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Aug. 16, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
54:39
Dan Liddicott
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Welcome to The Deling Pod with me James Delingpole and I know I always say I'm excited about this with special guests but I really am.
It's Dan Liddicott.
Dan is a libertarian but I know because I've been disappointed with libertarians recently.
I want to talk about this.
Dan is one of the good libertarians because I get the impression from what I've read of your thoughts Dan that you are Not stupid on the subject of what's going on, unlike so many people right now, so many libertarians right now.
Anyway, tell me, tell me about about your libertarian credentials.
You were in the Libertarian Party and then you left to form a breakaway party, is that right?
Well, pretty much.
I was in the Libertarian Party for a number of years.
But when I left, I didn't form another party.
What I did was I formed an association, if you want to call it that.
Because my experience in the party had taught me that the top-down nature of parties Yeah, it was actually proving to be fundamentally at odds with what libertarianism was about.
So we've gone for something with a much flatter structure.
Yeah.
And the association is now about helping independent libertarian candidates rather than being a party.
Right, I see.
Well, I'm glad we've cleared that one up.
I don't really want to talk about libertarian politics because I think it's bloody boring.
I want to talk about ideas.
But I do have a policy, as you know, on this on this podcast of, you know, I just want to want to chat and bring out the best in my guests rather than confront them.
But I'm slightly, I'm slightly going to break my rule to a degree by inviting you to agree with me or disagree.
Libertarians, the Libertarians have been really, really shit in this, in the last 18 months.
I mean, I don't know whether you know, back in the day, before 2020, when I did my podcast, one of my staples were the libertarians from the
Institute of Economic Affairs and and I I was I used to read people like um oh god what's he called that that one who now works at Cato who writes a column in the Telegraph I've I've kind of obliterated his name from my memory but so many libertarians have proved unequal to the task of responding to what's going on.
It's like they're good at dealing with totalitarianism in theory.
You know, if you're Christian Nimitz, you can write lots of books about how communism is bad and okay, and it never works in the real world.
And then you suddenly get the biggest assault on freedoms, on liberty in our lifetime.
And what are they doing?
They're rolling over and saying, yeah, I quite like our new insect overlords.
So what's going on?
I honestly don't know I think people are afraid, perhaps of consequences.
And of course that's the thing that people are going on about you know you, you, there are consequences to what you do and that's that that's something very much of the authoritarians and of the left at the moment, you know, You can be free to do what you like, but you can't be free from the consequences and the consequences are we will de-platform you, or something like that.
So maybe there's an element of reticence there, you know, keeping their powder dry, but now is not the time to be keeping your powder dry.
That's, that's sort of my initial reaction to what I think is going on.
Yeah, I suppose a lot of the libertarians I'm thinking of here are dependent on the funding that their think tanks get.
And I used to live in a world, I mean I was so innocent before 2020, I've completely changed my worldview.
I used to think that I used to think it was nobody's business where the Institute of Economic Affairs got its funding.
I thought that they were genuinely free spirits who were making an argument that was not generally being made in the newspapers or whatever.
whatever and that and and that these were these were the kind of the same kind of people who who introduced margaret thatcher to hayek but they're not are they They're just essentially servants of whoever is funding them.
And it looks like the people who are funding them are actually part of the establishment machine.
They're not about liberty at all.
That is the problem, of course, with taking funding of any kind, that it can be withdrawn.
And it's not necessarily even that the person giving the funding attaches strings, not overtly anyway, but they do tacitly, of course, because if you then come to rely on the funding, you then come to rely on not upsetting them and having that funding removed.
So you almost tie yourself into knots to try and keep this thing you now rely on.
And Well, it's true with everything, isn't it?
You know, it's whether you're dependent on the welfare state, it's whether you're dependent on sponsorship for your YouTube channel, or any of those things.
They're all kinds of de-platforming that people are afraid of.
And that seems to be more important than the truth, or at least the open and free debate that might bring the truth out.
You know, I'm not saying I'm right on everything, but I do say that I try and give the other side of the argument and let people argue with me and say, actually you're wrong, Dan, because look at this, this and this, and we can have some challenge.
But, you know, people are afraid of that challenge.
There's probably a lot of what I would call small c conservative money going into what people might have thought was libertarian.
I mean, for goodness sake, people thought Boris Johnson was a libertarian.
Yeah, yeah.
It's his press machine.
That being the case, it's the conservatives, it's the small c conservatives that they don't want to upset.
And of course, a lot of those people Especially if you look at Jordan Peterson's psychological view of what a conservative is, you know, they're highly addicted to order and conscientiousness and things like that, especially surrounding pathogens and pandemics and stuff like that.
Oh, that's interesting.
So you think the conservative mindset is part of the problem?
Oh, definitely.
And I haven't really fully cottoned on to this, but, you know, I'm interested in, you know, psychology, psychology on some level, and I actually paid to do Jordan Peterson's understanding personality course.
And how much does that cost?
Oh, I think I got it on a deal and it cost me about 20 quid.
You get access.
Yeah, you get access to his lectures, you get to, you know, submit answers to questions and get a little certificate at the end to say you've, you've done the course, but I was more interested in the content.
You know, I wanted to hear his lectures, I wanted to understand his, his big five view of personality.
And I was absolutely fascinated when he talked about the conscientiousness scale, and where small C or psychological, you know, conservatives, personality profile conservatives, not necessarily people who vote Tory, or Lib Dem or anything like that, but people who in their personality are conservative.
And apparently, according to all his research, they're high in conscientiousness and high in orderliness.
And I used to think conscientiousness is a really good trait, you know, and I ought to be it, and recognizing I'm not necessarily wildly conscientious, but when you understand it from Jordan Peterson's psychology point of view, it can be an absolutely destructive force.
You know, he basically says Hitler was really, really, really conscientious.
Oh, okay.
And so, you know, and you obviously know what he achieved.
Yeah, so how was Hitler conscientious?
You mean carrying through his task with diligence and commitment?
That kind of thing?
That's right.
Apparently, on this scale, a conservative thinker is high in orderliness, and apparently that comes out of the disgust emotion.
And you feel disgust about things that are dirty and filthy and that make you sick.
You know, he compared it in the Victorian era to, you know, Victorian prudishness, you know, as a response to venereal disease.
And he looked at Hitler's sort of pursuit of cleanliness against initially tuberculosis.
And then it was about cleaning up the factories.
And then it was about cleaning up the hospitals, which he says didn't work out so well for the people who were never going to get well.
And then it's cleaning out certain ethnic, what Hitler would have perceived was impurities.
And before you know it, you're marching people into ovens, You're being really conscientious and it's all about cleaning up and orderliness and eradicating pathogens.
And if that exists in the conservative mindset, then they're all on board with the excess lockdown and the social distancing and the masking and all of the, some of the inhumane aspects of what's been going on for the last 18 months.
Separating families and, you know, people dying alone and all that kind of thing.
That's interesting.
So yeah, you've helped answer a question which had puzzled me slightly in that so many Brexiteers whose rough-hewn common sense I'd applauded during Brexit and I thought, you know, these are the people, they understand, they can't be fooled by the political class.
They've fallen hook, line, and sinker for the Covid scam, for the lockdowns.
They like the authoritarianism.
Boris Johnson's approval ratings are still remarkably high, given that the guy is a
uh an incompetent psychopath enthralled to a globalist cabal which is trying to destroy us all um but most people seem to be content to yeah well he's keeping us safe and and these measures are necessary because this is this is a real this is a real um nasty disease that's going around and and and i had a mate who was like in his 50s and and you should have seen i mean
You may call it just flu, but actually, he almost died.
You know, all this kind of crap you see.
So I get that.
So if conservatives are crippled by their conscientiousness, tell me what qualities, according to Peterson, libertarians have that better suit them to dealing with this, what's going on?
Well, I wish he'd gone into what libertarians are to do that, but he would probably class them, just by opinion now, among the liberals.
And don't forget, we're talking about personality traits, not the way people vote, necessarily.
Right.
So you can get a socialist with a conservative personality.
Yeah.
And they're really conscientious.
And so he sort of balances it that way.
It's not necessarily split along, you know, voting lines.
It's how your psyche is made up.
And so liberals are open to, you know, they have a high degree of openness to new ideas.
They're very creative, but they're not very organized.
So he sort of sets them at opposite strands that way.
And he says, you know, the liberals would come up with great ideas and solutions to complex problems all day long, but they can't organize them.
and make them happen, because the conservative thinkers will be very orderly and conscientious and whatever plan you give them, they'll march off and do it off straight off the edge of the cliff.
And so you do need both sides, he says, to do it.
And I imagine that libertarians fall along the liberal end of things.
They want to be left alone.
They're not necessarily interested in the rules that are being imposed from outside.
But that doesn't mean they're without their own code of ethics or Or morals or their behavior towards other people.
Right.
But that's the way he sort of splits it up on the conscientiousness scale anyway.
Right.
Yes.
But we still come back to the initial point, don't we?
That libertarians have not risen to the challenge.
Now, I always thought that libertarianism was something that came from... that you live the life as a libertarian.
I mean, anyone could be a socialist, obviously, because it just means you're a nice person and, you know, you go with the flow.
It's really not difficult being a conservative either, you know.
Harder, obviously, than being on the left.
But to be a libertarian is about having a belief system which you believe in and you live out in every aspect of your life.
Well, clearly in the case of... That's right, it's principles-based.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And yet in the case of the Lolbertarians, I keep banging on about because I'm so disappointed in them.
Ryan Bourne is his name, he's another one.
They don't seem to be manning the barricades and fighting to their last dying breath for liberty and for smaller government and for freedom.
On the contrary, they just kind of suddenly see that all this authoritarianism is necessary, which at the moment's analysis... They behave like it's inevitable.
Yeah.
So come on, what's going on?
Let's take what Jordan Peterson would call politeness versus agreeableness.
So liberals are agreeable.
Conservative personalities are polite.
All right.
They might seem like the same thing, but they're probably not.
Again, it's about the forms and the rules rather than, you know, what's actually going on inside.
But I wonder if, as usual, libertarians just don't really fit.
But the problem with libertarians is they are loners to an extent, aren't they?
They actually do believe in leaving people alone and living and let live, the real ones that is.
So how do you organize a group of people who are highly individualistic?
to come together and man a barricade or even build the barricade in the first place.
I think that's the real challenge libertarianism has.
A lot of people have the opinions and the views and they recognize what's going wrong, but to actually do it, they've got to adopt some conservative attitudes, which maybe they lack.
Right.
Do you think libertarianism is compatible with Christianity?
Because I know you're a Mormon, aren't you?
Is that right?
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
So I mean... And the Mormons I know are very, very conscientious.
I'm using the C word there, but you are very conscientious, hardworking and very principled.
I mean, you're true believing, honest Christian types.
But I would have thought that those kind of people generally would be more conservative than libertarian.
But tell me about that.
I would say culturally, yeah.
Culturally, probably, certainly in the US, certainly in Utah, probably most members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would probably veer towards conservatism, politically.
Certainly not all, by a long stretch.
And in the UK, it's much more diverse, I think.
I've got friends at church who... One's a Labour candidate, people who vote.
Lib Dem, people who voted for most parties under the sun that are mainstream.
And the church itself isn't politically, you know, involved.
It doesn't tell you which way to vote.
It's deliberately non-partisan.
It doesn't support platforms or candidates or parties, one over another at all.
But the attitude of mine is probably veering towards conservatism.
Mormons are typically, they are conscientious, they are ordered people.
It's part of our religion that God's house is a house of order.
But at the same time, for myself, and this is my own beliefs and my own experience and what I've learned about the religion that I follow, there is plenty in it to advocate for libertarianism.
From beginning to end, you know, the whole strand running throughout the history of the Earth, and even before our life on Earth, is about liberty.
And it's about the freedom to choose.
And the fact that this life is a time to be tested and demonstrate, you know, by faith, how would we choose to live and who would we choose to follow.
It's easy to follow a God that's present in the same room.
His presence might overpower you completely, as C.S.
Lewis alludes to in The Screwtape Letters.
But when you're walking by faith, and God's not present to you at every moment, what do you choose?
And you can only prove that in an environment of freedom and liberty, and plenty of Latter-day Saint church leaders have talked on that topic.
That's interesting.
You don't have to answer this, but why do you think Mitt Romney has chosen the dark side?
Which he obviously has.
I mean, he's part of the cabal, isn't he?
I'm a little bit disappointed.
Well, I say a little bit.
I'm quite disappointed in Mitt Romney and what he's doing.
But again, he's a vulture.
Maybe it's a bit like the Those people you talked about earlier who rely on funding from different sources and he's he's selling out.
But personally, I would not support Mitt Romney if I was in the US.
I'd probably even be voting Constitution Party.
I wouldn't even be voting Libertarian Party over there.
Right.
I think over there, the best way to secure liberty and libertarianism is to uphold their constitution, which is very unique in the world.
And it's the thing that's most under threat.
I wish we had something like it here.
But Mitt Romney, yeah, his politics don't interest me even a little bit.
No, I agree with you on the US Constitution.
It would be nice, very nice if we had a Second Amendment over here, wouldn't it?
I mean, Might have been the first one too, wouldn't it?
Yeah, well it would, it would.
Although I have to say the way things are going in the US, I don't think that their constitution is going to protect them either.
I mean, I fully expect that to be a real hinge point in their history in the in the next few years, because it's seriously under attack.
And those libertarians that you're talking about who aren't getting their barricades manned and things, they're going to have to do it.
And they and I think they will do it and it will be a close run thing.
But I expect that that's that's a huge pivot moment that's got to happen over there.
We've already lost that battle here.
So where do you think we are?
And what do you think is going on right now in the world, and how is it going to pan out?
That's two questions, so let's answer the first one first.
Where do you think we are?
Well...
We are losing the battle for liberty.
I think it was Ronald Reagan who observed that the US was the last stand for liberty, really, and probably protected by its constitution.
But where we are, I believe, is a place which what I'm going to call the insiders, the globalist elite, however you want to label them, is a place that they have been gunning for for decades.
Probably over a hundred years they've been gunning for this opportunity to rule the world.
Now I know that that seems far-fetched to a lot of people because they want to believe that they can just live their life and They want to believe they can just live their life and that everything's fine.
You can always trust what government says, even though they know full well from experience in their lifetime, they can't.
You know, it's like there's this cognitive dissonance going on with most people because, you know, there's plenty of other people have pointed out.
Gary Allen, I don't know if you've heard of him, wrote a wonderful book called None Dare Call It Conspiracy.
Fantastic read, really lays out the background of what's really going on here.
Yeah.
Even though it's, you know, a good 40 years old, the book.
But most people, if they knew what was going on, it would be too, it would be too horrifying to accept.
If you were given the red and the blue pill, most of them would go back into the Matrix, because to understand what's really happening is too frightening for them.
Everything they believe is saving them is really looking to enslave them.
And everyone that they think is trying to deceive them is actually trying to save them.
And so it's black is white, truth is error, violence is the new peace.
That's where we are.
Yeah.
You say, when do you think it started?
I think it's a battle that's been going on for all time.
If I go back to my faith roots and theology, this battle started before the creation of the Earth, and it's continuing now here, which is the fundamental battle between good and evil, right and wrong, freedom and slavery.
They are the same battle.
And, you know, you can look through world history and see moments where this battle has come to certain pinnacle points.
And this is happening now for our civilization.
You know, we might have believed that, you know, since modernism and all of those things, that we are a free and enlightened civilization.
But unfortunately, there were lots of civilizations throughout history who thought that they were the enlightened and civilized ones.
And they rotted from within, because they accepted false principles.
Take ancient Rome.
All right, they did, before their collapse, all the same things our civilization is doing, you know, they had a massive welfare state, they had huge inflation.
They had increasing authoritarianism.
They had bread and circuses.
It's exactly what's going on now in our civilization.
And we think, well, but this time, because magic fairy dust, it will be different.
It won't be different.
We have to get back to core principles, you know, the principles that I believe run throughout libertarianism that I believe run throughout true Christianity, which is That we are all equal.
We should observe those rules which, you know, we've had for so many thousands of years about how we treat each other.
I mean, let's take one.
Thou shalt not steal.
All right?
We think that's fundamental, don't we?
If a child steals, we teach them it's wrong.
If they steal at school, they get held up as an example, sent to their head, letters written home, all this kind of thing.
And then they go and enter work life and stealing becomes part of it all the time.
The taxman, council tax, PAYE, you get to the petrol pump.
Stealing is fine.
In fact, it's so fine you can vote You can steal more from your neighbors to fund your favorite projects.
Yeah.
And that's okay.
Now, I'll have that debate with someone one day.
Do you really have to?
Is there no other way of doing it?
But the reality is people accept theft on a grand scale, and they accept it for stupid reasons.
You know, it's always think of the children when you hand your money over and then you go and watch them blow it on a legal war in Iraq, and people don't put the two and two together and say, well, hang on a minute.
You see what I'm saying?
It's a moral good to pay your taxes.
Well, fine.
It's a moral good to fund wars and the droning of civilians and everything that the government decides to do with those taxes.
You know, you're now culpable if you thought it was a moral good.
Why don't people think like this?
Why don't they add one and one and see the two and go, my goodness, I'm funding all these things that I abhor.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Take me through it.
Give me some other examples.
of that of these of these principles that are that are kind of Okay, so that was Thou Shalt Not Steal.
I mean, Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Why are we getting involved in wars of aggression anywhere?
Yeah.
And supporting it.
And saying, look at those brave soldiers and, you know, all of that.
My goodness, we might as well, to a large degree in this country, be running a bunch of mercenaries.
Because who gains from the land grabs and the regime changes?
It isn't you, James.
It isn't me.
Certainly not the people who die in the War-like, what is it?
War-like activities.
I mean, that's just an abomination, that phrase.
Was it Obama that came up with that?
War-like activities.
Talk about soft-peddling murder, all right, in order to gain political advantage from whom?
You know, people far above you and me in the echelons of finance or corporations or politics who gain a lot from And it's the blood of young men and women and civilians who pay for it all.
And we watch it on telly and we applaud it because some of them have got our flag on their arm.
And we never say, what's going on?
The peace movement in the 60s had something going for it.
We need another one.
So you've outlined the problem.
What are we going to do?
I mean, for me, yeah.
The answer is found in those in those core principles.
You can call them libertarianism and libertarianism to me is the is the golden rule made political or Social.
You know, do as you would be done by, or do unto your neighbour as you'd have them do unto you, or don't do unto them as you wouldn't have them do unto you.
We do it all the time, of course.
We just vote for other people to do it on our behalf and then sleep well at night without having to have a Horlicks.
But that is a real principle.
And the reason that government gets so huge, I mean, I know leaders from my own church have spoken in this vein, which is that the more wicked or unrighteous people become, The more government is necessary or called on to sort of fix the problems caused by their unrighteousness.
So some examples might be about how do we care for the poor in the absence of a welfare state, for instance?
Is there actually a way of doing it?
Now, I believe there is, because in my own church, we have a way of doing it.
Every month the members of the church are encouraged to fast for two meals.
They skip two meals and they fast and they gain from that a spiritual experience of, you know, that the ancients and people from lots of faiths gain by fasting, which is to go without food or drink.
for about 24 hours, whatever your health can allow.
And in that, on a personal level, you learn a degree of self-control and you learn a degree of putting off, you know, natural appetites and things and promoting your spiritual wellbeing over it.
But what we do with what we would have spent on those meals, we donate.
And those donations go to help the needy in our church community.
Now, it might not sound like a lot of money, but actually it does work out quite well.
And we also pay a tithe of our income, 10%, which goes, and that can also be used to promote, you know, the work of the church, but also can go to the needy in our church community.
And if you go to places where there are a large number of Latter-day Saints or Mormons as we're commonly known, you see it really well organized.
Go to Utah and they have whole warehouses and canneries and production places where unemployed people can find work.
You know, temporarily until they gain experience and then get a better job.
The stuff they're doing actually goes into food, which is canned, and then given to the needy in their community, you know, to help them out of a dire situation.
But what's key to all this is it's not a handout, it's a help up, because it is temporary.
And how it's different from the large entitlement idea of a welfare state is, it's done on a local level.
If I found myself in financial straits, I could go to my local church leader and tell him, and he'd say, all right, Dan, I can see you've got an immediate problem.
Let's help you with that.
Now, what are we going to do to get you out of it?
Do you need some training?
Why don't you talk to one of our employment specialists?
Maybe they can help you with your CV.
All of those things which you see happening in a way in the welfare state, this is just happening in a small church community.
And it's working.
And you don't have to pay 33, 43, 53% tax to fund it.
This is all out of a monthly donation from what you didn't eat for 24 hours and your tithe.
Yeah, what you're describing is essentially the friendly societies that operated in the 19th century and until the early 20th century, until they were destroyed by the welfare state.
That's right, and I look at things like that and what I see is George Orwell's animal farm come to life.
All right, because it's a bait and switch.
And it's a way of taking control.
And who would want that kind of control?
And it's people who, who enjoy control.
And suddenly we know that people, you know, if we say that 1% of the population of psychopaths, three to 4% in positions of authority of psychopaths, you know, that's the where it, how it... What percentage?
Three to four.
Oh, what?
No, four times as many.
I'd say it's way more than that.
I think that's what it may well be.
But when they say positions of authority, they're talking about, you know, any managerial position right up to, you know, I'd say like 90%, maybe 95, but whatever.
Probably the higher you get, probably the higher you get, the more concentrated So the greater authority there is to wield, probably the higher the concentration of psychopaths.
Right.
And I mean, I spent some time studying what a psychopath is, you know, for my own interest, and their ability to lie glibly, as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouth, to tell grandiose stories, which don't have a figure of truth in them, in a convincing way, you know, we're talking about skilled con people.
Who can dupe even the most wary of individuals who don't do thorough due diligence.
Are they missing key parts of their brain?
What's the reason that people behave that way?
Well, according to a couple of books by Dr. Robert Hare that I read, one was called Without Conscience and the other was called Snakes in Suits When Psychopaths Go to Work.
The indication seems to be that they have what's called emotional poverty.
In other words, they're very, very lacking on the empathy side.
So, logically, they know what they're doing is hurting other people, but they just don't feel it.
You and I might have a pang of empathy that would stop us committing a particular act.
But they're missing that completely.
They know logically that what they're doing, you know, is going to have a certain outcome, but because they don't actually feel the emotional response, that break on human action is missing.
Good example from Dr. Robert Hare's book, And I mentioned him because he actually invented the psychopathic sort of report scale against which people are clinically diagnosed.
Right.
You know, he cuts his teeth working, I think, in prisons in Canada, you know, where he met a few.
But he gives one example in his book where he describes a scene in a movie with Nicole Kidman in it, where her character, you know, leaves for work, walks down the street, comes across a road traffic accident.
Yeah.
that has just happened.
If I'm remembering this correctly, this is how it goes.
And she goes right up to it to see what's happening.
And she sees, you know, I think a young person on the floor, clearly either harmed or dead, a mother wailing with grief.
And she looks right at the mother and then she goes back to her flat and in the mirror is practicing pulling those expressions on her face.
To show what grief looks like.
Did you see what I mean?
Yes.
To me, that's someone who's completely tapped.
They don't get it.
They don't feel it, but they have to communicate.
You've made me think instantly of Mark Zuckerberg, who is clearly constantly trying to impersonate a human.
He's looking for signs as to how you behave because he's incapable himself.
I mean, he's like a robot.
Um, an evil robot, that.
I've never had the pleasure of meeting him.
No, but you've seen, but you've surely seen him testifying in, in Congress, for example, he's, he's not, he's not human.
The problem is psychopaths really do exist.
Um, the research says that 1% roughly are, and that's a lot of people, you know, one in a hundred, you've got a hundred friends.
One of them's a psychopath.
You know which one it is, you know, and, and because we know they they are attracted to positions of power because it allows them to mask their behaviors and get away with what they want to do, which is well, that's where you find them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, as Gary Allen points out in his book that I mentioned earlier, you know, this isn't new.
You know, there have been Alexander the Greats and, you know, Julius Caesars and all of this throughout history.
Why do we think this generation doesn't have one?
That's a very good question.
Or ten.
Or a hundred.
Yeah, you're right.
That is one of the big questions, I think, of our time.
That everyone thinks that That yeah, Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot and whatever were just these anomalous figures from a past that that need not trouble us anymore because we're not going to repeat it.
And that's just that's just weird.
And I would add to that, that those people are actually more connected.
If you look at Gary Allen's book of how the insiders or the global elites work, those people are probably more connected than we realise, in that where did their funding come from?
And who's egging them on?
And who's making money out of both sides of the wars?
There is more connection between apparent enemies.
I mean, take G. Edward Griffin, for instance, who wrote, I think, The Beast of Jekyll Island.
Is that what it's called?
The Creature from Jekyll Island.
And he points out that the difference between left wing and right wing is non-existent.
Take the far left and take the far right.
And the only difference is a very slight definition in where they want to split who they see as the enemy.
The far right see the enemy as a sort of a racial nationalistic line and the far left see it as a class line.
But apart from that, they are identical.
They are authoritarian.
They are collectivist.
They want to tell you how to live and impose their utopia on you.
There is no difference other than which line they draw about who is the enemy.
Everything else is the same.
And he says, so it's a false dichotomy when you choose between left and right.
It's the same thing.
It's just about which colour banner do you want to wave while you're doing it?
Yes.
Yes.
Absolutely.
So, by the way, what you were talking about earlier reminded me, I think, of something that, I think it was Václav Havel said, that when it came to
pre-velvet revolution Czechoslovakia, when it was still under communist rule, that the best forms of resistance came not from overtly political organizations,
but rather from kind of community groups, just people doing hobbies or whatever, people doing normal things in defiance of the system.
I was wondering whether you had any thoughts on that?
I certainly do.
And I wasn't sure where you're going to go with that question because the way the resistance, the way the revolution sort of occurred in Czechoslovakia, I think.
is described as a pincer movement, which is, you know, what you might call the people carrying out the actions on the street, you know, the violent revolution, and then the ostensibly respectable colleagues in positions in higher up actually working together to grab middle class society in the middle and win.
But if that middle class society just keeps quietly cracking on with With the old normal.
Let's use the phrase, the old normal, because we're trying to have a new normal imposed on us.
That's one way we could resist now, is by living in the form of the old normal.
To take your point there, in our little groups, doing what we always used to do, the way we always used to do it.
Best form of resistance.
If 40%, probably even 20% of the country just cracked on with that, it would have a wonderful effect.
On how free everyone else felt.
I'm seeing that happening, aren't you?
I'm already seeing people opting out.
And I have, I know people who would, they wouldn't say this publicly.
And in a way, this is part of the problem that people don't want to say it publicly.
Because what we see in public is, of course, the controlled media, they're all in lockstep.
But they say, I've had enough, Dan.
I don't care.
Someone tells me they've had a positive test.
I'm like, don't tell me mate, I don't care.
I'm just cracking on with it now.
I've had enough of it, which seems really cold and callous.
That's to people who take the emotional response only, but never look at what's really going on.
Do you look at what the statistics really say, or do you only look at the 10 o'clock news and what the headline tells you it should mean?
It's the old joke.
In the old days, the news would tell us what happened, and we'd decide what to think about it.
And these days, the news tells us what to think, and we have to decide whether it really happened.
And not enough people are actually doing that.
I mean, I had a friend point out to me, and I posted it on my Facebook page, that technical briefing number 20 actually shows that people without any vaccination at all and people with two vaccines have approximately the same viral load.
So what was her passport for?
And so right there in that publicly published briefing is the passports aren't going to do anything fact, but there still seems to be pushing ahead with it anyway and no one's calling them out on it.
Take another one, if you actually crunch into some of the data in the same briefing, it indicated that someone who's under 50, who has had no vaccinations at all, is actually less likely to die of the Delta variant than someone who's had both vaccines.
Well, that doesn't surprise me.
Almost half as likely.
And what is odd, just for full disclosure, if you've had one vaccine, then you're actually the safest still.
But that's just what the data shows.
But no one's going into this nuance and saying, what does it really mean?
They are literally just believing the headlines and the headlines all say the same thing.
Yeah.
And people, it may not be a huge number, but some people have died having taken the vaccine because they took it.
And some people died because they didn't.
But can you tell me which is which before they've done it?
No.
And this is why pushing compulsory vaccination and having the old normal or the new normal even contingent on whether you've had one is so wrong.
Because we know that there will be adverse effects and no one can predict who's going to be affected and in what way.
So it has to always be an individual choice and continuation in normal life can't be dependent on it.
Yeah, yeah.
We get all that.
But like, what do we do?
I mean, what's going to happen next, do you think?
Outline the next six months, what's going to happen?
I mean, it may be six months, it may be two years, but I firmly believe that the train is in motion, and only a huge resistance from ordinary people can prevent it.
But the train is in motion towards a digital identity.
That's already being consulted on, by the way.
You know, there's a consultation out now and they'll be looking at getting contractors in to do all the programming.
And let's hope it's not EDS and all of those kinds of things from the old ID card debacle.
But I firmly believe a digital ID is coming, which ultimately, if you don't have it, you'll be locked out of all kinds of normal parts of society.
I think that the train means cash will disappear.
And I think then that what people don't realize, but what they should be most afraid of, is that then their compliance on anything at all, will become entirely dependent on whether the state, whether directly or through regulation or legislation that affects businesses and corporations, their compliance will directly affect whether they can access normal life.
Public transport, venues, the shops, the bank, their own bank accounts.
Now I know that seems like tinfoil hat stuff to a lot of people, But it's not tinfoil hat stuff in China where it's already happening.
So there is precedent for this and there's nothing in the water or the air in the UK that means psychopaths can't take over and digitally monitored social credit systems can't be installed.
And what worries me most is that anything that was vaguely conspiratorial about vaccine passports, you know, before, first it was denied, no, there'll never be such a thing.
And now they're on the horizon, instead of saying, you were right, thanks for warning us, they actually say, oh, actually, but maybe there'll be a good thing.
So they go from denying they'll ever exist to justifying why they should exist.
Yeah.
And this is too many people.
And it's a lack of critical thinking.
It's a lack of just basic looking ahead and thinking, what are the consequences?
Yeah.
Could they possibly be?
I'd be the same if I was interviewing somebody from Patriotic Alternative or from the Labour Party or whatever.
This is not going to be solved by by political affiliations, is it?
This is a universal problem.
It is a universal problem.
It's not going to be solved by political affiliations and actually something that I experienced recently gave me great cause to be optimistic about cross-party working on some things.
I'm involved in a website with another chap called Liberty for Assange and It's just two guys running a website in promoting the idea that, guess what?
Julian Assange should not be in jail, all right?
And we had the opportunity to interview a lady who would be politically of the left.
And the amount we could agree on, on the issues of why WikiLeaks was so important and why it's so immoral that Julian Assange is still in jail over 800 days later and still being denied proper access to his family and all of those things.
That gave me good reason to think that they could be cross working on this.
But people have to stop thinking in terms of left and right.
And I think that's one of the great tricks that's been imposed on us.
That we actually think left and right are the opposite.
It's not.
It's the state versus you.
And if we can start to ditch the idea of left and right, and I was reflecting on this, you know, on the way into work today, if we can ditch left and right completely, and just find the people who are About individual freedom, regardless of where they might vote or what routes, they think will achieve that freedom for them, then we can start to get somewhere, and people, many people a lot more libertarian than perhaps we think.
But they are locked into particular, you know, parties or organizations, and they do it out of good motives because they have these principles that they want to promote and they think that that's the best route to it.
And I really think a lot of the disagreement isn't about what people want to achieve but what's the best way to do it.
So if we can just find all the people who think small governments, individual freedom, COVID passports are wrong, digital IDs, compulsory are wrong, all of those things, then we might get somewhere.
But then you've got to unite and organize in some way in order to do something.
And that's the challenge, because who do you organize around?
Because those left and right wing ideas are so embedded that it's difficult to get past.
Yeah, I think it's on that analysis.
We've got our work cut out before we go really good.
Let's tell me a bit about WikiLeaks because and the importance thereof because I you know, A few years ago, it was an issue that I didn't really care about.
I was sort of agnostic about it.
People were saying, you should take more interest in this, but I didn't.
But you've obviously been fighting this for some time.
So tell me about why they were necessary.
What could they've done?
So, I mean, probably the most famous output from Wikileaks has to be the collateral murder video.
I don't even know what that is.
Okay.
It's one we're definitely worth looking at, but it's a video that shows civilians being killed by a drone, if I understand it correctly.
And this obviously is not the kind of footage that governments fighting dodgy wars of aggression in foreign lands really want to be leaked.
And yet they were, along with an awful lot of other stuff.
And so Wikileaks is Marmite to a lot of people.
Because while they appreciate that governments lie and cheat and murder and are corrupt, on the flip side, they feel really strongly that British or American or whoever, their agents shouldn't be harmed in the leaking of information.
And that is a real dichotomy, that whoever leaks information has got a way up.
Arguably, it's one of the risks of working for an organization such as the government that is so corrupt and so willing to lie and steal and murder.
If you work for them, and someone decides to tell the truth about what you're involved in, however innocently you might have got involved in it, that's one of the risks that you take, potentially.
A coal miner takes the risk.
Every day that are inherent to his job, a soldier, a policeman, a medic, a teacher, a driver, there are risks to all jobs.
Whoever's going to leak needs somewhere to do it.
There are lots of examples of where leaking information was very, very important.
It's not just Julian Assange, isn't it?
It's Chelsea Manning.
It's Edward Snowden.
It's Catherine Gunn.
You know, there are people who've leaked and suffered for it.
Dragged to court.
afraid for their liberty.
And, you know, in the case of the US, you know, if you're going to get extradited, you might be afraid for your life because they still have the death penalty over there.
And I wouldn't put past the elites who are having their nefarious work made public.
I wouldn't put anything past them, you know?
Yes, totally.
They will exact their revenge if they can.
And I think Julian Assange is in danger there.
But WikiLeaks is important because I still believe in the idea that government works for us.
Oh, you old-fashioned, naive fool, you.
Yeah.
Well, they ought to, anyway.
Yeah, they ought to, I was going to say.
Yeah, they don't.
I'm willing to keep pushing that way.
And the law ought to apply to them.
As it applies to other people.
And I don't just mean legislation, but I mean natural law, you know, you don't just get to kidnap people you don't just get to kill people, because it suits whatever hidden agenda.
Being led by whatever hidden person or group or cabal or whatever it is.
So much of what the global elites get away with is because governments get to hide behind, that governments basically act as their agents and get to hide behind things like the Official Secrets Act and stuff like that.
And people don't like to think this is what goes on, but it really is what goes on.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's why WikiLeaks is important, because we can go and see.
I mean, even I had a little crafty search of Clinton's email server.
I found it pretty boring.
But the fact that someone could leak it was brilliant, because they shouldn't have had their private server and they're a public person, they shouldn't have anything to hide in the operations of their office.
Hmm.
Can you see the Hunter Biden email contents?
Have you seen any of those?
To be fair, I haven't looked.
I've been too busy, but actually that could be pretty interesting.
I think probably too interesting is from what I've heard.
Um, yeah.
Well, um, Dan, um, we're not going to resolve anything in the space of an hour.
Um, but thank you for giving me the sort of tour d'horizon of the sort of the reasonable libertarian position.
I'm not sure the libertarians are going to save us right now.
I don't think any, any, who is going to?
Well, I could ask you, how much do you believe what Christianity says about this time in which we're living?
Because that probably holds part of the answer.
Yeah.
I suggest the only way is through.
Yeah.
No, I'm with you.
I'm totally with you on that one.
Good.
Well, Dan Liddicott, thank you very much for being my podcast guest.
May I remind listeners, viewers even, if you've enjoyed this podcast, don't forget, freedom isn't free, liberty isn't free either.
And you can support me on Patreon and Subscribestar or you can go to my Delingpole World website and get a special friend badge or discover how to support me on PayPal or Bitcoin.
I wish more of you would pay me in Bitcoin.
I like cryptos.
I don't care whether it could go to nothing.
It might go to the moon.
I mean, Bitcoin's on a roll at the moment, isn't it?
So give me your Bitcoin.
Give me lots of cryptos.
I'm up for it.
Thank you again, Dan, and good luck.
Pleasure.
Thank you, and to you.
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