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Aug. 3, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:36:10
Ronan Maher
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I love Denny Pole.
Welcome to the Denny Pole with me, James Denny Pole.
I really am excited about this week's guest and I know I always say this, but he's a guy that I've been sort of getting to know on Twitter and he's going to tell me more about himself.
While we have a chat through a kind of...
I'm in a slight haze at the moment of various drugs.
I'm on codeine and diazepam and other things because I've knackered my back and I'm in enormous pain.
So if I sort of drift off, Ronan, I'm sure, can do the heavy lifting because I'm certainly not capable of heavy lifting right now.
So, Ronan, just remind me how to pronounce your surname.
Ronan Maher?
No, Maher.
In Britain, I say Maher.
If I was back in Ireland and around my Irish friends and family, I would say Maher.
But Maher's good.
I have to...
I have to say, to be sure, to be sure, you don't have an Irish accent.
You've got a Northern accent.
I do, I do.
I was born in Manchester 36 years ago, and I've lived in Ireland after.
And tell me a bit about yourself, because I have to say, and I think that this is a problem that a lot of older journalists have.
We see this sort of younger generation of journalists coming up And we don't really know who they are because one minute they're kind of kids at school and the next second they've got careers and we probably think of them as a sort of threat and I don't know what.
So tell me about yourself.
You're a journalist, don't you?
Yeah, I mean, I'm just starting out.
As a journalist, I've written for The Critic, I've written for Hector Drummond's website, and I'm writing my first book at the moment.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, I was writing for the local paper, the Stockport Mail.
It's Britain's lesser-known paper of record.
Oh my God, that's very old school, that starting out on a local newspaper...
I mean, that used to be the route into journalism for most people.
But I didn't realize it still happened.
So what was it like working on a local newspaper?
It was...
It gave me the chance to reach a lot more people than you otherwise might expect.
About 90,000 people, which isn't too bad.
90,000 a week now.
I mean, I know it's not anything like a national paper.
Yeah.
It gave me a chance to get around talking to people in the community and dealing with issues on a local level.
It's quite a long way from thinking about the US election and international issues and so forth.
It's a bit more palpable, really.
I feel like it can have more of an effect.
But also, I think that one of the rationales behind that old learning the trade Was that you had to do proper stuff like doorstepping people, sort of writing about stuff that you really might not want to write about, like people who'd been recently bereaved or cover...
I mean, was that the sort of thing you were doing as well?
Yeah, I mean, the last piece I wrote was something called what I call the Food Bank Archipelago.
And this is...
It's happening all across the Western world where they said that a food bank archipelago has grown out across the West and that it basically is a huge bureaucracy of people who are making a fortune out of food banks, really.
Really?
Poverty industry.
And we've got six food banks here in Stockport alone.
And I argued that they're not going to go away and it's nothing to do with poverty really.
Because once you wean people onto free stuff, it's quite difficult to wean them off it.
Yeah, well quite.
I mean, if you build it, they will come.
Who would not turn down free food?
Of course, this is it.
I mean, I remember when Domino's offered free pizza one day, free slices of pizza, and there was a queue all the way down the road, obviously.
There's a huge difference in behaviour between zero for free and even ten pence.
Prices do affect behaviour.
It's a fact which people ignore too much.
Well, you know, You're obviously a bright thinking person, but as you say, it ought not to be beyond the wit of most even halfway intelligent people, and I suppose that should be the entry-level requirement for journalists of being halfway intelligent.
Sure.
You would have thought that they would see this straight away, and yet it's amazing how the left Uses the argument about, look, we have X number of food banks, and the fact that we have so many food banks means that poverty is a serious problem in Britain.
How did your piece go down when you made this case that perhaps...
This was a kind of an industrial scam.
It went down well.
I was a little bit nervous putting that out because it's one of those things which, you know, it's one of those subjects that you're supposed to stay away from, isn't it?
You're supposed to only view it in one way and that is to say through the prism of the left.
It was okay.
It was a bit difficult because my girlfriend's family are quite on the left, so I was concerned about that, especially as her mum actually works with food banks.
So I was a bit concerned about what they would think, because you don't want to offend the in-laws, you know?
They don't actually know the full horror of my political views.
Do they not?
Well, luckily they're never going to find it because they're not going to listen to this podcast.
I doubt it, unfortunately.
They should do.
Your podcast is great.
I'm afraid only drooling right-wing loons listen to me.
I've captured the market, you know, me and David Icke.
Yes.
Are you going to get David Icke on?
I've captured...
I'd love to get David Icahn.
I mean, I'm intrigued by him.
He talks a lot of sense on some things.
I don't think on everything.
I mean, I don't kind of share his views on Jews, for example.
Well, yeah, he's not very...
I mean, I'm kind of fellow-Semitic, and I'm not sure that he is altogether.
But I'm sure we find lots to...
Is it that lizards is a mask for Jews?
Or does he actually mean lizards?
Well, that would be the interesting thing to find out.
I think the challenge of doing...
David, I, you know, people often say to me, why don't you do podcasts with more left-wing people, you know, then it would stop being an echo chamber, which is a phrase I absolutely hate.
All I'm interested in is in interesting conversations, intelligent conversations, and the two areas I wouldn't want to go down are, one, the kind of Marxist dialectic in which people like Owen Jones and Ash Sarker specialise.
It wouldn't really be a conversation because their view of what is is so different from my view of what is.
And it's not a question of...
I mean, it's a question of...
Marxist dialectic is a sort of parallel logic.
It's got nothing to do with the world we inhabit.
And I can't see anything fruitful in having conversations with such people.
In the same way, I'm not sure I'd be wanting to spend 20 minutes Sort of cringing while somebody expanded on why the Jews or the lizard-headed people were responsible, you know, how the Rothschilds were taking over the world.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe that there are conspiracies going on.
I just don't really feel threatened by the Jews or the lizard-headed master race.
And I kind of think that would be a waste of podcast time.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
It's a wicked thing, the anti-Semitic virus, and it's still all around us, especially in the Labour Party, but not exclusively.
I mean, it's curious, isn't it?
Because I kind of think that...
It's a bit like with women, actually.
I do think women are, in many ways, the superior species, and they can do loads of really good shit.
They're there for us in so many ways.
Without them, we'd be lost.
At the same time, they can do really, really annoying shit, which just defies rationalism, and you can see why people could become misogynist.
In the same way, I suppose, with Jews, the problem is that They're fantastic.
I mean, they're just like superheroes.
They're so clever.
They punch above the weight with Nobel Prizes and I love them and I've got lots of Jewish friends.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that many of the world's worst Marxist philosophers are Jews.
So you can see why if you wanted to be anti-Semitic, you could focus on people like Saul Alinsky and was Karl Marx Jewish?
I don't know, was he?
Karl Marx was, yeah.
But anyway, that's by the by.
So, local newspaper, you then, I mean, I have to say, you poor Saul, how old are you?
I'm 36.
Yeah.
You're 36.
I mean, you know, I think mine, I'm 54, I think mine was the last generation of Which saw journalism when it was still a trade worth being part of.
I mean, you know, the first half of my career, I could lead a comfortable middle-class lifestyle on a journalist's salary, which you definitely can't now.
I mean, you know, you're in it purely for the love, whereas I could get a bit of the money as well.
Does that bother you?
It does.
I'm studying law part-time at night, so I have a backup.
I originally studied English language and English literature, the same as you, but it was at Leeds University and it was a horror story.
I mean, the first week I arrived, I was told that I should read The Guardian.
For instance, it was critical theory.
Oh, that's terrible.
Marxist drivel, mumbo jumbo shoved down my throat.
I hated it with a passion.
And I love it.
I love English.
That's awful.
I love literature.
So it was...
It was hurtful in ways and extremely irritating too because I moved over from Ireland especially to study at Leeds and I arrived there and found it was like a Maoist re-education camp.
Did you have any kind of indications beforehand that The course was going to be theory dominated.
No, but I mean, now, looking back, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have gone on the course.
Absolutely not.
But at the time, it wasn't obvious to me because I didn't know what critical theory was.
You know, when someone said critical theory, well, surely that's just, you know, critical reasoning, how to look at things critically.
That's a good thing, surely.
But it's not that.
It's Marxist.
Attack everything in the West, try and pull it down and do it through the prism of literature.
Destroying books like Heart of Darkness, for example, where everything is seen as a patriarchal, oppressive, racist, misogynist.
Racist, yeah.
Of course racist, yeah.
Misogynist.
Yeah, absolutely.
Ignoring that Conrad was a truly great novelist, writing in his second language, of course, too.
That didn't matter to them really very much.
It didn't seem that way anyway.
It reminds me a bit of a...
There's a piece I read yesterday, I think, in The Guardian of All Places, where an art critic was talking about how people...
Who've read History of Art no longer have the capacity to be able to differentiate between quite similar artists, because they haven't been taught about that aspect of art.
They haven't been taught about painting techniques or Or styles or schools or whatever.
They're more interested in the social aspects of the world that produce the art and the phallocentric...
I suppose the fact that women are outnumbered by men.
Cultural Marxism has infected, I think, most of the liberal arts.
So that part of me Understands why people sing the praises of STEM subjects and are down on the art.
So I think that's a mistake.
I think that there are pockets.
I mean, my kids are both studying English at Durham.
And although there is one compulsory critical theory paper...
Which my son certainly massively ripped the piss out of.
He just kind of...
He said the things that they wanted to hear him say, but at the same time completely ripped apart Marxism and done it.
But what I'm saying is that you still can study the joy of literature, and I'm very sorry that you, who obviously love literature, have never had a chance to spend three years reading lots of books and sort of explaining or finding thoughts to express why they're great, which is, I think, why you should study literature.
Do you think that the taxpayers should pay for it, though?
That's an interesting...
Yeah, to a degree.
I'm going to sound elitist here, but I don't think elitism is a dirty word.
Sure.
I really think that the idea...
That there ought to be a kind of cultured elite is a good one.
I do think it's very, very important that a percentage of the population of a civilised country is familiar As the educated classes once were, with art, with literature, with history, that they're probably able to speak at least one language, that they're familiar with the sciences as well.
I don't think you should be totally scientifically ignorant.
To be familiar with Latin phrases and the odd Greek phrase and so on.
Maybe you've done a bit of Latin.
I think that's a good thing.
I think you do need something for the rest of the population, aspirational people at least, to want to become part of.
You know, I mean, opera.
I'm not an opera fan, but I like the idea that opera's there You know, Wagner, I'm hoping that one day, maybe when I'm 60 or 70, I'll suddenly want to go to Bayreuth and listen to The Ring Cycle and I'll realise that it's not boring, it's just a bloody amazing thing.
And I like the idea that...
Classical music is being performed to the highest level, or it ought to be, rather than recruiting orchestras on the basis of skin colour, which seems to be the new fashion.
So what I'm saying is, going back, I think Tony Blair utterly destroyed Education, university education in this country, but by imposing this 50% quota, when in fact I think probably only 10% or 15% of the population is really suited to that level of education.
I think most people should be going on from school and having an apprenticeship or something actually useful where they can earn a good living.
I wouldn't have any objection to...
My generation, of course, got a free education courtesy of the taxpayer.
I'm not sure that's such a terrible thing.
I mean, you know, I can see the counter-arguments.
It's not something that I would...
It's not a hill I want to die on.
Yeah.
But, again, to answer your question, I don't...
I think the fetishisation of STEM subjects...
Is a mistake, because what it ignores is two things.
One, people who've done sciences can be just as incredibly, ineffably stupid as people who've done liberal arts subjects.
You only have to look at the field of environmental sciences, for example.
And the second thing is that what the sciences don't teach you is critical thinking and actually critical thinking I think is just as important a contributor to culture as being good at maths and sciences and stuff.
Where are you on that one?
Do you agree or am I wrong?
I think that Gavin Williamson just torpedoed the 50% target, which is one of the only good things to come out of this government.
He's also said that universities will have to support free speech if they're going to get funds going forward to help with the coronavirus pandemic effects.
Yeah, I think that's a very good thing.
Both of those moves are very good.
I do think that people should be going to university far less and studying things other than just the STEMs.
I do see the other side of the coin, though.
Someone might argue, well, why should my taxes, why should the taxes of someone who only earns 20k a year go to paying for people to go and study literature for three years?
I see what they're saying, but I broadly agree with you.
We do need to have an elite, we do need to have I think inequality is a fact of life, and I think it's a good thing, and we should be able to look up.
I like looking up to experienced writers, for example, and aspiring to reach their levels.
I think if everyone's dumbed down to the same level, nothing ever improves, and it'll just slowly go down even further.
Yeah.
I think, who was it?
Who said greed is good?
Ayn Rand.
No, no, we are great.
Yeah, Arun said it, but who else said greed is good?
Gordon Gekko said it in Wall Street.
But I also think that, I mean, obviously greed is good.
I mean, it's a motivating force.
In the same way, I think inequality is good for much the same reasons that inequality means that you look at where you are and you think, well, I'm not sure I want to be where I am.
I want something more than that.
And it gives you something to aspire to and something to yearn to provide for your children, to give them a better life than you had.
I think that these are very powerful things and that's good.
I also think that one of the things that's missing about the debate about inequality is that it's not just about Wealth, is it?
It's about all manner of things that the state could never micromanage to the point where we were all equal.
You know, looks, for example, penis size, charisma, sporting skills, even things like, you know, okay, so I'm born probably into the upper middle classes, but My disadvantage is that I haven't got the credibility that working class people have.
If I wanted to be a pop star, I would be a considerable disadvantage to somebody who could claim to be from Manchester, say, from urban Manchester.
That would be a far better...
I mean, the best hope for me as a pop star would be fucking Coldplay, wouldn't it?
Whereas if I were from Manchester, I could have been Morrissey.
Or Johnny Marr.
Yeah.
Which is way cooler.
So it's just...
I don't know.
I think people should stop whinging and just...
I was thinking about this today, actually.
I was thinking about...
What was it?
People...
People of mixed race who seize on the black half of their parentage and use that as a kind of way of showing that they're, you know, to improve their position in the hierarchy of victimhood.
And I was thinking, I was looking at my parents and I was thinking, They're just my parents.
But imagine if your parents weren't just your parents but they suddenly became a vital tool in enabling you to find a better place in the hierarchy of victimhood.
What's all that about?
It's just crazy that we let these people get away with that shit.
Yeah, it's appalling, isn't it?
Leveraging your parents to climb up the hierarchy of all this mad identity politics is wrong.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, I could do it with the NHS. Both my parents are NHS nurses and they're retired now.
I could cloak myself in that and probably go right for the Guardian or something, but I have no desire to do it.
Did you go through a phase where you...
Did you go through a left-wing phase?
Yeah, I started out on the left.
I was a Guardian reader, even occasionally the Morningstar.
I was very much on the left until...
It was Islam, which turned me, actually, as it happens.
I couldn't square defending this, what I see as a very dangerous ideology.
I know that's not something you're supposed to say these days.
I mean, you've had Tommy Robinson on your podcast several times, so you know all about this stuff.
Yeah, the way they treat women, Jews, gays, I found it absolutely appalling, and I couldn't understand why it was being defended by people on the left.
I think I was reading a lot of Christopher Hitchens, who obviously was a man on the left too, and that kind of pulled me away.
As it happens, I think Christopher Hitchens remained on the left all of his life, but Anyway, I moved away because of Islam and then everything else kind of started coming down to the idea that you should have high taxes became obviously absurd to me.
Because it constricts the society and stops people from starting businesses, stops people from expanding businesses.
You end up with a huge, great big state, and you've got a huge, great big state.
Everything becomes about politics.
And I find politics fascinating, but I don't like that it is everywhere now.
Everything's politicized.
And I think that's because of the size of the state.
A whole host of other things just...
I don't know.
Do I have any left-wing opinions now?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
They've all kind of gone.
It depends, I suppose, how you define left-wing.
I mean, I'm just racking my brain to think of what left-wing opinions I hold.
I mean, for example, I don't think we should have bailed out the banks in 2008.
That's arguably a right-wing opinion, though, isn't it?
Well, you see, that's the thing.
But Occupy, who are about as left as they come, I think are always whining on about how we bailed out the banks.
So it's interesting there's a kind of nexus there, isn't there, where between us kind of Hayek and von Mises kind of classical liberals and the really hard left.
And I suppose, again, I'd be with George Soros on drugs legalisation.
I mean, I can see the harm that they do, but this is where I differ from Peter Hitchens.
I just think that we...
We seek altered states, and I'm sure we have done since monkeys drank fermented whatever, you know, and got off their faces on fermented berries or something.
It's just what we like to do.
Drinking reindeer piss.
Drinking what, sorry?
Reindeer piss.
Yeah, well, very good point.
Drinking reindeer piss.
I think partly it's a function of the fact that I'm not...
I don't know whether you found this with your circle of friends.
Some people lend themselves readily to alcohol and can handle it, and some people are much better off with the weed.
I happen to, my body just doesn't really like alcohol that much, unless it's very, very good sort of grand cru, grand cru, claret, or whatever.
You know, it's about the only wine I drink, and I like a gin, but generally I'm much, you know, between the And a cocktail I like, because cocktails are like drugs, but generally I think I much prefer the weed to booze.
And I think it's unfair that we have a system which discriminates against the weed smokers.
Yeah, I mean, I'm on the fence about this one.
I'm on the fence about this.
I'm somewhere between you and Peter Hitchens.
I used to be very much with you on this, legalise everything, let people make their minds up for themselves.
And I would always look at alcohol and say, well, why is that legal and why is weed not?
I used to smoke quite a lot of weed.
I don't anymore.
I find it very demotivating.
That said, I do like listening to music when I'm stoned.
I like reading when I'm stoned.
I like writing when I'm stoned.
But it is demotivating for me.
It's not obvious to me that if we were to legalise weed tomorrow in Britain that it would be a good thing.
It's not obvious to me that it wouldn't end in disaster.
My girlfriend is a psychiatrist and she deals with people who've got I mean, marijuana-induced psychosis.
Yes, indeed.
All the time.
And these people are a mess.
Now, I know the pro-legalization side of the argument will say that there are other confounding factors and that it wasn't the weed.
The weed is incidental.
But...
I don't know.
I'm not convinced.
There does seem to be a lot of evidence that it's maybe not for everybody, but for some people it's bad.
Oh, no, totally.
I don't think you even need to argue with that.
I think it's a given.
I think lots of people are being made psychotic by the weed and people smoke too much of it and stuff.
But the thing is, I'm not sure that...
That legalisation would make these people smoke any more than they do anywhere.
I think they're probably already smoking to the max.
I don't think you're going to housing estates and things and finding people are thinking, well, I would get off my face on weed if it were legal, but the fact that it isn't illegal is making me think twice.
It's there.
So why waste the criminal justice system on weed?
You know, prosecuting and persecuting people who are going to do this thing regardless.
It's a bit like prohibition.
I mean, you could make the same argument about booze, couldn't you?
I know loads of people whose lives have been ruined, quite, quite ruined.
They are just husks, promising people who have just been wrecked by alcohol.
Yeah.
And not to mention the sort of violence and car accidents.
So I don't know.
That would be my rationale.
It's not, you know, it's certainly not the Wheeler's Harmer's rationale.
It's more that like prohibition, it doesn't work.
Yeah, didn't more people drink during Prohibition than before?
Didn't it virtually promote drinking in some ways?
Is that right?
Yeah, I'm almost sure of that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm on the fence.
I want to say I agree.
I'm almost there, but there's a niggling doubt there that it would end well.
I think that if it was available on the high street, what's left of the high street, supermarket, I think more people who would not have otherwise smoked would start smoking.
They might.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
It could revive the high street, Brendan.
My God!
My God!
How much do the high streets need?
I mean, what's happening to our country?
I mean, how bizarre is...
Look, if you'd written a dystopian novel, even in 1919, And you'd called it 2020.
And you'd outlined the stuff that's happened this year.
It would just be, I don't know.
Would anyone believe it?
I think fiction is dead.
I think fiction is dead.
I don't know how you can beat this by making it up.
People would have said you were mad if you said this two years ago.
If you said in two years' time, our great cities would be hollowed out, depopulated, of everyone, not just of people fleeing from the effects of left-wing policies.
Yeah, because you've gone, the City of London, well, at least the City of London, that's never going to get empty because like finance, it's the beating heart of our economy and bankers work really hard.
They're never not going to turn up to the office.
And yet, carry on.
It's happened.
You know, if you said that we would be instructed to stay at home, in other words, put under de facto house arrest by the government government, For a disease which is no more dangerous than the flu, and even less dangerous than the flu by orders of magnitude for very young people.
And that most of us would comply willingly and ridicule those who say that it's wrong and that it's damaging.
They would have said you were mad.
They would have said you are a mad person.
They'd have categorized you along with David Icke.
They would.
I mean, I think we ought to nail this issue with the flu.
I mean, I don't think either of us certainly is saying that the flu is not a bad thing.
I don't know how many times in your life you've had the flu.
I've had it about maybe two or three times, something like that.
And it's been nasty.
You know, it knocks you sideways, doesn't it?
And you're in bed and you're aching.
And I know that flu is a killer.
It can be if you're old and you're vulnerable.
But yet, if you get the flu, okay, your mum knows about it and maybe your work might know about it, we should take time off work, but that's it.
If you get the coronavirus, which actually in my experience is not as bad as the flu, I had it for five days and I carried on working through it and all it did was I remember thinking, God, this is shit.
God, I feel rotten.
And I carried on working and why am I thinking so slowly?
I hate the fact that I can't bash my peace out as quickly as I can.
And then I went to bed and And I was drenching my t-shirt in sweat and I thought to myself, this is good because a fever is your body's way of getting rid of the disease.
But that was my COVID experience.
But it wasn't like flu where you're thinking, I can't move.
I can't do anything.
I just feel...
So flu is bad.
And coronavirus can be bad, but that's it.
It's not an order of magnitude worse.
In fact, as you say, it's actually not as bad as the flu.
And yet, if anyone gets the coronavirus, we know about it.
And we've heard their anecdotes.
We've heard how bad it is.
But you wouldn't get the same with the flu just because we accept that the flu is a thing that happens.
Yeah.
I mean, we've had winters where 60,000 people have died from the flu.
Flu's no joke.
2017, 2018, I believe, was one of those.
The excess winter deaths, I think, were 60,000, which is more than we've had in 2020 of coronavirus.
Exactly.
Now, of course, the pro-lockdowners, the bedwetters, would argue that if it were not for the lockdown, it would have been far worse.
But, you know, they have to explain why that didn't happen in Sweden, for example.
Well, the peak...
The peak, I think, happened before the lockdown, didn't it, actually?
The peak of deaths was April 7th.
Yeah.
I don't know.
When did it?
March 23rd did the lockdown start?
In which case it was in decline before lockdown.
You can't claim that lockdown is what did it.
Although many are.
Even people who otherwise are very intelligent.
For example, Rod Liddle.
Extremely surprised that Rod Liddle has bought this.
Because I regarded Rod as...
One of Britain's best columnists.
Well, he is.
On his day, Rod is unbeatable.
But not on his day, he can be quite a bit disappointing.
In the same way, I really don't like slagging off my mates because I'm very fond of Rod and I'm very fond of Douglas, but there was a very well-made point in a letter that Peter Hitchens wrote to The Spectator, I don't know whether you saw it.
Douglas wrote a piece saying, well, you know, I really don't know what to think about the coronavirus and the policy, but I'm glad that people like Peter Hitchens are out there with their contrarian voices.
And Peter Hitchens wrote back to the effect that I have been vilified for my opinions on the coronavirus, for saying unpopular things.
And I'm glad that Douglas thinks that it's nice that I'm expressing my freedom of spree, but actually it's rather more important than that.
And this is not one of those issues where you can sit on the fence and say, well, I really don't know.
Because actually, One is perfectly capable, any intelligent person, You don't need to be a virologist, you don't need to be an epidemiologist or any scientist of any kind to look at the charts, to look at the evidence, to look at the range of scientific views of which are being expressed and they're available because of this wonderful thing we have called the internet.
We can see this stuff.
And you can form an intelligent view.
And you can form the view that what we're being told by the government is not accurate.
So tell me about your journey on this, because you've been, like me, you've been pretty forthright in your scepticism, but when did it click with you?
I started out...
Very worried.
You know, I saw what was happening in Italy, from a distance, obviously.
Bodies piling up.
I saw what was going on in China, welding people into apartments and all the rest of it.
Yeah, like me, you'd seen the stuff on sort of the back channels on Twitter and stuff, and you've been following this stuff, and you're thinking, Yeah, people being welded into their buildings and the stories about the mysterious composition of the pyres that have been spotted by satellite, you know, of clearly biological, basically humans being burned.
You saw all that.
And I heard that huge numbers of urns were being ordered by funeral homes in China.
And, you know, and I saw that the flights were continuing.
Our borders were still effectively wide open.
Nothing was being done.
My dad's not in great health.
My mum's got health problems too.
I've got other family members who are older and are not in great shape.
I wasn't worried so much for myself because I figured it was highly unlikely that it was going to be something that's going to hurt me badly.
I mean, I agree with what you said earlier in the conversation about the flu.
Flu is no joke.
You don't want to get it.
I think I've had it once, and not me sideways.
I expected something like that was coming our way.
But I mean, I was worried about my parents.
I got on the phone to them.
You've got to take this seriously.
You've got to stay at home.
Yeah.
Over the next couple of weeks, I started to realise that maybe it's not quite that bad, really.
And I was reading Dr.
Michael Levitt's work and John Unardis, Professor John Unardis, both of them at Stanford University, And I like Stanford.
I like especially the Hoover Institute.
I think they've got a lot of the best.
They've got Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell, yeah, who I'm a big fan of.
I love Thomas Sowell.
He's my god.
He's the man, isn't he?
Yeah.
Yes, absolutely.
Love him.
Oh, I love that book.
I love that book, yeah.
I tried to get friends to read that and all they see is basic economics.
Why would I want to read a book about economics?
I know it's fantastic.
It's beautifully written too, you know.
Anyway, I was listening to those guys in the United States and...
And suddenly it started to look not that bad, you know?
And I remember that fateful weekend where Boris moved from...
On the first day, he was saying we need to isolate ourselves if we're sick.
And then by Monday, he was locking the country down after the media went mental in response to the Professor Ferguson doomsday report.
By then I was fully against it.
I was arguing that anyone who says the army should be out on the streets against the British people was quite mad and that we needed to protect our liberty.
I believe that it's now under great threat.
I was right.
Yeah.
By the way, are you in London or are you in Manchester?
I'm in Manchester.
I'm just outside of Manchester.
Your sort of friendship group, where are they on all this?
There's a mix.
I do have friends who I love them dearly, extremely bright people, but they think that the lockdown was the right thing to do.
And beyond just thinking that it was the right thing to do at the time of the information that we had then, They think it was effective.
They think that it was the right thing to do, even in hindsight.
And that boggles my mind a bit.
But then I've got other friends who are right there with me and think it's crazy.
My parents, my mum's a bit on the fence, my dad's fully, he listens to your podcast, he's right there with us.
He's been going out for quite a while.
He doesn't consider it to be a threat to him at all.
My dad's quite militant as well.
He's militantly, he's a sceptic, yeah?
He'd be happy to die for the principle of his freedom to go out.
He had heart surgery late last year and he got a message saying, a printed form saying if you've had this surgery you need to take exercise and you need to get back working.
So when they closed the car parks on the Malvern Hills where he used to walk, he would find somewhere, you know, in a private road and park there and defy the police and, you know, he wasn't having it at all.
I'm very, very proud of him.
He claims that I've sort of radicalised him, but I think he's, I think I think Delling Poles actually all have a very bloody-minded streak, because my mother's the same.
We just don't take any shit.
I don't know why.
I'm fascinated by that aspect of evolutionary biology, what it is that predisposes some of us.
And it doesn't seem to be an education thing.
You can have the same education and everything, same social background.
But you can reach completely different conclusions.
And it seems to me to be the way that our brains...
You haven't got kids, I imagine, have you?
Not yet, no.
No.
It's weird.
I think a lot of it is nature.
And I think we create these almost fully formed beings.
I mean, obviously, you can help them become more rounded, more polite, more intelligent, more whatever.
But I think generally, people's politics are actually hardwired into them.
That's interesting.
I've not heard that before.
I think that our personalities are inherited.
Not entirely, of course, but I do think they are largely inherited.
I don't buy into the blank slate theory or any of that nonsense.
I think we inherit traits.
Are you arguing that Our politics are shaped by those traits.
What do you mean when you say they're hardwired?
Well, you see, it's interesting.
What I've read about this is that people say that actually, as a parent, you don't really have much influence on your children's...
development beyond a certain point, their personalities and their politics and stuff, that peer group pressure has a much more important role to play, which is quite interesting.
But, I mean, what do I know?
I've only been observing this from the experiment of my own children.
How old are your children, James?
Well, you see, I've got three.
I've got a grown-up one who's not He's my stepson, but he's like mine.
I've had him since he was six, so he's my boy.
And I think of him as my boy.
And he shares my politics, so that would go against, you know, that does sound like a nurture argument.
Then I look at my two, you know, the other two, and They're really, they try and fight it.
You know, daughter tries to be a feminist because, you know, that's what girls are like when they're teenagers.
You know, I'm not a feminist.
Definitely not.
But I just get my observations that so much of their veld and shower, as it were, is really just like it's hardwired into them.
They're not going to turn out to be leftards.
They're just not, I hope.
What would you rather they be?
Left-hearted or Scientologists?
Oh!
I don't know.
That would be weird.
That would be weird if they were Scientologists.
I don't know.
Do you know what?
I think actually, and you'll find this when you become a parent, that you just want them to be happy, really.
You just want them to be happy and fulfilled.
And you have to accept that if they turn out to be gay or Christian or left-wing or whatever, you've just got to kind of love them for who they are.
Are you religious?
To a degree.
When they were younger, I took them to church.
And I thought it was a very important part of their upbringing.
This is their culture.
I talked a bit about this to Nick Timothy.
I had on the podcast the other day.
I used to enjoy going to church.
I think it's really important that every British child should be aware of the Christian tradition of their culture.
They should know the Bible stories backwards because this is their culture and whether they like it or not, whether they want to go to church later on, That for 2,000 years, nearly, every British person,
well, obviously we didn't have Christian evangelists coming to England immediately after Christ, but whenever it was that the first Christian evangelists came to Britain, from that point on, British people were versed in Christian culture,
Christian tradition, And that to reject that would be like rejecting, I don't know, I mean, well, I'm not going to say Morris dancing, but, you know, think of something that's really important and really English that's sort of one of our defining characteristics.
I think it's really important.
Curing.
It's very unhealthy if we're deracinated.
I think that this is where I don't like the kind of globalist vision of people like George Soros, the idea that we should all just be this homogenous mass.
I think it's really good that when you go to Germany...
I went to Germany, I spent a...
I had three weeks living in Germany in Frankfurt and I had such a happy time there, just immersing myself in German culture and, you know, a bit of the language and I went out one night to this bar with this German and While we were having dinner, this man came in in this strange outfit.
It wasn't lederhosen, but it was a sort of weird traditional outfit.
And it turned out that he was some kind of journeyman.
Training to be, I don't know, a carpenter or something like that.
And there is in Germany this tradition where they wear these outfits and you recognise them by their outfits and they wander around and you give them your charity, you buy them drinks and you get them board and lodging and you give them work and they work their way round the country developing their skills.
And I thought, isn't that a fantastic...
German tradition.
And how could you not love that?
And how could you not want that to continue forever?
There are things the French do, which are uniquely French.
I remember I was just going to, when I was last in Paris, and seeing these 14-year-old girls smoking, smoking in kind of doorways and things, you know, just like, we smoke because it's what we do because we are French.
Yeah, go French, stay French.
We love you for that.
The Italians would put them...
The Italians would argue that they did the same.
We were in Bologna in December, probably fully exposed to Italian coronavirus, because of course it was in the north that it hit hardest, wasn't it?
And it was noticeable how many young people, again, 14-year-old girls, sat outside cafes smoking chimneys.
You just don't see that here.
And also what about the tradition of the passagetta, you know, where in the evening the old folk sit on their benches and they watch people just kind of walking up and down and hanging out and doing their stuff.
This is, you know, the European Union wants to erase all that.
They want to make everything homogenous.
They wanted to make...
I felt this very much when, recently, when All the blackface Morris dancing troops decided because of Black Lives Matter that they were never going to do blackface.
Well, blackface was never a racist thing.
It was a tradition that predates that kind of racist attitude.
It was from something else.
And the idea that because of political correctness, yet another piece of our culture dies just because a few offender trons want to be offended Or in the same way, the RAF blanking over the gravestone of Guy Gibson's dog, Nigger.
Insane.
I can't imagine that any rational black person looking at the gravestone of a dog from 1944...
Or whatever it was, 42, 43, would be offended by it because everything is about context and about meaning.
I had this conversation where I had a really shit time at Cambridge, last time I went to Cambridge.
And one of the few people who took my side was this black guy.
You know, he got in it totally and he looked after me when I was being harassed by these white SJWs.
So what were the circumstances?
What were the circumstances?
Oh, God, I had to go and...
I was invited to be...
I read about this in The Spectator when I still had my Spectator column, he said bitterly...
I was invited to talk to the annual Christmas dinner of the Cambridge Conservatives.
And I gave this speech, and I was thinking on the way there in my car, I was driving up, because I tend to write my speech to the last minute.
I was thinking, what can I do?
How can I entertain them in this politically correct world when you can't say anything?
And I said, and I was describing, I wanted an analogy to describe how much the world had changed between the time I was at university, you know, when I was quite familiar with Cambridge as well as Oxford, because, you know, I remember going up to the varsity boxing match at Cambridge once.
There was a sort of friendly rivalry between, you know, We used to call the Cambridge people tabs, can tabs, and dismissively, you know, like this rubbish university, you know, sort of inferior to Oxford and so on.
Anyway, I was thinking, you are a persecuted minority at Cambridge now.
You have a really shit time.
So let me give you a bit of a taste of the old values.
So I described a previous visit that I'd made to Cambridge where I had found in the bar about two or three or four Conservative undergraduates who told me about how tough it was being a Conservative at Cambridge.
The feeling I got was that they were a bit like Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth or Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary.
They almost had to hide in their Well, priestholes, if they'd been Catholics, I suppose.
They were very persecuted, and they were sort of cowering, and they were sort of grateful to talk to somebody who had their back for change, and they sort of hung eagerly on my words.
And I was trying to describe this, and I was saying that the difference in attitudes is a bit like if Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris had got into a time machine from a Top of the Pops in 1973.
And come forward to the present and realise that sleeping with underage girls was no longer a surprise.
It was an analogy of that.
I'm telling it now, I don't even think it was a particularly sick analogy.
It's just an effective and true analogy.
And at the mere invocation of the names of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, and at the invocation of, in a faintly jocular context of sexual abuse or paedophilia or whatever, that this was completely beyond the pearl of acceptability.
It was so unfunny.
And people started walking out as I, and I'd just been warming up at this stage in my speech.
And Once people start walking out, you can never recover.
It was a very unsatisfactory experience and I didn't deliver the fun thing I wanted to deliver.
And the guy who'd invited me basically sort of completely fucked me over.
He didn't go, I'm really sorry, mate.
You know, the few people here, you know, they just reacted badly.
He just fucked off, you know, left me in my misery.
But there was an Irish guy, black Irish guy, and I'm eternally grateful to him.
And, you know, he went with me to the pub and he just said, no, don't worry, mate.
It's all right.
Anyway, I was talking to him on Passant about how everything is in context.
I was not making light of paedophilia per se.
I was making light of the change in cultural attitudes.
And I said, in the same way, the word nigger can either be, if voiced with contempt and hatred, can be about the nastiest word in the language, At the same time, it can be an expression of great affection.
Like, you know, if you say, you're my neighbor, you know, it means like, you're my brother, you're my blood brother.
That was a very, very long anecdote to come to the point.
But yeah, I'm glad you asked me because I haven't told it properly before.
So thank you.
No, thank you for sharing it.
Humour is seemingly not allowed in this new era, is it?
Everything is...
No, and humour is very much about context.
It's a very it's it's.
It involves a level of intellectual sophistication, which which we all have within us because we all would know how to get a joke.
But nevertheless, it does involve an understanding of nuance and levels, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
This shutting down of our traditions and of our cultural past in the name of political correctness is deeply worrying.
Did you hear about the choir at Sheffield Cathedral?
I did.
It upset me so, so much.
It's horrendous.
Just tell us a bit more for American and other listeners who don't know about this, what's happened.
Yeah, well, in a nutshell, Sheffield is a northern city in England.
Its beautiful big old cathedral has a long-standing choir, which has just been disbanded for not being diverse enough.
Of course, by diverse, they don't mean diversity of opinion.
They mean...
Not enough.
Too white, basically, is what they're saying, isn't it?
They want an over-representation of black and minority ethnic people everywhere in society.
An equal representation is not enough, of course.
I mean, last week it was revealed that there are 400 transgenders at the BBC. I mean, what percentage?
400?
400 employed by the BBC. Are you serious?
400.
Wow.
What percentage of the population identifies as transgender?
0.1% or something?
I don't know.
It can't be much more than that.
So, yeah, anyway, they've decided they want more diversity in the choir, and until they get it, there will be no choir in Sheffield.
Sheffield's a very poor city, a destitute city in many ways, and it doesn't have that much cultural amenities left, and getting rid of them like this is appalling.
It really is.
I mean, how many people are on the choir?
20?
So how can it be sufficiently diverse?
How will they be able to achieve the diversity they want?
The answer, I think, of course, is that they'll never stop.
It will never be diverse enough.
The choir won't, the universities won't, the BBC won't.
It will never be diverse enough.
There'll always be something wrong.
There'll always be someone there who has to go.
It does seem to be always the same people.
Mostly male people of white skin colour.
They want these people gone.
I mean, I try not to buy into...
I mean, I'm deeply suspicious of things like, you know, Kalergi plan and all this sort of stuff, because I do think there is an anti-Semitic streak in a lot of that, as we discussed earlier on.
Tell me about the Kalergi plan, briefly, because I've sort of seen it referred to and I'm not sure...
How much into David Icke territory it is and how real it is?
I don't know that much about it.
There's a guy called Kuvenhove Kalergi.
Basically, the conspiracy goes that the white race is being eradicated and that the European Union and the United Nations and all those entities are working towards the eradication of the white race.
I I don't buy into that myself.
I think that there are other things, there are other ideologies driving those organisations.
You know, I don't think it's that.
But yeah, that's the Kalerke plan.
I don't buy into it.
I think I'm put off by it being adjacent to a lot of actual Nazis.
Who are out there, you know?
I mean, I don't think they're as common as the average Guardian columnist would have you believe, but these people do exist and they are deeply unpleasant, obviously.
Although I think we can push this thing too far, this about if people who might be described as hard-right Worry about something, therefore it cannot be real or true.
Just a slight digression.
I was thinking of a Twitter exchange yesterday or the day before between One of the guys from Trigonometry, Constantine, you know, the...
Yeah, Constantine Kisson.
Constantine Kisson, yeah.
It's weird.
I'm slightly puzzled by why they haven't had me on the show yet because, I mean, originally, when they started out, they invited me on and I said, yeah.
But they've been very sort of backward about having me on recently.
They haven't pushed it and they keep sort of making excuses why not.
And yesterday somebody was asking why they hadn't have or why they wouldn't have Tommy Robinson on the show.
And he was like, you know, well, we don't want to be cancelled and Tommy Robinson is blah, blah, blah.
And I was thinking, well, Tommy Robinson is not...
I mean, I know him reasonably well.
I mean, he's got his flaws.
You know, he's handy with his fists.
He's sometimes rash and he quite likes a bit of confrontation.
But when you talk to him, I don't get the impression that he fits into any definition of racist or, you know, he doesn't hate Muslims per se.
I mean, he's suspicious about the religion, which I think is reasonable.
This thing that people have of trying to distance themselves from anything which might enable the left to tar them as hard right.
Mind you, the bar is so bloody low these days.
I mean, I've never been called hard right or far right before, until the last five years.
Because I'm not...
You know, I believe in limited government and freedom and I like...
I get on with black people and Jews and, you know, I've got my Muslim special friend who writes to me, you know, dear James, it's your Muslim special friend here.
I mean, I don't think that if I were really...
Racist or Islamophobic.
I'd have Muslims writing to me saying, I'm your Muslim special friend.
Maybe I'm wrong.
But it's extraordinary how to have even this conversation.
I imagine there's going to be leftists, if they listen to it, who'd think, yeah, these are a pair of evil fascists.
Sure.
Why?
What have we...
What happened?
It's strange, isn't it?
I mean, as it happens, I place fascism on the left.
I don't think...
Yeah, so do I. So do I. I don't accept that the further right you go, you know, the more like Hitler you become.
I think that's absurd and in actual fact...
In actual fact, both fascists and communists look to utopia for guidance.
Thomas More's utopia is a left-wing vision.
The idea that you can perfect mankind is not a right-wing view at all.
Right-wing people see that human beings are inherently flawed, imperfectable.
And that you just have to learn to live with that.
And that's obviously what limited government's about, isn't it?
You can't have...
It is.
Well, the definition that Hayek preferred was collectivist.
And he said, look, communists and Nazis are both collectivist ideologies.
And he made very little distinction between the two, having seen both in action.
When he wrote that book in 1944.
Yeah, yeah.
Wrote a surf, wasn't it?
Have you read Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg?
Yeah, I have.
I have.
And I'm a great admirer of that book when he points out also that America experienced liberal fascism very much under Woodrow Wilson.
I mean, when you look at what America was like during the First World War, it was fascistic.
There's no question about it.
And I hardly think that FDR's confiscation of gold was not a pretty fascistic measure, not the sort of thing you'd associate with the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So, yeah, I mean, I do worry that That what's happening to our world now is something that you and I, growing up, never imagined would happen.
The totalitarianism we're experiencing now was something that happened behind the Iron Curtain, and in South American banana republics, and in African countries run by dictators, and in communist countries, but not in the West.
No way!
It was unimaginable.
I, as a boy, remember hearing the words Nazi and fascist in relation to Mussolini and Hitler and Hitler.
Neo-Nazi in relation to skinheads beating up Jews and gays in the streets and so on.
These words really meant something.
They were powerful words.
Like racist.
If you call someone a racist, it meant something.
That was a heavy, hard-hitting word.
And now these things just...
They've been rendered meaningless.
And we have all around us speech codes based upon the notion that these are problems all over.
Britain is not a racist country.
I don't believe that Britain is a racist country.
Actually, I find Black Lives Matter deeply offensive.
I find it for a whole host of different reasons, but that perhaps above all.
It's not a racist country.
We're not racist people.
We're extremely tolerant.
All the best data on the subject shows that we're far more tolerant than our neighbours on the continent.
And I don't think that continentals are terribly racist people either.
Yeah, it's very, very strange.
I could never have imagined it.
The speech codes especially are extraordinary.
I could never have predicted it.
They are extraordinary.
No, you're right.
They've pathologised.
Normal behavior.
For example, when I get talking to somebody with a different color or a different accent or whatever, one of the first things I want to know is about where they're from, what their background is, because I think getting to know somebody is about getting a feel for who they are and where they're coming from.
That's a microaggression, isn't it?
Microaggressions.
So being polite and being interested, being curious is a microaggression.
I would consider it rude not to ask somebody about where they're from.
Because you can have good conversations.
I mean, I love talking to people.
Pakistani taxi drivers about what's going on in Pakistan.
It's how you find out about the world, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
It's so strange.
It's like they want to make us into incurious meat robots, which is horrifying.
Marxist-Leninist sausage factory.
I'm churning out these meat robots.
I don't want to live in a country like that.
I don't want to live in a country where everyone is the same.
You mentioned earlier that the European Union's desire to extinguish the ancient, evolved nation states of Europe, Italy and France and Greece and all these different countries, and to have one universal European.
I mean, European is meaningless, isn't it, really?
There's no such thing as a European as such.
I mean, it's a geographic term, I suppose, but I mean, how different are Germans and Greeks?
How wonderfully different are Germans and Greeks and French and Italians?
I like that.
I like those differences.
Those are fascinating countries with fascinating histories.
It is about Germany, though, isn't it?
It's about Germany getting rid of Hitler from its past.
Yes, yes.
And that's what's driving it.
What do you think is driving it here in Britain?
Oh, it's a combination of things.
I mean, it's a function partly, I think, of the dumbing down of our education system.
Well, it seems a bit too pat to talk about Gramsci, and I think it was Rudi Dutschke, wasn't it, who came up with the phrase, the long march through the institutions, not Gramsci, but Gramsci sort of formulated the idea.
But I think that there is no question that our entire...
I keep thinking about these book ideas, which I then failed to write because I haven't got the time or the inclination and stuff.
One of the books I wanted to write was called something like Parasite Wasps.
And I was thinking of the wasps that lay their eggs inside the spider.
And then the eggs, as they hatch, they eat their way through the body of the spider and they feast on its living body and they emerge.
And I think something similar has happened to all our cultural institutions.
I mean, it's obvious that the universities have fallen.
There is no diversity of thought in our universities anymore.
And even, you know, I was at university in the 80s.
And there were definitely...
I don't think I was taught by any of them, but there were definitely...
Dons there who were conservatives rather than Labour.
I think all my Dons were probably left, but they never showed their left-wingery.
It was all about the literature.
It wasn't about the politics.
I had a Marxist.
I had a feminist Marxist called Penny Boomerler, and Penny Boomerler took me for George Eliot, and I was terrified when I heard that I was going to get a feminist Marxist.
But when she marked my essays, she didn't mark me down for not being a feminist Marxist.
She was great.
I think back then it was okay, and now they're all hard left, and I think they're shameless about showing it.
But it's not just the schools and the universities.
It's institutions like the law firms, even sort of crusty Chambers are now recruiting people because they're women or because they're black or both, rather than because they're the best person for the job.
Look at the army.
Even the army has been SJW converged.
Look at the adverts they produce now.
Look at the...
Look at the firemen.
Firemen don't exist anymore.
They're now, what are they called?
Firefighters.
And when I drive past, I drive through a place called Long Buckby and I look at the billboard outside the fire station and the recruitment drives Aimed at women and aimed at minorities.
And you're thinking, well, there aren't many minorities run up.
You know, it's rural Northamptonshire, number one.
But women, why do you want women as farmen?
They're called farmen for a reason.
You want You want a chap carrying out of a burning building.
You don't want some girl.
And as an old-fashioned man, I don't really want women being put in the way of danger.
In the same way, I don't really want women as infantry.
I'm not saying that there are no women who could make good infantry.
You see it in those Kurdish units, which are all women, and you see it in the IDF to a degree.
I think as the Israeli Defence Forces have shown in countless experiments, women and men, you know, mixed combat infantry units don't work.
Because when the woman gets hit, the men's instinct is to go and rescue the women rather than pressing on to take the position, which is what you should do.
Otherwise you all get wiped out.
Just a couple of examples of the way that our whole culture Has been really a minority of people on the left, but determined people have turned the institutions from their ostensible purpose.
You know, the army is about defence of the realm.
Law is about the application of the law, you know, according to English common law and so on.
They've changed.
It's now about things like diversity and...
Equity.
Correctness.
Equity, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's one of the, that's almost the most dangerous idea of the age, the idea that equality is something that we should try and create.
Equality is not a very good goal.
No.
It's an extremely dangerous goal to pursue.
A lot of people are aware that equality of outcome is unachievable and that it is dangerous to pursue it.
But I actually think that equality of opportunity is also equally impossible to achieve and dangerous to go after.
How would you have a society where everybody has equality of opportunity?
It wouldn't be feasible, would it?
How would you bring about a society like that?
It wouldn't be achievable, and it's wrong.
You know, you don't want, I mean, people who join the army, you want people who want to kill, basically.
I mean, the idea that the army is about, I don't know, about boosting your self-esteem or whatever.
I mean, these are adjunct things that may, adjunct benefits that And I think they are true.
I think we know that...
Well, Wellington called his soldiers the scum of the earth.
And we know that the army has traditionally recruited men from backgrounds where if they hadn't joined the army, they'd have ended up in prison or they'd have ended up drunk and living on the street.
And the army...
Has given them a sense of purpose.
It's given them discipline.
It's made real men of them and productive men.
I mean, heroes.
They're laying their lives on the line for us.
And that's great.
I can't remember how I got to this.
What was I saying at the beginning?
Talking about the kind of hollowing out of our institutions.
Oh yes, that's right.
By Parasite Wasp.
Parasite was, you know, by the way, it's really nice talking to you, Roman, because sometimes when I've got somebody like David Starkey or Douglas Murray or somebody.
I always feel slightly like it's more like an interview.
There's certain buttons I've got to push to get them.
And actually, Starkey was really tricky.
Really?
It didn't help.
When I interviewed him, I didn't know it at the time.
I had coronavirus.
And I thought I had a nasty cold, but I booked it.
You know, he was quite hard to get in advance anyway.
Did you do it face-to-face?
Sorry?
Did you do it in person?
Oh, you did.
I actually saw it.
Yeah, I saw the interview.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was feeling really rotten.
And you're conscious with Starkey that there is an interviewer you want to get at him.
You want him to be at his most Starkey-ish forthright and stuff.
And actually...
Interesting, I corresponded with him and he said something about that he didn't think I'd done a very good interview or something, which I thought was rather rude with him.
I rather felt that actually he was being deliberately perverse, that he was playing hard to get and rather than giving me the stocky I wanted, he was being Yeah, I used to be a libertarian and now I'm kind of a bit of a kind of liberal squish.
He gave his hardcore interview to Darren Grimes instead with consequences, which is...
What are your thoughts on that episode?
I've made a note, Parasite Wasps, by the way.
I want to get you to continue with that in a minute.
Yeah, we'll come back to that point.
I feel, no, I think...
Starkey is a brilliant man.
I think he's one of our best historians.
I think he is very brave.
He's one of the very few people with the balls to go out there and articulate.
Ideas that actually ought to be commonplace.
Just sensible conservative ideas.
I don't think he's racist.
I don't think he's a bad person.
I think he's probably a creature of his...
A product of his generation.
So he might have slightly different cultural attitudes to somebody who's kind of been brought up in the world of woke.
But beyond that, he's certainly not a racist.
I think his...
His only mistake in that, he shouldn't have apologised afterwards.
I mean, you know, they completely fucked him up the arse on the other side with a ginormous pointed dildo with poison tipped.
And he lost everything.
And I think it's just...
It's illustrative of just how much the Red Guard cultural revolution madness has gone, that he can be destroyed.
Look, we're doing a podcast now.
At any point in this conversation, I could say something.
Which was just the work of a fleeting moment, the product of a thought that came into my head that I might have...
In different circumstances, I might have voiced it in an entirely different way.
And yet for that, it would be possible...
If interpreted in an aggressive way, to destroy my whole career.
Well, it would do if I had a career to destroy it, and I do particularly.
I'm not reliant on a publisher.
I haven't got a publisher.
I work for Breitbart.
Breitbart is probably not going to sack me for being right-wing.
I haven't got a slot on the BBC. I'm not...
I'm attached to an Oxbridge College or anything like that.
I haven't got a literary agent or I've got one but I haven't written a book for her yet.
But how easy it is in these times for somebody to be cancelled.
I mean, there's a sort of thing you're meant to say about how, oh, he expressed himself clumsily.
But I mean, who doesn't express themselves clumsily occasionally?
That's the nature of conversations.
They're not pre-prepared speeches.
They are whatever makes our thoughts work in that particular moment.
So I think poor guy.
I think it's appalling what's happened to him.
Tell me, what's your take on it?
I'm horrified.
Starkey is a great man.
He's a heavyweight thinker.
He's a brilliant writer.
He's a great personality, a great character.
He's someone who brings enormous amounts of wealth, a wealth of knowledge to the conversation.
He doesn't deserve to have been treated as he has been.
It's disgusting.
I wonder if Darren Grimes should have edited that, to be honest with you.
This is how I look at it, okay?
It's a bit like...
You know, Sam Harris does the same thing, I believe.
I don't mean to compare myself to Sam Harris.
I just mean that I have the same approach as him to doing things like what we're doing now.
And that is that if you say anything which might, you know, which came...
If something comes out wrong, it comes out clumsily, it might get you in trouble.
Maybe it's something you said that you didn't mean.
We're thinking aloud sometimes, aren't we?
That he's happy to edit it out or happy to say it again.
That, for me, is how this sort of thing should be approached, especially in this time when these woke fascists are running around cancelling people.
I hate that word, cancel.
It's all totalitarian.
It belongs in Ceausescu's Romania or something.
It doesn't belong in a free country.
Yeah, I think what happened to Starkey was appalling.
But the mistake he made was apologising.
He never apologised.
Ever.
Never, ever apologise.
This is what Vox Day says and Vox Day is right.
Never apologise.
They just see that as an invitation to go in harder.
Yeah, that's weak.
And it's always what I'm telling my dear friend Toby.
I mean, the transformation of Toby...
It's one of the things that's given me great pleasure in the last two or three years.
Toby is so much less of a cuck than he was.
He should never have apologised or shown any contrition because he'd done nothing wrong.
In fact, this is an interesting point.
I always digress in these things, but maybe that's for the best.
And especially when you're on drugs like I am.
What was I thinking of here?
Oh no, it's gone.
It will come back to me.
It will come back to me.
Going back to what was...
Let's go back to the talk about the army and about parasite wasps.
Yeah, yeah.
Which is that I think this is so important, and although I mentioned it before, I can't mention it often enough, that there is not enough thinking from first principles in our culture.
You know, the left loves to caricature.
The position of people like you and me as being one of uncaring.
We have the view that we do because we just don't give a shit about other people.
I've been having this on Twitter today about when I posed in Waitrose and Aldi.
Not wearing a mask.
I read some of those tweets to you.
Sorry to stop you there for a second, James.
I read some of those tweets directed at you online today regarding the masks are absolutely vile.
They're really tolerant people, of course.
They like to tell everyone how tolerant they are.
Level the most obnoxious, mean-spirited abuse of people.
It's just horrible.
It really is.
They want to dehumanise you and that of course is what the Nazis did to the Jews.
I don't think the reducto ad hitleram is a kind of sign that you lost the debate.
It's just factually accurate that totalitarians love to dehumanise their enemies in order to make their eradication seem somehow like No worse than eradicating any other form of vermin.
And that's how they roll, and that's what we're heading towards.
But first principles, what is it that we want about this world we live in?
Well, one of the first things we want to do is we all want to get along.
That seems to be a basic.
And so how can we foster a world when we all get along, while at the same time a world that functions economically, which enables people to enjoy the fruits of their labour.
If they work hard, they should benefit from it.
How do we ensure that business you mentioned about equality of opportunity?
I agree with you.
It's become a bit of a cliché.
It's a bit of a lazy cop-out for Conservatives to say, I don't believe in equality of outcome, but I do believe in equality of opportunity.
But I share your scepticism that that's really popular, really possible.
I mean, where do you stop?
Is it unfair that I can't play for Chelsea, despite my inability to play football?
Well, no, I don't think it is, really.
Equally, is it unfair that an Islamist girl...
In full hijab, can't work in a hairdresser.
Well, no, I don't think it is.
I think she's made her bed, she's got a lie in it.
You know, if her religion is that important to her, then you can't get, there's only a cat there, but lots of jobs that you can't be able to do.
So equality of opportunity is actually a complete chimera.
If everyone thought according to first principles, the world would be a lot less hatred and violence in the world, I think.
And people would think a lot more clearly.
Most people can't think clearly.
I mean, for example, imagine if you...
Oh my god, Ronan, what I've been told is that I've got to go swimming now, and I do have to go swimming, not just for recreational purposes, but because my arm is so fucked that I need...
I'll go, well, it'll just be two minutes and I'll be there.
What are we going to do?
Should we continue this podcast some other time or should we just say, well, we'll do one soon?
Look, it's up to you.
I'm enjoying the conversation.
I'd like to continue.
Why don't we know?
Let's...
I think what we should do is just do this one and then put another one soon.
We can have another...
You know, we might wear different coloured shirts or something.
If you can remember where we are...
Yeah, we'll start with first principles.
This has been good.
I've really enjoyed this.
And we must have done about an hour, have we?
We've done an hour and 45 minutes.
Have we really?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh my god, it felt like no more than an hour.
That's really good.
So I think we'll make this one self-contained and then we'll do another one soon because it's been really good talking to you.
So you're listening to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpoll, and my special guest, Ronan.
I still forget how to pronounce your name.
Ronan Mayer.
Mayor.
Roman, it's been really good.
And I'd like to meet you in person one day.
It's been fantastic.
Likewise, James.
It was a real pleasure.
Really enjoyable.
So thanks a lot.
And, oh, listeners, don't forget to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
You get early access to this stuff.
And you support me and...
Enable me to have my expensive back treatment and my other things.
And thank you, Ronan Mayer.
It's been really fun.
Thank you.
Let's do another one soon.
Okay.
Great.
Bye, James.
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