All Episodes
Previous Next
July 26, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:05:56
Dan Astin-Gregory
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Paul!
Come and subscribe to the podcast baby!
I love Danny Paul!
And there's another time, subscribe with me!
Welcome to the Deling Pod with me James Delingpole and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but I'm extra excited this time because because we're going to be randomly live streaming it and we've given like Dan is it about zero seconds notice we've given to the to the audience Yeah, zero time whatsoever.
So let's see how that goes.
So Dan Aston Gregory, welcome to The Zelling Pod.
The only thing I know about you is that last weekend you hosted, I thought it was very, very clever of you, and I'm sorry I didn't turn up, you hosted this amazing conference in London, all about the lockdown and vaccines, and you got quite a good crowd.
Yes, I mean, we were still, obviously it's two days before Freedom Day, so we were still dealing with venue restrictions, which limited the attendance in the room.
We had something like 40, 50,000 people sign up, but of course, you know, we'd need an actual stadium to fill that crowd.
So it was an invite-only audience of journalists, media, academics, scientists, influencers, public figures, really to try and help spread some of these Conversations that we've, you and I have probably been talking about for the last 12 months.
And let me guess, let me guess, it got really widespread coverage in the mainstream media and they were all hungry for this information.
Yes, yes.
I've been, my door has been beaten down since the weekend.
No, you're absolutely right.
Unfortunately, deadly silence once again.
Alternative media, kind of the usual suspects have been very helpful.
Spiked and Spectator, which I still consider as main mainstream media to some degree, were in attendance, which is great to see them there.
Yeah, yeah.
RT News were there, they've done some pieces.
But yeah, we did have some signups from the Sunday Times and the Daily Express, but they didn't actually show.
Yeah, colour me incredibly surprised.
It's inevitable.
Just tell me a bit about yourself, Dan, apart from the conference you organised.
I see that you're a young person, you're younger than me, and everyone younger than me looks like a young person.
Yeah, I'm 37 years old.
That's young, still.
Yeah, OK, that's young.
Categorized as young, I take that as a compliment.
But in the last decade, I've spent working with entrepreneurs, helping them transform their ideas into reality.
I'm really quite passionate about solving major problems through entrepreneurship and innovation.
So when this situation emerged in 2020, Well, firstly, I was really excited for 2020.
We get excited about New Year's Eve, don't we?
It's the 31st of December.
We expect the 1st of January to be this miraculous new beginning.
It never is, but we kind of build it up that way.
So even more so, I was excited for the new decade.
I thought this would be a fantastic decade of opportunity for change.
Lo and behold, within several months, you see a global pandemic arise.
So naturally, as an entrepreneur who focuses on solving problems, this thing piqued my attention.
And I've been following it ever since and started my own podcast in October, the Pandemic Podcast, to cover a lot of the critical issues around the pandemic.
We've now reached between 5 and 6 million views through our live show.
I wanted to do something a bit different to try and raise awareness about these critical issues and hence the summit on Saturday.
I think we're not going to solve it.
I think it's beyond you and me, you or me.
Even if we combine forces, as we're doing on this podcast now, I suspect it's slightly above our pay grade.
But I know what you mean about 2020.
I had on the I like reading magazines in the bath, and I had a copy of the January issue of Country Life, and it was all about all the amazing destinations that we're going to be going to in 2020.
And it stood there, mocking me, mocking me with my petty aspirations about all the places I could go.
I did actually make it to Greece, which was nice, but this year, I'm just wondering, is it worth it?
Is it worth the the hassle because they're deliberately making it really really hard and really unpleasant.
I know there were some places you can go to which are Albania apparently is the best European destination right now.
Albania and North Macedonia I think.
Two areas I know very sadly know very little about but you know if that's our choices then I haven't been there so maybe there's an opportunity but You're absolutely right.
We are a little bit stuck when it comes to international travel and for how long is completely unknown.
Like you said, I was lucky to get a little bit of travel in at the beginning of last year.
My wife and I went on our honeymoon to Thailand, which actually was the beginning of my own investigation into what was happening because I'd heard rumblings, of course, of what was happening in China, with the dramatic imagery of crash test dummies lying on the floor.
It's a little insulting to say that, really.
I think they're called crisis actors, aren't they?
That's the technical term.
Crisis actors.
Yeah, that's the technical term.
When were you in Thailand?
Two weeks before the, in fact, one week before the lockdown began.
So we were there for nearly three weeks.
We flew back into Britain and pretty much as soon as we landed back, the lockdowns were announced.
And within a week, the rest is history.
So just by a nose scrape.
That is the equivalent of being on the last helicopter out of Saigon, I think.
Pretty much.
All these places, like, that you would think would not give a toss about this stuff, you know, Thailand, I mean, they're all... it's... I used to imagine, as probably you did, that countries, nation-states had a degree of autonomy about how they're going to Well, decide their people's affairs, you know, based on the sort of democratic process.
I mean, okay, maybe it's wanting in some countries in Africa and stuff, but you would have thought that there would be a variety around the world.
And actually, we're all looking around thinking, Where could we go?
Where, where is it not?
Where is the stupid not prevailing?
And I think the answer is almost nowhere.
And even those countries which have bravely tried to, I mean, I think how many, how many heads of the state have died, died mysteriously?
I mean, there was Magufuli in Tanzania.
There was the president of Haiti.
It's like there's tremendous pressure to toe the line and I'm not seeing anywhere where you can escape the madness.
I mean it's shocking I was discussing this with one of our speakers from the conference and you know people refer back to the Rockefeller documents from 2010 I think talking about the lockstep program and we were debating whether that was a kind of a prescription for how to operate, or a prediction of how human behaviour would unfold in the face of a crisis like this.
Now, there's arguments on both sides, but certainly the similarities, the unorthodox similarities between international approaches is highly questionable.
And, you know, really very little autonomous decision-making.
I mean, there's exceptions like Sweden, for instance, that have taken a different approach.
But even to today, I mean, I saw a video coming out of New Zealand and, you know, they're telling their citizens to not speak to each other in the supermarkets because speaking itself may cause a greater risk.
So they're actually telling their citizens not to communicate with one another, which In any other time in history, you would recognize the alarm bells that that would create.
But seemingly, this is all becoming acceptable.
No, they're focusing particularly on the Five Eyes countries.
That's a given.
And you think about it, it's ironic, particularly With New Zealand.
I think that for most of my life, New Zealand will be on the list of places you you flee to when the shit hits the fan, you know, at least you've got this redoubt in the back of beyond where plenty of open space and and you know, they speak English and it's a civilized culture.
And I mean, who wouldn't want to live in New Zealand?
Or rather, the question now is, who wouldn't have wanted to live in New Zealand?
Because you wouldn't want to live there now, you wouldn't want to live under old horse-face woman.
I mean, she might as well be working for the Chinese Communist Party.
She's just awful.
Yeah, I mean, I'd be interested in your observations.
I mean, what I've tried to make sense of around this is why this is happening on a political scale.
Obviously, in the last 5, 10, 15 years, we've seen this kind of rise of right-wing populism.
And I just wonder, is this another one of those classic kind of pendulum swings to the opposite, magnified by a pendulum?
Dan, you're already using the kind of language which is completely irrelevant.
It's the language of the debate in the pre-2020 world, which no longer exists.
And it didn't even exist at the time.
We were just fooled.
Right-wing populism, or populism, any of these terms are the invention of, well, I suppose, the same kind of people who are responsible for what's going on now.
Indeed, the whole left-right divide is created by the same people responsible for what's going on now.
They are completely meaningless.
And anyone who is unaware of this really needs to To give their head a good, I don't know what, pull themselves together is a polite way of putting it.
Well, that's the hard thing, James.
I agree with you.
It's the hard thing is that, you know, we've seen in 2020, 2021, you know, conscious awareness of what happens in the world and why it happens is extremely limited.
So people kind of still reference the kind of identity of these pieces.
So, you know, In traditional pre-2020 terms, it looks to me the approach is a fundamentalist kind of left-wing radicalism in terms of the policies, particularly using the New Zealand example.
But again, I know it's using kind of old terminology, and you're absolutely right, those that can punctuate between what's really happening amongst this divisive nature.
But a lot of people out there still haven't made their way, they haven't navigated that conversation.
It's very difficult for them to observe, you know.
It is very difficult.
And it's, I think, one of the most shocking things about the last 18 months is the degree to which people choose their own their own slave camps, their own concentration camps.
They just they wander willingly in.
They've been enticed in by the orchestra playing at the entrance and they think, oh, that's nice.
It's it's playing.
You wouldn't have an orchestra at the at the gateway to a concentration camp.
It's all going to be OK.
It's amazing.
I was thinking about this, actually, because I've got to do I've got to do an interview with an American show tonight.
And I was thinking How extraordinary it is that, I don't know whether it's the same in America, but it's certainly the case in Britain, that about the only thing that kids learn in their history lessons in school is the rise of the Nazis.
This is the lesson from history, and I remember a few years back when they still used to make serious documentaries on TV.
There was a series called The Nazis, a warning from history.
You know, the subtitle kind of gives you a clue that this is the message that we know that Hitler's Germany, World War II Germany, have become the sort of the very type of what happens when tyrants are allowed to take over a country and how they How they are able to manipulate and brainwash a populace into a position where people start being carted off in trains to death camps and things like this.
And that a regime, initially with a very narrow support base, is able to create this kind of Gotterdammerung where the whole country is destroyed.
And I had a look at my kids history project, their textbooks that they had to study when they were doing their history GCSEs.
And it's really quite detailed stuff.
It's actually quite turgid.
You get far more detail than you would ever possibly need, certainly far more than you could ever possibly absorb on the details of, you know, the Reichstag fire and all that, the brown shirts and etc, etc.
And when it happens in real time, in real life, everyone goes, yeah, but it's going to be fine.
Like the BBC says this and Boris says he's a libertarian.
And yeah, it's all going to be fine.
Why are people so stupid?
Well, I mean, it's fascinating.
I mean, it's less than in human behaviour.
I mean, I've just read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Ardent, who's very well respected.
Political scientist or political philosopher, but really, really lays out the outline for what the conditions that result in totalitarianism.
And it'd be very difficult for anyone to read that book and not recognize the distinct similarities with what we're seeing right now.
And I'm horrified at the public reaction.
But again, reading those books, reading the history, you can see that the same thing.
It's a history.
It does repeat itself.
The large was there is some level of kind of polite rejection of what's happening.
Generally, people just go about their business.
And before you know it, the, you know, the mission creepers is taken over.
And so is your life.
You know, it's people.
Well, it's shocking.
People do seem to have a desire to, they want to be within the in crowd.
I mean, they want to be part of the group, I think, rather than part of the out group.
And of course, Hitler and all the 20th century tyrants had access to books explaining to them exactly how to manipulate people and the propaganda industry.
They do use the same playbook, but it's interesting, isn't it?
Okay, so there's currently a documentary series on Netflix presented by the imp from Game of Thrones.
He does the voiceover, Peter Dinklage, and it's called, I don't know, How to Make a Tyrant or something, and it analyzes all these dictators through history and, oh, isn't it amazing?
They've got all these things in common.
And I was looking at the episode on the manipulation of the media with propaganda and also through just promoting evident falsehoods and marginalizing people who are marginalizing critics and Oh, yeah, junk science.
I mean, there was a section that there's one on on Stalin.
And yeah.
What's the guy who that?
It's so hot that I've forgotten his name template.
The junk science geneticist who just just made up crap.
And science is coming back to be installed and promoted him even though he was talking absolute rubbish.
But this documentary series failed to notice that this is what is happening in every country of the world right now.
Absolutely.
So we have not learned lessons from history at all.
Not at all.
People just say, this is different, this is different.
It's like, no, it's not different.
You know, you're discriminating, in the case of vaccine passports, you're still discriminating on a human characteristic.
You know, it's a medical status.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
I mean, and this is another interesting facet of this, that, for example, early last year, when when some of us were becoming perfectly well aware that there was going to be this discrimination of that not just discrimination against but a kind of a campaign of vituperation against people who were not on board with the correct thinking and who didn't want to get this alleged vaccine which isn't which isn't a vaccine and so on.
We made references to yellow stars, you know, why not wear a yellow star?
And what happens is, this is quite interesting, you get, well, the shit libs are the first to move in, and the shit libs, I'm convinced, there are lots of people who are on social media who pose as these kind of random people who've come from nowhere, who've acquired this massive following.
I don't think that that is necessarily the case.
I think that they are, planted and financed by the kind of people who want this shit to happen.
I mean, I'm not going to name the names because I don't want to be sued by them.
But it's extraordinary.
So these people are the first to... I mean, actually, quite a few of them are licensed BBC comics.
I mean, they are the kind of vanguard of the shitlib commentariat.
They've got this public profile, they've got the correct sort of fascist, communist, whatever opinions, because you know they have, because they work for the BBC, they wouldn't get the job otherwise.
And what they do is they instantly say, how dare you compare what's going on now to the murder of six million Jews?
And this is the trope that they sort of promote, if that's what you do with a trope.
Do you promote a trope?
Anyway, they push out this trope.
And then you get people like, sort of, innocent people like Kirsty Allsopp, you know, who's actually, you know, she's all right.
She does that nice program about, about...
places to live and and she seems a nice you know reasonable person and she says some nice things but she gets sucked into this thing and promotes this actually fallacious um idea that there is no comparison between and that furthermore it is outrageous to do so it is wrong And what they do is they discourage people from making the obvious connections with historical events that have happened.
And as a result, they downplay what is happening now.
They make people frightened to comment.
And they even give people the false illusion that actually this time it's really okay.
And it's all a lot of fuss about nothing.
It's very insidious.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
It's like, oh, no, this is different.
This is different.
This is, you know, that's just not the case.
And I think to make comparisons is not to diminish any other circumstances.
It's to raise awareness of the fact that some of the clear principles and mechanisms that resulted in those conditions are beginning to unfold.
Whether it's through a digital technology this time versus a physical badge, you're still distinguishing between one type of person, one type of person, and another type of person based upon this time a different set of human characteristics.
You know, in World War II, you know, it had the Jewish shops and the Aryan shops that started with just simple labeling.
And, you know, we've got nightclubs now, allegedly, from September, if it goes through, saying, you know, it won't necessarily say vaccinated only on the door, but it may as well say that.
this goes through but people can't make that they can't seem to make the comparison but the reality is if you do make the comparison you recognize that one group of people are being made to be labeled as a superior race or a superior group of people because they've done x y and z and others are are inferior or or less worthy members of society because they haven't done This.
And that's where you can see the comparison.
But for a lot of people, they justify it under the idea of the fact that this is supposedly to protect others, it's for the greater good.
But they're unable to see that moral authority is being assumed by the state or the global elites who have taken this stance and inflicted it essentially on a global scale.
Because when we look at this at a global scale, when you look at Not Germany.
You can start to make sense of, you know, a single dictator.
You can see it in a single isolated area.
I mean, it still baffles me when I see how this is unfolding on a global level around a single Does it baffle you?
I mean, it all makes total sense to me.
I'm just not reading any satisfactory explanation or informed explanation in the newspapers.
I mean, for example, today I read a piece in The Telegraph by Alastair Heath.
This has been a real sheep-goats scenario.
In the last 18 months, every single journalist that I admire, or used to admire, has shit the bed.
I'm trying to think what exceptions there are to this rule.
Majid Nawaz on LBC of all places.
I mean, LBC is a kind of lefty stronghold, but he's held the line, you know, and there are a few others.
But I'm talking about people, I'm not talking, you know, there are voices in the alternative media and the debate there is quite vigorous, but the mainstream media has been completely bought and paid for.
So, for example, Alistair Heath, who is about as outspoken as it gets, about as kind of into limited government and free markets and stuff as you'll find in the media.
And even when he writes pieces about what a disgraceful state of affairs it is that our country is being Our economy is being destroyed in the name of this thing that is killing, you know, certainly no more people than flu.
Even he, every article, it's like, they all do it.
He has to genuflect to the vaccine.
He has to celebrate the amazing, miraculous achievement.
They all do it, every single publication in the mainstream media.
Every single columnist, they're all obeying orders.
Where did we get that phrase from?
They are all obeying orders.
They all say that, as a matter of course, the vaccine is a wonderful thing and it's what's going to liberate us.
And why aren't we opening up, given that we've had this incredible technological success?
You know, our medics have excelled themselves and stuff.
And it's just not true.
It simply is not true.
How many articles have you read in the mainstream media about adverse reactions?
Very limited.
There's been a couple, but they don't really ask questions.
They'll state a situation, but they won't go beneath it.
The bonnet.
And recently as well, you know, breakthrough cases, you know, where it's this Navy vessel, there's been a hundred cases amongst double-jabbed individuals.
They'll point it out, but they won't go as far as saying, perhaps this isn't as effective as we thought it was.
You know, we've never seen in history the most such fraudulent use of the term safe, effective, or rare.
These three words have been fraudulently used So, so much in the last six to eight months that, you know, it's unsurprising why there is a, despite the kind of ideological bedding in of this idea that this is the way out of this, there are amongst the critical voices, you know, the level of trust that has been lost in institutions.
I mean, many people May have already had a healthy scepticism.
But off the back of this, you know, the government is running things like vaccine confidence summits without ever looking at themselves in the mirror and understanding that it's their own behaviours and their own actions that drive a lack of trust and a lack of confidence by the fact that just sweeping these issues under the carpet, you know, barely even touching them.
Do you ever look at Cliff High's podcasts?
I don't know.
You're a bit of a normie, aren't you, Dan?
You're sort of between the normie and the not.
Cliff High, he's a kind of crazy American who does these podcasts.
I'm sweating.
I wish I had a team here to powder my forehead.
Okay, so you should check out his stuff.
He's quite kooky, but he's quite interesting.
So Cliff Hine, his speciality is searching databases, searching the internet basically.
And seeing how many times particular words crop up, and there's probably a technical term for this, word analysis, word frequency analysis, something like that.
Anyway, he forecasts trends based on what he's seeing.
And if you want it to be optimistic, Which I'm generally not.
But if you want it to be, Cliff is your man.
Because Cliff says that, OK, it's all going to be terrible.
I mean, really bad stuff is coming down the line.
But observing the trends, people are becoming increasingly aware.
that these jabs, these so-called vaccines, are not what we're being told they are.
And that the knock-on effect of this is that Big Pharma is over its toast, that no one is going to trust.
In fact, it's not just Big Pharma that's going to be the victim of this, it's going to be the entire medical establishment.
I don't know about you, I don't want to go anywhere near my NHS surgery.
And I love my doctor.
You know, he's a lovely chap called Dr Shah.
And, you know, he's got a good... he's intelligent, he's got... he's sympathetic and he's got a good manner.
But... I'm not sure.
You're absolutely right.
I wouldn't trust him.
No, you're absolutely right.
I think on one hand, that is really frustrating.
But on the other hand, I've always had a bias towards natural health.
And I've always tried to take full ownership of my own well-being and nourish myself and condition my body accordingly.
Well, not all the time.
I try to.
This particular year has been actually pretty damn hard to do that.
But nonetheless, that's led me to having a healthy skepticism.
You know, whenever I require medical intervention, if there is such an occasion, I will do my own research.
But in 2005, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease.
It's an autoimmune condition, which in itself has now, within the last 12 months, has taken me on a bit of a journey back.
Oh, what are the symptoms?
Well, Crohn's disease is a, you know, it's an inflammatory bowel disease.
So, fortunately, I've been free of symptoms since 2005, but at the time, I mean, I wouldn't want to describe the symptoms in graphic detail here, but you can imagine.
But it's interesting.
The reason I'm sort of morbidly curious in your medical health is that I, too, for many, many years had, and still have to a degree, a chronic autoimmune disease, which is what What basically Lyme disease becomes after, you know, if you fail to get it within To zap it with antibiotics within three months, it just, the parasite goes into every recess of your body.
And really it ceases to be about the parasite and becomes this chronic autoimmune disease.
And you get exactly the same things as you do with fibromyalgia, with ME, with CFS.
And I suspect that Crohn's disease is... The guy who invented the Botteco method called,
diseases of civilization because these are and what he meant by that these are diseases which are which people used not to get in the old days you know up until probably the early 20th century people did not get these get these things so clearly they are a product of something which has happened in the world with with industrial civilization and that's to do with with diet
to do with chemicals, to do with the water supply, to do with I would have thought things like the radio waves and and you know all this I mean, you've seen the shit that comes off a mobile phone, you know?
Yes.
And you've got kids glued to these things all day.
They're probably throwing their brains, aren't they?
So yeah, I don't think there's anything kooky about wanting to, you know, recognizing that health starts with healthy food, probably lots of meat.
Yeah, absolutely.
Lots of meat.
Lots and lots and lots and lots of meat.
I'm not buying this vegetarian shit and still less and less vegan shit.
I think, you know, I was a vegan for three months.
I had to be.
I mean, I was advised to be.
I went to Germany to be treated for my Lyme disease.
I went to this expensive clinic and it was great.
I mean, I just, I was, had these sexy nurses shoving these tubes in my arms and pumping me full of these kinds of, you know, healthy gunk.
I don't know, you know, not chemical stuff, but nice stuff.
And they had a resident nutritionist And the resident nutritionist said that you want to go on an anti-inflammatory diet and so therefore we recommend veganism.
And by uncanny coincidence, the nutritionist was herself a vegan.
So, you know, it's like, I imagine to a vegan, every dietary problem looks vegan shaped, but actually it's a complete waste of time.
You do not become a vegan.
Yeah, I mean, the problem of veganism and vegetarianism, it doesn't necessarily promote healthy living.
I think, you know, I've got plenty of friends who are vegetarian or vegan who aren't necessarily healthy.
For myself, following anti-inflammatory diet, which actually, to play devil's advocate to that, it did require reducing meat intake and prioritising plant-based foods.
You're using your language at the end of me already.
I'm sorry, Dan, you are.
I'm sorry.
I'm talking about food that grows in the earth.
Vegetables, fruits.
I mean, for me personally, we're talking about autoimmune conditions.
You know, the reason I'm telling you this is because I went to the doctor and they said, you know, you need to have these steroids, you need to have this.
And I've done my own research.
I thought these are going to cause me more harm than good.
So I did my own independent research.
I founded a set of dietary protocols and other contributory Mindfulness and all these other things.
Because stress can be a big factor in autoimmune conditions.
But nonetheless, as a curative method, there are certain food types that have the micronutrients, the phytonutrients that you need to help flush your body of toxins.
I followed this 30-day protocol, essentially, and my doctor told me that there's no evidence it's going to work.
And I said, well, not in your world, but I've seen tens of thousands of testimonials for this type of approach.
So I follow it, and lo and behold, 28 days later, all of the symptoms are healed.
And I have another autoimmune condition, psoriasis.
I suffered from psoriasis for Years when I was a childhood.
Fortunately, it went away when I was about 15.
But when I was 30, it flared up.
Same problem.
Massive, massive amount of stress, working too hard, Christmas coming up, burning things at both ends, candle at both ends.
And the same thing, doctor was like, you've got to do this, this, and this.
I said, I'm not doing that.
I'm not putting all that in my body.
I'm going to just follow this protocol.
And again, followed the protocol, cured itself, healed itself naturally, disappeared, haven't looked back.
So for me, it's about medical empowerment.
We can disagree or agree on the different dietary principles.
What I do agree with you on is all these identity labels.
I refuse to subscribe to labels.
Vegetarian, veganism, entrepreneur, business leader.
It just plays into categorizing people, and I'm not into that.
Humans are very deep, rich characters that can't be pigeonholed with labels.
It's just a way to Minimize and simplify things.
But the point is, for me, around this is about taking ownership of one's own medical future.
And the last 12 months, for me, has driven home how important it is to take full autonomy of your own medical decisions.
Because I already had skepticism.
And it doesn't mean there aren't great doctors.
It doesn't mean there aren't great scientists.
Of course there are.
But as an institution, A set of institutions.
It's driven by the same source that causes most of the problems we see in the world.
Money is the primary driver, and at the end of that is greed.
As we've seen in the last 12 months, 18 months, however long this is, people don't necessarily stop to question.
Our event on the Saturday was called Question Everything.
That's the title of my brand, is to ask questions about what's in front of you.
When I was at university, I'm a different character as I was then, but I was someone who would poke holes in things.
I'd pull them apart.
In fact, my tutor said, we want you to stay and do a master's because, you know, I was essentially telling them that economic theory doesn't exist.
It doesn't work anymore.
So we need more people.
Economics.
I did.
I studied economics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And did you get, did they introduce you to ideas like Mises and Hayek or was it purely sort of Keynesian bollocks?
It's quite broad.
Keynesian was relatively dominant, but there was quite a breadth.
And again, I felt quite lucky.
I felt like I was part of the last generation of I don't know when the education system changed, but there was a lot of free debate and discussion, and I think that trained me well for looking at the world in a slightly different way, but also to empathise with different perspectives, even if they're not the same as my own.
To seek and have a thirst for understanding, you know, that's, you know, a relentlessly tried to make sense of the world.
And I just think we've lost that through the education system as part of the problem.
And it's also part of why we're experiencing what we're experiencing right now.
So what do you think what's going on?
What's your grand universal theory about what's happening?
I don't have a universal theory, but I do have a ball of yarn that has many, many strands to it that need individually unravelling to say, well, here's this strand.
We've got the philanthro-capitalism strand over here.
We've kind of got the globalist thing over here.
We've got the cultural dimension over here.
To me, there's no single unifying theory, but there is an amalgamation.
of cultural, social, political, economic intercepts that have led to what we're experiencing today.
And I find it fascinating trying to unravel all of those strands to understand what role they play, what level of, how much of an influence these different factors have upon what we're witnessing today.
Okay, let me try and make you more specific.
Which of the speakers at your conference did you find made the most compelling case?
Frank Ferretti, Professor Frank Ferretti, who's a cultural scientist, he talked about cultural safetyism, he talked about the world's relationship with fear, he talked about the trade-off between, the illusion of the trade-off between freedom and safety, and he studied for decades how
How fear can permeate a culture or a society and the impact of doing so, but also how fear can be propagated.
I was just transfixed on his presentation.
We're just uploading all the talks now, but you can watch the full summit at questioneverything.io.
That talk in particular, I mean, speaking to the other speakers, all of them came away thinking that that guy was on the money.
You know, he really understands the cultural dimension of what's led to people's behavior during this particular episode, but not just this episode.
What's been happening over the last 10 to 15 years and how it's descended to the point where this was the perfect melting pot or storm for some of these things to unfold.
It's truly fascinating.
Yeah, well, Frank Frady is part of the kind of the living Marxism crowd that went on to give us Baroness Fox, aka Claire Fox, and it gave us Spike and Brendan O'Neill.
And these used to be used to be my comrades.
I used to, I used to, I once wrote a piece about for the spectator about, you know, I think I may be a Marxist or something like that, you know, it was it was a typical sort of click clickbait headline.
And it was the point I was making was that The people with whose views I most identified, wasn't it crazy?
They all happen to have worked for the defunct Living Marxism magazine, or they're part of that.
Their political analysis seemed to me so much more honest and fearless than so much of the conservative commentariat.
But I have to say, I'm, yeah, I mean, I'll check out the Frank Ferretti lecture.
It sounds to me like he's describing a phenomenon, a process.
He's describing, you know, how fear is, how fear is promulgated and generated.
And we've seen that.
I mean, we've seen that in Well, that Sage, for example, is full of behavioral scientists, you know, the government has been working hand in hand with Sage to ramp up the fear.
That's a given.
But it doesn't, obviously, I'm being unfair, judging a talk that I haven't seen.
It doesn't sound to me like he's just he's describing what's happening but he's not he's not explaining why it's happening which I think is the much deeper question and I have to say I've noticed
Brendan O'Neill, who I used to think was fantastic, and I've been on platforms with him, and he's a nice chap, but for me he lost his commentator-to-be-taken-seriously points.
At the moment when, I think it was last week, he said that he thought it was right to make care home staff take the vaccine, to force them to... I was very surprised to see that.
I almost felt like they put the article out with the wrong byline, you know, it's just...
Yeah, I'm just very surprised.
I was very surprised at seeing that.
Given his position on a lot of other issues around the pandemic response, I was very surprised to see that one in particular.
Well, given that his shtick is, I can say stuff that nobody else can say, because I think with the intellectual clarity of a Marxist, and that gives me a special privilege, because it doesn't mean I'm an evil right-wing bastard, and I just tell it like it is.
Given that all that is so, you would have thought that he would be prepared to take the line, well look, this is about principles and they go beyond the possibility that some old person in an old person's home might die as a result of Covid contracted from a, you know, he's not going to fall.
You would have thought he would not fall for that weasellish, falsely sentimental line.
But no, he's gone along with it.
And he hasn't even questioned the vaccine narrative.
Now, what's that about?
What's going on there?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know enough about Brandon.
I've not had any contact with Brandon, but I think it's also it's a function of Well, if someone's been questioning everything else that's been going on, I find it very hard to understand why one wouldn't extend that series of questioning into the vaccines, the vaccine passports, the coercion and everything else that follows.
I think there is an institutionalized ideology that surrounds vaccines that makes them almost dogmatic in nature, that people have prior conceptions that seem to be infallible, Yeah, but Dan, I'm going to pin you down on this because you're talking about generalities here.
It's not just that there's a sort of miasma of kind of thoughts floating around which make people predispose towards... Come on, nobody, we're talking about a situation where nobody, not the libertarian think tankers, not Brendan O'Neill of spite, not the Daily Telegraph, not any of their conservative commentators, nobody is questioning the vaccine.
What does that tell you?
This is the strangest... Well, I think it's the same as the previous response, is that the money gives you the answer.
I think, you know, you mentioned that the media is bought and sold, and I think there is... I mean, we've worked extensively to try and get pieces into the mainstream press, and even if the journalists themselves resonate with the point of view, we can share agreements.
But they take it to their editor, and even if their editor agrees, then it still finds its way into a barrier, a blockade, where, you know, let's face the facts, the government has invested money into the mainstream press to propagate their own Quote-unquote advertising, propaganda.
And whose money is it ultimately?
It's our money that they're using.
It's our money!
It's our money, which is the most damning thing, you know?
I think the government's put, or is planning to put something like a billion pounds, a billion pounds into... I mean, I remember when a billion pounds was a lot of money.
And let's not forget how much money Bill Gates has put into, I think, what, $3 million to the Telegraph?
Now, I used to work on the Telegraph.
I think my starting salary in the 1980s was $25,000.
Okay, what would you get now?
I mean, actually, journalist salaries are really piss poor now, you know, relative to I used to be on the level with sort of mid-level solicitors and things.
Journalism used to be a career where you got quite well paid.
That market has collapsed now and I think you get these kids prepared to work for peanuts.
I suppose what I'm saying is you can buy an awful lot of global health editors for three million dollars and it's a crying scandal.
How can newspapers allow themselves to accept donations from people with vested interests in certain agendas?
Unfortunately, and this for me is one of the biggest ironies of the whole situation, You know, I consider myself to be relatively politically centrist.
I dabble on either side of that line as necessary.
But there is obviously, within the left, there is a general dissatisfaction with the influence of globalist agendas and corruption.
Yet this entire thing has been underpinned by corruption and financial incentives.
Yeah, there's whole swathes of the population have not picked up on that fact and challenged that.
Because you're absolutely right.
Whether it's the media being bought, the World Health Organization, many of the other central institutions which have propagated what we've seen here.
Where is the outcry around that injustice?
You know, the role of philanthrocapitalism.
How can Bill Gates play such a dominant force in a single global issue?
It's quite frankly shocking.
No matter what you think about the virus or lockdowns or the vaccines, Surely you can look at this situation and think this is not right.
Surely you can look at the media and see the amount of money they're receiving from governments and the messaging from governments and say, well, hang on a minute, how do we have a free press when there is this influence?
How are so many people sitting silent?
But also within the industry itself.
So there's no wonder why mainstream press is struggling to, you know, having to put up paywalls and, you know, local media, you've got a local newspaper and it's just endless pop-ups because they can't financially survive.
You're not going to survive if you're not going to remain a truly independent, free press.
Independence is a strong word for the mainstream media.
There's never been truly true independence.
But at least free press, where you have the opportunity to dissect what is happening.
It just blows my mind, but it's why there's the rise of alternative media.
It's a classic disrupter situation here, where I think some of the mainstream press are on borrowed time.
It's like the Blockbuster Netflix story.
Some people, you know, Blockbuster thought they were too big to be destroyed.
But, you know, I think the same is coming for mainstream media.
Some are so institutionalized that perhaps they'll last a bit longer than others.
But we cannot live in a world where there is no free press.
Or can we, if the corruption is so deep?
You know, that's the challenge.
Well, you're right.
They would have died long ago.
All of them, actually, I think.
But they're being... I mean, look at The Sun.
The Sun is not representing its readers' interests anymore.
The Sun has been pushing the vaccine narrative more aggressively than I think any other newspaper.
I read a I read a leader in the Super Sore Away Sun only last week where it was saying anyone who doesn't want to get one of these experimental gene therapies injected in their arm is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist loon Who is irresponsible, jeopardizing the lives of others.
I mean, it's the old Jews thing again.
It could have come from Völkischer Beobachter or De Sturmer.
It's, you know, just changed the identity of the marginalized group being mentioned and it's the same story.
Now, the tabloid newspapers, if nothing you know if they had one job and that is to represent the interests of of the of the working classes um of their readership and they just don't do that anymore they just lie to them just like any other like like like the broadsheets are lying and they I mean no but you know do you remember you're old enough to remember the time when you'd go and you'd go away to
To stay with people in the country, maybe.
And you'd nip down, on Sunday morning, you'd nip down to the news agents to get, you know, you settle down with your, you know, having a late breakfast and read the papers and spread them out over the floor and sprawl in front of a fire or whatever.
No one does that anymore.
No one reads the papers anymore.
They should have died long ago.
And they've been kept on a drip.
They've been, I mean, they're zombie.
They're zombie institutions, which have been kept alive by this, Buy our money!
That's the thing.
I'm paying for this crap.
You're paying for this crap.
It's outrageous.
I think every newspaper should be closed down right now.
I despise them all.
I have no respect for them.
I really don't.
I just think they are scum.
Do you think there will come a field day?
The journalists have had it so easy.
Just log into the internet every day, find out the latest number of cases, the latest number of deaths, put it on a front page, use the word surge excessively.
Basically, put your feet up, drink as much espresso as you want, and, you know, the story writes itself.
But do you think there will come a time where there is a field day, once the hysteria of coronavirus dies down, where they pull this thing to shreds, they tear apart the governments, Because there's plenty.
I mean, the ammunition is there.
I mean, on whichever side, you know, if you've got a political leaning as a paper, whether you want to tear down the Conservatives or Labour, who have been completely absent as an opposition, the ammunition is rife.
So do you think there will come a time?
No.
Right.
Because I thought this summer there would be a ripple.
I'll tell you why.
I think it won't happen.
Because the business model of newspapers now is not about sales.
It's not, it's about, they are quite literally departments of the state.
That's what they've become.
They've become yet another branch, you know, they might as well be called the Ministry of, well, they might as well be called the Ministry of Propaganda, because that is what they are.
The BBC is past, you know, that's what George Orwell, the Ministry of Truth, was based on the BBC.
And that is all they are now.
So there is no incentive for them, no financial incentive for them to turn around and say, because if there were, Wouldn't at least one paper be taking a contrary line?
Just one?
You would have thought so.
I mean, the mail had a pop.
They've had a pop here and there, but not consistently.
The telegraph, here and there.
You know, there's the occasional piece, just to give the illusion that there is a critical voice.
But in that case, if they're not going to turn on the governments, will they turn on the private contractors?
The Sun did an expose on the test and trace, sorry, the testing, the lateral flow testing.
Will they examine the role of Bill Gates?
Will they go beyond the government?
If they are the ministry, will they find a way to at least criticize the institutions that have manufactured the vaccines for instance will they will they take a tear down approach there do you think there's any recourse yeah what what will well what will happen is that the orders will come down from on high um that we need a few token sacrificial victims
I mean, I think, for example, Fauci is living on borrowed time.
I think it's, I mean, we can but dream, but it's possible that even Bill Gates is living on borrowed time.
That would be good, wouldn't it?
I think that Hancock ought to have gone down by now because of the Midazolam, if that's how you pronounce it, Midazolam scandal where essentially people in old people's homes have been, their deaths have been hastened by this, you know, put on the kind of the so-called care pathway prematurely.
You would have thought that, but instead he was kind of eased out of office on a kind of an engineered sex scandal, which I'm just still not convinced by.
It's like, yeah, we proles, we ordinary folk will be given a few, you know, here's a head on a platter for you proles, you know, enjoy it, you know, be Salome for the day.
But the machine will grind on.
I don't see a media reckoning because the media is no longer the free press that John Wilkes and people like that fought for.
You know, you look at the history of the free press and interestingly Mick Hume wrote another of the living Marxism crowd.
Again, he used to make great arguments, wrote a book called There's No Such Thing as a Free I forget, about the history of the press.
And you realize how hard-won our media freedoms were, and how there was a time when people weren't allowed even to report on the proceedings of Parliament.
You know, these MPs supposedly representing you, you couldn't know what they were saying in the House.
And gradually that changed, and the mobs demanded it.
That's what we need, you know?
We need a return to the 18th century, the mob, saying, look, we're not going to put up with this crap.
You cannot get away with it.
But I don't see it happening anytime soon.
I mean, for me, that was always a perception of the role of the press is to take that role.
It's to hold the government to account.
From your perspective, obviously, you worked inside of the big press.
Yeah.
Do you think there was a tipping point where that fully eroded?
Because obviously it's probably been a gradual decline.
But was there a tipping point where?
Right.
It's been a boiling frog.
I think people who've studied this kind of thing for longer than I have will tell you.
You, James Dallingpole, are being seriously naive if you imagine that it suddenly went downhill in 2020.
No, I think that the newspaper proprietors have never acted in the interests of the people who read their newspapers.
They make a token show of it.
They embrace these campaigns, you know, the people's whatever, you know.
They adopt causes because they know that this is what the polls like, but ultimately they're not serving the interests of the readership.
I think that's probably... But yes, definitely it's got worse.
Definitely it's got worse, you know.
I think that the Telegraph now, for example, is unrecognizable from the paper I wrote for.
There was...
I think you could take it.
I'll give you one example of this.
When they tried to do with the swine flu, what they're doing now with so-called COVID-19, The swine flu too was this kind of non-event which the media tried to big up into something it was not.
I think people twigged much more effectively then.
My kids had swine flu and they didn't even notice they had it.
When they brought out this vaccine for swine flu and only a handful of people died, very quickly the vaccine was nixed.
They stopped the rollout because the public just weren't going to wear it.
And there were media voices saying, this is ridiculous, we cannot have this.
That is not happening now, and that's the difference, that nobody, nobody is saying, as I say, there seems to be some kind of editorial clause, sort of an edict given down to every commentator, however edgy and feisty, which is why, thank God, I don't work in the mainstream media anymore.
That I don't give a shit.
I will never write for The Mail, or The Sun, or The Telegraph, or any of these papers ever again.
And I do not give a flying fuck.
And so I can say this, but how many other journalists are there?
You get paid pretty well for writing for The Mail and The Sun, even now.
A lot of people kind of depend on it.
So they have to toe the line.
And they are not allowed to say that they'd be rude about the vaccines.
It's extraordinary.
I mean, I find it very hard.
I mean, even those I know of, you know, independently, you see them on Twitter sharing their views.
I just don't know how you can go and work for an organisation that's not representative of the whole picture.
You know, it's... I don't know how you...
I boycotted certain products because, you know, the way Heineken started advertising that the night is for the jabbed.
I mean, I don't really drink Heineken anyway.
Are you telling me that you used to drink Heineken?
- No, they actually were. - Busy Dutch.
- My wife is pregnant, so she has a couple of non-alcoholic beers and the Heineken one was reasonable.
But I just said, I will boycott that.
It's just that it's in principle.
So, where is the principles amongst the individual, but it, you know, I know that everyone has bills to pay, families to feed, etc.
But there's got to be a point in, I mean, surely everyone has a tipping point.
Everyone has a point of leverage where enough is enough.
You know, if I was working for an organization now, I would be looking elsewhere to find somewhere that was more closely aligned with my values where I could have full expression.
Look, you've been lucky enough to carve yourself out a career where you're kind of, I mean, okay, maybe you're the bitch of your clients, but basically you are free to decide how you earn your money.
You and all have really- I am now, but I spent eight years in corporate, you know.
In fact, I left corporate because it didn't resonate with my values.
That was one of the primary reasons I left.
I had a good career, I enjoyed my work, but I just didn't resonate with the organization.
I couldn't be part of it.
But most people don't have that option.
Playing Mr. Sympathy for a moment, Mr. Understanding, even though I despise people for their cowardice, and I can do so because I'm not one of them, Nevertheless, I do understand that people have got to eat.
And if you're a hack, and every conceivable mainstream outlet for your jottings says, sorry, mate.
I mean, this was the case with... I don't think I'm talking out of turn here.
I think Lawrence Fox, when he was campaigning to be mayor of London, And he was told by the media bigwigs, we're totally behind you, mate, if you want to talk about freedom of speech.
And we love freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is, you know, we're really behind it.
It's a great thing.
But don't criticise the government's coronavirus policy.
That's where we are.
And you know, I've reached the point now where I almost won't write stories about the culture wars and about freedom of speech, because I know that this is a... It's like you are doing the world a disservice because you are pretending that the issue now is, yeah, people can't say what they want.
And it is, of course, an issue, but it's much, much worse than that.
There is much, much more serious stuff going down than
uh another oxford college saying that somebody should should use the correct you know ask questions about pronouns or something it's just like you know another day another story about an oxbridge college doing something woke and you think my appetite for these stories is diminishing rapidly because it's ultimately meaningless oxford and cambridge have fallen every institution has fallen that's not that's not the problem that is a symptom
But the cause of the problem is much bigger than that, and you're not talking about it, because you don't dare.
What are you specifically talking about?
Oh, well, no, you see, that's the subject of, you know, two dozen other podcasts, which I'm not going to do now.
Yes.
Well, I, you know, I, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot out there about what people believe or understand that is behind this.
And some of it, I think there is, there is, there is truth, but I think there is no single, you know, I go back to the ball of yarn.
I think there is, there are multiple strands to this and each one of them plays an important role in what we're, What we're experiencing and dissecting that, you're absolutely right, would take multiple episodes.
In fact, we are embarking on this journey on the pandemic podcast with Question Everything.
In fact, we're talking about our next summit may be on the wider issues about the things that underpin the erosion of science, the things that have underpinned The destruction of free speech, all of these factors that have led to what we're experiencing today.
It all connects.
And there is actually, there is a grand overarching theory, but we're not going to go into it now.
And it's not even a theory.
It's the true history of the world.
And it ain't what we're taught in the schools.
Not that we are taught much in schools these days.
And that's another problem.
But anyway, I know you've got to go.
I've taken up too much of your time because I can see that we're already overrunning and you're a busy boy.
I'm jumping on another interview in just under an hour.
I understand from your assistant or whatever that you actually prepare for your interviews, which is very impressive.
I dare you.
But it's been really good talking to you, thank you.
Likewise, thank you James.
May I remind anyone who doesn't support me on Patreon or Subscribestar that, you know, freedom isn't free and I love your support and you can also find me at dellingpoleworld.com and And I'm on channels like Odyssey and Rumble because obviously YouTube is going to make people like us increasingly unwelcome.
So thank you for support.
And again, Dan, thank you very much for being on Telepath.
By the way, how many live viewers did we get?
Did anyone watch?
I haven't got the numbers in front of me.
Let me see.
Let's have a look.
I would imagine a reasonable number.
Let's have a look.
I'll let you know after the live.
I'll take a look.
We'll take a look.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thank you.
▲
Export Selection