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May 27, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:48:30
Simon Elmer
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
It's my old friend, Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
It's my old friend, Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing.
Well, Simon, it's weird.
I call you my old friend because you've been on the pod before.
But I reckon there would have been a time in your life when you would have thought I was a complete wanker.
And or at least your ideological opponent, because for years I used to think of myself as being on this thing called the right.
And you, I imagine, thought of yourself as being on the left.
And I think in our different ways, we've both come to realise that those concepts are just impossible.
illusory ones designed to divide us.
Hello, James.
Thank you for having me back.
It's lovely to talk to you again.
Much worse than that, James, a few years ago, I didn't even know who you were, which is even worse than thinking you were on the right, as you didn't know who I was either.
But yes, I mean, I did an interview a little while ago, and I was reflecting on the fact that one of the people I published an article with is a conservative woman.
Which I think my friends would have found, you know, very amusing a few years ago.
I think because of the, you know, we talked about this last time, the work I did with Architects for Social Housing, which is based in London, most of the work we did was against Labour councils demolishing council estates, which is primarily what they do at the moment.
So my belief in any kind of opposition between at least the official left and the official right died before this, I think, in a way.
I was very beginning to doubt that.
I think I still had a bit of faith that they were non-labour affiliated left organisations, but my faith in them has also disappeared with their complete collaboration with what's been going on over the last three years.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think it is, we probably made this point last time, it's not really about left v right, it's about them v us.
They are few, we are many.
The extraordinary levels of authoritarianism that's happening at the moment, I mean there's There's three things.
The state is becoming more authoritarian.
The global technocracies running the state or telling the governments what to do are becoming totalitarian, especially in the new programs and technologies they're implementing.
And I was kind of thinking a word for what's happening to the corporate world, and I think it's anarchism in a way.
The corporate world doesn't even have any kind of oversight from the state or anyone else at the moment.
So those sort of three elements, I think.
Corporate anarchism, state authoritarianism, And I guess technological totalitarianism, digital totalitarianism.
Well, of course, I was thinking about the corporate anarchism.
This is what Hollywood does.
It warns us about these things.
Revelation of the method, predictive programming.
And Blade Runner was really all about that, wasn't it?
The world was run by these megacorps.
And we're really feeling it now.
I really get the impression The thing I really get, the feeling I get from the corporate world is it despises us.
If it even considers us at all.
I think it doesn't even think of us as counting for anything.
It just does its thing.
Which is bizarre when you think that these businesses notionally started out as creating products for our delectation, if you like.
I mean, the wonderful The wonderful belief system that one used to have, I used to have, that there was this system called the free market and that companies competed to provide products for consumers and that whichever one provided the best product at the lowest price would thrive while the others would go under in this process called creative destruction.
And there was an endless cycle of Of gradual improvement of everything.
Yeah.
Yes, that idea of the free market, which, you know, I think I read this in my book, that if it ever existed, it was in a small German town in the 18th century and it lasted for a few decades or something.
Yeah.
It's amazing how that image kind of still retains such a kind of a purchase on people's idea of what capitalism is in a way.
Capitalism has been for a long time and particularly now is about creating monopolies.
And yeah, you're right about the kind of the Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation, which exists above the kind of, you know, the underclass who are kind of messing around on the street is a very good image of where we are now.
I also think, I mean, the various analyses of commodities and what they are, which I guess have come out of things like historical materialism, or what you'd call the left, have been that commodities actually create not simply objects, but subjects for their objects, subjects for their products.
Recently I've been trying to get people to get rid of their smartphones.
It's absolutely impossible.
I was giving a talk when I launched my books and the whole room was full of, you know, like-minded people.
And I said, you know, does anyone want to get rid of their smartphone?
And I've just given a talk about how the smartphone is going to be the vehicle for digital ID, for central bank digital currency, for the, our, you know, obedience to environmental, social and governance criteria.
All these new programs for the World Health Organization's Pandemic Treaty.
And having said all this for an hour in great detail, and I said, and this, this is the digital prison.
It's in your hand.
Get rid of it, comrades.
And everyone was like, are you mad?
And I published an article in The Off-Guardian about this.
And I think the last time I looked, it had something like 350 responses, which is kind of quite a lot for the sort of stuff that I wrote.
And with a few exceptions, but generally, the responses were You know, nothing short of appalled.
You know, if I said we have to overthrow world capitalism and set up a communist utopia, people would be like, yeah, but get rid of your iPhone.
And it really convinces me, you know, when people protest too much, you realize you really struck a kind of a nerve there.
Yeah, I've got a story that echoes that, which is that I was recently in Singapore, and some friends have this ZipLine company and it's a really good zip line.
I recommend it.
The one that I think is the only one in Singapore.
Anyway, you get to the bottom and in order to get your photographs from your ride, you know, pictures of you going, you know, whatever, you have to upload this app onto your phone and it then gives it access to all your photographs in your phone.
And this young guy, a nice guy, was helping me to install this.
And I was thinking, well, hang on a second, why am I installing this app that I don't need to get photographs I don't particularly want of me going down the wire?
And I said to, I pointed this out to him, I said, look, this is just crazy.
I'm just giving, this app seems to want information on me.
And he said, have you looked at the terms and conditions for your iPhone?
Have you looked at the terms and conditions?
Yeah, they know everything about you.
You're selling your soul.
But he said, I know all this, but he was presenting it to me in a way that like, yeah, but whatever, this is how it is.
What can you do?
He was amused by it rather than appalled.
And I think that's how most people are.
Yeah, I think most people are.
You know, I kind of put up these in this article, I put up these statistics on the kind of the level of our addiction, as it is what it is, an addiction to these phones.
I think the demonstration of that addiction that not a single person in the room or since has sort of said, yes, I'm going to get rid of my iPhone.
I don't own one, but I must be one of the few people in London who doesn't.
What do you do?
I use a, you know, G3.
I've got an old Nokia.
I spend enough time in front of this laptop to want to do it.
So it's really simply because I spend so much of my life in front of a laptop.
I don't want to take a computer out with me, but I'm very glad that I didn't go through that process of addiction formation, which is definitely what it was.
You know, the other day I was doing some new research and I was in the British Library.
I was on the outside bit, you know, where everyone sort of has coffee and stuff.
And I was joined at my table by sort of about six young girls who were, they were studying economics.
They were sort of first year, second year students or something like that.
So very bright people, the sort of people who could be running You know, CEOs and companies and so on and so forth in a few years.
And it's a long time since I've sort of, you know, I don't teach anymore.
I've been around young students.
And they sat around me ostensibly studying economics.
And literally, I don't think a half a minute passed, 30 seconds, when each one of them would sort of do something on their phone, touch it like that.
And I thought, you know, these are people who are living in difficult circumstances, you know, people who haven't got much in their life to fill their, you know, you can understand that they're turning to various forms of addiction.
These are the kind of the former leaders and they were utterly bound to those phones.
So to go back to the kind of the point you began this with, people, you know, we think we use these phones.
They don't.
They have programmed us to use them.
Yes.
And that inversion of the idea that somehow capitalism is creating commodities which fulfill our needs and desires.
It's exactly the other way around.
They're creating subjects, they're creating human beings which fit their needs, the needs of the people making them.
And in a way, that is what the 4th Industrial Revolution is about, the ideologues of the 4th Industrial Revolution.
Harari has said, the new product of the 4th Industrial Revolution isn't things like new clothes or cars or mechanics or even computers.
He says, it's human beings.
We are the things being produced.
And I think that's where we are at the moment.
Just explain that a bit more, we are the things being produced.
The mind exploited?
Yeah, I think we are being produced as new human beings.
I think all totalitarian ideologies, whether it's Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Communist China or something, have this idea that there is a new man, there's a new figure who's going to become the dominant, the new model of how human beings relate with each other.
I think the difference between those is that Flawed as they were, the idea of the new man of those ideologies was something positive, something which would be superior.
I think the new man, the new human being, which is being fashioned at the moment, is being deliberately fashioned to compliance, to weakness, to an absence of community with our fellow human beings.
You know, the other day, I've been putting this off for a very long time, but I know that I have to write an article about trans ideology, which I don't see as being Coincidental, you know, it's enormous investment financially, through company sponsorship, through new legislation.
I don't see this as incidental to this great reset of Western civilization.
I see it really at the heart of the ideology.
And trans ideology is a transhumanism.
On this kind of spurious idea of trans rights, young children are given this choice that they can choose what sex they are.
What they're actually given a choice is just to mutilate themselves But there's two things going on.
One is the way that we think, the way we behave, our patterns of behavior, creating forms of addiction which habituate us to certain patterns of behavior and compliance.
But I think there's also a big change going under in our biology as well.
I think the trans ideology is encouraging us to regard our bodies as a kind of a consumer choice.
We can choose what we are.
The whole The idea of identity politics is you can search around for an identity and say, I am this, that and the other.
It's about focusing on who you are, what you are.
It's not really about who you are.
You can choose what you are, rather than your relationship to the world or to each other.
So it's a very fragmenting form of ideology.
But I think it's also, I think it is becoming kind of a bit like, you know, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
It's not just about the ideology.
They are trying, I think, fundamentally to change our biology.
They're very open about that.
Yuval Harari, the advisor to Klaus Schwab, says the product of the fourth industrial revolution is the minds and bodies of human beings.
I believe it.
It's interesting, isn't it, that his book has been on the bestseller list, very heavily promoted.
Once you understand just how all the different industries move in lockstep, It's my belief, I don't know whether you've reached this conclusion as well, that no book that becomes a bestseller does so without essentially the design of the publishing industry.
There are very few kind of quality books that slip through the net and somehow by accident become popular.
Yuval Harari, whatever, his book was Foisted on us and we were told this is a really important book about human beings and their transitional point in history and suddenly the chattering classes took it up, you know, the BBC would have promoted it or all the sort of write-on book clubs would have got on board with it and so on and so forth.
Not a person would have bought that book, willingly, without the kind of the system pointing them in the right direction.
Yeah, he had everyone from Bill Gates and Barack Obama and all the big oligarchs saying this is the greatest thing I've ever read.
I'm not sure why we should think that anything that Bill Gates reads and approves of is a recommendation.
I've looked briefly at the book.
It's one of those popular philosophy books, isn't it?
It's the opinions of a very unpleasant person.
It's got absolutely no intellectual clout at all.
And yet he's probably the most fated public intellectual in the world at the moment, isn't he?
In the West, at least.
Every book he publishes is a bestseller.
He's invited around to go and speak to very influential think tanks.
And yet, if you listen to what he's saying... I mean, I described him in my book as a latter-day Joseph Goebbels, and he is.
He's appalling.
He uses quite openly I mean, he's an Israeli, and Israel is an apartheid state.
And I imagine growing up in that state as a kind of a, as an Israeli who looks on Palestinians as, the word he uses to describe us is, useless mouths.
He kind of talks about, he says, you know, all the people who used to do labor who are going to be replaced by not just the digitalization of labor, but he says, you know, these are useless people.
We have to find something to do with them.
I mean, he's not an idiot.
He must know that term.
I can't remember what the German translation is here.
Useless mouths was used by the Nazis to describe anyone who was deemed either because they were not capable of engaging in manual labor or in any way serving the state as surplus to requirements.
And they were the first people who were subjected to the involuntary euthanasia program.
And yet this guy is quite openly talking in this way.
And yet he is fated At the very, very highest levels.
Not only is he a great intellectual, which he isn't, he's a populist ideologue, but someone we should be looking up to.
What he says is absolutely appalling.
So yeah, it's extraordinary.
He's just essentially a pawn who has been found and promoted.
He suits the agenda.
They pick these figures and they promote them because they're on message.
He will have been chosen to deliver this particular phase of the messaging but all this stuff that's happening now can be traced back decades and you see the gradualist approach.
So you talk about identity politics, I mean obviously in the past that it was all about for example race and then it became well and I suppose you had the various waves of feminism again you know that it's all about We women are completely different from men, and men just shaft us over and, you know, they're the enemy.
Always, but always, it's about division and confusion.
They want to turn us against one another so that they can control us better.
It does go back a long way.
I mean, I remember a long time ago now, but when I was doing my master's degree at UCL in London, and this new term came out, was it political correctness?
And I didn't really know about where it came from.
It obviously came from the States.
All bad ideas come from the United States.
And it was adopted very quickly.
And like a lot of these ideas, they seem, on the surface of it, to be liberal, I guess.
You know, the same thing about, you know, combating, you know, discrimination and all this sort of stuff, not causing offense and so on and so forth.
And, you know, identity politics, which seemed to come shortly after that.
Critical race theory now, you know, woke and then Trans, all these things are so successful and they've been adopted so uncritically by liberals, by university students, by the liberal middle classes, and held up as kind of new, they've become the new credo of this generation.
On the face of it, they seem to be good things, but they really, I think, unveiled themselves now, or been unveiled by people like us, as being incredibly insidious ideologies.
I mean, I think what we're talking about is, this is what I've been thinking about recently, when I was thinking about what we were going to talk about.
Yeah, yeah.
We mentioned this before, we're both a bit dispirited and sort of, you know, what exactly, where are we now and what are we trying to do?
I think I'm trying to understand, this I think is something where history can help us a little to try and understand this, how it has been, how has it been possible for what apparently seems that at every level of life,
From not just the top of the, you know, the CEOs of corporations or the top of government or the top of our kind of civic institutions, but apparently all the way down through unions, through the kind of civic bodies, the kind of the balances and checks, you know, the checks and balances, this phrase we use, which is somehow something inherent, something which is woven into the warp and weft of democracy, that fascism or totalitarianism or authoritarianism can never come back because they use Checks and balances are woven into our civic society.
And yes, we might have a bad government.
We might have a corrupt corporation.
We might have a bad police force.
We might have all these sort of things.
But these checks and balances will keep them in place, whether it's the media or whatever.
The media can be corrupted by highly powerful oligarchs and so on.
But there's always a checks and balances.
And what's happened is those checks and balances have somehow been taken away.
They've been undermined.
And I think it's been done in two ways.
I think on the one hand, 40 years, at least, of neoliberalism, which has done a number of things.
But one of the things it does is it has disinvested from these civic institutions, not just the state, but civic institutions, from universities, from the media, from education, from Parliament itself, if you like.
They've all been disinvested and into that vacuum of a lack of the NHS, another example, have come very, very, very powerful billionaires, multi-billionaires.
Who have, as we know now, when we look at things like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, how far it has penetrated into almost every aspect of our society, not just merely medical and health institutions, but our media, our universities, everywhere.
So on the one hand, they've now got a power where they can simply say to somewhere like University College London or Oxford University, these institutions which represent themselves as kind of Bastions of free thinking, maybe of not being free thinking, but of autonomous, being autonomous and somehow being a place from which one can critique and hold power to account, have been completely taken over by these oligarchs.
Let's call them what they are.
Yeah.
So that's one of the ways it's been done.
And it's filtered down everywhere.
It's filtered down to places I don't think we could have imagined.
But the other thing that's happened is what we were just talking about, these ideologies.
Which on the surface of them do seem to be positive things, things against immigration, discrimination, things which are liberal in their intentions, have actually worked to raise any kind of criticality, not only towards themselves, but towards this far more material process, which has raised the checks and balances, the institutional or mechanics of checks and balances, which can hold
We're defending a democratic society against the kind of corporate takeover that we've seen at the moment.
You know, at the moment, someone like von der Leyen, the unelected president of the European Commission.
I kind of knew her before this, but she's swatting around now, like Adolf Hitler, frankly, declaring that we're going to do this in Ukraine and we're going to do that to digital ID and we're going to invest in this and we're going to do... And I look at her and I'm like, where the hell are you?
I have no idea.
Who are you?
And she's got no... She literally is swanning around like a Führer, like a European Führer, declaring what we're going to do.
Declaring that all the G7 nations, all the European nations, the G20, are all united against Russia and Ukraine.
And I'm like, who is this person that's suddenly become the elected spokesperson?
She's a little bit like the President of the United States, but in Europe.
But at least the President of the United States goes through some democratic process to get elected.
Flawed and corrupted as that is, as we've seen.
But she's just this sort of, she's just been kind of chosen by a secret society in a way.
It makes me nostalgic for somebody that during his lifetime I rejected as a kind of insane leftist dangerous lunatic.
Who's that?
Tony Blair.
Sorry, I thought you said Blair there for a moment.
No, I think Tony Blair really is a dangerous lunatic.
But Tony Benn, who I used to be infuriated by when he was a public figure, and I thought, you know, how can people be fooled by this avuncular pipe-smoking demeanour with this flake speech impediment?
Didn't they realise that he was a self-proclaimed Hating Toff who'd renounced his title in order to foment dangerous leftist ideas.
That was me in my kind of conservative youth.
And I now look back and his oft-quoted statements about... I can't remember exactly about... If you can't vote them out.
Yes, that's what it comes down to.
And you look at Ursula von der Leyen and you think, well, we have no...
She seems to be setting the agenda and the policy.
We have no control.
We can't get rid of her.
And when you see her in these appalling meetings with our another unelected figure, our unelected Prime Minister, you don't have to be a student of body language to understand where the power lays there.
And yet, nominally, Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the sixth largest economy in the world, one of the major kind of powers in Europe, the great link between Europe and the USA, and yet when he's around her he's like a lapdog and it's quite clear where the power lies.
And she seems to be fairly similar, perhaps not with the Italian Prime Minister, but who is this woman?
We've moved, you know, I've been warning about this, I did it through all my books, about this move from the nation-state as the model of democratic governance since at least the French Revolution, if you like, and how we've moved into a global form of government.
We're now quite openly calling it, well not us, people who are forming it, quite openly calling it a world government.
Or a single world order.
They're not even trying to set up a kind of a UN sort of model of accountability that somehow we vote for people who then vote for people who then go on to the council or this.
They simply set themselves up as a top-down kind of dictatorship really.
And they're very open about it.
And that's happened in front of our faces over the last three years but actually even closer than that.
It's actually happened I think it's actually happened since this proxy war with Ukraine.
Yes.
That's become the sort of the front, the new front, for this utterly autocratic model of governance.
It's quite extraordinary.
And she somehow emerges as this new Führer figure.
It's quite amazing.
I want to talk to you about Ukraine in a moment, but I just wanted to pick up on one point you made, which is about national sovereignty.
Did you see There was a conference recently in London, something like National Conservatism, and I noticed that some of the participants in this National Conservatism conference were bigging themselves up by saying, and you can tell we matter because the left has really been getting up in arms about us, and you go on Twitter and they've been saying terrible things about us.
And I was looking at these people and I was thinking, actually, you know what, Nobody gives a toss.
Nobody who wasn't at your silly conference gives a toss.
And okay, the people who you claim are opposing you are themselves part of this illusion, this Punch and Judy show which is put on for our benefit.
You don't count for anything.
Because I was looking at the figures, looking at these sort of conservative voices, I'm not going to name any names, but the kind of Supposed conservative voices speaking out for national sovereignty, who were speaking at this conference, none of them spoke out against the vaccine rollout program.
None of them spoke at the time, but barely, about the lockdown.
None of them spoke out, for example, when Australia was essentially turned once more into a prison colony, with concentration camps being erected in plain view for dissenters, for people who quarantine camps and things.
And I remember at the time, waiting to read the robust op-ed in the Telegraph or whatever, by one of these conservative voices, you know, where was, where was the robust piece by one of those empire lovers like Dan Hannan or, or Celebrators of the Power of the Anglosphere?
You know, where was the Douglas Murray Peace on how appalling this was, that this should happen in our lifetime.
And there was nothing.
Where was Charles Moore?
Nowhere to be seen.
And yet these are the people who are now saying, yes, but we think national sovereignty is really important.
We need a new way.
We need an alternative system to counter this one world government thing.
Well, hang on a second, guys.
Where were you in the fight when it mattered?
You were nowhere.
And now you're having this... I hate to use the word echo chamber, but there you are, sitting in your echo chamber, making your speeches, and you're not going to make a difference because you're part of the problem.
Yeah, it's... If we, and we have, if we've moved the ultimate source of power, upper level, to this global block, Which is being formed.
It's not quite global because obviously, you know, there's, what's very interesting at the moment is there's this alternative block forming around this alliance between China and Russia.
Yes.
With the BRICS nations coming in as well, which has really given the USA and Europe pause, particularly over, you know, what's going on in the Ukraine.
I was kind of hoping it would lead to them standing down, but there's definitely a Western, a new Western block being formed.
It's been there for a long time.
And it's very much now around, not the USA and the UK, with us playing our typical role of the sort of the lap dog on Blofeld's kind of, you know, stroking cat.
It's now very much about Europe and the USA becoming these two kind of superpowers.
Since power has moved up there, you've then got to think, well, what is the role of national governments now?
I remember very, very early on, actually it was before all this, it was in his book, what was it called?
By Lord Sumption, Jonathan Sumption, the former Justice of the Supreme Court.
In his book, what was it called?
Trials of the State, he gave those Reith lectures, which I think they published it in 2019, just before this.
And at the end, he ends with a kind of a prediction about what's happening to our democracy.
And I think he was reflecting on the whole sort of the, you know, the torturous Brexit process.
But he said, he said, this is how democracy dies.
And it doesn't happen with, in mature democracies, you don't have People coming out onto the streets.
You don't have people taking over.
It's not a coup.
It's not like somewhere in Chile or something like that.
He says, the facade of democracy remains, but the actual mechanics of it have simply been erased, if you like.
And he says, if this happens, it will be our fault.
Because it can only happen in a democracy when the people who constitute that democracy, because it's not just the institutions, it is the public, it is the population as well, don't defend it strongly.
They don't stand up for free speech.
They don't stand up for the fundamental principles of this.
And I agree with you absolutely that what Parliament now, perhaps it has been for a while, but now it is absolutely, is a spectacle of democracy.
It's almost like a game show.
It is a game show.
Everyone watches Prime Minister's question times every week and they actually think this matters.
They think this is actually something which is having any kind of effect whatsoever.
And people sit there and they fight with each other and they call each other's names and And it's amazing they can keep it up, but I guess that's their job.
They are actors in a theatre.
And it creates, you know, sometimes I go on to Twitter, I go on to Twitter a lot and I see these kind of old-school leftists, the kind of the Corbynite lot, who still think there's something at stake in Parliament.
They still think there's a chance that if only Corbyn had taken over Parliament, if only he'd formed a government, that somehow, you know, we could all go into this lovely, you know, people like, what's his name, Owen and, you know, the whole kind of Corbyn artist sort of stuff.
They do think that this is a source of, you know, kind of power and stuff.
And I agree with you.
You kind of want to say to them, when do you think this all happened?
You know, when do you think this, this threat of a glow-new-woke government happened?
You know, do you really think some sort of national conservatism is going to take back power?
It's just another Punch and Judy show.
It is.
You see, you know, we say with what's his name?
Matt Hancock now being interrogated about his his affairs under lockdown and things like that.
Nobody actually asks what on earth he actually did during that time.
You know, the appalling kind of crimes against humanity he was responsible for.
And nobody actually asked him about what is actually going on with the World Health Organization here.
These are all distractions.
To stop us looking at the real threats which are coming, which are being implemented right now, and which the press is completely and utterly failing to cover at all.
Although I totally agree with your view, except the cynical and maybe wiser, actually, part of my brain reminds me that the corruption Um, has been embedded in the system far longer than we understood at the time.
For example, you and I may be just old enough to, I remember when Ted Heath was prime minister.
Do you remember Ted Heath?
Yes, I do.
Uh, I mean, here you've got a guy who in all likelihood was a, a murderous pedophile who was in 10 Downing Street and bumping off rent boys On his yacht, on his yacht Morning Cloud.
We were always encouraged to say, like, what do we know about Ted Heath?
What did we know at the time about Ted Heath?
We knew that there was the Mike Yardwood impersonation of him.
There was the fact that he loved sailing on his yacht.
We knew the name of the yacht, Morning Cloud.
And we knew that he had classical music aspirations because he conducted some symphony orchestra or other.
You think about it, it's a bit like the things we know about Matt Hancock, that he goes on I'm a celebrity and he had an affair with this woman who obviously wasn't his wife and all these... I noticed the same thing going on with Labour MPs.
They'll often pick issues, sort of, they troll the right and they sort of They sort of appeal to their kind of rabid fan base by picking on silly racial issues or whatever, making a fuss about it.
Like Diane Abbott is the mistress of this, talking about slavery and so on.
None of this is really relevant to the lives of the people that their job supposedly is to serve.
People care about things like the fact that They can't afford to heat their homes because of net zero.
They care about the fact that they can't get jobs anymore because so many jobs have been destroyed during the fake pandemic and so on.
So, yes, you're right.
We've got these pantomime figures in Parliament who don't do anything that is of any use to us, but I would suggest to you that they've been bad actors for much longer than we realised.
Yes, definitely.
I almost pined for the days of Thatcher's governments and that wonderful group of weirdos that she had in her cabinet.
They were kind of extraordinary.
The people we have in, I've said many, many times and I'll repeat it all the time, the Parliament we've got now is the worst Parliament we've had in my lifetime, probably in living memory, probably beyond that, probably in modern times at all.
They're mediocre people.
I got the feeling that the people around in Thatcher's government, they were corrupt and awful people, but they weren't mediocre.
They kind of knew their stuff, in a way.
You might not agree with what they were doing, but they weren't mediocre people.
I think Parliament now is simply not up to the job of governing or holding the government to account at all.
Yes, they were kind of crooks with hinterland.
They might be terrible people, but at least... So Lord Carrington had been in the Guards Armoured Division and had
had been on the sort of the the doomed attempt to rescue um the paratroopers at Arnhem and and uh Willie Whitelaw had got an emcee in in in the Second World War I suppose yeah so they had had a past but I mean every now and then I I kind of go into who actually makes up our parliament usually when there's been a vote and I'd like to see who voted which way and stuff and
Labour, I mean this is the way these these ideologies now are having really, you know, these kind of marginal ideologies have completely infiltrated into our politics.
Identity politics means that most of Labour, and particularly in its London constituencies, are chosen because of their identity.
That is, what their religion is, what their race is, what their sex is, maybe what their sexuality is, whatever.
They're chosen because people will go out and vote for them because they'll go, well, okay, here is a black or Asian or Muslim or gay or female or whatever.
And if you look at the constituent, you know, the people who make up the Labour Party, it seems to me, and this is my knowledge of kind of fighting with Labour for a long time in kind of housing policy, that they've been chosen not on any kind of qualifications they've got as, you know, someone who you might go to for advice, someone who might know how to read a legal document, someone who understands anything about the economy.
They're chosen as kind of cheerleaders to go around and rustle up votes to get that constituency to vote Labour.
Unfortunately, when they're then asked, as MPs, as sitting members of Parliament, to scrutinise a document, which is, you know, like the documents that were just taken away so many of our liberties, or to engage with something like the repercussions of digital ID, they simply don't have the chops to do it.
They simply can't do it at all.
Whereas the makeup of the Conservative Party seems to me very different.
They're people who seem to be entrepreneurs, basically.
They got there because the Labour Party and the Conservative Party are such different animals.
The Labour Party is this sort of vast organisation.
The Conservative Party is a very tight, small organisation, and they don't get people in to rustle up votes.
I think England, certainly England, but Britain generally, defaults to voting Conservative.
It has historically, and it does all the time.
They're not worried about, I think, so much getting votes.
They both have a crack team, which they call the Cabinet, who are there to disparage the opposition.
But the rest of them are there because they're good at what MPs are primarily there for, which is to lobby for corporations who will then receive preferential treatment and in return will spend a huge amount of money supporting the Conservative Party.
So they're both operating on very different mechanisms, I think, of parliamentary engagements.
But unfortunately, I don't think any of them, certainly on the Labour side, literally don't have the intellectual capacity, or the education, or the life experience, or what they've learned from running a company, or something like that, or anything at all, to read a document, to read a bit of legislation.
And that is primarily what the legislature is there for.
Parliament is a legislature there that you scrutinize documents and hold governments to account.
They can't do that.
They literally can't do that.
And I think that's why the appalling dismantling of our democratic institutions and the checks and balances that we were talking about before has been done so rapidly and with such ease over the last three years.
I think there's no doubt that things have got dramatically worse in the last few years.
Let me put it another way.
I think they have become more shameless and overt in displaying their utter contempt for what we imagine, what we've deluded ourselves is this thing called democracy.
I think that actually elections have long been rigged.
I think that whenever they have a debate about something, the issue has been actually decided long ago and that the discussion, the back and forth is just I'm more cynical than you that I think this rot goes back a very long way.
that an element of kind of cost-benefit analysis has gone into this stuff.
I'm more cynical than you that I think that this rot goes back a very long way.
Just picking up on one point, which I agree with you, by the way, about the way that all the institutions have been captured, that the universities, for example, that they've got, how easy it is that they've got, how easy it is to capture institutions and subvert them.
And I was thinking the playbook for this goes at least back to, was it 1911?
Do you know about the Flexner Report in the US?
No.
Okay, so Carnegie and Rockefeller, two of the robber barons who were just raping America, raping the economy, just grabbing what they could.
I think I'm right in saying that this was partly a response to the breakup of Standard Oil, which meant that their monopolistic business model was no longer going to make them as disgustingly rich as Hitherto.
So they needed a new way of just leeching off the system.
And they decided that they would transform medicine into the behemoth that it's become today.
So they decided to How do you do that?
How do you create this new model whereby you foist on the consumer, on the public, these alleged medical treatments which actually probably make them sick rather than healthy, but keep them in a state where they require more and more of these medicines?
What they did was that they They said to all the different medical colleges across America, we will give you loads and loads of money.
I mean, a bit like Carnegie did with the libraries.
He put these libraries all over the world so that they could propagandize in the guise of education.
We will fund your medical college, but here's the deal.
You've got to accept our man.
Our great new guy is going to come and run this college for you.
And of course they would parachute into these roles, people who were on board with this new Rockefeller Carnegie medicine.
I may have got the details slightly wrong, but this is the essence of it.
That money talks.
And these people have unimaginable amounts of money.
They can buy up every institution.
And you're right, back in the day it may have been possible that there would still have been these crusty old Don's and professors at universities who would have held out against this stuff but they don't exist anymore I don't think.
Even when I was at university it was very very rare to have professors who were like that, who stood up for values regardless of politics.
Now I think they don't exist at all.
Everyone's just a creature of the beast system.
Yeah I mean one of the things that Well, in this country, under Thatcher did it explicitly, but it was part of the kind of the neoliberal drive, although she favored this greatly, was this idea of a new managerial class.
You know, the old model of a university or of a factory, any kind of industry, is that the person who was, not the person who owned it, of course, that would be the capitalist, don't you like the person to say, but the person who was kind of running the shop had come up from below, a university professor who was head of department, had been an undergraduate, Then he'd been a junior lecturer, then he'd been a senior lecturer, then a professor and so on.
And they kind of knew something about how a department is run.
And a university department is not the same as a telephone company.
It's not the same as a factory floor for someone who's building cars.
It's not the same thing as a doctor's surgery.
These all have particular cultures.
They have particular mechanics of how they function best.
And neoliberalism came in and said, They're all businesses.
Everything was reduced to a business and therefore they installed at the top a managerial class who had absolutely no experience whatsoever about the culture of that particular industry.
Whether it was education or mechanics or whatever at all.
Whether it was running an airline.
They simply kind of parachuted people in.
And certainly in things like education, which I've got experience of being from that industry myself.
But I mentioned it's the same in the media and everything.
It's created enormous problems as well.
You know, my partner, my girlfriend is still in, for her sins, still part-time in an education, and you don't have heads of department now, you have a line manager.
And, you know, they've got absolutely no idea about what it is to, what are the student experiences in that particular field?
So, yeah, I think that's one of the consequences, I think, of neoliberalism, where everything is seen as a business.
Everything's a business.
But it's, I mean, all these things are gradual and they're incremental, but there has been some very fundamental shifts recently.
I think the way that, I mean, to identify Oxford University, our greatest university, if you like, it's collusion in the AstraZeneca, you know, gene therapy, and it's complete lack of apology for the thousands of people that that poison killed.
And it's, you know, the knighting of, What's his name, Andrew?
I can't remember his name now.
The people involved in it, it's just disgraceful.
You know, one of the things I did in my books, which I'll get around to talking to in a minute, is to look at the... Show us your book!
Okay, well this is... Books!
These are the two new books.
One is the first volume, the collections of essays.
One is Virtue and Terror, Selected Articles on the UK Biosecurity State.
That's volume one.
And the second one is The New Normal, which is volume two.
I'll probably have a third one coming out the way things are going at the end of the year.
Can I just give a quick plug on your bluff?
They are really, really good scholarly books of essays on the emergent biosecurity state, on the corruption, malfeasance and so on that happened during the so-called pandemic.
And one of the problems I had before we started this conversation was knowing which of the many threads in your book to pick up.
I would certainly, it's a different book, I think it's actually probably more readable, but I would, in its significance, I would say it's up there with the Robert Kennedy book, which I think blows, the RFK book on the history of Anthony Fauci, the real Anthony Fauci and all the monstrosity that went into that.
It's not a bedtime read, but it is full of really interesting information.
You've picked one of the many excellent examples from the book about the AstraZeneca thing.
I'm sure you mentioned in the book the way that the woman who was made a dame, who was Given a standing ovation at Wimbledon, having invented this or been involved in the development of this jab, which we now know caused people to have fatal blood clots and things.
It is definitely the most deadly of the various experimental forms of gene therapy.
It's different to the mRNA vehicle, but it's still a form of gene therapy.
It is an absolute bloody disgrace what it did and is continuing to do.
I mean, the whole history of the development and rollout of that vaccine, in inverted commas, has been just completely buried by the press.
You know, now they're kind of selling it to African countries and things like that, because they don't really care about what kind of the damages it does to it.
And everyone associated with it is... What's his name?
Pascal... Pascal... I've forgotten his name now.
The Australian guy who's the head of it, the CEO of it, You know, he's best friends with Prince, sorry, King Charles now.
Everyone in it has been either made into a dame or a knight, which kind of immunizes them.
It's one of the things that is associated with that fake vaccine, which actually does confirm immunity.
That is, the people who developed it are now apparently immune from prosecution.
It will be very, very hard because they have been effectively, you know, welcomed into the aristocracy, if you like.
One of the things I did in my book, going back to kind of Oxford University, The levels of funding it has accepted, not just from, but primarily from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are absolutely astronomical.
And the individual funding of people involved in the development of the AstraZeneca gene therapy, or also their own practices, their own studios, their own, what do I call it, workshops, are all privately funded by basically the corporate The corporate world has taken over in this vacuum which is created by defunding from government.
They've taken over these institutions and it is an absolute bloody disgrace.
You know, I come out of academia and I think the way that these so-called intellectuals, who are meant to be one, only one, but one of the checks and balances which holds on and defends democracy, has been completely and utterly bought and co-opted by it.
Yeah, and that's something I try to I try to document and to record in these books, because one of the reasons these, these, the articles in these books were written, as you know, over the first two years of the pandemic, the lockdown, if you like.
And I published them after I published my book, The Road to Fascism, which did very well.
And I suddenly thought, OK, maybe there is a kind of a readership for this.
There had been a readership online.
I think about the last time I looked, I had about 300,000 people who have read these articles online.
But then I thought, I'm actually going to put them into a book.
I did that for a number of reasons.
One of them is, a few months ago, everyone started saying, oh, we were wrong about lockdown, maybe.
Maybe we were a little bit too harsh.
It was definitely the right thing to do.
We were a little bit too harsh about it.
Oh, maybe the vaccines, not the vaccines, but you had people like Chris Whitty, who is one of the leading figures in justifying lockdown.
And the declarations of SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and ultimately for the gene therapy rollout.
And he started saying in the face of this huge increase in excess deaths that we've had over the last year, he said, well, maybe lockdown and the withdrawal of medical diagnosis and of treatment for 68 million people for two years, maybe that was going to have a kind of a knock-on effect.
And then you had the journalists coming in and saying, well, we should call an amnesty now because, OK, maybe we were a little bit overzealous, but we didn't really know what was going on because this was unprecedented and stuff like this.
And this really got me annoyed and a lot of other people got annoyed.
I'm very happy to say that people sort of said, you can take a flying jump.
A lot of us, in different degrees and different ways, we knew almost from the start and very shortly after the start or within six months or whatever the time was that Locking down a country for two years would have incredibly appalling effects on the economy.
We knew that the kind of financial measures used to address that, specifically quantitative easing, in this country nearly 10 billion was, sorry not 10 billion, 1 billion, would cause rising inflation.
We knew that putting businesses on furlough would lead to the huge rise in bankruptcies and loss of jobs and so on.
We knew that rolling out a experimental gene therapy program would kill thousands, injure millions, and have still unknown consequences.
We knew all this from the very beginning.
And the fact that now a lot of journalists, doctors, and politicians are now saying, oh, well, we didn't know that.
We did the best we could.
That is a fundamental line.
One of the things I wanted to do was to republish these articles.
Fiddled with them a little bit, but I wanted to keep them as they were to show that in, what was it, March, in May 2020, I wrote a very substantial article about the costs, I called it the collateral damage of lockdown.
And I looked all around the world and I compared it to England.
It was absolutely without a shadow of a doubt that lockdown was going to kill thousands of people, millions of people worldwide, and destroy the economy.
So anyone saying that they didn't know that is a liar.
If I could work it out, you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an economist, and I'm not an actuary.
But I was able to work that out.
I don't want to publish these in a way as a historical document, one amongst many, which will show, no, these people who are lying about what they did and didn't know at the time, they are lying about it.
We can show why they were lying about it.
There's another reason as well.
There's another reason, if you let me just get this in.
We've got a whole lot of new legislation coming in a moment, like the online safety bill and so on.
When the online safety bill goes through, I think social media is kind of over in a way.
Twitter's censorship has kind of changed now.
I don't see you online at all on Twitter anymore, James.
And I don't see any of the other thousand people also I follow.
I never see anything.
All I see is Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.
Or I see stuff about the monarchy.
Or I see stuff about Ukraine.
That's all I get on.
So it's not censorship anymore.
It's not so much censorship.
It's just that we don't see what we want to see.
It's all a one-way speech now.
Twitter is now telling us what we want to see.
But when the online safety bill comes on and these online platforms are given the authority and the duty, it's not only authority, they're told they have to do this, I think my stuff and a lot of other stuff written similarly like this, your stuff, will simply no longer be accessible.
It won't simply have a warning saying Twitter says this could cause actual world harm.
If you read it, it simply won't be accessible as well.
I can see that various environmental fundamentalist groups, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Well, very soon, or soon, come out and say, since books use trees, and we need trees to save the planet, books are killing the planet.
And I can see books, which are a very strange form of information.
When they, you know, the printing began, when was it, sort of 17th century or something, or 18th century, when it came out, the church was very worried about printing, because people could start communicating with each other outside of the control of the church.
They've always been a sort of subversive form of, a subversive medium.
I like books.
I grew up with books.
And I remember my father who was in computers said when I was very young, one day books won't exist because everything will be online.
Not online, but in digital form.
And he was right.
And I think that's where we're going.
And when they do that, they'll have complete control over education.
They'll have complete control over the media.
They'll have complete control over all forms of propaganda that we live by.
So I've been encouraging people to buy my books.
Not just because I want to get my sales up and stuff and I'd like them to read this information.
But I do believe genuinely that in a few years, I don't know how long, books will not be accessible.
They will simply be seen as a form of killing the planet.
And that means they've got complete control, particularly over our education system.
Yes.
Well, everything is coordinated and pre-planned, which is Google and Amazon.
I suppose it's more of an Amazon project.
We imagine that there are these people, these entrepreneurs, who think up these brilliant ideas.
You know, I'm Jeff Bezos, and I'm just a farsighted guy, and I'm going to set up Amazon.
No, these people are selected in the same way that Bill Gates was selected, that Mark Zuckerberg was selected.
And of course, one of the functions of Amazon was this thing to promote the Kindle in order to get people out of the habit of reading books.
Put everything, make everything digital.
Precisely with the long-term view that we should no longer have this repository of knowledge and diverse thinking.
That is and always was the plan.
And luckily for us, just as quite a significant portion of us
Would not get we're not going to take the death jab for whatever reason and in the same way I think a lot of us Resisted the Iii had to go at Kindle's for a while and then I just thought I don't like it I didn't get the tactile pleasure of Reading a book and the smell of that you get from touching touching paper so our human needs and
will always frustrate these, well not always, but they do help frustrate the technocrats because we are humans and we are the things they don't want us to be because we have these emotions and these senses that they can't quite deal with.
Yeah, I think, I mean I come from a generation and a kind of an education background which was very critical of humanism.
It's kind of claims to universality, etc, etc, etc.
And a lot of the theories that I grew up being educated in at undergraduate and postgraduate level, like discourse theory and post-structuralism and all these kind of terrible words and stuff, post-modernism and so on, were about attacks on humanism, which was seen to be at the heart of kind of ills like racism and all that sort of stuff.
And I used to teach this sort of stuff.
I understand it.
But I understand what it originally was as a critique.
And unfortunately a lot of clever people have taken a lot of those critiques of power which emerged out of the 60s like feminism, like black consciousness, like colonial studies, like critiques of language, of discourse theory and stuff.
All things which are about trying to understand the nature of power and perhaps to combat it and to educate people and to enable them to have a more critical relationship to this wave of corporaganda that we're getting from the media and the parliament and all this stuff.
Basic kind of stuff.
But a lot of very clever people have got together and found how to turn socialism into identity politics, how to turn black consciousness into screaming racism at everyone, you know, who you disagree with, turning feminism into, I don't know, something like that.
They've been very clever about inverting all these critiques of power into means by which power can be defended.
And I think that's that's kind of where we got now.
Sorry, I was going to get around to what you were saying about, what were you saying in your comment about?
About books.
Yes, about books.
My point about humanism is, I've become a new humanist.
I really want to defend the human being now.
And I think, in a kind of a theoretical framework, it's a funny one, if humanism was right, and there is something called the human being, that we're not a merely or exclusively A construct of ideology, power, structures of society, that there is something peculiar and particular to us, which you can call the human being, and that this goes throughout time and across the world.
Of course, we're all going to have different cultural habits and so on and so forth, but there is something called the human being, and that something is worth defending.
If that's the case, we will win this battle.
Maybe not now.
But in generations to come.
But we will win this battle, because the human being will reassert itself.
If we're wrong, and we are simply constructs of power, we'll lose it.
Like you, I'm with sort of similar generation, and I'm a lover of books, and I've always, I've got way too many books up in my, it's very difficult when you live in London, kind of carting these books around.
I love the smell and the touch of them, but what I like most of all, is the independence they give me.
I've got that book, and when I want to think about something, My mind will go, somewhere in that book is a quote which I think is about that, if I'm writing something, and I can find that book.
I don't have to go online.
I don't even have to go to the British Library and dig it out.
It's there.
It's accessible to me.
And I've developed, like you were saying, I've developed a relationship to books as objects.
They're extraordinary objects in which you get a lot invested.
But going back to that picture I kind of painted of me sitting down in the British Library with that group of, you know, very intelligent girls studying economics.
Have they got that relationship to books?
You know, I said, my partner, she teaches architecture at De Montfort University, and I remember under lockdown, she asked her class, how many books have you read this year?
She said, what books have you read this year?
What books about architecture?
And they said, none.
She said, OK, what other books have you read?
And they said, none.
She said, has anyone read a book?
This is a group of students, first, second, third years.
Has anyone read a book this year?
A whole class didn't know.
They just don't read books anymore.
So this thing that you talked about, is there a human relationship to books?
Which of course have only been around for 500 years, something like that, less than that actually, 300, 400 years, accessible to the population with people being able to read them widely.
That's only maybe 200 years or so, maybe less.
Is that going to survive this?
Because going back to what I was saying before, Product of the 4th Industrial Revolution is the human being, our bodies and minds.
We're being taught NOT to read books.
To pick up a book like this, which is 200 pages long, and read it from cover to cover.
We've got different patterns of reading now.
Students, or anyone, reads as you know.
We read online, we read on phones, and we only read little bits.
We get soundbites.
So it's not simply the text or the words, it's how these patterns of behaviour Ways of finding knowledge, ways of thinking through the world.
Because a book, finally, the most important thing about the book is it's a space in which you think for hours on end.
Just you in that book.
And that is being deliberately and very aggressively undermined.
Yes, yes, you're absolutely right.
There was somebody on my Telegram channel, I was talking about this new Netflix series I'd been quite enjoying called Silo set in a dystopian future where they all live in a silo.
And I've been saying this is actually pretty good.
I'm enjoying it.
And somebody said, it's nothing like the book.
I've read the book and that episode three where they spend the whole episode trying to stop the turbine breaking down, you know, it's ridiculous.
It wasn't given that prominence in the book.
And I was thinking, duh, when was the adaptation ever Better than the book.
The book is because you've got that special relationship.
It's you and the author and in between is your imagination and it's a relationship with the words and it takes you to a realm that you're never going to experience or very rarely in the cinema or with television screen.
And I remember moments of my Well, getting lost in a book.
The whole idea of being lost in a book.
It's something you could... Whatever your troubles, you can get involved with the emotional problems of... Anna Karenina's got it much worse than you.
I mean, she really has.
I wouldn't want to be in her shoes.
Or identifying, as I am at the moment, with Levin.
I think Levin's my man.
I'm totally with his relationship with the land and scything and stuff.
This stuff, yeah, I mean, I dread to watch a TV adaptation of Anna Karenina.
You could be right that we could be the last... I mean, actually, having said that, one of my sons reads books, and only books, and reads them all the time, and reads lots of them, and voraciously.
But he may be the exception.
I mean, when's the last time you saw, you've just answered that, but if I think about the last time I saw someone reading a book, like on the tube, or in a park, on a bench.
Even in the British Library, there are not that many people reading books.
They're sitting there with their laptops.
There's not actually that many people reading books now.
I haven't been to the British Library for a while and I went back recently to do some research and I was amazed at how much it had changed in a way.
You know, it used to be a sort of a place of higher learning.
You had to be postgraduate to get in there.
Now, kind of, there's a big sign outside saying, we're open to everyone.
Which was when I was, you know, when I was an undergraduate, we couldn't get anywhere near the place.
And it's now full of people working on their laptops, they're not really reading books.
So I think books are a threat.
And that's one of the reasons, not the only one, that I encourage people to not just buy my books, to buy books as well, to hold on to them.
Do you know what, Simon, you actually going back to the beginning of this of this podcast, you have actually helped my wife in her campaign to get me off my bloody iPhone.
And you're right.
I really must get into it.
The thing is, you sort of persuade yourself you need the phone because you need it for directions or you need to book a restaurant or you need to Find out random bits of information.
But really, it's a series of dopamine hits, isn't it?
That you're looking for people reacting adversely or positively to your latest post on Twitter or whatever.
That's what you're really after.
And you make these excuses for yourself about, yeah, I just need it just to communicate.
I think one should really get in the habit of, well, I was going to give you an example.
When you're traveling on the tube, Or in a train carriage.
And sometimes if you look up from your phone, and you look at this dystopian vision of all these people, they're all playing fruit games.
They're killing time.
And it's not good.
Time is life, isn't it?
I mean, when people defend The smartphone.
They talk about its convenience.
And it does.
I made a great big long list of all the things it combines.
It's an A to Z. It's a map of the world.
It's a phone.
It's a camera.
It's a music console.
It's loads of things, isn't it?
It's got 20 things.
It's a printer.
And I kind of say, well, you could put all those things in your bag.
You could carry a novel for read on the tube.
You could buy a newspaper.
You could have an A to Z. You could have a sound system if you want to have that in your ears.
You could replace all that stuff Well, that's actually not what it's about.
Smartphones are convenient, but that's not how people use them.
I was looking up the figures.
These were based in the US, but it's not so different from us, I think.
Guess how many times the average person, whatever that is, consults their smartphone per day.
Do you think it is?
I'm guessing quite a lot.
It's 2,600.
I was going to guess 300, and I thought I was being generous.
2,600.
Now, you're not going to your phone, 2,600, to look at the map to find the pub so you can meet your friend for a date.
You're not using it to look up, oh, what's that word mean?
And make sure I'm spelling it right.
You're not using it for all these things that you say.
Well, I'm not using you personally, but one says that I use it for convenience.
You're not consulting it.
We're not consulting them 2,600 times a day for convenience.
We're consulting it out of addiction, And it's changing the way our consciousness works.
It's keeping us, as I said with this example, which I keep on going back to, of these highly intelligent girls studying economics.
They were not able to enter into a conscious step space of attention, of concentration.
And a infinitely distracted populace is one which is open to, maybe we can get onto this now actually, onto just having their minds completely controlled.
You know, the other day, Like all of us, I've been horrified and fascinated at how COVID compliance has now gone into Ukraine compliance, if we can call it that.
The seamless transition from anyone not complying with COVID measures being a murderer, to anyone who is not in favour of environmental fundamentalism is killing the planet, to anyone who is not completely on the side of handing over every last penny we ever have, to Vladimir Zelensky, Let me give you a little example.
I was looking at Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP.
He's not someone I've got any particular opinion about or something.
I do know that he was expelled from the Labour Party for his criticisms of the Israel state and is denounced now, like everyone who does that, as an anti-Semite.
You know, he's a member of this kind of coalition, this anti-war coalition, and he was kind of commenting on the fact that supplying the Ukraine with these weapons, whether they're using or not, or whether they're actually being sent out to shell companies and then sent on to, you know, kind of arms dealers around the world.
But if they don't do that, if they do go to the Ukraine, it's merely kind of prolonging this war.
And it's going to, it is leading us into a very, very dangerous state at the moment.
We're probably closer to a possible World War III.
than we have since the Bay of Pigs crisis back in 1962, or the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And the way he was responded to, you know, he's one of these people, probably like you, who gets, you know, kind of public figures who get appallingly trolled.
But the way that people were responding to him wasn't, you know, I disagree with you because I think, you know, we need to defend Ukraine or whatever, whatever the reason was.
It was this visceral loathing and hatred, people saying, you disgust me, or you are a Putin apologist.
Or you are Russian propaganda.
These kinds of reactions, and this is not coming from kids, it's not coming from even Twitter trolls, it's coming from adults and people like you and I. That knee-jerk way of thinking, there's a lot of things behind it.
Social media has been incredibly influential, I think, decisive in creating that form of consciousness.
But we're not always on social media, but we are, as these statistics reveal, we are always On our mobile phone.
And smartphones are changing our consciousness, I think.
Whereby, that is the limit of thinking that most people have got.
Chris Willis says we should not spend all this money in arming Ukraine in a war of, you know, dubious concern.
And their reaction is like, well, let's debate that.
Well, let's think about that, even.
It's simply to have these, you disgust me.
He's approved an apology.
I'm very, very struck by what has come out Of the COVID period, that two years of lockdown is not simply this dismantling of our democracy, which we've been kind of talking about through this.
It's not just about a destruction of the checks and balances and the institutional kind of barriers to this takeover that's going on.
It's created something new.
And I think it is new.
Obviously, it goes back a long way because, you know, we were talking about all these things have a long genesis.
But there are qualitative shifts, which I think we've entered into now.
And the way that we're reacting to the Ukraine situation, the way we're reacting to the supposed environmental crisis, and the way we were taught to react to COVID, there is a continuum between these things.
And it can now be, it now is being sent out to colonize all our thinking about anything at all.
If anyone, if you say to anyone, well, what do you think about the WHO's pandemic treaty?
Do you think it's taking away our sovereignty?
No.
I can imagine the kind of reactions that are going to happen to that.
What about digital IT?
What about central bank digital currency?
What about these fundamental changes to our social contract?
I don't think people are capable or have the desire anymore.
It's not about capabilities.
It's not about intellectual capability.
It's about patterns of behavior, modes of thinking, of actual consciousness, which have been really changed.
And the way that... I mean, I don't want to reduce... You've got to be careful with this.
I've got to be careful not to reduce the population of the UK or of the West to Twitter, which is a kind of a lunatic asylum.
But it is a very influential lunatic asylum.
And the way that people are thinking on Twitter, the way that people are thinking in social media, there is a continuum now between Covid, the environmental and the Ukraine situation.
And that worries me a lot.
We haven't simply dismantled what we had before.
We are creating I can give you an example of this.
is your Harari.
I think if I got his name right, the ideologue of the fourth industrial revolution, we are creating new minds, new forms of consciousness.
And that worries me very much.
I can give you an example of this.
So I live in a rented house on a country estate.
So one knows the people who live, the fellow tenants of the estate.
And there was one guy who lives on the estate, who I've lived here for 12 years, who was very friendly when we arrived.
We'd known his, you know, his daughter played with my daughter and we've got Shared interests, you know, he was into the music industry and I was a music critic for some time.
So we used to have big old chats.
Anyway, my son went to chat to him the other day and he said, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to talk to your father.
And it turned out this was because of my disgraceful, inexcusable position On the Ukraine.
And my son said to me, you know, are you a Putin supporter?
And I said, it's not like that.
I'm much more a plague on all their houses.
And I don't think that the analysis that we hear in the media about Ukraine is actually accurate.
And I remembered, I know how this feud, this guy, where he picked this up.
I'd gone to this party in the village and tried engaging two people there, two sort of local bigwigs.
One of them I think was the deputy lieutenant of the county and the other one had a hereditary title.
We were talking about Ukraine and stuff and I pointed out to them that That in 2014, the colour revolution had been staged, that the democratically elected president of Ukraine had been ousted by Soros-funded, CIA-backed revolutionaries, who also happened to be Nazis.
The stuff that one knows is a modicum of research.
And they looked at me with a mixture of contempt and Like, I was the most ridiculous person on earth.
And they asked me, you know, so, what are your sources for this information?
And I was thinking, well, what are your sources for your information?
You've just, you've just been brainwashed by this massive sci-fi.
I was thinking about this very angry man who will never talk to me again.
And I'm thinking, he's never going to question the sources of information.
He's never going to consider, stop to consider the fact that when he drives through the next door village, There is a blue and yellow flag on the wall.
And this is exactly the same programming that in the run up to the First World War, when Britain and Germany were really natural allies.
We had a lot in common, including after the war, when people were suddenly killing Dachshunds.
And that we are, as you say, easily programmed.
By the way, I wanted to point out, look behind you.
Look at Marilyn's hair and look at her eye shadow.
Subliminal!
I'm subliminally bringing you over.
You are basically a Zelensky.
Yes, definitely.
Me and Zelensky, we get on well.
We used to hang out in New York in the 70s with Andy Warhol.
I tell you what, the photographs of Zelensky... I don't know if they're true, but it wouldn't surprise me.
First of all, I want to say what a disgusting thing for your neighbor to say to your son.
What a cowardly and revolting thing to say.
If he's got a problem with you, you should have the courage and decency to come up and tell you at least to your face and not try to embarrass or humiliate your son against you.
That's typical, unfortunately, of the behavior of these people and it's disgraceful.
So I'm very sorry to hear that.
I think the two points One of the theses of my first book, The Road to Fascism, is that we're moving to a fascist society and to try and learn from the past why it's justified to say that.
And I think, apart from the flawed, whether someone disagrees or disagrees or agrees with you, over one's view about what exactly is going on in Ukraine.
Which I'm willing to bet most of the people on Twitter didn't even know where Ukraine was, or was even at a war, you know, up until we were told we were going to a war with them or something.
Whether or not you agree with it, not just the willingness, the eagerness, the joy which almost everyone has taken, and particularly liberals, in this process of dehumanizing The Russian people and their culture, I find utterly abhorrent.
I lived in the Soviet Union when I was a child and I've always had a close kind of affiliation.
And I'm, again, like you, I'm not, you know, Putin is definitely the lesser of two evils, if you like, but that doesn't mean he's not.
This is something that I, you know, I want to live in Russia or China or anything like that.
But this dehumanization, the blanket ban on Russian athletes performing or cancelling shows by Tchaikovsky or the burning or the pulping of books by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the Ukraine the blanket ban on Russian athletes performing or cancelling shows by Tchaikovsky or the burning or the pulping of books by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the Ukraine and turning
and turning them into toilet roll for their troops, which for me has very, very dark echoes of the abuse made of killed Jewish people in concentration camps and so on.
The kind of re-harvesting, if you like, of a dehumanized people That was literally done with Jewish bodies, with the hair and the soap and stuff like that.
But this is sort of similar.
They actually haven't done it to the Russians yet, but there is a process of dehumanization going on now, which is
very very fascist in its origins and its effects and the fact that these people who they may disagree they may think actually no Ukraine you know has to come he has to take back the Donbass and stuff like that what happens next name whatever you know the Russia is the you know they whatever their view of it that doesn't mean engaging with this utterly disgraceful that doesn't really describe it dehumanization of everything to do with Russia I find that
Very, very, very awful.
I don't really know how to say it strong enough without swearing.
It disgusts me.
And I'm appalled that so many people in this country and across the West have fallen into doing that.
They haven't really fallen into it.
They've embraced it.
It's the same thing.
It's the same thing again.
It's a continuation of what happened in the COVID.
It's the enemy within, the enemy within with people like you and me who didn't observe lockdown, who didn't get injected and stuff.
Now the enemy is the Russians.
I just wanted to agree with you so strongly on that point.
I think one of the most upsetting experiences I've ever had on social media was about 18 months ago, I think, when footage emerged proving pretty much beyond reasonable doubt that Ukrainian militia, probably the Azov Brigade, were killing Russian prisoners in cold blood.
And there were people, I mean it's hard to be sure because I think a lot of this stuff is seeded by things like 77th Brigade, there were a lot of sort of propaganda operators on but I think that there were Genuine people who were applauding this and saying things like, serves them right for invading sovereign territory.
And I was thinking, hang on a second.
These are just boys.
They could be our sons.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the country, that's separate.
But their conscripts in some cases, they didn't choose to be there.
And whatever happened to the Geneva Convention?
How can you be gloating about this?
And even though I differ from most of my family on this issue, I was very pleased the other day that my son was looking at the paper, about two or three days ago, And there was a picture of Rishi embracing Zelensky.
They all seem to be on the verge of having sex with him.
There's a strange erotic going on between him and Western leaders, isn't there?
And it was all sort of feel good copy and isn't this great fantastic.
But my son pointed out that that you read further down and it was to celebrate the fact that suicide drones were being British made suicide drones were being sent out to To fight Putin.
I think, hang on a second, so we are being invited to gloat over the fact that we are sending out this weapon, which presumably when you're in a trench trying to avoid being blown to pieces by the enemy's artillery and these drones come and they sort of dive down and they They kill you, they blow you to pieces.
They're like the whiz-bangs that blew people to pieces in the First World War, which we've been encouraged to think of as a bad thing, about the horror and pity of war.
Suddenly we're being encouraged to gloat and celebrate.
Isn't this fun?
We had stuff like this, I remember in the first Gulf War, they used a sort of a surgical, a medical metaphor for, what was it called?
Was it surgical bombing?
It wasn't quite that.
It was something like that, where you had footage shown on the national TV of stealth bombers going across and sort of going, and then dropping a bomb on a building.
And you knew the people in the building, this bomb was going to be killing people.
And I thought that was a level of, you know, because the Vietnam War was so visceral, you know, this time the media wanted to take control over this.
But it was still kind of quite abstract in a way.
It was a building, you didn't actually see people being killed.
But now it's impossible to go on Twitter without seeing One of these drones hovering over a man in a trench who we told is a Russian and they drop a bomb on him and he dies.
It's a snuff movie and people are cheering it on.
They're gloating over it as you say.
Now that's showing, that's demonstration of a level of being made inured to, well it's not about being inured to death because it's not death, it's an image of death, it's about This process of dehumanizing other people.
And that concerns me very much.
Maybe something else I want to get to about this.
I saw the other day, I think you wrote a very nice, very generous article in Conservative Woman when you were questioning the very existence of a virus or of a pandemic and so on.
And you cited my article.
It's a good article.
It's one of my best ones, I think, in which I go through kind of the figures that showed that very, very few people, you know, that most of the people who died in that first year died because, as we said, of lockdown and so on.
I republished it recently because when the, I was going to call them the Hancock tapes, but the, um, uh, what was, you know, the, the, the, the, the text messages about Hancock and, and the other, they all came out, didn't they?
And the Telegraph sort of started publishing them and everyone was like, Oh my God, this was terrible.
They were kind of, they were manufacturing things and they were lying to us.
And I just thought, if you really think what these are exposing is the full level of the lies or the manufacturer of this, you really need to read my article.
Because it kind of grazed the surface.
The levels of manufacturing, if you will, are far, far greater than that.
So I thought I'll sort of slightly I concentrated a condensed version of the article and I published it in a UK column.
I thought I would preface it with something a little bit different.
I wanted to talk about this idea of manufacturing, how we manufacture things.
I wanted to make analogies between the manufacturing of the pandemic and the manufacturing of what's going on in Ukraine now.
I went back to the first Gulf War.
I don't know if you remember, but when that happened, the French philosopher Jean Baudricard, who was one of these people very closely associated with postmodernism, he published this series of articles called The Gulf War Isn't Happening, The Gulf War Wrote Happened, Isn't Happening, Wrote Didn't Happen.
Three articles, which he then put together in a book.
And people were outraged at the time.
They were like, how could you possibly say this?
You know, we see every night on the TV these terrible, terrible battle going on between, you know, the son of Hussein's Imperial Guard and all this sort of stuff.
And his point was that this wasn't a battle.
This was a massacre by the most powerful nation on Earth with its coalition against a very small, impoverished nation.
And this wasn't this great battle called Desert Storm at all.
Is that what they call it?
I'm not sure.
Maybe I'm mixing them up.
This was a spectacle which had been created by the government and the media to justify the West going in and basically stealing all the oil and destabilizing the Middle East and taking over Iraq, which is where we are now in that place.
I remember when that came out, when those books came out, the intelligentsia, if you want to call them that, at least the bloody academics, and probably some of the journalists as well, they were persuaded by this.
It's an important thesis about the nature of reality and the nature of Baudrillard's term is the simulacrum, the simulation of reality, which had a lot of purchase on a lot of people's minds with the beginning of new digital technologies and the augmentation of reality and stuff.
Today we've gone way, way, way beyond those capacities.
We know that most of the time we're seeing images of Zelensky, They're actually 3D modeling, projecting holograms and stuff.
The people who've produced that technology and produced the images are, you know, happily advertising it.
If you go onto Google and you put Zelensky hologram, you'll have someone boasting about it saying, we can't be everywhere, so we'll create him.
So it's quite openly, quite openly now, talking about the manufacturing of propaganda around What we're not told, what we're told we can't do though, is even though we are manipulating, we the media, the governments, the people in control of this proxy war, are manipulating our opinion about it and our perception of it.
We are not, therefore, on the basis of that, able to question the foundations for that.
They're saying, well, yes, we are manipulating your perception of that because we're right.
It's very similar in the COVID thing.
Yes, maybe we are exaggerating the deaths a little bit.
Maybe we are being slightly overzealous in locking you down.
Maybe these vaccines haven't gone through all the procedures of taking care of it, but people are dying, so we have to do it.
I'm really struck that after all these years, you know, the Gulf War was a long time ago.
It's 30 odd years ago and yet we seem to have learned nothing.
And all the intellectuals, all the academics who probably got copies of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Didn't Happen on their bookshelf, They seem to have forgotten everything we know about war and politics and the spectacle and how this Ukraine war... It's almost like the war in the Ukraine is the first war we've ever witnessed.
It's quite extraordinary.
We've learned nothing from the Gulf War.
We've learned nothing from the Iraqi War.
We've learned nothing from the First World War or the Second World War.
We seem to have learned nothing at all.
We're told once again that this is sort of an unprecedented situation and we must never look back on history to learn anything about this.
And there's a kind of a willing idiocy, a willing kind of erasure of memory of critical faculties, of, as I was saying before, of reflective thought to think, maybe I should look into this.
You know, these people saying to you, where do you get this information that actually there was a political coup in 2014?
Well, just bloody Google it, you know.
Have a look at it.
It's not hard to find it.
Go on and hear Vicky, what's her name, talking with, you know, about setting up the new, you know, choosing the new cabinet for the Ukraine in 2019 and stuff.
Yes.
This stuff is all out here.
Or read The Guardian before the narrative changed.
I mean, all this stuff was out there.
It's not hidden.
This is not about data and information.
It's about People's desire or disposition or capability or again going back to this term consciousness.
These new technologies and programs are about creating a permanently distracted state of consciousness which I guess what we're trying to do in doing podcasts like this and in my case your case writing articles me writing articles and publishing books
is to try to get people to be a bit more reflective about this and not respond to everyone who disagrees with them, who's got an alternative view, with the same process of dehumanization which is being used to justify what looks like the declaration of war against one of the great superpowers.
I mean, I don't know how victory over Russia... What does that mean?
What does that possibly mean?
I mean, what could that possibly mean?
And yet nobody's asking that question.
If, as Ursula von der Leyen is saying, we will not stop until we defeat Russia, what does that actually mean?
What do these terms mean?
They terrify me because I can't imagine what a defeated Russia would look like.
Perhaps at the top of a big mushroom cloud, but there's no discussion about that.
Nobody's considering about that.
They're just, you know, is that a very unpleasant answer to your son?
You're a Putin apologist, if you dare to think about what those phrases mean.
Yes, exactly.
Well, I was thinking, you know, that the guy on the estate would clearly happily see my sons going out to be cannon fodder, to be in the meat grinder for this pointless war.
I'm thinking, well, no, wait a second.
Who's benefiting from this?
Where's it all going?
Yeah.
By the way, Simon, If I may say so, you must have been a very good lecturer.
What were you teaching?
I taught in the history and theory of art.
My particular area, my specialty was the 20s and 30s, which is why I've got a kind of a background in this kind of period.
But I also taught 19th century stuff as well.
I was a good lecturer.
I wasn't a very good academic though, which are two different things.
So you would have covered the way that art was used in the Bolshevik Revolution as well?
Yes.
Because I saw there was a very good show at the Royal Academy a few years ago on that.
Yeah, there was a range of art exhibitions.
It was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and there was exhibitions at the Hayward, at the British Library I think, at the Royal Academy and at the Design Museum as well.
I went to all of them.
If you want to, there's a very long article I wrote about them on architectural social housing.
Yeah, I found it fascinating.
I found it very interesting about that the UK, and I guess certainly the UK, had decided to mark this historic event, 100 years since this event which kind of changed the 20th century, and how they would how they would kind of do that, how they would go about it.
I mean, the Royal Academy show was absolutely extraordinary because it was mostly funded by Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, who, as you can imagine, didn't want to celebrate the Soviet Union or the Bolshevik Revolution.
Well, I tell you what my take-home from it was, and I think it's quite germane to what we were talking about today, which was just how few people there were involved in the revolution I mean, how they managed to turn this vast, vast country with this huge population, how they managed to suborn the people in such short space and just take control of the system.
And a lot of it was through propaganda.
We talked about this last time, I think, because we're probably coming to the end here.
When we come to what can we do, you know, we've discussed in certain depth The buying up of the checks and balances, the institutional checks and balances, to this dismantling of our democracy.
We've talked about the role of ideology in convincing people to not question.
Extraordinary as it seems.
People whose very identity is about being questioning.
Academics, intellectuals, journalists, youth, young people, don't seem to want to question the state anymore.
I think ideology, I don't have any faith in Parliament.
We kind of discussed it as a kind of a spectacle, Punch and Judy show.
It's there to make us think that it actually is a forum for change, somewhere where our political agency is expressed.
I think it still does lie in the realm of ideology.
We discussed this last time.
The takeover, this new Great Reset, is not merely being done through regulations and laws and legislation.
It's not merely a top-down thing.
The next level that I think is coming along is the level of programs and technologies, digital IDs, central bank digital currency, the new agendas, kind of the Agenda 2030, which has been around for a while, but it's being implemented with greater violence, if I think, and autocracy.
But there is still a battle that we can fight, which is what we're trying to do today, which is to get people to restart thinking.
It's not keep on thinking anymore, is it?
It's to start thinking again and to, I don't know, to have some, to reclaim our minds, because it's our minds we started with this.
It's our minds they're after.
The body is merely a vehicle for the mind.
If they can control our bodies, for those of us who can't be taken over, central bank digital currency is the next best thing.
That's biopower.
It doesn't matter whether I agree with Central Bank, Digital Currency or Digital ID.
If it's a condition of my citizenship, my ability to get money or travel around, they've got control of my body.
That will only happen if they get enough people get into their minds and that's what they've done at the moment.
The absolute penetration of environmental fundamentalism into our parliaments, our education system, our culture, our media is terrifying.
And what's most terrifying about it is that nobody has got the courage, it seems, nobody who's in those systems has got the courage to stand up and say, hold on, we need to start thinking about this.
The same way that they won't think about the Ukraine, or they won't think about what happened to the COVID crisis.
So yeah, keep thinking, start thinking again.
And that's the field of ideology, which people like you, it's kind of the only thing we've got left.
In a way, we've got to fight on it.
And it is important, because to go back to your initial point, The way the Bolsheviks were able to take over, and whatever you think of, you know, I've got some sympathy with them at the beginning, but by 1929 Stalin had set up a totalitarian system, and the role in all autocratic, authoritarian, tyrannical, or totalitarian systems, the role of ideology is at the very, very center of it.
It's at the very center of it.
So that's our battleground, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, the other thing I'd add to that is that we've got to just preach.
Preach, bro.
I mean, which is what you've been doing and what I do.
I see it as my, like, whenever my brief forays into teaching, I've always enjoyed communication because I am a communicator and, you know, I'm just lucky, blessed to have those skills.
But I was talking to this, I was talking to this girl the other day who's been involved in the resistance and she joined the various campaign groups.
I mentioned this on a previous podcast.
And various of her campaign groups had run out of steam, the issues they were fighting for whatever reason.
And I said, well, you think back to Jesus and the disciples.
How did he spread the word?
Did he say to his disciples, we're going to form this action committee and it's going to be called the Let's Spread Christianity Action Committee.
And this is what we stand for.
No, he didn't.
Each one of those disciples went and spoke to 12 other people and those 12 spoke to 12 people and so on and so forth.
It's spread by word of mouth.
I find this that I've never been a joiner.
I've never wanted to join any of these campaign groups.
I think get co-opted very easily.
I've never wanted to join some kind of collective.
I think collectives are the problem.
We've just got to go out there and speak the word and just do what we're doing, because that's how the message gets across.
Communication.
I know you always like to talk about, not always, but you did last time, talked about Jesus.
And recently, you'll be happy to know that I've been writing a new book, and it's not about COVID.
It's not about totalitarianism.
It's something positive.
I'm about to publish it, actually.
It's called Notes to Poetry.
Because people have been saying, I've been very aware that when I'm criticizing the COVID faithful or the environmental fundamentalists with these apocalyptic visions of the future which they're using to get everyone scared and therefore compliant, I know that I myself are in danger of falling into a similar kind of apocalyptic form of thinking by saying if we don't combat CBDC or digital IT we're going to be living in a totalitarian world.
It's a difficult line I want to make people aware, as much as I can as an individual, what the threats are.
But I also want them to, I think all of us want to do this, we want to have a positive vision of the future as well.
As I've said before, and I'll repeat it, one of our greatest weapons against the enemies of humanity, who are winning at the moment, is this dystopian vision of the future they have for us, which we're told, okay, this may not be great, but it's better than The world falling under, you know, rising sea levels or, you know, contagion or whatever.
We need to use that by painting a more positive picture.
Now, to get back to your point, my notes to poetry is a selection of writings on poetry, because I think poetry is very important to me.
It's very important to me.
I think it's important to us.
I think the values of poetry are those which are being erased.
And my book is about why we should defend those values in a way.
But I start off with the first reading I do of poetry is the reading of the Gospels, the New Testament.
And there's a wonderful reading itself of the Gospels by my old friend Friedrich Nietzsche.
And he says the Gospels is a manual for, I don't know, how to attain the kingdom of God in the here below.
He has no truck with the idea that the Kingdom of God is in an afterlife.
He says it's a manual for how to bring about the Kingdom of God, if you want to use that as a metonym for a better life, a just world, and a better way to react and live with each other.
And he did it through his parables, but he also did it through his behavior, through his practice as a human being, which was then given as a model.
He constantly says to his disciples, go forth and spread my word.
I'm not a religious man myself, but I'm very fascinated with religious thought.
I'm very fascinated with the Gospels.
I think there's a lot of good in it.
I agree with you.
Organizations, particularly organizations on the left, I can warn you probably know more about those than you do, once they form they spend a lot of time thinking about what they are and how they should operate and what are the parameters and who we are and they kind of disappear down their own kind of black hole as it were.
Sometimes it's good to form into groups but ultimately people become better citizens by Their own behavior, their own practices.
And they need models of that, I think.
We all need to be a model for each other of behaving towards each other with humanity and intelligence and tolerance.
All those other things you can associate with various figures throughout history that we look up to.
And love!
Definitely love.
So that's what my next book is about.
Well, that sounds great.
I really look forward to reading it because, yeah, we could do a whole other podcast on poetry.
Oh, great.
My things as well, learning poetry.
But thank you so much.
So where can people find you?
Where can people read your stuff?
The easiest way to find me is on Twitter.
I'm at SimonElmer2022.
That's my second Twitter handle because the first one was erased by Twitter for obvious reasons.
I've also got a very long name for a website.
It's called architects for social housing.co.uk and you can find a lot of my writings on there.
And you can also find ways to get access to these books as well.
Maybe, James, I could send you a few links to the latest books and you could put them on this.
No, definitely send me some links and we'll put those.
Thank you, I really appreciate you having me on the board.
I've done quite a lot of these podcasts since I published my first book.
But everyone always comes up to me at meetings and said, I saw you on the Deling pod and you were rather good.
So thank you, thank you for having me.
I can confirm that you were rather good again.
Thank you so much.
It only remains for me to say, please, if you want early access, this is a better way of putting it, because rather than sounding like I'm pleading, but look, you can get my stuff for free.
But if you want to give money to the cause, or if you want to get early access to my stuff, You'll find me on Patreon, Subscribestar, Locals, Substack.
You can buy me a coffee.
Buy me a coffee if you don't want to commit to anything deeper than that.
But you know, it's occasionally nice tipping somebody for stuff that you enjoy.
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