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Jan. 9, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:21:27
James and Laura's Chinwag #9
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So, Dora, I was going to postpone it till tomorrow so I could go riding, because obviously riding is one of the few bits of therapy I've got right now.
Horses keep me sane.
I mean, we all need a thing, don't we, to keep us sane?
Yeah.
But I suddenly thought that if we record this tomorrow, It's possible that Trump might have lost, and that would put me on such a downer that it might distract me from other things.
But also, I just think we've got so much to talk about in terms of, well, Boris's announcement.
I mean, did you see it?
Did you watch him?
I watched the announcement, and I normally don't.
I knew it was coming, right, because you see the build-up over the course of the couple of days.
Normally, I haven't.
I never watch the press conferences, but yeah, I did watch the announcement.
And, you know, again, even though I know it's coming, I still find it shocking.
You know, you're still thinking, you know, there's still part of you who's sort of in denial.
And the big thing, of course, is that he didn't put any time limit on us.
You know, like even with the first lockdown, although obviously they extended it, it was three weeks, right?
Three weeks to flatten the curve.
This is your lockdown.
I'll get back to you.
I'll get back to you about the lifting of the restrictions.
You're probably, you know, the sun will probably be splitting the ground by then.
So don't call me.
I'll call you.
It's incredible.
Again, we keep saying it.
It's incredible.
I think we are... I mean, the last time with the viewers, we tried to end on a happy note, but I think we both knew that things are so serious now.
So serious now, you cannot overstate it.
It's so bad.
No, Laura, we must end on a happy note.
We must keep... I keep saying this to people, and actually, I have been frantically Well, not frantically, but ruthlessly blocking people on Twitter or muting them if I show signs of them whining like a whipped cur.
It just doesn't do... I don't mind people telling me stuff that's true, pointing me to sources where I can assess the information, but when people are just saying, oh, I don't see how Trump's going to do it, I just think it's all going to go wrong.
I think, I don't care what's going on in your rumbling gut.
Do you think you're the only person who's nervous?
I mean, you think about those, you think about those officers in the trenches who grew their mustaches, allegedly, partly to hide the quivering of their upper lip.
I mean, I don't know whether it's true, but I think that the spirit of that apocryphal story is there, that in ages past, Chaps knew that they had to hold themselves together in order that the men that the men under their command didn't see them being afraid.
I think we've got to be lots of people come to us now for.
I mean, I don't know about you, I get so many tweets and comments now saying our podcast, the Chinwag, as it's become, is people's last rock.
And that's great, I'm really glad.
A, it means that we're doing a service, and B, it means that there are lots of people like us out there.
Yeah.
Well, we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't do it otherwise.
And the view, the viewing numbers are definitely, you know, very good for a completely organic show, you know.
Um, so I certainly, I mean, actually I do for people who are out there, I do appreciate that you keep me saying emails because that keeps me saying, you know, I think it's, I will do it then if you, if you want me to do it because, um, uh, you know, yeah, you do, you do think it's, it's worthwhile, but I also think I do it also because if we,
I was thinking this morning, and I'm going to blog on it later, what irritates me the most about this is how these pro-lockdown fanatics have the high moral ground.
How did this happen?
We have the high moral ground.
They are an abomination of selfishness.
where they want everybody else including the children and we will talk about the children to sacrifice their lives for for themselves and the idea that they have a high moral ground on this it must be must be quashed and this is why we're really losing on this I've always said I mean the numbers are important but they are not the critical issue for me is that you know when people say should we lock down you might as well say to me Well, lockdown, yeah, that's from China.
Do you think we should execute prisoners and sell their organs?
No.
No, I don't.
No, but that's actually quite a good wave, Laura.
That's quite a good wave.
Don't bother telling me, you know, going into the numbers because you've already lost me because it's completely immoral.
You know what I think?
Do you think we should force women to have late-term abortions?
No.
No, I don't think we should.
No.
You toddle off now and come back to me with something fucking sensible.
Sorry, I shouldn't swear.
No, no, no.
I see these people like Dan Hodges and the accusation that we have blood on their hands, I'm like, arrogance!
Laura, at the mention, you mentioned Dan Hodges, which is a prompt for one of the many conversational avenues I wanted to go down.
Yeah.
What about all the people that should be on our team?
Team Reasonable, Team Fact, Team Science.
Yeah.
All those people.
Team Moral.
Team Moral.
Yeah.
Team Moral.
Well, but also Team Free Market, Team Limited Government.
So we've got, okay, these are my friends.
These are my comrades in arms.
People like Chris Chris Snowden of the IEA, he used to come on, you know, I've done a few podcasts with him.
This is a guy who's a libertarian, massively big on things like freedom to smoke and, you know, against the nanny state, against sugar taxes and all that.
What's his job?
He works for a think tank where he has to sit in front of a computer Deep diving into the facts beneath the propaganda, the government's bloviations, you would have thought there would be no better person equipped to do a deep dive on the actual evidence of how dangerous is this virus, how lethal is it, and therefore how proportionate are the government's measures
Um, to deal with this, this threat is, you know, what, what's the cost benefit analysis?
I mean, that's what, that's what economists do or people with an, with an economics background.
Yeah.
So what does he do?
He says, uh, I now agree with the third lockdown.
And it's not, you know, okay.
So, so there's him and then you've got Dan Hodges who was, you know, I mean, he's, he's quite sparky.
He's not, he's not stupid.
You've got, well, I mean, there's, there's, there's a whole, Oh, Steve Baker.
Steve Baker MP.
All these guys who are supposed to be the free-thinking mavericks have suddenly gone over to the enemy camp.
They've left Thermopylae, they've left the Hot Gates, and they've gone to join the Persian army.
And you're thinking, hang on a second, you're supposed to be Spartans.
This is the deal.
You fight for You fight for the future of Western civilisation.
You don't surrender to this horrible Persian fascistic monolith.
But anyway, so have you got any theories on this?
Why are they doing this?
I don't like to second-guess motives too much, but there's a few things like, I mean, the think tanks, you know, who are funding those guys?
You know, because you have the Adam Smith Institution.
I know.
These are people who have issues with posters being put up saying to pregnant women, don't smoke during pregnancy.
That used to really get going.
But if you literally lock everybody down for an indefinite period of time on dodgy grounds, yeah, that's that's fine.
I mean, look, I can't I don't get their logic.
I think one, you have to accept they could be genuine, true believers.
I mean, you have to you have to accept that, too.
They're just afraid, as I said, that if they don't take it, they'll be accused.
You know, they don't take this.
They'll be accused of being being granny killers.
Three, a lot of them, you know, they don't really have anything to lose, James, I think, long term or short term.
I mean, you know, day to day, are their lives very different?
I mean, yeah, you have to accept that, you know, that they are, you know, they don't get to go to the pub and Maybe they don't.
They are obviously missing out on things they lose.
But I always do the big tip.
They're not losing out.
I assume there's no drop in income, right?
If they're at the think tanks or whatever, they're still getting paid.
You're still getting paid to write for the Daily Mail.
So there is no loss that way.
They're not losing the opportunity to actually work.
Because remember, it's not just the check people want, right?
It's the actual ability and satisfaction that comes, and we've talked about this before, you know, with a job well done.
It's the actual human dignity of doing the job.
They're not bored, in other words, right?
This is just another thing for them to pontificate.
I mean, you could say the same about us.
But obviously we're not saying everybody else to stay at home and get bored out of your brains.
So that's the second thing.
And I'm afraid as well, if they're not homeschooling small kids, they don't care.
They don't care.
They have no idea of the stress involved.
So, you know, no income, no huge data.
They still get to work.
They still get the income.
They're not homeschooling small children.
It's just, it's not a huge, it's not a huge deal to them.
But again, I mean, I wouldn't rule out the fact that they're, They're true believers.
I mean, why a free marketing tank has people there pushing neo-communist tools of governance, I do not know.
But it's frightening.
You know, it's like China have imposed this on us without firing a single shot.
It's incredible.
I mean, well, we might come on to that, although that is that is really going far down the rabbit hole.
I don't mean, you know, I don't mean that they they're following your Western governments are so but they are that they have adopted this Chinese form of governance.
You know, in terms of you talk about Pax Romana or Pax Britannia, how they managed to to spread their their values over.
That took hundreds of years, right?
China's done it in like A couple of decades.
And that's what the viewers should remember.
This is a Chinese tool of governance.
It is not ethical.
It is not moral.
It should be rejected out of hand.
Yes.
I can't remember how many lockdowns we've had, partly because I think they keep sort of re-designating them so that we don't notice.
They call it tiers instead of lockdowns.
But I think we're roughly on the third lockdown.
And I'd like to dispute Christopher Snowden's claim, you know, I was against the first two, but I was for the third.
I mean, that's a deeply illogical position.
I think the first lockdown was more or less tenable.
I mean, I'd like to think I wouldn't have gone for it, but, you know, there was an argument, wasn't there at the time, that this was unprecedentedly deadly, certainly the worst since It wasn't that deadly.
No, I mean, that's not true.
I mean, obviously, mitigation mitigation techniques are fine.
I mean, a work from home order, or even if then they had said wear masks as you go about your ordinary life, things like that, that's all fine.
But no, I will never.
No, Laura, I'm being generous to the other side.
Yes, I know you are.
I know what you're saying.
And actually, Ivor Cummins is very good on this.
He tells us about how much... In 2019, as recently as 2019, the World Health Organization's recommendations for how to deal with a pandemic, and this was This was in the days before they re-designated pandemic so that it became something much gentler than it was originally.
I mean, the pandemic used to mean lots of people dropping dead in the streets, like in that fake Chinese video released to propagandisers.
But yeah, the lockdowns were never considered a proportionate or appropriate response.
So you're right.
None of the lockdowns have been justified.
But this third one is just...
As you say, it is cause for a degree of despair.
Because, I mean, what's actually happening?
I'm afraid to say, by the way, I'm very, very cross with Toby Young.
I love him.
So he went on Newsnight to talk about some free speeches.
Well, I mean, already, don't go on.
Don't go on BBC Newsnight.
The BBC is It's like going on Radio North Korea.
It's not a neutral party anymore.
It's not the BBC that used to give us Animal Magic with Johnny Morris and the Magic Roundabout.
It's not.
The world has changed.
You cannot impute good faith to an implacable enemy that wants to destroy you.
So anyway, Toby talks about some free speech issue.
Inevitably, he gets asked a question about, well, what about your prediction that there would be no winter spike?
Yeah.
And Toby says something like, well, actually, no, maybe I got that slightly wrong.
Well, no, Toby, you didn't get it wrong.
What's actually happened with this second spike, the second wave, is that it is an artifact of propaganda.
You know, and I know, and everyone ought to know, If you test positive, say you've got terminal cancer, and you test positive within 28 days of your death for COVID-19, then despite the fact that you've actually died of terminal cancer, what's put on your death certificate is coronavirus, so you become another fake statistic.
That's number one.
Number two, a lot of these deaths are The standard winter deaths of people with respiratory infections, not necessarily connected with coronavirus, they could be flu.
There are no flu deaths anymore.
I mean, that's weird in itself.
If you look at the winter death figures compared with previous years, we're pretty much on trend.
There's nothing abnormal about what's going on.
So to go on the BBC, to go in the enemy camp and then be seen to be admitting that foolishly that you were wrong when you weren't wrong.
Seems to me just it's why we lose, Laura.
This is why we lose.
It's not a competition to see who can be the most balanced and reasonable.
Some of us get it.
I mean, I think I think also in that.
I mean, look, it's it's it's always difficult crunching the numbers, even if there was a second wave.
Aren't people saying, oh, but this is because it's a new variant that like nobody could predict.
Oh, that's the other thing, yeah.
That's the other thing I had an argument with Tobes about.
He said, yeah, well, there is a new variant.
And I'm thinking, well, yeah, so what?
It's like, if I got my car repainted red, it would be a red looking car instead of a blue car.
But what difference would it make to the scheme of things?
It doesn't matter.
Just because they designate a slight variation, which is what you and I know, I mean, everyone knows, this is basic knowledge, that viruses mutate.
So normal behaviour of a virus is being pathologised.
Yeah, I know.
Yes, exactly.
Also, I mean, how can a virus come out and go, oh, it could be 50 to 70% more transmissible?
I'm like, OK, you know, I'm not a scientific expert, but I'm pretty convinced that there's a big difference between 50 and 70%.
You know, that's huge.
That's like saying I might spend a billion or I might spend 250 billion.
You're giving yourself quite a bit of leeway there.
And secondly, I mean, look, I just think even if it is that transmissible, James, this lockdown isn't going to stop it spreading.
I mean, that's the other thing.
The idea that a government can control a virus is, to me, unhinged.
It's actually unhinged.
I mean, if it's that spreadable, it will, it is going to spread.
I mean, they can say we can slow it down, maybe.
But again, I don't even, I just, and then, and then, oh, now, now the media are pushing, this is the new line, right?
Will the variant be immune from the vaccine?
You know, that's the new one, right?
So I'm driving back today and I just hear, you know, my five minutes of Radio 4 just to keep an eye on them and it came up in the press conference yesterday.
Supposedly the scientists are like, you know, they're talking about their protein spike and, you know, there could be one mutant protein spike that means that it bounces around, bounces around the vaccine and it's a theoretical possibility.
And I'm like, this is the problem we have.
Scientists now, like, are sitting around And they are thinking up every single theoretical possibility that's going.
They're modelers, the modelers, the scientists.
This to them is like Christmas, right?
How bad a scenario, you're frozen a bit James, how bad a scenario can we actually, can we generate?
How much more can we scare people?
And I mean, I'm sure there's a theoretical possibilities all over the place.
There's nerds in universities everywhere thinking, well, there's a theoretical possibility that an astronaut could like zoom through the air and kill us all, you know, this time next year.
But you don't run it on the mainstream media.
You've just described one of the greatest, one of the most stupid ideas of modern science, the precautionary principle.
Which means that if something might happen Even if the chances are remote we must act to ensure that it doesn't happen because yeah terrible thing if it does happen It could be terrible.
It's crazy.
Do you remember early on I?
Disagreed with this from the start that early on there were people touting a vaccine as the only way out of this Yeah, but now it seems that Even the vaccines are not the way out, after all.
You know, as you said, they're now spinning this line that maybe the vaccines won't work on the new variant.
And we know already that some of these vaccines being released don't even stop you getting coronavirus.
They just mitigate the symptoms slightly.
And that's that's setting aside from all the side effects, which which which possibly include infertility.
Well, hang on a second.
We can't surely be seriously thinking of giving university kids just about to start on life and then you're going to leave university, find a partner, get married, have children.
I'm very, very scared by that.
I mean, I think if a single person under 80, frankly, takes the vaccine, I think that they need their head examining.
And have you noticed that you don't get this reported in the papers, but there's lots of stuff going through sort of more private channels, like on the internet, about health workers do not want to take the vaccine.
Yeah, I have heard that.
Large, the majority of health workers do not want to go near it.
And who can blame them when you've got stories like that Portuguese woman who died as a result of taking the vaccine, taking one of the vaccines, I don't know which one.
But this story is being suppressed by the mainstream media, which is not doing its job.
And when you say that, when you say the mainstream media is suppressing stories, you sound like a kook.
But this is happening now.
We've got to a stage where the cooks are the normies.
Yeah, you're going to get your YouTube station taken down now.
No, I know.
I mean, I just... Look, there's a lot of worrying trends.
The first of all is this idea... Well, the first of all, the big problem, of course, is we've normalised lockdowns and they're now the status quo.
If we're going to lock you down, you give me a reason why we should come out.
The first thing they're going to do then is say, as we're coming up to, you know, February and March, I mean, the fact that we're even just, we've just blown up the next eight weeks is scandalous.
But we're going to come up to February or March, and then there's going to be like, I mean, there'll be a bit of a push to ease the restrictions and it'll all be, this is what'll happen, it'll all be like, um, there's not enough people vaccinated.
And even if they vaccinated all the under, say, 80s, all the under 70s, or all the over 80s, all the over 70s, then you'll get, oh, you think people, you think the unvaccinated aren't worthy.
You just, you just want them to die.
So no, we have to keep, we have to lock down until everybody's vaccinated.
And then more and more pressure, as you say, grows on people who have no business getting vaccinated.
Maybe, like, young people, people under, you know, 40 or whatever it is.
So that'll be two.
And then it'll be, oh God, yeah, with another mutant strain it can beat the vaccine.
Sorry about that.
You have to get another booster.
It's all right.
It's not completely fatal.
But instead, you know those two shots you have?
Yeah, you need another two shots.
And then another flu will hit next autumn.
And magically, you're going to need another vaccine.
Who knows?
It could be a money spinner.
It could be panic, that they're just genuinely now want to get the hell out of this.
But the biggest problem to me, as I said, is this idea that people are dispensable, that you can just lock people down, their lives don't matter, because we have to save 0.1% of the population from a virus.
Now, people say, oh, you think they're disposable.
It comes down to this, Jane.
I need my full platform now.
And this is why you have these libertarians spouting what they're doing.
Because they're all atheists.
So I'm afraid, viewers, this to me is a big religious or conservative split.
And I wrote about this today.
So you know your woman Carol Waterface?
The crazy one.
The anti-Brexit lady.
Carol the cat woman.
Mad cats.
Okay, so she tweeted something yesterday.
She tweeted something yesterday basically saying how they've made so many mistakes again, they've basically sent thousands of people to their deaths.
So this is the difference, say, between AXA.
So her, if I'm taking the long road, if your view is that government is God, then government can do anything it wants, no matter what the threat, even if it's essentially a threat, a threat like a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a virus.
And a failure to do that makes you morally culpable.
Whereas if you're a conservative or religious person, your first basis is this is not a perfect world where it cannot sneak back to Eden.
Some people will die.
Governments, you should do all you can to mitigate that in proportion.
Government has enough power.
They don't have a license to do what everything you want.
You have to justify to me why they are acting.
A, is it proportionate to the, no, A, will it be effective?
Well, lockdowns aren't effective, not outside of New Zealand anyway.
So it's not, it fails on that ground.
B, even if it was slightly effective, is it proportionate to all the disasters that will go along?
It's definitely not proportionate.
I mean, in any way can you say that the misery this will cause, both spiritually, mentally, economically, to children's education, is disproportionate?
And there were four things.
Three, is it actually moral and ethical?
No, it isn't.
So unless you pass those tests, you can't take that specific action.
Whereas if you're on the left, your default position is, we're God.
Take, you must take the action and then justify to me why you can't.
And that is, you know, I don't know if I put it right, but that is a split.
Honestly, it just amazes me that we have destroyed the government over it, our country over it.
It is literally life.
I mean, I wrote in a previous blog, no one is more pro-life on the website than us.
But it's basically the idea that no one can die.
And if somebody dies, James, someone's to blame.
There's no such thing as a natural death anymore.
They are equating dying of coronavirus to basically being not just a car accident, but like, you know, to being killed by your by your neighbor because they dared to live a life.
You have blood on your hands.
And I think psychologically for the country, that is that is very, very dangerous.
You know, this is a natural occurrence.
I'm sorry, but it's a natural occurrence.
It's not reminded me of another thing.
Yeah.
Blood on blood on your hands.
Yeah.
You see, the BBC interviewed a guy called Montgomery, who is a he he's a doctor.
He works in the intensive intensive care department.
He's a professor of intensive care at University College London.
And this guy, Montgomery, told the BBC, and they put it out on their Twitter field, that anyone not wearing a mask has blood on their hands.
Can you imagine what an irresponsible thing that is for a doctor to say, given that the world's largest scale study on the matter, the one in Denmark that they tried to suppress, has shown that masks make no measurable difference, no statistically significant difference,
So you've got this guy, he's wearing his special surgeon's hat, he's a professor, and he's stating with absolute adamantine certainty, and he's telling it to the BBC, and the BBC are putting out to all those millions of viewers they've got, he's saying, If you do not wear a mask, you are basically a murderer.
You've got blood on your hands.
I mean, he could scarcely be more literal.
No, that's why I said it.
Yeah, that's different because I knew he'd use that phrase.
And then the BBC Five Live ran another interview, do you know, about a doctor saying that there are loads of kids dying in a hospital.
That's right.
And then they had some brave paediatrician So that this wasn't true.
Yeah.
The BBC did a rare thing for the BBC and it sort of modestly retracted, moderately retracted.
But yeah.
So the BBC is this vicious propaganda machine.
And I mean, I blame this for causing the environment, which made somebody under death threat to Toby Young.
You know, threatening to slit his throat and cut out his tongue.
Yeah.
Well, that seems to me we shouldn't have Surgeons.
We shouldn't have surgeons that we pay for in the National Health Service.
We shouldn't have our state broadcaster, which we pay for.
We shouldn't have MPs like Neil O'Brien, who we pay for.
He's very nasty.
I mean, Laura, is it my imagination?
I thought the Conservatives were the party of a fair play.
I mean, this is traditionally the party of fair play of debate.
We expect nastiness from the hard left.
We expect it from the Scottish nationalists who are basically national socialists.
I mean, they're vicious, hardcore political activists.
But I never thought I would live to see a time when a conservative MP started sending out messages implying that Bob Moran, the cartoonist, is more or less a murderer, that Toby Young is more or less a murderer.
Simply for questioning the government narrative.
That seems to be a new direction.
Yeah, again, because he thinks the government is God.
And for anybody who opposes that, the government is God.
God can control a virus.
God can save you from death completely, it seems.
Or our blessed NHS can.
So, you know, it makes sense to them.
If you oppose that, you're essentially, you know, you're anti-God.
You're trying to kill people here.
But they don't understand, no, the virus is naturally occurring.
The lockdown is government action.
The lockdown is what we can control, not the virus.
So go and justify the lockdown to me.
And then you get all this, the COVID-19 has caused this problem and that problem.
No, the lockdown has caused that problem.
Or it'll be like he died because there wasn't a lockdown.
No, he died because of COVID.
You know, it's really sad, but people die of cancer.
People die of COVID.
You know, you could be diagnosed with cancer the next day.
Who are you going to blame?
But, you know, everybody, people blame people all the time.
And if you haven't locked down and you haven't sealed yourself in your house and worn a mask on the two times you've ventured out, you're to blame.
Do you see what I'm trying to explain?
It's a really twisted form of logic.
You always have to start with what is your prime facie, your status quo.
Your status quo is we don't live in Eden.
Bad things happen.
Some people will die.
Of course, we live in such a progressive society now, like medicine has saved us from so many things, right?
But it must be proportionate.
It must be moral.
It must be ethical.
And lockdown fails on all of those points.
It does.
But also, I think, I want to be optimistic, but this really worries me.
That evidence That undermines the government's case is being deliberately, indeed, aggressively suppressed.
Yeah.
So you've got hospitals now in cahoots with the police having arrested anyone who takes video footage of empty wards.
You've got you've got NHS staffers either doing a Doing a Montgomery and acting like political activists, by the way, that guy, look at his Twitter feed.
He's, you know, in deep with the whole Extinction Rebellion crowd.
He thinks that the world's only got sort of six months left to live unless we ban fossil fuels and so on.
This guy is a political activist first and a medic second.
It's clear as a lot of people in the NHS are because it's basically a sort of communistic radicalization organization.
Doctors sort of buy into the narrative that only the state can provide health using a sort of Stalinist health health model hangover from the end of the Second World War.
But what was I saying?
Oh, the media cover-up.
Yeah, the media cover-up.
So you've got this people being banned from providing evidence within hospitals.
You've probably got people that are scared of losing their jobs within the NHS.
You might get the odd whistleblower or at least people sort of Admitting this is true in private forums, you know, doctors, for example, expressing disquiet over the fact that they're having to put on death certificates COVID-19 when they know it was nothing of the kind.
I mean, you read that piece by Malcolm Kendrick, who admitted to having done that himself and said, look, the bottom line is the death figures.
Everything else can be manipulated.
Everything.
Deaths can be attributed to COVID that aren't, by a doctor's signature.
But what you cannot fake are the total Death figures and the total death figures are not are not abnormal.
They're not worrying and yet whenever this is raised that the politicians won't discuss it and the media seems determined to turn a blind eye to it as they're turning a blind eye to stories about about people dying of taking the vaccine as they're turning a blind eye to stories about the extreme reluctance of medical people to you know, not doctors and nurses to take the vaccine themselves.
So it's like Tell me what the difference between what we're living through now and the experience of people living in Nazi Germany or China under Mao or the Soviet Union under Stalin.
It seems to me to be of a piece.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's very, in terms of what the end game is, it is incredibly worrying because, you know, the propaganda machine It's just I've never, as you said, we've never witnessed anything like it in Britain.
I mean, there's normally always been a bit of it.
There's always been bias.
Right.
But this propaganda machine, you know, every BBC, Sky, every single one of the papers, I mean, the Mail now and again, You know, the mail a little bit are anti-lockdown, are like, they have been printing stories, crunching the numbers and stuff like that.
But pretty much all of them are in total lockstep.
Something I've never sort of witnessed before.
All the radio stations.
First of all, to terrorise the public.
And to manufacture consent for this insane lockdown.
And I mean, the reference points are so wide.
I mean, the end point is either to get everybody to take the vaccine, right?
And then they want to just, you know, or either just to, it's just power.
I mean, power is probably the more obvious one.
And we've gone through all the different little waves they can do.
I mean, this could go on for years.
Or the other way.
This could go on for years.
You mentioned manufactured consent.
Isn't it odd?
I mentioned the people on our side of the argument who failed us totally, and they are many, and it is shaming.
But isn't it also weird, the people from the other side who are actually of our party, for example, Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky, who I always thought of was the kind of the devil incarnate.
He got all along that the media is just deeply compromised and corrupt.
Naomi Wolf, you know, the author of ghastly, sort of, woke books that I'd never dream of reading.
She's up again.
Because you've got Americans fighting this battle as well, you know, and Australians.
It's not just What's happening in our country is happening across the world apart from China.
These people can often be worth reading because their analysis of certain things is often correct.
But what you find again is usually that their value system is different to yours.
So their starting point is different or their endpoints are different.
But their analysis of what's going on is often absolutely fine.
Of course there is a media machine going on.
There's no doubt about that and it's a very dangerous time now that they have terrorized the public, they have manufactured their consent, they have gotten themselves, you know, used to lockdown.
I think people, they just keep paying them, right?
They just keep paying them this furlough money, this endless furlough money.
I think they're demotivating them and, you know, they're just terrifying them and people are just, people are just happy.
It seems happy to go along with it.
I find it Astonishing the level, as I said, the level of consent.
I honestly think if they ran a poll and said, we're going to seal people into their houses and indefinitely detain people who don't wear masks, you'd get a majority of people saying, yeah, that's fine by me.
This is why, have you, have you watched yet to the lake?
You haven't, have you?
No, I started watching it, James, okay?
And I can see the attraction, but I just do not want to become emotionally invested in What I know can end badly.
And I think I saw there's a kid involved and all that stuff.
And I thought, I can't, I can't take, I can't take this now.
If I'm watching something, I need escapism.
So.
No.
Okay.
No, but it gets the balance right.
It doesn't, you won't find yourself being so upset that you wish you hadn't watched it.
And actually there were lessons to be learned.
There's the, I'm not going to spoil it for you, but, but in episode, episode five, there was this key scene where These drunken Russian peasants find themselves rather in the state we are now, where they're they're thinking the forces of the state are not acting ethically, let alone in our interests.
And yet at the same time, there is this this this pandemic going around and it's killing people.
And there's a discussion with the peasants where they talk about it in much the same way that you with the same motives you attribute to the British public.
Now, they say things like, Well, clearly, you know, it's perfectly OK to execute people in a hospital, say, if they're all infected, because otherwise, you know, how are you going to control the disease?
But then the peasants, little by little, make the logical leap when they're saying, hang on a second, that diseased person that I think should be executed to make us all safe, that diseased person could be me or it could be my friend.
Yeah.
And there's a sort of There's the cognitive dissonance, isn't there, that seems to be prevalent among the British public now, whereby they sort of on the one hand, they see the evidence that around them that nobody they know is dying and nobody and their children are being denied an education.
And so they've got their children kicking around that, you know, while they're trying to get the housework done or whatever, trying to do their jobs.
And you've got all these myriad inconveniences, like the woman yesterday on Twitter saying, my friend is in the terminal stage of her illness.
I so desperately want to go and see her.
Should I?
And I was thinking, Yeah, do it.
I said, do it.
Go and see your dying friend.
Can you not see that you shouldn't even be needing to ask this question?
Your friend is dying.
You will never see your friend again.
This is your last chance.
You're not going to get... What's going to happen if you share some air with your dying friend?
Nothing.
You might get the equivalent of a nasty cold.
That's about it.
Yeah.
So there's a cognitive distance between, on the one hand, people's realisation that, well, it seems to be no-one's dropping dead in the streets, and at the same time, welcoming this government policy which is derived from the assumption that this is the deadliest thing ever.
Yeah, I know.
It's true.
I think very few people know somebody who's died.
I think very few people know people who've had it seriously.
A good friend of ours did get it and he, he was, you know, he was, he was ill for the two weeks and he has lots of sense of taste and smell, but he, he's with us, by the way.
There's no sort of self, oh, you don't know how bad it is.
Uh, he thinks it's all, you know, it's just all ridiculous.
If people really thought it was incredibly serious, you would know about it first hand.
But you have to get it from the news.
If it wasn't the news telling you all the time, or social media telling you all the time, you probably would barely be none the wiser.
Have you ever had the flu?
I don't think I've ever had a flu.
I've had, you know, because I know how debilitating the flu is and people say I've had the flu and you've had a cold.
I've had obviously very bad colds but I don't think I've ever had the flu flu.
Yeah, you'll probably get it one day.
I think I've had it three times and the reason I know I've had it three times is because you remember vividly each time you had it because you're in bed and you do Feel like death.
That is the phrase.
That is the appropriate phrase.
Your limbs ache and you... Way worse than the bout of coronavirus.
I mean, admittedly, I was on zinc supplements, which I'm sure made a huge difference and stopped me getting the worst of it.
I mean, I think I would have been... But even so, it's not... Look, when you get a serious viral respiratory infection, Be it influenza or coronavirus.
You feel bad!
The only difference between coronavirus and influenza is that everyone feels they have a license to tell everybody about it.
I know, I know.
You know instantly who's had coronavirus.
You don't necessarily know who's had flu, unless you happen to have popped round for drinks a few weeks later and they'll tell you.
I suppose all the hospitals are filling up.
But then I'm like, well why did you close the nightcare hospitals then?
I mean, what a scam that was.
They built them for something like 220 million and then close it.
And then you go into lockdown three anyway, because our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed.
OK, well, even if the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed, then bloody well open the Nightingale hospitals and let the rest of us get on with it.
Like, it's just nothing they say makes sense.
That's part of me thinks they're actually just taking the piss out of you.
And they must think they're going to go along with this.
They'll go along with anything.
You know, they could say anything, and I reckon people would just nod along.
I can't believe the level of, I'm afraid, some of it is just selfishness, some of it is just idiocy, and some of it is just fear.
And that's the other thing, is that like, I think I made my mind up a while ago, like, I'm just not going to live my life in fear.
And people go, oh, but it's not you, it's not your life, Laura.
But like, you know, you're going to hide away forever.
I don't take ridiculous risks.
You know, I don't go off and do stupid things, but I am not going to live my life in fear, and I don't think whatever age you are, you should do that.
You know, and certainly I'm not going to ask for other people to make huge sacrifices because I might get sick, even if it was very sick.
I want to put that in my living will now, especially if I'm older.
I do not expect my grandchildren to sacrifice their education for my sake.
I am not asking people to do that.
Most societies, the older generations make sacrifices for children.
This generation asks the children to make all the biggest sacrifices.
And I really do think they are making the biggest sacrifices.
You know, because I have to get on my rant with schools, James, because I mean, what they have done to the schools is so wrong.
It is so, as I called it on Twitter, morally degenerate.
And again, the idea that they get the high moral ground when essentially you have turned around to either your own grandchild or someone else's child and said, really, this is what you're saying.
I don't care.
That you will not go to school.
I don't care that you're going to get a proper education.
And don't give me all this nonsense about it's online, blah, blah, blah.
It's completely not the same.
There are kids out there right now in front of a TV and they'll be knocking into their third hour of TV.
They might be the minority and they will never recover from this.
They are not going to be able to make it up.
They're not going to be able to have catch-up lessons, you know.
And we as a society have just said, you, you five-year-old, you 15-year-old, who've had your exams cancelled, we just, we're going to sacrifice you.
Deal with it.
And as I said, it is morally degenerate.
And I've said to my father, I always say, do you know what my dad said?
He was like, oh, just put them in front of the TV for a couple of hours.
And I said, I had a big argument.
We're actually quite close.
Was it your mother who brought you up?
Did your mother do all the discipline and stuff?
But I just said, that's it.
That's it right there.
You, I said to him, you don't, you don't care.
You don't care.
And I mean, as I said, I'm equal opportunity.
I will tell my nearest and dearest to their to their face.
You know, oh, we have to do it.
We don't have to do it.
We certainly don't have to close the schools.
But you you you are important.
That's what you're saying.
I was amazed.
Go on.
I was amazed when they when they when they closed closed the schools again, I thought they weren't that insane.
But here's something I noticed.
If you go to the World Economic Forum's website, you'll find that they've teamed up with the company that makes Sesame Street.
OK.
And they're pumping out all this very, very dodgy, you know, give me a child until it is seven and I'll show you the man kind of stuff that it's all about.
It's all about how to make the most of this COVID-19, how to make the most of home learning.
And basically, I think this is part of a a broader and terrifying trend to educate, educate children via, via video with the same state approved material.
And here's, here's a, here's a funny thing.
Rory Bremner, Rory Bremner, the impressionist tweeted out day before yesterday, I think about Here's a thought.
Let me float this thought.
Wouldn't it be nice if the BBC could take advantage of this situation by providing educational programming for the children stuck at home?
What happens the next day, but we get it announced that the BBC is going to be producing this educational programming for the children at home?
And I'm thinking, Rory Bremner's tweet was not some sort of random thought that he decided to cast into the ether.
This was a guy who's on board with the programme.
It's all part of us softening up, making us compliant.
I don't want the BBC anywhere near my children's education.
I know, and it's just all this screen-based learning.
It's like, you know, you can't have human experiences anymore, you know.
It's, what was I going to say?
Yeah, it's, you know, you can do it.
Like, my kids will have some Zoom music classes.
Yes, I see.
We'll have some... Look what my wife's bought me.
Sorry.
We'll have some Zoom music classes, you know, because they have to kind of thing to keep them going.
But obviously, you know, it's not the same.
But they just, yeah, they just want to get people used to the telescreen, right?
We'll put you in front of the screen and everything.
They think every, every gap can be plugged by a laptop.
And a Zoom class.
And this is it.
You get people on the left going, we should close the schools.
Usually people who are key never stop telling us about how disadvantaged children are, how they must be in school, how they must have their free school moved.
Then they're the first to ask for the school to be closed.
But of course, the government caused the problem by closing the school.
And of course, then they want the government to solve all the problems that have been generated from this.
You know, so your free school meals, and your vouchers, and your Zoom classes, and your BBC.
And I just think this is just more and more work for the massive administrative and bureaucracy.
The idea that you can plug this hole, buy a laptop and three hours of programming from BBC is just fantasy land.
It's garbage.
It's all lies.
They're lying to you all the time.
It's more it's garbage.
It's all lies.
They're lying to you all the time.
And I mean, things are very things are very bad.
I mean, go on.
Did you see, though, that we were given a small scrap of comfort, which I think we should tell listeners, the school in Sheffield?
Yeah.
Well, I give you a warm feeling in your heart.
No.
But did you look at the dates?
Because I think that was issued on the 4th of January.
So I think it was issued before the full national lockdown.
Yes.
Because if you I read the whole.
Yes, so viewers, what happened was a school in Sheffield said, all our children, secondary school said, actually all of our children are vulnerable, we're opening up.
But if you read the article, what they had done is they had gone back and forth with public health and they had specifically said they were only the only reason they were closing is to roll out mass testing.
It's not a sort of a public health.
We're a vector ground.
Therefore, all our kids are vulnerable.
So you can all come in.
So I would like to see a follow up on that.
I think they probably will have closed post national lockdown.
Of course, they could say the same thing.
I mean, a really brave headmaster would just say, all of our kids are vulnerable.
You can all come in.
That's what, again, that would be an act of courage.
But they won't.
Well, over Christmas, I don't really notice, they very dangerously showed a film called Spartacus.
And you've seen Spartacus, I'm sure.
But have you not?
No.
OK.
I know.
Plot spoiler.
Yeah.
A guy called Spartacus, who is a is a gladiator, leads this rebellion against Imperial Rome and all the, yeah.
And for a time he does really well using his guerrilla tactics to defeat the Roman army.
And Tony Curtis joins him to escape being buggered by Larry Olivier, because Larry Olivier likes snails and oysters, as he explains in a significant scene.
Anyway, cut to the end.
The rebels get captured and the Romans say, which one of you is Spartacus?
And Kirk Douglas, who is Spartacus, is about to put up his hand when somebody else says, I'm Spartacus.
No, I'm Spartacus.
So is my wife, you know, and so it goes on.
I'm afraid to say that none of us wants to be crucified on the Appian Way, but it's kind of where we're at.
It's the gladiatorial rebellion.
That's the only way you're going to teach Rome some sort of lesson.
We have to engage in acts of rebellion, which are going to require a degree of self-sacrifice.
There's no way around this.
Yeah, you're right.
This is the problem.
It's the opposition is so splintered.
And well, apart from the fact that propaganda and so many true believers, but the opposition is very splintered.
And just, you know, if you say there's too much at stake for people to say, right, we're going to You know, we're going to do this on mass or a school to say, actually, all of our children are vulnerable.
So we're going to open because then the teachers unions are like, no, we're I mean, there was the head of the teacher union again on GMB saying how all the teachers are terrified, terrified.
You're just like, what is wrong with you?
Check the numbers, even on their side.
Nobody under 60 is going to die of this.
How many teachers under 60 are there?
And for those that are clinically vulnerable, fine.
Fine, don't come in.
Get a substitute teacher.
That's fine.
They're quite fat though, Laura.
A lot of them are quite fat.
I mean, not all of them.
You know, just go do your job.
Look, there it is.
There's a lot of cowardly behaviour.
A lot of people here are... I just can't believe how people are going along with this.
They're just happy to stay at home.
They're happy to have their kids' education trashed.
You know, all these... Again, most people calling for lockdown have nothing to lose.
Or very little to lose.
They're not losing any income.
They're not even yet losing, as I said, the satisfaction of doing the job.
And most of them don't have to homeschool.
And this is just a massive... Do you know who they are?
Well, I can... Yeah, I do know who they are.
They are the Clerisy.
They're what Coleridge called the Clerisy.
Oh, yes.
And it's that kind of middle class of spongers with their non-jobs who are in league with the state.
And you're right.
They are.
Now, I'll tell you something interesting, which I thought of the other day.
Which is... I went to... I've been to quite a few of the anti-lockdown rallies.
You're better than me.
Starting with one of the first ones in Hyde Park.
And what I noticed was that the kind of people who were overly represented in these demos were anti-vaxxers, 5G people, Um, they were, they were very likable crowd, but, but quite eccentric.
And the biggest rally that I went to was that the main speaker was David Icke.
Um, and you also had Piers Corbyn.
What's interesting.
What's, what's interesting about these people is that these are the kinds of people that have been following for years, websites like UK column.
Journalists like Vanessa Beely, obviously David Icke, they've been reading his stuff as well.
They probably were red-pilled or black-pilled by things like 9-11 or, you know, the building that mysteriously collapsed when it wasn't hit by a plane and stuff.
And we've been, you and I, as kind of normies or ex-normies, have been encouraged by the media To see these people as freaks.
Don't even consider 5G.
That story's a lunatic tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
Don't even consider that the vaccine might be dangerous because that's just a sort of Robert Kennedy fixation.
And anti-vaxxers.
These are bad people because they're anti-vax.
And it's never really explained to you why these labels are necessarily as pejorative as they'd like them to be.
It's just there.
And I remember early on, Toby saying to me something typically pompous from our side.
This is why we lose, I think.
He said something like, well, I don't want to be associated with these people because of their crazy views.
They're not good for, we need a kind of respectable people protesting against these.
Well, the respectable people are all at home wearing their masks or driving their car with their masks and believing what the Daily Mail and The Sun tells them.
It's the weirdos, the freaks, who have been there onto this all along and they know what's going on and they realise that what has been dismissed as conspiracy theory is actually the reality of what's going on.
I think we need to respect the, you know, I mean, not take everything, you know, trust, but verify.
But at least we need to...
You know, I would probably have a similar reaction to Toby if I was really honest.
But I do.
I do think, you know, you look again, what's your starting position?
Your starting position should always be scepticism of the government, should always be scepticism of media.
You should never take what they say at face value because they have a ridiculous amount of power.
You know, a lot of them have their own agendas.
Um, so just don't, just don't accept what, and also I love, you know, what annoys me about the media is how they, they, uh, their, their first position is always a given, you know?
So it's, as you say, you go into the studio and the fact that you've even walked into the studio and accepted their terms of debate, you know, you have immediately conceded so much ground, you know?
And I mean, language is so important.
Um, and you, you particularly, you know, Yeah, language is everything and it's so manipulated now, you know, in terms of any omission is basically a criminal act.
And yeah, I mean, look, you know, these guys have huge amounts of power.
I mean, is there any more anybody more powerful right now than Valance and Witty?
I mean, their words are essentially gods.
They have so much power over so many people.
And what do we know of them?
Has anybody examined?
You know, I'm not casting these forces, I don't want to be sued.
But I mean, these guys have more power than, like, any of the previous kings have had, than the flipping, as I said, the ayatollahs in Iran.
And, like, someone go and do some journalism on them.
Well, Neil Ferguson is a physicist and a computer modeler.
He's not a... Yeah, he doesn't even have an own biology background.
And yet these guys are...
It's incredible that they have, you know, the left go on about the power of the media and the corporate power, et cetera, et cetera, yet Sainsbury's can't make you stay at home.
You know, I mean, not even Google can can take your kid's education away from you, although conveniently they may well benefit from all the schools being closed.
But we are supposed to take these these guys are as close to godlike as you can.
The power they have is is something we have never seen before.
In our lifetime.
Boris Johnson is completely useless.
He will go along with this, you know, for as long as possible.
And no one, you know, very few people are willing, all the mainstream media that should be examining them, are just going along with it.
They're worse, they're their handmaids.
You know, it's... I think there are signs and portents that we're living through end times.
This is one of those moments in history where men say openly that God and his saints slept.
Um, as they did in the reign of, in the, during the anarchy, um, of, you know, King Stephen, um, A few years ago, I was planning to write a book, which was, which I wish I'd written.
Um, it was expressing my puzzlement that institutions that were supposed to be doing one thing and were accepted as doing is still publicly accepted as doing the thing they were supposed to do.
We're actually doing something else.
So for example, the army, what's the army's job?
The army's job is defense of the realm.
Yeah.
What was the army actually doing?
It was engaging in, in kind of woke sort of diversity signaling to putting out adverts showing that if you're a Muslim and you want to whip out your prayer mat on exercise and in the Brecon's, um, or your, your comrades are going to kind of keep watch while you do your thing, this, this kind of thing.
And you think, well, it's nice, but I don't want that to be the, the army's raison d'etre.
NASA did something similar when under Obama.
Obama declared that it was no longer going to be about kind of space exploration.
It was going to or the head of NASA said it was going to be more about sort of race relations.
Lots of examples.
The look at the the Royal Horticultural Society.
It's got a new guy in charge who actually thinks that the main job of the RHS, which, remember, this is a quintessentially middle class organisation which runs things like the schemes that people go and visit gardens and so on, interests the nation in horticulture.
He thinks his job now should be to get more black people, you know, diverse people on the panel.
Well, maybe they don't want to do that.
Maybe they're not interested in gardening.
I mean, I don't care either way, but I don't think it's a kind of moral duty to get more of them on board.
It's a free country.
And in the same way, just coming full circle, when your conservative MP no longer, A, holds up conservative values or B, looks after the interests of his constituents, which, of course, are these government policies, when you've got libertarian Free market think tankers endorsing the exact opposite of everything that ideologically they should be representing.
And when they're not actually doing their job, they're not actually doing the very research that they're paid to do.
Yeah.
When the BBC, which is supposed to be informing, instead puts out government propaganda, When you've got the media, which should be reporting on the most interesting political story of our lifetime, the wholesale theft of an election in the US by the Chinese Communist Party, the Democrats, In League With, Facebook.
That's quite a big story, no?
When not even conservative magazines will touch this story, then you start thinking, hang on a second, what can I trust?
This world is so wrong that there needs to be a radical shake-up.
It's not going to be fixed easily.
Yeah, I mean, who gets to speak?
Who's drawing the parameters of, you know, reasonable and unreasonable speech?
These are all, you know, their vested interests.
You know, it's easy to say, oh, that person's an extremist.
Well, who says?
Who says that person is an extremist?
Oh, you who disagree with her.
So do you know the new words?
The new lingo now is disinformation is the new word for facts I don't agree with.
Or opinions I don't agree with.
And in terms of when you were talking about the other, you know, the sort of David Ikes, whatever, what they're doing, I've noticed a little bit of it on Twitter now, is they're completely trying to delegitimize people like Toby Young and Julia Hartley Brewer, or even Alison Pearson.
They're considered, and the new word, of course, is dangerous.
And even so, and then remember when Michael, or not Michael, Owen Jones then went after the cancer doctor, you know, the guy who cures cancer for a living.
And again, he's calling him dangerous.
But they've always done this.
You know, your opinion is dangerous.
You're spreading a disinformation campaign.
And as you say, they never say what it is that's wrong you're saying.
They just label you.
I mean, sometimes it's you're a racist, you're homophobic, you're sexist.
But now the more because the sort of identity politics campaign has been parked a little bit.
Now it's either you're just it's a disinformation campaign or you're dangerous.
And it's all labeling.
They never explain their position.
Although, unfortunately, it's very effective because who wants to be dangerous, James?
I mean, out of interest.
Have they, have they tried this shit on you?
No, I think I'm too small.
I think I'm, I think we're, I don't think we're big enough.
So, um, or yeah, or who knows.
But, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's a class, it's a classic.
They label you.
And then again, nice middle-class people don't want to listen to the dangerous people.
Or really what, what am I saying is dangerous?
Oh, uh.
So, okay.
So that's the, that's the, the, the negative.
That you and Cathy and Conservative Woman are just so obscure that it doesn't matter at all.
But I would like to float a more optimistic theory, particularly with Toby particularly.
And I keep telling him this.
I think we've got a very good lesson to learn from Paul Joseph Watson.
Paul Joseph Watson will not and has not engaged with with the mainstream media.
And they've asked him on quite a lot.
And he knows that it's he knows it's a trap and doesn't want to.
Well, he's got a million or more followers on Twitter.
Toby, Toby thinks that if only he sounds reasonable and balanced enough and he goes on the BBC, goes near enemy camp, that somehow the truth will prevail.
And it's not that's not how it works anymore.
It's just a trap.
I'm...
I think there's something to be said for it.
I mean, the only way to do it is do it the way, you know, your man Seb Gorka does it.
And you just go in there and just completely drop it.
But you don't even listen to the question.
You just say what you want to say and you get out of there and you just you delegitimize them.
You know, you just you just tell them what you think of them.
And and then they'll probably cut you off.
And then and then you go, because unfortunately, the mainstream media, you know, this is the problem.
They still have a massive reach.
So I totally get the, should you engage, should you not.
I mean, the problem with Toby James is, I mean, I might even put you in this bracket now in the end, is, you know, you're way more establishment than we are.
You know, Toby writes for The Spectator, you write for The Spectator.
As you say, you know all the people in the book, whereas I don't, and I don't care, and I don't want to know them.
I don't care.
You know, they're dangerous people.
I've no interest in, I mean, in engaging with them really well.
I mean, you hope you have some influence.
I mean, look, they only ever respond to shame and pressure.
And at the moment... And apologies.
They feed on apologies.
They feed on contrition.
They feed on weakness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you should never... Look, I mean, just going back to Toby's grave mistake.
Yeah.
I noticed this campaign building and this was, you remember my interview with Mike Yeadon?
Mike Yeadon pointed out absolutely correctly that viral respiratory infections follow a Gompertz curve.
Certainly in climates like our own, that's how it works.
So you get a massive spike at the beginning and then it comes down and then you might get a kind of a blip at the end in the next winter that comes along, because that's how it goes.
But basically, it's become endemic by that point.
The dry tinder has been infected.
Those who were going to get it badly have got it, and everyone else has got herd immunity.
This is what has actually happened.
But I've noticed lots of people in the last few days have been saying, look at this massive second wave we've been experiencing.
Look at this huge winter spike.
That means that people like Mike Yeadon.
Mike Yeadon is an idiot.
And people who've repeated what Mike Yeadon says, like Toby.
Toby said, you know, I don't think it's going to be a second wave.
Idiots like Toby have been proved completely wrong.
And look, this is what the evidence says.
It's not a good response.
It's not a good look to go on Newsnight and admit you were wrong, when in fact you were not wrong.
They rigged the evidence.
They rigged the data to make it look like, to make it accord with what they want to happen, with their narrative, their version of events.
But this is not science.
This is not epidemiology.
It's completely divorced from facts.
It's the narrative.
It's like Marxist dialectic.
It's designed to sort of subvert truth and create a sort of parallel reality.
That's what it is.
People on our side should not be playing this game, ever.
Yeah, no, look, I mean, but you know what I would do?
I wouldn't even be, I would just go on and talk about the damage, the damage lockdowns are doing.
I mean, I would just flip it completely.
I wouldn't even, don't get... Why haven't been invited on, Laura?
Yeah, well, I know, I've noticed that, probably because I'd be better than Toby.
But, um, you know, don't, once you start saying, oh, well, you know, maybe it's this numbers and maybe that, no, as I've always said, no, these lockdowns are evil.
Stop it!
And anyway, we can't trust any of your numbers, you know.
Let's look at the exact figures five years from now.
Not five days from now, five years from now.
And if the hospitals are getting overwhelmed, then open all your stupid Nightingale hospitals.
I mean, there's millions of things you could do other than this crazy neo-communist experiment.
I mean, this is cuckoo land you're talking about.
I mean, you're right, though.
Why even bother going on?
I mean, you might as well be going and arguing with Stalin at one of your staged Stalin trials.
But I didn't.
I didn't do it.
I'm so, you know, I'm so sorry.
What can you say?
You know, my kids are walking around and they listen to no media.
And all there is like, oh, two meters and lockdown and this.
I'm like, this is their vocabulary now.
I'm like, oh my God, like this is, you know, they're happy overall, but I cannot even imagine what some other people are thinking.
I mean, any parents out there who's GMB on their screens, you need to turn it off.
It is a terrifying, it's terrorism.
It's psychological warfare.
They are launching on you and your family.
Turn it off now.
Yeah.
Do you want to see evidence of my good parenting?
On the night that Boris announced the lockdown, my kids said to me, let's go and see what the stupid twat's got to say, shall we?
That's, if only children across the land shared that healthy skepticism.
Do you know how profoundly ignorant these kids are going to grow up now?
You know, there's people doing degrees now, say engineering degrees, who aren't in university.
I mean, okay, they're getting their lessons online, maybe, and they'll do a bit of reading.
Like, I don't want to be walking over the bridges that the next generation of engineers are going to build.
Like, sorry, but you know, you've missed so much schooling.
You know, we're just the knowledge gap.
I mean, as I said, we're ignorant enough as it is.
Oh my God, do you know what it's going to be like?
It's going to be like the Dark Ages, when people are going to be walking over the ruins of these buildings with their hypercorts and their baths and all these civilised things that they've forgotten how to... I mean, look how long it took to rebuild the... What's that fantastic dome in Rome that we love?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Before that, the Roman thing that some anyway.
Well, actually, the Dark Ages, I have a bone to pick with you there.
I don't think the Dark Ages were that dark.
Notre Dame was built in the Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages, I am told, is a myth generated by those anti-religious Enlightenment nutbags and a lot of the Protestants.
To basically demonise and delegitimise a lot of the Catholic rule at that time.
But if you go through what they actually built... Rodney Stark has done a lot of work on this.
I might re-read some of his books.
This idea that people thought the world was flat then.
This is all garbage.
Nonsense.
They knew it wasn't flat.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, now people believe the world is slash.
Now we're, yes, yeah, they think that they can, the government can control the virus.
I mean, I just, this is just, this is a failure in both faith and even basic logic.
But, um, I wanted to, I wanted to end on a, on a, on a happy note, but, but, I just wanted to mention something.
The thing that made my blood run cold this week, I don't know whether you saw it, the sun ran apiece on the Great Reset, the World Economic Forum's Great Reset.
Exposed?
I assume?
Not at all.
It was written in an approbatory way.
So it introduced to some readers the idea that this might be the economic model that could help end the world's economic problems.
It was absolutely extraordinary.
Again, if you'd asked me 20 years ago if shit got real, If, you know, the country was in dire straits, who would be fighting for traditional roast beef English values?
Who would be recapturing the spirit of Cressy and Agincourt and the Blitz?
And number one, I would have thought, would be our robust tabloid press, particularly The Sun.
You know, the sort of, you think of the Kelvin Mackenzie era Sun.
But no, it's now this branch of the global They're all bought and paid for.
Oh yeah, no, the Sunday Times ran something very similar to, you know, what the future will be.
And of course they ran the, we'll all be eating roast crickets line.
You know this one, you know how they pushed it, how we need to eat less meat and insects are delicious.
And did you know it was only in the West where we eat meat because insects are really, really, uh, you know, popular in the third world.
Exactly.
But if they had a choice, they would eat the roast beef.
But you just want to basically make us live like we're in third world conditions.
You fascist.
Yeah, no, I know.
They probably ran that at the same time.
Murdoch probably ran those two pieces in the Sunday Times at the same time.
No, they're completely prepping people.
They're completely prepping people for a lower standard of living, for constantly everything being online, on screen.
You're just a little pleb that can be manipulated.
There'll be no culture.
It's going to take a year at least to bring back the culture on best, best case scenario.
It's bad.
It's bad.
But at least we've got our Olympian contempt for our sellout former comrades.
Yeah, that's quite a nice thing to have.
That kind of keeps me warm at night.
Yeah, people who should know better, I always say, are worse than the true believers, right?
They are worse than the people who believe this nonsense from the first.
Because it's just self-serving.
They're only ever doing it for self-serving reasons.
So, yeah, yeah, it's fine.
But it's not just a contempt for For the traitors and the sellouts that keeps us warm.
It's ultimately the camaraderie of our friends.
Because it's hard won.
What we do is hard won.
We take personal risks.
We suffer career damage.
Not that I've really got a career anymore.
We tell it like it is.
We take physical risks every time we go and not wear a mask or whatever.
I think that's great that we found each other.
I mean, it really does.
I don't feel unhappy at all.
OK.
Yeah, that's good.
I mean, I'm pretty down about the state of things, but yeah, you do try and keep your spirits up.
Yes, that's that's true.
That's true.
A lot of people pushing this lockdown are probably also miserable and they want everybody else to be miserable.
I think that's a that's a big issue as well.
But I have to then, I just want to ask you, I know you're going to scowl, have you or your wife been watching Bridgerton on Netflix?
I watched the first episode and I thought, it was not my favourite, it was shite, I mean complete shite.
But daughter, daughter absolutely loves it.
Yeah I love it.
Yeah, I mean, look, it is, it is escapist, but I really, you know, it's a good story.
It's a simple yarn in a way.
And I know people might think, oh, it's a bit PC.
It really isn't.
I actually think it's quite a conservative.
A bit PC?
What?
I mean, well, look.
I know what you're going to say, and then I'll criticise you better.
Come on.
Oh, God.
Are you going to?
No, I don't want to be criticised by you.
It's so boring.
You know what?
Change your mind on it.
You are the only girl I've had on my podcast that doesn't give me a hard time.
Which I think reflects well on you, can I say?
You don't feel the urge to tip me off all the time.
It's so boring being told off.
OK, well, I think you should watch Bridgerton to the end.
And I know they're saying, oh, well, they use black actors and there wouldn't be black actors back in Georgian times.
Yeah.
But, you know, my view is, look, if you want to write a period drama and you don't want to exclude half your working, your workforce, all the black actors, then just think of something quirky that includes them in the main part.
And that's all she's done.
No, you don't look at it.
You don't go, oh, oh, that's a black actor.
It's a very good, it's a very good, simple yarn.
I take back everything I said.
All the fondness I felt with you, all the kinship is now gone.
It's good.
You are dead to me, Laura Perrin.
No, it's good.
It's good.
Well, your daughter, your daughter is a conservative and she really liked it.
It's really beautiful to watch.
You know how I like to watch the beautiful things.
So.
Oh, I hate that as well.
I hate the colour schemes.
No, no, they're not.
They're just absolutely vomit-inducing.
Well, they're a bit gaudy, but... Yeah, gaudy.
Yeah, and the two leads, both male and female, I mean, they are beautiful to watch.
She is a vision, I mean, really.
You could spend an hour with her.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say...
That's the sort of thing you'd expect a chap to say, but yeah, yeah, she definitely is.
She just fulfills those criteria, right?
And I can see that the other chaps are, you know, the chap is a handsome fellow.
Yeah.
Anyway, so the thing is, Laura, what we've done is we've covered off the UK angle without drifting across the Atlantic, which I think is good.
So we can, our next Our next podcast, I imagine we will probably know who's, well, whether tyranny and corruption and cheating has won the US election or whether truth and honest and God have prevailed.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it's one of those things that's so scary.
I can't even, it's like waiting for your Oxbridge results, you know.
Yeah, it's like that.
I don't think I've ever... I've been quite so nervous since the late 80s, the early 80s.
Yeah, well, there it is.
Anyway, yeah, I'm going to get some lunch now.
Do you want to get some lunch?
Yes, and we will keep the comments coming in, people, and we will gather again soon.
Bye-bye, and don't forget to support me and Laura on Patreon and Subscribestar and stuff because, yeah, we need your support.
Thank you.
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