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Sept. 13, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
58:43
Douglas Murray
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I love Denny Pole.
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I love Denny Pole.
And listen another time, subscribe with me.
I love Denny Pole.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Denny Pole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but you can see my...
Well, those of you who are looking at the visual version can see my excitement.
Well, sort of.
Can I first apologise for the fact that I'm not looking as elegant as this week's guest, Douglas Murray?
It's because my wife didn't iron my shirt properly, and I haven't got that pared-down look that you've perfected recently.
A lockdown look?
Yeah.
I've given up on suits and shirts, what's the point?
If it's the end of times, we might as well be comfortable.
Well, there is something to be said for the new normal after all, because I think actually you look better like this than in a jacket.
Well, that's very kind.
I mean, don't you think now we don't have to ever go into offices again, it seems, then we'll just stay at home and wait for the apocalypse?
Yeah.
Driving into London today, I felt no excitement.
I think London is over, isn't it?
Yeah.
It could be.
I mean, everything feels like it could be.
At the moment, as we speak, in London, we have Extinction Rebellion, which one might have hoped had gone away like a bad venereal disease, as opposed to all the good ones you can get.
Yeah, quite.
And, you know, yet here they are, still trying to bring London to a standstill.
Ten days, they plan to.
And there isn't a London to bring to a standstill at the moment.
London's already empty.
Yeah.
It's already been standstilled by Corona and the response to it.
And yet, even at this stage, these maniacs come back to try to make life just that little bit worse for everyone.
Yeah.
I could have been out there today, actually.
Doing a piece to camera, outraged about Extinction Rebellion, obviously I preferred your company, but I wonder whether...
That's the smallest compliment anyone's ever paid me.
I'd rather be with you than with the Extinction Rebellion maniacs.
I must remember to return that compliment at some point.
Well, the thing is though...
By covering them, when we on the conservative side of the argument go out there and film them doing their stupid plastic bag dances and dressing up as red women that don't say anything, are we kind of doing their work for them?
Shouldn't we just be ignoring them?
I don't know.
I mean, my own view increasingly is that people should just sort them out another way.
I have to say that if I was trying to get to the hospital across the bridge and these selfish maniacs, because of their own crazed apocalyptic ideology, stopped me getting to the hospital, I think I would feel much more visceral about how to solve it.
There was the case, wasn't there?
Remember in Bristol, the last round of protests, where somebody was denied the chance to see their dying dad in hospital, For me, that story alone should have been enough to...
Oh, I mean, it's all like that.
Yesterday, they attacked a building where a lot of think tanks in London are.
And writers for Extinction Rebellion, which includes Stephen Fry, urged this to happen.
They said, yes, you should target these think tanks.
What kind of a situation are we in that somebody like Stephen Fry...
Advocates direct action against think tanks as a normal thing to do.
So, yeah, I've got very little patience with these people.
I really want the British police to go in hard at some point soon.
I hope they do.
Yeah.
Interesting you raise the Stephen Fry issue.
I was struck when I read his tweets on the subject, and I was thinking, hang on a second.
You're supposed to be a national treasure, like the Queen Mum's dead, so now you've taken over.
What the hell are you doing, Mr Entertainer?
I know.
And by the way, in supporting a group whose founder just yesterday was discovered to have urged or said that MPs should be shot in the head.
I thought, particularly after the murder of Joe Cox, that we all deprecated that sort of chat.
But it seems that it's okay to talk about putting one in the head of MPs.
If you're Extinction Rebellion.
And you can support people who advocate shooting MPs in the head if you're Stephen Fry and it's Extinction Rebellion.
I find all of this just very, very bad.
Very bad news.
Very bad signs about the unhealthiness of the society that we've ended up in.
Irrespective of all the deeper, real issues that are going on.
I know that this is...
Once you've mentioned the Nazis, you've lost the debate.
But I think that these times have answered a question that we asked when we were growing up, which is how the civilised country that produced Schubert and Beethoven could suddenly, and Goethe, could embrace this nihilistic death cult with all these Jews being killed and stuff and accept it as normal.
But...
We're experiencing it, that decline, aren't we?
Quite rapidly, actually.
We're experiencing a certain element of it, which is...
Well, we're being reminded of that central truth that the German people weren't uniquely different to the rest of humanity in the 1930s, but that the species always behaves in the same fashion, and that things happen like...
You start to not mind when buildings get attacked and you start to not mind when a certain type of person gets attacked and then you don't mind when a certain type of person gets killed and then you start to cheer when a certain type of person gets killed and you don't know where the damn brakes are on the thing.
And that's one of the places we're at at the moment.
When you have celebrities supporting movements That say, yeah, put one in the head of all MPs in a democracy.
Who the hell do you think you are to have the right to say that?
Who the hell do you think you are?
And, of course, the answer is they think they've got a bigger cause.
Yes, because every maniac always thinks they've got a bigger cause.
To utilise your highly rare Hitler analogy...
It's not like the Nazis didn't think they had a bigger cause.
The Extinction Rebellion, who are not the same as the Nazis, but they think they have a bigger cause.
They think they're saving everybody on Earth.
So yes, of course you can start attacking public buildings and private buildings.
And of course you can start to talk about direct action and violence against all elected members of Parliament.
Of course, because you're saving us all.
Yeah.
The elected members of parliament.
Do you share my abject disappointment?
Yeah, I'm just not surprised.
Why are you not surprised?
Oh, I think because we all know that for a long time the best people haven't gone into Parliament.
Yeah.
I mean, that's not to say that there aren't good people there, and there are.
But, yeah, of course, I mean, the hurdles that we put in place...
To get there are now such that you couldn't have very many free thinkers.
And if you did, well, when you do, they have to keep their heads down.
I remember thinking it some years ago when Rory Stewart went into Parliament.
I thought he was an interesting figure.
I disagreed with him on quite a lot of stuff.
When he became an MP, I actually thought less of him, I noticed.
And I remember registering at the time that was probably a bad sign.
I just thought less of him.
I thought, that's a shame.
I thought you were an interesting person.
And we can point to a lot of figures in Parliament who are mediocre, but that's the public's fault and it's the media's fault because we play these stupid games.
Did you ever once say something?
Were you ever once near something?
Were you adjacent to someone who said something?
Have you ever sat on a sofa with James Dellingpole?
That would be a bad one.
Terrible.
About the worst side of thought.
Career destroying, I'd say.
Yeah.
Tony Abbott...
For example?
For example.
I find you extraordinary that the people who are agreeing that Tony Abbott's sexism, alleged sexism, homophobia, whatever, are the charge of the educate, among the people endorsing this are Conservative MPs.
I mean, some of our viewers may not have followed the ins and outs of this, but yes, Tony Abbott, the former...
Australian Prime Minister and distinguished statesman and great friend and fan of the United Kingdom is proposed as a trade envoy of the UK, since it looks like we're going to leave the EU without a deal.
People who know how to do business deals like that, trade deals like Tony Abbott, have It's going to be very helpful.
It's fantastic that he should want such a role.
Somebody as distinguished as him and with such a great career track record and he's done big deals with other countries and he was Prime Minister of Australia.
It's fantastic that he'd want to help us.
At the moment I heard the news, I thought, this is just great.
This is exactly what we want, you know?
Our friends to show up.
And what happens?
The British media start playing the usual game.
They claim he's a homophobe.
Tony Abbott is not a homophobe.
He's not a homophobe.
They say he's a sexist.
He isn't a sexist.
He's a misogynist.
He isn't a misogynist.
They'll probably try to claim he's transphobic or some other crap next.
And they say he's a climate denier and all this.
And then these broadcasters who play this stupid game get weak, weak men like Matt Hancock and Grant Shapps and they put it to them.
And they're there with their NHS lanyard sort of thinking, love me.
And they don't know what to say and they say things like, well, I don't know about the allegations and I'll look into them.
Instead of saying stop it, just stop playing this game.
My view, at this stage...
These people have overreached so much, I wouldn't care if Tony Abbott was a fire-breathing Paisleyite.
I wouldn't care if he had personally run the Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign and tried to stretch it out across all of Australia and the United Kingdom.
I wouldn't care.
I don't care.
I don't care if they say he's a misogynist.
I don't care if they say he's a homophobe.
I don't care about any of it now, and nor should anybody else.
They've overused their currency.
They've hyperinflated.
They were in a Zimbabwean situation, and it's time that we say we don't care.
Your magic spell words don't work anymore.
And, what's more, we're not going to allow your stupidity To cripple this country.
What exactly does this country want to be after Brexit?
Do we want to be this weirdo country where, you know, the Kay Burleys find things that people once did and then make sure that as a result around the world we're represented by people who've never done anything or thought anything and are totally incapable?
Good!
We're halfway there already.
Yeah.
By the way, has to be said, if you are Kay Burley and doing that and watching this, I'll play that game back to her.
2009, she throttled a female reporter round the neck till the woman was bruised.
Okay, I'll do this.
Fine.
Kay Burley, you want to play that game?
Nobody should appear in a studio with Kay Burley because she's somebody who throttles women till they're bruised.
And if you appear in a studio with her, you approve of the throttling of women.
Okay, who's going to be left in this landscape?
Who's going to be left?
Yeah.
And then people say, oh, we don't seem to have the right representation in Parliament.
No, because you played these stupid games for years.
You said everybody was a racist.
Everybody was a homophobe.
Everybody was a sexist.
Time that we stopped caring.
High time we stopped caring.
Yeah.
We agree on this one.
I'm already depressed by the answer you can give it to my next question, which is, where does the hope lie?
How are we going to stop this stuff happening?
I'm very hopeful.
Oh.
Very, very hopeful.
Oh, oh, people have had enough.
People have had enough.
Show me some evidence.
Well, let me give you an example of what can happen.
I suspect that, like me, all your adult life you've heard about the silent majority.
By the way, I've always hated the talk of the silent majority.
People say, oh, but the silent majority is with me.
Why is the majority silent?
Why are they silent?
Now, at elections, they make themselves heard.
And people say Donald Trump is, you know, every single thing imaginable.
And he, in many ways, is a fairly reprehensible character.
You know, he has lots of traits that we were brought up not to like.
Boastfulness and a lot more.
But the American people knew all this and they voted him in as president anyway.
Why?
When almost the entirety of the press is against it.
Because the public have been factoring that in and have got past caring.
I think the same thing is the case with the public in the UK. The general public were told by a lot of the media and by all the opposition parties that Boris Johnson is the biggest racist imaginable.
Because he once published a column in The Spectator by Taki, which made a joke they don't still find funny 20 years later.
And that he said that Muslim women who wear burqas can sometimes by some people be said to look like letterboxes.
So this makes Boris a huge, great, big racist.
Yet the public voted for the Conservative government with an 80-seat majority.
Park for the moment whether or not they remotely behave like a Conservative government with an 80-seat majority.
But that's what the so-called silent majority does.
So...
Why are we still vulnerable despite the silent majority being right?
Two things need to happen.
The silent majority needs to start finding its voice.
It needs to speak and not just at general elections.
Second thing is we need to turn this around.
And we can on these weird people who are a deep minority in all of our societies and who think they can dictate all of the moral and political weather.
They've got it coming to them and it's high time we put it to them.
These people are absolute fraudsters.
They should be shamed, they should be called out, they should be humiliated, they should be embarrassed.
Every single era before this one, we knew what this type of person was.
These people who peacock around, showing everyone their own virtue.
Literature is filled with these figures.
From biblical times to the present, it's filled with these people.
We all know these people.
Why don't we identify them today?
What is it that Gary Lineker has in his closet that means he goes around endlessly lecturing the British people about our alleged racism?
I can tell you there's something.
Oh, I can tell you there's something.
What is it about all these celebrities who do this ultra-woke stuff?
Oh, they've got stuff in their closets.
What are they doing other than masquerading as the most virtuous people in order to try to keep the attention away from them?
Why don't we focus the attention finally?
You know, David Walliams, who likes to do a bit of this stuff, and made some vile jokes about Lawrence Fox, that absolutely bombed at the awards ceremony he did, tried to take the piss out of Lawrence Fox.
Oh, and then made some jokes about Caroline Flack.
Who then killed herself.
What's David Walliams done?
I can bet there's a hell of a lot of skeletons in that closet.
But what is it he's done that means he auditions at award shows to try to show that he's anti-Lawrence Fox and then anti-Caroline Flatt?
Oh, whoops.
Oh, and then she killed herself.
Whoops.
Hope to get away with it.
Who are these people?
Why do we listen to them?
Why do we listen to these weird online warriors?
Why is anyone moved by them?
Why are Fortune 500 companies influenced by them?
No.
Absolutely.
We are the majority.
We are the ones who are stronger.
We are the ones who can absolutely turn this around and I have no doubt that we will.
Do you know what, Douglas?
You've made me want to put on my armour and follow you into battle.
In fact...
As you said before we did this bit, you know, I'm natural kamikaze material.
Yes, yes, yes.
But I'd happily do that.
No, I agree.
I agree.
And yet, to return to one of your earlier points, you said that we, despite the slurs cast on the mighty Boris, we still voted for Boris.
But look what we've got.
Look at the husk of a man.
And not just Boris.
I mean...
You mentioned the Dred Hancock, who was, of course, a classic example of what you're talking about, George Osborne's creature.
He's with no hinterland, nothing in the past that might make him an interesting person or an intelligent person.
He's just a political creature.
How do we...
If this is the best our political class can produce, how do we, the people...
Because we need the politicians to make things happen, don't we?
We can't divorce ourselves from what our government does.
No, we can make them know that they have a predator.
I mean, you know, I've often said about various things.
I mean, you know, it's an unnatural thing in nature not to have a predator.
The Conservative government at the moment doesn't think it has any predator because it's...
It's shot for our just fox.
Absolutely.
They don't face an election for four and a half years and they seem to be lost.
Can that change?
Yes, I think so.
Will it happen without people pushing them to?
No.
I mean, the government didn't make an issue of the crossings in the channel until Nigel Farage personally went on and on about it.
But there's issue after issue with this.
I come back to this Tony Abbott thing quickly.
It is preposterous that a former Prime Minister of Australia should be deemed unappointable in 2020 by a British government.
So the British government needs to know there is a price to pay if they fail at this sort of thing.
You know, the idea that such a figure could be unappointable.
Yeah, yeah.
I share your ideals, obviously, but can you see mobs taking to the street when...
I don't want or need mobs taking to the street, and I urge against it.
What I would urge, though, is a bit of civic courage.
You know, it is unsustainable that we are held hostage as a nation by a minority of fanatics who have fanatical views that we have never voted in.
People who wanted fanatical views had a chance to vote for them last December, and we rejected them in the ballot box.
So I simply think that it is incumbent upon all individuals, whether in the media or in politics or in business or anywhere else, to start to write this.
And this requires individual acts of courage.
It involves individuals to make a stand in their own lives and not to simply sit by and allow this cultural revolution to wash over us.
You do not have to pay your tithes to Black Lives Matter.
You do not have to pay your deingeld to the latest LGBT thing.
You don't need to invite Stonewall in to give you a mark on how good a gay boy you are at your company.
You don't have to do any of this.
But you will end up a martyr?
No.
Possibly.
Possibly.
Every single generation before this one had more to do than we do.
Every single one.
I have no sympathy now for people who say, I would like to say this thing, but I might get in trouble if I do.
Well, your ancestors would have been lucky to have been in your position, and you dreamt to have been in that position.
This is the luckiest generation in human history, and it mules that it fears to speak.
It's pathetic.
I want to talk about your alma mater, Eton, which I had a go at on Twitter the other day.
And going back to one of our favourite subjects, Black Lives Matter, I don't know whether you're aware of this, but at the time when we had peak Black Lives Matter, just after the killing of George Floyd...
It was weird.
There was obviously some organisational hand over this, but the headmaster of, I think, every public school in Britain, and the girls' schools as well, got letters signed by their recent alumni.
I think the older alumni didn't bother and and they were all demanding the same thing they said this this school has to change its curriculum it has to decolonize its curriculum it has to address the very real issues raised by BLM and so many schools cave to this and I know Eton is one of them with with this new head man Trendy Henry that I keep having a go at Eton flying the rainbow flag I want Eton to be training the elite to I mean, people like you, you're an outlier.
You're the exception rather than the rule.
I want Etonians to be all like you, Douglas.
Well, I'm a scholarship boy, of course.
So you're basically a pleb.
I'm a deep pleb, as you can tell.
And I suspect there's a lot of things going on here.
I agree, by the way, that all is organised.
There's no doubt about it.
All the schools who got the same communications claiming that there'd been racism.
I think this is all bullshit, by the way.
When I was at school, oh gosh, there were two things that were very, very bad.
One was to be gay, and I can tell you that myself.
That was not a great place to be gay.
And there are a lot of people whose lives have been effectively ruined by just how...
Unpleasant it was to be gay at public school in the time when I was there.
By the way, I went partly hoping this wouldn't be the case, but it was.
It really was very, very anti-gay.
And the other thing was, of course, to have ginger hair.
Gingers had a hell of a time.
I don't believe that I ever saw racism.
There were black students.
I think it was absolutely obvious, even then in the 90s, that was the worst thing you could do.
It just wasn't on the table.
No way people were going to do that.
And I was brought up in state schools in London, which were also very diverse.
And in which racism would never have entered anyone's mind as being a thing to do, because it was a diverse city, a multicultural city.
So these letters that have come out claiming that in the last couple of decades these schools are all highly racist and they have to decolonise is an organised effort, I've got no doubt about that.
And they are simply trying to defeat a particular type of education.
But it's weird, isn't it, that Black Lives Matter could be so...
I mean, it's weird and worrying that Black Lives Matter could be so organised as to start writing round robins to...
No, no, they're a highly organised organisation at this stage.
Millions and millions of pounds of funding.
Coming from where?
George Soros?
No, it's...
Well...
It's mainly, as far as I know, come from subscriptions of people who send in money in the erroneous belief that they are doing what they say they're doing.
And increasingly from corporations and others who've been forced to pay their tithes or encouraged to pay their tithes.
It is day geld.
It is day geld.
And they announce that they're giving donations and encourage their consumers and customers to do the same and encourage their workers to do the same.
So these organisations have a lot of money now and they need to do something with it.
They were absolutely primed before the death of George Floyd to do something like this at such a moment.
They were ready and waiting for such a moment.
They've pushed their political advantage.
I think they've pushed it too far already.
But yeah, this is a campaign.
By the way, again, we come back to this thing about adults leaving the room.
Yeah.
You know, I'm getting to the stage, and I suspect you are long past it being more of a kamikaze than me.
I'm getting to the stage of saying I don't care.
I don't care at this stage what you think about the curriculum.
We could have curriculum wars till the end of time.
Until the beginning of this decade, one-fifth of children in the UK left school functionally illiterate.
When you say we haven't been told enough about racism in the past, students at British schools aren't taught enough about anything.
When people in America say there isn't enough of an understanding about our history, and most school children in America don't leave American education with a knowledge of anything enough.
Anything.
What subject is that?
You say, I think that American British students are just too educated on this area.
You know, we could do with them piping down a little.
They just know maths too well.
We could do with them knowing something else a bit.
Yeah.
And I stress an absolutely key thing.
BLM and other groups and their attempts to influence education and much more are doing something which is not understood enough.
They are not, as they pretend, trying to upgrade our societal software.
They are not doing that.
They are introducing societal malware.
For any techies, non-techies watching, let me explain.
It is a program designed to destroy the system.
It is designed to destruct the computer.
It is not designed as a software upgrade.
It is meant to corrupt.
What BLM and others are doing is meant to corrupt the societal system.
They say that they want to bring down capitalism.
They say they want Marxism.
This is malware.
It is designed to corrupt the entire system.
So if you're a CEO of a hedge fund or of a bank or of a corporation and you anticipate that you will bring any value to your shareholders and you have also brought in the BLM stuff, And you've also brought in the diversity officer crap.
And you've also brought in the implicit bias training crap.
You should know that what you have done is clicked except on a piece of malware that will corrupt your entire company.
In California, they have just passed a bill that makes it compulsory For all boards in California to have a certain degree of representation.
So I think I'm right in saying that by the end of 2020, a board of four or five has to have at least two women on the board and at least one member of an underrepresented group.
And by the end of 2022, a board of up to, I think, nine people in any company in California has to have at least two people from an underrepresented group.
What is an underrepresented group?
People who are black, Afro-Caribbean, I think a Pacific Islander, gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans...
If you look at the breakdown of people who live in California, being trans is going to become a full-time job finally.
They are going to have to whisk from board meeting to board meeting.
It's not going to work.
And they've made it a legal requirement.
Is that an upgrade to your software or is it malware that's going to corrupt your company?
Malware.
Don't download it.
Do not click accept.
But the sort of people who become CEOs of these companies, rather like, indeed, look at the armed forces.
Look at what's happened to the army.
I think you and I both thought the army would never go.
I certainly did.
But look at them now.
They're having the same agenda.
So if even the army is not immune, and they're supposed to be brave, for God's sake...
Well, it's the top of the army, isn't it?
Like everything.
And a certain type of jobsworth nowadays gets to that position.
Somebody who knows...
When the whole era is set up with a particular obstacle course, a certain type of person learns how to play the obstacle course.
And the one who gets to the end fastest will win.
And so the certain type of person can navigate their way through anything, including companies, including the army.
By the way, with the army, in my view, it's been going on for a while, but you have things like the emphasis on stopping rape and conflict.
You know, because it's another one of these sort of unopposable things.
And, you know, everybody sensible thinks, well, sure, it'd be nice to stop rape in conflict.
It'd be nice to stop injuries in conflict, you know, come to that.
It'd be nice to stop deaths in conflict.
There's an awful lot of stuff that'd be nice to stop in conflict.
Don't give them ideas.
That'll be the next one.
Absolutely.
Opposition to minor injuries.
And...
It's that sort of thing.
It's everything begging to be presented in the terms of the day.
And that's why I say in The Madness of Crowds that this is This has all been presented as something we've all just got to suck up wholesale.
We've all just got to say the right things.
We've all got to think the right things on everything to do with LGBT, everything to do with women, everything to do with everything to do with ethnic minorities.
We've all got to think and say the right things.
It's high time people just said, you know, no, I'm not going to download all of this Partly because just none of it makes sense.
I explain in The Madness of Crowds, as you know, why it doesn't make sense.
On its own terms, it doesn't make sense.
It won't work.
Just like those California boards.
It won't work.
It cannot work on its own terms.
But on the wider point, it doesn't work in a society.
It doesn't work in a society like Britain.
We aren't a bad country.
We're not a racist country.
No, our history isn't a history of colonialism and racism.
No, the British people should not be talked to in this attitude, in this manner of endless malice and malevolence.
We don't deserve it.
It's completely wrong.
It's high time we stop putting up with it.
But at the risk of playing devil's advocate, Douglas, I used to have faith in the British people, but then I've looked at the way they've allowed themselves to become coward and compliant over masks, for example.
I mean, muzzles.
It would have been unthinkable even six months ago that everyone would go round in the streets...
When the pandemic ended in April, officially, it technically ended in April, people are not dying anymore.
And yet still people are going around wearing muzzles in the sunlight.
We know that sunlight kills viruses.
Yes.
My assumption of that is that it's all, or at least it's largely, as you know, an attempt to persuade people to come back out of their houses.
And if they think that they're doing this...
I mean, I delight in seeing ones who just wear it on their chin.
A London bus now is just filled with people wearing these chin warmers.
And I think it's to persuade people to come out of the house and that this will persuade them to do it.
But look, I mean, all of this, all coming along at the same time, I mean, it's just, that's what's so disastrous, is that we're, you know, we're, I mean, we're just fooling ourselves.
The enemy seemed to be very, very, much quicker than we are at taking advantage of a situation.
I mean, they didn't know that the, well, unless one would want to be really kind of conspiracy theory, they didn't know that this coronavirus thing was coming.
And yet, look, they managed, in this country, someone somewhere has decided this is the perfect opportunity to stop people using cash.
You know, you go to a bakery now.
Oh, we don't take care.
Can you pay by card?
We know that this was the plan of the Davos World Economic Forum elite.
Anyway, they wanted to abolish cash because it makes it easier for the government to get taxes.
It destroys the black economy and so on.
We knew they wanted that.
But look how they've seized the moment.
We've been left floundering.
Look at how the media has acquiesced with government policy when hitherto they would have held the government to account.
Well, the corona thing is...
It's like an extra scrambling device on the top of everything as I see it.
I mean, it's just an extra scramble, isn't it?
I mean, I'm partly guilty of this myself because when it started, I thought, well...
I've never studied pandemics in any meaningful way.
Whenever I was at conferences on sort of catastrophe scenarios, you know, you sort of duck out during the pandemic session because you sort of thought, well, that's not...
Yeah.
You know, it wasn't...
Well, you know, I've had that from lots of people like you, not necessarily you, on the global warming thing.
People say, well, I just don't know enough.
But I think you've said this before.
You've actually said...
It's not an acceptable position.
No, I say it's not my thing.
Right.
I say it's not my thing, and I do think that's worth saying if it's not.
I'd rather say that than pretend.
But, no, I think with the corona, it was the fact that it was something that very few people were specialists in.
At the beginning, when we thought it was going to be much worse than it turned out to be, I think there was a legitimate moment.
Loads of us called it wrong at the beginning.
I had a brief period as a bedwetter before I recovered my bollocks.
Because you're sort of a hypochondriac, aren't you?
Yeah, exactly.
I was the perfect person for the...
Toby Young, whose wife said that he took to bed and was so worried about it he got shingles.
I had it without even knowing it.
I thought it was a cold.
But before I got it, in the run-up, when I was reading the internet and looking at viral videos from China of people being immured in their houses, being welded in, I was worried.
It's forgivable to have been wrong at the beginning.
It's not forgivable now, I think.
It's not forgivable.
You should not be wearing a mask now.
Well, I don't want to get into the masks thing because I think it's a personal choice and I would advocate if you want to wear it, wear it.
If you don't, I don't.
I do think that, you know...
But the real thing with it now is that we have come to the stage where we have to recognize there are competing issues at stake.
And at the very beginning that wasn't the case.
At the very beginning it seemed to be a thing so large and considerable that everything had to bow to it.
In the same way that you might say that science and The law and other sort of magisteria sometimes claim to have a complete terrain grab.
And you have to be careful about that.
These magisteria overlap.
Now, at the moment, obviously, there is an overlap.
And that's the complex area that we're looking at, which is the overlap of the virus, the pandemic, and the economy.
And long before the date on which we're speaking, the fact that these were competing and needed to be judged in the round should have become clearer.
And unfortunately, the land grab by the pandemics people was so strong, so complete, that it wiped everything else out of the terrain in the public square so that...
The people saying, but economy, were pushed aside.
And you get these, as I wrote the other week, these ridiculous situations where, you know, nine people in Aberdeen, who were in a pub, found to have some symptoms of corona, and the city's locked down for a second time.
By the way, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do think that there are people who like to use catastrophes for their own preconceived ends.
And I think in America at the moment, in particular, I'd be very, very suspicious if I was an American citizen about the manner in which this is being used.
Because I do think that there are people who are actually willing to crash the American economy in order that in November Donald Trump doesn't get re-elected.
I think that's right.
It seems very clear at this stage.
Yeah, I even wonder actually if this, whatever you want to call it, coronavirus crisis, had not happened in a presidential election year involving Donald Trump, whether it would have panned out in the way it has.
Yeah, yeah.
The whole thing is, as I say, it's a set of things that have mounted up on top of each other by this stage, all of which is...
We haven't solved any one of the things that's mounted up.
And as I may have said to you before, the thing that worries me is we have this total global focus on single issues.
Corona, BLM, climate.
We don't solve any of them.
We focus our eye of Sauron on each of them and make them worse and then move on to the next thing and make that worse.
What's that from?
What causes that?
Is this the kind of civilisational cycles whereby we're in the decadent phase where we just embrace destructive causes?
Something like that.
I mean, think of all the things we could do.
I mean, if we had this amount of...
Almost total planetary focus on one issue.
We should be able to solve something, surely.
We should be able to solve transport in megacities.
For instance.
Yeah.
Because it's sort of something that made a meaningful difference in people's lives.
But we don't do any of that.
We just...
Well, in the case of the anti-racism one, we make it worse because the people who claim to fix it are the people with the worst answers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We should...
How are we doing your time?
Okay, good, because we all want ten minutes for the...
You need to do some book plugging.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
New updated edition and all that as well.
Yeah.
How wonderful is your new book?
The paperback edition of your wonderful book, The Madness of Crowds.
Actually, that is relevant to this.
I'd like to think so.
Yeah.
When did the hardback edition come out?
A year ago?
Yeah.
When you published that, did you not think...
I'm going to bring this book up.
I've just caught the peak madness.
And thank God I did, because it's all going to be, it's all going to have gone by next year.
You never think that?
No, I thought the madness would continue.
I hoped that more people would see through it.
And I thought then, I became confident, because the reception of the book was so good, papers and other reviewers who I thought would be giving me hell said, at the very least, okay, he's on to something.
And some people said, this is how we're going to get out of it, is by realising some of the truths that I tried to uncover in that book.
And I explained how the system worked.
And, you know, my own view is that if you have a virus in your societal system, then you need to work out antibodies.
And I was trying to give people in the Mans of Crown the antibodies.
Was that the analogy you used?
I think so.
That was great.
But the thing is, then, of course, something very strange happened since.
And As I say in the new Afterward, the updated edition of Mans of Crowds, when Corona first hit, I thought, well, that'll see off the woke people.
Because I thought, well, if everyone's got real worries, like everyone's losing a lot of loved ones, we're not going to be worrying about Sam Smith, they, them pronoun issues.
We're going to have less time for people claiming that they've recently suffered a microaggression or did whilst they were eaten 30 years ago.
It's possible.
Yeah.
And so I was sort of, in a way, I thought, well, okay, everything has a silver lining.
Corona may take out 10% of the population, but the woke people will shut up for a bit.
And that was obviously a total miscalculation because what happened was that they doubled down themselves but everyone else ignored them.
So during Corona they doubled down on things like, oh, we had the women one.
Women are suffering from Corona more than men.
Then the stats showed that actually men died of it more, and the same people said, well, the men might be doing the dying, but the women are doing the suffering, or some kind of shit like this.
And then we had the ones...
LGBT people are suffering from corona more.
The BBC actually did this with their LGBT correspondent, if you can believe there's such a thing.
And this LGBT correspondent did something on how difficult it is for gay people living at home with homophobic parents.
And you think, well, sure, but I mean, like, loads of people having to live with their parents and they're having to be celibate for months, and they're in their 20s.
It's not great fun for them either.
Then the BBC ran a story about somebody who was trans saying, I'm really worried about being buried in the wrong sex.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm worried about being buried, mate.
I mean, being buried isn't great, full stop.
I mean, you know, I'd worry less if they got the headstone wrong than just that I was down there to begin with.
But, you know, this sort of crap...
It was all being played.
But I just thought, people don't really care about it.
Then, of course, we had the most serious corona identity politics, which was the Black Lives Matter precursor, which was...
BAME, as we call them in Britain, we'll call them something different by next week, obviously, I think it's already changing, but what in America you would call the black minority populations were suffering more from corona than white people.
At no point did this get presented as...
Because it might be something to do with higher levels of obesity or of various illnesses, including hereditary illnesses within certain ethnic minority communities.
Or, by the way, the considerable possibility that certain communities in the UK and the US Mixed at an early level more, failed to isolate in the same way that other communities did.
And there's lots of anecdotal examples of that, but I think that's, again, no, no, none of it was focused on in that way.
It was all, you see, we're so racist, we can't even import a virus from Wuhan without giving it our own special anti-black spin.
That was how it was presented.
You know, the government was sprung by the opposition into having an inquiry into why BAME people in Britain were more likely to get corona and what is it about our country that's so racist, other than obviously the racism of Eton College and elsewhere, that has made so many ethnic minority people get corona.
And so we had all of that, but my impression was that although they were all doubling down on it, these identity groups, the rest of the population was just thinking, well at the best we're all going to be out of a job, so ease off a bit on that.
And then George Floyd happened.
Minnesota happened.
And it turned out everyone was primed just to smash along that route as fast and as unpleasantly as they could.
And I can't stress enough, this spillage of a specific issue...
In a specific bit of American policing should not in any way be allowed to spread out and contaminate all race relations in Britain, all history in Britain or any other country.
It's an unbelievable overreach.
What's it sold by the way?
You're a hardback sales.
I can't give you the numbers, but it's a bestseller in multiple countries, like The Strange Death of Europe that I wrote before it.
And this, by the way, I mean, this gives me hope.
It gives me real hope because, you know, there was a time...
When, you know, people like us would lament that, you know, he wrote books and, you know, they were ignored or, you know, we were siloed and all this sort of thing.
This isn't my experience at all.
And the experience of others is that there is a huge public out there who's had enough.
They've just had enough.
Have there been any countries that have been particularly...
that have really, really loved the book?
Yes.
I mean, in general, Anglosphere countries, it's done very well in all of them.
I find...
I mean, there's a lot of translations of it.
Southern America, for instance, they've had a lot of the woke crap come their way, rather surprisingly.
What, the southern states of America?
No, no, no, no.
As in South America.
Brazil or Argentina.
I've yet to get the speaking tour, which was the only purpose of writing the book, in Brazil.
Yeah.
But yes.
Because you're Bolsonaro.
You've got to meet him, Douglas.
I mean, that's a match made in heaven.
Well, all of the photos of me meeting all the world leaders that the woke karate hate the most, I can add it to that wall of fame in my house.
No, but I mean, there are lots of countries where it's been taken up really well because people say, actually, I thought this was just us, but it turns out to be everywhere.
But yes, I mean, the reaction has been terrific.
I feel like...
I say this in the expanded edition, I feel like the same thing happened with A Strange Death of Europe, which is that I published it, I felt slightly like in the cartoons where you do the plunging of the device and then run into the corner and do that.
And then I emerge and I discover I'm still alive.
And, you know, I'm still allowed into what used to be polite society.
Because what I've said is true.
And that's obviously a big problem for my critics.
But, you know, what I say about relations between the sexes, so many people at the beginning tried to pretend I was saying I wasn't saying.
And they tried to pretend I was making stuff up or something.
But every honest reader knows what I'm talking about when I say, for instance, why is it that we have always had a motif of the predatory male, always, throughout history, throughout literature, throughout everything, Bible, everything, we have the predatory male.
Why is it that until today we also had a perfectly familiar trope of the predatory female and only today have we pretended that no such thing exists?
All men know this to be the case.
All women know it to be the case.
They all know.
They've seen it in other women.
They know that a type of woman exists who locks her eyes on a prize and will go for it whatever it takes.
And our society has pretended, no, no, no.
These must be mythical beings.
They don't exist.
And why have we pretended that the only problem in the sexual arena is the alpha male?
And why have we pretended that it's That it's desirable to make men, heterosexual men, into these cringing eunuch-like figures who have to wear the feminist t-shirt and have to do all of this stuff.
And why do we pretend somewhere down the road that any women want those men?
Everyone knows this is true.
Amen, bro.
Amen.
Yeah.
Everybody knows this is true.
Yeah, yeah.
And we've pretended it isn't.
And a few people try to pretend when I make this point in the women chapter that I must be making it up.
And they know I'm not.
That was my favourite chapter, actually.
Women?
Well, yeah.
Yeah, because I think the trans stuff, I mean, he's self-evidently stupid, wrong and insane.
But the women stuff, I mean, women, they're great, but they're also bloody evil.
Obviously, I, as the camera card, you can say that you can't.
But at their worst, they're...
I describe in the Women's Chapter this conference of women in business that I went to and I was researching that and one of my favourite things was, and this comes up all the time now when I'm allowed to speak in a company or any other public gathering where people ask advice on this, And always, always afterwards, women come up and say, thank you for saying this.
Because there are things like, you know, well, so I give this example of this Women in Business conference.
Everything, again, was presented as, you know, the only problem in the workplace is predatory males, alpha males and so on.
And one brave woman, there was a sort of screen where you could send questions to the panellists.
And it came up on a big screen in the back.
And there was all this just boring female solidarity stuff going on all day.
Some brave soul, anonymously though, it has to be said, she's wise, put up a question saying...
Has any other woman in the audience found that it's other women in the workplace who are a bigger problem than men?
And it was on the screen, like, it's just Damocles sword above the whole damn day.
And they ignored it because they can't deal with that because they've set up their paradigm which is evil, nasty, rampaging men.
And everybody in the hall knew that there's another story.
Oh, is there another story?
So I love those sorts of ones and I love the fact that it's possible to say them and I hope that readers get some Encouragement from knowing that this stuff we've pretended we've forgotten is known and is able to be identified and is able to be said.
And, you know, and by the way, we haven't touched it, but since we last met, this so-called cancel culture stuff has all grown.
I'm very against this, not just in the ways that you and I would agree we're against it.
But I'm against it for lots of other reasons.
I don't like this exaggeration of it.
I don't like the exaggeration of it.
To one extent, you can't exaggerate it enough.
These people who advocate it are evil.
They want to destroy the incomes and the livelihoods of the people they get in their sights.
On the other side, there are lots of us who can survive this perfectly well.
I haven't been cancelled.
I don't intend to be cancelled.
They can't cancel me.
Every time I write a book, it's a bestseller.
It sells in multiple countries, in multiple languages.
I can say what I want.
I strongly encourage other people to do the same.
It'll make them happier.
It'll make them richer, more successful.
They'll get more sex.
They'll get a larger penis.
They'll get a larger penis.
Or breasts if they're a woman.
Or both if they're trans.
I mean, that's the best.
What's not to like?
Imagine.
Imagine.
Good.
Yeah, I think that's a...
And I think that's a great message to end on.
I think it is.
It is.
It is, definitely.
Good.
Thank you.
Dream the dream, Dellingpole.
I will dream that dream, Douglas.
And next time, I hope you'll look at my chest admiringly.
And obviously, the bulge, the aubergine type...
Yeah, okay.
Thank you, Douglas Murray, and thank you, my patrons on Patreon and subscribers.
You can get more of this stuff if you subscribe.
I'm giving you an Easter egg.
I'm giving an Easter egg to my patrons of Uncensored Douglas.
Thank you.
.
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