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June 6, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:13:28
Delingpod 24: Bella d'Abrera
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Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Delingpaux.
And I know I always say this, but I really am excited about my special guest this week.
She's come all the way from the other side of the world.
Her name is Bella Debrera.
Absolutely perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
Good.
And I was trying to work out whether, I was guessing either Italian or Spanish, and you tell me it's Catalan?
It is.
It's a town called Abrera, and it's between Barcelona and Montserrat.
And I gather it used to be a lovely place, but now it's a car manufacturing town, so it's pretty boring.
But once, I mean, I imagine with the de apostrophe, you must have been aristocratic, maybe.
Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And I can also tell by the way that you pronounce it, that you must be fluent in Spanish or Catalan or both or...
In my day, I was fluent in Spanish when I was doing my PhD.
But unfortunately, no one really speaks Spanish in Australia, so I don't get it apart from the South Americans, but I don't really mix with the Chileans.
That's interesting, actually.
I was discussing...
Because I'm having a Kim Kardashian moment.
You know Kim Kardashian?
Yes, I do know Kim Kardashian.
She's studying for law.
No.
Kim Kardashian is studying for a law degree.
That's astounding.
No, no, I know it is.
And I'm thinking...
One of our previous podcast guests was Jim Mellon, who's into the whole idea of ageing and the fact that we're all going to live much longer.
So we're all going to need skills and hobbies to keep our brains active and to entertain ourselves as we have our second life.
And I was wondering with the wife, with the four the other day, what language I should learn.
And I was thinking...
My immediate response was German, because I did German at O-level.
And so I've got the basics of the grammar, and it's not completely alien to me, but it is so heavily inflected that it's very hard to learn.
But the fawn said probably she'd rather learn Italian.
And I was thinking, actually, it certainly does annoy me when I go to Spain and Italy, That I can't communicate with the locals in their language.
So I think either Italian or Spanish would be the one.
And also, there'd be a piece of piss, wouldn't there?
Yeah, look, once you speak Spanish, then Italian comes naturally as well.
But if you listen to opera, you've probably got half your Italian vocab at the ready anyway.
I don't...
Do you know, Bella, you obviously...
Perhaps I'm assuming...
You're assuming too much about my culture.
I don't listen to much opera.
At the moment, I like classical music.
Particularly...
Bach and Rachmaninoff, I suppose, would be my two favourites.
But I haven't really got to the stage in life.
I'm saving opera for my old age.
I like Puccini-Arias.
That's good.
I did go and see Richard Strauss, or probably Richard Strauss, as I pronounce him, where I kind of up my own arse.
Yeah.
I saw the one where three of them sing at the same time, famous...
Oh, yes, the famous...
I'm not a Strauss fan.
No, anyway.
But look, why not Spanish?
Because then if you ever do go to South America, that's the whole continent covered.
Well, not Brazil.
Apart from Brazil.
I'm sorry.
Apart from Brazil.
But then again, you can get away with...
If you've got Spanish, you can probably get away with Brazilian Portuguese because it's easier to understand than Portuguese, Portuguese.
Yeah, dos cervezas, por favor.
Dos cervezas, por favor.
Yeah, okay, yeah, so I'm already on the way there.
So you've got, okay, English, well, Australian, which is almost English.
Oh, yes, just.
And you've got Spanish.
Have you got any others?
Languages.
A little bit of Italian, a little bit of French, but it's just mainly Spanish.
And before we go on, I was looking up your CV, and I noticed you studied at St Andrews.
You did your MA at St Andrews, and then you've got your doctorate in history.
I have.
From Cambridge.
Now, I tell you what surprised me there.
I'm not saying you're too thick to get into Cambridge.
That wasn't my argument at all.
I still think they made a mistake.
My concern was, look, how on earth did somebody of a right-wing persuasion get into Cambridge, get accepted for...
Because you have to be accepted, but don't you, by a tutor?
You do, yes.
Your supervisor.
Supervisor, exactly.
Yeah.
So how did you pass that test?
Because Cambridge and Oxford are so woke now, they won't let the likes of us in.
I don't think they were woke in the 1990s.
This shows how old I am.
So I started in 1998.
And there was absolutely no sense of politics, identity politics, how I voted, what my views were.
It just didn't come into it.
I remember I wrote to my supervisor, who was Professor David Arvalafia, and said, look, I'd like to...
Is he a lefty or...?
No, he's not actually.
He's one of the supporters of Brexit with Robert Toombs.
So you were taught by one of the two?
Yes.
I had no idea.
It was 1998.
Nobody was talking about any of this.
No.
You're so right.
The world has changed so rapidly that I think it's taken all of us by surprise.
Look, the last five years has just been unbelievably quick in terms of how we've gone from sort of relative normality to, especially in the university sector, it's all coming out now.
I mean, obviously it's been bubbling away in the humanities since the 60s.
Yes.
But it's now becoming very, very apparent.
And they're really putting their heads above the parapet in Australia.
But I can talk more about that later.
Yeah.
But, you know, in 1998, doing a PhD in history at Cambridge...
Politics just did not come into it at all.
I was just there to study the Inquisition.
That's all we talked about in our supervisions.
I went off to Spain.
I read 120 court trials from 1480 and came back and wrote up my thesis.
Okay, so give me, in a nutshell, what do we know about the Inquisition?
Well, we know that this whole idea of people languishing in jail for years is a total myth.
Maybe it was your paper that I heard of that the Inquisition has been overdone.
Oh, absolutely.
Academics have known about this for a long time, but it will never enter the public sphere because people love this whole idea about the Inquisition.
You know, Monty Python and everything else.
We'll never be able to dispel this myth, even though we keep talking about it in academia.
It was a really well-run court of law.
I read through the trials.
They had defence counsels.
It was very strict.
Nobody really wanted to be an inquisitor.
It was a horrible job.
You had to get up at, you know, six o'clock in the morning and work all day and you've probably killed.
The inquisitor that ran the tribunal I looked at in Aragon was murdered in the cathedral at midnight by the people that he was accusing.
Really?
Yeah, so it was not a great job.
So we feel sorry for the people in the pointy hats?
They weren't wearing pointy hats, but yes.
Torquemada was brilliant.
Torquemada actually changed the medieval inquisition and improved it because he found that there were things that was being run.
So the inquisition already existed because it had been used in medieval Europe against the Cathars, who were totally bonkers.
And then...
Are you not on the Cathar side?
Not at all.
They were insane.
Yeah, they were sort of Gnostic Puritans and this idea that they were anti-marriage, they were anti-family, they were twisting sort of Christian ideas and just turning them...
They were pretty insane.
So you two would have been burning them alive in Bézier Cathedral?
No.
Personally, I probably wouldn't have, but I would have supported an Inquisition that was trying to work out who was a Cathar and who wasn't.
Oh, really?
Yes.
And again, I would have supported the Spanish Inquisition as well.
So Torquemada was a great guy.
He was, yeah.
He was a Dominican.
He was a lawyer.
He was, you know, this whole Dostoyevsky idea of Torquemada being this villain is just, again, it's just complete rubbish.
But it's much more interesting to have these villains in history than it is.
It's all, everything is about stories.
Yes.
And I had a fascinating conversation with my very good friend Christopher Booker the other day, who's written the definitive book about stories, Seven Basic Plots.
And he was, we spent half an hour talking about the final episode of Game of Thrones and the bizarre, do you watch the final episode?
I watched the final episode, yes.
Okay, so the bizarre, the apparently bizarre decision by Tyrion to effectively bequeath the Iron Throne to Bran because Bran had a better story than anybody else.
Yes.
But Booker said this was not a trivial comment that it actually goes to the heart of everything.
We tell ourselves stories about the world and it's not the reality that matters.
It's the stories that matter.
So isn't it fascinating that presumably Torquemada as the arch villain and the Spanish Inquisition as the kind of the very type of ruthlessness and cruelty was presumably Protestant propaganda.
Yes, it was.
It happened 100 years after the Inquisition.
It came to an end.
Because the Inquisition only went for 300 years.
Because by the end of the...
In the 1700s, there was no point to it anymore.
So they just shut it down.
And the whole sort of thing was just Protestant propaganda, as you say, to make the Spaniards look just appalling.
Was it not the case, though, that...
I know that Flores and the Azores were Sir Richard Grenville lay...
That he's got his sick men ashore and he brings them onto the ship because they know that if they're left behind for the Spanish, the Spanish are going to subject them to the Inquisition and then kill them all.
Did that not happen?
Oh, no.
Not in this respect.
No, there was the Inquisition in South America, but they were pursuing the same people that they were pursuing in Spain.
So the Conversos and the Moriscos.
And there were a few Protestant heretics as well, but it was never to the scale where...
A Protestant would be in fear of his life just by walking around the streets.
Oh, really?
No.
Interesting.
Okay.
But again, it's a much better story.
See, but notice my clever technique, and it wasn't even deliberate.
I've got you comfortable now.
Yes.
Because I've talked about a subject, an academic subject, and you know it well.
Yes.
And I've lulled you into a false sense of security.
Well, no, not a false sense of security.
I've made it easier for you to talk about whatever the hell you like now.
Good.
Yeah, we've covered the Inquisition.
So, I'm very, very interested in what has happened, particularly to Oxford and Cambridge, just because I... I think it's so important.
This isn't a snobbery thing.
I think it's so important that the acme of academe, which I suppose is what they are, that it should be pursuing knowledge and truth without regard to concepts like social justice.
I mean, I frankly wouldn't care if every single person at Oxford and Cambridge had been privately educated, if they were the best, cleverest people.
In the same way, I wouldn't mind if everyone at Oxford and Cambridge were black, if they were the cleverest and best people for the...
It doesn't bother me.
I don't think that people's identity should have anything to do with...
Whether or not they get into Oxford and Cambridge.
But it seems to me that now both establishments and across the Western world, I mean you've got Monash University, all the ones in Australia, they're all the same aren't they?
Yes.
They have been so, they have so surrendered to progressive values that they seem no longer to reject, they seem no longer to celebrate excellence as their highest goal.
Oh no, look, that went out the window a long time ago.
Australia has far too many universities.
It has 43 universities.
And they're just sort of cookie-cutter establishments.
They're large, you know, they have a huge amount of students.
There's nothing different about any particular university from one to the other.
There's a sort of group of eight, which are meant to be the top universities.
So it's a bit like American universities.
It's a bit like American universities.
The non-Ivy League anyway.
Yes, there's a sort of equivalent to the Ivy League, but they are the worst.
So the University of Sydney, which is the oldest university in Australia, is probably the worst university in Australia when it comes to the humanities.
I must say, I have found that Australian lefties are more whiny and self-righteous and ghastly than lefties almost anywhere in the world I've encountered.
I mean, I think Irish ones are pretty bad.
Um...
I haven't...
Yeah, I suppose kind of Antifa is big in Berkeley, so I suppose there's bad stuff in America too.
But your lefties are pretty bad.
They're pretty bad.
Why is that?
I wonder about...
I don't know.
I think it's because...
There is, because the standard of, I don't know if this has anything to do with why they're so bad, but I think the standard of living in Australia is quite high still.
It's still a very good country to live in.
There's not much suffering.
There's not much struggle.
And I think they've got more time...
They've got the luxury of time and the luxury of a high salary and a very lovely lifestyle, you know, living in a city, Sydney, with a view of the harbour or something like that.
They've got more time to create suffering where there is none and to create this sort of division where there is none.
It seems to be keeping them...
It justifies their existence somehow.
Well, you make a good point here, and I think we can always segue perfectly into one of your main preoccupations, which is the rise and fall of civilisations.
And is it not very much the case, and all the people who've written about the rise and fall of civilisations say this, That when a culture reaches a certain state of affluence, it also becomes intellectually decadent.
You get more sexual depravity going on.
No longer do the people honour their gods.
The family starts to fall apart or be less valued.
The old traditions are not valued anymore.
And people start embracing all these, well, what we would now call the woke ideology.
And so what you say about Australia's affluence would seem to fit into that perfectly.
Yes, I mean, I haven't really thought about it in those terms before.
I mean, they are pretty bad.
And there's a sort of this self-loathing in Australia that is pushed by academia on the rest of society constantly, especially around Australia Day.
Because you're not the, what are they called, the original?
Because we're not the...
What do you call the aboriginals and other people?
The indigenous, the first peoples.
The first peoples.
We're not the first peoples.
We're the, I don't know, the fourth peoples.
I don't know what peoples we are, but we're definitely not the first peoples.
So there's this narrative that they keep pushing on the Australian public.
Which is, you need to be ashamed of Western civilization.
You need to be ashamed of being non-Indigenous.
And this is a terrible past.
It's sort of, you know, this idea of the stolen generations and everything else.
And it's constantly pushed from academia onto the populace.
And every year for the last three years, I've done a poll around Australia Day to ask people what they actually think about their history and what they think about being Australian.
Every year, Australians say, we're proud to be Australian.
We're proud of our history.
We're proud of our country.
We value the freedom of speech.
We value freedom of religion.
And every year, it's getting higher and higher.
We're actually winning the debate.
Oh, with real people.
Real people.
Where do you conduct these polls?
So we use a company, a research company, and we ask them to ask a thousand people a set of questions about how they feel about being Australian, and the results keep coming back in our favour, and it's fantastic.
And it's even more fantastic, given the recent election results, because...
One thing I always say in my articles at the IPA is the stuff that the left is pushing is totally out of step with mainstream Australians, totally opposite to what mainstream Australians believe and want.
And now we're vindicated because they just voted that way.
Gosh, from your lips to God's ear.
It's wonderful.
Yeah, well, as you say, you have been vindicated also by the recent Australian election results.
Which came as a massive surprise, didn't they?
Because we were told that these were the climate change elections and that the BBC was telling us for a long time, and I'm sure it was the same with your ABC, which is even worse than the BBC, was telling us that Labour was definitely going to win this one.
I know, and we all believed it.
So the weekend before the election, we were sort of preparing ourselves for coming back into work on Monday, just thinking, this is going to be three years of absolute devastation.
The Labour Party is going to ruin the country.
By Saturday night when we realised that we were winning, it was just unbelievable and we were so unprepared for good news that we didn't know how to respond because how often do these good things happen apart from Trump's victory and the recent Brexit party results?
When do we ever get good news being conservative?
Is it a bit like, when I was traveling through Africa, I went to this mission in Zaire, in the former Belgian Congo.
And I met this missionary who, during the Katanga crisis, there was a terrible thing where basically they were bumping off missionaries and white people generally.
And he'd been lined up in a row.
and they bumped off the people next to him.
And then they'd stopped by the time they got to him.
And I imagine that's how you must have felt.
It really was.
It was just, we were so close.
We felt we'd been saved from just disaster.
Because the policies that the Labour government introduced would just ruin the country in three years.
Particularly, I think, on their environmental and energy policy.
What were they going to do?
Well, they were going to introduce electric cars in the next, I think, 2030.
Everybody driving an electric car.
They had this crazy sort of carbon reduction that was even more extreme than the Paris Agreement.
Even more extreme than the one that recently caused massive brownouts in South Australia.
Yes, pretty much.
And the problem was they could never come up with a number about how much it was going to cost.
So one of the things that really finished Shorten off was just being questioned by journalists, and what's the number?
How much is it going to cost Australians?
And he couldn't answer.
Bill Shorten is the ALP leader, the Australian Labour Party.
Yes, he was the leader.
And I'm surprised that any journalists were asking these questions, given your mainstream media is as horribly progressive as ours.
We were surprised as well, but it did damage the party's line, I think.
The other thing that was great was John Howard, former Prime Minister, pretty much killed the whole campaign in just one sentence in a car park, saying, you know, the Labour Party just wants to get your money.
They just want to get their hands on your money.
And everybody heard that, and there's so much respect for John Howard that he pretty much won the entire...
He won it.
Well, good old John Howard.
John Howard was quite arid, wasn't he?
Arid in terms of...
Well, in terms of personality, he's quite kind of...
He's not very charismatic, is he?
Oh, he's very charismatic.
Oh, is he?
Oh, I'm sorry, I've got it wrong.
No, you've got it wrong.
He's amazing.
He's one of these people that will remember your name in five...
Meet you once, remember your name, and then meet you five years later and know who you are.
I want to meet John Howard now.
It's incredible.
I want him to remember my name.
He will.
He will remember your name.
Good old John Howard.
Okay.
Okay.
So I've maligned John Howard, but now I've remembered that by saying I want to meet him.
So, OK, so Labour were going to win and then didn't.
And I saw Rowan Dean's fantastic speech, his sort of victory lap on, I think, Sky, where he talked about this was the election and he explained about...
And what he said rang so true to me in the UK that...
The great divides of our time between political correctness and common sense, between credulousness about climate change and sound science, between affordable energy and renewable energy and so on.
He laid out the divide.
And I'm just wondering why the Conservatives in the UK are not looking across to this shining example in Australia, which is not dissimilar to the rest of the West, is it?
No, it's similar.
New Zealand, Canada, UK, it's all the same sort of idea.
Do you know anything about New Zealand?
You can tell me about that in a moment.
What I want to ask you is about what you were saying to me in the car on the way here, that People didn't admit in polls that they were going to vote conservative or liberal, as you call it, because for the same reason people didn't admit they were going to vote Trump, which is why the results came as a surprise.
Is that right?
Yes.
So the polls got it completely wrong because people didn't even admit on the telephone when people phoned to ask how they were going to vote.
They lied, essentially.
I mean, that's the only explanation because when it actually came to the polling day, people voted liberal and the majority voted liberal.
So, I wonder why, and I do wonder why the English don't look at that as an example and take solace in the fact that they are in the majority.
People are in the majority, but they're just too scared to admit it.
Everything's up in the air at the moment over here.
We don't know whether we're going to get Venezuela-style government and Jeremy Corbyn, whether the Conservatives are going to get their act together under somebody like Boris Johnson, presumably with some sound people underneath him, because Boris is a bit of a flip-flopper, whether he's going to restore Conservatism, or whether Nigel Farage's Brexit party is going to steal the mantle of the Conservatives.
Well, it's difficult when the Brexit party has no policy other than Brexit.
Interesting you say that.
There was a piece I read yesterday by a former UKIP guy, Patrick Padio Flynn, who...
Padio Flynn?
Who used to write for the Express, and I always thought was...
I assumed he was pretty sound, because a lot of conservative journalists pretend they're to be sound, and they're not really.
They're basically squishes.
And Patrick, I like him, but he's a squish.
And he was saying, I'm one of the few people who've read the Brexit Party manifesto.
And do you realize they have a skeleton in their closet?
They are a classical liberal party.
It defines itself as we are a democratic classical liberal party.
Well, for me...
That was like, hang on a second, I'm liking the Brexit Party more and more.
They're not ashamed to admit that they're classical liberals.
In other words, they are probably the heirs to Margaret Thatcher.
And that's exciting for me.
And I think that unless the Conservatives can...
Can return to Anna Basis, to Margaret Thatcher.
They're fucked.
I think so.
And deservedly so!
Yeah, absolutely.
But this is what, I mean, this was the problem with our previous Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
He's awful.
He's an awful man.
Absolutely horrendous.
And he actually famously said he didn't care which party he was Prime Minister of.
He just wanted to be Prime Minister.
That's how fundamentally lacking in any ideals or beliefs that he has.
He just didn't care.
Wait, wasn't he called the Honourable Member for Goldman Sachs?
Yes, because he's obviously...
He's classic Davos man, liberal elite.
He was very kind of pro-climate change.
Terrible.
His son's even worse.
His son is just awful.
What's his son called?
Oh, I've forgotten.
Mr Turnbull.
Jolion.
His son is just awful.
Jolion.
His son treats out dreadful things about conservatives.
I mean, yeah, they're a terrible family.
But this is a terrible...
Because this is the problem.
One of the problems with the world is...
Is that the children of the rich tend to, being ladies and gentlemen of leisure, tend to have plenty of time to go on arts, do liberal arts degrees.
Yes, like the academics who have time, plenty of leisure time.
Just as the heirs of Rockefeller and so on, they all turn left and they all spend...
granddaddies and great granddaddies millions on shit causes they haven't had to work for it they haven't had to be entrepreneurs they haven't they haven't had to understand taxation or or hard work talking of which yes that woman who was married to jeff bezos who's giving away her multi-billion half of her multi-billion fortune do you think she's going to give it to any cause which is No, she won't.
She won't.
It'll all go on shit, won't it?
Absolutely, yeah.
Speaking of which, we've got a similar situation in Australia.
We've got the Ramsey Foundation.
Have you heard of this?
No, tell me.
So he was a sort of philanthropist and...
A millionaire who ran healthcare companies.
He passed away about four years ago and he left an awful lot of money to start a Foundations of Western Civilization Bachelor of Arts in any university in Australia.
Yeah, oh!
Do you know about this?
It's coming back to me.
Tell me more.
So, it's been very interesting to watch.
I've written about this.
You've written about this too?
I have.
Okay.
No one wants to host it.
Nobody wants to host it.
One of the unions is actually taking the Ramsey Centre for Western Civilisation, they're taking them to court.
Sorry, no, sorry, I get that wrong.
We'll have to start again.
No, no, no, it's fine.
It's confusing.
So there's a University of Wollongong that they've finally settled on.
It's one of the less universities in Australia.
They've finally said, okay, we'll have this BA in Western Civ.
We might just teach some Shakespeare and some Plato and Aquinas.
Yeah.
And of course the union and a staff member from Wollongong are actually taking Wollongong to court for even entertaining the idea of this Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation.
Western Civilisation because it's so toxic.
It's already been ousted by the University of Sydney, the one that's the worst university in Australia.
200 academics signed this ridiculous letter saying that it was white supremacy writ large and there was no way they could have it on campus.
And ANU, another Australian national university, has also rejected it.
And another university, even if it's Queensland, is also rejecting it as well.
So nobody wants this Western Civilisation, Bachelor of Western Civilisation.
And presumably it comes with quite a lot of money and universities are short of money.
Oh yeah, it's free!
No, they're not short of money.
That's the problem.
Mega, mega funding from the government.
So they don't need it.
They don't need the money.
They don't need the extra thing.
And they're also terrified that the minute they have a decent course being taught to students, the students will realize that they're being fed absolute rubbish and will go and will want to learn about Western civilization, will want to read the classics.
So they're terrified because they're going to be shown up for the frauds that they are.
Isn't this the most perfect example of the anti-intellectualism and anti-Western civilisation attitudes which prevail across academia?
I was thinking my father-in-law studied history at your alma mater and he had received a copy of Cambridge History magazine and And the lead article was by a student who'd clearly got in on diversity grounds and was now boasting about the fact that her main joy at Cambridge had been to
participate in the Decolonise the Curriculum campaign.
Tell me about Decolonising the Curriculum.
You must know about that.
I do.
I think it hasn't hit Australia yet.
I'm waiting for the next, that'll be the next big thing in the next couple of years.
Sounds like it doesn't need decolonising in your case.
Well, they're doing it in terms of, actually you're right, because it's taught so badly already there's nothing to decolonise.
I've had a look at every single history course being taught across all 35 universities that offer history programmes and I can tell you that it doesn't need decolonising because they don't.
I like it when a hard fact intrudes on this podcast.
So tell me more about this research you've done.
So I've done two papers looking into the history that is taught.
I looked at every single subject, 746 subjects, and read through them all.
And basically, identity politics wins.
Identity politics is the king.
So it's class, race and gender.
It's, you know, the extension of the Marxist idea of just class and then you add race and gender to it and hey presto, you've got the same course, you've got the same identity politics, totalitarian orthodoxy in every single course.
With few exceptions, but mostly if you go and do a history degree, that's what you'll come out with.
You'll come out with the idea that all of history can be explained in terms of this oppressor versus oppressed.
And then I looked at Australian history last year just to sort of see how Australian history is taught.
And it was even worse, actually.
So there are 147 subjects taught in total by all 35 universities, and 102 of them specifically deal with class, race, and gender.
So that's three courses of all subjects at university.
If you study Australian history, we'll look at the past through that lens.
And they don't even mention one prime minister, one single prime minister in all the course descriptions in the whole history of the country, because the individual doesn't count.
You see, you can't even talk about a Labour politician anymore because of the idea of identity politics is about the collective.
It's not about the individual.
It's about the movement.
So, look, if you do a history degree in Australia, you'll come out pretty much twisted.
You'll become out more ignorant than when you arrived.
Well, look, if you've been through the Australian school system, it's unlikely that you'll know anything in the first place.
If you do, you'll know less.
I've seen some heights high.
Yes.
Which was presumably a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
I'm surprised he got away with it, actually.
He probably wouldn't now.
I think it's interesting that he's got no ethnic characters anymore.
He hasn't.
Have you seen the new one?
Yes, I have.
He's got the South African.
He's got the white South African.
The who?
Who's tanned.
Yeah, she's tanned.
She's tanned.
No, he hasn't done that.
No.
But I suspect I know where his politics lie.
Yes, I think so, too.
And he gets...
He's caned for it by the left.
The Guardian wrote a piece really slagging him off, saying he's completely lost it.
No, no, he's the only one that's producing anything of any...
Oh, he's good.
He's brilliant.
The way he takes on those characters...
What's his name?
I'm sorry, I've got jet lag.
I keep asking me things and I don't know.
It's terrible, isn't it?
Chris something.
I'll remember by the end of the podcast.
Yeah, well, anyway, we know some of our Titans.
The Australian schools, that's another thing altogether.
We've got this dreadful national curriculum that is just an appalling thing.
Is it like Common Core in the US? Yes, but it's worse because they've got these things called cross-curriculum priorities.
Oh.
Which are in every single subject.
So no matter what the subject, you have to have indigenous and Torres Strait Islander histories, sustainability, and Australia and Australia's engagement with Asia in every subject.
Right.
By the way, apropos of nothing, well, apart from that last thing you said, China has got Australia by the balls, isn't it?
Is what I hear.
That they have the ability now to crash your economy at any time pour encourager les autres.
You are totally in hock to the Chinese.
Well, just as much as the rest of the world, I think.
Yes, but you're an easier target because you're smaller.
Well, there is that, but we've also banned Huayi, or however you pronounce it, Huayi.
Yeah, Huayi.
Huayi.
Which we haven't.
Yes, exactly.
And you overlords are going to have easy access to ours.
Who's got more power?
Who's got more power?
I, for one, welcome our new inset overlords.
Perhaps you should learn Mandarin.
Forget Spanish.
Yeah, but they can...
Cantonese.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, Cantonese is no good, is it, really?
Because it's just Hong Kong.
Yes, all right, Mandarin then.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
I mean, if you're thinking about the most utilitarian language to learn, then...
Do you know what?
I think it would just be too depressing acknowledging that the Chinese are going to take over the world.
That's the thing.
That's why I want to pretend that we still live in a world where a European culture dominates the world.
I think so, yeah.
If you want to wake up and be not depressed in the morning, we'll go with that.
So what were we talking about before I digressed?
Well, we were talking about the national curriculum, which is these ridiculous things.
So the teachers have to, even if it's a math subject, they still have to have either sustainability or this Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stuff in it.
So children in Australia are not learning how to read or write.
The literacy and the numeracy is just plummeting.
They're coming out of school just knowing nothing and barely literate.
But when it comes to doing a dot painting, symbolising...
Well, if it's coming...
Walkabout.
Actually, dot paintings are relatively recent.
They're not even historical.
This is fake history.
It is fake history.
Being invented.
I understand that there's a kind of problem now, the fact that the Aboriginals aren't the first peoples.
This has been something that they really...
This idea has been around for a long time, but this is something that you really cannot say in Australia.
It's so funny!
This is social death for you if you mention this.
But there are some cave paintings in the Kimberleys that are...
Show people who are dressed a little bit differently and look different.
And they look more Indonesian than they do Australian Indigenous.
And again, nobody wants to talk about it.
Nobody wants to talk about the idea that there might have been other people there.
They might not be the first peoples.
They might be the second peoples.
Have you read William Golding's The Inheritors?
No, I haven't.
It's written from the perspective of these Neanderthals on the verge of being wiped out by these more savage people.
Which I think could be quite germane.
Yes, perhaps.
You feel sorry for the poor old Neanderthals.
They're all quite sweet.
Anyway, yes, I'm always fascinated by that.
There was a definite treading on eggshells aspect to Australia.
Even quite robust conservatives.
I mean, I think Andrew Bolt's been in trouble for it.
Yes, Bolt has been in trouble.
He's so brave.
He's so brave.
I love going on his show.
He does Whiskey with a Mate.
Have you seen that?
And you basically just go and have a glass of whiskey with him on a Thursday night on television.
Whiskey with a Mate?
Yes, it's fantastic.
I'm going to do that.
So yes, you have to do that.
When I come to Australia, and by the way, Australia, I am coming.
Yes!
I am coming.
Next year, we've decided.
That's wonderful news.
No, no.
And we'll definitely get you on Whiskey with a Mate.
Whiskey with a Mate, yeah.
Or actually, you know what I'd like to do?
Reefer with a Mate.
I don't think that's going to go to where?
No, well, the Americans do it, don't they?
Now it's illegal.
Anyway, I wanted to...
Western Civilisation is actually your job?
It is.
Tell me your title.
Well, so it's quite funny because we can't think of anything else, but my title is the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Programme.
And often people forget programme, so they just say that I'm the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation.
Which is...
And so, you know, when it collapses, it's going to be my fault, because I'm the director of Western Civilization, apparently.
Yeah, well, don't screw it up then, Bella.
I'm trying not to, but it seems to be...
Sort yourself out.
It's screwing it up all by itself.
I'm doing my best.
Yeah.
Have you read all those books, like...
All those essays and books like Glubpashers and Spengler, The Decline of the West.
Are you familiar with Decline of Civilization Theory?
I'm seeing it.
I'm witnessing as it's happening.
I think I know why it's happening, but I don't know how to stop it.
No.
Other than calling them out constantly, which is what I do.
The university is Bet Noir now in Australia.
I think they've got a poster of me on their walls, which they throw darts at constantly.
I think you probably couldn't get away with this stuff at all, were it not for the fact that you're a woman.
I think that helps, doesn't it?
I mean, you've got at least one minority card to play.
I've got a minority card, that's true.
And also, you could probably play the, you know, you're a bit of a foreigner because you're de Brera.
Yes, that's right.
So, it's funny to read the Twitter comments, actually, because they just don't know where I'm from.
And someone said the other day when I was talking about Australia Day, what does that English numpty know about Australia?
Can I give you a tip, actually, Bella?
Why don't you thicken your Hispanic accent?
I should, shouldn't I? Hello.
Yeah, exactly.
I have no English.
I only speak...
Little words.
You're so much better already.
I'm buying your arguments now.
So, next time you go on the ABC. Oh, look, we're not invited on the ABC. Which is a blessing.
It is a blessing.
I have to say, your ABC is not...
There are different schools of thought on whether you should engage with the enemy or not.
And there's the Paul Joseph Watson school of thought, which says, fuck them, fuck them all.
I am not going to go anywhere near these horrible people because all they're doing is they're to shaw for me.
And then there's the kind of, well, Brendan O'Neill is not afraid.
He's very brave.
A, he's brave, and B, he can play that pretend lefty card.
Yes, he can.
I'm a Marxist.
Yes.
And then they can't quite sort of criticise him as they would normally because he plays this Marxist card, even though we know he's not a Marxist.
He's really not a Marxist.
He's totally one of us.
But we have this Q&A show on Monday night.
I don't know if it's a dreadful panel.
Q&A, appalling.
Absolutely appalling.
That's the one where the dodgy climate alarmist Brian Cox had to go at Malcolm Roberts with a confected graph which he pulled out of his pocket and actually...
Further analysis shows it's just more climate change propaganda.
But how was Malcolm Roberts to know that when he was pulled out second?
But I think I'm with you in terms of, is there any point in going on the ABC? You're just a lamb to the slaughter going on Q&A. Actually, maybe you can answer this question.
Is it just leftists who watch Q&A? Yes.
Unless there's one of us on it and then the numbers, the viewing goes up.
So again, you're not convincing anyone of anything because they're already convinced.
They're already stuck in their leftiness anyway.
And they're not going to suddenly go, actually, he has a point.
So going back to your elections, tell me about the leader of the Liberals at the moment.
Scott Morrison is...
Scomo.
Scomo.
Because Australians love shortening people's names.
Well, do you know how I know that more than anything?
No.
I watch...
What's the series?
Bondi Rescue.
Oh, yes.
And do you know what...
Why are they talking about Scomo and Bondi Rescue?
No, they're not.
But everyone's got a nickname.
And I know the cure for every medical problem.
It's the green whistle.
Have you seen...
You bring out the green whistle and it sorts out...
When a white pointer's taken off your leg...
Get out the green whistle.
Yeah.
And you're fine.
The green whistle?
Yeah.
Have you watched the one where they all get stung by Blue Bottle?
It actually puts you off going in the sea in Bondi Beach.
Bondi Rescue.
Bondi Rescue.
I actually watch it as well.
It's great.
Because it's on at the same time as the news, the ABC News.
And I'd rather watch Bondi Rescue.
Obviously.
There's more truth in it.
That's true.
Yeah.
But ScoMo, how is he...
How do you know ScoMo from Bondi Rescue?
No, no, I don't.
I'm just saying that that's how they shorten people's names in Australia, that everyone's got a nickname and all that.
No.
Sorry, I just wanted to...
I wanted to shoehorn Bondi Rescue into the conversation because it's so important.
I thought it might have been an episode I missed where ScoMo was on the beach.
No.
I'm just going to get...
This calls an on me, just in case it's important.
We'll just put on pause a second.
Oh, now the dog's going.
I was going to...
So I can't remember what we were talking about before, it doesn't really matter, because I wanted to ask you about feminism, because I love it when I've got girls, as I call you, on my show, because...
Some of them, quite a few of them can't help telling me off in a kind of, you know, like you're a really naughty boy.
Isabel Oakshott and even Katie Hopkins did it and a few others.
But I like it when I've got a girl because I can talk to them about feminism, which I think is a...
I think it's a real problem with our culture.
And I was just wondering what your take on it was.
I mean, I imagine you must have seen quite a lot of it, third-wave feminism, in your time looking at universities and things.
Yes, it's, I mean, I think the gender studies department...
Is it an escape dog?
Yes, an escape dog.
Oh my God, hang on.
Okay, as you might have noticed, because these podcasts are largely unedited, apart from the sound and a few other things have changed, but we've let the dog in.
Assume it's skittering around in a stupid way.
Oh my God, it's now jumped up.
It's going to turn off the tape recorder soon.
Yeah, sorry, you were saying about feminism...
So I think feminism, look, it makes me embarrassed to be a woman, for a start.
The third-weight feminists are so destructive, and they're so irrational, and they're so angry, and they're so out of control.
And actually, I went to an awful event with Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Summers in Melbourne about three weeks ago.
It was meant to be a debate.
There were about...
I don't know.
900 people there.
Most of them were third wave feminists.
There were about 10 of us who weren't.
And they were shouting her down.
They were yelling and screaming.
She'd had a much worse time in Sydney the previous night where they'd been throwing things at her on the stage.
This is at Christine Hoff Summers.
This is at Christine Hoff Summers.
She's American and she's a feminist though.
She's a second wave feminist?
I suppose she's a second wave.
Look, she's a feminist.
She's pro-abortion.
She would normally fit the sort of feminist...
Sorry, the dog's distracting.
I'm trying to talk about feminism and the dog's...
Do you know what the problem is?
It's a bloody female dog.
It's a female dog.
She's trying to...
They're trying to assert her stupidness.
Anyway, look, the point is, I walked away from that event.
I couldn't stay for question time because I knew how bad it was going to be.
But I just thought these are the same women who went berserk during the French Revolution.
The trichoteurs.
They're the same ones.
They're the same ones that were the most violent, the most awful, bloodthirsty women.
Yes.
And in the same way, the women, the ululating women on the Afghan planes who chopped the bollocks off of sort of redcoats and stuff them in their mouths.
They're the ones who do the really nasty stuff.
When they go bad, they go really bad.
These are the worst people, I think, in society at the moment.
They are just appalling.
And if there'd been a guillotine there, Christina Hoff Summers would have lost her head.
If there'd been the 18th century...
There's no way she would have survived.
And they're the same people reincarnated.
And I think it's really damaging.
I think they just hate men.
Yes.
It's got nothing to do with...
But this has always been part of the female makeup, isn't it?
It's a kind of love-hate relationship with men.
Is it though?
I don't think so.
I think...
I don't think so.
I think it's a modern day thing.
I think it's being done...
It's being imposed on us.
Identity politics is dividing us.
It's telling us that we're being oppressed by men and that men are the enemy.
There's this idea of toxic masculinity that you're born...
You're bad already.
You don't have a chance if you're born a man.
You're already bad.
I think it's a modern day thing.
I don't think men and women have been enemies historically to the degree that they're making us enemies now.
Well, I think it's a bit like Tom and Jerry.
I mean, how do we know about the relationship between men and women?
We look at the, okay, the taming of the shrew.
But then you go back to the first work of Western literature.
You look at the Iliad.
And there's a sort of, you don't get the feeling there that the women hate the men, do you?
No, I don't, I mean, I don't get the feeling that, I mean, there's already, I just don't get the feeling that there's been this idea, there's never been in history this idea that one sex, and I'm not going to use the word gender because it's wrong anyway, one sex has always been, has been, is inherently bad.
I think this is an invention of the 21st century.
Yes.
It's very different to anything else that we've had in history of Western Civilization where you're born bad because you're born a male.
Yes.
Can you think of anywhere else where that has been propounded in history?
No, I can't.
You're right.
I think we are living in absolutely extraordinary, unprecedented times.
And the same goes, by the way, for being white.
I don't think there's been any time in history where being white has actually been a bad thing that one should feel embarrassed about.
And that actually that it could be punished by death, as we saw with that couple in South Africa, whose car ran out of petrol 20 miles outside Joburg and just got executed by three passing black guys who don't like white people.
And my theory on that, by the way, is that, OK, so there's always been racial tension in South Africa to a greater or lesser degree.
But I think that the people who are making that form of homicide justifiable intellectually are white liberals in the West.
And in South Africa, that seeps into that kind of culture of guilt in South Africa to the point where even white South African lefties probably agree on some level that they've got it coming to them because historically they've been the oppressors.
Well, that's certainly how it's taught in Australia, the whole race thing, is, you know, you must be embarrassed because you're white and you must, you must, you know, the mea culpa, mea culpa, Maxima culpa thing.
And you wonder how, what the logical conclusion of that is then, if it's bad being white and if it's bad being a male, then...
Then how do you proceed from that?
What is the next step?
I've seen in universities this very anti-man movement.
They keep having these, a couple of universities in Victoria, they've had these dreadful workshops where they're telling men to be less like men, so you have to, you know...
Just be more like a woman.
Don't engage in so much banter.
Don't be so masculine.
And they had another workshop recently where they basically said...
That men shouldn't be in the class.
So it's going to be a point where men will be banned.
I think it's going to get to a point, if things continue the way it will, that men are going to be banned from studying certain things.
They won't be allowed to go to university.
It's totally sexist.
Yeah.
That's how I can see...
I can't see any other way it can go unless everything is totally reversed and people see sense.
But...
Yes.
I think that...
That men are responsible for this, partly.
And I don't mean men like me.
Not proper men.
Not manly men.
Lol.
I mean what I would call manginas or mangini.
I'm not sure what the technical mangini.
Probably.
Yes.
Mangini.
Yeah.
People who...
Men who call themselves feminists.
And there was a classic example...
They're the worst.
The classic example of this.
We have a comedian...
Oh, who was it?
A comedian who plays kind of sexist men on TV, his name will come back to me in a moment, who wrote this book, a sort of self-hating book about his male awfulness, in which he kind of presented his bollocks to womankind and said, here are my bollocks, take them away, for I am not worthy to have them.
Or as they say in Spanish, no tiene cojones.
Yeah.
Did they actually say that?
Yeah, no tiene cojones.
He doesn't have cojones.
You see, I wonder whether there are cultures out there which are going to be doing our job for us, I mean, as in Western civilization, and resisting this.
And I would imagine that the culture of your...
Surely the Hispanics aren't going to buy into this stuff so much.
I'd hope so.
But look, I don't know.
It's the Anglosphere that seems to be most hit by all this stuff.
I don't know what's going on in France and Spain and Italy in terms of the gender stuff and the feminism.
Surely not Italy.
You'd hope not.
But I'm sure that it'll be somehow being introduced into the younger people.
I can't see why they'd be let off the hook.
But you're trying to say that culturally there might be some kind of resistance to it.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, in the same way, I'm encouraged by the kind of...
the racism of the Japanese and the Chinese.
They're not buying into all this kind of...
No, they're not.
Not at all.
Multicultory stuff.
No.
And, I mean, that gives me hope.
My eldest boy is in Hong Kong.
And he's just had a baby with his...
With his Hong Kong Chinese wife.
And In the maternity ward or the hospitals, he heard all the nurses referring to it as the foreign baby.
Really?
Yeah.
Still?
Yeah, yeah.
I thought that...
I love them for that.
But there's so many expats in Hong Kong, I'm quite surprised.
Yeah, but it was a public maternity hospital.
But I just thought they were so cool about it.
They didn't make any pretense that, you know, that is the foreign baby.
Even though she looks Chinese.
Yeah.
I thought it was great.
Anyway...
That, by the way, going back to feminism, the third wave variety, where do you see it coming from?
How did it come about?
Well, I can see it coming from the establishment of the gender studies departments in the universities.
So that started when?
So, I mean, they've got crazy Simone de Beauvoir saying that, and Judith Butler saying that gender is a social construct.
So Simone de Beauvoir, I haven't read any of her stuff.
I've only heard a sort of reference in Lloyd Cole songs and stuff.
She was one of the authors of this third wave feminism, I'm sure.
Was she?
I mean, I could be wrong on that, but she introduced this idea that...
That being a woman is a social construct that it's got nothing to do with.
Right.
And presumably when she was doing it, when she was advancing that silly notion, it was kind of chic.
Oh yeah, it would have been completely chic.
Cutting edge.
And also confined within the sort of that...
The problem with this stuff now is that it's being imposed on society.
All the stuff that's going on in universities, all the gender stuff, all the feminist critiques, that is now becoming mainstream.
And that's the thing that I keep writing about and keep arguing every time I see a sign that it is being imposed on us through our taxes.
That's why I keep pointing it out.
That's why we recently had...
A Victorian government department that is introducing a thing called They Day, where every month you have to use the pronouns they.
No.
Yes.
So just run that by me again.
So every month, one day a month, you're compelled to use the pronouns of the they pronoun rather than he or she.
Compelled by whom?
By the department.
It's one of the state departments.
There's the state government departments.
I think it was the Department of Health and Human Services.
But how do they enforce?
Just their employees?
Yes.
And they're calling it they day.
So the question is, so if you don't turn up on that day, you're going to be known to be a non-participant.
Yes.
That stupid dog's tail is actually hitting the microphone.
Anyway, look, we keep...
We need to shoot this dog.
I keep not talking about feminism.
I know you want to talk about feminism, but...
No, no, but this is all fascinating.
It's sort of all related, all the gender stuff.
It's pretty bad.
It's pretty bad in Australia that the gender stuff is terrible.
Last year, they...
A city council was going to ban all books in libraries and kindergartens that were too gender normative.
So they're going to get rid of...
But that's like everything written before about 2010.
They were going to get rid of...
Noddy...
What's the train one again?
Thomas the Tank Engine.
Anything that was too boyish or too girlish they would get rid of because they couldn't have such gender normative books for children.
And this is coming straight out of the universities and then being imposed on the public by the government, by city councils, by state government.
It's just so crazy.
Have you looked into what kind of stuff they study on gender studies courses?
Yeah, I've read a lot of the blurbs.
Oh, tell me, what do they study?
Well, it's like a parody.
I can't even tell.
It's all about gender being a social construct.
It's all about...
I'd have to look one up.
Do they not, to use a lefty word, do they not interrogate their own narrative?
They do.
Well, they don't even...
Do they have any narrative anymore?
I think that's actually probably too academic a way of looking at it.
It's all about...
Too rigorous a way.
Too rigorous a way.
It's too rigorous, using the word interrogate.
It's just accepted as a given.
It's just accepted as a given.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
But it seems to me such a sort of...
Non-subject.
I mean, you might as well study the world from the point of view of the colour red.
Oh, look, it's a total waste of time, but unfortunately, they're all getting jobs in HR departments.
And then writing it into the policies.
Have you...
This is the problem.
You've nailed it now.
Have you read Vox Day's Social Justice Warriors Always Double Down?
I haven't read the whole thing, but I... You know what he says?
He warns that HR departments are where the rot sets in.
Oh yes.
And I see it across the board that it starts in the HR department but it infects the whole company.
So the parasite takes over the host.
Yeah.
And so suddenly your company becomes woke, even though what you wanted to do was to generate value for your customers by creating a product that people want to buy and selling it more efficiently and cheaply and better quality than anyone else is capable of. even though what you wanted to do was to generate And suddenly your goal becomes diversity.
Well, it's called woke capitalism.
This is the new phrase for it, woke capitalism.
I never heard the phrase.
Yes, this is quite recent.
And it's wonderful when it goes wrong.
So Gillette, for example, with this terrible ad that they came up with at the beginning of the year.
I'm sure you saw it.
I did see it.
Their sales have apparently suffered as a result.
Have they, though?
Yes.
They've just brought out a new advert in which a woman...
Calling herself a man.
Oh, no.
Shaves.
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's right.
A father introduces his son, lol, not, i.e.
a daughter, to the joys of shaving.
Now, that would suggest to me that either they're on a suicide mission or that actually the laws of go woke get broke.
Or get woke, go broke, don't actually apply.
Because we saw that with the Nike advert, with the Colin Kaepernick advert, where we all thought on the right, this is going to so fuck Nike, they're never going to recover.
And actually it turned out that the wokeness was appealing to their target audience.
I wonder...
Sorry, I've just suddenly run out of steam.
No, that's right.
By the way, what you're experiencing now is what I get from my brain fog from Lyme disease.
It's just like jet lag.
Yes.
I'm trying to be optimistic and hope that most people would see how bad these ads are.
But perhaps I'm being overly optimistic and most people are woke.
Most of the younger people are woke.
Tell you what we're going to do.
We're going to go and either I'm going to make lunch or I'm going to show you this interesting cultural thing and then your brain can recover and maybe we'll do a bit more after that.
So more in a moment.
So, we've been for our walk, but by the miracle of technology, even though it seems like nothing has happened, we've actually, like, two hours have elapsed.
You were telling me on the walk about the departments you run at the Institute of Public Affairs, the OPA in Australia, which is a, I love it, it's a great Australian think tank.
And you were saying that what you hear time and again from your donors and supporters is this despair at how...
The Australian education system is turning out people who've got no foundational knowledge of anything.
Is that right?
Yeah, so our members are mostly concerned that their grandchildren are just not being taught the basics of how Australia came about as a nation.
They're not being taught how to read, they're not being taught how to write.
They're essentially being turned into, you know, mini social justice warriors.
Yeah.
And that's really evident with this climate change stuff.
So they've been taking to the streets one day a week for the last six months.
Have they?
You've had this problem as well.
Almost, yeah.
And sort of, you know, hijacking the centre of the city, complaining about how they're all going to die in 12 years' time.
Is it 12 years' time, I think?
I don't know.
But do you know what?
They are all going to die.
Yeah.
That is a fact.
Yeah, they are all going to die.
Not necessarily in 12 years' time.
No, no, no.
But the latest one before the election was extremely, they were extremely wound up because they're all terrified.
And there was a kid in a Sesame Street Elmo backpack that said he wanted to kill ScoMo.
Really?
Yep.
How old was the kid?
Oh, 12?
I don't know.
Old enough to know what he was saying.
This is what worries me about the...
This is what's changed, I think, in our lifetime since you and I were at university.
That the stakes have got so much higher and the aggression has got on the left.
I don't think there's been a comparable hardening of the right.
But on the left, they really do think that it's kind of sort of acceptable to put right-wing people up against the wall because, hey, they're killing the planet or they're...
Yeah, and these children, they generally believe this because they're being told by their teachers that we're evil, that ScoMo is evil, that they're deliberately not doing anything about the fact that, you know, the world's going to end in 12 years' time.
So you can sort of understand the children responding this way because they think that we're taking their future away from them.
Yes.
They genuinely believe that we're responsible for their imminent deaths.
So this is how they're responding.
And there was one girl actually who was in tears.
She was putting on a really good show and it was broadcast on all the news items.
Of course it was.
And she was an actress.
She was actually a child actor.
Was she?
Yes.
Right.
She was very convincing.
Well...
What do we do to save Western Civilisation?
For example, what can we do about academe?
Is it over?
Academe as we know it is over.
We have to take academe out of the universities and translate it and put it somewhere else, which is what's going on, which is what's happening in this podcast, for example, which is what's happening in sort of what we're doing at the IPA is starting to run an IPA academy next month.
So we're actually going to be holding a week of lectures and flying in academics from actually around the world as well and taking 20 kids and actually teaching them some decent...
Something.
Something.
Much more than they're learning at school or university.
So it'll be like one of those science fiction movies where the planet has been destroyed and you go and colonise a new world and try and recreate all that was best about the old world.
And that's what you're doing with these 20.
These 20 children will be the only educated people in the entirety of Australia.
That's it.
They are the future.
There's only 20 people.
No, look, I exaggerate.
We've got a lot of young members.
We've got over a thousand members under 25.
Right.
And they are extremely knowledgeable.
And I'm amazed at the conversations I have with them.
They're 20, 21 years old.
I knew nothing when I was 21.
So where do they get the information from?
They get it from the internet.
They get it from podcasts.
From DellingPod.
DellingPod.
All of them.
Everything they know comes from you.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, so look, there is actually hope, but The hope is not in academia.
There's no hope.
It's too entrenched in the humanities I'm talking about anyway.
I feel that I owe Australia a debt because you know that Australia produced the man who formed me intellectually, Peter Conrad, who was a Tasmanian, left Tasmania to come to Oxford to study.
Maybe he was a Rhodes Scholar or something.
Anyway, he got a place at Oxford.
And then became a fellow of all souls at a very young age.
He's absolutely brilliant.
I don't think he's even got a doctorate.
I don't think he ever...
He didn't need one in those days.
He never did a doctorate and yet he was just...
I was so lucky to be taught by him.
So if I can do my bit to thank Australia for...
Who would have thought that an Australian would have formed the mind of an Englishman?
And a Taswegian.
We call them Taswegian as even more amazing.
Exactly.
They're not known for that.
No.
But you think about the Australians who came over to Britain in the 1960s.
Clive James.
Dame Edna.
Dame Edna.
Barry Humphries.
That's right.
Jermaine Greer.
Jermaine Greer.
You had some really bright people.
I know.
And I wonder whether it's even possible to have such people now.
Well, I think, you know, as I was saying to you earlier, if you do want a decent education in the humanities, you do have to leave now.
And I think there's some very bright Australians, but they're...
Who've studied art and history and English literature, but they're not necessarily in Australia.
I think they've had to come to England and stay here.
I think there are a million Australians living in England.
Right.
That's quite a lot.
I mean, that was a few years ago.
It could be different now.
But there's certainly a sense that if you want to get a decent education, you have to go somewhere else.
Yes.
Although I wonder whether they can go in England now.
I mean, I know that the education I had is no longer available at Oxford.
No, but there's still, there's much more variety.
I've had a look at a few sort of university websites just out of interest to the history degrees.
You can still learn something.
You have no idea how bad it is when you look at the courses in England.
I was being kind when I said three quarters of the Australian history subjects are identity politics, because that's just from the course descriptions, but guaranteed that if you actually sat in on the class in a semester, it would be in there somewhere in one of the lectures.
You just have to.
It's the orthodoxy.
This is the sad thing, that you told me about your doctorate, and it wasn't tainted by identity politics the other day.
It was pure history in the way that I would imagine that history should be taught.
And yet, you would never get a job in academe.
Where are the Bella de Barreras?
Nowhere to be found.
They're doing other things, or they're writing books in the background, or they're just not going anywhere near academia.
That is a terrible indictment of our culture.
There ought to be at least one university in Australia, in the same way that America has got Hillsdale College.
Well, we have a small college, Campion College, which is a very valiant sort of liberal arts college.
They do three years of a wonderful education of Latin and Greek and everything that people should know.
Oh, yes.
Fantastic.
Where's it based?
It's in Sydney.
It's in New South Wales.
It's about 45 minutes from Sydney.
And they produce wonderful graduates every year who go out into the world.
And then they end up doing other degrees because they end up doing teaching or something.
So we're actually, they're actually producing really amazing young people.
Have you got to be Catholic to go there?
No.
No.
No, not at all.
And I've been, and I gave a talk about a year ago, and it was just the best atmosphere.
It was the most amazing atmosphere of any institution I've been to, of higher learning.
Just everybody was just so happy to be there.
There was no angry lefties on campus, no women's room with a Y, no safe spaces, no trigger warnings, nothing.
Just pure, pure education.
Yes.
But they're struggling because they don't get any government funding.
It's a struggle for them, and it shouldn't be.
But you see, Hillsdale is richly funded because so many conservatives are keen to...
I know, but the Americans are wonderful with their donations, but we just don't have that in Australia.
It's the same as there's not that sort of philanthropy in England either.
No, there isn't.
It just doesn't exist.
No, we believe too much in the state over here.
Yes, yes.
Which is, of course, the problem with a big state.
It reduces private charity.
Yeah, this is what's going on in Australia.
This is what I was saying to you earlier, the 43 cookie-cutter universities that are just funded by government money and international students.
If a university gets the money regardless of the quality of its education, of course it's going to give a shit.
Teach whatever you want.
They need to actually cease government funding for the humanities.
And then start teaching something decent, and they'll suddenly realise that they have to teach a course on Western civilisation if they want to attract the students.
I've suddenly remembered the thing that I wanted to talk to you about.
About women.
Right.
Is that women with a Y? Well, women.
You were saying something which, of course, I totally agree with.
And one really can't say.
So I think we should say it.
So let's not say it on the podcast.
Really?
No.
Well...
It's a bit controversial, but we can go there.
Yeah, go on.
So tell me what you said.
Can I blame my brother for this one?
This is actually his idea.
No, actually, let's not bring him into this.
It was the fact that in today's society, women generally vote...
What I would say the wrong way.
They generally vote left.
You know who says this?
Who?
Stefan Molyneux.
Does he?
You listen to the Stefan Molyneux podcast.
I can't remember whether we actually mentioned it on the podcast.
I think we did, but he talks about this, exactly this, that women vote for a government which gives them everything.
Which is going to look after them.
But in doing so, they're killing...
This is what's happening, isn't it?
Because men are no longer the breadwinners.
They are losing their sense of purpose.
The suicide rate is rocketing.
Which doesn't sit well with the toxic masculinity narrative at all.
It completely undermines the narrative of this toxic male thing.
It completely undermines the idea of the men being the oppressors.
If they're committing suicide, it's...
It's crazy.
And also, I very much agree with, I think, another Christopher Booker line, that men and women separately, it's not meant to be.
We are meant to be this kind of whole thing.
That's how it should work.
And any cultural trend which splits us asunder is diminishing everything that makes our civilization tick.
Yes.
Well, I mean, the family is the foundation of society.
You, conservative you.
Yes.
You dangerous radical.
Isn't it a crazy idea?
And then once you destroy the family, in destroying the family, it's essentially pitting the husband against the wife or the man against the woman.
Yeah.
And then everything else falls apart after that.
And that's what we're seeing.
And then so in these broken families and all the sort of single mothers, they're voting for the state that will look after them because that male figure isn't looking after them anymore.
There's no...
And your delicious conclusion from this was that some women really shouldn't have the vote.
Oh, gosh.
Well, I think the women who are going to vote for the wrong party shouldn't have the vote.
This is the problem with this.
We aren't seriously going to reverse universal suffrage.
Nevertheless, I do...
Agree with the tenor of your argument that just like girls, they're causing real trouble in the world right now.
They are.
Well, I think on that note, we'll leave it there.
I hope I still have a job.
Thank you.
I hope I still have a job by the time I get back to Australia.
Maybe release this after I've gone back.
Of course you will.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming all the way from the bottom of the world to come and see me.
I'm really touched.
And I will come out, Australians, next year.
Get ready.
Yeah, be there or...
2020.
Or don't be.
Yeah, great.
All right.
Listening to The Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod, and my very special guest, friend, so guest...
Bella Debrera.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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