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Feb. 28, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:28:22

Michael Malice

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	I love Danny Paul, go and subscribe to the podcast baby!
	I love Danny Paul, unless another time subscribe with me!
	Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
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	Now, more enjoyment!
	Michael Malice, welcome to The Delling Pod.
	I'm really excited, but I don't know what to expect, because I don't know whether you're remotely familiar with the stuff I do.
	I am.
	We follow each other on Twitter, though mostly my mentions, to be fair.
	I have a very strong affection for British people who are on the right.
	In fact, I just recently acquired... When you spend a lot of money, it's acquired instead of bought.
	I recently acquired two of Margaret Thatcher's bookcases from her home, and they're in my living room right now.
	That's kind of... wasn't what I was expecting to hear.
	Right.
	So, the only thing is, Michael, that... like...
	Four years ago, that remark would have made me big in my trousers.
	I would have thought, ooh, a Thatcherite American.
	And now I'm kind of, I've moved on.
	I'm now completely over the left, the left-right thing.
	And I know that you're an anarchist.
	Sure.
	So you must be to a degree where I am, in as much as I mean, to be an anarchist, you've got to kind of believe that the state in itself is the problem and the plague on all their houses.
	Is that where you're coming from?
	Absolutely, but vis-a-vis Thatcher, you have to also appreciate I was born in the Soviet Union, right?
	And Americans had a greater reverence for Thatcher than the Brits did in the sense that the idea of Thatcher, in many ways, was better than the reality of her.
	It's better when she's coming to visit and she's on your TV than when she's there 24-7.
	I do.
	And the kind of the myth of Margaret Thatcher as opposed to the day-to-day politician is different.
	But also you have to appreciate as an immigrant to own her furniture in my home is such a moment of like, all right, you've made it.
	You know, this is some kind of you've arrived, don't you think?
	I do.
	I mean, is it is it tasteful furniture?
	Oh, it's it's this it's two bookcases and they're ginormous.
	And it's this like really kind of tacky old lady, like orangey velvet lining on the shelves.
	But I flipped them upside down because you could still see the shadows of where she had like, I don't know, bowls or trophies displayed.
	And they're beautiful.
	And let me tell you something, James.
	They weren't expensive, but they don't tell you how much it costs to ship two ten-foot-tall, three-meter bookcases from London to Austin.
	And it's not cheap.
	Yeah, but do you know what?
	I think one of the great pleasures about... I think it is a man thing, that men love having objects, collectible things, to show people.
	Yes.
	I mean, yeah, so I can see, I can see however hideous they are or not, or not, however expensive it must have been to ship them across to Austin, which is not a place you'd expect to see sort of Thatcher memorabilia.
	Right.
	It must, it must be a talking point.
	They fit my home perfectly in terms of size and stature.
	and there's two of them.
	So they're almost like, you know, like the lion and the unicorn guarding the living room from opposite ends.
	So it's just, you know, the thing is, and this is part, you know, getting to the book, but growing up, you know, when the Soviet Union was still a thing, you know, as a young little Russian kid, she was the one who was like front and center and being like, this is wrong, you know, and she took the fight to them.
	So that always, you know, that kind of, obviously she did for partisan reasons as well and political reasons as well, no question.
	But that does resonate with you as someone who was born in Eastern Europe.
	There's a reason there's statues to her all over Eastern Europe.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Although, well, we can come on to this in a moment.
	Tell me about your book, which I confess, I've only read the first two and a half chapters, because those were the ones I sort of, in my hurried research, I thought, fuck, I haven't read any of it.
	But I know it's quite a big book.
	Yeah, well, the thing that shocked me recently is how, first of all, there's something I disdain, which is there's a lot of discussion about World War I and World War II and the enormous loss of life, both civilian and military.
	Here in the States, you know, there's a lot of interest, not just political reasons, just historical reasons, but civil war, civil war reenactments, right?
	But the fact that the Cold War was won relatively peacefully and very recently, you know, in our lifetime, certainly, and it's almost kind of forgotten.
	And this is kind of insane to me because this was the big conservative victory.
	This was their big accomplishment.
	And I think that if there were like Uh, to use a cheeky phrase, rivers of blood that happened, it would be regarded as more valorous.
	But my perspective is, if you're going to win a conflict and liberate half the world peacefully, isn't that much better than having to slaughter, you know, people from various countries and having carnage in the process?
	So, but the other thing that really bothers me is We had a mayor in my former city, New York City, Mayor Bloomberg, and he had a law or whatever it was, an edict, that you couldn't have too big of a soda in 7-Eleven, the big gulps, right?
	And Mike Huckabee, who was governor of Arkansas, later ran for president, his daughter now is governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was saying, oh, this is like North Korea.
	And I was like, do you have any understanding of what totalitarianism means.
	Do you think the problem in North Korea is that the cups are too small when they go to the 24-7 convenience store to buy their sodas?
	To me, it was such a disturbing comment and it's very prevalent in Western circles.
	So the point of the book, The White Pill, It starts, as you saw, with Ayn Rand testifying in front of Congress, saying how it's impossible to explain to a free people what it's like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.
	It is so far beyond Jeremy Corbyn or Trump or Hillary Clinton.
	This book tells that story, which is swiftly being forgotten, and which is completely unacceptable to me as a Soviet, former Soviet, someone who was born in the Soviet Union, that what these people went through for decades, millions of people, the atrocities, is now just being like, is a historical asterisk.
	That to me is just outrageous, and that is kind of the point of the book.
	A, to explain what life is like in these countries, what they actually did to these people, what does communism mean in practice, But B, the fact that they lost, and they lost so completely that the country itself no longer exists.
	Yeah, so I read your chapter on the birth of the Cheka, which was under Lenin, which was presumably the precursor to the KGB, or the NKVD and then the KGB.
	Absolutely horrible.
	Designed to be above the law, to instil terror, and not even to look for signs of guilt other than people belonging to the wrong class, the wrong social class.
	Yeah, there's one story where, like, let's suppose you're arrested, right?
	And you've got a rich uncle.
	And they go to your uncle and they go, hey, James was arrested.
	If you give us some cash, this is going to go the other way.
	And your uncle wants to free James, gives them the money, then they arrest the uncle for bribery.
	So now they have the money and they have two souls.
	So that kind of systemic depravity is something, you know, in the West, when we think of, like, evil cops or evil authority, we think, all right, someone's on the take.
	It's like how C.S.
	Lewis says, I'd rather be under the rubric of people who are just culpable and just crooks than moral busybodies.
	Because when the moral busybody does it, they do it with the approval of their own conscience.
	They never let you rest.
	When people talk about totalitarianism, total, that's the word.
	It's every aspect of every person's life from birth till death, 24-7.
	Yeah.
	You don't need to persuade me that totalitarianism is a bad thing.
	I think not least because I belong to a generation that is old enough to remember this stuff.
	I think it's good that you're... I mean you're about 15 years younger than me and I imagine that many of your readers will be a bit younger than you and they won't know this stuff.
	Right.
	They won't know anything about it.
	I mean my take On what you're saying, I mean, I'm looking forward to reading the detail about, well, actually I'm not looking forward to it, because actually some of the stuff you describe is really, really horrible, isn't it?
	Yeah, I was crying a lot writing this book, because the thing is, what people again don't appreciate is, it's not like they're going for James, they're going for James' kids.
	Because if James is going to be a tough guy, well, you've got kids.
	So, you know, in the West, Americans especially, we imagine, all right, I'm not going to snitch on anyone.
	They can take me in jail.
	They can beat the crap out of me, break my fingers.
	Screw you!
	And they might even be telling the truth.
	You've got a son, right?
	You've got a daughter.
	Let's see how tough you are when they call your house and be like, can I talk to your daughter?
	You're going to be signing anything.
	Yeah, this is why I've encouraged my children to hate me and to become estranged from me, so that they can't use them against me.
	Michael, you laugh, but it's very effective.
	We've got to be free from attachments of every kind if we're going to fight the power, yeah?
	Well, I mean, in all seriousness, any attachment in these countries was a threat to the power, because that's something bourgeois.
	The family unit was what they were against, the petty bourgeois values, because if you're valuing your children over somebody else's children, that's not equality.
	So husbands had to be turned against wives, children against parents, and publicly so.
	You know, many of these parents told their kids to denounce them in class so that at least the kids could save themselves and have some kind of modicum of respectability.
	And again, that's something that in the West, we just never enter our heads.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Do you just cover the Soviet Empire or do you cover China as well?
	No, it's just the Soviet Union and then a lot about Romania and East Germany and the Berlin Wall and the horrors there.
	That's probably enough to go on.
	I suppose, I don't know, I was wondering when to bring this up though, but you know, you've made this distinction between the West and the Soviet Union, particularly in the early days when the terror was just like beyond, almost beyond our imagination.
	And for most of my life, my take would have been, yeah, this is what communism does.
	But more recently, I've come to discover that the people responsible, the people who've financed the original The Lenin Bolshevik Revolution, for example, were people in the West.
	I mean, Anthony Sutton, Professor Anthony Sutton, wrote books about this, and it's absolutely clear that the revolution in 1917 was funded by Wall Street, by central banks and stuff, and the same actually with the First and Second World Wars.
	Is that a rabbit hole you've gone down yet?
	I say yet because I think everyone must one day.
	Not that rabbit hole, but there's something analogous to that, which is one of the things that I talk about heavily in the book is as bad as these atrocities were, there was always someone in the West, in Britain and the United States, making apologies and excuses for what was being done and telling the populations at home, you're stupid, You don't understand this noble experiment.
	This is the future.
	They have free speech and we don't.
	We're racist here and they have racial equality and and Lenin, you know, is a great example.
	He was it was Ludendorff.
	I think the guy's name was a German general who's like, all right, we got to get you know, Russia's on our eastern border.
	We got to get her out of here.
	So he got Lenin to be Lenin had, of course, been exiled.
	He reintroduced Lenin to kind of mess things up.
	He didn't realize just how badly Lenin would upset the apple cart in what became the Soviet Union.
	So, yeah, there was a lot of Western chicanery in making this giant empire become established and also to metastasize.
	And to have, you know, the big ones were the Fabians.
	Yes.
	I mean, they were as respected as anyone.
	H.G.
	Wells, who is still read today, easily one of the greatest writers of all time, easily one of the most original fiction writers of all time, he talked to Stalin and he's like, I'm to the left of Stalin.
	Well, if you're this respectable thinker, and you're saying Stalin is more to the center than you are, Clearly the message is, oh, he's not all that bad if you can handle H.G.
	Wells.
	So when you see this in black and white, and again, I think a lot of people in the West think they're these people who are like vaguely communist that they regarded the philosophy or the, you know, political program.
	No, they were explicitly advocating the Soviet Union and Lenin and Stalin.
	It wasn't some academic like, you know, Marxist economics.
	It was these guys have it right and we have it wrong.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Also, I think George Bernard Shaw, who was one of our leading playwrights, was another Fabian.
	And, of course, you know what the symbol of... I was telling somebody about this the other day.
	Wolf in sheep's clothing.
	Yes!
	It's like, how more obvious could they be?
	A wolf in sheep's clothing.
	Yeah, so the Fabian Society, which were very instrumental in forming the Labour Party and the London School of Economics, their model was, alright, we need socialism in Britain, the people are too stupid to understand how great this is, but we're brilliant.
	My favourite author of all time, E. Nesbitt, she was a big Fabian as well, so I've got to give her some slack for that, yes.
	Five children in it, or seven children in it?
	Yes, five children in it, and her husband Hubert Bland.
	And so they're like, all right, we can't put this over overnight.
	They were against the idea of this kind of Marxist revolution and overthrowing, you know, the capitalist class.
	So they're like, we got to do it gradually, you know, boiling the frog kind of thing.
	So as you said, they adopted as their symbol a wolf in sheep's clothing.
	And when people like, hold on a minute, maybe we're showing our hand a little.
	They changed it to a tortoise because the tortoise slowly and gradually beats the hare and gets to the finish line and wins.
	I didn't realize they changed it.
	Because actually a lot of these extremely dodgy groups, they do hide in plain sight.
	You read their statements and their documents and you realise they're up front about their evil master plans.
	And Hannah Arendt, who's the great philosopher, I quote her at length in this book, she talks about how Their role is to provide this veneer of respectability, right?
	If you have Lenin, this crazy Georgian with the mustache, excuse me, Stalin, and he's ranting on TV in some other language and in black and white, it's like, what is this?
	But if you have, you know, some Hollywood starlet, Or some, you know, prominent London, some British politician in their suit, and they've got the proper accent, and they're telling you, you know, this is all great, it hits very differently.
	Because now it's not alien, now it's not crazy, now it's respectable and something worth listening to, even though it's complete atrocities and dementia.
	Yes, I was just thinking just then, you mentioned Stalin, Avril Harriman, who was, I think, the kind of, the person from the US administration, was he the ambassador to Moscow?
	Or Secretary of State or something?
	He was high up.
	He was high up, but the coziness of the relationship between the American elites and these barbarous thugs, I mean, Stalin was just like a psychopath, wasn't he?
	What about Yalta?
	When like Churchill sitting there looking around and FDR's like, okay, that's cool, Winston, go in the corner.
	I'm going to be here with my buddy, Uncle Joe.
	I mean, and then even after that, there was that little brief window where it was Clement Attlee who was sitting with Truman and Stalin, you know, make being buddy, buddy.
	It's just, The thing that also I talk about in this book that I learned is the argument wasn't, alright, Hitler's a unique evil, we've got to make a deal with the devil, and Stalin's a dictator but we've got to take whatever allies we can because losing this war is unthinkable.
	No, even before that, it was like, this guy's great.
	We got to follow his lead.
	You know, this stupid backwards, you know, liberalism is just the era of the 19th century, the thinking of the 19th century, and this is the future.
	And God help us if it, and thankfully it wasn't.
	Well, of course, you almost quoted... It was Lincoln Steffens, wasn't it?
	Yes.
	He was a New York Times journalist who said, I've seen the future and it works.
	Yes.
	I mean, bastards!
	But his equivalents live today, and they're still writing for the New York Times, of course.
	There is a scene in the book, I'm going to spoil it, and I had a clever little line and I was on the fence about including it.
	And then I'm like, you know, F these bastards, I'm including it.
	Because there was someone, this guy named Stanislav Kosior, he was very high up in Ukraine, and he knew about what Stalin did with the Ukrainians in the Holodomor and with Holding Grain.
	And then because he knew too much, he gets arrested.
	And so he's, he became like second in command in the Soviet Union I think in January 38, in May he's like arrested.
	So he's being tortured and they can't break him, right?
	So they're doing everything they can, the guy's like screw you, and a lot of them of course thought this was done without Stalin's knowledge.
	If only Stalin knew, he wouldn't let you guys get away with this, right?
	So they bring in his teenage daughter and rape her in front of him.
	And he actually sort of outlived her because she killed herself shortly after that, then they killed him.
	And then I had the line, I go, I don't know if she was who the New York Times was thinking of when in 2020, they had an op-ed discussing how women had better sex under socialism.
	And that op-ed was referring not to like Sweden, it was specifically referring to the far side of the Iron Curtain.
	So you would think with this history of the atrocities that are done to men, to women and children, If they had any semblance of decency, they would be like, hold on a minute.
	Let's put some context here if you're going to make such kind of claims about, you know, human sanctity and consent and all sorts of things.
	But they don't care.
	It's exactly the same organizations in place right now.
	And of course, Walter Durante being the classic example.
	where he told all the Westerners there's no famine or hunger, nor is there likely to be.
	This is just propaganda.
	The quote was the Russians are the Ukrainians are merely tightening their belts.
	James, as you and I know, you only have to tighten your belt when you don't have food.
	You don't or you have an exercise regimen and they weren't on the treadmill.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's this this.
	But this is kind of what I'm getting at.
	I think we are on the same page, really.
	The relationship between the supposedly free West and these totalitarian states is much, much more intimate.
	Our elites, our establishment, they love this kind of stuff.
	They love it.
	So, did you ever come across an historian called Eric Hobsbawm?
	No, I don't think I have.
	Eric Hobsbawm, an English-British historian, he was, you know, he's taken very seriously.
	He was made, I believe, a Companion of Honour, which is one of those things that is in the gift of the Queen or of the Monarch.
	So, Eric Hobsbawm, Companion of Honour, was a guy who was a complete Marxist.
	His history of the Soviet Union was very sympathetic.
	So this is one of our most preeminent historians.
	And he was asked about this, and he was, yeah, well, you know, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, was kind of his line.
	And his daughter founded a kind of, a sort of, like something similar to the Fabian Society, which is this organization called Common Purpose, which infiltrates every public institution like the police, the civil service, the local government, in order to instill the values of communitarianism, communism, whatever.
	So they're all around us, these people.
	Where are the omelets?
	I can even take that hypothesis at face value if there were omelets.
	I could understand, we're all smart enough in terms of just intellectually being like, all right, you're going to make the argument that I'm going to kill millions of people.
	And as a result of this, there's going to be, like, this is kind of an interesting philosophical question.
	Would you press a button to kill a million people if it caused the end of all crime and disease and all hardship on earth?
	And we'd all have to think about it, right?
	But they're pressing the button over and over, and everyone's still starving and hungry.
	Upton Sinclair, I have a whole chapter about him.
	He, first of all, he said, well, I don't think it was five million that were starved in Ukraine.
	I think it was one.
	He gives no reason why it's one, other than one is easier to hand wave away than five.
	And of course, at this point, it's just numbers, you know, five, one, who cares?
	It's just such a huge number.
	And then he goes, but look at it this way.
	They solved the problem of famine forever.
	They hadn't!
	And here's the other thing, James, there's other ways to solve the problems of famine than killing millions of people.
	You can import food, you can have less money being spent for factories, and more money being spent on, you know, farm infrastructure, things like that, just off the top of my head.
	So, Eugene Lyons, who was a reporter, he had been a communist, got sent to Moscow, I think it was United Press, was the organization, he got an interview with Stalin, which was a major, major coup, but when he saw what was happening, He's just like, this is just completely depraved and evil.
	And he made it a point to come back and discuss what he had seen.
	And thank God that he had.
	Do you know what's really annoying about what you just said about Upton Sinclair?
	Because the only thing that most people know about Upton Sinclair is he came up with that brilliant and incredibly quotable quote.
	It is difficult to get a man to understand it when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
	Well, also the jungle, it's still read here very widely.
	Is that the book that it came from?
	No, no.
	So Upton Sinclair in the States made his name, I have a whole chapter about him, called The Jungle.
	He was a big socialist and the premise of this book is you need to have food regulation because the novel, vaguely a novel, is about this kind of place where they make sausages and at the end one of the workers falls in and he's just rendered into fat and people eat him and there's rat feces everywhere.
	Very quickly, they passed the Food Safety Act, and there was the FDA, which still continues to this day.
	He was also the nominee for California Governor in 1934.
	The thing is, that book just had the government being the regulator and the guarantor that food is safe.
	As a socialist, he goes, I was aiming for their heads, but I hit them in the stomach, because he wanted the government to take over food production, which would, of course, have been absolutely disastrous.
	He is a very big name here in the US still.
	I've just, I've just had a memory then of a slightly achingly tedious overrated movie I saw about the making of, about Citizen Kane, about the making of Citizen Kane where there was an Upton Sinclair... Was it Upton?
	I don't think it was Upton Sinclair.
	Was it not?
	I don't think so.
	You know the one I mean?
	That's William Randolph Hearst.
	It was the one about... Yeah, it had Orson Welles in it, and it had... Yeah.
	Yeah, that movie.
	What was that?
	Citizen Kane.
	But it's not... No, no, no, no, no, no.
	I'm talking about recent.
	I'm talking about in the last couple of years.
	Oh, I don't know.
	I can't help you.
	The critics are all kind of wanking over it.
	Anyway, the point I was leading to... Because I just found it a bit tedious, and I could see that its politics were awry, but...
	Brings me back to an interesting point made by Ayn Rand in your first chapter.
	She was saying, look, it's not the obvious communist movies with the obvious communist messages which are the problem.
	It's the ones where they just had their sly digs at free markets and things.
	I mean, I think J. Edgar Hoover was a creep, I think.
	I loathe the FBI and, you know, etc, etc.
	But he was right.
	There were Reds under the belt.
	They were everywhere, weren't they?
	Oh, for sure.
	But J. Edgar Hoover is actually a figure in this book because he was instrumental in getting Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman deported.
	They were hardcore anarchists.
	Berkman tried to assassinate Frick, who was Andrew Carnegie's man at the Homestead Mills.
	And there was something called the Red Arc, where all these radicals were deported.
	And to their great credit, even though they're anarchists, they're like, let's give this Bolshevik thing a shot.
	This is our chance to have a socialist country.
	And they both fled and they warned everyone in the West.
	They're like, you guys, this is not what we're about.
	They are doing things to the workers that's far beyond what the czar ever did in his worst imaginations.
	And there was this scene where she gave a talk in London.
	I don't remember what date.
	I think it was in the 20s.
	It was very early on.
	And Red Emma, you know, the big radical, you know, even to this day, there's always these radicals who are valorized.
	Angela Davis is one that comes to mind here in the West.
	I'm sure there's no shortage in Britain, too, of these just kind of randos who are just given pedestals.
	And so she's giving a talk, standing ovation.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And when she was finished, you could hear a pin drop because they didn't want to hear it.
	Like this had been their kind of Zion.
	And now it's here.
	It's heaven on earth.
	And it's our duty not to do anything to undermine it.
	Theodore Dreiser, who's a big naturalist fiction writer here in the West, he wrote a book called Sister Carrie and a few others.
	And he just had this comment about like, Yeah, we can free these people from the camps, but what good would that do?
	Or Sartre was talking about, like, it's not going to help us to discuss these things.
	It's just being used as a cudgel against the Soviet Union.
	So the extent to which Western intellectuals were willing to hand wave away atrocities in writing was extremely disturbing to discover.
	And also to the extent that what Eugene Lyons referred to as the guinea pig theory.
	It's like, Let them experiment on the Russians.
	It's worth a shot.
	We're not the ones who are suffering or paying the cost.
	If it doesn't work out, who cares?
	It's not our people.
	I'm not the one who's bearing any of the risk, but I'll be the one who gets the reward because I could have been part of this vanguard who posited how great it was over there.
	Plus, there's also this big sense among many aspects of the left about valorizing the other, right?
	Like, oh, I'm too good for Great Britain.
	You know, the little Britner.
	You know, oh, I'm erudite.
	I'm sophisticated.
	You know, I'm for Stalin.
	Yeah, I was going to ask you to sort of psychoanalyse these people, and you have gone halfway to doing that.
	Because it's not a minority activity, we're talking about the whole of what we in England would call loveydom.
	Do you have a concept of loveys in America?
	No.
	The whole of the entertainment industry, you know, the thespians, people who stand on platforms and make speeches for this or that, and they always embrace really stupid, illiberal causes in the guise of liberalism.
	So, for example, look at all the rock bands in America who insisted that their That their fans be vaccinated with the death jab before they came to their gigs.
	They embrace these statist, authoritarian causes.
	Why do they do this?
	Let's be our entertainers!
	Let me give you a historical example.
	There was a case here in Boston, I believe, called the Sacco and Vanzetti case, where these two men who were anarchists, who were accused of robbing a bank, they were given the death penalty, and it was the cause celebre of the day.
	Everyone was marching, you know, free Sacco and Vanzetti, they were put to death.
	Uh, we can argue all day long about whether they're guilty or not.
	The point being, every celebrity jumped on this bandwagon.
	It was, you know, we later had someone called Mumia Abdul-Jamal.
	There's always someone, I'm sure this is the case in England, where it's just become this, they somehow pluck this case and everyone has to be for this case.
	Meanwhile, in the 30s, you had these show trials where people were being tortured.
	And they were admitting, for example, oh, I met Trotsky at this hotel and we plotted against Stalin in Norway or Sweden.
	And then the Swedish newspaper goes, this hotel hasn't existed in 20 years.
	So they were admitting to things that were literally not possible.
	Or I met Trotsky at this airfield and the airfield reports, this was winter, we had no planes landing in this six-month window, it's not possible.
	All those same Western intellectuals who had their shoes made bare by how much they marched for Sacco and Mazzetti tripped over themselves to defend the Soviet Union's need and right to kill its own citizens.
	So there is this kind of fetishization of the outgroup.
	Is I think part and parcel of I think it's also definitional to leftism.
	I think that's also often leftism at its best because leftism at its best is let's worry about the forgotten guy, you know back in the day.
	I think it's a good thing that people are more open about drug use and abuse and let's get people help instead of putting them in jail or just throwing them in the gutter right some of those lives can certainly be saved.
	But back in the day, it's like, you don't talk about this.
	If someone had some kind of problem, you pretend it's not happening, or you certainly don't write about it.
	It's not what dignified people do.
	So that is kind of my steel man case for leftism.
	But if you have that pervasively, and it's always the outgroup, you have results like this, where it's like, all right, we've got to defend the Soviet Union, who's the outgroup, against Great Britain and America.
	Yeah.
	I mean, look, my theory, which is going to float, you may not be ready for it yet, but I think it's essentially because the entertainment industry and all its participants are part of the same problem that creates things like Soviet Russia.
	They are just the propaganda branch of this This machine which creates misery and terror throughout the world and they play their roles as the dual role as entertainers but really that what they are is is propagandists for for this evil evil machine.
	They're not like us.
	Well, if you're an entertainer, if you're an actor, you're, you're basically a puppet made out of meat, right?
	Your job, like literally, is to take words written by people who are usually better and smarter than you and put emotion behind them and then make them sound true and believable.
	You know, if you're playing, you're, you're not always playing a role that's analogous to your own personality.
	You know, not everyone, like virtually no one who plays a murderer in a movie is actually a murderer in real life.
	So that is their job.
	What's he called?
	Baldwin.
	Alec Baldwin.
	Well, yes.
	You know, I think they're still releasing that movie, is my understanding.
	It's going to do such good box office, isn't it?
	People are going to see the movie where somebody died.
	People are sick like that.
	You can understand why, I guess.
	And I heard the movie's just a complete piece of crap anyway.
	Regardless, the point being, I think the intellectual class are very good at picking out who's charismatic and who can get their message across.
	And it's always going to be, you know, the actors and the beautiful people, as opposed to, you know, a Jeremy Corbyn, to put it mildly.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, if they are beautiful people, I mean, we don't know what they look like when they rip off their masks and the scaly creatures reveal themselves.
	But look, this is your world, Michael, isn't it?
	I mean, I know you're not a Hollywood guy, but do you rub shoulders with any of these people?
	Do you ever interview them and stuff?
	A few.
	But I mean, I tend to avoid, I mean, I'm in Austin.
	I'm not in Los Angeles.
	I know a few people who are actors, professional actors.
	And I've talked to them about stuff like this off the record and on the record.
	And the perspective is that it very much is Los Angeles specifically, and I'm sure London is going to have a lot of similarities, it's very much you don't want to swim against the current, right?
	Because actors are already, let's steel man their position, actors are already going to have a reputation of being difficult to being divas, right?
	So if I'm going to be difficult to being a diva, let it be for me to get a driver or certain kinds of food in my trailer, as opposed to causing problems with politics.
	And I think also a big part of these cultures is they're so hypervigilant about someone who's an outsider, that as soon as you're even saying, like, here's the thing, if I said to you that Trump isn't the worst president ever, maybe he's just mediocre, right?
	Maybe he's just like a William McKinley figure.
	That is equivalent in the ears of many of these people as endorsing full-fledged Nazism.
	Like that's literally what they hear.
	So it's not only that you have to hate the same things, you have to hate them to the same intensity as everybody else.
	Yes.
	You see, I used to be a Trump fan and now I'm just sort of... I mean, I think you're right.
	As presidents go, he's not that bad.
	Look, there's a podcast I still haven't released yet because the revelations are so horrifying.
	I mean, I will, I will, but I've just got to get my ducks in a row with God and stuff and make sure the demons don't get me.
	This woman I spoke to was a Mother of Darkness.
	She's one of the high priests of the Satanists who run the world.
	And she tells me that even Ronald Reagan was one of them.
	Even Ronald and Nancy were busy sacrificing children to the Dark Lord.
	So, you know, I mean, when you realise this next level shit... Even Nancy?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I would have thought especially Nancy, actually.
	I do have a lot about Reagan and Nancy and Ronald in the book.
	There's one historical story in this book, which I think you and everyone listening to this will absolutely love, because it really exemplifies what Reagan was like as a person.
	It's the first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev.
	They're in Geneva, I believe it was.
	It's like, all right, what's the icebreaker?
	Reagan sidles up to him and he goes, you know, if aliens invaded the world, you and I would team up to fight them.
	And Gorbachev, not knowing what the Marxist position on alien invasion was, quickly changed the subject.
	And Reagan was so proud of himself, he boasted to his advisors, and then he gave a talk at some high school or college talking about, you know, what he told Gorbachev.
	And Colin Powell, who was, I think, a National Security Advisor or something at the point at that time, had to keep striking that out from his future speeches and saying, oh God, here come the little green men again.
	But you can imagine Gorbachev, you know, this young, vigorous go-getter, head of the Soviet Union, he's going to become a transformative figure, President of the United States, you know, he certainly looks like from Central Casting, saddles up to you, and the first thing he talks about is Martians.
	It's like you don't know what to do.
	You weren't prepped for that.
	He did come up with some good lines, Reagan.
	Is Gorbachev dead now?
	Yes, he died very recently.
	That's what I thought, because he was in that pizza advert, wasn't he?
	Yes.
	Have you met him?
	I was working very feverishly behind the scenes to interview him and then Covid hit.
	He is a character in this book who basically wrote himself.
	I didn't realise to what extent he was instrumental in imposing, I'll use that word, you know, kind of ironically, a peaceful resolution to the end of the Soviet Empire.
	And there were many cases in this book where people were phoning him up and saying, all right, send in the tanks.
	And he said, I'm not sending in the tanks.
	This is going to resolve itself peacefully.
	And that he, you know, I did my best to give him the credit where he's due.
	This is going to make you jealous, Michael.
	And it shouldn't.
	I went to this weird evening, which was an event held for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, which is some kind of, like, Clinton-esque charity that they run or ran.
	It was full of oligarchs and full of hangers-on.
	It was in this enormous, enormous mansion in, you know, like outside Windsor, with this long, long drive through this deer park, presumably policed by heavies with machine guns and stuff.
	And there was synchronised swimming as we arrived and stuff.
	And the highlight of the evening was Gorbachev singing Russian folk songs to us.
	Yeah, it was an experience, but I have to say, again, I hear what you say about Gorbachev and Reagan sort of ending the Cold War.
	At the same time, I don't trust any of these people, like Gorbachev, because of that weird birthmark on his head.
	You're talking to an anarchist.
	I'm not at all.
	Trust Gorbachev.
	Trust Reagan.
	No, no, no.
	That's not the message.
	The message is sometimes people do the right thing.
	You know what?
	Here's the thing.
	I have such a low opinion of politicians.
	If they do the right thing for the wrong reasons, I don't care.
	If someone decides, there's this great moment, and this brings tears to my eye, I'm not joking at all, when there were increasing demonstrations in East Berlin, in East Germany, in Leipzig particularly, where they were marching for better education, to tear down the wall, and every week the demonstrations got bigger and bigger, and the East German authorities didn't know what to do.
	And then at a certain point, Honecker, who was the head of East Germany, wanted another Tiananmen Square.
	He said, we have to do something about this.
	They put guns in the arms of the military and the cops, and they're ready to start killing people.
	And these are people marching for like, and their chants were, we are the people, no violence.
	That was their chant.
	And they're like, all right, you don't want violence, we're going to give it to you.
	And the head of the military, and he goes, we got to do something about this.
	And the head of the military, who was a hardcore communist, and a really authoritarian thug, looks at him and says, there's nothing we can do.
	We're going to let this resolve peacefully.
	And the next day, Hanukkah was ousted.
	Point being, when he said that, this isn't some Mother Teresa Gandhi.
	I don't want to say Gandhi because the whole British thing, but you know what I mean?
	Some kind of peaceful avatar of hope and humanity.
	This guy's an evil person.
	But he still did the right thing, and I'm happy to give him credit for saying we're not shooting anyone.
	You've just made me think.
	I've just been watching this German TV series on Netflix, a drama series, a bit like Nikita, you know, one of those kind of rogue female agents.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And it's called Cleo.
	It's quite good.
	It's weird.
	It's sort of German.
	It's sort of part black comedy, part... But there's a thesis, or there's a theory.
	I'm a guffin, if you like.
	Which is that, and I don't know whether this is based on reality, but it theorises that there was a secret compact made between the Reagan administration and Hanukkah to secretly fund the East Germany
	As a, I don't know, a sort of bulwark against West German hegemony, you know, sort of the fear that a united Germany might present a kind of a regional threat.
	Have you heard that one?
	No, and it doesn't sound plausible to me.
	I think the biggest concern by far was from Britain where Thatcher was just, you know, the one standing very firmly against a reunified Germany and for obvious reasons given her biography.
	I had not heard that.
	And the Berlin Wall fell under his successor, as you know, H.W.
	Bush.
	So I would wonder what the chronology of this would look like.
	Yeah, well it's obviously a theory that preoccupies German minds.
	I don't know.
	So, you... I mean, obviously, this is kind of personal for you, because your family must have experienced... Was your family... Did they experience the Holodomor?
	No.
	So, we were in the city, so, you know, Lvov.
	So, we just experienced kind of the Holocaust, but it's... So, that's not, you know, personal to us.
	Gorbachev did.
	You know, he had members of his family being starved to death.
	And that's the other thing about these...
	um, you know, genocidal governments is that if you're going to kill a lot of people, those people have kids and those kids grow up and they're not going to be too happy about it.
	So even in that sense, you have to realize that their sense of control is not going to be absolute because at a certain point someone's going to grow up and try to get revenge or try to do something about the situation.
	Um, but yeah, I, what, what, let me do, let me speak about what my family did go through.
	There's a great, great place in Prague called the Museum of Communism.
	And I sent my protégé there because I'd been there years past and I'd forgotten the exact wording of the captions.
	And the thing that's great about the captions, perhaps like the British Museum, is they're written in very emotional terms, being like, under this demented philosophy, when we were promised to have food, we're standing in line for hours for no reason and hungry nevertheless.
	So it's just written like that.
	And as he sent me all these photos from the museum, what made me appreciate what my family experienced, it was like a gut punch, was the fact that it was every aspect of their life.
	So it's the books you read at school, what you watch on TV, Who you're talking to and about what, what job you have, where you can travel to.
	You know, there's no aspect of their lives that wasn't through the filter of this ideology.
	And you and I might hate certain ideologies, prefer others.
	Point being, we can watch sports, we can read Enid Blyton.
	I'll try to be referential to something you'd appreciate.
	Roald Dahl, yep.
	Roald Dahl, who's a character in this book, he was very instrumental in getting Truman to be FDR's successor.
	We can do all these things and just get away from politics.
	And in these countries, there's nowhere else to go from the time you're born till the day you die.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Except, look, I'm still not totally buying your thesis that we're all okay in the West.
	I'm not saying that at all.
	Are you crazy?
	We're not okay in the West at all.
	It's bad, isn't it?
	It's getting really bad.
	No, the thesis is that the people we're against are not gods.
	They're not invincible deities.
	They're not omniscient.
	And in most cases, they're not particularly impressive.
	So as long as there's hope, it is incumbent upon all of us to fight for our values.
	And what this book demonstrates is, A, just how evil these people are capable of being.
	It's not Diane Abbott.
	it it goes so many degrees more or or uh teresa may it's so many degrees more than that but the point is they have been defeated repeatedly and far easier and quicker than people realize that's the point it's not at all things in the west aren't bad or that you know oh we're all basically the same for us if you won't labor or tory not at all the by the way
	um i i was disappointed when i when i read your book's title because i'm writing a book at the moment which is also going to be called well slightly different white pilled But you see for me...
	White-pilled is something quite specific.
	So we go through our stages where we get red-pilled, where we realise the crazy shit that's going on.
	Yeah.
	And then we get black-pilled, where we just, we think, well, we're screwed.
	I mean, it's just like, it's so much evil.
	But then for me, White-pilled is an essentially religious experience where, you know, God has got this one.
	And I was wondering, I mean, you're Jewish, right?
	Yes.
	Are you kind of a religious Jew or just a kind of cultural Jew?
	There's no yarmulke here that tells you something.
	Right, okay.
	Do you have a kind of an eschatology?
	Do you believe in?
	Do you think there's a life beyond this?
	Are there spiritual forces in your worldview?
	So let me address this from, I went to yeshiva as a kid from kindergarten to fourth grade and I was very fortunate to go to private school instead of public school.
	And I mean this is something that I think anyone who goes to private school instead of public school is going to really be better off in the future.
	And the Jewish perspective, insofar as I can speak to it, is this.
	Imagine you're at this Amazing banquet right and the tables overflowing and there's chilled fruits and there's hams and turkeys and chickens and The most amazing drinks and the breads every kind you can imagine You know and God has given you this amazing bounty and you're looking around and you're like so what's for dessert?
	And like how offensive that would be when you've been given this amazing gift to kind of like look what's next.
	So what I was taught and what I do believe is that to have this kind of trust is like he's got this and to focus as much as possible with what we have and on this world and doing the best we can with what we have.
	Right, OK.
	So, yeah, I mean, look, I read the Psalms every day and I know that we have, Christians and Jews have that in common, you know, we've got what we call the Old Testament, what do you call it?
	The Torah?
	The Torah, exactly.
	And the Psalms, I imagine, are a pretty key part of that.
	The Torah's the first five books, I don't know if it includes the Psalms.
	OK.
	Off the top of my head.
	OK.
	But you know the psalms?
	Yes, of course.
	Yeah, they're kind of key.
	And a lot of the psalms are about...
	Essentially, woe is us.
	Things are really bad.
	The evildoers and the bad guys are just all over us and they're crushing us.
	But God, please God, come along and smite them and crush them and destroy them.
	We know you're going to because it's what you do.
	And we know that you hold these people in derision and that you laugh at the scorn, etc, etc.
	And we know that this is the deal.
	That seems to me to be the essence of white piledness.
	It's like God has got this because, I don't know, I mean...
	That's not how I would use the term, although I do think that that is a very healthy and one of the best aspects of religion mindsets to give people.
	Because I've talked to several people who are like elderly, right?
	Or I've had friends talk to elderly people and you ask them, what would you have done differently?
	And this is a very common thing.
	They go, I wouldn't have worried as much.
	And there's this rabbinical story I was told recently, which is, imagine you had a time machine, you and I, James, and you go back in time ten years to talk to yourself.
	And you tell yourself, look, remember how you were worried about this girlfriend, or you got fired, or you thought this was awful?
	It's going to be okay.
	A lot of this is going to suck, there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering, but I'm here, ten years in the future, and telling you, you're still around, You lost some stuff along the way, but you're still this, you know, and you did pretty well for yourself.
	Everyone listening to this has the capacity now to imagine yourself from 2033, coming back in time and telling yourself the same thing.
	And when you have that perspective, and you have that kind of, you know, I hate that expression, but don't sweat the small stuff.
	I think that's very important and very psychologically healthy.
	And that's something exterior to politics.
	You shouldn't have chosen 2033, Michael.
	You realise that lots of people are going to be going, he chose the number.
	What do you mean, what number?
	33.
	What about 33?
	What's 33?
	33's got a cult symbolism to it.
	Oh, OK.
	But listen, I totally agree with you.
	That is really, really good advice.
	Listen, kids, actually, anyone watching this.
	The amount of life that I have wasted worrying about shit that didn't come to pass and was never going to come, well obviously hasn't come to pass, and that was just wasted emotional energy and upset.
	I have something called a worry coin, which I carry around my back pocket.
	You can rub it when you're worried.
	It has written on it, I forget the exact phrasing, but worrying is paying a debt that you haven't incurred.
	It's like, what is this gaining you to worry?
	Now, it makes sense that I might get fired, so let me look at other job opportunities, so if shit hits the fan, You know, I have plan B and C and D, or this relationship's not going well.
	What would I do if I break up?
	And let me think this through.
	If I'm going to get evicted, what am I going to do that?
	And planning for bad terms, but just sitting here and stressing out and not doing anything about it.
	What is the advantage here, or benefit?
	It only causes you pain and stress, it hurts your morale, and there's no upside to it at all.
	Now, that's not to say that these threats aren't real, both politically and personally, but it just says worrying in and of itself is not helping anything other than wasting your extremely valuable precious time.
	This is why our religions work, because if you read the Torah, you will find that the commonest injunction is, Thou shalt not be afraid.
	It's all about not being afraid.
	Not worrying about stuff.
	And in the New Testament we've got, there's a phrase that always used to puzzle me, which Jesus says, which is, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
	Have you heard that one?
	No.
	No.
	Do you know what it means?
	No.
	It means there's enough stuff to worry about in one day without you having to worry about all the other stuff in the future.
	Just let stuff Things will take care of themselves.
	And it also brings me to mind of St.
	Augustine, who was writing when the church was at its probably lowest point, and Rome's getting sacked, and so on and so forth, and he was, you know, I read a book by Arthur Herman where he discussed this, and he posited Augustine as a optimistic figure.
	He goes, yes, we're suffering, and yes, this is all going through, but in the end, if you have faith, you know, everything will be redeemed in the long run.
	So, we're going through kind of Hell on Earth right now, but this is temporary and you're losing perspective as to what really matters.
	But do you believe, personally, that there is a supernatural realm?
	Yes.
	And is it what you believe in, kind of, angels and demons and that kind of thing?
	I, not in the biblical sense, but yes, I do think that many, I want to be specific in how I describe this, I do think that many of the people around us are literal demons, in that they are automata without what we would, what anyone, even a secular person, would regard as a soul.
	Is that, yes, dybbuk, is that, I've heard of those.
	Something like that, yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's interesting.
	I mean, what proportion of the people around us are... I don't know, but just as an easy example, when you hear this sort of thing, some people do to, like, foster children.
	And it's like, this isn't just someone who's a jerk.
	This isn't even someone who beats his wife, which we can, you know, kind of maybe wrap our heads around, or someone who kills someone out of anger.
	This is so beyond any kind of bell curve of what you and I would ever dream of doing.
	And to have it day after day, you know what I mean?
	It's like, this is not human to me in a very literal sense.
	Well, you see, I think we're on the same page there.
	You see, I think that some of the things that I'm not looking forward to reading your book about the kind of things that the Communists got up to behind, you know, in the Soviet Union, the terrible tortures, I mean, the sort of refined, exquisite tortures that they thought of, the terrible things they thought to do with people.
	Yes.
	That, to me, is demonic, satanic.
	They are being motivated by otherworldly forces to behave, because I don't think it's natural for humans to behave in this way.
	James, they got priests to rip off their collars and denounce God from the pulpit in order to turn the constituents, the congregants, against religion, because religion was an opiate.
	Let me, I have a book right here.
	There's a book that was published called Godless Utopia.
	I haven't read it, but it's all the anti-religious propaganda.
	Again, in the West, when we think of evil or totalitarianism, you think, alright, I've got to go to school, and I've got to read about how Stalin's great, and then I've got a crappy job, and I've got to wait in line.
	If that was the extent of it, you know what I mean?
	I can almost wrap my head around it.
	It's so many orders of magnitude and more pervasive than that.
	And that was part of the reason I wrote this.
	A lot of times people will attack me as an anarchist and be like, Oh, you're naive.
	You think people are basically good.
	And I'm like, Oh yeah.
	Okay.
	Read this book and tell me I think people are basically good.
	Yeah.
	But they lost and they lost completely.
	And that is so key.
	Look, I'm with you on this.
	I think that one of my bugbears is this phrase, man's inhumanity to man.
	And this phrase contains the idea that human beings are geared towards being cruel to other people.
	I don't believe that we are like that.
	Most of us just want to be left alone to get on with our families, give our kids a better life than us, educate them, enjoy our hobbies.
	It's a particular class of people, you know, a sort of parasite kind of evil people, who I'm wondering if they're even wholly human.
	There's another element of that puzzle which I'm sure you'll agree with, which is, after East Germany fell, all the Stasi files were available for public viewing.
	So you could go in and find out who turned you in and why and what they knew about you.
	And this was a moment of conscience for every former East German.
	Do I want to know who was spying on me?
	And there's this one, there's a woman who worked in these files.
	I think her name was Frau Kumpelmann.
	And it's like her job, when people came in, was to kind of walk them through it and, you know, because it's kind of like in the 80s getting an AIDS test.
	You've got to make sure the person is prepared for whatever the answer is.
	And this woman went to jail, I think for three years, because she had commented that she wanted to visit the West and someone turned her into the Stasi and she got arrested and went to jail.
	And she read the file and it was the man she was still living with.
	And just that morning he told her to have a nice day.
	And she's collapsed in Krumpelman's arms and she has to go home to this.
	And this woman, Anna Funder, wrote a book called Stasi Land.
	She talked to people who were former Stasi, and one of the Stasi recruiters said, we didn't have to arrest James and say, James, give me names, or we're going to go after James' kids.
	They volunteered.
	There were so many people who were more than happy to snitch because they made them feel important.
	It made them feel they were doing something.
	And he says that some of them were just bored and happy to have someone to listen to them.
	And we saw this reiterated with COVID because the amount of people who were tripping over themselves To point out someone who wasn't following the protocol.
	No one had a gun to their head.
	Their kids were not being arrested.
	There was no financial incentive for them.
	They couldn't wait to turn in Michael or James and then boast about it on social media.
	You know, I'm really glad you made that point because I was about to segue into it as well.
	I was wondering what your experience is.
	Were you a skeptic?
	Were you a freedom fighter right from the start or did you buy into the shit at first?
	I bought into the shit at first, yeah.
	You didn't get jammed?
	But not for long.
	Did you get jammed?
	I can't talk about it.
	I'll tell you off the air, though.
	Okay, alright.
	I respect that.
	But, I mean, did you get into fights with people over not wearing a mask and things like that?
	I yelled at the people asking for my information at the airport and I called her a piece of shit, the woman from the army.
	And took her photo.
	So I was the one doing the reverse.
	Because we had to fill out all these forms whenever we got off a flight.
	And they're standing there with the American flag on their shoulder patch and asking papers, please.
	Can I curse here?
	Yeah, you can.
	Get the fuck out of here and go back to Russia with that shit.
	Who the hell do you think you're talking to?
	But interestingly, I've noticed, because there were countries that you could go and visit which were less authoritarian.
	You know what, let me just tell you, I wasn't jabbed.
	I never got the jab.
	The reason I had to dance around is because, whatever, but I have not been jabbed, yes.
	Right, okay, yeah.
	I mean, I don't feel smug about it because I have many loved ones who went ahead and got it.
	You can understand why.
	Yeah.
	Well, do you know what?
	I was with these kids the other day, who were pretty based, these kids in their twenties, and they'd all got jammed.
	And I said, why?
	And they said, duh, we wanted to go on holiday.
	Yeah.
	Hang on a second.
	So if somebody says to you, OK, you can go on holiday, but first of all, I'm going to inject some extract of dog shit in a needle.
	Hold on.
	No, no, I'm going to defend them.
	Because if you're 20, first of all, you feel invincible.
	We all remember being, you remember being 20.
	You feel invincible, right?
	And second, all your friends are going to Ibiza and you're going to be sitting at home, you know, watching the BBC.
	And it's the kind of thing where they're very smart about it because if the risk is universal and distributed, you kind of think it can't really be that bad because everyone's getting it.
	Like, that's the psychology there.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I went to Costa Rica.
	Is Costa Rica not good enough?
	I went without a chat.
	Well, ask your friend.
	Ask your best friend.
	I don't know.
	I saw a tapir on the beach in Costa Rica.
	I mean, you don't... Say you'd gone to Italy skiing or something, or France, you wouldn't have seen a tapir on the beach.
	No way!
	Or you could have gone to Mexico, smoked really good weed.
	There were options, is what I'm saying.
	It is still illegal to come to the States without a vaccine.
	I know.
	It's crazy.
	I can't come and see you.
	But people can come here with COVID.
	They just can't come here unless they have the vaccine.
	But you're right, it was a test.
	It was the STASI test.
	I had this tweet where I said, and I stand by it, it's very, it's inarguable, whether by design or otherwise, the COVID protocols gave some very, very bad people some very useful information about the limits of compliance in this country and elsewhere.
	You mean we're on a mess now?
	No, I just meant like they know how far they can push the dial before they push back.
	I know.
	They learned it.
	It was useful information for them.
	Totally.
	Totally.
	Well, so I'm wondering, why are you, given that you know what you know, why are you, and okay, we both have faith in human nature, but we also see how few people are resisting and we see all eradicate.
	You've got what's happening in Ohio, you know, the trains being derailed.
	And poisonous stuff going into the air, the war on farming, the war on foodstuffs, basic supplies, the approach of central bank digital currencies, which was an ex-Goldman Sachs.
	You were ex-Goldman Sachs, weren't you?
	I was helpdesk.
	OK, all right.
	But you're aware of CBDCs and the threats and of digital stuff and transhumanism.
	Yes, of course.
	We've got all these heaps of horror coming our way.
	What are we going to do about this stuff?
	Are you just going to say it will pass?
	No, what are you talking about?
	Don't ever become a ghostwriter.
	You know what?
	As a troll, a professional troll, that's my answer.
	It'll pass.
	It's fine.
	Everything's fine.
	No, my point being, first of all, I am not a democrat, lowercase d. I don't think it's ever a function of heading the majority one way or another.
	I think the majority in any society is ballast and they're going to be for whatever they're told one way or another.
	Emma Goldman had an essay about this called Majorities vs. Minorities and she said the majority cannot reason.
	I think it's absolutely true.
	Number one.
	Number two is the fact that you and I can sit here and discuss this.
	And the focus isn't on the issue of the day, which changes rapidly.
	For here in America, one week it's trans bathrooms, and the next week it's Muslim immigration.
	They don't care about trans people or Muslim immigrants.
	It's like a magician misdirection.
	Look at the keys while they're picking your pocket, right?
	So the fact that there is a large number and an increasing number of people who can sit down like you and I are doing Anticipate what the steps are and realize is this is systemic and instead of focusing on issue and issue and you're always playing defense to be like, all right, what this has been going on for a long time.
	What are we going to do about it that in and of itself is a major step forward and what one of the key things that brought down the Soviet Union and which I'm hopeful not optimistic per se hopeful will bring down this whole edifice is that it's very difficult to sustain an edifice built on lies and misinformation and lies by omission if there's any possibility for the free flow of information.
	Because if you are my close friend and you tell me one lie and a thousand truths, it's completely asymmetrical.
	I'm going to lose my trust in you.
	So this is how people become red-pilled.
	As soon as you realize, wait a minute, this isn't a mistake like, oh, the weatherman said it was going to rain and it was sunny.
	This is Can a very easy example.
	And this is something, when I talk to leftists, I use this example.
	There's a guy here named Cenk Uygur, who has a show called The Young Turks, a very progressive show.
	And he had David Duke on his show, who's a former Klansman, and David Duke was going on, and they're having a vigorous debate, and David Duke says, I'm not an anti-Semite, and Cenk Uygur goes, no, of course you're not!
	The New York Times covered it, and said, he said I'm an anti-Semite, and the host agreed and said, no, of course you're not.
	It's not possible To have watched that show, or even if you didn't watch it, just know who Cenk Uygur is, to think that he said this not sarcastically or was genuinely agreeing with him.
	But when you see that, you realize this isn't a mistake.
	This is them trying to paint him in a certain brush and make him radioactive to the audience.
	You realize, alright, this cannot... Ayn Rand has this great quote where she says, I don't know if I got the verbiage exactly right, errors of this magnitude are never made innocently.
	And when you see that that's the case, you can start to fight.
	Yeah, but they've got all this... I mean, I was thinking then about airbrushing people out of history, and... They've got technology now which can do even crazier stuff than that.
	They can fake...
	They could fake James Dallingpole or Michael Malice saying, I don't know... It's not bad.
	Just take the vaccine, they could have the saying.
	Just take the damn vaccine, like Jordan Peterson does.
	I mean, but frankly, I'd rather them.
	I'm going to be a little cheeky, but I'm still going to make the point.
	I'd rather they be having to make deep fakes of us than a hundred years ago where they would put a gun to our head and we would go on camera and say it or torture us or our children and go on camera and say it.
	So even that is a step in a better direction.
	Well, at the moment, that's the state of affairs.
	Listen, I'll take what victories I can get.
	Exactly.
	I mean, there is this comforting theory, isn't there, that back in the day, they would have shot us or assassinated us.
	I mean, one of the popular techniques is they make you commit suicide in your hotel room by With your bath towel, which is like, yeah, what you're really going to do, isn't it?
	This is how the CIA does it.
	Or they cancel you.
	But they're not going to get you, are they?
	They're going to come for me first, because I'm more dangerous.
	I mean, you're just...
	But look at my chair, it's got horns on it!
	Yeah, you've got horns on your chair, but they're not devil's horns, are they?
	What are they?
	They're just like... I'm in Texas now, so these are like steer horns, I believe.
	Steer horns, okay, right.
	Can you ride a horse?
	I can't even ride a bike!
	Exactly, that's a thing.
	See, I can ride a horse almost.
	No one likes a show-off.
	No, no.
	But that's the consolation.
	I just think I'm relying on the thinking he's such a stupid mad fucker with a minority audience that, you know, people are just going to think he's crazy.
	So let's not let's not bother killing him.
	Let me speak on this also because this is something I think you'd agree with.
	There is a pervasive sense in red-pilled circles that if anyone is successful they are inherently not to be trusted or they're controlled opposition or they're a fraud because they're so convinced that they're going to lose that anyone who has the appearance of not losing therefore is something else is going on.
	And one of the things I point out in this book is the enemy class is not omniscient.
	They are not these supervillain gods.
	They often are very stupid and very manageable to navigate around because a lot of times they're these apparatchiks who are just in power simply because they tow the party line and are not capable of independent thought on their own.
	Yeah, I think I would agree with you mostly.
	I think what we'd agree on is these people are very lazy.
	Yes.
	They use the same methods.
	Yes.
	And once you become attuned to their techniques, you see the patterns and it becomes very easy to spot how they work.
	Yeah, I spoke recently with Christina Pashaw, who is Governor Ron DeSantis' press secretary, and I said to her, I go, don't you get nervous doing a press conference?
	Because, you know, we can be glib all we want, but if you have a room full of reporters who are hostile to you, and they could ask you anything they want, and you have to do improv for like half an hour, that's not going to be that, and they're all going to try and play gotcha, that's not going to be that easy of a job.
	And she goes, have you met these people?
	They're not particularly bright.
	They're not particularly impressive.
	If you read the leftist websites and podcasts, you know what they're going to ask about.
	You know what their angle is going to be.
	And once you have that, once you know their pattern, it's really easy to navigate around it.
	So to your point, exactly.
	Once you realize, all right, what is their strategies and what's their approaches, they're not particularly, the dangerous ones are the creative ones.
	But thankfully, in my view, those are a very small minority.
	Although they are disproportionately powerful.
	Particularly now in the mainstream media that we are talking, they are NCPs, aren't they?
	And they really are just basic, basic in their thinking.
	I don't ever say mainstream because that implies that they are mainstream.
	I always say the corporate press, because there's nothing mainstream about their worldview.
	Yeah.
	Tell me about your show.
	How well do you do?
	Are you a big thing?
	I don't know if I'd say... I mean, I'm always in the top, like, 50 of American political podcasts, so it's a pretty decent audience.
	Yeah, you see, I tell you what, I mean, if I were in America, I'd probably make so much more money than I do over here, because apart from everything else, Americans are much more generous in their patronage, because you believe in free markets, whereas over here... Well, I don't have a Patreon.
	It's funded by advertising.
	OK, but also there's a sort of element of chauvinism that Americans are more likely to watch an American podcast than a UK one.
	I mean, I'm just guessing that you would probably be more successful than that.
	Other than the lefties, because there's a reason John Oliver is here.
	There's a reason why Trevor Noah was host of The Daily Show for many years.
	So if you're a lefty and you have someone with an accent like yours, I mean, they're tripping over themselves, because what better way to show that I'm better than the middle American riffraff trash savages, I'm listening to an Englishman.
	And every person I know from Britain who I've talked to about this says, "Are you going to tell me that there's no stupid British people?
	They'll laugh in my face." It's like, what are you talking...
	Of course, there's plenty of stupid British people, and many of them are on our televisions and in our parliament.
	Is what you're saying, Michael, that I could be the new James Corden?
	If only I'm... Chris, I could.
	I could put on weight.
	50 kilos.
	50 or 60 kilos.
	I could learn to sing.
	You're going to have to be insufferable to a degree that makes Piers Morgan blush.
	I think I could do that.
	I think I could study Piers Morgan's videos very carefully.
	James, that's the white pill.
	There's your hope.
	I'm going to be the next James Corbyn.
	Okay, I'll give you a cut for that.
	So, okay, you never answered the question at the beginning.
	I mean, like, just tell me about your anarchist, because I'm wondering whether I should be an anarchist too.
	Just give me the hard sell on what anarchism means, really?
	Sure.
	I mean, I put out a book last year called The Anarchist Handbook, which is a collection of historical essays about every aspect of anarchism.
	And my tagline is, the black flag comes in many colors.
	And in my introductory essay, I say anarchism just is the thesis that you do not speak for me, and everything else is application.
	So it is at its base a vision that political authority is inherently and always be entirely illegitimate, and everything else follows from there.
	Well, you said nothing there that I could disagree with.
	I mean, I think... Because we know that anarchy has been mis-sold to us as this, you know, you're an anarchist?
	Yeah, go live in Somalia.
	You know, this is what they always... Or you're an anarchist, but you use postage stamps and currency?
	Okay, hypocrite.
	Or if someone's about to murder you, you'd call the cops?
	Okay, hypocrite.
	Yeah, stuff like that, right.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	I think you're case made.
	I'm with you there.
	I would encourage you to read the Anarchist Handbook, and I think you'd find it very edifying.
	And one of the specific examples that I know you would love is Mikhail Bakunin, who was Marx's big rival.
	In 1867, I have the essay in the book, he predicted 50 years, exactly 50 years for the Soviet Union, what Marx's scientific socialism would look like in practice.
	And how nightmarish it would be for the workers.
	And his great quote is, the people aren't much happier when their stick that they're beaten with is called the people stick.
	Isn't that a great quote?
	That is a really good quote.
	I must try and learn that one.
	Yeah, that is very, very true.
	I just think at the moment we are run by slightly more shit versions of the people who were running the Soviet Union.
	Okay, sure, they're not at the moment.
	Putting bullets in the back of our heads after a period of torture in the Lubyanka or whatever.
	But nevertheless, they are the same kind of functionaries of a kind of a system.
	They just, they don't care.
	They have no moral core.
	They have no... And here's the other thing.
	I don't even know how to pronounce his last name.
	One other reason I'm an anarchist.
	I don't think anyone watching this with a straight face can tell me that Rishi... Is it Sunak?
	Sunak, yeah.
	That Rishi Sunak is going to be the one who's going to save Britain, or save your culture.
	I mean, that, to me, is such an absurdity, I don't even know where to start.
	Rishi Sunak is about saving his arse, and that's it.
	I mean, he actually, look, he sold loads and loads of shares in his, you know, when he's a billionaire, in his company, and then changed the tax laws so that nobody else could have the same tax rate.
	Yeah, but you wouldn't begrudge him that if he was actually doing things as PM.
	Listen, you save a country and you get a billion on the side.
	I don't care.
	Take it.
	You've earned it, right?
	Like, no one would be grudge of this.
	That's, to me, such a side issue from the absolute atrocity of what the Tories are.
	Although, I have to say, Michael, for an anarchist, you've conceded the notion that it's anyone's business to save a country.
	I mean, you know, like politicians.
	Wait a... well, I mean, I love my country because I hate my government.
	Yeah.
	And I can also easily point out that I'd rather have the flu than brain cancer.
	Doesn't mean I want the flu.
	No, no, I agree.
	There was something... another question I was dying because I was listening to some of your stuff and... My condolences.
	What's happened to Milo?
	Because, you know, I used to, before Milo moved to America, I knew him.
	I knew him before he was famous.
	And the other day I put a message on his, on his, like, Telegram or something?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, saying, let's do a podcast.
	And I don't know whether he ever saw it, but I never got a reply.
	And I was thinking, if he did see it and ignored it, it's a bit like Luke Skywalker turning down a reunion invitation from Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi.
	I hate Star Wars, by the way, but it's like that level of, kind of, sort of, I'll defend Milo and I think you'll agree with my defense.
	I have a chapter about him in my book, The New Right.
	I think Milo got a bad rap.
	I think what he was saying that got him cancelled was something that in any other context would be no one would argue with.
	That A, it's very common, especially in past decades, for gay relationships to have an older gay man initiate the younger gay man into the lifestyle, especially when everyone's underground.
	You didn't know anyone your age.
	Two, he was clearly the victim of that exchange where, you know, it was a priest or whoever it was, and he's trying to be glib.
	He's glib about everything.
	He's trying to make the best of that interaction historically, and I don't begrudge anyone who had been the victim of statutory rape how they're going to deal with it.
	If you want to make jokes about it, if you want to cry with it, I've never had to experience that.
	I don't begrudge you how you're going to handle it.
	So for that to be the thing, Which ruins his career, I think, was completely outrageous.
	And he knew, clearly, it's ridiculous that this is, of all the things he said and done, that's going to be the problem?
	Something that happened to him?
	And to have it be kind of portrayed as him defending child sexual abuse was completely disingenuous.
	So I don't know what I would do.
	If I had the rug pulled out from me so hard and so publicly, what shows I'd be going on and who I'd be talking to, I don't know.
	I can't speak on that.
	Oh yeah.
	No, but you're preaching to the choir on that one, Michael.
	I thought it was a load of bullshit.
	But you know and I know that they will find a thing to get you on.
	They kept trying.
	They kept trying to stick things against the wall with him and this is the one that worked.
	And it was the Conservatives who were the first ones to throw him under the bus.
	Which actually brings us back to the original topic of conversation, which is that the techniques used by the checker, it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or innocent.
	We know you're innocent.
	We're just going to find something to pin on you.
	It doesn't really matter.
	The point is... Jay, one of the things I talk about in the book is a lot of times these people who are interrogating someone who was arrested, they knew the person was innocent.
	They're like, you're wasting my time.
	I'm here to get a confession out of you.
	We both know you're innocent, but you're going to confess.
	So let's just hurry up and get it on with.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	By the way, have you read Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate?
	No, I've not.
	OK.
	It's pretty good.
	I mean, it's the kind of the 20th century Russian war and peace.
	Wassily Grossman was a war correspondent and had a very interesting war.
	He wrote this book called Life and Fate.
	I was reminded of it when you said that the characters are always saying in the book, if only Stalin got to hear about this, he'd be appalled.
	He doesn't realise what's going on.
	Well, you have to laugh, but this is what happened in North Korea as well.
	In the 90s, when the famine hit, the people who were the true believers and the good people, who were honest, were the first to starve because they thought, the government's going to take care of us.
	Kim Jong-il cares about us.
	He's fighting as much as he can.
	And it was the crooks and the thieves who were stealing food or trying to hustle across the border with China.
	They're the ones who survived.
	So what's even more pernicious about these systems is the ones who are honest and true believers and really were, in their way, doing their best to make a society of equality for everyone.
	They were often the first targets and the first ones tortured and put up against the wall.
	Yeah.
	Which is, actually, just to ride one of my hobby horses here, and we talked about this in a different way, talking about people's responses to Covid and how the Stasi found their informers.
	Nobody has to do this thing.
	And if you follow, for example, the Christian, I think Judaism, I'm sure it has the same thing, that if you make truth, the truth, your watchword, and you realize that God the truth, your watchword, and you realize that God is love, God is truth, and you make those your kind of part of your moral compass, you're never gonna do this stuff, Because you won't.
	James, thou shalt not bear false witness is one of the Big Ten.
	God gave it to Moses directly.
	This is up there.
	And it was a, yeah, that's right, it was a big issue back then.
	Of course.
	This, this tender, yeah.
	Because you'd get somebody put to death, could you, by bearing, by bearing false witness.
	Of course, yes.
	Yeah.
	So yeah, we should all just go back to those, those basic rules.
	Whenever someone uses the word just, they're hand-waving away a lot of stuff.
	So, I get what you're saying about how that would be the great goal, but for us to get there, it's going to be a process and a slog.
	Especially with a century of education in the hands of very, very malevolent people.
	Yeah.
	But I mean, the Ten Commandments.
	You wouldn't go far wrong with that, would you?
	I don't know.
	There's something to be said for coveting.
	Do you think what, you cover your neighbor's ass?
	Have you seen that ass?
	You could drop a dime off of it.
	Shaking that ass, yeah.
	Excuse me, I have a pence.
	Let me speak the language.
	It's actually much funnier in American because it wouldn't make sense because we say arse.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	Not arse, but it's good.
	It's good in American.
	I like it.
	Well, Michael, it's getting off my suppertime now and I've really enjoyed talking to you.
	Tell us, because I imagine some of my listeners, they're meeting you for the first time.
	Tell us where we can see your stuff and tell us about where we can get your books and all that.
	WhitePillBook.com and I'm on Twitter at Michael Malice and YouTube at Michael Malice Official.
	I was looking forward to this enormously and you didn't disappoint, so I really, really enjoyed this conversation a lot.
	It's really fun when instead of being surface, you know, we can sit down and talk about things at a far deeper level and I think the audience enjoys that kind of conversation much more as well, don't you?
	Oh, totally!
	Well, yeah, absolutely.
	I think you've just got to...
	I listen to some podcasts where people just skitter over the surface and you think, well, what's the point, you know?
	Oh, Tory versus Labour.
	Oh, Diana Abbott.
	Oh, Boris Johnson.
	Yeah, we get it.
	We get it.
	Yeah.
	Well, those are the ones that get promoted, of course, by the... Of course.
	Let's not use the word mainstream, but... The corporate press.
	Yeah.
	The system.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The corporate corporate horse.
	And you, amazingly, have still got a YouTube channel, which I haven't.
	Yeah, they pulled you from YouTube?
	Yeah.
	Do you know what they did?
	I was keeping my nose clean because I recognized that YouTube is a useful conduit for just traffic and stuff.
	Because people are very lazy.
	And if you disappear from YouTube, they don't go, oh, we must find where he has gone.
	They just go, we don't see you on YouTube anymore.
	He ceased to exist, yeah.
	And there's no way to search for someone in some kind of engine.
	No.
	Well, yeah, but actually there isn't, really, because the engines are controlled by the... But yeah, what they did, because I was keeping my nose clean, I was... They went through year-old podcasts and found evidence of me dissing the death jab, or whatever.
	And, I mean, these were even podcasts that I didn't care about.
	These were podcasts with very limited traffic.
	And they just said, right, this is your third strike, you're out.
	And also, it would have been so easy for them to say, pull these and never talk about it again, and then I'm sure you would have at least thought about complying, but they don't want to give you the opportunity to rectify what they perceive to be a mistake, and not only that,
	If this was about, alright, we want to have healthy discourse, what they define as healthy discourse, on our outlet, which you can understand, a company has a right to delineate, you know, to some extent, conversation, they would, if they were acting in good faith, say, this is off limits for you.
	Pull these videos and then you can have the decision to be like, you know, F off or okay, I'll, you know, I'll be a good boy.
	But they are not, they don't want to give you, and you're not some crackpot in a basement.
	You're, you're, you're many books to your name.
	You know, you, you have, you know, again, you're an established personality.
	So if they were acting in good faith, they would be treating you with a certain modicum of decency and respect, but of course they won't.
	I would have deleted, because those videos, in the great scheme of things, they mattered so little.
	I would have deleted them in a trice in order that I could put out some stuff.
	Of course.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And certainly at this point, no one's watching them.
	You know, it's like, who cares?
	But again, they are using the same techniques that the Checker would have used, whereby You're not certain what the rules are.
	And they make up the rules and they can change them.
	Right.
	And they make them retroactive.
	That's the key.
	Retroactivity.
	So if you were a good boy in 2020, well, good boy, it's like Trotskyites, right?
	You sided with the wrong person 20 years ago and now you're paying the price today.
	So you're correct in that regard.
	That's the trick.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, Michael, it's been great talking to you.
	Just, if you've enjoyed this podcast, do please keep supporting me on Patreon, Subscribestar, Locals, Substack, BuyMeACoffee.
	I really appreciate it.
	I mean, I'm just giving you an example of how they try and close me down and demonetize me and stuff.
	So I hope you can beat the system and support me in different ways.
	Michael, it's been a pleasure.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Enormous, enormous pleasure here as well.
	And thanks a lot.
	Have fun in sunny Austin.
	Go and round up some steers and have a barbecue, like we did.
	Good.

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