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Nov. 29, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
46:20
(Even More) Laura Perrins
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Time Text
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
And I am.
I really am.
Even though she was last week's special guest and the week before special guest.
It's Laura Perrins.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this special guest and I am.
I really am.
Even though she was last week's special guest and the week before special guest.
It's Laura Perrins.
Laura, I think this is a really good idea.
The feedback I'm getting, and I think you're getting the same, is that our listeners love coming to this place for a sign of hope.
It's like, we should call it, you're not alone.
That should be the name of this.
It's a safe space.
It's a safe space from the lockdown.
Yeah.
Because I think there are so many.
No, you go on.
There are so many out there.
Yeah, yeah.
I imagine you're getting really pleased at the moment that the lockdown has ended and it's been replaced by this complete freedom, hasn't it?
We're all free to roam wherever we want and shop and drink where we will, is that right?
Have you been a good boy, James?
What tier are you in?
Have you been behaving yourself?
Tier 2, is it?
You didn't even check to see what you're allowed to do.
It's such, it's such utter wank.
I mean, it really is.
But isn't this lockdown in name only?
Or sorry, lockdown in everything except the name?
I mean, calling them Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 doesn't alter the fact that most of us are actually in a worse place, I think, than before this latest lockdown started.
We're actually, you know, less free.
You're right.
You're right.
That is true.
I mean, it's so many different things.
So you have to go to before the stupid.
So the best time was August.
I think they were probably the fewer restrictions.
But I do have a confession to make, James, because I have fallen into the trap.
That I think Dead-Eyed Hancock and the rest of them wanted to do that.
I was punching the air that I was in tier two because they've given me back this little bit of freedom.
And it's wrong to do that.
But that is what I did, James.
That's what I've been reduced to.
And it's wrong.
They are so clever.
But, you know, I knew that I shouldn't be delighted about the fact that I'm in here too and that I can just do, well, tweaking a few rules here and there.
I will be able to go out for a Christmas drink with the moms because we'll have to have a business meeting.
You have to have a business meeting.
Very important.
Very important business meeting.
But that's the point.
But I mean, if you live in Manchester, right?
I mean, if you live up north, It's unbelievable that they have closed all the pubs.
I say we try and keep it light, but there's no light at the end of the tunnel if you're a landlord and you put your heart and soul into this bar and now they've told you to shut down at the busiest and most important time of the year, right?
And I mean, I think two things about it is, first of all, and I was saying again to my co-editor, it's not that you argue on the numbers.
This is this is evil and wrong.
They're destroying people's livelihoods.
They're destroying people's social life.
But I also don't think if you want to argue it on a utilitarian basis, which I rarely do.
I mean, everyone's just going to get tanked up at home, right?
I mean, people are just going to get drink in to their tiny houses and flats at home and have like, you know, at least, you know, six people, maybe 10 people.
The neighbours aren't going to call the police anymore.
I don't think that's going to necessarily happen because so many people will be doing it.
And even the true believers are probably thinking, oh.
Yeah, they really have.
They've stitched us up like a kipper here.
And you're just going to have loads of house parties instead of something that will be slightly more spaced in the pubs.
So I don't even... It's totally immoral.
It's also insane.
I fear, though, Laura, that even that is part of the sinister campaign.
I mean, we are, as you say, we are being treated like
Prisoners we are being given, you know, you're gonna you're going to get your rations back We're going to get slightly improved rations for good behavior and we are being conditioned to act in accordance with the government's government's will and I wonder whether even with Christmas they know they know that we are going to we are going to break the rules because it's Christmas and how dare they impose these rules on us, but
That in itself will be part of the government's plans.
What they're banking on, I think, is that if they grant us a little bit of licensed dissent, then it will stop the bigger reaction, which is what they deserve and what we need to do.
I mean, there needs to be a massive public backlash, not dribs and drabs of petty rebellion.
OK, so the massive public backlash.
I mean, well, first of all, they haven't given dribs and drabs, really, if you're living in Tier 3.
I mean, if you cannot go out at all, you know, a restaurant, even a coffee shop, all hospitality is closed.
Is that right in Tier 3?
At all?
Do you know what?
I don't want to dignify them.
By taking it seriously.
But, you know, the thing is, if you live in Tier 3, it is serious.
You cannot go to your local pub, even with your wife, right?
So they never mind the mixing of the bubbles, blah, blah, blah.
We don't want social mixing.
You can't even go with your brother.
You can't even go with your adult kids if they still live in the house.
You know, all socialising must be done inside.
So that's what they've done.
I'm thinking about it.
It really is wicked.
And then in terms of the pushback, so again, I think it's our third week doing it and we always say to ourselves, where is the pushback coming from?
I mean, this is really big.
Closing pubs coming up to Christmas.
That's a really big deal in Britain.
And but again, what will the pushback be?
And I said on Twitter, only in a collective way.
The pubs say we are going to open.
We are going to open.
But of course, it has to be collectively right.
You can't pick.
Otherwise they can just revoke the license of one or two.
And people can come and they can do their whole Covid, you know, secure, and we'll only say do families to cover them because they will have to do that, James.
We believe that this is actually safer than people congregating at home.
This is what, if it was me, this is what I would do.
You get your alliance together.
You get in touch with all the other pubs, especially in your area, and say, right, This is what we're doing.
We are opening.
We're going to announce we're opening on whenever it is the 3rd.
We're doing our COVID secure.
We're only letting people in from the same house.
We might even reduce the numbers.
But this is what we were doing.
It's an act of civil disobedience.
You want to come and shut us down, shut us down.
Publicans are so enthralled to the licensing system.
That's the problem.
Things that before, Laura, things that we accepted as part of the necessary regulations of a civil society, things like that pubs needed a licence before they could serve alcohol, These seemed innocuous things at the time, or at least historical hangovers, maybe from, I don't know, when licensing started.
Was it in the war?
Was it before?
But we sort of accepted them as a sort of a fair and necessary thing.
Suddenly, we're starting to realise that all these things are actually, that we don't have freedoms.
We've never have had these freedoms.
It's just that up until now, the state has been less in enforcing them aggressively.
But suddenly we find, no, if you want to have a pub business and you've got lots of customers who are desperate to come, even then you cannot serve alcohol just because the government on a whim decides that you can't.
Because it wants to bolster, it wants to double down or treble down on its unconscionable policy of treating something that is no worse than bad seasonal flu.
They don't want to transform it into something the equivalent of 1918, 1919, which it certainly ain't.
It's terrifying.
It is terrifying, but again, it's only, in terms of turning the tide, all we can do is, I keep saying to myself, you know, looking back on other precedences, other big movements that were small in the beginning, say, and then suddenly switched, because it was rarely You know, a parliamentary vote, say, that ended something.
Or, I mean, again, the most obvious example is the civil rights and the Vietnam War in America.
And that was all a massive groundswell.
It was the protests that came first, until the inevitable political surrender then comes years later, right?
right?
That was years in the making.
So it, well, it, you know, it may well be that something similar is needed here, but at the moment, everything is just, it's so split across, I think the opposition is sort of wide, but it isn't deep enough.
You need it collectively together, but it's difficult and you need more public groundswell.
I mean, I don't have a... Oh, that's the doorbell.
I don't have a map in front of me.
Can I get that quickly?
Sorry, James.
That's the very traditional doorbell.
Of course you can.
I'll be very, very quick.
You can talk to your people.
Hello, lovely, lovely podcast viewers.
What have I got to say?
Now, I'm going to save it for Laura.
I think that's fine.
Yeah.
We're alive!
Well done.
Yeah.
Laura, I wanted to say to you, if you want to get really, really depressed, and I know you're always looking for an opportunity, just have a look at the, what do we call it?
Yeah, it's a kind of video debate I did on the internet yesterday with David Vance, who's great.
Yeah.
Godfrey Bloom, who's great.
And Andrew Bridgen, MP, who I used to think was great and who has completely and utterly shit the bed.
I mean, you know, you would not want to sleep on that mattress anymore.
It is absolutely awful.
It was so embarrassing.
And Andrew Bridgen was a hero of mine in as much as... I used to do this thing when one was still able to travel freely and stuff.
I used to go for... I got a House of Commons pass and I used to go and hang out with With the sort of sounder MPs.
One of them was Priti Patel, who I thought at the time was great, you know, kind of heir to Thatcher.
One of them was Jacob Rees-Mogg, you know, he gave me the most fantastic interviews.
And Andrew Bridgen was my go-to guy, because he was, as you know, he was one of the, what are they called, the Spartans.
He stood firm on Brexit.
But also, talking to him, it was very, very clear that he Genuinely understood where, well, Thatcherite values, I suppose, because I mean, conservatism, it's a it depends on who's defining it, doesn't it?
But but I think what you and I mean by sound conservative values, Andrew Bridgen, a self self-made man in a sort of proper working class constituency, understood the importance of stuff like lower taxes, personal responsibility, minimal state spending and so on.
And it was so embarrassing.
He just buys in, or appeared to buy in, to every government shibboleth.
Number one, he thinks that the coronavirus is an unprecedented thing, a terrible thing.
He thinks that the government's response is proportionate and wise.
And when you mention things like T-cell immunity, he laughs knowingly, you know, like, ha ha ha.
Like it's some wacko fringe theory.
I mean, T-cell immunity, it's just, it's not a wacko thing.
And he was totally on board with the idea that the only way, the only way you can deal with this virus is a vaccine.
Because, I mean, that's how we always deal with viruses, isn't it?
Actually, no, it's not.
No.
You've got decades of history to show.
Yeah.
I mean, vaccines are for the really, really serious stuff as well, like polio, right?
Things that will leave you permanently disabled.
Not a very bad flu.
So that's the kind of the straw man or the dodgy argument he used.
You know, well, there was a vaccine for polio.
Are you saying that you didn't want a vaccine?
Did you take the polio vaccine?
Well, as Godfrey pointed out, yeah.
Polio is a serious disease.
Coronavirus just ain't.
It just ain't.
I mean, you can get it bad, but you're unlucky. 99.5% percent of cases you're going to be fine anyway i was only mentioning that to you um because to sort of reinforce the point that parliament is not our friend that our elected representatives are going to do absolutely subtle to get us out of this mess they will um in fact yeah they will only do something if they have if they think they're threatened right
So they'll either lose their seats, that they have stacks of constituents emailing them all the time saying, you have to change this or I'm never voting for you again.
Unless they are threatened in a way they actually care about, then they don't care.
And it may well be that, again, some of them, they've either been got at, right, by the crew.
They're just holding the line.
They're true believers, that's the other thing.
Or, unfortunately, there may also be an authoritarian streak.
This is the problem, right?
With some people on the right.
So you'd expect that from people on the left, or at least some people on the left.
I don't know where all the libertarians and the classical liberals have gone.
They can't be found.
But you may well have an authoritarian streak on the right, especially because it's combined with a conservative government and they're just in denial that this could be done to them by a conservative government who are just thinking, you know, well, I'll just go along with it.
I mean, what does he have to suffer personally anyway?
His pension will be fine, right?
His salary is fine.
I mean, that is part of the problem, I think.
The public sector should take a massive pay cut, certainly the equivalent of the pay cut the private sector has experienced, and obviously that would include MPs.
This is the problem, Laura, one of them, that there are a lot of people out there with no skin in the game.
They're all right, Jack, and they're mostly in the public sector, which is in league with the government.
Look at how Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, has completely failed to stand up to the public sector in this latest spending round.
It's as if...
As if we can easily afford this stuff at a time when we've experienced the biggest drop in GDP in 300 years.
Literally off the charts, because I saw a chart last night on it, and you know, it has your GDP.
And this is, they have to sort of lengthen the chart, GDP was so far down.
And the thing is, they intended this drop in GDP.
So this is what people don't know.
So this is what I wrote about today, when the spending review came out yesterday, with kind of numbers that nobody can understand, really, right?
You're talking 340 billion was it they're going to spend this year?
I can't even, I have it in front of me, you know, and then there's, but yet they're still going to borrow, still going to, you know, raise, of course, the pay of doctors and nurses.
Still building HS2, which you don't need.
And then you have the foreign aid route, you know, and you have the likes of Tim Montgomery and all the rest of them, sort of, can I have my couch?
I need to sit down now.
I can't believe they've cut foreign aid.
I'm pretty neutral on foreign aid.
I could be convinced either way.
I know that you may well say it's corrupt, but my point was, no, if you Supported either lockdown, you don't get to come along and start bitching now when the cuts start falling, which we assume they eventually will.
You know, don't start talking to me when you must have known there would be consequences down the line to this insane splurging, first of all, of everybody's money to pay people to stay at home and do nothing, right?
And then also bailing out various businesses and borrowing insane levels of money.
And then, oh, we have to make a minor cut in foreign aid.
Well, you know, you were on the front of the line on that first lockdown, as I remember, Tim, thinking it was all very reasonable.
So don't come crying to me now.
And don't bother telling me how you thought this could happen.
And it wasn't foreseeable.
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, it was.
I mean, what did you think?
Did I read it right?
I think the figure we were given for the cost.
I love the idea that the cost of COVID is this thing that's written on a sterile tablet, which has been handed down from heaven, and that there was no avoiding this cost.
This cost just appeared.
Actually, this was entirely within the government's And I think it was £550 billion.
Now, okay, so £550 billion being spunked against the wall, absolutely no purpose whatsoever, on incredibly dodgy PPE equipment contracts for favoured cronies of government ministers, on Matt Hancock's ridiculous track-and-trace thing.
The track-and-trace thing.
I'll do it in a minute, but go on.
So, all this stuff, 550 billion.
Now, the total saving to the exchequer, I think, or rather to the taxpayer, because that's ultimately who's paying for this stuff, by reducing the ring-fence foreign aid spending from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% is 5 billion.
of GDP to 0.5% is 5 billion.
So a fraction of the 550 billion.
Here's the thing, I'll just make this point.
So what was the story that we heard yesterday?
It was mainly from The five prime ministers, five ex-prime ministers, who were all outraged, Tony Blair and David Cameron, about this betrayal of our brethren overseas, who so badly needed things like a Chinese-language translation of Shaun the Sheep, for example.
And, you know, there would be no new Ethiopian Spice Girls without our foreign aid budget.
But look, here's the thing.
So you've got Blair, Brown, Cameron, the rest, lining up to say what a tragedy it is.
Wets, like Tim Montgomery.
I mean, I wish there was a stronger word than wet to describe it.
Let's keep it clean.
OK, yeah, OK.
No, no, I won't keep it clean.
I worry greatly that, OK, there are sort of hardcore street fighters like you and me, but All the politicians and all the, pretty much, I would say 99% of the conservative commentariat, let alone the general commentariat, I mean, you know, but even the right-wingers have fled the field.
They are focusing on the least relevant aspect of the story, which is that Britain is in a complete mess and all they're focusing on is, yeah, but it's not nice.
What about our international reputation?
As though anyone, any normal person gives a shit about this.
Nobody thinks this.
And yet, if you listen to the BBC yesterday, this was the main story.
And the fact that we are epically screwed was nowhere to be seen.
I mean, I guess you could just say it's another classic deflection, right?
I mean, it's like somebody has come in and set your entire house on fire.
Your house is now being engulfed.
In a massive inferno, okay?
There's a leak in your dog's kennel.
And everybody's over the dog's kennel going, oh my God, you know, there's a leak in this part of your garden.
What are you going to do?
And you're like, well, hang on.
All my kids are stuck in the house and it's an inferno.
No, no, no, no.
That's not what's important.
What's important is this little problem over here.
So I can only get- What's the dog's name?
Oh, well, my dog.
My dog is leaking.
The dog in the kennel.
I mean, I'm moved by this story already and I don't see why not.
People should care about the dog.
Never mind the house.
Never mind the family, the human family in the house.
What really matters is the dog in the leaking roofed kennel.
I know.
And of course, actually, I mean, of course, it is a percentage of GDP.
But the point is, there was hardly any GDP last year, right?
The government specifically crushed productivity, because productivity meant people coming together.
And then if you had people together, we were all going to die of COVID.
So it's just, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if, of course, some genius spinner in there, we can't blame Cummings anymore, said, well, I know what we're going to do to deflect from the fact that we've burned the house down.
Let's put in the foreign aid.
Let's put in the foreign aid cut, because that will That's what will get the left angry.
And that's what will get the likes of Tim Montgomery angry.
And then everybody will just argue with themselves amidst the fact that there's a 46, there could be a 46 billion people that will have to be filled by either tax rises or cuts to public spending.
Well, it ain't going to be cuts to public spending, is it?
Because they seem to be addicted to doing all that.
It's insane.
I mean, it's just the numbers are No one can really comprehend, you know, the billions that are involved.
I don't even know how they can do it, you know?
Okay, Laura, one of the things I've got to do over the next, rather than making extra bonus podcasts, vidcasts with you, although it's always such a delight, what I'm supposed to be doing, what I don't want to be doing, because I hate hard work, I'm much happier doing this.
But what I'm supposed to be doing is writing the outline for my first book in a very, very long time.
And I'm going to be talking about 2020 and all the shit that's happened.
And there were so many strands leading up to this.
I mean, yeah, we can talk about the Great Reset and all that, but that's just that's just just part of it.
But another example of the way the things that made this year possible, the things that made the government able to do all the bad things they're doing now is the weakness, the weakness of our media.
I mean, the mainstream media doesn't do its job at all, hasn't done its job for ages.
But even even all those I'm thinking of the plethora of Allegedly conservative stroke right wing stroke free market websites.
You know, we know their names and they churn out these articles every day and I think they're probably financed by rich sort of conservative libertarian leaning donors.
Yeah, but actually what they put out is at best bland centrism and sometimes even worse.
I mean, I can't remember on one of the sites.
There was a piece the other day by somebody agonizing over how to counter the outrageous notion that vaccines are bad for you.
And so they're taking the side of the establishment.
Apart from your website, Conservative Woman, the Conservative Woman, the critic is fighting a good game.
I mean, the critic is good.
Yeah.
Breitbart obviously is Breitbart.
But where is the right wing?
Where are the voices of the right in this country?
I think, I mean, the media, you could do a whole pod.
I mean, the media, both the main channels and then, as you say, dripping down to the broadsheet and then, you know, the website.
I mean, the media are a huge problem.
I don't know, pick any, in terms of, I actually did a piece on this.
It's not the stories.
So we complain about, say, we're watching Newsnight or we're watching whatever, and we look at them and we go, this is so unbalanced.
I mean, they've chosen this guy and that guy, and then you get set up.
I'm sure you've had this yourself.
You get the media call and you're like, should I really do this?
Because I know I'm just being set up to be the punch bag, right?
They set up the debate in such a way, with very clever wording, where you kind of end up defending fascism, right?
They may well have invited you on, say, to talk about free speech, but they'll run loads of clips, say, of like some genuinely, we all agree on fascist, and then they go, so Laura Perrin, do you think Mr. Fascist should be able to be You know, and you're like, um, uh, well, so that's the first problem, but it's just how the stories are presented.
But James, the big bias comes in the stories they never cover.
The stories that are left on the cutting room floor, and this is particularly the case In America, where it's, I mean, criminal levels.
I mean, the media there are just a pack of gangsters, basically.
But the stories they choose not to cover, I think especially, I would say, I mean, before this blew up, I'd be more interested in culture, big cultural stories that they just bury.
You know, that never see the light of day.
They're the stories that really you should.
That's where the real bias comes in.
So they could be giving you stories.
So you could turn on your TV instead every night.
And instead of every night, there were 700 deaths.
Give me the suicide toll.
Give me the amount of people unemployed.
Give me the up close and personal interviews with the old person who hasn't been able to leave her house in four months.
And we're all in tears about that.
And you would switch the narrative so quickly with, say, three or four days of that, you would be talking a completely different story.
Miss, Miss.
I've got another example.
Imagine if the elections, the presidential elections in the United States, imagine for a moment if they'd been stolen using stuffed ballots and voting machines, which had been programmed to actually convert the votes of the Republican candidate to the Democrat candidate.
Can you imagine how the media would be excited over a story like that?
I mean, it would be absolute dynamite, wouldn't it?
And if there was if there was solid legal evidence and if there was there was endless testimony from various witnesses and you had experts able to prove that the algorithms have been...
Imagine, I mean, the media would be all over it, wouldn't it?
I mean, it'd be front page of the Telegraph.
Democracy, you know, so even again, I mean, so the electoral story in the US is a classic, is a classic case.
So even if you were to remain neutral on it, which I know you aren't, but say I'm a little bit wetter than you are on it, OK?
And I'm like, look, I don't really know what happened, OK?
Because I'm not there.
I just wasn't in Michigan, OK?
I don't know what happened.
But, like, first of all, they call it for Biden.
There's no such office as President-elect, OK?
It doesn't exist, right?
No, actually, there is.
Check my Twitter handle.
President-elect James Dallinpos has stopped that.
But they actually say things like, when they say, we shouldn't even ask the question, was there some dodgy voting?
It's like, you're a journalist.
And as I said, for the previous four years, you pushed this garbage Russian collusion story for four years.
You terrorized the American government on it.
The story I buried myself deepest in ever in my blogging career was the Justice Kavanaugh story, where you waved around a 30-year-old yearbook like it was a murder weapon, right?
To try and destroy this man's nomination.
You had probably a thousand journalists on that case.
Do you know what they would have done?
They would have sent him to everybody he went to school with, everybody he went to university with.
Did you ever see him?
Ever see him even touch a girl the wrong way, right?
They literally waved this yearbook around like a murder weapon.
The Covington kids, the guy, the 17 year old who they tried to destroy because he was wearing a hat at a pro-life march.
That school had to be... Yeah, but it was a red hat.
That school had to be... It had a snogger on it.
For a week because of the way the media, and I remember watching that story.
I remember watching it literally live on Twitter.
It started to grow and grow and grow.
And I remember thinking to myself, hmm.
This looks suspicious.
But, you know, someone even raises a question that maybe people who people were voting that shouldn't have been voting or that there were dodgy machines that actually turns out they weren't made in Canada.
They were made in Venezuela.
No, no.
If you even ask the question, you're a conspiracy theorist.
You're worse than that.
You're a danger to democracy.
So you don't even have to take a position on it.
The only position you have to take in is have the media, how do they treat the stories?
The stories they want you to get hysterical about, they egg you on.
And the stories they want buried, they bury deep.
They bury deep.
And I think the American media are worse for it than the British media, but it's not.
British media aren't great.
Let's just indulge ourselves for a moment.
Just imagine, imagine the epic reckoning that is going to take place if somehow, if somehow Trump manages to... Because you realise, you realise there is a... Yeah, you see, even you're laughing.
I'm very much alone in this.
I'm going to give you my Trump fantasy now in a minute.
I bet you've never heard that, but I'll let you finish.
Go on.
No, no, I definitely want to hear your Trump fantasy.
The ending to this film, James, is Justice Kavanaugh Right.
The majority opinion in the Supreme Court.
Right.
And it kind of goes along the lines of the media.
Don't the media don't get to choose who the president is.
Why?
It was only a few years ago when I've had some personal experience with how the media works.
And then just who the Clarence Thomas concurs.
Because, you know, Biden, Biden basically told or called Clarence Thomas a rapist at his confirmation hearing.
And the VP, Camilla Harris, she basically called Kavanaugh a rapist at his confirmation hearing.
So that's, that's the dream end of the film, James.
I think there's going to be lots of American viewers who are going to be just smiling to themselves.
But look, let's consider for a moment a bit more the outrageousness of what's gone on.
So you've got, correct me if I'm wrong, you've got Michael Flynn.
Michael Flynn, who was one of the very few stand-up guys right at the beginning of the Trump administration, because he had great difficulty finding people who were actually genuinely on board with this program.
A lot of them were just kind of going along to get along.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, Rex Tillerson, for example, was never a good Secretary of State.
He was part of the blob.
He was always going to be a disastrous pick.
Mad Dog Mattis, who you would think, having been a sort of gung-ho marine, you know, the sort of guy who doesn't duck under shellfire when he's taking the bridge or whatever at Fallujah.
Yeah, he's fine in a combat situation, but he's actually part of the military-industrial complex which wants more of the wars that President Trump doesn't want.
So again, you know, a lot of these senior military figures are Democrats who want to get on the military-industrial gravy train.
They want more war.
Trump is against war.
That's why the ordinary soldiers love him.
Sure.
The senior military, not so much.
Yeah.
So Michael Flynn would have been his rock and the left knew this and they destroyed him.
They ruined this man's career, I think, for these alleged conversations he'd had with the Russians.
He'd somehow broken the Logan Act.
Well, excuse me.
Well, the Logan Act.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
What what has Biden been doing?
What have all these the president elect Biden been doing?
He's not he's not definitely going to be the next president yet.
He's been acting as if he is.
He's surely in breach of the Logan Act.
I think a lot of his staffers are as well.
Now, here's the thing.
The really exciting thing, I'm told, By some of my, because as you can imagine, I've been lurking in the darker recesses of the internet.
I mean, I'm trying to find cherry-picking, if you like, my company.
I've been hanging out with people who, like me, believe that Trump still has a chance, that this election was definitely stolen, and it is essential that Trump wins for the future of Western civilization.
And what some of them have been telling me is that Trump Well, we know that he knew that this was going to happen.
We know that he knew that the Dems were going to try and steal the election by the foulest means.
But that actually he kind of put them in a position where they had deliberately put them in a position where they overreached themselves on such an outrageous scale that if he wins, he can really, really throw the book at them.
There's going to be jail time for a lot of these people, and deservedly so, because this is the epic confrontation, the Armageddon, if you like, that we've all been waiting for.
It's been building for decades, this battle between left and right, and I think it's coming to a head.
You're a warmonger, James!
You're a warmonger!
No, funnily enough, funnily enough, I think there will be a war if this is not resolved peacefully now.
Well, I think one thing that the Democrats frequently do do is what is overreach.
And again, running back to my favourite story.
So that's what happened with Kavanaugh, right?
Because if they stuck to the original story, they'd have been OK.
You might remember as well as I do.
Once they started bringing in the gang rape and the creepy porn lawyer Avanti and all that stuff, even I knew in my heart, I was like, ah, They've done the classic Democrat mistake.
They have done overreach.
And that's what killed them on that.
And it may well be that you're right in the analysis, and this is overreach for them as well.
But the other, again, more depressing way of thinking about it, and I've seen this... I don't.
Well, in a way, you could bring it back with Cummings as well.
When you live in a sort of authoritarian or fascist state, whatever you want to do, the elite break the rules, right?
And they let you move because they want to humiliate you.
Right.
So the Democrats are saying, yeah, I mean, look, we can steal an election and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's part of your humiliation.
So Cummings can go here, there and everywhere and to his castle.
And the same creepy guy, Professor Ferguson, with his threesome or whatever it is, although he's back on stage, isn't he?
He went off and never came back to the stage.
Oh yeah, he's still very much part of the show.
That is part of it.
People like Governor Newsom of California doing the same thing.
Absolutely cavalier.
They are like dogs licking their balls.
They do it because they can.
Same as Hillary Clinton and the server, right?
Most other people would be doing serious jail time if they did what she did, namely had her own private server while being Secretary of State, right?
Crooked Hillary, yeah, exactly.
But she does it in plain sight, not because she's sort of stupid or whatever.
That's part of the humiliation for the general public in that she's saying, I am above the law.
You little people have to obey the law.
But I am special.
And Bill is special.
And the rest of us are all special.
And we can do whatever we want.
And you, you guys, you're just going to have to live with it.
I suddenly realised who you are.
No, you're Katniss Everdeen.
I want to see you in that special exploding dress that catches fire.
How does the symbol work?
What's the special symbol they all do when they're fighting?
Have you not seen?
Oh my God, you don't know who Katniss Everdeen is?
Well, OK, when your kids are a bit older, you will be exposed to this.
So just Google it afterwards.
You will find that story very resonant.
It's called Hunger Games.
You've heard of Hunger Games?
Oh, yeah.
I wouldn't watch Hunger Games.
No, you would!
No, I boycott them.
You should.
Yeah, I've heard.
I do like dystopians, but yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're living in one.
Films about flowers and horses?
Well, now and again I do.
I watch very little films.
Honestly, it has to be really, really good.
I'm very bad.
I basically, if it was made after the 50s, namely the 1850s, I don't watch it anymore.
You're quite old school, aren't you?
It's about making political points.
The last movie I think I watched was Terminator, the latest one.
Which I actually, I'm still emotionally traumatized from what they did to the Terminator franchise in that latest film.
I don't think I've gone back.
Tell me, tell me.
Oh my god.
Right, okay, I'll try and keep it.
I did a blog on it as well.
So first of all, they killed John Connor in like the first minute, right?
They killed John Connor.
So remember, so now I've forgotten the ones that, so I like one and two are obviously classics, right?
Terminator 1 and 2, greatest sci-fi movies perhaps ever, right?
So all of the sacrifice that went into 1 and 2, namely sending Reece back in time, getting the mother out of the asylum, blowing up the whole factory, that was for nothing.
He gets knocked off by a T-1000 as well, not even one of the better ones, he just comes up out of the water and like shoots John Connor, a kid John Connor, That was the first problem.
The second problem is Sarah Connor, who's back in it, is just this bitter, you know, so in one, she's this very attractive, but innocent, you know, waitress, soon to be mom.
And then in T2, she's a warrior, but still like a maternal warrior, right?
She'll do anything to protect her son.
She's just now this bitter, twisted individual.
Just this terrible character, right?
And you know who the saviour is?
Because it's not John Connor anymore.
Oh, it's not Arnie?
No, no, no.
It's this tiny, illegal immigrant from Mexico who's probably shorter than- Oh no!
Yes!
Who's like, who's like five foot one, first of all.
So we were to believe that this five foot one girl from Mexico, who by the way, shoots loads of law enforcement officers, wink, wink, um, is going to be the leader of the free world.
Yeah.
Whereas if you look back at one, Oh yeah.
And then the, the, um, Her protector, of course, is a female, I think, half-human, half-Terminator, but also can, like, wear men's clothes and is basically, practically, you know,
female it's awful and if you compare it to so in one right you had one also was a love story because reese was always in love with sarah connor and he he says i've seen them a lot i traveled through time for you sarah right and then they they have seen them a lot haven't you yeah i have and then they conceived they conceived john so he's he has he dismissed this This paternal protector, this man, is sent back through time to protect a mother and her child.
Now we have a half-man, half-woman sent back through time to protect an illegal immigrant from Mexico.
That was what they did to Terminator.
Thank you.
Thank you for saving me, having to go and see that movie.
As a farewell thought, because we just keep doing these things because people love them anyway, and people need us.
But as a farewell thought, can I... I imagine you haven't got Netflix, have you?
No, we don't.
No, we do.
No one watches Netflix.
Oh, you do?
Okay, okay.
Have you seen my top pick of the year?
You're going to say barbarians.
What?
What was I going to say?
Oh, barbarians.
No?
No, Barbarians is a bit shite.
I mean, it's perfectly okay.
I think the Teutoburg Forest is a very interesting battle, and Arminius is an interesting character, but it was a bit poor man's Last Kingdom, I thought.
It wasn't nearly as good as Last Kingdom.
Watch To The Lake.
It is a Russian-made drama.
It was made in 2018.
It is about a deadly viral outbreak.
But here's the interesting part.
What the Russians get, what they get totally, is the response of the government.
And the government is much more dangerous than the virus.
And there is a particular... This will make your heart sing.
I mean, I promise you, it is one of the best moments of TV.
It's the best hour of TV you will see this year.
I absolutely guarantee it.
When you get to episode 5, You can call me afterwards and just say thank you, James.
It is so moving.
It is exciting.
It's kind of Tarantino-esque in its time structure.
It invokes all these Russian tropes, which you don't understand, but you kind of think they're great because, hey, Russia.
It's a beautiful piece.
It's clever.
It's moving.
I mean, it's a bit racy in places.
I don't know how comfortable you are with that, but it's good.
It's certainly better than Chess Girl becomes champion, which is nice, which is no, which is very nice in its way, but it's but to the lake is brilliant.
OK, anyway, I'm going to go.
You know, it may happen that Justice Kavanaugh writes that majority opinion.
OK, that's that may well happen.
Shall we have?
No, Laura, if that happens, should we have a special celebration?
I might even see you in person and break all lockdown rules just so we can have a drink to that.
And just have a massive bottle of champagne.
Well, yeah, I mean, sadly I don't think it's going to happen but, you know, hope springs eternal!
Yeah, you can have champagne, I'll have gin.
I don't think champagne is a proper drink for a man.
I think it's a girl's drink.
Well, that's okay.
I've got the whole panel to myself, and you can have whatever drink you want.
I'll just be a gin-soaked Hogarthian character.
I do fantasise about that happening, but I don't think it will.
No, I think it will.
And I'm going to drink to that.
Laura, thank you.
Until our next podcast, which I hope will be very soon.
Thank you.
See you, James.
Bye.
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