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June 30, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:20:04
Carbon Mike 4
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Welcome to the Dalling Pod with me James Dalling-Paul.
And I am so excited about today's guest.
You've met him before.
He has the best voice in the world and he's full of wisdom.
His name is Carbon Mike.
Oh, by the way, before we go any further, please remember to support my Patreon to free me from the evil.
I know some of you have objections to giving money to Patreon.
Maybe I'll find another place soon.
But in the meantime, yeah, Patreon's good.
Mike, how are you?
I'm very well.
First of all, I want to weigh in on the Patreon thing very briefly because what I have noticed...
Now, of course, I would never urge anyone to use a particular platform if they're boycotting, but what I do notice is a lot of conservatives justifiably angry at the shenanigans of big tech, of this company or that company.
I think a lot of us take it to a point that is not productive in terms of advancing the overall strategic position.
That is to say...
Like, a sound, true-blue conservative who wants to support you and is not supporting you just because you're on Patreon.
They don't want to support Patreon.
I think is, in my opinion...
Guilty of just tactically misreading the situation.
There are many instances in actual warfare when you may sacrifice a bit of ground tactically to advance the overall position strategically.
Yes, it rankles when I think of Patreon kind of snuffling up whatever percentage of the money that people give to you.
But the fact is that people are giving you money to do what you do, and that's good.
And perhaps I would kind of respectfully suggest that people rethink that perhaps it could be you, it could be anyone who they want to support on Patreon, any conservative they want to support on Patreon.
I would suggest that sometimes it might be worth it I'm just saying that I think sound conservatives Who are,
again, justifiably angry at whatever tech platform, goodness knows there's reason to be angry with all of them, right?
Might want to rethink that because we can't, we're not going to kind of, we're going to win this thing through perfection.
We're going to win this thing, you know, with kind of superior tactics and superior strategy.
So that's it.
No, do you know what?
I'm so glad you said that, because I just wanted to add two things to that.
One is, I had a long conversation with Vox Day, who has been representing several people fighting lawsuits against Patreon.
And he said, because I said to him about this, look, you know, what if I build this fantastic career on Patreon?
pull the rug from under me like they did with sargon of akkad and milo and a few others back in the day yeah and and vox said look you know i i understand your reservations about patreon but he said i think it's highly unlikely that they will take the risk of doing that again because we so own their asses we are so owning their asses in this lawsuit right that they don't really want to Why would they want to defund a small fra like me anyway?
Although, of course, the counter-argument to that is even mild people like me are increasingly getting targeted by the hard left.
You know, the fact that you're kind of innocent is no defence.
That's right, yeah.
The second thing I've noticed, some of the people who announce in a highly principled way that they won't give a penny to Patreon, what they're really saying is, I'm too tight to fund your podcast.
And I'm going to dress it up as my moral superiority.
And you're going to feel, you know, no, I'm not buying that.
But anyway, that's by the way.
Since we last spoke, oh my God.
I mean, did you not think?
Did you see any of this shit coming?
Because I didn't.
I knew craziness was coming around the corner because I knew there were going to be consequences of this insane lockdown.
But I seem to remember the last time we were talking, the main problem in the world was the fact that the global economy was being tanked.
As a result of a stupid lockdown imposed by idiots.
Government bedwetters.
Yeah, exactly.
And that was, you know, looking back, that looks like a luxury problem.
The destruction of the entire global economy seems like nothing.
And okay, so we've been having the last week in London, we had the Black Lives Matter, you know, sort of Graffiti-ing Churchill's statue, trying to pull it down.
And horrible scenes like that.
Poor woman on the police, the policewoman on her police horse, where they chucked a bicycle on the horse.
That was horrible.
Yeah.
But tell me, what's been going on in the US? I mean, hasn't even crazier shit been happening over there?
Well, so here's the thing.
Yes, a lot of crazy stuff has been happening over here.
But I just want to interject about what's happening on your side of the water.
Yeah.
I think I have to say that what it looks like to me, Is that much of my optimism about ordinary people in the UK has been warranted, has been shown to be warranted, because I'm getting reports from my people over there, from my network, that And there's footage out.
There's like the network of people, network of volunteer soldiers, some retired, maybe mostly retired, maybe a few active duty, falling out all over the country to protect statues.
Bunch of guys falling out to protect the cenotaph.
Football lads falling out to chase Antifa away from whatever spots.
And I have to say, it was heartening to see.
There was...
I forget where it was.
I got into a big Twitter argument with some people.
But it was a relatively civil argument about Hoddesdon.
I don't know if you said that.
Hoddesdon.
But, yeah, the townspeople came out.
To protect their monument.
And they were faced off.
They were surrounding.
They were in the town center and kind of facing off against Black Lives Matter protesters.
Now, the argument was, well, that was always meant to be a peaceful protest.
No one was planning to deface anything.
Nobody was planning to riot.
No one was planning to do anything in the back and forth I was having on my Twitter.
Wow.
Well, that may well be, as you say, but the thing is that people are not irrational for coming out and saying, no, we're not going to have that here.
Because the fact is, all you have to do is look at the news, look at YouTube, look at your newsfeed, and you see what kinds of things Black Lives Matter and their camp followers are getting up to.
You see this incestuous relationship between Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
So, I find it very interesting that Black Lives Matter people have taken, let's be as charitable as possible and say maybe the people actually running the organization really did not want to kind of mix streams with Antifa and with non-law-abiding citizens.
Let's say that for a second.
Well, the fact is that they haven't done anything to dissociate themselves from We're good to go.
Then you have to exert the media discipline that's required in an age like this and come out and say, listen, we're not going to have any of this burning.
We're not going to have this looting.
This is not what we are about.
You have to say that.
And if you don't say that, then the fact is that you are guilty of bad optics at the very least, even if you're not guilty of actual rioting.
So that excuse, that...
Black Lives Matter is mostly peaceful, but there are some people who have, you know, signed on after the fact and done bad things.
That excuse will not wash because, again, I have not heard from any of the leadership of Black Lives Matter, and no one has heard from them, you know, condemning this kind of activity, saying they won't have any of it, making sure that people know that they are on the side of reason and law and order.
I want to jump sideways into the thing of law and order.
I want to come back to that in a minute.
But, you know, these people seem to have...
Because, see, I've studied the actual civil rights movement.
Well, one, these people don't understand the history of the real civil rights movement.
They don't understand its grounding in the Black church.
They don't understand its grounding in Black labor, in the organized labor movement in the Black community.
And they don't understand the tremendous kind of erudition and discipline and focus that the leaders of this movement show.
This is a very narrow, very disciplined, very focused political movement that just was trying to accomplish a couple of of achievable political objectives.
They weren't maximalists.
They weren't revolutionaries.
They were evolutionaries.
And Black Lives Matter, among others in the modern age, have just taken the thing of protest from that movement and left everything by the wayside.
So, for example, civil disobedience in the age of the actual civil rights movement involved disobeying a very specific law that they held to be wrong based on the higher law or either based on the Constitution or based on the higher law of God.
OK, and they said, OK, you know, it is wrong to segregate the lunch counters.
It's wrong to lynch people.
It's wrong to keep people from voting.
It's wrong to do.
So we're going to disobey this narrow law, right?
But we're going to obey every other law scrupulously.
This was why when you saw civil rights people do direct actions, okay?
They were dressed to the nines.
They looked like they were going to church and their behavior was beyond reproach.
So the people listening and the people watching could see that, could see that I see these people seem to just want one specific thing.
They don't want to burn everything down.
What do we see now?
We see the amazing spectacle of people saying defund the police as they run around and and and so chaos and violence and terror and guarantee that everyone watching that is going to say, no, no, no, we need more police and more no, no, no, we need more police and more money for police.
So these people are not politically serious because they're not really engaged in politics.
They are not evolutionaries.
They are revolutionaries.
But people on the fence, people thinking about them, people who are justifiably angry about George Floyd need to remember that Ultimately, this is a political fix.
What happened to George Floyd is a problem.
It is a general problem we have in the United States.
It is solvable via political means, but revolution is the opposite of politics.
Politics has to do with governance.
Governance requires continuity and discipline and those kind of things.
Revolution is an upheaval of an established order.
It's a change of order.
People who want to burn things down can't be trusted to do this thing because this is a political fix we have to do.
Also, by the way, people who hate American society A dentist who hates civilization can't be trusted to fix it.
Any more than a dentist who hates your guts can be trusted to fix your teeth.
Anyway, I've gone on for a bit.
And you've upset me by bringing out my least favorite topic, my teeth.
And now you've triggered me.
But actually, Mike, I think you've been over generous in even giving them the semi-benefit of the doubt.
It's quite obvious.
It's not like Black Lives Matter.
It's this wonderful protest movement which emerged suddenly in protest at the beating of George Floyd.
We know that was the pretext.
I'm not sure how long it's been around, but essentially it's just a different end of the same turd as Antifa, which before that was the Black Bloc, which before that was Occupy.
It's all the same thing, and it's all the hard left trying to...
It's neo-Marxism.
They want to overthrow the system.
Well, that's...
Yes, yes.
That's correct.
That's correct.
I mean, yeah, rhetorically, I was being kind of scrupulously fair in how I was saying that, but you're absolutely right.
Look, Antifa has been around even since before Occupy.
And way, way back in the day, there was an Antifa that used to just kind of mix it up with actual Nazi skinheads in the street.
But this is not that.
This is something different.
Black Lives Matter emerged, I believe, in the aftermath of the Ferguson shoot.
It was either Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown.
And the thing I noticed back then, I didn't like the movement back then.
I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for a bit as I saw how they operated.
But even back then, what I didn't like about it was that their aims, they had, they had a, I don't know if they still have website, but their website had a very, a big sprawling maximalist lefty manifesto.
They announced openly their hostility to all kinds of things, including inexplicably the traditional family, right?
That's classic Marxism, isn't it?
Thank you.
The end of the family.
Okay.
So, so right away, I'm not with you at all because I know, I understand very well that like the destruction of the family is, is the very thing that has given us a semi-permanent black underclass in, in America.
It's the destruction of the black family, not the black crime gene, online conservatives, not our IQ scores.
It's the destruction, the government...
Sponsored destruction of black families that has led to the kind of crime problems that dumb conservatives, present company, I'm not referring to present company, that has led to dumb conservatives making stupid comments about crime statistics as if those are material to a discussion of We're
in police abuse, because of course, police abuse is a dagger at the heart of the republic.
It is an abuse of power problem, not a race problem.
And all the dumb conservatives I see on television or online talking about, referring to crime stats, which are true, because I've read those same crime stats, but referring to those as if they excuse police but referring to those as if they excuse police misconduct, those stats, which are a disgrace, which are a stain on the national life.
those crime stats are pretty much a direct result of the destruction of The systematic destruction of black families.
And so for these people now, you know, to have started this movement on the back of a police incident, and to say that they're in favor of the destruction of the traditional family is a disgrace for the black intelligentsia, right?
I mean, you know, maybe one could say that the broader intelligentsia is not paying attention, what have you, but for the black intelligentsia, It's been clear that they were kind of...
Basically, you know, a bunch of postmodern types, all that Marxist stuff, you know, post-structural, intersectional feminists.
Exactly right.
It's like I think the two founders are both women.
They're both so-called queer women, what have you.
So right away, I was like, okay, these people are a problem.
But again, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If you all can move the needle politically on these things that we think are important, fine.
And what we found was that over and over again, They blew it.
They never went for the transcendent moment.
They never tried to expand the conversation to how to get people to agree with us.
I think that the first time I realized that these guys really had nothing was when they interrupted a Bernie Sanders rally and kind of talked to people, behaved churlishly, what have you, and actually Sanders himself kind of We're good to
go.
That tells you a lot about these kind of movements.
Because what it tells you is that you're in the presence of people who can't take yes for an answer and who will not take yes for an answer.
Right?
Because what do you think?
This is a Bernie Sanders rally.
At that time in America, the people most likely to be receptive to a message from Black Lives Matter were intended Bernie Sanders voters.
Right?
So why are you talking to these people as if they're the enemy?
Right?
Because you don't have a plan.
You don't have any ideas.
Again, because you're not grounded in anything except social media and except the dumb things you were learning in your gender studies class, in your ethnic studies class, in your post-modernist literature bullshit.
You know, Marxism dressed up as some kind of actual science class.
You have nothing.
You have nothing.
And so that's what you do.
And again, subsequent events have...
Have borne that out.
And so you find that what you say about them is 100%.
And this is why, by the way, the mainstream media, and I've been getting arguments with people about this too, the mainstream media is desperate to imply that more people agree with these guys than actually do agree with these guys.
Yes.
Why?
Why is that?
It's driving me nuts.
Very good.
Why?
Because the Gramscian march through the institutions isn't just an attempt to destroy the institutions from within.
The Gramscian march more generally is an attempt to destroy common sense because Gramsci himself said, if I can destroy common sense, I can destroy a society.
Now, if you can destroy society, A society's sense of itself as being fundamentally decent.
That is, if you can destroy the sense, if you can destroy people's sense that reasonable points of view are actually held to be reasonable by most people, then you've gone a long way toward winning.
So, if you're someone sitting in suburban America somewhere, And you're seeing the ridiculousness, the destructiveness, the vicious, stupid, cold, empty nihilism of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, if you're seeing this.
And at the same time, you feel, again, let's say you're some white guy.
And so at the same time, you feel, man, what that guy did to Floyd was awful.
And this is, by the way, a lot of people, a lot of people, guys I know, ex-law enforcement people, ex-army people, Ex-military police looking at this thing saying, this is nauseating.
This is terrible, right?
This guy should have been fired long ago.
People, you know, ordinary people believe this.
Ordinary white people in America believe this.
Okay, now, if you're a person like that, and so you think that you think that was horrible, that was a crime, and then you look at what Black Lives Matter is getting up to.
If you can be made to think that everyone else is, for some strange reason, supporting these people, supporting Black Lives Matter, then you're much more likely to despair.
You're like, well, maybe that's it, because I don't see why we have to burn our cities down just because we have police officers who are criminally bad at their jobs, who commit crimes in the course of duty.
I don't see why we have to burn our cities to reform our police departments.
Right?
Yeah.
And so that's one, right?
It's, I think, a largely calculated tactic of trying to show people a false image of the country.
The other thing is that in terms of their own cognitive dissonance, these media people, these are the same people who are largely behind things like, what is that new project at the New York Times, the 16-whatever...
Basically, the America has always been evil project.
That's a good...
I like the name of that project.
That has been the New York Times' philosophy for a long time.
Since forever.
I mean, since at least Lincoln Steffens.
I've seen the future and it works.
After his visit to the Behind the Iron Curtain to see the...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is...
The New York Times, that project, it's the same kind of, I think they have a, there is a cognitive dissonance is what I'm trying to get at, that those people feel.
Yeah.
Because for their thesis to be true, it would have to be the case that there wasn't a broad wellspring of decency in the United States.
That it would have to be true that people across the country of any color, right?
Look at this footage and say, look at this officer kneeling on this guy's neck while he's in handcuffs, suffocating him.
And say, well, I don't see what's wrong with that.
That looks fine to me.
You see what I'm saying?
Nobody thinks that, do they?
I imagine even racists.
Even racists.
They don't.
I mean, it's just normal, a human response to look at that and go, it's bad.
And yet there is assumption that somehow, you're right, they are trying to foment this notion that actually most Americans and most British don't care about this.
They don't care about injustice.
And that's why we must take to the streets.
Either don't care about it or actively support it.
They have to, they must prove this.
In order for their thesis not to fall apart, okay?
And they don't want their thesis to fall apart because, of course, if their thesis fall apart, their whole raison d'etre falls apart, right?
So this is...
And now you see how this destruction of common sense cuts both ways.
Because on the one hand, right, you're taking...
You want to show that...
It's like you want to show people...
show young, let's say young black people, for example, that the country is racist and everyone's, you're surrounded by these white people who are walking around kind of seething with racist thoughts, right?
And then on the other side, you're trying to show white people that, well, actually, your reasonable, common sense view about race relations, policing, reform, whatever, you're Your reasonable common sense view is in the minority.
Most of us are with Black Lives Matter.
cuts us right down the middle.
Do you see how that just...
And either side, if a critical mass of people on either side really believes that, then the lefties and the revolutionaries and the kind of the burners and the looters will have scored a massive victory, which is why every chance I get, I'm saying to people, listen, which is why every chance I get, I'm saying to No one believes this stuff.
I had a big argument with Milo Yiannopoulos on his show a couple of Fridays ago.
Along the same lines, you know me, I've said this for a long time, it's like black people are very conservative.
Never mind how they vote.
That's a separate question.
But the fact is, working class black people, middle class black people, those who work real jobs, that is, you know, academia, they're a separate thing.
And the media people are a separate thing.
But everyone who works a real job is very conservative.
And most of us want nothing to do with all this writing business.
Most of us think, and most of us, by the way, are more up in arms than the Republican leadership about police brutality and police violence.
That is, most of us are more hawkish about it because we have closer experience with it.
So we get it.
We know what's going on.
You know, I remember Eleanor Bumpers.
I remember names from back in the 70s of people who had been wrongly killed by the police.
But the fact is that I also understand that we've made progress with We've made tremendous progress.
Because and you talk to black people, any talk to any black person who works, who does a real job for living in America, for example.
And they'll tell you right away that 60 years ago, you know, if a police officer did that, there wouldn't even have been an inquest.
There would have been nothing.
It would have been like he would have gone and done the paperwork and stood by the body and completed his shift and gone home.
That would have been it.
Yeah.
OK, so the fact is that we can have a situation where this happens and the police officer gets arrested and charged and the officers with him get arrested and charged.
That is progress.
But again, as I keep saying, we have to remember that progressives, we have to be not not not we have to not let ourselves be fooled by the name they give themselves progress.
Progressives are neither interested in progress, nor can they recognize progress when they see it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree with that.
By the way, I wanted to ask you, well, actually, the various things you said I wanted to pick you up on, one of which, just briefly...
I don't think Black Lives Matter are really aiming their message at black people.
I don't think they give a shit about black people.
I think the people they want are white liberals.
That's where the message is aimed, and that's how they want to overthrow the system.
They want both.
They want both.
I see what you mean.
I see what you mean, yes.
They want both.
Yeah, go on.
Actually, I wanted to ask you about something.
Last weekend, after the Black Lives Matter I thought it was shocking.
There was a double-page picture spread in the Mail on Sunday, which I don't know how familiar you are with our newspapers, but I would say there are only really two vaguely conservative newspapers left in the country.
One is the Mail on Sunday, And one is the Sunday Telegraph.
The rest have pretty much been converged by the left.
Anyway, so this double-page spread was in the Mail on Sunday, which I imagine has an audience which is probably in the Shires mainly, certainly conservative voting, social conservative, you know, sort of patriotic and so on.
And the caption to this photograph was, Powerful statement.
They came in their thousands, driven by an urge to be heard that overrode the lockdown.
A stark, simple message, Black Lives Matter, was etched on the homemade placards they carried as they marched on Downing Street yesterday before the protests became marred by violence.
Well, shut up.
Your reaction is a good one.
It was very much shut up.
I mean, I thought that newspapers were produced by journalists.
Now, no self-respecting journalists could imagine that that slogan, Black Lives Matter, had suddenly emerged from the ether on that particular, because of the George Floyd killing.
Correct.
They, any, particularly on a conservative newspaper, any conservative newspaper must surely have known, well, I'm sure they did know, that Black Lives Matter is a branch of Antifa.
It's got nothing to do with George Floyd or anything else.
It is a hard-left activist group.
And okay, so maybe some of the Daily Mail and Sunday readers' kids were on that march.
I mean, I know that some of my kids have been brainwashed and, you know, writing angry kind of stuff about this.
I won't get into more details on that.
But they pitched their message very well.
But I saw this fascinating thing on YouTube the other day.
Some American girl, youngish, was talking about the origins of these protests in the Sunrise Movement, which, as you probably know, is a hard left environmental movement which mobilized its youth machine.
They were looking for a pretext, and the George Floyd thing came in nicely.
What I'm saying is, this rage is fake.
It was rage looking for an excuse to be triggered by something and have mass protests.
Correct.
It was revolutionaries doing what they always wanted to do anyway and having found a perfect pretext.
And also, by the way, having found law enforcement to be...
I'm trying to think of a suitably kind of...
Derogatory word, yeah, exactly.
Oh my God, cucked.
There you go.
Tell me about this.
I mean, tell me about police officers taking the knee to effectively terrorists, aren't they?
Jesus Christ.
Just give me your thoughts on that.
I mean, I guess it's difficult for me to articulate my feelings on this thing while staying calm, because especially someone like me, I very much feel I'm politically homeless because...
Because it's like I am, of course, outraged.
Again, as a conservative, as a foundationist, I'm outraged by the behavior of this police officer, the killing of Mr.
George Floyd.
But I don't know, I guess maybe having disciplined my mind to the extent that I can think two things at the same time.
I can think that policing needs to be reformed.
I can think that police reform is important.
I can think that crime stats in black high-crime neighborhoods, I should say, that the crime stats are a disgrace.
And I don't have to cross those two issues.
They are facts which exist in the world.
I can think that I can think that police officers in various jurisdictions across my country have a lot to answer for.
And at the same time, I can think that we cannot have people running around and burning and looting and dragging white people out of their cars and beating them up.
I can think all of those things and they're just facts in the world, right?
Because I'm not a fucking moron.
You know what I'm saying?
So now, so now what am I to make of this?
What am I to make of, of, of police officers deciding that a gesture is more important than their fundamental role?
The reason policing exists, which is again, you know, going directly back to Sir Robert Peel, the professionalized maintenance of public order.
That is their prime mission.
They have one job.
Yeah.
Now, now, you know, I understand that one might want to express one's solidarity with a given political movement, but you see, this is the thing.
First of all, so we have to go back to first principles here because, okay, let's first of all, police officers are supposed to be politically neutral.
That's the first thing.
So, so police officers, so forget about what you think about black lives matter for a second.
It is certainly a political organization on the surface.
Now, of course, underneath, they have no interest in politics.
6.
Because if you have interest in politics, that's not what you do.
You're interested in engaging with the political system.
They're not.
They don't care about politics as such.
They care about power.
No, that's one.
But even taking them at their notional word that they're a political organization.
Police officers are not supposed to show solidarity with political movements, ever.
That undermines them fatally.
Okay?
That obviously so.
Obviously so.
And people have forgotten how to reason about this and how to think about this and how to look at this because we've been, I don't want to say polarized, but we've kind of allowed that sense, that cold, kind of hard-headed sense of fairness, of, you know, sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
We've allowed that to atrophy.
Everyone knows that certain people among us, well, even me, I mean, even conservatives, I would hope that even conservatives would not want to see police officers, you know, for example, I don't know, take off their blue caps and put on like a red MAGA hat, right?
Because that would mean that you're aligning yourself with something.
Now, you could say Trump is a very polarizing figure, but it doesn't matter what it is.
It doesn't matter what it is.
The whole point is the police are supposed to be outside of politics so they can uphold the law.
When we get into politics, when we fight about politics, we're fighting about what the law should be.
Yes.
But it is whatever the existing, the established law is what they are supposed to uphold and they're supposed to be outside of politics.
So what does it mean when police officers do something or say something, anything to demonstrate their solidarity with a political organization?
That's a problem.
It is doubly a problem if that organization is very obviously not interested in politics.
Right?
So you're a fool twice over.
You're kneeling in the face of—you're forgetting that your job is to maintain public order.
You are demonstrating it.
You are submitting to the agents of public disorder.
And you are gesturally aligning yourself with a political movement— Again, that itself is a wrong thing to do.
And then that political movement with which you've wrongly aligned yourself, right?
You've compromised your neutrality now.
You've wrongly aligned yourself with this political movement.
And then that movement isn't even interested in politics.
So how stupid are you?
How is it that you don't understand the fundamental nature of what you do for a living?
And where are these?
I mean, there are some.
I have to be fair.
There are some senior police commanders who get this.
There are some people who still remember what policing is on both sides of the line who understand this and who said, listen, I don't want you people kneeling in the street.
I don't want this.
I will not have it.
I'll boot you off the force if I have to.
I've seen this.
Some senior officials in some police departments have said this, and good on them.
I'm good on that.
In America or in the UK? In America.
Name some names.
I don't remember.
I didn't take notes.
I'm very sorry.
But it might have been in Chicago.
And here's what's funny.
The Chicago Police Department is notoriously brutal and corrupt.
This is what I mean about believing two things at the same time.
Chicago PD has a lot to answer for, but that's a separate matter.
That is something we can fix.
That is a political heavy lift.
That is it that we have to restructure certain things.
We have to figure things out.
We have to get back to first principles.
We have to do all those things.
And anyone who has heard me talk about this stuff for the past, I don't know how many years, knows that I'm not one of these people making excuses for the police.
In fact, I won't have it.
I won't have excuse making for the police.
And you know this because we talk all the time.
I think conservatives are, I hold...
I yield to no one in my contempt for the naked, craven hypocrisy of conservatives who forget all their conservative principles when the government excess is coming from agents of the government who wear badges and sidearms and are authorized to take people's lives in the street.
So, I'm all in on that.
But we can't have this.
We can't have that.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
No, no, no.
And going back to your side of the water, again, people are able to think more than one thing at a time.
Look, it's like, by now you probably know that I'm a bit of a history geek.
Okay?
That I'm a bit of a nerd about this stuff.
Okay, so I know who the hell Cecil Rhodes was.
And I know what kind of racist Cecil Rhodes was.
But you know something?
No, no, no, no.
We can't have this.
No, no, no.
You can't...
No, you may not come into the square and just rip down a Cecil Rhodes statue.
No, the answer is no.
No.
Yeah.
Same thing with...
I have a copy of The River War.
By the way, very good book by Winston Churchill, The River War.
But yeah, Winston Churchill was a racist.
Sure.
Okay.
So...
No, no, no.
You may not.
The answer is no.
Again, speak it as a black person who wears his black skin with pride, okay?
As a most dashing and handsome accoutremer, okay?
No, you may not rip down the statue of Winston Churchill, all right?
No.
No.
You must not be allowed to do this.
Absolutely not.
Or any other notional or real racist in the history.
This is not how it is done.
And you must not allow this to be done.
You must defend your monuments.
All of them.
Now, if through a political process, people wanna come into the public square now and convince their fellow citizens that maybe a statue of someone else would look better on that plinth, then that's different.
That's different.
But this here, the answer has to be no.
And the answer always has to be no.
Always.
And you cannot yield one inch on this.
You must not yield.
Get out into the streets and fight these people if you have to.
Because they'll destroy you.
They'll destroy you.
Now we come to the crunch.
I've been feeling very bleak this weekend.
Have you read...
Peter Hitchens' latest column.
It's very, very good.
I have not.
Oh, it's about as black-pilled as it gets.
But what it comes down to, at the very beginning of the show, you said that you were heartened by how the people of Hoddesdon and also of course in Bournemouth I think it is where the Baden-Powell statue they tried to take down the Liberal Democrat Council was caving to some local leftist activists and the people,
just the ordinary people surrounded the statue and said we will not let this happen.
I agree with you the points you make about how This is a sign that ordinary decent people will not have this stuff, do not agree with it.
But this is my worry.
Why recently did we have all these veterans and the football lads and whatever converging on London to protest and, as they said, to defend these monuments?
Why did they do that?
They did it because the police had failed.
The government, I suppose, had failed.
But certainly Sadiq Khan, who's in charge of policing in London, failed.
The local police in Bristol failed.
In fact, the police in Bristol and elsewhere have been so cucked that they are social justice warriors in uniform.
And they're up front about it.
They were happy for that statue to be pulled down, signaling to the mob that it's okay if you commit the kind of crime that we...
There you go, exactly.
I was just going to say they're worse than social justice warriors because social justice warriors are apparently, most of them I hear...
Are apparently feminists.
But of course, these same police you have running around your country in certain places, we know what those places are, don't care about women when those women happen to be of the wrong color and they are raped and abused and groomed and traded like chattels by people who you've allowed into your country.
So let's get it right.
They're the worst of all worlds.
You make a very good point there.
Actually, it does beg a belief.
I mean, when future historians look back at this era and look at the policing, and they look...
But not just the police.
They're going to look at our media and our government.
And conservatives, I think, have been particularly...
I mean, we kind of have come to expect the left to cover up and to indeed indulge some of this stuff.
Yes, yes.
But the reason we're in this mess is that there has been no opposition, no serious opposition, no committed opposition from conservatives.
So why are those...
Those citizens you mentioned at the beginning, those patriotic people, why are they being forced to defend the statues when, for goodness sake, that should be, if anything, it's a policing matter.
They shouldn't put their lives at risk.
But you're heartened by this.
I'm saying, hang on a second.
Have we come to the point where it is going to come down to civil war?
No, no.
So tell me what we should be doing and how this can resolve itself happily.
Before you go into your carbon mic thing, answer me that question also about what it was that a conservative newspaper was doing, sprouting that complete shite last week that I read out to you about the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's just...
Another of my bugbears, Priti Patel.
Priti Patel is about as close to Margaret Thatcher as you can get.
Yet, what did she tweet about yesterday's riots?
She tweeted a photograph of a guy urinating next to the memorial to the poor policeman who got killed by that Muslim terrorist in 2017, Keith Palmer.
It was very unfortunate optics.
I've no doubt what happened.
He wasn't deliberately urinating on the memorial to insult him.
It was quite obvious he was a bloke who probably had a few to drink.
He needed to relieve himself, found a convenient pillar.
And don't forget, all the public toilets have been closed down in London because of the coronavirus fake scare.
But that's by the by.
What is a conservative, not just an ordinary conservative, but a robustly conservative Home Secretary doing, tweeting left-wing talking points, tweeting left-wing propaganda, which is what it was, doesn't it?
The guy who took that photograph, took it with her and framed it with a particular purpose, which was to reframe the narrative.
So, okay, so give me grounds for optimism, or at least tell me what the hell we should be doing and explain what's going on.
Well, I think, okay, so let's first talk about what we are doing, because what we are doing is our problems lie in the roots of what we are doing, what we have been doing, okay?
Okay.
Now, I think the problem...
And again, I've been kind of developing this thought, talking to people about it.
I launched a series last week called Carbon Black, where I talked to this sound young Scotsman named James Black, who came to my Twitter feed as a result of me having been on with you.
And in any case, we've talked a lot and we've decided to start recording our conversations.
And now...
This is the notion of shadow war, shadow warfare, okay?
And the notion of overreaction and jumping at shadows.
So what's the problem?
One of the fundamental problems we have, and one of the reasons why the left has been so successful and the media organs have been so successful at cutting us off from each other in the public square, at making our two, at making...
Each of us think that the other doesn't really exist, right?
That is, have been so successful at making reasonable people feel like they're all alone, right?
Why have they been successful at doing this?
Because they come out of, and they are the offspring and the product of, A political culture that spent half a century fighting a shadow war.
And so, one, they're very good at concealing.
They're very good at...
And they're very good at...
Paranoia is kind of an art to them.
It's their...
Well, it's their métier, isn't it, right?
It's like paranoia and fear and panic.
Okay, that's one.
So we have that.
And then on the other hand, on the other side, opposing them now, remember because these, in one sense, these people are insurgents.
They've come up, you know, in this guerrilla movement and kind of infiltrated your institutions, your newspapers, your magazines, your public services, your civil service.
They've infiltrated these things, right?
Right.
And they're destroying them from within.
Okay, that's one.
Now, opposing them are conservatives, notional conservatives in your country and mine, who, again, also spent 50 years fighting a shadow war, a cold war.
And in this shadow war, right, their response was to overreact to things, one, right?
Because why?
Because you tend to overreact to things when they are in shadow because you don't know it's dark.
You don't know how big it is, how much of a threat it is.
You tend to jump.
In other words, having been fighting a shadow war, your reflexes are attuned to jump at shadows, right?
And so we come out of that shadow war and we find that people...
Who will swallow an elephant and strain at a gnat.
I guess that's the expression, right?
People jump at shadows and ignore the things that are directly in front of their face.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
And then the last thing is that we have a situation where we have a symbiotic...
Left and right, I think.
Left and right in America and the UK, maybe across the West in general, but especially in the United States.
Right.
Left and right have a symbiotically dysfunctional relationship.
It is symbiotically dysfunctional.
They are dysfunctional in different ways, but the different ways in which they are lopsided and wrong...
The different ways in which each side is lopsided in the wrong overall help the other side to stay upright.
If you can just imagine like the visual analogy of taking like a two by four piece of wood and kind of leaning it 45 degrees.
You stand it up on its end, it'll stand up, right?
But you lean it 45 degrees, it'll fall over.
But if you have another piece of wood that's also stood on its end and leaned in the opposite direction, then they kind of prop each other up.
Like an inverted V, and they can balance and stay upright.
Leftist ideology, what these people are really about, is so dysfunctional, is so fundamentally kind of unworkable, that it would fall over all by itself.
If it didn't have something equally stupid and dysfunctional pushing against it from the other direction.
That is to say, here's the thing.
The opposite of this kind of leftism is not conservatism.
It's neoliberalism.
And that's part of the problem.
Because actual conservatives, actual conservatives don't agree with either the hard leftists or the hard neoliberals.
That's the thing.
So we're going to, we, if we think about we as being conservatives and we think of us as being aligned with the eternal things, the values of the nation, okay?
Hmm.
Well, we're going to keep losing.
Even if we align with what looks like the enemies of the hard left, we're obviously going to lose because those people aren't our friends either.
This should be obvious.
That's certainly true.
So many of the people...
I mean, I'm slightly wary of this term neoliberal because I'm not sure what it means, though.
I mean, it's a bit like sustainability.
It seems to be one of those words that means...
I do agree with your point that there are enablers of the left right now.
And they are people who sort of pose as being on our side of the argument, but are not.
And also, just before we started this show, somebody...
Did you ever watch Little Britain?
Yes, yes, Little Britain, yeah.
Did you find it funny?
Yeah, parts of it were extremely funny.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I thought it was pretty good.
It wasn't my favourite, but it's not something I look back on and think...
How on earth did we ever find that funny?
I thought like a lot of broken sketch comedies, it was good and bad.
But there's a very good one that I urge you to watch.
Somebody tweeted it out and it's on YouTube and it's called Black Friends.
And I don't know whether it's an outtake or what, but it's got David Walliams and he's inviting his black friends to his house.
And he said, and there's some rice.
And there's some peas for you to snack on.
And I've put some music.
It's just reggae music in the background.
And he keeps us talking.
This, it seems to me, is maybe the answer to the question I was asking you earlier about why did the Mail on Sunday run that complete bollocks about, you know, motivated by this noble quest to blah, blah, blah.
It's this kind of white kind of breast-beating guilt, which even people wearing the conservative label have got.
This idea that somehow they must constantly...
Make amends, pay atonement.
And it's just bollocks.
I'm amazed they cannot see that.
I don't feel I have to apologize to you for being white any more than you need to apologize for being black.
It seems to be obvious that we're equal.
Well, it's radically disrespectful, by the way.
I launched quite a few tweets to that effect earlier when I was just nauseated by seeing all these people bending the knee in the street.
And I put out some tweets and said, you know, listen, my white brothers do not kneel to me.
We're equals.
Because I'm not going to kneel to you.
Why on earth should you kneel to me?
That's disgraceful!
But listen, here's the thing.
This is what I'm saying, right?
We're getting to the heart of the matter because talking about the notion of these two political philosophies, neither of which is fundamentally aligned with the life of the nation, with the eternal things, with the organic constitution of the country. with the organic constitution of the country.
See, that's the problem.
We've accustomed ourselves to aligning ourselves with the political currents, Well, if this current is, I think that's wrong.
That's largely wrong.
So the current that opposes that is largely right.
We have to stop that.
And I don't mean that we have to get rid of political, but we don't have to get rid of political parties.
We don't have to upend politics.
We just have to reorient our thinking so that we can begin to change the culture from underneath.
Because remember, this is a culture problem.
If the person you would like to see in office is on the ballot and doesn't win, that's a politics problem.
If there is no one who you could even vote for in good conscience on the ballot, that is a culture problem.
We have a culture problem.
Now, how are we going to fix that?
We're not going to fix that by going first to politics.
The politics is broken because the culture is broken.
So how do we fix it?
We go back and we start reasoning from first principles, not what not not what is left and right, but what is what is fundamentally good and right for the country.
This is why the Brexit thing was so exciting, because it took place at the level of the culture.
First, people said, well, what do I what does it mean for me to people up now?
You know, this people did this.
They said, what does it mean for us to be British?
What does that mean?
What is this country?
What is it for?
People in Hull were thinking this.
What does it mean that we are a fishing community?
Historically, what does our history mean?
This is really important.
Talking about Hull, which is one of my favorite places in the UK that's kind of captured my imagination.
You know what I'm saying?
Going back to Hull in the labor history of the country.
There may be people still alive, I don't know, who remember the Triple Trawler tragedy.
Huh?
And Lillian Bilacca.
Okay?
Oh, my God.
You better tell me this, because you see, this is your eidetic memory at work, isn't it?
Oh, sorry about that.
Just tell me about Hull, and all I know is that the beautiful South come from there.
I can't think much else.
Brief digression.
So there was, I forget what the, I'm not good, that could be dates in my so-called eidetic memory, but there was a, well, you know, Hull has been a fishing town for a long time.
The fishing industry was, It was very unsafe.
The boats that these guys went out in, first of all, they didn't own the boats.
The boats were owned by money guys.
They outfitted the boats and they hired crews to crew the boats and take them out and fish.
And the boats were very unsafe.
And on one day, they lost three fishing trawlers with almost all hands.
And there were a few men that survived, but it was a massive loss of life all on the same day.
Okay.
And it's called the triple trawler tragedy.
And the wife of one of the sailors, I think her husband may have survived.
I think maybe her son died.
I don't remember exactly.
But her name was Lillian Bilaca.
Right.
B-I-L-O-C-C-A.
Okay.
And she got up in arms with a bunch of other wives from Hull.
And actually, she had a job working for one of the fishing trawler owners, right?
Some kind of office job.
Anyway, she organized the local women.
And they made a lot of noise.
It was hot for the fishing boat owners, and they managed to get fundamental safety reforms put in place.
Like, these guys all have to have radios, they have to have emergency gear, they have to have, you know, the maintenance has to be on point, you know, all this business.
And this was just this, it was a big deal back then.
Especially because, you know, all these women, right, you know, taking this very, very public kind of political stance.
But in this way that was so, I don't know, these are working class women.
I just found them so...
The degree to which kind of these women kind of kept their dignity and kept their focus, even when so many of their husbands and sons had died in this thing.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's like...
But they kept the pressure on and they got real reform.
Anyway, so this is...
All I'm saying is that up and down your country in the Brexit debate, people started to reason from first principles.
Who are we?
What does it mean to be us?
What do we mean when we say we?
What do we mean when we say we?
What does that mean?
And so that's what we have to do because if we continue to.
So, again, I'm trying to answer a question because I don't want to go without.
I don't want to just ramble on the answer to your question.
You're talking about a very real problem.
Of supposedly conservative media outlets, you know, supposedly conservative, supposed journalists engaging in this kind of ridiculous posturing.
Right.
So what is wrong?
What's happening there?
What's happening there is that what we're seeing is that inverted V of two sticks leaning against each other.
Either one, both of them are lopsided.
Neither one can stand without the other lopsided one propping it up.
So I am not disheartened.
I'm saying this is good because what's happening now is we're showing that even that structure is becoming unbalanced, right?
And that is good because what that means is that now we can go back to first principles.
We don't have to say, well, now we have to have a pushback from the right against the left because the left is dysfunctional and wrong and stupid.
And the notional right that's been pushing back against that is also dysfunctional and wrong and stupid.
So we have to go back to what is society?
What is it for?
Never mind what is the conservative, what's the Tory view of policing?
Who gives a shit about the Tory view of policing?
Really?
No.
What are the police?
What are they for?
So in other words, don't look at the Tory manifesto.
Go back and look at Robert Peel's manifesto.
That's what I'm getting at.
And we have to go back and reason about these things.
And then we have to insist that we have people, that we have to seed political candidates and seed kind of local leaders and whoever, you know, we have to basically push up from underneath.
Push this back into the culture, this way of thinking back into the culture.
Reason from first principles.
And anyone who doesn't understand those first principles is not the person for you.
Anyone who does and aligns with those first principles is the person for you.
Doesn't matter what their political party is.
Does not matter.
So that's what's happening, is that dumb, lopsided structure in the wake of political upheaval Right.
Even that is starting to shake and kind of show its fundamental weakness.
That is good news, not bad.
That always had to happen.
Because again, if you had knocked out the left side of that lopsided structure, the lopsided right would have also lurched and collapsed as well.
So this is good.
Now we are required to step in and argue for right, as in correct, as in first principles of society and nation and culture and family.
Okay, so I think we're going to sort of wrap it up fairly soon because I think, you know, we would need to save ourselves for another podcast in the future.
Yes.
I think, first of all, thank you for being the antidote to the Peter Hitchens black pill, which has only a message of despair.
However, I would have to say I'm not sure that I'm quite as optimistic as you.
But I do think one of the reasons that you and I get on so well, apart from when we're bickering like a kind of couple that's been together for too long, as we sometimes do.
Oh, Jesus.
Yeah, no, we do, because, you know, we are like one of those couples.
One of the reasons I think we get on is because, actually, I, too, am kind of obsessed with first principles.
And I think we've both got the kind of brains which naturally gravitate towards...
We're constantly asking our questions.
Why does this thing exist?
What is the purpose of it?
Is that the optimal situation?
Why do we have a police?
What are they there for?
Are they there to look good in uniform?
Are they there to boss us around?
No, they're not.
They're essentially our police.
Paid agents in uniform to keep law and order and so on.
So first principles, I agree, are really, really important.
I don't know.
I think this is a subject for a future podcast.
But in a way, I think this is why academe has been so dangerous in that...
Thanks to the influence of people like Foucault and Derrida and Saussure and all these kind of structuralists and postmodernists that The educated classes have been taught a form of anti-logic, anti-common sense.
They've had the common sense educated out of them, which I think is one of the reasons why you and I have this kind of sentimental attraction to the working classes who haven't been through this education.
They've got common sense.
So I agree that that common sense is abroad and that's good.
But we're now talking, I don't know about what the situation in America is, We've now got 50% of the eligible population, you know, of university age population.
50% of them now go to uni to study.
Post-modernism and neo-Marxism.
So what do we do about that?
Well, wait a minute.
First of all, are you saying that 50% of young people go to college?
Yes.
Thanks to Tony Blair did that.
That's all his fault.
So, what I'm saying is that, so you really got to count the people who study things that are like in that orbit, like, you know, liberal arts, the corruption of liberal arts, because the original liberal arts were kind of awesome.
But, you know, in other words, non-STEM subjects, that's the first thing, right?
So, people studying STEM, that doesn't count.
Now, listen, I think it's the same thing.
The higher education system in my country definitely, possibly in yours too, is ripe for disruption.
Now, yours works a little bit differently from ours.
So that may be, you know, that's and I don't want I don't want to say too much about that because I don't know enough about how your system works.
But I will say this.
This goes right back to what I keep saying about these two lopsided things pushing against each other.
You see, so much can be in the same way that when you listen to Peter Hitchens, you understand right away.
He because he maps things out in terms of the rise and the fall of Christendom.
He goes right back to the First World War correctly, in my opinion.
And shows the decline of things and shows how the ripples that kind of kind of echo out from that incident.
I think the ripples that echo out from the Cold War are can can explain a lot of what is wrong with us now.
Why?
Because the reason why these sterile, almost charisma-free lefty figures, these French postmodernist philosophers, these people who really don't, they're not even interesting to read.
This is the thing.
If you go back and you look at these people, It's not even thrilling to read them.
We've done ourselves a disservice by only focusing on how wrong they are.
Instead of focusing on, hang on a second, why would a sane young person Even try to read this drivel and make sense of it.
Why?
Because, again, it's not like it's fun to read.
I came up reading a genre called cyberpunk, which had some of the best, like William Gibson.
William Gibson's one of the best prose stylists alive, right?
Okay, so it's not even like they had some cool kind of cyberpunk view of hacking civilization or whatever.
Their stuff is just not even a good science fiction story.
So why was it so popular?
And what I'm saying is that it was so popular because the people who should have been opposing them, opposing their basically crypto Marxist and crypto socialist and crypto communist views, the righties who should have been opposing them, We're also lying to people's faces in a way that was so obvious that it was nauseating.
That's what was going on.
I forget if it was Ben Irvine or Hector Drummond I was talking to.
I was mentioning that Noam Chomsky I remember where I was when I first read Noam Chomsky and first heard Noam Chomsky speak, and I was mesmerized.
Now, that's fascinating to be mesmerized by Noam Chomsky, because if you've ever seen Noam Chomsky speak, even back when he was a young man, Noam Chomsky, put it this way, you'll understand this, Noam Chomsky has less charisma than Theresa May.
I mean, Noam Chomsky makes Theresa May look like Margaret Thatcher.
Although, just briefly interrupting you there, one of the biggest revelations to me was when I saw a clip of Noam Chomsky Being interviewed by, what's he called?
The BBC interviewer with Big Ears.
Frost.
No, no.
Had a stroke.
Whatever.
Anyway, the point of this interview was that Chomsky was pointing out to this BBC interviewer, no, you are not a free and fearless seeker after truth.
You have been programmed.
You are...
You are part of the system.
You are very much part of this establishment.
You are incapable of doing real journalism.
And he's absolutely right.
So he does talk some sense.
But that's my point.
I'm glad you said that because, yes, I don't mean to put Noam Chomsky in the post-modernist bucket.
Mone Chomsky is more of the genuine history of American foreign policy bucket.
But secretly, he doesn't like America all that much.
That's kind of how that works, right?
So he's, I would say- Oh, totally, yeah, yeah.
You see what I'm saying?
But he's not a postmodernist, right?
And that's my point, is that, you know, Why was Noam Chomsky so appealing, even though he is so lacking in charisma and fun?
The conservatives of the time, the Republicans of the time, were lying to my face about everything.
Yes, they were correct on the merits about the importance of family and about values and things.
Yes, certainly.
But when they spoke about the material issues of foreign policy, they were just lying.
And when they weren't lying, they were being hypocrites.
Andrew Marr, by the way, is his name.
Do you remember?
Okay, Andrew Marr.
Yeah, I never saw that interview.
So this is my point, is that this has turned a lot of people off.
I know it turned me off.
Because it's like, don't bullshit me.
Don't lie to my face.
You know, say that, you know, in other words, have the courage of your convictions to say, listen, it was necessary for us to support this terrible dictatorship because this and this and this because we were fighting the Soviets.
Say that.
Man up and own it.
Don't tell me that America has always stood for democracy because it hasn't, right?
And again, I don't need to think that America has always stood for democracy to love my country.
I love my country because she is my home.
I'm an American.
It's like, this is the only home I'm ever going to have.
So, of course, I love it.
Of course, I'm going to defend my country, you know?
And it's like, yeah, you know, do we have to reconcile with some things?
Do we have to go and look at some things and have painful conversations?
Absolutely.
And was America guilty of some things?
Absolutely.
Did it buy and sell people who look like me, like chattels?
Absolutely.
And if you want to come and burn my home down, it's going to be a fucking problem, all right?
No, go fuck yourself.
You see what I'm saying?
This is my home here.
Now, so anyway, what I'm trying to get at is, I know we don't have much time left, but what I'm getting at is this, that, you know, this is why we have to ask ourselves why these poisonous postmodernist seeds actually fell on fertile ground.
Why was the ground fertile?
The ground was fertile.
Because the ground was devoid of truth, because the right weren't speaking the truth.
The right was speaking, we have to say whatever's necessary to undermine the Soviet threat.
We have to undermine the left.
See, that's my point, exactly.
And so you see how opposing instead of reasoning from first principles of right and wrong and what is necessary, they were reasoning from we have to take down those people over there.
And we see this by the way, this is dynamic all the time.
We see that in the case of Donald Trump.
Right.
We see that like this is back and forth dynamic of, well, the are the lefties or the Democrats, I should say, against sexual harassment.
No, they're against Donald Trump.
So if Donald Trump, you see what I'm saying?
So if Donald Trump did something where, oh, he said you can do this and this and that, then he's a big problem.
But now when, if there's something, if there's a credible allegation about Joe Biden, now everyone shuts up.
You see what I'm saying?
I do.
Right.
So that's my point.
It's like we on the conservative side of things need to go back to first principles.
And I think once we do that, we'll be able...
Look, everything else will come out of that.
I'm not saying it's going to happen automatically.
I'm not saying everything's going to be sunlit uplands if we just...
No.
This is going to be a fight.
This is going to be a fight.
But we have to first be willing to fight.
But to do that, we have to pick the ground on which we fight.
And we have to make sure that ground is well watered with truth.
And then we can go and we can fight.
I think that is a good way of ending the podcast.
In order to save the world, people must learn to be more like James and Carbon Mike.
And I actually mean that as well.
I've always...
Did I ever tell you the story about why it is that I'm so shit at lying?
Why I'm a compulsive kind of speaker of truth to power and stuff?
Well, partly it's because I'm from the Midlands, straight black country, and we tend to call a spade a spade there.
We don't mince our words and apologise or whatever.
But I think it's partly because I had this psychological problem.
When I was younger, I always used to imagine that when I tried lying, people could see what I was thinking.
So I never bothered to lie because I thought I was going to get found out anyway.
Let me tell you a sad story, a sad story before we go.
The other day, my boy, who is pretty much politically on side with me, and I think he does love me really, but he said to me, he gave me a really hard time the other day and said, why do you always champion these lost causes?
You know, your climate change, why do you have to go on about that when everyone says...
And I say, well...
Because it's true what I say.
I'm speaking the truth.
And maybe he'll understand that later on.
I mean, it's very hard, I imagine, when you're 20 or 21, however old he is, to realize that the world out there, the establishment, is just full of lies, a tissue of lies, a cathedral of lies.
But unless...
Frankly, unless conservatives like ourselves, well, unlike ourselves, because they're not like us, Unless conservatives start manning up and speak the truth without fear or favor, we are totally stuffed.
That's right.
That's right.
We can't satisfy ourselves with speaking kind of like half-truths that are calibrated to oppose the lies on the other side.
That is no longer good enough.
Maybe it was never good enough, but certainly the exigencies of the Cold War may be masked that deficiency.
But now that we're in a new era and this is no longer good enough, the only thing, the only ground for, again, especially because these people have made so many inroads and undermined so many of our institutions, we have to scrape all the way down to bedrock and that bedrock is the truth.
And then we can go from there. - I think it was never good enough I think that the other thing we haven't mentioned, but it's part and parcel of this, is that the way so many conservatives, and my God, Boris Johnson is a living example of this, They want to be liked and they think that by sacrificing conservative principles and by telling beautiful lies like that Mel on Sunday story I quoted,
they can bring people round to their cause.
And it's not.
People respond.
Why is Islam?
Currently more vigorous than Christianity.
It's because it doesn't try to make itself easy.
That's very good.
Oh, listen, I don't want to interrupt you, but speaking of things that are not easy, everyone, everyone should read A Church That Was, which is a kind of luminous essay that Peter Hitchens wrote for a Catholic magazine called First Things.
One of the things he says, he's talking about the Church of England, of course, right?
And what he's saying is that he's saying that there are things which are alarming, which are supposed to be alarming in the Gospels and the Scriptures, you know, and that we've tried to replace these majestic things.
bland banalities and he obviously think that's that's a mistake so anyway you're 100 right exactly they don't try to make themselves easy they don't they it's like this is hard this is this is difficult and that's exactly what i'm saying about like conservatives and how we really need to talk about foreign policy how to talk about policing how to talk don't try to make it don't try to paper over things call it what it is and And because people will respect you if you call the thing what they may not necessarily agree with you, that's okay.
People will respect you if you call the thing what it is.
And again, that is one of the legacies of the Cold War.
This is how conservatives used to conceal certain unpleasant truths during the Cold War.
Because again, they were fighting this ideological battle.
You could argue that it's bigger than ideology now.
I think you could argue that now we're playing for...
You know, we're playing for all the marbles.
I agree.
No, we are.
We are totally paying for all the marbles, including the whatever they're called.
The king marble is called.
The crowner?
Anyway, whatever.
Right.
We've got to go.
Thank you, Carbon Mike.
I really enjoyed that.
And don't forget to fund my Patreon.
And don't use the cheapskate excuse that you're being morally principled by not doing so.
And until we speak again, it's been great.
And it's good to catch up, mate.
It's been too long.
It's been too long.
Great to talk with you.
And we'll talk again soon.
Take care.
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