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March 5, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:03:18
Delingpod 59: Allum Bokhari
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I love DellingPod.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I know I'm excited.
I always say I'm excited about this week's guest.
But he's come all the way over from the States and he's an old friend of mine, a Breitbart colleague, no less.
And we're going to talk about something I don't really understand, but I think is a really interesting subject.
And he's going to be my guide.
Alan Bakari, welcome to the show.
Hello, James.
Good to see you.
And thank you for adding your colourful ethnicity.
Where's Alan Bakari from?
Well, Bukhari actually refers to a specific place.
It refers to Bukhara, which is a province in Central Asia.
My father was from Pakistan, so I assume some offshoot of the Bukharians must have moved to Pakistan at some point.
So my father's from Pakistan, so my mother's...
I'm from England, but her father is from Slovenia, so I'm Pakistani, English, Slovenian.
You're quite a mix, but you were originally a camel jockey from the waist of...
My father was indeed, although I'm not sure there are many deserts in Pakistan.
They actually might have the double-humped camels up there because it's quite close to that whole Central Asian region, so they might have...
Is a camel jockey different if they ride a double-humped camel?
I just think of camel jockeys as being sort of generic, anyone who comes from the desert.
Anyone with a funny name, yes.
Now you're making me sound racist.
And I'm certainly not racist.
I'm lovely.
Now, Alan, you've been telling me some scary things about tech.
We're saving the scary bit until later on.
Right.
Oh, well, there are many scary bits.
Pick one.
So many.
I'm really worried about some of the scary things you've told me.
And I like to think that the special friend avatars are going to be shitting themselves by the end of this podcast.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
If you're an anonymous person, you've got to listen to this full podcast.
But we'll get on to that later.
So, one of the reasons you're over here is to see what the state of play is on this ridiculous new policy, the internet harms policy.
The online harms bill.
Yeah.
So, Britain is going the way of France, Germany and Canada in that governments across the Western world are trying to crack down on what they call social media hate speech.
mean by that?
Well, that's the question.
The definition of hate speech has always been the issue.
I remember when Mark Zuckerberg went and testified before both houses of Congress in, I believe, April 2018.
One of the senators, I think it was Ben Sasse, asked him, well, can you define hate speech?
And of course, Mark Zuckerberg couldn't.
He was completely flabbergasted.
And he said, maybe it's not even Facebook's place to decide what hate speech is.
Maybe the government should decide that.
But can the government get it right?
It's so vague.
How do you ban hate?
It's an emotion.
It's something internal.
Well, more than that, where do you see the word hate?
You only see the word hate used on leftist Twitter.
It's only the left that talks about hate.
Yes.
And if you see the way social media companies enforce their so-called hate speech guidelines, there are numerous, numerous instances of really vile, outrageous comments from leftists on social media, incitement to violence even.
this are treated with kid gloves does anyone remember for example the case of the covington high school kids in america yes high school kids who wore maga hats and were accosted by radical progressive activists somehow the media turned them into villains and as a result of this there's this outpouring of vitriol towards them on social media from these blue check verified libtards Yes, who was that guy?
There was one guy particularly, wasn't there, who really laid into them.
Oh, there were many, many people.
There were like celebrities, journalists.
Kathy Griffin called for them to be doxxed.
These are like grown adult people.
Doxxed means have their names and addresses published so that people can go and...
Harassed them, yes, indeed.
And this was either grown adult people losing their shit at 12-year-olds because they wore the wrong hat and calling for violence against them on Twitter.
In one hand, it shows you just how far gone these Twitter leftists are.
But it also shows you the double standards of the social media platforms because some of these people didn't even lose their verified checkmarks.
Some of them had to delete their posts, but they're still on Twitter.
They weren't banned.
If a right-wing had said something remotely similar, they'd be gone.
In fact, some right-wingers have been banned just for posting facts.
Tommy Robinson said something to the effect of, well, most grooming gangs in the UK, the people who join them are mostly young Muslim men, and that's a fact.
Quid have banned him for it.
Apparently, it's not just hate speech, it's hate facts now, you can say.
There was Andy Ngo, who said...
He was responding to a tweet from Chelsea Clinton, and he said...
Something about trans lives mattering.
And he pointed out that the majority of trans murders in the US are actually committed by, not by, you know, evil white male, the evil white male patriarchy, but by black males.
And this, again, is a statistic.
You can look at the FBI research to back it up.
The FBI numbers, but again, banned.
Well, not banned.
Locked out of his account and forced to delete the tweet.
But again, for posting facts.
Yes.
So, yes, if you're a leftist, you can call for violence against high school kids because they wear the wrong hat and nothing will happen to you.
If you're a right-winger, if you post the wrong fact on Twitter, your account will either be locked or you might even be permanently banned.
So that's the double standards we're dealing with when it comes to terms like hate speech.
They're created and enforced...
With one side of the political spectrum in mind.
Yes.
So that's worrying.
Presumably the Facebooks and the Twitters and stuff can say, well, look, what can we do?
We're under pressure from governments to regulate this stuff.
And then they give it to interns fresh from indoctrination at university who sort of enforce all the left-wing shibboleths.
Is that how it works?
Yes.
That's very much how it works.
And I think the real question you guys are facing here in the UK is, who do you trust to define hate speech?
Do you trust the government with its online harms bill?
Just for context, the online harms bill is essentially a version of the French law, the German law, whereby social media executives of the UK will face penalties if they don't take down so-called hate speech.
within a certain amount of time yeah if you create a law like that then it'll be the government defining hate speech it won't be facebook in america it's very different america has a first amendment so the only people who can define hate speech and ban people for hate speech are the tech companies themselves um here in europe here in the uk it'll be the government deciding what that word means uh and you know it's two very very bad options i'm Ideally, you don't want to have a hate speech law at all.
Ideally, you don't want people kicked off for hate speech at all.
But if you had to choose between the government defining hate speech and Facebook or Google or YouTube defining hate speech, which would you choose?
It's a genuinely difficult question.
Yes.
I would assume, reluctantly, we would have to choose the government just because they are democratically accountable, whereas presumably you can do nothing.
This is an argument I often hear from lefties.
They say, well, you believe in free markets, you believe in corporations being like entities which can make their own decisions, you believe in freedom.
Why do you want to constrain these guys?
Is that right?
No, absolutely right.
So they're unaccountable, whereas the government at least can write angry letters to your local MP? Yes, I think that's right, and it is a very interesting argument from the left.
They're supposedly against corporate dominance of American society or British society, except when it's giant tech companies deciding who gets a say in the public square or not.
They're totally fine with that.
That, by the way, is something that your generation has invented, not mine.
When I was your age, free speech wasn't even up for debate.
No one was thinking, well, of course I approve of free speech but not hate speech.
No one was making that weasel argument.
There was either free speech or not.
It was just a given.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, back in the 1990s, Larry King could interview Louis Farrakhan and David Duke, you know, black supremacists on the one hand or white supremacists on the other.
And, you know, people say, well, yeah, controversial interview, but that's his job.
He interviews people.
That's what he does.
You do that today, then people will assume you're endorsing the person you're interviewing.
They'll try and cancel you.
There's so much that the Overton window has really narrowed on certain topics.
And I think it is very much this generation.
There was a very interesting study, I think it was published in Quillette, that looked at the usage of words like critical race theory, racism, intersectionality, all these woke, SGW-style words.
And the study looked at how commonly they appeared in mainstream newspapers in the New York Times.
And there's just this massive explosion in the use of those kinds of words around 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013.
It just shoots up and keeps on going up.
What happened in 2010 or 2011 or 2012?
I don't know, but that seems to have been the inflection point.
It was a very clear historical moment.
Everyone started talking about it, or at least everyone in the media.
There is certainly, I've noticed this a lot, a leftist hive mind, just as there was this kind of environmentalist hive mind, and sometimes literally a hive mind.
I mean, I remember there was an absolute glut, suddenly, of stories about bees and about the bee-pocalypse and bees dying, and it had to be coordinated.
It's got these little sort of group of skills, communicating with one another and saying, right, we're going to do this and that on this particular occasion.
And A really small number of people are capable of changing the agenda.
Oh yes, vocal minorities.
I said I wasn't sure what caused it back in 2010, 2011, 2013.
one thing which might have caused it was the rise of social media because that's when those platforms like Twitter and Facebook started becoming really, really popular.
Oh, yes.
So all of a sudden, all of these people who in the past were confined to some sort of crazy, loony department at the University of Berkeley that no one ever took as a major, and if you took it as a minor, you probably wanted to leave pretty quickly unless you were slightly insane.
Suddenly they have an Internet connection.
They can connect with people who are very much like them and start pressuring corporations and corporations and media organizations and politicians and everyone they can think.
think of to follow their radiology and if you don't follow the radiology then we're going to try and get you fired or canceled or shut down or ostracized.
Yes.
So all these people with authoritarian instincts suddenly had an outlet.
They could use social media to mob people and that's when we saw the rise of them and I think that's also why we saw the media start to talk about it as well, especially the internet reporters because they also tend to be very young millennial people.
Often the most radical journalists at a publication, a mainstream publication, will be the younger former tech reporters because they're the millennials.
Oh, right.
So you're the exception.
Oh, yes.
Being a techie reporter.
Well, the good thing about the millennial right-wingers tend to understand all this quite well.
Yes.
I think what we're seeing in these battles over cancel culture and SJW politics and intersectionality, it's almost like the millennial culture wars.
That's what's playing out.
I very much felt that...
One of the most misrepresented stories of recent years was Comicsgate.
Anyone who understands Comicsgate knows that it was an attempt by SJWs to hijack the comics industry.
And yet it was presented in the mainstream media as kind of a fascistic system trying to close down talented new writers.
Right, that hates diversity and hates women and sexist and misogynist.
Basically the exact same things they said about Gamergate, which was a very similar thing of, you know...
social justice worries on the one hand, and people who just wanted to be left alone to enjoy their hobby on the other hand, right?
Or in this case, writers who wanted to write comics and draw comics free of political bullying, political nonsense.
It's an established playbook at this point, I think.
Whenever the media doesn't like an organic movement arising on social media, it could be non-political movements like Comicsgate, like Gamergate.
They'll call it bigoted, misogynist, racist, whatever buzzword is most appropriate.
If it's a political movement, they'll call, in the case of the Trump movement, they called almost all of his online supporters, they put them in the alt-right, neo-Nazi, fascist camp.
Jeremy Corbyn, another movement like, you know, the establishment did not really like Jeremy Corbyn, the neoliberal establishment.
They said his supporters were harassing women, his supporters are sexist, these online Corbyn trolls.
Bernie Sanders as well, establishment hates him.
And sure enough, the media calls his online supporters, you know, troll, sexist Bernie bros.
So it's the same playbook again and again.
So it does work both ways then?
Oh yes.
So lefties are unfairly treated too, are you saying?
Well, certain types of lefties.
Haven't they kind of got it coming to them?
Lefties that are...
I mean, cybernats, for example.
Yeah, cybernats as well.
They're very, very nasty.
I mean, they are.
When you get sent a really vicious, shitty personal tweet...
Oh yes.
Not so much now, but during the referendum...
Cybernats were evil.
In the same way, people with FBPE, that was more than an accident.
That was a coordinated thing, I think, partly funded by one of the lobby groups lobbying for the European Union.
They actually really, really monstered anyone they felt was too overtly on the Brexit side of the argument.
Well, the frustrating thing is, and we should get onto privacy now because I think this is important, there is genuine tension between the right to free speech and the right to privacy.
There always has been the right to be left alone and not be bothered by these huge harassment mobs, not to have your details of your personal life taken and blasted all over the internet.
Yes.
The internet's allowed violations of privacy.
It's made violations of privacy a lot more common, not just by big tech companies like Facebook and Google hoovering up all your personal data, trying to find out everything there is to know about you, but also when everyone has access to a computer, everyone becomes a kind of potential gossip journalist, right?
They can tell everyone about your personal life.
Yes.
This is like the Gorka problem.
This is why Gorka was so hated because it leaned into that trend.
So we're going to be the online gossip columnists.
We're going to invade people's privacy relentlessly and gratuitously.
The internet is very easy.
And it is a genuine tension between that and the right to free speech.
How do you balance privacy?
How do you balance free speech?
And this online harassment thing is part of that, I think.
online mobbing as part of that but we can't have an honest conversation about it because it's so political because everyone accuses their political opponent of having an online mob or trolling them or engaging in harassment when actually they might just be calling you an idiot that's not harassment that's just someone calling you an idiot right uh so it's impossible we we need an honest honest conversation about online mobs and online harassment but all the people driving it up till now have been these highly political people
uh using the word in a very opportunistic manner yeah and also just you know thin-skinned feminists and stw types who view who view mere political discrete disagreement girls who can't do banter harassment when actually they might be calling you an idiot that's not harassment that's just someone calling you an idiot right uh so it's impossible we we need an honest honest conversation about online mobs and online harassment but all the people driving it up till now have been these highly political people uh using the word in a very opportunistic manner yeah and also just you know thin-skinned feminists and stw types who view who view mere political discrete disagreement girls who can't do banter basically which is yes i mean that's the problem isn't it i i i think a lot of the a lot of the feminist rage on on twitter particularly in the days when caroline criado perez was a thing and and those other feminazis were were a thing they were very big on twitter
it was basically girls not being able to deal with the cut and thrust of of of bans They invented the online harassment panic, the trolling panic.
That was them.
people will, you know, if a leftist heard you talking, they'll call you a massive sexist.
But you can actually go and find studies on how people respond to online harassment and trolling.
And women say they're much more upset by it than men are.
So there is a genuine gender divide there.
And that's probably why it was extraordinarily thin-skinned feminists in 2012 and 2013 who started the discussion about online harassment.
And it's always been heavily politicized because the way they used the word was, you know, anyone who disagrees with me, anyone who disagrees with feminism, anyone who's mocking me slightly, they're a harasser, they're a troll.
They're a rapist, basically.
They're going to be locked in jail, yes.
Yeah, I once got that from some woman on Twitter, some sort of blousy, late middle-aged journalist from The Guardian.
And she tried to destroy me.
I was lucky.
I managed to get off.
But I remember...
A tweet of mine being described as a rape threat, which it so totally wasn't.
There was no rapey implication there.
I thought this escalation, the trick they use, whereby they make what you've said a rude remark into something much, much worse.
It suddenly becomes a rape threat and therefore effectively a criminal act rather than just a bit of...
There are multiple incentives to make this kind of false allegations on Twitter because, first of all, Twitter will take them much more seriously if you make them.
And second of all, you'll go a lot more viral if you make a bigger allegation.
It's like a modern version of the old Nazi propaganda idea.
The bigger the lie, they said, the more people believe it.
In today's world, the bigger the lie, the more people will retweet it.
So, why is a conservative administration led by somebody who...
I mean, Boris Johnson plays fairly fast and loose with the English language.
He likes an extravagant metaphor, some of which people claim to be offended by.
Or an obscure word.
Or an obscure word.
You would think that...
A government led by this man would not be playing the left's game for them, would not be talking up to Caroline Criado Perez, recognising that these people are actually vexatious.
They're not really representative of a genuine problem.
They're just talking it up.
So why is Sajid Javid's silly rule...
Online harms bill, yes.
I... It's beyond me, honestly.
I think there's such an institutional, it's almost like a deep state, such an institutional bias in Britain to having hate speech laws, to having laws against offending people too much, against hurting people's feelings too much.
What do they call it?
Malicious communications over here?
I mean, it's just been a thing in Britain for so long, you guys don't have a first amendment.
Well...
I say you guys, I'm British too.
We don't have a First Amendment.
So I think it's just part of the political culture that we're going to have these speech regulations and that we've got to impose them now on social media companies.
I do think that ultimately could be a good thing because the good thing about having a hate speech law debated, especially with the conservative government, is that you can define hate speech a lot more narrowly than Facebook or Google or Twitter will define them on their own.
And then if Facebook or Google kick you off the hate speech in Britain and it doesn't meet the official definition, then you can take them to court, which is very different to the way it works in America where the definition of hate speech is left entirely up to these crazy far-left corporations.
Right.
And there's just no public accountability as we discussed earlier.
So there might be a silver lining, but at the end of the day you're picking, as I said earlier, you're choosing between two very, very bad options.
One is the government defining hate speech and making a law against it.
The other is these crazy Silicon Valley leftists defining hate speech and writing their terms of service around it.
So you're rocking a hard place very much so.
Yeah.
What can we do about this?
Because I worry, for example, and I know this has been, the Germans have tried this, for example, where they try and conflate opinions that need to be censored, hate speech or whatever.
legitimate views on things like climate change.
Yeah.
Where they're trying to brand climate denialism as a form of something that needs to be censored because of the dangers it can do to the populace.
Yes, and I think this, again, is something that makes me a little bit more hopeful about having the government being involved because the government moves very slowly whereas Silicon Valley moves very quickly.
And when Silicon Valley gets a little bit of pressure from the media class or politicians in America to ban something or to ban a topic or to climate denialism, as you said, they can just do it.
Whereas if you make a legal framework then it's going to be much harder for them to do that.
Yeah.
Do you think it's time we talked about the scary, scary thing that you told me?
Yes, indeed we should.
I'm sure some of your listeners, being internet people who listen to podcasts, will have an anonymous Reddit account.
Or they might post on an anonymous message board.
Or they might have an anonymous post on YouTube in the comments section, right?
Yeah.
Or 4chan.
Or 4chan.
Or 8chan, even worse.
I like to think that my special friend avatars are really on the bleeding edge of tech and they just do very edgy things.
Well, here's the scary thing.
That edgy anonymous post you made might not be anonymous in the future.
So I recently had a talk with someone who works in ad tech.
Ad tech is the technology of online advertisements.
And she told me that...
Anonymous posts on YouTube, for example, anonymous comments, are being stored in databases of ad tech companies who then try and match the anonymous posts to real identities.
They're using things like email addresses now.
If they use the same email address, then they're linked to this one identity.
They use other factors as well.
But here's the thing.
Technology exists today that could absolutely link any anonymous post to a real identity as long as you have a suspicion of who the real person might be.
So your podcast listeners will be familiar with J.K. Rowling.
Very silly tweets about many silly topics.
Keeps informing us that, you know, Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape had a gay trans relationship back in the day in Hogwarts.
Yeah.
We won't talk about that for now.
We'll talk about her pen name.
So when she finished Harry Potter, she wanted to branch off into a new genre.
Crime thrillers, I believe.
So she made a pen name.
I've got to remember the name of the pen name.
It's escaping me.
She was eventually unmasked because there was a rumor going around on Twitter that this pen name she was using is actually JK Rowling, right?
No one knew, but people suspected.
So the Times takes the book that she'd written under the pen name, sends it to some computer scientists at a university.
the computer scientists run it through some software comparing the writing style of the book with the pen name to both J.K. Rowling's books and a bunch of other authors.
And within 30 minutes, the computer reaches the conclusion, this is J.K. Rowling who wrote the book.
And that's how she was unmasked.
So it's very easy to imagine a future where all of your anonymous posts on Reddit or on YouTube or on 4chan are stored in databases and then run through computer software trying to match your writing style to, say, your public Facebook posts.
And we're using search technology to find out who's the most likely author of these anonymous posts.
So the anonymous posts you leave on Reddit, on YouTube, on 4chan may not stay anonymous for very long.
And it's not even just writing style.
My source told me that they can...
I like the way it comes from a source, this.
So it's obviously, you know...
Someone who knows their stuff.
They can also track the unique typing speed you have.
No.
Yes, they can.
The speed of your mouse clicks, how you move your mouse around.
The purpose of technology is to know everything there is to know about you and identify you whenever, wherever you are.
So, this could be the end of anonymity because...
Let's say you want to go completely off the grid, have a totally new identity, you throw your laptop away, throw your smartphone away, your tablet away, you move halfway across the world to outer Mongolia, you go into an internet cafe, you log onto Facebook with a completely new name, new profile, new location.
Facebook could theoretically figure out who you are based on how fast you're typing or how fast you're using your mouse.
That is just, that is just freaky.
Yes.
How are they storing so much data?
I mean, doesn't it cost a lot of money to store all this kind of, every tweet, everything?
Not really.
I mean, data is money.
Data is very valuable.
And an anonymous post that you can tie to a real identity is much more valuable to an advertiser than an anonymous post that can't be tied to anyone because the post will tell you more about that person, their interests, what products they'll be interested in, etc., etc., what their values are, what adverts to send them.
So they've got a strong economic incentive to unmask these people.
So in a way, people like me, who are kind of really pretty upfront about everything they say and do and don't hide behind anonymous avatars...
Well, you have an advantage because you wear your opinion on your sleeve.
Yeah.
Because this was a discussion really that I had with Douglas Murray the other week where we were talking about...
Cancel culture and stuff.
And he said, really, the only people who can have free opinions are people who aren't in jobs where they're beholden to a system which monitors you for political correctness, for wokeness.
So, if you're me, I think they're kind of unlikely to sack me for being too edgy.
The spectator, ditto.
So, it's okay for me to do that.
But for most people, they need these alter egos where they can be free to speak their mind.
Yes, if you work in a regular corporation, the HR departments will just get more draconian and more draconian every year.
The people inside Google tell me this.
Rox Day was so right about this, wasn't he?
Have you read Rox Day's books on this subject?
Oh yes, yes.
S2W's always like this, absolutely.
So tell me a bit.
I'd like you to expand on that, about the human resources departments.
Well, yes, I mean, Silicon Valley is probably more left-wing than other industries, but the people in there, you know, many, many stories about how, you know, conservatives have to stay in the closet, that conservatives can be openly threatened for their viewpoints, and HR will do nothing about it.
In fact, they might even reward the attackers, the mobbers.
Yeah.
So HR is very much on the side.
Off the cancel culture of people who want to shut down and fire you and ruin you for having the wrong opinions.
Why would you want to go into HR in the first place?
Probably because...
You haven't got any real talents.
Yes, yes.
And you just get drunk on the power.
And you decide you can be a heroic warrior for justice, you know, shutting down racism and sexism wherever you find it.
And you just develop this bias towards the furthest left definitions of those words.
And also, funnily enough, because this morning, this is a double bill.
We're really spoiling us today with podcasts.
I spoke to David Starkey.
And he made a point, which I don't think is said often enough, which is that the people who are really pushing the SJW stuff tend to be women rather than men.
Girls seem to buy in for this harder, I would say.
And HR departments tend to be women.
Yes, that does make sense.
Certainly the...
There is a growing gender divide in politics.
Populist nationalist parties around the world tend to be pretty male.
Because we're sensible.
We're not prey to our hormones.
Yeah, I mean, the Democrats are becoming a party of affluent white females.
If you look at the data, that's their biggest source of support now.
It's people who are most enthusiastic about them.
God, I've just ruined my chances of bagging an affluent white female, haven't I? If ever I get divorced, I'm completely stuck now.
Because they'll know, they'll listen to that remark about women, and they'll think, he's so sexist, even though I think, you know, chicks are great.
Yeah.
If you're trying to not be reported on Twitter, you might want to block all the women on there because I saw some data about who's most likely to report you and get your account banned.
And it looked at Republican men, Republican women, Democrat men, Democrat women.
Now, okay, don't block the Republican women because the Republican women were only slightly higher than Republican men.
It was about 14% to 16%, right?
Yeah.
Democrat men, you know, not much higher than Republican men or Republican women.
I think they're about the same as Republican women in their likelihood to block or report someone on social media.
Democrat women, 30%.
Twice as high as the nearest group.
So, there certainly seems to be something about Democrat women, liberal women, that makes them way more likely to report you or block you on social media.
That's what the data shows.
Isn't that great that I can just say a casual, allegedly sexist remark, and you have the actual metrics to support what I'm saying?
The dynamic duo.
Well, it's great.
Of empirical facts, not sexism?
I've got the advantage of just being a normal person who's actually had the experience of breeding males and females.
And any parent who's been through this goes through the same experience, which is that this is what girls do.
They goad and goad and goad and goad and goad their little brother or their big brother until the brother loses patience and hits them, at which point the girl will go crying and report the boy to parents and get them into trouble.
It's the playbook.
And you see it happening all the time and you think, well, no wonder the world's in the way it is.
No wonder 30% of...
Of Democrat girls love reporting people on Twitter.
Not Republican girls.
Republican girls have a very normal rate of locks on reports.
This is another podcast I intend to do one day, and I keep promising listeners.
A podcast on good wife material.
I think that GWM is...
It'll be your most controversial podcast yet.
Do you think it is that controversial?
I mean, surely...
In terms of making people mad, it'll be your most anger-inducing podcast yet.
Maybe not objectively controversial.
You say that.
You see, I don't even try and be controversial.
I just say normal.
It's the world which has made my views controversial.
Are you a millennial or a Gen X? I'm a millennial.
Yeah, bastards.
I mean, what have you done?
Sorry about it.
You've got to hope Gen Z saves us.
Oh, no, tell me about this, because is this another kind of meme, an urban myth, that Gen X will save us?
Gen Z, sorry, Gen Z. Yeah, I've heard this, but is there any evidence for it?
Well, I've heard different opinions.
Some people say it's a myth, some people...
Certainly, in my anecdotal experience, I don't have the data to back this up, I find Gen Z conservatives to be a lot more right-wing than millennial right-wingers, and millennial right-wingers are a lot more right-wing than Boomer and Gen X right-wingers, generally, not always.
Are they?
Because they've been so...
They find the general leftishness so objectionable that they become more extreme.
Yes, I think they experience a more extreme identitarian version of it.
I think, you know, boomer Republicans and boomer conservatives, they don't have bad opinions, but they grew up at a time when the only debate that mattered was capitalism versus socialism, America versus the USSR. That was it.
That was the main thing.
Yeah.
It makes me feel rather primitive to have emerged from that particular era, because it was like sort of Rambo.
He was basically fighting commies, wasn't he?
Yes, I mean, it was probably quite a good time to grow up in because, you know, it was very clarifying, you know, good versus evil.
Here is a system that sucks.
Here is a system that doesn't suck.
It's pretty simple.
But now we've got the divide between left and right is so much in flux.
Tell me about it.
We've got left-wing populists and right-wing populists.
Oh yeah, most of my buddies in the foxhole next to me are so-called revolutionary Marxists.
I mean, you know, go figure.
Brendan O'Neill, Claire Fox, the rest, Frank Farody.
Oh yes, I mean, there's the whole thing.
I mean...
Whereas my fellow conservative bros are nothing of the kind.
They're spineless cucks, most of them.
Yes, indeed.
Because I think the general strategy of the Republican establishment and I guess the conservative establishment as well in the neoliberal era was to say, OK, we're going to give the left everything they want on social and cultural values.
We're going to, if they call us racist, we'll just fire whoever they're calling racist.
We'll do all that because we're going to get, well, we want the economy.
We're going to get our tax cuts.
We're going to get deregulation.
We're going to get choice and competition.
And that's our priority.
We're going to get, you know, wars in the Middle East.
And that's what we want.
And, you know, we'll leave the culture and the society stuff for another day.
We'll just call those guys racist as well.
Okay, we'll just do that.
And I don't think younger conservatives believe in that anymore.
I think they're kind of disgusted with it.
Yeah, with a certain amount of reason.
Very much so, yes.
Talking about conservative fails, one of the things that's been really getting my go, one of the signs I knew that Boris Johnson was going to disappoint, was when he signed that deal with Huawei.
Now you being a techie must have views on whether this is, is it safe?
To quote marathon man?
Well, I'm just a tech journalist.
I'm not like a supercomputer programming genius, but I know lots of supercomputer programming geniuses.
And the most paranoid one I know, the one who's always the most into encryption and anonymous accounts and keeping himself secure online, he used to work in security, keeping big social networks secure.
He thinks that the whole purpose of Huawei is to gather vast amounts of data on everyone.
He thinks it's a global spying network.
And if you look at the way China behaves in Africa, how Huawei behaves in Africa, they offer these mobile networks, Huawei-run mobile networks at incredibly cut-rate prices, way, way lower than, say, an American company like Cisco.
Huawei lower, yeah.
Huawei lower.
Precisely.
You have to ask, why are they giving it away for so cheap?
I mean, yes, all Chinese products are cheap.
Well, it's market domination, isn't it?
I mean, that's the same way that Amazon's growth.
Domination, but also political domination, because they're getting these countries to pay them to build potential spying networks that they could use to hoover up all of the data, all of the browsing history, all of your browsing history, all of your mobile activity.
There's nothing, nothing to stop Huawei from accessing all that if they want to.
They could keep it secret.
So what Insofar as I've been able to equate myself with the counter-arguments, what I read somewhere is that because we're only using the hardware, somehow this is safe.
Is that right?
It doesn't make sense to me.
I mean, the hardware has to be connected to something.
The data is probably going to go through the hardware at some point.
So how is the data going to stay secure?
That's the question.
Do you really want all of your browsing history...
I don't know, you know, the weirdest porn you've ever watched on a Chinese database that they can use as Compromat, you know, in 10 years when you become a politician.
So they'll have...
This is the fear, that the Chinese will have database...
They'll know everything about us.
Everyone.
Yes, the thing is, you can't hide your online activity from your internet service provider.
And the data that you send to your internet service provider will go through the 5G network if you're on a mobile device.
And if Huawei is part of that, then they'll be able to access the data at some point, presumably.
Oh my god!
And so, are we taking it just totally on trust?
They won't do that?
It certainly seems that way to me.
I should probably look into it a little bit more.
But I think it's a huge risk to introduce Huawei into any part of your network infrastructure.
Because some data is going to go through that network infrastructure and they can see it.
Well, you're in America now.
How are the Americans taking all this?
What with the special relationship that we're supposed to have?
Well, I think it creates big problems for the intelligence security.
I think America's probably worried that if they send Intel over to the Brits, will that Intel be secure?
That's probably what they're wondering now, because will it at some point go through a Huawei device?
Well, presumably the answer is yes, if they own the whole 5G network.
No, I still have to find out how limited it really is.
Maybe it'll never go near the security services.
Who knows?
It might not be that bad.
But it's still a stupid message to send if you're trying to maintain an alliance.
Although, in fairness, I did read a fascinating article a few months ago about how the largest provider, I think, encrypted communications, so secure communications, before the internet was a big thing.
The company that provided it was a German company that was funded by the CIA. So you had all these countries around the world that used this encrypted communication technology, encryption technology.
And all the while, the CIA knew exactly how to access it.
It's fascinating.
So I have to imagine the Schadenfreude at Huawei headquarters where they saw that story.
But I would feel happier about that story if I trusted the CIA. But the CIA are the deep state, aren't they?
No, I don't trust the deep state.
It's so much part of the problem.
Yes, yes.
I mean, Huawei, the deep state, who's more dangerous?
Oh!
That's why, you know, I want to get on to this Assange story.
Yes, tell me.
Because I don't know what to think about Assange.
I genuinely, I've got an opinion on most things.
I think the deep state wants him dead because he embarrassed the deep state.
I think that's the simple truth of the matter.
I think people who are not frightened by the establishment, not frightened by the deep state...
Have no reason to fear Assange.
Trump was a huge fan of Assange on the campaign trail and then suddenly changed his tune once he entered office.
Why?
Well, who knows?
I think once you become president, then you get all this pressure on you from the agencies, from advisors, from the deep state.
What, the agency that tried to get you impeached and sacked?
Yes, precisely that one, yes.
And I guess even if they try to get you impeached and sacked, then it's still dangerous to just ignore them.
And they really want this guy.
They really want Assange.
And some people, the argument that's being made against Assange to win over conservatives is that his reports got U.S. agents, U.S. sources killed overseas.
That's their strongest argument.
Which is a good argument, isn't it?
It's a good argument if it were true.
The thing is, what they're talking about is the Afghan war logs, the leak of the unredacted files.
So WikiLeaks does not release unredacted files when there's a risk of someone being killed.
They don't do that.
They're not completely irresponsible.
They wouldn't publish something that they know is going to get someone killed.
In this one instance, the full unredacted files got out of their hands and into the hands of hackers.
That wasn't deliberate, first of all.
And second of all, the person who made the accident was not Julian Assange.
It was a Guardian reporter.
Who was that?
I've got to be very clear about that, so I'm just going to double check.
Yes, don't drop me in any legal shit, man.
No, no, no, of course.
But...
Well, you can Google the story.
You can Google the story, but the point is the reason the files leaked was because he included a password to the unredacted files in the footnotes of a book he released, not realizing, I believe, that the password hadn't expired.
And that's how these full unredacted files that did cause big problems for Americans overseas came to be leaked to hackers.
But you can't possibly hold Julian Assange responsible for that.
It's a total excuse.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Okay, so I should be on Team Assange.
And there's another thing to consider.
I don't know if you're pro the death penalty.
I certainly would say there are some crimes that are so bad and so horrific that they do warrant the death penalty.
Yeah, I think in the fields of environmentalism.
Right.
If you're going to destroy the world economy in the name of a non-existent problem, I'm not saying death penalty, but definitely, I'm thinking probably gulags of some kind.
Fair enough.
With me giving lectures every day, that's the thing.
The James Delingpole lecture.
Right, right.
Morning, environmentalists.
Morning, Greta.
Morning, David.
On a big screen that they can't escape every day, like in 1984.
Absolutely.
And they'd have to do exercises.
I'd make them, you know, it'd be like a mixture of Dellingpole and...
So it'd be good for them.
I mean, really good for them.
Dellingpole, Pilates maybe.
They'd be on an all-meat diet.
Yes.
Or, you know, a kind of...
Well, a lot of red meat anyway, to kind of counter.
Red meat?
It would be like the Americans who got kidnapped in the Korean War, and they had to go to the re-education camps, and I would be doing re-education camps for Greenies, and I think it would be...
I'd be giving something back to the world.
The least energy-efficient gym equipment you can imagine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it would be good.
So anyway, sorry, I interrupted you.
Side track, we're talking about the death penalty.
You don't want the death penalty for death penalty.
You just want to put her in some sort of camp.
But regardless of how you feel about the death penalty, certainly you can make a case there are some crimes so horrific that you should just knock a guy off.
Maybe a total psychopath, serial killer, murderer, rapist, pedophile, whatever.
Yes.
Embarrassing the deep state does not warrant the death penalty, in my view.
Even accidental leaking of a file, if it's accidental, does not warrant the death penalty, regardless of how much damage it caused.
It wasn't intentional.
Yes, I mean, there aren't many crimes in America you get.
Even reckless journalism that endangers lives, would you kill journalists for that?
I mean, how many lives were killed by the stupid newspapers that published that headline story back in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that could hit British bases in 45 minutes?
They got people killed.
That's very true.
Yes, lots.
So, when it comes to Assange, just remember that the reason they want to punish him, maybe even sentence him to death, is because he embarrassed the deep state.
Yes.
That's the reason.
Okay.
You sold me on that one.
Tell me about...
Do you know anything about Q? QAnon.
I try to avoid that topic.
Those guys seem a little bit weird, to be honest with you.
You see, I don't know.
I always find it slightly worrying when I don't have an opinion on something, given that opinions are my trade.
So you've helped me out on the Assange one.
I'm now Team Julian, Team Assange.
Excellent.
We don't know where to go on Q. There's another guy I think I can talk to about Q and all that.
Yeah, I'm really not an expert.
You should really ask Jack Posobiec about this, because he's been a target of the many times for calling them nutters.
Oh, he thinks they're nutters, does he?
Yes, well, a lot of people think they're nutters.
Oh, do they?
Other people are very, very enthusiastic.
I have friends who are, okay, one or two friends who are Q believers, one or two contacts, but most of my friend circles think they're nutters.
I just try and avoid it because it seems too complicated for me.
Yes, that is probably the best policy on those ones.
One can't have too many wacko opinions that people get you on.
Yeah, you can't dive down every single rabbit hole you see.
You can't have too many hills to die on.
You'll get a sore head.
Yeah.
You'll get stuck in one of them.
Do you have any good news for me?
I look at Silicon Valley and I think this is like...
Blade Runner, but much, much worse.
The corporations have taken over the world, but they're much more evil than the ones in Blade Runner, which were just kind of harmless neon lights and stuff with a few replicants and a lot of rain, and that was fine.
We can cope with that.
But I really can't...
I don't want lots of little kind of Yale-educated Nazis pretending to be anti-fascists sort of snooping on my life and judging me and cancelling me.
How do we do...
Is there any hope?
Well...
That's a good question.
Honestly, I can get that the kids call it being black-pilled when you think there's no hope whatsoever.
Thank you for explaining that term.
That's what black-pilled means.
There's a red pill, which is when you take the red pill and you become awakened to some truth that's been suppressed.
There's the blue pill, which is when you say, I'm just going to live a normal life and have safe neoliberal opinions.
Then there's a black pill, where you just lose all hope in the future.
Right, so maybe...
In a way, I think Peter Hitchens is quite blackpilled.
Oh, he was blackpilled before blackpilled was at work.
Yeah, he really is.
That's a perfect...
He's great, but he does seem to have not much hope for the future.
Whereas I do have a little bit.
Yes, no, I think I have a little bit too.
I'll tell you why I have a little bit of hope.
Because all of this online censorship...
It's just damage control by the establishment.
The signal got out in 2016, you know, the power of the dark side was broken.
By the Lord of Light?
By the Lord of Light.
I wonder if he's ever been called the Lord of Light before.
We're mixing our pop culture references now.
Yeah, no, no.
The Dark Side was defeated.
The Lord of Light was triumphant.
Harry Potter defeated Voldemort.
And the Hobbits defeated Sauron.
Yeah, they did.
And that happened because the mainstream media lost its power, because all of this energy from the grassroots was able to bubble up.
People were able to share information on social media.
People were able to organize, go outside the establishment.
go outside the party machinery.
And in a way, you can't, no matter how much censorship you do, you can't really put that genie back in the bottle.
You can do some damage, maybe even a lot of damage.
Yeah.
But you can't undo the internet entirely.
Right.
They're certainly trying to make it a lot less effective by making Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg the online speech police.
They've taken out lots of really great, you know, right-wing voices, really effective right-wing voices with huge audiences, you know, Laura Luma, Paul Joseph Watson, a band on so many social media platforms, Sagan of Akata, you know, I could go on and on.
The list is endless.
Katie Hopkins, so many.
So yes, they've done a lot of damage.
It shouldn't be under the rest of it.
That's hundreds of millions of potential social media impressions that they've taken away from the right ahead of 2020.
If that's not election interference, I don't know what is.
But at the same time, they can't ban everyone.
They can't suppress the message everywhere.
It will get out.
We do live in the age of the internet.
And Trump is going to win.
And Trump is going to win, I think.
Well...
Who's going to win after Trump, though?
Isn't it all over after 2024?
Well, you know, politics moves in cycles.
And if Trump wins, then the next midterm election after that, 2022, probably very bad for Republicans because there are more vulnerable seats that will be going up for election.
So I shouldn't be thinking about moving to America, really.
I should have moved...
No, no, no.
If...
If you're purely basing your destination on soundness, how sound your destination is, you've got to go to Hungary.
I mean, where else?
Okay, Hungary.
Hungary is the most sound country in the world.
Yeah, but the language is quite complicated.
Yes.
I mean, there's also Poland.
Maybe Italy.
They've got Salvini now.
I certainly think that if there is hope...
You know the 1984 quote, if there is hope, it lies in the proles?
Yes.
I think, for a right-ringer today, if there is hope, it lies in the polls.
Yes.
Ah, okay.
All the Eastern Europeans.
They're extremely based, extremely woke.
Flat taxes?
Flat taxes, hate communism.
And when they ban so-called hate speech, what they do is they take the Nazi flag and the hammer and sickle, the communist flag, and they ban both of them at the same time.
So even if they do regulate speech, they're doing it to both sides equally.
Yeah.
Traditionalists, maybe not quite so libertarian for your tastes.
No, I don't.
Look, I have problems with libertarians.
My problem with libertarians is, as I keep saying, that they always play the more libertarian-than-thou games.
So, you know, you don't want open borders, or you don't want...
Maybe I'm confusing it with neoliberals at the Adam Smith Institute, but I have problems with that too.
You're saying you shouldn't be allowed to give your kid gender-changing hormones when they're nine years old?
What?
Are you some kind of fascist?
So I've definitely discovered, as I got older, I've discovered my inner conservative.
Can I ask you one last point before we have a cup of coffee or something?
Which is, why isn't Peter Thiel saving us?
I mean, he seems to be the one person in Silicon Valley who's not a stupid, liberal, pink-tard nightmare.
Well, I don't know him personally, but just because someone isn't being very public, in my experience, just because someone isn't at the forefront of things doesn't mean they're not helping.
And I think a lot of people do help out behind the scenes.
You know, I'm not talking about Teal specifically because I don't know what he's up to.
Certainly he's in a difficult spot because he's in Silicon Valley and it's not safe to be a right-winger in Silicon Valley.
Probably safer for him because he's already a billionaire.
Isn't that not true, Alan?
Basically, you and I need to be billionaires to sort out...
Yes, this is actually the solution to almost every problem in the West if you and I just became billionaires.
That's what everyone should focus on.
That's it, basically.
Yeah, but you've got to be kind of on the spectrum, probably.
Right.
Actually, I've been accused of being on the spectrum.
I don't know about you.
Certainly, in certain online discussions, I've certainly received that.
Then again, having been to Silicon Valley, I know how to recognize people who are genuinely on the spectrum.
And?
Probably not us.
They don't meet your eyes.
Probably not us.
Well, they do it less than normal people.
They're extremely shy and awkward and obviously incredibly, incredibly smart.
This is why they're so often in big tech.
But political correctness is especially difficult for them.
Because, you know, James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired, he is autistic.
He said so in interviews.
If you're autistic, you're very good at understanding systems.
You're very good at processing complex sets of facts and data.
But you're not so good at navigating social systems.
And what political correctness is, is a social system, a system of speech codes that actually conflicts with the truth.
You know, it's not factually correct, it's politically correct, right?
So James Damore simply saw truth, that men and women are different, an obvious truth.
He saw the lack of viewpoint diversity and other truth.
And if he was extremely socially savvy, he would have realized that saying these truths will get you ostracized and fired.
Yes.
But he didn't realize that.
So in a way, political correctness is harder on autistic and people who are on the spectrum more than other people.
Speaking of processing power...
We might want to finish on this because we're talking about technology.
It occurred to me that artificial intelligence is naturally conservative because a totally neutral artificial intelligence simply processes data and spits out conclusions.
If you want to make it biased, you have to introduce that bias somehow.
And I think this is what leftists in Silicon Valley are panicked the most about.
That's why they've created this field called machine learning fairness.
And the whole idea behind machine learning fairness is making sure that artificial intelligence does not start spitting out so-called racist and sexist and phobic conclusions.
Because I think they realize that if you leave AI to its own devices to just process data and come to factual conclusions, it's going to demolish a lot of left-wing assumptions about things.
Yes.
We didn't even talk about that eugenics...
Oh, Zubisky, yes.
Zubisky.
Before we move on to that, I'll just say a very, very simple solution that you don't need an AI to solve.
But imagine if you asked an AI, well, what sort of person is most at risk of joining a radical terrorist cell?
The answer that the AI will spit out is the kind of answer that would get Tommy Robinson banned from Twitter.
I really cannot think what you...
I think some of your assumptions might be racist.
Or even Islamophobic, am I allowed to...
Oh, I've given the game away.
I've betrayed my assumptions.
Some sort of phobicism thing, yes.
Yeah.
But isn't it weird, like we said earlier, that one doesn't want to have too many out there opinions on stuff.
So this guy, what's his name again?
Andrew Sabisky.
Andrew Sabisky.
He fulfills the category of kind of weird thinkers outside the box.
Yeah, so this is what Dominic Cummings calls for, right?
Weirdos and oddballs to join the government.
And then he gives an interview to some civil service magazine or something about two or three years ago in which he talks about eugenics.
He talks about it like somebody who's just recently been reading about it and has been quite excited about different aspects of it.
And he's not really...
He's not really saying, I want to create a new master race or anything like that.
He's not saying exterminate the weak and the disabled.
He's just playing around with it.
But even for this, he loses his job.
Now, that's not the bit that interests me.
The bit that interests me about this is that even conservatives are saying, oh no, I'm not going to go there.
I'm not going to touch this one with a barge pole.
What do you think about that?
I think most millennial right-wingers, especially, they just see this as part of the problem.
This is why they don't crush conservative elites.
Because, you know, on the one hand, they'll go out on stage and they'll say, well, we believe in free speech.
Even dangerous, offensive, unacceptable ideas that need to be debated in the open.
All viewpoints are important to be heard.
And yes, you can make it the case that this was government.
This wasn't a university campus or a social media platform.
He wasn't going to be put in charge of government department of eugenics.
Yeah, he was like an outside advisor, some sort of consultant.
One small voice among many.
And, you know...
You don't want people who hold the same opinion advising you.
But also, going back to what you said about how we're not going to have any privacy whatsoever again, what that means is taken to its logical extreme, and it will be taken to its logical extreme because we know how zealous the other side are.
Anyone who's had a wrong opinion on anything ever will have it used against them to stop them getting a job.
Yes, and it'll be very common, I think, because you go on Reddit to all these anonymous posts and you think you're safe.
You can say whatever you want.
You can even have some fun and have edgy opinions than you actually hold.
You can roleplay the craziest person imaginable.
You're giving me ideas now.
People had a lot of fun on these anonymous platforms growing up.
It was the outlet to say the craziest shit that was ever on your mind.
That could all potentially be on Mars and link back to you.
In fact, wasn't Sabisky's Reddit account discovered?
Was it?
I haven't looked into it, but I'm curious whether it was a totally anonymous account or whether it was linked to his name somehow.
Because I wonder if it was some sort of software trick they used where they matched his writing style or something like that.
Certainly that technology does exist and can be used.
So I think we have to get to a point where our culture is more tolerant of wacky ideas and weird comments because they're all online forever now.
But sadly I think we're going the other way.
We're getting less tolerant, we're getting more determined to cancel and go on witch hunt mobs.
And it seems to be getting worse, but hopefully it's simply getting worse before it gets better.
Good.
Well, on that really depressing note, I'm going to say it is time for you to get your special friend red pill shaped badge.
I'm sorry it's not black pill.
In fact, you know what I might do?
Because when the red pill special edition runs out...
We need to issue really expensive badges, really exclusive, in different shapes I imagine.
There could be a black pill badge, which I imagine would be like having a black American Express card.
You've got to have quite high income for that, haven't you?
Yes, that's true.
I mean, I guess if we wanted to make the pills into actual pills, a red pill would be very much an upper and a black pill very much a downer.
So a black pill would just knock you out, whereas a red pill gets you hyped up and talking about everything.
So yes, one's speed and one's maybe heroin, something like that.
Yeah, opium, something like that.
I think there's room for all.
I'm quite libertarian in the field of drugs.
I think there's room for all of them.
Indeed.
People can make their own decisions about that kind of thing.
I become more traditionalist as I get older, much like you.
I think glorifying what the fully traditionalist right would call degeneracy in popular culture has probably gone a little bit too far over the last few decades, but certainly I think people should be left to their own devices to make their own decisions about things.
Yeah.
Amen, bro.
Okay, right, I'm going to say bye-bye now.
Thank you very much to my special guest, Alan Bakari, and let's hope that Peter Thiel, is it Thiel or Thiel?
Thiel.
Peter Thiel listens to this and thinks, fuck, I'm going to give these guys a billion dollars each just to give them some fuck-off money to help them save the world.
It might happen.
Bye!
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