts that we recorded before this.
And I really like the idea of doing a kind of a double thing, where if you like one half, go and find...
Yours will have...
How many...
How many listeners have you got?
Oh, about 900,000 subscribers.
You've got 900,000.
I think I've got about 900.
So that's fair, isn't it?
I think that's fair.
So we can do a bit of cross-pollination.
But I think what you say there is the subject for so many podcasts.
In fact, pretty much every podcast I've ever done.
Ultimately the question underlying it is how do we on the right win the culture wars when at the moment the left's all over us really?
Yeah I mean I'm a centrist so I like a good balance between both preferably I would like the main problem is the kind of I don't know how to put it.
The basic axioms of left-wing and right-wing thought are different, obviously.
And the concerns of each one.
I mean, for example, the left don't really believe in personal agency, but the right don't really believe in the effect of structure and order.
And...
So you can never really have a conversation with someone that finds comprehensive solutions from one side or the other in their extremity, or at least on their own.
It's never that simple.
And this is something I find the conservatives...
Like, for example, the conservatives will argue, oh, well, okay, we need, you know, completely minimal state, we need absolutely zero state interference...
And what you do there is you open up the grounds for the lefties, the Labour socialists, to turn around and say these people don't care about you at all, and so they're going to do nothing for you.
And so now what do you do?
Yes, but that's more a failure of argument than a failure of ideology.
I mean, I just...
If you...
My god is Thomas Sowell, for example.
And if you ever want to know why the minimum wage is a bad thing, you just consult Thomas Sowell, who explains, both from his personal life experience and in economic terms, why it actually doesn't benefit the poor.
And a very intelligent person will read that and come away convinced.
But most Labour voters...
No, I agree with that.
It's easy to appeal to people's baser states, especially if they're not highly educated people.
And it's not just that, though.
This is kind of getting off into the weeds of what I really want to talk about, because it's about engaging with people.
Because the conservative, like, the impression that the conservatives give is of being lofty and self-important and, you know, educated, aristocratic, and these are not bad things, but these are also the diametric opposite of the way that the Labour Party try and persuade them, convince people of them.
I mean, for example, Jeremy Corbyn's been in Parliament since, what, the 80s, the early 80s?
When was the last job he had?
And yet he's parading around as if he isn't worth a large amount of money.
And saying that he's the friend of the working man.
He doesn't know anything about the working man, which is why Labour can't understand why people are voting UKIP or Tory in the North now.
They just have no idea.
But it's the fact that the Conservatives leave this ground open.
Again, you're talking about tactics, not the ideology itself.
Well, it comes from the ideology.
The kind of tactics that you use are born from the ideology itself, because you set out a system of boundaries to be able to even decide and define your ideology.
And necessarily, you're going to include some things and exclude other things.
And the things that the Conservatives are excluding are, honestly, fertile ground for Labour.
And so I don't think that being all one or all the other is very wise, because...
All you're doing is effectively leaving an open field for the enemy.
But do you think...
And I notice we've strayed far from the original question, which we'll come back to, the Patreon thing.
But do you think that the solution to that is for the Conservatives or whoever, the people roughly on our side of the argument, to water down their ideology and actually abandon their belief that minimal government is a good thing?
Or do you think it's simply a question of PR and explanation and...
I don't think it's either.
I think it's a case of learning when to compromise and learning when to be firm on your principles.
So it's very easy to say, I disagree with social healthcare because I'm a principled conservative and I want to have absolutely minimal government interference.
But that doesn't in any way persuade anyone who is poor and needs government assistance for healthcare.
And so the Conservatives might well believe this, and I don't say that it's right or wrong that they do, but they do have to accept the reality that this is not appealing to large segments of the population.
And now, I don't suggest that you go the complete other way and become Theresa May capitulating to Labour's every demand.
You do still, do not abandon your principles, but you have to learn when to compromise.
And I think that there are certain subjects like that on which the Conservatives really need to learn how to compromise.
Well, you say that, but actually, earlier today we were bemoaning the fact that the Conservatives don't stand for anything Conservative anymore.
Well, that's the point, isn't it?
Because when I say you should compromise, what I mean is you've got a set of certain principles that you hold to be Conservative ideals, and being people who are sensible, pragmatic, you live in the real world, you understand that you never know one ideology.
It's the same with a socialist.
I would say exactly the same thing to a socialist.
You know, they would say, well, I've got these socialist ideals and I want to see them realised perfectly.
Okay, but most of the world doesn't.
And you now have to engage in a dialogue with your political opposites, let's say conservatives, and you need to find a reasonable middle ground on which you can both find an acceptable compromise.
Because ultimately, politics isn't about the talking heads realising their political ambitions and ideals for their own moral satisfaction.
It's about helping people.
So when you say, I'm going to sit there and I'm standing on this point of principle, well sometimes it is really appropriate to stand on this point of principle, and we can get into how the Conservative Party have failed to do that.
But the question is not, do you abandon your principles?
The question is, when do you understand that you're never going to reach the exact expression of them that you want?
Yes.
Taking a realistic...
I have to say, you're sounding dangerously like a politician.
I don't consider myself a politician.
No, I'm sure you wouldn't, but you are actually sounding a bit like...
Before we develop that, maybe we don't want to develop that one, but the Patreon...
Sorry, yes.
Yeah, which...
Why did they...
What was the reason given for getting rid of it?
It's because context no longer matters.
What matters is...
There are certain dog-whistle words that bring out the rabid lefty pressure groups, and there are many of these, and they operate very openly on Twitter, where they just say, we actively want to de-platform and defund various, and I mean, I wouldn't even just say conservative now at this point, it's just various dissident voices who go against their very far-left narratives.
And if you're one of them, and I mean, for example, I got in trouble for calling Nazis the N-word.
Did you?
Yes.
With whom?
With Patreon.
That was the reason.
Oh, sorry, I see what you mean.
I understand.
So yeah, basically, there are very unsavory types on the internet.
I don't really like talking about them, because if I talk about this, then it gives them life.
And they'll go to some, you know, opaque message board somewhere and talk about how, oh, Sargon talked about this, us on James Daly or whatever.
And so I don't really like, you know, breathing any life into it, but unfortunately I have to talk about it because it's part of the story.
But basically, they view me as a gatekeeper, in a way.
They think that I obviously should become a Nazi, and the fact that I'm not becoming a Nazi means that I'm effectively holding my audience hostage away from them, because they feel like they're entitled to my audience or something like that.
And so they'll go out of the way to harass me and my family and things like this.
And I obviously try to kind of keep it on the down low.
But it was getting quite stressful.
This was about 10 months ago.
It's all over now, so I'm not worried about now.
But it was getting quite stressful.
And I just wanted to lash out at them, frankly.
And I was on a podcast of a YouTuber with something like 4,000 subscribers.
It's a very small channel.
Very obscure, you know.
I hadn't told any of my patrons or anything, so they wouldn't have known.
But the alt-right were there in the chat.
I was like, you know what?
I'll insult them and tell them that they act in the same way that they consider black people to act.
Right.
So yes, you were looking for the ultimate insult to a white supremacist, which is accusing them of behaving like their concept of black people.
Yeah, exactly.
The way they demonize black people.
Obviously, that's not an opinion I hold.
But it doesn't matter that that's the context.
No, it really doesn't matter because I was having a conversation the other day with somebody very much on our side of the argument, internet savvy and stuff, and this person said to me, yeah, you want to be careful with that Saganavaka.
Do you hear what he actually said?
And I was thinking, well, yeah, I did.
And yeah, context.
But it's amazing how effective that strategy is if you want to de-platform somebody.
Absolutely.
And I mean, this kind of brings us back to what I was trying to say with the Conservatives.
I'm all for compromise, but it must be done from your own principled position.
As in, you know where your principles are and how far you're prepared to compromise on them.
And as an outsider watching the Conservatives and Labour, I'm a member of UKIP for anyone who doesn't know.
Watching the Conservatives and Labour having a dialogue, I honestly don't see much difference between the, I guess you call them the wet Tories, and Labour.
It seems that the Conservatives themselves, they're not just compromising, they seem to have embraced the principles of the Labour Party, and are in fact in some sort of competition with the Labour Party to push these principles even further.
Yeah.
For example, censorship of pornography.
It's not a very classically liberal thing that they should be conserving censorship.
And hate speech laws.
Sajid Javid saying that he wanted to expand them to include misogyny and ageism.
And I'm just sat there pulling out my hair thinking, you've been in government since, what, 2010?
You guys should have repealed these like a decade ago.
There should be no hate speech laws.
We're the country who invented freedom of speech.
Shouldn't you try and conserve that?
But instead, they're pandering to Labour because they don't seem to have any moral base with which to resist Jeremy Corbyn's moral attacks.
And that's all he does, is moral attacks at the Conservatives.
And instead of doing something like...
I can't believe that I'm rooting for Margaret Thatcher at this point to come back and retake the Labour Party.
But I mean, whatever you thought about Margaret Thatcher, at least she had a moral grounding for what she was saying.
She would take a very high-minded, very British approach to...
What is right and wrong, you know?
And she was very firm on this.
And my goodness, it's something I really miss from political dialogue now, from the Conservatives.
Because, I mean, all I see is Theresa May promising 20 extra trillion or however much it is for the NHS. And I'm just thinking, or you could do the sensible thing and stop mass immigration.
And then you don't have to continue to throw billions after billions after billions at an ever-expanding NHS that is essentially going to be unstable and unprofitable.
Not even unprofitable, at all.
It's untenable, you know, but for some reason they weren't.
But she's following the Labour line of reasoning and she can't get off of it because she's already implicitly agreed to its premises and now she has to follow it on.
It's very hard to find an issue actually where the Conservatives haven't saw the path to the left.
I mean, one of the things that the Conservatives used to be famous for was having a strong defence.
And yet they've run down our military so that we can no longer operate in many, many theatres.
We're not a credible force anymore.
Not even slightly.
And one of the main problems with the Conservatives is their abandonment of national pride.
I mean, that used to be the...
They were the bulwark.
I mean, again, you listen to Margaret Thatcher in the 80s speak about being British.
My God, it makes you want to stand up straighter, you know, and pronounce your T's correctly.
It is an ideal that was held up by the Conservatives as a moral good to be British.
And now they're ashamed to say it in public.
I'll tell you what really, really puzzles me is you look at what, for example, Bolsonaro did in Brazil.
And he...
In fact, Bolsonaro really is the Trump of the tropics, I think, in the way that he approached that campaign.
And he was accused, for example, of abusing somebody in Parliament using sexist language when he said, I wouldn't even rape you or something like that.
He's got my vote.
But...
The thing was, when you looked at the context of that remark, it was perfectly justifiable that she had...
Well, context again, isn't it?
She had said something really vile to him and he was just responding in kind.
But he didn't back down.
He didn't apologise.
He said, this is who I am.
Vote for me or don't.
How is it that...
Our Conservatives haven't learned the lesson from Trump, from Bolsonaro, from Viktor Orban.
We're never going to be like...
We're not Hungarians, we're not Brazilians, we're not Americans.
But the lesson surely is authenticity, honesty, ideological integrity are what people want.
Yes.
I mean, one of the things that you notice is Nigel Farage should essentially be leading the Conservative Party.
Yes.
He's what I would consider to be a classic Conservative.
And I mean in a very positive way.
Yes.
You know, someone who isn't a Conservative but can see the strengths of being a Conservative.
But then, I mean, 20 years ago, I would have been able to make the same sort of case for Labour.
You know, there are strengths in being, you know, part of a movement who are concerned about the struggles of the working class.
Because there's no doubt that they have them and they need representation.
But it's all changed now.
And yes, like the Conservative Party obviously wouldn't have someone as fiery as Bolsonaro.
But they could still have a very, you know, well-mannered, well-spoken, very British and...
Called Jacob.
Called Jacob.
I mean, in fact, it's actually wildly frustrating as someone outside of the Conservative Party to watch how they're afraid, the establishment of the Conservative Party.
It's obviously terrified of Jacob Rees-Mogg because...
And they have every reason to be because...
I mean, cometh the man, cometh the hour.
We're at a time, Britain as a country is at a point where the Conservatives have failed to embody Britishness.
And they've just failed.
Because the Labour parties and the left in general, the sort of globalist left, and I suppose the globalist right in this case as well, I mean, the left's entire weapon is attacking your identity.
So it's no surprise that the conservatives, not really being conversant in this kind of ideology, and not understanding the angles and vectors at which it attacks you, And having no real good defence of their own, because they've never taken the time to formulate one, have just collapsed completely to these attacks.
And so now Theresa May is offering up billions to the NHS, she's opened the borders, they think hate speech laws are a great thing, and I'm sat here thinking, okay, revolution.
Yes.
I think that's a very good analysis, that they have bought into the terms defined for them by the left, which are actually the terms of a, probably what, 10% of the country maybe thinks?
If that.
If that.
And yet, because they're so visible on Twitter and through change org campaigns and stuff, they've created a climate in which every female MP, pretty much, is desperate to show that what really matters to her is the gender pay gap.
It's unbelievable, isn't it?
Whatever else the Conservatives should stand for, it should be empiricism.
We know that the left is all about the narrative, about my feelings.
The right is always about unpalatable truths, the facts, whatever.
So if you're talking about unpalatable truths or just truths, the gender pay gap does not exist.
It's even worse than that.
Well, when I say worse, I should say better.
It's even worse for the left on the narrative of the gender pay gap.
It's not that there isn't one.
There is one, and it's justified.
And every single conservative who wants to earn the name needs to say that proudly and loudly and confidently and back one another up, regardless of who it is saying it.
The gender pay gap is just.
This is how it should be.
Women work less hours in easier jobs and less danger and all this.
There are all these other factors that mean that...
I mean, honestly, it's amazing that women earn as much as they do, given how much more effort and time and danger that men put into their jobs.
Can you think of any Conservative MP who would go on a public platform...
They will all go out and condemn me for this.
They will all condemn me for saying that.
And if...
Here's the other problem.
If anyone did go on a platform and say that...
Yeah, it would be...
Women work less and therefore they should earn less.
And there is no formulation of this where you can say men work something like 44 hours a week on average, women work something like 37 hours a week on average.
The idea that that could ever equal out would require women to be privileged.
For women to work fewer hours than men and earn the same amount of money must necessarily require female privilege and a deliberate weighting of the scales in their favour.
The fact that that's not the case and they're about 15% down with about 15% hours down means that we're working in quite a fair system.
And no one can actually identify any of the sexism in the system.
Point to the people.
They're filled with...
Actors.
Point to the hiring.
That person is a sexist.
Point to the pay.
And this was most exemplified by the BBC's gender pay gap scandal with Carrie Gracie.
She's there working something like five hours a day in China, and she's comparing her wage to the chap who works ten hours a day in Washington, and wondering why she earns half as much as him.
And it's like, well, I think...
I mean, I'm not a mathematician or anything, but it seems to work out fairly...
Easily on paper.
And you could tell that she knew she was getting away with this in the hearing that she had.
And she was just smirking and smiling and looking around at her friends.
And it's like she can't believe she can get away with this absolute grift.
This is an absolute...
She's rolling the taxpayer at this point.
And a bunch of men had to take pay cuts.
A bunch of these women got a bunch of money that they weren't entitled to.
And it's all coming at our expense.
It's ridiculous.
At the risk of sounding like an unreconstructed chauvinist pig, which no one's ever accused me of before.
But there are definitely characteristics in women.
They don't all have them, but they are quite often shared.
There's sort of, I suppose, the bitch factor, the factor that cries rape when there hasn't been a rape.
The sort of...
I watch my male children and my female children and there are different characteristics.
And I think that one of the problems about third wave feminism is that it has weaponized some of the worst characteristics in women, like the fact that they can laugh about the fact that they're getting one over on men.
They're not really after justice.
They're really after actually trying to grind.
It's about power.
And they're very forthright about saying it.
I mean, for example, the important thing, and again, the conservatives don't know anything about this.
Okay, so if you're a conservative listening to this, right, never again use the phrase cultural Marxism.
Never use it, right?
The correct term that the left uses for what you're trying to describe is intersectionality.
That's the word.
So replace it in your lexicon, cultural Marxism means intersectionalism.
And then Google intersectionality or intersectionalism, and then just look in your local schools, in your universities.
They're very intersectional, very inclusive, they're very diverse.
This is what you're talking about.
But as soon as you say cultural Marxism, they can parlay that into, oh, it's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Even though literally, like, a conservative will say, well, we're talking about the Frankfurt School with Herbert Marcuse, they fled over with Jacques Derrida and Foucault, and all of that's correct.
All of that is, yes, that's exactly what happened.
And that's where these ideas were first born.
But the left has a habit of forming narratives.
But they can't form an anti-intersectional narrative, because that's the main thrust of their own argument.
So you've got to weaponise that against them.
You see, it's interesting.
I think I was mentioning to you earlier about how I used to describe myself as a kind of libertarian.
And then I realized that there are actually some elements in my worldview which weren't answered by libertarianism.
And actually, sometimes libertarianism is about stupid things like open borders, for example, which can completely...
Liberty is nothing if it doesn't mean liberty for the people in any given country.
If you're taking away the liberty to give it to somebody else, that's not really liberty, is it?
No.
And at no point were any of these people consulted about opening the borders.
It's not like Tony Blair didn't run on a platform of open borders for everyone because the working class voters of the North would have gone...
No.
No, he did it by stealth, didn't he?
Yeah, exactly.
It's all done.
The Andrew Nether letter.
Absolutely.
And the Conservatives never decided to change the situation, which is terrible.
And it ended up with, I think, this kind of thing fed into Brexit.
This is why we're in this situation.
Totally.
In fact, we'll go back onto open borders and stuff in a moment, but I just wanted to develop this point about a strand within Conservatism that they ought to be talking about to do with gender pay gap, which is they're not, which is that Of course it's a good thing that there is a gender pay gap, because actually what it means is that you don't have this,
well rather, less likelihood of this problem which has now arisen in the West, which is that men earning less than women, women are interested in having these men as their partners because they're useful, so people are not breeding, so the family is breaking down.
These are things that conservatives should be getting on top of, rather than feeling embarrassed about.
Yeah, yeah.
And the conservatives should be hyper-aggressive about this.
Because, I mean, if you think about it, the left, the intersectional left, are attacking the very foundations of civilization itself.
Civilization is built on the family unit.
It's built on a mother, a father, who make children, who are then concerned about their local communities, and the local communities are concerned about...
The wider sort of county that they're in, and then the counties are concerned about state control.
You know, it all should flow from the bottom upwards.
And it all starts with the family unit.
And that starts with a man and a woman.
And so the left have gone right for those most fundamental building blocks of society.
And the Conservatives have nothing to say about it.
It's disgraceful.
It's absolutely disgraceful.
And it's honestly something that I think future generations of Conservatives are going to look back on the time period now, and there will be nothing good said about modern Conservatism.
I think you're right.
Do you think that it was planned, this multiple-pronged assault on the very basis of civilisation?
For example, you've got not just attacks on the family as the source of all good, and notice how the left, when the Conservative Party used that phrase family values, how roundly they were mocked and abused by the left for using that.
Exactly.
So, they're not just attacking the family, but they're also attacking the very concept of what is a man and what is a woman.
Oh, yeah.
Was this planned or was this accidental?
So...
It's not accidental.
It is by design, but I wouldn't say it was planned.
To say it's planned implies some sort of overarching conspirator or something like that that has some 40 year plan for the West or something.
That's not how they view themselves.
They view themselves in much more immediate circumstances.
But the point is that the ideology itself is all about critiquing power.
Now, this is something that most people are generally uncomfortable talking about because power is a word that's got very negative connotations and rightfully so.
Obviously, some terrible things have been done using great power and very little responsibility.
But if you look at anything from intersectionality, you can't even define the terms without factoring power dynamics into it.
For example, they'll tell you that racism is power plus privilege and prejudice or something.
Power plus prejudice, sorry.
And so you can be prejudicial against a white person, but as far as they're concerned, black people don't have institutional power, so therefore they cannot actually be racist.
And that formula applies to sexism, ageism, transgenderism, all that sort of thing.
This is the general logic of which the...
Has this been codified in a book?
Absolutely.
Any social science text, you'll be able to find some formulation of this.
And this is what every social sciences student is learning about?
Probably not every single one, but it's very widespread.
Very widespread.
I mean, go into any diversity officer...
And ask them how they define racism.
And if they know their stuff, they'll say it's power plus prejudice.
If they don't, they'll say, oh, it's about judging people based on their skin.
And that's how you know you've got useful idiots.
Right, yeah.
Well, we've got a lot of catching up to do.
Yes, we do.
And this is why a centre-left liberal is here to kick the Conservatives up the rear.
For example, like you were saying, the Conservatives would say family values and they'd be laughed at by the left.
Well, I think it's time for the Conservatives to start understanding that the left is dying.
They're losing elections all over the place.
They're currently, I mean, the amount of Vice magazine articles I've seen about people voluntarily sterilizing themselves.
Yes.
Good.
Maybe we should encourage leftists to voluntarily sterilize themselves.
Because I'm a father.
Well, they go one further.
There's the VHment, voluntary extinction.
Oh really?
I haven't seen that yet.
But it's the inevitable conclusion if you kind of hate humans.
But yes, I think it is definitely time for Conservatives to say actually we do stand for family values and when you laugh at us we're just going to smile and say yes but we are right and you're wrong and history will bear that out.
That's what Jacob Rees-Mogg does.
He's completely unembarrassed.
Oh totally.
And he will repeat it.
Yeah.
Don't look at these childless 30-something feminist women who are going to die and eventually be eaten by their own cats.
They are not a model for how people should live.
They don't know.
They just know they hate their fathers.
They hate the patriarchy.
They hate everything around them.
The entire world was crafted by an evil god, as far as they are concerned.
And they will do everything in their power to destroy it.
Because at the end of the day, the left has managed to delegitimize all of Western civilization.
I mean, the very concept of being anti-racist comes from English liberal tradition.
If it wasn't for us, there would be no conception of what it is bad to be racist.
Unfortunately for us, or fortunately for us, I suppose, we did agree that.
And now the progressives have gone, ah, right, well, we've decided that racism No, racism is not the worst thing in the world.
It's not pleasant, but it's not the worst.
There are many, many worse things than racism.
It's the same way as the feminists going, oh, well, rape is the worst thing that can happen to a person.
No, it's not.
It's absolutely not.
If rape was the worst thing that could happen to you, every rape could commit suicide.
Yes.
They don't.
And so it's not.
You know, it's bad.
Very bad, obviously.
But it's this sense of scale that they've completely lost.
And almost deliberately so.
And so they've got to the point now where they've undermined all of the foundations of the civilization in which they were bred.
And they are trying to break down every single barrier, as you see in things like drag kids now.
And I mean, like any parent who wants their child to dress up in drag before they've even hit puberty...
I mean, I've got very little positive to say about those people.
And yet it's celebrated in...
What have you got?
In Vice magazine and in The Guardian.
In Vice magazine.
And on a sort of higher level than that, you've got Vanity Fair celebrating the courage of Caitlyn stroke Bruce Jenner.
And it's...
Well, the important thing...
So this is the thing, right?
The important thing for conservatives to remember is where they can get a victory and where they can't, right?
So you can't...
Actually argue against transgenderism because you are defenders of liberty.
And part of being at liberty is to say that I own my own body.
And if I own my own body, I can do the damn hell I want with my body.
And there is, again, an unimpeachable moral good for the liberal side, the liberty side.
However, a child is in absolutely no condition to make that kind of judgment.
An adult, like Bruce Jenner or whatever, or Caitlyn Jenner, fine, and you guys should celebrate that.
If an adult wants to do that, you say, great, you use your freedom exactly as you think is necessary to make you happy in your life.
However, being a parent, you have a duty of care to a child who hasn't even hit puberty yet.
And you're expecting them to start taking hormone blockers and chemically castrate themselves in order to fill a particularly progressive worldview.
The fact that these people have a 40% suicide rate and a much higher rate of cancer, and like I said, they're sterilized, is not relevant to this ideology.
And that's where the Conservatives have to go, wait, we are the party of family values, we are the defenders of children, and we will not let you do this.
Yes.
Can I run a theory by you on the whole transgender thing, which is that I think we understand that if you incentivize particular kinds of behavior through the tax system or whatever, for example, if you enable single mothers to jump up the housing queue, then you will get more single mothers.
In the same way, I wonder whether the rush of transgenderism is a response, even if only a subconscious response, by men, by some men, to the current feminist hegemony.
So you've got this world in which women now in the West completely rule.
Everything is going their way.
What is your option as a man?
Well, one of the few options you've got to gain power in this weird power pyramid is to join the ranks of the powerful gender.
Now, that's a very interesting way of framing it, because it's not only to gain power in the power pyramid, it's to leap to the very top.
Because as far as they're concerned, transgender people are among the most oppressed people in all of the world.
It's the victory of the Olympics.
It is absolutely the totem pole of victimhood.
And if you're a person of colour, that's the way to achieve the very top of it, is to be a disabled, transgender, homosexual person of colour.
That is the most oppressed person in all of society.
And because you're so oppressed, you'll be invited everywhere, like Monroe Bergdorf.
It doesn't matter how much you hate the white race and sit there and say the white race is the most evil force to have ever existed, which is something she said on a BBC clip that was, you know, put around the internet by the BBC, using my money to tell me how much of an evil racist I am, she'll be considered oppressed while she does it.
Which is, frankly, quite amazing, in my opinion.
Tell me, do you think that we are, well, you particularly, because you've got about 100 people A thousand times more listeners than I've got.
Is the mainstream media just over, basically?
I think they're on a clock.
I mean, they are trying to adapt to the new reality.
Are they, though?
Yeah, they are.
They're trying to get video content on the internet, and they're trying to modernise.
Here's what I'm seeing.
I was a journalist in the glory days.
I was at the end of the Roman Republic.
I saw it before it all went tits up.
Before the barbarians got through the gates.
And...
Newspapers had values.
They had the back bench and they had the subs and they had all these keepers of the wisdom of print media going back generations and it was very respectable.
Now I see these teenagers who want to be journalists but they can't write.
They all have a very heavy social justice warrior agenda to promote.
And newspapers are run by editors who are conscious of the fact that they're losing circulation.
But their solution to losing circulation is to make themselves more like the stuff that people can get for free on the internet, thus defeating the object of being a print newspaper, which should provide value added that the internet can't provide.
Professionalism.
So, for example, what I see a lot in newspapers now is this celebrity or politician is criticised on Twitter for having said something.
And you examine it and you're talking about two or three Twitter activists.
Well, that's not a legitimate story.
And yet, this is where the papers are going.
Yes, but do you know why?
Tell me.
It's terribly convenient.
They don't even have to get out of their chairs.
Yeah, that's true.
It's very easy.
And, I mean, there is an entire industry in the press now that is effectively just monitoring Donald Trump's Twitter feed.
And every day, Donald Trump will tweet something incendiary, and then a dozen articles will be written by two dozen journalists, quote-unquote journalists, who are very proud of their scoop on Donald Trump's latest tweets.
But, to be fair...
Donald Trump is the President of the USA and his tweets are really, really good.
That's true.
I'm always happy.
They just brighten up my life when I read a Donald Trump tweet.
Same here, especially when he's sassing them.
But the point is, this is not a healthy and conducive environment to, honestly, what I would consider to be proper journalism.
It's lazy and it's easy and they don't bother.
And it's very easy to get trapped in these kind of ideological channels and be entirely adversarial and give no charity to the other side.
It's interesting that two of the things that have real traction on the internet are long-form journalism like you get at Queer and long-form discussions like the ones that you do, which shows that there is an appetite out there, not for stupid, but for clever.
There is, absolutely.
I mean, QI was a great example.
QI was a smash hit, and nobody expected it to be, because it sounds like stuffy, pretentious, middle-class nonsense, but it turned out to be wildly entertaining, and they had the right host, and it shows that people aren't actually as far gone as they might think.
Who are these people that listen to you or watch your shows?
Well, I mean, they're an average age of 30 on my channel.
How do you know this stuff?
I've got analytics, which I can see, with a good spread between around 24 to 30 and then 30 to 44, I think, is the rough spread, like the bell curve on mine, with 30 being the centre.
Yeah.
And I suppose they're people who have seen much in the same way that I've seen in real life, and are glad that someone's talking about it and telling them about this aspect of reality that otherwise tends to go unmentioned in the mainstream.
Isn't that, after all, the essence of free markets, that you work out something that is not being currently provided, that people want, and you give it to them?
It wasn't even deliberate, to be honest.
I only ever started doing this, because at the time I was unemployed, and I was just frustrated, frankly.
There'd be times where I'd see something, something that was just like, well, that is so unbelievably illiberal.
I mean, I can't believe even the Labour Party would suggest something like that.
I'd just be laying in bed thinking, should I be doing something?
I guess I felt kind of helpless because I was just laying there and I was frustrated.
There were some nights where I'd be unable to get to sleep thinking, do I have a duty to be at least in some way active in regards to this?
Or do I just silently carry on with my life and just ignore what I've seen and assume that everything will work itself out?
And I'm glad I did start speaking about this sort of thing, because the more I've learned is there is absolutely no hope of this fixing itself, because the way that Western society is being attacked is unbelievably clever.
And the people who have developed this, undoubted geniuses, everyone.
Who are you talking about?
The people like Marcuse, people like Foucault and Derrida, people...
People who have taken what would be sloppily called postmodernism, but I think it's more accurately called poststructuralism, although I'm not an expert on this, and have decided to use these kind of techniques to invalidate almost everything.
Logic, facts.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, these people, they start with the premise that All of reality is constructed via words, which is true.
All of our perceived realities is constructed by words, and these are in fact a prison.
Words only ever interface with other words, so you can never escape this prison.
Then you take into account that language is obviously inherently subjective.
People interpret from different statements different things.
And then you realise that, in fact, all of our perceptions are inherently subjective.
For example, we can presume we're both seeing the same colours and hearing the same noises, but to each other we don't actually know what they sound like.
And so we find ourselves in some kind of Cartesian bind.
if what we are perceiving is reality or if we're plugged into a matrix or something like that.
And then the bumbling British empiricist has to come along and say, "Well, we're just going to have to assume that we are." Because we don't actually have the evolutionary tools to be able to ever break this bind.
So we've thought ourselves into a position where we can't be sure.
But the postmodernist can say, "Well, effectively what this means is that everything is a subjective judgment, a value judgment of a sort." So you can say that I believe that's empirically better, but I can undermine your very notion of empiricism.
By pointing out the subjective flaws of your own perceptions and your own mental processes.
And think of, you know, your own senses deceive you from time to time.
And this all, it puts the person that they're attacking with this line of logic into a kind of fog, into a kind of haze.
And you see the quickest thing is them saying, well, what are British values?
And you suddenly, oh, God...
I don't know.
But you know it when you see it.
And so now you have to think, oh god, how do I categorise British values?
And for anyone listening, the quickest way to pin it down, and you just say it and be firm on it, is all of English political thought is about accountability of power.
That's it.
All of it.
From the very first sort of Anglo-Saxon electoral kings, right through the Middle Ages to, I can't remember who it was, but at some time in the 14th century...
I read The Rule of Law by Tom Bingley, I think it was.
Tom Bingham.
Bingham, sorry, yeah.
And he pointed out that in the 14th century, it was commonly said that, though the wind would, paraphrasing obviously, the wind would enter the most rickety shack in all of England, but the king couldn't.
And that is just, isn't that just a beautiful statement in itself?
It's about accountability.
It's about the importance and sovereignty of the individual.
And that is, all of English political thought has always been about accountability.
And I mean, there are modern studies that say, oh, well, the English language is very quick to place blame.
And they say, well, of course it is, because that's the person you hold accountable.
You know, whose fault?
Why did this happen?
You know, and that accountability keeps people honest.
It keeps them responsible.
And so, if you want what's a British value?
Accountability.
That's the first thing you should go for.
And it's unimpeachable.
They can't attack that.
You know, you can't say, well, I don't want someone.
In power, who's unaccountable, or who's accountable.
I want them to be unaccountable.
They're never going to say that.
And so you've won that argument right away.
And now you've got a firm footing.
British values are about accountability.
Now what?
Fairness, tolerance, you know, acceptance, whatever you want to build on top of that.
But you've got a root, and then they can't attack it.
And that's what you have to do.
You just cut through the fog and find something solid that, even if they say, well, I don't think that you can be sure, I'm like, well, that's your opinion.
But I'm sure of this, and I don't care if you don't think I'm sure.
You know, you find something that's solid that you can hold on to, and then you move from there.
I think that this yearning for, A, for personal meaning, and B, for counters to the current narrative, explains, for example, the huge success of Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life.
Absolutely.
These young men, particularly young men, who've been told that they're basically rapists.
Yeah.
And racist.
And racist.
Their culture has no value.
Well, they're inherently oppressive.
Yeah.
And they're looking...
And where do they...
They don't learn this...
They don't get a character to this in the universities.
They don't even get it in schools increasingly.
I mean, even in private schools.
One of my mini-gripes...
I'm sure you haven't got children that you're trying to put through private school, have you?
Not yet.
No, no.
My son's too young for school.
Okay, but actually it's really depressing seeing how pretty much every private school now has a kind of super head who wants to make the school more modern and relevant and do exactly what the parents don't really want the school to do because actually they want tradition, they want values.
Yeah.
One of the things that you're saying about meaning is very important, because this is something that you see amongst millennials, again, who get themselves sterilized every five minutes.
They are desperately searching for meaning.
And it's so bizarre to watch it, because you know that meaning comes from your children, right?
I mean, the purpose of a human being is to reproduce and continue the species.
And so once you realize that that is the biological imperative of a human being...
meaning starts to come from children because as soon as you're like for any millennials who are like afraid of children they're really easy they kind of raise themselves in many ways you know you you just have to be a secure an emotional stability for them and for you unbelievable amounts of meaning Suddenly your life has a purpose.
You have a goal.
You have responsibility and you have reason.
The millennials at the moment who are busy debasing themselves by doing whatever it is they want and getting themselves sterilized, these people are too afraid to take on any responsibility and will never find any meaning because of it.
People often point out that you look at the leaders of the West at the moment.
Childless.
Childless.
20 years ago it would have been unthinkable.
It's a big deal, isn't it?
Unthinkable.
The left is very good at talking about, and we're talking about the regressive SJW, very good at talking about future generations and think of the children and brandishing children as their tool to advance their argument.
But actually they don't believe in the children or the future.
At least not British children.
I mean, they seem to treat, like, other countries and people from the Third World as children.
They seem to have exported that kind of parental instinct into these other adults from other civilizations.
And I find that very strange, you know, but it's a long thing to get into.
Well, it's a projection of that, but it's like Mrs.
Jellybean in Dickens constantly trying to save people from foreign countries and ignoring...
Yeah, that's the common...
Yeah, well, I think the fact that you exist and that you're so popular does give me a bit of hope.
Because I don't think we're going to...
I was watching Owen Jones the other night, and he's very effective at...
He's always on the attack.
He's very good with soundbites, and the left is very good at soundbites.
And I think sometimes these can't be countered by soundbites.
They have to be deconstructed with long arguments like your...
I mean, you've taken, what, 10, 15 minutes this week to talk about Anna Soubry and the Nazis.
Yeah.
I think it was about 20 or something.
Oh, was it?
Yeah.
But it needed that.
Yes.
It needed...
All Anastasia has to do is go on TV and say, they called me a Nazi and it is the worst thing in the world and it means that we must censor the far right.
Yeah.
That's her argument made.
And it's amazing.
Everyone jumps on the bandwagon, from Theresa May to Owen Jones to Corbyn and so on.
It's amazing, isn't it?
There's a complete consensus.
It's unacceptable for people to call Anna Soubry a Nazi.
It's like, well, I'm sorry.
There are lots of clips of Anna Soubry calling other people Nazis and fascists.
I'm sorry, this is the height of hypocrisy.
And do tell me about the suffering that you've had after being called a Nazi.
That's never happened to me before.
Go on, explain to me exactly what that's like.
You're Bloody hypocrites.
Yeah, yeah.
That's it.
And there's no...
The sad thing is I don't think there's any magic formula that we can find which is going to...
But we can use cheats.
Well, honestly, the magic formula is establishing your own moral framework and then being certain of it.
Why what you think is moral?
The reason that Mogg and Pete Hitchens are becoming superstars of the British bright at the moment is because they have a moral base.
Now, I might not even agree necessarily on every point of their moral base, but I am just so relieved to see some kind of moral fortitude Coming out of the Conservatives for once that isn't left-wing morality.
Because left-wing morality is, in my opinion, basically an inversion of morality.
It's all an appeal to power.
The idea that weakness is virtue is the curse of the left.
And the first thing they'll do is say, well, are you saying strength is a virtue?
It's like, no, I'm saying right action is a virtue.
That's the only way virtue is derived.
It's not from weakness.
It's not from strength.
It's from being good.
Actually being virtuous.
And then you say, well, what does that mean?
Exactly.
Now we have to have a long, detailed conversation.
Now we can talk.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Now we have a conversation about that.
But we don't just say, oh, that person's weak, therefore they are decent.
Before we go, and I think we should soon, but I have got to ask you, what do you think about...
You must feel, as I do, that Silicon Valley censorship of conservative voices particularly, but free speech generally, is one of the greatest problems of our age.
Do you think that this can be solved by somebody like Peter Thiel coming along and setting up a new...
Or do you think trust-busting is the answer?
I mean, in the immediate future, I would say trust-busting is the best option.
And it's very frustrating, so I'm going to sneeze.
Sorry about that.
That's God punishing you for being not left-wing enough.
And an atheist.
In the immediate future, I do think antitrust laws could be used to break up what is obviously a cartel in Silicon Valley.
They're open about the fact that they all talk to each other, they all share the same values, and when Tim Cook is preaching sin and not sin from a pulpit in Silicon Valley, it's hard not to view them as some kind of woke entity.
Honestly, very much like fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile would say.
This is why I'm not a fascist, obviously.
In fact, I'm an anti-fascist in many ways, but you've got to be able to understand where they're coming from, and you've got to read their material to understand why they thought what they did.
One of the things I found very interesting about fascism is the way that Gentile, he characterised it as an ethical statement.
Now, we usually use the term ethical in lay terms to say that's a good thing to do, that's a moral thing to do.
But that's not what he means.
What he means is an entity with an ethical framework.
As in, it's the entity itself, more than an individual, the structure itself has an ethical framework that it determines right from wrong from, and then has a moral goal in mind.
So it starts from its position and then is trying to achieve something.
Whereas the liberal state doesn't do that.
The whole point of the small government conservatives is then say the state itself derives its legitimacy from protecting your rights.
And so it can't tell you how to think.
It can't tell you how to be.
All it can say is these are certain conditions that the state will guarantee.
And from that point onwards, we can have a talk about anything else, right?
But that's the way the liberal state derives legitimacy.
And the difference between that and the fascist and socialist states, the fascist and socialists said no.
The socialists say we should all be equal.
The fascists say we should all be in service of the one true state and all of this.
But they have a distinct, different ethical goal.
And so when Gentile says the fascist state is wide awake and has a will of its own...
What he means is it's an entity that's going to try and alter the world to suit its sensibilities.
It doesn't care about the individual.
And that's the same thing that Tim Cook is doing in Silicon Valley right now.
It's an ethical, wide-awake organization, and it knows what it wants.
I think on that sinister note, we should end the podcast.
You were listening to the Delling Pod, I think we're going to call it.
Is that a good Delling Pod?
I think it's very good.
Okay.
Delling Pod with Carl Benjamin.
Wasn't it wonderful?
Wasn't it fantastic having him on?
I'm so pleased.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Okay, bye.
Thank you.
.
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