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Feb. 13, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
57:55
Delingpod 56: Douglas Murray
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Welcome to the DeliPod with me James DeliPod.
And I know I always say I'm really excited about this week's special guest, but I am actually really excited.
Douglas Murray.
It's you.
You're here.
It is I. And...
You know, you're in the rare category of people who've been three times on the pod.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And people are going to be thinking, wow, he's got Douglas again.
That's really good.
And you said before we started recording this, you were slightly worried because we're friends and it might lull you into a false sense of security.
Exactly.
But isn't that part of the problem for people like us?
That always, we're innocent wildebeest, happily on the savannah, and we just want to live like wildebeest do, and there are crocodiles and lions, and they want to take us out one by one.
Hmm.
Yes, there's certainly some of that.
I do think that the reason I mention that, thank you for breaking our pre-recording confidence, one of the reasons that I mention that is because actually we are all struggling with what I described in my last book as the problem of public and private language eroding.
Yeah.
Almost all of the, let's say, the sort of cancellation problems of our time come to some extent from this fact that there are, for instance, mediums where it's sort of people...
Social media, for instance.
People use basically private, in-group language, but it's discovered by an out-group that then can destroy them because of it.
And I simply think that that is the liminal moment of most threat.
I should stress, by the way, there's absolutely nothing that I say in private that I don't say in public.
But inevitably in private you're less cautious to some degree because you're not speaking to the world.
You're speaking to friends.
Unless you have literally no filter like me.
Yes, I mean you're a rare beast in nature.
There's like albino zebras that forgot to have some stripes.
But I worry that that makes me unfit, that my survival chances are not going to be that great.
Or maybe it's a strategy.
It's a super thing.
It's a bit like when you're walking through Central Park at three in the morning and you start gibbering like a madman in order not to get mugged.
Is that how you do it?
I do sometimes wonder whether...
I've noticed, for example, we're going to come on to this in a moment.
Why is it that Toby Young...
I love Toby, but he's a complete cuck.
Why is it that he gets so much more shit on Twitter than me?
Toby is always treading on eggshells, trying to not appear too extreme.
His conservative politics are really quite mainstream.
And I'm much more out there than he is.
I noticed that.
Yet Toby gets so much hate.
Every other day I look at Twitter and I see Toby trending on Twitter and the hate he gets is extraordinary, almost jealous making actually.
I don't pay any attention to Twitter so I don't know how to verify what you just said.
But okay, you don't need, just trust me, you don't need to verify.
But what I'm asking is, or suggesting even, is maybe if you are unapologetic and you don't try and say, oh well, maybe I could have phrased myself a bit better, maybe that is a better strategy than trying to appease the enemy.
Well, no, I think if what you say is true, and I'll assume it is, then there's a reason for it, which is that Toby is seen to be wanting some of the baubles, and you are not.
I mean, if you are, you're playing a really long and strange game.
LAUGHTER That, I tell you now, is highly unlikely to work.
But Toby, however, has allowed himself, for instance, in the past to be put forward for an entirely unimportant government appointment position as one member of a 15-member quango that...
If it advised something, all as one could then appear on a ministerial desk for that minister to forget about.
So it wasn't a very important job he was up for, but it was a government-approved job.
And the left in Britain thinks that such jobs are only for them and their family and ex-wives and so on.
And they don't think that somebody who's ever been remotely conservative should get such a job.
But when Toby did try to, that was when he was vulnerable, because that was when they had something to get him on.
They can't, for instance, get him sacked from his column at The Spectator because he hasn't said the right thing in their eyes, because that doesn't matter.
That's his editor's decision.
But they can try to stop positions in public life coming your way.
So the minute you show you want that, then you get killed.
Well, you bring me neatly onto your recent column on the subject of why we should, why the Conservatives, if they have any backbone at all, should start giving positions out to actual Conservatives rather than this bizarre suicidal, and it happened in the Cameron administration, it happened in the Theresa May administration, that whenever a sort of quango job was available, it always went to somebody on the left.
Yes, the Taxpayers Alliance recently did a study of public appointments in the last 10 years, I quoted in the piece in the Sunday Telegraph, showing that of people who self-declared their significant political affiliations.
I mean, this isn't just how you vote, but if you've actually been significantly involved in party politics.
All but two years of the last ten, every year, there were more people who were affiliated with the Labour Party getting public appointments than members of the Conservative tribe.
And this is very telling, and by the way, it's just a demonstration in numbers of what we all sensed anecdotally, which was that it was extremely hard to identify cases where people who were conservative, not even party conservative, just conservative-minded people, were getting not even party conservative, just conservative-minded people, were getting any positions in public life.
The two I point to, the one that's pointed to most is William Shawcross at the Charity Commission.
William Shawcross, by the way, is not a Conservative Party member or has ever been a campaigning conservative.
He just happens to be a more C conservative.
And apart from that, the only job that anyone can point to was Roger Scruton being appointed as an unpaid advisor on the Building Beautiful Commission, and everyone knows how that went.
So there are several things.
One is an inability to put forward conservative figures for these.
The second is a vulnerability to the left's mob tactics to try to take people out.
And a third, by the way, is that when you ask Conservative MPs and others about why this situation has happened for the last 10 years, they tend to say things like, well, it's very hard to get people to put themselves forward.
And they don't connect the dots.
Things like what happened to Roger Scruton, and indeed I would argue the parliamentary process of questioning of Shawcross before getting the Charity Commission job approved, is such incredibly abusive and offensive treatment that it's not surprising that people wouldn't put themselves forward for it.
And so I think that one of the things conservatives should do, well I think there are two things they should do that I advocate.
The first is to make the whole process more appealing.
For people to put themselves forward for.
So that you don't just think, okay, I'll agree to be put forward for that.
I'll declare all of my personal earnings and all sorts of other very invasive stuff and then get mauled by the left and called a racist and an Islamophobe and a homophobe and a sexist and a transphobe and every other sin of the era.
But actually, no, you're going to be supported by the government who would like your expertise.
But that brings me on to the second thing, which is where I mentioned Toby Young in the piece, which is really what the Conservative Party needs to do.
And I think it's got a window of no more than another two to five months to do this in.
Is to make appointments that demoralize their opponents.
So Toby Young, having not been able to get this totally unimportant membership of a 15-member advisory quango, ought to be put in charge of a major educational institution.
The far left will rail and rage at this, as they did before.
And the Conservatives ought to be aware that they can turn around and say, well, it doesn't matter, because if you don't like it, you ought to have won a majority of 80 seats in Parliament at the last election.
I have a whole list in my head of the sorts of figures who will create this sort of upset on the left, and I'm encouraging the Conservative government to appoint each and every one of them.
Totally.
I want Andrew Roberts to be made head of the Cambridge College.
You look at the extraordinary absence of talent that has been promoted to Trinity College, Cambridge.
I mean, the grandest Cambridge college.
Who have they got now?
They've got the woman who used to...
What's her name?
Ivo, can you Google it?
She's really awful.
Really, really low grade.
You compare and contrast the distinguished heads of Trinity before the Masters and who it is now.
It's...
NHS Quango.
We'll come back to that.
Well, the Oxbridge Colleges, that's because there are headhunters.
Sally Davis.
Nanny State.
Right.
So the reason that happens with Oxbridge Colleges is several things.
One is, unfortunately, the intrusion of people from the media like Alan Rusbridger into these jobs.
It's so awful.
I mean, editing The Guardian is an interesting thing to do, I'm sure, but it shouldn't necessarily qualify you to head an Oxford college.
And the problem is that once you get that, the worst example is Will Hutton.
most people won't remember him but he wrote one book about 30 years ago that was regarded as being quite interesting never heard of him yeah and a sort of left-wing observer very bland columnist and very bland thinker but of the left and and he's got a college as well in actual fact the recent thing sorry this is probably more detailed than any of your listeners are interested in but the reason why oxbridge colleges keep going to really um underwhelming people at the moment is because there are headhunting firms
there's one in particular that is hired by the colleges to look for people uh And they have a list of candidates who are suitably diverse so that the colleges can pick a diverse candidate.
I was informed a little while ago that quite a close personal enemy of mine called Saeed Awazi, who was a failed MP, she tried to be an MP and didn't get it in about 2005.
And because she was such a failure and happened to be female and Muslim, David Cameron immediately put her in the House of Lords.
And she then failed at what she did then.
More than failed.
And then turned on the people who promoted her.
Anyhow, she's on the list of people to be head of her.
Some Oxford or Cambridge College.
She's like Baroness Scotland.
Yes, because of course one of the hilarious, fascinating things about our era is that all the people who shout most about their oppression most publicly are the luckiest people of our day.
Douglas, I am so bloody oppressed.
I am, and I've got a really nasty cold at the moment.
I know, you bored me about that earlier.
I would be, I think I would be a bloody good dean of Christchurch.
To be dean, don't you have to be a clergyman?
Yeah, but the problem is that I would only want to be head of Christchurch and I think to be...
You'd have to get into holy orders.
You don't have to believe in God, of course.
I could be like a hunting parson.
That would be my dream.
A hunting parson with a private income and just preaching sound things and rescuing the church from the pinkos.
That would be good.
Yeah, so, okay, Andrew Roberts obviously gets, because, no, I do feel very strongly about this, and it's one of those things that people almost don't dare say, because it sort of reveals their class snobberies or whatever, but I do think it's really, really sad that increasingly people like us are just not getting places at Oxford and Cambridge because they want diversity.
Yeah, I'm not.
None of this stuff bothers me.
No, well, it does bother me.
And it bothers me greatly.
And I do think there ought to be one or two sound colleges in Oxford and Cambridge that, you know, where you get kind of rights of revisited types.
Well, I mean...
Are you a Ruthless Meritocrat then?
One of the things I think has...
It becomes clearer to you with age, as you know better than me, is that you discover one by one that the institutions you imagine to be one thing are not that thing.
Yes.
And they are something else.
And that happens across the media, across education, with extraordinary consistency.
Even sort of places, if you're not an economist or involved in finance in any way, you sort of assume that certain financial institutions must be sort of solid.
And then you discover they're run by the same children who run everything.
Yeah.
And I just accept that.
I want it to be turned around, but I don't think it'll be turned around by anything other than, as I hint at this column, the placing of...
I actually don't just mean right-wing people or conservative people.
I'm not that hung up on that.
I would like to see the promotion of heroic people.
That is, people who have held fast against the prevailing winds of the era and have demonstrated in their own lives how an adult ought to behave in an era run by children.
That's totally you and me.
We would get...
It's not for me to say.
Well, it is for me to say, and I'm telling you now, Douglas, that we'd be bloody good at whatever quango...
I'd quite like to run something like...
I don't know.
Actually, do you know what I love?
I'd like the National Trust.
National Trust would be good.
Because that has been royally screwed up.
I mean, I would do so much sacking.
There would be no end of sacking.
All I would keep would be the nice ladies in twin sets and the sort of elderly gentlemen who sort of volunteer guides and stuff.
They're nice.
But all the people in charge of sustainability, all the people, they've had a succession of Fiona Reynolds, Helen Gosch, awful...
God, we're getting specific.
Yeah, go on.
But do you know where Helen Gosch ended up?
No.
Running an Oxford College.
Of course.
Just...
But I sense that you're much more...
I'm more phlegmatic about this kind of thing than I am.
I mean, it really gets my goat, the way that everything, as you say, institutions are not what they're supposed to be.
I find it, I mean, maybe I'm past the stage of grief and I'm on to hilarity.
Right.
But, I mean, I find it with something like the National Trust just to be hilarious.
Because yes, you would assume that this body was for nice middle class people who want to go and see a grand house at the weekend and enjoy one of the most wonderful things in their country's heritage.
And then you discover that actually the National Trust is mainly about celebrating being gay or something.
And you can't quite work out how they do that.
But I find it funny because you get things like when the National Trust did do that a while ago, they said that of course...
Basically everything is being translated into the new language and ethics of the era.
And I love it because it's like watching children discovering things.
They're so ignorant.
They did a thing at Sissinghurst, the home of Harold Nicholson and Rita Sackville West.
And the National Trust couldn't believe their luck, that these were two LGBT people.
As if prior to that...
No one had known that Harold Nicholson liked the boys and that Vita liked the girls.
And that they had a slightly...
I mean, this was old news in the 1960s or whatever it was, when their son wrote a portrait of a marriage about his gay parents' gay marriage.
And yet in the 2010s, the National Trust discovers it and translates it into a new era where...
Where it's the main reason to visit Sissinghurst is because the previous owners were gay.
It's such a beautiful display of ignorance.
Recently acquired ignorance.
And these places used to be run by people who knew so much.
This is another of my bugbears.
The decline of scholarship in these institutions.
Well that's everywhere.
There's a reason for that.
If I can elaborate.
I'd love to hear that, yeah.
There's a reason for that, and I notice it sometimes.
It's to do with universities.
Neil Ferguson made this point a little while ago when he said that throughout his career as a historian, he had always noticed that somebody very big like, say, Richard Pipes, one of the great historians in America of Russia...
Somebody like that would retire or die and they would never be replaced by somebody else who was like the next greatest person on Russia.
They'd be replaced by somebody whose work was, you know, women in 1990s Russia and their crossover with class issues or something like that.
That sounds enticing.
And it was never something which had the sweep of the previous person in the role.
And this backs up my view on this which is that you can see it in PhDs.
People don't specialize in very major canonical figures and work.
Or if they do, they do it in such an obscure part of it because it's assumed that everything else has been done.
And the problem with this is it means that you...
Because you're doing things so far to the margins, nobody focuses on the core.
And so you get the situation where the philosophy departments literally don't have anyone to teach the core philosophers.
And the literature departments don't have anyone who specializes in the great authors.
And so the knowledge all diffuses to the margins, and it leaves it like a tree after a strangling fig has eaten around it, where the centre is hollow.
Yes, I like that analogy.
Yes, I'm going to mention something that we talked about last night, actually, because I think that's quite germane, that you and I were both very, very lucky To have been taught by tutors who didn't expect us to have read the critics.
We read the texts.
And you made the very good point that actually, say you're doing an English degree, how much time do you have to read the actual texts?
Yeah, and you discover, by the way, we both specialised in the non-discipline, really, of literature.
Let's face it.
And look where we ended up.
Yeah, it's not a happy story.
It's not a happy story.
But it can be a discipline of a kind, but...
You discover that you think that this only happens in your discipline, then you discover as you go along that this has happened in all the others as well.
Including, in my experience, more and more friends in recent years who are in the sciences and things, you discover that similar trends have happened there.
Yes.
However, yes, you mentioned this.
Well, there's something very interesting underneath this, isn't there?
Which is the question of what the age should be doing.
I've sometimes speculated that if this era were to be given a name, a good era, I mean the last, say, half a century, a good name for the era would be the era of deconstruction, where everything gets pulled apart as part of a game.
So that the deconstruction in literature, for instance, I mean...
There's been nothing that the humanities haven't wanted to deconstruct in recent years apart from themselves and their own salaries and income.
They remain remarkably intact.
But everything else, the game is let's pull apart what we have in front of us.
And actually there is a very straightforward analogy which all parents know, which is that children do this because children do deconstruct things in the erroneous belief that they are going to then be able to put them back together and they can't.
And if you don't have enough people around with the knowledge to reconstruct, you're in a real mess.
And that's one of the things we're in at the moment.
There are not enough people who know how to construct.
And I mean this across a whole range of disciplines.
To construct, for instance, an idea of what we are meant to be doing on this earth is a very, very long project.
It can be pulled apart with enormous swiftness and, I would say, some ease.
But it cannot be reversed with the same swiftness.
And I think all of these things...
It's the same thing with the great houses we were talking about, the National Trust.
You know, it's the same thing.
You can pull these things down with extraordinary ease, as was shown in the post-war period in particular.
Constructing them is the work, really, of generations.
Yeah.
Interesting what you say about science.
Probably you hear this all the time as well, that people are always saying, yeah, we should only teach STEM subjects.
They're the only things worth teaching.
Yeah.
But actually, I think that the rot has set in science as much as it has in the arts.
And are you familiar with the concept of post-normal science?
Go on.
Post-modernism has hit science as it has in the arts.
Somebody called Jerry Rabbits...
Wrote this paper about post-normal science and it was essentially an argument for ignoring the scientific method and that science ought to have a political agenda as well.
Yes, this has been creeping into maths as well, this.
Has it?
Yeah.
How does that work?
Well, I mean, it doesn't.
What's your question?
I'm just wondering how you do make maths, how you make anything other than about maths.
Well, I mean, we're all familiar by now with the extremities of idiocy that occur on American campuses in particular, but...
That stuff does actually have a spilling out effect that we all now know about as well.
And one of the things that's most interesting in that is the very racist and incredibly unhelpful idea that concepts like truth and indeed facts are basically white Western racism.
Oh yes, that's right.
And this happens, this has happened, actually I chart in my latest book, which we ought to mention at some point, The Matters for Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity, available if you can find any shops that still sell books.
And I mention in their cases, you know, quite a lot of cases of people making exactly this assertion.
But the facts are basically a white thing.
And there was a case only very recently, by the way, of this in the more popular realm.
I know we're bouncing around a little here, but on the British media recently when there was a debate about, a very boring debate about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.
Never heard of them.
The Sussexes, I should say.
Yeah.
People previously known as the Sussexes that when there was this very facile debate about them and the claim by some people that the reason why anyone had ever been critical of Meghan Markle was because they were racist.
Yeah.
A couple of black commentators in the UK making this assertion on television were asked for examples of the racism that was said to have been expressed in such a strong way that the Sussexists had to free the UK. And the interviewers got the response back, this is part of the whole problem, this demand for examples.
Right.
Right.
You wanting facts is yet more evidence of your racism.
Right.
Only a racist would demand examples.
And so this stuff is now, it has flooded quite wide.
Since digression is my mode, I liked, I was watching this Netflix series, Messiah.
Oh yeah.
Have you seen it?
No, I haven't seen that one.
It's not worth seeing.
And there's a scene right at the beginning where there's this kind of overworked female, obviously feisty but with problems, CIA operative.
And she's a fan.
She's a fan of...
Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilization.
So you know that she's going to...
She's evil.
She's going to go through a transformative process where she realizes that things are not as simple as she thought they were in her right-wing...
Yes, because Samuel Huntington's work is notoriously simple, as anyone who's read it will definitely know.
So, it was quite interesting seeing it introduced, and you just knew it being Netflix, which is, okay, not as bad as the BBC, but it's pretty bad.
You just knew that this woman was going to have an awakening at some point.
Anyway, there's a scene where she is interviewing a potential recruit and they discuss, do you think there is such a thing as objective truth?
And the other guy that she's interviewing says that he doesn't believe truth is a grey area and it depends on points of view and stuff.
And We're good to go.
By the way, that trend you mentioned, just to digress from your digression, the trend you mentioned of this in the movies is always in that one direction.
The water only goes in that one direction.
Mark Stein pointed this out some years ago in a beautiful piece about...
For instance, take a film like, is it Meet the Parents?
What's that one with Robert De Niro playing the sort of CIA? Meet the Parents.
Yeah.
And, you know, he's a sort of rigorous career CIA guy and the parents of the guy are this sort of hippie Dustin Hoffman, hippie, you know, don't flush the loo or wash your hair sort of, you know California couple
you know that what is going to happen is not that the California couple get a bit more order into their lives and realise the importance apart from anything else possibly in your nation security of rigour and discipline but rather that the former CIA guy has to become like relaxed and smoke a joint and you know you know become an easier person Everything, everything...
By the way, I mean, that all happened such a long time ago that there aren't enough targets to assail in the sort of buttoned-up, you know, rigorous De Niro character-like place.
So they have to present...
You know, people who are not all that buttoned up as the enemy.
Anyhow, I digress from the digression, but I can't remember now where the trail was that we digressed from.
No, I can't either.
I think, look, the general theme is that we're the decline of our Western civilization, which is ongoing.
Yeah, I'm not so pessimistic about that as you are.
Why?
Why?
There have been times when I have been.
I'm not anymore.
Really?
That is the most shocking thing I've ever heard you say.
I have more optimism about this now than at any previous stage.
Is that because you met my little boy?
No, it is not.
Although meeting intelligent young people is always a pleasure.
Yeah.
No, I'll tell you why it is.
It's because it's possible we might be at a moment of turnaround.
And I think there are lots of reasons for that.
But one is what I think of as something like the second wave of tech.
In the first wave of tech, everyone becomes stupider.
We spend our time watching too many cat videos.
Don't log cat videos, Douglas.
They're great.
You know, it's this that's the problem.
You epitomise it just there.
No, look, the first wave, everyone watches cat videos.
The expectation of the first wave is that everyone will be jumping around the new knowledge, like children running around libraries saying, I can't believe all these books I can access, which we all know is what happens.
And the expectation was great, and actually the first wave of the internet we'd spent watching cat videos.
There's a fascinating thing happening now.
Maybe it's because I spend so much time in different countries.
I notice the same pattern everywhere.
And this is a positive pattern.
The positive pattern is wherever in the world you are now, if you're young and you have access to the internet, particularly to things like YouTube and podcasts, maybe not this one, But you can educate yourself to a degree that your forebears could not collectively have managed.
The appetite for long-form...
The appetite for long-form discussion is a wonderful development.
At the time that the mainstream media continues to think that discussion is a three-minute ding-dong between two illiterate people.
both of whom are being misrepresented and misrepresenting each other.
The fact that long-form discussion has swept through, the fact that, in my experience, the sort of student-aged and thereabouts people who I find, who come to events I do and in audiences and things, they're so well-informed who come to events I do and in audiences and things, They're not idiots.
They know so much and they know what they should know.
They know what they'd like to know.
And it's all on a good track.
And this doesn't mean everyone is.
No.
And it's quite a self-selecting audience, the people that come to your talks.
Well, in some ways, yes.
But they also happen to be the best people.
They're smart.
They're curious.
They're attractive.
They're attractive people.
I mean, personalities as well.
Beautiful people love us.
But my point, they're interested in things.
And they've realised that that's a way to succeed as well as to have a good life.
It's not to be this...
I mean, who wants to join this retributive, know-nothing, presume-you-know-everything, nasty, puritanical cult that has dominated the...
Certainly that has led the stampeding of recent years.
Who wants to actually be part of that?
Nobody sensible or ambitious wants to be part of that.
So I'm very optimistic about that.
And I think, as I say, that the opportunity now to access knowledge is just astonishing.
And people are realizing this.
Yeah.
I'm heartened by that.
You made me think as you were saying that.
We've got to come on briefly, before we move on to the Starbucks, briefly to our differing views about how to handle the old media like the BBC. I think that the BBC is utterly toxic, and I do not want to have anything to do with the fuckers.
And the reason I don't is precisely because of this.
Their whole model for political debate is A, massively skewed towards the left, B, skewed towards getting gotcha moments, and C, skewed towards this two people with completely...
Opposing views, just shouting at one another and not coming to any form of agreement or saying anything interesting.
And actually, the other problem, of course, and the reason I can't bear watching any question time, is that politicians particularly just say things that are going to earn them, come up with parties that are going to get them claps from the audience.
So, in every respect, the BBC is wrong.
And, of course, the other one is it's like the scorpion ferrying you across the...
The scorpion on the frog's back across the river.
The BBC will always fuck you over.
I don't think this is a BBC problem only.
I think that there's something very deep we're still struggling with about what the nature of communication is meant to be in this era.
Um...
Let me steal, man, what I think is going on.
Because for a while, I've had this curious feeling when I've been on the BBC and other, as you say, legacy media platforms.
I'm treated in a very odd way.
And for a while, I think this is the first time I've said this publicly, for a while I've tried to work out quite what it is that's going on.
Because I just feel that it's rather like...
Having a conversation with somebody who thinks you're someone else, like that character in Evening Wars Vile Bodies, the potential stepfather who thinks that the future son-in-law is the vacuum seller.
I go on and I know fairly well who I am and what I've done and written and said and I discover that I'm treated as some other person.
Or some slightly similar person, but only in places, like a little bit of me magnified out into something else.
And I realized recently what it is that's going on.
Can I tell you what I think it is?
I think it's the development of recent years which is massively exacerbated by the Trump vote in 2016 and the Brexit vote in 2016.
There is a presumption that what has happened is, for instance, that racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia have been made legitimate and mainstream and that the Brexit and Trump votes demonstrate this.
And that we must not allow...
We, the sort of guardians of opinion, must not allow these retrograde forces to spill out any further.
And we must cordon them and hold them back wherever they are.
And I... In particular, I think, perhaps, I'm seen as a part of this trend.
Now, as it happens, I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump, and I can make as many criticisms as anyone else of him, and I can say what I think he's done well.
But as it happens, I don't write or speak about Donald Trump, because the whole rest of the world has an opinion.
And I don't speak or write much about Brexit.
But I notice that in some line of causality, I'm on it.
So that, for instance, in a recent discussion on the BBC, there was a half-hour interview with me and then a half-hour discussion about me and my latest work, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity.
Available from all good bookshops if there are only left.
Yeah.
And the first question I was asked by the interviewer, apart from being incredibly rambling, was, it included a reference, he said, one of the words I use in The Madness of Crowds, a search term, maybe it's even madness or derangement or something, is a word that Donald Trump has used.
Yeah.
I thought, well...
He probably has.
He probably has, and it's quite hard not to use words that other people speaking the language also use.
But he said, well, Donald Trump's used this word, and this is the same thing as what Viktor Orban does.
And I thought, hang on, I don't write about Donald Trump or Viktor Orban in this book, and what's going on?
What is going on is, they, the interviewer, with BBC sort of view, thinks...
He, Douglas, is part of this whole continuum, and we just, at the very least, he mustn't progress any further in the course of this interview.
We mustn't allow him to gain any ground.
We must keep him at best...
At worst, we can keep him exactly where he is with his ideas, but...
The best we can hope for is that we destroy his ideas, because to have done so will have been also to destroy, to some degree, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump and Brexit.
And when I realised that this is their view, I realised why they treat me and others so strangely.
And all I can say is, but that's not what I'm doing.
It's not a fair estimation of my work or my thought.
And I simply think it's sad.
I haven't given up on them totally as you have.
But I do think, if I may say this, I think this insight is quite interesting.
Yeah, yeah, no.
Um...
Finally.
I mean, we could go on forever, but actually we've got to go and look at a church, which is quite important.
Oh yeah, and you promised to...
Yes, we should stress that we're staying at your country seat.
Yeah, well, yes, as opposed to my New York seat or my London seat.
Yeah.
Starbucks.
I was watching, I imagine you're a fan too, the only program left that I can watch on terrestrial television.
I mean, my son would say University Challenge, but actually I... No, no, no.
Oh, Any Connect?
Yeah, maybe.
So, okay, I can just about tolerate quiz shows, but even University Challenge has been infected by it.
You don't feel life just draining away whilst you watch quiz shows?
Anyhow, that's a diversion.
But you were saying, the main...
Who Dares Wins.
Have you ever seen it?
No.
Because you've got your brain to fill with classical music and knowledge and...
So it's a program where about 25 ordinary members of the public who happen to be super fit get put through SAS training and they get whittled down.
And it's very tough to the point where in the second episode...
A woman got hit in the face by an undercover SAS chap.
It's called Milling, where they were encouraged to test each other's courage in the arena.
Anyway, roughy-tufty, old-school, unapologetic, transgressive even.
And then I looked at the adverts, and there was a Starbucks advert.
And the Starbucks advert was about a girl who, back in the day, would have been called Gamine.
And she would have either decided that she was a lesbian...
Or she would have been picked up by people like me who, in my youth, I was very attracted to gamine girls, probably because I'm a closeted homosexual.
And it was about the transition from...
So Jemima is looking in the mirror and looks at her short hair and...
I was thinking, you look great, Jemima.
Jemima goes into Starbucks and when she's asked what her name is and the next cut to shot of Jemima's cup and it says, James.
And I'm thinking, how many people who go to Starbucks are going to be encouraged?
Or how many sort of Starbucks waverers are going to think, well, I was going to be drinking Costa, but now I've seen that Starbucks is promoting transgenderism.
I'm going to go for them.
And you've got a piece about this.
Yes.
I'm so pleased, by the way, if we were on a commercial channel, as opposed to one that earns you no money, I wouldn't be able to even name this chain, would I? But Starbucks, it's true, you can't.
One of the great problems I find in my life is that I can't be sufficiently defamatory about things on mainstream channels.
Starbucks is one thing it's meant to do right, which is to make coffee, and it can't do that.
So I don't like that.
I don't like anything about it.
I don't like the counter of inedible products, croissants that look like rock cakes, and so on.
It's a great failure that such a dreadful chain should perch in every high street and every street in every town in the world.
However, that's not my point.
I already had an instinctive, vitriolic loathing of Starbucks.
In the last week, this has been taken to a new height, and my prejudice against the chain has now been ramped up to category 10, force 10.
Excellent.
Because, you know, they have those chalkboard, fake chalkboards that are meant to look like what you're doing is actually having overpriced, undrinkable coffee at a local place run by local people with a charming sort of local chalkboard thing.
And these now, Starbucks in the UK at any rate, say they've got a new inedible product called a mermaid cookie and there's a drawing of it.
And by the way, I also have an incredible prejudice against any adult who wants to eat a cookie.
There's something so incredibly childlike about this that I think that everybody who orders a cookie whilst being an adult should to some extent be just taken aside.
And then away.
But anyhow, the mermaid cookie is on sale.
And Starbucks, of course, because it's such an entirely altruistic chain of bad coffee making, says that it will give 50 pence from the sale of every one of these tooth rotters to the charity mermaids.
And I mention this because actually this is the crossover of one of the ugliest bits of capitalism with one of the most sinister things in our era.
And Mermaids is a British charity that is actually quite notorious.
It should be far more interrogated than it is.
It claims to be supportive of young people who don't know what gender they are and to help advocate for transgender youth.
And every single thing about this should be more interrogated than it is.
The lobbying of, for instance, the lobbying for young people who claim not to know what gender they are.
And I'm very, very...
I mean, readers of my books will know this, but I'm very sceptical about this whole thing.
I think we're allowing something utterly mad to go on with the adults giving up.
And this idea that because you're feeding a little bit, you know...
A little bit like a girl, feeling like a bit feminine today.
And now I'm feeling a bit masculine.
Oh, I don't know what sex I am.
Oh, it's so confusing.
No, I don't accept all of this.
And to put it the other way around, I retain the offer I give in the column of a week's supply of actually edible croissant from any of Starbucks' competitors.
To anyone who can actually define for me what anything like non-binary actually means, we're being forced to say terms that haven't been defined.
And anyhow, but to get me back on track of this, the Mermaids thing is, I think, an incredibly sinister organisation.
I don't accept that there's any such thing as transgender youth or transgender children.
And I think that the adults have left the room on this and that it is not for a major multinational like Starbucks to jump on board with something that has been so little thought about ethically.
And practically.
And I just mentioned in passing also there's a 13-year-old girl in Oxfordshire who's taking Oxford County Council to court for judicial review because of their advice, which includes that people who identify as the opposite sex to the sex they are should be allowed in schools to use changing rooms and lavatories and indeed to sleep in the dormitories of the opposite sex if they feel that day, as it were, that they are of the opposite sex.
I'm not against anyone because of their sex life or whatever they want to do.
I'm enormously open-minded on all of that.
I don't know.
I'm against people who have really good sex lives.
I'm strongly against them.
Sorry that you feel that way.
I genuinely, whatever people want to do, I'm fine with.
That does not extend to telling confused and possibly unhappy children that their lives can be solved by going through incredibly difficult hormonal therapies, including puberty blockers.
And then at some later stage being made into an approximation of the body of the opposite sex.
No.
No, no, no.
It stops right there.
And it should stop at the stage that a...
Sinister multinational, as we now have to think of Starbucks, should be promoting sinister groups in this way.
And if the adults are all leaving the room, as they seem to have done, I'm delighted that one 13-year-old schoolgirl in Oxfordshire isn't.
Yeah.
Do you have any theories on how this can even happen?
How is it that a company whose core business, you might think, be to selling coffee...
Suddenly gets hijacked by an agenda which has got nothing to do.
I know why that's happening.
It's the same reason it's happening with banks and with a lot of other large corporations.
Here it is.
Starbucks is what most people would think of as being one of the most evil faces of capitalism.
I'm a capitalist, but I think there are parts of capitalism that I dislike very much, like I think most capitalists.
There are unacceptable faces of capitalism at all eras.
One is groups, and I suppose we ought to be careful of this one for defamation, but an awful lot of very large multinationals, among other things, for instance, skip taxes, don't pay their taxes in the countries that they earn money in, have incredibly circuitous arrangements for it.
The public don't like this.
Right and left, we don't like this.
Yeah.
The left in particular has made clear how much they dislike it.
So what these companies are doing, these multinationals are doing in particular, is to do very loud, ostentatious appeals To show that they are on board with the zeitgeist.
A good example is, I may have said this to you before, Barclays Bank.
After 2008 and the banking crisis, it's very striking.
There's a lot of things the banking sector and the financial sector ought to have done.
There was a lot of blame that they should have got and escaped from.
The cheapest way you can get out of that is to suck up the woke agenda and do it very visibly.
So that Barclays Bank goes for LGBT Pride Month in a huge way.
Huge way.
And Starbucks demonstrates that it wants to transition children into the opposite sex with their cookies.
And this means that the evil Starbucks thing goes down quite a significant amount at the cheapest possible outlay by Starbucks.
And Barclays and all the other banks that ought to have taken far more criticism for what happened in 2008 get to dodge that by the ostentatious appeal to the woke agenda.
It's the cheapest way.
Cheapest way.
Have you come across Paul Polman, who's the CEO of Unilever?
Go on.
Ivo, can you just check Unilever's share price?
So Jamie, sorry.
Jemima, can you go and check Unilever's share price?
Paul Polman is one of those corporate CEOs who spends his whole time virtue signalling about climate change, about sustainability, about transgenderism.
I don't know whether he's done transgenderism, but it's the kind of thing he would talk about.
So Unilever, you would think its core business is selling, well, a range of products.
But I don't think, a bit like General Electric, I think that their share price did nothing for a long, long, long period.
And again, I think it got taken over by Woke.
So you're a CEO. You'll be paid stupid amounts of money.
You're doing absolutely bugger all in terms of generating shareholder value, creating value.
But my, you can get a seat at the table by virtue signaling.
Yeah.
Yeah, this just has to be called out more.
We have to recognize, we as consumers, we have to recognize that we're being played.
And that's why I should stress I'm especially vitriolic about Starbucks.
I want them to realize that there will be a cost to this stuff.
It's not just that there's nothing to lose and actually will gain a bit by our horrible, inedible products, including this mermaid cookie for adults.
We might actually suffer.
People might point out how inedible our products are and how disgusting our coffee is and how really anyone should buy coffee anywhere other than Starbucks.
They ought to know that the share price can go down as well as up.
They ought to know that there's a cost, potentially.
I can't do it myself, but if enough people do it, there will be a cost to playing these games.
There's not just an advantage.
There could be a cost to it.
I've often wondered...
Throughout my adult life, why are there so few people willing to stand up and defend truths and principles and facts and hard facts?
And one of the few breakthroughs I've made on this is the realization that most people are not interested in truth.
Most people are not interested in any of that.
What they are interested in is a cost benefit risk analysis.
And if it goes one way...
And it's wrong, but make some more money.
They'll do it.
And if it goes the other way, and it's right, but it doesn't increase the share price, they won't.
So, subtly or otherwise, more people have to make sure...
That the cost-benefit analysis goes the other way.
And making the horrible tooth-rotting mermaid coffee to transition young children in the UK is not just an encouragement of child abuse by this coffee chain, but something that could cost it.
I won't be buying any coffee from there.
Frankly, I never really did, other than a couple of times to discover how disgusting and inedible their products are.
But if more people just decided that we could ensure that there are different...
Then we might get to a stage where at the very least we could get to the point where our banks have no particular views on gay sex.
Our coffee doesn't have to involve the medical transition of children.
And we can just get on with what we should be doing with our lives.
Yeah.
Finally, I can present to you...
Did I give you the special friend badge last time or not?
I don't want one.
You don't want a special friend badge?
No.
That's awful, Douglas.
Somebody else can have it.
Okay.
You could have two.
Why don't you want a special friend badge?
I hate badges.
Actually, I kind of admire your...
Your fucking rude...
Oh, my God.
I'm ill.
You're not meant to say these...
Yeah, Wuhan was bloody great.
Okay, somebody else, in that case...
Somebody else can have it.
Somebody else, I'm going to auction Douglas' special friend badge.
You'd have to contact me via the website, delingpoleworld.com.
I give it, I gift it.
You gift it?
Okay.
Well, yeah, but I've got to raise money for the podcast.
No, don't auction it for mermaids.
No, in that case, give it to me now.
Right.
You're listening to The Darling Bob with me, James Darling Bob, and my very special, slightly rude and rude of the end of the podcast guest, Douglas Marin.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Bye-bye.
...
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