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Jan. 9, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
56:51
Delingpod 51: James Delingpole
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I love Danny Cole.
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I love Danny Cole.
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's guest, but I have to say I'm not this week.
I think he's probably the worst guest we've ever had.
That's because the guest this week is me.
No, I was only teasing.
Of course I'm a good guest.
I'm just a bit worried that without the discipline of, say, having Dick here with his carefully annotated filofax, I might have a tendency to wander off piste, as is my word.
So I'll try and be disciplined.
The first thing I want to say is, special friend, thank you for being my only special friend.
And you know you are my only special friend.
There is only one of you.
Admittedly, there are various avatars of the special friend.
Some of the avatars are male.
Some of them are female.
Some of them are quite possibly transgender.
I do not judge.
So thank you, special friend, for your loyalty, your ongoing loyalty to this podcast, which is now, I think we've done about 150 maybe episodes, so we've been together for a long time.
Some of you have been here, sorry, some avatars of you have been here right from the beginning.
And I also wanted to say thank you to those avatars of you.
Who've already got your special friend badges.
It's really appreciated because I have to say, it's a bit of a...
Is loss leader the right word?
I think if I had a business advisor, my business advisor would be saying to me, ditch the podcast.
It ain't worth it, mate.
I don't know why he's a sort of gangster figure, but he is...
It ain't worth it, James.
James, it ain't worth it.
You don't...
You give up that podcast right now because the time you spend on that podcast, you're not recouping the dosh, mate.
You're not.
You're not.
Do something else.
Go and...
You probably earn more money on the meat rack, frankly.
I mean, I know you're old, but you're probably...
Tossing off old men, you probably earn more than you do from the podcast.
In fact, you definitely would because...
Anyway, so thank you, special friend.
For buying your special friend badge and at least cushioning me from the massive losses that I incur.
I would also like to say thank you before we go on to some of the people who are involved with the making of this pod who never get thanked because they're like the silent backroom boys.
One of them is literally a backroom, well a backwoods actually boy and that is Richard.
Richard lives in Canada, in the backwoods, and he has a beard.
We've never met, but I imagine Richard wears a lumberjack shirt.
I imagine he has a very large axe.
I kind of imagine also that if you try and approach his log cabin in the backwoods of Canada, there were probably tripwires.
And probably there are holes in the ground with punji stakes in them and probably there are other tripwires which set off Like Automatic Machine Gun, a bit like the final scene, spoiler alert here, if you haven't seen Breaking Bad, don't listen to this bit.
Okay, like in the final scene of Breaking Bad, where he escapes out of the scenario with his machine gun.
Anyway, that is what I imagine Richard is like.
But he's really good.
Richard is in charge of the Dellingpole World website.
He keeps everything together because I am absolutely bloody...
I'm letting you into a secret here.
You probably aren't aware of this at all.
Never knew this.
I am really crap at tech.
I'm also really disorganised.
In fact, I'm going to discuss that in a moment with reference to something, an email that a special friend sent me.
I would also like to thank Jason.
I'm not going to give you his surname, just in case Jason wants to keep it secret.
The problem is that associating with Dellingpole is a bit like being Hitler's best friend, or at least it is like being Hitler's best friend if you are on the left.
Obviously, I think I'm a very nice, reasonable person.
I'm somewhere between a classical liberal and a libertarian and a South Park conservative.
But in the last 10 years, for the first time in my life, I've been branded far-right, alt-right, a Nazi.
People say all sorts.
This is how our culture has changed.
That the left now, it's not enough that you are the right-wing opposition.
You are now literally Hitler.
So I'm not going to mention Jason's surname just in case.
But thank you, Jason, my sound man.
Thank you also to my nephew, Oliver.
Oliver cannot disguise the fact that he's a Dellingpole, so I'm going to admit to you that he is called Oliver Dellingpole.
Oliver takes care of the dispatching of the special friend badges to their destinations.
If your special friend badge, if you've ordered it and it hasn't arrived yet, that is not Oliver's fault, that is my fault.
And the reason for that is that I am the weakest link in the chain.
Which is to say that I have to look at your emails and remember to pass them on to Oliver who then sends them efficiently.
So don't blame Oliver, blame me.
Now, I know that some of you special friend avatars understand the problems that I have because I wanted to share with you an email that I had from one of my special friends sent, sorry, one of the avatars sent, if I forget, I'm going to forget, you know, just remember there's only one special friend.
It was sent to me and...
I found it a moment ago.
Hang on, I know how to look for it.
Yes, here we are.
So this special friend wrote to me and he said, I'm still waiting for my badges.
He ordered two, by the way, because he knows that they are made of pure gold and Anglo-Saxon-style red enamel work.
And they're in the shape of, obviously designed by Dick, in the shape of a red pill badge.
So everyone wants them.
Some special friend avatars are taking their time in applying, paying the money, basically, to get one of these things.
Anyway...
This special friend called Ben, who paid for two badges, which I think is really good.
Ben's obviously a very good person.
Then he's a lawyer, so I suppose he's probably got more money than some of us.
Ben said, I'm still waiting for them.
Don't stress, though.
I trust you'll send them soon.
And then he puts, and this is really interesting, he says, have you ever done a Myers-Briggs personality test before?
You seem like a typical ENTP. Well, obviously I haven't done a Myers-Briggs personality test, so I went and asked, boy, Boy is obviously my son.
He's also known to some of you as Loser Failure Boy or Failure Loser Boy because he didn't get all A-stars in his A-levels.
He only got, I think, one and two A's or something.
Anyway...
He said, yeah, I'm an ENTP. I went to ask Boy, I said, do you know about Myers-Briggs?
He said, yeah, you're an ENTP. I said, what?
How do you know?
He said, you just are.
I'm one too.
I just asked Ben how he knew I was an ENTP. And he said, hilarious.
I could have been wrong, but I guessed you were an E because of the way you always think out loud on the podcast.
I I haven't looked at what these letters stand for.
I'm so disorganized.
Sorry about that.
The N basically represents your intuitive creative abilities.
The part in you that comes up with the ideas.
You are definitely a T because you don't have patience for airy fairy nonsense.
The complete opposite of Ian Dale.
We like Ian Dale, by the way, very much.
I think his podcast was really good, but I don't think there's any question that Ian is a bit of a fluffy...
Well, he's a squish.
He is, frankly, a squish.
I know he's a conservative, but he's kind of not a sort of red-meat-dellingpole conservative, is he?
Anyway, as Ben goes on to say, that's not to say you don't have feelings.
Thanks for noticing that, Ben.
You just realise that some things are more important.
And that's true, actually.
I do care.
I do care about lots of things, but I recognise that there are greater goals in the world.
The P is the part of you that finds it difficult to follow through.
This is Ben, by the way.
The P is the part of you that finds it difficult to follow through on all your ideas.
With respect, it may explain why you are hopeless at monetising the podcast.
And Ben, you are absolutely right.
I am absolutely sodding useless at monetising the podcast.
And one of my New Year's resolutions, by eerie coincidence, I've made a list of New Year's resolutions just for this podcast, Not that I have any intention of keeping them.
It's more to keep me on track vaguely so I don't ramble around too much.
It's the sort of thing Dick would have done had he been around producing this show.
Um...
So, yes, one of my resolutions is monetize the podcast.
Well, actually, what I wrote was get better at monetizing shit.
Now, that is another of my resolutions broken, by the way, which was trying to swear less.
It's not because I don't enjoy swearing.
I enjoy swearing very much.
In fact, I think I'm much more fluent when I swear.
The problem is that, as certain avatars of special friends have said to me, I like listening to you with my kids in the car.
And I really like red-pilling de youth.
And I also enjoy...
Other special friends have written to me saying, I... I tried listening to one of your podcasts in the car with my daughter, and she's at university, and she is a Corbyn voter, and she said, who is this effing blinding evil fascist bastard?
That's me, by the way.
So, how is that relevant to my...
Yes, I must try to swear less on the podcast because I know that there are younger listeners and it's really important that my wisdom and my political insight gets through to their brains as their frontal lobes begin to form.
And if I can create lots of kind of mini-delling polls, at least in terms of politics, then that's got to be good for the world, hasn't it?
It'll be like part of my...
My life mission, which is really to save the world.
I mean, I think that's what I'm doing.
I think that's what my career...
I could have made money.
I could have gone for the fame thing.
I could have gone for the...
I could have been Prime Minister, like two of my mates have become, or my ex-university mates, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
But instead, I chose to save the world, which I think is kind of more important.
I'm just going to have a sip, by the way.
Just while I collect my thoughts.
Well, I'm not recollecting my thoughts.
I'm just having a sip.
Of my cup of Twist tea.
And today, because Twist, as you know, one of our most generous sponsors, at least when it comes to giving us free tea, um...
I am drinking their Refresher Green tea, which is, this light and refreshing green tea contains ginkgo biloba, gotu kola and Siberian ginseng, said to create a natural lift.
Above all, it tastes great.
Well, I agree.
It tastes great.
Let's have a sip of that.
Now, Another of my New Year resolutions, and I'm going to talk about the big, because I know some of you avatars and special friends just like the pure politics.
Some of you quite like the dick stuff, which is more kind of a bit like this.
But I am going to give you some politics later on, some proper politics.
I'm going to talk about The Great Endeavour.
Which isn't that what Eisenhower said before D-Day?
Everyone got a bit of paper saying, you know, you have been signed up for the Great Endeavour.
So I'll tell you about my Great Endeavour in 2020, in the 2020s indeed, in a moment.
But first of all, I'm just going to do a bit more kind of verbal shitposting.
Another of my resolutions is to be more like King Morax.
Now...
It's quite a niche reference, I admit, but over Christmas one of my treats was that A friend of mine, a celebrity friend no less.
Even though I didn't become a hedge fund manager, even though I haven't made as much money as I kind of...
You know how when you're 18 or 17 you imagine you're going to be very, very rich and why not?
Because obviously the world owes you a living and you sort of think everything's going to pan out.
And it didn't quite pan out.
I didn't become very, very rich.
But...
I've had a career where I've got to meet some amazing people, to call them my friends.
The kind of people that, if I hadn't become a journalist, if I'd just got a, well, I don't know, something different, I wouldn't necessarily have met these people and had the privilege of getting to know them.
And one of these people is Mark Miller, who is the brilliant comic book writer who gave us Kingsman, who gave us Kick-Ass, among other things.
And Mark Miller, he's so clever.
He's just endlessly inventive.
He's like a kind of child trapped in a grown-up's body.
No one told him that you're not allowed to imagine all this stuff.
So he went on imagining it and he's become this multimillionaire, one-man film industry, comic book industry.
So for my Christmas treat, he sent to me and the wife, because she loves it too, a pile of his comic books.
And they're all great.
And one of them is called Empress.
And the baddie in Empress is called King Morax.
And what I love about King Morax, who is now my role model, is that he is completely, utterly ruthless and merciless, as villains are meant to be.
And I just kind of think how much easier my life would be, particularly on Twitter, where I spend far, far too much time, If I started ruthlessly executing for the slightest, tiniest offences, people who displease me.
And I've already started putting this into practice.
Even I have to say, this is quite naughty of me, even people who might possibly have been avatars of special friends.
I've just been...
Ruthlessly, cruelly, wantonly blocking them on Twitter just for, I don't know, phrasing things in a slightly annoying way.
And I know that this is quite peevish of me and possibly a bit spoiled.
But at the same time, as Dick would tell you if he were here, and I kind of wish he were...
As Dick would tell you, I was completely ruined by reading English at Oxford.
Or maybe I was ruined anyway.
Maybe it's got nothing to do with my education.
Maybe it's just the kind of bastard I am.
But I do think that studying English at university refined that problem I have, which is that I care over much about nuance and tone.
And when...
Oh, hello.
I'm being interrupted.
I'm doing my podcast with me.
Yeah, I mean, is it weird?
It is weird, isn't it?
What?
Doing my podcast with myself.
But at the same time, you're somewhere on the spectrum and it's kind of normal behaviour but...
Do you think I am on the spectrum?
Is that part of my Myers-Briggs thing?
Isn't Myers-Briggs?
It's meant to be like horoscopes for people who think I'm slightly smarter than horoscopes.
Well, I still can't work out whether that ENTP thing was a good or a bad thing.
No, but do you think I'm on the spectrum or not?
I really am somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, but am I... You have a degree in Asperger's.
Do I? Yeah.
Okay.
The cat's just walking in the room and the dog is looking at the cat and there's a way in the direction.
Okay.
So anyway, that's Boy telling me that he thinks I might be on the spectrum probably a bit Asperger's-ish.
Which is cool.
I'm cool with that.
Obviously I'm cool with that because I've got it.
But I can't remember what I was talking about.
Oh no.
What was I talking about?
Oh yeah, about how I'm King Morax.
So, yeah, and about my refined sensibility to do with tone and stuff.
Now, I just want to give you a few hints to those of you who want to spar with me on Twitter.
Or rather, I don't want you to exactly suck up to me in a nauseating, cloying, needy way, because that really puts me off.
You know, it's a bit like...
It's a bit like when you really fancy a girl or boy, I suppose.
But nothing is more off-putting to that girl, is it, than when you show how much you fancy her.
I mean, they bloody hate it.
They do, I think, from what I can remember from my courting days.
And in the same way, I don't want to know...
Sorry if I'm sounding like King Morax here, but I may as well tell you like it is.
I don't like it when you kind of suck up to me horribly.
But equally, I don't like that thing.
And lots of famous and semi-famous people have experienced this.
It's that when...
Look, I mean, I'm as bad as anyone here.
When you meet a famous person, I'm not saying I'm famous, I'm saying I'm semi, semi, semi, minor, minor, minor famous.
But when you meet a famous person for the sake of argument...
It's quite common, I find, quite a common reaction is to overdo the I'm not impressed and I'm just the same as you, if not slightly better routine.
And I can tell you, it's just common.
It's kind of annoying, but it's as annoying as when somebody really recognises you and overdoes the, oh, I'm such a fan, it's amazing.
It's quite hard to get right, but some of my Twitter, some of my avatars, my special friend avatars, do manage it very well.
And it's basically all I'm after is...
You understand that we're coming from the same place.
We may not be in exactly the same foxhole, but we're in neighbouring foxholes and we're fighting the enemy and we have the common enemy and we're in it for fun, we're in it for the shits and giggles and we find the left priggish, censorious, Stupid.
We don't hate them exactly.
We just like taking the piss out of the left.
Because we're not haters, we on the right.
We on the conservative side of the argument.
We don't hate the left.
We just kind of...
We despise them.
We just think we like holding them up to ridicule.
I think that's the best way.
Which brings me on to another of my resolutions, which is actually completely contradicts my Be More Like King Morax one, which is...
Be snarky and funny, but not rude or unpleasant.
You never know who your fans are.
And the reason I mention this is because only the other day I had this experience which brought me up sharp.
And I wonder if I can, I wonder if I can find it without spending too long.
Because I've got my screen in front of me and I'm going to try and look up the Twitter.
I should have done this beforehand.
If I'd been Dick, I would have prepared this beforehand.
Um, I'm going to try and look it up without, um, uh, wasting too much of your time.
So what, I'll give you a bit of background.
So I was writing stuff and tweeting about the Australian bushfires, which is a contentious subject I'm going to go into.
Well, it's not really contentious.
It's bloody obvious what the causes of the Australian bushfires are.
Number one, arsonists.
Um, The Australian police in various states have arrested over 180 arsonists in the last three months.
So I think that gives a pretty good clue as to what started all these fires.
But what's made the fires much, much worse is, of course, the failure of the Australian authorities.
Either to clear or to give permission to be cleared.
All the undergrowth, all the brush, all the scrub, which back in the day used to be burned off.
And if you don't burn off this flammable material, I mean Australia is just the tinderbox, particularly with the eucalyptus trees, which are particularly flammable.
What you're going to get every bushfire season is just out-of-control bushfires, which is pretty much what's been happening.
So anyway, I've had mostly Messages of support from people agreeing with me.
But, also, I've had people being annoying.
Green is saying that I am...
Actually, one person compared me to a Nazi, sort of, involved with the death trains to Auschwitz, something like that.
That was a typical, sort of, understated, greeny response.
So, One of the emails I got was from this girl, a journalist in Australia.
And you can tell I'm stalling for time here.
I'm still trying to go through my wretched Twitter feed.
Why am I so disorganised?
And I will try and...
Oh God, some of my tweets are really weird.
Let's have a look.
I'm not even going to pretend to be talking now.
I'm just going to leave a pause and hope that Jason can edit this gap out.
Subtle edit.
Do you know what?
I just kept you waiting.
Well, I would have kept you waiting had I not had this bit edited out for about five minutes.
And I was looking for the tweet, but I'll try and do it from memory, which is worrying because I've got a very bad short-term memory for a number of reasons.
But basically, I had an email from a...
No, I'm still going to look for it, actually.
I'm going to try and find it, because it's just annoying me now.
Aha.
I found it.
I finally found it.
It took bloody, bloody ages.
Okay.
So I got this, I got this tweet from somebody called Huena, W-H-E-N-A Owen.
And it said, James, this is my Australian accent by the way, it said, James, come down to Australia and talk to the ex-climate change sceptics whose lives have burned to the ground.
In other words, if you've had your house burnt down, then you get suddenly convinced that climate change is real, that it was climate change that was responsible for the fires.
And obviously I dispute this popular meme very strongly.
And I looked at Weena Owen and I saw that she was a journalist.
And I thought, gosh, now I'm really going to come down hard.
You know, she's one of the new generation of activist journalists.
And she's trying to imply that if I were to come to Australia and talk to somebody whose house had been burnt down, I too would be persuaded that climate change was real.
And I was going to, I had to hold myself back because my tendency is to, I think I may have mentioned this before, I'm a bit like the Israelis.
Well, I mean like King Morax.
I do believe in massive retaliation.
If you, for the slightest infraction, if you piss me off, I destroy you.
That's just the rule.
Poor old Wiener Owen.
You'll like her in a moment, as I'm going to explain.
So I said that I was thinking about how best to crush her utterly, just to make her life just not worth living, because that's the kind of bastard that I am sometimes.
I get quite stroppy.
And luckily I just managed to hold myself back and I just did the quote thing where I retweeted her tweet with my quote on top saying, having your house burned down renders you better capable of rationally assessing the validity of anthropogenic global warming theory.
In other words, I was just mocking her argument without attacking the person, which of course is what one should do if one was responsible.
And...
Weena...
came back at me.
But she didn't go...
I bloody hate you.
You're evil.
She said...
Again, I can't find the actual tweet.
Why is Twitter so annoying about the way it...
Oh, she's from New Zealand.
So I don't know whether my Australian accent works on her very well.
Maybe I should have gone for the...
I should have said yes.
Yes.
Isn't that how New Zealand speak?
Anyway, what she said in this next tweet, she said...
I'm just thrilled JD knows I exist now down here in the Antipodes.
Love listening to the Dellingpod.
Not so hot on some of his climate theories, but lovely interview style, and not afraid of awkward moments with his guests.
Can you imagine how awful I would have felt?
Well, I probably wouldn't have known, but she'd never have come back.
She'd never revealed herself.
Weiner would just have cancelled.
She'd never have listened to The Darling Pod again.
So I think this is a lesson to us all in 2020, and 2020s generally, and beyond into the 2030s, that when people annoy us, I don't want to sound sententious here.
I don't want it to sound like somebody who works for the BBC. But when somebody like Weena annoys us with a tweet, we should resist the urge to destroy her and eradicate her from the earth.
We must just lightly tap her with a, you know, a sort of, like a...
A wrap on the knuckles with a ruler, if you're allowed to do that still.
I don't know whether you are.
Probably not.
It's probably been banned.
And lo!
You discover that the wieners of this world actually do like you, and you have more in common than you don't have in common.
So, wiener...
Thank you for being a special friend, an avatar of a special friend.
Thank you for listening to the podcast.
And I hope you're excited about being given a special mention if you are actually listening to this.
But I love all my special friend avatars.
And that includes you, Wina.
Not that I'm coming on to you or anything.
I know you're young and female, but I'm not.
This is the problem.
I just get carried away.
I think Boyd was right just there.
I may be on the spectrum or I may have some kind of mental problem.
Now, what else was I going to talk about?
I'm just checking out my list here.
Yes, be snarky and funny but not rude.
You never know who your fans are.
That was the New Year's resolution there.
Another of my resolutions is travel more.
I think this goes without saying.
I still...
I meant what I said about I think Dick and James should go to Israel, and we should hang out with the IDF, and we should meet Doron and the team from Fowder, and we should learn how to do the martial art that Dick wittily called Jiu-Jitsu, as in J-E-W, which I can't pronounce.
It's either Krav Maga or Krav Maga or something like that.
And, oh yeah, here's another one.
Before I move on to my serious political thing, another of my resolutions, and this shows, I think, actually, that I am underneath all my King Morax evil.
I am actually quite nice and sensitive, really.
The resolution is...
Visit old people.
Now, many of you will be familiar with, sorry, you, the only one listener.
You will be familiar, I'm sure, with my favourite Johnny Cash song, which is, of course, Hurt.
Which was written by the guy from Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, but Johnny Cash's cover was matchless.
And there's a line in it that goes, Everyone I know goes away in the end.
As you get older you realise just how true this is.
I mean Johnny Cash was I think on his way out when he sang that song so he would have felt it especially keenly.
But I have reached the age where people you took for granted suddenly disappear from your lives because they've died.
And last year I lost my very good friend.
Christopher Booker and I felt so lucky to to get to know Christopher in fact I really had wanted to do a podcast with him before he died and we talked about it but it was never the right moment because when Christopher knew that he was dying of cancer he decided right I'm going to get all my projects finished.
He had his autobiography to finish, which of course he never did finish.
He had a book that he was writing about groupthink, which he wanted to finish, which of course he never did.
And he had so much on his plate that he never had time for me to come down to Somerset and spend a couple of hours with him doing a podcast or even a vidcast.
Which was a shame, because I think it would have been wonderful for all of us to have the Booker's wisdom on a podcast.
And there's a lesson there.
I think I should have been more forceful.
I think I should have just got in the car and driven down to Lytton, the lovely Somerset village where Booker lived, and just said, right, Booker, here I am.
We're going to do a podcast before the cancer...
It makes you too much in pain and too weakened to do this.
And we're going to do a podcast, and there it is.
But I didn't do that, probably because of the Myers-Briggs type I am.
I'm not very good at translating ideas into action.
But Booker is a reminder of that...
Some of the most interesting people who make really, really good podcast guests are the people who aren't on Twitter, who get overlooked by our contemporary culture because they're old and slightly out of the loop.
And I'm thinking of people like probably my favourite author.
Who is a chap now in his 80s, I think he's 86, called Derek Robinson.
And Derek Robinson, special friend, give me a good hard kick if in the next six months I do not get Derek Robinson on the podcast.
He writes the most...
He's written these quartets set in World War I, in World War II, and he's written another quartet set in the Cold War, and they are mainly about flyers.
So the World War I quartet is obviously about flyers.
Raw Flying Corps Flyers.
The World War II one is all about the RAF and he does bombers and he does fighters.
They're fantastic.
Fantastically realistic books.
Incredibly...
They're black as your hat, these books.
They are...
It's a bit like Game of Thrones.
Everyone dies, pretty much.
Everyone dies.
And that's not a plot spoiler, but it's just the way it is.
He's a brilliant writer, and I want to get him on the podcast.
Another person I want to get on the podcast is the author of the Flambards book, Kathleen Payton.
I hope she's still alive.
I mean, she...
I got to know Kathleen because her husband...
I did this brief series for The Spectator of interviews of World War II veterans.
And Mike Payton, her husband, had a particularly interesting war.
But I loved Kathleen too because she wrote...
Flambards, which was a book, children's books about, or adolescents book about horses.
But Kath is quite a character.
And I am, I'm just Googling her now, just making sure she's still alive.
Yes.
Born 2nd of August 1929.
Oh, please be alive, Kathleen, because I would love to come and see you and talk to you about the world that we've lost.
Kathleen wrote to me about two years ago.
And I'm so inefficient about replying to people that I don't think I ever did reply.
And Kathleen wrote to me.
She'd heard that I'd been forced to give up fox hunting by my family after my bad accident.
And she wrote to me urging me to take up hunting again because she said, if you love something, you've got to do it.
And I just thought this is a fantastic piece of advice from a woman in her 90s who's had a rich, interesting life.
And I'd like to say hello to her again and hear about her life and say thank you to her and how much I was that Mike has died.
Mike was a fantastic character too.
So anyway, cut a long story short, one of my resolutions is to try and Not let people disappear out of my life like Christopher Booker, but at least have a chance to say goodbye to them before they go and to partake of their wisdom before they go.
So I said I was going to talk about politics and I think this is important.
What do I think are the most important battles to come in this decade?
I'd say that That we won a major battle at the end of the teens, or whatever we're going to call them, the tens or the teens, the decade we've just lost, by finally getting Brexit, or at least I think it's likely we're going to get Brexit.
But I think that the ideological divide that splits the people who voted Brexit from the people who were bitter Ramoners who voted to remain, I think the ideological divide is not going to go away.
Because I've often said in my articles, I don't think...
Brexit was only approximately about the European Union.
What it really was about is much bigger things.
I mean, in a way, it's about sort of Anglo-Saxons versus Normans.
It's about liberty versus tyranny.
It's about whether you're the kind of person who believes the government knows best or whether you're the kind of person who believes in independence.
Whether you trust the man or whether you think the man is the enemy.
Whether you believe in self-reliance or whether you believe in kind of a nanny state looking after your needs.
These issues aren't going to go away.
And I think that they are going to mutate into the...
They're going to manifest themselves mainly over things like climate change.
I've been fighting the climate wars for over a decade now, and I really genuinely thought at the time of Climategate, which was 10 years ago, it's all over.
We've basically won this one because it's quite clear that the The scientific establishment has been corrupted, whether through noble cause corruption or through money or just kind of second-rate intellects or whatever, that now that their dodgy science has been exposed, it's going to be impossible to maintain the pretense that man-made global warming is anything other than an illusory problem.
And the caravan's going to move on to some other issue.
This hasn't happened.
Instead, what's happened with the Green Movement is that it has doubled down.
So we've got we've got extremists like Extinction Rebellion.
We've got kind of Joan of Arc figures like like Greta Thunberg and the world people, even people that oughtn't to have been People who are taken in by this are being taken in, even people on the conservative side of the argument.
At the time of Brexit, I was mildly gobsmacked, to say the least, to discover just how many Conservative voters, and Conservative MPs even, were subscribing to the belief that Britain was better off under an anti-democratic superstate,
socialistic superstate, which made up The majority of our laws, which was essentially socialistic in its outlook.
I thought, how can you be a Conservative MP and believe in such an institution?
How can you be campaigning for us to remain in this body?
That puzzled me.
But I'm equally puzzled by the number of Conservatives who have bought into the green narrative.
You know, naming no names, but I'm a bit shocked that Michael Gove, who's a very good friend of mine, I love him very much, and I respect him greatly, but I don't respect his position on climate change.
And I want to give you just two examples of this before I go.
I think I've probably delighted you enough.
I hope I haven't bored you rigid.
But it concerns the Australian bushfires, which are the green cause at the moment.
The caravan keeps moving on from topic to topic.
So in the middle of last year, the The cause du jour was the Amazon rainforest, which was being burned down, of course, by evil right-wing bastard Bolsonaro, at least if you believe the Green Movement.
In fact, these fires were entirely normal.
And in the same way, the Australian bushfires have been ramped up from a seasonal event into yet another harbinger of global climate doom.
By the very powerful green propaganda machine.
Now, Paul Homewood is one of the best, most informed writers on environmentalism.
I recommend you check out his website if you haven't already.
It's called Not A Lot Of People Know That.
Paul has been looking at the at the rule.
data and the climate records in australia and and has found that there is okay this year's the recent drought in australia has been has been pretty extreme um but that there is no trend which suggests that droughts in australia are getting worse and that In other words, this is a weather event, not a climatic event.
It's not something that has happened over a period of years.
Sometimes you get dry years, sometimes you get wet years, sometimes you get hot years, sometimes you get cooler years.
We are in an unusually hot, dry period, but it is not hideously anomalous to the point where we can trace this to, Anthropogenic global warming.
It's nothing like that.
But the Green Movement is determined to blame it on climate change.
And so you had recently, you had this spectacle of Russell Crowe declaring, through a spokesman, through Jennifer Aniston from Friends, declaring that this was definitely a climate change event.
And you also had Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, Cate Blanchett also Claiming that this was definitely global warming, nothing else.
In fact, the real cause of the Australian bushfires is twofold.
First of all, arsonists.
The Australian police at the time of recording this podcast have arrested over 180 arsonists.
That's quite a few arsonists, I think you'll agree.
And the second thing is the sort of green...
Attitude towards nature.
They have this idea that nature should be kept, the natural landscape should be kept in a kind of Thoreau-esque, pristine wilderness state, and that man should not touch it in any way because that just makes it worse.
Well, actually...
Outside the most remote parts of the planet, landscapes are all man-made.
I mean, the trees are harvested and cleared.
And actually, if you don't clear, particularly the underbrush, And you don't clear fire bricks in woods, particularly where you've got flammable eucalypts like you have in Australia, then what you end up is out of control infernos.
And the green movement had far too much influence on Australian government policy.
And there are far too many rules and regulations preventing landowners from clearing the trees from their property.
And You'd expect this from the left and you'd expect this from the greenie, but even Conservatives, even in Australia where you'd think they might be more robust, Conservatives have not been very good at resisting this green finger-wagging.
Not even John Howard, who was one of Australia's best recent Conservative Prime Ministers, or Liberal Prime Ministers as they call them over there.
John Howard, I believe it was, who in the aftermath of the Kyoto Agreement, It was responsible for declaring Australia's trees a carbon sink, imagining, I think, that by not cutting down trees, this would enable Australia to fulfil its carbon reduction obligations under Kyoto.
So anyway, there are various strict laws in Australia preventing landowners from clearing trees as firebreaks.
And we are seeing the terrible consequences of this disastrous policy in the form of houses being burned down, of people losing their lives.
I mean, 24 at the time of broadcasting.
I'm sure it won't be the last people who die.
Don't forget, though, in 2009, I think over 200 people were killed in the fires.
So this is a recurring problem in Australia, and I think Australians have every right to be angry about what's happening the way that an avoidable problem, which could easily be solved by clearing firebreaks and clearing away scrub, is not being addressed because the powerful green movement in Australia is in denial about the nature of the problem.
They're blaming it on climate change, and it's nothing to do with climate change.
It is to do with bad climate change.
Land management practices.
Now, this ought to be obvious to anyone who's looked into the subject, particularly those of a conservative disposition, who ought to stick to facts rather than emotions.
It's generally what separates us from the lefties, that we don't talk about my feelings.
We just go about what...
We do the right thing.
We ascertain the facts and then act accordingly.
But what really, really irritated me was...
A couple of articles.
One of them was in one of my favourite newspapers, which is normally very, very sound, The Mail on Sunday.
The Mail on Sunday ran a piece by Tobias Elwood, who was a former Conservative government minister, And he said, hang on, let me just find you this, this what he said
yeah he wrote a piece saying *bzz* *snap* Hello.
I'm just doing the podcast and then I'll be...
I won't be long.
No, but...
Are you going to the gym?
Yeah.
I'm going in about...
I'll probably go about eight.
So you're going to put the...
Yeah, how long does it need?
I'm going to use like half an hour.
Okay.
Does it need actually half an hour or longer?
Have you checked the timing?
Sorry?
Have you actually checked...
What does the recipe say?
Does it say half an hour?
I think so.
Okay, fine.
You need to run and take out the album before you put it in the other way.
Oh yes, I'll do that.
Okay.
I'll chat, okay.
That's my supper, by the way.
I don't know whether we're going to leave this in or...
I mean, it adds a bit of kind of background, doesn't it?
It just makes me...
It makes me human.
It makes me stop seeing so evil that I actually am...
Even though I am King Morax and a Nazi and literally Hitler, I also have...
Children who cook lasagna for me and we eat like any normal human being.
So what Tobias Elwood said in the Mail on Sunday is the piece linked Australia's tragic inferno, as it was called in the headline, to the wanton use of fossil fuels.
It's pretty disappointing I would say from a Conservative minister to claim that Australia, as we know, is an island built on fossil fuel, basically.
It's got coal, it's got oil, it's got gas, it's got everything.
It's got an abundance of natural resources, which, quite rightly, it's exporting to India, to China.
It's got a fantastic iron ore industry with my friend Gina, Gina Reinhardt.
And I think good for Australia.
I don't see why Australia shouldn't enjoy the benefits of its prosperity.
And here is Tobias Elwood implying in this article that Australia should no longer be exporting these fossil fuels to India and China because they are supposedly causing global warming, which they're just not.
They're really not.
So that's one.
There's another article written by Daniel Johnson.
I admire Daniel Johnson.
I think he's generally a very good writer.
He used to be, I think, editor of the excellent Conservative Journal Standpoint.
His dad is Paul Johnson.
I can't remember whether Paul's dead or not, but Paul's spectator writer.
In fact, I think I inherited Paul Johnson's slot in The Spectator.
Anyway, Daniel is definitely a conservative.
He's probably more of a neocon than I am, but he's definitely a conservative.
And Daniel wrote this piece in this new website he edits, and the article said, Australians must listen to the voice of conscience that speaks from their burning bush.
And again, he urged Australia to give up its coal export market in the interests of humanity.
So Daniel Tu, et tu, et tu, Daniel I wanted to go.
Daniel Tu had bought into this idea that Australia's fossil fuel industry was partly responsible for the bushfires now affecting significant parts of Australia.
Well, it's just not true.
I mean, Tobias, Daniel, you're Conservatives, you really ought to be better than this.
And they're not the only ones.
I just mentioned them because I happen to have written about them in an article for the Australian Spectator, so their names were to hand.
But there are lots of other people like this.
I think it's going to...
One of our greatest challenges, I think, in 2020 is going to be resisting the advance on the...
The green narrative is taking over the whole of our culture, and it is a false narrative.
It is a mendacious narrative.
And I'm starting to feel like that final scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where everyone has turned into one of the alien creatures.
And you remember the famous scene where Donald Sutherland goes...
He goes...
Because he too is a body snatcher.
And I look at my conservatives...
One by one are being suborned by the green lunacy.
And I fear for the future.
I'm going to be addressing this again because, damn it, somebody's got to fight back against this nonsense.
And I guess if no one else will, it's going to have to be me.
As my friend Booker said, this is definitely a case of groupthink.
We have a situation where...
It's a bit like, it's a form of religion.
It's a bit like you can't, or indeed it's like it must have been in Stalin's Soviet Union or in Germany under Hitler.
If you weren't in the Nazi party, you weren't in the game.
If you weren't a communist, you weren't in the game.
You couldn't get a job, you couldn't get...
You couldn't get taken seriously.
In the same way nowadays, we're starting to reach the point where if you are a climate sceptic like me, you are considered beyond the pale of discussion.
Everyone believes in climate change.
Everyone knows that Greta Thunberg is a heroine.
Everyone knows that anyone who disagrees with this narrative is a denier or worse.
And I'm getting quite frightened because there is no evidence to support it.
Just to support anthropogenic climate change theory or certainly not catastrophic anthropogenic climate change theory.
There is no evidence to support the idea that the measures we are taking to deal with AGW are effective.
In fact, they are largely counterproductive and heinously expensive.
And yet, you look at our media and you get pretty much nothing but Junk news stories supporting this climate change fake news scare story.
And the Australian fires are a classic example of this.
I've been reading the mainstream media for the last few days and...
Even conservative newspapers have barely touched the idea that A, these are started by arsonists, and B, that this is probably a land management issue, not a climate change issue.
So you look in vain in our media for the truth about climate change, and I think that is very worrying.
So, definitely one of my missions in the 2020s is to slay the Green Beast once and for all.
But I think it's quite a task I have ahead of me.
So, wish me the best of luck.
And thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening, special friend.
I hope I didn't ramble too much.
And I'm very excited about some of the guests I've got coming up.
I won't spoil your excitement by telling you who they are.
You'll still have to wait and see.
Thank you very much.
You're listening to me, James Delingpole.
I'm appearing as the guest of James Delingpole on The Delingpod.
Thank you and goodbye.
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