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Feb. 16, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:14:00
John Waters
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am excited.
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am excited.
It's none other than John Waters.
John, I mean, I was going to talk about your interesting past, but isn't it a weird thing that...
The world has changed so much that our old lives don't really matter very much anymore.
It's like during the war, before the Germans invaded France, you could have been a really good blacksmith or you could have been a great novelist even, but everything would have been wiped out and replaced by this new normal.
That's right.
You know, although, you know, I have to warn you, James, you know, apparently you're not allowed to make any references to Germany when you're talking about anything to do with or the war or any of that stuff.
That's verboten.
Are you talking about that Mandalorian actress?
Yes, I heard that she was cancelled for making an egregious and offensive comparison I don't know.
But yeah, your point is actually really one that struck me recently when I was thinking about, you know, being a writer.
That actually, it doesn't really matter what you wrote before.
It's all nonsense now, in a certain sense, because it's about a world that no longer exists and can't really have existed.
You know, people won't be able to believe.
I mean, people are already saying, you know, by way of advice, I hear them now, people online or whatever, advising people about how to handle this moment, that when you're talking to your children, always assure them that before COVID, there was a life.
There was a life, a human existence that they can't dream of now.
And which is kind of really sad and really terrifying at the same time.
But it's actually really true.
I was thinking about it in the context of the novel, because I always wanted to be a novelist, even though I was never able to really get a book together that I was happy with.
And I was very kind of, I suppose, complexed about that.
Now I'm kind of relieved because those books would be out there haunting me.
They'd just be another thing to haunt me about the irrelevance of the first, you know, in my case, 65 years of my life.
I know.
I mean, you had a kind of a better version of the life that I had before.
I mean, We were both rock journalists.
I was sort of more part-time than you.
But you had an amazing career in the glory days of rock journalism, didn't you?
I mean, you're just the right age for it.
I did actually in Ireland.
I mean I'm Irish and I live in Ireland all my life and I was really lucky because I hadn't gone to college or anything like that and I kind of having started off doing various kinds of jobs in the beginning like clerical work and so on after I left school.
I got very disillusioned with that.
But then I hit the rocks and I couldn't, I had no work at all.
And I just got, I had always wanted to be a journalist and I got really lucky.
I got it.
I just kept, you know, pummeling hot press, which had just started with articles.
And eventually they used one.
Then they wouldn't use 13.
And then I would use another one.
Then like 27 would pass and they wouldn't use another.
And then they'd use another one.
And finally they said, do you want a job?
And I mean, I was down in the West of Ireland driving a mail car, which is kind of like some kind of equivalent in Irish 1980s terms of the Western stagecoach, you know, because you carry mails, posts and newspapers and passengers and day-old chicks and all that stuff.
So I was working At the weekends, going to gigs and writing about bands, interviewing bands.
I had some really bizarre experiences.
I will tell you one.
Actually, one time after I was maybe a year doing it, the editor Niall Stokes rang me up one day and he said, how would you like to go to Paris and interview Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits?
I said, yeah, okay, yeah, okay.
So he said, oh great, okay, I'll fix it up.
So I was driving around Roscommon, you know, for the next 24 hours, absolutely ecstatic with this.
Couldn't believe this fairy tale existence had really exploded.
And then he rang me the next day again and said, yeah, everything's under control.
He said, I just need one thing.
I just need to get your passport details.
And you hadn't got one?
I hadn't got one.
Never thought of it, never dreamt of having a fastball where I came from, never entered the picture absolutely whatsoever.
So my consolation prize then was the following, a few months later for Christmas, I got to go to Birmingham to interview Rory Gallaher, which kind of made up for it really.
Yes, I had my worst, my worst hangover ever was in Paris when I had to go and interview a band that I'm very, very fond of called, do you ever come across Tindersticks?
Yeah, I heard of them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I went, you never go drinking with a rock band and never try and smoke dope with a rock band.
They can always smoke and drink you under the table.
It's hideous.
That's what they do.
That's their job.
It's their job, isn't it?
But this world, you know, I mean, when I spent the time I got sent out to L.A.
to interview Page and Plant on their You know, their comeback tour, where they did that Paige Plant thing with Paul Thompson from The Cure doing second lead on their guitar, so you could recreate the sound of the album for the first time.
All that stuff.
And I spent five days at the Sunset Marquee, sitting by the pool, waiting for Paige and Plant to deign to interview, you know, find time in their schedule.
Anyway, I'm sure you've got better experiences than this, but I'm only mentioning it to Try and capture what our world was like, what we've lost.
Because I can't see us flying out.
I mean, A, newspapers.
They've given up the ghost.
And we'll talk about this in a moment.
You wrote a very, very good article about this.
I loved it.
Newspapers haven't got the budgets.
They're not serious anymore.
You can't do decent long-form journalism for them.
They certainly wouldn't send you out to LA to interview Page and Plant.
It just wouldn't be a thing.
So those days are gone.
And it's so sad because, I mean, I haven't changed that much since those days you know it was definitely me and the world has changed.
Well we really are you know I mean we're in the business of words James but I'm struggling to find words to kind of build pictures of what's going on what's actually happening and what it means you know occasionally you get flashes like I was like over the weekend myself and my wife went west down to Sligo and Totally illicitly, you know.
I mean we just went and there were no checkpoints or anything.
But actually on the way back I kind of said to her, God isn't it wonderful that we can actually drive on the road and actually stop at a garage and get a cup of tea and take it out and drink it in the car.
Isn't that what an amazing thing?
After like 10 months of not being able to do that.
Like, you know, and I mean it, but you hear yourself saying it and you think, oh my, we can't grasp this.
We cannot grasp what this means.
We cannot look, I mean, if we look at our so-called leaders and look, you look at somebody like Matt Hancock or I look at someone like Leo Varadkar, they seem to me to be alien beings.
They actually, I'm beginning to kind of believe the idea that, you know, They're actually lizards underneath this kind of mask, that they're going to rip it off any moment and reveal themselves as these monsters from space.
They're definitely lizards or pod creatures from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Definitely.
Definitely.
I mean, I saw Henry Hogg the other day announcing 10-year prison sentences for people who tell lies.
About where they've been on holiday?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, what do you say about that?
How can you begin to enter into that as a serious idea?
Having read your Orwell and your Huxley all those years ago, and with great condescension, thought, well, yeah, yeah, Orwell, yeah, he was a very massive bloke.
You know, you know, how did he manage to work that out?
Well, he should have just hung around for a few more years and he wouldn't have to bother writing that book.
It's true what you say about the condescension, that we all felt that That history had pretty much ended.
That we were so past the age of totalitarianism.
We'd had communism, we'd had the Bolshevik revolution, and we'd had the rise of Hitler.
Rammed down our throats at school.
Everyone knew the moral fables of history.
Everyone knew it could never happen again because six million Jews, because All these reasons.
We were just living in this, what now we realize was a fool's paradise.
Totally a fool's paradise.
But it's quite extraordinary to think about How do we kind of sort out that thing, you know, because we assumed that we looked at everybody and we thought about these things and we said, well, they've read their Orwell too.
They know all this stuff.
It's kind of, if I can use this, it's kind of like an inoculation against the possibility of anything like this ever happening in reality.
Yes.
We thought, more or less, but it wasn't.
It's happening right in front of our eyes, and people that we thought we knew are coming out with lines that are straight out of 1984, and they don't know that they are lines from 1984.
It's staggering.
Yes, and it's particularly the educated classes.
People... I had imagined that you went to university... I mean, you didn't go to university, okay, but I thought the purpose of university was to broaden your mind, to expose you to new ideas and teach you how to think critically, how to sift the good from the bad, how to analyse stuff and recognise truth from falsehood.
And this stuff about I believe in free speech, but... That was never a phrase people used.
Free speech was completely taken as a given.
You didn't need to defend it.
This was only back in the 80s.
And you didn't, at best, tolerate it.
Like now, at the very best you get is people saying, well, I, I, I, you know, you have the right to say something, even though it's nonsense type of thing is implicit in what they're saying.
You know, even though you're completely wrong and actually dangerously psychotic, I defend to the death your right to say that stupid thing you've just said.
Right.
That's the kind of best you're going to get now.
You know but it's amazing too you know like I was just thinking you know I mean rock and roll to go back to that story briefly.
I mean rock and roll if there ever was an entity on the face of the planet that you would have expected to rise up against this.
It would be rock and roll.
Like, I remember back in 1984, the real actual January 1984, I actually wrote an article for Hot Press.
They had this thing on page three, which is kind of called the Mad Hatter's Box.
And it was just like about 20 silly questions you asked people.
And there was a guest every week, you know?
And I decided I would make one up and it would be in the name of Winston Smith.
So I asked Winston Smith all of these questions.
I can't remember now, I haven't got it anymore.
But that was the concept, right?
And I remember like, We were really celebrating this moment with a sense of triumphalism that this thing that Orwell had imagined, which had been a danger, no longer was.
And yet, like Hot Press, if you were to look at his pages now, he's actually accepting completely the whole COVID tyranny, is completely accepting the whole kind of narrative.
The only rock and rollers that have, you know, risen up, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Noel Gallagher has spoken a couple of things and Ian Brown has spoken.
Ian Brown has been very vigorous.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.
And Van the Man has been as well, you know.
But otherwise, nothing.
It's just crickets.
And I just can't get my head around that.
And insofar as I mean, I'm still in touch with people in the artistic world or have any kind of communication from them or with them.
They're all bought in.
They're all completely bought into all this.
Yeah, yeah.
It is shocking.
I would imagine that Morrissey must be on our side, mustn't he?
I think he may have said a few words.
Yeah, I wrote a piece about him for The Spectator saying that he was kind of like the man of COVID in a way, or the man of the lockdown, because he actually had been into social distancing Long before anybody else ever thought about it you know.
He just didn't like other people you know and he admitted it freely.
He actually once said you know that he's ambition like he couldn't wait to get on when he was on Desert Island Discs and he just couldn't wait to get onto that island to get away from other people you know.
But that was Morrissey's kind of like thing you know he was just that was his fun part of him.
But yeah, I think so.
I think, you know, his mum died in the middle of the whole thing, so I think that probably was a distraction from it.
But yeah, you would expect him to have a position on it normally.
I don't know.
I can't really, you know, work this out.
And it's got to do... but I can in this sense.
It's clearly got to do with the power of propaganda.
I wrote an article recently about it.
I'm on Substack.
now since last year and it's a kind of a newsletter platform and I do lots of blog but they're not letters they're actually they're half books you know like long articles yeah but the propaganda thing like it's just that you know I was talking about the the power of propaganda in in like which is Science as a word that was kind of evolved in the 30s, 40s, 50s through Edward Bernays and then into advertising and depth merchandising and all that kind of stuff.
But at that time, all they had was radio, cinema, newspapers and the odd advertising hoarding.
And that was deemed to be a deeply dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong people.
Now just think of the comparison, like we live in an age where we're actually literally living in bubbles full of noise and information and opinion and we're infinitely more suggestible than we were then and the result is like that's the only way I can actually understand The people that I meet in the streets were clearly terrified out of their wits that they're going to get something and die within an hour, you know, something like that.
And what you're saying, our profession, James, really is responsible for this, I have to say.
It wouldn't be possible without journalism having been corrupted by this.
And I see this very clearly now in Ireland, you know, where newspapers just see that they have put themselves at the disposal of governments.
and health czars to sell the message above all else.
There's no questioning, there's no investigation, there's no analysis.
It's just, you know, carry the message, you know, like journalists coming out with absolute, you know, Banal one-liners like today I heard some well-known journalists here saying that to compare COVID to the flu is like comparing a lion to a pussycat or something like that you know which is complete nonsense.
I mean you know like but that's the kind of thing that people remember and it's operates on that kind of prepared, you know, refined kind of sensibility that is generated by this propaganda.
And this, I would say, mass hypnosis, mass entrancement, really.
Yeah, I read your article on the decline of the media, and it just really hit home for me.
So few, so very few of my contemporaries, even the really bright, outspoken, free-thinking ones, So few of them have got what's going on.
So few of them acknowledge what's going on.
And I find it unforgivable that when fascism comes to take over.
It is a form of fascism.
We can quibble over the terms.
You can call it technocracy or whatever you want to.
But it is essentially totalitarian, what is happening to our countries.
And part of the terrifying nature of it is that it's everywhere.
It's across the West, all over the West.
There are very few pockets and those pockets that are holding out, like Sweden, are under tremendous pressure to shift in line with the general author totalitarian orthodoxy and yet so few journalists are calling this out no just just talk me through your your theory on on because just one more thing the media
In Britain, for example, we always used to pride ourselves on just how robust and fearless our press was in holding the government to account.
And this is one of our bulwarks, one of the things that kept us free, that our press, you know, John Wilkes had fought for this stuff in the 18th century.
uh fought for the right to report on on parliamentary proceedings and we were never going to give those powers back to the to the authorities but looks what so tell me what's happened well it's a really interesting one because it seems to me that at some level
The whole COVID thing was somehow imbued or primed with a kind of an ideological kind of colorant or something, you know, that it actually suggested itself immediately for some reason that is kind of quite mysterious as kind of left wing, you know, that Which journalism has been instinctively, mostly, for the last, you know, 40, 50 years.
The broad generality of it.
And that was a good thing at one point.
Back in the 70s, perhaps, you would say, well, there was an, or, you know, certainly in Ireland, it was, you know, because you were against the establishment, which was deeply conservative.
And so it was a good thing to be left-wing and I wasn't in rock and roll journalism, of course, that's what we were.
But there was something about COVID that, I mean, one thing that struck me early on was that how, how cleanly the world seemed to break down in terms of people who were
anti-lockdown which was basically conservative right-wing loosely I don't like these terms much but they're generally useful for this and on the other that there was kind of like a sense of you know the state is right we must do what we're told you're killing people if you don't and so on now it struck me that if I went back 30 years when I was in the Irish times and we're going to weekly Conferences, feature conferences, news conferences.
I couldn't in a million years imagine that a pandemic or a virus would be received in this way.
You know, there would be probably a breakdown of people who thought it was going too far or not far enough or whatever, but it wouldn't be cleanly that the lefties would have one position and the conservatives have the other.
But COVID seemed to have this from the beginning.
I think perhaps it had a lot to do with Trump, for example, because it seems to me now, really looking back, that a way of seeing it usefully, in terms of at least the timing of it, is that it was an attempt or a As we know, we now see a successful attempt to take out Trump, that it was designed in that way to make him look bad.
You know, however you kind of trace the origins of it, whether it was the Chinese, whether it was Fauci leaking the stuff or moving, shifting the stuff to Wuhan in the first place, bringing it back and letting it loose then to basically undermine Trump's presidency in his last year.
In the first term.
And I do think there's a lot of those kinds of things.
I mean, because it is quite extraordinary that when you actually talk to people, you can almost guess their entire politics, just as you can if you talk about LGBT or you talk about, you can talk about, you can ask about COVID and you know what their entire, the print, you get the full printout of their ideology.
Yeah, you do.
From that.
And so I think that journalism kind of in that context was easily swayed.
The other thing, of course, is that financially, The newspapers themselves, incorporately, were on their last legs.
A lot of them were on their last legs.
And something like this, with a built-in economic crisis, would have finished them off.
So it seems that they were presented with a, you know, a Hobson's Choice, or let's be kind to them, and said, well, you can go against us and suffer the consequences of the inevitable, or you can play it our way and we'll see you're okay.
And I think that's kind of what happened.
And journalists were told, you take it or leave it, you know?
There isn't any room for dissent here.
You either leave or you just do what you're told.
And it's very interesting, you know, James, I've noticed, the names wouldn't mean anything to you, but you know there's a certain kind of journalist, particularly in the broadsheets, well it's exclusively in the broadsheets, of the Guardian, the Observer, you know, the Independent, who particularly at the weekend, Saturdays, or Friday, Saturday, Sunday, They do what we used to call a think piece, you know?
And this will be like reflecting in the deep, you know, about the kind of philosophical meanings of different events.
And no matter what it will be, it could be like a football match or it could be like the weather or something like that, but there would be deep philosophical reflections, right?
There's been almost none of that in relation to COVID, to the best of my knowledge, in the broadsheets.
I don't look at them religiously, but I would hear if somebody, and I'm thinking of particular guys had come up with some kind of great theory of COVID.
But the problem with that is if you go up with a great theory of COVID the only thing to do is actually expose the scar.
That's all you can do.
Yeah.
You can't really go under in any other way.
So they're not going there.
They're avoiding the subject it seems to me.
Can you, I mean, I find it, and I'm sure you feel the same, that it is the bizarrest situation imaginable, where there is a story out there where you've got, it's, you've got the facts, you understand what's really going on, and the public narrative is completely the opposite of what is actually true.
And you're a journalist, and your job is to reveal the truth, and yet you can't touch it.
The biggest story of our lifetime, and you can't touch it.
How crazy is that?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
I mean, you see these press conferences with the health czars and the politicians, and you know from the general semiotics of it, that there's an audience there of journalists, right?
But they never ask any questions other than kind of easy softball things that are kind of used for the TV news.
Yeah.
But like, it's screaming out for somebody to jump up and say, what the hell are you talking about?
You know, the PCR test is a complete fraud.
You know it.
I know it.
Everybody knows it.
And nobody ever says this.
And so the next day they're telling us about all the cases they have, and they're going to go up and they're going to come down.
But it doesn't matter what they do, because it's a complete fraud.
Nobody says this.
It's quite extraordinary.
I mean, we have some just bizarre things happening now.
I mean, there was apparently a TV program the other night where a guy who's kind of like one of those head stars, was on demonstrating something, which I don't know if he's invented it.
Somebody's invented it anywhere.
And it's a kind of a device which would allow people to go to gigs, right?
Oh, yes.
Maybe even to go.
Have you seen this?
Is it a distance monitor?
What does it do?
Tell me.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's a big bubble.
It's a big bubble of plastic, right?
And you just get into it.
And there's room for your legs so you can walk, I think, underneath, you know.
But it completely surrounds you so that you just kind of, I suppose there are some kind of sensors on it that if you bump into another bubble it'll go beep beep beep beep like your car.
And these guys seriously were demonstrating this on this TV show.
People should send me clips of it.
I'm afraid to turn on the sound because I'm sure they're saying completely crazy things, you know.
We're close enough to the edge as it is without inviting total, you know, disintegration by listening to that madness.
But this is, you see, I think this is related to something that we weren't really monitoring.
I mean, I've been talking about it for some years in different contexts.
I don't know if you felt this, James, but that the world was going crazy anyway.
Yeah.
Do you know what I mean?
That the adults had left the room.
The adults had left the building, actually.
You actually think about it.
When we were kids and when I was a kid, the world was full of adults and they were playing the ads, right?
They were always telling you what to do and giving out to you and, you know, they've all gone.
You don't see them now anymore.
I mean, okay, in the COVID episode there have been these kind of busybodies, but that's coming up and telling you where your masters and that, but that's a different thing.
Robert Bly, 25 years ago, wrote a book called The Sibling Society, where he kind of predicted this, that the world would end up with generations of half-adults.
And that there would be no real adults and that we would all be siblings, squabbling with one another, you know, and that's what social media is essentially.
And I think that's kind of something that we haven't described.
See, one of the problems is, James, that we worked in the media.
And apart from, I mean, you're lucky in a way because you work for the Spectator and, you know, Alternative Magazine.
We haven't had those in Ireland for a long, long time.
That's where I started out with Hot Press in Dublin, McGill, you know, which were really great magazines back in the 70s and 80s.
But they stopped.
They just ran out of steam because there wasn't a market big enough for them.
But you still had the spectator there.
So at least there's an opportunity to get in some kind of lateral position on all this now and again.
But no, here there isn't.
I'm really lucky in that the bulk of my income comes from my Breitbart salary.
If it wasn't for the alternative media, I would be in the same position of those of my contemporaries who've got You know, they depend on the Telegraph and the Mail for their, or whatever, on the mainstream media for their incomes.
And it's easy for me to say, you complete sellout tossers, you know, where is your self-respect?
But there's a, you know, if that is your living, and there comes a point in journalism, as you know, where you can't, you can't suddenly move into, you can't suddenly become a racing driver or a lawyer.
It's a very limited trade, a very limited craft that, you know, what do you do with it afterwards?
I mean, this is the thing.
Like, I do actually look at some of these guys and actually wonder, you know, cause you know that there was always an element of that in journalism where you'd say to somebody, you know, you're really, you're having this on with all that stuff, you know, or, you know, and and he'd say well yeah you know yourself you know.
You gotta play the game you know because that's what the editor wants or that's what the chairman wants or whatever you know but there's none of that this time.
You gotta say they're either totally convinced of it or they're really good at pretending they're totally convinced by the whole thing.
There's no change.
They're not admitting anything.
Because I think they understand the implications of it, maybe, that if you were to admit that you were, you know, frauding it up, I mean, that this, that would be absolutely deadly.
Yeah.
So I think that we're in a situation where I think journalism is over now, really.
I mean, as I say, I started off with Substack.
I mean, I think there's some chance that the alternative will, that the margins will start to come in.
after this, that the internet, the Breitbarts, you know, the spectators and all these kind of slightly marginal platforms will become much more important because I do think that one of the things, if we ever get out of this, one of the consequences will be a total loss of faith in the media, mainstream media, because they have behaved abominably.
I totally agree with you.
I do not read the mainstream media now.
My wife has the telegraph out of habit.
She's of a certain generation and she likes a newspaper to read at breakfast.
Whereas I saw I saw the decline over a period of years, and I would find myself increasingly angry about this or that article, because it was just against everything that the Telegraph readership believed in.
I mean, that's the thing.
It's not just the traditional leftist media which has gone this direction.
It's the conservative media, again, has also betrayed us.
I mean, that's where I would dispute this.
It's a left-right thing.
I mean, they've all gone in this... they've all followed the the COVID blob direction, haven't they?
They've all gone the same... There's no... Yeah, I do agree, but I would say that even though, you know, newspapers are maybe conservative in terms of their corporate kind of image or whatever, very often you still find that most of the journalists are left-leaning.
They're liberal, at least in that sense.
You know, they're not very rare to meet really conservative journalists.
in Britain or Ireland now.
I mean, you do meet them still in America quite a lot, actually.
There's some really good ones.
But it's a rare thing.
And so that's what I meant by that.
America is very different, actually, on the whole thing.
COVID is really freaky, because if you actually think right from Trump down, there seems to be this kind of inability to see that the whole thing is a scam.
And I'm talking about people like, say someone like Victor Davis Hanson, who's brilliant, this brilliant critic of American society, American history, historian, classical scholar and so on.
He's written a great book about Trump, The Case for Trump, and he kind of compares Trump to both Greek kind of legends and also to movie stars, movie parts, you know, like Shane and these guys and The Magnificent Seven and this, and it's really brilliant stuff.
But when he starts to talk about COVID, he goes into like pure literalism.
He talks about the virus, the gravity of it, like there's no questions at all that it might actually be fake.
It doesn't seem to occur to him.
And I find this amazing.
And he's not alone in that in America for some reason.
I think it may be a lot to do with the story of New York and what happened there, which is still to be really explored in its depth.
What are the particular reasons that caused that massive number of deaths in New York in April last year?
Nobody's really got to the bottom of it, but it isn't actually the general American experience.
Generally, the virus did not affect most of America very substantially.
But Trump, it seemed that he was kind of like... My theory for a long time was that he was kind of a prisoner of Fauci and didn't dare to open his mouth.
But he's had an opportunity now that he's free of it all to say, by the way, it was all a con, but he hasn't done it.
Well, I think my theory on that is that because, you know, there was that famous, there was that famous moment where Tucker Carlson went, drove to Mar-a-Lago to seek an audience with Trump to explain to him that no, this COVID thing was wasn't something he could sort of brush under the carpet, Bolsonaro style.
Although, of course, actually, that's exactly what he should have done.
You look at Kristi Noem in South Dakota, South Dakota, fantastic record, just kept businesses open, no masks, none of this nonsense.
Its curves were pretty much the same as any place that instituted a lockdown.
You and I know this, probably everyone watching knows this.
This is how pandemics, if you even call it a pandemic, which it isn't, or it wasn't until The WHO redefined pandemic.
This is the trajectory of our respiratory illnesses, that they have a steep curve at the beginning and then they go down and they become endemic and you might get a kind of second bump, but it's not, you know, it's normal.
But yeah, so Trump should have done that, and I think part of the reason he's conflicted is that he's now invested in, I launched the vaccine program, and this vaccine, they say I couldn't, it couldn't be done, but I rushed it out, and here's the vaccine, isn't it great?
So he's caught up with that, and of course, yes, lots of, yeah, I think he adopted this tactic early on that the models were all saying that there would be two million people would die in America and if he managed to kind of keep it under that That would be a victory for him.
He was more or less accepting their narrative and I think he possibly thought it's too dangerous to do that, to just simply say no, we're just going to keep going.
But it's a very strange thing, you know, that the virus did actually take Trump out.
They wouldn't have been able to do it.
There's no question.
He lost.
He lost this election because of the virus, because it gave them the excuse to for the postal ballot ballots.
I mean, OK, so we know that they also would divide the Dominion machines as well.
But I think.
I'd go even further than that, that the only reason the coronavirus pandemic scare happened was because a concerted globalist attempt to destroy Donald Trump.
I think the CCP, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, with compromised people like Fauci, Bill Gates, big tech, it was all ultimately to destroy Trump, who was the enemy of the globalist New World Order.
That's right.
And it was a remarkable thing that I remember doing.
I don't remember the precise details of it now, but I remember last April, end of April, doing a study of all the American states where there were high fatality rates.
And they were all Democrat states, run states at that point.
Yeah.
You know, even though Trump was being blamed for it at the federal level, the actual responsibility fell genuinely to Democrat governors who were in place and who seemed to be either, I don't know, who knows?
I mean, there was all kinds of fraudulence all over the world, including in Ireland.
You know, the fixing of figures, you know, the cooking of fatality rates, you know, the mixing up of dying of and dying with, all that stuff.
There was, you know, really a lot of falsification all over the place.
And that, you see, again, that goes back to journalism, because that's the first thing journalism will be in on.
Immediately taking it apart.
It was not happening.
Exactly!
It's a gift, isn't it?
I mean, there is... I felt a bit like this way with the global warming thing.
There is so much low-hanging fruit for any journalist prepared to do the barest minimum of research outside the crap you get fed by Greenpeace or whoever.
It doesn't take much digging to see that everything they tell you is a lie.
Or an exaggeration, that the narrative is false.
And it's the same with coronavirus.
It ought to be a gift.
Any journalist who had any self-respect would be saying the things that we're saying.
And they would also be saying... I mean, if they wanted to sleep at night and live with themselves and have a decent afterlife, they would be saying, OK, I'm just going to have to accept that I may have to lose my job.
I may have to write for Substack instead.
Because my integrity will not allow me to propagandize on behalf of this lying globalist elite.
It's wrong.
It's not my job.
I'm a journalist.
You would have thought so.
I mean, this is the astonishing thing that I really cannot get my head around, that journalists who have taken great pride in their craft and in their position over the years, can just simply do something that is actually not just giving in to some particular agenda in the newsroom.
It's actually flipping their entire model.
It's moving from trying to tell the truth to simply blatantly telling lies for money.
And that's it.
So they're not any longer journalists.
I'd say, well, this is not something that journalists like, but I say this is not journalism.
This is, they're journalists.
And that's what it has become, unfortunately, our profession.
It's so sad, isn't it?
- I get lots of really lovely emails and things from people who say, yeah, you're the last journalist left standing.
You're a total hero.
And some of the women even fancy me, which is great.
And they want to have dinner with me and stuff.
And I'm thinking, well, this is a piece of piss.
Because all I'm going to do is tell the truth and just do my basic, really basic due diligence.
And yet, you and I, Just about the only ones doing this shit, which is why I'm talking to you.
Well, there's almost nobody.
Yeah, there's almost nobody.
There's a couple of us here in Ireland, you know, but we're not working for any newspapers or, you know, we're doing our own thing on our own.
Gemma O'Doherty was doing this legal case with me.
She's got her own website and she's pumping out all kinds of stuff all the time.
So what's her name?
Tell me.
Jim O'Doherty.
Jim O'Doherty.
We took a legal action against the lockdown here, which is still being held up in the courts, you know, because we basically took a constitutional action saying this is completely unconstitutional, it's completely... you can't basically... I mean, if you can do this, James, it means that the constitution which has existed since 1937 is nothing but a roll of toilet paper.
That's what it means, because...
Are you about to discover that it is a roll of toilet paper?
Because I'm thinking... Well, we've had similar tests in the UK.
Simon Dolan's brought a case, tried to, you know, judicial review.
Nightly.
That's right.
Yeah, we've had a similar trajectory, except it's taking longer.
We're now before the Court of Appeal.
They've gone off.
And of course, I don't want to tempt fate by agreeing with you and what you've just said, but you can take it that I'm not exactly jumping up and down with anticipation, you know, because unfortunately, the consensus, I mean, you get these kind of circular judgments now, which says, The government was confronted by an unprecedented pandemic.
Therefore, everything the government did was justified.
But you say, but no, that's the question we're asking.
You know, we're asking, how can this be justified?
You know, I said, no, because of the pandemic.
No, but can we get that?
Can we open that box as well?
No, no.
The pandemic is a fact.
How is it a fact?
Because the government say so.
Yeah it's but this is this again is is common to a lot of a lot of western democracies which thought they had a system you know you've got constitution the US has got a constitution we've got a kind of living constitution and part of that those various constitutions was the notion that the law would operate without fear or favor and everyone was equal before the law
And that the lawyers would kind of, their job was to ensure justice, but you had the case where the Supreme Court of the USA wouldn't even look at the cases brought by the states about electoral fraud, saying, with a sort of bullshit excuse, they've got no standing, something like that.
They just didn't want to know, not least because Justice Roberts is part of the swamp and doesn't want to, doesn't want to, I mean, I find that shocking.
I really do.
I genuinely thought the US Supreme Court, that it's a big deal becoming a Supreme Court justice and that you take the law very seriously.
You're not a political activist.
Turns out they're political activists.
And the same in the UK.
I mean, we've got Lord Sumption.
Lord Sumption is the only voice speaking out.
Why aren't all the law lords speaking out?
What's happened?
We've had no lower assumption.
I mean, you know, we really are very deeply envious that at least you've had lower assumption.
We've had nobody, like no retired politician, no retired judge, no lawyer.
It's impossible for people who have tried to take actions to get lawyers.
You know, they're willing to take their money and give them bad advice.
Basically that you have no hope of winning.
But so we took our cases and we are actually lay litigants in our own case because you couldn't get lawyers anyway.
This is the most remarkable thing, you know, and as regards America, you're dead right about the Supreme Court.
I mean, Trump appointed, this is to huge fanfare, Trump appointed three allegedly conservative judges.
to the Supreme Court.
They all sat on their hands throughout that.
And the only two who supported him were people who owed him nothing at all, Alito and the other guy.
I forget the name now.
But, you know, like, what was the point?
I mean, I said to people, like, you know, Trump would have been better off just sticking a pen in a list of lawyers.
and nominating whatever ones he got because there were at least one or two of them might have actually felt well I owe him something you know.
I'm going to give him a nod you know but no nothing nothing.
It's extraordinary and you know it's amazing like I mean when you saw what Mike Pence did I mean all Pence had to do was refer the whole thing back to the states.
Yeah.
The electors back to the states because a lot of them wanted it.
Pennsylvania wanted them back to review the whole thing.
No, can't do it.
Not my job, you know.
It's the old adult thing.
It's the adult thing again, you see, James.
There are no adults.
People, everybody's running scared and everybody's genuinely scared and I think actually the whole cancel culture thing and the LGBT thing and all of that kind of BLM, that has created a terror around the world and what you said earlier is so right because ultimately it's going to come to that that people are going to have to look in the mirror and say okay am I going to protect my little job or am I going to protect my civilization?
Yeah.
Because that's what that's what it's down to.
It is, it is, which is why I've got absolutely zero respect for those who are not.
Those were the intelligent, were the critical faculties and the literary skills and the communication skills to be able to Analyse what is going on and broadcast to the world what's going on.
Because one thing I've noticed in politics, when bad guys do things, when the kind of radical left undermines our system using devious propaganda methods that are familiar, used by the Bolsheviks, used by the Nazis, etc.
The first thing you have to do is to show their workings.
Expose their methods.
Show the world what's really going on, what they're saying.
And you're halfway to winning the battle.
And yet, so few of my contemporaries are even doing that.
They're not saying... For example, I mean, here's the thing.
And I have an argument about this with my friend Toby Young.
He's good, but he's a bit cucked.
So I looked at the ONS data of age-standardized mortality from 2020 going back to 1942.
And you look at the bars going down and then they rise up.
So 2020, which is the year when the world changed totally because of this allegedly near unprecedented pandemic you know the pandemic like we've never seen before not since the Spanish flu and you look at the deaths and the deaths in 2020 total deaths are the same as they were in 2008 and every year before it going back to 1942.
2020 was the 12th best year for for survival um in in that period and you're thinking about well All the years before that, from 2008 backwards, why did we not wear masks then?
Why did we not shut down the economy?
Why did we not have quarantine and social distancing?
I don't remember any newspaper articles in 2008 saying, we've got to deal with this virus before it kills us all.
Life went on.
And journalists can't even do that basic, basic thing to put what's going on in context.
That's right.
I mean, you know, it's an amazing thing, but apparently right around the world now, there has been no flu this winter.
Just COVID.
You know, that's become the respiratory disease of choice, it seems for people.
And I mean, that's kind of like, you know, if you go back, the only stories that used to happen When there were in Ireland, you know, lots and lots of people on trolleys in previous winters.
There will be articles about that.
But everybody knew that that was happening.
Everybody knows that in January, February, A lot of old people die, disproportionate numbers of old people die because that's the beginning of the year, the end of the year, and their bodies give out and that's kind of accepted.
But it's an amazing thing that culturally they've managed to do this thing which involves a kind of insinuation that nobody ever died before.
Nobody's ever been ill before because you hear people say to you things like, well, you know, I wouldn't like to get it.
I wouldn't like to get it.
I said, well, I wouldn't like to get it either.
I don't want to get the flu anytime, you know, but I'm not going to bring up the Taoiseach or the prime minister and say, I'm sorry that, you know, Boris, you know, you're going to have to close the country down.
Because, like, I've got a terrible sore throat.
You know, I mean, it's complete nonsense.
The logic of it is absolutely absurd.
The logic of the lockdown itself is absurd.
People don't know.
The idea for the lockdown came from Xi Jinping.
That was his idea, right?
It's never been tried before.
Nobody ever thought of it before.
People would have laughed at you before if you said it.
And suddenly, Jinping says it.
He tells the who, the who tell the governments, the governments sort of say, OK, yeah, that's all.
And because everybody's doing it, everybody does it.
And then everybody acts like it's the most obvious thing in the world to do.
And then they try to tell you that it's actually working when actually you say, you know, you compare North Dakota and South Dakota, they have similar levels of deaths.
One had a total lockdown, the other had no lockdown.
You know, it's absolute nonsense.
But see, there's another factor as well in that.
I mean, that there was a spike in a lot of places around the world in April.
Very sharp and very mysterious looking spike, if you see it drawn out.
And there's a brilliant scientist from Canada called Dennis, or Denny Rankor, who's done an amazing analysis of this.
And what he concluded was that most of these deaths occurred in care homes, and they were the result of panic and stress.
which was generated by media hysteria.
And they didn't die of any virus whatsoever.
And that this was actually a built-in part of the plan to create statistical deaths that they could use to terrify everybody.
And I think there's a lot of sense in that.
I think it has the appearance, it has certainly the verisimilitude of truth about it.
Yes, certainly.
The stuff you mentioned about the lockdowns, I'm amazed by how few people know this.
I think Michael Senger, if you come across him, I think he did a lot of, I think I've got his name right, American lawyer from Atlanta.
He researched this and he started looking at Twitter activity.
I mean, the Chinese have got this mass army of, they're not even bots, they are actually living people who just work these Twitter accounts.
And they say things like, why is the British government washing its hands while people are dying?
And you get this mass pressure on social media, which filters into the general discourse.
But you're right, lockdowns were never considered appropriate for outbreaks before 2020.
It's a Chinese imposition.
So why can't journalists do this basic stuff?
Why are they so...
Incurious.
Uncurious.
I think it goes further than in curiosity because actually a lot of these journalists are militantly opposed to anybody who dares to question it.
I mean their longer energies are devoted to sneering at or demonizing those who question it and that's because they're bought in.
You see one of the things is James you know that if you're drawn into a kind of a corrupt conspiracy uh you get a stake in the whole thing because you don't want it to be found out then because you're going to be shamed and so the fear of being shamed is causing them to huddle in and protect this edifice this creaky edifice even when now it's beginning to kind of totter a little bit.
Like in Ireland, we've just had an announcement that our lockdown is now going to be extended until Easter, whereas previously it was just supposed to be January.
And this is going to continue.
I mean, this is the thing.
I saw on a website, on the World Bank website, people can look this up, I presume it's still there, was a section about what they call the COVID project.
And the interesting thing is that there are two dates, the start date and the finish date for the COVID project.
The start date, not controversial, March 2020.
Finish date, March 2025.
That's what we're doing.
That makes it work, I'm told.
It does.
But you know, you're aware, and I've heard you talk about the Great Reset, and I mean, that's fundamentally what this is about.
I mean, you talked there about, again, the ideological cast of this whole thing.
You know, the green thing, you mentioned the green thing, that's a big factor in there because there's a very strong relationship at some deep level between the climate change agenda and the COVID agenda.
What we noticed here, I mean, within a couple of weeks of the lockdown in March-April, April it really dug in, they started putting down cycle lanes outside our homes.
Yes, we had the same.
They're moving in lockdown.
Yeah, and this was all obviously planned for a very long time.
You don't come up with stuff like that and get the finance together and get all the materials and the work.
You don't do that in a weekend, you know, but it was ready to go.
And so this is all about changing the world.
Really.
And what it actually means, James, is that our democracies have been bypassed, that the people who actually run our countries have come to the decision, or somebody is telling them that this decision has been made, That, you know, this democracy business really hasn't worked very well.
You know, it's very slow and cumbersome and, you know, we have to ask people what they think and the people don't know anything very much really, you know, and they'll be talking.
They want to debate about it, you know, and discuss things and we can't be having that.
So let's just lock them up and we'll just do what we want.
Yeah.
And that's nothing.
I, no, I don't, I don't.
I don't think you and I play the victim card at all, because we don't give a shit.
But have you had a lot of grief for sticking out like a sore thumb in Ireland?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's funny, actually.
It's funny, James, because the grief I've got talking about cyclists is the cyclists.
It's the men in Lycra that hate me more than anybody for some reason.
And I can't really identify what it is.
I mean, if I'm walking along the street, since we took our court case, right, and we got a lot of stick from the journalists, of course, that's kind of part of what I mean.
But, you know, for about nearly six months afterwards, when I was walking around the place here, Like, every turd cyclist would, like, let rip with a payload of excretives in my direction.
Yeah, but you couldn't hear them because they're wearing masks, I imagine.
Well, I'm kind of half-deaf.
I lost a hearing in this ear, in my left ear, but so that's a great benefit, actually, to me, if I can turn that particular ear to them.
But they may, like, I often tell people, if I'm walking on the street, And I see a guy coming in, you know, those blue overalls like mechanics wear, you know, and he's got a wrench sticking out of his pocket or, you know, and he's kind of face is covered in grease.
I'm 100% certain he's not going to say anything to me, anything unpleasant or nasty.
But if I see a guy on a bicycle in yellow lycra, I know I better duck, you know.
And it's quite astonishing.
It's again, that kind of ideological stripe thing, you know, that It somehow has found all of its kind of adherence by some osmotic process that we don't really understand.
And it's something to do with this whole entrancement business, you know, which is really fascinating.
I think it's terrifying, really, James.
We've talked a lot about propaganda and we kind of used to think it was all about posters or Goebbels or something like that.
And it was all terrible stuff.
But we had no idea that actually it essentially is a way of stealing the mind of entire populations.
You could actually, you can get 98% of a population and make them believe something and they will become fervent adherents of that belief.
It's terrifying.
We should be terrified by it.
It's very interesting what you say about the kinds of people who give you grief and the kinds of people who you know are on the side and this has been very much my experience when I've gone to rallies or when I've just bumped into people in the streets.
I did something the other day, I went to We had an attempt at a great reopening, which is a bit of a damn squib because the weather was terrible and it just, you know, but I think it's, future events might be more successful, I don't know.
But definitely the people I met on these things who are on-site, they're kind of like ordinary people, just people who haven't had their minds corrupted by university, people who do stuff, people who make stuff.
And I've started to feel, I mean, I'm not an actual TOF, but I do feel a bit like one of those aristocratic generals that commanded parliamentary regiments under Cromwell, that I've found myself to be a kind of A man of the people.
And I like being a man of the people because the people seem to have decency and common sense and love of their country and understanding of their country's values in a way that this kind of university-educated elite just doesn't.
It's shaming.
It is absolutely.
You're dead right there.
I firmly believe that.
And I firmly believe that's kind of behind the Trump phenomenon.
Yes.
And was behind the Brexit phenomenon and the Gilly Jones and all that.
Where the Greeks used to call these the able men, you know.
that there were people who worked with muscles.
Victor Davis Hanson talks about them as well.
He calls them the muscular part of society.
And there's a brilliant guy called Matthew Crawford, maybe you've heard of him, but he's a philosopher and he's a motorcycle mechanic.
He's written a couple of great books about this, about the connection between thinking and working with your hands, that there's a profound connection, that the quality of the thought is better if you're governed by your spirit level than if you're actually just floating in space with nothing to hold on to, which is where a lot of the thinking that you would get on Twitter comes from, like it's literally floating in space and it's all disconnected and there's no foundations to it other than that somebody else said it or somebody else thinks it and
I think that sounds like a good idea and it fits with this other idea I have, you know.
And I think what you're actually seeing now is this divide in society.
There's not any more.
The divide is not left, right.
It's literally between these, the able men and women who build, who make and mend the societies, who build America, who build Britain and clean Britain and polished Britain every day, you know, and paint it.
And then on the other hand, you have these people who are all the time at the screen, like ourselves in a way.
I mean, we're right in the middle there because we're on the tippy-tappy, you know, and it's kind of like that what's actually going on is a war for supremacy, which is essentially based on envy because the tippy-toppy boys look at the able men and the able women and they're envious.
Because that's real work and it's real engagement with reality.
And they would love to be doing that, but they're not.
Yes.
So they sort of slightly despise themselves for being this... They're what Coleridge called the clerisy, this class of sort of... And they kind of do feel, no matter how much they assert, in fact, the more they assert it, they actually do feel quite parasitical on the work of the able classes.
You know, and they wish that the Able Classes would just disappear so that wouldn't happen.
Of course, what would happen if the Able Classes disappear is that they would all starve to death.
You know, they don't realise this.
We're talking about Atlas Shrugged now, aren't we?
We should all move beyond the mountains to this.
Yeah.
Well, actually, I think that's what we're going to do, Jane.
Once this thing gets really going in a year or two, if it keeps going the way it's going, I think that's going to happen.
I think we're all going to have to actually go back to basics and, you know, reenact the Swiss family Robinson out there in the sticks somewhere and build ourselves a log cabin and, you know, learn how to light a fire without matches and basically start civilization again from the very beginning.
I'm certainly feeling at the moment, and I'm trying to, you see, I think a lot of people have got this experience.
Families have been divided between, for example, on the issue of vaccines.
I do not want my children to get vaccine.
I really, really don't.
And yet there are other elements of my family which are going, yeah, yeah, it's fine.
People are divided on this.
And there are also still lots of people who cleave to the old world to imagine that, you know, we're going to get over this.
They don't, they don't know, for example, about that World Bank thing you mentioned about, you know, end date 2025.
They think it's all going to be, they think this is all normal.
It's all going to pass soon.
And I don't think it is.
I think it's going to get, get worse.
But I also think, you know, one of the, despite what's happened with Trump, despite the failure of the American system, One of the blessings that America has is it does have the federal system.
It's got these states which can act as a kind of outlier, a sort of resistance to whatever the DC government is imposing on them.
And you're seeing this now in Florida.
Very much under Governor DeSantis.
He's being very robust on coronavirus.
He's saying we're going to open all the... well, of course, Christine Irms is doing the same thing, but the climate is not so good in South Dakota, I'm thinking.
Although they've got horses, haven't they?
You see, I'm thinking aloud here.
I'm thinking about where I might move to sit this one out.
Yeah.
Because I'm looking at my own country and I'm looking at the politicians and I'm seeing nobody apart from Charles Walker MP resisting this shit.
And I'm seeing the opposition is under Keir Starmer, who's a member of the Trilateral Commission and therefore It's great reset central.
He's already talking about a new kind of economy.
So the opposition is not offering any opposition to this.
Boris Johnson is a husk.
The worst people in his cabinet are dominant people like Matt Hancock and Grant Shapps.
I'm looking across at America and I'm thinking, OK, it's complete shitsville with the fake President Biden at the moment.
If you get these little pockets of resistance, like Florida and Texas, maybe these are the places to go to, to begin the fight back.
Because you've got... I think to fight, you need a secure base, don't you?
It's a bit like during the Second World War, Britain stood alone and it could do so because it was an island against what was going on in the continent.
In the same way, I think, Britain is not a secure base anymore.
It's been overrun by the enemy.
I think you need to be a place where there are people like you who are fighting back.
Yeah, but I mean, there's clearly an imaginative deficit on the part of anybody who looks at Hancock and listens to what he's coming out with and thinks it can never go back to what it was like before.
That he's going to stop behaving like this.
Unless he's put in jail, I don't see him stopping, right?
And that seems to me to be obvious and the same applies here and that's what we're... I mean I would be thinking of that as well but I'm not sure how does one go about it?
Does one like seek asylum in America somewhere in Texas or as you say in Florida?
I mean that's a possibility.
I haven't looked into residency but yeah it's...
Yeah, like, so I think that because our options are kind of, you know, running out here and because in Europe, I mean, we go to Spain, can't go there now, it's not safe, you know.
Why Spain?
What's wrong with Spain?
Well, it's just, I mean, it's completely crazy leftist stuff and they could come down with a complete martial law at any moment, you just don't know.
Even in the darkest parts of Andalusia, like, where, you know, it's quiet and there's still kind of tyrannies, police officers going around Enforcing mass laws and all the rest of it.
And I just find that people are unrealistic about all this.
That we really are in a completely uncharted waters now.
But this is the point.
We don't have any commentary on that really above ground.
Because the media is corrupted.
And that's the strange thing.
I mean, in a certain sense, it's unrealistic to expect people to wake up when they're surrounded all the time by a singular viewpoint.
The same thing, morning, noon and night.
It becomes reality, James.
I mean, you know, that's what news is.
News is reality.
Especially when you've had 150 or 270 years of tradition behind a newspaper and today it's telling you that there are, you know, 750 cases of COVID in a hospital in whatever.
I was thinking about this last night, John.
I wanted to tell you this story.
It's just an example of the craziness that has been normalized in our culture.
The other day I had to do some filming for a documentary, a TV documentary, and I said, listen, I really can't be asked to go to up to London.
I don't want to go through the written rule of of a train journey where I'm not wearing a mask and I could be risk.
You know, confronted by other passengers like happened once and saying, you should wear a mask.
You know, fuck off.
I just want to sit on the train and just go to my destination.
So all that.
Yeah.
And London, there was no point in London now, but with all the shops closed, why would you go to London anyway?
It's horrible.
So they came around to my house.
But before they came around, before the cameraman, just a single cameraman, uh I had to go through this and can you make sure uh how how many rooms will he have to pass through in order to get to the room where they're going to film and I was thinking I don't fucking know I mean he's going to decide when he arrives what room is going to film in and then there was and how many how many bathrooms do you have in your house and I was counting the bathrooms oh you mean toilets uh yeah we've got you know however many and then and
An hour before he arrives, can you open the window in the room that you're going to film in?
And my wife was like, fuck off.
It's freezing outside.
We're not going to do that.
And they said, and when he arrives, you don't have to wear it all the time, but can you be wearing a mask?
And I'm thinking, hang on a second.
This is akin to saying, Before the cameraman comes, you've got to wear a special unicorn hat with a spike on it.
And can you make sure there is tinsel sprinkled on the unicorn hat?
And please, can you make sure that it is a rainbow unicorn horn?
And when the cameraman arrives, can you do a sort of unicorn dance?
It is similarly bullshit as that and yet we all have to pretend like these face coverings, as they're called, they're not even surgical masks, these face coverings make any difference when all the evidence suggests that they don't.
It reminds me of when we were in court.
I mean all the courtrooms that we've been in for the last year All the seats have these placards, COVID placards, plastic placards stuck to them.
So you can't sit on those ones.
And there's only about like three seats in the entire courtroom that somebody can actually sit on.
And you know, if you're actually with somebody, you have to sit, you know, six feet apart.
You're supposed to maybe exchange information if you're in a McKenzie friend or something.
But I said to the judge, you know, we're here to try to make the case that this whole thing is completely bogus, right?
And here we are, we walk into the courtroom and we're confronted by these posters which say the direct opposite, right?
So how do we know, how are we to believe that the situation is not already prejudged as it were?
I mean, it's like if I came into the court accused of murder and everywhere I looked There was a poster saying, wanted for murder, John Waters, you know?
Yeah.
Like, what's the difference?
You know, it's complete bonkers.
But you see, this is the thing, gent.
I mean, we can't really get to the depths of this because language, in whatever way we use it, I think journalistic language can't get to this, actually.
Because we're trying to describe a reality that is actually not there.
It's not constructed for people to look at.
So therefore what they're seeing is something completely different, right?
So when you describe something, you're actually banging off it.
There's no traction.
And I think that that's one of the problems that we're dealing with now, that it's going to take years to formulate a language and you're going to need novels.
You're going to need, you know, plays.
And of course, where are you going to do plays?
On Zoom.
You know what I mean?
Like, I mean, that's what I think.
Has anybody yet done the first Zoom play, James?
You know, I think there's money in that.
Oh, I know.
I think it has been happening because I think the spectators, drama critics have still been in business every week.
So, so that That's an area where you'd have thought the artists, like you said about the rock stars, you'd have thought the artists would rebel, that their imagination would enable them to see what's going on and find a way of... a bit like artists thrive under repression, don't they?
You think of all the... But no, the artists have completely wet the bed and fled the field and they kind of deserve it, I think.
Yeah, they do.
You see, I'm kind of astonished.
I mean, in Ireland, it's kind of, you know, OK, I can see why there's nobody, right?
It's just us and we're like crazy.
But if you look at somebody like Lord Assumption, like, you know, I mean, I'm out there, you know, you know, the way I look and the way I, you know, the way I've always... Yeah, you're a complete... But if you look at somebody like Lord Assumption and the way he speaks so reasonably and intelligently and eloquently, And the way he describes things in terms of risk, you know, that we have a right to take a risk with our own lives in order to live.
And that's such a beautiful and fundamental idea, that it's the kind of thing that philosophers, artists, poets should immediately say yes to, right?
But where are the philosophers, poets and artists?
They're nowhere to be seen.
I think you're talking to him and I'm talking to you, and that's about bloody it.
That's it.
Right.
And I wonder, James, I do have this question.
You know, I mean, I'm all the time struggling with this in my imagination.
Where is this going to go?
Are we going to have 70 years of tyranny?
And at the end of it, somebody will dig up, you know, this video.
They will.
And they say, who are these guys?
Who are these guys?
God, they were there.
There was people there who were saying no to this.
Oh, my God, this is astonishing news.
You know, I don't know.
Or is some little article that we've written or something, is it going to survive and people are going to say, wow, I didn't know that there was any resistance.
Yeah, no, listen, John, I've enjoyed this conversation more than, and I have really good conversations.
It's been absolutely fantastic.
And I feel like I've found, you know, I love you.
It's been great.
It's been so good.
I highly recommend people sign up to your Substack.
I think I might have to go on Substack as well.
Yeah, it's johnwaters.substack.com, but it's actually called John Waters Unchained.
So if I ever kind of become a press baron my newspaper will be called Unchained because I think actually one of my theories about this is that everything's going to collapse, the internet is going to be taken down because it's a danger to mankind and we're going to all go back to paper newspapers and we'll start off with pamphlets or Sammy's Dats and we'll work our way back up again and so mine's going to be called Unchained.
Good.
Yeah, me too.
I think that's a very good idea.
So support you on Unchained, on Substack.
Please, if you enjoy this interview as much as I've enjoyed it, don't forget to support me.
You can support me on Patreon or Subscribestar, and it enables me to do lots more stuff like this that you like.
Remember that.
I mean, I think we've all got to do our bit.
We can't play a passive role in this.
If you want to help the resistance, you can start from one thing by I absolutely loved it, James.
I really loved the conversation.
I shouldn't have to do it for free out of the goodness of my heart, even though I do have a good heart.
Thank you, John.
Will you come back on this vidcast one day?
I absolutely loved it, James.
I really loved the conversation.
It's really nice.
And it's so nice to meet somebody, even remotely, who is of the same mind.
I mean, it's such a rare thing these days.
I'd love to come over for a pint with you now, with a Guinness.
I can't have more than one pint because it makes me fart horribly.
I don't know why.
We would have to drink it by the seaside in the wind.
We would, yes.
Especially in the wind, yes.
With the effects it has on me.
Anyway, it's really good to see you.
And let's have a drink, not in 2020, earlier I hope.
Stay in touch.
Thanks a lot.
Bye bye.
See you soon.
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