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Oct. 19, 2024 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

02:36:03

Vox Day

Vox populi? No, it’s Vox Day!https://castalialibrary.substack.comhttps://voxday.net↓ ↓ ↓Monetary Metals is providing a true alternative to saving and earning in dollars by making it possible to save AND EARN in gold and silver. Monetary Metals has been paying interest on gold and silver for over 8 years. Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in their latest silver bond offering. For example, if you have 1,000 ounces of silver in the deal, you receive 120 ounces of silver interest paid to your account in the first year. Go to the link in the description or head to https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on honest money again with Monetary Metals.↓ ↓ ↓ Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk x

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	Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before we meet him, let's have a quick word from one of our sponsors.
	Monetary Metals is providing a true alternative to saving and earning in dollars by making it possible to save and earn in gold and silver.
	Monetary Metals has been paying interest on gold and silver for over 8 years.
	Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in their latest silver bond offering.
	For example, if you have 1,000 ounces of silver in the deal, you receive 120 ounces of silver interest paid to your account in the first year.
	Go to the link in the description or head to www.monetary-metals.com To learn about how to participate and start earning a return on honest money, again, with monetary metals.
	I'd definitely give the silver a go.
	I've got gold, but I like silver because silver has the potential to go much, much higher if you're of a sort of more adventurous disposition, which I am.
	Anyway, you should do both, gold and silver.
	If you want interest on it, go to Monetary Metals.
	Welcome to The Delling Pod, Vox Dei.
	Vox, I'm so excited.
	I don't know whether you are.
	Do you do many of these things, by the way?
	Actually, no.
	I generally don't talk to the media at all.
	I get a lot of requests, but I have a lot of respect for the stuff you've done.
	I've followed your writing for years and so forth, so I'm always quite happy to talk to you.
	Well, I'm flattered, and I just...
	I mean some people will know who you are and some people won't have a clue who this American guy I'm talking to is but I just want before you I'm going to give you a chance to talk about yourself and tell and tell us who you are people don't know but I remember do you remember this conversation that you and I had it must have been about five years ago And you liked my stuff.
	You knew that I could string some ideas together in an attractive way.
	And you were explaining to me how there was going to be a massive clampdown on sort of independent media voices and that you had made preparations for that and that part of your setup was getting people like, getting sort of counselled people like Owen Benjamin on board and etc, etc.
	And I remember saying to you something like, do you mean people like me?
	Am I in danger of being cancelled?
	And you sort of laughed in a kind of avuncular way.
	And you indicated to me that the sort of stuff I was saying was really quite mild and not the sort of stuff that gets you cancelled.
	And at the time, I had no idea What you were talking about.
	Because at that time, I was basically a normie.
	Right.
	So I've been on a journey since.
	Yeah, well, I'm not surprised because there are certain intellectual figures that you can see are seekers.
	They're looking for the truth.
	They're expressing their opinion within the context of the perspective they have at the moment.
	But you can see that they're intellectually honest enough that as they go on, as they dig, as they're exposed to new things, as the world changes, as things become more obvious, you know that they're going to adjust their thinking accordingly.
	Roosh, the former pickup artist, is a good example.
	Even before he was a Christian, you could tell that he was...
	Seeking the truth.
	And, you know, now I believe he's in training to become an Orthodox monk.
	You know?
	I mean, his transformation is by far the greatest of anybody who's been in the public space that I've ever seen.
	But, you know, you, I felt, were too honest to be locked into the British labor Tory paradigm forever.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you know what it reminds me of, actually?
	It reminds me of the time when I went to Mount Athos and I... I was a kind of a, you know, sort of cultural Christian at the time.
	You know, I went to Easter and stuff, went to Christmas rather, and I had my confirmation and stuff.
	So I sort of, you know, I pretty much believed in God, but nothing more than that.
	And I remember going to this monastery at Mount Athos, quite a remote monastery.
	Well, they all are.
	And It was in the middle of these woods and it was accessible by this incredibly thick wooden door.
	I remember knocking at this door for some time and a grill opened and this face appeared.
	This novice monk appeared and ushered me and my friend, an American friend, a novelist called Wilton Barnhart.
	He'd arranged this trip and he called, he invited us in and we were greeted by the abbot of the monastery who was called Father Seraphim.
	And this abbot had these very pale but piercing blue eyes that fixed on me.
	And we were given this glass of well water with sherbet in the bottom.
	I remember this experience quite vividly.
	And I remember Father Seraphim looking at me in a way that he knew something that I didn't.
	And I think what he knew now, what he knew then that I know now, is that he was part of a stage on my journey towards Christianity, and he foresaw my future.
	And in the same way, I think that you...
	Saw in me, well I mean I'm flattered, that you saw a kind of intellectual integrity in me that was going to lead me towards the truth, regardless of the problems I encountered in the way.
	Well I think that people who value the truth themselves, and I certainly wouldn't put myself in the same category as Father Seraphim, I'm a considerably more fallen creature, but But you can see when people are genuinely looking for it, and when people are doing their best to hide from it.
	Or worse, when they're doing their best to be dishonest to lie.
	Those three things are fairly readily ascertainable.
	For example, people sometimes ask me, why are you friends with Owen?
	Why are you colleagues with Razor Fist?
	These guys are notoriously vulgar, crass at times, etc.
	The reason that...
	And now people understand much better.
	For example, Razor Fist shocked everyone when he came out with his comic, this long-awaited comic.
	It was a hugely successful crowdfund.
	I think it was like $350,000 in the crowdfund for this comic.
	Which, by the way, we published the retail version.
	But I was astonished when I read it because I'm going through it and I realize it's like openly Christian.
	I mean, it's Razor Fist, so it's, you know, this violent Old West, very, you know, retribution and so forth.
	But it was really astonishing.
	But in the same way that it didn't surprise me that you ended up moving...
	In a direction towards inevitable cancellation by the world, it didn't really...
	Even though I was surprised, I wasn't surprised, if you know what I mean.
	Because we have this private...
	Video service called Unauthorized, which you're aware of.
	And one of the reasons that it exists, and most of the people on it, whether it's a comics writer like Chuck Dixon, who's been canceled by Marvel and DC for years, whether someone like Owen Benjamin, who's a comedian,
	who got completely canceled by Hollywood because he had the courage to stand up and say that Declaring a five-year-old child trans is child abuse.
	Every single person there has been persecuted because they dared to speak a truth that the mainstream did not want spoken.
	Before we go on, I'm hearing you quite faint.
	I don't know whether it's going to come out louder at your end, but can you make yourself louder at all?
	Um...
	Not much, well, not much I can see on my settings.
	But let me see if the settings will let me do so.
	My settings are up.
	I suppose, well I can hear you louder now, now you're closer to your mic.
	Okay, yeah, I'll just move my mic more centrally.
	Usually it comes off.
	It's funny how the different systems work.
	Sometimes on some services they're way too hot, and then on others they're faint.
	Yeah, you're talking to a complete technological ignoramus, so I don't know.
	Let's hope it works.
	Yeah, I think without...
	In fact, just before I go on, tell us briefly about yourself, for those who don't know.
	Well, I am an author.
	Started out writing game reviews.
	I was one of the first nationally syndicated game reviewers back in the early 90s.
	Also did some music.
	Formed a band.
	We had several top 40 dance hits on Billboard.
	I got into game development and then stumbled into political commentary in 2001 after 9-11.
	I've been writing some technology stuff for WorldNetDaily and wrote a column after 9-11 that really resonated with a lot of people, basically warning them not to get caught up in the Patriot Act and foreign wars.
	Which, of course, was completely useless because that's exactly what the US did.
	And then the column actually got nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate.
	So I've actually been...
	Twice nationally syndicated in the US. And eventually that led to...
	I moved away from regular journalism and just focused on writing a blog.
	And starting in 2005, I started to get cancelled by the social justice warriors in the science fiction space.
	It's at the point now where the Wall Street Journal described me as the most despised man in science fiction.
	And so, because of that, I had to start my own publishing company, Castalia House, which has successfully published 150 books or so.
	We accidentally got into comics by doing a crowdfund.
	It was the first big independent comics crowdfund.
	It's since been surpassed by people like Ethan VanSkyver and Eric July, but we were the first ones to do.
	We did a crowdfund that raised $250,000 for the alt-hero comic.
	So now we have a site called Arctunes at arcaven.com, which has like 6,000 episodes and about 16 million views, you know, daily comics every day.
	We also have, you can see behind me, some of the books from our leather bindery.
	We have We now have our own printer, our own bindery, our own publishing house, video channel, etc., etc.
	Just because we believe in the philosophy of build your own platform.
	Don't use the platforms...
	Because they're traps.
	Just two days ago, Kickstarter banned one of the comics writers that we published for no reason.
	He's been on there for years, and they've just decided that, well, he's too successful.
	We need to stop him from getting any bigger.
	That's how it works.
	That's the mistake that people make.
	They think that, well, I'm getting big enough that they can't get rid of me.
	They're not like regular businesses.
	They don't care if you're small and trivial.
	Once you get to a certain point, whether it's 150,000 followers on YouTube or a crowdfund in excess of 50,000 or whatever, that's when they kick you off.
	yeah yeah um are you going to tell me any more about yourself or can I can I can I now ask you questions things Oh, just go ahead.
	I tend to find...
	Go read Wikipedia's lies about me.
	That's probably the most entertaining thing.
	It's very interesting what you say, because...
	Sorry to talk about myself, but actually, I know you're quite interested in this kind of stuff, and I think it will make for a better conversation.
	But...
	I spent...
	Most of my life asking the question, why aren't I more successful?
	Why, you know, because, I mean, I have many, many faults, just myriad faults, but writing badly is not one of them.
	Correct.
	I feel like it's a, well, it is a God-given gift, that God has blessed me with the skill of writing in an entertaining, punchy way.
	And I can do it without planning.
	I can write it.
	It's great.
	I look at Jimmy Page playing the guitar.
	I wouldn't want to make the pat that he had to make to be able to play the guitar like that.
	But I imagine that some people could look at my writing and go, I wish I could write like that.
	And I can write like that.
	And I'm eternally grateful for that skill.
	So I was just a wonder.
	I mean, so many worse writers, particularly in journalism, but even in novel writing, so many worse writers do so much better.
	And I used to feel slightly kind of resentful about this and slightly bitter and just sort of just the ambition, the frustrated ambition was really getting to me.
	And It's only since I've gone down the rabbit hole and understand how the world really works that I've lost all that kind of frustration and I feel completely at peace with myself because I understand that you don't make it in this world, not make it big, certainly, unless you've made the pact with the system.
	That's true, isn't it?
	That's partly true.
	In general you don't make it big without accommodating and bending the knee and so forth, kissing the ring.
	There's another element that, to be honest, I think is probably more relevant to you.
	So you didn't have the benefit that I did of working with honest Midwestern people in your youth.
	When I was writing the video game review column, I was 20, I think I started when I was 22, maybe 23.
	And they had one space on the opinion editorial page reserved for the token house conservative.
	And so they had a very normal token house conservative.
	He took all the standard Republican lines and so forth.
	And then, so I've been writing the, in the tech section, I wrote a front page Named column, you know, had my picture on it and everything.
	It was very well, they pushed it hard.
	It was very popular.
	I was only the sixth columnist in 180 years to get nationally syndicated.
	So they would have my picture on billboards and everything in Minneapolis and St.
	Paul.
	And so I was really...
	I was considered by them and by myself to be the up-and-coming writer at the paper, right?
	I mean, the editor would tell me how much he loved my stuff and how popular it was and all this sort of thing.
	So when the House conservative moved to North Carolina, I assumed that I would be the guy.
	And so I called the op-ed editor, the top guy, and asked him if I could come in and told him I'd be interested in getting that slot.
	And he said, Okay, I'll just go ahead and send in, go ahead and send in two sample columns, and then come in.
	So I sent in my two sample columns.
	And the following week, I went into the headquarters in St.
	Paul's, the St.
	Paul Pioneer Press.
	Good paper.
	And we sat down and he said, Okay, I have to tell you something.
	You're a good writer, you're our best young writer, and your work will never ever appear on the op-ed page.
	And I mean, this was a huge favor to me that he did.
	I mean, it was a little bit disappointing at the time.
	But he said, Look, You're not willing to compromise your vision with ours.
	He said, for example, the sample column you sent me, it's a great column.
	It's a very, very compelling, you know, my background was economics.
	So I wrote a sample column about why the state and the city should not subsidize the sports stadium that the Vikings, the football team, were looking to build.
	And it was a very compelling case.
	And he said, it's a good column, but it's absolutely antithetical to the paper's position.
	A significant portion of our business is covering the sports teams.
	Therefore, we want that stadium to get built.
	It doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong.
	That's our position.
	And he said, I appreciate that you have the integrity to say what you believe to be true, but you're going to do that.
	He said, we know you well enough that you're going to do that.
	So you will never, ever write for our op-ed page.
	Now, what's really interesting is that after I got signed years later, by Universal Press Syndicate, they wanted me as their eventual replacement for William F. Buckley.
	They were looking at every single young author around the United States who had anything to do with politics, all the way from the middle democratic left to the wild libertarian right, and they selected me to be his eventual heir for them.
	The problem is, not a single editorial page would buy my column.
	None.
	So obviously, the word had been gotten out probably 10 years before.
	This guy can't be on the op-ed page.
	And I even warned the syndicate that.
	I even said, you know, I'm not sure you're going to be able to sell it.
	And they're like, no, no, we're just going to pair you with Ann Coulter and it's going to be, you know, her columns everywhere.
	Your column is going to be everywhere.
	I said, okay, well, if you can do it, great.
	But sure enough, they managed to sell it to the Dallas Morning News for two weeks.
	And then it was, and then Rod Dreher was the op-ed editor at the time.
	And then they cancelled it after two weeks.
	So that was it.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I've grown very cynical towards what I now understand as conservative ink.
	And all those edgy conservative commentators that previously I used to think were great, I now think are just, you know...
	Some are legitimate.
	Pat Buchanan was legitimate.
	Samuel Francis was legitimate, but William F. Buckley was a gatekeeper.
	Totally!
	He was fake.
	Jonah Goldberg, same thing.
	Jonah is interesting because Jonah was honest up to a point.
	And then he would just go silent.
	So he had a degree of integrity.
	He didn't like to lie about things.
	And I think that's probably one reason why we don't see him anymore.
	He's not enough of a shill for them.
	But the ultimate shill, for example, is Ben Shapiro.
	He's a totally managed...
	I used to, at World Nut Daily, I had access to all of the readerships.
	Like, I could see exactly how many people were reading each column.
	And he wasn't even in the top 12.
	He was barely in the top 15.
	Oh, really?
	Yeah.
	Nobody ever...
	Paid much attention to him, but they just pushed him relentlessly because he was young enough and corruptible enough that he would say absolutely anything they told him to say.
	I mean, he even told me once, he said, I'm so tired of just regurgitating Republican talking points.
	I'd rather, you know, be able to say what I think.
	And I said, well, so do it.
	And he just couldn't do it.
	But it's really hard writing an article saying something you don't believe.
	I mean, I'd say it's harder than...
	Oh, I don't think...
	I mean, I'm a fiction novelist.
	I have no problem.
	You know, you just...
	All you need is empathy.
	If you have sufficient empathy, you can put yourself in a totally different perspective and then write from that perspective.
	I mean, any good novelist has to be able to do that.
	Ah...
	My kids think that I'm on the autistic spectrum.
	Because they made me do this online, are you autistic test the other day?
	And a lot of my answers seem to suggest that I might be in that category.
	So maybe that's why I can't empathize.
	I mean, tomato, tomato, autistic, lack of empathy, they're the same thing.
	Autism is just not having empathy for others.
	People don't like to describe it that way, but that's what it is.
	Well, I hope I'm not.
	I hope I do have empathy.
	But certainly, I've always found it very, very hard to tell lies in print.
	When I was earning my bread from the mainstream media, what you really wanted was the Daily Mail gig, where the Daily Mail would pay you 900, 1000, I think it was even 1200 back in the day, for an article that would take you half a day max to write.
	And they'd just, they'd give you the headline, and then you'd write the piece to fit the...
	But sometimes they would say, well, we want a piece on so-and-so.
	And I said, well, what's your angle?
	And they said, blah, blah, blah.
	And I said, well, I can't do that.
	And I sensed their kind of mild disgust.
	At my inability to do what every journalist should be able to do, which is write to order and adjust their opinions according to the publication.
	But I couldn't do that.
	Yes, I mean, some people can, some people can't.
	I had the ability to do so, but I was never in a position to do so because I was never a journalist.
	I was always a reviewer opinion columnist.
	So I always had complete freedom to write about whatever I wanted to, especially in the video game, computer game space, where at the time, none of them knew a damn thing about it.
	Here's the funny thing.
	I actually did, in 1996, I did actually appear on the opinion editorial page of the paper that said I never would.
	And it was a huge piece, like half the page.
	And the reason was that they didn't have anybody who could make heads or tails of the Unabomber's manifesto.
	And the funniest thing is, it was a good thing they couldn't make...
	I have to say that looking back in retrospect, they were probably correct to not allow me onto the op-ed page.
	And fortunately, not only did they not understand the Unabomber's manifesto, but they didn't really understand my explanation of it.
	Because I basically endorsed it.
	So they had the paper basically endorsing, not his actions, but his thoughts about modern society.
	But I did what they told me to do.
	I explained it.
	Yeah, I read the whole thing.
	I explained it.
	I made it more accessible.
	And it amuses me now to realize that they actually published the entire thing basically unedited just because they couldn't follow what was being described.
	Well, that's interesting.
	So it suggests to me that the system does occasionally make mistakes.
	Oh, they do.
	It does all the time.
	Because sometimes one can feel overwhelmed by the monstrous evil and the diabolical cunning.
	I mean, I look at how the world is arranged and, okay, for example, I did a substat the other day about Boris Johnson and I speculated as to whether or not he was actually put in the position of being Britain's Prime Minister,
	expressly in order to be there at the time of the fake pandemic, in order to use his kind of charm and sort of bumbling sort of comedy value to kind of amuse and cajole the British people into accepting Fascistic measures like lockdown and near compulsory vaccines.
	Whether or not he'd been tailored for the role because the British people needed a particular kind of treatment in order to swing them round.
	People seem to suggest that, yes, this probably was the case, that the rulers of the darkness of this world really are that organized and devious.
	But it seems to me that the only intelligence that could be capable of such organization and such scheming is a supernatural one, a diabolical one, you know, that Satan himself is calling the shots.
	Over time, yes.
	I don't think that the example you're citing is a particularly good example of that just because they'll use whoever's to hand.
	Right.
	You didn't need Boris Johnson to sell the lockdowns or the vaccines.
	I mean, we know that roughly 75 to 80% of the people are functionally NPCs, non-player characters, in gamer parlance.
	I was astonished, and as you know, I was a very, very outspoken opponent of the vaccines even before they were announced or created.
	Because it was obvious that that's what they were moving towards.
	And I was astonished at how many people who should have known better Went ahead and took them.
	You know?
	And, I mean, for me it was pretty obvious.
	Any time a group of very rich and powerful globalists who believe that humanity needs to be significantly reduced in number tells you to do something, and it doesn't matter what it is, don't do it.
	You know, if they tell you to get in the cattle car, if they tell you to get injected, if they tell you to eat one way versus another, they're not telling you that for your benefit.
	They're telling you that to further their goal of depopulation.
	I mean, this is not rocket science.
	It's basic logic.
	And yet that's beyond...
	That very, very small amount of thinking is unfortunately beyond most people.
	And so Boris Johnson...
	Now, there is a...
	It's a very long-term evil plan, and various aspects of it have played out over time again and again and again throughout the centuries.
	That's where I think that even for the most irreligious rationalists out there, That's probably one of the more compelling arguments for the existence of the supernatural, just because the sheer repetition of the same evil over and over and over again, if you have a sufficient grounding in history, is undeniable.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I think they've got a playbook.
	And it works.
	It works to a certain point, but it always seems to have the seeds of its own failure in it.
	They always seem to overreach, to push too hard, to push too fast.
	Why?
	I don't know.
	But, you know, Carthage failed.
	The evil empires always fail.
	You know, the U.S. is going to collapse eventually.
	I said back in 2004, I believe it was, that was the first time I put it in public, but I said that I thought the U.S. as an entity, as a political entity, would probably collapse around 2033 or so.
	Because the money always collapses after an average of 70 years.
	And so that whole structure depends upon that debt cycle.
	And we're very close to the end of one.
	Yeah.
	I suppose there's going to be some...
	The Americans who are still invested in MAGA, who really believe that Trump's going to save America's ass and save the world's ass by extension, they would listen to you saying that and they would say, this guy...
	He's really bad.
	He's a defeatist.
	Actually, they usually don't.
	Because a lot of the MAGA folks...
	I was around in 2015.
	I like Trump.
	I still think that Trump was the...
	For all his failures and flaws, I think he was the greatest American president since Andrew Jackson.
	But the degree of difficulty that he's facing is just too much.
	He's the charismatic leader, the negotiator, all that, in a time when the US needs somebody who's more like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, who just doesn't give a damn what anybody thinks and just does what he thinks is best for the nation.
	Okay, that's interesting.
	So you think that Trump is not one of them?
	I'm talking about his character.
	I'm not talking about his goals.
	I'm saying that I think that he is too soft a character to do what saving the United States would require.
	Sure.
	I mean, in the social sexual parlance, he's an alpha, the other two are sigmas.
	They're not as into the hierarchy, they're not as into natural hierarchy as he is.
	They don't require other people to buy into what they're doing the way that he does.
	So, who are the other two?
	Who are the Sigmas?
	Who do you mean?
	Putin and Xi.
	Oh, I see.
	Sorry.
	It's not about the ideology.
	Sometimes people get confused.
	They're like, well, you're saying that Trump should be more this or more that.
	I'm saying, no.
	His natural instinct is to reach an accommodation with the enemy.
	But there are certain enemies, especially wicked ones, that you cannot reach any accommodation with.
	possible.
	Yeah, because they're devoted to their their devotion to the destruction of your civilization of your nation of your faith is comprehensive.
	You know, it's the whole thing about not yoking good with dark with light and that sort of thing.
	You can't It's not possible.
	And regardless of what you think of Putin, regardless of what you think of Xi, it's very, very clear that their commitment to their nation is total.
	No one doubts that either one of them will do whatever they believe is necessary for their nation.
	I don't think you can say the same thing about Trump or Johnson or any of these folks.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, I wasn't expecting you to say that, but then I'm not sure that I've totally...
	One of the reasons I was looking forward to this chat was because I do think that you are one of the most incisive, astute...
	I loved your book, SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down.
	Although those seem like charming period pieces now.
	I know.
	People say, you should write the third one.
	And my response is always, why?
	It's barely...
	Relevant.
	I mean, like you said, it's a period piece.
	It describes what was going on in 2015.
	We're so far beyond that now.
	I mean, now we all understand that SJWs are just like one set of pawns in this massive, evil, fallen structure that is...
	Because right now, a lot of people don't seem to grasp that we're already in World War III. World War III began, you can trace it back to wherever you want, but it began sometime between 2015 and 2022.
	But it was inevitable since 1999.
	Because that's when the Chinese understood that they had to go to war with what we used to call the West.
	Have you ever read Unrestricted Warfare?
	No.
	It's fascinating.
	It's difficult to read just because it's poorly translated from the Chinese, but it was written by two Chinese colonels and they were explaining how China was going to have to engage in comprehensive asymmetric warfare to deal with the advantages that the West had.
	And, but their big concern was not, you know, China has no interest whatsoever in ruling the world.
	But China is absolutely 100% committed to not being ruled by the same evil powers that rule the rest of the world.
	And so, So they were basically describing, this is what we have to do.
	And of course now, 25 years later, we can see that they have really succeeded in most of their goals.
	Bricks being the...
	The absolute trophy beyond which I think they had even dreamed back then.
	And so what we're seeing is the division of the world into the half that we used to call the West that I now refer to as clown world.
	And then the...
	What I would call the sovereign nations, which is China, Russia, Iran, etc., etc.
	Most of those countries are not places that you or I would approve of in many, many ways, right?
	They don't want to live according to the historical standards of the West.
	They want to live in their own way, their own cultures, etc., etc., But what they have succeeded in doing, and where countries like the US and the UK have failed, is that they've defended their own heritage, they've defended their own faiths, etc, etc.
	They haven't been subverted and conquered the way that we have.
	And so that's why you see things like in...
	Look at what's happening in North Carolina right now.
	No money, no help, The FEMA is actually getting in the way of churches and private organizations and individuals going to help these people in need.
	And meanwhile, they're sending another, you know, however many billion to Ukraine.
	You know, who gives a flying fuck about Ukraine, especially given the fact that there was never any chance whatsoever that Russia wasn't going to defeat them.
	There was never any chance that Ukraine was going to win.
	If you know anything at all, every single...
	I published Martin Van Trevold, I published William S. Lind, two of the greatest military minds of the 20th century, and not a single one ever believed that you could beat Russia.
	I mean, unless your last name is Khan and your first name begins with a G, you probably shouldn't even think about it.
	Anyhow, we're caught up in this global war that isn't really quite an open war, for the most part, except in certain places.
	It's a very, very interesting time.
	But you can't believe anything that you see in the mainstream narrative because, as you know, it's just a bunch of people cranking out what the editors tell them to crank out.
	Yes.
	I'll tell you what I've never worked out, so this is a digression, but how do the editors get their briefings?
	I mean, I used to think when I was a journalist, I used to think that Editors were independent-minded spirits, ex-journalists who knew the trade, and who were constantly fighting battles with their proprietors for independence.
	No, that's a Hollywood script.
	It is, isn't it?
	But how do they get their orders, and who...
	Well, we already know.
	I mean, basically...
	You remember Gamergate, right?
	Yeah.
	All Gamergate was was the gamers' reaction to the news that all of the game journalists belonged to a private list called Game Journal Pros, and every day they would basically get their marching orders about what the theme of the day was.
	And you could see that all the pieces were written Exactly the same way, often using the exact same phrases.
	Well, Game Journal Prose was an imitation of Journalist, which was the same thing in the political world, and it was all of the big name journalists and op-ed writers.
	But even Journalist was just an imitation of what the editors all have.
	Okay.
	They're all on basically, essentially, probably a literal mailing list.
	It's just an email chain.
	And then somebody at some point, you know, there's probably like a small number of senior members who basically say, today's narrative is J.D. Vance is weird.
	You know?
	It's like I described in SJW's Always Lie.
	They're like a school of fish.
	They're all very sensitive to what the others are doing and saying.
	So whenever somebody makes a turn or introduces a new phrase or You know, generates a new piece of rhetoric, then everybody immediately leaps on it.
	And I mean, you know, you can watch it happening in real time.
	Oh, I can see the effects very much.
	But I'm just curious as to who composes the editor's narrative.
	I think it's usually like the...
	I think you can probably trace it back, but some of it is through the AP. But I think that a lot of it is formulated by somebody at the New York Times.
	Typically, you'll see it in the New York Times, like Paul Krugman will come up with a phrase, and then three days later, that phrase is everywhere.
	I think what you need to look at is whoever is considered to be an opinion leader.
	I mean, that's what an opinion leader...
	If you notice, it's always right in front of you.
	The opinion leaders are the ones who lead the opinions of all the editors.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I want you to be an opinion leader, Vox.
	Yeah, because I've got such compelling opinions and I'm going to make such a great case for these opinions.
	That's entirely backwards.
	Opinion leader is a job title.
	You are given the job, but your opinions, of course, have to be carefully vetted.
	For approval first.
	I really appreciate that editor who told me that you'll never play in this field.
	And I think that's one reason why I've been able to deal with the various cancellations so productively.
	Yeah, once you understand that that's how things work, you don't waste your time banging your head against a wall that you're never going to get through.
	I tell you what, I could have saved myself so much life frustration if I'd had that conversation that you had with that guy.
	Well, that's why I'm so grateful to him.
	When they told me back in Charles Stross...
	Very good science fiction writer.
	I don't know if you've ever read him, but his Accelerando is one of my favorite modern science fiction novels, and his Laundry series, which is kind of like a H.P. Lovecraft meets James Bond, is really quite good too, but quite entertaining anyhow.
	But he told me back in, I think it was 2005, that if you don't learn to keep your mouth shut about political things, no major science fiction publisher is going to publish you.
	If you want to have a career, you need to shut up.
	Now, I was already a nationally syndicated columnist.
	Doing politics at that point.
	So, of course, I was like, yeah, whatever.
	But I immediately understood the truth of what he was saying, which is why I never even bothered...
	To submit a single short story or novel to Tor Books, Del Rey, any of them, because I knew what he meant.
	I knew he was saying, look, the editors all know who you are, and they don't approve of you, so don't even think about trying to work.
	Don't think about trying to work here.
	But I thought that science fiction is just a kind of veiled way of commenting on the world's politics, is it not?
	No, no.
	Science fiction is well to the left of the mainstream.
	And, you know, you can't, at these days, in fact, you can't even get, like, Ross Dutwatt, or whatever is, however you pronounce his name, the sort of vaguely conservative New York Times columnist, despite the fact that he's a pretty significant mainstream news player, mainstream journalism player, he can't get published by anyone in science fiction because he's not far enough left.
	Right.
	And so they're very, very off...
	I mean, they're off the charts wacko these days.
	Right.
	Well, since we're on science...
	I did want at some point to talk to you about science fiction.
	My son has started...
	I've got this hyper-literate son who just, you know, reads everything.
	And he's started reading science fiction...
	He made me read Starship Troopers.
	Yeah, good book.
	I didn't like it.
	I just felt discomforted by the politics.
	Because by the time I read that book, I was awake.
	And it seemed to me that this was basically somebody's shilling for the American military-industrial complex.
	Yeah, more or less.
	I mean, that was Heinlein.
	Heinlein was...
	He's popular because for some reason he's wrongly considered to be conservative.
	I didn't get that right.
	He's not conservative at all.
	In fact, in his later years he declined into freaky, hippie, pansexuality nonsense at best.
	But his older stuff, his juvenile stuff, was very westward ho.
	You know, very pro-individual, pro-military, etc., etc.
	The kind of thing like, the Navy made me, that sort of thing.
	And it's not bad stuff.
	His juvenile novels are all quite good.
	But yeah, you're right.
	I mean, the Starship Troopers is...
	Highly jingoistic, you know, the world would be better if only military veterans were allowed to vote, which frankly is probably true, but to a point.
	But, you know, there's a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interesting stuff in science fiction, very little of which is applicable at all to the world that we know.
	I mean, frankly, fantasy is probably a better preparation for understanding the world we know.
	But...
	But there was a time when it was, you know, I mean, I remember reading William Gibson for the first time, and it was just, it was so exciting and so mind-blowing, and it's probably why I went to Japan to study Japanese for a while, you know?
	The Chiba City Blues.
	But anyhow...
	But, you know, the modern science fiction is not even...
	I mean, there's no science, and it's all basically, you know, blue-haired women shrieking about oppression.
	That's all it is now.
	That sounds like reality.
	Yeah.
	Well, you have to understand that...
	All these women do in science fiction, it's almost all women now, is write about themselves.
	So it's all like, if I was Superman, if I was an astronaut, you know, and then of course it's all about how she as an astronaut was oppressed and how she conquered that oppression by being so amazingly wonderful.
	I mean, they're all the same fucking book.
	It's astonishing.
	But I thought that it was boys who read science fiction, and they're not going to be attracted to that narrative.
	No, that's because nobody reads that anymore.
	I mean, that's why boys don't read anymore.
	When they say, well, how come boys don't read?
	It's like, well, because you have a bunch of...
	Weird SJW women writing now, and nobody wants to read what they write.
	Even the girls don't really want to read what they write.
	And that's why, of course, the SJWs went after video games, because boys had retreated from reading science fiction and comics to reading video games.
	So comics has been invaded, games has been invaded, and they're all being completely wiped out in the same way.
	Which, of course, is why independents like Arkhaven and like Ethan VanSkyver and Eric July are all doing so well, because we just do what people used to do.
	In fact, three of us are together next year going to be launching a new line of comics and a new line of superheroes that are just basically returned to what people used to like.
	Thank you.
	You know, heroes, masculine heroes stopping bad guys from doing bad things.
	Yeah.
	Do you remember that time in your more naive youth?
	when you thought of yourself as a conservative, where you imagined that the market would always fix things? - I honestly never really considered myself to be a conservative.
	I was always a libertarian.
	But that's the same thing.
	I mean, for the terms of the point I'm making, it's the same thing.
	In terms of the market, yeah.
	I do remember being a free market, private sector guy.
	Definitely.
	And the thing that finally turned me against that whole thing was reading Ian Fletcher's book about free trade.
	And it just completely opened my eyes.
	And actually, I ended up coming up with...
	He had seven very powerful arguments against free trade.
	I was eventually able to articulate an even more comprehensively powerful argument against it.
	But that was really the turning point.
	Because I read his book, and you can even read some of this on my blog, I read his book, was really impressed by it, and then started applying it to what I had believed.
	You know, the Austrian economics in which I was steeped, which I believed.
	And somebody had pointed out, oh, well, you know, you really need to reread economics in one lesson.
	I'd never read it before because I was always well advanced beyond that, being an economics major.
	So I went back and read it.
	It was Henry Hazlitt, and it's kind of like the starter kit economics 101 for the conservative libertarian free marketeer.
	And I found 13 fairly significant errors in his one chapter on free trade.
	And I wrote all this out.
	It's all on the blog.
	I wrote it all out.
	And it was interesting because a lot of people, as a result, ended up turning against it as well because a number of people tried to defend it and just realized they couldn't, that it was not possible.
	I'll have to read that.
	Do you think that Hayek and von Mises were just playing their roles in the PSYOP? I've heard some of that theory.
	With Hayek, I have to admit, it's always bothered me a little bit You know, his famous work, The Road to Serfdom, it was just such a comic book compared to his regular work.
	You know, it was just so simplistic and not very nuanced compared to his normal work that it wouldn't surprise me if he got...
	Persuaded or talked into making that case.
	Mises...
	I think Mises was more likely a true believer.
	I mean, he wrote so much and worked so hard at that.
	Rothbard's the one that I think is more the...
	Rothbard I think was Lenin to Mises Marx.
	Meaning what?
	Taking stuff that was Well-intentioned, however useful to the powers that be, and then turning it into something that was like a useful alternative, you know, a useful pathway to draw the right down the road to hell.
	Okay, so Rothbard, baddie.
	I suspect.
	What really turned me against Rothbard, because of course he was one of my heroes in my youth, was I read his two-volume history of the development of economic thought.
	And I can summarize it for you in a single sentence.
	Usury is good.
	Debt is good.
	And it just took us a long time to convince the Christians to let us do it.
	Whoa!
	That's a dumbing summary, if correct.
	No, that's literally what the...
	I mean, we're talking about two massive volumes.
	We're talking about, you know, I don't know how much...
	It's well over a thousand pages.
	And that's what the history is.
	It's constant.
	The whole history is...
	This person tried to relax the rules against debt, but they were stopped, and then this person managed to allow some debt for a while, and things were good, but then we couldn't do debt anymore.
	They should just call it the history of debt and why we love it.
	I'm glad that you read it so that I didn't have to.
	Oh yeah, it's a long, long book.
	But lots of people, I mean, probably people watching this podcast, you know, think, Rothbard, he's a name, he's like, he's a great guy.
	Well yeah, but what they don't realize is that all that free trade stuff, all it comes down to is debt and migration.
	Ah, yes!
	The thing is, to be fair, we have the advantage of actually, for 200, 300 years, people discussed these things in theory.
	Whether they knew or not, regardless of what they believed or not, they didn't actually know.
	They didn't actually know how things would play out.
	We do, because we've had the opportunity to see how things have played out for the last 50 years.
	Yeah.
	So, we know that...
	Like, for example, it was astonishing to me to realize that debt was not incorporated at all into mainstream economics.
	You know, it plays no role in any of the models that they use.
	And so I have a copy of the original landmark text, Economics, written by Paul Samuelson.
	Robert Samuelson.
	Samuelson, anyhow.
	Paul Samuelson.
	He's the guy who wrote the textbook that basically turned Keynesianism into GDP and all the quantitative models that we know.
	And he's got like about two paragraphs in the entire 500 or 600 page book on debt.
	And he basically says, it doesn't matter because as long as...
	It doesn't matter whether Peter owes Paul or Paul owes Peter because of all the debts within the system anyhow.
	Which, of course, isn't even the case because of, you know, foreign debt.
	But that's it.
	And so meanwhile, now Rothbard was at least honest enough to say, hey, everything revolves around that.
	Like, the whole history of economic development is, are we okay with debt or not?
	Right.
	And so...
	I mean, that was why I was correct.
	Back in 2008, they didn't put me on the official list, but Steve Keen was kind enough to recognize me as one of the people who had seen the crisis coming and predicted it.
	And it was just because I paid attention to the death statistics.
	Which, of course, they ended up destroying after that because they realized that, oh, wait, we don't like people being able to keep track of this stuff.
	A bit like the trillion or whatever that they borrowed on the eve of 9-11.
	Well, the thing is, is that they're constantly trying to eliminate the ability of people to see what they have done.
	Like, for example, that's why all of the crime statistics now are not being reported anymore.
	You know, in the US, they've basically, the FBI has stopped collecting crime statistics in most of the major cities, including New York and Los Angeles.
	The same way in the UK and in some of the European countries, you can't figure out what the all-cause death statistics are.
	Yes!
	Because they don't want you knowing that so many vaccinated people have died of turbo cancer and strokes and heart attacks and what else.
	And they've changed it into this sort of rolling average thing so that as the years move on, it becomes harder and harder to have a reasonable comparison between now and...
	Oh yeah, it's just like when they talk about the economy.
	It's like the economy grew 2.4% versus 2.1% and they don't ever just publish the flat numbers.
	Yeah.
	And so, which is why it all just ends up becoming grist for the narrative mill, so they can run around and say, you know, immigration is good for the economy.
	And then you're like, well, okay, then great.
	Let's build a new airport.
	Well, we can't.
	We don't have any money because we need all of it to pay for putting up Kenyans in hotels.
	Yeah.
	I'd leave the Kenyans alone.
	I don't think the Kenyans are the problem.
	I don't know where your immigrants are coming from.
	I was just randomly throwing a country out there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	They could all be coming from San Marino.
	I don't know.
	They're bloody San Marinos.
	They're the pets.
	Fox, it is time for...
	My wife likes a coffee at this time.
	Coffee and a cigarette.
	She's recovering from an illness.
	I think it's very important that she has access to tobacco and caffeine.
	So I'm going to put you on pause and you can have a coffee too.
	Sounds good.
	And then we'll come back because there's loads more stuff I want to ask you.
	Okay.
	Okay, no worries.
	See you in a bit.
	So just sticking with science fiction for the moment, where do you think...
	Are all...
	The golden age of science fiction writers.
	Were they all basically bad guys engaging in some form of predictive programming and preparing us for that?
	I mean, there are obvious examples like Brave New World.
	Yeah, some of them were.
	Certainly, Arthur C. Clarke was probably the worst of them.
	His childhood's end is where the aliens just happen to look like demons from Christian mythology is pretty on the nose.
	Isaac Asimov Less so.
	He was a big advocate of central planning.
	Paul Krugman has said that his whole desire to become an economist was because of reading Asimov's foundation.
	Heinlein The original third in the Big Three was actually A.E. Van Vogt, but he's almost entirely forgotten now and was replaced in that sort of triumvirate by Robert Heinlein.
	Is the one who really pointed toward the whole sexual degradation and degeneracy that we see today.
	So I think that in general what you're saying is more or less true.
	I don't think they were writing what they were told.
	I think that they were pushed because of what they were writing.
	Right.
	Yeah, that does make...
	Sense to me.
	Who is actually worth reading?
	Well, you know, all of those authors, I mean, those three authors are worth reading in bits and pieces.
	Like, for example, The Fountains of Paradise that Arthur C. Clarke wrote is really good.
	You know, we published two of his short stories in the There Will Be War series.
	They're fantastic.
	It's really about what you're reading for.
	Are you reading for pleasure and enjoyment?
	Are you reading for edification?
	Et cetera, et cetera.
	I think the best writers writing today in the world of science fiction are Neal Stephenson, John C. Wright, and China Mieville.
	Three very different perspectives.
	You know, Mieville's a...
	I think he might actually be a liberal communist.
	I'm not sure if he's a socialist or a communist, but he's very left.
	John C. Wright is a very devout Catholic.
	And his stuff is generally much more edifying.
	But they're both excellent writers.
	And Neil Stevenson...
	Until his last two novels, I would have put him at the top.
	But I think that he's lost his fastball at this point.
	But Anathon is great.
	Anathon is a really, really good book.
	So is the one about the games.
	And what about Philip K. Dick?
	Philip K. Dick is very interesting.
	He's somewhat incoherent.
	I do think that he's probably more useful in terms of understanding the world as it is.
	What I call clown world, he called the empire that never ended.
	Which frankly is a better name for it because it's true that it's always around.
	You know, sometimes it's ruling, sometimes it's licking its wounds, but it's always around.
	And so if you want to understand the modern world, the two science fiction writers that are useful to read are Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson.
	I haven't even heard of Robert.
	Robin Anton Wilson wrote the Illuminati trilogy.
	Okay.
	He also wrote Prometheus Unbound.
	I mean, he's more or less an advocate of it.
	But he's kind of the jester.
	You might call him the jester of Clown World, in a way.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Also, his stuff would not be for your son.
	Right.
	I'll give you an example.
	He's got this absolutely hilarious passage where...
	This one character brings up the bit about Nietzsche and Nietzsche staring at the spider making its web in the moonlight and contemplating on the idea of a multiplicity or a multitude of Nietzsche's Contemplating a multitude of spiders under a multitude of moons and the other character just shrugs and says,
	Nietzsche masturbates too much.
	It was the most concise demolition.
	Of that philosophical fraud that I've ever encountered.
	I laughed helplessly.
	I remember I called one of my friends and woke him up to read him the entire passage while laughing the entire time.
	He was not happy.
	I don't believe that space is real, that outer space is...
	I just think it's all a fiction designed to make us imagine that there are worlds beyond ours and there are possibilities beyond our world.
	I think that this is it.
	I'm agnostic on that, but I'm very familiar...
	My friend Owen is very...
	He's been saying that NASA's a PSYOP designed to just basically have an excuse to...
	Funnel billions of dollars elsewhere.
	I have to admit, I was wildly skeptical when I'd first heard about that sort of thing.
	And then when I... Somebody pointed out something about the...
	I did always think that the lunar lander was a bit...
	Flimsy looking.
	Yeah.
	Just a bit.
	And then somebody pointed out that there was no physical way for the astronauts in their gear to climb through.
	Just the size was wrong.
	And I remember somebody getting violently upset over this.
	And I remember thinking, hmm.
	That's a pretty good point.
	And then there was a...
	Owen's been saying for years that rockets and satellites and stuff are just balloons.
	And I was very skeptical until I saw this video of a launch.
	And it started going up.
	And then it actually went down a little bit.
	Just like a balloon when it's going up.
	And I thought...
	Dammit, it's at least possible that he's correct.
	So I would say that I'm agnostic on the question.
	I don't feel like I have enough information, but I will say that considering the amount of lies that we've been told with regards to everything from evolution to history, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find out that Reality is very, very, very different than we're presently told that it is.
	Well, they mock us, don't they?
	I mean, what was the name in the rebooted Star Trek?
	Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who was named after Picard, the Belgian, who went up in the early 20th century, I think, went up in this balloon.
	There's a lot of little things like that that I think are indicative, but I don't regard them as proof.
	I mean, it may sound funny considering that I'm known for being very skeptical and for disproving a fair number of things, whether it's free trade or evolution or whatever.
	I just generally don't stake an opinion until I can mathematically prove something.
	I've never looked into it.
	Now, I will say that I have written a very, very funny script for a movie called We Never Went to the Moon.
	That will get made.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's hangover-level funny.
	I would say that if they ever make that, if it ever gets made, it will be the funniest movie since the first Hangover.
	That movie will only get made when After Christ has returned, I think.
	Oh yeah, I learned my lesson from the Rebels Run debacle where, you know, there's a major scam that stole a bunch of money that we had raised to make a movie.
	And after that it was kind of like, okay, I think that's a pretty strong message, to use a science fiction metaphor.
	This space is not allowed.
	Like, you are not allowed to land here.
	So I was like...
	Yeah.
	It's not like I particularly want to make movies.
	I'm not a movies guy, I'm a book guy.
	And so it was something that we've been encouraged to get into, to try, and then it's just like, yeah, maybe not.
	So my theory on this, for what it's worth, is that one of the functions of science fiction was to promote the idea of Interstellar travel and Star Trek, we know that Gene Roddenberry was A, a Satanist, and B, he was pushing the United Nations, he was pushing world government, which is what Star Trek was really all about.
	I mean, Star Trek is obviously about world government and that sort of thing.
	I always hated Star Trek, to be honest.
	I watched the original series in reruns when I was a kid.
	I always found it kind of creepy.
	I really loved the original Star Wars and then hated what they did to it.
	It's certainly possible that the whole genre was essentially created to push impressionable minds towards that unquestioning, you know, that I fucking love science meme.
	They wanted to create the kind of people who would think that way.
	Well, that film, is it with Matt Damon, where he's going to science the shit out of...
	He's stuck on the moon or Mars or somewhere.
	Oh yeah, The Martian.
	The Martian, yeah.
	He's going to science the shit out of his situation and use the science to kind of science his way out of trouble.
	Right.
	Now that was a useful appropriation of a mindset that had been created in part through science fiction both in books and movie form.
	Although sometimes I think that the one reason that the The whole SJW thing was utilized to destroy it was because, you know, oftentimes the Frankenstein's monster gets out of control of the mad scientist.
	And so, you know, when suddenly they're starting to talk about how, well, you know, you can't really travel faster than light, and so basically all this stuff is impossible...
	That sort of tended to work against the idea of science can do anything and we're all going to go to outer space and live in this shiny, sexy, secular utopia that was envisioned back in the 50s.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	Are you with me that aliens are just essentially rebadged demonic entities?
	No, I think that it's probably the case in some circumstances, but I see no reason why there's not room for both.
	Okay, so you think that there are galaxies far, far away and stuff?
	No, not necessarily.
	Well, yes, but not necessarily in the material sense.
	You know, if you look at...
	Personally, I think that the quantum world points towards the spiritual world.
	The quantum model potentially points towards the spiritual world, and in which case...
	I mean, it's pretty clear that there's a supernatural dimension and that there's a natural dimension.
	There's levels, right?
	And so what we don't know is how many levels there are.
	I mean, you don't have to imagine a multiverse where absolutely everything exists, and every time you decide to go to the bathroom or not, you split off a new universe.
	You don't have to go to that level of nonsense.
	To hypothesize that maybe there are, instead of galaxies far far away, there are dimensions that are not necessarily passable to us that are to other entities.
	For example, I was actually thinking about writing a story connecting the concept of quantum entanglement to the Eucharist.
	That would be one theoretical explanation for why evil is so obsessed with the host.
	If there was an actual direct line, forget transubstantiation, what if it's a direct line to the spiritual entity, the spiritual aspect of Jesus Christ himself?
	Right?
	You call it transubstantiation.
	We call it quantum entanglement.
	I'm not saying that's the case at all.
	I'm just saying that you could hypothesize and come up with some pretty interesting concepts by making that hypothetical connection.
	Yeah.
	Well, you're a Christian.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	When did that happen for you?
	Well, I was raised in a Christian household.
	We went to a Baptist church.
	I was duly baptized around the age of 10 or so.
	But I don't consider myself to have been a Christian then because I was just doing what I was told.
	I consciously became a Christian and was baptized as an adult at the age of 27.
	Oh, the age when rock stars die.
	Yeah, basically.
	Maybe you died to the world.
	In some respects, I suppose, yeah.
	But, you know, that's why I do think it's important.
	I mean, I think it's very important for people to be able to come right out and say that Jesus Christ is Lord, that we live in a fallen world ruled by evil.
	I'm not hiding, you know, I want it to be very, very clear.
	I'm not playing any games with the word Christian.
	I'm not like Dawkins, a cultural Christian, any of that sort of thing.
	Just because sometimes my fiction, sometimes my comics and stuff, they can be pretty dark.
	But I believe that Christianity is fundamentally a relatively dark perception of the world, model of the world.
	You know, and oftentimes it's not portrayed that way.
	It's portrayed as all, you know, lambs and hugs and that sort of thing.
	And there is definitely that aspect of the church and of Christianity, but it's very, very far from the whole and doesn't even begin to encompass the evil that's in the world, that rules the world, of which we see signs every single freaking day.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, I'm with you on the darkness.
	If somebody was trying to sell Christianity to you on a sort of rational level, okay, so there's this thing that...
	I think the problem, the funny thing is, people talk about the problem of evil as if it's a problem for...
	And that gets it so backwards because Christianity relies upon the existence of evil because it doesn't need to exist if evil doesn't exist.
	And Christianity, Jesus Christ, is the answer to the problem of evil.
	And when you look at the, you know, it was funny, I was doing a podcast back, you remember when Pizzagate first broke out?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I was doing a podcast with Stefan Molyneux and Mike Cernovich.
	And at the time, both of them were agnostic.
	I don't know if that's still the case in both cases.
	But regardless, at the time, they were both agnostic.
	And we were talking about...
	Some of the revelations, which, of course, all of which were, not all of which, but most of which were absolutely true.
	I mean, the whole idea that it was debunked is just total nonsense.
	But both of them, I thought it was very striking, said, you know...
	I've never believed in this stuff, but it's getting hard to continue to not believe in it.
	And if I've got to pick a side, I'm definitely going with the Christians.
	Because if they're right, the awfulness...
	Basically, they're saying Christians are not clear enough on how awful the other side is.
	And so that's something that I think that we need to do a better job of doing is telling people, first of all, there's no fence.
	You can't sit on a fence.
	And what you're allowing yourself to do by refusing to bend the knee and accept Jesus Christ is you're allowing yourself to be used as a pawn, as an unwitting pawn and foot soldier by...
	Things that are far worse than you would ever want to imagine or believe.
	I think that that realization has been responsible for a lot of people turning to Christ in the last few years.
	I agree.
	And it's also responsible for, especially among the younger generation, they're much stronger, better, harder Christians than us.
	We grew up in a time that was fat and happy.
	You didn't need Jesus the way that you obviously need him now.
	Because a lot of the bad stuff was hidden.
	And, you know, now it's so in your face and so undeniable.
	And, you know, the way that they're running around screaming that 2 plus 2 equals 37.
	And if you don't believe 2 plus 2 equals 37, then you're a terrible, awful person who shouldn't have a job and shouldn't have a family and shouldn't have anywhere to live.
	I mean...
	What can you do?
	What can you conclude except for, I don't want anything to do with that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I was thinking about my late grandmother who died.
	She lived to a hundred.
	And when was she born?
	She's probably born in about 1913.
	Okay, so she was a baby in the First World War and she would have lived through the Second World War.
	But although the world wasn't perfect, it was perfectly possible for her generation to go through the world and Not really need Christianity in the way that we need it now.
	Absolutely true.
	I mean, I'm not sure that...
	You know, there's some people who say we choose to live in the time we live and that, you know...
	We're old souls.
	I mean, you know, that takes you into sort of realms which are really outside Christianity.
	But there are those who say that, yeah, we're here because we chose to be.
	We wanted to have a ringside seat when it all kicked off.
	I don't think so.
	But I do think that we're in the times we're in.
	Yeah.
	That's what Gandalf tells Frodo.
	Yeah, but Tolkien was a wise philosopher.
	And that's one of the reasons, of course, why Amazon is absolutely defecating upon his legacy.
	They want to destroy our love for Tolkien the same way that they destroyed our love for Star Wars or Batman.
	They're doing such a good job.
	Well done, Jeff Bezos.
	He's really killing that franchise.
	Well, the funny thing is that he's killing the franchise, but he's not killing the books.
	And if anything, it's actually making people return more to the books because they realize that...
	I usually refer to Hollywood as the Hellmouth, kind of a Buffy the Vampire term.
	But not only can the Hellmouth only mock and destroy, but its power in that regard is really illusory because it's always going to pale before the comparison to the real thing.
	Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings are going to be around for millennia, and no one's going to remember the Rings of Power You know, five years from now.
	But, except, you realise that the dark side loves Lord of the Rings.
	I mean, it's one of their instruction manuals.
	In some ways, yes, but the point is that it still communicates, I mean, as Tolkien himself said, it is a fundamentally Catholic Christian work.
	You know?
	Yeah.
	Where are you on the Catholics?
	Well, I have deep respect for the traditional Catholic Church.
	Obviously, I don't think that fake Pope Francis is even a Christian.
	I mean, like all human organizations, it's susceptible to infiltration and subversion that obviously happened and was culminated in Vatican II and so forth.
	But my grandfather was a Catholic.
	I've got Catholic family members.
	And when I say Catholic, I mean hardcore, certificationist, you know, types.
	Yeah.
	And I have tremendous respect for them.
	I think at the end of the day, what matters is your relationship with Jesus Christ, not the particular dogma that happens to have attached itself to that sort of thing.
	That's why I always describe myself as a non-denominational Christian.
	I think technically, I'm probably still on the rolls of the Southern Baptist Church that we joined 25 years ago.
	But I don't even live on the same continent as that.
	But, you know, at the end of the day, light knows light and dark knows dark.
	And, you know, just the same way that that That monk, that Father Seraphim, looked at you and knew what you were and what you could be.
	I think that the same thing is true of the other side as well.
	If people hate you because you're a Christian, you're probably on the right path.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I'm with you on what you said that it is about your relationship with Jesus.
	I look at all the different denominations.
	Somebody told me on my substat that Catholicism isn't a denomination.
	I don't know what that means.
	But I see good people, really good people, good Christians, In all the different branches of the church.
	And it pains me to see the sort of the schismatic hissy fits that people have.
	Yeah, I don't care at all about the schisms.
	I mean, I don't care about the, you know, if somebody's Orthodox, if somebody's Southern Baptist, if somebody's, you know, traditional Catholic, certificationist Catholic.
	I don't care.
	At all.
	To me, it's always in, what are you doing, if anything, to further the kingdom of God?
	If you're spending all of your time Defending your own dogma and attacking other people's dogma, I'm pretty sure you're missing the point.
	If you're somebody who's out there helping the poor, if you're out there feeding the poor, healing the sick, if you're speaking the truth, if you're evangelizing, I mean, it's been said for years, buy your fruits, you will know them.
	What are your fruits?
	Yeah.
	And, you know, I don't pretend to be, I don't think that I'm a good Christian.
	I know I'm not.
	But even if I'm a bad one, I am one.
	Yeah.
	And I know that.
	Yeah, I like that.
	I look at that.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, and, you know, we are who we are.
	And sometimes the best that you can do isn't very much.
	But you just have to speak as much truth as you understand, and you have to do as much as you can bring yourself to do.
	And if you want to get hung up on You know, infant baptism or whether women should put something on their heads or whatever.
	I mean, I have no time or interest in that.
	I think all of that stuff is just encrustations.
	Yeah.
	Any organization, a football team, a sewing club, a choir, any human organization, given any amount of time, immediately starts adding on all this extraneous stuff that has nothing to do with the core purpose of the group.
	And there's no reason to believe that any church would have ever been any different.
	Yeah.
	And so if you look at that and you say, okay, well here's a group that's been around for a thousand years.
	We know that there's going to be some encrustations.
	What could they possibly be?
	Probably the stuff that wasn't there.
	Also, if you're at all into history like I am, In fact, the shirt I'm wearing is actually our Castellia History shirt.
	We have a line of leather books.
	Every two months, we do a new leather book that's history-related.
	You can see some of the books behind me, in fact.
	One of the books that we did, we did a two-volume Cambridge Medieval History, Volumes 1 and 2.
	And we also have the Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire coming out, which is going to be fantastic.
	But we've been serializing On the Castellia Library Substack, we always do a serialization of a history book.
	So right now we're serializing the 1911 edition, the unabridged Cambridge Medieval History that J.B. Burry edited.
	And there's so much information there on the early formation of the Christian churches And when you see how we got to where we are, when you see how the Catholic Church got to where it is,
	when you're aware of the difference between the Nicene Creed and the Niceno-Constantopolitan Creed and the Jerusalem Creed and all these things, you realize that a lot of the stuff that people are arguing about and talking about is all stuff that was centuries after the fact.
	Right.
	Yes, I'm very tempted by that book, because am I right in thinking that a lot of really good scholarly history has been suppressed?
	Oh, definitely.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the thing is, suppressed...
	Rendered inaccessible by societal dumbing down.
	I mean, both.
	Ron Unz does brilliant work in unearthing some of the stuff from the early 20th century and mid 20th century that was suppressed.
	Some of the biggest names, some of the equivalents of our biggest public intellectual figures um from like 1930 1940 uh in this in america have been completely eliminated i didn't even know the names and i'm very well read you know but they were because their perspective and because their views became out of sync with the mainstream they were completely disappeared so
	what were they saying these people Oh, I don't recall, but I think, I mean, a lot of them had, basically, didn't go along with whatever the current narrative was, whether it was regards to, you know, economics, immigration, Israel, etc., etc.
	You know, they were, basically, you know, it was the equivalent, it was a less nasty But more comprehensive version of what happened to, say, David Irving.
	You know, there weren't any court cases, nobody got bankrupted, etc., etc.
	Their stuff just all fell out of print, and their columns just suddenly ended up getting cut by the newspapers that used to carry them and that sort of thing.
	Before the internet, it was a lot easier to disappear people's work.
	If the mainstream publishers didn't publish it, if the mainstream newspapers didn't run it, and the mainstream magazines didn't continue to publish you, you were done.
	I didn't have to do anything else.
	There were what we would now call awake intellectuals throughout time.
	There were these voices that knew what we know.
	There always have been.
	And that's why it's so eye-opening when you read this stuff and you're like, whoa...
	Hilaire Baloch, for example.
	G.K. Chesterton sometimes.
	You read the stuff that they write, and whereas 15 years ago you might have said, well, their views are certainly outdated.
	And, you know, now you're like, wow, they knew what they were talking about.
	Right.
	And so, you know, that's why I think it's...
	You know, like, because a lot of people don't...
	The thing is, a lot of the information is right there in front of you.
	Like, for example, what...
	Think about this.
	Rome conquered dozens, if not hundreds of kingdoms, right?
	Right.
	Rome was defeated by a number of other enemies and foes over time.
	You know, Germans, Parthians, whatever, right?
	So, what was it about Carthage that made them so determined to wipe it out entirely?
	You pronounce it Carthage.
	What's the proper one?
	Carthage.
	Carthage.
	Okay, well, Carthage.
	Then I'm probably saying it wrong.
	Carthage, wasn't that the seat of the Phoenician Empire?
	Correct.
	And so, if you think about it, what provoked Rome to such outrage and disgust?
	That they treated, they uncharacteristically treated a defeated foe kind of the way that the Spaniards treated the Aztecs.
	Yeah.
	Like, whatever was happening there was obviously so awful and repugnant to the Romans that they stamped it out to the greatest extent of their ability.
	Yeah.
	And so I think that what Philip K. Dick describes as the empire that never ended is it was there in Carthage.
	I think it was there in Technoctlon.
	I think it's here in the West today.
	And that's that supernatural intelligence that you've said has been guiding, you know, that you can see the hand throughout history.
	Is your theory that the Phoenicians were goodies?
	No, not at all.
	The exact opposite.
	So the Romans in this scenario are goodies?
	Yes.
	I think the Romans reacted to what they discovered in Carthage in much the same way that the Spaniards reacted when they saw all the human sacrifice taking place.
	I think we know, don't we, that the Phoenicians were masters of the sea trade, and they probably had been to America years before Columbus, if he existed.
	They were all over the world.
	They were very secretive, they were very powerful.
	Right, and that's why, for example, you've got conspiracy theorists like Miles Mathis who talks about what I call clown world, he would refer to as the Phoenician Navy.
	Yeah.
	Of course, he seems to think that everyone with a title in England is a member.
	He does, doesn't he?
	Yeah, you can't take...
	I mean...
	Again, as with all these folks, they have a little bit of truth and they have a fair amount of...
	Because everybody extrapolates.
	Everybody takes what information they know and then they extrapolate from it.
	Sometimes those extrapolations are correct, sometimes they're not.
	And it's impossible to...
	Unless you have other evidence that you can confirm or reject it with, you just can't know.
	So I don't pretend to know.
	I make no pretense of trying to know who is what or claim to understand more than I understand other than, you know, you know it's out there.
	You can see the consequences.
	You can see the fruits.
	And, you know, it's bad.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So, big picture stuff.
	I wanted to get you on this.
	Yes.
	What do you think?
	Give me the overview of what's happening and when it all began and who are the baddies.
	Well, I think it all began, obviously, back...
	Well, first of all, I think that the Garden of Eden and all that sort of thing is...
	Not as complete as, let's say, most Christians would like to think.
	I think that there was like, I think there are probably entire societies that were already there and already around and so forth.
	You know, whether the whether the seven days represent seven, you know, seven millennia or seven eras, or I have no idea.
	I don't, I don't find it very profitable to You know, invent an explanation and then cling to it.
	No one's going to hold you to account on that point because everyone's got their own theories.
	Right, but my point is everyone's got a theory.
	Nobody knows.
	And so, but obviously at some point the evil supernatural ruler got control.
	And that's, you know, Jesus specifically referred to the prince of this world.
	Yeah.
	They talked specifically about the ruler.
	So we know that the world is ruled by an immortal supernatural evil.
	That's beyond question.
	And obviously, there's not exactly a shortage of evidence to that.
	That's why people are like, why does God allow this?
	Why does this bad thing to happen?
	Why does God allow that bad thing?
	Because the world is ruled by an evil supernatural serial killer.
	This is not difficult.
	Who isn't the creator God.
	The God that they're talking about is a small g God.
	And we can get into the whys and wherefores of how he got control.
	The Lord of the Rings offers one theory.
	There's many, many other theories, etc.
	He found a ring.
	They forged a ring.
	Right, right.
	So I doubt that's the correct one.
	But, you know, you never know.
	But the point is that throughout...
	The centuries, throughout the millennia, there have been people who serve that.
	People who serve that power.
	There are people who are born into serving that power.
	There are people who are born into it and then reject it.
	There are people who were not born into it and ran towards it out of greed and ambition and so forth.
	But that's why we have all of these...
	This even relates to something as mundane as the P. Diddy thing.
	You know, I mean, you could actually write a book called The Theology of the P. Diddy Scandal, and it would probably be more relevant than 98% of all books ever written on theology.
	You know, because it's just the, you know, he's a poor, you know, a poor black young man who was offered A ring.
	And did all the terrible things that he had to do in order to be granted his ostentatious, supposedly lifestyle of the rich and famous.
	And then of course, and this is why I think that fantasy is a better model of the world than science fiction.
	Because, you know, as the example of Susan Cooper in The Dark is Rising shows, sooner or later, every servant of the dark gets thrown down from the high horse.
	That's what's happening to P. Diddy right now.
	You know, and it'll happen to, you know, maybe Soros will die before he actually gets thrown up.
	But, you know, you can see who some of the servants of evil are.
	I mean, you can see it with P. Diddy.
	You can see it with David Geffen.
	You can see it with George Soros.
	You can see it with Bill Gates.
	I mean, they all serve the same power.
	Yes.
	They all worship the same God, even though they don't really consider it a God, and they don't really consider what they do to be worship, necessarily, but it's what it amounts to.
	I'm just reading Deuteronomy at the moment, and there's a really hardcore section of Deuteronomy where God says, through Moses, he says, look, this is the deal.
	If your wife starts saying to you, there are these other gods that I kind of fancy worshipping, your duty is to kill your wife.
	And if the town where you live starts following the ways of these rival junior gods and putting children in the fire and putting out Asherah poles...
	Then your duty is to wipe out this town, destroy it completely and leave its ruins there as an example of what happens when you follow these gods.
	And you read this stuff and you think, you can see why Marcion came up with his heresy about the god being kind of the sort of an evil entity really, the god of the Old Testament.
	But it's not that, in my view, it's god.
	It abhors the kind of things that people worshipping these junior gods like Baal and Moloch did.
	They did terrible things.
	They sacrificed their children.
	The thing is, it's obviously no different than when you find a calf with hoof-and-mouth disease.
	They kill the whole herd.
	I mean, that's what is being described there.
	Yeah, if you believe in foot...
	I don't believe any of these foot and mouth...
	I'm very suspicious about the whole kind of...
	Yeah, yeah, I know, I understand, but I'm just giving you an example.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And so...
	But yeah, it's because I don't think that, you know...
	Their dream of a boot on the face forever is awful.
	Can I just briefly flashback to the Romans?
	Sure.
	The Romans worshipped a multitude of gods.
	Sort of, but the reality is Romans didn't really worship anything.
	Okay.
	They were a good example of what I think you'd call the virtuous pagans.
	So you're quite pro-Rome?
	Yeah, definitely.
	Interesting.
	I mean, I don't think it's an accident that they rose to the heights that they did, because I think that they rose to the heights that they did in part because of their relative to other people, righteousness.
	So do you think God...
	I mean, obviously the children of Israel were God's chosen people, and they were contemporaneous with the Romans, at least in the later period.
	But you think God was okay with the Romans?
	Well, I mean, no, I don't think it has to do with that.
	I think it has to do with whether you are personally connected to God or not.
	He's set up a series of rules that we will call nature.
	And if you live in accordance with those rules, by your own preference, by accident, whatever, for whatever reason, you're going to do much better than if you live in violation with them.
	Yes.
	And so I think that the Romans, I think that that's what virtuous pagan means.
	Somebody who lives properly in accordance with the rules of nature, regardless of Why?
	Yes.
	And so if you look at a lot of the Roman laws, we see them as very harsh.
	If you were a son and you talk back to your father, he could execute you.
	Tell that to my sons.
	But imagine what that would do for your culture.
	Imagine how disciplined that culture must have been.
	For example, I actually drew upon this in one of my fantasy novels, and I actually had to soften it a bit in order to make it more credible to the modern reader.
	But this Roman legate, the general, had given an order that there was to be no single combats.
	He told all the cavalry, the knights, no single combats.
	And then one of the knights rode out and engaged in a single combat with one of the enemy leaders.
	And then he killed him.
	The enemy broke and ran because of it.
	And then the Romans rode them down while they were retreating and wiped them out.
	And so everybody was like, you know, everybody thought this guy was the hero, right?
	And the legate calls the whole legion together, says, you broke, you know, you violated an order and ordered him decapitated immediately in front of the whole legion.
	It was his son.
	Wow.
	I didn't know that story.
	And that was, to the Romans, that was the height of virtue.
	You know, no excuses, no exceptions.
	This guy violated, knowingly violated a clear order.
	Didn't matter that it helped them win the victory, etc.
	Didn't matter that it was his son.
	He was an officer of the legion and he violated the general's order.
	That's not very libertarian.
	No, not at all.
	But you can see why a society where that behavior was regarded as a virtue would go on to conquer half the known world.
	It's not like you had to violate the order.
	You know?
	There's no, like, pressing need for him or anything like that.
	Or even where, you know, the example of Cincinnatus, they basically have to drag him, like, drag him to the Capitol, say, okay, we need you to be dictator and help us defeat the enemy.
	So he goes and defeats the enemy, and he's like, okay, I'm going back to my farm, I'll see you later.
	I mean, can you imagine anyone in this day and age?
	Can you imagine a Boris Johnson doing that?
	In his dreams.
	Boris Johnson, obviously, he wouldn't be able to defeat the enemy in the first place.
	But the point is, is there any chance that any leader in the UK or the US would give up a scrap of power without having their fingers pried from it first?
	It's a totally different mindset, a totally different perspective.
	It has nothing directly to do with Christianity or religion, but it does have to do with the overall virtue of the society in line with the rules of nature.
	Yes.
	It's very interesting hearing you say that, because there's a lot of Christians who would say, no one comes to the Father except through me, and that essentially the deal is that everyone who's not a Christian is going to burn in hell.
	Well, and maybe they will.
	Maybe all of the, well, I don't know what the rules are for people that live before Jesus Christ.
	Well, that's another complication, yeah.
	But the point is, but here's the thing, if time doesn't matter, then when you choose, before you die, after you die, whatever, you're going to, God knows what your heart is.
	I called this out in a book I wrote back in 2008 called The Irrational Atheist.
	The Bible never says that God knows everything.
	Never once.
	The only place that there's any even apparent statement that God knows everything is a direct statement that God knows everything about the human heart.
	And so, you know, whether it's Scipio Africanus or Julius Caesar, even though they lived and died before Jesus did, God can take one look at them, and he knows whether they are a Christian or not.
	Right.
	And it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it turned out that there were a lot of Noble, pagan, pre-Christians who might come out of it better in the comparison than we modern day Christians.
	Well, then Pope Francis, definitely.
	Yeah.
	I've set the bar pretty low there.
	I was going to say.
	Justin Welby.
	But the thing is that, you know, we don't know.
	We can only do as best we can with what we understand.
	And the important thing is to be intellectually humble enough to not rely upon either our own intelligence or the conclusions of intelligent men of the past.
	Which is, frankly, what most religious dogma is.
	The stuff that they claim is, this is definitely true, and then you go and you look into it, and you're like, oh, okay, this is actually something that a very well-spoken, well-regarded, smart priest concluded, extrapolated and concluded in the year 700s.
	Doesn't mean it's true.
	Yeah.
	Yes, well, you see, this is one of the things, it's quite difficult being a, what would you call this?
	I hate to use the phrase conspiracy theorist, but awake?
	What's the, have you got a preferred term?
	I don't really, because I don't really think in those terms.
	Okay, but...
	See, here's the thing that I find a little frustrating, is that most people, and when I say most people, I mean nearly everybody, is so desperate to put...
	Labels on things and categorize things.
	Basically, so many people think essentially binary.
	And able-ardian, it is so or it is not.
	And for those of us who think probabilistically...
	I think this is more likely to be true than that.
	It's impossible to square that circle.
	I think this is one reason why...
	I was talking to Milo Yiannopoulos once, and I said, why is it that you're so much more disliked than I am?
	And he said, it's because nobody has any clue what you're talking about most of the time.
	You know?
	He's like, I understand you.
	I understand what you're saying.
	He said, but honestly, most people don't.
	Because, you know, it's just like when we're talking about what should we call ourselves.
	And I'm like...
	What is this us of which you speak?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Because even though we share one particular perspective over here, there might be 37 other perspectives that we don't.
	And there's nothing wrong with that.
	I'm not saying you can't be...
	I see your point, but if we have to define every single term, we're going to have very, very long, drawn-out bits, whereas you kind of know what I mean.
	What I'm saying is, if you are sceptical...
	I would...
	I mean, the way that I describe myself is a Christian nationalist.
	Okay.
	Yeah, well, I mean, whatever.
	But I suppose it's not quite relevant to the point I'm making, which is that the reason that...
	One of the things that has happened to me in the last five years is that I've become sceptical of everything, but particularly sceptical of authority and institutions, because authorities are human clay.
	And I encounter some Christians who...
	They'll quote...
	Augustine, or they'll quote Calvin, or whoever their favourite role model is.
	The Apostle Paul.
	Paul, yeah, exactly.
	And they seem to think that the rules that they apply to every other aspect of our world, history, science, and whatever, somehow doesn't apply in the realm of Christian history.
	But how can that be?
	How can that possibly be?
	Well, the only way that can possibly be is that God is maintaining a very active hand and shaping everything so that it's absolutely completely and reliably true.
	But that's observably not the case because some of these things are not reliably true.
	So ergo that common implication is not correct.
	Yeah.
	Because that's all it is.
	They won't even articulate that specifically because they know on some level it sounds ridiculous.
	But that's really what they believe.
	I wanted to get a bit more lowbrow because I do consider you one of my touchstones in terms of...
	Well, for example, what do you make of Milo?
	I think he's a tormented soul.
	Yeah.
	I like him a lot.
	He's a friend.
	Well, I love Muller, even though he's absolutely shit about getting back.
	He's so sketchy.
	I tried a couple of times to get him to do a podcast, and he'd be brilliant.
	He'd be absolutely brilliant, because he's such a great conversationalist.
	And he's got a very, very good mind.
	But...
	I mean, I sense that he's been on a similar journey to my own.
	I mean, he's one of the few people that I knew from the world of journalism before my awakening who's been on the journey that I have.
	Yeah, I think that Milo is much more tempted by some of the aspects of that particular world than I am.
	Yeah.
	And I think that's hard.
	I would find it a lot harder to accept some of the rejection and the cancellations and the constant criticism and so forth.
	A lot harder to deal with if I cared about it at all.
	But I'm fortunate in that I've just...
	I mean, for example, when that editor told me, you're never going to be on the op-ed page, I wasn't angry.
	I wasn't upset.
	I was like, oh, that's good to know.
	Don't waste any time pursuing that.
	That's probably not a normal reaction for somebody like you or me or Milo who was...
	Yeah, but I would say that if you are of the mindset where your only priority is the truth...
	Then it suddenly becomes very, very easy.
	Because like if somebody said to me, okay, James, we're going to give you 10 billion.
	And from now on, we own your ass.
	But hey, 10 billion, what's not to like?
	I'd go, I think about it for about five seconds.
	And I would not, I would definitely not tell my wife or my kids because they'd be like, you are just such a dick, dad.
	But it all depends on what you know.
	I mean, for example, if I told my wife and told her that I had taken the deal, she'd divorce me.
	I mean, she might not even divorce me.
	She might not even say anything.
	She would almost certainly just walk right out the door, probably without saying anything.
	But my wife is also hardcore enough that she's gotten kicked off Twitter twice on her own.
	Okay.
	But I get what you're saying, but the point is that you know what the price is of that $10 billion.
	Yeah.
	So do I. So does my wife.
	A lot of people don't.
	The kind of people that went to the P. Diddy parties, it's like, okay, so I've got to give one blowjob and then I'll get a record contract.
	They were happy to do it.
	But it wasn't just the one blowjob, was it?
	No, it never is.
	And also, not only that, but it's the first step in a road to complete and utter soul destruction.
	And so, you know, I think with Milo, One thing that we both share that you probably don't is that we both have had a foot or more into that world.
	You know, I was on, I was a, you know, professional recording artist on Wax Tracks Records, which probably means nothing to you.
	But it was a fairly, a fairly well known gay record label that is somewhat notorious for its historical over the topness.
	Some of our other label mates were bands like Ministry, KMFDM, My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult, the KLF. I was never that far.
	Fortunately, because my band never wanted to go on tour, we never got really into any of that lifestyle significantly.
	But it was there.
	You could see it.
	And Milo, I think, probably got a bit deeper in.
	But he has...
	for whatever reason he has enough of a connection to to God or enough of a sense of right and wrong that that part of it you know he's a lot more pulled into I think and so that's what's difficult what what level can you get to in music without having to pay the terrible price Sounds like you tested it to the edge.
	To be honest, I was young enough.
	We didn't know what we were doing.
	We just happened to be kind of fortunate in that we were all from a very different social class than they realized.
	We were all well-to-do suburbanites.
	I remember we went out to dinner once at a nice restaurant and we were arguing over the wine and the vice president of the label said, I don't even know what's happening.
	I thought we signed a techno industrial act and we got a bunch of wine connoisseurs, you know?
	And so, and like one of our drummer, who's actually hugely successful now, he, we're driving past this gay bar and there's a bunch of, it was like closing time.
	So there are a bunch of them standing on the sidewalk and the clientele.
	And he made a very, let's say, not politically correct comment about them.
	And fortunately, we were in two different cars.
	So the vice president says, you know, Mike, Jim and Danny are partners.
	Like the guys in the other car, the two top executives.
	He goes, oh, well, yeah, I know they're business partners.
	I mean, that was how clueless some of us were at the time.
	But fortunately, we all just really liked recording music.
	None of us had a strong desire to perform on stage or be rock stars or anything like that.
	And so when they were trying to put this tour together in Europe for us, we were like...
	Yeah, we're not going.
	They're like, what?
	We're like, yeah, we have no desire to tour or play live or anything like that.
	So we were never really going to get pushed to that level because we weren't even willing to play the normal game, much less the power game.
	I think it's sometimes hard to remember Just how desperate most of us are in our youths to get on.
	Because the whole narrative, everything around you, the stories you're told in the movies, stories you're told in literature, it's all about rising above your current status and kind of...
	And in the world.
	And doing whatever you need to do.
	Doing whatever you need to do.
	Exactly.
	And that's part of the problem because what they do is just they offer...
	It's basically...
	What they do is they test you for susceptibility.
	So for example, like in our case, we did get that in that, you know, they take you out, you go to parties, you go to the VIP rooms and stuff, and then there's always, you know, there's always like, you know, they make drugs available to you, they make, they make, you know, oh, you should meet this girl, you know, that kind of thing.
	And, you know, we were just kind of fortunate in that, None of us had any interest in drugs, except for, well, no, two of the guys did, but they didn't have interest in, like, social drugs, you know what I mean?
	And so, you know, so we were just kind of like, ah, no thanks.
	And then that's why so many people don't know about anything about how it works, is because they get, they're not susceptible to whatever the offer is.
	And so they don't even realize it's been made.
	They don't even realize.
	I was talking to a friend in business, and he twice got invited to a specific event that would have been the first step.
	And both times he was just like, why would I want to go there?
	No, I'm not.
	No, thanks.
	And, you know, looking back years later, he's like, oh, okay.
	Because he's like, how come I didn't get, you know, I had all these things I had all I was, I was perfectly well suited for this kind of success and that kind of success.
	How come I never got handed any of that success that like, like with you?
	You're a much more talented writer than a lot of the journalists out there.
	There's no question.
	But You didn't take the bait.
	You got to take the bait and then eventually after you are hooked, then you get the conscious, you need to do this to do that.
	It never starts out that way.
	It always starts off like, hey kid, do you want to try a puff of this for free?
	And if you say no, then you're not on the ride.
	Yeah, I keep, occasionally rather, I look back on my past and try and remember what occasions there might have been where I was being offered stuff and I wasn't being aware of it.
	I think the most basic, I think my failure initially in their eyes was that I just wouldn't write to order.
	Right, that's all they, they don't, it's not like they, they don't want people who don't want it.
	For you, it was, will you write to order?
	I mean, in my case, it was so obvious.
	I mean, to put it in perspective.
	My personality is such that it's pretty well recognized that I don't play well with others.
	I was supposed to go to the Naval Academy because my family has been associated with the US military and the Marines going back to the Revolutionary War.
	And my uncle, the general at the time, said, yeah, don't make him go there.
	He'll be kicked out within 24 hours.
	You know, so if they know that you're a hopeless case, they're more likely to just like, you know, do your own thing.
	And if you have too much success, we'll just take it away from you.
	Yeah.
	You see, this is where I think God must surely have come in.
	I think for whatever reason, maybe God wanted to protect me.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, that's what God does.
	And that's why it's important to resist your temptations and remain in a good place with them so that he can protect you.
	Yeah.
	Because basically, God's like, hey, yeah, I'll protect you, but you've got to do the right thing.
	You've got to be in a reasonable place.
	And you can take yourself out from under that umbrella and And then usually you get kicked in the teeth pretty good.
	Because the evil hates you.
	I mean, that's the main thing that every Christian has to understand is that the devil and all of his servants hate you.
	And you can't understand it.
	Even when you're just a baby Christian, you don't have any understanding of anything.
	They can pick it up.
	And they hate it.
	I couldn't figure out why I was so hated by the people in science fiction right from the get-go.
	And they literally hated me because I was healthy and athletic.
	Because they're so given over to their evil that it literally affects the way that they look and it affects their bodies.
	You look at a picture of them and it looks like the cantina in Star Wars.
	And that's the result of just...
	Diving into the fetid swamp of evil and allowing it to transform your body and your mind and your soul.
	Because it's all connected.
	That's why Noah Yuval Harari looks like he does.
	Exactly.
	He was Martin Van Krevel's best student.
	Martin talks about him fondly.
	He talks about this guy who writes about him in his biography, about this amazing, intelligent student stuff.
	But look at what he's become.
	I mean, he barely looks human now.
	No, he doesn't.
	So when he was a young man, was he a kind of healthy-looking...
	I think he was always probably inclined to be on the skinny dweeby side, but he wasn't the alien freaky looking creature he is now.
	Yes.
	I mean, the whole thing is, you know, humanity must perish.
	You're like, well, no wonder you hate humanity.
	Look at you.
	It's funny because if you want to read something funny, look up on my blog.
	Dr.
	Christopher Hallpike critiques one of Harari's books or pieces.
	I can't remember which.
	And, I mean, it's a prison gang rape of a critique.
	Oh, I like a prison gang rape of a review.
	That sounds great.
	It's so...
	It is impossible.
	I don't even pay any attention to anything Harari does, says or writes after reading that.
	It is impossible to take him seriously after reading it.
	You're just like, you're wondering, I'm even wondering, like, how did Martin ever think this guy was smart?
	Well, it's interesting, isn't it?
	When one deconstructs bullshit...
	As I've done before with Jordan Peterson.
	You've done it with Jordan Peterson beautifully.
	And also with Russell Brand.
	I mean, Russell Brand is an idiot's idea of an intellectual.
	He's verbose.
	But he's incoherent.
	Yeah, I have to admit, I haven't paid any attention.
	It never occurred to me to pay any attention to Russell Brand before or after his rebirth, which maybe it's genuine, maybe it's not.
	I hope it is.
	Well, if you had to put a bet...
	I wouldn't.
	I just wouldn't.
	Because even an idiot can follow Jesus.
	But either way, Christian or pagan degenerate, I wouldn't take Russell Brand seriously as an intellectual.
	No.
	I mean, that's a category error.
	It's like when Owen briefly made the mistake of delving into theology and just said some ridiculous stuff that upset a lot of people.
	People were like, how can you accept what Owen's saying about the Trinity?
	Because when I want to delve into Christian theology, the first thing I do is consult a comedian.
	That's a good line.
	Why are you paying any attention to anything that certain people say about certain subjects?
	Because they obviously don't know anything about it.
	It'd be like listening to me suddenly start talking about the Tony Awards.
	I don't know anything.
	I literally know nothing about the Tony Awards.
	You're well qualified to write about them.
	Yeah, so if I suddenly start, like, telling you the truth about the Tony Awards, don't listen to me.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I was going to ask you something really interesting there, but I've completely forgotten.
	What was it?
	Jordan Peterson.
	These figures...
	Who are these sort of alternative celebrities who are ostentatiously turning to Christ.
	That's not real, surely.
	Hard to say.
	I mean, look at the evil they're surrounded with.
	Maybe they're turning away from the evil.
	Well...
	I mean, when Justin Bieber is weeping on stage...
	Because he's being forced to take part in a public satanic ritual.
	I think that's probably genuine.
	I feel so sorry for Justin Bieber.
	Maybe I'm wrong.
	Maybe he is just an awful person who is happily doing awful things.
	The thing is that anyone can repent.
	Any denizen of the hell mouth can repent.
	And so I don't think it's...
	And also, I'm also a firm believer in baby steps.
	You know, it's...
	Maybe they're still a bad person, maybe they're still involved in some bad things, but at least they have made the first big step going in the right direction.
	I'd rather take those things at face value.
	However, I would caution everyone, don't ever pay attention to anybody who's in that situation because they are just taking baby steps.
	This is completely the wrong question to ask you because it's speculative.
	Okay.
	How do you think it's...
	Where do we go from here?
	How does it all end?
	Jesus comes back and slaughters the Antichrist and his minions.
	Yeah, what do you think about 2030 for that?
	I don't.
	I mean, I take very seriously the whole no man shall know the hour.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I recall very clearly one thing that amused me as doing research for a kind of apocalyptic novel type thing and that I never ended up writing.
	Back in the year 999, the entire Italian peninsula was convinced that the return of Jesus was nigh, and they were also convinced that a certain figure was the Antichrist.
	He's so obscure that not even someone who has seriously studied medieval and Renaissance history would recognize the name.
	tell me the name I don't I don't remember I mean I I was I'll have to look it up but I was shocked because it's like I'm like I was expecting you know somebody like a on the level of a you know Pope like the the Borgia Pope or something like that but I mean it was somebody that I'd never heard of it was like some random nobleman from like from like Ravenna I mean,
	it was nobody that you'd ever have heard of in history.
	And everybody was convinced he's the Antichrist.
	After that, I was like, nothing.
	They didn't hear him or anything?
	No, they were just all scared that because of the year going to 999 to 1000, they were like, obviously cast around for a while.
	Because of the year turning 1000, that means the world's going to end.
	So we need an Antichrist.
	So he must be the Antichrist.
	It was all nonsense.
	Yeah.
	But that's why every generation, I remember in the 70s when I was a kid, some boomer woman saying, you know, I don't know when Jesus is going to come back, but I know it'll be in our lifetimes.
	You know, it's that historical solipsism that most people have that they can't really imagine a universe before or after their own lives.
	That's true.
	But there's a lot that's happened before, and maybe there's just as much that's going to come.
	Well, that would be weird, because that would mean we've got to go through it.
	I mean, I tell you what, Vox, I am banking on Jesus coming sooner rather than later, because if he doesn't, we've got a whole heap of massive shit to be going through.
	Yeah, but people always have.
	It goes in cycles.
	It goes in cycles.
	I mean, look at what's already happening.
	The clown world is shattering before the resurgence of Russia and China.
	Imagine what happens this.
	Suppose, for example, that Xi Jinping is a secret Christian.
	What if there's suddenly a massive Christian revival in China?
	Do you think it is?
	I don't know that he is.
	I personally think he's more the virtuous pagan type.
	Okay.
	But what do we know about Xi?
	What's the one thing we absolutely know about Xi?
	He's very, very good about not sharing what he really thinks with anyone.
	That's how he came to power in the first place.
	Yeah, I'd be a shit Chinese leader.
	Exactly.
	It was never going to happen, was it, Vox?
	Right.
	No, but the thing is, he wasn't supposed to be the leader.
	But then they decided, oh, he's just this colorless bureaucrat who's safe.
	So instead of giving it to this active politician or this active politician, we'll give it to this guy as a placeholder.
	And then suddenly it turns out that he's operating on a level well beyond any of them.
	You know, Putin isn't that different.
	You know, he wasn't supposed to be an effective leader either.
	And so, you know, I'm not saying that that's the case.
	I'm just saying, doesn't your vision of a shit show coming in the future become a lot different if suddenly China undergoes a serious awakening and revival?
	Well, suddenly I'm thinking of moving to China.
	Although I don't think it'd be that much fun.
	I've never had much of an urge to get to China.
	Even Hong Kong is a bit of a stretch for me.
	I like Japan.
	But all I'm saying is that we don't know.
	And God works in mysterious ways.
	And the only thing that we know is that we have to fight our battles that we face today.
	You've actually cheered me up, and I would make that the final point, and I do need to pee, so I can't last much longer than about three minutes, but...
	Sounds good.
	Briefly, I wanted to ask you, Switzerland.
	You live in Switzerland.
	There's so much evil there.
	The CERN experiment, that evil tunnel, the tunnel ceremony.
	I don't think it, yeah, there is evil there, but there's, just like everywhere, there's good too, you know?
	It's kind of Illuminati Central though, isn't it, Switzerland?
	In some ways, but you know, I come from the US where that's where they're most active.
	Unless you think about Britain.
	We can illuminate your path.
	So the point is that it doesn't matter where you are.
	Because either you're walking in the light of God or you're not.
	We can end there.
	That's the end point.
	Vox, thank you so much.
	Tell us where we can...
	I'm very much tempted to buy that history book, but where do we find your stuff?
	Go to castallialibrary.substack.com or voxday.net.
	I hope that my enormous popularity, Vox, will send many people your way.
	And I wanted to say thank you.
	Thank you for kind of, like, almost talent spotting me.
	I mean, thank you for giving me...
	I love the way...
	I really appreciate the way you post up my pieces.
	And, you know, it's nice having so many respect, you know, having your back.
	So thank you for all that.
	And it's been great talking to you.
	Lovely.
	We'll have to do it again sometime.
	We definitely will.
	We definitely will.
	I've got loads more shit that I didn't ask you.
	It only remains for me to thank you.
	Hasn't this been a great show?
	I mean, this has been one of my longer ones.
	Thank you, dear viewers and listeners.
	Please continue to support me, support my sponsors.
	If you want early access to my stuff, I just want to, you know, you love me and you want to help me and you believe in me.
	Substack is a good place you can sign up to, or Patreon, or the other one.
	Locals, locals, locals.
	You can buy me a coffee if you want.
	And please do.

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