All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 23, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
49:58
Delingpod 53: The Delinglogue
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to the DelingPod with me, James DelingPod.
And I was really excited about this week's special guest.
But I'm really sorry to say, as you may have been forewarned on Twitter, Julia Hartley Brewer.
We did a really great podcast together and we talked about Harry and Meghan and we talked about our love for the Lozza, Lawrence Fox, and we talked about all sorts of interesting things.
And sadly, it is, I don't know where it's gone, it's vanished into the ether.
It is just a thing that we will never know, apart from me and Julia, what we said.
Because for some reason, my bloody tape recorder, and I know it wasn't my fault actually, this time it wasn't.
Just randomly decided to just cancel it.
It said, I looked at the file, the sound file, and my file said, what, 351 megabytes or gigabytes or whatever the bytes are.
And Julius, it said zero.
And I'm told by my technical advisors that...
You just can't get this information back.
So I'm going to keep it quite short and sweet because there's only so much of me I think you can stomach.
You really need a Dick or a Julia or a Lawrence for me to bounce my ideas off.
But there are certain things that I wanted to talk about.
And by way of, you know, of not having a podcast where there is nothing.
Because that was the other option, having no podcast at all.
And I think most...
Some of you will be thinking, oh, sod this.
I don't want James rambling on.
I'm just going to give up until next week.
Some of you will be thinking that.
But others will be thinking, no...
Actually, hear him out.
Hear him out.
I quite like what he's got to say.
So I wanted to talk to you about, I think, the most important thing that has happened this week, which is President Trump's speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos.
I'm not sure whether it's his single greatest speech.
I think that was probably his Warsaw speech defending Western civilisation, which I think Steve Bannon may have had a hand in.
That was his great moment.
But this speech was really pretty good, and I'm surprised by how little attention it has had.
Or rather, I'm not surprised because actually the lack of attention it is being given reflects the bias of so much of the UK media, certainly, and I imagine that the mainstream media in the US too, whereby they will not take Trump seriously.
Whenever he says something sensible, they just see it as evidence that he is a kind of, you know, a sort of Fascist, lunatic, completely out of control, and the sooner we can get a Democrat into the White House, the better.
But actually, I'm going to explain why it was so important.
So this is the speech where Trump flies in by helicopter to Davos, and that very morning, a 17-year-old pigtailed school dropout called Greta Thunberg, which apparently is how you pronounce it, Greta has made this speech saying that we are all doomed.
Pretty much nothing has been done, she says, meaning nothing has been done to combat the horrors of climate change, which of course she knows all about, having dropped out of school aged 16.
And Trump, with young Greta in the audience, he's not so rude as to name her, but he says, Gosh, who could he have meant by the perennial prophets of doom?
He says, this is not a time for pessimists, it is a time for optimism.
And then he lists some of the doomsday predictions that people like Greta have made that haven't come true.
They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 60s, mass starvation in the 1970s, the end of oil in the 1990s.
And then he goes on.
These alarmists always demand the same thing, absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.
We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country, eradicate our liberty.
America will always be the strong, proud, unyielding bastion of freedom.
Yeah, I mean, obviously on one level it's a murica.
It's a rallying call for the Trumpisters.
He's got an eye on the 2020 presidency.
That's obvious.
Sorry, taking a sip of my tea.
But it's also more than that.
Trump is one of the very few leaders in the Western world, or indeed anywhere in the world, who totally gets it.
It's almost like he's read my book Watermelons, it's almost like he's read Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, but he totally understands that Human progress depends on innovation, on optimism, on cheap energy.
It's another key factor.
And he's essentially speaking up for something we used to celebrate, Western industrial civilization.
And in Britain, particularly, we ought to be proud of Western industrial civilization because we more or less invented it, you know, from the very late 18th century through the 19th century.
The Industrial Revolution really was born in Britain.
And we had all our innovators.
We had...
We had our canal builders and our railway builders.
We had the people who owned the various mills and we had our thriving cotton export trade and so on.
And it made us incredibly prosperous and it defied the pessimism of doom mongers like Thomas Malthus.
Who are continually proven wrong.
Thomas Malthus said that we weren't going to be able to feed our growing populations and soon there was going to be a massive crisis.
Actually, although it can't have been much fun working in a northern mill town.
The lives that people led were probably less back-breakingly miserable than those rural workers, which is why people tended to flock towards the city where they could get more reliable wages and ultimately a better future for their children and grandchildren, which is exactly what transpired.
So Trump is restating something which ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone who's got an understanding of economic history or social history, in fact.
And yet we find ourselves in this weird era where...
So many of our leaders, and so many of our politicians indeed, and that certainly includes Boris Johnson and a lot of the Conservative government in Britain, they feel slightly embarrassed in defending industrial civilisation in the way that Trump does.
They find it slightly embarrassing.
And you can tell this by the fact that Boris Johnson's government is committed to something called net zero by 2050.
He wants to decarbonise the economy by 2050.
And needless to say, I think this is absolute madness.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation is soon to come up with some reports revealing just how incredibly expensive this is going to be.
It's the by-product of almost every industrial process, unless you've got nuclear power.
It's very hard to produce carbon neutral energy on the levels required for industry.
You're certainly not going to get it from wind turbines, even if you assume they're carbon neutral, which of course they're not.
You're not going to get it from solar.
You're only going to get it from fossil fuels.
So how possibly...
Britain, Great Britain, the fifth largest economy, is going to go net zero by 2050 is at best moot at worst.
At worst, absolutely nonsensical.
It's ridiculous and it's a ridiculous aim.
Now, I reckon, and this is one of the things I discussed with Julia, and of course Julia agreed with me.
She said, oh yes, James, you are so sexy and you are so right.
I don't know why I've given Julia a French accent, but I'm sure that had we got the tape recordings available, we would know that Julia was...
Like, gazing at me adoringly and, you know, I got a PPE degree from Oxford, James, but you seem to be even better briefed on politics and economics than I am.
How can this possibly be a great one?
Actually, she may not have said that, but anyway, I think she did agree with my point, which is that...
After...
Brexit was, until very recently, the great dividing line.
The great fracture in British culture between, I suppose, what you might call the liberal Remainer elite, generally university-educated, quite a lot of them working in what I would consider non-jobs in the public sector, so sort of NHS administrators and...
Civil service and stuff.
And I'm not saying they're all kind of stupid leftists, just most of them.
Academics, obviously.
People in the city law firms, people in the corporations, people in the city actually as well.
Never have I felt so much not part of my own class as I have over Brexit.
And on the other hand, on the other side of this divide, you had the workers, you had people in the shires, you had people in the cities, most of the cities outside London, which is of course Romania, and And you had mavericks like Nigel Farage, people like me, Matt Ridley, aforementioned.
And we were the counter-revolution.
Most of us were not university educated.
There were a few of us.
There was that classic moment, I thought...
Almost the most emblematic moment of the Brexit debate for me was when Nigel Farage and a bunch of a fleet of fishing trawlers from was it Grimsby I think sail up the Thames to be confronted by Bob Geldof, millionaire pop star Bob Geldof.
And a bunch of Remainers on a gin palace.
And they were flicking V signs at these fishermen.
And I know whose side I was on that day, and it certainly wasn't arrogant, snooty, Bob millionaire, Irishman, Bob Geldof.
Anyway...
Obviously the Ramonas haven't got over it, but I think most Remainers, I think we need to distinguish between Remainers and Ramonas.
Ramonas are unrepentant.
The Ramonas are the quintessential Japanese soldier on the Pacific Island who doesn't know that the Emperor has surrendered.
And I don't think they're ever going to know the Emperor has surrendered.
They're always going to be fighting for Britain to go to rejoin the European Union.
And some of them, as we know, have been completely unhinged by this.
But where was I? Yes.
The fault line has shifted now.
I mean, I think basically it's the same groups of people on either side of the fault line.
So on the one hand, you've got ordinary working class folk, normal people, people in the country and so on.
And on the other side, you've got pretty much what we call the liberal elite.
So the divide is the same, but the fissure is no longer Brexit.
It's climate change.
And what's unfortunate, I think, is that some of the people who would have been staunch Brexiteers or staunch-ish Brexiteers...
...are on the wrong side of this argument.
I mean, I think...
I'll give you an example.
There's a columnist in The Telegraph called Philip Johnston.
And Philip, I think, was pretty robust, pretty sound on Brexit, as I recall.
And he's written a piece...
Headlined, If it's a choice between Trump and Greta, I'm with the teenage zealot.
I might tell you he got completely ripped to shreds in the comments section, which I think is quite indicative of...
The Telegraph, for some time, I think has been quite schizo...
It was pretty sound on Brexit.
It was robust on that topic.
But it's clearly undecided where it stands in the culture wars.
You get quite a lot of sort of feminazi journalism.
I mean, it loved the story about...
The gender pay gap at the BBC, when loads of really not that talented women, or certainly less talented than the men, decided to seize the opportunity to play the gender wars game and take advantage of this culture where we're all trying to erase this alleged and largely non-existent pay gap.
And where they managed to grab massive extra loads of dosh, Just because the clamour of the times enabled them to do so.
And the Telegraph was going, yeah, you go girls.
This is entirely right.
But it's not entirely right.
It's completely wrong.
Not least because...
In the field of entertainment, clearly, it's very hard.
You're going to get world variations in salaries.
And I'm sorry, but Jeremy Vine may be overpaid, but he's a much, much better journalist and a more...
More likely to pull in listeners, I'd say, than some of the overpaid women who demanded parity with him.
Anyway, that's one issue where the Telegraph has been rather irritatingly woke.
But another one is recently on the subject of climate change.
Which is sad when you think that this former Telegraph journalist was the one who more or less broke the Climategate story in Telegraph blogs.
And of course the Telegraph, or the Sunday Telegraph, was the home of perhaps the greatest climate sceptic of them all because he was so well informed and thorough, the mighty Booker, Christopher Booker.
And now you've got Philip Johnston, He's formerly a reasonably sound Telegraph columnist, writing absolute bilge.
He starts off by talking about how mild winters have been recently.
He says, where have our winters gone?
I miss them.
And he talks about how he hasn't got out his old wooden toboggan, hardly been put to use since the 1980s, so he hasn't got his rosebud out recently.
He's getting dangerously close at this stage in the article, I would say, to writing the piece that was the biggest embarrassment in the history of the independent newspaper, the now defunct independent newspaper.
Children will forget what snow looks like.
Which is, I think, the most retrieved article from the Independent's archives.
The article where an expert, an alleged climate expert in the Independent, says that soon global warming is going to mean there's going to be no more snow.
Well, I don't know whether you've looked recently, but actually lots of kind of...
I bet they're mainly liberal elite Ramona types.
They've continued to take their skiing holidays.
I imagine there was a bit of snow in Davos.
I'm sure that there's been snow in Verbier and Wengen and...
Les Arc, etc.
There doesn't seem to have been an alpine skiing crisis, and I think I'm sure the same is in the US. So snow hasn't gone away, even though the experts promised us it was going to go away soon.
So here is Philip Johnston, who's supposed to be a sensible chap.
You know, I mean, he's writing an op-ed article.
It's supposed to have been researched a bit and thoughtful.
And here he is churning out this abject, warm-easter, bed-wetting bilge about how winters are getting milder.
Therefore, he feels in his bones that Greta must be right.
And he says stuff like...
We don't have to buy into the apocalyptic angst of Greta Thunberg on show again in Davos to recognise that something has to be done.
Why?
Why do we not have to buy into the...
What am I saying here?
How does he know that something has to be done?
He goes on, Every
word of that sentence, those two sentences, including to and and those, are an absolute lie.
It's rubbish.
We know, for example, that the only reason that China even pretends to be interested in clean energy...
It's in order to exploit the gullibility of Westerners to, A, to sort of pretend it cares more about the environment than it actually does.
I mean, it's ramping up its coal-fired power stations exponentially.
And in doing so, any CO2 that the West might agree to cut, China will more than offset and overtake it.
And as for this mention of the rapidly growing green energy sector in the US, I don't buy that either.
Actually, President Trump is very anti-renewable energy because he recognizes that it can only survive with taxpayer subsidies.
It can't survive on its own.
So...
And as for the idea that our energy future is a non-carbon one, you can type that thing, you can type that shit, but it doesn't make it true.
The fact that virtually every government has committed to a low carbon future...
...is simply an indication of the nonsense that various governments signed up to in the Paris Climate Accord...
...which was non-binding and which, when you added up all their carbon reduction promises...
Would, if they succeed in implementing these cuts, would possibly reduce global warming by less than 1 20th of a degree by the end of the century.
So minuscule that it is unmeasurable.
Remember, this was after thrashing out at Paris, you know, I think two weeks of fraught negotiations.
This was the best that the world's nations could come up with.
Since then, of course, America, the United States, Trump has unilaterally, naturally withdrawn the states from the obligations of the Paris Climate Agreement because President Trump recognized quite rightly that this was really a way to enable countries like India naturally withdrawn the states from the obligations of the Paris Climate Agreement because President Trump recognized quite rightly that this was really a way to enable countries like India and China to handicap the West with carbon
And they were quite open about that.
And good luck to them.
I totally respect that.
They were saying, look, we are putting economic growth and the interests of our people before this alleged planetary crisis.
Because I don't think either the Indians or the Chinese, certainly not the Brazilians now, not with Bolsonaro in charge, they don't subscribe to this green virtue signaling nonsense.
Anyway, later on in the piece, Philip Johnston avers.
This is a reasoned, not a hysterical approach.
I think, let me be the judge of that, Mr.
Johnson.
He quits somebody called Mr.
Alvera, I don't know what, yeah, somebody called Alvera.
Mr.
Alvera likes to adapt the argument known as Pascal's wager to our climate change conundrum.
The 17th century French philosopher and mathematician asked what we should do if we had to bet our lives on the existence of God.
Pascal posited that the rational response was to behave as though he did exist because we have nothing much to lose if it turns out that he doesn't, but risk eternal damnation if he does.
Climate change is the same...
Actually, it's totally not the same Philip Johnston, and I feel slightly embarrassed that you should wheel out this rather tired and inapt analogy.
I dealt with the Pascal's Wager question in my book Watermelons, which I think the UK edition was published in 2012.
I think I wrote it in about 2010.
And I dealt with this problem.
The reason it's not like Pascal's Wager is because it is not subject to any cost-benefit analysis.
Oh my god, that is so annoying.
That was my daughter ringing up and I pressed the wrong button.
I mean, I bloody hate technology.
It's so annoying.
It's absolutely so annoying.
Why can't I afford little helpers that do all this kind of boring shit for me?
I'm not up to the job.
It's all I can do to keep it together to think about the podcast itself without having to worry about the technical sort of thing.
I was talking about this cartoon, which I... I think I hate this cartoon more than almost anything I've ever seen in the world.
Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration.
But it's the cartoon...
That goes, what if global warming is a hoax?
And it's at this, so there's a sign on the wall that says Climate Summit, and then there's a chap on a podium, and behind him, on the whiteboard behind him, whatever, on the screen, it says...
Energy independence, preserve rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, clean water, air, healthy children, etc., etc.
And one of the delegates at this climate summit is saying to a woman sitting in front of him, What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?
And obviously you're supposed to go, yeah.
Gosh, I really agree with the satirical point of this cartoon.
I mean, you know, these climate deniers, they don't care about...
All the advantages that are going to accrue.
Even if we're wrong about climate change, think of all the wonderful things we're doing to the world anyway as part of this process.
Well...
Of course, the glaring omission in this argument is the trillions of dollars that we are currently spunking against the wall to deal with this problem.
It completely ignores the corruption of science.
And there's a good example of this recently, which I'll briefly mention.
It completely ignores the environmental damage done by the favourite energy production method of the Greenies wind turbines.
All the millions of birds and bats that they slice and dice, which is why, as you know, I call them bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.
The landscapes that these eco-crucifixes lay waste to.
Ditto solar panels, turning green fields into something like a bad 1970s sci-fi.
Sure.
The terror that is imposed on our children, who've all been brainwashed into thinking that the apocalypse is imminent, I mean, possibly as soon as 12 years away, if you believe Greta.
So it is not cost-free, believing in God, to return to the Pascal's Wager analogy.
It's actually very, very, very expensive and damaging.
And actually, I would argue that it It puts the world in the clutches of Satan rather than God or some kind of weird Moloch kind of God who just wants to feed on the terror of children and on the deaths of all the birds and bats destroyed by wind turbines and enjoys the burning of the money which could go on useful causes like I don't know,
I mean, I wouldn't spunk more money on the NHS, but it goes into worthwhile things where actually public money might be well spent.
And I'm amazed that this argument is being rehearsed anywhere, in any newspaper, given that it's been so frequently taken apart for the reasons I've given.
But what's really shocking is the fact that it appears in the Daily Telegraph, which used to be...
Well, it still is a conservative newspaper.
And I worry about this gulf between where the Telegraph's editorial line is and where its readers are, because I don't think that there is a meeting of minds here, to judge by the comments below the line.
On the same day, there was a piece by another of the Telegraph's house alarmists, and it has quite a few.
In the business pages, it's got Jeremy Warner, who used to be a pretty good economics writer.
And let me just find the relevant bit.
So here is Warner conceding a tiny bit of territory to the subject of reasonableness and practicality.
He goes, virtually all Trump's peers on the world stage, including his Chinese opposite number, Xi Jinping, feign support for the goal of a carbon-free planet, while falling woefully short on the actions needed for its early realization.
Well, why do you think that is, Jeremy?
Why do you think that all these leaders are feigning support for this thing?
Could it be that perhaps they know deep down that it's complete rubbish?
Because obviously, if it were a problem, they would be dealing with it.
He goes on, they may not care to admit it, but ultimately their position amounts to much the same as that of President Trump.
Trust in the power of technology and human creativity to solve the problem of their own accords.
And he presents this as though this is a kind of bizarre position, as though no intelligent person could think this.
And you do wonder whether he's read Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist and books like Rational Optimist, which proves that on every occasion, when the sort of the Malthusians have feared...
That we are running out of scarce resources and it's all going to be, or we're going to have mass starvation, mass starvation of the kind that Paul Ehrlich predicted in the late 60s.
And turned out to be wrong-footed by the green revolution, the real green revolution, the revolution in agriculture which enabled fields in places like India to become much more productive or developed disease-resistant strains of wheat and so on, which enabled the planet to feed itself.
These kind of technological leaps.
Jeremy Warner, economist, in The Telegraph, a conservative newspaper, He undermines this argument, doesn't believe it.
He says, would that this were so.
Without further incentives, this is very unlikely to happen on the timescale climate change scientists believe necessary.
There are almost bound to be costs, but despite the lip service they pay to the cause, the politicians remain as reluctant as ever to face up to them.
Well, who are these climate change scientists that Jeremy Warner is citing as though they are the ultimate authority?
I mean, there are plenty of people with expertise in the field of climate science.
Richard Lindzen, for example.
Fred Singer.
Plenty of Will Happer, of course, that I had on the podcast the other day.
Plenty of alpha intellects with a very strong scientific background who say that this whole global warming scare is bunk, and yet Jeremy Warner has taken the side of the alarmists and is now telling us that they must be trusted and we must act on their diktats, which I'm not sure that I agree at all.
I worry greatly that not all telegraph readers, but a proportion of them are buying into this stuff because they're being told it by the chosen experts of this conservative newspaper.
And I worry that this kind of licensed stupidity Is going to spread throughout the Boris Johnson administration, which seems to be infected with this idea that net zero is a good idea and that climate change is something we should be addressing.
One final thing before I move on.
I think that this is going to be the biggest problem of the Boris Johnson administration, which has committed itself to looking after the interests of all those working-class voters who voted Conservative for the first time, not in their own lives, but probably in the lives of their parents.
I mean, ever.
Because...
A few of the seats that were won, that Boris Johnson won and gave him his stonking majority, quite a few of them were, in working class areas which were, you know, red ran through them like a stick of rock.
And suddenly they gave Boris Johnson a chance and he said, well I'm going to repay your trust in me by making sure that I prioritise the interests of working class communities.
And the problem is that working class people don't, as a rule, buy into climate bullshit.
This is a luxury of pampered middle class households with nothing else to worry about other than the weather which they misinterpret as climate.
What working class people want, I don't want to presume to speak for them all, but I think generally the evidence suggests that they enjoy their holidays.
I mean, I often see them at the airport when I'm queuing up for my EasyJet or Ryanair flights.
There seem to be quite a few ordinary working folk there on those flights.
They want cheap energy bills, not expensive energy bills.
I think that's a no-brainer because obviously if you've got expensive energy bills, that means less to spend on other stuff.
I think they probably don't want their children coming back home bleating annoying climate propaganda.
And yet Boris is committed to a policy which is going to massively drive up the cost of living, which is going to restrict people's freedom to use things like aeroplanes and cars, and that's another thing that the working class people like, the freedom that having a car gives them.
So I reckon there is going to be an almighty clash of interests here, and I'm not altogether sure how this is going to be resolved.
Now, the other thing I wanted to talk about before I go is the Lawrence Fox interview.
I don't want to crow.
I totally love the Lozza and it was just a complete accident that I managed to bag that interview.
Interview with him just before he rocketed to national disgrace or hero status, depending on your point of view, as a result of his appearance on BBC Question Time.
And I don't know whether you remember, we were talking about what it was like...
Being able to chat like boys.
We were in our podcast mode and we were just talking like two mates down the pub, which I think probably is what a lot of people like about The Delling Pod, if it has anything good about it.
It's that, oh, why am I being falsely modest?
Of course, it's bloody great.
But that is what I'm trying to capture.
I'm trying to capture...
They're not meant to be oppositional, which is why I'm really not interested in getting somebody like Owen Jones on or whatever.
I mean, I'm sure he's a perfectly okay chap.
In fact, I've met him in the green room and he's a polite young boy.
You know, teddy bear.
It's a teddy bear Marxist.
And I... I just want it to be a relaxed conversation like people used to have in the old days when boys were free to be a little bit sexist but not to and just to sort of speak their minds and to crack inappropriate jokes.
I think inappropriate is kind of what I'm aiming for.
I like inappropriate.
Inappropriate is a good thing because inappropriate means that it is...
I'm frowned on by the current woke culture.
And almost everything I do is motivated by one question.
How can I piss off woke people?
How can I wind them up?
And I think there was a moment in the podcast where we said, yeah, imagine if they go through our podcast and listen to some of the stuff we say.
I mean, they'll have a field day.
They'll, you know, offence policing our conversation.
So this, of course, is exactly what the left has been doing, the wankerati have been doing.
Since that podcast.
There's a piece here I've got I'm reading in the New Statesman by one George Grylls.
I wonder if he's any relation to Bear Grylls.
I expect he probably is some relation.
It can't be that common a name.
And it's headlined The Radicalisation of Lawrence Fox Shows the Worrying Power of Right-Wing YouTube.
I love the idea that there is a worrying power of right-wing YouTube but the fact is that anyone who knows anything knows that the left makes all the running on YouTube because it's the left that controls YouTube, the left that owns YouTube.
I haven't even attempted to monetize my show on YouTube because I know that if I even tried to put on the monetization button, I would almost instantly be demonetized because my podcasts are insufficiently woke friendly.
Whereas I'm sure there are lots and lots of lefties who have no problem at all.
So the piece starts off.
Lawrence Fox is not a fan of the BBC. Last week on the very same day that Fox appeared on Question Time, a YouTube video was uploaded featuring the actor in conversation with fellow right-winger James Dellingpole.
The two men agreed that the BBC was telling people how to think.
And he then goes on in this rather convoluted New Statesman article.
Full of straw men and false premises.
For example, he talks about the famous encounter between Channel 4, Maven, Cathy Newman, and Jordan Peterson.
And he...
I love his euphemism for the complete poning that Peterson administers to Cathy Newman.
He says, in which the Channel 4 presenter visibly struggles with the Canadian academics' debating skills.
The implication is that Peterson has used some clever tricks to wrong-foot Cathy Newman.
Whereas in fact, all he's done is, all he does in that interview, is expose the shallowness of the left-wing narrative, which seeks to impose constantly its left-wing,
its disapproving version of events on normal behavior and and and make normal behavior seem somehow a normal thinking somehow transgressive which is which is which is the left's game
it's the game of the modern left to make normal conversation untenable to to force people like me and you and lawrence vox into constantly mentally treading on eggshells before we before we speak for fear that somebody might be offended and And Jordan Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman was one of the first times when...
I wouldn't even call it the right.
I'm not sure even how much Peterson qualifies as being on the right.
But when the normal folk struck back at the embittered, warped, leftist minority.
So this Grills character goes on.
There is another reason why the video is so popular, the subtext.
An alternative title for the video could quite easily be The Clever Man Puts Silly Woman in Her Place.
Well, I suppose that this is partially true, trivially true, but it's also dishonest in that what it suggests, indeed it goes on to specify this, is that the reason that we relish the destruction of Cathy Newman by Jordan Peterson is misogyny.
But it's not hatred of women.
That motivates the schadenfreude with which so many of us greet that interview.
It's not misogyny.
It's not the woman that people disapprove of.
It's the lefty, Oxford-educated, woke, annoying woman.
That's what they hate.
In the same way that in my infamous...
Infamous encounter with Yasmin Alibi-Brown, where she tried claiming that it was racism and misogyny that motivated people to mock and revile her.
I said, no, it's not that.
It's just that you're an incredibly annoying woman.
It's not about your gender.
It's not about your race.
And it's the same with With Cathy Newman.
The left plays this identity politics game.
And up until now, certainly in the last 20 years, they've made some pretty good running with this game.
It's worked very, very well for them.
They've succeeded in shutting down people they disapprove of, shutting down alternative ideas, shutting down free speech indeed.
By constantly playing this identity politics game so that if you say something they don't like, you're a racist or a misogynist or a transphobe, whatever.
In other words, the whole process has been designed to silence their opposition by...
By accusing them of things which are considered to be such crimes, racism, misogynist, whatever, that they automatically rule the speaker out of the debate.
They have no place in the public square because what they're saying is just wrong because they are a racist, they are a sexist.
And I think that Jordan Peterson was probably the beginning of the backlash and the various performances by Lawrence Fox are another example of this.
They're another stage in the revolution.
Add to that things like the Ricky Gervais speech at the Golden Globes.
I really feel like our side are finally starting to reclaim the territory that we've ceded to the enemy in often such cowardly fashion over the years.
Well, I'm not accusing you and me of being cowards, but I just mean our general culture.
The telegraph, for example, has ceded far too much territory to people that did not deserve that territory.
And I wonder whether this is the beginning of the turnaround.
I really hope so.
I'm just going to conclude by thanking you, dear special friend, and you know you are my only special friend, there is only one of you, although there might be the odd avatar, for all the kind letters that you send me, and for all the good things you do for me, and all your tremendous loyalty and loveliness, and obviously all the special friend badges that you buy, that's been going really quite well.
And I'm glad that you covered these things.
I'll just give you an example of some of the letters I get.
Dear James and Dick, my badge has arrived just in time for my birthday.
Thank you.
Keep up the good fight.
And that was once from Elvin.
Hello, Elvin.
Are you like a character from Lord of the Rings?
Elvin.
That's a really bad joke, isn't it?
And there's another one.
Really nice chap who has a books warehouse.
And he said, please can I give you some books rather than cash?
A sort of old-fashioned barter.
Yeah, that's really fine by me, Mike.
Lovely, lovely thought.
And I haven't forgotten.
I haven't forgotten my friend.
My friend, the dentist in Birmingham, who's going to fix my teeth for me, maybe, possibly.
It would probably come as quite a shock to him because he's probably thinking, I sent that email bloody ages ago and you didn't do anything about it.
Well, I didn't because I'm just a bit disorganised.
I think I've delighted you enough.
I'm really sorry that I'm not Julia Hartley Brewer, but I promise you I will get some absolutely tip-top guests on In the near future.
And they'll make you very happy to be my only special friend.
So thank you very much for listening.
Oh, by the way, the fulfillment of special friend badges has got much better since Oliver, my nephew, has been put in charge.
He's got tech skills, which is really good.
And I think he's got more of an organized brain than me, which again is great.
So well done, Oliver.
Thank you for doing that.
Anyway, thank you for listening.
And speak to you next week, ideally with a decent guest in tow, finally.
Thanks.
▲
Export Selection