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Nov. 8, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:17:22
C. J. Hopkins
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Time Text
Are you going to start?
Do I call you CJ, by the way?
Is that your preferred...?
Yeah, my name's Chris, but CJ is my... Hang on, let me turn this thing off.
You know, CJ is... All my stuff is published under CJ, and CJ Hopkins is the name that everybody knows me by.
So, you know... Yeah, but my name's Chris, so... I answer to both.
Yeah, but you're giving me option paralysis now.
I just think CJ's got a good...
It's got a good ring to it.
Call me CJ then.
Call me CJ then.
Everybody else does.
OK, cool.
Cool.
Well, we're going to plunge straight in there.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
CJ Hopkins is a man that everyone has been saying you've so got to have him on your pod.
So here we are, finally.
CJ and I are both battling major problems as we do this thing.
CJ has got... should I mention it or should I draw attention to it?
Would that make people stare at you for the whole interview?
Probably.
Yeah, they'll probably, they'll probably tune out on whatever we say.
I'm not going to mention, I'm not going to mention, I'm not going to mention, except that he's not an animal.
She's a human being.
I am.
I am.
In fact, the dog is farting madly in my office.
I'm just inhaling dog farts.
So if I sort of keel over and die, CJ, you'll, you'll understand why.
I'll take over, yeah.
Now, I know you're a writer, a playwright, and you've won awards and things.
Just tell me, are you a man of the left?
Is that right?
It depends on what the left means anymore.
I agree.
Were you a man of the left?
Yeah, and I still consider myself a man of the left.
I really haven't changed at all in my politics over the years.
I'm not a doctrinaire or anything.
I don't like isms very much, but sure, yeah, I'm a man of the left.
I've lived a lot of my life in, you know, New York City working in downtown experimental theater surrounded by liberals and leftists and, you know, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I only ask you, I mean, as you hinted in your answer, your immediate answer, the terms left and right are completely meaningless, I think, nowadays.
But I was just trying to establish one of the kind of stranger things I've noticed about these these weird weird times we're living through.
is the unlikely alliances that have been thrown up that who would have guessed half half the people who've become heroes of the last 18 months are people you'd never necessarily have predicted.
I mean, people like Eric Clapton, a few medics in the US, John Yanidis, Zev Zelenko, a guy treating the Orthodox Jewish community in New York.
I mean, It's it's bizarre, isn't it?
And I mean, me, I imagine I'm the kind of person that a few years ago, had you known who I was, you'd never have been breaking bread with me, you know, sort of conservative sort of fox hunting man kind of thing.
Well, maybe, maybe numerous years ago, you know, a few years ago, I might have, um, you know, I, I, I started this whole political satirist gig, uh, right around 2016, um, uh, right after Brexit and, you know, during the rise of Trump and when Trump got elected and what have you.
And, you know, part of the reason I came out of hiding, I'd basically been living like a hermit, you know?
Um, and part of the reason that I came out of hiding is I got, Interested in phenomena.
I saw what was happening as kind of a working class pushback against just the hegemony of global capitalism.
I know people on the right freak out when I call it global capitalism.
Global corporatism, if capitalism freaks you out.
But I got interested because I saw Trump as a rupture.
I saw Brexit first and Trump also as kind of a rupture in the matrix.
And I got very interested in the response of the establishment.
You know, to that rupture, that's what pulled me into it.
So, I don't know, I've been speaking to a very mixed audience for, I don't know, what is it, five years now or so.
The thing about the left, yes, I am a creature of the left, but I hate to even say it these days because what does it mean if I say that these days?
Does this mean that I'm in alignment with the and the military industrial complex and yeah yeah it's the definitions are are insane well do you not think i mean i i never intended the conversation to to go in this particular direction we may as well kill this this thing while we while we were on it um that we could we could talk about that for a whole night well we could yeah we could we could but i just think it's a
i think it's kind of a distraction but nevertheless do you not think that that actually left right were always an illusion they were always giving us this creating this this notion in so many people that that there was a there was a degree of politically political agency within their lives that if they voted for the right party they'd get right-wing policies and they voted for the left party they'd get left-wing policies
when it seems to me that what we've learned recently is that actually you get the same old shit regardless of who you voted it.
Well, sure, you know, the thing I try to explain this to, you know, I live in Berlin and I try to explain this to Germans and other Europeans a lot, you know, in the United States, and I think most Americans understand this, you know, in the United States, it usually, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever who you vote for, because no one is allowed into high office that hasn't been completely vetted by, you know, the corporatocracy and the military industrial complex.
And approved, you know, for service.
So, so it really doesn't make any difference.
That's what I thought was so interesting about the Trump phenomenon is, uh, you know, my reading of it was, is that he, he actually was an unauthorized president.
He got elected, you know, without being vetted by the establishment.
Um, so yeah, I think it's true.
I do think, I do think that there are real differences that have been completely, uh, you know, Overridden and rendered moot at this point between the left and the right.
I mean, if you want to get just down to the simple core of it, why I still consider myself a creature of the left is and I have a big obviously have a big libertarian streak running through me as well.
But I basically what it comes down to is I feel like if you're going to have a society and you're going to have a government in that society, then it should be the government's responsibility.
To, you know, to regulate, and if you're going to have a capitalist economy, it should be the government's responsibility to regulate that free market, you know, economy, that capitalist machine, to protect society in whichever way that society wants, you know, to enforce its values, you know, simple things like, you know, and An education system, a health care system, what have you.
And I still think that's, you know, that's the core of my leftism, you know, that and just my general sympathy and, and, and alliance with the working classes.
And I still think there are real differences.
A lot of people on the right are saying, no, let's strip away all the government's power to regulate and interfere with the marketplace.
But again, these arguments, I'd love to get to a point where I can have these arguments with people on the right again.
I think at this point, it's really irrelevant.
It's totally irrelevant.
I was thinking, you know, everything we've just said is really a conversation from pre-2020.
And you've, I know that you think this because I've read some of your most excellent essays on the subject, that trio of essays you wrote whose title temporarily eludes me.
What was it called?
The Covidian cult, probably.
The Covidian cult, yeah, yeah.
And just, do you want to just outline, save me doing it badly for you, what the thesis was in those essays?
I mean, essentially, we're living through totalitarianism, aren't we?
A kind of, sort of, cute totalitarianism.
What I was trying to do, yeah, what I was trying to do in those essays, and some people misinterpreted, the point was not, you know, to call people names and say you're a cultist and what have you.
The point was, yes, since the very beginning of this, I'm talking March 2020, the rollout, you know, I started documenting the rollout of all of this, and very early on, to me, like a new form of totalitarianism or something very similar to totalitarianism.
And it just looked, it has looked more and more like that as it has progressed.
And when I say a new form of totalitarianism, I mean a new form, you know, not Stalinism, not Nazism, you know, a new global capitalist form of it.
The point and the goal of the cult pieces, I think was, Let me back up.
I really, I understand, you can understand totalitarianism as a cult writ large, sort of a cult on a societal scale.
I think the machines, the machinery of totalitarianism and the machinery of cults at That advanced stage of cultism are maybe not identical, but incredibly similar.
The machines work exactly the same way.
And so I was using cults to try to get at this new totalitarianism that has been imposed on society for 18, 19 months now.
Yeah.
So just give us some, some examples of the characteristics of the totalitarian state that we are experiencing now.
Yeah.
Well, just the, you know, the raw physical examples of it, I mean, you can go back to, you know, When all this started, one of the first things I did is I compiled an incredibly long Twitter thread, just taking from the corporate media, not from any alternative sources, but just pulling down reports from the corporate media, just documenting the extreme authoritarian measures that were being rolled out.
People locked down in their homes and you had to have papers, you had to have papers to go outside.
And there was a famous incident in France where, you know, some woman was outside of her house without permission.
And somebody had seen her outside of her house too many times and, you know, called the police and they wrestled her to the ground.
And the neighbors were literally out on the balconies, you know, shouting curses down at this woman.
This, you know, there are many more examples, but this hysteria, first of all, the whole state of emergency that was rolled out.
You know, the first thing that was done was everyone was terrified.
You know, everyone was terrorized.
They rolled out the pictures of people dropping dead in the streets of China, you know, which are, of course, absolutely ridiculous.
And then it was just nonstop fear porn being pumped out by the corporate media, just fomenting the state of mass hysteria, which is totalitarianism 101.
And then, okay, state of emergency.
And then, okay, draconian measures.
And let's just clamp down on society and put everybody in this state of emergency environment.
environment.
And then starting with the polarization immediately.
First, it was people disobeying the, you know, the quote unquote restrictions, like the woman who was wrestled down in the street.
And now it has progressed to the point where, you know, the unvaccinated, I mean, we are literally the new undermentioned.
Yeah.
I mean, George Orwell in 1984 had this character, this hate figure of the regime called Emmanuel Goldstein.
And you would have, I can't remember how many minutes of hate it was directed at this hate figure, who may, two minutes of hate, who may not even have existed.
And in the same way now, the The anti-vaxxers have become the sort of Emanuel Goldstein or the unvaccinated have become the Emanuel Goldstein of the totalitarian.
And at the same time, as well as hate figures in totalitarian regimes, you also get the hero figures.
So, for example, in the Soviet Union, you had Stakhanov.
The who produced more.
Either he mined more coal or made more tractors than anybody else.
I mean, I think he he mined heroic amounts of coal, didn't he?
And in the same way, I don't know what you what you've had in in Germany.
You probably had similar similar figures.
But we had this early on in the in this kind of fake, fake, fake the pandemic.
We had this character called Captain Tom.
Do you know about Captain Tom?
Captain Tom was this old bloke who dominated the newspapers for weeks on end.
And Captain Tom was a World War II veteran who walked around his garden on his Zimmer frame.
He walked, I don't know, a long distance for an old man on a Zimmer frame.
In order to raise money for our NHS, the heroic NHS, which which was just like selflessly making the most amazing TikTok videos throughout this deadly pandemic, and therefore it needed to be celebrated through the through this Zimmer walk of this Zimmer marathon of Captain Tom.
And yet, I was looking at this stuff and I'm thinking, Why cannot people see that this is just complete horseshit?
I mean, it's so obvious that the guy wasn't even a war hero.
He was made out to be a war hero.
I mean, he had a very agreeable war riding motorbikes in the Far East.
Yeah, fine.
I mean, no, I'm not dissing his war record, but he wasn't what he was made out to be.
Everything about the story was just ersatz.
And I don't understand why so few people are aware that they are being played by this manipulation machine.
Have you got any theories on this?
Well, yeah, thanks, because that allows me to get into the, you know, the comedian cult pieces a little bit more, because it was another one of the main points of writing those pieces.
It's something, you know, I didn't come up with this just during the new normal, Well, I originally wrote about it during the Trump years, but it's a phenomenon.
It's something that I've written about repeatedly.
I think a lot of people understand propaganda and the effect of propaganda as people being misled or tricked or duped into believing things that are not true.
And obviously, that is part of the purpose.
an official propagandist, and I can get you to believe bullshit, I can get you to believe a lie, then great, my job is done.
But I don't see that as the fundamental, the essential purpose of official propaganda and what I've written and what I wrote about in the cult piece, because I think cults work exactly the same way.
It's not really fundamentally about deceiving people, What it is, is about creating a reality, a new reality, you know, scare quotes around reality.
It's creating this new reality in the social body and creating an atmosphere where people either conform to the new reality.
And force themselves to believe it, whatever it is, or they are punished and ostracized or disciplined or and or what have you.
I think I think a lot of, you know.
I've been seeing this for 18 months.
People are just dumbfounded.
It's like, how can people believe this?
The facts are easily accessible.
And as you said, a lot of the production values are just terrible, just really hokey and transparently so.
So people asking, how can so many people believe this?
What I was trying to get at in the cult pieces is it's not about people believing it.
It's not about.
being tricked or deceived, which is why you can't wake them up.
You know, you can't show, you can show them actual facts and they will just sort of, you know, melt down and start, you know, jabbering about, you know, somebody they knew who died or, you know, I'm going to, you know, go and, you know, hope you die suffocating on a respirator.
It's not a rational discussion.
These are people The real fanatics, you know, the hardcore fanatics, are people who have converted, you know, in essence, to a new religion, to a new reality.
And when you present them with facts, or you show them the hokiness of the spectacle, what you're doing, you're literally attacking their reality.
Right.
And they react to it in the same way that cult members react to anyone that is challenging their reality.
I mean, the thing that I brought up, or I mentioned it in the pieces is, you know, in Scientology, for example, the name for these people are, you know, is suppressive persons.
You know, anyone who anyone who challenges, you know, Scientology dogma is labeled a suppressive person and then is, you know, hounded and and so on.
This is the dynamic that we're living in.
It's it's I really don't believe that it's, you know, if if it were a matter of waking people up, they'd be awake by now.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's kind of depressing there, isn't it?
Because it means you said in one of your pieces that normally with cult people who've fallen victim to a cult, what you do is you go and stage an intervention.
You go and rescue them and you pull them out of the cult and deprogram them.
But you can't do that because we are living in the cult.
The whole of society is the cult and the dissenters are We're a minority, aren't we?
Yeah, this is the first thing that I wrote in the original piece and I think it's what part of what struck a chord with so many people is, is, you know, yeah, once you understand the cult and that metaphor works for you and now you understand it's normally the cult The cult has become the dominant society.
And those of us that have not joined the cult, we've become the subcultures.
has become the dominant society.
And those of us that have not joined the cult, we've become the subcultures, we've become the little islands inside of the broader cult.
And, you know, that is, is possible really for the first time in human history, it's possible because of, you know, Globocap, what I call Globocap, you know, the global capitalist system that we live in.
It's the first time And so it is now possible and we're living it.
The entire world is dominated by a single ideological power.
And so it is now possible, and we're living it, it is now possible to do this, to impose a reality on the entire globe.
Yeah, I wrote in the other piece I think it was in part three that's exactly what you do.
It's the only way to get through to someone who is deep inside of a cult.
out of the cult.
You can't reason with them.
You can't persuade them out of the cult.
You have to kidnap them and take them to a safe house somewhere and, you know, gradually deprogram over the time or deprogram them over time.
And we can't do it.
Yeah.
No, I think of all the many weird things that, that ought to be like red flags to anyone with a, any, any, any critical faculty at all.
It's the number of people who are dying, having had these support, these, these vaccines, so-called vaccines, which are supposed to protect them.
And, And instead of going Oh my God, I've just been conned by the medical establishment into taking a, an experimental gene therapy, which is, which it turns out has damaged my health or killed my beloved relative or whatever.
They just blanket, they, they, they don't make the connection at all.
And you see, you see this on Twitter, you see, yeah, there was one of the other day of a young woman in Australia, I think, who'd had some kind of, Something like myocarditis or a similar reaction to her having had her first jab.
And she was talking about her progress and saying how her cardiologist had said that actually she was making a good recovery and she was now ready to have the second jab.
And you're thinking, wait, what?
What is going on here?
And it's not just, you know, random, stupid individuals.
It's parents of children who've died in the night at schools.
These stories, which ought to be dominating the newspapers, particularly our famously robust, supposedly tabloid press in Britain, which, you know, five years ago would have been majoring on these stories, are now completely ignoring them.
And the public is participating in this, in this, this big lie.
Which, yeah, which is also just typical, you know, just classic cult-like behavior.
And it's behavior that is just, these are just classic hallmarks of both cults and totalitarian systems.
You know, just the ability, whatever you call it, Orwellian double thing, cognitive distance, whatever.
It's the ability to stare something in the face And refuse to let it register, you know, as part of reality, just to deny, just to deny that it is happening.
One of the, if we start talking about the kids, I'll tell you, you know, don't tell anyone it's, you know, it's a secret because I like to pose as, you know, a really jaded, cynical, you know, type of satirist and what have you.
You know, we get into the kid stuff and, you know, I was, you know, I'm going to break down and cry.
That's where I've been.
Recently, you know, they just rolled out the kid stuff.
And yeah, they're gonna, and I wrote a tweet about it, you know, trying to be funny and, and, and sharp at the same time.
It's, you know, it's, they're not all going to die.
You know, it's, you know, it's the odds are pretty good.
If you've got kids, you know, it's pretty good, you know, shoot them full of the vaccine.
And, you know, the odds are good that your kid won't die because we're only going to kill you know a few tens of thousands of children or something, you know, and I joke about this stuff but it's real I mean there's this.
I'm sorry, I got lost on that.
The cult stuff, if people dig into this, and I think it's easier to see it if you dig into it with the cult stuff, you can watch.
If you read about the progression of cults, you can watch.
Manson family, whatever, just a, you know, stereotypical, you know, cult.
They didn't start as a bunch of crazy, you know, acid-laced, you know, butchers.
You know, they started, you know, singing peace and love and dropping acid and having orgies and, you know.
And everything was groovy.
And then gradually, you know, gradually, it started getting a little more twisted.
And at every step, you know, every step that it took getting sicker and darker and weirder, you know, people did that.
They did exactly what you described.
You know, they say, you know, that's not happening.
You know, oh, no, no, Charlie didn't say that.
You know, this, you know, and it's all these little steps that get us here.
And again, it's not people being tricked.
It's people saying, look, we're, you know, we're part of this social body with the good guys.
We're the we're part of reality.
You know, we're not like those weird, you know, anti-vaxxers or whoever.
And it's people just terrified people just wanting to stay part of The herd part of the group.
You can also see the same progression in totalitarian systems.
A book that I recommend that people read if they don't know anything about the nuts and bolts of how things happened is by Milton Mayer.
Oh, gosh, now I forgot the title of it.
I'll think of it before we're done.
I was about to say Google is your friend, but of course it isn't at all your friend.
It's your bitter enemy.
Yeah, well, it's a, it's a book, you know, he interviewed a bunch of just regular Germans in a, you know, in a, in a small city, you know, and just painted a picture of, you know, the progression, how, how Nazism was rolled out, and how it affected people in their day to day lives, you know, it doesn't go from zero to 60.
It's all these little steps.
You rationalize one, then you rationalize the next one, and rationalize the next one.
Which is why they do this stuff incrementally.
Because if they dumped it on us all at once, we'd go, wait, what?
You're making us have this jab to go clubbing?
But yeah, if they do it little by little, they wear us down.
But it's, I mean, with hindsight, We can now look back on not just the years but even the decades leading up to now and realizing that there were numerous factors which were, I think, we were being softened up.
I'll give you one example.
I think one of the reasons that Their campaign to get us all to take these jabs has been so successful is a phenomenon which I would call pathological altruism, which has been inculcated in our culture for quite some time.
For example, the BBC, which I think is just a massive, massive state propagandist and always has been,
um every year there's this thing called Children in Need and this teddy bear with a with a you know a bandage over its eye called I can't remember is it Pudsey or something you know and there's a there's a sort of orgy of of of um the BBC the BBC's top stars go around the world saving children um and and we're encouraged to donate to this thing Live Aid was another of them
And it's sold as, you know, like appealing to your generosity, you know, dig into your pockets.
There are people, which is not an unworthy aim, but actually when it becomes this annual event and it becomes relentless, it creates in the mind of the populace this idea that, yes, I must give for this higher cause, regardless of whether the cause is actually worthwhile or not, because you don't know where the money's going, really.
But that kind of thing, I think, because we could spend, you know, five hours talking about all the different ways we've been softened up for what's happening now.
Well, sure.
I think what I heard mostly what you're getting into, and it's a lot of what I do in this gig.
It's not specifically what I've done in my fiction or in my plays or what have you, but as a political satirist and a commentator, a lot of my focus is on just the sheer power of the corporate media.
I think It's fascinating to me academically and it's frightening to me personally, just the sheer power of the global corporate media propaganda apparatus.
If you look back at 20th century totalitarianism, 20th century propaganda, it looks like kindergarten.
You know, we could go back and analyze the whole rollout of the new normal, the entire, you know, apocalyptic pandemic narrative and how it was rolled out.
It's, as a, you know, as a theater person, as somebody who's involved in the performing arts, it's stunning.
You know, it's stunning.
What I'm trying to get at, I think, is, is, I think, most, I think it's encouraging that I feel like there are more and more people who are waking up to it and and approaching it critically.
power of that machine and what it is doing to us every single day.
I think it's encouraging that I feel like there are more and more people who are waking up to it and approaching it critically.
But again, I've been in contact with a lot of people who don't read the media critically.
And, and it's like, once again, it's like somebody talking to someone in a cult.
And it feels maybe you've had this experience too, is someone just sort of repeating an article that they read in the Guardian this morning, as if.
As if this were the gospel truth because it was published in The Guardian.
Numerous examples of this during the Trump years.
I mean, The Guardian, they still have not retracted.
They published this infamous article about, I forget what it was.
It was Paul Manafort, I think, supposedly secretly met with Julian Assange in the embassy as part of the Russian plot to destroy democracy and what have you.
Paul Manafort was nowhere near This was just complete, utter fiction.
Total fiction that was published and ripped apart by critics, you know, Glenn Greenwald and other people.
And The Guardian, you know, they never pulled it, never retracted it, never apologized for it.
Because they don't have to.
That's the power that we're dealing with.
Because we are indeed living, as I think you said in another of your essays, we're living in a post-truth age where genuinely the facts do not matter anymore and they can get away with it.
They can absolutely spew out these lies continually.
I mean, Russiagate was one example.
The narrative about the January the 6th, another one.
You don't get any honesty in any of the mainstream media.
I find it extraordinary.
Not even in the conservative press.
You'll just get columnists in a notionally conservative newspaper like the Telegraph just repeating as if it were fact that this was an insurrection.
And it just wasn't.
The weird thing is, I spent, what, 30 years, maybe, or certainly 20 years as a mainstream media journalist.
And I consider myself a pretty, you know, okay, I can be a bit gullible sometimes, but I think I'm a pretty smart cookie.
You know, I can do critical thinking and stuff.
I can tell you that never in my mainstream media career Did I feel like I was being pressured into expressing a particular viewpoint on the part of the newspaper employing me?
I never felt like the media was this kind of manipulative behemoth which was controlling the agenda and serving forces.
And yet, I think probably I was wrong.
I was deluded.
But it's weird, isn't it?
That even when you're inside that industry, you don't really see, you know, you think it's acting in good faith.
I thought all Germanists were like me, that their sole mission was to find out the truth, wherever it was, without fear or favor.
It's, it's, you know, of course, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote about this and you know in their classic and manufacturing consent and what have you.
And, and I've, I've written I've mentioned it in my collected essays.
I think people, it's a mistake to think that, you know, that there's a conspiracy of people that are running things and issuing orders and saying that, you know, you can say this and you can't say this.
No, it's a machine.
It's an organic network.
It's how power functions.
The point that Chomsky and Herman were making is you don't have to tell corporate journalists, you don't have to tell Guardian journalists what they can write and what they can't write.
By the time they get a byline, by the time that they're able to publish things, they know what they can write and what they can't write and where the lines are and how far they can go and what lines they can't cross.
And, you know, they don't get you don't get into that position without demonstrating your awareness of those lines and your willingness to stay within them.
That's the point.
You can see it.
I spent a little time a little while ago kind of harassing Glenn Greenwald on Twitter.
I was doing it because from the beginning of the pandemic narrative, you know, first, you know, Greenwald wasn't saying anything.
And then he came out and he was, you know, just, you know, pushing vaccines and, you know, going after, you know, because of course he hates Bolsonaro.
Which I'm not a fan of Bolsonaro either.
And, you know, and Glenn was just pushing the, you know, the vaccines and it's horrible and everybody's dying, you know, and I, you know, Greenwald is someone that I, you know, I respect the guy and I admire him.
And I would expect somebody like Greenwald to approach this whole narrative and the rollout of all of these Uh, you know, restrictions on society.
I would expect him to approach it critically, right?
So I started, you know, needling him a little bit.
I don't know if he ever saw my tweets, you know, he doesn't follow me.
So maybe he never even saw them, but I'm sure other people were doing it too.
At some point, you know, he started gradually finding the places where he could express some criticism of the narrative.
Without crossing the line and falling into a crazy anti-Vaxxer camp.
I mean, just as a journalist, James, I'm pointing this out because, you know, and as a student of how this works, you know, he's a real interesting case.
And again, you know, I absolutely respect and admire him.
But if you watch his behavior around this narrative, you can watch someone who is You know, just tiptoeing around where he thinks he can go and you can see him walk right up to a line, you know, and then feel like, oh, maybe I've stepped over that line a little bit far.
Let me go and focus on something else for a while.
You know, you know what I'm saying?
That's not, no one is giving Glenn Greenwald orders.
You know, it's the territory itself that is disciplining him and telling him what he can say and what he can't say.
Let's be honest.
The reason that I can write the way that I write and speak the way that I speak is because no one's paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
I don't have a big lucrative job.
There's not very much that people can take away from me.
So I can say whatever the fuck I want.
Yeah it's really annoying isn't it not being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Although I'm used to it is kind of a blessing as well because it means that you are free.
It's interesting though isn't it you if you wouldn't if you were talking about really establishment journalists and you're making a list of them Glenn Greenwald would not be on the list you'd think he was kind of A bit edgy, a bit prepared to go to places that others weren't.
And interesting, you mentioned Chomsky.
I mean, Chomsky, I've had a love-hate relationship with him.
I mean, I think a lot of what he says is just complete bullshit.
But I think what he said about manufacturing consent was absolutely on the money and he did a fantastic, fantastic interview with with some British journalists like was it the one with big sticky out ears?
I can't remember but but he really nailed him you know this guy was sort of he he was in this deluded state a bit like I was where like no one's ever put any pressure on me to to say anything that I and Chomsky says to him something like you wouldn't even be sitting where you are now if you didn't If you weren't self-censoring, if you weren't part of the machine.
But anyway, that wasn't the point I was going to make about Glenn Greenwald.
It's interesting, isn't it?
I mean, it's disappointing.
Even the likes of Glenn Greenwald have been incapable of rising to the occasion, as they should.
I mean, this ought to be, this ought to be the moment that every journalist in the world has been waiting for.
Finally, they can take on this almighty, mendacious establishment and show that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
And instead, they've all gone and said, Wow, the Emperor's new clothes are just like amazing.
The Emperor's new normal is a place I can live comfortably with, which is very disappointing.
One more point.
I suppose what we're talking about, we haven't mentioned it yet, is this thing called the Overton window, the acceptable frame of discourse.
And it varies.
Oh, you make me want a cigarette now, smoking like that, you bastard.
Smoking right on your podcast, James.
Well done.
I'm going to inhale your... Is that a rollie?
Yeah, I'll blow it your way.
Yeah, excellent.
They haven't banned that yet in Germany.
Yeah, the Overton window.
I look at the Overton window and I don't go, oh, well, I better not stray outside its confines.
I think, I want to smash that window and its frames.
I don't accept the Overton window at all.
Why would you?
You just... I mean, if the truth is outside the frame of that window, then the frame should be broken.
I think there's not just one Overton window, there are many Overton windows.
The reason that I bring Greenwald up is not to pick on him, and actually it's because of how much I respect him.
And thus I have these expectations of him.
Just to pick a complete, you know, You know, corporatist mouthpiece, you know, Luke Harding, you know, who writes for The Guardian and just writes, you know, fiction, nonfiction for The Guardian.
I have zero expectations of Luke Harding.
You know, I see, you know, I would never do that.
I, you know, make fun of him from time to time, but absolutely zero expectations.
He's doing his job.
Right.
But someone like Greenwald, you know, the reason that he commands the respect that he does in the business is because of what he's accomplished and what he's done and because of his critical approach.
And that's why those expectations are there.
The Overton window for a Luke Harding is a completely different Overton window than the Overton window for Glenn Greenwald.
And that's why I say it's so interesting to watch, you know, Greenwald taking steps and beginning, you know, and criticizing the, you know, the pandemic narrative, the inconsistency of it, and, you know, some of the authoritarianism of it, but not being able to take that big step.
And start criticizing it as this massive psyop, this massive propaganda operation.
You were talking about the opportunity that it should represent for journalists.
Again, for a journalist, for a corporate mouthpiece like Luke Harding, it represents great opportunity.
It's an opportunity to just pump out as much propaganda as he possibly can.
For someone like Greenwald, The thing that drives me crazy is, you know, these guys are avoiding the probably the biggest story in our lifetimes.
You know, it's society, global society, right?
Global society.
It's not just happening in one country.
Global society is being radically restructured.
Yeah.
You know, it's our fundamental ideology, our fundamental understanding of reality.
And the reality that we live in is being radically restructured, is being radically altered.
And it is being done openly.
And the machinery of it is right there to be reported on.
And it makes me crazy.
The only people who are really digging into that story are the people who are safely marginalized enough that we can be dismissed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's, that's absolutely right.
By the way, I meant to ask you, given that you're in Germany, how are things over there?
Terrible.
It's, it's, it's...
Let me slow down and see if I can describe it.
I left the United States and I wanted to come and live in Europe.
I moved to Berlin in 2004, 2005, bounced around for a while, and I had been so completely happy here.
You know, again, creature of the left, still, you know, a lot of social democracy left here, you know, healthcare system, free education, you know, culture.
And there was this feeling of basic solidarity, I think, in the society, you know, of we're all in this together and we don't mind, you know, helping out people who are unfortunate or paying for education or whatever.
Just a general good feeling for, you know, a leftist type like me.
And when the new normal was rolled out in the spring of 2020, I watched German society perform, you know, what the Nazis called Gleissschalte.
Yeah, you're familiar with this?
It's just the entire machine, the entirety of German state media, government, and the most frightening and heartbreaking part of it is the vast majority of actual German society.
People just clicked heels and started, you know, Marching in lockstep.
And anyone who expressed any form of doubt, questioning, criticism, you know, opposition, we have been demonized from the very beginning.
Demonized as, you know, far-right, neo-Nazi, crazy conspiracy theory, reality deniers.
It's incredibly oppressive, is how it is here, James.
It's suffocating.
Yeah, I'm really sorry to hear that.
I've got this quiet love for Germany.
I mean, I've just spent, you know, a couple of weeks there, here and there, living in Frankfurt.
And I really liked the Germans, and I liked Their attitude, their cleanliness, their just an agreeable society to live in.
And you know, we're encouraged in this country to think of the Germans as the enemy or the Nazis or whatever.
But I think that's just kind of a legacy of that propaganda campaign from World War Two.
But yeah, I can see how upsetting it would be for you to have moved into that world and then watched it turn.
I mean, I mean, I suppose like, here am I feeling sorry for you.
Something similar is going on over here.
I mean, I think we're all we're all living through it.
We've all got this experience of people that we thought were on side and shared all our values.
And suddenly have turned into these what it's like invasion of the body snatchers, isn't it?
They've all turned into the pod creatures.
It is, it is.
And, you know, and I want to say this, it's not, this is not, you know, I...
I skewer the Germans a lot because I live here, and I've lived here for 17 years.
I don't know how long it is now.
And this is my home now, and that's why I skewer them.
But none of this is in any way unique to the Germans, the suffocating atmosphere that I'm talking about.
It just has a German character here.
That's all.
In the United States, it has an American character.
In Australia, it has an Australian character.
And here it has a German character.
I think part of the reason that it was just so personally heartbreaking for me, you know, I live in Berlin and that's where I've lived and Berlin of all places, you know, and I think this is true of Germany generally after the, you know, after the Nazis and the Second World War and what have you.
You know, it's just huge, you know, denazification, you know, efforts were made culturally.
And, you know, most of the people in Berlin and certainly all of the people that I knew and hung out with Germans I'm talking about, you know, the I kind of felt like this is the last place, you know, Berlin would be the last place that would ever
You know, succumb to this type of mass hysteria and totalitarianism again, because the younger generations of Germans having, you know, dealt with their history were just so deceived, you know, so hyper aware Of anything like fascism or totalitarianism and what have you.
And that's, it's just been personally heartbreaking to me to watch.
And, you know, and there is plenty of, you know, opposition.
We're a minority, but there's a lot of opposition also and a lot of resistance among Germans.
I don't mean to suggest that it's universal, but it's undeniable.
The vast majority of German society is, you and parroting propaganda and it's suffocating.
I don't know, have you read anything about, who is it, Joshua Kimmish, the footballer? - What, is he one of the job victims or is he one of the campaigners? - I just, no, I just, I mentioned this 'cause it's something that's happening right now that people can look I mentioned this 'cause it's something that's happening right now that You know, basically, he didn't he doesn't want to get vaccinated.
Right.
So, you know, he didn't want to get vaccinated.
The media got a hold of it.
He's being crucified.
Basically, he's being crucified by government officials and the entire German state media.
And, you know, it's it's, you know, Kimmich won't get vaccinated.
And now, you know, I just there was an opinion piece in one of the tabloids today.
You know, now anyone who defends anyone who defends Kimmich's right to make this personal decision for himself, you know, they're also being crucified.
Now they're being interrogated.
And it's like, well, are you vaccinated?
Have you been vaccinated yet?
And why haven't it's the hysteria?
I don't I don't think McCarthy is Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, if you stick your head above the parapet, particularly if you're in a kind of high profile field like sports, I mean, Djokovic has had a similar Sort of hounding, hasn't he, because of his stance on the jab.
And I was talking to a tennis player the other day, and he was telling me that a French player had very reluctantly had the jab.
and had a very, very bad reaction to the point where he was bedridden.
And he's probably in a state where he's never going to be able to play competitive international tennis again, this guy.
And when this French guy, I forget his name, I'm not well up on my tennis stats, but when this guy sort of said on social media, "Look, this is what's happened to me since I had the jab." Instead of being sympathetic towards him, all his fellow players who'd had the jab sort of said, how dare you?
How dare you talk about this?
This stuff, which may put people off having this life saving.
So, yeah, it's it's we know why they're doing this.
We know how it operates.
Again, James, there's the cult analogy again.
I mean, that behavior you just described, you know, let's just for a moment, let's just say, okay, let's say the virus is as dangerous as they say it is, and the vaccines are really just a good faith attempt to, you know, in a rational world,
You know, if that's the case, and people are taking the vaccines and having these bad reactions and dying, you know, rational people would say, you know, okay, we're still all you know, we're all engaged in this good faith effort.
But oh, we've got a problem.
You know, we've got a problem here that we need to address.
Right, it's okay.
Let's, you know, let's make sure everyone understands it's not, you know, it's not, you know, 90% of the people taking the vaccine.
But we have a significant percentage of people who are dying, you know, and being, you know, crippled and experiencing all sorts of things.
And we need to look into this.
You know, we need to look into this to try to improve.
This is a rational response.
And instead, what we're witnessing is the response that you just described, which is a completely cult-like response.
It's also just a classic hallmark of totalitarian systems, just this absolute denial of reality. - Yeah.
Yeah.
So, given that the world is now a gigantic cult, and we can't stage an intervention by removing people from the cult physically, how do we get out of this mess?
Yeah, well, I've recommended a course, and a lot of people have a lot of criticism of the course that I've recommended.
It's what I've been doing since the very beginning.
I think because we can't pull people out of the cult and take them to the safe, dominant, non-cult society because it doesn't exist, the only real choice that we have is to create as much friction as humanly possible within the cult.
We can't get out of it.
There's nowhere to go.
People ask me all the time, you know, CJ, why don't you leave Germany?
CJ, why don't you, you know, why don't you leave and go somewhere?
Where?
Where am I going to go?
There's nowhere to go.
We're stuck inside of it.
And really, the only choice we have is to create friction.
It goes back.
Let me talk about this for a little bit because I want to make it clear.
It goes back to basic nonviolent civil disobedience principles.
I don't believe that the majority of who I call the new normals, people who are collaborating with us, you know, going along with it and not asking questions and not thinking critically, not challenging.
I don't believe that the majority of these people are fanatics.
I believe there is a hardcore minority of absolute fanatics, but I believe the majority of people are simply people just like the good Germans during the rise of Nazism.
They're simply people who are trying to keep their jobs and feed their families.
They don't want to get punished.
They don't want to get singled out.
They don't want to, you know, get ostracized from their social circles.
You know, and so they're going along to get along.
Right and as long as they can continue to pretend to believe.
That this isn't totalitarianism.
This isn't a new form of totalitarianism.
It isn't, you know, the ugly thing that it is.
If they can continue to convince themselves and each other that this is all really just a response to a really terrible virus and that all of these things are necessary, as long as they can continue to believe in this, you know, fantasy, Then they can continue to stay with the herd and they're not forced into a position.
But I think if they are shown and confronted with the actual despotic totalitarian nature of what this thing is, if they're confronted enough over a long enough period of time, you know, I have to believe in the fundamental goodness of these people.
And if they're forced into a position where they're looking at the ugliness, the despotic ugliness and the totalitarian ugliness of this, we're talking segregation.
You know, Germany's talking now about a lockdown of the unvaccinated.
Yeah.
Right.
Ugly, ugly stuff.
What is going on in Australia?
Ugly stuff.
If people are forced to stare at the ugliness of the new normal, right?
And choose, you know, and choose.
Do you know what I'm trying to say, James?
I don't know if I'm saying it well enough.
As long as they're able to keep a veneer over the ugliness, then they can stay in good standing with the cult.
What I've been trying to do is push the reality, the ugly reality of it into people's faces and say, look at what you're doing.
Look at what you're cooperating with.
You know, we talked about the kids before.
People who are collaborating with this system, people who are not criticizing, not asking questions, not speaking out, right?
They're about to kill thousands of kids.
Yes, they are.
Right?
Yeah.
Thousands of kids are going to be killed unnecessarily, absolutely unnecessarily.
They're going to be killed for the sake of maintaining this narrative.
And the people who are collaborating with it, you know, are helping to kill those kids.
Now, what I just did is an example of what I've been trying to do is I want to grab people, whoever I can still grab and say, you're going to kill kids now, you know, in order to maintain your fantasy.
And yes, initially they will say, shut up CJ, you're a crazy anti-vaxxer, I'll run away from you.
But if I can grab them and make them hear that enough times, I have to believe that somewhere inside them, the part of them that is decent and good is going to say, that's too much.
I don't want to kill the kids.
I have to speak up.
I have to say something.
I have to start asking questions.
Maybe I'm wrong, James, but that's my faith.
That's what I believe.
Yeah, I hate to rain on the parade of your theory, because I'd love to think there was a way out of this.
But it seems to me that the powers that be I mean, given that we're being run by really behavioral psychologists more than anything else, and they're a step ahead of us.
They've already worked out that they've already seeded the idea, and they were doing this at least six months ago.
I started reading the first articles, I think, over six months ago.
They seeded the idea that the unvaxxed are the problem, and the unvaxxed are creating these new variants, like the Delta variant.
And it's the Unvaxxed people who are going to be blamed for the deaths of these children.
It's almost impossible to believe that the media, which we imagine to be the medium by which people were informed of the truth or the news, The media is actually gaslighting us into believing something that simply isn't true.
And even though there's loads of scientific evidence, this has been suppressed.
I mean, any halfway decent virologist, epidemiologist, vaccine expert would be able to tell you, well, one thing they say is you don't vaccinate into pandemics because what it does is it creates precisely these kinds of mutants and instead of the virus
um becoming milder it actually develops these new deadly strains so they know all about this and yet this information has been suppressed and I mean every newspaper's got a science correspondent or a medical correspondent they they ought to be ringing up these these scientists and the scientists saying well no this is this is a crazy idea um But they're not.
Nobody is doing their job.
The scientists aren't doing their job.
The journalists aren't doing their job.
We've got a perfect storm of stupid.
And I wonder whether you're pointing out to people, to the brainwashed, that, what, do you really want to sacrifice children on the altar of this fantasy?
I don't think that they're going to buy it.
That's my worry.
It's again and this is where I have to make the distinction, you know, you're absolutely right, James, they just I think, you know, all of the mainstream outlets were forced to just run the results of this.
I think it was a Lancet study that just came out, you know, just showing that.
You know, people who were double vaccinated, you know, can spread the virus just like people who are unvaccinated.
I mean, it's just there's literally no grounds at all for the segregation system that is being rolled out.
But again, getting back to the cult stuff that I was talking about, I don't think it's not about the tactic that I'm talking about.
It's not about trying to convince anyone Of any facts or truth or anything, I'll give you another example of something that I put out recently in one of my newsletters.
It was a video that I just found online that somebody had posted of.
It was a teacher, I think, or a mother, perhaps very small, an infant or toddler.
Maybe I was a toddler that it was at school or something or at a play date and the toddler didn't want to wear the mask.
And the adult just over and over and over again, you know, speaking in this sickly sweet, you know, sentimental fascist voice, you know, and the toddler was wailing.
I mean, just hysterically wailing, you know, terrified and tortured.
And the video went on and on as the new normal was like, you know, oh, no, no, you have to leave it on, darling.
And you know, the toddler's like, you know, losing it.
My point was not to convince the, you know, some new normal of watching that of any information.
My point was, look at what you're doing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look at what you're doing.
Just like the civil rights activists in the 1960s in the United States, the point of a lot of those actions, the lunch counter actions and the marches, the point was to get abused, to have the Mississippi police beat the hell out of you and show it to liberals in the North and say, this is what you're Condoning this is what you're collaborating with by doing nothing.
It's not.
I don't believe you can get through to these people rationally anymore.
What I'm what I'm suggesting is they need to be forced to look at the reality of what they're doing, torturing children, killing children, you know, if it's not enough, if it's not enough, you know, that if segregation and, you know, and police state tactics aren't enough to shake them up, you know, well,
You know, it's the kids, you know, here we are, it's time to kill the kids, you know, and they need to, they need to look at it.
They need to look at what they're doing.
Again, it's not rational.
It's about holding a mirror up and saying, do you see what you're doing?
Yeah.
Well, it may not work.
It may not work, James, but I have to.
I can't.
I don't think I can live in a world where I believe that that tactic won't work.
I've got to continue to believe that in their core, underneath all the conditioning, underneath all of the programming, that people are essentially decent, or at least not sadistic, fascistic monsters.
Yeah.
I look, I think it's, it's the best we've got because, uh, I mean, like you, I'm not, I'm in, I'm in pretty much the same trade as you are and I'm doing my bit by communicating.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not a street fighter.
I've just haven't got this, got the skillsets, you know, I haven't done my martial arts training.
I haven't got the weapons.
I haven't got the, got the strength, but what I can do is communicate.
And I think that that's, well, what else can we do?
It's all and James, I want to be clear.
Everything that everybody is doing is important.
There are a lot of people, you know, I'm not putting the scientific facts out the medical facts out because I don't have that expertise.
That's not what I do.
There are a lot of good people who are doing that and that's absolutely necessary.
We need the facts out there.
You know, there are people I just did a thing with Catherine Austin Fitz recently.
Absolutely.
And all of that is incredibly important.
I'm not saying that my tactic and my approach is the only way to go.
I think everything that everyone is doing to push back, because if I can shake one of those people loose by showing them the little toddler that they're torturing, You know, then hopefully they can turn, you know, sideways and see all of the medical facts in a new light and actually see them for once, or turn this way and watch what's happening, you know, with the massive financial restructuring that is going on.
You know, all of that information needs to be there for the moment when a crack opens in someone's mind and they're able to actually see outside of the cult.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I was wondering, sort of feeling my way towards a final note of optimism.
Sorry, don't laugh darkly.
I'm not an animal!
That's not going to help, is it?
If you go laugh darkly when I use the word optimism.
I've got one for you actually, go ahead.
Oh yeah, I was just wondering whether I mean, I've, I've discovered who you are in the last, you know, in the last six months or so.
I imagine that, are you, are you having signs that you are reaching a wider audience?
Are you, are you, are you finding people who, yeah.
Tell me about that.
Um, uh, yes.
Uh, you know, I, I, you know, obviously I started reaching a wider audience when I came out of my cave in 2016.
I, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't even on social media or anything.
I was, you know.
Was it in Tora Bora, your cave?
Yes.
Yep.
It was deep in the core and Osama and I, you know, hanging out, writing experimental, writing experimental plays and stuff.
You know, he was a CIA asset.
Well, so am I actually.
We were both down there, you know, with our handlers and stuff, you know, cooking up the experimental place.
No, when I came out of my cave in, you know, 2016 and started writing political satire and commentary, you know, obviously, I started getting an audience for that.
And that's a wider audience than one gets writing experimental literature.
But since March 2020, since the rollout of this, absolutely, my audience has expanded, in my opinion, massively.
It's nothing compared to a lot of people, but it's huge.
And I think it is...
Because so many of us, you know, so many of us who have not joined the cult who are still thinking critically, we're still trying to, you know, hold on to reality, you know, we are surrounded We are surrounded by this overwhelming, oppressive force.
You just described it as gaslighting, and that is exactly what it is.
And I think that so many of us, you know, we're reaching out for other voices that can feed back to us and say, hey, you know, yeah, I'm still living in reality, you know, just like you, you know.
And I think it's absolutely essential, you know, to all of us.
It's not just me talking to people.
I get it back.
You know, readers write to me as well, you know, and that feeds me.
I think we really need that to hold on to our sanity.
And I do have an optimistic note for you, if you want.
Yeah, yeah, please.
It's something I just touched on in my in my latest essay.
And again, you know, at the core of my cynical satirist pose is just a hopeless idealist and sap.
And so maybe I'm wrong, but here's what I believe.
I don't think that they can maintain, we're about to go through winter number three of apocalyptic virus, right?
It's winter number three of mass hysteria.
You know, I don't think they can sustain it into winter number four.
I don't think That they can make it past the spring.
I think come April, either we're going to be locked into this new reality, which is completely insane, where we'll all be walking around with our medical-looking masks for the rest of our lives, showing our little conformity papers, digital compliance certificates, You know, to go in and get a cup of coffee somewhere.
Either we're going to be living in that kind of pathologized, you know, totalitarian dystopia, or we will have thrown a monkey wrench into this thing.
And I'm not saying that it's going to disappear and go away and shangri-la, but we will have disrupted it enough That kind of dystopia cannot become our reality.
The point that I made in my latest piece was, we don't have to take the battle to them.
There are enough of us.
If we simply hold out, if we simply withstand this coming winter, this siege that we're about to experience.
Yeah, I was going to say, this sounds like the siege of Leningrad, CJ.
And I know from what I've read about it, that wasn't fun.
It's it's not I don't think it's going to be fun.
I'm dreading it James, but I think if it's it is exactly that is exactly the analogy because at the end of the day, the you know, the little digital compliance certificate system will not work.
If 25 to 30% of us refuse to participate, it will not work.
It can't it cannot function right.
It's it and if If we simply hold out and refuse to join it, refuse to join the cult and just, you know, eat the horses and, you know, exactly.
And then eat the rats and our pets and, you know, and eat our shoes when it comes to that.
And if we can just hold out until April, until the spring, I don't think they can keep this level of mass hysteria going for another year.
Well, on that sort of semi-optimistic note, CJ, where can people read your stuff?
They can go to the ConsentFactory.org.
That's my blog.
I've got a sub stack now too.
The sub stack is free or paid.
People can subscribe to it and get my columns right in their email inboxes.
They can pay me if they can afford it.
I need the money.
And if they can't afford it, they can still get them, you know, and just help spread the word.
My books are out.
You can get them in any, you know, get them from any book story, you know, Amazon or the bookshop, you know, the non-Amazon online places.
Yeah, that's it.
I'm easy to find.
That's good.
And I must say, as I always do, probably too late because people have probably stopped watching at this point, but thank you for your support, those of you who support me.
Patreon, Subscribestar, dellingpoleworld.com, All these places you can you can support me.
Give me Bitcoin.
I'd love I love Bitcoin.
No one has given me Bitcoin, but I think you should.
You can buy special friend badges.
Yeah, because freedom isn't free.
And I mean, CJ, people like CJ and me are going to find ourselves increasingly marginalized.
And I don't know what's going to happen.
But we're going to keep fighting the fight to the bitter end and beyond.
Aren't we?
What else can we do?
That there really isn't anything else to do and there's nowhere to go.
There isn't.
And you know what I'm thinking?
I don't that doesn't depress me particularly.
I just think like.
I think that the world that we'd like to live in is worth fighting for.
I don't want to sound like a crazy idealist, but actually I would rather not live in the world that they are planning for us.
So it's better to fight for the death.
Because, you know, I don't want to live a slave.
I really don't.
These are horrible people.
I can't.
You know, it's simple.
And I think, James, again, faith.
I have faith there.
I think there are enough people out there like me.
I mean, I simply cannot.
I cannot live in a society that functions that way.
You know, I won't make it.
And so, yeah, there's really no choice.
Yeah.
Good.
Excellent.
Well, I'll see you in the foxhole.
Thanks TJ.
We're in the camps.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
That's what I mean.
I'm really, I'm really dreading the camps.
Yeah.
Oh God.
Anyway, let's not go there.
Thanks a lot TJ.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me on James.
Okay.
Pleasure.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
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