John Waters - Thinker, Talker, Writer - used to be one of Ireland's best known journalists and feature-writers (from politics to music) and now writes probably its finest Substack. You can find it at johnwaters.substack.com. You can read more about him at his website johnwaters.ie.
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Following on from the grand success of last year's Delingpod event in London with guest Maajid Nawaz and earlier this year with the great Neil Oliver - James has decided to bring his popular Delingpod LIVE UP NORTH this time with his extremely special guest, David Icke!Please note that the exact location of the event will be disclosed within 48 hours of the date.Link to buy tickets:https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thedelingpodlive/1012094?fbclid=IwAR1C_3Vldrr8w0ifxPL81j-6qiQa1c6QB3BZ1lFfxcoDSiLooSCeoDbU--g
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Welcome to the Dell and Paul with me, James Dell and Paul.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But before I introduce him, a quick word from our sponsors.
Here I am, James, with the bit you love.
The bit where we talk about our sponsors and other bits of housekeeping.
I haven't bothered to get into the original clothes that I was wearing for the rest of the video.
I thought about it for continuity purposes and then I thought, sod it.
Anyway, various things I want to tell you about.
First of all, Is the event I've got coming up with David Icke in Manchester on the 15th of November.
I think you would be insane not to make it if you possibly can.
It's going to be a gathering of the clans.
All your friends are going to be there.
People are going to be talking about it afterwards.
I mean it's Delingpole and Icke.
It's the moment you've been waiting for.
There's all sorts of stuff I want to ask him about.
I'm obviously going to ask him about the Lizard People, which I totally agree with.
I'm also going to quiz him on some of his views on religion and stuff.
I don't think he gets challenged enough on those.
But it's going to be, I hope, a conversation, David.
Not a monologue.
A conversation, yeah?
With James.
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Can help in other ways.
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You should subscribe and download his stuff.
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Now, let's meet this week's special guest.
Enjoy!
I do this thing, John, where I just insert it rather than having you just sit through it.
I know, that's a good adaptation of the old line.
It's a good way of doing it.
John Waters, I have been so looking forward to this.
I've been feeling quite down recently.
I mean, for pretty obvious reasons.
And I know that chatting to you is going to cheer me up.
Because you can talk.
You can talk.
Not only can you talk and digress, which is what I love in this podcast, but also you're one of the really very few, passing few people out there.
Who has been on the same journey as me and has looked around at the people that one used to perhaps look up to as one's maybe even our intellectual superiors or the people also who you thought were going to be our allies and who've completely sold the past.
When did we last talk?
It's about two and a half years ago.
I think it was February or so of 2021.
So we were about a year into the whole shit show.
And I think that's when it was.
I may be mistaken, but I think that's when it was.
Right.
Three and a half years.
Nearly four years we've been in this tunnel, you know?
It's so incredible.
It's weird, isn't it?
This discovering that the world that you thought you knew Was in fact just a tissue of lies.
Yes.
And looking around and realizing that most people still don't get it at all.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's and really my former profession or our former profession to the extent that we're no longer journalists.
I bridle at the word journalist now as a description of myself.
And I've left my wife instructions that when I die, if any of my obituaries, if there are any, mention the word journalist.
That she should demand a correction and clarification the following day and say that I recanted and renounced all journalistic claims.
It's funny you say that because I'm the same.
When people ask me what I do, I don't say anymore I'm a journalist.
I say yeah I do podcasts.
I used to be a journalist.
Yes.
But it's all really isn't it that the word has become tainted Yes people say oh you John Motors and I say I used to be yeah you know by the way I've got a gammy eye I've got a kind of a black eye which I don't know what I know people it might be off-putting for people but it makes me look a bit funny but other than that I'm not worried by it.
I hadn't noticed, but I know that there are some people who look at videos, because there are two types of people, aren't there?
The ones who digest podcasts orally, or AU, they don't eat them, and those who like the visuals.
And they're the sort of people sometimes who will be, for example, scrutinizing the books, the spines of your books on your shelf behind you.
Yeah, I forgot to check them, James.
You never know.
That's another thing.
Have you been doing what I've been doing, which is sort of chucking out books from the sort of normie world?
Because most of my library is...
Oh yeah.
Oh well no, not chucking out.
I don't want my wife to hear this because she knows above all people.
I refuse to throw out any book of any kind.
In fact I pick up books everywhere.
But a thing that I can identify with in what you say is a syndrome that I've never encountered in all my life is that I get a book now and almost Certainly by the end of the first paragraph, and sometimes in the first sentence, it is completely rendered dead to me.
Yes.
Because of some reference to something that I know to be utterly false.
And utterly, you know, anybody who would write such a sentence cannot write a decent book.
That's kind of the way I look on it.
And I immediately abandoned the book, even though I've been intrigued by... I saw one recently, it had the title was 2030.
And I thought, oh, that's an interesting concept because some of the stuff sounded like it was kind of... It was written in 2020 and it sounded like it was kind of a little bit about the Great Reset, but maybe parallel to that in its thinking and the way the world was developing in a different way.
But the very first sentence was about the world warming up and all this and I said no, my life is too precious now, what's left of it, to be wasting on books like that.
Yeah, I had a similar experience.
People sort of post up videos in my channel and I occasionally glance to see whether they're of interest.
There was one where this chap was giving a lecture and in the first minute he referenced, as if they were real things, both evolution And then he used dinosaurs as an example of things that were once with us and that have gone away.
And I was thinking, well, I'm not going to bother, mate.
You've got nothing of interest to tell me because your understanding of the world is limited.
Well, this is the extraordinary thing, James, isn't it?
That, yes, that is true.
But we don't know.
That's the old version of the world and it has fallen apart for us.
And yet the new world has yet to be.
The world as it actually was is only really forming itself impartially like a jigsaw, which has only begun really.
Little bits and patches here and there.
The corners are maybe building in.
A little bit of the edges and maybe a little section in the middle.
So that in the meantime, we're actually bereft of any understanding of reality at all, in a sense.
Oh, we are rudderless.
Because I haven't discounted the possibility.
Lots of my followers are very insistent that this is the case.
I haven't discounted the possibility that the world may not even be a globe.
I mean, all bets are off at this point.
I think anyone who is truly awake must perforce recognise that everything that they previously thought they understood about the world may be a lie.
And yet, James, and I wonder if you feel this because I do very much and I think perhaps you'd feel it less than I do.
That in certain areas, you mentioned one of them there, even though we may have that feeling, it's stronger than a suspicion.
It's the fact that everything else is a lie, so why not that?
That kind of idea.
And yet, even though you see people around you who are now kind of beginning to blurt this out, I'm inclined to be reticent about things like that.
And I kind of call it like, it's like limbo dancing, that we try to, we try to keep talking about things in a way that is at least partially coherent, that may make sense to somebody who just happens upon us and doesn't really know much about what we're talking about.
So that we have to still make sense on the old terms in some way in order to hold people's attention and not appear to be, you know, candidates for the local psychiatric institution in their view.
You see the point like that?
That you kind of therefore avoid certain topics altogether because you know that you don't know what exactly is true about this anymore.
But nevertheless, you know for sure that talking about this will either get you into deep trouble or will get you tarred as a complete idiot.
Yes, this may be one of the rare points of difference between us.
I did a podcast recently.
I think you've told me you haven't caught up with all my recent ones.
I did a podcast with Ed Dowd.
Yes.
And Ed lives in Hawaii and I thought well here is the man to tell me whether or not it was caused by directed energy weapons and tell me about why it is that houses with blue roofs are not affected whereas houses with red roofs are and stuff like this.
And he didn't want to go there.
It was obvious to me.
He was blaming it on things which were stuff from the conventional narrative.
It was probably some sort of extreme weather event, which I don't believe for a moment.
And I think it was a tactic.
I think he had decided that I am the man who does vaccine injury.
I am interested in verifiable statistics and hard and verifiable facts.
And that's what I do.
And I don't want to jeopardize my credibility on the vaccine injury front by talking about crazy stuff like directed energy weapons.
Whereas for me, I'm a pure, you might say, a suicidal truth seeker.
I will go wherever the truth, wherever the evidence takes me, however bizarre it might be.
Okay, well that's interesting and I think that's a very admirable position, although I think it's also a very difficult one.
It can become, as you know, and will become more so.
But I'm a little bit more pragmatic than that, James, and it is pragmatism in this sense that I kind of say, OK, well, I'm in Ireland, right?
And my primary gripe in all of this is with my government.
Who are democratically elected supposedly and who are supposedly representing the Irish people and have ceased to do so and not alone that have been attacking the Irish people now for 43 months.
So in my view, you know, there are people around me and people that I know and people I admire and respect and so on who are taking the battle to other fronts and drawing bigger pictures about certain Factions, for example, that may be involved.
And I will touch on those things from time to time, but it's not my primary concern.
I simply want to say to the Irish Taoiseach, to the Prime Minister of Ireland, what do you think you're doing?
What gives you the right to do these things?
Explain to me where you get your authority from, because I don't remember giving you authority as an Irish citizen to do these things.
Please explain yourself.
That's kind of my position.
Now, I know that that's somewhat evasive of the bigger picture, and in a certain sense, that's true.
But there's also the sense of, well, the bigger picture belongs in other places.
I mean, people in America have a much more responsibility To tease out this picture at the bigger level than somebody in Ireland, I would suggest.
And the reality is they're waiting all the time to get us, you see.
Like, you know, I mean, I find them all the time coming after me now.
They're beginning to close in now because they see that I'm beginning to reach people and that people are coming to me.
It's not so much that I'm reaching people, actually.
It's that people are searching out now for those voices and beginning to say, oh, that guy, I thought he was crazy.
But actually he's still here and he's still saying these things.
Maybe I should be listening.
You know, and that's dangerous in a certain sense.
It's great in one way, but it's dangerous because that's when you then start noticing the things going bump in the night as they start to come after you.
I think, look, I think there are dangers in, there are flaws, let's say, in both our tactics.
I would say that the problem with your method, and I see it a lot, particularly on American Twitter,
I look at the people that I used to consider my comrades in, you know, because the big, my journey down the rabbit hole, I suppose it began with my research into the climate change scam, but the thing that really made me, began my journey to full awakeness was the stolen presidential election.
And people who I considered my allies in that war are now invested in Trump's return.
And they think that once we get the right man in office, everything will get back to normal.
And it ain't so.
It ain't so.
And it's the same in the UK.
We're talking about a class of people who are... I mean, the number of politicians who are involved in things like child sex It's shocking, I think.
I mean, if ever it were revealed, some people lost their lives for this.
You know, Geoffrey Dickens, MP, who had a dossier on all the MPs who were involved in child sex abuse and probably ritual satanic abuse when it comes down to it.
Geoffrey Dickens was around, I think, in the 80s, he was talking about this stuff.
So we're talking about a system of entrenched corruption and it just doesn't it doesn't go back just to the 80s or even the 70s.
You look at the you look at the 19th 1930s, you know, you look at look at I'm very skeptical for example about Winston Churchill.
I don't think he's he's the man that is presented to us as a national hero.
I think was nothing of the kind.
I think he I think he was probably Demonically possessed, I think.
I think that, you know, he's a 33rd degree Freemason.
He was a Druid.
These... These are not... These are not...
Good Christian people.
No.
They're working for the other side.
By the way, I'm presuming you're with me on the spiritual nature of this world.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
100%.
100%.
I mean, it is a spiritual war.
It's good versus evil at the most primal level, unquestionably now.
And when I look at, you know, again, even in the particularities of my own context and my own political, to look at the demeanor of politicians, you know, I mean, I'm not happy simply to state that it's a spiritual war and leave that as a kind of an abstraction.
I'm somewhat fixated with the idea of trying to translate that into the material, if you know what I mean.
In other words, what does it actually mean when we talk about evil personified?
Well, to me, it's about lies, fundamentally.
It's about the lie.
Because if we had the truth, then Good people could expose all this and bring these people to justice.
Isn't that true?
I mean, fundamentally, it's about the lie.
And then when you actually look at the demeanour of politicians now, you realise that actually, that the most fundamental change is, as it were, the weather of politics.
In the last four years has been the amount and the nature of the lying that is taking place.
That is absolutely industrial and that is clearly being coached by very skilled malevolent people.
I mean, I saw a clip the other day.
There's a guy here, very good young journalist called Ben Scallon.
He works for an operation called RIPT.ie, which is supposedly an alternative Media thing.
It's not particularly good for other reasons, but he's a rather excellent journalist and he has really perfected this thing now of doing the doorstep at the press conference, you know, and getting the politicians and they really absolutely loathe him, even though they're coaches, you can tell that they're being told to call him Ben, you know, say Ben, yes, thank you for the question, Ben, you know, even though they absolutely want to strangle him, you know, because he's absolutely brilliant.
He just asked the question and when they waffled on, He waits for them, he doesn't interrupt them very often, sometimes he does, but generally he just says, and this is, yes Minister, but you didn't answer my question, which was.
Now there was a very interesting example the other day, where he asked the Minister for Education, a woman, about a proposal in a draft legislation about education, which would be teaching young boys, Irish boys, quite Christian boys as it were, that they have privilege.
And he was asking, in what sense do Irish boys need to know and in what sense will they be told that they are privileged?
And she started to waffle, oh well the purpose of this is to make everybody kind to each other and be aware of each other's weaknesses and strengths and blah blah.
He said, but that's not what it says in the draft legislation.
It says specifically white Irish Christian etc, male actually.
And again, she waffled, well, I was a teacher for 35 years myself, and I know, blah, blah.
He said, no, no, that's not the point, Minister.
You know, the question is in the draft legislation.
And then she, well, it's only a draft, you know.
But you see, people might think, well, that's very funny in a way.
And we're smiling and laughing at the absurdity because we know we've seen this.
But, you know, you've got to ask yourself, what is this, James?
This is lying.
It's not just evasion.
Like evasion is lying.
What is lying?
Lying is any mechanism which conveys the wrong impression or seeks to do so.
These people, they don't speak, they have these techniques which we kind of find amusing in a way, that they're kind of avoiding and evading.
No, no, no, they're liars!
And the lie is at the core of this evil because, as I said again, if we had a straight press, an honest press, and they exposed the lies, the lies would stop and the truth would emerge and we would arrest these people and put them in jail where they belong.
You see, in a sense, then, when we say it's a spiritual war, I'd like to translate it into those kind of tableaus, you know, that that's an example of the spiritual war in action, in the material.
This is how it manifests.
It's not just an abstraction of, you know, a religious idea.
You know, it is, of course, all that, but this is the manifestation of it in this dimension, and we need to start recognising that when we see it.
It's very interesting you say that because my journey to Christianity has been as much as anything else an intellectual one.
There are a lot of Christians you encounter who are just kind of, I call them trust the plan Christians.
They don't want to think too much, they just feel, they've felt their way into Christianity and they just kind of believe it for emotional reasons or whatever.
I think.
I mean, I think far too much.
And I think if there were not an intellectual case for Christianity, it wouldn't really appeal to me.
I wouldn't find it so persuasive.
And one of the things that happens when you become a sort of open Christian is that people say, well, yeah, hang on a second.
You do realize, of course, that Christianity is just another trap.
It's just a thing that they invented in order to weaken you, to make you all passive and so on.
And actually the truth about the world is this, that some people sort of prefer a sort of Gnostic view of the world.
And a lot of, as you know, a lot of the great thinkers have been Gnostics.
The people who founded the Royal Society, Francis Bacon and so on.
You think, well, If the cleverest people in the world were Gnostics, what does that say about Christianity?
But then I think, what is God?
How can we intuit that God exists?
And C.F.
Lewis wrote about this in his lectures, Mere Christianity.
That we all have an inbuilt moral compass.
We just do.
We know.
When we tell a lie, we feel uncomfortable telling a lie.
It goes against our nature.
We know instinctively that lies are not things we like to do.
Number one.
So lying is something we know.
We know to be bad.
The second thing, what are we drawn towards?
What things do we find attractive?
What things make us happy?
What things make us feel good?
I would argue that we are attracted to the things that are beautiful.
Things that are honest.
Now, that seems to me to be sort of intellectual proof that we have ultimately a benign creator.
Who intended us to seek the truth, to seek out beauty.
And you look at the alternatives to that, for example, the Gnostics and the Illuminati and their sort of Babylonian mystery religions and stuff.
And their religion, their version of the world is rooted in secrecy and mendacity.
Now, I'm thinking, okay, maybe I've backed the wrong course.
Maybe there really is a demiurge.
Maybe there is this... Maybe the person who created this world is actually evil or whatever.
Maybe actually telling lies and being secretive is the way forward.
But that to me is a council of despair.
I'm going to take a gamble.
I'm going to take a gamble based on my intuition and my intellectual understanding that actually Truth and beauty should be our watchwords, and that these are manifestations of the divine.
Therefore, I think I'm on the right team.
And people who engage in lies are de facto on the wrong side.
Well, exactly.
And you see, again, our former profession is now its business.
It has shifted its trade from the construction of images of truth, versions of the truth.
Into basically pseudo realities.
Yes.
It's building stage sets in front of people's eyes every day, which are completely bogus and fictional, and which convince them that they're real.
And the commentary around these things convince people.
And that's lying again.
That's lying.
I call them journaliers now.
I don't call them journalists, you know.
And I call the media... I was looking for a long time for a I don't like the MSM or the legacy media.
I don't know what that means.
So I came up with this phrase which I call the Set Aside Media.
Set Aside was a scheme which the EU came up with about 30 years ago for farmers to disable their fields in order to qualify for grants.
So in other words, they weren't in use.
And to do that, they had to spray the fields with poisonous chemicals.
In order the satellites overhead could see that they were sufficiently yellow and therefore the farmer was entitled to his grant, you know?
That's what journalism has become.
The media has basically set aside the profession of journalism, the truth-telling function of journalism, and replaced it with the construction of pseudo-realities in front of people's faces.
But to go back to the religious thing, and this is a very... I think... See, I've never... I've done an awful lot of writing about these themes.
And I find that most people who kind of half hear or hear Second Diversion have a very half-baked or quarter-baked or eighth-baked notion of what I'm saying because I don't ever go into what you might call the ritualistic or even the practice elements of religion.
They're, for me, private.
Very often I'm talking about the public manifestation of religion in thought, in public discussion, in public understandings, in culture.
And you might even, in that context, even stray into realms of mythology.
The mythological basis of a society, for example, is something that I would be quite comfortable with in talking about a religious context.
Because the true meaning of myth is truer than true.
You see, so Now I've been writing about this stuff and it seems to me that I found huge hostility towards me on that account and I often felt that people would be much more accommodating of me if I had been simply a crawl-thumper.
You know, they don't want you talking in this way.
They didn't want you talking in this way about faith, about religion, about Christianity, because it is precisely, it is reasonable.
I wrote a review recently of a book by David Baddiel, the comedian, the British comedian.
It's called The God Desire.
And it's a very interesting book because it's quite different to the neo-atheist books that we had 10 or 15, 20 years ago.
or 15, 20 years ago.
Because he's an atheist who wishes God existed.
That's his whole thing, that he has a desire for God, but he can't be convinced that God exists.
And he kind of talks about nothingness, and I find a lot of these guys, and I say to them, what I put in the review was this, that if I met David Baddiel, By way of just maybe opening up his consciousness to the possibility that he's wrong about everything, what I would say to him was this.
Now I've discovered that he and I, we share a birthday.
He's much younger than I am, about nine or ten years, but we were both born on the 28th of May.
And I happened to find out a few years ago, by accident, That I was actually conceived on my father's 50th birthday.
Now, my mother didn't tell me this.
My father is dead.
My mother is now dead.
But there's no way I would have asked them.
But the way I found out, James, was, you know those cards you get?
I was reflecting on the idea about when my daughter was born, trying to work out how much older than she was.
Her, I was, as compared to how much older than me my father was and that kind of thing.
And so I was fascinated and I was sort of thinking, and I said, oh God, you know, and once it occurred to me, God, I must have been conceived sometime around September 1954, right?
And then I forgot, somebody gave me a present.
I mean, all those cards you got, your birthday, the day of your birth, and it tells you the headlines on the papers and the number one record.
And then underneath there was this line, you were most probably conceived on the 3rd, the 4th of September 1954.
I thought, wow, that's my father's 50th birthday.
So I thought, oh wow, was I an act of commiseration or consolation or what was the nature of this, you know, event, which we won't dwell on further.
So if I was met David Baddiel in a railway cafeteria on our journey across this dimension, I would say to him, you know, go back, why not try this?
Go back.
To the date of your birth, the date of your conception is the 4th of September.
I forget, it's 63 or something like that.
Now, go back one day more to the 3rd of September that year, in which there is nothing of you, according to your hypothesis, and indeed, maybe according to mine.
There's nothing of you, but let's just say that you're in that moment and I can talk to you.
And we can discuss this, and somehow you have the consciousness, but you don't have anything else, and you have capacity to understand reality.
And to the extent that I can ask you questions, and I ask you, well, David, on the 3rd of September 1963, the day before your conception, while you were still not even a twinkle in your father's eye, what do you think is possible?
And that David Bally, in whatever form he would have taken, of something or nothingness, would have had to say, well, nothing.
Nothing's possible.
Nothing's possible.
And I said, here you are, now, in the middle of everything.
You know, everything!
The Atlantic, the mountains, the sky, James Dellingpole, John Mortles.
And all you can talk about is nothingness.
How is this rational?
Please tell me!
You come from nothing into something and now you think that nothing is the default state of existence.
But you don't even know whether you were in nothingness because you can't remember.
So the whole basis of atheism is completely kaput if you begin to reason it.
And if we were permitted, James, this is why they ridicule any kind of discussion like this, and indeed the churches don't encourage it either.
But I believe that in the modern world, if you were able to have these kinds of discussions on a daily basis in mass media, I mean that day's gone now, it's over, forget it, but if we had We could have changed the whole dynamic of these discussions.
I remember I was in a debate once with Christopher Hitchens, you know, when his book came out, God is Not Great, in Dublin.
And it wasn't a very pleasant experience, I've got to tell you.
But because he was very taciturn and grumpy and very hostile in a way that was completely gratuitous, you know.
But in the end... Was this before the debate or in the debate?
Before, during and after.
You know like we had a dinner the night before for some of the speakers or whatever and he was kind of just down the table from me a couple of spaces on the far side and he was talking away to a friend of mine who was sitting beside me and he just completely blagged to me you know and and the following day he was just but in the end he He said, well, I don't know what kind of religion you belong to, he said, because it's not like anything I've ever seen.
And I said, well, Christopher, you know, the problem is you spend three years in your little den, you know, imagining, fantasizing about all kinds of fanatics and fundamentalists.
And now you've come out, you can't find any.
It's not like that.
And that's the real truth, you know.
Like, there was another atheist, and I talked about this in the review as well, that I knew, Peter Atkin.
He was in, I think, Cambridge.
And he used to come over to Ireland and we used to debate.
But he was a really nice man.
And we were, like, in the debate, he wasn't nice.
Like, we were kicking lumps out of each other, right?
But afterwards, we would sit down and have a conversation about the Eurovision or something, you know.
And he was a very nice, likeable man.
I said to him one evening that one of the debates I said on the way across the campus in UCC, And Cork.
I said, you know, Peter, of the two of us, I'm the only one who has any chance of being vindicated.
And he says, what do you mean?
Well, I says, if I'm right, if you're right, I says, neither of us will ever know.
If I'm right, we'll both know.
And you know what he said, James?
He said, it's much worse than that, John.
He says, because if you're right, I'm going to be very happy.
So, you know, this is the concession of the desire, and I am of the school of thought that believes that the desire itself is a way of, is a measure of the appetite, the need for, of the space, the God-shaped hole, by that cliché, right?
And there was a father, a priest in Italy, a great father, Giussani, who came up with this beautiful analogy for this kind of thing.
He said, imagine a boy who is kidnapped just after birth by animals and lives on a desert island, but is looked after by these animals all through his childhood, and he's reared by these animals.
And then when he gets to the age of 12 or 13, he starts suddenly having these desires for something that he cannot see.
His body is changing, and he feels things, and he has something for which there is no correspondence on the island, which is a woman.
But he becomes convinced that the woman must exist because the desire is so strong.
And yet we're not permitted to apply this analogy to the idea of God in our culture, which imposes this completely false reality on us, which is based not on reality in its totality and its mystery, but it is based on the prefabricated units that we move through in modern society.
Which are really just constructs which we have built to keep us warm, to keep us sheltered, but which also have the effect of shutting out the mystery of reality.
And that's what our culture has become.
It has become a culture in which mystery has been abolished.
But the real problem with that, James, is not even that.
The real problem is that you can shut out all the mystery from outside and you maybe can survive 75 years or 80 years on this And claim that you don't believe in anything.
But you can't close down the mystery inside.
Because that's always there.
What do you think happens?
After we've had our three school years and ten, or four school years if we like.
I have no way of knowing James.
And this is interesting because you see, one of the things that I find problematic about Christianity in a sense, and I hesitate to say these things because people misunderstand, but you know, I like to think of Jesus as a guy you could say anything to, right?
And he could say anything back to you, right?
Yeah.
You could have any kind of conversation with him and he wouldn't lose the rag, right?
You know, so I kind of like to think, well, you see, the big problem I have is that Christianity in our culture has become highly anthropomorphised and it has become fixed in the period of the New Testament.
So that when we think of heaven, we think of Jesus walking around with long hair and a beard and this red Toilet thing or whatever it is, cloak thing, right?
And this kind of throws us, and we have this kind of, I think, crude idea.
This is somewhat a caricature, but it's like that when we die, to answer your question, by our cultural kind of norms, we were saying, well, what happens?
Well, I shoot up to over the clouds.
I end up in heaven and there's the table is set for dinner and God comes in and he sits at the top of the table and Jesus and Mary and Joseph is there too.
And I sit down and they say, oh, John, yeah, sit down, you know, and off we go and we have a chat about how things are in the old world.
And that's kind of, I think, how limited the imagination of our culture generally is.
And that's what it's rejecting, because it's no longer plausible.
Whereas, you know, put Benedict in one of those interviews with Peter Seawald, and these things get very little, he talked about this interesting, he says that we have to forget these spatial notions and temporal notions of heaven.
You know, it's not like that, he says.
It's a completely different dimension.
And I, you see, we, as human beings, you know, we think dramatically or even melodramatically about things and we put each other into it and we see things, characters, and that's the way we envisage the world.
And we kind of do that through religion as well.
And it's no harm.
So long as you remember that it's purely a kind of some kind of manifestation, visual manifestation of something that is beyond pictures, beyond images, beyond words.
I think C.S.
Lewis, I think St.
Gusten said it, that if you describe God, then you're wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing that puzzles me, because like you, I don't know everything, amazingly.
Our souls are immortal.
Yes.
And indestructible, right?
What were they doing before we were born?
Before they inhabited our sort of mortal shell, our flesh?
Well, you see, again, this gets into a very roughly theological territory now because You kind of, in answering that, have to leave open the possibility that the doctrines of the church may be not entirely right about everything.
The Council of Nicaea, which apparently was where it was decided that the notion of reincarnation, for example, was verboten.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, again, one has to be careful.
Because I think, you know, when there's a famous quotation, and you mentioned one of the people before, Churchill, I mean, there's a kind of a certain, there's a sort of idea that when anybody quotes something which is really clever from long ago, it's either down to Churchill or George Bernard Shaw, right?
Yeah.
Probably neither of them.
Or Mark Twain.
Both of whom are horrible creeps, right?
Both of whom are horrible creeps, as you say.
But the phrase I'm thinking of is that the human mind is such a complex instrument that it exceeds its own capacity to understand itself.
Which is quite an involuted kind of, you know, you're not sure where it finishes up.
Is it good or bad or smart or not smart, you know?
But it's that complexity.
And you see, the problem is that we kind of think in very literal, substantialist kind of concepts when we try to talk about these ideas, you know, about religion and so on.
But when you actually, the evidence that, for example, I mean, and this may be, that saying may debunk what I'm about to say, but I mean, I've come across situations.
I remember once being involved in a session won by a very, very eccentric psychiatrist in Dublin who used to bring in artistic-minded people and put them into this process of halotrophic breathing and Ketamine injections and so on, and they would go into an altered reality.
The Cahill?
Yeah, yeah.
And they would start re-entering past lives, you know, and dying in a past life.
I remember I did this and there was a guy next bed and I was telling jokes.
Or something from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
I was saying all these lines that I remember for some reason, because the whole thing reminded me of that.
And he was just, you know, he suddenly jumped up in bed.
He says, can you keep quiet?
I'm trying to die over here.
You know, and, you know, is that evidence?
Well, it is.
Whether it's definitive or conclusive, I don't know.
But what I'm saying is that, you know, There's much more in the world than we've been led to believe, and you've got to, if where we came in, you know, talking about how unknowable the world is, well, isn't it possible that there were interferences with church doctrines along the way as well, and so on?
This is the thing, this is one of the things that gets, one of the other problems when you become a Christian, is that all the other Christians in the world start telling you what is correct doctrine.
So the Catholics, you know, tell you that theirs is the Mother Church and discount the rest, and the Calvinists tell you, no, we're predestined, and the Orthodox tell you this and that.
And you're thinking, well, hang on, you can't all be right.
You know, you've all got elements of the understanding of the nature of God and Christianity, but maybe you can't afford to be too dogmatic.
But on the subject of Scripture, what I understand is the sort of standard line is that the Scriptures that we have now must be what God wants, because if God didn't want them, they wouldn't have happened.
Therefore, they are what God wants, and therefore they can be taken seriously.
For me that slightly trusts the plan.
And of course also James there's a difference between taking something seriously and taking it literally.
I don't take Genesis literally.
I don't think God made the world in six days and then had a rest on the seventh.
That's a poetic construction, in my view.
I don't care if this is heretical or not.
But you do think he made the world, don't you?
Yes, of course.
Yes.
But I don't think necessarily that we have to kind of, you know, like, and I've got into arguments with this about it and people have sort of, you know, Tell me about the temporal nature.
Seven days then was probably the equivalent of about 500 years now.
Who knows?
Time is bending and shaping and changing shape and so on.
There's all kinds of things that are variations that come into these pictures.
To my mind, the Bible is a piece of literature as much as it is A holy book.
And a fantastic piece of literature.
Wow.
I tell you what John, one of the greatest pleasures of becoming a Christian, I love reading the Bible every night.
I don't go, oh, I suppose God wants me to read a bit more Bible tonight.
I'm thinking, Yeah, I take it with me on holiday.
I read the Bible before I read, you know, other stuff like I'm reading at the moment.
I'm reading Somerset Maugham's A Human Bondage and trying to finish Gogol's Dead Souls and stuff.
But first of all, I read the Bible and the Psalms and It's just great but like you, and I'm sorry Christians, you have to forgive me on this one, I don't think because it's in the Bible therefore I must take every word literally because I know that there are generations of scholars who've
Who've micro-analyzed every passage in the Bible and we know that there are differences in the translations from the Hebrew or from the Septuagint and so even the translations are contested.
Maybe I'm maybe I'm being too simple here.
It is enough for me to know that God created the world.
I don't need to believe the detail about he did it in six days.
Yeah, because maybe the definition of the bloke who wrote Genesis, maybe a day was, you know, maybe time expired.
I don't know but I feel I don't need to focus on that particular.
Does that make me a bad Christian?
I don't think so.
Well, you see, I don't think it does James at all.
It makes you, in my view, it makes you a good anything because you're curious.
Yeah.
You know, I actually, I'm a big fan of doubting Thomas, who is a kind of a figure in Christianity who is kind of put somewhere next to Judas as in the naughty corner, you know, and that's not real at all.
There's no basis for that because Jesus did not condemn Thomas for doubting him.
He simply said, well, blessed are you because you believe, but now, and blessed are those who believe without seeing.
But the point is that Thomas's action of verification allows those of us who weren't there to see to have an extra witness.
In the verification process.
And I think there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't see why we have to behave like children in talking about these things and say, oh, no, no, no, no.
Amen.
Definitely.
That's, you know, you're very good at sort of raising these serious problems that I object quite violently to people telling me that I must, I know Jesus said that in a way that, you know, you must be like a child.
Yeah.
But at the same time, I balk at this detail that Christians who tell me that I should be like that.
You know, I am much more doubting Thomas.
Really?
Well, you see, I think what Jesus meant there was about wonder.
You have to have that disposition of wonder before reality in order to understand.
There's a saying, I don't know who said this first, but it's a beautiful phrase, only wonder knows.
In other words, that only when you are awestruck are you completely in connection with the world and its majesty.
And I think that's real.
You know, Also, I think John, I mean I've said, it sounds arrogant but I don't mean it to be arrogant, I feel it's a privilege, it's a gift rather than a thing.
I think I've been, I believe I've been given a mission by God to evangelise and I think That through this podcast and elsewhere, I reach the kind of people who would otherwise be not reached.
I reach the kind of people who ask the questions that I am asking.
And if I were more, this is the deal, this is what the Bible says, I think I would alienate people.
And that's not my job.
My job is to bring them on board with doubts and all.
You see, I think that when we talk about different religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and then agnosticism and atheism, these are just labels in a certain sense, for which we pen to ourselves on the basis of a kind of a very rudimentary and contingent hypothesis, working hypothesis of reality.
Which, you know, in reality, given that we said already that if you describe God, you can't know what you're talking about, which is true.
We're actually trying to describe something that is unknowable, and yet that we have a desire for, which we have a vested interest in, and which we also have to find a way of comprehending within ourselves, within our hearts, perhaps more than our heads.
as we move through this reality.
But the problem is that, you see, all of this kind of finicky kind of literalisation and dogmatisation of the subject causes people like, I mean, I find that as well with people who, you know, challenge me if I say something which is slightly, you know, speculative, or you say, oh, that's not what the Church teaches.
But to be honest with you, if that's the case, I don't care.
I'm so with you.
I don't care.
I'm so totally with you.
You see, because like, you know, Jesus, God give us these minds.
And he asked us to pursue reality in its pure nature.
And he doesn't give you a pat on the head, in my view, unless he's a very old-fashioned, not very godlike figure, for doing what you were told under every heading.
That's not what it's about.
He wants you to use your heart and your head to contemplate and to find some way.
And, of course, to read and inform yourself and learn.
I mean, I find, you know, there's a dreadful reductionism about an awful lot of Christianity as it is practiced, the residual elements of it now within our culture, which is like, almost like, I find it, for example, in relation to this COVID thing, you know, where you might be speaking at meetings and so on.
And there'll be always a deeply religious person who you'll talk for two and a half hours about what we need to do and how we can do it and what.
And there'll be somebody who'll say, oh, we'll just leave it to Jesus, say the rosary and just, you know, Jesus will look after everything else.
I don't believe that.
I don't believe that.
When I was, I'm a recovering alcoholic and I learned, I had been an agnostic forever.
I wrote a book called lapsed agnostic about this.
I've been an agnostic for about 20 years, but I went back and I discovered again the meaning of religious.
Religious kind of ideas as they played out in your life and.
You know, because AA has this concept of God as we understand Him, which is kind of an advice they use to avoid the prejudices that people have built up about God under their headings, right?
And they say, and the important thing, there's a very interesting book which is written about AA in the early stages, kind of a biography of AA by a German called Ernest Schmitz was his name, something like that.
And the book was called Not God.
And the point of the Not God title is to remind us And that he is reminding us that whatever about our belief in God, far more important than that, in the first instance, is to become convinced that you are not God.
In other words, that there is somebody greater than you.
There is something greater than you.
That's the first step.
And I think that that's really, you know, This idea that there is this tyrannical guy up in the clouds who is watching everything we do and is going to punish us and we won't be able to explain ourselves to him.
I don't buy that.
I kind of almost would be at the point of, if that's the deal, then sorry, I'm off the table.
I wouldn't want that.
And I'm sorry if that offends people, but that's the way I am.
And I think what you say is so true, because this form of discussion, in my view, has the potential to be far more interesting and attractive to people who have lost their faith than all of this kind of parading and rule-based dogmatism that is just basically wanting them to go back to be children in the classroom and be told what to believe.
What I was dying to dying to say to you was of course awake people are particularly disposed towards our kind of thinking and I think I think the people I'm evangelizing are mainly the awake and awake people are deeply skeptical about everything.
Yes, and I think a lot of awake people saying well, okay.
They lied to us about 9-11.
They lied to us about Shakespeare.
They lied to us about, no matter how far you go back in history, they were lying to us all the time.
So, is there some rule whereby everything we were taught about the world is a lie, but everything in the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Church says is true?
I think a lot of awake people have a problem with that, so I understand why people are sceptical about things like Translations, doctrine, etc.
We have to address that, don't we?
We do, yeah.
We certainly do.
I think the big problem is literalism.
I mean, if you think about it, first of all, like, look at the performance of the Church during the Covid time, the Catholic Church, or indeed the other churches.
Dreadful.
Dreadful.
They closed their churches down.
I mean, in the Black Death, what did the priests do?
They went out seeking the faithful so they could baptise them and give them the last rites.
In case they would die and go to hell.
Now the church lock the doors up and walks away and leave it there for months on end.
And now even yet some of them are up with the hand sanitiser on the altar, you know, or gloves and all this stuff.
I mean, how are we to believe that they believe if they behave like this, given that Jesus talked about kissing the lepers and so on?
Yeah.
How does this fit together?
It doesn't.
No, that's the thing.
But here's the thing, I think, James.
There was an Irish writer called John McGarren.
He's a novelist.
He was from down near where I was from myself, in the West of Ireland.
And I remember once reading an interview with him where he was talking about religion.
And he turned into an atheist later.
He actually said this strange sentence.
He said, the church was my first book.
At the time I didn't, what does he mean by that?
It's only years later that I began to think about my own life and write about my own life and realised that actually I was writing about a thing.
It is almost literally like That religion in that context was like going into a book, you know, a great book that you want to read forever, that you don't ever want to end.
And it was like that everything in the world was being presented to you in different ways and different perspectives.
And what was actually happening was that you were being asked to kind of reconcile different versions of things, different accounts, the four different Gospels, which were in some instances quite different.
And reconcile those and not see contradictions.
And in fact, moreover, James, not just not see contradictions, but actually see the contradictions as evidence.
Because that's the way it would be if four independent witnesses saw something, they would give slightly different accounts.
Yeah.
You know, so all of this.
So, I've always felt about this that The church was a different place.
We had a pretty poor house and so on.
I couldn't bring my friends in.
We didn't have carpets or a bathroom or stuff like that.
But there was one house in the town I could just walk into anytime I wanted.
And that was the church.
And it was beautiful.
I could stay as long as I liked.
And I could go in with my friends and we would sit there quietly and we'd whisper to each other.
Like, this was a whole parallel reality within the reality that we were living.
And I think this is something that people, you know, forget, you know, as they move into that kind of prefabricated reality that we call reality, which is only a partial reality.
That all of those mysterious things that we learn, very beautiful.
I'll tell you an experience I had, James, because I mean, people will say, this guy, you can see why Christopher Hitchens said, I don't know what kind of religion you belong to, because it doesn't sound like it.
But why not, you know?
But I remember a few years ago, I got a very bad attack about five years ago, where I got a viral attack, dormant chicken pox, which basically wiped out half my face.
I had a paralysis on my left side of my face.
I've lost a hearing this year, so it's not going to come back.
I shouldn't say that.
That's not a very... That shows my lack of faith, James.
You haven't prayed to the Virgin.
Come on, Joel.
Put yourself together.
No, you know, maybe that is true.
Maybe that is true, James.
I haven't found the code.
I wouldn't make a joke about that.
Ask your intercession, yeah.
Maybe one day, you know.
Who knows?
But my good feeling is...
I'm going to be deaf in this ear.
Okay.
Okay.
And I was walking in a stick.
I'd lost my balance.
And this was about a few months after.
Myself and my wife were over in Oxford at a conference in a university there.
And on the Sunday, we went down to the Oratory.
And there was a Latin mass there.
I think it was 11 o'clock.
Very beautiful mass.
And I used to serve this mass as a child.
I loved it.
It was absolutely astonishing.
The mass in Latin, the music, the songs, the dies irae.
Agnes Day, all these hymns.
I used to sing them, I mean, when people died, when they died, the High Mass, we would sing, you know.
And I went into this church and I was standing there and it all erupted at the beginning with the music and then about like 60 priests and altar boys come out of the sacristy and start parading down the middle of the church, you know, and they've all got crosses and And the guy in the front had a big bucket of, I forget what it's called, for holy water, you know, and this thing.
And he was lashing it about the place, you know.
And it was like theatre, of course, but something deeper, obviously.
And when it came to me, James, just in front of me, he lashed out with the thing, with the holy water.
And a flood of it caught me right there, on the paralysed part of my face.
And I burst into tears.
I literally wept for 10 minutes nearly.
And my wife beside me didn't know what's wrong, what's wrong.
I couldn't explain it but afterwards I realised I'm home.
I've come home.
You know that this was the meaning of it.
That the beauty, you talked about beauty.
This is the great loss from the change in the vernacular.
And I knew this at the time as a boy.
How can they do this?
It's boring.
It's terrible.
Into English.
Who needs the mass in English?
Latin is so beautiful.
I mean, it was just poetry.
I didn't know what it was.
But when you heard a priest who knew how to say it, who knew it all properly, oh man, it would just cause your soul to explode.
And I felt all this again.
And I realise this is not nostalgia.
This is something much deeper.
This desire, the thing that Baddiel talks about, you know, and I wish I could talk to him.
I think you should talk to him, James, you know, because he's a very interesting character, you know, and a very, I think, a very likeable guy.
I liked his comedy.
He was funny, you know.
Jewish guy, you know, so interesting.
But what I'm saying here is that This part of ourselves is there all the time.
It's been there since we were children.
That's what Jesus is talking about.
Because when you look at the world and you say, you don't say, so what?
As a child, you say, oh boy, oh boy, oh wow.
I have a step grandson.
I call him Kojak.
I won't say his real name, but I call him Kojak because he had no hair when I met him first.
And people don't get that joke.
Do you get that joke?
No, you don't know who Kojak is.
You see, you're too young, James!
Kojak was a cop in The Greatest Cop.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
Sorry.
I didn't hear you properly.
Yeah, yeah.
Kojak.
Yeah.
He sucked lollipop.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But Kojak, my great step-grandson, he just runs out the world with his eyes A lice at everything and everything you say, he wants to know what you mean and what's that?
And he picks things up and he looks at them and he just figures things out really fast.
We were in a house in Spain with him during the summer and there was an older guy there and he had loads of toy guns and Kojak wanted to play with them.
And he said, sure, yeah.
But then there was one that Kojak actually liked and the guy said, no, no, that one's broken.
And Kojak just gets it out and he looks at it and he goes Like a lubric tube.
It's working.
It's magical.
And that's the religious dimension.
That's the religious demeanour.
That's the religious sense.
We are in a great place.
Look where we are.
How could we be bored by this?
How could we be depressed here?
How could we take this for granted?
How could we say so what?
How could we say who cares?
That's what they should be inculcating in the adults of the world.
Not teaching them what the doctrines are.
You just reminded me John.
I go writing.
Every week.
And my favourite time when I go riding is in the school holidays where all the little girls are out on their ponies on the ride.
And it's not because I'm a pedo.
It's because I just love chatting to the kids.
Yeah!
Because I feel like I found my level.
I can talk to people who are totally open-minded.
So when you talk to grown-ups there's that kind of everyone's everyone's sort of formed in their views and that they think you know they've seen the world they know what they know what's what and they're skeptical about what you said.
You chat to these children about things and they're open to the possibility that you might be right, that you're not talking bullshit.
So I talk to them about God, I talk to them about all sorts of... I talk to them about Madonna being a Satanist and don't... All sorts!
And I tell them about the satanic symbolism in their favourite Disney movies.
Yeah, for sure.
I much prefer talking to them than I do the grown-ups because they have that thing that Jesus talked about.
It's great.
Yeah, because it's, this is interesting because, you know, I saw an interview with Baddiel's former comic partner, Skinner.
Rob Newman.
No, Skinner, what's it called?
Oh, Skinner, yes.
Yeah, what's his first name?
I forgot, I can't remember.
But he was actually doing... Frank Skinner.
Frank Skinner, yes.
He's a very funny guy and he's a Catholic.
Very, very, very sincere, very real Catholic, right?
Yeah.
And somebody asked him in an interview, well, have you read Balliol's book?
And he says, no, why should I?
He says, you know, you're like, what?
What a radical idea.
I'm an atheist.
Oh, that's very brave, isn't it?
You know, like, the interesting people, he said, like, are the people who believe.
They're the ones who are taking a risk now.
And it's so true.
You know, this idea has gone from being counterculture to being mainstream.
Of being, you know, oh, I'm an atheist, you know.
Oh, that's so clever of you.
Edgy.
So edgy, being an atheist.
Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, it's missing out, like, 99% of reality.
And living in that box.
Pope Benedict called it the bunker that we've built for ourselves to live in.
And, you know, we all
know exactly where everything is in the bunker and we can we could walk around it in the dark in our bare feet but it's not reality it's false and it works up to a after a fashion but reality is out there out in the jungle out in the desert you know I think in a way I was very fortunate in my life James because I was born in a very small town and it's very strange because even though in a certain sense the main the street outside was like any street in any city
There were shops and cars and lights and so on and signposts and a chipper up the town with a jukebox in it, which was the centre of our existence for lots of our childhood.
But then out the back door, There was kind of a wilderness because all the gardens had run into one.
You know, nobody stopped.
People had stopped cultivating them years before.
And we used to play around there and go down the river and climb trees and all that kind of stuff.
And when you're out in the street, you're being told what to do and where to go.
You're being pointed in certain directions.
Go this way or that way or this way.
You know, the lights, walk, don't walk, all that kind of stuff.
Now, we didn't have traffic lights in those days, but the general idea is the same.
But go out in the back.
You're in the wilderness and there was an island in the middle of the river behind where you could get over with a tree.
You'd fell a tree and you could climb across and stay on the island on your own on a summer's day and just lie down in the hollow and stare at the sky.
You couldn't possibly do that and not believe that there is something great that we don't know.
Whereas in the street you can easily believe that man made everything and man is in total control of reality.
Having that kind of dichotomy available to me right there in my own house, you know?
I think our generation was very lucky in that we were blessed with the availability of boredom.
We didn't have iPhones and TikTok to distract us every single second.
So there were long hours to while away just thinking about stuff.
Yeah, although I obviously wasn't born in rural Ireland, with hindsight I was similarly blessed.
I remember when I went up to Oxford, I really resented the fact, I bitterly resented the fact that I had not been born into a landed family.
With huge estates and loads of money because I thought, well, that's the way to be.
I mean, obviously, I wouldn't mind if that had happened, but I was born in... My father was originally from Birmingham, father's side family, mother's side from the black country.
So I was a kind of nothing.
I was sort of halfway between the kind of the toffs that I aspired to belong among and sort of ordinary people.
But I think that in retrospect, this kind of slightly rootless status where I didn't quite belong anywhere was actually a blessing.
Yes.
Yes, no man's land.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, because you have both.
And you have neither.
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I can play, I can play the tough when I go when I go fox hunting.
And I've, I've developed the accent and stuff.
But I feel just as at home with people from not those backgrounds.
Particularly since I became awake, I've become absolutely... I just love my fellow man.
I can see virtues in everyone in different ways.
It's great.
It's been a joy.
The last 43 months have shown us something that we didn't...
realise or hadn't allowed ourselves to think about.
It's that what we call education isn't really education.
You know, and that the people that are educated are people who have a certain, very narrow understanding of one subject maybe, and a certain strip of that subject, and that's their thing.
And out of that then they have a kind of a comity of expertise with other people that we all agree not to intrude on each other's expertises.
So we don't contradict one another.
So when the lawyer says this is the law, the scientist doesn't say, sorry, I disagree with you.
And vice versa.
But the ordinary guy who has to make and mend the world every day with his hands or her hands, a dressmaker or a carpenter or a plumber or a motor mechanic, he has to figure out how things work.
From sounds, noises in the engine or, you know, You know, the feel of the tires or whatever it is, right?
And the spirit level as Matthew Crawford, great Matthew B Crawford talks about the spirit level, you know, as being the guide, you know, that it has to be level.
At the end, it has to be level.
When the electrician leaves your house, the lights have to work.
It's very clear.
Whereas when the philosopher leaves your house, nothing works.
So the point is that, you know, there's a very, I think that this has been the one, the core, again, we go back to that concept of evil.
Because it's evil, you know, this idea that they're pushing their expertise, their singular narrow band of expertise at us.
And they're attaching to it a power over us to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own little lives, our precious time.
And they're using a small bit of book larding to justify this.
And all the other so-called experts are backing them up because they are waiting their turn to do the same thing.
That's how they did it.
That's how they did it.
Whereas my father was smarter than the whole lot of them put together.
He drove a mail car, which is a kind of a stagecoach.
But he could take an engine apart and put it together again in an afternoon.
He could build a door frame or a window.
He could build a wall.
He could do all he could do.
Mickey Garden, you know, he was like, he had a whole lot of disciplines.
And out of that, this is the point.
It's not just out of that.
It's an understanding of the three dimensional world that is absent from those who have purely book learning.
That's because at a certain point, you know, I'm talking about my Step grandson, you know, Kojak.
Like I used to watch him crawling around on the floor and, you know, he'd pick things up and he'd look at them, you know, and he'd smell them and taste them and rattle them, you know.
And I realised he's actually figuring out this place.
It's not just one thing.
It's the whole thing.
He's doing this to everything.
And that's how he's developing these pictures and these sound images of everything.
And that process has to go on.
It should rightly go on into your adulthood, but it doesn't anymore.
They've arrested it sometime in your mid-teens, maybe, where everything after that becomes purely abstraction.
It becomes second- or third-hand, and you have nothing to compare it with, so you have to learn it off by roach.
And that's no good.
You know, there's a very interesting... a fella I know who used to teach speed reading, an old fella, you know, he's a very smart guy and very funny and so on.
But I was talking to him one day about certain, he used to teach politicians, and I was talking to him, you know, he would never tell you who they were, but I would say, you know, about this guy must be very intelligent, you know, and so on.
And he says, be careful.
Don't confuse intelligence with retention.
You know, and that's the difference.
I was struck by that watching a recent interview with Alexander Wall because he was a profoundly intelligent man, you know, and I could see in him that sense of, you know, that he had somehow acquired something, as you have as well James, that there's something that is Still there in the culture.
It survives.
It's a residue of that old style of presenting people with all kinds of, in a certain sense, irrelevant things.
You know, ancient Greece, Latin, you know, all these different things, Yiddish or whatever, you know, and you learn these things Because they're there and because they have with them a version of the world within them.
They contain attached to them a version of reality.
And by comparing that one to that one to that one in your mind, not consciously, but unconsciously, you form a very complex view of reality, which allows you to speak to all kinds of things.
But now our culture refuses to allow us to speak.
I mean, think about during the so-called pandemic that we were forbidden from discussing publicly Things that affected intimately our own lives, our health, our futures, unless we had a microbiology degree, or a virology degree, or something of nonsense like that.
And that those idiots could stand there and tell us, because they had these pieces of paper in their earth pockets, they could tell us what we could and could not do with our own lives.
But it's not... Okay, so we can look back at that time with bemused wonderment that ever such a state of affairs could exist.
But isn't the even weirder thing that here we are, a couple of years on from that period, and still all those, our former colleagues in the world of journalism, are still in denial.
They still will not talk about things like vaccine injury.
I find that extraordinary.
Well, it is, in an absolute sense, extraordinary.
In that sense, moral sense, which is how I think you mean it.
But it's actually not that extraordinary when you think it through from, you know, the beginning.
Because you've got to remember that these guys are complicit in mass murder and they know it.
The journalists you mean?
Yes, yes.
Okay, they know it, but how much do they know it?
How aware are they?
Are they subliminally aware?
They know it as much as they're permitting themselves to know it.
It's all there for them.
Some of them are very skilful at denial, of course, but the point is that they All of the participants in this, this situation James is completely is unique as far as I know in the entire history of the world where a crime of this magnitude was committed by so many people who now are involved in a cover-up In which they are determined to say there was no crime.
What do you mean crime?
Not only was there no crime, but we're continuing what we were doing before just to prove that there wasn't, there was nothing wrong with it.
We're going to kill more people because that proves that we didn't kill anybody in the first place, kind of thing, you know?
Yeah.
And you see, the journalism thing is really shocking because they don't take any responsibility for the magnitude of their importance and significance in what happened.
Because without them and without their corruption, none of it would have been possible at all.
It would have been over in a couple of days.
Yep.
You know, I mean, all you, like, you just look at those press conferences, like with all those health boffins and czars, you know, and stand on this, in this platform, and you, like, they've just been throwing softball questions by, by, by journalists who used to have integrity.
But you see, there's something very, very weird about what's happened to the world in general, and I find this a lot.
Have you noticed this thing, James, whereby you talk to certain categories of people and it's like they're in a time warp?
That, you know, you start to talk to them about, for example, I met a guy recently who was a very successful, very major journalist in Ireland, an editor, A few years back, you know, a very high profile and I, you know, I used to get on kind of all right, but I worked for him a lot in the early days and, you know, he could be, you know, psychotic and so on, but I got on okay outside of that most of the time.
So I ran into him and I'm talking away and we're talking about, you know, the state of the country, you know, and the next thing he starts Propounding this hypothesis that what's wrong with politics now is that we should have a system.
The system doesn't work.
But we should have a system in which elected politicians never get to be ministers.
They just appoint ministers from outside who are experts in their field.
And this would solve the whole problem.
And he said, that's the problem.
I said, that's not the problem!
That's not the problem!
What are you talking about?
And he said, what's the problem?
I said, the problem is, one of the major problems is the influence of supranational organisations on domestic politics, on the running of our countries.
Well, for example, Wallace at the World Economic Forum.
He said, oh, that has no power.
That has no power.
They have no power.
You know, like, complete unreality.
This is a kind of a thing that I notice about a lot of... I'll tell you on even more graphic case jibs, which is really not quite in the journalistic but in the writing field.
Very interesting.
The Booker shortlist.
There's a book on there called Prophet's Song by an Irish writer.
There are two Irish writers on it.
But this guy, Paul Lynch, Prophet's Song.
And it's made the shortlist.
It's one of the six books now, and I think it's going to win it.
And if it does, I hope it does, because of what I'm going to tell you.
I first became aware of this book about a couple of months ago, and the blurb that I saw for it was really promising, because it was like, Ireland falls to a dystopian regime, taking over a democracy, end of democracy.
Oh, I said, he's one of us.
Yes.
It's going to be in the non-fiction section.
Yes.
Our Sergeant Edson has arrived!
You know, come on!
And so then I started rooting around before I got the book.
I was sitting away from the book immediately and then I started rooting around and online I found a little blurb where he had done and he talked about when he got the first impulse to write this book.
And it was in 2018, he says, and the world was kind of coming down to populist nationalists and they were taking over everywhere in Germany and all that.
Bastards!
AfD and Poland and blah blah.
And I thought, oh no.
And then I thought, well, come on.
That was 2018.
He's written the book.
It was published, I think, in 20...
This year.
So he must have been writing it in 20, 21, 22, 23.
So, you know, what was going on in that period?
Was it a nationalist populist dystopia?
I don't think so.
Well, this guy actually wrote a book According to his initial impulse about a nationalist populist takeover of Ireland.
And he must have been writing it while he was looking out his window from his writing desk at members of the police force dragging people by the hair of their head off buses because they weren't wearing masks and kicking people out of cafes.
And stopping people sitting on park benches and asking them why they were sitting down, that they had to keep moving.
And he continued to write this story of a nationalist populist revolution in Ireland, while A globalist coup was conducted right outside his window.
Now that to me is astonishing.
Now I'll say this further thing about him.
I need to qualify this and parse this a little bit.
I'll say it first of all straight on.
He's a really good writer.
What does that question mean?
When you say somebody's a good writer, do you mean, well, he can write really nice sentences, and that that's what makes a good writer?
He's a good paragraphist, you know?
Yeah, that's part of it, isn't it?
But surely the most important criterion for a writer is a capacity to reflect what the world is like, or something like that.
Would you say something of a better definition of that?
You'd hope.
You would hope.
So I was kind of, I mean, this book is really well written.
And it has some very good things in it.
But at its core, it's again, a lie.
It's a lie.
Yeah.
Because while he was writing it, the very thing he wanted to write about was happening, but just not the way he had thought it was going to.
And he ignored that and continued with his initial plan.
Now, the song is probably, watch it, I believe it will win.
And I believe that in a certain sense that will vindicate his decision, in a certain sense, to write it the way he did.
Because he would have maybe intuited that, look, if I write the truth about this, I'm not going to make it on the shortlist.
I was thinking, you're right, it probably will win for that reason that we talked about earlier.
Where all the journalists know That they were complicit in the greatest crime that has ever been committed.
The biggest because of the scale of it.
They all know they were complicit.
So what they're looking for is reasons to explain to themselves that actually they aren't culpable because there are other problems in the world much worse.
And here's an imaginary problem.
Yes.
Off the hook, guys.
Are you having this experience intermittently or even continuously, whereby somebody who was once a close friend in the journalistic profession life, right, with whom you drank, laughed, you know, hung out, he slept on your couch, you slept on his couch, after a session on the town, and now you read something There's a headline.
You hear a headline and you say, oh, he's written an article.
Oh, that sounds interesting.
I'll read that.
And then you think, oh my God.
This guy has completely lost all of his brain cells.
He has given away everything he ever was.
He was a cynic.
He was a sceptic.
He was, you know, you know, funny.
He had a disrespect, a healthy disrespect for authority.
And now it's all gone.
And what's he doing?
He's attacking the far right, which doesn't exist.
I've had to... I now try and avoid placing myself in situations where I'm going to meet anybody.
From my journalistic past because I don't really like people think that they will James Dellingpole contrarian.
He loves a good fight.
Actually.
I really don't I don't like confrontation.
I want us all to get along and it would be too painful for me to have to because I know we're and I'm right.
I've got the moral high ground over these people.
I mean, I mean, I you know, I'm on this huge mountain and they are just these pygmies at the bottom, morally.
Yes.
And I find it uncomfortable to be in that position.
It's a bit like, I occasionally cite this example.
Have you ever seen Pacific, the Pacific version of Band of Brothers?
There's a guy, it's Guadalcanal, and there's a marine manning the foxhole with a bloke next to him, and the Japanese are attacking at night, and it's chaos, and you think they're going to get overrun, and everyone depends on everyone else, on his comrades.
And the guy looks down and he sees one of his buddies sort of writhing around in the bottom of the foxhole and he thinks, oh God, he's been hit.
And eventually they beat off the Japanese and he looks down and he realizes that the guy hasn't been hit at all.
He's just in a funk.
He lost his nerve.
And it's kind of how I feel about it.
It's not, Contempt so much as I feel almost embarrassed for them.
Pity.
I don't hate them.
I just think how could you?
You're going to be judged for this.
They are.
They're not going to be able to stand in the judgment.
Well, that's the feeling, almost the feeling that I have is that I don't know about the judgment because these people don't believe in the judgment and so it wouldn't come into play.
The judgment's going to find them whether they believe in it or not.
But I kind of think I'd say, well, what would I say to this person to kind of either plumb what their actions Or maybe begin the process of changing their minds.
And really, I'm always confounded for something to say.
Not that I meet them now, I don't.
I avoid going to places where I might.
Even things like funerals, unless it was a very particular situation.
A very close situation.
I wouldn't go because of the risk of meeting such people.
Not that I'm afraid of them or anything like that, because I can hold my head up high now, you know, I believe.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're spoken around the place, you know, rewriting press releases for the government.
Yes, that's what they do!
That is what they do!
Yeah, it is, yeah.
Also the security services.
You have to look to the editor to see what's approved this week.
What can I say about Israel?
What can I say about Palestine?
What can I say about Gaza?
Because I need to tiptoe through all those landmines.
On that point, John, I'm just writing a piece about the Israel-Palestine thing.
And I've noticed that one of the fashionable tropes among the conservative commentariat, of which I used to be one, and all my old comrades, the current outrage is that the BBC refuses to use the word terrorist to describe Hamas.
And how outrageous this is.
Another of their popular tropes, I saw Charles Moore using it, I've heard it wheeled out quite a few times, that this was the worst assault on Jews since the Second World War.
So instantly in the mind of the reader, the Holocaust.
This is the worst thing since the Holocaust.
And I'm thinking, hang on a second.
What you're saying is very emotive and effective but it is demonstrably untrue.
The biggest assault on the Jews in terms of death toll was carried out by Benjamin Netanyahu in cahoots with FISA between 21 and 22.
An order of magnitude more Jews were killed by Pfizer and Netanyahu in their aggressive vaccine rollout program.
I shouldn't call them vaccines at all.
Many, many more, at least 10 times more, probably more than that, than were killed in Gaza recently.
And what I find extraordinary, John, is that The people I used to look at, you know, I used to look at Charles Moore and I think, well, you know, you're cleverer than me, Charles.
You know, you wrote, you were chosen to write Margaret Thatcher's authorized biography.
You edited The Spectator.
You edited The Sunday Telegraph.
And Douglas Murray, you know, I always thought you were not only braver than me, putting your neck on the line to expose these evil Islamists, but also, you know, you're so clever as well.
And these clever, clever, educated people who are, you know, who have a higher market value than I had, they're in demand and everything.
They were completely silent during COVID, despite all these, despite mass murder taking place on an epic scale at the behest of governments.
Yes.
And so they're hot for war, hot for a third world war over Israel, but they cannot see that more Israelis, more Jews were killed.
By their own government because of vaccine mandates.
Another one is Jordan Peterson, you know, who similarly, you know, ignored the whole Covid thing.
In fact, he didn't ignore it.
At one point he said, take the damn vaccine.
I wrote a long article about all that a couple of years back.
and went through the whole thing and looked at his interviews and the way he would respond when asked about it, and he was basically evading the question.
He would literally listen to the question, he would nod, and then he would change the subject.
But he comes out last week with this extraordinary tweet after the Hamas attack on Israel, tweeting Netanyahu, go get him, give him hell!
Now, you know, and this is a guy, I mean, now I have to kind of confess something here, because there's an event on in London in a couple of weeks time in the Docklands, which is being spearheaded by Peterson, and I've been invited.
It's called ARC.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's a trap.
Well, this is interesting because I'm coming to that view.
No, I have arrived at that view, but I had booked my ticket.
And you have to pay for your ticket.
It's not free or anything.
It's a reduced rate and you have to get through a hotel.
But I'm curious and I want to go and I also want to ambush the whole thing if I can and ask some really pertinent questions about what's going on.
But for a principle of an organisation called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship to put out that tweet at that moment has got to raise eyebrows everywhere.
It's a mad thing to do.
But But to go into the art business, I mean, you said it's a trap?
Yes, I think so.
It is.
You should look at Vox Dei on this.
Vox Dei wrote a book called Jordanetics, where he exposed Jordan Peterson.
I wrote an essay, because I was a fanboy for a while.
I thought when he owned That ghastly Channel 4 newswoman.
I think with Newman in retrospect.
I think that was a setup.
I don't believe that that it was it was organic.
I don't I don't think it was meant to be in order to bolster his reputation as I mean a left-wing left-wing psychiatry professor reinvents himself as the darling of the right.
Through the medium of a faked, of a contrived interview.
That, I think, was the purpose of it.
I don't trust any of the narratives that are sold to us by the mainstream.
I no longer trust.
Where I began to worry about this was when I looked at the pictures of the guys.
And there's all this bunch of, you know, shiny suited former Australian politicians.
Yeah, like Howard.
Howard?
Yeah, I think he's in there.
It's all these guys.
But the point was, I am certain in the beginning I heard Peterson saying that what they were going to do was to take on the World Economic Forum.
Now that's gone.
That's just suddenly evaporated.
And it's now all about being a responsible citizen.
And I suppose cleaning your room will be next.
You know, it seems to me to be a way of diffusing energy, drawing in all of these energies of expectations, people who actually are aware, very aware of this, because most people would have been plucked out of, you know, Podcasts and stuff.
I'm surprised you weren't asked.
Maybe they already know you're a sceptic.
They've sniffed me out already.
They know.
Yeah.
Well, they didn't know about me, so I got invited.
And I was kind of very intrigued in the beginning and thought, oh, yeah, let's take on the World Economic Forum for sure.
But there's no talk about that now.
And it's all about, you know, just climate change, which is fine.
You know, I've no problem with that.
But that's just one issue.
And it's not the most pressing issue at this moment.
It's a synonym for Lots of other issues in a certain sense.
But we're talking here about a coup that has basically taken over the world.
Could we actually speak this and begin to discuss really what it is, what it's about and what we're going to do with it?
How are we going to restore the democratic ethos to Western civilisation?
By the way, we'll have to do a whole other podcast by the sounds of it on climate change because that whole thing is my area speciality.
Total bollocks.
Total bollocks.
It's another.
But what you say about Klaus Schwab is right.
I remember one of my former journalistic confreres, he lives in Switzerland, sends me these occasional jabbing missives.
uh accusing me of having lost the plot and he says you know it's absurd that you believe that klaus schwab and the world economic forum have the power to to rule the world and how did you fall for this nonsense and the answer is i didn't i
I never thought of the WEF as anything other than a front for the much higher powers that rule the world, most of whose, the highest levels, we don't know their names.
And Klaus Schwab, the reason that everyone has got that, the reason that Klaus Schwab talks like a Bond villain, has never been able to master good English, or at least with an English accent, is part of the design.
The reason he's pictured in that funny kind of space-age outfit, the reason there's a photograph of him on the beach in that see-through sort of I don't know, pedo, weirdo outfit, is because he is the designated hate figure.
And the WEF was there just long enough for everyone to wake up and go, we hate you, we want, you know, you are bad, for it, as you say, for it to disappear like a puff of smoke, in a puff of smoke, because it has served its purpose.
And do you think, do you agree with me that there's a kind of a competition on For the heroes role, which hasn't been quite decided yet, and Peterson's in for that, Elon Musk's in first.
You know, they're all competing to see who's going to be the guy on the white Charger who comes over the hill and... and rescues everybody.
Oh, and don't forget Top G. Andrew Tate.
He's going to save the world with his masculine masculinity.
I wasn't making any editorial comment on the climate change issue.
I agree with you, although I don't know nearly as much about it as you do.
But I agree from what I've written occasionally about it.
But not as much as I should have.
What I mean is that in the present moment, things like CBDCs are right up there in our faces.
Social credit.
Climate change is coming hard behind and is going to be part of that.
But it seems to me that climate change is kind of like, in a certain sense, from a right-wing perspective, a safe issue.
Conservative issue, whereas he's not going to go into the COVID stuff, into the CBDC stuff or any of that stuff.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Sorry, I misunderstood you.
Yeah, he's one of these guys who constantly kind of throws out this thing about, well, you know, avoiding conspiracy theories, you know, which is a real giveaway for a lot of these conservative guys like Douglas Murray.
Again, I mean, I've read two of Douglas Murray's most recent books, Strange Death of Europe and the other one, but the last one, I haven't opened it because of his behaviour and the things he's saying and going to, you know, Ukraine in the company of Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Did you ever hear worse in all your life?
You know, to give up, to spout propaganda on behalf of Zelensky, Yes, to try and drag us into a war of no benefit to... I think... I feel particularly resentful about people like Douglas who's not gonna... who hasn't got children, is never going to have any children.
And I think people who are clamouring for war Ought, at the very least, to have sons of military age, military call-up age, before they do so.
So that they've got a bit of skin in the game.
Yes.
Because otherwise, talk is cheap.
I agree.
And you kind of have to ask yourself, look, this is a form, whatever way you put it, it's a form of U-turn for someone like Murray, right?
Like, it's not on course with what he was doing before.
You know, I know there are new issues.
Covid is a new issue.
He said it's not in his wheelhouse.
It's that thing about trust the experts.
I'm a Ukraine expert, but I'm not a... Yeah, it's like sports.
Well, I do football, but I don't do cricket.
you know sorry but you know it's not like that yeah it's changing the back but isn't it very interesting James that these guys used to call themselves the intellectual dark web Remember that?
The clue is in the word dark.
Yeah, and one after the other they have shown themselves to be complete duds, like Peterson, Murray, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris, the Weinsteins, you know, like half-arsed, weak, watery commentaries on Covid which When you emerge from them, listening to them, what do you say?
What did I learn there?
I learned that COVID exists and is a serious disease.
Yeah, which in itself, but by the way, that's a tell in itself.
Miri Finch has this, I don't know if you've come across her sub stack, she's very good.
She's like a kind of younger, more attractive female, James Delling Poe.
And she says, if you know the name, they're in the game.
And you look at the designated sort of populist fight back figures.
You look at, for example, R.F.K.
Jr.
So R.F.K.
Jr.
was pretty sound on the vaccines and on COVID and stuff being nonsense, but he's completely unsound on... he could completely Establishment on on climate change you look at you look at Douglas.
He's he's sort of sign.
He's been right about immigration and a few other things.
I mean the culture Wars.
I mean they all they all do the culture Wars.
That's an easy one, you know, they can it requires real courage to stick your head above the parapet and talk about pronouns.
But he was completely absent.
Absent isn't even the word.
He was beyond that.
He just fled the field screaming, crying on Covid.
And Andrew Tate, okay, so he can talk the talk about maleness and about the feminization of our culture, all of which is true, but there are loads of other issues that he won't go near.
So they all say a few of the things that the awake would like to hear, but they never do the whole panoply, because That's their job.
Their job is to lure us with little tidbits, but never to deliver the full meal.
Yes, but there's another dimension of it as well, James, if you think about it.
That their silence on those issues is actually deafening in the sense that it implies Well, these guys are so outspoken on all the relevant matters, whether it's pronouns or climate change or whatever, that if there was anything real about this stuff about COVID, they'd be on that as well.
And the fact they're saying nothing has a thousand times more force in its silence than us going and banging on for three weeks with facts and data.
Or Ed Dowd producing like a dozen books showing the amount, the levels of excess debts.
Jordan Peterson's silence is far more articulate because it implies that there's nothing to this.
Yes.
And that's why they'll never be part of the Congregation of the Righteous.
Because they're not!
Yeah.
They are the ungodly, John.
There's very few of us.
I must say one person I do admire greatly is Naomi Wolf.
I don't know.
I mean, you see, somebody who I kind of would have had a lot of differences with in the past from when she was a feminist and all that, you know.
But she's really acquitted herself well.
What do you think?
She's another one.
She's not, you know.
Yeah.
No?
No.
No.
I'm afraid to say there are no heroes.
It is better to trust in the Lord than put any confidence in man.
It is better to trust in the Lord than put any confidence in princes.
She has a book coming out which you might like the title of.
It's called Facing the Beast.
What, is that the Beast 666?
Yes.
Well, you know, the thing is, you know she's currently hot for war over this Israel psyop.
I don't begrudge success, but in this world, it does raise a few questions.
Anyone who's making serious money is there for a reason.
It's because they, with a capital T, have permitted them to do so because they want them to be...
There's something in that, I guess, you know, there's something in that.
But, you know, at the same time, James, you know, I become, I mean, you know, the idea of you can dismantle the world in front of yourself.
By being too aware of how... I get this.
I hear this all the time from a certain strand of mine.
They say, why are you so cynical?
Look, at least they're saying, look at Russell Brand.
He's probably radicalized more people than you'll ever reach.
And you're thinking, yeah, but it's a trap.
He's a pied piper.
Jordan Peterson is a pied piper.
That you put your finger on it.
The problem is that they use their crip.
credibility in one area to then discount the argument in another area.
That's why they're dangerous.
It's not what they say that is true that is the problem.
It's what they do not mention, which is the issue.
Yes, because it's like that, you know, I always think about journalism and commentary in the context of A very good metaphor, I think, for this is an airplane and you're flying along and there's sudden, you know, the stewards are giving out coffees and teas and the trolleys and all that.
And next thing, there's quite serious turbulence.
Yeah.
And what do you do?
You look to the stewards.
You do?
To see, are they panicked?
Are they running?
Good analogy.
Are they abandoning the trolley?
You know?
And if they're not, you say, it's okay.
No matter how it feels, it's okay.
And in journalism and in commentary, that's a huge factor.
That's the factor we're looking at here, where there is this misdirection given by virtue of Jordan just standing there saying, no big deal here, there's no pandemic, or there's a pandemic, and yeah, we were lucky to escape it, you know, and I got the vaccine, you know, you're lucky it's still alive, you know, that kind of thing, you know.
And Douglas Morrie, who is known to be stuck in everything, To have an opinion about just about everything has no opinion about this.
Well, the fact that he has no opinion is also, in a way, in another sense, telling.
I noticed this about a particular comedian in Ireland.
It was a very funny guy and really kind of really... But he never did jokes about Covid.
And I was thinking about this.
What's that mean?
Well, I know what it means.
It means that he knows it's bullshit.
But he knows better than to actually make jokes that say it's bullshit.
Because if he didn't think it was bullshit, he'd be slagging me off.
He'd be making jokes about me.
He didn't know.
And so, I don't know which is worse, you know, to actually not talk about something or to dismiss it.
But the conditions that we have created, I don't think, I was talking to somebody there recently, Matthew Eris there, you know, was in Ireland there last year, and we were talking about this and I was trying to describe him how I saw it from a journalistic point of view.
How serious this situation is, that it's utterly unprecedented, you know, because the capacities of the media now to create pseudo realities and false realities and a sense of, you know, that they can actually put out truthful information, but undermine it by giving it a lower profile than it should have achieved.
Like if somebody says, you know, to you in the street, Boris Johnson has been assassinated.
And you go home and you go to bed and you forget about it.
And the next morning you go up and you pick up the morning paper and the front page is a story about a strike at London Transport or something.
So it's not true.
It's not there.
It's not where it should be.
And then on page three, even if it's on page three, Boris Johnson Fascinating.
You think, that can't be true because it would be on page one.
You know, that kind of thing.
They're doing all these kind of tricks, you know, and people are actually looking to the media for that verification.
And they're not being told what they should be told, is that This is wrong.
This is evil.
This is exactly what your gut is telling you.
Trust your gut.
Trust your repugnance.
And because that's happening, people are actually distrusting their own instincts.
And they're actually giving more trust then to the people telling the lies.
And so at many deep levels, there are many undertoes of this that are completely unprecedented.
And, you know, like another one is that, you remember Alistair Campbell, bless the mark, used to say that, something to the effect that, if a politician who's in trouble in the media can't get the story off the front pages within a week, he's toast, right?
Something like that.
That was the principle, right?
You've got to get it off the front pages or else you're gone, you know?
But that's no longer true, James, you know, in the sense that, You know, there are no consequences necessarily, except the media want to make something consequential.
If you're discovered, if Pfizer admits that their vaccine, or so-called vaccine, is causing pericarditis and myocarditis, which they now have, That should be the front page headline on the Irish Times, the Guardian and the like.
And because it's not, in a certain sense it becomes untrue.
It never happened.
Yes.
Yeah in the same way people think well okay so there were these stories about Matt Hancock when he was health secretary sort of murdering effectively old people in old people's homes in order to ramp up the death figures using midazolam that sort of death pathway drug.
Yes.
Because the guy used to be on I Am A Celebrity, and then subsequently on this new SAS Who Dares Wins TV show, people look at this and think, well, he can't have done the terrible things that they say he has, because if he had, he wouldn't be on a TV game show.
The media would have exposed him.
It would be in the papers.
James, but there's even more darker things than that happening as well.
And yesterday only, I saw a picture.
There's a particular scientist, one of these kind of thin-strip experts, who basically caused the country to be closed down for 22 months back a couple of years ago.
And he was on all the shows.
And he even brought with him a book.
And he used to play the guitar.
And he used to go to arts festivals.
And he was a big star for the summer of 22 or 20, whatever it was.
But his latest thing now is promoting this new device, which, believe it or not, James, is a new way of disposing of human bodies.
Right?
It's been touted as a replacement for burial or cremation.
You just lash the body in there and it chews it all up and turns it into something else and they spread it out on the lawn or whatever.
I don't know what I'd say.
But the idea that he can do this and parade this thing around and talk about it, Implicitly, you mightn't actually ever articulate, the person watching might never articulate something as crude as, well God no, you know, Jesus, he couldn't have been responsible for all the murders, like as they're saying, if he's promoting that thing, you know?
Like, Jesus, they'd never do that, would they?
But people think that down here, thinking, well, that he looks, God yeah, okay, dead bodies, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very necessary, yeah, very, very important, very good, very good advice, sounds, looks good, yeah, you know?
But the impact of it is to rubbish the idea that he could possibly have any sense of guilt about what he's done.
Yeah.
The BBC, I mean, I think I'm going to, I'm not going to call it the BBC anymore.
I'm going to call it for now, I'm going to call it Big Black Cock.
Just because Big Black Cock did this one-off the other day with Greg Wallace, the former Greengrocer turned MasterChef co-host.
You know, cheerful Greg Wallace.
And it was a spoof in which Greg Wallace visited a factory where they were turning humans, human flesh, into meat for public consumption.
And you think, well, what they're doing here is sort of Ridiculing an idea which is probably somewhere down the line, you know, we're heading towards Soylent Green and it was This is how they operate.
They play with our heads so that we don't know what's real and what's unreal, what is good and what's bad, because people have lost, I mean, people have, as I said earlier, they still have an inbuilt moral compass, but it's designed to kind of take a magnet in front of the moral compass to kind of skew its workings.
Yeah, that's right.
And again, the subtext that is read by the viewer is, well, implicitly, if my suspicions were well-founded, they wouldn't be doing this kind of stuff.
Yes, exactly that!
Listen, one thing I think everyone will agree after this chat we've had is that we should not leave it a year and a half or two and a half years before our next podcast.
We've got to do another one sooner because I love talking to you.
We are totally on the same page.
Tell me, where can people find your staff and all that?
It's very easy.
I'm on Substack.
John Waters dot Substack dot com.
John Waters Unchained.
That'll get it as well.
And that's it.
I'm not anywhere else.
I don't do any social media or any stuff like that.
And is it working for you, the Substack business model?
Not as well as for Naomi Wolf, shall we say.
She'll get six million, I think.
So, obviously not.
No, but Ireland's a small country.
But, you know, I work hard.
I probably work a lot harder than I, you know, I'm not being paid for my work, but I don't care.
I'm happy to do it because, you know, there's multiple kinds.
I want to communicate these things.
But I also want to leave behind something that will be a record.
And I have to now think about how I get all this material off of Substack and into books, because I believe that they can wipe Substack out tomorrow morning.
But a book, even if you have only two copies of a book, there's a good chance that at least one of them will survive to a time if somebody is prudent enough to hide it away.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think that's wise.
I keep thinking about that as well.
I've so enjoyed talking to you.
And if dear viewers and listeners, please keep watching.
Oh, subscribe.
I never say subscribe, but do that.
Definitely subscribe, but also support me.
Really.
I mean, like John, I'm dependent on my living now for my podcasts and my sub stacks and stuff.
You can support me on Substack, Patreon, Subscribestar, Locals, BuyMeACoffee, and I really appreciate it.
And thanks for watching.
And thank you again, John.
Let's definitely do another one soon.
Very soon.
Thanks, James.
Yeah, let's do it.
Great.
Maybe a Mucker Prize comes out if it wins.
Oh, I might even put money on that.
I wonder what the odds are?
Let's see.
Profits on.
Let's see.
Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but it's even better than that.
This is a promo for the event you've all been waiting for.
You wanted me to do a live event in the North.
I'm going to be doing a live event in the North, in Manchester.
You've been angling for ages to get me to do a podcast with one particular person.
I've held off till now, but finally the moment has come.
Delingpole meets Ike.
Yep.
I am going to do a live podcast event with the guy you could almost call the living Godfather of all the conspiracy theorists.
I mean, most of them have been bumped off, of course, but not David.
And I hope he stays around till this live event.
So implies to me, actually.
It's going to be in Manchester, as I said, and it's on November the 15th.
I'm really looking forward to seeing you all there.
You can get your tickets, book them while they're still available.
You can get them on Eventbrite.
You'll find the details below this little advertlet.
