John Robson holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas at Austin and has worked as a historian, policy analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker for three decades. His https://climatediscussionnexus.com channel regularly debunks the media's wild, unscientific claims about climate change.
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but I really am.
Before I introduce him a quick word on behalf of our sponsors.
Welcome to The Delling Hall with me, James Delling Hall.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Before I introduce him, a quick word on behalf of our sponsors.
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Well, Dr. John Robson, I really am excited to have you on the podcast because I'll tell you why.
I've got this friend, let's call him Steve, who Maybe it's unfair to say he badgers me relentlessly saying, when are you going to get John Robson on the podcast?
But he does kind of think that what's missing in my career is that I could be the new John Robson.
Now, I think the current John Robson is doing a perfectly good job.
And you're doing something which I did for many, many years.
But I sort of stopped doing for reasons I'll explain a bit later on.
But you're fighting the climate wars, aren't you?
You're fighting the climate nonsense.
Absolutely, it is one of the most dangerous initiatives in public policy these days and it's built on an enormous misunderstanding of how science works, of what the evidence says and of what would happen if you actually implemented the policies that the people who are pushing this supposed emergency are advocating.
I mean I've been involved in policy wars for a long time and there's been a lot of really bad ideas out there and some of them eventually we seem to have defeated and then they They come back like that comic book Dracula.
You just think you get him finally finished off and then some idiot tourist pulls a steak out of the skeleton.
But this one at the moment I think is among the most critical threats to our well-being and in fact to our ability to discuss public policy in a sane and productive manner.
Yeah, well tell me about your battles with public policy.
Tell me about your background.
Well, I am by training.
I'm a historian and of course we get comments on our website saying, oh, you got a PhD in history.
You got to be stupid.
Generally, they botch the grammar pretty badly or the punctuation into the process.
But I studied American history during the latter part of the Cold War, because at that point, it seemed to me that two major threats to our way of life were Soviet aggression on the one hand, and the extraordinary tendency of many Western elites to say that we were the problem, that Reagan was the aggressor and Brezhnev was a man of peace.
Sorry, make that Chernenko, no Andropov.
Oh, he died too.
So in the end, we did win that battle.
But I've also worked at economic think tanks.
I've worked at the Fraser Institute here in Canada and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute because there's a lot of very bad policy including, you know, encouraging behavior that we actually don't want to see.
And I was also working as a newspaper columnist and editorial writer when suddenly this climate thing became huge and our Prime Minister at the time, Jean Chrétien, used that term deniers.
And this is a bit of a red flag for me in the first place because it was obvious that Jean Chrétien didn't know anything about science.
Not a thing.
thing.
Never had, never would.
And secondly, he was demonizing opponents for daring to think for themselves on an issue.
And this is kind of a familiar pattern.
I thought, gee, this reminds me of things I didn't like in the past.
And so I started to look into the issue.
And again, being a historian, and I've made a video about this, the first thing I thought was, okay, they say carbon dioxide drives temperature on the planet Earth.
Is that what we find historically?
If we look back at what we know about the temperature of the Earth 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100, a million, 500 million, and what we think we know about atmospheric CO2, is there any even correlation between them, let alone causation?
And I immediately saw that there wasn't.
There is very few points in Earth's history where temperature and atmospheric CO2 are moving in the same direction at all.
And so I thought, so the evidence is just really not there, but all these people are not just passionately convinced that it is, they're insulting anyone who asks questions.
And I thought, something needs to be done about this.
Just a second.
They're soaring outside my window.
I'm just going to shut the window.
Oh, this window won't shut because it's been nailed open.
I'm just going to shut the window.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Apparently the sawing's going to stop soon and I can't do anything about it.
So, um, anyway, yeah, I, I, I agree.
It is, Very, very frustrating the way that this, well you called it Dracula, I called it, it's like the Terminator isn't it, the end of Terminator 2, he just keeps coming back.
Have you reached the point that I've reached where you realise that this is entirely Fictitious, entirely deliberate, that they have goals which have nothing to do with saving the planet from the CO2.
No, this I think is the one major place where you and I disagree because, as I say, I studied the Cold War but my doctoral dissertation was actually on ideology and in the ways that people think about the world and the curious ways in which they disagree at such a fundamental level that discussion is often difficult.
And so when you see people who look at the climate and say, oh my goodness, awful human beings, not like myself, are setting the world on fire.
Something must be done.
I must have more money and power.
This isn't a plot on their part to get more money and power.
It's actually how they react to things.
It's how these people react to all kinds of circumstances.
They see a crisis that isn't really there, they blame it on malevolence instead of misunderstanding, and then they demand that they be given complete control over their fellows.
And this is because this is how their minds work.
This is not something they're making up in order to do something else.
They are, I mean, you can call them control freaks if you want to psychoanalyze them, but This is, it's quite sincere.
I mean, and I always say about human beings, we're bad enough at the job we're meant to be doing.
The idea that you could have people who are pretending to do one thing while secretly successfully doing something else much more complicated and sinister and hiding all of it.
Humans just aren't like that.
We are very good at making mistakes and very bad at carrying out plots.
I think, John, you've probably lost about a third of the audience there, but that's cool.
I'm okay with that because we can talk about areas of, I believe, very much in talking about things we have in common rather than having arguments about the areas where we disagree because there's loads of stuff, you know, that I think Whatever side of the divide you're on, whether you're what I would call a normie and you still believe that there's no conspiracy going on or whether you're red pilled and you know that actually this is all this is all part of the evil grand design.
I think there's one thing that everyone, regardless of where they are, should know that the climate, the climate scare is not based on any.
I mean, have you found any real world evidence anywhere ever to demonstrate that there's anything to worry about about climate?
Well, I think there are a lot of things to worry about about climate.
For instance, as we were coming out of the last glaciation, the beginning of the Holocene interglacial, and temperature was rising, there was this sudden precipitous drop into something called the Younger Dryas.
And we don't know.
I mean, the proxies don't give you enough precision, but it may have gotten 5 degrees colder or even 10 in the space of a couple of decades.
And this happened for purely natural reasons, which means it could happen again.
And it went on for a while, and then boom!
It warmed up again quite suddenly.
Climate does sudden things, and sudden things are alarming.
I mean, you look at the Little Ice Age, right?
Michael Mann tried to get rid of it along with the Medieval Warm Period, but there was a Medieval Warm Period, and it was very nice.
People were prosperous, and the weather was actually more stable then.
It was more predictable, and then as temperatures plummeted, the weather got worse.
You started to get nasty storms, harvests failed, all kinds of bad things happened.
And again, we're now in what seems to be another of these natural warming periods.
It's a kind of a long cycle, right?
There's a Roman warm period, dark ages, cold period, medieval warm period, little ice age, modern warming, on something roughly a thousand years for the whole warming and cooling cycle in recent times.
And I think there's a significant possibility that we're going to start cycling down again.
And if you look at the entire, this Ice Age, people say, you know, the Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago.
It didn't really.
An Ice Age, meaning significant polar ice, we're still in one, we're just in a mercifully warm period.
And we've been in one for about 2.6 million years.
And then you have, you have these long glaciations, 125,000 years, and then 15,000 year warm periods.
And they seem to be getting cooler.
And the Holocene has been going on for almost 15,000 years.
So again, there's a lot to worry about.
Plus the fact that weather's just always been nasty.
That's one of the things that the alarmists don't understand.
And they really don't.
Again, they're not making this up.
They don't know everything I know.
They don't secretly agree with me and they're just pretending so they can go to Davos and get rich.
But they don't realize that weather's always been bad.
Things like the Grote Mandring, this enormous flood as the medical war period was ending, killed tens of thousands of people, washed away an entire county somewhere in England.
And it only killed tens of thousands because the population was a lot lower then.
If we had something like that now, the casualties would be far higher.
So there's a lot of things to worry about in climate.
The thing that I don't worry about is that human beings are causing the weather to get worse.
That we're causing some unnatural warming trend.
Again, if you just look at the 20th century, let's keep it simple for the alarmists for a moment here.
You know, there's a pretty steep warming up to about 1940, and then there's a cooling that lasts until about 79, then there's another warming.
The warming up to 1940 was about as rapid as the warming today, with atmospheric CO2 far lower.
So the idea that you'd look at it and say, oh, it must be CO2, or you look at the cooling from 1940 to 79, the CO2 is still going up, the temperature is going down.
So, the problem is that they don't know their history.
They're fixated on the short run.
And they go on.
I mean, look at the thing with wildfires now.
And every time there's a wildfire, they run over and say, oh, it's climate change.
A tree is burning.
Like, we never had wildfires until now.
But actually, globally, wildfires have been trending down for decades.
And there's considerable evidence, say, in North America, that the 17th and 18th centuries were far smokier.
And there was a lot more burning than there is today.
But these people, again, they make fun of me for being a historian, but they don't know their climate history.
They don't know about anything, you know.
They don't know what the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
They just, they don't know about any of this stuff.
They don't know what the Younger Dryas was, and when they're told about it, they refuse to believe it.
Which is, again, is the Mark of a Zealot not a conspirator?
You know, people like to say, oh, Davos, the WF, and all that.
They write books about what they're doing.
It's a plan, not a plot.
Um, and I know this thing, I'm going to say this about the, you know, the normies and the red pills.
You feel important if you know stuff other people don't.
But it's important that what you know be true, because otherwise you're, you're, you're, and it's just, there's an arrogance about assuming, and the alarmists do this, right?
They say that we deniers know they're right, and we're just doing it for the money.
Like, we're part of a plot, but they've taken the red pill.
But the idea that nobody could hear my opinion and then disagree with it.
Like, I don't know what in anybody's personal life experience, especially if you've ever been married, right?
You can explain something to somebody and have them not agree with you when you're done.
This really does happen a lot.
Yeah, you're affronted when I said that a third of the people watching are going to be deserting at this point.
I'm sure they are.
I'm not affronted.
I'll get nasty notes, but you know what?
Bill Gates doesn't care if you're alive or dead.
It's not that.
I think all these things can work on various levels.
I mean, for example, the scientists.
It's quite possible for The fact that academia has been completely hijacked by green values is not a product of the fact that scientists are in on the conspiracy or not on any kind of conscious level.
It just means that they're greedy bastards who want to pay off their mortgages and want to jet on freebies around the world to wherever the latest COP conference is, that their mouths have been filled with gold.
You know, the climate industrial complex is very, very, very well funded.
And you know, and I know that if you want to do, say you're a zoologist and you want to do research into red squirrel populations, you ain't going to get the funding.
But if you want to do a paper on how red squirrel behavior has been affected by climate change, suddenly the money starts rolling in.
So we can agree that the science has been corrupted.
Oh yeah, and you write the same paper.
And you know, one of my other causes is to privatize the universities.
Let's have them get by by charging students fees for the teaching they do, instead of charging the government fees for the propaganda they create.
Because again, don't forget with the people who get to jet around the world saving us all from ourselves, in addition to the appeal of the money, the sin of pride is involved here.
You are told you are an important, wise person whose presence is essential.
Like John Kerry, when he was asked about taking a private jet, I think to get an award, and he said, I'm too busy, you know, to travel steerage like you peasants.
And that was a very revealing moment because, again, he wasn't pretending to think he was better than us.
He was revealing that he thinks he's better than us.
Much better.
And that he's doing work that's so important that he should burn fossil fuels to do it, whereas our lives are so shabby and irrelevant that we should take the ox cart.
And he's not pretending that.
He really thinks that.
He's just as arrogant as he looks.
And again, I have some sympathy for the younger scientists because they're afraid.
And again, it's easy to say, oh, you should be courageous.
You should get yourself fired.
You know, you should lose your mortgage.
You should have your wife leave with the kids because you're not a good provider.
It's easy to give other people that kind of advice.
But yes, academia is corrupted, and not just in this area.
So there's so many causes.
Again, I'd like to see school vouchers implemented.
Even get the public schools off these exotic agendas and back to what parents want them to teach kids.
But again, I always insisted the root of it and you know, a lot of people on our side say it's a plot.
A lot of people on the other side say it's a plot.
It's not.
It's people who really see the world differently.
The danger when you assert that it's not a plot is that it's going to be an argument between you and me on whether it is and isn't a plot because I can't let that comment stand.
I recently did a podcast with somebody called Ivor Cummings.
And we talked about the history of the climate change movement, which dates back probably to the 1940s.
Essentially, the five grandsons of J.D.
Rockefeller were really pushing this, and climate change was They favored climate change because climate change is a problem which is not confined within national borders.
They needed a global problem that they could sell to the world as everyone's problem, which transcended nation states, and therefore you would need global policy to deal with it.
I read a book about this a few years ago called Watermelons, in which I trace the history of the climate change Scare.
Scare narrative, which was ramped up from conference to conference.
So the Norwegian Prime Minister, Royal Harlan Brundtland, led the Brundtland Commission, I think, possibly as early as the 1970s, inventing the term sustainability.
And then, of course, we move on to the... You Canadians, by the way, I'm sorry to say this, and maybe you can explain this to me.
You, You Canadians are balls deep in this conspiracy.
You've got Maurice Strong, the guy behind the Rio Earth Summit, inventing this Agenda 21 and pushing the sustainability agenda again.
You've got David Suzuki.
You've got I'm glad you've heard of him.
David Suzuki is one of those guys I call world famous in Canada.
Why has Canada done that?
Why has Canada produced so many green cards?
Canada is an odd kind of place that we're absolutely convinced that we hew to the radical centre.
But in fact on most policies we're way off to the left.
And we're not even having a proper discussion about it, you know, on things like on the new gender radicalism, you know, on the size of the state, on levels of immigration and all kinds of issues.
And we can't really talk about why are we so radical because we are unwilling to recognize that we are radical.
Uh and and it's it's a very odd thing but again the thing we need to do is is convince the reasonable people in the audience that we're on the wrong track on all kinds of things uh including again on climate you know what we do at the climate discussion nexus is we look at the news stories and we say well they're telling you this but they've got it wrong here's what's really happening and it's interesting we just we we do a weekly newsletter and then we do a video on it uh When we get around to it.
By the way, speaking of gold, please send us some because we're a very small outfit and sometimes we get behind.
So we did one about this the hottest day ever according to some computer reconstruction.
And normally our videos of that sort will get 30,000 views maybe.
This one got over 200,000 in the first week and a half, because people really were thinking to themselves, okay, I've heard that, what's wrong with it?
And we came and we told them what was wrong with it.
And part of what's wrong with it, not only was it a computer reconstruction, which is always a bit fishy, but it only went back to 1979.
And all these journalists were saying, hottest day ever!
Not either not realizing only went back to 79 or having somehow the notion that oh we know the planets heating so anything before 1979 was cold and dark and since then it's been hot and sweaty.
So they don't know about the 1930s and the heat waves then.
They certainly don't know about the medieval warm period.
They've never heard of the Holocene climatic optimum.
And then some Germans were saying, well, it's been the hottest day in 125,000 years, which it wasn't.
But the reason why that's a significant number is that that's when the previous interglacial, the Eemian, ended.
And there's very little scientific debate that the Eemian was warmer than the Holocene by a couple of degrees.
And that, of course, is entirely natural.
Fred Flintstone jokes aside.
We just know that was entirely natural.
So if it's natural for temperature to be warmer than it is today in the interglacials, And if there were not mass extinctions, oh, the polar bears are going to get it, the coral's going to get it, right?
Coral's been around for millions of years.
But you need to bring this stuff to people's attention and to say to them, no, what you've been told is wrong.
And one of the things also that we are forever running into is, oh, you're not a climate scientist, right?
And you look at, well, neither is David Suzuki, right?
Neither is Marie Strong.
Al Gore certainly wasn't.
He wasn't any kind of scientist.
Nor David Attenborough.
I mean, he's just a kind of TV personality.
And we'll often actually go and look up the educational qualifications of some journalist or another.
But I did this video, a historian looks at climate change, where I defended the informed citizen being involved in issues.
I mean, I think it's very strange to say, oh, you're not a climate scientist and you can't talk about this because If you think people should vote and they say, oh, voters should be engaged on climate and do they need to be climate scientists?
No.
Okay, well, I'm engaged on climate.
Oh, you're not a climate scientist.
And then you say, okay, so should no one vote on the budget if they're not an accountant or an economist?
You know, should nobody vote on foreign policy if they're not a general?
It's it's it but it's one of these things that is they kind of grab this rhetorical club in a bit of a panic because it makes them uncomfortable to have people dissent but that's the essence of an open societies that we ask questions we check the data for ourselves and we we do these videos based on our newsletter and blog but if you go to the newsletter in the blog you see there are links so you can check for yourself did we present it fairly
Yeah, so when you got your 200,000 viewers on the Was This The Hottest Day Ever?
I mean, it's good, but in some ways, you should have had many, many more.
And I think this is a problem with our time particularly.
Because you're dependent on the algorithms which lead people on the internet to that particular site.
I mean, how did you do that?
Well, you know, we've had over 9 million views, and I figure I should become a guru of getting views.
But honestly, all I can really say is we say what we think is true without fear or favor, and we try to make the presentation engaging.
My mother now passed away.
She taught history at the University of Toronto.
And she said she really tried to make her lectures amusing as well as informative, partly because people remember things better if they laugh while hearing them, and partly because she was taking an hour of her students' lives they could never get back, and she figured they ought to enjoy it.
And so we actually, the first entire year that we were putting out these videos, we had 17,000 total views.
And we were earnest and, you know, making a better mousetrap way off in the woods.
And then very suddenly, in the space of a couple of weeks, we went viral and got to a million views.
And one of our videos, the one on the 97% consensus myth, alone now has a million views.
And we have no idea how it happened.
But that's what it's the nature of debate in a free society.
You're saying things and saying things and nobody's listening.
And suddenly people are listening.
And you just You have to keep trying and don't get discouraged.
You know what Rudyard Kipling said about treating success and failure equally, as both being imposters.
And believe in the long-term power of the truth.
Because if you don't believe that, nothing makes sense in our society.
And if you do believe that, stand by the truth and try not to irritate people beyond measure.
Well, Joel, I totally agree with the principle of what you're saying.
I think the truth should be our only goal.
And I'm totally with you on content as well.
But I think possibly you're on the Pollyanna-ish side of the argument there.
I mean, the problem is not about your content, which I'm sure is absolutely first rate.
The problem is fighting a technological system which doesn't want stuff like yours and mine to get out there.
I mean, look, your media in Canada is an embarrassment.
And the reason it's an embarrassment is that you've got this, what would you call him, a fascist dictator, son of Fidel Castro.
No, no, no.
He was not the son of Fidel Castro.
The Trudeaus didn't meet Fidel Castro till after Justin was born.
Well, we can disagree over who the dad is, but I think we can agree that Justin Trudeau, President Bieber as I call him, is a stooge of the World Economic Forum.
He has no loyalty to Canada or to Canadians.
And he's acting like a dictator, and particularly in the way he's bought and paid for your press now.
I mean, when I was covering the climate wars a decade ago, you had the National Post, which was still producing fairly robust articles.
I don't know whether it still is, but I would suspect Correct me if I'm wrong.
In the last 10 years, Canadian journalism has gone massively downhill.
And when it talks about climate change, it will be pushing the same narrative that the UK mainstream media is pushing that the US mainstream media is pushing.
It's extremely rare now to find any voice of dissent on the subject of climate change anywhere in the mainstream media, anywhere in the world.
Now that has changed very much in the last 10 or 15 years.
15 years ago you could have got counter opinions.
Now you don't get them.
Yeah, now I should say I actually do write for the National Post and they do publish contrary and opinions on climate and other things.
And I also, I would like to say in defense of Canadian media that it was an embarrassment 30 years ago too.
It's not like we suddenly got terrible.
But being on the government take is a bad thing, right?
And I know the Post may fire me now because they lobbied for that.
And then our government... Did they?
They lobbied?
They asked for the money and they got it.
But, and another thing, you know, our government decided they were going to make Google and, you know, Facebook and Google pay for the, to link to our stories.
And they said, we won't do it.
And the government said, ha ha, we'll bring you to your knees.
And they passed this bill.
And now they've stopped linking to our news.
And it was like, wham, wham, wham, where'd all the money go?
And so it's important to remember about Justin Trudeau that, yeah, he is, he is, if he was any shallower, he would bulge, right?
Justin Trudeau is, absolutely faithful reflection of the left-wing trends of the day because he doesn't really think independently.
But he's not a competent man.
Virtually everything he does goes wrong.
And he's actually way behind in the polls now.
The man is actually a klutz, right?
He's done a lot of harm, but none of his policies have worked the way he wanted them to, because he won't tolerate dissent, even in his inner circle, and he doesn't know much about anything.
But you're right, there's been a narrowing of opinion, because I've been writing opinion in Canada for more years than I want to mention, starting at the Ottawa Citizen back in 1997.
And the range of stuff that you could say and the vigor with which you could express yourself on contentious issues has narrowed considerably.
And this is bad for a free society because it drives frustration into other channels, right?
You saw the Trekkers convoy, which did speak for a lot of Canadians, though not always as coherently as one might have ideally liked.
And the more it got condemned, the more popular it became because people said, oh, there they go again.
They're just condescending to us.
They won't listen to us.
And it's like when people, I'm not going to name David Frum specifically, but these people in the United States who keep saying, oh, Trump and his supporters are so revolting.
And the result is that people say, yeah, well, same to you with knobs on, buddy, as opposed to saying, look, we understand your frustrations.
We see you as fellow human beings and citizens, but we think you've got some of these issues wrong.
And so the result is it really poisons the well of discourse because there's so little Willingness to concede that people the other side might be both intelligent and well-meaning and nevertheless have hold of the thing the wrong way.
And I think that again, in the long run, you call me Pollyannish.
I mean, I'm not.
I often say optimism is a psychological condition and a fatuous one.
But hope is a theological virtue, and what we have to do is believe that, you know, St.
George didn't measure the dragon before he fought it, right?
If you see a dragon, get out your lance, or if you haven't got a lance, you know, get out your dagger or your stick or something, and go and hit the thing.
And amazingly, you look back at history again, look at World War II.
I've often said that if World War II had never happened, and you'd written this magnum opus and sent it to your publisher, they'd have sent it back with an indignant note that it was just too unrealistic.
Tone down this Hitler guy.
He's just too awful, right?
The Battle of Britain, you've got to give the Allies more planes or they would never win it.
You know, you can't make this come out this way.
It's just not going to happen.
But it did, right?
And we need to remember that.
Alfred the Great, he really did defeat the Danes, force them to convert to Christianity and teach himself Latin.
We walk in the footsteps of heroes and we should not get discouraged just because things are awful.
They've always been awful, and humans have found a way in the West to overcome it time and again.
Do you know what?
I don't believe a word we're told about World War II.
I think it's, you know, I think I trust the narrative on World War II about as much as I trust what we're told about, possibly even less than I trust what we're told about Alfred the Great.
I'm sure some of it.
Did Alfred burn the cakes?
Yeah, maybe, maybe not.
No, that's a great story that's apocryphal.
But he really did teach himself Latin as an adult because he thought learning in England had fallen into disrepute and he wanted to translate books into Anglo-Saxon.
He really did do that.
Yeah, I don't doubt that bit, but you know, I don't doubt there was a battle of Stalingrad, I don't doubt there was a battle of El Alamein, but I think beyond those broad, those big picture stuff, I'm not sure that I believe any of the detail that we're told.
I think it was all propaganda narrative.
Look, can we just, Since this seems to have turned into a discussion about, is it a conspiracy or not?
I used to write, for about 10 or 15 years, I was fully engaged in the climate trenches and I was living through the kind of things that you must live through every day now.
You know, I'd have friends, I remember this friend called Damien saying to me, I've got a scientist friend who really knows his stuff and my scientist friend tells me that no, climate change it really is serious and actually we need to address it and blah blah blah.
So I was very much, very much in a lonely position.
I remember looking around and looking for allies and there weren't many books from a sceptical point of view.
Okay Bjorn Lomborg came out with his book which was a big help but You'd search on the internet for articles supporting the sceptical side, and articles were there very few.
And then came ClimateGate.
And you know all about ClimateGate, the emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
And what these emails demonstrated was that the scientists at the very heart of the What you might call the climate industrial complex, the guys writing all the papers that were acting as lead authors on the papers that were then presented to the IPCC at their COP conferences.
These guys were clearly far less certain about global warming than they claimed publicly, even to the point of cooking the books, rigging the data, doing what you said with Michael Mann did the medieval warming period, actually trying to erase it from history.
And I thought at the time, and I think a lot of us did in the sceptical movement, That this would be the game over.
We had presented killer evidence proving that this was a busted flush.
That this was a... They were making it up as they went along.
They were lying to us.
They were shutting down dissenters.
They were getting dissenters denied funding.
They were stopping dissenters being published in scientific journals.
I thought this... The wrongdoing here is so egregious that everybody will be able to see it.
So here we are, fast forward what, 11 years, 12 years from...
It was even longer ago than that, wasn't it?
It was 2007.
So getting on for two decades on, what do we find?
Instead of people being more and more sceptical of this stuff, we find that the media reports war-to-war nonsense about how we've got to adopt this crap like net zero.
School children have now been comprehensively brainwashed.
There's probably not a child in the world that doesn't believe that all the polar bears are dying and stuff.
The newspapers will not, will barely run, okay so national posters and etc, will barely run sceptical pieces.
You've got my government committed to this nonsense, net zero, forcing us all to adopt heating systems which don't heat our homes and are very very expensive.
The same thing is going on around the world.
Bat-chomping, bird-slicing, eco-crucifixes are ruining the landscape, driving up people's energy bills.
You're telling me that this is not a conspiracy?
What, this is just accidental?
Yeah, it's like in the 1930s, when Winston Churchill talked about trying to raise the alarm about Hitler, he said it was like being smothered by a feather mattress.
You know, the Times wouldn't hear of it, the government wouldn't hear of it, the schools were teaching pacifism and saying that World War I had been a conspiracy by the merchants of death.
And you know, there's even a book, Bad News, about the foreign policy of the New York Times, which was very, very much on the side of appeasement in the 1930s.
It was this huge Uh, elite push against the West defending itself, but it wasn't a conspiracy.
They weren't secretly Nazis writing editorials at the Times and running the British government.
They were fools.
And that's what we've got today.
Like the average Germans.
I remember when I, when I joined the Ottawa Citizen, having come in from the world of academia and think tanks and so on.
Having a bit of a view that journalists maybe were in a conspiracy, and my editor, a wise, experienced journalist and a libertarian, she told me, you spend three weeks in a newsroom and you realize that journalists couldn't carry off a conspiracy because A, they're too busy and overstretched, and B, they're not smart enough.
And most journalists are not, you know, they're not plotters out of a Dan Brown novel.
They're people with a degree, if you're lucky, in English literature who know nothing about the subjects they write about.
They just go to the archive and look up the last story and then reword it.
And errors propagate.
I remember this as a citizen, we'd have this problem.
If you got an error in a news story, people would look it up for subsequent news stories and you couldn't stamp the thing out because it was in the records.
But I mean, I have worked in a newsroom and I can tell you those people couldn't conspire if they wanted to, but they don't.
They just all think the same way.
They've got the same mentality as the appeasers.
And again, you think we got them.
Think about the arguments over the Vietnam War and the passion and the fact that people would say, gotcha.
This proves I'm right.
People would say it on the peace movement side.
People would say it on the pro-war side.
And, you know, 40 years later, we're still mad about it.
I mean, I know people are still mad that Richard III was deposed and murdered, right?
And he didn't kill his nephews.
In English, it would still be Catholic.
And I'm actually inclined to that view.
So if you could disagree about whether Richard III murdered his nephews, there's all kinds of things people disagree about.
And there's an arrogance in thinking there's no way that anybody could hear my opinion and not agree with it.
Certainly they can.
And what we need to do in winning the climate debate isn't to unmask conspiracy.
It's to refute bad arguments.
Because even if there were a plot, let me concede your plot, we're being plotted against it.
Davos, they have a secret plot they write books about.
The average person isn't part of the conspiracy.
What they need is to be shown that the arguments are bad.
That's how truth prevails.
That's how we won the Cold War.
And I remember years ago, there's a book, How Democracies Perish, by Jean-Francois Ravel, written in the 80s, where he talked about the incredible supine appeasement and almost self-hatred of Western leaders.
And I'm still mad about it.
I can't believe these European politicians in the 80s seemed to be trying to lose the Cold War.
But they weren't trying to lose it, except possibly some people in the German government.
They were just idiots.
We're governed by idiots, not by geniuses.
What you see is what you get with politicians.
Joe Biden isn't plotting anything.
The man can't remember what day it is.
No, Joe Biden isn't.
The people who control him are.
Who, Kamala Harris?
An incontinent, senile fool clearly isn't deciding American policy.
But who is?
You think the people around him are smarter than he is?
They're not.
They're actually the fools.
They see Nancy Pelosi is what she looks like.
And, you know, so's Mitch McConnell.
These people haven't got something in reserve they're not sharing with us.
Justin Trudeau.
You know, his IQ is probably over 100.
He's sort of witty and quick.
But there's no depth to the man at all.
He wouldn't even be a good puppet if he was a puppet.
He's forever saying embarrassing stuff.
I don't really buy any of your analogies.
I mean, for example, you mentioned the Vietnam War.
We established at the beginning that truth should be our only goal.
We know now, we know with hindsight, because the evidence has since emerged, that the US started the Vietnam War because they wanted to start the Vietnam War.
No, they didn't.
The communists were trying to take over and they ultimately succeeded.
Well, we're going to have to disagree on our facts there, because the Gulf of Tonkin incident was clearly engineered by the Americans, and Congress miraculously was ready to vote all the money for the Vietnam War that same weekend.
And clearly the media was not on the case, because it didn't question the validity of this alleged attack by this North Vietnamese torpedo.
But not that they've necessarily been able to do so, because they were going on the US Fleet's Don't forget, these people were traumatized by the failure to resist Hitler.
So they were very disposed to see aggression.
And the Gulf of Tonkin incident is murky.
It seems like something, some of it was real, some of it wasn't.
But yeah, so maybe they overreacted.
And yes, Lyndon Johnson wasn't the man you want in charge of your war.
And what he said about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he said, it's like grandma's nightshirt.
It covers everything.
But the communists were trying to take over South Vietnam and eventually they did, right?
You can't make them go away so that you can have your plot.
They were real and they were determined.
So it was justified in faking the Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to start a war?
No, I don't think lying is justified.
I think one of the attacks was real.
50,000 Americans and what?
Two million Vietnamese civilians on both sides, maybe one and a half million NVA.
And you're thinking, what, to stop communism, right?
Yeah, well, communism kills tens of millions of people.
It's kind of bad, right?
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot.
Don't forget.
Paul Pott came to power because the Americans eventually bugged out in Vietnam.
They should have stayed and stopped him.
Even George McGovern in 1978, when they found out about the genocide, he said, well, can't we send in the Marines?
And again, you see, he wasn't a plotter, he was a dunce.
To say that after his whole career was spent getting the Marines out of Vietnam shows you the true intellectual qualities of the man.
And I mean, once you get to the idea that everything's fake, maybe I'm a cyborg, right?
Where do you stop once you stop believing in anything?
And I've known people who fought in World War II, so I can tell you some of it's real.
I knew people who were involved in D-Day.
It really happened the way they told you.
It was quite an amazing story and a heroic story.
Very ordinary people from this country.
I remember Spike Milligan after the Battle of El Alamein.
He wrote in his memoirs, had we ordinary layabouts really beaten the mighty German army?
And this is something to treasure, not something to sort of deconstruct.
This is an appeal to anecdote and nostalgia, I'm afraid, John.
There's lots about the Second World War that we haven't been told, and a lot of it is very, very ugly indeed.
I'm not in any way denigrating what individual men and women went through, because I used to do interviews with them when there were more of them around, and I was fascinated with World War II, but I think that that doesn't excuse the stuff that went on behind the scenes, some of the appalling stuff.
For example, the number of German civilians who died in the aftermath of the Second World War, who were starved to death, who were killed during the invasion of Germany.
There's all sorts of... because the victors wrote the history.
But look... Well, then how do you know all this, right?
No, we've been told all this stuff.
We know about the vindictiveness of FDR and Morgenthau, and we know about their fatuousness about Stalin.
I mean, I remember my dissertation advisor, when we were covering the Second World War, and he said, there have been more battles about the war since than there were during it.
When you finally get done with historiography, you wonder if we even won.
So it's all been raked over.
The West does this.
We look at our failings.
We obsess on our failings.
We examine them.
We write books.
We do talk shows about them.
We don't hide the truth.
We're forever looking.
Our own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada is carrying on an ongoing genocide against Aboriginal people, right?
And this may be nonsense, but it's not a matter of hiding the ugly truth.
It's right out there for everybody to look at and debate.
That's what we're doing right now, right?
Just have a, have a, have a, the, the James Delling poll of 10, 15 years ago.
Who thought that he was going to win this one through doing the thing that you've done, through force of argument.
Because every day, pretty much, I would put out a story demonstrating with a degree of solid scientific backing, certainly a lot more solid science than anything the environmentalists have on their side.
I would demonstrate that polar bear populations were increasing, as they still are, that the glaciers were not melting all over the world, just that some were growing and some were shrinking, that the ice caps were under no threat and that actually Antarctica was growing.
That these record-breaking temperatures that we got told about even then were not actually record-breaking on any long-term scale and so on and so forth.
I counted their arguments across the board.
And here I am 15 years on and nothing has changed.
In fact, the public policy has intensified in pushing the Green agenda.
All my arguments have been completely wasted.
Now, if I try to get them publicized, or broadcast them on the internet, or get books published on the subject, I would stand an even smaller chance than I did 15 years ago.
And you're telling me that it's okay, we just keep banging on, ramming home the message, and eventually what?
The truth will out?
I don't think that's going to happen.
Yeah, there's a cartoon that I had at my desk at the Ottawa Citizen.
It's a Herman cartoon of this guy.
He's a pony express rider.
He's leaning over the boss's desk.
He's got three arrows in his back.
And the boss is saying, well, nobody said the job was going to be easy.
I mean, yeah, sure, we're putting stuff out.
Other people are putting stuff out.
You don't win all the arguments, even if you're right.
But again, whoever told you you would?
Sure, it's hard.
But we will win this battle.
And you know what?
They'll find something else.
And I mean, there's other things going on that we urgently need to pay attention to.
The dissolution of the family is a huge problem, and the radical gender ideology that's just as entrenched as the stuff about climate in the same minds.
But again, one of the books that really influenced me when I was in grad school, it's funny, I read a lot of books in grad school, and I read some good ones, but none of the best ones were actually given to me by one of my professors.
Thomas Sowell's book, A Conflict of Visions.
is a very profound meditation on the nature, the deep disagreement on the importance of motives versus the importance of methods in public policy.
And we're up against people who think that all you need is love.
And so it's very hard to win the battle when you talk about methods and what's tried and true, because they say, oh, the past is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awaken.
You know, James Joyce line.
But the average person is not a fool, right?
And so the point is that there is this common sense out there and you appeal to it.
It's slow, but it's persistent and it does work.
And then the radicals will find something else because that's what radicals do.
You know, you look at Hayek's The Intellectuals and Socialism.
Because if you're reasonably content with the world as it is, there are all kinds of outlets for your talent.
But if you're a malcontent, you're drawn to a couple of professions.
Journalism, politics, academia.
So there's a disproportionate number of articulate people who just feel really ill at ease in reality.
And they're forever looking for some way of overthrowing reality.
And that's the battle that will never end.
But we can win, that's the war that will never end, but we can win specific battles.
Because ordinary people are, at heart, quite normal.
And they don't like this radicalism, but they're intimidated.
And part of our job is to encourage them not to quit.
To tell them you're not alone.
I remember this, actually, I wrote a column, it was about the Canadian military paying for a soldier's sex change operation, back when you could talk about this stuff.
And then I got this email from someone saying, well done, sir.
I really liked your column.
I'm a veteran of the D-Day and I would like to have lunch with you.
And I thought, okay, sure.
I owe this guy a lunch of boring war stories because, you know, he put his life on the line for me.
Instead, he was absolutely fascinating.
He'd been the intelligence officer for the Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry Highlanders.
And he taught me an enormous amount about the mechanics of World War II combat and the logistics.
A marvelous individual.
And, you know, very much he was driven out of the military eventually by bilingualism.
And he really, really disliked the way we were governed.
But you know what?
He was a happy warrior.
And that's what we need to be.
We need to be happy warriors.
We can't retreat down the rabbit hole.
We can't succumb to despair.
This is not what we're called to do in this world.
We have a fight worth fighting against long odds.
We can be rebels and be right at the same time.
And this is actually a marvelous opportunity.
This is not a reason to be bitter.
This is something to celebrate.
We have a good fight to wage and we are going to win against the odds.
What more could you ask for?
Well, I agree with you that the odds are extreme, but that's because the odds have been... the whole game has been rigged.
The dice has been weighted.
I agree with you entirely that most people have a deal of common sense.
I think most people instinctively know that a lot of the stuff we Get taught about climate change and so on is absolute rubbish.
I think the younger generation find it slightly more difficult because they've been brainwashed from about the age of five or six, right through their schooling now.
But I think that the, you talk about the media, we've both spent time as journalists, I think that, I believe that newspapers were always corrupt.
I think that the newspapers were always, always selling a narrative in the interests of the elites.
So I don't think that there was a golden age when actually the newspapers were doing anything other than our overlords bidding and selling and telling us lies.
You know, the New York Times telling us, I've seen the future and it works.
Was it the New York Times or Lincoln Steffens anyway, going to the Soviet Union and Ignoring all the atrocities they're being committed.
They've lied to us for a very long time, but I do think they've become much more shameless about it.
And I don't think it's any good saying, well, journalists are stupid, they don't know any better.
Ultimately, it's up to the people who own the newspapers, who are pushing this agenda on behalf of this shadowy elite, which has decided to stake its all on this
This industry, this fake industry, which people like Al Gore have got very rich on things like carbon credits and I suppose wind farms and solar farms, all the other unnecessary things.
So it's partly a sort of get rich quick, get richer quick scheme for the elites, but mainly it is designed to crush and control us.
And to impoverish us.
And it's happening.
All these decent ordinary people whose common sense we can appeal to and yet win the day, it doesn't matter because we've reached a point where public policy is being decided regardless of what the populace wants.
I'm sure it's the same in Canada.
Your opposition is pretty bloody useless.
Our Conservative Party specializes in being useless and the NDP hammering the Liberals while propping them up.
But at the same time, there's been a sudden stampede away from hiding gender transitions in schools because they discovered parents hated it.
And, you know, in Britain, the government is sort of backing away from the net zero.
And again, if you think to yourself, Yeah, I mean, it's going to take a while.
They're stumbling again.
Don't forget these people are boobs, right?
They're not, they're not clever and adept.
Yes, I agree that they're boobs.
If he's running a conspiracy, fine, he'll bungle it.
But, but the thing is that, you know, and it's always been the case that the elites have been somewhat out of touch, and it's always been a problem going back before Magna Carta.
But don't forget these media outlets you're talking about have plunging circulation.
People are stopping buying the paper because they don't believe what it says anymore.
And the only way to fix that is for the papers to get back to selling news and opinion to an audience.
But I mean, you look back to the New York Times back in the 30s, right?
But the Chicago Tribune was going at it hammer and tongs with them.
There's lively debate.
There's papers with different points of view.
There is not a uniform successful conspiracy out there.
There's a lot of stupid opinions, a lot of which seem to be held by people in power.
And we've got to make common sense prevail.
And it is more durable.
It may be less nimble than idiocy, but it's more durable.
And if it's not, why are we even doing this podcast, right?
What's the point?
But it's okay.
Well, I suppose the point, if I'm honest, The Berlin Wall came down.
I presume you believe that, right?
You believe the Berlin Wall came down?
That's not also just some fake stage thing?
Yeah, I think probably the Berlin Wall did come down.
Well, I would probably ...greatly dispute the politics surrounding it.
I think East Germany... Hanukkah, for example, was, I think, funded for years by the West.
I think that the East-West divide in Germany was probably a Western intelligence services creation designed to weaken Germany in the same way that now the West, if that term has any meaning... Give Stalin a little credit for occupying East Germany with the Red Army.
Well, given that communism was, that the Bolshevik Revolution was funded by central banks, by banks in America, I think we probably disagree with that too, about that too.
It's not as, this notion we've been sold about the West goodies and the East or the red peril, it's all propaganda.
So there's no Holodomor?
Stalin didn't really starve the Ukrainians?
Oh, yeah, yeah, he did.
He did?
That wasn't just propaganda?
Yeah, look, there are incidents in history which are... Incidents?
Is the Great Leap Forward real?
A Cambodian genocide for you?
Are you now sort of shroud-waving on behalf of... you're citing your favourite communist atrocities and saying, look, the Reds did it.
Well, that's like saying it's not fair to mention the death camps because then you're just shroud-waving over Hitler.
I'm saying... what I'm saying...
What I'm saying, John, is that, yes, we can go, oh, wasn't Stalin awful?
Wasn't Pol Pot awful?
Wasn't Mao awful?
I'm saying that these people were all creations of the Western deep states.
So no, I'm not saying, look at these evil foreigners.
Well, they're not like us.
I'm saying that we created them.
So we can disagree about that.
Good heavens!
Stalin was created in Russia by the conditions in Russia at the time, plus personal choices that he made, right?
Human agency.
And don't forget, we're all sinners, right?
So of course the West is not perfect, but we're a lot better than the others because we do have open discussion, we do address our failings, we do try and think things through, and we try and do better next time.
We win World War II and then we criticize our performance, including the morality of it.
Was the mass bombing of German cities a war crime?
Should the atomic bombs have been dropped?
We explore these questions.
But we also say, should we have acted against Hitler sooner?
Should we have gone to war in 1936?
Did we bungle security policy?
Was the settlement at the end of World War I ill-advised or did we just not follow through?
Should we have prevented World War One?
Could we have prevented it?
We debate all these questions, but again, if you believe... But we never come to honest answers, because the narrative is controlled by the very people who are responsible for all this.
It's financed by them.
But this is, you know, Chesterfield's point about lunatics, all thought in some sense is circular, but the lunatics move in circles that are too tight.
And by the time Mao is a Western agent, that's like the John Birch Society thinking Eisenhower was a communist agent.
It's a theory that is untouchable by evidence.
Because it just repels it all as part of the plot.
You know, that just shows how clever they are.
Alternatively, maybe you just haven't done sufficiently wide reading on the subject.
You've been trapped in your own paradigm.
That's the problem.
Well, anybody can say that.
Actually, when I was in graduate school, my roommate knew I thought conspiracy theories were interesting phenomena, and he got me this book called The Unseen Hand.
An introduction to the conspiratorial view of history by a guy who didn't just believe in all the conspiracies.
He thought they were all one conspiracy.
Yes, that's a logical conclusion.
And again, it was an invention.
The only thing that bothered him was that he hadn't been assassinated because he figured he was exposing it and they should have killed him.
And he said, if you hear that I died in an accident, don't believe it.
But it was like, no, you've just you've lost so much.
When you were going through what sounds like a very brief phase when you opened to the possibility of these so-called conspiracy theories, this was presumably, what, before the term conspiracy theory had been even invented?
No, this was a book about conspiracy theories.
I mean, when I was a teenager, I believed in the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy theory, but eventually, you know, reality set in.
It's just, it's just not how the world works.
So you bought into Kennedy, you understand that he wasn't got by lone gunman, or do you think he was?
Oh, yeah, he was shot by a lone gunman.
At one time I thought he wasn't, but he was.
So what kind of deep dive research did you do into the Kennedy assassination that you came to the conclusion that Leehard lost it?
Oh, all kinds.
My friend Fred Linwin is obsessed with Kennedy conspiracies.
But one of the points that he made is that it's a left-wing conspiracy theory because the left cannot stand that their hero, John Kennedy, was shot by a Castro-loving communist, and their hero, Robert Kennedy, was shot by an Israeli-hating Palestinian.
But this is really what happened.
And they were lone kooks and filled with evil in their hearts.
And, you know, it wasn't Lyndon Johnson.
I mean, I've read McBird, but Lyndon Johnson didn't assassinate him.
So you were at college and you were flirting briefly with conspiracy theorists to the point where your friend gave you a book.
Which were the conspiracy theories which you thought might be true?
And how much time did you give it to look into them?
Well, again, I was interested in ideology and this phenomenon, how you can construct an impenetrable mental fortress that dismisses all contrary evidence as part of the fraud.
You know, it's like if you're in the Matrix, how would you know?
You might be a brain in a jar and being fed utterly persuasive sensory input, but it's all fake.
And you couldn't tell.
Chang Tzu, you know, dreaming he's a butterfly and then wondering if he's a butterfly dreaming he's Chang Tzu.
It's a very interesting phenomenon, the person who cannot be reached.
But as you know, as Chesterton again says, there's this horrible clarity of detail about mental illness.
If a man is swinging a stick and hitting blades of grass, he's attacking private property.
But in fact, he's just in a carefree mood.
And one of the problems with conspiracy theories is they're utterly joyless.
And life should have joy in it.
Life is an eccentric privilege and we ought to enjoy it and we ought to fight the good fight because there's so much that needs doing and there's so much happy warrior that is needed in this world.
You've come dangerously close to suggesting that I'm mentally unstable.
Well, conspiracy theories are bad for your brain and for your soul.
I'm not making any secret of that.
You need to come back and join the fight, right?
Think of the end of Casablanca.
You know, welcome back to the fight.
This time I know we'll win.
That's what we need.
I thought we'd agree that our duty, our holy duty indeed, was to find out the truth at whatever cost.
Now we've established in the teeth of a narrative which would ask us to believe otherwise that there is no evidence that Well, there's evidence, but it's not persuasive.
I mean, there are hot days, right?
There is bad weather.
There are things they can point to and say, that proves my theory.
Is that evidence?
But there's not enough of it.
It's the weight of evidence, the preponderance, the tendentious nature of the claims.
You're dignifying hot days.
If you're going to call them evidence, I think you're already kind of playing the enemy's game.
I know that's not what you meant to do.
Well, no, because they say it's getting hotter, and then it's a hot day, and they say we said it was getting hotter, right?
That is evidence.
It's just not good enough.
That's not evidence.
That's just anecdote, isn't it?
But that's why there are competing scientific and other theories.
It's because the facts, you know, as Goethe said, every fact is already a theory, right?
We all have these interpretive paradigms.
And the question is, at what point does the stress on a paradigm become so great that you abandon it?
And for people like Al Gore or Michael Mann, like Michael Mann is going to have a very hard time walking it back.
Because it'd be so embarrassing for him.
And plus he'd probably, you know, get sued and things of that sort.
But that doesn't mean he doesn't believe it.
It just means he's dug in very hard on a position that I think isn't sustained by the evidence.
But the fact that I think that doesn't mean that nobody can disagree with me.
They can.
As I said, I used to be married.
My wife would disagree with me about things even after I'd explained them.
Every married person has had that experience.
It's just not true that people can't disagree with you and point to evidence.
We were thinking, what the heck was that?
What are the arguments over Hitler, right?
Is Hitler planning to take over the world?
Some people thinking it's absolutely clear and other people saying you're nuts.
I mean, even Richard Nixon talked about this in his memoirs, that when he was a young man, he thought that Neville Chamberlain was a champion of peace and that Churchill had it badly wrong.
And then he saw the war come and he changed his mind.
This is what people do.
And we can convince people by showing them that the facts do not really support the theory, although there are certainly things that might.
That's why people cherry pick, right?
Because it is possible to sustain some pretty wacky theories with selective use of evidence.
And it's not, again, mostly it's not insincere, but it just becomes a point where you suddenly say, hey, wait a minute, I'm an idiot.
That's not how it works.
Well, I'm looking forward to the point where you reach that understanding.
Some of the things you've said are not Very rigorous.
I mean, you're assuming you know what Al Gore thinks.
You're giving him views that we have no way of knowing whether he has them.
You're telling me on the basis of what?
Your gut feeling, basically, that Al Gore does actually believe in this stuff.
You don't know.
No, but when people say things you disagree with and do things you disagree with, it's a pretty safe bet that they think things you disagree with.
Right?
That's just what happens in the world, right?
Well, you say that, but for what evidence?
I mean, going back to the is it a conspiracy or not question about global warming, I could point you to numerous examples of the way, for example, that the Rockefeller brothers, including Nelson Rockefeller, who I think was Vice President at one point, pushed the green agenda, that they funded institutions to create this false narrative.
So we don't need to speculate on what the mindset, what we think they're thinking might have been, because we look at the evidence, the real world evidence, and we see the conspiracy happening in real time.
They fund the UN.
Before that, they fund the League of Nations.
They create the IPCC.
Institutions like that.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a plan.
They're doing all this in plain sight.
They're saying, hey, we created the IPCC.
A conspiracy doesn't have to be behind closed doors.
Sure it does.
It's not a conspiracy.
It can be in plain sight.
It's just a plan.
They're saying, here's what we should do, and then they're trying to do it.
And here's why we should do it.
And you go, no, you shouldn't do that because you're wrong about the reasons.
Yes, we say that.
And despite the fact that people like you and me are saying, no, you're wrong.
Here is why you're wrong.
I can demonstrate why you're wrong.
It's a lie.
These people have bought up the media.
They've bought up the scientific institutions.
They've bought the politicians.
So here you're saying, we've got to be happy warriors.
And I agree with that principle, by the way.
We should be happy warriors.
Of course, we should be happy warriors.
And I am a happy warrior.
But I'm a realistic happy warrior.
I know what's going on.
And I think that if you know what the people behind the scenes are planning, it puts you in a better position to fight the war than somebody going, well, I kind of, you know, I think they're acting good faith.
They're wrong, but we've got to go into battle with them.
If you know that they're going to be arranging all these traps for you because they are basically devious and they control everything, At least you're going into battle with your eyes open, rather than in this kind of, yeah, we'll win in the end.
It doesn't work for me.
Well, we've had nine million YouTube views.
We won the Cold War.
I think it's going pretty well so far.
But again, you know, there's no guarantee that I will prevail, right?
I have not been given the special magic power to win all the time.
Um, so, uh, it's, you know, if I experience setbacks, sometimes I get things wrong.
Sometimes I express myself badly.
There's all kinds of ways in which I could be better than I am.
But, uh, but I do believe that we're called to fight the good fight, and at the end, truth will prevail.
And so, I intend to be found at my post, if nothing else, that I will not abandon the cause.
And again, you know, I think things are going pretty well so far.
And if you, as our first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald once said to somebody, do you expect to get through life without trouble?
If so, you have been misled.
So of course there are setbacks and problems because there's a lot of people out there who don't agree with me, who have talent and determination.
And again, you know, you look at this Davos, right?
And Klaus Schwab writes books about it.
Yeah, he's telling you what he's going to do.
He's telling you why he's going to do it.
He's telling you how he's going to do it.
So it's all laid out there.
And then you say, OK, well, I know what you're up to.
It's like Hitler publishing Mein Kampf, right?
Nobody said, oh, that wacky Hitler with his Mein Kampf.
And then years later, they went, oh, my goodness, he wrote us a book about it.
And we all ignored it.
What a bunch of chumps.
Nazism was a conspiracy.
It was a plan.
We're going to take over Germany, conquer the world, and kill all the Jews.
And people were like, what?
Hitler can't possibly want to do that.
And then he made a really big attempt, and people said, why weren't we told?
But of course they were told.
Stalin's foundations of Leninism.
Like, they've all laid out what they want to do, and then they've challenged us to stop them.
And we're like, okay, fine.
Your challenge is accepted.
We'll stop you.
We're going to out-argue you.
We're going to out-work you.
We're going to out-think you, and we're going to win.
But it's not.
There's no plot there.
There's a plan out in plain sight.
Well, there is a plot.
That is exactly what it is.
You can't... I mean, look, fine.
If you feel more comfortable calling it a plan rather than a conspiracy, which is fair enough.
I mean, I don't accept that a conspiracy needs to be behind closed doors.
It can be in plain sight.
And I agree with you.
I mean, I read a book about it demonstrating that they had written about what they were planning all along.
But it doesn't make me feel that good because I know that even though Klaus Schwab has written a book about exactly the fourth industrial revolution and about how Covid was a wonderful opportunity for a great reset and they produce videos telling us that you will know nothing and be happy.
I don't feel that that makes it all right, or that therefore it's not some kind of wicked conspiracy.
I just think, yeah, this is classic revelation of the method.
It's classic, they think that if they tell us what they're going to do, and we We act, we don't do anything to stop them, then that's our bad luck and we deserve everything that's coming to us.
That's how I think it works.
I don't feel reassured, I don't feel that by avoiding the conspiracy word that somehow I've made it all legit and acceptable because it's not.
What is going on is wicked and it's not going to be solved simply by people writing enough learned articles or coming up with decent videos, which I do all the time, by the way.
I mean, but I think sometimes I'm banging my head up against a brick wall.
I'm speaking the truth, but we're not going to win because there's not enough people fighting the fight.
Well, we'll recruit more, right?
That's what people always say.
Why don't more people watch your videos?
And I say, well, share them with your friends, right?
Step up.
Be a part of it.
It's one of the reasons I've always liked C.S.
Lewis's writing, because he has these improbable bands of overmatched heroes who prevail against the odds.
Or, again, J.R.R.
Tolkien, right?
You look at The Fellowship of the Ring.
I mean, obviously Gandalf and Aragorn brought something to the party, but for the Hobbits in particular, it's like you can't be serious that these characters are going to do anything.
But they do.
And, you know, Tolkien didn't like metaphor very much.
He thought Lewis was too heavy handed, but he was trying to tell us something about how the world really works.
And that is the simple, persistent honesty and decency of the Hobbits among us.
And he, you know, he saw all of us as hobbits with this strange reserve of courage hidden deep within us.
This really is how the world works.
And so, yeah, if Net Zero were carried out, there would be mass death.
They don't know that.
And if they had complete control, we'd all be miserable.
And they don't know that, but that doesn't make it better, right?
It makes it worse because they don't have a furtive look on their faces.
We have to stop it, but we're gonna stop it, and we're gonna stop it the old-fashioned way, right?
We're gonna outwork them, out-think them, out-talk them, and outlast them, and then they'll go on to something else crazy, and we'll have to go and run off and fight that.
I mean, look at the number of stupid crazes in the 20th century.
Now, maybe it's hit peak stupidity, because with deconstructionism and this whole, there is no truth, you know, there's nowhere else for them to go.
I think transgender may actually have been the last frontier, not the, uh, Next frontier for them because that other than maybe people can now assert that they're a different race and we'll start agreeing with that but they've really run out of ways to try and smash reality that old 60s slogan so it may be that there's a long swing back but at any event you know as Gandalf says you know we can't really know what's gonna happen in the future we can't change the circumstances all we can do is decide what to do with the time that's been given to us
And what I'm doing is presenting common sense and proper factual background with good humor.
And that way, you know, when the consequence of these policies start to be felt, it will show that we were right and they were wrong.
Because the idea is it'll be painless.
The green transition will be painless.
Well, people are seeing that it's not now.
And that's one of the ways in which we're winning.
Our predictions came true.
The alarmist predictions did not about what would happen if we followed their policies.
And more and more people are saying, hey, wait a minute.
I can't afford my heating bill.
You told me this wouldn't happen.
And so, you know, I think we should actually, again, optimism is a dangerous thing, but I think we should be very hopeful about the state of the debate on climate.
I think we are winning, actually.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I can only speak from my position in the UK and I see no sign of... it's not that the public is not aware that the whole thing is a gigantic scam, it's that now our political class, and I suspect it's probably the same in other parts of the world,
has so arranged it that it doesn't matter what the public thinks anymore because we have, I'm sure, well we've hinted that earlier on, we have a uniparty in this country.
The Conservatives might just as well be Labour, might just as well be the Green Party.
So we've now reached the stage where this illusion that we used to hold that by voting for this party or that party, we might be able to change the course of political event.
That option is now no longer available to us.
that, The Conservatives and Labour are a uniparty.
They are both pushing the same green policies as are the Green Party, as are the Liberal Democrats, even to extent the kind of faux opposition parties like UKIP, which just like chipping away at aspects of the Green agenda, but still accept that climate change is a problem.
So, I don't really understand, in that state of affairs, how the democratic process is going to change anything.
I'd say that we have lost and we have been crushed.
And I agree with you, by the way, about the hobbits.
You know, little hobbits fighting Mordor.
I like Tolkien, I like that quote.
That Gandalf says to Frodo when he asks about this.
And before that, we've got the Bible.
We've got Gideon and his 300 men that God selects to defeat the enemy in small numbers.
It's what God does.
But I don't see, without divine intervention, us winning this one.
I think that we are approaching the end days.
Well, luckily, divine intervention is a constant reality.
I mean, look at the apostles, right?
After the crucifixion, you couldn't pick 12 more hapless characters than those guys, and look what they managed to get done.
But the complaint about the political parties being Tweedledum and Tweedledee is old news, because they always are trying to crowd toward where they think the swing public opinion is.
But as Andrew Breitbart used to say, politics is downstream of culture.
We have to change culture, we have to change popular thinking, and both parties will move.
Because remember, right-wingers are always saying, oh, the Tories might as well be Labour.
And left-wingers are always saying, oh, the Labour might as well be the Tories, right?
Why can't we have a real left-wing party?
And then you get some Trotskyite fringe and it gets seven votes.
But what we need to do is move the centre so that all those politicians... Alberta Premier Ralph Klein once said, show me a big enough parade and I'll get in front of it, right?
We need to create the parade and the politicians will get in front of it.
And then they'll be arguing over the details of policy we like instead of the details of policy we don't like.
You know, back in the 50s, everything seemed, most places, was very conventional and sort of right of center.
And then everything went to left of center because the center of public opinion changed.
But we can move it back, right?
We change the public opinion, we change politics.
Trying to change politics directly is a mugs game.
But we change what people are thinking and saying.
As, again, I think is happening on transgender.
I think that one has really hit and bounced back.
Because people are starting to see the real consequences, including in this aggressive wedge between parents and children.
And when it becomes a real experience, they say, I don't like that.
I don't want that.
And suddenly all the politicians change their minds without ever admitting they've done it.
So we can do it.
We just need to get out the word to the average person about what's really happening with the weather and what's really happening with their energy bill.
And if we can't do that, we don't deserve to succeed.
But I think we can.
I'm not discouraged.
I think it's going great.
I don't buy the idea that we deserve any of this.
I think that most people have just been brainwashed since birth by the media, by the entertainment industry, by the publishing industry, by Hollywood, by pop songs, by lying politicians.
Speaking of pop songs, if you let them do it to you, you've got yourself to blame.
You want people to wake up?
I want people to wake up.
That's a slogan.
That's a quote from a film which was produced by the very people who want to shape the narrative and brainwash us.
But it comes originally from an album from rockers who, you know, Pete Townshend smashing his guitar on stage wasn't exactly establishment.
I mean, it's a bit like Pink Floyd, right?
Criticizing the music business while making hundreds of millions of pounds.
Well, you know, we're all prone to hypocrisies, but... So who do you think...
I hope I die before I get old.
Who do you think was pushing that narrative?
Who do you think, in whose interest do you think it lay?
I don't think we feel that way today.
It was a division between generations.
I mean, you've heard of divide and rule.
Yeah, sure, but you know.
Do you not think that our current rulers might have learned something from the masters of this art?
Well, again, our current rulers don't strike me as deep thinkers.
They've probably learned something.
But they're not the rulers.
But they've probably learned it badly, right?
Like, right now, our environment is just off in China, hobnobbing with communists, and it looks terrible on them.
It's like, what idiot told you to do that, right?
This isn't part of a cunning plan.
This is a stooge bumbling around on the world stage.
You're pointing at puppets on the string, and you're saying, look, they've got wooden-topped heads.
But whoever's pulling the strings has pulled them in a foolish way too, right?
They should have told them, don't go on a mission!
Well, how do you know?
They seem to be doing remarkably well to me.
I mean, they've done pretty well in making the Green Agenda a global religion.
Where heretics like you and me are very few and far between.
And look, see how there is division between us on how to fight the fight, what the problem is, etc, etc.
I think they're very, very good at divide and rule.
Well, yeah, but we're also very good at being divided.
But at the same time, nobody, as I said, nobody said the job was easy.
I don't buy this blaming ourselves stuff.
I really don't.
I think it's really unhealthy.
But you look at the arguments during the Cold War among people who were, loosely speaking, were cold warriors.
You know, there were the moralists, and there were the realists, and there were the people who thought that America should go it alone, and the people who thought it needed to engage in the world.
There was a lot of debate and some considerable acrimony.
But that's how you find the truth, in part, is by arguing things out, thinking them through, seeing which position actually seems to hold up better in the face of the evidence, and giving all points of view and errands.
You know, we're going back to John Stuart Mill and this thing about the only warrant that I have for believing anything is a standing invitation to the world to refute it.
That includes people on our side.
And in fact one of the weaknesses of the left is their tendency all to get in lockstep and sing from the same sheet.
It looks like a strength but it's actually a weakness because it means they don't think enough about what they're doing and it creeps people out.
Right?
It's actually people find it off-putting all this slickness.
So, you know, we have strengths and we have weaknesses, but again, nobody said that it was going to be easier that we had the automatic win card.
We don't.
We could lose.
We could bungle it.
We could be overwhelmed by circumstances.
Look at Poland at the start of World War II.
They didn't do anything all that wrong, but they got crushed by the Nazis and the Soviets and they were incorporated into the East Bloc.
And bad things happen to good people.
It is certainly a possibility.
But we're not, you know, that's part of the romance of rebellion is that we are not told line up where the strength is.
We're told line up where the truth is and take whatever comes.
And that's what we're doing.
But again, you've got to keep your spirits, you've got to keep your good cheer and you've got to keep your perspective about it.
Yeah, well I think I'm pretty cheerful long term because I know how this ends because I've read Revelation and I've read the bits of the Gospels which tell us how it ends and I'm very happy with that but I don't see that
I don't see this wonderful swing in public opinion happening, and even if it does, I think it's already too late because the people who control our puppet politicians have so arranged it that there is no democratic voice anymore nobody likes ulez for example this this is this new kind of zoning policy for cars that's being rolled out by sadiq khan the leftist mayor
nobody likes the fact that they whenever you get into a car now you're going to get blipped by a speed camera no one likes any of this stuff yet it happens regardless and well i suspect the next london municipal elections will uh reveal a strong swing in public opinion because that one is you know again it all sounded kind of nice in principle and then you actually run into it in practice uh and And it really, really annoys people.
And that's an important thing.
When it starts to bite, people get mad.
And by the way, in the Cold War, one of the things polling in the United States showed consistently, that elite opinions swung around from being very credulous about the Soviets to being hostile.
Popular opinion was pretty much hostile all along.
The average person never fell for communism.
But, you know, they didn't think, probably people don't There you are.
Deal with things until they become pressing.
They think, oh, yeah, it's just politicians gassing on like they always do.
And then when it bites, they bite back.
And this is happening in Canada again.
You know, gas prices are getting high.
Home heating is getting very expensive.
All kinds of things are happening.
There's a lot of job losses.
And Justin Trudeau's up there saying, oh, it's all wonderful.
It's great.
And people are saying, you idiot.
It's not great.
He's trailing the Tories in the polls by 10% now.
And again, the Tory policy on this is a bit lukewarm.
But you know, it's going to take some time.
You've said it.
I mean, look, Trudeau has President Castro has served his function.
He's not Fidel Castro's son.
This is the kind of thing you can't say enough people and retain credibility.
He is the son of Pierre Trudeau.
He's a lot like Pierre Trudeau and he looks like Pierre Trudeau.
He has the same strengths and he has the same weaknesses.
You've just told me earlier on that you don't believe that the Gulf... that America initiated the Vietnam War.
So I'm going to have to contend with your historical opinions.
No, it started with the North Vietnamese and the French, right?
So that's kind of revealing.
Yeah.
So you've admitted that even when Trudeau goes, as he must, You're going to get replaced by just the sort of watered down version of him.
It's not going to change anything.
The policy is not going to change.
There's not going to be a massive sudden U-turn.
Canadians are going to find their energy prices going up.
You're going to have more wind turbines being put up even though you're incredibly oil rich.
It's going to carry on.
I'm not sure that it will.
I mean, Pierre Polliver says he's going to axe the carbon tax now.
Politicians say a lot of things.
Also, you know, the new Alberta government.
And again, you know, if you put your trust in politicians, you're going to get what you deserve.
But, you know, policies move and change slowly.
I mean, I've been fighting against the welfare state ever since I was young, and it's getting bigger.
So I haven't won that one yet.
It's funny, huh?
It's had very pernicious consequences.
But at some point, I mean, you look at the level of indebtedness and so on, all of these things do come together.
And, you know, public policy, it's like if you look at the United States, you know, the United States is dominated by Republicans for quite a while until the Great Depression.
And then after the Great Depression, people don't trust Republicans in the economy.
The Democrats dominate national politics for a long time.
Until people stop trusting them on the economy.
So this popular opinion does change, but it changes slowly.
And thank goodness it does, right?
Because if it was swinging around wildly, we'd never get to test policies.
You have to try them and see if they work.
And we live in a left-wing period and a lot of bad left-wing policies happening.
And we are going to expose it and it's going to go in a different direction.
We may get back to Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, Louis Saint Laurent, right?
This kind of stuff.
It could happen.
I mean, look at government in Britain in the 19th century.
There's no reason you couldn't get back to that level of 10% of GDP.
As long as we dare to dream, we can make it happen.
I'd like to get a hold of whatever it is you're smoking.
That would be really good.
I think I'd be much happier.
We didn't exactly agree on many things other than the fact that there's no evidence.
Well, I'd say there's no evidence for man-made climate change.
You'd say there's scant evidence.
But apart from that, it's been good having a fight with you.
Tell us where we can find your stuff.
Oh, okay.
Thank you very much for that.
Yes.
www.climatediscussionnexus.com.
And we're ClimateDN on the various social media.
And I hope that people will excuse us our idiocies and find some value in what we do.
And I'm very grateful that you had me on the podcast.
Good.
Well, thank you very much.
And it just remains for me to thank all my wonderful viewers and listeners, especially those who are kind enough to support me on Locals, on Subscribestar, Patreon, and Substack, all a very popular way of funding me this, buying me a coffee.
I mean, I am wired on caffeine with all the coffee you buy me, and I'm very grateful to you.
